On any given night of the week, you might catch me dancing on a stage under bright lights in hot-pink spandex and short shorts. Gets off on attention, you might think. A total exhibitionist.

Oh yes. Probably. But my relationship to the stage is fraught with paradox. It has way more S&M overtones than it does exhibitionist tendencies. Musicians make ourselves vulnerable, repeatedly, publicly. Musicians set up a scene with no idea where it's going to go. It's edge play with no safe word. And it's pretty hot.

Sometimes I'm the top. At its best, performing is the ultimate adrenaline rush—a transcendent experience of communicating with a crowd and recycling the energy of a room until we're all chewed up and spit out somewhere new. It tastes good. Like sweat and money.

As a performer, I'm a total domme. I have my fetish gear: fishnets, heels. I engage in role-play: lesbian rapper, singer-songwriter, tour booker, marketer of my own and other people's creative work. (To say nothing of the myriad roles I play onstage: ingenue, 12-year-old boy, satirist, robot nurse...) And when Gina Bling and I step out from the wings as Team Gina, we experience power. Not cringey, totalitarian, goose-stepping fascist-dictator power—no. Empowerment. Power to the people. "I have the power!" shouted He-Man style, while animated purple lightning crackles in the air.

A good performance is me topping you. I have you in the palm of my hand. You hang on to my every word. I say jump; you jump. And not only do you jump, but you enjoy jumping—you're glad someone asked you to jump and that you stopped acting cool for a fucking second, let yourself laugh or dance, pushed your own boundaries. Generally, when I'm onstage, you will do whatever I say.

As a woman, though, and especially as a queer woman whose sexuality often precludes/precedes what anyone knows about my work, I'd be fooling you if I played like it's all as simple as that. I went to Catholic school for 13 years. Our plaid kilts had to be worn long—four inches from the floor when kneeling or else demerits, detention. (To say nothing of the implicit "burning in hell.") These "skirt checks" were conducted gleefully by older female administrators who saw absolutely no irony in the fact that they loved lining us up on our knees and whipping out the ruler.

Sexuality was thus equated with shame in my mind from a very early age. Sometimes I'm a performer who hates being looked at, a girl in a leotard and short skirt who fully knows the repercussions of showing too much. So why this compulsion to put myself onstage, into such a loaded, sexualized relationship with so many friends and strangers?

I started discovering my queerness right around the time that the nuns discovered most of the girls in my class were rolling up their skirts. And from day one, queer content crept into my music. If all performance is masochistic, lesbian performance is perhaps excessively so. The word lesbian precedes us, alternately trivializing or exalting our work depending on the biases of the audience involved. Sexuality creeps into the conversation regardless of how sex-free the content.

And sometimes I'm the submissive. Bad review? Hit me! Mean blog comment? Hit me! Exclusion from certain opportunities because I'm queer? Hit me! Performing hurts. It's a business full of rejection, full of making yourself vulnerable and facing humiliating defeats. But I can take it. I get up onstage every night knowing damn well that every success has its equal and opposite humiliation.

That's my kink. Most of us who perform don't really have a choice. It's how we're wired. It's what we're into. And it's often far less about exhibitionism, a desire to be looked at, than it is a semimasochistic need to experience the highs of a good show, a great record, a truly incredible intimate communion with an audience, regardless of the pain it takes to get there.

Because the thing is, if we lesbians (and anyone else on the margins) don't take to the stage and represent ourselves, someone else is going to do it for us. And I know I'm not the only one who remembers the t.A.T.u. debacle or sees the ludicrous hypocrisy of Katy Perry releasing hit singles entitled, respectively, "I Kissed a Girl" and "Ur So Gay."

In the end, for me, performing is not just a desire to be looked at.

It's a desire to be seen.