Davey Davis's Blog, page 19

Tonight: a reading for Book Passage

A quick reminder that the Bay Area’s liveliest bookstore, Book Passage, is hosting a ~very special Pride conversation~ between me and the inimitable Gretchen Felker-Martin, filthcore queen and author of 2022’s horror standout, Manhunt. It’s free, it’s virtual, and it starts at 5:30pm PST/8:30pm EST.

As an obsessive Gretchen stan (I mean, who isn’t?), I couldn’t be more excited to talk about my book with this brilliant novelist, critic, and thinker. See you there, biscuits.

Find me on Twitter. Preorder my second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), out June 28. I have events and everything!

Book Passage Pride Reading with Gretchen Felker-Martin: Thursday, June 23, virtual.

The Strand Book Launch with Torrey Peters: Tuesday, June 28, in person.

Subscribe to support GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, an 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.

David Davis 39

J.G. Ballard’s seminal novel—on which the 1996 David Cronenberg joint1 is based—is about people who get off on car crashes.

Protagonist James Ballard (who shares a name with the author) is inducted into this deathstyle by Dr. Robert Vaughan, a “nightmare angel of the expressways” driven by the ultimate fantasy of a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor2. Reckless as tornado hunters, Vaughan and his acolytes roam the highways around what’s now Heathrow Airport in search of accidents and their survivors, all brutalized, disabled, and, if they’re anything like them, newly ravenous for exciting new traumas. As James discovers, these fire-and-metal baptisms—catalytic converters, if you will—produce new relationships to his own and others’ bodies, as well as to the “trap[s] of gas and metal knives” where they fuck.

While nominally straight, James begins having sex with Vaughan, using these erotic experiences to fuel other ones. In one scene, he describes an encounter with Vaughan to arouse his wife, Catherine.

My description of Vaughan continued more for Catherine’s benefit than for my own. She pressed her head deep into the pillow, right hand in a fierce dance as she forced my fingers to manipulate her nipple. Although stirred by the idea of intercourse with Vaughan, it seemed to me that I was describing a sex act involving someone other than myself. Vaughan excited some latent homosexual impulse only within the cabin of his car or driving along the highway. His attraction lay not so much in a complex of familiar anatomical triggers - a curve of exposed breast, the soft cushion of a buttock, the hair-lined arch of a damp perineum - but in the stylization of posture achieved between Vaughan and the car. Detached from his automobile, particularly in his own emblem-filled highway cruiser, Vaughan ceased to hold any interest.

James’s queerness is specific but not incidental. Prior to the crash that transformed his sex drive, his desire for Catherine, and hers for him, was cold as Plexiglass. With their shared fetish, James, Vaughan, Catherine, and their lovers create space for new desires, not to mention excretions, sensations, and crises.

Viewed in the normative way, the fetish is limiting; the fetishist can’t have normal sexuality and instead is doomed to chase the deviant object of desire (though as we say here on DAVID, sometimes a foot is just a foot). But as an alternative to the equally limiting—and, arguably, dangerous, depending on who you are—heterosexuality from which Ballard’s characters have been wrested, it’s broadening the field of pleasure, not shrinking it. While rehabilitating from the injuries of his own crash, James discovers in exam rooms and x-ray machines that while cars claim his heart and cock, there’s endless pleasure to be found beyond the heterosexed human body. Among alien “[mazes] of electronic machinery” are “languages of invisible eroticisms” and “undiscovered sexual acts” for the roving eye of subjectivity to witness.

I’ve been thinking a lot about social contagion, and, surprising no one, I’ve found myself returning to the pervert maestros of body horror to think my way through it. Right now, some trans people are critiquing our knee-jerk response to the idea that being trans is contagious (derogatory. Paging Susan Sontag!). On this subject, I’m in agreement with P.E. Moskowitz, who tweeted recently that “ofc transness is socially spread!!!! there’s no set number of people who are trans!!! we must be comfortable with the idea that many more people WANT to be trans. and that’s good!!! stop with ur born this way bullshit!!!”

I enjoy thinking about the trans people who made me want to be trans. Some of them I wanted to look and be like, like the first transmasculine person I ever spoke to. Some of them, like Morgan M Page, were trans in a different way but had created transsexual lifestyles and communities that I desperately wanted for myself, that were familial, political, glamorous, intellectual, sexy, defiant, and brave. Whether encountered interpersonally or otherwise, these trans people are why I am the way I am—which is to say, alive.

They’re not the whole picture. Pretending that my social contagion of transness begins and ends with trans people would require pretending that they’re the limits of my social existence. Yet cis people have comprised the vast majority of my human relationships, especially the formative ones. Within the confines of cisnormativity, this has been traumatizing in ways I will never be able to fully express. In thinking about my cis influences, the word salvage comes up frequently—true to queer form, I’ve taken a great deal from straight culture3 that wasn’t meant for me.

