Dear Reader,

I have loved sharing and connecting with you through this epistolary project. It gave me a much-needed creative outlet during a very weird time in my life, and it helped me explore my queer identity and engage with some really challenging topics in a disarmingly whimsical sort of format. I hope you have gotten a bit of a kick out of it as well.

Last weekend, M. and I spent the day with a friend meandering through the Art Institute of Chicago. At one point we were chatting about a question that must confront all artists: when is the work done? When do I call this finished? How do I know? Or is “done” always just a matter of when I decide to put down the brush?

I don’t know how other creative types answer this question for themselves, but it turns out that for me, sometimes “done” is a matter of my brain moving on to other topics. I have loved writing this newsletter, but I think I’ve crossed that threshold. I couldn’t have told you what exactly I had set out to say, yet in the shape of this collection, I think somehow I said it.

Life has lows and highs. Over the past two years, I managed to ride out a very low time in my own life, in part by feeding my brain a steady supplement of fiction that captured different aspects of radical optimism, straight-up unabashed weirdness, and the joyful exploration of queer happy endings. And in the meantime I made some changes, and the shape of my life started to change accordingly. I changed my career path. I moved to a new place. I started building connections in my new place and found new opportunities to explore.

As a romance reader, and as a writer, I feel a temptation to tie this off by saying, “Reader, I’m happy.” What could be more satisfying than a real-life happy ending? And I am happy. And, yes, ok, here I am wrapping up this newsletter, which I guess makes this my delivery of the happy ending.

Only let me write you a little epilogue. This is a fiction, since I can’t predict the future. But in some ways, all personal essay is a little bit of a fiction. There are the things you choose to leave out, or the details you elide for the sake of story, or just sheer human boneheadedness. We are all unreliable narrators.

The epilogue is this: More life stuff happens. A story doesn’t end with the ending, after all. I take a road trip back home to see some old friends, attend a family memorial service, wear a blue dress in the sunshine. When I get home, I kiss my partner hello and I missed you, and then I roll up my sleeves and get back to work. I’ve been finding a balance, taking gigs and juggling new responsibilities, but now I open a notebook. There’s a new story that followed me home, whispering in my ear, and this time I’m ready to hear it.

Thank you for sharing this journey with me.

Love,

Beas

P.S. If you’d like to follow me for future writing projects, I’ll be picking up the thread over at So Many Moving Parts.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

I’ve come down with some kind of summer cold, so I hope you’ll bear with me if I start wandering off into fever dream territory. I’m feeling a little loopy.

M and I were at Electric Forest last weekend, which was its own kind of fever dream experience but all in a good way. Even the sweltering hot dusty days and the exciting and soggy Sunday afternoon thunderstorm.

It was interesting to see the variety of people and all the ways those people found to express themselves. For some people, that self-expression seemed to involve a lot of recreational substance use. The thing that always strikes me when I’m around people describing their altered-state experiences is just the reinforcement that, yep, my brain does not work quite like other people’s brains — because other people’s experience on drugs sounds an awful lot like my baseline experience of the world all the time.

And that’s not a complaint. I like my brain. I like my experience of the world. But it’s not without challenges. Four days immersed in an intense sensory environment, with a soundscape of music clashing with other music, sticky with heat and dirt, people everywhere, and everywhere bright lights and artistic visions, and competing smells of sweaty festival goers and cannabis, fresh pine needles and food vendors, port-a-potties and dusty earth — it was a lot.

So now I’m back to real life, and of course I’m not exactly thrilled to have a cold, but also I don’t mind too much. It seems like a fitting sort of hangover, a mundane consequence of a pretty otherworldly couple days.

(And a few minutes ago, M brought me a lunch tray with soup and tea and a vegetable spring roll, which just goes to show that I am actually the luckiest person in the world.)

Before the cold set in, I also had the chance to catch up with my best friend from college, who I shall call Mandolin. She had arrived in town while I was away but luckily was still around one more day when I got back. I did warn her that I might be a germ factory, and she pointed out that not only does she work with kids, but also she’d just spent the last few days packed into conference rooms with a few thousand fellow librarians.

Amidst the catch-up we spent a fair amount of time talking about the challenges faced by queer kids in her community. She lives in an area with demographics and cultural norms that are much more like the small town I grew up in than the metropolitan area I live in today. And while I typically think of access to queer communities on the internet as a potentially life-saving resource for LGBTQIA+ kids who feel isolated, it was eye-opening to hear some of the toxic side of kids falling down the wrong internet rabbit hole, enabling some self-destructive coping behaviors.

I’d like to think that every queer person going through a hard time with their identity can be helped by knowing there are others out there like them, and people who care, and that there’s space in the world for them in whatever shape they choose to express themselves. But queer people, like straight people, are also just people, with the same mix of being well-meaning and selfish, thoughtful and thoughtless, compassionate and careless. Queer teenagers are likely to get fired up the way all teenagers can get fired up, bringing all that youthful zeal and earnest passion to the cause that captures their attention. Queer adults are fallible the same way all adults are fallible, and hoo boy, do some adults take unkindly to having that pointed out.

And straight cisgender kids are also discovering their identities. We don’t typically put it in those terms, of course. Heteronormativity tells us that it’s a normal part of growing up for boys to discover girls and to start doing boy things to impress girls, and for girls to discover boys and to start doing girl things to impress boys. But those are unique journeys for every straight kid as well.

When I was a kid, I didn’t have a hard time fitting in because I was queer. That wasn’t even really on my radar. Rather I was weird, proudly and unapologetically. I wore weird clothes, and I liked weird movies and books and music. I wasn’t afraid to speak up in class or to embarrass myself in front of other people, which was definitely weird. (In fact I’ve always had a hard time with the question, “What was your most embarrassing moment?” because mostly I don’t find embarrassment memorable. I can come up with mortifying experiences, but those don’t really make fun anecdotes.) And in hindsight I stand by my identity as a weirdo. I wasn’t acting out a queer identity that I didn’t know how to express — it just happens that I’m queer and weird. Being an oddball is not a prerequisite to LGBTQIA+ identify; I know plenty of gay and bi and trans and nonbinary people who are very conventional in their tastes and interests.

I think this is part of what can be so confusing for kids figuring themselves out. A lot of queer kids hit a sort of funhouse mirror corner where society has defined “normal” one way, and where they themselves feel “normal”, and yet somehow there’s a gap between those versions of what normal is. For instance, a gay friend of mine once told me that as a teenager, he was really stuck on the idea of wanting kids that were biologically his own, and in his teenage brain that necessarily meant marrying a woman. Knowing he was attracted to guys came second in his mind to the normative nuclear family life he’d envisioned for himself.

I don’t know where I’m going with this except that growing up is messy, and it’s important to know that you’ve got allies in your corner.

What else is new? I had a chance to read Cat Sebastian’s new release, We Could Be So Good, which was just excellent. Once again, Sebastian does a remarkable job creating a rich sense of time and place in her depiction of 1950s New York. I love this developing vein of queer historical romance that creates space for unsung queer history. Mid-20th-century America was a more hostile time for queer people, yet people still figured out how to live out their lives and find loving relationships. That’s an especially strong theme in this book as relates to Nick, the up-and-coming reporter who has a lot to lose if he gets exposed or arrested. Andy has a lot more privilege, coming from a background of wealth if not familial warmth, but he’s still faced with the interesting crossroads of a bisexual awakening and fumbling his way through figuring out how to pursue the relationship he wants with Nick. It’s a great story, and it really made me want to up my Italian cooking game.

That’s it from me. Now I’m going to go take a nap with my cat. Hope you’re well.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

I took the title of this letter from a Greg Brown song, Sleeper, with no deeper significance intended beyond being a reference to April, and also I happened to recently be giving that album a re-listen. (If there was a way to read exposure to song lyrics via brain scan, I bet my results would reveal a brain pretty substantially shaped by 80s and 90s Greg Brown.)

I started this newsletter a little over a year ago. The last year was kind of a trip for me. I went through various job-related changes, including the big one of leaving my last position in the fall. More recently I sort of stumbled into some freelance opportunities that I don’t think I’m going to talk too much about in this space but which I’m pretty happy about, and that has been another shift.

I also went through some big relationship changes, with a long marital separation ending in divorce. I moved to a new city and started dating again, which has given me an opportunity to start exploring polyamory and what it means for me. In the midst of moving to my new city, I found a connection with a new partner, JD, that helped me recover a sense of delight and possibility in a really challenging transitional time. And now I’m on a new journey of nourishing a developing partnership with M. (who is the one who happened to introduce me to said freelance opportunities), with whom I share a really unexpectedly lovely nexus of professional and philosophical interests, and a deep investment in living with enthusiasm and compassion and wonder, and that has been … well, pretty magical.

Over the last year, this love letter has been a place for me to pour out a bunch of interests and express a bunch of feelings that just needed to go somewhere. And I remain interested in exploring the same sorts of things — culture and sex and queerness, and excavating little interesting tidbits from my own lived experience, and the ongoing meditation of what it means to be alive in the world.

But in all the change of the last few months, one that has so far persisted is that I still haven’t picked back up with reading fiction. I’ve read a couple nonfiction books, but even I would be hard-pressed to come up with a queer reading of SQL in 10 Minutes a Day or Analyzing Data with Power BI and Power Pivot for Excel.

It has been true throughout my life that I tend to read things in waves. High fantasy, urban fantasy, sci fi, dystopian apocalypse, romantic suspense, classic whodunit mystery, cozy mystery, cozy international spy thriller (is that a genre? How would you classify The Unexpected Mrs Pollifax?), and on the nonfiction side, nutrition and health, psychology and neurology, behavioral economics, negotiation and influence and decision-making. Some years ago I read a run of books on parenting, even though I don’t have kids and had no immediate intention of having kids. I just get interested in things, you know?

So I think maybe it’s time to update my “About” statement. I set out with this vision:

This newsletter seeks to explore the intersection of romance writing and queerness and sex and culture, and to really indulge in waaaay overthinking the shit out of all if it, with joyful abandon.

And I think I have pretty much the same vision going forward, but I’m going to swap out “romance writing” for the more broad umbrella of “creativity.” Let’s explore the intersection of creativity and queerness and sex and culture. Which may continue to involve books, but also could involve other types of creative expression and engagement. There’s a whole wide world out there, baby.

Also, happy belated Trans Day of Visibility. Erin In The Morning had a great roundup of some of the events and victories to celebrate:

The queer community as a whole owes a lot to the trans folks who have had to fight tooth and nail for every square inch of their right to exist. Personally, as I have come to understand myself better as genderqueer, one of the funny things I have experienced is being more comfortable leaning into femme gender expression, particularly wearing dresses. I think maybe it’s because I used to feel like, if all someone sees is the dress, then they’re not really seeing me, and that idea makes me uncomfortable. But embracing the complexity of my gender identity lets me feel less like I’m “dressing up like a girl” and more like I’m just expressing an aspect of who I am, which is no more or less meaningful than any other aspect. And I don’t know how I ever could have gotten to that discovery about myself if it weren’t for the language that has evolved around marginalized gender identities and the sharing of those experiences — that is, if it weren’t for the visibility of trans people.

It seems like there’s always a little rumbling around whether “visibility” is the right word, and that’s not a semantic debate that I feel I’ve got any skin in. But I do believe there’s social value in affirming: Trans people exist. Trans people come in all shapes and sizes, and have all sorts of different life experiences, just like every other sort of people. They work jobs and play board games. They get popcorn at the movies and laugh at the funny parts and cry at the sad parts. They text their friends about the ridiculous encounter they just had at the grocery store, or the insane thing their boss just said. Trans people exist, with lives and experiences every bit as complex and beautiful and mundane and silly and heartbreaking and wonderful as anyone else.

One trans non-binary artist whose work I have been following for a while is Mx. Frank Duffy. Their art is great, plus I just like crows. I’d like to recommend their shop if you need a sweet skeleton sweatshirt or an awesome crow coffee mug, except the catch is that you have to be in the UK. (I managed to score a queer owl t-shirt via PrintSocial campaign some weeks back, but alas, that window has since closed.)

That’s about all I’ve got for today. Hope this finds you safe and well.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

I’ve been in my new place about two weeks now, and it’s all starting to feel a little more settled. I’ve got art on my walls. I know where to find the eggs and cream and Ezekiel bread at my neighborhood grocery store. My cat has mapped out the coziest napping spots for each part of the day.

I’m still in a little bit of a reading lull. I piled all my physical books onto their shelves, with a bunch of to-be-read titles in the mix, and at least once a day I look at them and think, “I should read something.” And then my splintered attention catches on some other little thing to do first — laundry or checking messages or starting a fresh pot of tea — which leads to another thing and another, and the poor books are forgotten again.

I’ve also started dating again, which might have something to do with the reading lull. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been separated from my spouse and living on my own for quite some time. So far venturing back into the dating world has been quite invigorating. Perhaps a little like finding a favorite piece of clothing that got lost in the back of the closet, shaking out the creases, putting it on and just remembering how good it feels, how well it fits.

When I set out to start dating again, it was with a little hesitation. Once I’d settled on moving, it felt like a natural turning point also to open a new chapter in my love life — not just that it’s nice to meet new people when you’re in a new place, but also in having that feeling of being a little more settled and confident in terms of where I’m at and what I have to offer. Still, it’s been a while, and I’m continuing to work through some big life change. So, a little hesitation, not just for my own sake but also with respect to a very deeply seated desire not to hurt or mislead or disappoint anyone else. If I’m still working through my own shit, I don’t want to overcommit to a new potential relationship and then not be able to muster the spoons to actually follow through.

One thing that’s different as I’m approaching dating again is that I’m pursuing polyamory. That might sound counterintuitive if I’m afraid of overcommitting my energy, but it hasn’t felt like that at all so far. A big appeal of polyamory for me is being intentional in approaching each new relationship with the idea that we don’t have to be all the things for each other — that each relationship can evolve organically and find its own natural level. I don’t have to look for a checklist of “perfect match” wish list attributes in the person I’m seeing, and I can feel confident that they are not going to expect me to be their absolute everything in all the ways. I can indulge in pouring out my openhearted affection with new partners, and be wholeheartedly supportive of their other relationships, and continue to enjoy my independence and space. At least, that’s the dream right there. And it’s not like I expect things to always be magically easy, but “how do we best support each other’s autonomy” is exactly the emotional and relational labor that I have a pretty endless well of energy for.

And to my mild astonishment and certainly to my delight, I’ve found myself already in a lovely fledgling relationship and enjoying a very promising start with a few new connections, and that’s probably a full dance card for me. So, wish me luck, and we’ll see where things go.

With the people I’ve been seeing, my days have also gotten rich in amazing conversation. Just a glorious wealth of meandering exploration, over all kinds of topics. As you may have noticed, I am super, super into that. We’ve talked about power and privilege and wealth and shitty capitalism, and systems as safety nets versus systems as vehicles of bias and oppression, and political polarization and community development, and the promise of developing technologies, the problems of commercialization, the importance of compassion. How we can do better with this world, how we can be more real to each other. Spider monkeys. Uses for ChatGPT. How to make a good shortbread. All kinds of things.

And then in the midst of this, beyond my little personal corner of the world, I am also thinking a lot about Tyre Nichols. I’m not going to try to capture any thoughts in writing other than just, fucking Christ, Jesus wept, but I will share Garrett Bucks’ piece from the weekend, which was excellent:

And ok, also: Fuck the complacency of systems that perpetuate this culture of violence. Fuck the dehumanization of ordinary people just trying to get on with their lives. Fuck any pundit who wants to use this as a talking point to further their own brand. Fuck anyone brandishing a “blue lives matter” flag as if that’s a counterpoint. Any cop who wouldn’t lay down their own life rather than risk murdering an innocent civilian should turn in their fucking badge. Fuck the glamorization of throwing the rule book out the window. There is never, never, never a justification for police beating the shit out of somebody. Ever.

In romance novels, where there’s a character who is a lawyer, sometimes authors will take a stab at the age-old question of how lawyers justify defending criminals. Occasionally they even do a decent job of it. Alexis Hall had a fair take with Oliver Blackwood, the criminal barrister in Boyfriend Material:

“The short version is: an adversarial justice system isn’t perfect, but it’s the best that we’ve got. Statistically, yes, most people I defend in court are guilty because the police can broadly do their jobs. But even people who probably did it are entitled to a zealous legal defence. And that’s a principle to which… to which I am ideologically committed.”

And L.A. Witt did a pretty nice job with Aaron Taylor, the criminal defense attorney in Extra Whip.

… “I’m not there to prove [my client is] innocent. I’m there to make sure the prosecution is doing their job to prove he’s guilty.”

… “I like what I do, and I’m glad to do it because if there’s no one there to force the prosecution to present a bulletproof case, then there’s no such thing as a fair trial. I don’t have to believe the defendant [isn’t] guilty. Hell, sometimes I know they’re guilty. All I have to believe in is the defendant’s right to due process.”

The guarantee of due process starts waaaaay before the courtroom, even before anyone is arrested. It starts with the cops having a reasonable basis to stop an individual in the first place. It continues with how that stop is conducted, whether and to what extent a search of person or property is justifiable, whether a person is wrongfully detained, whether they’ve been properly notified of their rights once in custody, how evidence is handled, how questioning is conducted. All of these things implicate civil rights that most law-abiding people (and even white-collar criminals) take entirely for granted — the right to be free to go about your business and not be stopped by law enforcement on a mere pretext, the expectation of being free from verbal harassment or physical violence or coercion, the assumption that you will not be detained or taken into custody for some trivial bullshit.

One of the primary methods we have of backing up those rights is that if the cops violate them by not adhering to proper procedure, then any evidence resulting from that wrongful stop or that wrongful search is deemed tainted and can’t be used against the person. In TV and pop culture, this often shows up as the defendant “getting off on a technicality” because there’s a strong mainstream cultural bias in favor of law enforcement. But in reality, someone who “gets off on a technicality” is most likely someone whose civil rights were being violated.

If an innocent person is wrongfully stopped, harassed, pushed around or yelled at a little, and then the cops realize “oops, my bad” and just let them go again, that person can register a complaint about it or try filing a civil rights claim, but mostly the consequences are pretty unimpressive. So it is really, really important that the cops are meaningfully disincentivized against abusing their authority and violating people’s rights, in the form of making sure that evidence obtained through police misconduct can’t be used in court. Protecting the rights of the guilty is our best backstop in protecting the rights of everyone.

Also, if you don’t want innocent people getting kicked to death in the street by the cops, then it helps to set out as a core value that (all caps here) NO ONE SHOULD EVER GET FUCKING KICKED TO DEATH IN THE STREET BY THE COPS. Even, like, a really bad guy. It’s never fucking ok. Period. For fuck’s sake.

So I suppose that’s another, very different reason that I haven’t been feeling the romance reading vibe.

And yet, because we do have to live in the world, because all our stuff is here, and sometimes the world is a dumpster fire but also it remains full of beauty and kindness and kids eating cheese sandwiches and cats jumping at cucumbers, and all those things can be hard to reconcile — well, sometimes there’s a lot to be said for a little healthy escapism. This isn’t going to be a review because I haven’t actually read it yet, but I am very keen to start Can’t Spell Treason without Tea by Rebecca Thorne.

All Reyna and Kianthe want is to open a bookshop that serves tea. Worn wooden floors, plants on every table, firelight drifting between the rafters… all complemented by love and good company. Thing is, Reyna works as one of the Queen’s private guards, and Kianthe is the most powerful mage in existence. Leaving their lives isn’t so easy…

What follows is a cozy tale of mishaps, mysteries, and a murderous queen throwing the realm’s biggest temper tantrum.

This sounds like a perfect cozy fantasy read. Do you know how much I love tea? My friend: so much. Also books. Also love and good company. All those things.

It also might be time for a reread of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, which isn’t a romance but is totally wonderful. The Rankin/Bass animated version is also very charming and captures the spirit of the thing, but if you’ve never read the book, it’s worth poking your nose in, and also has a lot of potential for applying a queer reading.

When I was a kid watching the movie version, I was enamored with the unicorn’s lovely human alter ego, the Princess Amalthea. As an adult, I came to identify much more with Molly Grue, and was particularly struck by the scene where Molly meets the unicorn and demands, “Where have you been?” and “How dare you come to me now, when I am this?”:

The unicorn made no reply, and Schmendrick said, “She is the last. She is the last unicorn in the world.”

“She would be,” Molly sniffed. “It would be the last unicorn in the world that came to Molly Grue.” She reached up then to lay her hand on the unicorn’s cheek; but both of them flinched a little, and the touch came to rest on the swift, shivering place under the jaw. Molly said, “It’s all right. I forgive you.”

And now? I find myself identifying more with the unicorn. Not the poor bewildered Princess Amalthea, but the nameless ancient unicorn who remains uniquely herself, navigating a world that is perplexing and changeable and that doesn’t even really see her most of the time, and working her slow steady magic by means of simply being herself. At least, that’s who I’d like to be.

Hope you’re doing alright. Just saw a social media post today reminding the northern hemisphere that we’re now past the darkest weeks of the year and have turned the corner toward spring. So, days should be getting brighter. Hope you feel that where you are.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

One of the convenient things about writing this letter electronically is ease of editing. Normally. But I’m finding that this particular letter is a little unruly. Something of a weird ramble. I thought about pulling it to pieces and starting over again, but you know what? Screw it. We’re going full ramble. You’ve been warned.

Have you heard of aphantasia? It’s the phenomenon some people experience (or rather, don’t experience) of being unable to visualize images in their mind’s eye. If a person with aphantasia is told to “picture a tree,” they can of course call forth the concept of a tree, but there’s no actual picturing anything. It’s just a concept.

Thinking about this, I realized that while I can and do picture things in my mind, it’s not necessarily the first sense conjured by my brain. Rather, I’d say that I’m a predominantly tactile thinker.

Which: huh? How does that work? Well, it’s sort of a terrible analogy, but let’s say my mind is a bit like the ball tumbler from a bingo game.

Images and concepts are a wild jumble that I can sift through and ultimately express. But how my brain works is all tied up in the physicality of things: the smooth turning of the handle, the thrumming of the balls against the wire frame, the gentle back-and-forth press of the rubber feet against the surface of the table, the whirr of air as the wheel turns.

When I describe a ball as round, I really mean the sensation of roundness, the smooth plastic curve that you’d feel under your fingertips or as it was cupped in your hand, the way it would nestle in the bingo tray or roll loose across the table. These things become visual images in the way that I describe them, but I imagine them most vividly as tactile impressions.

When I think of my cat, I think of the silky feel of her fur, or the flattened quills of her whiskers against her cheeks when she rubs her face against my fingers, or the cool tips of her ears, or her little knobby kitty elbows. Sometimes she sleeps curled up with one paw tucked over her nose, and it looks so cozy I could die.

When I think of snow, I imagine the way it compresses under my boots when I go out for a walk, or the feel of it collecting on my jacket and hat while it falls, the chill and the absence of smell and whether it’s wet or dry depending on just how cold it is. I think of the soft whoosh-thump of clumps of snow collecting and letting go of bare branches in the winter woods.

And when, say, I think about imaginary hot people, I suppose I don’t really think all that much about how they might look. I know some people are super into a particular look or type — burly lumberjacks, curvy bombshells, nerds in glasses, vampires and werewolves, whatever — but I’ve never been particularly hung up on type. I mean, sure I appreciate lovely physical attributes; I just think that lovely can take a lot of forms. But when I think about what’s sexy, to me that has to be touchable.

Makeup can be very visually beautiful, but it’s not very touchable. Same with perfect hair or exquisite fashion. Anything too carefully, too perfectly arranged? If it’s a look that smells like chemicals or has to be stuck in place with fashion tape, then to me it has very limited appeal.

At the other end of the spectrum from too-put-together, how about a filthy, sweaty mess? Think hot construction worker at the end of their shift, or maybe fitness instructor post-workout? That’s not really for me either. I’ve got nothing against a little honest dirt or sweat, but generally speaking, I think clean is more touchable.

And sexy is subjective. It’s all about appeal, right? Obviously there are plenty of different opinions about what’s appealing. I have to think that people who are super into fashion or, like, Kardashianism must be very visually oriented. And maybe filthy-sweaty-mess people are scent-oriented, and so that sweaty-mess image wakes up their olfactory brain. I dunno.

Probably there are infinite variations on this — on how cognition and sensory processing relate to one another. I’d venture that my primary orientation is tactile, but scent and taste are also very vivid in my mind. I can readily call up, say, the taste and feel of a bite of spaghetti bolognese, or fresh asparagus with butter — or the rich smell of sandstone in the rain, or peonies in early summer (which smell comes with the tactile memory of petals against my face and the sensation of pollinating ants making a getaway across my fingers on their soft little ant feet) — or the sweet baby smell of my nieces and nephews when they were small. And visual images come much more naturally to me when they’re attached to touch or smell or taste.

Maybe this tactile-processing quirk of my brain is why I enjoy giving massages more than receiving them? Receiving a massage is nice enough, and honestly I could do with one right now because my neck has been killing me for the last couple days. But I really love giving a massage. It feels like having a whole conversation in muscle and bone.

And maybe also this is why my love of philosophy and just pure, wild speculation always seeks purchase in what is real, in what exists in the world. I can get so far out on the kite string of what is possible because I am securely tethered to the feel of the earth beneath me.

How do you perceive the world, friend? What senses resonate most in the way that you think about things, or in the rooms and halls of your memory? I am so curious about this. I think it also must be another thing that I like about reading — because the way someone constructs a narrative or sets a scene or frames a character, it quietly reflects all these interesting things about the way the writer thinks.

Recently I happened to read a couple of m/m romance series involving motorcycle clubs (MCs). And I really don’t know anything about the world of MCs, so already I can feel myself sounding like Derry Murbles from Parks & Recreation:

Again, I don’t know anything about MCs, but I do know a wee little bit about the carnival shitshow of law enforcement, the courts, and the corrections system. And discussion of these things? It lights up a very odd part of my brain.

When a character in one book pulled a gun in a nearly-empty bar as a warning to a side character, the immediate thing it evoked in me, weirdly enough, was the sense memory of sitting in a slightly ill-fitting suit jacket, pulled up to a zinc-topped table in a prison’s visiting room, my left arm bracketing my legal pad, the feel of the paper against the heel of my right hand and the scratch of my pen as I took notes, talking to a guy who was serving a sentence for shooting someone who had been belligerent with him in a bar. My client was a skinny blond guy, maybe an inch taller than me. Not a big guy. He had gone out to his car, and the other guy had followed him. My client pulled a gun from his car that he kept for self defense and used it to threaten the other guy. The other guy threw up his hands and kept coming, and my client shot him, and the guy died. And if you are unmoved by the fate of some guy picking a fight in a bar, it turns out he was a pretty ordinary dude, with a family who loved him, who’d been struggling with clinical depression and grief following the death of a parent earlier that year. My client chose to pull a gun because he had this idea of standing his ground and defending himself, but he could have just gotten into his car. He could have driven away. Instead he was sentenced to 21 years for killing a guy. The facts were all laid out in the sentencing hearing, the transcript of which I read end-to-end because it was related to what I was helping my client with. He was sentenced under an old parole system, so 21 years meant the combination of prison plus parole, which could end up being 21+ years in prison if the client was a fuck-up, or could have been more like 14 years in prison plus 7 years parole if he toed every line and parole was never revoked. And if you are a white collar professional working with people who’ve been convicted of a crime, you’d say that parole (or probation or extended supervision) can be revoked, but if you’re on the jumpsuit-wearing side of the system, you’re more likely to use the word revocated.

So, the character in the book pulls a gun, and my brain immediately ziplines down that entire sense-memory track, all of those facts and details embedded in that memory of sitting at that table and taking notes: oof, remember that client — jesus, this could go so wrong — wait, this character just got out of prison, but he’s not on parole, right? or shit, is he gonna get revocated for waving a gun around??

When I was a baby lawyer, I thought revocated was an amusing non-word. I know I joked about it with peers. But I see it differently now. “Do you think her probation will be revoked?” is just a dry statement of bureaucracy. But “Do you think she’ll get revocated?” has a different heft. Do you think she’s going to get nailed to the wall for this inability to comply with an arbitrary rule her supervisor made up? Do you think this latest particular fuck-up means she’s going to lose her job and her apartment and access to her kids? Revocated means being kicked back to zero, again, and probably with new baggage.

I like to think that I don’t have overly cynical or overly romantic views of people with criminal histories. I’m solidly against doing harm, but as moral standards go, that’s pretty vague — and beyond that I think that it’s just generally a bad idea to commit crimes if you can help it, which is more of a pragmatic stance than a moral one. And most people who get popped for petty crimes aren’t coherently motivated by one clear thing, like some definable moment of past trauma which can be confronted and resolved to reach a happy ending — usually it’s more complex and more chaotic than that, and what most folks need isn’t a big psychic resolution but rather plain old stability and consistency and to live in a world that can be trusted not to sweep their feet out from under them at any second.

Anyway, that’s a very rambling way to say: I tend to have sort of complex feelings about main characters who have a history of conviction or who are engaging in acts for which they might be criminally liable. If that sounds like a lawyerly way of saying it, well yeah. I can’t help that. There’s a part of me that’s forever dressed up in that suit and taking notes and bleeding a little over something that can’t be fixed. I can feel the rubbed-smooth edges of that fat file. I can feel that pen in my hand.

But as for the actual books! Both series about motorcycle clubs, but otherwise very different.

The Leather & Chrome series by Kiki Clark starts with Tank and CJ. Tank just got out of prison and is hoping to patch in to the Michigan chapter of his MC and leave his old life behind, and especially to start a new life with CJ, his sweet prison pen pal. Tank isn’t immediately accepted by his new brothers with open arms — first he has to prove that he’s committed to walking the straight and narrow, and that he’s not going to bring trouble to the club. When instead he brings home his aspiring-artist boyfriend, it quickly becomes clear that Tank and CJ are a match for this out-of-the-ordinary MC and its secret mission. The first book also kicks off something of a tour of kink throughout the series, with each book so far including different forms of D/s relationship. There’s at least one more book yet to come.

