Greg and I grabbed food before making it over to the Eagle. And, as always, we talked about what counted as kink, and I think we got closer to a definition—Greg mentioned something about non-procreative sex for sensation (a neutral term, rather than pain or pleasure), which seems closer (but still crude) than something referring to statistically-unpopular sexual practices. And I reminded Greg that his friend Jason asked me if I was kinky, and that I had a hard time answering that question, because even something “obviously kinky” like fisting does not seem especially kinky to me—it’s just fingering with more mass and the quantitative difference did not seem qualitative enough to justify another category, unless fingering was also already kinky. Greg said that that was a pretty bratty answer, plus Jason’s a biologist, so is interested, probably, in categories, while I prefer the blur.
So later, I pulled up to the Eagle, which is a dark leather bar, before Greg arrived (because my car is small and can parallel park anywhere) and ordered a whiskey ginger, standing at the bar next to older gay men, while one of the go-go dancers smiled at me, with sustained and repeated eye contact, not in the detached dancer sort of way, and then Greg showed up and ordered the same drink. At the Eagle, Greg wanted to flirt with Cal, whom Greg is infatuated with, and I planned to meet Alden (a boy that I invited to the Eagle over Twitter, who has been chatting with me for the past couple years online). So Alden showed up, blending in with the other men at the Eagle, who kind-of all looked the same, while Greg was scoping out Cal among similar-looking older men all wearing leather uniforms. Alden dressed in a harness and a trucker hat and a mustache and ripped jorts, in the middle of this outdoor crowd, closed in by this assortment of gay male bodies in the dark, and I did not recognize him exactly, but out of all of the people at the Eagle, he looked the most like the Alden I had seen online. And so he walked over, and I introduced Greg to him. We kissed for a moment, and then he walked off to his friend, and Greg talked to Cal who was talking to his other friend Blake, interrupted by an older leather-wearing gay man, who, by reading it out loud, complimented Greg’s shirt (“What is a heterosexual and why is he so obsessed with the homosexual?”). And Alden said “Blake!” so I walked to him and his friend, and he wondered whether I was going to a different party that night. “I’m not much of a partier,” I said, and Alden seemed ready to leave, but decided that the drinks were cheaper here than at the party, so said, “come with me,” and pulled me aside, while weaving our way through the crowd, which was as easy to move through as tar; Dom daddies asserting dominance through immobility, and most of them wearing all black or just a jockstrap—Alden pulled me aside to thrust his tongue into my mouth, and I felt an aggressive ring of lips, and imagined that Alden enjoyed making out with a blunt or forceful mode of sensuality (which made more sense at the Eagle than the Tin Lizzie), and that was it: we walked to the bar. And Alden pulled his jockstrap out of a hole in the back of his shorts, saying, “this is a party trick,” so I grabbed it and imagined that I could just pull Alden through the bar from behind, towards his friends and back through the crowd, where he pressed against me pretty close, and I said, “we fit well,” and he replied, “I’m not looking to date. I can’t do that again,” and I said, “oh I meant physically,” and he said, “sorry,” and I said, “it’s no big deal but people say I do give off dating vibes from my hookups,” and he left with his friends to the party (“womp womp party was lame,” he sent me later, before mentioning that his friend’s car got broken into).
So I took another lap around the Eagle, shrugging off an older man who said he likes the Eagle but does not come often because he lives far away, and I said “same,” and snuck out of the conversation, trying to identify the different Instagram and Twitter models standing around in jockstraps, and sat down to watch the go-go dancer from earlier make out with his coworker, while the man next to me, shy and bearded, looked towards me then away. I walked around, looking for Greg, then back to the bathroom (to the trough, or, as Greg named it, “the piss pit,” which is the great equalizer of gay men, a democratic spot) and stood next to the bearded boy, gazing through the angled-down mirror above us and making eye contact, then glancing away, then we grabbed each other, while a line of bears formed behind us eager to pee (now, reflecting, there is enough room at the piss pit for so many people to squeeze into, and yet…), so we left and stood outside. Greg walked up and I introduced Greg to Ben, and Greg wandered off to find Cal, while I told Ben that I was sobering up because I drove, and he suggested cuddling at his place. “Alright,” I said, so he turned to the stage with the go-go boys, and said goodbye to the one who had been looking at me earlier, introduced me to him, and then we kissed quickly, and he introduced me to another go-go dancer, who did not kiss me, and then introduced me to the bouncer. We found my car.
Ben is a nurse in pediatrics, I learned as I drove the Geo Tracker down Melrose Boulevard (which was mostly empty and bounded by buildings blurring by with lights shut off) who has experience in a holistic, counseling-based approach to medicine, which means that the kids who want to “get off this planet” might develop physical conditions in response to their anxiety or depression or BPD, and so Ben counsels them. That night we drove through the streets of West Hollywood, where a rogue group of crop-topped boys and women ran across the street in front of us, yelling, “I love your Isuzu Trooper,” and I thought, “close enough.” I told Ben that my turn signals smoke when I use them, and even though we only had a single turn to make, I don’t want to risk my car catching on fire because of a turn signal, and Ben asked “where does the smoke come from?” and I said, “the steering column,” and he said, “show me,” and I thought “what if my car catches on fire?” so I turned my left turn signal on when we pulled up to the pink neon lights indicating his street, and when I turned the signal off, it continued to click for a while, but there was no smoke (we won this game of driving-roulette) and Ben did not say anything. So we walked into his apartment, and Ben offered me water, and I said “sure!” to avoid hanging over, and then Ben walked towards the refrigerator, took his shirt and pants off, and got in bed instead of grabbing water. He put on a Netflix movie about learning to be single, and then we mostly fell asleep, except, in a somnambulant haze, I remember Ben pulling out his phone and it read 3:00 AM.
Which was accompanied by a conversation about how Ben was a total bottom, and had not cleaned out, and I thought of how rigid categories like KINK and BOTTOM and TOP were only so rigid because people say I’m a BRAT (which means I don’t exactly believe in rigidity, because my normal reply to any of these identities is to think of the spiky medical-looking spinny wheel that Brett, acting as Dom, used on me once, and that, through a small device and some sort of power-induced headspace, there was such an intense and acute sensation that might be erotic, or might not be, because rolling a spikey wheel down my chest had more to do with fear and power than any interaction with an erogenous zone—would a “total bottom” participate in something like this, or does he just want to get fucked?) and Ben started telling me about self-hating Jews who do not support Israel—he’s culturally Jewish, he said, having grown up in a pretty intense private Jewish day school in an Orthodox home. “I grew up Orthodox” he said. And I thought, “shoot,” because I could not tell him about the book I was reading earlier that day, which featured second-hand testimonies of Palestinians in 2002, recounting their trauma from Israeli colonization, but I was not here to ask him, especially at 3AM, about what constitutes culture or nation or Zionism or whatever. His mom did not take his coming-out well, he told me later, and Ben told me (or was it Alden earlier that night? I think both) about his connection with Orange County conservative gays. I said that I do shoots, sometimes, for the Republican Party of Orange County because they pay well, and I get to see this small section of politics and culture unfold in a way that many other people do not get to witness, even if I do not especially agree with them. And I mentioned that I get to see conservative gays in action, and Ben asked me if I knew Doyle. “Does he have post-it notes of encouragements and affirmations all over his home? Like, ‘you can do it!’ and ‘remember love yourself,’ and ‘you are worthy of love,’ and stuff like that?” and Ben replied, “that sounds like a Doyle thing to do,” so I said, “then yeah, probably, I went to, on accident or just by circumstance, to a party at his house, and it was weird because Greg’s brother showed up but did not recognize me, but his (now ex-) husband did” and then Ben mentioned how the gay conservatives in Orange County were beat up when they decided to do a pro-Trump protest, and Ben said, “Political violence is never okay,” and now, I reflect on how you could even know the motive (Political? Sexual? Or both?), and I said, “nobody should beat up the conservative gays,” and continued.
