Headnote: UNTIMELY TRANSMISSIONS

I am late turning in this letter because I started watching porn. Actually, I was already very late, and kind of stuck, and then the porn helped get me going. I needed to spend time with Annie Sprinkle, whose interview with Amelia Groom appears in this issue of the MRPJ. Amelia described to me a feeling of being in the presence of “a legendary slut,” with fifty years of service — community and sexual service, as well as service in the religious sense, stretching back from Annie’s present-day ecosexual performance and film work all the way to Teenage Deviate (1975), her first porn. I needed to feel Annie’s presence too, and some time travel was involved. 

The works in my contributing editor section — performance texts by S*an D. Henry-Smith and Geo Wyex, an essay by Zoey Lubitz, and the conversation between Amelia and Annie —  each concern a delayed message from another time in one way or another. “The past inside the present” is how my friend Park described it, or the future inside the past and present. The contributing editors for this issue were invited to loosely revisit the third-ever issue of MRPJ, published thirty-three years ago, in 1991. Theme: “Gender Disarray.” This visitation is both pleasurable and discomfiting.  

When I first heard about Annie it was the late 1990s. I was having a little gender disarray of my own and earnestly studying what I thought she represented. Annie had been making performance art for a decade, and I was newly co-president of my high school’s Gay/Straight Alliance, my highest-ranking office to date. I was also running a photocopied feminist magazine with two friends. The three of us wrote most of the articles, on topics like how it was okay to do whatever you wanted with your body hair, pro-porn feminism, and Thelma and Louise. On St. Mark’s Place, I bought an issue of On Our Backs, the lesbian-run sex mag whose title spoofed off our backs, an older, anti-porn feminist periodical. I inspected it carefully, trying to get my cultural bearings. It didn’t turn me on, which worried me: was I “really” gay? No matter how kinky the content, a certain edge of shame, fear, or vulnerability essential to my own fantasy life was blunted by the very mechanism that made sex “positive.” Bringing sex under the redemptive halo of queer belonging somehow both neutralized it and made it anxiety-producing in a different way.  

Inwardly, I was beset by bad faith: virginal, but ambushing high school health classes to protest the lack of adequate information about dental dams. How had I arrived at this delicate predicament? When Justin P. called me an ugly dyke in eighth grade, was the main point that I was a dyke, or that I was ugly? Which of these conditions had caused the other?  

“Ugly” felt painfully final, “dyke” vertiginously confusing, an abyssal, scary little void of non-meaning, which I abruptly leapt into a few years later, without exactly knowing why. It wasn’t because I was gay gay: I had scientifically tested this by carefully examining my half-dressed peers in the locker room for a fixed count and assessing my inner state, which under inspection remained tensely neutral. Girls could be very pleasurable to be around, but this was an impersonal empirical fact around which all of society was plainly organized, evident on any tv show or billboard. I regarded their beauty, the skill and substance of it, with the kind of wistful respect I might accord an Olympic athlete, or a very tall tree. I had long hoped to be impossibly beautiful and powerfully seductive myself, but I was a tiny, aggressive person wearing a sweatsuit my mom had bought me. I went super hard in class and then ate lunch by myself behind the gym. Attempts to act on or reveal my aspirations (for example, by applying makeup) were generally mortifying. 

If anything, I knew my feelings about boys and men to be somewhat closer to the compelling toxic stew of my sexual imagination. I wanted to be better than them at everything, I wanted them to want me, and I wanted to win. Whether Justin P. was beautiful was immaterial, since his judgments mattered, and his desire too. If I could be someone whose desire and judgments mattered, perhaps I too could circumvent being judged. 

Thus I embarked upon the fairly short path to who I am today: a guy who has, broadly speaking, parlayed the reframing of judgments about value, beauty, and desire into the dubious pursuit of queer academia. I’m watching vintage Annie Sprinkle porn for work, and re-reading old issues of MRPJ, and having feelings about the 1990s.  

