GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY housekeeping
a little business, plus queer love
“It’s funny about love,” Sophia said. “The more you love someone, the less he likes you back.”
“That’s very true,” Grandmother observed. “And so what do you do?”
“You go on loving,” said Sophia threateningly. “You love harder and harder.”
Her grandmother sighed and said nothing.
A dear friend gave me Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book for my birthday. This exquisite novel-in-vignettes—about a girl, her father, and her grandmother, all of whom spend their summers on an island in the Gulf of Finland—has a uniquely warm-weather coziness, appropriate for when the air and water are just a few degrees cooler than the body, freeing one to laze rather than languish. As I read Jansson’s book, I keep putting it down to stretch out on cool sheets, pondering the supremacy of birds (“It seemed to her that no other creature had the same dramatic capacity to underline and perfect events”) and the qualities of Baltic plants (“Bird-cherry and rowan, especially rowan, smell like cat piss when they’re in bloom”). Will I ever visit this febrile string of skerries, with its bygone midsummer rituals and beaches jungled with “the spirea and the nettles and the vetch and all the other plants that like salt”? Anyone’s guess. There are a lot of homos in Europe I’ve been meaning to visit.
Few things are more pleasurable than a book about a place written by someone who loves that place, because true love will be as honest with shortcoming as it is generous with praise. To paraphrase the great Morgan M. Page, though it should be about safety and healing, queer love is frequently a site of failure and regret (though Jansson’s book centers on the relationship between a grandmother and her grandchild, I’m comfortable taking the author’s queerness into account in this platonic narrative). In the quote above, Sophia, a child who feels the exacting love of a person still new to human disappointment, is furiously heartbroken over a wild little cat that won’t return her devotion. Against the backdrop of the The Summer Book’s coziness, with kindly but human caretakers and a virginal wilderness that provokes escapist problematics I like to forget are burrowed inside me, Sophia’s desire struggles like a fish in a net, muscle entwined in the promise of escape.
It’s been on my mind, little Sophia’s restless, bittersweet love. As New York reopens, the relief that we—or at least I—expected has been swept away by the return of that which once felt normal. Many of the things I was wishing desperately for only a few months ago are back, but at what cost, I ask myself, massaging my carpal tunnel and totting up my student loan payments. I survived a pandemic, and all I have to show for it are a diminished quality of life and weird PTSD.
I’m not the only one. You may have noticed a BAD GAY delay. After six months doing this fundraiser, the good doctor and I have fallen a little behind. Between our day jobs, families, obligations, money, and the odd afternoon drinking lemonade and talking about sex, we’re a little snowed under. But have no fear. Mark your calendars for early June, when the next BAD GAY will arrive in your inboxes. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hurl, etc.
On the plus side, this delay means that we now have over $1500 waiting to go to FentCheck next month. FentCheck is an Oakland-based harm-reduction non-profit that provides education to recreational drug users and puts free fentanyl test strips in bars and restaurants across the SF Bay Area. Because people deserve to be alive. (To New Yorkers looking for Narcan training, I recommend Alliance Les Harm Reduction Center. Utterly painless & lovely people.)
As a part of the disclosure segment of this post (I’m friends with the founder of FentCheck), I want to remind you that Bad Gay and I take recommendations on where to send the funds that you raise! We prioritize fundraisers, mutual aid, and/or reparations projects led by and benefitting black, POC, trans, queer, incarcerated/abolitionist, and sex worker-led orgs and groups. In the past, your money has gone to SWOP Minneapolis, For The Gworls, St. James Infirmary, No North Brooklyn Pipeline, and SWOP Behind Bars. I’m especially interested in suggestions for bail funds and supporting people on the inside, so please, let me know!
We can’t begin to express our gratitude for your patience, and of course, your continued support. Until next time.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.