“I hooked up with a conservative gay recently. I met him while he was cheering against Biden at a private screening of the debate—I was shooting for the conservatives. And it was like any stereotypical screaming queen—a gaggle of gays is what I call them—except instead of cheering about drag queens or a parade or Charlie XCX, their subject became politics; the same style (gay is a style, David Halperin, and probably some parts of Mark Doty, argues), but a different object. It’s all about style and its object.
“So I came over to this gay’s place, and before I left, we chatted, in cuddle-position, about religion and politics. The more that he said, the more his position became clearer and clearer to me, not that it was any more or less correct, but that his experience of growing up Catholic and then, through religious conviction, going to a Catholic College in Texas that introduced him to so many different Catholic schools of thought (with no big push for him to ever leave the fold) and now his career as a lobbyist that requires him to maintain his political commitments (even if his convictions change) all made his position, as someone who paid a lot of money to go watch a debate with his conservative and gay friends, make more sense to me. He was very sweet, but I think, despite how pleasant and kind he was, he might be, structurally, slightly villainous, working for the party committed to eroding “gay rights,” but I would never beat him up,” I said.
Ben offered me one of his guest toothbrushes, and then held me tighter, and I said, “you have guest toothbrushes?” and he said, “yeah,” and I said, “well that’s pretty smart. I should brush my teeth now so I can come back quickly,” and he held me tighter and tighter so I did not get up, realizing that, past 3 in the morning, I just let this moment happen to me, allowing my mind to ease itself, letting the television play in the background and each singular moment to collapse onto the next, ungrasping, so that when Ben talked about his encounter with a bioethicist for work, and how to decide when to pull the plug on a dying patient, I had no real questions for him and just accepted what he said, and the movie which had been playing slowly ended (I wondered why people let movies serenade them to sleep) and we played around a bit, and then, heavy, I dreamt that I was at the Eagle.
In the morning, Ben and I laid there, bodies nearly locked together. I saw Ben grab his phone, and I fell back asleep. When I woke up, Ben hopped into the shower with me, saying how he never showers with a boy he picks up at the Eagle—how this is so sweet and rare, before sharing his very nice shampoo with me (he used to be a hairdresser) and then conditioner (I never use conditioner). He had to quit hairdressing because he could not tolerate the chemicals that hairdressers use, “so you became a nurse,” I said, and he said, “exactly.” He told me how he’s on Ozempic, and still called a bear, and I told him that I like his body, and thought of the meme of bears oppressed by Ozempic. We got out, and he offered me product for my hair, and I said I’d try it out, and it was thicker than I wanted; he said to take more and I did and my hair laid flatter than I like, and I smelled like fragrant shampoo and conditioner and hair product (I thought, “this is very West Hollywood”) and I had my hat in my hand, realizing that I did not know where to put it, and put it on the couch. He handed me a toothbrush, and I thought it would be silly to brush my teeth right before we walked to get breakfast, so I threw it in my pocket (I told him, “I just made the silliest decision because I put my hat in the apartment, but I brought the toothbrush with me”) and we walked out the door. As we headed towards breakfast, Ben said that a lot of nurses had lived on the same street as him, and that they used to be coworkers, but then each one got assigned to a different hospital, so they do not hang out as often, and I said, “it still seems like this community is very walkable,” as we walked to breakfast, sitting down at a coffee-shop-breakfast-place.
Ben showed me a picture of Doyle (“yep, that’s him,” I said), and told me about how the person who runs the event at the Eagle from the night before was super rapey. He emanates rapey vibes apparently, and I almost said, “so many of the straight clubs in Orange County give off a date-rape vibe, which scares me,” but I let Ben continue instead. He told me that the person who runs the event used to have a husband, and at one point, the husband’s mom died, so the person who runs the event took the opportunity to take a baseball bat—you know, the metal one—and force his husband (now, ex-husband) to shove the baseball bat up his ass. “Stay away from him!” Ben told me, and I asked him a question that I thought was inappropriate for a boy I had met the night before (nonetheless…): had he ever experienced any aggression during a hookup? Because in my mind, it’s not uncommon for gays to be aggressive towards other gays in West Hollywood, like some type of community infighting, and Ben told me that a man from Grindr told him that he looked thirty pounds heavier than his pictures, and began to spite fuck him, so he shut that shit down. He grabbed his balls and told him to leave immediately. And the guy did.
“Nobody has dated after the pandemic,” Ben said, and suddenly I thought he had given up hope on ever finding love, “because the pandemic taught us—if we were single throughout it—how to be alone.”
“That’s a good thing for gay men, because so many might be incredibly co-dependent, without anything else to really be proud of in life, and so learning to be single means learning how to appreciate yourself, I guess? I don’t know really,” and I thought of the movie that he put on last night.
Across the street, tourists took pictures of the Paul Simon building’s hot pink wall. We finished our food to take a look, then take our own photos. And Ben inched into the tourists’ pictures, and I took pictures of him photobombing, especially when he walked right into the group photo for the Chinese tourist group, with their own bright red banner and everything, visiting the area. Ben is not Chinese.
And as we walked across the street again, back towards Ben’s apartment, I told Ben that there was an exhibit nearby that I had been meaning to go to—an abstract photography exhibition by a photographer that I like. And he asked if Instagram would censor an abstract dick pic. “One way to find out,” I said. He laughed, telling me his plans at noon to go to the beach. While I was in the area, he decided that he would show me around a bit, because I only go to West Hollywood for a small strip of bars, and am not so familiar with Melrose Boulevard. We walked down the street, past a building featured in a current Getty exhibition of a Gemini artist group, in front of a sign that said, in bold, BLAKE, down the street, to walk past, then into, high-end clothing stores. One of Ben’s friends works in one of the stores, and I asked him if he gets good discounts. He said that the store probably has an interest in dressing its employees in its clothes, as a promotion of its own products, and I thought that maybe, in the same line of thinking, the store would be required to only hire hot people, because people buy clothes to become, sometimes, hotter.
So we walked in and I thought that Ben’s friend was hot. Ben introduced me to Aaron, with a hug, and I thought that sounded familiar. Aaron must be a type that I’ve encountered, like this sort of nominal recognition that takes place biblically in the Joseph story, and Ben and Aaron were biblical names too, and Ben introduced me again, and Aaron, with a wink, said “nice to meet you again,” and it felt as if Aaron knew me, or were flirting, while talking about a boy he had been chatting with, in a sort-of situationship-like ordeal, and, as Ben observed, while Aaron faced me, Aaron had been surrounded by nurses, which was a strange and random detail. And Ben said, “I’ll leave you back to your work,” and Aaron said, “I’ve got no work to do, I don’t mind,” and as we left Aaron said, “good to meet you,” and I felt a bit confused.
“Why is Aaron surrounded by nurses?” I asked Ben, puzzling. Ben mentioned that Aaron lived on the same street as him, before he and his husband split—an ugly, bad split, and all of a sudden the world pulled back and none of the words Ben said to me stuck in my brain, except that Aaron had tried to set him up with a chaotic, rude boy, and I kept asking what this meant for Aaron, because I had to feign interest, impatiently, not because of anything Ben did, but there was a bit too much to explain to him, and the world shrank a tiny bit, as Ben gave me so many toothbrushes and extra sunscreen and talked about how awful it is to meet sex workers on Grindr because no one should charge for free sex, and I took my hat and toothbrushes and sunscreen and we exchanged numbers and I ran to my car and sat down and pulled out my phone, and texted Brett, “does your other sub work in WeHo at a clothing store?” and Brett asked me “which one?” which meant, “yes,” and I drove to 1301PE to see Uta Barth’s exhibition.
I guess it’s a good time for a little break, like a breath of air from the whole thick and continuous experience of the world. Where my mind was at ease and passive, now I pull it back into focus, to examine what I would call the artifacts of unthinking. Because in my car are about 5 or 7 packages of toothbrushes, right now, and two packs of sunscreen, that Ben got from being a frequent Amazon reviewer, so they send him this stuff for free. I can, like Ben, bring guest toothbrushes with me, or compose them into a still life. Objects, like it or not, have history.
A few weeks ago I stole Simon’s tank top to try to keep in contact with him, so that I would have to come back and return it. Simultaneously, the tank top is not just an excuse, but also an object that I continue to interact with—I wear it—in a way that reminds me of my night out with Simon, and how I want to reach out to him again, when he gets back from his multi-country Asia trip. The tank top carries meaning through memory, I guess, which is a bit of a cheap-shot against something like “objective” meaning retained inside the object itself (taking this “subjectivity of objects” a bit more seriously), closer to a sort of phenomenological intentionality, and I wonder if Ben must have had a similar regard for toothbrushes. That these are objects to hold onto, a way of permanentizing experience, placing it into an object, and becoming emblematic of a person or a night out or something. Or, at least, I’m following what Mark Doty says about objects with histories in his book on Still Lives, that although we maintain “the adult recognition that the things of this world go on without us, that the meaning with which we invest in them may not persist,” there is a recognition of what is “held in the mind” so that, although associations held by objects may fade, an object continues to emanate an “aura of intimacy,” beyond its pure utility.
So I wonder about this last-second gesture while I was distracted, to send me home with two sets of objects, both utilitarian, and whether it had to do with memory cast into the future, or intimacy. The objects could not be more detached from personal experience than the fruit of a still life or a vase, and yet there’s something thoughtful about extra sunscreen, maybe—something, despite the dichotomy of utility/intimacy, that finds both blurred in a single gesture; memory stilled put back in motion.
The sidewalk, leading from where I parked down to a closed-off street under construction, slanted lopsidedly. The crossing guard flirted with a woman crossing, and I walked across and down the street, into the half-opened door of a small building. Images of the Getty Museum, recognizably Uta Barth, hung on the walls. I walked further into the building. A man worked on a computer. A woman sat and talked on the phone. “Take a poster and a press release and a list,” the man said, so I took each object with me. Small font on the wall pointed upstairs, where the exhibition continued, and I stood alone in a room blending natural and artificial light, with images both natural and processed. I looked closely.
Do architectural pictures draw attention to the room that contains them? Or is that just a “me,” thing? I looked more closely at one of the images, and it seemed to contain two images processed together, and I looked around, again, realizing that, despite their appearances, each of these images was the “same” image, or the same scene, or the same place-where-the-camera-stood, and each one was either shot at a different time of day, or shot blurry, or processed differently, or printed strangely, but each image was, despite the surface, somehow, referring to the same object. And I thought, “such a Barthian attention to perception,” because this artist deals with subtle changes in perceptions, and now, like she has done before, deals with repetition and what counts as “the same,” or “difference?” Is it just a variation of style, with a similar object—should we look past the style? Or do all of these images just refer to each other (is it all style)? I was getting a bit too excited, unable to look at the images anymore without getting caught up in what I was thinking—all the images became, through a sort of typology, one single form of image, making it difficult to look particularly at a single image, because each image was caught up in another, no longer stilled in its own frame, but taking place in another—so I took it all in and walked out the door, poster and press release (which I have not read, and thought I would read by now) in hand. Back on the street, a billboard advertised John Waters Pope of Trash, and I walked back to my car to drive back to Pasadena for tacos with Greg.
We met at Greg’s apartment, which no longer smelled like toxic fumes, and I helped Greg fold his laundry. In my mind, this is just what gays do as an excuse to chat with each other, and Greg insisted that I only needed to help as much or little as I liked, so I took breaks to continue texting Brett. I told Brett where, exactly, Aaron worked, and he confirmed that he was the other sub, and Brett asked if this other sub “met my needs,” and I was confused because I had no expectations, so I said, “I just said hi, but he exceeded my non-existent expectations, and I’m wondering if he recognized me, because he winked at me and our body language was…interesting,” and Brett admitted that only I get to know his secrets, and that Aaron does not know who I am, despite the fact that I know who a few of his other subs are. “Oh,” I said, more confused at the entire situation, and Brett asked who I was with when I met Aaron, and I told him “a guy I met at the Eagle named Ben,” and Brett complained about being replaced (which I think, and hope, is his perennial joke), then found Ben immediately on Instagram, despite the existence of a million other Ben’s, because apparently I have a type, and said, “so bratty, yet so predictable, I love it!” and I got back to folding laundry, a bit frustrated because I do not like being called predictable.
So Greg bought me tacos in exchange for laundry, and we talked about the viability of Biden’s campaign, and I told him how Alden’s reaction to me saying “we fit well” was “I’m not looking to date,” and how that was strange, and I imagine that his last relationship ended badly, and I thought how it made sense that he interpreted something I intended so physically as a metaphor, so I told Greg that sometimes it’s a chaotic vibe if someone is only looking to get fucked, and found myself grasping for words because I felt so bigoted and regressive to hear this sort of puritanical judgment coming from my mouth, but also because I had such little sleep, and I don’t think Greg knew what to make of it, and maybe it was just that Alden seemed chaotic, with how aggressively he tongued the inside of my mouth.
“Biden should drop out,” Greg explained. And maybe Biden is waiting, so he can take all the criticism from the Republican party, and they can spend all this money trashing him, so that at the last minute Kamala can swoop in and lead the race—she’s doing decently in the polls. And to me, Kamala has the strength, as a political candidate (no: potential presidential candidate) of funny memes about her, and a slightly villainous and sociopathic laugh, and, probably, will be very entertaining as an opponent to Donald Trump, who, ignoring all the real-life implications, would make great TV.
So we walked to a coffee shop, making eye-contact with a man all dressed up in pride gear, and we wondered where the pride event was. Greg told me how he needed an elevated spanking bench for the next pup night demonstration, and we talked about configurations of Ikea storage (especially Kallax, which we both own and know well), in order to construct a spanking platform. The barista whispered, “Blake,” to me, when my coffee was ready, and we walked in the alleys of Pasadena to scope cruisey backdrops for pictures of Greg’s brother (for a pride leather party in San Diego), styled after Tom of Finland (but also inspired by vintage gay porn—“you’re the only one doing that around here,” said Greg), and we got to Greg’s apartment so that Greg could prepare for a gay-sex-therapist barbecue, and I could nap, before our trip to Ikea, when Snooze texted me, “Trump just got shot at a rally,” and I replied, “the fun never stops!” and I told Greg, who said “holy shit!” texted Mikey, who thought I had gotten shot, before re-reading the text, and Greg and I talked about how this near-miss will turn Trump into a living martyr, and that none of this was very good. And Greg discovered that he might not be as much of a pacifist as he thought (maybe political violence is sometimes okay), and I realized that I’ve got such a knee-jerk pacifistic reaction (to think that Trump dying would not be good because killing people is probably bad). So Greg went to the party while I sent everyone I knew memes about Trump going to Claires to get his ear pierced, and searched for more information in what seemed like an empty void of journalistic detail, grasping onto theories of martyrs and political violence from the past, placing it into predictable categories, and Ben sent me pictures of me in front of the pink wall, and finally, I fell into sleep surrounded by heat.
It's attention to detail that removes still lives from any easy typology. Although my professor enjoys attributing a memento-mori symbolism to them, there are too many exceptions to that rule to equate memento-mori to the still-life genre. Instead, still lives, following Doty, and like many other paintings, relish in the surface, in particularity. The closer you look, the more (in spite of this whole unifying “still life” category) still lives seem embrace a singular object or scene, where appearance is all that matters; or where style’s weight is its rendition of a moment from the world, instead of its participation in repetition or narrative or meaning. It is the same, listening closely to Grigoni’s album, in the musical still life—the more pronounced detail and texture make it more difficult to find anyone who does what Michael Grigoni does (despite the immensity of the “ambient” genre), which is why I return to his music again and again. Maybe that’s bratty.
Greg returned. We evaluated Ikea options. Sturdiness. Width. Durability-upon-impact. Will it look like Ikea storage furniture? Nothing that we tested out fit the bill. No Ikea materials for our Spånkerbord. So I drove home, then to sleep.
I woke up for church, where Ann, who is the music director, and whom I work “under” (but not really—I do what I want) found a case for a wedding ring on the lectern, left over from a funeral the day before. “It would be perfect for you, one day, Blake,” and she picked it up to inspect it further. The box said “Mr.” on it, and so Ann said, “Oh, just kidding, you need a Mrs. box” and I wondered how she could miss that I’m gay after, each time I stepped foot in the building for the first four months of working there, and only most of the time afterwards, I wore pride shirts and shoes and pins and mentioned how I was ditching church early to go to pride. I really enjoy these covert ways of coming out, but clearly this is not enough (I need to bludgeon people with rainbows in order for them to recognize anything…but even then…) so I stood kind-of shocked, more confused than anything, and before I could speak, Ann pointed to a pen on the lectern, saying “that’s a real nice pen. We should give it to the office. Or…hmmm…finders keepers!” And now I’m using that pen to write this down.
I took a nap that day, heading to Ikea not for a Spånkerbord but for storage for the church—I guess the object I searched for needed no testing, but retained its articulated utility as a shelving unit, and then I had planned to go out to the Tin Lizzie, but had dinner with my family’s friends. My mom’s friend Diana began to talk about churches, and talked, after referring to pastoral messages of identities in love instead of nationalism and love instead of gender and love instead of anything (love abstracted with no object, I guess?) about gays and the church. And Brian, Diana’s husband, talked about how gays don’t wanna go to church anymore, they’ve been treated badly, and I thought he was not wrong but it was strange that nobody really asked for my opinion—the only gay man at the table—except when we found out that my mom’s church only believes in marriage, according to something God apparently said, between one man and one woman. My mom sank into her seat, grieving. And Diana asked me how that was homophobic, and I was so shocked (I do not like being shocked all the time), and said, “well they do not believe gays should have access to the institution of marriage, which comes with particular state-sanctioned benefits,” and Diana asked, “well, I’m confused, because how is that homophobic if,” and she sat and thought for a while, “if a pastor refuses to marry gays, but believes gays should go somewhere else to get married?” And I thought of the “anti-assimilationist” arguments that have, historically, been against gay marriage, which (now, reflecting) seem to be conditioned on the (not untrue) supposition that the world is homophobic, and my parents spoke up, “because you’re treating gays differently for being gay!” and Diana began, slowly, like a sloth, or butter melting in room temperature, to process, making statements, then rescinding them when she realized that they were homophobic, then “well why don’t gays go to churches where they will be supported,” which, is the same as saying “leave, because we won’t support you here,” which I guess is a sort-of big question, but not as big as Diana asking me to define what homophobia is for her, to give her a definition to work with, and me saying, to the former, “well a lot of gays believe what churches tell them, and internalize the fact that they should not get married, or that they are sinful” (which is why so many end up so kinky probably—add that to the definition), and I guess, reflecting, that it’s easier to ask gays to leave your church than to ask the church to change, and I looked over at my mom, who totally sank into her chair, and hardly looked up, and was grieving the fact that she would need to either confront her church or leave it (the place she thought she could call home), and probably ultimately both, and I looked at my phone for the time, waiting for the night to fall, so I could sit in a gay bar, which, this night, happened to be nearly empty and full of older men, and when my phone read 9:00, I sent my mom and dad a text that Diana had drained all the rainbow from me, and that I was going to re-up, but thanks for helping explain what homophobia is to Diana, and being good Allies. Yay Allies. My dad sent me gifs of animals puking rainbows. And I sat down with a whiskey ginger at a gay bar that played Chappell Roan songs on repeat.
I enjoy, after a day of church and talking about God’s opinion on fags, sitting down with a drink and being surrounded by gays, even without any intention of going home with anyone, but just soaking in an upbeat atmosphere filled with gay men. It’s sort-of an alternative world. An older man walked up to me, chatting about photography and how different it used to be in the darkroom, and began listing the different bars and spas around.
“Back in the 90s, when we were still dealing with AIDS, there were bars in WeHo, but they all had blacked out windows, or were underground, or discreet.”
“Things have definitely changed a lot,” I said, “people are a lot less homophobic now.”
I told him, through the noise of a wedding party, which was sharing our table, that it was late, and that I needed to buy a shirt and leave, so he walked outside, and I got one of the last Tin Lizzie Pride shirts. This one would not signify anything to Ann, though, but maybe Greg’s shirt would, and as I drove away, this older man slipped a paper through my car’s open window with his name, phone number, hotel address and room number, and the name of a nearby spa. I drove home.
This morning, I prepare for a shoot in Tom-of-Finland style, at LUV Collective. I tell Sam about this weekend, and she tells me, “You need a break.” So I sit and write, and I cannot find the man’s slip of paper, even if I try; no object, no memory, no life stilled in the paper. Instead, experience streaming continuously, with little rupture, to be taken up again and again.
Before Still Lives, Michael Grigoni, a religious studies scholar, released Field Notes. A sort-of self-proclaimed ethnography seems crucial to his way of hearing, then organizing the world around him.
So today, I pick up Cynthia Cruz’s Disquieting (which is the book I hesitated to tell Ben about in bed) while a barista compliments my hair. Normally this is a loud barista, and his coworker talk loudly to every customer, who, usually, are just tired and jaded and want their coffee, and not to talk about how cute their little “fur baby” is. But today he’s alone, and calls my hair “Disney Prince Hair.” And so now I know that every man in this coffee shop is a gay man—me, the two other men chatting with each other, and the barista.
On Thursday, in the afternoon, I drove down to West Street Beach by myself. The last time I had been here, I had seen a man, during sunset, sitting alone on the beach, reading and writing. The sun set as the person I was with (but did not want to be with) continued talking, and I wished I were sitting and reading and writing like that man, content with life and immune to the desire that got me stuck here with a man from Grindr in the first place. Really, I guess I wanted some space, from this man who decided to process his sexuality at me all at once, and so when I came this time I came alone, deciding to watch the sunset. I brought Ben’s sunscreen, and a towel, and two men from Utah walked up to me. One was bright red like a lobster. They were visiting and told me that there was nothing like West Street Beach in Utah. Men in speedos walked all around us. And I asked them if they had been to Black’s beach yet, and they said, “what’s Black’s Beach,” so I told them, “it’s the nude beach in San Diego,” and their faces lit up, and they asked, “would it be crazy if we all went to Black’s Beach tomorrow?” and I said, “only a bit,” and they asked me, “are you down?” and I said, “sure, I’m down,” and they added me on Snapchat so we could plan the details, and I left the beach. That night, I felt so sunburned, and naturally, angry at the Amazon sunscreen that Ben had given me (“of course a Zionist would give you sunscreen that doesn’t work,” my friends said, laughing), so I cancelled on the boys.
Instead of Black’s, while the boys drove down in the morning, I sat at home until the afternoon, when Rod, spending the afternoon at the park, invited me to sit under a tree with him. I told him that I was sunburned. He offered to help put aloe on me. “Okay,” I said, initially wanting Brett, who was busy, to do that; Brett said, “hoe!,” and I pulled into the park, walked under at tree, and found Rod. I sat on his blanket in the empty park on an afternoon. Rod and I talked about San Diego Pride, which was happening over the weekend, and about trying out different kinky things (Rod joked about tying me up to a tree, and I said that it would look like a hate crime—isn’t the relationship between violence and kink interesting?) and Rod recommended the book The Sluts, which I had seen in a bookstore, but that a customer had hidden. I bought it later that day. And we repeated the terms, over and over, “it’s part of the culture,” when talking about sluttiness and cruising and laying in the park in public together, talking about the gay books we had read. “It’s part of the culture,” I said, “is a sort-of legitimating factor to whichever practices we want to participate in,” and in this case, as “part of the culture,” we found a bathroom together, in the middle of the day.
I am no anthropologist. And I can approach anthropology only through an analogy made by J.Z. Smith, the late religious studies scholar (one of my professors, when asked about the difference between religion and culture, paused. She stood in silence for a moment. And, after reflecting, she said, “Well, if you think about it, sometimes for years, eventually you realize that there is no difference between religion and culture.”) Smith offers a “definition” of religion: “It is a second-order generic concept that plays the same role in establishing a disciplinary horizon that a concept such as ‘language’ plays in linguistics or ‘culture’ plays in anthropology.” Culture, like religion, is a scholar’s term, complicit in this whole maybe-good/maybe-bad business of knowledge-production. But not only does culture as a category construct forms of knowledge (raising the question: is there any unknowing culture?); it also, somehow, orients our bodies and the materials of our lives. But tell this to me and Rod in the park, using the term conscientiously to legitimate our own practices, and either we’re both scholars or “culture” is a vernacular legitimation—taking something taboo and self-consciously recategorizing it; what was once the “anti-culture” becomes “culture.” A contrast, then, against laying in the shade, under the branches of intertwined trees, and getting aloe rubbed on my burns.
(on Saturday I read the Sluts)
On July 21st, I worked at church. Ann told me about her neighbor, who wants to stop getting older, like many of the older folks where she lives. And Ann replied, “Well, it’s better than the alternative,” gazing at me in silence, when I asked, “what alternative: getting younger?” and she said, “DYING!” I do not know if Ann believes in God, but I know that she does like directing music.
I drove to LUV Collective to shoot pictures of their birthday party. I opened my phone and saw, on Instagram, a post announcing that Joe Biden had dropped out of the Presidential campaign. Lesbians crowded LUV Collective. “What a different culture,” I thought, within the LGBTQ+ group, “than gay male culture.” And I drove down to San Diego Pride while my brother texted me that Biden could not drop out—what a suspicious thing to do—and I told him “I dunno,” as I was stuck in traffic, then at the Air BnB that Mikey and Greg rented, before the trek down the cliffside stairs onto Black’s Beach.
I recommended, at the Air BnB, the book The Sluts to Jason, who is Greg’s friend, after having finished it in a day. And Jason wondered whether he could get it at the library: “probably not,” I said, and I told him that I would lend it to him. He looked at my shoes and said, “Chacos!” and I said, “they have a toe strap for hiking, for when we go down the trail,” and Greg said that we would take the stairs instead of the “goat trail,” because we could slip and fall on the goat trail. So off we went to the beach, in the late afternoon on a long summer day, walking across the sand, clothed on a nude beach. Along the shore I’d seen a few faces before, because bodies and bodies and bodies (so many nude bodies) packed the beach, as if every Southern California gay male were participating in “the culture.” Greg aimed towards the pup flag, so we walked further across the sand, where crowds of bodies became denser, and the pups lowered their flag, so as we approached through layers and layers of gay men, we gazed and hunted for Greg’s pup community, until we spotted them, and I walked right past Alden, who waved.
I sprayed sunscreen all over Mikey’s and Greg’s and Jason’s and Kelly’s bodies, when Alden walked up in a little cowboy hat, and began to make out with me. Out of the corner of my eye, Mikey’s jaw dropped, and after feeling each other—Alden’s body somehow radiated sand, Alden left, leaving me to hang out with Mikey and Greg. “How do you do that?” Mikey asked, and I told him I’d met Alden the week before, or online.
Mikey asked that I grab my camera so we could take pictures for Twitter, and I grabbed the camera, telling Mikey and Greg to walk towards the rocks at the end of the beach. So we climbed the rocks, naked, with Kelly and Jason watching me pose Mikey and Greg. Mikey tells Greg to close his eyes. Greg thinks it’s going to be the dirtiest photo. Mikey crouches down. He pulls out a ring, from his shorts that he carried, and Greg opens his eyes. “Oh my God. Yes. Oh my God,’ and I take pictures and fifteen people behind me applaud, while Greg cries.
So we took pictures: of Mikey and Greg, of Kelly alone, of Jason alone, and of Mikey and Kelly, and walked back for a change of clothes. Alden walked up. I told him Mikey and Greg just proposed, and he kissed me and picked me up and then began to finger me, and he told me to relax while the lifeguards pulled up, making Alden nervous, and I thought, “not with your sandy hand!” (saying something else) so he put me down and he walked back to his little orgy group. Mikey and Greg put clothes on. We walked back to the rocks—them, the most-clothed people on the beach; me with a giant camera in my hand—and took G-rated photos for Mikey’s and Greg’s families, and, as we finally walked back, the lifeguards announced, “you must be waist-deep only in the water.” The did not want people to drown when they left. Alden, no longer under the surveillance of the trucks patrolling the beach, began to get fucked by a man right next to where we placed our towels. Well, another couple fucked slowly, softly, next to them, while Alden’s was a bit more sporadic, and Mikey, paying attention to the slow, “romantic,” couple, said, “I’m taking notes,” and when Alden finished, he looked at me with a lowered head, as if, in public, he carried some shame towards what he had performed. Why is his shame so visible?
Greg and I walked to the water, noticing the proliferation of bodies around us. “I keep thinking, and we just talked about this, that a chiseled body is less attractive than a person who is comfortable in their own body. Padraig O Tuama talks about it,” and we watched boys wander around—some obviously on Viagra, others playing and bantering and unselfconscious of their own skin. Boys threw frisbee next to us. And I told Greg about gay culture, how it seems to form our gestures and postures and roles, and that desire might be dissociable from the specific form that it takes, and Greg told me, “that’s very phenomenological of you. That must be an isolating perspective,” and I began to think of how the real-life fact of sand really eliminated the desire for any of that erotic fun on the beach, revealing desire as fantasy that does not exactly correspond to the reality of the situation. Greg mentioned that he is “intersubjective,” which means he believes in a shared-consensus reality, according to him, and I find that really lame because sometimes minorities (like gay men) are marginalized because they are left out of some form of hegemonic cultural consensus. (And, following the outline that Maia Kotrosits lays out, Intersubjectivity seems to be effective for psychology—positing that there might be objects or figures beyond the individual—but lacking for materiality, or “reality.” And Jean-Luc Nancy, that it seems to posit a unitary truth where there might be multiple. I did not say any of this.) So Greg pointed out a boy that seemed to be my type, while talking about each others’ types, while a boy with a bandana around his neck (Greg’s weakness!) walked right in front of us, and I pointed out several boys that I recognized from Long Beach, and Mikey called Greg over, and I told Mikey that we talked about phenomenology: all this happening at Pride in San Diego at a very gay nude beach, with bodies crowded everywhere.
Cynthia Cruz, quoting Hannah Arendt, trusts (in 2019, by the way) a sort-of Cartesian split between the mind and body— that the body disappears in the act of thinking, and that the body acts independently, animalistically, from the mind. And I wonder, apart from the clinical language that sometimes reduces the body’s desires (or clinical language that augments it, following a fictional doctor in The Sluts), how an individual would even begin to think of a body accurately (reminder: it disappears in the act of thinking) within this Cartesian-Arendt-Cruz framework.
