The Clothes You Were

"They were always getting ready for a world that would never be ready for them."

I went to New York City last week to help Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore launch her new novel, Terry Dactyl, in New York. I got into town on the early bus out of Hanover, took myself straight to my barber for a fade and beard trim—if my hair is short enough, I feel like I can do anything—and I needed some of that energy. I was tired from the term, by which I mean teaching this term has felt a lot like being that aerobics teacher in Myanmar who doesn’t know the coup is happening behind her, except that you do and you keep teaching, through the whole term, just showing up and doing the thing.

Mattilda’s novel had me feeling a certain kind of way that was hard for me to articulate, but which I realized mean that it had woken something up, and that was what I thought about as I headed to the Strand after seeing my barber. As I said that night at the event, the novel took me back to parts of New York I had not thought of in a very long time, like Limelight, for example, the setting for the opening scene to the first chapter. I was about to summarize it but it’s really a beautiful paragraph, so:

The first time I met Sid she was on the dance floor in a silver and gold tube dress pulled over her head except it wasn’t just a dress because the fabric went on and on and somehow she knew the exact spot on the dance floor when the light would shine right on her or that’s how it felt when she was writhing inside this tube of fabric, pulling it up and down, a hand out and a hand in, and when her face exposed in harsh white makeup and black lipstick with long glittering eyelashes and then she rolled onto the floor, she was crawling or more like bending but also she was completely still in the bouncing lights and all this was happening on a crowded dance floor at the Limelight while I was sipping my cocktail and I didn’t know what I was seeing I mean it felt like this went on forever, how many songs, it was like there wasn’t even music anymore just my body inside the fabric peeking out and then she pulled the dress up around her neck like a huge elegant collar, and underneath she was wearing a gold bodysuit with a silver metallic skirt that flared out, with ballet slippers also painted gold and she walked right up to me and said what did you think.

Thus does the main character, a trans femme named Terry, fall in love with a trans femme named Sid, beginning a relationship that marks Terry forever.

Mattilda and I have something that is like a long shared past, but we’ve never really talked about it, just lived inside of it, and so I did something I don’t think I’ve ever done and addressed it before we went on stage, a way of just making that connection across the queer punk club scene in San Francisco in the 1990s more literal. We were queer kids in San Francisco during times that almost overlapped in the 1990s, the city almost like a school we both went to. I lived there just two years, but experienced so much life that it has marked me forever in ways I’d never take back. I’ve had a better life for having lived there. I left for New York just before Mattilda arrived.

Every conversation I have with a writer about their novel for a launch is really me setting them up to tell some stories about their story. When we got on stage for the conversation I asked her about dressing up to go out to the clubs as self-creation, and protest as self-creation also. These tie together in the novel but it was something I associated with the era in general before understanding that there is a link. Mattilda promptly quoted Sarah Schulman on the subject, and this will be a paraphrase, “They were always getting ready for a world that would never be ready for them.” I then asked her about whether there were autobiographical outfits in the novel, a question that really took off for her, and I left for dinner thinking about my own, and whether I had put any of my old favorite clothes, as it were, into any of my fiction.

I haven’t had time to have an answer yet but I have been thinking about earrings, clip on earrings specifically, for months now, and found myself remembering the night back when was 17 and I wore my first earring out at night in Portland, ME—a clip-on, a big chunky fake gem with a fake pearl drop dangling below it. It was an embarrassingly fake deep purple color, “amethyst,” and I loved it, fearing all the while I wore it that both that it would fall off—it was a clip-on—or that it would get me beaten up. This was the summer of 1984. There was a beautiful boy at my high school I was infatuated with who I was desperate to impress, unafraid of the occasional beatings he got for being openly gay. He was my first crush to show up in black jeans and sockless Converse sneakers and a falling to pieces band t-shirt he’d cut the sleeves off of. I don’t think this earring was going to do it for him but every conversation I had with him I always fell into his enormous blue eyes. I couldn’t have said what he felt about me, my own feelings were overwhelming. Youth, I guess.

I’ve never written about him but maybe it is almost time.

In my mind the earring I speak of looks like one of these but of course, it did not. From the Met Open Access, a pair of earrings from a parure in their collection.

Reads

Silvia Park’s Luminous is still giving me life as we used to say. It is set in a reunified Korea and does not describe how the country was reunified but we seem to be approaching that in the story, which for me makes it like a thriller.

On my commutes this term I listened to The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, read by Joe Jameson, and he was so good for the book, he gave a perfect performance.

I wrote an introduction to the new Bloomsbury edition of Edmund White’s The Flaneur. I kept calling him Ed in the text, a really unforgivable thing to do, but it was because of love and grief. I did change it to be respectful at the last minute.

The Edward P. Jones edition of The O. Henry Prize anthology is still thrilling me.

This Deborah Eisenberg interview in BOMB with Craig Lucas changed my trajectory when I found it back in 1992.

Kaitlyn Greenidge’s books newsletter for Harper’s Bazaar is already one of my favorites. Here she is on Jamaica Kincaid and her new essay collection.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee