Davey Davis's Blog, page 10

David Davis 46, part 2

Read the introduction to this series here.

When I began using gay hookup apps a few years ago, I traveled almost exclusively. Deciding that the greater risk was in a strange man knowing my address, I rarely invited hookups my place, where I live alone. “I don’t want them in my apartment!” I told a trans friend. He’d been using the apps longer than I, and assured me, laughing, that I would soon change my mind.

My friend was right. As I gradually began to entertain gentlemen callers, I noticed that many arrived with the telltale signs of nerves. Even the biggest, strongest, butchest guys could exhibit a caution that verged on rudeness. You know how men are; I’m sure some envisioned themselves CoD heroes, scanning the perimeter for insurgents. To me, they recalled flop-eared pedigrees, suspiciously sniffing every piss-stained angle of an urban tree.

But that’s not quite fair. Though there were other reasons for my hookups to be nervous—my gender among them—I recognized their anxiety because I feel it myself every time I darken a new date’s doorway1. Rejoining MSM culture, this time as a transsexual, was a reminder that cis men could be vulnerable too, no matter how disadvantaged I felt myself to be in comparison.

This anecdote is about (more or less) vanilla sex, but I think it illustrates a phenomenon that a lot of us overlook in SM contexts: just because someone has more power doesn’t mean they have all of it. Whether the differential is “real” (that is, based on material conditions like physical strength, or the less tangible, but no less substantial, pressures of our social organization) or negotiated, trust must be earned on both sides—not just on the part of the bottom.

So, my first piece of advice for this series on vetting? Safer sadists, dominants, and tops don’t trust you right away.

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on Victor I. Cazares

Cazares stages their own burial on Instagram. Photo: Courtesy of Victor Cazares

This morning, Vulture reported on the HIV medication strike of playwright Victor I. Cazares, who has not taken their Dovato in almost three months. Cazares will continue to deprive themself of this life-saving medication until the New York Theatre Workshop—with which they have been affiliated since 2020—calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.

I urge you to take a few minutes to email anyone and everyone on staff at the NYTW (you can find their contact info here) and urge them to do the right thing. As well as being profoundly moral, Cazares' selflessness is, in my humble opinion, the praxis of art. What an honor to have an artist of this caliber associated with one’s institution!

I hope that our combined emails may contribute to the public pressure that will cause the NYTW to end this strike and the harm it is causing to Cazares, who for the first time since they seroconverted a decade ago is no longer undetectable. Phone calls, boycotting, and other means of applying pressure to the NYTW are of course a great idea as well!

Thank you so much, everyone.

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Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here. Learn more about the history of this newsletter here.

David Davis 46

What began as a single post has somehow snowballed into a longer project. While this intro is available to everyone, the rest of the series will be paywalled. More to come!

There’s a recent viral Twitter prompt that goes like this: What are 5 topics you can talk about unprepared for 30 minutes? “How to vet tops for sadomasochistic experiences” might be one of mine—not because I’m an authority, but because I’ve fucked up enough, over the years, to have learned a thing or two. To these lessons belong the physical and emotional scars that I feel complicated about (regret being, as it usually is, inadequate).

Now, some of those fuckups weren’t really fuckups at all. They were my best choices under the circumstances, albeit sometimes made in ignorance or while otherwise limited by factors beyond my control. As much as I have tried to ignore or deny it, some of these scars are ones it was not in my power to prevent.

As for the actual fuckups? They were self-harming or self-serving (sometimes both), and led to damage done to me or to someone else; sometimes, that someone else included a particular scar’s perpetrator. I’m not responsible for the harm caused by their malevolence or neglect, but with the benefit of retrospect and the knowledge shared by people wiser than I am, I now understand that I could have substantially reduced my risk profile by exhibiting more care toward myself and those around me. Not all of these scars were inevitable.

I can’t deny that I’m writing this guide for selfish reasons: to better understand why I made certain choices in my past, if only so I can make better ones in the future. But I’m also writing this guide so others can learn from my carelessness. Maybe it will help you avoid complicated scars of your own.

