Davey Davis's Blog, page 18

Phyllis Christopher's "Dark Room"

"Dancers", Club Ecstasy, San Francisco, CA, 1991

If you watch porn, you may have encountered camerawork that’s almost surgical in its focus, trained on specific parts of performers’ genitals with a fixity that might make you feel like an OB/GYN (or urologist, or proctologist. Whatever). With this kind of closeup, you’re telescoped almost inside your subject, to the extent that someone glancing over your shoulder may not even recognize the mucus membrane that fills your screen.

Whether this perspective is the result of a creative decision or practical circumstance—like low production value, for example—there’s nothing wrong with getting up close and personal with pussy. Ethically and artistically speaking, it’s no more objectionable to me than fixating on a face or a foot, which is to say, not at all. But since I’m not a genital fetishist for whom hole successfully synecdochizes the whole, such a limited visual range just doesn’t do it for me. My loss, I suppose.

Unfortunately, we’re rarely in the habit of judging erotic art by whether we find it arousing, unless we’re looking at it critically as art, in which case its potential to arouse will probably be grounds for artistic dismissal. In art that is regarded as non-pornographic, zooming in on a single body part might read as familiar, lingering, or personal. For art that’s considered pornographic, however, such good faith is rarely extended. A certain kind of feminist might echo a certain kind of anti-feminist in arguing that, in a porno, this closeup is objectifying because it replaces a person with one of their components. (Have I reinforced this tendency by describing this kind of camerawork as surgical, thereby associating it with our meatiness under the doctor’s knife?)

We don’t make such mistakes here, of course. What am I but a sum of my parts?

On Our Backs Pin-Up, Marin, CA, 1991

The distinction between “good” and “bad” closeups came to mind while I paged through Phyllis Christopher’s Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Protest, 1988-2003, a sumptuous and stunning archive of lesbian and queer life1. In “Tongues, San Francisco, 2000,” an open mouth engulfs another, the blunt smudge of tongues contrasted against the gleam of teeth, metal, and lip. Something, perhaps a human figure, is reflected in the ball of a piercing, bright against the black of the throat. Though we know what we’re looking at, this image is difficult enough to parse that all that we do know about it is that it’s (homo)sexual. Lascivious. Pornographic. Have the dykes who serve as our subjects here been dehumanized by this perspective?

Dancer, Club Ecstasy, San Francisco, CA, 1991

Re-situated in a context where the pornographic is not a dead-end, the closeup takes on a new emotional valence. Very little in Dark Room would escape classification as dirty, seedy, blue, and yet these images from our gay past feel like home to a certain kind of homo, whether or not you’ve ever lived in the city by the Bay. From street brawls with pigs to spreads for On Our Backs, Dark Room zooms all the way in on taboo with butch on butch fucking, titty gloryholes, bloody live performances, go-go girls and boys, whips and chains, butch/femme “roleplay,” as it was once known, and strippers of all kinds, reveling in an intimacy that the straight lens would likely seek to flatten.

Marcus, San Francisco, CA, 2001

Though its subjects are often genital—pierced nipples, pissing pussies, winking vulvas—Dark Room’s closeups also feature genitalia that only dykes would recognize, our means and methods of fucking that hide in plain sight: hankies, mouths, fists (“Do Lesbians Cruise Hands?” asks a cartoon in “Cartoonist Kris Kovich, San Francisco, CA, 1992”).

That’s the other thing about the zoom: allowing for a level of anonymity, it becomes a queer tactic of safety. “I think we were developing a lesbian visual language,” says Christopher in an interview with Shar Rednour at the end of Dark Room. “Maybe it didn’t mean so much to other women, like they thought it was just fashion. But to me it was very important because it was the way we identified each other in crowds and in smaller cities.” Having found each other, of course, there is opportunity to zoom out again. The lens widens, restoring the whole from which the hole emerges.

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1

You can see more images from the book here.

David Davis

In my early twenties I was denied top surgery because I was too feminine. It was explained to me by medical professionals with jack o’lanterns for hearts that the way I looked and lived my life meant it was unlikely that medical transition was what I actually wanted, which fundamental desire was buried deep in the very quick of everything that’s wrong with me, like a beetle in dung. My already-embattled relationship with femininity grew a new ring: usually too butch by default, I was now too faggy. Hello Kitty was definitely involved.

Some genders are best understood in terms of volume. For some, excessive does more work than any single label can, while neatly accounting for the consequences of gender variance without forcing you into essentialisms or explanations. There is a reason why I identify with femmes so deeply, despite our playful pretense of being perfect opposites.

Like when I’m out of town, as I am right now, Jade complains that she’s been weakened by years of not carrying her own bags, which normally I don’t let her do; now that I’m gone, she’s helpless! This is an inside joke that butch/femme type of gay people love to tell ourselves: we both know that Jade is actually capable of carrying her own bags and that I wouldn’t actually die of embarrassment if she did, but to pretend otherwise complements our genders, lifelong sensations comprised not just of pinpricks of euphoria (as everyone insists on calling it these days), but insecurities in need of regular reassurance from someone who understands without relating too directly.

One of gender hierarchy’s tricks is making us believe that intimacy only happens by way of similarity (which myth sits paradoxically astride the idea that it only happens by way of heterosexual copulation, itself dependent on difference). This is a natural conclusion of allowing the notion of balance to limit your desire. But if both of you are too much, then your genders can never cancel each other out.

