by Becca Shaw Glaser February 8, 2022, The Free Press

“To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture, but if you go
beneath that picture, it’s like turning over a rock with your foot — all kinds
of strange things crawl out.” — Grace Metalious, author of “Peyton Place”

Growing up in Maine I often felt stifled, suffocated by the conformity, the
whiteness, the conservatism, the out-and proud racism, misogyny, homophobia, and classism. The dominant characteristic of Camden, where I primarily lived, was its tight-assed obsession with appearances — our lives were scripted performances to please the tourists, teachers, school administrators, Rockport CIA retirees and, later, MBNA. I hated it as a teenager and was eager to get the hell out of Maine, to go where things felt actively in motion, where you could taste the grit in your teeth, where you didn’t get harassed for having a streak of green hair, where no one told you you didn’t belong because, although you were born in the state, your parents weren’t.

I got out of Maine as soon as I could. It was thrilling in other places to find newspapers whose back pages unapologetically embraced sexuality: columns by Tristan Taormino, Dan Savage and Carol Queen, where oral sex, anuses, affirmative consent, queer sex, sexual shame, BDSM, internalized homophobia and polyamory were generously, humorously and seriously explored. It wasn’t just sex, of course: other places were bursting with a sort of energy and variety that midcoast Maine was either squashing out of people or maybe, being such small towns, would never be capable of.

I ended up living many places, but nowhere else felt like home — not home in the way the sea salt sticks to your lashes, or the way the spines of the spruce tree graze your fingertips like the very best lover. Plus my family, for all its imperfections, is here. I moved back about six years ago only to be promptly confronted with just how puritanical, closed-minded and behind-the-times the communities I grew up in could still be. When Trump became president, towns and cities across the country started passing resolutions to denounce the
racism, sexism and anti-immigrant hate he flaunted; to refuse to collaborate with CBP and ICE; and to unequivocally state their pro-diversity values. I jumped in to help Rockland pass a diversity resolution, which apparently made me a controversial public persona. My local political involvement has come with high costs, which I won’t go into fully. But one of the things that happened with the Diversity Resolution is that a local elected official who opposed the original version scoured my social media, then pursued private meetings with other politicians to discuss me, my beliefs and my postings. On top of that, a local woman, whose identity I was not told (so as far as I know she could be almost any woman in the community) looked me up and found some of my shockingly depraved creative writing online. She printed it out, annotated the parts she found especially sinful and slipped it to a local politician, telling her she should not support the Diversity Resolution because, basically, a perverted woman was pushing for it.

Just thinking about these things, years later, wears me out.

After being in a recent writing workshop I am reinspired to create manuscripts with the writings I had abandoned after getting my MFA in, that’s right, poetry. These writings are often overtly sexual; that was the whole point, to deliberately work with sex — its muscular passion, its joyfulness and its complexity within
capitalist patriarchy — with a feminist lens. But I wonder, is there room for this in midcoast Maine, or do I need to keep splitting myself in two to live here? The reality is that people in Maine are still so freaked out by sex and pleasure that municipalities are passing policies to discriminate against stores that sell sex toys, with regulations that highly restrict locations and times of operation, such as Rockland’s 2014 “Article XII: Licensing of Adult Amusement Stores,” a 2,488-word ordinance stuffed, ironically, with gratuitously porn-like details. (Meanwhile, the Walmart in Thomaston now sells sex toys above the condom section, like no big deal.) Likely, those who push to get “adult toy” stores out of the community haven’t stayed abreast of the major transformations in the sex toy industry over the last few decades, where, in many cases, feminists reclaimed the often male-dominated sex toy landscape. This has resulted in sex toy stores like Good Vibrations, Babeland, and The Pleasure Chest, which feel inclusive, safe, liberating and educational. In truth, many in midcoast Maine have likely missed out entirely on the sex positivity movement, which believes that a culture where sexuality is
taboo leads to shame, particularly for LGBTQI+ people, and results in a culture where sexual assault and rape are absolutely everywhere.

Any small community will tend towards conformity, whether that be radical anarchist-type collectives or majority white, puritanical-derived communities in Maine. But I’m trying to figure out my own part in the perpetuation of the status quo. Who is my presumed audience and how does that shape what I create? Am I
squashing myself in attempting to reach certain people, or am I being squashed from outside? At times, as a columnist for The Free Press, I censor my writing before sending it to my editor. And, yes, there have been times when my editor asks me to take the f-, or even the h- word, out. I almost always agree, and yet, what if there are readers, or potential readers, who’d like to see more swears, love to see a broader array of discourse in the local paper? That is, are we catering too much to a partly imagined, homogenous group of people, thereby, in a sense, insulting the community, which most certainly has a wider range of tastes, experiences, and beliefs than we might be assuming?

A year ago, a passing reference in this column to “being gone down on” was
followed by some aghast tittering in the community, including from current and former politicians. I wrote about the tittering on my socials; the response, by people who grew up in midcoast Maine, or still live here, was that they find the area “suffocating,” full of sexual shame, obsessed with being “quaint.” I asked my
editor, tongue-in-cheek, “Would you say the primary demographic of a Free Press reader is the 6-to-10-year-old crowd?” And no, it’s not. Actually, we are living at a time where the 60- and 70-year-olds are the Baby Boomers, responsible for the so-called Sexual Revolution, second-wave feminism, and furthering Queer
Liberation. So why does the midcoast as a whole still seem to clutch so tightly its discomfort with sexuality? As Grace Metalious, the author of “Peyton Place,” said, “… to talk about adults without talking about their sex drives is like talking about a window without glass.”

No, The Free Press is probably not about to have a fabulous, fun sex column in its back pages like so many of the weekly papers I found when I left the midcoast, but, it’s kind of too bad, because you start to wonder: Exactly how do things, truly, change for the better?

Becca Shaw Glaser’s writing has appeared in Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Rumpus, Columbia Journal, The Offing, xoJane, New South, The Maine Commons, and more.