Since writing my previous post about loneliness and horror, I’ve had cause to think a lot about varieties of loneliness, lostness, violence (physical and especially psychological), and intimacy. Some has been purely theoretical, trying to continue to tease out some ideas I explored in that post, some has been more immediate, but it’s all got me wondering about what we need to get through the lonely horrors of contemporary life.
By we here, I’m meaning, for the moment, mostly men, and mostly (but not exclusively) queer men. Mostly, just because that’s my experience. I’ve observed plenty of beautiful companionship and care and intimacy between people who are other than men, but though I am deeply skeptical of the genre of gender, I must admit that my lived experience is that of a being socially constructed to maleness. (Friends are now thinking, “You are such a hopeless academic! ‘A being socially constructed to maleness!'” My friends are very tolerant.) And my experience is that of someone whose dominant erotic attraction is to features of anatomy that more often than not get socially interpreted as male. (“Hopeless academic,” my friends whisper to each other.)
What I’ve been thinking about recently is the poverty of our language for friendships and intimacies between men. Other societies and languages may not be as limited, but in general American English, it can be difficult to describe the realms between friend and lover. Yet it has been my experience for pretty much all of adulthood that queer men often have — and need — other sorts of relationships.
Earlier this week, I attended a friends and family memorial for my dear friend and mentor Richard Bowes. Everybody there had a different relationship to Rick, who was a genius of maintaining a variety of relationships and friendships, and I was struck by how wonderful it was that especially those of us younger than him, and especially the queer males, had a different but still in some way or another intimate relationship with him.
(And by intimate, I don’t mean sexual. That’s one of the terrible failures of our language and our society: you’re either casual friends with a guy or else fucking him. Intimacy, though, is vastly more than sex and may not — often, in my life, has not — even include sex at all. Indeed, sex is sometimes a barrier to intimacy. [I think Gore Vidal once said something to the effect of: You should never sleep with someone you love. Maybe good advice, but also pretty miserable!] Or — and this is something I find a lot of straight people get very confused about with gay men in particular — maybe sex was how you got to know each other and then once you knew each other you didn’t need to bother with it anymore. Maybe it’s not like that with younger folks, I don’t know, but it was true in my experience for my generation and older. [I am ancient in queer years.])
In Rick’s tiny Greenwich Village apartment, it was impossible not to be intimate. We’d sit across from each other in his bedroom and inevitably our knees would touch. We’d sometimes just hold hands wandering through the city. (Especially as he got older, this was a practical necessity. But I always liked it. An intimacy.) In the last ten years, we’d typically kiss each other goodbye in a gentle and unselfconscious way. When my mother came to the city and was wheelchair-bound and attached to a portable oxygen tank, we made a point of having lunch with Rick, because it was vital to me that they see each other. I didn’t want to see other friends because I was trying to keep up a good, strong facade even as I knew this would be the last time my mother got to see the city, and with other friends I would work hard to avoid certain topics lest my armor melt away. I needed no facade, no armor with Rick. He loved to think of himself as a judgy old queen, and at times he was, but that was for fun. When it mattered, his love was not conditioned on your being at your best. When I told him I wanted him to have lunch with us, that we needed to find a place that was wheelchair-accessible and wouldn’t mind the oxygen tank, he understood things immediately, understood exactly what it all meant to me, to us. That, too, is intimacy.
I thought about this during the memorial, and realized that part of my great sadness in losing RIck has been a sadness at the loss of that particular, irreplaceable intimacy we had developed. It was also an intimacy of wisdom and life experience: the stories he shared, the opinions, the advice. There is an intimacy of knowledge-sharing, an intimacy of conversation. I am often wary of indentitarian explanations of anything, but there is an intimacy of shared experience even with people you don’t know. Despite some very bad experiences in some queer spaces, I still feel least anxious about strangers when I am in a place I know is majority queer: the knowledge of shared experience via identity may be shallow (detail and nuance may undo it), but it is nonetheless a touch of safety, a glimpse of intimacy.
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It’s not that intimacy, generally speaking, is the opposite of loneliness, and certainly not the opposite of horror. Horror, in many ways, relies on intimacy for its effects.
