Sexual assault, getting canceled, and why Wild Goose 2023 changed my life

The final stage of deconstruction in my sexuality and my faith happened after I was raped. Here’s what I’ve been learning.

All the sexual assault content warnings. This is quite intense. Feel free to skip it if ya need.

selfie by me

Because I have two stable partners and like to emphasize the aspect of myself that is a good parent and a good Christian, I rarely talk about my dating life outside of that. Some people have even come to assume that I’m polyfidelitous, meaning that I only have sex with Ty and Daniel, my two husbands, and nobody else. And look, while I am a homebody who is picky about who I share my body with, I do have and enjoy casual sex. Group sex. Kinky sex.

It’s rare, and the moment has to be just right. I have to be sure I really want them, and they really want me. I have to trust that they are good people with my best interests at heart. I have to know that we are both (or all) in an emotionally healthy place and respectful of our bodies and our partners’ bodies. I need to know that if the other people are non-monogamous, their partners are fully on-board and totally comfortable. And whomever I have sex with has to consent to the encounter with the knowledge that I am at my max for emotionally intense, serious relationships as a working mom with two full-time primary partners.

But occasionally, when the time is right, I do still look for something more casual. Maybe with other polyamorous friends, maybe on dating apps, maybe in unique circumstances where I happen to meet or know someone cool. Naturally, this was more common when I first started opening my marriage and dating around for the first time ever. I’d only had one real boyfriend other than Daniel.

Sure, there were some uncomfortable experiences in dating. But I’d chosen to engage in those experiences fully and entirely. It was totally new to me, and I wanted to learn more about my sexual preferences and myself.

(Last chance content warning.)

---

In the fall of 2017, I’d recently gone through a breakup and was looking to hang out with new people and get over the emotional hump. There was one man, let’s call him P. — who suggested we meet up at a bar. By the time it was the night of our date, I wasn’t feeling up to doing much. However, when I’m depressed, I tend to clam up and stay home and stew in my sadness. I wanted to push past that urge. Besides, he seemed pretty chill and attractive.

When I got to the bar, P. was already sitting there and waiting for me. I told him I wasn’t drinking, as I occasionally go through periods of sobriety from marijuana or alcohol to keep myself in moderation. I ordered a Sprite. I talked about being married and polyamorous, and he told me he and his girlfriend were currently living long-distance and had an open thing. Now, I wonder if he was lying about that.

“Hey,” he said. “Do you smoke? I live around the corner if you want to smoke and watch a movie.” I was still smoking, so I said yes. I thought it might be fun. I walked over to his house. To this day, I don’t remember what movie we were watching, and I don’t remember what I was wearing. I think it was a 2000s comedy or something.

Halfway through the movie, he started touching my knee. I remember enjoying it, and then he started leaning in and kissing me. I was so high, much higher than I usually got, even though I didn’t feel like I had smoked any more than usual. There wasn’t any spark, and I knew immediately I didn’t want to go further. Besides, I was on my period anyway. I wanted to come down, finish the movie, hug goodbye, and leave.

“Let’s go to my room,” he suggested. “Oh, you don’t want to finish the movie?” I said. “Nah, let’s just go hang out in my room,” he replied. I felt hazy. I didn’t want to go, but I felt myself being led by the hand, and soon we were making out in the blue dusk of a darkened room on a messy bed that smelled like feet. I thought to myself, “At least I’m on my period,” and told P. that I was. I thought if we made out a bit, it could be over. I don’t have period sex almost ever, but especially not with strangers. I only rarely have first-date sex.

“That’s no problem,” said P. Before I knew it, he had pried apart my big, powerful thighs, and his fingers were inside me, removing my menstrual cup. Did it spill blood on his bed? He didn’t even seem to care. I was scared. I didn’t think this was real. “Wait,” I said. “What about a c-c-condom?” I stuttered, trying to lessen the impact of whatever was about to happen.

“I’m clean, girl,” he replied. And then he was inside of me, with no condom. I never said “no.” I never said, “Stop.” I just kept repeating, “Wait… wait… wait…” I closed my eyes. He came quickly.

When it was over, my fingers grasped toward my menstrual cup, and I ran into the dirty bathroom to put it back in. I remember being fully dressed and heading out the door immediately. P. wanted to hug bye. I squeezed him from the side and said “bye,” and walked out the door to my car. I was coming down, but I sat in the car and cried a bit because everything felt terrible. It didn’t occur to me I had been raped — I simply thought I’d had a terrible sexual experience.

