ᔖᐘᓄᐱᓀᐢ

CONTENT WARNINGS: vague references to sexual violence, sardonic references to Ancient Greek pederasty, omnipresent sense of dread/surveillance and being misgendered

Also my recording sounds all shaky and unpracticed and then I get into a flow just trust me xoxo gossip girl

On visibility post-panopticon

Writer’s note: I understand many of you to assume “post-” means a concept or social construct is “over,” hence your difficulty interfacing with “postcolonial” theory or “post-covid,” but for our purposes, “post-” means “after the advent of the thing” or “in the thing’s world now.”

#ootd

Out on Aliceanna Street, I swung my left leg back and forth off the curb like a child, tilting my head to make sure my pants reached all the way down. My father’s voice calling a boy’s too-short jeans “highwaters” derisively in the eighth grade lives in my head whenever I dress myself. If I’m trying on a coat, I do “the Waawaakeyaash Test,” something Ojibwe language teacher Waawaakeyaash Keller Paap taught us when we were really little, where you put on your jacket. “At ease,” meaning arms resting at your sides. “Reach for the sausages,” as in, reach to the top shelf. “Do the circle dance,” which means putting your hands in fists in front of you and circling them around. Well, yeah, dancing.

A lot of the cardigans I wear these days don’t really pass the test, but my new pants seem to fit okay, so I stepped out on Easter in my favorite “worst outfit ever,” which consists of the pants in question–faux-patchwork white and blue wide-leg jeans from Chickie & Co. on Howard, just past all the pitted empty storefronts in Antique Row, a white and grey baby tee with boxing gloves embroidered across the chest and KNOCKOUT embroidered underneath, with a matching patchwork jacket I’ve been meaning to add embroidery to that Della gave me from our basement. I think it’s from the 90s, but I can’t be sure.

I’ve been listening to a lot of cassettes lately. Unlike CDs, vinyl, or streaming, I can actually hold the music in my hands, examine it. I love the click of the hard plastic or the soft matte slide of the paper cases against my palm. When I first got really into cassettes, however, one thought pushed itself to the forefront of my mind. Disturbed the shit out of me.

Well, I thought, there goes my end-of-the-year music recap.

You know it. You love it. Spotify Wrapped. Apple Music Replay. The annual roundup of everyone’s most-listened to artists and songs we all share with each other in December like the business card scene in American Psycho.

You’re always gonna use it. Sure, some jumped ship from Spotify when the Rogan scandal caused a bunch of classic rock stars to pull their catalogs from the streaming platform, openly deriding the website for how they severely underpay their artists. And yeah, Spotify’s known for its “CIA-level surveillance software,” which a noble few try to push against as best they can. But you love it, don’t you? You love being watched.

Apple Music and Youtube both jacked Spotify’s swag the moment they noticed the gorilla grip Wrapped has on consumers, which is a fun little dirty euphemism for “people” I like to toss out every now and again. Less and less now that I’ve met more people who actively identify with the epithet. I’m what my friends call an “Apple music understander,” a label just a few notches above “Riverdale Apologist” and below “such a hater.” Thus, my “Wrapped” is Apple’s “Replay,” which tries with clumsy glossiness to copy what Spotify corners the market on. Before your hackles raise at my irony-poisoned tone, I need you to know I love my little Replay. Last year, I drew immense pleasure from posting Deafheaven as my top artist, because one of my best friends had literally no idea I loved Deafheaven that much. The conversation that ensued gave me enough serotonin to last me through the rest of that brutal winter.

There’s something so comforting in being surveilled, isn’t there? In proving you have nothing to hide. You’ve done nothing wrong. You’re a Good Person. You believe in The Acceptable Things. You listen to the Sanctioned Music and you support the Proper Celebrities. You say the right thing, always, and if you don’t, well, you’d better dust off that Notes app, because accountability and catharsis are your only saving grace right now.

I get watched a lot. My landlord’s set up all these cameras, see, three at the door before you unlock the building, three more in the landing. Maybe more upstairs, I haven’t checked. These walls are thin. The floors are thinner. Today I crossed my apartment and realized my upstairs neighbor was crossing his at the same time, our footfalls an eerie harmony. Creak, thump, creak. We’re doing our laundry at the same time, too, right now, both of our machines lurching and rattling the whole old building.

