That time I got a lesbian porn mag seized at the Canadian border.
And my own personal bi erasure.
If you happen to know people in the kink or sex work worlds who like to travel, it’s very possible that you’ll have heard a story about some weirdness that went down at the Canadian border. Canada, you see, has laws about consent that are basically drawn from 1970s feminist ideals. In Canada, a person cannot consent to physical harm, which puts BDSM in a legal grey area. If you try to bring bondage porn or even bondage equipment through Canada’s borders, there’s a sizable chance it’ll wind up seized. (Feel free to test that for yourself, but I wouldn’t do it with anything expensive or irreplaceable.)
There’s another weird quirk to Canadian consent laws, one that I learned about in a very roundabout way (which we’ll get to in just a second). In Canada, I’ve been told, a gay person having sex with a straight person is also considered rape. It is apparently impossible in the eyes of Canadian law for a straight person to consent to non-straight sex. I mean, that’s what I’ve been told — and at the very least, there was one Canadian border guard who absolutely believed that to be true about twenty years ago.
But before we can get to that, I need to tell you a quick story. I’m gonna leave out a lot of details, largely for my own privacy but also because I don’t really feel like outing anyone because the whole thing is kinda stressful just generally. The important thing to know, though, is that when I was nineteen years old I had a sexual encounter with a queer writer — someone I idolized, someone I adored, someone I basically considered a bona fide celebrity. It will not surprise you to learn that the experience was incredibly exciting for me and I bragged about it to all my friends because, omg, [Redacted] had wanted me. [Redacted] [redacted] me. It was very very cool.
What was less cool was a few months later when I was leafing through an issue of a popular lesbian porn mag and happened upon a story written by [Redacted] that sounded suspiciously familiar. Several details had been changed, presumably to anonymize me — my name had been changed, I’d been transformed into a blonde — but the contours of the story were so undeniably the encounter I’d had (an encounter that was so unique in its details that I could not imagine it having happened again, just with a blonde instead of me). And I have to admit, even though I’d personally written about this story in my LiveJournal and bragged about it to friends, I felt a little weird about it appearing in a porno magazine. I mean, my story was about me getting intimate with my celebrity crush. [Redacted]’s story was about [redacted] a teenager. A little different, no?
I should note now that there was an additional detail that had been changed in the story, a detail that really fucked me up. In the story, I wasn’t a bi girl with a huge crush on a notable queer writer. I was a straight girl experimenting with queer sex.
I do not know why [Redacted] made that change. At the time, I assumed it was her genuine assessment of me: that despite the fact that I’d been out as bi for a full five years, despite the fact that at that point I’d had more queer sex partners than straight ones, this queer tastemaker had looked me up and down and judged me to be actually straight. Unsurprisingly, that possibility left me gutted: what a way to be invalidated, you know? And by your celebrity crush, at that.
I suppose it’s also possible that [Redacted] was fully aware that I was bi but chose to fudge the details and make me straight because that made the story hotter to her — or at least made it hot in a way that was more publicly palatable. A bi teenager with a boyfriend who wants to fuck her queer idol is, I suppose, a story about a celebrity fucking a groupie, a story about an adult fucking a teenager: things that could potentially, in a certain light, feel a little ick. But a story about a queer person who’s so sexually compelling that even a straight girl can’t help but want to get down? I mean, I guess that is something entirely different.
But let’s go back to the Canadian border. I wasn’t aware of any of this at the time: I was, again, nineteen, maybe twenty, and no one from the magazine knew who I was or had any reason to tell me shit. But maybe a decade later, when I was adult and a writer myself, I was hanging out with a colleague who’d been on the magazine’s staff at the time this all went down. And when I casually mentioned to her that, oh, by the way, that “straight” girl was me, she was overcome with shock. “You! You were the reason that issue was seized at the Canadian border!” she said. When that issue’s run had been sent to the magazine’s Canadian subscribers and stockists, censors at the border had flagged the story about me as utterly unacceptable, and barred distribution of the issue within the borders of the Great White North.
So, yeah, that’s how I found out that in Canada, it is (or perhaps was — laws do change!) considered rape for a lesbian to have sex with a straight girl.
This story is a weird one for me, one that I don’t really know the moral of. On the one hand, there’s a personal sense of justice in the way it all shook out: if I had been correctly identified as bisexual, not straight, there presumably wouldn’t have been a problem at the border. A bi girl having sex with a lesbian couldn’t possibly be an affront to Canadian standards could it? It was the erasure of my bisexuality that led the story to run afoul of Canadian law — and that, I guess, feels kind of redemptive.
But on the other hand, it’s difficult for me to actually feel successfully avenged by the Canadian legal system because I’m fully aware that the law, itself, is pretty biphobic. I’m not sure what justification there might have been behind eradicating the ability to consent to sex acts counter to one’s stated sexual orientation — and because I haven’t been able to locate the specific clause here, it’s pretty hard to assess what the history or intent was. But I do know that balkanizing human sexuality, erecting impenetrable borders between “gay” and “straight” does not do bisexuals any favors. Plenty of “straight” people only begin to understand their queerness through sexual exploration that goes beyond the bounds of heterosexuality — and plenty of straight-identified people happily enjoy queer hookups while still predominantly seeing themselves as straight. (As you may recall, I just wrote an essay about heteroromantic bisexuals that touched on this very point.) It’s also possible for gays and lesbians to opt to explore sex with straight people out of curiosity, or because (surprise!) they actually have bi tendencies that they’ve been ignoring or suppressing. Sexuality is complicated, man. I don’t know what to tell you.
But it’s funny, I think, that a writer who erased my bisexuality managed to run afoul of a Canadian regulation that, itself, erases bisexuality. In the rush to reduce me to a more simplistic sexual archetype, the story was gutted of the nuance that might have made it more palatable to Canadian border guards — but those border guards were, themselves, operating in a world with little room for nuance around sexual identity and labels. If the law had understood the nuances of bisexuality, then the “gay/straight” sex story wouldn’t have been a problem; if my own bisexuality hadn't been erased, then the story wouldn’t have been deemed illegal. On either end, the magazine’s unfortunate outcome could have been avoided if more space had been carved out for bisexuality. On both ends, bisexuality wound up erased, and a magazine recounting an entirely consensual encounter between two adults wound up deemed a description of rape.
At the end of the day, I think it’s pretty clear that the biggest loser here was the lesbian porno mag that got pulped at the Canadian border. Well, the lesbian porno mag and also all the Canadians who have to live under laws that define sexuality so narrowly. And, okay, maybe also poor little teen me, whose exciting celebrity hookup story got transformed into an uncomfortable experience of erasure. But at least the fates found a way to grant me my very own ironic moment of justice. The magazine, on the other hand, just lost a bunch of cash.
And Canadians? Well, as long as Canadian consent laws continue to draw from outdated ideas of sexual behavior, anyone who lives in — or even just attempts to export magazines to — that country is going to be operating at a loss.
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This is one of my favorites of yours so far. There's a lesson buried in the story, and I like that it's left ambiguous. I'll be thinking about this piece for at least the rest of the week
I have no elaborate post in response to your story. There are, of course, implications about which you already so eloquently wrote. That story is very entertaining and educational. I had no idea of Canada's unique brand of antiquated lawmaking on this topic.