I try to tell a girl at a trans-centric queer party in Chicago about the Publick Universal Friend but she seems either bored or offended, I can’t tell which. I rarely attend parties anymore but occasionally I motivate myself, and this party is my favorite because it’s the same party I used to go to when I was young—a bus to Chicago and dumpstering some food, visiting a sweetheart I met at Camp Trans. When I first came back to this party after a decade away, there were two of these early-transition girls with the sides of their heads shaved and lots of lipstick, like a harder-edged version of how I used to dress when I was that age. Then the next month there were a few more, and they had many bracelets on and piercings through their skin. And then there were more of them, with so much purple hair (I used to have purple hair, many times) and their hair was also silver (my silver hair). There came to be so many of these girls that they occupied a small room in the back of the bar each month. Now that it is winter, I walk through that room to get my coat and go smoke a cigarette, and I have to inch between them all, my knuckle tattoos grazing their knuckle tattoos. I hear their names, which sound like my name, or like the names of my friends. They are mad about things that once made me mad as they find joy in each other. Yet every time I try to talk to someone, we each only stutter awkwardness until I walk away, wordless at such a confrontation with age.
My relationship to who I was is tenuous. Is this true of all people? This is why it seems important to me that all people create, make art, practice their imaginations, exercise beauty. When we fill the world with artifacts of what we dreamed we begin to learn from who we wanted to be, an imagined people who might know enough to stop making the same mistakes.
Although, despite how similar these girls and I may look, how much our experiences overlap, I never actually saw myself as a woman. There was a moment once, 2010 or so, when I looked in a mirror, hacking away at my hair with paper scissors, and felt suddenly and almost mystically this sense that I was a woman. I kind of stared in the mirror for a while and felt it, this sense of self, which was nice enough, and just as quickly as that it left. I hoped after that I would have a moment like this in which I felt what it was to be a man, maybe also while I was hacking away at my hair, although this has not yet happened, and likely never will.
Isn’t it strange, to grow up in a culture where your own experience is so completely erased that you don’t even realize you’re possible until your early twenties? If I am adding myself to the crowd of people who write, I would like it sometimes to be me when I am warm. I would like people to know that I am happy, sometimes. Like after I eat a weed brownie, and the warm feeling seems to come up inside and fill me, the warmth even exceeding me, a gooey brownie feeling of who I am. A warm person holding someone and feeling entirely present in that moment. I would like to know: Can this offer something? To someone who is not me? Like a girl at a bar, whom I would have been friends with. Who might have meant the world to me and I to her, were the time right.
My nightlife nights are rarer because they are increasingly followed by these hangovers, the sun off the white snow brighter, more painful, than summer sun. Chicago is, of course, very icy. It’s thrilling, how icy this city is. It’s a city that ices with and without snow, with and without rain. It’s one of those cities that just gets so cold that there’s ice. I lift ice off the sides of walls and poles and fences where it has frozen and I hold the ice in my hand. I look very closely at the rough frozen edges of bark, rippled with ice. I watch the dew-ice that patterns my window. I slip a bit on the ice in my high-heeled snow boots as I carry a large vase of flowers from a funeral. I taste the ice.
The ice is also an excuse for Lake Michigan, which freezes sometimes. People are less likely to attend the lake during the winter, so my experience of it is interior, less shared than the lake of summer. The thing about the lake freezing is that I don’t have any idea what its system is. It’s not that it just freezes when it’s cold enough, because sometimes it is surprisingly warm and the lake freezes, and sometimes it has been bitterly goddamn cold for days and the lake is liquid. And when it freezes it is sometimes only a bit, sometimes so far out that the ice keeps going, sometimes with sharp edges that invite waves to crash against them, and sometimes in blobby floating chunks and slushes. I think that by going to the lake I might learn what this system is. It seems that to do this I will have to go there every day, which is what I try, and then, when this doesn’t quite work, I try going there and writing about it. What I learn about the weird rules of the lake is that the time of day when I go there seems to matter as much as anything else, which is to say unmeasurably. The lake does not conform to my expectations of motion or fit its shapes to the rise and fall of temperature that I feel because of its expanse, stretching much farther than I can see, in many directions, with different qualities of light. Like how white ice reflects sunlight back toward the sky, so the cold and unfrozen water, inky blue, traps heat, and the vast expanses of unseen ice cool us. So really what I am measuring is not the lake but the sun, the most instinctive measure besides breath or heartbeat.
When the ice is wet enough the slush chunks rise up like gray things. Although they don’t go anywhere they seem to keep rising, like a cold boil. It reminds me of how Benjy’s photographs look. He doesn’t manipulate the pictures digitally but instead creates images that suggest a false past of digital manipulation. This is done lo-fi, just mirrors, lights, strings, all in multitudes, all reflections of suspensions of reflections of glow. A giant rectangular mirrored tube with orange flowers like a lipstick, engorging out of its top, and the mirrors reflecting the grass and bugs and trees around it, and some sky. Or a cave, its first cavern illuminated pink and its outer edges electrically blue by the lights Benjy casts, and the pond outside it electrically blue, too, all to frame a neon sign reading Soft Butch in pink-and-blue cursive.
