Avidly Reads Making Out 9781479801329

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Avidly Reads Making Out

Avidly Reads General Editors: Sarah Mesle and Sarah Blackwood

The Avidly Reads series presents brief books about how culture makes us feel. We invite readers and writers to indulge feelings—and to tell their stories—in the idiom that distinguishes the best conversations about culture. Avidly Reads Theory Jordan Alexander Stein Avidly Reads Making Out Kathryn Bond Stockton Avidly Reads Board Games Eric Thurm

Avidl Read y s

Making Out Kathryn Bond Stockton n E W Y O R k u n i V E R S i t Y P R E S S New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2019 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 1958- author. Title: Avidly reads making out / Kathryn Bond Stockton. Description: New York : New York University Press, [2019] | Series: Avidly reads | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019006916| ISBN 9781479833825 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479843275 (pb : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 1958- | Lesbians-Sexual behavior. | Sex. | Kissing. Classification: LCC HQ75.5 .S758 2019 | DDC 306.76/63—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006916 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

For Shelley and Lisa, whose words I’ve kissed

Contents

Preface

xi

1. Making Out Is Kissing, Reading, Sex with Ideas

1

2. Making Out Enterings, Outings, and Remains

15

3. Communal Making Out

55

4. Just Say No to Making Out

89

5. Making Out the Face

125

Coda

145

Acknowledgments

149

Notes

153

About the Author

161

Ix

Preface

Do you, ever, reflect on kissing? Maybe mid- kiss, wonder who you are, who you’re kissing, where it’s leading? Perhaps you don’t make out—now, or ever. Still, what is kissing? Why do we kiss? It can feel luscious, libidinal, friendly. It can just be friendly. But are we trying to make out something via kissing? Is it a yearning, interpretive action? (I wonder if you think so. This book’s for you.) I am hot for kissing. Tonight, I’m determined she will melt from kisses, delivered in a pattern (clever, irresistible) I am going to improvise. (Don’t ask me how.) She doesn’t know I’m kissing her with insects on my mind. Something is making our lips astir. Something somewhere flutters, making me wish I could trap a few of these kisses under glass. Consider kissing’s strangeness. You know you want to (I taunt myself while kissing). Make it out, slowly. All the political forces of our world are at our lips. xI

Fragments of the world embedded in a kiss. Kissing takes me deeply into politics and thought, race and economics, sexual childhood. I ask myself, How does something sensual swell so dramatically into these dimensions? Also, the status of the face feels involved. The way we grasp faces—just that worlddefining endeavor—hangs around kissing.1 Kissing swells with thinking, making kissing hotter. Stoked, unquiet, I want company in thinking hotter thoughts. Maybe, like me, you have felt that kissing allows for feeling to overcome thinking, giving us space to escape our minds. Kissing halts thinking? It’s not true. Not entirely true. The phrase “making out” can mean “to discern,” as well as “to kiss.” “To manage with some difficulty to see or hear something.” “To understand the character or motivation of someone.” It’s about interpreting; it’s about the wily searchings of desire. Kissing becomes our coolest quest. Kissing can be cloudy, but it’s also grand. We make each other out, discern the fog surrounding us, the haze that we are, when we’re kissing. Here’s the adventure—making out—I invite. How do I tell it? Don’t get thinking this book’s about identity. (I say this to myself as much as to anyone.) I am tender toward identities but suspicious of them. I don’t xII

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“identify with” many words attached to me, to put it mildly. But while I don’t identify with certain forceful signs—signs assigned to me—I believe their force.2 I believe in words. We wear words—on skin, on cloth, on face, on muscle, willingly or not, clearly or not. (Some signs change, some are hard to read.) These quite often deeply, thoroughly, maddeningly, importantly wind around our kissing; drive our kissing; impede our kissing; shape our kissing. Therefore, kissing involves us in words. Who am I who tells of words? What’s my kissing body? Piece me together—I am words for you—and you will assign me aspects of sight, hearing, cognition, dexterity, color, and shifting dress. These affect my kissing and your reading of my kissing. Making Out, no surprise, is about some kisses. They might prompt you to kiss, question, think, debate. And, of course, I’d prompt all the stories you have about your own kissing. Unless you’d rather lose them, which I’d understand. Kissing, clearly, can hold such pain. The bigger surprise may involve reading. This book on kissing asks about reading. Reading, you will watch me claim, is kissing and sex with ideas. Relax; I’ll explain. For the moment, ask yourself two simple questions. Why do we love the feel of certain words, seeking to roll them around in our mouths, eyes, and minds? (If we can.) How do words get into us, in Pre faC e

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order to be words to us? The feel of words, the entry of words in bodyminds: what specific words would you use if you answered these two questions? Mine involve kissing and sex with ideas. You’ll see why. The stranger you find this, all the better. Kissing itself is just plain strange. Kissing is neither hetero nor homo; trans nor cis. Children do it, too— even with adults. Asexuals and celibates may partake. But is kissing sex? Odder still, is reading? For adults and kids? Kissing, in this book, is strange, fertile, inefficient, treasured, tonally various, related to reading, beautifully unknowable. xIV

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There’s a story here about my kissing and my reading: how I’ve read kissing, made myself out in the kisses I’ve encountered. I am revealed in kisses I bend to. Take back “revealed”: strewn is more like it; I, whoever I may be, am strewn, splayed across my memories. Memories I love as I distrust them. Thus, in all that follows, I recall kisses from across my life: the “Hollywood kiss” I request when I’m six, raising thorny issues of gender identity; Devin trying to kiss me as Fred bullies me; the chairlift kiss, with God in tow; “interracial kisses” (bullshit term); the accidental kiss we mean and desire during a haircut that will out me—the kiss and haircut blowing my cover; The Kiss, which can never be repeated or rendered; my kissing “marriage” (as a queer concept) while I’m against it; the don’t-share-your-day kiss changing my love. The trail of varied kisses described in what’s to come makes for a layer cake of words through which I made myself out: “girl” turning “gay” feeling “trans” under “white” facing “God” soaked in “shame,” having a “blast.” An arc of heated memory curves across this book. But this book isn’t just composed of kisses. It also asks what can count as a kiss: it includes a set of zones: memoir; conceptions; brief reflections on movies and books. Pre faCe

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Making Out grows across five numbered sections: a splash of central claims (helping to lay out kissing, reading, and sex with ideas); a group of enterings, outings, and remains (asking how kisses sometimes stick with us; how do words decay in us?); various scenes of communal making out (what is group kissing?); the awesome force of “no” (not what you think—and fertile, besides); and the place of face (central to kissing, puzzling to read, something to hold). In case you’re wondering, I survived. Often, I flourished— positively greened. Pleasure and joy weave around my pain, as does desire. (Always, there’s desire—even in childhood.) But my pain’s alerting. The climax of this book is tender, but unflinching. In fact, it explores “pain not mine”: how to think it, how to hold it, how kissing and reading may disclose it, how to have sex with this idea. Lastly, something vital permeates this book, undoing “memoir” in its simple sense: This could sound odd, though I think you’ll understand as you read Making Out: I do not believe in “the child” as we generally, typically, speak of it. (I wrote a book about this.)3 Indeed, I believe the “child” is the act of “adults” looking back. Neither exists, I still claim, and this division wildly plagues us. As I speak of “children,” and myself as “child,” take me as xVI

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looking fantastically back, suspended in the liquid now as not-adult. But since I had no choice but to “be” a child, I’ll use this sign. It may look like there’s “a child” before you; a later me; a kisser; a rational reader. Yet for you, I’m words. My stories involve my desire for a word. What I wished to kiss: one blunt word. You’ll meet it soon enough. I think you’ll grasp what I mean when I say that I— with others—am a prequel to “trans” and gendered “nonbinary” life today. And perhaps a word-starved, word-aspiring child, such as I was, was bound to find in reading, often with others, a bounty almost not to be believed. The book is a place for communal making out.

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1 M aKING O UT IS K I SSING r ea D ING Se X WITH IDe aS

“We could just make out.” “Just?” I’m thinking. This is what I’m angling for. It has been a week since we’ve kissed intently, creatively, slyly. Now we’re poised for ambush, setting sensual traps for each other. When she least expects it—in our tiny closet, near her velvet coat, when I’ve doused the lights—I am going to . . . what? Here’s the thing with kissing: it matters intensely or not at all. It is a prelude to throbbing tension and a companion to throbbing coming . . . or . . . a spreading-sideways suspension in time, going fully nowhere except to1

ward a surface you’re aching to reach. You can do it after sex, and sometimes it feels like orgasm is the prelude to kissing, what we do to get to kiss, so profound is catching your lover’s breath, making faintest contact at the hint of skin. What kind of animal, what kind of insect, is my kiss? A kiss is something abuzz, alighting, maybe even burrowing. Kissing’s inhuman, one might say, even impersonal, probably chemical, not quite of me, yet so alive. Why, then, do objects—feathers, of all things— come to my mind? I can’t locate the substance of a kiss, what it’s made of (though I’ll try). Easier to ask what kissing means. I feel I’m dropping into kissing from a height; stepping into liquid; surfing a wave of palpable mystery. A walk in the woods, it’s dark in my kissing. Beautiful blackout of light. Dark depth. (Do I always close my eyes? Must start watching myself when I kiss.) I am bent on kissing. Bent on tender surface, its seductive plane. And its willful depths. In Genet, male lovers, who plunge their tongues into heads “hewn of granite,” entering the “tunnels” of each other’s mouths, cannot imagine kissing each other’s cheeks, because this tenderness would be untenable. Tunnel or plane, surface feels very deep to me. 2

M aKI N G OUT IS KISSING, re aDING, S e X . . .

So does reading. I’m wondering if reading is meant to feel like kissing. A mode of making out. (A mode of discerning, interpreting, questioning.) As an “avid reader”—charming phrase—I’m obsessed with all that happens when we kiss a text, when we linger long enough to lovingly capture what’s laid down in sequence. Simply, what happens to me when facing text? How does that word or image cross my skin to enter my brain? The word stays on the page, the image stays onscreen, but truly comes inside— invisibly, literally enters through an orifice. What (in) human mystery. Word goes into flesh. (The undocumented artist Julio Salgado has jokingly said that when he crosses back to Mexico, no one can stop him from taking American images with him. Actually, in him?)1 Lounging in my bed, where I’ve been kissing, I am now reading: what’s unfolding as I kiss a text? as I make contact, actively receiving it in my body? Something bold. Penetration’s in my kiss. (I’m a pitcher and a catcher.) Kissing with my eyes, so as to touch a page, becomes in an instant a penetration of me. This penetration I, in essence, cause, taking the words of a book inside me. (Words composed as a text by someone’s body.) The word enters me. The image enters me. From this penetration, there’s immediate birth. The word, for example, births other words (as my mind makes meaning, making out the word), upon M aKING OUT IS KISSING, re a D ING, Se X . . .

3

which birth there’s partial death or at least decay (words start fading in my brain or disappear, as do many images). All from a kiss? A kiss on a text? Such kissing renders a penetration-birth-death-decaying experience? Whatever one’s gendering? Yes, it does.2 (Manically bursting with this realization, with its implications for getting “in” each other, using no genitals, I desire to shout; bark a proclamation; collar perfect strangers: reading and kissing are uniquely sexual, truly, weirdly sexual, don’t you see? Instead, I chill. Decide to tell it calmly. Let my passion lengthen.) Some impish impulse (or the ironic importance of being earnest?) takes me to why making out through eyes and mouth—a sexuality of the face— matters to me. There were childhood moments when I read a kiss— relating it, as a child, to my own desires. For Instance, This Might a blind girl kiss me? I have seen a movie in 1965 at the age of seven. That’s where this is coming from. Starring Sidney Poitier and a young actress unknown to Hollywood, 4

M aKI N G OUT IS KISSING, re aDING, S e X . . .

A Patch of Blue, touted as a liberal race film, has me imagining blindness is a beckoning. Inky absence of light for her engenders shadows of promise for me. (Expect to be thinking in reference to my longings: “that’s messed up.” My child-ableism, my child-racism, snakes throughout my stories in telling displays.) Everything rotates around a tree. I would kiss a tree? In a manner of speaking. There’s a tree in this film— love this tree—where a black man—I’m this man— loves a white girl who has lost her vision. The reason I am improbably Sidney Poitier is because she’ll kiss him. I want to be whoever gets kissed. Despite whatever his problem is—don’t really get it (white child oblivion at the age of seven)—she can’t see it. A girl who doesn’t care! Where can I find one?3 From A Patch of Blue comes my blueprint for a femme—my little template—all because of kissing. (Prepare to feel disturbed.) I desire a woman, feminine and fine, with problems of her own, which make her blind to mine. That’s how the film’s racialized fictions lodge inside me. I’ll find a place, a role for myself, confirming the beauty of beautiful girls, who, for some reason, can’t see their beauty. As for Poitier? I just want to be him: oozing intelligence, kindness, and gracefulness, Poitier glides. He can also snap. Words flame out of M aKING OUT IS KISSING, re a D ING, Se X . . .

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his body, then subside. (He’s even better than Bond, my idol. 007 doesn’t seem deep.) Besides, my parents deem him “important,” whatever that means. I know for a fact, feel for a fact, that slices of this film have lived inside me. What has long been in me, I am sure, is this: some distinct image of the protagonists under that tree; he is standing (this is Poitier); she is often seated, wearing dark glasses (she’s the young actress); and they kiss. That’s about it. And she reads Braille. (Actually, she doesn’t. She only runs her finger across a book in Braille. That’s so cool. Words come through your finger?) What didn’t strike me when I was seven is just how horrific they have to make the mother (played by Shelley Winters, awarded an Oscar) in order to make you side with the kissers. She is a prostitute who, in the midst of a violent fight, blinds her own daughter and continues to abuse her, alongside her drunken, abusive father. (They would murder puppies if the film went further.) It’s the challenging aim of the movie to clear a patch for kissing. When the kiss comes, he (Poitier) has kissed her breezily, as a parent would, on the top of her head, but she goes in, hands to his face, as if she’s reading his visage as a prelude, and passionately busses him. Something taboo is silently screaming. The theater is rocking. I don’t know why. 6

M aKI N G OUT IS KISSING, re aDING, S e X . . .

As a white child, black male precarity, any black precarity, hasn’t yet entered me; I don’t have the concept, the history, the urgency living in my body. My parents put it in me after the film, I vaguely remember, but in what measure, with what words? How do white parents suffuse a white child with dangers for blacks at the hands of whites, over an ardent, lingering kiss? How would parents do so for a child who’s inserting herself inside this scene? At any rate, Poitier, sensing this danger, registers the “wrongness” of this kiss. She (the femme!) sees nothing to disparage. Tellingly, however, the girl is heading to a home away from home: some group home that will keep her “safe” from home. Also safe from . . . kissing? The history of group homes is out of our sight. Poitier’s precarity is left hanging. Nothing is pretty beyond this kiss. These key details, I now know, didn’t stay with me. Didn’t stay as details. Did they live as a lingering thought somewhere inside me? Stuck to a tree was a sexy notion I recall having as a queer child. (Who knows how I worded it.) There is a “wrongness” that feels right. The person you kiss might feel this, too. These kid- templates prove to be profound. Something of a black-man-kissing-a-white-girl-becominga-woman-while-she’s-blind has come to mark me. All this jumble of racist ignorance, cluelessness on M aKING OUT IS KISSING, re a D ING, Se X . . .

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blindness, and femme worship did inhabit me. Just how lastingly? Is it in my kiss? What I Ask of Kissing (A Favor for Reading) As an aching reader and devoted kisser, I want kissing to hold a key to reading. (With a teenage lustiness, I would have it so.) Lips we know can kiss, but who kisses with their eyes, kisses with their mind? Just every lover—also every reader. How we make out the meaning of something involves our reading it, including reading kisses. Including reading gender (which is always racialized). Gender is always a scene of making out. Asking how you kiss your assigned or chosen gender(s)—kiss this, kids—is asking how you read them; reading them, you open them like a book; and the book of genders is fattening every day. My confounding story—was I trans, was I gay, was I clouding “boy” by kissing it?—opens onto mysteries flooding all genders. Funny how my descriptions of kissing—“stepping into liquid,” “surfing a wave of palpable mystery,” making a “surface” feel “deep to me,” with the “political forces of our world” encountered here—hold for our experiments in kissing gendersigns, reading gender-signs, whether these signs are old or new, forced or freed. 8

M aKI N G OUT IS KISSING, re aDING, S e X . . .

Some of us, in retrospect, were a linguistic prequel to “trans,” though transgender was happening and being somewhere around us, out of our grasp. We were crafty creatures, but unlike the gender scene now evident, ours felt denuding, maddening, stranding. Part of my story of kissing and reading therefore spotlights two- word children: word-stranded children; or, in the positive, word- aspiring children; weird-reading children. (I was truly this. Maybe you, too? At least to some degree?) Those of us said to be “girl” or “boy,” without any way to ditch our one word and get the other word, were impaled upon both while falling between them. Not-girl-not-boy (wasn’t the one, couldn’t be the other), not “trans” either (no such word I knew), we were prequelpeople, linguistically stranded at that point in history. With no surgery or drugs known to us, weird word kissing—kissing a word we could read, not “have”—was all we knew to do. Weird little readers beyond the scope of genitals. Yet that’s the beauty of reading, after all? What really is the pull of reading? Reading’s a sexy beast, I find. Reading itself needs making out—needs to be deciphered. It does not just birth ideas in us. It gives pleasure, powerfully provokes us, and guarantees loss: we lose many more words than we retain. Kissing is equally ephemeral, monumental. M aKING OUT IS KISSING, re a D ING, Se X . . .

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I’m enthralled with making out. I decide its modes are these: how we make out the meaning of kissing (our own kisses or kisses we encounter in books or on the screen); how we could see reading as kissing (love for the physical feel of words, surface attraction to the luminous image); how we could see both reading and kissing as funky kinds of sex (given their intimate, bodily contacts, sometimes involving groups of people); how we could fathom the faces we kiss. Don’t overthink it, some would say. But I reject advice. What all sticks to my memorable kisses? My mother, feathers, a tomboy’s dress, religious confusion, vampire horizons . . . nothing less than my queer childhood and my present nexus. Even moviekisses—child eye candy—turn entire plots, inviting the reader’s messy involvements. (I was quite messily immersed. More than I’ve conveyed. “How do I get a Hollywood kiss?” I start pounding this question at six, driving the knowable world through this sieve. . . .) Images, sure. We get attached. Kissing words, however? Isn’t that fanciful? I say the reader kisses the word that gets inside them because I seek a term for how the eye caresses, lightly or intently, the words it encounters through the reading process. A light encounter is like a brush of the lips in a greeting. It’s done, it’s gone, it’s instrumental. Just enough contact to get the word in. 10

M aKI N G OUT IS KISSING, re a DING, SeX . . .

(I read flat, unremarkable prose in just this way: like some uncle I’m required to kiss.) But an intent, luxuriant encounter often happens when we love a word or sequence of words due to their “feel”—rhythm or pulse—or mental stimulations. I call this kissing because the uniqueness of a word, its vibe, makes us want to linger, whether it “takes us somewhere” as it enters us (kissing can lead us down the path toward climax) or it’s simply sumptuous, something to savor (kissing takes us nowhere beyond a striking surface). Lingerer, I am. Moreover, ideas about “sex with ideas” come through some of the most famous novels and films of the past two centuries, begging me to kiss them, briefly but intently. Funkified sexualities throughout. Candidates for kissing when the moment’s right: Oscar Wilde’s man-penetrated-by-portrait in The Picture of Dorian Gray; Beloved’s viral memory of US slavery, with a murdered baby getting back inside her mother as a truculent thought, a viral conception, a sexual idea; strange group kissing in Capturing the Friedmans, whereby the police with the aid of parents put wild stories of sex into children, with the help of . . . children; kissing in the classroom—even of texts as squirrely as Lolita—showing our desire to kiss disturbing words, to caress them as a class, esM a KING O UT IS KISSING, re aD ING, S eX . . .

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pecially when they’re lyrical, shocking, or funny; and much more in Woolf’s Orlando, Brontë’s Villette, the new film Moonlight, an older film Fire, and my friend’s disability memoir, Christina Crosby’s A Body, Undone. Yes, but Sexual? No small quandary circles making out. The question “what is sexual?” seems to surround it (haunting the likes of religious youth groups and Bill Clinton). You can’t pin it down, whoever you are: savvy intellectual, amateur sexologist, piercing critic of racist thought, blushing lover- to-be, sex hound. Liquid and labile, “sex” evades, as it moves and multiplies under our bodies, under our gaze. Another kind of sex is extremely perplexing, especially one right under our noses. That’s the thing, in fact. Encounters with words and kisses are routine, yet they’re strange, strangely profound, even as they happen in ordinary ways. Just take kissing. (Also think of reading.) Kissing is the ultimate act of estrangement, queer in the stretchy sense of “strange” that many queers prefer to distinctions between straight and gay. Kissing can be sexual; that seems certain. Intensity, duration appear to matter greatly, as does penetration. Penetrative kissing—leave it to Americans to call it “French kissing”—does seem sexual. But does reading, 12

M aKI N G OUT IS KISSING, re a DING, SeX . . .

too? I consult my dictionary. Mine defines “sexual” as “relating to the instincts, physiological processes, and activities connected with physical attraction or intimate physical contact between individuals.”4 Reading, to be sure, is a physiological process, involving (even physical) attraction. (I am physically attracted to “liquid”—this word’s sound. Don’t know why, but I’m drawn to it. Equally inexplicable, I love “Browse,” a cozy imperative when it names a spot off a Utah highway. From whose body did “Browse” emerge? Whom should I thank for this sensual pleasure?) Reading creates intimate contact, body to body, courtesy of words that pierce the body’s envelope. The more one considers making out, the more it seasons, the more it opens up. Just how promiscuous is our reading? As a kind of sex, does it have protected and unprotected forms? Is it any tamer for the reading child? Do we kiss in common when we read together? Are there mental condoms? How do shards of fiction live inside the body? (And just to press my luck: is reading most like barebacking?) All of this invites. And the entwining of kissing and reading, reading-as-kissing, for me, can’t help but amp my intent. I mean to seduce. Not that I can. I’m not that vain. But if I could—through the reflections and suggestions of my writing, sending vivid filaments into readers’ brains—I’d induce more kissing, more reading that is spilling into sex with ideas. M a KING O UT IS KISSING, re aD ING, S eX . . .

