💛❤️💙
The rainbow cock was first placed into my hands by a dear, platonic, friend. It was a gag gift either she had bought for her elderly mother, or her elderly mother had bought for her. I enjoy that the setting for this scene is a somewhat conservative rural Irish town. Rest assured, sensory-sensitive reader, it hadn’t actually been used by either of them at that point in time, but was instead destined for the role of Dick, for my Christmas drag performance of “Dick In A Box”.
Imagine my recognition and hesitation some months later when the card you have just seen appeared before me. Pulled from a card deck about intuition: a Rainbow Cock. A card that represents ‘victory, success, a self-serving joy’. It comes with the accompanying tale:
He finds her in the middle of nowhere, laying on the ground, dirty and covered in scratches like a wild animal. He tries to ask her for her name, but she can’t speak.
So he smiles at her, he lifts her up gently and walks away taking her with him. She lets him do that because his smile is lovely and reassuring, his arms are strong, his chest is warm.
And the line that spoke right to my soul, that had been stalking me through the stacks of the public library I managed, whispering like some bawdy daemon:
If that rainbow cock isn’t getting hard, get up and do something else.
To which I responded, “How in the name of god can I do something else, leave a 15 year career, to do what, be a rock star?”
A delightful fiction that shielded me from the truth that I was not really making the choices any more, and life was about to pull the handbrake.
….
The piano that this story is about, is called Jai. It is the name he came with. It means, Victory. He was delivered on a rainy Easter Sunday morning in April 2022. I had travelled across the country the week before, to a little place called Hollywood, high up in the mountains, to the studio where Jai was refurbished. My sights were set on a smaller, more colourful piano. But when I heard Jai, the richness of his voice was familiar and my fingers began to play.
When the man who had transformed him, given him a second life, played him for me in my sitting room a week later, I cried. The piece he played was sad and alive, full of movement. It was an emotional release, a vivid reminder of why I had bought a piano. When I was a child, anywhere I went that had one, I was glued to it. My whole body vibrating with those strings. I remember one night, smuggling my Dad’s red plastic walkman under the covers, listening to Grieg’s Piano concerto, I conjured a vision of a forest fire, mighty stags in flight, great storms of emotion filling my small chest.
I bought Jai trusting in the rightness of the action, rather than listening to the voice cautioning me to mind my money. To gift the child and teenage me who had shown such promise but needed more support. To believe in my ability to learn, despite my fears of not being able to stick with things. Jai was a lavish gift to a part of me long supressed, at a time when self-love and reparenting were becoming essential to my survival. When trusting what felt in integrity, that movement towards joy over the cultural scripts, were to be my guiding principles.
The week Jai arrived, two men died and another was badly injured by a man who was using Grindr to target them in my town.
Seven days later I was sexually harassed on the street.
Nine days later, the Guards were at my door asking about a neighbour who had been found dead in her garden.
Ten days later, I told my my boss that I thought I was having a breakdown and that I should go home.
…
I am whirling around my room, dancing to a soaring synth track, making a video of myself in drag for the first time for the side-hustle business course I’m taking. They love him, they are enamoured of this eye-brow waggling bit-of-rough I have summoned. I look at the photos the next day and I feel the way you feel when you are crushing hard on someone. That giddy fascination. I know him, I recognise him, and I can’t describe the feeling in my heart as anything other than love. Love and relief.
…
I am walking through Dublin City. Tight leather pants. My shirt open, chest bare, taped down. Theatrical, but sharp. I have painted on neck tattoos and a Tony Stark-adjacent goatee that follows the natural growth of my pre-testosterone moustache. I look like I feel on the inside and people are responding. Eye-contact, grins, fuck-yeah energy. They are responding to the playfulness, the sexiness of uninhibited self-expression.
I am Ben Panthera. Son of the panther. Wielder of the rainbow cock.
…
Piano music has always had the power to break me open. But now it was me playing.
I played piano as my heart broke, as the days off turned unexpectedly into weeks and months. I stumbled through the repetition of scales, realising over and over that I was going to have to try being on Testosterone to know if it was true. I learned the chord progression to Let it Be as I was realising that yes, the agony I felt looking at photos of myself was gender dysphoria. That something could change your entire life and still be unexplainable to you.
I played piano as I learned to love myself through the realisation of the depth of my grief, my fear, the complex PTSD of it all.
So I became Ben, because Ben had come for me and shown me who I really was. There were no trans men when I was young, no matter what I said, or thought, or felt, it was not a choice that was given to me. Like the ash and the willow on the country lane I walk, the He of me and the She of me had braided together so they could grow, a necessary adaptation so they could reach the light.
Who I was in those months did not want to be alive any more and I was terrified of that thought, that thinking it would give it power. But eventually I realised it was actually just a part of me being completely honest. I didn’t want to live the life I had been living. Masking, not allowing myself to be who I really was, for fear of being attacked, rejected. And of course I was, and I might be again, but a life lived from fear is one I can understand someone wanting to leave. To be someone who lives from joy and integrity, though, to create a life that truly turns you on… that’s who I want to be as I grow up.
I think that is Holy work. Soul work. Bringing forth what is yours to give. Self-serving joy is life-serving joy.
I say it is holy because who I am, as honestly as I can offer that, is more loving and expansive than the performed version of me. What supported me to breakdown/out/through was love. And I discovered love is not just a state or an idea. Love is self-acceptance, love is the gift of time to heal, love is the ancestors and spirits and holy people who helped healed me.
Love is a rainbow cock, chasing a librarian towards a piano and the life of his dreams.
