Issue 002

The Other Holy Trinity: Art, Sex, and Politics

ESSAY

What Is Art Really?

This past February, nineteen ten- and eleven-year-olds from my son’s fifth-grade class discussed the question: “Is art important?” One of them said it was a distraction from mathematics and the sciences because the United States of America ranked poorly when compared to the rest of the world in those categories. The child went on to say that math was more important because it taught you how to think logically rather than emotionally. My child said the arts were important because “it was about self-expression" and I immediately disagreed. I was more interested in who indoctrinated the first child with a hostile vision of the world than I was in disagreeing with them. It was more alarming that an eleven-year-old had such sterilized visions of the world. And until the conversation with my son, it had never occurred to me to challenge the widely accepted notion that art was important for self-expression. I didn’t have a satisfactory rebuttal even after several hours of discussing it with my opinionated preteen. As we discussed, the question evolved from “Is art important?” to “What is art if it isn’t self-expression?”

The “art” I am referring to here is anything shared publicly inside and outside museums and galleries. I am not interested in defining the art we make for ourselves in the privacy of our homes.

The scholastic definition of art, according to the Arts Council of England, is “a diverse range of human activities, creations, and expressions that convey emotions, ideas, or stories, typically characterized by creative imagination, technical skill, and aesthetic beauty.” Several reputable art councils and organizations around the world, such as the California Arts Council and the Arts Council of England, which advocate for free public art, defend their beliefs with claims that art is subjective, often defined by the viewer. They say its purpose is aesthetic value, emotional release, social commentary, or personal expression, and functions as a conduit for expressing emotions, advocating for causes, and creating beauty in a complex world. I have combined multiple definitions for art and paraphrased them here to cover its colloquial definitions. What is obvious is the passive and vague nature of these definitions. They raise questions I would consider antithetical to what a definition is supposed to do: provide exact meaning. I was alarmed that one of the definitions delineated the task of understanding and contextualizing public art to the individual witnessing it. How can we engage with art meaningfully if we are required to consider everyone’s individual opinions? Who benefits from such chaos?

Unsurprisingly, these definitions of art that center self-expression were of no use to me, which made me restless. I began reevaluating works of art I held dearly. I wondered whether memoirs should even exist. Should parents encourage skilled or “naturally gifted” children to monetize their “art?” These questions possessed me. It colored my perception of everything I read and watched. It soon became evident that clarifying this question was fundamental to everything else I thought I might write for tiny Pleasures. I began revisiting works by fine artists, writers, deceased and contemporary cultural critics I respected to formulate a definition that might support my ideas.

What is art if it isn’t self-expression?

The debate regarding art’s importance is a duplicitous one. These asinine dialectics foster other asinine dialectics, like whether we can separate the art from the artist or if only painful experiences can create art. The fact is, art has persisted through various civilizations and cultures. I do not think it is a coincidence that these fruitless discourses are what preoccupy our minds and dominate public discussions of various art forms. Coincidences involve chance or unplanned occurrences. If the sciences are more important, why are tech brothers lobbying to keep us out of the arts while pillaging their way into art institutions? Is it also a coincidence that our wealthiest and most affluent citizens have launched a mammoth-sized campaign promoting AI “art?” The arts have always been tools for inhumane propaganda. We are intolerably ignorant about how so-called democratic governments have orchestrated psychological operations using self-expressive art as their cannon. It is remarkable!

With these truths, I am more interested in using this newsletter to propose a line of more creative and critical questions: What is art, and why do we give it such precedence?

Although I am asking what art is, I am uninterested in specifying what it is because what is it really? I’m interested in establishing definitions of art that delineate how it ought to function to qualify as art. Questioning art’s function raises other crucial questions about how we decide what demands our attention. If we judge art by its beauty, which is subjective, and what it has to say, which is both subjective and objective, how do we agree on what the artist says it is?

The lack of exact definitions of art’s purpose and function has curtailed inventive public discourse and fostered a climate where the most “important” artists and inventors are the ones who sell the most albums, successfully convince us of their manufactured worth, and make the most salacious spectacle. In this society, mutilated intelligence thrives and nothing means everything.

It would be a waste to establish a rational definition of art that encapsulates its creative, civil, ethical, and humane functions and purpose when so many others with better words have defined it ad nauseam. I resonated with the definitions proposed by writers. The following definitions struck me as both sober and passionate:

In an interview with Claudia Tate for Black Women Writers at Work, Toni Morrison referred to writing as “discovery.” She said, “It's talking deep within myself.”
In the same book, Audre Lorde proclaimed that “Art is not living. It is the use of the living. The artist can take the living and use it in a certain way to produce art.” She also encourages writers to write what is unresolved, not what is understood.
Also, in Black Women Writers at Work, when talking about writing, Gayl Jones claimed that “perhaps brutality enables one to recognize what tenderness is.”
When asked why she wrote in the Fall 1990 issue of The Paris Review, Maya Angelou said her writing was about documenting what it cost to grow up, which is telling the truth about “what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.” In the same interview, she explained how writing about one’s life isn’t merely about telling the facts of what happened, but rather an honest account of how it felt.
In his 1981 Art Forum essay “Radiant Child,” which cemented Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artistic influence and historical relevance in the world, René Ricard defines art as information, not about information.
Poet Mary Ruefle asserts in Madness, Rack, and Honey that “Poetry is subversive for good reason, but for me it should never be rapacious, living on prey.”
In a 1984 interview with The Paris Review, James Baldwin said, “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” I will include this snippet from his 1979 interview with the New York Times: “I find much of so‐called avant‐garde writing utterly trivial. If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. I’m an old‐fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world. What I hope to convey? Well, joy, love, the passion to feel how our choices affect the world . . . that’s all.”

The problem with art as self-expression

The definitions above are specific; they leave minimal space for misinterpretations — thus is the very function of definitions: exact meaning. Morrison’s description of writing as discovery directly supports Lorde and Baldwin’s advice to write what is unresolved. They all say that the writing has to begin with a question, an overlooked phenomenon, or a vision that you cannot let go of. Ricard’s definition also supports theirs by emphasizing that, no matter the form, art has to be informative. Writing what is unresolved is informative. Angelou’s assertion that it isn’t enough to simply tell the facts of what happened illuminates what kind of information art must possess. They all agree that if the writing is about oneself, it ought to be confronted with wonder and dignity and not merely vague references to the facts: who did what or what happened. Angelou says, “The facts can obstruct the truth, what it really felt like.”

I want to introduce several examples of popular artworks and “artists” that illustrate my arguments against art as self-expression.

Entertainers such as Taylor Swift come to mind when I think about the dangers of art as self-expression in a consumer-driven economy. Swift treats her experiences with little to no dignity. Swift’s inclusion of salacious relationship details without ever using the men’s names in her music is to be melodramatic—to provoke a response that inadvertently distracts audiences, to show her knowledge of figures of speech, and to be the wealthiest pop star in the world. No one has proposed sound arguments for why we should pay attention to yet another twelve-track album about the same theme Swift has nauseatingly exhausted for two decades: romantic love. Before album releases, she notoriously drops clues for rabid, sycophantic fans (and critics) to concoct delusions about the contents of her pedestrian lyrics.

Swift’s most recent album, The Life of a Showgirl, is her most heinous production. Like the rest of her body of work, it is riddled with the other holy trinity: elementary figures of speech, outdated and unintelligent internet lingo, and melodrama. She announced the album eight months after the end of her retrospective tribute Eras tour. The twenty-one-month-long, 149-show tour grossed over one billion dollars in ticket sales and two billion in merchandise revenue, making it the highest-grossing tour of all time. She even had the effrontery to orchestrate a cash-grabbing theatrical release for the album. One month before the album’s premiere, she had released over 40 vinyls, digital album and single editions, CDs and more. In this spreadsheet generously created by a “Swiftie,” you can see that the average fan spends almost $800 before they even hear a lyric.

The album opens with “Fate of Ophelia,” which is a Disney Channel-sponsored Shakespearean revisionist nightmare. She reimagines a less tragic fate for Ophelia similar to how she “reimagined” Romeo and Juliet’s fate in her 2008 single “Love Story.” Devout fans and Shakespearean purists have debated whether Swift has actually read Hamlet because the damsel in distress (herself) Swift describes in “Fate of Ophelia” is rescued by Prince Charming, which is a far cry from Ophelia’s tragic fate in the book. She fumbles through the entire album with one poorly crafted simile after another. She closes the calamitous album with “CANCELLED.” Here are some of the unforgettable lyrics:

Did you girl-boss too close to the sun?

Good thing I like my friends cancelled
I like 'em cloaked in Gucci and in scandal

Welcome to my underworld
Where it gets quite dark

The last lyric is a brain teaser. Is it ever not “quite dark” in the underworld?

Her playground-level lyricism and illiterate figures of speech are overlooked because we can relate to being broken up with (again) or falling in love (again). Even the supposedly prestigious Harvard University created a course analyzing her lyrics alongside the works of William Wordsworth and Shakespeare. But is songwriting or poetry about relatability?

Ricard addresses this phenomenon of relatability while defending Basquiat’s works. He says, “We need to see ourselves now but not this literally. For some reason we need recognizable evidence of our existence. Something has happened and we need, if not advice, at least a demonstration of the situation…” Ricard argues that we do not need to create language to describe emotions like fear, which are hardwired biological functions of the nervous system. Emotions are evident. Instead, he urges us to write, paint, and sing about the feelings which, as Mary Ruefle put it in her lecture “On Fear,” “are more complicated and involve emotion, memories, experience, and intelligence.”

The responses from gay men after Heated Rivalry’s release on HBOMAX last year highlight the “relatable art” phenomenon. Many gay men and even gay male celebrities chimed in to share how unrelatable the sex on Heated Rivalry was. Jordan Firstman, the resident gay in charge of homosexual sex, told Vulture that it was not an accurate representation of “how gay men fuck.” These asinine conclusions only arise when we think that our subjective interpretations of art are of utmost importance. We should, of course, think of what the artist and the art are trying to say. However, it is paramount to include the subject matter’s context and history. But if our intelligence, experiences, memories, or emotions are tainted, we are unable to draw educated conclusions. Art as self-expression inadvertently communicates that art should represent our personal realities, which would explain the catastrophic state of the arts: everything mirrors our reality, nothing reflects it. Reflection requires deep consideration; mirroring is less interesting; it emulates and reproduces our reality. Taylor Swift has not lived a life worthy of meaningful reflection, which explains her reliance on recycled melodrama to sell records. Her life is a premeditated anomaly—she has nothing of substance to teach us.

I want to be clear that I am not defending removing enjoyment or personal details from songwriting or any kind of writing. In fact, some of our most popular bops combine an upbeat groove with deeply personal lyrics that express feelings. For example, Candi Staton’s “Young Hearts Run Free” is a record about the consequences of prioritizing a romantic relationship over one’s well-being. You will not feel its eeriness until you sit with the lyrics. I once heard someone describe the song as the kind of music used in horror movie trailers, slowly drifting into an echo. The song was written and produced by David Crawford after Staton confided in him about her abusive marriage. Although Staton did not write the lyrics, she sang them in one take with haunting exhaustion and anguish. Without fail, I choke up during the second verse when she says:

It’s high time now just one crack at life
Who wants to live in, in trouble and strife?
My mind must be free
To learn all I can about me, uh-huh
I’m gonna love me, for the rest of my days
Encourage the babies every time they say
Self-preservation is what’s really going on today

We have evidence that it is not impossible to invent that which is both achingly beautiful and useful. Staton’s song is about her life and she is singing to herself, but “Young Hearts Run Free” is also for everyone who might fall under any delusions of romantic love. Ricard’s description of art as information emphasizes the point I am making here: Staton’s lyrics are useful because they give us information about what she has endured —skipping the scandalous innuendos and encouraging self-preservative love. Swift’s lyrics are also about who hurt her, which isn’t useful beyond gossip. Staton isn’t merely centering her pain in this record—she lets us know that she is committed to spreading the message of self-preservation over sacrificing oneself for a romantic love that will only hollow you out. This isn’t the story of a woman scorned. Staton’s song is one of a woman who owns herself because she has liberated herself, using her life lessons to hopefully liberate others. On the other hand, Swift reproduces emotion as art.

I will introduce Swift’s critically acclaimed 2020 release Folklore as an example of how she reproduces emotion as art. Folklore is Swift’s only non-biographical album and even then, fans have speculated that some of the songs are about her romantic entanglement with sewer rat Matt Healy. While she attempts to steer clear of her personal life, she does not hesitate to tackle the same subjects: heartbreak, loss, and rage with an astounding absence of perception. “Cardigan,” the lead single, is heralded as her Magnum Opus by fans because of its supposedly strong lyrics:

Cause I knew you
Steppin' on the last train
Marked me like a bloodstain, I
I knew you
Tried to change the ending
Peter losing Wendy, I
I knew you
Leavin' like a father
Running like water, I
And when you are young, they assume you know nothing

These lyrics are from the point of view of a young woman remembering why she left her first love. She leaves him because he lacks maturity like Peter Pan, hence the “Peter losing Wendy” line. (These pedestrian similes are heavy-handed and obvious: “marked me like a bloodstain,” “leavin’ like a father,” and “when you are young, they assume you know nothing” are tales as old as time.

“Cardigan” is supposed to be a song about overcoming losing one’s first love to betrayal and yet, Swift did not hesitate to maximize profits on the single. For a low price of $49, fans could own the cardigan similar to the one Swift wore in the single’s music video. You can read the dreadful Vogue press release that’s pretending not to be an advertisement. Her rapacious greed exposes her: she has little to no regard for the characters she invents and is incurious about them, belaboring them with her stunted prepubescent romantic fantasies. Even in the fictive world, Swift is omnipresent in every narrative.

Let me remind you of Mary Ruefle’s lecture on fear, in which she distinguishes between emotion and feelings. She says that emotions are hardwired biological functions such as fear, terror, sexual attraction, hunger, etc, which means that you have no control over your emotions. On the other hand, “feelings seem to represent a place where emotions combine with intelligence and experience to create a highly personal thought process that results in an individual’s worldview.” All this to say, Taylor Swift is a deeply emotional person as her lyrics reveal, but she lacks a sophisticated cognitive system, freezing her in a prepubescent state, which is on display in every song lyric she has ever written. She has never cast a spell on language; she has never “put language in extenuating circumstances with dangerous limits until an acute physical sensation results.”* Instead, she is calculating and conniving with every secret she reveals. She never leans into obscurity, nor does she reveal and hide the secret, which are the very tenets of poetry and songwriting. Her lyrics are prose-like exposés to humiliate whoever is on the receiving end of her rabid emotions. She is unable to write about anything outside herself. Her worldview and the feelings she expresses in her lyrics are corrupt because her intelligence, emotions, memories, and experiences are underdeveloped.

You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye
And I got that red lip classic thing that you like
And when we go crashing down, we come back every time
Cause we never go out of style, we never go out of style
You got that long hair, slicked back, white T-shirt
And I got that good girl faith and a tight little skirt
And when we go crashing down, we come back every time
'Cause we never go out of style, we never go out of style

These lyrics above are from her song “Style” from her 2014 album, 1989. The song is about her intermittent romantic relationship with Harry Styles. She wants you to know who the song is about, hence his name in the title. She then goes on to describe him so you know for sure who the song is about. But the entire song is a big secret that also isn’t one. She never tells you anything of substance about what makes this romance worthy of a song—there are no noteworthy insights. The listener walks away feeling like they are in on a secret while knowing nothing at all. This isn’t art; this is pageantry.

(Mr. Styles also employs these tactics in his songwriting, so this example is not in defense of his privacy. Instead, it is to illuminate that what we call art is nothing short of a spectacle.)

Yet Swift is a cheap example. To truly understand what it costs us to prioritize art as self-expression, we have to look at Beyoncé. At first glance, we can unequivocally agree that Beyoncé is a better performer and entertainer than Swift, but, upon further examination, we find that she is similarly tactical, even though it isn’t exactly in the same way as Ms. Swift. They both rely on leaving a trail of clues for fanatics to piece together before every album release. At Beyoncé’s 2023 sold-out Renaissance tour, nosebleed seats cost between $60–$150, with highly coveted seats in “Club Renaissance” going for up to $1000. The tour grossed over half a billion dollars and was the highest-grossing tour of all time until Swift’s Eras Tour.

Before Renaissance, Beyoncé’s 2016 album Lemonade was a cultural reset. Fans, critics, and those straddling the fence (including myself) celebrated that for the first time we were finally getting clued into Beyoncé’s personal life. At this time, the entertainer had all but withdrawn from public appearances, refusing to share aspects of her personal life, and foregoing press tours to promote her albums. This withdrawal from society came after several malicious comments speculating a feigned pregnancy with the musician’s first child. Even when TMZ published a video of her sister Solange hitting her husband Jay Z in an elevator following the 2014 Met Gala after-party, the musician did not rush to set the record straight. For two years, the public wondered about the incident. Lemonade is an indirect explanation of that incident and the events that surrounded it. With this album, she galvanized fans who had long criticized her for seeming too perfect and having it all together. Audiences pored over the lyrics in hopes of deciphering “Becky with the good hair’s” identity. Beyoncé’s painstakingly emotional descriptions of her one-sided relationship with her adulterous husband clash with the first six songs that emphasize his disposability. She alludes to miscarriages, documents her rage, and even exposes the reproduction of violence throughout her family and the trauma it also reproduces. Then she abruptly changes her tune at the end of “Love Drought.” “Love Drought” is difficult to listen to. She sings, “You’re my lifeline but you’re trying to kill me,” and then moves on to:

I’ll always been committed, I been focused
I always paid attention, been devoted
Tell me, what did I do wrong?

None of these painful lyrics amount to anything because the song is ultimately about how powerful their love is and how it has been strengthened by her endurance of his cruelty. But what is love if it is riddled with so much cruelty?

The late writer and critic bell hooks wrote an appropriate and loving review of Lemonade for The Guardian, in which she praises Beyoncé’s undertaking while succinctly outlining its fictitious politics. She points out that we miss the whole picture when we view Lemonade as a radical project for and by Black women. Instead, she urges us to notice its marketing brilliance: it is no coincidence that Beyoncé began the visual album in an Ivy Park hoodie. (Ivy Park, the musician’s athleisure brand, was launched one week before the album’s release.) Even when we take them seriously, our most “important” artists cannot resist the urge to sell us one more thing. hooks criticizes Lemonade’s romanticized message about an emotionally volatile relationship as a tale as old as time of the scorned woman’s rage. She says:

“Even though Beyoncé and her creative collaborators make use of the powerful voice and words of Malcolm X to emphasize the lack of respect for black womanhood, simply showcasing beautiful black bodies does not create a just culture of optimal wellbeing where black women can become fully self-actualized and be truly respected… All the references to honoring our ancestors and elders in Lemonade inspire. However, concluding this narrative of hurt and betrayal with caring images of family and home do not serve as adequate ways to reconcile and heal trauma.”

Lemonade’s conclusion is the equivalent of the United Colors of Benetton 90s ads. Benetton’s ads communicate “We are the World,” while Lemonade communicates “After all, we are a family.” Beyoncé is aware of the high market value of images in a consumer-driven economy. She uses this visual album to do multiple things: she is showcasing how human she is, which is in direct response to widespread criticisms and even critique from bell hooks after the release of her 2013 self-titled album. Secondly, she showcases black women's pain whilst insisting on its universality. She’s saying, “I am just like you.” And finally, she wants you to know her love with Jay Z is exceptional as an explanation for why she has forgiven his violence. In her own words, their love is “generational.” In every love story, “love conquers all,” but her love for and with Jay Z “can move mountains” and “end love droughts,” even if, in her words, he is “trying to kill her.” What a feat!

After the first-of-its-kind surprise release of Beyoncé’s self-titled album in 2013, hooks infamously referred to Beyoncé as a “terrorist.” I remember the vitriol directed at hooks from the “beyhive.” I was unfamiliar with hooks at the time, but I never forgot her critique, although it did not affect me as it should have. I recently watched the scholar discussion at The New School where hooks uttered this statement. I was flabbergasted that, even with proper context for how she made this conclusion, fanatics and critics completely took hooks’ critique out of context. We have suffered for this misreading. hooks said that she sees “a part of Beyoncé that is, in fact, anti-feminist — that is a terrorist, especially in terms of the impact on young girls.” This critique was aimed at both Beyoncé and her husband Jay-Z, who had previously belittled the often imbalanced and turbulent romantic dynamics women face in heterosexual partnerships. For example, on the album’s bestselling single, “Drunk in Love,” Jay Z mocks the physical and emotional abuse Tina Turner endured during her marriage to Ike. The rapper’s repetition of the lyric, “eat the cake, Anna Mae,” continues the trivialization of Turner’s abuse also by other prominent rappers and musicians. Two years later, Beyoncé’s Lemonade responded to hooks’ critique with Anglo-American feminist imagery.

To conclude this thought, let us examine hooks’ critique of Lemonade’s fictive feminist politics:

“Concurrently, in the world of art-making, a black female creator as powerfully placed as Beyoncé can both create images and present viewers with her own interpretation of what those images mean. However, her interpretation cannot stand as truth. For example, Beyoncé uses her nonfictional voice and persona to claim feminism, even to claim, as she does in a recent issue of Elle magazine, “to give clarity to the true meaning” of the term, but her construction of feminism cannot be trusted. Her vision of feminism does not call for an end to patriarchal domination. It’s all about insisting on equal rights for men and women.”

hooks states that we cannot trust what Beyoncé has to say about women's liberation given her track record. Her worldview is tainted because her emotions, intelligence, and experiences—and how she remembers them—are corrupt. Furthermore, the scholar highlights how Lemonade’s visuals refuse to challenge “systems of domination,” exalting female empowerment that amounts to having the same access to systems of domination as men. Beyoncé is fighting for a society where women are equal opportunity exploiters. While bell hooks agrees Beyoncé’s narration of heartbreak is a crucial aspect of self liberation, she insists that merely doing so does not lead to an end of patriarchal domination because even when women do the work to forgive and reconcile, like Beyoncé says she had in the second half of the album, men are yet to begin the work of emotional transformation necessary to end intracommunal patriarchal violence inflicted on black women. hooks concludes with, “If change is not mutual, then black female emotional hurt can be voiced, but the reality of men inflicting emotional pain will still continue (can we really trust the caring images of Jay Z which conclude this narrative?).”

hooks ends the review eloquently:

“It is only as black women and all women resist patriarchal romanticization of domination in relationships can a healthy self-love emerge that allows every black female, and all females, to refuse to be a victim. Ultimately, Lemonade glamorizes a world of gendered cultural paradox and contradiction. It does not resolve.

As Beyoncé proudly proclaims in the powerful anthem “Freedom,” “I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up.” To truly be free, we must choose beyond simply surviving adversity; we must dare to create lives of sustained optimal wellbeing and joy. In that world, the making and drinking of lemonade will be a fresh and zestful delight, a real-life mixture of the bitter and the sweet, and not a measure of our capacity to endure pain, but rather a celebration of our moving beyond pain.”

With this exploration of Lemonade, we can understand how Beyoncé and Taylor Swift operate similarly. Both are skilled businesswomen who have successfully convinced the masses of their artistic genius, but not without the help of cultural critics, fanatics, and other systems of domination. Beyoncé and Swift come from middle-class families equipped with disposable income and time to pursue careers in the entertainment industry for their children, but their fans believe the myth that they were random, uniquely talented individuals who “made it big.” With perfectly timed tragedies, they have galvanized an army of fanatics who shield them from any kind of criticism. They have successfully centered their careers (in varying ways) around their romantic lives with liberal white feminist aesthetics of equality in their heterosexual dynamics. The myth of their “rags to riches” positions them as “just like us,” which deludes fans into thinking that they are protecting “one of us.”

A decade later, many will agree that Lemonade cemented in history a diabolical wave of the celebritization of capitalist feminism with black American caricatural aesthetics. I will remind you that in 2016, the Kardashians were at the height of their fame, every industry was inundated with heavily venture-capital-funded millennial women-owned businesses like The Wing, Glossier, and Outdoor Voices, everyone wanted you to know they had hot sauce in their bags, and girl bosses peaked.

With Lemonade, Beyoncé has transformed her husband’s cruelty into a love story, while manipulating hers and the public’s reality similar to Ms. Swift, aka Mrs. Kelce, god help us all! But of course Beyoncé’s worldview and conclusions are corrupt. She thought it clever to sing and dance to rhymes and innuendos about Tina Turner’s abuse. By the way, she also refers to Turner as an inspiration for her music.

Why would Beyoncé care to correct her politics when she can distract and manipulate her audience with superficial political views with bone-in details of her personal life? By prioritizing art as self-expression, we have curtailed criticisms of popular music. We’re unable to judge the body of work with equal measures of aesthetic and political criticism because it is impossible to make these kinds of judgments on a body of work containing the personal details of a person’s life without seeming callous! Even when critics offer meaningful political judgments, the discourse is snuffed out by vitriolic fanatics. Long-time fans are only just realizing that the person they exalted as politically radical is the anti feminist terrorist capitalist bell hooks described her to be after the release of her most recent album Cowboy Carter and its dangerously nationalistic visuals.

Most of the damage has already been done—the Lemonade era cemented neoliberal, corporate definitions of feminism and political radicalism, while limiting a generation of young people with mutilated intelligence and a laughable praxis regarding social and class politics. This generation, like the ones who raised them, learned to use politics as a way to establish an identity rather than viewing politics as a vehicle for assimilating in a larger cause. They’re convinced of the viability of online fandoms as a substitute for real-life communities. They are unable to adequately criticize, much less divest from their favorite pop stars and celebrities, because their political endeavors are rooted in what is popular. Politics for them is a social club. They view any critique of their favorite pop star as a critique of themselves and they are overly self-conscious while lacking an understanding of the inner workings of society because they have not explored anything outside their algorithmic feeds. They have been indoctrinated into thinking it is possible to hoard wealth like their most awarded “artists” and yet still be trusted as a moral compass. In this society, we are unable to see that art as self-expression commodifies our lives, emotions, and experiences with others. It incentivizes melodrama. It ensures that your favorite artist can convince you of their revolutionary persona, while selling you $15 keychains that say “fuck the patriarchy.”

If we combine Gayl Jones’ clarification that art needn’t be aesthetically beautiful to help us recognize beauty with Mary Ruefle's assertion that whatever brutality the art depicted, it could not be predatory or for the sake of brutality, we would unanimously agree that art needed to serve a humane purpose. With these truths, we can comprehend the current cultural malaise where every song is either another heartbreak song or one with worthless lyrics hoping for virality and cheap fame. Modern “literature” is riddled with self-help and indulgence where facts have replaced statements that sound authoritative without giving any authoritative information. We can then conclude that art cannot be diaristic even when the lyrics are beautiful, like in Lemonade; it must decenter the self to tell the truth about what it means to be human. It must reflect society, not mirror or replicate it. Even when the material is personal, like all of the examples I have shown here, it must reveal more than the salacious details of one’s personal life and psyche.

With this distinction, we can better understand Lorde’s definition of art as the use of living in a certain way. I am emphasizing “a certain way” because Beyoncé and Staton document domestic partner abuse in their albums. However, Staton never uses innuendos or melodrama to get her message across. She never addresses the abusive husband. There are no “fuck you” lyrics like in Swift’s and Beyoncé’s fictive feminist anthems. She never even swears off men or romantic love. Instead, she instructs all young hearts (including her own) as follows “To yourself be true. Don't be no fool when love really don't love you.” We can now understand that Lorde and hooks are essentially saying that your personal experience of pain is not art.

Beauty for its own sake does not interest me and it should not impress us, especially when our favorite cultural pastime is suspending belief. I can assure you that the truth reads beautifully even if it is painful or uncomfortable. Art must make it difficult for us to “remain just one person.”** Clear definitions for how art functions in our society shift the standard for “good” art and eliminate a climate where self-confessional albums, written and performed by emotionally stunted and corrupt adults, are what top the charts. Art for the sake of beauty is uninteresting._{* quote from Mary Ruefle’s lecture Madness, Rack, and Honey, p. 135

** quote from Mary Ruefle’s lecture Madness, Rack, and Honey, p. 140}

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COLUMN

“I Couldn’t Help But Wonder”: A Sex and the City Column

Season 3 Episode 2: Politically Erect

SYNOPSIS

Carrie is still dating the politician Bill Kelley, which is an opportunity for her to cosplay as First Lady Jackie Kennedy, until he makes a request that snaps her out of the fantasy: he wants her to pee on him.

Steve wants to go steady with Miwanda. She's initially apprehensive because she had no other potential boyfriend candidates. She didn’t want Steve winning boyfriend status by default. Miwanda’s hair increases in size by mid-episode. Big hair and all, she chooses Steve.

Charlotte is scheming. She sees Carrie’s connection with the politician as an opportunity to be elected wife. This is the most interest she or any of them have shown in politics since Charlotte’s crush on Dan Quayle. Charlotte convinces Carrie to host a fundraiser for her politician so the girls could meet “interesting donors.” Charlotte gets the idea to have a party where women bring men they aren’t interested in—one woman’s trash is another woman’s treasure (trash) party. The only man she’s interested in ends up with his ex that same night.

Samantha meets Jeff, the short man who shopped in the little boy’s department. Samantha brings him to Charlotte’s “used date” party and he is offended. He ultimately woos her with his sense of humor and bedroom skills. They date for two incredible weeks and she ends it.

THE QUESTION

“Though politics seemed as relevant to me as a new Erica John novel, I did find it interesting that a discussion about politics ultimately became a discussion about sex. And a discussion about sex ultimately became a question of politics, which led me to wonder if the two weren’t, in fact, inextricably linked, and if so, can there be sex without politics?”

If you take this question at face value, you might formulate an answer in good faith. However, in the context of the show, I must address a few things before answering the question.

Carrie asks this question after a conversation with the girls about politics and sex. They only begin talking about sex after Samantha says that Americans need a good looking man in the White House because “look what happened with Nixon. No one wanted to fuck him, so he fucked everyone.”

There is a lot of truth to what Samantha is saying here and many on the left will agree because a significant portion of American politics rely on beauty and fashion as markers of good morals. Take the 2020 inauguration, for example; many unfortunate souls spent most of that day dissecting the fashions of everyone in attendance: the Obamas, Bidens, and even the newly sworn VP’s stepdaughter came out of it with a modeling contract. One might hear Samantha and think, “how shallow,” while forgetting that beauty as social capital is as crucial to the American economy as greed is. Although it is delivered from an apolitical stance, their analysis of US politics is precise.

Most people who consider themselves politically conscious or left-leaning are convinced that having a good fashion sense indicates good morals, as is the case with many celebrities and their devoted fanatics. Not only is the idea classist, it also has deep roots in hegemonic beauty ideals. Carrie asks, “What is the difference between fashion and politics?” She answers herself, “They’re both about recycling shopworn ideas and making them seem fresh and inspiring.” Although her intentions aren’t to expose the duplicitous political structure of this country, she is correct in her comparison.

The last thing I’ll address is how Carrie compares her interest in politics with whatever enthusiasm she can muster for an Erica John novel. Here’s what I think she meant by that statement: she did not say Danielle Steele, which would then mean that she thought politics was irrelevant in the grand scheme of things but fun to occasionally dabble in. Using Erica John signifies some kind of liberal affiliation because Erica John tackled feminism and issues surrounding female sexuality. However, it could also be that a sex columnist would have a lot to learn from a book about female sexuality. You see this confusion I have for where Carrie stands is my exact frustration with this episode and many in the show where they tackle social, cultural, and political issues. Carrie and friends treat politics like something handsome, monied men do. The women stand there while looking beautiful, motherly, and relatable.

Now that I have situated this episode’s question within the larger context of SATC and our world, it is time to answer: Can there be sex without politics? No, but many of us have unsuccessfully tried and many of us continue undignified attempts. Every choice you make in any romantic dynamic is political, especially who you choose. Hegemonic beauty ideals dominate much of romantic sexual relational dynamics—it affects how your partner treats you, how the world interacts with your partnership, and relational
power dynamics. It is inconceivable that any of us think we can divorce our choices from politics.

Carrie concludes the episode with an answer to the question she posed about sex and politics: sex cannot exist alongside American politics unless it is repressed and hidden. (Even when the show isn’t trying, it still exposes something.)

At the end of the episode, Carrie tries to let Kelley down after he asks her to pee on him. She offers two compromises: drizzling warm tea on him, allowing him to hear her pee. He responds by telling her some of the people managing his campaign think it is a bad idea to date a sex columnist. Carrie is confused by Kelley’s response. She cannot understand why her column is more obscene than Kelley’s pee request. Kelley lets her know that his request is different from her profession as a sex columnist because nobody knows about his pee request. His response exposes what we all know to be true: you can be a sexually promiscuous politician as long as nobody finds out and as long as you do not question politics, you can have the kind of sex your heart desires.

This conclusion begs the questions: If you pee on a politician and nobody else is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And, what does it cost to enjoy all the sex your heart desires if you never question your lover’s politics?

UNFORGETTABLE LINES FROM THE EPISODE

Carrie during sex with Bill Kelley

That was the night I had my consciousness raised.

Samantha

The country runs better with a good looking man in the White House. Look what happened with Nixon, no one wanted to fuck him so he fucked everyone.

I don’t believe in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, I just believe in parties.

Miranda

I would be very worried if I were you. The pee could just be foreplay.

Carrie narrating

Meanwhile, across town, Steve was stuffing Miranda’s ballot box.

COLUMN

On The Fly

Sincerely, A Terrified Driver

I am begrudgingly in love with California. There are many reasons to love living in California as a transplant if you can ignore the terrifyingly patriotic culture of native Californians. No one loves California more than Californians who believe the state should secede from the Union. If you can move past patriotism, you can enjoy everything this majestic land boasts. The terrain is diverse and breathtaking—it surpasses even whimsical imaginations. If you can sidestep how annoyingly self-righteous Californians are, you might enjoy the variety of foods and produce—my diet and palette have improved since moving here. Unless you’re comparing California’s produce with Mexico or any other North American country, its local farm grown produce is the crème de la crème of these United States.

However, since moving to Northern California, I have developed the kind of road rage that makes driving a frightful ordeal. It’s the sort of fright that makes any kind of sound, especially music in the vehicle, threatening. This isn’t your generic white (black) knuckling; it’s two Masters degree level terror. During the excruciating 75 minute drive to and from Sacramento, I exhaustively oscillate between terror and defensive driving. By the end of the agonizing journey, muscles I didn’t know existed ache and a skin peeling ritual sounds delightful!

Here are a few driving related offenses I would like to bring to the attention of Gavin Newsom for immediate review:

The Left Lane

Who else was raised at a time when it was universally understood that the left lane was strictly for passing and fighting for your life? If you saw me wandering into my farthest left lane, know that I’d slept well, eaten breakfast, and have no debt. What I am trying to say is that I bring my best effort to the prestigious and delicate undertaking of operating a motor vehicle. On my long drives to Sacramento, I begin bracing myself for what I will encounter as I try to merge (more on that later) from the roundabout that leads to the highway ramp to Interstate 80 west. The speed limit is 65mph. It is a two-lane freeway, so getting to the left lane should be a cakewalk, except there’s a burgundy PT Cruiser in the left lane in cruise control at 57 mph.

If you didn’t know: the left lane is for passing because you exit and join the highway from the right. It is dangerous to pass on the right. It is unpredictable, creates blind spots, and causes congestion. Did you know that the left lane isn’t your god given right?

Merging/Yielding

According to me, merging on the highway is the number 7 leading cause of death in the USA. Before I merge, I run through the list of everyone I love because it is possible I may not make it home alive. I recently almost got into an accident while merging. You’re supposed to match the speed of the highway as you merge; avoid stopping and check for blind spots on your left. The driver on the highway has the right-of-way, but they’re also supposed to allow you to enter since YOU CANNOT STOP. Motorists already on the highway can also merge into their left lane to give you space to join. In my case, the car on my left wouldn’t slow down, speed up, or move to the left for me to join, and they almost rear-ended me. Sometimes the problem is that the left lane is congested with PT Cruisers driving under the speed limit, but most of the time, the person driving is choosing this very crucial moment to assert dominance. In a just society, both deserve severe punishment.

High Beams

It seems that we have collectively reached catastrophic conclusions about what is reasonable luminance for headlights. On top of that, most people might have serious vision impediments (HEY GANG!) since they require high beams on a four-lane freeway. My senses are overloaded and crashing by the time I make it back home from Sacramento. Most times, I sit in silence to recover from the assault, swearing that I will never drive to Sacramento until I have to. I have started a form of offensive driving for drivers inappropriately utilizing their high beams by turning mine on when they pass. Seventy-five percent of the time, they respond by switching theirs off. I regularly pass others who don’t have their high beams on, but instead drive cars with disorientingly bright low beams or forget their high beams are on or don’t even have a concept of high or low beams. Tesla drivers rarely know their high beams are on or purposefully leave them on. Drivers of vehicles that look like hostile SUV replicas of the car from back to the future, possess the low beams from hell. I will see you in court.

Traveling

In the summer of 2009, I was 16 and sitting in the passenger seat when my step dad got an astounding $450 ticket for travelling across a four-lane freeway. It was a silent drive back home. I have not traveled lanes since then. I am completely horrified when someone does it and almost causes an accident. You’re supposed to start by signaling to the cars on your left or right for at least 300 yards before crossing over. Now, repeat the rest like a mantra because I will not repeat myself: You must increase your speed, spend a little time in the new lane, and reassess traffic before joining a new lane.

Other Grievances

Self-righteousness has caused calamity on California roadways and more. Californians have sanctimoniously confused trivial driving etiquette with state driving laws. I have to drive by multiple intersections on my short commute on weekdays; some drivers have stop signs before joining oncoming traffic, or there might be turning lanes breaking up ongoing traffic. My least favorite are the turning lanes that lead into places like grocery store parking lots, where the state paints “KEEP CLEAR” on the road to prevent traffic from blocking off the entrance. There are at least two drivers per day who abruptly stop in the middle of the road to allow other drivers at the stop sign (out of the parking lot) to merge, even when the stoplight is green. I am happy to stop to allow merging drivers in front of me IF the stoplight is red. To make matters worse, motorists

at the stop sign will stare you down if you refuse to stop. I have considered attaching a poster to the back of my car or a marquee display to inform people of the differences between driving etiquette and state law, but I am worried that a disgruntled driver might retaliate by rear-ending me. I would be prosecuted for presenting new (existing) ideas. My final words for motorists who think they can freelance as traffic officers are: fill out a job application.

I aced the written portion of my driver’s license test because I once excelled at cramming. I failed my driving test twice before passing with flying colors on my third try. Because of failure, I remember driving rules that most people have forgotten or never learned to begin with. I read every page of that driving book. Like I said, I was fantastic at cramming.

But that isn’t why you should hear me out. Hear me out because I have never met a curb I didn’t love driving or bumping my tire on. If my tire rims could talk, their experiences of me would affect your opinion of me. I can indeed parallel park in my sleep, but I also have poor depth perception, so I worry all the time that I am driving out of my lane. This disgruntled essay isn’t from the desk of someone who thinks they drive well. Instead, I am asserting that as an average driver, I find it alarming that most people rank from bad to abysmal on the driving scale. We should ALL be alarmed.

I propose a mandatory written and driving test every seven years for every driver since we have to renew our driver’s licenses regularly. You cannot operate a motor vehicle if you do not know basic driving rules that keep everyone alive. Driving is very serious business. We must treat it as such. I do not wish to hear arguments for why my proposal is problematic. I am at capacity for receiving feedback.

I thought about including a list of things I love about driving but I am currently full of hate.

Questionnaire

Assuming we are all on the same page about driving while intoxicated, may I test the rest of your driving knowledge? Answer this anonymous questionnaire without looking the answers up, PLEASE! (For US drivers).

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The First Issue

COLUMN

What’s Your Occupation?

Q: Where do you live and how old are you?
A: I live in Portland, Oregon. And I am twenty-nine years old

Q: What is your highest level of education?

A: I went to and finished college at a 4 year university

Q: At what age did you start working?

A: Fourteen

Q: What is your current profession?

A: I do a lot of things, but I’m an editor and writer mostly

Q: Did you start out in this field? Can you map out your career for me?

A: I’ll talk about writing and editing because those are my most mappable lines of work. Since I could write, I’ve written stories, conducted interviews, and loved reading. In college I thought I would become a “capital A” Art Historian—meaning I’d go on to get a PhD and then produce research and write books about my specialized topic, Black American performance art. But I went to a state school with an abysmal Art History department and I don’t come from wealth, making my survival in that field pretty fragile. To sustain myself, I worked any and every art job I could get my hands on. Before the white people in charge let me write anything, I installed projectors into ceilings, re-painted white wall galleries, gave tours to board members who still said “colored,” coordinated volunteers for art festivals, picked up empty glasses after openings—all the physical and emotional labor people conveniently forget makes the arts run. From there, I wrote here and there when the folks in charge would allow it: press releases, random comms, a little something for the museum magazine, shit like that.

Working in galleries and museums was foundational to my understanding that I didn’t want to work in these spaces and that academia wasn’t for me either. In 2020, after being fired from all three of my jobs at the beginning of quarantine, two people who I kept bumping into at openings took chances on me as a writer and editor. Sharita Towne, is a brilliant Black woman artist also from Oregon who gave me first writing paid residency. For three months, I occupied a basement studio tucked beneath hers, and wrote and made art uninterrupted for the first time in my life. She taught me how to risograph print, put my writing in published zine, and connected me with a curator who then exhibited this work at our local museum. Amelia Rina, arts writer and editorial wizard, hired me at twenty-three as the Associate Editor for her online arts magazine called Variable West. She taught me how to edit from the ground up and published my first “big” piece of art writing and I was there until the magazine closed earlier this year. Both of these people pushed me to call myself a writer/editor/artist. Over the last six years I’ve built a writing and editing career out of studying my craft, being a forever student that is confident enough to take on experimental and non-traditional projects, saying no to things that don’t align, and a desire to support language production and criticisms from everyday folks.

Q: Do you have any certifications for your current profession?

A: Nope. I wasn’t formally taught editing in school, like many of my colleagues who went onto graduate school or specifically studied English at the university level. I was given a Chicago Manual, told to learn it, and everything else I’ve learned on the fly, through Youtube university or books, and by being rigorously edited by others.

Q: What other skills do you possess that support your current profession?

A:

I’m a Virgo, so I’m hypercritical, detail-obsessed, and kinda turned on by “less sexy” tasks like technical copy editing. I’m a slash and burn type editor when it comes to content and developmental work, meaning I’m really good at pushing the text until it’s “where it’s supposed to be,” pulling on all the loose threads and poking holes. It’s a bit full on, but this Virgo-ness, this inclination to make things as close to the vision as possible, is because I believe in the writer’s capacity to make the work better
Reading! Like really reading, annotating, getting into the material and asking questions, and revisiting texts has only made me more capable of translating my own ideas and helping others do the same
Discernment. Sometimes as an editor, and as a writer, you need to know when something isn’t working whether it’s your own or not.

Q: Do you mind sharing your estimated salary?

A: It varies year to year based on if I have a 9 to 5 work on top of my writing and editing, I’ve made $30,000 one year and $70,000 the next. So within that range.

ESSAY

Contextualizing Heated Rivalry

March 20, 2026

Sourced from IMDB

Six weeks after Heated Rivalry ushered the cisheterosexual world into a humiliating hysteria, I scoured the internet in search of affirming, challenging, or enlightening discourse about the most-watched TV show on HBOMAX since 2020, according to The New Yorker. After a simple Google search, almost every article I read in supposedly prestigious media like The New Yorker, British Vogue, The Guardian, and even Out Magazine—the nation’s leading publication for LGBTQ+ media—centered heteronormativity in creatively facile fashions. Did no one find it elementary that the dominating conversation almost two months after the premiere was, “Why do straight women resonate so much with Heated Rivalry?”

Heated Rivalry is an adapted TV show based on the books by Rachel Reid—Heated Rivalry and The Long Game—about sex, desire, and sexuality portrayed through the sexual relationship of its main characters, hockey stars Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. Framing Heated Rivalry as a love story effaces what the show is at its core: A historically humane projection of queer life. Positing Heated Rivalry as a love story that transcends all sexual identities, in defense of its merits, dilutes issues of casual sex, gender, and sexual identity. The show is also surprisingly beautifully shot. At a time when everything in the mainstream is excruciatingly monotonous, jejune, or apathetic, Heated Rivalry is a multi-sensory opulence with lighting, framing, music, and a spectacular screenplay.

The sex scenes don’t feel gratuitous because of stylistic (camera work, editing, and lighting) and ethical (the use of an intimacy coordinator) choices. Jacob Tierney, the show’s writer and director, respects his audience; he refuses to be didactic, which is now routine in every form of contemporary media. He eschews tropes of queer presentism, which queer studies graduate student Colton Valentine defines as “a Whig history of sexuality that positions today’s LGBTQ+ writers as liberators of the closet past,” by situating these characters alongside, rather than against, documented depictions of queer identity and life. It captures in vivid vignettes, sincere characterizations, historical and cultural depictions of queer life in the late aughts, and the pressures of the “exceptional minority” trope in meticulous blink-or-you’ll-miss-it dialogue and acting.

Sourced from IMDB

Sourced from IMDB

Much of what I feel for Heated Rivalry is entwined in the individual choices of the director, Jacob Tierney, and actors Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, made to adapt this story for TV. It is Tierney’s incorporation of consent as foreplay that intensifies the effervescence of the moment; the camera work invites you into each intimate encounter without intruding. Williams inhabits Shane Hollander with depth, charm, and striking (micro) facial acting. When we meet Shane in the opening scene of the first episode, we immediately learn that he is a rule follower with a competitive sense of humor. By the end of the second episode, we gather that he is deliberate, with a profound sensitivity illustrated through all of his unsent text messages to Ilya. Storrie personifies Ilya with hypnotic line deliveries and a convincing Russian accent for a rural Texan native. During a scene in episode two, Olympians, in the bathroom after the MHL awards (the show substitutes the NHL with MHL to avoid copyright issues), Ilya rejects Shane after making him beg for fellatio. With deep vocal timbre and an intoxicating cadence, he says to Shane, “We will go back to our seats, watch the rest of this boring show, and then go to a boring party after. And then, when you have been waiting all night, you'll go back to my hotel room and I will maybe… maybe do more than just suck your dick.” By the end of the scene, I was spellbound.

The show is filled with queer history and coding, but my favorite is episode one’s shower scene, where Ilya masturbates in front of Shane. Gender studies academic and intimacy coordinator Amber Rose McNeil historicizes and contextualizes this scene in the Heated Rivalry intimacy scene analysis they publish on their website. They remind us about cruising, “a way that gay and queer men have historically found other gay and queer men to have sexual encounters with,” to illustrate that Ilya’s masturbation isn’t random or merely entertainment. McNeil breaks down Shane and Ilya’s “casually distanced cruising” by highlighting all of the moments that lead up to the shower masturbation scene. McNeil selects the hotel cycling scene to illustrate how Tierney’s camera work shows us where Shane’s eyes rest throughout the rousing exchange, specifying that this scene features a “light cruising” where “Ilya is showing and gauging interest and attraction. His words and actions are flirty, providing Shane with information but also gathering information from Shane. In this scene, the flirting and measured behaviour from Ilya are more apparent to a general audience. But, when viewed through a queer lens, it is another scene that intentionally and handsomely illustrates queer coding, queer history, and queer culture.”

Heated Rivalry’s conceit includes a contrast between the pressures of the homophobic hockey world and the couple’s affection. It is notably the tension in the exterior world and repercussions in their interior life that make for a compelling watch. The show is an earnest, imaginative deviation from representations of queer life as a miserable existence portrayed in many queer presentist media. Queer presentist media portray caricatural models of queerness through contemporary characterizations and aesthetics, while, as Valentine puts it, "[canonizing] contemporary texts, but eliding and delegitimizing older queer lives and artworks” to make queerness digestible for a heterosexual audience. The writers of the book and of the screenplay reject the impulse to highlight the inherent unhappiness of a life that deviates from the dominant narrative, ultimately refusing to make the injustices and wrongdoings of a heteronormative society its central point.

It did not surprise me that the dominant media ignored all the complexities of this exquisite production. What confounds me is the seriousness with which queer media and social media personalities have devoted to theorizing the show’s cisheterosexual resonance as if queer existence needed universal appeal to rationalize its reason for being. Unsurprisingly, the abundance of theories for this asinine phenomenon has failed to produce any imaginative insight. Is it shocking that relying on the restrictive framework of heteronormativity, which predictably excludes anything that doesn’t fit neatly into its bleak worldview, has produced terrifyingly colorless conclusions?

I will not subjugate you or myself to more humiliation by offering a theory on this futile discourse. Instead of a dignifying review, which the cast and crew deserve—but is absent in legacy and independent media—I have chosen a superlative response in the mainstream (although it falls short) as a framework to contextualize Heated Rivalry from a queer perspective.

Sourced from IMDB

The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast offers an interesting perspective on the proverbial closet. They also mention the show’s resonance with the straights™, so beware!

***

In the episode “Scott Galloway vs. Heated Rivalry: Who will save men?” the hosts of Diabolical Lies, a culture and political podcast hosted by Katie Gatti Tassin and Caro Claire Burke, analyze professional grifter Scott Galloway’s vision of masculinity as proposed in his book, Notes on Being a Man, and Heated Rivalry’s supposed “portrayal of masculinity” as solutions for “reimagining the masculinity crisis” from their leftist feminist lens. The focus of my response will start from midway through the episode when they begin discussing Heated Rivalry because I do not have valuable minutes to expend theorizing on the screeching incoherence of Scott Galloway’s book.

In the first part of the podcast episode, the hosts offer visceral feelings and favorite snapshots of the show. They introduce a TikTok video of a cisheterosexual woman outlining personal claims for why the show resonates in a diaristic manner, culminating in trivial observations and fallacious reasoning steeped in Anglo-American feminism. They wholeheartedly agree that the video, “succinctly highlights all of how we are grappling with this idea of idealistic masculinity versus the masculinity that we really deal with in the world today.” Whatever that means.

They claim that “the show walks the line between what is (masculinity that we deal with in the world today) and what could be (idealistic masculinity portrayed in the show).” Legacy media and audiences gushed about the presence of “safe masculinity” instead of “toxic masculinity.” Even the TikToker asserts that “They are literally the embodiment of traditional masculinity. Yet, their masculinity is never weaponized.” But what is safe masculinity and how is it different from toxic masculinity? If masculinity is defined as the qualities or attributes regarded as characteristic of men and boys, which preserves hegemonic ideals for gender and sexual identities within binaries determined by biological sex, how does one achieve “safe masculinity” when masculinity itself is restrictive? I reject the idea that there is such a thing as “safe masculinity” when the doctrine of masculinity ostracizes those who deviate from these norms, while imposing a circumscribed order for those who adhere. The hosts and Tiktoker are essentially saying: Isn’t it so nice that they get to be buff and chiseled while talking like girls? This assertion is both misogynistic and homophobic because there’s the subtext that these queer men are vulnerable privately while passing as straight publicly, as if it’s a good thing. Both “safe masculinity” and “toxic masculinity” are oxymoronic ideas.

The TikToker expresses that it “causes grief” to watch two men on an even physical, economic, and gendered playing field, not because she envied the relationship, but she “craves that freedom within love.” She boldly states that “there's no inherent power dynamic between them, no underlying expectations that one person be smaller, softer, gentler, easier, or more accommodating because of their gender. They're both allowed to be strong and vulnerable at the same time and also masculine without being threatening.” The hosts also reflected on the absence of a “power dynamic” between Shane and Ilya. What I think they all mean to say is that there is no power imbalance between the couple. Power dynamics is the distribution and experience of power in any relational dynamic. In Shane and Ilya’s case, the dynamic is balanced and not for the reasons outlined. Perhaps the ignorance surrounding the concept of power dynamics has produced shallow conclusions.

Sourced from IMDB

Power dynamics exist in every relational dynamic, but not every relationship, romantic, familial, professional, and platonic, experiences an imbalance of power. A relationship (and I am not strictly referring to romantic relationships) can start balanced and end or remain imbalanced. Many factors, such as class, age, race, gender, ethnicity, and culture, affect the distribution and experience of power. In Shane and Ilya’s case, the absence of a power imbalance isn’t merely because they are men. The relationship is able to maintain a healthy balance because both parties are unconcerned with overly defining their roles within the relationship, which is the norm for heterosexual couples. Together, they reject the prescriptive, proscriptive, and descriptive confines of heteronormativity, thereby creating a balanced relationship. They exclude heteronormative expectations commonly adopted in most sexual and romantic relationships. Ilya never weaponizes Shane’s virginity by using his experience to dominate Shane. He playfully asserts his sexual knowledge competitively before reciprocating oral sex during their first sexual encounter and never mentions his experience again. Although Shane enjoys relinquishing control during their sexual encounters, it is also true that he initiates sex just as much as Ilya does. When he admits to Rose Landry, a famous actress he briefly dates, that he “prefers being the hole rather than the peg,” he is simply expressing a preference. Instead of prescriptive agendas or restrictive labels like “leader” and “follower,” resulting in dominance and control, they have invited playfulness, consent, healthy teasing, and tenderness. They take turns starting and meeting each other.

It is a myth that the relational dynamics on the show are “functionally unimaginable” for cisheterosexual people. The TikToker hypothesizes that an egalitarian romantic relationship is unattainable because “no matter what, in a heterosexual relationship, misogyny plays a role regardless of how progressive both of you are.” Truthfully, cisheterosexuals seldom explore imaginative solutions outside of their microscopic ideas of what romantic relationships should look like. To have egalitarian romantic partnerships, cisheterosexual women, like their male counterparts, must confront the homophobia that surrounds their romantic life. The women reject men who are either openly bisexual or men who exist outside the parameters of the dominant definitions for how men should act, in this case, “strong and vulnerable at the same time and also masculine without being threatening.” Tedious!

It bears repeating that the dismal worldview and frigid imaginations of heteronormativity remain inferior for comprehending queer relationality that exists outside of the binaries of heterosexuality, i.e., bisexuality or genderqueer identities. Even with the best intentions, a cisheteronormative lens inadvertently excludes and sanitizes Ilya’s bisexual identity. Throughout the podcast episode, the hosts (and many others who have theorized on the show’s resonance with cisheterosexual women, including The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast hosts) omit or gloss over Ilya’s bisexuality as if it were a trivial characteristic like having blue eyes. Bisexuality exists outside the monosexual framework, threatening monosexual dominance and deconstructing the idea of sex. Through omission, the hosts are unable to perceive and translate the nuances differentiating the queer sexual and romantic relations of the central characters from gay and lesbian couples with heteronormative dynamics. To create equitable partnerships under a patriarchal economy, monosexuals must abandon the illusion of safety and security the heteronormative doctrine promises in pursuit of a queer political praxis that interrogates the conception of power and deconstructs the dominant narrative of gender identity, sexuality, and behavior. Michael Foucault’s History of Sexuality, and the writings of queer theorists such as Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage, and Black feminist theorists such as Patricia Hills Collins’ Black Feminist Thought are critical texts for queer and heterosexual people looking to develop a queer political praxis.

Sourced from IMDB

Suppositions on queer relational dynamics through the lens of cisheteronormativity have also curtailed any meaningful discourse about the show. Towards the end of the video, the TikToker professes that the show “resonates because they show what love looks like when gender stops interfering, and it reveals what's possible and what isn't.” The approach is homophobic and illiterate, regardless of intention. Neither the hosts nor the person in this TikTok has questioned their unfounded claims. Because if they’d looked further down, they’d ask, “If Ilya and Shane can have a balanced dynamic where ‘gender stops interfering’ just because they’re gay and men, how then can one explain the misogyny and internalized homonegativity of coupled gay men? Or the rejection of ‘feminized' men in queer communities?” The analysis suffers from an absence of consideration for relevant qualities that shape the main character’s identities and how they experience each other.

Maybe the question isn’t “who will save men,” which is undoubtedly a bootless errand, but theories for how cisheterosexual women might extricate themselves from the clutches of a heteronormative abyss.

***

One of the hosts asserts that “Shane and Ilya's difficulty with communication is quite literally shown via language barrier. Ilya can barely speak English.” They claim the language barrier supposedly prevents the couple from sharing their true feelings, which makes the relationship “largely physical.” According to them, the couple is only able to communicate better once Ilya’s English improves. The absence of communication between Shane and Ilya (to the hosts) is “a very central issue in masculinity.”

Shane Hollander is biracial (Japanese 2nd-generation mother and white Canadian father) and lives in Canada. Ilya Rozanov, Russian, lives in Boston during the hockey season, and spends summers in Moscow with his father and brother, whom he literally and figuratively refers to as “police.” These national and racial identities inform their early and later communicative fashion. Hollander is also established as neurodivergent in the book, which Jacob Tierney superbly portrays without ever telling it throughout the season.