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David Davis

Smothering though our bewitchment by “generation,” as an organizing principle, may be, I think it’s safe to say that The Brave Little Toaster—Toy Story’s darksided 1987 ur-text—is a millennial touchstone. Following the adventures of a group of household appliances searching for their “Master,” the young boy they live to serve, our inanimate heroes are animated by creamy colors, cheerful singalongs, and the ever-present threat of obsolescence, physical destruction, and ultimately psychic death. Such is the fate of the dubiously-gendered sentient consumer good.

Toaster's first kill happens just a few minutes into the movie. Taunted by a malevolent air conditioning unit who claims that the little boy will never return to the vacation cabin where they all live, Toaster and its friends accuse Air Conditioner of jealousy (Master doesn’t play with HVAC, you see), triggering it until it overheats and explodes, leaving behind a smoking corpse wedged into the windowsill.

Voiced by the late, great Phil Hartman, the cruelly sarcastic Air Conditioner is obviously a caricature of Jack Nicholson. Sneering and leering like the Great Pumpkin of New Hollywood himself, Air Conditioner’s filtration design suggests Jack’s shining cupid’s bow, broadly and brightly dimpling and from which point gravity’s obligate rainbow drags his facial excess down into cinema’s original Jokerfied grin. From the raspy voice to the idiosyncratic cadence to the plasticine brow, there’s no missing the resemblance. But for me, Air Conditioner didn’t register as a cameo, as it were, because I didn’t recognize the source material. It would take years, both of caricatures like Hartman’s and the opportunity to see the original himself in other movies, for me to pick up on the homage.

When my parents were children, cinema legends like Peter Lorre (another film star lampooned by Hartman in Toaster, he as a bag-eyed light fixture), Katherine Hepburn, and Humphrey Bogart often turned up the cartoons they watched. I wonder how often my parents recognized them, and how often they were assumed to be a strange new character in a harem of scribbled freaks. Nicholson’s ambience took place before my awareness, while I was still in the early stages of sponging up the culture; I suppose that’s how ambience works. But eventually, Nicholson would come to be as recognizable to me as Jesus, Elvis, the president, etc., as I was reminded when Jade and I watched Easy Rider (1969) for the first time last week.

Nicholson’s role as the alcoholic lawyer who delivers the film’s keynote—“What you represent to them,” he informs his hippie comrades hours before his own brutal murder, “is freedom.”—got me. Earnest and boyish, he’s a pre-calcified Nicholson, who for all his remarkable versatility suffers from the constraints of caricature, as all greats must. When was the last time he was in something? I wondered. Now 85, he’s elderly enough that he no longer appears at Knicks games or in the tabloids along with Lindsay Lohan. One assumes he’s been made comfortable in a mansion, smoking stogies and reminiscing about a coffee shop called Poopie’s, up on the strip, the phlegm rich and murky in his agéd throat.

I love a genius. Every so often I develop a little romance with a new one, sacking the library for their books and piping in podcasts about their illustrious lives. In one interview, Jack humbly responded to a question about missed opportunity (he famously passed on The Godfather, among other classics) by quoting his own mother: “All comparisons are odious.”

But comparison is its own pleasure, and there’s much to be found in the long life of a great and productive artist. I’ll never be anything but a writer, but as artists I think we ought to study forms other than our own, which is why I care about the Method, or Italian Neo-Realism, or queer of color critique. Gone about a certain way, comparison erodes the difference upon which it relies. Caricature is undone, and yet ever ascends.

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David Davis 39, part 3

Read Part 1. Read Part 2.

Frankie and I met up at Metropolitan. For a few hours, we sat at a corner table on the back patio, smoking, drinking, and wiggling our fingers at trans people we recognized from the internet. After dishing about our jobs, our girlfriends, and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s banger episode on the Gender Reveal podcast our conversation landed on people who are stuck—those pitiable souls who can’t admit they’re queer or who won’t transition, and maybe never will.

Why do grownup transsexuals like Frankie and I have any interest in stuck people? Because we’ve been them ourselves, to varying degrees, and will never outrun the risk of becoming them again. Because, deep lez though we are, she and I know people like this, and as long as heterosexuality exists we always will. For as much sturm und drang there seems to be around community—what it means, what it does, who’s in, who’s out—the construct is nothing if not dynamic. Community is something you do, not something you have or are in. As such, stuck people meander in and out of our lives as friends, lovers, coworkers, acquaintances, nemeses. Are the stuck people here with us in the room right now? Often! Even if they do tend to have one foot out the door.

You can’t talk about closet-cases without talking about chasers, too. Many people, and not just the straight ones, are fond of accusing our biggest fans (as well as our fiercest enemies) of secretly being among our ranks, which is facile and stupid and transphobic, actually. But that doesn’t mean that cis fascination with us—of both the positive and negative tenors—can’t be located in their relationships with their own genders. As trans people, we are symbol and proof of the world’s unraveling, which sounds pretty dramatic until you’ve been on this side of things. In our realness, trans people expose systemic artifice so foundational that departing from it in thought or deed can literally drive you crazy. Confronting that is terrifying, especially if you’re cis, since in that case you actually have something to lose if the whole thing were to ever come tumbling down. This means, incidentally, that cis fascination with us is also about power. But when is gender not about that, too?

Are all chasers stuck? No, I don’t think so, though of course many of them are. If you’re trans, and particularly if you’re transsexual, then you’ve surely encountered someone who loves you because they can’t see you—only themself, or a version of themself that they wish existed. Or perhaps they see you so much they can’t see themself at all. However you slice it, you’re not having a person-to-person interaction with them, or only rarely. How can you, if not everyone in the room is a person?

