love in a closed room
This Week in Reading
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Giovanni’s Room is the story of David, an American expat in Paris. When his girlfriend jets off to Spain he falls in with the underground gay scene, and in particular, falls in with Giovanni, a Italian bartender living in France. He moves into Giovanni’s room, unwilling to want him, but unable to deny his own desire. When his girlfriend returns to Paris, David is forced to examine what he had with Giovanni and the price of masculinity and love.
Gay love (perhaps all romantic love, but this is the only type I have ever known) is like running towards the edge of a cliff. Everything feels dangerous, everything means too much. Falling in love with someone who has a body like your body cannot happen apart from hard conversations about identity; cannot happen without rebuilding your entire understanding of the world from the ground up. Certain things can’t be taken back. It is tempting to back away from the cliff, to leave your world unturned. I promise you won’t fall off the edge if you stay, I promise the view is really damn good. My only metric for how much I like I girl is by how much I actively want to die. Right now I am dating a girl so pretty I am fearful I may combust.
We love in private, in rooms with doors that close. We build worlds in those rooms, and then live in those worlds. Giovanni spends weeks chiseling a bookshelf into the wall of their tiny room. He chips away at the brick, making their world a tiny bit bigger, one inch at a time. To be in love may be to live in a bubble, but that bubble is still part of the broader world. To live in a bubble isn’t to deny reality, but rather to carve out a piece of that reality that is yours alone, a corner that is softer and sweeter and safer than all of the other places you have ever known.
It has always been this way. The gay rights movement is young, but men have loved men and women have loved women since the beginning of time. In 1956, when Giovanni’s Room was published, two men could not walk down the street hand in hand— but the way they loved each other is the same way we love today.
Times are easier now, of course. It is much easier to be gay today than it was in 1956 (and it is a lot easier to be gay today than it was in 2011, I would like to point out). I will not be stoned in the streets for holding a pretty girl’s hand, at least not in Los Angeles. Progress has been made, rapidly. But all LGBT history is recent history. The AIDS epidemic, an honest to god genocide, is only a few decades in our past; gay conversion camps and job discrimination are still a fading part of our present. This legacy of suffering haunts the queer community to this day. It is the reason why, despite rainbow banners and pride parades, gay movies are still so fucking sad.
Even now, in 2018, even here, in a progressive west coast city, the shadow of wrongness dogs me. I’ve never felt ashamed about my sexuality, but this winter, during the stretch of months when I couldn’t stop crying, I became convinced, for a long moment, that there was something wrong with me. Why else could all of this be so hard? The problem, I decided, was that I wanted too much. I wanted things that were not owed to me, things that were unfair to ask for. I was wired in a way that was against nature— there was no biological purpose for my happiness. My desires were simply a hiccup in evolution. I knew better, knew that there is nothing to “wrong” with being gay, but still, I felt alienated by biology.
I have moved past this. Happiness, joy, love are all achievable, whether or not evolution is on my side. It is not a crime, to want things.
I resent the idea that to exist in a queer body is a radical act. I don’t want my life to be a perpetual state of action. Please, just let me lie fallow. Pushing forward through an oppositional world day after day is a political act, but to fall in love, to lie sleepily beside someone in a dark room, has nothing to do with politics. That tenderness exists someplace private and sweet, far away from Supreme Court rulings and Twitter and everything else.
This summer, certain things that had been impossible, quite unexpectedly, became possible, and suddenly life was sweet and good and miraculous. It is a luxury, to smile moonily across the table at someone, to press my finger into a glowing cheek, to be so dumbly happy all the goddamn time. This a longer, better story, but for now I want to keep it to myself, want to keep it in the room in which it was born.
(Who We Are With Our Clothes Off, 2018)
Studio-ing
I’ve been slowly chipping away at this series of naked fruit for several years now. This is the shot I’ve wanted since the very beginning, it took me two years to track down a ripe banana tree. This project technically has nothing to do with sex, but I will admit that this one did turn out pretty graphic.
My official statement, from my website:
Fruits stripped of their skins, left naked on the vine. Abandoned on the tree, exposed to an indifferent world; survival seems unlikely. A question posed as a series of nude portraits: how much can you lay bare? What is that worth?
If anyone in LA has access to a peach tree, hit me up.
Other big news: I pulled the trigger on a studio space! I’m thrilled, it’s been a goal of mine for a year or so now. I’ll share some photos once it’s more set up. LA friends, come by for a studio visit! I’ll give you wine.
Further Reading
Other cornerstone texts in the Gay Canon: Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, which is one of the least chill books I have ever read in my entire life.