Unlike graffiti found on freeway underpasses or billboards, latrinalia is the art of tattooing anonymous (and yet personal) details on the stalls, walls and mirrors of public bathrooms. This month, my poems are memes of latrinalia I’ve come across in my own life that I now scrawl here on the bathroom walls of substack.

Ordination

Squat.
Denim ankle cuffs.

On the metal door.
“D” + “T”.
In the vice grip of.

Black sharpied heart.

Caught.
In the vice grip of. 

Black sharpied heart.

Pissing witness.
Turns.

Belated officiant.

Power vested.
And undressed.

Mutual. 
Exposure.

Do you.
And.
Do you.

Ache.

From tenderness.

Testified to.
And.
Notarized in.
The Walmart restroom.

Hello substack friends!

I’m reaching out to share the good news that I am a part of a new reading community and teaching collective called The New Commons, alongside my friend Ris, founded by my friend Lauren. At its core, this is a program where we teach our (and hopefully your) favorite books to make them come alive in new ways through guided discussion.

In two weeks, I will be teaching my first cohort: a four week course on The Odyssey and one of its incredible film adaptations, O Brother, Where Art Thou?

It’s interesting teaching this in the midst of a ton of discourse about Christopher Nolan’s adaptation, alongside some of its worthy praise and critique. Whether you loved, hated, or were stirred by Nolan’s retelling or if you just want to revisit a classic you might have used CliffNotes for in high school, this cohort is for you.

We’ll dig into conversations about The Odyssey’s characters, themes, literary style and the work of adaptation itself. But most importantly, this is a chance to discover for yourself why this epic remains one of humanity’s most enduring stories.

We want as many folks as possible to join our Tuesday and Wednesday cohorts (starting August 18th and 19th), so if you are interested, use the FRIEND30 discount code to get 30% off.

As a new venture, we want people to enjoy the benefits of our community as soon as possible, so if you are one of these early members you will also receive 20% off on all cohorts you register for in the future!

So, please join me at The New Commons to read, discuss and dive head first into The Odyssey!

Digital Versatile Disk (cinquain)

feature
presentations
“In a world” where video
cassette’s heroin chic cousin
eats in.

Walkman (lyrette)

Crush-burned
CD: tracks
sharpied around 
alien portal.
Quantum shift day-
dream, teenage 
Stonehenge.

CD Docey Doe 

Caught red light, handed 
off disk skips jewel case: scraped.
Bowie stutters at the Beeb.


2008: The Dancing Silhouette Is on the Wall

Homeroom prophet stoned
by paper boos: “The “i” in
“ipod” means ‘isolation.’”

Chapter 3

Three years and half a dozen more proposals later, Henri was standing in front of The Old Banger waiting for another round of marriage antics to begin. As annoying as she found the rituals of romance, she had been rather bored lately and was ready for some sport.

Two minutes later, the assortment of carriages pulled into town right in front of the gathering crowd. To everyone’s excitement it was the old, but very fine barouche that that approached first with carriage top had been fashionably pulled down (even though it was a chilled grey English day). Everyone could see three sets of heads and shoulders extend elegantly from the carriage’s lovely purple interior.

Once the carriage had come to a stop, the driver opened the door and a lordly middle-aged man stepped out. He had a large nose and a pair of round, blue eyes. Using his left hand, this gentleman escorted from the carriage his elegant wife, a porcelain figurine with small, angular features. Finally, from the other side of the four seated carriage, a young man bobbed out.

The young man was tall, dark haired, and trim (Henri could hear the women around her mutter what a “fine leg he had”). Catching her eye, the young man gave a sideways smile to Henri. As he did so, two lovely dimples formed around his bowed mouth which was forming strange, but not unpleasing shapes to his companions. Handsome, yes, but Henri had had enough of the pageantry and was about to turn away when a rider came from behind the caravan. Noting the rider, the young man turned and lightly strode over to these new presumably human and equine figures.