Frankie and I can happily bitch about chasers at length, but for my money there’s a time and a place for them, as long as you know what you’re doing. It can be fun or sexy to be worshipped, especially when the reason for that worship is why the rest of the world reviles you. If everyone is going to be obsessed with us, at least the chaser variation comes with perks.

My advice for indulging chasers is this: think of your time with them as a vacation from being a person, rather than an exiling from humanity. Just don’t forget that vacations, by definition, are temporary.

In part one of this series about gendered social contagion, I said that I wanted to write about “the cis people who saw my transness” before I knew of it myself. The chaser can’t see anything but my transness; in this way, they’re indistinguishable from almost all other cis people.

Who was my first chaser? I asked myself. Not gay men on hookup apps. Not the cis femmes who talk about trans mascs as if we’re pets or men, but can’t find it in themselves to date anyone else. Not the dykes who asked me not to transition, but watched trans porn exclusively. Not the straight men with force fem fantasies that could only come to life in the dark. Not the straight women who felt I should be grateful to fuck them, and met any disinterest on my part with indignation and shock.

If we’re defining the chaser as someone who calls their obsession with your gender love, then my first chasers were probably my parents. Which is to say that the people most invested in making sure I wasn’t trans played a role in bringing it to pass.

In liberal terms, the rights of trans people are often framed along the lines of “expression.” It’s inhumane not to permit us to be authentic to ourselves, goes the logic; when given the opportunity to do so, we are bravely living our truths. However well-meant, the closet understood as facade positions us, a priori, as liars. As I wrote in another post, “If our genders are produced, that means that the concealment, deception, and revelation of deviant genders is also produced.”

I don’t think the closet metaphor goes far enough when understood in this way. For me, closeting was not like wearing a mask or a costume, allowing for at least some part of “the real me” into the daylight. It was like being dead. Gender organizes how we share information about ourselves—that is, it’s how we communicate. Our genders inform and shape how we are polite and rude, gentle and violent; how we convey want, need, desire, and interest. Like age, race, class—a whole mess of things—gender (like community) is something you do. Even agender people must interact with people with genders, in cultures and milieus organized around normative gender, and are beholden, on some level, to gendered interaction, particularly in how others understand them. Without your gender (or lack thereof), as you understand it, you are nothing. Maybe, like me, you’re spiritually dead. Maybe, like trans people without the luck and safety I’ve had, you’re literally dead.

So. Say your gender isn’t safe. Say your only alternative, for the moment, anyway, is death. The thing about chasers is that they, like transphobes, see dead people. As I walked home, thinking over my conversation with Frankie, I wondered what would have happened to me if the chasers had never found me, over and over again. They’re cogs in the system that produces deviant genders, sure. But they’re the bloodhounds that sniff us out, too. Maybe a better comparison would be one of those fish that live on the shark’s pearlescent underside, feeding with the focus only a parasite can offer.

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This week, Astra published my piece on Nitehawk’s Pride screening of BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes & Sadomasochism (1995), feat. my leather associate, Daemonumx, if you’d like to give it a read.

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David Davis

Mom got up early to get C ready. After she left, C circled, trying to pick a fight with me. I sat at the kitchen table and waited for her. You can offer me a drink at Starbucks, brother, she would attempt, and I would offer it, and she would get overwhelmed, go to her room and wail, then come back and try again. Still, she has done very little screaming this visit. No door-slamming, no name-calling. Mom and I have remained calm, though I got short with C in the car this morning when she, to be contrary, insisted that our grandmother was not a grandmother.

I was driving C to Grammy’s because there was no one else to watch her, and Mom and I had work. I don’t like putting Grammy at risk of COVID, but she insisted, and Mom is exhausted. I’m exhausted, too. On the way there, we saw a truck that said SOCIALISM on the back window. You couldn’t see the part that said SUCKS until the truck was a half-block ahead of us. On Grammy’s street, I waved to two ancient white people before I realized both were wearing bright red MAGA hats.

Grammy was the same but frailer, hair now lapsing white. Your mother is incredible, she said. I tried to be polite; I was not supposed to have seen her again before she dies. C wanted me to leave, kept touching my wrist and looking at the car. Your legs are swollen, she said, shaming me in front of our grandmother, who hates my body. You look wonderful, Grammy said. I forgot that she has cancer again.

In the car, I cried. I think my tears are less salty now, but also more buoyant, rising up from my skin like the kind of nipples that are my favorite. 

The ash is on the street, like dust, and in the plants, like big grains of salt. I wanted to call Mom and ask her to tell me I’m not a bad person, but I didn’t. The tears smeared my mineral-based sunblock (chemicals are dangerous). The fire is still going, but the air quality is better today. Grammy does not understand how contagion works and probably never will. 

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GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY #15: on bad vibes

GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY is a monthly advice series from an anonymous gay therapist1 who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth.

Submit your requests for advice to badgayadvice@gmail.com. All submissions get a free 3-month subscription and all subscription funds benefit rotating mutual aid projects, so please share and tell your friends!

Dear Bad Gay,

I live in a big queer house with four friends. It's the kind of space where intimacy is encouraged and open communication is lauded, with queer-platonic vibes aplenty.

Recently, me and one of my housemates rekindled a romance that ended between us four years ago, only this time we're totally in love. We're polyamorous, so are dating others at the same time, but they've become my primary partner, and we told our other housemates about it as soon as we knew it was serious. They've all been fine with it except for one: our best friend, with whom we've always had a playful, sibling-y dynamic.

