A Queer Shoulder to the Wheel

A version of this piece was originally published in Flaming Hydra, an art collective I'm proud to be a part of. Then I let David loose to edit as he does so well, and he illustrated the piece with the magnificent art of J.C. Leyendecker, a prolific gay artist who inserted quite a bit of homoeroticism into the advertising of the early American 20th century. The perfect accompaniment to a piece about queer historical yearning.

Problem: You are a writer who has spent most of the last ten years writing about very evil people, and you are witnessing their triumph, and you don’t have any money, and you don’t have any leads, and you don’t have any institutional clout, and it feels like you are taking on a Panzer tank with nail scissors or even a feather, and the thought is paralyzing. 

Compare it to this problem: you are the estranged son of a duke, and find yourself irresistibly attracted to the handsome, moustachio’d jewel thief you’ve hired to steal your wicked stepmother’s diamond parure, a symbol of your stolen inheritance.

Problem: You wake up feeling like your throat is full of dust. You don’t know what to do with yourself. The words get all knotted up and feel so futile in the first place that bringing on a conniption by writing them down seems hardly worthwhile. It’s so hot that going outside is a bad idea, and it’s too expensive to get out of the city. Every day is the same. Even the bronze-sealed sky, which always seems to be bursting with rain that never falls. This is why you can’t stop reading smutty gay romance novels.

Nobody cares that the president is a rapist. Nobody cares about the teen girls at the center of the juicy scandal that took place long ago. When you try to write about the welter of emotions that churns up you get the sense that you’re going to break apart. You were a teen girl too once and someone hurt you. It seems far away and far too close all at once. Maybe you could make people feel as bad as you do about it. That would be the sum total of your accomplishments, and it would hurt.

Compare it to this problem: You have suddenly discovered that magic exists in England after a paperwork error put you in the liaison office for the magical community. You are a bluff, handsome, broke baronet, and finding yourself assigned to liaise with an alluringly waspish fair-haired wizard whose acerbity is matched only by his fragility, you would like to make it a real liaison… if only an evil plot weren’t afoot involving cruel and merciless enemies throwing the two of you into mortal danger, and closer and closer proximity.

Problem: You feel orthogonal to the entire world. You are ill and you are useless and it’s too hot, too hot. You don’t want to write, or take out the garbage, or move. You have forgotten what you’re for. If there ever was a purpose to your life, it feels like it’s stuck under glass, or maybe yourself stuck there, airless, stifled, diminished. So many people are being hurt, starved en masse, jailed, having their bodily autonomy, their right to love or even to live in the bodies they choose threatened or stolen. They made a woman in a coma give birth.

Compare to this problem: You, an ironmonger’s son and industrial magician, who has so far limited himself to brief illicit encounters with other men, find yourself irresistibly, tenderly attracted to a marquess’s son who is cursed to be trapped in the confines of his repulsive father’s manor house. He is in danger, and only the confluence of salt imbued with your magic and the passionate congress of your lovemaking can spring the trap that will free him. (It blows a hole in the manor’s wall, in fact.) Also, he turns out to be half-selkie, a fairy creature, and when he swims away into the sea in his seal form, you feel so abandoned you realize at once that you were desperately in love.

Problem: What is the point? Of writing? Of being alive? Of living right now and believing what you believe—in human dignity, in human rights—in 2025? What can you do? What can you do, resourceless as you are, with freedom withering in a bone-stripping sirocco of stupid, wasteful fascist oppression? You have been writing warnings for a decade.

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Compare to this problem: You, an FBI agent, are investigating the attempted assassination of Nikita Khrushchev. Unfortunately, you are teamed up with a Soviet agent whose fine hair, soulful eyes, and deeply Russian pessimism you quickly find overpoweringly seductive, especially when the motel you get stuck in during an ice storm turns out to have only one bed. He has been instructed to blackmail you with his sexual wiles, but will his longing for you overcome the adamantine power of the Iron Curtain? 

Problem: What is the point of anything I do? Anything I write? Why should I wake up in the morning, why should I sleep at night, when crying out against injustice is so useless? Have I wasted my life?

Compare to this problem: You, a shellshocked World War II surgeon, move to a quiet English village and become its country doctor. But then someone is murdered, tingeing the lace-curtained world of your pastoral idyll with a sinister stain. When a handsome spy comes to hush it all up, your attraction to this cynical purveyor of violence threatens to disturb your fragile peace, and your cozy relationship with your elderly lesbian neighbors.

Problem: All your life, even though you fled religion, you found solace in one saying that has come to define your battered moral compass, from The Chapters of Our Fathers: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”

Allen Ginsberg, a much later Jew than Rabbi Tarfon of the Talmud, put it differently in America, which you memorized a long time ago,

I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts 
     factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

You want to put your queer shoulder to the wheel. You don’t believe in shirking even if feels like being flayed alive. But you want it to matter. You don’t know how to make it matter. So you do what you’ve always done: hide in books. Five books and then ten and then a dozen and then dozens. Love stories that are fantastical but still truer than you’ve allowed yourself to be in your life. 

And they’re happy; for the most part, they’re happy. Reading becomes compulsive in this familiar state: a withdrawal from the world so total that you can’t stop, like gambling, or drinking, or any other compulsion. You read books like you’re chain-smoking. (And often while you are in fact also chain-smoking, out in the unbearable heat.) You know you’re hiding, suspending yourself under the surface of the books because it’s easier to breathe there, when you’re pretending. It makes the breaks between books worse. The real air is too hot and dry to breathe. You have responsibilities. If only you knew what they were.

Problem: If words can’t make a difference, how can you so easily slip into other worlds for solace through them? Are the surfeit and the respite they offer so negligible? Is a giddy silliness so terrible? Have you put your shoulder to the wheel long enough to earn a reprieve?

Problem: You haven’t.

But: You know you’ll come back. The air will cool, one day a month or two hence, there will be a good breeze on your cheek, and you will have caught your breath enough to fight again. The wheel is there and it is grinding people down to death, and if your bruised shoulder will shift it at all you know you will brace against it with everything you have. Was it shirking to pursue joy as hard as you could, for a little while, by drowning your sorrows in fantastical romances?

Problem: You are a powerful magician whose lover, while un-magical, is descended from a deeply powerful bloodline, and whenever you have sex, his semen enhances your magic, and now your colleagues suspect you of being a warlock. Also, both of you keep getting dramatically kidnapped by enemies, thus forcing you to realize how deep your feelings run. There’s a wrought-gold ring possessed by a Jacobean sorcerer involved in this, also. The prose has no business being this good. But it is.