Davey Davis's Blog, page 13

David Davis 44, part 1

Jonathan Majors’s former coworkers and current attorney can agree on this much: Majors, whose rising star skyrocketed with his recent entrée into the MCU as Kang the Conqueror, is a Method actor. Or is he?

After Majors was arrested in March for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, dozens of people from his personal and professional lives have come forward with claims about his past abusive behavior. While Majors denies all of them, his attorney, Dustin A. Pusch, does offer an explanation for the ones coming from his client’s former colleagues:

“The allegations that Mr. Majors got physical with or physically intimidated anyone on any movie set are downright false…Everyone who has worked with Mr. Majors knows that he employs an immersive Method acting style1, and while that can be misconstrued as rudeness at times, those who know Mr. Majors and work in the industry have attested to his dedication to his craft as well as his kindness.”

The logic of this defense is that the Method—a series of training techniques created at the beginning of the 20th century by Konstantin Stanislavski, and further developed for the American stage and cinema by Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner—stands in for Art with a capital A. Like its most famous practitioners, from James Dean to Marlon Brando, Majors should not only be accorded prestige, but lenience, because anything done in the Method’s name is understood to be necessary in the service of a sanctioned and profitable creativity. Pusch makes explicit the claim that Majors’s former coworkers can’t tell the difference between “rudeness” and unprofessionalism or even violence. While only implied, the clearest message to be taken from this line of defense is that Art takes precedence over people.

Now, we don’t need anything subtler than a meat cleaver to start deconstructing all of that, but what first jumped out at me was that the “immersive” preparatory technique invoked to excuse Majors’s on-set behavior is not actually Method acting. In fact, many of the actors working today who identify, or are identified, with the Method aren’t actually doing it.

Over the past century, as others have pointed out before me, the Method has come to be synonymous with actors taking extreme measures before filming and while on set, from losing or gaining a great deal of weight in a short period of time; to imitating a physical disability for so long they injure themselves; to loading a live round in the revolver used for a Russian roulette scene. The focus is on the lengths that the—usually white, usually male—actor will go to “become” the character, not on whether those lengths were successful in creating a beautiful, moving performance.

This isn’t to say that so-called immersive acting was foreign to Stanislavksi. In fact, it was one of the first ideas he hit upon as a young actor struggling to get into character as an elderly, miserly knight, way back in the late nineteenth century. At a loss, Stanislavski went to live in a castle, where all he gained was “a bad cold and despair.” “What might seem like a suspiciously perfect origin story for the immersive preparations now commonly associated with Method acting—an attempt ‘to live as his character lived’—in fact proved to be a false start,” writes Evan Kindley in last year’s review of Isaac Butler’s The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act.

For Stanislavski, immersion was the doorway to a much bigger idea. The trick to “living the part,” as he puts it in An Actor Prepares, which lays out his “System” by way of dozens of exercises and examples, is to make room for inspiration’s unanticipated and ungovernable arrival with somatic training. As the title indicates, the actor prepares to take advantage of inspiration by training those parts of themself that are under their control. “Our art teaches us first of all to create consciously and rightly,” says Tortsov, Stanislavski’s stand-in, “because that will best prepare the way for the blossoming of the subconscious, which is inspiration. The more you have of conscious creative moments in your role the more chance you will have a flow of inspiration.”

Last year, for a DAVID series about the commodification of kink, I wrote about Democratic donor and convicted murderer Ed Buck. Buck, a wealthy white man, paid Gemmel Moore, Timothy Dean, and Dane Brown, all poor black men, to come to his home and be “administered large doses of narcotics,” which resulted in the deaths of Moore and Dean (Brown survived, barely). Buck’s attorneys argued that the government’s “kink-shaming,” based on “prejudicial and irrelevant character evidence,” resulted in his convictions.

While there are many differences between the cases of Jonathan Majors and Ed Buck (including the fact that Majors has not yet had his day in court), I’m fascinated by the similarities in their defense strategies. Like Buck’s legal team, Majors’s seeks to excuse what ought to be unambiguous violence by conflating it with a nonviolent somatic practice2. In both of these high-profile legal cases, the defense teams are banking on mainstream definitions of violence and extremity—and what I believe is a widespread confusion regarding and hostility toward consent, desire, and pleasure—to disappear alleged harm.

Despite recent efforts to demystify the Method, including books like Butler’s, film programming, and documentaries, the public awareness of this approach remains confused enough to be exploited. While I’m no Method scholar, I am interested in what this means for Art with a capital A. Maybe you are, too.

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1

Bolding mine.

2

Yes, I think the Method is grounded in non-violence. More on that later.

David Davis

In the summertime, I dream more and fuck less. The dreams are formulaic, even for dreams, while the sex, though less frequent, tends to be stranger and harder. And yet even the most obvious of these warm weather phantasms will somehow yield epiphanies, while what I believed to be random hookups or casual scenes are afterward exposed as the culmination of psychodramas enacted by some mysterious somatic energy of which I’m only vaguely aware. What is it about the season that makes contact with my unconscious so very on-the-nose? It’s almost irritating.

Even just writing the above graf has ferreted out another one of those epiphanies I mentioned: the dreams and the sex mirror each other! But of course they do. My dreams often involve me being forced or obligated to kill someone else1, usually someone vulnerable and helpless. Death features in my sex life, too, whether implicitly in the form of risk-taking, or explicitly as consensual violence. As a hypochondriac who wears sunblock every day, I’ve clearly figured out how to compartmentalize that which the dreams suggest (evoke? foretell? fetishize?).

What would happen if I were to compartmentalize a little less? But before I can work up the courage to find out, the summer is already drawing to a close. By the time September arrives, the dreams : sex ratio will be restored to a flirtier balance. Any scorekeeping my body will be doing will happen on a strict need-to-know basis. Bruises will yellow, nerve damage will rewire (hopefully), and the antibiotics? They’ll do what they do best. It’ll be as if nothing ever happened.

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Thank you for your patience during my little summer vacation. I’ve been using this time to recover from writing my third novel, rest, read, and have fun. I’ve also been developing a new series about the Method, a pet interest of mine, and I’m excited to share the first installment with you soon. In the meantime, I hope you’re drinking enough water, eating enough food, and taking your deepest breath of the day first thing in the morning.

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1

From my journal: Dreamed about an old man who lived in my house and wouldn’t die. Laid him down when no one was home and held a pillow over his face. He struggled but I didn’t have to try too hard. Suddenly someone was coming home. I left the room, with the man still alive. He couldn’t speak, so he wouldn’t tell, but he wanted a hug from me.

David Davis

My first association with the before/after diptych is the TV infomercial: take this pill for hair growth, buy that workout equipment for weight loss, invest in this complicated food processor for a purée the likes of which you never thought possible. On the left, the grainy, poorly lit, unflattering before hovers like a Dickensian spirit; on the right, a sexy, glossy, hyper-saturated invocation of potential, the after, supplants its sinister sister.

These days, we have before/afters for trans people. They’re not new, of course—I suspect that not even Christine Jorgensen’s infamous 1952 cover story, “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty,” could be said to be the first to make the papers—but they’ve certainly become far more popular, particularly on social media. Many of us, maybe most of us, have created some variation on it, if only for ourselves in the private light of our photo app.

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But popularity eats itself. Before/afters are highly clickable, especially for cis people. They’re titillated, appalled, and frightened by our transformation, which they scour for clues they can then use to transvestigate (transvestigation being another neo-genre of relationality and time-marking that eats itself). As a result, many of us trans people distrust the before/after, finding it to be problematic, cisnormative, and cringe. Everything has to be a freak show for cis people, doesn’t it? Binary-addicted, porn-brained, tin foil-hatted circle-jerkers turning a normal human experience into, at the very best, hollow, shallow, fallow aspirational content.

What I resent about the before/after, as a narrative, is that it’s not optional. Any two images of me must necessarily become a before/after, provided the latter was taken within the last five years or so. I understand why we get irritated when other trans people intentionally position themselves in this way, but the fact of the matter is that it’s unavoidable, and for this reason I can’t get all worked up about it. We’re all defined by this fetishization of change: first by the pursuit of it, and then by the process of it, and finally by the persisting notion that a sex change is somehow distinct from any other kind of aging, biologically speaking, anyway.

I thought about sharing my own before/after here in this post. I’m proud of how I’ve changed, and I suppose I could pretend to illustrate my point while actually capitalizing on the reality that images of myself make this newsletter pay out more. Not that there would be anything wrong with that. And maybe I’ll do it, sometime.

But what I like about my own before/after is how little I’ve changed, physically speaking. Most of it happened inside me, before the physical part even began, when I made the conscious decision to change. There’s no quantifying, not in pounds or hair follicles, the difference between my before and after. Like a religious relic, perhaps, the diptych tells you more with form than with content.

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I’m taking the month off from thinking, so this essay—written but never published for the dear, departed Astra —is now unlocked. Don’t worry, paid subscribers! I’ll be making it up to you, likely with blood. Stay cool out there.

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Though it offers a steam room, a sauna, and bodywork services, Oakland’s Piedmont Springs is best known (among my old milieu of Millennial punks and queers, anyway) for its private outdoor hot tubs.

Wedged between a garden store and a bookshop, the spa’s shabby foyer leads to a wood-paneled corridor, beyond which are the patios that are so popular you should aim to book a week in advance. Hang your bag on one of the wall hooks and, once your escort closes the door behind you, strip down and surrender yourself to the caldera. If clouds bruise the square of sky above, it’s easy to imagine that you’re cloistered in the core of a Pescadero yurt, the air piquant with sequoias and sea salt. 

From Berkeley’s women-only backyard nude tub with the hottest temps I’ve ever braved; to gay bathhouses like Steamworks and Eros; to the geothermal pools scattered throughout the Bay Area, there are plenty of local institutions distinguished by their potential for sweat and anonymity, but Piedmont Springs is probably my favorite. You can go with your friends to shvitz. You can go with your dates to fuck. You can go with your regular because, for the price of $27 per person per hour (though I think it was cheaper, back in my day), it’s one of the most convenient places for professional piss play outside of a private residence.

Discreet, relatively inexpensive, and requiring minimal cleanup—there’s a shower in the corner and drains in the concrete floor—at Piedmont Springs, you can work with the sun on your shoulders and a jet massage as consolation prize if your client no-shows. Not that G ever did. 

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I first started seeing G at my old dungeon, and when I went independent, he came with me. When we met, he described himself as a normal guy into vanilla sex, with one interest niche enough that he was obliged to outsource its fulfillment: the desire to slide under a pretty girl and drown, for a few precious moments, in her sharp and silky warmth. G was covered in traditional tattoos and restored muscle cars for fun, but he went schoolboy when he talked about what he wanted from me.

It’s so sexy, he said. G loved sexy things. And it tastes amazing.

He struggled to convey what it was about golden showers that he liked so much, and why they brought him to what was essentially a brothel, rather than to the feet of an open-minded girlfriend. This mystifying urge left him both verbose and inarticulate, as our deepest erotic desires do for most of us; though he was no poet, G’s passion, which he was happy to leave more or less unexamined, felt poetic to me. 

A couple times a month, G drove down from Sacramento to meet me at Piedmont Springs, which both of us preferred to the dungeon bathroom where we first spent time together. Granted an additional layer of privacy by the roar of the jets, it was easy to relax in our moisture-slick cubicle, where the air is keen with chlorine yet soft with mildew. In the daylight, our sessions felt casual, even like happenstance—preferable for G, who tended to date the girls he hired, grimly trusting that the strippers and pro-dommes that were twenty-five years his junior shared his belief in a connection that was more than transactional. And maybe it was for some of them. G was a nice enough guy with a good job, and not at all bad-looking, though admittedly I can’t remember a single thing about his dick.

