February 27, 2024 First Person My Friend Ellis By Geoffrey Mak Photograph by Ben Ross Davis. Twice in his life, Ellis made a contract with himself. He’d promised he would give himself five years and by the end of them, if he still wanted to kill himself, he would. Both times he’d made this contract, he still wanted to die at year five. But since, for a few months during each five-year span, he had a break from his compulsive ideations, he told himself it meant that the clock had reset and the contract was void. That, and he didn’t want to kill himself, not really. I met Ellis in New York when I was twenty-six. He was the soft-spoken cybergoth—black mesh top, bleached-blond hair shaved to a perennial buzz—who always danced by the speaker stacks at warehouse parties. The angles of his jaw and his heavy brow lent him a harsh beauty. He told me about his suicidal thoughts the first time we had dinner. We didn’t know each other well, really at all, so his pain alarmed me. “I’ve had them ever since I was young,” he added. “Me too,” I said. Read More
February 14, 2024 First Person My Year of Finance Boys By Daniel Lefferts Sg1959, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the hedge fund analyst knew me better than I knew myself. It was his job to predict distant developments, covert motives, hidden risks, and shortly into our brief relationship he turned his powers of divination on me. After I told him I was writing a novel about finance, he suggested that I’d been drawn to him partly for mercenary reasons: that I was, in a word, dating him for research. He took it in stride—he lived and breathed all things mercenary—but he did issue a polite warning. “Never put anything I tell you in writing,” he said. I’d like to think that, in his predictive genius, he also knew I would eventually ignore this warning. Read More
February 14, 2024 First Person Ash Wednesday By Sophie Haigney From “Longing,” Prabuddha Dasgupta. From the Spring 2012 Issue of The Review. I like the ashes on Ash Wednesday. I am at best a lapsed Catholic though it would be more accurate to say that I never really began, just that I was raised against the backdrop of already-faded-Catholicism and its associated traumas, now transmuted and passed on in their mysterious ways to me. I inherited also the pining and the predilection that many Americans have for certain things to do with Ireland. In San Francisco, I used to drink afternoons after I got off work at an Irish bar in Noe Valley, the Valley Tavern, or a different Irish bar downtown, the Chieftain, or sometimes come to think of it an Irish bar on Guerrero with big windows where my friend Graham and I used to like to watch the rain. San Francisco is a more Catholic city than most people think, and more Irish too. More Irish American, which is really what I am talking about: girls in red school uniforms and tennis shoes outside the Convent of the Sacred Heart, looking forward to football games Friday nights at St. Ignatius, the high school by the church where my feet were washed as a kid on Holy Thursday. The gold beads strewn on the street after St. Patrick’s Day parades, orange-and-green bumper stickers for a united Ireland overlaid with 49ers insignia. There are things like that everywhere, I know. But then there is the way the fog rolls in in the afternoon, bone-chillingly damp, and the washed-up light on the pink facades in the Richmond, the looming lonesome palm trees lining the meridians. And the illuminated signs for old-school strip clubs as you drive into North Beach and the Tenderloin—or the one I always liked that read JOEY’S ICE CREAM ESPRESSO SAUSAGE WASH AND DRY. Now I have lost the thread of religion. Really I am just watching the movie of my childhood again. I have a memory of dust motes floating around in a shaft of light and trying to catch them in my hands, one long afternoon, or maybe many afternoons, or never. It’s just an image. Read More
February 13, 2024 First Person Fun By Jeremy Atherton Lin Photo by Kelly from Pexels. When I was another boy, I was the boy next door. He was Jase, short for Jason: generic, but with a nickname just off enough to seem real. My lover—I call him Famous, which he is to me—became Jase’s best friend, Chris, a name that needs no explanation. Jase and Chris weren’t quite boyfriends, not like we were in real life, in which we worked very hard to be boyfriends. In real life, we had to stay below the radar of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. We had to figure out what domestic meant, as in home and as in argument. We were known to many for being adorable and codependent. IRL, we were gay. Because the way we were identified became an identity. Maybe that’s how it works, for me anyway: I don’t seek out identity but consider my position and articulate it like a mime feels their box. Online, I could shake it off altogether. Read More
February 6, 2024 First Person My Brush with Greatness By Laurie Stone Joan Collins in Drive Hard, Drive Fast (1973). Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It was 1990, and the man I loved had died. I was out all the time. I just couldn’t stay inside, and I was writing in a notebook in places where I could sit for a spell. A new shop opened on Broadway, a bakery that was also a café in the low eighties or maybe the seventies, on the east side of the street. You could sit there with a coffee and maybe—after God knows how long—you would also buy a muffin out of obligation and shame. The owner hated his customers because he’d created the wrong kind of flock in us. We were a band of deadbeat loners, off whom rose different kinds of sadness that united us into a force. The owner was a loud and theatrical gay man I also felt for because he may have been as lonely as we were, and he was trying to establish a business. I don’t remember if he had a boyfriend. I remember the startling freedom of his contempt for us—and by us, I don’t mean the customers who came and left in a timely fashion and didn’t turn his place into a campsite. He would thrash about, sighing and slamming down the cups he bussed after one of us moved on. It was theater. The boss staged his show, and we were the audience. Read More
January 22, 2024 First Person Young, Slender, Blond, Blue-Eyed By Édouard Louis From Interiors, Claudia Keep’s portfolio in issue no. 246 of The Paris Review. PHOTOGRAPH BY CARY WHITTIER, COURTESY OF CLAUDIA KEEP AND MARCH. I climbed the stairs two at a time. I no longer know what I was thinking about in that stairwell, I imagine I was counting the steps so as not to think of anything else. I arrived at the door, caught my breath and rang the bell. The man approached from the other side, I could hear him, I could make out his footsteps on the wooden floor. *** I’d first met him on the Internet just two hours earlier. He was the one who’d contacted me. He’d told me he liked boys like me, young, slender, blond, blue-eyed—the Aryan type, he’d insisted. He’d asked me to dress like a student and that’s what I’d done—at least his idea of a student—with an oversized hoodie I’d borrowed from Geoffroy and sky-blue trainers, my favorites, I’d done what he wanted because I was hoping he’d reward my efforts and pay me more than he’d promised. I waited. Read More