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.
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.
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