Privatized

Excerpted from The Freezer Door, published by Semiotext(e)

Now that my view is gone, I can’t stop staring at the black mold growing on the frame of the new building across the street — I’d love to take a workshop on crying, but I still haven’t made it to a cuddle party. I’m thinking about the body as a potential, but a potential for what?

We make art from our neuroses, but do we make neuroses from our art? The transition from walling off desire to desiring walls. The way advertising collides with selfhood, and we all know who wins the lottery. 

Sometimes the lack of critical engagement in worlds allegedly built around critical engagement stuns me — it stuns me. I can’t tell if I’m hungry, or enraged. And what’s the difference. I wonder if I’m the only person who still goes outside thinking something magnificent and unexpected might happen. 

I walk towards the sun, stand at the bottom of the hill before the stairs to the street above the highway overlooking the skyline, and watch the shifting colors of the leaves blowing in the wind. Halfway down the stairs there’s a friendly dog, almost too friendly because it keeps jumping up. I didn’t realize English bulldogs actually jumped. But I liked English bulldogs even before I decided to like dogs, so it’s okay. Also there’s the sun, so this is a different world, flowers growing in a field which isn’t really a field, just some rocks overlooking the highway. 

I decide to walk up that grassy steep hill to help realign my feet so they don’t hurt anymore, and when I get to the top I have to step over a railing to get back to the street. Then there are the usual gay couples who ignore me. Someone points in my direction, but actually he’s pointing at a condo. I decide to go back up that hill again, so I go down a different way, and I notice someone else wearing purple pants, but actually I’m not wearing purple pants. She smiles at me, and then goes back to texting. There’s that field of bluebells again, just past the hill I’m going to walk up, and when I look up at the window of a building that looks redone I see that someone is looking out but not out, and then halfway up the hill I realize it’s not as pretty this time. Maybe it’s not as pretty because I’m already thinking about writing about it. 

Halfway up or maybe two-thirds of the way the grass turns to mud and moss and then just mud and cigarette butts, and I keep almost stepping in dog shit. Back on the street, I’m walking up the hill that usually seems overwhelming but now it doesn’t, except that now the sun isn’t out anymore and I’m cold. Suddenly I’m sad too, and when I get back to my block there’s some really loud noise, maybe the construction is going on late tonight. Actually it’s someone with a leaf blower, blowing allergies right into my face, and now my head hurts. There’s a container of dental floss on a chair in the lobby of my building, I do need floss but I don’t think I want someone else’s.

Maybe there’s nothing straighter than a gay sex club. I walk into the video room, and there are five guys on the bench, naked except for towels around their waists, acting like they’re just hanging out. They even have those traumatized I’m-a-dude-but-I’m-turned-on expressions. I want to yell girls, this is a sex club — you can have sex in here. But I’m here too, silenced by the dehumanization of complicity. Three of them leave, I sit down. Then I say why is everyone acting like they’re straight? The other two guys leave without even looking at me. This is only the beginning. 

The difference between satire and what’s going on in the world is that the goal of satire is to illuminate hypocrisy. I walk by a boarded-up house, and there’s a real estate sign that says EXCLUSIVE. Why is it that a little depression goes a long way, but a lot of depression goes nowhere? The balance between something that’s too awful to comment on, and something that’s too awful not to comment on.  An update from the yoga boutique: nuclear-sunset-pattern hotpants made of recycled plastic bottles — the tag says “Dreaming in the clouds, and loving the earth.” 

One problem with the human interest story is that so often it doesn’t seem interested, or humane — I mean mobilizing a personal narrative in service of a humanizing agenda is dehumanizing. The only thing worse than a baby boutique is a dog boutique. The only thing worse than a dog boutique is a dog spa. 

Realism is overrated, but just because something is overrated doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be realistic. The good thing about falling in love with a phrase is that it will not love you back I mean leave you. But doesn’t it seem vaguely pornographic when someone you’ve never seen before opens his cellphone charger port to ask if you have one like it?

Walking through the back side of the city, under the highway and then next to it, watching the views go by — there’s one up ahead, oh, thorns. The Amazon towers and the underbrush. An almost-shack next to a ‘60s apartment building next to condos next to a fence next to another highway entrance next to the clouds. As long as the contrasts last there might still be hope. 

I take off my scarf, coat, mittens, sweater, shirt, tank top, shoes, and socks, and then I dance right there on the cement. I dance for the sun on my skin, for the way my body suddenly feels alive, for the way I need this in spite of the glances from the few people around. Who don’t want me around. I dance for them anyway.

But I don’t want to get too tired, so I put my clothes back on, and walk uphill as it starts to rain. And I remember how the rain clears my head. There are three figs that have fallen from a tree, or maybe not figs but something like figs. The first one I roll down the hill for fearlessness, and it takes off. The second one I roll down the hill for staying present in my body no matter what, and it rolls away quickly, between the wheels of a car and still downhill. The third one is for letting go of the relationships I don’t need anymore, and of course that one gets stuck.

