The one time I had an opportunity to meet Martin Amis, I ended up taking heroin instead. I’m not especially proud of this fact, it was a kind of accident, but also perhaps a lucky swerve from the more difficult experience of having to have dinner with Mr. Amis himself. It was the very late nineties and I was teaching undergraduate courses in creative writing and literature at the University of East Anglia. The university was, and still is, famous for having nurtured the talents of a generation of British writers—think Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro—and the department regularly hosted dinners for the writers who came down from London to give talks and public lectures.

I was working, largely, in a world of men, most of whom were privileged white men. Although there were some female academics in the department, the main tutors in the writing department at that time were men, the writers who came to speak were mostly male, and the grand fromage of the whole department had developed something of a bad reputation with the ladies. It was the poisoned duckpond of the late twentieth century. And yet, it was the water in which I was swimming, and it’s hard to atomize the water while you’re trying to stay afloat.

I was nervous about the dinner with Amis. What could I say to the self-styled bad boy of English letters, with whom so many of my male contemporaries were enamored? I was ambivalent about his lugubrious prose, and his caricatures of women and the working classes, and although I approved of his scathing critiques of capitalism, I was much less convinced by his worldview, and all the stories about his teeth and his sexual conquests. There was something cynical and self-serving about his work, and he depicted a world in which women were largely sexualized adjuncts to the male ego, or mysterious cyphers never to be fully understood. His work, and the cultural response to it, seemed to embody Simone de Beauvoir’s observation that “representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.” Read More

Like many other queer writers and activists of his generation, Lou Sullivan lived a painfully short life: he died in 1991, at the age of thirty-nine, from complications related to AIDS. But he left behind a wealth of material, thirty years of diaries chronicling, in joyous detail, his emerging sense of self, his relationships, and his daily triumphs. As arguably the first publicly gay trans man to medically transition, Sullivan found himself walking a path few had previously trodden. Without models for how to live, he found his own way, refusing to compromise his identity, working tirelessly to help others, and all the while keeping careful note of his day-to-day. Sullivan never realized his dream of publishing his diaries, but We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961–1991, published last month by Nightboat Books, finally brings Sullivan’s writing to a wider audience. An excerpt appears below.

Image from the Louis Graydon Sullivan papers, courtesy of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

Yesterday T + I rode our bikes through GG Park, he was leading me through hidden path + trails. Found a secluded spot + laid in the grass. Told me he wished he could introduce me to his family + be open with them about us, but he knew he never could, that he has always strived to be what they expected him to be, especially his ma. He said he felt that way even if I were a normal man + we were together, so I don’t feel too bad.

Then he asks me if I have any problems with our relationship + I said yes: I wish he’d turn off the iron by the switch instead of just pulling out the cord (telling him in that way how content I am). He pressed me further + then said I never tell him how I feel about him! I couldn’t believe it, and so tried my best to express to him how much he means to me. Read More

Marguerite Duras.

My mother had green eyes. Black hair. Her name was Marie Augustine Adeline Legrand. She was born a peasant, daughter of farmers, near Dunkirk. She had one sister and seven brothers. She went to teachers college, on a scholarship, and she taught in Dunkirk. The day after an inspection, the inspector who had visited her class asked for her hand in marriage. Love at first sight. They got married and left for Indochina. Between 1900 and 1903. A sort of commitment, adventure, a sort of desire, too, not for fortune but for success. They left like heroes, pioneers, they visited the schools in oxcarts, they brought everything, quills, paper, ink. They had succumbed to the posters of the era urging, as if they were soldiers: “Enlist.”

She was beautiful, my mother, she was very charming. Many men wanted her over the years, but as far as I know, nothing ever happened outside of her marriages. She was brilliant, and had an incredible way with words. I remember her being fought over at parties. She was one of a kind, very funny, often laughing, wholeheartedly. She was not coquettish, all she did was wash herself, she was always extremely clean. She had a sewing machine but she didn’t know what to have it make. I, too, until I was fourteen or fifteen, dressed like her, in sack dresses. When I started to become interested in men, I picked out my outfits more carefully. Then my mother had me sew incredible dresses, with frills, that made me look like a lampshade. I wore it all.

