Davey Davis's Blog, page 20

Exclusive | Zach Ozma on queer art

For our last installment of GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, interdisciplinary artist and author Zach Ozma was kind enough to weigh in on a queer art question from a budding perv afraid of community backlash for edgy work.

Wrote Stuck In My Head, “1) I'm afraid to start working because I don't think my skill level will ever match what I imagine in my head, and 2) I want to write about disgusting, depraved things that scare me. I want to write about queer people with fucked up morals who have gross sex and fuck each other over…I guess I'm afraid of backlash from my family and friends, or on the other hand, backlash from the kinky queers that I want to like me if I end up misrepresenting their communities, since I haven't been able to form my own yet.”

Read on for Zach Ozma’s paywalled advice about the work of art work1.

Your skills not matching your imagination is a Certified Universal Artist Problem. With so much love in my heart, I tell you to suck it up.

Read more

GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY #14: on queer art

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

Last time, we asked readers to submit their queer art questions to be answered by today’s guest, interdisciplinary artist and author Zach Ozma. All submissions were entered into a raffle for prizes made by Zach (congrats to J and K on their victories!).

For this entry, Bad Gay and I decided to be extremely generous and share Zach’s answers with everyone. HOWEVER, only subscribers will be able to access Zach’s advice for comic artists, including homework assignments for structured creative play and a list of controversial queer artists to look to for inspiration that Zach and I came up with together.

Subscribers should also stay tuned for next week, when Bad Gay will also weigh in on this question. That will be paywalled, too, so if you want to know what Bad Gay thinks about queer art, well…you know what to do.

Hi Zach and Bad Gay,

I'm a young trans man and aspiring artist/kinkster. I have a lot of ideas for things I want to make and things I want to do. My passion is making comics, and I have a few short ones under my belt. However, I've never made a comic that I was completely excited about. 

I think this stems from a couple places: 1) I'm afraid to start working because I don't think my skill level will ever match what I imagine in my head, and 2) I want to write about disgusting, depraved things that scare me. I want to write about queer people with fucked up morals who have gross sex and fuck each other over. 

I know there's a market for stuff like this because I myself want to read it, but I think it takes a certain amount of courage to put something like that out into the world that I'm not sure I have. I guess I'm afraid of backlash from my family and friends, or on the other hand, backlash from the kinky queers that I want to like me if I end up misrepresenting their communities, since I haven't been able to form my own yet. 

Do you have any advice on getting past these fears and just creating already??

Sincerely,

Stuck In My Head

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Dear Stuck,

Few things make art-working less exciting than imagining future reviews. I have a great deal of empathy for your worry about what The Public will think of your art work and by extension you. Ask Ellis Martin—I was 100% sure our edit of Lou Sullivan’s diary would be too much sex for the people to handle, and that they’d all hate us for perving up a nice, neat trans historical figure. 

Perhaps you’re even encountering a universal artist anxiety about reception. But let’s not mince words: this one’s harder when you’re queer.

If you are a person who wants to be good and who perhaps has also come of age in a dogmatic queer community with lots of unclear rules about how to be good, you may find yourself with some anxieties about how your people perceive you. It may be hard to let go of imagining all your actions through the lens of a publicist who is trying to not get you canceled. Nobody gets any good art-making done under that level of self-scrutiny. I personally can’t even draw a full breath when I feel that way. 

So what do you do? For one thing, you build tolerance for receiving rejection or misdirected aggression—some people are going to HATE your work. It’s fine. You probably hate their work, too. Most of the time, they will not tell you. (I’m hoping Bad Gay can say some therapisty things about building tolerance.) Editor’s note: They will, next week! 

For another, you make some conscious decisions about how to protect your own feelings: using a pseudonym for privacy, not reading your reviews, asking for only a specific kind of feedback, choosing which work is for social media and which isn’t, not showing work to family, wearing sunglasses so no one can see you cry. 

For yet another, you make attempts to disentangle your personal goodness or morality or values from queer clout-chasing via buzzwords and walking on eggshells. Actually, Darryl author Jackie Ess probably says better things about this than I do, or anyway a lot of what I say I got from her: 

“I really wanted to write outside of a slightly valorized political identity, because that’s something that felt very uncomfortable for me to wear. I walk poorly in heels and balance poorly on pedestals. Just let me wobble on this way.”

