Davey Davis's Blog, page 15
March 31, 2023
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After hooking up, we laid on my bed together, chatting and sharing a j. He told me about his upcoming plans to visit family in a distant country, where the women are known to be particularly beautiful. He had been relaxed and speaking with some excitement, but as he said this, he abruptly cut himself off: forgetting himself, he had talked to me as a straight man talks to another straight man. This put us at risk of doing something homosocial, which put our very recent past at risk of being something homosexual.
That cis men of all orientations lie to themselves in order to have sex with me is nothing new. I used to think I could predict the nature of these lies based on the liar telling them: some straight men think of me as a girl, some gay men think of me as a boy, and some bi men think of me as the best of both worlds, as they’re inclined to put it. What I’ve learned since going on hormones is that not only are these lies unpredictable, they’re often not even internally consistent.
March 22, 2023
David Davis 42, part 1
Of all my bad habits, it is the ruthless desire to befriend that exerts the strongest pull on my behavior. Not that I want more friends — God, no. If anything, I’d love to drop about 80 percent of the ones I have, so I could stop remembering their birthdays. But because I can’t quit — because constantly pulling strangers into my orbit is what stabilizes my bearing in the universe — I have determined to double down.1
This excerpt from Caity Weaver’s recent NYT piece about group-travel companies designed to help upwardly-mobile Millennials make friends caught my attention: in describing her compulsive need to gather companions, Weaver pins down my own compulsive need to get laid23. Swap “befriend” with “fuck,” and she’s describing my relationship to casual sex.
While on a meticulously curated trip to Morocco, Weaver finds herself in the company of 12 other women like her—“the Jeff Bezoses of friend-making”—and arrives at the conclusion that what really unites them is not how they make friends, but why. “My tendency to mechanically entrap others into friendship seemed suddenly explicated: I do it because I have no tolerance for those who unintentionally imperil fun party moods by fostering atmospheres of social awkwardness,” she writes.
The founders of the group-travel company in question rely on this tendency, of course. Their clients are “‘decision makers or leaders’ in their regular lives who ‘want somebody else to take control’ of their vacations” because they have “decision fatigue” from the pressures of having it all. Coming as no surprise to anyone, Type A types like Weaver are control freaks, and vacations like this one have been devised not for relaxation but for a distinctly unrestorative pleasure, which is found in the illusion of giving up control without having ceded a single inch.
If you’ve been around since the beginning of DAVID, you might remember how often I wrote about fantasy in the early days. At the dawn of hormonal transition and the pandemic, this project was my distraction from loneliness, fear, and overwork. On the bleeding cusp of being alive, I was tipped back into the ether by 2020 (as so many of us were) with a series of personal tragedies and frustrations. Like finally deciding you want that surgery, only to be told that you must wait another year—another five—before you can have it, I learned through contrast what it’s really like to be crushed by desire.
In my lowest moments, I missed Jade and my friends, I panicked about money and my chronic illness, and I grieved the worlds I once took for granted. Without reducing its substance, fantasy—whether it was about getting hurt by my friends, or fucking strangers, or simply being in a bar4 with other people again—stood in for yearnings too hurtful to look at dead-on. I’d rather want than need, you know?
But I kept going. So did you. The first years of the pandemic are now behind us, as is my second puberty, more or less, and I’ve been given some freedom to pursue the daydreams that kept me going. Some have been attained, others still wait in the wings, and yet others will forever defy realization, as they should. With age, experience, and a tempering of urgency, I’d like to think I’ve gotten some perspective on all of it, enough to return to DAVID’s roots, now that it’s aboveground. If early DAVID was about fantasies yet to come, this stage will ask after fantasies old, failed, retired, and betrayed. The memory of a fantasy, after all, its own fantasy.
To hearken back to the old DAVID tagline—a mise en abîme in serial—we’re not looking at mere fantasy, here, but fantasy remembered, refracted, even regretted. I typically structure these series in posts of three, but since fantasy is my gluten-free bread and dairy-free butter, this one may take a while.
Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.
1Italics mine.
2It feels bitchy to describe this piece as “fluffy,” although I think that it is, while also being well-written, funny, and insightful, as I’ve come to expect from Weaver over the years.
3By the way, I don’t subscribe to the New York Times. Steal the New York Times! This is what I think about the New York Times!
4When I tell you that I’ve cried to this TikTok.
March 17, 2023
David Davis
Below is an excerpt from a November 2017 journal entry.
broke up with [Redacted] last week. that same day, a strange blemish on my face—not quite a zit, something hardier and smoother and resistant to popping for months and months—burst open, expelling something white and solid and smooth, like an egg yolk. it healed a few days ago, my skin the same as before it arrived, as if it had never been there.
