Davey Davis's Blog, page 14

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?

$ is good for me

Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X (which just celebrated its first birthday🎉), right here.

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.

i <3 $5

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.

5

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

6

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!

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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.

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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.

1

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.

David Davis 42, part 5

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

(I can sort of gloss over Ottessa Moshfegh’s OCD lit without getting carried away, right? Right.)

In 2018, when my friend Tyler Ford gave me an ARC of Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, its premise provoked a nostalgia that, while painful, was so specific it was almost cozy. I have, let’s say, little in common with the book’s nameless narrator, a beautiful, orphaned, post-grad WASP working in a Manhattan art gallery in 2001, save her desire to put herself in chemical hibernation for a year in hopes of becoming “a person who lives in the world instead of constantly fantasizing about removing herself from it,” as Jia Tolentino writes in her New Yorker review.

While I never pulled off my own fantasy, which I won’t describe here in order to preserve my dignity1, Moshfegh’s narrator does. Without spoiling any more than is warranted, My Year’s ending isn’t exactly a happy one, but its protagonist’s goals are more or less attained. To use Bush 2’s phrasing, which went what we would now call viral two years after the events of My Year: Mission Accomplished.

When I pivot to less-than-magical language to nutshell My Year’s narrative—that our WASP has self-diagnosed and then healed her own adrenal fatigue, albeit in a way that is most generously described as experimental—I don’t do so to undermine her fantasy, or the relief that it brings her. Like many of Moshfegh’s protagonists, our narrator takes a ruthlessly practical approach to an old existential problem, “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to,” as the Bard says.

Tranquil though the surface may be, the flat water of emptiness all but disappears the submarine boil of rage, sadness, and grief. With her magical pills, our narratrix improves upon the methods of her mother (OD by suicide) with this simple innovation: why die when you can sleep?

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When I write about fantasy, my focus is often on sex and (sexual) desire. This is because I’m interested in these things, and because you are, and because so much of our notion of the sensual is sexualized. I have no doubt that we’ve the capacity for sensuality without sexuality (and vice versa), but because former is so rarely legible except through the latter (and vice versa), even I sometimes miss the forest for the trees. I guess this is my way of saying that this post is the result of my having made a point of writing at least one installment of this series on a fantasy that’s not explicitly or primarily sexual.

In Part 1 of this series, I wrote, “we’re not looking at mere fantasy, here, but fantasy remembered, refracted, even regretted.” In keeping with this theme, I’ll admit that my own private year of rest and relaxation never came to pass. As a sort of inversion of My Year’s plot, that redacted yearning was just death drive, man. Now that I have a reason to live, my fantasies have been appropriately downsized. “My week of rest and relaxation, where no one dies and healthcare is free,” has insanely delicious vibes, doesn’t it?

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

1

Lol

David Davis

When I suffer, my panic shapes itself like this: Fuck, that hurts! This must mean that my pain tolerance is gone! Fuck! What will I do without it? If I can’t manage pain, then I will be in pain—and what’s worse than that? In those moments, my suffering is primarily derived from a pain that doesn’t yet exist. Suffering is time travel, the opposite of mindfulness. (Craving some takeout? We have perfectly good pain at home!)

The other night, my first-ever UTI knocked me so hard on my ass I was daydreaming about 10g needles. 25 of them, hell, even 50, couldn’t be as bad as this. What I would do to trade one discomfort for another! Funny how my brain goes, We prefer this pain and not, We prefer no pain.

It doesn’t hurt, I said to Jade, who was driving me for emergency antibiotics. But it’s still unbearable.

That’s pain, she said decisively. I wondered if she said that because she knew it would make me feel better.

After one sleepless, excruciating night, the antibiotics have basically fixed everything, and now the pain—or whatever it was—is not even a memory. It’s just gone. But while it was here, I tolerated it. What other choice did I have?

I’ve clung to a certain idea of pain tolerance for a long time, associating it with power, endurance, and self-control; in my mind, it’s something that can be enhanced with conditioning, and weakened with neglect (that is, going too long without getting your ass kicked). But this isn’t true, or at least, that which promotes a higher pain tolerance is still up for debate, scientifically speaking. To speak anecdotally, some of my experiences have made me less tolerant of certain sensations; and while over the years, the needles have gotten bigger, the scenes more varied, the risks more risky, I’m also less likely to take just any kind of punishment just because I can. It turns out that I was wrong: pain tolerance is not unidirectional, linear, or static, and it is situational, circumstantial, and subjective. Once again, I’ve mixed up my moralizing with my biopsychosocial processes, and to my own detriment.

At any rate, pain tolerance isn’t a very useful concept for nonconsensual suffering, is it? Whether or not you can tolerate the pain doesn’t dictate whether you will encounter it (and of course you will, for you are alive in a body). Your pain tolerance may have something to say about how long your life will be, of course, and pain management—a facet of emotional regulation—is a useful skill, indeed. But I have long thought of pain tolerance as a kind of strength-training for a consensual event, assuming that the sufferer in question (me) has the power to end the sensation. And yet we almost never do.

