I'm still pretending. When I was in second and third grade I had a crush on Elaine and Evan. Elaine didn't like me. A popular kid with curled puffy hair. Our school's adults separated the boys from the girls, keeping us socializing outside of one another. Heteronormative watchtowers. Evan, however, was available to me.
My parents would arrange play dates where we’d disappear upstairs to his bedroom and pretend we were a married couple. I’d put pairs of socks where my breasts would be and we’d remove our clothes in a kind of striptease. We’d kiss in a kind of cartoonish peck on the lips sort of way. Evan had bunk beds, but I can’t recall if he had a younger or older sibling. We would always sit on the top bunk, pretending we were space explorers, the last of our planet. One afternoon while we were playing around, I fell out of the bed, getting stuck between the wall and the mattress, my little arms holding me up.
I’m not sure why we didn’t lock the door. Maybe, we just didn’t know any better. I never got aroused, I don’t think Evan did either. Our bodies just weren’t made for that yet. We were too dumb for real fondling. I started to squirm and freak out. Evan quickly got down and tried to lift me up, then failing to pull me down. When Evan’s parents popped in, I didn’t have any pants on. I can’t recall getting yelled at, maybe I blocked it out. We never hung out again. I do remember my mother sitting in the kitchen on the long cord of a yellow rotary phone. I was never punished, it was never talked about.
I didn’t kiss another person until I was 18 years old, near the tail end of high school. Over the years, I’ve had a difficult relationship to love. I assume that most of us have. I can’t really recall what I thought it was as a kid. It seemed important; it was said all the time. I’d say it to my parents and my grandparents and my brother, but I didn’t know what it meant to say it to someone else. I wanted to though, and I remember asking my parents to pretend that Elaine was coming over on Friday nights. We would cuddle on the couch, watching old Saturday Night Live 70s reruns. There is this closeness I wanted but what it was I didn’t know. There must have been some understanding that my heartbeat wasn’t supposed to be lonely. I just wanted to sync up with people, to hold on.
And this, this has never gone away, always in my system. I’ve put a lot on the line for lovers, for something that wouldn’t just hold over as an abstraction. In some ways, love has represented a similar space to that of God for me while I was younger. A practical holdover from my Roman Catholic roots, this belief in ‘love forever after’, a Beatles track on repeat. I have waited an absurd amount of time trying to wish someone to come to me, to come back to me. I couldn’t work as a person. My desire was for something that couldn’t reasonably exist. As it grew, my paranoia would increase, that I would lose the person in question, that I would not be able to hold together the cool human I was attempting to be.
I'm just made of extremes. I go one way, pivot and go the other. Traditional monogamous love has never been a source of stability for me. I fall head over heels and then I eat at myself trying to hold on. I didn't love or trust myself. I was never a true believer. The hand I dealt was always just a night here or there. A couple months here or there. I loved the drama for a long time. Center of attention, always playing the game. Just couldn't get enough. In the last couple years I don't think I've gone more than a few weeks without being in a new bed. Even though, I was an ardent atheist for many years and now a chaos magick practitioner, the religious blowback of my action still sat with me.
It's not sex addiction, it's compulsion. What I thought was an error has turned out to be just a path. I'm not a monogamous person. All those years, hating the shit out myself, being inundated by the Spectacle, and bathing in darkness didn't turn me into a very self-loving kind of person. In some ways, I think it was the danger of the heart. Once I gave up on trying to find this all-encompassing thing, my feelings freed up. It was a very reincarnate feeling.
I love that sense of being filled up with positive emotion, filling up others, taking a small part in the way someone's eyes catch mine, the pushing back and forth of one another in conversation, that little distance we all achieve out of a sense of disunity, of unity. Stay here, stay there, keep going, run, slow down.
