May makes me happy for so many reasons.

Growing up on the Frozen Tundra, may was the first month you could reliably count on to not be buried under snow. It’s my birthday month and I’m really into birthdays. Here in Virginia, it’s astoundingly beautiful. Lush, green and not yet too hot for me.

Then we have National Masturbation Month. I remember when I learned about the history regarding Dr Elders and Good Vibes creating the space to celebrate masturbation in response. There were lightbulbs. It was one of my defining moments of “I’m not alone” in my sex-positive views.

Working in the sex toy stores, I had become evangelical about sex toys. Pre-store days, I had always been very pro-masturbation/pro-normalizing masturbation, but I didn’t really have a sex-pos/sex toy philosophy. Was unaware of the sex positive movement. I was more or less “Crista, that pink haired girl who likes to talk about sex”.

A bit into finding my calling in the stores, masturbation month rolled in and I discovered My People. Shortly after I read “Real Live Nude Girl” by Dr Carol Queen for the first time. Discovered CATT. Got to know Metis. Started finding sex-pos spaces on the net. MY PEOPLE!

Being me in Texas wasn’t the easiest thing. My job was technically illegal and I worried every day that I was going to get arrested for selling someone a pocket rocket. There were people picketing my stores. Sure, we sold sex toys and I worked a lot in the gayborhood, but it was still Texas. Customers still treated me like part of the merchandise. I could be as sex-pos as possible, but my environment was astoundingly sex-neg. As I moved up into management and buying for my locations, the hard limits in what I could do became clear and became stifling.

In that space is where I discovered that outside of my small bubble there was a much larger one that was actually fighting for the same things I wanted to. I had people. People who I did not need to persuade into thinking that masturbation was a normal and healthy facet of sexuality. I could yell “masturbation” and they would shout back “fuck yeah!!”

National Masturbation Month was the birth of my making sense, not just the month of my actual birth. The knowledge it existed was the creation of my context. It’s the happiest month of the year for me.