(What is more frightening than that which is intimate to us, with us?)
There can be, as anyone who has suffered abuse knows, a terrible violence to intimacy.
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This morning I watched the new video for a Kevin Abstract and Lil Nas X collaboration, “Tennessee“, a beautiful testament to male intimacies. It made me think of the ways some queer musicians are reconfiguring the landscape for such representations, sometimes via a sincere and more or less social-realist approach as “Tennessee” offers, sometimes via the more baroque, wild, even campy style of, say, Lil Nas X on his own.
For instance, there’s Orville Peck, who right now is deservedly getting attention for his duet with Willie Nelson on “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other”, but what he’s doing to queer country is impressive, emphasizing country music’s fondness for melodrama and its own sort of camp, but without sacrificing meaningful emotion. A relatively simple performance like “Let Me Drown” is an opportunity for him to be less a country singer than something more in the vein of Celine Dion. (But still, a song that ends, “And this town just ain’t big enough for the both of us now/ Let me drown” still has one foot solidly in country music and the Western mythos.)
Let’s look at two of Peck’s songs and their videos. From his first album, Pony (released by SubPop), there’s “Dead of Night”. The first words are sung while there’s a close-up of his lips: half-lipsticked and under the fringe of his (signature) mask. It’s sexy, sleazy, fabulous. As the video progresses, it gives us imagery of solitude, loneliness — and it all throbs with yearning. Lonely yearning is one of Peck’s artistic obsessions, but there’s a great tenderness to it. “Dead of Night” is lonely like Hank Williams, but big-hearted like John Prine. The imagery — filmed in a legal brothel in Nevada — is not exclusively homosexual, but it’s all (even the hetero moments) based in sensibility closer to Rainer Werner Fassbinder than Toby Keith.
In terms of male intimacy, “Dead of Night” is a warm-up for the second song we should look at: “C’mon Baby, Cry” from Peck’s second album, Bronco. The color palette of the video is Velvet Goldmine by way of Wong Kar-Wai, while the setting is one from deep in the heart of country music: a bar. Peck sings and makes his way to the stage, his eyes clearly on a lovely man sitting alone and apparently forlorn. As he sings, patrons throw bottles and glasses at him, he’s booed, but he gives it no attention: all his attention is on the forlorn guy. “I can see the sadness in your eyes. /You’ve been tryin’ to hide what you left behind,” he sings. The entire song is a plea for feeling, for openness, for vulnerability. The video shows that that plea also recognizes vulnerability as sexiness. But also that such vulnerability is queer. By the second verse, the toxically macho guys have all apparently been vanquished from the bar and a chorus of more diverse (in body types, races, etc.) women now dominate. Then, when we get to lyrics like “Just bat your eyes, baby, let me feel the pain” we see Peck serenading the forlorn beauty via a neon Busby Berklee-style set … and with a rather traditional country music character on either side of him dancing. We get montaged into something like a dream sequence, and finally, as the song climaxes, the forlorn man lowers his head and cries — and the imagery explodes in orgasmic celebration. The audience is applauding. The whole scene has now been taken over with jubilance and celebration of a beautiful man letting some emotion out. A final shot shows Orville Peck from the back, wearing his self-branded cowboy jacket, making his way through a street at night as if he’s either a superhero or somebody out cruising, maybe both.
Peck is a master of turning the most familiar clichés of melodrama into something new, strange, and yet also earnest. “C’mon Baby, Cry” is a serious call for men to stop being so stoic, it’s a proclamation that vulnerability is both healthy and sexy, and it’s also high camp. In an age when “authenticity” is endlessly valorized, it’s a relief to find some queer artists maintaining the old tradition of seizing the absurd, ridiculous, and artificial for earnest purposes.
Through Orville Peck, we discover a kind of aesthetic intimacy hiding within the apparently distancing forces of melodrama, camp, and torch songs. At least since Oscar Wilde, queers have known that ideas of “authenticity” are as likely to get us killed as not. Authenticity and purity are of more use to fascists than to freaks.
