round-up: 10/14
a resource, reading recs, quotations, tweets, & more
Happy Friday, folks!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
Resource
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
& note: I’ve been reading widely this week, & there are a lot of quotations, so please open this email in a new window if you want to get to the end!
Housekeeping:
I’ll be selling some fun stuff that I made with my very own hands in Berkeley on 10/30—if you’re local, please come! Everything will be on sale!
Also:
Pushcart Prize nominations have been mailed out, as of today! I love these poets & their words. Cross your fingers that they win, please!
A resource:
As usual, my lil e-book Publishing Poems: An Easy Guide is available to download for free. I cleaned up a few of the typos this week, and I hope it might be helpful for you, especially if you’re starting to submit your work.
What I read this week:
To read:
How ‘writing a book’ became the ultimate influencer status symbol
I Really Didn’t Want to Write This Promotional Essay Tied to My Book Release
The journalist as influencer: how we sell ourselves on social media
What Is A “Hot Girl Book” & Why Is Everyone Talking About Them?
Self-documenting and self-branding are becoming basic to all forms of work
Quotations:
It’s startling to realize how narrowly we avoid, or miss, living radically different lives.
-Rachel Aviv
Mental health is a space that doesn’t align with one particular political school of thought. But there’s something wrong with a society that funnels so many people who are mentally ill into the prison system, and then goes one step further and takes some of the most mentally ill people in the prison and funnels them into solitary confinement.
And it’s worth noting that it might feel very different for a white, upper-middle-class person to be told that their mental illness is biological than for people who have struggled with poverty or discrimination all their lives. Their response to this explanation might be, “You’re ignoring the way that all of these things have pushed me to a point of crisis.”
Diagnoses are necessary: we need them to communicate. They serve a purpose that is non-negotiable. But the dictates of managed care endow diagnoses with disproportionate importance. In order to be reimbursed for care, doctors need to give a diagnosis, often after just meeting the patient. I do wonder if, once the diagnosis is given, there is a failure to recognize how subjective and provisional it is, and it may discourage curiosity, both on the part of the patient and the doctor, in terms of seeking suitable, individual answers to what is really going on.
The role that diagnoses play feels even more disproportionate when it comes to disability benefits: people can get locked in a kind of “illness career” because they need that diagnosis to get support from the government. The scholar Helena Hansen describes this as the “pathologization of poverty”: when the government cut back on welfare benefits in the late nineties, medical claims became the new avenue to qualify for government benefits—there were suddenly bureaucratic pressures to qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis in order to financially survive.
It’s unequivocable that there’s over-prescription and that psychiatric medication is too often used as the only solution. But there’s a way in which anti-psychiatry can be reductive and diminish the real disability that people experience. I don’t know why it has to be an either/or: that it’s either within the person, or her society—it is also about the relationship between the person and the society. People do have really damaging experiences on medication, but people are also living lives that wouldn’t be possible without medication. I think both truths have to be acknowledged at the same time.
There is, however, a long history of medical transition in the United States—though it mostly unfolded outside the confines of the medical establishment. There was either no doctor to visit, or the gender clinic was a place that only the white middle class could successfully navigate. Instead, trans people—like the women in the Tenderloin in the 1970s—provided care to and for themselves. This kind of DIY, or do-it-yourself, transition sits at the heart of trans history, though you wouldn’t know it from reading today’s headlines in so-called papers of record.
The diagnosis of transsexuality came with a particularly cruel twist: it was explicitly designed to restrict access to transition. By establishing extremely narrow diagnostic criteria, doctors were able to reject the vast majority of potential patients from their clinics: either they did not perfectly “pass” as generic women or men; they were not heterosexual enough; they did not dress in a conservative fashion; or they weren’t white, didn’t have blue- or white-collar jobs, and were therefore broadly undeserving. While clinicians pretended outwardly that their self-appointed role was to make sure no one who wasn’t really trans made a decision they might later regret, in private they admitted to one another that there was no test that could determine who was or wasn’t trans.
The history of DIY trans care doesn’t leave behind the written records, research data, and publications that form conventional medical science, forcing researchers to rely on community newsletters, personal archives, and interviews to reveal the punk sensibility and medical ingenuity of those determined to provide care for themselves and their community.