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I wish I could channel Wile E. Coyote to deploy a big, red, neon arrow to direct you to the sunny pastures where they keep all the safe sadists and dominants—but I can’t. The “safe sadist/dominant” doesn’t exist, just as the “unsafe sadist/dominant” doesn’t exist. A person who may have once been a walking red flag may now have their shit together; a person who I may have recommended to you a few years ago may now deserve to have their DMs ignored. People change, and regardless of what’s going on inside, we are concerned with behavioral patterns, here, not internal states (This applies to everyone, not just tops1!)

While there is no safe player, there are habits, practices, and beliefs that lead to safer play. In my experience, a person who consistently demonstrates these habits, practices, and beliefs tends to be safer to play with2. Perhaps more importantly, they also tend to be more willing to be accountable for their mistakes3 ; to problem-solve to avoid future mistakes; and to establish and maintain boundaries to protect themselves, as well as the people around them.

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Before we get to the guide part of this series—which I’m hoping to publish within the next week—a little housekeeping is in order.

First of all, this guide is not designed for everyone, though everyone is welcome to it. This guide is also not designed to be read without a hefty dose of context and nuance: my North Star here is personal responsibility and community accountability. Partaking in SM means accepting that, even if we do everything right, something still may go wrong. That is the nature of high-octane sex, just as it is skydiving, extreme sports, giving birth, one-night-stands, unregulated drugs, falling in love, signing a contract, getting behind the wheel, and so many other things that are fun, interesting, meaningful, or otherwise worthwhile.

So, without further ado, my notate bene:

This guide operates on the assumption that the reader has foundational knowledge about SM and may even be active in their local leather scene. While I think those with less experience, or those with less of an intention to act on this advice, could also benefit from it, it’s aimed primarily at those who aren’t merely kinky (i.e., they are leather-identified, not weekend warriors), or who don’t need BDSM 101 to first understand what we’re doing here.

Like I said, I’m no authority. I’m not an educator, a teacher, or a leader—and certainly not a sadist or dominant. My credentials are, mainly, my mistakes. If it helps for you to know, for the past decade or so I’ve played both recreationally and professionally and have been involved in my local scenes in the Bay and New York City.

Just as “safe” is not a permanent label, neither are “sadist,” “dominant,” or “top.” The people you’re vetting may disidentify with these labels some or all of the time, but it may still be relevant to them; that’s your call. While I think most, if not all, of my advice can also be applied to be masochists, submissives, and bottoms, this guide was written with people who are looking to have stuff done to them in mind.

I do not believe that the power in the scene is concentrated with the sadist, dominant, or top. Nor do I think it really belongs to the masochist, submissive, or bottom, as some people like to say (this reactionary stance drives me nuts!). Here’s what I think: that SM is people coming together to exchange power in an eroticized way, and that while that exchange can take many different shapes, it aspires to—though can never really attain, IMO—an egalitarian expression of desire among likeminded people. SM is the dramatization of inequality, but while it explicitly names power differentials in a way I don’t see in any other context, it doesn’t take place among social equals, just like vanilla sex, or indeed any other interaction. I play with people of different races, genders, ages, (dis)abilities, economic statuses, etc., and while trying to find an absolute answer to whether one person is more powerful than another tends to devolve into useless “oppression Olympics,” the fact of the matter is that some people are more at risk of me abusing them than vice versa—because I’m white, because I get a W-2 in the mail every year, because I’m not subject to transmisogyny, because because because of an ever-shifting amalgamation of reasons. Abuse is the leveraging of social, legal, and political power to harm someone else, and it is, again IMO, more often than not a crime of opportunity, an (often unconscious or repressed) expression of entitlement reinforced by the culture at large, and ultimately reliant on deep-seated assumptions about what is natural, essential, and inescapable.

I may use sex and play somewhat interchangeably, but this guide is more about play than sexual intercourse (to the extent that these things can be distinguished from each other). By that I mean: while anyone can be harmed during vanilla sex, your risk profile changes when you add sadomasochism to the mix. SM and its associated identities and subcultures are criminalized and/or illegal4, socially stigmatized, and involve what are, essentially, weapons.

