Your favorite DAVIDs of 2023
bondage, my new book, lying, and one very special trick
I can count the number of DAVID-driven hate emails I’ve received on one hand, but they’ve left their mark. Last spring, a number-and-symbol address sent a message that was mostly gibberish, save the solitary legible, if inexplicable, statement: You have gonorrhea! Yet within the week, my doctor confirmed that I did, indeed, have the social disease. I felt seen, if nothing else.
Luckily for me, most of you are able to see me in a much friendlier way. Over the past almost-four years, DAVID has continued to grow and change, and aside from the occasional evil clairvoyant, almost everyone has been super nice about it. So, thank you for being here, truly. Thank you for subscribing, sharing, responding, and supporting me in other ways, like buying my books. Your money helps me pay off my student loans and your participation fuels the tragic feedback loop that is my desperate need for attention. I couldn’t do it without you.
Read on for the top 10 DAVIDs of 2024.
This essay about my first heavy bondage/abandonment scene isn’t just the top DAVID of the year, but of all time, supplanting my 2020 piece on bad dads. It turns out you guys love it when I suffer for no good reason. Fuck you very much.
When would I know that it was time to panic, that he wasn’t coming back? Four hours? More? What was my worst-case scenario? Through the slit below my chin, the sunlight had begun to fail. How long would it take before I had to piss myself? How long before I felt the torture of thirst? Of course, all of that would only happen if something tragic befell my friend, like a car accident. I imagined him on the sidewalk in front of his apartment, unable to enter because of a police barricade or clouds of smoke. How selfish I am, I thought, worrying about his misfortune or death because it would mean that I would be stuck here, afraid and suffering, and not for his own sake.
what is the trans experience without trans people?
A transphobic encounter while promoting my second novel, X, came to represent a nascent desire to make art about transness in a different way. This resulted in my third novel, Casanova 20: or, Hot World (forthcoming in 202?!), which you’ll also find excerpted behind the paywall.
I enjoyed researching this essay about sleeping with cis men as much as I enjoyed writing it.
That cis men of all orientations lie to themselves in order to have sex with me is nothing new. I used to think I could predict the nature of these lies based on the liar telling them: some straight men think of me as a girl, some gay men think of me as a boy, and some bi men think of me as the best of both worlds, as they’re inclined to put it. What I’ve learned since going on hormones is that not only are these lies unpredictable, they’re often not even internally consistent.
Fat needles. Fainting. Femme tops. Nuff said.
Most of the time, the needles go in my back, where I can’t see them. I tell people it’s because I’m squeamish, which is true. Last night, when Daemonumx was suturing and piercing me amidst others doing similar—pussies were sewn shut; hand-sketched designs came to florid life under painstaking scalpels—I kept my eyes averted. I’m already prone to fainting as it is.
I wrote about one of 2023’s standout queer discourses, the fall of Lex, and Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest!
As the punchline it’s come to be, Lex encapsulates the limitations imposed on those of us who can’t access the freedom of public sex in the same way that (some) cis men can. I’m like super open to pushback on this, but I suspect that this is why you can have a Grindr and not a Grinda; that is, a lesbian sex app that is explicitly about fucking, rather than about dating, relationships, networking, and, implicitly, monogamy in which any capital exchange happens behind the plausible deniability of a marriage contract. It’s one thing to pony up the overhead for such an apparatus. It’s another to execute the kind of backend enforcement required to manage any risk of solicitation to an extent that satisfies stockholders, VC funds, credit card companies, and the feds that it could be a safe bet.
As the world degrades, knowing what emotional regulation is, and how to do it, is only going to become more important. This one’s at the intersections of family, ableism, and PSTD.
Over the past few years, as we’ve belatedly learned about things like PTSD and the parasympathetic nervous system, C’s behavior has begun to make sense to us. It’s not that she was being set off by nothing for all this time—it’s that we, her caretakers, didn’t recognize her triggers for what they were. It wasn’t that what we interpreted as violence was a symptom of willfulness or malice—it’s that the overwhelm of sensory stimuli and trauma response made it difficult, even impossible, for her to do anything other than scream, cry, and hit. She was not bad, as we had been telling her, and each other, for her whole life. We were not making her life safe enough for her to ever be good.
Every once in a while, I get a little squirrelly on the topic of writing for money.
Only gradually have I realized that my favorite question—Are you a writer?—is a somewhat sadistic one. Curious about people but for the most part too nervous for most normal socializing, I’ve learned, in a sort of instinctual way, that putting someone on their guard is a great way to control the conversation. Any good interviewer knows that simply giving their subject enough rope is likely to be more successful than even the most incisive line of inquiry. Gently prompt someone to account for something they feel even a little conflicted about and nine times out of ten you can sit back, relax, and let their neuroses carry you away.
if I didn’t hurt myself so much, then I wouldn’t hurt so much
We call it RACK, or “risk-aware consensual kink” for a reason: sometimes your shit gets wrecked.
What began as a meditation on incest fantasies became a portrait of one very special trick.
When Pony Brad arrived for our first session, the other girl and I took care of business, then brought him to the Green Room. Pony Brad pointed at me and said, “You’re my aunt,” and at the other girl and said, “and you’re my sister.” Straightforward enough. So far, so good. Time to put on the old razzle-dazzle and make out with a bitch I lowkey despised while pretending that we were all related.
I think this one is kind of sexy! Which reminds me: I need to write about writing sex. Look forward to that series, along with others about masculine socialization, dreams, sex scenes, feeling, and John Gielgud, in 2024.
See you in the New Year! Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here. Learn more about the history of this newsletter here.