Not y'all waiting for RuPaul to save Drag
It's 21:12 PST, April 19th, and there's a New Moon/Solar Eclipse in Aries
Dearest F@guettes,
In light of the drag bans and anti-trans legislation sweeping the United States, I have returned to David L. Halperin’s book How to Be Gay. He takes his pointy pen and separates gay identity (who you are) from queer subjectivity (how you feel) to better understand their relationship to popular American culture. I should mention that he does so without resorting to the treacherous waters of pathology. Gender inverts, deviants, and homosexuals need not apply. Like D.A. Miller, the author of A Place For Us, Halperin argues that sexual orientation cannot adequately flesh out queer desire. And yet Broadway musicals, for example, can. Why? According to him, shows like Gypsy or The Wizard of Oz aesthetically realize a queer “sense of difference, desire to escape, and will to imagine alternatives.” So does drag. Queers of all ages run to these forms because they concretize their f@ggy desires and sensibilities. It’s been eighty-four years and the alt-right has finally caught on. Now, they’re coming for The Children. By criminalizing our care, our art forms, and the spaces in which they flourish, they are drying up wellsprings of queer feeling and being. Stay wet, y’all. Even if you have to do so on the Internet. “Destroying art,” Alexander Chee warned, “is practice for destroying people” and I don’t want to see you get destroyed. Take care.
Sincerely,
E.Y.
Endangered Bookslut Sighted in the Wild:
Last month, I had the pleasure of performing a sing-a-long at U.C. San Diego’s Epstein Family Amphitheatre. Encanto, Grease, High School Musical, and Frozen pervaded the campus air for four different and delightful days. Arriving an hour or two early each day, I decided, despite my wallet’s protestations, to visit the university’s bookstore. Emotions stirred. I miss bookselling. When I bought The City and The Pillar there, I was reminded of the subject category I had the pleasure of shepherding while wasting away at Barnes & Noble. LGBTQ Literature is life. In time, I long to add something remarkable to its canon.
Books with Words, Books with Pictures, Books that Caught My Eye:
Note: Rachel Pollack’s writing has had a chokehold on me since 2019. I was traveling to Seattle for work and bought her short story collection The Beatrix Gates at the glorious bookshop Elliot Bay Books. After drinking up one hundred and eleven of its breathtaking pages, I was deeply affirmed. I am trans, I have trans feelings, and this is what they feel like. She passed away about a month ago now and her work has been on my heart. Please enjoy.
Burning Beard
by Rachel Pollack
In the last month of his life, when his runaway liver has all but eaten his body, Lord Joseph orders his slave to set his flimsy frame upright, like the sacred pillar of the God Osiris in the annual festival of rebirth. Joseph has other things on his mind, however, than his journey to the next world. He has his servant dress him as a Phoenician trader, and then two bearers carry him alone to the dream house behind the temple of Thoth, God of magic, science, writing, celestial navigation, swindlers, gamblers, and dreams. Joseph braces himself against the red column on the outside of the building, then enters with as firm a step as he can. The two interpreters who come to him strike him as hacks, their beards unkempt, their hair dirty, their makeup cracked and sloppy, and their long coats—
It hardly matters that the coats are torn in places, bare in others. Just the sight of those swirls of color floods Joseph’s heart with memory. He sees his childhood dream as if he has just woken up from it. The court magicians in their magnificent coats lined up before Pharaoh. The Burning Beard and his brother shouting their demands. The sticks that changed into snakes. And he remembers the coat his mother made for him, the start of all his troubles. And the way he screamed when Judah and Gad tore it off him and drenched it in the blood of some poor ibex they’d caught in one of their traps.
Startled, Joseph realizes the interpreters are speaking to him. “Sir,” they say, “how may we serve you?”
Now, don’t let the door hit ya where the Good Lord split ya ;)