THIS IS A DESIRE TEXT

America is about finding something to worship. - Alex Dimitrov

pretext: separateness is not equal

He wanted to know himself better....know, meaning? He paused, but could not come to any sort of conclusion. Just a fragment came to mind, from Bhanu Kapil's Incubation: A Space For Monsters: I don't even have an origin myth. Just places where I stood, at crosswalks, waiting for people to start moving/disappearing (50). He breaks down the words a bit, makes into a more of a poem, but the end result is always the same. He did this not wanting to terrify (51). He realizes, in this instance, he is terrified of being seen, of even seeing himself for what he is: not as a truth, no absolute, hands not to grasp past hands, but memories, like a traces of fingers stuck above a candle flame, as a child, curiosity growing in heat, before pulling away, too hot, that you had to forget. So where to begin, he mutters. Where can I find the meaning that resists meaning? Start by dropping he, I mutter. Separateness is not equal. Do I have to recall such a painful history? ...yes, some voice reaches my ears. Whose voice is it? ...your own.

Here I begin.

part 1: this is a desire text A beginning is these words. A beginning is, like before, recognizing myself as split. A beginning is birth, not from the womb, because language and self-discovery do not have an incubation period, but the parsing together of the strands of identification and disidentification...that engage...in an endless conversation (Rohy 349). Why do I have to try and define a beginning? Like Alison Bechdel, I pick a moment that feels less incomplete than the others and sketch it. But I work against the archival grain that tries for nicely tied knots, as if some old white man shoots disparaging glances when I recite his rules for tying shoes, but like messiness instead. I say something I'm not supposed to: fuck you. But I know I really cannot play delicately here. The shoelaces are a noose I could have used around my neck when the thought, but never the full reality, of suicide struck me. When I arrived at place of bearing the full force of violence, I wanted the only possible end. Death. But I resisted this impulse. A beginning is, like before, recognizing myself as split. Splitting myself from the impact of that memory of ending. A beginning to find wholeness: January 31st, 1989, Eight individuals, arms interlocked, across the Golden Gate Bridge, To protest against AIDS, Fog obscures the background of the image, Rick Gerharter's eye drawing them into our gaze, Symbolic without being specific, quoting Deborah Gould in Moving Politics, they awaken us toward uprising (3). A sense exists that anything we can do is possible. This is what a beginning is. Utopia? No, the world's never going to flourish. Instead: the anticipation of some shift. Like a monstrous wave inundating you, taking everything you know in. But also giving you freedom to find new ways of being. Here I begin, again.

I want to write about Bhanu Kapil's Incubation: A Space for Monsters and Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?. (This is another beginning.) I want to talk about them because, on the surface level, they don't seem to connect: to my body to each other to questions of selfhood That I endlessly mull over. (As subtext: even as I sit outdoors at restaurant with the faint trace of of ancho chile in my throat.) I want to talk about them because they do connect, and more than that, like Incubation says, they're imprinted on each other without ever knowing it. Memory that is expectant, not realized until after the fact. Like this moment sitting outside in sunshine. Vague so you can place that memory for yourself. I want to talk about them because they invade my dreams. No, not the actual dreams I never seem to remember, but the day dreams, when I'm wide eyed, walking west down Spruce Street in Philadelphia, and they somehow leave their impression on my sense of self as I lengthen my stride to make the changing stoplight. Kapil says go, Laloo, go. Bechdel sketches an opening in a mirror. Here I make some declarative statements: Incubation is not just a work of fiction. It is a work of desire. (Do you understand this distinction? If not, just think about everything you imagine your body to be.) Are You My Mother? is not just a work of memoir. It is a work of desire. (Do you understand this distinction? If not, imagine your body intertwined with a lover's.) This text is not just an academic text. It is a text of desire. (Do you understand this distinction? If not, combine declarations one and two. I will not spell it out for you.) But I will explore a question: What do you do with a desire text?

