As a kid, I was a notorious snooper. I peeked at Christmas presents, and I pilfered through bedside tables and closets. When I’d spend the night with friends, I’d go through their medicine cabinets and rummage through drawers beneath their sinks. I was never looking for anything in particular. I was just looking.

When I was nine or ten years old, I found a large garbage bag full of VHS tapes underneath my parents’ bed that seemed not to be there during one such excavation and appeared sometime between the next. Inside was a treasure trove of now-vintage pornography. One such tape, titled Heartbreaker, caught my eye. I remember sneaking it into my room and pushing it through the VCR's opening. The film featured a black man, whom I would later learn was named Sean Michaels. I’d never seen a penis like his. Unlike the other men’s in the video (and mine), his had skin bunched up behind his shiny pink glans, soft and gathered, as a curtain pulled back from a window. When he was about to cum, he began stroking himself, and the skin that had bunched up behind the glans glided back and forth over the head with a wet fluidity that I didn’t have language for. I didn’t know what I was seeing. I remember sneaking other videos to my room, sometimes three or four at a time, looking for what Sean Michaels had, and feeling that same charged recognition on the rare occasion I found it.

I became obsessed, and I’ve never stopped being obsessed.

Is it Freudian? The fetish as a response to lack—wanting what’s absent, desiring what was taken? Freud would say the fetish object fills a gap. Lacan might say the foreskin became my objet petit a, or the thing whose pursuit organizes desire without ever fully satisfying it, the placeholder for something lost before I had language to name the loss. Maybe both are right. What I know is that I saw it once at nine years old on a VHS tape under my father's bed, and I never stopped wanting it. Make of that what you will.

Many years later, after I’d come out, my first boyfriend had a foreskin. He and I were both still religious despite our sexuality, and I remember both of us being confused about each other’s bodies. He didn’t understand why I was circumcised if I wasn’t Jewish, and I didn’t understand why he wasn’t if he was Christian.

I remember asking my mother why I had been circumcised, and she said it was because we were Christian. As someone who had previously been heavily involved in the church, I pointed out that Paul is quite explicit in Galatians 5:2: “If you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ does you no good at all.”

She looked skeptical at me and said, “Well, it was your father who wanted it done. He wanted you to look like him.” I remember thinking, “Why did my dad think my dick would look like his? Why was he thinking about it at all?” My being circumcised wouldn’t have made me look like him in any meaningful anatomical sense beyond one surgical detail. I’d have my own size, shape, and proportions regardless, influenced by my own genetics and development. It was just a body part removed, the reasoning about as convincing as a one-night stand's promise to call. So let's slip underneath and take a closer look. What is a foreskin? What does it actually do? And what, precisely, gets sliced off before an infant's first goo goo ga ga.

With roughly three out of four American men circumcised for most of the last century1, a large share of the country grew up with no real exposure to what an intact penis looks like or how it functions, and even less of an understanding of what was removed.

I also want to quickly add that this essay is not an argument that circumcised men are less than. Most of the men I've been attracted to were circumcised. Most of the men reading this probably are, too. This is an argument about consent and about what the culture decided without asking anyone.

Under the Hood

The easiest way to begin is to start with what it isn’t. The foreskin is not an extra flap of skin. In an average adult male, the foreskin accounts for about half of the total skin of the penis. If unfolded, the missing skin on a circumcised man would measure somewhere around 3x5 inches, or the size of a standard index card.2

That’s not a trim. That’s a significant structure, removed in its entirety, from a day-old infant who cannot object, and who, as recently as the late 1990s, had roughly a 1 in 25 chance of being given anything for the pain.3 And despite the index card illustration, it's not a single undifferentiated piece of skin. The foreskin has parts, each with its own function and name.

The pucker of skin that extends past the glans (the head) on a healthy, intact penis has its own name. The Greeks called it the akroposthion.4 It's the part their sculptors idealized, the part their athletes tied closed with a kynodesmē (a string) before competition so it wouldn't accidentally retract and reveal the glans in public (considered obscene). They had a word for it because they valued it. We don't have a word for it because we don't have it. And the words we do have imply excess — overhang, extra skin — as if the body made a mistake that a scalpel was invented to fix.

Just behind the akroposthion is the ridged band, a specific stretch of tissue, different from the rest of the foreskin, dense with nerve endings and built to respond to motion.5 It's part of what makes the foreskin function less like a covering and more like an instrument. And below the ridged band, on the underside, is the frenulum: a small, V-shaped piece of tissue anchoring the foreskin to the glans, one of the most nerve-dense areas on the entire penis. Surveys suggest the frenulum is fully or partially removed in roughly a fifth to a third of circumcisions, sometimes as a side effect of a "tight" circumcision, sometimes because the surgeon simply takes it without distinguishing it from the rest of the foreskin.6 Almost no parent is told there's a difference. Almost no parent is told there's a choice.

There’s also a comparison I keep coming back to, one that sounds glib until you look at the actual anatomy: the foreskin and the labia are not just similar in function, they’re the same tissue.7 In early fetal development, the genital folds that become the labia minora in a female fetus are the same folds that become the foreskin in a male one. They’re developmentally identical structures that diverge based on hormonal signaling, not separate inventions that happen to look alike. This isn’t a metaphor. It’s why, in gender-affirming vaginoplasty, surgeons frequently use foreskin tissue to construct the labia minora and clitoral hood because the body already knows how to be that tissue. Ask yourself, honestly, whether removing a newborn girl’s labia minora as a routine, undiscussed procedure would ever have been treated as no big deal. Then ask why this one was.

What gets lost isn't just the structure itself. Without the foreskin, the entire environment of the penis changes. The glans, beneath the foreskin, remains moist internally, similar to a mucous membrane. Once it’s permanently exposed to the friction of underwear and the open air, every single day, for the rest of a man’s life, it does what any exposed skin would do: it thickens. It keratinizes.8 The fine mucosal surface coarsens into something closer to ordinary skin, which is less sensitive, more callused, and never quite returns to what it would have been.

And during sex specifically, the foreskin isn’t just decorative. The penis is designed to glide within its own skin like a sheath. The outer layer rolls back; the inner layer, moist and almost frictionless, makes contact, and the whole mechanism reduces drag. That gliding action does real work. It protects the vaginal wall from the kind of repeated friction that causes irritation, dryness, and micro-tearing, and it does the same for the rectal tissue during anal sex, which is even more delicate and even less tolerant of friction than vaginal tissue.9 Multiple studies on women with both circumcised and uncircumcised partners report more natural lubrication, less discomfort, and higher rates of orgasm with intact partners.10 This is not due to size or technique but to this one mechanical difference. Without the foreskin, that gliding mechanism is just gone. The shaft skin is taut, doesn't move independently, and rubs directly against whatever it's inside. Some studies estimate that penetration without that mechanism requires roughly ten times the force.11 That difference in friction is part of why a circumcised penis typically needs more lubricant than an intact one.

None of this is exotic information. America decided not to listen.

The Longer the Pucker, the Better

The Greeks didn’t tolerate the foreskin. They celebrated it!

Greek sculpture is the most immediate evidence. The kouros figures, the bronze athletes, the gods and heroes rendered in marble across five centuries of classical antiquity, and all of them are intact, idealized, and depicted with a pronounced akroposthion. The “overhang” was standard, not extra. The Greek aesthetic ideal of the male body included the foreskin as a necessary feature, the way it included proportion and musculature. A penis without it was wrong.12

The ideal wasn’t simply intact. It was a long, tapered, elegant akroposthion that completely covered the glans and extended beyond it. Greek sculpture makes this clear: the heroes and gods are depicted with a deliberate, graceful overhang that reads as a marker of beauty and refinement. A large penis, by contrast, was associated with satyrs and barbarians and comic figures.13 The aesthetic was modest overall in size, with a long foreskin. More coverage was the beauty standard.

This makes the kynodesmē make even more sense. A string or leather cord tied around the akroposthion to pull it forward and secure it during athletic competition. Greek athletes competed naked. The penis itself was unremarkable, simply the body in its natural state. But the exposed glans was another matter. The kynodesmē prevented accidental indecency. It also tells you something about how substantial the akroposthion was; you needed enough overhang to actually tie a string around it. The structure the Greeks were protecting was real and significant, not a minor anatomical detail.

They also had a specific word for the exposed glans: psolos. It carried connotations of vulgarity, lasciviousness, and lack of self-control. In Greek comedy, exposing the glans was a joke, the kind of thing a buffoon did for a laugh. The decent man kept his akroposthion forward. In public, anyway.

The public/private distinction matters here. The modesty norm around the glans was social, not sexual. The erotic pottery, such as the red-figure vases depicting every conceivable sex act with the specificity of a medical illustration, shows men fully engaged, foreskins doing exactly what foreskins do during intercourse. Nobody was suggesting men keep their kynodesmē tied during sex. The foreskin covered the glans in the gymnasium and the agora. During intercourse, it moved the way it was designed to move. The Greeks understood the difference between public decorum and private function. What they didn’t understand, what they would have found genuinely incomprehensible, is why anyone would remove the structure entirely.

Jewish men living under Greek and later Roman rule understood this pressure acutely. Circumcision marked them as different in a culture that considered the intact penis the only acceptable penis. Some responded by practicing epispasm, a form of foreskin restoration, where one would pull and stretch the remaining skin forward over the glans to approximate the intact appearance. It’s referenced in the Maccabees and in Paul’s letters. Surprisingly, foreskin restoration is not a contemporary invention. It’s a two-thousand-year-old response to a two-thousand-year-old cultural pressure fueled by the desire to get back what was taken, or at least to appear to have done so.14

Paul, writing to the Galatians, was operating inside this cultural context. His argument against circumcision was made in a world where circumcision was associated with barbarism, where the intact penis was the cultural ideal, and where Jewish men were literally stretching their skin back over their glans to avoid being marked as different. When Paul tells the Galatians that circumcision does them no good at all, he’s making a theological argument, but he’s making it within a culture that would have understood, viscerally, what he was describing and why it mattered. Which is why my mother’s answer that we were Christians didn’t quite land. Paul, the architect of much of Christian theology, was actively arguing against it.

The Renaissance absorbed the Greek aesthetic wholesale. Michelangelo's David, arguably the most famous sculpture in the Western tradition, a depiction of a Jewish biblical hero who would have been circumcised on the eighth day of his life, stands in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence with a clearly intact penis. Scholars have debated this for centuries. The Greek aesthetic ideal absorbed through Hellenism is one explanation. A deliberate artistic choice to make David universally legible, uncoupled from his specifically Jewish body, is another, less comfortable one. Whatever Michelangelo's reasoning, the result is the same: the Western artistic tradition, from ancient Greece through the Renaissance, simply could not bring itself to depict the ideal male form without a foreskin. Even when the subject demanded otherwise.15

That’s how thoroughly the Greek foreskin ideal had been absorbed into Western aesthetics. Which makes what happened in the late nineteenth century all the stranger, a deliberate break from two thousand years of Western aesthetic tradition, in favor of a Victorian moral panic about masturbation that lasted long enough to become a cultural default nobody questions.

But we’ll get to that.

How the Corn Flake King Took Your Foreskin

Circumcision is one of the oldest surgical procedures in human history, documented in ancient Egypt as far back as 2400 BCE and practiced continuously in Jewish and Muslim communities for millennia. This essay argues something more specific and more American: that routine, non-religious, medicalized infant circumcision, the kind performed on virtually every male born in a U.S. hospital for most of the 20th century, is not an ancient tradition. It’s not a religious covenant. It’s not even particularly old. It’s a Victorian invention, less than two hundred years old, built on a rotating cast of medical justifications that kept changing because none of them held up.

For most of American history, circumcision simply wasn’t done. Until 1870, it was a practice limited to Jewish and Muslim communities and a few scattered cultural traditions elsewhere. The general American population didn’t circumcise. There was no norm to question because there was no norm.

Then Lewis Sayre got involved.

Sayre was an orthopedic surgeon (a fucking bone doctor, if you can believe it) and Vice President of the American Medical Association. In 1870, he began advocating for circumcision as a cure for a remarkable range of conditions: paralysis, epilepsy, insanity, masturbation, hip-joint disease, hernia, and headache, among others. His theory was that the foreskin caused “reflex irritation” that produced neurological symptoms throughout the body. He was not a urologist. He was not a genital specialist. He was a man who had decided, without substantial evidence, that the foreskin was causing seizures, and he was Vice President of the most powerful medical organization in the country.16

John Harvey Kellogg took it further. Kellogg (yes, the cereal) was a physician, a devout Seventh-day Adventist, and one of the most influential health reformers of the late nineteenth century. He believed masturbation was the cause of nearly every human ailment, from cancer to epilepsy to moral degeneracy, and he approached its prevention with the enthusiasm of a man who had found his life’s calling. He recommended circumcision specifically as a punishment. “The operation should be performed,” he wrote in 1877, “without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment.”17

He also invented corn flakes as an anaphrodisiac. A bland, unsweetened breakfast cereal specifically designed to reduce sexual arousal and masturbatory impulses. You eat his cereal every morning. He also designed a surgery to punish your sexuality. And lest anyone doubt the sincerity of his convictions, he circumcised himself. At thirty-seven years old. The man practiced what he preached, at least on his own body.18

Kellogg’s interventions weren’t limited to boys. He recommended carbolic acid applied to the clitoris of girls for the same reasons in the same era to prevent masturbation through pain and permanent desensitization. Both procedures were performed by the same cultural logic at the same historical moment. Intactivists who compare circumcision to female genital mutilation are sometimes accused of hyperbole. They are describing history.

The medical justifications kept shifting because none of them held up. Epilepsy and paralysis quietly disappeared from the list as the neurology didn’t pan out. Hygiene moved to the foreground. The foreskin was dirty and was a breeding ground for smegma, that villain of the locker room, the thing that got whispered about as evidence that intact men were unclean. This too didn’t hold up. Smegma is a natural sebaceous secretion produced under the foreskin, the same type produced under the clitoral hood in women, yet no sane person is recommending we remove the clitoral hood for hygiene. The supposed carcinogenic effect of smegma, which was used for decades as a justification for circumcision, has been conclusively disproven.19 A Canadian pediatric urologist put it plainly: “There’s no evidence there’s any need to clean under the foreskin before puberty.”20 For adults, warm water and basic hygiene are sufficient. The intact penis does not require more maintenance than any other body part. The argument that circumcision makes hygiene easier is technically true in the same way that removing an ear makes it easier to clean. The surgery itself doesn’t improve hygiene. It eliminates the need for it by eliminating the structure.

Then came STI prevention. Then HIV prevention specifically, after three African randomized controlled trials in the 2000s suggested that circumcision reduced heterosexual HIV transmission by roughly 60%. The WHO endorsed it. The CDC cited it. The argument seemed airtight until you looked at the Western data. The United States has a circumcision rate of roughly 71%, which is higher than that of any other Western nation by a significant margin. Germany sits at 11%. Sweden at 5%. Italy at 3%. Ireland at 1%.21 If circumcision prevented HIV in Western contexts, the United States should have dramatically lower HIV rates than these countries. It doesn’t. Among gay and bisexual men specifically, the protective effect disappears entirely because studies at San Francisco’s municipal STD clinic found virtually identical HIV rates between circumcised and uncircumcised gay and bisexual men, 71.1% versus 72.2%.22 And then in 2022, the Danish national cohort study of 810,719 men followed over 22 years found that circumcision did not protect against HIV or other STIs and that circumcised men had a 53% higher overall STI rate than intact men. The most recent and largest study ever conducted on the question walked back the claim entirely.23

The World Wars accelerated what Sayre and Kellogg started. The U.S. military made circumcision mandatory for soldiers during both World War I and World War II, justified as a hygiene measure in unsanitary wartime conditions. The practice migrated from adult soldiers to male infants born in hospitals. By the 1960s, roughly 83% of American male infants were being circumcised as a matter of routine because it had become what you did. The default. The thing that happened before you left the hospital.24

The American Academy of Pediatrics has been trying to figure out what to say about this for fifty years. In 1971, they concluded there were no valid medical indications for routine circumcision. In 1975, they said there was no absolute medical indication. In 1989, new research on urinary tract infections prompted a shift toward neutrality. In 1999, they said benefits were not significant enough to recommend it routinely. In 2012, they shifted again, claiming that benefits outweigh risks, but stopped short of recommending it for all male newborns. The medical establishment has been changing its position on this procedure for half a century while the procedure continued as if the debate were settled.25

And then there is metzitzah b’peh, a practice, in some ultra-Orthodox Jewish circumcision ceremonies, of the mohel placing his mouth directly over the circumcision wound and drawing blood through oral suction. The practice originates in the 4th-century Babylonian Talmud, where it was described as a sanitary measure. Between 2000 and 2011, eleven male infants in New York City contracted herpes following the procedure. Two died. Two suffered brain damage. Parents performing brit milah in New York City were not always informed that oral suction was part of the ceremony. The New York City Department of Health eventually required written consent acknowledging the risks.26 The practice continues.

Circumcision rates have been declining for decades. From roughly 83% in the 1960s to 54% in 2012 to 49.3% in 2022, it marks the first time in American history that fewer than half of male infants were circumcised in a given year. The culture is quietly walking it back. Nobody is saying out loud that a mistake was made. Nobody is apologizing. The rate is just going down, procedure by procedure, family by family, as parents ask questions that previous generations didn’t think to ask.27

The questioning isn’t limited to secular American families. Within Jewish communities, a growing movement of rabbis now offers brit shalom, a covenant of peace, a naming ceremony without circumcision, as an alternative to brit milah. More than 130 rabbis across all non-Orthodox movements, and some who grew up Orthodox, now perform the ceremony. Some stopped officiating at circumcisions entirely after decades of practice, having concluded they could no longer ethically continue.28 Within Islam, circumcision doesn’t appear in the Quran. It enters Islamic practice through the Hadith and is treated differently across the major schools of jurisprudence, with some making it obligatory and others merely recommending it. Scholars have argued that peer disagreement on the question means circumcision cannot be considered a necessary condition of being a devout Muslim.29 The traditions most associated with circumcision are producing their own internal critiques. The religious necessity argument is collapsing from within.

The question my parents and many other parents didn’t ask was simple: why?

The answer, it turns out, is corn flakes.

Foreskin in the Game

Circumcision is not a single standardized procedure. It has variables. The surgeon makes choices, such as how high on the shaft to place the incision, how much skin to remove, and how tight the result will be, and those choices determine how the penis looks, feels, and functions for the rest of the man’s life. High or low. Tight or loose. These are permanent structural decisions made on a non-consenting infant by a surgeon whose preferences your parents were never asked about and probably never considered.