[Redacted] is my storied Bad Relationship. We all have one. Art that comes to mind when I think of her include Tár (2022) and Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, for reasons that probably don’t require a lot of explanation. Less obvious are Dennis Cooper’s Closer, God Jr., Ugly Man: Stories, and The Marbled Swarm, all of which I read in the months leading up to my announcement to [Redacted] that I was moving out of our apartment, which was really, for all intents and purposes, her apartment.
Though Closer was a revelation, I needed to check my reading list to confirm the Coopers; 2017 was a fuzzy year. But I didn’t need the journal entry to confirm the blemish. I think about it not infrequently, because I like signs, and things that lend themselves to interpretation as signs. I removed something repulsive from my body on the same day that I removed something violent from my life. Very tidy.
Personally, I don’t think that imposing significance is all that different from finding it.
Earlier this week, I woke up in the middle of the night to pee. A cockroach, big and sensitive, looked up at me from the bathroom sink. It’s the kind of insect that makes me feel like a cartoon elephant, so fearful of the mouse that it leaps onto the table. The cockroach was so big that it knocked over my almost-empty bottle of hand soap while fleeing the scene. I haven’t been sleeping well anyway lately, but that little nip of panic ruined the rest of the night for me. I was up until 4 am.
Yesterday, something happened that made me sad. When I got home for the night, I worked on the new book, Casanova 20, in bed for a while. Then I shut my laptop, turned off the lamp, and closed my eyes.
Not long after, I woke up. I didn’t have to pee. But I did have a feeling.
There are surely thousands of cockroaches in my building. Who knows how many wait until my apartment is dark and still to climb into the drain of my bathroom sink, for water, I suppose. But I knew that the motherfucker in my sink was the same one I had seen a few nights before. I knew that he was back, waiting for me.
Insects—with their associations with filth, contagion, overwhelm—factor into my mental health history in such a way that developing a relationship with an “individual” bug is never a great sign. But now that the cockroach had an identity, he and I had a rapport. Because I knew him, I was less afraid of him, though my disgust was just as extreme. But I was also more determined to end his life. He fled again, but waited on the underside of the sink, watching me. I knocked him to the floor and crushed his body with the dustpan. His corpse went in the toilet. Before I went back to bed, I bleached the whole bathroom.
When I was back under the covers again, I fell asleep right away. I slept all night.
There’s a sign there. What is it?
Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.
March 13, 2023
David Davis 41, part 3
In a 2002 conversation between John Berger and Michael Ondaatje, the writers consider the creative process. Ondaatje says that in order to work he sometimes needs to “escape that place where you are very conscious of the audience.” The great Berger, holding his own hands like a happy saint, investigates.
Berger: Are you withdrawing to yourself or to somewhere else? Tell me about the place where you find yourself when you withdraw. Is it here? Is it there?
Ondaatje: I don’t think it’s withdrawing. It’s more like descending, in the sense that I’m trying to descend to a level that I haven’t gone before. If I began to write something that I already knew, it would be a problem for me. I’m trying to accept the given of what I know and then write something that I don’t know. And that’s why that privacy, that secrecy, which I’m obsessed with, is necessary. It becomes discovery as opposed to clarification.
Have you, as a writer, visited this place before? A place that, despite hopefully producing written work, is nonverbal, even sublingual? That is extraconscious, metaphysical, spiritual? That is both communicative (communal) and private (exclusive)? (Instinct, said Proust, is that which makes art “the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgment.”) And are you excited, as Berger is, to regard another artist’s experience of this place? His acknowledgement of Ondaatje’s descent to an inaccessible place is a gift to his colleague, and the opportunity to watch him do so, another gift.
Few things are more creatively energizing than the generosity on display between Berger and Ondaatje, which is why I recommend watching the conversation in full, even if you’re unfamiliar with both writers. The warmth between them, artist to artist, is palpable, invigorating. I’m not a Ondaatje fan, but I don’t need to be to feel the mutual esteem and appreciation. I think I might like all artists, though I know I don’t like all art. Sometimes I’m moved by a work of art and sometimes I’m moved by the artist that produced it; in this latter sense, the art is almost negligible.
Is that wrong? It’s how I feel, at any rate1. If it matters, what I think (which here mirrors how I feel) is that artist is a sensibility. It’s a way of seeing, doing, feeling, reckoning, connecting. Being a sensibility, artistry is distinct from commerce. Though it can be capitalized upon, it cannot be measured by, say, books sold or dollars earned. For these reasons, an artist need not be economically viable. An artist need not be recognized in their time. An artist need not be successful, or even not fail. They need only to be encountered.
