Getting To Know Sam- Queering Pleasure Episode 1

TRANSCRIPT:

This is the first Shrimp Teeth episode. I want to introduce myself, this podcast, and talk about how we got here. First, thank you so much for listening, I’m really glad you’re here. 

So who am I? 

My name is Sam I use she/they pronouns. It’s kinda hard to do these intros, I’m not exactly sure where to start. I guess I’ll give you a quick background and we can go from there. I was born in Quebec, and moved to NY when I was about six. I grew up in an expat family, spent middle school in Japan, and high school in Italy before coming back to NY. There I met my best friend, who went on to become my husband. We spent a decade together living in Kentucky and back to NY before moving to Portland, during which I struggled to fully understand my sexuality. I went to school for packaging design and eventually got my MA in psychology. By the time I was out of school, working in advertising in NY, and living with my husband, I knew something didn’t feel right. I’d ticked off most of the boxes on the normative relationship and work escalator, but none of it was right. During the time I was with my husband,I struggled to be monogamous, after we both finished grad school, we decided to move to Portland. That’s when I met a girl, decided I didn’t want to cheat on my partner anymore, and we officially embarked on an ENM journey together. I’d also quit my ad jobs and was taking on freelance gigs. One of the companies I worked for was a Safer Sex Center at a university in Toronto. They hired me to make an erotic coloring book that focused on consent for their campus office. As I dived into this project, I started making more and more erotic drawings that were depicting my journey in understanding my sexuality and polyamorous relationship. I posted them on Instagram, and before I knew it there were thousands of followers. I want to say that after years of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, me and my husband were NOT ready for ethical non-monogamy. Similarly, after years of suppressing my sexuality, staying in the closet publicly, and trying to assimilate to a very hetero-aggressive corporate culture, I didn’t know how to be my authentic slutty, kinky, queer self. It was all a work in progress, and I illustrated and wrote about my journey. During that time I was taking various contract jobs and realizing I needed to officially get out of consumer research. While I loved understanding people’s behavior and preferences, I was struggling with the capitalist model of constant innovation that prioritizes profit over the good of people. I didn’t want to work in advertising anymore. I found that the conversations I was having on social media were similar to what I’d been trained to do, but they we’re more genuine, human-focused, and fulfilling.  I started doing more and more research on polyamory, queerness, and sexuality. By the end of the year, I’d read a giant pile of books, written daily content about my experiences, and really thought through a lot of the concepts I’d been grappling with. I was getting flooded with DMs from folks who were also in straight-assumed relationships who were coming into their queerness and seeking to practice ethical non-monogamy. They didn’t have a lot of places to go, and I offered a sounding board, support, and resources that I had used myself. I started offering phone sessions with people who needed help with these topics. By talking to more and more people, I understood that a lot of what I was going through wasn’t unique to my experience, that there were common struggles folks had with queerness, sexuality, and polyam. I assembled booklists, compiled reflections, and questionnaires, and started publishing workbooks that I had been testing out with my pals and metas. Other people found it really useful and I became a bonafide sex and relationship educator. Meanwhile, I was becoming more and more confident in my identity, I started identifying as a lesbian, started dating a bunch of different people, played around with different relationship structures, explored more and more kinks, and got really into writing erotica. Then the pandemic hit. The woman I’d been dating for under a month became my primary partner. I moved in with her, and my husband and I went through an admittedly complicated legal divorce. And I ended up in a far more monogamous relationship than I’d ever had. I went through another period of transition. The loss of my previous pals gave me a lot of time alone to think and reflect. I started focusing more on myself and answered some gender identity questions I’d been wrestling with for a long time. I also started embracing my queer community more and noticed how similar the dynamics were to ethical non-monogamy. Again, my personal life informed my learning and what I wrote about. I eventually quit my job as a marketing director for a sex toy company and decided to focus solely on Shrimp Teeth. I noticed the difficulties that we face as people in the sexuality industry with censorship, targeting, and de-platforming. I kept learning. And now I’m here. 

That was a whirlwind. But I feel like a little complexity is often beneficial in these introductions. It’s easy to say I’m a kinky polyam gender fluid lesbian sex educator. But that misses a lot of the transitions and backstories that led me to where I am today. 

Part of what I want to accomplish with this podcast is to talk about sex, queerness, and relationships. I also want to embrace the complexity of our human experiences. Life isn’t a simple straightforward narrative. Sometimes our relationships shape our identities and are influenced by our community and impact our work. It’s really easy to put people into boxes and leave it at that, but I find the whole story to be far more important. So on our podcast, we’ll talk about an array of different topics and try to dive into the nuances of each. We won’t get everything perfect, obviously. At the end of the day, these are personal stories and experiences and they don’t follow a template. We’ll talk about what we got right, what we’ve learned, the things we’re unlearning, and what we still struggle. We’ll also get a bunch of things wrong. And that’s ok too. Above all, we want to be an open place to have conversations that are often ignored, dismissed, or too shrouded in shame. 

I hope we got your juices flowing. As always, we aim to provide as much free and accessible content as possible; thanks to the amazing support of our patrons. Head over to our Patreon to support our work and get access to bonus content! If you have any questions or want to chat, please book a peer support session.