It doesn’t stop when I leave my house, either. It might even get worse. Once, a few months back, I stepped out in my favorite pink and gossamer outfit, the one I’ve pretty much dry-docked since upping my T-dose. It’s a long, flowing pink skirt with a mesh gold petticoat that gives the illusion I’m floating. Then there’s usually a pink shirt on top, only I believe that day, I was wearing a red waistcoat that definitely didn’t pass the Keller Paap test and therefore required the posture of an Irish River-dancer. A carful of older women, Millennials or maybe even Gen X, started to scream at my approach, with two of them raising their phones to film and photograph me. One woman panicked when she realized she had her flash on—it was nighttime. Some phones turn the flash on automatically. I did not turn around. I was used to people having bizarre reactions to my presence at this point, but the two friends trailing behind me stammered, “Did… were they… did they just take a video of you?”

I shrugged and kept walking. These things happen.

Out on Aliceanna, I swung my leg off the curb like a small child. I wondered if I was going to post on Instagram for Trans Day of Visibility. I’ve been oscillating between trans pride and trans prejudice, you see, joy at my own body and anger at its implicit betrayal, at how many times I’ve entered a space with other trans mascs just to have them slant their eyes at me because I’m not like them. Whether that’s because I’ve been on T for longer, or my height, voice, whatever, is anyone’s guess.

It was a beautiful, sunny Easter Sunday, and a lot of people—men, mostly—were out with DSLR cameras. Phil and I had just gone to the Sound Garden, where I bought about ten new cassettes and one vinyl copy of Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing, an apt record to name-drop in a written piece dedicated to watching and being watched. I FaceTimed my grandparents from the curb, furrowing my brow at my unkempt face, my loose, dry surfer waves that looked crunchy. Across the street, I registered the vague presence of a man with a camera and a beautifully dressed middle-aged woman. She’d walk a few paces, strike a pose, and he’d capture her. I watched her for a moment in admiration until my grandparents picked up and I got ready to tell them about my plans to pursue a prelaw degree.

Just as my grandfather said to me, “We should FaceTime more often. You know, I won’t be around for very much longer,” I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked up just in time to catch the man with the camera as he casually hooked his arm up and around, winked, and took my picture.

I faltered in my response to my grandfather’s alarming and true statement here. For one long, agonizing moment, the world moved in slow motion. My leg swung back and forth off the curbside, one long, infected pendulum. The warm spring breeze ruffled my hair as dogwood petals swirled around me, white as an angel’s feathers but reeking of cum. My eye zeroed in on the bulbous black eye of the camera, where all light seemed to disappear. My grandfather smiled at his mortal assertion and I glanced down at where I held his face in my hands, frightened by how it took me twenty-four years to realize his eyes are green. The man across the street saw me see him and smirked a little, lowering his camera. His lady friend spun on her heel and looked expectantly at him. I opened my mouth and as I was saying, “Yes, yes, that’s true, you’re right,” two young men walking into the alley tripped over each other and began to point at me. They both stared, walking backwards into the dark.

passing time

Transness is a funny thing. There’s all these layers to how it’s perceived. Monstrous, threatening, laughable, embarrassing, liberatory, beautiful, bold, annoying, or, in my case, just plain boring. Being trans might be the most boring thing about me, and I have a lot of boring things.

Because my phone thinks I’m a cis gay guy who struggles with erectile dysfunction and keeping my asshole clean, my explore page is filled with weird, quasi-right wing memes. That is, of course, until I spend time training my algorithm to show me calls for submission, grant opportunities, and job postings. Instagram recently removed the timestamps, at least on my version of the app, which has made this difficult and made my explore page backslide into the mean spirited, weird shit I don’t actually like to see, peppered with femcel rhetoric I super don’t like to see. What I end up finding is a lot of biological essentialism, insecurity, and comment sections filled with “bro got mental illness” and “bro switched sides” and “no way bro” with the crying laughing emojis in response to trans people acknowledging our own existence.

