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Sometimes it feels like the words I could use to describe myself to you obscure what I am actually trying to say. Certain words can be sets of approximations, categorizations, operations, and calculations. They reason, identify, and quantify. To say certain words about myself, or to hear them said about me, can be a way of giving you a set of approximate coordinates to map me with. Just exactly what those axes are sets the stage for our encounter.
A kind of choose-your-own-adventure: are you a selection committee craving diversity, lonely and looking for a friend, or just looking for something entirely anonymous?
I am acutely aware that there are certain words once (and still) chanted, howled, and screamed—now flaunted in corporate slogans and big-time curatorial statements. In the flattest interpretation, these slogans and statements tell us that the moment has arrived, the past is past, we’ve righted the wrongs. There are ways that words for identity are now used to usurp the calls to life and liberation they signify.
Communities or consumer groups; manifestos or diversity statements; redistribution or representation?
I can tell you certain words about myself, and they may or may not be ones you want to hear. I can tell you about certain scenes and communities I lie within or certain characteristics that mark me and my navigation through the world. I could tell you these things for a variety of reasons: to get your money, to be your friend, to join your group, or to communicate to you the stakes of my livelihood. I could tell you words about myself, and they’ll bring associations with them—you could imagine me at a certain kind of club or bar or academic event.
But does that help explain my obsession with the congealed surface of a club floor after a night where so much flesh has traversed it? That get your tacones-momentarily-cemented kind of stick, that piss-and-sweat-and-drinks-and-maybe-cum-coagulating-on-the-floor stick—that stick that you can’t quite escape from. The stick that lingers even after you’ve left the bar. Do you know it?
There are murkier terrains that lie below the clean and limited languages for identity. Substances and fluids that fly under the radar of representation. These are the terrains I prefer to reside in. These are the spaces, for me, where the work gets made. If I list off a set of words about myself, I fear it will distract you from my actual goal: to get us to cohabit the fleshy interstices between such identity markers. This is a labor of difficulty and of love. It asks you to participate instead of observe. It leaves us room for play, for being cryptic and opaque to each other while still refusing to be separate. It is an attempt to find another way to deal with those words, one that rubs them ’til they bleed. We never really wanted them anyway.
I’ve spent hours digitally leafing through archives of personal ads under the guise of research. Personals sections in tranny and cross-dresser magazines with names like Ladylike and En Femme. There’s an efficiency to their language—where words are deployed in service of identity but never only so. These are ads so efficient that there aren’t even complete words for identities, but short abbreviations. TS, TV, TG. I like these forums because they remind me of the desire at the heart of such language. Here, identities and other words are not selfsame facts but invitations. They are sticky, complicated, breached, and leaky. They are attempts to do something with words, in order to make space for touch, exchange, rupture.
When I do choose to say certain things about myself, I hope you can find the desire encased in the words I choose. When I identify myself, please read it as a personal ad and not a biographical fact. There is a way of wielding such words for identity that is more about looking and searching than about simply and statically being. Here, I deploy certain words for myself as imperfect mediators for the desires that lie beneath them. I want to make these words enfleshed and sticky. I want to use these words not as definitions or categories, but as inadequate stop-gaps towards relation. Which means: through them, I want to make space for you, too.
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