That this could even be considered a career path available to a kid in Kansas City was owed to my rather literary father, Michael. After all, he’s the one who introduced me to Sedaris. We had a ritual every Tuesday surrounding my guitar lessons: dinner before, where I’d needle him over history and trivia; the drive home after, when we’d listen to This American Life, idling in the driveway if the story was that good. My dad loved David Sedaris, and I’m sure in his own way he wanted to be him, too. In his post-collegiate twenties, armed with an English degree, he’d penned wry essays and read them on the radio in Kansas City—a small-time, short-lived satirist, to be sure, but maybe just a bit ahead of his time. Who says he wasn’t someone’s 1980s Ira Glass?

When I got to college, I started a work-study job at KBIA, Columbia’s NPR affiliate, which included work in the booth at the top of Jesse Hall as well as at the theater downstairs. On Saturdays I announced the call numbers, read local ads (I can still recall the copy for various donor drives and miscellaneous Boone County B&Bs), and plugged Weekend Edition. I could practically tase my media future; I could practice my pronunciations for an eventual This American Life debut. My draw to public radio was doubly inherited: my mother, who attended the University of Missouri herself in the 1970s, worked the same shift as an on-air announcer at KBIA. I didn’t realize how lucky I was that my parents had had what I wanted; of course, I wanted more.

When it was announced that David Sedaris was coming through Jesse Auditorium on his upcoming tour, I requested the night off and bought two tickets with my discount. I was going to take my dad to see our favorite author read. I’d show him the snug studio on the fourth floor, under the grand dome, and ask him about the past over dinner. I’d missed our talks that first fall away from home, but I was feeling freshly prepared to share with him my authors, my trivia that I seemed to be collecting faster than a phone call could support. I’d only just come out to my folks right before I left for school, so there’d be a whole new dimension of Sedaris’s work for us to discuss. It must have been autumn when I planned the April evening, and spring must have seemed so far away.

In December, my dad’s heart stopped working. When I got the frantic call, I was showing off the novel I’d gotten him for Christmas: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. The story of a boy who loses his father, describing his unbearable grief as “heavy boots.” The last moments I believed we were both here together, my father and I, we were talking, in a way, about books. I came back from the holiday dazed and depressive, struggling to focus in class—when I even could get up to go to class. The whole cold winter was heavy boots. Saturdays were a small sanctuary, alone in the quiet KBIA booth, listening to the radio.

By the time April, and David Sedaris, arrived, I’d decided the pick up the shift. I still wanted to hear him read, but figured it would be too hard to sit through alone. I might as well make some money doing it. The event was sold out, and the audience was exactly as you’d imagine in a college town: library totes and chunky glasses, deep-hued scarves and overserved professors. The 1,700-seat theater buzzed with chatter just before Sedaris took the stage. Then it erupted. He was a legitimate star, and he commanded the laughter of the audience like a maestro with his orchestra. But he seemed completely human, too. In one generous gesture I’ll never forget, he read a piece of someone else’s work he loved: the Wells Tower story “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,” a funny-sad fiction written from the perspective of plundering Vikings, with a surprisingly heartfelt meditation on grief and loss at the end, “the awful fear that comes with getting hold of something you can’t afford to lose.”

After the reading, the author was ushered out to the stately lobby and perched at a black-aproned folding table to autograph copies of his latest collection. The signing line stretched hundreds-deep down the building’s west wing, and it was our job to keep it moving along. I was a strange mix of numb and totally overcome, listening to strangers gab about their Sedaris connections. When you’re that deep in grief, you begin to feel yourself like a ghost among the living: can’t you see me here, bust-open and forever bent? It was only shortly later I would learn that this is actually the most graceful thing about experiencing such a loss, how it equips you with a kind of extrasensory ability, to connect with other grief-ghosts. You can see each other more deeply, and you can feel better seen.

(Grief, after all, is the one and very most universal thing; can you imagine if we prioritized it in small-talk, replacing perhaps the weather: “so, have you lost anyone lately?” It might make the grocery checkout line a bit morose, but wouldn’t it helpfully cut through the bullshit, too? “Oh, traffic is crazy, and so was my intolerable woe this morning.” “I get it,” you’d respond, and that might be just enough.)

An hour dragged on, then half of another. It was getting late as the line wound down to just past the front entrance, the rest of the building eerily dark. I couldn’t believe that Sedaris had stuck around this long, that he wasn’t whisked away to some limo by now. I didn’t understand what a touring author actually did, I only knew that I wanted to be one. But I watched as David Sedaris gave each stranger the gift of a little time, listening to their anecdotes and laughing along. As the serpentine queue shrunk to the size of a garden snake, I asked my supervisor if it would be okay that I get my book signed, too. I’d brought my dad’s copy of Naked, just in case, which included the first Sedaris story my father had pointed me to, “The Drama Bug.” I hopped into the end and waited my turn, rehearsing my message, editing it in my head for efficiency, pithiness, pathos. It was my first time meeting a real writer, as I understood it, and I had to get it right.

The moment I came face to face (or, voice to voice) with the author I felt I knew so well, I almost panicked. But another voice, my father’s, came into my ear; I had to do this not for me, but for him. Out spilled a short, but surely somewhat incoherent, sob story: My dad was your biggest fan… he wrote funny essays, too… I was supposed to come here tonight with him, but he died suddenly in December… he would’ve loved this. As surprising as it is that I can’t specifically remember, as I’m sure it must have felt, in the moment, mortifying, I’m fairly certain I started to cry.

In a way I’ll never not be struck by, David Sedaris sat in that moment with a presence and warmth that seems to defy physics for a person who had just sat through nearly two hours of talking to strangers. Surely someone else in that line had spilled their heart, too, had shared something meaningful and poignant with the man in their brief interaction. Yet he was able to receive my story with a legitimate grace that meant everything to me. In my (our) copy of Naked, he wrote, above his signature: “to Michael Leonard, I’m sorry we never met.”

It was maybe not exactly in that moment, but from that moment, I understood something about what kind of career one could want or make in literature. What I took away from Sedaris’s appearance that night had nothing to do with the sold-out audience in the palm of his hand, not the presumed glitz of a world tour or the demand for one’s own scrawled name. It was instead his gestures of generosity, in reading that Wells Tower story, and in sticking around for all of our stories. That someone of stature could be not just touchable, but reaching out to touch. This was the writerly life I began to imagine, one rooted in creative collaboration and meaningful connection.

I’ve been returning to that moment over and over again as I plan my first book tour. To be clear, I do not expect to be appearing before audiences anywhere near that size or fervor; I have no Sedaris-shaped delusions of grandeur. But I pieced each stop together with the spirit of reaching out to touch, of prioritizing collaboration and connection. I’ll be reading alongside friends and authors I admire; I’ll be joined by musicians and performance artists. I’ll be reading at some bookstores I’ve had relationships with for years, having sold my DIY zines on their shelves since the mid-2010s. There will be no limo service, but instead a rental car we’ll pick up at the Westchester County Airport, to avoid driving in Manhattan. And I will not be alone: my partner, Jim, will be joining for the whole ride. Really, if you’d pitched the whole idea to 18-year-old Me, I suppose he’d be completely dizzy at the possibility, and maybe—no, definitely—impatient to get to it.

So as 36-year-old Me gets yanked forward into the dizzying future, only six weeks away, what I am hoping most to remember is that gift of presence. Not just for myself and my gratitude, but for anyone who’s made the time and effort to join me in that room. I won’t know who’s been grieving, or who’s been dreaming of their own turn at the podium. I can only offer everyone the dignity of a little time, to see or hear each other, to cry or laugh together. I can only imagine that my dad is right there with me, living out his own writerly dreams, meeting everyone along the way.

News & Events!

and now, I am so excited to finally, formally announce the full tour for this fall…!

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I’ll be updating and elaborating upon the lineups and programs for each as October approaches. There are even still a few more engagements up and down California that will be added in the coming months, too, so stay tuned for those.

But that was then. On this day, I could not feel saved alone by the persistent disco. One of my oldest, dearest friends was flying in from Portland on Friday. We watched the triangles leap and duplicate and could smell the smoke floating in from the coast. As nervous as I was at the darkening sky, there was something else clouding the visit: the nerves—restless, exhilarating—of seeing an old, dear friend. So much time had elapsed since we’d last spent this much time together. How has it changed us? What if it’s changed us? Before I left for the airport, the smoke was hanging around the trees.

Once the morning fog lifted, patches of blue became visible again. By the time my friend came dancing out of the airport, I could breathe easy again. The smoke cleared by Saturday morning, and we went for a long, hot hike through town. It was Lazy Bear, again, and we passed the bass thumping parties and laughed about who we used to be. We walked a long way down River Road. The rhythm itself dancing us down into our deeper selves.

It was one of those long, lake-deep conversations with your close friends you know you’ll remember like a song. One with catharsis, an arc. The contours of recognition and newfound legibility becoming hummable, memorable parts. You’ll sing them back to yourself later, in a low moment, better understanding who you’re meant to be. Friendship, like a poem or song, has this ferrying capacity, delivering our present selves back into the past. Charming a previous ghost to walk alongside us, measuring.

So many of the poems I’ve written about friendship are acts of attempted engineering, cobbled together time machines meant to encase a moment and ensure safe travel to it from a later time. They try to capture the flicker of a beloved body dancing, or a laughter as familiar as your own. Poems about small mercies or memorable meals or other care displays made by friends. In a friend poem—or time machine—the tense serves like a gear shift: in the present, animating these dear memories alive; in the past, a look back longingly on who we’ve both been; in the future continuous, a gesture of optimism toward who we will, together, become.

In Ada Limón’s 2010 poem “The Russian River,” the poet recalls a young visit to Guerneville, the summer after finishing high school. She captures the hot, sticky sense of both freedom and contingency that come from being this age, in this season. (“We were all so stoned that the world was perfectly defined/by goodness and realness and the opposite of those.”) The friends jump into the river. They swim and laze and feel the buzz of first love. In the poem, they’re still there, swimming and lazing and loving. And you, the reader, who may have never before been to Sonoma County, remember, too, your own youth, your own river.

...I remember thinking this
was what life was, and what I had always wanted,
outside, by the river, being pressed on a warm, flat
rock as if our wet imprint there would matter,
as if to say, I am holding on. I am holding on.

The magic trick at the end of Limón’s poem is that the tense changes, even if it appears textually the same. “I am holding on” is repeated twice, but follow the first one back up its syntactical vine and find that it’s spoken in memory: “I remember thinking”—this, in the present of the poem’s moment, that summer day—that their imprint would matter, would say “I am holding on.” Now, I read the repeated phrase after it as the speaker of the poem today, almost as a declaration: “I am holding on.” But to what?

Could it be simply to the memory of this moment? Or something deeper, and more elemental, or essential? Perhaps the speaker is gripping at that youthful certainty, that stoned belief in goodness and realness and absolutes. Maybe she’s holding on not only to the friends she loved then, but the friend she was then. While we grow up and away from each other, from ourselves, there’s always some stuff we still wish to save.

Memory alone is a powerful privilege. Like any potent resource, it can be manipulated maliciously (see: the halcyon hallucination to which Make America Great Again gestures); it can also be handled more carefully, tumbled to the edge and revealing new refractions, new past possibilities. This slipperiness means that writing about the past—ours and ours—welcomes impassioned emotional reactions. Lucille Clifton put it succinctly in her poem “why some people be mad at me sometimes”:

they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and I keep on remembering
mine

We may be doomed to only remember our own narrow versions of the past. But every friendship contains its own intimate, collaborative history, and often the accounts get blurred. How she tells it may become how I lived it; something small he forgot may have formed something vital in my mind. We remember ourselves through each other, assigning from the present vantage a kind of meaningfulness to the shared laughs, tears, or embraces that seem to have shaped who we are today. In brutal, alienating times, these archives of our most connected, most beautiful pasts become essential vehicles for reassurance, or even optimism.

As articulated by co-authors Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed in If Memory Serves: “Memories enable more than survival; they are imaginative ways to disrupt and transform conditions that make survival necessary.” Their book (subtitled Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past) looks at various pieces of public art, memorials, and gallery installation as space-disrupting time machines. “Like utopias,” they go on, “memories craft a world that stands as a counterreality to the lacking or painful present.”

Poems, like friends or songs, provide for us a site upon which we can set design and self-construct our lives. The containment of their time and lines serve as perfect stages to enact the plays of who we’ve been, who we’ve meant to be, who we hope to yet become. Each one is its own sort of room, or theater, into which memory—mine and yours—is shone like a follow spot, illuminating vignettes of recognition, or reinvention. In Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival my friend poems attempt to carve space out of dancefloors, apartment floors, park lawns, and car seats. Some are reconstructions of specific, lived moments in time; some are dream homes of imagined histories, period pieces allowing for the imagining of how friends like us loved.

In “Suite: A Fraternal Order of Glitter & Ash” there are four poems about friends strung, poetic pearl necklace, into a time-traveling quartet. We begin with “The Trojans” and end in the early 2000s, with a foursome of friends from my own young life. It’s a reach backwards along a long velvet rope of queer friendships in their respective historical moments. If you can accept a basic concept of cultural memory, then it is not such a leap to acknowledge that my generation’s inheritance is one heavy with early grief and collective loss. But also of a collective strength. In “The Woods,” the 1991 burning of a Guerneville disco is the setting for four friends who, through the plague years, become three. The remaining trio has gathered at their favorite forest getaway just before its untimely demise, memorializing their fallen friend. Even as the world around them goes up in smoke, they keep on dancing together—the friends the things you grab in a fire.

Enduring the AIDS epidemic meant forging steel-tough friendships, as for many suffering who had been outcasted from their blood families, these comrades were their sisters and their brothers, their nurses and their executors. Documenting these endangered bonds—in pamphlets and poetry, in memoirs and medical brochures—became essential to survival. And delegating their memory, through quilt panels and shared photos and art made in the wake, is how friends keep each other living.

One of my favorite archivists of queer camaraderie is Wolfgang Tillmans. His 2016 book Conor Donlon is an exercise in partnered memory, capturing a yearslong photo series of Donlon, Tillmans’s friend and collaborator. From its catalogue copy: “The book sees Donlon’s appearance and style changing, as well as his backdrops: a 2003 demonstration against George W. Bush’s state visit; a picnic at the park after an opening at Tillmans’s exhibition space Between Bridges; the bright yellow walls of Tillmans and Donlon’s home; long-gone LGBT clubs The Ghetto and The Joiners’ Arm; and quieter moments spent talking in the studio and around town.”

Flipping through Conor Donlon, you feel the tenseless, dizzying powers of memory. Conors stack on Conors, the corners of a shaggy youth meeting the edges of a growing man. These simultaneous pasts are multiplied by the presence of the artist and the subject: Wolfgang seeing this Conor; Wolfgang capturing that Conor. It’s in his dogged gaze we recognize the intimacy of beholding, of being held. How like a camera lens our friends are, perceiving and reflecting, seeing us move through time. We observe and change one another as we go. Capturing in poetry our friendships is a way of pinning these fleeting mirrors to the page.

