Davey Davis's Blog, page 17

David Davis

MICHELLE HANDELMAN, 1995. PHOTOGRAPH BY J.C. COLLINS.

With the recent announcement that the newly-launched Astra Magazine is not long for this world, I thought I’d re-share “Pain is the Point,” which I wrote for them about Michelle Handelman’s film, BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism (1995), over the summer. Featuring my friend Daemonumx, femme4femme torture, the feminist sex wars, and fist-fucking, “Pain is the Point” is a sentimental piece about an important film, one to which I’ll surely return in the years to come. Even if you don’t read my essay, see this movie. It’s worth it.

Just so this post isn’t entirely self-serving, I’ll note that this essay was edited by the illustrious Spencer Quong, a sharp and thoughtful reader that I recommend to any writer.

All right, then. As you were.

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David Davis

Max, surname “Grindr,” is in my phone, but our short message history doesn’t tell me much about him. He claims that we’ve already met—Before I went to Barcelona, remember? I don't. My recall can’t be trusted, and I’m pretty slutty, but because I like to record things I have a spreadsheet of people I’ve slept with recently, and Max isn’t on it.

Instead of blocking him, however, I admit that the possibility that he’s lying is kind of hot.

I'm honest, Max promises. It's probably my sole virtue.

He sends me a photo of his cock and it’s big and pretty, so I decide to see what happens.

My doubts are confirmed when I arrive at Max’s Upper West Side apartment building. Even my THC-addled brain would remember a place like this. It’s new, built in that boxy, trendy style that you can see for yourself if you Google “gentrifier architecture.” A man in a suit hustles to open the door for me, then makes a phone call. A second suited man is seated at an island at the end of a glass corridor, beyond which is a landlocked garden with a redwood deck. Though he watched the first doorman make his call, the second screens me, too. At the top of the elevator and down a hallway, a short middle-aged man that I don’t recognize answers my ring. He is wearing a plaid button-down over khakis. He smiles.

Max is not attractive, but I didn’t expect him to be. He told me he was “ethically non-monogamous,” so the only reason he wouldn’t send me a photo of his face is that he knows it can’t do the heavy lifting his dick can. But it’s not so much his appearance that I don’t like—that ranks fairly low for me, when it comes to these things. It’s his demeanor, his vibe. Ushering me into a foyer that’s half the size of my own apartment, Max is politely apologetic, and not interested, seemingly, in convincing me to stay. As I look around, I realize why.

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I start removing my coat, spinning on my heel to take it all in. There’s unblemished marble and unsmudged steel. The appliances, Scandinavian and Japanese, are brand-new. Whoever cleans the place obviously doesn’t live here. I see, from the corner of my eye, that Max is watching me. By the way he holds himself—tensely, as if waiting for the Russian judge’s decision—I can tell there’s room to be bratty.

I’ve never seen you before, I announce, tossing my things on an upholstered chair the color of ivory and cream and the shiny side of tungsten.

I guess not, Max says, still smiling. His glasses have thick, black frames. I thought you were someone else.

I laugh at him. Another t boy?

I was going to offer you a drink, Max feints, but why don’t I give you the tour first?

Even New Yorkers use this expression, even those who don’t have more than a room to call their own. This is not the case for Max, whose apartment, glass-walled like the lobby below, has two offices, three bedrooms, and a stunning view of the River. Any single piece of furniture costs more than my rent, or at least my student loan payment. The walls are full, though not cluttered, with vast paintings and prints. As we move through the apartment, Max recounts the origin and value of every piece, with a smattering of boorish detail. Have you heard of so-and-so? He painted this before he killed himself. The art, most of it reminiscent of Basquiat and Banksy, is, without exception, hideous. One painting features Donald Trump with a ball gag in his mouth and graffiti-esque squiggles around his body.

When we return to the open kitchen, Max announces that he’ll make me a Negroni (hold the Prosecco), taking care to explain to me what exactly that is. I know what I look like to him, in my crop top and piercings. I think of the little white trans boy he mistook me for, and wonder how old he is.

We take our drinks to a circle of Eames chairs, where Max tells me about his homes in Maine and the aforementioned Barcelona; I half-expect him to ask me if I’ve ever heard of it. When he stands and turns to dim the lights, he exposes his cheap, ill-fitting boxer shorts. He won’t tell me what he does for a living—or used to do, since he retired years ago—but says he divides his time between consulting for a nonprofit and writing books. He is coy about what consulting means, as he is about the books, although, he says slyly, they both did quite well.

And what do you do? he finally asks, seizing his Negroni from its makeshift coaster, a copy of Artforum.

I also write books, I tell him. He Googles my new novel. A New York Times Editors’ Choice! He almost hollers it. Oh, fuck you, David!

Max is impressed and sheepish; his evening has taken an unexpected turn. I take a big swig of Negroni. It tastes great.

We talk some more, which is to say, I listen some more. He tells me about his wife, his adult children (who he believes are older than I am), the sex positive community he was once a member of in San Francisco (but you're too young to know what that is). Max is under the impression that his sexual lifestyle—polyamory, group sex, gay sex, casual sex—is a recent development made possible by the creation of a “market” by hookup apps. When he tells me that older men, like him, couldn’t find beautiful young boys, like me, before Grindr, I laugh in his face. He laughs with me, looking more confused than pained.

