Your favorite DAVIDs of 2021
Another year of reading, watching, and fucking
The retrospective is a little early this year because I have a hunch that no 11th-hour barn-burners are coming your way between now and NYE.
Not that I don’t have them in me. But since 2022 is going to be a busy one for your humble David, here and elsewhere, I’m hibernating when and where I can.
Thank you for reading in 2021 ✨.
On kink as therapy
Part 3 of this series, which spanned 2020 and 2021, resonated with people who, like me, are suspicious of efforts to make leathersex respectable.
In seeking to justify more easily sanitized aspects of BDSM by claiming that choice aspects of it are good for us, this educator engages with leather’s detractors on their terms, not ours. This is where the concept of respectability politics comes in handy. Instead of challenging anti-BDSM moral panickers and policymakers with, No, it is actually good for me to get stepped on by a woman pretending to be my Mommy, what if we were just honest?
I don’t care if it’s good for me. It doesn’t need to be good for me for me to be allowed to do it.
On bisexual problems
In this unlocked edition of GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, the good doctor advised an inexperienced bi on the pitfalls of clinging to a straight sensibility.
Congrats on being able to sexualize women and NB folks, just like the rest of society. The bad news is that having the ability and desire to fuck women and NB folks is easy. You do not get points for this. I’m happy for you, but no medals are awarded. You place yourself historically in the context of a whole lot of people who can fuck all manner of lesser or less socially acceptable people but find it “bizarre” to think of loving them and building relationships with them.
On the dyke nod
As friend of the newsletter Sabrina Imbler (whose next book we await with great excitement!) tweeted, it’s nice to have a little discourse, as a treat.
Do you expect the dyke nod from all masculine queers, or just the ones you want to fuck?
On genital preference
Another series that spanned 2020-2021. Fun to write, lots of haters!
Cis people who take “genital preference” seriously are pretending that our bodies are weirder than theirs.
On Gerri and Roman
In which I urged Vulture to reconsider their stance on whether or not Gerri and Roman of HBO’s Succession have fucked.
“Succession, just let them fuck! Or don’t,” begged Vulture yesterday in a very handy timeline of the duo’s so-called “sexual tension.” But they have fucked. As I recently threaded about, the “consummation” of Gerri and Roman’s relationship has already happened (see above). Any other reading of the text not only misunderstands the diversity of human sexuality generally—and Roman’s in particular—but the driver behind audience interest in the fate of these star-crossed lovers.
On normal girls
In late 2019, Stephen Ira invited me to read at one of the NYC release parties for Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma’s We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan. It was a beautiful celebration of an important book, a revitalizing sharing of work on “transmasculinity, intimacy, and freedom,” as the flyer put it. Here is what I read:
I was once a normal girl with a normal family. Like other normal families, mine watched The Godfather movies on Sundays after church.
On passing, a year later
Ongoing reflections on passing, with a short review of Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (which got picked up by HBO in February).
One of the strongest aspects of Half is Bennett’s weaving of the somatic experience of trauma into her characters’ lives, using their bodies’ defense mechanisms to color and inform their desires and decisions. This is a function of her empathy for all of her characters, including the often-hard-to-empathize-with Stella, whose decision to abandon her sister and integrate into whiteness is held up alongside the nightmares, terrors, and dissociation of a young life shaped by vicious anti-black violence, including the horrific lynching of Stella and Desiree’s father when they were young children.
On safe, sane, and consensual
The first post in a series about New York leatherman david stein, known for being one of the people to coin safe, sane, and consensual (SSC) in the early 1980s. The series also discusses M/s, race play, respectability politics, and desire.
These days, leatherpeople (or at least the leatherpeople that I associate with) dump on safe, sane, and consensual like we dump on “valid” culture, or like stein himself dumped on stand & model back in the day. But while SSC is way out of date in 2021 for a variety of very good reasons, it would be a mistake to forget the context from which it emerged, and what it can tell us about that time’s (leather) politics. To paraphrase Gayle Rubin, our rhetorical needs as leatherpeople seeking to defend ourselves and our movements differ over time and across communities.
on bad faith and risk-taking
On queerness and pain at the Whitney
How an artistic collaboration about dykehood and erotic kinship prompted more questions than it answered.
I suppose it was silly of me to expect that an artist operating at Elle’s level of institutional recognition—even as a trans person of color—might be less misunderstood. The frequency with which Elle’s work was, at best, benevolently dismissed as an “exploration” of undefined “issues of gender and cultural identity”4 was an enlightening experience for me.
On the top box
How a joke about queer sex turned into my second novel.
Having just published the earthquake room, I had begun thinking about what I wanted from a second novel. As I took more control—and more responsibility for—my body and my desires, I realized that it wasn’t just people like us that had a complicated relationship to the metaphor of sexual positionality. All of us did. So I began writing a book about what happens to a top who decides they don’t want to be a top anymore.
Until next year, friends.