‘Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.’ So wrote George Orwell nearly a hundred years ago. Looking at the so-called Parents Bill of Rights Act recently passed in the House, his words hold equally true today.
This bill seeks to give parents in every state the right, among other things, to inspect all books held in a school library, to review the budget of their child’s school, and—most disastrously—to be informed when a school employee allows a child to change their pronouns.
To some, this might seem like a good idea. Rep. V. Foxx (R-N.C.) hailed the bill’s passing, saying it ‘will help parents steer the educations of their children back onto the correct path.’
But when it comes to ‘steering’ children’s education, it’s wrong to assume that parents should be behind the wheel.
When a student receives only the knowledge, ideas, and values held by whoever’s teaching them, that’s not education, that’s indoctrination. Real education doesn’t just inform a student, it teaches them to think critically, to think for themselves. That kind of teaching is a skill that takes training. I imagine no parent would feel qualified to clean their kids’ teeth or perform their baptisms, so why do we assume that parents are qualified to educate their children?
If we want children to succeed, we can’t leave their education in untrained hands. So while we’d all agree that parents may want what’s best for their kids, they don’t necessarily know what’s best.
This is especially true for parents of LGBTQ kids.
When I came out to my parents decades ago, my dad said, ‘I’m worried that life’s going to be a lot harder for you now.’ These were the words of a man who’d just had his entire parenting toolkit taken away from him. What my dad understood was that he couldn’t prepare me to enter adulthood as a gay man. To his credit, he knew the best thing he could do was support me as I found my own way.
Which I did, through books. I didn’t have gay friends or relatives. But I had teachers who were gay, and who were happy and successful, and they directed me to the books that finally, finally showed me who I was.
Today, LGBTQ kids (1 out of every 14 parents has one, according to the latest statistics) don’t need to find their own way. But that’s exactly what 213 House representatives want to force on them. By playing into the myth that parents know best, legislators can present regressive, undemocratic laws as being ‘common sense.’ As K. McCarthy (R-Ca.) said on the bill’s passing, ‘I couldn’t imagine someone would oppose a Parents Bill of Rights.’
Opposing the bill is crucial when you remember and repeat that parents can’t always know what’s best for their kids.
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I imagine this argument will make a lot of parents angry. Loving their children, as my dad did all those years ago, parents naturally want to protect them from harm. But too often this protection leaves kids—especially LGBTQ kids—not just unequipped for their future, but terrified of becoming who they are, lest they disappoint the parents who’ve given them all that love.
That love, for it to be real, can’t be conditional on the child believing only what the parents believe.
The central defense of this bill is that it will protect children from ‘sexualized’ materials, but this is a lie. You can no more sexualize a child with a book than you can ‘violentize’ them with a video game: it’s all there from birth. Having been a gay child, I can assure you I was ready for LGBTQ stories far before the age of 18. I needed social contacts, a personal history, some simple self-acceptance.
And yes, I needed before 18 to know what kind of sex I was able to have, because nobody anywhere was talking about it.
We give this sort of thing to straight kids as soon as they choose their aisle in the toy store. School dances. Romeo & Juliet. Clothes that express their gender. All that healthy support, affirming who they are and what they want, is how we develop our next generation of leaders. This bill’s main purpose is not, in the end, to help parents, but to deny that same support to our queer and trans kids.
If it passes, it’ll hurt us all. To rephrase Orwell, if education is working well, every generation should know more than the one that went before it, but should imagine itself humbler than the one that comes after it.
The ideas behind the Parents Bill of Rights aren’t based on reason, or science, or even faith. They’re based on fear, namely the fear that our children may turn out different from us. Even smarter than us. We should all, parents and non-parents alike, be so lucky.
UPDATE: For more on how parents’ preference for the status quo can stand in the way of their children’s education, see this Alec MacGillis story about Richmond, Va.’s attempts to recover from pandemic learning loss.
Jack Parlett seems to think so, given his piece in Boston Review on the topic. I do, too—or at least I tried to make the argument in the far fewer words I had in my 2021 piece for the Guardian. In this post, I want to do a few things:
Summarize Parlett’s argument (and my erstwhile one)
Point out its key limitations and shortcomings, bringing in some counterarguments
Address those counterarguments and see about cruising’s role in a healthy democracy.
It’s gonna be a long one.
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1. Cruising is shorthand for having sex in public with strangers. It happens most often in parks and restrooms. I should say men’s rooms, because most cruising (and most writing about it) is among men who have sex with men (MSM). Cruising among WSW must exist, but I know little of it. Cruising among heterosexuals is common as couples; they like to call it swinging, especially in clubs and parties organized around it, and the Brits call it dogging (a term I’ve always loved) when couples fuck in parks for an audience.
What does this have to do with a healthy democracy? If you don’t have time to go read Parlett’s piece, here’s a hasty summary. Cruising—among men in cities—has a long history of people extolling it, going back at least to Whitman. This history, Parlett writes, shows how cruising’s ‘not only, or even primarily, about hooking up, but about the communal power of eroticized looking, flashes of affinity that may not lead directly to sexual consummation, but are an important way of situating yourself within a shared community.’
So it’s about being out and being seen—not as an enemy, or even just another burden, but as a desirable object. That’s one key thing with cruising: the eroticization of being among others. Which leads to one key problem: not everyone on the streets gets looked at erotically. Flashes of affinity are not equally distributed.
Parlett does what anyone writing about sex in public (esp. in cities) is obligated to do: cite Samuel Delany’s watershed text Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, which covers his years cruising porn theaters in the 70s and 80s, and the kinds of encounters and engagements he had with the men who did the same. The central argument in TSRTSB is that infrastructure affects superstructure (i.e., our settings/environments dictate not just how we behave there but our overall values), and that gentrification hurts democracy by promoting networking over contact.
Here’s how I summed it up in the Guardian:
Business and politics as usual promote networking, which is exclusionary and consolidates power within groups, whereas sex and the places we have it – not just bedrooms and sofas, but porn theaters, public toilets, cruising areas – promote contact, which fosters encounters across classes and groups, the writer Samuel R Delany points out. ‘Given the mode of capitalism under which we live,’ Delaney writes, ‘life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of goodwill.’
And what better will than wanting to help somebody come?
They cut that last sentence. They also cut an illustrative bit about my body wanting lots of sex with Dean Cain, an anti-gay conservative who stumps often enough for the NRA that my brain finds him pretty loathsome. But when he shows up in another Hallmark Christmas movie, my body again wants what my mind thinks it shouldn’t have.
This is the heart of the Cruising = Healthy Democracy argument: if we can openly acknowledge our erotic desires for one another, we can create the kind of communal bonds that can counter the divisiveness that online, politicized interactions promote. Or, in Parlett’s words:
[I]mplicit in even the most cursory cruising encounter is, in my experience, the shared admission of a vulnerability, and of loneliness, perhaps, an unspoken basis of the desire to come together. To cruise is, in its most basic sense, to tap into a community whose only logic is desire itself, even if this improvised grouping is far from homogenous, and rarely even harmonious. Like Delany, I have met people cruising whom I’m unlikely to have met otherwise.
Like Parlett, I have done the same. And I have been struck by it long afterward, how I just spent some very intimate time with a person whose politics I’m certain I’d abhor. As an abstraction—a ‘red state’ voter—I felt repelled from them, but as a man physically near me whose desire reflected my own, we two came together.
It’s beautiful, really. But it may not be the cure-all we writers are making it out to be.
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2. One question is whether coming together (in both senses, but mostly the sexual one) can form the basis for a shared politics, which is similar enough to my third topic in the list at the start of this post that I’ll address it in Section 3. The other major question is whether cruising really is equally available to all.
Much of my thinking about this question came from a Substack post by the queer writer Brandon Taylor, where he writes about somerecentessays decrying the popularity of gay novels that tend toward the sad and tragic, that tell stories which seem to twin queerness to loneliness. Taylor’s argument—i.e., these essayists are jealous of their targets’ successes—is witless and not worth reading. And coming as it does from such a titan in the literary world (Taylor interviewed George Saunders at an event in Brooklyn on the latter’s recent book tour, e.g.), the post reads like a lot of punching down. (Taylor’s also friends with Garth Greenwell, another literary titan whose work is often a subject of the essays at hand, which provides some context for why he’s writing.)
At one point, Taylor claims that these critics are writing from some unspoken white privilege:
I sometimes wonder what to make of these critiques from both the so-called TenderQueer squishy gays and the…I don’t know what to call them, but you know, the ones who read Marx and tweet memes online and listen to podcasts. Those ones. I wonder what to make of their alternating charges of too much sex, too little sex, too much drugs, not enough, etc. Particularly because the platonic homosexual experience over which they are scrapping in the representational field is ultimately a white, cis, and abled homosexual experience, no? Like, the mean internet homosexual socialists and the tenderqueer Heartstopper Tumblr goblins are ostensibly arguing over how the cis white gay male should be represented in narrative.
