It wasn’t until the fourth screening of Bohemian Rhapsody, before Lauren understood why this 80’s bio-pic really hit home for her.
And it was something she never thought she’d share.

Maybe I failed to recognize the deeper layer because Bohemian Rhapsody is a feelgood movie.
Or maybe because Freddie Mercury’s sexuality was supposedly “downplayed”. As critics claimed who seemed to be looking for a posthumous outing of the star who never wanted to be seen as gay, or sick, during his life.
Or maybe because I simply saw my aids phobia as a thing from the past.
It had been rooted in a stay in Africa but I was basically talked into it by overly protective parents, and government funded sex education.

Although I hung in there for a couple of years, I broke at the age of 17 and hid in long-term relationships until I was way over thirty.
I worked through all these fears in my first book, the Dutch novel Mango.
Mango featured both the aids phobia, as well as making out with gay or bisexual boys in my mid-teens.
As if I had been magnetically drawn to the risks that scared me most.
Until at seventeen, and still a virgin, I gave up experimenting and turned away from exciting heterosexual or gay men. I had two long-term relationships with reliable, straight men.
For 17 long years.

So maybe it was because of all those things, that I didn’t see the reason I kept coming back to the theater for another dose of Bohemian Rhapsody.
But I had been deluded on all of those accounts.

First of all Bohemian Rhapsody is not merely a feelgood movie. It is the triumph of passion in the broadest sense of the word. And it shows it coming at the ultimate price.
Secondly Freddie Mercury’s sexuality is not “downplayed”.
There are two male-male kisses that moved me to my core. And we all know what core means in this sentence.

But most of all I was wrong about my lack of emotional baggage.
In fact, I now consider myself absolutely ignorant, on how two decades of fear and sexual hiding have turned me into the person I am today.
My anxiety, my phobia for aids, was never “one story” that could be neatly written up in one book, after I had become a liberated heterosexual single woman.

My lover Mr.Big pointed out a long time ago, how my aids phobia had put my sexuality under tremendous pressure, in my developing years. That it was the most logical explanation for my need for sex to be exciting and adventurous.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t enjoy normal sex. For the untrained eye at least.
I had that within the two long-term relationships.
But it was just NORMAL.

I always call my body “beginner-friendly”. It responds pretty easily. I’m good at turning myself on (by thinking of a more exciting setting) and I have orgasms easily. 
But having said all that, none of those long-term relationships, nor most of the shorter ones, came close to what I really wanted.
What I thought about when I masturbated.
What fascinated me.
Moved me to my core.
And we still know what core means in this sentence.

Someone once told me his mother taught him:
“When a woman says she’s okay, she never is.”
I was “okay” in the sense that I wasn’t having panic attacks.
But it wasn’t having the type of sex I really wanted. Which was dangerously close to being gang banged in a dark room, as far as I knew.
I had no idea because I never had the chance to explore.

After twelve years of being single, I am aware my sexuality is actually quite the opposite to having sex with strangers.
The key for me is that I want my partner or partners to be sexually audacious. I still don’t think I could handle my partner being exposed to risks the way gay men were in the eighties.
But I would definitely try, if that was the situation at hand.
I’ve always admired gay men for their zest for life. It is that entrepreneurial approach to sex that I require a partner to have. And I also need a partner to weave power play into sex, and role play with me.
Badly.
Which was the kink my lover was referring to.
“You’re so used to sex being this high-voltage thing; you simply don’t respond to normal sex.”
He was right.

Yet a monogamous, master-submissive like relationship would never satisfy me either.
I need a man to move freely in and out of my life.

Next to that I loved seeing male-male kissing, my fascination with gay men had also been fueled by the fact that they were usually promiscuous. When it could cost them their life.
In my opinion, then and now, it made gay men and gay relationships the absolute pinnacle of sexuality. They were like Gods.
And in the eighties there was another element that added to the status of gay men:
They had been unaware of the risks.
As Paul Gambaccini counts back, in the documentary Mercury Rising, there was a more than fair chance Freddie had already been infected long before anybody knew anything about the virus.
Which could explain why he seemed to take so many risks later in life.

I had been in my early teens when aids became known. So warnings for aids fit seamlessly into my sex education.
For better or worse.
But Freddie had been my parent’s age. He had been part of the gay scene since the late seventies. Freddie Mercury was never given a choice if he was willing to risk contracting hiv. It was too late for that.

