Pretty Baby

A Memoir

Chris Belcher

• Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781982175832
• eBook ISBN: 9781982175849
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

“Absolutely not to be missed.” —Vogue
“A muscular, canny memoir about labor and power and gender…I couldn’t put it down. What a fucking gorgeous book.” —Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

A queer teen rebel escapes small-town Appalachia and becomes Los Angeles’s Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix in this searing and darkly funny memoir that upends our ideas about desire, class, and power.

The dominatrix is the id of American femininity. She says the words that we all wish we could say when we find ourselves frozen in the presence of men. No is principal among them.

So writes Chris Belcher, who appeared destined for a life of conventional femininity after she took first place in an infant beauty contest—a minor glory that followed her around a working-class town of 1,600 people in rural West Virginia. But when she came out as queer, the conservative community that had once celebrated its prettiest baby turned on her.

A decade later, living in Los Angeles and trying to stay afloat in the early years of a PhD program, Belcher plunges into the work of a pro domme. Branding herself as Los Angeles’s Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix, she specializes in male clients who want a domme to make them feel worthless, shameful, and weak—all the abuse regularly heaped upon women for free. A queer woman whom men can trust with the unorthodox sides of their sexualities, Belcher is paid to be the keeper of the fantasies that they can’t enact in their everyday relationships. But moonlighting as a sex worker also carries risks, like the not-so-submissive who tries to turn the tables and the jealous client out for revenge.

As Belcher moves between the embodied world of the pro domme and the abstract realm of academia, she discovers how lessons from the classroom apply to the dungeon, and vice versa. Still, fear that her doctoral program won’t approve burdens her with a double life. Pretty Baby is her second coming out.

In this sharp and discerning memoir, we see through Belcher’s eyes how power and desire can be renegotiated—or reinforced.

1

When I was ten, my parents caught me messing with my father’s Penthouse collection. A small utility room opened next to the bathroom in my childhood home. I wasn’t allowed inside. A hot-water tank sat in the corner, and when one of us took a shower, a faint knock came from the inside, like a ghostly third sister. The opposite wall was stacked floor to ceiling with my dad’s hunting gear and a gun case, locked. A neat row of polished rifles and shotguns. I sneaked inside sometimes, pried my fingers into my father’s things, smelled his dirt, gun oil, and sweat. He had old coins and photographs of people I didn’t know. Once, with my little sister distracting our babysitter, I dragged a chair from the dining room into that utility closet, determined to investigate the things my dad kept on top of the gun cabinet.

I had seen pornos before, in my friend’s basement, packed into boxes ready to move out because her dad had cheated on her mom. As far as I could tell, the magazines on top of the gun cabinet were evidence that my dad was doing the same. Those women looked me right in my kid face and spread themselves open with manicured fingers.

I took the whole stack.

I hid the women who spread themselves open under my bed for days until I got a chance to escape, then ran with them down the railroad tracks that marked our property line. I threw them one by one off the overpass, into the creek below, where we fished for crawdads and minnows. Letting my legs dangle over the concrete ledge, spray-painted with swastikas and declarations of teenage love, I dammed up that tiny trickle of a creek with what I saw as my father’s infidelity. Despite my moralizing, I too felt the white-hot throb of desire that Dad must have felt for the centerfolds.

Weeks later, when he noticed they were gone, I was the only possible suspect, my sister still too young for perversion. First, a spanking for the immediacy of his anger, and a subsequent grounding for a chance to think about what a pervert I had been. I passed the time alone in my bedroom, masturbating to what I had seen in the magazines. My father’s betrayal became my own body’s. I never got to tell my parents that my intention was to save their marriage, a lost cause even then. If I had set out to be the good daughter, the hum between my legs betrayed me. I kept my mouth shut and accepted what I had coming.

An obsession with losing my virginity came soon after.

