Who is Ginny Tonic?

Ginny Tonic?

I have a confession. From about 2010 to 2015, I led a double life.

Most of the time I was Rachel Moore. Special education teacher, Quaker, mother of two, posting pictures of my kids and pets on Facebook. The rest of the time I was Ginny Tonic: corset-wearing events promoter, bourbon blogger, go-go dancer with a punk surf band called Dr. Bombay and the Atomic Bachelor Pad, co-host of a podcast with episode titles like "Zombies, a Little Sex, and a Lady Killer."

If you came into my life through the burn community, through Sin and Tonic, or Tonic for Life coaching you probably didn't know the Ginny Tonic chapter of my life existed. Even if you knew Ginny Tonic, you probably didn’t know what else she was up to or what’s been going on since. 

No matter how you know me, you’re invited to hear the full story on June 25th.

Here's the short version: My then-husband discovered steampunk around 2010 and started hosting salons and cabaret shows. I was a teacher at a low-income high school, and I'd seen colleagues get written up for having a beer at a baseball game. Running events with alcohol and burlesque wasn't something I could do as Rachel Moore. So I invented a persona. I named her after my husband's favorite cocktail because I wasn't thinking too hard about it, and became Ginny Tonic.

What I didn't expect was how much I needed her.

I'd gotten married at twenty. I'd spent my twenties being responsible in ways that left me feeling like I'd missed something. Ginny Tonic was the woman I'd always wanted to be: someone who could start a party just by showing up, got on stage in fringe hot pants without fear of how her thighs looked, and talked openly about things people weren't supposed to talk about. She made dirty jokes and took up space. She was also the first version of me who felt like she fit in somewhere.

Not long after creating this persona, I met Charlie “Rambles” Moore at a steampunk convention. In a hotel pool party, in circumstances I will describe in detail on June 25th and not before. That was the moment I leaned all the way into Ginny Tonic. Charlie had a podcast about comic books and was getting burned out on the content and recurring format. He asked if I wanted to make new podcast together. The Charlie Tonic Hour was born. 

Making that podcast as Ginny Tonic was my first real taste of being publicly flirtatious and playful. I could be openly interested in the parts of life that a married teacher and mother of two shouldn’t discuss. We called it an "alcohol-infused culture podcast with a side of sexy." Topics covered included bourbon, cocktail culture, sexy Halloween costumes, and why men's underwear is inexplicably boring. It was enormously fun to be Ginny Tonic for an hour a week but I still wasn’t sharing the full story. 

I wrote an article for Bourbon and Banter in 2013 about my first whiskey festival. I'd made every rookie mistake possible — drank too hard the night before, had no plan once I got there, skipped the food, refused the dump buckets out of some misguided reverence for the whiskey, and left hours early in full disgrace. Woke up in my hotel room not knowing how I'd gotten there, with texts from the blog founder waiting on my phone and friends already out without me. I wrote about it with as much humor as I could muster, and it became one of my favorite things I published during that phase because it let me be honest about something I was embarrassed about and turn my mistake into something that might be useful to someone else.

What I didn't write about: what was actually going on in my life while I was telling those charming, self-deprecating stories into a microphone. The relationship that had started at that steampunk convention. The attempt to navigate non-monogamy that none of us knew how to do. The whiskey festival in Chicago where Charlie and I spent half the weekend fighting in our hotel room in some kind of alcohol-induced shame spiral that neither of us fully understood at the time, and then got back behind the microphone the following week and talked about how great the drinks were.

I thought I was good at relationships because I could stay in them. I thought my first marriage was strong because I didn't fight back when my husband acted badly. I thought polyamory was a get out of jail free card when I fell in love with Charlie. I could keep managing my ex-husband's feelings and finally have someone who was putting energy into mine. What I was actually doing was using everyone else's emotional world as a substitute for looking at my own. Long after my first marriage ended, I was still using the same broken tools to try to save my second.

The thing that changed this was a burn.

Burns are Regional Burning Man events that take place off in the woods throughout the US and around the world. On the last night of our first burn, Mosaic Experiment 2018, around 3 AM Charlie and I walked out of a tent. We’d spent hours talking with friends and giving each other multi-hand massages. It was intimate and warm in a way I didn't have language for yet. Not sexual but genuinely close in the way I'd always wanted closeness to feel. We'd each done half a tab of acid for the first time. We walked out and looked up and I could see the Milky Way.

Instead of a blur, and my life had felt like a blur for years, everything was crisp and clear.

I kissed Charlie. And then I did something I'd never done in all the years I'd been kissing him: I told him what I actually wanted. Softer. Slower. Let yourself actually be here. He listened. He did it. And it felt like a first kiss after seven years of being together. 

That is what the burn gave me. Not just that moment, but the whole culture gave me courage to ask for what I really wanted. A world where people gather to be genuinely intimate with each other rather than perform a version of themselves that looks right on social media. I’d spent years honing the Ginny Tonic persona, and in one night under the Milky Way I understood viscerally that I hadn’t been trying to create someone new. I’d been trying to allow more of w was already there to come through. To drop the false self I’d been performing since childhood. 

I'd been telling half-stories. On the podcast, in my relationships, to myself. We came home and ended the podcast. We found a therapist. We did the work. 

I wasn’t Ginny Tonic anymore. I was Tonic. Dropped the alcohol and kept the healing. 

A few years later I left the alcohol industry, and started training as a somatic sex and relationship coach. It turns out the thing I'd been doing all along, turning my own messy experiences into something that might be useful for someone else, was what I wanted to do with my whole life. In stories but also in person. 

It's never too late to become the person you wanted to be when you grew up. I'm living proof, and I'm still working on it.

On June 25th from 6:30-9:00 pm I'm doing an event called Bourbon & Tonic in Sharonville. There will be four pours from my private collection, some storytelling, and an open-floor Q&A. Bring all your questions about sex, relationships, kink, non-monogamy, or anything else. I don't soften my answers.

This is the night where I finally get to tell the full stories. The hotel room at the steampunk convention. The matching tattoos. The first kiss under the Milky Way. The sex camps at burns. The kidnapping scene I did at a sex-positive retreat in Germany.

Ginny Tonic is gone but Tonic is here to stay.