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Timing is essential with piss guys, which meant that, nice though G was, our dates were unpleasant for me. He usually booked for an hour, which meant I had to hold it for 60 minutes at minimum, not including however long it took to work up a reserve before the session began (and god forbid he ask to extend!). To give a professional golden shower, you must be well-hydrated overall, not just for the sake of volume—like a dog on a walk, quantity matters—but because most people of G’s sort have strong opinions about their ambrosia’s flavor, smell, even texture (in a transactional situation, these opinions can veer into micromanagement, but that’s fetishists for you). 

What’s more, I couldn’t relieve myself until G was ready to cum, which only happened when he’d had his hour’s worth of fooling around and talking about himself. It’s one thing to sit on a full bladder while hunting for a place to pull over. It’s another to do it while flirting or even fucking, usually in heels and uncomfortable lingerie, all while trying to maintain the illusion of a sudden, surprising need to let loose a gallon of crystal-clear nectar all over the nearest man’s unwitting pate. Whereas gay men seem to prefer to use “watersports” for their piss play, a term communicating a jocular, messy, and even egalitarian exchange of fluids, the more straight-inflected “golden shower” suggests a top-down phenomenon not found in nature unless by way of divine circumstance, like Zeus’ nocturnal visit to Danaë’s bronze prison. 

Was it the sense of being anointed that got G’s dick hard? Maybe I’m overthinking it. It’s easy enough to compare the golden shower to orgasm—or, these days, to the internet porn-popularized phenomenon of female ejaculation. As with orgasm, a golden shower begins with pressure, building as you approach an intuited but unknown limit, tantalized by a pleasure that promises its own annihilation. The animating liquids in your body boil, preparing to burst from one of your rare natural apertures. Sensation races through your nerves, nearing an obscure destination, an irresistible nexus that hits like a flipped switch, like jets screaming awake in quiet water. Boom. Nut. The little death, all over someone else’s face. 

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Inevitable though it may feel, this release can’t always be taken for granted. It didn’t take long for me to develop a comfort with golden showers, but that didn’t mean they came easily every time, even with G, one of my best clients. There were days that I realized, with his eyes locked on my cunt and his muscles tensed, that I was unable to perform—but the show must go on. While I waited out the freeze, I pretended it was all a part of our naughty little game, a withholding rather than a malfunctioning. This was the part of the job where personality was clutch, and where an injection of dominance came in handy, even for someone as vanilla as G professed to be.

It’s going to feel so good, baby, I would say. It’s coming all over your face. Is that what you want? Shit like that.

The trick was to build tension, playing on his anticipation, hypnotizing him with the threat of attaining his fantasy. And what was that, exactly? To break the rules? To feel special? To go under for good?

Before I started working at that dungeon, I never would have thought that I’d come to enjoy pissing on anyone. At best, I figured while waiting in the hallway for my first-ever $30 walk-on, it would be another thing to grudgingly do for money, like mop floors or organize spreadsheets. I think I can be forgiven for once believing this kind of scene was always straightforward, all about the piss. But then sometimes, while perched above G’s handsome nose, the need for relief so strong I wasn’t sure I could have made it to the toilet three feet away, I watched him watching me—desperate yet focused, nowhere else but here, and yet totally gone—and realized I could feel it, too. 

Earlier this year, when I watched Ken Russell’s campy horror comedy, The Lair of The White Worm, I was reminded of G, by now almost a decade in my past. Amanda Donohue stars as the film’s villain, the sylphy Lady Sylvia, an immortal priestess posing as an aristocratic nympho who kidnaps people to feed the medieval monster roaming the caves under her estate. Stumbling across a custardy young man hitching for a ride in a rainstorm, she lures him back to her manor, where she convinces him to take a hot bath in a tub even bigger than the ones you’ll find at Piedmont Springs. Lulled by Lady Sylvia to horny compliance, the young man dutifully stands to be soaped down, only to watch her sink her fangs into his cock. Paralyzed by her poison, he can’t resist as she pushes him under with her latex boot, his dying breath joining the bubbles like so much foam on the sea.