part 2: in-between desire lines A desire text creates: An archive, not boxes among many others filled with artifacts in a dingy basement, but of flesh a form lying out in Rittenhouse sun, collecting rays in elegant worship. Look at me with your eyes; Undress me. (No, not to objectify.) Look at me to be with me. As Halperin would say, The writing of history is taking place now (18). An archive, taking place now, Kapil says, is a blood text (22). Red. Laloo. Who is this Laloo, you probably wonder. Laloo...is being written. Laloo is who or what you make it. You and not you, a cyborg, a monster. But always red, always bleeding, taking place now, bleeding because it flows. An archive, flows but has stoppages. Bechdel knows this and represents this visually in her comics: a literal space between frames, not emptiness, lack of meaning, but an excess. How do you pause between memories? How do you reconcile gaps in meaning? An archive, asks did you ever do it? Wish you weren't there? (Kapil 7). Yes, you didn't want to be queer. When he tried to pound out of you. Stop. There I go splitting myself again. I, I, I, I...I didn't want to be queer again, when punched he tried to shatter me, but the pieces were large enough to be made whole again. I... An archive, space where language gets very confusing as it approaches this place where inside and outside touch (Bechdel 257). You as a subject authoring your desire, and finding moments where you wish that very desire away. Not dead, but in-between, enveloped by irreconcilable tension.

An archive attempts reconciliation. How?

Two anecdotes meeting like I do over coffee with friends. I'll have a macchiato, I say to the barista, before asking the anecdotes what they'll have. They inform me in a soft, dismissive tone they want nothing, before proceeding more forcefully: JUST LISTEN. Anecdotes assuming forms not realized in the fragmented memories themselves. Physical forms beyond the bounds of physicality that is real. (Real as in: two fingers grasping the pen that transmits sensation through ink.) They are monstrous because they are different; cyborgs because I endlessly choose them to reproduce associations. (I'm talking about virtual reproduction here.) JUST LISTEN. JUST LISTEN. JUST LISTEN. JUST LISTEN. I let the first anecdote speak: I am 12 years old. My body is a piece of paper. Thin, tearing at the edges, ready to be written all over. I sneak glances at guys' cocks on our shared computer. I know my family will catch sometime soon. But I can't stop looking, even though it's not the right thing to do. They write faggot on my lines. I can't get past that word, but I first noticed this feeling sitting in the restaurant booth. The way the light hit him, and I felt it in my own cock. Why do I hate how I feel without knowing what it means? (I realize now I've been trying to suppress something. I can't trace my shame back to March 11th, 2011. Blood still drips from scraped up hands, but this negation runs so much deeper.) JUST LISTEN. YOU'VE GOT SOMETHING MORE. The second anecdote compels itself to speak: I am 22 years old. My body is solid as I stand in front of a mirror, the pair of cobalt blue briefs tightly hugging my hips. He's naked and hard, as he stands pressed up behind me. His hands wrap around my waist as I feel his warm breath against the nape of my neck. I am beautiful.

Do you understand how reconciliation is possible? Do you need theory to make it clearer? Do you only understand your desire through theory? Here's a little bit of theory, courtesy of Homi Bhabha. (My word first) Pleasure attempts to turn rhetorical and temporal disjunction into a poetics of praxis (307). . . . . . . . . . I try to figure out what I'm saying but I don't understand. It just feels too fucking incomplete. I love theory, but it only helps the archive so much. Let's think differently. I want you to join me as I am thinking differently. Toni Morrison springs up from inside the 'o' of join: I am looking for the join... I want to joint...I want to join... Again: Do you understand how reconciliation is possible? Then how? Bhanu Kapil, so succinctly: I love you. Please don't die (72). Yes.

It's March 5th 2011. No, not 2012. Last year in the dissipation of winter, but not quite the emergence of spring. I'm sitting on a bench in Fort Greene Park in New York. (If you've never heard of it, it is a a large swath of green on the western of Brooklyn between downtown on the west, and the abandoned Navy Yard on the north.) My hair is longer than usual. I'm not getting enough work, and the tension boils over at my current job, so I've held off cutting it. A gust of wind picks up, strands swirl, and though previously lost to tree shadows and foot traffic buzzing along the path, I am brought back into my body as the wind subsides, and the hair rests along my eyebrow. Why am I telling you this? Why do you think this is for you? (It is, though.) I love you. Please don't die repeats. (I am trying to prove I am real.) (I want you to love me, too.) Now is difficult times. Now I am afraid of the future. Now am I afraid of myself. But I rifle through my tote bag, as the sun peaks through a passing cloud, to find David Wojnarowicz. He writes toward uprising from his grave, dead from AIDS in the mid-90s. The image on the cover of The Waterfront Journals is simple: A man, whose skin is a map of the city, runs while he is burning. I'm suddenly warm, and not sure why. Physical surroundings are still the same yet my feet burn, then torso and heart, then brain, which is the trigger. Suddenly he, this man or maybe Wojnarowicz (or maybe they're the same person), speaks to me. Run run run run run. (I have repeated this phrase many times, but it always applies.) Run run run run running into something different this time, though. Into I love you. Please don't die. (Told from myself to myself.) Into another sentence by Kapil, which is as close to truth as you can get: I choose a basic word deep inside what I want, which is the body, and begin there (22).

