I have always had a very conflicted love/hate relationship with Yaqi. At times it has led to supreme moments where I felt I was truly in harmony with some of the deepest facets of my sexuality. At times it clings to my shoulder like an unwanted albatross.
As Yaqi I have inspired people to explore their erotic fantasies and I have helped to show that tickling as an interest, or lifestyle, or an exploration of self is healthy and nothing to be ashamed of. I am proud of the things I have accomplished; it is satisfying to know that you have inspired people on a very personal level.
What I had hoped to do through Yaqi was to open the door, to inspire by example and to shatter the perceived stigmatism that tickling was “taboo,” a view I feel is largely self inflicted and ultimately self defeating. I’ve tried to show that the mainstream world is far more accepting of tickling and that people should break through their boundaries and feel comfortable in opening up with friends and partners.
Anything that evokes passionate feelings should be explored on an experiential level. It can only lead to knowing more about yourself and the things that drive you, adding additional layers to ones journey of discovery. I think that people who are afraid to explore their interests simply because they fear judgment or rejection do themselves a grave disservice. Life is short. One should strive to understand one’s potential to the fullest of possibilities. Certainly my own journey of discovering why tickling is such a primal fascination for me has helped me grow in many distinct ways.
I think that my journey has helped add to my complexity as a human being. It has taught me a great deal about what drives me. It is obviously much more than something that turns me on; it is something that operates on a very primal wavelength
I’ve been doing a lot of reflection lately. I am fighting a health battle that I cannot win. There are fewer days ahead for me than behind and I am very conflicted about what to do with Yaqi because I am no longer able to indulge my tickling passions the way that I used to. Sarcoidosis has taken so much from me already that it seems a brutal slap in the face to lose the ability to practice something that gives me such joy.
I’m often asked if I regret appearing on the Stern show. While my answer is always unequivocally no; it is not simply because off all the perks an opportunities it generated. What I do regret was how little I knew about Howard and what he tries to achieve, since then I have become a huge fan of him and I’ve been able to listen to many of the classic moments throughout his career. I realized that he treated me no differently than he treats everyone, especially his cast and staff. At one time or another, every member of his crew, Howard included, has been teased and taunted into at least one huge on-air-meltdown resulting in physical violence, threatening to quit and/or storming out of the studio in a belligerent rage. Had I known the dynamics of his show when I did it in 2002 I probably would have been willing to go much further than I did. If I were to return to the show, and it has been discussed on numerous occasions, but health issues have always forbidden it, I would be willing to anything he asked of me, even a grotesque act of self abasement because I have a much greater understanding of what The Howard Stern Show is all about. I did manage to turn a lot of people on to tickling via those appearances and it is interesting that my shows are amongst the most frequently replayed and still amongst the most requested.
I did pay a price for doing his show. While all my friends and professional clients and colleagues have always been highly enthusiastic of Yaqi’s World, my appearance deeply upset my parents. My mother I can understand, but my father was an Oncologist and full professor at Baylor College of Medicine and he taught a very liberal course in human sexuality. I spent part of the summer when I was 15 running the 16mm film projector for his class and I was exposed to very clinical, yet highly graphic films that perpetrated to be “educational pornography.” My father died of a hemorrhagic stroke in 2004 so I never got an opportunity to sit down with him and discover the reasoning behind his objections. I personally think that he felt that Yaqi was an insult to my abilities, but here I am speculating idly.
My older sister, with whom I have never gotten along with, used Yaqi to injure me in a hateful, vindictive way. She has always been selfish and self serving and she keeps her temper very close by. I remember the Thanksgiving after I did the Stern Show. She, her husband and three children were in town for the holidays. She and I got into a brother/sister argument and I was teasing her about something trivial and she got very livid at me. She marched straight into the room where her children were and told them in a voice loud enough for me to hear: “If Uncle David ever tries to tickle you or touch you in an inappropriate way I want to know about it immediately!” In addition to being ludicrous and mean spirited, she all but guaranteed that her children will ever get to know their Uncle David. I have never been called a pedophile before and I knew that she had said it to inflict the maximum amount of emotional pain in me that she could and she succeeded.
Other than that my experiences with Howard Stern were always a great pleasure.
What frustrates me the most is that Yaqi is just a tiny fraction of who I am, certainly an important part, but I have done many other things in my life. I have embraced other issues that have burned much brighter and much more significantly, yet they will always be obscured by Yaqi’s shadow. It is an identity that I can never shake. Even more discouraging is the fact that the only thing that the mainstream public wants from me is more tickling. They have no interest in my doing anything else, regardless of how socially important it might be. Granted I carved out a lucrative niche but in the process I have backed myself into a corner from which escape is untenable.