In the encounter, I marvel that I have found someone who, by successive touches, each one successful, unfailing, completes the painting of my hallucination; I am like a gambler whose luck cannot fail, so that his hand unfailingly lands on the little piece which immediately completes the puzzle of his desire. This is gradual discovery (and a kind of verification) of affinities, complicities, and intimacies which I shall (I imagine) eternally sustain with the other, who is thereby becoming 'my other': I am totally given over to this discovery (I tremble within it), to the point where any intense curiosity for someone encountered is more or less equivalent to love. -Roland Barthes from "A Lover’s Discourse"
I'm seeing different people in the eyes of my lovers. It's either the sheer number, or as I keep thinking, something else, a touch of the beyond, where I can visit the past lives, the past energies and desires that seem to be impacted there. The eyes are so dense with the pressure of ghosts. As I drift into this intimate gesture, the distance fades outside of me. I wash away your knowledge of self and it washes me. I've left little pieces of myself with each stranger.
Being non-monogamous now, I don't have to lie. I don't have to be careful on how I talk about my availability. In monogamy, I was never much of a cheat, because I was so afraid to be alone, to have love vanish. And now, outside of that, being honest, showcasing who I am and what I want out of this world, it's easier. My heart doesn't hurt as much. It still yearns for something, some curious human that might just be down to fight in the trenches of the future.
There are trenches where I dream of us Earthlings putting our energy into caring for each other, feeding, clothing, creating a positive sexuality where there is no repercussive diseases, where we do get off the planet and explore the Universe. A space where we are not so afraid of expressing our bodies with one another. I'm not talking about some kind of crazy utopia, just a safe arena where it's okay for us to be sexual.
It's a hard space to imagine, being that we have so many terrible fuckers out there. In a lot ways, I think what I'm calling for is a new minority: less shitty white dudes. I am a white dude, but when it comes to the identification rounds, I don't think of myself as straight or gay or bi or any such thing. I like the mystery of whomever is right in front of me. I don't like being anything I am really. It's just capital, the way the Spectacle careened in and bought us all out for another generation, like the one before. It's just a fucking mess, where I wish I didn't have a face, where my face is wrought with misunderstanding.
I just want to sleep with everyone. Being open to all the pleasures of the body frees up a terabyte of storage space and functional control. Once I knock back the biological subroutines I realize how badly I just want to join up the intimacy of everyone. Every person that I see I imagine hearing them release in my ear, in my mouth, on my face. I think of that glistening bit of emotion when the strings snap off. As a kid I would imagine millions of hands sliding delicately across my body, rough hands, cold, hot, wet, along that thin layer of skin. I would imagine cuddling with all of my classmates. I still want it all, this strange intersecting of the two. I want to be so close with everyone, to hold their hands when the days are good or when the bottom drops out. I think often of the heat that travels hot down my throat when you cum. I look at your shoulder blades and all the work they do holding you up when your elbows are pressed into the bed. I worry that I'm not present because of all these ideas running through me, this orgasm, this love, this trick of the Earth.
We have these little buttons that do any/everything. If I want everyone shouldn't you too? Shouldn't everyone experience all of us? I want names and tics.What have you found on your sexual journey? What circumstances transfered into your grace? Is this impossible? Has the spectacle broken our autonomy to a point where we can't fuck anymore? And then I think of death in relation to this, and how this real intimate moment keeps me alive. It allows me to be beyond living, it's the breakneck of an afterlife. Intimacy is the key to revolutionary action. Once we conquer the Spectacle, once we free ourselves to some kind of spiritual autonomy, some kind of new consciousness, it'll be our intimacy that gives us the path.
I look at the sigil and how it fights to break our subconscious biology. The beauty of it, the way it snaps along the mind in that moment of death, extinction, an orgasm, pulling down the centuries of the body along the curve of the spine. Deep behind that tissue there is a long line of sight that spools itself. The sharp knife along the hairs of your arms. I'm so slow that when I think of the pressure in my gut, the rise of air in my lungs and my heart burning until it exits my throat in speech of flame.
I'm 32. I've got maybe 30 years left, if, of course, we all don't fucking drown here in New York City. So, what do you do? I dream of a better place, a better situation for my friends. I dream of a world where we can be anything we want. I dream of that in between space of gender, where I'm not a man or a woman or anything. I'm not trans. I don't want to speak for people for whom I'm only an ally, but I often think of how refreshing our lives could be if we weren't so stuck with our default gender.
What if we could wake up as something else? I’m thinking of being able to modify your sex, giving yourself more organs, a person without gender, with a combination of male and female physiology to the point that those terms could be retired. What if we could be something that was completely different? We could design a body with different types of orgasmic features, a series of clitoris’ with a pattern of penises that run through a series of nerve endings? We could create a level and layer of gnosis that would blow the world apart, right?
