Remembering Is Also Defiant | A Conversation with Nate Lippens
Interviews
By Lindsay Lerman
Nate Lippens’s My Dead Book is not transgressive because it follows a gay man—an unnamed narrator—as he struggles to survive, selling his body, living on the fringes of multiple worlds, watching friends die, grieving them alone in bed at night. In fact, I might say it’s not “transgressive” at all, because it is continually transgressing. It’s a living book (a living dead book), not a slick product that’s been workshopped-to-death. It drifts. It moves around in time. It makes tangential connections and follows them for a while. It grieves; it gets aroused; it spaces out; it gets high. It loves, hates, and laughs. Most of all, it remembers, and it does so on its own terms. It carries the uncertainty and difficulty of life within it. As such, it possesses a beauty that cannot be explained by simply invoking “technique,” or “shock value,” or anything else—though Nate certainly knows more than most about technique and shock value.
My Dead Book is a singular creation, in part because it is proudly indebted to many continually transgressing works of art that came before it—in the sense that a singular creation is not the result of the lone genius in the tower, but the result of deep interaction with the world and artwork produced out of necessity, out of struggle with the world. In this case, books by Cookie Mueller and Eileen Myles and Kathy Acker and Silvina Ocampo. But also photography and film—and even the art of the telephone conversation—and the many references to art scattered throughout the book.
Nate and I talked about his book over email for a couple weeks, and it was such a pleasure. We talked about gender and performance, communication and connection, exchanges of energy, commodification of desires, and more. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Lindsay Lerman: One thing that stands out to me is how your book gets at the heart of what’s happening when labor is exchanged for money. It’s not just that your book expresses that all work is essentially sex work (which everyone honest knows is true to a certain extent); it’s that your book gets deep into how it’s all an exchange of energy and it’s all done in the service of survival. The men who pay the narrator want his youth, his promise, his vulnerability, his beauty, his willingness to do what he’s told, his ability to make them feel a certain way. They need his energy to want to stay alive. And he needs their money (energy) to actually stay alive. Do you think the narrator finds some kind of agency in this? There’s a way that he seems self-possessed—not just hardened by life, but also in charge of himself and his life in some ways.
Nate Lippens: Yeah, his independence—being out on his own at fifteen—has necessitated a certain agency. No one is going to save him. And he has no one to answer to but himself. His world is rough, so he needs some swagger. He creates choices where there aren’t many, like walking out on a trick or selling a watch given to him by another man. He knows the gift is actually a down payment on belonging to someone, so he pawns it and turns the transaction into actual cash. It’s also interesting to think about how the term “sex work” wasn’t used in the 80s. The narrator and his friends would have been called hustlers or rent boys and the clients were johns or tricks. The conditions of living under different terms may seem unimportant—certainly sex workers are still treated as disposable, criminal, and worse by many—but there wasn’t a professional or business network to contextualize the labor. He doesn’t think of what he’s doing as a profession. It’s a means to an end, so his self-possession lies less in identity and more in actions. He’s aware of the expectations and chooses to meet them but sometimes makes them into something else. Or walks away.
LL: I can’t stop thinking about how the narrator knows that all of life is a performance. It comes out in these extraordinary ways. I’m thinking of what happens when a trick turns violent. What the narrator sees (I think) is a deeper truth than plain old sadism; he sees that a man who needs to beat another man into submission is doing it for some frantic confirmation that he is, in fact, a man. But your narrator knows all along that to be a man is some kind of lifelong performance—a bit, a part—one that most will refuse to admit to playing. Those men can’t even see the prison of performance; those men think the prison bars don’t exist. Your narrator understands that, because of this, they are only kind of half-alive—not really real. He knows exactly how pathetic it is to beat someone into submission because you didn’t have what it takes to seduce them into submission. The fake men want to beat him into being fake like they are. They don’t want him to know what he knows: that we’re all just nothingness with some roles impossibly stitched around nothing. This isn’t a question, I guess—I just want to know if you have thoughts about this.
NL: He’s hyperaware of the performance of sex for money and trying on and discarding identities to fit someone else’s fantasies. He’s also an effeminate kid, so that completely shapes his views on gender as a performance. Effeminacy is treated as a half-world, like a shameful joke. You are either invisible or conspicuous. He sees how much energy men expend to maintain their masculinity. It’s deep cover. And, with time, only the role remains. I’ve always been most fascinated by people who see gender as a game, where the performance is a little heightened and they slip in and out of it. There’s a societal obsession with authenticity or realness, or who is fake, but I’m drawn to the authentic fakes. The narrator sees this all around him from the other hustlers and the tricks. He sees the internalized self-hatred and how it’s an engine for behavior. He knows that the man beating him is actually not in control of the situation or himself. It’s a reenactment. Maybe it’s the only way the john can imagine being intimate with another man. As a teenager in New York, the narrator is exposed to people who dress up and change their appearances, partially as a way to create and recreate identity, but also for freedom, for fun. The 80s were a period when genderfuck and androgyny were big pop culture forces. I remember seeing Grace Jones and Annie Lennox on MTV when I was a kid and being mesmerized. That was such a strong visual. I think I was more drawn to the women who were playing forcefully with gender because the men who did were treated like clowns. I wanted to be a tough girl, I guess. That seemed better than a boy.