A low, loose circumcision — the least aggressive style — removes the foreskin but leaves more shaft skin and is more likely to preserve the frenulum. A high, tight circumcision removes significantly more tissue, often including the frenulum, and leaves the shaft skin taut. During erection, a high and tight cut can produce what men describe as drum-tight skin, so little remaining tissue that the edges of the circumcision scar pull apart under tension, causing the head of the penis to bend at odd angles. Some men with high and tight cuts experience painful erections for their entire lives.30

The frenulum, that V-shaped band of tissue on the underside of the penis, one of the most nerve-dense structures in the male body, is removed in roughly a fifth to a third of circumcisions. Sometimes it’s a side effect of a tight style. Sometimes the surgeon simply takes it without distinguishing it from the rest of the foreskin. Men circumcised as adults can request that their frenulum be preserved. They can specify the style they want. They can discuss the tradeoffs with their surgeon before the procedure. Infant boys cannot do any of these things. The decisions get made anyway.31

I do want to make a brief note that none of this is an argument against circumcision when medically indicated. Phimosis, the condition where the foreskin is too tight to retract comfortably, can cause genuine pain, urinary difficulties, and increased infection risk. But even here, circumcision is increasingly considered a last resort rather than a first response. The standard first-line treatment recommended by the British Association of Urological Surgeons and the NHS is topical steroid cream combined with gentle stretching exercises, applied once or twice daily for four to eight weeks, with success rates between 67% and 95% across multiple studies.32 Preputioplasty, a minor surgical procedure that widens the foreskin opening without removing it, exists for cases where conservative management fails.33 The only reasonable medical indication for circumcision, pathological phimosis, affects approximately 0.6% of boys, with a peak incidence at age eleven, and is rarely encountered before age five.34 The procedure is available when actually needed, by someone old enough to have symptoms, who can consent to treatment. What it cannot be is performed preemptively on a day-old infant who has not yet developed any condition requiring it.

There’s also the complications that nobody puts in the circumcision brochure: skin bridges, where adhesions form between the glans and the shaft skin after circumcision, tethering the penis during erection, and causing pain. Correcting them requires a second surgery, an operation to fix the first one. Penoscrotal webbing, where too much shaft skin is removed, and the scrotal skin gets pulled forward onto the penile shaft, bringing pubic hair with it and shortening the functional length of the penis. Buried or trapped penis, where aggressive circumcision causes scarring that pulls the shaft inward, sometimes requiring reconstructive surgery to correct. These are documented complications, not theoretical ones.3536

The overall complication rate for infant circumcision runs between 0.2% and 2%. For adult circumcision, the rate runs between 2% and 10%. The death rate for infants is estimated at roughly 2 per 100,000, but that number is almost certainly an undercount, because circumcision is rarely listed as the cause of death even when it contributed. The death is attributed to sepsis, hemorrhage, or surgical complications. The procedure that caused those outcomes goes unrecorded. There is no prospective systematic collection of mortality statistics associated with non-therapeutic circumcision in the United States. We don’t actually know how many infants die from this surgery because the medical system doesn’t track it properly.37

And then there is the part nobody talks about at all.

When a foreskin is removed during circumcision, the tissue doesn’t get discarded. It gets sold. Foreskin tissue, specifically the fibroblasts, the cells that produce collagen and growth factors, is extraordinarily valuable to the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries. A single donated foreskin sample can be cultured and propagated in a laboratory for decades, producing millions of cells used in skin grafts, wound-healing research, and anti-aging skincare products. In 2013, Oprah Winfrey endorsed SkinMedica, an anti-wrinkle cream whose active ingredient, a growth factor serum derived from human foreskin fibroblasts, she described as her “magic fountain of youth.” SkinMedica’s manufacturer noted that the company hadn’t needed to purchase a new foreskin in over twenty years. One foreskin, they said, is the gift that keeps on giving.38

The parents of the infants whose foreskins supply this industry are not told this is happening. The boys who grow up to learn about it are not compensated. The companies that profit from the tissue are not required to disclose its origin. A body part is removed from a non-consenting infant, sold to a corporation, and used to make luxury skincare products that retail for hundreds of dollars a jar. This is legal. This is routine. This is the part of the conversation that gets labeled hyperbole when intactivists bring it up, despite being documented straightforwardly.

The gift that keeps on giving.

For everyone except the person it came from.

A Fleeting Impulse From Silly Men

In April 2026, The Cut published a piece by Bianca Bosker titled “The Men Who Want Their Foreskins Back.” It was a reported feature about foreskin restoration — the men pursuing it, the surgeons beginning to offer it, the cultural shift underway as circumcision rates decline. It was serious journalism about a documented phenomenon. The Instagram post promoting it received 444 comments.39

Here is a representative sample:

“Oh god. Please not with this in my eyes. I’m trying to do Monday peacefully.”

“Men need more issues to deal with.”

“Not in a place to care about foreskin or lack thereof.”

“Imagine telling a Victorian person that we’re in the middle of WWIII and men are legit concerned about reclaiming their foreskin.”

“Not every fleeting impulse from silly men must be explored or dignified, I fear.”

“This article before a cup of coffee on a Monday is a crime against humanity.”

“We don’t have time to deal with this rn.”

“Men really need to get some hobbies.”

None of these comments engage with the argument. None of them address consent, or nerve endings, or the fact that a surgery performed on non-consenting infants for reasons that have since been discredited might be worth reconsidering. They don’t dispute the research. They don’t offer a counterargument. They simply register that the conversation itself is an imposition on their Monday morning, on their attention, on their capacity to care.

This is worth sitting with. A piece of journalism about men grieving a body part removed from them without consent is met, overwhelmingly, with the response that the grief itself is the problem. The timing is wrong. The concern is silly. The men having it need better hobbies.

The most-liked comment, at 601 likes, was different in register if not in conclusion:

“You mean to tell me they can re-attach foreskin for men but they still have to slice women open to diagnose endometriosis and often times recommend full hysterectomies to ‘cure’ it? I really hate it here.”

The commenter is not wrong about women. Women are catastrophically failed by the medical system in ways that are well-documented and ongoing. Black women die in childbirth at rates that reflect a healthcare infrastructure that was never built with them in mind.40 Women with endometriosis wait an average of seven to ten years for a diagnosis because their pain is consistently dismissed, minimized, and attributed to psychological causes rather than investigated as a physical reality.41 I had to tell my own mother, just last month, that she needed to find a doctor who was a woman because I didn’t think her current doctor was taking her seriously enough. The medical establishment has a long and well-documented history of deciding it knows more about certain bodies than the people living in them, and the bodies it has been most consistently wrong about are Black bodies and women’s bodies.

I’m a feminist. I believe this. I’m also a gay man who has watched the same dynamic play out in the context of my own community’s health: the dismissal, the minimization, the assumption that our experiences don’t warrant serious medical attention. I know what it looks like when a system decides certain people’s bodies don’t matter.

What I’m arguing is not that men have it worse. What I’m arguing is that the framework we use to name these injustices (consent, bodily autonomy, the right to know what is being done to your body and why, the right to grieve what was taken) should apply consistently. The commenter on endometriosis wasn’t wrong about women. She was wrong about the math. Justice isn’t a fixed sum. Taking men’s bodies seriously doesn’t require taking women’s bodies less seriously. The medical system’s failure to adequately research and treat endometriosis is not solved by also ignoring routine infant circumcision. These are parallel issues that, from where I’m standing, don’t need to compete with each other.

The AMA Journal of Ethics has a term for what happens when a patient’s identity is used to undermine their credibility as an authoritative knower of their own body: testimonial injustice. It describes the specific mechanism by which certain patients (Black, women, & queer patients) are systematically not believed about their own experiences.42 The comment section I described above is testimonial injustice applied to men who grieve circumcision. The grief is real. The body it’s about is real. The response is: silly men and their fleeting impulses.

I will be the first to say that the intactivism movement has not helped itself here. In 2011, an anti-circumcision activist named Matthew Hess published a comic book called Foreskin Man, featuring a blond, Aryan-presenting hero and a villain called “Monster Mohel,” a caricature of a Jewish mohel performing circumcision as an act of predatory violence. The Anti-Defamation League called it antisemitic. It was. Jewish filmmaker Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon, himself a critic of infant circumcision, documented how antisemitism moved from the fringes of the intactivist movement to its center, carried by people who had correctly identified a bodily autonomy problem and responded by making Jewish people the villain.43 The argument is not wrong because some of its loudest advocates are. But the movement has made it easy to dismiss the argument by association, which is essentially the same problem. The right problem, the wrong vehicle. Again.

What gets lost in all of this is the person at the other end of the surgery, who was a day old when the decision was made, nine years old when he found a VHS tape under his father's bed and saw something he couldn't name, and considerably older before he understood what those two things had to do with each other. That person has a right to grieve. That grief is not a fleeting impulse. It’s not a hobby. It’s the entirely reasonable response of a person who learned, late, what was taken from him before he could object.

Confessions of a Foreskin Queen

Let me be honest about something I’ve been circling since the opening of this essay: I am biased. So if you’ve gotten this far, and you’re still on the fence about what I’ve been saying, this might make you jump to the side you’ve already been leaning toward. And I’m not just biased. It’s a fetish. The kind that formed at nine years old, watching a VHS tape and never loosening its grip. The kind that sent me down rabbit holes of scholarship and surgery and ancient Greek pottery, not just because I think bodily autonomy matters, though I unequivocally do, but because the foreskin itself has organized my desire for as long as I can remember.

In American gay culture, that makes me something of a specialist. Roughly three-quarters of American men are circumcised, which means the intact penis in American gay spaces, in bars and on apps, is anomalous. Marked. A spectacle. Gay men who prefer intact partners exist in a country where intact partners are genuinely hard to find, which means the preference exists against the grain of what’s available rather than simply reflecting familiarity. That’s worth noting. You can’t explain away the foreskin fetish as mere exposure bias when most of the men around you are circumcised.44

Gay porn bears this out. Jonathan Allan’s scholarship on gay men’s magazines documents how the intact penis in American gay media has historically been treated as an event, something to be noted, highlighted, celebrated specifically because of its anomalous status. Allan traces this through Foreskin Quarterly, a gay intactivist magazine that ran from 1984 to 2001, using what he calls “pornography as activism” to normalize and eroticize the foreskin during the exact years when the AIDS crisis was reshaping what gay sex could look like and mean. The men producing and consuming Foreskin Quarterly were making an argument with desire: that this body part was worth wanting, worth preserving, worth grieving when absent.45

I came to the same conclusion through a different route. I prefer intact partners. I always have. The specific pleasures available with a foreskin, the mobility of the skin during manual stimulation, the way it moves during oral sex, the specific texture and moisture of the inner foreskin, and the frenulum when it’s present, are not available with a circumcised partner in the same way, and the difference is not subtle. This isn’t a moral position. It’s an anatomical one. The foreskin is a functional structure that produces specific sensations. Preferring a partner who has it intact is not a fetish in the pathological sense; it’s a preference for a body that hasn’t been surgically altered. The same way some people prefer unshaved partners, or partners who haven’t had rhinoplasty. The surgery changed the body. The preference is for the original.

And then there is docking.

Docking is the sexual act in which one intact man slides his foreskin over the glans of another man, whether they be intact or circumcised, so that both glans are enclosed within the foreskin simultaneously. It requires at least one intact partner. It is, in the words of one writer, the French kiss of gay sex: intimate, specific, requiring a particular kind of presence and attention.46 Allan, writing about docking in the context of circumcision debates, argues that the foreskin treated as an erotic appendage rather than a vestigial remnant “demands resignification,” or a rewriting not just of the foreskin but of the penis and its symbolic meaning in gay culture.47

What strikes me about docking specifically is its ephemerality. It only works within a narrow window of arousal; if either partner gets too excited, the foreskin detaches. “It only has this moment,” one man told MEL Magazine. “And if it turns you on too much, it ends.”48 That’s not a limitation. That’s the point, or should I say the pucker. It’s an act that requires you to be there, present, attending to the specific body in front of you, rather than performing toward an outcome. The foreskin that makes docking possible is the same foreskin that the culture decided was unnecessary. The act it enables is one that the culture has no filing system for.

Half-docking, one intact partner, one circumcised, exists as an adaptation. The community that developed docking developed the vocabulary for its partial version, too, which tells you something about how seriously these men take both the act and the absence. The term “half-docking” contains the loss right there in its name.

Is the fetish Freudian? Lacanian? I raised this question in the opening and want to return to it here with greater specificity. Lacan’s objet petit a, the thing whose pursuit organizes desire without ever fully satisfying it, fits the foreskin fetish better than Freud’s gap-filling model, because the foreskin I want isn’t exactly a substitute for something else. It’s the thing itself. What got organized at nine years old, watching Sean Michaels, wasn’t a displacement. It was a recognition. The body on screen had something mine didn’t. The desire that formed around that recognition has never been about filling a gap. It’s been about understanding the gap.

Studies on gay and bisexual men’s partner preferences confirm what my own desire has always told me: men indicate a strong preference for intact partners across sexual activities.49 The preference is real, documented, and exists in a culture where acting on it requires actively seeking out a minority of available partners. The foreskin is rare enough in America to be fetishized. The fetish is reasonable enough to be documented in peer-reviewed literature. Both things are true.

Epispasm

We’ve been here before. Not metaphorically, literally. Jewish men living under Greek and Roman rule two thousand years ago, marked by circumcision in a culture that considered the intact penis the only acceptable penis, developed a procedure for pulling the remaining foreskin tissue forward over the glans to approximate what had been removed. They called it epispasm. It required sustained manual traction, applied consistently over time, stretching the remaining skin until it covered what circumcision had exposed. It’s documented in the Maccabees. It’s referenced in Paul’s letters. Foreskin restoration is not a contemporary invention. It is two thousand years old, and the desire behind it, to have back what was taken, or at least the appearance of it, has apparently never gone away.50

The contemporary version operates on the same principle. Non-surgical foreskin restoration works through tissue expansion, the same biological mechanism used in reconstructive surgery and wound healing. Skin stretched consistently over time will grow new cells to accommodate the tension. Devices such as the TLC Tugger, the DTR, various weights and straps, and retaining cones apply gentle, sustained traction to the remaining shaft skin, encouraging it to expand and lengthen until it begins to cover the glans. The process takes years. Most restorers work on it daily. It’s not fast, it’s not glamorous, and it’s not covered by insurance.51

The foreskin restoration community has developed its own taxonomy for tracking progress: the Coverage Index (NSFW), a scale from CI-0 to CI-10 measuring how much skin covers the glans. CI-0 is the tightest circumcision, where the scar line is far back on the shaft, maximum skin removed, minimum coverage remaining. CI-10 is a fully intact foreskin with complete coverage in both flaccid and erect states. Most restorers start somewhere between CI-1 and CI-3, depending on their circumcision style. The goal varies, with some men working toward CI-5 or CI-6, enough to achieve consistent glans coverage. Others work toward CI-10. The index makes visible what circumcision made invisible: that there is a spectrum of what was taken, and that reclamation, however partial, is measurable.52

One of the most significant physiological milestones in the restoration process occurs around CI-6. The glans, having been permanently exposed since birth, develops a thickened keratinized layer as protection, the same process described in Section I. As the restored foreskin begins to consistently cover the glans, that protective layer starts to shed. The skin softens. The sensitivity returns, not to what it would have been with an intact foreskin, but closer. Men who have reached this stage describe it as one of the most significant changes in their experience of their own body. The tissue exposed due to the surgery is slowly reverting to its original state.53

Here is what restoration cannot do. It cannot recreate the ridged band, that specific stretch of nerve-dense tissue just inside the foreskin’s tip that responds to motion. It cannot restore the original mucosal tissue. It cannot bring back the frenulum if it was removed. It cannot replace the specific nerve endings that were lost. What it can do is restore coverage, restore the gliding mechanism to some degree, de-keratinize the glans, and, according to a 2023 survey of foreskin restorers, significantly improve the experience of sex. 69% of restorers reported increased sexual pleasure following restoration. 25% reported improved relationships. These are self-reported numbers from a self-selected population, which means they should be interpreted carefully, but they are also the numbers of men who did something difficult and sustained over years because they believed it mattered, and found that it did.54

I haven’t just dabbled. I started at CI-0, the tightest end of the scale, maximum skin removed, and I’ve restored to roughly CI-5. When I’m sitting down, skin covers my glans. The tissue around the coronal ridge has de-keratinized, where it’s smooth and supple in a way the still-exposed tip isn’t, which tells you something about what permanent exposure does to tissue over decades and what coverage can begin to undo. I was fortunate enough that my circumcision left at least part of my frenulum intact, and that remaining tissue has expanded with the restoration process, compounding the sensitivity I was able to keep with what I’ve been able to recover. When I jerk off, there is real gliding action now. That changed things. Not metaphorically, but the sensation was transformed in a way I couldn’t have anticipated from reading about it. The scholarship said this would happen. My body confirmed it.

I don’t even remember what my penis looked like before I started. I’ve restored enough that the starting point is gone from memory. Which is either a measure of how much has changed, or how long I’ve been at this, or both.

What restoration cannot give back is the original tissue: the ridged band, the specific nerve endings that were lost, and the frenulum in full if it was removed. What it can give back, and has given back to me, is coverage, mobility, and a body that feels more like it was supposed to. I want to reach CI-10. I don’t know if that will ever happen.

For some men, the restoration process is less about the physical outcome and more about the psychological one, or the feeling of agency over a body that had a decision made about it without consent. The grief around circumcision is real and documented. Researchers have identified it as a form of disenfranchised grief that society refuses to recognize, that gets silenced and ridiculed rather than acknowledged.55 Men who have tried to talk to their families about their feelings around circumcision report being met with dismissal, laughter, or the suggestion that they need better hobbies.56 The comment section I described in Section V is not an anomaly. It’s the standard response. And the restoration process, for some men, is a way of refusing to accept that standard response, of insisting, quietly and daily, that what was taken mattered.

I think that’s what I’m doing. I’m not stretching skin. I’m insisting.

What I’m insisting on is the end of routine, non-religious, non-consensual infant circumcision in the United States. I want the conversation that isn't happening, the honest reckoning with what was done, why it was done, and what the men who lived with the consequences are owed. I want parents to be told, before they sign anything, what the foreskin is, what it does, what style of circumcision their surgeon prefers, and what that means for their son's body for the rest of his life. I want the grief to be acknowledged rather than dismissed as a fleeting impulse from a silly man.

Author's note: This essay was updated on 08/24/2026 to include additional information on phimosis and non-surgical treatment alternatives.

When I was little, before I even knew what sex was, a friend who lived across the street and I would jerk off together in my grandparents’ shed. When he’d spend the night at my place, or I his, we’d take baths, sitting at opposite ends of the tub, and put our boners together. When he came over to swim in my pool, he taught me to put my penis up against the water jets because it felt good, and after we’d get hard, we’d go underwater and suck each other off to see how long we could “hold our breath”. When we’d be out in the woods, playing in and around the bayou where we lived, we’d cross swords with our piss streams and hold each other in our hands.

We covered a lot of ground, this friend and I.

And none of it involved buttfucking.

I've been thinking about that a lot lately. About how much ground we covered before anyone told us what the real thing looked like. About what got lost when we found out. Nobody gave us a position selector. Nobody asked us to declare ourselves. We were just two curious kids in Alabama doing what felt good.

Sex has a definition problem. We decided, somewhere along the way, that sex means penetration, and everything else is either foreplay or not quite the real thing. Straight culture has this problem. Gay culture inherited it, internalized it, and then built an entire identity system on top of it: a top/bottom binary enforced by position selectors on hook-up apps that are broken down into four options that made penetration the definition of who you are.

Ask most people what gay men do in bed, and they will describe, with varying degrees of detail and comfort, anal sex. Top or bottom. Insertive or receptive. The position selector on Grindr makes it official: Top, Bottom, Versatile, and now, finally, after years of men existing without the language for it, Side. Four options. Pick one. This is who you are.