When you consider transexuality, cross-dressing, cosmetic surgery, piercing and tattooing, they are all calculated impulses – a symptomatic groping towards a next phase. One of the great things about human beings is that they impulsively and intuitively express what is inevitably next in the evolution of culture and our species. It is the Other that we are destined to become. Pandrogeny is not about defining differences but about creating similarities. Not about separation but about unification and resolution. - Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
In some ways, I'm really fucking angry. All these conservative sexualities you run into. Whether it's the friend groups that gossip, whether it's the intensity that someone wants from you or just how hard it is to make an evening not carry repercussions. Why can't we go home with someone and really enjoy ourselves without feeling like shit. This ‘walk of shame’, or this ‘slut’ or any of this language. I mean, it's not like it hasn't been said before, but I guess when I say it sounds like I've wanted to say it for a long time. I guess that's what anger is, finally allowing yourself to feel a touch of that rage that says, 'No, you can't do this anymore.' This fucking goddamn rape culture. Why are we so full of Neanderthals? All these years growing up with people who have had so much shit thrown at them. I can't take a shower in the boys locker room, cause they point at my penis and throw shit at me and call me ‘faggot’. Most of them just wanted to fuck me. Growing up and being so afraid to speak.
I remember being terrified as my friend Joey pulled down his 3 year old sister’s undergarments to reveal that she did not have a penis. We were all of 7 years old. Joey laughed and laughed until his mother came in and scolded him. The sister, Samantha, cried, confused, too young to know what’s going on, but old enough to know that this was bad. I never got yelled at for that. I was scared, this terrible thing happening in front of me that didn’t totally register. It wasn't too much earlier that my father had told me that if anyone touched me and I felt uncomfortable to tell him. I knew that's what was happening. I started to cry and felt sick to my stomach. I don't remember seeing him much after that. I don't know what happened to them. Joey and Samantha. You have to start to wonder how screwed up you’ve been over all these years. Whether it's the awful transgressions of dumb people or the ongoing church rhetoric, or capital’s heavy fucking hammer, I can't figure out what I'd want to be.
It's raining outside again. I live on a pretty busy street and the semis go down along the veins of the city all night long. Little blood cells pushing along the road. I dream now of going out and meeting someone on the street. Letting them take me away from this place for a few hours, somewhere they want to devour me. I want someone to give me their best dress and their best make-up and court me on Madison Avenue. I want to blow the cute homeless guy at the end of the block playing guitar at the gas station. When I get on the bus, I look at the bus driver and I wonder how long it's been since he did anything with anyone. I look at the older people sitting with their canes and shopping bags on the train and want to kiss them and dip my head into their shoulder.
I'm always morphing into someone else. I'm haunted by people and all their touch, the super pleasure and complicated intense beams of confrontation. It's hard to confront each other, but I want that, I want real people. I've slept with hundreds of real people with lives and mothers and fathers and death and sickness and heartache. I've slept with the most beautiful and wondrous failures and all of this like mannequin parts, switching them out. You take this an add this, remove this, rearrange this. Sometimes I delete my lovers phone numbers. This way when they contact me, I can just show up to whatever situation is there. Whoever it is, all my heart on the line again for one final push.
This is my out. I'm fucking done with your arch conservative spectacular bullshit. No longer will I love with the chains of history. I will love each person I choose as they will love me. The most abstract love I’ve ever had was with an online chat partner. We met on AIM in 1999, when you could join small chat groups via the University Network. We ended up talking on and off for the next 8 years. We never met, we never saw a picture of one another. It was just our voices, having phone sex for hours into the early morning hours. Voices that seemed in-between a self. I could never tell what they were. Sometimes they would have a cock and fuck me, sometimes a pussy, sometimes a combination of both. We’d talk about the wish for different ways to explore our intimacy. I remember imagining my body splitting into multiple segments, long stringy nerves, electricity pulsing into the ground. We’d pretend that we were slowly spilling into one another when we came, like our orgasm would cover our whole bodies. We would pretend that we were having sex as a cloud evaporated into the sun.
