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Timing’s a funny thing. A few weeks ago, just as dating-cum-hookup app Lex announced that it would be refocusing on “friends and community”—to great gay consternation—I received my advance copy of Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest!in the mail. If the former development is an example of the ongoing privatization and gentrification of digital spaces, then the latter is a demand for its opposite, what you might call a fk commons. As the editors of Sex Forest! write in their introduction, “Public space is what we need, not in the narrow sense of government-funded projects but rather in the sense of open, non-hierarchical containers for a range of different uses and possibilities.” Possibilities which include public sex without the risk of violence, from police and other sources.

I thumbed through my copy of Sex Forest! with interest, scanning a genre-diverse selection of poetry, S/M erotica, and horny hybrid fiction. This balance of what the editors call “hot porn” and “headier theoretical and historical explorations into the relationship between sex and notions of the public” aspires toward upending the same social, economic, and legal forces that have transformed Lex from a would-be descendent of the lesbian personal ads of On Our Backs to the kind of place where, to revisit a personal anecdote, one might be accused of human trafficking while seeking a co-top for their femme bottom girlfriend.

Disappointing though some find Lex’s new chapter to be, it was inevitable. There’s just no way that a free, American, venture-backed sex app purportedly for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, [and] queer” people could continue to exist, not in the same hellscape where sex workers are purged not just from their own websites, but from all social media platforms, particularly those designed for recreational sexual and romantic connection. So long as public sex is a crime, public women (to use an antiquated term), and all who are identified as such, will remain criminals—whether or not they’re f*g, whether or not their f*g is sanctioned by law. As the primary targets of legislation designed to discipline and punish public women, sex workers and trans women are already too proximate to gender obscenity; the women proximate to them are put at risk, too, albeit at a lower intensity, depending on other identity intersections.

From the death of the search engine to the rise of FOSTA-SESTA-type assaults on those in the sex trade (as well as those who are trafficked, which this legislation is ostensibly meant to protect), the online privatization I mentioned was of course underway when Lex was still just an Instagram account, but things were admittedly more loose back then. Four or five years ago, Lex was where I met the most chaotic lovers of my fucked up Saturn return (not to mention my friend and one-time collaborator, photographer Elle Pérez). Though it hewed more toward the weekly newspaper model than eyeballing a hot b***h in the street, Lex was, or aspired to be, an online dyke cruising apparatus. Now it’s become/ing something else, as anything does when its goal is to be above-board, legal, and, most importantly of all, profitable.

As the punchline it’s come to be, Lex encapsulates the limitations imposed on those of us who can’t access the freedom of public sex in the same way that cis men who identify themselves (or more crucially, are identified) as queer. I’m like super open to pushback on this, but I suspect that this is why you can have a Grindr and not a Grinda; that is, a lesbian sex app that is explicitly about f*g, rather than about dating, relationships, networking, and, implicitly, monogamy in which any capital exchange happens behind the plausible deniability of a marriage contract. It’s one thing to pony up the overhead for such an apparatus. It’s another to execute the kind of backend enforcement required to manage any risk of solicitation to an extent that satisfies stockholders, VC funds, credit card companies, and the feds that it could be a safe bet.

Because how many workers do you know who can’t be on Tinder in their private lives? How many tgirls do you know who get magically deleted from Hinge? If you’re not one, or both, of these populations, are you and the dykes that make up your community sure that you’re far enough away from them that you could get away with a real-life cruising app? Because I’m not.

But why do we, as dykes, need an app in the first place? Fags, for all their Scruffs and their Sniffies, still have anonymous public hookups without the benefit of wifi. Why can’t—or don’t—dykes do the same?

This is a question posed in an essay found in Sex Forest! Authored by Kathy, it takes a stab at answering why, when it comes to cruising, dykes are “out of luck.” “Public environments where women can easily, within 10 or 20 minutes, meet and fk other women do not and have never existed,” writes Kathy. I don’t agree with the answers provided to the question Kathy poses, but then, I don’t agree with the question itself. Regardless of how you define cruising, there is ample evidence to the contrary of Kathy’s claim, some of it supplied in this very essay. Daemonumx, a human library of dyke and gay history, came up with a litany of counter-examples off the top of her head (she also sent me this PDF). She’s also written about it here and here (and elsewhere, I’m sure). Long story short, dykes do cruise, and have since the criminalization of public sex.

I won’t argue that dykes can or do cruise in precisely the same way that fags do, because we as dykes are not (exclusively) fags. But we can safely put “dykes don’t cruise!” aside while taking the opportunity to explore the resonances this claim activates: anxieties about dyke and lesbian sexual desire; the differences between dyke and fag cruising, as well as the limitations of both and the interplay between the two (some of us are fagdykes!); the crucial role that straight people play in the act and culture of cruising, for both dykes and fags, which Kathy gestures toward, pointing out that dykes don’t have a corollary for fags’ trade, with which I can only sort of tenuously agree. To be provocative for a moment, if we’re to understand the act of cruising as inextricable from straight people, or even as a primarily transactional exchange between queer men and straight men, why isn’t the dyke equivalent turning a trick (i.e., why does the dyke equivalent of trade have to be a straight woman)?

I suppose my beef with this question, as it appears in Sex Forest!, is that I suspect it reaffirms dykes as a subsidiary of fags, obfuscates the challenges and dangers of cruising to fags of all genders, and forecloses on solutions to the problems that many dykes seem to struggle with vis a vis their sex lives in general (ones that Lex, even now, purports to answer): how do I find other dykes? How do I talk to them? How do I f**k them?

What I’m saying is, if we insist on differentiating between dykes and fags when it comes to public sex, we could choose to see it as an aperture rather than a slipknot. Cruising, for fags, is the criminalized reclamation of pleasure and power. Dykes, too, do this through cruising—so where else do we encounter these reclamations?

So. Lots to chew on here. I don’t mean for this newsletter to be understood as a takedown, or even a rejoinder, of either Kathy’s essay or of Sex Forest! All of us are writing about, around, and toward freedoms that we, in many different ways, are denied. The thing to remember about cruising is that it exists because public and transactional sex are illegal, and queer people can access neither the public nor sex with the same degree of safety that straight people can (your mileage may vary, etc., etc.).

If you are cruising, good for you! If you want to but aren’t sure if and how you can, I hope a few of the resources I’ve shared here can help you get started on your ~journey~. Stay safe out there, babes.

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The first year I lived in New York, I wound up in yet another bad relationship with a femdom. This relationship was nasty, brutish, and short, as I should have guessed it would be from all the red flags, but I didn’t emerge from it empty-handed. Shortly before it all fell apart (who else attended that legendarily messy FIST launch party?), my ex gave me a Monstera deliciosa clipping, and though I had my doubts, I decided to let it live. Almost four years later, the single leaf occupies a hulking ceramic jar in my bedroom, now accompanied by something like ten other split fronds that gather (or discharge?) subtle beads of water, like knives under a broken faucet.

I’ve never been good at keeping plants alive. I tend to do the opposite, actually, rationing their sustenance and relegating them to windowless bathrooms. I’ve corrected this tendency as I’ve grown more conscious of it, though no one would ever accuse me of having a green thumb. But this winter, for the first time, my Monstera is having problems. One of its leaves, an elder that incidentally gets the least sunlight of all of all his compatriots, has turned a sort of translucent yellow, recently and as if overnight.

Probably overwatered it, said Jesse. It’s true that the soil is still moist this long after watering day. Is it possible that I took care of my plant with too much gusto, that I paid it too much attention?

I don’t want my Monstera to die. At first, when it still lived in a jar of water, I almost dared it to. If it hadn’t been for a roommate, who assigned her plants names and personalities and sang to them when she watered them, my Monstera would have become a rubbery tabescence on top of the fridge, doomed to turn up a corpse on the front stoop. Now I’m invested, like when I’ve soldiered through the first four episodes of almost any TV show. In the last year or so, I’ve begun talking to my plants, though not singing to them, and certainly not naming them. They get some encouragement, sometimes in a baby voice, especially the Monstera. I’ll give credit where credit is due.

I don’t think my Monstera will die, but I resent my preoccupation with the possibility. Yesterday, instead of writing—there’s the next installment of my latest series, a piece I pitched for Irresistible Damage, and an essay on dyke cruising that’s been weighing on my soul, not to mention my third novel—I worried about the plant. I hope I don’t resent it so much that I kill it. Or fuss over it so much thatI kill it. I’m hell-bent on setting us both up for failure, it seems.

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Read Part 1.

I can think of a lot of not-so-flattering reasons why people write. Control issues, as I mentioned in Part 1 of this series. Insecurity. Obsession. (When accused of being “extremely repetitious” by a critic, Nabokov defended himself on the basis of his a priori genius: “Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only its own self to copy.”) Then there’s hypergraphia, a behavioral condition characterized by the intense desire to write (or draw), which is a symptom of temporal lobe epilepsy; Fyodor Dostoevsky, himself epileptic, is among the prolific writers said to have been hypergraphic.

Why am I a writer? It’s interesting to approach art in this way, as if what we do and why we do it are the results of discrete, perhaps even random factors. As if writer were an identity with a root cause. Maybe the urge to write, or even the professional aspiration of writer, are biochemical fates, the irresistible results of our genetic recombinants locking into place when we were but a twinkle in our whatever’s eye.

Haha, jk. The problems posed by this line of reasoning are plentiful enough, but to keep things simple, the destiny of DNA doesn’t account for the external pressures that influence why we write (and perhaps more interestingly, why we don’t). As just one example, marginal writers can be overshadowed by the politics of marginality, when they’re published at all, that is. This ghettoization, to use Edmund White’s term from his 1995 essay about gay autofiction, means that gay writers, for example, must choose between work that is “highly coded, not to say obscure” and a “tiresome and overt obsession with homosexuality.” You, a writer, certainly have writerly choices, but naturally they’re constrained by who you are, when and where you live, and the political circumstances of your one wild and precious life. DNA can only get you so far. Tough titty.

Which is to say that when we ask ourselves this question—Why am I a writer?—we run the risk of reinscribing narratives that locate the writer within a rational meritocracy, rather than whatever all this is. The writer is reimagined as an individual with total control over their positionality, output, and reception. And yet I wonder, constantly constantly constantly, if a writer can ever be said to write alone, without an audience, even an imaginary one.

I certainly understand this tendency to individualize, and anyway, it’s fun: if the buck stops here, then I, who find myself interesting, may navel-gaze endlessly. At any rate, I wouldn’t be the first the acknowledge the diminishing returns of this tendency. For one thing, to buy into this idea that we actually have total control over our selves necessarily leads to the idea that it’s not only possible, but desirable, to optimize those selves. I’m so bored by the gamification of self-improvement, the way it bleeds into everything from “health and wellness” to relationships to art. It reminds me of the endless regurgitation of artistic properties, the way franchises like the MCU collapse stories by expanding them with prequel after sequel, spinoff after reboot. Some depths can’t be plumbed. It’s like going in search of a core in a garlic clove, slivering away until all you have left is nothing and a wet razor blade.

Not too long ago, there was a Gawker piece about the so-called resurgence of the Künstlerroman—the novel form that asks, How does this person become an artist? Per Sam Lipsyte: “Obviously a lot of fiction by young people these days is still in an autobiographical or autofictional vein, inspired by Rooney and Lerner and others over the last decade. These novels often deal with the formation of an artist, and the Germans came up with a really good word for that, so I guess people are excited to use it.”

How did I become a writer? asks a different question, and prompts more revealing answers, than, Why am I a writer?, don’t you think? But I’ll leave all of that to you, along with some links to writing about writers that I’ve recently enjoyed. Until next time.

On Thomas Bernhard
On Octavia Butler
On Dennis Cooper
On Yukio Mishima
On Cecilia Gentili

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While I’m not against public sex on principle (in fact, I insist on it), the risk of getting caught in flagrante delicto has never been a big turn-on for me. What can I say? I love safety. For this reason, when I went to meet a hookup at a co-working space last year, I did so with the vague hope that the danger would finally click. I’ll try anything a hundred times, you know.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my hopes were dashed. Though I made my patriotic contribution to the ambient surveillance matrix with yet another cute video of my ass getting fucked, I couldn’t really feel the frisson of possible capture or humiliation. Despite the risks—the security personnel; the frosting on the glass walls that began a foot above the ground, exposing our stocking feet to the adjacent cells; the unlocked door—I was not afraid.

I walked home afterward under a blue sky, Stay Puft clouds, gentle cranes impressed into condo construction, thinking. Far from being dangerous, that particular co-working space on that particular day, I realized, presented less risk than most of my hookups do. My diffident date was as harmless as they come, but even if he hadn’t been, he would have had more opportunity to hurt me if we’d met at his apartment, or in a car, or at a park in the dark. Some of the straight chasers I talk to express frustration about having to convince trans people that their worship won’t end in murder. If they were willing to sacrifice a little more of their own safety, like my closeted date did by meeting me at his place of business, those chasers would probably have an easier time getting laid.

Not too long ago, a TikTok in which a young white gay man recorded himself sitting on the New York City subway went viral. The text overlay says “omw to meet a guy i met online 8 mins ago” and the audio is the bit in Lana Del Rey’s “Happiness is a Butterfly” where she sings, If he’s a serial killer / then what’s the worst / That can happen to a girl who’s already hurt?” The song lyrics reaffirm what the TikTokker’s casual clothing and almost schoolmarm-ish pose—legs crossed, fingers clasped on the top knee—already tell us: that he is about to do something with at least some level of risk, and that he feels a little silly about just how resigned he is to that risk. Who among us?

I sometimes think of this TikTok when I’m on my way to meet a guy I met online 8 minutes ago, my horniness and curiosity alternating with that sense of silliness and resignation. It’s pleasant to know that some cis men share these feelings of vulnerability with the rest of us, not because I wish for them to be endangered but because being aware of their endangerment gives me a better sense of my own. One hallmark of feminine socialization (whatever that is) is the notion that we are uniquely unsafe by virtue of our bodies (your fault); for better or for worse, the dangers of the masculinely socialized (again—whatever that is, and I recognize the iffiness of ascribing it to gay men as a class) are concealed, de-linked from their bodies, or at the very least dignified with meaning.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that to be allowed to make the tradeoff in the same way that certain cis men may—that is, to be allowed to accept fear or silliness as the price of satisfying a desire—is, and my apologies for using this word, empowering. Such empowerment is surely a result of being white rather than otherwise, transmasculine rather than otherwise, etc; it’s also one of the privileges that we are hoodwinked into thinking lives inside identities rather than exists in circumstances and vibes. Risk can be seized, not just endured. It’s not perfect, but it’s what’s available. My advice, mercenary, is to enjoy it, this narcotic and beautiful and tasty thing.

As much as that TikTok resonated with me, or whatever, it’s not the first or favorite thing to think of when I’m on my way to meet a guy I met online 8 minutes ago. This bit of Frank O’Hara is: subways are only fun when you’re feeling sexy.

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Not too long ago, I hooked up with a weird old man who made his own electronic music and had been to prison for stabbing his ex-girlfriend’s drug dealer. That’s a lot of information to get out of a single encounter with a stranger, but this guy—let’s call him Derek—loved to talk. Blowhards tend to be unobservant, but Derek paid close attention to whether I was listening and how, modulating his narrative according to my interest (more about his time milking morphine on the burn ward after the gas explosion; less about his childhood in fifties Williamsburg).

Derek was also sensitive to the fact that I’m, let’s say, susceptible to negging in the right context. I suppose it’s not strictly negging that I mean here, but rather that strain of flirting that manifests as verbal jockeying, a power struggle that’s less a true conflict than the slow, interactive reveal of one’s personal predilections. It’s fun if you’re into antagonistic sex, which I am. Derek immediately grasped that he could neg me in order to recapture my flagging attention—something I wasn’t about to put any effort into concealing—and to great effect, I might add.

When I told him that I’m a writer, he began yarning about a closeted writer friend of his (one you might recognize if I shared his name) who had been unrequitedly in love with heterosexual Derek back in the nineties. Though this new story was engaging enough at first, it wasn’t long before he started getting bogged down in the details. Naked on his bed, boredom soon got the better of me. I played with my hair; I chewed a hangnail. Watching my eyes wander his wall-to-wall bookshelves, linger over the switchboard-looking thing where he made his music, leap to his phone every time Grindr clucked, Derek patiently waited for my focus to make its perfunctory return to his face before he did it again.

“I wasn’t surprised that he ending up blowing his head off.” He watched me as he reached to stroke my leg. “Writers are obsessed with love because they don’t get enough.”

If you’re after attention, and who isn’t, you’ll know that the most attentive observers will perceive your faults as well as your charms. As I’ve said before, the appeal of the sadistic type is quite simple: They're genuinely interested in you, which is very rare indeed.

Derek’s assessment of why we write—or rather, why we become writers—rings true for me, at least somewhat. Though the idea of getting onstage terrifies me, I have always felt an affinity with performers, comedians, and actors, artists who lose themselves in exposure, preferring power over privacy and validation over safety. As writers, we have landed on this most literal of ways to control the narrative, telling all, some of us more slantly than others, so that nothing can be revealed against our will.

I will be generous to us and say that insecurity isn’t all there is to it—powered only by neuroses, our craft could not also be art. Soothing as it feels, control is the opposite of communication. When we fail to take it in hand, something more interesting happens. This is a good thing. But more on that next time.

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Unbelievable as it sounds, there are aspects of my personal life that never make it to the internet.

I understand why this may be surprising. For one thing, the general conflation of public and private for feminized people means that my fiction is more closely associated with the real me than it is for other kinds of people. For another, my candidness on Twitter and IG likely lends to the impression that no filter exists between my life and its digital render. Of course, this is an illusion with which all of us who have social media must negotiate. To exist on an increasingly privatized internet is to be a product (one that can never be totally self-managed) to be marketed, whether or not we ourselves are selling something (though I certainly am, and not just subscriptions to this very enriching and charming newsletter).

Open as I may seem, I am calculating about what I share with you here, whether it’s about my sex life, my natal family, or my art. It would be a lie to say that my calculation isn’t informed by my bottom line, but for the most part it comes down to a question of my own, perhaps idiosyncratic, notions of vulnerability. In this world where my nudes are online, my sex change has been documented, and my identity, likeness, shopping habits, and location are available to the highest bidder, my idea of personal may be unorthodox, but rest assured it’s intact. It includes my romantic relationship with my lover, or the parts of it that comprise what’s most precious to me (and likely most boring to you).

Still, the boundary between public and private is not impermeable, and occasionally crossing it can be helpful in illustrating a point.

Lesbian processing is an extreme sport. This occurred to me after a recent conversation with Jade about sex, leather, and our relationship; in essence, about how we talk to each other. The conversation was a successful one, but due to its duration and intensity (and the makeup sex that followed) it was a good example of what we usually mean by lesbian processing, an epithet informed by stereotypes about women in general being overemotional and queer women in particular placing a hysterical, unscientific, and unsexy level of importance on communication; this being set in opposition to normal heterosexual relations, which happen without anyone having to think, without there even needing to be consent, because these relations are natural and unchanged and unchanging since forever.

When you’re a dyke, your fate is to always be seen as either utterly ridiculous or an ugly threat. I’m old enough now to have a sense of humor about lesbian-specific things—from bed death to dyke nods—that I’m supposed to feel ashamed of. As with the other stereotypes, lesbian processing is something that we dykes often poke fun at ourselves, but I think that the humor limns what should be a goal for all intimate relationships: regular and honest communication among equals. When done correctly, processing, lesbian or otherwise, is a tool for deepening connection and intimacy. Having the opportunity to say yes as well as no, to negotiate and to compromise, to share as well as to maintain private. Outside the four walls of a corny joke, lesbian processing is a cog in a communication style, one that fosters the trust that Jade and I need in order to do a lot of fun things together and separately while also being, as a friend said recently, the “most monogamous non-monogamous couple” they know.

The physical and mental exertion. The sweat and the tears. The gender non-conformity. Lesbian processing is an extreme sport. This is not an original thought. It’s probably on a snapback somewhere, or on a bumper sticker in Portland, or scrawled on the bathroom wall at Eli’s in Oakland or Ginger’s in Brooklyn. But platitudes are platitudes, and as it bubbled up, it collided with another thought that I’ve been mulling recently: that the social activities requiring the most communication, willingness, and consent are the very same that straight culture and its institutions take great pains to forbid us.

It’s tempting to follow this thesis to its converse, especially for someone who, like me, abhors a power vacuum. I could suggest that the social activities requiring the least cooperation—the ones that are executed in a manner that’s unthinkingly rote at best, that are promoted, normalized, and ultimately socially, economically, and legally enforced—are actually the least consensual. I could locate the coercion in the acts themselves, rather than in the dynamics wherein they take place. I could position the mechanism of heterosexual sex as inherently violent, as if it were a static, graspable thing instead of a fluid intangible, much like we like to say about our own genders and sexualities.

But for my benefit as much as yours, I will insist on an alternative: that there is no sex act or actor that is inherently safe or dangerous, and that an outsider looking in cannot know better than the insiders do.

In my first book, the earthquake room, one of my characters echoes an observation that I’ve long held close for myself: “if straight people have something to say about us at all, they’re probably wrong. in fact, the opposite of what they say is probably true.”

This idea has been a sort of anti-internalization spell since I was a young gay, and I still rely on it all these years later. When I’m told that lesbian SM is patriarchal, or that drag queens are groomers, or that fisting is violent—ancient, rust-jointed canards you’ll hear just about everywhere, from liberal LGBT types to right-wing politicians, from radical feminists to Christian fundamentalists—I have trained myself to first consider the source before deciding to believe. I don’t even really need to be told these things. They’re felt and known in the body, the way you’d feel the current of a river if you walked the floor against it.

Because not only are SM, genderplay, and queer-coded sex not inherently violent, but when done successfully they require total collusion from all involved. Vaginal fisting, for example, is a queer-coded sexual practice that is widely regarded as risky, and even dangerous, when—as with other kinds of penetration with other objects and holes—risk and safety depend on a constellation of factors, one of them being the bottom’s level of sustained arousal. It's often framed as an edge case, as inaccessible to most “normal” people, even to gay people, when it’s actually an activity that I think many, if not most, can participate in (as tops if not as bottoms) with just a little knowledge, practice, and patience—and not even that, sometimes. As I tweeted a while ago, the first time I fisted someone vaginally, it was almost by mistake, because some people can be fisted easily, even as others struggle to take the average-size penis, or dildo, or even a finger or two.

But as we observe in contexts where sexual censorship meets capitalist commerce in a culture that hates women, gay people, and pleasure, fisting is positioned as inherently obscene, unsafe, violent. Just ask anyone trying to post content on sites like OnlyFans that use vague or subjective language to circumscribe activities like fisting, roleplaying, or gaping, which not only further stigmatizes sex work and consensual sexual activity, but relies on normative definitions of extremity to pick and choose which content creators are censored, and therefore economically deprived.

Just as prostitution is made dangerous by criminalization, or our society ableist because it’s designed to be inaccessible right down to the handlebars and street curbs, the sociocultural conditions in which we find ourselves are intentionally hostile to life, meaning they’re intentionally hostile to connection. The more time, effort, and attention a sex act requires, the more difficult it is. I won’t say that a kiss (or a b*b) requires less connection than a fistfuck, but it does require less overhead (to use a capitalist term), and that’s before we even factor the identities of the kissers (or whatever) involved.

Lesbian processing is an extreme sport. Being both gay and non-monogamous puts me at heightened risk of being annoying. Like vegans or those who use they/them pronouns, the non-monogamous have a reputation for sanctimony and condescension meant to conceal the flaws in a less-than-peachy romantic relationship. I’m not interested in pretending that Jade and I don’t have to deal with jealousy, or insecurity, or hurt feelings, not because I mind lying but because I think it’s silly to aspire toward perfection that doesn’t exist (especially because its puncture is more humiliating than the failure to reach it in the first place). But I don’t think romantic relationships have to be hard, or any harder than any other kind of relationship, and my relationship with Jade isn’t hard at all. It makes my life better and easier. That’s why I’m in it with her.

When our friend made the cheeky comment about us being the “most monogamous non-monogamous couple,” it was a kind of joke. Like the notion of lesbian processing is a kind of joke. A relationship style, like a communication style, takes place over time. It can be cherrypicked for absurdity or failure or even a punchline, but when it becomes its own kind of normal, farce loses its steam. I guess what I’m trying to underline here is the difference between normal and everything else, and how very rarely we take the time to examine why one is one and not the other.

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A beautiful young man strolls through a field of white flowers—perhaps one of the many clearings to be found in San Francisco’s byzantine Golden Gate Park. Our beauty encounters another beauty, though this one is nowhere near as beautiful as our original, a truth we gather less by comparison than by the composition of the shots; the actors’ wardrobes; and the way the camera follows the slow, almost contemplative movements of our anointed one. As the other watches, the beautiful young man undoes his skintight leathers to stroke and climax from among the fallen white flowers, surrounded by the violins of what’s known colloquially as Pachelbel’s Canon.

When Peter Berlin’s That Boy was filmed in the early seventies, Johann Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major” had not yet become the anthem of weddings and college graduations. Sweet yet plodding, its growing popularity since the 1980s has turned the canon into the West’s aural shorthand for major life events that are serious but rote, sentimental yet unfeeling, normal and yet far from natural. One may suspect that the bridal tenderness the music imbues That Boy is an intentional juxtaposition with its hardcore gay sex, arthouse plotlessness, and leatherfuck finale, but I like to think otherwise.

Philosophical, romantic, imaginative, comical (though whether that’s intentional is also unclear), and ultimately transcendent, That Boy encapsulates the mythos of Berlin, legendary muse of Mapplethorpe and Warhol and pre-internet “photosexual” whose documentation of his own beauty “gave a world starved of blatantly gay visual role models a new conception of the beautiful, empowered, self-loving, sensual, shameless gay man.” As his alter-ego, Helmut, Berlin struts Lou Sullivan’s Polk Street (now gentrified into oblivion), where he is observed by all with the fascinated adoration of his park cruise. In art as in life, Berlin is his own fantasy, too: “Every guy I meet is in competition with myself. I get into my persona. I look at myself; I have sex with myself.”

As art, and particularly as pornographic art, That Boy collapses fantasy with the stylization of a real man’s life that is and remains, by all reports, utterly dedicated to cruising. While he has called the camera his “dream lover,” Berlin’s artistry does not, cannot, supplant the reality of his body among other bodies. “Real for me,” he told Aperture a few years ago, “is when I walk the streets and you pass me, I look at you, you look at me, we pass each other, and then I look back, and you look back, and you stop. That’s real! That will never happen inside a computer.”

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Below you’ll find DAVID’s most-read posts of the past year, plus my favorite series, which didn’t exactly rank with you all but which was, I think, some of my most solid writing.

And by the way, thank you for reading in 2022! It was a pretty big year for me. I said hello to new experiences and goodbye to GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY. I reviewed books, movies, and flavors. I made a case for girlfriends and against intelligence. For my non-DAVID writing, I published my second novel and almost nothing else, other than an essay on a documentary called BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism for the short-lived Astra Magazine (RIP).

It’s fair to say I’ve been quite productive this annum, but I feel as if I haven’t really flexed yet. With any luck, I’ll have something to show for myself soon. Until then, this newsletter will keep coming out more or less weekly. I hope it’s nice for you. It is for me.

On the gangbang

If America’s incest fantasy could be peeled apart, like a banana, the fruit inside would be thick, sweet, and less convincingly phallic than its exterior might suggest. My theory is that the substance of this edge fantasy is an intimacy that can be taken for granted. Imagine.

An interlude on heteronormativity

[W]hile drunkenly fooling around in a car with some straight guy, I became too distracted by what he looked like to f**k; instead of getting angry or pressuring me, he listened while I talked at length about much I wished I had his body (?!?!), then drove me to a Jack In The Box and bought me food to soak up the booze. I’ve always looked back on that experience with gratitude—he was kind to tolerate my strange behavior, and he didn’t even try to rape me. Only relatively recently did I understand what was actually going on between us, or between me and his body, anyway.

A hookup yields reflections on trans life

This is also fascinating to me: the chaser who can’t learn the language he needs to get the pussy he wants. From the couch, I peer into his wife’s office, where a Peloton twists in the shadows like a dozing xenomorph. I suppose a chaser like Max doesn’t have to learn anything he doesn’t want to.

“Gender is not my boundary”

There was a popular meme, for a minute there, that non-binary people were sharing that said something to the effect of If you’re attracted to me, you’re gay. Which, if that’s your experience of yourself, sure, fine. But I’m much more interested in the challenges of maintaining what are, for most of us, deeply held understandings of our own genders and sexualities when they are fundamentally incompatible with those with whom we vibe and fk. How can straight people and gay people have sex? It happens all the time! How can dykes fk fags? Literally every day. How can one be a monogamous sex worker? Easily! How can your identity not invalidate mine when our bodies push against each other? I don’t know, but it can!

On going under

Hestruggled to convey what it was about golden showers that he liked so much, and why they brought him to what was essentially a brothel, rather than to the feet of an open-minded girlfriend. This mystifying urge left him both verbose and inarticulate, as our deepest erotic desires do for most of us; though he was no poet, G’s passion, which he was happy to leave more or less unexamined, felt poetic to me.

Let a thousand fisting daisychains bloom

To say that the deviant subjects produced by white supremacist patriarchy are welcome at Pride so long as they don’t use it to indulge in deviance is to contradict oneself. They’re already deviant because they exist.

An interlude about straight people

As a result of this penchant for taking out the trash, I’m one of those lucky gay people that has had very few heteros in their day-to-day life for many years. It’s not my intention to be categorical, but since I won’t tolerate disrespect from someone who’s not paying my rent…well, you know how straight people are.

Can I smell this public rose? Can I smile in the street?

I looked out the window, where below me a cumulus shelf of orange sherbet witnessed our howl to New York City. No one could see me crying, but what if they did? I think it would be okay.

An interlude on craft, work, and fantasy

Though I’m fundamentally repulsed by his prioritizing of style and structure over “the great idea” (which he called “hogwash”), my dear Nabokov’s dedication to component can be read as another kind of subversion. “Caress the details, the divine details!” he urged, which dictum we can reappropriate for our anti-work perspective: what is work if not effort with a capitalist agenda, rendering pleasure incidental?

On Dick Cavett and the art of the interview

We all have our special interests. Mine happens to be a problematic nonagenarian talkshow host that my girlfriend refers to as my “interview man.”

I don’t remember why I started watching episodes of The Dick Cavett Showon YouTube, but suddenly it was a part of my solitary nighttime ritual, the hour or two before sleep when I laid down on my mom’s yoga mat, chain-smoked joints, and anticipated another 16-hour-day of muting C’s screams over Zoom meetings while trapped indoors by viral plague and fire season. Delighted by the seemingly endless roster of famous subjects—including Salvador Dalí, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali, Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, Lucille Ball, Truman Capote, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Richard Pryor, and my beloved Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni—I found myself entranced by the pedantic patter of this boyish Midwesterner, who over the course of almost 40 years of hosting his self-titled talk show has aged from Pinnochio-esque whippersnapper to batty examiner emeritus.

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Max, surname “Grindr,” is in my phone, but our short message history doesn’t tell me much about him. He claims that we’ve already met—Before I went to Barcelona, remember? I don't. My recall can’t be trusted, and I’m pretty slutty, but because I like to record things I have a spreadsheet of people I’ve slept with recently, and Max isn’t on it.

Instead of blocking him, however, I admit that the possibility that he’s lying is kind of hot.

I'm honest, Max promises. It's probably my sole virtue.

He sends me a photo of his cock and it’s big and pretty, so I decide to see what happens.

My doubts are confirmed when I arrive at Max’s Upper West Side apartment building. Even my THC-addled brain would remember a place like this. It’s new, built in that boxy, trendy style that you can see for yourself if you Google “gentrifier architecture.” A man in a suit hustles to open the door for me, then makes a phone call. A second suited man is seated at an island at the end of a glass corridor, beyond which is a landlocked garden with a redwood deck. Though he watched the first doorman make his call, the second screens me, too. At the top of the elevator and down a hallway, a short middle-aged man that I don’t recognize answers my ring. He is wearing a plaid button-down over khakis. He smiles.

Max is not attractive, but I didn’t expect him to be. He told me he was “ethically non-monogamous,” so the only reason he wouldn’t send me a photo of his face is that he knows it can’t do the heavy lifting his dick can. But it’s not so much his appearance that I don’t like—that ranks fairly low for me, when it comes to these things. It’s his demeanor, his vibe. Ushering me into a foyer that’s half the size of my own apartment, Max is politely apologetic, and not interested, seemingly, in convincing me to stay. As I look around, I realize why.

I start removing my coat, spinning on my heel to take it all in. There’s unblemished marble and unsmudged steel. The appliances, Scandinavian and Japanese, are brand-new. Whoever cleans the place obviously doesn’t live here. I see, from the corner of my eye, that Max is watching me. By the way he holds himself—tensely, as if waiting for the Russian judge’s decision—I can tell there’s room to be bratty.

I’ve never seen you before, I announce, tossing my things on an upholstered chair the color of ivory and cream and the shiny side of tungsten.

I guess not, Max says, still smiling. His glasses have thick, black frames. I thought you were someone else.

I laugh at him. Another t boy?

I was going to offer you a drink, Max feints, but why don’t I give you the tour first?

Even New Yorkers use this expression, even those who don’t have more than a room to call their own. This is not the case for Max, whose apartment, glass-walled like the lobby below, has two offices, three bedrooms, and a stunning view of the River. Any single piece of furniture costs more than my rent, or at least my student loan payment. The walls are full, though not cluttered, with vast paintings and prints. As we move through the apartment, Max recounts the origin and value of every piece, with a smattering of boorish detail. Have you heard of so-and-so? He painted this before he killed himself. The art, most of it reminiscent of Basquiat and Banksy, is, without exception, hideous. One painting features Donald Trump with a ball gag in his mouth and graffiti-esque squiggles around his body.

When we return to the open kitchen, Max announces that he’ll make me a Negroni (hold the Prosecco), taking care to explain to me what exactly that is. I know what I look like to him, in my crop top and piercings. I think of the little white trans boy he mistook me for, and wonder how old he is.

We take our drinks to a circle of Eames chairs, where Max tells me about his homes in Maine and the aforementioned Barcelona; I half-expect him to ask me if I’ve ever heard of it. When he stands and turns to dim the lights, he exposes his cheap, ill-fitting boxer shorts. He won’t tell me what he does for a living—or used to do, since he retired years ago—but says he divides his time between consulting for a nonprofit and writing books. He is coy about what consulting means, as he is about the books, although, he says slyly, they both did quite well.

And what do you do? he finally asks, seizing his Negroni from its makeshift coaster, a copy of Artforum.

I also write books, I tell him. He Googles my new novel. A New York Times Editors’ Choice! He almost hollers it. Oh, fk you, David!

Max is impressed and sheepish; his evening has taken an unexpected turn. I take a big swig of Negroni. It tastes great.

We talk some more, which is to say, I listen some more. He tells me about his wife, his adult children (who he believes are older than I am), the sex positive community he was once a member of in San Francisco (but you're too young to know what that is). Max is under the impression that his sexual lifestyle—polyamory, group sex, gay sex, casual sex—is a recent development made possible by the creation of a “market” by hookup apps. When he tells me that older men, like him, couldn’t find beautiful young boys, like me, before Grindr, I laugh in his face. He laughs with me, looking more confused than pained.

Still, he senses that I’m having a good time, and I can’t say I’m not entertained. The Negroni starts to hit and the apartment is warm. All is going well. Max starts putting the moves on me in the most juiceless way imaginable.

You're so fabulous, he says. Now we’re on a couch together, our empty glasses abandoned in a different room. I find you so incredibly appealing.

I find him fascinating, if repulsive. I don’t want to have sex with him, but I do want to see if I can get things out of him, this wealthy man who seems inclined to generosity. It’s a fun game. He asks me my age, and is shocked to learn that I am, in fact, older than his adult children. The transsexual he had me confused with was 19. In comparing us, he struggles to describe the trajectory of our transitions, though of course I did not ask him to. This is also fascinating to me: the chaser who can’t learn the language he needs to get the pussy he wants. From the couch, I peer into his wife’s office, where a Peloton twists in the shadows like a dozing xenomorph. I suppose a chaser like Max doesn’t have to learn anything he doesn’t want to.

In the interest of keeping my options open, I decide that I won’t have sex with him, but that I will let him cum. I take my clothes off, and Max admires me while I stroke the shaft of his big, pretty cock. I know what you like, Max says, affecting an unnaturally deep voice. He wraps his fingers around my throat. He doesn’t have a strong grip, so his bad form isn’t dangerous. I repress more laughter. (I wish that this sort of thing wasn’t fun, but it is.)

When he cums, and he cums quickly, Max emits a loud, abrupt scream. Remember that (maybe apocryphal) viral video about a group of scientists who recreated the voice of a mummified neanderthal and it’s hilarious? That’s what he sounds like. As his blood pressure returns to normal, he gazes up at me, squinting a little without his glasses. I await more compliments, or else more demands. Instead, he asks me why the Times chose my book. He’s still catching his breath.

I’m caught off guard. But I tell him why they chose it, or why I think they did, anyway. I’m still wondering if I’m even close to right when then Max says something else: that trans kids shouldn't get to transition until they're at least 18.

Only the day before, the most recent transphobic hit piece from the Times, this one about the “dangers” of puberty blockers, had rocked Twitter, the platform itself newly acquired by a billionaire transmisogynist who’s since reinstated a bunch of banned accounts, including Trump’s. Max’s projection is obvious to me—put the tranny f*t in its place, while insisting on the clockiness that is clearly more to his erotic tastes—but I can’t escape the coincidence. How can I, with the Times*’ audience right here with me, a liberal with cum on his belly and Campari on his breath, a rich white straight man—I don’t care who he f*s—with everything to lose and nothing to fear?

No. I don’t care to argue with him, but it must be said. You’re wrong.

Realizing his mistake, Max attempts to explain himself. He tells me about a trans girl whose family he knows. Her parents did not permit her to medically transition until she was 18, and she turned out just fine, he insists. He misgenders her until I correct him. It’s difficult, I think, to balance dominance with satisfaction.

Kids die because of that mindset, I say. There’s nothing else.

Only kids from bad families! Max retorts.

The game is over. I used to mock women who had sex with men for free—who’s the loser now? I go back to the living room for my clothes. Max is still talking about the girl who is now beautiful and happy and surged up, intercutting her story with fantasies about f*g me with his cis boyfriend, who’s 24 and, according to him, has a long, skinny dick. I wonder how much he pays the boyfriend. A lot, I hope.

Max insists on getting me a car home. He shows me his phone, proving that he’s ordered a copy of my book. Now that the balance has been restored, he is generous again.

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I identify more strongly as a sadomasochist than as a lesbian. I hang out in the gay community because that’s where the sexual fringe starts to unravel. Most of my partners are women, but gender is not my boundary…If I had a choice between being shipwrecked on a desert island with a vanilla lesbian and a hot male masochist, I’d pick the boy. This is the kind of sex I like—sex that tests physical limits within a context of polarized roles.

If it seems like I quote Patrick Califia’s “A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality” in every other newsletter, well, can you blame me? Like Alex Chee on E. M. Forster, Kim TallBear on sex and family, Astra and Sunaura Taylor on animal liberation, or Patricia Lockwood on Vladimir Nabokov, Califia on desire is, for me, a long revelation. Each time I return to this essay, it revitalizes me, as the backs of shampoo bottles like to say. If I step away for a few years, I may even discover, upon my return, that a challenging concept has suddenly slid into focus.

When I read this passage for the first time, I was awestruck, but I also believed I understood it completely. Green as I was, I figured I followed its elucidation of the work of freedom, the intellectual effort required to define and then pursue one’s desires (Gender is not my boundary!) as, if not distinct from social mores and pressures, then at least plastic enough to be played with. (I also perceived within it the kernel of transsexual privilege, which is that we get to have sex with everyone we want to because we are more beautiful and special than normal people, but that’s besides today’s point.) Over the years, my body has grown into this knowledge: I grasp the work of this kind of freedom. I am doing it all the time.

But in thinking that I understood this passage completely, I was mistaken, as I learned when I returned to it recently and sensed something new there. For a long time now, I’ve trusted in desire as a route to freedom; or trusted that freedom can be found in the honest embrace of desire. This is because I owe my desire everything. When I was young, it brought me to gay people, who eventually brought me to my current political commitments, which are broader than gayness, and include the commitments of those coalitions of which I’m not a member. Desire need not always be fulfilled—in fact, I think it oughtn’t be—but it should always be acknowledged, if not explored.

Gender is not my boundary. In my first reading of this line, I understood it as an imperative of sorts: If there is a boundary, it must be crossed—and thus, annihilated. Very genderqueer, as the enbies of my generation called ourselves. With this perspective, connection happens in the wake of destruction: like vampires, in making more of those like ourselves, we eliminate those who are not. But what if, instead of destroying boundaries, you brought them along with you to that island?

At an event in London a few weeks ago, I had a wonderful conversation about my book, leathersex, and dyke drama with Christie Costello. She asked me to define leather, and I did my best before putting the question back to her. I won’t paraphrase her answer, but were I to centrifuge it, the juice would gather round the word excess. Excess of gender, excess of sex, excess of feeling and of affect.

I think of Christie’s excess when I think of my new reading of A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality. Califia’s hot male masochist is my straight person, or my gay man, and these are not exceptions to my being a dyke, but rather included by it, subsumed by it. I connect more with highly-gendered people than people with whom I, ostensibly, share genders. Which in the context of this reading means, to me, that I do not bring people unlike me to the island, but rather that have found new ways to experience our likeness. Our connection by way of extremity is our similarity.

Who would be on my island? Total tops and absolute bottoms of a variety of genders and sexualities. I don’t switch in scene, but between them, occupying alternately strict realities that remain, like gelatin molds, soft yet fast. For this reason, I can identify with straight people, even those who don’t know what topping and bottoming is, over gay people who don’t fk that way, or who are switchy or vers, or otherwise less rigid in what it is they do. This diversity of connection needn’t be a hierarchy of values; there is no right way, just the way that *I fk. That is desire. This is the kind of sex I like—sex that tests physical limits within a context of polarized roles.* (NB: “queer” and “bi” and concepts like those work just fine for lots of people, by the way!)

My connections with highly-gendered people, and with people whose sexual sensibilities are, like mine, structured, controlled, formalized, rigid, inflexible, and courtly, overlap, extending even to straight people (and always has, I suppose). Benighted straight people! Straight women who are unwilling to give up the hidden power of heterosexuality and straight men whose sense of straightness is unshakeable, or is different from the conventional understanding of straightness (trade as straight, a queered heterosexuality that is, nevertheless, straight)—I love that s**t. I also hate it. But I do love it. At any rate, it’s complicated.

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When it comes to the humane treatment and conservation of other species (once-discrete concepts that seem to degrade every time we get another one of those U.N. reports), the name of the game is similarity: if we can convince the skeptical that non-human animals are just like us, our case for their mercy grows that much stronger.

By this standard, Sabrina Imbler’s How Far The Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, is a great success. Over the course of this book of essays, they transpose the human body against those of various marine creatures—their grandmother and the Chinese sturgeon, sexual predators and carnivorous sand worms—to reveal the linkage between our wars and their migration, our family lives and their ecosystems, our industry and their disappearance. We (The West?) see the world as an entropic hinterland to be conquered and controlled. With their meticulous prose, whose discipline can’t conceal the enthusiasm of a true lover, Imbler disproves and rebukes the paradigm, leaving, if not a replacement, then room for something else.

This space is where transcendence happens. In “We Swarm,” their essay about Jacob Riis Beach and salp, the blobby marine invertebrate better known as the sea grape, they write about how it feels to experience our own permeability:

The poet Ross Gay asks if joining together all our sorrows—all our dead relatives and broken relationships, all the moments that make life seem impossible—if joining all these big and little griefs together, if that constitutes joy. As I watched the other beachgoers floating amongst the [salp], all of us strangers until this strange, shared moment, I imagined my body chained to their bodies. My sorrows to their sorrows. My survival to their survival.

Light has many moments of beauty, and many more of passion—Imbler’s fascination with the deep’s inner workings is endearing and contagious—but what’s really interesting about itis that Imbler is so good at this showcasing of similarity that they manage to cancel it out. Deposited into the same wading pool as feral goldfish, dancing yeti crabs, and necrotic blue whales, we are given the opportunity to espy resemblance we would not have otherwise noticed. But we are also given the opportunity to see difference up close, to appreciate its magnitude in a way our imaginations could never have conjured. Connection happens, but awe remains.

Find me on Twitter. Get my second novel, X, right here. Also, I’ve had some interviews over the past few weeks. I’ll be in London next week, so find me at Foyles and elsewhere if you want to get a book and say hi.

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It’s distasteful to admit that breaking the taboo did something for me back then, when I was still ignorant of the problems that being gay can cause. But when I first started dating L, I quickly discovered that more thrilling than holding her hand in public, appalling the religious, or feeling superior to heterosexuals was being able to say the words my girlfriend.

The pleasure this elicited came from someplace old, older than the adolescent urge to shock or infuriate. Saying my girlfriend produced the satisfaction of a child declaring their age, right down to the month, for the benefit of an inquiring adult (“Seven and three-quarters!”). I was not one of those little girls who wanted to get married; the phantom I was supposed to have been would likely have spoken of her future husband the way I say my girlfriend today, which remains: bashful, arch, incredulous, smug.

Venturing into a new kind of homosexuality is fun, especially when you can do it with your friends. Last night, I went with two other t boys to one of those grimy gay bars where you can drink cheaply, cruise in the dark, and sometimes get robbed. We stood around in a basement more sewer than grotto gossiping with each other and chatting with wasted guys, barely making it home in time for dawn.

In my experience of transness, public life is a paranoid arithmetic: how clocky am I alone? How clocky am I with Jade (less clocky as trans, it turns out, but whether I’ll read as a man or a butch woman is 50/50)? How clocky am I with my trans friends, all of us comprising a spectrum of passability that bloats like yeast, then implodes like a star, recombinant as DNA and inverted as we are, with every lightshift, jacket removal, gesture? Who knows.

At some point in the night, a tall white man approached us, too drunk to stand up straight. I’ve been married for forty years, he announced, and I just realized I’m bisexual.

Female-socialized as the three of us supposedly are, we smiled and cooed. That’s nice, I simpered. Congratulations, S lisped.

But the man was despairing, looking back over the lost years, hand to his forehead, high above mine. I’m bisexual, he soldiered on, and I need support!

The three of us shifted our eyes. You should drink some water, babe, I said. J, always effortlessly masculine, tapped the man’s shoulder with an open hand.

The man stumbled off, having been gently made aware that we weren’t offering what he was looking for. My hilarity—how bisexual can you be if you zeroed in on us, sis?—was a soft landing for my bitterness. My conscience said: Everyone deserves love and support, and the closet is a brutal shame. But my life was its rejoinder.

It’s raining today. Out late, up late. Instead of doing what needs to be done, I did nothing, until I went out for the ingredients for tonight’s dinner with Jade and a few friends. On Manhattan and Greenpoint, I remembered that I needed to supplement the pair of beautiful ceramic dishes a dear friend made for me, unless I wanted to serve my guests from pots and colanders. I got three bowls—two matching white, one angular and lined in blue—at the 99¢ Discount.

Groceries and bowls in hand, I sat outside a cafe near my apartment with a book (Zain Khalid’s remarkable Brother Alive) to wait for Jade. She arrived flecked in rain, like perfect fruit.

I got bowls! I pronounced.

Jade laughed. In her tote were a pair of beautiful ceramic dishes, because she knew I needed them. Then she was off to her tattoo appointment, fruit stung for beauty’s sake.

I’ve noticed the small and intentional reclamation of lover, that I’ve been predicting for a few years, has started taking place. I love it—love the word lover, and how gay people use it. I use it occasionally myself, and suppose that if it really does have a moment, even just among a wedge of New York-adjacent dykes, that I’ll use it even more. But while it feels good to say—a hearkening back to beloved gay people I’ll never know—it’s not my girlfriend. It can’t be.

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GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY is coming to a close. No regrets here—we’ve had a great run.

Two years into the mutual aid fundraiser that my anonymous gay therapist friend and I made at the beginning of the pandemic, our subscribers have sent over $30k to the orgs, projects, and people listed below. Bad Gay and I hope you’ll continue supporting them to the extent that you can. As for our gratitude, there are no words, other than that I feel very lucky to know BG’s true identity (and home address). Best of luck to you all, but they still have to give me advice when I’ve done something stupid.

Before I share BG’s parting message, a little housekeeping.

All subscriber funds through the end of the month will be sent to Food Not Bombs. After this post goes live, they’re getting the roughly $2,680 that’s currently in the bank. Anything that trickles in between now and October 31st will be sent there as well.
As of November 1, EYE will be keeping subscriber funds to pay my student loans (Dark Brandon or not, I’m still pretty deep in the red). You are welcome to unsubscribe! In fact, I encourage it! Send that $5 to someone who really needs it, or buy yourself a nice PSL with all the fixings. DAVID will remain free, though I’ll never turn a jaundiced eye on your financial support. I may even occasionally reward subscribers with exclusive content. In fact, I almost certainly will.
GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY will continue to be paywalled, though I’ll probably unlock posts here and there. You can always subscribe to get full access to the archive, which will be available in perpetuity, or at least as long as DAVID exists.

And now, your farewell message from my dear BG. It’s been an honor to have been assumed to be you for all this time! (BG is not me. I am not BG. Not all gay people are the same. I don’t give advice, usually.)

Dearest readers and advice-seekers,

In the depths of a strange time for the world, my dear friend David and I concocted GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY to connect to each other and to all of you, to have a few laughs, and to put money directly into the hands of organizations and causes that mean a lot to us. We are extremely proud of the $30,578 we were able to raise over the past two years.

We used David's platform to develop a very particular bit of fun—advice tinged with truth-telling, warm disdain for queer antics, humor, and genuine calls for all of us to see ourselves a bit better so we can do a bit better. Bad Gay, despite my credentials, was only my clinical voice in part. There is a therapeutic lens underneath the glibness in the columns, but Bad Gay has David's voice in it, too. We spend a lot of time dissecting the communities we love, the people we love (both parasocially and actual-socially), and the patterns of gleefully ill-behaved queerness that we, I think, both believe is our inalienable right: to exist and be messy and learn.

Thank you to the advice-seekers, the readers, and the subscribers who helped us get funds to the people that need them, and most especially to David. I would be remiss, as I wrap up, not to remind all of you to dig in and ask yourselves, whenever possible, "What is my commitment to suffering?"

Have fun, keep f***g up, and we'll see you around.

Bad Gay

GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY MUTUAL AID RECIPIENTS

Whose Corner Is It Anyway
G.L.I.T.S.
The Okra Project
SWOP Behind Bars
No North Brooklyn Pipeline
St. James Infirmary
For the Gworls
Free Ashley Diamond (As of this summer, she is now free!)
SWOP Minneapolis
FentCheck
Casa Ruby
Prevention Point Philadelphia
Venus Cuffs’ ongoing NY-based fundraiser
REBUILD
No New Jails NYC
Noname Book Club
National Bailout
Morris Home
Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop
Brigid Alliance

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In “A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality,” Patrick Califia makes passing mention of bottoms outnumbering tops in the San Francisco leatherdyke scene of the late 1970s. Califia wasn’t the first to notice the queer “top shortage” we’ve heard so much about.But I once read, somewhere, that at the dawn of leather—or maybe even before “leather,” what we call the gay sadomasochist subcultures born of American postwar veteran and biker clubs—this phenomenon was reversed. A half-century before Califia was on the scene, according to my source (Maybe it was Mark Thompson? Maybe you can track it down?), it was the bottoms who were in short supply, forcing tops to compete for their flesh and attention.

Though in the past I’ve been forced to do extra legwork in order to weed out the fakes and the freaks, I’m a good masochist who’s lived in big cities for almost 15 years, which means I have both the ability and the privilege to avoid said top shortage. But of course I’ve noticed, or thought I’ve noticed, an imbalance in the roles that anchor our erotic lives. For as long as I’ve been in leather, my sadist and top friends have been in high demand, the inverse of pass-around Pattys, servicing a bevy of needy pincushions and thirsty holes. This imbalance appears—or is at least bitched about—in the broader queer culture, too, brought to more mainstream attention in gay thinkpieces over the past five years, though these seemed to have peaked not long before the pandemic began.

Has a fad discourse receded back into the ether where it belongs, or has something real shifted? Recently, my friends and I have been going through a gangbang phase, and in the process I’ve realized that there are more tops and (true) switches than strict bottoms in my life. For instance, it’s been no trouble staffing our gangbangs, where tops will outnumber the bottom by at least 5 to 1. On the other hand, finding bottoms to take all our cocks and boots is, if not difficult, a disproportionately taller order than finding said cocks and boots. By the logic of the so-called top shortage, it should be the other way around.

What gives? I have my theories. For all the blood and guts-rearrangement, bottoming isn’t necessarily harder or riskier than topping, but when you reach a certain level of play, where experience takes precedence over a willingness to try new things, a seasoned bottom is as much of a luxury as an expert top (an open-minded novice can only bring you so far—getting good at being used takes a lot of practice!). Perhaps inflation has gotten us here, too, rendering the bottom’s skill set more dear than ever and skewing its value in relation to the top’s, like the dollar superseding the pound.

Then there’s the makeup of our gangbangs, which this summer have happened among friends and friends-of-friends. We don’t have a greater responsibility to our bottom’s welfare because we know their name, but there is a difference, I think. Among strangers, respect is understood; among friends, love. We may sleep with our bottom after the gangbang is done. We will certainly be there for them the morning after, and the morning after that. Which is to say that in a gangbang of friends and lovers, rather than of strangers, where experience and intensity and intimacy converge, the needs of the bottom are greater than ever. If the bottom requires a satisfaction that a single top can’t provide, they will also require commensurate protection from themselves, from the ravages of their own desires.

“It takes a village,” I said as I lifted our bottom up onto the bed, their arms bound behind their back with pink rope. We laughed. Another friend helped me support our bottom’s weight, while a third held their legs apart so a femme in black vinyl could push herself inside.

Suppose there was, for a time, a top shortage. Suppose that it’s now gone, for some reason. Because bottoms have become more brave and voracious, perhaps. Or because tops crave a challenge for their caretaking skills, more developed since the country has undergone a mass-disabling event. Or because all of us have greater rage to excise, and a deeper need for connection.

Even if this reversal, from a plurality of bottoms to a dearth of them, is real, all of this is anecdotal and personal and highly speculative; if the top shortage is indeed now a bottom shortage, it may well be a phenomenon limited to my individual sexual ecosystem, which is admittedly bigger than most. But so much has changed over the past few years. Is it so unreasonable to think that this change brought about a significant, even seismic, shift in our erotic lives? Where once the role of the victim was more popular, now the role of the predator is. Perhaps it has become more difficult to need, or more appealing to control. Perhaps both, or neither, or something else.

In a gangbang, the bottom receives more attention, stimulation, focus, and (after)care than their tops do. This isn’t to say that their top(s) do not also receive these things, but the one who gets fucked, who struggles, bleeds, weeps, and withstands, will need first aid, comfort, tenderness, and relief that the top will not, in ways that the top will not. What has changed, over the past few years, to have altered the resonance of these experiences?

For the summer’s first gangbang, I shared my girlfriend with my friends, negotiating, managing, and running her turnout for an intimate group leatherdykes. It felt like being an auteur directing my favorite actress—a star is born! I felt very close to Jade, and very close to my friends, all of us together, a family, focused on our bottom—our main attraction, our doll, our charge. Afterward, we ordered french fries and ate them in a big hotel bed, lingerie traded in for oversize t-shirts, talking about this and that until we fell asleep.

I have not always liked sex, but what I’ve always appreciated about doing it in a group is the redistribution of responsibility. Less pressure, without diminishing returns. In some circumstances it can feel communist, utopic. With a gangbang in particular, everyone other than the bottom can tap in and out as they like. Sometimes you are active (co-starring as fist-f****r, or playing a supporting role with tongue or toy), and sometimes you sit, watching actively as a voyeur, or passively as you rest, maybe with an arm slung around someone’s shoulder (this is a time when I feel so comradely, so fraternal). You step in and out as you’re needed, restoring yourself with a snack, a drink, some drugs, a piss.

Two dear friends have recently had their first child, and I haven’t spend as much time around an infant since my youngest sister was born when I was 18. Even with two adults (two-and-a-half with me, someone who is not as helpful and can’t breastfeed, but can hold, bottle feed, burp, and entertain), the work of a baby is very demanding; even with all of my years of caretaking—my whole life, with babies of many ages, and people of many needs—I marvel at the effort required to be someone else’s universe.

I have never wanted children of my own, but I adore them, especially infants. After I met my friends’ baby, I told my therapist about how good it felt to care for someone whose requirements, while extreme, can be completely and entirely met. I love that their need is not in vain with me. Unable yet to question whether they will get what they want, I can ensure, as long as I am with them, that they won’t have to.

The urge to break the incest taboo suggests a powerful craving, one highly gendered but ultimately plastic, for sexual and filial certainty that can never be rent asunder, no matter the risks—such as being caught, whether by another family member, or your friends at school, or the authorities. To fantasize about incest suggests the fulfillment not just of desires, but of needs. I want this so badly that I need it. And it’s right here, provided for me by someone wise enough to know, and strong enough to give. Maybe it’s punishment. Maybe it’s nurturing. Maybe it’s an orgasm.

As a lover, I strive to take taboo desires on their own terms, doing my best not to assume that they are facades for something more real. But as a writer, I’m curious about the affects smuggled inside them, hidden below the surface like a cooking pot’s nascent simmer. I suspect the incest taboo contains an aggression that’s at turns righteous and indignant. In scene, it feels to me like a furious demand for authenticity. By that, I mean: the great harm of child abuse (which is really what we’re talking about when we talk about the incest fantasy) is the betrayal. The second great harm is the denial of the first, the universal gaslighting by family, church, TV, school, doctor, policeman, and culture. To embrace the incest fantasy affirms that you are not crazy (or maybe you are, and who gives a s**t?), that harm really was perpetrated by those entrusted with your care and growth, and that while your response to it was not of an uncomplicated and uniform rejection, that that’s okay, too.

You don’t have to be a survivor of literal CSA to see the appeal in that, I don’t think.

When I look around me at the reading, the rave, the sex party, I see gay people of all backgrounds, the vast majority of whom have survived some kind of schism from their natal family. Even those who retain those connections completely do so under duress. But this is not unique to gay people, though in a way it’s reassuring to pretend that it is. As much as “chosen family” has arisen to describe a specific solution to a certain kind of gay abjection, people are exiled from their natal families all the time, and for all kinds of reasons. The nuclear family is created by the state, only to be broken by it—by foster care, prisons, and mental facilities; by the institutions of marriage and divorce; by wage labor, debt, and poverty; by gendered, racialized, and ableist divisions of labor and love.

Is it any wonder that incest has an appeal for some of us? We were promised a family, and a home, an unconditional love that can never be broken, no matter what we do or don’t do. We were promised that harm, should there be any, would always come from without. We were promised that there was recourse for injustice and failure. We were promised, if not safety, then community.

We were also promised that the closest intimacies happen in families; if it happens within the family it is, by definition, love, even if it hurts or is scary. If love does take place outside the family, it must be legitimized by the family’s legal reorganization, via marriage or adoption. One is bred to question if you can really have love outside of your birth family, which means that losing it means losing love, all of it. If you manage to overcome these terms—which constitute heteronormativity, among other things—and replace that love, is it any surprise that that love feels like the family you lost?

In times of fear and disaster, the bonds that don’t break are strengthened, or so they say. Jade and I started dating not long before March 2020, so we can also joke about COVID fast-tracking our romantic relationship. Where would we be, as a couple, without it, I wonder? Would we still be at this gangbang, with these people?

One of the linguistic patterns of gay hookup apps like Grindr, I’ve noticed, is the inclusion of the term body contact on a list of desired activities. Kissing, oral, rimming, body contact—as if the first three can be accomplished without the last. The language is both unappealingly clinical and yet endearing to me, functional in its straightforwardness, but almost too useful to be erotic, to my ears, anyway. And yet, as someone who has felt starved for touch for years now, I understand it. I use it myself.

I want to walk into the room where my friend is being fucked, take off my clothes, and f**k my friend, too. I want Jade to stroke my hair while someone gets pushed against the plate glass, their body flush with the skyline. I want to conspire with another top about swapping girlfriends, radiating laughter. I have been telling men whose names I don’t know that I love them. I take the person that I love the most and I give her away. I can afford to be generous; it feels good to have someone, and it feels good to share the having.

Incest, as the state understands it, was never about child abuse. The taboo is somehow big enough to contain sodomy, gender nonconformity, non-whiteness, the reasons for which we’re accused of grooming everyone around us, yet it’s not big enough to stop children from being harmed, particularly by their legal guardians, whether those are natal family or the state. Under suspicion of love, what you have to offer is criminalized, explicitly or tacitly.

This summer’s gangbangs weren’t my idea, but after COVID, which for me meant years without other lovers and months without my girlfriend, I was ravenous. Then monkeypox happened. Still reeling from one plague, here was another. I could feel the deprivation in my body. Could others too? I’ve been f*g a lot, unable to decide if it’s good or bad. But it feels good, so who cares? I know how close I am to losing it again.

Of those who have survived AIDS, COVID, and MPX, many have been permanently affected, not just directly in their bodies, but by extension: by stress, lost jobs, worsening work conditions and healthcare, the constriction of social services, skyrocketing rent and the shrinking dollar. The nuclear family, our supposed safety net, is further exposed for what it is, the bones splitting the offal from below. It was never going to work, for us, anyway. Is that why desire for incest in our porn has skyrocketed (I promise I’m not just revealing my personal curation)? Why it continues to shock, despite featuring in our most popular mainstream TV shows and films?

As the emotional valence of the family changes, so must the anti-family. Our erotic lives are never untouched. Is that why the top shortage went away? Is that why?

What does a top (or bottom) shortage tell us about the world? I don’t know. I don’t want you to think of this is a diagnosis, much less an attempt at an explanation. In times of change, I leave that to the experts.

I’ll leave you with this: instead of “chosen family”—an expression that I’ve come to loathe—I prefer the unwieldy but much more beautiful “consensual sentient state of relationship,” as Rena Davis-Phoenix puts it in Michelle Handelman’s BloodSisters. But what does that accomplish, I wonder, that gangbang doesn’t, and so much more succinctly, too?

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In grad school, my advisor was a mediocre homophobe who was occasionally good for solid writing advice. This was a decade ago. At 24, I was still an unthinking grinder, pestle to my own empty mortar, so it verged on the revelatory to hear a real writer—with books and a teaching job and everything—insist that sometimes the best thing you can do for your manuscript is sit at a sunny window and daydream.

Her enduring mid-ness aside, I’ve come to think my advisor was onto something. Over the years, I’ve discovered that the window is not just indispensable, but undeniable. The body needs time and space to process. When I force the painstaking, backbreaking effort needed to go sit by the window, I’m often rewarded with a passage that wouldn’t come or a plot hole finding its bite. Sometimes I can’t connect the window to any writing accomplishment, but its proximity makes me feel better. Unfortunately, restoration counts as one of its benefits, too.

My advisor had a lot of ideas, some of them about the legitimacy of trans people, but she failed to offer any suggestions for actually getting to the window. I had to figure that out myself. I believe in hard work, if only by virtue of its difficulty, which is a belief that leaves little room for reverie. When I feel myself resisting the window, a state of mind more daunting than eight hours in front of my laptop, I try to make it more palatable with a reframe: if doing nothing in front of a window is hard, then it counts as work, right? (And shouldn’t hard work be its own redundancy?).

It helps to enlist other writers, ones I actually respect, to strengthen my case for the window. “So much of making art is the time spent not making art,” Raven Leilani told BOMB Magazine a few years ago. Craft is earned with effort, but isn’t guaranteed, not least because the conditions of that effort are never a given. “To make anything,” Leilani went on, “you need the means and time, and you need to be intact, and that is frustrated by the racist, sexist, and capitalist forces that all contribute to your erasure. So to be able to make art is a privilege and a refusal of this erasure.” The window, then, is not just a gift, but a responsibility and a provocation.

This understanding of craft, then, requires work—a nonnegotiable for anyone who must draw a wage to survive—while also requiring its subversion. Craftbecomes the workday’s byproduct, a silver lining wrung from the laborer along with the value that their labor produces. It’s also a powerful antidote to the contemporary push to literally separate art from the artist, an anti-worker project if I’ve ever heard one. Art, as Gretchen Felker-Martin wrote last year in a piece about moral panic as back door to censorship, is the culmination of “both labor and experience,” a stance with which any self-interested worker, artist or not, should wholeheartedly agree. (The window watches me, a taunting cyclops.)

Though what we do is usually described as intellectual or even white-collar, as writers we cannot fail to conceive of what we do as labor, even those moments between, when one sits by the window, chin cradled in palm. My soft-handed job is preferable to any I’ve ever had, but that doesn’t mean it’s not work, an uncomplicated position that seems—with the past week’s “Are baristas proletarians?” coursing through Twitter like Taco Bell through a Millennial’s colon—to nevertheless be controversial.

Divisive, anti-worker propaganda aside, sure, the notion that we do as writers—artístes—is not actually work can be so very tempting. Such a possibility frees us from having to think about the ways in which our embodiment complicates our politics, our experience, and our identity, and thus our art. “The body can seem like a problem, but it can also bring us together,” counters T Fleischmann. With their book, Time is the thing a body moves through, Fleischmann seeks to “push against some forms of knowledge” by working/engaging with visual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres without having something “definitive” to say about him. Gesturing, flirting, suggesting, winking, nodding, cruising, and fantasizing, Fleischmann wants to meet the body on its own terms, resisting certainty as both form and praxis. (What does the window know that it can teach me?)

And yet work, as a straightforward, quantifiable exchange—x hours in, y words (dollars/clicks/books) out—remains seductive. “The form demands discipline, and through that discipline, urgency,” says Leilani. In that urgency there is purpose and, supposedly, a reward; a pot of gold tantalizes at the end of the rainbow. Though I’m fundamentally repulsed by his prioritizing of style and structure over “the great idea” (which he called “hogwash”), my dear Nabokov’s dedication to component can be read as another kind of subversion. “Caress the details, the divine details!” he urged, which dictum we can reappropriate for our anti-work perspective: what is work if not effort with a capitalist agenda, rendering pleasure incidental? Indeed, in his rebuke of Nabokov’s whole deal, Updike invokes the writer’s essential dialectical tension: we dash our inherent “will to manipulate” (hi, liar!) against the “banal, heavily actual subject.” How romantic. Like an open window on an autumn afternoon, chilly Brooklyn below inching past on its Saturday errands.

I prefer to view my work as a writer as being in service of my political commitments and, failing that, my own pleasure. It’s a lot of pressure. Reducing art to work can be freeing, if not liberating. It’s something that working people do, this craft of mine. Decent, salt-of-the-earth, but moral only insofar as it’s constitutionally bracing, like a loaf of home-baked bread. Or a window that, I just noticed, needs Windexing. This reduction plays into the pleasure I take in artists who conceive of themselves as tradespeople, or even better, as workmen, as Jack Nicholson calls himself in a 1986 interview with Rolling Stone. “My first acting teacher said all art is one thing—a stimulating point of departure. That’s it. And if you can do that in a piece, you’ve fulfilled your cultural, sociological obligation as a workman.” Workman. Ah. Bracing, honest. Puts hair on your chest.

Of course, this pleasure is a fetish of sorts, relying on fantasies of what work is, does, and feels like. In opposition to an increasingly always-on office environment, or scraping together a living from the gig economy, or clinging to what remains of the twentieth-century’s union gains, the notion of clocking in and out at a satisfying, decently compensated 40-hour-per-week job (don’t forget the pension!) is such a fantastic fantasy that one might forget altogether that even if it were attainable to you (it almost certainly isn’t), that attainability relies on the exploitation of workers of which you can only imagine. (Do those workers, either alienated within the imperial core or conscripted into its replication outside its borders, have a window?)

Now it’s dark, and my window has lost some of its potency, though if I crane my head, I can see the ghostly Manhattan skyline through the trees and condos. In writing about the window, I’ve failed it. My book is still not done.

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If you watch porn, you may have encountered camerawork that’s almost surgical in its focus, trained on specific parts of performers’ genitals with a fixity that might make you feel like an OB/GYN (or urologist, or proctologist. Whatever). With this kind of closeup, you’re telescoped almost inside your subject, to the extent that someone glancing over your shoulder may not even recognize the mucus membrane that fills your screen.

Whether this perspective is the result of a creative decision or practical circumstance—like low production value, for example—there’s nothing wrong with getting up close and personal with pussy. Ethically and artistically speaking, it’s no more objectionable to me than fixating on a face or a foot, which is to say, not at all. But since I’m not a genital fetishist for whom hole successfully synecdochizes the whole, such a limited visual range just doesn’t do it for me. My loss, I suppose.

Unfortunately, we’re rarely in the habit of judging erotic art by whether we find it arousing, unless we’re looking at it critically as art, in which case its potential to arouse will probably be grounds for artistic dismissal. In art that is regarded as non-pornographic, zooming in on a single body part might read as familiar, lingering, or personal. For art that’s considered pornographic, however, such good faith is rarely extended. A certain kind of feminist might echo a certain kind of anti-feminist in arguing that, in a porno, this closeup is objectifying because it replaces a person with one of their components. (Have I reinforced this tendency by describing this kind of camerawork as surgical, thereby associating it with our meatiness under the doctor’s knife?)

We don’t make such mistakes here, of course. What am I but a sum of my parts?

The distinction between “good” and “bad” closeups came to mind while I paged through Phyllis Christopher’s Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Protest, 1988-2003, a sumptuous and stunning archive of lesbian and queer life. In “Tongues, San Francisco, 2000,” an open mouth engulfs another, the blunt smudge of tongues contrasted against the gleam of teeth, metal, and lip. Something, perhaps a human figure, is reflected in the ball of a piercing, bright against the black of the throat. Though we know what we’re looking at, this image is difficult enough to parse that all that we do know about it is that it’s (homo)sexual. Lascivious. Pornographic. Have the dykes who serve as our subjects here been dehumanized by this perspective?

Re-situated in a context where the pornographic is not a dead-end, the closeup takes on a new emotional valence. Very little in Dark Room would escape classification as dirty, seedy, blue, and yet these images from our gay past feel like home to a certain kind of homo, whether or not you’ve ever lived in the city by the Bay. From street brawls with pigs to spreads for On Our Backs, Dark Room zooms all the way in on taboo with butch on butch f*g, titty gloryholes, bloody live performances, go-go girls and boys, whips and chains, butch/femme “roleplay,” as it was once known, and strippers of all kinds, reveling in an intimacy that the straight lens would likely seek to flatten.

Though its subjects are often genital—pierced nipples, pissing pussies, winking vulvas—Dark Room’s closeups also feature genitalia that only dykes would recognize, our means and methods of f*g that hide in plain sight: hankies, mouths, fists (“Do Lesbians Cruise Hands?” asks a cartoon in “Cartoonist Kris Kovich, San Francisco, CA, 1992”).

That’s the other thing about the zoom: allowing for a level of anonymity, it becomes a queer tactic of safety. “I think we were developing a lesbian visual language,” says Christopher in an interview with Shar Rednour at the end of Dark Room. “Maybe it didn’t mean so much to other women, like they thought it was just fashion. But to me it was very important because it was the way we identified each other in crowds and in smaller cities.” Having found each other, of course, there is opportunity to zoom out again. The lens widens, restoring the whole from which the hole emerges.

Find me on Twitter. Get my second novel, X, right here.

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Smothering though our bewitchment by “generation,” as an organizing principle, may be, I think it’s safe to say that The Brave Little Toaster—Toy Story’s darksided 1987 ur-text—is a millennial touchstone. Following the adventures of a group of household appliances searching for their “Master,” the young boy they live to serve, our inanimate heroes are animated by creamy colors, cheerful singalongs, and the ever-present threat of obsolescence, physical destruction, and ultimately psychic death. Such is the fate of the dubiously-gendered sentient consumer good.

Toaster's first kill happens just a few minutes into the movie. Taunted by a malevolent air conditioning unit who claims that the little boy will never return to the vacation cabin where they all live, Toaster and its friends accuse Air Conditioner of jealousy (Master doesn’t play with HVAC, you see), triggering it until it overheats and explodes, leaving behind a smoking corpse wedged into the windowsill.

Voiced by the late, great Phil Hartman, the cruelly sarcastic Air Conditioner is obviously a caricature of Jack Nicholson. Sneering and leering like the Great Pumpkin of New Hollywood himself, Air Conditioner’s filtration design suggests Jack’s shining cupid’s bow, broadly and brightly dimpling and from which point gravity’s obligate rainbow drags his facial excess down into cinema’s original Jokerfied grin. From the raspy voice to the idiosyncratic cadence to the plasticine brow, there’s no missing the resemblance. But for me, Air Conditioner didn’t register as a cameo, as it were, because I didn’t recognize the source material. It would take years, both of caricatures like Hartman’s and the opportunity to see the original himself in other movies, for me to pick up on the homage.

When my parents were children, cinema legends like Peter Lorre (another film star lampooned by Hartman in Toaster, he as a bag-eyed light fixture), Katherine Hepburn, and Humphrey Bogart often turned up the cartoons they watched. I wonder how often my parents recognized them, and how often they were assumed to be a strange new character in a harem of scribbled freaks. Nicholson’s ambience took place before my awareness, while I was still in the early stages of sponging up the culture; I suppose that’s how ambience works. But eventually, Nicholson would come to be as recognizable to me as Jesus, Elvis, the president, etc., as I was reminded when Jade and I watched Easy Rider (1969) for the first time last week.

Nicholson’s role as the alcoholic lawyer who delivers the film’s keynote—“What you represent to them,” he informs his hippie comrades hours before his own brutal murder, “is freedom.”—got me. Earnest and boyish, he’s a pre-calcified Nicholson, who for all his remarkable versatility suffers from the constraints of caricature, as all greats must. When was the last time he was in something? I wondered. Now 85, he’s elderly enough that he no longer appears at Knicks games or in the tabloids along with Lindsay Lohan. One assumes he’s been made comfortable in a mansion, smoking stogies and reminiscing about a coffee shop called Poopie’s, up on the strip, the phlegm rich and murky in his agéd throat.

I love a genius. Every so often I develop a little romance with a new one, sacking the library for their books and piping in podcasts about their illustrious lives. In one interview, Jack humbly responded to a question about missed opportunity (he famously passed on The Godfather, among other classics) by quoting his own mother: “All comparisons are odious.”

But comparison is its own pleasure, and there’s much to be found in the long life of a great and productive artist. I’ll never be anything but a writer, but as artists I think we ought to study forms other than our own, which is why I care about the Method, or Italian Neo-Realism, or queer of color critique. Gone about a certain way, comparison erodes the difference upon which it relies. Caricature is undone, and yet ever ascends.

Find me on Twitter. Get my second novel, X, right here.

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Read Part 1. Read Part 2.

Frankie and I met up at Metropolitan. For a few hours, we sat at a corner table on the back patio, smoking, drinking, and wiggling our fingers at trans people we recognized from the internet. After dishing about our jobs, our girlfriends, and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s banger episode on the Gender Reveal podcast our conversation landed on people who are stuck—those pitiable souls who can’t admit they’re queer or who won’t transition, and maybe never will.

Why do grownup transsexuals like Frankie and I have any interest in stuck people? Because we’ve been them ourselves, to varying degrees, and will never outrun the risk of becoming them again. Because, deep lez though we are, she and I know people like this, and as long as heterosexuality exists we always will. For as much sturm und drang there seems to be around community—what it means, what it does, who’s in, who’s out—the construct is nothing if not dynamic. Community is something you do, not something you have or are in. As such, stuck people meander in and out of our lives as friends, lovers, coworkers, acquaintances, nemeses. Are the stuck people here with us in the room right now? Often! Even if they do tend to have one foot out the door.

You can’t talk about closet-cases without talking about chasers, too. Many people, and not just the straight ones, are fond of accusing our biggest fans (as well as our fiercest enemies) of secretly being among our ranks, which is facile and stupid and transphobic, actually. But that doesn’t mean that cis fascination with us—of both the positive and negative tenors—can’t be located in their relationships with their own genders. As trans people, we are symbol and proof of the world’s unraveling, which sounds pretty dramatic until you’ve been on this side of things. In our realness, trans people expose systemic artifice so foundational that departing from it in thought or deed can literally drive you crazy. Confronting that is terrifying, especially if you’re cis, since in that case you actually have something to lose if the whole thing were to ever come tumbling down. This means, incidentally, that cis fascination with us is also about power. But when is gender not about that, too?

Are all chasers stuck? No, I don’t think so, though of course many of them are. If you’re trans, and particularly if you’re transsexual, then you’ve surely encountered someone who loves you because they can’t see you—only themself, or a version of themself that they wish existed. Or perhaps they see you so much they can’t see themself at all. However you slice it, you’re not having a person-to-person interaction with them, or only rarely. How can you, if not everyone in the room is a person?

Frankie and I can happily b***h about chasers at length, but for my money there’s a time and a place for them, as long as you know what you’re doing. It can be fun or sexy to be worshipped, especially when the reason for that worship is why the rest of the world reviles you. If everyone is going to be obsessed with us, at least the chaser variation comes with perks.

My advice for indulging chasers is this: think of your time with them as a vacation from being a person, rather than an exiling from humanity. Just don’t forget that vacations, by definition, are temporary.

In part one of this series about gendered social contagion, I said that I wanted to write about “the cis people who saw my transness” before I knew of it myself. The chaser can’t see anything but my transness; in this way, they’re indistinguishable from almost all other cis people.

Who was my first chaser? I asked myself. Not gay men on hookup apps. Not the cis femmes who talk about trans mascs as if we’re pets or men, but can’t find it in themselves to date anyone else. Not the dykes who asked me not to transition, but watched trans porn exclusively. Not the straight men with force fem fantasies that could only come to life in the dark. Not the straight women who felt I should be grateful to f**k them, and met any disinterest on my part with indignation and shock.

If we’re defining the chaser as someone who calls their obsession with your gender love, then my first chasers were probably my parents. Which is to say that the people most invested in making sure I wasn’t trans played a role in bringing it to pass.

In liberal terms, the rights of trans people are often framed along the lines of “expression.” It’s inhumane not to permit us to be authentic to ourselves, goes the logic; when given the opportunity to do so, we are bravely living our truths. However well-meant, the closet understood as facade positions us, a priori, as liars. As I wrote in another post, “If our genders are produced, that means that the concealment, deception, and revelation of deviant genders is also produced.”

I don’t think the closet metaphor goes far enough when understood in this way. For me, closeting was not like wearing a mask or a costume, allowing for at least some part of “the real me” into the daylight. It was like being dead. Gender organizes how we share information about ourselves—that is, it’s how we communicate. Our genders inform and shape how we are polite and rude, gentle and violent; how we convey want, need, desire, and interest. Like age, race, class—a whole mess of things—gender (like community) is something you do. Even agender people must interact with people with genders, in cultures and milieus organized around normative gender, and are beholden, on some level, to gendered interaction, particularly in how others understand them. Without your gender (or lack thereof), as you understand it, you are nothing. Maybe, like me, you’re spiritually dead. Maybe, like trans people without the luck and safety I’ve had, you’re literally dead.

So. Say your gender isn’t safe. Say your only alternative, for the moment, anyway, is death. The thing about chasers is that they, like transphobes, see dead people. As I walked home, thinking over my conversation with Frankie, I wondered what would have happened to me if the chasers had never found me, over and over again. They’re cogs in the system that produces deviant genders, sure. But they’re the bloodhounds that sniff us out, too. Maybe a better comparison would be one of those fish that live on the shark’s pearlescent underside, feeding with the focus only a parasite can offer.

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This week, Astra published my piece on Nitehawk’s Pride screening of BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes & Sadomasochism (1995), feat. my leather associate, Daemonumx, if you’d like to give it a read.

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I believe in luck, unfortunately. The kind of person to toss salt, knock wood, converse with a dead god in the bathroom mirror, I’m an unwilling subscriber to a pastiche of cosmic checks and balances in which thought and action hold equal power, ends justify means, and correlation = causation. My world filters through a sieve of Christian-inflected superstition, and I’ve spent a lifetime kneeling over the remains, sifting for fault. There is always fault. It’s a stressful, but uncomplicated, way to live.

Lately, when people joke about doom and apocalypse, as they seem be doing more and more often, my bad luck antennae shiver. Though it’s tempting to indulge in this kind of humor—I’m guilty of it myself—to me, it reeks of bad luck. In assuming knowledge of our ultimate end, these jokers display hubris, a thing which by definition cannot go unpunished. With every flip remark about hell on earth, the superstitious among us must wonder if that hell is only being hastened. Maybe it’s the gay plague remix that’s happening as we speak, but the connection between vibes and consequences has never felt stronger.

I guess the jokes scare me. We mustn’t be glib about the crisis, I think, so very virtuously. We must resist the certainty that we’re being led to the slaughter. As if virtue has anything to do with suffering.

In part 1 of this series on gender contagion, I used J.G. Ballard’s Crash to explore the social production of pleasure. In Ballard’s novel, disabling car accidents spawn a cult of perverts who find both purpose and erotic release in physical suffering and high-stakes sexual risk. Looked at one way, Crash, and the 1996 Cronenberg film that’s based on it, offers one non-essentialist view of (sexual) perversion. In the worlds of Crash, the fetish—viewed by the mainstream as an inherently unnatural desire that is acquired, like lice, from an incident or a corruptor—broadens, rather than shrinks, the field of pleasure.

It’s one thing to suggest that social contagion, broadly speaking, need not necessarily be a bad thing. It’s another to claim the same of actual pathogens. Sure, we can look at getting your egg cracked by another tran as value-neutral, but how can you do the same with a literal plague? Though the COVID super-dodgers are dwindling in number, falling ill is the thing we’re all striving to avoid, right?

I’m reminded of an academic paper that I read way back in grad school written by a white settler scholar embedded in a rural community of indigenous Australians. If an outsider spent enough time in this community, they would invariably contract one of its epidemic illnesses, which caused lesions (minor but scarring) on one’s body. While also symptomatic of post- and neocolonial austerity, including lack of access to adequate healthcare, these scars were also visual markers of a community, signaling that the person bearing them was a member, or something like it.

In the paper, the grad student reports that she stayed in her community of study for years, long enough to finally contract the illness herself. Beginning to exhibit lesions of her own, she was more closely, complexly bound to her subjects, understood by the academy as not unlike viruses themselves: living, but not in quite the same way as humans are.

But we’re talking about the social contagion of gender, aren’t we? Gender being what it is, most of us experience ours in different ways at different times. One of the pleasures of being trans, at least for me, is being able to participate in those changes, and to be fascinated by them as they happen. My straight counterpart takes them as they come, like table scraps even, rarely viewing them as anything but inevitable, if they think of them at all. In the straight mind, no one escapes themselves (which is one reason why the high femme, the bimbo, the sex worker, etc., make such able infiltrators). As a transsexual, the amount of work that you do just to make it all happen, and keep it happening while you’re still alive, can make it easy to forget that it’s something that happens to you, too.

As hormones have transformed my physiology, I feel more androgynous than I ever have. I am a woman and a man at the same time, I’ve recently begun to think, and this is actually true, on, like, a material level. In most contexts, my odds of being seen as one or the other are pretty split—and all of that depends on my beholder. When I was younger, this ambiguity made me feel vulnerable (and it certainly does make life riskier). Now that it’s an ambiguity of my choosing, it’s also sometimes fun, and exciting, and sexy, and comfortable. I am both, at least for now. And I think it’s neat that most people pick up on that, as well as interesting how many elect a lane and lean into it, regardless of what my papers, voice, or genitals go on to reveal.

A dykefag knows no single hormonal regimen, but the one I’m currently on has altered my material needs and investments. Expanded them, I should say. I had sex with queer cis men before medical transition, but this new body has made a certain kind of faggotry accessible (to me!) in a way it wasn’t before. With this accessibility comes new pleasures, new connections, new knowings. It also comes with new risks, one of which has been in the news for the past month or so as yet another example of a state-sponsored public health crisis. Even if I never catch one of the illnesses to which gay men have been condemned, I am, in a sense, caught.

But more on that next time.

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If I seem to you like the kind of person who would happily cut someone out of my life for crossing a line, congratulations—you’ve got me dead to rights.

I’m aware that this is not necessarily a healthy quality. In my case, it can be reactionary or arbitrary. The camel’s-back-breaking offense can be unfairly weighted with petty variables like past resentments, hormonal imbalance, a bad cup of coffee. And it can arrive without warning, both for me and for the person who somehow ended up on the wrong side of my sandbox.

Don’t get me wrong. Being able to set boundaries for my own safety and happiness is a hard-earned skill that I cherish; I’ve not always been the kind of person that was willing to protect myself. But it would be dishonest to say that I don’t sometimes overcorrect, or that haven’t I’ve gone on to regret my overcorrections. There are people I know I will never talk to again, even though I recognize, in the comfort of hindsight, that they weren’t as dangerous or unforgivable as I felt they were when I kicked them off the emotional premises. There are people that have no idea why I stopped talking to them, and though I could—maybe even should—explain myself, I know I never will. That ship has sunk, is how I think of it. If you’re not in my life, I obviously didn’t need you, anyway. Not that I need anyone at all. The vast majority of the people that I have eliminated from my life were f*g around and finding out, as they say, but I can admit that avoidance is a lot easier than managing conflict, and that of the two, only one offers the potential for vulnerability and growth.

It’s not just homophobia or transphobia. It’s (and of course I’m generalizing here, etc. etc. etc.) their general tolerance for authoritarianism; their willingness to disregard others’ discomfort, fear, or pain if it means smoothing over a social situation or bolstering their status; their inability to recognize survivor concepts like chosen family for what they are—worst-case scenarios, to which many of us were driven against our will. This reflects a compounding entitlement that pads their days and their years, their relationships with their natal families and other oppressive institutions, their opportunities and their limitations, their health and their lack thereof. If I am to understand that you will not defend me to your friend when she wonders if maybe I’m a disgusting unnatural freak; that you won’t bring me around your straight boyfriend because you’re afraid of what he will say to me—but not enough to do something about his behavior; that you aren’t willing to end a relationship with a fascist who cannot be convinced of life’s value, even if that fascist is a blood relative that you love very much, then you will not enjoy intimacy with me. If this means that as a result straight people, and straight-acting people, are by and large vanished from my life, well. It is what it is.

What I’m saying is, my general separation from straight people has more to do with cultural differences than individual fault. Which means that it’s possible for straight people to change. Some of them, maybe even many of them, having benefited from the alternation of hand-holding and boundaries of gays like me, will later enter into the orbits of other homos who find them to be well-mannered, even comradely. (I’m sure that something similar has happened with me and other people as I’ve gotten older and learned some of the contours of, for example, my racism.) This is solidarity, and it transcends identity and difference, thrives on them, in fact, and it is beautiful. May we all get there someday. May we all overcome ourselves.

But it also means that my tolerance for straight people has wasted away. Outside of my remote 9-5 job or going the doctor, I really don’t have to deal with them in any sustained way. And so when there is a circumstance where I am forced to deal with one and as a result am harmed or disrespected, I’m shocked by my response. No matter how small the incident, I’m outraged. I lose sleep. I rave about it to whomever will listen. I stew. I grow a pungent new resentment like a blister, rice-papering it with so many layers of skin that it becomes a callus, pregnant with blood and spleen, indefatigable and yet tender. It’s a boil. It’s a lesion. It’s a carbuncle square on my ass. And I can’t lance it or ignore it or chew on it til it bursts. It’s just down there, infuriating me.

My parents divorced when I was young, and even at the best of times, their relationship was never good. Though my dad had many faults—some of them normal straight white guy things and some of them weird as s**t—my mom always claimed that there was a core to his intolerability. “He’s prideful,” she would say. “His pride won’t let him budge an inch on anything.” The older I get, the more I understand why. What my mom saw as my dad’s fundamental inflexibility was, in his mind, a refusal to accept contempt. Of course, he didn’t reckon that his grasping for dignity was, ultimately, undignified. I guess they were both right.

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My host, an Italian bear an inch shorter than I, ushered me into the dim and bitter-smelling apartment. At my request, he guided me to the bathroom. Would you like a towel? he asked politely; I declined. The bathroom was normal except for the dozens of boxes of Colgate toothpaste that were stacked above the sink. I took a picture for Bambi.

When I joined Antonio in his bedroom, he appraised me, rubbing his hands together and smiling. You’re so gorgeous, he said. I liked him, too. Bald, bearded, muscled, tight-bellied, big-cocked, and uncut, as Europeans tend to be, with an It’s-a-me, Mario-style accent. I should have been in heaven.

But then he kept talking. Though I like verbal as a rule, I was disappointed to discover that Antonio’s fantasies were scat-centric—not my cup of tea. He really got off on the idea of shitting in my pussy, or of me shitting on his face, or of him shitting in my mouth, god bless him. You dirty bh, Antonio said, gently squeezing my arms. He talked about me f**g a dog, too, though with his rapid, uncertain English, the narrative was hard to follow.

Sweating, unfocused, Antonio kept moving his body and changing the subject, introducing a new scenario or position every other minute while struggling to stay hard. Great, I thought. Drugs, and he didn’t even offer me any. But I didn’t leave. I enjoy this kind of person, the kind that is so distracted that one is essentially alone in their presence.

Maybe it wasn’t drugs. It was hot outside, but the sweat on Antonio’s skin smelled like fear. His chest hair curled, wet and pungent, under my fingers. I love your nipples, I attempted, having given up any pretense of keeping pace with him. They were just long enough to betray themselves, a little pointed, rising from his chest hair like tree stumps from black fog. Like his apartment, his body smelled sharp and bitter, with an undercurrent of saccharine, the accord of cheap fragrance, molded walls, dusty pillows, Gun Oil, and the clean but perspirant f****t who loved pussy, he told me, loved girls like me, had had all the girls or, sorry, boys like me, but why were they all so flaky, so afraid of Antonio?

I mean, I understand, he said. It’s hard to meet people on Grindr. But they so nervous. They say they come and then they don’t come. I wondered how many t boys had picked up on the scat thing before they actually came over.

I’m complaining, but I liked Antonio, liked listening to his stories. He seemed unable to decide if he wanted to f**k or unburden himself, so we awkwardly cycled between both. He had been living in New York for 25 years, he told me. Before the pandemic, he worked in hotels—Trump hotels, actually, which he said like he was making a confession—but after lockdown, he began escorting so he wouldn’t have to go into an office every day. He hated it. Clients were flaky yet constantly calling, trying to get him to go all the way Downtown, and his friends with straight jobs judged him, not that they could ever hang out, anyway, with the hours Antonio kept.

The solution seemed obvious to me. Why don’t you just make friends with other hookers? I asked.

Eh, he said, grimacing. They’re catty! He threw his wrist in a way that reminded me of an uncle I don’t talk to anymore.

I thought about the toothpaste boxes. Bambi would have a good laugh about that, I was sure. If only they could see me now, rolling my eyes while my date rambled about Great Danes and his rent-controlled apartment. For all his talk about loving t boys, Antonio didn’t know what to do with pussy. Typical. The only way he could stay hard was by avoiding eye contact with me and talking about st, his own hand on his cock. We fucked for a little bit—Bambi would want to know what else Antonio was hoarding, I thought, would demand that I do a tour of the apartment to take more photos of weird stuff—and then he asked to st in my mouth.

No, I said, laughing. His cock was thick at the base, but tapered considerably at the top.

I understand, Antonio said. He was serious, almost apologetic. I never done any of the stuff I talk about. Not even taste my own cum.

I felt no need to hide my laughter from him; I don’t think he noticed. He was so lost in himself, so high or whatever. It’s strange, but thinking about it now turns me on, even though I was anything but during our date, and I knew for sure I’d never be coming back.

When it was time to leave, I wished he hadn’t escorted me down the long, shadowy entryway. With its scent of ancient summers and hard sweat, it had the air of a haunted mineshaft, and Bambi would have liked to see the creepy, homemade-seeming oil paintings.

At the door, Antonio seized my waist and kissed me. I stepped into the hall and put on my sunglasses.

Oh, you look so good. So very good, he said, laughing as he closed the door.

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Earlier this year, I began working with Natalie Adler of Lux Mag on an essay about the commodification of kink. With the news being what it is—the hits stop coming and they don’t stop coming—that essay swiftly became another, about the intracommunity discourses of kink at Pride. Though a condensed version was sent to Lux subscribers last week, the pub graciously allowed me to share the long one here with you. Gay Wrath Month, indeed.

Like springtime in the Anthropocene, the much-maligned “kink at Pride” (kaP) discourse comes earlier every year, and those of us in the Twitter trenches can’t seem to shake the debate that’s as popular as it is detested. With the demise of Roe v Wade and the rollback on gender, sexual, and racial freedoms it will likely bring; the boom in “no promo homo” legislation restricting the rights of trans people, especially our youth; and spiking trans-antagonism and homophobia, some might see kaP as hair-splitting while the house is on fire.

But rather than distract, kaP marks the spot where moral panics around deviant sex meet America’s queer and trans culture wars. Those queer people who fear public displays of kinky sex, at Pride or anywhere else, often invoke same victim as the fascists do: the straight, cis, white, middle-class, often-feminized abstraction known as the Child. As more privacy-based rights appear on the Supreme Court’s chopping block, including contraception and marriage equality, the anti-kaP crowd would do well to remember that their respectability politics dovetail with far-right agendas to restrict queer rights and eliminate queer lives—and that what constitutes kink, deviant, and even sex are moving targets for our enemies to exploit.

Of course, kaP is much older than Twitter. Since the early days of gay liberation, liberal homos have been eager to collaborate with the state in order to neutralize the danger that radical sexual and erotic freedom—which is demonized by the right as deviance—pose to homosexual assimilation. In his 1982 essay, “Public Sex,” Patrick Califia charts the post-Stonewall history of the white, cis, middle-class gays, and their apologists, who demand that the freaks desist from public sex and cooperate with the cops. “The threat that children might see men having sex with each other is far and away the most popular excuse for surveillance and arrests,” Califia writes. “And it’s possible that a child or a teenager who saw such an act could be frightened, disgusted, or upset. However, that’s not because sex is inherently toxic or traumatic to children. It’s because young people are denied information about sexuality and are kept especially ignorant on the subject of gay and lesbian sex.”

Of course, as Califia goes on to point out, the Child and children represent two different priorities. If children mattered as much as the Child does, the politicians that call queer people “groomers” wouldn’t be gunning for the forced the genital examinations of child athletes (much less the elimination of subsidized school lunches, or public education entirely). kaP must be understood as the backwash of state efforts to regulate and discipline non-normative genders, a process in which the Child has a long history. The idea that witnessing a certain kind of human sexuality is inherently traumatizing in a way that lack of healthcare, incarceration, or white supremacy is not has recycled and reinforced rhetoric used to criminalize queer people in service of repressive moral panics since at least the emergence of the homosexual as an identity.

In the face of increasing state, media, and stochastic violence against queer and trans people, “respectability” will seem like a safe harbor to those who don’t know, or don’t want to know, that queer, trans, and deviant cannot be separated from each other.

In his introduction to the 2001 reissue of Leatherfolk, journalist and leatherman Mark Thompson writes: “Cultural conservatives, increasingly inhibited from wholesale queer bashing, narrow their target by distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ gays, the former being the nice same-sex couple next door, the latter demonized as the perverts in leather on the streets.” If we’re looking to spot the difference between the “good” gays and the perverts ruining Pride, it might help to define our terms.

Expanding on the now-outré S/M or S&M, BDSM stands for bondage and discipline, Dominance and submission, and sadism, masochism, and sadomasochism. Often used interchangeably with S/M, leather is the legacy of queer sadomasochist subcultures born of American post-WWII veteran and biker clubs bound by a desire to “erogenize the forbidden,” as Thompson puts it. Kink generally refers to non-normative sex; it also can be an umbrella term, one often problematically encompassing leather and BDSM, as well as fetish. All of these terms signify deviant sexual behavior, though deviance itself demarcates a moral and/or criminal element of censure, punishment, and carcerality. Crucially, while today we see “kink” and “BDSM” used to describe a kind of “community,” only leather is a sexual subculture as well as a diffuse but coherent political movement for sexual freedom.

So—let’s break down a few kinky activities and see which are actually deviant, and which are just, you know, gay. Public sex, for example, terrifies the anti-kaP crowd. Nothing LGBTQI about that, right? Except for the queer people who can’t safely be at home or be intimate at home; or the reality for Americans experiencing homelessness, 20-40% of whom are LGBTQI; or outdoor-based sex workers, a trade over-represented by marginal people, including queer and trans people. Deviance doesn’t account for the material circumstances that make private space difficult or even impossible to attain for those without the money, paperwork, or racial capital. Even with mass criminalization, the housing and debt crises, and rampant inflation rendering “privacy” a luxury good, it’s worth remembering that public sex is a part of queer history for reasons beyond the material and practical: some of us simply want to f**k somewhere other than where we sleep without that being used as a pretext for our criminalization. As Dorothy Allison once wrote, “There is this notion that sex is separate from life.”

What about gender play, with which we as trans people, famously the “T” in LGBTQI, are associated—is that allowed at Pride? Is a cross-dresser daring to appear in the light of day forcing someone else to witness their dangerous kink, and if so, how are we to distinguish them from someone like me, who has made cross-dressing a lifestyle (committed to the bit, as they say)? As the Madison Cawthorn scandal or Proud Boy attacks on drag queens daring to interact with children remind us, gender play is broadly recognized as a fetish, a legacy of pre-Stonewall cross-dressing laws and an echo of newer, intentionally vague legislation, like New York’s “walking while trans” law—used to target trans women, sex workers, undocumented people, and people of color—which was on the books until just last year.

While it’s long been debated whether leatherfolk were actually in attendance at Stonewall, deviant sexuality has always been found at Pride events. (Incidentally, so have children and youth, and not just the ones who fought police in the insurrection the parade commemorates.) In 1983, Gayle Rubin wrote that a coherent leather political identity trailed the gay liberation movement by about a decade, when leather organizations began demanding a place at Pride events. As documented in Coming to Power: Writing and Graphics on Lesbian S/M, the San Francisco lesbian-feminist leather organization Samois struggled to be included at the 1978 Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade (a proto-Pride event). Though they got what they wanted, they were heckled and harassed by the crowd.

Over the past five decades, leatherfolk have made a place for themselves in Pride celebrations, and have created their own, too. But a bug (or perhaps a feature) of a vague and capacious definition of deviant is that one doesn’t have to be a leatherperson, or even kinky, to be ostracized from LGBTQI functions and organizations—and more crucially, resources earmarked for the same—while being identified as such.

The consensual activities that can supposedly do permanent damage to children, should they accidentally witness them, remain inextricable from the human beings that gay liberation is supposed to be for. If the races, genders, classes, sizes, abilities, and trades that deviate from the white, straight, cis, middle-class, thin, abled, whorephobic norm are among the identity categories viewed as inherently and dangerously sexual, then only the norm can be safe (and when these deviant categories overlap, their vulnerability is only compounded). To say that the deviant subjects produced by white supremacist patriarchy are welcome at Pride so long as they don’t use it to indulge in deviance is to contradict oneself. They’re already deviant because they exist.

Moral panic surrounding the deviance of queer genders is at least as old as the 19th-century Western construct of the (male) homosexual, a legal, medical, and sexological category understood by Europeans as having an intrinsic connection to moral depravity, pathology, or primitivism, depending on where and how in the colonial context he was found. In the intervening years, moral panics surrounding homosexuality and gender variance (though the distinction between the two is rarely clear) in Europe and its colonies have worked to advance white supremacy, colonialism, and the capitalist expansion of state power. Lately, the homosexual moral panic has been expanded to explicitly include a new emergent sexual identity: trans people.

Manifested in bathroom bills and legislation equating access to trans healthcare with child abuse, trans people and our accomplices are being targeted as “groomers” of children both in preparation for sexual assault as well as contamination of “cis” children with transsexuality. This not only puts trans adults in danger, but trans children, too; they are condemned as both victims and monsters by everyone from out-and-proud transphobes to The New York Times’ more subtle liberal stooges. As scholars Cassius Adair and Aren Aizura wrote for Transgender Studies Quarterly earlier this year, “Since (some) same-sex sexuality has successfully been privatized and normativized, trans youth now bear the burden of a public, visible social force of ‘sex’ that is imagined to violate the sanctified space of the middle-class nuclear family…If same-sex desire has been domesticated, transness must now represent 'deviant' sex.”

A 21st-century variation on the trusty narrative that we, as queer and trans people, pose moral, emotional, and physical threats to others, kaP both summons and reinforces state violence against anyone identified as deviant. As a popular discourse, it’s framed as a slippery slope into degeneracy: if X is permitted, then Y is inevitable. But it’s no less about the past than the future. Hinging queer and trans civil rights on mutable definitions of privacy, violence, and morality is not new, and the tactical shortcomings of embracing this compromise have been demonstrated again and again (how long before America’s contingent of Buttigieg clones must kiss their precious marriage goodbye?). In tracing its history, we see that kaP discourse is not an aberration, but rather representative of a highly adaptable method of violently imposing norms on queer and trans people by way of the straight superstructure.

Queer opposition to kaP and legislative attacks on trans people—whether directly or by neglect—share analogous logics. kaP is antecedent to and concomitant with legislation meant to “protect” the Child from queer and trans people of all ages. Among these is “Don’t Say Gay”—signed into law by Florida governor Rob DeSantis in late March—which, while outrageous, isn’t groundbreaking in its cruelty. Expanding on the homophobia of its legislative forebears with explicit transphobia, it prevents public school teachers from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity and requires parents to be the first to be notified of any health or support services offered to their kids in school, effectively forcing teachers to out LGBTQI students to their legal guardians.

Supporters of DSG have called it anti-grooming legislation, conflating the acknowledgement of human variety in gender and sexuality with manipulative behaviors used to sexually exploit and abuse children. In a crowded field, it’s among the most prominent current example of right-wing propaganda claiming that the existence of queer and trans people is the equivalent of an unforgivable sexual violence.

DSG joins a fresh paroxysm of anti-gay, anti-trans, and anti-critical race theory legislation. In February, PenAmerica reported that since January 2021, 156 educational gag order bills on speech, behavior, and educational materials have been introduced or prefiled in 39 states. Many use the language of obscenity to discuss these behaviors, while at least one of them, Oklahoma Senate Bill 1142, goes further to reference deviant sex explicitly (italics mine): “No public school district, public charter school, or public school library shall maintain in its inventory or promote books that make as their primary subject the study of sex, sexual preferences, sexual activity, sexual perversion, sex-based classifications, sexual identity, or gender identity or books that are of a sexual nature…” As scholar Ariane Cruz writes, perversion is “a technology of power deployed in the discursive production of sexuality”.

It’s impossible to talk about the legal status of deviant sex, at Pride or elsewhere, without also talking about the many groups of people marginalized by the law as sexual deviants: not just queer and trans and kinky people, but people of color—particularly black and indigenous people—people experiencing houselessness, disabled people and people with mental illness, sex workers, people who use illegal drugs, and incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Deviance is a conceptual place to throw people away, and as the recent escalation of anti-trans sentiment demonstrates, kaP is an outgrowth of a rhetoric with proven results. Its logic hasn’t just infiltrated America’s legal, educational, medical, and military systems—it organizes them.

What would a Pride parade without kink look like? No puppy masks or leather harnesses, no nudity, and no public sex, which, depending on who’s complaining, could be anything from second base to fisting daisychains—but we’ll leave the details to the lawyers. Of course, cops must be there to ensure no one pollutes our celebration of sexuality with sexuality, their rainbow squad cars bravely defending the sanctity of the Chase floats and Target-branded unicorn swag surrounded by a docile crowd of blood-related, child-laden white families who don’t feel endangered by police. For me, “Is kink allowed at Pride?” smuggles inside another question: “Do we want policing at Pride?”

To protect Pride, we have to protect kink at Pride—kink everywhere, in fact—on its own terms. The alternative is our elimination from public life.

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J.G. Ballard’s seminal novel—on which the 1996 David Cronenberg joint is based—is about people who get off on car crashes.

Protagonist James Ballard (who shares a name with the author) is inducted into this deathstyle by Dr. Robert Vaughan, a “nightmare angel of the expressways” driven by the ultimate fantasy of a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor. Reckless as tornado hunters, Vaughan and his acolytes roam the highways around what’s now Heathrow Airport in search of accidents and their survivors, all brutalized, disabled, and, if they’re anything like them, newly ravenous for exciting new traumas. As James discovers, these fire-and-metal baptisms—catalytic converters, if you will—produce new relationships to his own and others’ bodies, as well as to the “trap[s] of gas and metal knives” where they f**k.

While nominally straight, James begins having sex with Vaughan, using these erotic experiences to fuel other ones. In one scene, he describes an encounter with Vaughan to arouse his wife, Catherine.

My description of Vaughan continued more for Catherine’s benefit than for my own. She pressed her head deep into the pillow, right hand in a fierce dance as she forced my fingers to manipulate her nipple. Although stirred by the idea of intercourse with Vaughan, it seemed to me that I was describing a sex act involving someone other than myself. Vaughan excited some latent homosexual impulse only within the cabin of his car or driving along the highway. His attraction lay not so much in a complex of familiar anatomical triggers - a curve of exposed breast, the soft cushion of a buttock, the hair-lined arch of a damp perineum - but in the stylization of posture achieved between Vaughan and the car. Detached from his automobile, particularly in his own emblem-filled highway cruiser, Vaughan ceased to hold any interest.

James’s queerness is specific but not incidental. Prior to the crash that transformed his sex drive, his desire for Catherine, and hers for him, was cold as Plexiglass. With their shared fetish, James, Vaughan, Catherine, and their lovers create space for new desires, not to mention excretions, sensations, and crises.

Viewed in the normative way, the fetish is limiting; the fetishist can’t have normal sexuality and instead is doomed to chase the deviant object of desire (though as we say here on DAVID, sometimes a foot is just a foot). But as an alternative to the equally limiting—and, arguably, dangerous, depending on who you are—heterosexuality from which Ballard’s characters have been wrested, it’s broadening the field of pleasure, not shrinking it. While rehabilitating from the injuries of his own crash, James discovers in exam rooms and x-ray machines that while cars claim his heart and cock, there’s endless pleasure to be found beyond the heterosexed human body. Among alien “[mazes] of electronic machinery” are “languages of invisible eroticisms” and “undiscovered sexual acts” for the roving eye of subjectivity to witness.

I’ve been thinking a lot about social contagion, and, surprising no one, I’ve found myself returning to the pervert maestros of body horror to think my way through it. Right now, some trans people are critiquing our knee-jerk response to the idea that being trans is contagious (derogatory. Paging Susan Sontag!). On this subject, I’m in agreement with P.E. Moskowitz, who tweeted recently that “ofc transness is socially spread!!!! there’s no set number of people who are trans!!! we must be comfortable with the idea that many more people WANT to be trans. and that’s good!!! stop with ur born this way b**t!!!”

I enjoy thinking about the trans people who made me want to be trans. Some of them I wanted to look and be like, like the first transmasculine person I ever spoke to. Some of them, like Morgan M Page, were trans in a different way but had created transsexual lifestyles and communities that I desperately wanted for myself, that were familial, political, glamorous, intellectual, sexy, defiant, and brave. Whether encountered interpersonally or otherwise, these trans people are why I am the way I am—which is to say, alive.

They’re not the whole picture. Pretending that my social contagion of transness begins and ends with trans people would require pretending that they’re the limits of my social existence. Yet cis people have comprised the vast majority of my human relationships, especially the formative ones. Within the confines of cisnormativity, this has been traumatizing in ways I will never be able to fully express. In thinking about my cis influences, the word salvage comes up frequently—true to queer form, I’ve taken a great deal from straight culture that wasn’t meant for me.

But what about the cis people who saw my transness, who nurtured, supported, desired, fetishized, or welcomed it? If being trans is contagious, it’s not impossible that a cis person was my Patient Zero.

Find me on Twitter. Preorder my second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), out June 28. I have events and everything!

Book Passage Pride Reading with Gretchen Felker-Martin: Thursday, June 23, virtual.

The Strand Book Launch with Torrey Peters: Tuesday, June 28, in person.

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“That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Mankind (or humankind, as we’d probably say now) has been to the moon. You, the human reading this, almost certainly have not.

In thinking about how we talk about ourselves as a species, I’m forced to reckon with how little I, personally, have to do with our global supremacy. Whether God granted us “dominion over…every living thing that moves on the earth,” or we’ve just leveraged evolutionary advantage (plus a little luck), humans have been apt, resourceful, intelligent enough to develop calculus, circumnavigation, the combustion engine, plastic, computers, Post-it notes, instant coffee—the full spectrum of technologies necessary to send a guy to the moon and bring him back again all in one piece. Humans did that. I am a human. I am somehow involved, and yet, of course, not in the least. I’ve never even changed a car tire.

A movie cliche you’ve surely encountered is the character who looks up at the Milky Way and says, in awe, something along the lines of, “It makes me feel so small, like an ant.” Ants haven’t built any rockets, but they do accomplish feats of engineering that, like the feats of humans, may be more accurately attributed to the group than to the individual. Scientists use the term superorganism to describe the ant colony because individual ants aren’t able to survive by themselves for extended periods; the ant as an individual is contested ground, at best.

Understood as a component of the superorganism, what does a single ant know or do? It knows to collect food and it plays its role within the colony because the colony wants it (understanding want as a not-necessarily-conscious function, here). Separated from the colony, not only is the ant as good as dead but it has no agency, purpose, or knowing.

For all that I don’t believe in it, intelligence is often on my mind. But maybe believe isn’t the right word. I mean, I believe in intelligence, just not in the way that it’s been naturalized. Like “biological sex,” race, or disability, intelligence is a relational, culturally mediated, and context-specific quality wielded as a tool to organize and hoard power and discipline/produce subjectivity. I believe that the smart way to approach intelligence is with skepticism and with the recognition that it should never be taken for granted.

Here, when and where I am, we are trained from birth to understand intelligence as inborn and immutable but also a commodity that’s always for sale; imbuing not just value but morality; directly proportionate to one’s capacity for productivity under capitalism; and existing outside of so-called “identity politics” while also somehow magically aligning with money, power, and whiteness, plus other normalized ways of embodiment. To me, it makes more sense to think of what intelligence does rather than what it is. In this way, we can start teasing it apart from our essentialist preconceptions, while also reclaiming those aspects of it that are useful, informative, and even, possibly, liberatory.

What good does it do to decide that one person is intelligent and another isn’t? What is gained and what is lost? I don’t mean that we should pretend there are no differences between our minds, but rather that it’s possible resist the poisonous idea that this diversity must exist within a moral hierarchy, or that it’s both utterly vast and yet reducible to a few Scantron tests taken under surveillance by a for-profit company, like your own mind isn’t yours. Can we discuss ability, talent, aptitude, skill, genius, and power, the kinds that we’re hard-wired for and the kinds that can be stunted or developed, as our life circumstances dictate, without dismissing human value? I think we can, with some practice and intentionality.

If you’re a regular reader, you know that my sister, C., has intellectual and developmental disabilities that I don’t. She is not unaccustomed to being dismissed and, frankly, oppressed, for these reasons, even if she doesn’t always understand or recognize when this is happening. As she and I build an adult relationship that goes beyond caretaker and burden—something that we must do together, but that requires a ceding of control and ego on my part—I have begun telling her that she is smart (as well as funny, cool, kind, caring, and hard-working, all of which she is).

At first, this felt unnatural, and I think, though I don’t know for sure, that it surprised her. It’s not something she’s ever regularly been told. But it’s true. Why didn’t I ever tell her that she was smart when she gained a skill, learned a word, told a funny joke, made an insightful observation, or otherwise demonstrated growth (something that all people of all I.Q.s can do)? Because it never occurred to me to do so. And because when it finally did occur to me, the notion felt almost taboo, as if I was giving away a finite resource meant to be hoarded for others more “deserving” than she, including myself.

Find me on Twitter. Preorder my second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), out June 28. I have events and everything!

Book Passage Pride Reading: Thursday, June 23, virtual. I’ll soon be announcing my extremely exciting conversation partner—don’t miss us!

The Strand Book Launch with Torrey Peters: Tuesday, June 28, in person.

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When David Cronenberg took the stage at the Walter Reade Theater last night, he was introduced—to a smattering of dry laughter—as the Prophet of the New Flesh.

“Maybe the Prophet of the Slowly-Aging Flesh is more like it,” the great director humbly rejoined, his shock of white hair standing at attention.

Since Torrey had plans, she generously donated her tickets to the New York premiere of Cronenberg’s newest film, Crimes of the Future, to me and Jade. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart, Crimes is a revival of OG body horror Croney, a return to his old stomping grounds of rent flesh and razor’s edging after a couple decades of less viscerally grotesque, if not less brutal, fare.

Crimes drops us in a near-future—more ravaged by climate crisis than now—where famous performance artists Saul Tenser and Caprice (Mortensen and Seydoux) titillate audiences with waking surgery in darkened drawing rooms. As Saul and Caprice’s star rises, a body known as the National Organ Registry begins investigating the disease, known as Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, that causes the Saul to proliferate with new organs and novel hormones; if it wasn’t for Caprice’s surgical interventions, he would swiftly become something else other, or more, than human. And he’s not the only one.

Without getting too much into it—I may actually write something like a review, at some point—Crimes’s themes of public intimacy/sex, S/M, bureaucratic quagmire, and apocalypse merge into a distinctly transsexual valence that feels blissfully depoliticized, or at least politicized differently than what we’re used to. Maybe that’s what has drawn me to Cronenberg since I first saw Videodrome(1983): his work with the textures, torments, and sensations so often relegated or even confined to us, as trans people, without limiting himself to mere gender play. Jade has an, I think, very credible theory about the chaser gaze in Crimes, but neither of us think the director emits it himself.

As livid, shocking, and strange as it is, and as clickable a tagline as Surgery is the new sex, Crimes is most preoccupied, I think, with the creative process—a fitting theme for a highly successful artist who is, frankly, nearing the end of his life. I might even suggest that Crimes is an attempt to interrogate the limits of body horror as a metaphor by the director with whom it’s mostly closely associated. Does Cronenberg denaturalize body horror with more of the same? If he is successful—and I’m not sure that he is, still chewing on it—it proves that, even now, decades since he started this beat, it remains, as Saul says, with sensual satisfaction, “juicy with meaning.”

Find me on Twitter. Preorder my second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), out June 28. Join me on Thursday, June 23, at a virtual event with Book Passage. I’ll soon be announcing my extremely exciting conversation partner—don’t miss us!

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I used to work as a copywriter at a third-wave coffee company. Before I was hired, I drank Starbucks, or whatever came out of the spattered pot on someone’s kitchen counter, its bitterness concealed with creamer and refined sugar. But since everything I wrote was to be printed on packages, cans, and display cases, becoming a coffee snob was a part of the job description.

I spent a lot of time at the roastery with real coffee people—roasters, farmers, buyers, baristas—getting to know the product. Dirtying countless cupping spoons, I sipped, slurped, and huffed freshly brewed varietals from Guatemala to Myanmar. Like wine, cheese, or chocolate tasting, coffee cupping requires thinking with your mouth, nose, and tongue. You use these instruments to assess the sweetness, acidity, body, and finish of not just every cup, but every sip, of the strange tea that a billion people drink each morning.

That copywriting job, which I got in my late twenties, was my first exposure to the idea of flavor as a multidimensional experience. Growing up, no one in my family approached any sensation with that much thought or intention. My parents drank sugary margaritas, discount wine, and Budweiser. Dark chocolate didn’t exist. Cheese came in sticks or oblongs wrapped in plastic. Food in general was only of interest as a risk factor in becoming fat, not that the alternative was much better; in my families, like many other white American homes, you either became fat and hated, or remained thin and resented.

This terror of fatness informed the way we ate in confusing, contradictory ways, which varied depending on which parent my sisters and I were living with. With my single working mom, food needed to be convenient and cheap, so dinner was often picked up at a drive-thru. Though my dad had a wife to shift the reproductive labor onto (though she, like he, worked full time), there was less money but an additional kid to feed: fast food wasn’t cheap enough. Since I was often in charge of my sisters, I boiled pallets of Top Ramen and gallons of Kraft’s mac n cheese, the latter occasionally bobbing with chunks of brutalized hot dog. Then there were my stepmom’s cheap diet foods—in my teens, America was cresting the anti-fatness tsunami that’s since collapsed into the insidious “wellness” rebrand—with their carcinogenic sweetness, cardboard texture, and chemical aftertaste.

Eating what you fear is not merely unpleasant. It prevents you from asking yourself if you are enjoying your food, what people and places and meals it reminds you of, what you would change about the recipe if you were to prepare it again. It prevents you from admiring what your food looks like or how it’s been plated, or inhaling its scent before it goes in your mouth, or chewing enough for comfortable digestion, or savoring a dish that is excellent or novel or, as we say in English, made with love. Fearing your food extricates you from the moment while obliterating your connection to past or future. More than being unpleasant, fearing your food is bad for you—mind, body, and soul.

At the roastery, phone and notebook ready for note-taking, I often felt very stupid. Many of my coworkers who were learning alongside me had professional backgrounds in food or hospitality, so even if they were as new to coffee cupping as I was, they had a foundation to build on that I didn’t. Everyone else seemed to be able to identify the notes of stone fruit or fresh-cut grass or baker’s chocolate that eluded my atrophied senses. Sometimes I was convinced that they were lying, that they were just pretending to agree with any coffee’s given profile. Elbow out as I lowered my face to my spoon, I imagined the shape of my tongue and the liquid around it, trying to inhale and think and perceive without dribbling down my front when I spat into the mug reserved for waste. Though intriguing, the idea that a single spoonful of a single roast of a single varietal from a single season harvested on a single patch of land could express a rainbow of flavor, holoscoping as it cooled, was alien and frustrating. Scribbling my notes, I prayed that no one else noticed how clueless I was.

I had that job for a few years, long enough to learn a little, enough that I can now appreciate coffee in a way I didn’t before. Being addicted to this bittersweet, palm-warming drink is its own simple joy; discovering through it that sensation is not off or on, this or that, was the beginning of a paradigm shift. Flavor, which I had once experienced as a numbing agent, at best, revealed its depths. Like pleasure and pain, flavor is biomedical reality, social construct, cultural memory, and the substance of our days—the composite of living.

Flavor is interpretation, divination, introspection. I’m reminded of Alex Chee’s writing on writing in his book, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel:

To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth but into it. My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, teachers, people met on planes, people I have seen only in my mind, all my mother and father ever did, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you. All of this meets along the edge of a sentence like this one, as if the sentence is a fence, with you on one side and me on the other… Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022).

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Last week, I kicked off my series about the commodification of kink with the high-profile criminal case of Ed Buck, the white gay Democratic donor convicted in 2021 of killing two black men, Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean. Buck’s case is certainly not the first to touch on BDSM, but the way in which it was discussed, particularly by Buck’s legal team, is a fascinating nexus of contemporary popular discourses around deviant sex and the legal history of BDSM in America. (I promise I’m going somewhere with this.)

Sexual perversion’s enmeshment with queerness, gender-nonconformity, transactional sex, and other dimensions of sexual immorality means that there’s a long and storied history of what some (like Buck’s legal team) might today call the kink-shaming of BDSM in the American legal system. I figure a very quick and dirty legal history of deviant sex in the USA might be useful for context.

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Before we get to consensual violence, let’s review consent vis-à-visviolence. In the 1886 case People v. Gordon—which regarded the sexual assault of a child—the California Supreme Court acknowledged America’s earliest consent defense to criminal assault charges. The court explained that an attempt to commit a violent injury on another person “must be made without the consent of the person against whom it is made. If it be made with his consent, it will not constitute an assault.” This established a precedent for consent in matters of “violent injury” and violent sexual conduct, though from what I’ve seen of the case, the decision does appear to conflate the two; it also states that “there must be some evidence that the act was committed without [the victim’s] consent,” putting the burden of proof, it seems, on the person who was allegedly harmed. For what it’s worth, the court found that the victim was incapable of extending that consent due to her age.

Let’s jump ahead to 1967, the year of what’s thought to be the first American assault case to reference sadomasochism explicitly. People v. Samuels was brought against a man who filmed himself binding and whipping his consenting partners. When Samuels sent his film to a company to process those sweet memories, it was reported to police and he was charged with aggravated assault. At trial, Samuels defended himself on the basis of his bottoms’ consent, but, in contravention with People v. Gordon, the court rejected his argument: consent may not be a defense to battery or assault, except in the case of contact sports.

But even with consent, the court went on to argue, masochists must suffer (👀) from “some form of mental aberration,” thus disqualifying both their agency and their desire.

As recently as 2015’s People v. Davidson, the California court of appeals maintained that consent is not a recognized defense to assault, “even when based on a claim of consensual sadomasochistic activity.” Here, as in earlier American court cases, “lack of consent is not an element of the offense of assault, so the presence of consent does not eliminate the crime.” But the court in this case, as in others, is clear that consent, or lack thereof, is not the only legal consideration. In State v Collier (1982), the Supreme Court of New Jersey insisted on the state’s right to criminalize consensual BDSM activity because of the danger it posed to morality, among other things: “Whatever rights the defendant may enjoy regarding private sexual activity…such rights are outweighed by the State's interest in protecting its citizens' health, safety, and moral welfare.” In the eyes of the state, private citizens not only don’t have a right to consensual sadomasochism—they don’t have a right to immorality as the state defines it, either.

Nevertheless, the early 21st century showed progress for some American sexual civil rights, which had implications for deviant sex. Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark 2003 case in which the Supreme Court held that anti-sodomy laws targeting same-sex partners were unconstitutional, made same-sex activity legal in every US state and territory. Many arguments for the decriminalization of same-sex activity, and shortly thereafter marriage, can be applied to BDSM as understood as a kind of deviant sex.

You don’t really need me to walk you through these arguments—DAVID readers will anticipate them and anyone sans brain worms will find them sound—but suffice it to say that since its advent, the white supremacist United States government has cynically deployed “morality” against its citizens, its colonized, and its enslaved to take and hoard power, to engorge its empire, and to surveil and incarcerate with increasing effectiveness. The state is in no position to dictate “moral” behavior, including as it regards to the criminality of BDSM; as this brief, and I’m sure not-very-good, history demonstrates, it can’t even do so according to its own internal logic.

What does this have to do with the commodification of deviant sex? More on that next time.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder X: A Novel, out on June 28.

I’m excited to share that we now have a cover for the UK edition, available 10/28 from Cipher Press. I’ll be in London in late October—see you then!

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In 2017, when 26-year-old Gemmel Moore’s body was found in the West Hollywood apartment of small-time Democratic donor Ed Buck, his death was dismissed as an accidental drug overdose. Two years later, when 55-year-old Timothy Dean died by overdose in the same apartment, the police ignored the coincidence. Although by then a coalition of activists and civil rights organizations were demanding an investigation, it was not until 39-year-old Dane Brown escaped the apartment at 1234 Laurel Avenue in search of emergency medical care that the police arrested Buck.

In keeping with his extensive pattern of targeting what the New York Times calls “vulnerable men,” Buck—a wealthy white man with political connections—paid Moore, Dean, and Brown—black men with little money and less clout—to return to his apartment where he “administered large doses of narcotics to manipulate his victims to participate in sex acts.” As a result of what the media has referred to as Buck’s “fetish” for “pay to play,” two men’s lives were stolen. It’s some kind of miracle that Brown, who reported that he overdosed not once but twice while he was in Buck’s apartment, is still alive.

At the time of this writing, Buck is awaiting sentencing. But in March, his attorneys filed to have his convictions overturned, arguing that the government “kink-shamed” him by “pointing the jury toward his sexual fetishes in an effort to obscure the lack of proof supporting the charges.” Buck’s conviction, his team’s argument goes, was based on “prejudicial and irrelevant character evidence…by presenting graphic images and videos of his sexual fetishes.”

The governmental power—and prerogative—to punish those who engage in deviant sex is undeniable. Buck’s lawyers need look no further than their client’s own victims to witness that same systemic prejudice against queer, drug-using, and kinky people; indeed, it took a literal grassroots movement to force the justice system to treat the lives of Moore, Dean, and Brown as if they mattered. But there were other biases that Buck’s team failed to name. Why didn’t they also invoke the anti-blackness, classism, and whorephobia that almost disappeared the tragic deaths of at least two people and the traumatization of many more?

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder X: A Novel, out on June 28.

I’m excited to share that we now have a cover for the UK edition, available 10/28 from Cipher Press. I’ll be in London in late October—see you then!

Want advice? Email badgayadvice@gmail.com for a free 3-month subscription.

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When I was 8 or 9, I found a copy of John Steinbeck’s The Pearl on a shelf at my mom’s house. It was a cheap student paperback, brown but glossy, and small enough that you felt like you were reading something secret—a diary or a spell book. I took it with me to school and read it under the sycamore oaks. Spare and sure-footed as a parable, The Pearl was like if a Bible story was also Captains Courageous. When the scorpion stung the baby, Coyotito, I felt its hot barb in my flesh, too.

Steinbeck was a favorite after that, but years later, when a high school English teacher assigned Of Mice and Men, I remember peeling open the novel with a sigh of resignation. Dourly inviting us to reflect upon the mercy-killing of a disabled man by his only friend, Mrs. Something—a vapid woman with a white stripe where her scalp pared her shitty home-dyed bob—invited ambiguity where the great Californian author hadn’t sown any. Steinbeck’s villains are, as ever, the bosses, including the woman that Lennie mistakenly murders. But Mrs. Something was more interested in cross-examining Lennie’s life, scrutinizing it for value. In her classroom, naked injustice became a parlor trick or ice-breaker question. We wasted that period on the titillating sacrifice of a simpleton, instead of the evils of capitalism.

Thankfully, moral quandaries of that sort didn’t arise very often in school. There’s only so much performative pity that even wretches like Mrs. Something—who once explained that since we needed more women authors in our curriculum, she had quadrupled the number of Jane Austen novels—can puke up for stock characters like Lennie: childlike white men who are unable to stop themselves from committing sexy sex crimes against bad women. As is the case for the protagonists of Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Of Mice and Men’s Lennie is sweet, horny, abandoned, abject, and doomed (these men are also impoverished assault victims, too, but no one seems to care about that). My teacher is a stupid person who believes human value is measured in IQ points. I’ve dozed off in more than one cold, bony desk while trying to Heimlich that particular ouroboros.

It was around then, at 15 or 16, that I began to be visited by a nightmare that I won’t describe here. It still comes around sometimes, when things aren’t going so well.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder X: A Novel, out on June 28. It just received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, so that’s pretty neat.

Subscribe to support GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, an advice series from an anonymous gay therapist who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth. (Here’s an unlocked post for a taste of what you’re missing.) 100% of funds go to support a rotating selection of mutual aid and reparations projects.

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GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY is an advice series from an anonymous gay therapist who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth.

Last time, we asked readers to submit their queer art questions to be answered by today’s guest, interdisciplinary artist and author Zach Ozma. All submissions were entered into a raffle for prizes made by Zach (congrats to J and K on their victories!).

For this entry, Bad Gay and I decided to be extremely generous and share Zach’s answers with everyone. HOWEVER, only subscribers will be able to access Zach’s advice for comic artists, including homework assignments for structured creative play and a list of controversial queer artists to look to for inspiration that Zach and I came up with together.

Subscribers should also stay tuned for next week, when Bad Gay will also weigh in on this question. That will be paywalled, too, so if you want to know what Bad Gay thinks about queer art, well…you know what to do.

Hi Zach and Bad Gay,

I'm a young trans man and aspiring artist/kinkster. I have a lot of ideas for things I want to make and things I want to do. My passion is making comics, and I have a few short ones under my belt. However, I've never made a comic that I was completely excited about.

I think this stems from a couple places: 1) I'm afraid to start working because I don't think my skill level will ever match what I imagine in my head, and 2) I want to write about disgusting, depraved things that scare me. I want to write about queer people with fucked up morals who have gross sex and f**k each other over.

I know there's a market for stuff like this because I myself want to read it, but I think it takes a certain amount of courage to put something like that out into the world that I'm not sure I have. I guess I'm afraid of backlash from my family and friends, or on the other hand, backlash from the kinky queers that I want to like me if I end up misrepresenting their communities, since I haven't been able to form my own yet.

Do you have any advice on getting past these fears and just creating already??

Sincerely,

Stuck In My Head

Dear Stuck,

Few things make art-working less exciting than imagining future reviews. I have a great deal of empathy for your worry about what The Public will think of your art work and by extension you. Ask Ellis Martin—I was 100% sure our edit of Lou Sullivan’s diary would be too much sex for the people to handle, and that they’d all hate us for perving up a nice, neat trans historical figure.

Perhaps you’re even encountering a universal artist anxiety about reception. But let’s not mince words: this one’s harder when you’re queer.

If you are a person who wants to be good and who perhaps has also come of age in a dogmatic queer community with lots of unclear rules about how to be good, you may find yourself with some anxieties about how your people perceive you. It may be hard to let go of imagining all your actions through the lens of a publicist who is trying to not get you canceled. Nobody gets any good art-making done under that level of self-scrutiny. I personally can’t even draw a full breath when I feel that way.

So what do you do? For one thing, you build tolerance for receiving rejection or misdirected aggression—some people are going to HATE your work. It’s fine. You probably hate their work, too. Most of the time, they will not tell you. (I’m hoping Bad Gay can say some therapisty things about building tolerance.) Editor’s note: They will, next week!

For another, you make some conscious decisions about how to protect your own feelings: using a pseudonym for privacy, not reading your reviews, asking for only a specific kind of feedback, choosing which work is for social media and which isn’t, not showing work to family, wearing sunglasses so no one can see you cry.

For yet another, you make attempts to disentangle your personal goodness or morality or values from queer clout-chasing via buzzwords and walking on eggshells. Actually, Darryl author Jackie Ess probably says better things about this than I do, or anyway a lot of what I say I got from her:

“I really wanted to write outside of a slightly valorized political identity, because that’s something that felt very uncomfortable for me to wear. I walk poorly in heels and balance poorly on pedestals. Just let me wobble on this way.”

Whether or not your art receives backlash is essentially a marketing question. You, Stuck, identified the market for your work (the fact that you yourself want it!) as a reason to make it. It’s difficult (though not impossible) to sell art work that doesn’t exist. Try to put off imagining publishing and exhibiting the work. Publishing and exhibiting are administrative tasks. Making the work is a studio task. I find it helps to separate them. Are you unable to avoid seeing the future audience when you are doing studio work? Try to have an exhibitionistic experience with that fantasy.

As queer artists, we are conscripted into a multi-generational conflict with interests that seek to censor deviant cultural production. Forces governmental, social, religious, educational, and simply snobbish move at all times to squeeze gay and erotic art out from the visible realm of Art and into the musty, beaded-curtain dim of Pornography. This used to be trendy on the Right, but lately more lefties seem to be riding the anti-sex wave.

You “want to write about queer people with fucked up morals who have gross sex and f**k each other over.” Good! I actually don’t think art needs to tell a morality tale. A lot of art for children does this, and art for children is popular for queer people. Maybe Steven Universe queers simply aren’t your audience—it’s ok! They have plenty of art to look at. Me? I want more smut.

I actually think it is our obligation as queer artists to make real our most out-there ideas. This kind of art has enemies who would like to see it dead. I am telling you, it is your duty to add your fucked up, depraved comics to the visible realm of art. There’s plenty of sexual art out there that isn’t my taste or just doesn’t turn me on, but I am grateful for every bit it because it expands the visual realm, taking that big squeeze off me and my work a little.

As poet Essex Hemphill puts it:

“They’re too busy

looting the land

to watch us.

They don’t know

we need each other

critically.

They expect us to call in sick,

watch television all night,

die by our own hands.

They don’t know

we are becoming powerful.

Every time we kiss

we confirm the new world coming.”

Every time we write queer texts, produce queer images, do queer actions, we confirm the new world coming. You worry about misrepresenting kinky, queer communities in your work because you haven’t found your own. What if you find your people BY making the work? We need each other critically. What is it about their experiences that draws you? What do you want to mimic or try on? Can you become part of what you want to represent? Is your art a way you might enter into the communities you desire? Are you a voyeur? Is that wrong?

Want to read Zach’s advice for comic artists, homework assignments for structured creative play, and a list of controversial queer artists to look to for inspiration? Subscribe for $5/month for all that and more.

Gonna be in Philly this month? Support Zach in person at:

Vicarious Love Artist’s Market

Love City Brewery, April 23 12-7pm

West Craft Fest

The Woodlands, April 30 11am-5pm

Thank you so much for supporting GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY! As you know, 100% of your subscription funds go to mutual aid and reparations projects.

For this edition, we’re splitting $4,200 between National Bailout and Philadelphia’s Morris Home. $2,100 will go to National Bailout, a Black-led and Black-centered collective of abolitionist organizers, lawyers, and activists building a community-based movement to support our folks and end systems of pretrial detention and ultimately mass incarceration, and $2,100 to Morris Home, the only residential recovery program in the country to offer comprehensive services specifically for the transgender community.

Bad Gay and I thank you for your continued support. We’re all in this together, so let’s act like it!

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. David is not Bad Gay. David is DAVID. Bad Gay and David are two separate entities, brought together by a shared passion for being gay and mean. Read more GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY.

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If you saw me writing on my vacation, no you didn’t. See you in April.

As regular readers may have noticed, I do my best to distinguish SM from sex without separating them entirely. The reasons for this are both practical and political.

The practical: you must know what you want to get what you want (failing that, you should know when you don’t know what you want). For me, deciding with my partners whether and how a scene will be sexual makes good common sense. Being prepared instead of spontaneous—or rather, preparing to be spontaneous—is as impedimentary to a good time as determining whether someone has a latex allergy or figuring out who will host. Which is to say that it isn’t impedimentary at all.

The political: Dismissing leather as purely sexual is a tactic to delegitimize its role in liberation movements and its function as a hub, engendered by semi-legal and illegal sexual behavior, for “interclass communication,” to paraphrase Chip Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. It’s also the mechanism by which perverts are pathologized and disciplined by the state and its apparatuses. Unfortunately, sanitizing leather of its sexuality—and of its history—has more recently emerged to accomplish, essentially, the same goal.

So, to recap: sex and SM are not the same thing, except when they are. As I gestured toward in one of my most popular DAVID posts, this nuance is as complicating as it is clarifying. “So-and-so is looking to get topped,” a friend might reveal about another friend. “Sex-topped or SM-topped?” a third friend demands. Often requiring friendly debate, this distinction translates into the best kind of gossip: informative yet mysterious, satisfying yet inconclusive. (How dull it would be to be confined by sexual and romantic scripts that don’t allow for erotic detective work!) In denaturalizing sex and pleasure and divesting from monogamy and legal/biological family, we begin to have more choices, both with regards to what we “can” do and, more importantly, to what we can feel and experience.

Freedom isn’t free (non-derogatory). When we shred the scripts for normal, legal, sane, healthy, procreative heterosexual kinship, our relationships transform, multiply, and variegate. When you abandon the dating-to-monogamous-marriage pipeline; when you second-guess the idea that it’s natural to want family, sex, or your experience of gender to be a certain, specific, predictable way; when you begin to experience your feelings as they arrive rather than resist the unexpected ones, the clock starts working against you. Allowing your body to perceive, react, process, luxuriate, suffer, grieve, and heal requires more time than capitalism allows.

In February, I began writing about a scene I did with my friend Daemonumx, which was my first proper scene with her as a rope bottom. She tied me up and dangled me from a bespoke suspension structure in her apartment. I was warned that it would hurt, but it didn’t.

“That’s because you’re an experienced masochist,” Daemonumx said. This was validating but also scary, because it meant that she, as an experienced sadist, must hurt me harder in order to attain the effect we’re both looking for.

In rope, strength, flexibility, and well-developed interoception and proprioception can make your pain threshold higher, but as I’ve learned through yoga, the shapes that your body can make don’t really matter to the practice itself. Headstands and half-monkeys are impressive, but they’re not the point (in fact, advanced poses like these are only a couple hundred years old, while yoga itself goes back millennia). Attaining calm and relaxation through meditation, breath work, and a good stretch can be done by any body. The rest is just showboating.

So it goes with rope, or any other kind of scene. Discovering your limits while experiencing a full spectrum of sensation is a value-neutral activity that is relative to your unique body. I am deeply moved and intimidated by heavy masochists, and am likewise sometimes dismissive of SM activities that no longer challenge me, but in my better moments, I’m one of those people who basically thinks that everyone should get a trophy just for participating. A practice is not a competition, and treating it like one is a waste of everyone’s time.

While it’s tempting to pat myself on the back for needing more, Daemonumx can give it to me with humbling ease. Last week she tied me again, and this time it did hurt, though it could have hurt more (and probably will next time). I look forward to it. It’s astonishing how much pain can be managed once you learn the basics of pain management.

If you’re not hitting your pain limit every moment of every scene—and for my money, you really should not try to—you have the opportunity to undergo other kinds of sensation. Even without a lot of pain, SM presents a fair amount of risk. The physical risks are more obvious, and far more fetishized by vanilla culture. The emotional ones get a lot less attention.

Experienced as I am, I can’t predict how a scene will make me feel emotionally, anymore than I can predict how it will make me feel physically. Daemonumx is my girlfriend’s best friend and my platonic friend. To put ourselves in this intimate scenario poses a particular kind of emotional risk, at least for me. Will I be afraid in front of my friend, with whom I am not in the habit of fear? Will I cry in front of my friend, with whom I’m not in the habit of crying? Will I get turned on? Will I get angry? It feels like a statement of the obvious as well as an ageless profundity to say: To allow oneself to feel is the definition of vulnerability.

SM is sex and it’s also not sex. In embracing this paradox instead of sticking to the script, even one of the meager ones supplied for “deviant” behavior, we take a risk that still goes mostly unacknowledged in the wider world. I can put the activity—rope bondage—into a bucket—hanging out with a friend—but that doesn’t mean it can’t crawl out of the bucket again, like a curious octopus. “I recognise in the urge to shape narrative an urge to dominate, to manipulate and control the human in service of a greater desire for meaning,” as Huw Lemmey wrote in a recent newsletter. As a writer, I used to associate this urge with the empty screen. As a player, however, I’m beginning to see it everywhere else, too.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder X: A Novel, out on June 28.

Our next GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY will be out at the end of the month! Subscribe to find out who won our giveaway!

GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY is an advice series from an anonymous gay therapist who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth. (Sample an unlocked post for a taste of what you’re missing.) 100% of funds go to support a rotating selection of mutual aid and reparations projects. Want advice? Email badgayadvice@gmail.com for a free 3-month subscription.

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I recently started watching Barry. The dark comedy HBO series stars Bill Hader as Barry Berkman, a hitman who catches the acting bug while visiting LA on a job.

Though roughly half the show is set in and around Barry’s Studio City acting class—taught by third-rate Svengali Gene Cousineau (a very primo Henry Winkler simultaneously channeling two of the original Arrested Development’s best side characters, Gene Parmesan and Barry Zuckercorn, the latter of whom is played by. . . Henry Winkler)—Barry’s drama ignites among Chechen mobsters, Bolivian drug cartels, crusty LAPD detectives, and the man that I think of as Barry’s agent, assassin-wrangler Monroe Fuches (played by character actor icon Stephen Root). Whether they’re aspiring thespians or contract killers, the conniving, venal, and mercenary people surrounding Barry are most kindly described as colorful. It’s not a question of if but to what profound depths his friends, coworkers, love interests, and acquaintances are self-involved. The killers all have main-character syndrome, while the would-be actors marinating in professional rejection would probably have a body count, too, if they thought it would get them a pilot.

And then there’s Barry. In the midst of the machine gunfire and Stanislavskian histrionics, the tall, slump-shouldered Hader is often stoically silent, if not totally dissociated. An ex-Marine who left Afghanistan behind to make a living killing the “bad guys” queued up for him by Fuches, Barry’s emotional repression and soldierly deferral of agency prime Barry’s (re)viewers for conversations about trauma and toxic masculinity (a phrase Barry himself learns from Sarah Goldberg’s Sally, the struggling actress who has no idea what actually brought him to the City of Angels). And those are conversations to be had; if I had the energy, I’d pitch around to write about war criminal Barry as a white feminist fantasy of a “good man” in honor of season 3, which was delayed, as everything was, due to COVID-19.

But I don’t have the energy. Instead of pitching, I’m getting high and watching Barry, doing my level best to avoid feeling seen. And it’s true that, other than our lazy eye, Hader’s surprisingly butch Barry and I have little in common, physically or otherwise. As Barry scales the walls of his PTSD, however, his mutedness feels familiar. There I am, in a hoodie with my mouth agape while people around me talk about things that don’t matter. Searching for purpose in a pool of guilt. Existential dread without focus, because too much is dreadful to pick just one thing.

Who’s self-involved now?

I’ve written about burnout before. I’ve been feeling it again lately, but not for any specific reason. This is an ambiguity that I resent.

But this time around, I’m going to do something about it. I think a little vacation is in order. So this post is to inform you that DAVID will be on hiatus for the month of March. And really, it’s past due! Since January of 2020, I’ve churned out weekly writing on sex, gender, friendship, family, pleasure, pain, people named David, film, TV, art, books, and queer discourse at least once a week, on top of all this other junk I have to do, like sit in my apartment and write b**t for my boss, ask you to subscribe to support our mutual aid fundraiser, and remind my fellow Brooklyn residents that we’re not paying our gas bills to protest the massive fracked gas transmission pipeline that Nat Grid wants to run from Brownsville to Bushwick.

So. Vacation. Toward the end of the month, I’ll have some news for you about my forthcoming novel and GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, but otherwise, the goal is radio silence.

Until April.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, June 2022).

Subscribe to support GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, an advice series from an anonymous gay therapist who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth. (Sample an unlocked post for a taste of what you’re missing.) 100% of funds go to support a rotating selection of mutual aid and reparations projects.

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I don’t remember it very well, not even the fear. In exchange for allowing a man to tie me up where I sat on the ground, over the span of about sixty minutes, I was paid $200 (some of which went back to the dungeon as rent). My client didn’t make eye contact with me, didn’t even speak. He did tip, generously. If only they could all be like that.

Bondage, broadly speaking, is a somewhat new pleasure for me. After that client, I never again bottomed in a paid rope scene. While I’ve dabbled in other kinds of bondage over the years, I’ve never sought out rope recreationally, either. This is primarily because there are significant risks with rope bondage, and since I didn’t think I would enjoy getting tied up and suspended in the air, those risks seemed like more trouble than they were worth.

Rope bondage’s reputation, earned or not, precedes it into the straight world. Unlike piercing or fisting, rope bondage has proven easier to co-opt and commodify than other leather activities. With their terror of actual transgression, straight players have been known to desexualize activities like rope bondage with so-called sensuality, a mere shadow of the erotic it’s intended to replace. When it is incorporated into straight sexuality as wellness, naughtiness, or some other flavor of respectable reinscription, rope is no longer the sex act. It is a predecessor to it or involved with it, an ornament or an approach, but it has been displaced by heteronormativity—downgraded from fetish to kink.

I hasten to remind you that I’m the furthest thing from a rope expert. This is just stuff I’ve observed in and out of the scene, and from talking to rope players that I know socially. It’s also extrapolation, because, as I expanded on at some length with my validity series, leathersex is, like most other queer-coded subcultures, especially ripe for commodification right now.

As with other activities that are typically classified as BDSM, certain popular modes of rope share a great deal with ancient practices that emphasize breath work, mindfulness, and endurance. A version of rope bondage has been assimilated into Wellness™ like meditation or whatever starvation cult they’re shilling as a diet these days—although maybe polework’s gentrification by racist & whorephobic fitness cosplayers is a better comparison here. In fact, many straight people who come to rope through Wellness™, or what amounts to what my grandmother might have once called a “marital aid,” are unaware that rope bondage hurts, or that it’s supposed to (or so my leather associate, leatherdyke and rigger Daemonumx, tells me). It’s not just straight people, of course: scrub just a little, and beneath the nonspecific spirituality with which some white players greasepaint their practice, you’ll find Orientalism, racism, and fetishization masquerading as profundity, preference, and mystique.

Perhaps my biggest barrier to rope, however, was in its aesthetics. The scene’s slow-burning baroque intimidated me. Other forms of torture can be subtle, sure, but rope, like other bondage, prizes form as highly as function, if not higher. Me, I’m more of a function girl: a utility knife and whatever’s around the house works just fine. Recently, a leatherman I know commented on the “clinical” approach I take to my scenes, and he was correct on more than one level, including the one having to do with flair. I’m not one for pageantry, extravagance, or hedonism, and while many players are, and god bless them for it, I resist their inclinations, which feel like static, distraction. Clear cuts in a scriptless world are one of the main reasons SM is so appealing to me, and rope is knotty.

But a few weeks ago, when Daemonumx asked the gc if anyone wanted get tied, Jade encouraged me to give it a shot. So I did. More on that later.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022).

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I’ve known of interdisciplinary artist Zach Ozma for many years now. Friendly satellites back in Oakland, where I encountered him through our mutual friend, writer Emme Lund, Zach and I didn’t really get to talking until he was touring in New York to promote the Lambda-winning WE BOTH LAUGHED IN PLEASURE: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, which he co-edited with Ellis Martin, in 2019. I liked him very much right away; handsome and accomplished though he is, Zach’s cozy effervescence makes it impossible to feel intimidated or uncertain around him.

I hope you keep this in mind when I tell you that this working artist of some renown is going to be GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY’s second special guest star. How exciting slash don’t be shy!

That means that you can now submit your queer art questions for the chance to have Bad Gay and Zach answer them. Everyone who submits under this theme gets:

(1) 3-month subscription to GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, which includes access to our archives

(1) Chance to have their question answered by the good doctor and our esteemed guest

(1) Entry into a raffle for stickers, pins, and posters made by Zach, plus the big enchilada: this Zach Ozma creation

But wait a minute. Queer art questions—what does that even mean? The prompt is open-ended, but here are some thought-starters:

queerness, art, queer art, artistic practice, artistic jealousy, feelings around success/failure, how to get or stay inspired, how to prioritize art in your life, what the hell is queer art anyway??, the weirdness of being curated as ~queer~, am I really making art?, should I quit my jobs and move to the mountains to make art? what does queer art do?

So, to recap: Send your queer art question to badgayadvice@gmail.com by midnight on Sunday, February 20. Have a mutual aid or reparations project to recommend? We prioritize individuals, groups, and orgs led by and for black, POC, indigenous, trans, queer, incarcerated, disabled, drug using, and sex working individuals, so please send them our way! You’ve shared $2,827 in subscriber funds, so it’s gonna be a big one 😎.

GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY is an advice series from an anonymous gay therapist who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth. (Sample an unlocked post for a taste of what you’re missing.) 100% of funds go to support a rotating selection of projects like No New Jails NYC, Noname Book Club, SWOP Minneapolis, For The Gworls, St. James Infirmary, No North Brooklyn Pipeline, and SWOP Behind Bars, plus many more.

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Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

John Berger said that glamour cannot exist “without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.” I will pretend, for just a little bit, that we’re helpless against this truism. That it is romantic, rather than implicating.

In profiling legendary talk show host Dick Cavett in earlier installments of this series, I’ve examined the art of the interview mostly in terms of the Interlocutor’s creative choices. But since I think of this art form as a collaborative one, I should also consider the interviewee in this rough survey of what it means to be publicly questioned, sometimes before a live audience and often with the purpose, spoken or otherwise, of generating money-making attention through scandal or humiliation. After spending so much time with Cavett’s interview with actor Richard Burton (which I jokingly refer to as my favorite movie), it seemed only natural that Burton’s ex-ex-wife, actor Elizabeth Taylor—in her time considered one of the most beautiful and controversial women in the world—would appear to me as a fitting subject.

There are countless interviews with Taylor from which to choose, but the first that came to mind was one she held with Barbara Walters in 2006 to promote her book, Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair With Jewelry.

The Taylor of my teen years ought to be distinctly unglamorous: an elderly, embittered woman whose tabloid-trashings for her age, weight, marriages, substance use, relationships with other celebrity weirdos, like Michael Jackson, and disjointed political commitments are just about as old as my pre-war grandmother. Shilling a book that is a capitalization on her history of glamour, she comes across as wispy, unfocused, goofy. “Shame on you!” she says, searching for a camera to glare at when Walters mentions that the kids of today aren’t familiar with Burton. He was, she says with a snarl, “a hunk!”

Even when I saw this interview for the first time, I sensed the depth of that glamour, legible even for someone who had only seen her onscreen in the live-action version of The Flintstones (1994). Over the years, I return to it for a good laugh, because it really is quite funny. It’s a puff interview for coffee-table book with a woman who is no longer taken seriously, if she ever has been (although Burton, and many others, have praised her talent—as distinct from her beauty or cultural impact—over the years). But still, the glamour is there, straddling grand lady and gay icon to generate the tension required for camp, where worship and denigration, over-identification and ownership, meet in the meat of affective satisfaction.

“This red is from god,” she declaims, gesturing to a chain of rubies among her collection. “And those green little things…” She doesn’t even say “emeralds!” She’s so goddamn rich—the collection was valued at over one-hundred-million at the time—she doesn’t even have to call the rock by its name!

There is something alluring about a woman who will not apologize for being so fabulously wealthy, so fabulously fabulous. She feels like royalty, like she was sent down to earth by god. Her beauty and acclaim is so tightly enmeshed with her scandal and humiliation as to be a part of it, like gemstones in a Cartier necklace, and yet somehow, even with my disbelief unsuspended again, she endears herself to me, this bizarre old woman.

“Personal social envy…” as Berger said. The remarkable thing about having one’s consciousness raised is that what you think doesn’t always change how you feel.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022).

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Listen now | an interlude about needles (cw)

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Read Part 1. Read Part 2.

There are two sides to the Dick Cavett coin, but we’re capable of nuance here at DAVID, aren’t we? It suits our subject, too. “You invert things so beautifully,” actor Richard Burton, the star of Part 2 of this series, tells Cavett in 1980. Five years later, while interviewing director Paul Schrader about his bio-drama, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, he makes the mistake of saying that writer Yukio Mishima killed himself at the age of 54. “45,” Schrader corrects him. “I always reverse numbers when it’s the other side of the world,” Cavett charms back.

As much as I’ve appreciated The Dick Cavett Show’s YouTube renaissance, it’s generated a lot of Cavett lionizing without enough Cavett critique. In an early-pandemic piece for the BBC, Christina Newland claimed that Cavett was the “greatest talk show host of all.”

Cavett’s style of hosting and of initiating genuine conversation with his guests – neither pandering to them nor acting smugly superior – reflected how entertainment and cultural spheres were liberated by the bohemian spirit of the 70s.

Now, I like this piece. It’s an informative bit of writing that captures the nostalgia that streaming Cavett can evoke for people born after his heyday, especially when compared with the dismal quality of late-night television in the 21st century. As Cavett himself said a few years back, “There’s no honor, now, to have a talk show.”

But while I agree with Newland that Cavett is one of the greats, if not the greatest, she’s dead wrong about his treatment of his guests. Though genuine, funny, and at times even sweet, Cavett can be not just smug and superior, but cruel. In fact, there are guests with whom he is nakedly dehumanizing, particularly when those guests are white women, and especially when those guests are black men; unsurprisingly, precious few black women were ever on The Dick Cavett Show as guests during its prime, and off the top of my head, I can only think of two—Shirley Chisholm and Alice Walker—out of the dozens of episodes that I’ve seen. To overlook this tendency toward bigotry (to dust off a word that Cavett himself would have used back in the 70s) is not just to do a disservice to those guests, but to misunderstand Cavett as an interviewer.

Though Cavett’s challenge as the Interlocutor—at which he often succeeds, and which others so often fail—is to draw history, insight, truth from his guests, his own shortcomings, as we may euphemistically refer to his supremacy logics, regularly overwhelm him. What makes these failures so striking, at least to me, as a white person of redacted gender, is that I get the sense that he does it defensively; in moments of powerlessness, insecurity, or mere dead air, Cavett will jockey for the top by belittling his guests, and when this happens, the guest in question is rarely a white guy.

This tactic for self-aggrandizement is far from unheard of among men and white people, whether or not they/we are hosting a talk show. But when I use the word failure, I mean it in the sense of Cavett’s project as interviewer, rather than in the sense of him being a nice person. In these moments, Cavett changes the focus of the interview; that is, he fails at his task of revealing his subject, and instead reveals himself.

These failures are all the more striking when you consider Cavett’s reputation for control. Taut as piano wire, Cavett’s penchant for preparation is so severe that it actually works against him; he would go on to joke that in the early days of his show, he trained himself to have stock questions at the ready for when he missed what a guest said because he was “too wedded to his notes.”

This reputation for control is why Cavett’s loss of it when with a guest who isn’t a white man is so fascinating, to me, anyway. This isn’t to say he doesn’t sometimes go in on white male guests, but he tends to be forgiving of even the trickiest weirdos, from the Thin White Duke to Brando at his most lampooned. At worst, the energy Cavett brings to these guests isn’t unlike that of a kid brother: irritating but harmless. As Esquire writes, while he doesn’t throw softballs, he’s “no firebrand griller,” either.

A possible emotional inverse of impish, an adjective often used to describe Cavett, is, I think, waspy, which is how he can be with the women he interviews, especially if they are regarded as sex symbols. “Here they are, Jayne Mansfield!” is the joke that famously got Cavett his breakthrough writing gig on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show, and I’ve often thought that its offense is located in the assumption that Cavett has the altitude needed to condescend so hard. For every interview where he mansplains to Gina Lollobrigida or speaks over Yoko Ono’s head is another where his attempts at belittlement fall flat because, well, he’s a little b***h. Most of the women he interviews, white or not, have been socialized to disappear male aggression with grace and camouflaged wit, but a lot of them let it rip with Cavett, who’s so easy to humiliate it’s almost not fun. Whether he’s being ganged up on by Janis Joplin and Gloria Swanson (a setup that feels like an acid trip in and of itself), or Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett, one has to wonder if Cavett actually likes it. He certainly asks for it.

It is easy to recognize the sexism in Cavett’s treatment of (mostly) white women because, broadly speaking, we still only recognize sexism as a white woman’s problem. I would suggest that Cavett’s treatment of the black men who are guests on his show is also sexualized, perhaps even to a higher degree than that of his white women guests.

Take his 1985 interview with Eddie Murphy. It begins with Murphy teasing the house musicians, a group of white guys who’ve never been to New Orleans, for calling themselves the New Orleans Jazz Band. I’ve said that Cavett is charming, but Murphy, as we all know, could out-charm him any day of the week. Still in the midst of his atmospheric rise to fame, Murphy’s charisma is soft yet sparkling. As Cavett triangulates the young comic’s burgeoning career with that of the even-then legendary Richard Pryor, he quickly draws Murphy into a conversation about his earliest memories. When he brings up Mark Twain out of nowhere, you barely have enough time to recognize that you’re on edge before he asks Murphy, his voice rippling in gleeful caricature, “Are you offended by the word ‘n- - - - -?’”

Murphy’s demeanor transforms. “Why…Where is this coming from?” he asks. He is bewildered. He hardens.

“Did I say that?” cries Cavett, campily clutching invisible pearls.

The interview continues. Though he recommences his teasing, Murphy is never once rude, but neither, I think, is he ever warm again. I was shocked to hear the word come from Cavett’s mouth, though perhaps I should not have been. While surely informed by my inexperience with racism, however, my shock was also due to having watched, just before, one of Cavett’s sycophantic interviews with Pryor, the comic genius that he plainly idolizes—and whose work inspired Murphy, too.

The sexualization takes more shape when you zoom out from this one interview. While talking with Marc Maron decades later, Murphy says that he got to know Cavett well outside of The Dick Cavett Show. Cavett “popped up” a lot, Murphy reports. “I used to hang out with Dick Cavett a lot. If you dared him to do anything he would do it.” Once, while watching Diana Ross perform at Madison Square Garden together, he dared Cavett to grab Ross’s ass. “Why you doing this to me?” Cavett plaintively demanded. But then he f*g did it—went right up onstage and did it, to Murphy’s bemused entertainment. While I won’t excuse Murphy’s role in this scenario, Cavett’s willingness to entertain it screams humiliation bottom. How can such a grudging fixation on someone, described in some circles as a fetish, not be sexual, I wonder? To speak of triangulation again (and to evoke, on some level, Barbara Kruger): how can you, as a man, sexually assault a woman at another man’s invitation and not feel an erotic charge with him?

From all that I’ve seen and read, Cavett appears to simultaneously worship and revile black men, compulsively seeking their attention by provoking outrage and offering bizarre displays of submission, usually in encounters that make him appear more like a member of the entourage than a friend. There’s another story, this one told by Cavett himself, about going on vacation with none other than Muhammad Ali. When Cavett cooked breakfast for the both of them, he turned around to find that Ali had eaten all of it.

When he realized what he’d done he put on a hilarious, pitiful sad look and murmured, “Oh, Dick. You never gonna invite me back.”

It was so sweet, I almost cried.

Like all bigots, passive and active, Cavett has this tendency to position himself as a pseudo-victim, even in this attempt at humor, which lands for me as both condescending and pathetic. It’s akin to the extremely cringe largesse that Norman Mailer demonstrates when the writer and Ali are on The Dick Cavett Show together in 1970. “I came here to pay my respects to you tonight, that’s why I came on after you,” Mailer tells Ali, offering his honor like an adult giving a child a ballon, grinning with all of Spongebob’s teeth and none of his humanity. Mailer waits, as if expecting Ali—who almost went to prison and missed out on four of his prime athletic years for refusing to be drafted into America’s imperialist war against the people of Vietnam—to be grateful for his praise. Ali’s response is steeped in a quiet dignity that imperils the remainder of the interview with its restraint. It punctures Mailer’s balloons. It makes s**t awkward.

Over the past few years, I’ve begun to think of the interview as an art form, one serious enough to merit rigorous critique. Cavett, like almost everyone, is a person of his time, and we are hardly surprised that he demonstrates racism, sexism, and the like over the span of his 50-year career. These are, in my opinion, personal ethical failings with personal and social ramifications for the people they effect.

They are also artistic failings: to succeed creatively as an interviewer, one must interview a subject, and the subject can’t be a subject when they’ve been objectified. But even in his obscuring of his subjects, Cavett, as I’ve said, reveals himself. To paraphrase painter Francis Bacon, when you paint something, you’re painting yourself, too.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022).

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I haven’t written about sex in a while. As I wrote a few months ago, I have been trying to think about it less: I’m sick of intellectualizing every emotional fluctuation and fantasy, every craving and mood.

There are risks to this compulsive cataloging, itself a reaction, in part, to the modern world’s technologically-produced proliferation of pleasures, with which identity and a variety of disciplining forces (e.g., criminalization, medicalization) have become intertwined. The “oracular” algorithms that clog our feeds with ads for so-called genderless clothing and TikToks that mirror back at us our own cherry-picked characteristics, like our ethnicity or our interest in vegan baking, supposedly know us better than ourselves. Initiating a feedback loop of identity, desire, and ultimately consumption, this artificial knowledge informs and influences—produces, as the theorists say—what those selves are, and could be.

These risks don’t come without rewards. The at-times paradoxical blend of radicalization and co-optation, like consciousness-raising vs “awareness,” or therapy vs. self-help infographics, with which we locate our selves in this hegemon, sometimes favors us. In 2020, when I was writing a DAVID series on genital preference, I tweeted: “the cool thing about having sex with a lot of people is getting to see a wide variety of bodies in sexual and non-sexual situations. it has informed my understanding of so many things, especially so-called ‘genital preference.’” The interrogation of our own desires, as I went on to tweet, has implications for our identity and self-conception; this can be (politically) formative as well as regressive.

These interrogations are why I could be radicalized by my marginalization, such as it is, and why, more importantly, I could build outward from my individual identity to a politic that’s not actually about me. It’s funny to think that picking up a Reader’s Digest in an auto shop when I was 17, in which I read that masturbation is actually okay and won’t kill you or make you go blind, was one of the many small revelations that made it possible for me to eventually become a person, which was foundational to my eventually becoming a political person.

These revelations are temporally as well as quantitatively incremental. Learning how to decouple sex from procreation, heterosexuality, and monogamy, and to subvert the scripts we’re trained from birth to follow—that is, to denaturalize sex—requires time and exposure to people, experiences, and information. Not all of these exposures make sense to us immediately, like the Reader’s Digest article did for me; revelation can be cumulative, contextual, a practice in hindsight, and not just a lightning bolt.

For example. A year after reading that Reader’s Digest, while drunkenly fooling around in a car with some straight guy, I became too distracted by what he looked like to f**k; instead of getting angry or pressuring me, he listened while I talked at length about much I wished I had his body (?!?!), then drove me to a Jack In The Box and bought me food to soak up the booze. I’ve always looked back on that experience with gratitude—he was kind to tolerate my strange behavior, and he didn’t even try to rape me. Only relatively recently did I understand what was actually going on between us, or between me and his body, anyway.

Moments like that one that help drive that denaturalization of sex, but rarely are they totalities unto themselves. It’s context, like I said. But there’s something else to it: the sexual self-knowledge that leads to political awareness and action must be chosen, again and again. It cannot be passive, because sexual repression, cissexism, comphet, and capitalism are not working passively against us. Which isn’t to say that they exert their pressures uniformly. The pressure comes from all sides, not just above.

For example. We are aware that heteronormativity motivates with punishment. It also motivates with incentive, which is something that straight people have a harder time acknowledging, especially these days. The gender and sexual scripts that we all know, though maybe don’t always recognize, often offer both punishment and incentive: girls wear pink, boys don’t cry, marriage is romantic, the nuclear family is safe, natural, and eternal. There are scripts for sexual intercourse, too, and while they can be stifling, constraining, or boring (or worse), these scripts are also incentives in themselves. That’s because, when you believe that there’s only a handful of ways to f**k, sex becomes remarkably easy. This is one of heteronormativity’s incentives to conform.

I don’t mean that straight people can’t or don’t do weirdo sex s**t, or that being able to do a handstand while getting drilled means you have some kind of advanced understanding of sexuality and yourself, or that sex that looks normative can’t be pleasureful. What I mean is that we’re initiated into sex as something that can be learned, mastered, and replicated, over and over, like it’s a product on an assembly line. It is always the same, across time, space, and bodies. We’re all familiar with the script of cis man and cis woman having vaginal intercourse, so much so that most of us can do it in our sleep, even if we don’t appear in the script whatsoever.

So what’s the benefit of this sex script, then, if it’s so deleterious to pleasure and connection? How is this an incentive of heteronormativity, and not a punishment? Well, if you know exactly how sex is supposed to be—what you’re supposed to do, how you’re supposed to do it, and how it’s supposed to make you feel—then you don’t have to be present for it, do you? You can do it, or have it done to you, in your sleep. It’s not just that deviation from “normal” sex is pathologized, criminalized, or unimaginable—it’s that following the script for normal sex can be done with a minimum of static, if not effort or pain. Heteronormativity renders sex as a specific series of acts that is done with specific people, with specific goals in mind, so much so that concepts like consent are challenging to understand and difficult to introduce into our sexual practices. Sexual practices like consent that we, as good feminists or leftists or whatever, can all agree are good are also difficult, because they require effort, negotiation, vulnerability, accountability, and presence.

Like I said, there are risks to overthinking it. But being present can often feel uncomfortable, and no more so than when you’re trying to unfuck your approach to f*g. These sexual scripts seem simple enough on the surface, but they have roots. They’re like mushrooms that way, with fruit that we see, and miles of mycelium hidden deep underground, so that it’s easy to mistake an ecosystem for a single organism.

My advice is to follow pleasure, but there is a caveat: pleasure, like sex, like gender, like desire, also needs to be denaturalized. This is where more challenging avenues to pleasure, like difference, pain, and even abstention, come into play. I recommend those, too.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022).

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Listen now | on Dick Cavett as a coping mechanism

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When I thought to join everyone in ranking the books I read in 2021, my list reminded me that Maurice was among my favorites. E.M. Forster’s novel of homosexual love in Edwardian England, which was not published until after his death in 1970, is notable and unique for its happy ending, on which the great author refused to compromise. Forster’s “posthumous novel of gay life,” as Alexander Chee describes it in one of last year’s standout essays, follows the eponymous homosexual in his desperate struggle against the “unspeakable vice of the Greeks.”

In its attention to detail, Forster’s portrait of a young man’s developmental trajectory from innocent to lover is as painstaking as the removal of orthodontia, and yet as joyous as public sex. When he meets Clive, the agent of his first heartbreak, Maurice spends the night pacing the lawns of Cambridge, “his heart glowing.” Though the following morning, and for the next few years, he will compartmentalize his desires from his gender, race, and class obligations, Maurice’s “heart had lit never to be quenched again, and one thing in him at last was real.”

This flame stands him in good stead in conflicted Clive’s kissless purgatory, in the physician’s hostile exam room, in the hypnotist’s sterile oblivion: Maurice goes on to find Alec, the upper-class Clive’s groundskeeper, and Alec finds him, in return. “He knew what the call was, and what his answer must be. They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions’ who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.”

The publication of Maurice was a coda: as text, with its articulation of the unspeakable (including that for which Forster, personally, could have gone to prison); and beyond, with an afterword contextualizing the author’s creative decisions: “I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.” As real as their world feels to me—who among us has not had to choose between our souls and a closet-case?—Maurice the modern novel concludes as fairytale, with the two lovers disappearing into an England where “it was still possible to get lost,” as the author writes. Following two world wars, “the wildness of our island…was stamped upon and built over and patrolled in no time. There is no forest or fell to escape to today.”

Though Maurice and Alec get their happy ending, modernity keeps on its inevitable grind, in a process of attrition rather than progress. “We had not realized that what the public really loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it,” Forster wrote in 1960. The ruling class would maintain control through, in part, the criminalization of free sexuality: “Clive on the bench will continue to sentence Alec in the dock. Maurice may get off.” Though we must be suspicious of our separatist impulses—which, uninterrogated, replicate those same hegemonic structures we wish to flee—Maurice and Alec’s alternative to assimilation, even if imaginary, is what saves Maurice from obsolescence, even here, even now.

I’ve begun 2022 with another novel about (homo)sexual outlaws. Lucy & Mickey, American author Red Jordan Arobateau’s “butch trip through life before Stonewall” is worlds away from Maurice in subject matter (impoverished butch/femme dykes hustling to survive in late-1950s Chicago), style, perspective, and reception. But it shares with Maurice an insistence on pleasure as truth, as real, though for queers it can only take place outside of real life.

In opposition to that real life, to the nuclear family, straight jobs, white supremacy, and the cages of foster care, mental ward, and prison, Lucy & Mickey’s main characters live the Life, the extralegal existence relegated to the poor, the drug-using, the sex-working, the gay and transvestite, the black, brown, and indigenous. So long as Arobateau’s protagonist, teen butch dyke Mickey, chooses the Life over straightness, she will never really be a citizen, fighting to survive the great apathy of “the shops and factories that didn’t want to hire her. Restaurants and bars that didn’t want to serve her,” and the more targeted threat of the police state.

But together with Lucy, the femme she meets while turning a trick to save herself from starvation, Mickey can find her own greenwood, steal “a piece out of this insane world with its trade & its freaks.”

“It’s a dangerous world out there. Dangerous to the heart,” Mickey thinks to herself. Like Maurice’s flame, the heat of her lust keeps her warm, if not safe.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), here.

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Has someone ever made you feel as if you were the most interesting person in the world? Though most of us are neither Joe Exotic nor Raven Leilani, we enjoy, now and again, indulging in the fantasy that we might someday join their number, that we’re one lucky break away from real recognition—an It Girl in the making, an influencer on the rise, an undiscovered genius vibrating in the wings.

The ability to make other people feel interesting belongs to the same kingdom as the ability to tell stories. I’ve met raconteurs, too, but their magic trick is more obvious. The Storyteller holds you in thrall, spinning yarn on the the knife’s edge of credibility. I’m thinking of an acquaintance who seems to live in a telenovela, always with a semi-legal caper, near-death experience, or absurdist breakup to share as she works her way through her pack of Marlboro Reds. She is a Storyteller because she can convince me, for a few breathless minutes at a time, that she is the main character. While her math may not always add up (Wait a minute, I thought you said that the cop went home with the meth-dealing performance artist?), my skepticism never outweighs my entertainment.

The Interlocutor, meanwhile, casts Main Character Syndrome upon you like a spell. Intoxicated by their attention, your fallback anecdote, secret grudge, or bland trauma suddenly become worthy of analysis, laughter, and commiseration. You find yourself revealing more than you ever though you would, confident in the Interlocutor’s thoughtful but unobtrusive goodwill. Is it authentic? It doesn’t matter. “My only advantage as a reporter,” wrote Joan Didion, whose death last week prompted a bunch of her quotes to recycle their way through through Twitter again, “is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.” What makes a good Interlocutor? You never see them coming and they leave without a trace.

We all have Interlocutors, of various levels of skill, in our lives. They are the historians, the gossips, the nurturers, the middle children, the conflict-averse, the fawners who’ve figured out how to hide in plain sight. I’ve no wish to pathologize—some people are simply curious—but I’m fascinated by the Interlocutor-type who wants none of my fascination, who strives not just to redirect attention from themself, but to control it entirely, rationing it out like a key-ringed steward. Appraising both subject and audience with learned perspicacity, in total control—or so they like to think—this Interlocutor-type only seems averse to the spotlight. They actually quite like it, provided that they’re running the board.

If I sound critical, it’s only because, as a writer, I’m deeply envious of the Interlocutor’s power to expose others while disclosing nothing of themself. Tempted by the discursive immediacy of online, I sometimes succumb to the fantasy of writerly tease-and-denial: that I am controlling my readers, rather than interesting them, being in conversation with them, or telling them a story. But then I remember that I am here to communicate, not to obscure. As someone who writes for a living, I must do my best to prevent this transactionalism from seeping into my art. Just because we must work within the attention economy doesn’t mean we need be defined by it.

Nevertheless, there’s much to be learned from the Interlocutor as artist and artisan. At its best, this rare and pleasurable talent pinpoints the narrative ore in a continent of content. This DAVID series will feature my favorite interviewers as a dissection of the interview as mode, craft, and object d’art: How does the Interlocutor convince their audience and their subject that the latter is the most interesting person in the world?

Read Part 2.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), here.

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GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY is an advice series from an anonymous gay therapist who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth.

Submit your requests for advice to badgayadvice@gmail.com and get 3 free months of BAD GAY. All subscription funds benefit rotating fundraisers and mutual aid projects, so please share and tell your friends!

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Last time, we asked readers to submit questions according to a theme: What is your commitment to suffering? (All submissions were entered into a raffle for a Bluestockings gift card. Congrats to Azura on their victory!) Below, you can read the one that Bad Gay picked for this week.

Dear Bad Gay,

I have a storied career as a leatherqueer and pain slut, but after a lot of bad experiences and the general exhaustion that comes from growing up (I'm middle-aged now), I had mostly closed the door on that part of my life. I didn't try to convince myself that I had stopped being a masochist or a submissive, but I was no longer prioritizing that in my hookups or potential romantic partners, and had mostly given up finding sadists and dominants that would treat me the way I wanted to be treated.

That decision brought me some sadness but also the contentment that comes from making an emotionally honest choice. And then, of course, I met my partner, a sadistic dominant whose main kink is receiving the exact same kind of service I love to provide.

Our relationship (still new, under a year) is wonderful: an ease-filled blend of egalitarian partnership with elements of an intense dynamic, small acts of D/s peppered into the day-to-day fabric of a loving relationship, and incredibly hot f*g. I'm writing to ask you, now, how to jumpstart incorporating S&M into all that.

Communication isn't the issue; I want them to hurt me, and they want to hurt me, we've discussed this. But we both have intense jobs, their apartment doesn't have a dungeon, play parties haven't come back yet, and when they come home from work to the dinner I've cooked, neither of us seems to know how to transition from those warm cuddly feelings to pulling out a flogger or a cane. I'm not inclined to ask them to schedule it, because who knows if both of us will be in the right space for it when the date and time arrives, but it also feels like the longer it takes to happen, the more fraught, in some unexplainable way, it will become.

How do we welcome this brand of suffering into our lives?

Love,

not so green

Dear NSG,

This letter is a curious response to our prompt. I’m using your question in particular as an in-road to what I have been thinking of as the being and fussiness tenor of many of the BAD GAY responses we receive, e.g.,

“I’m happy in other parts of my life but I’m miserable on Twitter, a place I choose to be, and am also a little famous, what should I do?”

“I’m in a wonderful place in my life but I’m poly so that means I have to do some extra emotional work to f**k lots of people I love and that feels hard, thoughts?”

“I have a great group of friends and I love my community, but I’m in love with someone who hasn’t responded to a text in a year. Are they still interested? How do I get them to care?”

Above, you outline what I venture would be read by many as the dream scenario: a wonderful relationship with an “ease-filled blend of egalitarian partnership” and “elements of an intense dynamic,” where you are figuring out how to integrate the old and the new versions of yourselves, and kinky world-build together.

And yet. What I hear in your question is, “What is any of this without suffering?” which seems to me to be at the heart of so many of our letters. Your response seeks to answer our original question with new ones: “Is this anything if I am not suffering? How do I release myself from suffering?” How do you move from the suffering of equals engaged and invested in an internal gratification-loop into the good and secure and also kinky without relational distress gratification-loop? How then do you all grow up into mature perverts?

Let me ask first, NSG, what would it mean to sink in? To really languish in the pleasure of what you have achieved? And, what do you leave behind when you leave behind suffering? When I say suffering, let’s make sure we don’t mean pain, as in the physical and sexualized experience. I mean suffering as the tacky, muddy emotional experience of distress that so many of us hold onto and nurture like so many sourdough mothers, hidden in all of our closets, trendy and begging to be fed. NSG, can you find the pain without the suffering? I actually think you might be a little bored—because without the bad experiences, who are you? Who are any of us adolescent queers growing into adulthood?

At less than a year together with your partner, I think you can just take it easy and find out. Queer maturity is quite a feat, and I commend you. The challenge of it is that, all things being equal, if you make it to therapized, connected, having-a-grasp-on-your trauma, loving, purposeful, supportive-community adulthood, then you are greeted with a particularly excruciating expansiveness. Often, we mistake that for an issue. You, against all odds, made it here. What would it mean for any of us to stop striving, when we know so well that our private worlds are really only limited by our imaginations? What does it mean to just be?

Functionally, I could tell you to rent a hotel room once a month where, yes, you schedule your S&M, but where you would also get out of your own zones into the unfamiliar to play through scenes in a strange new space where you can RP like the middle-aged perverts you are. Don’t despair in this—decide to delight in it. Perverts in LTRs have to get a little creative because, lest we forget, the roots of perversion lie in the novel. It’s horny because it’s disgusting, so what happens when it becomes common in your life? So, again: Functionally find ways to make kink uncommon in order to re-infuse it with the taboo that gets you off. Also, talk to your partner, move into the next phase together, and say out loud both what’s wanting and what you enjoy about the things you’ve worked for together.

Yours,

Bad Gay

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What it means to write about oneself online has changed dramatically in the 15 years since I’ve come of age.

In high school, I was taught to regard my beloved white lady Confessional poets, who spilled the secrets of feminine domesticity, as gifted but undisciplined creative accidents, forces of nature to be diagnosed and controlled, while their male counterparts’ indiscretions were taken for granted. In college, I was assigned Pamela and Shamela, 18th c. epistolary novels written by men from a woman’s perspective, which I half-read while developing my Online Voice, then still in its infancy, with the brand-new technology of the Facebook status update. In my twenties, most everyone who wanted to make money as a writer—including me—failed to resist the tech-enabled trauma farms, from Gawker to Bustle to Buzzfeed, that shilled out payment as generous as $50 and as scant as exposure or spreading awareness in exchange for our highly clickable tales of sexual assault, workplace abuse, medical violence, and state terror.

One would think, now that everything from birth onward is livestreamed, and fights, funerals, and federal murder are uploaded, viewed, and shared indiscriminately, that writing about oneself online in 2021 would have lower stakes. To divulge, to share, to spill—shouldn’t the bar for exposure (derogatory) be lower, now that we’re post-personal essay, post-finsta, post-OnlyFans mainstreaming, post-Jeff Toobin?

And yet, as someone who has now lived the majority of their life online (which is saying something, unless you’re a Zoomer), I’m not sure that it is. The facial-recognition software is more sophisticated (though ever-skewed), the targeted ads more insistent, the internet as Wild West now Gone With The Wind. Anonymity is harder to come by, is what I’m saying, while the pressure to blend self and brand has an inverse relationship with the returns that diminish with every passing every year.

Nevertheless, I think I’ve struck a balance of self-revelation. Because of course I must reveal myself. I can’t not. To the extent that my writing must display my stakes in a given subject—as a gay person, a trans person, a sick person, etc.—it’s unavoidable. But for the most part I am able to write about myself on my terms, because these days I am both wise and lucky enough that I don’t need to do it out of fear or a sense of scarcity. That is, I no longer write in a way that makes me feel vulnerable (though whether or not it actually makes me vulnerable is another matter).

This is a skill that we, as online writers, many of us working for free or damn near, hopefully learn over the years, the remnants of our lessons so much detritus caught in the gears of the wayback machine. Comfortably grown-up and carefully employed by someone who pays me to write stuff that isn’t mine, I can publish about f*g for money or family estrangement without sitting up nights, sweating through my sheets, because, sensitive as these topics are, I have not exposed myself despite myself. If I am revealing, it’s because the revelation has already been resolved (likely in therapy), and this is an advantage of aging and a privilege of mental health care.

This does not mean I am not on my guard. I write so much, and about so many things (though I do have my beat), that it’s easier to locate my soft underbelly by looking at what I’m not writing about. And since DAVID began, what I have not written about the most is my girlfriend. I mention her here and there, sure, but she has remained separate from all of this, and that is by design.

Recently, Jade mentioned this separation. She wasn’t reproachful, but she has noticed that while I have written about exes, sex, and X, she rarely makes an appearance.

Oh, really, I replied. But that was a feint. I, too, have wondered why she almost never leaves my journal.

Is it because I don’t know what to say? I have spent hours wondering how I would write her brown eyes or her cheekbones for the benefit of someone who has not seen them; on the way these features shimmer and transform as my feelings for her deepen. A Grecian urn, a Lascaudian wall, an aubade would be better formats than prose, I often think. Words, or mine anyway, don’t do justice. But then justice implies balance, equity, a measuring of sorts, and what I want to say is not to be calculated.

Not long after Jade and I started dating, we watched Manhunter (1986) for the first time together, and it swiftly became a dyadic shorthand, an ur-text for a relationship that I did not expect to happen, work, or last. In the two years since we met—including the six months that we were separated by the pandemic—we have found such pleasure in cinema, a glowing safe haven amidst all of this. Manhunter especially and in particular activates a certain sanguinity that we somehow share, bringing us to the edge of the separation that lovers must live by.

“It's hard to have anything, isn't it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet,” says Molly, Manhunter protagonist Will Graham’s wife, in an eddy of calm hollowed from dread and carnage. It’s a watchful, searching film, but in their scenes, Will and Molly look at each other. “Slick as hell,” he replies.

In honor of Manhunter, I spent a year researching and writing a middling essay for a website with the respectable but small twitter following of 33K. I was paid $100. I read two books, watched the film at least a dozen times, talked about it endlessly, wrote around and toward it, pitched and haggled with editors and proofers, suffered my final 11th hour overnighter—all for a piece that will surface and sink like a bubble on the Pacific. It’s not about Jade but it’s not not about her, or us. Even though I’m happy with the end result, it does not say what I originally wanted it to say, which would have gestured toward, at least, why I need her.

Why don’t I write more about Jade? The closest I’ve come is an essay about a cult-classic horror thriller released the weekend she was born. But I’ll keep trying. I know the value of our days.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), here.

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“Ahead of its time: Seinfeld’s chosen family queers straight friendship.”

See? It’s almost too easy. The Salty headline is there for the writing, dangling like a dirt farmer dangles a carrot in front of a mule, as Jerry might put it. Judging solely by the way Twitter is curating my feed, it appears a Netflix-spurred Seinfeld resurgence is afoot, and the queering—tongue-in-cheek and otherwise—is in full swing.

But for real, though. Seinfeld is about four straight adults in their thirties who never marry (let alone maintain long-term monogamous partnerships, plus or minus a Susan), nor do they seem to really want to; even as the main cast’s sole woman, Elaine’s occasional expression of desire for matrimony is based in thirst, either for JFK, Jr., or for status. Her longest onscreen relationship, with David “Puddy” Puddy, the absurdly funny Patrick Warburton, is off-and-on and decidedly rooted in a mutual antipathy dipped in a hard shell of sexual chemistry.

Even during the final episode, which aired around my 10th birthday, Seinfeld’s writers string us along with the possibility of Jerry and Elaine getting back together for good, which of course they never do. Watching in the 90s, there was a real tension around this will-they-won’t-they (I felt one, anyway, at my tender age). Watching in 2021, the notion that this pair of narcissists might somehow completely change their personalities for a walk down the aisle, just for the sake of appearances, is absolutely laughable.

That’s the funny thing about Seinfeld. As reactionary and mean-spirited as the humor is (don’t get me started on the man himself, famed Zionist and dater of the underaged), the show really does successfully resist wedlock, the big enchilada of white hetero normalcy. This isn’t to say that it doesn’t also reinscribe said enchilada, thereby creating the template anew for its successors: American sitcoms about grown adults living together in what’s seen by straight, white, middle-class people as arrested development, as not real life, over the years penetrating deeper into adulthood to keep pace with the diminishing returns of neoliberalism’s crumbling middle class and skyrocketing household debt. Unlike on Friends (or Living Single, the black show that the white Friends ripped off), or New Girl, Girls, How I Met Your Mother, etc., none of Seinfeld’s main characters ties the knot. Even when compared with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Seinfeld’s more offensive but also more socially-minded spawn, Jerry’s show about nothing resisted the temptation to make something out of the lives of its Upper West Side wretches.

How does it accomplish this? With simplicity. The characters aren’t complex and Seinfeld, clever as it is, is not nuanced, not when we zoom out from the manners microdrama. This doesn’t make the gruesome foursome relatable, in the way that ensembles of self-involved, mostly white people strive to be, but it does make them realistic. That’s Seinfeld’s and Larry David’s talent, I think: the ability to tap into mainstream resentment with an artfully concealed hostility, the kind that even when writ large with gags about deporting immigrants and anti-indigenous slurs, or with the show’s distinctive approach to racial segregation, is belied with its star’s unsettlingly blank yet toothy delivery.

I’m not saying that Seinfeld is actually queer, although that would be quite hilarious of me. We’ve wised up enough that we can now anticipate the corporate-sponsored sites, mags, newsletters, and services that churn out ~content~ about how queer this or that product, and thus primed for purchase with our rainbow dollars. But that doesn’t mean that Seinfeld’s anti-family values don’t resemble, if not mirror, ours. Unlike your standard them piece pointing this out, though, we don’t celebrate assimilation or appropriation with a brand partnership. Better to interrogate it: What’s the deal with Seinfeld’s chosen family?

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), here.

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Read Part 1 and Part 2.

In 2018, David Cronenberg said, “If movies disappeared overnight, I wouldn’t care. The cinema is not my life.”

Tracing the advent of the internet, streaming services, and the Disneyfication of the moviegoing experience to one of its logical conclusions, Cronenberg went on to say that the big screen, “is shattering into a million small screens.” Like the human body—his oeuvre, his specialty—cinema is “evolving and changing,” a process that can’t happen without destruction.

I don’t stray far from writing. It’s what I do. Occasionally I collaborate with other kinds of artists (historically, photographers and editors), but generally speaking, I stick with what I know. Still, I’m moved by Cronenberg’s view of medium as a means to an end, one that does not vanish when that medium changes. For Cronenberg, the movie theater is “the cathedral that you go to where you commune with many other people”; the Holy Spirit inspires architecture, but does not require it. Perhaps watching a movie on an iPad, he suggests, is transforming the filmgoing experience of yore to one more akin to reading a novel. We may have our concerns about how this compartmentalization can affect the nature of our communion (I certainly do), but to diagnose it out of hand as some kind of inherent loss is shortsighted.

This acceptance of change is unsurprising coming from the man famously willing to track sensation across genre, format, and technology. I think a lot about eXistenZ (1999), which while one of my least favorite Cronenbergs strikes me—with its Boomer-ish director’s generous curiosity about the home videogame, at that point still an unserious Gen X pastime—as almost courageous in a way that earlier films like Videodrome (1983) or The Fly (1986) are not. His movies are “voyages,” as he puts it in the article above, whose prime directives aren’t scaring people, but to provoke “philosophical thought.” Cronenberg’s unfailing curiosity reminds us that the ship’s captain comes with us on the voyage, too.

This perspective is indicative of the Buddhist detachment Cronenberg has cultivated in his old age and, perhaps paradoxically, of his artistic prioritization of pleasure. I admit that this may seem counterintuitive. Like this is the guy who made the car-f*g movie (no, not that car-fg movie), the guy whose fixation on mutation, destruction, and pain is what put him on the map. Like this is thee body horror guy we’re talking about here. What about “trauma incarnate as soulless goblin children in matching tracksuits” says pleasure to you, bh?!

In Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism, Amber Jamilla Musser summarizes Foucault’s stance on SM as a strategy for moving homosexuality from an identity-based category toward “a way of being.” As Foucault wrote, “The idea that bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure as the root of all our possible pleasure—I think that’s something quite wrong.” SM, Foucault goes on, insists that “we can produce pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies.” Musser writes that SM “redraws the lines between pleasure and eroticism,” destabilizing the privileging of genitally based sexuality for something bigger, queerer, and more free. While formally resembling violence, SM is actually resisting it; for Foucault, it “reorganizes the body to emphasize pleasure rather than identity or discipline; it offers tangible corporeal freedom.” After decades of organization, activism, and theory, many of us today can at least parrot rhetoric like “kill heteronormativity” or “smash the gender binary,” those “pleasures” have been built to crush us, and which we now recognize are to be interrogated. Why is it that we struggle so much to extend this critical lens to other pleasures and, by extension, other pains? There is more than a handful of binaries to be smashed!

In Cronenberg’s career-long focus on pain and horror among the more accessible joys of filmgoing, we see an artist greedily rooting around in pleasure’s almost endless, and almost entirely unrecognized, capaciousness for pain. It is not an act of perversion to spotlights the metal fetishists and neogynephiles, but rather a commitment to pleasure, the pursuit of which we are trained to take for granted as natural and intuitive. What’s more, that commitment, like SM, is a communal one, and therefore, like the movies, a space for communion.

It occurs to me that in both their communality and their misrepresented vitality, both SM and David Cronenberg’s films resemble fungus: the self-annihilating, self-feeding, self-sustaining churning of old bodies into new flesh and back again.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022).

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Whether they’re being asked for advice about unrequited love, dyke bed death, or romantic codependence, Bad Gay will, not uncommonly, prompt their readers with a gentle question: What is your commitment to suffering? (But only after doing the written version of what my dad used to resort to when my sisters and I were being stupid, which was pick us up by our shirts and conk our heads together like coconuts.)

This question has turned into a running joke between us and our subscribers—the precious darlings we adore with the all-consuming heat of a million gay suns—so much so that when the good doctor suggested it as the theme for our next BAD GAY giveaway, I immediately agreed.

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Why am I like this? I return to this question over and over in my fiction, and I wish I didn’t. I think it’s self-destructive. Why search for an explanation for every desire and fear unless you believe that one can be found? The urge implies the paradoxical belief in both one’s inherent wrongness and in the ability to correct it, as if it were possible to pull it up by the roots or cut it out like rot.

I’m sick of intellectualizing every emotional fluctuation and fantasy, every craving and mood, I tell my therapist, with whom I spend 45 minutes a week doing the very same. I think the point of therapy—of my therapy, anyway—is to unfuck myself enough that the self-destruction loses its appeal. No more Why am I like this? But that hasn’t happened yet, or I would have stopped writing about it.

I met up with a sadist last weekend, and as with any test of endurance, I was given the opportunity to ponder the question at length while hooded and naked on the floor, undergoing varying kinds of pressure and sensation on vulnerable parts of my body. Flinching and bruising, once almost fainting, I focused on it almost angrily, frustrated. I’m accustomed to attributing Why am I like this? to growing up, as we all do, in a world where the queerphobia is structural and systemic. But if gender, a cornerstone of normalcy, of capital, of the imperial core, can be destabilized, so can everything else.

I’ve talked about the pain/pleasure binary before, about how it’s fake, or, as I said another time, an “unwieldy tool for our understanding of goodness and badness and purpose and meaning.” It is one thing to recognize that we construct, and co-construct, sensation, that it is not only entirely subjective, but experienced with and alongside our histories, traumas, cultures, and social lives, maybe even on an epigenetic level. It is another, I think, to suggest that pleasure as it was once constructed is disappearing.

Even now, healthier than I have ever been, the anxiety shrieks, the paranoia burns. The forests burn, too, while the ice caps melt and the fash creeps. What if we are not given the opportunity to reject the pain/pleasure binary, I worry, feeling the boot pressing into the thin skin of my forehead, but instead have it wrested from us?

Then we rebuild pleasure from the remains, as people always have, the boot reassures me.

But what if we can’t? I ask.

Then you will die, says the boot. You were going to, anyway.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Their second novel, X, is now available for preorder from Catapult.

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About four years ago, a boy dyke friend and I spent a lot of time complaining about something we called the Top Box.

A phenomenon among the dykes and queer women of our Bay Area milieu, the Top Box was where other queers—cis and gender-conforming ones, specifically—put their trans or gender-nonconforming lovers. Were you read as trans, androgynous, butch, or masculine? Then it was often taken for granted (including by others like you) that you would top your partner in sexual and romantic situations, literally as well as figuratively. Being stuck in the Top Box was what happened with the almost seamless conflation of trans genders; of being the giving, active, or penetrating partner; and a suite of unsympathetic and reductionist understandings of queer masculinity (which often included by default queers of color, trans women and femmes, and others masculinized by non-normativity).

My friend and I complained about the Top Box (and its corollary, the Fake Top) a LOT. Both of us verging on our respective medical transitions, it was only after years of being gay that we were beginning to articulate what it felt like to be fetishized by our own people while having that fetishization be either dismissed or used against us as evidence of the “privilege” that comes from being “masculine,” highly visible, and/or sexually aggressive. But what began as a bit of boyfriendly flip became a really useful term to express the alienating, frustrating, and conflicting experience of being seen as man-lite, not a real woman, not a real lesbian, too queer, inherently violent or dangerous, a sentient dildo. Why couldn’t we simply enjoy being appreciated for the qualities that made us unwanted in the straight world? Perhaps because this newfound desirability came with the threat (sometimes made explicitly) that it would be used against us at the first sign of difficulty or vulnerability.

My friend and I joked that we could write a whole book about the Top Box. Maybe someday we would get bunch of trans people to anthologize about their gendered, racialized, classed, and embodied experiences with it. But the joke took on a life of its own. Having just published the earthquake room, I had begun thinking about what I wanted from a second novel. As I took more control—and more responsibility for—my body and my desires, I realized that it wasn’t just people like us that had a complicated relationship to the metaphor of sexual positionality. All of us did. So I began writing a book about what happens to a top who decides they don’t want to be a top anymore.

X grew to be more than that, of course; both of my novels began as lines of inquiry, and neither has revealed more than it has prompted. As well as a meditation on desire and power, X is also my opportunity to experiment with noir—perhaps my most beloved genre—to document butchness, to provide a postmortem of two abusive relationships, and to eulogize that most ineffable of lifeforms, the femdom nightmare.

Maybe we still will write the Top Box book. But until then, there’s X. Tell your friends, etc. See on bookshelves in June 2022!

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Their second novel, X, is now available for preorder from Catapult.

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Gerri and Roman have some kind of sexual relationship—that much we can all agree on. Away from the prying eyes of her employers and his family/employers, they roleplay, she as a motherly abuser who scolds and berates, and he as the nasty little pervert that’s so richly deserving of her lip-curled disgust. In an especially memorable scene from season 2, she sends him to the bathroom and humiliates him to orgasm, safely solo behind the door.

This, to me, is sex. (How is it not?!) But it is not sex to everyone. “Succession,just let them f**k! Or don’t,” begged Vulture yesterday in a very handy timeline of the duo’s so-called “sexual tension.” But they have fucked. As I recently threaded about, the “consummation” of Gerri and Roman’s relationship has already happened (see above). Any other reading of the text not only misunderstands the diversity of human sexuality generally—and Roman’s in particular—but the driver behind audience interest in the fate of these star-crossed lovers.

The will-they-won’t-they is a pliant narrative device, its limits long stretched by sitcoms and soap operas. The longer the timeline of the will-they-won’t-they, the more likely we’ll need to revise what it is that we’re waiting for. We oblige the show’s writers as they knock down their psychosexual dominos, going from traditional sexual consummation, to the revelation of the relationship to friends and family, to a marriage proposal, to a successful walk down the aisle, to, often, the birth of children. Once one has been attained, we begin our anticipation of the next; sometimes there is backtracking, short-cuts, and dalliances; sometimes a relationship ends on one stage or another. 90s: Ross and Rachel on Friends, Maxine and Kyle on Living Single. 2000s: The L Word and Gilmore Girls, from what I hear (couldn’t get into it). 2010s: New Girl, Community. (There’s more, I don’t have to supply them for you, and quite frankly, I don’t feel like it.) From the 90s on, we even saw the introduction of the enlightened man-woman friendship, which had the very occasional “benefits” that neither damaged the relationship nor led to romantic attachment—Jerry and Elaine on Seinfeld, Frasier and Roz on Frasier.

It’s this will-they-won’t-they model, approximately, that people want to apply to Gerri and Roman. Now in season 3 of the series, we are impatiently waiting for them to hit the first milestone of a “real” relationship; that is, we are waiting for them to “fk” for “real.” But as I said, they have already fucked. What’s more, I think that their sexual interaction is not only fg because sex is, as it turns out, not something limited to PIV intercourse between a cis man and a cis woman of roughly similar ages (cool and not perverted if the man is older, though, of course)—it’s also fg because, as we know from watching Roman conduct his other sexual relationships, as it were, it is the only way that he can fk at the present moment.

So what’s keeping us interested? If they have already fucked, as I maintain they have, then what is it that we are waiting for? Why is it that Gerri and Roman’s relationship feels so drawn out, like it’s building toward something (besides more sex, of course)? Per my thread, two thoughts:

We enjoy Gerri and Roman because theirs is the most pleasureful sexual relationship on the show. Form aside, it's passionate, it's horny, it's romantic, and most important of all—it's consensual, a rarity in Succession’s distasteful history.

The will-they-won't-they is built around cultural mores like state-recognized legal commitment and childbearing, but in straight and mainstream culture, these are often conflated with emotional intimacy. What I am waiting for with Gerri and Roman, personally, is the speaking of that which has heretofore been unspoken, an exchange between them that isn’t couched in fantasy or dirty talk, but which makes explicit the genuine attraction, feeling, and horniness between them that isn’t cynical, two-faced, or prepared to betray itself. I don’t believe either of them, especially Roman, is capable of this, but I hope against hope, don’t I?

Speaking of the unspoken, in yesterday’s thread, I also touched on Roman as a sort of fool figure who speaks the truth in slant, cunning, and sometimes unconscious ways (I’m not the only one have referenced Shakespeare in this regard). This misreading of Succession’s most spicy entanglement is an excellent illustration of normative language’s limit when we talk about sex, romance, and desire (in English, anyway), which I’ve written toward before in my series on the transphobia of so-called “genital preference.”

So, the question before us is the same one that preoccupies the vicious little narcissists that have made Succession so popular: Will we, the audience, get what we want?

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), is now available for preorder!!!!

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Moviegoing is the the rare social event where you’re more likely to be communicating with noises than with words, a constraint that has a way of bringing the culture’s id into the theater with you, along with your popcorn and soda. How many times have you grimaced at a movie’s use of a fat, elderly, or disabled character as a punchline, while laughter echoed in the darkness around you? How many times have you gone indignant, or even felt a conspiratorial shame, at the inappropriate reactions erupting from other rows—snickers during a rape scene, sound effects during a drama’s doomed childbirth?

I can’t begrudge my fellow ticket-holders their natural responses, but that doesn’t mean I don’t notice them. Sitting in the many-scented velveteen of that artificial night, I often find myself wondering what this (albeit very tiny) sample size of people can tell me, through their reactions to the film, about what it means to be good or bad, funny or scary, pleasurable or worth walking out over. Truth is as much a matter of majority as anything else.

It was the audience at the Williamsburg Nitehawk where I watched Titane (2021)—director Julia Ducournau’s “extreme body horror” Palm d’Or-winner (or “the car-f****r movie,” as Jade calls it)—that shaped my own response to the film. I don’t think I would have hated it quite so much if I’d seen it at home, although had I done that, I would have probably turned it off long before the credits rolled.

But first, the plot: Titane follows Alexia, a woman with childhood car trauma and a TBI who at the age of 32 sort of randomly starts killing people before being redeemed by the love of Vincent, a manic pixie dream dad who has convinced himself that she is his long-lost teenage son, even though she’s actually an adult cis lady who is pregnant with the spawn of a Cadillac that she knew in the biblical way. Despite the perversity of its subject matter, which includes graphic depictions of objectum sexuality, brain surgery, homicide, and self-mutilation, there’s a tweeness, a cuteness, a conventionality in this ultimately uplifting story about a father’s unconditional love that saves his child from herself. He accepts her ugliness, her viciousness—she almost murders him, as she did the others—and most disturbing of all, her revelation as being someone other than his biological child.

It’s probably a little unsportsmanlike to review a movie you’ve only technically seen 80% of, but I’ve never covered my eyes that much in a movie before. What can I say? I’m squeamish. But I can attest that Titane has confirmed Ducournau’s reputation for violence, all but cemented by her first and previous feature, Raw (2016). But I want to be clear that the violence isn’t why I hated it. In fact, I’m very interested in the way Ducournau uses violence, especially gendered violence, to paint an abject picture of transness without any trans people. A pregnant woman pretends to be a teenage boy, dancing, binding, working as a first responder with his firefighter father. A pregnant woman shocks and appalls with her body, unruly in gestation, concupiscent for cars, completely willing to torture itself and others, sometimes to death.

Reviewers dwell on Ducourneau’s use of shock, horror, and disgust, and the positive ones frame her as a feminist transgressor of “gender,” among other things. I found both of her movies frustratingly boring, save for her tableaux of homosociality, in Titane’s case with a bunch of sexy young firemen dancing together in virile abandon. One review called it a “transgender parable,” going so far as to invoke Isabell Fall and thus betray a total misunderstanding of both texts. In resistance to patly saccharine takes like these, Jude Dry identifies Ducourneau’s use of these markers of transsexuality as “window dressing in [a] gory fable.” From Alexia’s disabling binding (couldn’t they have hired a transmasculine or butch consultant to make that look less shitty) to Vincent’s frantic self-injection of steroids because he’s “tired” (?), “Titane twists these milestones of transition — a beautiful and liberating experience for most trans people — making them painful and grotesque in service of its bent toward body horror.”

I recently watched of Color of Night (1994), the so-bad-it’s-good erotic thriller I wrote about a few days ago. Its transphobic plot is so convoluted that none of us who watched it, cis or trans, could figure out the birth assignment of the trans character playing villain and victim, though it was apparently “obvious” to the transphobic audiences of its time. Color of Night had no interest in humanizing us as trans people, or in appearing to humanize us, and for that, I’m grateful. It was honest, at least. Though Titane has an exponentially more sophisticated understanding of the trans phenomenon than its 90s forebears, watching it is far more unpleasant, and incidentally feels far more transphobic. The cis people who created Titane aren’t dreamers scratching at the unconscious, stretching their straight anxieties across trans people’s bodies, as was once the norm. Now that we have become text, become legible, we can be mounted upon the sticks of Representation while continuing to be visually conflated with violence, death, destruction, and disgust. They are in conversation with us without saying a damn word. The horrors of a woman cumming on a stickshift, of a chopstick jammed into a human ear, of a man stabbed through the kidneys with a rusty sword, of a pregnant belly splitting open to reveal glowing steel ring at the same emotional timbre as the suffering of breast and body binding, of looking “androgynous” while also being with child. There was apparently a scene where Vincent shaves Alexia’s face, but I can’t speak to that. I missed it because I went to the bathroom during the movie rather than after, because I’m afraid of public restrooms when other people are around.

The feeling of the, statistically speaking, predominantly cis audience reacting to Titane around me is what made it click: The screeches as a nose shattered on ceramic. The reflexive laughter as a father walks in on his naked teenage son, only to find him a pregnant adult woman. The oohs and ahhs when Vincent tells the revealed Alexia that he accepts her for who she is, in twisted mimicry of an after-school-special’s version of queer assimilation into the straight nuclear family. The smatter of applause when the lights went down. In Titane, I saw, the old revulsion and fear of bodies like mine has been cleverly metabolized into the horror version of the homophobic Freddie Mercury biopic. Liberals, am I right? (Though I would be eager to see Ducournau shoot a gay porn—whatever flavor, dealer’s choice—provided she promised to keep the gore to a minimum.)

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Read the earthquake room. Keep reading DAVID to find out when their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), is available for preorder.

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Any Twitter follower of Gretchen Felker-Martin knows that Art, with a capital A, is one of her favorite subjects. Hers is no idle interest. A trans woman writer and critic who explores and critiques the ins, outs, and limits of horror, gore, and deviance, Gretchen has become a lightning-rod for the ire of “think-of-the-children”-type censors of creativity and imagination. She’s tweeted and written at length about what she calls the “almost theme park guest mentality” of artistic consumers who feel entitled to “seamless and uniformly pleasurable experience from any art they purchase.” These are the people who feel victimized when they encounter art they do not like or understand, or find to be troubling, objectionable, abusive, or triggering—and who, for these reasons, wish to not only control that art’s availability, but remove it from the category of Art altogether (which matters to working artists like Gretchen because that which is designated Art—like that which is designated Human, Normal, Healthy, and Beautiful—enjoys certain legal and commercial protections).

Gretchen’s searing lucidity on this point is informed by personal experience and a knowledge of what happens to artists (as well as to humans) that don’t have these protections. Whether or not her trolls know it, they’re participating in a long and bloody history of efforts to delimit and control expressions of art, obscenity, and pornography, imbuing status on the former while censuring the latter two, moving the goalposts at warp-speed to suit their agendas. What is new, however, are the attacks on certain kinds of Art that employ a novel variation on that old “think-of-the-children” chestnut: the requirement of fulfilling a specific definition of “consent” for that Art to be not only “valid,” but safe, acceptable, and legal. Regarding this trigger-warning warring, Gretchen has remained consistent on a position with which I totally agree: Consent, she says, is the wrong framework for experiencing art.

As I quoted John Berger last week, “Valid art, in fact, because it derives from passionate, fairly simple convictions about life, is bound, in one sense, to be intolerant.” And to some, so it goes, intolerable. The pleasure and power of art is in its ability to inspire uncontrolled emotional responses, which no one, not even the artist themself, can predict. As someone who has been triggered by art in their time, I think this is great! Magnificent! My own triggering is, and I mean this in the least cynical and b****y sense I can muster, a personal problem. To see it as otherwise is to conflate the creation of art with the perpetration of harm, and unless someone’s got me tied up with my eyes stretched open, droog-style, how can this comparison ever honestly be made?

(Well, actually, there are plenty of examples that stress-test my framing of this situation—like the racist and anti-indigenous Sam Durant sculpture, Scaffold, recently revisited in Maggie Nelson’s new book—but we can’t have these conversations without also talking about power: of the artist and of the institutions that support them, of the communities in which the art is displayed, of the institutional and monetary value of the object d’art itself. This is especially the case if the solution to artistic “harm,” as many have pointed out before me, always seems to return to the same solutions: policing, incarceration, the engorgement of the state.)

While I wish no one distress, the “good/safe” vs. “bad/triggering” framing of art flattens the entire field, erasing affective responses from sublime euphoria all the way down to meh. Because, like, negative reactions to art are good! They allow you to learn what you like and don’t like, giving you a deeper appreciation of your own pleasures and disgusts, and a context for having the ability to assess art at all. What is Art without judgment? And what is Art, too, without the ability to contextualize it, to ascertain a knowledge of your own limits?

Just the other day, as I was literally laughing my way through My Lunches with Orson—Henry Jaglom’s collection of late-in-life interviews with the big man—on the E train, I was especially riveted by the chapter in which the two friends discussed Art and one’s taste for it. “I don’t believe, in literature, that anybody can have a taste so catholic that he genuinely likes Joyce and Eliot—and Céline,” says Orson over his plate of chicken salad and capers. “I think [Francis] Bacon is a great painter, but I hate his paintings…I believe that there is no law, and should be no law under the heavens that tells an artist what he ought to be.” (Speaking of Bacon, remember Berger's big Bacon about-face? So epic. Will plug every chance I get.)

To be sure, Welles, the great and prevaricating raconteur, goes on to contradict himself only a few moments later, but my point here is that these endless debates about what is and isn’t Art (debate being a nice way of describing the pile-ons and cancellation crusades conducted mostly online and mostly on people already marginalized by their identity) steal our attention from more pressing questions, like asking what art is or does. Of course, distraction is the point (though Gretchen does her best to keep us on topic. Subscribe to her Patreon!). Attempting to universalize the experience of Art along the lines of what is already conventionally understood as good, safe, normal, and moral in a literal white-supremacist patriarchy harms marginalized artists and also gets in the way of doing something about art that is actually harmful.

God, this series is expanding like proving dough. I have all these notes—Toni Morrison on art as disruption of social oppression, which “functions like a coma on the population”; Leo Tolstoy on art’s business as making “that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.” But we’ll have to get into that next week.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Read the earthquake room. Keep reading DAVID to find out when their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), is available for preorder.

Want advice? Email badgayadvice@gmail.com with your questions for a free 3-month subscription.

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What do you do with your fear? I won’t list all the things there are for us to be afraid of, because you already know them, from your intimate terrors, to our ambient nightmares, to that which doesn’t have anything to do with you personally, but nevertheless keeps you up at night. How do you live with it all? How do you live with yourself while living with it?

Sometimes I remember the things that used to scare me. Meditating on the former limits of my knowledge and imagination remind me that little about me has changed, or will change. I’m a blip, and even a blip can take heart in impermanence. The perspective is soothing.

Here is a list of what I was afraid of at 3, 4, and 5 years old:

Blue jays

Roosters

Geese

Our neighbors’ dogs

Green racer snakes

Needles

Tornadoes (from watching The Wizard of Oz [1939])

Eye contact

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Bathrooms

Electric fences

Most other children

Sundresses

My dad

I’m not afraid of most of these things anymore, certainly not in an active way (although a few weeks ago, I did get simultaneous tornado and flood warnings when Hurricane Ida breezed past Brooklyn). Even the fears that I’ve retained from back then—dogs and bathrooms, namely—have changed enough that they’re essentially different.

Unfortunately, among my many new fears is nihilism, the evil twin of this perspective exercise. What do I do with this fear? How do I live with it? Will let you know if I figure it out.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Read the earthquake room. Keep reading DAVID to find out when their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), is available for preorder.

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When the green-visored demon inside me starts crunching the numbers and shoving them under my nose, I can never resist for long. Sooner or later, the demon wins out, and I look. There I am, awake and alone at 2 am, reckoning with how much of my time and energy is spent creating content rather than creating art. I won’t relay the grisly data here—it’s simply too much.

Working at the commercial factory has paid my bills for years now, but I’ve always found ways to stay engaged with the real thing, managing to still feel like a participant in the culture, sometimes as a writer, but even if only as a reader, a watcher, a listener, a witness. But my day job has been very busy—digital birdcage liner can create itself, but for now it’s better when people do it—and my mental health not so good, and so, lately, it feels like that culture is happening without me. I’m no longer a front-row ticket-holder at the moviehouse, but a slavering stray fogging up the window of a steak joint. I want what they have, I think, scrolling through feeds clogged with book reviews, movies and TV shows, stage productions, features, primers, art installations. My tabs, numerous as spores, await me, untended (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) The ARCs Jenga on my nightstand. I rewatch the shows I watched last year, or twenty years ago. I subscribe to sites, newsletters, Patreons, and then let my subscriptions rot like fruit under a lonely tree.

A combination of overwhelm (like I said, work and brain and, oh yeah, everything else) and creative listlessness have left me thirsty for art, even if it’s everywhere, even if I live in New York City. Behind this thirst trails bitterness like a hangover, because capitalism, et. al., has made it so that I have to be operating at full cylinders under a very specific set of more or less ideal circumstances to live my life the way I would like to: reading and writing, every day, about things I want to read and write about. There’s this book about Casanova I’m trying to get off the ground, an essay about Michael Mann that’s been collecting dust, merch for GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY to be designed and promoted, so many books and projects—many of them by friends and colleagues—that I would like to review and maybe even write around.

I would prefer to always live within the wonderful focus that envelops you when you’re working on a project, that rare, miraculous, satiating certainty of artistic vision in which your conviction is so strong it becomes predestination. But if I can’t, as I suppose we all must, for me there is at least a silver lining: When I do not feel as if I have a creative purpose, I am more likely to consider the mechanism itself. What is art, and why do I do it? Does it matter, and if so, why? Most importantly of all, what can art do?

These questions occur to me anyway, of course. They are inextricable from the kind of artistic practice I want to have, and the side effects, I think, of artistic maturation if you came to art as individualistic escapism before recognizing its potential for something more, as I did. Does my art marry my politics, furthering a vision for, or even contributing to, a world in which there is more and better for the people? Or is it distinct from those politics (and if so, am I wasting time that could be spent on more and better, for the people)? Or does it, like visual artist Paul Chan has said of his anti/non-idpol work, disperse power, “…and so, in a way, the political project and the art project are sometimes in opposition?”

But in the absence of creative all-consumption, these questions feature more prominently in my day-to-day. Perhaps this is nature’s way of forcing me to be principled—by denying my pleasures. The god of the Old Testament strikes again.

How to bring about the meeting of pleasure, craft, and the political? How to find, create, or imbue meaning in the work that we do (so as to, perhaps, convince ourselves that it can be done in tandem with The Work—could even be considered The Work as such)? This is my preoccupation, anyway, and one that is shared by the artists I most admire. “All works of art within their immediate context are bound directly or indirectly to be weapons,” wrote Marxist artist and critic John Berger, the project of whose life was illuminating the ways in which art does, and can do, for liberation, “…only after a considerable passage of time, when the context has changed, can they be viewed objectively as objects d’art…Valid art, in fact, because it derives from passionate, fairly simple convictions about life, is bound, in one sense, to be intolerant.”

Of course, not everyone feels that way, which is interesting in and of itself. Studying these diversions to inform, if not construct, one’s own art practice is a pleasure in and of itself, and one of the fun parts about being an artist, I think. So, in the spirit of fun—god knows I need it—this DAVID series will be about art and why some of us do it. A project so insurmountable that I can take comfort in my insignificance, like a cliche under a night bright with stars. If you’re in a similar pit as I am, let’s relight our fires, remind ourselves why we’re here, keep that demon at bay. It’s not like we have anything else going on.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Read the earthquake room. Keep reading DAVID to find out when their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), is available for preorder.

Want advice? Email badgayadvice@gmail.com with your questions for a free 3-month subscription.

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The only good male dominant I’ve ever played with for free was a blond bisexual switch who kept company with beautiful fags of all birth assignments. Aaron was easy to talk to and easier to bottom to, especially considering that he was a white cis guy.

Maybe Aaron didn’t feel like he had anything to prove. In his late twenties, he was several years older than I, dating two gorgeous men, and one of the first people I ever played with who wasn’t also a beginner. Unlike me, he had known about and embraced his sexuality since childhood. His first perverted memory was from back in elementary school, when he got hard while wrapping himself up in an electrical cord. It was, he said with a smile acknowledging his joke’s corniness, like a lightbulb turning on.

Charmed, I started asking other players I knew about their kinky a-ha moment. Only a few years gay at that point, I was sick of other homos’ depressing coming out stories (not to mention my own); of that inevitable moment early in any new relationship with another queer person when you would have to revisit the self-loathing, the fear, the confusion, the betrayal of family and friends. While these coming-to-kink stories weren’t always positive—and many of them mirrored or appended queer and trans coming out stories, because there once was a time, not so long ago, when a perv was a perv all the way down the line—I hadn’t yet come to a political understanding of myself as a leatherdyke, so my burgeoning interest in getting beat up by hot people still felt distinct from my interest in gay sex. Newer to me, conceptually speaking, than sodomy, kinky felt like more of a nut to crack than gay, which felt like it had cracked me. In both cases, however, I was still preoccupied with my difference from my natal family and culture, still asking myself, Why am I like this?

I thought about Aaron while reading Leigh Cowart’s delightful Hurts So Good: The Science & Culture of Pain on Purpose. Early in the book—part science journalism and part ethnography, with a just taste of memoir—as they recount their formative experiences as a young dancer, Leigh poses that same question:

Did ballet make me a masochist? Or was I simply well suited to the grueling discipline of the art form because of something intrinsic to my core personality, the nebulous you-ness that becomes solid and nameable by kindergarten? (Two things can be true at once, and my guts tell me that the answer to both of these questions is yes.)

Unlike I was back when I was sleeping with Aaron, Leigh is not expecting a single answer to their question, an approach I understand now that I’m a mature gay person and, if I may be so bold, a student of pain.

But I am not a scholar of pain, a scientist of pain, or, like Leigh, a journalist of pain. Briskly interweaving history, biology, and reportage, Hurts showcases the expertise of not only doctors and scientists, but pain experts of all types—ballerinas, Muay Thai fighters, perverts, competitive pepper eaters, hook-suspension enthusiasts—resisting the medicalization of masochism and its associated sexual subcultures for a more holistic understanding of why and how “using pain for its own sake is an everyday part of being human,” as Leigh puts it (and has been since time immemorial across cultures all over the world). Combining what hard data we have available (though never without a critique of the many biases such studies tend to drag along with them), trawling strip malls, fairgrounds, and gyms, they’re able to ask, Why am I like this? without the constraints the search for a defining answer imposes. A masochist themself, Leigh seeks a better and broader understanding of masochism rather than a solution for it, in defiance of mainstream approaches to difference that are more interested in tracking down the “gay gene,” the trans disease, the black mental illness—thereby reinforcing the structures that birth and then destroy such difference—than they are with understanding the systems within with they exist. The critical but undoubtedly harm reductionist bent to Leigh’s survey of cutters, addicts, disordered eaters, Jesus freaks, pervs, perfectionists, and other masochistic types, and those who love them, put me at ease right away; while a part of Leigh’s agenda is expanding what we mean when we say masochist, I wonder that a non-masochist could have done it so well.

Such an approach undermines the pain/pleasure binary at the root. “It seems counterintuitive: although our experience of pain feels immediate and straightforward, it is nothing like flipping a switch,” writes Leigh. “What makes pain so interesting to study,” says one of their sources, neuroscientist Jans Foell, “is that pain itself is really one hundred percent subjective.” Like sex, the body, and desire, the experience of pain is circumstantial and contextual, making it a rich site of study for anyone who wants to know why from angles other than the ones in which we’re so violently inculcated. Though pleasure is not their explicit quarry here, Leigh’s exploded view of pain is an essential component of the excavation of pleasure for which we’re long overdue. In American culture, pleasure is inherently sexualized and viewed with suspicion, and yet even when we get away from the moralizing (and moral panics), we can’t agree about pleasure’s familiars, from consent and responsibility to risk and harm.

While I think Leigh’s project aligns with mine, what I probably won’t be able to do for you here on DAVID is provide a mini bio of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, or explain why male platypus venom is so dangerous, or recount the blackout-inducing suffering of standing en pointe, or explain how a nociceptor works, or walk you through the excruciating lows—and highs—of an ultramarathon. But Hurt does, and for that reason alone I recommend it. Courageous, diverting, and written with dark good humor, Leigh’s first book has left me looking forward to the next. Maybe that one will be about pleasure? We can only hope.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Read the earthquake room. Keep reading DAVID to find out when their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), is available for preorder.

Want advice? Email badgayadvice@gmail.com for a free 3-month subscription.

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Recently, a friend told me about having a vitamin deficiency that occasionally caused her heart to race for no reason. She re-enacted her confusion for me, hand over her breast in nonplussed pantomime. “Am I having a panic attack?” she would wonder, the sanguine mystery spasming under her fingers. Since starting some kind of supplement, her heart now behaves as it should.

Someone on Twitter recently linked me to the Wiki for misattribution of arousal, which is the process “whereby people make a mistake in assuming what is causing them to feel [sexually] aroused.” It’s a concept with which I’m acquainted, though I didn’t know it had a Wiki (a source we’ll be treating here as more or less unimpeachable because this newsletter is free). “The reason physiological symptoms may be attributed to incorrect stimuli,” the page goes on, “is because many stimuli have similar physiological symptoms such as increased blood pressure or shortness of breath.”

As people who do SM, we recognize intuitively that feelings like fear, shame, and physical suffering, in their physiological resemblance to sexual and other kinds of arousal, can be deliciously generative proxies for horniness. This is not because the latter is by definition more palatable than other, more negative affects, but rather because, in this imperfect world, pleasure is not always as accessible or as easy to define as we’re led to believe. (The pain/pleasure binary is fake. I’m always saying this.) We recognize too, perhaps also intuitively, the limitations of this concept of misattribution of arousal: How can desire be “incorrect?” How can it be said to be more or less real or authentic based on the conditions of its arrival? How can it be meaningfully studied with uninterrogated and undefined terms like “arousal,” “attractive,” “romantic,” “sexual,” and even “sex?” (By and on straight [very likely white] men, no less.) In this framework, desire is a tangible thing, a token of a specific shape that has a corresponding “correct” receptacle that can’t be jammed into any other receptacle unless you break it, prize it open, and shove it inside. (Hot.)

Readers of DAVID know that SM is my preferred metaphor, but in thinking about the limitations of desire as it’s conventionally understood, it doesn’t have to be. When I was in high school, my cross-country running team wore shirts that said Pain is weakness leaving the body. When we traveled for meets, I took careful note of the proto-masochist slogans worn by competing teams, stuff like Our sport is your sport’s punishment. In the hierarchy of high school athletics, our sport—underfunded, co-educational, low on the cooperative dynamic that makes watching teams so enjoyable for some people—hovered somewhere around tennis, just a few inches above Academic Decathlon. We defined ourselves more by our willingness to suffer than excellence or triumph or sportspersonship, finding the pleasureful emotional backwash of perversity, defiance, spite, and arrogance. The pleasure we took in our physical discomfort was not from the infamous runner’s high, but the recognition that as athletes we were, in a way, more than one flavor of loser. After all, only one person can win a race.

But back to SM. This newsletter reveals to me, over and again, that what distinguishes sadomasochism from everything else is not its bucking of sensory convention, but rather the communities and movements it tends to umbrella (for the past century or so, anyway). The “problem” with contemporary SM, or leather, is not that its violence is ambiguous or toxic, but rather that it creates spaces where marginal people build solidarity and sometimes even feel good. It accomplishes this by upending what we take for granted about desire, a project that we are trained to see as debased—even cringe—while accepting without a second thought the real debasement of a culture that finds genuine, reciprocal desire to be more frightening than random cruelty.

I did not always know this, of course. As a teen, I read Perez Hilton’s vicious little blog every single day. I regularly watched Cops and Intervention and other morally implicated reality shows, not bothered enough by the spectacle of others’ humiliation and pain to stop myself from being entertained by it. In the early aughts, I indulged with gleeful, morbid pity a series of short documentaries about objectum sexuality, whose subjects were people who fucked, fell in love with, and sometimes even married inanimate objects. It wasn’t the heterosexual relationships all around me, poisoned with patriarchy, infiltrated by the constraints of survival under capitalism, limited by cisheterosexist understandings of sexual pleasure, and leeched of solidarity that were perverted. No, no, the real freaks were the people taking earnest comfort and sexual pleasure in a car, a picket fence, the Eiffel Tower. They weren’t hurting anybody. Who f*g cares?

I am changing. Once one has begun to interrogate one’s desire and one’s cruelty—a process that can only be done in tandem, I think—one begins to see the shocking artifice of normative pleasure, and the way it so seamlessly circumscribes what it means to feel good, what it means to want. I was reminded of this by Robin Craig’s recent primer on the fetish, an introduction to the concept that is arguably the example par excellence of the misattribution of arousal.

In Freudian terms, fetishes are about object worship and, as much as I dislike the majority of Freud’s work, our cultural understanding of fetish is heavily derived from his writing. In his 1927 essay ‘Fetishism’, Freud describes how a fetish is an object that replaces the mother’s penis, writing that “the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and - for reasons familiar to us - does not want to give up.” Men f**k shoes, according to Freud, because they lean on their mother’s shoes when looking up her skirt and realising she does not have a penis, and therefore the shoe or foot becomes a manifestation of his protection from castration, a symbolic dick.

The fetish as a normative category of sexual object worship makes no room for nonsexual object worship; a broad, fluid, and dynamic erotics that can be both sexual and not sexual simultaneously; for even the difference between a shoe and a foot, as Robin points out—a massive distinction for fetishists, the sexual subgroup for whom specificity is absolutely key. One definition of the fetish I’ve heard floating around is that it’s the thing that you just can’t nut without. Whether and how this is distinct from people who can’t nut without a more normative kind stimulation remains unclear, for obvious reasons.

The sexual object, as Robin refers to the fetish, was until very recently a medicalized paraphilia because it was understood to be a misattribution of arousal born of Freud’s legacy of castration anxiety. Because a normal person (straight man) only gets hard because of a normal person (straight woman) in a normal situation (marital bed, appropriately sexualized environment, porno, street harassment, sexual assault), right? Tits, ass, pussy. Legs are more sketchy. Face, too.

Of course, assimilation into this framework—straight men aren’t the only people who want to f**k feet!—is not the goal. To be seen by Freud, or the medical establishment he represents, does us little more good than it does to be unseen by him. Reading Jules Gill-Peterson’s latest newsletter about Magnus Hirschfeld, the homosexual doctor most famous for founding the Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft in Weimar Berlin, I’m reminded that even the most pro-trans of medical establishment forebears approach us with an understanding of desire grounded in, as Jules describes Hirschfeld’s ethnological brand of sexology, “contemporary Anglo-American taxonomies of endless gender and sexual categories.” Even correctly attributed arousal is wrong.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Read the earthquake room. Keep reading DAVID to find out when their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), is available for preorder.

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We had not discussed fire in our extensive negotiations, but when the neoprene eye-piece was removed from my hood, the sadist was holding a lit candle. I froze.

I’m afraid of fire and don’t involve it in my scenes. Never have. Some children have to be told to stay away from matches, but my mom had to force me to learn how to light them on my own. It could have something to do with our apartment burning down when I was 6 or 7, but I don’t think so. That’s just the kind of kid I was: risk-averse, terrified of hurting myself. I’m still that way.

That evening, I was not supposed to say a word, but at the sight of the flame I almost broke scene. I don’t even like hot wax, even though it doesn’t hurt that much, or for very long. But I trust my sadist, so I overrode my natural response, famously a poor gauge of safety. They told me to listen, and watch the flame as they spoke.

The fire, the sadist said, was merely a symbol. A signal for my brain, for my prefrontal cortex, specifically. With their free hand, they pointed to the area of skull above my forehead, tapping gently. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that governs complex cognitive behavior, personality expression, and decision making, among other things. “No thinking tonight,” they said. Thinking gets in the way.

I’ve never been into hypnotism, though after “sissy hypno” entered mainstream consciousness via Andrea Long Chu and Torrey Peters and became a lightning-rod/synonym for transfeminine sexuality and desire, my interest was piqued. It’s an interesting avenue for the giving up of control, synthesizing as it does so many locations and sensations attributed to medicine, magic, and the liminal spaces between: the Freudian’s leather chair, the ominous exam room. For me it also evokes practitioners who are not-quite-medical professionals, alternative healers with muddled certifications who work out of dingy office spaces or hotel conference rooms. Whether your body worker presents as proof of their expertise an Ivy League PhD or the back of a cereal box, giving your body over to psychiatry, science, or something else is a surrendering, and never without danger.

But it is a calm surrendering, a sinking under the surface, as opposed to a baptism by fire, with which I’m far more comfortable, provided the heat isn’t literal. At a different time in my life, I would have found the whole candle thing to be silly—cringe, even. But as I now understand, SM incorporates ritual for a reason: It works. It hacks.

I have had the pleasure of writing about so many things—dyke drama, pop stars, IUDs, beautiful men, holy women—but I obviously have a soft spot for whatever it is that leather is, this bodyhack for pleasure and presence. What’s most interesting to me is its ineffability, and the challenge of encapsulating desire, fantasy, and feeling with mere words. It’s my hope that my second book, X, goes a little way in doing that. I can’t wait for you to read it! Until then, I wanted to share the cover with DAVID readers in advance of its “official” release.

Gives “soft opening” a whole new flavor, doesn’t it?

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Read the earthquake room. Keep reading DAVID to find out when X (Catapult, 2022) is available for preorder.

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Touch is tough, as old DAVID readers know. During a period where my tolerance for it was at its lowest, going to the barber for my monthly felt immensely conflicted. Because I both missed being touched and feared it, especially from someone I either didn’t know or didn’t know well, an already tense situation—I started getting barbered in a small town where none of the men cutting my hair were normal about it; for some reason this still affects me—became dramatically tenser.

Draped with black on the hydraulic chair, I felt like the centerpiece of a banquet in a 17th century Dutch still life, the cheese wheel to my tonsurist’s split artichoke, the two of us greasily spotlit and surrounded by brocade and brass, fruit and flowers, frozen in oleaginous silence; his face and elbows fading away into velvet, his straight razor always just on the verge of grazing my neck.

Because that was the tensest part. Over the course of the cut, the frisson of his fingers dotting my skull, bending my ears, and squaring my neck slowly gathered into an electrical charge behind this last moment of cleavage. The modern barber offers the straight razor as a little something extra, when the deliciously hot towel, steaming with eucalyptus, emerges from its box to cleanse and open and refresh. But back then, when the barber approached me as I was armless and bound to my chair, with cotton in one hand and steel in the other—Anubis and his scales—it felt like the end of the gauntlet, the final weapon one encounters before bursting into a clearing surrounded by enemies.

Fear is an entryway. Over time, going to the barber has become much more comfortable, and now the straight razor feels like the treat it’s supposed to be. It helps that I have learned to remind myself, in the rare moment of panic, that I have chosen to be there in that barber shop; that I made the appointment of my own volition; that I waited, arrived, and paid because I love having short hair. Cutting off my shoulder-length mane was the first thing I did to cleanse myself of straightness, executed unconsciously during a teenage blackout.

Last week, I had a scene with someone I hadn’t been with since before the pandemic. We sat in their living room chatting, catching up on our work and our partners, before negotiating our evening, which ended up being significantly different than it had in the past; my interests had changed a lot since 2019, a fact that caused me a great deal of anxiety leading up to our date. It was with unwitting profundity that my sadist, who I don’t know very well but trust very much, reassured me.

“I’ve only ever done what you wanted me to do,” they said. And they were right.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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In May of 2017, Charlotte Shane emailed to ask me if I was interested in publishing my first novel with TigerBee Press. A reader from back in the Tumblr days, I was astonished to have heard from her at all. Four years later, it’s safe to admit that no other indie publisher responded to my book pitch. (I mean, I get it.)

My girlfriend and I were on vacation. We had just left New York—my first visit to the city where I now live—and were in Chicago, another first. The email was surprising and thrilling and all of that. I had recently read the elusive N.B., a collection of Charlotte’s aughts-era writing about cruelty, kindness, loyalty, love, and money. As a former worker writing about people living lives like ours, I felt safe entrusting my book to Charlotte, who as N.B. and many other projects have demonstrated is an incredible (and criminally underrated) talent. I couldn’t have been happier that she chose me back.

But when I announced to my girlfriend that someone wanted my book (!), she ignored me. When I showed her the email, she looked at it and squeezed out a wan smile. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to take a shower.” And she did.

Though three years into our relationship I should have expected such a reaction from her—a dyke who located her strength in gelid emotionless (unless you counted anger, which she didn’t)—the resulting argument lasted until we got back to Berkeley. I didn’t leave her for another six months, and each one of them was miserable enough that I’ve since forgotten how much growth happened alongside that misery. As I wrote in my journal entry about Charlotte’s email:

i'm changing. i’m feeling differently. such a body, is mine, one that senses like a flower, like a hunted animal, like a touchscreen -- intense but inexact, aware but often wrong. it is difficult.

Here on DAVID, I’ve written a disproportionate amount about the earthquake room, which, fine; its personal significance is disproportionate. Or maybe not. A girl’s first book is a big deal. A girl’s second, even bigger! So I wanted to let you know that my next novel, X, will be available on June 28, 2022. Criss-cross your calendars. Here’s a brief description, in case you’re considering a pre-order.

X takes place in a New York City parallel to the one we know. In the midst of violent political purging, the government has begun encouraging the semi-voluntary “exporting” of undesirable citizens. It’s against this backdrop that Lee—dyke and sadomasochist—encounters someone who changes their life before disappearing, drawing Lee out of a post-breakup stupor and into the pursuit of pure, perverted pleasure. In homage to the queer and kinky noir of Schulman, Califia, and Delynn, Davis’s second novel follows Lee as they attempt to track down X before she exports and is gone forever.

Since I’m in a celebratory mood about it, and since DAVID has gained so many new followers recently, Bad Gay is indulging me with another book giveaway. Thinking about submitting a request for advice from an anonymous gay therapist who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth? Now’s your chance!

We’re giving away a copy apiece of Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends and Joss Lake’s Future Feeling to the first two people to email us at badgayadvice@gmail.com for advice (no, you don’t get to pick which). Plus, everyone who submits receives a free 3-month subscription to DAVID, which means they can access all the locked posts, like this scorcher about codependence, or this one, with special co-host, leather worker, and trans masq Frankie. While we welcome all writers and all problems (except for heterosexuality. That one’s on you.), Bad Gay asked me to remind you that short questions, easy questions, frivolous questions, weird questions, and stupid questions are all very welcome. Grist for the b***h, baby.

You’re hearing it here before I tell Twitter and Instagram, so get to writing.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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The reason why Showtime’s Billions can get masochism so right while getting BDSM so wrong is because masochism does not belong to BDSM.

That the show’s first episode opens with weird sex, setting a major theme for the rest of the series, was inevitable. Following Randian hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod (played by Damian Lewis, an uncannily appealing personification of the old Woll Smoth meme) and Chuck Rhoades, the US Attorney who loves to hate him (played with wolverine verve by Paul Giamatti), the show returns often to Rhoades’s sexual proclivities as a disgusting little pain slut. A powerful straight white man who channels his obsessive insecurities into sadomasochism is a trope worn smooth as old leather.

As with any Trump-era drama chronicling the lives of the obscenely wealthy, Billions is about power; I envision a sheet with holes cut out for eyes and mouth, animated into ghostliness by the money, sex, and liberal politics beneath it. The sex games, as they at one time would have been described, between Rhoades and his wife, Wendy—whose employment as corporate therapist to Axelrod underpins his hatred for the ginger fintech folk hero—are the kind of kinky that strives to shock, but not by breaking any new ground. Like I said, in a show like this one, this flavor of weird sex was inevitable. (If you want groundbreaking, go check out Succession’s ageplay arc. Spot-on, horny as f**k perfection.)

Billions’s weird sex was not only inevitable, but inevitably bad. The rope bondage is sloppy. Rhoades’ pain tolerance is incoherent (anyone who can take a cigarette burn isn’t scared of your tens unit). Wendy gives him a golden shower outside of a bathroom. At one point, frustrated with her husband’s distraction and wielding her puny little violet wand, Wendy says, “This makes cattle concentrate!” No, Wendy. Cattle prods make cattle concentrate.

In Rhoades, I see a masochistic personality type embodied by straight male (and often white) clients everywhere: an intimacy-averse control freak obsessed with rule-following, addicted to black-and-white thinking, and hungry for power in a way he’s too pussy to own. To differing degrees, I see these qualities in myself. As Rhoades’s sworn enemy, Axelrod is not his inverse—a sadist—but a control-freak of a different stripe. Axelrod wants total control over the highs. Rhoades wants total control over the lows. As the narrator of Venus in Furs opines: “The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.”

Masochistic types seek out BDSM as one of many ways to do masochism. BDSM is a receptacle, a structure, an MO, an outlet, or, if you let it, a place for community (tricks, in their capacity as tricks, can’t share in this community; one might as well say one is in community with other Walgreens shoppers). In the latter respect, masochism is an identity, but even for those of us who think of it that way, it’s not totalizing. In his daily life, Rhoades is far more sadistic than Axelrod is. Terms like “sadist” and “masochist” obscure the real power, and power relations, of both men who, as a glorified cop and a literal billionaire, come about as close as individuals can to running the f*g world.

The fantasy of powerlessness is just that, and anyone telling you otherwise has a bridge to sell you (if he’s not too busy suing you).

So why make this point, that masochism does not belong to BDSM? Because I think it bears repeating that desire and ethics are not the same. That identity and action are not the same. That interest in sensation, patronage of sex workers, and a commitment to suffering does not a leatherperson make.

At some point during Brooklyn’s first leatherdyke picnic, organized a few weeks ago by Daemonumx and Jade, someone stood up and, speaking to everyone in earshot, said, “God, this is good. This feel so good.”

I didn’t know that person, or most of the people in attendance. What I had anticipated would be a small get-together—a half-dozen huddle on Nellie’s Lawn in Prospect Park—ballooned to at least 50 dykes talking, flirting, cruising, eating, sharing, and peeling off to piss in the trees over the course of six hours. It was wonderful. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt that good in a gathering of that kind. That it happened after over a year of isolation on a bright summer day only made it feel more like a dream.

I was struck by how diverse we were. Cis and trans, black and brown and white, boy dykes and girl dykes, and other kinds of dykes, too. Dykes of all body types and experience levels and interests. Dykes who bussed in from Philly and drove down from Boston for the day. Dykes who were workers and dykes who were civilians. Dykes in head-to-toe leather, dykes topless, dykes in matching outfits, dykes in street clothes. Dyke Daddies and dyke Mommies and dyke littles. Dyke fags and dyke b*s. Dykes flagging with hankies, fingernails, and other things, all there together because of leather—a desire that both transcends and centers the fk. Bottoms, tops, we all hate cops.

Masochism does not belong to BDSM. But you can belong to leather, if you want.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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Until I started HRT, I put on at least one item of clothing backwards or inside-out most days of the week. I usually caught it before I walked out the door. Despite its frequency, I didn’t really notice this pattern until it began to fade, not long after I began the boy juice.

Now it happens so rarely that when it does, I take notice, like this morning, when I put on my shirt both backwards and inside-out. Was it because I’d simply been rushing? Or have I been distracted lately, not making the effort to stay present? When I left Jade’s apartment for the train, instead of putting in my headphones, I did the 54321 grounding technique. There was the sight of a Puerto Rican flag, the sensation of the sun on my face, the sound of a bus breaking on Nassau, the scent of wilting roses, the taste of nothing.

I first learned about grounding techniques during the press junket for How The Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) in People magazine: After Jim Carrey kept having panic attacks in his costume and prostheses, which took 8 hours to get into, an ex-Marine was hired to teach him to tolerate his claustrophobia by counting his fingers over and over again. I can’t find that article now, but a more recent one with so-called “fun facts” says that it was CIA agents who were hired, only their “distraction tactics” were “eat everything you see,” “smoke as much as you possibly can,” and “punch yourself in the leg.” I suppose it’s heartening, how little our American war criminals know about withstanding their own torture practices. I wonder how much they charged.

I learned the 54321 technique when I attempted to do EMDR for the first time in my late twenties. Sunk into the brown leather couch in the chilly Berkeley office, stressed out by the blanket the therapist instructed me to cover myself with (germs, etc.), weeping as I fought to regulate, a concept which I had only just learned about in The Body Keeps The Score. The weeks went by, and we never got any closer to actually doing the EMDR—I could never settle enough. Two months in, the therapist told me she couldn’t help me.

“You’ve managed to fully objectify yourself,” she said. I didn’t know what to do with that, or how to fix it. Occasionally she wouldn’t let me leave our weekly session on time because I wasn’t yet “grounded,” and she was worried about my safety (why, I didn’t know). What I did know was that I resented her gentle efforts to prevent me from using my own distraction tactics, most of them variations on “punch yourself in the leg.” She was the first medical professional I had ever expressed hostility toward directly and honestly, which I didn’t understand, because unlike the many bad medical professionals I’ve encountered, she hadn’t done anything other than ask me to do things like speak about myself, count aloud, remember, be present. But I couldn’t help but be furious, any more than I could prevent myself from crying, shivering, chattering, or vomiting during and after our sessions.

It’s different now, of course. I can do 54321 whenever I want, and I do. It helps.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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Read Part 1.

I wanted to open this entry with an engaging, maybe even titillating, example of the use of mind-controlling drugs. Like, the obvious choice would be MKUltra, right? The CIA project that dosed psychoactives like LSD to nonconsenting test subjects because the feds wanted to figure out how to manipulate Soviet (not to mention American) spies? (While these test subjects were often marginalized people, like prisoners, mental patients, and sex workers, they were also CIA employees and other government agents, some of whom were blackmailed into cooperation. Nobody was safe!) Titillating stuff, but fairly well-known at this point.

I soon realized that limiting the definition of “mind-controlling drug” to clear-cut situations like MKUltra was kind of tricky. For example, when the Spanish colonized South America in the 16th century, they forced enslaved Incan people to more efficiently mine gold by ingesting coca—a sacred plant prized for reducing hunger, thirst, and fatigue, not unlike a piping-hot cup of coffee. This isn’t the same kind of mind control that the CIA created MKUltra to implement, but it is the use of a chemical substance, in tandem with other kinds of coercion, to control human behavior. Those enslaved Incans weren’t golems or zombies—the latter modern monster originating as a powerful metaphor for colonialist slavery—but their body/minds were not entirely theirs, and the substances they were forced to use were a part of this manipulation.

The more I thought about it, the more clear it became that “mind-controlling drugs” resists easy definition; like I said last week, drugs and drug use are contextual, and in the context of “mind control” (as in others), not even coercion is cut and dried. Conspiracy theories about chemicals modifying our mind/bodies to make us more easy to subjugate abound, and we must wonder what fears surrounding water fluoridation, chips in our vaccines, and so-called ROGD can tell us—as well as why the combined neglect + straightup psyop s**t behind phenomena like the crack and opioid epidemics doesn’t garner the same timbre of interest.

This wouldn’t be a DAVID entry if I didn’t suggest SM as one means of conceptualizing the slippage between drug and hack, control and freedom, consent and coercion. Like power exchange, and sexuality more generally, “mind-controlling drugs” exist in contexts wherein coercion and consent are not always easy to parse out. We choose to take drugs, are “driven to” drugs, escape by drugs. Drugs are pushed, available, ambient. As chemicals, hormones, and assorted synthetic substances, drugs are leeching into the water, injected into the meat, writhing in the microplastics. In their omnipresence, examining them inevitably lands you at one of the many intersections of power and desire.

“I started thinking back to those moments when chemical highs can switch the way you understand and relate to the world, and the political changes that can produce,” says Huw Lemmey in an i-D interview regarding his gorgeous novel, Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell. “When I started the book I was having a conversation with a friend about what he called ‘the psychotropic edge’—whether stuff like the second summer of love (in 1988/89) really disarmed the burgeoning hooligan movement's alliance with the far right in England through the massive introduction of ecstasy into working-class culture.”

Set in London shortly after the UK’s 2015 general election, Red Tory follows Tom Buckle, a white gay Labour careerist whose ambitions are threatened by his newfound enthusiasm for chemsex parties. After an encounter with Otto, a German anarchist, fizzles before it can spark, Tom is turned on to a mysterious hallucinogenic during one of his benders. As his night life takes more and more precedence over his straight life, Tom vacillates between his colleagues on the center-right and his potential comrades on the far left, pushed and pulled by the tension between his current political commitments and his nascent appetites for pleasure, connection, and solidarity.

This mystery drug is, of course, too good to be true. After catching wind of a leftist plot to reproduce the summer-of-love phenomenon with Love Drug 3.0, right-wing militants have developed a plan to capture the leftist formula and manufacture their own party drug, one that will inspire its users not to open their minds, but to close them. As one of their fascist scientists explains, “Where the Cultural Marxists use this drug to stimulate an uncontrollable political consciousness…we will chemically restore the natural family balance, and in turn create great hallucinogenic visions of the pure ethno-state!”

Not that Tom is aware of these insurgencies, at least at first, though as he watches his dealer take a snort of the fascist formula, we’re provided with unmistakable foreshadowing: In the dealer’s eyes, Tom sees “a furious and passionate anger, and something modern, a speed and excitement…diesel trains bursting into light from a darkened tunnel, men in hi-viz sorting men from women and children, a single spot-light scanning from a rocket destroyer across 100 miles of blood-black sea.” Unlike the anti-fascist Otto, who fights neoliberal numbness with direct action (“The city could bruise so hard that a dignified retreat to anesthesia seemed a strategic defense.”), Tom’s already-incoherent sense of self disintegrates as the fashy drug’s hallucinations creep into a political reality that is increasingly chaotic and violent. Overwhelmed by the pressures of centrism (hypocrisy is thirsty work), Tom returns evermore to that blood-black sea; to the hallucinogenic fantasies of Roman centurions and porcine politicians; to the narcotic sensations of bottom as specimen, victim, dinner, hole. All that stands between him and doom is the cautious regard of a sexy anarchist.

Will Tom be brought to our side, or will he be absorbed into the increasingly right-wing “progressive” party of his childhood dreams? Heart or mind? Or put another way, body or mind? The fascists’ chemical warfare co-opted the formerly liberatory trajectory of the “drug-addled” gays because they knew the revolutionary effects it can inspire. “The more sex [Tom] had, the more distant he felt from the Party, from the centrist daddies who had been leading his hand—the closer he felt to the boys, to the binmen, to the shifting lights at night, the halos.” With its drug orgies, Red Tory offers a fictional riffing on the sexual solidarity of Samuel Delaney’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue; as Chip writes, “Given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.”

At times literary, contemporary, spy thriller-y, and psychedelic (I mean this in the best way), the preponderance of Lemmey’s writerly flexing is in the f**k. With the exception of one of Tom’s final hallucinations on a beach—my favorite scene, I think, in terms of Lemmey’s transportive virtuosity—his chemsex fugues are lurid, feverishly lucid, vivacious “political pornography,” as some of Lemmey’s reviewers dub it.

Indeed, were Tom Buckle f*g women rather than men—and more specifically, conceiving of this behavior as indicative of a stable personal and political identity—this would obviously be a very different kind of novel. Red Tory’s difference is in its gayness, but just as gay sex is different than normal sex, so does Lemmey recognize chemsex as different from normal sex. (Grace Lavery: “Str8 thought, recoiling against the erotic drive, attempts to split desire into different kinds; it understands queerness as a kind of desire rather than as a coalitional politics founded on the fact of desire as a prohibited social condition.”) Tom’s political journey embodies the tension between leftist and assimilationist gays, the latter of whom understand chemsex as self-harming, as “recklessness,” as one character puts it. “What was missing from our lives that drove us to this?” ponders Tom. “Were we risking our health? Losing our souls?” Losing, too, the ability to prove to straight people that he, as a gay man, is as “normal” and “deserving” as they.

While Tom and Otto ultimately decide that the leftist hallucinogenic drug, known as MMT, is the medicine the system needs, I wonder if Red Tory suggests that any pleasureful drug, even the mind-controlling sort, is its own entryway to revolution; that it’s a specifically fascistic mistake to assume that pleasure can be harnessed. (Sontag: “Fascist aesthetics is based on the containment of vital forces; movements are confined, held tight, held in.”) Even when ignoring the laws they create to regulate drugs, liberals see their use, for decadence or liberation, as temporary—a conception that better approximates the chemsexual’s binge/purge cycle than the moderate’s legal/illegal framework. It’s through this back door, as it were, that Tom arrives at the counter-erotics that many believe antifascism requires.

Pleasure, or the question of it, burns at the core of Red Tory, and little is left to the imagination—Lemmey has the capacity to do that for us, a rare skill indeed. “I like sexual politics that are actually about sex,” he says in that i-D interview. “You know, touching each other, for better or worse, for harder or tender, because that sort of sexual politics gets sloppy and fluid fast.” Some of Sophie Lewis’s post-COVID writing resonates on this same level: “The denial of pleasure to populations is a grave historic harm, and the denial by some leftists of the centrality of pleasure to liberation struggles is a correspondingly serious error.” Lemmey conjures chemsex as a component of this anticapitalist strategy, in an outlandish and often dreamlike narrative that is layered with enough suffering, confusion, fear, and trauma to feel real. I was reminded of Ariane Cruz’s pleasure theory, in which the “unspeakable pleasures” “of black abjection, the perverse contemporaneity of pleasure and pain…make visible the simultaneity of pleasure and anti-black violence.”

In Red Tory, if not elsewhere, “mind-control” becomes a contradiction in terms. The mind/body’s unruliness can be unleashed with drugs—that is, pleasure—but never completely dominated by them.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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Hi Bad Gay,

Basically my issue is a common one: different levels of sexual interest and different traumas knocking nasties in a relationship. But of course it has its own particular complications and I need help sorting it all out.

My partner and I have been together for more than a few years now and also were close before we started dating. When we started moving to a more romantic situation, she had made it known that she felt very alienated from her body and wasn't sure she could be in a sexual relationship. I told her I wouldn't hold any sexual expectations. We were and still are non-monogamous and this gave me the sense that I didn't need one partner to satisfy all my needs, something I still believe.

Then early on in our romantic relationship and to my surprise, she initiated sex and this started a period of us having a lot of sex. We had both left relationships where we felt undervalued and unattractive, and I think our mutual excitement about falling for each other prompted that winter when we would spend days in bed f*g or wake up in the middle of the night to fk. She told me I was the first person to make her cum and I naively and arrogantly thought we (I, the knight in a shining black glove) had overcome all the bad associations she had with sex prior.

Those early relationship endorphins have since dissipated, and over the years my partner has become more and more withdrawn from sex. We've talked about it many times, and usually the conversation ends with my partner saying the problem is she doesn't feel attractive and brushing away my statements of desire for her. I know there is also a lot of unprocessed shame around her sexuality and body and though she was in therapy for several years, she has told me she never talked about sex and rarely about her relationship to her body. She is a queer cis woman, who hates being called femme, from a repressive religious family with lots of trauma, and I’m a they/them dyke dude from a repressive “broken” family with lots of trauma. I mention this to say not only are we both messed up (who isn’t), but that there’s a gender dynamic at play.

I have tried to come to terms with us simply not being sexual partners but remaining romantic partners. To me, this is an acknowledgement of my initial commitment to her (no expectations of sex) and also just the fact I want to be with her and I like being her partner. We are a really good little team together and I love being her companion in the world and we do have a ton of physical intimacy. But then, once every ~6 months, she initiates sex. And each time, I think, Wow, we might start doing this again. Though when I bring it up after to see if it's something she'd like to do more or do differently, she usually responds, "I don't know." She fully acknowledges the frustrations of being met with this ambivalence and she seems frustrated as well. More often we masturbate separately, sometimes next to each other but without engaging each other. I almost wish we just had a cut and dry non-sexual relationship if the alternative is this rare and rather random occurrence of sexual contact. Because they seem random to me, I don’t even have a chance to really feel good about it, i.e. I’m neither seduced nor acknowledged as seductive.

This is maybe my major difficulty, that not having sex also goes along with me feeling completely de-sexualized and infantilized (I am cuddly but not sexy). While I could accept not having a sexual relationship, it's hard for me to confront the idea of being with someone who doesn't find me attractive. I also think it’s getting to me that we don’t even make out. She assures me she does find me attractive and that she feels terrible that while I helped her at one point feel good about her body, she is incapable of doing the same for me. The infantilization according to her is a defense mechanism. As somebody who was once “daddy” to her in the bedroom, it’s hard to not feel demoted.

For most of our relationship I have navigated our differing orientations to sex by being with other people. This was an ongoing negotiation between us, as she hasn’t really dated anyone besides one long-distance flame (a mostly non-sexual relationship), while I have had several casual and one more seriously romantic relationship (this was very painful for her and ended over an impasse). Over the last year, though, I haven’t had sex with anyone. Tensions are also strained because we usually live separately but did lockdown together and I feel like my masturbation life has been disrupted. Maybe this will all seem less bad than it does right now when people feel comfortable dating again. But I also worry that no matter how much sex I have with other people, there will still be this feeling of alternating rejection and confusion with my partner.

How can I come to terms with the fact that she seems sometimes to want to scratch an itch with me but doesn’t think of me as a fully sexual adult person because she doesn’t seem to see herself that way? I think there is also some shame on both our parts that I am seeking sex outside the relationship. How might we create a reciprocal relationship where both people, despite different inclinations to sex, are sexually fulfilled? Should I ask for clarity in the form of taking sex off the table between us for the near future until we work out our issues?

Sincerely,

Long Gone Daddy

My dear Long Gone Daddy,

There is a tendency, I think, for us to hold these relational complications in our hands like a Rubik's Cube or a million-piece puzzle, thinking to ourselves, “All of the pieces are here. Why, after turning it over and over in my hands, sorting and organizing all of these pieces, can I not make this all fit together in a way that feels satisfying to me?”

The idea that pulling all of the right levers in the relationship (whether monogamous or not) will suddenly, like a mad scientist's experiment, result in a day where everyone feels fulfilled, sexually satisfied, and happy is misguided. This striving can cause you to lose sight of what is happening, and by that I mean that this letter, this constant re-adjusting, this “a little bit of this, little bit of that” recipe-testing, is the relationship.

And I say that without judgement, if you can believe that. You are here, this is the relationship you are in. The withholding and the closeness, the “knight in a shining black glove” to the sex every 6 months, to the hurt and pain navigated as you figure out what style of non-monogamy works best for you as a couple. The come here, come here, yes I am attracted to you but know I don’t want to f**k intermittent reinforcement schedule is it. This is who you and she are, for better or worse.

This is a relational dynamic, not a her problem or a you problem. The hard part of relational problems is that though they are co-created, they sometimes cannot be unwound in collaboration. Sometimes one person says, “Oh, THIS is my limit and not how I want my life to be and I have lots of evidence that it won’t change, so I have to make a change.”

Let me pause here and say that one of the ways to look at a relational conflict is to imagine it like this: Instead of sitting across the table from each other with something between us (a problem or dynamic that needs working on), what if we sat on the same side of the table and worked through it together? What if it wasn’t just you doing the puzzle, but rather both of you. Is this an incompatibility or is this an opportunity to really work through something as a team? This letter doesn’t make it clear to me whether you know what kind of problem you have here, but I think it is worth asking yourself.

Here’s my other thing, and this is perhaps a less-trusting read of her issues (as described by you) than she deserves, but what the hell—you deserve to be wanted, like really f*g wanted, by the person you love. And I’m not saying she has to be sexually available to you. I'm saying in a relationship it feels good to have someone you love, who you are sexually interested in, be sexually interested in you, and show you that. That’s really an OK want/need/feeling to have within the bounds of respectful and thoughtful sexual dynamics. You would do well to find your Daddy mode (a place you seem to like yourself in) and ask yourself, “How do I want to feel in relation to this very important person in my life?” You are a sexual adult. You should not have to convince anyone of this, especially not your long-term partner.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with different levels of sexual desire. There are PLENTY of relationships where one person is hornier than the other and people figure that out every day. The thing to watch out for here is your partner’s dip into “I’m soooooo sorry I’m the woooooorst, you deserve better.” That’s immature. It has smol energy. Very I’m an adult with agency but that’s hard so I’m going to just apologize and stay the same instead of thinking concretely about how to meet my partner’s needs energy. Instead, imagine a world where she says, “Listen, Daddy, our sexual drives are different and we love each other. Let’s problem-solve and make it hot,” instead of moping.

The question becomes, are you going to take it or leave it? I deduce from this letter that you are fairly good at communicating with each other. Though I will say all the Bad Gay RED FLAG sirens are absolutely blaring at the phrase you used earlier in the letter, “knocking nasties,” which perhaps reveals more than you meant to about your relationship to sex and bodies. The other one I pursed my lips at was that your partner has been in therapy for “several years” but has “never talked about sex and rarely about her relationship to her body.”

BUT I have decided to give you both the benefit of the doubt that you are reasonable and loving and doing your best because I’ve been absent for a little while and it is Pride after all (please someone write a letter about the babies being upset about Kink At Pride so I can really let loose?). So here is what you need to ask yourself: Are you ok with all this? Can you (now that we can cautiously re-emerge into the sexual world) be ok with getting your sexual needs met with just other folks? (It sounds like no.) Can you enjoy the every six months for what it is and feel good about the partnership in other ways? (It sounds like you feel really like you are squashing a part of yourself in order to stay in this relationship but, ok, do you.) Can you get yourself a nice hobby that makes you feel good and sexy and cool and strong and look within for some bits of that fulfillment rather than waiting for her sexual sun to shine on you?

As always, I can’t answer that for you but, as I always ask my dear readers—what is your commitment to suffering? You want what you want and you deserve it, but you cannot talk your way into her behavior shift. To answer one of your specific questions: You don’t want to take sex with her off the table, so don’t offer that, and don’t play “chicken” in relationships; that way lies madness. The only behavior you can shift is your own, at the end of the day. You can feel heard by another person, you can feel loved by another person, but if that other person isn’t interested in shifting the behavior, or in this case maybe just can’t, then I don’t know what to tell you, Daddy. It’s your life, do you want.

You seem to want to make it work, so it’s time to put all the puzzle pieces one the table, sit down next to each other, and work through them together. Be honest about the things that make you sad, mad, and hurt. Don’t forget to check in with your body, and listen to her a little less and you a little more. The way this relationship is, is your relationship—are you ok with that?

Sincerely,

Bad Gay

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David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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As a Northern Californian, calling myself a pothead would be akin to stolen valor, but I do like to get high, and have ever since my first boyfriend bumped into my stepdad while buying me a piece at the only head shop in town, thus majorly blowing up my spot. But it occurred to me only very recently that a significant aspect of this pleasure—the pleasure of getting high—has to do with choice: By smoking, dropping, or snorting, I am choosing to change how I feel, sometimes almost instantly.

Sorry if this was already obvious to you, but, like, wow! The knowledge that I can interrupt or even end my thinking day whenever I want to feels good, almost as good as the chemicals that can energize or relax or disappear me. Now in my thirties, my standard 6pm edible represents, on some level, a clocking out of my salaried job, an act which due to white-collar American work norms doesn’t exactly exist. Everything after this point will be smudged, fuzzy, dull, gentle, creative, open, hilarious. Even if my boss Slacks me at 10pm asking for something, the quality of work I provide him will be subpar. This isn’t Don Draper’s all-day alcoholic buzz, or an “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere!” letting down of the proverbial hair. It’s an intentional depreciation of one’s own labor power, since one can’t totally demur without losing one’s job. Workplace sabotage is another story—this is passive aggression.

While not all of them are as adaptable to a 9-5 straight job as caffeine or even oui’d, the pleasure of any drug is not limited to a nonfunctional understanding of fun, because I’m starting to suspect that recreational drug use cannot be distinguished from functional drug use. Caffeine helps me do my jobs better (or at least makes doing them more psychically bearable), but I also enjoy the taste of coffee, and the smooth speed with which it stimulates my mind and boosts my mood. Other substances permit me to move beyond my shyness in social situations, or to stay awake late enough to socialize at nightclubs and bars, or to experience the world in different colors than I normally would.

I guess what I’m saying is that the reasons to become intoxicated are neither simple nor single, but getting to decide just how present I will be for the next 1-5 hours is one that I heretofore overlooked. The technology of the drug is not only about working better or feeling better, but having a say in how I work and feel (two things which, unfortunately, I cannot opt out of I want to continue living as I do). As important as it is to reiterate that “curing” addiction is not a matter of discipline, the pleasure of having control over one’s feelings tends to get lost in the necessary but tricky counter-narrative of addiction as something that no one chooses, or indeed can choose at all. Drugs serve as a regulation hack in a world littered not just with opportunities to be traumatized, but retraumatized by past trauma. Not everyone has the luxury of choosing whether drugs, some of them criminalized or habit-forming, are their best bet at self-regulation.

We know that drugs are consumed individually and collectively in that one’s choice to partake happens within a broader context of access, regulation, and criminalization. These choices are complicated by discourses of risk, ethics, and desire, among other things. A white person smokes a cigarette differently than a person of color smokes a cigarette, and our laws reflect/reinforce this; a white person undertakes to break the law by using illegal drugs differently than a person of color, and our laws reflect/reinforce this. What constitutes even a “drug” versus a substance, pleasure, or tool changes depending on who you are, where you live, how much money you have, whether or not you’re pregnant or have children, whether you’re disabled, whether you’ve been incarcerated, and whether and how that substance is also being used by white people as a group.

The mechanisms that influence whether we do or don’t do drugs—that is, mind/body-altering substances, although as “California sobriety” reveals, this is not a static or universal category—are manifold, extending beyond pleasure, physical dependency, and political rhetoric like “peer pressure.” Whether your drug use helps you to become a better subject under capital matters, too, because being a good subject is safer and more comfortable. A handy example might be Weimar Germany’s culture of permissive and easy drug use being eclipsed by Nazi propaganda in the 1930s promoting fascist ideals of health, beauty, and citizenship. But this shift didn’t result in a regime of wellness-cultivating teetotalers: By the end of the decade, “pharmaceutical production had pivoted away from opioids and cocaine and towards synthetic stimulants that could be produced entirely within Germany, per Nazi directive. The transition from cabaret cocaine to over-the-counter meth helped fuel what German journalist Norman Ohler in his new book Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich calls the ‘developing performance society’ of the early Nazi era, and primed Germany for the war to come.”

Drugs are contextual, is what I’m saying, which isn’t an original observation. But here in the 21st century—"post"-drug war and post-DARE and in the midst of the American opioid crisis, the legalization of marijuana, the increasing danger of party and street drugs, the lack of a health care system, the revisiting of criminalized drugs like ketamine as potential medical treatments, and moral panics about who is putting what chemicals in their body for what reason—what is that context, exactly?

It’s a big subject that can’t be covered in a few essays, but I’d like to scratch the surface over the next couple of DAVIDs. Luckily for me, there’s so much to draw from, from trans writers theorizing technologies of dissociation, queer writers exploring the overlap between political and sexual desires, and trans and queer artists and activists organizing and agitating for more rights and better services for drug users who are marginalized by criminalization, among other things.

I’ll close with a Foucault quote I found in Hannah Baer’s Trans Girl Suicide Museum, a book that is, among other things, a meditation on ketamine as a mediation of trans experience. (You can watch the interview here.)

“Deep down, what is the experience of drugs, if not this: to erase limits, to reject divisions, to put away all prohibitions, and then to ask oneself the question, what has become of knowledge? Do we then know something altogether other? Can we still know what we knew before the experience of drugs? Is this knowledge of before drugs still valid, or is it a new knowledge? This is a real problem and I think that in this measure the experience of drugs isn’t original in our society, it’s not a sort of little deviance that does not count. It seems to me that it is at the very heart of problems that the society in which we live—that is to say, in capitalist society—is confronted with.”

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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What do you know about St. Helena, the island that Darwin described as a “huge black castle” rising to meet him from the South Atlantic? While I’ve been aware of it since I was a kid (it’s where Napoleon was exiled; his tomb is the British Overseas Territory’s calling card), I can’t stop thinking about it lately. At more than thousand miles from anywhere, it’s just so remote. Go ahead and Google it. I’ll wait.

It’s not just that it’s remote—it’s also claustrophobically tiny. Maybe I just feel that way because I was born among a couple million acres of cropland in one of the biggest states of one of the biggest countries in the world. As a runner of 20 years, I tend to think of physical space in terms of workouts: It would take a strong middle-distance athlete 90 minutes to run between St. Helena’s southwestern and northeastern tips, as the crow flies. Sure, it’s an ex-volcano, so you’ve got to factor in the 2,600 foot climb, but still, an ultra-marathoner would eat that s**t for breakfast—an international but heavily British-inflected cuisine that on St. Helena might be served with the 8th most expensive coffee in the world, a washed Arabica.

Even with more than one DAVID entry in the chamber, I can’t get this island off my mind long enough to focus. I don’t spend more than a minute or two on my drafts before drifting back its Wikipedia page, hunting for points of reference. Most Saints, as inhabitants are called, have nicknames because there are so few surnames on the island! The population of roughly 5,000 are descended from British colonizers, Indian and African enslaved people, and Chinese laborers brought to supplement the workforce in the 19th century!

When I discovered that St. Helena—the home of Jonathan the tortoise, the world’s oldest living land animal!—is roughly the size of Brooklyn, I had to go lie down.

I wrote a while ago that I don’t experience writer’s block, but I do get burned out. I’m only human, after all. What with New York’s reopening and the ever-controversial Pride month—which, regardless of your feelings about it, comes with plenty to do—the distractions are everywhere. I’m going to museums and beaches, making plans to visit my gay family, rekindling leather relationships, organizing orgies. My mental docket for DAVID is loaded with upcoming newsletters: dissociation as a trans technology, mind-controlling drugs, Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, not to mention a scrum of new Davids. A year-and-a-half into this experiment, I have more than enough material, but I’m running low on juice. The body is willing, the spirit is spent, etc. As much as I want to dive into the next thing, I can’t shake St. Helena. Appropriately enough, it feels like my Waterloo.

This is not a warning, just an excuse. The DAVIDs will keep coming as long as you’ll have them, and they’ll maintain the weekly schedule I’ve imposed on myself. But operating on the assumption that you’re just as sick of me as I am, there may be some space in between, just to give us all a chance to rest. A little goes a long way.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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Read Part 1. Read Part 2.

With June only a few weeks hence, kink at Pride discourse is peaking like the rusty tail car on an ancient roller coaster: We know the drop is coming, but no amount of preparation can save us from the whiplash.

Today’s DAVID isn’t about all of that, both because it’s readily available (we’ve been having variations on this respectability argument since before the brick was thrown), and because I’m optimistic that if you’re here with me now, you don’t need convincing. Which isn’t to say that it’s not worth asking why we need to be protected from so-called public so-called displays of so-called kink by the police (note those last three words, the issue’s almost-always unspoken core). But once you’ve recognized the pattern within which this question fits, you tend to become more interested in the system than its symptoms.

There are probably bigger fish to fry than whether and how queer, trans, feminized, racialized, sexualized, poor, disabled, and otherwise deviant bodies negotiate public spaces allocated for Pride™. From the brutal spike in violence against occupied Palestine to the ongoing mobilization against the police state here in the USA, there are more pressing concerns than whether it is “okay” for me to wear a harness at a parade that I wasn’t going to attend anyway. But as we know, the framing of “kink at Pride” obscures the real question about who else gets to be in attendance. ACAB but we need police to protect us from the naked gay men is a deadly relevant contradiction in the struggle against white supremacist colonialist hegemony.

While these conflicts may be nothing new, with our culture being what it is—especially when exacerbated by the pseudo-anonymity of the internet, generational differences, media and historical illiteracy, and ambient fascistic ideologies—they seem to be worsening. The season for online arguing about who is welcome at Pride and whether that’s pedophilia, actually, seems to be expanding, and for once, we can’t blame it on climate change (directly, anyway).

So let’s think of the cringe that public sex inspires as the bellwether for larger cultural shifts and conversations. Which way is that little guy headed? Not Tennessee, if he knows what’s good for him.

In part 1 of this series, I wrote about the way that the Fifty Shades of Grey film franchise has become a cipher for people who position BDSM as both dangerous and cringe. In part 2, I wrote about the ways in which affect theory can be a helpful means for approaching cringe as a temporal construct grounded in capitalist feeling. For this final chapter, I want to branch out a little from cringe itself into other words and phrases whose use in relation to kink I want to complicate and explore: don’t yuck my yum, vanilla, and kinkshame.

Within leather subcultures, these words and phrases are used to talk about concepts specific to those cultures. Though they mean one thing while used in-community, outside it, they’ve come to mean something else. “I’m definitely going to yuck this yum,” someone might joke of another’s desire to drink the renal ambrosia. “Vanilla is a slur,” someone else might claim as a part of their whorephobic, transphobic, racist, and misogynist campaign to narrow the window of what women can and can’t sexually consent to. “Don’t kinkshame!” we tease when sharing a personal proclivity that’s really not at all that shameful, or else when the media tantalizes us with the possibility of a presidential piss tape.

What’s wrong with non-leatherpeople using these terms? Nothing, and even if there were, there’s nothing I can do to stop them (nor do I want to. When I say ACAB, I mean it). But when not being used to communicate internally and in good faith among people with a stake in community, these words adopt different meanings, reflecting different values and moods. They become, in effect, different words.

Don’t yuck my yum is used among kinky people as a reminder of how to express our desires in the company of other kinky people. Whether someone’s desire is very taboo, like scat play, or something that’s merely not your style, expressing that you don’t do it because you simply don’t want to—not because it’s inherently bad or immoral—is how we show respect and avoid replicating the stigmas that affect all of us. For example, I have an intense aversion to sploshing, but I have many friends who like it or do it for work. I show them respect not by saying that sploshing is inherently disgusting or evil or degenerate, but that I don’t care to do it.

Vanilla describes the people who don’t share our affinities for non-normative intimacy and/or don’t identify themselves with leather. Like the word “cis,” vanilla is not a slur, nor does it designate an oppressed class. As I wrote for my validity series, there is no structural pressure on anyone to ~be kinky~. White cis women who are angry about their male partners insisting on “kinky” sex that they don’t want will not end gendered violence by positioning themselves as victims of leather culture. Further criminalizing BDSM, pornography, sex work, public sex, immigration, and transsexuality will not make any of those women safer, or if it does, that safety will be secured by the ceding of both individual and collective power. Does it make sense to locate the problem of violent straight men in a primarily queer subculture based around consensual non-normative sex? If you’re committed to reducing that violence, why is your solution to outsource it to the policing of people who are likely already vulnerable to the violence of the system? The fact of the matter is, as reception of media like Fifty Shades of Grey demonstrates, that what gets defined as transgressive or dangerous is as much about who you are as what you’re doing. When straight people do it, it’s less kinky. This is not because straight people can’t be kinky, but rather because what makes kink transgressive is that it is not claimed by the norm. Because claiming it has consequences, sometimes quite dangerous ones. Many of us with the advantages of straightness, whiteness, class, etc. are loathe to sacrifice them by aligning ourselves with deviance. In terms of power and safety within the system, there’s nothing to gain by being kinky rather than being vanilla.

Kinkshame is a lot like yuck/yum in that it describes the shaming of an act that you, yourself, have a different subjective reaction to than another player might. If I choose to kinkshame someone for their amorous feelings about feet, while I myself enjoy fisting holes, one might wonder where the f**k I get off deciding that feet is bad and fist is good. Again, this is about respect within community: We choose to be respectful in our language because we respect those to whom we speak. Any response to asking people to use respectful language as some kind of prescription, or even punishment, should be highly suspect.

Now, if you get off by being a voyeur without consent, to shame you for such would not be a shaming of the kink of voyeurism, but of your desire for nonconsensual sexuality with other people. The shame doesn’t go with the kink, but with the abuse of power. One might even suggest that “kink” describes an exclusively consensual category, and so kinkshame can’t be used for an act that is not done with consent with all parties, similar to the way that while sex and rape might look similar, or even identical, one is predicated on consent and one isn’t. I could be convinced otherwise, but that’s how I use these terms, anyway.

When in-community terms take on different meanings outside community, they aren’t being co-opted, but rather misappropriated. Like gatekeep, gaslight, and valid, these words and terms have come to embody almost contradictory meanings than the ones they have for leatherpeople. Like other shibboleth words and concepts—lover comes to mind—that enter the mainstream as punchlines, they’re mostly deployed sarcastically, as if we’re all in on it together and as if our mocking of how “gay” Trump and Putin are together, of how outlandish Armie Hammer’s cannibalism fetish, of how freaky T.I.’s interest in his daughter’s virginity are, are on par with their abuses of power and consent. As if normative sex, and everything it touches—gender, intimacy, money, family—is not carefully and painfully imposed and disciplined into all of us.

While cringe has been the purported subject of this DAVID series, I think what I really wanted to explore was the difference between what happens within a community and what happens without, and why people struggle so much to distinguish between the two. Why does this matter? Because a lot of us, including our own youth, have been hoodwinked into believing that hypervisibility and “representation” has changed a culture that remains fiercely queerphobic and sex-negative. In my eyes, the relationship of this kind of entitlement, by means of cultural commodification, to a general failure to understand what consent means and constitutes, is undeniable.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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Last year’s release of Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalism Form produced a flurry of fun interviews with the American academic. It was COVID’s first autumn, the season leading into our dark winter, and I—like you all, I’m sure—was eager to be distracted.

The third book-length installment in Ngai’s body of work around the aesthetic features of contemporary capitalism, Theory of the Gimmick “tracks the gimmick through a number of guises,” as Charlie Tyson writes for the Chronicle of Higher Ed. “When we say something is a gimmick, we mean it is overrated and deceptive, that you would have to be a sucker to fall for it. Yet gimmicks exert a strange hold on us. As with a magic show, we can enjoy the gimmick even while we know we are being tricked.”

Considered something of a rock star in the field of affect theory—which is the analysis of the role of emotions and feeling in art, politics, and the constitution of the self—Ngai’s especial areas of focus are the “weak, morally unattractive feelings associated with situations of powerlessness.” She studies “negative” affects like envy and paranoia, as opposed to the more established, high-falutin’ types, like empathy, terror, and anger. There’s much to be said about those girls, to be sure, but Ngai’s quarry, as she writes in her first book, Ugly Feelings,

is the negative affects that read the predicaments posed by a general state of obstructed agency with respect to other human actors or to the social as such—a dilemma I take as charged with political meaning regardless of whether the obstruction is actual or fantasized, or whether the agency obstructed is individual or collective. These situations of passivity…can also be thought of as allegories for an autonomous or bourgeois art’s increasingly resigned and pessimistic understanding of its own relationship to political action.

Compared with alpha feelings, like the Kantian sublime, these beta affects—like awkwardness, or Ngai’s “animatedness” and “stuplimity”—may not be the feeling categories that we want but, given our roles as victim/minions of late capitalism, I suppose they’re the ones we deserve.

While following Theory of the Gimmick’s release last year, it occurred to me that one could also include among this “bestiary of negative affects,” as Ngai puts it, a feeling that I don’t believe she’s gotten around to dissecting just yet. While cringe is used to both diagnose and express the sensations of witnessing a broad range of what tend to be mortifying, try-hard faux pas, it has a special frisson when used in connection with BDSM. Whether you object to aspects of leather (Florentine flogging, straight male doms, ABDL) or to the whole enchilada (polyamorous fedora-jockeys who look like the cat-eared spawn of Burning Man and emo), you have likely used the word cringe to describe your displeasure with the subculture.

In part 1 of this series, I wrote about the way that the Fifty Shades of Grey film franchise has become a cipher for people who position BDSM as both dangerous and cringe while simultaneously “positioning that danger/cringe in opposition with an idealized version of BDSM that is both ‘safe’ AND not cringe.” Because isn’t it weird that a film that’s considered dangerous, a characteristic that usually lends mystique, and even sexiness, can also be considered cringe, which is the same quality that makes Twitter’s main character of the day so captivating? As I hope to have made clear, Fifty is a handy excuse for making contradictory, two-pronged attacks on non-normative sex, even though Fifty is neither representative of real leathersex nor exceptional in the problems of desire that it poses, which are not just endemic in heteronormativity but the bedrock of patriarchal sexual culture. Though it’s almost devoid of anything that most people would consider perverted, the bad of Fifty is still attributed to BDSM while the good is salvaged for straight, cis, white, accessed consumption. (This is part and parcel of the commodification of leather cultures, about which my leather associate, Daemonumx, often writes.)

If you know what you’re doing, BDSM can be a conduit for big, explosive, dramatic, world-changing feelings. Like sex, drugs, and other pursuits of embodied and communal pleasure, BDSM can also be bad, disappointing, and dangerous in ways we don’t want. Much like sex, BDSM seems to bring with it lofty expectations that seem to be more often fulfilled in the movies than in real life; but unlike sex, for some reason this chasm between expectation and reality is more likely to make us see BDSM, or rather, our failed attempts at manifesting it, as inherently corny, embarrassing, cringe.

Much of leathersex is heavily grounded in what we refer to as play; within this sense of fantasy and suspended disbelief is the co-creation of new spaces, temporalities, and energies. BDSM is active, living metaphor (although sometimes a foot is just a foot). But BDSM is also itself a metaphor. Like sex, it’s a way of understanding ourselves and our worlds with a system for the building, interpreting, and sharing of knowledge learned through sensation and psychodrama. If we adopt Ngai’s approach to affect theory as a study of how certain feelings—publicly negotiated, usually uncomfortable, and ugly, as she terms them—can be readings of our general state of obstructed or suspended agency under capitalism, then what can we learn from cringe?

I’m glad I can’t convey the physical beauty of Oliver Reed in Ken Russell’s almost-perfect The Devils (1971). You must see it to witness it, if you can stomach the violence. Like the Christ of my childhood, Reed is white and fauny with piercing blue eyes, but unlike the Christ of my childhood, he is also butch, sexy, sensual. He’s more goat than faun, now that I think about it—amorous, barrel-chested, concupiscent. Trade Christ.

A combined adaptation from the book and the stage, The Devils is based on the true story of the trial of Reed’s Urbain Grandier, a French Jesuit priest who was executed in 1634 on charges of witchcraft. Provocative and famously censored, Russell’s “only political movie,” as he put it, follows the downfall of Grandier, who when he becomes the subject of a horny Ursuline nun’s Freudian malevolence is scapegoated by Cardinal Richelieu and tortured to death by the church’s anime-looking exorcist-in-chief. Though it gave Derek Jarman props for his transcendent set design, the Vatican condemned Russell for “obscenity”—offering no comment regarding its past of Inquisition-type brutality to consolidate political power (which The Devils depicts at excruciating length), not to speak of literally everything else it has ever done.

“Satan is ever ready to seduce us with sensual delights,” sibilantly warns Sister Jeanne, perfectly played by Vanessa Redgrave, who as Grandier’s sorcery “victim” undergoes similar purgative tortures by the same exorcist. This pain he humbly withstands, whereas she takes a fervent, twisted pleasure in the whipping, the boiling enemas, the public humiliation. The slutty Grandier (whose crimes include violating the priesthood with marriage) is supposedly on trial for this sensuality, but he knows—and names—the lie until his romantic death at the stake. “If you wish to destroy me, then destroy me,” he roars. “Accuse me of exposing political chicanery and the evils of the state, and I will plead guilty! But who would not hold back some scraps to prove to himself, in his dotage, that he was once loved?”

Like Christ, Grandier suffers beautifully, especially while shorn and broken, denuded of power. While Sister Jeanne exposes suffering as the mirror image, and thus comparable sin, of pleasure, Grandier knows the binary is not to be found here on this earth, but rather in its contrast with heaven. “With love comes hate,” he explains as he forgives Sister Jeanne her sins against him. Though he may be passive, he is not helpless.

Like Christ, over the course of the The Devils Grandier casts out charlatans and calls out liars, offers succor to the sick and dying, takes confession, blesses bread, has his feet washed with a woman’s hair, climbs the mountain, and ultimately sacrifices himself. Surrounded by plague and avarice and chaos, offset by Jarman’s holy monochrome and basilican scale, he is the only good man. As much as I enjoyed The Devils’ voluptuousness, my emotions were most manipulated by the moral purity of Reed’s messiah. Despite what the Vatican had to say, some Jesuits thought The Devils was a good Catholic movie (Russell was a convert), and with them I agree. Inside me remains a somewhat-secret affinity for Christ, all these years after leaving a church where my “lifestyle” was considered a symptom of demonic possession. While watching, it occurred to me that the highs and lows, the protocol and pageantry, the order and structure, the dark and light of SM might be efforts to approximate the loss of a Protestantism that, while it can’t compare to Catholicism’s production budget or taste, is every bit as sadomasochistic.

The Devils, and Reed as Grandier in particular, made me miss the faith that rid itself of me. I won’t go back, and am, to be honest, disturbed by homosexuals who do, but this limited-edition nostalgia reopened like a wound inside me, needled by loss like the barbers’ wasps piercing plague buboes under orbs of glass. The wound felt big, explosive, dramatic, world-changing, like Christianity used to. Though there is much for which to adore The Devils, its ability to replicate the emotional volume of the time before god left me was key to the pleasure of my viewing. This conflicted sense of abjection and grandiosity dueling in the soul of someone who is, as we sang each week, nothing, less than nothing, even, yet whose every instinct and action could mark the difference between eternity and damnation, is heavy as the Leviathan. There is no high like seeing Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) in theaters and believing it.

“I dread pain,” admits Grandier to his interlocutors, not long before they break his kneecaps. As with Christ, his is a passivity to which we can at once relate and strive toward.

“Well, perhaps the judges will think it unnecessary,” is the response. “Or perhaps, as one who has sustained so much pleasure, you will take to pain, its ugly sister, without the usual noises of complaint.”

Russell uses Renaissance France to explore contemporary political power and religious hypocrisy to great effect, a reminder that anachronism can be a great artistic tool. And who doesn’t love a sexy gay nun movie set in the 17th c? The period film is juxtapositionally fertile, though it can also offer an out for those who would rather not delve too deeply into the present—we’re well aware that Hollywood’s penchant for the sapphic period film is less about showcasing our queer ancestors, or whatever, and more about avoiding the problems posed by the dykes of today that love is love doesn’t resolve.

Just as our modern sexual identities, like “homosexual” and “leathersex,” did not exist in Grandier’s time, neither did the contemporary phenomenon of cringe. The agrarian feudalism of The Devils is more than a few worlds away from our late capitalist consumer economies. Many of the same erotics and activities that you will find enjoyed or emulated in BDSM today yearn toward that bigness of alpha affects past, and indeed are its inheritors, as the self-flagellating Sister Jeanne, whose pain is indistinguishable from her orgasms, reminds us.

But here, in the 21st c, we are overwhelmed by our beta affects, our expressions of systemic impotence. Ngai identifies that while feelings like cringe are unproductive of action, they are productive of diagnosis of an “ambient condition.” Cringe—like that other pseudo-neologism that makes me want to pull my eyes out, comfy—speaks to the nettling distractions that at once precipitate and stave off deadly neoliberal attrition.

From our position all these centuries later, have we have lost access to the powerful feelings of earlier times and conditions? Can we replicate their cathartic powers through art or the f**k, or can we only approximate them (until revolution, anyway)? Is BDSM, as we know it right now, an unconscious effort to turn these lesser feelings into something more powerful—a purgative, a therapy, an adaptive intimacy? In the vein of Corbusier, is the BDSM of the 21st c a machine for remembering? If so, it becomes a beacon of hope, rather than an aspirational goad, the carrot/stick combo that individualism, social media, and celebrity culture have wrought. How corny, like a Ren Faire. How grand, like a religion.

In Theory of the Gimmick, Ngai zooms in on the gimmicks of contemporary life as simulacra of contemporary life itself, a thing saturated with the affective whiplash of precarity, austerity, and the merging of emotional and physical drudgery. It sucks to be here, but we can’t even benefit from the catharsis of that suck’s fallout, as those witness to Grandier’s tragedy can. Unlike its alpha, shame, cringe is not just a type of embarrassed disgust, but a symptom of stalled purpose and unfulfilled desire. We might compare it with the ruined orgasm, to use the parlance of BDSM: a momentary disappointment punctuating a longer-term bad desire. The sexy passivity of the martyr is reduced to the resignation of the exploited retail drone, in the imperial core, anyway.

Ngai calls these negative affects, which are unable to bring about catharsis, “politically ambiguous.” When will we reach the point when they can no longer be borne, and so must become politically determined? Does a BDSM practice bring that day closer, or does it numb us to our true desires? Or maybe it’s just something we do to kill the time?

I hope I haven’t lost you with this one. I won’t argue that there aren’t aspects of BDSM that are embarrassing—and not by design—or that there aren’t practices and subcultures that don’t align with my tastes. But I think that cringe as a blanket response to BDSM speaks to bigger things than BDSM, just as BDSM itself does. There’s a something there, I think. Next time, I’ll be getting into that with the inter- and intra-communal tensions of cringe, the vanilla vs. kinky portion of the series. I expect that one to be a little closer to earth. Until then.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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There is no accounting for taste, especially in the realm of the “gross.”—Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”

If you’ve written about BDSM for publication in the past decade, you were probably prompted by your editor to include a reference to the 2011 novel Fifty Shades of Grey. To contextualize kink in popular American culture, you see.

I’ve been asked to do this enough times that I started pre-empting the editorial request, even though I wouldn’t normally be so inclined. This isn’t because I’m a contrarian or a snob, but rather because E.L. James’s best-selling series—an erotic romance about a beautiful and innocent young virgin who falls in love with a handsome and perverted young Bezos-type in the Seattle metropolitan area—has as much to do with actual leathersex as it does with Frasier.

Having since spawned a successful film franchise as well as lots of conversation about abuse, consent, and horny white, middle-class, straight women, James’s trilogy has become a, if not the, 21st c. touchstone for BDSM in American popular culture. But I hadn’t seen any of the films, much less read any of the books on which they’re based, until a few weeks ago. Again, this is not because I’m a contrarian or a snob (though it’s safe to admit I can be both). I enjoy romantic dramas, especially those of the it’s-so-bad-it’s-good variety, but I didn’t get around to watching Anastasia and Christian play their little hetero mind games until a fan in my pod recommended them.

But there’s another reason why I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. After so many years listening to whinging about how bad Fifty is for not only for vanilla people but kinksters as well—in particular from people whose opinions on BDSM I neither trust nor respect—I began to wonder if it was really all that bad. It was one thing if normal people thought Fifty had the power to promote or even create abusive sexual behavior. But while some kinky people seemed to share similar concerns, they also talked about Anastasia and Christian’s BDSM as embarrassing or corny in a manner that reminded me of how real SM, the kind that is humiliating, dirty, illegal, transactional, slutty, filthy, or perverted, is talked about in society at large. While vanilla critics were concerned that other vanilla people (i.e., straight [white] women) would be swept away by Fifty’s sensual power into a licentious void of intimate partner violence, kinky critics wanted it both ways: Fifty was both the alluring Pied Piper of IPV as well as straight-up cringe. One wondered how something that was so impossible to take seriously could also be so threatening. This positioning of Fifty as at once activating and dismissible reminded me of Linda Williams, who’s best-known for film scholarship focused on the “body genres” of horror, melodrama, and porn. As she writes, “Alone or in combination, heavy doses of sex, violence, and emotion are dismissed by one faction or another as having no logic or reason for existence beyond their power to excite.” And yet the determination of these excesses is highly subjective, as well as reliant on the genre in which they appear: “For example,” she writes, “pornography is today more often deemed excessive for its violence than for its sex, while horror films are excessive in their displacement of sex onto violence.”

In watching (and enjoying) the cinematic crapjunk of Fifty Shades of Grey and Fifty Shades Darker (the third installment, Fifty Shades Freed, is still on the docket), I found myself disagreeing with the concerns raised by both kinky and vanilla critics of Fifty’s moral and ethical role-modeling. Are there issues of consent between Anastasia and Christian? Absolutely, although the scene in Fifty Shades Darker where Christian shows Anastasia where he doesn’t want to be touched (trauma 😔) by drawing a “road map” on his naked chest with her lipstick approaches, endearingly, a fleeting example of what true consent might look like in these star-crossed lovers’ lives.

But why are these movies responsible for being responsible, again? To be clear, they’re over-the-top, badly written, grudgingly acted, packed with explicit vanilla sex (by American standards), and generally speaking so confused about what constitutes consent that I wouldn’t recommend them as a guide for interacting with another human, let alone cutting them open. But so are a lot of so-called romantic movies, whether or not their subject is rough sex or explicit power exchange.

More interesting than Fifty as a text is how that text has been received, particularly by those who conflate its danger and cringe while positioning that danger/cringe in opposition with an idealized version of BDSM that is both “safe” AND not cringe. For this crowd, it seems as if there is more concern about Fifty’s connection with “real” BDSM as a matter of reputation than of the bad consent and technique it portrays.

Because while we’ve all done some grousing over the years, I think people who are actually in leather scenes aren’t overly worried about the optics of Fifty. Putting aside for the moment that the kinkiest thing Anastasia and Christian get up to is dithering over a sex contract and playing with what are sometimes referred to as ben wa balls, who cares what goes on in straight BDSM? As with the cryptid kingdom of the Pacific Northwest, one must doubt whether it’s even real. Second, anyone who wants to learn about BDSM won’t be doing it with Fifty, no matter how green they are. Even if they start there—and we all had something, didn’t we, some problematic text that excited, inspired, bedeviled us into asking forbidden questions?—if they want more, they won’t end there. The infographic industrial complex has seen to that.

That’s the other thing about the Fifty backlash—the idea that for those of us in the scene there existed good, untainted, unproblematic ur-representations of BDSM that Fifty is somehow preventing the new guard from experiencing. As if. Our forefxthers were getting boners about cartoon quicksand and Wonder Woman and their aunt’s stockings under the kitchen table. People get into corporal punishment often because they themselves were corporally punished. These are not “morally” “good” introductions to BDSM, not least because our culture doesn’t have much in the way “morally” “good” entry points into any kind of sexuality, at least on a mass level. I don’t want to give them too much credit, but the fact that the protagonists of Fifty are even attempting to negotiate what is going to happen in the bedroom before it happens is lightyears beyond the sexual education and media I received as a child and teenager. Where I’m from, you just lie there and wait for whatever the man is doing to you to be done.

So wherefore this expectation that a bodice-ripper by a woman who has never claimed the lifestyle be a proper SM guidebook? Writing for BitchMedia in 2015, Catherine Scott identified Fifty for what it is: a romance novel that gets the same treatment that every other romance novel gets.

Where is the condemnation of Mr. Darcy, Mr. Rochester, and Heathcliff—those heroes of romantic literature—for being emotionally and sometimes physically abusive sociopaths? I can’t help but feel that some of the outrage over Fifty Shades is both selective and elitist. Fifty Shades faces the same kind of criticism that’s lobbed at romance in general: “Oh, look at those uneducated women and their trashy reads! Bless them for not knowing that classier books exist!” I wonder if many critics care less about misrepresentations of kink in the book and more about saving the undiscerning masses from themselves.

While watching Fifty, I was reminded of seeing Gone with the Wind (1939) for the first time as a child. I felt the excitement, the sexiness, the power of the infamous staircase scene, long debated for its dance between rape and ravishment. I was no more taught to wonder whether Scarlett’s husband raped her than I was taught to be appalled by Scarlett’s family’s enslavement of other people, or by the fact that Hattie McDaniel, the first black person to win an Oscar, was almost not allowed to attend the ceremony for which she was nominated.

Scott and I both see Fifty’s ravishment as part of a longer tradition of media demeaned by its centering of a certain kind of female sexual satisfaction, now adapted for a new century. What if Fifty is the next step in the evolution of what has long been known to be danger/cringe, a sensibility/sensation encompassing elements of the naive, the camp, the mortifying, the subversive, and of course, the feminine?

Despite its incompatibility with in-community values or its lack of resemblance to leathersex, in the sense that Fifty subverts, defies, and unsettles both vanilla and kinky people, one might say that it approaches kink much more than some would like to admit. And in the sense that it’s difficult to distinguish the discomfort and embarrassment it causes from the kind elicited by more taboo (or simply less palatable) in-community activities and relationalities, its danger/cringe approaches ours more than others would like to admit.

It’s enough to make you wonder whether kink and cringe can ever be fully extricated from each other…

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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Yesterday, I turned in what should be my penultimate pass on my novel manuscript, and it felt f*g great. It’s such a relief to be even a single step closer to its pub date next spring. Working 40 hours, freelancing, and running this newsletter/mutual aid project—there just isn’t much time for writing books. I’m ready for a little vacation.

At almost two years since I finished the first draft of X, I’m starting to see my second novel as a product of a past version of my self. My interest in people who are in conflict with their desire is as strong now as it ever was, but my headspace has shifted significantly. Despite the pandemic, the last couple of years have seen me go through a big breakup with my commitment to suffering, as Bad Gay might put it. I’m happier, and I look forward to the happiness to come.

Is it naive to hope some of that happiness will come from my book? Maybe. Even when I finally snagged an agent, I didn’t know how I would sell to X to a bigger publisher, mostly because I’m a nobody, but also because I wasn’t sure I was brave enough to go through with it. Bigger publisher, bigger audience. That’s more people you’re talking to, more people to whom you’re artistically accountable. X was the right book, but I wasn’t sure it had come at the right time.

This is not simply because its subject matter is perverted and violent in a way that I hope is interesting, and perhaps even challenging; I have great affection for X’s aberrance, but it’s no literary edge case. From Torrey’s pregnancy/HIV metaphors in Detransition, Baby; to Alissa Nutting’s “soulless” woman pedophile in Tampa; to Jackie’s exploration of cuck phenomenology in Darryl; to the complexities of raced and gendered passing in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, contemporary American fiction maintains a healthy appetite for pushing the envelope. Even the (mostly American) writers that I consider to be X’s godparents—Delany, Cooper, Schulman, Puig, DeLynn—are/were far more transgressive than I am, and before I was born, to boot.

So no, it’s not X’s content that made me doubt it: It’s that I’m afraid to be in the discursive crosshairs of writing sex on the platform that even a small publisher like Catapult Books can provide me. In a recent newsletter about similar anxieties, Huw Lemmey couldn’t help but wonder: “How do you write about embodied pleasures that reverberate with such an intense mental space without the dreaded metaphor of Bad Sex? And how do you overcome the anxiety of overstepping the permitted boundaries of your own communities, by writing a different form of bad sex?”

Fear of humiliation or of the problematic is not foreign to DAVID, but as intimate as these newsletters can sometimes be, sharing my fiction feels like more of an exposure than sharing details from my personal life. I’m not overly worried about being identified with the sexual activity or bad ethical behavior in X (which reflects my life in some ways, and not at all in others), which isn’t to say that I’m not a little worried. Why does a made-up story about people who don’t exist feel more implicating than anecdotes about my lifestyle, transition, or messy relationships? Huw approaches an answer, maybe, when he points out that “sex involves a lot of messy, complicated, troubling and unresolved experiences that can be felt when experienced in the body, but which when experienced as a contemplation, upon the page, become a different form of knowledge.” Perhaps the vulnerability is not in the details, but in the attempt at making meaning out of them. We show our bellies not by literally showing them, but by attempting to interpret what it means that they’re laid bare; what it means that we want so much to both deny and satisfy our instincts for lust, desire, and anger.

And then, of course, there’s discourse, and by discourse I mean the intra- and inter-communal conversations in what could very loosely be described as communities of which I’m a part AND the larger-scale conversations in which I am only a subject, not a participant. X is not just about people in conflict with their desire, but more concrete topics: intimate partner abuse among queers, sexual assault, consent, “toxic masculinity,” the dangers of straight women, the instability of identity, transsexuality and genderqueerness, sex work, censorship, state violence, BDSM. The fear of “cancellation” is often deployed as a smokescreen, a way to worm out of “accountability,” to use an overused term, but I think we can agree also that the nexus of internet, bad brains, American culture, and mass trauma has made us all aware of the threat of being misunderstood, willfully or otherwise. As Huw also writes, “Bad faith can take a lot from risk-taking.”

And so editing X has been, in large part, a battle against my natural conservatism, kicked into overdrive by a fear of going too far and hurting someone; of going too far and landing on the wrong side of the discourse; of being misunderstood to the extent that my work is tokenized or dismissed rather than rigorously engaged with. The danger of muzzling oneself in response to these fears, of undercutting one’s own project, of being frozen by that fear, is all too strong, and opens one to even more fears. In writing about the pleasures of the razor’s edge, one must walk it, and thereby risk solomonizing oneself. I fear the nihilistic “emotional vacuity”of the internet novel—as so devastatingly critiqued by Brandon Taylor—almost as much as the emotional glut of career confessionals, the poor souls who bring home the bacon by selling their trauma piecemeal, flesh for flesh. This fear manifests as a false dichotomy: That one can only either be too earnest (tender) or not earnest enough (problematic). Then there are the TERFS, the transphobes, the whorephobes, and the misogynists. My time will come, I suppose.

Whether these anxieties are a feature of writing at the present moment, a symptom of the unrealized artist (“Writers, feeling guilty for not doing real work,” wrote Elif Batuman in 2006, “turn in shame to the notion of writing as “craft.”), or something else entirely, they’re on my mind enough that I’ve decided it’s finally time to kick off my series on cringe. Taking as its jumping-off point the embarrassment of kink, I’m hoping to delve deeper into affect/theory, humiliation, orgasm, and why some stuff just doesn’t translate to the page. More on that next time.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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I met photographer Elle Pérez the same way I meet most of my friends: on a dating/hookup app.

Two years ago, I went sadist-hunting on the now-defunct Herstory Personals, where I mentioned one of my scars. Among my responses was a DM from a photographer who wanted to take a picture of the word spelled out in white, floss-thin lines on my left thigh.

I told Elle I would do them one better. My friend Dahlia, who had given me the scar, was going to go over it a second time—did they want to join us in exchange for some of their ~professional photos? Thanks to the systemic repression of sex workers, including pro-dommes like Dahlia, these photos couldn’t be used to advertise on sites like Eros, with their draconian TOS, but our family loves to document our scenes. Also, we tend to be a little exhibitionist about spilling blood.

Elle was into it. We didn’t learn until later that they were kind of a big deal, and that one of our photos was going to be included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. It was a funny turn of events, knowing where the scar had come from. Dahlia broke virgin flesh at her old house in the Rockridge neighborhood of North Oakland in 2018, using a scalpel to slice me open, then wrapping my thigh in plastic and hammering it with her fists and other things. High on endorphins, we laughed like hyenas. I biked home ten miles with the wound shrink-wrapped like a slab of chuck steak.

Following the Biennial, I kept an eye on the coverage of Elle’s work. Most reviews misgendered Elle, misnamed our photo (the official title is “Dahlia and David [fag with a scar that says dyke]”), or found other ways to misrepresent the trans artist and their queer, and often trans, subjects. One of the reviews referred to another trans subject’s facial feminization surgery as “adam’s apple surgery”. One or two took hamfisted issue with our “conflation” of queerness and pain.

I suppose it was silly of me to expect that an artist operating at Elle’s level of institutional recognition—even as a trans person of color—might be less misunderstood. The frequency with which Elle’s work was, at best, benevolently dismissed as an “exploration” of undefined “issues of gender and cultural identity” was an enlightening experience for me.

As a writer, I’m challenged and disoriented by the task of communicating via image rather than text. Writers must hold the uncomfortable desire to seek total precision of language while knowing that it can never be attained. Maybe that’s just me. In any case, in collaborating with Dahlia and Elle, it feels as if there’s another, complicating step between our expression and our audience. This isn’t a complaint about collaboration or photography or even visual media, but an observation about the differences between Elle’s art and mine.

And as a writer, I’m accustomed to being misunderstood, accusations regarding my desire to rape people in response to my genital preference series being a great case in point. I’ve often repented for writing the wrong thing, or writing the right thing wrong, though not as often as I’ve been indignant at someone else’s obtuseness. Only rarely have I had the opportunity of hindsight regarding an artistic project that wasn’t words that I wrote. Working with Dahlia and Elle and then seeing a wider-scale response than I am accustomed to was a chance to do just that. Which is to say that while I do think trans sadomasochistic art made by a trans Puerto-Rican American photographer is more likely to get short shrift—even when the artist is as undeniably “successful” as Elle is—I have spent some time thinking about the artistic choices that Dahlia and I made in the context of this general misunderstanding.

For example, though we are more or less fluid-bonded (😋), Dahlia and I decided that she would wear gloves for the shoot in order to model responsible cutting and blood play. So much of public play, or rather, social media depictions of play, doesn’t include behind-the-scenes information, guidance on safety protocols, or context about the players and their relationships. Though I’m not a sex or leather educator (Dahlia sometimes is), both of us wanted to offer a corrective for what we see as unsafe SM practices, both material and psychological, that are widely shared by inexperienced players and stand and modelers alike. In encountering abusers in and around our own communities, who we felt were enabled by this ignorance of and entitlement regarding dangerous, intimate, and high-octane activities formerly safeguarded (or as some dumbasses might put it today, gatekept) by kink and leather communities, we felt it was more responsible to show what “real” SM could look like than to indulge in the fantasy of unnegotiated sadomasochism.

This is a choice that I regret. For one, while I don’t think there’s anything wrong with “responsible” depictions of SM, that was not our purpose for the scene. The photo followed the scene; it was not a workshop, but a work of art and intimacy taking place between me and someone in my leather family. What’s more, I think the photo could have been very beautiful and interesting with Dahlia’s long, dangerous, gorgeous acrylics, which she does herself. As markers of queer, femme, and working-class whoreness, they are a key component of Dahlia’s gender identity and performance. What’s more, they are horny! Would their inclusion have helped viewers to understand the horniness of our image, which was rarely commented upon, or so it seems to me, as well as their relevance to “gender and cultural identity”? I think so.

This is not to say that depictions of safe leathersex do not have their own political purposes and ramifications, but in this instance a single pair of gloves concealed gay femme worker aesthetics that in retrospect I think should have been included in Elle’s photo, particularly in the context of the politically fraught 2019 Biennial. In the months preceding the exhibition, controversy erupted around the Whitney’s vice-chairman Warren B. Kanders, whose company is a major manufacturer of tear gas and arms. There were petitions, actions, and performances protesting this connection, as well as readings of exhibitors’ work within the framework of the Institution and capital. “While [their] images are not outrightly political in the same way Forensic Arcitecture’s formidable Triple-Chaser is, Pérez lenses bodies in uncomfortable states not always visible and accepted in mainstream narratives: bleeding, hurting, bruised, changing, and trans bodies are cast in a radically poetic light in this vital study,” wrote Kathryn O’Regan for Sleek Mag.

Without reading what Dahlia and I have to write about it, no one can look at Elle’s photo and have anything other than guesses as to why I wanted this scar, and why Dahlia wanted to give it. It’s like Catherine Opie, they say, and move on. A valid critique, I suppose, but then again I’m more interested in the relationship between body modification, identity, and connection than most.

“A photo is still a fraught metric in this post-truth moment,” writes Zoé Samudzi in her recent essay on pandemic photography and the visual nature of disease. “Art does not cover—it reveals,” wrote John Berger in his first novel, A Painter of Our Time.

We do not like to be misunderstood, especially when we are being seen in such an intimate way. All the same, I’m fascinated by critics’ reinterpretations of our play, even the ones that strike me as reductive or false. What does it mean that our scene is seen as primarily about sexuality or gender rather than BDSM, kink, love, and kinship? Or primarily about facile understandings of BDSM rather than about gender? Or primarily as torture porn rather than as softness, care, and laughter? All recastings of our play as essentially any one thing are telling, if nothing else.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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In late 2019, Stephen Ira invited me to read at one of the NYC release parties for Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma’s We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, alongside Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Jamie DiNicola, Chris Berntsen, An Duplan, Serge Rodriguez, and Stephen himself. It was a beautiful celebration of an important book, a revitalizing sharing of work on “transmasculinity, intimacy, and freedom,” as the flyer put it.

This week, I’m posting the essay I read that night here on DAVID, which I’ve tinkered with since then, because it’s one I enjoyed writing and reading, and because it’s an integral part of one of my favorite memories from my first year in New York. Though it’s tempting to get back up on my soapbox to rail about the rights of trans youth, what with Everything That’s Going On Right Now, today I would rather revisit a fond memory and leave it at that.

I was once a normal girl with a normal family. Like other normal families, mine watched The Godfather movies on Sundays after church.

With so many kids around, epics like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic series were an interactive experience, a time to workshop our Brando impressions and scream along with the script, unless we were silently bearing witness to the occasional, excruciating simulation of heterosexual coitus. We all loved Michael Corleone, but I loved him most of all, so sometime in early high school, my dad brought home another movie he thought I’d be interested in.

Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975) stars Pacino as Sonny Wortzik, a character inspired by John Wojtowicz, who became notorious for knocking over a Brooklyn Chase to fund his lover’s sex-change operation in 1972. For the first time, I saw Pacino as an actor rather than as a character, and I fell in love all over again, watching Afternoon on a loop while I traced the black-lashed eyes on the VHS box cover with my fingers.

Pacino’s face is narrower than that of Wojtowicz, in whose mugshot you’ll find a lipbitten beefcake for whom De Niro might have been a better casting. Pacino’s skinnier, too, but in Afternoon he dominates the screen with his coal-black hair, strung-out skin, sweat-stained dress shirt. His discomfort is electric, contagious, as he waves his white hanky, arm wrenched to his side, shrieking “Attica!” just a little too shrilly at the bystanders surrounding the bank. Pacino was no Wojtowicz, who these days occasionally pops up as a conflicted trans Twitter thirst trap, but I thought he was the most perfect man I’d ever seen. I coveted him, knowing without understanding that my puppylove dramatics could reassure my dad without either of us needing to think about why he needed reassuring.

I was not a cultured kid, and I did not grow up in cultured homes. Though I read widely, I still believed fervently in my Bible and the conservative talk radio I listened to before and after school. We had internet by that point, but I didn’t take much advantage of it, preferring to use the computer wedged between the kitchen table and kitchen sink to write stories in Word. My love for Afternoon was unanchored, a movie I had as much context for as I’d had for medieval Mesopotamia when I saw Aladdin (1992) for my first trip to the movie theater. I didn’t know what Attica was or why Sonny was screaming about it, much less about the massacre of incarcerated people that gave the word its power. I didn’t know why I wasn’t disgusted when Sonny is revealed to have a trans girlfriend, though I knew I was supposed to be.

The revelation of the pillow-lipped Leon—a character based on Wojtowitz’s lover, Liz Eden, and played by cis actor Chris Sarandon—kills Sonny’s crowd cachet, tanks the NYPD’s grudging respect for his daring, and dooms him as an enemy of the state. The carnival atmosphere ignited by Sonny’s anti-cop antics, which before earned him the sporting tolerance of the pigs, plummets like a Coney Island roller coaster. Afternoon dims as the day fades to night, the happy bystanders gone hostile as the feds kick off their plan to bust up the hostage situation created by Sonny and his stone-faced associate, Sal (played by John Cazale, another Godfather alum).

As much as I loved Afternoon, and as confident as I was that it was okay for me to love it, the entrée of Leon always made me uncomfortable. I didn’t think of either him or Sonny as gay men, though that’s how we’re meant to see them. When the cops allow Sonny a phone call with Leon, he talks to him like he talks to his cis wife: coldly, distantly. Sonny is childish, angry, distracted; a shell of a small-statured man (at 5’7”, Pacino and I are the same height—almost short for a man and almost tall for a woman). Sonny’s a failure of a man because of his emotion, his desire, and yet he is still a man—in fact, his maleness is what makes his desires reprehensible. It’s seen as degeneracy, but his humiliation is also his mainstay in the midst of the biggest fuckup of his life. With Sonny, Pacino made failed maleness seem possible in a way that I, a normal girl, found inexplicably intoxicating.

Afternoon could have easily been a professional debacle for Pacino; Lumet said later that as far as he knew, no major male star had played gay in a movie before. In his portrayal of Sonny Wortzik, there couldn’t be a whiff of faggotry about him, not if the audiences of the time were to accept him as their antihero. Pacino pulls it off, counterbalancing his frantic rage with either an asexual solicitude for or a virile impatience with the people around him. Even though he is committing a federal crime on behalf of his “gay lover,” as Leon was referred to for decades after Afternoon’s release, Sonny’s concentration on getting what he wants, on his desire, takes precedence even over the feeling presumably underlying his motive to commit it in the first place. Despite the crossed stars of Sonny and Leon, Afternoon is first a crime drama, a bank-heist flick, a man’s man’s movie. There’s little room for love here, and what tenderness there is feels as purloined as the cash Sonny came for.

Sarandon’s Leon, on the other hand, must be a f****t, as if to make up for Sonny’s homosexual emptiness. Cast instead of trans actress Elizabeth Coffey because she didn’t look like what straight people thought a transsexual ought to look like, Sarandon went on to be nominated for an Oscar for his role in Afternoon; though she eventually got her surgery, paid for with the money made from a movie about a crime committed in her honor, Eden died of AIDS complications in 1987 at the age of 41. In a 2014 interview, Sarandon noted, to my ears with some bitterness, that while many gay people over the years had thanked him for portraying a version of Eden, he had never been sought out for congratulations by “transgender” people.

But I was not a cultured kid—I didn’t know about any of that. I didn’t even know that trans people existed outside of the movies. They were as real to me as the Mafia or New York City. All I knew for sure was that Pacino was the man I ached to have in a way that kissing or touching or even sex, of which I lived in terror, didn’t seem able to satisfy. Wanting him felt like the way I’d always wanted men, and the members of NSYNC, and the boys I went to school with, and the boys in my apartment complex, and the person I sometimes dreamed about. It felt like that scene in Saturday Night Fever (1977) when John Travolta marches out of his bedroom in his underpants chanting “Attica!” just like Pacino, at once embodied and aspirational and more than a little bit gay. It felt like that. It felt normal.

It wasn't just that I thought Pacino was handsome. I believed that his was the kind of handsomeness that everybody else could see. When we made PowerPoint presentations about someone we admired in my computer class, most us picked people we wanted to bone. I set to work downloading jpgs of Pacino and his 70s shag, convinced that my feelings about him were no different from those of the girls downloading Leonardo DiCaprio or Orlando Bloom.

It wasn’t until much later, when I was no longer a normal girl, that I saw what most other people did—that the ratty, wet-lipped little guy was a legitimate actor but in the vaguely repulsive model of Nicolas Cage or James Spader, whereas in my eyes he had been a Pitt, a Washington, a Clooney. It’s a misunderstanding that reminds me of a gag from The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. When he tries to pass as straight, Titus’s closeted boyfriend puts a picture of Tilda Swinton on the back of his pickup to better blend in among his coworkers at the construction site. The gag lands because the boyfriend’s heterosexual math is sound yet fails to add up, and everyone knows why except him.

In 2013, indie filmmakers Frank Keraudren and Allison Berg released The Dog, a documentary about Wojtowicz’s life. In its viciously homophobic and transmisogynist review, the New York Times undercut its own attempt to demonstrate “how profoundly sensibilities have evolved since Mr. Wojtowicz robbed the bank.” Afternoon’s affective shift signals for us when it has given up on humanizing, even endearing to us, Pacino’s two-bit bank robber. Though by all accounts a rat, a mob henchman, a woman abuser, a bigamist, and a narcissist, Wojtowicz’s claim to fame—the reason the freakshow still had juice more than 40 years after he robbed that Chase—remained his abnormal desire.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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Some spoilers of Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (2020) ahead.

I started wearing men’s clothes when I was in college. I made the swap strategically, as I didn’t know how else to signal to other people—to girls, but also to boys?—that I was now gay. Wife pleasers and flannel felt good, but seeing them on my body did not. They didn’t fit right, just as women’s clothes had never fit right. But they did feel closer to right than women’s clothes had, with the added benefit of not having been forced on me. They also seemed to clarify me for others’ benefit: Whereas before there was simply something off or awkward or ugly about me, now there was a legible problem on which to fixate. Let it never be said that I would sacrifice clarity for comfort.

As I stared down the barrel of HRT, I considered myself lucky to have dressed like a lesbian for so long, which meant I wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of a wardrobe overhaul. There was no need to go to a new section of the store, nervously trying to parse vanity sizing, or to face for the first time the anxieties of cross-dressing in public. Compared with the expenses of trans medical care and document changes, plus the less direct costs of decreased job security and the “pre-existing condition” of transsexuality (all pricy, sure, but not to the tune of $150,000 as our venture capitalist friends might insist), new clothes were a drop in the bucket. Nevertheless, it was a relief to have one less thing to worry about.

As I’ve started to see what’s known by some as masculinization happen to my body, the type of clothes I’ve been wearing for over a decade have begun to fit better, emotionally and otherwise. The inverted triangle tattooed on my ribcage is now more than a gay cliche: It’s a simulacrum of my new shape. No inverts here, ladies!

But if I thought that would mean I wouldn’t want new clothes, I was wrong (as I have been about so many things). The butch uniform that one of my sisters jokingly refers to as TOP BUTTON!—button-ups and hoodies completely fastened, an insecure overdressing combined with the wistful illusion of breastlessness—doesn’t feel like it fits me, either. I dress like a lesbian, I thought with dismay as I peered into my closet from a cyclone of dysphoric anxiety last week. The same clothes that had once made me clocky in one way now made me clocky in another. It’s funny, the way that solutions create problems.

As someone who is not a man, do I want people to think I’m a man? Mostly no. My most attainable fantasy is to blend in, around straight people, anyway; to escape the notice that has sometimes been so frightening and alienating. With all respect due to genderfucking—something I enjoyed when I was younger and less broken—I don’t want to do it anymore. I can’t. Cissexism, both external and internalized, is traumatic. These days, anything that doesn’t explicitly bear the stamp of having been manufactured For Men feels like a tell, a scarlet letter. I think the homophobia and transmisogyny of tabloid kerfuffles around straight male celebrities wearing dresses or Gen Z lads painting their nails is pretty obvious, but it’s strange to fight my resentment for the growing (race- and class- inflected) freedom that cis men have to do things I didn’t even get away with as a girl.

The more frequently I pass as a man, the more my old fears about passing, and what that might mean for me—as someone who has not ever identified as masculine, let alone a man—diminish. Beneath is not a crater, but a garden, beautiful and hostile and alien (like Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X), lush with new insight into the violence of binary gender and our collective inability to escape it.

About a year ago, I wrote a DAVID series about David Cronenberg, in which I described my experiences with certain kinds of passing:

As a white queer person, I should make it clear that passing as straight or cis doesn’t map 1:1 to any other kind of passing, particularly with regards to race... There’s plenty of actual scholarship about the similarities, differences, and relationships between concepts of passing, about which I’m not even an amateur…I can speak to my experience with passing as a transsexual, but it’s impossible to do so in a vacuum.

Writing about Harlem Renaissance novels like Passing (1929) and Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928) for that entry, I remember making a mental note to look for contemporary stories about passing by black authors, which I never got around to. I was reminded of it again when, earlier this year, my agent sent me a copy of Brit Bennett’s highly praised The Vanishing Half.

Over the course of its 352 pages, Half grows subtly, almost shyly, from a book into a cinematic experience. An intergenerational novel spanning nearly half a century, it follows the lives of twin sisters Desiree and Stella from their tiny hometown of Mallard, Louisiana—populated almost exclusively by light-skinned black people—to New Orleans and Los Angeles. In Mallard, where “nobody married dark,” the twins, with their “creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair,” fit right in. It’s the rest of the world that finds them ambiguous, which they discover after running away to New Orleans at the age of 16 to make their own way.

Desiree ultimately marries a dark-skinned man, has a dark-skinned daughter, and returns home to Mallard to escape her abusive husband, where she struggles to make ends meet for her family. After being mistaken for a white woman at her job, Stella decides to permanently “cross over.” Gone without warning, Stella marries a rich white man and raises an affluent white daughter, disappearing into another life, the comfort and safety of which her twin can only dream.

Some reviewers of Half think Bennett doesn’t dig deep enough into her characters’ interiority. From the NYT: “Some depth is sacrificed for the swiftness; the book doesn’t burrow into the psychology of its characters so much as map the wages of artifice, fracture and loss across generations.” And it’s true that there are so many key characters in Half, so much distance in time and space to cover, that there isn’t enough time to feel as if we know any one of them as well as we would like to.

But in a sense, I disagree with that take. One of the strongest aspects of Half is Bennett’s weaving of the somatic experience of trauma into her characters’ lives, using their bodies’ defense mechanisms to color and inform their desires and decisions. This is a function of her empathy for all of her characters, including the often-hard-to-empathize-with Stella, whose decision to abandon her sister and integrate into whiteness is held up alongside the nightmares, terrors, and dissociation of a young life shaped by vicious antiblack violence, including the horrific lynching of Stella and Desiree’s father when they were young children. Even in her most intimate moments with her white husband, who doesn’t know Stella is black, “she saw the man who’d dragged her father onto the porch, the one with the red-gold hair.”

I think Bennett’s adroitness is most impressive in the subplot around Reese, the boyfriend of Jude, Desiree’s daughter who moves to California on a UCLA running scholarship. I’d heard that Half had a transmasculine character, and was curious to see how a cis author like Bennett would write him. Tense at his introduction—protective of this fiction of Bennett’s mind—I slowly grew impressed by the way she depicts him and the struggles that he faces as a young black trans man. Any questions of authenticity that arose for me, of which there were one or two, came from a place of my own ignorance; my cultural knowledge of black queer and trans communities in LA in the 70s and 80s amounts to a hill of beans.

By the final page—a scene which shows us Jude and Reese swimming “under the tangerine sky,” neither hiding their skin or their scars from the other, and which deftly feints melodrama with its hints at both finality and forever—I was surprised to realize I had come across a cis writer of a transsexual person that I not only didn’t loathe, but rather liked. What’s more, Bennett accomplishes the extremely daunting task of addressing and contrasting more than one passing discourse in a single book without conflating them.

Which is big. Huge, even. In a post-Dolezal context with skyrocketing animus and violence against black people and trans people, and especially black trans people, Bennett’s use of fiction to write with nuance and compassion about the distinct yet interlinking phenomena of raced and gendered passing without using one to demonize trans people or demarcating the other as an implicitly white (and therefore violently antiblack) category, is a triumph that I wish would get more recognition. For a book with so many laurels already, it’s the very least that it deserves!

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Subscribe to support our mutual aid project, GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, a bimonthly advice series from an anonymous gay therapist who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth.

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Read Part 1. Read Part 2.

I used to believe that morality was a matter of willpower. If Calvinists had koans, this one would have been the guiding principle of my early life:

Since everything that I want is bad, goodness is that which I do not want. The only valid desire is the desire to be good, which few have, and even fewer the discipline to attain.

Even as I was slowly becoming politically aware in the late oughts, my retrograde ideas about morality were reinforced by the most shallow, cynical, and reactionary aspects of swiftly commodifying internet feminisms. I became aware of the problematic at the same time I became aware of capitalism’s still-somewhat-nascent solution to digital political consciousness, which was to frame the problematic as momentary, insular, and subject to consumer trends while somehow, also, being the individual responsibility of the consumer. Is this movie sexist? Is that sweatshirt racist? Egads! Don’t purchase the problematic item (forget that you couldn’t afford it, anyway)—here’s an unproblematic item for you to purchase instead, though do feel free to share your displeasure (make your voice heard!) online. Don’t forget to hashtag.

I eventually figured out that these capitalist headfakes were distractions, and that consumerist feminisms—along with white feminisms, girlboss feminisms, empowerment feminisms, and corporate feminisms—had an uncanny way of defanging anti-capitalist and revolutionary concepts and movements. These forces upcycle radical theory and action into corporate ad campaigns, state propaganda, and political woolpulling, like the MTA buses that urge you to report “bias-motivated threats” to cops in the name of “solidarity” (one wonders what is to be done about the unbiased threats). Or the COVID-awareness signage in Union Square that probably cost thousands in adspend to say empty stupid b**t like “ENACT” and “DEFUND SADNESS” (or whatever the fk).

It’s hard to believe now that this was not always obvious to me. While I understand why consumer feminist virtue signaling is its own stumbling block—it’s the stuff often termed “identity politics” before being conflated with materialist analyses of oppression and power in order to sweep both into the dumpster—I also recognize it as a stage in my political development. It’s a problem when people don’t know what to do with their newfound analytic lens other than to identify and (superficially) condemn the sexism, racism, homophobia, etc., around them. It’s a bigger problem when they don’t learn to use those lenses as tools for something much more useful.

Around the time I started reading sites like Jezebel, I was dating someone on a somewhat parallel journey. The only other non-straight-white guy in our friend group, my boyfriend—a straight Chinese-American man—and I were starting to have conversations about the casual racism and misogyny of our culture, as well as that of our friends, (micro)aggressions that we sometimes foisted on each other, too. As our consumer habits began to be influenced by what we were recognizing as racist or sexist or what have you, the size of our project dawned on us. “If we don’t watch anything that’s problematic,” my boyfriend asked one night after I vetoed a particularly problematic movie, “will there be anything left for us to watch?”

I didn’t know. Neither of us had ever been avant-garde, or punk, or counterculture. Our movies starred Schwarzenegger and Tony Jaa. Our message boards were toxic. His video games were violent. For date nights, we watched MMA. As we began to connect big ideas like poverty, labor, or immigration law to the details of our own lives, we began to wonder what 86ing Con Air was supposed to accomplish. How was antipleasure going to serve us?

While my boyfriend’s question had been asked in earnest, it seemed to me that it missed the point. From my still-pretty-Evangelical perspective, whether or not we were “entertained” didn’t matter, because the right thing to do was abstain from the problematic, even if it made our lives boring. My boyfriend was asking, What else is out there? I had yet to realize that that was just as important as, What’s here right now isn’t working.

Our relationship didn’t outlast my coming out and the political awakening hot on its tail. As I began to branch out from Jezebel to writers like Monica Jones and Twisty (does anyone else remember Savage Death Island!?); as I began building communities with queers, anticapitalists, anarchists, antiracists; as I began organizing with my local Occupy chapters, I slowly, lopsidedly began to understand that my experience of culture didn’t have to be a white-knuckle abstention from the great white men I had always known as the bearers of Truth. I would not have to avoid Polanski, Allen, Gibson, Cosby, Foster Wallace, etc., like as a Christian child I had once avoided the temptations of MTV. I would simply lose interest in them.

This happened naturally, because more often than not their bigotry, their records of (sexual) violence, and their commitment to reaffirming supremacy logics were right there in their work, rippling red flags of their intellectual stinginess, vacuity, and hate. Even their generosity was a symptom of self-consciousness that dripped with condescension. Once unable to see anything else, I now found it almost impossible to stomach.

The version of me aswim in consumerist feminisms would have the current me chastised for still enjoying a noir like Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), insisting on the inherent badness that is its birthright. Thank god she has grown up. That which was once problematic—in the way that would have gotten you lightly canceled, in today’s parlance—has become, if not irrelevant, then contextualized and often surpassed by forms of creation that I didn’t even know existed.

The problem with nuance is that while it dissolves dogma, it doesn’t resolve it. There are some problematics I can’t let go of.

The laconic, ice-eyed William Hurt is an American actor who stars in some of my favorite movies, the ones I watch when I’m depressed, or when I’m going through a breakup, or when I’m sharing myself with new people. A 6’2” daddy-type wreathed in world-weary mystery, the man was on fire in the 80s, starring in a series of critically acclaimed hits—Body Heat (1981), The Big Chill (1983),Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), and Children of a Lesser God (1986)—about love and passion and the reconciliation of desire and difference. These movies, which I first watched in my late teens and early twenties, remain beloved to me, living inside the vapid and velvety reservoirs of my girlhood, where I still occasionally retreat to doodle hearts and moon.

Discovering that Hurt, the man, was problematic changed how I related to these movies, and to Hurt himself, but I was dismayed to find that it did not eliminate my interest in him. What was to be done? Nothing, and yet that didn’t feel like enough. As if refusing to stream or even steal Altered States (1980) could somehow punish or disempower him, could change the vicious, horrible things he did to Marlee Matlin, his co-star in Children of a Lesser God and his former partner. How could someone I had watched convey such depth and tenderness embody this brutality in his real life? How could he show me love and then break it? How was it that he had changed me, and how was it that knowing the substance of his life could not change me back?

I’ve mostly stopped paying attention to art and media created by people like Hurt, not as a matter of principle but of priority: I’m more interested in art that interests me, and nothing is more boring than convention (which doesn’t mean that the banality of evil isn’t sometimes titillating or fascinating). But it’s also true that the badness of the artist is not always enough to eliminate their art from my purview.

Though I’ve come to terms with it, I’ve spent a lot of time distressed by my inability to banish my bad desire for the bad man (one that’s not purely or even primarily erotic, by the way). What was I to do with this implicated art, this tainted art?

As this DAVID series draws to a close, I’ll remind you that while we can hack our bodies with leather and art, like the mask, hacking goes both ways. These mechanisms can be switched on in ways we can’t anticipate or control. In the second installment, I wrote about how unfair it feels that I have to be careful about the art I witness in order to keep myself safe. “Is that what self-protection is? Choosing not to participate in life to forestall the aftershock of trauma?” I asked.

I think we fall back on a conception of art as distinct from our bodies and embodied experiences, and that this conception limits our understanding both of art and of ourselves. A more somatic perspective would allow for a richer understanding of artistic experiences without ruling out the dangers they can present.

The internet is littered with discourses that leverage art for violence. To the Disneyfied, art ought to be a moral compass; to the racist and homophobic, art is an excuse to scapegoat black queer and women artists for violence against children. To the rape apologist, art can and should be separated from the artist when the artist in question has hurt other people, positioning critique of the artist as irrelevant yet critique of the art as assault. This is a disingenuous attempt at a failed project: to sever not only the creator from what he has created, but “art” from “reality,” behavior from punishment, harm from consequence.

It’s cruel to ask us to pretend it can be done, crueler still when we consider how brutality accumulates in our bodies, sometimes overwhelming our systems. We don’t choose how we respond to art’s resonance, any more than we choose which resonates with us.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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Before Dahlia and Bambi gave me my first hood for my 30th birthday, I had always thought about masking from the perspective of the unmasked. The gimp is a compelling figure to us as a family, a creative, artistic, political, sexual, and erotic inspiration occupying the same elevated status as the foot or piss.

But until I began to play with it from the other side, hoodedness was fairly one-dimensional to me. I was used to depriving other people of their senses with this kind of implement, but hadn’t had mine similarly deprived. I already knew that from the outside, the masked is a spectacle. It can be very entertaining to watch another adult choose to be humiliated or objectified, especially if they are attempting to render services or accomplish tasks that the mask (perhaps along with other accoutrements) makes difficult, or even impossible.

It’s different inside the mask. From in there, one can certainly appreciate the humor of being ridiculous, the freedom of being the fool. But there’s more to it. If you are ashamed of your body or what it does, the mask can hide your shame, freeing you to be unbearable. If you are afraid to see what you, or your tormentors, are capable of, the mask can conceal it from you, to be revealed in more digestible bits and pieces, or to be kept from you forever. If you struggle with anxiety, prompted by the challenges of a scene or life more generally, the mask will produce calm for you by dimming the lights, restricting your movement, forcing you to breathe more slowly and intentionally; like other kinds of bondage, the mask is a regulation hack.

Over the years, I’ve begun to occasionally wear my mask out of scene, usually when I’m alone in my room, in order to enjoy the relaxation it can facilitate. It reminds me of the series of cockatiels we had when I was a kid. At night, we put a sheet over their cages; we were told that darkness made them go to sleep immediately. I don’t know if this is strictly true of cockatiels or any other birds, but the idea of a being who can gain and lose consciousness at your will is almost magical (perhaps this is where anesthesiologists come from). Of course, I don’t fall asleep when I put the mask on, or when the mask is put on me, but the way it changes my body is instantaneous. There can be an immediate swooniness; or a sense of being taken away somewhere enchanted; or of transformation, of becoming a secretive creature, a watching witness, a little hider, a mischievous imp, a helping hand, a sexy victim, a nothing. The mask goes both ways, or maybe in all directions.

A not-insignificant pleasure of the mask is the tension between the insights and denials of self-containment. One must be brutally honest with oneself in determining whether presence/absence is generative or fallow; in knowing where the fantasy ends and reality begins. Am I going deeper, or am I hiding? Which is necessary, interesting, best for me in this moment? I find myself wondering what would have happened to Eurydice if Orpheus had had a mask. What about Medusa’s victims? What about Oedipus’ sex life? Whenever I watch a home invasion in a movie, I wonder what would happen if the victim simply refused to play ball. What if Drew Barrymore just didn’t answer the phone? What if Naomi Watts just hadn’t let those sexy boys into her chateau? Can anyone be saved by simply refusing to participate, by Bartlebying the guy in the Scream mask? Of course not. But it’s a lovely fantasy, isn’t it?

Last week, Jade and I watched Perfect Blue (1997), and I caught myself in that familiar line of thought: What if Mima hadn’t gone to the website made by the stalker surveilling her? But we know she couldn’t have saved herself in that way. It is a (sometimes violent) fantasy to insist that we can protect ourselves from danger by behaving perfectly. Conversely, we are not completely powerless, as much as that fantasy offers a unique relief of its own. Because if we didn’t have any power, they wouldn’t be so interested in taking it away.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY is a bimonthly advice series from an anonymous gay therapist who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth.

Submit your requests for advice to badgayadvice@gmail.com. All submissions get a free 3-month subscription and all subscription funds benefit rotating mutual aid projects, so please share and tell your friends!

Dear Bad Gay,

I'm a trans woman, and I started taking estrogen for the first time about six months ago. It felt great; even before I could perceive physical changes, I felt a new level of comfort in my body—and I felt like I could name and talk about my experiences in new ways.

However, the estrogen basically destroyed my sex drive. I didn't want to f**k—maybe once every month or two, but beyond that, no. This was tough on my relationship, but my partner is very supportive and was able to meet their sexual needs elsewhere.

But sex—and especially leather, kink—have always been central to my sense of identity, who I am, the things I value. The desire for play faded as completely as the desire for sex (the same thing, really)—but I don't want to be that person! If taking estrogen means I am no longer a pervert, I don't know if I wanna take it. And I hate this! I feel like I am being forced to choose between my gender and my sexuality, when both are central to who I want to be, who I want to be in community with, and how I want to move through the world.

I stopped taking my hormones a few weeks ago, and felt very confident in the decision at the time. But while my desire (and kinks) have returned, I feel a different lack of ease in my body, and am not sure I can think of myself as a woman if I'm not taking HRT (of course, I 100% believe and affirm that other people can be trans without hormones—but I don't know that I can).

I just don't know how to reconcile or prioritize these competing, conflicting parts of who I am. Any advice?

From,

Trans/Leather Woman

Dear T/LW,

Competing, conflicting—the words at the end of your letter stood out. In these letters we—and by we I mean queers who seek advice from curt, faceless people on the internet—tend to buckle ourselves into dichotomies, despite having found more liberated and radical ways to exist in the world. We tend to have a thought or feeling (I am this now, I am no longer that) and sink into the tragedy of it, deciding that this is where we live now and making a home there. I am going to push back against any letter that asks me, “How do I choose between two things I value on an essential level?” So I’m wondering, T/LW, with a little work, can’t you have it all?

I'm actually going to pause here because, T/LW, your letter is a little too reasonable for my taste. I much prefer bad behavior to this perfectly tidy little question, so I decided to ask for some help because I got bored. And because BAD GAY is, after all, a mutual aid project, David and I concocted a queer little cross-promotional plan to raise even more money by bringing in a ringer.

Leatherdyke and leather worker Frankie is going to help us out. We’ve been corresponding about your situation, so now you get two judgmental queers to help you work through this quagmire. Here’s what Frankie had to say on the matter:

The first thing that came to mind after reading the letter is the 1:1 relationship between hormones and desire, both toward SM and sex generally, that the writer is experiencing. I wish we had more info about what exactly the type of SM she engaged with was because I have this suspicion that the role SM plays for her is being satiated by being on hormones! I think she’s engaging with this idea passed around amongst cis people that gender and sexuality are distinct and separate categories. This misses the idea that sexuality/gender inform and co-construct each other.

That stands out as a distinct possibility for T/LW: SM was a pre-hormonal-transition entry point to a feeling, an experience, an affirmational space that post-hormones isn’t hitting in the same way. If that is the case, your problem makes total sense! You’re literally changing the chemical/mental/social aspects of who you are, and your relationship with sex and desire aren’t going to pass through that metamorphosis unchanged, as well! We’ve all heard the stories of lifelong dykes or f*s who switch teams two or three years into hormones.

Second: There is no one-size-fits-all hormone regimen despite doctor’s/Reddit’s/peers’ insistence otherwise. It’s taken me personally 7 years and 5 different dosages—weekly or biweekly, changes in type of injection (IM or subq)—to find a regimen that works for me. It’s entirely possible that the effects T/LW is experiencing could be related to her regimen. The options aren’t either hormones/no sex drive or no hormones/sex drive with no area in between. Maybe you need progesterone as a supplement, which many girls take specifically for sex drive. Or maybe microdosing? The power and terror of transition is that you are exercising your agency in the most radical way and there’s no true roadmap for that!

I guess what I’m driving at is that there’s this expectation that things will be the same—just better—post-transition, and in reality you have no idea where you’re going to wind up. It is entirely up to you and not intrinsically known from the outset. For instance, 8 years ago I had no idea I’d wind up some flavor of masc both on estrogen and testosterone who primarily bottoms. Changing is terrifying and confusing because it destabilizes what we think we know to be true and absolute about ourselves, but I guess I’m trying to also point to the parts of that which can be channeled into something empowering.

I want to challenge this mutual exclusivity between biology and desire that T/LW is suggesting with the distinct possibility that desire hasn’t dissipated but has rather found a new location, a new form, a new set of protocols yet to be explored. If we understand our desires on some level as being contextual to our experiences, our social locations, and/or our self-perceptions, why wouldn’t a change that radically alters all of those and more metamorphose the forms our desire takes? I think there’s also the idea that is part hormones/part gender stereotype that estrogen=bottom and testosterone=top, which could also be at play if you’re feeling as though bottoming is what you’re supposed to be doing but is also what you’re bored/disinterested in.

I do feel that it’s possible to acknowledge that she took a rather radical leap from going on hormones to being fully off them without any real reflection on the possibility of just not having the right combo. So I feel like there’s room to address that kind of either/or mentality in a way that’s not just about dosages or hormones, but rather as another instance of this overall approach she’s taking in figuring herself out.

Our desires change across our lives. Yes, dear T/LW, you are newly on hormones and you are struggling with libido changes—in a world where you have the privilege to make the choices you make, why not go all the way and experiment? What if this is an opportunity for you, T/LW, to discover something new about what you like? Six months after a long time of waiting is both an incredibly long and incredibly short amount of time. How can you envision where you might be six months from now and use that to your advantage? There are infinite ways to f**k and infinite ways to be kinky—use your imagination. It is not the time to resign yourself to a life without perversion but with peace in your body, or to a life with perversion but no sex drive.

Instead of splitting yourself into two selves with impossible choices, experiment with all the variables in this brave new horizon until you find the sweet spot. Why resign yourself to less? You've come this far, after all.

Yours as ever,

Bad Gay

Thank you so much for subscribing to BAD GAY! As you know, 100% of subscription funds go to mutual aid and reparations projects.

For this edition, funds are going to Free Ashley Diamond. Ashley Diamond is a Black, transgender woman, and prisoners' rights activist. She made national headlines in 2016 for her landmark victory against the Georgia Department of Corrections. Ashley has since been re-imprisoned because of a technical parole violation and is currently incarcerated at Coastal State Prison in Garden City, Georgia. Find out more about Ashley and her struggle here.

Thank you for your continued support. We’re all in this together, so let’s act like it!

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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Shortly after I moved to Brooklyn from the Bay, my dear Bambi came to visit. We went to a sexy movie festival at Anthology Film Archives, where their work was being featured. One of the other features was The Artist and the Pervert, a documentary following writer and sex educator Mollena Williams-Haas and world-famous microtonalist composer Georg Friedrich Haas. The two have an M/s relationship, based on both a legally binding marriage license and a Master-slave contract that designates Haas as the “owner” and Williams-Haas as his simultaneous “equal,” slave, and muse.

The documentary explores not only the couple’s controversial relationship, but the shifting boundaries between their creative endeavors and kink practices; the origins of their desires (a treasured deviant pastime); and the politics of race and anti-blackness in their respective countries, scenes, and family histories (Williams-Haas is a black American woman; Haas is a white Austrian man whose elderly mother appears in the film to defend the Nazi sympathies with which she raised her son). Williams-Haas has been on my radar since I entered the scene myself—a decade ago 😱—and as the most prominent recreational race player that I can think of, she’s always been a fascinating figure.

While I think The Artist and the Pervert is successful in providing a nuanced and intimate look at a partnership that unsettles both vanilla and kinky senses of what is normal, acceptable, and easy (“To say I can’t play my personal psychodrama out just because I’m black, that’s racist,” Williams-Haas said in an interview), I left the theater that night thinking that it didn’t resolve the question of race play for me. Is race play good or is it bad? Can people, you know, do it? If so, in what contexts and ways? If someone walked up to me to ask if I thought race play was okay, what should I say? It’s one thing to dissect the problematically racialized dynamics of white players, and another to make sweeping claims about modes of play altogether, especially when those playing aren’t white! It took me longer than it probably should have to realize that perhaps answering these questions was neither the goal of the documentary, nor a realistic expectation for me, as a white player, to have.

Recognizing that part of my interest in Williams-Haas, as an authority in the scene, rested in the potential she presents for a definitive answer regarding one of the most controversial activities in a controversial milieu made me realize I have an investment in race play—even though I don’t do it. Why is this? Well, I can come up with a few reasons, not all of which are flattering to me.

First of all, my nominal non-participation in race play is besides the point. I can’t exempt myself from engaging with issues affecting players of color just because I do not explicitly name or center racialization in my play dynamics. If so-called race play threatens the safety or mental health of players of color in my communities, it’s a problem I can’t responsibly ignore (and it’s highly likely that it’s a problem of which I am a part). As Ariane Cruz writes in The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography, “interraciality is a necessary optic considering kink”; even in scenes with exclusively black players, “whiteness haunts the scene.” I can enact whichever fantasies I want within the imaginary of the scene, but this doesn’t change the reality of white supremacy for all involved, both within the scene and beyond it. The “question” of race play is a component of white supremacy, which cannot be compartmentalized. Refusing to have an opinion on a specific fetish or an activity simply because I do not partake is to exercise a luxury (one that is, in this case, grounded in my whiteness); going around saying you f**k with power while refusing to name the more challenging power differentials is like throwing the rock but disowning the ripples.

Then there’s virtue-signaling, something that’s a lot easier to do when you know the party line. Whether I praise, condemn, or excuse race play takes place in the larger conversation around it, and I am impacted depending on if and how I depart from the majority opinion. Sometimes that opinion is righteous; sometimes it is not; sometimes, as in this case, it is ambiguous—which is highly inconvenient for me! My stance on race play, such as it is, communicates my values as a player and as a person in a community (or movement, if you will), and these values are not uninflected by concerns of desirability and capital. While the dynamic that Williams-Haas has chosen is one for which she won’t apologize, the unconscious requirement that this mean something for me, personally, is reductive of her identity, not to mention the expertise she brings to the scene: by asking her to answer this “question” for me, I am deflecting and delegating moral authority to an individual, who whether or not she wants it, cannot own it.

My unthinking entitlement to a one-size-fits-all answer to the question of race play is the bite-size version of a similar instinct for all controversial issues, in the scene and beyond. Incest rp is universally bad for all players and should be banned! is much more satisfying—and easy—than, As consenting adults with this fetish, we have to be careful about how and when we play with it so that we avoid harming those who have not consented to participate, or even harming ourselves. There’s a difference between trying to police that most unpoliceable of things—desire—and trying to navigate the intricacies of community, and it’s unsurprising to me when those who are not embedded in my leather communities—nor in intersecting communities of people marginalized by race, gender, class, ability, and criminality—choose the former over the latter.

Ultimately, my mistake regarding The Artist and the Pervert reflects the limitations of self/white-centeredness and of having a binarist and punitive approach to desire. Race play exists. To dispute this is not only inaccurate but ineffectual. It exists. Now what? There are more interesting questions than whether it shouldn’t, many of them obscured by this line of thinking.

I’ll close this series with an excerpt from an interview with Cruz, whose insistence on going deeper than superficial questions of good or bad, harmful or empowering, has been a fascinating and challenging addition to my conception of leather.

I am wary of presenting the politics of perversion as liberatory or as some kind of path toward some kind of freedom because I think that liberation is unrealized and at the very least uncertain. With the politics of perversion, it’s less a matter of liberation and more a matter of transformation. That is, I am invested in the ways that the politics of perversion can change our both our thinking (about the relationships between sex, race, bodies, pleasure, and power) but also our doing (everything from our scholarship, to our relationships, to our labor, to our f*g etc.). I see perversion as useful in illuminating sexuality’s vast deployment as a technique of power.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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The protagonists of david stein’s Boots, Bondage, and Beatings (BBB) are horny for power, but not their own. These bottoms—(implicitly white) men who mostly identify themselves as slaves—want nothing more than to be controlled, trained, and used. Everything they do is for their Masters’ happiness, meaning that their polymorphously perverse pleasures can be found almost anywhere: in the endurance of physical pain and manipulation; in full body bondage; in capture and incarceration, completely isolated from the world outside their cage; in months of chastity with no release; in pure subsistence on piss, semen, and dog chow (and for this, they are grateful. “Few American Masters will require you to eat their s**t, though it’s common in Europe,” one of stein’s Masters informs a new devotee). These slaves are, or are seeking to become, smooth-brained holes with perfect bodies in service to real alpha males who make enough money that they can keep their toys chained up in climate-controlled cells under their houses, always available to pump and dump. No gods, only Masters.

As I wrote in the first installment of this series, reading erotica for which you aren’t particularly primed can be an interesting affective experience. Not only is it harder to get into the flow state of arousal, wherein one’s beliefs, qualms, and scruples are suspended; it’s also easier to become bored by the patterns lurking under the pageantry of an overactive, one-handed imagination. Our personal sexual obsessions are endlessly interesting to us, but stein’s will get old pretty fast if you don’t share them. Though I found a lot of BBB entertaining, I did catch myself wondering just how many times I could read about a horsecocked Master in jodhpurs instructing a rock-hard slave on the finer points of high protocol without glazing over. When the erotica is about fetishes that aren’t yours, the stakes are low; it’s not like you’re going to have an orgasm, right?

This detachment frees you and your jaundiced eye to scrutinize the erotica’s problematics all the more incisively. From this distance of non-arousal, you can think more deeply about what the fantasy in question has to say about its writer and the world in which he lived. What do stein’s fantasies of hot cops, militaristic topmen, and snow-white sexual imaginaries say about his life, his scene, and his values? What do they convey about the ability of stein, as a writer, leatherman, and activist, to subvert powers against which he worked? And what do they convey about his potential reinforcement of said powers?

The desires showcased in BBB more or less contrast with my own, a surprisingly fertile juxtaposition in that it both reveals and implicates. Outside the horny cocoon of my preferred erotic fantasies, in reading BBB I was more apt to notice flashes of new or unsuspected desire or arousal, like lightning in the distance. In the fk hinterland of not-your-erotica, where you’re not only not seeing that to which you’re accustomed to fantasizing about but that which should be anathema to your hard-on, you’re liable to surprise yourself. BBB reminded me that many things can cause us to become aroused against our will, things that we find ugly, embarrassing, taboo, or uncomfortable. An example of this that I will talk anyone’s ear off about, given half a chance, is a bestiality scene in Jane Delynn’s 2001 novel Leash, which remains one of the most erotic reading experiences of my life. A few passages about a dyke f***g a dog produced a raw, horrifying, formulative experience in me that has gone on to inform my own work, not to mention my conception of my self. I did not expect to be turned on, but I was, and I was ashamed of myself. On a certain level, I still am. For all my issues with Delynn’s work—another thing I could talk your ear off about—I am still impressed at her power to confront me with myself.

Now, all of this isn’t to say that there weren’t scenes, or instances, in BBB that I found hot. Indeed, these flashes of desire re-illuminate the role that my preferred psychodynamic arena—the male-led white American family unit—has with US military hegemony. By now long accustomed to bad-faith, often carceralist arguments “against” taboo desires like, say, incest fantasies among consenting adults, it’s become rather easy to extract my preferred cumshots from stein’s. After all, there are no slaveowners in my fantasies! That means I don’t have to interrogate my relationship to anti-blackness, right? It’s all in the family!

Superficially immune to the spell that the M/s dynamic casts over stein himself, I observe with discomfort and curiosity the moments of BBB when I am breached and taken over, however briefly, by something that contradicts my sense of self as an anti-racist or anti-imperialist or anti-white-supremacist white person. I am forced to connect stein’s desires back to my own. I am forced to implicate myself, and to admit my implication.

BBB has almost zero discussion of race, anti-blackness, the history of chattel slavery, or anything offering contextualization of the M/s dynamic upon which it’s built. It doesn’t even have any characters coded or outright named as non-white. Though BBB is suffused with images and metaphors of mastery and servitude, of the American military and of America’s police state, of human property and naked power, one would never know that all of these shibboleths and structures came from somewhere. In stein’s stories, the slave auctions run by white, cis, muscled, middle-to-upper class gay guys are solely a solution for yuppies in search of connection, purpose, meaning, of a “real life,” as more than one slave puts it. There is no hint of the world-ending horror of the source material—or even that black leathermen might exist alongside and contemporaneous with the players of stein’s stories.

In stein’s fantasia, slavery is a vocation, a calling for certain white gay men. “I felt more real, more me, when I was naked and chained, with my tongue on a man’s boot and my ass burning from his belt, than I ever felt in the office where I worked or the studio apartment where I ate and slept. Which was the act and which was real?” In a 1997 essay called “What a Slave Needs,” stein wrote:

“The popular conception is that slaves are people who are forced to obey a Master's orders, and many slaves also fantasize being forced. Being obedient is held to be the opposite of freedom, and the negative connotations of ‘slavery’ largely consist in this lack of freedom.

This no doubt was true of many or most coerced slaves in history. It is not true of consensual slaves today. Those who become slaves today in the U.S., Europe, and the rest of the developed world do so not because they are being forced to obey, but because they positively need to obey. Obedience is the voluntary slave's lifeblood. To obey is not our cross but our joy! We only ask to be given the opportunity.”

We can comment on the obvious ~privilege of someone able to engage in a fantasy of powerlessness conceived of in this particular way while disengaging almost totally from the history of enslaved people in America and beyond. Still, you might ask, is it fair to require so much out of a book of erotica? It’s jerkoff material, after all. Is it right to litigate the unbidden desires of a leatherman who surely meant no harm to anyone else?

I’ll answer that question with a question: What would deciding whether stein’s desires were good or bad, problematic or not, accomplish? david stein’s white slave fantasy is bad. . I think if white people are going to confront white supremacy in our leather scenes, we must move beyond, “Is this desire good or bad?” to more actionable concerns, like “Does this activity/party theme/way of moving through community alienate players of color? How am I helping to build communities, coalitions, and movements alongside players of color that are not passive to white supremacy, but utterly inhospitable to it?” Inserting trigger warnings or token black characters into stein’s implicitly white fantasias would not only not resolve the issues of racism in today’s leather scenes, but it would be inauthentic; the worlds that he created in his stories weren’t taken from thin air, but probably reflected his leather scenes and the men in it. What is the point of elucidating stein’s problematics, or making neoliberalist corrections to them, when it would be more useful to ask all white players, myself included, to do more—and not for inclusivity fetishism’s sake?

Of course, I can’t comment on any of this without also implicating myself. Sure, there are nuances. One of BBB’s stories is set during SF Pride 1997, when a white slave pursuing a white Master, who is also an off-duty cop, remarks approvingly that, “You’re comfortable with who you are, sir, both gay and kinky. That should help you be a fine cop—and a good top.” In my milieu, gay leatherfolk who are also pigs is a contradiction in terms, and yet we all know there are cops, soldiers, and their ideological fellow travelers in all kinds of leather scenes, if not the ones in which we’re immediately active.

Nevertheless, in seeking to contextualize that which stein has decontextualized, I can’t fail to cast that same jaundiced eye over my own glass house. A few years ago, Bambi and I watched Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising together at their apartment in Oakland. It was another unexpectedly profound experience for me, to sit with my friend enjoying cute boys and their innocent markers of blue-collar culture that gradually become markers of gay and leather and biker culture that gradually become markers of Nazi and police cultures.

I couldn’t get it out of my head. What was the difference between what I did with my friends and what the white Old Guard was doing, and where did one draw the line? Lucifer Rising was released in 1972, three years before Corregidora, Gayl Jones’ novel about the generational trauma of a black American family in the aftermath of slavery. In some ways as dreamlike as Anger’s short film, Corregidora layers memory with family myth, the passing down of the soul-murder of anti-blackness from grandmother to mother to daughter. These works, and their creators, were roughly contemporaneous, and dealt with overlapping themes, and yet you would never know it.

Watching Lucifer Rising wasn’t the first time I had considered racism in the scene, but it was the first time that I began to think about how the scenes in which I made my home could be salvaged, or remade. More on that next time.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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Spoilers ahead. Preorder your copy of Darryl here.

There is, as we trans people often lament, a Trans Narrative. You know the one. And that’s fine, we insist, perhaps a little uneasily. Some people’s stories are like that. But not everyone’s is! Mine wasn’t! (I’m different!) Couldn’t we have more of that? More difference—like me? I came to Jackie Ess’s debut novel expecting to see this metanarrative explored in the story of Darryl Cook, an Oregonian cuck whose life is unraveling. Area Man begins to wonder if maybe he wouldn’t like to be Area Woman, but with a twist.

As our hero’s egg tendencies revealed themselves, I was even more on my guard, reading with my hand at my hip, so to speak. At first, Darryl’s transing is as classic as they come, consisting of most of the stages of grief plus bonus extras like dissociation and, briefly, institutionalization. “I wonder what happens to guys like me,” Darryl writes as he muses on what separates the alphas who f**k his wife from the soyboys like him. “We’re all kind of hiding in plain sight. Everything kills us, it’s all too much.” Darryl’s is something akin to the hero’s journey, or Pilgrim’s Progress, as Torrey’s endorsement offers, populated by the lies one tells and the lies one believes; the self-brutalization; the small, shocking moments of courage, all recombining into a gender crisis that haunts Darryl like a pendant of saliva suspended over an unwilling face.

I read Darryl’s first half as an egg cracking in real time, watching the pressures of Darryl’s marriage, finances, mental health, burgeoning queerness, friendship with a trans woman, etc., accumulate, bearing down across the weakest points of his shell. I wondered, not without a little superiority, how well most cis people would be able to track the cracking. At what point would your garden variety cis realize what was going on with dear Darryl? Would Ess’s inevitable twist, I wondered, be the adoption of a Trans Narrative that was so inside-baseball that cis people would, paradoxically, be unable to see it? That would be pretty cool.

But that wasn’t it. I was wrong about Darryl. What I had thought would be the anatomy of an egg, albeit twisted, was suddenly something else, which I realized around the time that Darryl merges universes with Dennis Cooper’s George Miles Cycle, when Darryl learns that Clive, his therapist as well as one of the men who f***s his wife, Mindy, was once known as Brian, the guy responsible for snuffing the young and corrupted gay escort, Brad, of Cooper’s The Sluts (2004). Darryl’s trajectory to transness is disrupted, the hero’s journey supplanted by a quest of another kind as his desire for a new woman, as well as for Bill, one of the bulls who emasculate him with Mindy, is further complicated by his dwindling bank account and his proximity to the Hannibalesque Clive.

Darryl ends with Darryl and Bill riding off into the sunset together, the former only just escaping slaughter. The sweet and sturdy Bill has accepted his gayness for Darryl, whose trans escalations have petered off into moody demurral. Though there are aspects to his genderqueerness he’ll continue to claim, he does not want to join the “frankly miserable” world of his friend, Oothoon, and her impoverished transness. Ess leaves us no reason to think that a Beryl exists on the other side of the last page. Darryl remains, the egg intact.

So here’s my lesson: In trying to slot Darryl into a trans narrative, if not the Trans Narrative, I neglected to consider the possibility that it wasn’t trans at all, or at least, not simply trans. Though many discourses of contemporary trans writing—from the chaser/trans binary (what came first, chicken or egg?), to the coercive pedestalization of trans women and femmes, to our demands for a linear and moral trans journey, to the problematics of microidentity, pathologized and otherwise—initially suggest themselves, Darryl is something else altogether. For me personally, the efforts to determine whether and in what way a text will be reactionary and/or in conversation with the texts around are already so overwhelming, so distracting; perhaps the greatest casualty of this is Darryl’s linguistic beauty and comedic genius, occasionally so subtle as to almost slip through your fingers. “Sometimes I feel like my heart is a long hallway with every door locked,” writes Darryl. It’s good to be twisted, but I still have egg on my face.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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I came across david stein last year while writing a short piece on the history of conduct acronyms in BDSM. SSC, the earliest and most well-known of these, is often attributed to stein, along with leathermen Martin Berkenwald and Bob Gillespie, with whom he formed New York’s Committee of GMSMA (Gay Male S/M Activists) in the early 1980s. stein was the last living member of GMSMA when he died in 2017.

These days, leatherpeople (or at least the leatherpeople that I associate with) dump on safe, sane, and consensual like we dump on “valid” culture, or like stein himself dumped on stand & model back in the day. But while SSC is way out of date in 2021 for a variety of very good reasons, it would be a mistake to forget the context from which it emerged, and what it can tell us about that time’s (leather) politics. To paraphrase Gayle Rubin, our rhetorical needs as leatherpeople seeking to defend ourselves and our movements differ over time and across communities.

At the time and place of its advent, was the invocation of safe, sane, and consensual play alienating for mentally ill players or counterintuitive to players for whom the (always subjective) concept of safety was nebulous or undesirable? Maybe. Probably. But you should also know that SSC was reportedly developed for a few specific purposes, with none of them having any idea of the almost catholic reach it would eventually have. A sort of big-picture axiom designed in order to 1) be inclusive of new or inexperienced players and 2) help all players avoid a small number of predatory so-called dominants in the New York leather scene, SSC was a stopgap measure, not a replacement for more thorough and nuanced education, the type of which it was hard to get back then. S**t, it’s still hard to get.

Still, we also can’t deny the other concern the creators of SSC had: that of S/M’s image to the wider public. Concerned with “the [common] perception of S/M as being as psycho-pathological destructive or neurotically self-abusive behaviour,” the respectability approach to leather’s bad PR meant separating it from mental illness and other kinds of criminalized “deviancy.” The pathologization of what the 20th century came to know as leather, BDSM, and/or kink was already enshrined in the DSM by the time stein hit the scene; not until 2013, with the most current edition of the DSM, were BDSM, fetishism, and transvestic fetishism (a variant of cross-dressing) formally depathologized (and we all know how inconsistently this plays out in our real-life experiences with the medical industrial complex!).

I can’t say with certainty what their relationships with still more marginal members of their gay and leather communities the members of the GMSMA were, but for all our contextualizing, or the good that SSC might have done in its heyday, we can’t dismiss the thought process and implications behind its development, either. Here’s an excerpt from the GMSMA’s newsletter on the subject: “We seek to establish a recognized political presence in the wider gay community in order to combat the prevailing stereotypes and misconceptions about S/M while working with others for the common goals of gay liberation.” Of course, no gay liberation is complete without liberation for crazy people, institutionalized people, and the other deviants affected by the pathologization of consensual behaviors.

Although stein, a lifestyle slave, bottom, and masochist (more on that later!), was an activist from his entry into leather, he would have been the first to insist that what always took precedence was the f**k. “Leather begins in erotic desire, not a response to social or political conditions,” he said in a 2011 interview with website Leatherati. “I would hope that any intelligent, informed person would be an activist to some degree; that’s part of being a good citizen in a democracy (or democratic republic, if you prefer). But Leather pertains to a different sphere of life. It has a political dimension only when something is wrong, as when folks are attacked or disenfranchised because of whom or how they love.” From my research, stein spoke often and at length about what he saw as the intersections of differentiated desire and politics, an understanding with which I mostly don’t agree but nevertheless find interesting. Wanting to know more about his, uh, proclivities, I ordered Boots, Bondage, and Beatings, one of his books of erotica, which I’ll be discussing in the next installment of this series.

Until then, I’ll leave you with this: While I don’t read a lot of kink erotica, I do enjoy it on occasion (Patrick Califia’s Doing It For Daddy is an all-time fave). As I began reading stein’s BBB, which is concerned with fetishes that have some intersections with mine but which I more or less don’t share, I was struck by the affective difference between reading for arousal and reading for literally any other reason. When one reads erotica for which one isn’t primed, it’s easy to lapse into embarrassment at its corniness, its earnestness, its uncoolness (what’s less cool than being really horny?). If you can fight that instinct, though, reading erotica that’s not for you can be really useful for thinking about the challenging, complicated, and “problematic” desires of others as well as of ourselves.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY is a bimonthly advice series from an anonymous gay therapist* who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth.

Submit your requests for advice to badgayadvice@gmail.com. All subscription funds benefit rotating mutual aid projects, so please share and tell your friends!

*This column is meant as a source of advice and entertainment, and should not be considered therapy or medical advice in any way, nor does it establish a therapeutic relationship. If you are seeking either, please look into appropriate venues.

Dear Bad Gay,

Late-twenties cis woman here, been out and bisexual for years. But I haven't actually dated much. For years, it's been a lot of hookups and casual friends with benefits. Recently working on trauma and attachment and being in touch with my feelings. I'm realizing that almost all my passion and love flows toward women and nb people, but I sublimated that desire into intense and possessive friendships (embarrassing at my age!) whilst hooking up indiscriminately and emotionlessly. It felt like I just wasn't that into anybody, but really I was operating out of fear/detachment. It explains a lot.

It's bizarre wanting to love women as well as f**k them, and it’s ABSURD that this is so bizarre to me. In many ways I feel like a late-in-life lesbian... except that I've been out this whole time. I feel like I can't talk to my friends about it because I'm supposed to be beyond this? I'm ashamed of my internalized homophobia. And I'm crushing wildly on any woman who looks my way. I never had a babygay phase but I think I'm in one now. Any words of wisdom?

Thank you!!

Dear Bizarre Bisexual,

To begin with, I have anointed you with Bizarre Bisexual because you broke the first rule of advice columns: You didn’t give me something with which to refer to you. This lack of manners betrays a deeper issue that I will attempt to elucidate as I give you the “wisdom” you seek.

Congrats on being able to sexualize women and NB folks, just like the rest of society. The bad news is that having the ability and desire to fk women and NB folks is easy. You do not get points for this. I’m happy for you, but no medals are awarded. You place yourself historically in the context of a whole lot of people who can fk all manner of lesser or less socially acceptable people but find it “bizarre” to think of loving them and building relationships with them.

So, fine. This does not make you bad, but it does require a heavy dose of caution. Unfortunately, for all the work you have done, you have not yet shed the straight sensibility. You are horny for queer people but you have yet to internalize your own queerness, probably because the internalized homophobia is taking up too much space. You are at the very high risk of turning the folks you fk into abstractions to fulfill your desires rather than seeing them as whole, complete, and worthy. You do not have to love everyone you fk, but I would encourage you to try and see the whole existence of the people you can so easily sexualize. I don’t particularly care about the labels—our lifelong, ebbing and flowing ability to sexualize different groups of folks in abstraction isn’t particularly subversive. Be bisexual, be gay, label yourself however you like, but don’t let that label get in the way of honest investigation of how your desires play out on real people.

We often think of ourselves as moving between the place we were and the place we are meant to be. You used to exist in a space of detachment and sublimated desire, you worked on it, and now you find yourself baffled that you are not in the space beyond—happy, released, romping around with the woman you love waving a rainbow flag. This ignores your investment in the thrall of the space between. You are ashamed of your internalized homophobia, you crush “wildly” on any woman that looks your way, and yet, the idea of building a meaningful relationship is baffling. You press your nose to the glass of the fantasized other life you could have and berate yourself for your “bizarre” feelings. You chew on the inability to link your sexual desire and your romance fantasy. This, stated another way, is masturbation.

I think that calling things what they are can sometimes help release us from them. BAD GAY is, of course, not against, flogging ourselves with shame while we masturbate about our own shortcomings, but let’s also make sure we know when we are doing that. Do you actually want to link love and sexual desire, or do think you’re supposed to?

There are also ghosts haunting this letter. I hear the whispers of socialization and parenting—all of the “supposed tos” in the background. The people you have hurt, too, are here, the grappling with detachment while you fk your way through and work it all out. I guess my advice is this: Masturbate about your own absurdity all you want, desire all you want, fk brazenly but wisely, and remember that we are all working out different inheritances, so be kind, and only unkind when people ask for it specifically.

Yours truly,

Bad Gay

Thank you so much for subscribing to BAD GAY! As you know, 100% of subscription funds go to mutual aid and reparations projects.

For this edition, funds go to For the Gworls, a Brooklyn-founded org that hosts parties to fundraise to help Black trans people pay for their rent and gender-affirming surgeries.

Thank you for your continued support. We’re all in this together, so let’s act like it!

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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Shitty still from “Forsaking All Others” (1934), one of a few pre-Code movies in which Clark Gable spanks Joan Crawford for being a bad girl.

Scott came to San Francisco a couple times a year on business. Though his evenings in the City were booked solid with dinners and drinks with colleagues, he would always find a night to fake food poisoning and call me, or some other girl, for an hour or two of spanking. He was less a hobbyist than an indulger, a guy who didn’t have the cashflow or the interest in regular transactional sex, but liked to treat himself every so often—as some people do with professional massages or prix fixe meals—to OTK with a girl-next-door type who didn’t cry.

Scott holds the distinction of having been my favorite client, as well as the only paying SM top that I didn’t daydream about murdering (most of those guys are b**s rather than tops, but even the real tops are almost exclusively b****s). He was clean, polite, decent-looking, and grateful for the opportunity to spank someone who enjoyed it, and I did enjoy it. Spanking, like any other SM skill, is both intuited and perfected over time, and Scott was a natural with a decent amount of applicable experience for a civilian. In fact, he was the only client who I probably would have had sex with for free. I still think softly of him from time to time, though since we saw each other last I quit the industry, moved across the country, and changed my body enough that a guy looking for girls to redden almost certainly wouldn’t be interested.

Although he made it clear he would have welcomed vanilla sex had it been included in my fee, for Scott, the spanking was the main event. A clean, polite, decent-looking straight guy like him could get laid any old time, but corporal punishment came much more dear. He insisted he could never tell his girlfriend, who he was going to marry, about his fetish. This had to do with his own shame, as well as the conviction that she wouldn’t be interested in partaking. But it also had to do with the hotness of secrecy, anonymity, indulgence, and the power trip of paid companionship. Scott’s girlfriend didn’t know what she was missing, but even if she did, she was too close to share the kind of experience he was looking for. Fantasy is funny that way.

Does it surprise you to learn that I was spanked as a kid? It shouldn’t, as that’s how our logic goes: Hit a child, create a pervert. As a culture we seem more disturbed by consensual adult reenactment of child abuse than the simple fact of harmed children (how many undocumented kids will benefit from Biden rolling back Trump-era immigration policy, and how many won’t?). While I personally tend to resent conflations such as these, I really can’t blame anyone for making the connection. I’m tempted to, myself.

I never asked Scott if he had been spanked, although with America’s cultural mores—apparently something like 75% of my fellow Millennials agree with their Boomer/Gen X parents that spanking helpless children is a good thing—it’s fair to assume that he was. But one of the many problems with the notion that masochism is always and necessarily a result of trauma is that it doesn’t account for sadists. If I like spanking because I was spanked, wouldn’t it make more sense that Scott liked spanking because he spanked his parents (or something?!). I’m sure psychologists have gone on record justifying both positionalities in ways I haven’t considered, but I also think the pat flimsiness of that reasoning suggests bigger inconsistencies deeper down.

Because I think there’s a connection between the false idea that victimhood is perpetuated by victims and the false idea that SM must be a therapeutic solution for pathologized desire. It’s currently in vogue to excuse one’s own SM practice as a component of healing; whether or not it is therapeutic (in the last installment, I insisted that it is), I don’t know how this argument is different from the one presented by concern trolls who see consensual leatherplay as inherently abusive, and masochists as inherently abused, a perspective that always seems to focus on bottoms and masochists over tops and dominants, women over men, people of color over white people, queer people over straight people, and mentally ill people over the sane and neurotypical. Both rely on the notion that BDSM, SM, leather, whatever you call it, is always already bad because of its superficial resemblance to certain kinds of abuse, and its tenuous, generalizing, and unproven origins in it. (Funny how spanking children also “resembles” abuse, and yet it’s not held to the same standards of decency.) Even if the abuse-to-kink pipeline was indisputable, I fail to see how preventing adults from being kinky together prevents the abuse of children at other adults’ hands.

All that’s well-traveled ground, and prejudices that leatherpeople have been grappling with for decades. It’s nothing new. What is new, or newer, at least, is the rise of a “normalized” (or commodified) SM alongside those prejudices. This series is my college try at tracing the trend of kink as therapy back to this a priori—and problematic—badness of kink. If kink is only excusable when it’s a response to victimhood, an undesirable but otherwise necessary curative for a disease (like shock treatments), that means not only that play must be justified, but also that that justification is elevating. Play is no longer a common pleasure, but a medical need. Like a disease, a desire to be spanked can be analyzed, treated, and cured. The doctor is in.

In the process of mounting such a strenuous defense of the chasm between kink and therapy, I kept forgetting that this separation has a way of contributing to that elevation, which I don’t want to do. Not because I don’t think therapy can be good or helpful—I am lucky enough to be in therapy—or that finding ways to treat and heal oneself can’t be done within the medical industrial complex. I just don’t trust it. No one should.

While I’ve written about this before, you’ll find a fascinating in-depth exploration of the tension between mistrusting the MIC and throwing yourself at its mercy over at Mental Hellth, a newsletter about how capitalism is bad for your brain, and often about how this country’s mental health care system is, at the very best, a stop-gap rather than solution, a dirty bandaid on an infected wound. It’s something I’ve been thinking about more than ever lately, inspired by writing like a recent Baffler piece about the boom of apps designed to treat mental illness. Samantha Nash zeroes in on clinical psychologist and philosopher David Smail’s book Power, Responsibility, and Freedom, which argues that most people’s suffering is a question “neither of medicine nor of ‘therapy’. . . [but] of morality and, by extension, politics.”

The formalism of clinical psychology, [Smail] writes, leads too many people to view their well-being as a matter of medical diagnosis rather than as the result of externally imposed conditions—chief among them “the machinery of global capitalism,” which “has enormous effects on vast numbers of people in the world who are themselves in no position to see into its operation.”

So spells the end of another DAVID series, but since the implications of SM’s commodification via medicine—kink as not just a product, but as a treatment—are far-reaching and many, I’m sure this won’t be the last time I write about this subject. Until then.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

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Iconic shot from “History of Black BDSM,” Dark Connections

In a recent BAD GAY column, the good doctor cautioned an advice-seeking pervert against confusing therapy with a good time.

Kink does not have to be self-care and kink is not therapy. Kink, done well, can feel therapeutic and cathartic and like self-care, but going into it with the idea that you are in some sort of grind to find your own limits sounds fairly stressful and not particularly joyful for anyone involved.

Not only is kink not therapy, but the desire to make it so can actually leech it of the pleasures offered us by a dangerous, sexy time among friends (or strangers!). When you try to make kink and therapy the same thing, in other words, you deprive yourself of the benefits of both. In this case, I agree with Bad Gay.

Where does this urge to make kink good for us come from, and why does it seem…if not common, then ambient, particularly at the moment? An example of this phenomenon might be a recent podcast interview with a popular online BDSM educator whose trauma-informed approach to so-called “sane and healing” BDSM boasts a variety of curative and therapeutic properties. While there are aspects to the educator’s approach that I wholeheartedly agree with—like her embrace of the power of kink to reimagine nonconsensual trauma in consensual circumstances, which I think is something a lot of players can relate to—there are others that I find deeply concerning, most of which popped up in the podcast episode but can be found echoed across her social media platforms.

It’s not just the educator’s casual conflation of BDSM with therapeutic interventions in comparing it to exposure therapy; relaying a story of likening BDSM to therapy during therapy with her therapist; and failing to correct the podcast host when they do the same that gave me pause. Taken on their own, I would probably have ignored them because I am aware that there are many approaches to BDSM that aren’t like mine. We know that players can be mystical, spiritual, occultist, crunchy, sensual, strictly sexual, strictly asexual, professional, romantic, nerdy, religious, clinical, medical, artistic, “primal,” and more, I’m sure. For me, I’ve been mindfulness-pilled enough to occasionally use the word “practice” to describe what I do, which I see as an amalgamate of connection with my gay and class history, somatic exploration, bodyhacking, and horny filth.

It’s the additional context that gives me pause, and makes me wonder whether this therapy kick isn’t something deeper. In the same podcast episode, the educator goes on to frame gay leathermen as scary or aggressive based off of pretty “mainstream” leather aesthetics (the color black and the bad UX of old cruising websites, basically) and because the community itself is not always easy for outsiders to access, not appearing to understand that this is by design. She also offers other heteronormative framings of BDSM that I won’t get into here, in the interest of time.

With this additional homophobic and heteronormative commentary, one begins to wonder if promoting the aspects of BDSM that are conducive to health, Wellness TM, and sanity* and vilifying the aspects that are scary, yucky, criminalized, challenging, dykey, and faggy don’t serve a greater purpose. In seeking to justify more easily sanitized aspects of BDSM by claiming that choice aspects of it are good for us, this educator engages with leather’s detractors on their terms, not ours. This is where the concept of respectability politics comes in handy. Instead of challenging anti-BDSM moral panickers and policymakers with, No, it is actually good for me to get stepped on by a woman pretending to be my Mommy, what if we were just honest?

I don’t care if it’s good for me. It doesn’t need to be good for me for me to be allowed to do it.

Leather may well be healing. It may well help address and resolve trauma. It may well aid us in becoming better, more well-rounded people. For me personally, this has been true in some respects. But it may not—and so what? The way you (consensually) have sex or explore sensation may be fucked up and nasty and dirty and pointless and hedonistic. It may hurt you, or never make you a better person, and this has been true for me, too. I have a scar that says Our first date <3 on my back (which I often forget about, it being on my back and all) carved by a person that I will no longer play with. The circumstances of the scar and the relationship were not particularly good for me, though the scene itself was one of the most fun I’ve ever had. Was this scene not good BDSM, or not BDSM at all, for those reasons? Should it have been prevented, my partner and I saved from ourselves, even though we both consented?

Good scenes and bad scenes, and even harm and abuse that happen within scenes, should have no bearing on whether it is acceptable to participate in leather and leather subcultures, especially when it comes to the interventions of the state via legislation and provision of resources and services, or lack thereof. Nonconsensual violence is unacceptable everywhere, but the state and its many tentacles have a funny way of only wanting to prevent it when doing so will harm, imprison, or destroy a community. We don’t need to justify BDSM with the idea that it can also somehow be good for us, like kale. Not only is this an insulting and counterproductive prospect, but it simply doesn’t work. Capitulation never does.

These conflicts are not new, even if the BDSM educator in question, who seems not to have a strong grasp of leather history overall, doesn’t realize it. In her intro to Guy Baldwin’s Ties That Bind, a collection of essays by the well-known leatherman and psychotherapist, cultural anthropologist and leatherdyke Gayle Rubin writes:

“…the gay movement had to move beyond simple affirmations of ‘gay is good’ to more nuanced understandings of the joys and sorrows and variety of gay and lesbian life. Similarly, the leather/SM/fetish movement needs the luxury of deeper and more complex discussions of the unique pleasures, and particular pitfalls, and endless diversity of what we call, for lack of a better term, ‘leather.’”

(I’m struck, re-reading this, at how we have come to describe leather as a “community” rather than a “movement.” Something to consider for all of us marginal people, I think.) Our rhetorical needs, as leatherpeople seeking to defend ourselves and our communities, have evolved since the early days of American leather. They also vary, surely, depending on the other identities you bring with you to leather. Players of color, professional fetish workers, players with children, players across the gender and sexuality spectrum, players with disabilities and illnesses, players who are criminalized for a variety of reasons—it’s not unreasonable to suspect that the ways in which we talk about ourselves might not suit other sub-communities (or -movements, as it were). For example, how did the racial segregation of the U.S. military affect black leathermen of the Old Guard differently from the white leathermen? As a rhetorical device, “Leather is good, actually,” may have worked differently for these groups. This question might be easier to answer if not for, as noted in the Dark Connections page linked above, the scant evidence regarding the history of people of color within the early stages of the leather community.

Many of us have been told our whole lives that we are bad, and that just by being what we happen to be we are harming ourselves and others. How we choose to engage with this moralizing, and ultimately punitive, propaganda—for even choosing not to engage is in itself a form of engagement—matters, and doing so without legitimizing the arguments of your enemies—or worse, playing into them—is important, and also really f*g hard. This is why learning your history as a leatherperson is both so important and so damn hard to do. The current online censorship of sex workers, for example, is not only an assault on one of the most marginal of labor forces, which is disproportionately peopled with the most marginal among us, but also the art, history, and scholarship of kinky, queer, trans, incarcerated, POC, fat, disabled, and otherwise criminalized people that may now lost to those who come after us.

If they’re not destroyed altogether, the paraphernalia of subversive or radical aesthetic and sexual practices face commodification, which uses us to make money for them and which seeks to rehabilitate that which is inherently unrespectable. We see it happening all around us, the f*g and healing to be found in BDSM streamlined and repackaged as products to be bought and sold and accumulated by figureheads and companies that are airbrushed, managed, and branded in a similar way that cultural and spiritual practices associated with much older histories, cultures, and struggles are extracted from marginal—and especially, primarily, racialized and colonized people—and marketed right back to us.

If this rant sounds at all familiar, might I direct you to a similar tangent in my recent validity series:

Here was another account spoon-feeding leather to people who see it as a plug-in to their online brand rather than as a tradition, a lifestyle, a community-based politics, or just plain old dirty f*g, all while people practicing leather—most of them sex working, trans, and/or of color—are being even more censored on IG than ever before, despite the platform’s attempts to obfuscate its racist, ableist, fatphobic, and whorephobic policies with empty gestures to nuance in its ever-evolving TOS. Feeling valid might be of use to people with no skin in the game, but for others, the squishy benefits of validity simply don’t go far enough.

I promised to talk more about the therapeutic relationship, how commodification impacts it, and the perspectives of those who see BDSM one of only a few options for mental health care, self-care, and healing in a country where the medical industrial complex has a death grip on all of us. Still, there’s only 24 hours in a day. I’ve been a faithful reader of P.E. Moskowitz’s Mental Hellth, which will definitely be informing the next, and hopefully final, entry in this series, so take a look over there while you wait for more.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

*I wrote about why we as a community have been trying to move away from sane/insane framings of BDSM last year for Lifehacker.

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If I’m going to be exploring what I’m calling the “kink as therapy” discourse, I suppose I must define my terms.

What is therapy? For our purposes, “therapy” is an umbrella term encompassing psychotherapy and counseling, which employ various psychological methods and modalities to help someone change their behavior and overcome personal problems in order to improve well-being and mental health.

What is kink? I have written a lot on this topic and yet I still find it difficult to define it succinctly, so here goes nothing: Kink and BDSM and leather are proximate, if not interchangeable, terms for sexual subcultures and practices* based in power exchange and sensation exploration. The acronym “BDSM” is an intricate one, standing for, alternately and simultaneously: “bondage and discipline,” “Dominance and submission,” and “sadism and masochism.”

Now, I’m defining our terms because I want to make something coherent for you here, and also because these terms in particular are already so nebulously defined. I’m reminded of the night that BAD GAY and I discovered Shawn Mendes (sorry, we’re in our thirties). We stayed up late watching all of his music videos, swooning over his resemblance to a Sean Cody model, catching up on his relationship with the benighted and bearded Camila Cabello, and immersing ourselves in his just top-notch cultural contributions, including his definition of therapy, which I’ve taken from his Wikipedia page.

“Therapy is what works for you: climbing a mountain, listening to music and running on the treadmill, going to dinner with your friends. It's something that distracts you, that helps you heal, and so it just depends on what you think therapy is.”—Shawn Mendes

This really was my shot heard round the world. Mendes’ idea of therapy has been stripped of meaning, flayed so close to the bone that even euphemism can’t cling like so much gristle. He might be an outstanding specimen, but in this instance Mendes is par for the course in a culture where commodification has rendered language around mental health almost entirely meaningless. The conflation he employs here—Therapy is whatever makes you feel good—is reminiscent of a parallel kind that I griped about in my recent series on kink and validity, where I pointed out that while labels can be constraining and counter-productive to the liberatory project of self-determination, being unable to identify and define concepts such as therapy, kink, and oppression tends to reinforce structural powers that they’re meant to disrupt, or at least question.

Not long ago, I tweeted, “what is kink, really? is it a gentle breeze? is it a kiss under the mistletoe?” I was joking about the kink Overton Window (otherwise known as the window of discourse). If kink can be anything, it’s all the more easy to commodify what is, or what should be, or what once was a radical subculture for mainstream, whitewashed, pro-carceral, pro-capitalist palates. The problem with broadening (i.e., diluting) radical or subversive thoughts and concepts is that it allows us to rehabilitate them, to make them safe—not safe for us, as marginal people, but safe for corporations to make a profit.

When I began this series, I had the intention of being sort of assy and b**y about people who claim that kink can be therapy (not therapeutic, but therapy, as in, a replacement or stand-in for the medical relationship between a licensed professional and a patient). My sense of this ambient conflation, which I’ve observed on social media and in real life, particularly among self-styled kink and BDSM educators and influencers, was that people whose conception of kink as an arm of therapy betrayed a shallow understanding of both concepts.

But I’m beginning to think that, as fun as it is to be a hater, my initial approach was shallow, too, and that what’s really going on here is that any conflation, confusion, merging, or blending of meaning is not just a misunderstanding of kink and therapy, but a cynical commodification of both through respectability politics.

Does this mean I’m above hating on individuals? Absolutely not. Listening to an interview with a queer 24/7 submissive BDSM educator about the therapeutic properties of kink that managed to be both homophobic and anti-leather as prep for this piece has made absolutely certain of that. But more on that next time, when I’ll be digging into the limitations of not only this “kink as therapy” viewpoint, but of therapy, in its spectrum of commodification, overall. Until then.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Read Part 1 and Part 3.

*I don’t know that I think BDSM is inherently sexual, and taking a definitive stance on that might be impossible. But it’s fair to say that BDSM is inextricably tied to sexualized people. Kink, regardless of who is practicing it or in what way, is always going to be sexualized because its practitioners—or the ones who are punished for it, anyway—always are, in the same way that everything we homos do is always essentially and inherently sexual. Like how it’s controversial for drag queens to read books to schoolchildren.

**This is not an unproblematic relationship or practice. I will be getting into all that in our next post.

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Tweets against BDSM are a dime a dozen. They’re one of those internet gimmes: an easy way to go viral without having to be humiliated as Twitter’s main character of the day. These tweets are the descendants of a bygone Tumblr, made by people with the courage to publicly admit that drinking piss is yucky; with the temerity to throw their weight squarely behind common decency and status quo to proclaim***:

(It’s not irrelevant to note here that Tumblr is bygone in large part because whorephobic sexual censorship decimated the platform’s audience back in 2018.)

I’ve written fairly extensively about SM, kinks, and fetishes, only in part because these are personal interests. When examined, fantasy—the indubitable star of DAVID (ha)—can reveal so much. This “survivalist lie,” this “middle ground between desire and reality” is fertile for self-reflection and discovery, which is important, I think, for cultivating political self-awareness followed by, you know, actually doing something with it. Praaaaxis.

I believe that our responses to perversion, knee-jerk and otherwise, offer a wealth of information about our own values, desires, and political commitments. Whether or not one believes that kinks are “good” or “bad” has bearing on other, more ostensibly significant, beliefs. I’ve quoted Gayle Rubin on this topic before: “Disputes over sexual behavior often become the vehicles for displacing social anxieties.”

Which is to say, I’ve never come across an anti-kink take that offered a solution to its perceived problem that didn’t include punishment, policing, and imprisonment; nor have I ever come across an anti-kink take that didn’t somehow, either directly or more subtly, implicate sex workers, transsexuals, neurodivergent and mentally ill people, or trauma survivors, though one or more of these are often invoked (alongside the ever-nebulous children) as the beneficiaries of a purely vanilla world.

These connections are telling, and we should pay attention to what they’re telling us. As I tweeted recently, those who arrange taboo fantasies in a hierarchy reveal to their audience the subjectivity of those taboos, as well as of desire and even harm. If anyone is less trustworthy than a Focus On The Family-ass anti-sex crusader—who at least has the consistency to dismiss every aspect of my lifestyle as devilry—it’s someone who believes they have the authority to decide which aspects of sexuality are acceptable (being a f*t) and which are not (being a f*t who enjoys a little piss now and then). Of course, even piss goes down easier than some of our more challenging kinks. My little piss metaphor is child’s play compared to the stuff that y’all claim to really be worried about. Just because I’ve chosen to write sparingly about it doesn’t mean that I’m not firing off spicy opinions about ageplay, incest, and certain aspects of sadomasochism, etc., in the gc!

Which is why I have to do the following caveat: When presenting a contrarian take—like “‘Genital preference’ is transphobic, actually”—I want to make it clear that my critique is not prescription. For many, drinking piss is beyond the pale, and if this is you, I highly advise you don’t try it. (As someone who has pissed in dozens, if not hundreds, of mouths, I might be tempted to make the claim that my opinion should outweigh those of someone scared to succumb to the forbidden lemonade, but I’ll resist.) I also want to make it clear that I am highly aware of issues of consent, and ask that anyone engaging in my arguments take them in good faith, i.e., I am not arguing that anyone should have sex with children, that nonconsensual violence has a place in BDSM subcultures, or that our perverse desires and—more importantly—activities don’t deserve the same level of interrogation and intentionality that everything else does. Sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. etc. etc. violence is real, in the world at large and in leather, something that we as perverts think and write about and engage with extensively (for newsletters by other leatherdykes that touch on these topics, check out DaemonumX, DollyRose, and The Bottom’s Line).

But I’m not here to make a case for BDSM. Unless you’re a hate-reader, you’re probably on the same page as I am, and I’d like to think my own political commitments to bodily autonomy, anti-racism, and liberation from supremacy logics & systems have long made the case for me. I don’t need to apologize for my sensual experience of the world any more than I need to apologize for being a devastatingly handsome transsexual. With regards to kink, the lines in the sand have been drawn, and we’ve all sorted ourselves accordingly. It’s 2021, for god’s sake.

Some topics, however, are less clearly defined, which finally brings me to the purpose of this entry. As the first installment in a series that will explore the “kink is therapy” phenomenon, one of the things I will be arguing is that this discourse has arisen, in part, as a rebuttal to some of the general anti-BDSM sentiment I’ve discussed above. And as I hope to make clear, just because I am, I suppose, pro-BDSM, doesn’t mean I am onboard with arguments that seek to legitimize it through respectability. But more on that later.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Read Part 2 and Part 3.

***After this entry went live, a reader pointed that, considering the tweet in question was made by a black woman, I should have used another tweet for my example rather than spotlight a black person with justified reservations about BDSM. I didn’t call out the fact that many black people avoid or distrust kink/kink communities because of racism and anti-blackness in white leather subcultures, as well as structural barriers.

I genuinely appreciate that the reader spoke up, and apologize for failing to contextualize that tweet within this post, as well as to anyone my insensitivity affected. Thank you for reading, engaging, and bearing with me!

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