In addition to my tickle videos I will be leaving behind a large body of film work that was created with just as much passion as my love of tickling, work that have been my way of interpreting my understanding of existence. I’ve always felt that the artist uses his medium to make sense of his inner reality. To be honest, I never expected Yaqi to become such an ongoing project. Like so much of my work, Yaqi started as a documentary, something to be explored and then finished. Yaqi was, for me, a personal project that reached fruition when I was honored at the world’s largest film festival and climaxed with my 2002 media tour. I expected to move on, feeling that I had accomplished everything I set out to do. But then, in 2002, Sarcoidosis came back like a freight train after ten years of complete remission. It returned with such a vengeance that I found myself, as I am today, without the physical strength and stamina to continue making films.
It is frustrating but it is oddly fortuitous. Since 2002 it has been impossible for me to work. A war with Sarcoidosis and subsequent steroid treatments, can easily take me out of the real world for more than a year. It has been 14 months since this new flare up of Sarcoid started. That’s not an illness; it is a way of life. It is the way that things are going to be from now on. I have extreme physical limitations that have grossly affected every aspect of my life and my illness is chronic and degenerative. I can never go back to who I was.
So I have to be grateful for the empire that Yaqi has afforded me. It has provided a living for me at times when I have been incapacitated. In that sense it has been a blessing. But I am an individual that abhors a vacuum.
So, without the physical ability to go return to my real passion, making movies I have, for all practical purposes, history will record that Yaqi was a common pornographer. And it rips me up inside to know that regardless of how noble my intentions were at the beginning, how my documentaries and motion pictures sought to inspire and to entertain to enrage and to educate, the ultimate bottom line is that I am a producer of masturbatory material: the most banal and least poetic of all mediums.
No matter how you embellish it, I have denigrated myself to something so common that it eclipses all the genuine ambitions I originally had for Yaqi. And this is to be my legacy. I will always, forever, be Yaqi of Yaqi’s world. Sometimes I feel I have abused and perverted my talents and in the process I have betrayed and dishonored all the truly important issues that I have explored in my serious film work. Part of me feels that I have sold myself out to the lowest common denominator. As an artist there can be no greater failure.
As Yaqi I have inspired people to explore their erotic fantasies and I have helped to show that tickling as an interest, or lifestyle, or an exploration of self is healthy and nothing to be ashamed of. I am proud of the things I have accomplished; it is satisfying to know that you have inspired people on a very personal level.
What I had hoped to do through Yaqi was to open the door, to inspire by example and to shatter the perceived stigmatism that tickling was “taboo,” a view I feel is largely self inflicted and ultimately self defeating. I’ve tried to show that the mainstream world is far more accepting of tickling and that people should break through their boundaries and feel comfortable in opening up with friends and partners.
Anything that evokes passionate feelings should be explored on an experiential level. It can only lead to knowing more about yourself and the things that drive you, adding additional layers to ones journey of discovery. I think that people who are afraid to explore their interests simply because they fear judgment or rejection do themselves a grave disservice. Life is short. One should strive to understand one’s potential to the fullest of possibilities. Certainly my own journey of discovering why tickling is such a primal fascination for me has helped me grow in many distinct ways.
I think that my journey has helped add to my complexity as a human being. It has taught me a great deal about what drives me. It is obviously much more than something that turns me on; it is something that operates on a very primal wavelength
I’ve been doing a lot of reflection lately. I am fighting a health battle that I cannot win. There are fewer days ahead for me than behind and I am very conflicted about what to do with Yaqi because I am no longer able to indulge my tickling passions the way that I used to. Sarcoidosis has taken so much from me already that it seems a brutal slap in the face to lose the ability to practice something that gives me such joy.
I’m often asked if I regret appearing on the Stern show. While my answer is always unequivocally no; it is not simply because off all the perks an opportunities it generated. What I do regret was how little I knew about Howard and what he tries to achieve, since then I have become a huge fan of him and I’ve been able to listen to many of the classic moments throughout his career. I realized that he treated me no differently than he treats everyone, especially his cast and staff. At one time or another, every member of his crew, Howard included, has been teased and taunted into at least one huge on-air-meltdown resulting in physical violence, threatening to quit and/or storming out of the studio in a belligerent rage. Had I known the dynamics of his show when I did it in 2002 I probably would have been willing to go much further than I did. If I were to return to the show, and it has been discussed on numerous occasions, but health issues have always forbidden it, I would be willing to anything he asked of me, even a grotesque act of self abasement because I have a much greater understanding of what The Howard Stern Show is all about. I did manage to turn a lot of people on to tickling via those appearances and it is interesting that my shows are amongst the most frequently replayed and still amongst the most requested.