It wasn’t about pleasure, or scratching an itch. I could do that myself, with or without the magazines. If I tipped myself to just the right angle under the bathtub faucet and squeezed my toes like a fist, my pulse would stop thrashing between my ears and travel down. If I swiped my mother’s back massager and put it between my thighs—hidden like a fugitive in the tight space between bed and wall, boom box turned up to drown out the electric hum—I could undo my insides entirely. It wasn’t hard to steal the massager. My mom was a shift worker, in and out of the house with a lunch box and hard hat like a man. She actually used the massager to beat down her worn-out back.

Without surveillance, I had gotten away with it for years. I got caught only once, on a summer vacation when Dad stayed home and we brought my grandma with us to South Carolina: a fresh pair of adult eyes. On an overcast day, no good for the beach, we went to see a movie.

My vigilant grandmother asked the teenage theater attendant if the film was suitable for children as he took our tickets to A League of Their Own. He ripped them halfway and handed them back without comment.

“It has Madonna in it,” she whispered, loud enough for me to hear. I didn’t know what Madonna meant, but the teenager gave in, said we would be fine, and I was excited to find out.

After the movie ended, when we left the air-conditioned theater for the stifling minivan that had baked in the sun during our matinee, I climbed onto the floor behind the driver’s seat and draped my yellow blanket over myself to find a different kind of relief from a different kind of heat. Suspicious of a kid under a blanket in the humidity of a Carolina afternoon, my grandma snatched it up to find me underneath, hands down the front of my shorts.

“Quit that!” she shouted. “It’s nasty!”

I pulled it back out of her hands and threw it into the front seat, denying I’d been doing anything nasty underneath it. I wasn’t even masturbating to Madonna. I was masturbating to the alcoholic coach, played by Tom Hanks, who stumbled into the women’s locker room and took a long, drunk piss in front of all the lady baseball players.

None of that was why I wanted to lose it. When I thought of pleasure, I thought of lukewarm faucet water and the back massager. I thought of a chipped-white daybed squeaking under my weight while I squirmed and squeezed a pillow between my thighs, staring up at my Spice Girls poster. In the years of “MMMBop” and “Wannabe,” Scary Spice would eventually dethrone the middle Hanson brother as my number one girl crush. A boy was unnecessary. I didn’t want to lose it for a boy. I wanted to lose it because I wanted to be the first.

I was the first of my friends to start my period, and I relished being the most adult twelve-year-old in the room. It meant that I knew the answers to all the most important questions like, Will I have to tell my dad? and What if it comes in class? I dispensed advice like the tampon machine that should have existed in our elementary school bathroom. No, it doesn’t feel like peeing. Always keep a pad in your desk, just in case. Yes, it hurts. I reveled in the power given over to me by those doing the asking, and I wanted to hold on to it. For a twelve-year-old girl, power is hard to come by, and you take it where you can get it.

At recess, in the year I started bleeding, an older boy who had been held back for a second year of sixth grade lined a bunch of girls up against the concrete wall that separated the cafeteria from the playground. He was slightly browner than the greasy-haired white kids who had already learned casual racism from their parents. His friends called him spic like it was a nickname and not a racial slur. There in the line, he walked from girl to girl, making each of us tug our shorts down a little so he could check for hair.

“If you have hair,” he said, “you’re not a virgin,” peering into each girl’s underwear while his friend Eric kept watch for teachers who might interrupt the inspection.

I had a little.

“I am though!” I insisted. “I swear!” I may have wanted to lose my virginity, but I wasn’t going to have it taken away by a sixth grader’s speculation.

He gave me the go-ahead to zip up my Levi’s, but he didn’t believe me. He called Eric over from his post, doing crowd control by that point on the half-moon of boys watching and the long line of girls waiting. He grabbed the waist of my jeans himself and pulled them away from a stretch of my skin that had never before been touched.

“Look,” he said to Eric, and Eric looked.

A few days later, Eric scribbled a note that asked if I wanted to be his girlfriend and gave it to a boy who gave it to a girl who gave it to me. I said yes. Having a boyfriend would get me that much closer to losing it, for real, on my own terms.