part 3: meditations on memory It may seem like I've been repeating myself, and I have. But a repetition is not so much an endless fixation on a particular moment. Instead, it's how that moment invades our body, our relationship to others, and the sense of what the future is going to be. I look at Kapil and Bechdel to find they say something similar about memory: Kapil says the body hangs its memory on itself, which is cystic, apparent, lolling (22). Bechdel, from a dream, literally shows us a cyst she pulls from her face, announcing the escape from particular memories she had of her mother. Memory is like a cyst because: It only grows in the moment of being enacted. But it never goes away; like Kapil says, it is hung on itself. A cyst is benign, but this doesn't mean it isn't painful. Bechdel, interrogating distance between her and her mother, reveals these painful effects. Painful effects trigger a reminder: Two weeks ago, sitting in the theater with my friend Tim, watching the French-Canadian flick Monsieur Lazhar. An Algerian man, outsider in Montreal, comes to a teach a class whose former teacher hung herself. Death hangs in the air, permeating things silently, is there, everywhere apparent in the silent rage and sorrow of children, who are told they must not confront their fears. After credits rolls, we both step out in darkness. We walk into the definition of art that Homi Bhabha provides. Art is the fully presence of a haunting of history (18). Into our own bodies as art... even deeper into memory...

I am alone, days later in the same darkness, except warmer this time, more humid as the air beads on the surface of my skin, and I recognize the feeling of being free in still, undisturbed spring air to have vanished. I'm not alone in myself, I find myself thinking silently. The atmosphere makes an impression. The rubber soles of my canvas shoes dragging, soft shuffle against hard asphalt beneath. A hum of a car speeding down some side street, a motion that travels right through me. Orange street bulbs tinted by their plastic covers, revealing, as I step under, my tan from earlier. Then that darkness, intensified along the edge of memory, and in its heart. Do you get it? Where I do not want to go but cannot control going. Here marks the site where the archival project turns against itself (Rohy 352). But how? A memory that is not always apparent, or at least rarely is. The sound of footsteps from behind me, soft thuds not belonging to me, but to some nameless figure who is also the haunting of my past. Who is the man on March 11th, 2011. Who punched me to the ground with three swift blows. Who may have hated me because I am a faggot. Who made me struggle, the day after my reconstructive surgery, to open my mouth wide enough to slip applesauce in. My pace rapidly speeds up. But in the act of my own motion, I do not let the atmosphere vanish. I let it speak to my own disappearance, to what Rohy calls the all-too-visible difference within historicism (352). That is, within living.

But do not believe disappearance is permanent. Do not believe any state is permanent. Do not believe the archive is permanent. If it is made of the body, and the memories which it hangs (or cannot control being being hung) on itself, disappearance will retreat. I only need to quote Elizabeth Grosz to get this inspiration. Space is open to how people live it. Space is the ongoing possibility of a different inhabitation (9). Like Bechdel cannot control her dreams, or in large part a persistent anxiety built up early in childhood, the memory of assault isn't going to be blown out like a candle on a birthday cake. But it is no longer paralyzing; continually revealing itself in unexpected moments, it enables the virtual, or the potential for something other than the actual (Grosz 12). It is 1989 and I am at the Golden Gate Bridge. Everyone else might tell me I'm only four months old, but I simply cannot erase what happened during this time. I sit on that bridge then, in a moment now, that literally reawakens the aim of politics then: To show it is worth dying for. To arrive at what is worth dying for, the archive doesn't look to what is possible, though sometimes these concrete actions compel political movements. The archive, at least where something queer happens, takes advantage of these impossible moments where the body hitchhikes beyond countries when it cannot take violence against its presence. Here, once again, I say I am Laloo, who holds on to memory of the earth: Paris, not Paris itself, but...(49) Here, once again, I say I am Laloo, who, though she is a Punjabi born in the UK, echoes what I feel. I'm sorry I don't not have more to say about the period of submergence that proceeded my arrival (35). Here, once again, I say I am Laloo, who echoes what I believe. I am speaking of hitchhiking which is the future (11).

