September Poet: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
On internalized homophobia and gentrification
I first discovered Sycamore’s work through this anthology whose title I think permanently ends the eternal quest for provocative titles:
It’s not a question one can easily or perhaps ever forget: Why are faggots so afraid of faggots? The book calls to queer and trans people, to the gay world across time but in a very crucial moment, as gay marriage and assimilation take on new visibility; as internet cruising, phones, technology and apps place a new premium on the consumption of—certain—flesh and bodies. Sycamore is razor-like clear (and appropriately scathing) about these prospects in her Introduction:
We wonder what happened to our dreams of a world of sexual splendor only bounded by the limits of imagination. Instead, we find ourselves in a culture where “party and play” means close the blinds, lock the door, and hope that no one will glimpse our degradation. Masculine ideals have long reigned supreme in male sexual spaces, from the locker room to the tea room, the bars to the boardrooms. Yet now a sanitized, straight-friendly version of gay identity exists side by side with the brutal, calculated hyper-objectification of internet cruising: scorn becomes “just a preference,” lack of respect is assumed, and lying is a given. We scan the options: HIV-neg, STD-free, UB2. Masc only, no femmes or fatties. Straight acting, straight appearing. No blacks or Asians. Must be discreet. Is this what has become of the intimacies we crave?
Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots is an emergency intervention. It’s also a deeply personal project for me. As a genderqueer faggot and a queen with a certain amount of notoriety, I find myself incredibly inspired by the politics and potentials of trans, genderqueer, and gender-defiant subcultures. Simultaneously I find myself less and less hopeful in the male sexual spaces I also inhabit. I wonder: if the desire I hold dear has only led to a product-driven sexual marketplace, what are the possibilities for transformation?
Queer life, night life, sex and cruising culture, the assimilation of laws and social norms as well as the policing of body types: Sycamore has an uncanny ability in her work as anthologist, essayist, memoirist, to document the details of time’s passing. We have a fantasy of gay sociality that goes beyond even the crude redundancies of the porn world (perfectly bleached and violently hairless assholes, etc.). We have a fantasy of connection, resistance, inclusion, body positivity, sex positivity, and so on. That we can be as rejects of the state-family system finally welcomed among the excluded. I’ll never forget learning that Dante’s greatest agony wasn’t even his exile from Florence following the regime overthrow in a civil war that he and his kin lost: it was being displaced within the other exiles, of finding himself rejected and betrayed there as well that did him in. To be not good enough in the kingdom of broken toys is really something.
What we’re dancing around is called lateral violence, or horizontal violence. It’s how minorities internalize the oppressive ideologies and practices weaponized against them—tragically—by turning on each other. Communities of color turn colonization inwards; socialized women bad mouth and isolate their own kind in the work place; queer and trans people hate on one another (of all things) for being “too” sissy, faggy, effeminate, genderqueer, etc.
Sycamore asks: