Davey Davis's Blog, page 6

David Davis

I used to publish articles and reviews in places other than DAVID, but I rarely do these days. As rates worsen, the time it takes to pitch, write, and revise for publication is too much—I simply can’t afford it. Which means that when I think a book or movie is worth writing about for someone other than myself, it must have really had an effect on me.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a home for my review of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Cuckoo, but Natalie Adler at Lux Magazine made space for me to cover it within a piece about conversion therapy in new queer horror for their Fall/Winter issue. Now that it’s available in print, I wanted to share my original review of Cuckoo with you all, as both companion and endnote to the Lux piece, and as a paean to Gretchen, a writer I think the world of.

The first half of Cuckoo, the searing second novel by Gretchen Felker-Martin, is set in the mid-nineties. Sent away to be scared straight in a remote Utahn compound, the teen prisoners of Camp Resolution are coming of age in a country in which anti-sodomy laws haven’t yet been ruled unconstitutional, euphemisms like “reparative therapy” are still picking up steam, and nascent Trojan horses like “porn addiction” are waiting patiently for widespread internet use. These campers aren’t referred to as queer unless they’re being bashed (by a relative or camp counselor, take your pick), let alone as trans, the inchoate prefix-as-identifier that had yet to attract the opportunistic sex panic now taking the West by storm. Camp Resolution isn’t about “identity.” It takes high-schoolers captive for one reason only, as Pastor Eddie reminds Cuckoo’s protagonists after their first day of back-breaking labor and beatings: because their families are fucked up. 

Which isn’t to say that these queer and trans teens are not also fucked up in the eyes of their captors, but for them, their sexual and gender deviance are symptomatic of a deeper problem. As Pastor Eddie explains, their parents don’t have the guts to guide them toward something better, to teach them how to be in the world. “The minute things got hard, they pushed you out of the nest and paid someone else to fix the problem,” he says. “They’re weak, and they abandoned you.” Had their families been better, is Pastor Eddie’s point, they wouldn’t currently be providing slave labor in total isolation from everyone they know, including the one or two relatives who might see their imprisonment for what it is.

Pastor Eddie’s irony is obvious to anyone who doesn’t hate children. It is true, if perversely, that Shelby, Nadine, Gabe (later Lara), Felix, John, Malcolm (later Mal), and Jo wouldn’t have been kidnapped and sent to the middle of nowhere if their families had been better. Though hailing from diverse backgrounds and family configurations, each camper shares in common home lives of tragic neglect and violent abuse. Like all conversion camps, Camp Resolution outsources that neglect and abuse for families that have realized, on some level, that they’re not equipped to dehumanize their children to the satisfaction of American heteronormativity. Along with the schools, clinics, and prisons, conversion camps—the bloody brick-and-mortars squatting down-funnel from sport and bathroom bans—are just the market meeting a demand. 

Pastor Eddie’s speech will prove to be the gentlest example of the tough love that Cuckoo’s protagonists must endure until they return home at the end of the summer. But of course, none of them are supposed to. Not as themselves, anyway. 

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Like Manhunt, Felker-Martin’s first novel, Cuckoo brings to life a constellation of characters and their myriad backstories with rapid-fire dialog, breathtaking action, and tightly controlled revelation of plot. Obscenely graphic and terrifically feeling, Cuckoo maintains its focus at a relentless pace as Camp Resolution’s newest cohort susses each other out among gun-happy counselors and their belt-wielding apparatchiks. Segregated by birth assignment in their lodging and labor and surveilled within an inch of their lives, the campers are nevertheless able to recognize each other—sometimes even before recognizing themselves. Watching “the transsexual” Felix in the girl’s shower, Jo registers one of the fleeting attractions over which entire Twitter discourses are waged. “‘He’s kind of hot,’ she thought, wondering if that made her less or more of a lesbian.”

Felker-Martin toggles deftly between her many main and supporting characters, demonstrating with surgical precision the conflict between their senses of self and the “reality” being shoved down their throats. Even the dipshits still complaining about the needless complexity of they/them for a single person can follow along with the campers whose very bodies are at odds with white and cis supremacy; can empathize with the desires that are mostly undesired but, like all desires, inexorable. The morning after hooking up with John, Malcolm’s fatphobia shames his pleasure in hindsight: “In the light of day, he felt embarrassed by how eager he’d been. How much he’d liked it.” Though the campers’ backgrounds and responses to their capture—Should they tough it out? Fight back? Cooperate, like the prefect-style campers that enforce just as brutally as their counselors?—are unique and appropriately conflicted, not a detail about their personalities, pasts, and hopes for the future is wasted. Among the misgendering, deprivation, and broken bones, I found myself wondering how such significant suffering could be imposed upon characters so obviously beloved by their author. 

From the campers’ memories of home to their bloody resistance against their captors, Cuckoo’s constant violence is a petri dish of power, an opportunity to observe its flow around and between identity categories that aren’t the explicit projects of the conversion camp’s bare life. As pretexts for their collective punishment, the campers’ queerness and transness serve to reinforce all modes of oppression: John’s fatness is integral to his father’s understanding of (and disgust in) his son’s effeminacy; Felix’s insistence on his maleness defies his immigrant father’s hopes for assimilation into American culture; Malcolm’s attraction to other boys, while not incidental to his abuse, is convenient cover for a mother who has turned her rage at her absent husband back on her children; Shelby’s girlhood is tolerated by one of her white adoptive mothers, but is seen by the other as a punishment, in the wet-dream register typical of gender-critical types (“The lit butt pressed to Shelby’s arm. The smell of burning flesh. You cannot do this to yourself, Andrew. You cannot do this to me.”). While they’re incapable of feigning the normalcy that would have allowed them to fly under the radar—as many of us would have, if only we could—not being straight isn’t really why they’re here at Camp Resolution. Their crime is having survived the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse their families decided that they deserved. Their queerness or transness makes destroying the evidence that much easier. 