As an artist, or a writer, or a friend you always run the risk of your loved one receiving their depiction awkwardly: well, that’s not how I remember it… But the same is true for how we see ourselves—just try rereading a page from your journal from even a year ago. We don’t write to record the truth so much as our truth. “Memory is a poet, not a historian,” a poet once said1 and its function, in art, is to transform into a more future-facing gesture. After all, the point is that this will be read. It is up to you, whenever you receive it, to find (or not) some meaning for yourself.

When I wrote “A Little Door,” the poem about the Lazy Bear blackout, it was the first summer of my first long-term relationship. The central image in the poem is a door my partner made for our medicine chest, a simple act of creation that felt so much bigger than its size. It was for a home we would share; it was a document of his careful labor. As the nearby fires drew closer, the vulnerability of that little piece of wood felt too much to bear. When the lights went out, I panicked, and my partner found a lantern. That’s when we noticed the bears were still dancing. At least that’s how I remember it. “Nothing stays dead long,” the poem opens, on something like a hopeful note.

To make art is to believe, prayerlike, that our wet imprints do matter. We memorialize our friends and lovers—their acts of service, their inside jokes—as a way to keep them here with us. To keep each other dancing, even through the smoke. Like the music still playing after the power outage, our songs may well outlive us. And in this, our raging fire season, to that I am holding on. I am holding on.

News & Events!

Ordering In: Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival arrives on October 6th, but it’s available now to pre-order from your favorite indie bookstore! You can find it online at places like Powell’s in Portland or Unabridged Bookstore in Chicago. Ask your local bookseller to order it if they don’t yet have the book in their inventory.

Checking Out: If you’ve already pre-ordered the book or if you can’t afford it, please consider suggesting the title at your local library system. Most libraries have a dedicated form for cardholders to Suggest a Purchase (seen here, at the Kansas City Public Library). I’d love for this collection to reach readers accessibly through their libraries.

Now, *drumroll* … the details for our NYC launch event!

I’ll be reading on Thursday, October 8th at 7:00pm at the Bureau located in the LGBT Center at 208 W. 13th St. - Rm 210. Joined by readers Joshua Garcia, charles theonia, and David Groff and featuring a musical performance from DAYS. It’s going to be a really special evening in a truly sacred space. This is the building where ACT UP began; there’s a Keith Haring bathroom down the hall from where we’ll read.

The Bureau of General Services - Queer Division was co-founded by Donnie Jochum and Greg Newton in 2012. After their move this year to Oregon, the shop got a second life thanks to Jules Wernersbach and the team at Brooklyn’s Hive Mind Books. Their successful GoFundMe hit the $50,000 goal in just two weeks, a lovely testament, I think, to the power and perseverance of queer literary community.

More dates and more cities to be announced in the coming weeks! For now, stay cool, keep singing.

In a virtual class last fall that Garth Greenwell taught on Confessions, where some hundreds of brainiacs traded well-researched repartee in the chat, the most meaningful contribution I made was to chime in towards the end about one unexpected place where we see Augustine’s legacy: Madonna’s 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor. A continuous-play disco comeback on which she continually bends time, through ABBA samples and clock-drenched lyrics, Madonna’s first Confessions recalls the most soulfully psychedelic wanderings of Augustine’s own. Because of Madonna’s long and storied explorations of both provocative Catholicism and syncopated spirituality on her records, I don’t think we can discount the possibly intentional connection here.

Her disco-spiritual experiment continues with Confessions II, a second round with producer Stuart Price expounding upon the themes of divine embodiment and club temporality. Plenty can and has been said about the meaning of Confessions II’s arrival as it relates to Madonna’s career—a rebirth! a redemption! a return to the dancefloor!—but I’m interested in what it signals for the soul. I mean, the idea of the soul. I mean, an idea of the soul, as any two of us would likely find a lot of places to disagree on what we mean when we say “soul.”

In Confessions, Augustine doesn’t—can’t—attempt to define what exactly a soul is, but he does, often, wrestle with what a soul means in relationship to its body. He compares his soul to a meager house, in an address to its maker: “It is falling down; rebuild it.” Augustine tries to understand the idea of the soul in terms of materiality, considering the physicality of elements we can observe: “Fire moves up, stone down.” “My love is my weight,” Augustine muses. The theist conceptualizes the soul theistically, imaging individual forces as expresses of his larger God—they are beams of light or an atmospheric air; we are each pieces of a larger whole.

Madonna, the pop star, conceptualizes the soul in similarly multitudinous terms. The album opens with an appeal to self-annihilation, in a whispered-word plea to hide in the shadows, create a new persona, and find the “safety in numbers” cultivated on the dance floor. It’s an Augustinian construction of the soul as glitter, flecks and flecks of reflective pieces scooped together in a glowing mound. She addresses the matter explicitly on “Good for the Soul”: “all the spirits they all intertwine.” For the dancer, this collectivity is freedom.

It’s one thing to imagine our spirits, like love-weights, rising and gathering, but this does beg more questions: How are they traveling? And to where do they go? On Confessions II, the disco forms a sort of ether, a weigh station for dancing ghosts. Are the songs their own conveyance? A four-on-the-floor ferryboat to disembodied eternity? While Madonna starts the second track confidently asserting “Everything begins with consciousness,” others have debated. Augustine, after a spiraling argument with himself about the backstory of the heavens and earth, concedes, “I don’t know what I don’t know.”

One soul who tried to get to the bottom of this question belonged to Dr. Ian Stevenson. The parapsychologist (born in 1908, died in 2007) searched sincerely and scientifically, from his esteemed post at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, for incontrovertible evidence that there was some kind of life after death. His pet dogma: reincarnation. His dogged pursuit of the unknown (unknowable?) is captured in Jesse Bering’s new book The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson. In a globe-spanning, decades-long field study of subjects with credible (by his own fastidious metric) “past life” experiences, Stevenson sought to answer, with evidence, life’s most unanswerable question.

Following leads to India and Alaska, often but not always in communities where a general belief in reincarnation was commonly held, his case studies focused on verifiable consistencies between one living person and one dead one: a child’s uncanny knowledge of a deceased boy’s family two villages over; near-death experiences; “telepathic impressions […] usually between persons united by love and during a special crisis to one of them;” a birth mark mirroring an observed exit wound, “like a flashbulb going off at a traumatic death, presumably, with its blinding aftereffects molding the body of the next ensoulment.”

Stevenson was tugging at a spiritual thread that stretched back to the turn of the 20^th century, and heavily influenced by the work of Frederic W. H. Myers, a psychical researcher who rode on the Victorian wave of interest in séances, spirit photography, and all things supernatural. Myers’s theories of the soul were more clearly defined—if less physically provable: the Self operates in a disembodied spiritual plane (the metetherial world) he called “the native environment of the soul.” Myers: “We are living a life in two worlds at once; a planetary life in this material world, to which the organism is intended to react; and also a cosmic life in that spiritual or metetherial world.” Or: we are living in a material world, but we are not exclusively material girls.

While trying to prove his own theories of the afterlife, Stevenson struggled to carefully describe, if not define, the possible physicality of where our lived lives go when they end. “I think our bodies may act for our minds as a corset acts for some bodies,” he wrote. “Removal of the corset allows the body to expand—but the body remains what it was, even though it has changed shape.” One might imagine a Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra, and how freeing it must be, after a marathon arena show, to jiggle out from under it.

Before the costumes or Confessions, Madonna was, at first, a nobody. There is a lovable video of a pre-fame Madonna in 1982 performing her soon-to-be debut single “Everybody” at Danceteria. This was for the anything goes cabaret night No Entiendes (translation: “you don’t understand”), a free-for-all hosted by doorman Haoui Montaug and DJ Anita Sarko. As recalled by Danceteria founder Rudolf Piper, in a recent oral history:2

“No Entiendes had the good and bad and terrible. I remember one Danceteria manager was always bothering me to perform. I said, “Okay, fine.” He went onstage and he started to recite a poem, and in the middle he stopped and said, “I can’t remember how it goes from here,” and started to cry onstage. It was unbelievable. Everybody loved it.

Here Madonna, the anonymous dancer, sparkles with an undeniable star power. Both self-possessed and pleading, she convincingly cultivates on that dingy stage the illusion of a pop star. This was (is?), I think, her artistry: the magic act that a girl from Michigan could summon, as if from some older, inherited place, the powers of a true diva. Why not here, she seems to ask. Why not us? (Jay McInerney, in attendance: “I was not remotely impressed with the song, but I thought she was a really good dancer. I genuinely thought I would never hear from her again.”)

On “Danceteria,” Madonna efforts to catalogue the living bodies of a long-gone scene, name-dropping everyone from Haoui to elevator operator Debi Mazar to Fab 5 Freddy and the B-52s. The song functions not as an idle boxed-up archive but instead as a kind of a disco séance: in present-tense lyrics, the singer summons a downtown night out dancing, sometime in the early 1980s. She narrates the night in a long tracking shot of dancey immediacy. “Everyone here is a work of art,” the revived young Madonna marvels, recalling as Augustine did the comrades with whom he “pursued my course through the streets of Babylon, and I rolled in the mud as it were cinnamon and expensive perfumes.”

(Augustine, again: “Friendship between human beings is sweet in its cherished bonds, because it creates a unity out of many separate souls.”)

“Danceteria” names, among its exhibition catalogue, Keith Haring and Jean-Michele Basquiat. Both of these artists—socially marginalized yet commercially celebrated even in their short lives—have experienced long, rich posthumous careers as brands. Their prescient penchant for iconography (Basquiat’s crowns, Haring’s barking dogs) and repeatability presaged a visual culture obsessed by brands, making their work ideal for social media legible merchandising. To be clear, I myself am an eager sucker: my closet comprises a collection of Keith tees and sweatshirts, my brand at least a little closely tied to my love for Haring’s art.

This kind of ongoingness has always been related to artmaking. “Children and art,” as the Sondheim song goes, lamenting the two things in this life we leave behind. For queer artists, especially, this dichotomy presents its alluring proposal: If you can’t procreate, you can, at least, create. In every poem or painting, each lyric or read line, a piece of its creator carries forward into the future. We feel close to even a gone artist when we connect with what they made. It’s not quite the uncanniness of seeing your sister in her daughter’s eyes, but it is its own conveyance. If there is anything like a soul, surely its conveyed through song.

After decades of rebirths and reincarnations (this newest album is, after all, explicitly a sequel), Madonna positions herself on “Danceteria” as the disco’s designated survivor. It’s a poignant reclamation after a series of albums chasing trends and plucky posturing, and a public image tied to her changing (and unchanging) body. A sampling of just this year’s headlines: Madonna Has Become an Avatar for Our Fear of Aging (the New York Times); What Madonna Teaches Us About Ageing (Harper’s Bazaar); Like Madonna at 67, I Refuse to Age Gracefully (Hello!).

There is in the discussion of the optics of Madonna’s aging (and her surgically-assisted refusals) a great unsaid implication that’s inherent in any conversation about aging: its proximity to mortality. Since what the singer described as near-death experience in 2023, this proximity is even more pronounced; on “One Step Away,” Death stalks the disco, where Madonna reminds us we’re all “one step away from the dance of life.” Elsewhere: “Time is a river we cannot unwind.” The diva, here, gets cosmological in the face of Death.

The back-half books of Confessions become similarly searching, as Augustine sorts through concepts of creation, memory, and mortality in looping self-reflection. “But what, after all, is time?” Augustine asks. “...In what way is something long or short, if it doesn’t exist? The past doesn’t exist anymore, and the future doesn’t yet exist.” Augustine decides the safest bet is to acknowledge that our lives as we experience them are capacious enough to contain eternity (“when it was present it was long”), anticipating the disco philosophy we find throughout Confessions II.

Simon(e) van Sarloos, in Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto, argues that our concepts of age and aging are caught up in overly linear (read: White, colonial, ableist, capitalistic) constructions of time. “Many age-related stereotypes are related to heteronormative family roles, generational growth, and the centralization of reproduction,” they write. “Queerness twists time, ideally opening space up for varied forms of intimacy.” The lasting impressions left by, for example, the performances at No Entiendes can gather up and twist time like this, providing a new plane for constructing our constellations of mentorship and care.

As she embraces more deeply her role as a community elder, Madonna here seems as interested in lineage and education. She invites Sabrina Carpenter on a track and doles out advice on love, sex, toxic exes, stepmothers, and stardom. “School” is in session. But, maybe most crucially, she demonstrates a grappling with loss and mortality that allows for both reverie and mystery. “This is just a portal we’re going through,” she muses, very Augustine-like, on “Fragile,” “still, it’s hard to let go.”

The album arrives, metaphysically, back at the start. “Everything fades away,” she laments on closer “L.E.S. Girl,” another downtown 80s vignette (still in the present-tense) conjuring the young Madonna—“except for you.” You can practically see that first, free Madonna dancing down Avenue B, messy makeup and affected swagger. Maybe on her way to Danceteria, maybe unknowing where she’d get to. Maybe utterly faithful in her own future. Kept alive at first by that poignant switch to the second-person, by the time the song ends she is subsumed into the greater whole—the stated “everything”—fading, necessarily, away. Where does it all go?

For Confessions II to arrive in its current moment—a country tearing itself apart limb by limb; a pandemic-weary public body still readjusting to being together (in “Everything,” she groans: “no one wants to go outside”); a paradigm-shifting technological revolution boosting machine power over people—the question of where we go from here looms large and ominous over the dance floor. It’s a mirror ball rising like a blood moon, some cosmic omen, but foretelling what?

In Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was, a double portrait of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek—downtown artists in a pre-Danceteria downtown—he explores either artist’s interests in imagery of spiritual capture and rebirth. (About a creatively fruitful visit to the Palermo catacombs, Paul Thek reflects: “We accept our thingness intellectually, but the emotional acceptance of it can be a joy.”) Both died in their fifties, from AIDS complications, but Durbin is interested in how they loved and lived before that. “Why shouldn’t we be as awed by birth as we are by death?” he poses in the prologue, before quoting British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips: “We are probably over-impressed by anticipation and inevitability—have, in a sense, organized our lives around them—because we have grossly overrated the significance of our own deaths.” To put another way: We don’t know what we don’t know.

But I am interested in the places where we, together, suspend the unlit mystery: the darkened dance floor, the blackout before a play begins. In an unprogrammed meeting of Quakers, everyone waits silently for the word of God to emerge. There is a dazzling potentiality that comes from joining together in this unknowing. The hush of the audience just before a song begins: and from where will it arrive? Isn’t this as mysterious as any act of creation? If there are souls searching for a good door to slip through, they must see in these gaps a fabulous opportunity.

(Rudolf Piper striking an Augustinian tone on Danceteria: “One of our slogans was: ‘The place where everything is nothing and everybody is nobody!’”)

Am I crazy if I believe the disco could call forward something close to heaven? Like the ghostly Paul Mescal appearing between flash beams in Aftersun, what if the dance floor has an open door policy with the dead? As Augustine asks of God: “do you instead show things that are here now as a way to show the future?” What if what’s waiting on the other side is a disco? And you arrive, Bianca Jagger showing up at Studio 54 on a horse, something both new and known. Maybe our time here, when we’re dancing—I mean, broadly: making art, sharing meals, caring for one another—is bringing forth a godly future, some heavenly glimpses in our hardening present.

