Davey Davis's Blog, page 16

David Davis

The first year I lived in New York, I wound up in yet another bad relationship with a femdom. This relationship was nasty, brutish, and short, as I should have guessed it would be from all the red flags1, but I didn’t emerge from it empty-handed. Shortly before it all fell apart (who else attended that legendarily messy FIST launch party?), my ex gave me a Monstera deliciosa clipping, and though I had my doubts, I decided to let it live. Almost four years later, the single leaf occupies a hulking ceramic jar in my bedroom, now accompanied by something like ten other split fronds that gather (or discharge?) subtle beads of water, like knives under a broken faucet.

I’ve never been good at keeping plants alive. I tend to do the opposite, actually, rationing their sustenance and relegating them to windowless bathrooms. I’ve corrected this tendency as I’ve grown more conscious of it2, though no one would ever accuse me of having a green thumb. But this winter, for the first time, my Monstera is having problems. One of its leaves, an elder that incidentally gets the least sunlight of all of all his compatriots, has turned a sort of translucent yellow, recently and as if overnight.

Probably overwatered it, said Jesse. It’s true that the soil is still moist this long after watering day. Is it possible that I took care of my plant with too much gusto, that I paid it too much attention?

Subscribe now

I don’t want my Monstera to die. At first, when it still lived in a jar of water, I almost dared it to. If it hadn’t been for a roommate, who assigned her plants names and personalities and sang to them when she watered them, my Monstera would have become a rubbery tabescence on top of the fridge, doomed to turn up a corpse on the front stoop. Now I’m invested, like when I’ve soldiered through the first four episodes of almost any TV show. In the last year or so, I’ve begun talking to my plants, though not singing to them, and certainly not naming them. They get some encouragement, sometimes in a baby voice, especially the Monstera. I’ll give credit where credit is due.

I don’t think my Monstera will die, but I resent my preoccupation with the possibility. Yesterday, instead of writing—there’s the next installment of my latest series, a piece I pitched for Irresistible Damage, and an essay on dyke cruising that’s been weighing on my soul, not to mention my third novel—I worried about the plant. I hope I don’t resent it so much that I kill it. Or fuss over it so much thatI kill it. I’m hell-bent on setting us both up for failure, it seems.

Get exclusive DAVID content

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

1

Including the untrained dog. Oh, you’re dominant, but Rupert pisses inside?

2

It helps that people, like Jade and Cristine, give me plants and then expect me to nourish them!

David Davis 41, part 2

Read Part 1.

I can think of a lot of not-so-flattering reasons why people write. Control issues, as I mentioned in Part 1 of this series. Insecurity. Obsession. (When accused of being “extremely repetitious” by a critic, Nabokov defended himself on the basis of his a priori genius: “Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only its own self to copy.”) Then there’s hypergraphia, a behavioral condition characterized by the intense desire to write (or draw), which is a symptom of temporal lobe epilepsy; Fyodor Dostoevsky, himself epileptic, is among the prolific writers said to have been hypergraphic.

Why am I a writer? It’s interesting to approach art in this way, as if what we do and why we do it are the results of discrete, perhaps even random factors. As if writer were an identity with a root cause. Maybe the urge to write, or even the professional aspiration of writer, are biochemical fates, the irresistible results of our genetic recombinants locking into place when we were but a twinkle in our whatever’s eye.

Haha, jk. The problems posed by this line of reasoning are plentiful enough, but to keep things simple, the destiny of DNA doesn’t account for the external pressures that influence why we write (and perhaps more interestingly, why we don’t)1. As just one example, marginal writers can be overshadowed by the politics of marginality, when they’re published at all, that is. This ghettoization, to use Edmund White’s term from his 1995 essay about gay autofiction, means that gay writers, for example, must choose between work that is “highly coded, not to say obscure” and a “tiresome and overt obsession with homosexuality.” You, a writer, certainly have writerly choices, but naturally they’re constrained by who you are, when and where you live, and the political circumstances of your one wild and precious life. DNA can only get you so far. Tough titty.