The stranger wore a large black riding coat, but even obscured under their oversized coat, a slender body could be noted as it was gesturing towards the newcomers. This cloaked form was fitted with an angular, almost cat-like face whose brow was furrowed as much as her companion’s mouth was dimpled. The rider was pouring over a small cloth covered book when the young man lifted his hand in a gesture of dismount. But the hand was to be ignored as the figure swiftly dismounted by kicking up a muddied boot from the stirrup.

As this figure dismounted the saddle, it was revealed that the figure was of a young woman (Henri could hear the other women around her mutter under their breath about the appalling sight of a young woman not riding sidesaddle). She scowled at the young man who had attempted to help her and began to berate him. They were having a semi-heated argument–in public. Henri let out a gasp, and yet, despite the public indiscretion, she tried very hard to overhear their conversation. To get closer, she wiggled in between the tightly knit crowd, but Henri couldn’t understand the furious syllables flying between the scowling rider and the smiling young man. Finally, in a fit of frustration, the rider took off their weathered hat and as they did so, a swath of tangled dark hair tumbled out under her electric eye. A kind of chill ran up Henri’s spine when she looked upon this almost unearthly creature.

Without offering a curtsey or a nod to the crowd-turned-audience, the windblown stranger made their exit.

Do the Bena-Drill 

3 a.m. blister 
packs, pink prizes, yet, by teeth,
tin-skin won’t peel.
I yield: pills on each eye;
tokens for the ferryman.


Sayge the Magician: A Koan 

Across Echo Park, 
a young woman levitates
above the spring reeds.
A magician’s assistant 
in training? Presto-hell-no!

She’s the pro sawing
herself in half. Calves braiding
rotate ‘til lotus
head smiling, floats. Do park pole
dancers have Buddha nature?

Snack Time Haiku

spork prongs teethe my fruit
cup. betrayed--upper cut--I’m
maraschino mouthed.


Corey M., You Made Me Laugh, and in Return, 

orange rubber cone
crowns you for an instant, flung
in fourth grade courtship.

Henrietta Bretton had the very great misfortune of being a handsome young woman not just of her village, but of the whole county. And what’s worse, her family name was well respected and her family estate grossly immodest. But what was worst of all, as the eldest with no brothers, it was all hers–almost. She could only keep the family estate within the family if she married and of course once she married it would ultimately be her husband’s.

When her father, Lord Henry Bretton, realized that he was not to have a first born son, he decided he’d cheat his disappointment and call his first born female heir after himself. It was a family name given to each first born going back four generations. However, even his own chromosomal disappointments wouldn’t stop his line of succession. As another means of cheating this genetic lottery, Henry would teach Henrietta how to play cards and listen to old gentlemen give specious, long winded diatribes as they drank and smoked. Henry eventually showed his daughter how she was to properly drink and smoke while not falling prey to such long talks. He showed her how the Bretton estate was to be valued, managed and properly maintained in the English way. As Henri grew, her father saw his daughter’s aptitude and appetite for competition grow along with her. As a solicitor, his heart swelled with a deep pride; as a father he was apoplectic. For as much as he could teach Henri how to grow the ambitions of her mind to theoretically manage the estate, he knew he could never materially give it to her to practically manage. If it were to stay in the family, it must pass on as a dowry. And on this account, Henry’s apoplexy only intensified, for as he saw his daughter grow, this hope slipped and tumbled ever more desperately with each passing year.

When she was twenty-two, Henri was proposed to by three men. One was rich and kind, but very old. Instead of kissing her hand would pat her on the head. The only thing Henri liked about this old man was that the war had taken an eye and an arm from him, making him a consistent source of mischief. The second suitor was middle aged, of the landed gentry (the polite way of saying “unemployed”), an overall a merry, rowdy bachelor. Henri couldn’t help but both admire and envy this man, well his freedom anyway, well his being a man anyway. But she knew that by marrying him, the admiration and envy would leave her. Besides, being materially comfortable his whole life had made him in equal parts a very good flirt and accomplished drunk. As these were the heights of his ambition, his liver was very well exercised even if the rest of him was not.

And finally there was a suitor who was young, jolly, good looking and even had a decent fortune, but was basically illiterate and would compose the most horrendous operas (however, he did have a transporting singing voice). Henri turned all these proposals down, or rather made her suitors turn their own suits down as her parents would not let her refuse them outright. This was done by scheming many devious ploys to scare her suitors away.

For the old man, Henri kept “accidentally” handing tea to his empty, armless sleeve resulting in a cuff drenched in tea water. For a military man, the embarrassment of a dirty cuff was almost more than he could bear. But he was a kindly and patient man and his embarrassment would ever reliably transform into forgiveness for Henri’s “accidentally” dirtying his cuff. When this tactic ceased to dissuade him from his suit, Henri would call the old gentleman on his blindside and when he turned, she ducked around him and would call him again until he had not just one tea soaked cuff, but two.

When it came to her middle-aged suitor things became a bit more challenging. Where the old man had wisdom to see through Henri’s tricks as a genuine unwillingness to get married, and so kindly refuse to continue his courtship, the middle-aged bachelor was too conceited to notice Henri’s not so subtle resistance. This made him easier to trick, but much more difficult to shake. Like most men of his financial and social position, this flamboyant cad believed that he was entitled to marry a young, beautiful heiress even if he did so only to eventually ignore her and flirt with other married women. But as quickly as Henri saw the shape of this man’s ambitions, she contrived a rather simple plan. When first courting Henri, the merry bachelor would squire her around exclusive parties with his wealthy friends who fancied themselves politicians. He brought her into his jockeying politico conversations in the hopes of making her dizzy and breathless with his contrarian opinions which he parroted from his peers, which in turn had been parroted from fashionable newspapers.

Unfortunately, Henri was also rich, richer even, and as a rich person had even more time to read fashionable newspapers. What was more unfortunate, Henri would read the political historians and philosophers stocked on her father’s bookshelf, the very ones which those fashionable newspapers would attempt to paraphrase (rather poorly) in their opining.

One night after being subjected to twenty minutes of recycled political punditry, Henri was duly bored. When this happened, she decided she would need to make a game of her circumstances or just walk into the ocean. So she seized up her intellectual and masculine peers. Having done so, she took a meaningful swig of her drink and in one motion downed it. She knew conversation was just as much about theatrics as it was about substance. When all eyes had been drawn to what they had previously thought was a wall with eyes and breasts, she turned her large eyes and breasts to the gentleman across from her. This gentleman had been speaking solidly for the last six minutes about a very interesting and controversial thesis on Napoleonic politics. Henri gathered almost immediately that he was the most respected in the group by way of his scholarly pedigree (but more importantly by his lordly title) and by equal measure was the most insecure.

Henri had found her mark.

Then the wall grew a month somewhere under her eyes, but above her breasts. Imitating doe-eyed naivety, Henri asked rhetorical question after rhetorical question about the flaccidity of Napoleon’s constitutional legitimacy and the emperor’s subsequent inability to maintain political potency in his body politic. When a lapse in awkward silence followed Henri’s questions, in theatrical ploy, she plucked the brandy from her mute interlocutor. As she sipped, she began to answer her own rhetorical questions with doe-eyes and a feminine brain. How dare she, and yet she dared. Boredom has often driven many a woman to such desperate undertakings.

After this public embarrassment, the merry bachelor became a melancholy one and stopped bringing Henri to these parties. But in a last ditch effort to beat her at romantic sport, he decided to draw Henri into a battlefield he was sure she would lose: London pubs. Again, unlucky for this man of nine and thirty, Henri had been duly prepared. Though it was her father’s lessons that had prepared her for the respectable drinking of a gentleman, it was her father’s colleagues that taught her the competitive drinking of a solicitor and what it took to win (which it turned out was a stubborn constitution, constant intake of water and pouring one’s own spirits into their neighbor’s).

