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In the middle of training a group of Russians on the finer points of self-injection, I agreed, by phone, to write this introduction. While I never got quite so far as womyn, not long after I hung up it began to bother me: why junkies and why girls? language is very important to me and I make a big deal about the words I (and people around me) use. In different locations, times, ears, the same word can have entirely different impact, nuance. When I was growing up, for instance, you pictured completely different things when you heard “He’s a professional,” versus, “She’s a professional.” I, if you get my drift, am now the former and was once the latter.
Although the role of the law is in no way minimal, my life (like many others) has been influenced less by those laws I chose to break or respect, than by the labels by which others have defined me. An irony is that the activities and characteristics which -pre-AIDS- I worked hardest to conceal, were precisely the reason I initially became employable. I now· have a good life teaching phlebotomy and fellatio with much the same people as I once had a rough life doing, minus the health insurance and academic credential, precisely the same. Suddenly to say, “I learned to inject from a ‘house doctor’ and when I had the gallery, I worked as one; I managed to keep reasonably clean, well-fed and dry when homeless; and I can sneak condoms on and off with my mouth,” would not be unheard of in an interview. Saying “I worked .. I’ve been getting high for years. my scars are minor, and I’ve got all my teeth,” made me employable, credible, desirable.
Although the word glamour has interesting roots (*), there is no glamour in being an addict; in having, rather than choosing, to routinely break the law; in picking for veins in frosty bathrooms; in living controlled by physiology and the clock. And proud as I am of the teeth I have and the scars I don’t, I make no mistake in the importance in this of having blue eyes, an educated medical family, hospitals and clinics from which I could steal things, and white skin to get me past the guard on the way in.
Despite the novelty of training Russians, or the pleasure of training those new to, and hungry for, the philosophy of Harm Reduction and practicalities of Needle Exchange, the training where the editor found me was pretty much routine. And, as I frequently do when working with Medicos, I told my usual Fred and Ginger joke (*) - namely, injectors do with no professional training everything you were educated to do, only under combat 'conditions, one-handed, and backwards.
Be a dope fiend, or just look like one. Be a straight person, or merely impersonate one on TV. Which’ll get you farther past what door? There’s no reason for injectors to get scarred, scabbed, stigmatized, picked out in a crowd. Or there’s many reasons: laws, fear, access, power, sexism, supplies, status, economics, education, entitlement. There’s power in “sticks and stones” terms to be sure -but only when you have control of who is doing the naming.
(*) Ginger Rodgers did exactly what Fred Astaire did, only backwards, and on high heels.
( *) GLAMOUR = the name for the profuse, shining, vaginal fluid of
horses 'in heat.’ Gypsy lore held that using the glossy pungent
mucous on your hair made one “irresistible” to woman- giving us
both an early ingredient of hair gel (placenta shampoo anyone?)
and a wry twist on the term, “glamour-puss.”
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