Which is to say that when we ask ourselves this question—Why am I a writer?—we run the risk of reinscribing narratives that locate the writer within a rational meritocracy, rather than whatever all this is. The writer is reimagined as an individual with total control over their positionality, output, and reception. And yet I wonder, constantly constantly constantly, if a writer can ever be said to write alone, without an audience, even an imaginary one.

I certainly understand this tendency to individualize, and anyway, it’s fun: if the buck stops here, then I, who find myself interesting, may navel-gaze endlessly. At any rate, I wouldn’t be the first the acknowledge the diminishing returns of this tendency. For one thing, to buy into this idea that we actually have total control over our selves necessarily leads to the idea that it’s not only possible, but desirable, to optimize those selves. I’m so bored by the gamification of self-improvement, the way it bleeds into everything from “health and wellness” to relationships to art. It reminds me of the endless regurgitation of artistic properties, the way franchises like the MCU collapse stories by expanding them with prequel after sequel, spinoff after reboot. Some depths can’t be plumbed. It’s like going in search of a core in a garlic clove, slivering away until all you have left is nothing and a wet razor blade.

Not too long ago, there was a Gawker piece about the so-called resurgence of the Künstlerroman—the novel form that asks, How does this person become an artist? Per Sam Lipsyte2: “Obviously a lot of fiction by young people these days is still in an autobiographical or autofictional vein, inspired by Rooney and Lerner and others over the last decade. These novels often deal with the formation of an artist, and the Germans came up with a really good word for that, so I guess people are excited to use it.”

How did I become a writer? asks a different question, and prompts more revealing answers, than, Why am I a writer?, don’t you think? But I’ll leave all of that to you, along with some links to writing about writers that I’ve recently enjoyed. Until next time.

On Thomas Bernhard

On Octavia Butler

On Dennis Cooper

On Yukio Mishima

On Cecilia Gentili

Get exclusive DAVID content

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

1

Since we’re talking about having not just the permission but the ability to create under capitalism, may I direct you to this fascinating recent piece about the history of the term “burnout.”

2

Incidentally, I’ve never read one of his books before. Just an FYI.

David Davis

While I’m not against public sex on principle (in fact, I insist on it), the risk of getting caught in flagrante delicto has never been a big turn-on for me. What can I say? I love safety. For this reason, when I went to meet a hookup at a co-working space last year, I did so with the vague hope that the danger would finally click. I’ll try anything a hundred times, you know.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my hopes were dashed. Though I made my patriotic contribution to the ambient surveillance matrix with yet another cute video of my ass getting fucked, I couldn’t really feel the frisson of possible capture or humiliation. Despite the risks—the security personnel; the frosting on the glass walls that began a foot above the ground, exposing our stocking feet to the adjacent cells; the unlocked door—I was not afraid.

I walked home afterward under a blue sky, Stay Puft clouds, gentle cranes impressed into condo construction, thinking. Far from being dangerous, that particular co-working space on that particular day, I realized, presented less risk than most of my hookups do1. My diffident date was as harmless as they come, but even if he hadn’t been, he would have had more opportunity to hurt me if we’d met at his apartment, or in a car, or at a park in the dark. Some of the straight chasers I talk to express frustration about having to convince trans people that their worship won’t end in murder2. If they were willing to sacrifice a little more of their own safety, like my closeted date did by meeting me at his place of business, those chasers would probably have an easier time getting laid.

Not too long ago, a TikTok in which a young white gay man recorded himself sitting on the New York City subway went viral3. The text overlay says “omw to meet a guy i met online 8 mins ago” and the audio is the bit in Lana Del Rey’s “Happiness is a Butterfly” where she sings, If he’s a serial killer / then what’s the worst / That can happen to a girl who’s already hurt?” The song lyrics reaffirm what the TikTokker’s casual clothing and almost schoolmarm-ish pose—legs crossed, fingers clasped on the top knee—already tell us: that he is about to do something with at least some level of risk, and that he feels a little silly about just how resigned he is to that risk. Who among us?

