Not y'all turning against Ryan Gosling
It's 10:33 P.S.T., May 5th, and there's a Full Moon/Lunar Eclipse in Scorpio
Dearest F@ggots,
Picture it! San Diego, California. 2003. I was bright-eyed, hopped up on sugar, and running through the aisles of a run-down Albertsons. Then, a bright pink box caught my ten-year-old eyes. I stretched out my hands and pulled the doll down off the shelf. It was, much to my young surprise, love at first sight. Without thinking, I sprinted through aisles, zig-zagged past shoppers, and darted by grocers until I found my parents, who were standing still, waiting patiently in line. “PLEASE CAN I HAVE IT!?” I begged. They eyed one another with curious looks, shrugged their shoulders, and famously bought me my first and only Barbie doll. I hadn’t even buckled my seatbelt before the box was torn asunder and the plastic restraints were abandoned in the parking lot. His name was Brad. He was Black. He had a polished skin-tight fade and his best friend was Ken. We were inseparable friends: or, in other words, in love. Now, when I say “in love,” I don’t mean romantically or sexually. I was, after all, a shy little girl far from her allergy-ridden spring awakening. When I say “I’m love,” I am speaking imaginatively. Brad facilitated a kind of proto-erotic daydreaming that encouraged me to connect with my inner emotional life. Who could ask for anything more?
Decades later, much to my gay surprise, Gen Z has taken up arms against Ryan Gosling. As Ken, he’s too old, lacks sex appeal, and is consequently unfit for the live-action film. Even now “fuck them kids” yearns to climb high, tumble up and out of my throat, and fling itself wildly upon these misguided youths. I will try my best to restrain myself. No promises though.
Remember when bell hooks criticized second-wave feminism for defining men as the problem while ardently refusing to provide a solution? If you didn’t, now you do. In her book, The Will to Change, hooks suggests a rather fruitful alternative: namely, give boys (and men too frankly) a choice to participate in non-violent, non-aggressive forms of play. In doing so, toxic masculinity may finally abate.
Ken-ergy, a term coined by Gosling himself, stands in direct opposition to the Big Dick Zaddy Energy often associated with more belligerent, erotically charged expressions of masculinity. “You have a Ken in your life,” Gosling commented in an interview, “and you know that Ken has ken-ergy.” According to the A.V. Club, his vibe is confident, blissfully idiotic, loyal, jovial, endearingly sincere, and stylish———the six tenants of ken-ergy, as it were. A few men, and most importantly boys, come running to my mind for comparison: Steven from Steven Universe, Ryan from High School Musical, Carlton from Fresh Prince, Jacob from Abbott Elementary, and Ryan fucking Gosling. They are outliers that reject the tried-and-true volatility hardwired into normative expressions of masculinity. See The Notebook for reference. They prefer a more playful, arguably queer-adjacent mode instead. I wonder, in retrospect, if ken-ergy is, for all its worth, the non-derogatory way of saying, while also redirecting, if not unabashedly celebrating, the heartwarming visage of the fag-hag. Only the film can tell us. See you hoes on opening.
Sincerely,
E.Y.
P.S. I will probably make an entire date night out of seeing the Barbie movie. Between 4 a.m. Starbucks shifts and 7 p.m. rehearsals, I am prioritizing play and rest during demon hour. Midnight showing anyone?
Endangered Bookslut Reading in the Wild:
Let’s talk about Gore Vidal’s The City and The Pillar.
Jim, a self-loathing protagonist, sleeps his way through inter-war America until finally reconnecting with his high-school crush, Will. Their story is clearly a tragedy but theirs is not the only one. Vidal’s pen detests girls, women, and the effeminate writ large. Described as whorish and subservient, Mrs. Willard (Jim’s mother) and Carrie (Jim’s sister) aren’t afforded a modicum of fullness until the novel’s close. Maria Verlaine, a traveling companion of Jim’s, is fleshed out only to suffer the same belittling fate. Why? Because, when given the opportunity, she cannot sexually excite Jim. All in all, I don’t regret reading the novel. It’s a cautionary tale and two-hundred page reminder: keep white people talking; they always tell on themselves.
Now, onto better books.
Books with Pictures, Books with Words, Books that Caught My Beautiful Eye:
Note: Ironically, I came across Garth Greenwell during the Shutdown. While nursing the well of loneliness that was threatening us all, I bought his second novel Cleanness and later his first What Belongs to You. They are punctuation-light, plotless treasures that I highly recommend. Last month, I took a four-week craft seminar, taught by him, and I am still floating. To read his other fiction and or non-fiction, click here. Adore “Frog King” in the meantime.
The Frog King
by Garth Greenwell
It was of snow. We had pulled the drapes before sleeping but they did almost nothing to darken the room, the snow caught scraps from street lamps and neon and cast them back up. It was bright enough to see R. still sleeping beside me, cocooned in the blanket I had bought after the first night we spent together, when I woke shivering to find him bound tight in the comforter we were sharing, swaddled beside me. He repeated the word all that day, apropos of nothing, swaddled, swaddled, he had never heard it before, the sound of it made him laugh. He would sleep for hours still, if I let him he would sleep the whole day. He loved to sleep in a way I didn’t, sliding into it at every chance; it was like his native element, whereas almost always I slept poorly, uneasily, I woke finally with a sense of relief. He complained if I woke him, I’m on holiday, he would say, let me sleep, but he complained more if I let him sleep too long. We only had ten days together, his winter vacation, which he had decided to spend in Sofia while everyone else he knew went home. Mornings were my time to work, to spend with my books and my writing, my time to be alone; I would get up soon but for now I kept looking at him, his face bearded and dark, smoothed out by sleep. It was all I could do not to touch it, as I did often when he was awake, cupping his cheek in my palm or reaching around the curve of his skull. He had shaved his head at the end of the semester, I liked to run my hand around and around it until he ducked and told me to stop, annoyed but laughing, too; even annoyance was part of the pleasure we took in each other, we were that early in love.