Though the young man is drowned, he does not meet his doom in Lady Sylvia’s cauldron. He was lost the moment he came across her ominous little sportster, her garter belt flashing from the British side of the car. Though he has his reservations—her absurd negligee, her brioche-thick double entendre, her canines winsome against her lipstick—he doesn’t feel unsafe until it’s too late. He knows he is being naughty, staying out longer than he’d intended when he left the hostel this morning. 

“To die so that the god may live is a privilege,” Lady Sylvia reassures him, moments before he goes under for good.

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Bunnies drip from the ceiling and collapse into nubile pretzels. Their backs arch and their hips thrust. Whether they smile and laugh, or tighten their lips in meditation, or merely suffer, they all share the anaerobic daze of a scruffed mammal. When I see their twisted bodies, I think, horribly, Yummy.

Am I going to have to learn how to do a chest tie so you can relax? Jade says.

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David Davis

In The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet’s protagonist is given a package by Stilitano, this criminal he’s fucking, and instructed to transport it from Germany to the Netherlands. Only after smuggling the package does he find out it contained opium. But he doesn’t feel betrayed.

I understood, nevertheless, why God needs an angel, which He calls a messenger, to carry out certain missions which He Himself is unable to…For [Stilitano] revealing himself to me in this way, my gratitude rose up to him.

Words like resilience or defiance are not enough to articulate how Genet’s protagonists respond to suffering. Theirs is a transmutation by sheer force of will. This journal is not a mere literary diversion, his Thief’s Journal protagonist writes. The further I progress…the more do I feel myself hardening my will to utilize, for virtuous ends, my former hardships. I feel their power.

Their power is Genet’s. As the emotional fallout of tragedy, the sensations of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress operate hypothetically, removing you from real time. Surrounded by if-thens and bulging with hideous potential, these states of being feel both fiercely attenuated and permanent as cold concrete. How is it that Genet’s orphans, itinerants, and prisoners can find not only pleasure—indeed, a form of eroticism, as our protagonist himself puts it—but honor, beauty, and adventure in their betrayal?

Something bad happened recently, so for the past few weeks, I’ve felt broken. No, that’s not specific enough: I’ve felt cis. That’s what despair feels like to me. It calls into question all other states of being, making happiness seem not just inaccessible, but specious. I believe that expanding one’s capacity for pleasure means encountering displeasure more often, and more intensely. When I’m down there like I have been, I’m asking myself: is the exchange worth it?

When I first started drafting this edition of DAVID, I didn’t think it was. At the moment, however, I do. Still, I’ve been dwelling on a line from Cormac McCarthy’s final novel, where a doomed woman tells her psychoanalyst, As long as you are breathing you can always be more scared. I don’t think Genet would disagree, and yet the contrast is astounding, isn’t it?

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Doctors Vs. David

Art by Mattie Lubchansky

Last week, Sabrina Imbler and Lauren Theisen of Defector reached out about a piece for a new series. Histories of Transition, whose inaugural installment was written by the inimitable Casey Plett, appealed to me for its straightforwardness: This is what the bureaucracy was. These are the steps I took to get through it.

While the point of this Defector series is to provide functional, if not dispassionate, information about medical transition, writing about mine reminded me that the primary emotions it inspired are, and have remained, joy and rage. I’m in love with transsexuals because we are beautiful, despite each of us knowing countless people—not just doctors, insurance reps, and employers, but family, friends, and partners—who would have happily watched us die from lack of healthcare.