Read more

David Davis 39, part 2

Read Part 1 here.

I believe in luck, unfortunately. The kind of person to toss salt, knock wood, converse with a dead god in the bathroom mirror, I’m an unwilling subscriber to a pastiche of cosmic checks and balances in which thought and action hold equal power, ends justify means, and correlation = causation. My world filters through a sieve of Christian-inflected superstition, and I’ve spent a lifetime kneeling over the remains, sifting for fault. There is always fault. It’s a stressful, but uncomplicated, way to live.

Lately, when people joke about doom and apocalypse, as they seem be doing more and more often, my bad luck antennae shiver. Though it’s tempting to indulge in this kind of humor—I’m guilty of it myself—to me, it reeks of bad luck. In assuming knowledge of our ultimate end, these jokers display hubris, a thing which by definition cannot go unpunished. With every flip remark about hell on earth, the superstitious among us must wonder if that hell is only being hastened. Maybe it’s the gay plague remix that’s happening as we speak, but the connection between vibes and consequences has never felt stronger.

I guess the jokes scare me. We mustn’t be glib about the crisis, I think, so very virtuously. We must resist the certainty that we’re being led to the slaughter. As if virtue has anything to do with suffering.

In part 1 of this series on gender contagion, I used J.G. Ballard’s Crash to explore the social production of pleasure. In Ballard’s novel, disabling car accidents spawn a cult of perverts who find both purpose and erotic release in physical suffering and high-stakes sexual risk. Looked at one way, Crash, and the 1996 Cronenberg film that’s based on it, offers one non-essentialist view of (sexual) perversion. In the worlds of Crash, the fetish—viewed by the mainstream as an inherently unnatural desire that is acquired, like lice, from an incident or a corruptor—broadens, rather than shrinks, the field of pleasure.

It’s one thing to suggest that social contagion, broadly speaking, need not necessarily be a bad thing. It’s another to claim the same of actual pathogens. Sure, we can look at getting your egg cracked by another tran as value-neutral, but how can you do the same with a literal plague? Though the COVID super-dodgers are dwindling in number, falling ill is the thing we’re all striving to avoid, right?

I’m reminded of an academic paper that I read way back in grad school written by a white settler scholar embedded in a rural community of indigenous Australians. If an outsider spent enough time in this community, they would invariably contract one of its epidemic illnesses, which caused lesions (minor but scarring) on one’s body. While also symptomatic of post- and neocolonial austerity, including lack of access to adequate healthcare, these scars were also visual markers of a community, signaling that the person bearing them was a member, or something like it.

In the paper, the grad student reports that she stayed in her community of study for years, long enough to finally contract the illness herself. Beginning to exhibit lesions of her own, she was more closely, complexly bound to her subjects, understood by the academy as not unlike viruses themselves: living, but not in quite the same way as humans are.

But we’re talking about the social contagion of gender, aren’t we? Gender being what it is, most of us experience ours in different ways at different times. One of the pleasures of being trans, at least for me, is being able to participate in those changes, and to be fascinated by them as they happen. My straight counterpart takes them as they come, like table scraps even, rarely viewing them as anything but inevitable, if they think of them at all. In the straight mind, no one escapes themselves (which is one reason why the high femme, the bimbo, the sex worker, etc., make such able infiltrators). As a transsexual, the amount of work that you do just to make it all happen, and keep it happening while you’re still alive, can make it easy to forget that it’s something that happens to you, too.

As hormones have transformed my physiology, I feel more androgynous than I ever have. I am a woman and a man at the same time, I’ve recently begun to think, and this is actually true, on, like, a material level. In most contexts, my odds of being seen as one or the other are pretty split—and all of that depends on my beholder. When I was younger, this ambiguity made me feel vulnerable (and it certainly does make life riskier). Now that it’s an ambiguity of my choosing, it’s also sometimes fun, and exciting, and sexy, and comfortable. I am both, at least for now. And I think it’s neat that most people pick up on that, as well as interesting how many elect a lane and lean into it, regardless of what my papers, voice, or genitals go on to reveal.

A dykefag knows no single hormonal regimen, but the one I’m currently on has altered my material needs and investments. Expanded them, I should say. I had sex with queer cis men before medical transition, but this new body has made a certain kind of faggotry accessible (to me!) in a way it wasn’t before. With this accessibility comes new pleasures, new connections, new knowings. It also comes with new risks, one of which has been in the news for the past month or so as yet another example of a state-sponsored public health crisis. Even if I never catch one of the illnesses to which gay men have been condemned, I am, in a sense, caught.

But more on that next time.

Find me on Twitter. Cop my second novel, X, right here. It’s NPR’s book of the day today, so here’s your chance to revisit my interview with Death, Sex & Money’s Anna Sale.

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David Davis

If I seem to you like the kind of person who would happily cut someone out of my life for crossing a line, congratulations—you’ve got me dead to rights.

I’m aware that this is not necessarily a healthy quality. In my case, it can be reactionary or arbitrary. The camel’s-back-breaking offense can be unfairly weighted with petty variables like past resentments, hormonal imbalance, a bad cup of coffee. And it can arrive without warning, both for me and for the person who somehow ended up on the wrong side of my sandbox.

