When my girlfriend and I met last November, things were different.
Though I was recovering from top surgery, I was more or less maintaining monthly SM appointments with my rotation of sadists—femme Mommy, femme Daddy, Dr. Daddy, and my no-homo brofriend—plus the odd vanilla date. J had a fairly serious boyfriend, though their relationship was long-distance by that point, and would end in the early months of 2020.
She and I started seeing each other regularly but carefully, gingerly feeling our way forward. Back then, we could go on dates to bars and movie theaters. We had stable jobs we could depend on having next month, or at least next week. The future seemed known, or knowable—we made plans to go on road trips to 24-hour dance parties and maybe even visit other countries together. The only thing that was uncertain was what this new relationship between recovering codependents was going to look like.
By the time COVID hit NYC in March, J and I were officially together. So together, in fact, that the week before lockdown we posted a Lex ad looking for a third (nothing serious, just sex). Of course, the threesome never came to pass. You remember how quickly it all happened. One day things were normal and the next they weren’t, the world slamming shut like a gate descending on Indiana Jones’ fedora. It was like an O. Henry story but, you know, more tragic.
Though dazed by a thousand new fears, we scrolled through our Lex responses together, naively optimistic that we would try again in a few months. We had no idea we were about to become monogamous for the foreseeable future (which is fine, by the way. Neither of us feel limited or cheated about it, although that threesome would have been nice!). In the sense that all of this has manifested like a gelatinous tsunami—slow but terrifying, revealing fragilities we hadn’t even thought to protect—we’ve had a little time to acclimate to what’s euphemistically been termed our new normal. As subcultures of queer, trans, polyamorous, and perverted people, we’re still resolving the discomforts of monogamy-under-duress—even the straights are noticing. (Not to mention belonging to an economic/generational cohort where housemates and non-family communal living are the norm.)
Of course, not everyone is social distancing in the recommended ways, despite the virus’ worsening grip on the USA in particular. Even though we keep breaking our own record for single-day infections—almost 70,000 at last count—we’re under assault by a capitalist campaign to pretend the old normal is still possible. We should not go back to work, back to school, back to the nightlife as we know it, and yet because our return would line the pockets of the billionaires, landlords, bosses, and jailers who run the show, our deaths are being marketed to us by corporations, politicians, and so-called public health officials.
When Disneyland’s COVID reopening campaign looks like a satire directed by Paul Verhoeven, you know you’re fucked. The phases and decrees and grandstanding, staggered on a schedule built on lies, misinformation, and denial, are now couched in the same marketing language employed by dead-eyed lifestyle brands and vicious nonprofits. (Like did anyone else feel patronized by LA’s “safer at home” order, a gentler, more chiding “shelter in place”?) There’s plenty of filler to go around, but in terms of coherent leadership, adequate resources, or a plan for the future, we got nothin.
I repeat all of this, of which you’re surely aware, to contextualize the pointlessness of my bitter resentment toward the many people who are buying into the death campaign. As easy as it would be to simply hate them and they way they rationalize their selfishness, I can’t. (Bitch, you are not going to brunch to support restaurants. You’re going to brunch because you want to believe your life can be normal ever again. If you wanted the restaurant to stay open so badly, you’d just donate your money instead of endangering the people who get an hourly wage to risk their lives to cater to your tipless ass.) The real bad guy here is the state, not the individuals who have little reason to trust the government or each other. How can I be angry with my mom’s dipshit neighbor for believing that COVID was manufactured to create chaos for the general election and that it will simply “go away” after November?
Still, the stakes of pandemic expose desire in an interesting way. Choosing to go to a restaurant is at least in part a pursuit of pleasure, even (or especially) if that pleasure comes at others’ expense and not yours. I imagine rationalizing this very American but deeply antisocial behavior is easier when you can blur the lines between what you want and what you can’t live without. (See Louise Glück: “All day I tried to distinguish / Need from desire.”)
Contrast these mean cravings with the desires—for liberation, solidarity, mutuality—that brought us out into the streets earlier this summer. J and I will not get our threesome anytime soon because we have decided that our individual pleasure is not worth the risk to our community; J and I, and everyone we know, will continue to increase our mutual risk (though only slightly) with direct action of a variety of sorts because we have decided that our community is more important than the risks physical collectivity pose us. Of course there are many people, J included, who because their jobs either didn’t disappear or have reappeared since quar started have not been given the choice that WFH brunchers take for granted: She has to work in retail and thus be exposed to people or she can’t pay her rent.
In this country, whether we’re talking about COVID, or public sex, or restorative justice, the balance between desire and need, self-protection and community accountability, me and you (I and thou) is subtle, precarious. I suppose it is this way because we, as a whole, do not know what it means to be together. I don’t really know what to do about that except to keep trying to learn.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.