Intent matters, until it doesn’t.

My approach to SM is grounded in RACK: it is risk-aware and consensual. These days, some people are also using PRICK (or personal-risk informed and consensual kink) to guide their play. This extra “P” doesn’t really make any sense to me, because I think everyone involved in a given scene should be aware of the risks involved for everyone else, and so I’m sticking with RACK for now.

This guide is only for recreational play. Screening for transactional play partners is a different beast (about which my knowledge is increasingly out-of-date), although there are many aspects of professional vetting that I think might be of use to recreational players5.

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So, as I said up top, more to come! In the meantime, if you don’t care about any of this, I’ll still be writing other ad-hoc newsletters and continuing with my other series on sex scenes. Until next time!

Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here. Learn more about the history of this newsletter here.

1

I’m often fast and loose with the distinctions between sadist, dominant, and top, but they’re not interchangeable. I broke down the distinction several years ago in a primer I wrote about aftercare for them.

2

Safer—never safe. There is no certainty of safety, and to expect as much from recreational violence is not only silly, but unfair to those doing it with you. A quick google revealed a short blog post on the difference between safe and safer sex is a good corollary for what we’re talking about here.

3

Daemonumx recently shared this resource on accountability on her Instagram, if you’d like further reading/listening.

4

The amount of people who have gotten angry at me on Twitter for acknowledging that SM is assault blows my mind. EYE do not see it as assault—unless we append that word with adjectives like “consensual,” “organized,” “romantic,” “therapeutic,” “sexy,” “risk-informed,” “thrill-seeking,” “spiritual,” etc.—but guess who does? The people who make and enforce the laws! That’s just the reality, people!

5

That being said, there are problems with the adoption of sex workers’ tactics for professional safety by civilians, which can become appropriative when used to reinforce the whorephobia that afflicts so-called “sex positive” and even leather spaces (imagine being whorephobic in LEATHER???). Here’s an example that I didn’t make up: on a Discord server for a private sex party, people were asking if attendees would/could be compelled present STI panels before entry. “I’m vetting them for my safety,” was their rationale. Requiring that people prove they don’t have STIs to attend a sex party reinforces all kinds of stigma (and it also doesn’t prevent the transmission of STIs), including the kind that gentrifies leather spaces—which originate in hustler/sex worker cultures—making them more hostile to sex workers. That’s the gist of my argument, one that deserves expanding on. Maybe another time.

David Davis

As a kid, I loved the Proust questionnaires in the back of my mom’s Vanity Fair magazines. Most of the articles went over my head, but these deceptively straightforward glimpses into the lives of famous actors, athletes, artists, and other figures were perfect for a young reader.

Believing their subjects’ answers to be both extemporaneous and deeply serious (I’ve always been very literal), the idea of doing one myself seemed entirely overwhelming. Now I understand that it’s all in good fun—not a federal deposition. I’ve always dreamed of assigning them to my friends. Maybe this will get the ball rolling.

David’s Proust Questionnaire

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Overcoming pain

What is your greatest fear?

Pain

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

Cowardice

What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Hypocrisy

Which living person do you most admire?

At the moment I am thinking of Dr. Amira Al-Assouli.

What is your greatest extravagance?

Using plastic containers to store food. Living alone. Thriftbooks.com.

What is your current state of mind?

Irritable, but fine

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Self-control

On what occasion do you lie?

Frequently, but only rarely about anything of consequence

What do you most dislike about your appearance?

The secret to feeling confident about your appearance is to never disclose what you dislike about it.

Which living person do you most despise?

Genocide Joe is as good an answer as any.

What is the quality you most like in a man?

Strength

What is the quality you most like in a woman?

Whatever makes her feel nice!

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

At the moment, “It’s developmental!”

What or who is the greatest love of your life?

Jade

When and where were you happiest?

I don’t like to think about this question.

