Fag poetry/ an introduction

1/The dream

I was kneeling on the floor of my bedroom, casually dressed - a tank top, maybe in jeans or underwear - doing my daily makeup in the mirror that rests against the wall. The day was delicate. Light poured through the windows of the space, turning the whole room into a bath of creams: a neat shoebox that captures dreams and documents memories, while remaining a loyal, stagnant stage. To my left, the woman perched on my bed. She lay on her side, blaze, donning light blues and whites, soft 50s lingerie, turning her body into more of a cloud. Her hair was frizzy and blonde; it rocketed from her head in a rough, choppy mat of curls, pinned together by a collection of star clips and ribbons, doodads, and pearls. Her feet, though she was inside, were encased in a pair of heels that protruded from her ankles so naturally that they seemed to transform into hooves.

Her whole body, made up of ribbon and bones, brocaded with jewels and teeth, and varnished in cheap tulle and taffeta, seemed to sparkle with a surreal radiance. It was as if she was glossed, coated in vaseline, or constantly melting like tar in the soft heat of this morning we shared. She raised her gloved hand to her lips, taking a slow draw from a cigarette, temporarily masking her mug in a cloak of smoke. Emerging from the cloud, I took a look at her face, similarly strange, with an artificial pale complexion, sharp blush lines, and an exaggerated eye drawn on by an unskilled yet dedicated hand. Her lips shone in the same surreal way: the way a freshly washed dish shines just for a moment while it sits wet.

topped with a church lady headpiece and thin caterpillar lashes, her whole body was too much to manage. I had to take her in in pieces, looking only at her legs or her torso -both of which seemed a little dirtier than expected, with yellow creases along her armpits, small bug bites up her arms, muddied knees, and thick hair running under the tights that wrapped her shins: a strangely elongated figure, punctuated by an uncomfortably protruding hip, and a chip in her tooth that you could only see when she laughed. I only saw her this way, in parts, yet when I saw her, I decided immediately that she was completely beautiful: somehow, in a revolutionary assessment, measuring the sum of fragments as almost greater than the whole.

While dreaming, I viewed the scene from the side, seeing the ridge of my brow as I leaned into the mirror to apply mascara, the arch of my neck, the shadow of her body on the wall behind us. I watched her eyes stare meaninglessly around the room as if she were in a daze. Sometimes they would catch on something, linger for a second, an otherworldly expression sitting on her face as she tapped ash onto the bedspread. Othertimes her eyes caught me in the mirror. She would take me in with authority, working her way from my back to my shoulders, and finally to my face, only seen by her in reflection. She smiled gently, possessively, and took a long draw, letting the smoke linger on her wet lips before slithering away again. When she turned to see me, she bore her eyes deep into mine. Looking into where I am looking, my whole body began to vibrate, and her face contorted into a surprised chuckle. She tossed her head back, breaking her stare, cracking the scene with a laugh: hair wafting through the light of the window, smoke drawing lines from the tip of her hand.

///

On an inconsequential morning in October 2024, I woke suddenly. My body was sharpened, energized, vibrating. It knew that it had just been encountered before I could unearth the dream described above. In the moments following my wake, lying still in bed, the dream, the woman, slowly revealed itself to me in parts. In these moments, I was suspended in the aftergaze of a vision that would challenge me to reconsider how we understand trans timelines, encounters, and the art of transformation.

This dream was presented as a tableau; I was not seen, but had the privilege of acting as another eye on the scene. My presence in this relationship (although I can only assume that I am the one looking in my dreams) transforms the encounter between me and my feminine deity into a cuckish tripartite love, charged by the act of watching each other watch ourselves. In this relationship, my eye is fixed. Instead of moving about, visualized in the scene, my presence is less human and more videographic. Importantly, although seeing from one perspective through the entire piece, the looking relationship of this dream assumes that the other figures - all of which inhabit a body that, although not mine as I write this now, exist within the same form - possess their own looks that, when in relation to mine, create a radical arrangement. With my stagnant viewpoint, I finalized the masturbatory fantasy of this dream, creating a visual circumstance that allowed my body, and with it, my gaze to simultaneously inhabit the here, there, and the then.[munos citation?!] And in this looking relation, in the sum of all of these visions and all of ‘my’ bodies, I decided, again, that the sum of the parts is somehow greater than the whole. I decided that it was beautiful, in looking, to be wholly broken.

Dialogue/ loving yourself as you would love another is a product of and homage to this dream: the woman, me, my gaze, and the love we all share. The film and corresponding oral poetry collection scaffold a relationship between a primary figure - a young person navigating the challenges and joys of queer adolescence - and ‘the goddess of my mind’ - a mystical drag caricature who begins to visit the protagonist in dreams. Staging the queer coming of age narrative as a relationship between two worlds - the dream, and the limited, fleshy body - Dialogue/ reworks the common coming of age motifs of queer encounter, the grief of the gendered body, feelings of difference and alienation, rituals of transformation, confusing desires, and early sexual experiences through the gaze of a constant, otherworldly onlooker.

Turning to the queer coming of age narrative, a framework that structures popular understanding of queer temporalities by narrativizing the entry into a queer life and body, provoked a questioning of how looking relations can understand the formulation of queer bodies, and how the radical lewd/masturbatory looking I experienced in the dreamscape can revolutionize the ways we come into, maintain, and celebrate queer life.