Being white and straight size, not wanting bottom surgery, and having begun medical transition at 30 (instead of at 19 or 20, when I became aware that such a thing was possible) means that my experience was easier than it is for many—but it was still profoundly traumatizing. Being gay at the doctor didn’t prepare me for it. Nor did being chronically ill or having done sex work. And yet, as I’ve often reflected over the past five years, if I woke up tomorrow in my government-issued body, I would do it all over again without a second thought. There is no alternative for me.

While at times frightening, this reality is also deeply reassuring. For me, being trans is like writing: it’s vocational and essential. Both give purpose to my survival. That anti-trans fascists must find their animation in my death is harrowingly sad. Their lives are lived in the negative space of my perfection, and their deaths will be all the more meaningless for it.

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Read me on Defector here. Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.

David Davis 43, part 6

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5

The first Trump election traumatized people, including the dyke I was dating at the time. Anticipating Clinton’s victory that Tuesday night, she and I turned down friends’ invitations to go drinking, opting instead to stay in for backgammon and MSNBC.

I remember the moment, if not the electoral details, when it became clear that Hillary was going to lose. In shock, I began laughing. My ex, whose preferred method of managing fear was to scapegoat me, picked a fight—how dare I make light of something so serious? That night, she didn’t sleep, and was angry that I could.

The following week, I talked it over in therapy: the funereal vibes of post-Obama Oakland, the spontaneous combustion of my straight coworkers’ romantic relationships1, the killing of what would have been my first piece in The Atlantic because the news cycle had completely shit the bed2. I didn’t feel traumatized by Trump’s win, like some seemed or claimed to be, but I was distressed. When I brought this up with my therapist, however, her response surprised me.

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Though I liked my therapist, when I first began seeing her I felt our sessions were sometimes more difficult than necessary. While she was queer, she had only ever been in relationships with cis men, and it showed. She sometimes misgendered me3. Her approach to my experiences with sex work could be unintentionally stigmatizing or alienating. But over the years together, her willingness to be direct with me about my own micro-aggressions, fed by my racism or anti-fat bias, taught me that I could be direct with her in return. To use some more therapy-speak, she facilitated a safe space for difference, error, and repair, maintaining her own boundaries while supporting the slow rewiring of my modus operandi: codependency, passive-aggression, and self-harm as regulation. Instead of crushing my feelings like an empty Lacroix can, I began speaking up when she upset or angered me. Instead of ghosting when her perspective and experiences as a fat black cis woman made me uncomfortable—or even revealed things about me that I didn’t want to think about—I kept coming back4.

I walked into my session that day assuming my therapist would feel like I did, if not worse. Because if I, as a white person, was this shaken by the Trump election, then she, as a black person, must be even more so, right? She laughed at me.

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I wish I’d written down what she said so I wouldn’t have to paraphrase 2.5 presidencies later, but the gist was that while white people were freaking out, none of our fears were new for black people. While Trump’s win (powered in part by the votes of white women—my cohort, give or take a pronoun circle) was not in any way good news for her or those she cared about, her feelings of anger, frustration, and fear predated the system of which Trump was merely the most recent, and controversial, figurehead. These feelings weren’t the result of resignation or fatalism. They came from a deeper familiarity with the crisis that me, my girlfriend, and the weeping white women at my work were encountering in a very different way.

Much of the hysteria over Trump came from liberals for whom a Clinton win would have been the preferred outcome, instead of the lesser (or at least, less effectual) of two evils. I knew he was a feature, not a bug, but I had not before felt—in my body, at this intensity—the proximity of the political attachments he represented and empowered. The election was another reminder that the institutions of debt, austerity, policing, and incarceration that threatened me, some from further afield than others, had had other neighborhoods, cities, camps, and countries for their first proving ground.

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One of my therapist’s goals for me was to learn how to differentiate between dysregulation and emergency; to internalize that discomfort, obsession, even a panic attack, are not intolerable, much less mortal perils; to understand that fear is not the same thing as danger (and that danger does not always evoke a proportionate fear response).

