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On Chinese gay dating apps, “fake profiles” are a constant concern: photos might have been altered or biometrics might have been fabricated. Offline, the person might barely resemble their profile. The lived experiences of Chinese gay men, however, show us that the fake is not always antithetical to the real. The fake, under certain circumstances, could enact material realities of its own. Gay socialites (同志名媛, tongzhi mingyuan) in urban China’s gay community are cases in point.
One aspect of my research among gay socialites focuses on the in-between zone of “real” and “unreal,” and how exactly the transformation from unreal to real can be achieved in a specific socio-technological context—contemporary urban China—in the digital age. I argue that we need to go beyond a binary of “real” and “unreal” to understand a social world where human actors are using digital technologies to create intermediate zones that are neither squarely real nor completely unreal, with the purpose of fulfilling their desires. These blurry, intermediate zones are liminal (Turner 1969), existing in the form of fantasies, constructed personas and lifestyles, and intoxicated states. It is through concrete human actions, and sometimes their unintended consequences, that liminal realities become full realities.
Fourteen years ago, in Coming of Age in Second Life, Tom Boellstorff (2008) argued that virtual worlds are in and of themselves cultural worlds distinct from the physical world, and that it is not only possible but suitable to study the culture of a virtual world with ethnography. Contesting the “false opposition” that fails to recognize that “the myriad ways that the online is real” and mistakenly assumes that “everything physical is real” (Boellstorff 2016, 387), Boellstorff states that “[c]hallenging the derealization of the digital is of pressing importance” (2016, 397). There have been consistent efforts in anthropology and related social sciences that echo or take up Boellstorff’s intervention. Anthropologists caution that design features and affordances of apps are deeply shaped by socio-cultural contexts, and that these new technologies bring about not only new possibilities, but also new risks and hierarchies in users’ lived realities (Batiste 2013; McGuire 2016; Edelman 2016). They pose a collective challenge to the misconception that the virtual and the actual are separated (McGuire 2016; Hu 2015). These pioneer studies have, from various perspectives and with meticulously constructed ethnographic details, highlighted the fact that the virtual and the actual are not only increasingly integrated, but on many occasions the virtual is real in every sense of the word.
Speaking more broadly, Lisa Messeri (2021) cogently points out that what she calls the “anthropologies of the unreal” have continuously expanded what counts as real in anthropological worldview by demonstrating how the seemingly “unreal,” such as illusions, dreams, digital technologies, intoxicated states of mind, and so on, are real or made real in specific socio-technological contexts (Boellstorff 2008; Mittermaier 2010; Messeri 2021; Zigon 2019; Pearce 2009).
In this case study, I use the term “liminal realities” to better conceptualize these in-between realities that were neither absolutely real nor undeniably fake. I draw on Victor Turner’s concept of liminality (1969) to highlight not only the transitional nature of these realities but also their uncertainty, malleability, and fluidity. Indeed, a gay socialite in China is not born; he is made.
The lives of the Chinese gay men I met during fieldwork provide a fruitful lens to understand the in-betweenness of life as a liminality between “real” and “unreal,” when boundaries, or thresholds, are not always clear or absolute. In this blog post, I will show how my interlocutors—mostly rural-to-urban migrant gay men—use digital technologies to create “fake” personas; that is, personas whose lifestyle, socio-economic status, and overall social status were different from their offline ones. In these urban Chinese men’s cases, however, “fake” is not the opposite of “real.” It was precisely through meticulously constructed “fakeness” that these men accumulate attention from China’s gay community, build a large fan base, and increase their social status. Eventually, this “fakeness” materialized and turned into tangible economic gains and social recognition. In other words, the fake became something undeniably real.
A “gay socialite” was one of the multiple identity categories created by urban Chinese gay men that placed gay men into an always changing hierarchical system according to their upbringing, education, class status, sexual practices, and more. My interlocutors described a gay socialite as someone who was young, good-looking, muscular, financially well-off, and fashionable. Most importantly, however, being a gay socialite was about enacting a particular lifestyle. Indeed, without a Louis Vuitton bag, or comparable luxury brand-name products, a good-looking, muscular, young gay man was considered a “wild chick” (乡下野鸡, xiang xia ye ji) ridiculed for their assumed rural, financially tight, and unsophisticated “nature” (本性, ben xing) despite their good looks. In contrast, hard labor was considered a foreign concept to gay socialites. A socialite must not work yet still have the financial means to travel around the world, stay in luxury hotels, and post their experiences on social media for fans to admire and/or evaluate.
Image 1: A well-known gay socialite posting on social media an image from a luxurious high-rise hotel room. The caption reads: “This is what a vacation is supposed to look like.” (Image screenshot by the author)
Image 2: On a different day, the same socialite posted a picture of a fancy breakfast at a luxurious hotel in Hangzhou, China. The caption reads: “A beautiful day begins with two Americanos.” (Image screenshot by the author)
During my fieldwork, however, I found out that most gay socialites actually came from humble backgrounds and that their financial position was not exactly as their social media posts suggested. Their luxurious lifestyle was, in fact, performed. It was common for gay socialites to rent a hotel room together. They took turns taking individual photos in each corner of the room and planned to post their pictures on social media at different times. During my fieldwork, I also learned that these gay men often borrowed brand-name products from others—from either individual people or companies specializing in brand-name rentals—to enhance their upscale persona on social media.
What’s the point, one might ask? Many socialites are looking for “gold masters” to look after them. In the gay lexicon, a “gold master” (金主, jin zhu) referred to a wealthy and usually older gay man who took care of younger and less monied gay men. However, in this gay social hierarchy, gold masters were not just looking to take care of any physically appealing gay men. Due to the equally intense hierarchical thinking among gold masters, and a social environment that measured a person’s social worth partly through the identity of their intimate partners, gold masters were looking for “worthy” (配得上，pei de shang) gay men—a position well fit by gay socialites. If a gold master ended up with a “nobody” (谁也不是, shei ye bu shi, translated literally as “who is nobody”) the reputation or social worth of the gold master would deteriorate as well. After all, the number of wealthy people in China grew to such an extent that some felt the pressure to differentiate themselves even further, pursuing a form of distinction from the so-called “vulgar new rich” (暴发户, bao fa hu, translated literally as “people who got rich as quickly as an explosion”) (Osburg 2020). During my fieldwork, gold masters and gay socialites were common couples. While the former gained face by having an attractive intimate partner, the latter eventually lived a material life that used to exist only in the virtual sphere.
There was more than one way the “fakeness” on social media could turn into material and financial realities. Not every gay socialite could find a gold master. Some took advantage of China’s vast “sunken market,” referring to the vast number of consumers who purchased cheaper products with their more meager incomes. Numbering in the billions, these individuals form the biggest market with the strongest potential one could hope for. By creating a fake persona, gay socialites accumulated a large number of followers from this market, many of whom could never keep a socialite like a gold master could or afford the socialite’s lifestyle for themselves. This is beside the point, however: most fans knew that the social media gay socialite life was often staged. Rather, these virtually mediated personas and lifestyles served not as truthful representation of another person’s reality, but snapshots of the fantasy of a good life, of an otherwise, of an alternative of a life (hopefully) yet to come. The power of fantasy was strong, leading to loyal fanfare, who would click the link and purchase whatever their idols recommend to them.
