Davey Davis's Blog, page 21

David Davis 37, Part 3

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Read Part 1. Read Part 2.

There are two sides to the Dick Cavett coin, but we’re capable of nuance here at DAVID, aren’t we? It suits our subject, too. “You invert things so beautifully,” actor Richard Burton, the star of Part 2 of this series, tells Cavett in 1980. Five years later, while interviewing director Paul Schrader about his bio-drama, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, he makes the mistake of saying that writer Yukio Mishima killed himself at the age of 54. “45,” Schrader corrects him. “I always reverse numbers when it’s the other side of the world,” Cavett charms back.

As much as I’ve appreciated The Dick Cavett Show’s YouTube renaissance, it’s generated a lot of Cavett lionizing without enough Cavett critique. In an early-pandemic piece for the BBC, Christina Newland claimed that Cavett was the “greatest talk show host of all.”

Cavett’s style of hosting and of initiating genuine conversation with his guests – neither pandering to them nor acting smugly superior – reflected how entertainment and cultural spheres were liberated by the bohemian spirit of the 70s.

Now, I like this piece. It’s an informative bit of writing that captures the nostalgia that streaming Cavett can evoke for people born after his heyday, especially when compared with the dismal quality of late-night television in the 21st century. As Cavett himself said a few years back, “There’s no honor, now, to have a talk show.”

But while I agree with Newland that Cavett is one of the greats, if not the greatest, she’s dead wrong about his treatment of his guests. Though genuine, funny, and at times even sweet, Cavett can be not just smug and superior, but cruel. In fact, there are guests with whom he is nakedly dehumanizing, particularly when those guests are white women, and especially when those guests are black men; unsurprisingly, precious few black women were ever on The Dick Cavett Show as guests during its prime, and off the top of my head, I can only think of two—Shirley Chisholm and Alice Walker—out of the dozens of episodes that I’ve seen. To overlook this tendency toward bigotry (to dust off a word that Cavett himself would have used back in the 70s) is not just to do a disservice to those guests, but to misunderstand Cavett as an interviewer.

Though Cavett’s challenge as the Interlocutor—at which he often succeeds, and which others so often fail—is to draw history, insight, truth from his guests, his own shortcomings, as we may euphemistically refer to his supremacy logics, regularly overwhelm him. What makes these failures so striking, at least to me, as a white person of redacted gender, is that I get the sense that he does it defensively; in moments of powerlessness, insecurity, or mere dead air, Cavett will jockey for the top by belittling his guests, and when this happens, the guest in question is rarely a white guy.

This tactic for self-aggrandizement is far from unheard of among men and white people, whether or not they/we are hosting a talk show. But when I use the word failure, I mean it in the sense of Cavett’s project as interviewer, rather than in the sense of him being a nice person. In these moments, Cavett changes the focus of the interview; that is, he fails at his task of revealing his subject, and instead reveals himself.

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These failures are all the more striking when you consider Cavett’s reputation for control. Taut as piano wire, Cavett’s penchant for preparation is so severe that it actually works against him; he would go on to joke that in the early days of his show, he trained himself to have stock questions at the ready for when he missed what a guest said because he was “too wedded to his notes.”

This reputation for control is why Cavett’s loss of it when with a guest who isn’t a white man is so fascinating, to me, anyway. This isn’t to say he doesn’t sometimes go in on white male guests1, but he tends to be forgiving of even the trickiest weirdos, from the Thin White Duke to Brando at his most lampooned. At worst, the energy Cavett brings to these guests isn’t unlike that of a kid brother: irritating but harmless. As Esquire writes, while he doesn’t throw softballs, he’s “no firebrand griller,” either.

A possible emotional inverse of impish, an adjective often used to describe Cavett, is, I think, waspy, which is how he can be with the women he interviews, especially if they are regarded as sex symbols. “Here they are, Jayne Mansfield!” is the joke that famously got Cavett his breakthrough writing gig on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show, and I’ve often thought that its offense is located in the assumption that Cavett has the altitude needed to condescend so hard. For every interview where he mansplains to Gina Lollobrigida or speaks over Yoko Ono’s head is another where his attempts at belittlement fall flat because, well, he’s a little bitch. Most of the women he interviews, white or not, have been socialized to disappear male aggression with grace and camouflaged wit, but a lot of them let it rip with Cavett, who’s so easy to humiliate it’s almost not fun. Whether he’s being ganged up on by Janis Joplin and Gloria Swanson (a setup that feels like an acid trip in and of itself), or Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett, one has to wonder if Cavett actually likes it. He certainly asks for it.

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It is easy to recognize the sexism in Cavett’s treatment of (mostly) white women because, broadly speaking, we still only recognize sexism as a white woman’s problem2. I would suggest that Cavett’s treatment of the black men who are guests on his show is also sexualized, perhaps even to a higher degree than that of his white women guests.

Take his 1985 interview with Eddie Murphy. It begins with Murphy teasing the house musicians, a group of white guys who’ve never been to New Orleans, for calling themselves the New Orleans Jazz Band. I’ve said that Cavett is charming, but Murphy, as we all know, could out-charm him any day of the week. Still in the midst of his atmospheric rise to fame, Murphy’s charisma is soft yet sparkling. As Cavett triangulates the young comic’s burgeoning career with that of the even-then legendary Richard Pryor, he quickly draws Murphy into a conversation about his earliest memories. When he brings up Mark Twain out of nowhere, you barely have enough time to recognize that you’re on edge before he asks Murphy, his voice rippling in gleeful caricature, “Are you offended by the word ‘n- - - - -?’”

Murphy’s demeanor transforms. “Why…Where is this coming from?” he asks. He is bewildered. He hardens.

“Did I say that?” cries Cavett, campily clutching invisible pearls.

The interview continues. Though he recommences his teasing, Murphy is never once rude, but neither, I think, is he ever warm again. I was shocked to hear the word come from Cavett’s mouth, though perhaps I should not have been. While surely informed by my inexperience with racism, however, my shock was also due to having watched, just before, one of Cavett’s sycophantic interviews with Pryor, the comic genius that he plainly idolizes—and whose work inspired Murphy, too.

