Davey Davis's Blog, page 2

Body scan

Brain: When I was in high school, my therapist said that eating disorders were about control. Control over who or what? Was this control in excess, or was it lacking? Could something be done about it, or was knowing that my problem was “about” something other than pounds or calories supposed to be the solution to my problem? He never explained. Strange, because my therapist loved to talk. He also did sessions with my mom, and since he told me her secrets, I could rest assured he told her mine.

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A flaming queen prancing

Regarding Frank Ripploh’s Taxi Zum Klo (1981)—a classic of queer cinema about a gay schoolteacher living in Berlin at the dawn of the HIV/AIDS pandemic—The Siskel & Ebert Review begins somewhat predictably: by highlighting one of the scenes most relatable to straight people, in which Ripploh’s semi-autobiographical Frank fusses about feeling controlled by his homemaking lover, the sweet Bernd (Bernd Broaderup), over a dinner of baked chicken. “That’s exactly what drives me nuts, that you always work so hard,” complains Frank, clearly feeling himself to be the victim of a butch nag.

When the clip ends, Gene Siskel gives us a sympathetic been there expression. “A lot of couples in the movies have had that kind of argument,” he observes.

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How can I "---" at a time like this?

Earlier this week, Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University’s Edward Said professor emeritus, announced that he wouldn’t be teaching his fall course after the school agreed to pay a $200 million settlement for trumped-up charges of antisemitism (that is, anti-Zionist advocacy on campus) and “woke ideology.” How can an anti-Zionist professor continue teaching modern Arab studies at a time like this? As Khalidi wrote for The Guardian, “[Columbia’s] draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible.”

“How can I write at a time like this?” I used to think this was a rhetorical question. Of course a writer could write, an artist create, a lover love, whenever they wanted. The problem was times like these—of war and suffering—in which doing so became vulgar or inconsiderate or wasteful. Naively, I was conflating ethics and propriety, philosophy and manners. As Professor Khalidi’s situation illustrates, however, times like these have implications that are undeniably practical in nature. How could they be otherwise? This isn’t a hypothetical, a thought experiment, a query for Emily Post. An assault on life is an assault on meaning, on which art and love depend.

In the past 24 hours, a 2-year-old Palestinian girl who died of malnutrition in the al-Mawasi area, a supposed safe zone. How can we speak at a time like this? Write? Take action? Be holy? I can’t offer you any answers (although I’ve certainly tried). But lately, as the people in what you might call my immediate digital vicinity have returned to this line of questioning, I’ve taken heart in their refusal to give up on it.

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Since 2023, the vast majority of Gaza Strip has been bombed and destroyed, displacing around 2 million people who need shelter. The Sameer Project is raising funds for tents, cash, and other vital supplies. Screenshot your donation of any amount and I’ll send you a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content. Please share the fundraiser in your networks!

The Village Shim

My boyfriend and I have this bit about how, back in the old days, we both would have been the Village Shim. In my head, this character exists in the same realm as those caveman cartoons with the leopard-print onesies and turkey bone-shaped clubs, an ahistorical cartoon so deep-fried that you can almost pretend it isn’t secretly racialized (but then, what isn’t). Of course, if we’re going to be literal about the old days, Nes and I would have been shimming in very different villages—my ancestry is European and his is African—so for the purposes of this bit, in which we know each other1, there has to be some suspension of disbelief. We would have both had leopard-print onesies, although mine would probably have had a pink bow.

The bit sticks, I think, because while neither of us know what our lives would have been like a thousand years ago, or whatever, it’s fun to pretend that we would have been together and that our genderweirdness would have had a social designation that wasn’t especially alienating or dangerous. That, while maybe a little unusual, it would have been more-or-less legible to the people around us, and that we would have had a role to fulfill based on this observable but minor variance2. But even on its own terms, this fantasy doesn’t hold water—the Village Shim is, definitionally, a weirdo, at odds with the normal genders in a similar state of difference as the Village Idiot, a humiliated figure of ableism upon whom our bit depends. Even when fantasizing about a life with less social friction, I’m unable to do so without reifying the kind that already exists.