Still, he senses that I’m having a good time, and I can’t say I’m not entertained. The Negroni starts to hit and the apartment is warm. All is going well. Max starts putting the moves on me in the most juiceless way imaginable.

You're so fabulous, he says. Now we’re on a couch together, our empty glasses abandoned in a different room. I find you so incredibly appealing.

I find him fascinating, if repulsive. I don’t want to have sex with him, but I do want to see if I can get things out of him, this wealthy man who seems inclined to generosity. It’s a fun game. He asks me my age, and is shocked to learn that I am, in fact, older than his adult children. The transsexual he had me confused with was 19. In comparing us, he struggles to describe the trajectory of our transitions, though of course I did not ask him to. 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.

In the interest of keeping my options open, I decide that I won’t have sex with him, but that I will let him cum. I take my clothes off, and Max admires me while I stroke the shaft of his big, pretty cock. I know what you like, Max says, affecting an unnaturally deep voice. He wraps his fingers around my throat. He doesn’t have a strong grip, so his bad form isn’t dangerous. I repress more laughter. (I wish that this sort of thing wasn’t fun, but it is.)

When he cums, and he cums quickly, Max emits a loud, abrupt scream. Remember that (maybe apocryphal) viral video about a group of scientists who recreated the voice of a mummified neanderthal and it’s hilarious? That’s what he sounds like. As his blood pressure returns to normal, he gazes up at me, squinting a little without his glasses. I await more compliments, or else more demands. Instead, he asks me why the Times chose my book. He’s still catching his breath.

I’m caught off guard. But I tell him why they chose it, or why I think they did, anyway. I’m still wondering if I’m even close to right when then Max says something else: that trans kids shouldn't get to transition until they're at least 18.

Only the day before, the most recent transphobic hit piece from the Times, this one about the “dangers” of puberty blockers, had rocked Twitter, the platform itself newly acquired by a billionaire transmisogynist who’s since reinstated a bunch of banned accounts, including Trump’s. Max’s projection is obvious to me—put the tranny faggot in its place, while insisting on the clockiness that is clearly more to his erotic tastes—but I can’t escape the coincidence. How can I, with the Times’ audience right here with me, a liberal with cum on his belly and Campari on his breath, a rich white straight man—I don’t care who he fucks—with everything to lose and nothing to fear?

No. I don’t care to argue with him, but it must be said. You’re wrong.

Realizing his mistake, Max attempts to explain himself. He tells me about a trans girl whose family he knows. Her parents did not permit her to medically transition until she was 18, and she turned out just fine, he insists. He misgenders her until I correct him. It’s difficult, I think, to balance dominance with satisfaction.

Kids die because of that mindset, I say. There’s nothing else.

Only kids from bad families! Max retorts.

The game is over. I used to mock women who had sex with men for free—who’s the loser now? I go back to the living room for my clothes. Max is still talking about the girl who is now beautiful and happy and surged up, intercutting her story with fantasies about fucking me with his cis boyfriend, who’s 24 and, according to him, has a long, skinny dick. I wonder how much he pays the boyfriend. A lot, I hope.

Max insists on getting me a car home. He shows me his phone, proving that he’s ordered a copy of my book. Now that the balance has been restored, he is generous again.

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David Davis

I identify more strongly as a sadomasochist than as a lesbian. I hang out in the gay community because that’s where the sexual fringe starts to unravel. Most of my partners are women, but gender is not my boundary…If I had a choice between being shipwrecked on a desert island with a vanilla lesbian and a hot male masochist, I’d pick the boy. This is the kind of sex I like—sex that tests physical limits within a context of polarized roles.

If it seems like I quote Patrick Califia’s “A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality” in every other newsletter, well, can you blame me? Like Alex Chee on E. M. Forster, Kim TallBear on sex and family, Astra and Sunaura Taylor on animal liberation, or Patricia Lockwood on Vladimir Nabokov, Califia on desire is, for me, a long revelation. Each time I return to this essay, it revitalizes me, as the backs of shampoo bottles like to say. If I step away for a few years, I may even discover, upon my return, that a challenging concept has suddenly slid into focus.

When I read this passage for the first time, I was awestruck, but I also believed I understood it completely. Green as I was, I figured I followed its elucidation of the work of freedom, the intellectual effort required to define and then pursue one’s desires (Gender is not my boundary!) as, if not distinct from social mores and pressures, then at least plastic enough to be played with. (I also perceived within it the kernel of transsexual privilege, which is that we get to have sex with everyone we want to because we are more beautiful and special than normal people, but that’s besides today’s point.) Over the years, my body has grown into this knowledge: I grasp the work of this kind of freedom. I am doing it all the time.