Audience is not just who you’re writing for (or who you’re momentarily evading). Audience is also a marketing term for the group of consumers for whom a given product is intended.
When I was being interviewed about my book, X, during its launch last year, I got asked about audience a lot: Who is this book for? As questions go, it’s not unfair, but neither is the answer that I usually wanted to give, which was: Me. I knew, however, that simple as this question sounds, it’s not a straightforward one. Who is this book for? There’s an honest answer, a PR answer (for other trans people, for other dykes, for anyone who’s ever felt like an outsider!), and a business answer (non-binary readers between the ages of 18-35, enjoyers of erotica or noir, or, hey, just go check out my Good Reads tags, which lists my book’s genre as transgender, just like me!)2. If a writer is savvy enough to combine the three answers—if they’re even distinct from each other, that is—they may leave the title of writer behind for one with even more earning power: influencer.
I began this series asking, Why do we write? Knowing for whom we write can surely help guide us toward our answer. Perhaps it even is our answer. But these days especially, knowing your audience can also contribute to an existential crisis of the distinctly writerly kind: if you know for whom you write, you’re better equipped to make money off the writing. Some worms can’t be put back in the can.
I’m not saying that the commercialization of art isn’t old as hell, that the dueling compulsions of artistic integrity and making rent don’t dance on our roofs like hot-footing demons. But as it becomes harder and harder to make a living as a writer of, say, fiction3, these considerations become more pertinent to our creative choices. They weigh on them, in fact. Added to the pressure to create ~authentically~ is the pressure to professionalize, both of which are fake problems with very real material consequences. Commodified authenticity is big bucks. Professionalization is job security. Luckily, whole industries—from MFA programs to pay-to-play writing competitions—have popped up to address them, draining the time, money, and energy of aspiring writers looking for a foot in the door.
And so I leave you with a craft exercise, if that’s something you can use. It’s corny, in the way that craft exercises can be, but if you’re having trouble making that descent, maybe it’s a way in: the next time you begin a project, write it as if the only name on the dedication page is your own.
Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.
1“Deal with your shit, this is literature.”—Dennis Cooper
2“I don’t make political art. I don’t make feminist art. I’m a woman who’s a feminist. I don’t make women’s art. I think those categories marginalize anyone’s work. I’m engaged with ideas of power and picturing, of pleasure and punishment, of lives and their beginnings and ends, and how, amid moments of pleasure and tenderness, there are explosions of destruction, subjugation, and the insanity of war.”—Barbara Kruger
3Which I don’t. She has a day job! On top of this newsletter. So, subscribe! I love $5!
March 6, 2023
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The toadstool is tiny because J doesn’t know the dose yet, and anyway I have work in the morning. I chew and swallow, the bitterness lodging in my teeth. It’s snowing, and J and I have plans to go for a nice long walk.
We’re just about to start bundling up when I remember. It’s like being in a car crash: knowing many things at once; the desperate wish to undo; the gaming out of one to three horrifying futures. How could I have forgotten? Within the next few days—maybe even tomorrow—my employer is having my piss analyzed for drug use, and psilocybin is one of the substances the panel will be screening for.
Lose my job. This is more of a sensation than an arrangement of words. I’m going to have to tell Jade that I lost my job because I’m stupid. This is a coherent sentence.
J feels responsible, though of course he shouldn’t. I knew these tests were coming, my first from an employer in over a decade, and yet I ate the mushroom. Still—and I’ve talked about this with him, and with Jade, and in therapy—there is something about J that changes the way I make choices. If only I had waited until after the test to spend time with him, one of the few trans men with whom I feel close. When I came out as trans in my early twenties, I began making friends with other transmasculine people, gay boys like me. When I recloseted not long after, I lost almost all of them except for one very patient and surprisingly self-actualized transfag. My internalized transphobia lived under glass, for all to see; I was not safe for transmasculine people. Even now that I’ve begun the process of fixing my heart, I still get along better with the dolls than with I do with the boys.
I begin to pace J’s living room. How did this happen? Poor timing. Self-sabotage. Pure bad luck. Without laying any blame at J’s feet, I think it’s safe to say that this could only have happened with him. But there’s this too: only J, a sadist, can help me now.
Everyone who meets J likes him instantly. He’s always smiling. You have to make yourself throw up, he advises, smiling. When he says it, I feel less afraid. It seems so simple, and really, it is. They should hire him to deliver cancer diagnoses.
The problem is, I can’t throw up by myself. I broke that mechanism a long time ago. I need help, I tell J. Will you help me? I know he will.
