Author’s Note: These pieces are written in the style called “skaz”—a term coined by early-Soviet Formalists to describe an oral bard’s voice on the page. Somewhere between prose poetry, theatrical performance, and rambling essays—dense and personal, holding eye contact with the reader. It was particularly popular in Ukraine, where skaz’s greatest practitioner, Nikolay Gogol, grew up and where I, too, lived for the first fifteen years of my life.
More Comment Than Question
“This is more of a comment than a question . . . ” You know how people in the crowd always say that at talks and readings? There’s a certain sweet shamelessness about it. And a sense of dread, of hopeless inevitability, that’s released in the room and whose fingers immediately start straining the face of the presenter.
Well, what you’re about to read here is also more of a comment than a question.
Who is the comment for—I mean, whose talk am I responding to? That’s hard to pin down. Maybe Aesthetics? Or maybe my parents—as a source of discourse? Beauty, or immigrant expectations?
I must have been five or six at the time. We went on our annual summer vacation—this time, to Sochi, a town on the Black Sea, which was further out from my native Ukraine, and closer to Georgia, hot and dreamy the way old resorts are, conceived, in principle, to plunge you into a hallucination of sun reflected off the water. I remember almost nothing about the trip except for that hallucinatory feeling of irrational well-being, luxurious and fragrant and unfamiliar: and cedars, and new kinds of flowers, and enormous furry peaches.
And then there’s this one memory, the only one real anchor. The first morning there, I tottered out into the courtyard where we were staying, and spotted a peacock. It was my first peacock: I’d never even seen one on a photograph or in a movie. All I knew was the word, pavlin—a word that rung with inaccessible dignity, untouchable distance—but somehow, seeing it, I immediately knew what was in front of me. I was stunned, exhilarated.
And then, as I gaped at it, the peacock opened its mouth, and produced the most vile sound I’ve ever heard in my life. It was peering towards the trees, shouting towards some invisible presence within the branches. It couldn’t possibly have been a mating call. Could not possible be. Certainly not one that would warrant any kind of a response. Maybe it was a defeatist, self-sabotaging mating gasp—there’s a lot of poetry like that.
As far as birdsongs go, it was definitely more of a comment than a question.
The other day we sat around the table. It was my birthday, one of those easily divisible ones. The subject of the conversation was our shared forgetting—the big swaths of life that we have no access to, whole selves that are gone and can only be vaguely smelled from the pages of books we were reading at the time, or pictures we half-smiled from. Immigration, and other forms of decorated trauma hung thick in the air.
When I drink, a lot and quickly, in a brief short-lived rise, I sometimes see across time. That was the case at this birthday gathering. We sat together at the table, and I saw chipped bits, cracks of our forgotten lives pirouetting from our eyes, and, as we refilled our glasses, we drank them, drank each other’s rescued contraband memories.
It was there and then that my Sochi peacock wondered into the scene, and I remembered him for the first time in many decades. A memory coming through a distance like that comes wrapped in a few tears, that’s just a given. But why did I remember Sochi peacock on my birthday? Was it a present the subconscious shoved my way? Did the peacock shout louder than other inhabitants of my loosening and disappearing world? Or is it just the sort of a thing that friends do for each other when they sit together and tell stories, and I forgot that this was still possible? Was I hearing my parents’ laugher—at my helplessness and dismay as I attempted to comprehend the disparity between that tail and that voice? That voice and this tale?
I came to America as a teenage student and stayed, stayed, stayed, through endless visa iterations and law tightenings, through all those moments when it felt as if my status here was a frail validation of my existence, graciously extended for another year, or about to be pulled out from under me at any moment. It is hard to hold one’s history when it stems from such an alien world—the one you dread being thrust back into in your worst nightmare of bureaucratic outcomes. You want to erase its pathways inside of you so you would never have to risk going back. All of us, at that birthday table, were kind of like that too, worn by these overlaying, unwelcomed allegiances—and as we drank and talked, it was as if these allegiances became people, and we were these people’s jeans.
No question about it.
God, Dog, Daughter
You’ve all heard it at some point: “language isn’t enough.” Or even: “a poem that’s reaching the edge of the unspeakable”—you may even have said it yourself, or even worse, to yourself, quietly, like? And if you are Paul Celan that’s one thing, but if you merely sitting and reading, or getting up to congratulate someone, or wish them well when they’re sick, or if you’re sick in love and you want to congratulate the object of your affection, language should be adequate for covering the ground you’re standing on. Even if you’re standing on a shred of the abstract. Don’t tell me the “true meaning” of this or that is too precious to be captured in words, as if language just flails and stops short in front of the vast abyss of silence somewhere at the bottom of which, on the unshrinkable god-couch, a brilliant pre-lingual understanding of your experience resides.
Never mind all that: What I was getting up to tell you about is the two times I did enter Silence. In neither of the two situations was it the matter of language’s insufficiency or inadequacy. And even the great void, which many of my poet friends talk about—I saw no void to speak of. It was precisely the opposite.
The first time it happened, I was seven years old. I was biking fast, tearing down a steep hill after my friend. There were these parks all over Ukraine that weren’t exactly parks, for they were neither cultivated nor marked. They were just these “nothing-there” patches of the world left alone by people who lived near them. And we were wild street kids, hanging out in these so-called parks, or maybe my friend was a wild street kid and I imagined we were alike. As I was saying, I was on my bike, and I was going fast, and as I made a sharp turn at the bottom of the hill, the bike tumbled, and I fell, and my left butt cheek landed right on a big, sharp rock. I laid there, butt on the rock, and could not speak for a whole minute, and even after that, the only word I had access to was “sobaka,” which means a “dog” in Ukrainian and Russian both. I said just that one word, over and again, and with deep feeling and conviction—everything was packed into it. There was something utterly blissful about that dogged near-silence I entered—even though the pain was sharp, it was strangely thrilling to lie unable to speak anything other than that one single word. It wasn’t that I transcended language or was bigger than it. No way.
See, I didn’t speak a word of English at the time and so didn’t even know about the—you know, the whole god/dog thing?
Reader, when I landed on the rock, I was propelled into another dimension, ushered in and out of its gateways by this sobaka.
Eventually, the language returned, and sobaka waddled off. But I saw it one more time, I swear, out of the corner of my eye, wagging its liminal tail just a few short years ago, in a very different part of the world, in a tiny Californian apartment on a university campus, where my daughter came up to me, put her hand flat on top of her head, and then moved the hand toward me.
“Papa,” she said, “See, Papa, I am as tall as your vagina already!” It wasn’t so much my stunned silence but her language, her rocking, precious words that let the dogs of transcendence out.
Have you ever harbored a desire so fierce that you were consumed by it? Maybe to fall in love, or shut down a toxic mine, or reconnect with a lost family member, or move to another country? And during the day you plot out how to achieve this goal, and during the night you dream about how you will be fulfilled? Of course, life rarely works out as scheduled. In fiction, the best-laid plans more often end in messy escapades and misadventures. Desires are quicksand: the more someone pines for something, the more they’re likely to get stuck deeper in a scandalous tarpit of their own devising. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, the young doctor achieves the objective of bringing his creation to life, but at a great and unforeseen cost.
Women especially, who have been for so long boxed into domestic roles and blocked out from more ambitious goals, might risk the roof over their heads to shatter the glass ceiling. Such fearless women are willing to blow up their lives for the idea of a better future. Strong women make history, sure; but strong women also catch fire.
Then again, maybe there is a part of us that wants to create a monster. After all, aren’t we predisposed to making something in our own image?
In my second novel The Formation of Calcium, Mary Ellen Washie finds herself on the precipice: her old life has been swept into the dustbin, and she can either make a clean break, or take herself out with the trash. But “survival was the most important thing, escape, no matter how painful it might be.” She abandons her family, quits her menial part-time jobs, and hightails it to Florida, where she risks everything to become a new woman, no matter if achieving her goals will require all the fight and cunning she’s got.
In the following reading list, you will find women who struggle just as hard to give themselves what they really want—and are damned to the consequences.
In this dark novel, our narrator Janina is suddenly alone after her “Little Girls,” a loyal pair of mutts, disappear. She is trapped by the stark winter, the isolated location of her home, and old age, but that does not stop her from plotting to create a better world, one where animals have a voice, and their rights are more important than the law. She is driven by a “state of clarity, divine Wrath, terrible and unstoppable,” and she channels this anger into action. Janina is an engrossing narrator whose obsessions with astrology, poetry, and the mounting murder count in her small hamlet make this novel a worthwhile read.
Sometimes what a woman wants is not accepted by society, and sometimes what she wants is plain illegal—as is the case for junior high school teacher Celeste Price, who takes the job so that, while chaperoning a school dance, she can waltz with a boy or two, her “pelvic bone ironing across the erect heat inside their rented tuxedo pants.” Celeste knows that what she craves could land her in jail, but her desire is greater than any consequence she could imagine. And, using her good looks, her husband’s money, and her influence as a teacher, she goes to incredible lengths to fulfill her fantasies.
Yeong-hye is a completely ordinary woman—that is, until she decides to become a vegetarian in a culture where every meal is meat. This decision is influenced by her violent dreams, where the “roof of [her] mouth, slick with crimson blood,” saturates her with a “vivid, strange, horribly uncanny feeling.” Soon the world inside her head becomes all-consuming, so much so that she feels she does not need to eat anything at all: perhaps she can turn into a plant and teach herself to photosynthesize. As Yeong-hye’s family tries to exert control over her body, she burrows deeper into her mind, where a startling transformation has taken root.
Deb, our astute and sarcastic narrator, is honeymooning with Chip when a fellow vacationer who happens to be a biologist informs them that she spotted mermaids near their Caribbean resort. Deb feels certain that the biologist is insane, or perhaps on LSD, until she sees the mermaids herself while diving. Chaos ensues: the resort’s “parent company” swoops in to figure out the logistics of commercializing mermaid tours, and Deb finds herself wrapped up in a fracas to save the enthralling creatures from “a mermaid zoo.” She is ready to risk anything, and she has one excellent reason not to hold back.
Connie is able to communicate with the year 2137, and so her present declares her crazy. This feminist classic explores a utopian future in which individualism is prized: people cannot be committed to an institution against their will, labor is equally proportioned, no one is homeless or marginalized or discriminated against—all the issues that plague Connie’s 1970s New York life have vanished. Through time travel, Connie experiences the sort of future she wants to be a part of, but she soon learns that she is an integral step in creating that future—and she decides to rebel against her present situation, to battle against her repressors, because she realizes that she is at war, and that the fate of the human race depends on her winning.
N.P. by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Ann Sherif
North Point is the title of a sad, old song, and Kazami finds herself caught up in its mood, despite the fact that the summer days are clear and blue. She lost her voice during an illness, and without that communicative instrument, she experiences synesthesia; she begins to view language “as a tool that encompasses both a single moment and eternity.” But when her boyfriend commits suicide after attempting to translate the final short story of a famous Japanese writer who composed it just before his own death, she leaves her comfort zone to figure out what went wrong. As the end of summer looms and she surrounds herself with people obsessed by suicide, she realizes that she needs to fight for happiness, for love, and for her life.
In this jaw-dropping memoir, former Hollywood starlet Barbara Payton spills her guts, lets all the cats out of the bag, and cackles while the felines snack on the entrails. At the time of the telling, Payton is 35, fuels herself with cheap wine, and pays for her vermin-infested apartment via “favors” to men; but her focus is on the past, when she was a coveted movie star “sitting on top of the world and going higher.” Her calculated manipulation of those around her result in the highest highs and the lowest lows of a life lived to the extreme. Barbara sets lofty goals for herself—“I filed for divorce and decided to become a movie star. Just like that”—and she achieves them.
This experimental work—part novel, play, poetry, drawings, and dream maps—is a trippy dive into Janey’s quest for power and sex. Janey lives with her father/boyfriend in Mexico until he decides to leave her for a woman named Sally, which plunges Janey into a surreal journey to realize her self-worth. She meets Jean Genet and President Carter, as well as figures such as Death and Mr. Blowjob. Janey is the sort of wild child who does whatever, whenever; she follows her whims and interests, and her rich inner life, displayed in exquisite detail on the page, makes this an engrossing piece full of abrupt turns.
Lune works in Storylandia, “a place where mothers and fathers bring their children to learn about fantastical things right before they tell them to stop believing in fantastical things.” Her mother Marcrina, once a midwife, now cries enormous tears that fill a deep, mysterious cenote. When The Generales, who control Cenote City, decide to make Marcrina and her cenote a tourist attraction, Lune knows that she will need to risk everything in order to steal her mother away. But as the worlds of the living and los muertos become more and more intertwined, Lune realizes that her mother might not need to be saved after all.
Christine “Oreo” Clark is completely her own person, and though she is just a kid, “because of her constant bullshit, she was often disguised as an adult.” Her family knows that she will go far after young Oreo strangles a lion coat with her jump rope—she thought the coat was alive and wasn’t afraid one bit. Oreo is strong and witty and blessed as any Greek hero, and when she leaves home at sixteen after her Black mother provides her with the clues to search for her Jewish father, the adventures she encounters are legendary. This book goes to extremes of humor, language, and culture, and in the end, nothing is black or white.
The Whore by Márcia Barbieri, translated by Adrian Minckley
Anúncia, the town whore, recounts her life of conquests and defiance in this monologue that follows lines of thought as whimsically as an Exquisite Corpse is drawn—and there are plenty of body parts, living and dead and in-between, that make their appearance throughout this orgiastic tale. In the post-apocalyptic setting, “the population dropped almost to zero,” but Anúncia survives, and though the earth has become infertile, she seeks out abortion after abortion as she believes “a child is a loogie you forgot you swallowed that ends up sliding out your pussy hole.” But when she becomes impregnated with a fetus that won’t come out and consequently falls in love with Flamenca, her abortionist, her life takes an unexpected path.
It’s March Madness, and you know what that means (or, if you’re like most of us, maybe you kind of don’t. Basketball? Competing colleges? Probably a lot of drinking?): it’s time to fill out all sorts of brackets entirely unrelated to actual March Madness. We may not always be up on all the sports news, but we do love a good competition, so this year we thought we’d join in the fun. In that spirit, over the next week on our Twitter and Instagram channels, we’ll be asking you to vote for your favorite book-to-TV adaptations and help us find the one literary TV show to rule them all.
Book adaptations are all the rage lately, and there are more coming out all the time. Who did it best? Will it be Game of Thrones, or did the show’s ending ruin its chances (the part not based on the books themselves, may we add—factor that in or not, at your discretion)? Will one of the newer additions to the club (a Rooney, perhaps?) rise to the top? What about a beloved show that people have probably forgotten was based on a book at all, like Friday Night Lights(see, we included some sports content after all! We’re well-rounded!)?
Click to enlarge
Fill out the bracket and make your predictions, then head to our Twitter and Instagram on Monday, 3/27 to start voting. May the best IP win!
Artists have long been notorious for their wellness of body and mind. Indisputable experts in life performance, these bastions of creativity are an infallible resource for healthy habits to live by. To optimize your holistic potential, consider The Famous Artist Wellness Plan (FAWP)™.
Or…don’t.
Wake and quickly smoke opium (Proust).
Swallow uppers to counteract the downers (Monroe).
Do not bathe. Ever (Michaelangelo).
Comb hair 100 times (Dickens).
Go for a 30 minute ramble in the desert collecting rattlesnake rattles (O’Keefe).
Feed your monkeys, hens, parrots, sparrows, fawn, and eagle (Kahlo).
Take three shots of vodka and just enough psilocybin (Thompson).
Drink three espressos and watch The Young and the Restless (Rauschenberg).
Pound 49 more cups of coffee (Balzac).
Create a meticulous record of the previous day’s events. Mail to the IRS (Warhol).
Drink glycerin with a honey chaser to “wash out the pipes” (Armstrong).
Eat first breakfast of the day and practice pirouettes (Pavlova).
Attend Mass. Have your portrait taken with your pet peahens (O’Connor).
Ingest Dexedrine. Experiment with Thorazine, Meprobamate, and Phenobarbital. Chain smoke all day. (Jackson).
Swallow downers to counteract the uppers (Monroe).
Take anteater for a walk before lecturing in a swimsuit (Dali).
Do headstand for ten to fifteen minutes (Stravinsky).
Untie knots with your toes (Houdini).
Smoke cigar (Twain).
Eat brunch then practice the pas de deux (Pavlova).
Bet the ponies (Bukowski).
Put an unlit cigarette and a flaming match into your mouth. Pull out a burning cigarette (Dean).
Smoke cigar (Twain).
Eat lunch then dance the pas de trois (Pavlova).
Study mimes (Bowie).
Eat pre-dinner then perform the grand pas (Pavlova).
Host a seance (af Klint).
House a bottle of gin, seven Martinis and two glasses of wine (Highsmith).
Smoke cigar (Twain).
Eat supper then solo the dying swan (Pavlova).
Shake off the narcs and go dancing (Holiday).
Go to bed with Jane Eyre and a bottle of whiskey (Rhys).
Sleep the rest of the day, get blotto and work all night (Pollock).
Drink wine until dawn and write poetry. Revel in the fruits of your healthy lifestyle (Bukowski).
Follow The FAWP™ and we guarantee your creative life will never be the same. Side effects may vary, and include (but are not limited to) addiction, bloating, headaches, rattlesnake bites, divorce, lung cancer, pulled hamstrings, poverty and delusions of grandeur.
For writers at every stage, the publishing industry can feel inaccessible. There are so many steps between drafting a book and seeing it out in the world. Especially for debut hopefuls, it’s more than a little intimidating: how do we know what we don’t know? Meanwhile, those who’ve already published may have different unknowns related to their brand, potential advances, or editor relationships from one book to the next. Luckily, the resurgence of the email newsletter over the past couple of years has led agents, publishers, and writers with publishing experience to lift the veil on much of the process.
The seven newsletters below offer the best insights and advice from abstract aspects of publishing to the smallest details, including market analysis, writing query emails and proposals, navigating contracts, marketing your work—and don’t forget much-needed emotional support and a laugh or two.
A writer and vice president at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency with bylines in Catapult, Electric Literature, and Racked, Kate McKean created Agents & Books to answer the most common questions she gets about writing, literary agents, and publishing. How to find and research agents, writing query letters and book proposals, contracts, publicity, and how to quit your job and write full time are all areas McKean dives into. There is free content, but for $5/month or $50/year, paid subscribers receive an additional weekly newsletter with Q&As they can submit questions to, along with insider content. Best of all, it’s easy to find the information you need on the newsletter’s home page, which is organized by topic.
Every Sunday, Leigh Stein sends out a completely free and extremely personable newsletter about how the internet is changing the way books are written and published. The author of five books, most recently the poetry collection What To Miss When, Stein gets writers to think beyond what they’re working on and instead about how they’re working on it. The newsletter demystifies the industry and process of getting published as it covers topics like the importance of having a strong concept to get a book deal, thinking of your writing career as a small business, platform building and marketing your own work, the shifting nature of the personal essay market due to social media, and trends in book title writing. She also includes writing exercises when relevant, gets into craft, and provides personal examples to make sure her points resonate.
Hailed as “The Economist of publishing but a lot easier to read,” Jane Friedman’s The Hot Sheet is for anyone who wants to keep up with the business realities of the publishing industry. The former publisher of Writer’s Digest and author of three books including The Business of Being a Writer, Friedman shares her sharp interpretation of launches and mergers, changes likely to affect author earnings, market analysis, and more in a variety of forms: top headlines of the latest news in publishing, in-depth articles with bottom-line takeaways, a summary of industry trends, new opportunities and ventures, and links to stories of interest in the writing and publishing community. There are no free subscription options here. For $59/year, subscribers receive an email every two weeks with relevant information that just might lead them to find their next publishing opportunity.