I did pay a price for doing his show. While all my friends and professional clients and colleagues have always been highly enthusiastic of Yaqi’s World, my appearance deeply upset my parents. My mother I can understand, but my father was an Oncologist and full professor at Baylor College of Medicine and he taught a very liberal course in human sexuality. I spent part of the summer when I was 15 running the 16mm film projector for his class and I was exposed to very clinical, yet highly graphic films that perpetrated to be “educational pornography.” My father died of a hemorrhagic stroke in 2004 so I never got an opportunity to sit down with him and discover the reasoning behind his objections. I personally think that he felt that Yaqi was an insult to my abilities, but here I am speculating idly.
My older sister, with whom I have never gotten along with, used Yaqi to injure me in a hateful, vindictive way. She has always been selfish and self serving and she keeps her temper very close by. I remember the Thanksgiving after I did the Stern Show. She, her husband and three children were in town for the holidays. She and I got into a brother/sister argument and I was teasing her about something trivial and she got very livid at me. She marched straight into the room where her children were and told them in a voice loud enough for me to hear: “If Uncle David ever tries to tickle you or touch you in an inappropriate way I want to know about it immediately!” In addition to being ludicrous and mean spirited, she all but guaranteed that her children will ever get to know their Uncle David. I have never been called a pedophile before and I knew that she had said it to inflict the maximum amount of emotional pain in me that she could and she succeeded.
Other than that my experiences with Howard Stern were always a great pleasure.
What frustrates me the most is that Yaqi is just a tiny fraction of who I am, certainly an important part, but I have done many other things in my life. I have embraced other issues that have burned much brighter and much more significantly, yet they will always be obscured by Yaqi’s shadow. It is an identity that I can never shake. Even more discouraging is the fact that the only thing that the mainstream public wants from me is more tickling. They have no interest in my doing anything else, regardless of how socially important it might be. Granted I carved out a lucrative niche but in the process I have backed myself into a corner from which escape is untenable.
In addition to my tickle videos I will be leaving behind a large body of film work that was created with just as much passion as my love of tickling, work that have been my way of interpreting my understanding of existence. I’ve always felt that the artist uses his medium to make sense of his inner reality. To be honest, I never expected Yaqi to become such an ongoing project. Like so much of my work, Yaqi started as a documentary, something to be explored and then finished. Yaqi was, for me, a personal project that reached fruition when I was honored at the world’s largest film festival and climaxed with my 2002 media tour. I expected to move on, feeling that I had accomplished everything I set out to do. But then, in 2002, Sarcoidosis came back like a freight train after ten years of complete remission. It returned with such a vengeance that I found myself, as I am today, without the physical strength and stamina to continue making films.
It is frustrating but it is oddly fortuitous. Since 2002 it has been impossible for me to work. A war with Sarcoidosis and subsequent steroid treatments, can easily take me out of the real world for more than a year. It has been 14 months since this new flare up of Sarcoid started. That’s not an illness; it is a way of life. It is the way that things are going to be from now on. I have extreme physical limitations that have grossly affected every aspect of my life and my illness is chronic and degenerative. I can never go back to who I was.
So I have to be grateful for the empire that Yaqi has afforded me. It has provided a living for me at times when I have been incapacitated. In that sense it has been a blessing. But I am an individual that abhors a vacuum.
So, without the physical ability to go return to my real passion, making movies I have, for all practical purposes, history will record that Yaqi was a common pornographer. And it rips me up inside to know that regardless of how noble my intentions were at the beginning, how my documentaries and motion pictures sought to inspire and to entertain to enrage and to educate, the ultimate bottom line is that I am a producer of masturbatory material: the most banal and least poetic of all mediums.
No matter how you embellish it, I have denigrated myself to something so common that it eclipses all the genuine ambitions I originally had for Yaqi. And this is to be my legacy. I will always, forever, be Yaqi of Yaqi’s world. Sometimes I feel I have abused and perverted my talents and in the process I have betrayed and dishonored all the truly important issues that I have explored in my serious film work. Part of me feels that I have sold myself out to the lowest common denominator. As an artist there can be no greater failure.
