Glimmer to Spark to Bonfire: Chris Maxwell Rose

“Glimmer to Spark to Bonfire: Chris Maxwell Rose”

a Girl Boner podcast transcript

[intro music that makes you wanna dance!]

[uplifting music: “Wings of Desire”]

Chris: I learned how to stretch those pleasures…and just kind of breathe gently into that known, comfortable, familiar sensation. Kind of allow little orgasms, right? So if I was going, I wanted to go riding my Hitachi, you know?  And that grew. That glimmer to spark to bonfire idea that we talk about,  it’s a real thing.

August/narration:

Can illness and healing involve eroticism? In that context, what does eroticism even mean? What role do pleasure and orgasms play when there’s a fair chance you won’t live much longer?

Chris Maxwell Rose’s experience, through a medical crisis and its ripple effects, reveals a lot about all of this.

In the last episode, you heard from Chris’s partner, Charlotte Mia Rose, who became Chris’s caretaker. If you haven’t yet listened, definitely check that out — you can listen in either order. Now, Chris’s story.

[encouraging, acoustic music]

Like Charlotte, Chris is a longtime somatic sex educator who’s supported thousands of people. Given Chris’s childhood, that’s no surprise.

Chris: I was that kid that you told about the sex stuff. From my earliest memories, I was holding my own and my peers’ secrets and stories. From there I went right to the library after school where I had a little wagon that I filled up after I convinced them to give me an adult library card. I think I was eight.

So I could check out more books and I would sit in the self help section and pull out all the books about sex and relationships that I could find and read and read because I wanted to find answers for my friends.

I remember that big wide slide and how it created this little place of safety for us and how we always needed safe places to have conversations.

Looking back now, I was that kid under the slide because of trauma and because of being sexualized before I even knew it was a thing. But also I see now that I was who I was and I had a wide open heart and loved my friends and loved my peers and just wanted us all to be able to love one another more.

August/narration:

Today, Chris said, they are in a “sexual renaissance.” But early on, they said, there was no “blossoming,” in terms of sexual discovery.

Chris: I went into fourth grade with my first bra, that was a C cup and my first period and forced sexualization. And from that point on, it was responsive and reactive to the cultural conditions around me.

I navigated being a sexual girl and having a curious sexuality and amongst a minefield of abuse and trauma, both sexual and at home with my family.

You know, I also had my first eating disorder in fourth grade. These things are related and I can see that now as an adult.

And I can also see my child now and how resourced she is as a child. And when we’re forced to deal with overwhelming circumstances as kids, we grow up really quickly. I always had older friends and older lovers. And as soon as there was a thing called AOL, I was finding chat boards where I could talk freely about sex, but that also meant meeting adult partners when I was a young teen after school. So I never had a sexuality on my own terms.

August/narration:

Challenging as that was, it led to some cool things. Chris turned them into amazing things. During college, at Vassar, they even started a sex magazine.

Chris: I was always curious about this topic because I saw what charge it had in people’s lives. I knew how much it was impacting my life and I just got really, really curious about it.

Why was sex culture the way it was? And Vassar was an amazing place to ask that question for four years as a student.

Through college, I got kinky. I started going to sex parties in New York City. And then that led me in a kind of direct line to the San Francisco sex education community where I stepped into this field as both a student and a practitioner of it for my own. stuff and my own trauma.

And then that was a direct line into my adult life in San Francisco.

August/narration:

At 23, Chris had a group of mentors, which included some of their sex education heroes.

Chris: Like I kind of washed up on Annie Sprinkle’s doorstep as her apprentice.

And was amongst the founding staff of Sexological Bodywork, and I was given the somatic, and I was given my body, but that also opened the Pandora’s box of trauma.

And we did four days of breath work class in which I cracked wide open and I was given these tools that actually work with our bodies as is, no matter what has happened to us and still experience pleasure, joy, and connection.

I started learning that in San Francisco, in this community of ecstatics, and queers and misfits and leather people who showed me a sexuality I could find a home in. And so kink and being a leather dyke, it was my first sexual home in the world, where I felt safe.

