Getting my victim to pardon me

The heat has been turned off in the building for some reason. There are only two of us. The rest of the apartments are empty and the doors swing wide open. Broken panes of glass everywhere. Sometimes I walk around in the empty apartments, the refrigerator doors swinging wide, the smell of gas from forgotten stoves breathing to themselves in bare kitchens, ugly lino.

A hot boy used to live downstairs. He had girls over all the time, pretty girls that I imagined he would fuck at night and in the morning I would watch them dash out in high heels and negligee as their cars got towed from out front. I would fantasize about this boy, thin as a rail and trash-faced, addicted to camel lights and ice beer, and wish he wanted me. Now he's gone and his apartment is empty. I wandered around in it just now, sniffing, trying to get a sense of him. He's been gone for months of course. The bathroom, the bedroom, swept clean of everything except a few dead skin cells, I imagine, on the windowsill.

The Christmas break has come and gone and Cute T hasn't called, which makes me sad and yet defiant. We met about a year ago--I threw a Christmas party and some boys brought him. He was cute and curly-haired, thin and indie. He was also moving to New York City in a few weeks, but we went out on a date anyway, to a trashy gay bar, and got drunk, and I, feeling giddy, told him I didn't care if he was moving--I liked him and I was going to keep liking him. Thus began about a month of intense passion...fucking all weekend, napping in bed to wake and fuck again, dinners, movies, more fucking, making out. He is so fucking cute I am getting aroused just imaginging being inside him again. He is also sweet and tender and one of those boys you want to spend all your money and time and cum making happy.

Part of the success of things for me was that he was moving. I know that doesn't make any sense, but we wouldn't have worked out had he stuck around. If we had had all the time in the world, we would have squandered it, grown bored, moved on. With only a few weeks, we crammed it all into a tight ball between us, like some critical mass of neutrons that burned our bellies.

He moved to NYC and I visited him and he would come back to town unannounced. His family lives in a small town about an hour away so Cute T would fly into the larger metropolis and call me. "Hey, it's me. I'm on the train heading into the city. Can I crash with you for a few days until my flight leaves?" I never knew when his calls were coming and he was always only an hour or two from my doorstop. It was sexy and exciting. We'd have a few more days to fuck and cuddle and whisper. And then he'd be gone.

Cute T always wanted more, and I was content with what we had. Finally he caught wind of my truth--that I didn't think we would have worked out had we stayed together. It was something I kept from him, calculatingly. Why spoil it with a kernel of truth he didn't need to know? Witholding your projection of a possible future that never came to pass isn't dishonest. He wrote me saying he just wanted to be loved the way he wanted to be loved. At first I was sad, and then I became angry--don't I want to be loved the way I want to be loved? And if Cute T could do that, wouldn't my thoughts have changed? I said as much to him, and that was the end.

So these past few days between Christmas and New Year's, wandering around my freezing apartment in slippers, wondering if Cute T would call (but knowing deep down that he won't ever call again), I can't help but think of another passage from Genet...

Here am I this morning, after a long night of caressing my beloved couple, torn from my sleep by the noise of the bolt being drawn by the guard who comes to collect the garbage. I get up and stagger to the latrine, still entangled in my strange dream, in which I succeeded in getting my victim to pardon me.

Of course that's how I felt this morning, waking with a slight hangover. Wishing Cute T was in bed with me and thinking for a brief moment that I might see him again. This time last year we were lying in bed together, watching the snow outside, making love over and over again.

The Scenes

Art...

The banners I've constructed for the site encapsulate in certain small ways what I hope this blog is about...



I'm a big fan of zines, diy culture and the rough aesthetics of copiers and inaccurate reproductions. This image comes from the cover of the zine Autocratic/Autoerotic.



Computers have a way of fucking things up in beautiful ways. When I began this blog, I returned to some old essays I wrote on Jean Genet in an very archaic version of Microsoft Word. Opening them, my computer jumbled the text into strange and somewhat beautiful patterns.


On the left, Justin Berry. Webcam porno star? victim of pedophiles? Born-again Christian? Federal witness? Web entrepreneur? All of the above? This photo of him is my favorite--after leaving behind his sorded webcam lifestyle, he got baptized again. On the right, Freddie Mercury. Live Aid. Bohemian Rhapsody. AIDS. "My makeup may be flaking but my smile stays on."


Speaking of autoerotics, this is an image I fell in love with a long time ago. It's a crime scene photo of a married man who died while practicing autoerotic asphyxiation, which involves masturbating while cutting off one's own airflow, which is obviously very dangerous. He is wearing pantyhose and women's shoes and died with the television on.


This is the body of Piers Paolo Pasolini, the Italian writer and filmmaker, who was stabbed to death on November 30th, 1975. At first, a young street ruffian named 'Pino the Frog' told how he had been having sex with Pasolini in the park when they were set up on by three men with Sicilian accents who beat and stabbed Pasolini to death while shouting anti-gay slurs at him. However, Pino's account was since discredited, and the details of the death of one of cinema's geniuses remains a mystery.


