I met Nicole Daedone on a dating site in 2013. My profile identified me as a black queer woman. Our initial contact on the site blossomed into a distance friendship over the course of nearly a year. I eventually came to visit Nicole in person and was introduced to OneTaste at that time. Shortly thereafter, I was hired by OneTaste to be an executive assistant.
I had neither participated in OneTaste courses nor tried the practice of OM before taking this position. I had, however, read Nicole’s book Slow Sex roughly two years prior to meeting her online. Reading that book was part of my journey to explore my attraction to women more deeply and courageously. Nonetheless, as a self-identified bisexual woman, I was skeptical of what OneTaste could offer me.
I’m an observer by nature. For months, I observed the interaction between leaders of the organization and students in the community. I observed people discovering and understanding their relationships and attractions (and aversions!). I gained a perspective of the community and organizational responses to the expressions of those relationships and attractions. I read everything I could get my hands on. I did my research before getting involved with the organization, and I am sharing with you my experience.
A key thing I observed was that OneTaste was invested in diversity, equity, and inclusion more than a decade before DEI was a corporate term. This included offering scholarships to minority and LGBTQI students. Beginning in 2014, OneTaste invited experts to give trainings to staff and students ( in the community and in specific programs) in sensitivity, awareness, and skill in how to deal with issues of non-binary sexual and gender identity. We also held extensive trauma training with at least three different industry leaders.
OneTaste hosted lesbian and queer TurnON events (sometimes as often as once a month), women-only Intro to OM classes, and queer women-only Intro to OM classes. I understand that before I arrived, there was even an initiative called Women Island, where only women were in the stroker position since they were uncomfortable with the idea of having male OM partners. I also met gay male strokers and transgender and transitioning students participating in our classes and practices.
It wasn’t just that we were in San Francisco, at the center and forefront of progressive inclusion. It was that we lived by the principle of including all. This was not mere lip service; it was a way of life. Creating an environment that feels inclusive to a wide variety of perspectives is not always easy to accomplish but it is what we aimed for at OneTaste.
It requires courage, openness, and availability to be with and amongst the myriad of feelings and perceptions, as well as the expression of feelings and perceptions that you and others around you are experiencing. This included coworkers, friends, family, intimate partners, students, and clients — relationships of many stripes and complexities. The process of staying in connection to work these things out is one that is rigorous and not always easy.
Some of my straight friends at OneTaste say that OneTaste’s courses and classes were where they had their first introduction to how to understand and discuss gender identity with sensitivity at a time when these issues were barely addressed in mainstream culture.
OneTaste put ‘inclusion’ into action by continuously inviting not just me but everyone who participated to help create the courses, events, community, and business that we wanted to experience and take part in. Co-creation drives inclusion. Throughout my time at OneTaste, I saw OneTaste make a lot of invitations to people to bring their ideas to fruition within the company and the community, take on roles and responsibilities, and partner in creation. And in turn, they would be met with organizational support to explore what they wanted to bring to life.
Across the board, from business ideas to teaching to events, there was a constant call to take ownership of personal power. A call to take initiative and grab something you wanted to see happen and make it happen. With support. Not suppression. In conversations about desire to create, both publicly and privately, the phrase “How would you want it to go?” was heard more times than I could ever count.
To the extent that there was a lack of diversity at times, it was not because people were asking to be included and were left out. They emphatically were included when they asked. This means — people of color, queer, etc., were all considered and welcomed. So inclusion from the co-creation perspective was reflective of desire for inclusion, not necessarily OneTaste going out to seek it.
If black folks wanted to come in and make contributions from a cultural perspective, they were and are welcome to do so, to infuse the culture with ‘blackness,’ so to speak. It was welcomed and supported. The same was true with regard to the queer community. Those who had the desire to bring forth queer events and classes to represent themselves and make the practice theirs had space to do so.
Instead of making symbolic gestures designed to prove we were inclusive, much like the virtue signaling so insidiously prevalent today, OneTaste, for over a decade, made continuous efforts to have an honest relationship with many things, including sexual identity. The point was to be right in the heart of it, not to merely live in the clean, cookie-cutter presentation of inclusion. We didn’t just visit until we were sure no one would be upset or until the papers might pick it up, then discard it as simply another initiative necessary to do business in the world today. We went to the heart and depth of it and lived there for the whole of life.
There seems to be an implication in the media reporting that OneTaste promoted a ‘heteronormative’ culture. This was especially implied in the Netflix film Orgasm, Inc., in which a former OneTaste staffer Audrey Wright asserted that as a queer woman, she felt pressure to be more feminine, stating:
“So it felt like for me as a queer woman that there was all this pressure to be either feminine or masculine, and so a lot of the things that I thought were wrong with me and that I needed to fix had to do with not being feminine enough for OneTaste, not behaving like the other women. You know, I’m a woman who works backstage like I wear tool belts, and I do things that are considered pretty masculine. And so I was sort of teased a lot.”
As I said above, there were deliberate efforts for the inclusion of groups who requested particular programming — women-only OM, LGBTQ+ Intro to OM classes, etc. — but the point of OM is deliberately and specifically to unleash and infuse feminine power. That feminine power is possessed in straight women, queer women, and also men who wanted to connect with the feminine. So looking at OM through a heteronormative lens misses the point in that respect. There were plenty of women working behind the scenes with tool belts at OneTaste — and these roles were never assigned based on gender — but purely on skill and desire for contribution.
My personal experience as a queer woman was different from what Audrey Wright described to Netflix. At OneTaste, I maintained an androgynous appearance and often wore masculine clothing. I was not made fun of. In fact, the opposite occurred. By following my desire with appearance, many others expressed attraction to me.
At OneTaste, there was always support for relating to our deep desires. Before getting involved with OneTaste, most of my previous sexual partners had been men, although I identify as bisexual. Cultivating the practice of OM actually brought me into better touch with my desire, into closer connection with my feminine power, and into intimate relationships with other women. OneTaste did not seek to prove or change, or control anyone’s gender identity or sexual expression of that identity.
What OneTaste provided was room and space for anyone who had the desire to express, explore, and understand the whole of who they are. OneTaste’s support for inclusion wasn’t based on quotas, statistics, or mandates. Success for us was about embracing the truth of each human involved. That is genuine inclusion.
- Courtney Walker