Whether or not your art receives backlash is essentially a marketing question. You, Stuck, identified the market for your work (the fact that you yourself want it!) as a reason to make it. It’s difficult (though not impossible) to sell art work that doesn’t exist. Try to put off imagining publishing and exhibiting the work. Publishing and exhibiting are administrative tasks. Making the work is a studio task. I find it helps to separate them. Are you unable to avoid seeing the future audience when you are doing studio work? Try to have an exhibitionistic experience with that fantasy.

Check Out Zach's Shop

As queer artists, we are conscripted into a multi-generational conflict with interests that seek to censor deviant cultural production. Forces governmental, social, religious, educational, and simply snobbish move at all times to squeeze gay and erotic art out from the visible realm of Art and into the musty, beaded-curtain dim of Pornography. This used to be trendy on the Right, but lately more lefties seem to be riding the anti-sex wave.

You “want to write about queer people with fucked up morals who have gross sex and fuck each other over.” Good! I actually don’t think art needs to tell a morality tale. A lot of art for children does this, and art for children is popular for queer people. Maybe Steven Universe queers simply aren’t your audience—it’s ok! They have plenty of art to look at. Me? I want more smut. 

I actually think it is our obligation as queer artists to make real our most out-there ideas. This kind of art has enemies who would like to see it dead. I am telling you, it is your duty to add your fucked up, depraved comics to the visible realm of art. There’s plenty of sexual art out there that isn’t my taste or just doesn’t turn me on, but I am grateful for every bit it because it expands the visual realm, taking that big squeeze off me and my work a little. 

As poet Essex Hemphill puts it:

“They’re too busy

looting the land

to watch us.

They don’t know

we need each other

critically.

They expect us to call in sick,

watch television all night,

die by our own hands.

They don’t know

we are becoming powerful.

Every time we kiss

we confirm the new world coming.”

Every time we write queer texts, produce queer images, do queer actions, we confirm the new world coming. You worry about misrepresenting kinky, queer communities in your work because you haven’t found your own. What if you find your people BY making the work? We need each other critically. What is it about their experiences that draws you? What do you want to mimic or try on? Can you become part of what you want to represent? Is your art a way you might enter into the communities you desire? Are you a voyeur? Is that wrong?

Want to read Zach’s advice for comic artists, homework assignments for structured creative play, and a list of controversial queer artists to look to for inspiration? Subscribe for $5/month for all that and more.

Gonna be in Philly this month? Support Zach in person at:

Vicarious Love Artist’s Market

Love City Brewery, April 23 12-7pm

West Craft Fest

The Woodlands, April 30 11am-5pm

Thank you so much for supporting GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY! As you know, 100% of your subscription funds go to mutual aid and reparations projects.

Treat a friend to BAD GAY

What is BAD GAY?

For this edition, we’re splitting $4,200 between National Bailout and Philadelphia’s Morris Home. $2,100 will go to National Bailout, a Black-led and Black-centered collective of abolitionist organizers, lawyers, and activists building a community-based movement to support our folks and end systems of pretrial detention and ultimately mass incarceration, and $2,100 to Morris Home, the only residential recovery program in the country to offer comprehensive services specifically for the transgender community.

Bad Gay and I thank you for your continued support. We’re all in this together, so let’s act like it!

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. David is not Bad Gay. David is DAVID. Bad Gay and David are two separate entities, brought together by a shared passion for being gay and mean. Read more GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY.

1

This column is meant as a source of advice and entertainment, and should not be considered therapy or medical advice in any way, nor does it establish a therapeutic relationship. If you are seeking either, please look into appropriate venues.

David Davis

If you saw me writing on my vacation, no you didn’t. See you in April.

As regular readers may have noticed, I do my best to distinguish SM from sex without separating them entirely. The reasons for this are both practical and political.

The practical: you must know what you want to get what you want (failing that, you should know when you don’t know what you want). For me, deciding with my partners whether and how a scene will be sexual makes good common sense. Being prepared instead of spontaneous—or rather, preparing to be spontaneous—is as impedimentary to a good time as determining whether someone has a latex allergy or figuring out who will host. Which is to say that it isn’t impedimentary at all.

The political: Dismissing leather as purely sexual is a tactic to delegitimize its role in liberation movements and its function as a hub, engendered by semi-legal and illegal sexual behavior, for “interclass communication,” to paraphrase Chip Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. It’s also the mechanism by which perverts are pathologized and disciplined by the state and its apparatuses. Unfortunately, sanitizing leather of its sexuality—and of its history—has more recently emerged to accomplish, essentially, the same goal.