The sexualization takes more shape when you zoom out from this one interview. While talking with Marc Maron decades later, Murphy says that he got to know Cavett well outside of The Dick Cavett Show. Cavett “popped up” a lot, Murphy reports. “I used to hang out with Dick Cavett a lot. If you dared him to do anything he would do it.” Once, while watching Diana Ross perform at Madison Square Garden together, he dared Cavett to grab Ross’s ass. “Why you doing this to me?” Cavett plaintively demanded. But then he fucking did it—went right up onstage and did it, to Murphy’s bemused entertainment. While I won’t excuse Murphy’s role in this scenario, Cavett’s willingness to entertain it screams humiliation bottom. How can such a grudging fixation on someone, described in some circles as a fetish, not be sexual, I wonder? To speak of triangulation again (and to evoke, on some level, Barbara Kruger): how can you, as a man, sexually assault a woman at another man’s invitation and not feel an erotic charge with him?

From all that I’ve seen and read, Cavett appears to simultaneously worship and revile black men, compulsively seeking their attention by provoking outrage and offering bizarre displays of submission, usually in encounters that make him appear more like a member of the entourage than a friend. There’s another story, this one told by Cavett himself, about going on vacation with none other than Muhammad Ali. When Cavett cooked breakfast for the both of them, he turned around to find that Ali had eaten all of it.

When he realized what he’d done he put on a hilarious, pitiful sad look and murmured, “Oh, Dick. You never gonna invite me back.”

It was so sweet, I almost cried.

Like all bigots, passive and active, Cavett has this tendency to position himself as a pseudo-victim, even in this attempt at humor, which lands for me as both condescending and pathetic. It’s akin to the extremely cringe largesse that Norman Mailer demonstrates when the writer and Ali are on The Dick Cavett Show together in 1970. “I came here to pay my respects to you tonight, that’s why I came on after you,” Mailer tells Ali, offering his honor like an adult giving a child a ballon, grinning with all of Spongebob’s teeth and none of his humanity3. Mailer waits, as if expecting Ali—who almost went to prison and missed out on four of his prime athletic years for refusing to be drafted into America’s imperialist war against the people of Vietnam—to be grateful for his praise. Ali’s response is steeped in a quiet dignity that imperils the remainder of the interview with its restraint. It punctures Mailer’s balloons. It makes shit awkward.

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Over the past few years, I’ve begun to think of the interview as an art form, one serious enough to merit rigorous critique. Cavett, like almost everyone, is a person of his time, and we are hardly surprised that he demonstrates racism, sexism, and the like over the span of his 50-year career. These are, in my opinion, personal ethical failings with personal and social ramifications for the people they effect.

They are also artistic failings: to succeed creatively as an interviewer, one must interview a subject, and the subject can’t be a subject when they’ve been objectified. But even in his obscuring of his subjects, Cavett, as I’ve said, reveals himself. To paraphrase painter Francis Bacon, when you paint something, you’re painting yourself, 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.

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What Is BAD GAY?

1

There are exceptions, as with the famously homosexual and at that point socially dethroned writer Truman Capote. “I haven’t seen very many people for the last three years,” Capote tells Cavett in 1980. “A lot of people would say it’s because you have no friends left,” Cavett lobs back.

2

Exacerbated by straightness, cisness, money, thinness, non-disableness, etc.

3

Like any normal person, I loathe Norman Mailer, who physically sickens me.

David Davis

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I haven’t written about sex in a while. As I wrote a few months ago, I have been trying to think about it less: I’m sick of intellectualizing every emotional fluctuation and fantasy, every craving and mood.

There are risks to this compulsive cataloging, itself a reaction, in part, to the modern world’s technologically-produced proliferation of pleasures, with which identity and a variety of disciplining forces (e.g., criminalization, medicalization) have become intertwined. The “oracular” algorithms that clog our feeds with ads for so-called genderless clothing and TikToks that mirror back at us our own cherry-picked characteristics, like our ethnicity or our interest in vegan baking, supposedly know us better than ourselves. Initiating a feedback loop of identity, desire, and ultimately consumption, this artificial knowledge informs and influences—produces, as the theorists say—what those selves are, and could be.

These risks don’t come without rewards. The at-times paradoxical blend of radicalization and co-optation, like consciousness-raising vs “awareness,” or therapy1 vs. self-help infographics, with which we locate our selves in this hegemon, sometimes favors us. In 2020, when I was writing a DAVID series on genital preference, I tweeted: “the cool thing about having sex with a lot of people is getting to see a wide variety of bodies in sexual and non-sexual situations. it has informed my understanding of so many things, especially so-called ‘genital preference.’” The interrogation of our own desires, as I went on to tweet, has implications for our identity and self-conception; this can be (politically) formative as well as regressive.

These interrogations are why I could be radicalized by my marginalization, such as it is, and why, more importantly, I could build outward from my individual identity to a politic that’s not actually about me. It’s funny to think that picking up a Reader’s Digest in an auto shop when I was 17, in which I read that masturbation is actually okay and won’t kill you or make you go blind, was one of the many small revelations that made it possible for me to eventually become a person, which was foundational to my eventually becoming a political person.

These revelations are temporally as well as quantitatively incremental. Learning how to decouple sex from procreation, heterosexuality, and monogamy, and to subvert the scripts we’re trained from birth to follow—that is, to denaturalize sex—requires time and exposure to people, experiences, and information. Not all of these exposures make sense to us immediately, like the Reader’s Digest article did for me; revelation can be cumulative, contextual, a practice in hindsight, and not just a lightning bolt.

For example. A year after reading that Reader’s Digest, while drunkenly fooling around in a car with some straight guy, I became too distracted by what he looked like to fuck; instead of getting angry or pressuring me, he listened while I talked at length about much I wished I had his body (?!?!), then drove me to a Jack In The Box and bought me food to soak up the booze. I’ve always looked back on that experience with gratitude—he was kind to tolerate my strange behavior, and he didn’t even try to rape me. Only relatively recently did I understand what was actually going on between us, or between me and his body, anyway.

