Davey Davis's Blog, page 3

Fuck it. I'll take a risk.

When I enter the hospital, the street’s piss and gasoline vapors are sealed out by a rotating glass cylinder that looks like a hamster wheel tipped on its side. At the front desk, the shovel-faced security guard emanates a spiky cologne with head notes of licking a nine-volt battery on a dare. He prints my driver’s license on a sticker and hands it over before waving me through what I think is a metal detector, though it’s never turned on. As I apply the sticker to my t-shirt, another security guard points at the elevators. I ride up with two nurses, women I reflexively think of as middle-aged and yet who could easily be in their thirties, like me. They smell both clean and contaminated, as healthcare workers tend to, embowered in bleach, talcum powder, rubbing alcohol, peppermint gum, blue razz vapes. At the sixth floor, the elevator bursts open, sucking like an airlock. In rushes the almost oleaginous odor of the public American medical facility: fried food, farts, and the uncanny lemon-and-lavender tang of Fabuloso.

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I’m here to visit my neighbor Robert, who I brought in last week. Robert is a shy but friendly man who lives on the street outside our apartment; Jade and I have gotten to know him since I moved in last year. Lately I’ve been looking forward to summer on his behalf. This past winter, no matter how cold it got—and it got fucking cold, especially for homeless New Yorkers, whose numbers have more than doubled since 2022—Robert politely refused our offer to sleep in the vestibule at the bottom of our stairwell. He didn’t want to impose, and it was clear that experience had taught him that suffering was smarter than trusting. Our compromise was a camping chair that Nes found on Facebook Marketplace and a stack of blankets that we put out at night and took in the next day.

But over the past few weeks, I noticed Robert having more and more difficulty walking. Only a month or so ago, when he joined me while I ran some errands, he kept up easily—though I had to prevent him from walking into traffic sometimes—while we chatted about space travel and how Greenpoint used to be a nice neighborhood1. Now he wasn’t even leaving the block, sticking to a recently emptied storefront two doors down from ours. His dirty clothes became filthy and his spot was surrounded by garbage, neither of which Robert would normally permit, being painfully aware of what that can mean for someone in his position, especially in a bourgie neighborhood like ours. When I asked him about his legs, he waved me off or started stringing words together in a way I couldn’t understand. While this is how Robert talks most of the time, I’ve learned that he just so happens to become less coherent when he doesn’t want to discuss a given topic. In any case, he insists on not being a burden, especially to those he considers his friends.

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On Thursday morning, I came outside to find Robert yelling, in his heavy Brooklyn accent, at nobody, which is something I’ve only seen him do at night, when the street is mostly empty. I went back upstairs and made him some coffee—black, like he likes it—and returned to stand with him for a while. Red in the face, he ranted and raved at a spot a little past my right shoulder, leaning on an iron fence for support. You know I don’t mean you, he once interrupted himself to clarify, before diving back into his tirade. Fuckers think you can do this to me when I tell you the truth and you ask yourselves how is it that a man such as this is looking you in the face from out here, right or wrong, and you lie to yourselves while you lick your knives…

Later that afternoon, after he’d calmed down, I asked Robert if we should go to urgent care. Fuck it, he said, I’ll take a risk. The nearest CityMD is a ten-minute walk away, but he would never make it on foot, so I called a car. He smoked a cigarette while we waited for it to arrive, then asked me to hold onto the rest of his pack and his life savings, a couple of five-dollar bills wetly wadded into the shape of a fist.

At CityMD, the doctor urged us to go to the emergency room, and not just because it’s the only place where Robert, who doesn’t have an ID or anything to pay with, can’t legally be turned away. It turned out that he had a very serious infection in both his feet and needed to be examined by a wound specialist immediately.

I held out as long as I could, Robert kept apologizing. I ordered another car.

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After our apartment building burned down when I was seven years old, my mom baked dozens of chocolate-chip cookies for the firefighters, who had done their best2. This memory came to me when the ER admitted Robert right away thanks to the CityMD doctor, who had told us how to lie in order to make his condition seem as serious as possible. I wished I could go back in time to hug her. But looking at Robert’s bare feet, which resembled rancid beef jerky that had been crushed by an anvil, I wondered how much we’d really needed to grease the wheels. Did someone light them on fire? Robert asked, peering down at himself from the top of his stretcher.

I stayed with Robert in the ER, translating his story for the intake team and explaining to a series of confused RNs and doctors what I meant when I said neighbor. I didn’t want to overemphasize his homelessness, in case it led to a poorer quality of care, or even to him getting booted before he had gotten the medical attention he needed. But because I had given him a change of clothes, and because I was there with him, it took them a while to figure out what had gone wrong in the first place. Only later did I realize that some of the clinicians had initially assumed they were looking at the results of extreme neglect—which wasn’t true, at least in the sense they were thinking. You know, it might be exposure, one doctor finally muttered to another, using a bare finger press down on the white-rimmed ulcer splashed across Robert’s hairless shin. An unhoused man with a housed companion of indeterminate gender was clearly not on their bingo card3.