Writer and book coach Courtney Maum is dedicated to giving her peers the tools they need to feel empowered when working to publish a book. Her newsletter—a continuation of Before and After The Book Deal, one of her five books—offers insight into all aspects of the publishing industry, as well as craft and publishing tips, for debut authors and veterans alike. With a direct but light-hearted delivery (ex: “Don’t write every day. Yep. You heard me”), Maum tackles details like blurb writing etiquette and query email subject lines alongside bigger picture items such as how to get out of your own way and deciding to self-publish. There are occasional free posts, but in addition to weekly, sometimes twice weekly emails, paid subscribers ($6/month or $60/year) can post, comment, and submit their promotional materials to Maum’s “Friday Office Hours” for a shared critique.
How to Glow in the Dark offers practical, candid, and entertaining advice to writers at every stage of their journey—“aspiring, #amwriting, querying, submitting, under contract, post-publication, popping champagne, popping Xanax, screaming into a pillow.” Most emails are written by Anna Sproul-Latimer with occasional contributions from her colleagues at Neon Literary, where she’s founding partner and president. This newsletter feels like a friend who helps you see all sides of a situation. Sproul-Latimer covers everything from the nitty gritty of profit and loss sheets to how writers can approach editors who don’t respond with timely edits to why neurodivergent writers shouldn’t ritualize their creativity but rather “make tedium a daily practice and your dreams an emergency.” Periodically, there are public posts for non-subscribers, but for $5.99/month or $49.99/year, subscribers receive weekly emails with publishing tips, as well as access to the newsletter archive.
Publishing is Hard is its own work of art in newsletter form. Its creator, DongWon Song, an agent at Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, began this (approximately) monthly venture to “share what it’s like, emotionally, to sit on my side of the table, and to try to shine a light on some of the business’s more confusing corners.” Song’s newsletter is emotional indeed—raw, authentic, humorous, and hopeful. At times, it’s philosophical, such as when Song describes their existence at the intersection of art and capitalism, and encourages us to write despite uncertainty. Other times, it’s practical, making a case for why writers should think about their brand long before commercial success, or breaking down the opening paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Song’s newsletter is free, but for $5/month or $50/year, subscribers receive bonus content like monthly Q&A streams with guests.
In Notes from a Small Press, Anne Trubek—founder and publisher of Belt Publishing and author of three books including So You Want to Publish a Book?—shares her take on an array of publishing industry-related topics. Each week she tackles something new, from defining what makes a small press small to summarizing the “most disastrous decision in corporate publishing history” to covering common misconceptions about publishing. The newsletter is free, but only paid subscribers ($5/month or $30/year) can see posts from the archives.
This essay, by Addie Tsai, is the first in Electric Literature’s new limited essay series, Both/And, which centers the voices of trans and gender nonconforming writers of color. For the next fifteen weeks, on Thursday, EL will publish an installment of Both/And, with the series running through spring and into Pride Month. At a time when my community (the trans community) is a political target for the far-right, I am incredibly proud to have the opportunity to elevate the voices of those most marginalized—and most often silenced—in our community so that we can tell our own stories. Both/And is the first series of its kind, and you’re in for a treat: stories of invisibility and hypervisibility, sexy stories, dreams and love and grief. But what ties them together is the fearlessness and honesty with which they are told. And the volume—because when it comes to our lives, it’s time our voices be the loudest in the conversation.
—Denne Michele Norris, Editor-in-Chief
If you asked me whether or not I’m trans, I wouldn’t know how to answer. On certain days, I wake up, and feel, with absolute certainty, that I’m a trans-masculine person who also defies gender. I will say it aloud to myself, while rocking back and forth on the porch swing in front of my house. But then, I will feel a little twinkling whisper in my chest, that says, but wait, what am I, really? and I will stow that certainty away, until the next time.
Let’s start with my earliest understanding of gender.
My earliest understanding of gender was not the gender I was assigned at birth. It was not male. It was, as the joke goes, an indefinable third thing, a thing most don’t consider because the nature of my birth is only interesting to those who weren’t born similarly as a trope, a gag, a joke, a nightmare, a fantasy.
My earliest understanding of gender was twin.
I’ve said before, elsewhere, on multiple occasions, that my first queer relationship wasn’t romantic, but it was one which will always signify more strongly than any other relationship, that started before consciousness, before speech. Because when you are twinned, the very way you move through the world is always already impacted by being born as two. This next point is even more important: it doesn’t matter whether the viewer, you, perceive me as born twinned or not. It is the physical fact and condition of my birth that irrevocably impacts that navigation. And even though, thanks to therapy, I have finally achieved a healthy sense of individuation, and even though I do not share anything resembling the fantasy image of enmeshment that so many actual twins experience, I am always us and me, all at once. (The us being primary is the point, the shadow trailing behind me).
It is the physical fact and condition of my birth that irrevocably impacts that navigation.
But it’s not only the physical fact of our twinhood that results in this deeply held identity. It is also the particular way that twins, especially in America, especially those assigned female at birth, are socialized to be seen and consumed as an amorphous two-bodied thing. We are fetishized. We are sexualized. We are mocked. We are watched. We are appropriated. We are feared. We are enfolded into fantasies. We are made object, which is slightly different but also not dissimilar from being objectified.
From the time that I was eight years old, it was clear that both my gender and sexual identity were perceived as twinned. In seventh grade biology, our classmate asked us if we had the same number of hairs “down there.” As teens, our father dressed us in identical dresses—dresses he kept in his closet and trotted out for us when it was time to be put on display like paper dolls. He would sit us on the sofa to be fetishized by his friends, whose language we did not speak. Mandarin swam in the waters around us as men stroked our arms and caressed our cheeks. As women cooed at us they requested, in English, that we sing songs whose words we could only parrot out of our mouths like the imitations of each other we were.
I suppose, in one way, something productive happened out of that gender assignment. The socialization of gender as twin was far more ideologically impactful than that of my assigned gender. And I always understood that the clothes we wore were a costume, and the gender ascribed to that costume clearly a performance. You could call it drag, but it was not very fun.
But, let’s go back. Because, of course, as we all are, I was also gendered from birth.
The socialization of gender as twin was far more ideologically impactful than that of my assigned gender.
I came of age in a small suburb south of Houston in the late 1990s. Before YouTube and TikTok, Twitter and Facebook. Before AOL chat rooms. If people who lived in bodies outside of cishet gender norms did not exist in your proximity, and they did not dress their bodies in ways that announced their defiance of those norms, they did not exist. And if you were raised in an abusively strict and restrictive home by a single immigrant father, like I was, then your frame of reference was relegated to high school, the roller rink, your father’s friends’ children, and the television. And if the people you found on television, even the inaccessible celebrities, included Ellen Degeneres and characters depicted in The Birdcage, then you would also deduce that people like you—Asian, biracial, queer, and non-binary—either did not exist, or it was too dangerous to even try.
I wouldn’t fully come to terms with all of me, by which I mean my queerness, my non-binary-ness, my masc-of-center-ness, until exactly ten years ago. I learned of myself in stages. And, like many of us queer, genderfluid, weirdos (especially of color), especially those born between the cultural time periods of Gen X and Millennial, I would encourage my brain to travel back to the early days, before I knew anything, lingering on the moments that would reveal to me that I was always here.
I would remember that day in 7th grade dance P.E. class, during which we watched a film on the television/VCR on the AV cart that was wheeled into our classroom that introduced me to Mikhail Baryshnikov for the first time—a dream in white tights and ballet slippers, who pushed off the ground into a double tour and floated in the air for what seemed both finite and an eternity, a prince and a lion all rolled into one. I wanted to be what he embodied—both strength and grace, barrel turns that felt masculine but softened with delicate edges like my favorite blue twirling dress I received for my birthday one year that I loved spinning in just to see its silky bottom puff out like a bell and undulate like water ripples.
I would remember that sleepy Saturday as a teenager when I sat with my (white) elusive sparkling mother in a bedroom somewhere while she cleaned out her closet. I never got enough of her, because she almost never stopped long enough to spend time with us. While my brother and twin used the reprieve away from my father to join their friends, I sat in a dimly lit room with my mother and played with her silk scarves. She taught me how to tie them into neckties around my neck. Although she was confident that I was just playing with knots and silk, I felt a twinkling in my body that was something different, and something I would never truly reveal to her.
I would remember, also, the time I fell in love with my father’s briefcase, and foolishly believed I could play with it without his watchful eye discovering it. In the end, I became so infatuated with the sparkling gold coils of the locks that I jammed the combination. I knew he would discover it, quickly, and I knew that I would meet a punishment I couldn’t escape. I hid in the bathroom, making my body small enough to fit between the toilet and the under-the-sink cabinets, but I wouldn’t make my body small enough that day to free myself of his piercing voice, or his sharp hand colliding against my fragile skin. Would I have come to understand myself sooner if my father hadn’t corrected my gender euphoria? What would my story have become?
I wouldn’t make my body small enough that day to free myself of his piercing voice, or his sharp hand.
But what I remember most was a television character I interpreted as both doubled and living outside of the binary, someone who was both boy and girl, and somehow they were not only accepted and safe, but they were an Asian weirdo, just like me.
What I remember most is Ranma ½.
Written and illustrated by Rumiko Takahashi, Ranma ½ was initially serialized from 1987 to 1996. It centers on Ranma Saotome, a teenage boy trained in martial arts who, as a result of an accident in a cursed river during a training journey with his father, is “cursed” to become a girl when splashed with cold water.
What I remember most about Ranma was that they were not, as I had already experienced of being a twin, a trope or a gag, an object of mockery. We saw, in the body of one character, both boy and girl, and although Ranma’s friends and family would laugh as Ranma embodied their feminine form, hair wet and bust heaving against their tight shirt (anime, amiright?), a comically deflated expression on their dripping face, it was not the fact of their gender that was the gag.
It remains, even now, one of the closest parallels I can chart for a representation of both my style and my gender—the dualities of the masculine and feminine, in both dress and body, from the masculine martial arts gi with the long ponytail to the occasional female dress.