Moments like that one that help drive that denaturalization of sex, but rarely are they totalities unto themselves. It’s context, like I said. But there’s something else to it: the sexual self-knowledge that leads to political awareness and action must be chosen, again and again. It cannot be passive, because sexual repression, cissexism, comphet, and capitalism are not working passively against us. Which isn’t to say that they exert their pressures uniformly. The pressure comes from all sides, not just above.

For example. We are aware that heteronormativity motivates with punishment. It also motivates with incentive, which is something that straight people have a harder time acknowledging, especially these days. The gender and sexual scripts that we all know, though maybe don’t always recognize, often offer both punishment and incentive: girls wear pink, boys don’t cry, marriage is romantic, the nuclear family is safe, natural, and eternal. There are scripts for sexual intercourse, too, and while they can be stifling, constraining, or boring (or worse), these scripts are also incentives in themselves. That’s because, when you believe that there’s only a handful of ways to fuck, sex becomes remarkably easy. This is one of heteronormativity’s incentives to conform.

I don’t mean that straight people can’t or don’t do weirdo sex shit, or that being able to do a handstand while getting drilled means you have some kind of advanced understanding of sexuality and yourself, or that sex that looks normative can’t be pleasureful. What I mean is that we’re initiated into sex as something that can be learned, mastered, and replicated, over and over, like it’s a product on an assembly line. It is always the same, across time, space, and bodies. We’re all familiar with the script of cis man and cis woman having vaginal intercourse2, so much so that most of us can do it in our sleep, even if we don’t appear in the script whatsoever.

So what’s the benefit of this sex script, then, if it’s so deleterious to pleasure and connection? How is this an incentive of heteronormativity, and not a punishment? Well, if you know exactly how sex is supposed to be—what you’re supposed to do, how you’re supposed to do it, and how it’s supposed to make you feel—then you don’t have to be present for it, do you? You can do it, or have it done to you, in your sleep. It’s not just that deviation from “normal” sex is pathologized, criminalized, or unimaginable—it’s that following the script for normal sex can be done with a minimum of static, if not effort or pain. Heteronormativity renders sex as a specific series of acts that is done with specific people, with specific goals in mind, so much so that concepts like consent are challenging to understand and difficult to introduce into our sexual practices. Sexual practices like consent that we, as good feminists or leftists or whatever, can all agree are good are also difficult, because they require effort, negotiation, vulnerability, accountability, and presence.

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Like I said, there are risks to overthinking it. But being present can often feel uncomfortable, and no more so than when you’re trying to unfuck your approach to fucking. These sexual scripts seem simple enough on the surface, but they have roots. They’re like mushrooms that way, with fruit that we see, and miles of mycelium hidden deep underground, so that it’s easy to mistake an ecosystem for a single organism.

My advice is to follow pleasure, but there is a caveat: pleasure, like sex, like gender, like desire, also needs to be denaturalized. This is where more challenging avenues to pleasure, like difference, pain, and even abstention, come into play. I recommend those, 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.

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What Is BAD GAY?

1

This is not to say that we aren’t critical of therapy or its role in the medical-industrial complex.

2

A euphemism that I actually avoid because of its inherent implication of penetration of a certain kind. Put another way, why does “vaginal intercourse” mean cishetero penis-in-vagina? Why wouldn’t it mean any other configuration, including one in which penetration isn’t happening, isn’t happening in the vagina, etc.

David Davis 37, Part 2

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Read Part 1.

Forgive me if you’ve read this spiel before, but 2020 was hard. I spent half of COVID-19’s inaugural year at my mom’s house in Northern California, helping her care for my older sister. On top of multi-day shifts with C (whose needs can often be intense), I was working full-time and freelancing, too, petrified of getting laid off again, as I had in the first months of the pandemic. My gay family was hundreds and thousands of miles away, and I was by myself in a town where I don’t know a soul, other than estranged relatives and two of my three sisters, who due to age and other factors are more like my children than my peers. There have been times in my life where I have felt more isolated and exhausted, but there haven’t been many, and 2020 was the first that the possibility of my sweet C, alone in a hospital that might consider her IQ reason enough to let her drown on dry land, ornamented my nightmares.

I don’t remember why I started watching episodes of The Dick Cavett Show on YouTube, but suddenly it was a part of my solitary nighttime ritual, the hour or two before sleep when I laid down on my mom’s yoga mat, chain-smoked joints, and anticipated another 16-hour-day of muting C’s screams over Zoom meetings while trapped indoors by viral plague and fire season. Delighted by the seemingly endless roster of famous subjects—including Salvador Dalí, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali, Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, Lucille Ball, Truman Capote, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Richard Pryor, and my beloved Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni—I found myself entranced by the pedantic patter of this boyish Midwesterner, who over the course of almost 40 years of hosting his self-titled talk show has aged from Pinnochio-esque whippersnapper to batty examiner emeritus.

I started joking (mostly to myself, because I was mostly alone) that my new favorite movie was Cavett’s 1980 interview with Welsh actor Richard Burton, the Shakespearean heartthrob considered the successor of Laurence Olivier, and of a generation with Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, and Oliver Reed (though in the interview he talks at length about his close friendship with American actor Humphrey Bogart, born a quarter-century before him). I was already familiar with Burton, but not overly, my association being mostly his leading role in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) and his supporting role as wife-guy to Elizabeth Taylor1, to whom he was married (and divorced) two times.

But despite Cavett’s reverential preamble to the episode, the actor, whom he describes as “graceful without effeminacy,” needs no introduction. Leonine yet poised, unleashing his languorous baritone with the razored elocution we recognize from his stage work, Burton’s fading physical beauty describes an unassuming yet arresting comfort in the spotlight. If you haven’t seen this interview, go watch it—right now. I could watch it over and over, and have, letting it play in my apartment as I do dishes or clean, sometimes catching myself raptly listening, while leaning on a broom like Cinderella, to what Vanity Fair called Burton’s “Welsh-barroom raconteurship.” You can’t believe that it’s extemporaneous, the way he spins outlandish yet tender stories about his coal miner father, expounds on the craft of acting, muses on attachment trauma and alcoholism, and coyly divulges old Hollywood lore; and yet were you told it was a performance, you would also find it unbelievable.