This difference matters for me, as a person, because the stress caused by chronic dysregulation is awful for your health and feels like total shit. And it matters for me, as someone in community, because it is on this basis of this difference that we build solidarity. Government policies designed to eliminate trans people from public life affect me, but they affect trans people who are women, children, living in a red state, of color, poor, or incarcerated more acutely and seriously. To be aware of one’s own risk, in this schema, is not privilege-checking, which is a mostly useless exercise, but reality-checking. I am exposed to this danger; I can access that power. What am I going to do with that information?

Like Trump’s election, that conversation with my therapist was another sporadic lesson in the long education that, for me, began with the Occupy movement: if I feel emergency incoming, that means it’s already in its afterlife.

My second novel, X, was born in a fantasy, but probably not the one you’d expect if you’ve read it. Around the time of the Trump election, the beginning of my medical transition, and my belated first foray into Christopher Isherwood, I began to think about leaving this country, despite knowing that this desire could never be fulfilled. I’m not unique in this—most of us can’t leave, as if the best-case scenario of emigration is a guarantee, anyway5. I took the resulting fear, frustration, and sense of encroaching danger that this fantasy produced (or expressed?) and shared it with my protagonist, Lee.

Both X and my other novel, the earthquake room, are often described as speculative or dystopian fiction. If you go to a bookstore that stocks them, you might find them in the sci-fi or fantasy sections, if they haven’t been relegated to the gay corner6. This makes sense. They both radiate bad vibes—anxiety, dissociation, misanthropy, compulsion—and take place “five minutes in the future” (despite the chronological generality of the adjective and its distinction from post-apocalyptic, dystopian fiction often seems to be set in certain stylized notions of future), while being preoccupied with themes like the 24-hour news cycle, being chronically online, body horror, surveillance culture, and fascistic political violence.

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While I understand why this happens, my blanket response to these categorizations has been to insist that I’m not attempting to predict anything. My novels are closer to portraits than extrapolations: almost everything that can be found inside them has already happened, or is already happening, to somebody somewhere. I’m not creative enough to come up with new horrors myself, or maybe I would be writing fantasy or sci-fi, instead of the little-F fantasy you often find in this newsletter.

The fantasy of leaving the States (or merely one’s state) isn’t just about escape from political persecution. It’s also about knowing the right thing to do at the right time; about knowing when to stay and fight, and when you’re licked; about being able to distinguish between dysregulation and emergency. Being transsexual, here and now, is frightening. Like being out in public—when you can’t know you’re in danger until it’s too late—every succeeding news article about the state-down punishment of our most vulnerable, especially our children, forces you to ask yourself if the emergency is happening yet. The answer, which doesn’t do much to clarify things, is yes and no.

Sometimes bad news just washes over me. Sometimes it makes me delete Twitter. Sometimes it sends me to bed, or someone else’s bed. Sometimes I do something. I started writing this newsletter after the Associated Press announced Stylebook updates regarding the use of the term TERF. For some reason, the AP’s timing, framing, and focus on TERFs among the many updates to its Transgender Topical Guide (click through the epic ratio to learn more) made me feel more angry and afraid than it probably should have. This item is no tipping point, but it is another ill bodement for sleepless nights.

When is the line crossed? For other people, for me? I don’t know.

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Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 of this series. Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.

1

If you were familiar with any hetero liberals at the time, you knew at least one man who slept on the couch for a week or two—straight people were going through it!

2

With the benefit of hindsight, I now realize that the film review that never was wasn’t very good, and nor is The Atlantic, so in this sense Donny did me a favor.

3

At this point in my life, it would take only one single incident of misgendering for me to fire a therapist. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again, lol. In 2016, however, misgendering was more normalized and my self-esteem was shit. I was also paying a mere $20/session for a well-meaning, more-or-less trans-informed mental healthcare provider who didn’t think kink or prostitution disqualified me from compassionate support. Was I going to walk away from that?