Brian, for example, was one of the most well-known gay socialites in China. Brian started his entrepreneurship and accumulated his fortune by selling affordable protein power on his social media accounts back in 2010s. When I returned to China for my dissertation fieldwork in 2019, Brian already owned a couple companies, multiple properties in China and Thailand, and was a major sponsor for one of Asia’s biggest dance parties in Bangkok. Even though Brian is still ridiculed by other gays for his highly photoshopped, “fake” pictures on social media, it would be hard to deny that the real and tangible changes in his life originated from purposefully constructed fakeness.
Indeed, the persona and lifestyle put on social media by these socialites might be “fake.” But “fakeness” is not always the opposite of realness. Mediated by virtuality, fakeness—understood in this context as a form of purposefully constructed liminal reality with the intention to craft a better life—is generative, productive, and performative; it brings new realities into existence. For Chinese gay socialites, many of whom migrated from rural China or lower-tier cities to the metropolis such as Shanghai, virtually mediated fakeness was their attempt—sometimes a very convenient and efficient one—to “make it” in China’s urban centers. In their cases, the fake, instead of standing in sharp opposition to the real, stood right beside the real. Here, the differences between the fake and the real were not quite ontological but temporal and conditional. The fake, in this sense, bears the potential to transition and transform into tangible and material realities that are no longer constrained in the virtual world. The fake, then, can be seen as a specific kind of real—the liminal real.
Batiste, Dominique Pierre. 2013. “‘0 Feet Away’: The Queer Cartography of French Gay Men’s Geo-Social Media Use.” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 22 (2): 111–32.Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.———. 2016. “For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real.” Current Anthropology 57 (4): 387–407.Edelman, Elijah Adiv. 2016. “‘This Is Where You Fall off My Map’: Trans-Spectrum Spatialities in Washington, DC, Safety, and the Refusal to Submit to Somatic Erasure.” Journal of Homosexuality 63 (3): 394–404.Horst, Heather A. 2013. “The Infrastructures of Mobile Media: Towards a Future Reseach Agenda.” Mobile Media and Communication 1 (1): 147–52.Hu, Tung-Hui. 2015. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.Ito, Mizuko. 2010. “Mobilizing the Imagination in Everyday Play: The Case of Japanese Media Mixes.” In Mashup Cultures, edited by S. Sonvilla-Weiss, 79–97. New York: Springer.McGuire, M. L. 2016. “The Problem of Technological Integration and Geosocial Cruising in Seoul.” New Media & Society, 1–15.Messeri, Lisa. 2021. “Realities of Illusion: Tracing an Anthropology of the Unreal from Torres Strait to Virtual Reality.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27 (2): 340–59.Mittermaier, Amira. 2010. Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.Nibbs, Faith. 2016. “Hmong Women on the Web: Transforming Power through Social Networking.” In Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women, edited by Chia Youyee Vang, Faith Nibbs, and Ma Vang, 169–94. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Okabe, Daisuke, and Mizuko Ito. 2006. “Everyday Contexts of Camera Phone Use: Steps toward Techno-Social Ethnographic Frameworks.” In Mobile Communication in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Views, Observations and Reflections, edited by Joachim R. Hoflich and Maren Hartmann, 79–102. Berlin: Frank and Timme.Osburg, John. 2020. “Consuming Belief: Luxury, Authenticity, and Chinese Patronage of Tibetan Buddhism in Contemporary China.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10 (1): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.1086/708547.Pearce, Celia. 2009. Communities of Play Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.Wallis, Cara. 2011. “Mobile Phones without Guarantees: The Promises of Technology and the Contingencies of Culture.” New Media & Society 13 (3): 471–85.———. 2013. Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones. New York and London: New York University Press.Zigon, Jarrett. 2019. A War on People: Drug Users Politics and A New Ethics of Community. Berkeley: University of California Press.
“If you’re going to write in a worthwhile way about something, you have to really understand why you care.”
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As a gay reader (and gay writer, myself), I take special notice when I come across a deal announcement for a queer novel written by an openly queer person. There are few enough of these books that I often find myself reading books destinated to disappoint me—young adult coming out stories, romantic comedies, women in their twenties and thirties having their first queer experience while already married to a man. These books are all valuable, and are often quite good, but I’m not their best reader. I want the uncomfortable nuances of queer life we don’t often find in queer media—even media created by queer people—thanks at least in part to the parameters set by cisgender, heterosexual people. I want, as I eventually realized, exactly what Richard Mirabella delivers in his stunning debut, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest.
Mirabella, a civil servant in his forties who lives in upstate New York, is a brave writer. Adult literary debuts are no stranger to the “ambitious” descriptor, but Mirabella’s novel is quiet. His prose—which could be described as plain or simple by someone who doesn’t understand its power—is controlled. Mirabella’s sentences ache in their simplicity.
Why does this stylistic choice work so well? Mirabella’s novel could easily be high drama. We have a dual timeline story of siblings—Justin and Willa—whose adolescence in a quiet, wintery town is permanently marred by violence committed by Nick, Justin’s older boyfriend. Readers watch this origin story unfold juxtaposed against the siblings decades later as they try to navigate their relationship as well as new ones. Willa, a nurse, creates dioramas. Justin lives with addiction as best he can. Does the violence that haunts this family change it forever?
That’s not the question this text answers. It’s too simple. Mirabella delicately portrays the after effects of trauma, and one of those traumas is a disturbing act of violence that defines the plot. But Mirabella also goes to that brave place: He shows readers the trauma of a mother who is quiet, even patient, in her homophobia. Of classroom bullies who are still around today. Of building a chosen family that disappoints. Of remembering—and not.
I was lucky enough to chat on the phone with Mirabella about these themes and his craft. We spent a good hour talking about depictions of dating violence in queer media (and how our community responds to it), healing from homophobia experienced both inside and outside of the home, and how it feels to wrestle with these hurts while Republicans wage war against queer people from a new angle—one where the sort of relationship Mirabella writes could be misconstrued as evidence that all queer people are predatory monsters.
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The Rumpus: Would you like to start us off by sharing what you think your book is about?
Richard Mirabella: I would say my novel is about siblings; in this case, Willa and Justin, and their relationship in youth and adulthood. That relationship has been affected by violence that the brother, Justin, experienced as a teenager. I also think it’s about the failure of a family to care for their queer child whose pain is inconvenient to them.
Rumpus: We have chosen families in this book who both heal and disappoint us.
Mirabella: Yeah, I’m actually glad you said disappointing. Nothing in life is perfect and Justin has found kind of a lovely little family but . . .
Rumpus: But?
Mirabella: I’m gonna slow down a little bit and just say: I wanted to give them to him. It’s kind of a gift. [But] they’re not magical. They’re just people. There are lovely moments between all of them where they’re trying but failing.