In particular, I’m reading MRPJ Issue #3, the 1991 “Gender Disarray” issue, in which Annie’s work also appears. It’s nice to see Annie there, in boy and girl drag, along with Les Nichols, her co-star in possibly the first post-phallo transmasc porn, Linda/Les and Annie (1989). Annie also has photo credits on some beautiful portraits that invoke a web of relationships. Other highlights include a gemlike short story by poet Cheryl Clarke. Among the lowlights is a Jill Johnston essay that compares her feelings about modern dance to “how Native Americans feel about us” on the possible basis that the former was created by women and then ‘taken over’ by other dance forms. Interviews with two different trans guys, Danny and Vern, supply occasionally heartwarming answers to dubious questions in the name of “research into the gender community.” 

In short, the 1991 “Gender Disarray” issue is an emotional rollercoaster of continuities and discontinuities with the present — some pleasurable, some uncomfortable, and some a heady mix of both that is the special gift of being gay in the flux of time. Watching Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle (1981), by contrast, is more of an emotional Ferris wheel, an exalted, wholesome sweep above whatever angsty identificatory tangles might melt away below. As it opens, we find Annie playing a piano. She rises to show us her baby photos and divulges her given name (Ellen!), before the camera pivots to reveal two muscled nudes with silky bowl cuts who have been arm-wrestling forehead-to-forehead by the fireplace this whole time. There are orgies, another piano break, and a masturbation scene that, despite Annie relentlessly breaking the fourth wall to address the viewer, feels so genuine that for several minutes I really thought she just got carried away and was talking dirty to the camera operator. About an hour in, Annie appears on a midtown street at dawn, walks into a porn theater where she herself is also on screen, finds a seat, and begins consorting with the audience, like Athena arriving to encourage the Greeks in The Iliad. I love these men, my fellow fans, and can’t help but feel that our common delight is at least a little bit about the sheer giddy wholesomeness of this plot twist. 

The ecosexual turn in Annie’s work, which arrived some decades later, bears out this unabashedly wholesome magic. When Annie and her partner-collaborator Beth Stephens perform an ecosexual wedding, “all the wedding guests can join us in the vows to ‘love, honor and cherish’ the mountains or the water or rocks or the snow.” The sublimely mismatched scale of this union is a kind of inversion of the monumental sublime of Land Art. Maybe there are problems of scale at any wedding — the compression of various boggling incommensurables into the contractual vow — and that’s why people cry.  

I’m not sure if ecosexual weddings include the traditional acknowledgment that you’re both going to die and you don’t know when. The mortality, or aliveness, of the earth nonetheless coexists with the ways that mountains, water, rocks, snow, and sex all express forms of mind-bendingly dilatory time. Amelia Groom is an especially good interlocutor for Annie because of her own love of rocks and minerals and the ways they render time. She has written a book on Beverly Buchanan’s Marsh Ruins (1) — barely-marked concrete-and-cement mounds perpetually eroding into Georgia’s coastal wetlands — and with M. Ty, an essay on rust in art.(2) Time appears in these texts as simultaneous accumulation and loss, among other forms: rust, for example, indexing and ensuring a tool’s removal from the rhythms of use. 

Although I would love to be a diminutive bridegroom with an incalculably bigger, sexier body of water on my arm, the scale comedy runs alongside another version in which the ecosexual celebrants are understood not as individuals entering a contract but as entangled substances the vow invokes, as in a spell. Annie defines ecosex as the expansion of sexual love to an ecosystem beyond the imagined boundaries of the physical body. Sex fucks with scale, both spatial and temporal, as anyone knows who has found themselves enveloped mid-act by a colorful auratic mist or errant historical grief, not to mention the ways that bodies reliably morph, big people turning small and small people big, imaginary-real genitals becoming undeniably palpable to all parties, etc. 

In their performance text, “astringency principle of the looking drum,”  S*an D. Henry-Smith shares and enacts these metamorphic powers with the camera and its tempos. Of all media, photography has been perhaps most captured by the framework of capture and fixity. S*an, which you can pronounce “swan,” among other possibilities, manages a release from this bind. As they perform the text included here, their hands work the swish of flash and shutter, trigger the film winder’s dizzy ribbon/snap, thump the chamber. Fitted with vocal, instrument, and contact mics, the camera resonates as it’s played like a drum kit. Its breath or interiority fills the room, the way a drum does. 