LL: Your book is wise about how difficult communication and connection are. It’s clear how difficult connection is when people just need someone (like the narrator) as the place to live out a fantasy or a dream, but it’s bigger than that. So much of the book has to do with trying to reach people and not being able to. And yet, friendship is at the core of the book, and friendship is evidence of connection sustaining—it’s the dead friends who show up in the first line, after all. It’s a beautiful contradiction.
NL: One of the narrator’s longest friendships is with Rudy, an older photographer, who is my homage to photographers like David Armstrong, Jimmy DeSana, Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, and Nan Goldin. A lot of their work sprang from friendships and all the improvised love that entails. Rudy is the record-keeper of those times. He photographed his friends and lovers. The narrator has stories. The two of them provide a throughline from the past to the present. And the past isn’t treated as prelude to the present. It’s a living thing they maintain for each other. People like to lean on the concept of chosen family, but for me and a lot of gay people I know, our families didn’t want us. I didn’t want to recreate a facsimile of those dynamics. I wanted friends. Friendships have been the most important relationships in my life. Friendship is the highest order to me. You’re not bound by blood or sex. You’re creating and sustaining it out of shared interests and a different kind of love than what’s celebrated and rewarded by society.
Because the narrator’s had an erratic history and moved a lot, certain people have been constant in his life while others have passed in and out. There’s a lot of shuffling around. This was a period of time when keeping in contact was more difficult. You had to call or write a letter, and there was no way to stay in touch if you didn’t have a stable place to live. Connection between gay men at the time was also fraught. AIDS made every sexual encounter feel like a possible brush with death. Internalized homophobia meant parsing who passed and who was “too gay.” Personal ads often said “straight-acting only. No femmes.” (Of course, that still persists. The last two gay men at the end of the world will still be deciding exactly how the other isn’t his type.) There was all this distance that had to be closed, repeatedly, but the effort made the connections meaningful. That’s where part of the accounting of the dead comes in. The narrator is almost like a herding dog counting his people. If everyone is tallied, he hasn’t lost as much. Some people are driven to forget so they can carry on, and some need to remember so they can. The memories are a foundation: This is where I’m from. These are the people who made me. That’s a way to keep a line of communication and connection with the world when it feels like there’s no place for you.
LL: Your book made me miss talking on the phone so much. Do you still talk on the phone?
NL: I do. I know a ringing phone is an act of violence for most people, but I love talking on the phone. It may actually be my true art form. I have two friends––one 71 and one 31––who I talk to frequently. Both poets. And hilarious. I’ll Skype or FaceTime or Zoom, of course, but I really love the phone. You aren’t visible. You’re maybe wandering around, walking your dog, eating, and it all becomes part of the conversation. The back-and-forth dialogue creates everything. The visual isn’t necessary. I guess, too, because I hated my voice, and because it was a source of mockery for a lot of my life, I love that that’s all someone gets on the phone: my craggy, faggy voice being absolutely itself. Truck stop Marianne Faithfull.
LL: I appreciate the way your book raises an eyebrow at the hyper-commercialization of queerness. (Even the ubiquity of the word “queer.”) It’s not necessarily dismissive about it, and it’s not bitter either, but it does serve as a powerful reminder that before pride flags were used to sell shampoo, people died because of their queerness, because of exile, because of willful neglect on the part of the US government, etc. (There’s that perfect line in My Dead Book about all the people who called the gay community bitter in the 90s now showing up for the Wojnarowicz retrospective.) I think about this issue a lot because I don’t always understand why I won’t let myself claim much queerness publicly. You know? No matter how many times I’ve fallen in love with another woman, I don’t tend to call myself a “queer writer.” But your book helped me see part of the answer: my two best friends in my early twenties were both gay, and they are now both dead. Although they were working very hard to heal from the trauma of their early lives by the time they came into my life, their pain was still enormous, undeniable. Aeyn came out at 15, was kicked out of his house, moved to Mexico, lived on the streets—you know how the story goes. And although Aeyn is dead, he’s still so real and alive to me. I still know how his face looked when he was in pain; I know in serious detail some of the hell he went through because he was a gay kid with a conservative Christian family who came out in the early 90s. I’ve had my own struggles, and they’ve been significant, but, in my early life, they were not the struggles of an out kid. I take pain like Aeyn’s very seriously, and I just can’t breeze past it or presume to understand it, no matter how close we were. I do not want to unwittingly contribute to pain and struggle like his being overlooked or buried. (There’s also the fact that I want to stay fluid in as many ways as possible, and I will never know exactly what I “am,” but that’s sort of a separate point.) It’s sort of like, if saying something about it probably won’t help anyone, why bother? Why not keep it to myself? I keep plenty of things to myself anyway. I hope it’s clear that I’m only speaking for myself here, not passing judgment on anyone else.
