Davey Davis's Blog, page 8
June 9, 2024
David Davis
My life as a fan began with Will Smith, the first non-cartoon celebrity I was conscious of. His early-nineties breakout, Fresh Prince, was perfect TV for a young child: sitcom-silly, family-friendly, and a little surreal for a 5-year-old, in the sense that the goofy, ebullient, and handsome Smith shared his name with his character (though the character’s Christian name was William, not Willard). When a teacher prompted my class to name a town other than our own, my hand shot up. “Bel-Air!” I didn’t know that Uncle Phil and Aunt Viv’s mansion was actually located in a neighborhood, in one of the biggest cities in the world.
Smith’s rise was, as they say, meteoric, with his music and movie careers swiftly gaining steam throughout the decade, much of it in similarly child- and family-friendly projects, from his starring turn in Men in Black (1997) to his debut solo album, Big Willie Style, that same year1. Though he’d already been a lead, along with Martin Lawrence, in Bad Boys (1995) and in the ensemble alien shoot-em-up, Independence Day (1996), he made his transition to serious leading man fare with Enemy of the State (1998), a movie that I joke was one of the first to radicalize me2.
In Enemy of the State, Smith plays Robert Clayton Dean, a labor lawyer who comes into unwitting possession of proof of a murder by an NSA operative greasing the wheels on Patriot Act-style “counterterrorism” legislation3. Dean’s life is summarily destroyed: his bank accounts are frozen and he’s framed as a cheater (his wife, played by Regina King, throws him out) and a money launderer, causing him to lose his job as well as his home. When he finally figures out what’s going on with the help of Brill (Gene Hackman), a rogue NSA comms expert, the situation only gets worse: the NSA murders one of Brill’s contacts and pins that on Dean, too.
A lot of stuff happens after that, but (spoiler alert), with the help of Brill, Dean finally exposes the conspiracy and clears his name (although the NSA is able to conceal its role in the snafu). The counterterrorism bill is scrapped, Dean reconciles with his wife, and Brill sends his regards from his retirement on a tropical island. All’s well that ends well, unless the government decides to come after Dean (or anyone else) ever again.
It’s probably for this reason that the “happy ending” of Enemy didn’t stick with me. What I do remember is Dean’s horrified realization that his bank accounts aren’t his anymore, that his wife hates him, that anything bearing his name—from his birth certificate to his driver’s license—is an implication, not a guarantor of his rights as an American citizen4.
As an adult, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Gene Hackman5 in a role considered by some to be the origin of the Enemy universe: Harry, the “soul-sick, uneasy” surveillance expert of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). Though his tough-guy mein makes him a great republican congressman (The Bird Cage [1996]), hard-nosed military man (Crimson Tide [1995]), or sleazy confidence man (The French Connection [1971]), Hackman is also capable of a professional disquiet that puts him at a compelling remove from his ordained authority; sanctioned yet straddling criminality, he’s shines in doubtful roles, like the queasy PI (Night Moves [1975]), or, in the case of Harry, the paranoid wiretapper.
One star in a constellation of New Hollywood’s paranoid cinema—Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976) among them—The Conversation scratched an itch first initiated by its descendent, with its mistrust in and cynicism regarding institutions (particularly the government), all equipped with technology that not only allows them to eavesdrop on me with impunity, but to infiltrate, and even eliminate, my connection to other people. As Dean, Smith’s profound vulnerability, perhaps best encapsulated by the nightmare-like image of him running through rush-hour traffic in his open bathrobe, was a wake-up call to a younger version of myself, one for whom the reasons for being unable to access, for example, one’s bank account were still divided into fair and unfair.
Enemy isn’t why I’m a paranoid person, but I think about it more than I should because I’m a paranoid person, of which I was reminded after spending this past week in isolation when someone I love got COVID. An obsessive-compulsive germaphobe can get in their head about these things, and not just for their own sake; if the wind’s blowing in the right direction, I can decide that Jade is dying or dead ten times in a single hour. Given a chance to stew, the paranoia soon becomes despair, descending like a cloud of toxic pollen over my jellied brain. What’s the point, of anything? This risk is too much. Everything is too much. Everything is doomed. Why live? Why write?
When done well, paranoid cinema makes you feel as if your world has been shrunk to the size of a microchip. But if we travel back up the cylinder, the tube, the wire; back through Al Pacino’s mic in Serpico (1973) and John Travolta’s boom in Blow Out (1981); back out of whatever machine of surveillance we’re inside, we find ourselves in the moviehouse itself. Do you ever feel surrounded by art, but unable to see the project? Perhaps a reparative reading of paranoid cinema requires an expansion into other genres and histories, a look at the big picture—or multiplex, as it were.
Which brings me to something written this week by Maya Cade. Film-lovers should be paying attention to Cade’s work with the Black Film Archive generally, but this week she published a meditation on “the role the artist in Black cinema, life, and Palestine” that I think everyone should read. As Maya writes:
Artmaking, as Toni Cade Bambara said clearly, has been put in bondage to an industry that demands artists' silence in exchange for the will to continue practicing freely. The task ahead of us—filmmakers, writers, spectators, painters, cultural workers, and everyone in between—is to have the courage to act. We must ask ourselves: is our artmaking, our lives, our creative practice dedicated to justice or what is right for only us as an individual?
This piece is a reminder that art, as one of the highest expressions of humanity, is for serving people. I needed it this week, and am sharing it here because I feel certain that others do, too.
Gaza Funds aggregates fundraisers for people fleeing the violence of the Zionist entity, so if you’re looking to share some cash, please do. If you donate to any of the fundraisers featured there, send me a screenshot for a free month of subscriber-only DAVID 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 if you’re nasty.
1To say Big Willie Style was more child- and family-friendly because of Smith’s refusal to use profanity while rapping is to capitulate to my white mom’s racist assumptions about what constituted “child- and family-friendly” music, rap or otherwise (the only other rap my mom would listen to was Eminem. Great stuff for a gay kid to hear their mom sing along to, but hey, he was white!). But I think it’s also safe to say that this was a function of Smith’s sanitized image, key to attaining his stated goal of becoming “the biggest movie star in the world,” which he pretty much crushed.
2Michael Mann’s Ali (2001), one of the only Manns I haven’t seen because I don’t go for biopics, was when Smith got his Best Acting Oscar.
3Released a little under three years before 9/11, Enemy of the State has since been acknowledged for anticipating the repressive surveillance expansion authored by the Bush administration.
4It goes without saying that these supposed rights are not assured for any citizen, something that Dean is already aware of as a Black man and labor lawyer.
5Goin’ strong at 94, baby. Jade is always like, Why do you think THAT man is hot? And it’s true that I’m drawn to the cornfed linebacker daddy thing. But it’s also a certain soulfulness that’s best on display when he’s playing a character doing his damnedest to repress it.
June 4, 2024
David Davis 46, part 8
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.
He was looking at me. Leaving the laughter and the red cups, I followed him into an empty bedroom—I don’t think it was his—where for a long time, including the five seconds he spent removing and halving his brown leather belt, he held me down, fucked me, and beat me, all without saying a word.
As we slid back into our clothes, I became aware of the party again, still humming on the other side of the door. We finally spoke, but I don’t remember what we said. If we kissed, I don’t remember that, either. I do remember, very well, knowing that I had fallen in love. But even that sensation, being in love, is gone. Only its certainty has been able to outlast the years between now and then.
June 3, 2024
David Davis
When I was in elementary school, my report cards always came back with the same caveats: smart, but doesn’t speak up/participate/socialize enough. My teachers saw that I preferred to spend my time either reading or with the wrong kids (bad homes, behavioral problems, etc.). The solution was clear: I needed to learn how to win friends and influence people—the right people—if my academic promise wasn’t to be wasted.
Not every teacher regarded my shyness as a problem. Anticipating the kind of women I would gravitate toward as an adult, the motherly, no-nonsense Mrs. Evans would permit me to spend recess under her yard-duty umbrella, blithely tolerating my data-dumping about medieval England. But others were on the hunt for the upwardly mobile extrovert within, like tough-loving Mr. Crandall, who cast me as the lead in the fifth-grade play to scare me out of my stage fright. From leadership programs for at-risk girls to Toastmasters-style speech contests, years of interventions never made a dent in my introversion, let alone the mumbling, shaking, and full-body sweats that still show up at my readings today.
Now in my mid-thirties, I’m still better able to articulate myself on paper than in person. Listening to my recent interview for the NYC Oral History Project, to which I was invited to participate by Jay Graham, I’m exasperated—but not surprised—by my ums and whatevers, my inability to stay on topic, and the limitations of my verbal vocabulary. But I’m also a little pleased to recognize the natural ellipticallity of my reasoning animated by my speech. As I wrote last year, “I speak, which is to say that I circle, with the hope that the person listening has the patience to wait for the final descent, if it’s even worth making; that whatever’s down there is animated by flesh and blood, and not a trick of the sunlight or my own hunger.” I’m not pithy or parsimonious, but I’m learning to appreciate that about myself.
If you’d like to hear me circle about my books, my politics, and leather in Oakland and NYC, you can listen to my interview here. I also recommend checking out other NYCTOHP interviews, including those by the recently departed Cecilia Gentili, the foundational Bryn Kelly, and local leatherman Santos Arce.
Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.
If you have a few dollars to spare, please help the al Baqi family, including baby Sami, escape the Israeli assault on Gaza. “The most important thing is, I don't want to die,” writes Ahmed, Sami’s father. If you do make a donation of any amount, send me a screenshot for a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content.
May 29, 2024
David Davis: Members Only (unlocked)
Will you wait for me here? he asked.
Yes, I said.
He laughed and said goodbye. The front door closed and clicked. For the next hour (though I didn’t know, at the moment, how long my friend would be gone), I tried not to move. If I did, I would be confronted with the limits of my ability, and if so confronted, I would struggle. I didn’t want to struggle, because it’s humiliating, and because I wanted to pretend that I was there of my own volition. Which, I reminded myself, I was.
The air conditioner hummed in the window, but otherwise my friend’s bedroom was silent. I wondered if he hadn’t really left. If he was still there, watching from the doorway. But I soon decided he wasn’t. For one thing, I would have heard him—his shifting weight on the hardwood, a heedless breath. Something. For another, staying here with me wasn’t what he wanted. What he wanted was to go somewhere else, to the park or a nearby bar, and think about me waiting for him naked, hooded, bound hand and foot to the bed frame, and slowly realizing that while Jade knew where I was, I had no way of contacting her if he didn’t come back.
I’ve heard that people in bondage lose time. Maybe I would have myself if sunlight, enough to grey the black vinyl, couldn’t filter through the drawstring of the military-style hood. Or maybe not. I don’t think of myself as into bondage, though I’ve been in close proximity with it for many years. I used to date a dominatrix who specialized in it, with an emphasis on abandonment. Her sleepsacked clients were forsaken in shower stalls overnight, while she slept in a queen bed in the other room. Want to try it? she asked me once. Fuck no. I like attention with my discomfort, thank you very much.
No, I wasn’t enjoying it, what was happening to me. But I was there for reasons other than pleasure. And what were those, exactly? I pushed the question away. In the ten minutes since my friend had left, I had discovered that all speculation led to panic. I began box breathing, intending to do it until I heard the key in the door (When would that be? An hour? Longer?). Since I was lying on my back, the handcuffs had begun slipping down my wrists toward my elbows, a lemniscate of steel digging into my forearms. How long until nerve damage? I pictured my friend ordering a beer, then another, then another, until he forgot all about me.
Stillness, of the body and of the mind, is the greatest challenge. I began doing yoga as preparation for a complete meditation practice without movement, and five years later, I’m nowhere close. Breathing through my nose, I counted to four over and over again, building a new world within the one made by my friend’s dark web torture toys. This, I believed, was the solution to all my fears, which I wanted to transcend. I would hide within the four walls of breath-and-no-breath until he returned.
I wanted. That was the problem, if all suffering is caused by desire. It wasn’t long before my fears infiltrated the counting, the breath, the awareness of my diaphragm. The discomfort from the cuffs reminded me of my hands, which reminded me not of my body, but of everything bad that my body was subject to.
Though I knew my friend was gone, I moved my body as if he wasn’t. Just my fingers and wrists, subtle and sly. I like watching you decide if you’re going to red or not, he told me once. Slowly, slowly; stillness was impossible, but I knew if I moved too much or too fast, I would lose control. With my index finger, I stroked the lock that held the cuffs to the velcro restraint around my waist. The metal was smooth and, I knew without being able to see, shiny. Kind of cute. I imagined that the lock was a locket, which became tattoo on my left pec, like Richard Gere's in Breathless (1983). I thought about putting it in my mouth. My hands could have reached that high, but the lock wouldn’t have gotten under the hood. Moving a little more boldly, I found that I had enough freedom to reach down and touch myself, if I wanted (I didn’t). But that was as far as my hands could go.
Afterward, I told my friend that I thought about him the entire time he was gone, but that wasn’t true. Though powerfully shaped by his absence, my thoughts were almost entirely self-centered. The risk I was taking; the discomfort I was feeling; the panic hovering in my solar plexus, still bruised purple by his knuckles. I yearned for other circumstances, not ones in which I was free, but in which my restrictions were more tolerable1. What if I hadn’t been wearing the hood? I would feel less calm, I suspected, but also less powerless. What if my friend were standing outside the building, or even at the bottom of the stairs, absent but nearby? I desperately wanted this to be true, but every time I forced myself to see the fantasy for what it was, my breath became hotter and louder on the inside of the hood, the drawstring tighter around my throat, my ankles more firmly secured.
As I write, I can’t feel that fear anymore; it’s as if someone else was in that hood, those chains. But while in the moment it was inescapable—by design, of course—I also found it impossible to believe. Every nightmare provoked another, every attempt to regain control surfacing a horrifying new way to suffer. In attempting to think my way out of my fear, to manufacture reasons why it wasn’t really happening the way it was, it grew heavier, more ingenious. How long would he make me sweat it out? When would I know that it was time to panic, that he wasn’t coming back? Four hours? More? And what did panic mean? Was it any different from what I was doing right now?
Through the slit below my chin, I noticed that the sunlight had begun to fail. How long before I pissed myself? How long before I felt the torture of thirst? Of course, all of that would only possibly happen if something tragic befell my friend, like a car accident. I imagined him standing on the sidewalk in front of his apartment, unable to enter because of a police barricade or clouds of smoke. How selfish I am, I thought, worrying about his misfortune, not for his own sake, but for mine.
Fearful, uncomfortable, resentful, ashamed, helpless. A brutal caning, with my friend’s warm body touching mine, talking to me and kissing me while he hurt me, was heaven in comparison. Why was I doing this? I was all alone. No one cared about me. I was nothing. If he came back, I was never doing this again.
And I really believed that, before I heard the key in the lock.
Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.
1As if I had a choice but to tolerate them.
May 24, 2024
David Davis 46, part 7 ½
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.
Though I’ll soon be attending a local screening of Hellraiser (1987), the first film in the franchise based on Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart, the series is one I mostly enjoy in theory1. I’m squeamish in the cinema, and B-ish horror tends to disturb me far more than the higher-production stuff, retaining as it does the scrappy anti-authoritarianism that defines the best of the genre. Though I’ve seen Hellraiser before, there’s a strong chance I will still cover my eyes as Barker’s Cenobites, the S&M-inspired beings who transcend sensation and dimension, pursue the pleasures of eternal torture.
It will come as no surprise that the Cenobites were inspired by Barker’s visits to 1970s S&M clubs, which were aesthetic and “emotional” inspirations, as the writer relays:
There was an underground club called Cellblock 28 in New York that had a very hard S&M night. No drink, no drugs, they played it very straight. It was the first time I ever saw people pierced for fun. It was the first time I saw blood spilt. The austere atmosphere definitely informed Pinhead: “No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering!” 2
I invoke the dreadful Order of the Gash for a reason. In warning you away from the sadists, dominants, and tops who prioritize the “optimization” of skill and technique over safer, more connected play, I see the Cenobites as inspiration for us all: they’re doing it for the love of the game, and isn’t that the spirit of leather? These sexualized yet sexless adrenaline freaks have been playing for so long that they no longer differentiate between pain and pleasure (let alone consent and violation3). There’s no profit-driven perversion of “health,” “community,” or “intimacy” here, just good, clean fun!
While last time I wrote that the SDATs that you and I are after aren’t optimizers, I’d like to expand the premise of this post so we can talk about what they do instead: safer sadists, dominants, and tops don’t optimize. They do build skill individually and collectively out of a desire to engage in more risk-aware and pleasurable play.
David Davis, part 7 ½
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.
Though I’ll soon be attending a local screening of Hellraiser (1987), the first film in the franchise based on Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart, the series is one I mostly enjoy in theory1. I’m squeamish in the cinema, and B-ish horror tends to disturb me far more than the higher-production stuff, retaining as it does the scrappy anti-authoritarianism that defines the best of the genre. Though I’ve seen Hellraiser before, there’s a strong chance I will still cover my eyes as Barker’s Cenobites, the S&M-inspired beings who transcend sensation and dimension, pursue the pleasures of eternal torture.
It will come as no surprise that the Cenobites were inspired by Barker’s visits to 1970s S&M clubs, which were aesthetic and “emotional” inspirations, as the writer relays:
There was an underground club called Cellblock 28 in New York that had a very hard S&M night. No drink, no drugs, they played it very straight. It was the first time I ever saw people pierced for fun. It was the first time I saw blood spilt. The austere atmosphere definitely informed Pinhead: “No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering!” 2
I invoke the dreadful Order of the Gash for a reason. In warning you away from the sadists, dominants, and tops who prioritize the “optimization” of skill and technique over safer, more connected play, I see the Cenobites as inspiration for us all: they’re doing it for the love of the game, and isn’t that the spirit of leather? These sexualized yet sexless adrenaline freaks have been playing for so long that they no longer differentiate between pain and pleasure (let alone consent and violation3). There’s no profit-driven perversion of “health,” “community,” or “intimacy” here, just good, clean fun!
While last time I wrote that the SDATs that you and I are after aren’t optimizers, I’d like to expand the premise of this post so we can talk about what they do instead: safer sadists, dominants, and tops don’t optimize. They do build skill individually and collectively out of a desire to engage in more risk-aware and pleasurable play.
May 22, 2024
David Davis 46, part 7
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.
Of course I wish I had a normal body, but it’s becoming more difficult to separate what that could look like from the rituals of normalcy I see around me. The regimens that produce this normal body—one that is thin, buff, or powerful, but ideally a combination of the three—have become increasingly inextricable from the body itself. Had I that normal body, I would no longer live to stay alive. Instead, I would live to attain an ever-evolving suite of health goals (many of which have little to do with overall longevity). Is that any better, to be freed from the tedium and time-suck of disease, only to become a Sisyphus of another sort?
Hustle and grind, gain and cut, crush and shred, maximize and master. Having been sick, and occasionally disabled, for most of my life, the concept of health optimization sparks a furious fascination within me, and it’s only gotten worse as the optimizer’s influence has grown. For the optimizer, the body is not a living thing. Not unlike a corpse on the pathologist’s table, it’s an object that, with the proper technology and data, can be known, refined, and even perfected. Institutional divestment from healthcare, general austerity, and the myriad oppressions of non-normative bodies in a failing consumerist culture have resulted in this: the repackaging of lack as an opportunity to bootstrap, which is then, most cruelly of all, sold back to us as a luxury good1. If you’re not furious, you’re not paying attention.
Now, the optimizer is far from irrational. Even more than balanced blood sugar or faster splits or boosted mitochondrial function, their reward is a sense of control and the promise of conformity, which come at a premium in late capitalism. Health optimization can improve your literal health, but quality of life runs deeper than what we as individuals can dictate; we all know, intuitively if not otherwise, that thin, healthy, white people are treated better and afforded more2. This context incentivizes buying into the myth that it’s possible manage your body to the extent that your environment can no longer affect you. Forget plummeting food, water, and air quality, lack of equity in education and medicine, or endemic microplastics—if you buy the right fits, chug the right shakes, do enough reps, and run the right functional tests, none of that has to be your problem.
Like the microplastics in our bodies, the optimizer ethos permeates our culture—social/media, policy, commerce, you name it. This is by design: American capitalism (ableism 🤝 racism 🤝 eugenics) puts the onus of survival on the individual, which means it’s your fault if you’re sick, and doubly so if you stay that way. Even if you aren’t sick, you still must be a competitor, not in order to achieve personal satisfaction or even material success, but to just get by. “Survival of the fittest” is not a dictum or a destiny, but rather a description of conditions, and its misconstrual is a prime example of this ethos’ entrenchment in all our lives.
Which brings me to this edition of my guide for vetting sadists, dominants, and tops: why would leather spaces be exempt from the seduction of optimization, which creates a commodity out of health (as well as various nebulous notions of wellbeing, wellness, and hygiene)? Especially now that leather has proven to be just as vulnerable to appropriation, co-opting, and commodification as any other subculture?
If anything, the optimizer brain worms may have an even easier time finding purchase in our scene. Because in leather, we don’t just value skill, power, precision, discipline, and control, and the ego required to accomplish them—we fetishize them! We want our SDATs to know what they’re doing (and to be absolutely insufferable about it). So how do we know when that desire for more knowledge and greater technical skill has crossed over into optimizer territory, a place where risk management and connection take a back seat to ego? We may know that safer sadists, dominants, and tops don’t optimize—so how do we use that information to weed out the SDATs who are lost in the sauce?
More on that next time.
Thank you for reading and sharing my weekly newsletter. You can also support me by buying my book. Find me on Twitter and Instagram.
1Variations on this theme include the tradwife, which is super hot right now.
2I include “white” here because of the centuries-old racialization of health and weight, about which you can learn a lot from Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Da’Shaun L. Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, and C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity.
May 10, 2024
David Davis
The more I read about gay life during the early years of the AIDS epidemic1, the less lonely I feel.
Perhaps I haven’t earned that loneliness, being privileged to have friends that I trust will care for me when I need them to. But COVID has made my world smaller, less spontaneous, more exhausting. I rarely go out anymore, because masking at most clubs and parties is cumbersome and of course not 100% effective. Two bouts with the virus have damaged my already compromised immune system, making one of my favorite hobbies, promiscuity, more onerous than the adventures it promises. Even if COVID were eradicated tomorrow, I’m painfully aware of every potential apocalyptic pony waiting to flee the barn. I hoard medication, obsess over mucus membranes, and agonize over pricy prophylactics, all the while resisting a growing revulsion at the thought of other microbiomes, human and animal alike.
But then I think of the gay people living during and immediately prior to my childhood who also feared contact with other living beings, dreaded the doctor (if they could find one to treat them), and raged against the CDC and FDA and the US government and all the other governments, besides. At each epidemiological encounter with loss, deprivation, or injustice—whether personal or witnessed through social media—I think, There is a precedent for this. It’s cope, but it’s also true. When I can’t fuck, party, breathe, seek healthcare, or move through the world as I would like to, I think of writers of a certain era who wrote about life with or surrounded by HIV/AIDS: Andrew Holleran, Essex Hemphill, Guillame Dustan, Hervé Guibert2, David Wojnarowicz, Reinaldo Arenas, Gary Indiana, Bob Glück. If they could live with it, so can I, I think, choosing to forget, for the moment, how many of them didn’t survive.
Comparing HIV and COVID-19 as social phenomena, public health failures, or symptoms of white supremacy’s colossal destructive force is a tricky business, not least of all because HIV hasn’t gone anywhere. We ought never forget that the differences between them are stark—I personally do not attend a friend’s funeral every week—but then, so are the similarities. Like all illnesses in a world in which healthcare is not a human right, they gravitate toward populations made vulnerable by their relative distance from capital. Immune-trashing viral diseases that could be mitigated, contained, or even eliminated if those in power cared to make the effort, HIV and COVID are, as we say about mismatched eyebrows, sisters rather than twins.
The image at the top of this post is from Nicholas Ray’s breathtaking In a Lonely Place, a film noir starring Humphrey Bogart as a Dixon “Dix” Steele, a down-on-his-luck screenwriter cynically seeking his next payday among the barflies and mercenaries of 1950s Hollywood3. His desire to write is stymied by the very industry that gave him his earlier success, and his resulting misanthropy—which manifests as an indiscriminately violent temper—prevents him not only from being satisfied in his work, but from finding happiness in the people around him. Why write at all?
Old Hollywood is good for movies about frustrated writers doomed to much worse than professional failure: Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)4. Lining them up now, I can’t help but notice their chronological placement between the second World War and the arrival of New Hollywood in the late 1960s. Their shared themes signal a post-war existential crisis, perhaps, for working artists in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the rise of McCarthyist repression. Despite our differences, I see myself in these fictional writers, as I see myself in the all-too-real writers of the first AIDS generation: artists whose personal circumstances force them to doubt the future. Why write at all?
I have written three books, two of which—the earthquake room and X—are published. Inside me are many more, and it is my greatest wish to make and share them. But if you want to know the truth, I don’t think I’ll have the chance. With current and incipient pandemics, climate collapse, rising fascism, and the foreign horrors in which my country is implicated, I fear the window for that kind of writing life, let alone career, is closing. I’ll get out one or two more, I suspect. After that, the writing, if and when it happens, will stay with me.
As sorry for myself as it makes me feel, failing to obtain a certain kind of career in a certain kind of consumerist economy would be no tragedy. But if there is a world after the fall of the American empire—and I hope very desperately that this happens sooner rather than later—there is little reason to think I’ll make it there, which leaves me at something of a personal impasse. I will keep writing until I can’t anymore, but how? To what end? For whom? The work of solidarity and survival is cut out for me, but as for my vocation…well…there are more questions than answers.
The more I read about gay life during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, the more I understand that I cannot only look to those writers for the lives they lived. I must also look to them for the deaths they died, all of them characterized by fear, suffering, and, yes, loneliness. In my better moments, this reassures me.
If you have a few dollars to spare, please help Lina and her family evacuate Gaza. Every life is priceless.
Thank you for reading and sharing. Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Buy my book. Learn the history of this newsletter.
1By which I mean the 1980s through the mid-1990s, although evidence suggests a decades-long emergence, including an illness referred to as “junkie flu” or “junkie pneumonia” that was killing homeless IV drug users in New York in the 1970s.
2And through him, his lover, Michel Foucault.
3Bogey is so fucking good. Peel back his snideness to find a yearning lover, not unlike Casablanca’s Rick Blaine, at your own risk. Beneath him lurks yet another man: a shark-eyed killer with a rage so terrifying you forget it’s trapped in the body of a middle-aged chain-smoking welterweight.
4If you’re looking for a worthwhile homage, the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (1991), starring sweet baby angel John Turturro, is excellent.
May 2, 2024
David Davis 46, part 6 ½
Last time, I wrote about the difference between fantasy and reality in terms of SM. I also wrote about fantasy and reality terms of safety, and the way that post-traumatic fantasies of control can make it more difficult to assess risk and build intimacy, two skills crucial for protecting ourselves and those in our communities.
TL;DR: if your SDAT cannot tell the difference between what they desire/fear and what is actually happening/may happen, they are not prepared for safer play—especially if that play is heavy.
April 29, 2024
David Davis
“I will kill you.” Done with the right kind of deadpan, this is the funniest thing you could say under the circumstances.
“I will fuck your husband.” If I haven’t already!
“Wanna see my cunt?” Asking this as a means of offering “proof” only reaffirms their logic, but asking this an act of sexual aggression (that they implicitly asked for, by the way) is great.
Hold eye contact while peeing my pants. A last resort since this one actually inconveniences you, but the catharsis appeals to me. It seems that most doctors and scientists, even ones that are trans-informed, haven’t cottoned on to one environmental reason why trans people are more prone to health issues like UTIs: a lot of us are afraid or unable to use public bathrooms.
Look around with confusion with my eyebrows screwed up like Jim Carrey, then point at myself, mouthing, “Who, me?” I’m imagining her getting increasingly frustrated as you meander around the bathroom pointing at random stuff—other people, empty stalls, your reflection in the mirror.
The Jojo Siwa seppuku dance. Karma’s a b*tch and so am I.
“Do you have a moment to hear about our lord and savior, Jesus Christ?” There’s an argument for having some JW literature or Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health on your person while out and about.
“Do you when you you you when you when when wheeen when when you—”
Pull her hair. I think violence is appropriate in a lot of situations, including this one. Sometimes more extreme measures are called for, but getting your hair pulled is so demeaning, and there’s something about the way it’s gendered as something done between women that just does it for me. I’m more of a woman than you ever will be, bitch!
“You aint even the 💨” I don’t know.
“Okay, ugly.” Short, sweet, and to the point.
If you have a few dollars to spare, please help Omar and his family evacuate Gaza. Every life is priceless.
Thank you for reading and sharing. Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Buy my book. Learn the history of this newsletter.
Davey Davis's Blog
- Davey Davis's profile
- 52 followers