About souls, I don’t know what I don’t know. But bodies? I know that they are capable of both brutal and beautiful things. I know that—and am knowing better, every year!—they do break down and bend. I know that they can be exploited and weaponized, misread and mistreated, over-legislated and underserved. And I know they can be breathtaking, in a leap across the stage; or in what an actor’s face can conjure and convey; or what far-spreading song fills a choir’s lungs; or the feats an athlete’s legs can accomplish in congress with their teams’; or when many assemble to prepare a holiday dinner; or when dozens link arms to form a protective chain. I know that if we do come back here for another round I hope to be still surrounded by bodies like these, future-making ones that see even in our callow present all its glittering potential. And I know that that will have to be enough.

The trend matches the energy, that feeling of breakneck possibility when you’re young and want everything. Before you know how getting what you want might break you down. The song’s central metaphors hint at this lurking destructive potential: she’s a speeding car without a brake, her clothes are catching fire; she feels wrong and insane. It’s a twinning of love and sickness that will haunt the album later, in “the cure” and “what’s wrong with me” (where, despite a spinning head, sick stomach, sleep deprivation, and clear depression, the singer “went to the doctor and she said I was fine”), and one that recalls another piece of near-monoculture in our atomized era. If there’s one sidewalk prop that seems ubiquitous this summer—especially for girls like me that are closer to forty than 40s—it’s Lena Dunham’s memoir Famesick. Here, too, warp illness and love.

Famesick is classic tell-all in the sense that it names some names, but it’s more accurately an illness memoir, tracing in brutal detail the arc one travels from the world of the well to the isolating chambers of the sick. It’s the journey alluded to by Susan Sontag at the start of her enduring 1978 work Illness as Metaphor: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”

For Dunham, this border crossing maps across her rise to blaring stardom—for writing, directing, and starring in Girls—and her relationship with a rising star, Jack Antonoff. The three threads get braided, and knotted, throughout the book: her love her art, her art her fame, her celebrity her sickness, her sickness her relationship—an ouroboros, or the snakes of a caduceus. Painfully, the relationship disintegrates over years of Dunham’s recurrent trysts with undiagnosed chronic illnesses that present as debilitating migraines, cysts, inflammation, hives and, concurrently, pill addiction. The doctors range from dismissive to savagely cruel, reflecting a pattern of misdiagnosis or non-diagnosis too familiar to women who have navigated the US health industry. Jack, as he is simply called throughout the book, veers from hapless to helpless to outright uncaring. A lover ill-equipped to handle his lover’s illness, to say the least.

Jack’s not the first man to be depicted in this dim light. There are echoes—in scenes where Dunham is left pruning in a tepid bathtub, shelved—that recall Louis leaving Prior in Tony Kushner’s 1991 play Angels in America. Prior’s body—wasting, involuntarily discharging, covered in sores—becomes all too much for his flappable partner to handle. “What if I walked out on this?” Louis asks, “Would you hate me forever?” The stage notes direct: Prior kisses Louis on the forehead. He answers: “Yes.” Louis lives in the kingdom of the well, but he’s terrified to get yanked across the border. He flees.

Sarah Schulman, in a recent Facebook post critiquing a newly-produced (and unnamed) AIDS play, is dismayed to find the Prior-Lou dynamic—“something that occurred rarely”—echoed still today. “The historical reality is that people with AIDS were abandoned by their families and government,” Schulman elaborates, “and supported by their community.” A legion of lovers well-equipped to handle their lovers’ illness.

It wasn’t the first time while reading Famesick I thought about a subgenre of this subgenre: the AIDS memoir. Specifically, the AIDS memoir penned by a partner losing a lover. Books like Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time (1988) or Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast (1996) provide an alternative—if no less complicated—model for partners straddling Sontag’s mismatched citizenship. Monette, watching his beloved Roger Horwitz waste, is almost always agonized, but refuses to look away. Doty, in painfully lush lyricism, too bears witness to his partner Wally’s succumbing to sickness as a means of care:

“I’m with him almost all day and night—little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel like we’re taking one another in, looking and looking. I tell him I love him and he says I love you, babe, and then when it’s too hard for him to speak he smiles back at me with the little crooked smile he can manage now, and I know what it means.”

This radical redefining of witness and depiction was happening, too, in visual art. Félix González-Torres interpreted hard candy, wall clocks, and lightbulbs all as means to approximate the body, to show how it is consumed and how time moves through it, how it glows and fades. González-Torres’s 1992 piece Untitled (America #1) is composed of an ascending string of common household lightbulbs, rising up from a pile on the gallery floor, described in its placard at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a “group portrait.”

Each bulb represents a friend of the artist; each bulb will burn out eventually. Henri Cole, in his 2018 book Orphic Paris, encounters one of González-Torres’s lightbulb installations at the Centre Pompidou, and wonders if it is a self-portrait; he, who lived in New York City in the 1980s, sees in it a certain solitude. Later, Cole recalls Susan Sontag’s AIDS-era story “The Way We Live Now”:

…she observes that ‘the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He’s still alive. But in a painting or photo you can’t show “still.”’ In a poem, too, you can say, He is still alive, or, I am living still.

This is the very magic trick that Assotto Saint performs in his poem “Rerun,” dedicated “for vito russo,” in which he reanimates his friend into a quotidian, profound moment of presence—the departed Russo eating a scoop of ice cream on the street in Chelsea:

…spring unwraps sweet & soft
like the cone you like
with the sun in your smile
the sun everywhere, all over
even under mustache hair

Saint, himself battling the same incurable illness—a fellow subject in the kingdom of the sick—chooses to not look away. This is a way to keep each other alive, the poet sees, to ensure his friend is “living still.” It’s a gesture of community building on the page, an expansion of citizenship that renders the loved one briefly well, beautifully vivid and there, out in the street and in the sun, enjoying something sweet.

last year/vito loped/right here
freeze-frame
vision burns
ice cream drips

In Famesick, Dunham does little to gesture toward her fellow subjects in the sick kingdom. There are some bumbling characterizations of her rehab cohort, and faceless strangers from chronic illness message boards. There is the occasional acknowledgment that if this—seeking care, clarity, support in a punishing and exploitative health industry—is so hard for her, imagine how hard it is for the less celebrated. Jack, in this depiction, does not rise to the occasion as a caregiver or witness. Dunham does it all herself, playing the role of witness to her own pain and subject of her own reanimation. Happily, she survives. In the end, she falls in love—not perfectly well, but better.

I’m interested in the timing of Famesick and Rodrigo’s album, and their use of illness as both subject and metaphor, mostly because it seems long overdue. Through the early seasons of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were all confronted—at the very least, and luckiest—with the precarious potentiality of illness. Sontag, again: “Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” In lockdown, we experienced a suspended state of illness: we stayed at home to avoid infection, and infecting, and called it “quarantine.” Converging with our increasingly online lives, the pandemic produced (or accelerated) a strange sense of disembodiment, with rituals from sex and dancing to elopements and memorials experienced in checkerboard Zoom rooms. Alone together, we were all afflicted with the same limiting conditions.

At its most optimistic, this was a potentially consciousness-shifting moment, a lesson in our co-inhabited speeding car-without-a-brake that we might at least look after one another, to keep each other alive. It wouldn’t be like the HIV/AIDS epidemic, where so many so easily dismissed the risks as their problem. No, this was a shared burden. We’d emerge better aware of our interconnection. Just imagine that kingdom of the well. In my dark bedroom on a laptop screen beamed videos of crowds—English fans shouting Oasis, festival-goers dancing to Lorde—nostalgic or anticipatory for all those bodies, gathered. When we emerge, we’ll all dance better together.

I don’t need to elaborate on how that’s been going so far.

If anything, the kingdom of the well has since 2020 been plagued by a headstrong denialism. We seem less interested than ever in confronting our shared risks, ground down from hard living and determined to move on. Ours is a selfish, stockpiling era, where those who can afford to hoard are turning a cruel eye on those perceived as too weak, too useless to their myopic future. Why are men so disgusted by the world they dominate so obsessed with living forever?

Unfortunately, this energy trickles down. It’s a season of looking out for yourself, because who else is going to? I think of Schulman’s post, shaking her fist at the new AIDS play—yes, the government abandoned the sick and dying, but their community never did. A pandemic gives the framework of illness for the whole public body, each of us bearing witness and beating back symptoms collectively. Our own lovers, if not ourselves, pass between the two kingdoms, and ideally, we can learn from this dual citizenship stronger practices in showing up, in care. Illness is not a metaphor, but it does provide a lesson in how to better love.

Audre Lorde, whose Cancer Journals form perhaps the essential illness memoir, reflects broadly from her own position in the kingdom of the sick: “What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?”

In her letters back to this kingdom from that one, Lorde suggests the most potent weapon we have against punishing systems—in the public body or in our own bodies—is a fierce fearlessness. It is the strength required to face your dying lover’s spotted body and to refuse to turn away. It is the tenacity to elbow through a medical establishment disinterested in believing you when you report your own pain. It is the power derived from accepting a collective precarity.

And the trudge toward insidious disembodiment marches on: as the speculative AI boom incentivizes further exploitation of our bodies—personal and public, human and planetary—it is increasingly urgent that we hold fast to the things that make us fabulously mortal. Part of that is vulnerability. Part of that is ending. (Ali Louis Bourzgui, accepting a Tony for his performance in The Lost Boys last week: “If there’s one thing we can learn from vampires it’s that life is short, but that’s its gift.”) When we recognize collectively, well and sick alike, the value of our imperfect bodies, the hoarders lose their power. The kingdoms’ borders start to crumble.

Now Famesick is a blockbuster bestseller, trading on a contagious nostalgia for a 20/20 hindsight version of the early 2010s—its references to the Chinatown art scene, the ‘golden era of TV,’ and Frances Ha. I wonder if the Manhattan ballerinas running to “stupid song” are referencing the tracking shot where Greta Gerwig leaps through black-and-white streets as Bowie’s “Modern Love” blares.

Just like those singalongs I watched during lockdown, the “stupid song” videos feel defiantly well, a radical embodiment celebrating a perfectly working machine. Perhaps they’re catching on because again—still—that embodiment feels so divine, so rare. That embodiment, its preciousness, may mean different things whether you’re in the kingdom of the sick or the kingdom of the well. But remember: we all hold dual citizenship. I’m just glad they’re dancing while they can.

News & Events!

Pre-orders are live for Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival! You an order your copy directly from FUP or request it at your favorite local bookstore. Pre-orders are a crucial part of the publishing process that lets the press know there is interest in a title and helps the printers deliver the production on time. Thank you to all the readers who have already pre-ordered a copy! I can’t wait to share this book with you.

Speaking of going live, I’ll be heading out a book tour this fall and have officially announced the first three stops! There will be more to come, so stay tuned.

This week marks Pride in San Francisco which means there is always too much to do. But here are some fabulous literary and otherwise options worth checking out!

Tuesday, 6/23 at Green Apple Books on the Park: Christian Bancroft for the release of his book, A Ghost Has No Fantasies, featuring Caroline Mar and Mukethe Kawinzi. “Through haunting poetry and prose, A Ghost Has No Fantasies illuminates the forgotten voices of LGBTQ+ individuals who suffered under Nazi persecution.” Bancroft is joined by Mukethe Kawinzi, one of my favorite writers and souls.

Thursday, 6/25 at Martuni’s: A Toast to Foglifter. Every last Thursday poet James J. Siegel hosts a lively, life-affirming literary series atop the piano in Martuni’s back room cabaret. This edition celebrates Foglifter, the stalwart LGBTQ+ literary journal whose pages have turned me on to so many great voices over the years. Cheers to that!

Friday, 6/26 at the 4 Star Theater: Richard Perez - I Have to Do This. Richard Perez performs a solo pantomime show depicting the hilarious, heart-twisting arc of a relationship — between the comic and thin air. There’s slapstick and sex and surprising moments of tenderness. I was lucky to catch the show at Joe’s Pub while in New York in February and cannot recommend it enough. Happy Pride, all!

The announcer at San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day deadpans a perfect transition as the parade passes by. It’s June, 1989. The voice belongs to Hank Plante, one of the nation’s first openly gay TV reporters, noted for contributing extensive coverage of the AIDS crisis on KPIX from the earliest days of epidemic in the city.1 He calls out the waving contingents: two-stepping cowboys with the Golden State Gay Rodeo and the chefs of Project Open Hand (“meals with love for people with AIDS”); karate kicking lesbians from Oakland’s Hand to Hand Self Defense Center.2

A marching band plays “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” trailed by the dozens-strong Surviving Partners of People with Aids. The video shakes and crackles.

The next float is one June later, 1990: Gilbert Baker as Pink Jesus flanked by a tits-out Scarlot Harlot and Sister Sadie, Sadie the Rabbi Lady. Gilbert’s cross is topped by a hand-scrawled sign: MARTYRS FOR ART. Sister Sadie, I later learn, got arrested protesting the Pope when he came to San Francisco in 1987 and, according to Gilbert Baker, was excommunicated from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for “being too fabulous.”3 In the photograph, she appears open-mouthed, mid-shriek or mid-song.

The archive comes alive, a parade of recognizable struggles, sisterly celebrations, and inherited iconography – each story its own float. At the GLBT Historical Society’s subterranean citadel of ephemeral scraps, it’s always Pride somewhere. Images of these June parades past are impressively legible. Sometimes reassuring, sometimes depressingly, how much the screaming queens meeting their own harrowing moment seem equipped to be plopped into ours.

Throughout the 2020s, drag bans and anti-trans bills and attacks on LGBTQ+ spaces have multiplied, meant to convince queer people that we are not only unwanted, but somehow unreal. Central to the proposition that queer people embody some festering, menacing force – more demonic than deviance – is the suggestion that queer people have only just arrived. To combat this straight hysteria, I dig into the ramparts offered in our archives. I sort through photographs, flyers, love letters, business cards, meeting minutes, magazines and see before my eyes an untaught history shake vividly alive.

Pride, for me, is inextricable from history. What is there to be proud of? one might ask, and in response I’d ask them to take a seat on the bleachers and announce, in my best Hank Plante, the floats as they pass: a flamboyance of volunteers; a gaggle of home cooks; a pride of friends and lovers building a ship as it sails, rebuilding our broken systems of care and of governance. In these our shameful times, there is to be found from the archives a rich example in how to respond to institutional injustice.

Deep in the archives one afternoon last June, another fabulous float passed by: a nun posed on a bluff, sinewy arms stretched into a kind of y and clasping their black habit as it kites behind them in the wind. In the distance, an iconic spire of the Golden Gate Bridge rises, just barely, through the fog. Okay, I gasped, tell me more—

The photograph was part of a recently updated Digital Collection, the Jean-Baptiste Carhaix Papers. Carhaix was a French photographer who started visiting San Francisco in the late 1970s and began photographing his beloved subjects, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, in the early 1980s.4 This photograph of Sister Dominique Nique-Nique, along with dozens more of the Sisters posed upon rocks in the Marin Headlands, playing cheerleaders at gay games, or ministering to the community at the Castro Street Fair, were donated to the GLBT Historical Society after Carhaix’s death in 2023.