4

Years later, when my insurance company tried to deny my corrective top surgery mere days before my date (my surgeon’s office admin told me they’d never had to fight so hard for a covered transgender procedure), this therapist overnighted one of the letters I needed to get approval.

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And many will arrive here under desperate circumstances only to be victimized by the mechanisms that some Americans are seeking to flee.

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I will be cunty about being a token but I will not be cunty about the magnificent kindliness of booksellers, especially the queer and trans ones, who have helped people find my books. I love them!

DAVID: Members Only

He was one of those sneaky types who presents himself as dominant, then expects you to show up and top from the bottom. That would have been bad enough, but here's where I made my real mistake: he said in his bio he wouldn't send photos, but that he was decently hung. Because I'm an idiot, I took his word for it (hey, he gave good text), because of course when I got there he was not even close to hung. Far from, in fact,

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David Davis

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When I was 19, my dad and I had an argument about climate change.

It’s real, I said.

It’s not, he insisted.

We were outside my apartment complex in Davis, CA, and the sky was perfect blue. There was no such thing as fire season back then, not the way we know it today, not the kind that travels across continents to expose uninitiated cities to a shiny new face of the lament configuration.

To call our conversation an argument would imply that either of us had evidence to support our case, but since mine was as disreputable, in his eyes, as his was in mine, we were quickly at an impasse. If we were to agree to disagree, we would have to engage in our argument based on the established hierarchy between us: I would take his word, as I always had, and he would decide whether mine was good enough to be taken.

How do you know it’s not real? I demanded.

Well, said my dad, I have a college degree…

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Indignant at this fallacy, I remember feeling a lick of panic. Was this the mind on whom I had based my worldview, my values, my intellectual pursuits? He hadn’t even been around for his college degree (which was, in his defense, agronomy) because he worked full time as a lumberjack and a redacted to put himself through school, same as me (the full-time part, not the lumberjack and redacted part). My own degree—still unassured because I’d already dropped out for the first time due to lack of funds—was suspicious even in utero. In his case, college was a symbol of class mobility and intellectual authority. In mine, all it did was prove that I thought I was smarter and better and fancier than the people who raised me.

We went around and around, but never settled on who was right. Eventually my dad went home, and I went back inside, probably to talk to the bugs I thought were living in my walls. That argument, which was far less charged than the ones to follow, was not the one that ended our relationship1. But I always think of it whenever the the climate catastrophe, as Democracy Now! refers to it, moves a little closer to home. Fearful of fire, smoke, or storm, my first emotion is anger, at my dad! As if the whole thing is his fault; as if, he had only believed me back in 2007, we wouldn’t be here now.

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I’ve begun paying attention to who I get angry with when something bad happens, whether the crisis is personal or geopolitical (whenever these things can be differentiated). The state, and the corporations and billionaires that run it, the cops and the collaborators—those are the ones who are responsible, and more importantly, continue to impede people’s movements to do something. But my immediate fear locates an infinitesimally small, and obviously hyper-personal, scapegoat, some boomer redneck I haven’t talked to in years. Fearful, I transform the world into my own suffering. Ineffectual, I superimpose myself on the bigness of this injustice.

This is different from empathy, I think, because it does not motivate me to action, other than blame, and is ultimately about me, rather than other people. And I do think we all have to compartmentalize sometimes. But when I examine the effects of this tendency in myself, I see that it does not galvanize me to action, or connection, or even the dreaded self-care. Instead, it permits me to continue to rage against an insignificant person.

help me get out of debt :)

Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.

If you’re looking for significant people, I’ll direct your attention to the ongoing #StopCopCity movement in Atlanta, which hit its most recent roadblock when the Atlanta City Council voted to fund the deeply unpopular police training center.

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If I had to pick, it would probably have been the one about Trayvon Martin, who was murdered in cold blood by George Zimmerman at 17—at the time, the same age as my half-sister, my dad’s youngest child. I thought this similarity would affect with him as it affected me. It didn’t.