/Hush

Secrets in and of themselves are sexy. Knowledge, especially knowledge that is personal and private, is sexy. Power is sexy. And secrets, those delightful, frisson-bearing scraps and orts of information, hold power. A secret told enough times becomes a story, and while stories hold pleasure and while stories carry power, a story lacks the whispering, murmuring, susurrating sexiness that a secret does. “Secret”: all sibilance and cutting consonants, even the word is sexy.

My previous boyfriend liked my secrets; I mean, he really liked secrets. He would trot out his favorites for me to dressage in the dark like so many ebony horses. “Tell me about the time you went to see that Dom in Princeton who looked like your uncle,” he would say, and I would. I took a train, I’d say. I was wearing that Carrie Bradshaw dress that shows my bra and my cleavage, and I felt exposed. I’d say, he met me at the station; we went to some banal mall restaurant; he drank Chardonnay; I ate gazpacho; we were nervous. He took me back to his scrupulously clean house and led me to the spare bedroom, where he had an array of black-leather-and-steel toys all laid out like a toy soldiers readying to storm Normandy.

“Then what?” my previous boyfriend would say, as if he hadn’t heard the secret, which he had.

The Dom prodded, poked, stuck, spanked and me, I would say, for hours. After he was finished, before I showered, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and I was covered in muck and red stripes, as if I’d crawled belly-down through nettles. My boyfriend would back me up to tell him that once-secret, now-story again, and again, this dark horse turning the grist for his erotic mill.

We all of us carry secrets with us, and these are, almost all of them, erotically charged. They, like the girl who was born to please, can’t help it. Perhaps that’s why so many erotic memoirs have the word “secret” in the title, and often redundantly as in “The Secret Diary,” as if we’ve any desire to read any other kind. Secrets, like lingerie, demand revelation. A secret that doesn’t make you want to tell it isn’t worth a fuck.

It’s this play between conceal and reveal that rests at the bottom of every burlesque dance. Dita Von Teese oozing across a stage in Christian Laboutins, dripping with Swarovski crystals, and slowly peeling a layer to drop it with nonchalant disdain. Sally Rand twirling and whirling her giant fans and her is-she-or-isn’t she nakedness. Julie Atlas Muz all grimace and insouciance grabbing her pubic hair to make her labia lip-synch “Breakin’ the Law.” The performer, the music, the persona, the pasties: they are all to some degree interchangeable. What is unique is that delicate dance between the conceal and the reveal. What will she show us, how, and when? Those are the questions that drive the burly-q dance, and often our erotic lives.

Burlesque dancers only do on stage and literally what we mortals do every day and metaphorically. Our bodies all carry secrets. Piercings, tattoos, scars, the fragile thrill of lingerie, the tender purple of last night’s restraints, the not-unpleasurable rash of too hard fucking, the tell-tale beat-beat-beating of a clit left too long untouched, the evanescent turgidity of a needy cock: we walk our pinstriped lives like we don’t own these secrets, but we do. We carry them like aces close to our chests, and we throw them gloriously on the table when it’s time to pony up. Our secrets are often our full house, but then someone else could be holding a royal flush. It’s all a matter of what information should—and shouldn’t—go public.

Our genitals, after all, are also called our privates. They are not our publics, unless in some kind of transgressive