Watching this performance a year ago relieved me of a discourse on the camera as (masculinized) eye or weapon. Anatomies of its violent histories often understand the camera as phallic, when it’s more readily a chamber or a sticky trap, its violations taking the form of capture as much as penetration or rupture. In any case, genital morphology as metaphor for violence is itself violent. Here is hope of another inside-outside arrangement — maybe camera as lung, with all that implies about respiratory exchange, rhythm, even wind instruments: “Akin to its operator, [the camera] must be treated as porous.” The eroto-ethical question is how to play with oneself and one’s instruments, or with what comes through them. 

Unworking the camera as instrument of capture entails a kind of timing that is not conventionally photographic, but musical, respiratory, choreographic, and echoic, offering untimely constellations “conscious and unconscious to [the camera’s] user at the time of exposure.” It also invokes a different historical temporality. S*an sketches a glossary for “a language of proto-photography” which precedes and conditions the camera’s invention -- “precedes colonialism, catalog, capture, surveillance,” and survives it too, into an ongoing “creolization of photo-speak,” a “burning latency” that remains to be practiced. At stake here is language’s porosity as well — its mutations and its tendency to preserve and replicate unanticipated roots. 

Strains of linguistic mutation and replication move through Zoey Lubitz’s essay, “Language Analog for Trans.” She follows Jules Gill-Peterson’s argument in Histories of the Transgender Child (2018) that the concept of gender plasticity found scientific and cultural legitimacy by way of a persistent analogy to childhood language learning. In both cases, the analogy goes, we come to fluency in a grammar that no one is born speaking. 

Although it’s come to be a familiar feature of how both the structure and experience of gender are narrated, the language analogy for gender plasticity has a longer history reaching back to sexologists like John Money and his eugenicist predecessors, who argued for the malleability of sex and gender, albeit within a limited developmental window and under interventionist medical oversight. Money’s falsified research and grotesque abuse of children yielded an ongoing legacy of surgeries on intersex infants. It also helped establish and legitimize the idea that sex and gender are learned. 

The language analogy pervades academic, political, clinical, and personal accounts of sex. A Hegelian like Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) but even more so in the sequel, Bodies That Matter (1993), drawing on the same bedrock of signification, finds sex less open to voluntary determination, whether by terrifying psychologists or actual trans and intersex people. That’s because the production of sex, for them, is much more widely distributed and ongoing, fractaling into endless little shards of signification, each a brief opening for slippage or aspirational obedience. The cumulative effect of these fragments is like a magic-eye picture: a wobbly illusion of coherence, that, for all its obvious fragility, nonetheless can’t be willfully formed into a different image. 

Ample personal experience of the willful forming of sex contradicts this idea. Still, it’s always a satisfying topographical twist when one’s “insides” turn out, yet again, to be an enfolded alien “outside." If we follow the language analogy, having a sex or a gender is an instance of what Walter Benjamin called “the foreignness of languages.” Languages, plural. What Zoey Lubitz points out (and I initially decided to write this essay primarily so I could repeat it) is that the language analogy for transness contains a universalist account of “native language”: 

The language analogy also relies on an unquestioned idea of the native language, discounting bilingualism, aphasia, indeed the arbitrariness of language understood through multilingual experience, through learning a new language, through translation. What makes a language native? The unquestioned performance of mastery in a language? Or the way one feels about the shape of language, not needing to know the rules and conventions, but feeling them? And then what becomes of this analogy if the primacy of a native language is really an affective structure, both a product of, and displaced by, historical and political exigencies or dalliance?  

Zoey draws on Samuel Delany’s novel Babel-17, which takes as its central plot device and thought experiment an alien grammar that reorganizes the sensoria of its learners and eventually the form of the book itself. Perhaps we don’t acquire languages so much as become infected and altered by them over time. I’m in agreement with Zoey (and to be honest, with some terrible people) that transness is plainly contagious. Sometimes it’s in the air, to follow the logic of S*an’s porous, respiring camera, and sometimes it’s like anything good and delicious your friend is eating that you need to try, and then keep eating. Sometimes the incubation period is long and unpredictable, a small dormant germ that gradually reorganizes sense itself. 

Zoey’s essay is bookended by a series of car accidents, or near collisions — the kind where meaning is slow to form, and the world glitches and malfunctions as the grammar that holds things in place warps. What is that animal form, bleached by headlights, hurtling toward my windshield? Is that blood and hair on my front fender? What did that driver see when he swerved and yelled “hey lady” at me, a teenage boy? Is that radiating heat my own pee? 