For a fortnight he would take her to rowdy pubs to try to out flirt and out drink her, but night after night Henri left with less hangovers and more calling cards (not an immodest amount from the women her bachelor was trying to win). By end of the second week, the now weary and considerably less merry bachelor told Henri he needed to “away to Bath immediately” for his health (which was true as his liver had become a liquored paté).

The only boon gained in this awful year of courtships was that Henri had made her last suitor, the jolly, illiterate young man, her friend (and eventual tutee). She didn’t need a trick to convince him not to marry her; she just had to show her suitor what a better playmate she would be to him than a wife, which it turned out was easy to do. He didn’t seem that interested in marriage himself. His name was Fitzpatrick Fitzgerald, but everyone called him Fitz. And indeed Henri and Fitz were good and faithful playmates to such an extent that Fitz eventually would assist Henri in her anti-marriage schemes.

The world of men was a game and Henri was so bored of playing it. But as far as she could tell, there was no other world. She tried to content herself in the belief that playing a game was better than doing nothing at all, even if it meant she was only to derive little pleasure in winning some rounds, but inevitably lose it all in the end.

For All Subscribers: We’re going to kick off the month of gay with a triad of poems titled, “Dysphoria Cocktail: Gin, Urine and Cures,” followed by chapter two of North-Gayer Abbey and then we will wrap up the month with my gay-poet forefathers in “Immortal Diamond” and “I Stutter the Body Pubescent.”

For Paid Subscribers: On top of all the free stuff, there will be a bonus chapter of North-Gayer Abbey and three audio recordings of me reciting the last piece“I Stutter the Body Pubescent” pre-testosterone, six months into starting it and now four years later. It’s been a fun, semi-surreal way of capturing my adult puberty.

Thanks again for all your support and look out for a new piece of writing every Wednesday !

If you want to continue enjoying this rich diet of essays, art, novellas and more, sign up for $5/mo!

Regardless of how ambitious your art metabolism is, all subscribers, paid and free, will get a new poem a week, each one unfolding the monthly theme.

Announcement for June’s theme will be made Sunday!

North-Gayer Abbey (working title)

By Julian Saturnalia Mammano

Dedicated to Miranda (Mei): Thank you for being the one I could send the first drafts of this queer little story to when we both needed some cheering up (and for being my Austen ride or die for the past fifteen years).

Chapter 1 

Face shining from sweat and sea mist, a chill needled up and down her body: Henrietta was utterly alone. Everything was a gray blur atop the windswept moor, but this particular young woman wasn’t put off by the lack of definition. There really wasn’t anything of interest at the moor anyway, just some knobbly rocks, a couple of wilty trees and some disembodied moans that ebbed over the brown sea of dead grass.  

Just beyond the raggedy moor was the smudge of the ocean. However, even if the ocean was more clearly visible, no one goes to the cliffs of the moor for the sights. They go to grieve the unique depth of their felt loneliness–and that’s just what Henri did, every Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday (Mondays were for gathering the town gossip for the week, Tuesdays and Thursdays were for making dreaded little embroidered things, and Fridays were for draping oneself over chairs while reading other people’s letters). Today was a Wednesday. The worst day of the week. All the more reason to grieve on the cliffs of the moor. 

After she was satisfied with how soaked and pathetic looking she had become, and that she was painfully hungry, Henri turned back towards Shropshire Village Town. She was almost so blinded by the rage of her hunger that she nearly plowed through a crowd that had gathered in front of The Old Banger, the village clocktower, which had been broken long ago and had not banged in centuries. But to have fixed the name or the clock would have been to have had the lowest regard for tradition, a decidedly unpatriotic position to take. But where a different town would have gathered in front of the clocktower to know the time, Shropshire Village Town did so to hear what John Doverly, the town crier (a self selected position) saw from its rooftop. 