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One time I hooked up with this beautiful real estate guy who came from lots of money. We had good chemistry, and he forgot himself with me. With the easy intimacy of straight men (I’m the only man a relationship needs, he said proudly), he spoke about the strange self-awareness of being a tall, handsome, rich Black man who felt welcomed and threatened in equal measure every time he entered a room. He mentioned his desire to travel to South Africa for all the fat-assed women there, before abruptly silencing himself, perhaps embarrassed to have shared a heterosexual thought with me, the decidedly not-fat-assed white boy he’d just bred. He didn’t know that I was used to this. Straight men call me their trophy, their fantasy, their ideal, but they would never introduce me to their parents. They come into my home, lie in my bed, and tell me everything. I’m the male friend they can fuck and the woman they can trust (or is it the other way around). I am everything in one person—like a lot of trans people, I’ve been demeaned with the best of both worlds too many times. Don’t stop, he said, when, for a moment, I ceased stroking his leg. He wanted to know if I could cook.

I worry that I’m making him sound as if he wasn’t absolutely charming, as if he didn’t walk into my house, smile, and throw open his arms, saying, Let me just look at you for a moment. When someone has been deeply loved by their family, they shine like a lighthouse for their entire lives. And yet he needed something from me. What does it feel like to be need as a woman? As a man? I know, but I will also never know.

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I don’t typically share fundraisers for people I know personally, but my friend Maddie is in a tight spot. I want to tell you all the reasons why Maddie deserves your help, but she would be the first to insist that healthcare isn’t a matter of “deserving,” and it’s sick that any of us are forced to behave as if it is. If you have a few dollars to send Maddie’s way, screenshot your donation of any amount and I’ll send you a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content.

1

Although this undermines the singular nature of Village Shim-ness.

2

Which isn’t to say that, here and now, trans people aren’t absolutely legible. The pretense that we aren’t is one of the more insidious aspects of the bigotry that endangers us.

From ape to angel

Beginning in the early 1960s, Arthur C. Clarke co-wrote the screenplay and novelization of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the culmination of an techno-artistic project as epic as its narrative1. Clarke, a scientist and lifelong proponent of space travel, believed that earth is man’s purgatory between the oceans and the heavens—“a staging ground for our ascension from ape to angel.” Coming from a man knighted by the British empire, a force whose intercontinental conquest of billions of people and countless ecosystems continues into the postcolonial era, it’s a pretty encapsulation of a perniciously white supremacist philosophy, one that we’re all paying for with every manifestation of climate change. Elon Musk could never express himself so articulately, but it’s not difficult to connect the dots between SpaceX’s explosions and Clarke’s fantasies of the final frontier.

Because you and I, we’re smart people, right? We read. We’re woke. We know, even if people like Clarke didn’t, that white supremacy and colonialism and capitalism are what got us into this mess; that the white-centric sci-fi dystopias of the past century’s popular books and movies have been the lived experience of Indigenous, colonized, and enslaved people since at least 1492; and that the only way to mitigate this global holocaust’s expansion (because there’s no going back now) is returning stewardship of the land to the people it was stolen from. So when I picked up Jordan Thomas’s When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, I expected to learn about the science of megafires—wildfires that behave in ways that would have been nearly impossible when I was a child—and the experience of the Los Padres Hotshots—a unit of America’s special forces firefighting service—which I did. I expected to feel depressed and panicked by unfamiliar details about the severity and speed of the climate crisis, which I also did. But I didn’t expect much more than that. Like, I have all this #landback stuff on lock, my friend, you don’t have to convince me! I get it!

