Tag Archives: Orchard corset mesh

Finished for Folsom Europe: Bi Pride Corset!

Bi Pride corset by Suzanne Forbes August 29 2018 front viewThis project took an entire year! About 200 hours of work! Dang!

Bi Pride corset by Suzanne Forbes August 29 2018I started this beaded corset project last fall when I got a great price on a used lilac 426 Standard mesh corset by Orchard Corset. It was always my intention to have it finished for the Motzstr. Festival, a special Pride event in Berlin in July.

But I wound up taking an entire year to finish it, and I think that’s good. Because I made it to affirm my fundamental identity as a queer woman, and I stitched that identity and pride and love into it thousands and thousands of times.

Last summer, while writing this post, I realized I’d developed a lot of internal biphobia over the last thirty years.

As a person who has been married to three men and who has almost only dated men in sobriety, I felt like a “retired” queer person. I stopped thinking of myself as bisexual.

And as a “retired” queer person, I felt so much safer.

Bi Pride corset by Suzanne Forbes August 29 2018It’s terrible to know that, to realize I took some comfort in the reduction of my vulnerability that living a straight life meant. Because I never for a minute stopped being aware of the consequences and dangers of living an out gay life.

I knew I couldn’t blame my cowardice on my upbringing. When I was fifteen and my mom opened the door to my bedroom to see me and my friend Jenny in bed naked, she asked if we wanted to go out for brunch. She accepted my girlfriend Pam into our home for years without question.

And I am no fan of my father, but he took me to Stonewall and told me what happened there before I was ten.

So my change in identity wasn’t about shame, it was about fear.

I felt guilty about living in the Bay Area as what appeared to be a straight person. I felt guilty about the privilege that accorded me. But it seemed like compared to the people around me, I was functionally straight. When you regularly attend sex parties where you draw a trans man fucking a trans woman while she gives oral sex to a nonbinary person, being a married cis-femme seems really conventional.

Bi Pride corset by Suzanne Forbes August 29 2018Plus, as a portrait painter who often asks women I’ve just met to come to my home and pose for me, I felt less creepy identifying as cis-straight-married!

Then I moved to Berlin.

Bi Pride corset by Suzanne Forbes August 29 2018 right panelLiving in Berlin has connected me to my youth and my New York identity in so many profound ways.

There was a jump-cut that happened when I left New York at 22, in 1989, to go to treatment.

I moved to St. Paul, where the halfway house was, for six years, and then to Hartford, then to DC, then to the Bay Area, for eighteen years.

In all those places I drove a car everywhere, lived in wooden houses, people were polite in the stores… It was like a different world.

I had all these adventures in this different world, and then in 2015, I got on the subway and went home.

Or so it feels. To live in a big apartment building, take the subway everywhere, walk the city streets at 3 am, eat a slice of pizza in a doorway just out of the rain, be yelled at by a shopkeeper – this reconnects me to my fundamental self.

And of course, even though married and cis, my fundamental self is queer as fuck.

So over this year, over 200 hours, I made this corset, beading and sewing and hotfixing crystals. I will wear it with Pride at Folsom Europe next month, and I’ll get some pictures of me in it!

 

Work in Progress: Bisexual Pride Corset!

Bisexual Pride corset project by Suzanne Forbes WIP 2017Happy Bisexual Visibility Day!

I’ve been working on this corset project all month; hand-applying hundreds of Swarovski crystals is the most time-consuming way of adding magic I know of. And I’m waiting for some sky-blue Venise lace to arrive from England, then I think it will be finished fairly quickly.

Meanwhile, look what happened when I set it down on my work table next to my asthma med diskus and the wrapper from a MIlka chocolate bar I had just finished eating.

I got the idea to do this corset at this point in time because a couple of pieces I wrote this summer led me to a new understanding about myself.

BiPride corset project by Suzanne Forbes WIP 2017

I realized, living in the Bay Area, I’d committed a lot of queer erasure on my own life.

Being in the sex-positive, kink and queer community, I was surrounded by people who were living an out and proud life. All around, people were living and loving all genders, and there I was dating all these men. I felt like as a person who hadn’t had sex with a girl in this century, I was a “retired” bisexual. I often referred to myself as “the straightest person I know.”

Even when I had sex with a girl – a girl half my age! in a coffin that was in a dumpster full of dirt! on a street in SoMA! being livestreamed onto a nearby building for a watching crowd! for a sex art project!- in 2010, I still felt like people would call me straight.

It did not occur to me that a straight person does not make a split-second decision to have public, filmed strap-on sex with a same-sex acquaintance.

Or that a straight person probably wouldn’t have had a harness and a purple dildo in the trunk of her car. (What? I worked for a website that reviewed sex toys!)

But this spring some news broke that reminded me who I am.

New Mutants Rahne and Dani slash by Suzanne Forbes 2017I was so exuberantly happy about the official news of Maisie Williams’ casting in the New Mutants!

I am so thrilled that the movie is based on the Demon Bear story arc!

I love the young cast!

I feel so good about the director Josh Boone’s relationship to the source material!

I even made Rahne and Dani fan art and when I posted it on Instagram the director followed me!!

Then I made this puppyplay fan art because fan art is a slippery slope!Mirage and Wolfsbane puppyplay by Suzanne Forbes May 16 2017

My joy helped me remember that I am a person who has loved women deeply and been lovers with women.

The fact that I have married three men doesn’t change that. As I did some more writing and sorting of archives this summer, I connected with my memories of so many young loves.

I was incredibly blessed and fortunate to live my teens with my mom. I lived in New York City, where I could – and did- kiss my girlfriends on the street.

I identified very clearly and strongly as bisexual from age thirteen, and because both my parents were queer-friendly, I never felt the slightest discomfort about it. I realise what a privilege that is, especially in the 80s. Or even now.

i want to honor the loves I’ve had, and doing a very detailed and meticulous project of fabulous, excessive beauty seems a good way.

The endless hours it takes to hand-sew lace appliques, to apply hundreds of crystals, is a kind of meditation and awareness. The finished corset will be perfect to wear to events like Pride, the Lesbian and Gay Festival, and Christoper St. Day.

For now, here’s a story about just how queer I am.

My second exhusband was from Australia. In Australia, as in England, dairy cream comes in different types than in the US. The first time my exhb saw American “heavy” cream, he was appalled. “What is this runny shit?!!” He couldn’t believe we didn’t have Double Cream. He raved about how rich and delicious and thick and silky it was.

So when we went to Australia the first time, he wanted to make sure I tried some proper cream. We sorted it on a day trip in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. We were nearly in the countryside, driving, and stopped at a roadside antique store/teahouse. It was as cute and dainty a little cafe as you could possibly imagine. We went inside and ordered an afternoon tea, with scones and little sandwiches and of course, double cream.

It was a weekday, mid-afternoon, and the little cafe was filled with elderly ladies. There were actual lace curtains. The waitress brought the tea service and set down an etagere of scones. She put a little ramekin of creamy, gleaming cream on the table. I picked it up and licked it.

“Oh my GOD!” I shouted. “It’s like eating pussy!”