Don’t get me wrong. Being able to set boundaries for my own safety and happiness is a hard-earned skill that I cherish; I’ve not always been the kind of person that was willing to protect myself. But it would be dishonest to say that I don’t sometimes overcorrect, or that haven’t I’ve gone on to regret my overcorrections. There are people I know I will never talk to again, even though I recognize, in the comfort of hindsight, that they weren’t as dangerous or unforgivable as I felt they were when I kicked them off the emotional premises. There are people that have no idea why I stopped talking to them, and though I could—maybe even should—explain myself, I know I never will. That ship has sunk, is how I think of it. If you’re not in my life, I obviously didn’t need you, anyway. Not that I need anyone at all. The vast majority of the people that I have eliminated from my life were fucking around and finding out, as they say, but I can admit that avoidance is a lot easier than managing conflict, and that of the two, only one offers the potential for vulnerability and growth.

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 rent1 …well, you know how straight people are.

It’s not just homophobia or transphobia. It’s (and of course I’m generalizing here, etc. etc. etc.) their general tolerance for authoritarianism; their willingness to disregard others’ discomfort, fear, or pain if it means smoothing over a social situation or bolstering their status; their inability to recognize survivor concepts like chosen family for what they are—worst-case scenarios, to which many of us were driven against our will. This reflects a compounding entitlement that pads their days and their years, their relationships with their natal families and other oppressive institutions, their opportunities and their limitations, their health and their lack thereof. If I am to understand that you will not defend me to your friend when she wonders if maybe I’m a disgusting unnatural freak; that you won’t bring me around your straight boyfriend because you’re afraid of what he will say to me—but not enough to do something about his behavior; that you aren’t willing to end a relationship with a fascist who cannot be convinced of life’s value, even if that fascist is a blood relative that you love very much, then you will not enjoy intimacy with me. If this means that as a result straight people, and straight-acting people, are by and large vanished from my life, well. It is what it is.

What I’m saying is, my general separation from straight people has more to do with cultural differences than individual fault. Which means that it’s possible for straight people to change. Some of them, maybe even many of them, having benefited from the alternation of hand-holding and boundaries of gays like me, will later enter into the orbits of other homos who find them to be well-mannered, even comradely. (I’m sure that something similar has happened with me and other people as I’ve gotten older and learned some of the contours of, for example, my racism.) This is solidarity, and it transcends identity and difference, thrives on them, in fact, and it is beautiful. May we all get there someday. May we all overcome ourselves.

But it also means that my tolerance for straight people has wasted away. Outside of my remote 9-5 job or going the doctor, I really don’t have to deal with them in any sustained way2. And so when there is a circumstance where I am forced to deal with one and as a result am harmed or disrespected, I’m shocked by my response. No matter how small the incident, I’m outraged. I lose sleep. I rave about it to whomever will listen. I stew. I grow a pungent new resentment like a blister, rice-papering it with so many layers of skin that it becomes a callous, pregnant with blood and spleen, indefatigable and yet tender. It’s a boil. It’s a lesion. It’s a carbuncle square on my ass. And I can’t lance it or ignore it or chew on it til it bursts. It’s just down there, infuriating me.

My parents divorced when I was young, and even at the best of times, their relationship was never good. Though my dad had many faults—some of them normal straight white guy things and some of them weird as shit—my mom always claimed that there was a core to his intolerability. “He’s prideful,” she would say. “His pride won’t let him budge an inch on anything.” The older I get, the more I understand why. What my mom saw as my dad’s fundamental inflexibility was, in his mind, a refusal to accept contempt. Of course, he didn’t reckon that his grasping for dignity was, ultimately, undignified. I guess they were both right.

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1

There are a few notable exceptions that it would be indiscreet to get into here.

2

I think often, too, about the ways in which having figured out a life for myself without the support of my natal family is in itself a reflection of what we may call privilege of varying kinds.

David Davis

My host, an Italian bear an inch shorter than I, ushered me into the dim and bitter-smelling apartment. At my request, he guided me to the bathroom. Would you like a towel? he asked politely; I declined. The bathroom was normal except for the dozens of boxes of Colgate toothpaste that were stacked above the sink. I took a picture for Bambi.

When I joined Antonio in his bedroom, he appraised me, rubbing his hands together and smiling. You’re so gorgeous, he said. I liked him, too. Bald, bearded, muscled, tight-bellied, big-cocked, and uncut, as Europeans tend to be, with an It’s-a-me, Mario-style accent. I should have been in heaven.

But then he kept talking. Though I like verbal as a rule, I was disappointed to discover that Antonio’s fantasies were scat-centric—not my cup of tea. He really got off on the idea of shitting in my pussy, or of me shitting on his face, or of him shitting in my mouth, god bless him. You dirty bitch, Antonio said, gently squeezing my arms. He talked about me fucking a dog, too, though with his rapid, uncertain English, the narrative was hard to follow.

Sweating, unfocused, Antonio kept moving his body and changing the subject, introducing a new scenario or position every other minute while struggling to stay hard. Great, I thought. Drugs, and he didn’t even offer me any. But I didn’t leave. I enjoy this kind of person, the kind that is so distracted that one is essentially alone in their presence.

Maybe it wasn’t drugs. It was hot outside, but the sweat on Antonio’s skin smelled like fear. His chest hair curled, wet and pungent, under my fingers. I love your nipples, I attempted, having given up any pretense of keeping pace with him. They were just long enough to betray themselves, a little pointed, rising from his chest hair like tree stumps from black fog. Like his apartment, his body smelled sharp and bitter, with an undercurrent of saccharine, the accord of cheap fragrance, molded walls, dusty pillows, Gun Oil, and the clean but perspirant faggot who loved pussy, he told me, loved girls like me, had had all the girls or, sorry, boys like me, but why were they all so flaky, so afraid of Antonio?