I sometimes think of this TikTok when I’m on my way to meet a guy I met online 8 minutes ago, my horniness and curiosity alternating with that sense of silliness and resignation. It’s pleasant to know that some cis men share these feelings of vulnerability with the rest of us, not because I wish for them to be endangered but because being aware of their endangerment gives me a better sense of my own. One hallmark of feminine socialization (whatever that is) is the notion that we are uniquely unsafe by virtue of our bodies (your fault); for better or for worse, the dangers of the masculinely socialized (again—whatever that is, and I recognize the iffiness of ascribing it to gay men as a class) are concealed, de-linked from their bodies, or at the very least dignified with meaning4.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that to be allowed to make the tradeoff in the same way that certain cis men may—that is, to be allowed to accept fear or silliness as the price of satisfying a desire—is, and my apologies for using this word, empowering. Such empowerment is surely a result of being white rather than otherwise, transmasculine rather than otherwise, etc; it’s also one of the privileges that we are hoodwinked into thinking lives inside identities rather than exists in circumstances and vibes. Risk can be seized, not just endured. It’s not perfect, but it’s what’s available. My advice, mercenary, is to enjoy it, this narcotic and beautiful and tasty thing.

As much as that TikTok resonated with me, or whatever, it’s not the first or favorite thing to think of when I’m on my way to meet a guy I met online 8 minutes ago. This bit of Frank O’Hara is: subways are only fun when you’re feeling sexy5.

Get exclusive DAVID content

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

1

My body both invites and mitigates these risks.

2

The gay ones don’t seem to encounter this problem as much, perhaps because they are not cursed with the sexual tunnel vision the straight ones are.

3

Thank you to Jade for sourcing.

4

See Footnote 1. I won’t forget about race, ability, class, all of that. Promise.

5

Thank you to Frankie for sourcing.

David Davis 41, part 1

Not too long ago, I hooked up with a weird old man who made his own electronic music and had been to prison for stabbing his ex-girlfriend’s drug dealer. That’s a lot of information to get out of a single encounter with a stranger, but this guy—let’s call him Derek—loved to talk. Blowhards tend to be unobservant, but Derek paid close attention to whether I was listening and how, modulating his narrative according to my interest (more about his time milking morphine on the burn ward after the gas explosion; less about his childhood in fifties Williamsburg).

Derek was also sensitive to the fact that I’m, let’s say, susceptible to negging in the right context. I suppose it’s not strictly negging that I mean here, but rather that strain of flirting that manifests as verbal jockeying, a power struggle that’s less a true conflict than the slow, interactive reveal of one’s personal predilections. It’s fun if you’re into antagonistic sex, which I am. Derek immediately grasped that he could neg me in order to recapture my flagging attention—something I wasn’t about to put any effort into concealing—and to great effect, I might add.

When I told him that I’m a writer, he began yarning about a closeted writer friend of his (one you might recognize if I shared his name) who had been unrequitedly in love with heterosexual Derek back in the nineties. Though this new story was engaging enough at first, it wasn’t long before he started getting bogged down in the details. Naked on his bed, boredom soon got the better of me. I played with my hair; I chewed a hangnail. Watching my eyes wander his wall-to-wall bookshelves, linger over the switchboard-looking thing where he made his music, leap to his phone every time Grindr clucked, Derek patiently waited for my focus to make its perfunctory return to his face before he did it again.

“I wasn’t surprised that he ending up blowing his head off.” He watched me as he reached to stroke my leg. “Writers are obsessed with love because they don’t get enough.”

If you’re after attention, and who isn’t, you’ll know that the most attentive observers will perceive your faults as well as your charms. As I’ve said before, the appeal of the sadistic type is quite simple: They're genuinely interested in you, which is very rare indeed.

Derek’s assessment of why we write—or rather, why we become writers—rings true for me, at least somewhat. Though the idea of getting onstage terrifies me, I have always felt an affinity with performers, comedians, and actors, artists who lose themselves in exposure, preferring power over privacy and validation over safety. As writers, we have landed on this most literal of ways to control the narrative, telling all, some of us more slantly than others, so that nothing can be revealed against our will.