Shoeless, in a blue suit and brown tie, Burton appears older than 54, and indeed, he is only four years from his death of complications from alcoholism. Aged both by drink and his resemblance to a Roman statesman2, he speaks beautifully of his home—“I don’t know if it’s the coal dust in the air or the eternal rain, but certainly most Welsh people sing mellifluously,”—casually recites from Hamlet in both English and German, and charmingly disparages his looks, his acting, and his writing, calling his diary “unreadable,” though at the time you could find excerpts of it in magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal3. He doesn’t watch television and doesn’t like being touched by other actors, particularly when shooting love scenes. He tells Cavett that he calls everyone he respects by their full first name, and then, after an avuncular feint to the contrary, proceeds to call Cavett by his, igniting, briefly, a kind of male homosocial warmth that’s hard to describe without irony. Dudes rock.

But that’s all I’ll say about that. If I don’t leave Burton alone now, I never will. This post is not about him, but the man sitting to his right, in earth tones to suit the drab tail-end of 70s talk show decor. Petite and fine-featured, he’s a sparrow to Burton’s eagle4. In 1980, Cavett is 12 years deep into his solo show, in control, even if obviously impressed by his guest. Almost ingratiating, but not quite, he guides Burton through his earliest childhood and into the most sensitive of subjects of his life—booze, women, and the insecurities strong enough to plague a man who got halfway to an EGOT—navigating commercial breaks as gracefully as Burton the stage. “You are clever,” Burton tells him, and as abashed as Cavett plainly is, the little bird is unflappable. “You’ll notice that more and more as we go,” he says, and his audience laughs.

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Then in his mid-forties, Cavett had had the kind of early success that, even skewed for his being a white guy and all, seems ridiculous in the age of the internet. After reading that Jack Paar, then the host of The Tonight Show, needed material for his opening monologue, Cavett wrote some jokes, put them in an envelope, and went to the RCA Building, where he hand-delivered them to Paar himself. Parlaying his luck (doesn’t that story feel massaged, like Lana Turner’s soda fountain?) into a writing gig on The Tonight Show and a brief career in stand-up, in 1968 he began hosting for ABC, and continued doing so, on one network or another, until 2007.

The Dick Cavett Show’s glory days, writes Esquire, “were undoubtedly in the early Seventies…The immensely more popular Tonight Show with Johnny Carson traded in big laughs, and his legacy can be felt in the fact that every current late-night host is either a former comedian or writer. But Dick Cavett, despite his stand-up background, was a conversationalist first and foremost. His was a subtle, impish wit. He was simultaneously disarming and confrontational. It made for some of the greatest televised interviews ever broadcast.” But Cavett is not remembered like his contemporary, Carson, or Carson’s successors, from David Letterman all the way through to James Corden (although when Stephen Colbert had Cavett on last year, he told him that he was his idol). For a guy who had enough of a presence to be threatened by President Nixon himself, he seems, if not forgotten, then often overlooked, at least here in his own country.

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I think this is because Cavett wasn’t like those other guys. “Cavett facilitates,” writes Christina Newland, fellow Cavett stan, “wry and unassuming, chairing gatherings that have the intellectual air of an old-school Parisian salon.” Though he talked often about being a comic, he was not an entertainer, like Carson. Though sometimes provocative or combative, he was not a provocateur, like Howard Stern, nor a pugilist, like Letterman. He was not an edutainment hack, like Jon Stewart or Colbert, nor a babysitter, like Jimmy Kimmel, nor a plant, like Seth Meyers, nor a dead-eyed consent manufacturer, like Jimmy Fallon.

No. As Esquire writes, he was a conversationalist, and while he wasn’t always as successful with his guests as he was with Burton, he cultivated something that it’s easy to feel nostalgic about, even if you weren’t alive to see it. Like many of us, I’ve spent the pandemic yearning for Before. As Newland writes, “Watching his show now, cooped up, makes me yearn for the days of public intellectualism, when the contrasts between people were celebrated for producing the most striking and engaging discussions, rather than manipulated and exploited for entertainment.” I think I disagree with the mythologizing inherent in her claim, but I feel, very deeply, the emotion from which it stems.

But more on that next time.

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.

Subscribe & Support Mutual Aid

What Is BAD GAY?

1

The star of her own interviews and to whom we will return over the course of this series.

2

Often cast as a Roman onstage, Burton reminds Cavett’s audience that his native Welsh is deeply influenced by Latin, the language of Britain’s old conquerors.

3

And today you can find them on Twitter.

4

Or maybe it’s better to be specific with the red kite, the national bird of Wales.

David Davis

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When I thought to join everyone in ranking the books I read in 2021, my list reminded me that Maurice was among my favorites1. E.M. Forster’s novel of homosexual love in Edwardian England, which was not published until after his death in 1970, is notable and unique for its happy ending, on which the great author refused to compromise. Forster’s “posthumous novel of gay life,” as Alexander Chee describes it in one of last year’s standout essays, follows the eponymous homosexual in his desperate struggle against the “unspeakable vice of the Greeks.”

In its attention to detail, Forster’s portrait of a young man’s developmental trajectory from innocent to lover is as painstaking as the removal of orthodontia, and yet as joyous as public sex. When he meets Clive, the agent of his first heartbreak, Maurice spends the night pacing the lawns of Cambridge, “his heart glowing.” Though the following morning, and for the next few years, he will compartmentalize his desires from his gender, race, and class obligations, Maurice’s “heart had lit never to be quenched again, and one thing in him at last was real.”

This flame stands him in good stead in conflicted Clive’s kissless purgatory, in the physician’s hostile exam room, in the hypnotist’s sterile oblivion: Maurice goes on to find Alec, the upper-class Clive’s groundskeeper, and Alec finds him, in return. “He knew what the call was, and what his answer must be. They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions’ who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.”

