Photograph by Emet North.

We travel to Lake Clark, Alaska, in a four-seater prop plane—my partner and I, the pilot, and the housekeeper for the residency where we’ll be staying. When asked which seat he wants, the housekeeper says, “I’ll take the leg room, I’m a big bitch.” I think, Queer? I ask about his work and over the racket of the plane he shouts that he performed for a decade as a drag queen at a famous Los Angeles bar. He quit during COVID. “People are gross,” he says. Though later he will tell me it was performance itself he tired of, finding it antithetical to intimacy.

My partner, R., and I have come to the residency with the intention of inhabiting new metaphors for intimacy. In our application, we wrote, “In 1991, Lynn Margulis coined the term holobiont to describe miniature ecologies consisting of a host organism and their microbiome. The human is a holobiont—more than half of the cells in our body have nonhuman DNA.” We wrote, “In this project, we will ask how this theory of the holobiont can create possibilities for queer joy.” We’ve considered, for example, replacing the phrase “I’m full” with “My gut bacteria have multiplied by a billion and are satiated.” We know we will sound ridiculous. As we fly, I try to inhabit this new mode of thinking. I put a hand on the back of the seat in front of me and think, Look at those microbial skin communities. But the thought glances off; it won’t stick. Read More

Colored engraving of a large scorpion, Buthus granulatus. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London, and Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 4.0.

1.

In the weeks before I left for Mexico, the flies showed up. My apartment became overrun with them, the size of small red grapes, five to ten ripe orbs at a time buzzing around in any given room. A fly or two had never bothered me, so I was able to balance my pacifist instincts with a more rigorous approach to housekeeping; I took the trash out every other day, and if I saw an errant roach in the bathroom I would kill it, the way you wash a glass in the sink without thinking twice. The flies radicalized me. They wheeled through the apartment, attacking every cubic foot of open space, refusing to be ignored. It sent me into a fugue state of bloodlust. I wondered if there was a corpse they were drawn to that I couldn’t see. Maybe I was the corpse.

I became obsessed with stalking and killing every last one of them, fantasizing that if I could annihilate them all before the sun went down, the problem would be solved. But it never worked. I slaughtered twenty-five at a time—my windows, ceiling, and rolled-up copies of The New Yorker splattered with gore. I’d wipe down nearly every wall and window in my apartment to keep other flies from coming back for the blood and guts. But they always returned. Read More

Ann-Margret in Tommy (1975). Screenshot by Molly Young.

A list of all my enemies, in alphabetical order.

ADMIN

All the tasks I dread because I’m too weak or lazy to (a) find a way to not do them or (b) use my imagination to render them interesting.

BELATEDLY LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Studying a new language when you’re thirty-seven is an unbelievably inefficient use of time. It takes me weeks to grasp what a five-year-old child could pick up without even trying. This isn’t true of anything else I do in my spare time, like gardening or baking. I could crush a five-year-old’s learning curve in both of those things.

When trying to speak a foreign language I am always catapulting myself out of a frying pan and into a fire. Last year, in Mexico, for instance, someone asked why I wasn’t speaking Spanish and I replied, “Because I’m afraid I will accidentally be rude”—except what I actually said was “Because I’m afraid I will accidentally become horny.”

COFFEE HEART

Some call it tachycardia. The New York Times named it “coffee heart” in a 1905 article with the fantastic title of “SMALL BOY HAS ‘COFFEE HEART'” and the subtitle “Child of Eight Is in City Hospital Slowly Regaining Health. HEART BEATS TOO FAST. Muscle Was Wearing itself Out — Drank a Dozen Cups a Day.”

The article is about an eight-year-old named Johnnie Murphy, whose heart was apparently beating at “twice the normal rate” after its owner got into the habit of drinking nine to twelve cups per day. A suspiciously timed mention of the coffee substitute Postum at the end of the article raises the likelihood that the whole thing is sponcon, though there’s no way to be sure. Read More

Map of Richard Kandt’s expedition to find the source of the Nile, from Caput Nili. Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I was born on the banks of the Rukarara, but I have no memory of it. My memories come from my mother.

The Rukarara flows in my imagination and my dreams. I was just a few months old when my family left its shores. My father’s job required our relocation to Magi, a village at the top of a tall, steep incline that overlooks another river, the Akanyaru. Beyond the Akanyaru is Burundi. For us to go down to the river was out of the question. Mama forbade her children to climb down the hill, even the intrepid boys, for fear of seeing us tumble to the bottom, where crocodiles and hippopotami crouched in the papyrus, waiting to devour us—not to mention, she added, the Burundian outlaws who lurked in the swamps along the banks, ready to spirit children away in their canoes and sell them to the Senegalese, who traded in human blood. For me, as for my brothers and sisters, the Akanyaru remained an inaccessible stream visible far below, like a long serpent amid the papyrus that barred our access to the unknown world stretching beyond the horizon—a world in which other rivers surely flowed, other rivers that I swore to myself I’d explore someday. Read More