Sourced from IMDB

I was sure we had watched different shows because these conclusions were incomprehensible and simply fiction. Supposing that Ilya can barely speak English when most of the show is in English is xenophobic. It is an uninformed analysis of non-native English speakers, which omits the nuances and particularities of how communication is culturally determined. Misunderstanding how someone communicates because of cultural differences is not the same as speaking different languages. Ilya’s communication style must be considered through his Russian identity, familial dynamics, and tragedies. When he first meets Shane, it has only been five years since he found his mother, who died by suicide. He speaks subtextually and it is difficult for anyone with neurodivergence to parse, especially Shane. These variables inform how he camouflages with bravado and humor. At the same time, Ilya’s sense of humor is both cultural and personal. When Marleau, Ilya’s teammate, observes him texting and comments on his blushing face, Ilya responds with what might be my favorite line in the show, “Uh, no, never in life have I blushed. Russians do not do this.” It is simultaneously the most Russian response, as it is indicative of Ilya’s personality. Only Ilya would object by making a common, human, and involuntary reaction a universally “Russian thing.” With Shane, he nestles his affection in humor. In jest, he calls Shane “Mr. Real Estate” because of what he calls a “real estate fetish.” In the scene before Shane visits Ilya’s Boston home for the first time in episode four, Ilya fakes indifference when Svetlana finds him watching a TV special of Shane discussing his love for architecture at his custom-built cottage home in Ottawa. What intrigues me about Ilya is his ability to use humor to elusively communicate his affection for Shane and expose how well he knows the object of his affection. He is neither cunning nor cruel.

Shane compartmentalizes external expectations and pressures as the first Asian Canadian signed to the Metros while balancing a relationship with his mother, who is also his manager. Shane’s neurodivergence is crucial in understanding miscommunications with Ilya throughout the season. Neurodivergence affects how Shane interprets Ilya’s impish nature at various points throughout the show. However, neurodivergence does not imply an absence of feeling. Compartmentalization does not diminish Shane's capacity to feel everything, everywhere, all at once. He does not pathologize or expedite emotional processing or introspection. Instead of interpreting Shane’s realizations as delayed, we can appreciate this stunning unfurling of sexual awakening and identity.

What I hope to convey here is that even two native speakers of the same language can have similar miscommunications. Communication is regional, personal, and cultural. Subtle and conspicuous nuances, similar to what I have outlined above, affect how we all communicate.

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In the relationship’s infancy and especially before their first sexual encounter, Shane and Ilya’s communication is explicit, oblique, and non-verbal. All of their flirtation is sketched with implicit dialogue and communicated with their bodies. My favorite of their early interactions is when Ilya, the more forward of the two, starts flirting by saying, “See you at the draft,” after beating Shane’s team at the International Prospect Cup. Six months later, after the cycling scene—an interaction I have concluded is the most exquisite foreplay—Shane tells Ilya, “See you in October.” It’s hard to miss Ilya’s faint smile after this interaction because Shane is mimicking how Ilya expresses interest, which is an understated example of how one begins and the other joins.

The two are teenagers and barely know each other when the sexual relationship begins. Any expectation of intense emotionality would be premature. It is true that they both struggle to express themselves in the infancy of the relationship, but are we to ignore the external circumstances—familial and systemic as well as cultural and personal nuances that dictate how these young men communicate? In their defense, the slow progression of their communication with one another is realistic and educational for young people starting to navigate and cultivate romantic lives. The lack of emotional communication between the two doesn’t delineate their relationship into “a largely physical one.” Instead, they begin by clearly defining the sexual relationship. And while confusing for both of them at different times and for different reasons, they allow each other the space to navigate personal confusions and external conflicts without saddling the other or their relationships with paralyzing expectations. Essentially, their scanty dialogue is simply because the relationship started out as, in Ilya’s words, "plans to fuck,” but then morphs into something more (because I reject the notion of “love at first sight”).

These days, most contemporary sexual and romantic dynamics are abundant with red flags from the beginning. We enter most sexual and romantic dynamics with overcommunicated personal agendas before we even know what the relationship might offer us. The show’s differing portrayal of gradual intimacy translates as “a very central issue in masculinity” for those with myopic relational standards, where heteronorms define expectations and performance of vulnerability from people we have yet to know. At some point, Katie says, “I wanted them to fucking talk to each other. There was one scene, I think they had started to talk about Ilya's father, and then they started making out, [we wanted them] to have a conversation! Talk about your dad! It was so physical, and they weren't communicating in a way that felt as though they were getting emotionally vulnerable with one another.” While Ilya and Shane’s relationship is very physical, what sustains the relationship is thrilling sexual encounters, tenderness, mutual respect, and admiration. By contrast, most heteronormative relationships begin in admiration and end with organizing individual disappointments. Shane and Ilya are equally titillated by the others' sportsmanship and personalities. Simply put, they clearly like each other. They needn’t know each other’s past trauma to have good sex. Is it incomprehensible that these two unambiguously initially wanted to fuck?

***

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The show strikes a balance by utilizing the supporting women cast as vehicles for pushing the main stories forward while maintaining empathetic and multifaceted characterizations of its women cast. Svetlana is Ilya’s fuck buddy, but she is also his unwavering support system since childhood. We know through Ilya that she isn’t waiting around for him since she is busy with a new profession. She is also aware of Ilya’s first homosexual relationship with their friend Sasha. Similarly, Rose Landry insists on a friendship with Shane after an affectionate conversation about his sexual identity and preference. Caro praises the show’s portrayal of the women characters on the show. She says, “These women do not carry the burden of educating or improving the lives of these characters. [They] are support systems, but they're also autonomous people in their own right.” When one of them verges on a cohesive argument or observation, the other follows with catastrophic conclusions. Katie rebuts that the women have to intervene to “usher [the men] along. We don't really know anything about [the women friends] apart from their relationships as supporting characters to the men.” She infers that although Svetlana is “understanding about Ilya,” she knows his relationship with Shane means more. She almost catches up to sound reasoning with “I guess I could make the argument that, like in some respects, that's literally just how friendship is supposed to work,” but logic was surely faster because she follows up with, “but we don't really see that [support] reciprocated.” So close!

Diabolical Lies is supposedly from a leftist feminist lens. Do the leftist feminists agree that it is reasonable to center the supporting cis’ter characters over the queer relationships throughout the show? Is it not enough that we have agonizingly sat through tropes of the supportive gay bestie to the cisheterosexual woman with sage advice (that she will not take) for her frightful dating life? In the rush to contribute to the discourse and ride the wave of the show’s popularity, the dominating discussions exclude critical theory and historical context while confusing aesthetic inquiries for political judgement thereby curtailing public and private colloquy. With clarifying language, we can acknowledge the show’s true accomplishments, identify the gaps, while also enjoying what it offers.

COLUMN

“I Couldn’t Help but Wonder...”: A Sex and the City Column

Season 3 Episode 4: Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl …

SYNOPSIS

Charlotte’s gallery hosts a photography exhibition titled Drag Kings: The collusion of illusion and reality. It features women dressing like men with sideburns and socks in their pants. Charlotte is attracted to the photographer Baird, but she’s too afraid to ask him out. Carrie suggests maybe she “needs a sock in her pants.”

Carrie is dating a 26 year old bisexual man named Sean. She smokes while ice skating with him. At the end of their ice skating date, he lists all of his past romantic relationships and casually includes that he’s dated a man. He asks Carrie if it’s a problem and she tells her friends that she lied by saying it wasn’t.

Miranda doesn’t want Steve to move in with her. She tries to tap into her “inner goddess,” or in 2026 lingo, her “divine feminine.” People who claim that the writers do Miranda a disservice by having her marry Steve are ignoring who she is at her core. An explanation for Miranda and those who cannot reconcile her character arc is Anglo-American feminism, which narrowly focuses on equality in business and the corporate world while accepting capitalist definitions of success and seeking their legitimacy within the constructs of wifehood. Audiences refuse to accept that Miranda, a partner at a law firm, would “settle” for a man like Steve. But, as the show progresses, we all watched her descend into the quintessential cisheteronormative hysteria of “finding the one.” Miranda’s character arc is identical to the choices the women criticizing Miranda make every day.

Samantha hires a young assistant who is rude to her clients while answering the phones. In true Sam fashion, she fires him and sleeps with him. This is the least terrifying storyline in this episode.

THE QUESTION

Carrie doesn’t “help but wonder” in this episode. But she does ask a question:

Was sexual flipping the wave of the future? And if it was, could I play that game, or was I over the hill? If women can transform into men and men can become women and we can choose to sleep with everyone, then maybe gender doesn’t exist anymore. If we can take the best of the other sex and make it our own, has the opposite sex become obsolete?

Responding to Carrie’s inane question feels like a form of legitimization for her ignorance and bigotry-laced question; however, I chose this episode as a contrast for how the topics of sexuality and gender presentation are addressed in Sex and the City and Heated Rivalry.

After discovering her new young boyfriend is bisexual, Carrie asserts that she’s “not really sure bisexuality exists.” She says, “I think it’s just a layover on the way to Gaytown.” Throughout the episode, Carrie fixates on Sean’s bisexuality through playground-level questions like asking Sean if he’s staring at a man when they go to a club called “Hair.” On the other hand, she equates bisexuality to “lacking sexual orientation.”

If I had to define Sex and the City to someone who’s never seen it, I’d say that it oscillates between being ahead of its time and portraying a frighteningly rigid depiction of the times. This episode is one of those that is both. It chooses to discuss bisexuality while “liberally” denigrating it. The entire episode is laden with biphobia from start to finish, but most memorably, Miranda refers to bisexuality as “greedy” and “double-dipping” while they discuss Sean’s sexuality. I want to single out Carrie and her friends here, but this is what most cisheterosexuals, gay and lesbian people today, think of bisexual people.

