The point, dear, the point...

On Kay Gabriel, via Angels in America and Amanda Lepore

PRIOR: The point, dear, the point…

LOUIS: That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation which disperses all the complexity in some unsatisfying little decision—the balancing of the scales…

PRIOR: I like this; very zen; it’s…reassuringly incomprehensible and useless. We who are about to die thank you.

- Angels in America, Millennium Approaches

First I dated handsome bisexuals,

then in medias res I joined the dead.

You can print that twice:

first I dated, dot dot dot

what else did I do with my bitchy life

I hopped into debt, then out again

I stuck my head out the window,

on the highway, for a joke

I picked a casualty—no, not that one, that one

some synapses fire and my boobs get bigger,

then smaller,

then smother a man

we're scaling the aisle of history, right to the top

hey! you can see my house!

Reading this sonnet from Kay Gabriel’s Candy, or Catastrophe I was reminded of the only ‘It Gets Better’ video that was ever worth watching, three seconds of anti-snuff movie starring Amanda Lepore as a politician attempting to ad-lib away an expenses scandal as a pageant queen on her vision for New Jersey as Amanda Lepore. Lepore pouts into the blur of the camera and admonishes: Do not…commit suicide. As even in writing I am cursed with gay affectation that makes sincerity confusing, I will clarify, I genuinely think Lepore’s is the best of the genre. I love the…pause. The dot dot dot. Is she improvising, or has she forgotten the party line, or her own carefully considered polemic? She is, of course, never serious, but not not serious. Lepore isn’t going to lie to you by laying it all out like it all makes sense. Do not dot dot dot commit suicide. Because, like, you shouldn’t do that. As transsexuals, we know all about doing inexplicable things, and arguably less about not doing them…clearly. 

The initial sensation that links the Lepore clip to Gabriel’s sonnet is deflection through blunt explanation. What do you need to know about my bitchy life? About this bitchy life we all find ourselves in? I’ll tell you everything you need to know! You can print that twice, three times even, louder for the cheap seats! Feeling brushed off, you realise you found out everything you needed to. This is a flippant trans poetics, whereby the imperative to explain gets only a cutting retort and an elegantly turned back in response, and it seems like a regal dismissal until you understand the secret generosity of obliquity (but don’t tell anyone or they’ll all come knocking at the alms house of gendered meaning). 

The very least, and very most, a transsexual can do is have a beginning, middle, and end; maybe a prequel in special cases. This leaves some of us with an anxious need to control the narrative—if we can’t disregard it completely, can we at the very least make it less dull, because Heaven forbid anyone really know what’s going on or why! Some synapses fire, what more do you want to know? The straight world is pin drop ready to hear the lie in the self-proclaimed truth, and entirely numb in all senses to the truth in the self-proclaimed lie. By scaling everything back to the barest sinew, complexity condensed to the shape of the life, we can arrive at an ethics of the need-to-know. I suppose it would be Irresponsible in the current climate to entirely disregard truth, but what I mean to criticise is the way Truth is the place card at the table of political subjecthood, the violence of I’m just trying to…understand, the way persuasive testimony becomes the prerequisite for earning solidarity, the riveting narrative rewarded with scraps from the table, another way to achieve wow, you’re so…convincing. In Gabriel’s poem I find a hopeful innuendo for a political solidarity not predicated on dispersing all the complexity into some unsatisfying little explanation.

We enter in media res because the beginning and end are a joke I made up to lie to you, we swing both ways from life to death and life again because we have to hang around to laugh about it later, laugh from the rooftop where we observe the shape of the bare bones of our bitchy lives, the rooftop we reached scaling an aisle, window shopping a horizontal mountain (sometimes called ‘history’) of highway near misses and undulating boobs and smothered men, maybe for a joke, maybe not…but wait—you can see my house? You can see my house is not so much a joyful outburst of situating oneself in the ‘real world’, more a bewildered accusation—what are you doing looking at my house? After I just described it to you perfectly and exactly how I want you to see it!