“They’re only about half a league away now!” John Doverly cried out.

“How many fine carriages do they have, sir?” shouted Mr. Fairington.

John turned back towards the road with his head sticking out of the side of the broken clock face, one hand shielding his eyes.

“Looks like maybe one fine carriage and two that are just alright–” 

There was an audible groan of disappointment from the crowd.

“Oh wait! Wait, I see an old, but very fine barouche as well!” 

The men gave sighs of relief into their pipes as they clapped each other on the back and shook hands. 

“What in the heavens is going on,” implored Henri. It wasn’t Monday, but Henri had to know what was happening that was making the village so concerned with a stranger’s collection of mediocre to very fine carriages. 

But no one was listening to Henri. They mistook her for a moor ghost as she was so pathetic and pale and whiny. She was ignored until she tugged on Old Woman Peters’ lace cuff. Old Woman Peters wasn't really old, just turning twenty-seven, with five healthy, awful children. Henri just liked to call her this pet name to make her angry. “Oh my dear girl, I thought you were a ghost of the moor! What do you want?” she asked while bouncing on the balls of her feet, trying vainly to see over a clocktower.

“Old Woman Peters–” Henri received a look that might as well have turned her into a ghost, but she pursued her inquiry. “What the devil’s going on? Who’s coming?”

“Do not invoke the Devil again, Henri. That was too close a call last time.” During a particularly boring winter, for a fortnight Henri had taken it upon herself to plant fun little items around O.W.P’s house: chicken’s feet, some pentacle shapes drawn in the snow and one night she came a-taping at Old Woman Peter’s parlor window in the horrible paper mache mask one of her sisters had made. O.W.P. had figured out Henri was behind these sloppy antics, but, for some reason, still believed Henri capable of successfully calling in the Dark Lord to her doorstep. Henri couldn’t help but be flattered.

Henri was mid-way through a magnificent eye roll when she saw Old Woman Peters’ nostrils flaring. “I’m sorry, very sorry, Young Lady Peters. Will you please tell me who is coming?”

In spite of herself, O.W.P.  smiled from the corner of her mouth. “It's a new family come to town. A rich family. Says they have ancestral land here they want to reestablish.”

“It’s just rich people?” The disappointment in Henri’s open mouth tumbled out. “Who cares about that?”

O.W.P. harrumphed. “Only people sensible enough to see the fortune a new son-in-law could bring to a family.”

“Isn't your eldest nine?” Henri couldn't help but blurt out. Old Woman Peters sniffed, “Not for my children, for Liza.” Liza Webster was Old Woman Peters’ eighteen year old ward who was left on her doorstep as a babe with naught but a thin blanket and a ribbon with the baby’s name scrawled in childish handwriting. The only reason the infant didn't die on the doorstep that night was that the stranger that had dropped Liza off had courteously attached a little bell to the ribbon so when the infant kicked or cried, the bells gave their own little cries, awakening the Peters. 

Despite this whimsical backstory, Liza had only ever grown more and more into a sensible and responsible young woman. Ever since Liza came of marriageable age, her guardian had been trying desperately to marry her off. But with no fortune nor family name to own her, this proved a near impossible task. But this mattered little to Liza since, from the age of thirteen, she had been preparing to take the veil. 

Even as a teenager, Liza played in her childhood fairy gardens. One day she heard a voice singing a little fairy song. She looked up to see The Holy Virgin sitting cross-legged on some dead grass in front of her, roofing a little fairy hut with an acorn top. Liza didn't take any time trying to convince herself of what she saw. Liza didn't bother questioning what was or wasn't in front of her: there was too much to attend to in the world to bother with all that. 

Ever a practical teen, the two quickly fell into a lively tête-à-tête about apostolic succession, the structural safety of straw fairy huts, and the sacrament of marriage. That last topic was quite the sticking point because, being raised as a good Anglican, Liza only recognized two Sacraments of the Gospel–and marriage was not one of them. Eventually, they agreed that it was deeply improper for a woman not to be married at all, so they landed on a compromise: Liza would be married to the church.