The top/bottom binary didn’t emerge organically from the actual diversity of gay sexual experience. It was built through porn, through identity politics, through decades of a culture that needed a legible shorthand for gay sex and reached for the most visually dramatic option available. And it was built so thoroughly that research now shows teenage boys who have never had anal sex are already sorting themselves into tops and bottoms based on how masculine or feminine they feel.1 The identity precedes the act.

In 2013, sex therapist Joe Kort, himself queer, himself a side, coined the term to describe gay men who don’t have anal sex and don’t want to.2 Grindr eventually added it to the position selector. And still, when you tell someone you’re a side, the first response is usually one of two things: “What’s that?” or “You just haven’t found the right top yet.”

Both responses tell you everything about how completely buttfucking colonized the definition of gay sex. The first says the category barely exists. The second says it can’t exist, that your preference is a symptom of inexperience. That you’ll come around.

I have not come around. I’ve been some version of a side my whole sexual life without knowing the word for it. My friend and I figured that out, living near a bayou in Alabama, before either of us knew there was a word for anything. The culture caught up to us eventually and told us we’d been doing it wrong.

This essay is my rebuttal. And it starts, as most things do, with the ancient Greeks.

Frotting

Ancient Greek vase paintings from as early as 480 BC depict intercrural sex, that is, the thigh-rubbing form of frottage that became, in certain elite homosocial circles, the customary form of sex between male lovers.3 The Greeks even wrote poems about thighs. Not metaphorically. Actual poems, to actual thighs, celebrating their beauty and the specific pleasure of what happened between them.

Has anyone seen Jonathan Bailey’s thighs? I digress.

The act accumulated vocabulary as it moved through history, entering clinical language in 1886 when Richard von Krafft-Ebing included it in Psychopathia Sexualis, his exhaustive taxonomy of human sexuality, and picking up nicknames along the way. The Princeton rub. The Ivy League rub. Oxford style. The names tell you everything about where men have always been doing this: elite institutions, homosocial spaces, men with everything to lose and no private space to lose it in. The alibi was structural. You weren't having sex. You were enthusiastically proximate. Alexander the Great did it. Oscar Wilde reportedly preferred it to oral sex. The act has an impressive résumé and almost no cultural recognition.4

The frot community has been making this argument since the early 2000s, that frottage is a complete sex act, not a warm-up, not a consolation prize, not what you do while you wait for the real thing. They built their own vocabulary, their own online spaces, their own toys. The CockBlock, a double-sided sleeve designed to hold two penises together, exists because someone recognized a need the mainstream market wasn’t meeting. The ancient Greeks had poems about thighs. We have silicone and Überlube. The desire is the same no matter your so-called position.

The most prominent voice in that community, the Man2Man Alliance, correctly identifies the problem: frottage has been devalued and marginalized in gay culture. Then they respond by building an identical hierarchy with different winners. In their framework, frottage is the natural, masculine form of gay sex, and anal sex is degrading and feminine. The binary is intact. Only the winner changed. Gay culture didn't need a new hierarchy. It needed to burn the old one down.5

Keguro Macharia takes the more interesting position. In Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora, Macharia uses the act as a conceptual framework for thinking about queer intimacy entirely outside normative structures.6 The act doesn’t need to win anything. All it needs is to exist on its own terms.

And there's a high cost to this binary that doesn't get named enough. Two tops can have sex with each other. Frottage, mutual oral, and circle jerks are all equally pleasurable and can establish real bonding between dudes. None of these acts requires complementary positions. But the culture has so thoroughly organized gay desire around the top/bottom binary that two tops meeting often results in nothing at all. A missed connection. Attraction abandoned because neither person thought to suggest an alternative. We are limiting ourselves. We are denying ourselves connection with people we find genuinely desirable because we've accepted a framework that was never a biological necessity, just a cultural decision, invented by heteros, that calcified into a rule. Frottage doesn't ask you to declare yourself anything. We queers have always been bigger than any binary. We only forgot to stand outside of it.

Blowjobs

Can I just say something? I really like to suck dick. I know it’s called a blowjob, but they say if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. I mean, the penis is fun, y’all!

Sucking dick was also, in a way, a defense mechanism. A guy I met on MySpace had doctored his photos so thoroughly that I barely recognized him when he answered the door. I wasn't attracted to him. My body knew it even if I was too polite and too much of a baby gay to say so out loud. When I couldn't get hard, he made it my problem rather than his, as if the issue were some malfunction in me rather than the entirely reasonable response of a body that wasn't interested. And so I left that encounter believing something was wrong with me, and for a long time after that, blowjobs were easier than risking that feeling again.

It also helped that I was good at it. That turned out to matter.

I’d post on Craigslist (ah, the good ol’ days), and guys would come park at the end of my parents’ driveway, and I’d walk out and suck them off. Sometimes I’d stop by the TA and blow a trucker passing through, or I’d drive out to the middle of nowhere and take care of daddies and camo-wearing blue-collar bros. Some of them I’d gone to high school with. Some of them are now married with kids. I was providing a service. I was also, though I wouldn’t have said it this way then, doing exactly what I wanted to do.

The legal history of what I was doing didn’t occur to me at the time. Alabama still had a sodomy law on the books. Oral sex between men was a criminal act in my state until the Supreme Court struck those laws down in 2003.7 In 1970, sociologist Laud Humphreys published Tearoom Trade, a study of anonymous oral sex between men in public restrooms.8 The men he documented were married men, closeted men, men who would never have called themselves gay. They weren't there despite the risk. They were there because the act was quick, deniable, and left no evidence. You could be home for dinner. The blowjob’s portability was its politics. Queer people have always built the infrastructure they needed with whatever was available: a bathroom stall, a dirt road, a glory hole in an apartment in Mobile with a layout so perfect I recognized it the moment I walked in. I didn’t plan it that way. I just used what was there. More dick came to me in Alabama than has ever come to me anywhere else. Hostility is a hell of a motivator.

The culture has a word for people like me. Cocksucker. That term has a long history of being an insult, a synonym for weak, for servile, for someone who exists to pleasure others at the expense of themselves. The assumption is baked into the language: we call it a blowjob, meaning the receiver is entitled to it, a service rendered rather than a pleasure shared.9 Research on sexual scripts confirms what the insult assumes, that in oral sex, the giver is the submissive one and the receiver holds the power.10 I want to push back on that. Guys will absolutely try to fuck my face no matter how uncomfortable it is for me, but they wince and pull away the moment I keep sucking after they've cum. Think about that for a second. The person who supposedly had all the power couldn't handle what I was doing the moment it stopped being on their terms. I'm not submitting. I'm performing a skill. I know what I'm doing. The men who want to fuck my throat, who want to make me gag, who arrive with a script written entirely by porn, they've mistaken the dynamic entirely. The person receiving the blowjob is the one who should be sitting back, and don’t be a little bitch the moment you’ve had your little nut.

Roll those eyes back. Curl those toes.

Ride the wave, bro. Ride the wave.

Circle Jerks

If I told you that the greatest American novel contains a coded circle jerk, would you believe me? If you believe me, can you guess which novel?

In 1851, Herman Melville published Moby Dick, widely considered the quintessential American novel. It’s also one of the great queer texts in American literature. Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed, declare themselves married, and form the emotional center of a novel that has no real interest in heterosexuality. And then there is Chapter 94, "A Squeeze of the Hand," in which Ishmael sits with his crewmates, hands submerged in a tub of spermaceti, squeezing the congealed whale oil back into fluid. A strange insanity comes over him. He finds himself squeezing his co-laborers' hands, mistaking them for the substance. "Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget," Melville writes, "that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally." He concludes: "let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness." Spermaceti was, among its many uses, the premier industrial lubricant of the 19th century. Melville was not unaware of this. And in case there was any remaining doubt about what he was doing, he titled the very next chapter "The Cassock,” a description of a sailor wearing the whale's foreskin as a work garment. Herman Melville was not subtle.11

The circle jerk has a longer and more distinguished history than its reputation suggests. The term appears in American slang as early as 1958, documented in Harrison Salisbury’s The Shook-up Generation, a study of youth culture that apparently had more to say about teenage boys than its author intended.12 Martha Cornog, whose research collected over a hundred first-person accounts of communal masturbation, argues that the circle jerk is one of the most consistent and underreported forms of male sexual bonding across cultures and centuries.13

The AIDS crisis gave it new meaning and new urgency. In 1984, a heterosexual judge with no gay advisory committee ordered San Francisco’s bathhouses closed, a judicial ruling that held throughout the 1980s and 90s.14 The Jacks phenomenon had actually started earlier, emerging from a gay bar in Manhattan in 1980, brought back to San Francisco by Ron Bluestein after a visit to New York, and grew fast and globally, eventually including men of all orientations.15 SF Jacks operated out of a shared clubhouse at 890 Folsom Street, sometimes called the Sextine Chapel of Inanna in underground circles, from 1986 to 1991, providing a physical refuge after the closures.16 Men who wanted to remain sexually connected found a way to maintain pleasure and community without the acts that were killing people. The circle jerk was a lifeline. It was also a political act, where gay men insisted on pleasure and connection in the face of a government that had decided their deaths were acceptable and a judiciary that had decided where they were allowed to have sex.17

That history didn’t disappear. JO parties happen every weekend in New York and San Francisco, rooms full of men of every type: tops and bottoms and sides and men who would never use any of those words for themselves. Nobody’s asking. Nobody needs to know. The only requirement is showing up. And by God, if you’re reading this and hosting one, please invite me.

None of these acts belongs exclusively to gay culture. They belong to bodies. The Jacks clubs, which started in gay bars, grew to include men of all orientations because the act itself doesn’t ask who you are when you go home. The blue-collar bros I grew up with, the truckers at the TA, the married men in Laud Humphreys’ restrooms were there because these acts have always existed outside the categories we build around them.

Rimming

I want to be clear about something before we go further. I've topped. I've bottomed. I understand the binary from the inside (pun intended). I'm just not a huge fan of penetrative sex, as this essay has probably made clear by now. That doesn't mean I don't like eating ass or having my ass eaten. On the contrary, rimming fits my oral proclivities very well. The distinction matters because the culture collapses it. Anal play gets treated as one category, penetration and rimming bundled together, when they are in fact completely different acts with completely different sensations and completely different relationships to the body. One involves the exterior. One involves the interior. The nerve endings on the outside of the anus are not the same as those inside. My body knows the difference even if the culture's vocabulary doesn't.

The act has a longer history than its current reputation suggests. Anilingus appears in ancient Greek and Roman pottery and wall paintings, which make clear that this was not a fringe practice.18 Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined the clinical term “anilingus” in Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886, the same exhaustive taxonomy that gave us “frottage.” James Bromley’s chapter “Rimming the Renaissance” in Sex Before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England argues that anilingus in early modern texts “challenges critics to think of sex as more than penetration,” which is, remarkably, still a challenge that needs making in 2024.19 The 1970s bathhouse era celebrated it. The act has been present in every era of human sexuality. It tragically keeps being relegated to a precursor.

And then there’s the porn/practice gap. Rimming is everywhere on screen. It appears in gay porn so routinely that it barely registers as remarkable anymore. And yet in my experience, and in the experience of what appears to be a significant portion of gay men who have discussed this publicly, nobody wants to do it. A hashtag, #FineMenThatEatAss, went viral in 2018 specifically because the desire was so legible and the practice so rare that men felt compelled to publicly celebrate the men who actually did it.20 That’s the gap. The culture produces images of things it doesn’t practice. The same gap as frottage. The culture keeps telling us what it wants, and then not doing it.

If someone ate my ass for thirty minutes first, a lot of experiences that weren't working might have worked. That's not a special request. That's how honest bodies work.

Call Me Ishmael Goldilocks

Ya know, I feel like Goldilocks in a world that only serves one temperature of porridge. A lot of men across the sexuality spectrum know what they know from porn. A jackhammer pace in positions optimized for viewing through a camera, rather than idealized for the people being filmed. One of my few brief relationships was with a guy who wanted to go at it, almost immediately. He thought eating me out for a minute with a few prods of his fingers was enough. He wanted it full speed every time. Even after taking his time eating me out, which resulted in one of the best bottoming experiences of my life, and judging from his face at the time, one of the best topping experiences for him, he still could not let go of what he’d learned.

There’s also an infrastructure problem. A lot of lubricants irritate me, and a lot of guys use unsafe alternatives like vaseline without a second thought. I’m allergic to poppers, which is a particular inconvenience in spaces where they’re as ambient as the music. Also, and this sounds ridiculous as I type it, the smell of sex is simply not a smell I enjoy, which pushes me to the margins in a culture that has increasingly become more piggy. It’s not a hygiene failure on anyone’s part. It’s the smell even the most thoroughly prepared hole produces that my body is simply not compatible with maintaining arousal around.

The culture also decided something else. Research shows that the top/bottom binary replicates heteronormative gender hierarchies so completely that teenagers who have never had anal sex are already sorting themselves into those binaries by how masculine or feminine they feel. The quintessential top is tall, muscular, dominant, and well-endowed. The chain is supposed to hold: top = insertive = dominant = masculine. Bottom = receptive = submissive = feminine. Penis size is literally built into the identity structure.21

I break the chain. Not because of whether I present as femme or masculine. But I want to be seduced. I want to be wanted. I want someone to cum for me, to make me feel desired, to take the lead energetically, even if I’m the one physically topping. The culture has no filing system for that. The scholarship literally calls the masculine passive top a “significant deficit in the literature.”22

“What’s a passive top?” I get asked. With the same confusion as “what’s a side?” As if the concept requires explanation, while “power bottom” is perfectly legible to everyone. Think about what that tells you. The culture can imagine a bottom with power because power is coded as masculine and masculinity as top, so a powerful bottom is a fun paradox that everyone can enjoy. A cocksucker who wants his mouth to be wanted? No filing system. No category. No language. Just a guy trying to explain himself on a dating app at midnight with his dick in his hand.

What’s Missing

Gay sexual culture has a short memory.

The breath-holding contest, the tearoom, the gloryhole, the dirt road. It was always sex. Complete and sufficient. Built by people who had no other options and found something real inside the constraints. The blowjob became politically important because it could happen anywhere, leave no evidence, and get you home for dinner. The frot survived from ancient Greece to Oscar Wilde to the Princeton dorm room because it was good. Two dowsing rods, the cock as a source of electrical output, and when you put two of them together, they amplify each other. The circle jerk sustained gay men through the AIDS crisis because it was pleasure and community and connection, which is what sex has always been when it’s working. While it all certainly can be foreplay that preludes intercourse, it can also be sex itself. It is just as complete.

The binary also has a cost that gets counted in missed connections. Two tops who are attracted to each other and do nothing about it. Two people who write each other off before saying hello. A passive top who can’t find the language to explain what he wants. A bicurious man like my friend C.B., who loves kissing guys but finds the culture’s shorthand for male-male sex so narrow and so penetration-focused that the parts that might appeal to him are buried under everything that doesn’t. C.B. isn’t an edge case. He’s evidence. The door is narrower than it needs to be, and people are standing on the other side. Maybe he just wants to appreciate a nice hog as he jerks his own on the other side of the couch.

These acts belong to more people than the culture acknowledges. The blue-collar bros on the dirt roads, the truckers at the TA, the married men in Humphreys’ restrooms, they were there because pleasure doesn’t ask for your identity before it lets you in. Gay culture didn’t invent frottage, the blowjob, or the circle jerk. It remembered them longer.

And then forgot.

The argument here is simple. Gay sex was always bigger than one act and one binary and four choices on a position selector on apps riddled with ads. The frot, the blowjob, the circle jerk, and the rimjob were here before the binary calcified sex into a heteronormative, capitalistic structure.

They’ll be here after it.

Coming to LIS as a queer person means arriving with a particular kind of awareness already in place. Before the scholarship, before the theoretical frameworks, there is the lived knowledge that your community’s history has always been precarious. My community has historically been held in informal spaces, passed between people, documented in formats that institutions never prioritized and platforms never protected. When I began my LIS program in graduate school, I encountered the literature on format obsolescence and the digital dark age of the 1990s; my reaction was both surprise and recognition. If rapid format change and technological obsolescence were threatening the broader historical record, the communities already on the margins of that record would bear the loss disproportionately. That’s not a prediction insofar as it’s a pattern, and it’s one that queer communities have been living inside for decades.

When that recognition hit, I felt what Jacques Derrida would call a fever. In Archive Fever (1996), he describes the compulsive, anxious drive that archivists and scholars develop in the face of loss.1 There’s a frenzy to preserve everything before it disappears, a desperate reaching after evidence that something existed. I know that feeling. The moment I understood how much queer memory was already gone — swallowed by obsolete formats, deleted platforms, and institutional indifference — I wanted to save all of it. Every informal document, every community-built digital archive, every home video that showcased the fragile traces of lives that institutions had decided were not worth keeping.

But the fever, if you sit with it long enough, runs into a harder question. There’s something about forgetting that’s not only loss but human. We embalm our dead, build monuments, and pour resources into life extension technology because immortality is one of humanity’s oldest obsessions. And yet mortality is exactly what it means to be alive and to have lived. We’re all meant to dissolve eventually. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger makes a version of this argument in Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (2009), warning that digital systems have made forgetting nearly impossible and that perfect memory is its own violence.2 Ultimately, people need the capacity for contextual decay, for the past to recede as it becomes less relevant to who they are now.

I find myself genuinely uncertain between these two pulls. My existence matters to me. Freddie Mercury’s existence matters. Keith Haring’s existence matters. Bayard Rustin’s existence matters. But how long do they deserve to be preserved? At what point is it right to let someone fade? These are not rhetorical questions. They sit at the center of what archivists actually do, and they become more complicated when the community in question was denied the natural arc of memory. Queer history was not allowed to live fully enough to earn a natural death, but was cut short by forces that had no right to cut it.

The distinction between chosen impermanence and imposed erasure is the argument this essay makes. Queer memory falls into the gap between Derrida’s fever and Mayer-Schönberger’s delete: too marginal to be preserved institutionally, too threatening to survive algorithmically, and too often lost to the digital dark age before it had a chance to be assessed, migrated, or mourned. The goal is not permanent memory for everyone. It’s the right of queer communities to have the same relationship to time that other communities have always taken for granted — to choose what fades and what endures, rather than having that choice made by institutions, platforms, and governments that never had their interests at heart. LIS has the frameworks and the professional obligation to help build those conditions. This essay argues that doing so requires honesty about what the archive has historically done, what digital infrastructure is currently doing, and what José Esteban Muñoz calls queer futurity, which, at its core, is about building toward a world that does not yet exist.

Two Theories, One Crisis

Derrida’s Archive Fever is not, despite appearances, a book about libraries. It’s a meditation on memory, power, and the violence that institutions perform on the past in the name of preserving it. The archive, Derrida argues, is not passive. It actively produces the past, shaping what can be known by deciding what gets housed, named, and made retrievable. This is what Derrida means by archive fever — a compulsive drive to preserve that paradoxically enacts destruction, institutionalizing memory by fixing its living, contingent forms into something manageable and therefore diminished. The archivist’s anxiety is not incidental to the work. It’s the condition of it.