Rumpus: Do you think straight people and queer people will have different reactions to these failures?
Mirabella: It really depends on the person. Justin’s gonna sink all of them—he’s taking them all down with him. Justin is a victim of heterosexist, homophobic abuse. The violence that happens to him is a direct reaction to that. He is failed by his chosen family too. I don’t know if straight people will get that. I want people to read it and get whatever they get from it, but I think queer people will immediately see and understand it.
Rumpus: Why do you think it works so well to have Nick [Justin’s older boyfriend] missing in the adult narrative?
Mirabella: I started writing this book and I thought, I’m gonna write like a Shirley Jackson novel. You know, the sort of literary novel that is haunted or has something unreal or supernatural about it. There were elements that I cut from it. But I think Nick is still a ghost and haunts the novel in a lot of ways. Maybe being haunted is just feeling something crooked nearby. In this book, that’s Nick. Justin doesn’t know what happened or where he is. To me, that’s so interesting, to have this spirit hovering over you.
Rumpus: Can you say more about your idea of it being a haunted literary novel?
Mirabella: I’m really fascinated by strange fiction, weird fiction. This novel was inspired by a Grimm’s fairytale, called “Brother and Sister” or “Little Brother and Little Sister,” where the brother is transformed into a fawn. And the sister vows to care for him.
It made me think a little bit about being transformed by something that happens to you, something that changes you in a way that is disruptive to you. Perhaps destructive even to other people in your life.
I think there are a few hauntings in this book. Nick is haunting Justin. Justin’s experiences of violence are haunting him. The feelings of fear. I think Willa is haunted by Justin in different ways—not knowing what to do or how to care for him. I think Justin is haunted by men in general. At one of my favorite moments in the book, Justin has this sort of surreal encounter in the middle of the night. That was a surprise when I wrote it, and it made me realize how haunted Justin is just by manhood.
Rumpus: Do you feel like men in this book are haunted by toxic masculinity?
Mirabella: I have to say yes because, I mean, we all are. We’re swimming in the ocean of patriarchy at all times. So yeah, absolutely.
Rumpus: Can you talk to me a little bit about your process of deciding to have dual timelines for adolescence and adulthood? Were you always hoping to use this method to show the aftermath of trauma?
Mirabella: That’s always what I wanted this book to be about, but I just didn’t know how it would play out. At first it was linear and then it sort of shattered and broke apart a little bit more. I wanted to write about a brother and sister, and so I started writing about them dealing with something in adulthood, but I wasn’t sure of what.
I’m really interested in what happens after something bad. So yeah, it was important for me to show the far reaching effects of trauma and of violence in people’s lives. I think it’s less interesting to me to just focus on one person. So I started writing about Willa and Justin coming back into her life. It kind of grew out of going back to their childhood to work towards whatever it was that happened to them.
Rumpus: What went into your decision to have this specific age gap in this book? Did their ages or the degree of the age gap ever change while writing?
Mirabella: My drafts are all hugely different from each other. So in earlier drafts, Nick was a side character associated with an older person that both Nick and Justin were sort of in a relationship with—like a friendship and a sexual relationship. And I just realized the other person wasn’t very interesting.
I liked Nick more. I thought Nick was more interesting, and I also thought he was frightening, a little bit. In then the next draft he became the focus rather than this other character, who eventually just went away.
Rumpus: Why do you think it’s valuable or interesting to write a character that’s a little scary to the writer?
Mirabella: It’s more interesting to write about that. Nick represents something that I’ve always struggled with, which is masculinity. You know, he’s toxic. And you know, he’s a gay person. He won’t accept that about himself. When I think about him I think of somebody who cannot accept himself. He also criticizes what he sees as signals of Justin’s queerness; the way he holds himself, the music he chooses when they go to the CD store. He’s always telling Justin: The world’s gonna eat you up, basically.
I’ve tried writing Nick for a long time. The muscle dude I would have avoided in my youth, who may have approached me in my youth, and who I was attracted to, but terrified of. I think my early fear of men comes out in writing Nick.
Rumpus: When I think about Justin’s teenage years, I think about him being bullied by his peers, and I think about him on the internet. A lot of readers today will relate to both the bullying and going online—including meeting people online—as the escape. What made you include the internet in this way? Do you feel the presence of the internet establishes readers in a very contemporary sort of narrative?
Mirabella: You know, the internet was pretty new when I when I was a teenager. But at this point, in the book? It’s not much later on. And I was thinking about how even if at that point I knew someone else was gay in my high school, we couldn’t speak to each other about it. That would have been dangerous.
I haven’t been in high school in an extremely long time, so I don’t know what it’s like now. I feel it’s probably a lot more open. But I wanted to include a situation where Justin had seen Nick in school, knew who he was, but they never spoke to each other. What created the opportunity for them to speak to each other was the internet. Here was this website where Justin could see: Oh, this person is gay. I didn’t know that! And could reach out to him.
Rumpus: That’s so interesting. It feels notable to me that while there isn’t a significant age difference between Justin and Nick, their lives feel so different because Nick is out of high school.
Mirabella: Nick has the freedom that Justin doesn’t yet possess. Nick sort of gives Justin a hard time about that too: Oh, why do you have to listen to your mother? They’re only a couple of years apart in age and I like the idea that Nick has a freedom that Justin doesn’t.
Rumpus: Do you feel the story would be very different if Justin and Nick had met when they were the same age? Or if their age difference was larger, as tends to be how age gap couples are portrayed in media?
Mirabella: In an earlier draft, Nick was older. What worried me was that the book would become about that topic; a young queer person being [in a relationship with] an older queer person. But the book is not really about that.
I have to say, I struggled with that for a little while. Honestly, when I started writing more about Nick, I liked his sort of youthful toughness. Justin is kind of a punk kid, but he’s also very soft.
Rumpus: Justin faces violence and harm from a number of people in this book, including, eventually, Nick. What went into the decision to have Justin’s partner be the one to ultimately hurt him, versus, say, a stranger or even a hate crime?
Mirabella: It’s very bleak, isn’t it? I think because it broke my heart, I had to write it. It wasn’t an intellectual choice. It was more about somebody feeling like they could trust a person and then slowly realizing they actually don’t have what they thought they had. They don’t have protection.
Maybe it’s trying to say we have ourselves and we have to find strength in ourselves. We have to do the best we can to love ourselves. I think, in youth, especially at Justin’s age—sixteen, seventeen—it’s very hard to feel that self-love. I think especially as a queer teen, it was hard for me to find that love inside for myself. I absolutely was looking for it outside.
Rumpus: Did you ever have concerns that queer people would read the depictions of same-sex abuse and violence in this book and see it as hurting the “cause” or ruin some sanitized version of queer people?
Mirabella: I lost sleep over that honestly. I think what’s important to me as a writer is to tell the truth about the world as best as I can. And that includes allowing queer people to be imperfect, like all other human beings. You know, writing shining examples of queerness is not gonna change the minds of people who already hate us. I think the realities of our lives don’t matter at all to those people who want to erase and criminalize us.
As far as other queer people, I understand that some queer people may be angry if they read something like this, about a queer person enacting violence on another queer person. But that just goes back to what I said. It’s a reality of our world. And I think there are other more nurturing relationships in the novel. So I think it shows a spectrum, but it is a worry of mine, of course.
Rumpus: Justin and Willa’s mother Grace embodies a sort of quiet homophobia we don’t often see portrayed in media. Do you think some readers, who might see themselves as accepting or even as allies, might recognize themselves in Grace? Like “Oh, I’m not actually as supportive or understanding as I thought I was?”
Mirabella: You know, I didn’t set out to write this novel with that in mind, but while I was writing the novel, I read the book Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and its Consequences by Sarah Schulman. It affected me so deeply (as does most of her work) and it really helped me shape the novel in a lot of ways.
In retrospect, I would hope somebody who perhaps has a queer child and doesn’t necessarily know how to handle that would read this and see the character of Grace—who I think is just unsure about Justin, she doesn’t understand him, doesn’t know what to do with him—and understand that perhaps if she showed some understanding, things would have gone differently for him.
Grace feels she has to do something, where [instead] she could just love and accept him. His troubles in his teen years were brought on by a society that doesn’t accept who Justin is, even though he accepts himself.
Rumpus: Grace fails Justin (and Willa) both when they’re adolescents and when they’re adults, though in different ways. Do you feel that if she was a more accepting or more nurturing parent, the whole plot of the book would be different?
Mirabella: To be honest, no, because it’s not just Grace. It’s the world. I hate to be so black and white about it, but . . . Obviously Grace is homophobic. But I don’t think she is nakedly homophobic. I think it’s a matter of ignorance on her part. What Justin faces in life, and even in school is a lot more intense and naked on the surface. And I think that is a catalyst for what happens later in the novel. I think even aside from Grace, he would be on that path.
Rumpus: We know book bans and censorship are bad. Why do you think it’s important that all young people have access to books by and about queer people?
Mirabella: We’re part of humanity, number one. I think it’s important, not just for queer children to read about themselves, but for other children to read about the spectrum of experience. It’s a part of life. And we want children to understand the world. That’s why they’re in school.
Rumpus: What do you think about the ongoing Republican rallying cries trying to paint queer people as predatory, manipulative, or somehow inherently obscene or inappropriate?
Mirabella: Republicans are always talking about personal freedom. And yet. You know, if they really believed in that freedom, they would allow people’s families to make these decisions. If a family is like, No, I don’t want you to read this, you’re too young, then that’s that family. They can do that (and I believe they’re stifling their children).
I grew up in a house where [the thinking was], You want to read this? Okay, go ahead, read it and we’ll talk about it. Parents don’t want to talk to their children, they’re uncomfortable talking to their children about the realities of the world. They wanna ban books so that other people can’t read them. It’s infuriating. I think a lot of it is that they have a particular vision of the world—which I think is largely white cis and hetero—and so anything that doesn’t fit into that mold is dangerous. Period.
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Author photo by Danielle Stephens
Robyn. Photograph by Lewis Chaplin. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0.
This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined.
Someone I recently kissed sends me a PDF of a rare, out-of-print book by John Ashbery. The fragment I tug from Fragment: “Seen from inside all is / abruptness. As though to get out your eye / sharpens and sharpens these particulars; no / longer visible, they breathe in multicolored / parentheses the way love in short periods / puts everything out of focus, coming and going.” It’s been a while since I’ve been in love, and, most of the time, the idea fatigues me: I can see the end before anything’s begun. But these lines make my clarity of vision briefly undesirable; I miss the blur.
When I was nineteen, an anxious wallflower at my first literary party, Ashbery barked at me to fetch him a gin and tonic. Now these lines of his wind back the tape to adolescence: when everything is seen from inside even as the self strains outward and time exits its usual shapes and the imagination knows no end. Teenagers make love and ontology anew. I remember the smell of wet grass on long night walks with the first girl I loved. The matching pale green stains on our white sneakers. Our long hair mingling, dark brown and red, in the stairwell, the party we’d just left still loud down the hall. That this was the most surprising thing that had ever happened to my nineteen-year-old body, though it was also the culmination of months of cloaked flirting as well as—it seemed—the culmination of every desire ever. Yet I also glimpsed how much more wanting there was to do.
Since I am time-traveling back to that relationship, my first queer one, which careened to a slow disintegration I didn’t see coming, I am listening to “Hang With Me,” Robyn’s dance-pop love song that forbids love. “Will you tell me once again / how we’re gonna be just friends?” she begins, a plea that morphs into command in the chorus: “Just don’t fall recklessly, headlessly in love with me.” This is the brinkmanship common to teenagers and lovers, feigning control over feelings.
“And if you do me right, I’m gonna do right by you,” Robyn sings before she gets to that other condition, the one that gives the song its title: if you don’t fall in love with me, you can hang with me. These are the stipulations of a contract that’s never going to work. It’s clear from the ecstatic production and obsessive insistence that Robyn herself is already in love. And in her demands, I hear seduction, the kind that plays out when you’re already in bed with someone, whispering “we can’t” while you do.
Wild requests, wild promises, nothing that can be kept—going as it comes. The “heartbreak, blissfully painful and insanity” that Robyn is worried about speeds toward her. It strikes me that this song is, like me, revisiting adolescent passions from a distance. The time travel is imperfect. “Heartbreak” is the tell. For falling in love to become possible, I’ll have to forget that heartbreak is equally possible, but the anticipation of pain worms into love that hasn’t yet earned the name.
The internet reveals that “Hang With Me” hadn’t yet been released during the short period of love I’ve just described. At first, I am sure that there’s a mistake. The song is overlaid on so many memories of her. But it seems I made a sequential connection simultaneous. At some point that I don’t remember, I heard this song and remembered my ex, and then, at Ashbery’s instigation, I remembered the song and the story together. Now that I’ve written this down, they’ll never be separate. Such a teenage word, never. Like: Don’t worry, I’ll never fall in love with you.
Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award.
Maggie Millner. Photograph by Sarah Wagner Miller.
It’s easy to feel happy for a friend who has suddenly, and seemingly irrevocably, fallen in love. It’s just as easy to wonder, privately, if they might, one day, fall out of it. Love stories, like rhymes, are initially generative. Both begin with the promise of infinite possibility: the couple—and the couplet—could go anywhere! But anywhere always winds up being somewhere, and that somewhere is very often a dead end.
Couplets, Maggie Millner’s rhapsodic debut, is officially described as a novel in verse, but the poems that comprise it buck constantly against their generic container. Some are in prose, others are in rhyme and meter, and all are spoken by a young woman straddling two relationships and a shifting sense of self. Affair narratives are all about reversed chronologies: they end where love begins. But when the speaker leaves her long-term boyfriend for a first-time girlfriend, her timelines get all mixed up: she becomes a “conduit / between them: a conversation they conducted / with my mouth.”
Couplets is preoccupied by triangulations. The speaker is intensely jealous of her new girlfriend’s other girlfriend, a novelist who every other weekend also has a “tryst” with a married hedge fund manager and his lover, who is a novelist, too. When he ejaculates into one of the novelists, the other pretends that she is a voyeur, peering in on her competitor, the hedge fund manager’s wife. Meanwhile, the protagonist, a poet, finds that her own love triangle produces shifting meaning. She and her lovers are bound together, but she can’t seem to harness them. “Our own story made no sense / to me and twisted up whenever I tried / writing it.”
At the end of January, Maggie and I spoke over Zoom about the language that attends love and the desires that animate the life of any writer, who will always find herself, no matter the genre, struggling between the impulse to act and the compulsion to self-analyze.
INTERVIEWER
Was there a moment when it suddenly became clear to you that you were writing a book, as opposed to a series of poems?
MILLNER
I hadnt imagined writing a single, book-length narrative poem. When we learn to write poems, we usually learn to write these very small, discrete lyric objects, and so I had always imagined that my first book would be a collection of things that I had foraged from various years of my life. But because I had two year-long fellowships, the ostensible goal of which were to write a book, I was able to be more ambitious. The momentum of this particular poetic form took hold, and I followed it until I had the bulk of a manuscript. Then I realized the prose sections also belonged in it—that the verse needed to be aerated.
INTERVIEWER
What was missing in the couplet form that the prose was able to provide?
MILLNER
There’s a relentlessness to writing in rhyming couples that for the reader can be exhausting and claustrophobic. I was concerned about the lack of formal surprise. But also, life has formal qualities, and a relationship model is a formal question. The book was also very much about putting things in dialectical relation to each other, so I realized that there needed to be some other secondary mode or interlocutor.
INTERVIEWER
The title of the book, Couplets, is a pun, but I also felt it to be a kind of joke, because the couples keep being interrupted by the intrusion of third parties: the speaker’s girlfriend’s girlfriend and the speaker’s ex. I wonder if you find this third necessary in matters of love—if the two depend on it.
MILLNER
Three is a more interesting number than two. There’s a romance to the love triangle. There’s an inherent asymmetry, a more volatile set of relationships. Our desires are most manifest when we’re being pulled in two directions, when there are disparate, orthogonal, or even oppositional forces inside us. Those are the moments when complex self-knowledge happens. The times when you have to prioritize multiple, competing selves lead to personal transformation, I think.
I was thinking of Aristophanes’ idea about the source of romantic love: that people were originally conjoined and then split in half, so we’re doomed to wander the earth until we find our missing counterpart, at which point we become complete. His myth actually makes a provision for gay couples, but it unfolds only within a strictly binary gender system, and only within the premise that there’s a single lasting partner for each of us. If you depart from the idea that the couple is the default, preordained arrangement, suddenly the constructed dimensions of relational structures start to open up. The book’s jacket copy says something about coming out: one woman’s coming-out, coming undone. But I do think those two things are discrete. The consummation of queer desire is a realization that anticipates a later realization, which is that relationships are not inherently meant to be durable.
INTERVIEWER
In Couplets, the only mention of coming out is immediately related to climaxing. Was it important to you to describe this supposedly outward and public-facing process as something very intimate?
MILLNER
The speaker is in part resistant to that climactic, self-actualizing narrative because she is also very reluctant to renounce her previous relationship. If we code her as stepping into some presupposed fate, it turns her previous life into a pretext for this other, truer moment. The cultural incentives to read things that way are both very appealing and very abundant. But the reality is that she still feels real love for her ex, which doesn’t neatly coexist with the role that she is stepping into; the relationship with her ex has an integrity that this book wants to honor. I don’t feel that time is teleological and progressive: that we’re always heading somewhere, but we’re not there yet. I believe that everyone has many lives.
INTERVIEWER
Much of the story of these two couples takes place in a rapidly gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the highly specific proper nouns that anchor your speaker to a sense of place and social milieu aren’t easy to square in verse. Eckhaus Latta, Saraghina: I find them to be rather ugly words. Why did you include them?
MILLNER
Through this new relationship, the speaker is stepping into an identity, but she’s also stepping into a social class and milieu that is not entirely comfortable to her, where queerness is the opposite of marginal, and where being a person in an alternative relationship model is actually quite common. She is hyper-attentive to the signifiers that attend this world, which she too finds ugly (and alluring). On the one hand, she longs to be naturalized into it, but on the other, there is also this inevitable friction between the person she knows herself to be within the social contexts that she has occupied, and the world that these proper nouns stand in for. Part of why this isn’t a more triumphant coming out story has to do with the fact that queer life, within the circles she’s in, doesn’t attract public shame. On the contrary, there’s social cachet in stepping into that identity. Which is not to elide the homophobia and queerphobia that continue to dominate most spaces in this country, or the elders and activists who have made communities like this one possible. But for the speaker, there’s something disingenuous about claiming her queerness only as a socially marginal identity.
INTERVIEWER
Toward the very end of the book, the narrator declares that in verse, as opposed to in prose, there are “barely any characters at all.” What do you think about the differences between character as it can be constructed in prose versus poetry?
MILLNER
As contemporary readers of poetry, we often assume that the lyric “I” is the writing self, which does seem to preclude characterization, because that “I” is seen as pointing to a nonfictional human figure. But we’re wrong when we make the assumption that the “I” and the self are coextensive, even in poems that seem totally autobiographical. I want to be taken seriously as a maker of artifice, and I’m interested in inviting my readers away from that assumption, while also maintaining a sense of intimate disclosure, which we typically associate with the lyric poem.
INTERVIEWER
The book is classified as “a novel in verse,” and your speaker is, for a period, intensely jealous of her girlfriend’s girlfriend, who is a novelist. Although she never says so outright, you get the sense that she fears the story this novelist will make of her love for the speaker’s girlfriend will be more compelling than the story the speaker can make in verse. Which makes me wonder, how do you feel about novels and novelists?
MILLNER
There might be more references to novelists in the book than to poets, which is reflective of the speaker’s taste and of a desire to be maximally immersed in experiences of every aesthetic kind. Novels provide that exhaustive immersion. It’s not that poems don’t, but poetry is more condensed and demanding and doesn’t act on attention the way that novelistic prose acts on attention. There’s a passivity and submissiveness that the reader of a novel gets to enjoy. The reader of poetry is invited to focus on granular particulate dimensions language—it’s a less submissive experience, or at least a less passive one.
As a poet, I have an inner conflict around the desire to write a novel while being a poet. I feel pulled in two different directions: I have a strong affinity for narrative, characterization, and durational storytelling, but it’s very hard for me to imagine turning off the poetic apparatus. The speaker is entertaining the possibility of being otherwise, of existing in a slightly different shape. She wonders if her life might be radically different if she could find a form that better reflects what’s going on with her.
INTERVIEWER
The couple form is said to be infinitely transformative, and yet many experience it as a restriction. The same can be said of rhyme and meter. On the one hand, it produces infinite meaning; on the other, it can feel laden with rules. How do you feel about living and working within these two forms?
MILLNER
A foundational belief that undergirds this book is that one way to feel free, to experience agency within the repressive systems that govern our lives, is to historicize and try to understand the material conditions through which they came to be. The idea that to write in free verse is an exercise in unmediated personal expression presupposes so many things about what that form does. The shift away from rhyme and meter is extremely recent relative to literary history; the phrase “free verse” is only a century and a half old. It’s also somewhat oxymoronic; to me, as soon as anything becomes compulsory—as soon as it’s presented as the only available option—it doesn’t make much sense to attach the adjective free to it. Contemporary poets are generally expected, with the consensus of the commercial and academic institutions, to write in ways that sound more like speech than like oldfangled verse forms. So the idea that writing in an inherited form is a deviation from the default is, ironically, a basically presentist idea. Still, if radical forms are those that stage a departure from the status quo, we live in a time when using rhyme and meter can actually qualify. I would argue that they can even take on a new political charge when used by people historically excluded from the institutions that propagated them.
I feel similarly vexed about relationship structures. I do feel there is something amazing and irreplicable about the experience of being in a couple. And I don’t think that experience is only a cultural production—there’s something genuinely special that can happen between two individuals. Moments of intimacy with one other person have been the most transformative, spiritual moments of my life. The speaker of Couplets is magnetized toward those experiences. They’re real, they’re important, and they’re beautiful—they’re what it’s all about. But through those experiences, she finds herself unwittingly signed up for a certain kind of partnership—caught in a default she didn’t necessarily choose.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel as if the couplet is a flawed form that we have to reinvent, to the extent that reinvention is possible? Or do you believe that the couple is an ideal form that is tarnished by lived reality?
MILLNER
I think the issue is not with the structure of the couple, but with the telos of any relationship being eternity—the idea that the couple is a form you only step into and never out of. There is something exalted about the experience that two individuals can have with each other. Suddenly, you’re not really an individual, which is the profundity that you experience in the presence of an other. I feel very attached to that. But this book is an experiment in thinking through the question, What if staying together wasn’t the tacit objective of every relationship? In Poetic Closure, Barbara Herrnstein Smith writes that the couplet is a unit that enacts closure. Every two lines, there’s resolution. And so there’s a propulsive momentum to the form, but it also pretends to arrive at closure over, and over, and over again. There’s an assumption that the couple is a closed container, but the couplet unravels that assumption through repetition.
INTERVIEWER
I was struck by how resistant your speaker is to the endings that might otherwise be imposed upon her; she leaves her boyfriend but feels herself conducting his mannerisms in her relationship with her girlfriend, so that the two meet in her. Why were you drawn to that choreography, which seems impossible for a book about couples, written in couplets?
MILLNER
On the one hand, we are all familiar with the story of falling in love—we all know how it can go. And at the same time, we don’t, as a culture, have many urtexts about voluntary breakups, because divorce only stopped being taboo, like, yesterday. The idea that a marriage is composed of two subjects who are equally entitled to an experience of self-actualization is not very old—even younger than free verse! If we look at our great foundational texts, especially within the Western canon, relationships end nonconsensually, either by death or by some other nonmutual event.
There’s a reason that literature is still being written about the fundamental question of how to know when a relationship is over, even if you still have an attachment to that person. We don’t have cultural scripts for those questions, and the way they are legislated is still retrograde and dependent on conservative notions of the sanctity of the nuclear family. The speaker of my book is very much reckoning with the residues of historical expectations of what women owe men. There’s a great temptation on the part of women in hetero partnerships to feel an outsized sense of responsibility for their demise.
Maya Binyam is a contributing editor of the Review.
Whiptail Lizard | Come night, burrowed in the same hole, they curl, beat to beat. When one is in estrus, the other jaws her abdomen, her neck. Rings her, touching cloaca to cloaca. No gametes are exchanged—the offspring will be clones of the mother—but they are nonetheless in co-creation. The one in estrus receives—a blessing, perhaps. A promise of support. Reason to begin the work of reproduction. A whiptail kept from her female[1] mate—for they are mates, without question—will hatch only a third as many young. A day later, even two, the bite marks remain, visible on her skin.
The first time I talked to my family about queerness, I spoke only about mice.
I was maybe thirteen, on the beach near my childhood home with my mother and her cousins. They were talking about the serenity of the beaches and the tourists who disrupted that serenity. A common topic of conversation, which I mostly ignored, until one of my mother’s cousins mentioned that some tourists came specifically to our beach—from all over the country—to spend a few days in the surf with people like them.
“Like them?” I said.
“Gay.”
I felt a thrill at the word. Not the thrill of recognition, but the thrill of the unknown, even the forbidden. As the conversation moved on, I considered how I might direct it back to that word, that titillating subject. My options were limited. I’d never met a queer person. None of the books I’d read were queer. I knew exactly one thing about homosexuality—When overcrowded, I said finally, mice turned homosexual.
I don’t remember where I’d learned this. As a teenager, I was always reading about animals, watching television about animals, spouting animal facts at the dinner table. Maybe I’d read about those mice or heard about them on Zooventure.
I didn’t know I was referencing a 1962 publication by John B. Calhoun, in which homosexuality—along with increases in aggression, infant mortality, and anti-sociality—was considered indicative of social collapse. I understood my statement as a defense of queerness: queerness as an altruistic act, absenting oneself from reproduction, a practical response to a crowded world.
I didn’t connect the mice with myself, hadn’t begun to think of myself as queer. At the time, those mice were the only model for queerness I had.
House Mouse | She ignores the courtship and provocations of male mice, but even near the end of her life, having raised her pups to self-sufficiency alone, she pauses when she encounters—amid the shavings and the pellet food and her own waste—the urine of another female. She takes her time, attempting through scent and moisture to pinpoint the location and readiness of this nearby mouse. If she finds her, she will mount her to suggest they nest together, raise future pups as a couple. She is a mutant, the successful deletion of her FucM gene signaled by her agouti coat. After her death (anesthesia and beheading) her brain will be sectioned, stained, and searched for an answer to one question—how did desire for a female mate survive the gene deletion when desire for a male mate did not?
In college I kept them in a folder on my desktop. The PDFs were sorted by scientific name—Larus argentatus, Thalassoma bifasciatum, Rattus norvegicus. Calhoun’s mouse observations. A description of female co-parenting in owls as an “Abnormal and Maladaptive Behavior in Captive Raptors.” An article observing that captive white ibises exposed to high levels of mercury became more likely to choose same-sex mates. An article detailing the activities of husbandry scientists who locked rams in a stanchion and presented them with male “receivers” (males frequently mounted by other males) and female sheep, killing rams who showed interest only in males to remove “dud studs” from the gene pool. An article from 1987 titled “A Note on the Apparent Lowering of Moral Standards in the Lepidoptera,” which described mature male Mazarine butterflies approaching and mating with male butterflies newly emerged from chrysalis, grasping the new male with their clasper and touching abdomen tip to abdomen tip before his wings were dry. The articles skewed toward vertebrates and, within vertebrates, toward mammals and birds. This reflected both the skew of research on same-sex animal pairs, and my own preoccupation.