This is not the argument these critics are making, and you can tell because Taylor doesn’t take the time to cite any of them making such an argument. And anyway to believe that writing about joyful sex, queer happiness, queer communality, and so on depicts a cis-white ableist experience belies an ignoring (if not an ignorance) of the work and lived experiences of Delany, José Esteban Muñoz, Alex Espinoza, Brontez Purnell, and other queer writers of color.
While Taylor’s argument is a poor one, I cite it at length because his concerns of representation attend in how we talk about (joyful, affirming, empowering) cruising. ‘Cruising is often, though not exclusively, urban and gay,’ Parlett writes, but cruising can’t just be great for urban gay men for cruising to be great. For it to pave the road to a democratic Eden, it has to be equally available and beneficial to everyone. And for those of us writing about its potential, we need to keep in mind that only 27 percent of Americans describe their neighborhood as urban, meaning the majority of the public lives in rural and suburban areas. How does cruising work there, or how can it, given the different relationships rural and suburban folks have to public spaces, public transit, cultural diversity, etc.?
That’s one question—the question of geography—I’d like to see cruising utopians address more directly.
The other question is Taylor’s question of biology, of bodies. While plenty of writers have shown cruising’s not just for white men, to what extent is it available to fat men, or disabled men, or skinny men who don’t go to the gym, or older men? The kinds of bodies you don’t see in underwear ads.
Let’s call that the Capitalist Body, the kind of body engineered to spark arousal (I want that) and fear (What if I can’t have that?), an uneasy mix that itself is made to get you to buy something as a way to quell the unease. Any writing on cruising that focuses on being open to looks and glances will only alienate those non-CB folks whose bodies the cruising public is not looking at, and even actively turning from.
So desire is not meted out equally. But there’s a complication here with the CB. While CBs are popularly desirable, not all desirable bodies are CBs. I’m talking about there being many fish in the sea. I’m talking about whatever floats your boat. If you don’t find yourself with a Capitalist Body, you may have to look harder for that desiring glance from a stranger, but—the theory goes—in time, you’ll find it.
How, though? Short answer = trust. To explore that in more detail, we need to look more closely at the dynamics of a cruising moment, which brings us to part 3.
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3. The cruising moment has a setting in place and time. Place = the Ramble, Buena Vista Park, what we back in Lincoln called ‘the Fruit Loop’, a stretch of 15th Street south of the Capitol that had a median, where MSM would circle in their cars looking for other interested car-circlers. Every cruising place was made for something other than cruising, but contains certain traits that turn it into a place for cruising. Remoteness. Lack of parents with kids around. A noisy door around the bend of a little hallway that alerts everyone in the restroom that someone is coming in.
Apps and websites may have made cruising places proliferate (you can now just look up where the active ones are in your town), but most of the cruising sites were activated before the Internet, and it’s noteworthy how they’ve persisted. You can’t advertise a cruising site. You can’t market it, or promote it. In this way, cruising sites belong to the commons. We cruisers have formed them together.
Cruising time = now. It’s stating the obvious but it’s important to our discussion. When you are in the cruising site, you’re looking for sex right now. You’re not looking to meet someone for coffee beforehand, or set something up for Friday afternoon when you have a half-day at work. Even when you cruise someone on the sidewalk, the idea is usually to go find a place right now.
There’s, thus, an urgency to the time setting. The cops might show up. Parents might enter this part of the park with their kids, or straight people might come walking their dogs, and start a campaign that’ll land you on the sex offender registry. We need to do this now.
That urgency often comes with a side of serendipity. Cruisers are patient. If you’re hanging out in a Home Depot men’s room stall, surreptitiously tapping your foot every time someone enters the stall next to yours, it could be an hour or two before that toe-tap gets returned. How many semis does the lot lizard loop around before finding one that opens its passenger door? It’s time-consuming, and so when your cruising signal gets returned, it feels a little like winning the lottery. We need to do this now because if we don’t, who knows how long it’ll be before another person shows interest?
Where I’m going with all this is that cruising place + cruising time affect desirability in ways very different from the commercial moment. What’s ‘a commercial moment’? Well, contrast public cruising with the bathhouse or hookup apps. These are (real, virtual) spaces that have been created (by the market) specifically for strangers to fuck each other, and so what you find in those spaces is the ongoing practice of consumerist choice. Which wear and wash of jean is right for your ideal image of yourself? In bathhouses and on the apps, the CB has a great time, and non-CBs have something else.