Verne Harris, who served as one of Nelson Mandela’s archivists and spent years navigating the distorted records of apartheid South Africa, gives this argument its sharpest real-world edge. Archives, Harris argues, capture only a sliver of social memory, and that sliver is always cut by power.3 The record is a construction, not a window to the past, shaped by whose hands held the scissors. For communities that have been criminalized, pathologized, or simply ignored by the institutions that produce official memory, that sliver approaches nothing at all. The South African state’s control of information under apartheid is an extreme case, but the mechanism it illustrates, in which institutions decide whose lives enter the record and whose dissolve, operates everywhere, including in the music industry, library catalogs, and content moderation algorithms.

Mayer-Schönberger’s concern runs in the opposite direction. Writing in 2009, he observed that digital technology inverted what had always been the default condition of memory: forgetting. For most of human history, memory required effort because records decayed, photographs faded, and people died carrying their knowledge with them. Digital systems changed that entirely. Storage became cheap, search became powerful, and the natural erosion of memory stopped. The result, Mayer-Schönberger argues, is a world in which people cannot escape their pasts, where youthful mistakes and vulnerable moments are preserved permanently and stripped of context.4 His argument for deletion is an argument for the human need for contextual decay and for memory’s capacity to recede naturally rather than be in its rawest form, frozen in stasis.

Avishai Margalit’s The Ethics of Memory (2002) offers a framework for navigating the tension between these positions. Margalit distinguishes between thick obligations (the deep duties owed to people we love and communities we belong to) and thin obligations (the more diffuse duties owed to strangers and historical figures); yet, not all forgetting is betrayal, Margalit argues.5 The question becomes not whether to forget but what we owe, to whom, and for how long. Applied to queer memory, this framework shifts the question from preservation versus forgetting to justice. The figures whose memory queer communities have fought to keep alive are not simply individuals whose private histories happen to persist. They are people whose lives carry the weight of a community’s history during periods when the official response to that community’s existence was silence, criminalization, or contempt.

Together, Derrida, Mayer-Schönberger, and Margalit frame a set of questions that neither resolves cleanly: What does the archive destroy in the act of preserving? What does digital permanence cost the people it puts into a frozen stasis? And, finally, what do we owe to those whose memory was cut short before it could earn a natural death? A third crisis connects all three. The digital dark age is a term that emerged in the 1990s among preservation professionals who recognized that digital formats were becoming obsolete faster than institutions could migrate content, and it gives these questions material stakes. Jeff Rothenberg’s foundational 1995 essay plainly named the problem: digital storage is not preservation.6 Without active, ongoing migration and institutional commitment, digital memory evaporates as quickly as the formats that hold it. For communities already on the margins of institutional concern, it’s the latest iteration of a much older erasure, not some neutral technical failure.

The Gap Queer Memory Falls Into

Paul Connerton (2009) argues that forgetting is not simply the absence of memory but an active social practice, engineered by institutions and built into the structures of modern life. He calls this “constitutive forgetting,” the systematic production of amnesia as a condition of social order.7 For queer communities, this forgetting has been both constitutive and deliberate, operating through the very infrastructure of information organization that LIS professionals maintain every day.

Melissa Adler’s Cruising the Library (2017) locates that deliberateness inside classification systems. Subject headings in the Library of Congress have historically pathologized, criminalized, and misrepresented queer subjects: filing homosexuality under mental illness, treating trans identities as inversion, and imposing clinical vocabularies that communicate judgment rather than description, just to name a few.8 This is Derrida’s archive fever made institutional and mundane. It’s not some dramatic act of censorship but a quiet, accumulated effect of thousands of cataloging decisions, each encoding the values of the person who made it. The digital catalog didn’t fix this. It made bad description permanent, searchable, and infinitely reproducible. When formats migrated, the distorted description migrated with them.

Sylvester illustrates how Harris’s archival sliver operates in cultural memory with particular clarity. Born in 1947, Sylvester James was an openly gay, gender-fluid Black musician who became one of the defining figures of disco, a genre rooted in Black, Latino, and queer communities that has been consistently undervalued in mainstream cultural histories. His 1978 anthem “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” dominated dance charts internationally and has been described as the cornerstone of gay disco and an epochal record in the genre’s history. As his biographer Joshua Gamson wrote in his essay for the Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Board, Sylvester was “genderfluid before anybody named that, and really queer before anybody named it.”9

When disco fell out of mainstream favor in the early 1980s (a fall driven in part by backlash against its association with Black, gay, and Latino communities), Sylvester was dropped by his major label. He moved to a small independent gay disco imprint, lost his collaborator Patrick Cowley to AIDS in 1982, and died of AIDS himself in 1988, bequeathing his future royalties to AIDS organizations rather than to any institution that might have preserved his legacy. For decades afterward, his foundational influence on electronic music, Hi-NRG, and house was largely unacknowledged in official music history. His memory survived not in institutional archives but in queer club culture, Black queer community memory, and the informal circulation of his music on dance floors that no library cataloged. It was not until 2019 — thirty-one years after his death — that the Library of Congress inducted “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” into the National Recording Registry, recognizing it as culturally and historically significant. The GLBT Historical Society, a community archive, holds his papers. The institution that should’ve been preserving his legacy all along came last.

The Sylvester example makes Harris’s archival sliver visible in a way that an abstract argument cannot. The sliver cut from disco history dropped him while preserving artists whose debt to him went unacknowledged. It is also a direct answer to Margalit’s question about what we owe.10 Sylvester did not simply fade — he was pushed out of the record by a commercial and institutional machinery that had no interest in preserving Black queer cultural history. The community that kept his memory alive for three decades before institutions noticed did so without resources, without infrastructure, and without the legitimacy that official preservation confers. That’s not natural forgetting. It’s constitutive forgetting with a human face.

The digital dark age hit queer community archives with particular force for reasons inseparable from Connerton’s engineered forgetting. More so in queer communities, format obsolescence is a resource problem, and resources have never been distributed equally. Community archives that arose precisely because mainstream institutions refused to preserve queer materials were, almost by definition, underfunded and understaffed. When formats became obsolete, well-resourced institutional archives migrated. Community archives lost content. Abigail De Kosnik’s Rogue Archives (2016) documents this dynamic in detail: the fan communities and queer communities that built their own digital archives outside institutional infrastructure were technically sophisticated but institutionally unprotected, their collections subject to exactly the dark age losses that Rothenberg warned about and largely invisible to the institutions that might have intervened.11

This is where the fever and the ethics of memory meet. The frenzy to preserve that Derrida describes is not irrational. It’s the appropriate response to recognizing that the natural arc of memory — the gradual, contextual fading that Mayer-Schönberger describes as human and necessary — was never available to queer communities on equal terms. The tens of thousands of people who died during the AIDS crisis, whose names appear in no institutional archive, did not get to fade naturally. They were erased. Sylvester survived into eventual institutional recognition only because communities fought to keep him visible long enough for institutions to notice. That is a different thing from natural forgetting, and it’s what the fever is responding to.

Ann Cvetkovich’s concept of the trauma archive names what disappears when community preservation fails. In An Archive of Feelings (2003), Cvetkovich argues that queer communities have always built memory from ephemera — ticket stubs, zines, photographs, informal digital posts — precisely because institutions refused to treat queer lives as historically significant.12 These objects are not supplementary to the official record. For many communities, they are the only record. José Esteban Muñoz (1996) calls this “ephemera as evidence,” the fragile, material traces through which queer history proves it existed at all.13 When platforms delete them and formats render them unreadable, the loss is not the natural fading that Mayer-Schönberger calls human. It’s the violent reduction of memory that never had the chance to live fully in the first place.

The platform era has added new mechanisms to this old pattern. Social media created spaces where queer communities could document their lives outside institutional control, and then systematically dismantled those spaces through content moderation policies that treated queer expression as inherently sexual. The effect is a new form of dark age loss that has become the new format obsolescence: algorithmic deletion. This is content removed not because the technology failed but because the platform decided it should not exist. Mayer-Schönberger worried about a world that could not forget. Queer communities live in a world that forgets selectively, preserves what is profitable, deletes what is threatening, migrates what already has institutional support, and calls all of those actions neutral and fair.

Toward Queer Futurity in LIS Practice

Margalit’s ethics of memory suggest that the question LIS professionals need to ask is not how to preserve everything but what we owe, to whom, and under what conditions.14 For queer communities specifically, the answer begins with honesty about what has been taken. The frenzy to preserve, the fever, is a legitimate response to illegitimate erasure. But the goal underneath the fever is not permanence for its own sake. It is justice: the restoration of the natural relationship between a community and its own memory, the right to choose what fades and what endures rather than having that choice made by forces indifferent or hostile to queer life.

Muñoz’s queer futurity reframes this from reactive to generative. In Cruising Utopia (2009), he argues that queerness is fundamentally oriented toward the future. He explains that queer identity has always been about imagining a world that does not yet exist rather than recovering a past that does.15 The work of queer memory is not only backward-looking preservation. It’s a forward-looking construction that creates the conditions for queer communities to have agency over their own histories, on their own terms, in their own language. Sylvester’s eventual entry into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry is a small step in that direction. The GLBT Historical Society that holds his papers is a larger step because it represents community stewardship that precedes and outlasts institutional recognition, rather than the other way around.

In LIS practice, this has concrete implications. Adler’s critique of subject headings in the Library of Congress is an ongoing problem that professionals can address by advocating for description vocabularies developed with communities rather than imposed on them.16 The Homosaurus, a linked data vocabulary for LGBTQ+ terminology developed collaboratively with queer communities, is one practical incarnation of not recovering the past but building infrastructure oriented toward a different future. It’s also a direct response to the dark age problem, a description that communities recognize and actively maintain is one that survives format migration, because it has living stewards rather than institutional inertia behind it.

Digital preservation strategy also requires rethinking in light of both platform volatility and format obsolescence. Cvetkovich’s insight that queer memory lives in ephemera means LIS professionals need to take seriously the archival significance of social media content, personal blogs, and community-built digital spaces, not only the institutional collections that have always been considered preservation-worthy.17 De Kosnik’s documentation of rogue archives suggests a model of community-built digital collections that require institutional partnerships and resources but lack institutional control.18 The volatility of digital platforms makes this urgency acute. When Tumblr purged adult content in 2018, entire archives of queer community history disappeared overnight simply because a platform made a business decision. Community archives that had built their collections in digital spaces outside institutional infrastructure had no recourse and no backup. That is the dark age operating in real time.

Harris argues that the archivist’s ethical obligation is a recognition that every archival decision is a political act.19 For LIS professionals working alongside queer communities, that accountability means being honest about what the profession has historically done and what digital infrastructure is currently doing. It also means sitting with the harder question that Margalit raises: not every memory can or should be preserved indefinitely, and part of the archivist’s work is understanding what a community needs to remember in order to survive and thrive, and what it might be ready to release. That discernment belongs to the community, not the institution. The archivist’s role is to ensure the community has the conditions to exercise it freely.

Conclusion

The fever, I’ve come to think, is not a problem to be solved. It’s information. It tells me that something important is at risk, that the frenzy to preserve is a reasonable response to unreasonable loss. Derrida is right that preservation and destruction are not opposites and that every archival choice enacts both, and the anxiety of that is the condition of the work.20 Mayer-Schönberger is right that perfect memory is a fantasy, and that forgetting is human.21 Margalit is right that not all forgetting is betrayal, and that what we owe to memory depends on what was taken and from whom.

What I’ve come to believe, working through these questions as a new LIS scholar and as a queer person, is that the problem was never preservation versus forgetting. It was never whether Sylvester, Freddie Mercury, Bayard Rustin, or the tens of thousands whose names the AIDS crisis took deserve to be remembered forever. The problem is that queer communities were never given the chance to answer that question for themselves. Their memory was reduced by institutional indifference, distorted by pathologizing description, swallowed by formats no one maintained, and deleted by platforms that treated queer existence as a terms of service violation. Sylvester’s music survived three decades of institutional silence because communities refused to let it disappear, and it eventually earned institutional recognition because the community had already decided, and kept deciding, long enough that institutions had no choice but to notice. That’s what community archives do. That’s what the fever is for.

The natural arc of memory — the gradual fading that Mayer-Schönberger describes as deeply human — was never made available to queer communities on equal terms. That is what LIS can work to change. Not by preserving everything forever, which is neither possible nor desirable, but by building the conditions under which queer communities have genuine agency over their own histories. By ensuring that what fades does so because a community chose it, not because an institution decided it was not worth saving or a platform decided it was too threatening to host. Muñoz’s queer futurity isn’t nostalgia.22 It’s the insistence that communities who have always been told their stories do not matter get to live long enough in the record to decide for themselves what to keep and what to let go.

I came to this field with a fever. I expect to carry it for a long time. But I’m learning to understand it not as a frenzy but as a compass that’s pointing me towards the communities whose memory most needs defending, and toward the future they deserve to help build.

I walked over to his place, in the rain, my chubbed up dick leading the way, and the moment I walked into his room, our bodies were immediately together, our tongues down each other’s throats. While he stroked my boner, I breathlessly asked if he had a condom, but he said no and rebuffed the question entirely. My dick concurred with a steady dribble of precum, daring me to say no.

After I filled him to the point of overflow, we lay back on his bed and kiki’d for an hour about ourselves, playing footsie as we did so.

I normally have such anxiety before and after the fucking, so this encounter was a breath of fresh air. We seemed to really vibe. He kissed me fully as we made our way toward his door, he asked for my contact info, and I asked for his. We traded numbers and socials while straddling the threshold, and I walked out into the rain, back to my house-sitting, with a pep in my step.

A week or so later, I felt a heaviness in my balls that turned into a dull ache. Urinating both burned and was a temporary release from the sporadic throbbing in my balls, and my urine itself was cloudy. I went to the doctor, one of my first visits with my new PCP, explained my symptoms, why I had them, and was given a full STI panel.

The results? Negative. Across the board.

I was treated for a bacterial infection and sent home.

I reached out to the guy and let him know that while my results were negative, I was having STI symptoms, and since he was the first person I’d been with sans condom, he should go get tested just to be safe. “Interesting,” he said, “I’m not having any symptoms,” and within 24 hours of that, I’d been removed and blocked by him on all social media.

Later, I was with a guy whom I’d slept with more than once. Again, he always refused to wear a condom and was partial to using vaseline for lube. I remember thinking I’d read somewhere that vaseline is a great lubricant, but it exacerbates the growth of harmful bacteria. I mentioned this and was told, “I’ve never had any issues using it, and it feels great,” in a tone that made it clear I was killing the vibe.

Like clockwork, a week later, my balls felt heavy, and there was a dull ache. I went back to my doctor, pissed in a cup, which had visible chunks of discharge, and strangely celebrated what would obviously be a positive test result. I was given meds for a bacterial infection and sent home.

Several days later, I received my test results. Chlamydia: Negative. Gonorrhea: Negative. Syphilis: Negative.

I reached out to this guy with some trepidation due to the previous encounter. But he’d been so kind during our hook-up, and we had previously told each other some of our most embarrassing sexcapades, so I stomped back the what-if committee in my head. I explained that I was having symptoms such as visible discharge, and even though my test results had been negative, he should go get tested to be safe since, again, he was the only person I’d been with since my last screening. “I don’t think you got that from me. I’m on Doxy.”

He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t cold. In fact, we still talk occasionally. But any flirtatious dialogue I send his way is given a benign heart emoji or ignored entirely. Someone I’d slept with numerous times immediately cut me off sexually after I’d been honest about my status, something we are told to do in our community to not only keep each other safe but to break the stigma.

And here I was being stigmatized.

There is a version of queer sexual culture that exists primarily at dinner parties and in think pieces. In this version, we are liberated. We talk openly about our bodies, our histories, our diagnoses. Someone will tell you about the time they got crabs with the same energy they’d use to describe a bad Airbnb. We have, as a community, decided that the stigma around sexual health is over, or at least that we are personally above it. We did the work. We read the essays. We know better.

This version of queer sexual culture is, in my experience, largely performative.

The public conversation around STI disclosure exists on two poles, and neither of them is where I live. On one end: the earnest public health messaging that frames disclosure as “the right thing to do,” a gift you give your community that keeps us all safe so that we can fuck more.1 On the other: the contrarian personal essay that argues disclosure is an unfair burden, that the system is too broken to require it, that people who know their status shouldn’t be held to a higher standard than people who simply never got tested.2 Both positions are defensible. Neither of them accounts for the person who disclosed anyway, inside a broken system, and was punished for it.

I learned to disclose from television. Specifically from Brian Kinney, the fictional libertine at the center of Queer As Folk, who wore condoms like a religion and treated his partners like adults capable of making informed decisions despite being an unabashed asshole. I was young and newly out, and I took that seriously, the way you take seriously the things that arrive at the exact moment you need them. What the show did not prepare me for was the social consequence of actually practicing what the culture preaches.

Researchers have a term for the gap between rhetoric and reality. A 2023 study found that public health messaging framing partner notification as “the right thing to do” led young people to adopt narratives that actively concealed the real difficulties they faced and their unmet needs.3 The script, in other words, was doing harm. It was asking people to absorb a cost it refused to acknowledge.

I could’ve told them that.

It would be dishonest to discount the marvels of PrEP and what it has accomplished. Before its approval in 2012, HIV transmission among men who fuck men was a condition of sex that required constant negotiation, fear, paranoia, and grief. PrEP (or pre-exposure prophylaxis; a daily antiretroviral that prevents HIV transmission with near-perfect efficacy when taken as directed, if you didn’t know) changed the math and the culture.4 It was the result of decades of queer activist pressure on the medical establishment that had spent the better part of the AIDS crisis doing as little as possible, and its arrival represented real effort. And yet even this hard-won tool, this genuinely life-changing pharmaceutical’s existence rests on shifting sands. In 2025, the Supreme Court narrowly preserved ACA coverage of PrEP in Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, a lawsuit originally filed by Christian employers who argued that covering HIV prevention medication violated their religious freedom because it 'encourages homosexual behavior.'5

DoxyPEP followed PrEP’s well-trodden path. A dose of doxycycline taken within 72 hours of sex reduces the transmission of chlamydia up to 88% and syphilis over 50%.6 For sexually active queer people cycling through the same exhausting rotation of positive results, antibiotics, and follow-up appointments, it was a different kind of intervention entirely. I've been on DoxyPEP for a while now and have gotten significantly fewer infections since. I’m not ungrateful.

The case for DoxyPEP over routine testing and treatment is more straightforward than it might seem. Testing catches infections after the fact. DoxyPEP interrupts them before they establish. Real-world data from San Francisco found chlamydia and syphilis infections among men who fuck men dropped by roughly half within a year of implementation.7 There is no testing schedule that produces numbers like that. And doxycycline is already the drug you’d be given to treat chlamydia after a positive result. DoxyPEP is simply the same medicine, taken earlier, before the infection has time to settle in and spread to someone else.

But here is what PrEP and DoxyPEP also did: they made condoms a hard sell. I'm not calling people irresponsible, I want to quickly add here. I'm just as much of a slut as the next hole. It's because the logic is genuinely compelling. PrEP handles HIV. DoxyPEP handles the most common bacterial infections. The risk calculus changed, and the culture ran with it faster than the science supported. And if I'm being completely honest (which is, after all, the whole point of this essay) fucking raw feels incredible. The intimacy, the heat, skin against skin without negotiation or interruption. I understand, viscerally and without apology, why nobody wants to stop and find a condom. I don't always want to either. Straight people fuck raw all the time. It is, in the most literal sense, the natural state of sex, and their STI risks are just as real as ours.8 The difference is that queer people were handed a pharmaceutical infrastructure and told to manage our risk with it, because our sex was always already framed as the dangerous kind. PrEP and DoxyPEP are miracles. They are also the result of a culture that decided queer bodies needed to be made safe rather than simply accepted. I've not successfully negotiated a condom with a partner in longer than I care to admit. The guy who said "I'm on Doxy" said it like a door closing. These tools were built to reduce harm. They've also quietly restructured what harm people are willing to think about.