But what about the cis people who saw my transness, who nurtured, supported, desired, fetishized, or welcomed it? If being trans is contagious, it’s not impossible that a cis person was my Patient Zero.

Find me on Twitter. Preorder my second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), out June 28. I have events and everything!

Book Passage Pride Reading with Gretchen Felker-Martin: Thursday, June 23, virtual.

The Strand Book Launch with Torrey Peters: Tuesday, June 28, in person.

Subscribe to support GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, an 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

I wrote about the newest Croney joint here, if you missed it.

2

Lol I’ve written about her here, here, and here.

3

Reminder that I occasionally, I use cis and straight interchangeably. This is never done by mistake.

David Davis 38, part 3

Read Part 1. Read Part 2.

“That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Mankind (or humankind, as we’d probably say now) has been to the moon. You, the human reading this, almost certainly have not.

In thinking about how we talk about ourselves as a species, I’m forced to reckon with how little I, personally, have to do with our global supremacy1. Whether God granted us “dominion over…every living thing that moves on the earth,” or we’ve just leveraged evolutionary advantage (plus a little luck), humans have been apt, resourceful, intelligent enough to develop calculus, circumnavigation, the combustion engine, plastic, computers, Post-it notes, instant coffee—the full spectrum of technologies necessary to send a guy to the moon and bring him back again all in one piece. Humans did that. I am a human. I am somehow involved, and yet, of course, not in the least. I’ve never even changed a car tire.

A movie cliche you’ve surely encountered is the character who looks up at the Milky Way and says, in awe, something along the lines of, “It makes me feel so small, like an ant.” Ants haven’t built any rockets, but they do accomplish feats of engineering that, like the feats of humans, may be more accurately attributed to the group than to the individual. Scientists use the term superorganism2 to describe the ant colony because individual ants aren’t able to survive by themselves for extended periods; the ant as an individual is contested ground, at best.

Understood as a component of the superorganism, what does a single ant know or do? It knows to collect food and it plays its role within the colony because the colony wants it (understanding want as a not-necessarily-conscious function, here). Separated from the colony, not only is the ant as good as dead but it has no agency, purpose, or knowing.

For all that I don’t believe in it, intelligence is often on my mind. But maybe believe isn’t the right word. I mean, I believe in intelligence, just not in the way that it’s been naturalized. Like “biological sex,” race, or disability, intelligence is a relational, culturally mediated, and context-specific quality wielded as a tool to organize and hoard power and discipline/produce subjectivity. I believe that the smart way to approach intelligence is with skepticism and with the recognition that it should never be taken for granted.

Here, when and where I am, we are trained from birth to understand intelligence as inborn and immutable but also a commodity that’s always for sale; imbuing not just value but morality; directly proportionate to one’s capacity for productivity under capitalism; and existing outside of so-called “identity politics” while also somehow magically aligning with money, power, and whiteness, plus other normalized ways of embodiment3. To me, it makes more sense to think of what intelligence does rather than what it is. In this way, we can start teasing it apart from our essentialist preconceptions, while also reclaiming those aspects of it that are useful, informative, and even, possibly, liberatory.

What good does it do to decide that one person is intelligent and another isn’t? What is gained and what is lost? I don’t mean that we should pretend there are no differences between our minds, but rather that it’s possible resist the poisonous idea that this diversity must exist within a moral hierarchy, or that it’s both utterly vast and yet reducible to a few Scantron tests taken under surveillance by a for-profit company, like your own mind isn’t yours. Can we discuss ability, talent, aptitude, skill, genius, and power, the kinds that we’re hard-wired for and the kinds that can be stunted or developed, as our life circumstances dictate, without dismissing human value? I think we can, with some practice and intentionality.

If you’re a regular reader, you know that my sister, C., has intellectual and developmental disabilities that I don’t. She is not unaccustomed to being dismissed and, frankly, oppressed, for these reasons, even if she doesn’t always understand or recognize when this is happening. As she and I build an adult relationship that goes beyond caretaker and burden—something that we must do together, but that requires a ceding of control and ego on my part—I have begun telling her that she is smart (as well as funny, cool, kind, caring, and hard-working, all of which she is).

At first, this felt unnatural, and I think, though I don’t know for sure, that it surprised her. It’s not something she’s ever regularly been told. But it’s true. Why didn’t I ever tell her that she was smart when she gained a skill, learned a word, told a funny joke, made an insightful observation, or otherwise demonstrated growth (something that all people of all I.Q.s4 can do)? Because it never occurred to me to do so. And because when it finally did occur to me, the notion felt almost taboo, as if I was giving away a finite resource meant to be hoarded for others more “deserving” than she, including myself.

Find me on Twitter. Preorder my second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), out June 28. I have events and everything!

