Strangers

You can skip to me writing about All Of Us Strangers (1800 words) at the divider.

There is a mighty part of me sitting here now or idly writing notes in my brain as I wait for the bus different days that thinks, ugh, you are not even real. As though writing into the void for some ill-defined validity will transform my shell from velveteen to, what exactly? Come on. In any case, here’s some random updates and a rough something I started a few weeks ago but will close out this platform’s run on.

I’m going to move whatever this ::waves hands:: thing is here off Substack. It’s a shame: I recently started paying for a couple newsletters, and will continue to do so but I just can’t with the Nazis. I cannot. It is 2024. If you are supporting Nazis / fascism / etc., I want to punch you in the nose too! Because the only answer for a Nazi is punching them in the goddamn nose. This also counts if people in your life are not condemning this proto- or just plain fascist nonsense! Tell them to knock it the fuck off! I don’t care if they’re your gym buddy or your boss or your MOM! We live in doomy times and if you’re not embodying one of my heroes, Indiana fucking Jones, and doing your very best to fight Nazis, please try harder.1 

So, yeah, it’s bullshit a company like Substack is just too interested in money or equivocating to get one iota of content moderation to STOP NAZIS FROM MAKING MONEY. It’s gross. Turns out in 2024 I just can’t with equivocation and while there’s personal sorrow there in many small ways, Substack isn’t my friend. And I realize it doesn’t really matter because who am I exactly? Some goon who cannot sell the smallest run of self-published books and just wants to run an advice column despite having no clout.

If you want to keep reading this, it’ll come from another spot that’s not Substack that I’m figuring out (no, I’m not going to pay for hosting, because yes, I make no money from this and no, that’s not a shill, I’m just figuring it out as I go). Please keep your subscription! Or don’t, hopefully whatever platform I get won’t neg me with “stats” about how bad of a job I’m doing.

I lost my bullwhip, so I guess the closest I get to Dr. Henry Walton Jones is continuing to tell Nazis to fuck off, so, there’s that.

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If you live in Chicago, Pilsen Community Books is selling “In Which There Are Things I’ve Never Liked Explaining”, the small self-published collection of essays. Go there, they’re the best, and also a great spot to get materials to show you give a damn about Palestinian liberation, ceasefire, and exemplifying you are not okay with this war. Also it’s just a great spot, so, if you want a book, head on over.

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It’s February now which? I did okay with the newsletter. Fingers crossed it continues on. It’s been a rough month of 2024 with writing, but I have some interesting ideas on the horizon in the Spring and just trying to keep that in mind. I really do miss doing advice stuff, so if you know anyone who wants to ask about ANYTHING, in the vein of (RIP) Ask a Dude, Ask a Lady, Ask a Queer Lady, Ask a Bowl of Hummus at The Hairpin, you can ask questions ANONYMOUSLY here: ASK SOMEBODY. I truly welcome questions about soup, trash takes on bike bullshit, or nervous questions about weird stuff you are afraid to ask, because I am always open to it.

I got some good reading done in January, also known as the 12-week long month. I managed to make it through Shuggie Bain, probably driven on the strength of seeing the movie I’m talking about in this newsletter. Otherwise: Glasgow, alcoholism, gay bildungsroman. I felt sooty afterwards. Mount Chicago, which is apparently all over town these days, also felt like a march to the end but I’m glad I finished it. Satire? Not satire? I don’t know, let me know if you read it. Picturing Millennium Park/AIC tumbling into a sinkhole was compelling! Otherwise out of everything I read (including The Late Americans, which I blathered on about earlier) I savored Nona The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, which I thought was the final installment in the Locked Tomb series AND IT ABSOLUTELY IS NOT! Now I have to wait for another one? FOUR? What happened to a trilogy!? In any case, I wish more people I knew IRL read this series so I could talk about chosen family and how despite a lot of English major in me, I am still trying to figure out how it’s The Bible / The Odyssey / Brave New World / ???. Emperor John Gaius is God is whomst? So is Griddle who is Kirona… Jesus? Or is that Alecto, AKA planet Earth? Help! What this actually means is I have to go find used copies of Gideon and Harrow at Open Books because honestly I still don’t really understand necromancy (somehow both engineering, martial arts, and wellness via bones, I think) and Tumblr, while full of really good fanart, is equally confused. I’m so glad for the Coronabeth representation. Truly, she underscores my sisters are confusing theories. Anyway, onto February.

