Not y'all having a kiki in the dark...
It's 04:30 PST, February 24th, and there's a Full Moon in Virgo
Dearest F@guettes,
Griffith Park. Pearson Park. And now, Morley Park.
After moving to San Diego, I felt as lonely and undesirable as a single sentence floating on a wide, blank page. Spas weren’t right, gym memberships expensive. All that was left, it seems, were beaches and parks. Of the latter, with its trails, restrooms, playgrounds, and picnic tables, Marcus McCann wrote they held “A Thousand Luminous Threads,” threads that connect every park to every cruiser.
I don’t feel as lonely, hidden there, connected, in love (or what feels like love), in the dark.
There they feel the same to me. Maybe that’s why it’s the only safe place left. Because they are the same: the dark and its loveliness. Must I always turn to poetry to free a feeling? “There is in God, some say,” Henry Vaughn scrawled, “a deep but dazzling darkness.” I know it well, most doomed queens do. We’re looking for lust-love-love-lust there and we find it . . . fleeting. “O, for that Night!,” Vaughn continued, “where I in Him / Might live invisible and dim!” No, he’s not talking about cruising or cruisers. He’s talking about God.
Although to be uncomfortably honest, I don’t see a difference.
Sincerely,
E.Y.
P.S. “Don’t be afraid of the dark,” I am summarizing Robert Jones Jr., “for that is what you’re made of.” I haven’t been able to look at the sky the same since. I’m going to masturbate now, goodnight.
Endangered Bookslut Caught Reading in the Wild:
Books with Pictures, Books with Words, and Books that Caught My Eye:
Note: Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance has captured my attention. I am moving through the novel slowly with savory concern. Reading him, reading his characters Malone and Sutherland is akin to experiencing a fever dream. At once, I am intimately familiar and a miserable stranger in Holleran’s New York. More thoughts to come. See if you like him and nibble on his short story in the meantime.
There’s a Small Hotel
by Andrew Holleran
He hated having to stay in hotels – or rather the fact that he had once lived in New York City made him feel demoted to an inferior status when he came back on visits. Returning to Manhattan was like seeing someone who’d once been your lover but was now with someone else; like going back to a house you used to own but can no longer enter, so you park your car across the street and look at it from a distance. For a long while he did something like that. The first thing he would do when he came up out of the subway was walk over to a building on St Mark’s Place – as if his apartment should still be waiting for him, with the same lock, fitting the same key he had kept as a memento. But he’d lost the apartment when the building was sold and the new landlord discovered he was not living there full time. Now someone else was, and after a few trips back he stopped walking past the entrance to peer up at his old windows – which led to the issue of hotels, which led to the issue of money.