I mean, I understand, he said. It’s hard to meet people on Grindr. But they so nervous. They say they come and then they don’t come. I wondered how many t boys had picked up on the scat thing before they actually came over.

I’m complaining, but I liked Antonio, liked listening to his stories. He seemed unable to decide if he wanted to fuck or unburden himself, so we awkwardly cycled between both. He had been living in New York for 25 years, he told me. Before the pandemic, he worked in hotels—Trump hotels, actually, which he said like he was making a confession—but after lockdown, he began escorting so he wouldn’t have to go into an office every day. He hated it. Clients were flaky yet constantly calling, trying to get him to go all the way Downtown, and his friends with straight jobs judged him, not that they could ever hang out, anyway, with the hours Antonio kept.

The solution seemed obvious to me. Why don’t you just make friends with other hookers? I asked.

Eh, he said, grimacing. They’re catty! He threw his wrist in a way that reminded me of an uncle I don’t talk to anymore.

I thought about the toothpaste boxes. Bambi would have a good laugh about that, I was sure. If only they could see me now, rolling my eyes while my date rambled about Great Danes and his rent-controlled apartment. For all his talk about loving t boys, Antonio didn’t know what to do with pussy. Typical. The only way he could stay hard was by avoiding eye contact with me and talking about shit, his own hand on his cock. We fucked for a little bit—Bambi would want to know what else Antonio was hoarding, I thought, would demand that I do a tour of the apartment to take more photos of weird stuff—and then he asked to shit in my mouth.

No, I said, laughing. His cock was thick at the base, but tapered considerably at the top.

I understand, Antonio said. He was serious, almost apologetic. I never done any of the stuff I talk about. Not even taste my own cum. 

I felt no need to hide my laughter from him; I don’t think he noticed. He was so lost in himself, so high or whatever. It’s strange, but thinking about it now turns me on, even though I was anything but during our date, and I knew for sure I’d never be coming back.

When it was time to leave, I wished he hadn’t escorted me down the long, shadowy entryway. With its scent of ancient summers and hard sweat, it had the air of a haunted mineshaft, and Bambi would have liked to see the creepy, homemade-seeming oil paintings.

At the door, Antonio seized my waist and kissed me. I stepped into the hall and put on my sunglasses.

Oh, you look so good. So very good, he said, laughing as he closed the door.  

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

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Let a thousand fisting daisychains bloom

Earlier this year, I began working with Natalie Adler of Lux Mag on an essay about the commodification of kink. With the news being what it is—the hits stop coming and they don’t stop coming—that essay swiftly became another, about the intracommunity discourses of kink at Pride. Though a condensed version was sent to Lux subscribers last week, the pub graciously allowed me to share the long one here with you. Gay Wrath Month, indeed.

Like springtime in the Anthropocene, the much-maligned “kink at Pride” (kaP) discourse comes earlier every year, and those of us in the Twitter trenches can’t seem to shake the debate that’s as popular as it is detested. With the demise of Roe v Wade and the rollback on gender, sexual, and racial freedoms it will likely bring; the boom in “no promo homo” legislation restricting the rights of trans people, especially our youth; and spiking trans-antagonism and homophobia, some might see kaP as hair-splitting while the house is on fire. 

But rather than distract, kaP marks the spot where moral panics around deviant sex meet America’s queer and trans culture wars. Those queer people who fear public displays of kinky sex, at Pride or anywhere else, often invoke same victim as the fascists do: the straight, cis, white, middle-class, often-feminized abstraction known as the Child. As more privacy-based rights appear on the Supreme Court’s chopping block, including contraception and marriage equality, the anti-kaP crowd would do well to remember that their respectability politics dovetail with far-right agendas to restrict queer rights and eliminate queer lives—and that what constitutes kink, deviant, and even sex are moving targets for our enemies to exploit.

Of course, kaP is much older than Twitter. Since the early days of gay liberation, liberal homos have been eager to collaborate with the state in order to neutralize the danger that radical sexual and erotic freedom—which is demonized by the right as deviance—pose to homosexual assimilation. In his 1982 essay, “Public Sex,” Patrick Califia charts the post-Stonewall history of the white, cis, middle-class gays, and their apologists, who demand that the freaks desist from public sex and cooperate with the cops. “The threat that children might see men having sex with each other is far and away the most popular excuse for surveillance and arrests,” Califia writes. “And it’s possible that a child or a teenager who saw such an act could be frightened, disgusted, or upset. However, that’s not because sex is inherently toxic or traumatic to children. It’s because young people are denied information about sexuality and are kept especially ignorant on the subject of gay and lesbian sex.”1 

Of course, as Califia goes on to point out, the Child and children represent two different priorities. If children mattered as much as the Child does, the politicians that call queer people “groomers” wouldn’t be gunning for the forced the genital examinations of child athletes (much less the elimination of subsidized school lunches, or public education entirely). kaP must be understood as the backwash of state efforts to regulate and discipline non-normative genders, a process in which the Child has a long history. The idea that witnessing a certain kind of human sexuality is inherently traumatizing in a way that lack of healthcare, incarceration, or white supremacy is not has recycled and reinforced rhetoric used to criminalize queer people in service of repressive moral panics since at least the emergence of the homosexual as an identity. 

In the face of increasing state, media, and stochastic violence against queer and trans people, “respectability” will seem like a safe harbor to those who don’t know, or don’t want to know, that queer, trans, and deviant cannot be separated from each other. 