But somehow, with Thomas’s artful arrangement of memoir, reportage, and research, I became even more certain of something I hadn’t realized I was only believing in degrees. I already knew a tiny bit about the history of fire suppression in America, the creation of “arson” and “firefighting” as pretexts for oppression in the genocide of Indigenous people. But Thomas contextualized it with scientific and anthropological history—from the vital role that fire plays in every single ecosystem, to its intentional use in human cultures all over the world going back thousands of years, to its suppression in the New World, to the Indigenous resistance of the violent destruction of this ancient science. For years now, ever since the first megafires threatened my home in Northern California, I’ve been craving a feeling of resignation. Then at least, I used to think, I could numb out the fear and anguish and rage. This book gave me something much more useful: acceptance.

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Thomas writes, “From a certain perspective, these [new] fires could be seen as aligning ecosystems with an emerging planet—transitioning from forest to brush, brush to grassland, grassland to desert, until there is no life left to burn.” This is terrifying. But in the face of this reality, the people with the most to fear (because they have already lost everything, or almost) have maintained a powerful integrity, even as increasingly desperate fire management programs become more amenable to Indigenous practices like regular controlled burns, anathema in an ecosystem transformed into a powder keg by centuries of abuse and exploitation. Despite the urgent need to act, capital still protects itself with policies that are only superficially about cooperation with Indigenous scientists and caretakers, which are assiduously rejected for the cynical compromises they are: the state will not rescue us (and who is “us?”). “Saving what for many of our people is a dystopia is not a very good strategy for allyship,” points out Kyle Powys Whyte, a Potawatomi philosopher and environmental scholar.

Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, When It All Burns also begins with apes. Thomas tells the story of primatologist Jill Pruetz, who discovers while living with a troop of chimpanzees in the grasslands of Senegal that her hosts are unafraid of wildfire. “As the fire approached them, the chimpanzees didn’t retreat—they stood and filed toward the flame front.” Like chimpanzees, many animals that evolved alongside humans are attracted to wildfire, which produces food and fertilizes the land—having developed a genetic mutation that allows us to eat cooked food, as humans, it’s literally in our DNA. “It’s not so much that humans domesticated wildfires,” Thomas writes, “but that wildfires domesticated us.”

“Then, just a few centuries ago,” he continues, “a small group of humans began putting these fires out.” As a white Californian, I had never questioned the notion that wildfire is to be avoided at all costs—why should I, when such a fear is “natural?” Over the course of 300 pages, Thomas upended everything I thought I knew about this subject in a way I can only describe as a radicalization. In search of solutions to the political gridlock surrounding prescribed burns, which settlers still view with suspicion, Thomas joins a state forester to learn how she’s organizing her community to embrace the old ways, the ones predating European colonization. While her work is slow going—“People view forest management as dealing with trees, but so much of it is dealing with emotions,” she says—she tells him that climate change no longer keeps her up at night. “This is my forest,” she says. “And I’m doing everything I can to ensure that, when it burns, it survives intact. This is one small piece of the problem, but it’s something I can control.”

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I don’t typically share fundraisers for people I know personally, but my friend Maddie is in a tight spot. I want to tell you all the reasons why Maddie deserves your help, but she would be the first to insist that healthcare isn’t a matter of “deserving,” and it’s sick that any of us are forced to behave as if it is. If you have a few dollars to send Maddie’s way, screenshot your donation of any amount and I’ll send you a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content.

1

Kubrick’s fame for his obsessive productions begins with 2001. For years before shooting, this man was inventing colors and chemicals and machines. He and Clarke were anticipating technology that didn’t come about until decades later. And out of it came one of the best movies ever made. Makes me cry like a baby.

Like Russian roulette in a tsunami's shadow

No shade, but I worry that my most of my readers are more prurient than curious. That you don’t subscribe to DAVID to think with me about art and culture, but for the occasional glimpse of something sexually intimate or ethically strange.

But then I hit send on a newsletter about blood or needles and bunch of you disappear. For a newsletter about sex and sensation, I lose way more followers to sadomasochism than you’d think. Churn’s not great for my bottom line, but considering this anxiety, it’s pretty reassuring.

So, to save us all some time, below the cut is an image of my mouth sewn shut, as well as a few words about the experience.

