In this episode of Queers & Co., I’m joined by Cameryn Moore, an award-winning playwright/performer with seven solo shows under her belt but perhaps best known as the founder of Smut Slam, a global network of community dirty-storytelling events.

We chat about becoming an activist in the mid-80s, the power of learning to dance later in life, sex positivity versus being sex aware, how people who have a problem with sex work really have a problem with capitalism, growing up Mormon and undoing our issues around sex. Plus, the joys of creating personalised smut on the street for passers by!

If you haven't already, be sure to join our Facebook community to connect with other like-minded queer folks and allies.

To book your ‘by donation’ coaching session, visit here.

Find out more about Gem Kennedy and Queers & Co.

Podcast Artwork by Gemma D’Souza

Resources

Check out Cameryn’s website to find out about upcoming performances and events.

Follow Cameryn on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

Follow Smut Slam London on Facebook here and Smut Slam International here

Watch Juno Mac’s TED Talk - The Laws that Sex Workers Really Want here

Cameryn’s recommendation: Little Women (2019)

More info on performer and fat activist Heather McAllister can be found here and here

Full Transcription

Gem: Hi Cameryn, thank you so much for joining me.

Cameryn: Oh, it’s good to be here. Thank you!

Gem: So, it’ll be really great if you just tell us a bit more about you and how you identify.

Cameryn: I am a playwright and a performer and a facilitator of smut. That’s kind of my professional designation I guess. I identify as an activist in a lot of ways around sex and fat and sex work. And phew, I’m just a middle-aged lady that didn’t really get the memo on how to be middle-aged sometimes is how I’m feeling like, yeah.

Gem: And so, there’s lots to explore there. I’m just wondering how you first got into activism.

Cameryn: I first got into activism when I was 16 actually. This was back in the mid-80s, so 1986. Nuclear war was kind of the constant looming thing. I don’t know how it was for other places, but certainly in the US, there was this constant sort of—it just hung over everything right? I started a peace activist group at my high school in a very conservative town. And that was probably also the time when I started shedding my introvert tendencies and found myself becoming an extrovert in support of causes that I felt strongly about.

Before that, I was very shy and definitely still the same geek that you see before you today. But I was really shy and not wanting to put myself forward. And nuclear disarmament was something I felt so strongly about that I just made myself go out and do things. And I think that I definitely had become that extrovert in real life. But most of the causes that I’m loud and brassy about are… they’re causes. They’re not just me. It’s things that I feel strongly about.

So, that all started when I was 16. It’s gone from nuclear disarmament to queer rights. I came of age as a little baby queer in the late ‘90s when Queer Nation was big on the scene in North America. And so, I moved through that into fat activism as well in the mid-90s in the San Francisco Bay area which is kind of the epicenter at that time for North American fat activism certainly.

So, I’ve been fortunate to be in areas where there’s kind of high visibility activism already happening that I can get involved with. And the activism has definitely moved around. It’s not to say that I leave those beliefs behind. But where I had put my activism has definitely changed over time a lot.

Gem: Yeah. And how is that developed in terms of what you were actually doing, what forms it took, and then also the different themes?

Cameryn: I would have to say, at first, it was almost more of an intellectual pursuit—not abstract, but I used my words. I wrote about it. Sometimes, I would speak. But mostly, it was in writing—either in paper writing, print writing, or when the internet came about, then I would do that. As a journalist when I started in the mid-90s, I would write about fat acceptance for a magazine there in the Bay area.

So, it was all very—yeah, I would say almost of the mind. It was activism of the mind—which is an important kind of activism. I’m not dismissing it. But that’s where I got my start a lot.

And then, what really shifted for me, one thing that really shifted everything for me was when I started dancing at the age of 28. It was just purely—I’ll confess, at the beginning, it was my last ditch attempt to try to lose weight. I tried out some things at a gym where I was living. And I couldn't stick with the gym at all. Gyms are terrible sometimes. But I was exploring the different classes offered, and I found a cardio hip-hop class. There was a rocky start, to begin with certainly. I definitely almost did not continue. But my teacher saved me. My teacher came out and said, “Look, don’t give up. Give this a month. I guarantee, you’re going to love it.” And she was right! I kept dancing.

And then, finding the strength in myself to just dance and move and function as a dancer was life-changing for me. It helped me get really into my body in a way that I had not in the decade before that. That was all the life of the mind. I was not really present in my body. And dancing and learning how to get my body do what I want it to do artistically and functionally was such a mind-blowing connection for me to make. And it changed my sense of fat activism. It changed my sense of “Am I worth being on a stage? Do I have value as a performer? And where does that value lie? And what can I do as a performer?”

Through dance, I found that I wanted to perform. Before that, I was always kind of in the orchestra. I never danced! I was playing French horn in the orchestra in high school. So, I was always backstage, off the side. And through dance, I found that I could perform, I could be present, and that my presence was striking to people and entertaining and good.

