About Not Interviewing Roxane Gay

This is not a post is not a story of triumph.  There will be no Facebook post with accompanying photo about my interview with Roxane Gay because there will be no interview.

Oh, I was asked.  My bookstore is co-hosting the event for her new memoir, Hunger. But like her book, the first book I’ve been able to successfully read beginning to end in 10 months – ok a year, if I’m being completely honest (I tried, Bruce), my story is not one with a neat happy ending.  Back in October, I melted down completely, spiraled into a horrid depression, and I haven’t been able to read more than a paragraph or two at a time.

My passion for words shrank to scattered thought, then slowly to short poems, then an article or two.  It’s been a nasty little secret until now, so when I got the email asking if I would be “in conversation” with Ms. Gay, I had to read it a few times to actually understand it.  Then I thought for a day or two before answering no, citing vague health issues.  I told the people around me that it wouldn’t make sense for me, a white guy who only struggles mildly with his weight to discuss such a tender, vulnerable subject with someone who has so clearly been subjected to mildly out of shape white guys’ opinions about her body.

The truth is I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to read in time to be articulate in front of a crowd.  I was afraid of being exposed as an illiterate bookseller.  A fraud.  Of course, I’m not really illiterate, not permanently at least.  The strange cognitive twist is that I can still write, but that doesn’t translate to intelligent discussion in front of an audience with someone as formidable as Roxane Gay.

But I regret my “no” answer now, so I’ll express my angst here in a public sort of letter.

Ms. Gay – yours is the very first book I could read, and if I had it to do over again, I would say yes to the interview.  Not because I’m an entitled white guy (although an argument could be made that I am) but because I spent 30 years in a female body I couldn’t reconcile before becoming this guy.

I would have loved to ask you about the bold, daring, stare the fear straight in the eyes courage it took to crack your life wide open in the pages of this book.  We have a lot in common. We could have talked about binging.  We could have talked about sexual assault, about being attacked from within our own bodies.  We could have talked about attacking our own bodies.  We could have talked about trauma housed in every cell that we want to lose, but cannot set free.  We could have talked about being so very alone in our cages – differently shaped cages, yes, but cages.  We could have talked about shame.  About touch.  About both craving it and slapping it away.

We could have talked about bodies, fat bodies, cis female bodies, transgender bodies, black bodies – all of the kinds of bodies that are war zones, that are property put up for public debate and judgement without input from the souls who inhabit those bodies.

We could have talked about taking up space and wishing we could disappear.  We could have talked about public space – TSA lines and airplanes, bathroom stalls and swimming pools.

But we won’t, and I’m sorry.  Sorry, not as an apology to you (you will be great as always and your book and event are not about me) so much as an expression of deep sorrow and regret that I had the chance to sit on a stage with you and talk freely about the experience of a body at war with itself – regret that I *finally* read something all the way through after months of sheer desperation BECAUSE you talked freely in this book and I couldn’t look away.  I couldn’t look away from the devastating beauty of it.

We met before, on your tour for Bad Feminist.  It was hot.  We borrowed the empty space next to the store to accommodate a more people.  I built a stage specifically for the event.  The air conditioner broke that day.  I was the guy with the fan.  You, no doubt, do not remember me and that’s ok.  I was being invisible that day, too.  But I remember you.  I saw you.  I see you now.  And even though we won’t do this conversation in person, I’ll take this small chance to thank you for writing this exquisite book.

So this post ends here.  Not quite satisfying.  Not triumphant.  Not neatly finished.  Imperfect and sort of selfish. But hopeful and grateful.

Twenty Minutes at a Conference

This past weekend, I’ve been at the Philadelphia Trans Health Conference.  I feel like I should write about this as soon as possible, but I’m in late conference zombie mode tonight and feeling slightly blocked, so I thought I’d just focus on twenty minutes I spent in a writing workshop yesterday, wedged in among the presentations about hormones, harassment and surgery.  There, surrounded by about 40 other trans people in a comically small room, our moderator prompted us to spend twenty minutes continuously writing the old fashioned way – longhand on paper – without stopping to edit.  The prompt – Tell your pet about your gender identity.  Here, unedited, is what twenty minutes with a notebook on my lap thinking about my bulldog produces, in case you’re interested.

Oh, Bruno.  You don’t care very much about my gender, do you buddy?  It’s one of your many awesome qualities, my man.  We make fun of your less than sharp intellect, but I keep coming back to your spectacular full-body smile, that drooling slobbery mess – so at ease with your joy.  That Fred Flintstone start to your gallop to the food bowl, the Scooby Doo slide across the kitchen floor.  My disgruntled, undercaffeinated lump standing by the microwave in the morning doesn’t dampen your spirits.  It can’t.  I love being irrelevant to you in this way, buddy.  Irrelevance as forgiveness as acceptance.

My ability to click your leash onto your collar and walk you out the front door is of utmost importance, in cosmic inversion to the importance of my scars, lumps, slowed gait after surgery.  Invisible to you are my hours of hand wringing and anxious glances at the computer screen, fingers hovering above the keyboard in amber suspension, forever acting out the moment before I wrote the story.

My feet on the couch under your belly are relevant, as are the precise number of scratches, head rubs and cookies from the jar above the counter.  You ignore me in the kindest turn of ignorance, need me in the happiest waves of desire, love me in the truest embrace of agape.  

You offer many gifts, my friend,  the least of which is the wave of digestive smell unleashed in mixed company.  Still, you roll your 85 pound frame onto its side, breathe deeply, sigh.  Satisfied.  At ease.  Naked.  Smelly.  So comfortable in your goofy, ill-fitting dog suit.  Silently urging me to be comfortable in my ill-fitting human suit.  No, you don’t care very much at all about my gender, which is the greatest of your gifts, my man.

Maybe you could teach me not to care as much as I do.