But in thinking that I understood this passage completely, I was mistaken, as I learned when I returned to it recently and sensed something new there. For a long time now, I’ve trusted in desire as a route to freedom; or trusted that freedom can be found in the honest embrace of desire. This is because I owe my desire everything. When I was young, it brought me to gay people, who eventually brought me to my current political commitments, which are broader than gayness, and include the commitments of those coalitions of which I’m not a member. Desire need not always be fulfilled—in fact, I think it oughtn’t be—but it should always be acknowledged, if not explored.

Gender is not my boundary. In my first reading of this line, I understood it as an imperative of sorts: If there is a boundary, it must be crossed—and thus, annihilated. Very genderqueer, as the enbies of my generation called ourselves. With this perspective, connection happens in the wake of destruction: like vampires, in making more of those like ourselves, we eliminate those who are not. But what if, instead of destroying boundaries, you brought them along with you to that island?

At an event in London a few weeks ago, I had a wonderful conversation about my book, leathersex, and dyke drama with Christie Costello. She asked me to define leather, and I did my best before putting the question back to her. I won’t paraphrase her answer, but were I to centrifuge it, the juice would gather round the word excess. Excess of gender, excess of sex, excess of feeling and of affect.

I think of Christie’s excess when I think of my new reading of A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality. Califia’s hot male masochist is my straight person, or my gay man, and these are not exceptions to my being a dyke, but rather included by it, subsumed by it. I connect more with highly-gendered people than people with whom I, ostensibly, share genders. Which in the context of this reading means, to me, that I do not bring people unlike me to the island, but rather that have found new ways to experience our likeness. Our connection by way of extremity is our similarity.

Who would be on my island? Total tops and absolute bottoms of a variety of genders and sexualities. I don’t switch in scene, but between them, occupying alternately strict realities that remain, like gelatin molds, soft yet fast. For this reason, I can identify with straight people, even those who don’t know what topping and bottoming is, over gay people who don’t fuck that way, or who are switchy or vers, or otherwise less rigid in what it is they do. This diversity of connection needn’t be a hierarchy of values; there is no right way, just the way that I fuck. That is desire. This is the kind of sex I like—sex that tests physical limits within a context of polarized roles. (NB: “queer” and “bi” and concepts like those work just fine for lots of people, by the way!)

My connections with highly-gendered people, and with people whose sexual sensibilities are, like mine, structured, controlled, formalized, rigid, inflexible, and courtly, overlap, extending even to straight people (and always has, I suppose). Benighted straight people! Straight women who are unwilling to give up the hidden power of heterosexuality and straight men whose sense of straightness is unshakeable, or is different from the conventional understanding of straightness (trade as straight, a queered heterosexuality that is, nevertheless, straight)—I love that shit. I also hate it. But I do love it. At any rate, it’s complicated.

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!

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Photo of me :) by Tamar Shlaim

The working-class Glaswegian families of Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain abandon each other with miraculous ease: in the slums and SROs of Thatcherite Scotland, sisters betray brothers, fathers belt daughters, husbands deceive wives. Everyone is drunk or high or dissociated, and all are prone to random violence, beatings and sexual violence sometimes doled out with a mourning as disconcerting as glee. They drink and despair and self-destruct (sometimes metaphorically, sometimes not). 

Dramatic as Shuggie is, for the first hundred or so pages, I thought it had been overhyped. My friend, Liz, who has great taste, raved about the 2020 Booker winner. It was well-paced -and constructed, I reckoned, and certainly entertaining—in the sense that it held my attention—but stylistically, I found it somewhat bland. Good? Yes. Excellent? I wasn’t convinced.

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David Davis

When it comes to the humane treatment and conservation of other species (once-discrete concepts that seem to degrade every time we get another one of those U.N. reports), the name of the game is similarity: if we can convince the skeptical that non-human animals are just like us, our case for their mercy grows that much stronger.

By this standard, Sabrina Imbler’s1 How Far The Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, is a great success. Over the course of this book of essays, they transpose the human body against those of various marine creatures—their grandmother and the Chinese sturgeon, sexual predators and carnivorous sand worms—to reveal the linkage between our wars and their migration, our family lives and their ecosystems, our industry and their disappearance. We (The West?) see the world as an entropic hinterland to be conquered and controlled. With their meticulous prose, whose discipline can’t conceal the enthusiasm of a true lover, Imbler disproves and rebukes the paradigm, leaving, if not a replacement, then room for something else.

This space is where transcendence happens. In “We Swarm,” their essay about Jacob Riis Beach and salp, the blobby marine invertebrate better known as the sea grape, they write about how it feels to experience our own permeability:

The poet Ross Gay asks if joining together all our sorrows—all our dead relatives and broken relationships, all the moments that make life seem impossible—if joining all these big and little griefs together, if that constitutes joy. As I watched the other beachgoers floating amongst the [salp], all of us strangers until this strange, shared moment, I imagined my body chained to their bodies. My sorrows to their sorrows. My survival to their survival.

Light has many moments of beauty, and many more of passion—Imbler’s fascination with the deep’s inner workings is endearing and contagious—but what’s really interesting about it is that Imbler is so good at this showcasing of similarity that they manage to cancel it out. Deposited into the same wading pool as feral goldfish, dancing yeti crabs, and necrotic blue whales, we are given the opportunity to espy resemblance we would not have otherwise noticed. But we are also given the opportunity to see difference up close, to appreciate its magnitude in a way our imaginations could never have conjured. Connection happens, but awe remains.

