David Clemens, Part 2

On not being touched

Read Part 1. TW for gender dysphoria, mental illness, BDSM

I’ve got to be careful.

This whole DAVID exercise could easily become a chronicling of the men I want to be, or am supposed to want to be, and that’s really not what I’m trying to do here (that’s what my Twitter’s for). What I’m trying to do is write about (my) gender by writing about other people, specifically other Davids. Aspiration is another way of saying fantasy, which means that while it’s often worth exploring, it’s never the whole story, and certainly not the beginning of that story.

I would like to do this honestly, and if I’m honest, my gender, such as it is, is often best understood as a masculinity that doesn’t…quite…work (though I’ve never identified as masculine, butch, or male. Go figure). As I wrote in Part 1, I saw myself first, and perhaps most clearly, in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, but I didn’t get around to reading that until my mid-twenties. Where did I see myself before then?

My earliest memories of identification are from before I knew I was a girl, or at least before I bought it as the party line. In the early nineties, I thought I was Alvin the Chipmunk or Michelangelo the teenage mutant ninja turtle or Hanna Barbera’s Ricochet Rabbit, a cartoon Lagomorpha with FTM energy if there ever was one.

I didn’t think I was a girl. But at some point during childhood, I learned to distrust my instincts. I stopped fighting the dresses and the curling irons and the way adults talked about and handled my body. I took crib notes on womanhood, studying my mom like a petri dish. If she did something—drank aloe vera juice, rode a bike, dated men who didn’t like her—then I would do it, too, I decided, because my mom was the best, most beautiful girl in the world. All I had to do was copy her and I could be a girl, too. She became an aspiration. Obviously, that didn’t work out.

What do you do when you don’t exist? You go in search of reference points. You hunt for clues. You cling to almosts and sort-ofs and good-enoughs. You take things that don’t belong to you and appropriate them for your own ends. You identify with people and sensibilities that aren’t really for you, making them your own through sheer force of will.

The first trans person I ever dated had an obsession with Daniel Craig that verged on the erotic. He was never sexually attracted to men, my ex told me, but he also described his feelings about Craig as BUFU—“be you, fuck you” (an acronym I wrote about for Leste a few years ago). I never heard him talk about a woman with the passion he reserved for the most potato-like of the Bond clones. A popsicle-maker by trade (I know), my ex even tried to make a silicone cast of Craig’s head, I suppose for the niche market of people who want their frozen desserts to look like Yukon Gold butt plugs.

One of my working definitions of gender is that it’s the word for the people you want to look like, to be like, to be understood as. By this definition, gender is as much about how you fail to conform as it is about how you succeed in conforming. It’s tempting to designate failure as the trans experience of gender, but let’s not forget that no cissexual grows up to be Superman or Wonder Woman or the person they once thought their Mommy or Daddy to be. The recent popularity of gender reveals is transphobic from stem to stern, but it’s not like they’re good news for cis people either; I wish more of you understood how dehumanizing it is to be reduced to pink or blue powder before you even draw your first breath.

If I’m not careful, if I’m not honest—with you and with me—DAVID could easily wind up a collection of Sexy or Impressive or Very Masculine Davids, a hall of mirrors I’ll never so much as set foot in. That’s why, for every statue and screen star in this series, there is an abuser or a failure or something worse. Of course, there’s no David binary, either—there are no good Davids that haven’t been bad, and no beauties whose humanity is above being called into question.

This entry in the DAVID project was originally about David Bowman, the spaceman who gets into a battle of wits and wills with a robot named HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both the book and the film were formative for me, as they may have been for you—I know it’s 🌽 as hell, but in all earnestness, the scene where the bad chimp suits discover tools to the soaring strains and stirring thunder of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” gets me every time.

But I can’t say I find David Bowman, the shiny, beautiful, emotionless astronaut, to be all that resonant in terms of my own gender. He’s too empty, and honestly, probably too heroic. Though I’d settled on him for this post a week ago, I found myself writing in circles, searching in vain for a point of entry.

As I was googling around about Keir Dullea, the ice-eyed blond who plays David Bowman (or Dave, as HAL calls the man who challenges this AI for most monotone breakout of 20th c. cinema), I came across a movie called David and Lisa (1962), in which Dullea plays another character named David. This David is a teenage boy with a mental illness that makes him unable to tolerate being touched by other people.

It was almost too perfect.

David and Lisa begins when David’s mother brings him to an expensive boarding school for mentally disturbed children. Think of David and Lisa as a co-ed, somewhat de-institutionalized Girl, Interrupted, with the naïveté of Rebel Without a Cause. The school looks like the one from The Children’s Hour, a cheerful Victorian oasis where the teachers dispense with honorifics, and where no one is yelled at or abused or shocked and locked away. This isn’t One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

The first time we’re shown how strongly David’s illness affects him is when another student inadvertently puts a hand on his arm.

“You fool! You touched me!” David shrieks. “You wanna kill me?”

Dullea plays this David as the inverse of 2001’s Dave—he’s hysterical, frantic, with a high-pitched voice. His hair is schoolboy shellacked, not military spare. He does not appear to have eyebrows. Despite the strength of his features, he seems embryonic, raw as an as-yet un-myelinated nerve—undone, underdone

“Touch can kill!” David screams at his exasperated mother, a trim, well-dressed lady in a pillbox hat. She shushes him, telling him he knows this isn’t true. She goes on to tell the school director, unprompted, that David was never struck as a child. “This was not our fault,” she insists.

But just who is at fault here? What has made David the untouchable boy? There’s his obvious need for control in a wildly spinning world, stemming from a fairly straightforward fear of death. There’s the tension between David and his parents—his mom in particular—and his rage at their phoniness, their superficiality, their cold-blooded bourgeois values. Most interesting to me is George Georgina, a circus performer with a beard and breasts whose body frightened David as a child. “The idea of someone so non-binary, so unclassifiable, jostled David’s belief in a world of absolutes,” writes Steven Mears for TCM.

David and Lisa gives us enough clues to more or less explain most of David’s OCD behaviors, except the most dramatic one: his aversion to touch. “A touch can kill!” he insists, but the basis of this fear, or even a logical framework for it—A phobia of germs? Past violence? Something else?—is never supplied. The separation of cause and effect disturbs other binaries, that of sick and well, broken and healed, normal and not.

The eponymous Lisa is another student whose illness also goes undiagnosed, but who appears to have what was once referred to as a split personality: Sometimes she is Lisa, a childlike teenager who only speaks in rhyme, and sometimes she is Muriel, who does not speak at all.

When David arrives at the school, he and Lisa are interested in each other right away. Soon, she approaches him with a sign she has made: “Play wit me.” David corrects her spelling and frankly critiques her hair, oblivious to her message, missing the forest for the trees.

Still, they gradually become friends. Using her own rhyming language, David teaches Lisa not to touch him. A precocious student of psychiatry, he attempts to diagnose her, and gives the staff advice on how to better interact with her. They play together. “You’re a pearl of a girl,” he tells her, and they smile at each other over the branches of a tree.

But there are moments of tension, too. One day, Lisa approaches him with her hand extended.

“No touching!” David screams, forgetting to speak her rhyming language, eyes locked on her finger, tense and ready to penetrate. He backs away and she pursues. He finally stops, obviously distressed, but instead of running or fighting, he simply watches her get closer.

It’s hard not to pick up on the eros in this moment (“Desire is lack”). Though David is afraid, he does not panic, and after a few long, testing seconds, Lisa retracts her finger; David is safe. Unlike his teachers and his parents, who don’t want to upset him out of kindness as much as a fear of the rage that touch elicits from him, Lisa is choosing to engage with David. She is not afraid of him. She is showing him his resilience. The face-off ends with David untouched, and their friendship resumes.

Watching them, I was reminded of a scene that I did with a dear friend in Oakland last year. I had forgotten to bring my mask to her apartment, so she vetwrapped my head, an easy shortcut to the muffled blur of sensory deprivation. She was paddling my ass while I knelt, an activity that can be very emotional for me, especially when it is done by someone I’m close to.

When you can’t see or smell; when you can only breathe a little through your mouth, which forces your heart-rate to slow down; when the impact is happening down low on your body—as opposed to higher up, near your precious head and throat and heart, so that you’re free from the fear of death and can focus on sensation, examining your reaction to every thud (Notice… goes my mind, like a therapist); when you are sinking down into dark unmemory and slow perception, as if your eyes are traveling backward in your head and your body elongating into another room; when you are fighting instinct and embracing inevitability at the same time; when you are doing the things you do, involuntarily, in response to pain, and having a little joke at your own expense, Look at how weak I am, and yet I’m not dead!; when you are trying to cry but fear what it will open, you can sometimes return somewhere you haven’t been in decades—but this time, with her fingers around the nape of your neck, acrylics sparkling against your skin, someone is there to hold you in place. Someone is showing you that death is elsewhere, that touch can be as safe as it is dangerous. Someone is showing you that you can survive.

David and Lisa, Mears goes on, “resists every invitation to bathos, refusing to ennoble the afflicted pair or present their association as curative.” If there’s no binary of sick and well, sane and crazy, then there’s no path back to normal, a state that David vociferously rejects rejects anyway. (“If you’re normal,” he screams at a man who assaults Lisa out in the real world, beyond the bounds of their school, “then who wants to be normal?”)

It’s possible to adapt your intimacy to a shattered world—one in which you have, in essence, always failed—and to your great terror and relief, there’s no other way than to do it together.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.