I’m trying not to write about how Adrian keeps letting me down, because everyone keeps letting me down, but then I run into him on the way back from the park — I actually thought I was going to run into him, but then I didn’t, and then I did. I kind of just feel distant, making small talk, when really I just want to say you don’t want a real relationship, right? Eventually I say you haven’t called me. He says it’s because I can’t think of a time when we can hang out. I say you can call me anyway. At the end I give him a hug and it feels like a real hug, I mean he’s letting his whole body go so it feels like we’re closer. Are we closer? 

At Pony, I’m back to taking photo booth pictures of myself — they have a new pattern on the wall, which is white rectangles inside black squares on a white background, and it’s incredible. Now we have the straight couples so drunk they’re in the gay bar with cocks on the wall, talking to me. They love my photo booth pictures, so I love these straight couples, in the way that love can be transitory and conditional. Also, one of the guys is hot, something about the bow tie and grey shirt, curly hair a refuge for thought. From thought. 

I don’t know if I’m the one that convinces them to do a photo shoot that starts with cocksucking, but I know I’m the one that says I need to see the results. Then I’m at a table with people who work at the thrift store, they’re talking about someone who came in to buy a Halloween costume for her kid, and she said: I want to dress her like an Indian princess. 

In second grade, I dressed as a Mexican for Halloween — I think this just meant wearing a poncho my grandmother bought for me. I never liked dressing up because I didn’t want anyone to look at me in that way, but I did like candy. I don’t think anyone understood my costume, and I don’t know if this means they were less in league with white supremacy, or more.

In third grade, my whole homeroom class went to a place called Turkey Run Farm, where we lived like Pilgrims for three days. We dressed entirely in undyed burlap, slept on hay in log cabins or in tents, ate from a root cellar, and used a latrine. 

I went to a school that prided itself on being the first integrated school in Washington, DC. I don’t remember learning that colonialism was an honorable path, and yet I have this anecdote to prove it. I remember each of us had to make our own pocket out of burlap that we would tie around our waist, just like the colonists had to do. I was so proud of my pocket, which I decorated with lace that I’d sewn on myself, an elegant accessory, but my teacher tore it out of my hand, and said “a big tsk and a boo for you,” because no male colonist would ever wear a pocket like that, and she handed me a plain one to replace it.

My favorite way to die is to stay alive as long as possible. You know that moment when your hair suddenly looks perfect, but you know that as soon as you step outside it’ll be ruined so maybe you never go outside again. Sometimes I think the language of rights is the language of blight. A headline about J.Crew, but I read Jim Crow. Is there a synonym for a synonym? One is uniform, and the other is the uniform. 

When a movie quotes other movies in order to make a movie about movies that’s really about walking: “Did you report your purse stolen from a dog,” quoted from Dragnet, in Los Angeles Plays Itself, which reminds me of Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, where two people meet in a taxi in Tehran, and one of them says “What’s your specialty?”

“Mugging.” Then there’s Nina Simone in What Happened, Miss Simone, where she says “I’ll tell you what freedom means to me NO FEAR.” Or I’m sitting in the booth by the video clips at Pony, trying to decode them, but now it’s just one woman with a perm, singing in a variety of campy eighties outfits. The movie that isn’t really a movie, and the movie that is. Maybe if the sound was on, I would know what she was singing, but I’m having such a good time, it’s like I’m escaping into myself. Also, I’m escaping. 

Even though no one will dance with me, I know it’s going well when someone asks me if I’ll give the birthday boy a lap dance. It’s a group of black and Latino fags who kind of remind me of New York — dressed conservative but total queens. I say I don’t give lap dances, but I can give you a kiss. But now the smoke machine is on — it’s amazing how much that horrible device can terrorize me, leaving my head in hollowed-out pain for days.

I’m outside dancing with Free, the doorman, and he asks me if I’ll dance naked and covered in fake blood on a rooftop for his movie, I guess I would be a vampire. No, dancing isn’t the word, is it? Rolling around and eating each other’s flesh. 

Free says I want to see your, what’s the word? 

Sass, I say. 

Sass, he agrees. 

But horror is not my place of worship. I want to map the place where self-hatred intersects with internalized oppression. Repression. Self-expression. Depression. I’m getting ready to cross the street, and a car pulls over, blocking the crosswalk. Welcome,  I say grandly, and twirl around, welcome to the crosswalk.

Four women get out, they want to know where the Madison Pub is. I say I’ll take you there. One of them hands me a mini bottle of liquor, and I don’t tell her I haven’t had a drink in over a decade. I just say no thanks. They pull me into the bar, and I think okay, just for a minute. I don’t know why I thought they were straight at first, just that I didn’t think lesbians went to the Madison Pub. Or maybe it was the straight couples from before. 