So, to recap: sex and SM are not the same thing, except when they are. As I gestured toward in one of my most popular DAVID posts, this nuance is as complicating as it is clarifying. “So-and-so is looking to get topped,” a friend might reveal about another friend. “Sex-topped or SM-topped?” a third friend demands1. Often requiring friendly debate, this distinction translates into the best kind of gossip: informative yet mysterious, satisfying yet inconclusive. (How dull it would be to be confined by sexual and romantic scripts that don’t allow for erotic detective work!) In denaturalizing sex and pleasure and divesting from monogamy and legal/biological family, we begin to have more choices, both with regards to what we “can” do2 and, more importantly, to what we can feel and experience.

Freedom isn’t free (non-derogatory). When we shred the scripts for normal, legal, sane, healthy, procreative heterosexual kinship, our relationships transform, multiply, and variegate. When you abandon the dating-to-monogamous-marriage pipeline; when you second-guess the idea that it’s natural to want family, sex, or your experience of gender to be a certain, specific, predictable way; when you begin to experience your feelings as they arrive rather than resist the unexpected ones, the clock starts working against you. Allowing your body to perceive, react, process, luxuriate, suffer, grieve, and heal requires more time than capitalism allows.

In February, I began writing about a scene I did with my friend Daemonumx, which was my first proper scene with her as a rope bottom. She tied me up and dangled me from a bespoke suspension structure in her apartment. I was warned that it would hurt, but it didn’t.

“That’s because you’re an experienced masochist,” Daemonumx said. This was validating but also scary, because it meant that she, as an experienced sadist, must hurt me harder in order to attain the effect we’re both looking for.

In rope, strength, flexibility, and well-developed interoception and proprioception3 can make your pain threshold higher, but as I’ve learned through yoga, the shapes that your body can make don’t really matter to the practice itself. Headstands and half-monkeys are impressive, but they’re not the point (in fact, advanced poses like these are only a couple hundred years old, while yoga itself goes back millennia). Attaining calm and relaxation through meditation, breath work, and a good stretch can be done by any body. The rest is just showboating.

So it goes with rope, or any other kind of scene. Discovering your limits4 while experiencing a full spectrum of sensation is a value-neutral activity that is relative to your unique body. I am deeply moved and intimidated by heavy masochists, and am likewise sometimes dismissive of SM activities that no longer challenge me, but in my better moments, I’m one of those people who basically thinks that everyone should get a trophy just for participating. A practice is not a competition, and treating it like one is a waste of everyone’s time.

While it’s tempting to pat myself on the back for needing more, Daemonumx can give it to me with humbling ease. Last week she tied me again, and this time it did hurt, though it could have hurt more (and probably will next time). I look forward to it. It’s astonishing how much pain can be managed once you learn the basics of pain management5.

If you’re not hitting your pain limit every moment of every scene—and for my money, you really should not try to—you have the opportunity to undergo other kinds of sensation. Even without a lot of pain, SM presents a fair amount of risk. The physical risks are more obvious, and far more fetishized by vanilla culture. The emotional ones get a lot less attention.

Experienced as I am, I can’t predict how a scene will make me feel emotionally, anymore than I can predict how it will make me feel physically. Daemonumx is my girlfriend’s best friend and my platonic friend. To put ourselves in this intimate scenario poses a particular kind of emotional risk, at least for me. Will I be afraid in front of my friend, with whom I am not in the habit of fear? Will I cry in front of my friend, with whom I’m not in the habit of crying? Will I get turned on? Will I get angry? It feels like a statement of the obvious as well as an ageless profundity to say: To allow oneself to feel is the definition of vulnerability.

SM is sex and it’s also not sex. In embracing this paradox instead of sticking to the script, even one of the meager ones supplied for “deviant” behavior, we take a risk that still goes mostly unacknowledged in the wider world. I can put the activity—rope bondage—into a bucket—hanging out with a friend—but that doesn’t mean it can’t crawl out of the bucket again, like a curious octopus. “I recognise in the urge to shape narrative an urge to dominate, to manipulate and control the human in service of a greater desire for meaning,” as Huw Lemmey wrote in a recent newsletter. As a writer, I used to associate this urge with the empty screen. As a player, however, I’m beginning to see it everywhere else, too.

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

Our next GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY will be out at the end of the month! Subscribe to find out who won our giveaway!

GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY is 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’m aware that not everyone talks like this, nor do I think they need to, but this is how my core cluster of dykes conducts our gossip, so!

2

Can I have five girlfriends at once? Can I have sex with any gender of person that I want without “losing” my identity? Can I have not just sexual freedom, but obligation to and interdependence with other people grounded in something other than biological and legal notions of belonging?