The Rebel Kings series by Garrett Leigh is a much darker world, centered on an MC in the UK that’s trying very hard to pivot toward non-criminal enterprise. It’s gritty and includes some brutal violence as the characters square off against rival gangs and defy human traffickers, and the books grapple hard with the recognition that sometimes there’s no way out but to fight through. The series opens with a poly romance that spans the first two books, when MC president Cam strikes up a new relationship with outsider Alexei which then ignites the existing bond between Cam and his sergeant-at-arms Saint. The third book takes up another long-slow-burn relationship between the MC’s chaplain and its enforcer, with another round of explosive revelations and more fight-or-die. And there’s plenty of back story setting up the long-thwarted romance between the road captain and the pres’s estranged brother, which is due out next May.

And because motorcycles, here’s a link to my plain-Jane cover of Greg Brown’s great cover of Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” (Sean Rowe’s version is also killer.) Or for more general rock and roll vibes, I’ve been enjoying the Beer & Wings playlist on Spotify.

Happy midwinter to you, and wishing you light and warmth through the longest night.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

I’m sure you heard the news that last Saturday five people were killed and 17 were injured at ClubQ in Colorado Springs. If you visit ClubQ’s website, you’ll find a note that they’re closed until further notice, but you can also find their regular dinner menu.

ClubQ has a menu because it’s a place to hang out and spend time with people, and it turns out that LGBTQIA+ people will eat burgers with waffle fries and grilled cheese and spinach dip and chicken tenders, and sometimes we want to add chicken to our nachos or salad for an extra $2. Some of us are vegetarians who will opt for the Beyond burger, but some of us are unabashed carnivores who want our beef burger pink in the middle; and if you want to order your burger on the rare side, there’s that same warning on the menu that you’ll see in any other restaurant.

Probably there was someone on Saturday who placed their order and said, “Hold the pickle please,” and then their friend said, “Ooh, can I have their pickle?” and the first person said, “Oh, I didn’t know you like pickles! Yes, can they have my pickle?” and the waiter smiled and said, “Of course!”

Probably there was someone who said to their date, “Do you want to just split a couple appetizers?” and their date said, “Yeah, perfect. How about the super nachos for one? Does something else look good to you?”

Probably someone was thinking about getting that brownie sundae for dessert, and their friend said, “Do it! You only live once!”

There have been 612 mass shootings so far in 2022 in the US. The school shooting in Uvalde, Texas was May 24. From May 25 through November 18, there have been another 373 people killed in mass shootings, and 1,579 more people injured. On November 19, the same day as the ClubQ shooting, there were also two other mass shootings. One happened early in the first hours of the day, a little after midnight, at a bonfire in Mississippi where one person was killed and six injured. The other was a drive-by shooting in the afternoon in Illinois, where a 13-year-old kid was killed and three others injured. Since November 19, as of this writing, another 18 people have been killed in other mass shooting events, and another 29 have been injured. In the time that I’ve had a draft of this letter in progress, I’ve had to update these numbers twice because Americans keep shooting each other. You can find all this on the Gun Violence Archive’s list of mass shootings.

Other places in the world have state-sponsored terrorism, but here in the US, we’ve got that independent, do-it-yourself mentality. Bootstrap terrorism. It’s not that the state instigates violence against the people, heaven forbid. Those victims have our thoughts and prayers! It’s just an innocent coincidence that certain entrenched interests disproportionately benefit politically and financially every time gun violence reaches a new pitch.

The thing about being out as queer, gay, lesbian, bi, pan, trans, non-binary, gender fluid, genderqueer, ace, aro, and/or other identities and vocabulary embraced under the pride flag — the thing about being out is that you know it might make you the target of violence.

When I started dating the woman I ultimately married, Nunya, I came out to my family right away as bisexual (like I finally got my bi-card punched, like Ok, I get to use this label now, like before I might have been faking it all those years merely admiring women but not wanting to date them), and I knew my family would be supportive. I came out to friends right away; I told my boss right away. I have been lucky and privileged to have about as open and welcoming a coming-out experience with everyone important in my life as it’s possible to have.

And I still knew that we could be subjected to violence. That I could be, I suppose, but it was the we that got to me. I don’t think I really told anyone at the time, but I grappled with intrusive thoughts big-time for at least the first several months that Nunya and I dated. I imagined her getting beat up or murdered, or her reaction to me getting beat up or murdered, or being forced to watch each other get beat up or murdered in assorted horrible ways.

I knew these thoughts weren’t real, but I also knew exactly where they were coming from. Plenty of queer people are subjected to violence. Horrible stories abound.

Some of our community would prefer to reject the term “queer” because of its use as a slur and its association with bigotry and violence. You can see that I am on the “reclaimed for the community” side — because I know some folks who strongly identify with that term and prefer it over others — but I am very respectful of the counterpoint. If a person feels that a term evokes the threat of violence, then it does a small violence to that person to use it.

This is why pronouns are so important — because willfully misgendering a trans or nonbinary or genderqueer person isn’t merely rude. It feels like a threat. When you have to fight for the recognition of your existence, and you live in a world where others feel entitled to openly deride and despise you, and you know that some of those people would happily see you brutalized or murdered, then yeah, being treated with basic respect and recognition for who you are as a person are pretty fucking important.

But there isn’t some magical “us” versus “them” line between the queer community and the threatening external world. Just as I had started to write a bunch of stuff about queer courage and resilience, I clicked through to a different article about the ClubQ shooting and finally learned that, oh, the shooter is a nonbinary person.

So. That sucks.

Definitely it unravels the whole set of assumptions I was making about what kind of homophobic bigot would shoot up a club for queer folks; but with that lesson, I’m also going to resist the temptation to construct a whole new imaginary narrative about what happened here. We make up these explanations to feel like we understand, to construct this illusionary shield of our pretended understanding, because maybe if we can explain why the bad thing happened, then the bad thing won’t happen to us, won’t happen in our safe spaces.

What happened is the same thing that has happened 611 other times so far in the US in 2022, which is that someone decided the solution to their problem was to shoot a bunch of people.

America, please stop romanticizing guns. Please.

The solution to the problem of violence is not more violence, the same way that the solution to the problem of plastic pollution is not more plastic, and the solution to the problem of carbon emissions is not more carbon, and the solution to economic inequity is not more billionaires.

Be kind. Be generous with other people, and be kind to yourself. Sometimes it’s the most disruptive, most revolutionary, most courageous thing you can do.

Ok, books. Ooh, actually I have a really good one to pivot to, on the theme of the revolutionary impact of kindness. If you are looking for a warm-hearted low angst read that is easy on plot and very beautifully steeped in time and place, allow me to recommend the recent release from Cat Sebastian, Daniel Cabot Puts Down Roots, set in 1973. Daniel and Alex fall into being friends joined at the hip after they meet by happenstance. Daniel is struggling with meaning and purpose after having been drafted then sidelined in a desk job, and building a neighborhood garden helps him start to feel like a real person again. Alex is a driven doctor who runs a local clinic along with his one other friend; he has Mary and his work and Daniel, and the idea of trying for more is a little terrifying. The characters are lovely, and the evocation of New York in 1973 is remarkable. This is a standalone read though it’s connected to the previous Cabot books, Tommy Cabot Was Here (a second-chance-at-love novella) and Peter Cabot Gets Lost (gorgeous classic road trip).

Not much else new in my world. Making slow progress on my writing. Had to take my car in thinking it might have some catastrophic wheel or bearing problem, and no, turns out the sound it was making was just probably the hubcap slowly falling off. Anticlimactic in the best possible way.

Hope you’re well. Take care of yourself, ok?

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

It has been an odd couple of weeks. I wrapped up my old job at the start of this month and had a nice send-off lunch with my former coworkers.

Now I’m working on getting used to being unemployed writing full time. So far the strangest thing about being unemployed writing full time is … well, that it kinda doesn’t feel like anything in particular.

That might be because my work-from-home routine hasn’t changed much, given that I dove face-first into writing. So far I’m about sixty pages into a first draft of the book I’m working on. Turns out that means that I wrote about ten pages that I was definitely expecting to write, plus about fifty pages that just showed up while I was trying to figure out how to get the characters from A to B to C, and now I have to come up with another fifty? hundred? however many pages where I’m genuinely not at all sure quite how this is going to go. But also, I’m totally enjoying the story as it shows up, and now I have to keep going with it because I’m seriously curious about what happens next, not to mention how it all wraps up in the end.

A few folks have asked me what I’m writing, and now that I’ve written a good chunk of it, I’ve finally realized that it’s basically a romantic comedy. Just, you know, a very queer one. This shouldn’t be a surprise to me because I’m not really a serious person. Indeed, I’m a deeply silly person with a profound enjoyment of the absurd. I’m sometimes so struck by amusement in dreams that I actually wake myself up laughing. So I don’t know if anyone else will find it humorous, but I’m sure amusing myself.

I’m also getting kind of a better handle on what interests me most to explore with the story, which circles back to some really fundamental questions about what romance is and does, and how a story works and why.

There have been some really good observations made about romance as a genre that center on the way that somehow books about relationships with happy endings are treated as less meaningful or less artistically valid than books that are… not that.

One of the key features of romance is that, well, love wins. Love is victorious. The characters claw their way through whatever obstacles are thrown up by the story, and it’s not merely that the main characters end up happy together. It’s celebrating that we as human beings are happier and stronger and better when we exercise our relational intelligence and figure out how to care for each other. And it’s also a common theme in romance novels that the main characters’ friends or family or coworkers are part of the story, or the backstory, and play a role in how the main characters grow. The theme of relational intelligence is multilayered. Often main characters end up also being a better friend or colleague or sibling / child / etc., or maybe they find a way to heal or let go of past relational trauma with those other characters. So, again, romances do typically have happy endings, but it’s not even exactly that romance wins. It’s that love wins.

The other thing about romance is that it tends to involve some degree of gender fantasy. That is, how gender shapes character, what’s expected, what pushes boundaries; the roles characters can hold, and how they interact with each other; how gender shapes the way characters view themselves and their relationship with the world. It could be implicit and unexamined, or it could be explicit and done with a critical eye. This is true in m/f romance, and it’s true in queer romance, and it has additional layers when you get into paranormal / urban fantasy / horror / sci fi subgenres, and it’s a whole next level of true in omegaverse romance. And while exploring the fantasy of gender is a pretty unifying theme, unfortunately I don’t think you could say that romance is necessarily all that gender-triumphant.

Love wins, but gender normativity might still kick you in the teeth.

As a for-instance, I’m currently reading (don’t you judge me) a sci fi / omegaverse-ish trilogy set on an unnamed alien planet that features a stranded human space soldier dude and two hot alien dudes (I said don’t judge me), and I’ve stuck with it because there are a lot of things that I find original and creative about these books, but also there’s a whole bunch of really gratuitous weird misogyny that shows up for no reason at all. Literally no character in these books is a woman. Space solider dude has gotten stranded on a planet with an indigenous population that is entirely “male” in that everyone has a dong but also has males who are “omegas,” capable of making babies. Supposedly their language doesn’t have a translatable word for “female” at all. But, ok, doesn’t this raise some really fundamental questions about language and gender? If there is no such thing as “female,” then you wouldn’t have the concept of “male” either, would you? If “male” isn’t distinguishing gender, then what does it even mean?

And meanwhile, the human space solider is living in a far future where being gay is no big deal because human sexuality has gotten waaaay more exotic than that since our horny and insatiable asses started interacting with alien races. Yet also the author has given him a bunch of hang-ups about being perceived as girly or unmanly or being treated like a princess. Which his new alien lovers are fundamentally incapable of doing because they have no concept of “girly” (no girls!) or “unmanly” (men are just people!) or “princess” (no royalty, but also no female anything). Space soldier dude is trying to reject unequal, pampering treatment from his partners, but why is he using gendered language to do it? And if you’re perhaps wondering, the author is a woman. For what it’s worth, I’ve never read a romance written by a man or a nonbinary person that engages in this kind of hand-waving casual misogyny. (I mean, maybe it’s out there, but I haven’t read it — while I’ve read a lot of it by women, so I’m not going to name names with this author in particular. She’s not a worse culprit than many others.)

Anyway, circling back to my own writing, it turns out that I’m just as interested in the exploration of gender as I am in the love story part. I’m just endlessly fascinated by all those questions of who we are and how we accept or push back on the world’s perceptions of us. How culture intersects with gender. How our understanding of ourselves evolves over time. Also, all the many things that make up one’s sense of self that have nothing at all to do with gender.

What else have I been up to? I also made time last week for a couple of little embroidery projects and have plans for more. Started a bit of knitting as well, but that seems to have quickly fizzled. Baked some 3-ingredient peanut butter cookies and managed to not eat all of them immediately. That's about all my news.

It’s getting cold here, and I think I see a few scattered snowflakes starting to come down outside. Hope you’re warm and well.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

Just a short letter this time. This week I am marking a new chapter in my life. I am leaving my very stable, steady, conventional job to … well, to make art. To write and explore my creative brain, and wash off the thick dust of years of disuse. It’s exhilarating and a bit terrifying and intoxicating and just deeply strange.

I’ve worked at the same company for more than ten years, with a lot of amazingly cool folks who it has been a tremendous privilege to know. As a way to stay connected and share what I’m up to, I’ve kicked off a new newsletter project which will be much more PG-rated, So Many Moving Parts. The current headlining essay will look, um, awfully familiar as I absolutely was not above cribbing from myself to get started. Over the coming weeks, I will be adding more new writing and hopefully visual art as well.

With that, I also plan to keep writing in this space, but perhaps now lean a little harder into books and sex and romance. So, if that’s less interesting to you, you might want to hop over to the new project instead. But why not both, eh?

I had such a lovely adventure last week at the GayRomLit Retreat in Virginia. I met a bunch of amazing authors and fellow readers; enjoyed conversations about hookups with Steves-plural and the logistics of anesthetics for colonoscopies and other perfectly normal topics; and came away with an unreasonably heavy stack of books for someone planning not to check a bag. And on the creative side, all week I was seeing plot bunnies everywhere, which was very invigorating for someone on the cusp of this crazy life change.

I also developed a bit of an inconvenient crush on Anna Zabo. I mean, it’s fun to have crushes on people, but it’s also sort of like walking down the street and smelling a delicious, mouth-watering cooking smell from some random house as you walk by, and then getting home to your own boring kitchen and making the same boring thing you always make.

I didn’t bring my guitar with me to Virginia, since I was flying, and it was a little odd to go a week without any cathartic banging around. Then I got back and realized that while I’ve pulled together an assortment of queered covers of songs that I like, I haven’t done any using they/them pronouns. So, I rectified that and worked up a version of Mary Lambert’s “She Keeps Me Warm” with a pronoun change.

I also managed to read some books while I was there, including some very off-the-wall recommendations that popped up like All He Wants For Christmas is a Fingerling by JP Sayle and Tina Løwén. This is an omegaverse shapeshifter romance in which a wolf falls in love with … a potato. Turns out potato shifters can have some unique talents like being able to shift in their clothing (which I read as a nod to jacket potatoes) or being able to regenerate from massive damage by being immersed in the magical dirt from Potatoville. Obviously the premise is very over-the-top silly, but I was impressed by how much the authors were able to do with it, making for a story that was wildly creative and quite funny and remarkably sweet.

I’m going to wrap this letter up because it has been a very tumultuous couple of weeks, and I’m pretty well out of spoons at the moment. I’m excited to wrap up work this week and start my new adventure. My mother’s birthday is also coming up, and we have some very fun family dinner plans in the works. (Happy birthday, Mama!)

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

I have a confession to make: I hate writing.

I mean, I also love writing. It’s definitely a love-hate relationship. But as a creative person, writing was not my first love. Probably not even my ninth or tenth.

As a kid, I loved to draw and paint and sew, to make art and weird crafty things. I remember once “wasting” most of a box of tissues making little puppets and stuffed animals. I regularly raided my mom’s scrap material box and sewing chest for my strange little sewing projects, and my dad’s woodshop for things to carve or paint. I still have a scar on one wrist from a woodcarving project gone awry.

I also loved to sing and often spent long mornings in my room making up rambling strange songs. As an older kid, if I happened to have the house to myself after school or on weekends, I would sing at the top of my lungs just to enjoy the acoustics of the empty space — or I would sing while I was by myself outside, rambling the back field like Maria traipsing through the hills.

The craftiness also showed up in an early love of baking. There was a line of microwavable cake mixes that came out while I was a kid, which were probably pretty mediocre as cake but excellent as a kid project. And then my mom bought a set of cake decorating supplies, and I learned how to make buttercream roses — the absolute pinnacle of elegance.

I had a brief flirtation with photography as well, borrowing my dad’s camera to tromp around outside and snap pics of trees and cows and clouds. This was before digital cameras, when cameras used actual film that had to be developed, which in my small town meant dropping it at the local grocery store or pharmacy and waiting a week for the photos to come back.

And I loved drama and acting. I signed up for anything drama-related that my school offered. I played dress-up with the flamboyant hand-me-downs I got from an artistic aunt, and in my bedroom I acted out favorite scenes of passionate heartbreak from movies and books. That’s part of how I fell in love with stories, alongside my early and abiding love of fairytales.

Writing was, well, something I was good at. Writing was a more relatable talent to pursue, and a less noisy one. It doesn’t take up a lot of space, nor does it require much in the way of materials. And once you really crack the lid on it, writing opens up a whole universe of creativity in a way that is hard to match — because it’s pure imagination. Words are a uniquely malleable medium.

But writing has always been hard for me as well. Writing stories is tremendously hard. Writing nonfiction isn’t much easier. Maintaining a consistent writing practice has always been a struggle — I’m not really a consistent habit sort of person, except when it comes to my morning tea. Getting my words into the shape of my thoughts is hard, when my thoughts tend to zoom around like glittering schools of fish, or maybe like a murmuration of starlings.

I love writing. I do. But god, I also hate it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about art lately. The thing that distinguishes any sort of art, I think, is intention. Found art is maybe the purest example of this. What was, say, a busted plastic fork is captured as art, purely through naming it so.

Art is definitely subjective. Not everything requiring craft and skill is necessarily art, and not every artwork is rendered skillfully. One person’s collection of toenail clippings is another person’s masterpiece waiting to happen. (Have I told you the toenails story? No? That was a college roommate, a passionate guy in the MFA program who loved art that was visceral and provocative. Once he was telling me about his philosophy as an artist, and he grabbed a little Carmex jar off a shelf in his bedroom. See this? See this? I’ve been collecting my toenail clippings. It’s almost full. This is real, you know? It has intensity. Art should evoke a response. That’s what art is. I can’t recall how I responded, but he did stop waving his jar of toenails around, so I must have said something acceptable.)

As with fashion and music, I’m not sure that I have any discernable taste in art. My taste is expansive. I can appreciate most things for what they are, and there’s no particular rhyme or reason to what kicks up my enthusiasm or makes me swoon with admiration. I do tend to like things that are a blend of whimsical and transgressive or just bafflingly weird, and beautiful portrayals of mundane things, and things of astonishing craftsmanship, and things that have a pleasing earthiness or tactile quality. But that covers a lot of ground, and I also like things that meet none of those criteria, so really, it’s anyone’s guess.

For Christmas last year, my elder brother got me this masterpiece from The Art of Pants:

I love this so much. I love the concept and execution. I love the vivid touches of blue watercolor, the delicacy of the drips, the sense of motion. I love the sloppy handprint, and I love the smudge of blue on the other cheek that creates the illusion of depth — one of the few places where the artist has carefully colored inside the lines.

Intention is a slippery concept. Subjective intent is untrustworthy, but intent is hard to discern objectively. In the law, a person has intent when they act with purpose to cause a result, or when one can infer that the person is aware their conduct is going to cause that result. Intent is a necessary element of certain legal claims, like intentional torts or crimes requiring proof of mens rea (Latin for “guilty mind”). In art, on the other hand, it’s an open question whether the intent of the artist means anything to the work, whether that intent survives the release of the work into the wild. The artist must have intentions in creating the work; but ultimately the audience gets to decide what the work means.

This game of when intent matters, and who gets to determine intent, and how intent relates to culpability or to meaning — this is all over the place in human interactions and culture.

I generally fall on the side of the death of the author. Similarly, I think Constitutional originalism is dumb. Saying “But that’s not what the founding fathers meant” is a lot like the witch in Cookie Monster and the Cookie Tree being mad that her only-give-cookies-to-people-who-share spell backfired.

Yet, intent means something. Doesn’t it? Veering away from art: Kindness is intentional. Compassion is intentional. You might mean well and fail miserably, but still, the good intent has to be there in the first place.

But intention is nothing without action. And then once there is an action, a manifestation of the intent, then it’s the manifestation that matters. If you meant well and failed miserably, you still owe an apology to the wronged party. If you meant well and did exactly what you meant to do, and then later you realize that your well-meaning actions hurt somebody, you owe the exact same apology. And if you meant well and did nothing, then you did nothing, and you get no credit.

In a convoluted way, that brings me around to my latest book binge, the Necessary Evils series by Onley James. This series follows a set of adopted brothers who are all psychopaths, raised by their adoptive father to leverage their lack of empathy and murderous tendencies to avenge wrongs that would otherwise escape justice. So, bad acts aren’t redeemed by good intent, but what about good acts done with evil intent? Or evil acts done to achieve good results? When do two wrongs make a right?

I had seen these recommended multiple times and kept hesitating because, you know, psychopaths. And yes, these books are very definitely on the violent and murdery side, but also? It turns out that they’re kind of weirdly adorable. Like, who knew violent psychopaths could be such cuddly sweethearts?

I think part of what makes these books work so well is that everybody in them is damaged, and they’re good for each other in the way their damage lines up. Most romances are redemptive, one way or another, and putting together characters who can help each other with their unique baggage is a common device. This is a creative take on that. Bad guys end up getting what they deserve, while the good guys (for a certain definition of “good”) get what makes them happy (even if it might make someone else run screaming).

The other thing I appreciated about these books is that the author is thoughtful in her treatment of psychopathy as a form of neurodivergence that exists on a spectrum. The brothers are not all the same. Traits associated with psychopathy are found in all of them, but not all in the same way or to the same degree. I mean, they are all kind of murderous, but other traits vary. This series makes for an interesting entry in the running of hot takes on neurodivergence in romance writing.

I don’t have any particular plans for the weekend. A few weeks ago I was all talk about doing a closet clean-out project and then having some girlfriends over for a clothing swap, to raid each others’ stuff before donating the leftovers. But did I actually act on all my big talk and follow through with an actual plan? No. Although I guess I could still clean out my closet.

Meh. Maybe I’ll make some art instead.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

I just read a scene in a romance novel where one character invites the other back to his place, despite being very omg-first-time-with-a-man nervous, and the other character notices the nervousness and suggests that they watch a movie. And it suddenly occurred to me for the first time (in spite of all the “Netflix and chill” references that have proliferated in the last decade) that in real life, it has never dawned on me in the moment that “Let’s watch a movie” means “Let’s put a on movie while we make out.” I have only ever interpreted this as a literal interest in watching a movie, then been surprised that the other person seems super distracted and not actually that into the movie.

My god, I really am an innocent naïve newborn baby.

Left to my own devices, I don’t watch many movies or shows or other TV. Most of the time, my television is actually my stereo, with Spotify being hands-down the most used application. I’m not anti-TV, and sometimes I’ll get on a kick of watching or re-watching something — but it has literally been months since I’ve watched anything at all. Since June, I think. Maybe longer.

I think it often comes across as a humblebrag to say “I don’t watch TV,” but in practice, what it means is that my pop-cultural competence is pretty shit. Common conversation starters in the modern world are things like “What shows are you watching?” or “Seen any good movies lately?” and I usually struggle for a response. Sometimes I’ll say, “Haha, I haven’t been watching anything new lately, just doing the comfort thing and re-watching old [blank] episodes,” where [blank] might be Parks & Rec, or The Good Place, or maybe Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Burn Notice, depending on the conversation. Mostly that gets me a pass; or if the other person says, “Oh, I love that show! I love the one about [whatever story or bit],” I will at least be able to competently and comfortably share their enthusiasm. And then I can usually nod along with the rest of the conversation without having to pretend I know what the hell anyone else is talking about.

A lot of things are kind of like that, I think. Social masks are all over the place.

Thinking about dating and movie-watching: I once went out with a very sweet country boy, while I was living in Colorado. This was when I worked at a jewelry store, after college and before law school. I met him when he came in to buy a pair of earrings for his mom for Christmas. He came back a few days later to ask me out, and he was really charming and down-to-earth and likeable. And then halfway through our date, he excused himself, and when he came back, he said, “Sorry, I had to go take care of my dirty little habit. I chew.” And I just smiled and nodded and had no idea how to respond, but Reader, chewing tobacco really grosses me out. I liked him, but I just couldn’t get my head past it.

So he asked me if I wanted to come back to his place and watch a movie, and I said yes because I did really like him, and I was definitely down to watch a movie. And that’s what we did, specifically Shaun of the Dead, with a solid several of inches of space separating us at all times, and him never quite making a move past putting his arm behind me on the couch, and me thinking the whole time, So were you spitting out your chew earlier, or getting a fix, or rinsing your mouth out or what? Oh god, is the inside of your lip all gross and cancerous like that educational movie they made us watch that one time in junior high? Are you chewing tobacco right now?

And I just didn’t know how to say or ask any of it, and definitely was not sure I wanted to be in a regular kissing sort of arrangement with a tobacco chewer. So I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t kiss him when I left, and we didn’t see each other again. And then six months later I moved across the country to start law school. But I thought of him off and on for a long time afterward. I hope he found a nice someone to settle down with. He was a sweetheart.

I was about to write, “I hope he found a nice girl to settle down with,” and stopped myself at “girl” because I am trying to be more conscientious about not assuming straightness just because of a current partner or love interest. I know he was into me, but maybe he’s since embraced his bisexuality, or maybe it just didn’t come up on our date. It’s not like I came out to him as bi either.

When I did first come out to friends and family, it was as bisexual, but now I find myself more identifying as pansexual. I don’t have strong feelings about this, and I’ll still use either term. I always thought of the word bisexual in the inclusive sense of “attracted to people of my gender and not of my gender” without necessarily attaching a gender binary to it. But as I’ve also come to better understand myself as genderfluid (or maybe genderflux? or maybe bigender? anyway, not fully cis), the word pansexual has felt like a better fit. A good friend of mine has said to me more than once that if a tentacled space alien asked me out on a date and turned out to be smart and interesting and have a good sense of humor, I could probably fall for them. She ain’t wrong. I like a person for who they are as a person, and I especially like people who are interesting.

Interesting is my catnip. It’s one of my go-to most sincere compliments. If I describe someone as really good-hearted and super interesting, that’s pretty much my absolute rave review of a fellow human. If I describe a book or a show as really full of heart and ideas that are really interesting, that’s 5 gold stars right there.

Lots of things are interesting to me. I’m pretty deeply egalitarian when it comes to valuing knowledge and experience. Whether you work in cow shit or in front of a computer (or both! or neither!), the thing that interests me is how you engage with what you know, and how you grow your knowledge, and what you’re curious about. It’s not that I think X-set of life experience is equivalent to Y-set of academic achievement or Z-level of professional qualification. It’s that the world is huge and spectacularly intricate, and domain expertise comes in all sorts of forms, and ultimately I’m a lot less interested in labels than in what people actually know and do.

I think maybe most people aren’t used to being told that they’re interesting, that their thoughts are interesting, or that they know things that are uniquely interesting. So if no one has told you lately, then listen: babe, you are totally interesting. You know lots of things I don’t know. You have a special area of expertise that I would find totally fascinating. I have no doubt about it. If we have a chance to sit down and have a conversation, it would be entirely my honor and privilege to hear what you know. 

But if you chew tobacco, I probably won’t want to kiss you.

On the book side of things, I have been trying to read as widely as possible from the authors who will be at GRL this fall. Most recently this led me to the Finding Home series by Carly Marie, starting with At Home. And I have to admit, this one was something of a learning experience.

The book blurb alludes to the fact that this story involves Daddy kink, and I thought I had an approximate idea of what that was going to be — maybe some rough outline of a domination-submission dynamic, maybe some bratty pouty behavior that gets disciplined. I was not really expecting to read about age play and age regression. I was definitely not prepared for diapers. But, look, if I’m going to proclaim myself to be open-minded, then I actually have to make the effort to be open-minded, right?

This story wasn’t really for me, but there were lots of things about it that I found thought-provoking. Derek is dealing with new-found fame as a country music star that has pushed him back into the closet. A chance encounter has him meeting Colt, sheriff of a small community outside Nashville, with instant chemistry between them. Colt knows himself to be a Daddy Dom. Derek is intrigued by age play, and while he hasn’t had any prior experience with it, he takes to it immediately.

A big part of the story arc involves — spoiler alert, so skip this next bit if you hate spoilers — Derek dealing with a homophobic manager at the start of the story and then later being outed as gay when a photo of him kissing Colt gets published. There were a couple of things that stood out to me here.

Regarding the homophobic manager, there’s a funny distinction that the story makes between whether the manager is “just ignorant” or “clearly homophobic,” as if those are meaningfully different categories. In the context of the story, I think this works as an example of the compromises queer people sometimes make, or feel they must make, with their own principles or even their own interests in order to get by in the face of pervasive homophobia.

Derek coming out as a gay country music star also struck me as poignant, not because he was outed by the media — particularly since he expected that would inevitably happen at some point, and didn’t seem to be all that concerned with avoiding it — but rather because while he could be out as a gay man, he would never be able to come out as “little.” It’s clear that Colt and Derek’s Daddy/little dynamic is every bit as integral to their relationship as their sexuality, but the book doesn’t try to get around the fact that most of the rest of the world will find it too taboo. The closest they come to being able to be seen and accepted is that Derek has a tendency to slip up and call Colt “Daddy” around bandmates and family members, and he discloses the nature of their relationship to his brother who explicitly asks about it and already has a clue what it means. Maybe they can’t be out to the world, but their friends and family give them a few harbors of safe and compassionate space in which to be themselves. Which is really what a lot of queer romance exists to do.

So, no kink-shaming here. Among consenting adults, people should get to be who they are, and love how they love, and not be questioned or psychoanalyzed or put under a microscope.

Looks like it’s going to be lovely this weekend in this corner of the world, so I mean to get outside and make the most of it. Hope you can too.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com