I haven’t been to the Madison Pub since I worked for Friend to Friend, so I guess that means almost two decades. I still can’t believe I can say something like that now. Anyway, it’s packed. I guess it’s a sports bar? These gays look at me like a spectacle, but they aren’t unfriendly. One of them is touching my thigh, he says it’s because he likes my pants but he leaves his hand there and I’m ready for more so then I talk to him and his boyfriend for an hour — there’s some kind of flirtation going on, but the more they talk the less I like them, and I can tell this is going to take a lot more talking, so I go home, and read about the David Wojnarowicz show at the new Whitney Museum, which literally sits on the ground where Wojnarowicz once cruised for sex and sensibility. Simultaneously I feel disgust, and a craving. 

When I first discovered Wojnarowicz’s work it was right after his death of AIDS in 1992 — I was 19, escaping childhood and everything I was supposed to be, gasping and grasping at the possibilities of living fully in a world I knew wanted me to die or disappear. Reading Wojnarowicz I immediately felt my rage and desire in print for the first time. Lust and loss as a part of everyday experience — the way it’s everything at once, you don’t get to choose unless you choose everything.

Nostalgia increases with each misrepresentation, marking the death of the imagination, increasing misrepresentation, but what about when it’s a nostalgia for death? Museums filled with the nostalgia of the gentrifiers: remember when death was all we had — oh, those were the days. Is there a difference between nostalgia and gentrification, or are they two elements of the same process of cultural erasure?

The key to gentrification is more gentrification, every cultural institution in downtown New York fighting to own what they displace. I remember the Wojnarowicz  retrospective at the New Museum in 1998 — I was so excited to finally see this work that had meant so much to me, the actual work, not just photocopies on my walls. But walking around that show, all I could think was that he was dead, and the work in this context was dead too. 

In one of the Wojnarowicz gallery shows accompanying the New Museum exhibit there was actually a beautiful piece rolled up on the table, grenades and burning houses — I had never seen that one before, and it felt like everything I had ever wanted. I signaled my friend to distract the only person working, but he didn’t catch on. 

And then I went to look at Wojnarowicz’s diaries in a cloistered New York University library. You could only gain entrance if you proved yourself a scholar — they gave me white gloves to look at the diaries, and I thought about ripping a few pages out. I imagined Wojnarowicz would have wanted me to do that, but I got too paranoid about owning a stolen commodity that would surely increase in value with every exhibit, each new book of reminiscences that I crave in spite of all my critiques. 

But Wojnarowicz was part of the art world, and his rage was a commodity the art world consumed. The angry artist smashing out the walls at a gallery that showed his work — even if the gallery deserved it, what a clichéd sort of masculinist triumph. If he had lived, would he have unlearned this? 

Nostalgia for the pre-gentrified time or place or space might be one of the worst forms of gentrification. If there always was a better time, nothing really matters now — we can never re-create what we never really created. The most successful museums are not just coffins for the dead, but coffins for the living. 

Have I ever been to a show at a museum that truly moved me, that’s what I’m wondering. Once, I realize. Nan Goldin’s I’ll Be Your Mirror, which starts out in black-and-white like it’s so long ago, but it’s just the 1970s, all these gorgeous queens posing for the camera, lesbians and fags with long hair, transfeminine makeup shots invoking and satirizing Boston’s frigid pose. Everyone is walking into tomorrow, suddenly so bright with the saturation of color and then we’re in New York. 

Nan Goldin follows her friends and lovers through drugs and violence and dreams and drama, a quarter-century of drama, all the failure and success, the taxi rides and bars and broken beds, her eyes bruised and bloody after her lover beats her up, somewhere near the middle of the show, and then everyone is dying. 

Wait. 

Everyone is dying. 

I cried so hard at that show, cried even when I was trying not to cry, cried even around all those people, although not as much as I would have done without all those people — I went back, back to cry again, and do you know what, that show was at the Whitney. I’m crying right now, just thinking about it, how AIDS and drug addiction and suicide transformed all our lives I mean I was entering the world as an avowedly queer person right in the middle of it, with no other context.

I’m thinking about a phrase Martin Duberman uses in the introduction to Hold Tight Gently, his biography of Michael Callen and Essex Hemphill, two more brilliant gay artists who died of AIDS in the 1990s. He writes about gay men who have physically survived the AIDS epidemic. 

After blowing the leaves into the street, and then out of the street, and then into the street, and then out again, this guy takes out a rake. He actually has a rake. And then, once he’s done, he takes out the leaf blower again. But when did love become privatized? When did lust become loss? Do you want some food, this guy asks me, assuming that I would only be dressed like this if I were homeless. Or maybe it’s because I’m trying to exist in public space? Even when people in Seattle are nice, they’re not nice.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s latest title is The Freezer Door, one of Oprah Magazine’s Best LGBTQ Books of 2020, just released from Semiotext(e).

Order a copy of The Freezer Door here, and check out the dates for Mattilda’s virtual book tour.