3

Which can be delayed or impacted, by the way, by trauma.

4

Not every scene should be a challenge of your limits, in my humble opinion. I think that’s a bad idea for most people. It’s like anything else: give yourself rests, allow yourself to explore, grant yourself curiosity, and don’t be too hard on yourself!

5

Even more astonishing is how pointless this skill set is in the face of pain that is not being carefully controlled by someone you trust. But that’s a topic for another post.

David Davis

I recently started watching Barry. The dark comedy HBO series stars Bill Hader as Barry Berkman, a hitman who catches the acting bug while visiting LA on a job.

Though roughly half the show is set in and around Barry’s Studio City acting class—orchestrated by third-rate Svengali Gene Cousineau (a very primo Henry Winkler simultaneously channeling two of the original Arrested Development’s best side characters, Gene Parmesan and Barry Zuckercorn, the latter of whom is played by. . . Henry Winkler)—Barry’s drama ignites among Chechen mobsters, Bolivian drug cartels, crusty LAPD detectives, and the man that I think of as Barry’s agent, assassin-wrangler Monroe Fuches (played by character actor icon Stephen Root). Whether they’re aspiring thespians or contract killers, the conniving, venal, and mercenary people surrounding Barry are most kindly described as colorful. It’s not a question of if but to what profound depths his friends, coworkers, love interests, and acquaintances are self-involved. The killers all have main-character syndrome, while the would-be actors marinating in professional rejection would probably have a body count, too, if they thought it would get them a pilot.

And then there’s Barry. In the midst of the machine gunfire and Stanislavskian histrionics, the tall, slump-shouldered Hader is often stoically silent, if not totally dissociated. An ex-Marine who left Afghanistan behind to make a living killing the “bad guys” queued up for him by Fuches, Barry’s emotional repression and soldierly deferral of agency prime Barry’s (re)viewers for conversations about trauma and toxic masculinity (a phrase Barry himself learns from Sarah Goldberg’s Sally, the struggling actress who has no idea what actually brought him to the City of Angels). And those are conversations to be had; if I had the energy, I’d pitch around to write about war criminal Barry as a white feminist fantasy of a “good man” in honor of season 3, which was delayed, as everything was, due to COVID-19.

But I don’t have the energy. Instead of pitching, I’m getting high and watching Barry, doing my level best to avoid feeling seen. And it’s true that, other than our lazy eye, Hader’s surprisingly butch Barry and I have little in common, physically or otherwise. As Barry scales the walls of his PTSD, however, his mutedness feels familiar. There I am, in a hoodie with my mouth agape while people around me talk about things that don’t matter. Searching for purpose in a pool of guilt. Existential dread without focus, because too much is dreadful to pick just one thing.

Who’s self-involved now?

I’ve written about burnout before. I’ve been feeling it again lately, but not for any specific reason. This is an ambiguity that I resent.

But this time around, I’m going to do something about it. I think a little vacation is in order. So this post is to inform you that DAVID will be on hiatus for the month of March. And really, it’s past due! Since January of 2020, I’ve churned out weekly writing on sex, gender, friendship, family, pleasure, pain, people named David, film, TV, art, books, and queer discourse at least once a week, on top of all this other junk I have to do, like sit in my apartment and write bullshit for my boss, ask you to subscribe to support our mutual aid fundraiser, and remind my fellow Brooklyn residents that we’re not paying our gas bills to protest the massive fracked gas transmission pipeline that Nat Grid wants to run from Brownsville to Bushwick.

So. Vacation. Toward the end of the month, I’ll have some news for you about my forthcoming novel and GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, but otherwise, the goal is radio silence.

Until April.

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

I don’t remember it very well, not even the fear. In exchange for allowing a man to tie me up where I sat on the ground, over the span of about sixty minutes, I was paid $200 (some of which went back to the dungeon as rent). My client didn’t make eye contact with me, didn’t even speak. He did tip, generously. If only they could all be like that.

Bondage, broadly speaking, is a somewhat new pleasure for me. After that client, I never again bottomed in a paid rope scene. While I’ve dabbled in other kinds of bondage over the years, I’ve never sought out rope recreationally, either. This is primarily because there are significant risks with rope bondage, and since I didn’t think I would enjoy getting tied up and suspended in the air, those risks seemed like more trouble than they were worth1.