Indeed, bathhouses and apps re-engineer what its denizens value. When everyone is willing, willingness is no longer sexy. Shared feeling isn’t sexy. Whereas in public cruising, ‘hot’ is less about the visual package of the body in front of you and more about its willingness, its receptiveness to what you’re putting out there. In this way, the pleasure in cruising is often less sexual than … performative? If sex is about engaging with another body (or two or more), playing at being both subject and object during the encounter, then cruising is about engaging with the practice of cruising.
In other words, it’s not so much about I get to be with this person as it is I get to be doing this public-sex thing.
But if that’s the case, how on earth can that be the basis for a shared political understanding?
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4. I didn’t expect to have a part 4, and I feel my argument is running away from me a little. So let me recap:
When cruising is framed as charged glances between (city) people, it’s hard to call it democratic.
When cruising is situated in non-urban spaces—i.e., truckstops, parks/trails, Kohl’s mensrooms—the practice becomes if not disinterested in CBs, then at least much more accommodating to other kinds of bodies and people.
Cruising’s settings retool desire in a way that makes the practice often impersonal, which is a difficult practice to form as the basis for political solidarity.
Public cruising values eagerness, readiness, willingness. It values the shared desire and luck of finding each other over the way each other looks. In this way, good (maybe we can even call it democratic) cruising practice calls on us to broadcast our availability. Cruising does the opposite of what this T-shirt does:
Cruising is a style or mode of moving through the world and engaging with it. It’s distinct from flirting, or being flirtatious, which carry more active notions of seduction and impressing oneself on others. Cruising puts one in a constant passive mode of open receptivity (it’s so queer/feminist!). In this formulation, you can cruise for anything, not just sex. You can cruise for conversation. You can cruise for help moving that armoire upstairs. Hitchhikers cruise for a ride.
Those forms of cruising involve looking to see what strangers can do for you. Cruising for sex is no different, except you’re also doing something for a stranger. Here’s Delany again, this time from his memoir The Motion of Light on Water, on what struck him the first time we beheld an orgy at the baths:
Whether male, female, working or middle class, the first direct sense of political power comes from the apprehension of massed bodies. That I’d felt it and was frightened by it means that others had felt it too. The myth said we, as isolated perverts, were only beings of desire…. But what this experience said was that there was a population … not of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather of millions of gay men, and that history had, actively and already, created for us whole galleries of institutions, good and bad, to accommodate our sex.
There are more of us than we individually thought. The theory goes that this recognition is the beginning of shared politics. And more so: This thing I find essential in me, I also share with that stranger.
Now: heterosexuals move through the world assuming both of those statements are true. Heterosexuals know they outnumber everyone else. And they presume, barring overt signs to the contrary, that any member of ‘the opposite sex’ is likewise interested in hetero sex.
The only way I can see cruising being of use, then, to heteros is in countering the proud identitarian ways we try to form our desire around our politics: i.e., I’d never fuck a man who voted for D. Trump and so on. This of course is a lie. There are plenty of such voters out there that, without knowing their voting history, you’d want to have sex with.
It was the writer Conner Habib who first calibrated my thinking on this dichotomy, in a tweet years ago I can’t find. To paraphrase: Forming your sexual desires based on your partisan politics is a dead end; instead, form your politics from your desire and you’ll live a happier and more authentic life.
There are some problems with this formulation it’ll take another post to get into. (In brief: What happens when you’re aroused by authoritarian/domination imagery? What if your kink is race play? Desire and politics don’t sit on such a one-way street.) But it does intersect with the argument for the democratic potential for cruising.
Your sexual desire impels you toward people your mind might prefer to keep you away from. The sex-positive way to see this is to listen to and honor what the body wants. You don’t always have to obey the body, but I want to give my body equal if not more attention than I give my mind. The mind is a factor of so many influences and variables—shame is a big one. Is the body free from such influences?
Likely that’s another another post. But if we want a democracy from the bottom-up, We the people, then engaging with one another on terms—sexual or otherwise—we’ve come to on our own seems like the right first step on making that happen.
The night before the election, N & I watched another episode of that Lord of the Rings series. I was in a rotten mood, having been earlier at happy hour drinks with a friend, where the bar gave my card to another customer who’d left long before I did. The episode was about humans and elves gearing up for another big battle with orcs. Solemn faces. Oaths of solidarity. Heaps of longbows getting handed out. I hate this, I kept repeating in my head. Then: why do I hate this?