Being Eric’s girlfriend meant sitting next to him on the school bus and calling his house in the evenings. I hadn’t liked Eric before, and I didn’t like him any more after weeks of listening to him play Donkey Kong with his brother through the phone. He laid it down each time it was his turn to take the controller. I sat on the line, listening to the mashing of his thumbs.

The issue of body hair that brought us together would also tear us apart. A month into our budding romance, Eric started sitting at my table at lunch. The unforgiving fluorescent lights of the school cafeteria illuminated the fine, dark hair covering my forearms, and Eric said he didn’t want a girlfriend who had more arm hair than he did. He said it in front of the whole table, and all the boys laughed. All the girls tugged down on their shirtsleeves. Twelve-year-old masculinity is just as fragile as it will be when those boys grow into men. I got home from school and shaved my entire body, a soft layer of protection gone. Freshly shorn, I hunkered down with my best friend, Becca, to plot the ends of our innocence.

Becca and I were in the same sixth-grade class, and on the last day of the school year, our teacher let us watch movies all day long. She laid her blond hair and gray roots down on her desk, exhausted after a year of babysitting restless kids whose parents sent them to school with lunch boxes full of white bread peanut butter sandwiches and Mountain Dew.

Becca was a tiny girl with stringy black hair and glasses thick enough to magnify her eyes if you looked at them from certain angles. Our classmates sat distracted by the brick of a television mounted in the corner of our classroom. A bulletin board’s trim drooped down over Crayola kid hands, traced and decorated: Thanksgiving turkeys. Our teacher had given up all the way back in November.

Becca pulled my notebook off my desk.

“Let’s write the pact,” she whispered.

We had already decided to have sex that summer before junior high began. If our parents had discovered their twelve-year-old daughters were planning to fuck, they would’ve likely taken us straight to the psych department of a pediatric hospital, or interrogated us to find out who was the instigator.

I’d been fascinated with sex for as long as I could remember. Before I had my period to brag about, I told my friends that I watched my parents do it every night through a hole in their bedroom wall. There was no hole in their bedroom wall, my parents were rarely home at the same time, and I’d never seen anyone have sex, at least not in person, only on late-night Cinemax and HBO. But telling the story made me feel powerful. It made me feel powerful, that is, until a girl in my class told her mother and her mother called mine and my mother screamed, “That isn’t true! What in the hell is wrong with you?”

She started watching me more closely in the bathtub and with the back massager.

Other girls my age talked about horses and dance routines. Other girls went to church. There were around fifteen hundred people in town, five hundred homes, but there were nearly twenty churches dotting both sides of the Ohio River across a ten-mile radius around my house. There were even more churches farther out in the country, where hands were laid and tongues were spoken. My parents dragged us to a hellfire-and-brimstone Baptist church every so often and always on holidays, where I got the sense that church existed for judging the behaviors of others—noticing those among us who were living in sin, asking them to let Jesus take the wheel—and my parents felt they were the ones being judged, never the ones doing the judging. Mom fell asleep in the pew each time we went and humiliated my dad, jolting herself awake with a loud snore when her head nodded, mouth open, chin to chest. Mom wanted Dad to remove his hat inside like all the other men, but he was self-conscious about his bald spot, and so he refused. Neither seemed to me cut out for organized religion.

At church, I watched grown men kneel at the altar and weep, begging for the keys to God’s kingdom. Humiliated on their behalf, I prayed only that the spirit didn’t grab hold of me and carry me to the front of the church, where I would be prayed over by a sweating man called Brother Graham. His breath smelled like the mothballs my grandma told me were poison but were still scattered in small packets across the floor of her bedroom closet.

I attended summer Bible school at my friends’ churches, where stout church ladies gave us watered-down orange Kool-Aid and off-brand Oreos. It was more arts and crafts than hellfire and brimstone. When the pastor asked who among us wanted to join God’s army, I stood up with everyone else to take my place among the ranks, even if they were in service of a God whose orders I couldn’t hear. I knew that if you got saved at the beginning of the week you could get baptized in the pastor’s pool at the end of the week, and nothing sounded more fun than jumping into a pool with all of my clothes on.