By the end of the episode, Carrie uses the “I’m an old fart” excuse as a euphemism to obfuscate her biphobia and homophobia. While playing spin-the-bottle with Sean and his friends, Carrie gives Alanis Morissette the driest kiss ever filmed for TV. I wish we all didn’t have to see that. About the kiss, Carrie says, “It was like chicken.” She breaks up with Sean by leaving the party without saying goodbye. She concludes with, “I realized they could do whatever they wanted, but deep down, I was too old to play this game. So I took my hot, old fart ass home.”

Times have changed, but not so much, given how prevalent cis-hetero patriarchy still exists in all visual media forms. It’s hard to decide. Do I prefer a time where a professional sex columnist spews openly biphobic and homophobic worldviews with rigid expectations of romantic relational gender roles? Or one where bisexuality is predominantly disregarded by the dominant media and treated as a footnote, like in Heated Rivalry? It’s hard to say.

Even when the topic is handled with dignity, like in Heated Rivalry, the predominant media still struggles to facilitate meaningful colloquy by omitting or glossing over Ilya’s bisexuality as context for understanding the character and how Ilya’s bisexuality affects the couple’s relational dynamics.

The only dignifying aspect of Carrie’s question is wondering if gender exists anymore. She comes close but lets us know firmly where she stands by the end of the episode. It’s evident in the show’s haphazard reboot, And Just Like That, 20 years later, that Carrie and the show’s writers haven’t resolved the question.

UNFORGETTABLE LINES FROM THE EPISODE

(Without context)

Stanford

See when you’re gay everyone can wear everyone’s underwear. Charlotte

That’s hygienic.

Carrie to her friends at brunch
He’s [Sean] a bisexual. Samantha

I could have told you that sweetie. He took you ice skating for god sake.Carrie

The weird thing was he was so open about it.

Samantha

Y’know, I think it’s [bisexuality] great. He’s open to all sexual experiences, he’s evolved. It’s hot.

Miranda

It’s not hot, he’s greedy. He’s double dipping.

Carrie

When did this happen? When did the sexes get all confused? You know I did the date the bisexual guy thing in college. But in the end, they all ended up with men.

Samantha
So did the bisexual women.

Carrie to Sean

Do I kiss better than a guy?Sean to Carrie

Could you stop making this all about sex?

Carrie to Miranda

I think in any relationship, one person is the alpha dog. The one that’s in charge. That’s you! You don’t want to share your water dish.

Carrie

10 seconds into making out, I could almost forget Sean’s lack of sexual orientation.

Carrie

I was in Alice in confused sexual orientation land.

tiny Media

LISTEN

This month’s list includes revisitations and one recent discovery. I have a rule: If I repeatedly listen to an album for more than two months, I will buy the record. I own all of these records excluding Frank Ocean’s Blonde, which was never officially released on vinyl, because I have not stopped listening to them in the last year.

Album

Wet Leg “Moisturizer”

I discovered Wet Leg after hearing Mangetout on Heated Rivalry in late January. I can only listen to the whole album which to me is a sign of a stellar production.. It is appropriately horny, romantic, and ensures a good fucking time from start to finish. I immediately loved the first seven tracks except Jennifer’s Body. But through repeated listens, I can now say that I LOVE Jennifer’s Body.

I purchased a secondhand $60 subwoofer for my speakers to appropriately experience the vinyl record. I hope you enjoy this safe, hedonistic indulgence.

Album

Laurie Torres “Après Coup”

Apres Coup might be the best contemporary jazz album I have discovered in the last five years. It creates celestial sounds using piano, drums, and a synthesizer. It is a highly intelligent production because Torres merges technique with emotion while inviting the listener’s own emotions with every listen. If I had to pick my favorite, I’d say Interieurs. The track is short, leaving you wanting while also fully satisfying the senses. Marvelous! Feux Fuyants would make a beautiful movie score. And if you loved Eiko Inshibashi’s Drive My Car movie score, specifically, Drive My Car (Masaki), listen to Exit, the closing track on Apres Coup.

Album

Frank Ocean “Blonde”

If the artist formerly known as Frank Ocean (I’m kidding) never makes another album, I would be genuinely content because Blonde is a masterful album. Its release pioneered much of contemporary popular RnB music in the last decade. I still viscerally react to Godspeed and Self Control, but I am yet to articulate the emotions Skyline To and Close To You elicit 10 years later. I think the silence from Frank Ocean since this album’s release has allowed it to air out, materialize, and cement itself in every nook and cranny of popular music. You know you’re about it when a new song emerges with comparable but not quite similar sounds to Blonde. Some of them enter the region where Blonde resides but none has ever come into its neighborhood of excellence.

Song

Nina Simone “Mood Indigo”

This song is in my unfinished personal playlist titled, “You’ve got it in your soul.” I began assembling the playlist after hearing the song for the first time. It opens with an almost 80 second upbeat piano intro until Simone’s voice joins with solemn lyrics. While the song is about experiencing a type of blues she calls mood indigo, you cannot help dancing. It’s as if the song is an antidote to the mood indigo. I invite you to listen to the rest of the album.

Song

Les McCann “Burnin’ Coal”

If you are unfamiliar with Les McCann, here’s what you need to know: He is a masterful pianist who, alongside some other elite Afro American jazz musicians, invented the sound of contemporary jazz starting in the late 50s. You will see a lot of Les McCann in my library in the coming months because I found a bunch of his vinyls for less than $5 each at my local record shop last year. Burnin’ Coal is on his Much Les album and I cannot recommend it enough for people exploring Afro American jazz sounds of the 60s.

Similar to Mood Indigo, prepare for a little or lots of movement if you decide to listen while driving. Let loose!

READ

Stephanie Wambugu Lonely Crowds: A Novel

I feverishly read this book in less than 48 hours in hopes that it would get there. Nigerians like to say, “It was there” in response to how something resonated. If you asked “how was the movie?,” a Nigerian might say, “It was there,” to convey that it was neither bad nor good. I love this measured and even tender framing to communicate that something did not resonate or meet one’s expectations. Sometime ago, Wale Lawal, editor-in-chief of the journalistic magazine The Republic based in Nigeria offered an intricate meaning for what “It was there” might mean on his personal Twitter account. He said ‘there’ means that the movie or book did not meet the viewer or reader where they hoped to be met. ‘There’ means that the movie or book maintained an indifference to its subjects throughout.

I had high expectations for this novel because many had prescribed it as an intelligent read exploring homoerotic relationships between women. The novel fell short and never arrived ‘there’ because it didn’t have a clear objective—I do not think Wambugu knew what she was trying to say. The book reads like it was written through a block because it was tedious—you could see the seams. And because it didn’t have a clear destination, it required too much effort and not in the ways I expect when I read. The main characters are confusing and painfully incomplete, which seems to be a personal (recurring) qualm with most contemporary novels about erotic friendships between women I have read. There is no single thread that helps me understand what motivates them personally and interrelationally. I wasn’t convinced these women even knew each other. I recognized bits of something familiar but it remained flaccid. And although I finished it, I left it there. I hope Wambugu tries again.

WATCH

The Chambermaid Lynn, Ingo Haeb, 2014

Since experiencing the versatile and magnificent Vicky Krieps on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, I have made considerable effort to watch more of her movies. The Chambermaid Lynn is weird and it is worth it. It triumphantly combines humor, while seriously tackling the topic of sexual identity with a thrilling storyline. Lynn is unlike any character I have ever watched—she is a mirror and a reflection of our exiled desires and explorations. I oscillated between being a little afraid of her, a lot of affection for her, and an overwhelming sadness. By the end Vicky “Creeps” has you reconsidering everything you thought you knew about sexual identity, presentation and the self.

Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee, 2005

I first absent mindedly watched Brokeback Mountain in 2021. I did not remember what I watched or felt and I certainly didn’t remember anything serious about it because I was on my phone half the time. I was also uninterested in what I considered to be “trauma porn.” I was looking for visual queer media that did not end in tragedy for its central characters. I have outgrown this infantile approach and now know the difference between painful but severely beautiful historical reflections and what we call trauma porn. For example, 12 years A Slave is trauma porn but Toni Morrison’s Beloved is achingly magnificent with its mystical reflections and historical depiction of slavery.

I wore the emotions of the movie like a cloak. I even looked into acquiring the screenplay and reading the book. I have yet to do any of this. However, I have revisited the aftershocks of emotions in my mind. Brokeback Mountain is an earnest offering for understanding queer life in rural white America in the 60s. It does not support the agenda of queer presentism. Although it is devastating, it tells a hauntingly truthful story. I may never watch it again but it is safely tucked within reach whenever I need to revisit it in my mind.

Moonlight, Barry Jenkins, 2016

When I think of humane depictions of queer life, especially Black American queer life, Moonlight comes to mind. Barry Jenkins, the film’s writer and director’s, adaptation of the unpublished play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, is in a league of its own. Moonlight tackles themes of masculinity, sexual identity, misogyny interwoven in the interpersonal relationships of its central character Chiron in three acts. Young Chiron learns to suppress his emotions after multiple betrayals from adults he was supposed to trust including his mother who struggles with a drug addiction. The film’s climax is just as much of an emotional release for the audience as it is for Chiron. In the second to the last scene, adult Chiron tells adult Kevin, “You’re the only one who’s ever touched me.” The line carries Chiron’s transcendent sadness. We discover that the Chiron we meet at the beginning of the movie is the same one at the end. But it is the build up to that scene that gets me every time. Trevante Rhodes and André Holland dance with their dialogue and their uncertainty is palpable.

Moonlight features an exquisite ensemble cast. There isn’t enough praise for the continuity of each of the actors portraying Chiron and Kevin. Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes succeed at portraying all of Chiron’s complexities and his suffocating silence in his teen and adult years. Mahershala Ali delivers a masterful performance and Naomie Harris as Paula is haunting. There isn’t a scene in this feature that doesn’t leave you with something. Even everything it leaves out is just as impactful.