Thursday, July 26, 2012



I first met Yuliya Kate a few years ago when she was a model at Focal Point where I teach photography. She is striking and elegant. The moment she begins to talk you realize quickly that some sort of argument will ensue. She has opinions. And should you introduce her as Yuliya the woman from the Ukraine you will be lambasted by a verbal barrage explaining that she is from Ukraine and no demonstrative adjective is needed.

My wife and Yuliya have one common defect (for me) and that is that they rarely like anything I do. My Rosemary is my worse critic. It has served me well as she has always pointed out the little things in photographs (a little finger in tension, an example) that ruin them. Whenever I take photographs I have Rosemary somewhere in my brain helping me scan those little offending things. Yuliya does not like any of the pictures I take of her. In some rare situations she has acknowledged that a picture is “not bad”.

Yuliya Kate is a professional dominatrix. I have been to her lair (where I took the picture you see here) and have noted that parts of it resemble areas in sports gyms. There are metal devices. I am simply too old fashioned and perhaps even afraid to inquire exactly what the metal devices are for, or what exactly a dominatrix will do to willing (and paying) clients.

But important to me is that as long as the word dominatrix exists and no ill-advised feminist decides for a one size fits all nomenclature, dominator it means that one of the most beautiful words of the English language will have to stand, too. I cannot imagine anybody saying, “That great American aviator Amelia Earhart” when we can replace that sexless word with that most wonderful aviatrix.

I try to explain to my 88 year old first cousin and godmother, Inesita O’Reilly Kuker who speaks a most beautiful English (the queen of England sounds like her because my cousin is older than the queen) in her apartment in the Belgrano district of Buenos Aires, that back in Vancouver you deal with servers in restaurants, chairs in boardrooms and fishers on boats. She is aghast when I mention sex workers and that beautiful young women with thespian tendencies are now actors.

In her clipped Argentine Spanish she says, “Alexander no te puedo creer.” (I cannot believe you.)

So as long as Yuliya Kate practices her profession I think the world, my world, a world in which stewardesses will never become flight attendants, will be a world in which I will find comfort.