round-up: 6/15
what i'm reading, quotations, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
Things to read:
An Israeli operation rescues four hostages and kills scores of Palestinians. Here’s what we know.
UN says Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups may have committed war crimes in a deadly raid
Housekeeping:
After a year of living in a nightmare apartment, I am moving this weekend! I once again have an address, so please feel free to reach out for that if we’re mail buddies. I’m also going to have a roommate for the first time since I was …….. 21? But it’s my best friend so we’re probably fine.
It’s also officially peach season! Sacred time.
What I’m reading:
Lesbians have more orgasms than straight women — and yes, it's men's fault
Let Them Be Morally Flawed: In Defense of Queer Villains in Stories
Quotations:
What if life really was a story? What if you could alter the plot? Assign meaning to the most brutal contempt? Claim passion and glory while walking away from the spit and rage everyone seemed to aim at the poor, the disdain of the well-off and their bland disregard for the not-pretty, the exhausted uncertain girl children struggling to be seen as full human beings, the tender soft-eyed boys who wanted only what we all wanted—vindication, hope, love and meaning.
But what if story was a way out? A path out of self-hatred to soul-sustaining sympathy? What if the simplest most effective act of resistance was to refuse self-hatred and claim meaning, purpose and vindication in love itself? What if there were a way to redefine how any one individual creature could revise what it meant to love another and build a personally meaningful satisfying life? What if I am a girl who wants to cross the line and live my life as an independent, perverse human in resistance to all that being a girl is “supposed” to mean?
I was a girl who loved girls. I was and am an outlaw, dreaming of her indrawn gasp, her sharp-toothed stubbornness and awkward reach for my hesitant stubborn grip.
Day by day, breath by breath, embrace by embrace, her hand on my neck, my mouth tasting her skin, the sweet sweep of her tongue along my earlobe while her hipbone pressed my thigh then slipped up along my belly to where my lungs were pulling her scent deep into my soul. She was heat and hope, meaning and courage and desire—yes, the most exquisite experience of the human soul, touching the soul of another. I will celebrate her with every pulse of my heart, the sensation of my teeth on my own skin, every deep enriching pull of her breath into my belly. The flash of her eyes when she was treated with contempt, the pure satisfying laugh rising up into the air when she lifted herself off my body, and the resonating exclamation she would give when I drew my teeth up her inner arm and nipped delicately at her throat—we were remade, vindicated and celebrated. We were unstoppable. We were lesbian—revolutionary, aspirational and deeply confrontational.
I know who and what I am. I know what survives even when I find myself alone to remake my life. I am the reflection of every glance she ever turned in my direction, every assessment she made of the extent of my courage, the power of my desire, and the way I could reflect back to her the heat of desire.
We are not what they name us. We are neither hateful nor contemptible.
Story is a way out, a way past, a hand in the dark, a whisper of hope, the hope I have for all of us.
I’ve always felt very accepted in the art world to a certain extent. I’ve felt very fortunate to have been out, and that as out as I’ve been and as bold as I’ve been, I’ve been able to achieve an international audience. I never thought I would be able to be this honest and actually have people follow along. But I would say that the arts are a bit of an island and incredibly liberal for the most part — there is permission for that kind of honesty, and that’s not the case in all fields. I mean, look at the assault on public libraries: states banning certain books so that children don’t read about gay people. It’s outrageous. Artists have a lot of permission still, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t crazy assaults on our ideas and what gets shown and doesn’t get shown.
One of the things that was so interesting was the over-sexualizing of the queer community — with Mapplethorpe, it was titillating in that way, and I certainly did that with early erotica work. But when I was thinking about dignity, it got to the point where, especially with so many of my friends dying from AIDS, I didn’t want to have queerness or the representation of being queer only be related to a sexual exploration of eroticism. And so by making portraits of people in which they were sexy in their bodies but really present with the camera, and using brightly colored backgrounds as a reference to traditional portraiture that people knew through the history of painting, it automatically created a specific dignity within the person, because of the formality of the portrait. So it wasn’t body parts, it wasn’t just nipples or, you know, whips up asses or things like that — which I love, which I think are awesome, and I’m glad they exist — but it was also, with so much loss, what does it mean to bear witness to my own community and begin to talk about our bodies and what’s going on?
I think we need all our allies. If people wanna slap a rainbow flag on a box of Wheaties during the month of June, hell, I’ll buy it. What the hell, you know? Any kind of visibility or advocacy that is positive is hopefully only going to create more allies versus more harm. Do I want the commodification of queer culture? No, but we live in a completely global capitalist society in which everything is commodified. So I’m just pro more allies. Let us have some allies.
"Butch" isn’t just a masculine aesthetic. It's an energy. It's a temperament. It's a demeanor. It's a thing you just know, and the best feeling in the whole world is when you can finally own it.
