David Davis
As we always do on our nighttime walks through Bed-Stuy, last night Frankie and I discussed the way the pandemic has changed romantic relationships, especially the ones we have with people we aren’t podded with. Unless your idea of romance is long letters and a longer separation—chastity via viral domination, though I do my best not to conflate sex with the subjective experience of all that googly-eyed shit—it now comes at a steep premium.
Romance has been on my mind lately. Maybe it’s because I work in marketing, and so my Januaries are devoted to reinventing the wheel for Valentine’s Day gifting campaigns, which must be sexual yet platonic, bubbly yet not alienating for singletons. (It’s funny to me that this is the only “religious” holiday that we are allowed to invoke by name in the entire calendar year of corporate shilling.)
Or maybe it’s because I read Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby and Raven Leilani’s Luster back-to-back last month. Today’s novel of manners is inextricable from the sexual and racial politics of love and/or kinship, and these books about economically precarious women New Yorkers square-pegging the white nuclear family into their lives (or is it the other way around?) have inspired me to revisit romance as one of desire’s trickiest arenas. When the heart wants what it wants, like sex with an overgrown orangutan of a straight man, or a baby, whatever is a girl to do?
Or maybe it’s because I recently searched for “romantic” in my messages with S and rediscovered discussions of the following relationships: Ramsay Bolton and Reek from Game of Thrones, Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham from really any point in the Lecter saga, and Chip and Dory from Search Party. Lots of 😍 to be found.
Or maybe it’s simply because I’m a romantic, romantic being the rare old-school affinity to have seamlessly transitioned into queer 21st century culture’s mandate to uncouple what we know as romantic love from sex, which is popularly depicted on social media as kissing your friends on the mouth. I do not kiss my friends on the mouth, or only rarely. I don’t much go in for that kind of thing with most people, even those with whom I’m very close. Even with my sisters, we touch each other rarely and carefully, as if the other could be hot as a burner at any given moment. But I am romantic with my friends, and friendly with those that I woo. Looked at optimistically, pandemic has only forced me to be more creative in how I show and share those affections, with gifts and games and time spent on the phone. If you’ve never started a mutual aid project because you and a friend were bored and yet unable to spend much physical time together, I can’t recommend it enough!
The thing about romance is that I know it when I feel it, and yet I struggle to define it for myself, or even distinguish it from other kinds of love, affection, sexuality, and affect. What a funny, complex sensation! I love romantic movies, from rom-coms to romdrams, all the more so because undergirding the more accessible frisson of boy-meets-girl are layers of intimacy, yearning, dissatisfaction/unfulfillment, ache and want to experience; unsurprisingly, however romance manifests in this body’s lurid heart, it is best characterized by the mutual failure to get what we want.
Just as an example: Beneath the doomed romance of working boy Monty Clift and society girl Liz Taylor in 1951’s A Place in the Sun is the actors’ infamous, doomed friendship. An ally to gay people throughout her life (ally being the appropriate rather than flattening moniker here, as Liz was a gay icon who actually did stuff for gay people), Taylor is reported to have literally saved Clift’s by pulling his own teeth from his throat after a 1956 car crash began the “long suicide” that ended him a decade later.
Though there’s essentially a 0% chance of springtime precipitation in Beverly Hills (one of the towns demolished by climate change-fueled infernos in 2018), I imagine a tiara of water crowning the world’s most beautiful woman as she fished through her beloved’s blood for the breath-obstructing bones. Have I dreamed up this storm because I know they were shooting Raintree County at the time of Clift’s accident? Or does my subconscious conspire to tip the scales, weighted by the faceless, closeted man, with a hint of drama, back toward something just a little more bearable?
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.