To maintain appearances, I would entertain Jesus and horses and dance routines and all the other childish topics my friends favored, but I couldn’t wait until we were alone so that I could talk about sex with Becca. Besides our parents, the only people we were sure had done it was the cast of The Real World, and there was nothing I wanted more than to grow up and be on The Real World.

MTV wasn’t allowed at my house, but Becca’s mom was younger than everyone else’s, and she recorded The Real World on VHS tapes so that she could keep up when she had to work evenings. A note from my mom would give me permission to take the bus from school to Becca’s house, where we had access to boxes full of adult programming on tape. When the bus dumped us at the bottom of Becca’s long driveway, we would run up the hill to her old two-story house, crumbling off the wooded mouth of a holler, and down the stairs into a windowless basement family room. I could have cared less about Pedro Zamora’s commitment ceremony with his partner, the first same-sex commitment to air on television, twenty years before gay marriage would be legalized in the United States. We fast-forwarded past all talk of his dying.

Our obsession with the show had only grown two seasons past San Francisco, when we watched Miami’s frat boy Mike bring a girl home to soak in the house Jacuzzi. Roommate Melissa joined the two, and the trio eventually ended up in the shower together, sending the rest of the cast into a frenzy of speculation about a wild threesome. Dan, Flora, and Sarah broke a window trying to watch the girl-on-girl-on-boy action. Becca and I sat close to the screen, eating Fun Dip and licking our sugary fingers. It was the first time I heard about girls making out with other girls.

Nineties teen culture was obsessed with virginity. Tai deals the harshest insult on Clueless when she calls Cher a virgin who can’t drive. On Beverly Hills, 90210, virginity was Donna’s defining characteristic.

“You can make all the 90210 Barbies have sex,” I explained to my sister. Brenda and Kelly, Dylan and Brenda, even Brenda and Brandon. “Everyone except for Donna.”

Donna didn’t do it; that’s what made her Donna.

The Real World’s producers cast a virgin on almost every season, and if I couldn’t relate to anything else on the show, I could relate to them. New York: Julie, a sweet Southern girl who was shocked by all things sex in the city. San Francisco: Rachel, a good Catholic girl who flirted with bad-hygiene bad-boy Puck. Boston: Elka, whose father forced her to sign a contract promising that she wouldn’t drink, do drugs, or have sex on TV. The show’s virgins were proxies for its mostly teenage audience, lying awake and wondering who might be having sex in the next bed over.

Genesis Moss was not a virgin. She looked like a lesbian Drew Barrymore: bleach-blond hair, crimson lips, black leather, the archetype of nineties hard femme. On the Boston season in 1997, Genesis spent most of her time in queer bars, befriending local drag queens, not wasting her breath on the people MTV had cast to confront her homosexuality.

Until the scenes set in the youth center where the Boston cast worked, there were never kids on the show. But in that youth center, a girl—younger than Becca and I by a few years—said to Genesis, “I don’t like gay people.” With bobble-head excitement, the girl’s voice singsonged when she said it: “I just have a feeling that I hate them.”

Them: gay people.

I wonder who that kid grew up to be and if she, like me, watches that scene over and over again on YouTube.

“When I grow up and go to college,” I said when Becca stopped the tape, “I’m going to be a lesbian like Genesis.”

Something about the way she hurt, the way her hurt rallied her housemates around her, made me want to be her. I wanted repercussions.

“If you want to be a lezzie,” Becca said, “you should go for it.”

She was a good friend.

After the episode, Becca got up to retrieve the magnifying hand mirror out of her parents’ bathroom so we could pluck our eyebrows into thin lines like Genesis and Drew Barrymore in Mad Love, a movie we rented on more than one Friday night sleepover. In it, Drew is so sexy that the boy next door can’t help but watch her through her bedroom window every night. He uses a telescope, and I couldn’t wait until a boy wanted to watch me through a telescope. I hoped my neighbor in college would have one.

I knew one lesbian outside of The Real World. Our elementary school bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright