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 f**k 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 (some) cis men can. 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 f**k 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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. “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 f**k. How can straight people and gay people have sex? It happens all the time! How can dykes f**k 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!

5. On going under

He struggled 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. 

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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?

10. 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 Show on 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.

See you next year. Find me on Twitter. Get my second novel, X, right here.

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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, f**k 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.

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

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit itsdavid.substack.com/subscribe

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 f**k 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 f**k. 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.

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 f**k. How can straight people and gay people have sex? It happens all the time! How can dykes f**k 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!

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

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit itsdavid.substack.com/subscribe