We can look at a rainbow crosswalk, maybe take a selfie with it, and feel recognized or represented in some way, but it doesn’t actually create a space for queer or trans belonging in any real sense.
I really don’t have a palate for total desolation in books. . . . So maybe as an unconscious decision I worked in these moments of hope or pockets of happiness that saved me from spiraling completely.
We’re all living in a historical moment that we can’t get out of.
You have to stand by your work at the end of the day, and honestly, if this book didn’t make me laugh, I wouldn’t have let it go to print.
I want to take things seriously, because these are serious things I’m writing about, but life is so funny, so ridiculous, and so bizarre—and the more bizarre I made the book, the more the book looked like real life.
All someone needs to do is open a window to a place like that and let me peer inside, and I’m intrigued.
I’m into spiky fashion and queer leather and outrageous looks and every so often an element of club kid. But different. I see queer fashion and the role it plays for me as one of adornment and resilience. Leather is another layer of skin, very protective. And spikes are a deterrent. So it’s a kind of armor.
Why would I want to write about my love affairs, my dinners with eminences, and my published works when the primordial North occupied such a crucial spot in my mind?
[Digging] reflects . . . for me, rather than a resignation, an active embrace of the dirt, the mud, the worms, the fungus, the bodies. The best way out is through . . . this kind of thing.
It made sense to me that writers or artists should utilize constraint in our present world of seemingly limitless possibility.