Morning hours move at a rate all their own. At once it can be 7 am, the world of opportunities laid bare before you, yet before you’ve even had your first-morning movement (of which there will be many following the full pot of hot coffee you drink each day) somehow, it will inexplicably already be noon. Surely the hours in this time— the hours of the working day— move more slowly. Perhaps because they cease to belong to only you. These are hours put on offer for things like necessities; for things like dentist appointments, and work meetings, and the monotony of life that creeps in and saps away your day from the things you really want to do— all those things you feel you ought to do.
I try to write morning pages, this is a habit that I think will yield great results for me. Like, if I can muster the strength to slow the clock long enough in the morning to write a page for myself, I will somehow crack the code and create art worthy of praise. I want to write a book, I want to exist in a space of longer-form storytelling, I want, I want I want. But I seldom do.
I seldom do anything much at all. Partly this is because the very act of writing is in itself a form of work. To create, as liberating as it often is for me, is in and of itself still a labor. Presently, I am not sure how much energy I have left for these such efforts.
This is why when looking into the lives of artists like Picasso or Van Gogh we see just how much they had taken care of for them. All to create the art that we all still clamor around. This is the invisible labors of sisters and wives— unsung heroes lost to the annals of time for the part they played in some of our most enduring masterpieces. These caregivers, who were largely women and girls allowed artists to create in their dingy little studios, all the while taking on the roles of cooking and cleaning and providing the necessary alleviation from the drudgery of normal life. I don’t have a manager of my household, but this itself is not reason enough for my inability to sit down and set aside time for my craft.
Near constantly, I find myself needing to do my own reminding that, yes indeed, I do enjoy creating art and writing. In fact, it may be the things that I love most of all. I write this all now in a period of slight mania at 1:51AM, and do so even with a sense of calm and freedom that could not feel further removed from the concept of labor. Have I ever been woken up by my own inherent drive to market pseudo-feminist sunglasses or create TikTok videos for Big Dairy? (actual assignments I was tasked with in my full-time job) No. But I have been so moved to create a painting or to write a poem that I have worked through the night, skipped meals, or cancelled plans. Perhaps I have misplaced priorities, perhaps I should put a greater emphasis on the jobs I do for others, especially when that is the work that pays my bills and affords me any of the comforts, such as the materials needed to create, but why should all my passions have to be put on the sidelines so that I can do what is practical?
Still, my journal lays untouched. Still I find myself unable to commit to writing. My last entry was nearly a month ago, and there was a several-week gap before that as well. This lapse is worsened by the realization that the life I am encountering now is precisely the type of things that ought to fill the pages of a diary. Professional layoffs, heartbreak, big moves, meeting a boy who’s fingers are tipped in honey—who treats my body with a kindness and softness entirely anathema to me— all things that I should want to write about. I wish I had the energy to immortalize these feelings. I wish I could capture my 27th year. I wish I could squeeze out the emotional truth of this moment, and suspend it in carbonate.
That’s the kind of reference I make nowadays. If you told me even two years ago that I would be referencing Star Wars today, I would never believe you. Star Wars is media for boys. Star Wars is being excluded from masculinity, not understanding the ways boys and men talk to each other or interact. Star Wars represents isolation from my sex, represents my own inability to fit in. My own failures of being the right kind of boy.
Star Wars also represents my brother, a man in my life I have tried to run from too, for the same feelings of not enoughness. With the right amount of time, morning hours rocketing past a life preserved in snapshots, these films have grown to represent less, and in that way grown to represent more.
I can divorce their context and my own traumas and enjoy them as something that someone I love loves. I can learn this language for someone who has shown they are willing to try and learn my own as well. In much the same way that my brother has learned to respect and enjoy my fruitier delights— Dolly Parton, dancing to ABBA, and Drag, I can in turn learn to understand the things he loves as well.
Unfortunately, this has left me in the precarious position of telling people that I, a cis-gendered white man, likes Star Wars, but importantly, not in that way. This is the gay identity in a nutshell. Only ever allowing a single foot into any interest, while also operating in a space removed from its context. I like pop music, but not in that way. I like the popular thing, but not in that way. This protective distance allows me, and other queens, to assume a feeling of superiority in many cases, while we constantly explain to others the greater meaning of each and every piece of media, cultural touchstone, and life event. I think this is clearly seen in the understanding of the concept of “camp.”
Camp is, and I don’t think this is a stretch to say, a largely queer concept. It is sort of our own secret cult classic. A little in-talk for those in the know. Like a secret codeword for a club we feel we must protect at all costs. Even its definition is obtuse by design. Ask any homo the meaning of camp and he will quickly retort with a line from Susan Sontag’s Note on “Camp” (itself a bit of a cliché coding, repeated ad nauseam, akin to asking if someone is a “friend of Dorothy.”) But when we really sit with the idea, and the queer fascination this concept offers, it is inherently exclusionary. It comes from a secret understanding of something that is only for us. Wig. Wig? Did you just say wig?
Is this not the slightest bit conceited? Is this not exactly the holier-than-thou high-horse ideology we typically prescribe to the hetro-normative oppressive power structures? Is this not just the same feeling of entitlement and fear of the unknown that has barred us from belonging in a heterosexual society only dressed up in a garish bubblegum paint job and pseudo-intellectualism?
Does our fascination with camp culture stem from our own inherent need to prove that we know something you don’t. We are become our own gatekeepers, we are the cultural tastemakers and mavens. We are so important, and in a way, are we not also better?
It is my opinion that this line of thought, though integral to feelings of self-worth for a culture that has been largely and historically disenfranchised, is the same cancer that poisons straight culture as well. This is the same patriarchal virus that excludes women from spaces like Comic Con— and we see this illness reflected in assuming women should not and must not be allowed into our “gay” spaces. As if gay spaces would, could, or even should exist without women in the first place.
For all our idolatry of the feminine mystique, we sure do know how to exert our own exclusionary traumas onto women.
Gay people continue their own cycles of abuse in this way, and it is, and I will make no qualms in saying this, one of the most disgusting and infuriating facets about gay people at large. It makes me ashamed of being gay in a way more primal than I have felt since I was initially told my mere existence was sin. I’ve outgrown that feeling, that being gay is inherently wrong in the eyes of “god” or whatever, but anytime I contribute in the further disenfranchisement of women I feel for the first time that concept of sinfulness creeping back in. Quite frankly I don’t care if you covet thy neighbor, but I do care a lot if you are the type of gay man who has rebranded and repackaged their own misogyny.
I think I might be insufferable. Not just a little bit, but like totally and indisputably a challenge to be around.
No one wants to watch a movie with the boy rattling off how there is indeed a queer reading to Jacob Black’s character in the Twilight series, that actually has a lot of interesting things to say about the platonic and occasionally romantic relationships between straight women and their gay best friends. No one, and I mean this, wants to hear about how it is actually very interesting and crucial to Doja Cat’s brand that in order to have her own bad girl era, she has to incorporate markers of problematic white-incel culture, because as a Black woman, she does not have access to the same bad girl era visual language that her white counterparts do. And just how unsettling it is to know that the culture women like her have created and popularized, can be so easily worn by her white counterparts like a costume, all the while she is either not allowed, or already expected to exist in those stereotypes herself.
It seems like nobody wants to talk about intersectional feminism these days. Especially as reported by a white man.
So instead of writing anything of substance, I create these elaborate thought experiments— try to consider so many angles to the same idea that I fragment out like kaleidoscopic shards. How can I, a man, ever hope to write something that considers all of this and more, while also growing alongside future sentiments as to not make my writing obsolete retrograde? How could I write a female character that doesn’t perpetuate patriarchal stereotypes when I have only ever lived a life conditioned by these patriarchal institutes? How can I write something that critiques queer identity without also giving the opposition ammunition to further tear down the communities I love? Every thought I have is taffy-pulled out so that I can inspect for the razor blades in my Halloween candy, and the process, I think, prevents me from being able to write.
The constant, debilitating process of self-censoring, of monitoring my own thoughts and feelings, is paralyzing. I want to do a good job, I want to write something that adds to the world, that makes people feel less alone, to show them that this place is for them— they just haven’t found the people who understand them yet. I want to do all of that, but I’m terrified that I could never be good enough. I could never be smart enough to play the 4D chess necessary to intuit every possible reading. I could never write something that lacked thorns.
In twenty years, hell, in five, could this entire essay be torn apart? Could it not too have the same makings of legacy burning not unlike what JK Rowling has done to her own career? Will people look back on me in five years and think of me like they think of Dr. Seuess or Walt Disney? Just another problematic cog in the machine? Does my own dreams of grandeur, of even including myself in discussion with these other genre-defining artists not also indicate some of that same germ of narcissism that eventually became their downfall? Maybe it is best to keep my journal untouched and not risk any of this at all. Maybe it would be for the best if I never wrote again.
***
I have a deposit in my eye that is genetic to the men in my family. In my left eye there is a shard, not unlike a snowflake, of calcium that sits in the very center of my vision. In the right lighting, it almost looks like I am peering into a microscope at a petri dish, complete with tiny squiggly germs and microbes. I had all but convinced myself that what I was seeing, which may I remind you— I have known about for all of my life, was ringworm. I had just about convinced myself that I was sick, some nasty little cesspool creature— the human embodiment of pond scum, when my aunt informed me that I probably just needed eye drops.
Oftentimes, the things we think make us sick— the things that we prescribe meaning to—the things we moralize over staying up at night in bouts of self-loathing, are merely another average facet of or being. An inconvenience so minor that it can be alleviated with a simple drop of Visine.
Tiktoks for Big Dairy is so real