Below you’ll find DAVID’s most-read posts of the past year, plus my favorite series, which didn’t exactly rank with you all but which was, I think, some of my most solid writing.
And by the way, thank you for reading in 2022! It was a pretty big year for me. I said hello to new experiences and goodbye to GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY. I reviewed books, movies, and flavors. I made a case for girlfriends and against intelligence. For my non-DAVID writing, I published my second novel and almost nothing else, other than an essay on a documentary called BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism for the short-lived Astra Magazine (RIP).
It’s fair to say I’ve been quite productive this annum, but I feel as if I haven’t really flexed yet. With any luck, I’ll have something to show for myself soon. Until then, this newsletter will keep coming out more or less weekly. I hope it’s nice for you. It is for me.
1. On the gangbang
If America’s incest fantasy could be peeled apart, like a banana, the fruit inside would be thick, sweet, and less convincingly phallic than its exterior might suggest. My theory is that the substance of this edge fantasy is an intimacy that can be taken for granted. Imagine.
2. An interlude on heteronormativity
[W]hile drunkenly fooling around in a car with some straight guy, I became too distracted by what he looked like to fuck; instead of getting angry or pressuring me, he listened while I talked at length about much I wished I had his body (?!?!), then drove me to a Jack In The Box and bought me food to soak up the booze. I’ve always looked back on that experience with gratitude—he was kind to tolerate my strange behavior, and he didn’t even try to rape me. Only relatively recently did I understand what was actually going on between us, or between me and his body, anyway.
3. A hookup yields reflections on trans life
This is also fascinating to me: the chaser who can’t learn the language he needs to get the pussy he wants. From the couch, I peer into his wife’s office, where a Peloton twists in the shadows like a dozing xenomorph. I suppose a chaser like Max doesn’t have to learn anything he doesn’t want to.
4. “Gender is not my boundary”
There was a popular meme, for a minute there, that non-binary people were sharing that said something to the effect of If you’re attracted to me, you’re gay. Which, if that’s your experience of yourself, sure, fine. But I’m much more interested in the challenges of maintaining what are, for most of us, deeply held understandings of our own genders and sexualities when they are fundamentally incompatible with those with whom we vibe and fuck. How can straight people and gay people have sex? It happens all the time! How can dykes fuck fags? Literally every day. How can one be a monogamous sex worker? Easily! How can your identity not invalidate mine when our bodies push against each other? I don’t know, but it can!
5. On going under
He struggled to convey what it was about golden showers that he liked so much, and why they brought him to what was essentially a brothel, rather than to the feet of an open-minded girlfriend. This mystifying urge left him both verbose and inarticulate, as our deepest erotic desires do for most of us; though he was no poet, G’s passion, which he was happy to leave more or less unexamined, felt poetic to me.
6. Let a thousand fisting daisychains bloom
To say that the deviant subjects produced by white supremacist patriarchy are welcome at Pride so long as they don’t use it to indulge in deviance is to contradict oneself. They’re already deviant because they exist.
7. An interlude about straight people
As a result of this penchant for taking out the trash, I’m one of those lucky gay people that has had very few heteros in their day-to-day life for many years. It’s not my intention to be categorical, but since I won’t tolerate disrespect from someone who’s not paying my rent…well, you know how straight people are.
8. Can I smell this public rose? Can I smile in the street?
I looked out the window, where below me a cumulus shelf of orange sherbet witnessed our howl to New York City. No one could see me crying, but what if they did? I think it would be okay.
9. An interlude on craft, work, and fantasy
Though I’m fundamentally repulsed by his prioritizing of style and structure over “the great idea” (which he called “hogwash”), my dear Nabokov’s dedication to component can be read as another kind of subversion. “Caress the details, the divine details!” he urged, which dictum we can reappropriate for our anti-work perspective: what is work if not effort with a capitalist agenda, rendering pleasure incidental?
10. On Dick Cavett and the art of the interview
We all have our special interests. Mine happens to be a problematic nonagenarian talkshow host that my girlfriend refers to as my “interview man.”
I don’t remember why I started watching episodes of The Dick Cavett Show on YouTube, but suddenly it was a part of my solitary nighttime ritual, the hour or two before sleep when I laid down on my mom’s yoga mat, chain-smoked joints, and anticipated another 16-hour-day of muting C’s screams over Zoom meetings while trapped indoors by viral plague and fire season. Delighted by the seemingly endless roster of famous subjects—including Salvador Dalí, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali, Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, Lucille Ball, Truman Capote, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Richard Pryor, and my beloved Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni—I found myself entranced by the pedantic patter of this boyish Midwesterner, who over the course of almost 40 years of hosting his self-titled talk show has aged from Pinnochio-esque whippersnapper to batty examiner emeritus.
See you next year. Find me on Twitter. Get my second novel, X, right here.
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