Which talent would you most like to have?

Being able to dance well appears to feel amazing.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

I have to admit that I often wish that I were healthy.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Writing

If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

Ah, to be a beloved cockatiel living, uncaged, among indulgent bourgeois lesbians.

Where would you most like to live?

Who wouldn’t relish a sturdy cottage on the Southeastern coast of Iceland?

What is your most treasured possession?

I don’t think I treasure possessions that much, though I adore living among my books.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Being ill and unshowered and alone and broke while far away from home

What is your favorite occupation?

Writing

What is your most marked characteristic?

Anxiety

What do you most value in your friends?

Conviction, creativity, and calm

Who are your favorite writers?

Vladimir Nabokov, Dennis Cooper, Gayl Jones, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, John Berger, E.M. Forster, Edith Wharton, Chip Delany

Who is your hero of fiction?

Hannibal Lecter

Which historical figure do you most identify with?

Gary Indiana is still living, but recently I’ve begun to feel strongly that we are the same person.

Who are your heroes in real life?

People who take care of other people and animals even when it would be easier not to

What are your favorite names?

I love my own name, actually.

What is it that you most dislike?

God, where do I start? I take it personally when city people don’t train their goddamn dogs.

What is your greatest regret?

Probably going to college

How would you like to die?

Quickly, painlessly, and unexpectedly

What is your motto?

“There’s no accounting for taste.”

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Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here. Learn more about the history of this newsletter here.

David Davis 45, part 2

My idea of heaven is to be hunting with you in some beautiful park with mountains like here at home but where we wont need guns or prey but we will just walk together arm in arm in this good world and be by ourselves always together forever and a day.

—Brian McFee’s letter to his lover and murderer, Sidney de Lakes

Be forewarned: even by 2024 standards, James Purdy’s Narrow Rooms, published in 1978, is as hard to stomach as it is easy to read. The above excerpt—which recalls E.M. Forster’s mythic greenwood, where Englishmen in love might escape the constraints of homophobic “civilization”—only hints at the violence in which the majority of the novel rolls like a dying pig in hot mud. Whereas Rooms’ depictions of homosexual sex (where consensual) have been tempered by time, its rape, murder, and general brutality are as challenging as ever. There’s even a crucifixion, all the more heretical for making Christ’s look like a walk in Brian’s beautiful, mountainous park.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, Rooms was recommended to me by my friend, Daemonumx, who raved about its violent, sodomitical romance. I was surprised, only familiar with the Purdy who was a “gentle naturalist” of “small-town American life,” as Susan Sontag described him1. It turned out there were other Purdys, and the one who wrote Rooms was, per Sontag, the “writer of vignettes or sketches which give us a horrifying snapshot image of helpless people destroying each other.”

In the case of Rooms, these “snapshot images” coalesce into the story of four young Appalachian queers: Sidney de Lakes, football hero turned murderer who has returned home after serving time; Brian McFee, the boy he loved and killed; Gareth, the invalid son of a wealthy widow; and Roy Sturtevant, known as the Renderer, whose sadistic obsession with Sidney was spawned deep in their shared boyhood. What results is a pulpy, queeny, almost eldritch love triangle set in a gothic country noir2.

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What I love about Rooms is that while (or perhaps because) its violence is atmospheric, it’s not always possible to discern which of it is good and which bad. By “good” and “bad” I mean, I suppose (though not even this is without reservation), consensual. In Rooms, sexual consent, or lack thereof, is constantly problematized—by the characters’ conflicted desires, by their muddled senses of obligation or ethics, by authorial appeals to the biblical, the magical, or the predestined. In leather culture, we rely on a sturdy, if not infallible, consent framework to help us stake out the line dividing hurt and harm. Rooms, while mostly peopled with homosexual men, takes place in a context outside and away from identity-based movements and subcultures like gay liberation and leather, to the extent that they can be teased apart. There is no sense that this small group of people in rural West Virginia is invested, or even aware, of these things3. They’re not doing S&M, or even homosexuality. They’re doing something else.

While the plot of Rooms is unambiguously sexual and violent, parsing it is complicated by this slippage4. When is it sexual violence and when is it violent sex? How do we differentiate between sex and violence (see Mitchum’s knuckles) at all? What even constitutes a sex scene in a book where guns are romantic; rusty nails flirtatious; sodomy ordained by god? To revisit Brian’s letter to Sidney, what is hunting without guns or prey?

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But if we eschew the philistine’s dictum that sex scenes are only acceptable when “advancing the plot,” we don’t need to answer any of these questions (not for the philistines’ ugly purposes, anyway)5! You guys, the plot is not some separate entity whose integrity must be protected from the story, the book itself, or the reader! God didn’t come down from heaven to say that any kind of scene must drive the plot, although of course how the novelist navigates this relationship will say a lot about whether their book is interesting, entertaining, transcendent, or something else.

The fact of the matter is that Rooms does not exist without so-called sex scenes, no matter how stringently defined or censoriously punished. As Paul Binding writes in the introduction of the 1985 edition Daemonumx loaned me:

Because [Rooms] could not work on us unless we were made to share the emotional and sexual experiences of the central characters, Purdy insists that we have access to scenes of the utmost intimacy.

Indeed, to lose Rooms’ scenes of “jubilant entry into anus, single and double fellatio…” would be like being “excluded from the exchanges of Heathcliff and Cathy”—protagonists of another geographically isolated, topographically wild, incestuously passionate love story whose racism/racialization is both text and sub-, but whose lovemaking is at least considered natural. No, were this to happen to Rooms, Binding writes, “The metaphysics of the novel, as well as the particular psychological predicament, would be invalidated.”

For these reasons, Binding goes on, Rooms “constitutes a new landmark in the serious and poetic treatment of homosexual behavior”6. Almost fifty years since the novel’s publication, I think that landmark retains its gravity. What’s more, Binding declares that a serious engagement with (the) homosexual (in) art actually requires the sex scene, at least in this case. Denying “…Purdy’s courageous and uncompromising acceptance of the far from comfortable truth that passion is the most important constituent of the universe, and confounds all intellectual attempts to define or contain it, is to pervert a creative force into a destructive one.”

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Read Part 1 of this series on the sex scene.

Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here. Learn more about the history of this newsletter here.

1

Often mistaken as black and often by white writers of note—perhaps because of the influences that the Harlem Renaissance and jazz had on his writing, perhaps because his black characters tended to be imbued with an unexpected quantum of humanity—the white Purdy was reportedly an antisemite of some conviction, despite his having written often about “outsiders—women, African Americans, gay people, Native Americans.” In the more recent writing about him that I’ve found, the former is highlighted and the latter downplayed. I’m reminded of Patricia Highsmith, another white gay author whose, uh, peccadilloes have often been overlooked in light of her sexual marginalization. At any rate, as the twentieth century waned, Purdy rejected the increasingly benign designation of “gay writer”: “I’m a monster. Gay writers are too conservative.”

2

This Amazon review, titled “When Bad Boys Feel Their Oats,” is a good, spoiler-filled summary if you’d like to know more about Rooms’ plot.

3

“Our little mountain town here, in remote West Virginia, has had its veil torn away, and there have been revealed things just as terrible as those we read about in great seaports and immense metropolises the world over.”

4

Back to Forster, whose Aspects of the Novel describes plot this way:

We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died,” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief,” is a plot…If it is in a story we say “and then?” If it is in a plot we ask “why?” That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel. A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave men or to a tyrannical sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public. They can only be kept awake by “and then—and then——”

5

Where does this “advancing the plot” thing come from? Twitter, naturally! Sorry, all the quality content in this newsletter is paywalled.

6

I can’t apologize for quoting Binding at length here. His analysis is better and clearer than mine, and so on the nose, in my opinion, that there’s little I can do to improve upon it. I’d never heard of him before reading this book but his intro slaps!