J’s left hand fits down my throat like a glove. His right rests on my shoulder. He presses down with both. You could say he fucks my face. Nothing doing.
Harder, I tell him when I come up for air. Nothing comes out except for some saliva. He teases me for not having a gag reflex.
All that cocksucking, he says.
My laughter squeezes his fingers. I feel grateful that he enjoys my fear and discomfort.
But the gratitude doesn’t cancel out the panic. My stomach is empty and my veins dehydrated, which means there’s almost nothing inside me, other than the mushroom, to be purged. What can I do? It won’t be long before I start metabolizing it.
What grosses you out? J prompts.
The hallmark of a sadist is an instinct to problem-solve. They approach your world of pain and fear like a puzzle, shrinking it down to a more tolerable size. I’m glad J is thinking, because I can’t. What grosses me out? Mold, maybe?
What if I throw up? he asks. Would that work?
This makes me laugh. I’ve been wiping asses and changing menstrual pads my whole life. I’ve spoonfed hundreds of mouths. I’ve listened to pedophiles, sick with post-coital sincerity, admit their crimes. My dad taught me how to eat insects. Your dad paid hundreds of dollars to eat my shit.
Nothing a body can do grosses me out, I tell J.
I’ve been saying this forever, to reassure friends fearful that I might judge them for being human. Now it’s the least reassuring thing I can think of.
J goes to his kitchen and starts opening cabinets. He’s going to make a concoction to disgust me, like the kind you make with your cousins, daring each other to drink the ketchup mixed with orange juice mixed with toothpaste. I chug tap water as he pours unseen liquids and powders into a glass. He stirs it with a spoon, takes a big whiff.
Oh god, he says.
He hands me eight ounces of what looks like rancid salad dressing.
Honestly, it doesn’t smell that bad to me, I say.
He adds a raw egg. For texture, he says, smiling.
Back to the bathroom. I down the drink. Salty, peppery, spicy, mucosal. It’s certainly gross, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it noxious. He tries to purge me again. My throat’s beginning to hurt. My neck will be sore tomorrow, I know. Nothing happens. Nothing comes up.
What about saltwater? J asks.
My mom used to purge that way, I say, remembering.
He mixes me another drink: a finger of kosher salt and more water from the tap.
That’s a lot. J sounds uncertain but he’s still smiling. He and I, similarly complected, are flushed. My face feels bloated. My nose is running.
Not more than a bottle of Gatorade, I say. I don’t think I’m right, but I want to be. At least my stomach is starting to hurt. We go back to bathroom and now I put my own hand down my throat. Still nothing. My desperation is a hum, like fluorescent lights. This is so cool, J keeps saying.
He’s googling on his phone. Ipecac? he asks. I tell him about my history with that stuff. If you don’t know how it works, I promise you, you don’t want to.
I’d rather get fired, I tell him. I really would.
I think I’m the one who suggests gut-punching. I’ve never done it before. Neither has J. Our first time. We stand together by the toilet. I put up my hands up in something like a Don’t shoot gesture and wait, trying not to flinch. J is strong and likes to hit, as I’ve learned from a few scenes together. He’s made me cry before. But right now I’m too tense. It does hurt, but less than you’d imagine, and nothing about it is nauseating. I think about my mom again. One time she and I were playing foosball at her boyfriend’s house. I was losing, and I slammed one of the bars in frustration, hitting her right in the belly. She didn’t say a word, just went and stood outside for a long time.
You’re too ready, J says. I cover my eyes so he can surprise me. The punches hurt more now, but they’re not getting me there. I think we’re having too much fun.
You don’t do anything, J remarks. If I was you, I wouldn’t be able to not swing back.
That’s the difference between you and me, I say. And thank god for that.
Now that gut-punching has failed, I think about the pro-ana/pro-mia forums I used to hang out on when I was a kid. What about a toothbrush? I wonder. It’s so basic. J pulls one out of a fixture in the bathroom wall. The bottom has been whittled to a sharp point.
Why? I ask.
So it’ll fit, he says, pointing to the tiny hole in the fixture. He’s such a boy.
I go back to the toilet and he stands behind me, right behind me, to watch. That’s nice. I feel like I can show him anything. I could drop my pants and take a shit right now and he wouldn’t care. Maybe it’s everything else, maybe it’s the way emergencies relax me, but with the toothbrush (the business end, not the sharp one), I finally start to feel sick. I puke five or six times, spicy water burning my nose. Reverse Bloody Mary. Euphoria.
I stop to take a breath. Doesn’t this gross you out? I ask him.
Nope, J says. He examines the toilet bowl carefully, like he’s reading sheet music. We’ve talked about limits before, and ours are about the same: no shit. Everything else is on the table. Increasingly so, it would seem.