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Find me on Twitter. Get my second novel, X, right here. Also, I’ve had some interviews over the past few weeks. I’ll be in London next week, so find me at Foyles and elsewhere if you want to get a book and say hi.

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In case disclosure is warranted, Sabrina—friend of the newsletter—is a friend and a person that I like! And I think they’re a fabulous writer!

David Davis

It’s distasteful to admit that breaking the taboo did something for me back then, when I was still ignorant of the problems that being gay can cause. But when I first started dating L, I quickly discovered that more thrilling than holding her hand in public, appalling the religious, or feeling superior to heterosexuals was being able to say the words my girlfriend.

The pleasure this elicited came from someplace old, older than the adolescent urge to shock or infuriate. Saying my girlfriend produced the satisfaction of a child declaring their age, right down to the month, for the benefit of an inquiring adult (“Seven and three-quarters!”). I was not one of those little girls who wanted to get married; the phantom I was supposed to have been would likely have spoken of her future husband the way I say my girlfriend today, which remains: bashful, arch, incredulous, smug.

Venturing into a new kind of homosexuality is fun, especially when you can do it with your friends. Last night, I went with two other t boys to one of those grimy gay bars where you can drink cheaply, cruise in the dark, and sometimes get robbed. We stood around in a basement more sewer than grotto gossiping with each other and chatting with wasted guys, barely making it home in time for dawn.

In my experience of transness, public life is a paranoid arithmetic: how clocky am I alone? How clocky am I with Jade (less clocky as trans, it turns out, but whether I’ll read as a man or a butch woman is 50/50)? How clocky am I with my trans friends, all of us comprising a spectrum of passability that bloats like yeast, then implodes like a star, recombinant as DNA and inverted as we are, with every lightshift, jacket removal, gesture? Who knows.

At some point in the night, a tall white man approached us, too drunk to stand up straight. I’ve been married for forty years, he announced, and I just realized I’m bisexual.

Female-socialized as the three of us supposedly are, we smiled and cooed. That’s nice, I simpered. Congratulations, S lisped.

But the man was despairing, looking back over the lost years, hand to his forehead, high above mine. I’m bisexual, he soldiered on, and I need support!

The three of us shifted our eyes. You should drink some water, babe, I said. J, always effortlessly masculine, tapped the man’s shoulder with an open hand.

The man stumbled off, having been gently made aware that we weren’t offering what he was looking for. My hilarity—how bisexual can you be if you zeroed in on us, sis?—was a soft landing for my bitterness. My conscience said: Everyone deserves love and support, and the closet is a brutal shame. But my life was its rejoinder.

It’s raining today. Out late, up late. Instead of doing what needs to be done, I did nothing, until I went out for the ingredients for tonight’s dinner with Jade and a few friends. On Manhattan and Greenpoint, I remembered that I needed to supplement the pair of beautiful ceramic dishes a dear friend made for me, unless I wanted to serve my guests from pots and colanders. I got three bowls—two matching white, one angular and lined in blue—at the 99¢ Discount.

Groceries and bowls in hand, I sat outside a cafe near my apartment with a book (Zain Khalid’s remarkable Brother Alive) to wait for Jade. She arrived flecked in rain, like perfect fruit.

I got bowls! I pronounced.

Jade laughed. In her tote were a pair of beautiful ceramic dishes, because she knew I needed them. Then she was off to her tattoo appointment, fruit stung for beauty’s sake.

I’ve noticed the small and intentional reclamation of lover, that I’ve been predicting for a few years, has started taking place. I love it—love the word lover, and how gay people use it. I use it occasionally myself, and suppose that if it really does have a moment, even just among a wedge of New York-adjacent dykes, that I’ll use it even more. But while it feels good to say—a hearkening back to beloved gay people I’ll never know—it’s not my girlfriend. It can’t be.

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DAVID: Members only

Now that GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY has gone up to the big advice column in the sky (though BG and I may have a few tricks up our sleeves yet…), I’ve started thinking about how I’m going to do this subscriber-only content thing on my own.

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GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY: Farewell

GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY is coming to a close. No regrets here—we’ve had a great run.

Two years into the mutual aid fundraiser that my anonymous gay therapist friend and I made at the beginning of the pandemic, our subscribers have sent over $30k to the orgs, projects, and people listed below. Bad Gay and I hope you’ll continue supporting them to the extent that you can. As for our gratitude, there are no words, other than that I feel very lucky to know BG’s true identity (and home address). Best of luck to you all, but they still have to give me advice when I’ve done something stupid.

Before I share BG’s parting message, a little housekeeping.

All subscriber funds through the end of the month will be sent to Food Not Bombs. After this post goes live, they’re getting the roughly $2,680 that’s currently in the bank. Anything that trickles in between now and October 31st will be sent there as well.