Rope bondage’s reputation, earned or not, precedes it into the straight world. Unlike piercing or fisting, rope bondage has proven easier to co-opt and commodify than other leather activities. With their terror of actual transgression, straight players have been known to desexualize activities like rope bondage with so-called sensuality, a mere shadow of the erotic it’s intended to replace. When it is incorporated into straight sexuality2 as wellness, naughtiness, or some other flavor of respectable reinscription, rope is no longer the sex act. It is a predecessor to it or involved with it, an ornament or an approach, but it has been displaced by heteronormativity—downgraded from fetish to kink.

I hasten to remind you that I’m the furthest thing from a rope expert. This is just stuff I’ve observed in and out of the scene, and from talking to rope players that I know socially. It’s also extrapolation, because, as I expanded on at some length with my validity series, leathersex is, like most other queer-coded subcultures, especially ripe for commodification right now.

As with other activities that are typically classified as BDSM, certain popular modes of rope share a great deal with ancient practices that emphasize breath work, mindfulness, and endurance. A version of rope bondage has been assimilated into Wellness™ like meditation or whatever starvation cult they’re shilling as a diet these days—although maybe polework’s gentrification by racist & whorephobic fitness cosplayers is a better comparison here. In fact, many straight people who come to rope through Wellness™, or what amounts to what my grandmother might have once called a “marital aid,” are unaware that rope bondage hurts, or that it’s supposed to (or so my leather associate, leatherdyke and rigger Daemonumx, tells me). It’s not just straight people, of course: scrub just a little, and beneath the nonspecific spirituality with which some white players greasepaint their practice, you’ll find Orientalism, racism, and fetishization masquerading as profundity, preference, and mystique.

Perhaps my biggest barrier to rope, however, was in its aesthetics. The scene’s slow-burning baroque intimidated me. Other forms of torture can be subtle, sure, but rope, like other bondage, prizes form as highly as function, if not higher. Me, I’m more of a function girl: a utility knife and whatever’s around the house works just fine. Recently, a leatherman I know commented on the “clinical” approach I take to my scenes, and he was correct on more than one level, including the one having to do with flair. I’m not one for pageantry, extravagance, or hedonism, and while many players are, and god bless them for it, I resist their inclinations, which feel like static, distraction. Clear cuts in a scriptless world are one of the main reasons SM is so appealing to me, and rope is knotty.

But a few weeks ago, when Daemonumx asked the gc if anyone wanted get tied, Jade encouraged me to give it a shot. So I did. More on that later.

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.

1

Nothing against calculated risks! We take them all the time. RACK, baby.

2

Which I might argue is distinct from heterosexuality. Maybe.

David Davis 37, part 5

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Listen, I’m 33 years old, which means that when I watch my teen sister use YouTube, I feel like Jane fucking Goodall.

The apparatus appeared when I was in high school and she not even a twinkle in my stepdad’s eye. While we both now go on YouTube, I simply adopted it; she, Bane-like, was born in it, using it exponentially more frequently and utterly differently than I do. The influencers, recaps, gameplays, unboxing videos, and tutorials that she watches are, for her, like after-school television was for me when I was roughly her age, but while being distinct from “adult” culture (which makes sense, given that a discrete children’s culture is more easily commodified). I use these things on occasion when I need to. She’s been marinading in them her entire life.

Though we’ve had the requisite conversations about online safety, I try to stay aware of her YouTube activities (I worry a lot about her getting red-pilled or catfished), which is hard to do because what I’ve seen is, for my tastes, excruciatingly tedious. Minecraft experts with names like Dream. Something called Five Nights At Freddy’s, which for years I thought was an unlistenable music group, but which turns out to be a “survival horror video game.” Hypnotically-breasted anime characters. White guy comedians who are not even comically unfunny but who, I have to admit, I would probably have found cool and hilarious were I her age. I never feel the distance of the almost-twenty years between us as much as I do than when she briefly welcomes me into her online media habits.

Because if you sat me down in front of YouTube and ask me to share something with you—something fun and funny and entertaining—this is probably where I’d go first.

While preparing to wrap up this series about the art of the interview, it occurred to me that some of my favorite interviews are ones in which the subjects upend what can feel like a disciplinary or even humiliating ritual, particularly if those subjects aren’t straight white men. Not that straight white men aren’t capable of this as well—I don’t care one way or another about actor Jonah Hill, but his refusal to allow interviewers to talk about his body as if it were disgusting is cool—but they’re not what tends to capture my attention.