I will be generous to us and say that insecurity isn’t all there is to it—powered only by neuroses, our craft could not also be art. Soothing as it feels, control is the opposite of communication. When we fail to take it in hand, something more interesting happens. This is a good thing. But more on that next time.

Get exclusive DAVID content

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

DAVID: Members Only

In high school, my best friend and I bonded over the unspoken naughtiness of losing weight on purpose. Deciding how much space we were to take up was not technically allowed, though every woman in our lives, it seemed, was doing just that, their attendant menfolk grinning smugly in their wake.

Like other Millennials, my best friend and I participated in diet culture defiantly, our habits windowdressed in implication and silence rather than the humiliating earnestness on display in the tabloids and our own kitchens. The eerie, cheery concern of Weight Watchers and the hysterical effigies of Jessica Simpson in an unforgivable size 4, weren’t for us: we denied their denial. We were not doing this to appeal to the men who would hate us anyway. Our self-harm was subtle and ironic, and perhaps even functional, like that of the many boys we knew, straight and otherwise, who were even better at it than girls were.

My best friend and I maintained our inside jokes with the superiority of the cat who got the cream (though the canary would have been less fatty). Here’s one of them: want to avoid your period? All you have to do is skip a meal or three during the luteal phase of your cycle. It wasn’t funny but we laughed. And isn’t that all that a joke is—an understanding that transpires in laughter?

Read more

David Davis 40

Unbelievable as it sounds, there are aspects of my personal life that never make it to the internet.

I understand why this may be surprising. For one thing, the general conflation of public and private for feminized people means that my fiction is more closely associated with the real me than it is for other kinds of people. For another, my candidness on Twitter and IG likely lends to the impression that no filter exists between my life and its digital render. Of course, this is an illusion with which all of us who have social media must negotiate. To exist on an increasingly privatized internet is to be a product (one that can never be totally self-managed) to be marketed, whether or not we ourselves are selling something (though I certainly am, and not just subscriptions to this very enriching and charming newsletter).

Open as I may seem, I am calculating about what I share with you here, whether it’s about my sex life, my natal family, or my art. It would be a lie to say that my calculation isn’t informed by my bottom line, but for the most part it comes down to a question of my own, perhaps idiosyncratic, notions of vulnerability. In this world where my nudes are online, my sex change has been documented, and my identity, likeness, shopping habits, and location are available to the highest bidder, my idea of personal may be unorthodox, but rest assured it’s intact. It includes my romantic relationship with my lover, or the parts of it that comprise what’s most precious to me (and likely most boring to you).

Still, the boundary between public and private is not impermeable, and occasionally crossing it can be helpful in illustrating a point.

Lesbian processing is an extreme sport. This occurred to me after a recent conversation with Jade about sex, leather, and our relationship; in essence, about how we talk to each other. The conversation was a successful one, but due to its duration and intensity (and the makeup sex that followed) it was a good example of what we usually mean by lesbian processing, an epithet informed by stereotypes about women in general being overemotional and queer women in particular placing a hysterical, unscientific, and unsexy level of importance on communication; this being set in opposition to normal heterosexual relations, which happen without anyone having to think, without there even needing to be consent, because these relations are natural and unchanged and unchanging since forever.

When you’re a dyke, your fate is to always be seen as either utterly ridiculous or an ugly threat. I’m old enough now to have a sense of humor about lesbian-specific things—from bed death to dyke nods—that I’m supposed to feel ashamed of. As with the other stereotypes, lesbian processing is something that we dykes often poke fun at ourselves, but I think that the humor limns what should be a goal for all intimate relationships: regular and honest communication among equals. When done correctly, processing, lesbian or otherwise, is a tool for deepening connection and intimacy. Having the opportunity to say yes as well as no, to negotiate and to compromise, to share as well as to maintain private. Outside the four walls of a corny joke, lesbian processing is a cog in a communication style, one that fosters the trust that Jade and I need in order to do a lot of fun things together and separately while also being, as a friend said recently, the “most monogamous non-monogamous couple” they know.