When I think of my coming of age, I think of that moment where I finally had the tools to start a relationship with my own sexuality on my own terms.

August/narration:

During all of that, Chris met and fell in love with Charlotte. Chris remembers the day they met. Charlotte was a student in a sexological bodywork training, and Chris was a teacher.

Chris: Charlotte was late for the first day of class, and I was very stressed out hosting this, you know, we were going into a two week intensive. And I was there with my clipboard and the door opened and Charlotte walked in and it was like a Disney movie, like songs and birds and butterflies floating behind her. It was a moment of like the earth moved under my feet. We looked at each other, and we were able to hold the charge.

August/narration:

They didn’t get involved right away.

Chris: I was in hospice that summer with my grandparents, but also as a teacher, you know, we were in a bodywork class, like I was holding the container for 24 people in training. I was not engaging with any one student, I was not going to the after parties.

And months went by and then she asked my boyfriend out on a date and not knowing how poly works, she just said, “Bring Chris if you want!” So the three of us went out for falafel and I walked her back to her car after the meal and I put my hand on her hip and we went on a hike a few days later.

And the two other people that were supposed to join us opted out last minute, kind of backed out. And so the two of us ended up on a hilltop above the Redwoods in Guerneville, California, and had our first kiss. And never really came back down. And we’ve been in love and partners at work ever since.

And that’s how it was like right from that first date and that first walk, even the first drive up to that hike, we were talking about the work and being together and it was a very purpose driven partnership from the beginning, a very passionate one.

She had a private practice as an erotic masseuse. And I was doing these long sessions with survivors primarily, and we loved the work and these modalities we had learned and wanted to share them. And, now here we are 18 years later. Yeah, it was a great falafel. [laughs]

August/narration:

Within months of Chris and Charlotte’s first date, Pleasure Mechanics was born.

Chris: Our first project was about prostate massage. We were learning about prostate health and the power of anal touch.

We were sitting at a coffee shop in Berkeley that was across from a body work mechanics garage and watch the men working on their cars. And I kind of said, you know, most men know more about their cars than they do about their sexual systems.

At that point, we called it the mechanics of men. And that became then Pleasure Mechanics.

We really wanted to look at the systems of the body, how we are wired for pleasure, what the human anatomy tells us about pleasure as body workers. We were touching hundreds of bodies a year and the privilege of that is that we got to tap into the stories bodies tell, and our sexual anatomy.

My cathedral of pleasure is what our bodies are made of, how we are designed to connect with one another and love one another in this world. So Pleasure Mechanics is devoted to exploring that.

August/narration:

Like Charlotte, Chris abides by Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic.

Chris: …the deep and big feelings we feel together and share together and the depth of aliveness the erotic brings us no matter what it is. She says it could be making love, building a bookshelf, discussing a poem.

I remember for the first time reading that essay, The Uses of the Erotic as Power, under a tree at Vassar. It was like a gift because all of a sudden I had a concept of the erotic that held it all, because for me as a survivor and as a kid that was, feeling just as much pain and struggle as I was like joy and pleasure and permission, right? I felt that whole range of things already so alive in my body and I needed a concept of sexuality that gave permission to all of that.

So I was so relieved when I found these words, queer and erotic, and had a framework that served me and held all of me. Because as much as I was a survivor, I also loved sexuality. I masturbated every day after school. Masturbation was one of the ways I coped with the abuse and trauma I was experiencing as a kid. I think it’s one of the things that really saved me.

I remember the specific toys I would rub on for comfort to get to sleep as a traumatized child and bless that child that found that coping mechanism and knew how to access pleasure no matter what, even when I was scared, right?

And I remember how I would tuck myself really tight under blankets, how I would create these zones of safety. And we know how to do this as humans. We are designed for this. Even under duress, right? Humans have experienced and survived so much, and we are no exception to that.

So finding refuge in pleasure is something I knew how to do, and I now get to learn how to do on purpose, and I’m so grateful for that, because it means we can hold more of life. The erotic includes death, it includes death work, and it certainly includes illness.

August/narration:

The role of eroticism amidst illness became pronounced for Chris when they became severely sick. It started when things were going really well.

Chris: I found myself in love with Charlotte. We had this thriving business. I had purpose-filled work. I had this beautiful wife. We were living this queer life. We were driving cross country, teaching workshops.

And then we finally got pregnant after years of struggling with infertility. Finally, we had that baby with this queer family that we’ve always wanted. We had a gorgeous birth. We had an amazing, beautiful daughter at long last. And I crashed into being more ill than I had ever experienced in my life and had a health crisis.

August/narration:

The symptoms came on gradually. But no one realized they were symptoms.

Chris: I just got sicker and sicker and did not get better.

We can justify illness in all sorts of ways, and people were saying to me, “Well, of course you’re tired. You’re a new parent.” “Of course, you’re tired. You’re taking such good care of your family.”

We are allowed to martyr ourselves for others. And so I was taking care of Charlotte and our baby and our sick mother in law, our sick homophobic mother in law, right? And so I was living with kind of that daily micro-aggressions, and running myself ragged for this business I believed in.

As I got more ill, it made sense that I was sick to everyone around me. I lost a hundred pounds, which I’ve never been a small girl in my life. And I was suddenly fitting into skinny jeans.

A lot of people around me were like, “Whatever you’re doing, keep it up. You look great!” And in that cacophony of other people’s voices, I was not listening to the voice in me that said, I feel like I’m dying here. I don’t feel well.

But to admit that when you’re holding things together for a lot of other people is really scary.

I was seeing doctors and, at some point I had developed a major breast infection and they thought I had breast cancer. And so I started writing my child goodbye letters as I watched her sleep.

August/narration:

Finally, Chris got answers – after a turn for the worse.

Chris: I ran our regional pride with a clipboard and deployed a hundred floats one day and the next day couldn’t catch a breath.

Turned out I was developing type one diabetes, which is not the type of diabetes that fat girls get. My doctors missed it and I missed it.

Charlotte drove me to the hospital in a coma and I spent a week in the ICU. And when I came to, they had to tell me a couple times what my diagnosis was.

When I first woke up in the hospital, I couldn’t remember how to say the alphabet in my head, and it was that very scary moment of, you don’t know what you’re waking up to, the kind of realization.

And I couldn’t feel my feet at that point. They looked like little baby watermelons stuck on my legs. And I couldn’t move them. So I didn’t know if I was facing immediate amputation or what the future held for me there.

August/narration:

That was the beginning of the disease Chris would soon learn a lot about.

Chris: So type one adult onset diabetes, it’s an autoimmune condition.

It leads to a chronic condition, but that emergent onset, some people don’t survive. It’s an acidification of the blood that happens. It’s very dangerous.

A lot of adults miss this diagnosis because it’s called things like juvenile diabetes. And it’s conflated with things like type 2 diabetes, which is a very serious disease, but a very different disease than the one I have.

August/narration:

Chris and Charlotte also had to deal with the stress and learning curve of navigating medical care.

Chris: Charlotte drove me home from the hospital after stopping at the pharmacy and getting our very expensive prescriptions.

Which is the other disease in America is surviving the healthcare system and the cost of it, and the stress of navigating that. I have a sister that lives in Australia with a very rare disease and her government sends her care packages, not bills.

And when she walked out of the She said, so when do I get the bills?And they said, there will be no bills. We will send you to specialists.

August/narration:

Chris’s experience was very different from that. And eroticism helped them accept this new body in different stages of recovery, with so many unknown as to where it would all lead.

Chris: I didn’t feel my feet for two and a half years. I was in bed for the better part of those years. Charlotte took exquisite care of me.

I was blessed with work that could sustain us. We had designed Pleasure Mechanics so we could be full time parents, but it ended up taking good care of me.

I actually ended up writing a whole course while I was sick because I was learning so much about being in my body in a whole new way.

And this is the flip side of illness or disease. We’re forced to pay attention to our body in new ways. And interoception, that skill of paying attention to the. feelings inside your body, the sensations that live inside you, turns out to be an erotic superpower. But I was forced to because I had to manage my blood sugar and keep myself alive.