I guess I’m just old enough to have some dead friends the same age as some characters in your book. But as an artist who hopes (maybe in vain) to make a few dollars on writing here and there, I see exactly how my desires could be used to sell my creation—if I were to let that happen. And it’s complicated; I really don’t think there are easy answers. Your book illuminates all of this. I don’t want to ask you to talk about the writing marketplace and the commodification of queerness, but I also kind of want to ask you to talk about the writing marketplace and commodification of queerness. Is it hellish? Is it just what happens when the market finds something new it can sell?
NL: Aeyn’s story is so familiar and heartbreaking. And yours as his friend and the carrier of his memory is too. I absolutely get what you mean about queerness. The assimilation, hyper-commercialization, and commodification of gay culture and queer culture seem inevitable now, in the way consumerism turns everything into product. Even the word “queer,” which I first associated with the early 90s radical activist group Queer Nation and was domesticated by 2003 with Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, has been co-opted into meaninglessness. What was shunted aside and lost wasn’t given much consideration. I had a lot of people die from AIDS and also addiction and suicide—which I call the home remedies of the trauma of homophobia—and there are moments where it feels like they’re being buried twice. That certain experiences have been erased and written over to suit a new narrative. All I can really do is address that loss and keep the memories alive. I don’t even mean as cultural memory. The culture has demonstrated it doesn’t have one. I mean as personal memory and an extension of friendships.
As far as the writing marketplace, I think of the term monetized cynicism. Queer in that context is a hashtaggable label, but danger and transgression—and especially ambivalence—are not welcome. There’s a larger narrative that the work has to harmonize with to be accepted. I actually saw the phrase gay miserabilism in relationship to some unrepentantly sad and sexual books that don’t forward a middle-class aspirant agenda. Imagine turning to fiction for role models. The books I love are usually a single consciousness moving through the mess of life. I don’t want to live like Sasha Jensen in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, but it’s one of my favorite novels. I wouldn’t say my work is dangerous or transgressive, but its emotional center is ambivalence and uncertainty, which doesn’t play with the team sports cultural mentality that’s prevalent now. I had a novel and a story collection I tried to publish over the last decade. Actually, my joke to friends was, “The problem with my work used to be my lack of institutional credibility and my gay working-class content, but now it’s taken so long I can add ageism.” I knew that was the case with mainstream publishing, but I was disappointed to discover it also was with the indies. I relate to what Vaginal Davis said: “I was always too gay for the punks and too punk for the gays.” I knew I couldn’t put this book through the protracted rejections and ghosting I did with the other two. I figured My Dead Book might be self-published and mailed to people I knew or wanted to have it. It would just show up in people’s mailboxes. I had a few queries out and I sent it to Matthew Stadler, who I knew from years back. He read it in a weekend and was interested in putting it out as part of the Fellow Travelers Series by Publication Studio. They’re a very small press. The books are made to order at the studio and are only available from the publisher. No distributors, no print runs, no Amazon. Patrick Kiley at PS Hudson designed and makes mine. I’m grateful to Matthew and Patrick and that people are seeking the book out and that it’s been received so well.
LL: I’m so moved by how your book refuses to let the dead go unacknowledged, unremembered. To me that’s beautiful and precious. At one point the narrator is crying on his birthday and it’s perfect: “I’m crying, not because I’m sad. Or not just sad. Not because I’m old. Not because it’s a privilege to be alive when many others are gone. I’m crying because I’m remembered. And that’s all there is.” We remember. We hope to be remembered. That’s it. In a way, it’s pathetic, like “please confirm that I exist.” But it’s also not pathetic—it’s all there is.
NL: It is. We carry each other that way. Grief, if we’re honest, is ongoing. It changes and alchemizes and sometimes rears up. It messes with our sense of time. Like Aeyn pops up in your day and rearranges it. That’s not bad. It’s honorable. People want to cordon grief off and be done with it. One thing that I thought about a lot while working on this book was the performance artist Ron Athey saying, “What is the real definition of ‘healing’ in a time where everyone is sick and dying? Is healing being restored to what you were when you were 23? Or is healing becoming a kind of monster on the other side who survived?” A monster is a composite. That’s why I structured My Dead Book how I did. I wanted to be at sea, to be drifting on loss and memory, and to say remembering doesn’t have to be just nostalgia or melancholy. Remembering is also defiant. I won’t forget no matter how the stories are erased, the dead are buried twice, or the historical record is twisted. I’m fine—proud (a word I used to avoid)—to still be pissed off and tender about it all.
Lindsay Lerman is a writer and translator. Her first novel, I’m From Nowhere, was published in 2019. Her second book, What Are You, will be published in 2022. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Entropy, New York Tyrant, and elsewhere. She has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Guelph.
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