“Don’t try to be your own doctor,” warned Virginia Prince, a prominent transvestite—a term that predates transsexuality and often referred to people who did not want to medically transition—a year earlier in her newsletter Transvestia. In a 1971 column for the newsletter New Trenns, Sally Ann Douglas, a trans woman embedded in an especially well-connected social network, remarked that “everywhere I go these days, I bump into gals who seem to be getting hormones from somewhere”—somewhere other than a doctor’s office, that is. Calling it a trend, she wrote that “most of them seem to be pursuing a ‘do-it-yourself’ program of experimentation with various formulations” of estrogen on the market. Trans women often wrote into such newsletters looking for advice on this subject, but Douglas, like many of her peers, dismissed DIY approaches as reflecting a lack of courage—being too “shy” to go to a doctor—rather than problems of finances and gatekeeping.
In light of the longstanding absence of peer-reviewed studies on matters beyond surgery and hormones, as well as a lack of resources for researching what is perceived as a very small population, many clinicians are unable to answer trans people’s basic questions about their health—and use that uncertainty as a reason to withhold care. In other words, doctors punish their trans patients for the legacy of institutional neglect. According to a 2021 U.S. survey, nearly half of trans people reported experiencing explicit discrimination in health care in the previous year. And that, once again, is only among those people who have some access to a doctor in the first place.
The history of DIY trans care challenges the coerced helplessness of the neoliberal politics of health. It is a story in which normal people, typecast as the most vulnerable, made transition possible for their friends, families, lovers, and neighbors, no matter the barriers. While their motives and beliefs varied, they were all driven by pragmatism: taking care into their own hands was safer, cheaper, and generally more effective than waiting on permission from the state or their doctors, let alone approval from an insurance company. It also meant that gatekeepers and lawmakers couldn’t revoke access on a whim or restrict it until its legality became meaningless. DIY trans history shows how tenacious and expert the most vulnerable have proven themselves to be without any support or legitimation.
DIY challenges the monopoly on care through which institutional medicine, and the liberal legal framework derived from the state, together control not just access, but the quality of life that depends on it.
As feminists and trans activists struggle against the liquidation of the right to privacy, digging into the connections between DIY transition and DIY abortion is instructive. Both reject how medicalization and the state collude to restrict people’s autonomy. And DIY history suggests that one of the core lessons of trans feminism is that you can steal your body back from the state—not to hold it as private property, but because the state power that polices and punishes your body, just like the doctors who execute its arbitrary policies, is fundamentally illegitimate. DIY treats legitimacy as arising from the people whose lives are most affected by resources and care, not from the abstract power of the state or medical gatekeepers.
The trans liberation activists of the 1970s who dreamed of free clinics were part of a political movement that wanted to depathologize transition, so it was no longer treated as a mental illness or a medical condition that required diagnosis and supervision from clinicians with no vested interest in trans people’s happiness. Gay and lesbian activists won a major victory when homosexuality was taken out of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), in 1973. But the removal of homosexuality was followed by the introduction of new trans diagnoses into the DSM in 1980, which permitted clinicians to retain their authority by shifting focus from sexuality to gender. Medical gatekeeping has expanded, rather than contracted, since then.
DIY has envisioned freedom in starkly different terms. Instead of pathologizing people to grant them access to medical resources, or relying on the state’s flimsy blessing, activists imagined community-run clinics where people to whom transition matters most would support one another and distribute the care they needed. In that framework, both abortion and gender transition would be something like resources for personal and collective autonomy—means to a life characterized by abundance, not dramatized medical procedures contingent on bizarre criteria of deservingness.
The Wife Guy aura is, like this scandal, not about the wife at all, which is why I personally find it so funny that this shtick could ever be convincing to people–or worse…and more common...an object of thirst. It is like a public proposal: it claims to be romantic, but more often than not it is non-consensually thrusting a woman into the spotlight as an object to be adored, an accessory to the dude’s own Good Boy narrative. We Remember: Curvy Wife Guy. Among many others. They are endless, they are legion.
We know by now that the problem with creating a career around being a Wife Guy, Good Boy, Great Man, etc. – as I’ve explored for many years now – is not only that such self description is ludicrous and hilarious, but also because it puts them on a pedestal of their own making. We applaud them for doing a thing for their spouse, like a normal spouse, a veritable parade of thirst for the most menial shows of support. A double edged sword, for the ease of uncritical reception finds a partner in the swift fall from grace. When they fall, they fall hard.