More people around us circle-jerked, as we packed up, and I waved “bye” to Alden. And our long trek across the beach began again, this time in reverse, as I told Jason about my goal, in spite of my own reluctance, to become a poppered-out goner, even though “poppers scare me,” I said, “but I could use to lose a brain cell or two.” And we walked past the “goat trail” surrounded by lifeguard trucks, where tiny figures dotted the hill, carrying a stretcher. I raised my camera. Mikey asked, “have you no respect for the dead?” and I said, “uh, no,” and we laughed and trekked up the stairs, not really knowing what happened to the person, but, after escalating the stairs (which was apparently famous for its crowd on gay twitter), with a long line of people before and after us, we saw an ambulance up top, and I said, “for the dead,” and Jason said, “cheaper than an uber if we use my insurance,” and Greg talked about how ambulances still carry dead bodies if lifeguards could not save that person.
So Mikey ordered us a ride to Puesto, with a friendly waiter, and I ordered a coconut margarita for the Kamala Harris “Coconut Army,” and Kelly code-switched, using a low voice to order, then returning to the Air BnB, then to the bars.
A few months ago, I talked to Brett about what I was reading while working on a photo project against “myth,” or more broadly, our impulse to construct “myth.” And now I’m not quite sure what myth is anymore, and the project, in my mind, failed.
I told Brett, “this author I’m reading tries to find secular analogues to something like ‘religious experiences.’ He’s post-Bataillian, who is a guy who sort-of deals erotic and mystical experiences,” and so, of course, he talks about sleep. You know the stage right before you fall asleep? Your brain is halfway off, and you’re starting to enter into dreams, but you’re still awake and conscious while your mind is clearing. Sometimes you resolve problems that you were working through during the day, or you come up with a creative project or a line of poetry, and, at least when this happens to me, I need to write them down, and then you can let go and enter into an inarticulate zone, where you do not care to remember anything, nor will you be able to. And for Nancy, who’s the author I’m talking about, that experience before being asleep is what some might analogize to “mystical,” in a way where I’d begin to critique that “mystical” category…
“I’ve never experienced that,” said Brett.
And so later, one night, we took a bit of CBD after I had a stressful day, and Brett put on RuPaul, and I kept waking up throughout the night to RuPaul’s dance music soundtrack, and drag queens queening out, and I slept so badly.
Today, I put on For James, To Sleep by Telefon Tel Aviv, and it is a long stretch of noise, slowly incorporating orchestral tones, and I notice my agitation cease. This is not music for sleep, in my mind, but music for the hour before sleep, for that slow tether of attention to lose grip on the world.
To the bars we went, during Pride in San Diego, where Mikey, Greg, Kelly, and now Jordy (I guess he replaced Jason) sat in a small circle next to the window. All talking. I “took a lap,” going to the back of the bar to see all the people dancing, but no one caught my eye, so I circled back, staring out the window onto the street, waiting for someone about-to-enter-the-bar to meet my eyes. Someone Mikey knew brought an out-of-town date, and the date leaned over to me, chatting, wondering to Mikey whether Brit (Mikey’s friend’s name) was going to kill him, and Mikey said, “no, he’s a sweetheart,” and the date told me his plans to just run out, to book it, or to hide in the bathroom, or find an emergency exit, and he got up to go to the bathroom, while I stared back out the window. The night passed. Mikey and Greg wanted to take a. picture with Jordy, so we walked near the restroom, abandoning Brit, who sat alone, at the table, while Mikey used the restroom, and a boy began to chat with me, saying that I looked out of it. “Oh yeah, I’m just here for my friends. They just got engaged,” and Mikey, seeing that I was chatting, and as we were all walking away and to the next bar, asked, “How do you do that?” and I said, “what?” and he replied, “I was checking him out in the bathroom, and he did not talk to me!” and I said, “it’s all in the eyes,” (But now I think it’s all in the vibe—I present as easy-going with a wide-open posture, which is approachable).
So we walked down the street to drop Jordy off at his car, then aimed at another bar. One in the morning, walking down the empty streets of San Diego on the end of Pride weekend. An argument broke out across the crosswalk from us. Mikey crossed the street, and as we all followed, Kelly protested that we outnumbered them anyways, but they disappeared, taking their argument with them. And we continued towards the bars, where the streetlights began to glow a bit brighter, and tired young couples walked home past us. The scene reminded me of Tillmans’ early night-life photography, which he moved on from I guess, but instead of energized youth here, the street contained what lies underneath: late-night burnout with faded eyes. The weather was clear, but the street felt foggy, as we entered, for $10, a club not-so-full. I ordered a water, while male go-go dancers performed like acrobats for $1 bills. I turned to Greg and said that it did not feel like gays could make out here, in spite of it probably being a gay bar, and in spite of Pride weekend. Greg agreed. We walked out back, and a dance party crowded the patio with straight couples. We walked back inside, allowing the night to pass. Older men complimented me, touching my shoulder, and I wanted to go home.
In the Uber then to the house, I crashed on the couch, next to Kelly on the pull-out bed. Kelly fell asleep to the television, to RomComs with bad acting by Instagram models, waking me up with interchangeable drama, so that I could not tell which movie was which, or whether twenty minutes or three hours had passed. The actors all looked the same. The plots did not play continuously—only fragments and one-liners appeared as I drifted in and out of sleep. I woke up at 9AM and drove myself home.
On Monday, I put on an album by Michael Grigoni. On Tuesday I finished Cynthia Cruz’s book and drove up to a climate dinner, and, finally, to Mikey and Greg’s pup night to document the flogging demonstration by “Wiley Wolf.” I think I had given up taking photos for Mikey and Greg to use, and shot these, now, to think about a subculture, realizing I forgot to bring The Sluts for Jason, who never showed up anyways. I talked to a trans pup, who complained about gay men not knowing how to please a trans man, and I felt burning and guilty inside because I, too, was oblivious, so I talked to Greg, before saying, “well, there’s no general way to please anyone, so I guess, you know, I’m gonna say that I definitely have know idea what to do, but I’d be open to learning, because communication is a big thing for anyone in any hookup,” feeling burning and transphobic in that moment, but in reality I am fully a Kinsey 6 and like dick—I’ve considered experimenting but don’t want to force anything, so I took pictures of people getting flogged and whipped that night, and I drove home feeling depressed, feeling like I’m losing myself.
I put ambient music in my headphones on Wednesday, editing photos, and decided to go to the contemporary art museum. I walked into the bright, modern building, and the most of exhibits remained intact from the last time I visited, except that two had been changed out. Saint Laurent occupied four rooms, staged with drawings and black mannequins. On one wall, images of clothing, with a model posed in the center, surrounded the viewer. And in the middle of the other rooms, unlit, or off-lit, or just subtle and dark, the black mannequins stood against the black flooring and the black walls, dressed in bright outfits. I think this exhibit was supposed to have to do with fashion, but I noticed the lighting and wondered more about that than the clothing itself. One group passed by, saying, “creepy!” and I thought I might have to come back to see the exhibit for more than just its lighting, noting the transformation from sketch-image into material bodies.
But I was here for “Half the Air in A Given Space,” and walked, for two minutes, into a room clustered with balloons, wondering if I should feel dread at such a claustrophobic presentation of air—immersed in yellow rubber pressing up against me, all over, only opening out above. I did not. I had fun. I felt playful, knowing I could leave in a bit.