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Body scan

Face: Stubble feels dismayingly unfeminine. I shave most days, wondering why I’m wasting my time and irritating my skin when I could just get laser (rather than electrolysis, in case one day I wake up yearning for that five o’clock shadow). I count among my closest friends butches and transfags whose first set of stitches came from trying to shave their faces—just like dad!—at five or six years old1, but I wasn’t that kind of kid. From a young age, I was as insistent about being a boy as I was about my party shoes, which is what my family called the fake patent leather Mary

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Feeling the rush

I get everything wrong the first time I do it, which isn’t just a story I tell myself. Look at my transition: I changed my name twice (my legal and professional name is Davey, but I prefer that my friends call me David). I got top surgery twice (long story). Thanks to the pandemic, I went through my second puberty in the same house with the same people twenty years after the first one almost killed me (a longer story, which some DAVID readers may already know something about). The more important a decision is, the more likely I am to choke, then be forced to repeat it later. My dad used to compare me to a squirrel, always digging in vain for its misplaced stash of food, repenting at my leisure on all fours in the yard.

I’ve learned my lesson, even if I don’t always practice it: rush less. Over many years, this habit has made my life better, and not just because I don’t always let panic steer the ship. Taking your time with the big things really does trickle down. These days, I read more books, get in fewer arguments on social media, and pay more attention to red flags in prospective friends, lovers, and hookups1.

Which feels good, for the most part. But it does make doing some things more difficult, things that I enjoy or that strongly inform my sense of self or that just seem like what I should be doing, as someone trying to make a living as a writer in an online world. When I’m not rushing, I’m less likely to slam black coffee and shitpost; to send a mean text instead of waiting for a conversation; to invite trade who thinks a blowjob makes us boyfriend/girlfriend to my house at 1 a.m; to go to the rave or a restaurant without a mask. But as angry or unhappy or afraid as these things can make me, they’re also exciting and interesting and more likely to result in a story2. As I learn how to live between the life I have and the life I would like, to borrow from Adam Phillips, I find that I’m living less much. This is the desired result of discernment, of course, but one does miss the muchness sometimes. Can’t beat the high of finally finding that nut, as squirrels everywhere can confirm.

I want to feel special, as if every moment and action of my life is exciting and interesting and important. But I am not special, and neither are you. We are, as Phillips says, “on a par with ants and daffodils3.” So as we dwell on our “(imaginary) unlived lives,” you and I, I hope we can follow him to think as well about what the need to be special prevents us from seeing about ourselves—and what it stops us from being.

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1

No more straight men. Please clap!

2

“But think of the story!” is a great coping mechanism, but it’s not a very good reason for doing things.

3

And squirrels!

On mama's boys

I don’t believe in rimming straight men, but Cristian was so beautiful I almost asked. 30 years old and 6’1”, with big taut arms and dark brown eyes, he was nearly hairless except for a closely trimmed beard. On one pec was IX, his lucky number; on the other, the Virgin wept over a perfect nipple. At least his other tattoos—a lopsided Greek deity, a blown-out jawbone—were humanizing. Trade is not supposed to be prettier than me! But Cristian insisted that no one noticed his looks. I’m skinny, he complained, rounding his juicy lower lip. Don’t worry, you can say it.

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Pride Guide 2025 📚

This one’s about more than supporting queer writers, authors, and other artists: Trump is putting American libraries in grave danger, particularly the ones serving indigenous communities and incarcerated people. Get connected to your local library and reach out to your federal reps in the to demand that crucial funding for the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) be restored.

Essay Collections

A twenty-something Girl Going Through It, the messy protagonist of Grace Byron’s debut novel, Herculine, has long looked up to NYC’s Hot Freelance Girls, her nickname for the trans women writers who enjoyed a brief window of upward mobility back in Obama-era Jezebel and Vice. Now, one of those women, the very non-fictional Harron Walker, has—after years of tantalizing us with profiles, interviews, and even serialized fiction—finally released her own debut (charmingly reviewed by Byron herself)1.