Book Passage Pride Reading: Thursday, June 23, virtual. I’ll soon be announcing my extremely exciting conversation partner—don’t miss us!

The Strand Book Launch with Torrey Peters: Tuesday, June 28, in person.

Subscribe to support GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, an 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

Which of us maintains that supremacy and under what terms is well-trod ground here, I hope. Suffice it to say that, in speaking about humanity as a group, I have not forgotten that our power is distributed along the lines of white supremacy and anti-blackness, neo/colonialism, patriarchy, etc.

2

Some scientists have suggested that humans (rather than humanity) qualify as superorganisms because of our microbiomes.

3

Eugenics, baby.

4

Fake.

David Davis

When David Cronenberg took the stage at the Walter Reade Theater last night, he was introduced—to a smattering of dry laughter—as the Prophet of the New Flesh.

“Maybe the Prophet of the Slowly-Aging Flesh is more like it,” the great director humbly rejoined, his shock of white hair standing at attention.

Since Torrey had plans, she generously donated her tickets to the New York premiere of Cronenberg’s newest film, Crimes of the Future, to me and Jade. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart, Crimes is a revival of OG body horror Croney, a return to his old stomping grounds of rent flesh and razor’s edging after a couple decades of less viscerally grotesque, if not less brutal, fare1.

Crimes drops us in a near-future—more ravaged by climate crisis than now—where famous performance artists Saul Tenser and Caprice (Mortensen and Seydoux) titillate audiences with waking surgery in darkened drawing rooms. As Saul and Caprice’s star rises, a body known as the National Organ Registry begins investigating the disease, known as Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, that causes the Saul to proliferate with new organs and novel hormones; if it wasn’t for Caprice’s surgical interventions, he would swiftly become something else other, or more, than human. And he’s not the only one.

Without getting too much into it—I may actually write something like a review, at some point—Crimes’s themes of public intimacy/sex, S/M, bureaucratic quagmire, and apocalypse merge into a distinctly transsexual valence that feels blissfully depoliticized, or at least politicized differently than what we’re used to. Maybe that’s what has drawn me to Cronenberg since I first saw Videodrome (1983): his work with the textures, torments, and sensations so often relegated or even confined to us, as trans people, without limiting himself to mere gender play. Jade has an, I think, very credible theory about the chaser gaze in Crimes, but neither of us think the director emits it himself2.

As livid, shocking, and strange as it is, and as clickable a tagline as Surgery is the new sex, Crimes is most preoccupied, I think, with the creative process—a fitting theme for a highly successful artist who is, frankly, nearing the end of his life. I might even suggest that Crimes is an attempt to interrogate the limits of body horror as a metaphor by the director with whom it’s mostly closely associated. Does Cronenberg denaturalize body horror with more of the same? If he is successful—and I’m not sure that he is, still chewing on it—it proves that, even now, decades since he started this beat, it remains, as Saul says, with sensual satisfaction, “juicy with meaning.”

Find me on Twitter. Preorder my second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), out June 28. Join me on Thursday, June 23, at a virtual event with Book Passage. I’ll soon be announcing my extremely exciting conversation partner—don’t miss us!

Subscribe to support GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, an 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

For more context, I recommend my friend Chris Randle’s Letterboxd review.

2

If anyone can direct me to reviews that take into account disability, please do! A rich text, indeed!

GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY #14: on Davey Davis

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

This month, instead of doling out their sage advice, my old friend Bad Gay fixed that enigmatic gaze on ~*me*~, in an interview about my forthcoming novel, X, which will be in stores on June 28 (you can preorder here, if you want).

This interview is quite long, but the juicy stuff is behind the paywall. Subscribe to read about X’s cinematic influences, true crime, incest porn, surveillance, New York, and why I call this book my love letter to sadists. Don’t miss it.

Subscribe now

BG: As someone who’s watched you work over the years, I can say that you’re very devoted and structured. Not one lazy brunch or hangover has deterred you from putting your little backpack on and heading home and churning out pages. I’ve always been curious about whether this feels like a glorious, languid, and satisfying process, or more like a What’s he building down there , Tom Waits-type scenario. Or is it a combination? Or is that a question only a non-writer would ask?

DD: Well, first of all, I think you’re a writer, so jot that down. But it’s funny, I was just talking about this with McKenzie Wark, another compulsive writer, about how when you go on hormones all of a sudden you wanna do stuff other than the thing you’re used to grinding away at. So true, bestie. 

Post-hormones, writing has gotten a little less compulsive for me. But I also love doing it. It’s fun. And the more I do it, the more fun it gets. People talk about how much work it is, which is true. When you’re younger and less focused, it is harder, because you don’t feel like you have a purpose or a direction yet, or at least I didn’t. Once I figured that out, I didn’t want to do anything else. Writing is also how I think. I can’t think if I’m not doing that.