And all of a sudden self manage this disease and this pain level. My nerves had been acidified so I had all of this chronic pain.

August/narration:

All of that meant interacting with Charlotte differently.

Chris: Charlotte and I, we had been lovers. We had been ecstatic explorers. I had been giving her erotic touch every day for 10 years at that point.

And all of a sudden I couldn’t use my hands. All of a sudden we could barely touch and our erotic story changed forever.

The massage we teach all of a sudden became like one stroke down the back just to anchor me while I tried to take my next breath.

So many of us journey through these health experiences with the people we love. Sometimes it’s our partner. Sometimes it’s a parent or a friend, and it’s part of loving one another. Just like we’re not taught how to have amazing sex and stay connected for all the orgasmic ecstasy, we’re also not taught how to stay present for one another when illness or injury changes things suddenly or Gradually for the worse.

August/narration:

Chris’s background and training helped, a lot. But that’s not to say the process was easy.

August: As somebody who’s so connected to your body and have so much training in somatics and all of this, were you able to like immediately have some level of hope and acceptance and you know, all of that about like, Oh, my body has changed. Or was there maybe some grief at the beginning?

Chris: Oh, I looked at Charlotte and I said, go on without me.

August: That’s so real.

Chris: Find a lover who can serve you, right? Like the shame and the debilitating sense of worthlessness that comes with illness. And just the very real ways of the care burden it throws on other people.

August/narration:

Years before, Chris had taken care of their mentor, Chester, through cancer.

Chris: And so I know what a lift it is. And I know what a gift it is. I know how much it means to me when others let me in and let me love them. When they need my care and support, especially when they can be specific about how they need to be loved.

And Charlotte and I had to figure it out as young parents and where I could find my purpose again, right? I still could write. I still could think. And I still could play with our daughter who was one and a half at the time and loved nothing more than long hours with me in bed with blocks that we would build up and knock over and laugh and build up and knock over and laugh.

That allowed Charlotte time to go on walks and start her process of finding the ground under her and also the immense caretaking she was doing for her mom at the time.

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August/narration:

We survive, Chris said. That’s what humans know how to do. But we have to be able to adapt and find glimmers, moments of joy, to help us through.

Chris: My daughter was a very easy one, where I lived for her. I wanted a future as her parent. We read endless books together and looked at endless animal encyclopedias, and that gave me something to do while thundering through my pain.

And sometimes I was just left alone, like, clinging to the sheets, breathing through another session of it.

August/narration:

Chris needed to “deeply accept those things,” they said. But they also wanted to strive for more. What else might be possible?

Chris: I had heard on a podcast at some point, an interview with a mountain climber who had faced an avalanche and lost his feet. And they told him that he would never walk again.

They told him he would never feel his feet again. And I remember him saying something like, “well, if I couldn’t wiggle my toes, I could think about wiggling my toes.” And I had heard this podcast years before ever being ill, and it kind of came up in my memory. And so I would lie in bed and think about wiggling my toes and think about my feet.

I remember the first day I saw one of my toes twitch. Finding that path because the doctors weren’t giving it to me, they were like, expect a double amputation within a few years. They gave me no physical therapy.

Self advocacy, again, is one of those erotic skills I was flexing in this whole new way. And the self curiosity of like, I wonder what would happen if I just started moving my feet. Couldn’t hurt.

August/narration:

Meanwhile, they were going deep into disability justice.

Chris: I learned so much from the disability justice movement when my ableism was suddenly confronted, when I felt like that sense of worthlessness because I could no longer X, Y, or Z.

And as I learned, and I was like stripped away from so much of my youth any of our ability is temporary at best, right? And that’s one of the things we learn is it’s a breath away from change for all of us.

And I remember the first time I lifted my daughter when I was sick, I couldn’t lift a spoon to beat an egg. Like that’s one of those visceral memories. I remember like I couldn’t beat my own eggs for scrambled eggs. Cause I didn’t have the muscle mass because when you lose insulin, your cells don’t get energy and you lose your muscles.

And so that radical adaptation, that acceptance, I started learning about prosthetics, and what my options would be if I had to have an amputation.