However, in wanting to gain some material compensation for taking care of this changeling, O.W.P. still held out hope Liza would marry a wealthy human man and thus reimburse her for her troubles.

When it came to her elderly neighbors’ insistence on marrying rich men, Henri flatly refused to be sensible–especially as it often led to predictable five act matrimonial alliances. She had found at an early age that the less sensible one would be, the less responsibility one would have to take on, and a suitable marriage was not a responsibility Henri was ready to accept yet. In fact, she wasn’t sure she would ever be ready and took great pains that everyone knew.

Romance of the Nonbinary Rose:

Medieval Romance and the Genre of Gender

By Julian Saturnalia Mammano

Prologue

So, good news everyone. I’m here to finally answer the question, “What gender is nonbinary anyway?”

Rather, I am here to literarily (that is homosexually) reframe that question as, “What genre is nonbinary anyway?”

Ok, but maybe, actually, I’m here to queer those questions by getting them into some hardcore HRT shit like, “How can nonbinary be translated from genre to gender?”

Which is a perfect time for someone like you to ask, “Who in the fuck cares?” To which I would reply, “I do.” To which you would exasperate, “Why do I care if you care?” Which, in turn, is the perfect set up for me to tell you, “I’m so glad you asked,” ‘cause now my queer duplicity has worked and the dialectical handcuffs are locked.

Logue

So now that we’re comfortably chained to the radiator in my Hello Kitty fantasy dungeon, it seems like the perfect time to have a little chat about our friend Sisyphus.

**For this “Theatrical Cut,” I have removed a chunk of the essay. In the ensuing sections, I present that Sisyphus’ gay counterpart, Sissyfist, is not bound to the absurdity of his punishment out of coercion. This is not just a choice of orientation towards the absurd (Camus’ ‘Happy Sisyphus’), but that Sissyfist perpetuates the absurd by his own choice to do so. The pursuit of “perfect masculinity” is used to illustrate the concept of striving for something elusive and absurd–you know, just as, like, a random example.

…..

So if striving for masculine perfection, maybe perfection of any gender, is a kind of absurd futility, then what the fuck is nonbinary? Non-futility? The most futility?

Nonbinary doesn’t have the illusion of a philosophical teleology. Don’t worry, it’s something more confusing and tautologically homosexual: it’s literary. In fact, it’s a genre, specifically the genre of Medieval Romance.

What’s more academically unforgivable, is that I’m basing the premise of my argument on etymologies, Latin ones to be exact. Still, it’s entirely fitting. If we must engage the absurd, we might as well let it beg the question in Latin like the whiny, vulgar bottom we know it is. So hit those poppers and open wide.

As some of you who are chronically virginal might know, both “genre” and “gender” are doublets of words that come from the same Latin root “genus” which means to designate categorization such as “kind, race, or type.”

Let’s introduce the two god ordained genre-genders: epic history and lyrical narrative.

From the earliest literature, while epics were written of battles and kings,

shoring up society’s structures and values, lyrics–narratives of one voice

expressing interiority–were written to represent that impossible, absent

experience, of access to the thoughts and feelings of another.1

Well, it turns out when these two gender-genre, epic historic and lyrical narrative, get it on, their twinky offspring becomes bigenred or bigendered or nongendered or maybe non-bin-gend-ed…? Regardless, this nonbinary gender-genre goes by the name of “Romanz” (if you’re a fan of the common tongue) or “Romance” if you’re nasty (e.g. French).

Romance, as a genre that places individual emotional experience

into the historical narrative and gives it equal weight and moral

signification, is the kind of narrative that most closely answers to

the business of actually living a human life.2

Well, shit, there you go: case closed. Except, it’s just a nice idea at this point. How does one actually assimilate this kind of genre, the one that gets at the “business of actually living a human life,” into their own human life?

