Prologue
Sacha - renamed Izador - came to me while I was recovering from my speed freak ex and her abuses. She was actually the ex of a former friend of mine - Vesper… before I decided to scrape her up from the bottom of the barrel. It was a poor choice brought on by low self esteem, and the supposition that Vesper wouldn’t mind, as it was she who initiated the breakup. Well I was wrong, and so lost a friend and gained an abuser. We had been broken up for several months and I was just regaining my footing in the social world - barely.
A newly joined member of an LGBT synagogue, I had joined the choir and sang for high holidays that year - and made a friend, Shayna. She had met another Jewish girl and they were moving in together. This girlfriend of hers, Noa, went hot and cold on her. And had little patience for her quirks. And ogled other skinnier, taller, more femme Jewish lesbians, even while sitting right next to her.
What an ass.
They remained together for years, and are still “friends.” Shayna, after trying everything else, had resorted to electro-convulsive therapy to deal with her depression, and has become a recluse. I don’t have the heart to tell her what I think the source of her depression really is. But maybe someone should...
As I was watching her struggle through this, I was just beginning to wake up to the realization that I, too, wanted a Jewish partner. I had witnessed older (than me) dyke couples come to Temple and High Holidays with their kids, dressed to the nines - looking as family friendly… and as not family friendly and queer as possible at the same time. That particular assemblage was my holy grail. I coveted it.
But there was another sense of self that I was missing - I was a not-yet-actualized pansexual. Growing up in a household that echoed modern tropes, I’d had bisexuality shamed out of me... For the foreseeable future. No way was I going to be “gay until graduation...”
Oh no. I was a dyke and a dyke only, because I had been convinced by my oh-so-straight sister that bisexual (let alone pansexual) people were just horny and immature, and “when they grew up they’d pick one.”
My sister was an unwilling stand-in for our emotionally immature mother for much of my childhood - so I found myself clamoring for her approval much the way many find themselves doing with their emotionally unavailable mothers.
I was desperate to prove to my sister and the world that I, too, had “grown up” and “picked one”.
But alas... It was not the case.
Actually - Sacha was an imaginary lover to keep me company while I licked my wounds from horrible memories of my ex, and horrible blind dates with people who ran away from me after “using the bathroom” who were - I would discover later - friends with people who didn’t know me anymore.
Thanks, Vesper.
ANYWAY...
Sacha was better than all of them. Sacha was a Hungarian Roma person with the physical attributes of a real person - Johnny Eckhart. Yes... The guy from Todd Browning’s “Freaks” movie. A script actually written by a disabled actor, I think.
For the uninitiated, “Freaks” was a film produced in the nineteen thirties about life in the circus, and had many actors in it who had really been in side shows and such at the time. It was very Very VERY bad. Very bad on a whole lot of levels. Bad plot, bad writing, bad script, bad acting, bad tropes, and... Well. More bad stuff.
But it got me asking myself:
Why can’t someone in a story with a different body be more than their difference?
Why can’t they be depicted as:
attractive
desirable
flirty
confident, and so forth?
Why CAN’T they:
Have an interesting background
“get the girl/guy”
be loved/needed/wanted/admired by others
be providers
be rescuers
be on the rejecting side of a breakup
“wear the pants” in the relationship
And, I don’t know....
HAVE A HAPPY ENDING?
In some ways I’ve seen movies evolve in that way. But, by and large, not that much. Just like movies do with just about every other type of marginalization, the story still always focuses on the difference, has a bad ending, has a bad trope, makes the character one-dimensional, etc.
Sacha was my fledgling attempt at this more redeeming character. But more importantly, Sacha didn’t resemble any of the gentile dykes who hurt me, or the Jewish dykes who were too good for me. Sacha was my escape from rejection.
The “c” in the spelling of Sacha instead of the “s” for “Sasha” was another teeny tiny, itty bitty secret easter egg for me. It was that single-letter differentiation that created the teeniest, tiniest permission for sexual orientation fluidity, with plausible deniability for those (if they found my diary) who would insist on my steadfastness as a dyke-in-shinning-armor.
Sacha was also a non-male person who could still get me pregnant.
Uh huh.
So you see here that I was working through a lot of stuff. A LOT.
Sacha didn’t morph into Izador until much later. It took me years to accept my pansexuality, thanks to the self-hate coaching from my sister. This anthology is an imagining of what it would have been like to recover sooner with Izador’s help - at different stages in my life and journey, real or imagined, in emotional rather than chronological order - to whatever end.