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2 M aKING O UT e NT e r I NG S , OUTIN GS, a ND r e MaI NS

On the chance of capture—here is kissing—I am keeping watch. I feel campy as soon as I begin. Visions of testing “kissing” in my laboratory. Testing it in memory is no less humorous. Or surreal. One kiss looms. The Kiss A liquid pillow, a depth of liquid feathers. I am softly falling, strangely into subtleness. I never knew subtlety could shout or be so strong. The utter force of softness— lips and the curious depths of her mouth—is shocking me. Tumbling out a window into plumage is the feeling. A vast expanse of feathers, free from any limit. Suddenly, and stunningly, I am lonely. I’ve just entered a state of no return. This is ’82. I have entered “gay.” Leapt from a balcony, ledge, window. Defenestration by my own hand. (Really, it’s weirder. De15

fenestration by my own mouth, throwing myself out a window as it were, throwing myself from my life-to-date, from a space between my lips.) You cannot go back. When you’ve kissed, you’ve crossed a line—so it feels to me—one kiss making you gay forever (but from what? gay juice, gay ways, presumed gay genes?). Now I am rootless from this single act. Also ecstatic, ready to be damned if it comes to that. And the girl I’m kissing, where is she in all of this? For one thing, we’re in divinity school. Moreover, she’s gorgeous and cynically sweet—and never, to her knowledge, been attracted “in this way.” (We are homo-white: alike in our whiteness, not in our gendering or histories of attraction.) I am thrilled by her, her femme-foreignness quite to the fore. A girl who doesn’t care. . . . She matters greatly in all her unicornuniqueness of a willingness to kiss me knowingly. Yet, my beautiful girl is A Woman—bold symbolic form. She now stands for “I have kissed A Woman.” Sensation, lover, and sign flood my body in different measures. Swiftly I’m flooded, or pierced, by feathers. The Kiss: Another Look My cat would mock these metaphors, scoff at the “feathers.” He’s just like that: undercuts my sentiments. 16

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(Would he like Moonlight, unsentimental, quiet as it is? One boy’s exquisite nonexpressivity, punctured by the question “am I a faggot?” anchors this film, begging me to study black boys’ blueness amid their kissing, in 2017. What is blue kissing? Kissing has its genres, I am reminded, much like reading.) I’m a bit dramatic, just a little gothic. Selfdefenestration? I leap into words—the variants of “gay”—not from a window, balcony, or ledge. But in ’82, these words are not just limiting tags. (By the way, count on me to stretch “gay,” bend “gay,” all out of shape, making it stranger by kissing it to death.) Actually, in ’82, “gay” spells death to one’s presumed life, leading a self-help book for parents, A Stranger in the Family: How to Cope If Your Child Is Gay, to include the chapter “The Bereavement Effect.” Parents are told that “coping” takes time because “this phenomenon has many symptoms in common with those experienced when someone in the family dies”: “the previously beloved son or daughter suddenly seems to disappear from life and is replaced by a sinister version of the same person”; “parents . . . grieve for what they have lost.”1 This is tender coping—in 1996, when this book is published, when the word “trans” isn’t much in evidence. (Ellen DeGeneres “outs herself” the following year: fourteen years beyond my kiss.) Gothic is the genre in 1982—for the general public— and I am in tune, in step, with it. Elton John is M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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closeted. Wellesley- girl experimentations (until graduation) are unknown to me. Transman anything? I don’t have a clue. “Sodomite”: am I this from a kiss? I’ve stepped more than a toe beyond the boundary the US has set in spirit, in law, in the early ’80s, when we’re more than sinister: when we’re sodomites. (US law is biblically gothic.) Only denial or admission or perfect hiding awaits me. A life of pleasure—or creative resistance to these terms—does not occur to me. Just this moment hangs in the air. I have become. (Genet, again: “Into what would he be transformed? A fairy. He was terrified at the thought. And what exactly is a fairy? What stuff is it made of? . . . What new monster does one become?” And later: “This fleeting, yet quite depressing thought [of being “a faggot”] generated, up his spine, . . . a rapid series of vibrations which quickly spread out over the entire surface of his black shoulders and covered them with a shawl woven out of shivers.”)2 I’ve become, what? Shivering, sinister, sodomite child. At the age of twenty-four, I am a queer child when I’m not a child. I am now the stalled child, I am the “arrested development” child, finally turning forward. Turning forward backward, toward my childhood in this kiss, as a forward fulfillment of my dreams. (Not really. Fulfillment is elusive. In those dreams, I was a boy kissing a girl. Oh well, can’t be sweating those details.) Now I am birthed, snagged, freed, somehow altogether. 18

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Months of humorous banter with my kissing-girl culminate here: nervous, excited cereal in bed (gay cliché of sexy sublimation) and a mistaken dinner of chicken backs we thought were breasts. (Ever eat a chicken back? Good luck with that.) The chicken backs ever after figure greatly: guilty little secret, since my mother had saved them for soup. We have surreptitiously stolen something-laughable-tied-tosomething-massive (the back of a chicken yoked to a kiss) from my own parents: symbolism not lost on us, even then, we young divines. I am felled, the plot is written, Madame Bovary has nothing on me now. (French literature is there to feed my drama.) So many things I think I’ll never be: the Episcopal priest I’m training to become; a politician like my father; a teacher?; admired. (Cry me a river, I preach to myself, feigning queeny sarcasm. Then I do cry.) This from a kiss. A gothic escapade. Later, a lingering contemplation. Given the force of The Kiss, I have wondered if kissing could ever be new again. I wouldn’t think so, but I’m intrigued that I want to do it over and over, with the same lover. The rhythmic, searching sensation of kissing, as if each pulse or probe must deepen, mark a separate move or make a separate curl or become more liquefying, fascinates me. What is the art of repetitive kissing? “Kissing is pointless,” says one friend, “highly M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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inefficient.” She doesn’t seek it. Maybe a kisser is a kind of Gertrude Stein, riding repetitive waves of kissing, knowing they break in rogue directions. A kiss is a kiss is a kiss, but story seeds in kissing, as it does in Stein, though you have to glean it. Hard to glean from rock. The onscreen kiss has offered many stories, even many moods, but I recall its rigidness. The kisses I grew up with seemed severely stiff. Like a slab of sheet rock suddenly grabbing another piece of sheet rock, pressing them both together in a bend (see Jimmy Stewart kissing Kim Novak, woodenly, in Vertigo); a rigid, jerky clutch with concrete face on concrete face, even though both, a moment ago, were human flesh (Fred Astaire clutching Ginger); a spasm of motion between closed mouths, the kiss disappearing in head-locked lips (truly, pick your movie). Here was Hollywood’s masking of kissing as it gives a crowning kiss.3 Today’s movie-kisses overcorrect for closed-mouth Hollywood, lips now voraciously opening on each other, but with a rush reminiscent of old. Someone grabbing someone, desperately in heat: no bend now; usually the bodies are pressed against a wall, propped at a sink, going down on a bed. The slow, intermittent play of opening-and-closing lips, the lightest possible grazing of skin and agonizing pause, interrupted by a probe, scarcely appears. 20

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No matter. As a child, sheet-rock kissing and concrete faces were fine by me. Just give me some of that. Hollywood Kiss at Six As I later long for God, I crave a Hollywood kiss from my mother. God and my mother are for now the same thing. I believe in her. May she be “in it” (the kiss) with me. If I get this kiss, I must be a boy. It will yield so much. (Somehow, at six, I’m an analogist. Quite a transactionalist. I’m in a sign-game and I know it. Kiss = word = boy-word. Score that kiss, my body pleads. Will my mom consent?) I read her propensity for kissing from my pants. (Just as I write this, I hear how bizarre this claim must sound. Anyone, nonetheless, who’s been in my shoes will know what’s coming next.) May I wear slacks? May I be permitted to clasp to my skin the-skin-ofclothes that makes me mysteriously calm? Or will I be shackled to the dresses of my pain? Good god, it’s hard to convey my debasement. Cloth was skin to me. Every dress a drapery of epidermal shame. (Kiss me, peel me.) Regarding my clothing, my mother seems torn. Preserving politeness—our family value—my mother M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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insists I wear the required costume of girlhood to church and school and birthday parties. Each and every day, a bad Halloween. The parties, to me, are the greatest insult, since they link such deep humiliation to a scene of celebration. Fanta Orange Soda—my preferred elixir and a party highlight— can’t undo the terror of my patent leather shoes. I am becoming expert in abjection, afraid of my feet. (Feet out of reach of the cure of orange soda: a child-diagnosis.) She cannot know, I know she cannot know, how searing the shame is becoming each year. Still, with her enormous love, she must feel it. I sense she feels my pain. But where can she go with it? Where can she truck it off to, to unload it? She’s dead-ended, too. She’s inside my gender. Looking back at me during daylight hours, if you’re apt to label, you’d say this tomboy is likely to be gay. I’d be a girl, however brash and boyish, digging other girls, growing to be an eventually-free-to-be-me “homosexual”—since I’m white, suburban white, making my gayness my presenting problem. (Confused at six, with no available terms for class, I think we’re “poor,” because we have one telephone, one refrigerator, a single black-and-white TV. We only “get color” many years later to watch the Watergate hearings in their glory. Suburban sorrows.) Seeing me at night, you’d say “they’re trans,” except that as a child I am unfurnished with this term and concept. “Trans” is not available to swoop me up in notional arms. I’m un-swooped. 22

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I am where “gay” and “trans” collide, if you see me retrospectively. (Over time, in fact, I am where “trans” and “trans” collide: am I transwoman atop transman? If I “was” a boy “assigned” to be a girl—that’s one way to read my story—then my later attempts to “be” a woman, yearning for a while to inhabit “woman” as my abode, my word-dwelling, place of my adventuring, could be a transwoman status, of sorts. But this is getting ahead of my story. Let me stick with childhood.) In my rearview mirror, I am a nontransitioned trans child—though at six I am never delaying in straying from the sign assigned to me. I am in motion, constantly queering. I’m not “trans”; I am always “transiting,” however stranded I feel as a child.4 In fact, I transit like a bouncing ball across the “girl”/“boy” divide each day, kissing that “boy” term every chance I get, lingering in its territory, making out its nimbus. What is its allure? Does it stand for movement otherwise denied me? (“Boy” is my personal cry to move?)5 Is it a passport to a set of privileges, a realm of possibilities, I can’t resist? Am I drawn to surface, aesthetically drawn to body and cloth? Am I pulled toward postures, a series of traits, none of which are neutral given their histories, given my race? (I hit pause, stopping on this question: my whole life is coiled right here.) Deep unknowability on a range of fronts. I don’t cozy up to questions of origin as a great authority for our lives. Why is someone gay? Why is M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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someone trans? These are generally uncool questions. (If we know what made you, we can unmake you. We can “improve” you. Racial eugenics, gay eugenics, disability eugenics have sprung from this root and proved disastrous.) But to my surprise, raising these queries gently to myself blooms a telling haze, shows a splendid fog, clinging to my childhood, a cloudiness due to my kissing of words—and what I would un-kiss that I’m made to kiss, at age six. Preview: I would like to kiss girl-bodies but run from kissing that word upon myself. Kiss the girl-body, kiss the boy-word: it sounds so simple but shows my confusion. (Man, it was murder to have two words, all of two words, to work with then. Everything had to be managed by snaking around their force, or saying no to them.) To make matters murkier, the words “boy” and “girl” do not confess their racialized histories to a six-year-old, surely not a white one. Whiteness is a gauziness, a translucent filminess I did not perceive, enveloping the whole of my childhood kissing of words and their promise. In essence, I am suckered into thinking that “girl” and “boy” float free of all but gender. This infects my kissing of the film A Patch of Blue one year later—also infects all I remember, how I remember. I am unreliable. I am kissing “boy.” And here’s the telling fog. Did my lusty wish for this word determine the people— people-category—I would kiss? Boys kiss girls, so 24

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I’ll kiss girls, so I can be a boy? Or would boy-asword permit my kissing girls? I can’t account for my chicken or my egg. Did one precede the other? Chicken- and- eggness affects my narratives and makes them suspect. I shift angles, to see what I sense: as a child of six, I’m not imprisoned in the wrong “being,” in the wrong “body,” but in the wrong word? (I aim these thoughts at no one but myself.) I’ve no beef with my body at six. In fact, I’ve never had any breasts to speak of, not even now, not as a child. The absence of breasts not the presence of a penis informs my body? Probably so, but having a penis would get me the boy-word. What else can a penis do at that age? I am incurious. (Was it ever flesh to me before it was word? Chicken and egg.) Which makes me ask, What would “boy” as word-appendage, full-body word-suit, watertight word-skin afford me in the 1960s? Privileges, yes, but which ones? Little League Baseball, saxophone, and rockets are conscious attractions, involving, allowing, what my body does and my mind pursues. But was I unconsciously responding to other presumed— perceived?— superior airs, stripes of power, sticking to the boyword (with my whiteness hovering)? They are in the mix, strongly in the mix, but what a mix I am. Word not body. Was I only trans-linguistic? Yet, at six, I have a craving. I, undeniably, love boy-surface, if I can call it this: the look and feel and movement of M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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boys (again, movement!) without regard to genitals. I can know the look of “boy,” but can I know its feel? Can I know the feel of the word not the body with my body? Each and every body can only know “a” feel. However, do I actually need other bodies—my parents, my school, my world of friends—to grant me the word, to get “a” feel at all? What would it feel like to have “boy” enter me as a word aimed at me, expected to be “owned” by me? How would these permissions change the feel of penetration (longed for) by the boy-word? Out of my ongoing passion for the look of “boy,” a range of “boys,” I now ask, in 2018, What does it mean for a feminist (body), as I am, still to be drawn to boyish surface, eschewing all the while the stereotypes and historical realities that attend it? Why in the world has my passion continued? Can boy-surfaces, regardless of genitals, regardless of hormones, receive new contents—would we say “depths”—as many different people of many different colors cross to boy-surfaces? Is “boy” redeemable as a changing word, changing into “boi”? As people cross to it, or recross to it, can it remean but not demean, engender new histories, hollow out old ones, undermine binaries, join a series as yet unknown? Can there be a range of experimental surfaces, birthing new meanings, forging new desires, changing these nouns, “boy” and “girl,” making them styles, among a range of styles, to kiss not impose? What is money’s role? 26

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(Paul Preciado gets in these spaces when, as a transman, he calls out, “Representatives, women and men, of the old sexual regime, come to grips with your shadowy side and have fun with it, and let us bury the dead. Enjoy your aesthetics of domination, but don’t try to turn your style into a law. And let us fuck with our own politics of desire, without men and without women, without penises and without vaginas, without hatchets, and without guns.”6 What a calling out of old tired words, even words for organs.) Going back to balls, balls in my childhood: every kind of ball is a talisman to me, at age six. As if my body puns, balls endow me with an almost-genital sexual pulse and gender surety I don’t have. Dodge balls, basketballs, tennis balls, footballs: what is this fetish? How did Freud miss it? I don’t want a penis so much as a ball. Even shoes that go with balls make me feel transformed— speak a raw appeal. Forget the dominatrix with her high-heeled shoes. My forbidden fruit, my Playboy kink, was a boy’s accouterment for my foot. Some kind of narrative was concentrated there. And though I had no nomenclature for the thought of “trans,” there was a name, when I was eleven, to which I pinned stories and fanciful shoes: Steve Chaplain. I made genitals through my ears (what my ears would hear). “Chaplain” was a word I tossed in the air, like a treasured ball, so as to catch it aurally. M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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The name came to me from Downhill Racer, the Robert Redford film from 1969, starring Robert Redford as Dave Chappellet in an exposé of the sleaze of sports glory (glory I adored). Having a name for myself, I can narrate—right out loud, I laughingly recall—what my (fictional) Steve is doing: “Chaplain’s down the field, my god what a slant, he’s caught it, caught the ball, touchdown, Chaplain!” “Another goal—hat trick—Steve Chaplain!” In this way I catch myself, as I feel I am, through my own ears, words in my ears, since I can’t see myself—can’t perceive Chaplain—through my own eyes. Thus, I am transiting without any hope that I’ll get beyond my ears. There is the fictional Myra Breckinridge I’ll hear mentioned in 1968, by the time I’m ten—my ears prick up! a man can be a woman! (that was the wording)—but a little not-girl becoming a boy?7 Someone would allow it? On what planet? Here on Planet Time, I must starkly settle for a split temporality. Girl by day, boy by night. With the migration of the sun goes my gender, as if falling light were a scalpel I go under to change my sex, every blessed night. Darkness is a benefactor, making me feel I innately love twilight. By morning, my imposter will rise again. But isn’t she me? I self-perplex. I am a boy—this girl, too? Am I two people, seeking one kiss? Kissing seems coherent: I am the problem, literally split by the dictates of the clock, as is labor and 28

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racialization, I’ll know later. This split is where I live, and I learn to nest inside its contradictions. I invent solutions that have me kissing clothes, birthing more confusion in my quest for clarity. Girl by day, boy by night, I in my skirts (manly school-time kilts, I tell myself—one my mother names my “sword dress”), I fall in love with a boy, Peter Reed. (This is me at six.) He looks like me: snowball-white with near-white hair. He owns two shirts, just two shirts, and a single pair of pants, for all I ever see. I know he is “poor” and comes from a farm, but his shirts capture me. So thrilled am I by his two shirts, I cross the line of identification to greet him from the side of desire. I have a crush on a figure for myself. At night, however, it is Pam Romano, the dark-eyed Italian girl next door, that I pursue. Out of my skirts, clothed in imaginary Peter Reed shirts (only two), I am “the Professor” from Gilligan’s Island, culturally ridiculous ’60s sit-com; she is “Mary Ann.” (The Professor, any viewer of the show will remember, wore a white shirt, the only shirt he ever wore, shipwrecked as he was.) Soon both Pam and Jenn across the street are dressing as babes, “Mary Ann” and “Ginger,” for the Professor. Once, in a panic to hide our operation—Pam’s sweet mother was coming through the door—the girls in their bikinis pulled the beach blanket out from under me, causing me to jam my finger on the floor and severely sprain it. M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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How do you explain that to your mother? That your crush on someone with only two shirts is giving you the confidence to be the Professor who only wore one. That your being the Professor, sublimely (un) aware of his clothes, helps you forget the shame of your own—bodily wounds you call women’s garments, which you worship on other girls’ forms. Well, I don’t explain. Going one better than Proust with his mother, I ask mine for a “Hollywood kiss.” I can name the genre by six. That is, I’ve distinguished one kind of kissing—an exciting kind—from another kind of kissing and want it from my mom. Yes, I’m in bed, the lights are low, I adore my mother, and I want to feel what I haven’t ever felt, all of which feels like an answer to the dress. (What did she say? I have no earthly idea, I’m afraid.) I know that even then I wanted this excitement from the older girls I liked (despite the fact that one of them, immune to my charms, has dumped me into a garbage can). I’ve no concept of “sex” at six—I doubt I know the word when I’m asking for this kiss—but kissing carries a charge for sure. This kind of kissing already feels ecstatic, making the fact that I’m eighteen years away from this kissing sadly stunning. At six, I am feeling this idea of “kissing,” blushing as it tumbles on and off inside me. Can anyone see me thinking with this word, hot as I am under my collar? I’m so liking this word at six. Many years later, after I’ve had sex, 30

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looking back I’ll recognize how similar the steaminess feels to the idea-of-the-kiss I couldn’t get. That is, I’m fairly certain I never captured that kiss from my mother. The Hollywood kiss was a childhood mirage and had me convinced that desire was a sentence to a bleeding wish. Making Out in Mirrors and on the Page I could have sex as a child only with the idea of existence. (I was a fiction, a sample of one. Was there another boy-called-a-girl-who-aimed-to-kiss-girls? Not that I knew.) I was seduced by my unseen face. Gender-queer Narcissus, I was at the mirror, straining to kiss the face I felt, trying for the life of me to make myself out. I felt myself a boy, saw myself a girl. Somewhere deep inside me I was discerning a face I couldn’t see, except that I could sense it. Call it liquid face. It didn’t jell; it rippled. By stark contrast, my observable face was a quandary; by daylight, by moonlight, it barred flights of (boyish) fancy. Each and every day, many minutes of the day, I was pierced by surface: my own image—my girl-image— M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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that was so discordant with the different surface-image I carried “deep” inside. Inside me was a surface—a boy-look of myself—that was my preference and also never seen. I had never seen myself as a boy. I was made of boys who were made-up boys, whose images I’d kissed. (Sidney Poitier meets James Bond meets a cool catcher on my brother’s baseball team: what does that look like?) I made a surface I held as a thought. Moreover, this thought melded fragments of images that had come inside me, that had birthed in me. This was a queer-kid intensification of a widespread dynamic of image-formation. Emphasis here on “intensification.” Though all people must incorporate their image, which in some measure is visible and fictional, the transiting kid has never seen its fiction.8 I was confounded. If I can’t be a boy, I’m going to be “gay,” I would think with terror and some irritation (by about ten). Where are these gays? I was always wondering. If I’m going to be one, I would like to see one. I never saw one. I remember thinking, when I was a teen, it would be a rare friend of any sort of color who would have my story, unless they were “a homo” (dreaded playground word, nipping at me). Imagine a Jewish friend, I would puzzle, raised in an all-non- Jewish family: she knows she’s Jewish, but no one knows she’s Jewish; she’ll have to tell her parents and siblings that she’s Jewish; meanwhile, she’s never seen 32