Aside from “C’mon Baby, Cry”, Peck’s goals are (admirably) broader than just intimacy between men. He’s creating a whole alternate world of diversely queer people inhabiting the typical environments and situations of country music.
Thinking about specifically male intimacy, I couldn’t help but think of serpentwithfeet’s “Same Size Shoe”. I discovered serpentwithfeet via this song after a friend noted it on one of the social media sites. It immediately became a favorite — it’s just a delightful, gentle, playful song, and the video is effortless and light in its presentation of a couple of guys who love being with each other, touching each other, dancing together, being silly together. Ordinary life, ordinary love. And just so much joy. (They hate us for our joy.)
Having watched that video again, YouTube suggested I should check out serpent’s newer video, “Safe Word”. I’d heard the song, as I’ve listened to the album it’s on a couple times, but haven’t really been captured by it the way I was by soil and DEACON. Yet the video is quite extraordinary, and offers a new way to appreciate the song, at least for me.
The relatively low-resolution imagery creates an intimacy on its own, since we associate these kinds of shots with camera phones (devices of individual vision and private moments). Toward the beginning, a shot of a handwritten note with a city in the background: “I miss you.” Toward the end, another handwritten note in front of the city: “Can’t wait to hold you.” Lots of selfie-type shots in between, an individual against the background of a metropolis. Shots of natural scenes, but no people in them. “The safe word is me. The safe place is me. I’m your shelter.” Then beautiful, ethereal singing of lyrics explicitly laying out sex acts: the heaven of the most intimate intimacy. In the end, the world of yearning and aloneness gets relieved with the appearance of the final split-screen shot of two men kissing and two swans floating in a park’s pond. After the nearly-unbearable ache of separation, the beautiful pleasure of reconnection and companionship.
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“I’ve been around long enough to know you can’t trust a man,” Orville Peck sings at the end of “Daytona Sand”.
It’s a strange, terrible bind for homosexual men: we desire that other who is like our selves, despite knowing (intimately) the violence and hurt men create — we create. We may be perfectly happy to have sex with men, but intimacy and trust are less common. We know just how to hurt each other. And it is often the best people, the kindest and most trusting, who get hurt the most.
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The history of queer literature is a history of yearning, companionship, pleasure, loneliness, horror, joy. This is true of much of literature, but there’s a clearer through-line with queer lit. From the earliest days, we learn that our desires are dangerous. Families may not be familial; companionship, safety, and love may need to be sought elsewhere. For men, the broiling inferno of masculinity’s expectations may burn our skin and burst our hearts. We become deformed, damaged. Damaged people do damage to other people.
If you have had to chart your life more toward survival than joy, every intimacy is terrifying.
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In “Lonely Passions and Lonely Horrors” I wrote about the strange, disturbing 2004 Belgian horror movie Calvaire, a tale of imposed desires, of yearnings for intimacy and love that, when experienced by men, lead to violence and torture. It ends, though, with something like a vision of grace. A moment of the greatest intimacy: witnessing death. The tortured, destroyed, innocent man sees one of his tormenters perish, and seconds before that perishing offers a lie so that the man may leave this world believing a memory of love.
I find this one of the most haunting scenes of any film I know.
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As I write about all this, I keep returning more to music than other arts, even though of course there are rich veins of complex intimacy in every artform. At heart, I suppose I’m just a Schopenhauerian. But also, I’m not a musician, and so music remains mysterious to me in a way some other artforms do not. I can turn off my analytical habits with music and just give myself over to it, because I don’t have much analytical ability with music. I’m grateful for that.
Thinking of intimacy and music, I realize now that two of my favorite explorers of this realm are both South African: Orville Peck and Nakhane. (I dream of them collaborating.) Peck obviously gets interpreted through the lens of the American western mythos, but the unreal psychogeography of his work is also informed by the frontier myths of southern Africa and western Canada (where his family moved in 2002 from Johannesburg). Nakhane grew up in Port Elizabeth, moved to Johannesburg, and now (or, at least, in April 2023) lives in London.