BG: I think it’s interesting, though, when you read writers on writing, the thing that comes up a lot is, How do you habitualize the writing? Often it’s presented as if 80% of the issue is getting your system down and doing your pages in the morning. As someone who’s been adjacent to other writers in my life, that’s something that I’ve never heard from you about your writing. Like you’ve never struggled with that part of it. 

DD: That’s just because I’m kind of embarrassed to talk about it. Because it’s very personal. 

BG: The process is?

DD: Yeah…I hate to be like, It’s my favorite thing and it’s so easy, because that’s not exactly true. There are a lot of hangovers where you’re writing through it and it feels like shit (well, fewer hangovers, these days). But what has actually helped me become a better writer was being less private about it. You talk to other writers, and learn things from them. Torrey Peters is one of those writers who seems to experiment, who will be like, I have a new thing I’m gonna do to get in my writing today. I think she approaches it like an athlete, which is a great model. Only by talking to other writers and sharing our processes have I been able to make my process work in the long-run.

BG: Do you write through and then edit? What’s your editing process?

DD: Editing is the fun and easy part. You have all the Content. Ugh, I hate that word, content. Getting the material and then working with it, that’s the fun part. That’s your little reward.

BG: Editing is the reward.

DD: Editing is the reward. Editing is an art and there’s a lot of pleasure in editing a book and sifting through it and kind of finding what it is that you’re looking for. I don’t want to say that the artistry of creating material is unconscious, but when you’re writing, that’s when you’re having a certain kind of conversation with yourself. In Alex Chee’s How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, and he he writes, “The story of your life, described, will not describe how to came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do—I think it is even what fiction is for.” If I was like, This is Bad Gay’s life, and then related all the things that have happened to you, that’s not really gonna tell me what you got out of it or why you’ve made the choices that you’ve made. That’s kind of what a novel is for, or what it does, is Alex’s take. I kind of think that the writing process—just the writing, not the editing—is reaching out to an unconscious intelligence (without making the claim that the writing is unconscious, if that makes sense). 

BG: I would say though, just to push back mildly, I don’t think that every author—and most especially not every author that’s getting published in 2022—is a built-in copy editor for themselves. I feel like you and I could list off six novels that could have used a heavy edit. And maybe the artistry would have emerged, but I think you’re talking about your process as having two parts in a way that I don’t think everybody does.

DD: I should add to that by saying that for me, becoming a more mature writer has been recognizing that I can’t just unthinkingly go into a fugue state where things come out. I never thought I’d be this person, but I plot, I graph, I color-coordinate. I use these tactics that are not very romantic, but then again, I’m a workhorse. Like, does the painter just stand in front of the canvas and wait for something to happen? I’m sure that’s not true. For a sustainable writing practice, you have to become more structured, but that’s where the spontaneity is. 

BG: I wanna talk about your influences. For me, anyway, it’s not a stretch to say that you can hear Dennis Cooper in this book. Not to brag, but I read it when it was printed on printer paper and bulldog-clipped, and I thought of it as queer noir or kink noir. I hear The Maltese Falcon in it. Were you in conversation with any authors or novels as you were writing?

DD: Not Hammett, but James M. Cain, for sure. And that was a writer that I sought out because of Old Hollywood, which is a big part of X also. Yes, Dennis Cooper, of course. Manuel Puig, forever. Sarah Schulman and Vera Caspary’s Laura, on which the Preminger film is based—that was big for me. When I was younger, I actually had a very strong suspicion of genre, which I think was ignorance and snobbishness, but queer pulp has a very strong, old history, and I didn’t know that. It took me a while to recognize it as a really interesting, useful structure for playing with archetype, which is not something I had done a lot of before. 

BG: You mean with the earthquake room ?

DD: Yeah, ter is embryonic. This book, X, was intentional. I had specific things that I wanted to do with it, so I had to research. I hadn’t read Cain before I started writing this book. The kernel was Sarah Schulman, as it is for everybody, or for a lot of people, or for dyke literature, at least. But that was my jumping-off point. Nabokov is always going to be there. I don’t think it comes through in the book at all, but he’s not ever far from my mind. 

BG: Do you have a favorite?

Read more

David Davis

I used to work as a copywriter at a third-wave coffee company. Before I was hired, I drank Starbucks, or whatever came out of the spattered pot on someone’s kitchen counter, its bitterness concealed with creamer and refined sugar. But since everything I wrote was to be printed on packages, cans, and display cases, becoming a coffee snob was a part of the job description.

I spent a lot of time at the roastery with real coffee people—roasters, farmers, buyers, baristas—getting to know the product. Dirtying countless cupping spoons, I sipped, slurped, and huffed freshly brewed varietals from Guatemala to Myanmar. Like wine, cheese, or chocolate tasting, coffee cupping requires thinking with your mouth, nose, and tongue. You use these instruments to assess the sweetness, acidity, body, and finish of not just every cup, but every sip, of the strange tea that a billion people drink each morning.

That copywriting job, which I got in my late twenties, was my first exposure to the idea of flavor as a multidimensional experience. Growing up, no one in my family approached any sensation with that much thought or intention. My parents drank sugary margaritas, discount wine, and Budweiser. Dark chocolate didn’t exist. Cheese came in sticks or oblongs wrapped in plastic. Food in general was only of interest as a risk factor in becoming fat, not that the alternative was much better; in my families, like many other white American homes, you either became fat and hated, or remained thin and resented.

This terror of fatness informed the way we ate in confusing, contradictory ways, which varied depending on which parent my sisters and I were living with. With my single working mom, food needed to be convenient and cheap, so dinner was often picked up at a drive-thru. Though my dad had a wife to shift the reproductive labor onto (though she, like he, worked full time), there was less money but an additional kid to feed: fast food wasn’t cheap enough. Since I was often in charge of my sisters, I boiled pallets of Top Ramen and gallons of Kraft’s mac n cheese, the latter occasionally bobbing with chunks of brutalized hot dog. Then there were my stepmom’s cheap diet foods—in my teens, America was cresting the anti-fatness tsunami that’s since collapsed into the insidious “wellness” rebrand—with their carcinogenic sweetness, cardboard texture, and chemical aftertaste.

Eating what you fear is not merely unpleasant. It prevents you from asking yourself if you are enjoying your food, what people and places and meals it reminds you of, what you would change about the recipe if you were to prepare it again. It prevents you from admiring what your food looks like or how it’s been plated, or inhaling its scent before it goes in your mouth, or chewing enough for comfortable digestion, or savoring a dish that is excellent or novel or, as we say in English, made with love. Fearing your food extricates you from the moment while obliterating your connection to past or future. More than being unpleasant, fearing your food is bad for you—mind, body, and soul.

At the roastery, phone and notebook ready for note-taking, I often felt very stupid. Many of my coworkers who were learning alongside me had professional backgrounds in food or hospitality, so even if they were as new to coffee cupping as I was, they had a foundation to build on that I didn’t. Everyone else seemed to be able to identify the notes of stone fruit or fresh-cut grass or baker’s chocolate that eluded my atrophied senses. Sometimes I was convinced that they were lying, that they were just pretending to agree with any coffee’s given profile. Elbow out as I lowered my face to my spoon, I imagined the shape of my tongue and the liquid around it, trying to inhale and think and perceive without dribbling down my front when I spat into the mug reserved for waste. Though intriguing, the idea that a single spoonful of a single roast of a single varietal from a single season harvested on a single patch of land could express a rainbow of flavor, holoscoping as it cooled, was alien and frustrating. Scribbling my notes, I prayed that no one else noticed how clueless I was.

I had that job for a few years, long enough to learn a little, enough that I can now appreciate coffee in a way I didn’t before. Being addicted to this bittersweet, palm-warming drink is its own simple joy; discovering through it that sensation is not off or on, this or that, was the beginning of a paradigm shift. Flavor, which I had once experienced as a numbing agent, at best, revealed its depths. Like pleasure and pain, flavor is biomedical reality, social construct, cultural memory, and the substance of our days—the composite of living.

Flavor is interpretation, divination, introspection. I’m reminded of Alex Chee’s writing on writing in his book, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel:

To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth but into it. My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, teachers, people met on planes, people I have seen only in my mind, all my mother and father ever did, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you. All of this meets along the edge of a sentence like this one, as if the sentence is a fence, with you on one side and me on the other… Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022).

Subscribe to support GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, an 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.

David Davis 39, part 2

Read Part 1.

Last week, I kicked off my series about the commodification of kink with the high-profile criminal case of Ed Buck, the white gay Democratic donor convicted in 2021 of killing two black men, Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean. Buck’s case is certainly not the first to touch on BDSM, but the way in which it was discussed, particularly by Buck’s legal team, is a fascinating nexus of contemporary popular discourses around deviant sex and the legal history of BDSM1 in America. (I promise I’m going somewhere with this.)

Sexual perversion’s enmeshment with queerness, gender-nonconformity, transactional sex, and other dimensions of sexual immorality means that there’s a long and storied history of what some (like Buck’s legal team) might today call the kink-shaming of BDSM in the American legal system2. I figure a very quick and dirty legal history of deviant sex in the USA might be useful for context.

DAVID is free, but subscribers get full access to GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY for $5/month.