Divas on divas, made by ex-Gawkerite Rich Juzwiak all the way back in 2011, is not just the upending, or even co-opting, of the interview by divas in conversation with other divas—it’s also pure gay adrenaline. Interlinking clips of pop stars and singers like Lady Gaga and Mary J. Blige talking about other pop stars, Juzwiak makes you feel like a speedball at the mercy of an alpha warming up for the big match. From Janet Jackson activating my fight-or-flight response by demurely implying that Madonna is classless, to Mariah Carey simply saying, No., at the mention of Christina Aguilera, this ten-minute clip is a daisy-chain of feminine terror, not a one of them failing to rouse the panicky bliss of seeing a straight woman and knowing, in your bones, that gay people are obsessed with her.

Between the slams, real generosity offsets, and even enriches, the cuntiness: Whitney Houston describes Mariah Carey to Wendy Williams as “a little lamb chop.” Celine Dion calls Mariah “fabulous, with a lot of class.” Britney Spears, infamous for her sweetness, doesn’t have an unkind word to say about anybody, even Madonna, who everyone else obviously hates. My favorite clip is one where Whitney, leaning back in an almost-caricature of seriousness, her upper lip just a little too firm, allows that Madonna, “works hard at what she does.” Fatality!

True to form, Juzwiak has collated camp for us, poking fun at these women’s expense while simultaneously taking an authentic pleasure in their sense of humor and ferocious nerve. While not the sole domain of women, is the campy interview—an upending by interviewer, subject, and audience, sometimes all at once—not predominated by them? Before Zach Galifianakis did Between Two Ferns, there was the iconic (and unironic) Nebraskan broadcaster Leta Powell Drake, who died this past September; Tom Cruise may have made that couch a legend, but that furniture first belonged to Oprah, who gave him the stage and both hands to hold.

To rephrase a question I asked in Part 1 of this series, how does a good interview hold its audience’s interest over time? Juzwiak made this superclip over a decade ago, and it comprises celebrity culture going back before I was born, and yet it still maintains its hold on me, thanks in no small part to the power of the internet.

But this doesn’t mean that its appeal remains static. It changes as I change, its pleasures shifting with time (I only love Whitney more. I only love Madonna less). When I remember with Divas on Divas, I’m remembering with myself, too.

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.

GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY: a new giveaway

I’ve known of interdisciplinary artist Zach Ozma for many years now. Friendly satellites back in Oakland, where I encountered him through our mutual friend, writer Emme Lund, Zach and I didn’t really get to talking until he was touring in New York to promote the Lambda-winning WE BOTH LAUGHED IN PLEASURE: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, which he co-edited with Ellis Martin, in 2019. I liked him very much right away; handsome and accomplished though he is, Zach’s cozy effervescence makes it impossible to feel intimidated or uncertain around him.

I hope you keep this in mind when I tell you that this working artist of some renown is going to be GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY’s second special guest star1. How exciting slash don’t be shy!

That means that you can now submit your queer art questions for the chance to have Bad Gay and Zach answer them. Everyone who submits under this theme gets:

(1) 3-month subscription to GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, which includes access to our archives

(1) Chance to have their question answered by the good doctor and our esteemed guest

(1) Entry into a raffle for stickers, pins, and posters made by Zach, plus the big enchilada: this Zach Ozma creation

But wait a minute. Queer art questions—what does that even mean? The prompt is open-ended, but here are some thought-starters:

queerness, art, queer art, artistic practice, artistic jealousy, feelings around success/failure, how to get or stay inspired, how to prioritize art in your life, what the hell is queer art anyway??, the weirdness of being curated as ~queer~, am I really making art?, should I quit my jobs and move to the mountains to make art? what does queer art do?

So, to recap: Send your queer art question to badgayadvice@gmail.com by midnight on Sunday, February 20. Have a mutual aid or reparations project to recommend? We prioritize individuals, groups, and orgs led by and for black, POC, indigenous, trans, queer, incarcerated, disabled, drug using, and sex working individuals, so please send them our way! You’ve shared $2,827 in subscriber funds, so it’s gonna be a big one 😎.

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1

Revisit our first, when friend-of-the-column, Frankie, advised a reader on sex, gender, and kink.

David Davis

When I was younger, I did not understand how poet Minnie Bruce Pratt could refer to Leslie Feinberg, who used a variety of pronouns in hir public life as a transgender lesbian and revolutionary communist, as she and her in their home together. They had this intimacy, as Pratt describes in a recent interview, “as lesbian lovers.”

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David Davis 37, part 4

Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

John Berger said that glamour cannot exist “without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.” I will pretend, for just a little bit, that we’re helpless against this truism. That it is romantic, rather than implicating.