When I got home, I told Daniel immediately, as part of our sexual agreement, that I’d had sex without a condom. He was understandably pissed and going off about it — but I burst into tears. “I didn’t even really want to have the sex,” I said to him. He didn’t say anything else to me. I glanced at my phone, and P. had followed me on Instagram. Normally, I love online friends and followers — even people I don’t intend to see again — but this time, I had the urge to block him immediately, and I did. I never saw him again.

I never told anyone I’d been raped for months. When I met Ty a few months later, I stopped having casual sex at all and focused all my energy on this relationship with a wonderful, caring person and my equally wonderful, caring husband. A few years ago, I looked P.’s name up online again and saw he got married. My stomach dropped at seeing the wedding website, two people sharing their seemingly perfect love story.

It didn’t matter that I’d been enjoying the casual aspects of non-monogamy to that point. It didn’t matter that I had already believed and encompassed a truly radical sexual ethic as a polyamorous person that I was already speaking out about openly. I clammed up. I got scared to meet anyone new. When COVID hit in 2020 and Ty moved in, I sought refuge in my family as my extreme source of personal support. To this day, I have to break myself out of this shell every time I leave the house.

Despite having deconstructed from Christianity years before, and worked through almost every issue of purity culture, I felt, deep inside, like maybe my getting sexually assaulted was because I’d chosen to be polyamorous. I imagined telling my mom and knowing that instead of sympathy, maybe I’d get a moral lecture instead. What was I wearing? Why did I get high with someone I didn’t know? Why didn’t I say no or stop it? Why did I agree to go back to his house? Why did I even kiss him if I didn’t like him?

I felt as if I deserved sexual assault because I’m non-monogamous and God was punishing me. As if I deserved it because I wasn’t living this cishet mononormative lifestyle that conservative Christians have all decided is the healthiest way, no matter how fucked up their own marriages and families are.

In early 2021, I felt like I was reliving this rape all over again when I wrote a dark story for Olney Magazine, “Dead Black Lingerie,” inspired by events in my life. I was attempting to emulate Flannery O’Connor and her Southern gothic flair and was brand-new to short fiction. Olney Magazine was starting out and had hardly any readers. I was writing the piece for free. It was clumsily adapted, perhaps, and tasteless in its timing, but I stand by it. I’m a proponent of writing unabashedly difficult stories, fictional or not. I don’t believe in banning books, and I don’t believe in artistic censorship. (You can Google this story and read it yourself if you like, but I’ve no desire to post the link here.)

It is a fictional piece but based on things that almost happened in my life in 2019: a friend who had lost a spouse wanted me to have a sexual experience with them. Because I was still processing my rape and had told absolutely nobody about it, I was scared of sex with anyone outside of my current and established partners. I didn’t want to hurt my friend’s feelings by saying no because the death of a spouse so young and so tragically is probably the worst thing that can happen to you. I have a lot of complex feelings and mental health issues regarding death that make it hard for me to process it in the first place, and this is not the first time I’ve had an awkward response to someone dying.

But I also didn’t want to have this sexual experience with my friend at all. I talked to my current partners about what I should do — and my girlfriend, who’d had a cancer scare with her own spouse, told me I “must” do it. I should do it. It was the right thing to do. I needed to do it. It would be good. I had to put my feelings aside and do this for him even though I wasn’t comfortable doing it in the first place.

In the end, I didn’t do it. My ex (not the friend, I should add) tried to pressure me into it, but I chose not to. My body didn’t want to, and I listened to my body. Over a year-ish later, though, I wrote and published the story. My girlfriend read it, broke up with me, broke up with my husband (who had nothing to do with the story), and started a cancel campaign against me with her entire polycule in cohorts. She was an influential member of Richmond’s non-monogamous community, and I watched as people who had never even spoken to me decried me publicly in our little local circles. I watched our friends refuse to talk to me or get my side of the story about any of it. I cried for weeks. This was harder for me than any breakup I’ve ever gone through, and honestly, it might have been worse for me than the rape. At least my rapist didn’t relentlessly try to ruin my life and isolate me from everyone I knew afterward.