As a writer and someone with experience in film (they starred in the acclaimed 2017 movie The Wound, a film which is also appropriate to a discussion of intimacy, masculinity, etc.), Nakhane brings a narrative and cinematic eye to the music videos they make. There’s an interesting progression of those videos, from the early ones which mostly focused on Nakhane alone (cf. the gorgeous collaboration with Anonhi, “New Brighton” — a collaborative song, but the only human figure in the video is Nakhane [not a criticism; I adore the video]). With regard to intimacy, compare the 2014 video for the song “In the Dark Room” (a song you may know from my Last Vanishing Man playlist) with the 2022 video for “Do You Well”, the official description of which is: “an exuberant invitation to bed. ‘Normally I’m “Oh my God, Jean Cocteau …” but this one is just rutting sex,’ Nakhane says, ‘which has its place!’”. The rutting there in the description is meaningful, because the video sometimes looks like a boxing match. There’s a celebration of animality in this intimacy. I’m less sure of the positive sense of that animality in “In the Dark Room”, which begins with solitude, progresses to a nearly-naked man gently trying to seduce a mostly unresponsive Nakhane (and the repeated lyrics, “Hope you know I’ll hate myself in the morning for this”), the relationship eventually turning to frustration and violence, then Nakhane alone again.
The middle ground is 2017’s “Clairvoyant”, which alternates scenes of isolation (generally, two people in the same space but separate, perhaps brooding, reflecting) with scenes of deep physical intimacy. It’s sexy and celebratory while also melancholy, the characters seemingly uncertain of what their intimacy means, what may become of it. The color palette is similar to that of Peck’s “C’mon Baby, Cry”, reminding me of Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Todd Haynes, Wong Kar-Wai, but the staging is more austere than Peck’s fantasia — more Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant than Velvet Goldmine.
There’s something meaningful here, too, in Nakhane’s nonbinary identity. A path forward, perhaps. Knowing nothing of Nakhane, we might watch “Clairvoyant” or one of the other videos and assume we are seeing the intimacy of two men, but that is inaccurate. Nakhane abjures the binary. There’s no simple escape from the toxicity of masculinity, but perhaps some of us, at least, might find power in refusing the categories imposed on us.
Of every work I’ve discussed so far, the aesthetics and mood of the “Clairvoyant” video best captures what I’m thinking about here. The pure joy of connection, the fear of … ourselves. Who are we? Who might we be?
Intimacy reminds us how many monsters live within us. How might we keep our desire from destroying us? Where might we find grace?
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One of the reasons why Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life remains a favorite of mine is that, like the music of Orville Peck, it uses the tools and tropes of melodrama and a heightened, even contrived, sense of reality to explore types of intimacy between men. The intimacies of A Little Life are often utterly horrific, but the horror is balanced by moments of selfless caring — moments in which people gain a greater sense of existence through the sacrifice of the self. It is one of the all-time great horror novels not because its horrors are more harrowing than many others (though that is true; I don’t know of a genre horror novel as emotionally wrenching) but because it finds moments of grace and even transcendance via caring and companionship.
The cover of the U.S. edition of A Little Life uses Peter Hujar’s photograph “Orgasmic Man”, an extraordinary image for a variety of reasons, but what makes it so haunting is its ambiguity. The title tells us one thing, but just looking at the image we probably first interpret it as the image of a man in pain.
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All that I want is a kind heart to haunt.
My shrink says it ain’t too much to ask…
—Orville Peck, “City of Gold”
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Intimacy haunts us because we necessarily experience the world singly, stuck in our own sensorium, trapped in our bodies and thoughts. We reach out, seeking the impossible melding (think Plato’s Symposium; think Hedwig’s “Origin of Love”). We may all die alone, but perhaps we do not need to live as if we are already dead.
One of the most moving songs I’ve heard in recent years is Sufjan Stevens’s “Shit Talk”, a song of impossibilities and anger and yet also some sort of love that survives. One of its refrains offers perhaps the best antidote to horror, an invocation of companionship and caring, a recognition that alone we are lost to the abyss:
Hold me closely
Hold me tightly
Lest I fall