My wife believes that I have the strength and knowledge and fortitude to do literally anything I want to do, but more than that she believes in the kindness of my touch and the wholeness of my love.
Is there any way of writing about happiness, queer or otherwise, that isn’t just obnoxious? Or boring? Is there any way of speaking about happiness that isn’t just a way of saying: ‘I’ve survived, why couldn’t you?’ Is there any way of talking about happiness that doesn’t also ask: ‘Shouldn’t you be trying harder?’
I think I’m constantly wrestling with the idea of fiction writing as entertainment or for aesthetic enjoyment versus the idea of fiction as an urgent form of communication about the things that matter most. Writing this book helped me see that this divide is arbitrary. The most beautiful sentences can also be the most just; there is justice to be found in just rendering a fat body with precision, sex appeal, and love.
A bubble is beautiful and a bubble also has to burst.
I wanted to show that rural places are home to people grappling with things that are just as complex as those my urban characters were grappling with, and that queer and trans people can thrive in rural areas. I have a theory that dense urban places and wild rural places are more alike than either of them are to the suburbs.
When I encounter these fatphobic moments, I’m forced to make a choice: Will whatever insight into being human this novel might offer be worth the damage? Often, I’m interested in the writer’s larger vision but their casual dismissal of the bodies of the majority of Americans creates a jarring effect. Fiction at its best shows genuine interest and curiosity about every aspect of what it is to be human; cruel remarks about fatness diminish the humanity of characters and diminish the book.
The use of “lesbian” to refer to gay women basically originates from around the same time, and was used interchangeably in Victorian sexological literature with “sapphic,” “sapphist,” “invert,” and “homosexual.” In the twentieth century U.S, “lesbian” continued to be used as an adjective and noun for gay women in medical literature, but it’s my understanding that in a lot of pre-1960s lesbian communities, “gay” or “gay girl” were the primary terms by which women referred to themselves. It was in lesbian feminist communities in the late 1960s and into the 1970s that “lesbian” really solidified as a term of identity, not just a description of behavior. A quick Google Ngram search comparing the usage of the two words in books over time shows that the usage of “lesbian” takes off starting in the 1960s, leaving “sapphic” in the dust.
I would argue that the main “problem with lesbian” today (and I use quotes here to demarcate that I am discussing this "problem” not in its material reality but in its existence as a widespread perception) is a problem of inclusivity. “Lesbian” is poised as a subject of critique by and large for who it does or does not include; for who claims it or is claimed by it, and who is not. “Sapphic,” which historically has been used synonymously with “lesbian,” now offers an escape hatch from this inclusivity problem, even though there’s no inherent reason why “sapphic romance novel,” “sapphic space,” or “sapphic tendencies” would translate to greater inclusion than “lesbian romance novel,” “lesbian space,” or “lesbian tendencies.” What the 1980s and 90s anxieties about lesbian eroticism (or lack thereof) and contemporary anxieties about lesbian inclusion (or lack thereof) have in common is a concern with the baggage of lesbian history and its consequences. Have decades of feminist critique made us sexless? Does a history of trans exclusion make us irredeemably backwards? What both of these questions miss is that the counter-history has been there all along: slutty and smutty lesbians, trans lesbians and their cis lovers, friends, and allies, and so on.
Above the hospital, the moon kept shining. I wasn’t anywhere and I couldn’t describe it, I couldn’t stay awake. I mumbled. I stuttered. I crashed the words together or trailed off. I couldn’t say it straight so I tried saying around it—dark-struck, slumber-felt, sleep-clogged.
blot everything out, the stars, blot everything; stop saying broken, stop saying broken; angel of broken, angel of broken, angel of broken, angel of broken; angel of headlights, angel of soap, angel of telephone, hurry red telephone; even if my mouth is closed, even if the song ends;
My problems were unimpressive and not unique. I had a grief counselor, like everyone, and a suicide counselor, because I had said the wrong thing.
Marriage is a tricky thing because you are both building a life together and maintaining your own sense of self.
“Exhibit” is fired by multiple kinds of desire, appetites having to do with ambition, belonging and sex. The physical desire is often queer and kinky, and writing this novel required putting words to lines, thoughts and scenes so private I almost felt that I’d trespassed on myself. I had to tell myself, daily, at times out loud, that I wouldn’t let anyone else read it. I knew this to be a lie, but it was a useful fib, a protective spell.
I’m always writing for a past version of myself who used to feel like a candidate for being the loneliest person in the world, too strange for wanting, hoping and lusting as I did.
It might be a condition of living as a woman with publicly stated opinions: People are going to tell us they want us dead.
I want more of people’s bodies in books, especially in fiction. There’s so much about our bodies that’s still judged shameful, a secret best kept hidden. I’m not just talking about sex, though that’s part of it.
That’s all for today!
-Despy Boutris
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