Inspo—
“When I first started writing about television, it was an excuse, as a new journalist, to write about what interested me.” —Emily Nussbaum, “The Big Picture” in I Like To Watch
“I can’t stand breakfast. It’s just constant eggs. Why? Who decided?” —Carolyn, Killing Eve
“He said, ‘You should be nicer.’ / Well, your dick should be bigger.” —Megan Thee Stallion, Running Up Freestyle
In junior high I had a pretty big fight with my best friend over whether I was qualified to run an advice column on a Freewebs site we drafted for our class. She insisted that boys don’t write advice columns, only girls do, which for a long time felt vaguely homophobic. Perhaps she should have explained it differently, that the advice column is sacred feminist territory, or that we couldn’t expect our classmates to open up to an under-pubescent know-it-all with a very obvious sexual identity crisis on the horizon. In any case, our whole friend group was not particularly well-liked or diligent, and the advice column never made it past committee. We went back to our day job, fanfiction.
This is not an advice column, which it turns out, nobody is especially qualified to run. This is a newsletter about gay sex, perhaps the only thing I am qualified to write as a queer sex worker. This measure of credibility keeps me up at night, always has. What if I am supposed to know more? What if I want to write about something else? Sometimes it appears that the only thing that makes you an expert is posturing as one for long enough until it’s true, that being a writer only happens when you write. Unfortunately, I tweet. I’m the kind of millennial who got an obscure degree, then got a non-profit job, then dropped out of all of it, and reads and talks and listens and belongs to a community, but not a field. These achievements feel frivolous, unfit for a cover letter or even a pitch email, even if they constitute a point of view. What good is a point of view, if not enough people see value in it?
I imagine a lot of queer writers, women writers, and writers of color have felt this insecurity, and instead of competing for jobs with so-called experts, we have carved out a whole sector of identity-centered digital media and journalism as a result. The social justice blogosphere evolved into something of monetary value, spawning new publications that would pay us to write about the minority point of view, either for each other or for liberal consumers hoping to make sense of difference freshly visible in the urbanity of social media. This proved difficult to sustain, as advertisers and algorithms established ever-shifting metrics that prioritized output and engagement over the rigor and durability of written work (although many writers found a delicate balance), reaching crisis in the wake of a shocking election blamed in part on the under-regulation of digital media— clickbait headlines, echo chambers, a new reactionary intelligentsia, and foreign interference. Digital media has undeniably struggled to rebound, with identity-driven journalism hit the hardest. As this bubble has burst, many have broken through into more mainstream politics, style, film, and TV journalism at legacy publications, and many more have struggled to cope with abrupt layoffs and job insecurity. Some got book deals, some started podcasts. I had already pivoted to video.
I like writing about sex, but I also like writing serious essays. We both know these aren’t mutually exclusive, that serious writing had long embraced sex and desire if it belonged to straight men, or that women and queer writers have critically widened the legs of serious publications. But it is difficult to shake the paranoias of precarity, both economic and carnal: sex interests us now, but can it withstand time as more than just a novelty, a passing curiosity? I think most sex workers face (or suppress) this fear of a post-coital culture. We know that sex will always have value, but we also question how we can scale that value into a secure and fulfilling future, all while being obstructed by the state. Perhaps we have internalized some whorephobia (“But what do you want to do after this?”). Perhaps I have. I simply want to write things that stay with people, not because they have been desensitized, but because they have found a new place they like to be touched. Sex is what I know, I reassure myself, and what moves me to speak. It is best not to speculate too much about the future, because nobody has lived in it yet.
However, there is another challenge to my qualifications that I would have never anticipated when I was in junior high. I might be too hot to write about sex. My body is implicated in my optimism. I cannot deny limitations of my point of view, and I cannot possibly understand, in its totality, what it is like to navigate sex in a body that is not my own, a body with a lot of visibility and access. I think a grain of salt is fair, but a pillar seems to overestimate the distance between my Sodom and yours. (Good one.) But this is the skepticism we carry with us toward all sex writing, the awareness that we may feel differently. We are not afraid we cannot relate; we are fatigued with feeling unrepresented. The maddening shadow of “me, too” is the long-accreted alternative, “not me.” Is my view of sex overrepresented in culture writing, because pieces of my body are overrepresented in visual media? Is sexual power the kind that lends authority, or takes it away? I cannot draw these parameters, but I am not the doctor. I am a professional bottom. I have handed you the speculum.
I started this newsletter as an extension of my Daily Writing Practice, my own personal resolution to build a habit out of something that brings me joy. If you decide to subscribe, you can expect brief, conversational writing about sex, pillow talk that deserves more than a tweet but less than a pitch. I’d like to feature guest writers and respond to reader’s questions, which I’ll figure out later. My hope is that this will keep my voice ringing in your ears between more ambitious publications, but also that you might feel less delusional, frustrated, or alone about tensions that get relegated to that liminal realm of pleasure and peril, moments of doubt that slip from erotic to frightening without the words to pin them down.
XO
TY