I fell in love with these photographs, but especially this one of Sister Dominique Nique-Nique in the fog. There’s something so timeless – as in, out-of-time – about the image, its craggy terrain and uncanny costuming. Our subject, posed open-chested and pale-faced, seems to effortlessly embody a full spectrum of the masculine and the feminine. Her ambiguity is echoed in the fog, a curtain keeping separate this ancient-seeming landscape from the city of San Francisco we know is on the other side. We are poised, strikingly, at the total in-between, straddling every possibility and yet no time at all.

But really it is 1984. That’s the date with which the photograph is labeled. What did Sister Dominique Nique-Nique do when she came back across the bridge? What trouble did she start, what art did she make? I went digging for any trace, sifting through what seemed like the most promising lead— the Gilbert Block/Sadie, Sadie The Rabbi Lady Papers, 1971-2001. Hers spans 10.5 linear feet: 5 cartons, 2 oversize boxes, and 1 oversize file. I spent a few days last June in the basement room at the archives, excavating.

In 1984, when the Moral Majority met in San Francisco ahead of the Democratic National Convention, the Sisters rallied in Union Square “on a stage dusted with red glitter” to perform an exorcism of Jerry Falwell’s homophobia.5 In 1984, you can hear Sister Sadie’s voice booming across the Gay Freedom Day celebrations singing, to the tune of “America the Beautiful”: “Americans, Americans, you’re gorgeous every one! Stop bigotry and poverty, and then we’ll all have fun!” The crowd goes wild.6

And another float goes by.

I can’t find anything more – yet – about Sister Dominique Nique-Nique. But she is, like any nun, just one in an order of so many fabulous examples. At the archives it becomes so clear how much our glitter sticks to one another. How long our voices do rattle off history’s walls. These fierce models of joyous resistance and true justice are as loud and necessary now as they were ten, twenty, forty years ago. And so our own acts are this essential. They can and will last.

When the time came to choose a cover image for Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, a book so deeply connected to these enduring frequencies, I knew it had to be her. How lucky that the folks at Fordham agreed; how lucky that Carhaix’s photography had been given to the GLBT Historical Society along with their full discretion for reuse permission; how lucky that the archivists there were so accommodating and encouraging in facilitating the image’s use. Like anything good, it’s a gift of community and timing. I’m so proud that it’s the cover of this collection:

Now, as June busts out all over in rainbows – dark storm clouds be dammed – I’ll be thinking about our sisters before us, how they met their own impossible moments. In neon pink and bare breasted to the world. In battalions of volunteers ready to bring home cooked food to their vanishing friends. In poses of defiance and refusal, open-mouthed and glorious—not a smidge of shame about them—fighting for all they loved.

Isn’t that what there is?

Isn’t that all we have?

News & Events!

On Sunday, June 7^th at 2:00pm I’ll be appearing in conversation with Noel Quiñones at Fabulosa Books to celebrate their new collection, Orange (CavanKerry Press). The book explores Quiñones’s coming of age in a queer body in the Bronx through formal play (a coloring book page! a hand drawn map!) and color theory. Its themes of creative endurance are captured in the illustratively titled “Ms. Frizzle Chaperones the Bronx Zoo Sleepaway Camp”: “Evolution is survival.” There’s a lot to talk about it. If you’re in San Francisco, please join us! RSVP.

On Monday, June 8^th the pre-orders for Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival go live on Fordham University Press. As you likely know, pre-orders are an essential way for publishers and booksellers to recognize a book’s possible impact, and crucial to ensure the printers can meet demand. Please consider pre-ordering your copy Monday, whether directly from Fordham or from your favorite local bookstore!

On the first day of the semester, a chilly Tuesday in January up on Lone Mountain, we formed twenty clunky chair desks into a circle and asked the students what they were expecting, excited for, and unsure about for the spring. The class was programmed through the University of San Francisco’s Honors College, so the assembled students were less a self-selecting representation of eager queer undergrads (what I’d initially imagined) and more a mélange of high-achievers who’d yet to complete some of their core requirements. The students—diverse in background, experience, and major—spoke one after another to their general unknowing about the subject and, luckily, their genuine openness. They were nervous, but smiling, in the face of the unknown.

For his unsure, Thomas shared his thoughts on the preciousness of doing a class like this at all in 2026—the words “queer” and “HIV/AIDS” appearing in the course catalog might be enough to shut us down now in Texas or in Florida. Or, really, elsewhere in California. This preciousness felt, to me on that first day, like precariousness. Such is the condition of any adjunct in America. Would the skeptical young men scoff at our syntax of intentions and intersectionality? What will they make of a syllabus featuring Cher? Would these honors students report to their advisers some whiff of unseriousness in our feeling-forward facilitation?

When we first conceived of the course, we couldn’t have known exactly how it would work. This was to be a many-sided prism—an intergenerational exploration of LGBTQ+ resilience, from Gay Liberation through the HIV/AIDS epidemic, as expressed in music, poetry, dance, and art—with the hope that it might refract a fabulous band of rainbow light. It was our first time teaching together. It was a big ask to have the students travel off campus once a week. As Thomas and I are both gay white men in our 30s, it was essential that we bring in guest lecturers to articulate experiences across disciplines and time. We’d concocted a culminating showcase featuring the performance of original song and poetry, but we hadn’t accounted for a population of programmers, economists, engineers, and psych majors who’d signed up and shared their timidness about working creatively: “the last time I wrote a poem was in elementary school.”

The first few weeks felt like the uneasy tuning of an ad hoc orchestra. Surely everyone’s part had its place, but we hadn’t yet reached a shared frequency. To test our class’s capacity for off-campus transportation, we planned a Thursday visit to the Castro. We convened at the GLBT Historical Society Museum and pointed to the original Gilbert Baker Pride flag, the José Sarria costumes, the Harvey Milk campaign buttons, the ACT UP action fliers. We marched over to Most Holy Redeemer Church—an early, important site of communal grief during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic—and discussed Richard Rodriguez’s 1990 essay “Late Victorians.” In the very sanctuary where his story ends, we read aloud his words:

…the saints of this city have names listed in the phone book, names I heard called through a microphone one cold Sunday in Advent as I sat in Most Holy Redeemer Church. It might have been any of the churches or community centers in the Castro district, but it happened at Most Holy Redeemer at a time in the history of the world when the Roman Catholic Church still pronounced the homosexual a sinner.

Something was beginning to shift, come alive. And then, as any showy queen making her entrance, it busted out into view, undeniable.

It was our first day meeting at Openhouse and the timing seemed off. Our older community members had shown up extra early, while our younger students were running especially late. We were meeting in a street-level multi-use room with big, bright windows and long tables pushed into four squares. Our older folks were spread out, unnaturally, at our request, so there could be a somewhat even distribution of students to community members. We chatted across tables about what to expect. Your guess is as good as mine, I thought. But soon the students started showing up and, with hardly any thought or direction, they plopped right down to introduce themselves. We got right into the activity: filling out a template we titled Soundtrack of Becoming with five songs that represent a chapter in your life, and what they reveal about you.

The room filled with a kind of music—the giggling, nervy, delighted sound of true connection. We had found our tuning.

Back in class, we read poems and listened to songs; we reconstructed a timeline of LGBTQ+ activism and discussed HIV as a virus on a biological and public health level. Our guests were crucial in providing texture and context, charming like a cobra the history alive before our eyes. Gerard Koskovich came to present the story of the Castro as a gayborhood, connecting detailed research and invaluable insight to our site visits. The Rev. Jim Mitulski, whose ministry at the Castro’s Metropolitan Community Church was a beacon to countless souls throughout the epidemic (told touchingly in the podcast When We All Get to Heaven), shared poignant stories of grief and gathering, bringing everyone to tears. Ka’lonji Lee, Mother of the Kiki House of Moschino, introduced the students to ballroom. Aaron Shurin spoke, movingly, about his elegiac poetics and shared a video from the performance of his collaborative dance piece “Turn Around.” We all cried, again.

Each week as our bonds with the Openhouse community members grew tighter, and our rapport looser, more natural, the divisions between age and status began to slip away. The older folks started coming to class, as thrilled to be students as much, I think, as to be peers. One memorable afternoon back in the classroom we shared some selections from our Soundtracks, giving priority to the Openhouse guests who’d joined us. Adam played Joan Baez’s “Before the Deluge” and spoke to the urgent necessity of protest music. Kevin shared Dar Williams’s “New York is a Harbor” and provoked an emotional analysis of the song’s poignant lyrics. Brian declined to play a recording, instead standing in the center of the circle and summoning, as if from some ancient source, his lark-like tenor to sing Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game.” I was watching all the young faces process this moment, a man in his seventies singing about youthful milestones that they’re currently passing. This experience, I knew then, was something truly rare.

At no point throughout the spring did I take for granted that preciousness, especially as the world outside continued to pound at the window. Our class community’s personal lives were touched, violently, by the Trump administration’s deportation tactics, public health policies, and acts of war in Iran. The students were students, young people navigating mental health challenges, job interviews, and general uncertainty. The community members were older people navigating their own challenges: health scares and isolation, political fears and a merciless care infrastructure. After a bout of illness kept Brian home for some weeks, he continued to refer to our meetings as the medicine— I know it was not meant metaphorically.

Our gatherings had become a lifeline. It became even more imperative that we celebrate them with a worthy finale. In addition to our long-planned culminating Showcase, we decided, boldly, to compile an anthology—a Songbook—to preserve the shared experience. The students were organized into roles along this spectrum, performers or editors or event organizers. For the latter-half of April we busied ourselves in a frenzied and unlikely dash to get the Songbooks printed and a Showcase ready to be performed. Quicker than felt possible, May arrived loud and ready, and on the second Thursday—our last together—we gathered to sing.

We fan the Songbooks out over a table at the entry to the large community room. Julie from Openhouse leads a fleet of volunteers—some of whom had been with us throughout the spring—setting up a taco bar in the back. On a pushcart perfectly labeled with a photo of Dolly Parton, we wheel in boxes and bags of variety store decorations. Sylvie’s uncle Jeremy—so taken by her enthusiastic description of the class he decided to fly down from Portland for this—prepares his camera equipment to document. Students string up a makeshift photo booth over a white board. As our community begins to assemble, bringing in with them roommates and parents and classmates and nephews, every single person enters wearing a face-wide smile.

The show begins, and immediately there is magic. Our first performance is an acoustic rendition of “In My Life,” with student Flynn on guitar and Brian singing, soulfully. Abigail performs her original composition about a first brush with queer desire a cappella. Ren and Nicky are joined by Brian, on percussion, for a raw take on “Fast Car.” Chloe, Annie, and Emi, with their community partner Andrew, hit girl group caliber choreography while singing “Isn’t She Lovely?” Jim E Sparkle Pants performs his rollicking original “Unconditional Love.” Noor reads an ekphrastic poem penned in response to Wolfgang Tillmans’s friends. Andre raps over a Bluetooth beat. After each number, there is a wave of raucous love. The whole place seems to shake with it.

It seems too alive to be almost over, but there’s only one song left. The tables in the community room—covered in black fabric and, for centerpieces, heaps of gold-and-silver glitter—are set in a backwards arrow, its tip the stage. I sit at the front edge and brace myself for the turning. Brian opens his mouth and out flies, like light, a clear line of life: yes, this has been beautiful, and yes, it has to end, but yes, we just keep going.

Once I’ve wiped the worst of the tears away and we stand to make some closing remarks, I joke that an alternate title for this class could have been Grown Men Crying. We’re meant to give a sparkling cider toast, but I can barely breathe. Thomas tries to take the reins, but he’s choked up, too. Julie, thankfully, takes over, raising her glass to the class: “listening to all of you sing, the first thing that came to my mind: we’ve got a future, we’re going somewhere. And you all are going to make it happen.”

. . . and the painted ponies go up and down . . .

I thought this class was about the past, but of course—it was always about moving forward. The students linger long enough to snap group shots before the banner and say some gushing goodbyes. We join the volunteers already stacking the chairs, wheeling away tables, and sweeping up the glitter. Metallic piles of tiny circles and stars. I’ll find pieces around the house for weeks after, like sand from the beach, these souvenirs from a too-brief glimpse at heaven.

Glitter. Orchestra. Anthology. Each piece is not, on its own, as striking as the whole. It takes each of our voices, our songs, our shine to tell the fullest story. Stories of loss, of plague and war—and of endurance, and of dancing—are essential to our survival. We can’t know who might need to hear our music, how that might be their medicine. But we can only stay ready to sing, to share what we’ve learned when the circle comes around, again.

“The man I love will be a mother / fucking monster…”1

When I wrote that line, sometime in the partly cloudy spring of 2020, it was sincerely aspirational: up to that point, I’d never been in love, not really. I’d been around love, been near it. The third point in a hopeless triangle, or on the far end of a too-long distance. I’d been over love, or under it—as one is under the influence of gin, or the power of a hex. My twenties produced a proverbial rolodex (shamelessly large, if literal) of half-attempts and misread imaginings of romantic relationships.

I was a gay boy from Missouri; I didn’t have a script. Much less a form. Of course all my earliest love poems took the shape of desire: a dance of only reaching; a memory of a wish to feel real; a projection. A shadowboxing kind of love. Although I didn’t even know what I was training for. So “Love Song” starts in the future tense. So all love songs seemed, to me, to be about this very distance. Between the feeling and the naming of it. Between the artist and the object.

In 2021, I fell in love with an artist. Between us was (is) a vast distance. Rather, an atlas of distances—our age difference, our career positions—on top of a geographical separation. All the songs that sold a legible kind of love felt suddenly, enviably naïve. It was not so simple as love-at-first-sight, even though it was. It is not so clear as the pain of long goodbyes, even though it is. Love is both exactly as beautiful as poems would have us believe, and in equal measure something much messier.

But messy in a good way: a maximalist work of wild colors and sharp corners, capacious enough to hold so many parts of ourselves and the ones we love. What poem, in its confinement, could possibly contain a useful comment on the enterprise? What place does the love poem have today, in our dark lurch toward authoritarianism? How do you sing of anything so rosy at the center of an emergency? I don’t claim to have the answer, but I have some ideas:

1. Don’t delete the hard parts. I love a love poem that accommodates the often gnarly side effects of romance. There are disagreements and misalignments. But after these come forgiveness. There is ugliness, inevitably, in sharing every side of yourself with someone. But along with this goes trust, and isn’t that pretty? A crush poem might anticipate a carefree (careless?) kind of romance, but a love poem can—perhaps should?—create space for complication. And with that grit comes grace.

          as passion spins its infinite
          tergiversations in between the bitter
          and the sweet

- June Jordan2

2. Keep the body close. Sex, too, can be viewed from many angles in a poem. There’s the immediacy of sweat and sounds described in the act. There’s a power, certainly for queer writers, in naming the unnamable, in making from the shadowy taboo something embodied, beautiful. You can learn a thing or two about how to fuck from poems. Too, the body doesn’t need to appear mid-thrust to be sensual, spectacular. Take Thom Gunn’s 1992 poem “The Hug,” when the speaker is awakened by a sudden sense of embrace:

	         “Your instep to my heel,
          My shoulder-blades against your chest.
          It was not sex, but I could feel
          The whole strength of your body set…”

It was not sex, Gunn tells us directly. But isn’t it something just as good? We can feel the warmth of the beating chest as it grazes our wanting back. That simple press. And yet, so much presence. So much love.