A bad habit of mine when I ask that question is to assume something heterosexual’s afoot, to ascribe badness or myopic thinking or rehashed triteness to the heterosexual. To be clear going forward: queerness has all kinds of this stuff too. One useful example might be Bros, which we’ll return to, delicately, as I haven’t even seen it.
Talk about myopic thinking.
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As I’ve written before, what makes a story heterosexual might be its being a story. ‘Story chauvinism’ is what I call the belief that storytelling isn’t just another aesthetic pleasure, another way of thinking about the world, but rather something essential to humanity. Its cri de coeur is Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The universe is made of stories, not of atoms,’ but you can findthemythrepeatedeverywhere.[*]
In that post linked above, I had trouble making the argument story = heteronormativity. This post might be another attempt. To what end? Why am I trying to make this argument? I’m by profession someone who writes stories at times, and I’m feeling a hunger for stories that feel truer to me than those I, a queer person, am often told.
That’s the smartypants version. The rotten-mood version from the other night? ‘This Lord of the Rings show isn’t half as good as any episode of Golden Girls,’ I told myself. I still believe this with all of my heart. How is it true? And what does it mean?
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Let’s get some definitions down. One thing I might mean by ‘heterosexual story’ is ‘important story’, as when I wrote, in the Commemorative Angela Lansbury issue of Shenny, ‘Gays aren’t the center of our culture’s Important Stories, and may never be.’
So what’s an ‘important story’? Here’s just as good a definition as any, coming as it does in the middle of one:
It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back. Only they didn’t, because they were holding on to something. That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.
This little speech has choked me up more than once at the end of The Two Towers, and half of that emotion is coming from Sean Astin’s big, thick, kissable face as he speaks it.
But we can extract a few key elements of ‘great stories’:
They present something about the fixity of good and evil, shadow and light.
Perseverance (i.e., ‘lots of chances of turning back’) takes the form of a fight/battle against evil.
They point to or are set in times of yore, and see ‘us’ as a continuation of the people therein.
This last one is the thing I feel most frustrated by. (Though the others present problems I’ll get to in a bit.) When you grow up queer in a straight family, you learn early on that stories/histories/the past can’t tell you who you are, because the story of every consanguineous family is the story of heterosexual generation. When you’re in the closet, or in denial about yourself, this truth hits you very painfully—I don’t fit in the story everyone’s telling—but later you begin to see how the story is wrong, or at least incomplete.
A queer person’s queerness begins at the moment of intractable separation from the birth family, which is a separation from history. What makes a story queer is how it thus begins with the actuality of loss or isolation.
Loss isn’t a threat, as it often is in Important Stories. The loss (of self, family, tradition, safety, values, etc.) that’s feared by the coming of evil can’t be fought against. For the queer person, it’s always already happened.
The important story then becomes: how to move on?
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Which brings us back to The Golden Girls, as great an epic as any on how to move on after tremendous loss: of husbands, of careers, of self-sufficiency, of one’s purportedly ‘fuckable years’. And what’s evil look like in the Golden Girls Universe? Who are the villains? It’s been a while since I’ve rewatched the series, but we can find an easy analogue in the Designing Women universe, where evil takes the form of people (straight men) who don’t even listen to, much less respect, the underrepresented:
If ‘evil’ in every story is shorthand for the forces that seek to destroy the lives and values of the protagonist(s), then ‘evil’ in a queer story involves a return to the pre-splintered family. Evil means retying the thread to the past. What characters embody that, or enforce it? What do they look like? How are they not-us or not-like-us?
Probably the biggest lie heterosexual stories tell is that evil will always stand out as different, making itself so clearly known that all the people who are not-different will band together to fight it.
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Lone heroes have little place in queer stories, because it turns out that How To Move On From Great Loss involves coalition-building, chosen families. I’m inspired a lot here by Kevin Brazil’s thinking in Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?, which posits a kind of Bechdel Test for queer stories: ‘Is there a scene where two queer friends appear without, and without discussing, their family trauma or their fucked-up lovers?’
Likely Bros passes this test, given the run time. And likely the elements of greatness in a romcom (so heterosexual genre) differ enough from those of the fantasy epic to warrant a separate post. But I count myself among the millions who didn’t go see Bros during its failed opening weekend. Representation matters, but from the $30 million advertising budget, it was clear that Bros had a very old story to tell. Letting gays avatar themselves inside hetero archetypes does not a queer movie make.