The physical and mental exertion. The sweat and the tears. The gender non-conformity. Lesbian processing is an extreme sport. This is not an original thought. It’s probably on a snapback somewhere, or on a bumper sticker in Portland, or scrawled on the bathroom wall at Eli’s in Oakland or Ginger’s in Brooklyn. But platitudes are platitudes, and as it bubbled up, it collided with another thought that I’ve been mulling recently: that the social activities requiring the most communication, willingness, and consent are the very same that straight culture and its institutions take great pains to forbid us1.

It’s tempting to follow this thesis to its converse, especially for someone who, like me, abhors a power vacuum. I could suggest that the social activities requiring the least cooperation—the ones that are executed in a manner that’s unthinkingly rote at best, that are promoted, normalized, and ultimately socially, economically, and legally enforced—are actually the least consensual. I could locate the coercion in the acts themselves, rather than in the dynamics wherein they take place. I could position the mechanism of heterosexual sex as inherently violent, as if it were a static, graspable thing instead of a fluid intangible, much like we like to say about our own genders and sexualities.

But for my benefit as much as yours, I will insist on an alternative: that there is no sex act or actor that is inherently safe or dangerous, and that an outsider looking in cannot know better than the insiders do.

In my first book, the earthquake room, one of my characters echoes an observation that I’ve long held close for myself: “if straight people have something to say about us at all, they’re probably wrong. in fact, the opposite of what they say is probably true.”

This idea has been a sort of anti-internalization spell since I was a young gay, and I still rely on it all these years later. When I’m told that lesbian SM is patriarchal, or that drag queens are groomers, or that fisting is violent—ancient, rust-jointed canards you’ll hear just about everywhere, from liberal LGBT types to right-wing politicians, from radical feminists to Christian fundamentalists—I have trained myself to first consider the source before deciding to believe. I don’t even really need to be told these things. They’re felt and known in the body, the way you’d feel the current of a river if you walked the floor against it.

Because not only are SM, genderplay, and queer-coded sex not inherently violent2, but when done successfully they require total collusion from all involved. Vaginal fisting, for example, is a queer-coded sexual practice that is widely regarded as risky, and even dangerous, when—as with other kinds of penetration with other objects and holes—risk and safety depend on a constellation of factors, one of them being the bottom’s level of sustained arousal3. It's often framed as an edge case, as inaccessible to most “normal” people, even to gay people, when it’s actually an activity that I think many, if not most, can participate in (as tops if not as bottoms) with just a little knowledge, practice, and patience—and not even that, sometimes. As I tweeted a while ago, the first time I fisted someone vaginally, it was almost by mistake, because some people can be fisted easily, even as others struggle to take the average-size penis, or dildo, or even a finger or two.

But as we observe in contexts where sexual censorship meets capitalist commerce in a culture that hates women, gay people, and pleasure, fisting is positioned as inherently obscene, unsafe, violent. Just ask anyone trying to post content on sites like OnlyFans that use vague or subjective language to circumscribe activities like fisting, roleplaying, or gaping, which not only further stigmatizes sex work and consensual sexual activity, but relies on normative definitions of extremity to pick and choose which content creators are censored, and therefore economically deprived.

Just as prostitution is made dangerous by criminalization, or our society ableist because it’s designed to be inaccessible right down to the handlebars and street curbs, the sociocultural conditions in which we find ourselves are intentionally hostile to life, meaning they’re intentionally hostile to connection. The more time, effort, and attention a sex act requires, the more difficult it is. I won’t say that a kiss (or a blowjob) requires less connection than a fistfuck, but it does require less overhead (to use a capitalist term), and that’s before we even factor the identities of the kissers (or whatever) involved.

Lesbian processing is an extreme sport. Being both gay and non-monogamous puts me at heightened risk of being annoying. Like vegans or those who use they/them pronouns, the non-monogamous have a reputation for sanctimony and condescension meant to conceal the flaws in a less-than-peachy romantic relationship. I’m not interested in pretending that Jade and I don’t have to deal with jealousy, or insecurity, or hurt feelings, not because I mind lying but because I think it’s silly to aspire toward perfection that doesn’t exist (especially because its puncture is more humiliating than the failure to reach it in the first place). But I don’t think romantic relationships have to be hard, or any harder than any other kind of relationship, and my relationship with Jade isn’t hard at all. It makes my life better and easier. That’s why I’m in it with her.