I didn’t always know what Ranma had done for me as a child with no community or understanding of queerness within my own limited environment. It became a part of me and I moved on, towards continuing to attempt to match what I was supposed to be. I wore heels and form-fitting dresses, garnering attention that made me feel squeamish, but I didn’t know why. I was supposed to feel honored that boys whistled, catcalled, told me that I’d be prettier if I smiled. I was supposed to like it when men salivated over my thick hourglass figure and curvy bottom. I was supposed to thank my lucky stars that I had a bottom most girls dreamt of. At the same time, I didn’t know how to explain to other trans, queer, and non-binary folks that I secretly loved my curves, as long as they didn’t have to mean what they meant for cis women. That it didn’t make me cis. As long as I got to choose who threw my body what attention. I smiled awkwardly while a burning sensation filled my chest when older women called my hips the ideal body type for child-rearing, or when gay men admired my perky nipples. Where was the water to turn me back to whatever it was I was supposed to be? Where was the cursed lake for me to throw myself into and pretend it was an accident so I could be the boy/girl I’d dreamed of?
I didn’t know how to explain to other trans, queer, and non-binary folks that I secretly loved my curves.
We no longer live in a world where we’re relegated to the queer selves that are “obvious,” or the one or two pieces of media that show us who aren’t cis white gays who we could really be. We have the recent manga Boys Run the Riot, centering trans boys who start their own clothing brand. We have Fire Island, written by and starring Joel Kim Booster, centering Asian queer men. We have Conrad Ricamora. We have Leo Sheng. We have Bilal Baig. We have Hayley Kiyoko. In terms of queer Asian popular cultural representation, we still have a long way to go, but it’s a far cry from the 90s desert I navigated as a young person. Ranma 1/2, however, remains a magical text for me, in how it represents a character I connect to not only as a nonbinary and bigender Asian, but as one of the only characters in popular media I can think of that expresses the duality I navigate as both twin and individual, masculine and feminine. Ranma was the first to show me it would be okay not to pick one gender, but to embrace being all the genders, and just as Asian as me.
It would take almost two decades after my Ranma phase to understand and embody the lessons it taught me. Two decades to find my queer self, my non-binary selves, but most importantly, all the queer Black, Asian, and other POC loves that would cradle me as I slowly began to develop an outward aesthetic to match my twinned interior. My necktie with my ruffles. My skirt adorned with children’s drawings in primary colors, my Reading Rainbow t-shirt. My patterned bowtie and neon eyeliner. My denim jacket bedazzled with a hundred pins. My white renaissance ruff with my lace mesh confetti blouse with matching frilly cuffs.
A century ago, Robert Lopez’s grandfather Sixto left Puerto Rico for Brooklyn. Puerto Rico would have been a U.S. territory for decades at that point. “In theory, Sixto wasn’t an immigrant,” Lopez writes in his new book Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere: An American Story of Assimilation and Erasure, “but of course he was.”
Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere is a collection of short essays illustrating the ramifications of assimilation and the way amnesia, at any scale, is difficult to see until it’s not, at which point you see it everywhere. “What’s missing isn’t just part of the story,” Lopez tells us. “It is the story.”
Lopez’s nonfiction debut is simple in form but chock-full of complexity: his fragmented family history is sprinkled with loss and longing and parades and boxing bouts and tennis matches and myths and misquotes and vaporous memories. Lopez feels his lack of family lore is something fundamental he is missing, not unlike proper tennis footwork, though he manages to compete without it. “Maybe I’d have a better forehand if I spoke Spanish,” he quips.
In telling his family’s story, Lopez is, in some sense, telling this nation’s story. The history of the United States is brimming with erasure—both actively (a founding dependent upon displacement and genocide) and passively (in terms of what’s left out in the stories we tell). “That I was born Puerto Rican was happenstance, but that I have no connection to what it means is no accident,” Lopez concludes. Put another way: What’s more American than forgetting?
Lopez and I connected to discuss assimilation, language, sports, and American culture.
Alyssa Oursler: In Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere, you chronicle your family’s “successful” migration and assimilation to the United States while reflecting on all that was lost in the process. Why is “successful assimilation” an oxymoron—and why did now feel like the time to write a book about that fact?
Robert Lopez: Assimilating into an adopted culture is the proper and respectful thing to do unless the assimilation includes some sort of repudiation or denial of one’s native culture and identity. One should try to assimilate if one decides to live in another country. Why choose that place unless you’re interested and invested in the language and culture of your new home? This should apply to everyone in every direction. But one needn’t deny the heritage left behind.
The book was started during the last administration and their draconian immigration policies. And then seeing the response to Hurricane Maria …. Well, if not then …
AO: I feel similarly that a part of my identity was lost in the language and culture that was not passed down to me—my grandfather was a war refugee from Ukraine and while my mother grew up speaking Ukrainian, she has since lost the language almost completely. But in a white supremacist country, assimilation with white skin is undoubtedly different. In the book, you’re grappling with being forced to assimilate in a country in which you are still not fully accepted. What do you think people overlook or misunderstand regarding the relationship between race and assimilation?
RL: I’m not sure I’ve ever felt or said that I’m not fully accepted in this country. Maybe I didn’t pay close attention and missed instances of that lack of acceptance, but I’m not complaining about how I’ve been treated. Latinos whose skin-tones are a little darker and speak English with an accent or not at all, they’re the people who have had a hard time here in the United States.
Every newcomer is or was an “other” at some point and all “others” have been ostracized in this country. No Irish need apply and so forth. Whether the “other” is based on religion or skin color/ethnicity or sex/gender/orientation or what have you, Americans don’t take too kindly to the “other.” Of course, the “other” has a hard time all over the world, so it’s not only an American phenomenon. So, we may call this country “white supremacist,” but so is every other “white” country in the world, to one degree or another. And the same is true for every country that isn’t white and who reigns supreme in those places. “Racial purity” has been going on for centuries all over the world and some of the most egregious examples of this can be found in Japan, Korea, China, for instance. The same goes in Africa and the Middle East. All one has to do is Google ethnic cleansing and you’ll have quite a lot to read.
AO: You discuss police violence in the book. While your friend who was killed by police was white, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the relationship between racialized police violence and assimilation/erasure.
RL: Of course, racialized police violence is heinous and a problem that needs to be addressed. But when we focus too much on race, we’re missing the overarching (fixable) issue in play here, which is the militarization of police throughout the country. The cops who beat Tyre Nichols to death in Memphis were all Black, too. Was there a racial component in this case? Perhaps. Perhaps, though, too many cops and the culture of “policing” in this country is the problem and we need to get rid of them and replace them with a new breed of police who are trained to actually protect and serve communities rather than brutalize and kill people. Calls to “end racism,” while well intentioned and a worthwhile goal, are futile. It’s like saying “end stupidity.” There’s no way to accomplish it.
Every newcomer is or was an ‘other’ at some point and all ‘others’ have been ostracized in this country.
We thought we made tremendous, groundbreaking, trailblazing strides when we elected President Obama. But look how far we’ve regressed in the wake of his presidency. How low we have sunk. It’s more than disheartening and the future is bleak. Nothing is likely to change in this regard, but in theory we should be able to get rid of brutal cops and replace them with the sort of people who aren’t looking for opportunities to beat, choke, or shoot people.
I don’t know if any of this has to do with assimilation or erasure.
AO: You offer several pointed, albeit brief, descriptions of the whitewashed suburban spaces you were raised in. How do you think the physical reality (or, in your words, “architectural atrocities”) of the suburbs encourages and/or depends on erasure?
RL: The strip mall is all about convenience and so much of our American life is about convenience. Aesthetic beauty or beauty of any kind doesn’t play a part in our day-to-day lives. All of these spaces and these attitudes promote and propagate a homogenous culture wherein we all become the same regardless of our disparate backgrounds. We’re all consumers. So, even if the strip mall has a Mexican restaurant next to a Middle Eastern restaurant next to a barbeque joint, it all feels the same. One would think there would be an acceptance or celebration of the individual cultures inside these places, but that hasn’t been my experience. The erasure is everywhere in the suburbs of New York City, in particular.
AO: Why did the term nuclear family confuse you as a child?
RL: I thought it had to do with nuclear war.
AO: I can see that. I threw myself into basketball as a kid, I think in part because it helped me fit in with my own nuclear family and because it helped me make friends—though neither of those were conscious calculations. What first drew you to the sport of tennis?
…when we focus too much on race, we’re missing the overarching (fixable) issue in play here, which is the militarization of police throughout the country.
RL: I always appreciated the game. You get to run around in short bursts and hit the hell out of a ball. You get to play offense and defense. There’s so much strategy when it comes to tennis. Pinning someone in the backhand corner with inside out forehands to induce the short ball you can then put away for a winner in the open court. Drawing someone into the net with a drop shot or slice so you can pass them. And beyond all of the strategy there is something meditative about sport – see the ball, hit the ball. Every part of it is addictive.
AO: I tend to think of sports as something that is used to define identity, whether as a player or a fan. But your relationship to tennis suggests the opposite: it’s a place where identity (or lack thereof) seemingly falls away as a result of the game at-hand. What do you think the popularity of sports tells us about American culture?
RL: There’s truth in both suggestions. The tennis crew I have, this community, we’re certainly defined through our love of the game and all of us have different stories on how we found the game. Most of my friends grew up with it, but there are a few of us who came to it later in life. All of us have different ethnic/racial backgrounds and the diversity is glorious. But always we’re bound together through the game. When I’m on the court playing doubles with a Nigerian as my partner, and across the net is an Italian and a Brit, and on the court next to us there are representatives from China and Argentina and India and Arizona, it feels like it should be a model for how the world can work.
Sports, like everything else, can bring out the best and worst of us as people. Examples of these poles can be seen daily.
AO: Do you feel that your insider-outsider status is part of what made you become a writer?
RL: I’ve never given this any thought, but it’s probably true. In fact, it probably is most definitely true.
AO: The book is made up of short essays with short paragraphs yet covers tremendous ground. Can you speak to the relationship between the cadence of the book and its subject?
Calls to ‘end racism,’ while well intentioned and a worthwhile goal, are futile. It’s like saying ‘end stupidity.’
RL: Like so many of us in this modern world, I see and experience everything in fragments. Originally, this book started as a series of braided essays, but then it morphed into a book length piece with fragments and diversions in any number of directions, but always tying into what the book is going after. I like your use of the word cadence because that’s always of paramount concern when assembling a book. Modulation makes the medicine go down, so to speak. Looking within and without, looking backwards and forwards, and all kinds of alternate side-angles, was critical in putting this book together.
AO: When/why did you decide this book needed to be nonfiction as opposed to exploring similar themes through a novel? RL: I’ve never tried to do anything with a piece of fiction, have never sat down and decided on any kind of subject matter or theme, which is a term I never use. I never think in these terms when it comes to the work. All of it has happened through language alone, never an idea. So, there was never a choice. This book started as nonfiction and, of course, stayed that way. It would never occur to me to try it as a novel. I wouldn’t know where to begin.
When I see Halley in a bar, years and years past when she disappeared, I know it’s her so quickly and completely that it makes me gasp. The Halley of her thirties is leaner than her teenage self, her hair dyed a blue so dark that in the shady bar I think it’s black, and she has a scar across one cheek. But she still has eyes the color of rainy days, a slight limp on her left side. I wonder if she also has a face etched with living, laugh lines around her eyes, a frown line permanently drawn across her forehead.
“Halley?” I half-shout across the bar. But she doesn’t even flinch or turn. I move through the other bar patrons as quickly as I can, trying not to lose her in the crowd. When I catch up to her she’s talking to a man in jeans and a band shirt of some musician I’ve never heard of. I reach out and tap her shoulder.
She flinches. The man stares at me and she turns. We haven’t been face-to-face since we were sixteen, sitting in my front yard, drinking lemonade in paper cups, talking about what senior year would be like. That was the day before she went missing. The day before everything slipped and crashed. “Do I know you?” she asks.
“It’s Abby?” For a second I feel like maybe I’m the one in the wrong. That she’s still Halley but I’m someone else.
She shakes her head. “I’m sorry? I don’t think I know you?” “From school? Lincoln. We were friends.” Friends feels incomplete.
She half-smiles. “I really don’t think I know you. I’m not sure what Lincoln is. I get confused for others all the time.”
“You’re not Halley Blackwell?”
She shakes her head. But her face is Halley’s face, and her head shake, always so confident and yet so disappointed to be saying no, is Halley’s head shake. “Sorry. I’m Faye.”
I take a step back. “Sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I retreat back to my corner of the bar. Occasionally, I glance over at her talking with the man. She sometimes laughs, but she never looks my way.
In the dark, at home, I count stars on the ceiling. In my childhood bedroom, I’d put up thousands of them. Every night, I’d find patterns in the way I’d arranged them. Count out in concentric circles until my eyes closed. Even years later, with a blank ceiling, I could still picture where they had all been. When I was young, I’d spent hours making up constellations with Halley during sleepovers. We’d use myths we knew or sometimes our own stories that we’d spool out like threads of our imagination. In Halley’s stories, girls were always lost, turned into lights, into flickers in the dark. I can still trace them all with my fingers.
We were sixteen when Halley disappeared. She was walking home from a football game. We were playing the Wildcats, our town’s rival. Everyone was at the game. If I hadn’t gone with my parents, if my little brother hadn’t been playing, if we hadn’t been waiting to take him out for ice cream after the game, if I’d asked her to join us and she’d said yes, if, if, if, I’d have been walking home with Halley. Her parents don’t call to check if she’s with me. No one reports her missing until well into the next day when I go over to her house to ask if she wants to come over for dinner. Her parents say she sometimes doesn’t come home at night. That it’s normal. They shrug at my insistence that she should be home. But my parents call the police when I tell them. They say it’s better to be safe.
No one finds Halley Blackwell. It’s like she stepped away from the stadium bleachers and right into another universe. There is no evidence. Just an Amber Alert with a picture of her that I took, because her parents don’t have any of her, and her school photo makes her look older than she is. A police officer tells me that a photo where she looks girlish would be best. People want to save girls, he says. I don’t say, Don’t people want to save everyone? I wish I had.
And years pass. And years pass. In college, I imagine that she went to another school and that’s why I never see her. I call her phone number sometimes, but no one ever picks up. And years pass. And years pass.
When I no longer think about Halley every day, when I no longer long to reach her, I still sometimes have nightmares that she is trapped underground. That some devil pulled her under the dirt. She calls out for me to help her, but in the dreams I’m always locked into my seat on the bleachers, I can’t hear her over everyone cheering. If I can find her in the dream, it will undo the past. If I wake up, she‘ll be fine. If I call her, she’ll pick up. If, if, if.
It’s a week before I see Faye again. I hadn’t thought about the interaction much. Usually, just before sleep, I’d see her face and try to find what I thought had been Halley’s features. But memory rearranges us, and I couldn’t be certain I was sure.
I’m grabbing a coffee before work and she’s in the café I always go to. I don’t notice her, but as I’m about to leave, she says, “You’re the woman who I thought I was someone else.”
I turn to her and it’s still Halley’s face. Her blue hair is pulled back into a bun, dressed professionally in tailored pants and a long-sleeved silk blouse draped so lightly on her it looks like the wind would turn it to shreds. I blush, feeling foolish. “Yeah, sorry about that. You really look like a friend I used to have.”
“Scientists say that everyone is likely to have at least one doppelganger,” she says.
I laugh, a little baffled. “Do scientists say that?”
She nods. “Something to do with a limited number of genes to compose humans. There are only so many facial characteristics to go around.”
“Huh. Well, you’re certainly my friend’s doppelganger then.” I move to leave.
“Would you like to get something to eat sometime?” she asks. “I’d love to know more about my lookalike.”
I’m about to say no, to leave, not wanting to carry my mistake forward. But she smiles fully and I can see that her lower canine is cracked off. When we were twelve and playing baseball, a ball hit Halley square in the face. She’d smiled over at me, said, “I’m okay!” but blood had pooled down her face as soon as she spoke. She’d broken her lower left canine clean in half. So, to Faye, I say, “That would be great!”
I write my number down for her and she says she’ll message me to set something up. When I get to my office, my hands are shaking. We’d met in first grade, the two girls in the back row of the classroom. She had a stuffed monkey with her. Benjamin was his name. I like monkeys too, I said, and she smiled. Back then, she was the shy one and I spoke too much. In our teens, we switched. I was all gangly limbs and awkwardness, and she was petite and precise and perfect.
At the office, my first client of the day is new. She runs a business consultation company. I wonder what a business consultation business does exactly, but I don’t ask because I’m supposed to know those things, to understand how businesses operate. I tell her how our services work. Why her business should use one of our training sessions.
The woman frowns more and more as I speak. Finally she asks, “How do you guarantee that what you do works?”
“The answer is we don’t, ma’am. We can’t. I could point out studies we’ve done and how we’ve seen employee charitable donations go up after a training session. I could show you surveys we’ve done several months after the training where employees have listed off positive things they’ve done since. I remember one man who started volunteering at a children’s foundation, and he talked about how much of a change he was bringing to those kids’ lives. I can’t tell you that our services made people more empathetic. No one can tell you that. Results for us are seeing positive changes, but . . . maybe that’s not what you would consider working.” I shrug. I’ve given this speech a thousand times, seen a thousand business owners have a moment’s mental struggle over how they could react. No one wants to say charity isn’t change.
She purses her lips, looks down at the floor, and then back up at me. “Positive results are certainly a huge thing. We would love to have your company come in and do a training if that is the impact.”
I smile my biggest smile. The one I used to practice in front of the mirror. Genuine without being too much, too happy. “You really are working to bring light to this world, ma’am. We’re so excited to partner with your company.”
She smiles at that. We go over the paperwork quickly. Once they’d heard the speech, most people didn’t have many questions. As she’s leaving, she turns back to me and says, “What got you into this line of work?”
The more like us an AI looked or sounded, the more we cared about it, the more we were willing to give it our information, let it into our lives.
I don’t know how to answer. My bosses had seen me give a presentation during college on how advancing robotics could be done not by advancing the technology but by advancing the amount of empathy people had for the robots themselves. The more like us an AI looked or sounded, the more we cared about it, the more we were willing to give it our information, let it into our lives. People would come up to me after and ask if I was looking for work after school. We train empathy, they’d said, and I’d laughed. I figured a friend was pranking me. But I’d looked up the company that night, and when I had graduated and was looking for work, I’d messaged them. I figured I’d be there for a year while I found something I actually cared about. And the years passed, until I couldn’t imagine sending out resumés, writing cover letters.
“I suppose I wanted to help,” I say to the woman. She nods, as if that is enough.
I call my brother at my lunch break. He’s at work but he picks up. “Slow day?”
“I literally watched paint dry earlier. They’re redoing one of the office wings,” he replies. “What about you? You sound like you, but not.”
I wonder what’s in a voice that he could tell. “I think I ran into Halley.”
There’s a pause. Silence. Maybe he doesn’t remember her, doesn’t know who I’m talking about. “Missing Halley?”
“Yeah. Halley who went missing.”
“You think you saw her?”
“This woman looks exactly like her, sounds like her, down to her broken tooth.”
“Okay, did you ask her?” I don’t need to see my brother to know that he has begun running a finger down the side of his desk, a thing he always did when he was thinking through something. After Halley went missing, he’d come to sit in my bedroom, crosslegged on the floor, and it always made me see him again like when he was a little, little kid. He’d never say much, just sit by me, as I stared out the window, trying to will Halley back home.
“She said her name was Faye.”
“Okay, so maybe she didn’t want to be remembered? I always kind of wondered if she’d run away.”
He’d mentioned that once before, had pointed out how we always saw bruises on her, how her parents looked through her when we saw them together anywhere. And I’d wanted it to be true. That she’d simply left, become someone else in a happier place. But I’d thought she’d have said something to me, she’d have reached out, she’d have let me know everything was going to be all right.
“I . . . had that thought. But she really looked like she didn’t know me. And she asked to get dinner, said she wanted to know more about her lookalike.”
A long pause. “I don’t like that. You shouldn’t meet up with her.”
I took in a breath about to explain why I needed to, why it was important, but he cut me off. “But I know you will. Just be on guard, Abs. Sometimes the people we remember should just be remembered.”
Later, when my phone goes off, I think about not looking. As if not giving into temptation is an option. As if I haven’t been scrolling through photos of Halley, looking for other clues I’ll be able to spot in Faye. “Late dinner? — Faye.”
I type back sure. A few moments later my phone lights up again. “I’m new to town. Suggest a place?”
I give the name of a restaurant that’s a ten-minute drive. Far enough to be away from my home, but not so far as to be unfamiliar. I want to be on my own turf. She wants to meet in a couple of hours.
It’s only as I’m changing, slipping out of business clothes into jeans and a t-shirt, that I realize the restaurant I picked is a Greek one. Halley’s favorite food had always been gyros. We’d get them at a local diner and she’d eat them as if she was starving, picking at the meat with her fingertips, grinning. I was never a voracious eater, picking at salads, sipping water, but her joy for food was infectious. She’d say, you have to enjoy things, you have to let them fill you up. When she went missing, I think about all the things she enjoys. All the things she won’t have. And then I push that away. She’s not dead. She has to be alive. She still can enjoy things. If she ran away, if she hopped on a bus out of town, if she’s living somewhere with a house and kids and a life that made her happy. If she never let me know, if she doesn’t trust me to tell me, if I’d never know, at least she was okay. If, if, if.
She’s already waiting for me when I arrive, sitting in a back booth, and staring out the window. It’s dark out, but the sidewalks are well lit and I wonder what she’s looking for. I sit down across from her and she jumps a little, pushed out of whatever thought she’d been in the middle of.
“Hey,” she says. “I was just thinking about how people walking past windows must never think about what they look like to the people inside. Like not knowing what stories we might be daydreaming them into.”
Halley had always known when I was wondering what she was thinking. She’d tell me before I even had the chance to ask.
“I think about people inside like that when I’m walking past. How I’m catching glimpses of them without knowing what they’re thinking, what they’re talking about.” We both turn to look at a couple walking past. They are holding hands but not talking to one another.
“What do you like here?” Faye asks. She picks up the menu and begins glancing at it.
“Oh, I’ve tried a lot of stuff. It’s all good.”
She laughs. “Sounds like you’re talking about life.”
The waiter approaches before I can respond. I see her waiting to see what I’d order.
“A Greek salad and water please.”
The waiter turns to her. “You, miss?”
She glances at the menu one more time. “I’ll do the same. But a Coke instead of water. Thanks.”
I want to say that she should try the gyro, but the moment is gone. She studies me and so I study her back. She’s wearing different clothes—but equally expensive-looking—a long-sleeved and cowl-necked dress also made of silk. A simple gold watch. She looks as if she’s come from a business dinner.
“What was your friend’s name again? The one I look like?”
“Halley. Halley Blackwell.” I say, but there’s no hint of change in her expression when she hears it. It’s someone else’s memory.
“It’s a nice name. Wish it were mine.” She chuckles. “You knew each other when you were teens?”
“Yeah.”
“But not since?”
“No.”
She smiles, just a little, just at the corners of her mouth. More wistful than happy. “It’s a shame that we lose the people we were friends with when we were young.” I nod.
“She must have been a good friend,” she continues. “You looked so startled, but happy, ecstatic really, when you touched my shoulder. I wanted to be your friend then. Wished I was her. So I could continue that happiness.”
“She was a very good friend,” I say. “The best I ever had.”
Our salads and drinks arrive, cutting the conversation. I want to thank the waiter profusely. The conversation felt like a trap, like standing at the edge of a chasm as someone tries to get you to walk closer to falling.
The conversation felt like a trap, like standing at the edge of a chasm as someone tries to get you to walk closer to falling.
We both begin to eat. I pick at my salad, lifting up a single leaf to nibble at. Across the table, she does the same. It’s like she is mirroring what I’m doing. I set my fork down and she does too.
“I noticed you broke your tooth. How did that happen?” I want to catch her off-guard, no time to make something up.
“Car accident,” she replies. “Those air bags are menaces. Did you know they can hit hard enough to take an eye out?”
“I didn’t know that. Wow.”
She nods and her face looks older for a moment. Layers of makeup. Maybe she’s much older than me. Older than Halley. Maybe this is all a mistake.
“What do you do?” I ask. Ready to just make conversation and be done with this.
She looks up from her food. “I’m a trauma specialist.”
“Like a surgeon?”
She laughs, and with it she changes completely. It’s a full-bodied laugh that shakes her shoulders. And I am seeing Halley laughing, almost falling off my bed because she’d remembered something stupid a boy had done in class. In the memory, I reach out to catch her. Do I catch her?
“Not a surgeon, no. Have you heard of Trauma Redemption Services?” she asks, the laugh leaving her body.
And I have. Of course. It’s all the rage for the wealthy. I’d talked to people who’d had it done. They often came to empathy trainings, ran businesses, would ask me if I thought the procedure would make them less empathetic or more.
The theory behind Trauma Redemption was that if you had a traumatic memory erased, you’d lose something fundamental. So they gave it to someone else. It was taken from their mind and implanted into someone who would sit in front of them, letting the memory run through them, as the person watched. The person who had the memory now had to keep it. In case the giver ever wanted to recall it, wanted to talk through what had happened again, wanted to relive it on someone else’s face.
“I have. What do you do with them?” I want her to be someone in the office, someone who typed up reports or moved finances around.
She looks out the window again, and her reflection on the glass looks younger. “The first one I ever did was someone who had crashed his car. Crashed the car right into someone else. He said to me, ‘I never saw her.’ But in the memory, he did. I wondered if he wanted me to know. If he wanted to forget, but wanted to know that someone else knew?”
I don’t say anything. And when she turns back to me, she still has Halley’s face. It’s older and sadder and lost in a moment of thought. But it’s Halley. She smiles at me. “I have a procedure tomorrow. It’s why I’m here actually. For some clients, we’ll travel. I’d like you to see the procedure.”
“Me?”
“Yes. I looked you up after we met in that café. Saw what you do for a living. It sounds like it might be an interesting thing for you to see, help your work.”
I don’t say, But I never gave you my last name. I don’t say, How did you find me? I just stare at her and remember when we were twelve and it was my birthday party. Halley was eating cake and she started crying. I ushered her into my room and asked what was the matter. She was sad because she had been eating my birthday cake and had looked up and realized that I was getting older and she said What if we keep getting older and we move away and we eventually start talking less and less and what if we aren’t friends in the future.
And I said, But we’re friends forever, Halley.
And she’d said, Promise?
“Okay, sure,” I say.
Faye smiles. And then she changes the subject, begins talking about a movie she saw recently. We make small talk for another thirty minutes or so. Then she writes down an address and time and slips me the piece of paper. Her handwriting is perfectly straight and neat, like someone trying to write in a way that wouldn’t be recognized.
“Oh, it’s not creepy by the way. I saw the building you walked into after you left with your coffee. The company name. Only one Abby works there. The miracles of modern search capabilities.” She picks up her purse carefully. “You can find anyone.” She leaves before I respond.
I count stars. Think about the constellation Halley had named after Persephone. She’d said, that one looks like it wants to run but she can’t. I said, isn’t that a myth about balance? Like we can’t always have spring and we can’t always have winter. Halley shook her head, it’s a story about trying to forgive. She didn’t explain. But every sleepover after, she’d trace the constellation with her fingers. On nights she isn’t there, I do it for her.
Halley in my bedroom, stretching over the bed, about to ask me a question.
“Please don’t forget tomorrow.” A text arrives and I don’t answer. But I think she must know I’ll be there.
My brother sends me a message, asking how it went. I want to tell him everything, but I don’t want him to worry. I don’t think it’s her, I type out. But I never hit Send.
Once, when we were in our twenties, we watched a movie in which a young girl is kidnapped. It’s violent, She screams and fights, but she’s still snatched up and forced into a van. I didn’t realize I was crying until my brother had placed a hand on one of my shoulders. So gentle I almost didn’t feel it. I’d turned to him and he’d had tears in his eyes too. I never asked him if he was thinking about Halley or if it was only because he was worried about me. She used to call him Bro, every time she came over. She was at our house so often, it felt true.
It might be her, I type out. I hit Send.
I call out from work. The first time I’ve used a sick day in years. In the morning, I pace the kitchen, sipping the same cup of tea for hours.
There are no messages from her. I wonder if she wants to see if I’ll really come, if she worries that pressure will make me stay away. I watch a video about monster movies, how creature effects evolved over time. It’s background noise, but I find myself listening when a makeup artist talks about how hybrids scare us. “If something is close to something we know already, but not quite it, it makes us nervous. It’s like the uncanny valley, you can be far away from being a human in looks and we’ll be fine with it—a happy little robot, all beeps and boops, and square frame. But make it almost human, have fingernails, and teeth, and smile at us when we smile, but only then, never on its own, and suddenly we’re terrified.”
In university I designed a program that seemed like a simple game from the outside. You created an avatar based on a photograph of yourself, then you entered a little game sphere. You answered trivia questions, and a little robot on the screen would smile or frown depending on whether you got the answer right or wrong. But as you got deeper into the game, the robot began to look more and more like the game player. At first the changes were simple—the cartoony robot would get the player’s eye color. But the game became more elaborate the more you played, and the robot’s face shifted to the shape of the player’s face. At the end, the player was playing a cartoon version of himself. My professor gave me an A, but he said he didn’t understand the concept. I hadn’t really known myself. Only that when I played the game, I never used my own photo. I used photos of people I loved. In the end, my mom or dad or my brother would be smiling at me when I got answers right. I never used photos of Halley.
The building could be anything. Just a rented-out office in the middle of the city. The café next to it is bustling, another office suite is filled with an accountant’s office. I walk past to the elevator and go up to the seventh floor. A receptionist is dressed in a simple black dress. She smiles at me and asks my name. “Oh, you’re Faye’s guest, right?” I nod.
“Awesome! We don’t usually have viewers, but she said your company is thinking of working with us? That would be so cool. Trauma and empathy go hand in hand.”
“Not really,” I say. But the receptionist is already not looking at me, instead playing a game on her phone. Tiny birds fluttered across her screen, diving to get coins that were falling alongside them.
I take a seat and wait. If I had gone to work today, I’d be just about on my lunch break. If I’d never said yes, I’d send my brother a photo of a coffee that I got from the place where the barista always swirled the foam into flowers, into the night sky, into anything he could think of. If I’d never gone to the diner, I’d be somewhere else. If I’d never been at that bar and I’d never seen her, I’d point out Persephone every night until one night when I forgot. If, if, if. Halley would finish walking home and she’d be home and we’d talk the next day about the football game and she’d lean over and tousle my brother’s hair and say good job, Bro. And he’d let her. Only her.
“You can go back now,” the receptionist says. And I follow her to a room that looks like an office, except it’s been divided in two by a glass partition. A woman sits across from Faye. They both are on simple office chairs, and there’s nothing between them. They are close enough their knees almost touch. A man in a lab coat stands to Faye’s right. He holds something that looks like a cross between a needle and laser pointer.
The receptionist sits next to me. “Let me know if you need anything. These sessions can be hard to watch the first time.”
“Only the first time?”
She shrugs, “You can get used to anything.”
“What’s the trauma?” I’m not sure I want to know, but I have to.
“The woman was kidnapped when she was a child. She has nightmares about it still. I don’t know why she waited so long to have it removed.”
The man in the lab coat moved next to Faye, pushed her hair away from one side of her head and I see a small metal plate right behind her ear. He uses one side of the device to pop the plate open, but I can’t see if it’s skull behind it or what. And then he places the device against her head and presses a button.
I watch her face. At first it’s pain and then it’s fear, and she cries and she cries. The woman watches her blankly. But the more Faye cries and pleads, the woman shifts in her seat, until she finally reaches out and takes hold of Faye’s hands. She holds them gently as the rest of the memory floods through her. And then it’s over. Faye’s head droops, she stays sitting, and the man in the lab coat talks to the woman for a few minutes. They shake hands and another woman enters the room and escorts the client out. I can’t believe there’s not more. That she doesn’t stay to ask Faye questions. If the memory is gone, does the woman feel free?
“It’s over?” I ask the receptionist.
She nods, smiling. “So simple, right?”
I ask where the restroom is and once inside I brace myself against the sink. My hands shaking so hard I can barely grip. I look up and Faye is behind me. Her face watching mine in the reflection. And her face is Halley’s face. Older. I try to look for laugh lines but I can’t find them.
“How can you do that?”
She steps closer to me, until she’s standing at the adjacent sink. She turns on the water. She rolls up her sleeves a little, and I see scars on her forearms, so many scars. “They’re not my memories. I’m just holding them.” She splashes her face with cold water. Grabs a paper towel and begins drying herself.
“Halley?” I almost whisper it.
She shakes her head. “I’m not her.”
“I lost her.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Maybe our services could help you, too?”
She reaches out and touches my hand. Just for a second. As she takes her hand away, I see a tiny tattoo etched in the hollow of her wrist. A pomegranate. She sees me looking. “After Persephone. Do you know that myth.”
I nod. “It’s about forgiveness.”
She smiles at me oddly, as if I’ve said something obtuse. “That’s a strange interpretation,” she says. And then she leaves. If she turned back, if she reached out again, if she whispered that promise, if she walked back to her office and back through her life until she was at the football game and she waited for me, she’d come with us, we’d eat ice cream, let it melt in our mouths, so sweet and cold. If, if, if she was Halley. If.
She doesn’t come back into the bathroom. It’s just me and the sink and the mirror. If I study my reflection in the mirror long enough, maybe I won’t know who I’ll recognize looking back at me.
Let’s face it: half of our favorite stories wouldn’t exist if the characters just went to therapy. The Trojan War would’ve lasted nine years, and Bruce Wayne would own a normal basement with a ping pong table.
Part of the reason so many stories resist therapy is that 1) mental illness has been unrecognized and stigmatized for a long time, therapy viewed as for the weak, but also 2) how do you build conflict if therapy is supposedly a cure-all?
Anybody who has been to therapy can tell you: therapy is not easy. Nor is it perfect. Take for instance the segment from Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings in which she describes being ghosted by her therapist in a time of need. Or Emma Grove’s miscommunications with her therapist in her graphic memoir The Third Person. Therapy is far from a cure-all—in fact, it might just lead you deeper down the rabbit hole.
From utilizing therapy as framework, conflict or simply including it as a facet of the character’s life, the following books showcase characters who receive some kind of mental health care.
Chemistry follows a PhD student on the brink—her chemistry research is proving increasingly unsolvable, and she has no idea how to respond to her boyfriend Eric’s marriage proposal. When years of repressed trauma come to a head, the narrator spirals into an unhinged breakdown, quitting her research and spending her days hiding and drinking. In the bleak aftermath, she slowly turns toward healing with the help of her best friend, her dog, and a therapist.
When a queer, Palestinian American woman comes out to her mother, her mother responds: “You exist too much.” Thus kickstarts years of emotional repression, culminating in an explosion of reckless flings and unattainable romantic obsessions. Her destructive behavior leads her to The Ledge, a treatment center that diagnoses her as a “love addict.” There she begins contemplating the origins of her trauma and how she can move forward.
The year is 2000. The narrator is a young, white, pretty trust fund baby living alone in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She should be happy, but low and behold, she is not. There is an emptiness inside her, possibly due to her dead parents, possibly due to her various problematic relationships, but rather than get to the root of the issue, she works with Dr. Tuttle—one of literature’s worst psychiatrists—to medicate herself into a year of unending sleep.
Dorothy is a thirty-something English adjunct professor in New York City who has lost all hope of gaining tenure. She has also just had a miscarriage—a secret she will not tell her two therapists nor any women in her life. As a researcher on the cultural representations of apocalypse, Dorothy can recognize an ending when she sees one. And yet, as her bleeding dissipates and the weeks pass, Dorothy must contend with the fact that life is not a story and must, for better or for worse, go on.
Queenie Jenkins’ no good, very bad year begins with a disastrous break-up with her white boyfriend Tom, followed soon by the realization that she was pregnant and just had a miscarriage. Things get worse when Queenie attempts to distract herself by sleeping with other men, one of whom turns out to be her close friend Cassandra’s boyfriend. As her personal life falls apart, her professional life grows stagnant, her editor refusing to take her pitches seriously and sending her off to write shallow fashion articles. Everything gets worse before it gets better, but eventually Queenie opts to visit a therapist, who slowly works with her to find value within herself.
Eleanor Oliphant is a bit of a social misfit, but she’s fine with that. Really. She enjoys her life of solitude, routine and her weekly “chats” with Mummy. She even splurges on pizza and vodka over the weekends. Nothing is missing—until she sees Johnnie Lomond in concert and realizes he is the love of her life. What follows is one woman’s unhinged attempt to fill every empty vacuum of her life with her celebrity crush. When Eleanlor’s attempts predictably prove unsustainable, she subsequently crashes and burns.
Jiyoung is a 33-year-old Korean woman who recently left her job to take care of her young daughter. Nothing is outwardly wrong with her life—though she rarely gets out anymore, she loves spending time at home with her daughter, and she has a loving husband whose job can support the three of them. But then Jiyoung wakes up one day acting like her mother, then later, inhabiting the character of a university friend who died in childbirth. Her husband sends her to a psychiatrist, who begins unraveling the mundane misogynies that have led Jiyoung to her current state.
It’s 1953 and intelligent, beautiful Esther Greenwood is slowly but surely cracking. A college student who dreams of becoming a poet, Esther is selected for a prestigious summer internship as a guest editor for Ladies Day magazine, but her time in New York only leaves her at odds with her own femininity. Trapped in a web of impossible expectations, Esther falls into a deep depression and attempts multiple suicides, culminating in her hospitalization under the care of Dr. Nolan.
Whether or not you’ve watched season 2 of The White Lotus, Mike White’s anthology series, you’ve witnessed Jennifer Coolidge’s frenzied intonations onboard a yacht: “These gays, they’re trying to murder me!”
Coolidge plays Tanya, a wealthy woman who finds herself at the center of a conspiracy to murder her for her money. The executors of this plot are a group of profligate European gay men, who she’s deduced plan to off her before they reach shore. She pleads with the captain, who speaks little-to-no English:
“Do you know these gays? … these gays, they take me off to Palermo, and then they set me up with this guy who’s in the mafia, and he’s coming here, I, I think to try to throw me off the boat. They’re going to do Greg’s dirty work for him because he’s gonna pay them with my money so they can decorate their houses or some shit.”
The captain only understands the word “gay”. He smiles, and replies “tutti gay!” They’re all gay. Crestfallen, Tanya turns away and mutters “oh my god” with absolute resignation. She knows she’s about to be sacrificed at the altar of luxury decor. The gays, who drew Tanya into their circle with warmth and flattery, now embody a smiling, unsparing menace.
The evil gays of The White Lotus are fictitious and cartoonishly sinister, but they also evoke queer villains of the past. In the 2022 popular history book Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller probe the lives of notorious queers to establish a counter-narrative of gay history. Rather than an unflaggingly virtuous and eventually victorious struggle for “rights,” Miller and Lemmey argue that queer history is tainted by the classist, racist, and colonialist ideals of the larger societies that birthed contemporary conceptions of queer identity.
Miller and Lemmey subscribe to the idea, influenced by Michel Foucault and numerous queer theorists and historians, that sexuality is shaped by the time and place someone lives in, rather than being an innate, unchangeable identity. They identify the birthplace of the tie between sexuality and identity as Europe in the mid-to-late 19th century. Industrialization was well underway, which led to cities populated by throngs of wage laborers who were newly able to pursue their sexual interests. Simultaneously, colonial powers propagated the idea that colonized subjects were “backwards” for reasons including sodomy, which helped form the idea that homosexuality was an immoral characteristic rather than simply a behavior, and ultimately led to increased criminalization.