Sometimes I see homoerotic videos, mostly of the gym bro variety, talking about touching tips with the boys, going on camping trips with the boys, jacking the boys off, or how the boys seem to understand better how to love each other than their girlfriends do. The latter is mostly in the form of “when my girlfriend says she loves me but bro just said if he were going blind in an hour he’d want my face to be the last face he sees” or some such poetic shit. These boy-centric homosocial posts tend to posit homosexual relationships as being simultaneously inevitable and unattainable, a fantasy bubble existing only in the gym or video games a la Black Mirror’s infamous “Striking Vipers” episode. There’s an undercurrent of “no homo” to all of it, centering the perceived misery of a heterosexual romantic contract as the end-all be-all of male existence. Tellingly, bro never wants to lock bro down, even when the feelings are mutual and the joy seems abundant. This is because, of course, straightness is sacred, unimpeachable. The natural order of things.

Enter they/them pussy.

Your “fruity boyfriend” cannot see you

I’d like to preface this by saying everything I’m about to discuss here suffers from my own prejudices. I’m writing from the perspective of someone who, as I’ve said before, was a no-boys-allowed lesbian until I wasn’t, at which point I began my social transition, still pursuing anyone who wasn’t a man (except for one gay man ten years my senior, but that’s… that’s classified), then entered my “volcel era” so I could be “more finished” before I actually kept having sex, then I detransitioned, then I shacked up with a girl, then we broke up, then I re-transitioned.

I’m not really the person you could easily bond with if you’re attracted to men from the get-go, is what I’m trying to say. I’ve never tried to justify the sexualities of the men I sleep with, because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt how we’re perceived. It’s why I don’t really hold their hands or their gazes out in public. It’s why I’m kind of a homophobic douchebag. I know, I know, I’m working on it.

With trans people becoming more “visible,” so too have our presences in the memetic world increased exponentially. One such meme is the coveted “they/them pussy,” which I’m certain began in T4T spaces as a sort of ostentatious flouting of gendered expectations for who can have what genitals before it became a chaser’s calling card. The amount of men I’ve come across who have their Tinder preferences set to “women only” but prefer “nonbinary chicks” with their boyish aesthetics, blunted emotional needs, and perpetual youth is staggering. As for the “chicks” in question, my absolute favorite thing is hearing an AFAB enby go off about how their new boy toy’s only ever been with cis girlies, but he must be a little fruity if he’s going out with them.

Of course, because he thinks I’m one of him, he drops his guard, starts talking about his “girlfriend” and “her” genderweird shit, calls “her” “a they/them” as if “a they/them” is a noun and not, like, a weirdly immature, slightly dehumanizing misuse of someone’s potential pronouns. These relationships never last, but I always wonder what would happen if they did. Would my friend, my beautiful, insane, nonbinary, disgusting little freak of a friend be tamed by this? Their boring, unimaginative, ludicrously uncurious boyfriend, the fucker they keep bringing around because he’s “basically queer” only for him to barge into everyone’s personal space with his entitlement and his black-hole lack of personality? Is he gonna win, is what I’m wondering, and are they going to relent, become a “she” to his “him,” a “wife” to his “husband?”

Furthermore, is he? Queer, I mean?

I think he might be. Queer, though, not in a life-giving, revolutionary kind of way, but in a repressed, emasculated, Hays code way. I’m thinking of this one absolutely batshit screenshot drag artist Penis Envy (Radcliffe) posted on his Instagram:

More on the “real women” idea later, but to wrap this portion up, I’m so against this type of guy being in me and my friends’ personal space because I’ve been chased by that exact guy. You know the kind. Straight guy, identifies as pansexual because he’s sucked a woman off and thinks pre-everything tboys are fuckable as long as they look twenty years old at most. I won’t name him. His life seems kind of bad. I don’t like kicking people while they’re down. But he was in his forties while I was barely nineteen, and he’d try to hold me down, make me spoon him. There was something empty and shattered in his eyes I couldn’t quite place. Now, having fucked a few guys as a guy and felt them melt within my hands, I wonder if it’s that. The simultaneous aversion and obsession with homosexuality. Some great, unmet need within himself. A lot of my friends think the boyfriends who fuck up their lives are looking for mommies. I almost disagree.

I think a lot of men wish they had a daddy.