Which isn’t to say that Felker-Martin renders scapegoating as a uniform experience. Cuckoo balances a diverse cast of characters who must organize, despite their differences and disagreements, in order to save themselves. These teens aren’t at Camp Resolution because they are queer or trans. They are fags, dykes, and transsexuals, or perhaps some other slur, or perhaps nothing at all. The words both used and denied in order to degrade these children describe real power imbalances that cease to matter when the campers start to suspect that even if their counselors don’t kill them, something else will—something that slithers under the cabins and peers up at them through the floorboards. With her characters’ bitter jokes about concentration camps, environments designed to use identity for the sole purpose of its annihilation, Felker-Martin underscores the co-optability of liberal identity politics. Camp Resolution is no True Directions, the conversion camp from But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) whose earnest goal is to correct gender transgression and restore its campers to happy, healthy heterosexuality. Like other conversion camps, it promises rehabilitation it can never deliver; unlike other conversion camps, its harsh physical labor and arbitrary punishment conceal something even more sinister, something that’s causing campers to waste away, suffer blinding headaches, and begin sharing the same dreams, night after night.

Camp Resolution runs on queerphobia, but the monster at its heart is no metaphor. Its purpose unclear and its reach octopodean, the creature the campers call the Cuckoo is a massive, cervix-textured, foul-smelling alien lifeform that colonizes human bodies—“They’re going to take us. Our faces. Our lives,” is Jo’s horrified realization—then sends their replicas back to their unsuspecting families, hatchlings hungry for the faces (and then some) of the people that betrayed their hosts’ utter helplessness.  

Able to convince families all over the country to hand over their own offspring, the Cuckoo grows, feeding on the queer and trans poster children of the American identity crisis that has gone on to take the lives of Nex Benedict and Alex “Boo” Taylor, to name two murdered youth from 2024 alone. That crisis is literalized by the Cuckoo as an extraterrestrial mother-parasite of Lovecraftian proportions from whom the imitations of human bodies protrude like tumors, mimicking the voices and words of the parents that gave the campers up. Their delayed realizations of their abandonment are among the most painful scenes in the book. “She sent me here to die,” thinks Gabe, shattered. “They both did.”

With Cuckoo, Felker-Martin forsakes euphemism to paint an exacting portrait of the campers whose lack of power begins with the wrongness of their bodies. In her extended descriptions of the Cuckoo’s unearthly incarnation, we see the same unflinching language reconstituted to convey its fleshy, weeping, even gynecological horror. Two different kinds of monster held up for our comparison—how could we fail to tell the difference? How could anyone?

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With research showing a relationship between conversion therapy and suicidality, use of the term “survivor” for those who’ve undergone the former is hardly overstated—least of all in the case of the refugees of Camp Resolution. It’s nothing short of a hard-earned miracle that some (though not all) of our original campers make their hair-raising escape through the desert to the nearest town where, devastated by their ordeal and aware they can never return home with the story they have to tell, they begin their lives as runaways with the help of Jo’s grandfather. Though safe for the moment, their relief is hardly commensurate with their suffering; thanks to trauma, it never is. Shelby, Lara, Felix, John, Mal, and Jo may have made it out of Camp Resolution, but, like so many queer and trans adults, they must continue to live on inside of their memories. 

In the 16 years between Parts 1 and 2 of Cuckoo, only Felix keeps tabs on the monster, following its cross-continental metastasization with the help of online forums and lonely stakeouts at suspected conversion camps, which as the nineties fade into the past have had to become more clandestine since his summer in Camp Resolution. His fellow survivors, now spread across the country in various stages of dysfunction and levels of contact, can deny or ignore it all they want. The Cuckoo knows time, and just about everything else, is on its side. 

Like the Losers Club of Stephen King’s epic, IT, the campers are summoned by a self-appointed watcher to finish what they started going on two decades later—only their demon is even more formidable than Pennywise. Like the sewer clown plugged into ChatGPT, the Cuckoo iterates rather than replicates, absorbs rather than haunts, consuming entire families at a time and infiltrating the country’s most powerful institutions, its process reminiscent of the climate-driven model of Lyme-carrying ticks and toxic algae blooms. Only Felker-Martin could one-up King with the campers’ Hail Mary plan to take out the Cuckoo once and for all, the mechanism of which is one of her many winks to Cuckoo’s transsexual readers.

Cuckoo’s strongest connection to IT, however, lies in its author’s authentic sympathy for young people, one that I sensed when reading King as a child myself. Cuckoo is gory and disturbing, and even its quietest moments of connection are shadowed by tragedy. And yet I would recommend it to any young person, because it takes their vulnerability seriously. As this country’s organized assault on trans children proves, the liberation of all children is the next (final?) frontier of any radical politics, and Felker-Martin understands this better than most. Her dedication at the beginning of Cuckoo reads simply: For all unwanted children. 

