Episodes
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On dyke cruising
Timing’s a funny thing. A few weeks ago, just as dating-cum-hookup app Lex announced that it would be refocusing on “friends and community”—to great gay consternation—I received my advance copy of Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest! in the mail. If the former development is an example of…
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On a dying plant
The first year I lived in New York, I wound up in yet another bad relationship with a femdom. This relationship was nasty, brutish, and short, as I should have guessed it would be from all the red flags, but I didn’t emerge from it empty-handed. Shortly before it all fell apart (who else attended...
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Why do we write?, part 2
Read Part 1. I can think of a lot of not-so-flattering reasons why people write. Control issues, as I mentioned in Part 1 of this series. Insecurity. Obsession. (When accused of being “extremely repetitious” by a critic, Nabokov defended himself on the basis of his a priori genius: “Derivative...
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If he’s a serial killer, then what’s the worst that can happen to a girl?
While I’m not against public sex on principle (in fact, I insist on it), the risk of getting caught in flagrante delicto has never been a big turn-on for me. What can I say? I love safety. For this reason, when I went to meet a hookup at a co-working space last year, I did so with the vague hope...
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Why do we write?, part 1
Not too long ago, I hooked up with a weird old man who made his own electronic music and had been to prison for stabbing his ex-girlfriend’s drug dealer. That’s a lot of information to get out of a single encounter with a stranger, but this guy—let’s call him Derek—loved to talk. Blowhards tend…
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Lesbian processing is an extreme sport
Unbelievable as it sounds, there are aspects of my personal life that never make it to the internet. I understand why this may be surprising. For one thing, the general conflation of public and private for feminized people means that my fiction is more closely associated with the real me than it…
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On Peter Berlin
A beautiful young man strolls through a field of white flowers—perhaps one of the many clearings to be found in San Francisco’s byzantine Golden Gate Park. Our beauty encounters another beauty, though this one is nowhere near as beautiful as our original, a truth we gather less by comparison than...
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Your favorite DAVIDs of 2022
Below you’ll find DAVID’s most-read posts of the past year, plus my favorite series, which didn’t exactly rank with you all but which was, I think, some of my most solid writing. And by the way, thank you for reading in 2022! It was a pretty big year for me. I said hello to new experiences and...
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A hookup yields reflections on trans life
Max, surname “Grindr,” is in my phone, but our short message history doesn’t tell me much about him. He claims that we’ve already met—Before I went to Barcelona, remember? I don't. My recall can’t be trusted, and I’m pretty slutty, but because I like to record things I have a spreadsheet of…
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"Gender is not my boundary"
I identify more strongly as a sadomasochist than as a lesbian. I hang out in the gay community because that’s where the sexual fringe starts to unravel. Most of my partners are women, but gender is not my boundary…If I had a choice between being shipwrecked on a desert island with a vanilla…
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On "How Far the Light Reaches"
When it comes to the humane treatment and conservation of other species (once-discrete concepts that seem to degrade every time we get another one of those U.N. reports), the name of the game is similarity: if we can convince the skeptical that non-human animals are just like us, our case for…
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On girlfriends
It’s distasteful to admit that breaking the taboo did something for me back then, when I was still ignorant of the problems that being gay can cause. But when I first started dating L, I quickly discovered that more thrilling than holding her hand in public, appalling the religious, or feeling...
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GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY: Farewell
GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY is coming to a close. No regrets here—we’ve had a great run. Two years into the mutual aid fundraiser that my anonymous gay therapist friend and I made at the beginning of the pandemic, our subscribers have sent over $30k to the orgs, projects, and people listed below. Bad Gay...
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On the gangbang
In “A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality,” Patrick Califia makes passing mention of bottoms outnumbering tops in the San Francisco leatherdyke scene of the late 1970s. Califia wasn’t the first to notice the queer “top shortage” we’ve heard so much about. But I once read, somewhere, that at the dawn...
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On craft, work, and fantasy
In grad school, my advisor was a mediocre homophobe who was occasionally good for solid writing advice. This was a decade ago. At 24, I was still an unthinking grinder, pestle to my own empty mortar, so it verged on the revelatory to hear a real writer—with books and a teaching job and...
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Phyllis Christopher's "Dark Room"
If you watch porn, you may have encountered camerawork that’s almost surgical in its focus, trained on specific parts of performers’ genitals with a fixity that might make you feel like an OB/GYN (or urologist, or proctologist. Whatever). With this kind of closeup, you’re telescoped almost inside...
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"All comparisons are odious."
Smothering though our bewitchment by “generation,” as an organizing principle, may be, I think it’s safe to say that The Brave Little Toaster—Toy Story’s darksided 1987 ur-text—is a millennial touchstone. Following the adventures of a group of household appliances searching for their “Master,”…
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On social contagion, part 3
Read Part 1. Read Part 2. Frankie and I met up at Metropolitan. For a few hours, we sat at a corner table on the back patio, smoking, drinking, and wiggling our fingers at trans people we recognized from the internet. After dishing about our jobs, our girlfriends, and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s...
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On social contagion, part 2
Read Part 1 here. I believe in luck, unfortunately. The kind of person to toss salt, knock wood, converse with a dead god in the bathroom mirror, I’m an unwilling subscriber to a pastiche of cosmic checks and balances in which thought and action hold equal power, ends justify means, and…
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On straight people
If I seem to you like the kind of person who would happily cut someone out of my life for crossing a line, congratulations—you’ve got me dead to rights. I’m aware that this is not necessarily a healthy quality. In my case, it can be reactionary or arbitrary. The camel’s-back-breaking offense can…
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David Davis
My host, an Italian bear an inch shorter than I, ushered me into the dim and bitter-smelling apartment. At my request, he guided me to the bathroom. Would you like a towel? he asked politely; I declined. The bathroom was normal except for the dozens of boxes of Colgate toothpaste that were…
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Let a thousand fisting daisychains bloom
Earlier this year, I began working with Natalie Adler of Lux Mag on an essay about the commodification of kink. With the news being what it is—the hits stop coming and they don’t stop coming—that essay swiftly became another, about the intracommunity discourses of kink at Pride. Though a…
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On social contagion, part 1
J.G. Ballard’s seminal novel—on which the 1996 David Cronenberg joint is based—is about people who get off on car crashes. Protagonist James Ballard (who shares a name with the author) is inducted into this deathstyle by Dr. Robert Vaughan, a “nightmare angel of the expressways” driven by the...
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On intelligence, part 3
Read Part 1. Read Part 2. “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Mankind (or humankind, as we’d probably say now) has been to the moon. You, the human reading this, almost certainly have not. In thinking about how we talk about ourselves as a species, I’m forced to reckon…
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On "Crimes of the Future"
When David Cronenberg took the stage at the Walter Reade Theater last night, he was introduced—to a smattering of dry laughter—as the Prophet of the New Flesh. “Maybe the Prophet of the Slowly-Aging Flesh is more like it,” the great director humbly rejoined, his shock of white hair standing at...
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On flavor
I used to work as a copywriter at a third-wave coffee company. Before I was hired, I drank Starbucks, or whatever came out of the spattered pot on someone’s kitchen counter, its bitterness concealed with creamer and refined sugar. But since everything I wrote was to be printed on packages, cans,...
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The commodification of kink, part 2
Read Part 1. Last week, I kicked off my series about the commodification of kink with the high-profile criminal case of Ed Buck, the white gay Democratic donor convicted in 2021 of killing two black men, Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean. Buck’s case is certainly not the first to touch on BDSM, but…
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The commodification of kink, part 1
In 2017, when 26-year-old Gemmel Moore’s body was found in the West Hollywood apartment of small-time Democratic donor Ed Buck, his death was dismissed as an accidental drug overdose. Two years later, when 55-year-old Timothy Dean died by overdose in the same apartment, the police ignored the...
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On intelligence, part 1
When I was 8 or 9, I found a copy of John Steinbeck’s The Pearl on a shelf at my mom’s house. It was a cheap student paperback, brown but glossy, and small enough that you felt like you were reading something secret—a diary or a spell book. I took it with me to school and read it under the…
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GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY #14: on queer art
GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY is an advice series from an anonymous gay therapist who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth. Last time, we asked readers to submit their queer art questions to be answered by today’s guest, interdisciplinary artist and author Zach Ozma. All submissions were…
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On emotional risk
If you saw me writing on my vacation, no you didn’t. See you in April. As regular readers may have noticed, I do my best to distinguish SM from sex without separating them entirely. The reasons for this are both practical and political. The practical: you must know what you want to get what you...
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On self-involvement
I recently started watching Barry. The dark comedy HBO series stars Bill Hader as Barry Berkman, a hitman who catches the acting bug while visiting LA on a job. Though roughly half the show is set in and around Barry’s Studio City acting class—taught by third-rate Svengali Gene Cousineau (a very...
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On bondage
I don’t remember it very well, not even the fear. In exchange for allowing a man to tie me up where I sat on the ground, over the span of about sixty minutes, I was paid $200 (some of which went back to the dungeon as rent). My client didn’t make eye contact with me, didn’t even speak. He did…
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GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY: a new giveaway
I’ve known of interdisciplinary artist Zach Ozma for many years now. Friendly satellites back in Oakland, where I encountered him through our mutual friend, writer Emme Lund, Zach and I didn’t really get to talking until he was touring in New York to promote the Lambda-winning WE BOTH LAUGHED IN...
