Desire

“Some Histories will say it was a carnival that day. But it was a Rebellion.”
— Confessions of the Fox

Watching friends go through their pre-TIFF preparations feels, to me, not unlike seeing children shopping for back-to-school: a semi-solid, semi-sweet chocolate nostalgia. “I used to do that.” I wake up early on chilly mornings now, brew my coffee and watch the moonset. After a July where the whole world seemed to be trembling on the peak, sun-baked and sweaty in an eternal moment of anticipation, the tumble down the mountainside is gaining strength and speed, now. Faster and faster. It’ll be dark before you know it.

Confessions of the Fox

I went to Flying Books and I bought Confessions of the Fox and it ruined my life.

First it ruined my life in a very direct way — a very, fuckkkkk, this is a better way to do it; this is maybe the perfect way to do it — re: my own narrative strategies in my own novel, which sure, I could rewrite entirely, based on Jordy Rosenberg’s example, but I ain’t gonna. Better to let the chips fall; play the hand I’ve dealt myself and hope for the best.

(I suspect now that this is either true of all writers, or is going to be perenially true of me: the thing where whatever mode you are writing in, every other piece you encounter in that mode is an example, against which you weigh yourself, Osiris’ scale played out in every television episode, every novel, every comic, every film. It sure makes watching Apple TV+ fun, lemme tellya!)

Good news: I got over it, because by the end of Confessions of the Fox, I was pretty clear on the fact that I could never write anything like it, and also that it’s maybe the best book I’ve ever read.

Confessions of the Fox queers the life story of Jack Sheppard, queers it in a world that sits (largely) prior to the premise of queerness as we understand it, and certainly prior to the word (and words) we use for it, which is a great part of its fun. Endless annotations of 18th-century vernacular slang — Rosenberg, among other things, is a professor of 18th-century literature — even as those annotations give way to something else. I won’t ruin it for you, but wow, I mean, wow.

It is language to which I consistently return in my own thinking about my own queerness; language that failed me when I needed it most; and yet language that I am trying to use now (yes, even literally right now, you are reading this aren’t you?) to describe my way out of the cell I put myself in. I suppose I didn’t have to put myself there, all those decades ago; I suppose there was, even then, a space beyond all of that failed language — Jack and Bess, in Confessions, might call it a somethingness — that I could always sense, and might have simply claimed for my own, wordlessly. Except that without words to describe it, and with the weight of other words that did describe things, things that I did not (through either fear or revulsion, or a simple dislike of inaccuracy) want to claim, I couldn’t bring myself to do it, until now.

And even now, I am doing it — using pronouns and names and words to try to tell people who I am — and it is all so rude, so crude, so rudimentary a thing, a tiny little set of objects sitting in open palms with a half-hearted shrug of, “uh, does this make sense?”, and nothing like that wordless space that had always been there, not really.

Let me put it to you another way: last night I had a dream I was filming something with Ncuti Gatwa, who was in costume as the Doctor, though it’s unclear if we were filming Doctor Who which would mean I was in an episode of Doctor Who, like holy shit, was I the companion?? But I digress, we were on a playground in Sheffield or Horsham or some such grey-heavened place, clinging to the monkey-bars together, and we were very close, bundled up beside one another, and I was telling him that he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, and he was smiling at me with those gigantic brown eyes, and I could feel his sweat and the heat of him, and smell that smell of him, the one that is so wonderful it is legendary.

And if I could tell you what that smell smelled like, language would be useful to me.

Get it?

Desire’s ungovernability

Exploring — that sounds stupid, I am not in an Amblin movie from 1986 — better understanding one’s gender identity does not, of course, need to intersect with one’s understanding of sexual or romantic desire. In my various coming-out conversations in June and July, desire came up only occasionally, and always haphazardly — “does [being bigender] mean you’re attracted to…?” — forever the dangling non-question at the end of the sentence, perhaps in deference to language’s inherent failings once again. When the hets (look at me! “the hets!!”) run off the end of the runway of words they can use to describe things, you are certainly and fully in the proper, ungovernable wilderness beyond, the jungle reeking and cawing as the dawn burns the night mists off the tree canopy.

My answer to the haphazard question of desire re: gender was always to leave the jungle immediately and emit a tight-lipped, eyes-down “it’s not about that” — for my sins, I am effectively eight years old again, having these conversations — but as the summer has worn on I’ve realized, it’s not not about that. I was quipping about it on TikTok last week — “I don’t know if I want to fuck you or be you” — calling back to Andrea Long Chu reminiscing about her early crushes in n+1, which I’d read the week before that; and it’s all part of the same thing, (Chu again), the need to legitimize all of this queerness by means more scientific than their inherently simple, inherently human idea: I want that. I want to be like that. Which, in a rational, sophisticated and evolved civilization, would not be a premise that causes any single person a level of concern. Would not need to run aground on the broken-rock shores of the words we’ve made up for things, as a means of proving our existence to people, defining the undefinable for the sake of conversational nuance. This is real, I need this, I give it X name and therefore it is really a real thing that really happens to real people like really me. It all just feels like pleading.