As these two opposing social and political forces intertwined to create a burgeoning awareness of same-sex sexuality, many tried to definitively classify same-sex attraction and behavior, including doctors and sociologists working at a clinical remove and queer people who sought to understand themselves better. The theory of homosexuality as a fixed trait gained traction, and thus homosexuality was “medicalized”: rather than an aberrant behavior, homosexuality was innate and unchangeable, and should be understood as a mental condition.
Miller and Lemmey argue against the medicalization of homosexuality: The idea that gay people are burdened with a condition that can’t be helped ignores that many gay people have chosen to live sexually and socially fulfilling lives. Yet the theory has stuck over time, and Lemmey and Miller argue that it led to the valorizing of gay historical heroes, a strategy that gained traction in the gay rights movement: By classifying people as diverse as Alexander the Great, Sappho, Alan Turing, and Langston Hughes as gay, activists could stake a claim on the eternal existence of queer identity, and argue that queer people have enriched human history.
Not every historical figure we can call ‘gay’ left a positive legacy behind.
This point of view smooths over the wrinkles in gay history: sexuality has not been understood as a stable identity category, and not every historical figure we can call “gay” left a positive legacy behind. Miller and Lemmey argue that examining the “bad gays” of history is just as important to understanding queer history, not to mention contemporary queer life and queer futures, as is uplifting the “good gays” that came before us.
A person who’s paid attention to recent representations of queer life in art and entertainment may have noticed an uptick in morally complex or ill-intentioned queer characters. Two key examples are The White Lotus and Terence Davies’s historical drama Benediction, both 2022 releases which feature groups of self-absorbed gay men who would be apt subjects of Bad Gays. The gay men seen in these narratives are exorbitantly privileged, socially exclusionary, inwardly miserable, and outwardly malicious; they live parasitic lives, extracting value from their hosts before moving onto new victims.
Benediction is a biopic of British poet Siegfried Sassoon, who chronicled the brutality of World War I. Rather than simply telling the story of Sassoon’s life, Davies (who also wrote the film) uses Sassoon as a vessel through which to explore the accumulated injuries that can macerate a man’s soul. Throughout his life, memories of the war linger heavily over Sassoon’s mind (played as a young man by Jack Lowden, and as an old man by Peter Capaldi), but he’s also damaged by a circle of gay men he falls in with. All are based on actual people: the most prominent characters are star of stage and screen Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine), socialite Stephan Tennant (Calam Lynch), and theatre actor-director Glen Byam Shaw (Tom Blyth).
This was also a circle that likely would have known several of Bad Gays’ subjects.
For instance, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas was Tennant’s uncle, and Siegfried and Ivor discuss him familiarly—”Bosie was always vindictive,” notes Ivor. Vindictive he was. Bosie engaged in an increasingly reckless love affair with Oscar Wilde that led to Bosie’s father accusing Wilde of sodomy. Egged on by Bosie, who wanted to hurt his father, Wilde sued. He lost the suit, and was subsequently tried for, and convicted of, gross indecency, with a sentence of hard labor that decimated his mental and physical health. Wilde died three years after his imprisonment, and Bosie—who, though typically attributed to Wilde, coined the phrase “the love that dare not speak its name”—went on to publish a virulently anti-Semitic magazine and serve time in jail for libeling Winston Churchill.
The secretive sexual and romantic bonds these men share, in Benediction, create the conditions for bitterness and betrayal.
Lemmey and Miller use the torrid affair and divergent paths of Wilde and Douglas as their opening anecdote: both because they serve as ideal “good gay”/”bad gay” archetypes, and because Wilde’s trial was perhaps the key event that solidified homosexual identity as a concept in the public imagination. That Bosie was a casually familiar figure to the characters in Benediction speaks to how crucial their milieu is to gay history: These men grew up in the shadows of the first steps toward codifying gayness as an identity, and Davies shows this era stage of gay life as turbulent and suffocating. The secretive sexual and romantic bonds these men share, in Benediction, create the conditions for bitterness and betrayal. The four central characters pair off and separate frequently and acrimoniously, and their lives are never fully transparent to one another. Ivor Novello is the most callow and manipulative of all, ditching Glen for Siegfried on first sight, and only revealing to Siegfried that he has a secret “life partner” after a drawn-out, hostile affair. Throughout Benediction, Davies subverts the commonly held idea that honestly expressing one’s queer desires is inherently liberatory: Art and moments of emotional intimacy occasionally allow Siegfried to transcend the traumas of his life, but the time he spends among other gay men depletes him nearly as much as trench warfare.
Season 2 of The White Lotus is set 100 years later and has a much looser relationship with reality, but many of its gay characters are cut from the same cloth. The gays that frequent the White Lotus luxury hotel—in Taormina, where Oscar Wilde lived after his imprisonment and a former gay tourist destination—are a cosmopolitan, indulgent bunch commanded by posh Quentin (Tom Hollander). Writer-director Mike White initially frames them as benevolent: they offer warm compliments and camaraderie toward attention-starved guest Tanya, who’s been left bereft after her husband leaves their vacation early. Because we see them through Tanya’s eyes, we’re led to share her opinion of them: “if you’re looking for a friend, gay guys are really the best.”
Maybe not.
Quentin invites Tanya to his extravagant villa, and it becomes apparent during her stay that his intentions may not be friendly. Only when Tanya’s stuck on a yacht with Quentin and crew does she put the pieces together: her husband Greg has enlisted Quentin to kill her. The terms of their prenup mean that Greg will inherit all of Tanya’s money; he’ll split it with Quentin, who needs it to maintain possession of the villa without opening it to the public.
Quentin’s backstory is mysterious, but key hints are revealed in a late-night conversation he has with Tanya, where he tells the story of his first and only love. As a Kerouac-pilled young man, he followed a “cowboy” to Wyoming for love and to spite his father (shades of Bosie). The cowboy was straight, which only nurtured Quentin’s obsession, and Quentin would still “do anything for” him after 30 years. (The cowboy, of course, is Greg.) The point of the story is for Quentin to opine that he wouldn’t die for love, but that he would die for beauty—which he pointedly asks Tanya if she would do, in effect sizing up her subconscious willingness to die for Quentin’s villa.
Buried in his story is a past filled with shame and isolation because of his sexuality; his father didn’t approve, and he concentrated all of his desire on an unavailable man. Quentin, then, is a suppressed character, and this suppression is sublimated by his devotion to aesthetics. In an earlier episode, he commented that his life has been “one long distraction,” and the implication is that the excesses and luxuries of his life distract him from his lack of emotional fulfillment. White takes this psychological makeup to its logical extension: Quentin shows himself to be completely willing to exploit and sacrifice human life for private property.
Quentin is an outgrowth of unsatisfied homosexuality, shallow devotion to beauty, and capitalistic greed—all working in concert. This is a character profile that fits many a Bad Gay profiled by Lemmey and Miller like a glove, but the one that may be the closest analogue is Philip Johnson, the celebrity architect. Johnson, who grew up in a wealthy family, began his architectural career in earnest when he curated a popular exhibition on modernist architecture for the Museum of Modern Art. As curator, he prioritized aesthetics and de-emphasized the prominent role of social housing in this architectural movement. His career became one of prestige and extravagance, working for clients as rich and odious as Donald Trump and perpetually enacting the most significant philosophies of his life: class superiority and fascism (Johnson was an avowed Nazi sympathizer from the 1930s until the early 1940s, and never fully disentangled himself from his fascist beliefs). By enacting an entirely aesthetic relationship to his profession, Johnson helped lurch architecture to the right through an abdication of social responsibility and the prioritization of wealth.
In the midst of his architectural career, Johnson was also enmeshed in an upper-crust gay social scene. In his home—the Glass House, his most famous building—Johnson regularly hosted the gay cultural elite of the era, including Andy Warhol, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and his own partner David Whitney. Miller and Lemmey describe the wealthy gay social lives of these men as being both restricted and uninhibited, bound by their sexuality but liberated by their money and cultural cachet. They “lived in closets of power in which their homosexuality could be an open secret, trapped in their privilege like bugs in amber.”
Miller and Lemmey describe the wealthy gay social lives of these men as being both restricted and uninhibited.
Quentin, who is cash-poor but lives a life with an exclusive in-group characterized by excess and outward signifiers of wealth, is portrayed as holding values similar to Johnson. When he notes that he’s “willing to die for beauty,” he means a specific sort of beauty: gilded, rarefied, and European. His full-throttle devotion to aesthetics and his hedonistic social life create a fetish for ownership: the villa must be in his sole possession, anyone who visits must be invited, and the masses should not be granted access. While White does not imbue Quentin with a particular political identity, his embrace of merciless exploitation to serve his luxury lifestyle can be read as a microcosm of the exploitative capitalism that Lemmey and Miller see in Johnson.
What the self-involved and malicious gays of The White Lotus and Benediction point to is a key part of Lemmey and Miller’s argument: that gay activism throughout history has often prioritized the most privileged of queers. What Lemmey and Miller view as an insufficient and exclusionary conception of queerness has primarily stemmed from cisgender, white, middle class-to-wealthy gay men in affluent societies who danced on the knife edge of social and cultural acceptance. While queer sexuality imperiled many—particularly those who lived under criminalization, which disproportionately affected working-class people and colonized subjects—many also developed the ability to keep their stigmatized sexualities in a delicate balance with the otherwise-privileged lives they could lead. The politics that developed from this relationship with homosexuality have historically leaned toward exclusionary assimilation, and lives of gay men ensconced in privilege—such as are depicted in Benediction and The White Lotus—ultimately come at the expense of collective liberation. The cruelty, competitiveness, and exploitation evinced by the characters in each results from the narrowness of their positions: even 100 years apart, assimilation requires rigid self-interest to overtake care for others.
The counter-narrative presented in Bad Gays is as vital to understanding queer history as is elevating queer heroism. Nuanced analysis of how bad actors and exclusionary politics shaped modern concepts of gay identity helps us understand historical and contemporary queerness from all angles. Narrative art like Benediction and The White Lotus does the same, presenting thoughtful depictions of villainous or cruel gay people that can complicate a viewer’s understanding, creating more complete and complex portraits of gay life over the course of history.
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