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a Jewish child or a Jewish person of any sort at all (never in the cinema, never on TV, though some of these characters strike her as Jewish); she’s read about Jews, knows they do exist, but has never seen a live Jewish person in her childhood, adolescence, young adulthood—until she goes to divinity school, as I did, at the age of twenty-one. There could be a straight Jewish child with this story—I say now—but it would be exceptional, almost fantastical. Was it me, then, or does every child who is growing queerly, twisting, stalling, feel she is a monster? I was this metaphor, this genre, this thing. That was how it felt. It was specific by age eight: I thought I was (like) Barnabas Collins, that congenial vampire.9 A great guy, really, except with a propensity he just couldn’t help. He could not not bite women (I only longed to kiss them) along the attractive length of their necks, opalescent pearl of any colored flesh apt to reveal his own wound: his own tendency to pursue an action that made women, in the last analysis, sadly unavailable to him. Talk about no future. He was never going to get the girl. We were monsters. If only someone would have told me we had company. Mothers, pregnant women, babies, fat girls (all crush-worthy, except the babies). Kids of color, warrior-figures, even teachers. Surrounded by these M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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comrades, I might have noticed the monstrous forces arrayed against us: naïve reading; incuriosity; for decades, the police. These were a few of the forces against us, we charming monsters. Monstrous forces stacked against monsters, for a juicy paradox, and a spread of monsters spreading ever wider. LGBTTIQQ2S. I enjoy this alphabet extravagance. (Truth be told, many folks of these persuasions might be unable to identify the letters past “LGBT.” Two-spirit people might miss their “2S.” “Questioning” denizens might not grasp that one “Q” denotes them.) May I respectfully add an “R” for “reader”? If our reading of word and image, on the page and on the screen, is sensuous, libidinal, promiscuous, influential for adult bodies, is it any less so for the reading child? Censorship of reading and censorship of cinema show that our culture is squeamish about the penetration of children by image and word, as if written or visual signs were in danger of ravishing children. Nonetheless, the sheer voluminous number of penetrating signs makes it impossible to censor penetration (including via “intercourse”: talk, communication). Children are penetrated all through the day—as are we all. Parents and authorities are therefore apt to censor only certain signs (ones about sex), though they increasingly worry about technology’s effects on chil34

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dren’s brains (kids being drugged by digital signs).10 The equally or far more fertile forms of damage—I suggest this gently—are caused by the words first put into children, “girl” or “boy,” when they’re not conscious, sliding from the womb. These forms of damage are often disavowed as we censor reading, gaming, and viewing. As for tender mind-flesh, surely my theories bear on “trigger warnings,” such as they’re being discussed in classrooms and other contexts. Eli Clare, disability theorist of cool dimensions, tries to front his book Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure by grappling with triggers: “Trigger warnings are in essence tools for self-care and collective care.” But how do they bear on listening and reading? Should one fashion a raft of mental condoms—is a trigger warning a (classroom) prophylactic or a reader’s rubber?—or should all readers “face” their encounters, however painful, with word and image? “I didn’t know what to tag,” Clare confesses; “I could have tagged almost every piece here with a trigger warning”; “but that wouldn’t help us know how and when to take care of ourselves and each other”; “so let me remind readers that you can stop listening to or reading this book”; “you can read it fast or slow”; “you can yell, type, breathe,” “add your own moments to the mosaic”; “I want to let this tension exist without trying to resolve it”; “what follows is a list of thirteen pieces that tell stories of sexual violence.”11 M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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His phrases get inside me and leave me no more resolved than he is. My thinking, nonetheless, goes way back to the early days of the 1990s, before there was any talk of “trigger warnings,” when one had to define “hyperlink” (a different kind of trigger, taking you places you couldn’t foresee), since the preInternet, known as “the Web,” in 1991 “went live” to the world.12 But I had been webbed and triggered already by kissing Toni Morrison. Getting Made Out: Sex with “Slavery” and “Homosexuality” Let the shroud lift, making out a mystery that I, for one, was slow to conceive: We’re bizarre breeders, each and every one of us. (We don’t know it? Apparently not.) Weird ways of breeding—how we make children, how we’re made through words—beg deciphering. And they’re sometimes painful. Certainly powerful. Powerfully historical. My ex-girlfriend wouldn’t have had her specific children without our relationship breaking up. Headslapping thought: loss is more central to breeding 36

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than we say. This queerly struck me—what “causes” children—when my kissing-girl and I parted ways, eight sweet years after our kiss. Despite our regret, our demise caused her children. At least in part. (There’s a key phrase: loss is partly causal, tenderly causal in many ways.) Before parental love, before parental intercourse (should these be in play), your child is the fertility of your negativity. Your specific child is caused by lost attachments, all of your prior failed attractions, and your other unpursued pursuits. (Loss-of-words in reading has its own causalities— what an alluring nut to crack—but first I need to think about words entering us. Their bizarre breedings. How they make us out.) Weirdly getting bred. It can’t be an accident, at least not with me, not with my history, that texts on “slavery” and “homosexuality” have birthed these thoughts in me. I’ve been obsessed, for a long time now, with the life of signs. And what I call sex with signs, be they words or images. There is a vibrant, sometimes viral life of signs in my body, in our bodies, because they birth and decay in us. Imagine a word dropping in your ear or entering your eye—or coming through your finger as you’re reading Braille—breeding in your body, for good or for ill. Know at the start that if you find this troubling (our getting bred) and find that it muddies the concept M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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of consent, you must blame Toni Morrison. Morrison’s words on her novel’s page—Beloved is the novel (from 1987)—make me think this thought. “Beloved” as vibrant sign and ghostly character (alive as a sign while dead as a character) enters the story and her mother’s body, where she breeds and spreads. (To put it lightly, loss has caused her.) And this famous novel on US slavery has utterly influenced the way I read the “father of homosexuality,” Oscar Wilde, and his take on reading. (Come to discover, Wilde views reading as bodily penetration, even infection and decay.) I’ve been in this state of delicious “blame” and influence since 1987, when I read Beloved and later published on it.13 Beloved remade me. So deep down, Beloved affected my thoughts on loss. What it means to carry beloved bodies in us—as a lively sign—even when they’re dead. 1987, as many people know, was the year of the AIDS quilt (called “The Names Project”: each quilt square the size of a grave, with a name and signs for each dead person); 1987 was also the start of my job as a professor. My new living commenced with death, thoughts on slavery spilling into AIDS, spilling into Wilde, with Beloved forging how I think of signs—oh, just that, just my entire conception of words, all reshaped for an English professor by a book on slavery. Words as stunningly, frighteningly fertile, after they’re inside us, even when, especially when, they convey the dead. 38

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Kissing dead skin is a surefire sign that the dead will break upon you. You might as well invite them into your mouth, up to your brain. Beloved, set in the years after slavery, offers arresting kissing from the start. A lover has returned and kisses a mother right where she cannot feel a kiss. On her striking scar. (Run for the hills. Invasion is pending. All that deadness must be a ruse for something quite alive.) “I got a tree on my back,” says the mother, describing a scar received from a whipping. “[They] open[ed] up my back”; “when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still.” The lover gets to business, kissing her tree. Holding her breasts in his hands, he “rubbed his cheek on her back and learned that way her sorrow” (slavery’s Braille?); “he would tolerate no peace until he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth, none of which Sethe could feel because her . . . skin had been dead for years.”14 (The hungry sex that follows ends in disappointment. The kiss was the thing, however peculiar.) The kiss is a prelude to weirdly getting bred. Something beloved wants inside you; can you bear it? You will kiss it; can you bear it? It’s your dead baby, who is Beloved. (Batten down the hatches for a freaky romance, quite the little triangle of mother-lover-baby.) A baby that you killed M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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to save it from slavery. A baby coming back as a teenage baby. A baby returning at the age it would have been if you hadn’t killed it. A baby that wants you to let it get inside you—as a strange child—who will get bigger as you’re forced to think it. And you want to think it, since it is beloved. Beloved is a sign posing as a character. She seems like a character but functions as a sign. (Beloved is truly the gothic version, the biggest baddest version, the epic racial version, of what a child may feel: being a character reduced to a sign.) What a sign Beloved is. After all, she’s the ghost—and, really, the name, the conceptual name—of slavery’s nameless dead—“sixty million and more” beloved dead—that penetrates bodies and minds, and spreads. Here a mother’s skin is a faulty prophylactic against penetration by an invasive, material, viral, beloved sign that grows in her brain. A sign with so many feelings surrounding it: pleasure, connection, wonder, elation, accomplishment, devotion, and racialized pain. Pain can have beauty in its surround, lest we forget. “Beloved” as a word holds a world of tones. I notice it enters through fluids exchange of the weirdest sort. What a stunning scene. When Beloved’s mother sees Beloved’s face—she doesn’t yet know this face is the ghost of the daughter she’s killed— this mother, Sethe, uncontrollably has to urinate. Running to the outhouse, she doesn’t quite 40

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make it, voiding her urine in plain view, “making a mudhole too deep to be witnessed without shame.” At the same time, Beloved’s in the house, drinking cup after cup of water, since Beloved is infected with cholera. Beloved-as-infectious-agent is inside. Sethe becomes infected with Beloved and all Beloved stands for and goes into symptoms (that in 1987 are all on the AIDS list): fevers, dementia, a wasting away, among many others. The sexual nature of Belovedas-sign makes itself known when Beloved says to her mother’s lover, “You have to touch me. On the inside part. And you have to call me my name.” Beloved embeds herself inside him through his finger or his lips or whatever is his instrument for touching her. The naming of her name is crucial to it all. The result? “She moved him.” “And Paul D didn’t know how to stop it.” Beloved is a sign. She is a sign of African American early death. A sign seeking vengeance. A sign that’s hard to bear. A sign of unkilled joy. A sign that gets inside you. M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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The story shows the challenge and effects of receiving this loaded signifier. For Sethe, its unbearable weight. It nearly kills her. But the novel that Morrison has crafted—the novel named Beloved—makes the reader a breeder of Morrison’s striking signs. (Here you go, readers: viral signs of US slavery. Can you bear them? Sixty million or more dead people. Can you hold this thought, even as it grows, as if it were your baby? The idea that the dead indeed are around you in the economic fortunes and economic downfalls inherited from slavery—and they attach to much you deem beloved.) Morrison infuses us with her words of pain in the hopes that we will carry them. And let’s recall that Beloved ends with Beloved out there, somehow roaming the place to which she’s exiled, as if she herself is the kind of viral dormancy that HIV can be at this point. We are not immune from what we cannot see. Another writer gets at the lie of immunity when it comes to slavery, the signs of its legacy. Morrison calls him—Ta-Nehisi Coates—by her highest and fiercest phrase: “required reading.” Why does she want his words inside us? He makes her fictional spectacle ordinary, which is a searing thing to do. Coates begins, “America’s heresies— torture, theft, enslavement— are so common among individu42

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als and nations that none can declare themselves immune.” Then, a pivot toward specificity: “white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe they are white, was built on looting and violence”; “there is nothing extreme in this statement.” And, then, the punch line: “All our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.”15 Coates uses words—visceral words—to endow our words with what-is-not-words. “Visceral experience.” The concept of visceral things’ slashing words, surrounding words, infecting words is, to name it in a word, Beloved. Beloved’s not alone on the viral life of signs—or their siren surface. Beloved, when I read it in 1987, as AIDS was raging, made me notice that The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, keenly conceptualizes sex with ideas.

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Kissing Sensation, Kissing Loss: In Praise of Being Unprotected from Decay I have to pause. To recall, momentarily, why this matters—sex with ideas—for what I felt in childhood. A lot of signs went into me, got draped onto me, when I was a child, without my having a chance to consider them or forget them or more artfully lose or carry them. Sex Education on Signs: that’s the class I needed in childhood. Central topic: how should children regard the birth of words in them, the force of words put onto them? This sex ed would supply some painful history—kids should know the history of powerful signs, especially if they wear them—and supply some decadence. There’s a queer thought, I fully grant you: a decent dose of decadence might help a child. Imagine being taught that signs can be sensations—you feel them in your body, feel them in your brain, even as they’re breeding, and they can decay. For me, if the girl-sign hadn’t been assigned to me, deeply affixed to me, daily put into me, I might have forged a suppler attachment to my surface as an intimate experiment in cloth/skin/movement, open to change or to signage I was shaping. How do we reconcile the history of signs (which both Morrison and Coates put before us) with the zest of brevity, some signs’ brevity? Wilde supplies this latter 44

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side as he gives a sex education on signs that permeates The Picture of Dorian Gray. The novel is as pro- penetration-and- sensation— and gothic—as Beloved. But here their sensibilities follow different vectors, as if a wave were breaking along two different paths. Slavery and so-called homosexuality are surely wildly divergent conceptions. And Wilde is writing perhaps from inside a (mistaken) sense of his own invincibility. Or is it euphoria? Whatever it is, it’s before his trials. Before he’s nabbed by the history of signs. . . . This is what gets to me. Truly quite viscerally. Reading Oscar Wilde, I know he’s put on trial four years beyond this novel, ending up imprisoned and dying soon after. Then, I realize Wilde is the history behind my signs. My own signs. What an epic fact. Luminous fact; breaking news from a distant star. Wilde individually, and quite bodily, via his fate, via his trials, influenced the signs I wore in my brain— “sodomite,” “homosexual”— when I was a child. I can’t dismiss what I know beyond his page, what as of yet he doesn’t know when he writes each word: every playful move has history heading toward it. Yet, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, only inexperienced, naïve readers hold onto words too tightly or in a way that’s toxic. Sexy sophisticates just let go. Words should be fleeting—like sensations—it’s suggested. M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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As fleeting as a kiss? I decide to play along. This morning, kissing in a cadence I was loving, I began thinking. (Shouldn’t read a novel just before kissing. . . .) To launch a new kiss, I must lose the prior kiss, must break it off in order to breathe amid my kissing. Letting go of kisses fosters breathing? (I will obey. I want to live.) A kiss is a curve, a beat, in time. The essence of decay, it glows and fades, even when hanging in tapering fire. “We kissed each other,” Dorian says. “All my life had . . . narrowed to one perfect point of rose-coloured joy.”16 Mind you, Dorian, in Wilde’s novel, says this of a woman he fleetingly loves. The only thing he kisses intending to keep it—boy, does he keep it, above all else—is a painted image. An image of himself: the picture of Dorian Gray, of course. (Even if you haven’t read Wilde’s novel, you may know this image: Dorian making a pact with his picture, a portrait of himself, because he can’t bear aging and decay; the picture will age, Dorian will not; he will not lose beauty, the portrait will suffer. Talk about the life of signs. And sexuality of the face.) In fact, “once, in boyish mockery of Narcissus, [Dorian] had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips.” Picture kisser! Wilde has put this thought in me: we kiss images. 46

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Yet, for all his kissing, what Wilde’s Dorian cannot kiss openly is another man. Wilde as author can’t even dabble in this direction. He could get in trouble. Ah, he did—he was sent to prison. Should have let his fictions burn like a blaze, I now say: men kissing men every way on every page. Actually, I take it back. Are we better off with what we have instead? We have a novel about the life of surface, the feel of surface—not lips only but words and images and succulent ideas that enter and ravish unguarded heads. . . . What can be said of these sensations, their decay? Surface sensation begs to be kissed in the words of Wilde. Feel these lines: “The wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy lilac-blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the languid air”; “the blue cloud-shadows chased themselves across the grass like swallows”; “tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like”; “the sunlight slipped over the polished leaves.” With these words, he has me. Wilde has lured me. Before I can conjure men’s strange ways with men on his page, in his story, I am hooked, seeking sensations of words about sensations. Words I start to lose (too rich for recollection) just as I’ve gained them. Then, I notice something: M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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They’re not kissing, but I’d swear they’re having sex (Dorian and Henry). In truth, they’re having words. It’s an odd scene: two guys in a garden, one young guy getting drunk on a flower (“feverishly drinking in [its] perfume as if [the flower] had been wine”), the older guy pouring words in his ear. Actually, the beautiful boy is deflowered by hearing of his beauty—and its future loss. Ideas about himself are getting inside him, making him out to himself most of all. The effects are bold. “[Lord Henry’s words] had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses.” The narrator continues, as if ensconced in Dorian’s brain: “Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what subtle magic there was in them! . . . Was there anything so real as words?” “There was a look of fear in his eyes, such as people have when they are suddenly awakened. His finelychiselled nostrils quivered, and some hidden nerve shook the scarlet of his lips and left them trembling.” It’s as if Dorian has no mental condom. I read this story of “homosexuality” as a revelation of penetrating surface (something many trans and “transiting” people have profoundly known). Physical attraction to a fleeting surface—a word, an image, a beauty, a page—Dorian’s portrait, along with the Yel48

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low Book Dorian is reading—shows us surface isn’t shallow. Surface is deep; (un)knowable depths wind around surface. We quite bodily take in a surface, which will birth and decay in us. Viva penetration and unprotection (!). Viva reproduction that accepts decay. Openness to what’s passed into us is the adventure of life? Not so quick. The Victorian public of Oscar Wilde’s day was frightened by the specter of bodies getting into other people’s bodies. The Contagious Diseases Acts, in the mid-1860s, to protect against syphilis, spoke to these fears. So did contraception, which was controversial, despite its ability to stop the spread of fluids. Slyly, playing on his public’s gothic fears, Wilde makes his own stress fall on the spread of infectious ideas passed from one man’s body to another. That’s how his men get inside each other. How does one stay safe? Take Lord Henry. He is simply decadent when it comes to words. Henry’s contraception is artful decay. He stays safe in his fluids exchange because he can’t recall what he himself has said. (“Was it all very bad?” he mischievously asks.) This decay, this loss of words, links to fleeting senses (a kiss or sunlight slipping over leaves). Let them enter, let them go. Of course, there’s penetration, and then there’s penetration. Wilde was convicted of “acts of gross M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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indecency with men” (presumptively, anal penetration) and sentenced to prison and labor in prison for two crushing years. At his trials in 1895, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) was used against him, which begs the question, What’s indecent here? What could scare the public about this novel? Weirdly, reading. The influence of words. And the word “influence.” “To flow in,” as the Latin would have it. Or, in a phrase from the age of AIDS, “fluids exchange.” (I love the lyrical definition of “influence”: “an ethereal fluid held to flow from the stars and to affect the actions of humans.”17 The stars are leaking danger.) Wilde’s characters talked instead of kissed, but in the words that flowed from them, his readers found a threat. Something remains to be said about decay. Why Kiss If . . . ? Making Out Remains What my friend said to me still sticks with me: “Kissing is pointless. It’s inefficient.” I do surrender. She’s got me from an efficiency standpoint. (Last night’s kissing was even absurd: I decided to kiss like a leopard, as if a muscular mass were holding back, expressing its force in a stalking set of rubs. “Surely she likes my fur, my smell. . . .” 50

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“Kissing’s not refined. It’s a raw syntax. . . .” I got more ridiculous with each passing kiss—never mind how.) Yes, inefficient. But on reflection, with my kissing lingering, prickling in my hair—what’s the furtive residue of my leopard kisses?—I refute the logic of kissing’s inefficiency. Reading defeats it. Musing on Wilde, I keep returning to reading’s decay: our unwavering devotion to reading despite its shocking fleetingness. So much fades in us after careful reading. Madly, I underline, desiring to retain—my hand an urgent agent (“let me remember this,” “love that phrase”)—only to find that details about the Ottoman Empire from a trip to Turkey, where I was immersed in all things Byzantium and the rise of Ataturk, have fled my body. It must be the pleasure of encountering these words in the moment, while I’m there, that keeps me kissing them with such unfounded hope. Then there’s the mysticism of the remains. If I’m going to lose whole swaths of Lolita or Nightwood or Beloved, then I must be game for the mysterious process by which certain words stay lodged inside my brain. Is this the adventure? We think that reading is the building of concepts—literally, the reproduction of ideas (from sex with ideas)—and surely such reproduction takes place. I continue holding M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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concepts from Wilde that have birthed in me, since this notion of sex-with-ideas, influenced by Morrison, is born of reading Wilde, as I interpret “him”— interpret his text, which issues from his body as a sequence of signs, where the signs are not his, though the sequence is. (Copyright, at bottom, is ownership of sequence: I’ve just realized this.) Is the more lasting adventure, nonetheless, simply the word? Is the mystical power of reading to be found less at the levels of concept, plot, or genre, however haunting and pleasurable they feel, than at the micro-level of words? Reading is a word-delivery system. That seems obvious. I mean something more. The luxurious and practical unpredictability of a person’s reading lies in not knowing what words are getting in and which words remain. All that kissing, all for naught, when I can’t recall that Ashbery poem (not even its ending). What a waste of time. And yet, not at all. Certain Ashbery word-selections and percussive slides, not devoid of meanings and arcs of meaning, broke from each other while inside me and may now be hiding (from me as much as anyone). With all practicality—is that the right word?— any of these items may emerge at any second in my own writing. Or, with hidden force, they may sculpt my next sentence or my comprehension of some52

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thing rather large. Even all my speaking is made from words I’ve kissed or have entered through an orifice; not one word can emerge from me that hasn’t lain inside me. An instance of my unconscious word-kissing and its birthing stays with me, frames this point for me. About twenty years ago, a vivid dream riddled me as I awoke. I wrote it down, naturally: I’m to give a talk on my research to my colleagues but I don’t want to. Happily, on my way to deliver this lecture, I recall I’m supposed to be teaching at this hour. In haste, I turn and hurry toward my classroom. On a wet embankment, I slide in a ditch, lose my shoe in mud, but carry on to class. Arriving, I discover that my girlfriend’s in the room with a cart full of instruments, and indeed she states: “I thought we could all make music for the hour.” Horrified, I cry: “You don’t understand, I must lecture on feldspar.”