In profiling legendary talk show host Dick Cavett in earlier installments of this series, I’ve examined the art of the interview mostly in terms of the Interlocutor’s creative choices. But since I think of this art form as a collaborative one, I should also consider the interviewee in this rough survey of what it means to be publicly questioned, sometimes before a live audience and often with the purpose, spoken or otherwise, of generating money-making attention through scandal or humiliation. After spending so much time with Cavett’s interview with actor Richard Burton (which I jokingly refer to as my favorite movie), it seemed only natural that Burton’s ex-ex-wife, actor Elizabeth Taylor—in her time considered one of the most beautiful and controversial women in the world—would appear to me as a fitting subject.

There are countless interviews with Taylor from which to choose, but the first that came to mind was one she held with Barbara Walters in 2006 to promote her book, Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair With Jewelry.

The Taylor of my teen years ought to be distinctly unglamorous: an elderly, embittered woman whose tabloid-trashings for her age, weight, marriages, substance use, relationships with other celebrity weirdos, like Michael Jackson, and disjointed political commitments1 are just about as old as my pre-war grandmother. Shilling a book that is a capitalization on her history of glamour, she comes across as wispy, unfocused, goofy. “Shame on you!” she says, searching for a camera to glare at when Walters mentions that the kids of today aren’t familiar with Burton. He was, she says with a snarl, “a hunk!”

Even when I saw this interview for the first time, I sensed the depth of that glamour, legible even for someone who had only seen her onscreen in the live-action version of The Flintstones (1994). Over the years, I return to it for a good laugh, because it really is quite funny. It’s a puff interview for coffee-table book with a woman who is no longer taken seriously, if she ever has been (although Burton, and many others, have praised her talent—as distinct from her beauty or cultural impact—over the years). But still, the glamour is there, straddling grand lady and gay icon to generate the tension required for camp, where worship and denigration, over-identification and ownership, meet in the meat of affective satisfaction.

“This red is from god,” she declaims, gesturing to a chain of rubies among her collection. “And those green little things…” She doesn’t even say “emeralds!” She’s so goddamn rich—the collection was valued at over one-hundred-million at the time—she doesn’t even have to call the rock by its name!

There is something alluring about a woman who will not apologize for being so fabulously wealthy, so fabulously fabulous. She feels like royalty, like she was sent down to earth by god. Her beauty and acclaim is so tightly enmeshed with her scandal and humiliation as to be a part of it, like gemstones in a Cartier necklace, and yet somehow, even with my disbelief unsuspended again, she endears herself to me, this bizarre old woman.

“Personal social envy…” as Berger said. The remarkable thing about having one’s consciousness raised is that what you think doesn’t always change how you feel.

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.

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1

Pro-gay and pro-Zionist—the latter to a weird and disturbing degree—until her death, she anticipated the neoliberal moment, as it were. Icon!

David Davis

Years ago, I came across an evopsych-y theory for OCD that got stuck in my brain.

Certain obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors, the argument went, were of use in early human societies, meaning that those who expressed them had more opportunity to reproduce and thereby pass on that genetic tendency. The clusters of characteristics that now fall under the umbrellas for hoarding1, contamination, or scrupulosity OCD2, for example—which are here and now pathologized as mental illness—actually provided a reproductive edge. Maybe today’s collectors were yesterday’s top-dog protein gatherers. Maybe obsessive cleanliness, even when existing in the absence of germ theory, staved off disease. Maybe the kind of person inclined to ritual and mystical meaning-making could be a little intense 10,000 years ago—but maybe that same person used their inclinations to help build culture that enriched social life and strengthened the collective.

More recently, I read a book about OCD that posited the above theory’s opposite. Certain newer studies suggested that OCD’s calling-card behaviors—like counting, collecting, and checking—actually predate meaning. That is, you did not learn about the danger of germs and only then, when encountering an environmental trigger that culminated in a DSM-V-able OCD, become germaphobic. Rather, your body decided that it needed to wash its hands until they bled; needed to count the stairs up to your apartment every day 13 times, at minimum, very very very important; was simply just gonna lock and unlock the front door so many times that you were late for work that day. Then your unconscious mind filled in the empty bits to give all of that activity some purpose.

Context creates the narrative, giving discrete events the reassuring structure of plot, but the compulsion never relied on a story to exist. What’s worse than needing to pray for everyone you know before you fall asleep or they will all die a fiery death? Knowing that you must go through with it despite the fact that you also know this isn’t true.