I started thinking through that as an option and I started wiggling my toes at the damn same time. And as my feet came back on board, I walked through that pain in order to explore what sensations might be possible. I called it doing BDSM with God.

I had to find some dynamic that made sense for the enormity of it. And I drew upon myself as a kinkster and I was like, okay, let’s do this.

August/narration:

If they were going to go out — as in pass away, Chris said, they wanted to out in Audre Lorde style: “in a blaze.”

[groovy rock music]

Lorde wrote: “I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my nose holes–everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!”

Chris: And I didn’t know how long I had. I didn’t know if I would get better. I didn’t know if I was facing a double amputation that would change my embodiment.

I started playing with my body again and just standing on feet I could not feel. You know, that feeling of pins and needles where you sit on your feet and it’s beyond pins and needles. Like, you can’t really feel it’s just heavy weight?

I remember diving into a pool or a lake and the sensation totally changing somewhere below my knees into this heavy leaden, weight I was dragging behind me.

Which is harrowing, right? But it was also what was real for me at the time. And so just going into it in the ways that I knew, getting curious about it and then feeling a change.

And that first moment I remember getting out of bed and feeling the feet, like I felt the ground meet my feet in this new way. And I was like, Oh, holy shit, it’s happening.

August/narration:

Today, eight years-post diagnosis, Chris isn’t only walking, but full on dancing. Eroticism and, above all, Charlotte’s immense caretaking, saved their life.

Chris: And now I am in a renaissance on the other side of that, which was only possible because I knew how to believe in change. And that for me is the other side of the erotic, is the deep acceptance of change in all directions. Some we can control, some we cannot. And in that acceptance is that urgent aliveness of being awake to it all, right?

And that brings us back to the very moment, whatever it is, right? Orgasm, death. We’re there for it. We’re alive for it. And that is now my daily practice. [singing] “Staying alive, staying alive, uh, uh, uh, uh….”

August: Yeah.

August/narration:

It’s been a gradual process — both with returning to activities Chris loves with their daughter, and intimate play with Charlotte.

Chris: I remember walking with my family down the rail trail, and carrying my daughter for the first time, and lifting the groceries again, and beating my own scrambled eggs, and then being able to beat beat my own wife with a flogger again, right?

Stepping back into my kinks was a gradual process of being able to use my hands to make love again, being able to give massages again, right? Because my whole identity as a Giver, I was Giver with a capital G, right? Like, my hands knew how to make love to Charlotte, and all of a sudden, not only could I not feel my feet, I couldn’t bend my fingers.

My joints were so inflamed, I had lost inflamed, I had lost all mobility in my hands. So I also had to learn how to type differently, right? Like we adapt.

August/narration:

I told Chris about a listener who wrote in describing the grief she’s feeling since developing a chronic illness. “I miss orgasms,” she wrote. Chris’s response seems like something we can all take to heart, any time we feel like our body or sexuality has changed – and not in ways we’d choose.

Chris: Pleasure contains both excitement and enjoyment. And when things like orgasm and arousal feel kind of far away, I go to like, what are the comforts? What are the joys? Cause that’s pleasure, too. And sometimes pleasure is just relief. And that feeling of just contentment and being able to enjoy the cool sheets against my skin or feeling healing happening, right? And I think we can feel this sometimes emotionally, physically, sometimes both at the same time, when we feel that uplift of, oh, I feel a little better now. Sometimes there’s a spark of vitality that follows that.

And so I welcomed that. I cultivated it. I was hungry for it. I wanted to get better and be a parent to my daughter. I wanted to get better and be there for Charlotte and make love to her again, right? Like I had reasons and motivations. And orgasm was always a friend to me.

Even as a little kid, before I knew what I was doing, I was seeking out that relief. And shout out to sex toys here. I didn’t have the energy to beat an egg, but I could turn on my reliable toys and nestle them against my clitoris.

August/narration:

And sometimes you have to get creative, like Chris did – especially in the thick of their pain.