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That’s it. If you keep reading about movies and gay shit and doing things solo, thanks. See you wherever we decamp. Send advice questions and fuck Nazis.

I could blame it on COVID, or I could blame it on just the way I became as an adult, but somewhere along the way I stopped going to the movies.

As a teenager I loved going to the movies and reading about movies and getting things from the library to secretly watch. I felt pleased when I got to gal college having already seen But I’m a Cheerleader! because I’d been skulking around the gay movie Livejournal communities2.

But lately there has something dissonantly pinging in me about the passive nature of how any media can soak through your spiritual or literal pores these days. It has aligned with something about what I felt like I needed to do in the past decade which was do people. People meant less of: go to the movies alone, or read books, or listen to records, or whatever. It was more: Hipster Spock practices the code of conscientious human interaction. If Hipster Spock really liked boxed wine.

A few weeks ago I decided I really wanted to see All of Us Strangers and in January I figured, why not go when theoretically everyone else would not be out in the world? Silly Caiken, this is a city of almost 3 million; the notion that seeing a movie on the Sunday of a three-day weekend would be as a solitary experience disappeared after bemusedly passing by groups of post-brunch crews on Southport.3 

But the Music Box is a treasure, and the theaters ARE large. I did sit by myself in a row quietly eating one piece of popcorn at a time. I really enjoyed it. I did barely any research other than people posting about it on tumblr, which hews to the new thing I’m trying to do which is: just see things. Just read things. I don’t need to know everything that happens, and art is there to sometimes just experience it.4

I found myself furtively looking at the other moviegoers, finding myself surprised at the troupe of LL Beaned women, what perhaps was a mother and son. It’s 2023! I eye-rolled at myself. Queer movies are for everyone. Still. I’m your average, garden variety bisexual, meaning there are many of us, and we are to be believed, and check yourself, and the ability to have movies to hold onto as queer signposts was everything to me in adolescence.

It felt as subversive as anything like checking out books or movies at the Arlington Heights Public Library was subversive (Rubyfruit Jungle and Bound? Check.) To be watching what was Seminal Gay Film both gave the semiotic of: I am like this, and I am a part of this. To live in an age two decades or so on, where despite there being many, many dumb things (kill your gays, queerbaiting, the death of Kit Porter on the Gen Q reboot), gay people in popular Western media is consistent and everywhere is amazing. We can stream Heartstopper. We are wondering when the next Locked Tomb is coming out. Drag Race continues on, apace.

Behind me was a row of gay men talking about Paul Mescal, and when I’d been waiting to enter, reading my magazine in the lounge, I tried to clock who would be in the movies, who they were. It’s an annoying tactic, but who doesn’t want to be in a Lex post later? (Nobody wrote a Lex post about me, alas.)

I wanted though to be alone and together and known at this movie, though. That’s my feeling about going to see queer movies. I love going places alone: looking at art, watching music, going to readings. When I go to see All of Us Strangers, though, I am intentionally centering something in myself: you are a queer going to see a queer movie. The space is such too. I thought about texting Truong, because we’d talked about it a few weeks earlier: I don’t know if I can go, I think I’ll just cry. I think I know I’m just going to cry, of course I’m going to go. I’m like him or he’s like me: we keep movies around we know we’ll cry to. Because his brain is better than mine, he’s smart enough to mark off the timestamps of where its coming. I just throw in Billy Elliot and ugly cry.5 

I was 18 when Brokeback Mountain came out. I know, because I went to Drag Ball that year in gay cowboy motif, even though none of us had even seen the movie before. That winter my boyfriend and I drove to Evanston to watch it opening weekend, sitting in a theater of gay men. At the time he was bisexual, too, and the terrible boundaries and curiousities deep in both of us with regards to desire and identity were thrilling, isolating, liberating, sweet, juvenile, and ended up in childish betrothal and also, well, let’s just say some shitty behavior. He was pretty, though. That Friday we sat watching close to the screen, ready.

I don’t know how to explain that feeling of belonging there, even with this boy and our effective hetero. I just know I needed to see it so did he, so we drove through the snow. The room was rapt the entire time, until. We stared at Anne Hathaway’s perfect features and steel gaze, the entire room gasped, ached, and my boyfriend began to cry next to me. I held his hand strongly, thinking about Things That Had Happened to Me, breathed deep, bit down on my own tears.