If, again, that’s what Bros does. Like I said, I haven’t seen it.
In sixth grade, I read Where the Red Fern Grows, which is about a young boy in the Ozarks with two dogs. In the story, he gets in a fight with a neighbor, who falls on an axe and is killed on the spot. Later he watches a mountain lion kill one of his dogs. The other dog dies of grief. I remember WTRFG as being a Good and Important book, and I think I felt this because it was one of the first books that led me through grim deaths and how it felt to grieve somebody.
It was also the first violent book I remember reading. I was 11 years old, the sort of kid who avoided any fight I saw coming on the horizon. You could say, then, that WTRFG violentized me—if, that is, we had a word for such a process. But we don’t, because we don’t believe such a process exists, because we understand that since Cain slew Abel, the capacity for violence lives in every human body.
We don’t believe the same about sex, and children are worse off for it.
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As you may know, I’m on Substack now. The platform has an app for reading-on-the-go-toilet, and in looking for good Substackers I browsed last night around the Faith & Spirituality category, because I wanted some new ideas and there’s only so much I can read about books and literature. There, I found ‘Unashamed with Phil Robertson’, with a pic of one of the guys very carefully groomed a decade ago to make a lot of money on TV as part of the ‘Duck Dynasty’ franchise.
The post I tapped on had an irresistible title: ‘There’s Nothing Progressive About Sexualizing Children’. Phil talks about a public school teacher fired for showing her students ways to access books online which had been banned by their school district:
[F]rom what I’ve been able to determine, some of the e-books she made available for her high school kids to read were far from harmless. For example, a book entitled “Gender Queer” graphically depicts a character performing oral sex on what I will politely call a prosthetic male sex organ. […] Truthfully, I’m not shocked that we’re talking about some public-school teachers encouraging our kids to fill their pliable minds with moral filth. But I am saddened by it. I can’t think of a single good thing that could come out of hypersexualizing people who are only just beginning to blindly navigate their own sexuality.
My emphasis there. Gender Queer is a memoir-in-comics about a nonbinary adolescent. Phil is correct about there being a scene of a teenager going down on another’s strap-on dildo. What’s fun about the Gender Queer controversy is that it began in my home county of Fairfax County Public Schools, which initially banned the book after one mother got enraged in a meeting, but then reinstated it after reviewing the book’s contents.
To break down Phil’s argument, children are born asexual, and then in adolescence they begin—blindly, note—to become sexual (like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis I guess is the metaphor). This is a ‘natural’ process that happens booklessly, on their own. If a child reads a book that depicts other children ‘navigating their own sexuality’, that book has somehow adulterated this natural process of a child finding their own sexuality. The book has, thus, ‘sexualized’ what was not yet (ready to be) sexual.
Of course the argument can’t stand on its own, specious at every point. But the counterargument I need to stress here is that when Phil imagines children blindly navigating their own sexuality, he’s only imagining cis-hetero kids. Those kids are never blind to what has surrounded them: a culture of stories that repeat and affirm cis-hetero sexuality.
When Cinderella or Star Wars or Genesis fail to tell you stories about who you are, when even the story of your family is false to your lived experience, you grow up feeling shitty, wrong, and suicidal. Phil and the millions of parents caught in these false moral crusades have no fucking clue what this kind of adolescence feels like. If you can survive that adolescence, and if you’re a creative person, you feel impelled to make art that might fill the void you grew up in and help others feel less shitty, wrong, and suicidal.
That’s the progressive identitarian argument for queer books in schools. But I’m here to write about ‘hypersexualization’. You can’t sexualize a child anymore than you can sterilize rubbing alcohol. It’s already done.
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Not by porn, that is. A counterargument you hear often is that porn / the internet are sexualizing children far earlier than library books can. It’s (a) not necessarily the case with all kids and (b) just providing additional fodder for Puritans on censorship crusades. And it leads me to want to make a distinction between two notions of ‘sexualization’:
Sexualizing1 = turning a child into a sexual object legible as such by an adult Sexualizing2 = initiating in a child a desire for sexual activity (i.e., ‘turning them into’ a sexual subject)
S1 is what right-wing folks are talking about when they use the word ‘grooming’—though as manyhavepointedout, what is posing as a warning about pedophilia and child trafficking is actually just old-fashioned anti-queer hate.[1] I’d argue that more grooming goes on in the apparel industry with the advent of the child-size bikini, or in the fashion photography industry. Shutterstock.com has 14,917 photos of ‘young child bikini royalty free images’ you would not want to be caught scrolling through at work.