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"Ponyboy": Eliot Duncan in conversation with Davey Davis

On June 24, I will be in conversation, as they say, with Eliot Duncan, the author of Ponyboy: A Novel, “an evocative debut novel of trans-masculinity, addiction, and the pain and joy of becoming.” Register here to listen in. It’s free! Hot dog!

I love talking with other novelists about their work, especially when said conversation comes with that little frisson of performance anxiety. Eliot and I have been like ships in the night for a while now1, so we’re well past due. Plus, we look cute together.

Learn more about Eliot and preorder Ponyboy here. Learn more about my friends at the lovely Charis Books here. Learn more about moi by becoming a paid subscriber of DAVID, which gives you access to my posts about huge needles, biohacking, hot tubs, and more.

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

1

Almost literally: after plans to meet in person fell through while he was visiting New York last year, we stomped past each other while transferring at the Metropolitan/Lorimer L/G.

David Davis 42, part 4

Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

I almost didn't choose M. There was another man I was talking to, a hot older daddy in town on business. Nice dick, big shoulders, hosting in Times Square. I couldn’t tell if he was gay or what. M was much younger than the daddy—late twenties, probably—and definitively homosexual. A hung vers bottom, according to his profile and confirmed, at least in part, by his pics. He’d been texting me here and there for weeks; his gentle insistence suggested stamina, among other qualities. I wanted to see the daddy more, but when M cleared his afternoon for me, I headed to Bushwick.

I dressed with care. I made sure that everything I needed—poppers, condoms, ear pods, gum—was in my little bag. When the G train arrived, I stepped through the sliding doors and found a wall to put my back against. Book neglected, I spent the ride deliberating. The train is my favorite place to be uncertain, and I was still uncertain about M.

There were, of course, the risks of fucking another bottom. Then there was the possibility that M wasn’t even properly cute (in the single blurred face pic I’d seen, he was wearing sunglasses). But I’d been wanting to hook up with more gay men around my age. Not that I avoid them, but I do shy away sometimes, a disinclination that I noticed didn’t have anything to do with desire. Doing this thing that I didn’t strictly want to do, but that I believed would be good for me, had begun to feel important. Can you do that? I wondered as I walked the long transfer at Metropolitan/Lorimer. Take a man like a vitamin?

The apartment door was already open when I reached the landing. M surprised me with his handsomeness. Dark, curly hair. A deep voice, with something of a lisp. Tall, lithe, polite. His apartment, which I surveyed while he got me the glass of water I wasn’t going to drink, was clean and well-organized (hot). His book collection told me that told me we likely had friends in common. On his bed, we dithered over his doorstop biography of Robert Moses, finding reasons to touch each other.

It mostly felt good: uncut, layered with delicate petals of skin that periscope in your hands, the glans bright like a star. When it didn’t feel good, I kept it to myself. For a long time, we moved our bodies around, mostly at his signal, talking very little. I could feel our wordless negotiation for submission, waiting for the other to take control before taking new initiative. Please don't cum inside me, I said. It’s usually a command. Of course, M said. All over my belly and chest, a little on my face. Mind if I smoke? He had Marlboros. I didn’t ask for one. We chatted. I got up to find my clothes before he finished the cigarette.

What’s under desire? I imagine a skeleton, picked clean by passion. Now that we were finished, and I was dressing, did M feel there was something wrong with him for wanting me? Do I1? (I'll never pass. Is that sad2?) If he doesn’t ask to see me again, will it be because I was a bad lay, or because the box had been ticked? (But hadn’t I been ticking a box, conducting this exposure therapy on myself?)

M pulled on his pants, walked me to the door, and kissed me goodbye. It was crisp outside, the end of spring. I was still uncertain, but even uncertainty yields information. For example: what I sometimes feel is different from what I always know, which is that desire is not an ethics. For another example: uncertainty is part of desire, its shield and core and residue. Unfortunately, despite having enjoyed someone’s body and company, sometimes you don’t fuck again for no reason at all.

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1

I do, sometimes.

2

I think so, sometimes.

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You may have read that Lauren Oyler took a Goop cruise, which she wrote about for the May issue of Harper’s. I don’t know that I have an opinion about the piece overall, though I do think that the self-awareness isn’t self-awareing like it used to. If, for example, one thinks that cruises should be illegal, as Oyler says she does, one might own the hypocrisy of going on one for a paycheck just a mite more strenuously.

But I can’t begrudge Oyler that paycheck, especially these days. Anyhow, the part where she and her fellow cruisers encounter Gwyneth in the flesh approaches captivating, as do the details from the author’s interrupted personal life “engaging in polyamory and doing unanticipated quantities of drugs”—said details being why she was primed for a luxury cruise in the first place:

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