In his introduction to the 2001 reissue of Leatherfolk, journalist and leatherman Mark Thompson writes: “Cultural conservatives, increasingly inhibited from wholesale queer bashing, narrow their target by distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ gays, the former being the nice same-sex couple next door, the latter demonized as the perverts in leather on the streets.” If we’re looking to spot the difference between the “good” gays and the perverts ruining Pride, it might help to define our terms. 

Expanding on the now-outré S/M or S&M, BDSM stands for bondage and discipline, Dominance and submission, and sadism, masochism, and sadomasochism2. Often used interchangeably with S/M, leather is the legacy of queer sadomasochist subcultures born of American post-WWII veteran and biker clubs bound by a desire to “erogenize the forbidden,” as Thompson puts it. Kink generally refers to non-normative sex; it also can be an umbrella term, one often problematically encompassing leather and BDSM, as well as fetish. All of these terms signify deviant sexual behavior, though deviance itself demarcates a moral and/or criminal element of censure, punishment, and carcerality. Crucially, while today we see “kink” and “BDSM” used to describe a kind of “community,” only leather is a sexual subculture as well as a diffuse but coherent political movement for sexual freedom. 

So—let’s break down a few kinky activities and see which are actually deviant, and which are just, you know, gay. Public sex, for example, terrifies the anti-kaP crowd. Nothing LGBTQI about that, right? Except for the queer people who can’t safely be at home or be intimate at home; or the reality for Americans experiencing homelessness, 20-40% of whom are LGBTQI; or outdoor-based sex workers, a trade over-represented by marginal people, including queer and trans people3. Deviance doesn’t account for the material circumstances that make private space difficult or even impossible to attain for those without the money, paperwork, or racial capital. Even with mass criminalization, the housing and debt crises, and rampant inflation rendering “privacy” a luxury good, it’s worth remembering that public sex is a part of queer history for reasons beyond the material and practical: some of us simply want to fuck somewhere other than where we sleep without that being used as a pretext for our criminalization4. As Dorothy Allison once wrote, “There is this notion that sex is separate from life.”

What about gender play, with which we as trans people, famously the “T” in LGBTQI, are associated—is that allowed at Pride? Is a cross-dresser daring to appear in the light of day forcing someone else to witness their dangerous kink, and if so, how are we to distinguish them from someone like me, who has made cross-dressing a lifestyle (committed to the bit, as they say)? As the Madison Cawthorn scandal or Proud Boy attacks on drag queens daring to interact with children remind us, gender play is broadly recognized as a fetish, a legacy of pre-Stonewall cross-dressing laws and an echo of newer, intentionally vague legislation, like New York’s “walking while trans” law—used to target trans women, sex workers, undocumented people, and people of color—which was on the books until just last year.

While it’s long been debated whether leatherfolk were actually in attendance at Stonewall, deviant sexuality has always been found at Pride events5. (Incidentally, so have children and youth6, and not just the ones who fought police in the insurrection the parade commemorates.) In 1983, Gayle Rubin wrote that a coherent leather political identity trailed the gay liberation movement by about a decade, when leather organizations began demanding a place at Pride events7. As documented in Coming to Power: Writing and Graphics on Lesbian S/M, the San Francisco lesbian-feminist leather organization Samois struggled to be included at the 1978 Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade (a proto-Pride event). Though they got what they wanted, they were heckled and harassed by the crowd. 

Over the past five decades, leatherfolk have made a place for themselves in Pride celebrations, and have created their own, too8. But a bug (or perhaps a feature) of a vague and capacious definition of deviant is that one doesn’t have to be a leatherperson, or even kinky, to be ostracized from LGBTQI functions and organizations—and more crucially, resources earmarked for the same—while being identified as such. 

The consensual activities that can supposedly do permanent damage to children, should they accidentally witness them, remain inextricable from the human beings that gay liberation is supposed to be for. If the races, genders, classes, sizes, abilities, and trades that deviate from the white, straight, cis, middle-class, thin, abled, whorephobic norm are among the identity categories viewed as inherently and dangerously sexual, then only the norm can be safe (and when these deviant categories overlap, their vulnerability is only compounded). 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.

Moral panic surrounding the deviance of queer genders is at least as old as the 19th-century Western construct of the (male) homosexual, a legal, medical, and sexological category understood by Europeans as having an intrinsic connection to moral depravity, pathology, or primitivism, depending on where and how in the colonial context he was found9. In the intervening years, moral panics surrounding homosexuality and gender variance (though the distinction between the two is rarely clear) in Europe and its colonies have worked to advance white supremacy, colonialism, and the capitalist expansion of state power. Lately, the homosexual moral panic has been expanded to explicitly include a new emergent sexual identity: trans people10. 

Manifested in bathroom bills and legislation equating access to trans healthcare with child abuse, trans people and our accomplices are being targeted as “groomers” of children both in preparation for sexual assault as well as contamination of “cis” children with transsexuality. This not only puts trans adults in danger, but trans children, too; they are condemned as both victims and monsters by everyone from out-and-proud transphobes to The New York Times’ more subtle liberal stooges. As scholars Cassius Adair and Aren Aizura wrote for Transgender Studies Quarterly earlier this year, “Since (some) same-sex sexuality has successfully been privatized and normativized, trans youth now bear the burden of a public, visible social force of ‘sex’ that is imagined to violate the sanctified space of the middle-class nuclear family…If same-sex desire has been domesticated, transness must now represent 'deviant' sex.”