S2 is what, I imagine, Phil et al. believe happens ‘naturally’ around the time that children start to discover masturbating to orgasm. Or maybe it’s even as specific as when cis-male children start to want to put their penises inside vaginas. Or likely it’s more innocent, as when cis-children want to hold hands and go on a date and maybe kiss a child of the ‘opposite’ sex.
S2 is hormonal and biological, goes I think the argument and the fact. But two things happen when we take a narrow view of what constitutes ‘sexual activity’:
We fuck up the health and well-being of queer and trans kids.
We blind ourselves to sex enough to create the ‘blind navigation’ Phil et al. understand.
If that’s what ‘sexualizing’ means, then what does ‘hypersexualizing’ mean? It means queer sex practices. That’s all. Queer sex in the duck-dynastic imagination is not another form of sex—with its own values, shapes, procedures, and paraphernalia—but something beyond sex, something outside it. A perversion. ‘Hypersexualizing’ is anti-gay bigotry as old as the fucking hills.
Which brings me back to violentizing kids. It becomes a foolish concept the moment you see a 2-year-old push another kid out of the way to get what they want. We can see that violence as being not just different in degree from shooting an AR-15 into a crowd, but different in kind and still categorize it as violence. Violence inheres in us, and we do our best to teach its proper place and time.
Sex inheres in us exactly the same way. When I played doctor with little girls, or dared boys to show their wieners, or rubbed the cup of my athletic supporter for a while before pulling up my baseball pants, or humped my dick on the mattress, or put little objects up my butthole and pulled them back out again—all before the age of 13—I was doing things with my body solely to make my body feel good, while also making my heart feel good about how my body felt good.
That’s being sexual. Your kids are doing it the way you did it. The fear of sexualizing kids is a Puritan ignorance of what sex is. If we don’t want our kids to enter adulthood blindly, learning what sex is from porn, let them have the tools they need to see.
I’m late to this book. I was early to it, having picked it up in 2018 (in the original printing!), but I couldn’t finish. The novel, as I wrote in a blog post on abandoning books, was ‘about 80 percent “hanging out at bars” and I couldn’t get engaged in the book as anything other than a remarkable tour de force.’
I don’t know what I was thinking.
Andrea Lawlor’s novel—about a boy named Paul who can transform his body’s size, shape, and even sex organs—is the queer narrative I’ve been looking for for ages. I want to try to figure out what changed, within me as a queer and/or a reader, that made me so grateful to be reading a book I had very little patience with 4 years ago. I always knew I would return to it (the reviews alone, from friends and the literati, suggested it was better than I was seeing), but I figured I’d do so as a bit of homework, housekeeping. Okay, I read it and I get why everyone loves it.
Instead, I’ve now read it and I need everyone to understand why it’s great.
*
‘Paul was never very good at having friends. If he liked someone enough to get to know them, he’d want to suck their cocks or even just make out after weeks of prolonged staring. That might be his favorite.’
Paul Polydoris is full of doubts about who he is and who he should be, who he should be with, what he should be doing with his life, etc.. He’s a very classic post-teen except when it comes to sex, about which he has few if any doubts. Paul is ‘good at sex’ in ways that have nothing to do with prowess or maneuvers in bed, and everything to do with knowing himself and what he likes or wants to try and not feeling ashamed about it. Here’s a passage from when Paul takes the titular form of Polly at Michfest:
Paul was naturally curious about girls; he didn’t know how to find a boyfriend; and sex was sex, he thought. Later, other gay men would find this remarkable; they would make their endless fish jokes, or confess proudly their inability to get hard with some cheerleader. Paul didn’t understand that. What was sex but newness? And sensation and conquest and intrigue and desire and romance and fantasy, and specific people sometimes, sure, but not always. Having sex with Heather Federson had been hotter than sucking off the fourth guy he’d ever gone down on. Not as hot as the first three, the newness there trumping their less-appealing qualities. Fucking Heather Federson had been scary and dangerous and even humiliating, and he’d felt brave to do it and protective of her and scared of her and all of that was fun, right? […] She didn’t love him either, and wouldn’t. She was proving something on him too. Boys were harder, easier, more dangerous, and mostly Paul just wanted them more, but something was better than nothing, when it came to sex, and always, always he was curious.