For my part, this was not a pattern of carelessness. I wasn’t stumbling through sexual encounters, indifferent to consequences. I got tested regularly. I disclosed when I had symptoms. I abstained from sex until my test results showed that I was no longer a risk to others. And this is not a moral position, just a fact about how I move through the world: I limited my partners to people I was genuinely trying to connect with. These were not strangers I never wanted to see again. They were people I’d reached toward, whose bodies I wanted to know, whose companionship I’d sought out.

And still.

A 2024 systematic review of STI disclosure literature found that fear of rejection and social consequences are among the primary drivers of non-disclosure — meaning the scientific community has spent considerable energy studying why people don’t disclose, while almost nobody has examined what happens to the people who do.9 The punishment is so expected that it shapes behavior before it even happens. I am apparently one of the few people foolish or principled enough to have kept disclosing anyway.

What I kept running into was a specific kind of erasure. Not anger, usually. Anger would have been something. Anger would have meant I was still a person in the room. What I got instead was the conversational equivalent of a door closing quietly. “Interesting.” Left on read. Removed and blocked. Someone I’d slept with numerous times, whose body I knew, who jokingly said I could pee inside him while I was inside him, suddenly treated me like a problem that had resolved itself.

It wasn’t that these guys were cruel. Most of them weren’t. It was that I became, in the moment of disclosure, suddenly optional. Someone they could have, or not have, and found it easier not to have. I’d reached toward them, considered them, prioritized their health over my own comfort, and they responded by deciding I was no longer worth the complication.

I’d done the things we tell each other to do to break the stigma. The script had been handed to me. I’d delivered it faithfully.

Nobody told me what it would cost.

There is something else worth naming, something that runs underneath the social failure like a second, swifter current. Every time I disclosed, I was disclosing into a void. People I told seemed not to want to hear it, and I often didn’t have a name for what I was telling them.

The standard STI panel tests for a fairly limited set of infections. Chlamydia. Gonorrhea. Syphilis. HIV. Sometimes herpes. For the heteros, this is what "getting tested" means in practice: checking for five or six organisms out of the more than thirty pathogens transmissible through sex.10 And that's if they bother at all. The CDC has routine annual testing recommendations for sexually active women under 25 and for gay and bisexual men. Heterosexual men don't even make the list.11

I had active symptoms. Visible discharge. A panel that came back negative. A doctor who treated me empirically for a bacterial infection, meaning he gave me antibiotics aimed at something he couldn’t see and hoped they’d hit whatever was actually there. They did. Which tells you something.

What they likely hit was something in the Mycoplasma family, specifically Ureaplasma or Mycoplasma hominis, close bacterial relatives that live in the genital tract, cause exactly the kind of symptoms I was experiencing, transmit through sex, and appear on no standard panel. They respond to doxycycline and azithromycin, which is why empirical treatment worked. They are not classified as STIs in most clinical guidelines, which is why nobody told me I had one. They exist in a definitional gap — infectious, transmissible, symptomatic, and officially invisible.

And here is the part that the guy who said "I'm on Doxy" could not have known, because nobody told him: rectal Mycoplasma infections are predominantly asymptomatic.12 He likely felt nothing. His panel, if he ever got one, wouldn't have tested for it anyway. He wasn't lying when he said he didn't think I got it from him. He was operating inside the same incomplete picture the rest of us were handed. DoxyPEP, as we've established, does not prevent Mycoplasma. The tool he trusted, the door he closed in my face, wasn't built for what was actually moving between us.

This is not a minor bureaucratic inconvenience. It means I was trying to disclose something the medical system had no language for. I couldn’t tell my partners what I had because my doctor couldn’t tell me. The panel said negative. The floating pulp in my piss said otherwise. And somewhere in that gap between what the testing infrastructure could see and what was actually moving between us, I was supposed to find the words to explain myself clearly enough that someone wouldn’t block me on Instagram.

I want to be precise about this because it matters: the failure here is not on an individual. It’s not a failure of my doctor, who did what the guidelines support, and, to his credit, behaved with an open mind and spoke matter-of-factly about gay sex in ways that made me genuinely comfortable and at ease. It’s not a failure of the partners who didn’t know what Ureaplasma was. Christ, I barely knew what it was. It’s a failure of infrastructure. Of a testing system built around the most visible, most studied, most politically legible infections, with an entire category of organisms thriving in the gap it left behind.

One of those organisms sounds like it came straight out of Jurassic Park. The mistake the scientists made before they resurrected dinosaurs: Mgen.

Mycoplasma genitalium has a resistance problem that makes everything else look manageable.

The standard drugs don’t work on it. Mgen lacks a cell wall entirely, which means penicillins and cephalosporins, the most common go-to antibiotics, are structurally useless against it.13 The drugs that do work are failing fast. Azithromycin, which became the preferred treatment, has developed such widespread resistance that the CDC now says a single dose should not be used at all because it fails and efficiently selects for further resistance, creating strains even harder to treat.14 A 2025 study in Tokyo found that among confirmed Mgen cases, over 94% had macrolide resistance mutations, and nearly 90% had dual-class resistance, meaning resistance to both the primary and secondary antibiotic classes.15

What the CDC currently recommends is a two-stage approach: doxycycline first to reduce bacterial load, followed by either high-dose azithromycin or moxifloxacin, depending on resistance testing. Resistance testing that most clinics don’t have. For an infection the majority of panels don’t test for.

DoxyPEP was designed for chlamydia, syphilis, and gonorrhea. Mgen was not part of the calculus. Given that Mgen already shows widespread resistance to tetracyclines (the antibiotic class DoxyPEP belongs to), there is no meaningful protective effect against DoxyPEP, and some evidence suggests that widespread DoxyPEP use may further accelerate resistance across multiple organisms.16

So here is the complete picture. A standard panel can’t see it. The drugs most likely to be prescribed can’t reliably treat it. The newest prevention tool doesn’t prevent it and may be making it worse. Rectal infections produce no symptoms, so the person carrying it has no reason to suspect anything. And the person it moves to, the person who develops discharge and a dull ache and a burning when they piss, is expected to disclose it clearly, responsibly, and without causing offense, to partners who will respond by blocking them on every platform they can find.

I did that. Repeatedly. With my whole chest.

I want to say that plainly before anyone mistakes this essay for a cautionary tale or a case for abstinence or an argument that sluthood has consequences and therefore you should reconsider your choices. I mean, sluthood definitely has consequences. So does leaving the goddamn house. Getting an STI is one of them, and it would be a much more bearable consequence, even ordinary, if the response to it weren’t so consistently fraught and hypocritical. If the culture that spends so much time congratulating itself on destigmatization could extend that generosity to the very moment when someone texts you and says, “Hey, I think you should get tested.” The STI isn’t the problem. The silence after is the problem. The blocking is the problem. The “interesting” is the problem. The slut isn’t the problem. I want to be very clear about that. I am, as the title suggests, an ethical slut. The ethics are the point. The slut is non-negotiable. I love sex. I love to cum. I love someone’s body melting into mine.

What I want isn’t complicated, though the culture seems to find it so. I want lovers, plural. I want a life that moves through people openly and honestly, people who move through me the same way, who I care about and who care about me, who I can call when something is wrong, and who will pick up. I want the kind of intimacy that doesn’t require me to choose between honesty and continued access to someone’s body. I want to be able to say: I have symptoms; I don’t know what they are yet; the panel won’t catch it anyway; here is what I know and here is what I don’t; and I need you to know it, too.

And have that be the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one.

That isn’t a small thing to want. It’s also not, I don’t think, an unreasonable one.

But the culture that handed me Brian Kinney, PrEP, DoxyPEP, and a vocabulary of destigmatization hasn’t built the infrastructure to support it. The panels can’t see what’s moving between us. The drugs can’t treat what the panels can’t name. The people I tell disappear. And I’m left trying to build something open, plural, honest, and reciprocal within a system that was not designed for any of those things.

How do you do that?

1

Depasse, Emily. “Do I Have to Disclose My STI Status?” emilydepasse.substack.com, September 30, 2025.

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“Each of us perceives things according to who and how we are at particular junctures, whose terms are always shifting.”

— Félix González-Torres1

In 2024, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery mounted a retrospective of queer Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres. Visitors encountered a pile of colorfully wrapped candy on the floor, an installation titled Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), but the museum placard omitted the work’s meaning: that the candy’s weight matched that of the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock, before he became HIV-positive and died from an AIDS-related illness in 1992. The words gay, AIDS, Cuban, and Laycock’s name were gone. The González-Torres Foundation had already done this at the Art Institute of Chicago and David Zwirner Gallery. Institutions scrubbed AIDS and with it the context that made the work profound, hoping to widen the collector base and make it safe for living rooms that did not want to think about who died and how.2 A national museum had made an active archival choice: to let a queer life disappear in favor of neutrality and brevity.

This erasure sits at the heart of one of librarianship’s most urgent debates. Schwartz and Cook argued two decades ago that archives are instruments of power wearing the cloak of neutral repositories.3 Archives determine whose memories survive, whose they distort, and whose they erase. In 2025, that threat became acute: the Trump administration dismantled the Institute of Museum and Library Services, canceling over 1,200 competitive grants and placing the agency’s staff on administrative leave.4 Community archives and digital preservation initiatives have filled the gap. The role of these initiatives is not to supplement mainstream archival practice; they are corrections to it, and they remain acutely vulnerable to federal defunding and political hostility, making queer memory one of the most urgent equity challenges in librarianship today.

The Archive as Instrument of Erasure

The problem of queer archival silence is structural. Schwartz and Cook argue that archives have always reflected the priorities of those who built them, whether it was governments, churches, or corporations; none of them had any interest in documenting queer lives except to criminalize or pathologize them.5 There is no neutral archival description. Every choice about what to name, what to surface, and what to bury is an act of interpretation. Someone’s values are always in the room. The only question is whose.

When the Smithsonian stripped Ross Laycock’s name from a placard on an installation explicitly meant to memorialize him, it made a descriptive choice, a story about whose love counts as history. Caswell has a name for when a community disappears from the historical record. She calls it symbolic annihilation, and the damage goes beyond scholarship to identity, dignity, and the basic sense that one’s community exists and matters.6

Freeman documented what this looks like from the researcher’s side. Queer scholars navigating institutional archives reported using slurs as search terms because those were the only words that surfaced results.7 Some participants met archivists who seemed personally offended by queer materials. One described the institution itself as a “gatekeeper of morality.” Those three words reveal everything about who built the archive and whom they had in mind when they built it. One archivist told researchers that identifying a historical figure as possibly gay was tantamount to an insult, as though queerness were something a person could weaponize against someone. Freeman is unsparing: institutions do not lose queer records through carelessness.8 They actively resist queer stewardship. Cifor pushes further in her work on trans archives: archival absence is an act. When an institution refuses to acknowledge that someone existed, that refusal reaches the people still living, and it does real damage. It is violence.9

The ALA counts equity among its core values, defining it as the absence of discrimination in the provision of services.10 Archives that systematically exclude queer histories are not meeting that standard. Access is on that list, too. It is the principle that anyone should be able to find and use information unburdened by barriers. A history buried deep enough that no one can find it is, for all practical purposes, gone.

Community Archives as Activist Intervention

When institutions fail, communities build their own systems.11 Cleve Jones and a few others took over a San Francisco storefront in 1987, afraid that the men dying around them would vanish without a trace. The government had already signaled it was fine with that, and so had mainstream medicine. Jones and their community sewed the AIDS Memorial Quilt into that silence. Sturken describes it as a deliberate intervention into the government’s failures.12 For many of the AIDS dead, it’s the only record that their lives had happened at all. Krouse reads it as a rebuttal to the biomedical framing that spent years casting gay men as vectors and threats.13 The Quilt did not engage that argument in words. It just kept sewing names.

These archives did not emerge from abundance. rukus! built a Black-led LGBT archive in the UK because the mainstream press, including the gay press, had never thought to. The GLBT Historical Society has been doing this work in San Francisco since 1985, not in manifestos but in boxes and finding aids. Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez document a phenomenon they call representational belonging: the epistemological and ontological impact of finding one’s community in the historical record.14 People described joy, surprise, and something harder to name. One participant spoke of suddenly discovering that they existed, not metaphorically, but in the concrete sense of finding themselves documented.15 To witness that in real time is to watch a person’s relationship to history change.

Caswell and Cifor argue that fixing this requires more than good intentions. Their model of radical empathy, rooted in feminist care theory, asks archivists to start with the communities whose records they are meant to preserve.16 For communities that institutions have silenced or misrepresented, collecting records that affirm their existence is a political act, an attempt to wrest control over how a community’s history is written. LIS cannot treat this as someone else’s concern. An institution that waits for records to arrive and files what shows up is not neutral. It’s making a choice.17 Honoring the ALA’s values means going after the histories that would otherwise vanish.

Digital Preservation and the Current Threat

Digital tools have transformed queer archival activism. The Digital Transgender Archive launched in 2016 and did something no physical collection could: it made trans history searchable and available to anyone with an internet connection. However, Rawson points out that something gets lost in conversations about access — description itself is never neutral.18 Clinical language inherited from earlier eras can quietly reinstate the pathology it once named. The vocabulary communities have built for themselves do something different: they treat the people in those records as people.

Ellis et al. (2026) argue that queer erasure runs in two directions simultaneously: institutional archives produce silence through omission and misdescription, while digital platforms replicate and accelerate that silence through content removal, algorithmic suppression, and the overnight wholesale deletion of LGBTQ+ materials from public-facing institutional spaces.19 Through content moderation policies, platform shutdowns, and terms of service drafted by people who were not thinking about queer users, the pattern Are documents is straightforward: Instagram and TikTok suppress LGBTQ+ creators through shadowbanning.20 No notification, no removal, no explanation, while leaving comparable heterosexual content alone. Delmonaco et al. show that marginalized users absorb the highest costs of systems deliberately designed to be unreadable to the people they affect most.21 When platforms delete this content, they destroy historical records that institutional archives have not collected and that community archives cannot always recover. An archivist throws away a document. A museum removes a name from a label. A platform tweaks an algorithm. The hands are different. The damage is the same.

The 2025 IMLS crisis made the federal dimension impossible to ignore. The Trump administration terminated over 1,000 competitive grants, gutting the primary federal funding mechanism for libraries, museums, and archives. Queer community archives do not have endowments or institutional budgets to fall back on. They had those grants.22 The Ohio History Connection’s $250,000 LGBTQ+ historical markers project was among those terminated.23 The threats are coming from more than one direction: institutions quietly gutting the context that makes queer collections meaningful, and partisan politics pulling federal funding for preservation work. For LIS professionals, none of this permits a passive response. Caswell argues for an activist archival practice that treats preservation as a form of social justice rather than a technical procedure, which she calls liberatory memory work.24 In practice, this means archivists who do not wait for communities to come to them but go to communities instead, who treat description as a political act, who advocate for controlled vocabularies built by the people they describe, and who understand that a finding aid is never just a finding aid. It means refusing the professional fiction of neutrality and accepting that every archival decision either works toward justice or against it. The IMLS crisis didn’t create that obligation. It made it harder to pretend the obligation was not already there.

Conclusion

When Carl George gave his friend Ross Laycock his last bath, he could not have known that decades later a national museum would strip Ross’s name from the memorial his partner had made for him. That is the condition of queer memory in America: always under threat, always requiring active defense.

The ALA’s core values of access, equity, and public good are commitments that require action when institutions erase queer histories from museum labels, when the federal government terminates funding for LGBTQ+ historical projects, and when archives strip trans materials of the community language that gives them meaning.25 From Schwartz and Cook’s archives-as-power26 to Caswell et al.’s representational belonging and liberatory memory work,27 librarianship has the theoretical frameworks to understand what is happening. What is required now is the professional will to respond.

His face and mouth was suddenly full of a viscous, inky substance. He fell back with eyes wide and he wretched, spewing vomit all over the front of his psychedelic smock. The Greev turned slowly by its waist, hunched, arms out spindly-crooked. When its head finally snapped around, it was grinning from ear to sickening ear. It had rows of teeth overlapping other rows. They were the color and shine of tarnished silver. It drooled while it snickered. “K-k-kiss me,” it hissed, as it solidified. Its limbs snapped at odd angles until it was on all fours and it rushed him with skin-chilling speed. He saw the blur of insect wings. And the Greev’s attack was reflected away, as if they stood on opposite sides of glass. Bubba was on the air, naked, his dragonfly wings shimmering as they agitated back and forth, keeping him aloft. Above him shone a full Moon. The Greev, in its spider-like form, shot a silver thread from a penile protrusion between its abdomen and thorax.

Bubba raised both of his hands in an arc over himself. The Moon seemed to grow, as if it were being physically pulled down onto them. It rotated as it descended over the Earth, turning its face like a grinning skull. A beam of otherworldly light shot from it, out over them, through them. The Greev lurched backward. It’s arms and legs splayed back, its mouth agape, the viscous inkiness of its form began to disintegrate away. Suddenly the inkiness burst outward from The Greev in long sinews, connected, like a latticework, like a net.

”Run, Hedg—” Bubba tried to scream, but the net closed around him, and it singed, burned, and scattered the fairy into small, tiny cubed pieces.

“Holy Christ,” Hedgehog exclaimed, feeling the air rush from his lungs. He felt Molly drop him, and he began dashing toward where? To Quiet? The Greev stepped in front of him with ease, more ape-like than arachnid this time. It reached out with a forceps-like appendage and grabbed him by his vomit-drenched smock. As it was about to lift him in the air, a sound—like brick on brick reassembling—came from behind and suddenly Bubba was there again between them. His hair was wild, his eyes white with rage, as he hovered wraith like above the ground.

“Listen well!” Bubba’s voice rang out, as if a gong, layered over and over, reverberating deep from within his energized core. His body hummed electric. It shone azure. “You will not touch him again!”

The Greev shrieked. “NO NO NO NOT THAT WAY, I TELL YOU! NO MERCY. ONLY A DARKENING! WE WILL SHRINK TOGETHER IN OBLIVION! I LOVE THE PAIN! I LOVE TO SUFFER! O BLUE FAIRY O BLUE FAIRY LISTEN TO ME. I LOVE TO HURT US. I LIVE TO HURT US. TELL HIM TO KISS ME, PLEASE. LET HIM KISS ME. I NEED IT. I WANT IT. I WON’T ASK FOR ANY—”

“I am the Gate Keeper,” Bubba’s voice clanged finite and resolute. The Greev was twisted and distorted by the sound. It stretched its body incomprehensibly as if in pain.

“The door is shut,” Bubba continued. “And the key swallowed.”

A spell, similar to the Greev’s own, a latticework of light, curved over them, and encased the Greev in a spherical cage. It began to shrink until it was no more than a pinprick of light and burst into nothing but a wisp of smoke. And they were back on the knoll, standing close to the path, in front of the HausBath.

“Well, goodness. I didn’t know it was that bad, my friend,” said Bubba. “You know what you have to do eventually, yeah?”

“Confront it?”

“Hm. Maybe. Confront is an interesting word choice.”

“But Quiet said it’s meaningless,” he said.

“You know what I think he also said?” Bubba put the palm of his hand against Hedgehog’s face, wiping away dirt and a stray tear. “It’s everything. Everywhere. All at once.”

He sighed. “You seem to have it all figured out.”

“Are you kidding? I’ve been psyching myself up to go in there all night.”

Bubba gestured to the HausBath. Its windows glowed orange and purple. Smoke puffed from the wonky tin chimney. People came to and fro. Behind the HausBath was a patio that had a few dim fairy lights strung along its bannisters. The silhouettes of people fucking could be seen in the dark.

“Didn’t you go with Animal after I arrived?”

“I chickened out,” Bubba said.

“You just fought a shadow demon,” Hedgehog exclaimed with an exasperated laugh.

“I am freezing after that scuffle,” Bubba said. “I bet its warm in the HausBath. But I can’t. I don’t know what to expect. It’s imposing.”

“Sex?”

“Yeah, sometimes.”

“Listen, go inside,” said Hedgehog with a soft grin. “Sit with the panic. And if it doesn’t go away, then leave.”

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” said Hedgehog. “Or I will be, anyway.”

“The learner teaching the learned. I could kiss you,” said Bubba, looking at the windows of the HausBath glowing saffron and plum.

Hedgehog grabbed Bubba’s face and pulled him close. They kissed.

“Now, go! Eat a butt. Suck a dick. I actually have a therapy appointment to get to.”

The forest was strangely quiet, even with the people coming to and fro down the paths with their head lamps and glowsticks and little Coleman camping lanterns. It sounded as though he, Hedgehog, had stuck cotton into his ears. There was still the faint thumpa-thumpa of the drum circle, or was it his heartbeat? The fairy lights and will-o’-wisps had gone dimmer in the maturing night. At the fork he saw two people under an awning where an actual living room was set up. An old plaid couch, from the 60s. Even a box TV with antenna. One person was on all fours, the other behind wearing an executioner’s hood. They were fucking doggy-style next to a white wicker coffee table. The top pulled at the bottom’s long, curly mohawk. The bottom contorted their back into an incomprehensible arch and the top began to thrust deeper. He felt a small twinge of secondhand embarrassment and shame from watching as he passed them, afraid he was gazing too long.

He looked ahead and there hanging from a tree was a Pineapple. Capital P. He took the path which seemed to stretch on for an odd length of time. He passed people here and there. He heard maniacal giggles behind the trees in the wood. Creatures of the night whooping and hollering all around him. Nightjars calling from somewhere in the deep. Whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will punctuated with the singular hooting of a barred owl asking a single question: Who? Who? Whooo-cooks-for-youuu? The drumming on the knoll was but a distant heartbeat now. He was shocked how the hills buffered sound, ensuring that each part of the night got its own solo. In the rare moments of silence, even that was pierced by the fluttering of bat wings over head.

Quiet was sitting outside of a giant, red mushroom that had windows and a door. It appeared to be a two-story dwelling. He was pulling the gummy rings off of his cock. He shoved one between his teeth and snapped it in half, chewing the what now appeared to be a pair of neon blue worms. He grinned at noticing Hedgehog approaching.

“Are your balls ready for therapy?” They asked.

Hedgehog shrugged and smiled. “I’m just happy to be here.”

They kissed. Quiet was instantly hard against him, and they tasted of blueberry. “Come.” They took Hedgehog’s hand and headed toward the shroom. “Come into my boudoir-parlor-whorehouse-bed-and-breakfast.”

As Hedgehog moved something caught his eye to the left: a pink light. He turned and saw through the wood a fire with pink and purple flame. Around it a group of goat men danced. He could hear the tinny of a pan flute. He could see the fauns also had massive erections. There were humans with them, dancing, some floating on brooms just above the fire, laughing, shrieking in glee.

“That’s the bad fairy circle,” Quiet said behind him. “Have you gone? We can go if you want.”

“I’m right where I want to be,” Hedgehog said. “Let’s check out your shroom.”

“You are certainly making great choices tonight.”

Inside the mushroom, there were no light fixtures. The skin of the mushroom itself gave off a faint, warm glow. It was pleasant and unobtrusive. In the far corner of the main floor was a little round table with a vase full of wildflowers. A rocking chair sat by the ground floor window. A vine of some kind snaked around up the walls of the mushroom to a simple second landing accessed by a tree-hewn ladder. A kettle was beginning to boil and whistle above a small wood stove nestled in between the table and the rocking chair.

“I only have early grey tea, if you’re interested.”

“Tea would great,” said Hedgehog.

“And just lay wherever,” said Quiet as they stuffed dried tea leaves into a small sieve. “Whatever is comfortable to you.”

Hedgehog removed his smock and sandals. Quiet let out a small woof in response to Hedgehog’s nudity.

“Here you are,” they said, handing Hedgehog a small teacup. “Let this sit for a few minutes.”

They sat in silence while the tea steeped, as if both hypnotized by the pulsing light of the mushroom. The clinking of china brought Hedgehog back to the physical. “Sugar?” Quiet asked. He gestured no and sipped on the tea. The notes of fruit flooded his mouth and he let out a content sigh. He fell back amongst a pile of crocheted pillows and blankets. Quiet scooted from their seat and brought their body close to Hedgehog.

“Are you familiar with the cremaster muscle,” they asked while gently caressing the inside of Hedgehog’s thighs. “It’s responsible for thermal regulation of the testicles, drawing them up into the body for warmth and dropping them to cool off.”

Hedgehog could feels his balls respond to Quiet’s touch. They drew themselves up into his groin and quickly dropped once more. “Do you feel that?”

Hedgehog nodded. Quiet moved up into his groin, almost strumming his inguinal ligament with a thumb as he went and slowly enclosed his grip around his cock and balls. “So when you pull—”

Quiet gathered the loose skin of his scrotum where it hung from the shaft of his cock and balled their fist so that his balls were tight against the sack and tugged slightly. Hedgehog gasped in surprise pleasure. Quiet lightly flicked his left testicle. An erection followed, and he suddenly felt Quiet’s tongue beneath his foreskin. He rolled his eyes back and saw the Greev. It was perched on his mind, a strange bug that had escaped from the deepest recesses of his psyche. It cleaned itself with its own juices.

“I know what it is you see,” said Quiet, and they flicked Hedgehog’s other testicle. He moaned and whimpered at the same time. “It’s small in your mind. Squash it.” Quiet moved one hand across the top of his groin. He could feel the resistance between Quiet’s fingers as they parted his thick pubic hair. Still, with their other hand, Quiet held his scrotum taught, pulling it with a delicate but constant tension. “Squash it.”

Hedgehog reached out with his mind. The Greev was an alien-cricket, its back legs arched, a knobby joint their keystones. It was slick black, its compound eyes a tie-dye black and gray stretching over each individual ommatidia. And for a moment he was the Greev, seeing points of himself compiled into an almost infinite range of angles, as if standing before a gargantuan wall, each stone a screen. He felt the thrum of his cremaster muscle as Quiet tapped a little harder against the bottom of both testicles. He gasped. The Greev was lured by his breath. He looked up and met Quiet’s eyes as they both looked to see the insect, now an alien-mosquito, descend toward him. It was small, hunched where its thorax met the abdomen, its many legs dangling beneath it. The glow of the mushroom made it stand out in the air, a thin black speck buzzing above the floor. And moving faster than he believed, he brought both of his hand up into a clap between the Greev. He parted his hands and held them against the mushroom’s light. There, the alien-mosquito was smeared, almost liquidated, bits and pieces strewn across both palms.

“HEDGEHOG!

HEDGEHOG!

HEDGEHOG!”

Patrick, John For Now, and Bubba screamed in unison. Bubba said “Welcome home, Hedgehog!” and blessed him with pixie dust. He—now to be referred to as Hedgehog, thank the gods—grabbed Bubba’s hand for a moment and shone his headlamp over Bubba’s fingertips. They were coated in dust, like a butterfly’s wing, and no matter how much he rubbed at them, the dust continued to flake off, showering the area with little bright shimmers. “What are you,” Hedgehog said in wonder.

Bubba stepped back, considering the question, before erupting—arms splayed out—into a theatrical shout. “I AM THAT I AM,” the fairy screamed, his wings pulsing with an electric blue current, his eyes like glowing sapphires. “AND WHEN YOU GO TO THE SODOMITES YOU WILL TELL THEM I AM HAS SENT ME TO YOU!”

They all stared at him. Reverting back, he said, “It would’ve been cooler with a musical score.”

“IN PLACE OF AN ORANGE LORD, YOU WOULD HAVE A QUEEN!” Shouted John For Now, who was now donning a 1920s flapper gown with a sequined headband. Their black, coifed hair glistened wet in the moonlight.

“I think you should have this,” Said Bubba, putting the bat nose nut into his palm.

And then Hedgehog was off alone, by himself, down the rocky path. He heard one of them say “there he goes again”. He stopped by Matteo—Teo’s photograph, picked it up, and kissed it hard. He set it back down among the various candles, which were now alighted with flame. He ran off into the dark. He stumbled into a older man with jet black hair, the man smiled, and he returned the smile. “Can I sniff your pit,” he asked, quickly. “Sure!” Said the man lifting his arm. He buried his nose in the man’s armpit. It smelled of musk and, vaguely, vanilla. He moved onto someone else. “Excuse me, would it be okay if I sniffed your armpit?” “Sure” they said. This person smelled like cumin. And on he went. What was he wearing as he did this? A simple smock that was sewn from a single psychedelic pattern and sneakers without socks. He climbed the knoll. There were more trees in this area than he anticipated. To the left of him, almost on the back slope of the knoll, was a giant, weathered but sturdy pavilion. To the right, scanning the scene, was a bonfire around which stood, danced, vibrated, and drummed throngs of people. And even further right, with the HausBath now behind him, the back of the barn in view, was a giant hole in the ground, surrounded by a circle of rocks. A single woman danced around the hole, naked, her breasts juddering with her sporadic, bird-like movements. She threw dust in the hole. She threw leaf litter. She spit in it. In that same moment, a man walking by, in a leather vest and nothing else, also spit in the hole.

“It’s the may hole,” said someone sitting on the ground next to him. “During the plague there were no celebrations. There was no may pole. This was done to honor the divine feminine.”

“But they’re spitting in it,” he said.

“Even the earth’s pussy gets a little dry,” said the person. “Would you like to give something?”

“I have this nut,” he held it up.

“She loves a good nut,” said the person and gestured an outstretched arm to the hole.

Molly’s kiss had given everything a soft, Rococo glow. It all moved liked colorful oil. And it buzzed as if the canvas of reality sat on top of a vinyl record. He moved toward’s the hole in the ground, he crawled, he began to think of Matteo, and he half-expected the damned Greev to slink out it, out of his thoughts. He crawled so close to the edge, encircled with stones, and he kissed one. He then extended his hand holding the bat nose nut, and he dropped it inside. He moved closer and peered into the hole. It was deeper than he anticipated. It seemed to stretch away from him. There was confetti, random things, much like the shrine down the path. There was a single earring bearing several Swarovski crystals. He spotted the nut he dropped. He could see the spatters of spit. A dirty jock strap. A small Polly Pocket figurine. And there, in the middle, deep deep at the bottom, was the largest, dirtiest, grittiest, girthiest dildo he had ever seen.

“It doesn’t matter, does it,” said the person behind him. “We think it’s all magic and spiritually, and I suppose it is, but it’s also ludicrous and silly. Chaotic. Full of dildos.”

“What is?”

“The may hole—and life. You kiss it. You honor it. You dance around it and spit on it, and there at the bottom is a dirt-covered, silicon cock mocking the seriousness of it all. Mocking your care as well as your anger. I used to go back and forth with it. Some days I’d be so sure that its all serious and beautiful and meaningful. And the next day, depending on the day, I’d be convinced it’s all dumb and weird and utterly, utterly meaningless. Now, I’m comfortable on the fence. It’s all of it at the same exact fucking time. What’s your name? Where’re you from? I live in California but I was born in Germany. I don’t really have a from. I was born in Germany. I dropped out of grad school in Wisconsin and left there, I don’t know, when I was about 24? I just had to leave and so I did. My partner is back in California. We have a cat.”

A beat.

“Are you gonna tell me your name?” The person said.

“Oh, I thought you were still… I’m Hedgehog, I’m from Alabama and currently live there.”

“Nice, nice. Well, you can call me Quiet.”

“Quiet?” He asked for clarification. “As in the synonym for silence? The opposite of loquacious?”

“I know, I talk a lot. That’s what makes my name dummy-stupid. I’m a himbo at heart. A thembo, if you will.”

“Quiet, would it be possible to kiss you,” asked Hedgehog.

“Well, yes,” they said.

Quiet was shorter than he was. They had chestnut brown hair, sleepy eyes, a sharp hooked nose adorned with a septum piercing. Quiet was also naked save for a crocheted shawl wrapped about their neck (“I made this” they would later say). They also had peach rings, the gummy candy, being used as cock rings around their dick and balls. Their foreskin, beneath which a PA peeked, was glaringly pallid in places in the firelit dark (“I have vitiligo” they would later explain). When they kissed, Hedgehog could feel the cold metal of Quiet’s septum and genital piercings against his skin. When they finally pulled away, Quiet looked him over.

“Hedgehog, you wouldn’t happen to be into CBT, would you?”

“Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?”

Quiet laughed. “No, cock & ball torture.”

Part VII

“Did you go and see the body,” John For Now asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I think I did.”

“What do you mean by that? You think?”

“Listen, I don’t know what’s happening. I went to see my lover’s dead body, I fell, and now I have this thing called a greev after me, and fairies with weird maps, and people who look like my friends but use different names. Bubba is my friend B but he has literal dragonfly wings. Literal wings! And you’re John—”

“For now,” said John For Now, but still listening to his every word.

“I saw a woman with a nine inch flaccid penis, do you hear me? Flaccid, foreskin over the head—nine inches soft. And a strange man named Green whisked me away here after an accident I ha—oh fuck me, have I died?”

“You’ve not died,” John For Now said, placing his hand on top of his own. “Green can just do that sometimes.”

“How would you know?”

“If you’re dead, then I’m dead, and I feel very much alive.”

“But—”

“And,” John For Now interrupted. “If you’re dead, then where is Teo?”

The Greev emerged from the floor between them, a inky sludge rising from the cracks in the floorboards. A corporeal shadow now towering above him. He yelled out a shrill cry and fell over the back of the chair, landing on the floor with soft thud. The head of a loose nail jabbed at his tailbone so hard he saw searing white. A high-pitched ringing did somersaults around in his ear.

When his senses came back to him, John For Now had stepped between him and the Greev. He brought his long, pilose arms up into an arc over his head so that his hands clapped together. But instead of loud smack, his hands colliding emitted a sound like a gong. The air visibly rippled out from that sound, dust particles in the fading light fanning out in a hypnotic dance. The Greev pivoted slightly so that he could now see the entity clearly. But John For Now was unfazed and simply held out an outstretched hand and pushed lightly with his fingertips against where he imagined was the Greev’s chest. John For Now stepped forward, pushing the Greev until its form slipped, somewhere, between a fold in space and was gone. The air then ceased to ripple and was abruptly pulled taut.

“H-h-how did you do that,” he stuttered, rubbing his tailbone.

“Nothing a cigarette lighter and a prayer can’t achieve,” said John For Now, showing off a gas station lighter that said ‘flick your Bic’.

“What kind of prayer was that?” He asked, still dumbfounded despite all he’d seen so far.

“I don’t know, babe, something about being a servant of a secret fire, wielder of the flame of Bic. And then some fairy dust fairy dust fairy dust! Voilà! Bye-bye Greev.”

They made a lengthy jaunt, away from the house toward the barn to gather his things. They continued down the rocky path, past the knoll that was labeled Tumulus on the pink map, and along a verdant garden. They moved around a bend in the road and there, at its terminus, opening up its mouth toward him, was a towering dark forest whose inside glittered with fireflies, will-o-wisps, and fairy lights. The trees were uncannily straight longleaf pines that grew in rows at every degree, giving the depths of the forest an almost diagonal pattern with a dolly zoom effect. At the edge of the forest, there was an open paddock gate with no fence.

To the left of the gate, on the inside boundary of the forest, someone had hung up a series of mesh platforms. A man sat hunched over a collection of lamps, fiddling with some gear and stood as we passed. He was doe-eyed and had a braided beard, and he waved silently and smiled.

When the aperture of his eyes adjusted to the darkened woods, he found that it was not at all dark, though the sun was rapidly disappearing behind the mountain. The fairy lights, the flaming wisps, along with the head lamps and battery-operated tent lanterns gave off enough sparkle to illuminate their way. The paths zagged every which way like veins through the forest floor. A tree covered in a black green vine had a painted wooden side that read: POISON IVY

To the right hung a canvas sign stretched between two trees and surrounded with jumbo, colorful Japanese lanterns. It read: COME TOGETHER

“Up here to the right is the shitter,” said John For Now, matter-of-factly. “No wipes in the shitter because they use it for compost. Also try not to pee in it. There’s a bucket of saw dust. Be a good neighbor and sprinkle it on your scat before you leave."

“What’s that way?” He asked, pointing to the left footpath.

“The Pineapple is that way which is like an area, a gayborhood if you will, and beyond beyond beyond is the Bad Faerie Circle. Don’t ask. You’ll find out on your own.”

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They continued down the main path, passing awnings with outdoor living rooms underneath them, decked in fairy lights and sparkly things (like tulle and garland). From the center of one such structure, that had been configured to a more Tipi-like shape, hung a small chandelier above a fully-made bed. The bed was adorned with a centerpiece unicorn plush and even had a footboard bench which was upholstered in a silk, burgundy damask.

When they came upon a bright pink hammock, tied between two trees that grew along a capillary-thin foot trail. It swung heavy, and as they approached, John For Now called out.

“Patrick, is that you?”

The hammock opened, blooming for a moment as if the most yonic Georgia O’Keeffe painting, revealing an olive-skinned man with his head shaved close to the scalp. He had a grecian nose, sad eyes, a heavy brow, and his lips had subtle, elongated curves. The voice that came from between them was silky yet rhinal, stoic yet powerful.

“Hello, John For Now,” said the man with perfect diction, who then looked over at him.

“I would tell you his name,” said John For Now, sucking air between their teeth. “But it just isn’t the right moment.”

“Oh, I see. A newbie,” said the man. “I’m Patrick. Would you care to join me in the hammock?”

Patrick pulled at one of the labia-like sides of the hammock, stretching it out, indicating more room. His gut said yes, but the man was so stunningly attractive, that he was, as they say, a deer in headlights. He didn’t want to intrude despite Patrick’s earnestness. And he was also strangely aware of the length of his nose hairs and the crookedness of his teeth.

“I appreciate it but I think I should probably set up my things before it gets dark.” He looked up at the sky, which was still uncannily bright. “Which seems to be taking forever.”

“You can never plan the sunset here,” said Patrick. “It goes when it goes. Or maybe it’s the moon that’s always late. I know Dazzle sometimes has to go to the summit to wake her up. Or maybe the sun and the moon are waiting on you.”