She said “Dead Black Lingerie” was offensive to widowers. She said it was a “rape story” because the character in the story was doing something sexually that she didn’t want to do. She told me it was evil to base it on anything that had actually happened and that I was an offensive and problematic person. She wanted the story to come down, but Olney Magazine editors (thank you, Brandon Noel and Tony Wade) and I all refused. I was so scared of her, though, and tried to make some edits to appease her and make it less personal, and try to make the character seem as if she was enjoying the sex more in the scenes of the story. I added links to donate to organizations that supported widows and widowers.

It didn’t matter: the goalposts had moved, and she kept posting videos and posts, naming me, and trying to cancel me, even after it was edited. To this day, she keeps a website about me and Olney Magazine, and I wonder if I’ve lost job opportunities over it. She kept sending her friends after me on social media for weeks afterward, and people who weren’t even friends with her were contacting me and asking, “What the fuck is up with this person?” She even messaged random online friends and followers of mine and told them to keep messaging Olney to get them to take down the story. It was obsessive.

I wish I’d never edited the piece at her whim. I should have kept it as is. The irony of her being mad about it being a “rape story” that was “offensive to widows and widowers” when I avoided this sexual encounter (that I felt she was trying to pressure me into in the first place) because I was struggling with my own rape is one that I only came to realize this year.

In two days, my husband lost two partners from that polycule, and we lost a dozen close friends. Our kids had grown up together and had even been homeschooled together for a short period of time. Five years of a familial relationship were gone like they were nothing. But it didn’t matter to her. She had utterly dehumanized me, caring little about what happened to my family, my career or my finances, or my personal life.

I became just as scared as when I had been raped. Scared to go out now, not just on dates, but scared to go out with friends. What if they got mad at me for something I didn’t mean to hurt anyone? What if I saw her or someone I knew? (One time, I thought I saw her at the theater after a date with my husband to see “My Fair Lady,” and I had a complete panic attack in the hallway.) What if they tried to cancel me, and I couldn’t get a job and feed my family? What if I got really close to someone, and then they abandoned me completely without even talking to me first? So for 2021 and 2022, I not only avoided new dates or romantic and sexual connections, I avoided even making new friends.

I’ve never talked or responded to her publicly in any way because I didn’t want to (and still don’t want to) escalate. I was mourning the sudden loss of my entire local queer family and community. My therapist and I worked on ways to move on for months and months. And just when I thought I was over all of this, only a few months ago, I got an official email from the local polyamory group where my ex-girlfriend is on the Board of Directors that I was being banned (I hadn’t gone to any events anyway since 2018 or so anyway) due to “interactions with other members.” They did not ask my side of things. They refused to meet and talk with me. They refused even to explain fully why I was being banned or what I had to do to warrant it, who was accusing me. One of my published articles is still on their website, however.

And even now, I’m not naming my ex, my friends, or the polyamory group because I don’t see cancel culture as the way to create real societal change or make myself feel better. (Please don’t try to figure out their identities and please don’t bother them if you do. Please.) Nothing positive comes from other people experiencing the same kind of pain that I did. I don’t believe in the values of retributive justice as someone who believes in police and prison abolition. Writer Clementine Morrigan has been my saving grace throughout all this. And my mental health is better with the Christian concept of forgiveness and turning the other cheek.

The only reason I mention this all now is because of this years-long journey I’ve been on, afraid of friends, afraid of community, and afraid of new connections: all while talking and writing about all of those things. And I want to explain why I’ve been so damn afraid for the past five years.

This weekend at Wild Goose Festival 2023, thanks to incredible new friends and old online friends turned irl friends, I’ve learned to move past this, I think. I’m a wonderful person who deserves a meaningful career, fun sex with whomever I like, great friends who can handle ideological disagreements without discarding me, and a community that has my back even when and if I fuck up. I deserve it. And it’s not my fault.

My guilt over my rape had impacted me to the extent that I was falling back into traps of purity culture without realizing it. But I didn’t deserve to be raped, and I didn’t deserve to lose my entire community over a story.

Those bad things happened anyway, and they can’t and won’t be undone. I would and have forgiven everyone involved, but I’m not going to let my fear hold me back anymore. I just quit my job, and I’m going to be on a new adventure as I try to establish this “side gig” of talking and writing about religion and non-monogamy and sex and politics as my full-time career.

I won’t let anything hold me back. Nobody controls my body or my relationships. Not a church, not my rapist, not the people who tried to upend and ruin my life over a story they didn’t like. It’s my body, and I’ve been blessed with love, friends, and opportunities beyond what I ever could have imagined. It’s time for me to take the leap, overcome my anxiety, and move onward and upward.

Expect big things from me coming soon.