As of November 1, EYE will be keeping subscriber funds to pay my student loans (Dark Brandon or not, I’m still pretty deep in the red). You are welcome to unsubscribe! In fact, I encourage it! Send that $5 to someone who really needs it, or buy yourself a nice PSL with all the fixings. DAVID will remain free, though I’ll never turn a jaundiced eye on your financial support. I may even occasionally reward subscribers with exclusive content. In fact, I almost certainly will.

GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY will continue to be paywalled, though I’ll probably unlock posts here and there. You can always subscribe to get full access to the archive, which will be available in perpetuity, or at least as long as DAVID exists.

And now, your farewell message from my dear BG. It’s been an honor to have been assumed to be you for all this time! (BG is not me. I am not BG. Not all gay people are the same. I don’t give advice, usually.)

Dearest readers and advice-seekers, 

In the depths of a strange time for the world, my dear friend David and I concocted GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY to connect to each other and to all of you, to have a few laughs, and to put money directly into the hands of organizations and causes that mean a lot to us. We are extremely proud of the $30,578 we were able to raise over the past two years. 

We used David's platform to develop a very particular bit of fun—advice tinged with truth-telling, warm disdain for queer antics, humor, and genuine calls for all of us to see ourselves a bit better so we can do a bit better. Bad Gay, despite my credentials, was only my clinical voice in part. There is a therapeutic lens underneath the glibness in the columns, but Bad Gay has David's voice in it, too. We spend a lot of time dissecting the communities we love, the people we love (both parasocially and actual-socially), and the patterns of gleefully ill-behaved queerness that we, I think, both believe is our inalienable right: to exist and be messy and learn. 

Thank you to the advice-seekers, the readers, and the subscribers who helped us get funds to the people that need them, and most especially to David. I would be remiss, as I wrap up, not to remind all of you to dig in and ask yourselves, whenever possible, "What is my commitment to suffering?"

Have fun, keep fucking up, and we'll see you around. 

Bad Gay 

GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY MUTUAL AID RECIPIENTS

 Whose Corner Is It Anyway

G.L.I.T.S.

The Okra Project

SWOP Behind Bars

No North Brooklyn Pipeline

St. James Infirmary

For the Gworls

Free Ashley Diamond (As of this summer, she is now free!)

SWOP Minneapolis

FentCheck

Casa Ruby

Prevention Point Philadelphia

Venus Cuffs’ ongoing NY-based fundraiser

REBUILD

No New Jails NYC

National Bailout

Morris Home

Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop

Brigid Alliance

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David Davis

Stills are from “The Rape of Christ,” one of the scenes deleted from Ken Russell’s “The Devils” (1971) for obscenity

In “A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality,” Patrick Califia makes passing mention of bottoms outnumbering tops in the San Francisco leatherdyke scene of the late 1970s. Califia wasn’t the first to notice the queer “top shortage” we’ve heard so much about. But I once read, somewhere, that at the dawn of leather—or maybe even before “leather,” what we call the gay sadomasochist subcultures born of American postwar veteran and biker clubs—this phenomenon was reversed. A half-century before Califia was on the scene, according to my source (Maybe it was Mark Thompson? Maybe you can track it down?), it was the bottoms who were in short supply, forcing tops to compete for their flesh and attention.

Though in the past I’ve been forced to do extra legwork in order to weed out the fakes and the freaks, I’m a good masochist who’s lived in big cities for almost 15 years, which means I have both the ability and the privilege to avoid said top shortage. But of course I’ve noticed, or thought I’ve noticed, an imbalance in the roles that anchor our erotic lives. For as long as I’ve been in leather, my sadist and top friends have been in high demand, the inverse of pass-around Pattys, servicing a bevy of needy pincushions and thirsty holes. This imbalance appears—or is at least bitched about—in the broader queer culture, too, brought to more mainstream attention in gay thinkpieces over the past five years, though these seemed to have peaked not long before the pandemic began.

Has a fad discourse receded back into the ether where it belongs, or has something real shifted? Recently, my friends and I have been going through a gangbang phase, and in the process I’ve realized that there are more tops and (true) switches than strict bottoms in my life. For instance, it’s been no trouble staffing our gangbangs, where tops will outnumber the bottom by at least 5 to 1. On the other hand, finding bottoms to take all our cocks and boots is, if not difficult, a disproportionately taller order than finding said cocks and boots. By the logic of the so-called top shortage, it should be the other way around.

What gives? I have my theories. For all the blood and guts-rearrangement, bottoming isn’t necessarily harder or riskier than topping, but when you reach a certain level of play, where experience takes precedence over a willingness to try new things, a seasoned bottom is as much of a luxury as an expert top (an open-minded novice can only bring you so far—getting good at being used takes a lot of practice!). Perhaps inflation has gotten us here, too, rendering the bottom’s skill set more dear than ever and skewing its value in relation to the top’s, like the dollar superseding the pound.

Then there’s the makeup of our gangbangs, which this summer have happened among friends and friends-of-friends. We don’t have a greater responsibility to our bottom’s welfare because we know their name, but there is a difference, I think. Among strangers, respect is understood; among friends, love. We may sleep with our bottom after the gangbang is done. We will certainly be there for them the morning after, and the morning after that. Which is to say that in a gangbang of friends and lovers, rather than of strangers, where experience and intensity and intimacy converge, the needs of the bottom are greater than ever. If the bottom requires a satisfaction that a single top can’t provide, they will also require commensurate protection from themselves, from the ravages of their own desires.