Patrick gave a sleepy wink and pulled the hammock closed so that it looked yonic once more.

“Patrick’s tent is there next to his womb—I mean hammock. We’re right next door. Bubba is over here, he has the weird pinwheels on the corners. This is our costume tent which you always have access to. And I think this spot here would be good for you. Did you bring a rainfly?”

He nodded and began to unpack, reopen, and unroll his belongings out onto the forest floor. John For Now rummaged around in the costume tent.

“Tally-ho!” Bubba exclaimed, coming down the main trail.

As he meandered down the trail, he stopped here and there to look at a seemingly normal dead leaf, or a new shoot of grass. He tousled the leaf litter and pulled a small round-ish object from underneath it. “A bat nose nut! A black walnut. When it’s halved like this, it looks like a bat nose.”

He scrunched his face and put the nut in front of his nose.

“The land giveth and the land taketh away,” said Patrick, an unseen oracle muffled in the darkening distance.

Bubba disappeared inside his tent for a moment. He could hear the flick of the lighter and, later, smelled ganja and saw wisps of smoke leaking from beneath Bubba’s rainfly. When Bubba came back out, he went right to work helping him pop up his tent. John For Now, too, emerged with the spoils from their scrounging. They had a pup mask, some feather boas, and a long coat that seemed to be bordered in Christmas lights. Bubba immediately took the pup hood and put it on.

“I also would like to introduce someone that you may or may not already know,” said John For Now. “Their name is Molly, and you each get your own.”

“I’m BUBBA. It’s so wonderful to see you,” said Bubba and shook Molly’s hand as if she were a businesswoman and he was looking for a raise. “Thank you for being here!”

Bubba’s Molly smiled and kissed him flat on the mouth.

Before he could introduce himself to his own Molly, she spoke up first.

“You smell of greev,” she said. “I will make you vulnerable.”

“Not necessarily,” said John For Now. “What about on the cheek? Not a full one?”

“I’m okay with that,” he said, grinning.

“I think that’s a good decision,” said his Molly, kissing him on the cheek. “I don’t feel so bad now.”

A sudden horn—a deep, bellowing—sounded in the distance, reverberating through the pines making them shiver in unison.

“That’ll be the conch for dinner,” said Patrick. “You they-thems hungry or what?”

When they made it out of the woods, after being forced to wear head lamps by John For Now, the sound of drums seemed to explode into the night. It was night! When did that happen? He twirled on the air. He felt an electrical hum alight in his mind, and it divided into multiple parts that moved from his head and down his body, splitting as it met each junction. His arms and hands tingled, he felt a tug at his navel, he felt the energy surge through his genitals and then split again as they sent a numbing shiver down his legs and into his feet. He was suddenly aware that he was naked, but oh my God was he the sexiest man who ever lived, and so were the people around him. A person was coming down the rocky path as they were going up. He suddenly said to them, “Could I kiss you?” The man obliged, and they kissed for a brief moment, almost without stopping. He twirled again and dashed off into the darkness.

“There he goes,” said John For Now.

“Scurrying away like a little hedgehog,” said Bubba.

He ran back out of the dark towards them.

“Did you just call me a hedgehog,” he giggled, out of breath.

Bubba and John For now both stopped in their tracks and turned to each other knowingly.

“Well, there it is,” said Patrick, putting his arms around John For Now and Bubba’s shoulders and looking at him. “Your name.”

Part VI - 2

… Six months ago…

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” whispered Matteo over and over and over again in his ear.

“What for?” He asked, simpering.

“You,” Matteo replied.

He snorted and so did his lover.

“Hey, no, listen, I’m serious,” Matteo said, his grin began to fade but stayed curling at the edges of his mouth. “It’s a wonderful thing. Of all possible possibles, it’s this.”

“So you’re saying it could be better,” he nagged.

“I’m saying that you’re the ending to that Shel Silverstein book,” he said.

“The Missing Piece?” He asked. “I love that book, but it’s kinda corny.”

“Oh my God,” Matteo suddenly exclaimed and stood up over him on the bed. “Don’t you know that I’m in love with you?”

“Are you,” he asked, knowing full well the answer.

Matteo suddenly stood up in the bed, the sunlight cascading through the window illuminating his pilose figure. Still naked, he bolted through the house and out the front door. He could hear his foot falls thudding down the front porch steps. And then a distant shouting…

“I AM IN LOVE WITH THE MAN IN MY HOUSE I AM IN LOVE WITH THE MAN IN MY HOUSE! I AM IN LOVE WITH THE BEAUTIFUL MAN IN MY HOUSE!”

Matteo’s footsteps came thundering back up the porch. He rushed to meet him, draping the top sheet around himself, and dashed to the front room. There stood the love of his life. He was looking at him with soft, blue eyes. A mess of long brown locks cascaded down his face. Rosied cheeks peeked out above a full beard. His hirsute chest heaved out of breath, sweat already beginning to glisten along his forehead and torso. He was hard and virile despite their long, previous night together. And he pushed into the room, pushing the tumescence against his own, and they kissed deeply, inhaling each other.

“I’m in love with you, too,” he said when they finally pulled away for a moment.

“Are you,” asked Matteo, his eyes shifting to the front door.

He laughed.

“If you think I’m going to run outside in the daylight with a boner to profess my love…”

“So you’ll do it without the boner,” Matteo asked, kneeling.

“Maybe…” He looked down with an impish smile.

Much of their work put them at the same conferences around the country and so in their free time they’d wander around a new city together, finding the best house on each street, pretending it was theirs, eating food from street vendors—the kind so bad for you it was good. But this was Birmingham. Why was he in Birmingham? He looked around, Matteo was gone, and he was in a church. People were scattered about the pews as a pastor solemnly said the lord’s prayer over an opened casket. He was suddenly standing over the wooden box and looked down to see a maimed figure inside.

He gasped and sat up in bed. A pool of sweat that had gathered on his neck ran down his chest. He threw his legs over the side and leaned into his knees.

“Mmyewohkay?” Matteo mumbled next to him, barely waking but still reaching out to him across the bed.

“I’m fine. Just the heat,” he said, speaking softly while his chest heaved.

He got up and turned on the fan and went to the bathroom. He rubbed his face and splashed himself with cold water. It was immediately soothing, and he looked at Matteo in the reflection of the mirror. He could see the glisten of his eyes as Matteo watched him.

The next morning, they said their goodbyes after he cooked them breakfast. He needed something to occupy his mind. He wanted to tell Matteo about the dream but decided to do it on their next visit. It would only be a few days before they saw each other again. He had no issues driving up from Mobile to Birmingham to see Matteo. Most of who and what he loved about Alabama was in Birmingham. But still, he had to make the four hour drive back down to the small but bustling port city.

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When he arrived home, he went through all the motions of the week-by-week. He found a workable housing situation for a trans girl who’d been kicked out of her family home. He successfully sussed out someone who had been sending threatening theocratical letters to his organization. There had been lunches for networking, an environmental protest he attended, and dates with friends and his parents. He even played a few gigs around town for extra cash. He woke up one morning before to a phone call from Matteo.

“Hey babe,” he said, a little panic in his voice, “I need to see you.”

He chuckled a bit and stretched.

“I know you do,” he yawned.

“No, you don’t understand. I’m on my way down.”

“You know there’s a severe band of thunderstorms coming through here, right?”

“I don’t care, I need to see you.”

“Matteo,” he said flatly. “Turn around and go back home. I will be up there in two more—”

“I saw something,” Matteo interrupted. “I saw something with you. I thought it was my imagination or a bout of PTSD from Scottie’s murder, but I know what I saw.”

Matteo’s brother Scottie was murdered by a group of teenagers several years ago. It’s why he’d become a social worker, to encourage emotional development among young boys. So Matteo had his fair share of nightmares. It’s why he was so obsessed with death, especially his own.

“What did you see,” he asked, cautiously.

“It’s going to sound bizarre,” Matteo said before stuttering, trying to find the right word. “A shadow?”

“You’re silly,” he said.

“I’m being serious!” He shouted.

“Whoaaa, okay, okay. Why don’t we talk about it more when you get here? You seem frightened, and I think you should focus on the road.”

“I love you,” Matteo said after a moment of silence, the rush of the road hissing in the background. “Thank you, thank y…”

“… you, thank you, thank you,” they said in unison.

He hung up just as thunder sounded in the distance and the first dark clouds rolled over the bay. It was a deluge once the sun began to set and whatever light shown out across the sky in brilliant colors was obscured by dark clouds. The drive between the two cities was around four hours and so on the fifth hour of waiting his anxiety began to reach its peak. He dare not call. He dare not give Matteo any distractions in this weather.

And just as his temptation reached its breaking point, dim lights spread along the length of the house as a small SUV pulled into the circular drive. Lightning crashed above him as he rushed out with an inadequately-sized umbrella for both of them. Even though it was a short jaunt to and fro, by the time they pushed through the double doors of the house, they were drenched through. But still, even wet, even with the sky falling down around them, even as Tyner made a loud tsk from his chair as water dripped on the hardwood, they clung to each other.

“Listen, before we talk about your shadow,” he said later when they were getting into bed. “I wasn’t going to tell you about this dream I had in Birmingham.”

“What dream?” Matteo asked.

“I was somewhere, everything was blurry and out of focus. But you, you were in clear view. And you were not alive.”

“Are you sure it was me?”

“Matt…”

“It was just a dream, babe,” he said, now looking up at him with his rosy cheeks.

“So the shadow you saw…”

“… was just anxiety playing tricks on me, too.”

“So you don’t want to talk about it?”

Matteo leaned in and kissed him firmly on the lips, then pulled back.

“I don’t want to waste a single moment I have with you worrying about specters and dreams.”

“Well, then, do you wish you had listened to me and turned around?”

“Nope,” he said and burrowed his face into his pillow. “Can we spoon now?”

The next morning, the sky was clear and what little bit of clouds there was were fine wisps of white curling through the upper atmosphere. The wind was still relatively strong, blowing through the hollow where the house sat. Winters, as with all winters in lower Alabama, were wet which meant Christmas was fast approaching. The tease of snow was ever present but never came to fruition.

Matteo cooked them breakfast. Tyner, his roommate, ate with them before heading out to work. Tyner, for some strange reason, was one of the last butlers in the world and was at the beck and call of one of its last megalomaniacs. He shouted his customary “see ya kiddo” that was often cut short by a swiftly shutting door.

With his mouth full of grits, he waved a goodbye Tyner didn’t see. The window panes of the old house rattled as a gust was whipped up in the hollow and he swallowed hard.

“Goodness,” he said. “The tailwinds on these storms.”

“Mhm,” Matteo said in response while reading an article in a local magazine.

“You really aren’t the least bit worried?” He finally asked, rubbing Matteo’s arm.

“No,” Matteo said finitely, the simple sentence punctuated with a cheshire grin. “I’m not.”

Part V - 1

After Green dropped him off, the first person he saw was very tall, with breasts bared to the woods and a large, flaccid uncircumcised penis knocking back and forth between their legs. Their hair was long and black, as if stolen from Cher, and they had a silky, tawny complexion. This person moved with the confidence, purpose and grace of a deity. A veritable dryad. They were smiling into the sun as they walked down the rocky path. He watched as they walked right up to him.

“Welcome home,” they said to him with a demure wave, continuing up the path behind him.

The weight of his many bags brought him back down to his present terra firma. A few other people were unloading their belongings. Green’s truck spun out in the long, winding drive way as it gained momentum to clear the steep hill he himself had just come down. Outside the house, people gathered about in little clusters with solitary individuals coming and going and milling about.

A great house sat next to the drive, leaning precariously at each corner and was riddled with carpenter bee holes, whose tenants buzzed en masse about the many gables. He watched the person who just passed him step up onto the wrap-around porch and disappear within the dark interior. Across the way was a barn with an overgrown sign that read:

WELCOME KWEENS

Next to the sign, in front of the barn’s great open door, sat two chatty individuals. They were under a pink awning behind a fold-out table covered in pamphlets and documents.

“Yoo hoo!” One of them exhalted. “If you’re arriving, come get a map.”

“You can try to find a wheelbarrow,” the other added. “But good luck!”

He began to place his belongings into the only empty wheelbarrow he saw. It was almost rusted through and sat at an odd angle. It would have to do.

“Oh, cherub. I’m sorry but that one’s broke, see?” One of the chatters gestured at an obvious deflated and dislocated wheel. “If you wait a while, another is bound to turn up.”

He considered that option for about five minutes but began to feel awkward standing there and figured that by the time he waited for one to turn up, he could have just walked down the path and found a spot to set up his tent and shed his belongings.

“Could I have a map?” He asked one of the dazzling chatters.

“Lucky ducky! You got the last one, son!” Said the other chatter with a bright smile, holding up a single document.

He took it gratefully and looked at the hot pink paper. The map had been copied over many times. It’s edges were blurry, the lines within the boundary were thick and messy. Directly to his left, on the other side of the path, was a place marked Lavender Lounge. “Transonly” it said in fine print. Beyond that was another building that had smoke rising from a wonky chimney. It was labeled HausBath. Across from that, on the right side of the path, someone had drawn a hill and written Tumulus next to it.

He waddled with his belongings down the path, entranced by a bed of tall, indigo-colored irises growing alongside the barn. A cicada buzzed in the early evening. The golden hour sun shown through a copse of poplars, illuminating the pollen and flying insects drifting through the air. It lit up a verdant knoll that sat behind the barn. Many people were splayed out on pallets of ivory linens and jewel-toned silk and velvet pillows.

Two naked men gently swung in a hammock strung up between two pines, one man gave fellatio to the other whose sun-worn face was a melting rhapsody. He moaned out loud as he climaxed. A smattering of scattered applauses erupted from those sitting on the ground around them.

He continued to walk down the rocky path, stumbling a bit as he went. He heard someone come up behind him and then pass, their belongings piled high and spilling over a brand new wheelbarrow.

“Could I use that when you’re done,” he muttered shyly.

But the person continued on, ignoring or not hearing his question. On the right, a road sign had been staked into the ground. Around the sign, makeshift tree stumps had been assembled together, upon which sat framed photographs, melted candles, and whatnots (a hot wheels car, a penis-shaped whistle on a plastic necklace chain, and a Trolls doll with no hair to name a few). The sign was an actual green street sign that read:

WHITNEY HOUSTON MEMORIAL PKWY

He looked at the faces looking back at him from the photographs. Some were water damaged and sun faded but the faces of the long gone individuals were still smiling through. A more recent photograph caught his attention. He immediately recognized the face smiling back at him, a man with wild hair and rosy cheeks.

“There he is,” exclaimed a familiar voice.

He turned to see B, naked, with a pair of iridescent dragonfly wings sprouting from his back. He sauntered down the path toward him. He had a light sprinkle of glitter on his cheeks.

“B? How?” He was perplexed, dumbfounded, and excited all at once.

“Girl, who? What? When? Where? Why?” B exclaimed. “It’s Bubba!”

And then he saw him, and they weren’t B, but goddamn it they were.

“I see you found Teo,” Bubba said, gesturing to the newest framed photograph. “I don’t know who put that there but it was here when I arrived.”

Bubba picked up the photograph and kissed it, holding his lips to the glass for a long time before setting the photograph back down.

“He’ll be back for you,” Bubba finally said, pointing to the smiling face in the photo. “But I gotta show your lover around!”

Bubba prodded his side naggingly before putting an arm around his shoulders.

“I’ve only been here for a few days. Shall we find John For Now? He’s around here somewhere. I don’t even think he knows I’m here. And I know you don’t tell people shit.”

They found John for Now at the main house and he stood there gooped and gagged. John for Now was the carbon copy of his friend John. John was a classically-trained opera singer, had tousled black hair and a five-o’-clock shadow growing along a jaw that could slice bread. John for Now had and did the same things but was also wearing a black and white spandex one piece that had bellbottom pants and showed off their bulge. They leaned against a door jamb, singing a song as a dapper man, who looked vaguely familiar, played along on an out-of-tune upright grand piano. They both wore feather boas that had seen better days.

“Student loans won’t matter in the water wars,” John for Now warbled slowly, with a deep but airy vibrato. “I said, ‘Student loans won’t matter in the water waaaars.’”

John for Now gestured with their hands out to the audience and fanned them toward themselves. And the crowd joined in like a low but growing hum until they were all shouting it at the ceiling.

STUDENT LOANS WON’T MATTER IN THE WATER WARS!

And then silence. And then applause with laughter, some cheering, and a whistle or two. John For Now looked about, appreciating the audience, basking in the light of their smiles. Their eyes suddenly bulged at the sight of Bubba and a large made-for-the-stage smile spread across their stubbled face.

“What a lovely surprise,” John For Now said, needing to stride only a few steps to approach them. “I see this one failed to mention that you would be here, Bubba.”

“He doesn’t say shit,” Bubba said, pinching at him again. “But I am glad to find you. I didn’t think there would be so many people after a plague but here we are.”

“This is Animal,” John For now said, gesturing to the approaching pianist.

A not quite as tall man with a full mustache and boyish face walked up with a wave and welcoming grin. He looked at Bubba whose eyes seemed to be glazed over as he stared at Animal.

“Are you Dick Cousins?” Bubba finally asked. “The Dick Cousins? From OnlyFans?”

That’s it! He’s that adult film star! He was known for his mustache and goofy grin while getting pile driver-ed by hung men. He’d bookmarked a video or two.

“Why, yes, I am,” said Animal with an adorable lisp, continuing to smile.

“I’m a really big fan,” Bubba squeaked.

“Do tell,” Animal said.

“Excuse us, we’re all new,” interrupted John For Now with a wave of his hand which then gestured ostentatiously toward him. “We’re not all used to such debauchery.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” he said. “I like sex as much as the horniest of us.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” said Animal. “And I’m excited for you all to discover yourselves here. But a first timer to come the eve of Beltane?”

He turned from Bubba and gestured toward him.

“That’s brave!,” he exclaimed with a goofy smile. “Remember: Pace yourself. Love yourself. Forgive yourself. Speaking of loving oneself, I’m going to the Bathhouse.”

“What’s gonna be in the Bathhouse?” Bubba asked.

“My dick, and everything that’s attached to it,” said Animal as he moseyed through the house and out onto the porch.

“And that’s my cue,” said Bubba suggestively, who disappeared and then, through a window, could be seen scurrying down the path after Animal.

There were other people about, moving beyond in other rooms, out on the porch, up the paths to the back of the house. But it was just him and John For Now in the dilapidated library. The floor seemed to rise and fall like a wave. Books shelved loosely sorted by subject (psychology, fiction/romance, etc) sat every which way, covered in dust and different kinds of exuviae depending on how often they’d been picked up. John For Now sat in one of two of the comfier-looking chairs in the room and gestured toward its partner.

“Just the two of us,” said John For Now, looking about and leaning in with a whisper. “Is it true what the mountain says? Is it true that you have the Greev?”

Part IV

Trigger Warning: death of a loved one and body horror.

If the story gets to be too much, you are encouraged and empowered to step away for your mental health safety.

The creature did not come to the funeral. Everyone else did.