But I am off on a tangent. I was thinking about desire. I have understood myself as queer long before I began to better understand the nuances of my gender, and I might have thought them separate issues, except that I must admit, now, the missing pieces certainly clear up some of the seeming prior confusions. And also, desire is out here now, and she is thirsty.

Here’s a funny thing. At various points in the past few years, when one or another partnered pal (it’s always the partnered pals) asked me why it’s so difficult for me to date — other than all the obvious reasons — and asked me what sort of woman I was attracted to, I began to answer: “lesbians.” And they’d laugh and cajole and be like, “oh, you!,” or sometimes get a very worried look on their face like they were concerned that I genuinely didn’t know that lesbians, as a general (though not exclusive) principle, tend not to be attracted to cis-male-presenting people with beards.

My saying that was quippy and facile; but then, so was “imagine Thor, crossed with an 11-year-old girl,” and look how that turned out. I guess I quip my way backwards into observable reality, sometimes, shame-faced little goblin that I am.

The thing is: desire is not required to be achievable to be real. If it were, that would be simple. Desire is the thing that is calling, not the map of how to get there. Thinking it so is the burden of language again; science and math insinuating itself — “one plus one equals fuck” — into something inherently ungovernable.

My ungovernable something, to slam premises together, certainly isn’t in one of the drop-downs on the dating apps. That’s all. I can tell you generally (though not exclusively) that I am attracted to femme-presenting people (whether cis, non-binary, or trans), along with anyone who reads as beautifully androgynous; and I feel like queer people offer my only real shot at anything real and fulfilling on an emotional level, if any such thing is out there for me at all. So if you were to use the language / science / math of it all, yeah, you might end up with “lesbian” as the one plus one equals fuck of it, but the entire rubric by which you arrived at that solution is faulty. “That math ain’t mathin’, boo!” hence the stricken looks on my interlocutors’ faces; but the math has failed them, not me. I’m just in the wordless space, feeling the trees, learning as I’m going.

Pageboy

My friend Becca gave me Elliot Page’s memoir and it ruined my life. Stupid books, always ruining my life! I was langorous with Confessions of the Fox, savouring every page; Pageboy, I shot through compulsively. Though structured like memory — i.e. non-linearly and with great attention paid to emotional, not chronological, arc — the memoir reads like a beach thriller, at least to me. I think, had I not known the ending already (that Page did, eventually, claim his identity and begin living a happier, fuller life), the story of how he got there might have been in its own way unbearable. I was astonished by how raw it all was; how much pain Page was able to process and communicate to the reader. Thank goodness he’s on the cover as his out self; it’s an image I kept flipping back to while reading, whenever I became overwhelmed and needed reassurance that things could, in fact, turn out okay.

Now I’m thinking about I Saw The TV Glow, another of this summer’s terror-reads (at least for me); and in that one, we don’t know the ending. The film never tells us; we are left only with (the second time I saw it) the hope that Owen will heed Maddy’s chalk-on-asphalt exhortation — “There Is Still Time” — or (the first time I saw it) the dread that Owen is just trapped like this forever. Emily St. James wrote about how the film’s ending was inherently hopeful, and perhaps to an out trans person it is, but to me in that first viewing — perhaps wanting to cling to science, to math, to language! — the ambiguity left me crushingly sad.

I’m off on a tangent again. I was thinking about desire. It’s possible that all of these layers of unpacking, of wrestling and reckoning with self, are in my way; that I don’t yet have the trust in the wild ungovernable country — the wordless space. It’s the realm of the endless, and it’s calling out to me louder and louder every morning now, when I wake up and watch the moonset.

I wasn’t a very mathy kid, but I was always practical. When the pandemic was (still is) in full swing and a long era of my life was simultaneously in the process of ending, the destabilization of it all made me feel like I was falling; at some point I scribbled out in my journal, “you’re not falling, you’re landing.” I have that feeling again now.

Something — my something — woke up once I started clearing away all the wreckage of who I was and was not inside; my own, detonated world. Maybe this is why the girls in my novels are both so often picking their way across wasted, ruined landscapes; places where people used to live, but which are now irrevocably smashed. I’m still there, in those places, I think. Scavenging. But something — my something — is becoming clearer, beyond the further reaches of the sand. Mirage? Oasis? Does it matter, if it pulls me forward?