The day of the Soft Butch image, I remember, was unreasonably cold, and Benjy had to float out in a little boat at the mouth of the millhouse cave and his hands were wet and the strings of lights and cameras had to stay safe. I was supposed to help but I didn’t, and when he was done Benjy hung the neon sign outside my little shack with its barn windows.
There is no way to know from the image that it was such a cold day. The water there is always the same temperature because it comes out of the cave, which goes back for miles and miles. We don’t go back there any longer on account of the bats. They hibernate and because of a fungus disease that is spreading across bat populations, if we wake them and they stretch their wings, that little energy expended before resting again might mean they die before spring. It’s even worse if you go in one cave and then another, waking the bats and then spreading the fungus and waking more bats. If I look at the ice on Lake Michigan I can make a guess that it is hard enough for me to walk on because it is very white and geese are sitting on it—maybe the webbing of their feet is even frozen to it, as Jackson suggests over Skype, having never been in a frozen winter. “The geese will be here until spring!” I can’t see how hard the ice is, anyway, or how cold. I can just see ice.
The few people who attend the Rogers Park beach in winter tend to be regulars. There are two old women who dress in the same cream outfits and hold hands, a creepy guy who is always off in the distance, some dogs. I see them all the time but we don’t talk. We’re just near one another. Men have always been so good at finding each other. They go to places that are straightforward: road, parking lot, bathroom, woods, park. Places where you can sit down until you find yourself a man. When I was young I spent years in those places—roads, parking lots, bathrooms, woods, parks—but it took until I was older and finally in a city that I had my wits about me to hook up with any random guys.
Despite my early adolescent experimentation, I was a latecomer to hookup culture. Partly, because I’d always gone for the aberrant and off-tune, people with odd relations to their gender or whatever, so the older straight guys I could have picked up when I was a small-town teenage twink didn’t intere
st me, but the weirdo faggots (and sometimes dykes!) in New York years later did. This was also a shield from a lot of violence, that I never went for straight guys, although it took me a long time to understand that distinction and its ramifications. More than that, though, I stopped myself for years from actually hooking up with anyone because I had been overcome with active, violent acne from puberty through my early twenties. It made a bloody mess of me, open pus everywhere, and it made me so deeply ashamed of my body that I would never have considered taking my clothing off in front of someone else until I was in my early twenties, when finally my chest and back were not, in my mind, impossible to look at.
I did really find it impossible to look at myself, although also I could not stop looking at myself. I’d hold hot cloths to my chest and pluck the irritated stubble out of my face, sometimes for a solid, painful hour without break. Any pressure to my skin hurt, and I would erupt in pus sometimes from leaning on a chair or bending too quickly. More than once I could not see out of an eye, swollen shut. When hair started growing on my chest and back it became even more a nightmare, bristle and grease, ingrown. I was miserable about it. All of this would be for long stretches of time all that I could think about, my face in particular, and everything I had decided I couldn’t do because of how I looked. It obsessed me, and during my teenage years sometimes I didn’t think much beyond these obsessions: I’m hideous and I’m gay, I’m hideous and I’m gay. In high school, especially, the harassment, for everything—it became the encompassing framework I had for my body. So it was impossible to see myself, not because of what I was looking at, but rather because I couldn’t get beyond what everyone else was looking at.
I was so greasy that I had to wash my face every few hours or I would feel myself breaking out even more. At the same time, from the moment I left my hometown, I refused to let any person see me without makeup, and so I was always needing a private sink, to wash myself and paint myself again. For sex, this meant I could quick-and-dirty go down on someone, and sometimes a person might go down on me. But I wouldn’t bring myself to kiss for more than a couple of seconds (and that only if I was having a rare clear moment around my lips), or else someone might pull me close with their arms around me, or touch my cheek, which would be unbearable. I was too embarrassed to fuck and ask if I could keep my shirt on, but I could never take my shirt off, and sometimes I would have to say this—that I would like to keep my shirt on—because I had caved to my own desires and gone home from the bar with someone. Saying this was humiliating, and it meant I blew people, but almost never more than once, or maybe twice. I would make rules for myself: that I could fool around until someone tried to take my shirt off or reach up under it. A person I dated for a while—this charming activist with a catsuit like the one the lady in Tomb Raider wore and who would change genders later—once opened up my trust enough to get me in a shower with them, but I only froze once there. After a horribly long moment they drew me a heart in the steam on the shower wall and I stepped out and wrapped a towel around myself, and I remember what it felt like to cover myself with that towel.