Now, listen. I don’t know much about OCD, and next to nothing of medical history, psychology, all that stuff. I have no idea which, if either, of these theories is true, or is generally accepted by the medical establishment, or even if I have accurately regurgitated them here for you.

But I can tell you which theory is more appealing to me, as a person with an interest in obsessive and compulsive behaviors, whether or not they qualify as mental illness. I like the latter notion: the idea that sometimes our bodies do things without our brains, and that for some reason—the need for internal coherence or fantasy or self-protection of some kind—our brain then decides to cover our body’s tracks. It feels godlike to make meaning from nothing, even if that meaning isn’t strictly factual (which isn’t to say that it isn’t real). Considering the frequency with which his abominations are found walking the earth, it sounds like god is often wrong, anyway, so maybe this inductive approach to suffering makes us more like him than we realize.

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Needles are my sweet spot. I’ve had my fair share of bad medical experiences, but few involved needles, per se, though I did develop a brief aversion to blood draws after I was in a year-long paid study where I went in twice a week for labs. I could only count on a real phlebotomist being at the clinic 75% of the time; otherwise, I got stuck with a specialist (an OB/GYN, usually, as the study had to do with so-called “women’s health”), and MDs suck major ass when it comes to finding and tapping veins, even with me, whose veins are often complimented in that kind of scenario. I’m vain about my veins.

Anyway. When Dahlia got me into needleplay almost ten years ago, I came to it without any needle baggage. I didn’t have any latent psychic needs to address or any phobias to overcome. I did it because it’s a fairly easy, low-risk, relatively inexpensive way to be hurt and produce blood that doesn’t really scar, or even leave many marks, if you don’t want it to. And also because Dahlia likes it.

A decade later, I’ve had thousands of needles inserted into my skin by her and other people, and as with any other practice, I’ve gotten better at it. The first or second time, Dahlia only put in a handful—maybe eight, maybe just four—and they were probably 26g, or something like that (which is quite small. Standard size for blood draws is 21g, I believe). I was so high off the adrenaline that I went to another room to be alone so I could laugh. Now I can take dozens of needles at a time, sometimes quite big ones, before it starts to feel like an effort. Sometimes my top fucks me with them—which is to say, they twist and pull, yank them out then reinsert at a different angle, finding ways to make the tiny pain of broken skin feel more like a knife than a pinprick. Sometimes they do other things, like wrap me in plastic with the needles still inside and hit me with leather, as Jade and Ez did the other night.

I still get that adrenaline rush, just like the first time, but it’s rarely as strong, and it takes much more than a casual scene to induce that drug-like euphoria. Because if you want intense highs, you must first experience intense lows. That’s the deal—I don’t make the rules. You have to feel pain and fear if you want to also feel the good stuff, and I make it a point, these days, to have easy scenes as well as stressful ones. Depending on the scene, in fact, a few needles can even be a nice way to unwind before bed.

There is still an element of punishment to needleplay, because of course it hurts; but that pain is the only way in which it resembles the other kinds of discomfort that interest me. My needle scenes are the least hierarchical, with very little in the way of power exchange. There is no roleplay, no humiliation other than a little teasing, no direct lines to negative early experiences, like spanking, or raced, gendered, and classed sociocultural associations, as is necessarily the case with corporal punishment. My relationship with needles was created consensually, in adulthood among other adults in fun, sexy contexts. Now that I think about it, it links most closely with the tattoo as it’s constructed today where I am: adult, consensual, more or less amoral and apolitical, vaguely sexy, a little challenging, like running a 10k.

What I’m saying is that needles are, in a way, a blank slate for me. They do not put me in conversation with my distant past, like other aspects of SM, and the older I get, the more I appreciate and value this aspect of the experience. My body needs to regularly indulge in discomfort to be comfortable, for some reason. But what sets needles apart, as a way to fulfill that need, is that there is a minimum of psychic distress that must be undergone in the process. I want the sensation and I join others to take it. As I make and remake meaning from it, I am not fighting against an ancient narrative, fossilized by culture and neural memory. In writing my own story, I am struck, again and again, by how fragile the categories of both pain and pleasure really are.

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.

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What Is BAD GAY?

1

Noting that “hoarding” is the more common—and far more stigmatized—term for collecting OCD behaviors. I’ve used it here because it’s one that people recognize, but please using “collecting” when you can instead.

2

That is, if an illness of the past can be said to be an illness of the present, even provided it could be produced because of similar conditions, which it couldn’t.