So I left, to gay beach, and talked to a man in a speedo on the shore. Had he been to Joshua Tree? I pointed to my Joshua Tree hat. He had, and enjoyed it, and we talked about the cuts of each others’ speedos, and looked at bodies on the beach, then walked off to our own towels, continuing to chat on Grindr, where I found a boy who had been meaning to meet up. The boy on the beach needed more gay friends, which, I said, “was rare,” and so we decided to be friends, and Zack called me, jealous that I was at gay beach without him, and I let the call go to voicemail, leaving for the boy’s house whom I had been meaning to meet, for a long time, where we kissed and slowly rubbed each others’ bodies, and I said, “you’re really sensual, I like that,” and he said, “so many people say that,” and I felt so timid, like, for weeks, I had just been reacting and reacting and reacting, on a sort of observant and defensive mode, and wondered what I truly wanted, thinking of losing agency in order to be impressed by “experience” (a move made problematic by Joan W. Scott in The Evidence of Experience, questioning whether experience can ever be isolated, and positing that subjects always have agency), as I drove home and Zack told me that we’re going to gay beach again the next day.
So Zack picked me up after work, with his friend Jacob in the car. Jacob smoked in the car. I felt trapped, as Zack drove like a histrionic gay man for an hour down to Laguna Beach, blasting karaoke through microphones connected to a little speaker box on the floor of his car, while Jacob started shouting “BOOBS!” out the window, and Zack mentioned that both of them probably have ADHD, and looked in the rearview mirror at me, rolling down the Pacific Coast Highway, telling me, not for the first time, that I have autism, and I was glad I brought books to the beach to dissociate from their chaos, and I put on Heartstopper songs for their karaoke that they did not know, and we made it, finally, somehow intact, to the beach.
Zack asked what I was reading about, and I said, “objects,” and I told him about the walking-talking cross in the Apocryphal Gospel of Peter, and that this author was making an argument about animacy and perception of reality. She uses Roman citizens’ perception of, or just literature about, statues, becoming both animate and inanimate, after tricking the viewer that the statue was living, so we have this blurry testament—not quite metaphor or allegory—to a living object; in this case, a walking-talking (might as well be singing and dancing too) cross, that, for contemporary scholars, does not make sense, so they say things like “well they must have put that thing into the text by mistake, because it’s completely silly,” and the author says, in reply, “well this seems to correspond with Jesus, who was dead, becoming not-dead.”
Zack thought that was interesting and smart, and then showed me bruises from a fight with his dad, who was being homophobic, and called him a “little bitch.” So Zack said, “who’s the little bitch now?” and jousted with chairs with his dad (in my mind: this is a silly fake fight, because chair jousting is so performative, like a dance), before Zack pinned his dad to the floor, and Zack’s mom (whom he loves so so so much) apologized profusely.
Jacob and Zack got up to go smoke in a small patio next to the beach, out of view, where an older man flashed them, and they came back horrified and cold, so Jacob left to pee in the porta potties, while a woman scream-laughed across the beach with her pack of homos, and I said, “Kamala laugh,” and Zack laughed hard for a minute, while Jacob, now returned, complained about how horny gay men were—as we were surrounded by gay men in speedos—because a man began to pee before closing the porta potty door, and I said, “it’s just the culture,” texting Greg, “Gen Z is, in real life, more puritanical than older gays,” but that might be, according to David Halperin, a coming-of-age phase, because I (older than them) think that it might be understandable and not outrageous that gay men walking around in speedos on a gay beach might be horny.
So we left and got burritos, while Zack and Jacob smoked in the car, and Zack dropped me off at home, and I forgot my hat in his car.
The next day, I visited Brett, feeling moody. I told him I wanted ice cream, or anything, and showed him my dobro, barely playing because I don’t know how to play it, and then we walked to grab ice cream. And I spoke of my boy trouble, and how so many boys in different states and countries all-of-a-sudden offered, all at the same time at the exact start of Leo Season, to date me, and many more crawled out from under the woodwork to circle back to lost conversations, and that I feel so pulled and overwhelmed, recently falling into a pining state of mind, and Brett made fun of me a bit, while we sat down at a patio for Thai food. We normally people-watch on the patio, and the waiter came up to us to quickly take our orders, and I blurted out, uncertain, “Pad Thai,” and the waiter, who was a blond mid-thirties man wearing an anime belt barely hanging onto his pants, said, “you might li the trout. It has tannins in it that are similar to Pad Thai,” and I said, “well, uhhh, sure,” and Brett said, “he’s straight, Blake,” and I said, “shut up!” and Brett said, “you were totally falling in love with the waiter,” and stuck out his tongue, making dreamy eyes, and I said, “I’m impressionable right now! It’s pining season.”
We talked about reading images, and decoding them. Both me and David, who hires me to run his social media, apparently have a particular eye for photography, able to assess qualities in an image like “this boy has the kindest eyes,” and I wondered what Brett sees in an image. I told Brett that this skill might come from being on both sides of the image, both as the one viewing the moment that constitutes the image, and being able to see how it translates into the picture, which puts the photographer on both sides of translation. But we all have phones these days that can take images, so I guess everyone can be on both sides of this sort of translation.
The waiter asked if we wanted dessert, and because we were on a mission for ice cream, it took everything inside me to say, “no,” so we walked into the ice cream shop. And it’s Long Beach, and every time we’ve been in here, we’ve seen gay men. Two worked behind the counter, and I memorized Tyler’s name (on his nametag!), because Brett said, “he’s exactly your type, Blake,” and I said, “shut up!” and the other ice cream man walked up to us, giddy, and asked for Brett’s order. Tyler dealt with the people behind me–the people behind me asked me, “oh were you in line before us?” and Brett gave me a glare, because I had a chance with Tyler, but I was polite and said, “no, you’re good,” and Brett said, “so close,” before the other ice cream guy took my order, fawning over me and bending over the counter to get as close to me as possible, prolonging the conversation and staring into my eyes, and when I asked for a single scoop he gave me at least three, and Brett was shocked, while the ice cream man offered him a discount, and talked as long as he could, and gave Brett a token to exchange for a pint of ice cream, and continued to talk in our direction as we walked out, and then, at the last minute, said, “WAIT,” and pulled out a little cardboard cartoon character designed to “hold” the token, and Brett squealed “cee–yute!” and finally, we walked out of the ice cream shop, while I looked through the window back at Tyler, and said, “Leo Season!”
We walked down the street, and back to Brett’s place, where he put on the Olympics, and I told him about several different boys I crushed hard on, as the opening ceremony began, and continued, and the ceremony, for some reason lasted four hours, so we went to Brett’s bed to watch, and after the torch was lit, Brett turned the TV off to sleep, and I told him I might just leave; “I’ve got a shoot in the morning, and I’m not feeling tired, just agitated, like the emotions I’m experiencing are larger than I can articulate, and I think I need to just go for a drive,” and Brett held me closer, asking, “are you safe?” and I said, “yeah, it’s just that I haven’t felt this way in a long time, since I lived in Merced, and I would normally drive to the mountains to deal with it,” and it was silly to drive to the mountains when I had a shoot the next morning, so Brett held me closer and I said, “you know I’ve been in such a pining mood, and maybe that’s the cause of this,” and I said, “I just want to find the space to articulate, to sit and write and find language for this feeling, but I don’t think I can get to the root of it—I don’t think I’ll ever be able to figure it out,” and then Brett started snoring and I fell asleep.
In the morning, Brett said, “so you opened up a bit last night,” and I said, “don’t perceive me! I was pining!” and he read his astrology report, saying that someone would open up to him and that it would change the nature of their relationship, and then added, “you opened up past midnight too.”
So I drove home to get ready for a shoot, which was in West Hollywood, for Critters and Kink LA, and I created a little photo booth during this educational conference, so that people dressed as dogs and cats and other, maybe ambiguous animals could pose for me. The playlist for the event reminded me that if you dig past the Scott Pilgrim Soundtrack into a marginal corner of the indie scene, you hit playlist upon playlist—the motherlode—of trans and gay and furry and creaturely people who make compilations and albums and playlists for their communities. Many of the people wore punk and Anarchist-logo’d outfits, like an indie punk scene. I took their photos, which were mostly cute. The first presenter, speaking about how to “find your inner animal,” presenting a quiz so that you knew whether you were an insect or a dolphin or a pup, asked for a donation to remove her family members from Gaza; the second presenter introduced pup play, with her own little pup posing on stage; the third presenter spoke on packs, which can be a particular form of polycule, and all, according to those who spoke up, dissolve from “pack chaos,” that seems (the pups thought out loud) to happen from groups larger than three.