Of course, this is taken from the movie poster for Fassbinder's Querelle, which starred Brad Davis in the role of the murderous, bisexual sailor.


Here is Little Edie near the end of the film Grey Gardens, lamenting the overbearing control her mother, Big Edie, has had on her life all these long years shut up in the ramshackle mansion on Long Island. The documentary, shot in 1975, provides a fascinating look into the mundane and eccentric lives of Jackie O's Aunt and her spinster daughter.


I'm quite proud of this one--It's a reworking of the cover of the Farber and Farber edition of Querelle.



I hope he won't mind...I recently heard from Sean, who sent me this updated photo of himself. Sean is 24 now, but he was seventeen and I was nineteen when we first met. I was a freshman living in the dorms and he would drive in from exurbia. We would go months without seeing each other sometimes, and then he'd show up and we'd spend a tender night together. He was the gentlest boy and I cared for him deeply. He chose others over me though, and that makes me sad, though deep down I know it couldn't have been different. He lives in Florida now, where he runs a successful windowblinds business with his boyfriend, who is my age. The last time I talked to Sean, his boyfriend was dying of cancer.


A random image, that's all, that I was struck by--a fine-art nude of a young man, decontextualized, taken from this link. No clue who what where when how.

Writing in white ink

A few years ago, I was in college and living in my first apartment, which was in a shitty part of town. The apartment was two bedrooms, a third floor walkup, hardwood floors that pitched like the deck of a boat at sea, a galley kitchen and a giant claw foot bathtub that took hours to fill. It went for the anachronistic price of $445 a month--for both bedrooms. I had just become a Cultural Studies major, and wrote papers on the queering of marriage and gay pornography and took my sexuality extremely seriously. It was newly discovered in me and a potent force. Not something to take lightly but let it run wild while you could only dig your hands into its mane and hold on for dear life.

In one particular class I fell under the spell of Jean Genet. He was many things I aspired to be at a time when they all seemed impossible--thief, criminal, buds with the Black Panthers, shaker of Arafat's hand, and unabashed homosexual. Our Lady of the Flowers became in a few short weeks my Bible and handbook. How well I followed him, I don't know. Not to the letter, certainly. But single, alone in my shitty apartment, I did find a kind of religiosity in paying homage to my own bodily functions and the whims of my burgeoning erotic life.

One weekend I wrote this paper that I'm still kind of proud of. Shit, yeah, but not bad for a nineteen year old. The paper was called "Writing in White Ink" and compared Genet's masturbatory fantasies of Darline and Divine to an essay by Helene Cixous, "Laugh of the Medusa." What I had before me was a neat little paperback published by Grove and typeset in Times but as I began to absorb that what I was reading were the sexual fantasies, the jerk-off diaries of a homosexual in prison, alone and isolated and so turning inward, relishing his farts and examing the jewels he left behind in the toilet bowl and writing down on the paperbags he assembled during the day for a measly job the stories he would jerk off to at night, I found myself stopping every few paragraphs to fall breathlessly to my own bed. I must have jerked off about ten times during the course of that paper. And since then I've devoted my life to writing in white ink.

Our lady of the flowers

I have given up the daydream. I was loved. I have quit, the way a contestant in a six-day bicycle race quits; yet the memory of his eyes and their fatigue, which I have to cull from the face of another youngster whom I saw coming out of a brothel, a boy with firm legs and ruthless cock, so solid that I might almost say it was knotted, and his face (it alone, seen without its veil), which asks for shelter like a knight-errant--this memory refuses to disappear as the memory of my dream-friends usually does. It floats about. It is less sharp than when the adventures were taking place, but it loves in me nevertheless. Certain details persist more obstinately in remaining: the little hollow key with which, if he wants to, he can whistle; his thumb; his sweater; his blue eyes...If I continue, he will rise up, become erect, and penetrate me so deeply that I shall be marked with stigmata. I can't bear it any longer. I am turning him into a character whom I shall be able to torment in my own way, namely, Darling Daintyfoot. He will still be twenty, although his destiny is to become the father and lover of Our Lady of the Flowers.

-- Jean Genet

The scene of a stratagem

Fifteen months have since gone by, during which time I have written the opening sentences of this text (roughly speaking, the ones I've just written) perhaps fifty times and have each time without fail become thoroughly snared in rhetorical devices. I wanted to write, I had to write, had to rediscover in writing, through writing, the trace of what had been said (all those pages recommenced, those unfinished drafts, those lines left hanging, are like souvenirs of the amorphous sessions in which I had the hateful sensation of being a machine for grinding out words without weight), but the words hardened into carefully chosen phrases and what one might assume to be preliminary questions: why do I need to write this text? Who is it really intended for? Why choose to write, and to publish, to make public, what was perhaps named only in the secrecy of analysis? Why choose to attach this uncertain search to the ambiguous theme of the Stratagem?

-- Georges Perec