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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/difficulty-jameson-fitzpatricks-pricks-tapestry/"></div>In the promotional copy for <a href="http://www.birdsllc.com/catalog/pricks-in-the-tapestry">Pricks in the Tapestry</a>, the queer poet Jameson Fitzpatrick forewarns his reader that he “[does] not always identify with the speakers of these poems, even as I recognize their speech (and sometimes, their desires) as my own.” Like many of the poems in this debut collection, the eloquence and candor of Fitzpatrick’s note works as a smokescreen. Which speech and desires does he claim, you might ask, and which does he reject? How often counts as not always? The line of questioning seems harmless enough, but once you indulge it, the text engulfs itself in flames.
The note might strike some readers as abrasive. It’s Pride Season, after all, and the summer’s iconography tends to be straightforward and uplifting, conveyed mostly by social media memes and advertising campaigns. For the queer individual who cannot identify with the “Love wins” slogans, he stands accused of militancy, defeatism, party-pooping. He smells smoke, but he doesn’t put out the fire — that would just ruin the parade. “Whatever room I am in my heart is not,” writes Fitzpatrick. “Before a mirror, which face is true / the one that moves or the one that is moved?”
Still, smoke is brewing. The legacy of homophobia persists, despite the neoliberal queer movement’s efforts to marginalize its presence. The breakout queer writers of the past decade have slyly played both sides of the ideological divide, cloaking their brutal portrayals of violence and sexuality under an elaborate layer of artifice. If you noticed the uncharacteristic enthusiasm straight readers had for Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous or Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, you probably caught the pattern. Critics fixated on the “structural hallmarks” or “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/books/review-a-little-life-hanya-yanagiharas-traumatic-tale-of-male-friendship.html">shock value</a>” of the authors’ craft, then casually glossed over the queer subject matter. It was as if the pages and pages of gay sex had been torn out of their copies.
The argument is worth making, but of course, it’s abrasive — it’s heavy on radical theory and unflattering to the liberal piety of your straight allies. Fitzpatrick gets the point, and he’ll give the smokescreen strategy a try. But he understands, on a deeply intimate level, the toll it takes on the queer psyche. “Effortlessness as it happens / is what my poems lack,” writes Fitzpatrick, “but genuinely / if I’ve got anything going for me it’s / my difficulty.”
Perhaps the sole drawback of Fitzpatrick’s debut, then, is that it might alienate those who are late to the conversation. But the conversation must move forward, and Pricks in the Tapestry poises Fitzpatrick as a brilliant, alluring mediator.
The poems collected in Pricks in the Tapestry, some of which were published in Poetry, The New Yorker, and The Believer, comprise a coming-of-age tale. Fitzpatrick’s mid-twenties were a time in which he learned “the insufficiencies of the self as subject,” but once again, his eloquence conceals an uglier truth. When a speaker recalls his childhood bullies, for instance, he wonders if he should “raise hell and maybe make a YouTube video which I parlay into some small fame.” But Fitzpatrick knows better than to yield to an escapist fantasy: “I get revenge / only on the people who owe it / to me, who is no one.”
Here, the subject of gay male selfhood proves especially insufficient. But the self fails elsewhere in the collection, too. On a momentous trip to Fire Island, that fabled haven of sex and sunshine, the speaker finds himself “watching / from the blue periphery / as they flex and pose / for a photo.” In both scenarios, Fitzpatrick examines popular media portrayals of white gay men and pinpoints a specific habit of vanity and mythomania. If you find the speakers pedantic, that’s part of Fitzpatrick’s critique. Shallow gay men are frequently obnoxious, but so are the sanctimonious ones.