The publication of Maurice was a coda: as text, with its articulation of the unspeakable (including that for which Forster, personally, could have gone to prison); and beyond, with an afterword contextualizing the author’s creative decisions: “I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.” As real as their world feels to me—who among us has not had to choose between our souls and a closet-case?—Maurice the modern novel concludes as fairytale, with the two lovers disappearing into an England where “it was still possible to get lost,” as the author writes. Following two world wars, “the wildness of our island…was stamped upon and built over and patrolled in no time. There is no forest or fell to escape to today.”

Though Maurice and Alec get their happy ending, modernity keeps on its inevitable grind, in a process of attrition rather than progress. “We had not realized that what the public really loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it,” Forster wrote in 1960. The ruling class would maintain control through, in part, the criminalization of free sexuality: “Clive on the bench will continue to sentence Alec in the dock. Maurice may get off.” Though we must be suspicious of our separatist impulses—which, uninterrogated, replicate those same hegemonic structures we wish to flee—Maurice and Alec’s alternative to assimilation, even if imaginary, is what saves Maurice from obsolescence, even here, even now.

I’ve begun 2022 with another novel about (homo)sexual outlaws. Lucy & Mickey, American author Red Jordan Arobateau’s “butch trip through life before Stonewall” is worlds away from Maurice in subject matter (impoverished butch/femme dykes hustling to survive in late-1950s Chicago), style, perspective, and reception. But it shares with Maurice an insistence on pleasure as truth, as real, though for queers it can only take place outside of real life.

In opposition to that real life, to the nuclear family, straight jobs, white supremacy, and the cages of foster care, mental ward, and prison, Lucy & Mickey’s main characters live the Life, the extralegal existence relegated to the poor, the drug-using, the sex-working, the gay and transvestite, the black, brown, and indigenous. So long as Arobateau’s protagonist, teen butch dyke Mickey, chooses the Life over straightness, she will never really be a citizen, fighting to survive the great apathy of “the shops and factories that didn’t want to hire her. Restaurants and bars that didn’t want to serve her,” and the more targeted threat of the police state.

But together with Lucy, the femme she meets while turning a trick to save herself from starvation, Mickey can find her own greenwood, steal “a piece out of this insane world with its trade & its freaks.”

“It’s a dangerous world out there. Dangerous to the heart,” Mickey thinks to herself. Like Maurice’s flame, the heat of her lust keeps her warm, if not safe.

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

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It was one of three Forsters I read last year, alongside Where Angels Fear to Tread (biting but homey) and Aspects of the Novel (trippy as fuck).

David Davis 37, Part 1

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Has someone ever made you feel as if you were the most interesting person in the world? Though most of us are neither Joe Exotic nor Raven Leilani, we enjoy, now and again, indulging in the fantasy that we might someday join their number, that we’re one lucky break away from real recognition—an It Girl in the making, an influencer on the rise, an undiscovered genius vibrating in the wings.

The ability to make other people feel interesting belongs to the same kingdom as the ability to tell stories. I’ve met raconteurs, too, but their magic trick is more obvious. The Storyteller holds you in thrall, spinning yarn on the the knife’s edge of credibility. I’m thinking of an acquaintance who seems to live in a telenovela, always with a semi-legal caper, near-death experience, or absurdist breakup to share as she works her way through her pack of Marlboro Reds. She is a Storyteller because she can convince me, for a few breathless minutes at a time, that she is the main character. While her math may not always add up (Wait a minute, I thought you said that the cop went home with the meth-dealing performance artist?), my skepticism never outweighs my entertainment.

The Interlocutor, meanwhile, casts Main Character Syndrome upon you like a spell. Intoxicated by their attention, your fallback anecdote, secret grudge, or bland trauma suddenly become worthy of analysis, laughter, and commiseration. You find yourself revealing more than you ever though you would, confident in the Interlocutor’s thoughtful but unobtrusive goodwill. Is it authentic? It doesn’t matter. “My only advantage as a reporter,” wrote Joan Didion, whose death last week prompted a bunch of her quotes to recycle their way through through Twitter again, “is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.” What makes a good Interlocutor? You never see them coming and they leave without a trace.

We all have Interlocutors, of various levels of skill, in our lives. They are the historians, the gossips, the nurturers, the middle children, the conflict-averse, the fawners who’ve figured out how to hide in plain sight. I’ve no wish to pathologize—some people are simply curious—but I’m fascinated by the Interlocutor-type who wants none of my fascination, who strives not just to redirect attention from themself, but to control it entirely, rationing it out like a key-ringed steward. Appraising both subject and audience with learned perspicacity, in total control—or so they like to think—this Interlocutor-type only seems averse to the spotlight. They actually quite like it, provided that they’re running the board.

If I sound critical, it’s only because, as a writer, I’m deeply envious of the Interlocutor’s power to expose others while disclosing nothing of themself. Tempted by the discursive immediacy of online, I sometimes succumb to the fantasy of writerly tease-and-denial: that I am controlling my readers, rather than interesting them, being in conversation with them, or telling them a story. But then I remember that I am here to communicate, not to obscure. As someone who writes for a living, I must do my best to prevent this transactionalism from seeping into my art. Just because we must work within the attention economy doesn’t mean we need be defined by it.

Nevertheless, there’s much to be learned from the Interlocutor as artist and artisan. At its best, this rare and pleasurable talent pinpoints the narrative ore in a continent of content. This DAVID series will feature my favorite interviewers as a dissection of the interview as mode, craft, and object d’art: How does the Interlocutor convince1 their audience and their subject that the latter is the most interesting person in the world?

Read Part 2.

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

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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Or trick

GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY #13: can you find the pain without the suffering?

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

Submit your requests for advice to badgayadvice@gmail.com and get 3 free months of BAD GAY. All subscription funds benefit rotating fundraisers and mutual aid projects, so please share and tell your friends!

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Last time, we asked readers to submit questions according to a theme: What is your commitment to suffering? (All submissions were entered into a raffle for a Bluestockings gift card. Congrats to Azura on their victory!) Below, you can read the one that Bad Gay picked for this week.