Before we get to consensual violence, let’s review consent vis-à-vis violence. In the 1886 case People v. Gordon—which regarded the sexual assault of a child—the California Supreme Court acknowledged America’s earliest consent defense to criminal assault charges. The court explained that an attempt to commit a violent injury on another person “must be made without the consent of the person against whom it is made. If it be made with his consent, it will not constitute an assault.” This established a precedent for consent in matters of “violent injury” and violent sexual conduct, though from what I’ve seen of the case, the decision does appear to conflate the two; it also states that “there must be some evidence that the act was committed without [the victim’s] consent,” putting the burden of proof, it seems, on the person who was allegedly harmed. For what it’s worth, the court found that the victim was incapable of extending that consent due to her age.

Let’s jump ahead to 1967, the year of what’s thought to be the first American assault case to reference sadomasochism explicitly. People v. Samuels was brought against a man who filmed himself binding and whipping his consenting partners. When Samuels sent his film to a company to process those sweet memories, it was reported to police and he was charged with aggravated assault. At trial, Samuels defended himself on the basis of his bottoms’ consent, but, in contravention with People v. Gordon, the court rejected his argument3: consent may not be a defense to battery or assault, except in the case of contact sports4.

But even with consent, the court went on to argue, masochists must suffer (👀) from “some form of mental aberration,” thus disqualifying both their agency and their desire5. 

As recently as 2015’s People v. Davidson, the California court of appeals maintained that consent is not a recognized defense to assault, “even when based on a claim of consensual sadomasochistic activity.” Here, as in earlier American court cases, “lack of consent is not an element of the offense of assault, so the presence of consent does not eliminate the crime.” But the court in this case, as in others, is clear that consent, or lack thereof, is not the only legal consideration. In State v Collier (1982), the Supreme Court of New Jersey insisted on the state’s right to criminalize consensual BDSM activity because of the danger it posed to morality, among other things: “Whatever rights the defendant may enjoy regarding private sexual activity…such rights are outweighed by the State's interest in protecting its citizens' health, safety, and moral welfare.” In the eyes of the state, private citizens not only don’t have a right to consensual sadomasochism—they don’t have a right to immorality as the state defines it, either.

Nevertheless, the early 21st century showed progress for some American sexual civil rights, which had implications for deviant sex. Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark 2003 case in which the Supreme Court held that anti-sodomy laws targeting same-sex partners were unconstitutional, made same-sex activity legal in every US state and territory. Many arguments for the decriminalization of same-sex activity, and shortly thereafter marriage, can be applied to BDSM as understood as a kind of deviant sex6.

You don’t really need me to walk you through these arguments—DAVID readers will anticipate them and anyone sans brain worms will find them sound—but suffice it to say that since its advent, the white supremacist United States government has cynically deployed “morality” against its citizens, its colonized, and its enslaved to take and hoard power, to engorge its empire, and to surveil and incarcerate with increasing effectiveness. The state is in no position to dictate “moral” behavior, including as it regards to the criminality of BDSM; as this brief, and I’m sure not-very-good, history demonstrates, it can’t even do so according to its own internal logic.

What does this have to do with the commodification of deviant sex? More on that next time.

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David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder X: A Novel , out on June 28.

I’m excited to share that we now have a cover for the UK edition, available 10/28 from Cipher Press. I’ll be in London in late October—see you then!

Subscribe to support GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, an advice series from an anonymous gay therapist who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth. (Here’s 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.

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1

Standing for, simultaneously and alternatively, bondage and discipline, Dominance and submission, and sadomasochism. The acronym has become an umbrella of sorts these days, interchangeably, and often problematically, encompassing terms like fetish, kink, and leather. Here, as always, I try to be intentional with the words I use.

2

Have relied heavily on this 2017 article from the Hastings Women’s Law Journal.

3

I am not a lawyer. I don’t know anything about the law. I’m just sharing some patterns with you here.

4

Not that a masochist has ever chased their high in a race.

5

Check out one of Daemonumx’s recent posts for a quick read on the “mental aberration” of sadism.

6

And as recent developments with SCOTUS and Roe v. Wade remind us, the legal connections between individual sexual, medical, and gender autonomy are such that our rights regarding them are not unlike a house of cards!

David Davis 39, part 1

Hillary Clinton with Democratic donor Ed Buck

In 2017, when 26-year-old Gemmel Moore’s body was found in the West Hollywood apartment of small-time Democratic donor Ed Buck, his death was dismissed as an accidental drug overdose. Two years later, when 55-year-old Timothy Dean died by overdose in the same apartment, the police ignored the coincidence. Although by then a coalition of activists and civil rights organizations were demanding an investigation, it was not until 39-year-old Dane Brown escaped the apartment at 1234 Laurel Avenue in search of emergency medical care that the police arrested Buck.