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David Davis: Members Only

Is it possible to do more with trauma than heal it? Referencing Avgi Saketopoulou in a about fascism and anti-trans sentiment, Willa Smart and Beckett Warzer expand on the psychoanalyst’s preferred subject, the traumatophiliac:

To make good use of one’s traumatic history means to “[enter] more deeply into its patterns of repetition,” rather than seeking to heal or eliminate trauma—a phobic response that leads to compulsive repetition rather than the possibility of transformation.

Has a phobic response to your trauma only made your distress worse? In attempting to dig the bullet from your flesh, have you instead pushed it deeper into your body?

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David Davis

Over the past few years, I’ve stopped going to events with exclusionary gender policies, which has really simplified things. When it comes to events or spaces that make a point about being only for men or women, there’s little ambiguity; they’re closed to me as an androgynous transsexual, for better or for worse. Things start getting a little hairy, however, when the event or space attempts to use exclusion in order to be inclusive of people like me.

How many event flyers have you seen with gender policies that use language like: “for women and femmes,” “for women and non-men,” or “for everyone but cis men?” For all that they probably mean well, these efforts to define the event against those who can’t come—rather than as for those who are invited—make me much more uncomfortable than women’s locker rooms or cis gay circuit parties. Just as some people prefer to interact with certain genders (or their idea of certain genders), I prefer not to submit myself to the scrutiny of the (invariably) cissexual person who thinks a flyer with “women and trans only” isn’t ignorant and disrespectful1.

So where do I feel welcome? At events with expansive gender policies. Events with expansive gender policies may say they invite “all genders” or, are, like Bawdy, simply “a queer party.” They may advertise themselves as centering certain gender identities, such as women or dykes, but welcome all comers. Some, like Inferno, may acknowledge themselves as spaces where people who mostly identify a certain way come to cruise each other, while simultaneously making an effort to connect with attendees and organizers of more marginalized genders to make it more inclusive without losing what makes it special. While they can be imperfect, expansive gender policies do more to ensure that people with marginalized genders don’t have to work harder than anyone else to attend.

But isn’t “women and femmes” an effort, at least? Isn’t she/they’s heart in the right place? Wasn’t the original purpose of complicated door policies to make sure people with marginalized genders could come in the first place?

Sure. (And it’s here that I should point out that when deployed a certain way, “women and femmes” could very feasibly include me, a person who is never read as a woman or a femme in dyke spaces, while excluding a literal trans woman or trans femme. Or lbr, a fem/me cis guy!) But over the years and in my experience, that approach causes more problems than it resolves. If the language of a so-called inclusive event leaves trans people, especially women, wondering if they are truly welcome; if they will be scrutinized at the door; if they will be stared at, ignored, talked over, or degendered or sexualized against their will; if they will be presumed to be the aggressors in any conflict or abandoned if someone hurts or takes advantage of them, then what has it accomplished except further discrimination against trans people?

In my experience, the “women and femmes” lingo is often just window dressing, anyway. So no one too scarily masculine has made it past the velvet rope—now what2? What else are we doing to make sure that the dolls at our party are safe and respected and having a good time? Because I hate to break it to you, but cis women and people who can move through the world like them can be just as violent to trans people as cis men are. How often do Canva flyers with HR language advertise events that actually take tangible, material steps to make sure that trans people, women especially, are regarded as worthy of integration—and not just outsiders or tokens, useful for little more than virtue signaling?

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I’m sorry if this is tedious. This gender policy thing isn’t an axe I grind very much, but I got to thinking about it again a few weeks ago when I went to Folsom for the first time in six years. I had fun, but the “no cis men” language among the dyke-adjacent leathersexuals in my vicinity was casual and frequent enough that I felt like I’d traveled back in time to my last visit, when “women and femmes” had more of a chokehold on dyke culture.

Folsom hosts countless groups, organizations, and meetups based on desire, identity, or affiliation, including the Playground, its formal space for “women of every kind and all trans and nonbinary folks.” While not for me, this language is pretty expansive3. And clearly I’m not alone, as it’s a popular destination among the, uh, non-cis men of Folsom. While many come and go, some stay there the entire time, protected from the sea of faggots and voyeurs and tourists surrounding them. I understand wanting to avoid cis men, but it does strike me as a choice to go out of one’s way—perhaps even flying across the country—to attend one of the nation’s premiere events of faggotry, one that began as resistance against the city of San Francisco’s shuttering of gay bathhouses at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, only to make a lot of noise about escaping the cis male gaze (as if there’s only one) for the duration of your visit4.

Because listen, I’ve gotten into fights with cis men at Folsom. I’ve spent some time in public, where cis men famously are, and a fair number of them have a lot of feelings about me. But this effort to keep an entire gender out of gender-diverse spaces—not in order to create space for certain genders, but to circumscribe safe genders through the creation of unsafe genders—comes at the expense of trans people, especially those of us who are feminized, racialized, disabled, etc.5 It reminds me of means-testing for welfare benefits: efforts to weed out the people who don’t “need” or “deserve” food stamps will fail, with the bonus effect of also weeding out people who, according to your government’s totally unbiased standards, actually do “need” or “deserve” food stamps.

If your event is about celebrating, centering, or otherwise supporting trans people, just say that! Or if you want to do something without men around, that’s literally so fine. But the more convoluted gender exclusionary language gets, the more I feel like these events are more focused on hating the cis men who aren’t present than loving the people who are—and as a trans person, I can never help but wonder where that resentment is going to end up.

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Not everyone agrees with me on this subject, and that’s okay. We can just go to different parties, which we do. But I’m tired of debating it with people who aren’t of the transsexual experience because their first argument is always this one: Well, I don’t want cis men at this event because I have been harmed by them before.

Over the years, it’s gotten more difficult to take this argument for what it is: the divulging of a very personal, sometimes very traumatizing experience of gendered violence. This is emotional and vulnerable, and for my two cents, gendered violence is a sound reason to find value in the exclusionary gender policy, at least initially. But I have to make an effort to keep all that in mind because it has begun to feel like an accusation in and of itself. Does this person think I haven’t considered that men as a group are incentivized to use their power over and against us? I wonder. That I can’t understand or relate to their fears? That I don’t come to this issue with similar experiences? That I haven’t also been assaulted by cis men, of all orientations, in gay and straight spaces alike? It’s difficult not to feel it as transphobia6, which in my case encreatures me as both a man, in that I can’t relate to women’s experiences, as well as a woman, in that my experiences don’t matter (I’m the woman’s woman). I can’t be trusted, as if I were a man, yet I don’t have the power over a woman that a man does. I’ve been assaulted by cis women, too—why is it that gender-diverse spaces have to accommodate someone like me, but not the cis women who’ve taken advantage of our gendered power differential?

Personally, I actually manage a lot more hostility toward cis women than cis men because I’ve never expected loyalty from the latter—but that’s my trauma and my neurosis, and I can’t build trust and connection with that (you can read more of my thoughts on community here). We don’t know what a stranger will do when they enter our space, and to pretend that their gender can help us predict that isn’t just absurd, but counterproductive. We can only agree on which behaviors are unacceptable and remove those who behave unacceptably.

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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

“Women and trans” what, exactly? Do the people throwing these parties recognize that they sound like alt-right Facebook paid ads and no-pic Grindr accounts that say “passable trans only” in the bio? “Women and trans”—as if these things were mutually exclusive.

2

Or maybe they have, but they’re on notice.

3

Although I heard that blood and fucking wasn’t allowed there this year…!?

4

As if faggotry were only for cis men.

5

As hordes of cis men are besieging the ramparts of dyke night—do you hear yourselves?

6

The kind shaped by my other identities, such as being white, being straight-size, being TME, etc.

David Davis

I woke up in an ugly mood because it’s October 7, 2024, and because I’m disturbed by the climate-driven changes in my local weather patterns, and because I’m likely dropping from a scarification I had done on Saturday. I want to write about what’s upcoming for this newsletter—you know, gin up some anticipation for all 4,336 of you—but how can I, with all this1?

Well, I can, and so I do, I suppose. I won’t attempt to pass off what I do here as more than it is, but what it is may be of use to some of you, if not as edification then at least as distraction. It’s both for me. So, what’s upcoming:

Free

Upcoming topics include: gender policies at play and sex parties; supermasochist Bob Flanagan; art patronage; reviews of sadomasochist art; and another body scan, which has become a series of sorts.

New series alert! I’ve been wanting to write about slurs for a long time now. From who can reclaim what, to the so-called resurgence of the r-word, to the humbling consented to by those who refuse to use a slur that does not apply to them, there’s a lot to think about here, especially regarding the unsaid.

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Cuts like a knife: Over the summer and now into fall, I’ve been having some really interesting sharps experiences. For those who’d like to see photos and read about the process, I recommend subscribing ASAP. It’s $6/month, but only $5/month if you pay for the year in advance. The majority of DAVID is always going to be free, so don’t sweat it if I’m not in your budget. There are much more important things.

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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

My sibling lives in the Midwest but regularly visits their partner in Florida, so they’re one of my on-the-ground contacts for climate collapse as it unfolds in those parts of the country. Today, they only just made it out of the Sunshine State ahead of Milton, which is due to hit on Wednesday and will likely be a Category 4, if not worse. Ever since 2018, when the Camp Fire—California’s deadliest wildfire—took out the town down the road from ours, the future has become our most consistent topic of conversation. While my sibling and I tend to catastrophize, there is little to indicate that our pessimism is unrealistic. If something doesn’t change, we’re scheduled to soar past the 2015 Paris Accord’s agreed-upon goal of keeping the rise in global surface temperature below 2 °C (3.6 °F) above pre-industrial levels, conditions which exacerbate and are accelerated by the immiseration of the world order, from the climate refugees of Hurricane Helene wading through toxic mud to the 25 million Sudanese suffering from “severe hunger” to the likely hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been murdered over the course of the genocide that began a year ago today.

David Davis

“It is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray our degree of insecurity,” explains Austerlitz, the protagonist of W.G. Sebald’s novel of the same name.

To wit: in Europe, the star-shaped fortresses of the 18th century were built in anticipation of advancing armies, only to undermine their effect by accentuating their weak points and expanding to keep pace with new enemies, urban sprawl, and the disadvantages of their mobile opposition. “The largest fortifications will naturally attract the largest enemy forces,” Austerlitz reasons. “The more you entrench yourself the more you must remain on the defensive.”

For all their brilliance, he says, the continental masters of military architecture never seemed to cotton on to the fundamental “wrong-headedness” of their behemoths. Instead, they “forged ahead…far and beyond any reasonable bounds.” Austerlitz muses that smaller buildings—like cottages and bothies—offer at least a semblance of peace to their beholder, but what of siegecraft’s vast and terrible edifice? He leaves us with this banger:

At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed form the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

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It’s all too easy to compare Austerlitz’s fortresses and their inexorable growth with the cancer of capitalism. As they expand, militarizing every square inch of a territory along the way, they become the borders they ostensibly defend, increasing their mutual hardness, sharpness, and destructive capacity as they fluctuate and contort within and around each other.

This is as true now in the States as it was in Belgium a few hundred years ago: nearly 2 out of 3 of people living in America are within the 100-mile border zone in which USCIS, ICE, and US Customs and Border Protection are granted certain “powers without warrant” (the Fourth Amendment still affords citizens some protection from that, sort of). In his review of John Washington’s The Case for Open Borders, Jake Romm calls borders “hellgates”—but which side is hell on? The Harris presidential campaign, and the Democratic establishment it represents, has agreed with the Republicans that it’s on the other side; as Republicans radicalize on immigration, writes Daniel Denvir, the “Democratic elites chase after them.” In contradiction to their Trump-era lip service, the Democrats’ “‘normal’ position on immigration moves ever rightward.”

But you and I know, of course, that the need to keep “them” out is propaganda designed to conceal the diminishing returns of citizenship here in the imperial core. The chickens have always roosted, but those birds are really going for it in 2024. As Romm writes, “The preservation of borders in the face of climate catastrophe, global conflict, and regular economic crises will require ever greater internal and external violence.” Beyond America’s borders, famine has been declared in Darfur, melting glaciers have forced Italy and Switzerland to redraw their borders, and greenhouse emissions from Israel’s genocide (now spilling over, again, into Lebanon) rivals those of dozens of other country’s annual outputs combined; within them, we beg our government to save us from tropical storms, chemical spills, and pandemics, and its response is to send yet more money to murder Palestinians.

Is our border a fortress? If these are still separate entities, what’s to stop their eventual convergence? Or has it already happened?

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David Davis

I love these quarterly check-ins. This time, I’m including a few movies and a painting, but I’ll only be talking about one book (kind of). Though I had a fun summer with Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library, Gary Indiana’s Rent Boy, and Joan Nestle and John Preston’s Sister and Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Write About Their Lives Together, plus a few others, there are only so many hours in the day—especially when you’re wrapping up the MS for your third novel.

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What I’ve been reading

Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories , by Torrey Peters

In 2019, a few months after I moved to the city, Torrey Peters invited me to lunch. I had read Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, but that was all I knew about her, if fiction can tell you anything at all about its author. She arrived at the restaurant on a hot-pink motorcycle, briskly unhelmeting the golden hair that doubled as her lit-girl aureole (Detransition, Baby was just around the corner), before greeting me with her disarmingly soft voice. She was polite in the self-effacing but deadly serious manner of Midwesterners, instantly putting me at ease, or what passed for it at that time in my life. Over our meal, we talked about writing.

We still do. Reading my ARC of Torrey’s newest book, Stag Dance—comprised of Infect Your Friends, two other novellas, The Masker (2016) and The Chaser (2020), and the eponymous novel, a tall tale-style yarn about gender trouble at a turn-of-the-century logging camp—I had the funny, pleasureful, obvious-in-retrospect realization that our friendship lives within our books, each a long and painful gestation of chapters nurtured, abandoned, executed, revivified, fretted over, and then finally whisked away into the world. (I’m mixing my metaphors here, but considering our oeuvres I think a little biological illegibility is in order.) Over the past five years, we’ve talked about everything under the sun, but there’s never a conversation with Torrey that doesn’t somehow find its way back to our work.

While Stag Dance the novel is new material, Stag Dance the collection has the shape and feel of a retrospective, which is highly appropriate for a brilliant though still-maturing artist who has managed to survive the (well-deserved) hype and circumstance of her debut, which included her nomination for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction, as well as its transmisogynist outcry from an unwashed minority whose open letter against it could have used a copy edit. As Torrey writes in her acknowledgements, Stag Dance brings together a decade of work that has “[puzzled] out, through genre, the inconvenient aspects of my never-ending transition—otherwise known as ongoing trans life,” with stunning and satisfying consonance.

In my brief review of each novel/la, I’ll keep it as impersonal as I can under the circumstances. But I will say, unprofessionally, that I see in Stag Dance’s successes the qualities that I adore in Torrey as a person: her delicacy; her sense of humor (highly sophisticated, with gleeful glimmers of adolescent raunch); and her uncanny ease with metaphor, as if even the most complex idea were merely an apple for her to lower into your reach by applying just the right amount pressure to its branch.

Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones: I had forgotten how cinematic this one is. In a post-pandemic future where everyone is trans—or rather, where everyone is forced to scrap for the sex hormones that keep our hair and muscle and fat in the preferred states and locations—our narrator toggles between her apocalyptic present foraging for estrogen and her no-so-distant t4t past with Lexi, the messy doll who started it all. Now that we’ve actually had our viral plague here in the real world (though it hasn’t fucked with our endocrine systems in a way that’s quite so interesting), aughts/teens spec-fic (mine included) has acquired a certain naiveté. For all its technical irrelevance, however, Infect Your Friends retains the narcotic charisma of transsexual littermate lovers, a page-turning momentum, and the breathless final grafs that made it pop in the first place.

The Chaser: We return to the scene of the crime—adolescence—not from the perspective of the gender-funny kid, but their grudging admirer. At a Midwestern Quaker boarding school, a butch jock gets involved with his roommate, femmy proto-girl Robbie, only to discover that detaching with his masculinity intact is harder than he would have guessed. There’s so much to love about this story, which I think remains my favorite of Torrey’s work, but what I love the most is that Robbie has the social status and emotional intelligence to be its villain, rather than its victim—the chaser’s chaser. But this reading begets another: that Robbie is not the villain at all, but simply insisting on not being disappeared by his erstwhile friend, which, in a world in which men are gendered through the de-gendering of other people, can only be understood as violence.

Stag Dance: Because Stag Dance is boldly written in dialect and because I have heard Torrey recite from it at “Trans Disruptions: The Future of Change,” reading this novel gives me the hilarious sensation of seeing my willowy friend in drag as bewhiskered Babe Bunyan, the self-loathing, ox-sized yeoman who yearns to wear the fabric triangle that will mark him as “the skooch” to be courted at his logging camp’s stag dance. Poised against his rough-hewn ribaldry is Torrey’s strongest setting and descriptive work yet, as well as her always-original approach to gender as a thing we desire more than inhabit. As Babe, triangle firmly in place, muses, “Maybe the order of events is jumbled, but it seems that the declaration and the aspiring happen in the same moment.” Ok, backwoods Judy Butler!

The Masker: Not all transsexuals have a red-pill moment, but for many of us an excruciating decision must be made: do I go full-time? Force-fem and sissy interiority (do you know the difference between a woman’s garment and a sissy’s?) is Torrey’s bread and butter, and so long as there is a social cost to transition, particularly for women, her essential treatment of these topics will continue to fascinate.

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What I’ve been watching

All That Jazz (1979): I love art about people who are terrified of sex, and few are more so than Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical stand-in, theater director, choreographer, and compulsive philanderer Joe Gideon (played by the gorgeous Roy Scheider, as I always call him). As a musical theater hater, I was nonetheless thrilled by Jazz’s beautiful choreography, fabulous casting, and mesmerizing assembly; its writer clearly has an intimate understanding of rhythm. Still, I spent most of the screening wishing I were watching 8½ instead.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974): Watched it again because of Gena Rowlands’ passing. For a loud movie, Woman has many moments of profound quiet. Though its scenes of naked tragedy, including the one where Rowlands’ Mabel begs her husband, Nick (a heartbreaking Peter Falk) not to institutionalize her, may draw the most attention, for me the most memorable is when Mabel waits on her tiptoes in the street for her children’s school bus, almost dancing with happy anticipation. It made me miss my own mother in a way that was almost not unpleasant.

Greta (2018): This one should have been drowned in a bucket. A crazy piano teacher living in New York City stalks, tortures, and kills young girls, and yet we’re bored. Chloë Grace Moretz stuns—in the bad way—and even the great Isabelle Huppert is wooden and unsatisfying, though she chews up one or two scenes, like when she forces her victim to serve her in the restaurant where she works.

The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973): Both brilliantly understated and depressingly on the nose, Ivan Dixon’s radical adaptation of Sam Greenlee’s novel follows the first Black CIA agent (a slow-burning Lawrence Cook) as he builds a guerrilla army intent on overthrowing the government. The FBI had it pulled from theaters, and I can’t imagine it would fare very differently as a new release today.

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What I’ve been looking at

“Is It Real? Yes, It Is!” by Juanita McNeely: Going through my notes, I came across a photo I took of the Whitney placard for this painting, a depiction of the artist’s experiences with illegal abortion because legitimate doctors would not do it in order to save her life from cancer—to protect the baby, you see. Even while acknowledging the brutal circumstances of her procedure, the placard describes the “cruelty and carelessness” of her male doctors as “perceived.” Every time I read the word, I become livid. I have not had an abortion, but I have been butchered; this painting, with its necrotic bones, suffocating bandages, leering Donald Duck, and faceless MDs stopped me dead in my tracks.

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

David Davis: Members Only

You may have noticed that images from my scenes are almost always paywalled. This is because I understand that “content” that is personal, eroticized, and involves me doing something freakish is more likely to inspire you to subscribe than reviews of interwar French novels or meditations on the romcom. While I believe that people like reading what I have to say about art, culture, and leather, I understand that what people like is rarely the same thing as what they’re willing to pay for.

It’s for this reason that the violence is below the cut, as it were.

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David Davis

You may have noticed that images from my scenes are almost always paywalled. This is because I understand that “content” that is personal, eroticized, and involves me doing something freakish is more likely to inspire you to subscribe than reviews of interwar French novels or meditations on the romcom. While I believe that people like reading what I have to say about art, culture, and leather, I understand that what people like is rarely the same thing as what they’re willing to pay for.

It’s for this reason that the violence is below the cut, as it were.

Read more

David Davis

Last week, I received a call from a man looking for my uncle, who apparently owes him money. It wasn’t out of any sense of loyalty that I blocked him—I haven’t seen my uncle in ten years, since he was running a scared-straight/conversion therapy racket on his property out in the Sierras. Out of curiosity, I tracked down the Instagram account for the now-bankrupt business he started with the money of the man I blocked; in dipping his toe into a new industry, it seemed, my uncle was soon lost at sea.

I examined the photos of him and his family, who, in true Davis fashion, were also his employees. Other than looking older, little about them had changed in the past decade. From my uncle’s frizzy, Viking-style beard, to his wife’s baggy, joyless dresses—femininity-as-chore for the woman he referred to as “Mother”—to his children, the drab young adults who I suppose are my cousins, these biological relatives of mine are the worst kind of white people: Disneyfied versions of the more aesthetically striking skinhead who harbor more or less the same politics.

I felt nothing for them. But blocking my uncle’s creditor still felt vindictive, rather than merely practical, and I was out of sorts for the rest of the day. Though it smarts to be deadnamed (as will happen to me forever thanks to the digitization of legal and medical records), my resentment had been stirred by this reminder of my natal family and my lack of feeling for them. These reminders of nothing, which aren’t unfamiliar to me, always have the paradoxical effect of making me feel something in the most unpleasant way.

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Also last week: bored and over-caffeinated, I did an anonymous AMA on my own Instagram. Among the submitted questions—What are my romantic relationships like? What do I think about this or that director? How have I integrated COVID safety into my sex life?—was this one: Why don’t we have a good written ethics of sadism?

I’ve condensed the question for you here, meaning you can’t see how its considerably longer original phrasing telegraphed, to my ears, a proud ignorance of leather and a disdain for the sadistic experience, something about which, as a masochist, I feel called upon to defend; I’m also suspicious of people who came to leather through a college critical theory course rather than, you know, gay sex, as they tend to arrive with a lot of bourgie hangups about a subculture that is definitionally poor, criminalized, and otherwise marginal1. Despite my irritation, however, I replied with lots of recommended reading—because how could I blame this person? These days, leather seems more accessible than it really is because its signifiers have been commodified by marketing and pop culture, and its body, if not its underbelly, exposed, via social media, to people (gay and otherwise) who have no actual stake in the lifestyle. Why don’t we have a good written ethics of sadism? Not that we need one, my dear, but how dare you assume that we don’t?

In my response, I included Guy Baldwin’s Ties That Bind: The SM/Leather/Fetish Erotic Style: Issues, Commentaries and Advice [sic]2, a collection of his Drummer advice columns from 1986 to 1993; it’s not theory, which I think is what my interlocutor wanted, but I thought a psychotherapist leatherman’s perspective had something to offer, ethically speaking. At around the time he was writing that column, Baldwin also wrote a series of essays on leather’s Old Guard, having discovered that the younger leatherfolk around him insisted on conceiving of these mystical creatures as this “rigid and dead thing rather than an evolving, living cultural entity.”

“Stranger still,” he writes in “The Old Guard: Classical Leather Culture Revisited,” “is the fact that the Old Guard is usually talked about by people who weren’t part of it as though it were some kind of monolithic, behemoth…homogeneous and static, neither of which was the case…”

Ignorance is no sin, especially when it comes to leather, a subculture that has been repressed and co-opted since the beginning. To revel in one’s own ignorance while disparaging that about which one knows nothing, however, is to display an arrogance antithetical to our tradition, which that Instagram person would have known if they had read beyond the sexy university press releases of the past year or two. Mama, let’s research the American homosexual military veterans who split off from The Wild One-style motorcycle gangs of the 50s to create their own hierarchical rough-fuck culture!

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To be sure, the leathersexuals that came before us aren’t unproblematic. Baldwin uses language like “feudal nobility,” “godfather,” and “baron” to help us conceptualize the way that leather families were organized among the white, cis, masculinist players of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. One was not socialized into leather as a vast, interconnected, highly political counterculture—movement, even—but into the norms, mores, and protocols unique to their region, city, and family. These “clans” or “tribes” subverted the nuclear family while also reproducing its organizational logics of white supremacy and patriarchy (power relations that define leather today, by the way). Nevertheless, they served an important purpose for leathersexual men, supplying, as Baldwin writes: “advice for love life and sex life; a home-life with our own kind; information about how leathersex worked; a place to barbecue on weekends; information on who were the responsible players in the community and who was best avoided; the very important Protocols, of course; and general mentoring.”

Unlike Baldwin’s Old Guard, my leather family is multi-gender, multi-racial3, and only incidentally ex-military (no one I know fucks with vets who haven’t been radicalized by their enlistment, denounced American imperialism, etc.). But both serve as replacements for our straight families of origin, who not only didn’t want us, but were incapable of supporting our safety and happiness as leathersexuals. The nuclear family is for reproducing capitalism; the leather family is for fucking.

In stark contrast to the way leather’s insularity has been on the decline since Stonewall (Baldwin has a lot to say about why this is), I suspect that our families have never been more important to that safety and happiness. But the Old Guard wasn’t just designed to protect its members: it also guarded “the mysteries of leather ritual” from outsiders, those who would have “exploited them for theatrical effect, chic, or merely from dilettantism .” Though the Old Guard has faded away, based on what we see of “S/M” in ad campaigns, TV shows and books, and social media, some things never change.

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In 2024, the “mysteries of leather ritual” are not hidden from view in Brooklyn’s leatherqueer scene. At Bruise, the public monthly party put on by Daemonumx and Jade, there is no cover or dress code, although horny leatherwear is highly encouraged. While most of us who come are perverts, no one is turned away. I think this is a good thing, and compatible with the time and place in which we find ourselves: “we recruit,” as the Lesbian Avengers used to say.

A few weeks ago, Bruise hosted a pop-up strip club to fundraise for DecrimNY (fundraising is an old biker and leather tradition, as Baldwin writes). As sex workers, strippers are naturally adjacent to leather, and the dancers at the fundraiser were intentionally in leather, meaning they are parents, siblings, and children of other leathersexuals. As I watched them being sexy for their community, I felt like a sister, an aunt, a mother, even: Isn’t she beautiful. What a good job they’re doing. Look at him go! Watching their friends and lovers use infantilizing terms of endearment like baby, hold cameras like proud papas, praise them and cheer them on as they leap, spin, bounce, hustle, and throw ass, I felt old, or maybe just young, because these are the feelings I still associate with my straight family, and the life it was supposed to give me.

That these feelings—reflexive and nostalgic, natural and unnatural—can transcend my old life feels good. But I can’t feel them without thinking of my old life, which feels painful. Despite everything I have gained by that loss, I still grieve it, even though, if you could see my uncle’s work Instagram, you would wonder what there could possibly be to grieve. I think I always will.

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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

I went to college! I have bourgie hangups! And I came to leather because it was the only way to survive a bad situation, which means I accord it a respect that weekend-warrior trust fundies just don’t, maybe can’t.

2

Not to be confused with Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, by the great Sarah Schulman.

3

I don’t remember Baldwin writing about race in his book, and glancing through his other writing—including a book on “slavecraft” (with an intro by Patrick Califia!!!)—there is nothing addressing race, racism, or white supremacy. Without making any claims about Baldwin’s personal beliefs, or going so far as to assume that he has never written about these topics, I am going to hypothesize that his milieu was pretty white.

David Davis

Whenever a celebrity makes the rounds for supporting the Zionist entity, Twitter leftists like to point out that the most noise tends to come from the most mid among them. When you’re C-list—at best—execrable politics, the logic goes, comes with the territory. See: Debra Messing, Mayim Bialik, the Good Wife, etc.

While it’s a tempting conclusion to draw, I think there’s another explanation. A-listers and Oscar winners like The Rock, Natalie Portman, and Jerry Seinfeld are also public about their Zionism, but the Michael Rapaports1 of the world are the ones building brands off of it. Like JK Rowling, who was already a billionaire before transphobia became the brain worm that Ratatouilles her smear campaigns against , Gal Gadot endorses genocide for the love of the game. Downstream of heavy hitters like them, however, are thousands of shills, opportunists, and mercenaries carving out their niche in an attention economy that rewards outrage, normalizes fascism, and embraces the dehumanization the thousands—possibly hundreds of thousands—of human beings who have been slaughtered since last October as not just the status quo, but emblematic of America’s moral righteousness.

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I first recognized this phenomenon when it started cropping up around the that’s brought transphobia to a fever pitch here in the Anglosphere. How many journalists, writers, comedians, artists, influencers, and content creators have pivoted to virulent transphobia as the industry crumbles around them? The media jobs are going away as worsening labor conditions and stagnant wages are the norm across the board, while most of the country struggles to survive backbreaking debt, skyrocketing inflation, and the criminalization of homelessness amidst record housing insecurity. And it’s not just those of us in production who are being affected: as performers, even the big names we presume are loaded, become even more vulnerable, other income streams are needed.

I’m not saying that people like Rapaport aren’t genuinely genocidal ghouls. But even if I were, why would it matter? Your heart is your actions. Whatever motivates you, whether it’s a quick buck, honest racism, or a desire for Christ’s return to earth (this was the Zionism I was raised on), baying for the slaughter of Palestinians is white supremacy and colonialism, pure and simple.

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It’s for this reason that I wanted to share some recent writing and reportage about Palestinian liberation I’ve come across lately. If these writers and culture workers aren’t Palestinian themselves, then they’re accomplices in their struggle in a context that censures all conscience with the most unctuous of liberal propaganda and the most violent of political repression.

Many of us have been following Peabody-winner Bisan Atef Owda on Instagram for months, if not longer. After Owda was nominated for an Emmy earlier this week, 150 entertainment industry “leaders” (including Messing) demanded that the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) rescind the nomination. Here’s how NATAS responded.

For Vittles, Mira Mattar wrote a powerful essay on starvation as a tool of genocide. Gaza as microcosm, laboratory, and proving ground of capitalism’s ravages—including climate collapse—is an evergreen observation worth repeating here.

I’m not big on poetry, but I was riveted by scholar Marina Magloire’s exploration of the Black feminist falling-out between June Jordan and Audre Lorde (feat. Adrienne Rich) over Zionism. “Jordan is lesser known nationally and internationally than Lorde,” Magloire writes, “and it seems to me that her decades of unwavering support for the Palestinian people is partly responsible.”

Vicky Osterweil’s always-astute coverage of the American political situation and resistance to fascism leaves me foundering in despair and brimming with hope (for those stuck in despair mode, here’s one she wrote on how to get organized/start organizing).

What these people are saying is important, which means supporting them in material ways—with money, with exposure, with solidarity—is important, too. If you can, I hope you will.

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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

The actor who famously looks like he “wakes up and dies every day.”