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[essaysonbanality]

The Grey

I moved to Washington, D.C. to explore the grey. I like unrequited love. I adore unexplained ruins. I hate a complete ending. I despise the knowable. I prefer that the Great Library of Alexandria burned, and its secrets lost to time. I abhor finality; I prefer the infinite. I am terrified of the infinite.

Terror of something unstoppable keeps life in perspective and makes you appreciate the material good you have. Terror sometimes seems the only logical response. Shakespeare said something about that...about our lives being surrounded on both sides by sleep. Well, I am awake now.

The grey has always seemed to me to be the natural state of the world. We learn as angsty teens that the world is not black and white. That is part of the great revelation of adulthood, but yet we are somehow supposed to pretend it is. The lunacy is the attempt to tame an altogether incoherent reality. To take the randomness and assert order and values.

Calling out this fact does not make me a sadist or make me somehow prefer disorder over order. Instead, it makes me appreciate more than most that we should embrace the small amount of order that we can create here and now. I must keep reminding myself that time on a geologic scale is so massive, that it was only seconds ago that Los Angeles was a dusty ranching town of only a few thousand people.

Despite being the center of law and order in the United States, D.C. is a town built on ambivalence. A city which features a veneer of respectability and good will so thick that it is peeling off, but we politely ignore it. A city where in an office building you can have prominent law firms, mega corporations, and intelligence agency fronts share a Sweet Green delivery kiosk in the lobby. The paradox here is that the town is full of people that don't believe in ambivalence or space between black and white. That is what makes it work as it does. That is what makes people move there.

I went to Washington to explore the ambivalence. I joke with friends that I came to see how the sausage is made, but the truth is sillier. I came to find truth in a universe where no truth exists. The "truth", as I see it, is we can't know the truth because there is no such thing. That is the grey.

That is why, when watching a movie, we are surprised to learn that it can still be just as satisfying to see the protagonist lose. To see the movie end with no explanation for the events we witnessed. What we don't want to admit to ourselves is that we actually like it when the protagonist doesn't get away clean and everything is resolved. We love it because at the very core it acknowledges our reality and our humanity.

Why then do people stay in D.C.? They don't stay because they believe the U.S. is the shining beacon on the hill. They stay because they know it is a lie, and perpetuating the lie is a better alternative to believing it. Knowing the lie and propagating it is preferrable to being duped by it.

It does raise the question though if it is better to pretend or propagate. That in our turbulent, catastrophic world, it may be preferable to carve out a little spot and fake it until you make it. Multiple layers of action and belief that in turn create the world you want. For us cynics the hardest part for us to acknowledge is that the people in D.C. may actually believe it all.

[essaysonbanality]

Leather

A man on Grindr once told me that “leather was like drag.” I pressed him on the point multiple times, but he couldn’t say much more than that. He typed it out with such finality that it seemed to him perfectly self-explanatory. I guess I understood what he was getting at, but I hate pronouncements. Pronouncements are for people who somehow have lived in this world as I have and still have the balls to think that they can be right. Maybe it is my millennial hemming and hawing that is the real problem.

Though I hated how he said it, I got the gist of what that man on Grindr meant. Gay men wear leather to become someone else. Just like in drag, there are entire leather productions and competitions where various men wearing leather go up on stage and perform for an audience. I have caught glimpses of these shows sometimes while I have hung around the Eagle or Bullet. The newly announced winner demonstrates the appropriate shock and surprise and receives a leather sash with big bolded letters pronouncing him as “Mr. Bullet Leather 2023.”

There are layers here; some stretching back to rituals and observances only known by the daddies and the boys who love them. Some reason that this system of competition exists and exalts certain characteristics. I am not intending to suggest that we are performing on the bones of old ritual that has lost all meaning. Quite the opposite actually. I think the entire production is imbued with more ritual significance now more than ever.

Leather serves as a stark contrast to drag in a lot of ways. While drag is meant to accentuate femininity and challenge gender conventions, leather attempts to solidify roles and to reinvigorate an image of masculinity. But it is an image of men refracted and warped across time from an era immediately prior to AIDS that gay men seem to yearn for. The idea of men who wear leather jackets and Levi jeans that draw all eyes to their bulge, sport an aggressively prominent mustache, and struts with a cigar in mouth. Except this man existed in the 1960s and 1970s, and now he does not.

Oh sure, that man probably never truly existed. He was always fantasy. An amalgamation of characteristics that a gay man wanted both to emulate and be dominated by. But somewhere between then and now that man went from living to extinct. Now at every leather bar in America you can watch locals attempt to recreate that now extinct man for an audience who never met him. Like a game of telephone across generations and time until you are left with men who are being worn by leather — not wearing leather.

The reason this ritual is so much more important now is because the oft-revered leather daddy symbol harkens back to a time when gay men had purpose. Cruising, bathhouses, gay bars, leather events, and many other subversive acts were radical before the 1990’s because they either directly challenged the status quo or were the only means by which gay men could subvert it. Without the radical or subversive element which imbued these spaces and acts with meaning, many have lost their appeal and edge.

This degradation over time is a topic that modern queer authors have been grappling with for the past few years. Books like Cruising; Gay Bar; or Times Square Red, Times Square Blue have raised the alarm bells on the disappearance of gay public encounters. These books all typically have the same premise: a famed gay institution is dying and that is a bad thing because of X. While all these authors acknowledge that these institutions were human and therefore contained problematic elements, they all speak to a common loss. The loss of equitable sexual relations between men, cross-class commingling inherent in public encounters, and a subversive edge that keeps the whole thing interesting.

Radical sexual acts are now all about bespoke and customized experiences meant to appeal exactly to your sexual desires. No longer do you need to traipse through some bushes in your local public park before weariness has you settling for the older, out-of-shape man you saw milling around. Just open the app and find the exact model you are looking for and they will be at your doorstep before you know it. Even the glory holes in bathhouses have expanded in size so people no longer have to suffer the horror of enjoying a sexual experience without knowing the exact age, height, and BMI of the person they are blowing.

No doubt there are justifiable fears and reasons driving this reality. Young gay men raised by concerned straight parents who passed on their fear of that “gay disease” AIDS, a population raised on the “stranger danger” curriculum, and a culture which, despite preaching equity, has yet to apply that to lust. But one can’t help feel that something went awry here.

What is left then? Groups of men putting on custom leather gear all bought from shops now offering express global shipping on orders over $40. Elaborate themed nights at leather bars catering to an increasingly bored community that has resorted to newer kinks in the name of subversion. Picky cruisers who would rather walk three hours in a dark park than touch someone they don’t immediately find attractive. Attractive men who claim that their commodified sexual acts broadcast on Twitter and OnlyFans are really in the name of liberation for all.

Leather men and the spaces they inhabit have taken on a new desperate edge. The ceremonies and pageantry becoming an increasingly tenuous link to a time and place that no longer exists, but that young gay men wished they were alive to experience. Vests, chaps, and mustaches all seeming to say “Remember? This used to have a purpose!”

Come to think of it maybe that guy on Grindr was right all along. Leather is sort of like drag.