Note the line ‘other gay men’—one of Paul’s many gifts is his ability to stay himself (a gay man) even when he’s fucking his girlfriend with his girl genitals. In Paul, the bounty of queerness multiplies and shifts as his body does, or his whimful desires do. He’s a total hero to me in this way—not in that I wish I could also have female genitals to explore lesbian sex with, but because Paul doesn’t let any categorical identity dictate his choices and desires.[1]
I can’t tell you how good it feels to read a novel about a queer character who just likes sex, and in liking sex acknowledges the reality of HIV (this story is set in 1993, by the way), but for whom sex doesn’t become a question of identity, destiny, or self-worth. It feels revolutionary, but maybe I’ve just been reading the wrong novels lately….
*
Another of Paul’s gifts is having grown up in thickly queer circles, which has given him sharply hewn opinions on art and aesthetics. Before I get to some examples, and why I love that the novel makes room for them, I want to first point out how remarkable this is. There are plenty of novels about gay men—going all the way back to Giovanni’s Room at least—that stick their protagonists in relative isolation. These novels tend to be tragedies, and even humorless ones,[2] which I’ve always found strange given how funny gay people are. When you yourself are a queer kid in isolation—no queer friends, no clubs at your school, etc.—these novels seem to affirm the lies you can’t help tell yourself (well, you’ve picked them up from the air around you): your difference is going to be painful, and likely leave you loveless, if you don’t commit suicide by the end of your short narrative.
Here are some representative passages I marked:
[Paul] crossed the street and used all the change in his pockets to buy two Boston cremes. He leaned on the counter, eating his donuts out of the bag. Paul liked any food that exploded into his mouth: grapes, Freshen-Up gum, soup dumplings. There was something pleasing, something orderly, about swallowing a mess.
[Paul’s friend] Jane was alternately drawn to and horrified by Darwinism, and often found herself attributing phenomena to the unseeable (hormones, pheromones) despite her strict identification as a social constructionist. This was one of her sore places. Was biology destiny, in fact? That might really fuck up not only her identity but her dissertation.
He ostentatiously returned [Patti Smith’s] Radio Ethiopia to the rack…. He made it to the shop on time, took the key from Madge, the owner, who was off to scout rural Salvation Armies. Paul settled into the big leather chair to think, because no one bought expensive snap shirts before noon. Patti Smith—why was she such a genius? The cover of Horses was tacked to the shop wall. He tried to imagine the day Mapplethorpe took that picture, what Patti Smith had been thinking. He wished he had a cigarette. He thought about the smell of piss baking on the August streets of the East Village. he imagined drinking Patti Smith’s piss, then Robert Mapplethorpe’s. Then Jean Genet’s. Then River Phoenix’s.
This was the stuff that I think originally made me put the book away. Nothing was happening. Paul didn’t want anything specific, and there was then no clear obstacle to get in the way of that pursuit. Etc. Etc. But lately I’ve been looking for queer narratives that are queer in form and not just in the characters involved—which, when they perpetuate ancient narratives about queer sex as tragic or disease-bringing, or even worse, when they mirror Austen-style love & marriage plots but with gays!, makes me think of the inevitable season of The Bachelor that’s the exact same show but just with men.[3]
I think I’m done with queer representation inside hetero forms. Lawlor’s consistent trust in association, digression, and tangents (best illustrated in the Patti Smith passage above), delivers a narrative as fluid and shifting as Paul’s body. The engine that drives whatever plot is here involves moods and ideas, and in this way it reminded me of maybe the queerest novel I’ve ever read: Huysmans’s À Rebours.
If you’re looking for a good story in the classic sense of plot and pacing and resolution, PTTFOAMG will disappoint you—as it did the me I was in 2018. But if what you want in a novel is to transport you into a body and a mind you can live inside for a while, and read their world through that perspective, this novel is for you. It’s for everyone. I’m so glad I returned to it.
Footnotes (↵ returns to text)
I know I’m not getting very deeply into the explorations and arguments about gender this novel pursues, mostly because it’s not exactly my beat and others have already written more smartly about this than I could. But here I do want to point you toward a really smart essay Lawlor has in Mutha on becoming a parent and seeking a new term for themselves.↵
I’m thinking here of Lie with Me, A Little Life, most of Garth Greenwell, likely other renowned novels I as a gay man do not need any more of (but which I’m also not sure I’m the intended audience for, which is a post for another time.)↵