In keeping with his extensive pattern of targeting what the New York Times calls “vulnerable men,” Buck—a wealthy white man with political connections—paid Moore, Dean, and Brown—black men with little money and less clout—to return to his apartment where he “administered large doses of narcotics to manipulate his victims to participate in sex acts.” As a result of what the media has referred to as Buck’s “fetish” for “pay to play,” two men’s lives were stolen. It’s some kind of miracle that Brown, who reported that he overdosed not once but twice while he was in Buck’s apartment, is still alive. 

At the time of this writing, Buck is awaiting sentencing. But in March, his attorneys filed to have his convictions overturned, arguing that the government “kink-shamed” him by “pointing the jury toward his sexual fetishes in an effort to obscure the lack of proof supporting the charges.” Buck’s conviction, his team’s argument goes, was based on “prejudicial and irrelevant character evidence…by presenting graphic images and videos of his sexual fetishes.” 

The governmental power—and prerogative—to punish those who engage in deviant sex is undeniable. Buck’s lawyers need look no further than their client’s own victims to witness that same systemic prejudice against queer, drug-using, and kinky people; indeed, it took a literal grassroots movement to force the justice system to treat the lives of Moore, Dean, and Brown as if they mattered. But there were other biases that Buck’s team failed to name. Why didn’t they also invoke the anti-blackness, classism, and whorephobia that almost disappeared the tragic deaths of at least two people and the traumatization of many more?

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder X: A Novel , out on June 28.

I’m excited to share that we now have a cover for the UK edition, available 10/28 from Cipher Press. I’ll be in London in late October—see you then!

Subscribe now

Subscribe to support GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, an advice series from an anonymous gay therapist who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth. (Here’s 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.

David Davis 38, part 2

Read Part 1.

Set in dreary postwar Italy, Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954) is the journey of Gelsomina, a young woman sold to a sideshow strongman by her impoverished mother. Forced into marriage to the cruel Zampanò, Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s frequent collaborator and wife) learns to clown, play the cornet, and pass the hat when her new husband strips down and breaks a giant chain with his pecs. Together, they tour the greyscale countryside in his motorcycle-drawn caravan, hustling change from apathetic crowds.

Zampanò—an electrifying Anthony Quinn—treats sweet Gelsomina very badly, though his violence is occasionally intercut with watchful, if not kind, ministrations. As A.H. Weiler wrote of the “ruthless” strongman for the New York Times, “[Quinn’s] characterization is sensitively developed so that his innate loneliness shows through the chinks of his rough exterior.” Even if the dainty Gelsomina, with Masina’s Chaplinesque face-pulling, wasn’t immediately dear, Zampanò’s monstrosity ought to mire him in one-dimensionality; yet Quinn renders a human sadist, one who cares about Gelsomina, if not for her.

But back to our story. One night, Gelsomina finds herself mesmerized by the Fool (Richard Basehart), a high-wire artist who balances miraculously above a packed city square. When she and Zampanò join up with the Fool’s circus, he goads her master into a fight. With Zampanò in lockup, Gelsomina confesses to the Fool that she wants to run away, maybe with him, but he convinces her not to leave. Bluntly but good-naturedly identifying her general worthlessness—she can’t cook, he explains, and has a face like an artichoke—he suggests that it may be her lot to remain. “Everything serves a purpose,” he says, “even the stones.”

As if in ironic cosmic punishment for his meddling, upon Zampanò’s release, the strongman finishes what he started, killing the Fool. He and Gelsomina go on the run together, finally converging with the tragic fate awaiting her in the snowy alps of the Abruzzos.

La Strada is the same movie today that it was 70 years ago, but compare its reviews over the decades to witness Gelsomina undergo an evolution of sorts. In 1956, Weiler describes Masina’s character as “simpleminded.” In 1993, Martin Scorsese adds to Weiler’s epithet: she is a “simpleminded waif.” In 1994, Roger Ebert boldly diagnoses her as “slow-witted.” In 2002, it’s the noun that is modified: Gelsomina is still a waif, but a “clownish” one. Sometimes the reviewer will sidestep mention of intelligence altogether, which tends to happen more as the reviews creep closer to us in time. In 2015, she is “sweet and naive” (as if intelligence and demeanor are not entirely extricable from one another); in 2021, she is “quiet and eclectic.”

In his 40th anniversary review of La Strada, Ebert refers to the film as a fable, a forgettable inaccuracy. But fable and parable, which to me have always felt interchangeable, are actually distinct. Both are forms of naive allegory that illustrate an instructive lesson or principle, but while parable usually has human characters, fable tells the tales of non-humans. Parable: despite his tribal enmity, a Samaritan stops to tend to the wounds of an injured Jew. Fable: tortoise beats a hare in a footrace.