In Aggregated Discontent: Confessions of the Last Normal Woman, Walker’s dishy yet intellectual sense of humor is on full display with essays on a broad range of topics, from reproductive healthcare for trans people, to the artist Greer Lankton, to what it actually felt like to be one of those fabled Freelance Girls. My favorite is the unexpectedly emotional piece about her grandmother, a department store clerk who found herself helping men (alleged and otherwise) in discreet pursuit of feminine clothing that they weren’t ready or able to wear publicly. Often using personal anecdotes and pop culture as her entrée, Walker sifts the liberal marketing and fascist moral panic for real stories about people who, like her, are totally normal (!)—in the sense that they, like all of us, are deserving of curious and considered writerly attention, not propaganda.

While I haven’t yet read it, Zefyr Lisowski’s Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love is another collection to look out for. “Gripping as any horror movie,” says Rax King, Uncanny explores the complexities of gender, class, and power with readings of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Antichrist (2009), Longlegs (2024), Ginger Snaps (2000), and more. (Devon Price, whose meticulously insightful newsletter I very much admire, is listed among Uncanny’s references.)

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Novels

Last year, I had the good luck to read some excellent new queer fiction, among them: the very impressive Ways and Means by Daniel Lefferts2; the brutally romantic Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (whose Nation piece on the ICE abduction of Turkish university student Rumeysa Ozturk left me in pieces); and the hair-raising Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin, the grand-dame of trans horror3, which literally made me cry (from sadness, not fear) five or six times.

I also read excellent older queer fiction, most memorably several books by the dearly departed Gary Indiana. Gone Tomorrow, which follows an American writer to the bizarre Colombian set of his director friend’s art film, wastes no time breeding nightmares with an opening scene where an airport cop beats someone to death. Resentment: A Comedy follows another writer to Los Angeles, where he and a few other gay guys make their intoxicated orbit around the trial of two Menendez-like prep-school brothers accused of slaughtering their sadistic parents. (I am not easily shocked, and yet both Gone and Resentment presented me with sexual scenes—one consensual, one not—so challenging I could feel my own artistic ambitions heaving themselves upward, like an orca out of the ocean.) Though rivetingly told and originally constructed (especially the choral Resentment, which literally circles the trial on the city’s dizzying freeway interchanges), these tragic yet acidly funny books inspire a profound depression—beneath which boils the same impotent fury that drives Indiana’s characters to booze, drugs, risky sex, violent relationships, callous venality, professional opportunism, and generally nihilistic behavior. Indiana’s bad feelings aren’t an acute but cleansing sadness. No, they stay with you, like wet shit in the groove of your sneakers. When he died, we lost a titan of American literature and reportage, period.

Last year, Bambi got real into Alan Hollinghurst, which spurred me to read more from a writer who’s become one of my favorite authors. With its incest-adjacent age-gap gay relationships, bucolic hustlers, and jubilant SoHo raves, The Spell is by far my rompiest Hollinghurst while retaining all the hallmarks of his pristine style. Hollinghurst writes perfectly; if I taught creative writing or English lit, I’d use him as an example of a writer who follows all the rules of the King’s English to tremendous effect4. That aside, his passions for elegant architecture, beautiful men, and depictions of a very English public school (and/but also very queer) social subtext unite in his unsurpassed literary experimentation with one of his favorite themes: the art of cruising.

And two novels I haven’t read yet: Passing Through a Prairie Country by Dennis E. Staples intrigues with haunted casinos, and Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyen, a satire following two Asian-American trans women into the world of men’s pro indoor volleyball, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

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Stories

You know I adored Torrey Peters’ new book, Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories, which I wrote about here. You may not know that I also adored Realistic Fiction, the debut collection by Anton Solomonik, which I was thrilled to blurb:

Realistic Fiction refuses to be normal. This truly original collection of short stories delights with disorienting humor, fascinating characters, and the enthusiastic plumbing of masculinity's many mysteries, from local politics to cross-dressing to Magic: The Gathering. Low affect yet high-fidelity, Fiction is giving Thomas Bernhard meets Dennis Cooper meets, I wanna say, Robert Walser? (While we're comparing, it's rare to find short stories as tightly moving as the Borgesian "August, 1962.")

