Maeve: Hi, I’m Maeve Marsden, and you’re listening to Queerstories. This week, Tamara Natt is a queer poet, essayist and playwright living with her wife and the local bird gangs on the semi-rural Australian coastline. Spanning her beat poetry play ALPHA which she presented at Edinburgh Fringe Festival to A Letter to Everyone I Have Ever Met, an online project that interrogates the significance of first impressions, her work is deeply personal, highly political and brutally romantic. This description of her work is particularly amusing when I tell you that this story is called Masturbating for Jesus. She’s performed it at Queerstories on the Gold Cost, in Mullumbimby, in Sydney and in Brisbane – yes I loved the story that much. Enjoy!
Tamara: In Year 7, I was nearly expelled for teaching my entire class how to masturbate. At this point, I was also entirely confident that I would be joining the priesthood. There was something about the theatre of smells, and the focus and the drama of Sunday service congregation that had me convinced I was destined for clergy. Tragically for my religious career, my parents were atheists and I shot out of the womb wearing men’s cologne and wrapped in a Rachel Weisz poster. So, naturally I turned to cult leadership instead. And that’s how I found myself sweating on a plastic chair in Principal Loadwick’s office on a very hot Friday afternoon in 2004 with cum on my hands.
My, my, how did we get here? I’m glad you asked.
Growing up, my parents were away, a lot so I learned how to masturbate from an early age. Unfortunately, my mother, Julie Anthony, is one of the country’s best loved singers. She was also on tour for 15 years straight. I, by contrast, wore a black cape to the beach and once bit myself to get out of the school swimming carnival. Naturally I comforted what a total letdown I was as the mutt child of Australia’s sweetheart with hotel dessert buffets, Nickelodeon and squeezing my legs together.
The television was my companion, as was custard straight from the carton, despite my catastrophic dairy intolerance, and my babysitter, Margaret, who I thought was 95 at the time but was probably closer to 40.
My dad was my mum’s tour manager, and Margaret started off as his secretary. She wrote in that secretarial shorthand, and so I thought she secretly spoke a magical language and was 100% a spy. Despite being our neighbour for 20 years, Margaret spent most of that time making shit sausages in our kitchen, and sleeping in the guest bedroom. Her husband was drunk and short sighed so when she was with me I was mostly just glad that she wasn’t with him.
Besides being nanny of the century, Margaret also played Big Brother at my now-infamous ‘Eviction Party’ in Year 5, where I voted people out when I got bored of them. I pointed to them and she would lead them off to the Diary Room, which was the rumpus at the time, and called their parents to come and pick them up. This may or may not have contributed to my loneliness as a child but I do prefer to blame my mother for that and we are working on that in therapy, thank you. Anyway I guess Margaret felt sorry for me or something because she turned a blind eye to me eating cake and plastic cheese slices for dinner and not doing my exercises that Celia, my personal trainer since I was 7, had tasked me with. Her blind eye also extended the moments I would lay flat on the couch, turn up the TV and flush my cheeks. Bless her.
I couldn’t explain what that feeling was at the time but safe to say, I was obsessed. Yep. I was dedicated to doing itanywhere I could – on the bus, in the bath, leaning against the trolley at Coles, almost always when watching Catherine Zeta-Jones in Zorro, and any movie starring Mandy Moore. Weird flex but okay. It was a friend, company, something I could turn to when I was bored that made me feel good and full.
After a year or so of experimentation, I was deep into the stages of research and development. Surely, I had discovered some kind of technique that nobody had before, and I could amass a following, a congregation, from this feeling. I was absolutely convinced that I had invented something remarkable and I had to perfect my method before releasing it to the public.
This was, and is to this day, The Method:
1. Lay with your legs extended in front of you. This can be done standing for advanced students.
2. Lick your hand. Wipe the saliva onto the insides of both thighs. This will provide friction.
3. Cross your legs, one thigh over the other, with your ankles interlaced.
4. Turn slightly on an angle.
5. Press your thighs together and pulse until you feel it in your underpants.
6. Continue like this until the warm feeling comes.
The Method was flawless. I was regularly orgasming from the age of 10 and it felt better than church. I knew I had to share my knowledge – what a goldmine, what a balm for future generations of leg squeezers to come! Unfortunately, I did choose to share it with Ms. Capper’s class of Year 6’s.
I started recruiting on the Monday. At first, it was just Shani and Leesa Brown but soon, word had spread like the cold sore epidemic the year before. Carefully, I selected my teaching spot, settling on the fort near the science rooms for its old sun baked plastic slide and large expanse of woodchip. More people could comfortably lay flat that way and I could lecture from the slide.
Knowing the lunch bell would ring at 1:30 on the dot, I excused myself from Basic Maths at 1:25, pointing furiously to my stomach – custard dairy intolerance. At that time, the fort was bare and I could plant my flag. I sat at the top of the slide, wincing through the hot plastic searing the soft part of my leg beneath my school skirt.
Suddenly, I was terrified. What if nobody showed up? Did I even want to share my secret? What Would Jesus Do? When the bell finally tore through the silent quadrangle, I was whispering to myself, “What Would Jesus Do, What Would Jesus Do, What Would – “ Before I was interrupted by the first curious students dribbling in. First three, then six, ten, twelve. By 1:40, the fort was full and silent.
I rose to stand at my pulpit. I addressed my congregation. It was a good ten minutes before the yard duty teacher realised what was happening. There were twenty five kids writhing around on the ground while I passed between them, adjusting them like a yoga teacher from hell. To my despair, none of them managed to make The Method stick before I was strung up by the elbow and hauled into the Principal’s office. But that moment of focus, attention and sheer will of the group was one of a few where I really felt like I could hear my aliveness in my ears, and feel it prickling on my skin. It was a religious experience.
Afterwards, Margaret came and picked me up in her old Holden Statesman from the Principal’s office. Mrs. Loadwick had sent me home early with a warning and the promise of a soiled reputation. That, and my life’s work to date was pissed to the wind. As I slunk into the back seat and swung my bag in, not wanting to be front and centre for my inevitable punishment, Margaret turned around. She was smiling. She patted the leather of the passenger’s seat, turned the radio up and said “Shall we go for hot chips?”. Teaching me, in one sentence, the point of my entire religious education and a memo to churches the world over – the difference between a priest and saint.
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