Long goes the night
Longer the day
Teclo your death
Will send me to my grave
—PJ Harvey, “Teclo”
My eyes are surrounded by red, like a flamboyant bandit. For the past several months, the skin around my eyes has grown both itchy and tender, constant irritation that doesn’t feel any relief when knuckles and fingertips rub against the sockets, my tears burning already leaky skin. I was beginning to have the look of someone bender-exhausted, a person distraught by both a breakup and a fistfight–worst yet, someone just vaguely unwell. It was the eyeshadow of general malaise, inviting low-level discomfort from every barista and bartender I met, as if I myself were being uncannily sociable in a desperate attempt for extra tips.
When I relented and finally saw a dermatologist, she gave me the least satisfying answer possible: contact dermatitis, the medical equivalent of someone shrugging and saying “you may want to consider avoiding objects.” This feels particularly impossible in New York City. Of what few upsides there were to living in Texas for several years, one was the clear allergen cycle; cedar would be followed by pollen, then mold and Saharan dust, then several months where the weather was too insufferable to go outside. New York City is, politely, a cesspool. Even with consistent hand washing and mask wearing, my immune system is already taxed enough in the city with drive-by illness that I cannot be fucked to figure what, exactly, among the 500 possible airborne or microscopic elements surrounding me at any possible moment could be giving my skin agita. Dander? Cologne? Soot? Secret wealth?
My skin has betrayed me this exact way before, leaving me a maroon-eyed raccoon. The last time the area around my eyes grew red for months on end was just under a decade ago, even before I moved to Texas, while I was still finishing my doctorate in my home state of Florida. Perhaps it’s corny to state the obvious–my skin has a general allergy to the onset of each Trump era–but it’s also disingenuous to ignore that, with both administrations, there’s just shit in the atmosphere. One doesn’t have to be a performative centrist or a money-hungry lobbying group to observe that life under Trump has–and frankly, should–make anyone feel worse. Some of us sleep more. Some of us sleep with more people. Some of us eat more, or don’t eat, or work out too much after eating, or don’t do anything. Some of us get rounded up while taking our kids to school by government goons or bashed with rubber bullets and police batons during a protest or have our diplomas withheld by quisling universities. I just happen to have the great good luck so far of only having a body whose natural reaction is to freak out even when my brain says to stay cool.
Still, New York pauses for no grievance, and when my friend John Z. offered me a spare ticket to see a drag show fully committed to PJ Harvey, I said yes without hesitation. We met up at C’mon Everybody and crammed into the back room, where a couple hundred other queers also watched as Miss Malice and a crew of Brooklyn’s finest performed drag and go-go to PJ’s decades-long discography. I can still recall my first encounter with PJ Harvey–thirteen years old, seeing the cover of Rid of Me at my local library, checking it out without a clue of the sound but knowing that I needed to know and maybe become the woman on the cover with the medusa hair. A quarter century later, I’m still surprised there were enough fans even in New York to stuff a gay bar to watch artists celebrate the very musician who set all of our heads and hearts on fire.
(The wisdom of the ages: most of us were grateful the venue scheduled the show for eight and not eleven.)
Drag is, at its best, a graceful distraction. A drag act can take you away from both the din of the crowd and the din of your life, holding you enchanted and by sheer transference making you, too, feel enchanting. This could be through faithful recreation, as Miss Malice did, recalling the looks and even hand gestures PJ gave in “Down By The Water.” Or it can be through Mystery and C’etait Bontemps forging the impossible–acting as PJ’s self-duet on “The Wind,” spoken and whispered parts entwined and enraptured with one another like the performers’ limbs and gowns. And it can even be through reimagining a still image in motion–adding a literal extra dimension, as when Sasha Velour took on the title track to Rid of Me, reimagining the bathtub siren of the cover as a woman in teal, all eyes and rising tension under the raucous chorus unleashed feet of hair in strobing seizing rage. A graceful distraction is the gift of an actual moment outside of yourself, even if you’re in the same room with comrades of the community. Bad drag is profoundly depressing, but good drag allows your eyes to focus on a reassembled scramble of sounds and culture, your undone and redone consciousness, still wet and leaky, all just long enough for your sight to be sharper than ever when you leave the club doors.
Maybe nothing full of grace is a distraction.
***
I learned to beg
I learned to pray
Send me his love
Send it to me again
For a long time, the idea of being in a crowded space during Pride month with a couple hundred queers filled me with dread–not from any type of unexamined self-disgust or respectability politics but for having known people who were murdered for doing the very same.
I had spent the better part of a decade in Orlando, picking up a couple of degrees along the way, but mostly figuring out who I was. Shedding the play pretend of girlfriends, I came out as queer, and being a townie meant going to the local gay bars, including Pulse. When I moved to Tampa to do my doctorate, Orlando was barely over an hour away–no real time at all, especially if you wanted to see certain kinds of artists or movies that wouldn’t play elsewhere.
No real time at all, really.