3. In defiance of the state, embrace. Nobody loves in a vacuum. There is around us, around even the most doe-eyed embracing lovers, the machinery of a political moment. Ours, for instance, is a catastrophic one: at this very moment there are lovers being ripped apart by the misleadingly named Immigration and Customs Enforcement (this last word belies the force with which they hunt their prey, while the first one’s definition changes every day); there are lovers fighting for the dignity of bodily autonomy, for their bodies to be recognized as valid by the state; there are lovers fighting to afford their bread, to keep a roof over their head, to stay alive. What does it mean to demonstrate love in a time so defined by its opposites?

Essex Hemphill’s 1992 poem “American Wedding” has a proposal: fuck them, and love each other more fiercely. In the poem’s opening lines, Hemphill mimes a literal, irreverent proposal—“In america, / I place my ring / on your cock”—before mining his own horrible political moment for reasons to soldier on, lovingly.

         They expect us to call in sick,
         watch television all night,
         die by our own hands.
         They don’t know
         we are becoming powerful.
         Every time we kiss
         we confirm the new world coming. 

The poem itself becomes a summoning of this gorgeous, mighty future. As convincing as any rally speech, “American Wedding” makes a case for a kind of loving praxis. The poem no less lovely, and no less loving, for having positioned itself, necessarily, within its dire moment. If anything, the urgency underlines our lovers’ fabulous potential.

4. Remake yourself. Love, and, I think, especially for queer people, often requires or extends a process of redefinition. We make space for the people we hope to become, our best selves glimpsed by seeing what’s reflected in our partner’s eyes. Audre Lorde: you create me against your thighs.3 Through relationships, we rename and reshape our orientations to attachment, to solitude, to occasions, to time. We grow, from a unit of one to something larger, something less defined. Find ways to blur.

In poetry we search for ways to differently say what a thing is, or to better phrase what elides paltry language, and no wonder it is an art so closely associated with that ineffable, undefinable condition that is love. Take from the poem an opportunity to reinvent subjectivity, orientation, appetites. Who’s allowed to be powerful? To be sexy? To be fragile? To be in control? The love poem is a canvas for this artful recreation.

5. Speak plainly of the pleasures. There are only so many metaphors. Sometimes, symbol merely muddies image, and in any relationship there are so many clear images. The French press in which the earlier rising partner brews their coffee, its silver curves. A saved stub from a shared performance on a significant spring date. One may not even need an image, only the artless language of what constitutes a day in love’s glow. In “Steps,” a terrific paragon of Frank O’Hara’s so-called I do this, I do that poems, the poet is not bashful or bombastic in declaring the wonders of his love.

          oh god it's wonderful
          to get out of bed
          and drink too much coffee
          and smoke too many cigarettes
          and love you so much

It’s simple, really: I wake up and I’m in love with you. What a fabulous reminder! That exaltation should be so easy. That when we’re lucky enough to be in love we’d better do our damn best to enjoy it.

6. Make room for the future. Love, I’ve learned, is a beast of many tenses. There are the pasts, unshared, that we bring into our present—whether willingly or by accident— informing our gestures, our expressions, our expectations of love. There is the moment, fleeting, at which we are trying to grab, through which we hope to come to a shared sense of recognition (think: deciding where to go for dinner; think: the instant of a deep kiss) that refuses to stay put. In its wrestling away do we scan for potential poetry. There is, then, the future, taunting, beckoning, licking its hungry lips. Watching us fumble, pathetically, in a bid for control, in a silly prayer that we can arrive to the same place at the same time, in two perfect bodies, having won at love. A strong love poem can make room for these many dimensions. Time traveling from us to us to us.

See, “The Lovers” by Timothy Liu:

          I was always afraid
          of the next card

          the psychic would turn
          over for us—
                                       Forgive me
          for not knowing
          how we were

          every card in the deck.

7. Don’t lose yourself. Don’t listen to a poet offering advice on how to love, or how to write a love poem. You need not comport or conform to any academy’s expectations of who or how to love. Nor should you edit or diminish how you express it. What tradition echoes down through your acts of care? Is there a certain recipe, or a distinct dance that goes along with your lineage of romance? Do you feel more comfortable with discreet displays of affection, perhaps obscured from view by a solid piece of scenery or an especially meaty metaphor?

Let your speaker guide your loving hand toward the words that feel the most authentic, the most honest—that’s where the best emotion lives. Listen to that older part, the one who didn’t yet know what loving really is, and see what melody they might offer, how you could harmonize. Let them see you in all your now-loved wisdom and try, in your own terms, to love them back.

          it’s so easy to be free
          you start by loving yourself

- Nikki Giovanni4

News & Events!

Readers in the Bay Area: I’ll be joining some fabulous friends for a reading about—what else?—Queer Love, tomorrow, February 10 at the Booksmith at 7:00PM. RSVP here and join us for what will surely be a heartening evening <3

Art-lovers in New York City: we’re celebrating the opening of Jim Isermann’s show, BUILD, at the Miles McEnery Gallery next Thursday, February 19 at 5:00pm - 7:00pm. This is the culmination of years of work and represents a thrilling new direction in Jim’s painting practice. You’ve got to see them in person.

In the Literary World: this month brings a new Preeti Vangani collection, Fifty Mothers (River River Books), which is certain to elicit both deep laughter and fabulous devastation; the wonderful & Change press hums along with the release of the co-written Love That For Us from Chen Chen & Sam Herschel Wein; Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis continues to serve its community with mutual aid efforts and resources— check out their site for up-to-date asks: currently, they’re running a Spanish-language book drive gathering children’s books for local students. Share the love!

“There’s a quantity / of tenderness I feel sometimes / that drops into my chest precipitous / and golden as the sun into Fort Lee. / I couldn’t tell you where it comes from, but / I’m learning where it hides…”

I had this poem in my mind when I visited New York in the summer of 2023, a moment in-between so many emergencies, and wrote a piece after it that I titled “Healing the World from Little Island.” That park was still quite new and its place in the city’s story still unformed. We put things to record before we know what they will come to mean. I keep returning to Dlugos and his later work, finding fresh clarity from his kept urgency. In “Healing the World…,” his meditative imperatives feel especially needed: “Hold the light inside and let it find / the ragged spots.” My poem after his was recently published in Bridge, a Chicago-based journal, and I wanted to share it here, now. I hope you find in it some flicker, at least, of that same necessary light.

Healing the World from Little Island

after Tim Dlugos

Draw a deep breath. Hold it. Let it go.

That’s the smell of the Hudson: trash and cargo oil,

another state blinking just across an impossible river. A steel

armature just across the street from the new Whitney

marks the cruising ghosts of Chelsea Street’s piers,

my peers in appetite and poor timing, the men

who roamed the run-down docks—leftovers of

an older, less-sexy revolution—feeling in the dark

for connection, or coming in masks to photograph

themselves as different men; to mark the breaking walls;

to make something as brief and perfect as an orgasm

last. I breathe the hurried, grateful breaths with these gone

men, artists of necessity. And how much longer will we still

call it the new Whitney? From here, you can spot the green

concrete and lacquered glass towers covering where Sylvia

Rivera lived the last end of her historic life in a tent. I split my time

unevenly between two centuries, straddling crises like Manhattan—

on a day as blue as this, who could forget the suited men sailing

through the sky, the paper flying, coughing up smoke—yes, but

let’s not forget, too, the flyers and the food banks and the Union

Square vigil. Where is the memorial to the people who helped

each other down the stairs? May the breath I draw become

a spotlight to beckon back all the displaced souls

from all the disaster zones: the evicted, the convicted,

the pockmarked and the bullet-wounded, the native and

the immigrant; all my friends. Anyone who dances along

the tulip edges of a man-made island. I split my time

between what I can see in front of me and the screen, a piece

of glass obstructing my view so that my heart breaks twice

with each injustice: once for feeling, once for feeling powerless.

In the Just-Before Times I marched right up that avenue,

in the opposite direction of Pride, with thousands of angry

strangers holding signs calling for resistance. I came alone,

but I made friends and by the end of the night I was dancing

with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to “Heart of Glass”

in a rent-controlled rat’s nest above Christopher Street

where the parade just kept passing by and I split my time

in pieces like a busted tiara for every queen who gave me strength

to keep moving. This breath is for all the dashed dreams of that before

and for how many have had to sit through this plague in one room,

how many have had to work through this plague in emergency rooms,

in supermarkets, on mass transit—glasses fogging up on masked buses,

balancing baskets of someone else’s dinner on a bicycle—and for those

moments, too, of true connection: playing “I Will Survive” for passersby

on our roof, scooping out bowls of perpetual stew. I split my time

between emergencies and the spaces of peace which live inside

each of them. Hurricane eyes of community, random acts of beauty

which go unreported, but are as real as the damage. I breathe in

the powerless, the priced-out, the tent cities and the artists;

the disparate young desperate for a real experience. And each

grain of sand on the beach spills out from a busted hourglass;

we feel it all. But we do not yet know its name. Like Quakers,

we wait silently for the words to reveal themselves—

but what if there are no words? What if there is only light?

I breathe in, and release a beam bright enough to reveal

the ghosts sucking each other off in the empty monument,

illuminate their fleeting love, shine on the loudmouth activists

and outspoken poets buried under the rubble of the greater West

Village, a light so bright it breaks time, splits the day like an egg,

freeing those who’ve gone and those to come from the emerald

glass-and-steel skyline as it dissolves into sand. Little bits of past

and future love slipping together in a glow. This is a moment

of lightness you can hold in the palm of your hand—

its essence catches in your life line; feel it writhe.

Hold on to this as long as you can.

It’s the night of the riots. Dan White, who just months before broke into City Hall and shot San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in the light of the morning, has been found guilty of voluntary manslaughter. His blatant murders vanished by the state. A crowd of hundreds gathered on Castro Street, starting an impromptu march charging down Market toward City Hall. Where, just months before, there had been a streaming river of candlelight slowly flowing to a makeshift vigil. This May night, the crowd—now in the thousands—is starting fires.

Cleve Jones is recalling it all, years later, in the oral history book White Nights and Ascending Shadows. He’s remembering the moment when the tear gas started, how he slipped away from the melee and ran into his friend Bill Kraus. Back on Market Street, in front of a Bank of America—the city burning behind them—Cleve asks Bill if he’s ever broken a window:

“I said, ‘Go for it Bill. Go for it.’ He picked up this rock and throws it as hard as he could and it bounced off the window. So I’m falling down on the sidewalk laughing at him and I said, ‘You nelly thing, you can’t even break a window. Let me show you how it’s done.’ So I pick up another rock and throw it as hard as I can at the window and it bounces off. So we’re both just rolling around on the sidewalk just laughing in the flames and smoke and sirens all around us and we’re just laughing at the fact that we’re too nelly to break a window with a brick.”1

How does joy, or pleasure, endure? To some degree, in its capturing and retelling. Even the briefest flickers of beauty or celebration can be gathered and glimpsed again in story. The tiny triangle of vigil votive light made, in memory, as bright and roaring as the riot fire. That people fought that day together is significant, yes, but that people also cackled and wept and sang, together, is meaningful, too. Our conveyance of the laughter, sex, and dancing that run parallel to loss, pain, and struggle is essential to constructing a full history.

How we tell our stories is how we survive. Queer people have always been gossip queens. I’m talking, here, about word of mouth, about a wide-open oral tradition encompassing stories, poems, songs; cocktail recipes, cruising tips, self-defense practices. So much of how we define, defend, and reimagine ourselves gets passed down along this spoken, or sung, line. It’s poetics, or a kind of music, which is learned in community and transferred mouth to mouth, friend to friend, kiss to kiss.

Or, as put by Robert Glück in the indelible opening line of his novel Jack the Modernist: “you’re not a lover ‘till you blab about it.”2

We constitute ourselves around our stories. Scenes of coming out, of dangerous hook-ups, of theme party glory and niche costumes—these are swapped and shared as set dressing for a greater legibility of who we are, to ourselves and to one another.

We protect ourselves by telling stories. The tactics deployed in the ACT UP kiss-in on Christopher Street on April 29, 1988 get passed down, mouth to mouth, and are as wet decades later in the kiss-in at the U.S./Mexico border on December 1, 2025.

We preserve ourselves by telling stories: just look at The Butch Manual or “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears” to see how a ghost’s own humor brings them roaring back to life. When Patrick Haggerty, performing in the 2010s with a revived Lavender Country, would introduce the song, he’d crack the audience up with his declaration: “I was the first person to get kicked out of the Peace Corps for sucking dick!” Later in the set, he’d have everybody crying, tearfully recalling the libertine 1970s: “We knew how to have sex, but we didn’t know how to love.” The gay cowboy cum oral historian, pulling taut that shimmering thread.

We preserve our ways of loving by telling stories. Who and how we fuck—and to whom and how we blab about it—is another organizing art form for queer community. In the many decades before any public records of deviant lovers, this word-of-mouth cord was the only way to construct a sense of continuity. Allen Ginsberg, in a 1972 interview with Allen Young for Gay Sunshine, describes one such lineage: Neal Cassady slept with Gavin Arthur, who had slept with Edward Carpenter, who had slept with Walt Whitman; “Kerouac’s heterosexual hero who also slept with somebody who slept with somebody who slept with Whitman,” Ginsberg says, “and received the Whispered Transmission, capital W, capital T of that love.”3

That Whispered Transmission, which might be as concrete as cum, or as spiritual as some energy transfer (which Ginsberg does, in characteristic fashion, go on to describe), or perhaps it’s something as plain as gossip. That word, amusingly, comes from the Old English godsibb—something like a godparent, but, recognizably, a relative (sibling) of God. Before it was a verb, it seems, it was the noun, defining a kind of holy proximity. Gossip as godliness, in the sense that telling stories is a classic act of creation.

Maybe the Whispered Transmission itself is some ineffable, divine conveyance—like a gut-deep laugh, or a profound orgasm—which contains and transfers some arcane part of ourselves, only real when shared. And in that case, shouldn’t we be loving, and laughing, and fucking, and storytelling more and more? Imagine that glittering net of so many coalescing transmissions, tauter for all its constituent connections. Imagine how it holds us, stronger, and connects us to our pasts and ancestors—their stories and singing voices still echoing in our ears. Imagine, down the years, how many future lovers will need to hear how we blabbed. To know how we, even now, had to laugh.

Hear that? The sound of a new track? Yes, I am coming out of my self-imposed substack exile to share the good news: I have a book coming out this year. It’s called Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival. It’s all that I can think about. I thought it might be fun to return to this platform and reimagine its scope to share new pieces reflecting on the collection’s themes: glitter, ash, memory; queerness, community care, lineage, ephemera; music, dancing, art, different love.

What does it mean to survive fabulously? What inheritance of glamorous grit can we cling to amidst our own unjust present? I hope you’ll follow along and enjoy these essays, craft notes, playlists, and archival excavations. Starting with a first taste here.

turn up the volume, this is my song —

At first, you might mistake it for a ballad. The Thelma Houston record starts with a few moody keys, a flourish of heartsick strings. Pensive humming. Don’t, she begins, begging, leave me this way. You would be forgiven for thinking this is a sad song. But you would be mistaken: Ahhhhhhhhhhhh—Baby! her voice explodes with the breakbeats, bass going crazy. A lover willing to lose her mind. Her heart so full of love. Full of desire-for-you, sung in quick succession like it’s one word. The transfiguration of urgent lust. What about this fire in my soul? You started this, she hisses. It’s all-consuming—the glittering synths, the string-swells. Thelma spits it all out like her man is halfway through the door; a woman who knows the stakes. This is a matter of life or death on the dance floor.

By the time The Communards—led by Jimmy Sommerville’s gloomy falsetto—covered the song in 1986, it was already an anthem for a generation fighting the AIDS epidemic. So many friends losing friends, so much young loss. The once-sacred disco was suddenly full of holes. People were organizing, and fighting, and frightened, and yet—even still, even then—there was also dancing. “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” as sung by Sommerville, offered a necessary catharsis. Set me free, he bellows over and over, don’t you know by now, he repeats at the fade out. The plea becomes a command, a fortifying march for a battle born community. Set me free, the tortured lover begs. A plea—not just for love, but liberation. A song becomes an anthem. Dancing becomes a means of survival.

It is this queer lineage—a kind of velvet rope—at which Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival tugs. A Time Traveler crashes into a gay bar, and out spills pasts and possibilities. Music and loss. The poems in the collection explore themes of grief, celebration, history, and sexuality—as they are experienced personally, and as they are shared collectively. They sing of a people’s survival: those who endured the dark unknowing and civic indifference of the early HIV/AIDS epidemic—and the long memory of those who did not; those who in their time retreat or are relegated to silences and shadows, told by their religion or their government or, god forbid, their own family that their capacity for loving is punishably wrong—and how they twirl anyway. What language they still build; toward what beauty they still reach—this is how we survive. They are poems inspired by spaces of queer community, the kind of dance floors and memorials forged out of necessity and invention.

It is important to note here that queerness, in this context, is not meant to serve as a fixed identity or exclusionary definition; rather, it is like a songbook—one tradition of communal imagining from which we can learn to sing. José Esteban Muñoz, in his landmark 2009 book Cruising Utopia, positions queerness as a horizon point, an act of always reaching beyond one’s imposed limitations. To Muñoz, disrupting linear time is a gesture of necessary resistance: “…queers think the past and the future do not belong to them,” he writes. “All we are allowed to imagine is barely surviving the present.”1 In Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, the Time Traveler acts as a recurring speaker, an untethered queer persona who allows the reader to differently imagine their place in the records of history and in the potentials of the future.

In “The Time Traveler Hears Music for the First Time,” a song is recalled as a sort of portal, the mechanism through which the Time Traveler can move freely along a temporal plane. To the Time Traveler, music is an eternity—it contains its own timeline, the song becoming spatial. “Entire symphonies rise from ash, loss,” the poem praises, an ode to the human capacity to make even from misery a music which endures. Here, music could be swapped with poetry, as each act of creation forms what Audre Lorde refers to as “…the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”2 Survival and change, our twin horizons. Lorde continues, “poetry is the way we help give names to the nameless so it can be thought.”

Survival holds an enshrined place in the history of queer music. Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” scored the closet-busting 1970s (much to her current politically postured chagrin), an aria of endurance which suggested strength could be found in self-definition. “As long as I know how to love,” Gaynor bellows, “I know I’ll stay alive.” A quarter-century later, Destiny’s Child—led by a growling Beyoncé—sang the hit “Survivor” like their life depended on it. Images from the song’s music video, with the three women weathering dark waters on an inflatable raft, were circulated again in 2023 (another quarter-century later), during historic floods in New York City.

The floods were just the latest in a series of disasters related to the planet’s changing climate, and queer people on the internet responded, naturally, with wry humor and with reference to a shared history. In the poem “Earth, Wind, and Mostly Fire”—from which the collection takes its title—“Survivor” is referenced in the context of wildfires, that increasingly familiar calamity for which we have adapted a new sense of weather (orange sky, smoke air) and a litany of losses. Survival, here, recalls what remains after a fire. The warped photographs or charred beams which still stand are, we say, what has survived. In this way, songs, too, are what survive us—each a record kept, a memory’s structural post preserved.

Songs, or poems, are what keep on surviving. The stories we tell that connect us are what keep on surviving. Our gestures of care are what keep on surviving. Whether through epidemic or through disaster, the artful acts of creation made in response last long past the makers. They beam like neon in the fog of an uncertain future, signage that assures our ancestors have walked this same or some worse way before, and even then they sang, and cooked, and dreamed, and danced.

This is what it means to survive fabulously: to not only endure our worst hard times, but to find in their cracks a space for transformation, room enough for love and laughter and music. To revel in this glow, knowing it might reach, like starlight, a future far beyond our imagining; more neon for their dance floor. To sing about the heartbreaking struggle but make it sound like a rallying cry. An anthem. A speck of glitter — souvenir from the dance — stuck, impish, in your sole. A record of our dogged, deathless joy. This is what I mean by fabulous survival.

From there, I wrote this poem, with the hope it might reach you and offer even a little bit of light in this dark time. Exhale. Keep going.

Whatever Comes Tomorrow  -  T.S. Leonard - 11/3/2024

today will be a distant past. The fall will burn bright gold
and loud with change. My sister will strain her voice
teaching the second grade about kindness. My postman
will sing all the way down the street. Blue jays will learn
to mimic hawks, little screeches. In Georgia, we’ll rely
on migrants' hands to harvest peaches. In Ohio, we’ll try
to clean up the mess left from politicians’ speeches, lies;
librarians will be like lanterns for lost kids needing language.
Tundra swans will seek temporary shelter on the Mississippi River,
tens of thousands of them in a row, whistling in the wind.
My friends will have to call about their health insurance, 
make up lyrics for the hold music. Sweetgum trunks 
will hoard their waning light; gulls will fish. Two strangers
will meet, unaware of the shared life they will soon build;
many tomorrows later, one of them will tell it like a story:
remember where you were that day? We will laugh along:
yes, you say, I remember crying; I remember having noticed
the tree across the way turning, inevitably, its brief new hue;
you will say, I remember I had to go to work that morning—
you will say, there was so much more left for us to do.

What happens to hope read backwards? Or a poem, scrawled to fit the margins of an organic shape, its lines bending to fit their borders? The text becomes color, first, and form—like a meaning mirage blurring in the deserted distance, you have to squint to see its message. You have to pay special attention. Sister Mary Corita, as she was called in her time teaching at the Immaculate Heart College, knew the radical potential of presence, of paying attention. Her first rule of ten which hung in Immaculate Heart’s art department: Find a place you trust, and try trusting it for a while.

Corita Kent, as she would be come to be known upon returning to secular life in 1968, uniquely understood the power of words on a symbolic level: words like flags, emblems of vaster, more slippery significance. Her art deploys language like sculptural scrap, twisting borrowed phrases from poetry, philosophy, scripture, and supermarkets to express unexpected connections, a flag of some imagined nation. Camus on truth joins the recognizable blue, yellow, and red of Wonder Bread. Phrases like open wide or come alive! pop vividly against bright hues, become irresistible instructions. Can you call this propaganda, if it’s asking you only to wonder?

A Los Angeles nun in the noisy decades of America’s mid-century, Kent paid special attention to mass messaging—the kind suddenly ubiquitous in freeway billboards and magazines and television screens. Waterfalls of words cascading down from every direction, streams of meaning-making redefining national identity. Toward war, toward purchasing power and private property, our attention pulled in a guided direction. Fencing built around words’ vastness, enforced borders. To Kent, this command of language as a tool for conformity was an affront to our very nature: “One of the most important parts of growing up is to see ourselves as we really are instead of assuming that we are what our parents and teachers told us we were.”1

Growing up, for Kent, meant something deeper and longer than maturing in age. Tenets of her teaching style (preserved and passed down in the book Learning by Heart) include exercises in looking, found poems and collages, games, play. What some may dismiss as childlike activities, Kent presents as necessities for unlocking a divine creativity. She saw in art the potential to push toward great change, its daily acts the makings of a more peaceful world—seeds, to grow “into a powerful tree bearing the fruit of hope.” Growing up a universal process, an effort of toil and grind in which we all must share to create a better future.

At the 1964 New York World’s Fair—themed Peace Through Understanding—Kent created for the Vatican Pavilion the Beatitudes Banner. A forty-foot flag bearing the New Testament beatitudes in varying bold colors, the word HAPPY is prominent and recurring, interspersed with quotes from the recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy. The banner itself a sort of prayer, wishing its repetition of blessings to bring forth a better decade.

The following March, in 1965, the United States began dropping what would eventually total 864,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam in a mission named, unfortunately, poetically, Operation Rolling Thunder. The disasters numb within us…2 Denise Levertov begins 1966’s “Life at War.” Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr.—men revered for their command of language; surveilled due to their power to radically imagine—two more voices silenced by bullets. We are the humans, men who can make; whose language imagines mercy, lovingkindness… Orange clouds, black smoke—the colors of the decade—blazing red, white, and blue. By 1968, protest burnings of the United States flag had become so prominent that congress passed the Flag Protection Act, a remarkable act of guardianship for a mere symbol. That summer, Sister Mary Corita requested a six-month sabbatical from the order; later that year, Kent sought an official release from her vows3. Read backwards, it almost seems inevitable.

nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying,
nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness,
the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

In “Flag Song,” Stephen Sondheim’s meditation on patriotic symbolism (cut from his 1990 musical Assassins), the American flag is continually referred to as an idea. It’s aspirational, a dream, a bright blue sky—a banner that, while wordless, conveys its own instructions on freedom, on belonging; on exclusion, on destruction. It all depends on who is waving it. Can you trust the flag long enough to sit with it for a while? What language does it offer you? Which way is it read?

Flags like words, mere emblems. Arrangements of shape and color in a crude effort to convey a history—or a possibility—of a whole people. An idea. What’s strikingly anti-democratic about the Flag Protection Act is its presumption of control over this idea, these ideas. This the exact sort of prescription against which Kent attempted to intervene, borrowing liberally the languages of nationalism and commercialism to create replicable, accessible images of peace. It’s the same tack used two decades later by the group Gran Fury, an artist collective outgrowth from ACT UP responsible for the now ubiquitous SILENCE = DEATH graphic: pink triangle, black background, bold white sans serif font. Jack Lowery, in his Gran Fury history It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful4: “These posters, pins, and T-shirts were meant to be worn and written over, or cut into a tank top, to be lived in.” Ideas you could wear, their elasticity the point.

We can take some strange comfort in the chaos of our histories. Comfort not that our kind has been so capable of utter destruction for so long, so innovative in its capacity to kill, but rather that against such sludgy currents our artists before us did their best to dam. To clog the flood with calls to mercy. Logjam with more caring language.

Our chaos, now, is remarkably involved in language. One of the two serious contenders for President of the United States uses words as darts, puncturing and paralyzing his prey to the delight of shouting crowds. What he offers his followers is permission, a pass to grasp forbidden language and feel from wielding it a certain power. In return, his opponents scramble to apply their own sticky labels—fascist repeated desperately, even as it loses its adhesiveness—because what tools do we have to use against words but more words, naming and definition.

The richest man on the planet purchased a virtual public square, hellbent on fostering what he considers free speech—like any definition of freedom, his is contingent and fragile, a firearm. Free for whom? No speech is fully free from responsibility, as no citizen is completely independent from another—each of us a part in the process of our collective growing up.

To suggest that our words are weightless is a dangerous fantasy. Our words carry our souls, buckets of splashing feeling the best we can do. And we are meaning-craving animals, hungry for stories of ourselves. We cling to words, to stories as instructions for our survival. It’s for this reason I found in novels, as a gay kid in Kansas City, an exhilarating rewiring of my sense of self; in Giovanni’s Room or in Fun Home, I learned a new language with which to define—and escape—my isolation, my sins, my shame. And it’s for this same reason Republicans across the country are enacting book bans at an alarming, maniacal clip. They, too, know the weight words hold; they’re just afraid of getting wet.

At the start of the 2022 school year, there were 315 instances of book bans in my home state of Missouri5, primarily targeting sexually explicit material (—that phrase itself a veil thrown over the immense and indefinable range of liberating self-discovery explored in what we shorthand as LGBTQ+ [this acronym, even, too short and limiting] stories). In California, where I live now, a Pride flag was burned at a North Hollywood elementary school in 20236, an act of protest against a scheduled assembly celebrating Pride Month. Must we now imagine names for the colors of a burning rainbow? Why is it that our desire to feel more legible engenders such a violent fear?

In a time of constant crisis, various crises, we feel hungry for resolution. We tell stories about ourselves, our histories, desperate to impose upon the disorder a certain syntax. The American impulse is to cram things in clean, profitable boxes. But what if we’re playing with the wrong shapes? “In narrative time, the crisis should suggest the encroachment of the end,” Isabella Hammad writes in Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative7, “even if, in real life, the end is a receding horizon.” In real life, things are rounder; narratives, like the words from which they are made, can stretch far beyond borders.   

What Corita Kent understood about language was its flexibility, that it could be—should be—bent and bowed and curved. In her work, shapes and sources spread out beyond their edges, flags for worlds resistant to containment. Messy and organic—EPOH, wonder, Stop the Bombing—language dancing across the paper, offering other possibilities. Words as wide doorways, expansive enough to let the future in. What Kent understood about language is how we must use it to call forth that future peace.

In 1964, Sister Mary Corita was commissioned to reimagine Immaculate Heart’s annual Mary’s Day procession. The occasion, which she describes as marked by “a solemn procession with students dressed in black academic caps and gowns […], a quiet mass and sacred music,” needed to grow to meet the moment. With the belief that “celebrations are always meant to instruct and inspire,” Sister Mary Corita convened a group of eager students to begin planning a new ritual to reflect their urgent times—something colorful and raucous, democratic in its messages and its movements.

We lift the common stuff—groceries and signs about groceries—out of the everyday and give it a place in our celebration. When we put them back into our everyday life they will be somehow ennobled on our grocery shelves and in our kitchens. When we see them every day they will remind us of this good day…and heaven and earth will not be so far apart.

When the day came, they were prepared: more than 1,600 people gathered that day, hoisting banners with words and images sourced from poetry and market shelves (power up; come alive) in a procession to a makeshift altar adorned with five hundred loaves of bread, five hundred baskets of fruit. Trumpets blared. The banners were cut down the middle so that they could be worn inside as vestments. Ideas to be lived in. After mass ended, balloons full of confetti fell from the balcony, bursting over the celebrants. A vision of a different world called forth, in unity. A hopeful synonym for the future.

It’s possible, because it happened. We have as many words—more!—to bend and bow and curve, building blocks for our better nations. Flags we’ve yet to make. What if we shake loose our sense of linear narratives and let the past and future in? Clog the flood with calls to mercy. Logjam with more caring language. This is our present moment of tricky change; together, we’re growing up. How will we reimagine our celebrations? What seeds will we leave? We can start by reading hope backwards, and tomorrow writing it a different way. Scrawled at the bottom of Sister Mary Corita’s rules, the last sentence just above the margin: There should be new rules next week.