Fitzpatrick employs a wide range of disciplines in Pricks in the Tapestry, from the lyric and confessional modes to hybrid memoir, medical literature, and activist eulogy. Derek Jarman and Frank O’Hara make welcome appearances, but so do Kierkegaard, the DSM-5, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/magazine/americas-hidden-hiv-epidemic.html">Linda Villarosa’s 2017 reporting</a> on the racial disparities present in HIV infections. One particularly striking passage consists of a prose essay dedicated to the poet’s late uncle, whose untimely death from AIDS loomed over Fitzpatrick’s upbringing. In this passage, arguably the collection’s centerpiece, Fitzpatrick fully demonstrates the rigor and precision of his craft. His insights, though, won’t cheer you up. “Though I demonstrated little care about my own sexual health as a teenager, I was interested in HIV/AIDS as a subject,” he writes. “I liked the idea of it, this blood amulet, I’m ashamed to admit. As if it could justify what little care I continued to pay.”
In passages like these, you’re tempted to call Fitzpatrick a party pooper — rather than rendering a catharsis, he urges you to consider why you expected a catharsis in the first place. It’s harsh, but for what it’s worth, Fitzpatrick is at his harshest when he cuts through the smokescreen and addresses himself. Images of self-harm, bulimia, and violent sex recur in Pricks and the Tapestry, their presence mimicking the circular logic of trauma flashbacks. An unyielding lover named Jacques slips in and out of the poems, and his vanishing act situates these behaviors within a broader cycle of self-sabotage. “I told him I would die without him. / I died.,” writes Fitzpatrick. “That was the worst thing. / No, coming back was the worst thing.” Here the poems turn gaudy and vulgar, completely wrong for Pride Season — yet Fitzpatrick’s excesses feel authentic, his revelations glorious.
Pricks in the Tapestry delivers few of the straightforward pleasures that the neoliberal queer movement asks of its writers. You might not understand Fitzpatrick’s intentions until the third or fourth read; his debut is heavy and rigorous and, yes, abrasive. But this summer, it’s a deeply urgent release. Smokescreens are barriers, of course, but Fitzpatrick happens to know the way out.
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It’s My Difficulty: On Jameson Fitzpatrick’s Pricks in the Tapestry

It’s My Difficulty: On Jameson Fitzpatrick’s Pricks in the Tapestry

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/walls-dont-work-lonely-christophers-january/"></div>“<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIPb-Y_EHqw">Oh no, it’s just a daydream of mine</a>,” says shopkeeper Audrey in the 1983 rock musical Little Shop of Horrors. Her forearm wrapped in gauze, her face scraped and bruised, our tragic heroine yearns to leave her bad-news boyfriend and abscond to the suburbs with the gentle florist Seymour Krelborn. “Not fancy like Levittown. Just a little street in a little suburb. Just me, and the toast-ah, and a sweet little guy.”
Perhaps the queer subtext of Audrey’s ballad “Somewhere That’s Green” could have once been read in earnest. In the 20th century homeownership served as an ideological incentive for postwar capitalism, its stability and prosperity available to those men and women who conformed to the nuclear family unit. The gay man’s relationship to domesticity, and to the society organized around it, was one of violence and disfigurement. The harder he strived to assimilate its aesthetics, as in the short stories of John Cheever and the plays of Tennessee Williams, the more brutal was his outcome. He could “cook like Betty Crocker,” but he’d never look like Donna Reed.
The queer poet Lonely Christopher, 33, came of age in the Great Recession, wherein the postwar promise of homeownership was gouged out by neoliberal austerity measures. A house in the suburbs could no longer justify capitalism, yet it appeared that capitalism needed no further justification — an entire generation could be displaced, saddled with debt, derided as lazy and entitled. For queers, the material deprivation was accompanied by the advent of marriage equality, wherein lobbyists and media pundits instrumentalized the promise of homeownership for political maneuvers. Audrey’s daydream of “a matchbox of our own / a fence of real chain link,” once an expression of genuine queer longing, now pointed to the daydream’s ultimate emptiness. “I had to build a wall / around the pain,” writes Christopher, “but walls don’t work / the very concept of a wall / is insane.”
Of course, walls work great for straight people. This might be why Christopher devotes much of his latest collection, <a href="https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781931824859/in-a-january-would.aspx">In a January Would</a>, to the act of demolition: “Gallons of two percent milk mixed with Ballantine Ale / the adamantine smell of calamitous blood / rushing skyward from the gutters through the floor / rats, millions of them, and forgiveness.” If an image is conjured, the reader can expect the poet to immediately deface it; a serene autumn visit to beautiful Fire Island features “a vial of poppers leaking / into the red wine stain / on the red carpeted floor” and “the strains of a boy’s cum floating in a champagne flute.”
Never does the vandalism register as gratuitous or geared for shock value, nor does it eschew affect or emotion altogether. Rather, In a January Would suggests that under capitalism, vandalism is inherent to the queer experience. It’s wicked and inscrutable, sure, but to ignore it is to reject a crucial aspect of identity. For Lonely Christopher, to leave our world intact is the true act of violence.
The collection opens at the dissolution of Christopher’s relationship and chronicles a bleak post-collegiate year of heartbreak, substance abuse, and precarious living conditions. The poet travels from Paris to San Francisco, Brooklyn to Connecticut, having become an itinerant: “You give me shelter and fugitive boys, their skin / the transient laurels with which I carpet my tongue.” Christopher’s depictions of the seasons, from one winter to the next, provide linearity to a period of the poet’s life in which linearity hardly figures. Formally, the poems assume an ornate Rococo style, perhaps to mimic the refractory experience of homelessness: “Half a year homeless / wasted the year before / there was his hair, the color of praline / like the triumph of Christmas Day.”
Christopher’s work has been acclaimed for its candor and lack of compromise — writing of his debut collection Death and Disaster Series, <a href="http://bostonreview.net/poetry/felix-bernstein-lonely-christopher-frank-ohara-death-disaster-series">performance artist Felix Bernstein commended him</a> for “revealing the unthinkably awful without making it palatable (commercializing it, redeeming it or politicizing it).” It’s curious, then, that In a January Would particularly excels at moments in which Christopher interacts with the tropes of neoliberal queer discourse. When he tells his ex-boyfriend “Wonder if it was worth it / not sure by which measure to judge / but I have a stabbing suspicion / all that pain was for nothing again,” he assumes the pose of tragic gay diva, singing platitudes over a disco beat. Likewise, when he recounts those of his generation who “flung their bodies in front of buses or trains / still others clawed vainly at the palace’s skeletal gates,” he deploys the rhetoric of Stonewall-was-a-Riot think pieces, <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/trans-black-stonewall-rivera-storme/">which tend to mistranslate fractured oral history into dubious trivia points</a>.
In the hands of a lesser poet, the passages could succumb to cheap parody or rote attempts at subversion. That would be better than nothing; <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/opinions/pride-for-sale/">as Pride Month approaches</a>, we need queer poets to parody and subvert the neutralizing of LGBT rights, even if the work itself is unremarkable. But that is not what Christopher is doing. He goes beyond the obvious, using the iconography of the neoliberal queer movement to demonstrate a scathing point: the rainbows and “Love wins” slogans are woefully out of touch with the day-to-day experience of queer oppression. “I need compensation / for all the time / spent in hells of my own devising,” he writes, “I was amazed to learn then / that it wasn’t all my fault.”
It’s tempting to say that Lonely Christopher is a necessary poet. Indeed, In a January Would expresses the renewed collective desire for a militant queer politics; a crossover is more likely for him than ever. Yet Christopher’s work, in its discipline and authenticity, transcends the dogma and lazy prescriptions of our current moment — it’s not suited for dinner party small-talk, and yet therein is its achievement. Here is queer art that refuses to flatter our biases, that urges us to reconsider what we deem “radical.”
As it turns out, Christopher succeeds where Audrey fails: In a January Would concludes at a country home in the Connecticut suburbs, “amok in the teeming frost.” The gesture might suggest that the poet has reached catharsis, that a broken heart is never beyond repair. But it’s a testament to the rigor of Christopher’s craft, to the strength of his convictions, that he can muster one final act of demolition: “Have you not heard the antsy pleas of less confident / constituents, willing to pay witness to the future onslaught?”