I’ve written so much about my mother. I can say that I owe her everything. In my everyday life, I don’t do anything that she didn’t do. For example, my way of cooking, of preparing a navarin of lamb, blanquettes. My love of ingredients, she had, too. I bore everyone at home with that. When there’s no extra bottle of oil on hand, it’s a problem. That’s normal. What’s abnormal is buying only one bottle of oil. What can you do with just one bottle of oil? What a disaster! What I’ve also inherited from my mother is fear, the fear of germs, along with the constant need to disinfect. This stems from my colonial childhood. Although my mother was very smart about practical things, she didn’t concern herself at all with the domestic realm. As if it didn’t exist. As if the house were a temporary thing, a waiting room. But the floors were washed every day. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone more clean than my mother. Read More

François Boucher, L’Odalisque Brune (cropped), 1743

The elevator doors opened onto a loft-like space throbbing with music. Organizers in T-shirts that read ASK ME ABOUT MY BUTTHOLE were setting up booths by the entrance, helping a strange panoply of performers prepare for the evening. A woman wearing all-but-invisible underwear sat on a perch while a companion covered her naked flesh with yellow paint. Another woman organized a kissing booth, dressed in a flesh-colored bodysuit and a pillowy hat shaped like a butt that covered her entire face. Her face cheeks became butt cheeks, her nose became an anus—she was a human butt.

The room was of a kind common in New York, where the walls are thick with layers of white paint applied slapdash over decades. It was the sort of room that could work for a wedding, or an art gallery, or, if someone nailed together some drywall partitions, a chiropractor’s office—a blank canvas that could become anything. On that sweaty evening in August, the room was transformed into an event called Butt-Con. Read More

© somemeans / Adobe Stock.

I’ve lived in a garage, a dormitory, a screened-in porch, and more than one basement. I’ve owned three houses. After my divorce and the divestiture of common property, I moved into a small second-floor apartment in a large complex of handsome brick buildings originally used as military family housing. Here, we have hardwood floors, tiny kitchens, big trees, lousy wiring.

Hardly anyone in the complex draws their curtains. I walk my dog in the evening, and behind the disguise of his slow rooting in the shrubbery, I get brief, cropped shots of other lives. A deer head with an impressive rack mounted on a wall painted navy blue. Two women at a dining table, heads close. A father drilling his kids in calisthenics, barking like a sergeant. A man practicing piano, the faint, rapid scales barely audible through the glass. A young couple, so unformed they seem to be made of putty, pushing a pair of Chihuahuas in a baby stroller down the walk. A dour woman sitting on the steps of the building where I get my mail, smoking. She refuses to move so I can enter; her profound distaste for the world seems immutable, genetic.

Below me, in #2, a couple approaches punk’s middle age: she has ropy dreadlocks, and he has a ropy beard, and both have a lot of ink. Through the windows, I can see the Tibetan prayer flags, the bicycles, the aquarium. Sometimes I hear hammering below, and their bulldog yaps every time I pass the door. In six years as neighbors, we have learned each other’s names and exchange occasional comments about the weather. Once I helped them jump their car battery, but I have never been in their apartment. When our basement storage units are broken into, I wake them up early in the morning with the news. It is a voyeur’s dream come true, the storage units open, spilling out contents: A dishwasher. Bicycles. An artificial Christmas tree. Dog crate. Old skis. An antique mirror. We pad around the mess in our pajamas, in our sudden, brief intimacy, sorting out what is theirs and what is mine. And what is mine to know. Read More

A cat running. Collotype after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887. Credit: Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons.

This morning—that morning, rather—two men in my train carriage lift their heads—two men in their fifties in silky, understated ties—then there is a little snap, like a red light camera going off, and even before the next stop gets announced they’re leaning into each other laughing, How long has it been? Must be forty years give or take. What’s been happening? They run through their classmates: two cancers (one in chemo, one cannot hack chemo), a property development fraud, one guy (just on the other side of a protracted settlement) with too many ex-wives (stupid bastard, he and them deserve each other). A pause. Please don’t tell me it’s all there is. Fraud, cancer, bad marriages, being caught, extricating yourself, chance encounters on trains; can you remember the last time life felt long or kind, or like it was yours and mine?

My phone vibrates, one time only for texts. “Make sure you don’t have scissors, nail files, anything sharp.” It’s Vanda. Thank you, Vanda.

Shhh.

In front of me is time. Time is not a river. It is two strangers on a train whose briefcases touch as they hold each other. Two men who’ll never ride the same train again. Read More