As you may or may not have noticed, Emergency Meditations has been on somewhat of a hiatus since August, lining up neatly with the beginning of the fall semester and a return to teaching. There is the element of time — finding it, making it — at play in my absence here, but there is also a larger question that has been nagging me about the project and what it wants to be. When I first envisioned Emergency Meditations as a newsletter, I felt extremely unbothered by pressures of growth or visibility, as this was simply an opportunity to pause and reflect through poetry during an undeniably chaotic time. I didn’t realize I was joining Substack exactly as it was growing two or three more heads, becoming another social media monster where there is an expectation to perform — in every sense of that word. Just as I was trying to back away from the noisy posturing of the Internet, I accidentally stepped right into its bubbly goo. This platform has introduced all sorts of features meant to gamify the exchange of writing, or replicate the feeds of so many scroll-inducing apps: notes (tweets); statistics for everything—how many clicks, how many visits, the rate of openings. And like any game, it is tempting to keep playing — to get better; to win.

I believe in the project and the point of writing each week with an open hand stretched toward all of you. But I am fatigued at the idea of branding myself, chasing subscribers, competing with other authors. What do I do now? I don’t want to let anyone down, especially those of you who have so generously supported this monetarily. I’m thinking maybe I will try to write just one big Emergency Meditation each month, still keeping the spirit alive but downshifting from the hustle-baiting mentality of this platform’s churn. Does one post each month feel like enough to stay subscribed here? Do you enjoy those deeper dives into themes and artists from history? I don’t want to lose the drive to keep writing this work, and think it’s worth sharing for an audience of any size who is looking for a little peace, a little possibility.

Let me know what you think.

This is what I was thinking about on Monday when Jason Isbell, in a blue tuxedo, performed “Something More Than Free” before a crowd of diverse, recently divided delegates at the Democratic National Convention. Outside, flanks of riot police in baby blue ballistic helmets leered over an outnumbered group of demonstrators calling for an end to war. Somewhere in between, security staff at the United Center shuffled people through the halls and someone had to stay late to sweep up the confetti. Democracy is messy; everyone has a hand in maintaining it. On stage, Isbell was singing about the work, the purpose that comes from rebuilding something busted back together. The song elevating the slog in the saintly light of necessity, of arms bared by rolled-up sleeves reaching for a greater good.  

Country music—which here I am using to refer to music made by an unwieldy coalition of artists performing in idioms ranging from folk, soul, R&B, bluegrass, and the blues—is a poetics of the people, a sonic democracy through which we can attempt to differently define our disparate struggles. At its most godly, it’s another gesture toward deep connection, an extended open palm asking the listener to understand, or to be better understood.

Any cursory study of the roots of country music as a genre will quickly reveal how ill-fitting the phrase is for the big tent of performers it includes. Forged, properly, through the dawn of radio, country music as a concept came from a sort of collective recognition: as songs from small communities across the rural South—a mélange of folk traditions brought from Ireland and Scotland and the West Coast of Africa; from field hollers and spirituals to murder ballads and fiddle tunes—listeners, many of whom had migrated far from home by choice or by force by the turn of the 20th century, began to identify with the twang pangs of place captured in recorded song.

It was the recording industry in Nashville who named this patchwork quilt “country music.”2 It's appropriate, then, that in another moment of swift and significant technological progress—where democratizing developments in connectivity create an even more immediate ability to hear one another’s voices—we should be seeing a more expanded syntax of country singing. Queer cowboys, Black cowgirls, Spanish-sung western swing; none of these are without historical precedence (see: Lavender Country; Linda Martell; Billy Mata), but in an era of easier access to marginalized music they are finally being heard. We should be listening for the shared notes in all these new country voices, paying attention to what has changed and what has endured.

Like any language, country’s is a loose and rich collection of textures: screen doors and beer-soaked paystubs; clear lakes and warm summer nights and lovers tiptoeing out in the morning; a certain drawl or lilt; the forlornness of string plucks or remembered bullfrogs. Its signposts are evocative and specific. You know it when you hear it, and it transports you somewhere felt and known. You start to belong to it, too.

Marilynne Robinson, herself something of a folk fictionist, on language as collective effort: “As individuals and as a species, we are unthinkable without our communities.”3

We come to know ourselves through our connections. The long traditions of union singalongs and praise spirituals coalesced to create in country music a collectivist identity—songs about us defined against a far-off them; ballads of pride in place, or barnburners with choral call-and-response choruses. There is a participatory pull into the togetherness conjured by country songs. There is also, simply, the attention to ordinariness. A timbre of daily grinding through work and heartbreak and sunsets and suppers speaking to the most recognizable elements of human living. When we hear our pain sung, when our struggles are elevated to the soulful quality of music, we share in a brief but necessary transcendence. We see ourselves in one another, and we feel a little less alone.

In the popular imagination, country’s obsession with independence belies its secret heart. If many of the upbeat songs on country radio are about a sense of freedom, their more tender sisters—torch songs, breakup songs, family ballads—are about attachments. Broken people in breakable relationships. Hurt and hurting one another, loving and losing and loving still. These are the challenges and triumphs inherent to living with one another, to being part of a whole. This is the ultimate democracy of grief.  

Because country songs often come from this cave of loss, they are easily interpreted by anyone who has lost. We see the genre’s inherent fluidity working its magic on performances like Luke Combs’s cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” The particulars of that song’s story, sung by a Black woman or a white man, sting with a raw immediacy because they sing of human-scale hopes and despair. Country songwriting is especially suited to confronting pain because it prizes a fidelity to authenticity. It creates a confessional space in which otherwise stoic men can shed tears for lost love or lonely longing, for feelings of failure or injustice. If we can recognize we’re hurt, then we can begin to heal; country music offers a language to articulate the unspeakable. If a certain agony cannot be spoken, maybe it can at least be sung.

Just as Leaves of Grass twined the American landscape to a dream of democracy, country music cultivates a collective identity through scenery. It is a poetics of place, where naming and conjuring create identity. Elevate the ordinary to the artistically essential. Open roads, vacant fields, little towns and old houses—these are the stage set pieces against which so many American lives play out. For a queer kid in Missouri, country music made my unremarkable surroundings somehow beautiful. A balm to alienation, my woes could at least belong to a landscape suited to them: wind blowing through a damp prairie, a wide river running somewhere far away. Confines reimagined into possibilities. Reenacting our stories of reaching and dreaming and hustling and fucking up upon this stage helps make us more legible to ourselves, and to one another.

Our rootedness must not necessarily mean rigidity. Part of country’s original, democratic appeal was the range of its roots. Any of us can claim our piece of country, participating in its possibilities. “Genres are a funny little concept, aren't they?” Linda Martell asks on Cowboy Carter, moments before the track explodes into a Brazilian funk beat—over which Beyoncé raps with grit and glee. It’s a defiant shove into the future, with an assist from country’s forgotten past. Braiding together this intergenerational, genre-indifferent collaboration, “SPAGHETTI” serves as coalition building in practice.

As the country braces for another national election amidst seething division—a polarization obsessed by harsh definitions, by borders and exclusions—Cowboy Carter feels like a utopic alternative. What if there was a country composed of a large-hearted collective? Country music, like democracy, loses potency when it narrows its scope of possibilities. Consider instead the jubilant potential of blues singers and swing players and banjo pickers and folk interpreters and beat producers, all together contributing their part to the American orchestra.  

A genre should be less like a levee and more like the river, its headwaters fed by small streams of references and traditions, gathering force as it flows on together. Constantly remaking. What would America look like if we could shake free of our limiting genres? What would America sound like if we listened to each other sing? It’s going to take work, but that’s what country music is all about. Claim your piece of country and start writing a new song.

for your listening pleasure, please enjoy a collection of genre-defying Americana:

Listen here

What is it about August that feels like the summer is ending just when it’s getting started? You scramble to finish the books, to get to the pool, to enjoy your long gold evenings before days get short again. Like any season, it seems to take its shape only as it is fading—and isn’t that like life? The last bites of nectarine taste the sweetest. We know good love when we come close to losing it. We tend to get our arms around a thing once its impermanence is made explicit, and what a shame for the longer, less lit days. August seems a good a time as any to practice a patient attention to these slippery places, people, and moments. To thoroughly feel their presence, even as it passes, and be grateful for the time we get to love. The books, album, and video I’ve included this month have each, in their way, helped me in this very practice — to live, to love.

Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace
Before he was an actor, a music writer, a father and an Oakland plant dad, Carvell Wallace was a queer Black boy in America, surviving in a world indifferent to his survival. With poetic voice and arresting honesty, Wallace reaches back to that kid—his earliest memories, sleeping in a car with his single mom—and offers the grace of witness. In brief, tightly focused chapters that dance somewhere between essay and confession, Carvel Wallace sands off layer after layer of learned behavior to explore, through his own deeply personal experiences, the why and how of loving. Pieces focus on themes or memories ranging from the L.A. riots to Black Lives Matter marches, from Solange to syntax, providing many lenses through which we can envision and revise our ideas around community, care, sex, loss, and love and love and love.
order from Bookshop.org

Soft Power - Ezra Feinberg
It starts with a lilting flute, and some plain guitar picking—by the end of “Future Sand,” the evocatively titled opening track on Soft Power, there is a sense we have traveled by swan boat back and forth through sonic time. Each small sound a piece of this wide landscape. Ezra Feinberg is a practicing psychoanalyst, which may not have anything to do with his music-making, compositionally, but does suggest something essential about him as a composer: this is an artist who understands the beauty of paying attention. In luring, wafting pieces which seem to rise and float from a pastoral ether—out of time, alluringly utopian—Feinberg (and his collaborators) gently invite the listener to notice, too. On “Get Some Rest,” the album’s closer, the harpist Mary Lattimore’s tender plucks converse with impressionistic keys, a constant peace, as a wind section grows above them. It is casually transcendent, the way a deep breath in the middle of stress can feel like a revelation. A far off sound which connects to something deep within, making the world it conjures feel not only possible, but innate—a matter of time.
Listen here

Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips
”How what never happened, if it’s / remembered hard enough, can seem / almost true,” Carl Phillips muses in the poem “Yes,” toward the end of this contemplative new collection. What does endure, the poet presents, is the emotion, the love or the pain. Throughout, Phillips demonstrates a long memory for the real and imagined collective past—vikings and gladiators, centaurs and myth, the title’s poem’s “slow unwinding” of the Roman Empire. Etched into this ancient-seeming stone are poems of astonishing feeling, exploring a ranging index of human ache and curiosity. If we can’t know simply why we are fated to love and to lose, we can take heart, at least, in remembering that it is all we have ever known—love and loss—and that it is always worth it for the wonder of being, while we can, alive.
order from Bookshop.org

Powers of Ten (1977) - dir. Charles and Ray Eames
A couple lounges for a picnic on the grass—pull back, they’re by Lake Michigan; keep pulling back, until they’re specks in the cosmos. So begins Powers of Ten, a nine-minutes short from 1977 which demonstrates “the relative size of things in the universe” by zooming out, then in, by factors of ten. That iconic designers Charles and Ray Eames would have a special sense of scale and space is not necessarily surprising, but the short film functions more like a guided meditation, revealing a natural network of relation. The pulsing core at the atomic level recalls the farthest expanses of the universe, suggesting that our human scale is perhaps not in fact inconsequential, but rather quite interconnected. The power of perspective in these heavy times an astounding balm.
Watch here

Friends, I hope you find some peace in these pieces, and please let me know if you think of any other works which speak to these questions of scale, perspective, and impermanence. I’ll be back next week with a music-centered meditation, with a playlist for your listening pleasure. Enjoy your August weekend.

“Fear of the unknown,” my friend says, with a shooing flutter of her hand. “Everybody’s got one.” It’s no wonder, I suppose, that I return, in my mind’s eye, to this dark sea whenever I get overwhelmed with the currents of our forming history. In times of great upheaval—and aren’t these those times?—it’s this teetering over an abyss feeling (literally, abysmal) that seizes from my grip the moment, that makes me feel ill-equipped for forging ahead. This is how I attempt to tame the unknown, to turn on some lights: I turn to books in these dim times, a bow line to a past that’s already been survived. I write to fix myself in the moment—to bear witness—or to cast out to any fellow travelers; “being able to name,” Lucille Clifton says, “is somehow being able to place, to identify.”1

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear2

Forty miles west and almost a century before me, Langston Hughes grew up in Lawrence, Kansas. He was the descendant of educators and abolitionists, raised by his mother’s mother Mary Patterson, whose storytelling instilled in young Langston a restless curiosity and a defiant sense of pride. He recalled later: “Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying.”3  

Langston—landlocked, but even further confined by the segregated Midwest—felt in poetry a possibility; he gathered his ambitions and ran right into the blue beyond. At 21, he joined as a crewman the S.S. Malone and set off for Africa’s West Coast. The Big Sea, Hughes’s 1940 autobiography, begins with Langston lightening his load, leaning out and heaving overboard his precious books. “And I felt that nothing would ever happen to me again that I didn't want to happen.”

When you’re 21 and 22 and 23 years old, every decision feels like launching into the great maw of the unknown. Everyone—and I think especially if they are a member of a marginalized community—finds themselves in a moment like Langston’s at the lip of that ship (can’t you feel the sea air, smell its wet salt?), facing down the uncharted path and declaring, even if uneasily, it will at least be theirs to chart.

Every generation, too, has its complementary context against which all personal anxieties are aligned. Maybe yours was the plague, or the threat of falling bombs. For Hughes and his peers, it was, at least in part, the recent Great War and its tremendous innovations of destruction. (About that, Gertrude Stein wrote: “Naturally one does not know how it happened until it is well over beginning happening.”4) Because history unfolds with and within each of us, its painful snags or its progress composites of our own disparate paths. Today, it seems, there is a hoggish buffet of quickly shifting catastrophes to which a young person may choose to surrender or rail against.

Or question. Poet, prophet Lucille Clifton—whose work so often tugs at the tough threads of the past, while also making slack the rope for those to come—saw in her art a space to grow tender towards uncertainty. To see in this gaping mystery something possibly divine. “The mistake teachers sometimes make is that they think art and poetry [are] about answers,” Clifton said, “and it’s not about that, it’s about questions… you come to poetry not out of what you know, but out of what you wonder.”5

The Big Sea is a Bildungsroman in the most classic, satisfying sense: the artist comes of age, and comes into his own. After his time on the S.S. Malone and stints in Italy and roaring Paris, Langston comes home. He arrives to Washington, D.C. in the mid-20s a weary traveler with a pocketful of poems and nowhere else to go. (“Folks!” he implores, “Start out with nothing sometime and see how long it takes to warm up to something.”)

Hughes finds himself set apart from an intellectual Black culture in D.C. he characterizes as snooty and stilted. While at sea, the world had changed, again. Hoping to find a slice of the heady, vibrant scene he’d seen in Harlem just a few years before, Langston drifts toward the more working class stretch of Seventh Street. “On Seventh Street in 1924 they played the blues, ate watermelon, barbecue, and fish sandwiches, shot pool, told tall tales, looked at the dome of the Capitol and laughed out loud.”

Hughes heard the blues and infused its rhythms, its beats into his poetry. While the ex-pats in Paris were practicing a lean, cool detachment from traditional forms, Hughes was bringing into his work this common folk music, this soul. A little older, having seen a lot more, Hughes was ready to push into a new beyond—this time on the page.

