gay panic! and the disco

“I can’t help its [the novel’s] being gay. I have been a full-time fag for the past five years, I realized the other day. Everyone I know is gay, everything I do is gay, all my fantasies are gay [...] I am a doomed queen." Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

Late July. I am living in Southern West Virginia for the month, working a job frying eggs at a summer camp on a mountain, and suddenly I am passing. Strangers no longer imagine me a masculine woman, gender that can code straight in rural places, but a faggot. In Greenbrier County, in Lewisburg I try to buy a flashlight at the Walmart and the Sporting Goods clerk hands me the implement out of the locked glass case over his shoulder, refusing to look at me, and this refusal of attention makes shoplifting easy. Walking my dog on Washington Street in the evening somebody shouts to me Hey daddy out the window of a pickup truck and while the words are intimate I can feel in their tone that the sentiment’s cruel, can feel eyes on me, a threat when I leave the bathroom. That danger so perversely affirming because my body means what I want it to. In Pocahontas County, in Renick, Seebert, and Marlinton, good old boys eye my effeminacy, my little cutoff shorts, with aggression and disdain, and it’s only when they spot my beefcake of a dog that I can feel I am safe for now, not because they’re afraid but because I have shown myself to have appropriately tough, masculine taste in animals, that they decide to let their anger go. I am relieved, and also a little thrilled to feel how I arouse and trouble their desire. Then I wish that I’d worn pants, wish it were winter, decide to have a drink instead of letting myself go for a swim in the river.

One night in Hillsboro I start talking to a guy from Richwood on Grindr. He has no photo on the app but quickly sends me a series of pictures of his dick by private message. He is sure my cock must be huge. But when with trepidation I tell him I’m trans all he says is You mean ftm? How cool!

This eager man becomes afraid to disclose his desires when he learns that I’m staying in neighboring Pocahontas County because it’s so close, he tells me, there’s too much risk that we could know someone in common, that his secrets might not stay secrets at all. This is a tough place to desire in, I write in return, and our shared understanding of this fact is enough to encourage him. The man starts to tell me just what it is that he struggles so much with wanting and then won't stop, texts me incessantly because in fact there’s no one in his life in his hometown that he can talk to. I know about his hometown but I'm not from it, so he can talk to me.

That night or the next one–I lose track of time in the woods, in my solitude–I summon the glow of my computer against the dark, and learn on Twitter that there’s been a bomb threat which shut down the bathhouse and one of the gay bars in Pittsburgh on a Friday night. There’s just one link to a news article with few details, and no word from any of my friends, or even parasocial acquaintances. From 200 miles away fear surges through me and I’m already tired of it. Is this why everyone kept quiet? Fear is viral. We all know by now how masking prevents a spread, how we carve out pleasure in spite of it.

A few days later my friend E is driving me from Hillsboro to Fayetteville where my car has been getting its brake lines fixed after they blew out on a downhill on the road to Anstead last weekend, the morning after the bomb threats though I didn't know that yet. We follow Route 55 which runs east to Richwood through the deep woods of the Monongahela National Forest, crest Kennison Mountain in the rain. These are the same rains flooding Eastern Kentucky and Southwestern Virginia, but I don’t know that yet. I only know that the mechanic closes at five and it sucks to be stranded in West Virginia’s most rural county, no matter how beautiful it is. You can lose your job if you’re car’s in the shop for two weeks, E says. So she guns it through the downpour, taking the hairpin turns at a 9% grade with the confidence of someone who grew up here, which she did.

In Nicholas County just outside of Richwood, the land begins to level out and the trees yield a little. I have to pee, and the quickest option is the roadside composting toilets maintained by the State Forest Service along the North Fork of the Cherry River. Even these grim, sparse, single-occupancy facilities are gendered. I enter the men’s room reluctantly but as I squat I’m fascinated: the graffiti here is so earnest, forthrightly pornographic, erotic and specific.

I don’t know if any of these men desiring each other’s wives and desiring other men’s desire of their wives got their wishes fulfilled, but if voyeurism is a kind of participation, then so, in its way, is the conversation– a shared imagining– that unfolds in the scrawl. I wish my Grindr friend could see what’s scrawled on these bathroom walls in his hometown, though I haven’t texted him back because it’s exhausting to symbolize someone else’s freedom. I am a three-hour drive from the nearest gay bar, and cuckolding fantasies are the closest I can get.

Passing of course doesn't protect me, even if only from others' projections; when the brake line blew my lover was in the car, and the tow truck driver, a sweet and beefy guy who (rightly) adored my dog, who wore a silicone wedding ring and a huge cross around his neck and had moved from Texas to Beckley nine years ago, it seemed like to get sober, sputtered as we climbed down from the cab that we were fine with him, by us he meant gay people, and that he would definitely party with us, had in the past. E who drove me to Fayetteville, tells me she’s surprised she didn’t accidentally misgender me, and she means it kindly. I receive it as such. The only other trans people she knows are teens, usually students whose safety and privacy she has to protect; they have names or pronouns she can’t use with parents, or they don’t know exactly what they want to be called yet. I’m the only one of us she knows who was already living a whole trans adult life when we met.

So after I pick up my car and find out it was an easy fix and not a financial disaster, after I take E out for a beer and we go our separate ways, I feel lonely, and not in a way I want to resolve, not with the resources available to me. Not with the gay ice cream shop in Fayetteville, not with men on the internet asking me what’s up. I don’t even want to call a friend, to take myself that far away from myself by trying to tell a story. Lately I don't trust language. Instead I want to feel how it is to be alive and in my body, ordinary in my faggotry as the gauche and humid Appalachian forest that surrounds me, not unusual or left wanting or anybody’s first.

Thank Hashem for the internet. In the humid West Virginian twilight I remember that last month among Donald Thinnes’ papers I found a playlist for the Norreh Social Club from the night of March 26, 1988, and I’d started recreating it with much help and fact-checking from my friend Gabe, a faggot music historian though he probably wouldn’t call himself such. So I pull up my own playlist, a sonic facsimile of one night on the dance floor in Pittsburgh twenty-five years ago, and let the music fill the car. Even as my cell signal cuts out between the mountains, the beats of history carry me into present pleasure on the dark and winding drive.

If the embedded link isn't showing up in your browser, you can listen here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Xjm288htpLVFPXumtcOra

Tune in later this week for a deep dive on faggot literature, sex with nature, racist nostalgia, and returning to Pittsburgh. As always, I invite you to send tips, opinions, criticisms, and nudes to me, Dade Lemanski, at dadelemanski@gmail.com. More historically informed Rust Belt sodomy news arriving in your inbox soon.

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