Dear Bad Gay,

I have a storied career as a leatherqueer and pain slut, but after a lot of bad experiences and the general exhaustion that comes from growing up (I'm middle-aged now), I had mostly closed the door on that part of my life. I didn't try to convince myself that I had stopped being a masochist or a submissive, but I was no longer prioritizing that in my hookups or potential romantic partners, and had mostly given up finding sadists and dominants that would treat me the way I wanted to be treated. 

That decision brought me some sadness but also the contentment that comes from making an emotionally honest choice. And then, of course, I met my partner, a sadistic dominant whose main kink is receiving the exact same kind of service I love to provide.

Our relationship (still new, under a year) is wonderful: an ease-filled blend of egalitarian partnership with elements of an intense dynamic, small acts of D/s peppered into the day-to-day fabric of a loving relationship, and incredibly hot fucking. I'm writing to ask you, now, how to jumpstart incorporating S&M into all that.

Communication isn't the issue; I want them to hurt me, and they want to hurt me, we've discussed this. But we both have intense jobs, their apartment doesn't have a dungeon, play parties haven't come back yet, and when they come home from work to the dinner I've cooked, neither of us seems to know how to transition from those warm cuddly feelings to pulling out a flogger or a cane. I'm not inclined to ask them to schedule it, because who knows if both of us will be in the right space for it when the date and time arrives, but it also feels like the longer it takes to happen, the more fraught, in some unexplainable way, it will become.

How do we welcome this brand of suffering into our lives?

Love,

not so green

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Dear NSG,

This letter is a curious response to our prompt. I’m using your question in particular as an in-road to what I have been thinking of as the being and fussiness tenor of many of the BAD GAY responses we receive, e.g.,

“I’m happy in other parts of my life but I’m miserable on Twitter, a place I choose to be, and am also a little famous, what should I do?”

“I’m in a wonderful place in my life but I’m poly so that means I have to do some extra emotional work to fuck lots of people I love and that feels hard, thoughts?”

“I have a great group of friends and I love my community, but I’m in love with someone who hasn’t responded to a text in a year. Are they still interested? How do I get them to care?”

Above, you outline what I venture would be read by many as the dream scenario: a wonderful relationship with an “ease-filled blend of egalitarian partnership” and “elements of an intense dynamic,” where you are figuring out how to integrate the old and the new versions of yourselves, and kinky world-build together. 

And yet. What I hear in your question is, “What is any of this without suffering?” which seems to me to be at the heart of so many of our letters. Your response seeks to answer our original question with new ones: “Is this anything if I am not suffering? How do I release myself from suffering?” How do you move from the suffering of equals engaged and invested in an internal gratification-loop into the good and secure and also kinky without relational distress gratification-loop? How then do you all grow up into mature perverts?

Let me ask first, NSG, what would it mean to sink in? To really languish in the pleasure of what you have achieved? And, what do you leave behind when you leave behind suffering? When I say suffering, let’s make sure we don’t mean pain, as in the physical and sexualized experience. I mean suffering as the tacky, muddy emotional experience of distress that so many of us hold onto and nurture like so many sourdough mothers, hidden in all of our closets, trendy and begging to be fed. NSG, can you find the pain without the suffering? I actually think you might be a little bored—because without the bad experiences, who are you? Who are any of us adolescent queers growing into adulthood? 

At less than a year together with your partner, I think you can just take it easy and find out. Queer maturity is quite a feat, and I commend you. The challenge of it is that, all things being equal, if you make it to therapized, connected, having-a-grasp-on-your trauma, loving, purposeful, supportive-community adulthood, then you are greeted with a particularly excruciating expansiveness. Often, we mistake that for an issue. You, against all odds, made it here. What would it mean for any of us to stop striving, when we know so well that our private worlds are really only limited by our imaginations? What does it mean to just be?

Functionally, I could tell you to rent a hotel room once a month where, yes, you schedule your S&M, but where you would also get out of your own zones into the unfamiliar to play through scenes in a strange new space where you can RP like the middle-aged perverts you are. Don’t despair in this—decide to delight in it. Perverts in LTRs have to get a little creative because, lest we forget, the roots of perversion lie in the novel. It’s horny because it’s disgusting, so what happens when it becomes common in your life? So, again: Functionally find ways to make kink uncommon in order to re-infuse it with the taboo that gets you off. Also, talk to your partner, move into the next phase together, and say out loud both what’s wanting and what you enjoy about the things you’ve worked for together.

Yours, 

Bad Gay

Thank you so much for subscribing to 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 $2,220 between No New Jails NYC and . Half will go to the former, whose name says it all, and half to project, which highlights two books each month written by authors of color and sends these book picks to incarcerated comrades.

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 the appropriate venues.

Your favorite DAVIDs of 2021

The retrospective is a little early this year because I have a hunch that no 11th-hour barn-burners are coming your way between now and NYE.

Not that I don’t have them in me. But since 2022 is going to be a busy one for your humble David, here and elsewhere, I’m hibernating when and where I can.

Thank you for reading in 2021 ✨.

On kink as therapy

Part 3 of this series, which spanned 2020 and 2021, resonated with people who, like me, are suspicious of efforts to make leathersex respectable.

In seeking to justify more easily sanitized aspects of BDSM by claiming that choice aspects of it are good for us, this educator engages with leather’s detractors on their terms, not ours. This is where the concept of respectability politics comes in handy. Instead of challenging anti-BDSM moral panickers and policymakers with, No, it is actually good for me to get stepped on by a woman pretending to be my Mommy, what if we were just honest?

I don’t care if it’s good for me. It doesn’t need to be good for me for me to be allowed to do it.

On bisexual problems

In this unlocked edition of GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, the good doctor advised an inexperienced bi on the pitfalls of clinging to a straight sensibility.

Congrats on being able to sexualize women and NB folks, just like the rest of society. The bad news is that having the ability and desire to fuck women and NB folks is easy. You do not get points for this. I’m happy for you, but no medals are awarded. You place yourself historically in the context of a whole lot of people who can fuck all manner of lesser or less socially acceptable people but find it “bizarre” to think of loving them and building relationships with them.