I told only one person about these articles, a stranger at the manatee health checks in Crystal River, Florida. She was working the nets, spent her hours waist-deep in muddy water, trapping manatees and beaching them, ensuring the capture didn’t harm them. I was on the veterinary side with the faculty advisor overseeing my undergraduate thesis. I squatted in front of each manatee, counted their breaths. If the manatee went more than forty-five seconds without a breath, I splashed their nose with a cup of water to trigger the surfacing response, watched the nostril plugs retreat as the manatee sucked in air, a low roar.
I had noticed her quick-dry khaki shorts, the bunch of her shoulders, her competence with the nets, and so when we were both on break, eating granola bars in the shade of a canopy tent, I tried talking to her about queerness. I told her that seagulls exposed to DDT were more likely to wind up in lesbian pairs, that atrazine disrupted endocrine functioning in frogs, causing male frogs to have lower levels of testosterone and to take male partners.
She gave a little shrug. She said, “Manatees are gay.”
“Yeah,” I said, though I hadn’t known this, hadn’t yet encountered the articles describing male manatees nuzzling each other, mouthing each other’s genitals, thrusting against each other, penises erect, as they sink from the water’s surface into the mud, uttering snort-chirps upon ejaculation.
She said, “I’m gay.”
I had, I realized, known this.
“Whatever’s in the water, we’re getting it, too,” she said. Her tone was flat, almost a shrug, but I thrilled at the pronoun. On that sweltering summer day, as manatees were dragged up the beaches for weighing and stool sampling and blood draws, I received the word we as an offer of community. I, too, might have been poisoned to queerness. We lived in a toxic world.
Razorbill | When she returns to the arena after feeding, the waiting razorbill runs toward her, a repeated squawk signaling intentions, which the returning female can accept or decline. The returned razorbill lifts her chest, extends her wings, an invitation. The two hook necks, bodies close, then one mounts the other. The returned razorbill does not lift her tail. The other does not insist she lift her tail. They are both paired. Each has an egg secure in a nest in the colony, brooded now by their mates. What matters isn’t the tail-lift, the cloacal kiss, but the mounting and the squawks that advertise the mounting, the show of it which benefits them both, insisting to the ones packed on the rock sheer, beaks to the sky, heads swiveling to attend to the activities of the arena, that they both belong.
By grad school I had put lesbian seagulls and effeminate frogs behind me. I understood stories about homosexuality in animals to be the terrain of conservative pundits and right-wingers on social media. Besides, I no longer needed those stories. I was sunk deep in the pleasures of a close friendship, an agape I believed the province solely of humans.
I called her my best friend, a label that made our connection legible to everyone except myself. We spent hours together in cafes and city parks, read books side-by-side. We took a summer road trip together, sharing a tent. One night, we camped just off the road in a coniferous forest where bats crowded the evening sky. There, she said she sometimes wished she were queer, which surprised me. I said I thought I was queer, which surprised her. The female bats calling above us were pair-bonded. In these nonsexual relationships, they share food, sometimes share a roost, grooming and huddling together. Animal behaviorists call these partnerships. They last five to ten years. We shared food, sometimes shared a roost, huddled together that summer, never had sex. We called it friendship, though at times I felt frustrated by the word and would propose that we change it—to partner, to sister. The last time I proposed this—after it had become clear that my desire for closeness, for contact, outpaced hers—she said, “I can only ever be a friend to you.” She said this as though it settled things, but the word remained opaque to me. In an attempt to understand it, I asked my housemates, my friends, my colleagues what was the difference between a friendship and a partnership. Sex, most of them said. But other than sex? I asked.
I charted their responses in a notebook—friendship on the left, partnership on the right. Beneath were categories: time spent together (friendship, episodic; partnership, continuous), traveling to see each other (friendship, rarely; partnership, often), help in medical emergencies (both), physical intimacy (friendship—hugs, sex possible but frowned upon; partnership—sex), celebration of successes (both), good conversations (both), and mutual love (both).
I sent her the chart, asked for revisions, comments, edits. This didn’t fix anything. Our friendship ended soon after, and for a time I wondered if it might have lasted if I’d just had better words—the word, or what passes for a word among bats, that brown bats use to describe their bonds; the word queer as I understand it now, as an orientation not about sex but about intimacy; a word for family that doesn’t mean blood.
I no longer think a lack of language alone spelled the ending. Rather, it signified a larger lack—my lack of experience and understanding of human relationship patterns. I moved, after the friendship ended, toward sex as a marker of romance, and toward romance as a sign of closeness. I created relationships that fell clearly to one side of my chart. I updated the chart occasionally, adding a row, adjusting a definition. I remember feeling, each time I worked at it, hopeful and productive, as though I were finally getting somewhere, as though with enough time and data points, if I worked with real precision, I could chart a taxonomy of love, as I’d once charted a taxonomy of cetaceans.
Bottlenose Dolphin | His species does not wuzzle, so when the spinner dolphins begin—the roil of water, the clicking which speeds as they move faster, the light shattered by the waves the pod creates, he approaches with his partner of thirty-two years. Their partnership began in adolescence. Their sex, then a daily and gymnastic undertaking, has long since subsided to an infrequent and brisk occurrence. The wuzzle offers them the stimulation of that old adolescent pod. They notice a small spinner at the wuzzle’s periphery and swim to the spinner, one on each side. His partner, soft-eyed, sinks slowly, log-like, a seduction the spinner refuses with a tail kick. The bottlenose swims upside down, locates the spinner’s slit, sends clicks, a genital buzz, acoustic foreplay. He pokes the spinner’s slit with his beak. The spinner shifts away, toward the wuzzle. His partner cuts in front, shifting the spinner up toward the surface. Each breathes. He and his partner become erect at the same time, taking turns rubbing against the spinner, the spinner dodging first up again to the water’s surface, then deeper, deeper, an attempted avoidance, but the two bottlenose dolphins can’t be avoided. They are far from the wuzzle now. The spinner emits pulsed squeaks. His partner nudges his beak into the spinner’s slit and swims forward, propelling the spinner. The spinner speeds up to break contact, but the bottlenose cuts in front, forces the spinner low, low in the water near to the bank of sand. His partner penetrates the spinner’s blowhole—a second, less than a second, then the spinner escapes in a scatter of sand, and the two of them are left alone. His partner beaks his slit and they swim until he tires of it, spins belly-up to detach, surfaces, watches languid as his partner, erect again, drags his penis through the sand.
