Davey Davis's Blog, page 22

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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?