My high school years were years of watching the Sad Gay Movies on DVD, heartbroken or righteously sad. Boys Don’t Cry, Angels in America, My Own Private Idaho, Elephant, Happy Together. Movies about sad lesbians or trans folks were everywhere. I hated Monster even as I knew I’d be expected to watch it. I still love many of these movies from watching them alone on my laptop, chunky and lonely.

But I also tried hard to get my hands on the camp and the joy and that’s what I could build an altar to in my little bisexual heart. I read biographies of James Dean and Allan Ginsberg, dreamed of classic cinema butch fashion, listened to a LOT of glam rock. I did make tiny LiveJournal icons from Todd Haynes Velvet Goldmine and I can quote Priscilla Queen of the Desert to this day (I liked The Birdcage when I got older.) The coded Baz Lurhmann oeuvre nestled strong in my heart: I owned the Romeo + Juliet CD, Moulin Rouge is still on my bookshelf somewhere, and I like to yell, WHO THE FUCK IS FRAN!?!

The semiotics of these adolescent trappings never left. I daydream about wanting to a Northern Soul brought to you by If These Walls Could Talk 2 aesthetic at the trendy gay bar, ready to bring out Wild One Butches and Femmes. I want this because rockabilly aesthetic remains in my closet, and RIP Soul Summit and Windy City Soul Club. I do not want to interrogate any of it. I do not want to explain it to youngsters or anyone else. It is impossible then, I know, because it is 2024 and out on the internet the discourse churns about youth and elders and slurs and problematic.

I am not very interested in organizing anything these days, but have developed a skill for it, if skill is simply doing the thing. I am baffled when people fawn over “event organizing” as it pertains to my abilities. The hardest thing about trying to gather people is sticking it out when nobody shows up, then trying again. That, and not being a dick. I’ve been trying to gather local community at bars I like and even that has turned into a whole thing. In-group, out-group, vetting, who is in charge? What I want is the doorman, me, to require nothing other than: is this you? Welcome in.

I am certain there are better writers and critics who can share the importance of movement, space, aloneness, and ambiguity in All of Us Strangers. We meet Adam and Harry in a sleek, tall London tower, no neighbors anywhere. Their adventuring and fucking is familiar and, to me, achingly lovely. It is knowable. At the same time, the braided story bringing their love to light is Adam’s return to the home he grew up in, his encounter with his parents as they were in the mid-80’s when they died. To detail the plot is not what I’m here for. But between his mother and father (Claire Foy, Jamie Bell) and their (again) ambiguous understanding of his life and queerness, I think the entire theater was stifling our own cries.

It isn’t maudlin or preachy or moralistic. It’s manner is how I walk through the world trying to embody and things will matter if you want them to matter to me. My life is mine, and the acceptance or belonging I will either cultivate in myself to exist beyond me is something I want to find alone in a movie theater, crying with queers and saying very little.

Adam’s aloneness is it’s own character. He writes alone, he eats takeaway alone, he gets on the tube alone. There’s no troupe of friends or an insistence on representation of a constructed community. When he encounters Harry, they become alone together. Ketamine at clubs, fevered dancing, listening to 80’s Britpop on telly, alone, familiar, an atmospheric ache, all of it that felt like I could sit in it in the dark for a long time, to never encounter the subzero dusk I’d shiver into after the credits rolled, after I left.

I seek and burrow into art, or music, or books, or movies on your own to find familiarity6 to encounter the familiar, to find kinship, to commune. To be alone together with strangers in a theater watching a story is a loose definition of a group activity. But the thrill of choosing what I enjoy and hold as my culture, my affinities, myself, on my own - I missed this, very much. It feels spacious and I think that echo can feel like an ache. And yet.

A week or so later I’d obligingly showed up to the “organized” gathering I’d tried very hard to not organize, but which had become more formal because I had no desire to control it’s shape or form. I found an almost-replica of Andrew Scott as Adam’s shirt in my favorite scenes and wore it, feeling handsome. It was warm and rainy and I sat in the bar reading, very tired, counting down the minutes until 9 PM when I would feel like I’d honored my word.

Indeed, not anyone showed up. These things can happen when we are courting strangers.

I would so much rather this song rocket back to the top than Murder on the Dancefloor but anyway this video is bananas, this scene in the movie was great, I am listening to this nonstop.