“It takes a village,” I said as I lifted our bottom up onto the bed, their arms bound behind their back with pink rope. We laughed. Another friend helped me support our bottom’s weight, while a third held their legs apart so a femme in black vinyl could push herself inside.

Suppose there was, for a time, a top shortage. Suppose that it’s now gone, for some reason. Because bottoms have become more brave and voracious, perhaps. Or because tops crave a challenge for their caretaking skills, more developed since the country has undergone a mass-disabling event. Or because all of us have greater rage to excise, and a deeper need for connection.

Even if this reversal, from a plurality of bottoms to a dearth of them, is real, all of this is anecdotal and personal and highly speculative; if the top shortage is indeed now a bottom shortage, it may well be a phenomenon limited to my individual sexual ecosystem, which is admittedly bigger than most. But so much has changed over the past few years. Is it so unreasonable to think that this change brought about a significant, even seismic, shift in our erotic lives? Where once the role of the victim was more popular, now the role of the predator is. Perhaps it has become more difficult to need, or more appealing to control. Perhaps both, or neither, or something else.

In a gangbang, the bottom receives more attention, stimulation, focus, and (after)care than their tops do. This isn’t to say that their top(s) do not also receive these things, but the one who gets fucked, who struggles, bleeds, weeps, and withstands, will need first aid, comfort, tenderness, and relief that the top will not, in ways that the top will not. What has changed, over the past few years, to have altered the resonance of these experiences?

For the summer’s first gangbang, I shared my girlfriend with my friends, negotiating, managing, and running her turnout for an intimate group leatherdykes. It felt like being an auteur directing my favorite actress—a star is born! I felt very close to Jade, and very close to my friends, all of us together, a family, focused on our bottom—our main attraction, our doll, our charge. Afterward, we ordered french fries and ate them in a big hotel bed, lingerie traded in for oversize t-shirts, talking about this and that until we fell asleep.

I have not always liked sex, but what I’ve always appreciated about doing it in a group is the redistribution of responsibility. Less pressure, without diminishing returns. In some circumstances it can feel communist, utopic. With a gangbang in particular, everyone other than the bottom can tap in and out as they like. Sometimes you are active (co-starring as fist-fucker, or playing a supporting role with tongue or toy), and sometimes you sit, watching actively as a voyeur, or passively as you rest, maybe with an arm slung around someone’s shoulder (this is a time when I feel so comradely, so fraternal). You step in and out as you’re needed, restoring yourself with a snack, a drink, some drugs, a piss.

Two dear friends have recently had their first child, and I haven’t spend as much time around an infant since my youngest sister was born when I was 18. Even with two adults (two-and-a-half with me, someone who is not as helpful and can’t breastfeed, but can hold, bottle feed, burp, and entertain), the work of a baby is very demanding; even with all of my years of caretaking—my whole life, with babies of many ages, and people of many needs—I marvel at the effort required to be someone else’s universe.

I have never wanted children of my own, but I adore them, especially infants. After I met my friends’ baby, I told my therapist about how good it felt to care for someone whose requirements, while extreme, can be completely and entirely met. I love that their need is not in vain with me. Unable yet to question whether they will get what they want, I can ensure, as long as I am with them, that they won’t have to.

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.

The urge to break the incest taboo suggests a powerful craving, one highly gendered but ultimately plastic, for sexual and filial certainty that can never be rent asunder, no matter the risks—such as being caught, whether by another family member, or your friends at school, or the authorities. To fantasize about incest suggests the fulfillment not just of desires, but of needs. I want this so badly that I need it. And it’s right here, provided for me by someone wise enough to know, and strong enough to give. Maybe it’s punishment. Maybe it’s nurturing. Maybe it’s an orgasm.

As a lover, I strive to take taboo desires on their own terms, doing my best not to assume that they are facades for something more real. But as a writer, I’m curious about the affects smuggled inside them, hidden below the surface like a cooking pot’s nascent simmer. I suspect the incest taboo contains an aggression that’s at turns righteous and indignant. In scene, it feels to me like a furious demand for authenticity. By that, I mean: the great harm of child abuse (which is really what we’re talking about when we talk about the incest fantasy) is the betrayal. The second great harm is the denial of the first, the universal gaslighting by family, church, TV, school, doctor, policeman, and culture. To embrace the incest fantasy affirms that you are not crazy (or maybe you are, and who gives a shit?), that harm really was perpetrated by those entrusted with your care and growth, and that while your response to it was not of an uncomplicated and uniform rejection, that that’s okay, too.

You don’t have to be a survivor of literal CSA to see the appeal in that, I don’t think.