This type of hitchhiking, traversing time and space through memory, is considered transhistorical. (What, you might be asking, do I mean by transhistorical? Lets break it down to its parts: trans & historical) Trans conjures a string of associations. Transformation, transgender, transdisciplinary. My own movement: Both through and beyond, What I call belonging while feeling unhinged. The historical is not: What white conservative men at textbook companies in Texas pass off as Truth. The historical is: The way of making a moment more official, official in the sense of a memory moving from a point of abstraction to artifact. The cultural artifact as: An object, often material, sometimes for an audience, sometimes not, that serves a point of departure for a much lager, still undefined, project. This text, in its accumulation of past memories, hung in excess on the present body wanting to search toward a virtual future. Transhistorical is thus the way in which we move through and beyond memories as cultural artifacts, or what Bhabha calls a right to difference in equality (xvii). As I proclaim the archive to demand a right to equality through difference, I recognize these cultural artifacts are to be considered equally. I recognize how this equal look will not lead to the conclusion that these artifacts are all same. But difference in memory does not paralyze the archive. It is the most clear boundary from which we generate overlapping, conflictual histories that reveal the productive and creative history of the minority as a social agent (xx). The transhistorical makes present how this social agency has been inhibited.

interlude, may 2012 (presencing) Summer has arrived. Bare flesh is everywhere I look from the vantage point of the coffee shop window. Just a few days ago, I thought I was moving to San Francisco on June 5th but now, somewhat curiously, with very sudden intensity and force, that plan has been altered. The archive begged me to stay. No, not begged, that's not the right word. It resonated within me that my time in Philly wasn't complete. The archive is able to speak to the future without making us aware of the reasons for why it resonates. At least not immediately. Summer has arrived, and I am alive again. Breath in the air, I tell myself, as I think of a single word: humectant. . . . I break from theory again. Bechdel gives me an uneasy tension I can't wrap my head around. You cannot live your life and write it at the same time (7). But is the archive writing? Is it not recollection? A process which occurs after a memory emerges, that is, after living itself is done. The key word: process, an action that I engage in for the purpose of giving myself a chance to inhabit the virtual spaces I've described as important. Summer has arrived, and I am alive again. Or, at least, I'm recognizing once again I am alive. And yes, I am writing these words. But soon as I'll set down my pen and exit the coffeeshop, I'll be in the sun. I'll breathe the air. And later, back in West Philadelphia, I'll return to writing. You can have both.

part 4: not enough rich, white heterosexuals give a shit This text is being written in crisis. Bodies stand out when they are out of place, Sara Ahmed reminds us (135). This seems obvious, but these bodies, who look and are different, actually or through perception, suffer because of this difference. Virginia Woolf comes to mind here. When she strolled along the banks of a fictional pond in a melding of Oxford and Cambridge. How she would, years later, sink herself with stones. Whatever her affliction, she reminds me of stories on the news. (I begin to tear up here. I have to pause for a moment...) 12 years olds, relentlessly bullied, until they believe no other recourse exists, except their own ending lives. Or the pastor who recently gave a sermon saying homosexuals should be rounded up into an electrified fence. I repeat death, again. I begin with death, again. I cannot resist the image of death coming from everyday life, again. Woolf, Bechdel, and Kapil share this with me. Like Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, we repeat the moment of...arrival with death as the effect of these out-of-place bodies (Rohy 357). Derrida calls this archive fever. His contemporary Lee Edelman explores how this brushing up against death makes a queer future hopeless because these rich white heterosexual men use death to keep things permanently unequal (Rohy 358). Yet I am not dead. Bechdel stills sketches. Laloo still bleeds. While traveling: You write them. Choose your own preferences (Kapil 80). Hitchhiking across the world I want to make for myself, I recognize difference and embrace it. From the little pieces of the poem, its comings and goings, there rises the great history of the languages and landscapes (Bhabha 337).

As I hitchhike, I have to think of something to make myself stand out. I know I said white, rich heterosexuals don't give a shit. But they do when: I put on my tight cutoff shorts that sit high above my knee, and wear that purple v-neck, with its plunging neckline exposing my chest. I know they care because they've called me a faggot before. As I was walking down to the 13th Street station one July last year, I walked by this group of young guys. Going in the opposite direction, they uttered that word again. Faggot. And added, for good measure, that I should be beaten because of it. That exposed chest tightened. My heart was beating faster than I can even put into language. Few moments in my life do I remember being so terrified. (I'm only afraid of myself, I try to think now.) Did you ever do it? Wish you weren't there? (Kapil 7) That question again. And another that blooms: Were you ever afraid of dying at the hands of another? Why am I sharing all of this? What am I really doing? I want you to know me. I want you to know me so I know you. Like when I'm with him and we're at the bar sharing a drink, and the conversation creeps into this dark place. Buildings, skylines, corners, have holes in themgaps: missing persons (Holleran 22). Yet we'll fuck later. We'll strip down in his bed after the long walk through the the humid night. We'll cut through the stillness of the air by undressing. Briefs also motionless in a puddle at the foot of the bed, as our bodies move in closer. Then that moment, that singular moment of ecstasy as I lift his legs up and our eyes meet in anticipation: What persists through all this is the allure of the body (23) I'll hitchhike in the glory of my body if you'll also accept my scars. If you'll hitchhike with me, these men will not be able to hide their indifference.