David Davis: Members Only

I’ve never needed stitches, other than for my transsexual surgeries (see above). I’ve never cut my finger too deep, never broken a bone, never been hospitalized for anything that wasn’t first scheduled by an administrator. All the recreational suturing I’ve received has been over virgin skin or a hole I already have. Daemonumx calls one of these latter procedures the “bellybuttonectomy,” and she’s given me at least three.

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David Davis

I don’t think of myself as a slut. I’m always surprised when I’m referred to as one, whether it’s with the recognition of a fellow traveler, or within a context where it is, theoretically, only a fantasy, or even as an attempted insult. These days, to be called a slut gives me something of an anthropological pause, a gentle but insistent sense of disidentification: Me? A slut? <Staring off into the sunset> You really think so?

I’m not denying my lifestyle or quibbling over my body count. It’s just that slut doesn’t feel like me. I mean no disrespect the proud sluts in my life, and I’m certainly not arguing against my more-than-reasonable inclusion among their ranks. But over the years, slut has acquired an insufficiency, an obsolescence. Changes to my gender, pop feminism, and queer social mores are all in there, to be sure, but it seems like something else is going on.

Of course, masculine women are not sluts the way normal women are. When I was younger, I often found myself in situations—parties, book fairs, demos—where I was, if not unwelcome, then at least assumed to be unable to relate to the fears and frustrations of life as a slut. I was ashamed of the emotions stirred up by what were usually oversights, and mostly kept them to myself: I’m fem in my own way! I may not look it, but I was once a girl, too! Rapists don’t care how pretty you are! These encounters made me feel lonely among comrades. They made me feel undesirable, though the cash in my pocket said otherwise. They made me feel as if a lie that had long been told about me had been suddenly retracted, without apology, before I could even begin to deny, much less reclaim, it.

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Last weekend, I went to a party where feet penetrated holes, bound dykes dangled over the floorboards, and someone was ridden like a pony over big-gauged knee piercings. (Unfortunately, this last scene happened after we left, so I can only enjoy it via social media.)

I love parties like this. At their best, they both distill and amplify the feeling you get when you share a sad story with someone who can laugh at, rather than look away from, its cruel absurdity. It’s brave to accept pain, but I think it may be braver to share it with someone else or to witness it for them, especially if you care about each other. I knew most of the people in attendance, but even if I hadn’t, I would still have felt like I belonged there. When I looked around me, I was puzzled by the notion that we could be violent1. Violent, in that context, feels as foreign to me as slut does.

I don’t remember hearing slut (or seeing it written on someone’s body in ink or blood) that night, but I’m sure it was there, one of the many handy tools of negotiated sexual degradation between friends.

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Most mornings, the first thing I do when I wake up is tidy my apartment. This extension of my meditation practice relaxes me, and builds anticipation for the first treat of my day: a hot cup of drip coffee, black.

I count as an accomplishment the fact that I can now do my tidying, most mornings, without aural distraction: no TV, no Democracy Now!, not even Schumann, who is the artist I listen to the most, according to Spotify2. It gives me the space to not think, which is naturally one of the best ways to foster thoughtfulness. This morning, while doing dishes, it occurred to me that it’s been five months since I’ve had sex with a stranger. That last stranger has since become a lover, so for our purposes he doesn’t count, pushing the timeline back even further.

Do I feel the need to correct this? I wondered, rinsing a preferred porcelain mug. Yes, but not strongly enough to act upon it right now.

It feels unnatural for me to not be available—up for it, ready and willing, submissive and breedable, etc.—in that way. I have been a slut, by all common definition, for many years, perhaps my whole life, at least according to the people who raised me. It’s the story, often sad but often not, that I have always known about myself, and it makes me uncomfortable when I can’t see myself in it. In the parlance of SSRI adverts, I don’t feel like myself. I wonder if this could be a good thing.