That’s it! I yell. Nutty brown specks in the clear yellow. I puke a few more times, just to make sure. The brown specks look like money to me.
You don’t have to, says J, but I insist. He finds some Clorox wipes and I carefully clean the toilet, inside and out. I drop the wipes in the water. You can’t flush those, he says. He fishes them out with his hand.
Now I just wait, I say. If I don’t come up, we’ll know we got it all.
The scene is over. We clean ourselves up. We put on our hats and coats. I feel silly and spacey and good, and hope it’s just endorphins, the purger’s cozy high. J keeps checking my eyes. I think ours are the same color. His are already dilating, but he says mine are still normal.
The snow falls like a Christmas movie. Winter comes to New York City, said the news this morning. It’s the last day of February. I fear the future every moment, but right now it doesn’t matter. As we make our way to the Manhattan Bridge, J points at slick garbage bags and raging steam vents and red light bulbs hanging from abandoned buildings. His smile shines. I can’t see their beauty in the way he can, so I know I’m safe.
The next day, he texts to check in on me. My toilet has never been so clean, he says.
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The toadstool is tiny because J doesn’t know the dose yet, and anyway I have work in the morning. I chew and swallow, the bitterness lodging in my teeth. It’s snowing, and J and I are going for a nice long walk.
We’re just about to start bundling up when I remember. It’s like being in a car crash: knowing many things at once; the desperate wish to undo;…
February 27, 2023
David Davis
Guillame is looking for a new apartment. His relationship with his live-in boyfriend, Stéphane, has been in a nosedive, and the two of them agree that if they’re going to stay together, they’ll need a fresh start. Stéphane goes to stay with his parents while Guillame looks for his own place. With a fresh start, Guillame hopes, they can salvage what they have and build something new.
On the morning of moving day, an old hookup calls Guillame and offers to pierce him. Guillame is busy moving, naturally; can they meet later in the week? No, says the old hookup, he is only free this afternoon. Guillame decides to go for it. “I had been thinking about it for a long time,” he tells us. “Lots of guys I had been seeing or knew had it done. Not me. It was one of the only things I hadn’t already done. And now I felt like doing something serious.”
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Guillame decides to have his balls pierced. Despite a few hiccups, the piercing goes well enough, but after the piercer leaves—he has a nipple to attend to—the bleeding won’t stop. Hours later, Stéphane returns to help Guillame move, “looking very happy to see me.” But when he learns about the botched (?) piercing, he is thrown into despair. Knowing they won’t be able to have sex for weeks, Stéphane, a normally insecure and even somewhat submissive man, punches a wall.
“I realized,” Guillame tells us, “that I had just fucked over our new start.”
This week, I wrote an essay about cruising and I’m Going Out Tonight, an autofiction novel by gay French writer Guillame Dustan. The scene above is from another one of his novels, In My Room. (Obviously I haven’t gotten Dustan out of my system yet.)
Readers will already know that piercing is an interest of mine (and subscribers can read and see more about that in a paywalled post, if they can handle it). But what caught my attention about this scene from In My Room was how Dustan uses a failed scrotal piercing to encapsulate Guillame’s relationship with sex, desire, and intimacy. This naked self-sabotage, clear to Guillame only in hindsight, of course, undercuts his stated desire to save his relationship with Stéphane: he has prioritized a risk with a fling over his partnership, one that has been transformative for both of them. To wit, Stéphane has told Guillame that, bottoming for him, he’s “beginning to understand what fucking is all about.” “He gives his ass up gladly,” Guillame observes of Stéphane. “I can see he’s really obsessed with his man cunt…He’s the same way I was when I discovered my asshole with Quentin [his ex-boyfriend] five years ago.”
Fucking, talking, eating, dancing, caretaking, cruising other guys, and cohabitating don’t appear to be enough to outweigh a more or less nonsexual encounter with a man that Guillame doesn’t even bother to name. Why would he choose the cheap countercultural thrill of needle through nutsack over love?
In a 1920 essay called Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Freud expanded on psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein’s writing on the death drive(s) to complicate his own formulations of the human instinct to self-preservation. He arrives at the conclusion that it is not just the search for pleasure and the avoidance of pain that satisfies our biological and psychological need. In fact, Eros, the biological “drive” that produces creativity, harmony, sexual connection, reproduction, and self-preservation, exists in opposition to another “drive,” the one producing destruction, repetition, aggression, compulsion, and self-destruction—the death drive. It’s in situations where the pleasure principle “cannot cope adequately” that the death drive emerges. Freud identifies these situations primarily as children's games and all-ages patterns of compulsive, repetitive, self-injuring behavior of the kind often now associated with traumatization and PTSD.