On the note of “feldspar,” I woke up. Bolt awake, as in the movies. What the hell is feldspar? I thought it was a rock or a form of quartz, but I wasn’t sure. “An abundant rock-forming mineral,” said the dictionary I consulted. But why feldspar? Why, of all things, would I need to lecture on a term I didn’t know? Why the specificity of the embankment, the ditch, the mud? I couldn’t crack the code. M aKI N G O UT e NTe rINGS , O UT INGS, a ND re M aINS

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At least a year passed. Then, as I’m rereading Beloved, preparing to teach it, I come across a sentence. It appears just before a memorable scene in which a group of slaves escapes through the mud, after a storm has flooded their dungeons built inside a trench. They escape as one (discombobulated) person since they’re chained together. Yet Toni Morrison describes their “two-step to the music of hand-forged iron” in these terms: “They chain-danced over the fields, through the woods to a trail that ended in the astonishing beauty of feldspar.” Remarkable how my mind contained this term until I needed it. It lay dormant until I required the perfect word for (giving a lecture of ) “astonishing beauty”—a talk I wasn’t sure I could conjure for my colleagues. Though if I escaped them in preference for my students, I could give a lecture more musical than instruments? Who can really say. Broken from the novel with bits of content clinging, “feldspar” had been quiet, lying in wait. Still to this moment in my body it remains, fixed to the contexts of Beloved and my dream.

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3 COMM UNa L M aKI NG OU T

The Double-Bully Kiss All the world saw. That was how it felt. He was a wall of freckles tackling me, taking me down with a kiss, no less. As if a linebacker took a running back and kissed him, stunningly, into submission, Devin kissed me into the ground. (A spray of signs—grin, red hair, satisfied grunt—occupied my senses. Boy-as-blurof-fragments soundly felled me.) I had never been hit while kissed. Indeed, I hadn’t been hit this hard since a friend had creamed me on the football field just as I caught a delicate pass. That was a shock. But also straightforward. This, Devin’s kiss, was a bully nightmare in the sixth grade. This tackle-kissing terrorized me. The kiss, because it was a kiss, caused an outing of my girl-captivity, an outing to the world, I thought with horror. (The feminist in me cringes as I say this, wincing at this 55

wording. Fascinating, though, that one can feel outed as something the world already assumes.) It happened on the playground, and, frankly, I don’t recall our being seen. I felt naked. I felt made (didn’t have this word). By my own child-homophobic logic, a reasoning floating in the air we breathed, boys do not kiss boys. The kiss might as well have stripped me clean for all the shame I felt. It was a revelation to me. This is going to happen over and over; this is your future: you’ll be crushed by kisses. In fact, my decimation at the hands of Devin was so thoroughgoing, I’m not sure I told anyone about it—not my teachers, not my parents, and certainly not my trusty guy friends (not them, ever). Later, in college, I don’t tell anyone I’ve just been molested by a stranger. The day had begun in philosophy class, where I was taking a final exam. I was feeling ill and thought I might throw up, or faint, or both. (Writing on Heraclitus and Parmenides has that effect from time to time.) My worried professor, as a prophylaxis, had moved the waste paper basket to my desk, in case I lost my breakfast. I didn’t, and managed to finish my final, only to collapse in a striking swoon. At which point, my professor evidently called the infirmary, and two guys took me away on a gurney. 56

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While in an elevator—where, exactly, were we?—one of these men thoroughly molested me, helped himself to me, with the other fellow presumably watching, while I lay frozen in angry disbelief that someone would molest an ailing person who is fully conscious but can’t defend herself, can’t sit up. (For many years now, I’ve told myself this event was not traumatic, just quite angering, as it most certainly was and is. I feel this way. I’m mad, not disturbed. Disturbed, but not traumatized. Yet I’ve told my partner only quite recently—before, nonetheless, the cultural flood of harassment stories in the wake of Harvey Weinstein. Why have I let the image seem dormant?) And strange as it may sound, Devin’s bully kiss seemed a prelude to this, as if it were a prophecy, given my almost comic propensity to read an event as a prescient sign. The girl-sign, nonetheless, comes with its actuarial statistics. Nothing really comic about it. But there’s another bully in my life by sixth grade. Fred, quite different from Irish Catholic Devin (the latter I continue to see at mass when attending with neighbors—just one Christian greeting another, one with total terror in her heart), is African American, lives across town, and came to “our” school (how is it ours?) two years before with a group of black kids. Together they made a surprising arrival that I grasp as “busing.” My parents, I know, introduce me to the concept. Given their left-leaning, Democratic souls (also Unitarian: double left-leaning), I’m sure they’ve COMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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told me that I should be friendly. I’m certain as well that the history of busing in promoting “integration” has been explored at our family dinner table, alongside matters like prison reform—we sponsor a prisoner—just not sex, anything but sex. That is, I’ve heard by the age of eleven why the arrival of ten (?) black kids in my grade is desirable, according to my parents and the board of education. I don’t disagree—in fact, I’m thrilled—but for different reasons than the ones I’m given. I watch my peers; I study intently their settling in, which looks difficult due to their being a fraction of our class. (They have come to us. We have stayed in place.) The woeful pronouns “us” and “them,” which I’m certain are present in my head, are belied by my noticing and being forcibly struck by a range of settling-in demeanors and behaviors. (Ousia is painfully shy, as is Jamie, and barely speaks. Harold is sunny, gregarious, irrepressible. Fred comes alive largely at recess.) Are these personalities or devised strategies? Yet “they” are grouped by children’s watchful eyes and notions, mine included. Now, moreover, begins my massive projection of my loneliness outward and onto these new companions. My body-boundary (bodily ego, as Freud would put it) extends to them. My non-boyness, thus my 58

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homo-hood, has their being-black inside it, in a way a white kid would misperceive “blackness” as if it were a thing, a substance I could share. Somehow I know my problem isn’t theirs. I’m fitting in, against all odds, in some measure, despite my genderbending. A white tomboy in the eyes of others: there’s a place for me. I have recess prowess. Magically, at recess, I’m a kind of boy in terms of how I function. A boy in a dress, I play all games. And many of the black kids, no doubt confirming (my) stereotypes, are ripping good at sports (some are not, of course, which escapes my notice as I bundle a type at age eleven). “I am like them!” I say to no one, thankfully enough. (A wacky version of anti-Semitism also attends me: I think there might be something wrong with Judaism, since there are few Jewish athletes of note, so I believe, aside from the obvious example of Koufax. The fact that Hebrew school explains boys’ absence from sports after hours doesn’t register. Something still is wrong.) Was it, then, the sports thing that enabled bonding? Was it my projection of only-one syndrome? Was it a pint-sized, childish version of white suburban guilt? (White guilt in childhood is wildly understudied, I can only guess.) Was it the form that sixties racism took inside my body? I’d say the latter quite profoundly. COMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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Whatever the parameters of my child-racism, my specific attachment to these kids was so intense. If I was feeling down about a gendered scene of deep frustration, I projected depression on them. If insecure, I noticed uncertainty on some of their parts. Always, hidden loneliness is what I suspected as I felt mine. Confidence also weirdly found its place, as I spun outward my paradoxical sense of assurance onto these puzzling kids who could come and hold their own. Fred, to be sure, was holding his own. That’s how it seemed. As I look back, he might have been fragile in the way tough boys are riven by fragility. He might have felt targeted, even trapped. He might have been hopping angry over busing, his being bused to an allwhite school. (Absence of anger would be irrational, if it were me. Ah, it wasn’t me.) Whatever his story, he wasn’t kissing me; Fred was harassing me, directly, physically. He was routinely bouncing a ball (those cool kick balls: loved those balls) off of my head with serious force, and everyone was noticing. My teachers got involved, as you might imagine, since these actions looked like bullying—and they were. It wasn’t a picnic. I didn’t like someone, often out of nowhere, fully trouncing me. The hits seemed to come when I least expected them and were always aimed at my head. I’ll sock him next time I see him, I’d think. I never did. But (do I say with the spur of white guilt? or as a valid index of my feelings?) Fred was hailing me as a boy, 60

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I told myself. I took it as the compliment perhaps it never was. Or was Fred’s bullying his way of kissing me—did he “like” me as Devin maybe did? Were they, either one, flirting through harassment, maybe even flirting safely with a “boy”? Or did they despise me? Were they wanting to expose a fake boy? Was Fred wanting to expose a white “boy”? Maybe I was just an available mark for spirited play. I’ll never know. I only recall that my teachers were “concerned” about Fred’s “bad” actions, which were not traumatic, but they were dismissive over girls’ getting kissed. Fred, unwittingly, hailed me as the transiting kid I was being. Devin’s chuckling kiss signified “no exit,” thus portending an existential crisis. Adults misperceive the harm done to children. In fact, insisting that children have been harmed can be highly damaging, especially when adults make us kiss their words of hurt. Kiss This, Children, Say the Police On this front of hurt, I am more than primed— kindling’s on my fire—for a film’s premiere. I foresee a bombshell, upending general notions of who enjoys harm. I don’t know the details; I’m just smacking my lips (as we say), since I’m in my forties, writing a book called The Queer Child. COMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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Indeed, when I see this film at its Sundance Festival premiere, in a packed theater, no one can know from reviews or filmgoers what is going to happen or how to add it up. I can feel the pull of specific moments on the auditorium throughout this first screening. At times I hear gasps. After having watched it, I know that the film shows white suburban fantasies collectively shaped by cops and parents—with the aid of children. The film is about how groups form images, only in their minds, sharing them insistently so as to shore them up, sometimes obsessively rehearsing—as if loving— what they deem harmful, scandalous, unlawful. Adults are missing something. I plead innocent of other people’s childhoods, but my white-suburban-hood soaked in its share of creepy kid fantasies. We had ideas. The term “red pig” had a lively little life and was code for . . . something. As was “husky cream puff ” (for which I’ve lost the thread). Naked beauty contests held us for a summer. (We were enchanted by our lean, coltish forms.) So did “Uncle Bobby” hold our attention. The latter was a disturbing game, as I look back, that distressed me even then. One of the Ken dolls in our neighborhood received this moniker, meant to convey despicable acts. (My Ken and I were afraid of 62

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Uncle Bobby.) I truly can’t recall a single thing he did. I can sense the feeling surrounding the name. Trust me when I say, then, I’ve been intrigued by strange group-think, communal making out of ideas that get rolling, especially among suburban kids. Children alone could make quite a movie, never mind in tandem with eager police. Thus, I was ready for this hyped documentary—and its famous line: “Arnold liked pictures.” With this seemingly anodyne phrase, implying that Arnold was a picture-kisser maybe at most (yes, kissing images is bodily in outcomes), viewers step inside a brutal labyrinth. The line is spoken by Arnold’s exwife. The maze is the documentary sensation Capturing the Friedmans (2003). At the heart of everything lies this circumstance: New York City’s number-one clown in the new millennium is found to have had an infamous father. This clown’s father, Arnold Friedman, a computer teacher, clearly was a pedophile and a receiver of child pornography, who didn’t rape his students. You heard right. Andrew Jarecki’s arresting documentary strongly implies that a pedophile didn’t harm the children in his classes; in fact, instead, the police harmed the children by insisting they were harmed. The mode of this insistence is fully telling and inCOMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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volves group kissing: caressing, as a group, what is pictured in the mind, courtesy of images concocted by the group. What commences as a clown show becomes a script for heartbreak. By the time we’re done, a pedophile who is innocent of charges brought against him has died in jail. His son, the younger brother of the son who is the clown, who conducted classes with his father in their home, has been falsely accused and also jailed. And the wife of Arnold, who had no clue that her husband fancied boys, has lived through a nightmare along with her sons, who, in large measure, roundly blame her for being too cold as a mother and a wife (!). This is just the plot. And it’s worth saying that Jarecki as director tries to tell this story in the most suspenseful way, making the matters cloudier and juicier than they now seem. A whole array of footage, taking different forms—home movies, self-recordings, television news, striking interviews with families and detectives and now-grown children, alongside snippets from the clown documentary that was never made—requires the viewer to decide-for-oneself amid these turns. One of the first narrative fragments shows the clown not appearing as a clown; breaking down, in fact; sitting in his underwear, filming himself only for himself: “Well, this is private, so if you’re not me, then 64

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you really shouldn’t be watching this, ’cause this is supposed to be a private situation between me and me—between me now and me in the future. So turn it off; it’s private.” What self-kissing of one’s own pain, with an eye to being seen by others’ spying eyes, do we encounter here? There is weird pleasure reminiscent of Lolita or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in a text this twisted and bedazzling. The film’s cubist form makes me kiss each cube. I found myself loving the feel of different surfaces, as they shifted from campy home movies— why is the grain in the image so appealing?—into talking heads, into audio-cassette recordings played over routine domestic scenes, into ’80s news (’80s clothes, ’80s hair! I’m charmed, I’m attentive). Yet, for all this seductive pastiche and ambiguity, a second disc with the DVD of Capturing the Friedmans includes a “dossier” that nails the police. Here we discover their fishing for answers they’re determined to hear; their direct threats; their manipulation of evidence and families with whom they share this evidence. Their entire conduct throughout their work on the case of Arnold Friedman tells you they framed him—consciously or not. One detective states, “If you talk to a lot of children, you don’t give them an option, really. . . . You have to tell them, ‘We know there was a good chance that [Mr. COMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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Friedman] touched you or Jesse touched you or somebody in that family touched you in a very inappropriate way.’” Excerpt from a dossier transcript: “We want to go through this with you, don’t deny it yet.” (Boy denies he was touched.) “Oh, it happened to everyone else but not to you? . . . It’s a monster created within you. . . . It’s a no-win situation unless the person goes and gets help and admits he was victimized.” (Subtext: those who won’t admit their victimhood will become monsters: gay pedophiles, in the minds of the police.) Also from the dossier, we learn that police told character witnesses for the defense that rumors now were surrounding them, causing them, naturally, to decline to testify. Forty counts of sodomy hung on Friedman— after he pled his charges down from hundreds—when they were done with him. Why? one asks. Because “Arnold liked pictures.” The whole thing starts in 1987 when a piece of porn, featuring boys, lands with the US Postal Service instead of with Friedman, causing police to search his home, where they find pornography (magazines and pictures). Learning that Arnold Friedman teaches, the police begin searching for his many victims, who, police presume, must be his young computer students, even though not one student has whispered even one complaint. In bizarre reversal, as the police perform their questioning, they, I would say, are the kiddy-porn kings, who put pornographic scenes 66

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into children (via suggestion) or, more intriguingly, release the sexual imagination of kids, alongside that of their suburban parents. One starts suspecting that many of these folks are loving making out, making up, what “happened.” The magisterial theorist James Kincaid, author of Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting, has taught us to spot the obvious “titillation” and “pious pornography” of such spectacles.1 Even so, this shocks. Elaborate stories of rape out in the open, of multiple sodomies of the same child in the same week, of slapping, hair-pulling, arms being pinned back (suspiciously sounding like what siblings do to siblings), wild games of leapfrog (I’ll spare the details). Unless these violent things took place with no one reporting them and no one ever seeing blood or semen or bruises on their children—never mind these kids signing up for these courses again and again—all this indicates what was contained in suburban brains, contents shared back and forth with each other. (There’s a competitive urge to invent. One cop muses about the parents, “Sometimes there’d be some mild conversation about another boy who was, you know, ‘sodomized five times but my son was sodomized six times,’ as if that meant something in the overall scheme of things.”) I try to comprehend this spread of “group kissing”—a public kissing of images, words, memories, and COMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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scenes, though they were said to be horrific. The police- protagonists in this documentary are not what they seem. They are putting stories of abuse into children, as if they are making their own childporn film with the help of children, thus revealing what is otherwise hard to catch and see: the actual content, in all its gory glory, of suburban pornography, of normative suburban fantasies of harm already percolating in the heads of kids, their families, law enforcement. A full-blown porno, strictly shaped by them, weirdly kissed by them, springs from their minds. Ungentle maze. Arnold liked pictures, and so did they. Group Kissing, Happy Masochism in Our Classrooms Kissing as a group isn’t bad in itself. Not by a long shot. The classroom is a place of all planetary spaces for communal making out. And a touch of masochism, I have come to learn. (Boards of education don’t consult me.) I think about it this way: Venus in Furs (1870), ur-text of masochism, renders a fabulous journey to . . . a surface. Not exclusively the surface of a page. Masochism here is a matter of fur, beautiful textures, a vaporous gown flashing through the woods. “I catch 68

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sight of a white gown,” says the narrator, “gleaming through the thick tangle of foliage”; “another fabulous outfit! Russian boots of mauve velvet lined with ermine, a dress of . . .”2 Here’s a man’s wish to be whipped by beauty, to carry its mark at the surface of his skin in the form of a bruise, even as he often heaps hot kisses on the whipper’s breast. (So many images of “the dominatrix” flow from this text: her unbending sexiness; her arresting clothes and weaponized shoes. She’s a plane of beauty, a beautiful surface, worth submitting to.) So, of course, I’m asking if reading resembles the masochist’s devotion to alluring surface. Like a group of masochists, we can pursue and wish to be bruised by the same vaporous gown in the woods. (There’s a new simile for classroom and book club: happy group of masochists.) We can comparatively share our kissing and our bruising, our tangled pursuits, even where they take us in terms of meanings we make from “close readings.” The latter is an academic phrase that is used to describe readers’ getting close to a text (intriguing description, the more I think about it), in the sense of getting precise over words and images and meanings. (I’ve known the term since high school—only a million years ago— when I did a close reading of the film The Graduate for my English class. I microscopically dissected that COMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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sucker.) Here’s a new meaning for the closeness of reading: getting close to readers, as you read in common. Close, intellectually. Seducers, unite (however unsexy you otherwise are). Bowing to elegance, heat, and daring, prepare to advance your queerest attraction. Attraction to readings. To proffer a reading of any kind of text—to say, “this is how I interpret this text”—is to pitch your masochism sideways to your audience in siren style. You might as well cry, “be bruised with me, kiss with me, submit as I submit!” The more professional you happen to be, the heavier the seduction. Professors, don’t deny it (I say to myself). Deceptively, we act as if we are showing the reading that any skilled reader would discover, if they’re reading closely. Yet the very dictates of publishable criticism, crowned by copyright, call for readings that must be unique, original, surprising, never-yetproffered, and, therefore, not shared by one’s readers— until our readings seduce them (if they do). How are they seduced? They are led to see how their own making out of the text could have led—though it didn’t— to these meanings. Seductive readings must prove plausible (also pleasurable?) to kissersof-the-same-text. (Even for a flirt, a textual Casanova, that’s a tall order, in and of itself, due to incompatible ideologies governing possible readings.) But even when, especially when, seductive readings flourish, they must birth meanings that didn’t birth in every70

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one—in fact, not in anyone but the seducer. Sexier still, “the reading” is a whole new sequence of words about the text in question, leading each seducer to put their text-about-text into readers, as if they’re saying, “Come with me, on the backs of my words. Now they are in you. Alas, like an author, I can’t control them, as they are birthing, forking, dying somewhere inside you.” Yet to go back. Group kissing needs our focus. There is more to say about kissing-in-common before it leads to anyone’s fashioning of a reading. Before the singularity of a seduction, kissing in the classroom makes a fertile mess. That’s what I say to my students in the room: let’s make a mess; see what got inside us. We do a little exercise—“Is It In Your Body?”—that I’ve devised and published. The aim is to reckon how much and what parts of a text, having entered us, lie inside our bodies, available for acts of interpretation. Devious simplicity: masking my aim, I assign a twenty-page scene from a novel for students to read outside of class. Something that is juicy, detail-rich. (For example, a scene from Jean Genet’s Querelle or Nabokov’s Lolita—the scene in which the sailor Querelle murders Vic or the one in which Humbert has active Lolita in his lap. Or something less sensational but still quite lush: the drug-dream sequence from Brontë’s Villette.) COMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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When our class convenes, students record solely from memory as many details as they can recall—first just verbatim, then at least putting into sequence the happenings and features of the scene (dialogue, descriptions, plot points, and so on). Once we have established how much of the text is still in our bodies, at least how much is consciously present, we reflect. Why did certain words or phrases stay inside us—which ones in common?—or become altered or just peter out? Salaciousness? Beauty? Unexpected word choice? Fascinating or ineluctable sequence? No surprise, most readers haven’t thought of words’ penetrating or decaying—or of readers’ differential kissing of words—leading different readers to have different novels (literally in them) after they’ve read the very same text. Equally freaky, I don’t “have” the text—ever—as it happens. (Vaporous gown, elusive lover, flashing through the woods?) Never do I have the text inside me all at once; in the stream of reading words, I lose reams of words. My hand can hold what my mind cannot. That is, I hold the object—the novel Middlemarch or a slim novella or, for that matter, a scientific essay—knowing I can never know it “as itself ”: that exact bundle of words in its entirety. Is it then reducible—is a text of any length functionally reducible—to what we extract from it and carry in our bodies? What a dilemma. (Wildean delight.) Something no professor confessed throughout my schooling. 72