When our friend made the cheeky comment about us being the “most monogamous non-monogamous couple,” it was a kind of joke. Like the notion of lesbian processing is a kind of joke. A relationship style, like a communication style, takes place over time. It can be cherrypicked for absurdity or failure or even a punchline, but when it becomes its own kind of normal, farce loses its steam. I guess what I’m trying to underline here is the difference between normal and everything else, and how very rarely we take the time to examine why one is one and not the other.

Get exclusive DAVID content

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

1

Straight here is, as I use it, understood as more capacious than mere heterosexuality. Straight is white supremacy, imperialism, carceralism, and capitalism. It’s anti-queer and trans, anti-woman, -child, and -elder, anti-black and -indigenous, anti-whore, anti-sick, anti-crazy, anti-poor, anti-migrant and -refugee.

2

I recognize that some of us in leather have reclaimed the idea of violence, in the same way that some of us have reclaimed slurs; for the most part, I’m one of those people. This is not a rebuttal of that reclamation. What I’m trying to do here in tandem is re-examine the conflation of violence and violation, to decouple a range of sensations from retrograde notions of consent. Just because something feels good doesn’t mean it’s consensual (see the footnote below); just because something causes pain doesn’t mean it isn’t. As if pain and pleasure are even that easily delineated, anyway!

3

I should note that arousal does not necessarily constitute consent.

David Davis

Between work, this newsletter, my novels, my lover and friends and hobbies—being alone, yoga, running, sex and violence, dancing—I’m a busy girl. Every December, I resolve to spend less time on Twitter and more in bed (alone) with a book, and every December I look back on the past year with not a little regret.

This December, I’ll allow myself some rationalization: for the most part, the books I read this year were challenging, enriching, diverting, and beautiful. A few are still in process (Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran, Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris, and The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy). Some were began but never finished for reasons outside my control (Sam Delany’s About Writing was lost to summer depression, and anyway it had to go back to the library), others because they were not at all pleasurable to read (Jordan Castro’s The Novelist, Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac). I even discovered, to my heartbreak, a Manuel Puig that I not only didn’t adore, but couldn’t stomach: his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth.

DAVID is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I don’t include near-misses and abandoned ships in my final count, but if the point of these end-of-the-year lists is to peek over the shoulder of our parasocialites, they give a fuller sense of how I read, if you’re curious about that: messily, sporadically, furiously, judgmentally (if not always critically). Jade says that when I’m obsessed with a book I spend a week or two talking endlessly about how its author is Just like me!, whether or not they are and whether or not their work resembles mine; I think this sensation is the closest I get to feeling seen, and delight in knowing that this recognition has very little to do with the liberalism’s CVified identity politics. That’s the power of literature, baby! If an artist is doing their job, I fall in love with both of us.

Anyway, here’s what I read this year. Wish me luck for a more readerly 2023!

Cataracts, John Berger

In the Cut, Susanna Moore

Heat and Dust, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, Da’Shaun L. Harrison

Tell Me I’m Worthless, Alison Rumfitt

Pig Earth, John Berger

Candy Darling: Memoirs of an Andy Warhol Superstar, Candy Darling

Palmares, Gayl Jones

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alex Chee

Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism, Amber Jamilla Musser

The Continuous Katherine Mortonhoe, D.G. Compton

Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud

Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

How Far the Light Reaches, Sabrina Imbler

Gargoyles, Thomas Bernhardt

Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, Wil Haygood

My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Mark Leyner

What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell

The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, Sam Wesson

Brother Alive, Zain Khalid

Couplets, Maggie Millner

Limbic, Peter Scapello

Death in Venice, Thomas Mann

Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stewart

At Certain Points We Touch, Lauren John Joseph

Get exclusive DAVID content

See you next year. Find me on Twitter. Get my second novel, X, right here.

David Davis

A beautiful young man strolls through a field of white flowers—perhaps one of the many clearings to be found in San Francisco’s byzantine Golden Gate Park. Our beauty encounters another beauty, though this one is nowhere near as beautiful as our original, a truth we gather less by comparison than by the composition of the shots; the actors’ wardrobes; and the way the camera follows the slow, almost contemplative movements of our anointed one. As the other watches, the beautiful young man undoes his skintight leathers to stroke and climax from among the fallen white flowers, surrounded by the violins of what’s known colloquially as Pachelbel’s Canon.

When Peter Berlin’s That Boy was filmed in the early seventies, Johann Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major” had not yet become the anthem of weddings and college graduations. Sweet yet plodding, its growing popularity since the 1980s has turned the canon into the West’s aural shorthand for major life events that are serious but rote, sentimental yet unfeeling, normal and yet far from natural. One may suspect that the bridal tenderness the music imbues That Boy is an intentional juxtaposition with its hardcore gay sex, arthouse plotlessness, and leatherfuck1 finale2, but I like to think otherwise.

Philosophical, romantic, imaginative, comical (though whether that’s intentional is also unclear3), and ultimately transcendent, That Boy encapsulates the mythos of Berlin, legendary muse of Mapplethorpe and Warhol and pre-internet “photosexual” whose documentation of his own beauty “gave a world starved of blatantly gay visual role models a new conception of the beautiful, empowered, self-loving, sensual, shameless gay man.” As his alter-ego, Helmut, Berlin struts Lou Sullivan’s Polk Street (now gentrified into oblivion), where he is observed by all with the fascinated adoration of his park cruise. In art as in life, Berlin is his own fantasy, too4: “Every guy I meet is in competition with myself. I get into my persona. I look at myself; I have sex with myself.”

As art, and particularly as pornographic art, That Boy collapses fantasy with the stylization of a real man’s life that is and remains, by all reports, utterly dedicated to cruising. While he has called the camera his “dream lover,” Berlin’s artistry does not, cannot, supplant the reality of his body among other bodies. “Real for me,” he told Aperture a few years ago, “is when I walk the streets and you pass me, I look at you, you look at me, we pass each other, and then I look back, and you look back, and you stop. That’s real! That will never happen inside a computer.”

Get exclusive DAVID content

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

1

I don’t want to fail to acknowledge that a few explicit Nazi symbols appear in That Boy, much of it on the leather regalia of the final scene. While Berlin’s provenance—he was born to a well-off German family in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942—is not immaterial here, military, police, uniform, fascist, and, indeed, Nazi symbolism have never been uncharacteristic of leather subcultures in the USA. I’ve written toward these connections before, but I’m far from any kind of authority on them.

2

Contrast it, too, against the UX of whatever porn aggregator where you view it. (I don’t recommend using those, but I’m not going to pretend it isn’t available there!)

3

“There's a comic tinge to his eroticism,” writes Armistead Maupin. “[H]e's too preposterously doll-like to exist. I think of him as the Bettie Page of beefcake.”

4

Although at one point in That Boy, Helmut meets a blind man who, as the only person immune to his glamour, joins his near-solipsistic fantasy of himself. (Cringe!) As Berlin told W in 2019, “I was always very visual. I get my whole information through my eyes.”

Your favorite DAVIDs of 2022

Below you’ll find DAVID’s most-read posts of the past year, plus my favorite series, which didn’t exactly rank with you all but which was, I think, some of my most solid writing.

And by the way, thank you for reading in 2022! It was a pretty big year for me. I said hello to new experiences and goodbye to GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY. I reviewed books, movies, and flavors. I made a case for girlfriends and against intelligence. For my non-DAVID writing, I published my second novel and almost nothing else, other than an essay on a documentary called BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism for the short-lived Astra Magazine (RIP).

It’s fair to say I’ve been quite productive this annum, but I feel as if I haven’t really flexed yet. With any luck, I’ll have something to show for myself soon. Until then, this newsletter will keep coming out more or less weekly. I hope it’s nice for you. It is for me.