In 1989, by the time British director Isaac Julien made his film Looking for Langston, Hughes’s sense for the blues spoke to a very different emerging moment in gay, Black Washington. Blacklight, based in D.C. and the nation’s first Black gay periodical, ran a cover story about AIDS in 19836; local activists struggled to bridge the historically segregated queer community in response to the worsening epidemic. Into this dark unknown sang Essex Hemphill, a poet whose sense for justice and ear to the streets helped articulate an art politic for the devastated community. Hemphill had carved out a place in the D.C. scene, performing throughout the early 1980s with his friends Larry Duckett and Wayson Jones as Cinque, a vocal trio delivering spoken word entreaties on blackness, queerness, violence, and love, their voices braiding into a small chorus of disruption and possibility. Julien, seeing in Hemphill this clear tether to Hughes’s poetic and musical tradition, asked Essex to contribute to Looking for Langston.

The movie is a dreamlike black-and-white meditation, blending archival footage and audio recordings with phantasmic, fantastic scenes of Harlem ball culture which seem to remix time and space. Performing “The Brass Rail” (named for a D.C. gay bar), in a call-and-response with Wayson Jones, Hemphill reads: “I hear the sea screaming behind your eyes7”—seduction of some far-off, unexplored waters a fitting match for forbidden desire. Here, the uncharted gets mapped in verse. In response to the exponentially increasing death rates and encroaching paranoia of the AIDS epidemic, Julien (and company) tug at Langston’s line in a gesture of queer continuity. Look how long we’ve been out here, it hums; look at all that we have survived. Imagine where we have yet to go.

Even through his own illness—the context of immense loss and incoming disease a dreadful night ocean—Essex did not stop writing, could not quit exploring. In 1991, Hemphill sent press materials for his anthology Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men to dozens of publications, including Book World, the review section of the Washington Post. When he heard through the grapevine that an employee at the Post overheard their editor say he had no interest in “reviewing gay and lesbian literature,” Essex was irate. He wrote a four-page letter to that very editor, spelling out his transgressions and inexcusable homophobia. He ended his treatise with this delicious kiss-off: “I leave you with my best wishes that you will be able to manage in a changing world.”8

Essex, nearly 36—tragically, just a few years before his death—and long enough around the block, had found in writing a power over the unknown. See, what Langston and Lucille and Essex and every poet and artist, canonized or unseen or all manner in between, understand is this: that just above our heads flicker pinholes of possibilities, pushed open each time one of us reimagines the world. Our ancient navigation system, we sail forth into the dark mystery equipped with these songs of endurance, these snapshots of survival, these books from which we have learned our names.

The fear of the unknown is inevitable, and understandable. Every age brings with it a certain doom; what will have happened has already begun, and we don’t always get to know the end. We can try like Langston, casting his collection into the ocean, to divide ourselves from where we’ve been and hurl headlong toward what’s next. We can listen to Lucille, and stare out into the unknowable with wonder—ask of it our glorious questions. Like Essex, we can write like hell, ensuring the travelers behind us have a clearer atlas than we did. What a generosity—to shine a little light out into the night ocean. Every song we sing a beacon.

Listen—try standing sturdy at the stern, rush of waves below you and enveloped in marine air; the ocean at night. But it is not pitch-dark, no, the whole thing is aglow. Our artists, our ancestors pushing from behind. Centuries of light. What we can do, now, is keep pushing, singing as we go. Carve into the coming times our own luminous possibilities.

and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

Friends, does it feel like you’re being pulled away from the present moment and into a nervy, unknowable future? It’s an act of self-trust to believe that we might be well-prepared to meet the moment once it comes, and that until then we can tend the ground where we stand. I am trying not to cede my precious presence to the noisy possibilities, to enjoy what I can, for now, reach. It’s July, there is still plenty of time to make a feast from fresh tomatoes. I’m hopeful that I can take some of the lessons from the following works and try to let things grow.

The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing
The brilliant essayist and thinker Olivia Laing—who has written revelatory books about loneliness and bodies—is back with this timely, time-warping meditation on gardens. To Laing, ever expansive in her scope, gardens here mean those in Eden and in your backyard; the ones built by plantation owners or the ones tended by artists as private utopias. Between lyrical descriptions of her own budding plot, Laing uproots moments in history from Paradise Lost to fascist Italy to Derek Jarman’s shoreside sanctuary at Prospect Cottage, exploring timeless themes of growth and change. We have much to learn from gardens, Laing reveals, about cycles, creation, and cooperation.
order from Bookshop.org

Let Go - Robert Glasper
Piano great and musical visionary Robert Glasper has the kind of ranging, genre-spanning career which has helped carve out jazz’s place in the 21st century. His fluid playing and complex compositions stick out on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, and Glasper expanded the piano’s hip-hop possibilities on his own Black Radio album series. His new full-length Let Go mostly sheds the vocal layer—save a seductive contribution from Meshell Ndegeocello on the opener “Breathing Underwater”—and tunes into a dreamy, ambient wavelength throughout. Put this on and get transported to a meditative state of surrender; blissfully, as the title instructs, let go.
Listen here

Janet Planet - dir. Annie Baker
Remember what I wrote last week about the surreal possibilities of childhood summer? This movie is the time machine that will take you back there, in all of its slow, strange glory. 11-year old Lacy (the unreasonably good Zoe Ziegler) spends the summer of 1991 with her single mother (Julianne Nicholson), watching her stumble through relationships with odd men and old friends, both figuring out who they are meant to be in the world. This is Annie Baker’s first film, but she is a deservedly renowned playwright. Unsurprisingly the world of Janet Planet includes theatrical flourishes like ferocious monologues, a political puppet show (a la Bread & Puppet), and a miniature stage-set before which Lacy stands—a director—arranging her figurines into places. Becoming who she will be.

All Friends are Necessary by Tomas Moniz
It’s not easy to write about these slippery, shifty times; to do so with warmth and grace sometimes feels impossible. So Tomas Moniz’s latest novel is a small miracle: a funny, frank novel about all kinds of love. Chino Flores, freshly grieving an unthinkable loss, is lured back to the Bay Area of the just-Before Times by an old friend. From there, Chino swims against the inevitable disasters—personal and natural—with a squad of endearing characters, each with their own distinct style of care. It’s the rare pandemic novel that makes space for the ephemeral, but essential, queer joys.
order from Bookshop.org

Sometimes what we need to grow is a little shade and to be left alone. While it’s easy to get sunshine guilt or fear missing out on summer fun, I’d argue that July is a perfect month for leaning into the sadness. Get comfortable indoors and enjoy the company of these downtempo, blue-breezy songs:

Listen here

Thanks for reading! I’ll be back next week with a proper Meditation. Still getting the hang of this Substack project— Does three posts a month feel good for you? What would you like to see more of? I’m hoping to include conversations with featured authors and artists soon. Let me know how you’d like to see this grow.

Any summer in our lives contains, between dog-eared dramas or celebrations, these yawning bouts of ordinary time. Dog days and hot, sleepless nights; picking at mosquito bites. But I read a chilling sentence yesterday wondering if this might be “our last summer in a democracy” and considered how I might remember it: talking about therapy over tacos with friends; dancing over Pride; adding chopped pecans to a bowl of apricot slices. How could it ever feel like enough?

Eileen Chang, in the sharp essay “From the Ashes” describing her time at university during the Battle of Hong Kong, recalls: “…when we first received word of the advent of war, one of the girls in the dormitory flew into a panic, ‘What am I to do? I have nothing to wear!’”1

Significance sneaks up on you. We watch history forming like a hurricane, darting around the parameters of its path, bracing for its winds to strengthen or praying that its intensity weakens by the time it passes over us. But of course we do not know which gutters it will flood, whose houses will be spared, or what cleanup it will require until after the storm has passed. You recognize what had been there—a gnarled branch, a season of friendship—once it is gone.

In Tim Dlugos’s poem “Ordinary Time,” the poet—battling HIV during the plague era of the epidemic, desperately aware of his own impending end—begins in wonder, asking, “which are the magic / moments in ordinary / time?” Immediately, he answers: all of them. As the poem unspools down the page, so too does a dizzying index of precious friendships and loving specificity: David, Leonard, Eileen; a scrap of fabric and blueberry peach pie. In the eye of history’s cruel storm, every detail, every bite becomes magical and necessary.

Ordinary Time
by Tim Dlugos

Which are the magic
moments in ordinary
time? All of them,
for those who can see.
That is what redemption
means, I decide
at the meeting. Then
walk with David wearing
his new Yale T-shirt
and new long hair to 103.
Leonard and Eileen come, too.
Leonard wears a shark’s tooth
on a chain around his neck
and long blond hair.
These days he’s the manager
of Boots and Saddles (“Bras
and Girdles,” my beloved
Bobby used to say) and
costumer for the Gay Cable
Network’s Dating Game.
One week the announcer is
a rhinestone cowboy, sequin
shirt and black fur chaps,
the next a leatherman, etc.
Eileen’s crewcut makes
her face light up.
Underneath our hairstyles,
23 years of sobriety, all told—
the age of a girl who’s “not
so young but not so very old,”
wrote Berryman, who flew
from his recovery with the force
of a poet hitting bottom.
It’s not the way I choose
to go out of this restaurant
or day today, and I
have a choice. Wanda
the comedian comes over
to our table. “Call me
wicked Wanda,” she smirks
when we’re introduced.
Why is New York City
awash in stand-up comics
at the least funny point
in its history? Still,
some things stay the same.
People wonder what the people
in their buildings would think
if the ones who were wondering
became incredibly famous,
as famous as Madonna.
Debby Harry lived in Eileen’s
building in the Village
in the early seventies, and she
was just the shy girl
in the band upstairs.
Poets read the writing
of their friends, and
are happy when they like it
thoroughly, when the work’s
that good and the crippling
sense of competition stays away.
Trips get planned: David
home to California, Eileen
to New Mexico, Chris and I
to France and Spain, on vectors
which will spread out
from a single point, like ribs
of an umbrella. Then
after the comfort of a wedge
of blueberry peach pie and cup
of Decaf, sober friends
thread separate ways home
through the maze of blankets
on the sidewalk covered with
the scraps of someone else’s life.
Mine consists of understanding
that the magic isn’t something
that I make, but something
that shines through the things
I make and do and say
the way a brooch or scrap of fabric
shines from the detritus
to catch Leonard’s eye
and be of use for costumes,
when I am fearless and thorough
enough to give it room,
all the room there is in ordinary
time, which embraces all
the people and events and hopes
that choke the street tonight
and still leaves room for everyone
and everything and every
other place, the undescribed
and indescribable, more various
and cacophonous than voice
can tell or mind conceive,
and for the sky’s vast depths
from which they’re all
a speck of light.

Tim Dlugos, "Ordinary Time" from A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos. Copyright © 2011 by Tim Dlugos.  Reprinted by permission of Nightboat Books2.

We don’t yet know what the fall will bring. We don’t know if these times will be the significant, shifting ones upon which we look back and wistfully smile. But what if they are? It is imperative, then, that we pay close attention, finding within this ordinary time all the specks of light worth saving.

What does it mean to make peace with violent changes in our environment? How do we prepare ourselves to live alongside flood or fire in an increasingly extreme future? As usual, there are instructions in the past: in California, there is a long history of indigenous tribes enacting annual controlled burns, cultivating the landscape and encouraging new growth. Tribes like the Coast Miwok used burns to regenerate sourberry bush, their straight sticks necessary for basketry, and in the process cleared out vulnerable brush1. Cultural burns are a way of living with the natural cycles of fire and rebirth, a relationship less like taming and more like compromise.

There is an evergreen shrub called snowbrush whose hard seeds require fire to grow2. The heat promotes germination, cracking them to life and covering the burn site with the cream-white flowering brush. Where and when the snowbrush grows can have long-lasting impact on the land around it, even improving the air for surrounding firs and pines to mature taller and healthier. This is not a metaphor to suggest that destructive fires are somehow beautiful, but rather a reminder that we are all desperately connected. From flame to seed to breath to tree, we do grow on together.

The History of Fire3
by Linda Hogan

My mother is a fire beneath stone.
My father, lava.

My grandmother is a match,
my sister straw.

Grandfather is kindling like trees of the world.
My brothers are gunpowder,

and I am smoke with gray hair,
ash with black fingers and palms.

I am wind for the fire.

My dear one is a jar of burned bones
I have saved.

This is where our living goes
and still we breathe,

and even the dry grass
with sun and lightning above it

has no choice but to grow
and then lie down

with no other end in sight.

Air is between these words,
fanning the flame.

Copyright © 2020 Originally published in When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, edited by Joy Harjo.

I love how this poem assigns familial lineage to fire, blurring personal history with the creation myth of burning itself. In just three short couplets, Hogan conjures a family tree of many generations, as ancient as lava and as recent as gunpowder; grandmother, father, brothers. After the speaker takes her place—and I am smoke with gray hair—we get our first standalone line: I am wind for the fire. This powerful declaration blows across the page like a gust, an assertion I read first as agency but think is really more like a relationship. The speaker is wind for the fire, part of its propagation. Like a daughter at the end of her family tree, she is discovering her place in an ongoing tradition. By the end of the poem, the very air we breathe is implicated; we all have a place in the history of fire. We don’t yet know its future, but if we can see ourselves in its lineage, perhaps it can help us imagine. An abundance of snowbrush.

In a time of colossal uncertainty, personally and politically, I take solace in the gentle passing of seasons. Sometimes you have to squint to see the changes in California, but to do so opens up a line of dialogue with a greater growth beyond your own changing cells.

Context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears.1

In this week’s poem, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s “The Sunset and the Purple-Flowered Tree,” we see how paying attention to the right blooms can help keep us alive.

The Sunset and the Purple-Flowered Tree2
by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

I talk to a screen who assures me everything is fine.

I am not broken. I am not depressed. I am simply

in touch with the material conditions of my life. It is

the end of the world, and it’s fine. People laugh

about this, self-soothing engines sputtering

through a nosedive. Not me. I’ve gone and lost my

sense of humor when I need it most. This is why I

speak smoke into a scene. I dance against language

and abandon verse halfway through, like a broken-

throated singer. I wander around the front yard,

pathless as a little ant at the tip of a curled-up

cactus. Birds flit in and out of shining branches.

A garden blooms large in my throat. Color and life

conspire against my idea of the world. I have to

laugh until I am crying, make an ocean to land

upon in this sea of flames. Here I am.  

Another late-winter afternoon,

            the sunset and the purple-flowered tree

trying their best to keep me alive.

Copyright © 2022 by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 11, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

At the start of the poem, the speaker is blinking at a screen, that thin sheet of glass we too often keep between us and the material world. From its window she watches the apocalypse and recognizes how distant it all feels; people laugh about this. But slowly, the world creeps in: an ant on cactus tip, birds in branches. A garden blooms large in my throat: simply by paying attention, a great merging occurs. We become part of the world when we let it in—feeling its agony, yes, but also participating in its enduring splendor. Another afternoon, she sings, the dependency of dusk and flowering trees being the beat that keeps us going. Make it to another May, to see another fabulous jacaranda bloom. Another, another, another…