The question essentially comes down to this: how do we get the individual experience into the historical narrative?

Over the centuries, Romance has donned its drag in many forms. In fact, its ability to shape-shift into different forms, into different media like manuscripts, film, tv, is what’s kept this genre from disappearing up its own bleached asshole.

These remediations kept the narratives “current,” offering new

products to consume and ensuring that medieval romances escaped

library and classroom shelves…[and into]...a new and more immediate

experience of the tale.3

Using Aronstein’s historical account of remediation, I further his assertion that Romance can be remediated into a new more immediate mediums, like, say, the human body. And maybe even as a gender in this new medium/body, like, say, nonbinary.

Neat–but, um, how? What is the mechanism of remediating the genre of Romance into the new media of a body? How does one go about stuffing certain kinds of stories–or genders for that matter–into bodies?

But wait, come to think of it, aren’t bodies, unlike manuscripts, more prone to changing over time? Can we get stable meaning out of uncertain flesh palpitating awkwardly in time ever flowing?

If we’re going to bother remediating a genre-gender into a body, we better know how to “read” it. We need to talk about hermeneutics, about the process by which we interpret.

So let’s cut out all this gay humanities bullshit for a moment and talk about some straight people shit: let’s talk about the hermeneutic of paranoia.4

To put it in inappropriate brevity, the paranoid hermeneutic, or hermeneutic of suspicion, takes “the universally widespread way in which enlightened people see to it that they are not taken for suckers.”5

To the straight world, an illegible body is a hostile text. If the body is the new medium for this gender-genre, the straight world reacts as a panicked reader facing symbols it cannot decode. They approach bodies—all bodies, their own included—with intense, paranoid suspicion, terrified of a misreading that might destabilize their own sense of safety in this straight world.

And in this straight world, if a paranoid hermeneutic can’t read a body, that body is far more prone to vulnerabilities of all kinds.

Paranoid hermeneutics reads by suspicion so we are not caught by surprise. To never be susceptible to surprise would mean you’ve transcended undesirable vulnerabilities like one’s clumsy humanity.

But the queer body inherently breaks with the project of transcended invulnerability. To be a “practicing” homosexual implies that you’re not, well, “right” “perfect” or exactly “legible.” It’s present progressive, it’s “becoming”--and how can you verify something that is not yet perfected?

“Becoming,” it turns out, leaves a lot of opportunity for “getting it wrong,” for humiliation. In the straight world, humiliation–being a sucker publicaly–is transmuted into involuntary divestment from the traditional power structure: the “right,” the “invulnerable,” the “powerful,” the “masculine.”

So what would our gay little non-hetero hermeneutic be if not paranoid? Eve Sedgwick calls it the “hermeneutic of the reparative.”

At a textual level, it seems to me that related practices of

reparative knowing may lie, barely recognized and little

explored, at the heart of many histories of gay, lesbian,

and queer intertextuality….6

Sedgwick elaborates on the relationship between the hermeneutic of the reparative and the histories of queer people with this quote by Joseph Litvak:

If a lot of queer energy, say around adolescence, goes into what Barthes calls ‘‘le vouloir-être-intelligent’’ (as in ‘‘If I have to be miserable, at least let me be brainier than everybody else’’), accounting in large part for paranoia’s enormous prestige as the very signature of smartness (a smartness that smarts), a lot of queer energy, later on, goes into . . . practices aimed at taking the terror out of error, at making the making of mistakes sexy, creative, even cognitively powerful. Doesn’t reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?7

Where Litvak tries to separate “mistakes” from “humiliation,” I think we need to keep them together. In a traditional straight power structure, humiliation is forced upon you—an involuntary stripping away of power. But embracing an illegible body flips the script: it becomes a voluntary choice to divest. Embracing an “illegible” identity that the dominant structure considers a “mistake” or a “humiliation” is a radical, voluntary reclamation of power. The cognitive, sexy and creative power of Litvak’s “queer energy” is generated precisely by not eliminating mistakes or humiliation, but by embodying them.