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David Davis 37, part 4
Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. John Berger said that glamour cannot exist “without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.” I will pretend, for just a little bit, that we’re helpless against this truism. That it is romantic, rather than implicating. In profiling legendary…
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On needles
Years ago, I came across an evopsych-y theory for OCD that got stuck in my brain. Certain obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors, the argument went, were of use in early human societies, meaning that those who expressed them had more opportunity to reproduce and thereby pass on that genetic...
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David Davis 37, Part 3
Read Part 1. Read Part 2. There are two sides to the Dick Cavett coin, but we’re capable of nuance here at DAVID, aren’t we? It suits our subject, too. “You invert things so beautifully,” actor Richard Burton, the star of Part 2 of this series, tells Cavett in 1980. Five years later, while...
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David Davis
I haven’t written about sex in a while. As I wrote a few months ago, I have been trying to think about it less: I’m sick of intellectualizing every emotional fluctuation and fantasy, every craving and mood. There are risks to this compulsive cataloging, itself a reaction, in part, to the modern...
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David Davis 37, Part 2
Read Part 1. Forgive me if you’ve read this spiel before, but 2020 was hard. I spent half of COVID-19’s inaugural year at my mom’s house in Northern California, helping her care for my older sister. On top of multi-day shifts with C (whose needs can often be intense), I was working full-time and...
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On (homo)sexual outlaws
When I thought to join everyone in ranking the books I read in 2021, my list reminded me that Maurice was among my favorites. E.M. Forster’s novel of homosexual love in Edwardian England, which was not published until after his death in 1970, is notable and unique for its happy ending, on which…
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David Davis 37, Part 1
Has someone ever made you feel as if you were the most interesting person in the world? Though most of us are neither Joe Exotic nor Raven Leilani, we enjoy, now and again, indulging in the fantasy that we might someday join their number, that we’re one lucky break away from real recognition—an…
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GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY #13: can you find the pain without the suffering?
GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY is an advice series from an anonymous gay therapist who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth. Submit your requests for advice to [email protected] and get 3 free months of BAD GAY. All subscription funds benefit rotating fundraisers and mutual aid projects…
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I know the value of our days
What it means to write about oneself online has changed dramatically in the 15 years since I’ve come of age. In high school, I was taught to regard my beloved white lady Confessional poets, who spilled the secrets of feminine domesticity, as gifted but undisciplined creative accidents, forces of...
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David Puddy
“Ahead of its time: Seinfeld’s chosen family queers straight friendship.” See? It’s almost too easy. The Salty headline is there for the writing, dangling like a dirt farmer dangles a carrot in front of a mule, as Jerry might put it. Judging solely by the way Twitter is curating my feed, it…
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On what art does, part 3
Read Part 1 and Part 2. In 2018, David Cronenberg said, “If movies disappeared overnight, I wouldn’t care. The cinema is not my life.” Tracing the advent of the internet, streaming services, and the Disneyfication of the moviegoing experience to one of its logical conclusions, Cronenberg went on…
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GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY
Whether they’re being asked for advice about unrequited love, dyke bed death, or romantic codependence, Bad Gay will, not uncommonly, prompt their readers with a gentle question: What is your commitment to suffering? (But only after doing the written version of what my dad used to resort to when…
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The boot
Why am I like this? I return to this question over and over in my fiction, and I wish I didn’t. I think it’s self-destructive. Why search for an explanation for every desire and fear unless you believe that one can be found? The urge implies the paradoxical belief in both one’s inherent wrongness...
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The Top Box
About four years ago, a boy dyke friend and I spent a lot of time complaining about something we called the Top Box. A phenomenon among the dykes and queer women of our Bay Area milieu, the Top Box was where other queers—cis and gender-conforming ones, specifically—put their trans or...
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On Gerri and Roman 💘
Gerri and Roman have some kind of sexual relationship—that much we can all agree on. Away from the prying eyes of her employers and his family/employers, they roleplay, she as a motherly abuser who scolds and berates, and he as the nasty little pervert that’s so richly deserving of her lip-curled...
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On "Titane" (2021)
Moviegoing is the the rare social event where you’re more likely to be communicating with noises than with words, a constraint that has a way of bringing the culture’s id into the theater with you, along with your popcorn and soda. How many times have you grimaced at a movie’s use of a fat,...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
sex and sensation
itsdavid.substack.com
HOSTED BY
David
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sex and sensation itsdavid.substack.com
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