I hope I’ve gotten that right. (I’m sure I haven’t.) But since I hear the term “death drive” thrown around a lot in the context of SM activities like piercing, I wanted to attempt to get a grip on what that means before digging in here. At this point, we’re used to encountering stigmatizing “explanations” of SM, and other so-called high-risk “sexual” behaviors, within the context of trauma; through this lens (whose origins can be found a century ago in the work of the father of psychoanalysis), SM is, at best, a set of reactionary behaviors in response to certain kinds of damage. Even if we’re able to move away from conceptions of SM as deviance or even just cope, at best it’s seen as a sort of unconscious self-therapizing. The current narrative, pitying and infantilizing and often highly hypocritical, feels like a pat on the head to broken people with no other recourse to healthy, normal sexuality and connection.
Long-time DAVID readers will know that I’ve gone over the pathologization of sadomasochism at length. What can we do about it? Well, I think we can start by rattling the conceptual cage in which SM is often contained by exploring its other uses and purposes. This can be done not just by studying the ways in which SM is done intentionally (and, yes, politically), as happens with leather traditions, but by taking another look at the ways in which it is done “naturally,” instinctively, and, yes, even compulsively.
In In My Room, Guillame introduces latex, pain, and power exchange into sex, with Stéphane and with other men, when it starts to get boring, or when he is angry, or when he has learned that a friend has seroconverted but cannot comfort him with a hug because they are in public together. One might say that, with the last-minute ball piercing, Guillame has introduced risk to a foundering relationship like he has introduced a leather hood to a slow fuck in the past—though this time, it doesn’t work. Or doesn’t it?
In My Room ends with Guillame making plans to leave Paris for a job overseas. He makes his farewells. “Stéphane,” he tells us, “was my last date.” They meet in Guillame’s eponymous room, where they talk. “And then we get so emotional that we held each other in our arms. Electric erection. We kissed. It was powerful.” It is only now, as they’re leaving each other, that Guillame sucks Stéphane’s dick “like I never sucked it before. With love.”
Afterward, they go out to eat. They drink, they laugh. Stéphane drives Guillame back home, where they say goodbye in the final paragraph of the book. “I know I should have left him much earlier,” Guillame admits to us. “When I told myself for the first time that I would never be in love with him. But it felt so good to be loved by him. So good.”
I’ve written before about SM as an adaptive intimacy. Perhaps it’s also an expansive one, an invitation to bring what we call sex—but which is actually something much more interesting and complex—outside of the places that are circumscribed for it. It need not involve whips, chains, or the normal paraphernalia, only a willingness to feel discomfort, physical or otherwise. To do so is unavoidable for some; as an HIV+ gay man at the height of the pandemic, how is Guillame to distinguish between risk and safety in the same way that normal people do? What is his death drive and what is his Eros when his sexuality, HIV status, and lifestyle are considered neither normal nor safe?
I take safety very seriously, as do the people I play with. But I doubt, or at least question, its primacy when we talk about SM, or even sex generally. (This is why “risk-aware” is superior, in my opinion, to “safe and sane.”) The overreliance on safety, or rather the notion of safety, which can become a fantasy of control, not only prevents us from accessing pleasure, or the thrill of danger, or the rewards of risk; it flattens the intimacy that we are supposedly seeking. What if, like Guillame (and Dustan, his self/creator), you could acknowledge resentment, or boredom, or anxiety in the course of a “normal” sexual encounter with another person? Or even elsewhere? Heartbreak can’t be compared to a heart attack, but neither are safe, are they?
“Sex” is so closely, restrictively associated with “pleasure” that there is little room for otherwise in our conception of it, and yet sex, like a conversation, a meal, a dance, takes place between people, often those who have met each other before and thus have a backstory, a context, a history. Hookups with someone about whom you know nothing, or next to it, are powerful and exciting and even intimate for their own reasons. But sex with someone you know, perhaps very well, cannot pretend to be that—and why should we want it to? Guillame, Stéphane, and the men they fuck together and separately respond to their feelings in the sexual moment. There is no script. There is no pure ecstasy, pleasure, or climax (particularly if you’re fucking for a long time, which is often needed for more “extreme” kinds of sexual pleasure, like fisting) without the frictions of anger, anxiety, boredom, fear, and a host of other negative affects.
One of the things I find so compelling about Dustan is his way of bringing me to a familiar conclusion: that the difference between SM and gay sex is sometimes (or perhaps even more often than sometimes) impossible to identify, and what’s more, that the difference between gay sex and gay life is just as nebulous.
Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.
February 17, 2023
David Davis
Timing’s a funny thing. A few weeks ago, just as dating-cum-hookup app Lex announced that it would be refocusing on “friends and community”—to great gay consternation—I received my advance copy of Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest! in the mail. If the former development is an example of the ongoing privatization and gentrification of digital spaces, then the latter is a demand for its opposite, what you might call a fuck commons. As the editors of Sex Forest! write in their introduction, “Public space is what we need, not in the narrow sense of government-funded projects but rather in the sense of open, non-hierarchical containers for a range of different uses and possibilities.” Possibilities which include public sex without the risk of violence, from police and other sources.
I thumbed through my copy of Sex Forest! with interest, scanning a genre-diverse selection of poetry, S/M erotica, and horny hybrid fiction. This balance of what the editors call “hot porn” and “headier theoretical and historical explorations into the relationship between sex and notions of the public” aspires toward upending the same social, economic, and legal forces that have transformed Lex from a would-be descendent of the lesbian personal ads of On Our Backs to the kind of place where, to revisit a personal anecdote, one might be accused of human trafficking while seeking a co-top for their femme bottom girlfriend.
Disappointing though some find Lex’s new chapter to be, it was inevitable. There’s just no way that a free, American, venture-backed sex app purportedly for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, [and] queer” people could continue to exist, not in the same hellscape where sex workers are purged not just from their own websites, but from all social media platforms, particularly those designed for recreational sexual and romantic connection1. So long as public sex is a crime, public women (to use an antiquated term), and all who are identified as such, will remain criminals—whether or not they’re fucking, whether or not their fucking is sanctioned by law. As the primary targets of legislation designed to discipline and punish public women, sex workers and trans women are already too proximate to gender obscenity; the women proximate to them are put at risk, too, albeit at a lower intensity, depending on other identity intersections2.
From the death of the search engine to the rise of FOSTA-SESTA-type assaults on those in the sex trade (as well as those who are trafficked, which this legislation is ostensibly meant to protect), the online privatization I mentioned was of course underway when Lex was still just an Instagram account, but things were admittedly more loose back then. Four or five years ago, Lex was where I met the most chaotic lovers of my fucked up Saturn return (not to mention my friend and one-time collaborator, photographer Elle Pérez). Though it hewed more toward the weekly newspaper model than eyeballing a hot bitch in the street, Lex was, or aspired to be, an online dyke cruising apparatus. Now it’s become/ing something else, as anything does when its goal is to be above-board, legal, and, most importantly of all, profitable.
As the punchline it’s come to be, Lex encapsulates the limitations imposed on those of us who can’t access the freedom of public sex in the same way that cis men who identify themselves (or more crucially, are identified) as queer. I’m like super open to pushback on this, but I suspect that this is why you can have a Grindr and not a Grinda; that is, a lesbian sex app that is explicitly about fucking, rather than about dating, relationships, networking, and, implicitly, monogamy in which any capital exchange happens behind the plausible deniability of a marriage contract. It’s one thing to pony up the overhead for such an apparatus. It’s another to execute the kind of backend enforcement required to manage any risk of solicitation to an extent that satisfies stockholders, VC funds, credit card companies, and the feds that it could be a safe bet.
Because how many workers do you know who can’t be on Tinder in their private lives? How many tgirls do you know who get magically deleted from Hinge? If you’re not one, or both, of these populations, are you and the dykes that make up your community sure that you’re far enough away from them that you could get away with a real-life cruising app? Because I’m not.
But why do we, as dykes, need an app in the first place? Fags, for all their Scruffs and their Sniffies, still have anonymous public hookups without the benefit of wifi. Why can’t—or don’t—dykes do the same?
This is a question posed in an essay found in Sex Forest! Authored by Kathy, it takes a stab at answering why, when it comes to cruising, dykes are “out of luck.” “Public environments where women can easily, within 10 or 20 minutes, meet and fuck other women do not and have never existed,” writes Kathy. I don’t agree with the answers provided to the question Kathy poses, but then, I don’t agree with the question itself. Regardless of how you define cruising, there is ample evidence to the contrary of Kathy’s claim, some of it supplied in this very essay. Daemonumx, a human library of dyke and gay history, came up with a litany of counter-examples off the top of her head (she also sent me this PDF)3. She’s also written about it here and here (and elsewhere, I’m sure). Long story short, dykes do cruise, and have since the criminalization of public sex.
