Abide

The one thing the Jonas Brothers and I have in common is that we both made the purity vow as a coming-of-age ritual. I used to repeat that to myself as a teenager, because it was the only way I could make what happened sound cool in my head. But the reality wasn’t cool at all.

It was a day like any other; I woke up for school, spent time at my extracurricular activities before heading home. But I knew things were serious when my caretakers gathered us all and brought out a piece of “contract”. They pitched it to me as making the holiest covenant of all: staying a virgin until marriage. They were waxing poetic about how we are “brides” for Jesus, and we will honor God with this promise. I honestly tuned out most of it because no one asked what I wanted. If someone did ask, this is how I would answer.

I definitely wasn’t ready for sex as a teenager, but at the same time, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to wait until marriage. I knew I wanted my first time to be with someone I liked and they liked me back. I would like us to be dating for some time, and there’s trust. I definitely didn’t want my first time to happen in the back of someone’s car, but I also wasn’t envisioning that I would be having sex on a bed of roses at some 5-star hotel.

But no one asked what I wanted. Instead, I was told that dinner would not be served until we had all signed our names on the dotted line. So between advocating for agency over my body or getting my basic needs met, I chose the latter. And I have made many choices like that in the following decades of my life.

I didn’t grow up with a positive and healthy dialogue around sex. Sex was just meant for procreation. I was taught that we don’t use our “hands” or our “mouths”, and there was definitely no mention of the “backdoor”. Sex was painted to me as something you would do in a missionary position on a Wednesday evening when you’re ovulating. I distinctly remember one of my older siblings sharing his promise that before copulation, he would kneel and hold hands with his wife, praying to God to bless this union. He was praised for his piety and righteousness because, even in the heat of the moment, he prioritised God. In hindsight, that sounds like a nightmare.

​But frankly, I also didn’t want to think about sex. When I was 11 or 12, I was brought to the entrance of a lady boy show in Thailand. My caretakers made sure to point out all the “creepy” men who were lurking and the dolls who sexualised their bodies for money. To drive the point home, my caretaker stated with disgust that if I continued exploring my femininity, I was looking at my future and they would want nothing to do with it. They went as far as physically pushing me away from them and towards the dolls, which led me to cling tighter to the very people who were instilling transphobia into me.

I think this is why respectability politics had such a hold on me.

In my sheltered and easily mold-able young mind, I saw that the solution to escaping this fate and staying safe from being objectified and sexualised was through being virtuous and pious enough that a straight Christian man would deem me “worthy” of being his wife. And with that belief, I held onto my virginity as proof that I was “good” and “not damaged”. In my mind, I told myself that it was good that the other girls, trans or cis, were having sex because it meant I had one less competitor when it came to being picked by a man.

It was only in my early 20s that I had this mentality slowly challenged.

I read Alicia Keys’ memoir: More Myself, and in the beginning chapters, she wrote about her experience as a 7-year-old seeing sex workers on the streets of New York. When she pressed her mom on what they were doing, this was what the mom said.

​“When people go through hard times, Ali,” she says slowly, “they often have to do things they don’t want to do. Those women are just trying to survive.”

Alicia Keys’ conclusion was her promise to herself that “I will never be in a situation like that. Half-clothed. Vulnerable. Powerless. Exposed”

But reading it, I was struck by how human Alicia Keys’ mother spoke about sex workers and what they did.

I thought about what my attitude towards sex and sex workers would be like if my caretakers humanized the trans women I saw in Thailand instead of shaming them. As an adult, I now know that those dolls were just doing what they could to survive. It was a job, and we all have to work in capitalism.

My beliefs around sex workers were further dismantled when the first sex worker I met after that was a fellow NYU student who was a cis white woman from the middle of America. Before then, I thought that the fate for all trans women was sex work, and she pointed out that regardless of your gender identity, sex work is just work that people do. Even though she got a scholarship and financial aid, it wasn’t enough to sustain living in New York City; one of the most expensive cities in the world. I remember being shocked when she asked, “Summer, do you think every girl who has a Chanel bag on campus was gifted that by their parents?”

Going to NYU was a huge cultural shock for me. Suddenly all the rules I was used to were gone. I could wear what I want, there were no curfews, no more mandatory church attendings and I struggled to adapt without the religious policing that I was used to. As a result, I sheltered myself by spending a lot of time locked in my room after class and trying out clothes in my closet. I now know that it takes a lot of time to adjust your nervous system after trauma.  My survival mechanism of protecting myself by staying small and hidden hasn’t been updated to my new reality and writing songs was my way of processing the big change I was going through. I remember spending hours at the piano practice rooms writing music. I was so productive and had so much to say that I would write 5 songs a week, trying on different genres and topics. 

During that time, one of the genres I wanted to try was RnB and I wrote a song called “I’m here.” The lyrics paint a woman who has done “everything right,” and her reward is the orgasm she has with her husband, where she proclaims "I'm here” over and over as she’s climaxing. I played this song at my songwriting class at NYU, and I was lowkey laughed out of the room. But my teacher at the time made a note that stayed with me. He said, “I love the melody, and how you are branching out to other genres, but of all the songs you showed, this one feels the least…you.”

And that’s true because I still haven’t asked what I wanted for myself; I was just writing what I was programmed to know.

At the time, I was listening to Carole King’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” on repeat. The lyric goes:

Tonight with words unspoken
You say that I'm the only one.
But will my heart be broken?
When the night meets the morning sun​

I didn’t like how she left it to chance; I thought, why didn’t she talk this out before sex? Why is she putting her needs aside and letting a man decide whether he’ll want what she wants? I did not want that, and that’s how Abide came to be.

I felt pulled between two worlds during those days. Coming from a Christian background, hookup culture was presented as the opposite of purity culture. Purity culture needed my shame and treated my body like God’s property, but then it seemed like in hookup culture, the mature move is to need nothing. It was an extreme on both ends. But through rewriting the lyrics to the song, I saw that I do need a lot. I needed safety, communication, and respect. That is not nothing.

Abide was the second song I put out after Masterpiece because I felt it was such a different side of me. It was also the first time I worked with a queer producer who really helped bring out the sensual vibes. This song stretched my abilities as a songwriter and allowed me to explore a lot of my hidden beliefs around sex and intimacy and unpick what did not belong to me post deconstruction. This song is my manifesto. It was me articulating what brought me pleasure and speaking up for myself and I’ll always be proud of the journey this song represented for me.

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