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Walls Don’t Work: On Lonely Christopher&#8217;s In a January Would

Walls Don’t Work: On Lonely Christopher&#8217;s In a January Would

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/dale-peck-party-mayor-pete-dale-peck-limits-queer-rhetorical-flourishes/"></div>Despite being a relative neophyte to American politics, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has received almost universally positive coverage by the mainstream media, his presidential campaign even earning laudatory profiles in Vogue and The New York Times. Perhaps that’s one reason why gay writer Dale Peck’s critique of Buttigieg struck such a nerve — it was almost like we hadn’t seen one yet.
<a href="https://archive.is/Tz45f">Writing for The New Republic</a>, Peck expresses his ambivalence towards Buttigieg’s invocations of his gay identity, arguing that they cannot be reconciled with his campaign’s centrist politics. “[He] is a neoliberal and a Jeffersonian meritocrat,” Peck writes, “which is to say he’s just another unrepentant… beneficiary of white male privilege.” Citing the candidate’s dismissal of leftist activists as “social justice warriors” and his cumbersome response to the murder of black South Bend resident Eric Logan, Peck urges Buttigieg to “take a good hard look at… his view of the public good as somehow synonymous with his own success.”
Media outlets and Twitter users have objected to the more provocative flourishes of Peck’s rhetoric, particularly the speculation on Buttigieg’s sex life: “The only thing that distinguishes [him]… is what he does with his dick… I get a definite top-by-default vibe… I bet he’s too uptight to [bottom].” Since its publication on Friday, headlines have denounced the essay as “<a href="https://www.mediaite.com/news/update-the-new-republic-takes-down-bizarre-hit-piece-on-pete-buttigieg-editors-note-apologizes-for-inappropriate-and-invasive-content/">a bizarre hit piece</a>,” “<a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/nasty-horribly-written-new-republic-op-ed-attacks-mayor-pete-as-the-gay-uncle-tom">horribly written</a>,” and “<a href="https://www.queerty.com/new-republic-crisis-mode-publishing-homophobic-hit-piece-pete-buttigiegs-sex-life-20190715">homophobic</a>.” Ultimately caving to the backlash, The New Republic pulled the piece and apologized for its “<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/154457/editors-note?utm_source=social&amp;utm_medium=facebook&amp;utm_campaign=sharebtn&amp;fbclid=IwAR1dxY9B_w5-UplPpjUnEEG7oW75UyzP6jGiBYufIzn6IAtfalegPwIP8VE">inappropriate and invasive content</a>.”
Admittedly, the piece relies heavily on turgid anecdotes and abrasive jokes. Such flourishes are characteristic of Peck, who once opened an essay with the line “<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/63251/the-moody-blues">Rick Moody is the worst writer of our generation</a>.” But is it actually homophobic for a gay writer to make a flippant joke about Mayor Pete’s sex life? Do a few tasteless lines justify the piece’s entire removal? Crude as it may have been, Peck draws attention to an urgent concern that until recently the mainstream media has largely ignored: Buttigieg’s gay identity and same-sex marriage to schoolteacher Chasten Buttigieg has been a deeply awkward fit to the overall narrative of his candidacy.
Consider Mayor Pete’s love of James Joyce. Having cited Joyce, Orhan Pamuk, and Graham Greene as his favorite novelists, he praises Ulysses as a universal, relatable story of everyday life: <a href="http://onegrandbooks.com/shop/curators/pete-buttigieg/">“[It’s about] what it is to be human as one middle-class guy goes about his life… in a way it’s very democratic.”</a>
Ulysses’s themes of universality have come to characterize the Buttigieg narrative more generally. His is the story of a man, of humble Midwestern origins, whose Episcopal faith and military service provide him a profound understanding of middle-class America’s current needs. His Harvard education, fluency in seven languages, and voracious reading habits aren’t framed as features of an elitist bourgeois pedigree — a critique commonly levied against fellow bookworm Barack Obama. Rather, in the age of Trump, Pete Buttigieg offers proof that we’ve retained our core American values: curiosity, self-improvement, and upward mobility.
