an audience of gay men

I entered Julius (N.Y.’s “oldest gay bar”) still buzzing from Cult of Love, the Broadway play that I had just seen with Gavin: a cutting and intense Connecticut WASP Christmas family dramedy (so like and unlike my own intellectual Jewish clan in Boulder, CO; my third matinee audience of the season, albeit not at an art cinema house). I was greeted with a different sort of holiday cheer: a reciprocated giddy admiration from one of my favored families of choice.

We were meeting in person to celebrate the bodily presence of Ben, visiting NY for a few days, a California member of our activist collective, What Would an HIV Doula Do? I gushed for a bit about the play; but we all went into raptures when I tried to put into words the ecstatic sway of the book I am reading, Pedro Lemebel’s A Last Supper of Apostles. It was only recently translated into English by Gwendolyn Harper (What an exquisite feat! Her’s a true audience of love. Translation as intelligent passionate devotion). I had learned about the book because Gwen is a member of my feminist reading group (an audience whose affordances I have also interrogated here).

I needed witnesses to my passion wrought by Lemebel’s extraordinary prose; his shattering visions of AIDS. They wanted to know more. We decided on the spot to host our own reading group to work together on this exquisite queer extravaganza. And then the conversation flowed elsewhere, as it will with gay men in a bar: from culture high to low, many alienating visits with family across the U.S., and a final roll call: who would be moving on to The Eagle or perhaps yet another Hanukkah Party?

I for one couldn’t drink and I also had to head home. Why? I still had to finish yesterday’s blog post … You have a blog? Do you mean a substack? How do we find it? What is it about?

Now to be clear, this is a group of men with whom I have written (about parties, no less), published, and even focused upon right here on this resuscitated blog, risen as it is like a phoenix, or even Jesus (one serious subject of Cult of Love), from the cold dark caves of yesterday’s internet, all because of a idiosyncratic self-imposed time-bound practice (commencing on November 20, ending in 20 or so more days) demanding that I write every time I put myself into an audience during the interval between the election and the inauguration.

As is true about most anything here on the internet, this minor project has quickly mushroomed, becoming ever more self-reflexive, intricate, and multi-faceted and hence harder to describe over drinks. But I tried, and in so doing four things came up and/as my audience of gay men assembled.

1. A group of dear friends, activists, collective-members at a bar is not an audience, until selfsame cis men assign the only cis female the honorific queer role of holding court. Since my early twenties I have been proud and pleased to accept such a mantle.
   • Audience lesson: when so assigned, and if so lucky, be the queen.
   • Audience lesson: anyone can be the queen, and all should be offered a turn.
2. Once assembled at the table — all the men younger than me, albeit members of several generations — my friends explained that even as they follow me on Instagram, somehow the versions of these posts that I share there, too, aren’t rising properly, haven’t been visible to them. This is because I don’t follow its rules. They explain that they won’t ever see the blog until I post selfies, or faces, or my own (topless) body.
   • Audience lesson: sometimes the apostles have good advice, heed them.
   • Audience lesson as per Lemembel: queering expectations, breaking rules of engagement, inventing new modes of discourse against the grains of propriety, deliver wonders and behaviors outside of capital, hetero-patriarchy, and neoliberalism.
3. As I tried to explain to Ben and Cea and Kyle and Rafi, part of this project has been a clear-headed if painful attempt to do all I can to deny the dark pull of the internet’s false promise of an audience of ballooning followers. (See findings from the feminist reading group post. I ask “how is or could be social media the audience as community for the interval?”) The beauty of my old blog had been that I knew who my audience was; that stays true, for now, and it is a goodness (as well as a failure).
   • Audience lesson: the queen knows some things, too. Adulation is empty if it lingers only on surface difference (age, gender, sex, style).
4. At which point, Cea said that he understood what I was talking about (and that he has been reading me!). Indeed, he has been lately moved to write his stunning poems as is for one person who he writes to: the perfect audience. Yes, he puts the poems on his Instagram, and if people liked them, all the better. But knowing thy reader, well, there’s a clarity, beauty, and satisfaction there.
   • Audience lesson: “Who is this for–?” “Today it is for us.”

‘Tis the season, and come what may, Christian and queer iconography has prevailed in this post (which seems fair after two devoted to the Jewish lights I don’t even really like). Each missive takes a long time (a few hours), but they are also fast (written right after I go there). I learn as I go, following what lived experiences in various groups, online and off, can teach me about the ways we can be together now, and for the future. I say, this post is for us—gay men and their queens, leaping into an unknown future.

“It’s a bad photo, the shot hastily taken because the locas couldn’t stop fidgeting, almost all of them blurred by too many poses and their wide desire to leap into the future. Practically a last supper of queer apostles, where the only thing clearly rendered is the pyramid of bones on the table. It might be mistaken for a biblical frieze, a Holy Thursday watercolor caught in the vapors rising from the jug of wine that la Chumi holds like a Chilean goblet. She stuck herself right in the middle standing in Christ’s stead, everything but the altar lights.” — “Night of Furs (Or, Popular Unity’s Last Supper),” Pedro Lemebel, 1996