Give a gift subscription

1. On the gangbang

If America’s incest fantasy could be peeled apart, like a banana, the fruit inside would be thick, sweet, and less convincingly phallic than its exterior might suggest. My theory is that the substance of this edge fantasy is an intimacy that can be taken for granted. Imagine.

2. An interlude on heteronormativity

[W]hile drunkenly fooling around in a car with some straight guy, I became too distracted by what he looked like to fuck; instead of getting angry or pressuring me, he listened while I talked at length about much I wished I had his body (?!?!), then drove me to a Jack In The Box and bought me food to soak up the booze. I’ve always looked back on that experience with gratitude—he was kind to tolerate my strange behavior, and he didn’t even try to rape me. Only relatively recently did I understand what was actually going on between us, or between me and his body, anyway.

3. A hookup yields reflections on trans life

This is also fascinating to me: the chaser who can’t learn the language he needs to get the pussy he wants. From the couch, I peer into his wife’s office, where a Peloton twists in the shadows like a dozing xenomorph. I suppose a chaser like Max doesn’t have to learn anything he doesn’t want to.

4. “Gender is not my boundary”

There was a popular meme, for a minute there, that non-binary people were sharing that said something to the effect of If you’re attracted to me, you’re gay. Which, if that’s your experience of yourself, sure, fine. But I’m much more interested in the challenges of maintaining what are, for most of us, deeply held understandings of our own genders and sexualities when they are fundamentally incompatible with those with whom we vibe and fuck. How can straight people and gay people have sex? It happens all the time! How can dykes fuck fags? Literally every day. How can one be a monogamous sex worker? Easily! How can your identity not invalidate mine when our bodies push against each other? I don’t know, but it can!

5. On going under

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. 

6. Let a thousand fisting daisychains bloom

To say that the deviant subjects produced by white supremacist patriarchy are welcome at Pride so long as they don’t use it to indulge in deviance is to contradict oneself. They’re already deviant because they exist.

7. An interlude about straight people

As a result of this penchant for taking out the trash, I’m one of those lucky gay people that has had very few heteros in their day-to-day life for many years. It’s not my intention to be categorical, but since I won’t tolerate disrespect from someone who’s not paying my rent…well, you know how straight people are.

8. Can I smell this public rose? Can I smile in the street?

I looked out the window, where below me a cumulus shelf of orange sherbet witnessed our howl to New York City. No one could see me crying, but what if they did? I think it would be okay.

9. An interlude on craft, work, and fantasy

Though I’m fundamentally repulsed by his prioritizing of style and structure over “the great idea” (which he called “hogwash”), my dear Nabokov’s dedication to component can be read as another kind of subversion. “Caress the details, the divine details!” he urged, which dictum we can reappropriate for our anti-work perspective: what is work if not effort with a capitalist agenda, rendering pleasure incidental?

10. On Dick Cavett and the art of the interview

We all have our special interests. Mine happens to be a problematic nonagenarian talkshow host that my girlfriend refers to as my “interview man.”

I don’t remember why I started watching episodes of The Dick Cavett Show on YouTube, but suddenly it was a part of my solitary nighttime ritual, the hour or two before sleep when I laid down on my mom’s yoga mat, chain-smoked joints, and anticipated another 16-hour-day of muting C’s screams over Zoom meetings while trapped indoors by viral plague and fire season. Delighted by the seemingly endless roster of famous subjects—including Salvador Dalí, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali, Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, Lucille Ball, Truman Capote, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Richard Pryor, and my beloved Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni—I found myself entranced by the pedantic patter of this boyish Midwesterner, who over the course of almost 40 years of hosting his self-titled talk show has aged from Pinnochio-esque whippersnapper to batty examiner emeritus.

Get exclusive DAVID content

See you next year. Find me on Twitter. Get my second novel, X, right here.

DAVID: Members only

Though it offers a steam room, a sauna, and bodywork services, Oakland institution 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 and relatively inexpensive, with minimal cleanup—there’s a shower in the corner and drains in the concrete floor—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. 

Read more