Obviously I would rather write about cancer, about nice people having affairs, about the Immigrant Experience, or growing up on a farm. I would prefer, of course, to write about writing professors who sleep with insatiable teaching assistants, about the sordid underbelly of creative writing programs in these United States of America.
Unfortunately these subjects are already taken; the quota is full. Everyone wants to be a writer nowadays!
What’s left is humiliation, shame not feigned or artful but smelly and sulking. Bad sex, waking up with the clap, sitting in the public STD clinic waiting to have my urethra swabbed by a nurse who remembers my name—this space available!
Obviously I would rather write about Nice Homosexuals. But you know how it is—the Nice Homosexuals are all taken. What’s left are a few bitter-faced members of the International Sex Army: men with sour hearts and bad breath. On retrovirals. Drunk.
The men who make mistakes occasionally—they were taken long ago. Ditto the men who often make mistakes. What’s left are a few men with unpleasant personalities and unremarkable genitals who make mistakes more or less constantly.
Obviously I would much rather write about cancer. But I do so want to be a writer—and there are so few spaces left available.
And so I devote myself, my heart and living hours, to smallness, humiliation and degradation, to everyone no one else wanted. (I myself cannot claim to like them.)
Bitter-faced, small-dicked, petty-minded queer army: accept me as your humble representative.
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