When I look around me at the reading, the rave, the sex party, I see gay people of all backgrounds, the vast majority of whom have survived some kind of schism from their natal family. Even those who retain those connections completely do so under duress. But this is not unique to gay people, though in a way it’s reassuring to pretend that it is. As much as “chosen family” has arisen to describe a specific solution to a certain kind of gay abjection, people are exiled from their natal families all the time, and for all kinds of reasons. The nuclear family is created by the state, only to be broken by it—by foster care, prisons, and mental facilities; by the institutions of marriage and divorce; by wage labor, debt, and poverty; by gendered, racialized, and ableist divisions of labor and love.

Is it any wonder that incest has an appeal for some of us? We were promised a family, and a home, an unconditional love that can never be broken, no matter what we do or don’t do. We were promised that harm, should there be any, would always come from without. We were promised that there was recourse for injustice and failure. We were promised, if not safety, then community.

We were also promised that the closest intimacies happen in families; if it happens within the family it is, by definition, love, even if it hurts or is scary. If love does take place outside the family, it must be legitimized by the family’s legal reorganization, via marriage or adoption. One is bred to question if you can really have love outside of your birth family, which means that losing it means losing love, all of it. If you manage to overcome these terms—which constitute heteronormativity, among other things—and replace that love, is it any surprise that that love feels like the family you lost?

In times of fear and disaster, the bonds that don’t break are strengthened, or so they say. Jade and I started dating not long before March 2020, so we can also joke about COVID fast-tracking our romantic relationship. Where would we be, as a couple, without it, I wonder? Would we still be at this gangbang, with these people?

One of the linguistic patterns of gay hookup apps like Grindr, I’ve noticed, is the inclusion of the term body contact on a list of desired activities. Kissing, oral, rimming, body contact—as if the first three can be accomplished without the last. The language is both unappealingly clinical and yet endearing to me, functional in its straightforwardness, but almost too useful to be erotic, to my ears, anyway. And yet, as someone who has felt starved for touch for years now, I understand it. I use it myself.

I want to walk into the room where my friend is being fucked, take off my clothes, and fuck my friend, too. I want Jade to stroke my hair while someone gets pushed against the plate glass, their body flush with the skyline. I want to conspire with another top about swapping girlfriends, radiating laughter. I have been telling men whose names I don’t know that I love them. I take the person that I love the most and I give her away. I can afford to be generous; it feels good to have someone, and it feels good to share the having.

Incest, as the state understands it, was never about child abuse. The taboo is somehow big enough to contain sodomy, gender nonconformity, non-whiteness, the reasons for which we’re accused of grooming everyone around us, yet it’s not big enough to stop children from being harmed, particularly by their legal guardians, whether those are natal family or the state. Under suspicion of love, what you have to offer is criminalized, explicitly or tacitly.

This summer’s gangbangs weren’t my idea, but after COVID, which for me meant years without other lovers and months without my girlfriend, I was ravenous. Then monkeypox happened. Still reeling from one plague, here was another. I could feel the deprivation in my body. Could others too? I’ve been fucking a lot, unable to decide if it’s good or bad. But it feels good, so who cares? I know how close I am to losing it again.

Of those who have survived AIDS, COVID, and MPX, many have been permanently affected, not just directly in their bodies, but by extension: by stress, lost jobs, worsening work conditions and healthcare, the constriction of social services, skyrocketing rent and the shrinking dollar. The nuclear family, our supposed safety net, is further exposed for what it is, the bones splitting the offal from below. It was never going to work, for us, anyway. Is that why desire for incest in our porn has skyrocketed (I promise I’m not just revealing my personal curation)? Why it continues to shock, despite featuring in our most popular mainstream TV shows and films?

As the emotional valence of the family changes, so must the anti-family. Our erotic lives are never untouched. Is that why the top shortage went away? Is that why?

What does a top (or bottom) shortage tell us about the world? I don’t know. I don’t want you to think of this is a diagnosis, much less an attempt at an explanation. In times of change, I leave that to the experts.

I’ll leave you with this: instead of “chosen family”—an expression that I’ve come to loathe—I prefer the unwieldy but much more beautiful “consensual sentient state of relationship,” as Rena Davis-Phoenix puts it in Michelle Handelman’s BloodSisters. But what does that accomplish, I wonder, that gangbang doesn’t, and so much more succinctly, too?

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David Davis

In grad school1, my advisor was a mediocre homophobe who was occasionally good for solid writing advice. This was a decade ago. At 24, I was still an unthinking grinder, pestle to my own empty mortar, so it verged on the revelatory to hear a real writer—with books and a teaching job and everything—insist that sometimes the best thing you can do for your manuscript is sit at a sunny window and daydream.

Her enduring mid-ness aside, I’ve come to think my advisor was onto something. Over the years, I’ve discovered that the window is not just indispensable, but undeniable. The body needs time and space to process. When I force the painstaking, backbreaking effort needed to go sit by the window, I’m often rewarded with a passage that wouldn’t come or a plot hole finding its bite. Sometimes I can’t connect the window to any writing accomplishment, but its proximity makes me feel better. Unfortunately, restoration counts as one of its benefits, too.