So I walked down the street to grab a burrito, before taking a group photo and then leaving, driving home to practice dobro, and then collapsing into bed, to wake up for church the next morning too early and exhausted. I edited photos in the sound booth.
I showed my mom a little video I took in the sound booth. Illuminated on my phone screen was an image of a laptop with photoshop, editing a panorama group-photo of BDSM creatures. The image on my phone screen panned out from the laptop, showing that I was at church, for my weekly gig. “That’s sacreligious!” my mom said. “Naked gay men in a church!,” and I think of how my mom did not really see the image, because it contained mostly women, who were not naked.
The pastor walked up to me, noticing that I was on my laptop, and said, “Blake, will you speak for us on the 18th?”
“Sure?” I said, and he said “for the wifi in the church,” and I said,
“Well, I’d need to make sure we need it, because we already have internet,” and he said, “OF COURSE WE NEED IT IN THIS DAY AND AGE: IT’S RIDICULOUS NOT TO,” and I thought of how I like to upload images over the church’s Wifi when I can, because it’s fast.
Yesterday, throughout the day, the BDSM Creature conference took the form of a classroom lecture. Those experienced in the community stood up, gave a lecture, and then little pups and critters asked questions by raising their hands. One lecturer even created a little powerpoint, reading off the slides, recalling her days as a student.
Mark Fisher, in a Benjaminian critique, describes coming of age in contemporary society, by coining the term “depressive hedonia.” Young people, graduating into a status of consumer, do nothing but pursue pleasure, in “the comfort food oblivion of Playstation, all night TV and marijuana.” Pleasure and consumption become marks of the subject’s identity under capitalism, because, according to Fisher, individuals lack the motivation to complete projects on their own, associating projects and achievement with the disciplinary structures of education. Depressive hedonia becomes the way to find pleasure beyond the structures that form a capitalist subjectivity.
So I thought it was strange but not unpredictable that this institution of pleasure, this kinky anti-normative event, which often proclaimed its unwillingness to conform to societal rules, reproduced, in sex and pleasure, the “Control” of education. Either pleasure and achievement takes the form of “Control” (as Fisher calls it) or there is no pleasure or achievement at all.
As the church demanded internet, I wondered, along with the essay Antimarriage in a queer theology book, about how this church could, at the very least, do something decent with its time. Nobody goes to church to continue being a phone junkie. No one goes to church to continue their productive work-from-home streak. No one needs to be chronically “perceived” by the network of technology–no one needs, if they believe in divine omnipresence, to feel the omnipresence of online communication. But there are a lot of ways that churches are positioned to critique disciplinary structures, or expand subjectivity beyond the status as a consumer/producer, or even just imagine a world (taking up Fisher’s challenge) in which there is an alternative Capitalism (by, here, at the very least, being a space, ideally, which is only minimally transformed into cyberspace). In its focus on pleasure (or pain–all sensation), and probably blinded by horny-brain, it seems like this kinky community lacks a critical pedagogy; in its focus on the divine (anti-pleasure, following Albert Camus and Peter Berger) and its own demand for relevance (insisting on its own sacred/secular boundaries, exempting technology from this category), it seems like the church lacks an imagination at all.
After church, Snooze stopped by so we could go to gay beach. He had Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer in his car, and we drove my car down to Laguna Beach. I think I talked about Fisher, and critiqued him a little bit, and snooze mentioned how nice this sort of conversation was. So we made it onto West Street Beach, and crossed the street, walking down the tree-shaded steps. And we laid on the beach, with lesbians next to us skipping every song on their Bluetooth speaker, so it sounded like sweeping through radio stations, and a boy moved his towel next to us, but did not speak.
We drove towards the Tin Lizzie and grabbed tacos first, and on a screen on the Television was a soccer game. This did not seem like Olympic soccer: there were ads all over, plastered, even on the players’ uniforms, like Ghirardelli; and the coach, standing on the sidelines, wore a different jacket. In rainbow, it read, “PRIDE.”
So we walked into the Tin Lizzie (“just one drink,” Snooze said), and found a table to people-watch at. A group of men who looked like West Hollywood gays sat at a table with a quiet, introverted man. And another man, who had been walking around with a woman and a camera, joined them. The woman, out on the patio, tried to exit back onto the street, to escape the bar dramatically out back, rather than the front entrance, hopping over bar chairs, before she realized her exit was blocked. So she stood among the gay men, while looking so irritated, and her friend took pictures of the boys taking their shirts off with his instant camera, and the woman paced between inside and outside, before leaving. I made eye contact with the camera guy and nodded him to our table.
Snooze had bought me a second drink, while I debated what to play on TouchTunes. “Sigur Ros,” I said. But they did not have Sigur Ros’ new album, and, well, I did not want to put on a ten-minute song, so I put on Shura. Maybe Frank Ocean too. And Brendan told me about his camera—he works with children, who had a Spiderman version of his camera, and so he bought the highest quality one he could find. And we tried to follow the West Hollywood boys to another bar, except that it was twenty minutes away and it was already past midnight at the Tin Lizzie, so we opted to stay. And Brendan mentioned that he’s only in town for a couple more days, visiting from Turkey. Snooze, who is Armenian, turned to him and asked, “are you a nationalist?” and Brendan said, “what?” and Snooze repeated, “are you a nationalist?” and Brendan said, “no, I was born here.” And Snooze turned away to chat with another man at another table. “We lost him,” Brendan said.
Brendan told me about the Turkey night life, and how people see the sunrise when they stay up all night and get wasted. “I’ve seen it, but only when I’m sober, when I’m taking pictures,” and Brendan said that I had experienced the experience; I guess being wasted did not matter as much as the sunrise. And Brendan thought that I should come visit Turkey, and I rolled my eyes, as Snooze walked inside to grab more drinks for me, and I had a water too, barely sipping on the third drink, and I walked inside with Brendan because we both had to pee. Standing in line for the restroom, Brendan took my photo. He did not like it. So he took a second photo, and gave them both to me. And I went pee, and the patio began to close, and so I grabbed my drink from outside and put it on the bar, while Brendan ran over to the ATM machine and Snooze walked up to me (probably signaling to leave) talking about how great of a makeout session he just had, and so I gave him the keys to my car, but he did not leave yet, while I waited at the ATM machine with Brendan wondering what he was doing (this was not a cash-only bar), and finally, he bought another beer (ten minutes before closing time, by the way!) and the bartenders told him he’d have to chug it quickly, so we stood near the exit while I rubbed his chest, and he said, “I do that to calm myself,” and asked me what I was into, but then he said, “I’m not really into penetrative sex. I think I’m autistic” and all of a sudden the bartender announced “GET OUT IT’S CLOSING TIME,” and Snooze walked to and inside of my car with the keys I had given him, and I walked outside, while Brendan, stuck inside, said “I want to finish my drink; let me finish my drink” and the bouncer kicked everyone else out, so we all crowded outside and watched while Brendan stood inside, saying “I want to finish my beer! I paid for it!” and the bouncer said, “I don’t give a FUCK about your beer!” and they wrestled with each other, beer splattering all over Brendan’s shirt, and Brendan left, saying, “I hate America,” and turned to me, saying, “so…now what?” and I said, “my friend is in the car and I have to get him home,” and Brendan, smelling like beer, said, “Oh. Okay. Alright. Well then. See you later,” before, the next day, sending me a message saying “remember when I wrestled with the bouncer?”