A 21st-century variation on the trusty narrative that we, as queer and trans people, pose moral, emotional, and physical threats to others, kaP both summons and reinforces state violence against anyone identified as deviant. As a popular discourse, it’s framed as a slippery slope into degeneracy: if X is permitted, then Y is inevitable. But it’s no less about the past than the future. Hinging queer and trans civil rights on mutable definitions of privacy, violence, and morality is not new, and the tactical shortcomings of embracing this compromise have been demonstrated again and again (how long before America’s contingent of Buttigieg clones must kiss their precious marriage goodbye?). In tracing its history, we see that kaP discourse is not an aberration, but rather representative of a highly adaptable method of violently imposing norms on queer and trans people by way of the straight superstructure.

Queer opposition to kaP and legislative attacks on trans people—whether directly or by neglect—share analogous logics. kaP is antecedent to and concomitant with legislation meant to “protect” the Child from queer and trans people of all ages. Among these is “Don’t Say Gay”—signed into law by Florida governor Rob DeSantis in late March—which, while outrageous, isn’t groundbreaking in its cruelty. Expanding on the homophobia of its legislative forebears with explicit transphobia, it prevents public school teachers from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity and requires parents to be the first to be notified of any health or support services offered to their kids in school, effectively forcing teachers to out LGBTQI students to their legal guardians.

Supporters of DSG have called it anti-grooming legislation, conflating the acknowledgement of human variety in gender and sexuality with manipulative behaviors used to sexually exploit and abuse children. In a crowded field, it’s among the most prominent current example of right-wing propaganda claiming that the existence of queer and trans people is the equivalent of an unforgivable sexual violence. 

DSG joins a fresh paroxysm of anti-gay, anti-trans, and anti-critical race theory legislation. In February, PenAmerica reported that since January 2021, 156 educational gag order bills on speech, behavior, and educational materials have been introduced or prefiled in 39 states. Many use the language of obscenity to discuss these behaviors, while at least one of them, Oklahoma Senate Bill 1142, goes further to reference deviant sex explicitly (italics mine): “No public school district, public charter school, or public school library shall maintain in its inventory or promote books that make as their primary subject the study of sex, sexual preferences, sexual activity, sexual perversion, sex-based classifications, sexual identity, or gender identity or books that are of a sexual nature…” As scholar Ariane Cruz writes, perversion is “a technology of power deployed in the discursive production of sexuality”.11

It’s impossible to talk about the legal status of deviant sex, at Pride or elsewhere, without also talking about the many groups of people marginalized by the law as sexual deviants: not just queer and trans and kinky people, but people of color—particularly black and indigenous people—people experiencing houselessness, disabled people and people with mental illness, sex workers, people who use illegal drugs, and incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Deviance is a conceptual place to throw people away, and as the recent escalation of anti-trans sentiment demonstrates, kaP is an outgrowth of a rhetoric with proven results. Its logic hasn’t just infiltrated America’s legal, educational, medical, and military systems—it organizes them12.

What would a Pride parade without kink look like? No puppy masks or leather harnesses, no nudity, and no public sex, which, depending on who’s complaining, could be anything from second base to fisting daisychains—but we’ll leave the details to the lawyers. Of course, cops must be there to ensure no one pollutes our celebration of sexuality with sexuality, their rainbow squad cars bravely defending the sanctity of the Chase floats and Target-branded unicorn swag surrounded by a docile crowd of blood-related, child-laden white families who don’t feel endangered by police. For me, “Is kink allowed at Pride?” smuggles inside another question: “Do we want policing at Pride?”

To protect Pride, we have to protect kink at Pride—kink everywhere, in fact—on its own terms. The alternative is our elimination from public life. 

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

1

 From Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (1994)

2

 Citing its entry in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, which concluded that homosexuality and bisexuality were mental illnesses, Thompson notes, “It is no coincidence that the notion of sadomasochism arose in an identical time and manner as the concept of homosexuality.”

3

 In a 2008 American study, those who lost a job due to anti-transgender bias were almost three times as likely to engage in the sex trade (19.9% vs. 7.7%). 

4

 Because straight people do it, too. They’re just less likely to be punished. 

5

 Kyle Kingsbury’s “A History of Leather At Pride: 1965–1995” has been a very helpful resource in researching this piece. 

6

“Christopher Street Liberation Day March, New York, 1976”

7

 “SM Politics, SM Communities in the United States,” The Ashgate Research Companion to Lesbian and Gay Activism

8

 They’ve also reproduced the same structures of oppression that the gay liberation movement has. As scholar Zoé Samudzi writes in “The Chromatics of Play,” “The sexual imaginary within which BDSM is broadly situated is a chromophobic one: it does not organically acknowledge the possibility of the pleasure or interiorities of Black people beyond their instrumentalization in and into white scripts.”

9

 For anyone looking to dig deeper in to this fascinating subject, I recommend the work of contemporary queer and trans scholars like Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller (Bad Gay: A Homosexual History), Jules Gill-Peterson (Histories of the Transgender Child), C. Riley Snorton (Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity), and Leah Tigers (“On the Clinics and Bars of Weimar Berlin”).

10

 In her recent appearance on the Death Panel podcast, Gill-Peterson pointed out that while homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973, transsexuality was added in the following edition.

11

 The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography

12

 In her analysis of Foucault’s turn toward S&M in Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism, Amber Jamilla Musser writes: “S&M reorganizes the body to emphasize pleasure rather than identity or discipline; it offers tangible corporeal freedom.”