An Epistemology of the Flesh: Writing About the 'Sex' in Sexuality
The absence of pride™ in 2020, a result of the onset of a global pandemic, prompted now-inactive user Meatsweatsx to tweet two pictures of himself with the caption “1 year ago: LA Pride.” The first picture was an innocent, if somewhat coquettish, selfie with a brush of rainbow highlighter across his cheek. The second picture, however, was a bit more risque: he was standing upright, wearing nothing but classic chucks, white socks, a backpack, and a black bandana binding his cock to his thigh, exposing only his neatly trimmed pubes. The pictures and their association with pride elicited responses from across the spectrum, some praising and celebrating the user while others dunking on and deriding him as well as those who supported him. The most popular response though quoted the original tweet and added, “This is not what pride is about. Sorry. I want to be able to take my little siblings to these events to spread awareness. Save that shit for the after parties.” Another user took the image of the guy wearing the bandana and added two other pictures, one of a male handler in leather walking his pup by a leather leash and the other of three bare-chested white women living laughing and loving while linked by the arms, with the caption: “Like imagine going to pride for the first time with both your parents and all your siblings that have been nothing but supportive and accepting. You get there and they see this for the first time ever. IMAGINE the second hand embarrassment. Think of all the kids that go too.” From there the discourse took off and, last I checked, left off with the condemnation of hypersexual queers who have sex behind dumpsters in public.
In the introduction to Cruising Utopia José Esteban Muñoz disidentifies with mainstream (read: white) queer theory’s tendency towards antirelationality - namely the polemic of Lee Edelman’s No Future: reproduction as the “organizing principle of communal relations.” Muñoz clarifies he has no issue with Edelman or his work, and only makes reference to No Future to reminds us there are other principles that structure and organize our life like race and class, organizing principles that contribute to the formation and maintenance of communal relations of not just the sexual minority but minoritarian subjects broadly.
Like Muñoz and as another queer with a sense of brown, I am not a fan of queer theory’s tendency to theorize about gender and sexuality siloed away from race, class, and lived experience. But like Muñoz, there are moments of concession. After all, Edelman did not write No Future for us to remain invested in the figurative (or literal) child. In other words, fuck them kids.
I read somewhere that gays, or queers more broadly, have no sense of history because history is framed as a journey of self-discovery. In this instance identity is the subject of history. This is not to dismiss the significance of identity formations (or relationality more broadly), but rather to emphasize, or spread awareness about, the cultural and historical amnesia brought on by the AIDS epidemic, and one that will only be intensified by the current global pandemic. Already we are forgetting how it feels to be touched. What else will we forget and what else will we lose? Will the cruising spots like the lake off interstate-69 populate the same? Will anonymous fantasies be interrupted and hindered by health scares once more? Will missed connections go unfound? Cobra, Rage, Flaming Saddles, Gold Coast are closed, and Akbar, New Jalisco, Precinct, Fiesta Cantina, and the Eagle are endangered. How do we preserve our culture and history?
31,196 people died of AIDS the year I was born. I think about that number a lot when I’m cruising campus, parks, and river trails; or when I’m on the other end of a glory hole at the local bathhouse or behind a dumpster somewhere off Santa Monica Blvd. I might be dead if I was born a bit before—but I wasn’t—so, along with the help of other generational benefits like prescription pre-exposure prophylaxis, I am not dead. I’m alive, and my existence these days, as well as that of other kinksters, is what pride is about. So, why are we made to feel like we’re not what pride is about? Why are we still alienated by our own, and why did we allow the stigma of AIDS to affect what we remember?
Writing about sex matters. It clearly has value beyond tantilization as Muñoz demonstrates. My writings about sex matters as well and although my writings may be similar to Giorno’s, my project is different. It’s not autobiography. I write about sex as a site to theorize from and critique, qualified through lived experience. Muñoz was most interested in the writings about the acts, and I am too; but in this essay I am more interested in the subjects performing the acts and their significance to pride and queer history. The experiences of perverts, kinksters, sexworkers, and sluts matter and hold utopian potential, but they continue to be erased from our history and culture. I’m writing as a scholar and approach sex as a legitimate object of study, but i am also a hoe - a hypersexual brown queer who has sex behind dumpsters in public - and I consider my writings about sex akin to Cherríe Moraga’s ‘theory-in-the-flesh,’ “one where the physical realities of our lives/our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings/all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity.” My sexual encounters “attempt to bridge the contradictions in our experience: We are the colored in a white feminist [and queer] movement. We are the feminists [and queers] among the people of our culture. We are often the lesbians [and fags] among the straight. We do this bridging by naming our selves and by telling our stories in our own words.”