Davey Davis's Blog, page 5

Body scan

Body scan

Eyelashes: Jade says that my eyelashes have gotten thicker since I upped my dose a few months ago. Maybe they just look thicker. Your eyes shrink when you go on T, or so Danny Lavery once joked.

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Who can say it? (Part 2)

Read Part 1.

My mom tells a story about the afternoon my older sister, then in kindergarten, got off the school bus with a piece of paper taped to her back. On the paper was written a single word in a child’s looping scrawl. The paper came right off, but my mom had to put my sister in the shower to wash her long, red hair—the other kids had spat in it all the way home. While my sister could scream for hours at a stretch or go days without sleep while repeating the same meaningless phrase over and over1, my mom says she seemed untroubled by what had happened. I wasn’t yet old enough to ride the bus, but there would be plenty of future opportunities for me to witness schoolyard humiliations that she didn’t understand, or even appear to notice.

Kids can be so cruel, people say, and it’s true that other children were the primary reason why the r-slur was never neutral for my family. But as my sisters and I learned early on, what children say and do can only be said and done with the approval, tacit or otherwise, of adults. (Why hadn’t the bus driver intervened? Perhaps they hadn’t known what was going on, although experience has taught me to never give the benefit of the doubt in situations like these.) Everyone who’s been bullied knows that while the discovery and exploitation of relative power is a normal part of every child’s development, that power is always on loan from higher up.

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I’ve been treating the so-called r-slur resurgence like Whac-A-Mole. Every time someone in my feed uses, shares, or engages with it, I unfollow, mute, or block. Brick by brick, as they say on TikTok: you build the algo you live in and I don’t want that shit in mine. At this point in my life, I can no longer regard its use as a teachable moment, even with acquaintances. Afraid I won’t be able to control my emotions, I do my best to avoid it.

Unfortunately, the desire to avoid hate speech (even the kind not directed at oneself) is an unrealistic one. “They’re saying the r-word again,” says a high school teacher in an episode of FX’s English Teacher2, perplexed by the re-normalization of one of the 90s’ favorite epithets. This joke relies on the idea that the resurgence is generational, but it isn’t merely regaining popularity among Gens Z and Alpha. From Millennials like Azealia Banks to Baby Boomers like Donald Trump, the use of the r-slur is all-ages fun, and the general sense is that it appears to be escalating.

In 2024, there was a lot of speculating about the origins of this resurgence. Some of it is pure narrative, in my opinion: a Special Olympics campaign with an online pledge does not an r-slur recession make. But with the rise in anti-woke (that is, reactionary) aesthetics, it does seem that the r-slur is returning from cultural hibernation. Why?

Social media rewards rage-bait: Writing for Mashable, Christianna Silva makes the dubious claim that the r-slur—which became a pejorative between the 1960s and the 1980s—“all but disappeared from common use by the early 2010s.” They do go on, however, to make the insightful observation that the resurgence reflects “how digital platforms are reshaping cultural norms in a way that seems to prioritize engagement over all else.” And what’s more engaging than outrage? Ann Coulter knew this in 2012, when she called Barack Obama an r-slur on Twitter (now X)3, one year after the White House hosted Lois Curtis, the lead plaintiff in the SCOTUS case that ruled that the unjustified segregation of people with disabilities is discriminatory, and two after the president signed Rosa’s law, legislation replacing federal use of “mental retardation” with “intellectual disability.” The rise of social media was concurrent with the entry of the r-slur into America’s culture wars, a context in which the liberal Obama could pay lip service (and, sure, even make some material concessions) to disabled peoples’ humanity while denying the same to teenagers in Yemen and prisoners in Guantanamo4. While Trump, a Twitter genius on par with the likes of Dril, was banned from the platform in 2021, he was reinstated the following year when it was acquired by Elon Musk, who went on to help bankroll his second presidential win and lead a new advisory commission to “increase governmental efficiency” (i.e., strip the fed for parts). The “reshaping,” as Silva puts it, between social media and culture isn’t unidirectional: with the victory of Trump and Musk, in fact, they finally converge. “As social media platforms like X allow offensive language to spread under the guise of free speech,” Silva writes, “the lines between humor and harm blur, revealing how digital spaces have become battlegrounds for societal norms.” The r-slur is much more heavily censored on sites like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Contrast this failure to create and/or enforce TOS that purport to protect users from hate speech with the creation of slurs where there are none, as Musk has done on X with the word “cis.” (Congresswoman Nancy Mace, however, is welcome to use the t-slur about trans activists, some of whom may even be her own constituents.)

People gotta make a living: This Vox explainer points out that while traditional public figures have reputations to maintain, and thus an incentive to avoid using hate speech unless that’s their niche, influencers do not. When your income relies on engagement farming, “being outrageous,” isn’t a liability, but may in fact be “the whole point.” Unlike the eugenicist millionaires and billionaires they parrot, most people who make an income off their social media followers are doing so without the protections that salaried employees enjoy. As a supplement, if not a replacement for, the formal economy, the attention and gig economies run on rage-bait, generating clicks from moral/sex panics (particularly transphobia), conspiracy theorizing, Zionism, and pretty much any other kind of dehumanization you can think of.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic: The disposability of disabled people has only intensified since 2020. It’s not just the capitalists’ “let it rip” and “back to work” approach to what was once called public health. It’s not just the escalation of organized abandonment. It’s not just misinformation about transmission, herd immunity, and vaccines; the devaluing of “vulnerable” populations; the myth of personal responsibility; the lie that the pandemic is “over”; or the abandonment of disabled comrades by progressive and left movements that won’t even prioritize masking. It’s not even just healthcare inequality so severe that the murder of a insurance executive could be received with not just approval, but almost hysterical celebration. It is, in fact, a cultural and political eugenicism so entrenched that even “COVID-conscious” communities reproduce the mainstream’s dehumanization of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in their fight for survival.

Since 2020 I, too, have noticed what seems like an increased comfort with the r-slur, especially among people that I assumed would have a stronger sense of solidarity with some of our most marginalized comrades5. But I think that the word “resurgence” is a little too simple for the phenomenon we’re trying to describe. Was there indeed a window of time in which was the world was less ableist—or was it just that a certain kind of liberalism found it could get traction co-opting disability rights movements, at least for a while?

There’s no debating that language plays a role in the incitement, normalization, and erasure of violence, to such an extent that I refuse to draw a line between “linguistic” (that is, abstracted or metaphorical) and “literal” violence. But as Obama’s signature of Rosa’s law demonstrates, liberals are satisfied with isolating language as both the source and expression of the oppression of disabled people: eliminate the word, eliminate the problem.

To be sure, removing a slur from legal and clinical documents is not meaningless6. But until the oppressive systems underlying hate speech is, reforms like these are little more than bandaids on the the cancer of institutionalized ableism that characterizes racial capitalism as we experience it in this country.

Hypocrisy is permission. When my family was out in public, adults often prevented their children from approaching my sister with honest curiosity. They weren’t being polite—they just didn’t want to be forced to think about her at all. They could chastise their child for staring in the same breath that they would inform my mom that her daughter wasn’t welcome in their school, place of business, or church. Scolding non-disabled children for saying the r-slur is meaningless if you don’t also provide disabled children with unfettered access to the same education and community that other children receive7. In the same way, not being called a slur at the doctor is meaningless if you can’t go to the doctor (or can’t control what happens at the doctor, as is the case of the many disabled people who don’t have the final say in their own healthcare).

At almost 40, my sister still regards young children as her peers. For my whole life, I’ve watched six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds suddenly recognize—often with frustration, occasionally with fascinated scorn—that the person they were until very recently content to watch cartoons with is neither a child like they are nor a grown-up that they must obey. Upon realizing this, some of them respond with cruelty. Not because they’ve outgrown her, but because they want to find out if anyone will stop them.

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1

Meaningless to my parents. It clearly meant something to her.

2

Yes, I read the Vulture article about the allegations against Brian Jordan Alvarez. All I can say is that I hope all sexual predators get what they deserve.

3

I think Obama is literally evil, but there’s not enough time in the day to list the disgusting slurs the contemptible Coulter used for him during his presidency.

4

I voted for him in 2008 in large part because he promised to close Guantanamo, which of course he didn’t end up doing. Big lesson for me!

5

For our purposes I mean people with IDD, although they’re certainly not the only ones targeted by the r-slur.

6

Nor, by the way, was the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

7

And in this country, not all of them receive it, anyway.

"Casanova 20" has a UK cover

Yesterday, I submitted the final draft of my third novel, Casanova 20: Or, Hot World, to my fabulous editor, Alicia Kroell (who also edited my second novel, X). Today, my UK publisher, the inimitable Cipher Press, released this cover. The timing is coincidental, but the instant gratification is still hitting. Where’s the nearest slot machine?

While the manuscript is finished, there’s still production to do—from copy edits to layout to printing—before Casanova’s release late next year. Feels like ages! Whatever! In the meantime, I’ll have a little more space for this newsletter (not to mention my fourth book…). I know I owe you a few things, including the next installment of my new series on slurs, so stay tuned.

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Reminder that I’ll send you one free month of subscriber-only DAVID content if you send me a screenshot of your donation to any of fundraiser for Palestinians trying to survive within Gaza or relocate to safety. Gaza Funds is one place to get started.

Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.

Your favorite DAVIDs of 2024

“Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it. Don't wait for it. Just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee.”

Anticipating Parks and Rec’s “Treat Yo Self” by two decades, Special Agent Dale Cooper’s sage advice from the first season of Twin Peaks is what comes to mind when I think about this weekly newsletter. For the past five years, DAVID has been the more-or-less daily present that one-ups obligations and chores for no good reason whatsoever. I hope you have a similar release valve in your life, a regular opportunity to be irresponsible and self-indulgent that’s not doomscrolling or bed-rotting. You deserve it!

If you’ve enjoyed my newsletter this year, I’m sending you a gentle reminder that I offer one free month of subscriber-only DAVID content if you send me a screenshot of your donation to any of fundraiser for Palestinians trying to survive within Gaza or relocate. (Streets are saying that multiple donations translate to multiple free months…). Since so many of my most popular posts are paywalled, this is your chance access them for the low, low price of literally any amount of money.

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Which side is hell on?: Reading W.G. Sebald’s sensational Austerlitz—about a Jewish architectural historian who uncovers his past as a child refugee of the Nazi annexation and occupation of Czechoslovakia—is a profound experience at any time, but in particular since October 7, 2023.

On gender policies: Other than FAW’s inspired “must be or be accompanied by a woman” rule, gender policies for queer events never sit right with me. Here’s why.

There is no “safe”: my guide for vetting sadists, dominants, and tops: Of the top-ten performing posts this year, four were from this series. This means a lot to me because I consider it to be a community service of sorts. Over my decade in leather, I’ve made a lot of mistakes and wound up in a lot of situations—from fainting in scene to being stalked to getting manipulated by “community” “pillars” looking for someone new to control—and it would be nice if someone other than me could learn from them.

See above.

See above.

See above.

What if it’s a bad pain?: Jade in a fluffy pink dress for Folsom Street Fair. What more do you need?

Navel gazing: What if I got my bellybutton pierced so many times it just fell out?

On “content”: More needles, big ones. I’m sensing a theme here.

Are you having a phobic response to your trauma?: How I turned a body mod into the opportunity to write about psychoanalytic theory.

Bonus | This is not a review of “Poor Things”: This post performed really well last year but was too late for the 2023 roundup, which is a shame, because Poor Things sucked so much ass I had to write about it. It’s also in conversation with my new series on slurs, so consider it recommended reading for DAVIDians1.

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Reminder that I’ll send you one free month of subscriber-only DAVID content if you send me a screenshot of your donation to any of fundraiser for Palestinians trying to survive within Gaza or relocate to safety. Gaza Funds is one place to get started.

Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.

1

Is referring to DAVID heads like this in poor taste? Sound off in the comments!

The reasons why I block on Grindr

Years ago, when my mom would drive down to see me in Oakland, other drivers would sometimes honk at her. This happens to everyone, of course, but from the way she reacted they may as well have fired warning shots. She refused to accept that in America’s bigger cities, honking your horn can be a kind of communication, one that lets another driver know that the light has turned green, that you’re merging, etc; that even if there is, admittedly, some attitude behind the honk, it can nevertheless have a constructive purpose. This didn’t matter to my mom. In the small Northern California town where she raised me, honking was and would always be a sign of rudeness, if not outright aggression.

Like honking, blocking on social media has a bad rap. The mainstream take on blocking seems to be that it’s the prerogative of cowards, assholes, and even authoritarians, to the extent that those who disappear without explanation—whether by failing to respond or, more pointedly, by eliminating the opportunity for contact—are seen as antisocial, even pathological. I’m not here to argue about that (although believe me, I have my opinions!). I just want to point out that, like honking, blocking has different meanings across contexts. In fact, it’s naive to insist they are uniformly negative.

In some situations, one or both parties understand that blocking is simply a more direct way of communicating desires, drawing boundaries, and granting and taking space. Take the gay hook up app, Grindr: to function well on this platform, you need to block, especially if you’re a fetishized minority. It’s not just trolls, spam, and creeps—it’s also the perfectly inoffensive people that you’re just not interested in (indeed, some users will put in their bio that you should block them in this case). Because Grindr is location-based, you see your grid—that is, the matrix of users in your immediate vicinity—every time you open the app. If you’re mostly opening it at home, that means you see more or less the same people every time, roughly 15 per scroll. If someone around the corner hits you up and you don’t respond, that could mean Not right now or Not ever. If you’re busy but potentially interested, you may just ignore their messages or likes until the stars align. If you know they’re not your type, blocking them saves you both some time.

Anyone who’s used apps like Grindr for longer than a minute will know that while rejection doesn’t feel good, it’s part of the playing the game. Without failing to acknowledge the ways that normative standards of attractiveness affect us all, taking a block personally just doesn’t make sense1.

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Last year, after a few scary encounters with men, I started dating a second person somewhat seriously. Since then, I haven’t had the time or inclination to use apps like Grindr. Recently, however, I’ve begun dipping my toe back into the cesspit of looking?, huge loads here, and can i eat u out beautiful ;) As much as we complain about it—and there is a lot to complain about, from functionality issues to subscription costs to the risks and humiliations of logging on while not being a white cis man—apps like Grindr can entertain, distract, and sometimes result in a fun time with a stranger. Having met more than one boyfriend on Grindr, not to mention a few friends, I try to keep in mind that it’s still a social media app at the end of the day.

When I used Grindr previously, I avoiding putting FTM in my handle because it drew a preponderance of chaser-types (I enjoy and will fuck chasers2, but they do take more work to weed through), though I was obliged to put a kindergarten-level explanation of my genitals in my bio, since people often read me as transfeminine3. This time around, I started advertising as FTM out of sheer laziness: with my transness in my handle as well as my bio, I get more messages than I can respond to, which means I can pick and choose. This has also put me in the position of needing to block considerably more, which has led me to think more about when and why I do it.

After a few years of being an FTM on gay hookup apps, my trigger finger is constantly itching. Within the first few words of an exchange, I can tell how worthwhile a conversation with someone will be. If there is any hint that I will be insulted or annoyed, I’m more likely to block than see it through. This is both good and bad: snap judgments save me time while limiting my range of experiences. I’ll deal with fewer time-wasters, assholes, and rapists, but I’ll also have more homogenous hookups as a result. This transgender hypersensitivity, while admittedly crazy, is the price of my safety and, paradoxically, my mental health (some have more tolerance, some less; your mileage, etc.). It is what it is.

I don’t block because someone sends me unprompted nudes, is direct or aggressive, offers to pay me, or misgenders me in a well-intentioned way. In fact, I prefer this sort of interaction, as it shows that the other person recognizes that 1) we are on a gay hookup app for FAGGOTS, 2) attraction both transcends and reinscribes identity, whether or not we think it does, 3) it’s just sex, 4) acknowledging the potential of a financial transaction means they understand that that I understand that my attention is valuable4, and 5) that I am clearly fem and should be approached with the princess treatment.

Using the internet is not unlike driving on the highway: people will inevitably rub other people the wrong way, even if there’s no harm intended or done. This is why blocking is a great tool, one I’ll use if someone does or is some variation on the following:

Hits me up without photos. On Grindr, NPNC (no pic, no chat) means I won’t talk to you if you contact me without any pictures of yourself in your bio, which regular users will know happens a LOT. People who are trade, discreet, DL, or have low self-esteem are well within their rights not to have public-facing photos, but many seem to believe that it’s interesting or attractive to receive “hey :) hru can we have sex” from a blank square. While I think this demonstrates that these men just aren’t very good at socializing, it’s also because it hasn’t occurred to them that I, too, have interiority; that sex could be something agreed upon between two people, rather than doled out by whatever madonna/mommy/whore figure dominates their psychic landscape. I’m sure this sort of thing happens between cis men, but there is a layer of misogyny to it that I, like all feminized people, am attuned to5. Chatting without pictures is also fundamentally passive aggressive: by forcing me to ask for photos, I must now confirm that you are fugly, hurting your feelings and making you feel like a victim. You asked, bitch! Proper Grindr etiquette for blank profiles is to send face and/or dick pics in the first message (Grindr offers disappearing images and lockable albums). If I like what you’re working with, now we can talk! If I don’t, I can ignore you without putting too fine a point on it, and therefore hurting your feelings more than they need to be hurt. Personally, I will consider chatting with people who share images of everything but their face, provided they don’t make a big deal about being discreet (don’t care, didn’t ask, get over yourself) and behave normally on all other fronts.

Benevolent transphobia. You know what they say about men talking their way out of pussy? This happens a lot to the male bi, pan, and gynosexual(🤮) crowd. They’re not gay men and they’re not straight—they’re open-mindedly living the best of both worlds, so FTM pussy should be a shoo-in, right? Well, no, not if you can’t stop yourself from saying things like I’m bi, I’m not scared of vag! (First of all, sis, gay men love pussy!), or thinking that everyone with a pussy was assigned female at birth, or treating transmasculine people as if we’re interchangeable (if we were, you’d be attracted to masculine pre/non-op trans men, and if you’re in my DMs this isn’t always the case). If they’re not hung up on so-called genital preference, cis bisexuals of both genders are often at risk of believing they’re special because they’re willing to fuck trans people. Universal fetishization means that we’re disposable—but also that we are in high demand. Don’t ever let them forget that. Unfortunately, cis men of all sexual orientations are vulnerable to performative allyship. Considering themselves woke, they’ll smarmily address the elephant in the room—I’m a tranny, isn’t that crazy?—as if this isn’t alienating for me, who has to live as a trans person every single day, and not just when it’s time for big boys to touch their special places. Here is just a sampling of how this can manifest:

I can’t believe other guys can’t tell you’re FTM 😏

Hey HANDSOME, how’s it going MR MAN, what’s up DUDE BRO BUdDY PAL

Wow, I love boi pussy!

Kill yourself!!!!!! Tbh

Cis nonbinaries. I’ve been tweeting through this one! My Grindr bio makes it very clear I’m only looking for men, so I used to ignore messages from non-binary people who are not transsexual. Recently, however, in response to a perverse and unbecoming hunch, I’ve begun replying with: “not into nb.” Half the time, it’s like tossing a grenade in a china shop. Tantrums, rationalizations, and bizarre lies (You’ve caught me at a funny time, someone recently responded. I thought I was non-binary until about two weeks ago. Turns out I’m just a really queer guy!) from non-binary people that move through the world as cis men who for some reason think they’re entitled to my body. Incidentally, on the rare occasion I’ve received similar messages from trans women and transsexual nonbinaries, all of them have been completely respectful.

Asks to see my album without sharing his first. This can be done in two ways. Only one is acceptable:

Hot (rare): a sexy, dominant, usually gay cis man opens with, Show me your album. Daddy!

Repulsive (common): a usually bi or queer cis man6 opens with, Hey, you’re super cute :) I would love to see more of you, if you’re comfy with that.

If I could reach through the phone and slit the ballsack of this second use case, I would in a heartbeat. The entitlement, the uwu/therapy/HR language & syntax, the implication that merely by showing interest in my naked body this numbnuts is doing me a favor—I feel violent just thinking about it. This is profoundly straight behavior without even a soupçon of what makes masculinity attractive. No “no true Scotsman,” but a real man gives compliments, promises you the world, and gets his meat out without prompting. Retvrn!!!!!

Misc. There are just so many ways to get blocked.

Grown men who open with Hiiiii (fags exempt).

Men who say, Oh, I guess you’re not into me then?! when you don’t immediately respond to their 12 expiring photos of them in bars, dick out on the john, at a photo op with Andre 3000, at the NYC Stock Exchange, naked with their ex-girlfriend, etc.

And my personal favorite: I bet you get hit up by so many losers on here, haha. Hi, I’m Chris. I’m married and looking for a long-term FWB. No, I’m not gen7.

Just not my type. Hookup apps give me the power to say no to men without worrying what they’ll do about it. Like a man, I can assess potential partners according to my appetites and whims, unconcerned with weighing their feelings against mine. There’s no reason to be unkind on Grindr (or anywhere) and I do my best to be polite, when warranted. But as gay male culture has taught me, it’s not unkind to say no, deny sex, or express disinterest. Blocking is a part of that, and I think that’s beautiful ;)

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Reminder that I’ll send you a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content if you screenshot your donation to any of fundraiser for Palestinians trying to survive within Gaza or relocate to safety. Gaza Funds is one place to get started.

Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.

1

Although I’ve noticed that straight men really struggle with this concept.

2

IMO, all cis people chase and “chaser” is a matter of degree.

3

This has been happening to me for my entire adult life and I find it flattering, but it hurts my feelings to vibe with someone and exchange albums (on Grindr, the selection of private photos that are usually nudes), only to have them express dismay or disappear when they realize I have a pussy.

4

Turning a trick is empowering. Get fucked.

5

Not all transmasculine or trans male people would use a word like misogyny to describe the experiences of gender-based discrimination they encounter.

6

Like gay men, trade and discreet (that is, straight) men aren’t as prone to this behavior.

7

On Grindr, gen (short for generous) means willing to pay.

What I've been reading and watching

What I’ve been reading

Books

It’s been an Irish autumn for me. A friend gave me a trio of Claire Keegan’s slim volumes, as they like to call them, and I couldn’t put them down: Foster, So Late in the Day, and Small Things Like These (now a film, which I haven’t yet seen). While all Keegan’s novels and stories are melancholic page turners, each a keen and bluish dissection of misogyny, Small Things—set in County Wexford in the 1980s—is the superior specimen. She really hit her stride with Bill Furlong, the upwardly mobile son of an unwed mother who discovers the local convent’s training school for girls is a Magdalene laundry, because he is somehow a good man, and you really believe it. Inspired by the recent fanfare around Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, I also listened to Conversations with Friends on audiobook. It was as dishy, diverting, and (on one or two occasions) humblingly relatable as I remember Normal People being1. Keegan and Rooney are a funny pair of spoons: the former does postmortems of patriarchy, while the latter’s characters are as preoccupied with interpersonal right-doing within the big P as they are with creating the conditions for it2.

From Ireland, I bopped over to the Caribbean, Florida, and New York City for Nights in Aruba, which took a little of the shine off Andrew Holleran for me, to my surprise. The self-centered perspectives of Dancer from the Dance and The Beauty of Men provide both charming and disenchanting looks into twentieth-century gay life with protagonists who are both saturated in and exiled from their own desire. Nights, which draws on the author’s life—from his upbringing in Aruba, to his military service during the Vietnam War, to his strained and claustrophobic relationships with his parents and sister—while often beautiful, and even emotionally incisive, suffers from a main character whose defining characteristic is avoidance. Maybe I’d have more patience for it if I found Holleran’s stand-in, a pathologically apolitical young man who prefers his family’s abuse to almost any other relationship, to be sympathetic, but his ennui wore on me. I can only take so much (literary) masochism before losing interest.

This whole audiobook thing is because I’ve started rowing four or five days a week, so I need something to listen to that isn’t Democracy Now! because I refuse to be alone with my thoughts for even an instant. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights3, an old favorite, was only 99¢ on one app or another, so I’ve been working my way through that, although this go-around has been admittedly more of a slog. Could be the medium; could be that, due to my advanced age and thousands of hours of therapy, the tragedy now outweighs the romance. When I get sick of all the little voices the audiobook reader has to affect so I can tell the difference between Cathy and Cathy, Jr., I switch over to whatever film studies nonfiction is free or immediately available on Libby, like Harlan Lebo’s Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey or one of the many about 2001: A Space Odyssey4.

My goal is to have read 40 books by the end of the year, and while I don’t think I’ll quite make it, I’m doing my level best with what’s on my night stand: Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (so far funny, good-hearted, and ambitious), Anton Solomonik’s forthcoming Realistic Fiction (more on this fascinating story collection to come), Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi, Georg Lukács on Lenin, and my Gary Indiana backlog. Pray for me, if you’ve ever prayed5.

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What I’ve been watching

Film

A few weeks ago, Nes took me to Film Forum to see Shuchi Talati’s splendid Girls Will Be Girls (2024). While I initially resisted—I’ve never been a fan of coming-of-age in any medium—Girls’ Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) and the stellar script won me over. Set in a boarding school in the Himalayan foothills, Girls follows high-achieving Mira’s disruptive romance with another student, which her mother (a smokin’ hot Kani Kusruti) supports at first ambivalently, and then inappropriately. To say that Girls gets emotionally incestuous with it wouldn’t be inaccurate, but I don’t want to sensationalize what is, at its core, a gentle yet fearless movie about what it means for a girl to be a grown-up.

Some other 2024 releases I saw recently:

The Substance, which was so boring and pointless I wanted to walk out. Everyone who enjoys this film as anything other than a smorgasbord of practical effects is a fool! What a waste of Demi Moore.

Heretic, which was good, clean fun. I agree with pretty much everything Fran had to say about it, but you really do have to be a Hugh Grant fan for it to work, I think.

Desire Lines, a hybrid documentary that Anthology Film Archives screened for its Narrow Rooms series. The narrative sections left a lot to be…desired…but the transfag interviews were really lovely. Plus, Nes and I got in for free because we’re clocky.

Plus some older fare:

I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982). The election was still looming over the BAM screening I went to with Jade in October. Spritely, amber-voiced James Baldwin returns to the American South to talk with old comrades from the civil rights movement, people who where there at the March on Washington and risked their lives on freedom rides, protests, and sit-ins. Directors Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley6 intercut their recollections with archival photographs and footage of profound suffering and humiliation: a white woman dumps a jar of ketchup onto a Black man’s head at a lunch counter; firefighters turn hoses on human beings that strip bark from trees and clothing from skin (pinioned against a building, a man shields the bodies of smaller people with his own). Baldwin joins a former teacher who tells the story of being incarcerated and tortured, along with her classroom of children, for protesting school conditions in Jimmy Carter’s Georgia (Carter, who is still alive at, like, 100, is these days hailed as a hero while his handlers cast his vote in the presidential election between genocidaires); as a new generation of schoolchildren learn her story, someone in the row behind me sobbed. I don’t have the luxury to be afraid, one man tells Baldwin while speaking of his youth as a political prisoner, because my grandmother lived through so much more, and her grandmother before her; now older, he devotes his life to teaching children, and his gentleness with them is almost destabilizing. The exhausted disillusionment of Baldwin’s interviewees is certainly not inspiring, in the sanitized way we like to use that word these days, but it is…motivating? Encouraging? I don’t know. Though carefully and boldly done, Grapevine is not a pleasant movie. In fact, it’s harrowing. But I needed to see it because it’s proof that courage is real, and that people have it all the time. Through it all, there is Baldwin’s sensitive eye and queenly warmth, his easy but nervous smile, his voluminous silences and insistent, even overwrought, speeches. He hugs easily, befriends curious children, offers his subjects sympathy without asking them to lie to him or to themself. Many of them believe integration failed; none have rose-colored glasses about the incoming Reagan administration. In the face of all this, is the great author cynical? I do not know. I do not think so.

Starship Troopers (1997): Of his fascist space fantasy, Paul Verhoeven said: “All the way through I wanted the audience to be asking, ‘Are [the characters] crazy?’” It’s difficult for me to tap into the shock and horror America’s great Dutch portraitist sought to elicit: I don’t think the ultraviolent teen soldiers are “crazy” at all, even though I know they are. I’m not really sure why I’m not crazy in the same way, to be perfectly honest.

Foxy Brown (1974): My favorite fun fact about Pam Grier is that she came in second in a beauty contest in her hometown of Denver. Breathtakingly beautiful and almost studiously badass, Grier’s best-known contribution to blaxploitation is campier than Coffy (1973), her other big one, despite of course also being brutally, graphically violent. If you enjoy the genre, there’s a lot to love about this movie, but the script’s management of Foxy’s sexual assault, and her hilariously gruesome revenge, is one of my favorite elements. If you’re promising me rape revenge in your movie, then somebody better die—at bare fucking minimum!

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1

I tried to read Beautiful World, Where Are You? and got bored.

2

Some may attribute this to her Marxist politics, which others have questioned in light of her subject matter. I don’t really care either way because Rooney has been unambiguous about her support for Palestine and her condemnation of Israel, which is unfortunately not the majority position among a lot of these big-time authors.

3

All the cool girls are reading it.

4

A favorite film of mine now, and a favorite book of mine from childhood, in no small part because Clarke was one of the first authors to create a world in which homosexuality could be ethically neutral. Imagine that.

5

Another Kubrick favorite.

6

Who was not originally credited for her work.

A stupid question

A few hours before Folsom Street Fair began, Jade put some needles in my back and plugged each one with a miniature cork. I put on a hoodie—it was a chilly September morning in San Francisco—and we walked through the Tenderloin to SoMa, where the police barricades had gone up the night before. By 11 am, the clouds had faded. It was warm enough that I could comfortably stroll around in little more than a pair of Mr. S-branded neoprene shorts.

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Who can say it?

Last month, the Arc of the United States—an organization that serves people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD)—published a blog post about the r-word. Alongside some questionable but well-intentioned editorializing, the post very briefly sketches the evolution of a 60s-era “neutral medical term” into a cruel yet ubiquitous epithet for people with IDD1. This evolution, the blog post acknowledges, encompasses the Arc itself: until 1992, the organization’s name was an acronym for “Association for Retarded Citizens.”

The timing of this blog post is not coincidental. While legally, clinically, and culturally we’ve begun to correcting for the harm caused by the pejoration of the r-word, it “stubbornly lingers in our vocabulary and even in some state laws,” as the Arc writes. With what feels like an “r-word resurgence” memeing its way across social and cultural media, “stubborn” is an understatement. (I have questions about this resurgence framing, but more on that later.) In any case, any reasonable person will agree that the r-word justifies and reinforces the dehumanization of people with IDD, which permits us as a society to physically and sexually abuse, financially exploit, deprive of resources, incarcerate, and kill them at much higher rates than people without IDD2.

Of course it does—that’s what slurs do! Scholar of dehumanization David Livingstone Smith talks about language as a precursor, if not a technology, of dehumanization that can predict more literal kinds of violence. “When you get that kind of rhetoric,” says Smith, referring to the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant referring to Hamas/Palestinians3 as “human animals” and “monsters,” “you just know there will be terrible atrocities following from it.”

I won’t make the claim that the use of the r-slur by some random Twitch streamer or your asshole coworker is the same thing as official propaganda issued by the architects of genocide. I do mean to compare them, however, in order to get us thinking about the fungibility of language and physical violence. It’s for this reason, in fact, that I’ve (mostly) given up on lecturing people that I don’t have relationships with about using the r-word. They will stop using it when they see people with IDD as people, and this will not come about through lectures (which isn’t to say that social pressure—and social consequences—don’t have a role in supporting and enforcing social safety). In my experience, a non-disabled person willing to use the r-slur is already willing to do much worse to them, if they can get away with it. Something more robust is needed than a half-baked culture war.

The r-slur topic is what got me thinking about this new series4. I’m curious about the online discourse surrounding a slur that many of people it describes can’t participate in (!), as well as the collective decision among progressives to refer to r-slur users as “childish,” “immature,” or “trapped in middle school”5. I also intend to write about other points of entry into the topic, from “who can say it?” and reclamation; to the relationship between the slurred subject and the slur respecter; to the unsaid and unsayable simultaneously conjured and repressed by the slur’s signifier, signified, and anyone else in the room. And I think I can do it all without invoking Lord Voldemort.

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1

As are all slurs, one supposes.

2

More often than not, people have more than one disability or more than one aspect of their identity serving as a pretext for this kind of dehumanization. This summer, after Mohammad Bhar, a 24-year-old Palestinian man with Down syndrome and autism, was mauled to death by an Israeli military dog, I did not want to say anything about it to anyone, on social media or real life, because I felt I could not do so without reinforcing the common perception of people with Down syndrome as sweet, childlike angels, a benevolent dehumanization has never been enough to protect them from far crueler kinds. What could I say about Mohammad that could not also be said about any other victim of Israel and its handler, the United States government—but may not be? Would those of us watching (I hesitate to say witnessing) the genocide of Palestinians from a few thousand miles away have accorded another young Muslim Palestinian man without IDD the same pity (I hesitate to say compassion)? Is receiving his horrific suffering with saccharine contempt any better than suspicion, or even apathy? In comparing Mohammad with non-disabled young Palestinian men who are branded as terrorist, we dehumanize all of them. For this I am so sorry. Fuck Israel and fuck America.

3

I don’t conflate these categories myself, but the IDF definitely does whenever convenient.

4

It’s one I’ve written about before.

5

That’s so interesting, isn’t it? It feels like the next closest thing to calling them stupid; that is, to calling them the slur right back, which you can’t do—or can you?

David Davis

Body scan

Mind: Head? Psyche? Or should I say brain, as I did for my last body scan? I never know which word to begin with when describing my mental state, which is really my emotional state, which is really my physical state. How can I possibly deconstruct the bodymind when the difference between here and eternity is a geriatric Manx for an alarm clock, followed by 15 minutes of light stretching and a cup of coffee?

As the dirty election approaches, the genocide bleeds on, and the world tracks for temperature rises of 2.6-3.1C this century1, all the little tricks I’ve learned from therapy, S/M, and surviving into my mid-thirties aren’t enough to settle me. Why should they? All signs point to very bad things in the very, very near future. But it’s almost disturbing to discover how much settling is still possible when my immediate physical needs are met (and at the moment, I’m very privileged to say that they are). (Oh yeah, I forgot about COVID. There’s that, too.)

Accountability time: I’m trying to write less about doom here on DAVID because I don’t think I add much, other than despair, to already-well-documented phenomena like climate collapse, fascism, disease, etc. I don’t think it’s useful, much less interesting—to me or to you, my beloved readers—to pop up every fortnight or so with yet more, I’m fretting, I’m panicking, and oh boy, am I ever scared! I wouldn’t say that I’m entirely at peace with the ways I’m which preparing myself for what’s to come2, but I do think this tendency undermines what it is that I am doing. I’m involved in North Brooklyn Mutual Aid3! I recently got a pen pal through the Prisoner Correspondence Project! I have made peace with death4! I’m looking into gun ownership! It also falsely inflates my sense of what agency I do have: there is actually very little that I can do in the face of all this, not least because nobody knows what’s going to happen. Even the information shaping my expectations is limited, colored, and biased against what I can know and learn from the internet which is, famously, designed to propagandize and feedback loop me into compliance or usefulness.

Over the past few weeks, I learned that Aruba has a lot of cactuses because it’s an arid xeric landscape5, saw a movie about what it’s like to attend boarding school in the Himalayan foothills, and finally gave up on a book about quantum electrodynamics (though not without coming to a half-understanding of the concept of action within physics). Just the other evening, Jade was served a TikTok showing how cargo ships stave off pirates while passing through the Guardafui Channel. I was suddenly overwhelmed. “The world is so big!” I exclaimed. On this planet, there is a functionally infinite number of lives (human and otherwise) I know nothing about, in locales as strange and foreign to me as Mars. My understanding of the world is minuscule, as is my life. This isn’t to say that its vastness, or the future’s unknowability, means nihilism is an option. But how it all shakes out isn’t just not my business—it’s beyond my capacity. Almost everything is, except what I owe the lives around me.

Sinuses: I don’t know if this happens to any of you, but once a quarter I wake up with an insistent congestion that is suddenly and volcanically resolved by me blowing my nose approximately 50-75 times. What emerges is healthfully clear but just as satisfying to expel as the hot, green morass that comes after debarking a plane at the tail end of a severe respiratory infection. Anyway, it just happened again the other week and it felt really good. I wish it would happen, like, every other day. More sustained than sneezing or cumming and much more pleasant than puking, it’s the kind of bodily function that really makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something.

Left thigh: My carving is healing really well, thanks so much for asking. After various needles and a caning from my boyfriend, I’m taking a brief tolerance break from pain that isn’t brought about my newest hobby: the rowing machine. If you’re doing S/M as a masochist type, I highly recommend it!

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1

The world’s biggest producers of greenhouse gases aren’t even on track for our best-case scenario’s worst-case scenarios—more on that here—and that’s not to speak of the impending collapse of the main ocean current system in the Atlantic, which would have devastating global implications and which is increasingly likely to happen (if it hasn’t already, there’s no way to be sure).

2

What an ominous way to express the future.

3

Speaking of mutual aid, revisited a cool piece about Aileen’s, a hospitality space for women in the sex trade, in Federal Way, Washington.

4

If not aging or suffering lol.

5

This island (you know how I am about my islands), located in the Lesser Antilles, is indeed desertlike, but that’s only partially due to its climate (which is changing, like everywhere else); Spanish colonization brought massive deforestation, drastically changing its landscape.

David Davis

It’s funny how sex passes through you. Gary Indiana—the huge bitch and faggot forefather who died yesterday—said that. Or rather, one of his characters did, in his novel Rent Boy (1993). I think I’ve overheard a million john life stories and another million whore life stories and once you plow off the bullshit the john’s story’s always “I’m lonely” and the whore’s story’s always “I came from a dysfunctional family,” its hustler hero complains. Rent Boy is about being desired, an inversion of another Indiana novel, Horse Crazy (1989), which is about the trials and tribulations of the poor bastard doing the desiring. If only these states of excruciation were mutually exclusive! But their author knew, even if his characters don’t, the truth: sex has a funny way of passing through all of us.

I have nothing to say that the elegies of social media haven’t said better, so I’ll leave you with a few humble recommendations for things to read and watch by and about the departed. Though I’ve only been reading Indiana for a few years now, I know, as all of us do, that something has been lost to us as artists, or New Yorkers, or Americans, or whatever. Thank god the work persists.

By Gary Indiana

“Fuck Israel,” (VICE, 2012)

“A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking” (short film, 1981)1

Some of his last published work: “Malaparte!” (The Ideas Letter, 2024) and “Five O’Clock Somewhere” (Granta, 2024)

About Gary Indiana

“A Vision of Neoliberalism in Flames,” by Christian Lorentzen

“Gary Indiana, The Art of Fiction No. 250,” interview by Tobi Haslett

“Gary Indiana Doesn’t Travel in Any Circles,” interview by Andrew Marzoni

“Sleep When I’m Dead,” by M.H. Miller2

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Shemaa and her family are still fundraising to evacuate Gaza. Send me your receipt of donation of any amount and I’ll send you 1 free month of subscriber-only content.

Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.

1

Liz Purchell turned me on to this one.

2

“You want to do what the artist wants, but you don’t want to go down in the books as the jellyfish killer.”