These words come to me in a country where 16-year-old Nex, of Oklahoma’s Choctaw Nation, refuses to stay confined by the gender norms imposed on them or endure the brutal reality of their identity. They suffer beatings in the girls' bathroom, where three girls yank at Nex’s hair and bang their head against the tiles until they lose consciousness. No high school official calls an ambulance. The next day, Nex collapses at their grandmother’s house and never stands up again. Authorities rule the death a suicide. The story fades away after a few weeks, leaving Nex Benedict and their kind to disappear into the void.
In Brooklyn, where O’Shae Sibley and his friends are pumping gas late one July night, Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul” booms from the stereo. They vogue around the car, celebrating the spirit of 1990s drag balls. A group of boys shouts slurs, demanding they stop dancing. Fists fly, and O’Shae and his friends fight back, but a knife is drawn. O’Shae falls to the ground. The youth who killed him turns himself in days later, caught by surveillance footage. After the memorial, the story dies, another queer life snuffed out and forgotten.
In my writing classes at New York University, the faces of Nex and O’Shae shimmer on a wall-sized LED screen, holding space as we discuss Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Beauvoir’s assertion that “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” challenges the notion that gender can totalize an individual’s existence. Our interpretive labor creates the categories of “woman” and “man,” and we can choose to defy these constraints. Yet, some cling to their gendered cages, defending them with violence.
One of them, the only white male student in my class, stands up, his rage palpable. He’s in his second week of college, struggling to reconcile his familiar world with the new one he’s entered. He says everything I’ve brought into the room is inappropriate, expecting his peers to agree. He doesn’t notice their wonderment at his assumption of leadership. His troubles are his own, not inherent to the texts we study. Grant slams the door, shutting out what he refuses to see.
The next day, before class, I try to quiet the tumult in my head at the men’s room sink. I know that “inappropriate” often leads to “unacceptable,” and those cast out should just shut up—or be made to. I’m exhausted by the inaudibility and illegibility forced upon my kind by systems and institutions that want us erased. Power obliterates bodies that don’t conform to its imperatives, our histories untaught, our existence denied. Against this backdrop, I want to tell a story.
I see two unacceptable men, talking at a restaurant table.
Douglas Harnden and I sit in a booth at Man Ray in lower Chelsea in the early 1990s, long before it transforms into a series of delis, followed by one radiology center after another. We’re unacceptable because we’re interested in men while living in a country that’s against our existence. And we’re unfit for sight: Douglas buckling from three years with AIDS; me in my platform boots, bone-white hair, and lashes. Douglas drops his spoon into the watercress soup he’s played at eating, the cane he now needs smacking the restaurant’s floor. He’s the body every man wanted in the five years I’ve known him. The lover I never quite slept with because his blood-roiling beauty would always push him elsewhere. I’m the friend, the family, who’s about to take him to New York Hospital for a medication adjustment to address the nightly leg spasms that can’t let Douglas dream. I match the curtness of the nurses when they insist the pills won’t be ready for another week.
I’m the loving family before whom Douglas undresses in his bedroom. He shows me lesions that rise on every inch of skin, from the waist down. I rub them with pine oil to shush their throbbing. Close to sleep, we’ll breathe at the same time. For a while.
In a reimagined world, Nex and O’Shae will walk on turf and among lives enriched by their contributions to them. Douglas won’t die at 32, too early for the protease inhibitors whose invention means that this is a survivable disease. No, he’ll live, growing into the Douglas who writes his book on Luis Buñuel who crafted films.
Nex, O’Shae, Douglas, the upright ones alongside them: we won’t need saving, which will be a new composition.
Bruce Bromley is the author of Making Figures: Reimagining Body, Sound, and Image in a World That Is Not for Us (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014); The Life in the Sky Comes Down: Essays, Stories, Essay/Stories (Backlash Press, 2017), nominated for the 2018 Victoria & Albert Best Illustrated Book Award; and Guesting: Essays, Essay/Stories (Understory Books, 2022). He has performed his music and poetry throughout the US and Europe and currently teaches writing at New York University, where he won the Golden Dozen Award for teaching excellence.
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