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Cunningly, my exercise “Is It in Your Body?” stages this confession. When I taught Lolita—the infamous lap scene—we had a riotous time with my experiment. Phrases commonly recalled verbatim: “Eden-red apple” (a few students added the adjective “banal,” which Humbert crucially attaches to this phrase), “hidden tumor” and “gagged, bursting beast” (phrases standing for Humbert’s erection), “tactile correspondence” (euphemism for his penis being rubbed by the monkeyish movements of Lolita), “innocent cotton frock” (Lolita’s dress is innocent, but is she?), “safely solipsized” (naming Humbert’s confidence that he’s saved her innocence), “Turk”/“slave” (Humbert’s tumescent sense of their positions), “bruise . . . on thigh” / “huge hairy hand” / “thumb . . . reaching . . . groin” / “giggling child” / “shrill voice” / “squirmed” / “crushed against buttock . . . throb” / “man or monster” / “[her] cheeks aflame, hair awry” / “Blessed be the Lord, she had noticed nothing!” (from the crucial sequence leading to his climax).3 These are elements commonly remembered. Simply on the level of who does what to whom and to what effect (is Lolita aroused by Humbert’s “beast”? does she, too, ecstatically arrive?) caused intense debate, illustrating how much hangs on what of the text stays with us after getting in us. Many students sheepishly admitted that they wanted to commit to memory this “beautiful” passage, despite some being repulsed by its content. And given what students did and didn’t memorize, even in the face of COMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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enormous effort, we as a class decided that the passage positions the reader as both attracted pedophile and distracted child. That is to say, like Humbert, we ourselves experience very strange attractions that time will erode: attraction to words we kiss on the page (dense, lyrical, rhythmic, funny, euphemistically fresh, and clearly antinormative); and these words distract us (much as Humbert tries to distract Lolita with his Carmen ditty) from the bewildering goal he seeks. We were left wondering which of these words would be in us, lingering, by semester’s end. Sensual qualities arose in our discussions. We kept circling round the feel of words, their surface flow. The words’ and phrases’ satisfying sounds—“plop,” “safely solipsized,” “gagged, bursting beast”—aided students’ recall. But we also noticed that certain sentences were so precise and dense that we were defeated in committing them to memory, despite our intense desire to do so (“Lola, the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet . . .”), making us like Humbert, who can’t keep hold of what he has only momentarily possessed. Crucially, we recognized how the text inside us contributes to meaning’s being plural and partial but not subjective in the way many students think the text can mean anything they think or say it does. We can speak precisely, analytically, conceptually about uncertainty. 74

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In the end, however, when we share our readings, we can just seduce. I have another seduction in mind. (I notice that I launch from personal investment to attempted seduction to grandiose confidence to resigned confession. This is the curve of my communal making out.) In 1982, the same year I began kissing a woman, I began kissing the surface of a text. I sought it, I adored it. Carefully, I took it in with my eyes. I was penetrated, penetrator though I am, and I tried to memorize whole chunks of text. I can still feel around certain passages exactly where I was when I was strongly kissing them, heading to my lover and separating from her. I, even then, could feel words die, as I lost them, failed to hold them. Two key thoughts impinge on this memory. One has to do with sexy depths worn on the surface of some texts. The other has to do with premature ejaculation, in which I encourage us all to indulge. Let me hold off on premature ejaculation. To sexy depths. One reason our reading cannot be solely “surface-y,” whoever we are, is that any surface we read gets inside us and births other planes, other stacks of surface. Another crucial reason lies in the fact that many novels wear their “depths,” their folds, their seeming latencies, on their sleeves. We may feel COMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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knottedness when we kiss their surface: “I’m sensing a depth here—what just happened?” (Enter your deep-reading English teacher, or your professor, to egg you on.) Feeling a need to seduce, I can show you the sexy depths of reading a surface through Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece Villette—the text I was kissing in 1982, after The Kiss. In this autobiographical novel, Brontë reconfigures her loss of possible love with a professor—a real live man she studied with and fell for when she lived in Belgium—giving us a novel about a woman’s losing a professor she loves, a novel boldly shaped by Brontë’s unsuccessful novel The Professor. Here’s a professor beside a professor beside a Professor, a veritable sideways growth of professors, or should we call it a depth of professors? Can you feel this depth? Is it like a stack (one professor stacked on another and another)? Or do many readers, without this knowledge concerning Brontë’s life and other novel, just feel knottedness around Villette’s professor? Speaking for myself, I kiss this knot; it births a joke. Why does it take three layers of professors to sex and bend the Bible? Bear with me here. If one can stand another depth, there’s a deeper dive. Brontë has a white-haired, elderly woman, Lucy Snowe, whose hair lies white under her bonnet, the novel tells us, “like snow beneath snow” (there’s a depth of Snowe), tell the memories of her young life (as Lucy Snowe) 76

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through a retrospection figured as biblical autobiography.4 (In this genre, in case you don’t know, someone’s individual life is read as tracing the lines of divine history, from the Garden of Eden through the life of Christ to the Book of Revelation. No small ambition for average Christians.) A deliciously bent biblical arc greets us in Villette. That is, the professor that Lucy comes to love is a figure for Christ, named Paul Emanuel (“Emanuel,” a name for Christ: “God with us,” according to the Bible), who, you’ll have to trust me, is an attempt on Brontë’s part to imagine Christ as a woman she might love. The descriptions of Emanuel become more feminine—downright womanly— toward the novel’s end. Hey, he’s Christ, he’s the New Testament’s gentle Jesus, what would you expect? More than that, old Lucy, via her telling what she cannot bear to tell— the vanishing of Professor Emanuel through apparent death (Christ will do that on you)—comes into virtual touch with her desire, as Brontë maybe did, by narrating young Lucy’s opium dream (I’m not kidding) full of words and phrases from the Book of Revelation, implying a Bridegroom’s coming down the line, after history ends. (Stay aroused, Christians.) I did say “bent.” And, indeed, one reviewer from Brontë’s own time complainingly wrote, “We are not COMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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at all proud of Lucy Snowe as a representative of our Reformed faith.”5 I can only bet. But I loved Lucy. Come to realize, I loved depths that I could fall into and—here’s the kicker—I could explain. Or I loved the novel because I was falling in love with a woman, while being Christian? I can’t say. But as I repeatedly kissed the novel’s signifiers with my eyes, I, who was coming from divinity school, picked up their echoes (sometimes exact) of biblical fragments not yet noticed by other critics. (I was simply lucky: divinity training; its divine remains.) The connotative field that stacked in me, that birthed in me—due to much kissing—showed me, I believe, that the Christian’s duty, according to Villette, is to desire and name one’s desire: the heat beneath Snowe, the Snowe beneath Snowe, in relation to a Christ with affinities to women. And if there were time, I would show you how my grasp of psychoanalysis in those days helped me read the biblical depths that were clinging to the words that inside me bespoke the novel’s use of fourfold allegory (typological, allegorical, tropological, anagogical)—another stack!—that showed a Victorian (psycho)analysis of a character and her author (I sense you, Charlotte) on two different planes. But let me confess: the appetite to see us kiss a text extensively—that is, at any length—appears to 78

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be waning outside the classroom. Even professors no longer have a set of texts they hold in common, which makes exhaustive readings exhausting, sad to say, beyond one’s students, beyond group kissing in our own courses. (God bless courses.) Listeners, especially, but even those who read us, want to watch us sex the texts we mention: to take them in hand quickly, splendidly, also climactically. I feel pressured—can’t say it’s unpleasant— to blow my wad, at least one wad, at the start of a talk or even an essay (premature ejaculation). Then, I’m aware of needing to build, with rhythm and pulse, my surface stacks. Don’t show every kiss, I have to tell myself. Kissing’s for the classroom. Kissing’s for the courses. So it should be. Together with our students, we are the masochists surfacing to catch a glimpse of a gown, to kiss its hem, that has gone inside us, leaving a bruise where it went down, or in, or spread, gleaming, if fleetingly, through thick foliage. God-Kiss on a Chairlift? If a text’s surface can be a negligee to my strange reckoning—and our group attraction—I am curious about my love of theory. What makes anyone desire to conceptualize on behalf of others? COMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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A depth of contradictions at and in my skin seems my own answer. Since I felt my knottedness, I was led to theorize? I prepare to laugh, to splash each sentiment in the face with irony, since my contradictions have always held the flavor of absurdity—for me. Mine, moreover, are amped by tangles involving divinity, the God-kiss being a contrapuntal scene of communal collisions. There’s this guy. I wasn’t kissing him so much as kissing God. God requires this kiss. From my reading, I’m believing this divine requirement, so I’ll kiss this boy on a night deep in March. The fragrance of the air is making the moment laden with sensations. Night snow in springtime has a particular density and glide. Even from a chairlift, you can sense this surface and smell the changing compactness of snow. I recall the chairlift and lure of the snow more than the kiss. (The brittle bits of ice exchanged between our lips made strong contrast with our heated mouths. The kiss was the transfer of a temperature contrast. That’s what I remember.) I think we had joked about kissing on the lift, dared by a couple in the chair behind us, but we kissed on the crest of a run, both of us cocky since we were skiing danger80

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ously fast. Quite an aphrodisiac. And quite a singular setting for a God-kiss that’s becoming an existential bind. Do I kiss for God? Do I obey the dictates, as I grasp them, that I am daily reading in God’s book? I hadn’t foreseen that my reading would drastically channel my kissing, throwing God to a place between my lips. Something, even so, has turned before this point. A watershed moment has already arrived, for which there is an indelible image. (As with all such images, this one is suspect.) Perhaps you can imagine how sexy . . . I wasn’t. I’m thirteen and, really, quite the looker: pageboy haircut being grown out, ill-fitting shirt, sad-sack skirt, and ridiculous knee socks. I’m on a swing set, of all the weird places, talking to the world’s most appealing girl, whom I’d like to kiss. Why in the world is she talking to me? Jesus is our topic. She wants me to want him. I want her, so I want him. I really want to want him. So I did. With a speed that seemed immediate, green with presentiment, Jesus became a pocket of the possible. (Truth be told, I didn’t know him, didn’t grow up with him. My loving parents were cerebral Unitarians—whatever a Unitarian is.) The point is COMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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this: “accepting Jesus in my heart,” as the saying goes, advanced me, propelled me, catapulted me, toward my own queerness. Evangelicals nurtured a queer side they didn’t know I had. It was elementary: they hailed me as a girl. I became a leader and lover of girls. Until that time, since all my friends were boys, I just didn’t know how surpassing girls could be. I wanted to preach this tasty gospel: girls can be matchless. We shared readings— catnip to me—in our bunk beds at night. Bounteous readings, close readings. Like some species of communal flâneur, we walked on the beach and talked ideas. At Formica tables in the school cafeteria, we held hands and prayed together, softly. (Reading D. H. Lawrence, I tracked hands, which across his novels he favors as erotic, forging, as he does, lust from banality. Perhaps I’m a young Lawrentian Evangelical.) Who invented this enchanting setup? Sex segregation is a sacred gift to gays, I found myself concluding. The boys go one way, the girls go the other way—and I go with the girls. True, you don’t get to kiss anybody, but you get to romance. Here I blamed straight boys. They had set the bar so low for straight-girl expectations, it wasn’t hard for me to inch above their bar. I was a spiritual fox in the henhouse. I didn’t mean to be. I wasn’t conniving. I was believing— truly, in 82

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Jesus. So it unfolded: the more I believed, the more I desired. The more I desired, the more I believed. O divine serpent biting its tail. I am not a lesbian, I said inside my head (though I’d been having a lengthy relationship by this point with the word and its synonyms). I am a boy concealed in a girl gang, a boy who is learning to be a gay girl through being Evangelical. This was my new thought. Kind of a head-scratcher, even for me, at age thirteen. I am being saved—from seventh-grade hell— but from which direction? Am I better off learning to be gay, converting my boyhood to closeted gaydom? Or will my closeting make me a boy-trying-to-be-agirl who must kiss a boy? That will make me gay in a different way: “boy” kissing boy. I’m on thin ice, very thin snow, when it comes to the out and out practice of dating. . . . That’s how the chairlift matter comes about. I’ve been reading Romans in the New Testament. It has pierced my brain: “God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error” (1:26–27). My dilemma wracks me, at that time. If, at bottom, COMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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I am more a boy than I am a girl (I’m still stuck with these poles at thirteen), kissing on the chairlift is my gayest, most “unnatural” option. It feels gay. That is, unnatural. It feels “homo”—same to same, “boy” to boy, and thus wrong—given the wrong way that US culture is thinking of “gay” in ’72 (as a sameness, thus a wrongness). Later, I realize that religious entities that oppose queers don’t deem gayness unnatural at all, in their heart of hearts. They must consider it hypernatural, since, to their minds, everyone’s “going gay” if we let them. (Besides, I later figure, US history is all about fetishizing same-race relations, same-class relations, as if these samenesses make great marriages. Homorace marriage, homo-class marriage: we’re all about these homo- sexualities.) This is not my thinking as I ride the chairlift. Much as I love God, I’m depressed to grasp that I must double-cross myself so as to please Him. I must “unnaturally” act like a girl as I “unnaturally” kiss this boy, all to obey the “natural relations” I read in a Bible I’m trying to memorize, word for word. (By the time I quit, I’m halfway through.) Even at this point—as a young teen—I’m having questions surrounding the gender confusions of Jesus. I ask myself, If the Church is the Bride and Jesus is the Bridegroom, but Jesus takes the spear on the cross for his Bride, making himself the substitute 84

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Bride for the sake of the Church, how is Christ not feminized, a man with holy holes, whose penis is fully excluded from mention, though ordinations of all-male priesthoods down through the ages hang on this organ? I have nowhere to go with these queries and mostly try to quash them when they come to mind. (I notice I like them.) I get gayer along two tracks. (Wider goes my splitting, self from self. I am a poster child for psychoanalysis.) Dating guys, I feel my gayness deepening in my boy-to-boy-ness, as on the chairlift. Liking girls feels “natural”—but perplexing. For the ones who like me in a special manner, they may feel in danger of the word “gay,” making me gay-ish as our romance blossoms, even if they see me as a guy-substitute. All this encircles each of my relationships, coming to explosion with my best friend. If Janis Joplin were a Christian, she’d be Deb. Flaming red hair and a raft of freckles—she redeemed freckles—Deb was the freest spirit I had met. She was irrepressibly sexual-sensual, melting that divide as she sought to maintain it. Not long after I first encountered her (she had just converted, and we were in high school), she shouted out to me, down a long hallway, “Kath, I have something to say about lesbians!” I was undone. Like Saint Peter denying Christ, I pretended I didn’t know her, or my own name. That’s how she was: Christian badass, a neon spark. COMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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Fluids from the stars could not have overwhelmed me more than our romance, laced with bookishness and sex with ideas. I performed my reading—of Christian theology and biblical commentary—longing to share it at length with her, as if I could lateral textual kissing and convert it into, what? Quite a dynamic: letting words enter you, make a life in you, all to get “in” (but what did “in” mean?) another woman’s body via these words. One day, however, in passing she said, “You’d be my perfect husband if you were a man.” That phrase knifed me, went way in me, for all my wanting my words to enter her. I lived inside that phrase that was now inside me. It was my vehicle, my fantasy, my coffin. Game over, baby. Never going to happen. There are other currents in my contradictions. Playing on a basketball team in high school, I wonder if my comrades—most of whom are black—“like” girls, too. There’s a nervous energy to our homophobia, trickling out in all kinds of anxious non sequiturs about sexuality, about our coach—should we watch her house, on the chance of catching her kissing a woman?—about the songs we’re singing on the bus to games. “Really love your peaches, want to shake your tree,” we repeatedly sing at full volume from the Steve Miller Band’s hit-song single. I say “we,” but I’m an outsider, an inside-observer, not fully trusted but kindly suffered and nicknamed Pro86

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fessor Bones by the group. I’m on the starting five but viewed as an oddity, perhaps because of my religious propensities more than my whiteness or wavering gender. Indeed, when my team may need me most—for a postgame fight, ignited by racist slurs launched against us by lily-white assholes from a WASPy town—I have already showered and left for my weekly Bible study. Our team’s undefeated run crashes here, since everyone but me is suspended (for weeks?). I am a WASPy, Christian letdown. Rescue had been found through Evangelicals, but now I needed salvation from their rescue. (I never stopped loving them.) This required my brother— and divinity school, fittingly enough. (It amazes even me that I went through college still an Evangelical, without having seen live gay people in the flesh in front of me. I can only chuckle that I wrote my honors thesis, “Being and Becoming Paradoxical,” with the supposed intent of reconciling Kant with Kierkegaard. Right. The God-kiss—that is to say, the chairlift predicament— trying to go unnatural for God—was lurking, I would guess.) Nonetheless, reading saved my future kissing, since my brother sat me down and told me consequentially, and a bit generously, “You’re an intellectual.” What’s in a word? That one phrase, spoken by my brother, arguing for the breadth and depth of reading, sends me off to Yale (where he is doing his economics docCOMMUN aL Ma KING O UT

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torate) instead of to an Evangelical seminary. There at divinity school, for the first time, I meet gays— many of them feminists. They don’t say they’re gay, not at first they don’t, but they imply it, and I’ll take it. That’s good enough. Whereby the chairlift surrenders to the haircut. There’s this girl. Naturally, she’s chasing after a gay guy and isn’t getting him. (Half the school is chasing him, due to his charms, to which I’m impervious.) I’m chasing her, quietly, carefully. Then comes my chance. We memorialize the moment ever after as “The Haircut,” since it was . . . a haircut. (A rarity: we’re literal.) She was not a stylist, God is my witness and my parents pointed out, but she obliged desire, approaching me with scissors. (It was afternoon, but I’ve endowed the moment, of course, with sinking light, a curtain dropping inchingly on our proceedings, as if what probably took six minutes was a slow fade.) In the midst of cutting—her cutting’s hot to me—she gets too near my crocodile face, and, suddenly, we kiss. There it is. The moment I’ve been waiting for— waiting forever for—happens as I blink little hairs from my eyes. How does it feel? Like a liquid pillow.

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4 JUST SaY NO TO M aKI NG OU T

The No Kiss, the Not Kiss However I glisten, riding the rhythm of a kiss or sinking in, kissing liquidly leads to a wall, taking me even now by surprise. I lean into the mystery of surface. (Just how slightly can I graze you?) Or I pretend to enter your face, as if your surface is holding a depth that calls to me, rebuffs me. A kiss is made of pressure, a lubricated slide, moisture meeting air, faces pulling open. Yet, what is kissing? All these years later, far beyond The Kiss, far beyond its subtleties and startling loneliness, kissing eludes me. Not just kissing. Words I’ve tumbled into due to my kisses—“homo,” “girl,” and “lesbian,” even “woman”— throw me still, requiring I deny them, for all my transiting, all my Houdini-bending inside them. I negate these terms with no small playfulness, without a word that stands for me. (Just how fertile is my negativity?) 89

“I am not a lesbian,” I still say. I’m not even “homo.” But I’ve made lesbians since my childhood, all by having sex with these signs. I rehearse my logic to test it for myself: I am not my girlfriend. We are not the same. Our genitals are different. Mine are not hers, so they’re not the same. We use them differently; their use is not the same. I do things to pleasure her that a man could do—and if she closed her eyes, she might think I were he. If she always closed her eyes, she’d never know if he were me. We’ve had different ways of coming to our “sameness,” a sameness so undone by the ways we’ve come to it. The crucial point is this: we are each strangers to the sign “lesbian,” and the sign estranges us each from ourselves. I was female-assigned at birth, though I was a boy (I could only guess) mistaken for a girl. And though I was, I felt, the ultimate straight boy seeking normally feminine girls, I became a “lesbian” against my will—seeking my desire. As for my girlfriend, she grew up, she felt, “normally” feminine as a rural Mormon raised in rural Utah. In her twenties, after her young fiancé died, after she didn’t become a missionary, after she walked across the US for nuclear disarmament, she met lesbians and wished she could be one, finding them rakish enough—and smart. But, she figured, she wasn’t a lesbian. 90

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Long story short: I didn’t want the sign but was pierced by it; she quite wanted it but didn’t think she’d gain it. We have been penetrated by the sign “lesbian.” We’ve been pleasured by it, as it’s come inside us—I’ve had to try to take it like a man—but we’ve also split from each other at the very point of our contact with this sign. In fact, if there were time, I could rehearse how the sign “lesbian” has functioned historically as an estrangement, breeding estrangements with every use: who is a lesbian? what do they do? can it be sex? is it all dildo (only a sign of the missing penis—I don’t miss it—that does the penetrating) or all kiss (surface relations of succulent sorts)? Penetrating sign, surface to be kissed. Confusion has raged. The good old sexologists from the nineteenth century into the twentieth didn’t know what to do with the “femme” (as we call her now). She was a stranger to lesbian desire. They tended thus to see her as a “normal woman” who was led astray by a “mannish lesbian.” And I must confess, so delightful is the femme that I’ve devised a game for whenever I am low, called “Femmes at the Mall.” You know what I do: hit a shopping center and imagine that every appealing woman whom I deem feminine is a femme lesbian, until proven otherwise. Since I never test them, they are not disproven. And, therefore, due to this generous pracJUST SaY N O TO Ma KING OU T

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tice, the world is virtually—dare I say, virally?—full of lesbians, thanks to me. But thanks have not arrived. Instead, my narrative nests inside a phrase: “Outrage, in perfect calm of mind,” as penned by the poet Don Revell about the poet Ely Shipley.1 I have lived my life in a queer state of calm, outraged to be called what I don’t feel I am. Yet I’ve learned so much by being called a woman, living with this word, walking in this sign. In some measure, I’ve fallen for this category—not to mention fallen for people of this category. Putting it maybe a bit too starkly, in being called a lesbian when I’m not a lesbian, I’ve made peace with the signifier “woman,” though I’m not a woman. I don’t know what a woman is. Others are confused. The dictionary, first of all. Historic women’s colleges as a close second. To put it succinctly: the dictionary used to be mythological when it came to “woman.” It weighed in. Gradually, it yielded to its own befuddlement, each definition apt to unravel. Now it’s tautological, more or less. If it doesn’t grab for genitals as its grounding move— many of us disprove this grounding—then it makes a circle: “woman” links to “female” links to “feminine” links to “woman.” You could run this circuit and be no wiser. 92

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That’s where the women’s colleges come in. Who can be admitted? The historic women’s colleges had to take a stand as transgender students sought admission. (Realize, we’re talking “the seven sisters,” not some far-flung, experimental schools: colleges founded because the Ivy League did not admit undergraduate “coeds” until the 1970s.) Of these women’s schools, Mount Holyoke College has crafted the most expansive policy, listing seven categories that can be admitted, including (to give you a feel for their lingo) “biologically born male, but identifies as other/they or ze and when ‘other/they’ identity includes woman.” Wellesley College draws a tighter circle: to be admitted, one must “consistently live and identify as a woman.” (The trick is “consistently.” Given that jobs require so many “masculine” traits, can professional women “live” this “consistency”? I suspect Wellesley means to admit whoever walks under the sign woman.) How do I identify? What is the name of my lived experiment? Sometimes I say I’m a nontransitioned-trans-person who is transiting, going somewhere sideways to these terms. Queer friends call me a “dandy butch” (a clear oxymoron), and I don’t mind it. I am a “woman” in quotation marks. I’m a queer child, even at this moment—backwardly birthed—since I am the child I JUST SaY N O TO Ma KING OU T