Perhaps we should instead argue for a sort of Wife Guy neutrality, to strive for sheer mediocrity so that we are neither enthralled or shocked, just softly let down.
-(x)
The problem is that art withers and dies without dissemination. The artist has a dual quest, to create good work and ensure that it’s shared.
-Lauren Ocampo
As a child, I was sort of obsessed with masculinity; obsessed with the male aura. I think I was responding to the way in which we condition and contextualize men and women differently. I craved the right to take up space in the way that I perceived men did.
When you were a child, weren’t there tyrants? I feel like that’s just a genre of person, people who seek power for power’s sake and take it at all costs.
I relate very much to the characters in the book who are whipping themselves to feel God.
Ultimately, I had to create the book that I needed to create.
After all these years, I’m still trying to forget.
-Sandra Cisneros
You can’t tell the difference between a leather belt and a lover’s tongue.
-Jericho Brown
I will breathe ruin into my hands.
-Marcel Hernandez Castillo
Desire is lonely work.
-Sean Horlor
What gives? I have my theories. For all the blood and guts-rearrangement, bottoming isn’t necessarily harder or riskier than topping, but when you reach a certain level of play, where experience takes precedence over a willingness to try new things, a seasoned bottom is as much of a luxury as an expert top (an open-minded novice can only bring you so far—getting good at being used takes a lot of practice!). Perhaps inflation has gotten us here, too, rendering the bottom’s skill set more dear than ever and skewing its value in relation to the top’s, like the dollar superseding the pound.
-David Davis (I cherish their newsletter, always)
So much has changed over the past few years. Is it so unreasonable to think that this change brought about a significant, even seismic, shift in our erotic lives? Where once the role of the victim was more popular, now the role of the predator is. Perhaps it has become more difficult to need, or more appealing to control.
I have not always liked sex, but what I’ve always appreciated about doing it in a group is the redistribution of responsibility. Less pressure, without diminishing returns. In some circumstances it can feel communist, utopic. With a gangbang in particular, everyone other than the bottom can tap in and out as they like.
I have never wanted children of my own, but I adore them, especially infants. After I met my friends’ baby, I told my therapist about how good it felt to care for someone whose requirements, while extreme, can be completely and entirely met. I love that their need is not in vain with me. Unable yet to question whether they will get what they want, I can ensure, as long as I am with them, that they won’t have to.
When I look around me at the reading, the rave, the sex party, I see gay people of all backgrounds, the vast majority of whom have survived some kind of schism from their natal family. Even those who retain those connections completely do so under duress.
Instead of “chosen family”—an expression that I’ve come to loathe—I prefer the unwieldy but much more beautiful “consensual sentient state of relationship,” as Rena Davis-Phoenix puts it in Michelle Handelman’s BloodSisters.
So much of making art is the time spent not making art.
To make anything, you need the means and time, and you need to be intact, and that is frustrated by the racist, sexist, and capitalist forces that all contribute to your erasure. So to be able to make art is a privilege and a refusal of this erasure.
Though what we do is usually described as intellectual or even white-collar, as writers we cannot fail to conceive of what we do as labor, even those moments between, when one sits by the window, chin cradled in palm. My soft-handed job is preferable to any I’ve ever had, but that doesn’t mean it’s not work, an uncomplicated position that seems to nevertheless be controversial.
I prefer to view my work as a writer as being in service of my political commitments and, failing that, my own pleasure. It’s a lot of pressure.
My first acting teacher said all art is one thing—a stimulating point of departure. That’s it. And if you can do that in a piece, you’ve fulfilled your cultural, sociological obligation as a workman.
Unfortunately, we’re rarely in the habit of judging erotic art by whether we find it arousing, unless we’re looking at it critically as art, in which case its potential to arouse will probably be grounds for artistic dismissal. In art that is regarded as non-pornographic, zooming in on a single body part might read as familiar, lingering, or personal. For art that’s considered pornographic, however, such good faith is rarely extended.
Tweets:
That’s all for today!
Please buy things so that I can pay my rent. Love you.
Many thanks for your generosity. Your eBook is indeed a rich resource.
Gratitude