In my early twenties the acne quieted on my body, and my face calmed down slowly, and then I became actually slutty. Just like how I had started wearing makeup when the acne came fully on, exactly as the acne began clearing is when I started slutting my way to the top of the slut class, this new me confident enough to put on a black slip and head to the Eagle. No surprise, then, that it was not until I started to take testosterone blockers that the acne actually stopped—although the hormones would also come, eventually, to mean good-bye to the hookup culture of anonymous gay men, to the bears and twinks of my youth. It had been testosterone, of course, that had been the problem all along. The doctors had tried all sorts of things, keeping me on harsh antibiotics for years, which wreaked havoc on my body’s ecology and permanently damage-dried my skin. The heaves in my digestion and my horrible sensitivity to light are from those antibiotics, with their long, long lists of side effects. I am reminded of this history, the same pain intensifying every time I have to take antibiotics for chlamydia or strep or whatever.
But of course no one would have thought to tell me any of that, about the testosterone in my body being the problem. This country finds so many ways to poison people. Instead, I just needed someone to say, Would you like all of this to go away? Here is a pill to make all of these horrible things stop. And then I would have had a body that I could see and I would have loved that. I would have had a delightful time with other twinks, naked and happy and figuring ourselves out, with my clear skin and my shriveled cock, not stressed about it at all.
Today I go to a beach a little farther away with a bird sanctuary. There’s not anyone cruising, although this used to be an always-cruising place. This used to be a place where people would touch but maybe not talk, unlike now, where it starts with people talking but maybe not ever touching—those taptap apps. I was clinging to some anarchist ideals and using a map and a notebook instead of a cell phone for long enough that it all seems alarming to me, that there was some exchange of touch for language, of fucking for messaging about maybe fucking, of namelessness for usernames and spontaneity for intention. I know it’s not that simple, tit for tap, but I don’t want to give any more of my touch to language. I just want language to generate more touch.
It’s the digital space, I think, that I fail to understand. I know that this is an important space, that it is real and that imagination thrives there, imagination even turns into reality there. Our human bodies can be haptic tools of whatever lives in a thriving digital space, as I understand it, and this could be revolutionary and/or a nightmare. But I think, I am fairly certain, that I was too late, even if only by a few years, to fully appreciate and live there. That this is a space I will be in awe and terror of, where language and bodies do something different.
For Simon, it was sometimes contact, but never language—our firm rule that we would never process our relationship became its undoing, each fuck verging us closer to the point where we would finally have to talk and admit the discordance of our desires. For Jackson, as deep in the Sydney summer as I am in the Chicago winter, it’s something like the inverse, with our long conversations about bodies and rebellion and power sustained by the impossibility of holding one another as much as by what we say. The epistolary or the journal, I try to have each at once.
Just like those first sexual contacts in my hometown were a game of silence and touch, of the vertiginous point between language and bodies—but never either entirely—my adult relationships aren’t always recognizable as such. Recognizable to me, I guess, but no one else. I used to gather my sister’s Barbies and bring them to my Ninja Turtles, placing them all on top of the Ninja Turtle Sewer Playset and acting out complex, sexualized dramas. The Barbies were often upset, and the Turtles a bit naive in their good intentions. I didn’t know what the tensions were, between these women who towered over these guys, only that things were tense and that I had to hide the play. It was many years later, walking to the beach-bound bus in New York, the girls all taller than the guys, that this game came back to me like Oh, of course.
The distinction is between narrative and something else, between the way a town looks in a photograph and the way a town looks when you play flashlight tag in it and you are nervous. Sometimes it takes so much momentum to escape your context that you seem to never stop straining at escape after that. Sometimes you meet people you love but that still won’t be enough because you won’t know who you are, when you are someone who isn’t alone.
Like the golden curtain for Roni Horn, the beads of “Untitled”
(Water) touch just slightly.
It is plastic beads, some blue and fewer clear or white, hanging
in vertical lines that collide.
The rows of blue are wider than the rows of clear, which appear
white from a distance.
Like many of the candy piles, some strings of light bulbs, the
&nbs
p; curtain begins not as a set object, but as text, instructions for
installation—
here, that its width should fill a space in such a way that the
audience is required to pass through it,
and that the beads should be acquired cheaply, and locally.
I have not seen this curtain in person, but imagine the feel of
the beads against my body, the movement of the beads (waves),
and the plastic clatter of their collisions.
Like just softly, all of me is touched, and I hear it.
Water is a bit like the moon, in that if we are not careful, it will
accumulate our ideas to a measure that obscures it.
To even place them together—
the moon, at dusk, reflected on a pond,
or the suspended water of a cloud obscuring the moon—
is to suggest a deep, almost selfish romanticism.
Such romanticism is pleasant, and I have spent many nights
on a Brooklyn roof or a Tennessee hillside gazing at the moon
and thinking of someone I loved.
Sometimes a person far away, sometimes sleeping in my bed.
The moon has a partial face, trapped to look at us just so,
and another face, always looking away.
This is why it is different than water.
When has water ever remained the same?
Gaze across the lake and see if you can find me.
Move through fog until we touch.
Here, my hair is wet with rain, and the white cotton of your
shirt see-through to your skin again.
Simon and I finally go to Berlin for the summer, my first trip
outside the United States, sparing a visit to Toronto with my
high school marching band.
A job writing multiple-choice questions for textbooks lets me
Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through Page 9