My eyes had started turning red months earlier. At first I thought it was dry skin, which would be weird to have in Florida, but I thought a rollerball eye cream from the clearance section of Publix could solve the problem. (It had Vitamin D or something, and I had 8 dollars in my bank account after rent.) The dryer and redder my eyes got, the more I used the eye cream. Had I thought more clearly, maybe I would have tried the Aquaphor I had leftover from my tattoos, but I was worried I would sweat so much it would seep in my eyes while I was driving. Everything at the beginning of 2016 was both the trigger and the target: too much or too little caffeine; too much or not enough beer; too many or not enough squats; too many or far too few words on the page or hours in the day or contracts to negotiate or academic jobs to fruitlessly pursue.
The one reprieve I had from the runaround in my head came from a research grant. For two weeks, I stayed in Ann Arbor, subjecting myself to the completely reasonable routine of walking miles to the Ford Library archives while underdressed for the weather, breathing in old document dust while a dweeb-ass librarian told me I could not open more than one box at a time, walking several extra miles to find one of three or four extra local attractions, and padding around an unheated rental while nursing the compounding blisters on my feet. About midway through my trip, while watching an exceptionally poor episode of Drag Race, I learned that my old friend Chris had decided to take his own life. As two queens flailed on the television screen, each performing an abysmal version of “I Will Survive,” I read the suicide note that my friend left on social media before wheeling off to a secluded area in a park and using a gun on himself. I read the comments pouring in on Chris’s Facebook post, his friends in Pittsburgh and abroad confused and concerned, some coordinating a wellness check, hoping they could intervene in time. RuPaul eliminated both contestants and about an hour later Chris’s death was confirmed.
Chris had a degenerative condition that was accelerating, and it seems at that point it was not worth suffering through any further. I hadn’t seen him in years, but we would message each other every so often, sometimes about his countless political posts on Facebook, and sometimes to flirt. What I have left of him in my head are just snippets, the snapshots of a casual pal: him coming to a party at my old house in Orlando; us dancing at Southern Nights before they changed their name to something abysmal; me emptying his urine container while we watched American Idol at a care home. I don’t know what we get to take with us when a friendship ends unexpectedly–especially if, like me, you spent enough time training to be a historian that you’re constantly worried that your memory betrays you, that your own brain is an accomplice to flimsy stories. When I used to think of Chris, particularly when I thought about him out loud, I suspected that we could have dated had one or two things been different–a work schedule or an opportunity in another city. Now, staring down 40, I think I understand that this type of calculus is baked into many queer friendships–that if Person A had been single two months earlier or if Person B got into running or needlepoint or cutoff shorts just a season later, then they might have wound up together, just as they might have wound up never seeing each other again or becoming sworn enemies. Withage comes the great good realization that some friendships are fueled and thrive on flirtation, or at least the casual daydream.
But in my head, we’re all still young and dancing.
When Pulse happened three months later, I could feel parts of my brain go offline, a switchboard in a hurricane. Going to sleep, I knew there had been some sort of shooting–but in America, that doesn’t mean much. What I thought was a minor event had actually been horrendous, dozens gunned down at the club in the middle of Pride month on Latin night. Nearly every queer person in Tampa and Orlando let each other know where they were–whether they had stayed in or drove out or went to Southern Nights to avoid the cover. Nobody was more than a degree away from someone who had been killed or injured or fled that night–grief like a spider web.
The horror happened twice: first the news and then the discourse. First the confirmation that people were indeed dead and then the understanding that the dead had been reanimated as political pawns. Resurrection without names but with twenty-four seven coverage. Footage of a presidential candidate holding an upside-down pride flag like a brain-damaged toddler, after endless footage of him hugging an American flag, again, like a brain-damaged toddler. Conversations about guns–nobody should have guns, everyone should have guns, gay people should have free guns if they get a training course, guns should have guns, guns are Left Praxis Actually, if gay people get guns then the Government Will Take The Guns, guns have a pride parade.
I’m not young anymore, but I still could dance all night.
Wounds come in all sizes, and with age comes the sadness that your psychic scar tissue may resemble many others’--those who may have also lost some fondness for large gatherings or events without clear exits. Worse yet is the realization that a horrible event was just the right size to fuck up a lot of people in a community without becoming truly abstract. Any New Yorker who lived through 9/11 is fucked up partially because after the war crimes of the W administration, everyone under 40 turned the simulacrum into a second-order simulacrum–jokes about the sheer abstractification itself of several-thousand people dying, all butting against the ingrained local urge to rank who, exactly, gets to complain about anything. A friend killing himself, even with a gun, tends to fracture the hearts of a specific group of people. A national tragedy can metastasize into gallows humor when unmoored from any real meaning. But the shittiest truth of a mid-sized city is that you and nearly all of your friends will agree on the worst thing to happen when you all lived in the area.