That which seemed impossible according to one grammar comes to have been inevitable. Should we understand trans experience as full of messages from other space-times, slips of the tongue that call something into being, linguistic seeds that grow wild and unpredictable? The call is coming from the future, or the past, or from inside the house; the inside of the house is an alien galaxy. 

Geo Wyex introduces a further polyvocal variation on the sci-fi thought experiment. “D.O.U.B.T., a density” takes up the Back to the Future paradox of traveling back in time to find and alter a seed of the present. In this case, the mission is to cast a spell on a white ancestor who receives a visitation, a message piped into his timeline as if through a portal. He is to be infused with perpetual unrest, with doubt, “tiny stars to maul you for all of eternity. Doubt thine hands, thine eyes, ears, mind, thine mouth.” 

The spell is cast in a graveyard, the message delivered in the white ancestor’s language, a kind of half-decayed “Shakespearean” English, larded generously with festering organic matter, fragments of baseball radio, and other lost transmissions, “a woven curtain of words and references.” There’s a lot happening linguistically, but it could be summarized as sportscasting performed by warlocks with community theater energy and Yonkers bagel store accents. In this confusion of tongues is a profusion of balls and fields — sporty, salty, slapping, aching, lumpy, galactic:  

The baseball field, the plantation field, the field of stars, the art field, the field work, the fielding of eyes or feelings. The balls on a body, the balls in a body, the balls of stars or planets, the balls to hit hard. 

The long trajectories and high-impact collisions of these fields produce space dust of a particularly stinky variety: skin flakes, teeth, eyeballs, stage blood, splintered bats, intestinal gas. Geo’s general insistence on flotsam and dreck is characteristic of Muck Studies Dept., the open-ended dramatic verse work of which “D.O.U.B.T.” is a part. The rivers are dirty on both sides of the Atlantic, their churn unsettling the muck. The stage directions are very difficult to stage: 

(sound of a suck, something that really has just sucked, for a very long time, and continues to suck) 

(relentless oncoming River currents, the sound of what’s naughty, covered in mud, covered in eczema, a very bad dog, what stinks, and can’t stop) 

(oncoming River currents, bringing relief to centuries of rage and abuse, the Home Run Stunner, wielding the slugger) 

The particulars of rage and abuse are not recounted, a decision not to translate black suffering for white audiences. Neither is repair to be had. (“Repair! Repair? With my grandmother’s hair???”) Instead, the restless stirring of muck yields a strange refreshment. The oncoming river of muck might be time, both its accumulated sediments and the churning together of “multiple timelines in one scene” that Geo admires in the plays of Adrienne Kennedy. Since his earliest work in cabaret, Geo has shown a loving regard for theater — its people, its conventions, and the way it can hold in tandem “so many worlds in ways that feel less possible in daily life.” Here, the deliberately impossible-to-execute stage directions stretch this capacity to hold multiple worlds and timelines past its limits, into another dimension: a fifth wall, a ceiling, a basement, a science fictional thought experiment. How to stage “the sound of what stinks, stank, has stunk for a long time, loud sniff for effect”? 

I admit to a bit of loud sniffing at the 1991 MRPJ issue. A sniff can be dismissive or investigative — hesitantly checking for appetite and/or revulsion, where they lead or come from, pursuing an ephemeral trail, following your nose. My friend Tina said the sniff is a fold. It’s not just that you’re tracing what was, “you smell your own nose a bit too. You can’t pick up a scent without leaving one. Since everyone on the trail is doing this, one person’s past is another’s future.” When I asked Amelia about it, she texted back to say she wondered what our present will look like from the perspective of the near future. You smelt it, you dealt it. I like how Annie handles it: 

we had a lot of fun. We made mistakes too. When Linda/Les & Annie shows these days, I make sure to use a disclaimer. Same with my other videos; I need to apologize. People still sometimes want to screen those old films, like Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop (1992), which is full of what I thought was respecting and honoring some other cultures but is actually cultural appropriation. In Linda/Les & Annie, the information is way out of date. Rather than try to erase these works, I say, ok, these are historical documents, and I wouldn’t do it the same way now, obviously.