Chris:

I couldn’t really rearrange my limbs very well because I didn’t have the strength to move and so I would find a position that felt good and then try to like hold that pleasure of just feeling, rearranged on the mattress properly. What is that pleasure? The relief of comfort, the relief of being at ease in my body for once. If my skeleton was arranged just so, I wouldn’t be in as much pain. And so I learned how to stretch those pleasures and I would nestle vibrators against my clitoris and just like kind of breathe gently into that known, comfortable, familiar sensation. Kind of allow little orgasms, right?

August/narration:

Chris also leaned on memories of helping Chester near the end.

Chris: When Chester was dying, we would assist him in stroking and we would assist him in receiving anal massage. And I would give him a ton of body work, so that he could ride out his death on a wave of his known pleasures.

So if I was going, I wanted to go riding my Hitachi, you know? And that grew, right? And so like that glimmer to spark a bonfire idea that we talk about, like, it’s a real thing.

August/narration:

Chris wasn’t dying, thankfully. They consider surviving the diabetic crisis a luxury. Type one diabetes has become a chronic disease they manage, with a steady stream of life-sustaining insulin, medical bills, support from others — especially Charlotte — and a lot of self care.

Chris: I had to learn a whole new way of eating. Without succumbing to the medicalization of my body, because I also wanted none of that shit. I don’t count carbs. I don’t do that whole thing because I don’t want to live like a patient . I am not recommending this approach for all patients, but for diabetics specifically, there’s this attitude of control and counting and industrialization of your body.

Eat packaged foods because it’s easier to control the carbs. I’d rather eat the strawberries right out of the field and pay attention to my body to know my blood sugar well enough. And that’s that interoception I started developing as I was like, I want to do life. I want to be able to go on hikes with my family and I need to learn how to stay alive while I do.

And that also means asking for care. Charlotte has become a diabetic wife who carries glucose packages. When we go on the dance floor, and my blood sugar is dropping, we both know how to care for me.

August/narration:

Other intimate partners offer similar care.

Chris: We’re poly, and as we’re dating, and I’m falling in love with people, the way they watch me, and know how to care for my diabetes as part of loving me shows me so much about how they pay attention to what they love.

When a lover says to me, like, “when’s the last time you checked your pump?” I consider that an act of care because we are together keeping me alive so we can make love one day longer. We all need that kind of care and support. And I have to ask for it out loud, but we all get to, if we choose to. And can care for each other.

When we receive care and give care and that mutuality starts flowing, like my life has become so much richer from that. I can show up for my friends from this place of vulnerability like I know what it is to need support.

August/narration:

The wisdom Chris wanted to leave you all with relates to that.

Chris: I remember a harm reduction counselor I worked with in San Francisco at a clinic for sex workers, his motto was never underestimate the power of incremental change.

And that’s a political statement as much as it’s a personal one. Navigating this world as a survivor. We’re all survivors within the sex culture. We need to remember the power of incremental change and that we have so many points of agency, even under duress.

Even when shit feels hard, especially then. And if pleasure feels out of reach, what about joy? What about comfort? What about relief from some of what ails you? What about support and nourishment?

I often ask, what would feel pleasurable right now to my lovers? But there was a time I was just asking, what would comfort and relief feel like? What would feel nourishing? And we can ask and receive that kind of love right now as is.

That care saves our lives. The care Charlotte gave to me and the amount of love that was available to me during that time and the motivation to love my daughter and stay alive as a lover and I now get to be in this sexual renaissance and have new loves in my life and share them with Charlotte.

We’re in our first, I just learned a new word, triologue. It’s not a sexual dialogue. We’re in a trialogue. Don’t call it a thrupple. [laughs]

And we get to explore all new seasons of our love together because we survived. And we survived because we made really small decisions again and again. And so wherever you’re at, whatever kind of care and love you need, please ask for it and receive love and support, even if it’s tiny little acts of love and care. So maybe never underestimate small incremental acts of love.

August/narration:

To learn more about Chris and check out Pleasure Mechanics courses, including the mindful sex course they wrote during their medical crisis, head to pleasuremechanics.com. Find their podcast, Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics, on your favorite podcast app.

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