My advisor had a lot of ideas, some of them about the legitimacy of trans people, but she failed to offer any suggestions for actually getting to the window. I had to figure that out myself. I believe in hard work, if only by virtue of its difficulty, which is a belief that leaves little room for reverie. When I feel myself resisting the window, a state of mind more daunting than eight hours in front of my laptop, I try to make it more palatable with a reframe: if doing nothing in front of a window is hard, then it counts as work, right? (And shouldn’t hard work be its own redundancy?).

It helps to enlist other writers, ones I actually respect, to strengthen my case for the window. “So much of making art is the time spent not making art,” Raven Leilani told BOMB Magazine a few years ago. Craft is earned with effort, but isn’t guaranteed, not least because the conditions of that effort are never a given. “To make anything,” Leilani went on, “you need the means and time, and you need to be intact, and that is frustrated by the racist, sexist, and capitalist forces that all contribute to your erasure. So to be able to make art is a privilege and a refusal of this erasure.” The window, then, is not just a gift, but a responsibility and a provocation.

This understanding of craft, then, requires work—a nonnegotiable for anyone who must draw a wage to survive—while also requiring its subversion. Craft becomes the workday’s byproduct, a silver lining wrung from the laborer along with the value that their labor produces. It’s also a powerful antidote to the contemporary push to literally separate art from the artist, an anti-worker project if I’ve ever heard one. Art, as Gretchen Felker-Martin wrote last year in a piece about moral panic as back door to censorship, is the culmination of “both labor and experience,” a stance with which any self-interested worker, artist or not, should wholeheartedly agree. (The window watches me, a taunting cyclops.)

Though what we do is usually described as intellectual or even white-collar, as writers we cannot fail to conceive of what we do as labor, even those moments between, when one sits by the window, chin cradled in palm. My soft-handed job is preferable to any I’ve ever had, but that doesn’t mean it’s not work, an uncomplicated position that seems—with the past week’s “Are baristas proletarians?” coursing through Twitter like Taco Bell through a Millennial’s colon—to nevertheless be controversial.

Divisive, anti-worker propaganda aside, sure, the notion that we do as writers—artístes—is not actually work can be so very tempting. Such a possibility frees us from having to think about the ways in which our embodiment complicates our politics, our experience, and our identity, and thus our art. “The body can seem like a problem, but it can also bring us together,” counters T Fleischmann. With their book, Time is the thing a body moves through, Fleischmann seeks to “push against some forms of knowledge” by working/engaging with visual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres without having something “definitive” to say about him. Gesturing, flirting, suggesting, winking, nodding, cruising, and fantasizing, Fleischmann wants to meet the body on its own terms, resisting certainty as both form and praxis. (What does the window know that it can teach me?)

And yet work, as a straightforward, quantifiable exchange—x hours in, y words (dollars/clicks/books) out—remains seductive. “The form demands discipline, and through that discipline, urgency,” says Leilani. In that urgency there is purpose and, supposedly, a reward; a pot of gold tantalizes at the end of the rainbow. 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? Indeed, in his rebuke of Nabokov’s whole deal, Updike invokes the writer’s essential dialectical tension: we dash our inherent “will to manipulate” (hi, liar!) against the “banal, heavily actual subject.” How romantic. Like an open window on an autumn afternoon, chilly Brooklyn below inching past on its Saturday errands.

I prefer to view my work as a writer as being in service of my political commitments and, failing that, my own pleasure. It’s a lot of pressure. Reducing art to work can be freeing, if not liberating. It’s something that working people do, this craft of mine. Decent, salt-of-the-earth, but moral only insofar as it’s constitutionally bracing, like a loaf of home-baked bread. Or a window that, I just noticed, needs Windexing. This reduction plays into the pleasure I take in artists who conceive of themselves as tradespeople, or even better, as workmen, as Jack Nicholson calls himself in a 1986 interview with Rolling Stone. “My first acting teacher said all art is one thing—a stimulating point of departure. That’s it. And if you can do that in a piece, you’ve fulfilled your cultural, sociological obligation as a workman.” Workman. Ah. Bracing, honest. Puts hair on your chest.

Of course, this pleasure is a fetish of sorts, relying on fantasies of what work is, does, and feels like. In opposition to an increasingly always-on office environment, or scraping together a living from the gig economy, or clinging to what remains of the twentieth-century’s union gains, the notion of clocking in and out at a satisfying, decently compensated 40-hour-per-week job (don’t forget the pension!) is such a fantastic fantasy that one might forget altogether that even if it were attainable to you (it almost certainly isn’t), that attainability relies on the exploitation of workers of which you can only imagine. (Do those workers, either alienated within the imperial core or conscripted into its replication outside its borders, have a window?)

Now it’s dark, and my window has lost some of its potency, though if I crane my head, I can see the ghostly Manhattan skyline through the trees and condos. In writing about the window, I’ve failed it. My book is still not done.

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

Subscribe to support GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, DAVID’s advice series from an anonymous gay therapist who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth. (Sample an unlocked post for a taste of what you’re missing.) 100% of funds go to support a rotating selection of mutual aid and reparations projects.

Want advice? Email badgayadvice@gmail.com for a free 3-month subscription.

1

A phrase I only rarely let loose from its rubious attic chains. Please don’t ask me about it.