He’d been to so many funerals growing up. Stuffy, awkward things. But he hadn’t seen a funeral quite like this one. He certainly had never participated in a funeral quite like this one. Was there a sermon? No, there were sermons. Everyone had something to say about Matteo. When they all finally broke out in song to sing This Little Light of Mine, Matteo was the light of the world. People poured into see it. Carter was there, Lyndsey, Genevieve, Moses, B. There was also Emi, Summer, and Lakshmi. Boys named Tammy, Sophia, Jules, and Sue. Their friends and families and families.

Even the many faeries, led by Orion, came flittering down from a mountain by any other name. Their clothes were jewel-toned, like Bedouin, and they brought sacred earth for which they traded Matteo’s own. They danced and splashed oils over Matteo’s grave and his mother who lay beside the mound of dirt weeping & singing.

For him, they poured a tincture of hawthorn, rose, and lemon balm over his head. Orion pulled a small pouch of tea made of wood betony and skullcap. He took the gift and inhaled the sweet, minty scent emanating from the pouch. And as quickly and sporadic as they arrived, the fairies danced and somersaulted back up, up into the mountains.

That night, after a strangely raucous dance party that no doubt turned orgasmic, he retired to bed earlier than the rest of the mourners and celebrators. In the kitchen, he rummaged through drawers to find a diffuser for the tea. When he emptied the dried concoction into the sieve, a small folded piece of parchment came out with it. He unfolded it and unfolded it and unfolded it until a giant map lay out across the kitchen island.

THE LAND OF AWE | EWA FO DNAL EHT

It said at the top of the parchment.

He let his finger trace the dozens of dozens of folds in the parchment, moving across the map until he came to a solid red triangle labeled YOU ARE HERE. From there, a dotted line zoomed across the parchment—which began to also turn itself inside and out—and led to a green triangle labeled YOU WANT TO BE HERE.

At the bottom of the parchment, it read:

PAM SIHT NO SSAP ESAELP HTAP SIHT REBMEMER LLIW OUY.

A lightbulb went off in his head, and he rushed down the long hallway to his room, and grabbed the photo with Matteo’s writing. He threw the large map across his bed like a blanket and entered the address Matteo had written into his computer.

The map was relatively featureless, cartoonish minimalism if there was such a thing compared with the hyper realistic one displayed on the monitor. He scratched his chin and began to look for similar landmarks. He located Nashville and found a similar topographical marking on the parchment. They overlapped. He grinned and attempted to fold the map back into its tiny origami square. But with one fold, the map began to fold its own self. He put it into his shirt pocket.

That next morning, he woke before the sun had risen, packed a slew of his belongings, and set out just at dawn. For the longest time, he drove in silence until he realized that he had not been looking at the map at all. But all of sudden he recalled the way, the path opening outward inside his mind’s mind. He was stunned by this for the next hour, even pulling off a few stops, to see if his own mind would reroute him. And it did.

The day turned to early afternoon, he’d only had to stop twice for gas, once to piss. He plugged in his AUX and a familiar tune rang out:

... say, what if we reincarnate...?

... would you rather come back, be born in a circle...?

... or would you prefer to see life underwater...?

... there's a part of hope that is sewn in this theory...

He looked in the rearview mirror to switch lanes, and there was the creature. It was hunched into a squat in the back seat, slack-jawed and drooling, its eyes rolled back and bulging dumb. It’s knees came up to its long tapered ears. And then its void-like eyes shifted slowly, together, in unison from their dumb state directly into his eyes looking at it from the mirror.

A klaxon erupted from his left, and he jerked the wheel to the right. Another horn shouted at him from the right and he spun the wheel to the left. There was a loud thump of the creature as it was thrown off balance into the passenger door. It groaned and snarled. He could feel its long, spindly arms and legs flailing about behind his seat. He could see its mass trashing in the mirrors as well as his peripherals, a veiled reflection in the windshield.

The creature then with lightning speed, as if suddenly competent and calculating, flung itself between the two front seats. One leg braced itself against the windshield, its other into the back of the passenger seat. It’s spider thin arms, clinging to the the head rests, like a possessed alien. It leaned in to face him, blocking his view. Their noses were touching, tip to tip, and he saw a green, foamy bile explode from the creatures mouth with a sickening belch. He felt his stomach turn as well as the hum of the tires as his car crossed into the berm of the road and hit the grass and gravel of the ditch. He was flung upwards and into darkness.

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When he awoke, it was noon again. The sun was bearing down on him, and the hard ground burned his back. A vulture circled over heard, eclipsing the bulb of sun for a moment as it flew around. He looked up and saw that he was in the middle of the road. He heard the time-slowed shriek of tires and looked to see a small SUV hurling, spinning toward him and then over him. He could have reached out and touched it. There was a man inside. It was Matteo. His hair was wild, he gripped the steering wheel with both hands, knuckles white, his triceps flexed. As the SUV arched over him, Matteo’s already bloodied face gritting down faded and turned to face him with a calm, dashing smile through the open driver’s window. The perpendicular sun, now behind him, gave Matteo the halo glow of saints long remembered. His lover winked with a rosy cheek and said “Welcome home, darlin’” before looking back toward the windshield, his face returning to its original grit.

He awoke, for real this time, against his steering wheel, his horn blaring. He sat back, and the horn stopped. The creature was gone but he was still shaking from what he’d just seen. He was no longer on the side of the highway but a country road. He got out of the car and looked around but saw no damage other than what he’d already done to it in the years gone by. It was early evening.

“Hi there,” a voice said from the opposite edge of the road.

He turned to find a man somewhat shorter than he was with medium-length chestnut colored hair tucked behind his ears.

“I’m Green,” he continued. “Can’t have you dying before you arrive.”

“What?” He was confused.

“You were gonna crash but I stopped it. I normally don’t go so far out to bring people here. But… considering what’s happened with the Greev and all, you were an exception.”

“Where is here? Wait—it has a name?”

“The Land of Awe,” he said with a sincere grandiosity. “And yes, the Greev. We all got one. You’ll have to confront it sooner or later, but it can’t get you here… I don’t think.”

“You said your name is Green?” He asked.

“Yeah, I reckon it is,” he said, and walked over to his car and gave it a pat. “We don’t have much room for cars where we’re going. My truck can only go so far.”

Green patted his car again and it appeared, toy-like, in the palm of his hand.

“Holy shit,” he screamed.

“Shush now,” Green said with modest smile. “Don’t go wakin’ the ghouls and goblins. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

They approached Green’s truck, which was a beaten up muddy-gold Toyota something. Green opened the driver’s door which let out a low creak. The man then leaned over and pulled up the lock of the passenger door.

“Oh shit my bags are in…”

“… the back. See?” Green snapped his fingers.

They were nestled in the bed of the dirty truck as if someone or something had just dropped them there.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he chuckled to himself, opened the truck door, and hopped in.

<--- Part II

Trigger warnings: death of a loved one and body horror.

If the story gets to be too much, you are empowered to step away for your mental health safety.

It was just him and the creature.

He called out to Matteo’s mother, but it was only the creature who responded with a raspy, head-splitting shriek.

“Kiss me,” it said, more coherently this time. It started to drool from its incomprehensible maw as it lumbered forward. “Kissss meeeeee!”

He reeled back in disgust, turned tail and fled out of the cold storage room. He heard the sickening slop of its form as it moved behind him. He dared not look. He slid into a dimly lit hall and ran down it until he came upon a pair of double doors. He heard a shout from somewhere, telling him to stop. He pushed through the doors and continued to run until he came to another pair. He pushed through those and came to a door with an EXIT sign adorning it. He shoved into it with his whole body and found himself behind the hospital, opposite of where he had parked.

“Goddamnit,” he spat.

He jumped from the loading dock and dashed up the ramp. Circumventing the entire hospital compound, he did not stop running until he got to his car. He was thankful he was a minimalist in this moment as he pulled out his car key ring adorned with just three keys and shoved the appropriate one into the driver’s side door. He tore the door open, pushed down on the manual lock, and slammed it shut. He jammed the keys into the ignition and jerked the seat lever so that he fell back as far as it would go and listened.

But all he heard was his heart beats thumping in his ears and the silence between them. The swaying clink of his keys joined in. When he finally got the courage to look out the driver side window, he was relieved to not see the creature anywhere. He then began to chuckle and shook his head. He was being so silly right now. A physical embodiment of grief manifested to terrorize him for all eternity? Puh-lease.

He turned the ignition, put his car into gear, and took the lonely route back home. It was silent the whole way. Only the hum of the road beneath him made a sound. He disassociated for a long time until he came to his road. As he turned, a switch flicked on, and he realized how far he’d gone unawares.

When he pulled into the driveway leading up to the house, every light was shining through the windows. They must be up, waiting, he thought. He opened the door, grabbed his bag from the passenger seat, and caught a glimpse of a shadowed figure in the back seat. Their eyes locked in the reflection. It hissed and reached out to him. He fell back onto the wet black drive, watching as the amorphous form of the creature bubbled over into the front seat. He shoved his foot against the door, closing it, and clicked the key fob in his hand. He heard the low thump of the doors as they locked, trapping it inside. As he turned to stand, he tripped over his feet, stumbled up the front porch stairs, and slammed into the double doors of the house.

When he pushed through, a group of people snapped their heads up. Some of them smiled or attempted to smile. Some of them looked shocked.

“Jesus Christ,” exclaimed a man, immediately. “You’re bleeding!”

The man named Tyner got up and shut the front door before turning back to him. A few gasps came about and several of his other friends stood up all at once. He felt the sting suddenly on his head. He reached up and touched about until his fingers sensed wet hair. When he pulled his hand back, it was indeed red with blood.

“Shh, shh! Everyone settle, let me see.” Genevieve said, waving her hands. “Bend down a bit.”

He did so.

“Oh goodness,” she finally said. “Come look, B, see if you think he needs stitches.”

B said he didn’t need stitches. He didn’t mention the creature either. He said the viewing was fine, that it was him, no doubt. Matteo’s mother called afterward but her signal was poor and voice garbled so he ended the call earlier than usual. After he was settled in for bed, his own mother called. The caller ID exhibited a nonsense jumble of characters and symbols but the unmistaken moniker of his mother “Lisa” was there, crisp and clear.

“Hey mom,” he mumbled, trying to sound more exhausted than he actually was. “Did you and dad make it home?

GREEEEEEEEEEEEEV!

Something shrieked from the other end.

“K-kiss m-me,” it yelled hoarsely through the receiver, as if it had phlegm stuck in its throat. “Fuuuck-k-kinnng-g-k-kisssm-m-meeeeee!”

He threw his phone across the room, into a pile of laundry. It was real. The damned thing was after him.

Knock-knock.

He nearly fell off of his bead, snapping his head toward the bedroom door.

“It’s B,” came a muffled voice. “Can I bother you?”

He let out a sigh and shuffled across his room to open the door.

“Hey, sorry but Carter and Lyndsey are gonna ride up together and have room. It’ll be me, Moses, and Genevieve in that tiny-ass Mustang.”

“I’ll ride with them, it’s no problem,” he said. “Listen, I might take another solo trip up the East Coast after this.”

“I think that’s a great idea,” said B. “But be honest, you’re not thinking of—tch tch.”

B forced his mouth to droop lopsided, rolled his eyes back to show the whites of his eyes and made a slicing gesture with his thumb across his throat.

“You don’t have to worry,” he said, cracking somewhat of a smile. It was genuine but painful. “I would let you know if I was there.”

B nodded, leaned in, and kissed him on the cheek.

“I can’t honestly say good night because it isn’t one,” he said sardonically. “But I do love you very much.”

And he continued down the hall, disappeared into its long darkness, with the thumps of his feet fading behind a closed door rattle.

Ruminating and afraid to sleep, he’d played a computer game, he worked on a few of his cases as a social worker, and tried to watch some porn. Instead, he lay back on his back, his pants unbuttoned with his hand half underneath, and stared at the ceiling. He followed the photographs he’d hung up on a string around his room. They depicted his road trip up the East Coast. He needed a real escape, a tangible one. He followed the remaining pictures, adoring the memories they unearthed. And there, on the end, was a photograph that he hadn’t taken.

He stood up on his bed, careful to not get hit by the fan, and pulled the photograph from its clip on the string. He turned it over and there was an address in Matteo’s swooping penmanship. Beneath that he’d written:

Don’t wait for me, daaarlin’!

The sound of his fan as well as the A/C cutting off woke him from whatever shallow sleep he had fallen. The photograph was still in his hand. His eyes burned in the stuffy air with exhaustion as he looked over at his clock but that was off as well. Must be a power outage. He felt about for his phone but realized he’d thrown it across the room. The calls and texts he had no doubt missed weighed heavily on him now.

When he turned back and looked down at the foot his bed, the creature sat in the chair where his laundry had been. His body tensed, expecting the creature to pounce, but it did not move. He could barely perceive the outline of it in the gloom of his room, but he could see its form expanding slightly at its edges with each breath. There was a small glimmer reflecting off of the voids you could call eyes. The more he stared into the dark, the more he could see it. It had its knees pulled up to its nose and its arms wrapped around itself. Its long toes hung off the edge of the seat. He could see the prominences of its cheeks. Was it smiling?

When he came to once more, he was on his side, facing the window. The sun had scarcely risen. The fan was spinning on high. The clock was blinking red. When he flashed his gaze to the foot of the bed, the laundry remained undisturbed in the chair.

Part III

Trigger Warning: death of a loved one and body horror.

If the story gets to be too much, you are encouraged and empowered to step away for your mental health safety.

I met someone in a coffee shop. I knew why they wanted to see me. It’s always the same. I don’t know how they find out. I mean, I sort of do, but I could never pinpoint the original source of the gossip. The hippie woman sitting across from me hadn’t been very loquacious since the start of our meeting. I didn’t blame her. It’s impossible to begin with something like this.

“How long have you had the Greev?”

She looked confused at my words, as if I was talking nonsense, but then I could see she remembered I was the reason she was here.

“Since the abortion. We’d just finished the nursery, and the shit with the state I think made it worse for me.”

“That’s awful, I’m sorry to hear. And, yes, that would certainly awaken such a thing.”

“I was told you have firsthand knowledge of such an entity,” the woman revealed almost in a whisper. “Is-is that correct?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s correct. Who told you?”

“I really should get back… just in case it…. look, can you just tell me a little bit about what you saw,” she asked, her impatience and nervousness growing. She took out a pen and notepad from her leather bag. “I just want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing.”

“That won’t help you,” I said, gesturing at her attempt to clarify. “You see, no two look or behave the same. They are as unique as our, their vessel’s, trauma. It shapes them. I was told by our confidant that yours is invisible?”

“Wait… are you saying we all have one? I thought trauma is what caus-”

“Every one of us. They lay dormant until the event,” I said. “It’s the trauma that wakes them and they respond accordingly.”

“And you defeated yours,” she said quickly, confidently.

“Defeat is interesting term,” I replied, nodding. “It is an interesting tale, if you’re not too busy?”

She shook her head and gestured for me to continue.

Even though it was prophesied, the death of Matteo was a cruel and devastating shock to those that loved him. It was an even heavier burden if you revered him like I did.

I was his lover. He was my god.

A social butterfly and faerie man, Matteo didn’t know a stranger, and it was this quality that crossed his path with mine. We’d first met, as most men who love men do these days, through the apps. Scruff? Tinder? I can’t remember which. Between the two of us, he was the hornier one but I made the first move. To his credit, he kept up with my meandering conversational style. There were no awkward moments in limbo and the exchange of big ideas and questions emerged effortlessly with no immediate hypotheses or answers from either of us.

It was a full eight months before we met in person. There were no expectations. It was casual but also purposeful. There were intimate touches here and there. Sideways glances of permission and ultimately the more direct yeses and nos. Even more so in person, Matteo made me laugh. The big belly kind that leaves you out of a breath and for a moment you think you could possibly die.

We’d been together for a quinquennial but Matteo had been obsessed with death, especially his own, years before I came into the picture. He’d had a sibling who’d been murdered, and it’s why he became a social worker like myself. Matteo was someone who lived immediately. He understood that every moment had the capacity to be a last moment. It echoed a churchly sentiment from my believing days: Life is a candle in the eyes of God.

A month or so before the accident, Matteo had a close call when another driver almost ran him off the road. And I myself had a horrific dream of his death a few days leading up to the accident. I’d also told him the day of to not text and drive, to call me on speaker if he needed to say anything. This was something I’d never said to him in the entire five years of our relationship. What compelled me to say it then?

He didn’t make it past the city limits, and I don’t know what exactly happened, but it’s not something that I’ve been quite able to shake. I don’t think I want to know. He expired on the helicopter that was taking him to the hospital. They told me that part, but I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know his last thoughts. I didn’t want to see his broken bruised body. I didn’t want to cut the necklace from around his swollen neck. I didn’t want the pity, the people holding me, my friends and the piercing sympathy in their voices.

When my roommate told me what the hospital said, that Matteo died, I ran out into the cul-de-sac. I made a noise, and I’m thankful I don’t remember the sound. I wasn’t in a vacuum. Everyone else was. It was only me who could hear this exquisite, piercing thing called grief.

When I went with his mother to view his body, it was a friend of mine who said seeing Matteo was important. He explained that the truth was far better than an evasion. It would help with closure. It made my day worse, and it’s why I’m telling you this story.

When the sheet was pulled back, Matteo was there. It looked as though his teeth had been knocked out. His eyes were closed. The redness of life had gone, and he seemed to be made of porcelain. Green-hued. I cut loose his necklace. When I tucked the chain into my pocket, I caught a glance of what did not resided under the sheet. I saw the dip of the fabric over his chest. The strongest urge to vomit came over me.

I turned to flee the sight but I slipped on something. I fell flat on my back, so hard that my head cracked against the tiled floor of the morgue. I felt the air forcefully pushed from lungs, and I rolled over and began to wretch. When I finally caught my breath, a pain had formed deep in my chest, behind my sternum.

“Oh, honey, are you okay?” I could hear the mortician speak and the clacking of her heels as she shuffled around the gurney. “Goodness, you’re turning blue!”

I was bent over in pain. I felt an apple-sized knot coming up my throat. I groaned and rasped. When the knot cleared my esophagus, I wretched forcefully so that whatever it was shot out of my mouth and onto the floor with a resounding splat. I felt my brain seize with pressure. My vision went spotty and then black. I felt cool and warm at the same time, and I was sweating profusely. When my vision slowly returned, looking up at me where I puked was the most grotesque being I had ever seen. It was reaching out to me, pointing to me.

GREEEEEEEEEV! GREEEEEEEV!

The noise it made was guttural and the sparse, cold room was the perfect echo chamber. It’s melding figure hummed with dissonant whispers as it rose from its splatter and faced me. It lurched forward, like an infant taking its first steps. I was up and against the gurney Matteo’s corpse was on. When I looked back at the creature, it was right practically on top of me.

“K-k-k-k-k,” it tried to speak, choking on its own tongue. “K-k-kiss m-meeee.”

I looked around for Matteo’s mother, to see if she was seeing what I was experiencing, but she was gone, as was the mortician. When my hands went back to brace myself from falling over the bed, Matteos’s corpse wasn’t there. I felt my consciousness flicker, my eyes twitched, and without warning I lost myself. I was someone I didn’t recognize. I saw myself as you see me now. I was what you are feeling like right now.

A character in a story standing across from their mortal enemy.

Part II

Hello, this is my very first Substack. Here, I will be sharing serialized fiction, short stories, poems, sketches, as well as mundane musings from my life.

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