Anton is great. I love transmasculine writers and wish there were more of us! If you have recommendations, please send them my way.

Memoir & Non-Fiction

It’s been a hard year. When feeling failed by cis people, I’ve found encouragement in the work of smart, brave, and creative trans writers, academics, and organizers who are applying their expertise as survivors to the $64,000 question: what could trans futures look like?

With her second memoir, Trauma Plot, Jamie Hood seeks meaning after debilitating misogynist violence5. With A Short History of Trans Misogyny, Jules Gill-Peterson asks, “How might trans women lead a coalition in the name of femininity, not to replace or even define other kinds of women, but to show what the world might look like for everyone if it were hospitable to being extra and having more than enough?” With Love in a Fucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell, Together, Dean Spade has written the self-help book that you simply must read if you’ve ever felt that your politics were crystal-clear everywhere except in your closest relationships. Are you always attracted to people who are “bad” for you? Has anyone ever told you that you’re terrible with conflict? Do you pride yourself on your boundaries, yet never seem to get ahold of the intimacy you crave? Are you polyamorous but struggle with jealousy? Has a betrayal by a friend, a lover, or even your entire community made you feel like you’ll never trust again? READ THIS BOOK.

Poetry

Even though Nes and I arrived early to the Poetry Project event for Essex Hemphill’s Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems (edited by John Keene and Robert F. Reid-Pharr), we ended up sitting on the floor against the back wall, leaning against each other. We listened to readings uproarious and tender from late poet’s family, friends, and mentees, then watched a projected video recording of the poet himself reading “Cordon Negro” and other poems a few short years before his death. Through my tears, I jotted this down: “Consider hatred / to be this: / the absence of everything.”6

Newsletters

For funny, informative, real slices of gay life, you can’t get much better than Maddy Court’s newsletter, TV Dinner. Subscribe for her advice column, stick around for her observations about books, movies, food, and the trials and tribulations of fostering incontinent puppies. Lately, she’s been sharing fun facts about Shakers, the eighteenth-century religious sect that went extinct in large part because they believed in celibacy (Fact: they thought shortcuts were morally wrong! Fact: they invented condensed milk! ).

TV Dinner is such a treat. I happily subscribe to a lot of newsletters, but there are few of them that I always read, every time, no matter what.

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After a cop murdered Rodney Hinton Jr.’s teenage son, Hinton allegedly took action. Get a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content when you screenshot your donation of any amount to his legal fund.

1

Not every writer or book I will be recommending in this newsletter is queer, but I loathe “LGBTQIA” and its variants for most use cases. Like, at my job I can call myself “LGBT,” which functionally means nothing, but not “fag,” which is what I actually am? My first instinct was to use “gay,” which is my preferred shorthand for non-cishet (another clunker) life and culture, but “queer” is probably the more popular solution to categorizations of this kind.

2

Read my review here.

3

Read my review here.

4

As an essentially monolingual person (I can get around with some high school Spanish, but I’m not winning any Scrabble games), I have no choice but to love English with my whole heart. Reading widely in my mother tongue and in translation, studying grammar, and exposing myself to other art forms has, I hope, taught me to appreciate its strengths without chauvinism, its weaknesses with compassion, and its role in Anglophone colonialisms with perspective, if not forgiveness.

5

Read my review here.

6

“Evil positions itself on the side of right and necessity. Pain is the enemy, regardless of its form. This constitutes the absolute logic of evil: the right to claim dominion, to name, locate, and eliminate the source of the world’s pain. In this case, Israelis here and Palestinians there; in other cases, it is other sources. The list is endless. No category is immune.”—“On Representations of Evil,” by Donald Moss