The responsibility of desire

I’d gone on a rant recently about how so many Native men are just gay. There was a point to it. I was all beat up and upset over a particular Richard Van Camp short story, the one where it’s these two childhood best friends and one of them is getting married (to a woman), and his friend asks him if he remembers their deal. The deal had been that, so they would never go a day apart, they’d both get married to women but they’d live in a great big house, or rather, two houses, attached in the middle, and they could all sleep together in one bed. And maybe they’d share their wives, if the wives were okay with it, but the point was, these two boys would grow old together, too. And the man, the husband, he goes to his new bride and asks her if she’d be alright with that. She says, “Can I think on it?”

The story passes in typical Van Camp fashion. Loopy time. Vivid and dreamlike at once. Gets inside you, in your head and in your heart, I mean, there’s a reason I have “Godless but loyal to heaven” tattooed down my hip. And then the bride summons her man back and says, “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

Her man says that’s alright, returns to his best friend. His best friend kisses him and says, “Okay. Maybe in our next life.”

I was mad as hell about that story for a couple reasons. Mostly my own sense of impending doom. Marriage seems like a death sentence to me. It’s probably the “child of divorce” talking, but I’m terrified of it. Whenever a high school buddy of mine posts their marriage photos, I have to fight the urge to pour one out. Especially if it’s someone I knew for a fact was having gay sex when we were in school and is now a good ole boy, going to church with his pretty blonde wife.

I was going off about this, how so many Native men would be better off, maybe even nicer to women, if they just admitted their own queerness. I was going off about it to Carmen, who I love so much, and she interrupted me.

“Listen. I think… look, I get where you’re coming from, but I feel like… I feel like alleged gayness absolves these men of the responsibility of desire. And… and I was. I was desired. I was desired, one hundred percent.”

In the final episode of Fellow Travelers, the main character’s wife says, “I’ve gone my whole life without knowing what it’s like to be desired. Do you have any idea how lonely that is?”

I stopped mid-rant, tension leaving my shoulders. I nodded, but Carmen couldn’t see me. We were, as usual, talking on the phone. There was context for her comments that cannot be shared here, and context for my relenting that can. She was right. I knew she was right, because I had desired women, too, and broken their hearts just the same, hiding in my own homosexuality as if that made my behavior any better.

Under one of the innumerable memes I mentioned before, which was a picture of some tomboyish teenage white girl with perfect skin, freckles, and buoyant hair, captioned, “This is my girlfriend but she goes to a different school,” someone commented, “Any idea what the deal is with right wing incels’ obsession with her?”

The top comment in response: “It feeds their Ancient Greek desire to have a teenage boy-wife.”

When I’m out with my friends, particularly my early or mid-transition trans masc and nonbinary friends, I am always chilled by how obsessed older men are with them. I know they’re beautiful, I fucking, like, have eyes, but seeing thirty-somethings and forty-somethings, unmarried and incapable of keeping a woman around long enough to have a wife, decide their next best option might just be the under-twenty-fives I love more than I can reasonably say, I start to wonder if aggravated assault should be legalized. You know. Just for me.

Not that I hang out with many straight women. Whenever I do, I’m always floored by their dysfunctional behaviors. Going through their man’s phone. Making him unfollow “all his hoes,” including his female cousins because… scarcity? I guess? But what I see in them is a desire, too, a desire for permanence. For a guaranteed future, free of the imperiled liminality of The Apps and texting their exes. They create their own intricate rituals to “trick” their men, find their own ways to blunt their emotions so they’re easier to consume. Being watched, being surveilled, being policed. What was it that Sylvia Plath once said? Every woman craves a fascist? A boot to the neck of a brute like you? When I was more girlish, more female, I’d urge these women to read up on compulsory heterosexuality. Especially if they were the types of girls who said they wished they were attracted to women.

Now, though, I find myself sort of seething in silence. I’m being tamed, too. Quelled. If not by a man, as a woman, which never would have happened to me to begin with, then by the cameras in the stairwell, the cameras in the hands of the people outside.

I’ve clocked that a lot of these men go after “they/them pussy” because women have expectations and nonbinary people have to expend most of that “expectant” energy on simply not being misgendered. You, as a two-bit no-good boyfriend, can get away with a lot of shit if your partner is so busy trying to be received as the person they truly are, they don’t notice your lack of personhood, your meat with its dumb, unformed mouth attached, spouting bare minimum pittances like you’re putting the blood of the lamb on your body. And I know chasers chase the moment they know what they’re chasing. The moment the prey can be shaped, named, observed.

The moment we’re made visible.