Ok, so we’ve got a definition by negation. What remains? Does nonbinary just refuse to acknowledge the reality of binaries, of definition itself? Is it an identity of delusion, staving off the inexorable decay of identity into one extreme of the binary or the other?

Yes, binaries are real, but what’s real isn’t totalizing.8

Epilogue

Maybe after all this, nonbinary isn’t a gender or a genre or even a hermeneutic afterall–maybe its not any one thing (oooh fuckin’ GOTCHA). Perhaps nonbinary is fundamentally an aperture, a hole, a gap where the common tongue of “Romanz” can interpolate, stimulate and inevitably ejaculate the individual’s unverifiable experiences into the homosocial eroticism of the verifiable historical epic by means of the remediation of this genre in their body (see I told you you would need those poppers).

Let’s take a final opportunity to slide back into Medieval Romance, to explore what it can look like to be involuntarily divested from a power structure to being reinstated to it by a hermeneutic of repair instead of paranoia. We are going to look at one of the most famous characters in Arthurian medieval literature, the Fisher King.

The story goes that the Fisher King was once the king of a prosperous land. However, after a significant betrayal of his kingly duties, he suffers a wound that makes him impotent and, as a result, the kingdom itself becomes barren. As punishment, in his little fishing boat, he is eternally bound to guard the Holy Grail alone. This was to be his fate until a knight came to his aid. The aid the knight offers isn’t to correct the king by combat or tongue lashing: it was to ask him a question. And the question is a simple one: “Whom does the grail serve?”

But shouldn’t the one guarding the grail already know (what a sucker)? And why couldn’t the knight just give the king the answer if it was going to help him (what an impotent sucker)?

It comes down to something close to a paradox: the king needed to give the answer himself, but also needed another person to ask him the question first.

In answer to the question, “Whom does the grail serve?” the king answers back, “It serves me.”

It’s only when the king acknowledges he is deserving of the grail’s healing, because he is in fact human, vulnerable and in need of it, does he take it–and in taking it, is restored to communion with his kingdom and they to him. He is healed.

Through Sedgwick’s hermeneutics of the reparative we can understand the Fisher King as the reparative reader who ‘‘helps himself again and again.”

What we can best learn from such [reparative] practices are, perhaps,

the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting

sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose

avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.9

The hermeneutic of repair, well, repairs. The practice of repair takes what is discarded from the power structure–mistakes, humiliation, vulnerabilities, uncertainties, what is undefinable, queer, nonbinary– and reinstates it back to its subjects on its own terms.

As a nonbinary person transing “toward” masculinity, I have not been exempt from wrestling with this absurdity. And after all this rock pushing of my own, I’ve realized that I can’t fix the absurdity of the orientation, but, through the hermeneutic of repair, I can choose to remediate this absurdity in my own body as something sexy, creative, cognitively powerful, humiliating–human.

The truth of my gay agenda is this: I think everyone has access to embodying the nonbinary because it’s not fundamentally an identity, it’s a capacity, one developed through the courage to exist within uncertainty, vulnerabilities. It is the totality that exists beyond the binary, beyond what is definable. It is the capacity that mediates and generates the ever shifting expressions of genres, genders and interpretations of a body throughout the messiness of time.

To develop capacities of the nonbinary is to be diligent in what will always be incomplete, to be serious in commitments to impermanence, to have form and flexibility. Nonbinary is what’s forged from the unstable center between binaries, with the absurd belief that something strange and beautiful and completely itself will step through that threshold of uncertainty—before it changes again.10

And that is true Romance, that is uniting the internal and external, the epic historical and the lyrical narrative in the perfect mess of a present moment: that is getting at the actual business of living a life.

Is this all still rather insufficient, unsatisfactory, and incomplete?

Let’s hope so.