And so, I had to say, the pure act of learning to dance and feel good in my body has affected almost all the activism that comes after.

Gem: Yeah. So, I don’t want to dwell on it, but I guess, just quickly, you mentioned that that was your last ditch attempt to lose weight. And then, through getting into the world of dance, am I right in thinking that then you became more involved in fat activism and left behind that desire to lose weight?

Cameryn: Yeah! Just to get clear on the timeline, even while I was thinking, “Oh, I’m going to try doing this gym to ‘get fit’”—and that’s in quotation marks, right?—only in retrospect do I realize that that was my last ditch attempt to lose weight. I was really covering that under layers of euphemism: “I just want to ‘get fit!’”

I had gone on for the whole eight or nine years before that definitely intellectually involved in fat activism. But this was kind of me being sneaky to myself. And after this, I definitely was like, “Oh, I’m fine like this. This is great! I can do this.” And it definitely, at that point, shifted entirely away from “Oh, I’d like to get fit” to “Oh, I’d like to learn how to do a double pirouette… oh, I’d like to train myself so I can drop to the floor and do this move, and then get back up quickly.”

So, for me, I learned to associate what it was that I wanted to do with the training and with that kind of focus rather than be like, “I need to lose weight, and then I can do what I want to do.”

Gem: Yeah, absolutely.

Cameryn: And so, learning that I could bypass this other harmful, ridiculous step and go straight to the “This is the shit that I want to do,” that’s a very radical piece of knowledge that we can have, that you don’t need to set aside things for this mystical, magical day that will almost certainly never come. Just go for what you want now because life is too short to spend it going after that mirage.

Gem: Absolutely! It’s so empowering as well, that idea of like, “Oh, hold on! I have a shortcut here. I just don’t have to do that anymore.”

Cameryn: Exactly, exactly.

Gem: And so then you went on to write—I think you said eight plays of different themes. And you’ve won awards for those. What has that been like? You’ve gone from I guess being very much behind-the-scenes potentially as a journalist and having your work for people to come along and you won awards for it?

Cameryn: There’s some stuff we’re skipping for the sake of space. But I did work for quite a while doing community dance and theatre with fat people, with other fat people, in size diverse groups. And that was community-based. We weren’t striving in a professional way in that group.

When I went off on my own and started doing a solo career and working on those pieces, that was a real test of personal stamina. Before that, I had been working in a group and I had other people to work with. I had other people’s bodies to work with as a canvass for like dance work or whatever. And when you go off on your own to do the performances, when you’re onstage, it’s all on you. So I would have to say I developed a rather strong streak of independence or contrariness. I don’t know what it is. It’s not always easy for me to work with groups now because I’ve gotten so used to being solo.

But what it also does is it puts me and my body in focus all the time on the stage. And other people are focusing on that, but that’s just the nature of the stage. And that’s the nature of the stage lights. And so it becomes yet another step of like, “I am worth this. I am worth your attention. I am worth the awards. I am worth listening to because the things that I do can change you.” And so, coming to accept that kind of power has been great… challenging, but also great!

Gem: And you’re continuing to make work. So, how has your work evolved with that learning, like learning that you have power and that people are captivated by you when you’re performing?

Cameryn: I go back and forth… So, what I’ve tried to do is go with the themes that definitely interests me at the time. I’m not trying to stick to one area because that’s professionally where I’m known. But I will confess, the first, I don’t know, five or six or seven, like a good chunk of my pieces, they are about sex. That is to say they use the language of sex to explore other things.

So, that’s been an interesting thing, to put myself out there as a person who has a voice and experience in those matters. Sometimes, when I’m performing in festivals, and I’m talking about sex, and there are mainstream people in the audience, you can almost feel their sense of disbelief like, “Who does she think she is? She’s a fat person. How can she possibly have anything to say about the subject of sex and desire and lovers, multiple lovers?” People don’t always get my authority at first.

I still d… occasionally, I’ll do standup comedy as a way to reach new audiences. I’ll do short, little pieces that are more funny. And this thing that I was just talking about, people’s disbelief, that I could have anything to say, one time, I got onstage at a comedy open mic, the room was quite full, but this person was loud enough for me to hear them from all the way in the back, they said, “Oh, my God!” when I got onstage, and all I could think of in the moment was like, “I know! It’s amazing, right?”

But that’s the sort of thing where people don’t quite—I don’t know what was going through her mind, the idea that someone could come up and be onstage and speak with authority about these subjects. It kind of is mind-blowing to people. And that, in itself, is enough to kind of already push people.

So, I guess what I mean by that is like, in a lot of my plays, I don’t directly address my body necessarily as a fat body. I’m just present as I am. When I was working with community theatre, we did mostly stuff that was explicitly about fat acceptance and body positivity. And that was the space that I was in then.