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I have been following the coverage (or lack thereof) of Columbia University’s use of chemical weapons on students protesting the Palestinian genocide. There are too many worthy places to direct our attention at this time, but for anyone looking for more evidence of how these foreign atrocities affect “us” “here”: these students (who are consumers, by the way, paying to attend this institution [when is the customer wrong?]) have been assaulted with chemical weapons used by the Israel Defense Forces against Palestinians and which American police departments have acquired from them in the past. Even if all you care about is your own safety, the relationship between the IDF and the American military/police, funded by our tax dollars, should galvanize you.

1

Even “kinky” straight people are like this, yet more evidence that “kink” and “leather” are not the same thing.

2

Couldn’t tell you a single thing about him or his music but here we are.

David Davis 45, part 1

Do you remember your first sex scene? Was it in a book, a film, or another kind of media? To my surprise, the first that came to mind for me didn’t include sexual intercourse at all.

I was 7 or 8 years old. While flipping channels with my sisters, I accidentally landed on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In the “sex scene” in question, an ultra-racist standout from Spielberg’s 1984 blockbuster, our hero, Indy (Harrison Ford), witnesses a ritual human sacrifice that culminates with the removal of a still-beating heart from a captive’s body. I remember fire and drums, the bloody penetration of one man by another, and the gruesome certainty that I had stumbled across an unspeakable evil of Biblical proportions.

But not even my horror was a match for my remorse: I knew my dad and his wife would punish me for watching even just a few minutes of this grownup movie without permission. I wanted desperately to confess, to be reassured with fact (Don’t worry, it’s all pretend!1) and forgiveness, but to do so would first mean getting in trouble. My agonizing only lasted a few minutes, I’m sure, but after what seemed like hours, I finally came clean.

It turned out that my parents didn’t care about what I had done, certainly not enough to punish me for it. They were amused by my histrionics—and I can understand why, now that I’m an adult myself. I don’t remember what happened after that.

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My immediate association of an occult, Orientalist cannibalism with sex comes as no surprise for an Evangelical child raised by racist anti-intellectuals whose primary values, shame and work ethic, were cherrypicked from religious pig-ignorance and right-wing propaganda. I was a particularly guilt-ridden kid, obsessed with the potential for transgression, all of which felt sexual to me, because as I understood it the sexual was the greatest taboo of all. Violence was one thing; I remember, at around the same time as the above anecdote, my dad explaining to me over dinner that capital punishment didn’t violate the sixth Commandment, that in fact Jesus Himself would have been, in a way, too primitive to understand why Americans needed the leeway to put some people in the electric chair2. Sex, on the other hand, was unforgivable.

When I ask, Do you remember your first sex scene?, I want you to be as free-associative about it as I was because, 90 years after the Motion Picture Production Code and 150 after the first Comstock law, the distinctions between art, commerce, and moral and legal obscenity—all of which dictate both sex and scene—remain unclear. How is a sex scene more or less sexual because of the gender(s), races, and sexual identities of its performers (both as actors and characters)? Because of the medium and genre in which it’s found? Because of where and when and by whom it was made? When does a sex scene cross over into pornography (and by framing this question in this way, do I limit us with a false spectrum, a careless conflation of genre or form, or something else)?

The sex scene is neither discrete nor contained. Like all sex(uality) it is constructed, disciplined, and often punished. This makes it a perfect site from which to explore the leaky, smushy, capaciousness of fantasy, desire, and profanity; to share and discuss our favorite sex scenes; to analyze texts across media; to investigate our horniness and disgust; to elevate our discussions of art to something more interesting than, Does consuming this make me a good person? Does creating that make me a bad person?

More to come soon. I’m excited for this one!

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1

These are people who regarded The Exorcist (1973) as a docudrama, so the odds were not in my favor.

2

I was taught that “Thou shalt not kill” was the sixth Commandment, but I’m discovering that it’s ranked differently in other Christian traditions. In any case, my dad is a bad person.

David Davis

You can set a sundial by it: 6–12 weeks after something bad happened, my body will take a vacation from functioning correctly. Like Kafka’s bug man, I will awaken one morning in a state of anxiety that slowly, excruciatingly clarifies into a realization that something is wrong.

Nowadays, my autoimmunity flares are usually mild, and with a little effort—rest, medication, a depressingly bland diet—my symptoms will disperse. Some joint pain and an upset stomach aren’t so bad, not when compared with the years of my life when they were at their worst, a fever pitch of suffering that prevented me from holding down jobs, staying awake in class, even regulating my body temperature. And yet somehow, these reminders are worse than the pain they hearken back to. How could that life ever have been worthwhile? I wonder, indulging in the coward’s rhetoric. If that were true, even a little, I wouldn’t have worked so hard to stay alive.

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In “On Risk and Solitude”—found in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life—Adam Phillips writes movingly and persuasively about the developmental importance of risk-taking. For the adolescent, the pursuit of risk is an exercise in “fearless passivity,” a surrender of the self that echoes the dependence of infancy while simultaneously striving to differentiate itself from it. In risk-taking, he suggests, the adolescent is communicating the questions that his infant self might have asked of the mother, had he the capacity.

It is not that the adolescent is attempting to “own his body”…as part of his separation from the mother, nor is he simply taking over her caregiving aspects. He is testing the representations of the body acquired through early experience. Is it a safe house? Is it reliable? Does it have other allegiances? What does it promise, and why does it refuse?1

With this essay, Phillips challenges the historical pathologization of risk-taking in psychoanalytic literature, speculating as to what we might call the “positive” reasons for so-called sexual perversions: perhaps, he says, these perversions are a way of keeping alive the risk-taking part of the self, the “fearless passive” who “both knows and refuses to know” that there comes a point in treatment (/in our lives) when we must do the thing we most fear.

“We create risk,” Phillips writes, “when we endanger something we value.” Perhaps risk-taking is also the reverse-engineering of being alive. I’m endangered, therefore I am; I’m entrusting myself to the unknown, therefore I have something to protect.

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Over these past four years of DAVID, I’ve written a lot about risk: emotional, sexual, artistic, interpersonal; the risks of having an identity, of heavy S/M, of dyke cruising. I’m on the record regarding risk’s potential role in a good life as I understand it, but I’ve never felt unconflicted on this point. It is easy to assume responsibility for everything, to find every fault within oneself, and in so doing to use risk not as enrichment, but as avoidance, depersonalization, abandonment. In this way, we engage in the fantasy of control, and fantasies, as we know, are characterized by their impossibility. A fantasy can never come true.

Naturally, Phillips has plenty to say about that, too: compulsive risk-taking is “always constituted by a fantasy of what has already been lost—only the impossible, as we know, is addictive.” Reading this, I was reminded of the epigraph I included in my first novel, by the French writer Robert Pinget: “When you’re expecting bad news you have to be prepared for it a long time ahead so that when the telegram comes you can already pronounce the syllables in your mouth before opening it.”

I love control and I hate control, a contradiction for which I have often castigated myself. By way of psychoanalysis, a discipline about which I still know very little, Phillips suggests the possibility of understanding this as something other than a paradox. He ends another essay, the luminous “First Hates: Phobias in Theory,” with these words: “the aim of psychoanalysis is not to cure people but to show them that there is nothing wrong with them.”

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1

Bolding mine.

David Davis: Members Only

That’s Lily, Terry says. At our knees, a morose old dog gazes up and a little to the side, as required by canine politesse.

Hi, Lily. I add prosody to my voice for her benefit, but I don’t offer my hand for her to smell. Though I like dogs, I’m afraid of most of them.

Come on in, says Terry. He has the kind of smile that people call toothy: big, friendly, imperfectly impressive. He’s wearing blue sweats and a grey hoodie. Lily, of course, isn’t wearing anything, not even a collar. I follow them down the long, narrow hallway.

The apartment is very gay, which sets me at ease. Playbills with bottle-necked chanteuses, flyers with slogans and pink triangles, a Target rainbow or two. Even when I’ve fled his apartment in anger, a gay guy has never made me feel endangered. Not yet, anyway.

Terry sits on the couch. Although our messages had been terse and transactional, I heed an instinct and climb onto his lap.

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