Not that I miss Ebert’s point. I think, in using fable, he’s trying express La Strada’s profound simplicity, especially in comparison with Fellini’s later films, observing that it “contains many of the obsessive visual trademarks that [Fellini] would return to again and again: the circus, and parades, and a figure suspended between earth and sky, and one woman who is a waif and another who is a carnal monster, and of course the seashore.” Peopled by people and animated by archetypes both personal and general, the parable of La Strada holds a dreamy three-way with itself and history, working and reworking its themes like a taffy puller. Fellini himself called it, “the complete catalogue of my entire mythological world.” Simple, in this context, means essential, or perhaps fundamental. But as we have noticed about the language used to talk about Gelsomina—who, in the non-stigmatizing parlance of today, might be called intellectually disabled—simple can mean other things, too.

Ebert’s flip-flop opened something up for me. Italian neorealist films like La Strada (which, per Ebert, was the “bridge between the postwar Italian neorealism which shaped Fellini, and the fanciful autobiographical extravaganzas which followed”) are characterized as stories about everyday life among the poor and working class in the ruins of World War II and the wake of Italian fascism. They’re honest narratives of quotidian struggle, sacrifice, and the dehumanization of poverty and want. While it was certainly not his intent, Ebert’s inversion beckons us to inspect what it means to be human, and otherwise, a little more closely. The main characters of La Strada are poor, itinerant, and uneducated. Our protagonist, the luminous Gelsomina, is also young woman and, what’s more, a “simple” one; in her short life, she is beaten, raped, trafficked, and abandoned as a matter of course.

And yet. “[Masina] is expert at pantomime, funny as the tow-headed, doe-eyed and trusting foil and sentient enough to portray in wordless tension her fear of the man she basically loves,” writes Weiler. Both Masina and Quinn transcend, their craftspersonship powerful enough to carry us along with them (strongmen both!). This clarity disrupted my instinct to fixate on the cinematic ableism in relation to Gelsomina as a character. As I’ve written before, I grew up watching maudlin “inspiration porn” parading as art, one of the few mainstream genres where contemporary artists and characters with cognitive, intellectual, and developmental disabilities can be found as something other than a punchline. Naive allegory or not, it was invigorating to see what we would now frame as a disabled character of this kind being taken seriously.

For those non-disabled people who can only find it in themselves to infantilize those like Gelsomina, so-called innocence is easily interpreted as virtue. And it’s true that she’s good: though unintelligent, she is smart (and I mean what I say), resourceful, courageous, kind, and strong, for a time creating a real life for herself from the meagerness she’s dealt. But it’s also true that she, like her brutal husband, whose cruelty challenges the very concept of forgiveness, is a person—though, in keeping with Fellini’s allegorical form, of a type that no longer exists, and perhaps never did.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder X: A Novel , out on June 28.

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David Davis 38, part 1

When I was 8 or 9, I found a copy of John Steinbeck’s The Pearl on a shelf at my mom’s house. It was a cheap student paperback, brown but glossy, and small enough that you felt like you were reading something secret—a diary or a spell book. I took it with me to school and read it under the sycamore oaks. Spare and sure-footed as a parable, The Pearl was like if a Bible story was also Captains Courageous. When the scorpion stung the baby, Coyotito, I felt its hot barb in my flesh, too.

Steinbeck was a favorite after that, but years later, when a high school English teacher assigned Of Mice and Men, I remember peeling open the novel with a sigh of resignation. Dourly inviting us to reflect upon the mercy-killing of a disabled man by his only friend, Mrs. Something—a vapid woman with a white stripe where her scalp pared her shitty home-dyed bob—invited ambiguity where the great Californian author hadn’t sown any. Steinbeck’s villains are, as ever, the bosses, including the woman that Lennie mistakenly murders. But Mrs. Something was more interested in cross-examining Lennie’s life, scrutinizing it for value. In her classroom, naked injustice became a parlor trick or ice-breaker question. We wasted that period on the titillating sacrifice of a simpleton, instead of the evils of capitalism.

Thankfully, moral quandaries of that sort didn’t arise very often in school. There’s only so much performative pity that even wretches like Mrs. Something—who once explained that since we needed more women authors in our curriculum, she had quadrupled the number of Jane Austen novels—can puke up for stock characters like Lennie: childlike white men who are unable to stop themselves from committing sexy sex crimes against bad women. As is the case for the protagonists of Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Of Mice and Men’s Lennie is sweet, horny, abandoned, abject, and doomed (these men are also impoverished assault victims, too, but no one seems to care about that). My teacher is a stupid person who believes human value is measured in IQ points. I’ve dozed off in more than one cold, bony desk while trying to Heimlich that particular ouroboros.

It was around then, at 15 or 16, that I began to be visited by a nightmare that I won’t describe here. It still comes around sometimes, when things aren’t going so well.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder X: A Novel , out on June 28. It just received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, so that’s pretty neat.

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Subscribe to support GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, an advice series from an anonymous gay therapist who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth. (Here’s 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.