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can only be now. And if we follow Ta-Nehisi Coates’s arresting claim, I’m nonwhite; there are no whites, there are only people who dream of being white; so I’m not-white with tremendous white privilege. Yet a colleague says to me, contradicting Coates. “Oh, girlfriend, you are white.” Come to think about it, have we ever had a two-sex system, “man” and “woman,” in this country’s history? Since our nation’s (violent) founding, we have consciously, often legally, had at least a six-sex system (with even more sexes beyond the thirteen colonies): white woman, white man, black woman, black man, Native woman, Native man. . . . This is more stunning the more one considers it, raising the question, Who is my “opposite,” my “opposite sex”? There are no opposites with six or more sexes. Which takes me back to Coates. He says something interesting: people called white “have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white”; but, as a people, they “were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish— and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again.” Thinking of my colleague’s reply to me, I’m not notwhite. Not yet, that is. 94

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My one hope: the greening of the negative. By which I mean, curling up with negatives is a form of growth. That was my fate: to grow through being a not-yet not-girl. This was more conscious than you might think. Willful negation was antideath, keeping me alive in the troughs of my lows. As a child, the thought of “no”—no to “girl,” no to “marriage,” no to “sex”-as-described—I had sex with “no”?—was fertile in my mind. “No” helped me flourish. You could say I greened. I didn’t know then that our thoughts on “sex”—being a sex, having sex with others—would become so expansive. Even retrospectively. That we’d grow our nos, discover cool nos, as we looked back to before we lived. History can grow us. But how grasp it? Fishing for Sex? Just Kiss “Green” What is sex? History and children want to know. This is where my child self, strewn across my nos, punks my professor self really quite pleasingly, shaping the ways I fish in texts, shaping how the history of “sex” presents creatively. I watch myself reading JUST SaY N O TO Ma KING OU T

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Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (a story, in part, about a boy-becomes-a- woman: shades of my story) and find, of all things, a bible of “no”—except that “no” is green. Literally, green. “Green” is deliciously negative in Woolf, to fertile effects. For a historically word-stranded child, stuck on two words, spinning my wheels in “girl” and “boy,” later being haunted by “natural” and “unnatural,” as the word “lesbian” also loomed, along comes Orlando in my young professorhood with all of one (!) word— lovely, little “green”—to show me how to negate my own reductions. Pretty sweet paradox: “green” keeps saying no to my grasp, so as to grow in meaning. We’re so used to reductions all around us (particularly popular, political reductions), we forget the power of a word for sustained and luscious making out. Woolf widens “sex” (being a sex, having sex with others) through a single word. Her grand “no” to normative sex is simply “green.” So it seems to me. I have noticed “green.” I kissed “green” each time it surfaced, last I read Orlando. Buoyantly using “sex” on my hook, I fished for “green,” hoping “green” would grow over “sex” and freshen it. It so did. The story of Orlando (who changes from boy to woman in the span of four hundred years, over the reigns of both “girl Queens,” Elizabeth and Victoria) is not a “trans” novel; it’s a green novel. 96

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What does “green” mean? (A reminder would be nice; “green” has reduced to recycling in my mind. . . .) “Any of a group of colors . . . whose hue is of the emerald, or . . . of growing grass”; “green growth or foliage”; “fresh, youthful, vigorous”; also, “gullible.”2 The only sex Orlando “has” is with green things: Nature, Poetry, and Love, to name them. Orlando is caught in a web of green; his every gullible, fresh disillusionment births a next expectancy. The novel’s negativity is endlessly green. I’m so hooked because Orlando’s greatest object of desire is words—words, he imagines, that can say what they mean, making, he believes, Nature, Poetry, and Love a natural threesome. Green says they aren’t and pulls them apart throughout Orlando. Green says no to clichés of Love and Poetry; Nature is unnatural in the realm of words (so I learned in childhood). (In the novel’s rendering, “Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. . . . Bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando . . . saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre.”)3 Green attracts Orlando, though he cannot have it, if having means naming the thing for what it is. It’s a fertile “not” that slips its knot to spawn. Green spawns weirdly. As a youthful poet, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Orlando has connotative JUST SaY N O TO Ma KING OU T

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sex with a tree. “He sighed . . . and flung himself— there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word—on the earth at the foot of the oak. . . . He loved . . . to feel the earth’s spine . . . for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to. . . . To the oak tree he tied it . . . [and] it was as if the fertility and amorous activity of a summer’s evening were woven web-like about his body.” (There’s your web of green, right around your body.) One suspects that after this “amorous activity,” Orlando naively begins his poem, entitled “The Oak Tree,” which, in the novel’s book-length joke, he perpetually unwrites, keeping it on his body, nonetheless, in the “bosom” of his clothes, as his one great love. A tree- become- a- poem- bound- to- bodies: that’s Orlando. (I feel better about my own phrases— eccentric, unwieldy—for myself.) He is clearly greening. So is Love. Orlando is a kisser of green in Orlando’s “lesbian” love scene (lesbian retrospectively, if at all, after Orlando becomes a woman; don’t I know). Orlando meets Sasha, and “Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot”; “longed to . . . crush acorns beneath his feet; to toss his arms with the beech trees and the oaks.” And “[this] person, whatever name or sex,” “dressed entirely in . . . velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur”; “she was like a fox, or an olive tree, . . . like the 98

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sun on a green hill which is yet clouded”; “so the green flame seems hidden in the emerald.” I recall how this ends: with Orlando green with jealousy as he sees Sasha in someone else’s arms. This disastrous end spawns . . . Greene. The poet Nick Greene comes to live with him. Orlando receives Greene’s words inside him—how could he not, since he’s reading Greene?— thus the novel spoofs our consent to green breedings (here, word-breedings) we cannot control. Orlando, indeed, is screwed by Greene. Greene fails to match the glory of “green” (knows nothing of Nature or green things); furthermore, he roasts Orlando in a poem. It’s as if “green,” via Greene’s poem, is punningly taking revenge on Orlando for lovingly trying to put “green” into words. Orlando is still youthful and vigorous (making him “green in the Queen’s mind”), though he’s been gullible (namely, green) when embracing Mr. Greene. Green goes gaga in the reign of Victoria, after Orlando becomes a not-man. The novel tells us that Victorian Britain, “smothered in greenery, . . . was nothing but a vast feather bed; and the undistinguished fecundity of the garden . . . was copied there.” Trying to say no to pregnancy and marriage, Orlando declares, “‘I am nature’s bride,’ . . . giving herself in rapture to the cold embraces of the grass.” Even so, she gets engaged. But expansively resistant—this is my life story in a nutshell—Orlando and her lover JUST SaY N O TO Ma KING OU T

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“invent between them” “a cypher-language,” “so that a whole spiritual state of the utmost complexity might be conveyed in a word or two.” (Namely, green?) That says it all, believe it or not. What’s in a Word (Perhaps a Dildo) Let me put my crazy right on the table. You know how in reading, all of a sudden, something somehow crystallizes? Some idea is born. Something catches hold. Something moves inside you that wasn’t there before. Something keeps spreading, expansively and purposefully. Fishing in Orlando, I’ve caught a dildo, of all the wild things. (There’s a green dildo in Woolf ’s Orlando? I believe so. “Green” is like a dildo that enters my mind, rushing irony, humor, and insight to a climax, conveying, in a word, “a spiritual state of the utmost complexity.”) Perhaps the word “dildo” has arrested you. Perhaps it hits you differently than my other words. Maybe you like it. Maybe it repels you. Or just jolts you. It is now in you. Before you accuse me of breaching consent, remember that you probably distinguish, as do I, penetration with an organ or rubberized object from the 100

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penetration that happens via words. Each has contested zones of consent, each can feel invasive, each can disturb to astonishing degrees, each can bring inordinate pleasure—but these are parallel sexual tracks. Reading-as-kissing-as-sex is a different, distinctive kind of sex. “Green” has affected my view of reading. Putting reading as queerly as I can, I try this on: in the act of reading, we are being penetrated by an author’s sequencing of sensuous dildos we call words, which we kiss, which then open us up to viral birth—a birth that needs our bodies and what our brains supply. The word is a dildo. A dildo we kiss. Kissing leads to penetration. Penetration causes birth. Birth from a dildo. So, we agree? Words aren’t phallicized pieces of rubber. Unlike rubber or silicone objects, words do birth. (Witness the spreading effects of “green.”) And, so crucially, not to forget: the seeding of reading is not sex-specific. It skirts genitals. Furthermore, the making out of words isn’t homo, hetero, trans, or cis. You could even call it asexual sex, if you desire. (No one lays a hand on you.) Such cool sex. Here is another plea for the classroom. I think fancifully: let’s with our students fashion word-dildos JUST SaY N O TO MaKING OUT

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from which to unpack any number of webbed funkified states, making the nuance, the beauty, the extravagance of sexual connotations—and the word “no”—something we’ll savor and have on hand. For starters, of course, my green dildo. Reading as Barebacking? No to Protection, Yes to Estrangement I’m still fishing for a way to grasp reading, the surprise of it all. I reach for something beyond my ken— something unfamiliar, something originally new to me—no matter how central it’s been to others. No matter how it’s changing now or not. To my own surprise, I reach for barebacking. Yet the very reason is unmistakable. I’ve been asked to speak on “What Is Sex?” at a symposium run by Tim Dean. Dean is Mr. Barebacker (I say kiddingly) in the world of scholars, so of course the practice is on my mind. I know barebacking from my reading (that seems fitting), and I’m not alone. Nine years ago, a treatise exploring barebacking practices hit academia with notable force. Readers professed themselves excited—and incited. And the book was lauded as bravery on the page, whether 102

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one views the phenomenon of barebacking as a thing to celebrate or condemn. Titillation is in the eye of the beholder, but the back cover of Tim Dean’s book Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (2009) describes his study as “a riveting investigation into . . . gay men deliberately abandoning condoms and embracing erotic risk,” a risk that may include contracting, or even seeking to contract, HIV.4 You shall be riveted, it is suggested. The idea of opening oneself to HIV, maybe seeking HIV, is, on its surface, truly unfamiliar to many readers (though not all). More unfamiliar is my train of thought. What I suggested at Tim’s symposium. That readers, simply by virtue of reading, are barebackers of an oddly broad sort. Here’s how broad. You might as well call anyone’s reading “lesbian barebacking.” Only by dint of what sticks to a word. The sign “lesbian,” rightly or wrongly, whatever lesbian lovers do, has functioned to highlight a sexual duo: penetrating sign (the dildo as object that penetrates and signifies the act of penetration) and surface to be kissed (lips and skin and genital skin). Penetrating sign. Surface to be kissed. These are the key features of reading. Reading’s not lesbian. It’s just strange. JUST SaY N O TO MaKING OUT

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Strange like this: a person quietly reading in the corner is like a barebacker chasing the virus. In fact, since reading has historically preceded contemporary barebacking, I would say barebacking more resembles reading. Gay male barebacking (à la Tim Dean) is like dildoing is like kissing is like reading: it’s a fetishizing of a sign (in Dean’s case, “HIV”) and a raw surface (skin, not condom) we invite inside us, where this unblocked entity may birth. Who’s riveted now? If barebackers like sex “raw,” as they say, with no condom on, I suggest that two forms of fetish are at play. The first is simply the feel of a surface (skin to skin). The second is more provocative: a fetish for a sign: the idea of HIV. The fascinating aspect of this second fetish—HIV—is how it may serve as a mental penetrator of all the people present at a scene of penetration or ingestion. If at such a scene a sero-conversion to HIV-positive is possible for someone, whether or not anyone is seeking it, it’s likely, though not certain, that HIV is a fetishized sign penetrating penetrator/penetrated/ voyeur/ and ingestor. The sign has gotten inside any body that is invoking it via speech or thought (consciously, unconsciously), whether or not the virus is actually getting in a body being opened up. In fact, though prophylactic pills now exist—Truvada for “pre-exposure 104

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prophylaxis”—some men are choosing not to take them or simply can’t afford them. Barebacking, therefore, as physical-and-mental engagement with HIV continues. Caressed by the mind, HIV can’t be felt as anything other than a sign. Consent, nonetheless, happens at the surface—skin without latex—where one consents to begin a penetration or ingestion, where the sign HIV (and perhaps the virus) may be permitted to journey in the body in both physical and mental ways: birthing something in you, letting something die, becoming a decaying of which you may not know the extent. Sex with ideas. As a commentator puts it, barebacking norms “already appear to be producing alterations  .  .  . in the larger sexual economy, the gay mainstream, at the level of sexual fantasy and fact.”5 Dean himself proffers, “the figure of the barebacker . . . offers an image and an identity with which any gay man may flirt.” (Also, any reader.) One idea swells for Dean. “Unfamiliarity”: its beauty, its broadenings. Sexual cruising, specifically, for Dean, “allegorizes” an “ethic of openness to alterity,” to the stranger. Cruising, says Dean, involves “how one treats the other and, more specifically, how one treats his or her own otherness,” even the unconscious. Not for nothing does Dean assert, “Without going so far as to advocate for unprotected sex, I want to JUST SaY N O TO MaKING OUT

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suggest that the [barebacking] subculture’s embrace of risk may help illuminate the pleasures and ethics of encountering the unfamiliar.” There are “lesbian” echoes here. Sounding a bit like Marilyn Frye in her famous essay “Lesbian ‘Sex,’”6 where she argues that lesbian sex cannot be conceptualized according to standard notions of orgasmic climax or genital intercourse, Dean underscores that “the ethics of cruising” is not “reducible to genital satisfaction.” Indeed, as a reviewer of Dean’s book puts it, “the pleasure[s] barebacking subculture seeks . . . are far more varied and [far more] diffuse than sex as sex is conventionally defined.”7 Hence, there are no adequate measuring devices for the frequency of barebacking sex—a point Frye makes for “lesbian ‘sex’.” And the sex that’s “had,” Dean emphasizes, is distanced from heteronormative and gay understandings. Ditto dyke sex. Will the real estrangement please stand up? That’s so easy. That would be reading. Talk about seeking a sensuous surface; talk about alterity. . . . A word is not itself. It cannot be one. It so spreads. Yes, on the page it looks singular and nicely contained: a grouping of letters accepted as a word. (We can see its form.) But to be grasped by a reader who reads it, it must quickly spawn and become not-itself. 106

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Every word has to become a different word or group of different words that the reader uses to define the word they’ve read. In fact, the word births in us, even greens in us, with us and through us, as we take it in and, prompted by the word, supply definitions and meanings for it. In the mode of barebacking, courtesy of us, it’s allowed to breed an intimate estrangement of itself in the form of denotation (a socially-agreed-upon definition, contained in words that are not the word), connotations (held in words that are not the denotation), cultural myths that stick to the word (as they’ve stuck to “lesbian” and “HIV”), along with feelings and memories the reader may attach to the word (I attached Beloved and a dream to “feldspar”). That’s a bunch of words-that-are-not-the-word, which we supply when our eyes touch a word, take in a word, one solitary word, as we read it on a page. We supply these words (from prior penetrations!) from our brains and bodies, but it, the word-dildo, “stimulates” them. We are dildoed by the word, in the sense that the word, as an object outside us, of sensuous form, must come inside us to be a word to us and to stimulate meanings (made of words-not-the-word). And though we consent to be dildoed by an author’s sequencing of words—all laid out like a line of dildos— and though we’re active bottoms as we take them in (even through a finger for someone reading Braille), JUST SaY N O TO MaKING OUT

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we are consenting to what we can’t control, to a kind of transport we cannot predict. Like one being barebacked, we consent to surface, unprotected from this surface that starts at our surface, never knowing how a surface coming in us will breed—or die or decay. Indeed, the words bred by an author’s word-dildo, never mind the copy of the word that is the dildo, may over time die in my body or decay. Or displace other words, causing their slow erosion or death. Even words I desperately seek to retain may not stay put—may become dormant in ways I can’t perceive (a specialty of HIV, we know). The word, like a dildo, keeps its form. You could say it’s mass-produced. It can be used over and over and does not belong either to the penetrator or the penetree. Moreover, it’s detachable from the body wielding it. It is not its author’s flesh, though it touches ours. Can we say we’re kissing the author when we’re reading her? Do we bugger authors? No less a famous writer than the French philosopher and theorist Gilles Deleuze has written of “see[ing] the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) an immaculate conception.”8 (Asexual sex?) “I would imagine myself,” writes Deleuze, “as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his offspring, yet monstrous.” Deleuze is right, largely in reverse. The author’s words, which we take inside 108

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us, become a monstrous offspring: a viral growth of meanings, which might lead to a beautiful transport, we should realize. Something is birthed. Only if we write it down, however, and get the author to read our words (as a critic might) do we penetrate the author. Generally, we don’t. (Sorry, Deleuze.) Our sole contact with the author’s body—and with their intent—lies in the words laid down on the page, in their certain sequence. No small thing. This is what we kiss: dildos left by authors who were living and breathing when they left them—and their selection and arrangement reign supreme—but who may be dead and very likely absent by the time we’re kissing their words and getting pierced by them. However impersonal, these contacts are intimate and come from authors to us as a surface that will get inside us. The author wonderfully contaminates established words through us. Authors, true enough, can’t control effects, never precisely and sometimes not at all, but their dildos profoundly affect what meanings get aroused and bred in us. Aroused denotations: are these fairly rational since culturally shared? Is the denotation a significant place for meanings-held-in-common with authors, other readers? Are denotations, and also connotations, what make us feel we can argue our points? Sure, we can argue, but seduction and counterpenetration are perhaps more apt descriptions for the interpretive readings we create. These are actions JUST SaY N O TO MaKING OUT

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we perform on fellow readers— precisely, our readers—or consenting listeners. Be a seducer, I say to myself. Then, I realize: seducing can’t be seen in the realm of reading. Words’ gettingin-us and breeding-once-inside-us are what we cannot see. What a remarkable invisibility the breeding of words by the word-dildo turns out to be. Barebacking porn frets about and plans around such invisibilities. How can viewers of porn observe a sero-conversion (from HIV-negative to HIV- positive) taking place? They can’t. No one can. So Tim Dean has a chapter, “Representing Raw Sex,” that discusses various imperfect methods for implying the effects that a camera cannot show (involving various maneuvers with ejaculate—and subtitles, funnily enough). A camera cannot capture even readers’ “kissing” (though it can show them looking at a page). Nor can it catch the dildo-action of a word getting into a reader’s body. We can’t witness the scene of penetration, never mind the stimulations of meanings, concepts, and ideas inside us. These are mystic materialities. We know they are there, know they are material, but what they are exactly, or how they unfold, we cannot perceive. The only thing we see is what we have in common: a surface we can kiss, all of us can kiss. A word which is not one. 110

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Then there is tumescence. A word-which-is-manywords—has to be many to be a word to us—may become tumescent as we use it over time. Readers encounter words they’ve heard, spoken, and read many times over, making for accretions around certain terms. “Swollen with significance” is a pleasing idiom. Swollenness also results when experiences intriguingly attach to a word and swell it. We need not be depressed, then, as we often understandably are, to hear our students or the general culture keep talking in the same old terms. We need to believe precisely in the materiality of words. We need to believe in altering words by the sensations we pack around them, in our classrooms, our interactions, our reading-in-common, and in the texture and rhythm of our use. Can the word “marriage” and its massive freight be unexpectedly affected—changed—by contact with those saying “no” to it? “Marriage” Kiss Say no to marriage? I have. I do. With my lover of twenty-eight years—I still “stare; tremble; turn hot”—I’ve volunteered to refuse the JUST SaY N O TO MaKING OUT

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right to marry. Someone has to do it. Someone has to say, “Marriage shall not get the credit for our love.” Soon as I say it, I remember I’ve been married. More precisely, I have wed. I see myself wearing a military uniform—Marine dress blues—before I recall that my buddy, Ken, who was probably six, owned that outfit and wore it on that day. The day every boy in our gang wed a girl. As did I, shocked to be permitted, at the age of nine, to wear my brother’s blazer (now I recall I drooped in plaid) as I married Jenn from across the street. That was my only public presentation to the world of parents—blissful, inexplicable as it was—of my “no” to marriage, since it could never happen for me, and at nine I knew it. Negation of marriage on my wedding day. As with the promise of a “Hollywood kiss,” which did not materialize for me at age six, there was no marriage kiss on this day. Don’t even think about kissing the bride. If only I could have nullified the photograph: the group of us shot against a white picket fence meant to hide a bomb shelter in my neighbor’s yard (that says it all). That shot menaced me throughout my teens, since it was produced intermittently by friends, “just for fun.” 112

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Little did I know that one day I’d be giving a speech at something called a Gayla during Pride Week to an audience excited that Utah had been granted marriage equality for about two weeks in 2013, albeit before it was halted by the courts. (Hard to say what my child self would have found most preposterous in this picture: I will feel proud; gays will get married; I’ll live in Utah?) My assigned topic was “beyond marriage,” so I gave a talk paradoxically titled “How I Toast Marriage While Being Against It.” After my toast (“To our period of marriage equality—and the remarkable people who were part of it”), I then said: Don’t listen to me. Whatever you do, don’t attend to me. I may provoke you. I’ll do it sweetly, gently, warmly—I love so many of you. But you’re about to witness one of the most contradictory talks embracing marriage. Let me be straight with you. Weddings are camp, no matter how sincerely enacted. Excessive clothes, unnatural settings, stupendous cakes, stilted photos, or the waiting in line at City Hall, all for the state to say you can love the person you’ve been loving— that you can wed yourself to their things. You marry their house, their mountain bike, their benefits, more than you marry an actual person, and that’s a little strange. (The officiant should blare, “You may now kiss the . . . stuff.”) JUST SaY N O TO MaKING OUT

