Local Gestures
because the personal is cultural
I went to my first maskless concert since the beginning of the pandemic. I wanted to figure something out. I knew I wouldn’t meet anyone there, but I wanted to know if the idea that I might would be enough.
I like to claim that I don’t tend to care about stories. Yet, if people knew the stories I make up in my head sometimes, I would die of embarrassment. After the show, I told myself that, from now on, I would go to a concert when I felt like I needed it… until the next time. This sounded a lot like the relationship I’ve had with sex. As someone who is demisexual within hookup culture, sex has rarely been able to occur organically or exist as itself for me. Sex was something I tended to have when I wanted something else, something I couldn’t get, like human touch. The experience was rarely satisfying; men are experts at fucking without touching. Keep reading... |
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I’ve always been a sucker. Not as in gullible, mind you. What I mean is that, when I was seven years old, I watched Dr. Zhivago over two nights as it played on TV and, when the titular character saw the woman he loved as he passed by her on a tramway and ran after her, dying of a heart attack while she kept on walking, completely oblivious to the drama unfolding behind her, I also died a little. It became my favourite movie, as it would for any normal seven-year-old. When I saw it on VHS a few years later at the store, still split over two cassettes, I bought it with the hard-earned money I made babysitting my cousins.
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Ninety percent of the time, when I went clubbing, I didn’t have a good time. So it was surprising to me, when rereading my old LiveJournal, to realize how often I went out all the same. Why did I keep on doing it in spite of everything? Because I was desperate.
I’ve always been an introverted loner. I like to say that it was because I grew up on a farm in the country and that I’m more used to the company of cows than that of humans, but that’s probably only partially true; I have two older brothers whose personalities are vastly different from mine. Yet I’ve probably gone to clubs hundreds of times more than both of them combined. I was hoping to meet someone. I never did. Still I kept going. Keep reading... |