***
In the hours after Pulse, an Internet-famous gay person–now an actually famous novelist and journalist in their own right–rattled off a tweet that became a rallying cry for the types who liked sassy sayings on mugs and needlepoint:
“the queers who were nice/patient/gentle all got shot or bullied to death all that's left r me & the other pissed-off cockroach motherfuckers.”
For a few years, I didn’t know whether I hated Anthony Oliveira for having a career that I didn’t–a PhD in the humanities who got to have great good fun with graphic novels and storytelling–or whether it was solely based on this one message. With time and enough writing credits of my own, I realized it was the latter. On the rare occasions that I’ve had a therapist, I never brought it up, mostly because explaining anything about Internet parasociality while paying out of pocket seemed humiliating–and partially because what, exactly, would I say? “Is it demented for me to think someone got unwarranted social capital based on a terrible rattled-off tweet that bonded their shared identity with people murdered thousands of miles away, even if I think the rest of their career is relatively fine?” Of course that’s demented: it misplaces some of the anger over the phenomenon of seeing people you know and a place you know becoming a broader cultural memory. Of course that’s demented: everyone has unearned moments for cloud hopping, and Twitter in its heyday was perhaps one of the few nobody-to-somebody pipelines that seemed possible, so why should I begrudge someone for catching the jet stream?
If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you.
Still, my reasons remain. What I hated–what I still hate–is the idea that everyone left has the tenacity of cockroach, as if that weren’t dehumanizing in itself, as if we queers skitter and scatter, as if that very comparison hadn’t been used by genocidaires themselves, as if a cockroach outside of Miami had ever withstood the stomp of a boot. I continue to hate the premise that there’s nothing nice or patient or gentle left about any of us here who are left, as if we need a type of resilience that breaks our genetic wiring, leading to the kind of mutations that could withstand nuclear warfare. It’s the sentiment that always bubbles up at the end of May: Now is the time for Gay Wrath month, suggesting pride wasn’t good enough of a weapon or that nobody in the history of queer rights with the exception of Sylvia Rivera ever summoned public anger out of a place of righteous pride.
What I hate–and this is nobody’s fault, because nobody can predict a decade into the future–is that the only cockroaches that are actually left are the ones running the country. The luxury of the first Trump administration was the illusion of guardrails–surely if there were enough careerists and principled ideologues in plum roles, if there were enough circuit court judges and mayors and representatives pushing back, if there were enough people doing the jobs they were elected and paid to do, whoever, that it could stave off the worst of it. Now the only people in charge are literal television personalities and pockmarked collegiates, junkies with carburetor voices, all with nothing but the naked impulse to hoard money and power for like 200 people. These are people who built a political identity around victimhood--that somehow, despite terrorizing immigrants and trans people and anyone who thinks disabled people should live and anyone who thinks the First Amendment is cool and anyone who has openly considered that funding genocide as bad, somehow, they are the actual victims in the scenario. It’s only politics insomuch as the tantrums are paired with billions of dollars and armed forces. The only shield against the constant looming horror–against trans people, against genocide, against ICE raids–has been the people themselves in the street, refusing to usher in fascism, proving nonstop that these actions by the government are both evil and unpopular, even if the mainstream media wants to jerk off over a spare broken window, or if the Democratic Party cannot understand anything besides shrugging and shouting the word “abundance” into a used toilet.
All that’s left as a safeguard are all of us who want anything saved. Humans, you might say. Maybe especially the ones who are still somehow gentle and nice.
***
Let me ride
Let me ride
Let me ride on his grace for a while
I don’t think that history repeats–but if there’s anything I hate more than that saying, it’s the idea that history rhymes. Rhymes with what? What rhymes with famine? What rhymes with trench warfare? What rhymes with union busting? What rhymes with concentration camps? In high school, one of my history teachers (a man who I otherwise found quite useless both in the moment and years later as a teacher myself) once quipped “I don’t think you can cross the same river twice because I don’t think you can cross the same river once.” I tend to think of history as a thread–one that is endlessly knotted and woven and frayed and looped, but all the strings all the same. Nostalgia’s cruelty is in its promise that we could restart the string. Liberalism’s emptiness is in the belief that everyone gets their own string, that anything else outside one’s own story is magically some other unrelated thread. Christianity’s disappointment is the pre-told story that if we make the thread good enough, Jesus will reward us.
Nearly a decade after Pulse, all I’m left with is knots. That past isn’t past because it’s never not been present. The ache of living through something terrible has become the pain of seeing everyone forget just enough to get back to spinning strands as we all live through something terrible once again. But all we have is the will to make more thread and the hope that everyone agrees that it’s a good idea, too. What we owe to each other is bound by the fact that we are knotted up with each other. There is no back because maybe there is no forward: there are just knots and thread and knots and thread and knots and thread. Nothing is fully unraveled even when it is revealed. Maybe sometimes grace is the distraction and sometimes it’s the reminder. Enough knots could stop a tank. Enough knots could make a good Pride outfit. Maybe the only graceful distraction is what keeps my eyes from itching, or at least, ushers new kinds of tears.
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