However, my high voltage association with sex, which was rooted in a phobia for aids and my fascination for gay men, was still not the whole picture.
Although Bohemian Rhapsody did give me a shiver of excitement, to see that fear played out by one of those Gods of the eighties (Mercury!).
There was another aspect of myself, my personality, which I had never before connected to what happened in the eighties.
I could see it now.
And also: Why no one would ever agree with me on this.
I usually don’t talk about it because I don’t want to upset people, and also because I get tired of them talking back at me.
Like I’m some kind of moron.

I talk and write about everything… down to the most intimate thing.
But not about this. Here it comes:
It doesn’t matter how long you live.
Nor what you die of.
The ONLY thing that matters in life, is that you wake up, find your passion, and work it as if your life is depending on it.
Because it is.

If I had it my way, there would be government funded check-ins if you’re on track with living a life on purpose.
But routine pap smears, prostate checks, breast cancer checks would be discouraged.
I can see there would be families where hereditary illness would make it more urgent to do a screening. Or at least where the worry about getting your hereditary disease is already omnipresent, and where screening could bring some relief.
But in most cases we’re talking about, and “they” are offering screening to, perfectly healthy people. Or at least they’re blissfully unaware they’re ill, which to me is basically the same thing. And now they are suddenly pressed into thinking they’re running some kind of risk.
That they might…
Perhaps.
And if they’re early, then they could do something about it.
And in a flash! The HOLY MOTHER OF FUCKING CHRIST FLASH BEFORE MY EYES – I realized why I am so against this.
Why I find it an outrage screening is allowed and even government funded;
Because I believe it is destroying lives.
No.
Let me fucking rephrase it.
Because I KNOW it is destroying lives.
And the reason I know government funded “education” about the health risks is destroying lives, is because my life was destroyed.

They leaped at me and sunk their teeth into me when I was still a girl, and shook me until three years later I didn’t move anymore.
I played dead for 17 years and sneaked out when I was already thirty-four. No one thought I would get up and they were no longer actively holding me down.
Not with aids. Not with hiv cautionary tales.
I got out.
And before they found something in my pap smears. Thank God for that.
But I’m never going to give them anything, ever again. Least of all my trust.
The entire medical world, and everybody related to it, cannot be trusted. And not just when there is sexual morale involved, it’s much broader than that.

The reason I think everybody should find their passion and stop listening to health warnings is because I knew from experience doctors, parents, and educators, cannot be trusted with fear of death.
They’re all shockingly incapable of making risk assessments, the pros (the life, the lust, the passion) versus the cons in the form of risks.
And they don’t have to.
Because we, their patients, children or citizens of their nation, are more than happy to turn our lives in, in order to be safe.
Well go ahead.
Do it.
Let yourself be turned inside and out, and be checked for cancer. They will literally cut little pieces out of you.
And then bigger ones.
They will remove entire parts, physically or mentally as was the case with me.
But the strategy is always the same:
They will convince you that it’s better to live without your current habits, your organs, your infected bits – than it is to die.

I can see the pattern, and call them out on their bullshit because they successfully immobilized me for seventeen years.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy with the excellent medication that’s currently available for hiv.
That’s great work.
And I do use condoms, and also take an std test when I switch partners to protect the next person that I’m with.
So I’m not saying that the medical world has not brought me anything. They have contributed to making the risks manageable even for someone as phobic as me.
So good work was done, eventually.

But in my case it came at the price of two decades of mental abuse disguised as concern for my health.
Freddie died in 1991, but he lived sexually free.
I didn’t live until 2006, when I slowly began the work of restoring my sexuality.
The reason I kept coming back to Bohemian Rhapsody, was because Freddie’s disease was what they had used to frighten me with, to manipulate me.
And now it was Freddie who showed me that I was right. Fear of death was indeed no basis for a life well lived.

The only thing that matters is how you live and then you can be anything you want to be.
Even Freddie fucking Mercury.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Causing a commotion is the thirty-first chapter from Project M. 

about “GLOW-UP 2026”

In January, Google has started pushing my old posts.
Unfortunately, my website was one of many casualties of WordPress Gugenheim software updates.
Meaning the layout of this post was completely destroyed and none of the new visitors was able to read it.

Therefor I have decided to run by all my old posts, starting with the ones currently in rotation, and give them a well-deserved update that will do what glow-ups are supposed to do;
Make them better.

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