I won’t argue that dykes can or do cruise in precisely the same way that fags do, because we as dykes are not (exclusively) fags. But we can safely put “dykes don’t cruise!” aside while taking the opportunity to explore the resonances this claim activates: anxieties about dyke and lesbian sexual desire; the differences between dyke and fag cruising, as well as the limitations of both and the interplay between the two (some of us are fagdykes!); the crucial role that straight people play in the act and culture of cruising, for both dykes and fags, which Kathy gestures toward, pointing out that dykes don’t have a corollary for fags’ trade, with which I can only sort of tenuously agree. To be provocative for a moment, if we’re to understand the act of cruising as inextricable from straight people, or even as a primarily transactional exchange between queer men and straight men, why isn’t the dyke equivalent turning a trick (i.e., why does the dyke equivalent of trade have to be a straight woman)?
I suppose my beef with this question, as it appears in Sex Forest!, is that I suspect it reaffirms dykes as a subsidiary of fags, obfuscates the challenges and dangers of cruising to fags of all genders, and forecloses on solutions to the problems that many dykes seem to struggle with vis a vis their sex lives in general (ones that Lex, even now, purports to answer): how do I find other dykes? How do I talk to them? How do I fuck them?
What I’m saying is, if we insist on differentiating between dykes and fags when it comes to public sex, we could choose to see it as an aperture rather than a slipknot. Cruising, for fags, is the criminalized reclamation of pleasure and power. Dykes, too, do this through cruising—so where else do we encounter these reclamations?
So. Lots to chew on here. I don’t mean for this newsletter to be understood as a takedown, or even a rejoinder, of either Kathy’s essay or of Sex Forest! All of us are writing about, around, and toward freedoms that we, in many different ways, are denied. The thing to remember about cruising is that it exists because public and transactional sex are illegal, and queer people can access neither the public nor sex with the same degree of safety that straight people can (your mileage may vary, etc., etc.).
If you are cruising, good for you! If you want to but aren’t sure if and how you can, I hope a few of the resources I’ve shared here can help you get started on your ~journey~. Stay safe out there, babes.
Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.
1As well as those conflated with them, particularly trans women and transfeminine people.
2Public womanhood can constitute not just sex workers and trans women but all feminized genders further marginalized by houselessness, race, class, ability, HIV status, citizenship, indigeneity, and more.
3So it turns out idk how things work and this PDF is paywalled. While I figure that out, someone sent me an abstract to an article about non-binary cruising that is, regrettably, paywalled.
February 15, 2023
on the NYT
In New York City today, it’s 63 degrees Fahrenheit. The early February hazmat spill in East Palestine, caused in part by the deregulation of the shipping industry and the Biden administration’s crushing of last year’s railroad workers’ strike, has “basically nuked” the Ohio town. There was another mass shooting yesterday at Michigan State University (survived by a student who was already a survivor of Sandy Hook, by the way). On May 11, the Biden administration intends to end the COVID public health emergency.
These are real problems facing our country, some of them with global, even existential, implications. And yet, to hear the New York Times tell it, the youngest and most vulnerable members of a tiny minority group—trans children—receiving healthcare they need to survive poses some kind of threat that climate catastrophe, crumbling infrastructure, labor exploitation, stochastic gun violence, and a mass-disabling and -impoverishing event do not. The Times has demonstrated its investment in the production of the cis state, as Jules Gill-Peterson calls it, and the country’s broader white supremacist fascism. Along with “conservative” news media, like Fox New, stoking a sex panic around LITERAL CHILDREN is their preferred mode of accomplishing that.
This morning, a group of almost 200 journalists and writers released an open letter addressed to the Times regarding the newspaper’s editorial bias against trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people. (GLAAD also published a similar letter today.) I signed it and you can, too, right here.
Find me on Twitter. Get my second novel, X, right here.
February 6, 2023
DAVID: Members Only
Below the cut are images of big needles going into my skin.
If you’re going to undergo suffering for any extended period of time, choosing a word or phrase to repeat can help you endure it. Here is my personal mantra: What is pain?1 I don’t repeat my mantra aloud. I repeat it in silence, in my head. The mantra is not a distraction, or it’s not meant to be one, anyway. Though mine manifests as a question, I ask it without expecting an answer, because it doesn’t exist, and I wouldn’t want it if it did.
By asking What is pain? while going through pain—sometimes at an intensity that feels unsustainable—I invite myself to deeper focus and to stronger identification with sensation. Counterintuitively, this has the effect of making the pain more manageable without diminishing it, I think because it allows me to experience it rather than merely react to it. Pain has a purpose, a very important one, but in a controlled environment with another person managing my safety for me, I have the opportunity to feel around it in a way I probably wouldn’t if I had encountered the pain by mistake or misfortune2. (The pain/pleasure binary isn’t real! It’s literally so not real!)
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