For most animals, queer sex is loud. Female Kob antelopes whistle to other females. Female koalas bellow. Female coupled red foxes gekker—mouths wide open, teeth nearly touching, paws on each other’s chests, throats working around a sound somewhere between a keen and desperate laughter. Female gray foxes snirk. I was silent. Silent during sex, a silence from which my first partner attempted to coax me with direct questions and frequent check-ins, a silence from which I tried to coax myself, reading books for humans—books on sex with women, on sexual communication, on liberated sex, on healing sex, books which didn’t help.
Having exhausted the resources of my species, I eventually turned again, for the first time in years, to other animals. Wasn’t sex, after all, the one thing that could be left to that older cortex, to the lizard brain, to the animal of me? Hadn’t the bacteria in my gut and the fungi in my ears and the mites on my eyelashes been copulating and procreating since I was a child, and weren’t those creatures in some way a part of me, and shouldn’t I, on account of their prowess, be able to tap into some sexual instinct, some deep and formidable desire? I still didn’t need other animals to justify my queerness, but I needed them to teach me how to be queer. Instead of searching for homosexuality or same-sex mating, I searched for articles about sexual communication in animals. I found Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance, which offers dozens of examples of queer desire in other animals—in bottlenose dolphins and whiptails, razorbills and bonobos. In these descriptions, there’s no talk of poisoning or genetic mutation. Queerness was natural.
Bonobos have more than twenty-five gestures to specify sexual intent and desire, sexual requests. I memorized these gestures. I extended my arm, bent my hand inward toward my belly, and made rapid vigorous circles to tell my (nonexistent) bonobo partner to turn around, one way of initiating a sexual interaction. I made come-hither motions with my fingers to invite approach. I had no desire to have sex with a bonobo. Even if I had, bonobos inhabit a single remote and densely forested area in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, accessible only by boat or plane. Most scientists estimate there are fewer than 20,000 left, and these estimations are probably too high. My likelihood of ever putting these gestures to use was nil. But I clutched my hands at my belly, then opened them to say, Spread your legs. I flicked my hand side-to-side to suggest that my bonobo partner position their genitals for sex.
Using hand gestures combined with facial expressions, eye contact, and body language, bonobos communicate sexual interest, negotiate positions, and describe desired types of sexual contact. The gestures are used in a specific order—they have syntax. A female bonobo might indicate to another female, “I want to finger fuck your front-hole.”
Biologists speculate that these gestures evolved because bonobo sexual contact is complex, diverse, and varied. Female bonobos regularly have sex with other females, rubbing their clitorises against one another. Marlene Zuk has suggested the bonobo clitoris is frontally placed, away from the vulva, as is the human clitoris, “perhaps because selection favored a position maximizing stimulation during the genital-genital rubbing common among females.” Female bonobos have sex lying down, standing rump to rump, hanging from tree branches. In a troop of ten females, female bonobos have on average five sexual partners. These sexual partners are also emotional partners, creating the multiple pair bonds that form the core of bonobo social organization.
In English, when I attempted to tell my partner what I wanted, I experienced a temporary aphasia, but it was easy to be obscene with my hands. In the bonobo lexicon, for the first time, I was fluent in desire.
Red Fox | When the breeding one has that smell of wet mud, she approaches. On first approach, the breeding one boxes her away. On second approach, she gekkers. On third approach, she snirks, opens her mouth in a V, showing teeth. The approaching fox opens her own jaw, calibrating the angle to match that of the breeding one, presses upper gum against gum, lower jaw against jaw, that click of tooth, that ache in the cheek muscle. The mounting, when it happens after, is brief, almost a formality. The bond comes of clicks and gekkers, noise-making together, and from the whelping, the after-whelping, when on first approach the lactating vixen might nudge away the other’s pups, but on second approach, exhausted, will let them suckle, and on third approach might even nudge the pup, not hers, with one paw, positioning their small body, facilitating the latch.
When my partner and I first discussed the relationship we wanted to create, we described it as asexual. Neither of us wanted the pressure of physical intimacy, the ticking clock of the first kiss, the difficulty of navigating desires in a framework of romance that structured and insisted upon them.
Six months in, we tickled and wrestled each other. A year in, we pressed our bodies together, put our fingers in each other’s mouths. “Is this sex?” I asked them. “No,” they said. We touched each other’s stomachs, thighs, clits. “Is this sex?” “No.” “Is this sex?” “No.” “How about now?” “Maybe.” “I think so.” “Probably.”
I could find no corollary for this phenomenon—an asexual relationship morphing into a sexual one—in the nonhuman world. I searched in mollusks, which fill oceans with their milky sperm, and in galliformes, the most gender-fluid and socially complex of birds.
When I brought this concern to my partner one evening before bed, they said, “Of course you can’t find one. Animals don’t force themselves to have sex, they don’t need those labels.”
“You don’t know that,” I said. I reminded them that people are always underestimating the sophistication, intelligence, and diversity of other animals.
They said of my approach to relationships—the chartmaking and the writing and the searching for models, the attempting to explain and rationalize, to taxonomize and codify—“It’s the most human approach I can think of.”
“The most human?”
“Red squirrels,” they said, “aren’t studying seagull mating habits to justify their poly relationship structures.”
“Seagulls aren’t poly,” I said.
“Regardless,” they said, an edge of impatience in their voice, “we’re specific.”
That word with the same root as species. We were human, they meant.
I said, “Cephalopods. Cephalopods might switch from asexual to sexual.”
They said, “This. Lying here, doing whatever we want, calling it whatever we want, not feeling ashamed of it, this is animal.”
I learned later that some octopi do live asexual lives, having sex only toward the end of their life cycle—the male dying immediately after, the female living long enough to lay eggs. Not an especially useful model, but still it comforts me, because when I think about my partner and I, our future, I can’t imagine us human. Instead, I imagine the anis, in which two couples share the avian equivalent of a one-bedroom apartment with a crib, or the wrasses who spawn in trios—one male, one female, one a third gender for which English offers no easy word (the wrass has a word). I imagine us as stumptail macaques or harbor seals or even cliff swallows, building our cozy mud nest onto a polycule beneath some bridge. Never as humans.
Tree Swallow | One lays eggs. The other does not, but she broods the laid eggs. The eggs will not hatch, what matters is not the hatching, what matters is the warmth of the eggs, the graceful passing of those eggs from one parent to the other, the folding of her partner’s bib of fat over those eggs, a slow unfurl which sometimes, like now, causes her cloaca to tighten, so that she mounts her partner as her partner broods the eggs, everting her cloaca to touch beneath her partner’s lifted tail, both of them overcome.
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[1] In this essay, I will use “female” to denote non-human organisms who make large gametes and “male” to denote organisms who make small gametes.
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Rumpus original art by Iris L.
A new animated series starring beloved kidlit characters "Frog and Toad" is headed to Apple TV+, premiering Friday, April 28. Them is reporting that "gay Twitter" is lauding the adaptation of Arnold Lobel's Caldecott and Newbery Award-winning children's book for its "queer subtext," calling the amphibious friends "one of the internet's favorite queer relationships." — Read the rest
Paisley Currah’s Sex Is as Sex Does raises questions about efforts to achieve equal recognition under laws that sanction repression and inequality.
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