Subscribe to GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY

On the dyke nod

As friend of the newsletter Sabrina Imbler (whose next book we await with great excitement!) tweeted, it’s nice to have a little discourse, as a treat.

Do you expect the dyke nod from all masculine queers, or just the ones you want to fuck?

On genital preference

Another series that spanned 2020-2021. Fun to write, lots of haters!

Cis people who take “genital preference” seriously are pretending that our bodies are weirder than theirs.

On Gerri and Roman

In which I urged Vulture to reconsider their stance on whether or not Gerri and Roman of HBO’s Succession have fucked.

“Succession, just let them fuck! Or don’t,” begged Vulture yesterday in a very handy timeline of the duo’s so-called “sexual tension.” But they have fucked. As I recently threaded about, the “consummation” of Gerri and Roman’s relationship has already happened (see above). Any other reading of the text not only misunderstands the diversity of human sexuality generally—and Roman’s in particular—but the driver behind audience interest in the fate of these star-crossed lovers.

On normal girls

In late 2019, Stephen Ira invited me to read at one of the NYC release parties for Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma’s We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan. It was a beautiful celebration of an important book, a revitalizing sharing of work on “transmasculinity, intimacy, and freedom,” as the flyer put it. Here is what I read:

I was once a normal girl with a normal family. Like other normal families, mine watched The Godfather movies on Sundays after church.

On passing, a year later

Ongoing reflections on passing, with a short review of Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (which got picked up by HBO in February).

One of the strongest aspects of Half is Bennett’s weaving of the somatic experience of trauma into her characters’ lives, using their bodies’ defense mechanisms to color and inform their desires and decisions. This is a function of her empathy for all of her characters, including the often-hard-to-empathize-with Stella, whose decision to abandon her sister and integrate into whiteness is held up alongside the nightmares, terrors, and dissociation of a young life shaped by vicious anti-black violence, including the horrific lynching of Stella and Desiree’s father when they were young children.

On safe, sane, and consensual

The first post in a series about New York leatherman david stein, known for being one of the people to coin safe, sane, and consensual (SSC) in the early 1980s. The series also discusses M/s, race play, respectability politics, and desire.

These days, leatherpeople (or at least the leatherpeople that I associate with) dump on safe, sane, and consensual like we dump on “valid” culture, or like stein himself dumped on stand & model back in the day. But while SSC is way out of date in 2021 for a variety of very good reasons, it would be a mistake to forget the context from which it emerged, and what it can tell us about that time’s (leather) politics. To paraphrase Gayle Rubin, our rhetorical needs as leatherpeople seeking to defend ourselves and our movements differ over time and across communities.
on bad faith and risk-taking

On queerness and pain at the Whitney

How an artistic collaboration about dykehood and erotic kinship prompted more questions than it answered.

I suppose it was silly of me to expect that an artist operating at Elle’s level of institutional recognition—even as a trans person of color—might be less misunderstood. The frequency with which Elle’s work was, at best, benevolently dismissed as an “exploration” of undefined “issues of gender and cultural identity”4 was an enlightening experience for me.

On the top box

How a joke about queer sex turned into my second novel.

Having just published the earthquake room, I had begun thinking about what I wanted from a second novel. As I took more control—and more responsibility for—my body and my desires, I realized that it wasn’t just people like us that had a complicated relationship to the metaphor of sexual positionality. All of us did. So I began writing a book about what happens to a top who decides they don’t want to be a top anymore.

Until next year, friends.

David Davis 36

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What it means to write about oneself online has changed dramatically in the 15 years since I’ve come of age.

In high school, I was taught to regard my beloved white lady Confessional poets, who spilled the secrets of feminine domesticity1, as gifted but undisciplined creative accidents, forces of nature to be diagnosed and controlled, while their male counterparts’ indiscretions were taken for granted. In college, I was assigned Pamela and Shamela, 18th c. epistolary novels written by men from a woman’s perspective, which I half-read while developing my Online Voice, then still in its infancy, with the brand-new technology of the Facebook status update2. In my twenties, most everyone who wanted to make money as a writer—including me—failed to resist the tech-enabled trauma farms, from Gawker to Bustle to Buzzfeed, that shilled out payment as generous as $50 and as scant as exposure or spreading awareness in exchange for our highly clickable tales of sexual assault, workplace abuse, medical violence, and state terror.

One would think, now that everything from birth onward is livestreamed, and fights, funerals, and federal murder are uploaded, viewed, and shared indiscriminately, that writing about oneself online in 2021 would have lower stakes. To divulge, to share, to spill—shouldn’t the bar for exposure (derogatory) be lower, now that we’re post-personal essay, post-finsta, post-OnlyFans mainstreaming, post-Jeff Toobin?

And yet, as someone who has now lived the majority of their life online (which is saying something, unless you’re a Zoomer), I’m not sure that it is. The facial-recognition software is more sophisticated (though ever-skewed), the targeted ads more insistent, the internet as Wild West now Gone With The Wind. Anonymity is harder to come by, is what I’m saying, while the pressure to blend self and brand has an inverse relationship with the returns that diminish with every passing every year.

Nevertheless, I think I’ve struck a balance of self-revelation. Because of course I must reveal myself. I can’t not. To the extent that my writing must display my stakes in a given subject—as a gay person, a trans person, a sick person, etc.—it’s unavoidable. But for the most part I am able to write about myself on my terms, because these days I am both wise and lucky enough that I don’t need to do it out of fear or a sense of scarcity. That is, I no longer write in a way that makes me feel vulnerable (though whether or not it actually makes me vulnerable is another matter).

This is a skill that we, as online writers, many of us working for free or damn near, hopefully learn over the years, the remnants of our lessons so much detritus caught in the gears of the wayback machine. Comfortably grown-up and carefully employed by someone who pays me to write stuff that isn’t mine, I can publish about fucking for money or family estrangement without sitting up nights, sweating through my sheets, because, sensitive as these topics are, I have not exposed myself despite myself. If I am revealing, it’s because the revelation has already been resolved (likely in therapy), and this is an advantage of aging and a privilege of mental health care.