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Weddings fit the definition of camp—they’re like drag queens—they are “artifice”; “love of the unnatural”; “excruciation”; “relish for exaggeration”; “a good taste of bad taste.”9 And, I recall, camp is generosity. Camp embraces what it knows is out-of-date, tacky, embarrassing: namely, marriage. We queer folk are generous to marriage. How delightfully démodé of us, how supremely retro we are being. We’re so clever that some of us are marrying and some of us are not. That’s so shrewd. We queer people spent many centuries crafting lifestyles the world so greenly envied. A huge part of homophobic thinking has resented us for the lives we’ve led, viewing queer life as a form of hedonism—I take this as a compliment—because it has seemed like seductive cheating to live our lives (marriage-free, child-free, soaked in pleasure: I editorialize). Indeed, queer folk have had the good sense to decouple sex from nesting: have your sexing outside your nesting; nesting kills sexing! or at least it can. We have had the sense to make an art form of kissing. And we’ve had the sense not to fetishize longevity. Give me two hot years of relating over thirty years of worn-out loving. Divorce, for this reason, can be heroic. Feminists have known this for a long time. Before “gay mar114

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riage,” queers also thematized the bravery of leaving. We’ve had a way of reminding the world that “it takes guts” to extract oneself from marriage—and it takes privilege, good old money; women, especially, have had to stay put if they would keep their standard of living or their children. Moreover, judgments against the unmarried strongly define the bad old remains of “The Moynihan Report on the Negro Family” from 1965, claiming that the “pathology” of African American families finds root in “female-headed homes,” showing how little “wedlock” has been thought (until just recently) outside white parameters of gender. So we’ve been telling a few white lies (“white” lies are light lies in the public lexicon, which tells you everything) when it comes to marriage equality. Even gays say, “we won’t change marriage” by letting gays marry. News flash: marriage has always been changing. Is marriage now what it was in the US in the 1950s when my parents married? Thankfully, no. (See Mad Men.) Is marriage here, in the US, what it is in many other parts of the world? Marriage never was, never is, one thing. Tracing the path toward “marriage equality” as we now envision it, we would need at minimum to scout Jane Austen, in whose novels people marry houses, though they have to think they mate for love. We’d have to mark the 1890s invention of “the homosexual,” along with the development (in 1839) of vulcanized rubJUST SaY N O TO MaKING OUT

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ber (blessed rubber), never mind the changes of the twentieth century: two world wars (soldiers remaking the sex department), the birth of birth control, Stonewall drag queens, people “transitioning,” and a little something—don’t get me started on more white lies—called “mixed-race” marriages. And, let’s remember, conservative straight folks put gay people at the heart of straight marriage, thus changing marriage. “One man, one woman” effectively means “no gay marriage.” Every time it’s said, “gays” are the ghost that is conjured by the phrase, leading us to hear, leading all to hear: “one man, one woman, no gays.” We’re a threesome, in a legal sense. Will we change “marriage”— the life of this sign in our bodies and lives— we queer lovers? What is beyond marriage equality? Will we insert our “beyond” inside it? (“Come here, marriage. . . . Come to Daddy. . . .”) Of course we’ll change marriage. If we’re lucky. With the queers I so respect, so adore, so celebrate for their new marriages—thank you for marrying, someone had to do it, someone had to grasp the “equality” we’re asking for—marriage overall has the chance to become more sex variant, more trans-rich, more divorce-friendly, and, dare I say, more replete with kissing (just my obsession?). On the front of kissing. . . . I’m throwing down the gauntlet of challenge to lovers. Unnest yourselves from inside your nests, while you build your nests. 116

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Keep desire alive! (A Jesse Jackson voice would enhance this cry.) Celebrate your girlfriend when she most annoys you. It proves she isn’t you. And that’s a good thing. She’s a sexy stranger you can have sex with. Whatever you do, then, don’t “share your day”—not with each other. Nothing is more deadening. Nothing’s less creative. Nothing’s more routine. She spews on you, while you’re not listening; you spew on her, while she’s not listening. Don’t share your day. Just make out at the point of contact. Cruise her, don’t abuse her with your day. But where are we headed on the matter of equality? That’s the hard question. Marriage, we know, is not a good way to get crucial benefits delivered to people; to make lives secure; to break up dyads; to end the grip of racism; to redistribute wealth (unless you divorce). I really used to hope, while we didn’t have our rights, that collective queers (whoever we are) would become activists for antipoverty, antiracism, anticlassism, while without our rights. Wouldn’t we be modeling something even grander than coalitionmaking? Wouldn’t we be modeling trans-categoricalpolitical-focus, or at least binocular focus, trinocular focus, showing our focus on issues not solely tied to our rights, which would have the benefit of honoring queers who have felt excluded in queer life (poor queer folk, queers with disabilities, many queers of JUST SaY N O TO MaKING OUT

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color)? Not to be ignored: I can afford to fight effects of marriage rights. This is the problem. For many, it’s too pricey to refuse the state of marriage. We have earned the right to be cleverly contradictory. Say yes to marriage; say no, too. “Homosexuality,” as it’s been conceptualized, doesn’t exist—but I’m going to Pride in Salt Lake City. Let’s have a red-state political strategy but show the blue states that it’s radical to teach and learn in red states. The queerest thing about me? I love Utah. So ends this speech. By which I would restore “a whole spiritual state of the utmost complexity,” as Orlando puts it, to the word “marriage.” I kiss it, expectant of its turning green. I am devoted to impurifying thoughts. Getting Tumescent: Heated Wives Do “Purity” Looked like squirrels had gotten to my hair, gnawing it ragged along its edges. Or like the haircut of a monk had gone wrong. That was the handiwork of my kissing-girl. During our fateful kiss, she had blithely sheared my head, almost to the nubbins. I didn’t think it mattered. There were bigger problems. 118

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I’d become impure. I was at sea on our liquid pillow, high and condemned. That was most important. Of course, pre-kiss, I tried to craft an alibi for what I hoped was coming—and to convince myself of my purity. Marriage, of all the surprising things, was the spar I clung to. I said to myself, If you feel you’ve married her in your heart, kissing would be pure. You have never dated her, you have never touched her, but you must marry her at the start. This was pretzel logic: a marriage that was not, and could never be (in 1982), was the yardstick for whether I could justify this kissing. Reader, I “married” her that very night. The morning after, I awoke to queasiness and nuptial guilt. Also to a phone call, telling me that my adoring grandfather had just died. I would be preaching the funeral sermon. With hacked hair and borrowed dress, with my beloved “Poppa” just behind me turning from laid-out body into sign (a terrifying process no one can see), I thought my kiss was radiating somewhere from my core, screaming my trespass. Where was a movie when I truly needed one? I had just “married”—married a girl—but never yet seen women kiss each other. Today I do wonder what I would have felt at my own religious crossroads had I been able to see Deepa Mehta’s film Fire (1996), with all its nonequivalence to my situation, before I “wed” my girl. JUST SaY N O TO MaKING OUT

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The women in Fire who bed each other (Radha and Sita) face a stacked deck. They are each married and fitted into a South Asian context—cultural and religious— that demands their “purity,” sexual and otherwise. I can’t help but notice that Fire creates conditions that would make any women start to want each other. One arranged marriage crumbles under the husband’s devotion to his guru, making the husband a married celibate. The other marriage turns around the husband’s mistress, whom he won’t forsake. The wives, all the while, are expected to present themselves purely to their husbands, men who don’t touch them with desire. The women’s “purity” is the mark of cruelty. The meaning of purity, in this manner, swells and shifts. Purity is brutality, and the wives’ “perversion,” as it unfolds, signals truer purity. I’m all in. As I think about it, Fire is a quietly hot prison flick: two fine wives are jailed in wedlock, partaking in homo(purity)sexuality with each other: a homosexuality I did not foresee in 1982. This is Fire’s forcefulness. Inserting new meanings into its viewers, doing so from two different cultural standpoints. Its cunning framework holds the rarity of South Asian characters stepping into the seeming meanings of the word “lesbian,” while EuroAmerican viewers themselves receive the sorts of signifiers they’re not used to. The wives’ sexuality, 120

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what I call homo(purity)sexuality, does not reduce to “lesbian,” “straight,” or “femme.” The viewer has sex with this idea? I did. In fact, if director Deepa Mehta would make the mutual sexual adoration of these women plausible, especially to other than “Western eyes,” she must find a blade with which to open purity to its own brutalities. Also make beautiful what would seem perverse. Hence, her film is a pretty prison flick, burnishing the surface of nearly every image involving the women. Indeed, the camera’s gaze amps the women’s beauty, objectifying them—oddly to striking feminist effect. Fire, that is, makes us wonder what two women, immured in their “prison,” could do for sex but have it together. Add to this mix a mother-in-law that both women wait on (since she is bed bound) and the family servant who masturbates to videos in full sight of the aging mother, before the servant is discovered by the women; after which discovery, he exposes them. Unthinkability has often been the mode of Asian women’s queerness, as we learn in Gayatri Gopinath’s book Impossible Desires. And, to be sure, when Fire hit theaters in Indian cities, after a two-year run at festivals held in India, Europe, and North America, feelings exploded over what the public (thought it) was seeing. Violent activists from the Shiv Sena, a JUST SaY N O TO MaKING OUT

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militant wing of the Hindu Right, assaulted both cinemas and moviegoers, claiming that the scene of the women having sex “is a direct attack on our Hindu culture and civilization” by the West. What provoked these viewers, one can well guess, was the film’s recruiting of Hindu mythology—its treasured signifiers—for its depictions of its protagonists, Radha and Sita. Gopinath gives context: “In Hindu mythology, Radha is the consort of the god Krishna, who is famous for his womanizing; together Radha and Krishna symbolize an idealized, transcendent heterosexual union”; “Sita, the heroine of the Hindu epic Ramayana, proves her chastity to her husband, Ram, by immersing herself in fire, and thus represents the ideal of wifely devotion and virtue.”10 Fire bends these myths (somewhere Brontë is definitely smiling) as Radha and Sita depart these stories and elope with each other, after Fire’s Radha (not the myth’s Sita) emerges unscathed from a kitchen fire, proving the purity of her desire. Crucially, as well, the meanings that offend the Hindu Right also step outside Euro-American “lesbian” histories. Fire offers figures for these warring layers. The masturbating servant is a brilliant touch. (Of course I would think so, as a former scholar of racy Victorians for whom masturbation was a frequent practice and all-consuming fear.) In the British Victorian novel, the servant is crucial for the maintenance of 122

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the family’s self-protection—their safekeeping from any penetration by impropriety— since the family servant controls the entrance and exits of visitors. That Fire’s servant is a fervent masturbator indicates that cultures, like families and signs, are porous to “impurities” and can’t avoid contact (self-stimulations) with their “Western” outsides. Moreover, the viewer observes the aging mother—obvious symbol of “Mother India,” who is confined to her bed and mute—having to watch the masturbating servant. As she rings her bell in heightened protest, we see signs tumesce. Signs become impure. A simple ring that once meant “I am hungry,” “I need water,” “please attend my needs” now can mean unheard-of things like “a man is masturbating in my room” or “two devoted wives are dancing with each other and acting in love.” One last image bespeaks tumescence: the celibate husband, head in hands, playing and replaying as if it were a film the image of the women body-kissing (the two of them in bed) that he now carries as a sign inside him. We are likewise pulverized. Now we have the Hindu-celibate-husband-replaying-the-scene inside ourselves. “Purity” gets a sexier life. I get something, too. Kissing veering off to places I would follow, since these women are breaking my JUST SaY N O TO MaKING OUT

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mold of Western femmes. (My first kiss coiled inside a haircut. Their first kiss is followed by one wife asking the other, “Oil my hair?”; oil my hair, my body answers, ready for this unfamiliar, hot procedure.) These are breadcrumbs in the world of kissing. I devour and trail them. Kissing can be shown but not much else. All “else” sits in what the camera doesn’t show. That’s where I’ve been living—in the vast unshown. How to make it out, facing someone else?

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Beautiful Defacement Have you longed to kiss your teacher? Would it be purely about the act of kissing even if you did? (My cogitations on the face aren’t so pretty; surely not so pure.) Miss Blott, Miss Harker, Mr. Hill, and a man named “The Falcon” were my targets, only in my mind. It happens that these teachers, from second grade through divinity school, were the most scholastically demanding people swimming in my waters, though I can’t recall what words they put inside me or what of them persists. Favorite topics from that time: deer, Greek mythology, the science of sound, and The Inferno. Did these passions implausibly transfer to my fascination with labor relations in Victorian novels, Black Panther essays, and the liquid high of fleeting lyrics? Can teachers’ faces prepare for such alchemical transformations? 125

With her deliciously pockmarked cheeks (from a bout of acne) and substantial weight (“she’s a bigboned woman!” kd lang sings), stout Miss Blott was a charming face to me, at age eight. Ditto Miss Harker: gently scarred face and plumpish form. I didn’t know what acne was, but it left magic in its striking wake, as if a lunar landscape with moony appeal were stamped upon skin. (Fat was attractive to me from the start.) They were distinctive, these two faces, with all kinds of texture and terrain to contemplate. What an assemblage: acne + fat + scholarly demand = face to kiss. Perhaps that’s why two other teachers— both of them men, both of them gay (?)—became my kissing targets. Since this thing with the teacher’s face was not about genitals or sexuality in the usual sense, I could extend my desire to men. Mr. Hill was big-boned with lighter acne traces; also so fey that he symbolized “homosexual” for me, though he was married and had a new baby. He was unfazed that a black boy (lovely, brazen femme?) was wearing lipstick, scarves, and culottes to our class. (I feigned horror at the sight of Carl, while I was magnetically attracted to their posture—such a gorgeous prancer—and to their campy dismissal of our bullshit. Forget my teachers, I should kiss Carl.)1 I was enamored of Mr. Hill’s unconcern, which went nicely with his insanely high expectations for our budding “taste.” (Taste: never heard that term linked to intellect until 126

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Mr. Hill came into my life. So fey.) Nonetheless, Mr. Hill ran afoul of me for a funny reason. Just having learned how babies are made (girl scouts briefed me), I now viewed him as uniquely criminal. (“You did that—to your wife!” “You put . . .” Disgusting, unforgivable. You speak of taste? You’re dead to me.) The Falcon? Simply, my finest teacher—made me love Dante in graduate school, along with “The Wasteland,” whose grim modernist experiments with language were awash in Falcon glow—and made me think, for about a month (two years before The Kiss), that I could indeed marry a man (I’ll marry him) instead of being celibate (my two options from what I could see). That he was a person independent of my wishes—was, in truth, gay—that’s okay, we can be gay as a straight couple—didn’t compute. He was the face of exquisite combinations and cascades of words, many from his mouth, about the texts before us. How would I ever have such a mien? This is where I find myself as a professor. Some old dilemma emerging from the mist of queer-child days sticks in the mix: the quandary of looking up to other people when I’ve had trouble facing myself. How do I look my teacher in the face? Oh, I’m the teacher. (I forget I’m not the child.) Something specific has tripped this wire. Having been asked to speak about graduate students and MaKING O UT T He faCe

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professors at my university (snoozer topic?)—how we should view this fraught apprenticeship (younger to older, less to more experienced)—makes me remember Blott and company and think . . . defacement. The way the sun defaces us when we face it. When we face its comeliness. Fragments of reading drive my thinking: A woman stares at the noonday sun, at the attractive face of the sun, which, as she stares at it, burns both eyes. A man, we are told, “stare[s] at the sun” and “receives from its rays the imperative order to tear off his finger,” which he performs without hesitation, seizing his finger between his teeth. I am reading Georges Bataille, a theorist from the 1930s and author of the essay “Rotten Sun.”2 In this odd nugget, Bataille reminds us that the sun not looked at is our most poetic ideal: our sense of elevation and life-giving beauty; whereas the sun scrutinized, looked at directly smack in its face, is fully dangerous. It will burn the eyeballs out of your head. My queer childhood—my ungettable cooked- up kisses—schooled me on ideals. (My ideals were always being doused with little horrors. Candy isn’t food; many of my football heroes are Republicans.) There are brutalities to any ideal: they’re not real and lead to loss. Professors and students, among other 128

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pairings, are the face of such defacing ideals. More than we admit, ideals strike the heart of our academic strangeness. Our ambivalent wish to be professional. (I have read this point in Marjorie Garber’s Academic Instincts—and I bend it.)3 I find myself saying what it’s not pretty to think or say, what no dean would have me say (though I am a dean): we are each other’s rotten sun. We professors and (graduate) students are each other’s scrutinized ideals, which makes us horrifying to each other precisely at the point of our appeal to each other. It’s as if professors say, You are so appealing because you are becoming. Your very coming-to-be, professionally and intellectually, is appealing, which is alarming. You horrify us: you are becoming us. In fact, to say that you’re becoming us, which, at times, is becoming to us, is to say truthfully that you deface us. You’re in our face, you take our face, and, let’s be frank, because you are learning, you spoil our face (you spoil the act of professionalization), which, in some ways, we want you to do. You are so becoming (!). This is precisely where we turn to face you, where we turn our defacement toward you, and I believe you see it: we are your defaced ideal. We are a sign of “the life of the mind”; a life of critique that we only wish MaKING O UT T He faCe

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we could lead, which we rarely do lead, given the insane demands of our jobs. We are rotten sun. If you study us, we will likely burn you, animating you with mad demands. Let’s just say, in language only a little prettier, we’re onto one another, in ways that guarantee that we’ll miss each other. This is the site of our mutual enchantment, where we together, defacing each other, kiss some fictions (image and word). What kind of fiction is the face itself? Why ever kiss it? What’s in a Face? The currents of my childhood still wash around me. My child-racism, my child-ableism, their sad remains. Nothing here is bloodless. And Sidney Poitier, as you might imagine, wasn’t my only telling man-crush. As a not-girl, I had a string of beautiful “suns”— manly, poetic, singeing ideals—most of them athletes. Picture in your mind: white-tennis-kid (tennis being a sport allowed to me) grooving to the face of Walt “Clyde” Frazier (“Clyde So Fly”) of the New York Knicks. (Wished to have his sideburns. Tried to cop his smile, along with his swish; attempted playing tennis in the manner he dribbled, which made no sense.) Never did I ask myself the story of his face. 130

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On this point, I open to the words of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—D&G, I’ll call them—on faciality.4 I seek sex with their ideas. D&G tell us that two “systems” come to a head, if you will, at the face. Academics know them as “signification” and “subjectivity.” D&G name them “the white wall,” “the black hole.” Think about it this way: imagine a whiteboard worn on our heads, with signifying elements appearing on it (at minimum, facial “traits” and “expressions”) that we, and others, read as signs. The face is a surface, and signs are on this surface we face and read. The black hole, by contrast, is the invisible, partially perceptible field of subjectivity. (The scientific use of the term “black hole” conveys “a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape.”)5 Our consciousness dwells with gravitational power, out of sight, out of reach, even from ourselves. I think of my child-self gazing in the mirror. There’s my girl-face, white-girl face, with its many signifiers, staring back at me. I’m intent on the girl- signs— whatever those look like—and don’t attend to the signs of my race. I see (some) signs. But I feel my hole. I am conscious as a child that I’m stuck with a face, subjected to a face, this girl-redundancy, that MaKING O UT T He faCe

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runs counter to a face I feel but can’t quite find, can’t quite see. Somewhere on or around that wall is the hole I feel. What could make anyone else perceive it, never mind hold it, hold my hole? I’m fond of this idea. It’s a way to describe how, in looking at my face, you couldn’t make me out, unless you could perceive the hole on my wall. Nonetheless, D&G profoundly state that “faces are not basically individual; they are definite zones of frequency or probability.” Isn’t that why my face seems a girl-face, much to my chagrin? It’s a zone of girl-frequency or girl-probability to those who are seeing it. What does it mean, then, to face a face? What of a face gets inside us when see it? We kiss faces, but do they enter us as tongues and genitals and signifiers do? Since in my childhood I felt facialized in unhappy ways, I embrace D&G when they oddly prophesy, “the face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled.” For me, this “destruction” involves more scissoring than they foresee. For me, it involves letting the hole (the hole where my consciousness sits unseen) scissor the white wall of signification—maybe erode it. D&G say that “certain assemblages of power require the production of a face,” as if we’re commanded, 132

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“Produce your face!” I and others felt this as wounding in our childhood. It wounds still. Bottom line for D&G: “find your black holes and white walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight.” Or, as I’ve been thinking, We must not trust our eyes. We must query sight; head instead to narrative. We must take the bait to find the story of the face. Yes, but how? Black’s Face, Blue Kiss Black holes are blue in the new film Moonlight. Here is blue kissing. A face that is draped in purple-blue tones graces the posters announcing the film. It’s a face made of boys—boys who are the same boy, though at different ages. Here, and in the film, a face that is wildly resistant to expression is a constant beckoning, a film-length broadening of a hole- that-acts-as-bait. The “black hole” of consciousness and sexual memory (what’s the child thinking? what’s he been desiring?) beguiles you at his face that in blue of sorrow, ocean-blue of MaKING O UT T He faCe

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buoyancy, somehow afloat in the ether of loneliness, won’t give viewers immediate emotions. Or reductions. Two signs bounce off the wall of this face. The signifiers “black” and “gay” relentlessly flash upon it. But the holes of subjectivity become an equal drama. The holes feel like waves overtaking the words “black” and “gay”—much like waves wash words in sand— licking them, revealing them, covering over them, eroding their crispness. Even more arresting, these effects are forged by a nonexpressive face. One child’s exquisite nonexpressivity: that’s the key to Moonlight. Its quiet, its allure. It doesn’t say much. Its extensive system of hole-and-wall is hushed. What’s the look onscreen? As if he were attempting a D&G parable, a strong black man tears down a white wall (I kid you not), then steps into a hole in the dark, finding a young boy hiding from bullies. “Whatcha doin’ here, little man?” There’s no answer. “You don’t talk to strangers?” He doesn’t much talk. He doesn’t much express. He barely lifts his head, scene after scene. Fleetingly, a boy, who names him “Black,” wrestles him into a cryptic look—hintingly erotic?— his hole’s blinking on the surface of his face—but it’s momentary. Blankness returns. Even the movie’s iconic scene—the man is holding him gracefully, surely, in lapping waves, teaching 134