It wasn’t on ours, either. Robert was afraid and so was I, although I was also relaxed by the ER’s unceasing movement and by the alert boredom of its young, racially diverse staff—men and women with tense, affectless faces, tight-fitting scrubs, and extreme My parents yelled at/ignored me vibes. Not me getting turned on, I thought, fussing with the strings on Robert’s gown. He asked me to stay with him, but visiting hours were almost over. I assured him I would be back in the morning. You promise? But morphine was already dulling his pleas.

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For the past week, I’ve gone to see Robert for an hour or two every day. When we’re not talking, looking at newspapers, or watching TV, I’m trying to piece together the story of his diagnosis, which was delayed by the holiday weekend. A friend connected me with another friend who’s been in a similar situation, and she shared what she knew about medical social workers, housing vouchers, psych evals, healthcare proxies, and ways I could help Robert, who’s leery of going to a rehabilitation and nursing facility to continue healing, without violating his autonomy. I’m trying to change his mind about that. If he gets discharged—or leaves early, against doctor’s orders—how will he heal his infection? After the doctor told Robert he had gangrene, I told him I was worried for his health. Well, I’m worried about freedom, he replied.

While I haven’t spend much time in hospitals and ERs, I feel at home anywhere sick, old, disabled, and mentally ill people are crammed together on the cheap. Robert’s nurses and doctors quickly came to recognize his only visitor. They are kind, or at least professional, calling him baby, bringing him treats, and answering my questions so I can make a plan to support him, whatever happens next. They are also unkind and unprofessional, telling Robert to be grateful that someone is willing to help him, chastising him for doing this to himself, implying that he does street drugs (he isn’t currently using, though this is of course besides the point), making snide jokes about him being “schizo,” and not bothering to hide their frustration when he puts up the least resistance to going to one of the city’s homeless shelters, which are so horrible he would rather die than return. I already know how to maintain a sort of cognitive dissonance about the abusive people that you rely on. This is American healthcare, especially for the sick, old, disabled, and mentally ill: patients who can’t afford better are deprived of almost every livable option except the oversight of overwhelmed, underpaid, and mightily exploited workers shoehorned into circumstances that make abuse inevitable, from doctors to medical assistants to social workers and all the way down to me, the housed acquaintance who could, at any time, invite Robert into their home (and not just their vestibule), but won’t.

When I enter the hospital room, Robert cries out, My friend! and shakes my hand. He can’t seem to believe that I always come back and tells me he prays to god that I will. When I met him, I didn’t want to be his friend. Helpful, sure, but not his friend. Maybe if I had been pushier about his feet, this wouldn’t have gotten out of control and we could have remained neighbors. Now Robert may need more than a neighbor, especially if he’s permanently disabled. (And anyway, if you’ve cried with someone, I think that’s grounds for something like friendship, at least.) I’m alone! I have nobody! This is what Robert yelled on Thursday morning while I stood beside him with his cup of coffee, waiting for him to get it out of his system. I could have contradicted him, but with what? I care about you, but I won’t blow up my life for you. What kind of care is that? I’ve given him cash. I’ve washed his clothes. I’ve helped him pee. I’ve touched his shoulder while doctors told him scary things. I’ve listened, bored and annoyed, as he invents religions and spins out on conspiracy theories (Is someone trying to kill me? he sometimes asks. No, no one here wants to hurt you, I reassure him, though we both know that this isn’t precisely true). I’ve brought him Kinder eggs and orange juice. My girlfriend and boyfriend bring him gifts, my friends ask how he’s feeling. It’s not enough. I’ve offered Robert my help, but I fear he’s not in a reality where he can receive it.

Jade said that I started talking to Robert more when her cat, our beloved Marcus, died in November. You always need a little guy, she said.

I’m ending this newsletter with additional reading on homeless Americans and homelessness in America. It’s hardly exhaustive, just the first few pieces that came to mind. If you have any to recommend—especially if it’s written by someone who is or has been homeless or unhoused, as some of these are—please add it in the comments.

“The Invisible Man” by Patrick Fealey

“Four Men” by William T. Vollmann

“California's homeless crisis could be Gavin Newsom's political albatross” by Alicia Victoria Lozano

“A Climate Dystopia in Northern California” by Naomi Klein

“Getting the House” by Cheryl Rivera

“Forced Alternatives with Tracy Rosenthal” on the Death Panel podcast

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1

I can never tell if Robert is referring to gentrification or to the mysterious street gangs that he believes are around every corner. In terms of the threats they pose, I guess it doesn’t really make much of a difference.

2

I’ve come to realize that this was most likely my mom trying to find herself a man. This fallen apple can hardly blame her.

3

As an androgynous transsexual, I am my context. Everyone in the ER assumed I was a woman, in part, I think, because I was serving as a caretaker for a man.

What I've been reading and watching

What I’ve been reading

Last week, Jade told a friend that I’m going through a “French peasant” phase. “Which book was that again?” she later asked me.

Had she meant John Berger’s Pig Earth (or even the author’s English turn in the photojournal-esque A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor)? Or was she referring to my more recent obsession with the tremendous Jean Giono, whose Song of the World changed my life, and whose Ennemonde (sensual, aphoristic tales of a fat, beautiful matriarch and her machinations for pleasure and freedom), The Open Road (while the Melville aficionado’s American influences rise to the top like cream, Giono’s affection for Steinbeck is especially apparent in this picaresque about an itinerant smart-aleck with a homoerotic fixation on a con-man), and A King Alone (what if David’s favorite Provençal novelist took a mid-century swerve into the noir with a blood-chilling chronique about a rural serial killer?) are currently rewiring my brain—no less because I’m reading the genre-expansive1 writer through a series of translators?

It’s not escape that I find in these books, nor do I believe that their authors, the great Marxist and the unwavering pacifist, would wish to provide it for me. But there is comfort in their reverence for and solidarity with what Berger called “the so-called ‘backward,’ whether they live in villages or have been forced to emigrate to a metropolis.” As the Trump administration dismantles the fed, decimates public health, and deports refugees, migrants, and citizens to Bukele’s concentration camps; as trans rights here and in Europe are under attack and even regressing; as war, famine, and nuclear uncertainty endanger and immiserate people the world over; and as, most horrifically of all, the Nakba enters its 78th year with what may have been Gaza’s deadliest night since October 2023, we will need this comfort.

To read novels is not enough, but if you can read novels, too, I think you should. I’ll conclude with a passage from Ennemonde: “The New Testament agrees with no one; the Old Testament with some people, sometimes; but what accords with everyone is the sense (which has no name in any language) that nothing is dust.”

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What I’ve been watching

In my dad’s house when I was growing up, our holy trinity was Jesus Christ, Ronald Reagan, and John Wayne (not necessarily in that order).

For this reason, returning to John Ford as an adult is like receiving a dream meant for someone else: it’s hard to know what’s their memory, what’s mine, and what’s been gleaned by both of us from the cultural ether, the soup of art, politics, and propaganda. Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience after seeing a film that’s been legendary your whole life, as I did with Citizen Kane (1941), Casablanca (1942), and now Stagecoach (1939), one of the most influential Westerns ever made. As Roger Ebert wrote, “Seen today, Stagecoach may not seem very original. That’s because it influenced countless later movies in which a mixed bag of characters are thrown together by chance and forced to survive an ordeal.”2

It’s with great regret that I report that the young John Wayne, a man I eventually learned enough about to loathe, is achingly beautiful. As Ringo Kid, a gentlemanly outlaw that’s long, lean, and squinting3, with a Silent Era star’s soft lips and labile smirks, Ford’s muse idiosyncratically pre-empts his vowels in that way so perfectly parodied by Robin Williams in The Birdcage (1996). I suppose it’s impossible to speak of the Ark Movie (as Ebert calls it) without summoning its imitators and iterations, which applies as much to Stagecoach’s now-iconic story and stars as it does its setting in Tsé Biiʼ Ndzisgaii, the sacred Navajo valley that has, thanks to Ford, since become the visual shorthand for cowboys, Indians, and Manifest Destiny in the American West4. Everything’s a palimpsest, even the originals.

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Like Stagecoach, much of which takes place in the stagecoach itself, The Long Voyage Home (1940) is a chamber piece by contrast, with the action occasionally boiling over from innards of a sailing ship to decks, wharves, and pubs. Cinematographically, the tramp steamer’s belly produces ingenious fish-eyes and other claustrophobic perspectives. Even better, Ford is careful to change the lighting according to the weather and time of day, with an effect so realistic as to be eerie, and yet too beautiful for waking life. I’m thinking of the crepuscular bridge, its helm and doorways misting with lamplight as the SS Glencairn drifts into World War II, its sailors certain they’ll be drawn into battle and die as “unsung heroes.”

In keeping with this month’s black-and-white theme, I’ll share two more recent viewings, both of them rewatches for me:

The sublimely phosphorescent The Night of the Hunter (1955), with Jade. We were struck by the abstract simplicity of the set pieces, which were designed by Hilyard Brown to evoke the tunnel-vision perspective of children.

Fellini’s final black-and-white film, 8 ½, with Nes; though the director famously identified himself as a liar, his psychological honesty—which is ultimately, I think, a loyalty to the child he once was—is my favorite thing about him.

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1

Sorry.

2

You can go ahead and disregard his defenses of Ford and Wayne as “not racist.” Get real.

3

“My dear, you’ve set your gaze upon the quintessential frontier type. Note the lean silhouette, eyes closed by the sun, though sharp as a hawk. He’s got the look of both predator and prey.”

4

In her episode about John Ford, You Must Remember This’ Karina Longworth gets into the racism of Stagecoach and other Ford Westerns, particularly regarding the Irish-American director’s depictions of Native Americans, and the complicated relationships early Hollywood’s Indigenous actors and crew members had with Ford and other white settler filmmakers.

So we talked about nothing

When she called, she didn’t greet me with her mouth full of food as she sometimes does, clearly relishing the minor social transgression. She didn’t try to put someone else on—one of her po-faced roommates, hollering from across the room, or a sullenly pithy staffer—then demand to know if this stranger and I knew each other. She didn’t talk over me, her favorite habit.

These are all things that I might hang up on her for, and have, and will again, I’m sure. But last night she was unusually present, if performatively sniffly. She had obviously been yelling at or with someone, and wanted me to know it. When I asked what was wrong, however, she said she didn’t want to talk about it, which was also unusual.

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Some sensory experiences

Since his address was in Williamsburg, and since he was a white gay man whose photos had all been taken in a locker room, I assumed he would live in one of those hideous high-rises with the cardboard walls and airport toilets and on-site doggy daycare. But though it was only a few steps from the Google store, Drew’s building was old and shabby, as was the apartment he shared with an indeterminate number of other people. Dim, spacious, and strewn with ancient bric-a-brac—Disney’s Ursula vamped on a light switch; dusty artificial vines framed doorways hung with quilts; ironic postcards lined the seams of crumbling corners and open cabinets—it reminded me of the many high-turnover, hand-me-down leases where I’ve lived, sucked, and fucked my way from West Oakland to New Orleans.

His bedroom was too small to be as messy as it was, but his rent was only $800; I congratulated him on his luck. Though we were still dressed, he invited me to sit on his rumpled bedspread, where I avoided eye contact with the cluttered dresser, the closetless rack of clothes, and the standing mirror pitted with, one can only hope, the human body’s natural adhesives: spit, pus, flecks of dried toothpaste. While we chatted, I daydreamed about filling a series of big plastic garbage bags and joyfully carting them to the nearest landfill. There’s nothing more ordering than absence.

It’s shallow, I know, to be turned off by slobs, but I did like Drew, a polite and mild-mannered lawyer around my age. He wasn’t bad-looking, either: big eyes, strong nose, weak hairline, with an upper body that was overdeveloped in proportion to his long, slender legs. In person, he was more effeminate and deferential than his messages suggested. I felt two ways about this—safe and sexless—which is really only one, now that I think about it.

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Drew’s tongue was nauseatingly frictionless, but I liked how his face felt in the crook of my neck, awakening my hair follicles and flushing my skin. He wasn’t wearing underwear beneath his jeans, which while not unexpected is a sensory experience I try not to think about. If I don’t wear something under denim, myself, I feel distressingly dirty; I don’t know how gay guys do it. As I had already confirmed, his cock was nice, rising quickly and easily to a respectable length and girth. I went down there as soon as possible, eager for the distractions of old reliable.

He talked to me, stroking my hair, and I began to relax. But when he reached down into my pants, his fingers went immediately to my asshole. Well, shit, I thought. Flattered as I was, gender-wise, by his homosexual instincts, I knew their next stop would be my pussy, even my clit, and the specter of a UTI ruined the mood I was in the process of summoning. The effort of stopping, negotiating, sending him to wash his hands, starting it up all over again—it just wasn’t worth it. I sucked his cock for a few minutes longer, trying to ascertain, by his sounds and shifting tumescences, what gave him true pleasure and what was merely encouragement or good manners, and then I stood up, apologized, put my shirt back on, and left.

I haven’t really been fucking strangers lately. Most men are only as dangerous as you allow them be, but I’ve gotten tired of knowing what happens if you give them an inch; I wish I didn’t, but I do. At the same time, rapidly enshittifying hookup apps seem to have gotten straighter and more violent—especially since January—while my ginger experiments with the men-seeking-men section of Tinder have proven, again, that I’m too trans for dating among normal people. Drew was an anomaly, the fluke alignment of opportunity, hormones, psychosexual conflict, and a paradoxically motivating apathy. It’s for this reason that, despite its interruption, our encounter felt like a success to me, the first I’ve had in months: nothing bad happened, which these days I don’t take for granted.

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Get a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content when you screenshot your donation of any amount to political prisoner Ángel, a butch lesbian, community organizer, and 2020 uprising defendant who is currently in ICE custody. She will not fight hir deportation to Chile, where she has not lived since the age of 7, but will need money to rebuild hir life from scratch. You can also send money directly to Loba-Cabrona on Venmo or $PunkWolfe2 on Cashapp.

(the) gay trauma convention(s)

Can you imagine expressing your sexuality in public without having to look over your shoulder? Because America has brutally commodified most of its commons, the majority of us cannot, save for in rarefied spaces where cash has temporarily suspended the forcefields of the moral panics that bestride us1. If I personally am to even have the option of this kind of normalcy among cis people, I must pay for it. What’s more, the cis must be of the resolutely not-normal sort.

This weekend, I went to IMsLBB—which I cheekily referred to as the gay trauma convention over on Twitter, but which is more like Spring Break for perverts—where attendees dress, socialize, and fuck as animals; get fisted on motorcycles; carefully drown their lovers; host salons to discuss the pros and cons of moistening one’s cigar on a stranger’s asshole; sexually identify as sixteen, eight, or two years old while having been born during the Carter administration; become aroused by the sound of

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The eyes have it

I never slept well as a kid, always certain that something—a vampire, the devil, germs—was under my bed or outside my window. I’m not so old that an adult would have gotten the Sandman on my case, but I knew who he was thanks to the Chordettes’ “Mr. Sandman,” the 1950s pop song that briefly features the apparition himself (…Yes…?). By the 90s, the retro hit had acquired several layers of irony on top of its intended cuteness, meaning I was just as likely to hear it at the grocery store as I was in a horror movie like Halloween II (1981)1.

Like all folkloric monsters, the Sandman, a creature of Germanic and Scandinavian fairytale, was at one time more straightforwardly disturbing. After centuries of giving kids the willies, his entrée into text was with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1816 short story, Der Sandmann, as a “wicked man” who steals the eyes of children who won’t go to bed. The story is told by a character named Nathaniel, who as a child believed that his father was in thrall to the Sandman himself. As an adult, he has a memory of the Sandman threatening to take his eyes while his father begs for mercy on his behalf.

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In Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, she distills the “eye of horror” down to the organ itself as penetrator as well as site of penetration: the eye is both a weapon and a “natural and original vulnerability.” Here she quotes Freud’s writing on Der Sandmann:

“We know from psycho-analytic experience . . . that the fear of damaging or losing one’s eyes is a terrible one in children. Many adults retain their apprehensiveness in this respect, and no physical injury is so much dreaded by them as an injury to the eye . . . A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated.”

I don’t remember worrying about my eyes in my childhood, but since developing panic attacks about two years ago, every other month I convince myself that I’m suffering the initial symptoms of an infection or disease that will permanently rob me of my vision. Last week, when the psychosomatics actually took shape in what was eventually determined to be a garden variety stye2, it was only years of practice, patient reassurance from my lovers, and my alprazolam prescription that kept me from becoming completely hysterical.

At the beginning of HRT, I began to experience a reversal of time more dynamic than mere regression. Fumbling my way through puberty3, I found myself brushing up against neuroses I had relegated to my twenties, teens, even my childhood. I kept aging, of course, but it was as if my path into the future was now doubling back through long-forgotten developmental milestones and the defense mechanisms that sprouted like flowers around them. Maybe these flowers grew from bulbs, which when peeled would reveal more bulbs inside, each enshrining its own abyssal bloom. Where to begin, in such a situation? Where to end?

For decades, I avoided my transness with dissociation. When I finally permitted my body to know this truth about myself (by this I mean the surgeries and the medicine, but also the acknowledging and accepting and entrusting of this truth with others), I gradually gained the ability to move both forward and backward in time—to remember my past rather than reside in it; to wonder about my future rather than merely anticipate or ignore it. (I don’t think the power of time reversal is unique to transsexuals. It can happen to anyone who begins to really feel their neuroses, which is the first step to really thinking about them4.)

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Six or so years later, this freedom of time has granted me the capacity to regard my neuroses with some curiosity. Does my new fear of blindness resemble any other fears that I’ve had before? When and where did they come up? If it was during my youth or childhood, which adults were involved, and how? If these associated fears did resolve, what story did I tell myself to explain this resolution? Did it happen in the way that I had feared or hoped? With these questions, I pluck the neuroses from their respective places in time and lay them out next to each other for comparison, like budding flowers, like pages of text: how does today’s narrative inform yesterday’s, and vice versa?

With the help of this system, I’ve realized that my so-called fear of blindness is actually about something else (no shit!). When obsessing over what’s going to happen to me, I don’t really dwell on my prospective life as a newly blind person and the struggles that would entail, like learning how to walk or read in an entirely new way. Instead, I focus on the possibility of being informed (perhaps obviously but nonetheless crucially by a white-coated authority figure) that my eye, as I have known it my whole life, is done for. Over. Caput. It’s not its injury or uncertain future that terrifies me, but the moment of sickening revelation that these entail, a cliffhanging sensation that I associate with other kinds of dreadful anticipation, like wondering if I will pass in a bathroom or at work. My eye, my “natural and original vulnerability,” as Clover writes, leaves me open to those who may diagnose, clock, or revile me using their own eyes—more reasonable fears, certainly, than a sudden and random loss of sight.

A symptom of the trauma of becoming, Freud’s castration anxiety—a universal experience that takes place between the ages of 3 and 5—is associated with the fear of losing control, autonomy, and even life itself. If we put aside the idea that HRT marked the beginning of my adolescence and instead regard it as my birth, two years ago I would have been right on track for this psychosexual development.

Years ago, I started going to therapy because I wanted answers. In the last year or two, I’ve become interested in psychoanalysis because it refuses them altogether (“All analyses end badly,” as Janet Malcolm wrote). Anyone with an irrational, or even hysterical, fear knows that recognizing it as such usually isn’t very helpful. But there is something soothing, even encouraging, about seeing my fear for what it is: an expression of a mechanism that is deeply, inevitably human.

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Thank you for reading and sharing my newsletter. Buy my books or find me on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky.

Get a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content when you screenshot your donation of any amount to political prisoner Ángel, a butch lesbian, community organizer, and 2020 uprising defendant who is currently in ICE custody. She will not fight her deportation to Chile, where she has not lived since the age of 7, but will need money to rebuild hir life from scratch. You can also send money directly to Loba-Cabrona on Venmo or $PunkWolfe2 on Cashapp.

1

As horror filmmakers well know, pop music deracinated from its context by time or juxtaposition can go from catchy to creepy really fast. Just as pop music gains a sinister new register over time, more “serious” music loses it, as Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” demonstrates.

2

My first and, god willing, my last.

3

Widely regarded as my second, which I’m not sure I agree with. The longer I’m at this, the more I feel that being forced to undergo the wrong puberty kept me locked in childhood. The TERF logics that infantilize white transmasculine people sure tell on themselves, don’t they?

4

Consideration being qualitatively distinct from anxiety’s spectrum of anticipatory affect: fretting, stewing, perseverating, fixating, etc.

What I've been reading and watching

What I’ve been reading

April has been busy, so this time I’m cheating with an audiobook: CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill.

To really enjoy CHAOS, you have to be kind of a Manson nerd (I’m not, but his story lives at the intersection of New Hollywood, the civil rights movement, and the libidinal energies underpinning twentieth/twenty-first century true crime, topics about which you could say I’m passionate). Yet you must also be credulous enough to need persuading that there may be something…untoward…about the institutions (child prisons, policing, the CIA, etc.) that produced the world’s most famous Beach Boys stan. While I appreciate O’Neill’s contributions to the case that the United States government is so corrupted by racial capitalism that it would manipulate charismatic psychopaths into destabilizing the Black liberation movement and dispatching inconvenient political figures, I certainly don’t need it, you know?

More interesting to me, as a writer, is how CHAOS illustrates the deterioration of American journalism over the past 25 years. What began in 1999 as a three-month assignment by a now-defunct entertainment magazine snowballed into twenty years of obsessive research that put O’Neill hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt with, if not little to show for it, then at least not the definitive proof of the CIA’s role in the Tate–LaBianca murders that he was looking for. This is not to undermine O’Neill’s persistence, resourcefulness, and grit; the man deserves a Pulitzer for all the death threats he received in the making of this book alone. For all that it’s inconclusive, CHAOS is not a failure, but it does represent an increasingly unimaginable undertaking. Unfortunately, in 2025, the notion of an independent investigative journalist devoting a quarter of his life to learning the truth behind one of the most famous crimes of the past century without institutional support other than a few book advances is almost as unthinkable as the nightmarish evening of August 9, 1969.

For a significantly shorter exploration of this same topic, I recommend Alexander Sorondo’s new long-form piece on William T. Vollmann. “The Last Contract” documents the writer’s herculean efforts to publish A Table for Fortune, his 3,000-page novel about the CIA. Not even Vollmann, the man for whom every avenue of inquiry—from poverty, to climate change, to violence—becomes a white whale of sorts, can escape the collapse of publishing, media, and journalism as we know them. I suppose I’m part of the problem: I’ve read lots about Vollmann, and a few short pieces by him, but have yet to finish one of his books.

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What I’ve been watching

Maurice (1987): Last week, Jade and I went to the Paris Theater (once informally known as the Merchant Ivory theater) for a screening of Maurice, which debuted there in 1987. By a stroke of luck, its director and co-writer, James Ivory, was sitting directly in front of us, accompanied by a strapping young man that Jade described as one of the top-ten most beautiful people she’d ever seen. I would go to war for him, she whispered as we tried to make ourselves comfortable in the tiny seats. Looking younger than his almost 97 years (although, Jade wondered, when was the last time she’d been this close to someone so old?), Ivory was dressed in a charming red knit sweater and khakis, a polished wooden cane propped against his knees. Alert but distant, he seemed nonplussed when director Ira Sachs (who we also adore) came to shake his hand. The man of the hour, said Sachs. Indeed, Ivory’s silence suggested.

It wasn’t difficult to focus on the movie, which is one of my favorites1, but every so often I glanced over at Ivory, whose three-quarter profile shone like a quail egg at my nine o’clock. He watched the screen carefully, his expression rarely changing, except when Ben Kingsley’s hypnotist adenoidally observes that, “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.” Like the rest of the audience, he laughed. It’s a great line read in a movie chock-full of them.

After the show, Ivory took to the stage to be interrogated by Sachs. I say interrogated because he resisted almost every question with generalities, quibbles, or circuitous summarizing. Of course homophobia was different in 1912 than in 1985! Of course his partner of 40 years, Ismail Merchant, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, shaped his world! He seemed a trifle over it; but maybe he was just distrustful, humble, or hard of hearing. When asked about Hugh Grant, the Maurice co-star who went on to become the king of the ‘90s romcom (and of my heart 🫶), he said simply that he had gone out for Daniel Day-Lewis’ role in A Room with a View (1985), but that he hadn’t been quite right.

Sachs was a good sport. Maurice, he explained, had meant so much to him as a young gay man who struggled with the closet as the film’s main characters do, despite having been born 70 years later in a different country. While Ivory wasn’t dismissive outright, he didn’t seem particularly interested in getting into it all, either. Perhaps when you’re almost 100, you’re just zen about everything. When, prompted by Sachs, Ivory announced his age, I was surprised by how excited I felt, by how hard I clapped along with the rest of the audience.

Ivory did say a few memorable things, including the observation that actors are deep, while directors are shallow, plus a few kittenish remarks that set the audience laughing. Still, I have to admit I was disappointed that he avoided answering the question that was, incidentally, one I asked Jade as the credits rolled: why had he chosen to end Maurice on Grant’s tragic Clive closing the windows on the greenwood, and not with the book’s happy ending (which had prevented its publication until many years after its author’s death)? In response, Ivory focused instead on the beauty of Clive’s wife in her looking glass, her face placid and yet fixed, as if she is doing a difficult math equation in her head. Of course, Ivory said, she didn’t know what was really going on, and [her closeted husband] would never tell her. But in a scene just a few minutes before, Clive remarks that his wife has an uncanny intuition. Like the other mothers, daughters, and wives in Maurice, her feminine repressions play differently than those of their male counterparts, but rarely are they as ignorant as they’re meant to be perceived. It’s funny—every time I watch Maurice, I’m struck anew by its women characters, who for me all but disappear between screenings. I wonder what this says about me.

“Fun City: NYC Woos Hollywood, Flirts with Disaster”: Criterion’s April programming of ‘60s and ‘70s cinema set in New York depicts a “raw and often surreal portrait of a city in crisis.” Popular classics—like Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975)—adjoin gritty gems that were new (to me), like Little Murders (1971), the scariest comedy I’ve ever seen starring the adorable Elliott Gould and a scene-stealing Donald Sutherland, and Black Caesar (1973), helmed by the sartorially sensational Fred Williamson as a Harlem mafioso with a diehard vendetta. It includes Black Caesar’s original ending, the fitting yet surprisingly surreal conclusion to a very violent film that has you simultaneously rooting for and despising its underdog.

Opus (2025): Not even Ayo Edebiri, whose beauty is just “normal” enough that she can be reasonably cast as the world’s most charming working girl, could make this AI movie likeable. Its villain (John Malkovich) is Alfred Moretti, a megalomaniac pop star with a murderous, if ideologically muddled, cult following that claims to worship creativity. Edebiri is a no-name young journalist who tries to foil, then capitalize on, his diabolical plans to spread his religion across the country. I say that Opus is an AI movie as both compliment and insult: while it seems interested in examining the contemporary hostility toward human creativity—what is its value? why does it matter? does it have a future?—it does so with a derivativeness that isn’t even redeemed by iteration. Whether or not we’re intended to find something salvageable in the dogmatic goulash that is Moretti’s ethos, the end result is the same: a film about art and creativity characterized by bad writing, wooden acting, stupid plotting, and pointless cinematography (establishing panoramic shots seem to take place in a different movie altogether, and one gets the impression that writer and director Mark Anthony Green has some kind of grudge against good lighting). There are a handful of pretty/interesting/frightening images and a fascinatingly disturbing nonsequitur of a puppet show about Billie Holiday, but otherwise this one’s poop from a butt.

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1

I’ve written about it here, but if you’ve only got a few minutes today, skip it for Alex Chee’s wonderful “The Afterlives of E.M. Forster.”

Body scan

Hair: Sometimes the difference between a good gendering (Sir) and a bad gendering (Here you go, um, I wanna say…shim?) is a haircut. My barber is a very friendly queer-identified cis man in an open marriage with a cis woman who would just love to fuck me, so he delights in giving me my monthly gender-affirming trim while oversharing about his sex life. To be clear, I like him. Like any good barber, he’s got the gift of gab

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You can now preorder "Casanova 20"

🎀🎀🎀My third novel, Casanova 20: Or, Hot World, is now available for preorder 🎀 🎀🎀

I’m so grateful to the Catapult team, my peerless editor, Alicia Kroell, and all of you who support me by subscribing, sharing, purchasing, and even talking shit, which is still attention. More to come!

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Thank you for reading and sharing my newsletter. Buy my books or find me on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky.

Get a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content when you screenshot your donation to any amount to political prisoner Marius Mason, who is currently serving 22 years in federal prison for acts of property damage carried out in defense of the planet. A trans man, Mason won the right to be transferred to a men’s prison but was recently returned to a women’s facility following a Trump executive order.

Who's afraid of writing sex?

Almost every time I do a reading, someone—sometimes the host, often an audience member—asks about writing sex: how exactly does one do it without being {TIGHT SHOT OF RAPID PUPIL CONTRACTION} cringe?1

Because of what I write about and what I am (namely, trans), even my non-sex writing is identified with sex and sexuality, so admittedly the interests of my audience skew along those lines. But it does seem that the fear of writing sex badly is a common one—from 1993 through 2022, the Literary Review had an annual award for it2—especially for writers who are young and unpublished. I’ve doled out my fair share of practical advice, but always with reservations I could never quite put into words. It’s not that I worried about being wrong; I’m no expert, but there are so many ways to approach this challenge, one shaped by endless anxieties and constraints, that I wonder if this is even possible.

Maybe that is what’s been bothering me. Why are so many writers afraid of writing sex in the first place?

A quick search turns up a survey of writers and filmmakers with recommendations for writing sex the non-humiliating way, most of it as sound (probably) as it is contradictory. The following, mostly sourced from interviews and essays, are just a small sample of how-tos, courses, and internet listicles that go on for pages:

Be pornographic.

Don’t be pornographic.

Focus on emotions—not physicality.

Avoid comedy.

Embrace comedy.

Transcend time.

Embrace failure.

Be a woman…

…but maybe not a feminist.

Ask yourself, does it drive the plot?

Try storyboarding (just don’t forget your intimacy coordinator).

Listen, there’s nothing wrong with improving your craft. But don’t the stakes seem a little high for this particular facet of it? This fear of writing sex that’s too cheesy, tawdry, corny, or horny is so oppressive that people will fret and fuss and even fork over their hard-earned cash to get it right. How much sense does this make in 2025? Does writing sex well matter when everyone is beautiful and no one is horny and audiences (especially younger ones) want to see less sex3? Does it pay to master sex for a literary audience when “novelist” is less of a job than ever; when not even white male writers can get a word in edgewise; when such work that you do manage to publish is plagiarized by AI, the same technology that’s toasting the planet and stealing your day job; when the institutions that fund and recognize writers are in bed with genocidaires; when your best bet for making money is engagement, not expertise? From a career perspective, anyway, shouldn’t becoming “good” at writing sex rank pretty low on the writer’s hierarchy of needs?

“I don’t think of sex as any more difficult to write about than any other human behavior.” That’s Rachel Kushner, and I agree with her—to a point. Were our culture sex neutral, writing sex wouldn’t be any more difficult than writing about two people playing a game of chess. But if we’re afraid of talking about it honestly, let alone doing it, it follows that writing it can be just as fearful a prospect, if not more so. Because in this context, writing “bad” sex isn’t just a technical shortcoming. To fuck up a depiction of an act that we fetishize, at turns, as immoral yet sacred, unspeakable yet inescapable, unique yet uniform, as decadent and dirty and immoral, becomes a personal failing. We’re overidentified with and implicated by sex to the point that it can never be fictional, even in fiction. Any art worth its salt exposes the artist, but if this exposure doesn’t land, it’s an indictment of the most personal sort: if you’re unable to represent sex, this most common and animal and degraded of activities, one that everyone wants and does in the same and right way (or else!), not only have you demonstrated some level of inhumanity, but you’ve revealed yourself as a person to be too cheesy, tawdry, corny, or horny—that is, too literal, too earnest, or even on the wrong side of obscene4.

Unlike a game of chess, sex adjoins obscenity so closely that writing it poses emotional and even professional risks to the author that the former doesn’t. Perhaps on some level it serves us to confuse these risks with technical difficulty. We’d rather believe that there’s a method, a class, or a hack for sex writing, rather than admit that doing it publicly makes us vulnerable to others and to ourselves.

You know what’s interesting? People ask me about writing sex in fiction even though it’s something I’ve done very little of. My characters have sexual fantasies, engage in sadomasochism, experience sexual assault, and dissociate their way out of and around consensual intercourse—but sex qua sex, and the activities it conventionally entails, rarely make it into one of my books. Even my sex writing here on DAVID is pretty oblique. I have a strong sense of privacy, though not about the things that most people are private about. Although it may not seem like it, there’s a lot that you will never see.

I haven’t written a lot of sex, but I have identified myself with it publicly and repeatedly, not just as a writer interested in sexuality, but as an out transsexual. I think this is what people who want my advice about writing sex are picking up on: that I’m living the worst-case scenario of a writer who is fearful of sexual exposure. This is something I’m proud of because I’ve sacrificed for it, this honesty, which has affected my relationship with my natal family, my career, and my safety in the world. I’m not fearless—far from it—and I won’t escape without, at the very least, the public humiliation of taking artistic risks only to strike out, which has happened too many times to count. But I am doing what many of these people are afraid is impossible for them, and that’s what they’re curious about, even if they don’t quite realize it.

Unfortunately, when it comes to writing sex, the only advice I have to offer is the worst kind someone can give: you just have to do it.

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1

I’m not a big deal, so such events are few and far between. With my new book coming out later this year, however, more are definitely in the works 💃

2

Notable winners include Normal Mailer and Morrissey, with John Updike meriting one for Lifetime Achievement.

3

The erotic thriller has been eulogized almost to death, but Karina Longworth’s podcast series on the subject is great stuff.

4

But isn’t this all of us? I recently started Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, which explores the relationship of the young male viewer to the female victim-heroes of the slashers of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. In her psychoanalytic reading, a horror film, like a dream, can be peopled with simultaneous variations of ourselves. “Competing figures…resonate with competing parts of the viewer’s psyche (masochistic victim and sadistic monster, for example)…the force of the experience, in horror, comes from ‘knowing’ both sides of the story.” As viewers confronted with fears “imaginable…only in nightmare” and fantasies we can’t admit to, even to ourselves, we manage our myriad repressions by identifying with characters across genders and “types,” an experience of forced de/feminization (though she doesn’t use this term) by the director. As Clover writes, “Hitchcock’s ‘torture the women’ then means, simply, torture the audience.”