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This does not mean I am not on my guard. I write so much, and about so many things (though I do have my beat), that it’s easier to locate my soft underbelly by looking at what I’m not writing about. And since DAVID began, what I have not written about the most is my girlfriend. I mention her here and there, sure, but she has remained separate from all of this, and that is by design.

Recently, Jade mentioned this separation. She wasn’t reproachful, but she has noticed that while I have written about exes, sex, and X, she rarely makes an appearance.

Oh, really, I replied. But that was a feint. I, too, have wondered why she almost never leaves my journal.

Is it because I don’t know what to say? I have spent hours wondering how I would write her brown eyes or her cheekbones for the benefit of someone who has not seen them; on the way these features shimmer and transform as my feelings for her deepen. A Grecian urn, a Lascaudian wall, an aubade would be better formats than prose, I often think. Words, or mine anyway, don’t do justice. But then justice implies balance, equity, a measuring of sorts, and what I want to say is not to be calculated.

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Not long after Jade and I started dating, we watched Manhunter (1986) for the first time together, and it swiftly became a dyadic shorthand, an ur-text for a relationship that I did not expect to happen, work, or last. In the two years since we met—including the six months that we were separated by the pandemic—we have found such pleasure in cinema, a glowing safe haven amidst all of this. Manhunter especially and in particular activates a certain sanguinity that we somehow share, bringing us to the edge of the separation that lovers must live by.

“It's hard to have anything, isn't it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet,” says Molly, Manhunter protagonist Will Graham’s wife, in an eddy of calm hollowed from dread and carnage. It’s a watchful, searching film, but in their scenes, Will and Molly look at each other. “Slick as hell,” he replies.

In honor of Manhunter, I spent a year researching and writing a middling essay for a website with the respectable but small twitter following of 33K. I was paid $1003. I read two books, watched the film at least a dozen times, talked about it endlessly, wrote around and toward it, pitched and haggled with editors and proofers, suffered my final 11th hour overnighter—all for a piece that will surface and sink like a bubble on the Pacific. It’s not about Jade but it’s not not about her, or us. Even though I’m happy with the end result, it does not say what I originally wanted it to say, which would have gestured toward, at least, why I need her.

Why don’t I write more about Jade? The closest I’ve come is an essay about a cult-classic horror thriller released the weekend she was born. But I’ll keep trying. I know the value of our days.

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

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.

Subscribe & Support Mutual Aid

What Is BAD GAY?

1

Or some of them, anyway.

2

This was back when people were still bitching about the social media phenomenon of people posting “what they had for lunch” in a public forum first developed to rank women based on their hotness.

3

I’m not complaining. I love Bright Wall, Dark Room and I love the writers it supports. It’s a shame that the going rate for such excellent work, including an essay by my friend Aegor Ray, which I encourage you to read, can’t sustain the average American writer.

David Davis 35

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A few years ago, my friend L noticed two seashell-shaped bookends on a shelf in my bedroom. With the smirk she acquires at any chance to tease, she levied that most most brutal of accusations: “These look like something your mom would own.” As exes and best friends, L has been in my life for a decade, which means she met my mom back when the two of us were on good terms, even staying at her home for a holiday or three. L was right about the bookends, and I hated it.

It’s a cliche that women fear becoming their mother, and I once fit into it neatly as a slice of bread in the toaster. But if I was doomed to that fate, I felt, back then, that it was only fair that the parent in question should be the one who could grow a halfway-decent mustache.

Once more, I’ve found myself shaking hands with the monkey’s paw. Like other people who use testosterone but aren’t male, the possibility of being seen as such used to circle like a vulture. For years, I told myself, my therapists, my friends that the world didn’t need another white man, which was a cowardly obscuring of the truth: that neither maleness nor “femaleness” can alter the fact of my whiteness. It took time to learn that medical transition is not unmediated by other aspects of my identity, and that the red herring of “becoming a white man” is an ultimately transphobic one. The possibility of trans men is to be treasured, not feared.

I got over all that. As I read more as fag and less as butch, I have undergone the discomfiting comfort of acquiring some new kinds of (albeit conditional) structural power, as well as of novel vulnerabilities that can’t be meaningfully described to those who don’t experience them. Those old fears—of “becoming” a man, of “losing” a womanhood that cis women never liked granting me, anyway—relied on an understanding of identity and legibility to which I no longer have the luxury of subscribing.

As I’ve adjusted to these old ambiguities, new ones arrive to test my limits. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that I would graduate from the fear of becoming my mother to the fear of becoming my father, but now that I have, it manifests in funny ways. I have not woken up, some transgender morning, to find myself a misogynist, like an incel Gregor Samsa, or pressure-cooked by heteromasculinity into total emotional unavailability (though I do feel its rib-cracking weight). Rather, I am able to empathize with my dad in ways I could never have before; now that my body more closely resembles his than my mother’s (kinda? sorta?), the world has folded back on me accordingly.

My dad is a redhead, which you can see in the siblings I share both parents with. My older sister grows an auburn mane, straight yet unruly thick; my younger sister’s curls, darkening like mine over the years, are sandy, with chestnut highlights. An ex-towhead, as an adult my hair has always been mousy, as Lucille Ball might have put it. But as my second puberty finally draws to a close, I have been finding tawny bits inside my disposable razor cartridges, only a shade or two darker than my dad’s old handlebar.

When I magically shedded most of the insecurities I inherited from my mom—a provincial, white, middle-class American woman addled by fad diets and Facebook—I never expected them to be replaced by my dad’s private moments of puniness (or what I suspect them to be, anyway). Occasionally, I find myself transposing him onto my life. I don’t mean to, it just happens. Here he is, sitting at my desk in the Brooklyn apartment where I live alone, Slacking with people who own MBAs and second homes, going to therapy (An activity which turns you into a faggot, he used to maintain. Guess he was right.), attending parties hosted by semi-famous transsexuals or fancy magazines he would only scoff at, if he’d ever even heard of them before. I haven’t seen him in years, and I hate him with my life, but when he is here, in my place, I worry about him. Does he feel lonely? Afraid? Inadequate?

I still have those bookends, which I know he would dislike.

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

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