Endless Sky
U turn, spontaneity, as I drove back down to Laguna to meet up with someone housesitting someone. Up a winding hill on a beachy hillside, I entered a gated community of condos, and walked into an art-colony home overlooking the beach during sunset. “Looks like Laguna Beach Abstract Art,” I told him, and he said, “yeah,” as we watched the sunset. “What’s your family like?” he asked. “I’m a triplet,” I said. He talked about his divorced parents and his close relationship with his sister. “She’s my best friend,” he said. “Look at how, in the sky, there are almost folds of clouds,” I said, looking at the ripples of sky backgrounding a paraglider. “I’d get so claustrophobic if I did that,” he said, waving to the paraglider, “I get so claustrophobic up high.” The sun set. The sky’s radiant teal dissolved into a dusky gray. Sliver of moon, cutting into the sky, transformed from white to amber. We sat on the couch, and he leaned over to kiss me, with stiff lips and a closed mouth, on repeat.
So we did some of our business, and I told him to stop. I was sandy from the beach and every touch grated against my skin. “I need to brush this sand off,” and I went to the bathroom to brush it off, but there was infinite sand, and so I said, “I should probably go home,” and he said, “you can use my shower,” and I said, “I don’t really want to shower here,” and he said, “okay then we can hang out for a bit,” and he invited me downstairs to the bedroom, “where there was a shower,” and I said, “you mean your dungeon?” and he did not think that was very funny. So I sat on his bed, downstairs, where he invited the dog too, but told him that I needed to eat. He offered to order something on postmates, and I felt strange about that, so I said, “no I should probably go soon,” and he asked “why?” and I said, “I want to practice dobro–it’s a thing that helps ground me after a long and stressful week,” and he looked so confused, and I said, “it’s a resonator guitar,” and he said, “is that on Beyonce’s new album?” and I said, “you should listen to Lake Mary,” so he pulled up Spotify and saw that Slow Grass was 20 minutes long: “holy fuck,” he said, but played it anyways. I just lay there in his bed, while my breath slowed down and I wondered what he thought. I felt like I was listening to this song for the first time again, imagining it through the lens of another person. And he said, “I have to pee,” and got up to pee, and I sat there on the bed, all-of-a-sudden snapped out of this whole thing, realizing that my life was slipping like sand between my fingers, while he was loudly pissing in the other room, and I waited for him to come back before saying, “I need to go home,” and he was like, “you’re not staying the night?” and I said, “uh no I need to go home,” and he grabbed me and started trying to suck me off and I said, “no I have to go,” and he said, “why?” and I was like “I’m going!” and he tried to grab me, and I pulled him up from the bed, and upstairs, and he was like “am I coming to your house? To meet your family?” and I said, “nope I’ve just gotta go,” and he said, “oh. Aw. well I had a good time,” and I said, “me too,” and sort-of ran to my car, thinking, “I wonder if I just hate people. I’m fine with that,” driving home, thinking that I could give myself two hours before midnight to play the dobro.
The sand came from the couple of hours that I spent on the beach. I arrived right when the housesitting dude left, and sat there listening to a gay man across the beach proclaim to his girly bestie how toxic his ex-boyfriend was. His ex-boyfriend had bought concert tickets for him, and made him dinner, and this gay man on the beach thought it was so inconsiderate, and so awful of the boyfriend, that it became a reason to break up with him. “He only bought me tickets because he had no one else to go with,” this guy said, but then said, without taking a breath, “but my ex said that he bought the tickets for me and planned to go with me the whole time, and that he thought making dinner would be a sweet gesture for the night.” The bestie sat silently on her beach towel, as this homo yelled about his toxic ex. I stood up to swim in the water. I walked by a bluetooth speaker playing cumbias. I walked by a bluetooth speaker with contemporary remixes of 80s pop music. More bluetooth music echoed from across the beach. I jumped into the water.
My mentor for a gay/queer photo project, in a meeting earlier that day, continued to bring up belonging. And as I looked across the gay beach, from my vantage point in the water, I saw men all dressed in speedos together, all laying on beach towels, a few guys alone, a few guys with groups, mostly inundated with pop music at the beach. The only women there were the straight-girl besties to the gay men. And I thought of the relationship between desire, identity, and culture: that gay is a sort-of process of becoming; that no one wakes up one day and immediately becomes a regular at the gay beach, bringing their bluetooth-blasted Beyoncé. All of a sudden the lifeguard yelled at me to go under the waves instead of over them, and I thought I was going over these swells before they were even waves at all.
I left the water, sitting on my towel alone, thinking of how I guess I belong to a sort of gay culture by going to this beach, but I do not really care to belong to it, except by talking about it, not fully convinced by it. A paraglider flew down and touched the water. The desire to belong to others, or an abstract culture, is a placeholder for some other inarticulate desire, in my mind (a desire to be seen, photographers would say). This culture becomes a way of delimiting desire, shaping it, and giving this expansive thing a particular form. Claustrophobic while surrounded by nothing. It’s mostly just relaxing to be on the beach down here.
During my meeting with my mentor John, I showed him a picture of Benjamin in a dress. He asked me how it was to be shooting Benjamin in a dress in public. I said, “oh it was okay, although being outdoors is a bit less intimate than indoors.” And he said, “it’s a lot to ask queer people to take public and out pictures outside,” and I said, “especially when we had a man walk up to us yelling, ‘stop! Stop! Stop!,’ against Benjamin,” and John said, “you don’t see that as a sort of aggression against both of you?” and I said, “Benjamin’s the one wearing the dress…” and John said, “I’m surprised you do not see yourself as a victim too,” and I said, “well only because he ruined the vibe, and it was shocking that it took place in Long Beach,” and John said, “you’d think in 2024 it would be better,” and I thought of how I needed a relaxing day, with no questions about sexuality: what better place than gay beach.
Well there are definitely better places, like at home playing dobro, away from the noise of competing bluetooth speakers, and away from the older men making moves on me, and away from the spontaneous nights with random guys.
The queer photo project, in its first week, was initially an anthropology or typology of gay men’s conception of gay culture. How they responded to the question, “what is gay,” how they moved their bodies, how they dressed, and how they thought about themselves, were all visible artifacts of the world they both constructed for themselves and participated in. John asked for more intimacy than play–more “art” than “lifestyle” photography. John asked that I break past compartmentalization in people’s lives. I sighed.
Sitting in an Urth Cafe, the night before John’s meeting, I sat staring at a room full of hetero couples, screaming children, and one gay man that continued to make eye contact, back and forth. I sat in a crop top. Women and Christian men stared. One woman looked horrified. Of course we go to a culture to belong, I thought; of course it’s difficult for gay men to belong to a hetero-culture, I thought; of course gay men will create a little enclave against the world around them, I thought; of course gay men will be claustrophobic surrounded by endless sky.