When I went on to do solo stuff, most of my stuff doesn’t really talk about it at all. I’ll mention it in passing. But it’s never self-deprecating. It’s just mentioning it as a thing. And I feel that, for myself, the space where I am now is this sort of place where— I don’t know if you know Heather McCallister. Do you know that name, Heather McCallister?

Gem: No, I don’t think so.

Cameryn: Okay. She founded, she was one of the pioneers of fat acceptance in—I would say “second wave” maybe, fat acceptance in the San Francisco Bay area, North America. And she did a plus size burlesque troop that I collaborated with very early on. And she said once that just the act of being onstage as a fat person without being the butt of a joke or deprecating yourself, that in itself is revolutionary.

Gem: Yeah, I’ve also come across that before.

Cameryn: There’s different kind of places where that comes from. And that’s definitely paraphrasing, but that’s the sentiment that I have been approaching a lot of these with. It’s enough for me to go up on there, stand tall, deliver what I have to say about sex or relationships or about the geek cultures or about—mostly, yeah, those are the ones. What about phone sex and sex work? And I just deliver that without a whole lot of reference to this body.

And it’s not that I’m ignoring it because I’m up there sometimes in clothes that are revealing, sometimes quite naked. I’m up there and moving through that. But I’m not going to spend my time talking about it very much because I don’t spend my time worrying about it very much anymore. There are other things that I want to talk about too. And I have just as much authority to talk about those things.

Gem: Yeah. And I think for some people, it’s the idea that fat people can’t be three dimensional. They have to just be constantly explaining about their fatness or justifying it before they can actually then do anything that they actually want to do.

Cameryn: Right, right, right. It’s also one of the reasons why I… Because people have asked me, “Why don’t you audition for other plays? Why don’t you get out there…?” Because I know what’s out there. I know what’s out there for people my size. I will be cast in jolly friend roles. I will be cast as comic relief. I will be cast for roles that are 20 years older than me. I want to write the work that I perform. I want to create the roles that I can because no one else is going to create these roles for me.

Gem: Yeah. And you mentioned that your activism has taken different forms around fat and around sex as well. I just wondered where did that first come about for you? Do you identify as being sex positive? Is that a term that you’d use? And if so, when did that come about?

Cameryn: I used to identify as sex positive. I now call it more as sex aware, so that people—

For me, my feeling about that is like sex positivity carries with it the burden of being positive all the time. And I know that that’s not true. But it’s kind of the tinge that it’s taken on. I prefer sex aware in that I’m being aware of all the ways that sex can impact our lives—it can be negative, it can be positive. And there’s room under that umbrella for that whole range of experience. In more mainstream environments, I will say “sex positive,” but I prefer, for myself, “sex aware.”

Gem: It’s not a term I’ve heard before. And it makes so much more sense. It’s the same with body positivity, this idea of like you’re supposed to love your body all the time. It just is completely unrealistic. Whereas, yeah, if it just makes it more neutral, like it’s a subject that I’m aware of and working on, that sounds really…

Cameryn: Yeah…

Gem: There’s some kind of relief in that.

Cameryn: Yeah, I think it gives it a little more room. For body positivity, what I prefer always is fat liberation, body liberation and fat liberation, because that’s where the body positivity movement kind of grew out from. They conveniently forget that that’s where it’s from. But fat liberation is my kind of background where you’re talking not about the need for individuals to find their own self-help solutions, but the need to address systemic structural problems and inequities and stigma, things that really fuck you up.

So, in the world of sex awareness, I would say that I’ve always been kind of along that path. I came out as queer when I was 19 and kind of moved through that space. And I figured out that I might be kinky quite late in life, like early thirties (late twenties, early thirties).

But really, everything came to a strong head when I started doing phone sex work when I was 39. And I ended up learning a lot at that job. And I ended up, I would say, developing most of my current kind of perspective around how people can be fluid and how people can change and how people can want one thing but do another… and all these things. That’s a lot of where I developed that perspective on for sex awareness, through my work doing phone sex.

Gem: And what was that experience like for you? I guess there was a lot of learning in that?

Cameryn: It was seven or eight years of rather intense immersion in other people’s heads, right? That’s what phone sex is. Whether you’re getting paid for it or not, you’re in someone else’s head. And I was spending a lot of time there, being kind of confused by it because my adult sex life has been a pretty mixed bag in terms of being with women, being with cisgendered men. I honestly had not spent that much time in the heads of men. There I was like, “Oh, God!” all day, you know… all day being on call and talking to men about the dicks and about what was going on in their heads.

I spent a lot of time blogging about it and talking with other people about it and trying to figure out what the hell was all these stuff because there’s nothing out in the world that prepares you for it. We don’t talk about our inner sex lives very much at all in our world.

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