A desire text is about going out into the open. The open as metaphor and actuality: These words began closed off, separate. But separateness is not equal. I, I, I, I, split, afraid to step outside. But the Empire State Building alight. A desire text is about going out into the open because: the city's inescapable, gorgeous, and on fire. I have my kingdom (Doty 164). A desire text is about owning the city, the country, about dissolving boundaries between cities and countries, because you're not content to be erased in the making of these boundaries. I am a monster. I am a cyborg. I reproduce myself in association. (I still define these terms as I write.) But better to be a creature that rejects the official histories of the State: Those people on the Golden Gate in 1989 yelling silence equals death. Laloo, who travels across a foreign land anticipating her arrival. Bechdel who sketches forgotten history in frames, and between them. A desire text is the body as superheated glass in a studio. Radioactive red, you as your own object being spun, being twisted and bent by your own subject. But this is not splitting. An image again: I, I, I, I. As if you scatter pieces of yourself among ephemera littered on your bedroom shelves. You cannot give someone else that power over you. A desire text is the body in the glory of its simultaneity in space and time. A desire text is a rushing forward, a hanging back, a living in the in-between. A desire text is the queering of death itself (something more than negation) to find your own body in those gaps to find the bodies of others who share that same drive to deny rich, white heterosexual men their indifference.

post-text: i'll not sketch doing I've got to leave you with some conclusion. Or at least I feel like I should, given how much of my body you have seen, with all of its scars. It's October 2010. (Yes, another sudden shift in time. If you're not used to it yet, you'll need to be; this is the future.) I'm visiting Washington D.C., though the reason why now seems to escape me. I remember the sunshine as I pass from the Hirshhorn Sculpture Gallery west to the National Portrait Gallery. I'm headed to see Hide/Seek: Desire and Difference in Modern American Portraiture, the first such exhibit at the Smithsonian to feature art by LGBTQ people. It takes a while to get there. Fill in those gaps, if you wish. I, at ease in the city. I at ease, light steps, almost a glide, on the sidewalk. The art surrounds me now, and I'm diminutive. Imagine me as a sculpture of Degas, apparent movement as a fixed, stone body. There are too many names to name, too moments where a naked body catches light and is more beautiful than any Greco-Roman sculpture. There is Wojnarowicz, with his video of ants crawling carelessly over a cross. They'll remove this video a few months later to uproar. This speaks to me, but I cannot forget the painting by Keith Haring. Unfinished Painting, 1989, is one of his last pieces. Known for his vibrant cartoon figures, I immediately notice how stark this piece is. Though the color is a deep purple, it begs me to think of a few words: somber, regal, reflective. The figures are still there, outlined in a thick black line, with squiggles in a blue shape colored inside the form, like crudely drawn bones and organs. But only a corner of the painting is complete.

My eyes scan downward. I see the bodies, once whole are now broken up. I know that Keith Haring is dying from AIDS at this time. I recognize how his own body might be suffering. How, at the time, before too many treatments, his body was a monster to itself; not the monster I am to myself, the one I want to be, but forced by some invisible virus he know didn't deserve, that he feels punished for. I see the bodies cut up, fragmented; memory is like glass shards now. My eyes scan downward As I trace the trail of paint dripping, dripping, dripping to the edge of the canvas. I am speechless, afraid to speak, even. I know he is dead, and my words could somehow do an injustice to his memory. But the dripping of the paint on the canvas reminds me of limbs, which have been stiff and immobile in my gazing. I recognize how the ink got on the canvas somehow. I recognize he is dead, and that I grieve he's no longer with me. But I also recognize he's telling me something. The only thing I can I possibly end with because this ending, like Bechdel reminds us, is an opening up into many things (244-5): i'll not sketch doing for you; but i'll sketch it with you, starting with what is unfinished in our intertwined histories.