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him to float—seems to reside in the hole of his consciousness, out of our sight, except the film pointedly marks this hole. Man to boy: “like swimming, eh?” No expression. “That much, eh?” The face won’t tell. I am more seduced. Soon, from his blank-boy-face comes a question, out of the blue, out of his hole, to the man and his girlfriend. “What’s a faggot?” “Am I a faggot?” They reply gently, only to watch the conversation turn toward the man’s selling drugs— to the boy’s mother. (My desire starts to follow. . . . I’m attached to the mother. . . . A world of money barriers, hidden public policies, and ravaged loveliness gathers in her face. . . . Does anyone agree?) The mother as user, the sweet man as pusher, his girlfriend as an ally, and the force of poverty eddy around whatever “gay” means to this boy called “Black” by the boy who’ll be his lover. (I’m feeling hailed by the film’s exquisite form: Moonlight’s tidal washings over “Black” and “gay”— swelling them, subsiding. How they build or loosen, behind a boy’s façade, is an unseen drama. Attentive, I am here, ready to hold, without ever knowing the exactness of, his hole.) Has he ever seen “a” gay? Not that we’re told. Will his kiss reveal “a” gay? He has no idea. Are the myths of his genitals freed in his face? Or revealed as myths? MaKING O UT T He faCe

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For me, they are. The film, in my view, plays with whether we’re reduced to our signs. Nothing about this film is colorblind. The film is from a project enticingly entitled In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. It confirms what I plead: we must not pretend that we don’t see color, if we’re sighted people—color dramatically and so politically saturates our lives—but no one is the color we perceive them to be. (No one is their sign.) The face is the place from which to take flight from so many signs, though the face is full of signs. Is his face penetrative of my bodymind? Yes, it’s pointed. But I keep composing it with the film’s images, lending it sharp, inhuman residues of playground/apartment/school/beach. The force of faciality takes up landscape. The playground, the school, his mother’s apartment (which feels like a jail): all feel holey in D&G’s sense: they must reside in the hole behind his eyes, as must seawater lap inside his mind, giving Freud’s sense of “oceanic” feelings literal depth. The film keeps putting all events in the face. Indeed, another beach scene—the ocean before him—leads to his unexpected kiss with the boy who calls him “Black.” From kissing, there is sex—though we can’t see his face—and by the time we see his face, his face isn’t talking. What opens his face, in a blue-black way, making the hole of consciousness shout (“Black” 136

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shouts out—cries, overflows), is the kissing-boy’s beating him up the next day. Now, in a mirror, just above a sink, he stands staring at his bruised and dripping face. The kissing-boy is further in this face as a force. Another face appears, lifting from the sink. Time has clearly passed: “Black” is a hypermasculine man, with golden grills that flash on his teeth. The kissing-boy has called him after many years. Powerful, tense flirtation unspools, taking many tones (uncertainty, excitement, fear, hope for something), showing modulations in seductive faciality gathering for them both—men who kissed as boys, before “Black’s” beating. “Who is you, man? You hard now?” the kissing-boy asks. (Both have been to prison. Stories of money sit in the hole of “Black’s” cresting consciousness.) In their talk of scrapping to make their daily dimes— “Black” reveals he’s “trapping” (that is, he’s pushing drugs)—“Black” reveals a chasm we’ve been reading in his blankness: “You’re the only man that’s ever touched me. . . . I haven’t really touched anyone since.” I expect a climax: the sea will rush the room, flooding the bed? The kissing-boy just so quietly holds a facialized head, “Black’s” strong head, on his shoulder in the dark. The film makes me feel I’ve entered that face—though the image enters me. MaKING O UT T He faCe

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The film’s last frames give the back of his head, but not his head now: his head from childhood. He is at the beach, in blue-black light, looking at the ocean, as if it were a mirror. He turns and looks. At us. At me? There is a face between my lips, where blue holes are birthed and kissed. Last Face, Last Kiss: Beside Ourselves Not-girl-not-boy all my life, I’m now haunted by the pain beside me, pain not-mine. The status of the not-mine—especially in a world where I am complicit in racialized pain and neglect of joy—troubles me greatly. More than ever, I need to think beside myself, being “beside myself ” with sorrow. Free-floating grief. A book about pain, with its words going in me, is helping me think. It’s about an accident, a freak bike accident, that left a feminist English professor with quadriplegia and a broken face. Memoir of sorts, Christina Crosby’s A Body, Undone: Living On after Great Pain is deeply personal—to her—to me—in ways I’m making out, scouting the not-mine features of pain.6 138

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I met Crosby the year I kissed a woman. What a queer coincidence. We were together in graduate school. I was starting, she was finishing. Unbeknownst to her, since she didn’t know me, we were both focused on Charlotte Brontë and Brontë’s Villette. (We loved the same novel: like lovers, we loved it.) Clearly, together, we adored sports. (I’d been teaching tennis to “afford” my next degree. Balls were still my thing, supplanted later in Utah by bikes; weights were my thing, intending, as I was, to beef my puny frame.) And I was a feminist, trying to be a woman. Here was a surface I could be down with. (I could have said something stupid if I’d tried: “You’re my face: I have your wall, I share your holes. . . .” Didn’t have this language. I said nothing.) Crosby’s face indelibly flashed. It was a sudden, sharp illumination; then, a floating portrait, a humming tableau. The images in me go something like this: strong body, bold frame, bike over shoulder (there was a bike, poignantly enough), unpretentious jeans, oddly wet T-shirt (she had been biking, so it was damp?), subtle smile, soft bearing in all that strength. (Somebody’s thinking “Ring of Keys.”) I can feel this image more than describe it. It still MaKING O UT T He faCe

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pulses. It’s a gestalt with a beating heart that’s a bleeding wish for its force to linger. The force of the body is up in the face. Crosby was the first of my human butch gods. She remains my template for beautiful butch. Her impersonality—I didn’t know her, I didn’t talk to her, I simply watched her and contemplated her—was personal to me, speaking to painful queer-child longing (where are my people? what are my words? who has my face?). She ceased to operate as someone who would grow and age and change. Like Dorian Gray, I let this portrait be myself, which was not myself. That’s not all. That same year, I began writing what became my book God Between Their Lips. The premise was that “God” is the space of our desire—the aching separation between our bodies—provoking our drive to close the space between us (via sex and words) while assuring that never can the space between us close, leaving us in unending desire. We are left beside ourselves, never quite having ourselves or someone else. Never quite having the meanings of words, words which also can’t be themselves (needing other words to define each word). “God” was my word for this nonequivalence. Not being me, Christina went in me, from my imagekissing, though she never touched me. What has come from reading her? 140

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Bent understandings about a friend’s pain. I have told her this: it’s surreal to read you, having your facialized body in my body acting as a catcher’s mitt for your written words. Every word you offer is caught by the image I’m holding of you. Subtleties pool around your image now—and some of them shout in aching tenderness, as you’re bewildered by effects of chronic pain. I am holding you while you’re now beside yourself. This nonequivalence—between my holding and your living—is a revelation. By which I mean, I am by your side, being pierced by words. You couldn’t put your pain in my body if you tried. That I cannot feel. I can feel your words, which are not your pain. (In fact, my body can supply sensations for the words you use right before the accident. I know the feel, or know “a” feel, of keeping “the torso steady, low, and forward,” curling my “hands over the brake hoods.” I can relate to grinding on the pedals with exhausting pleasure. I can feel the tension of “crest[ing] . . . a hill.” Then, not.) “Chin obliterated.” In the most terrifying way, I kiss your phrase. Its sound, its compression, its meanings immediately lead to expansiveness in my body— against my will but with my consent—creating free fall into despair. I fall out my window when I read that phrase. Sensations of your body, rendered MaKING O UT T He faCe

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in words, enter my body as sensations of the sign. Feathery knifepoints. But, so palpably, they are not your pain. Here is nonequivalence of the most radical, arresting sort. Yet the signifier is our sensate link. Your specific pain- put-into-words confounds you, and disturbs you, yet these words are what I hold, as I’m beside you. Something else as well. Many of your words will have been ephemeral—in my body. They were not pointless, however, to kiss, despite the fact they’ve died, are dying now. Many brought pleasure when they came inside me; some will now lie dormant, to rise up again; some are afterglowing. Slightly new question: what is the affective afterglow of words I have not retained? So I’ve said to Crosby. One last obsession. Christina’s book has helped me with students in pain. (I’m not in the classroom, as dean and vice president, so these are not “my” students.) One is a queer Latino fellow who’s taken to wanting some time with me; we have bonded faceto-face. The other is a student planning a protest. Another is . . . Take the first student: together, we’re exploring how to treat each other’s pain. His specific pain and mine are nonequivalent (amped by our institutional non142

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equivalence); and, as with Christina, I can’t feel his, nor he mine. Can’t feel “with” him. But we are committing to holding materially, in our bodies, each other’s image and ever- shifting signs. (Shades of Beloved.) Unprotected reading of each other is crafting something we need for when we’re not together: an affect for action that isn’t safety. Turning safe-space discourse on its side, more than on its head, we are going to practice, as an experiment, a horizontal hold, believing that we are inside each other in image and word, which we are, when we’re not together. (We are discussing what a daily commitment to fighting economic inequality might look like. How to build an affect for action on that front.) Let’s just say we’re taking a page from Crosby’s book. I would put it this way: there is no undoing of our undoneness. What’s undone is done. Not one reader, not a pack of readers, can redeem us if redemption pretends to undo, is a bright undoing. But if it’s accretion of signs and their sensations, side-by-side addition, horizontal holding of tender nonequivalence, it is a “God”-kiss.

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COD a

My own face never shouted, never fell. Not that I knew. Even so, I wondered what it might have felt like to kiss my face when I wore it like a mask. As a young “woman” in college, I’m passing and dating rather fitfully, when I meet a man who is gentle and remarkable: “marriage material,” should I have to marry. He is black. And gay? Even at the time, I’m swearing he’s gay and marvel over his saying to me, “I love how macha you are!” Macha? Buddy, this is me as feminine—lend a kid a hand. Does he think I’m gay? We never try to kiss. As I ponder macha-ness, afraid it will seep from my lips and pores, ooze from my mask, a different boy is kissing me, I’m kissing back. We’re in the corner of a stranger’s lawn, close to the statue of a deer, of all things. (Maybe it’s an elk? I start thinking of a deer’s distinctiveness. . . .) Shouldn’t be thinking, should be impressing. Instead, I’m receding. The girl-mask I’m wearing makes me uncertain: how to be a doe? (I stumble crazily into this question.) I should give in and let him press. I should scoot to CO Da

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the margins of this kiss. That’s the project here. So my face suggests. My façade of womanhood, with my Walt Clyde Frazier–fantasy–manhood not in evidence, was a mask that grew. White-girl flesh-mask, suburban style. (I’m a hockey goalie, I would pretend, so of course I’m masked.) I press harder on the secret of surface. If I went bolder, what would I say? The freeing of our genitals may come through the face. The face may fashion a positive path away from myths that are hanging on our genitals. Or reveal to others the ravage of these myths. To this day, I question what my long- term girlfriend is kissing when she kisses me. Does she kiss a “woman,” a “boy,” a “child” (the woman on my license, the boy I wasn’t granted, the child I’m always trailing in my wake)? Then, it smacks me. Surely, she must wonder what I kiss in her. She’s the bigger mystery, the more important story. In Moonlight, I am magnetized to a facial puzzle: learn to ride a boy’s face out to the women. My desire pools there, where a mother’s story is implied more than seen. My desire propels me from faces into actions, even activism. Follow the pathway out from facial holes, I instruct myself, holes so different from my own, after all. 146

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This isn’t sunny. Some of it’s akin to “chin obliterated”: phrase I’ve kissed that riots in my body. Face and words and pain not-mine—survival, elation, ideas not-mine—via many signs, enter my body, enter each reader, in odd measure. Holding them mysteriously, we make each other out.

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acknowledgments

My passions in this book bespeak my gratitude. There were people I got to kiss. I can only say, “you know who you are,” since names have been changed to protect the (not so) innocent. My remarkable parents, brother, and lover now surround these stories. So do the thinkers I’ve read for decades—authors I’ve encountered on the page or in life—people who have schooled me in racialized gender, childhood sexuality, genderqueer expressions, classroom dynamics, and political change. The books I’ve written have named these names. They figure grandly in all that precedes. As for the form of this book, its vibe, I thank profusely the marvelous Sarahs—Sarah Mesle, Sarah Blackwood, the editors of life, who brilliantly, patiently shepherded me—and the golden Eric Zinner, all of whom my comrade for years, Lisa Duggan, told me to trust. (Speaking of Lisa, such deep love for her unending kindness and belief in me.) Dolma Ombadykow, Andrew Katz, and Martin Coleman: great appreciation (!) for editorial assistance. 149

Then there’s Utah. My fine colleagues in Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Disability Studies (comprising the School for Cultural and Social Transformation), and the coolest staff on the planet in the Office for Equity and Diversity, have taught me way beyond my dreams. As for reader-friends, I mention those wits who’ve aided my thoughts: Rebecca H., Laura B., Adam W., Jenn B., Marina G., Jocelyn R., Jenn G., Susan S., Natalie A., and, discerning reader of my heart, Shelley W. I gratefully acknowledge permissions from the journals and presses below to draw on parts of my publications: “If Queer Children Were a Video Game.” In Queer Game Studies, ed. Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). “The Queer Child Now and Its Paradoxical Global Effects.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 4 (2016). “Is It in Your Body?” In The Pocket Instructor: Literature: 101 Exercises for the College Classroom, edited by Diana Fuss and William Gleason (Princeton University Press, 2016). “Reading as Kissing, Sex with Ideas: ‘Lesbian’ Barebacking?” Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, Fall 2015. “Surfacing (in the Heat of Reading): Is It Like Kissing or Some Other Sex Act?” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 3 (Spring 2015). “Monstrously Yours?” Afterword to Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors, edited by Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Sean Moreland (McFarland, 2015). 150

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“The Queerness of Race and Same-Sex Desire.” In The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing, edited by Hugh Stevens (Cambridge University Press, 2011). The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press, 2009). Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” (Duke University Press, 2006). God Between Their Lips: Desire Between Women in Irigaray, Brontë, and Eliot (Stanford University Press, 1994).

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Notes

Preface

1. A book that inspires my sense of scale—and so much more: Juana María Rodríguez’s Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: NYU Press, 2014). 2. A treasured colleague, Ella Blanchard, many years ago, when she was my student, introduced me to the terms “assigned male at birth,” “assigned female at birth.” We have discussed how what accumulates as scholarly research, under a singular scholar’s name, belongs to gathered community wisdom. Consider my name as pointing to a gathering. I am Ella’s student in this respect and others. 3. See Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). My scholar-friends Claudia Castañeda, Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Lee Edelman, Steven Bruhm, and Nat Hurley have made this point as powerfully as anyone. I’m with them. See Claudia Castañeda, Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, “Childhood, Queer Theory, and Feminism,” Feminist Theory 11, no. 3 (2011): 309–321; Lee Edelman, No Future (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, eds., Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 153

Chapter 1: Making Out Is Kissing, Reading, Sex with Ideas

1. Julio Salgado, public remarks, Campus Pride, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, October 2017. 2. I use the words “penetration” and “birth” quite pointedly here and throughout this book, so as to dramatically recontextualize them. In the realm of reading, they are not gender-exclusive terms. They refer to actions that all reading bodies undergo as they read. The astute person will also realize that listening bodies undergo these actions. Reading, however, demands that we actively contact the word for it to get inside us: hence, our kissing the word on the page. 3. Two things to notice. I call the Poitier character “Poitier,” because I was fixated on the actor, after my parents discussed him with me. As a sample of one, in many respects—part of the racist dynamics in play—Sidney Poitier was larger than the character. As for the actress, you won’t be surprised that in 1965 a sighted woman played a blind girl. My parents and I in no way marked this. 4. New Oxford American Dictionary, s.v. “sexual” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Chapter 2: Making Out Enterings, Outings, and Remains

1. Terry Sanderson, A Stranger in the Family: How to Cope If Your Child Is Gay (London: Other Way, 1996). 2. Jean Genet, Querelle, trans. Anselm Hollo (New York: Grove, 1974). 3. I’m supplying memories as a queer child. For a scholarly catalogue of kissing in Hollywood films, see Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 4. Many theorists-activists are coining words more apt for their purposes. I use “transiting” here to convey motion 154

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across, around, away, back and forth in relation to the established girl/boy divide in childhood and beyond. Jack Halberstam, in Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), uses “trans*” to refer to an entire range of gendering that does not reduce to binaries; Susan Stryker coins “transing.” See Stryker, “Transing the Queer (In)Human,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2015): 227–230. For an excellent addition to our knowledge of the medicalization of trans children, see the just-released book by Julian Gill-Peterson: Histories of the Transgender Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 5. For me, yes. Understandably, for children of a different temperament and/or differently abled children, the movements I sought might not rank on the list for “boy.” Besides, certain movements, in certain cultures, at certain times, are more available under the “girl” sign. 6. Paul Preciado, “Ladies and Gentlemen, and Everybody Else,” Bully Bloggers, January 26, 2018, https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2018/01/26/ ladies-and-gentlemen-and-everybody-else-by-paulpreciado/. 7. Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge (New York: Little, Brown, 1968). 8. Jacques Lacan explains that our image in the mirror is crucially both visible and fictional. It is not us—it is an image—and it’s partial (front, side, back, but not in the round). See his Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). 9. Barnabas Collins was a vampire character on the television series Dark Shadows (1966–1971). 10. See, for example, Hanna Rosin, “The Touch-Screen Generation,” Atlantic, April 2013. NOT eS

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11. Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 12. Martin Bryant, “20 Years Ago Today, the World Wide Web Opened to the Public,” TNW Insider, August 6, 2011, https://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/08/06/20years-ago-today-the-world-wide-web-opened-to-thepublic/. 13. Beloved, in 1987, as I’ve said, changed my view of reading. I published my views as “Prophylactics and Brains: Beloved in the Cybernetic Age of AIDS,” in Studies in the Novel 28, no. 3 (1996): 434–465, later reprinted in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s anthology, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Maurice Bloch, in his In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theory of Mind, Evolution, Truth and the Nature of the Social (London: Routledge, 2013), shows no sign of being influenced by Beloved or by me; and my thoughts were published long before I read him. More intriguingly, there’s a book I’ve just learned about—thanks to the classics scholar Ann R. Steiner at Franklin & Marshall—that also views reading as penetration: Jesper Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), originally published in French in 1988, one year after Beloved. I highly doubt Beloved influenced Svenbro. However, Svenbro gets his view of reading from the Greeks. Is what I detect in Wilde in any way his being influenced by Hellenic thought? He did love the Greeks. . . . 14. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987). 15. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015). 16. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Penguin, 1985).

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17. Merriam-Webster Online, s.v. “influence”: https://www. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/influence. Chapter 3: Communal Making Out

1. James R. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 2. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, trans. Jean McNeil, in Masochism, 143–272 (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 3. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1997). 4. Charlotte Brontë, Villette (New York: Penguin, 1979). 5. Anne Mozley, Christian Remembrancer, April 1853, quoted in Farris Miriam Allott, The Brontës: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974). Chapter 4: Just Say No to Making Out

1. See the back cover of Boy with Flowers (New York: Barrow Street, 2008). 2. American Heritage Dictionary: New College Edition, s.v. “green” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980). 3. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (New York: Harvest, 1928). 4. Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). For how long will this risk be in play? I speak of barebacking (circa 2009) as it appears in Dean’s book. The world of barebacking is indeed changing, due to the preexposure prophylactic drug Truvada, which is gaining traction among gay men, though with controversy. Will its users use the pill consistently, as it must be used so as to lower risk? Will the pill “encourage” “risky behavior”? Will it in any way affect those men who seek to catch the virus? For further reading, see Rich Juzwiak, “What Is Safe Sex?

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The Raw and Uncomfortable Truth about Truvada,” Gawker, March 4, 2014, http://gawker.com/what-issafe-sex-the-raw-and-uncomfortable-truthabout-1535583252, in which Tim Dean weighs in on these developments. See also Christopher Glazek, “Why Is No One on the First Treatment to Prevent H.I.V.?,” New Yorker, September 30, 2013. 5. Marc Spindelman, “Sexual Freedom’s Shadows,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 23, no. 1 (2011). 6. Marilyn Frye, “Lesbian ‘Sex,’” in Lesbian Philosophies and Cultures, ed. Jeffner Allen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990). 7. Spindelman, “Sexual Freedom’s Shadows.” 8. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1987). 9. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1966). 10. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Chapter 5: Making Out the Face

1. Carl, I believe, was “assigned male at birth.” Carl presented as a “boy”—had a boy’s name—but wore quite feminine clothing and accessories. The pronoun “he” was used for Carl and also by Carl. Since I don’t truly know what Carl would have wished, I use “they” here. 2. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 3. Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

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4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). My thoughts here on wall and hole are a much shortened version of my keynote— “Race, Face, Ravage, and Lyrical Fat”—delivered at the 10th International Deleuze Studies Conference in Toronto, June 2017. 5. D&G don’t imply a racialized sense to the term “black hole,” which largely seems to reference the scientific meaning. Speaking for myself, I can’t ignore the history of racist connotations sticking to “black”—along the lines of sinister darkness. Indeed, D&G do refer, quite centrally, to the way in which the face of Christ—White Man face—operates as the standard by which all human faces are judged. 6. Christina Crosby, A Body, Undone: Living On after Great Pain (New York: NYU Press, 2016).

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about the author

Kathryn Bond Stockton is Distinguished Professor of English, Associate Vice President for Equity and Diversity, and inaugural Dean of the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah. Her most recent books, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” and The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, were both finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies.

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