Certainly, Buttigieg’s love of reading is a refreshing reprieve from the lowbrow tastes of President Trump, who would likely choose The Art of the Deal over James Joyce. Still, something about Buttigieg’s literary tastes feels hollow and cynical. What does Mayor Pete think of <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25473572">Joyce’s depictions of homoerotic desire and gender ambiguity,</a> subject to decades of academic research? Or what about Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, and Edmund White, three highly accomplished and influential writers who centralize queerness as a universal American literary experience — has Buttigieg ever read them?
Ultimately, Buttigieg offers a narrow representation of queerness, one that appeals to straight voters at the exclusion of queers. And the queer electorate looks nothing like Buttigieg. Most of us do not share his whiteness, his gender conformity, or his Ivy League credentials. This, I believe, is the central argument of Peck’s piece. Again: why the censorship, why the backlash? Is it really all over a gay joke?
Recall that fixation on crudeness and perversion is an old-school conservative tactic, <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4634915/jeese-helms-criticism-robert-mapplethorpe">with Senator Jesse Helms as perhaps its most notorious practitioner</a>. “We have got to call a spade a spade,” said Helms of the NEA funding awarded to queer photographers David Wojnarowicz and Robert Mapplethorpe. “A perverted human being is a perverted human being… [The media is] obsessed with proving that black is white, and that the disgusting, insulting, revolting garbage produced by obviously sick minds, is somehow art.”
For the sake of our predecessors, many of whom died in the AIDS crisis, it is worth analyzing Peck’s rhetoric in this historical context. Having participated in AIDS activism of the 1990s, Peck comes from the same theoretical and artistic lineage as Wojnarowicz and Mapplethorpe. The crudeness comprised a central component of these artists’ visions, meant to force an intolerant heteronormative audience to reckon with the needs and desires of American queers. For whichever rhetorical flourishes fail to register in 2019, recall that the rhetoric of “reading” and “shade” recurs — however, it is most often found on Ru Paul’s Drag Race and Netflix’s Queer Eye, completely removed from its radical origins.
For those who maintain, nonetheless, that Peck’s rhetoric inhibits his argument — what about <a href="https://theoutline.com/post/7288/why-pete-buttigieg-is-bad-for-gays">Jacob Bacharach’s op-ed in The Outline</a>, or <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/pete-buttigieg-gay-diversity-white-male-candidate.html">Christina Cauterucci’s</a> essay for Slate? Both queer writers offer graceful, self-aware examinations of their ambivalence towards Buttigieg’s candidacy, without resorting to crude jokes or ad hominem attacks. Yet both received similar backlash, with Queerty’s <a href="https://www.queerty.com/writer-trashes-pete-buttigieg-says-hes-bad-gays-made-joke-grindr-20190409">Bacharach</a> and <a href="https://www.queerty.com/writer-questions-pete-buttigieg-gay-enough-first-gay-president-cue-outrage-20190329">Cauterucci</a> headlines being nearly identical to their Peck headline. The mainstream media’s response to these essays feels knee-jerk and pathological — shield Mayor Pete from all criticism, goes the directive, no matter the critique levied or rhetoric employed.
<a href="https://www.apnews.com/b63e349389c74772b2b796d8ea326f9d">When asked for his reaction to Dale Peck’s piece</a>, Buttigieg said briefly, “I appreciated that the article was taken down. I don’t think it really reflects The New Republic that I know.” Terse as it was, his response felt oddly appropriate for the controversy — if Dale Peck’s essay was an instance of “homophobic bullying,” then why didn’t Buttigieg seize the opportunity? Queer teens remain more likely to be bullied in school than their straight peers, despite wider LGBT representation in public life and media. Why didn’t Buttigieg emphasize homophobic bullying as an urgent, contemporary issue, one that holds universal significance to Americans?
Maybe once the #DalePeckIsOverParty clears out, Mayor Pete will take a stronger stance for the LGBT community. Maybe he will express admiration for the artistic achievements of Edmund White and David Wojnarowicz, and he will praise the political legacies of Sylvia Rivera, Harvey Milk, and ACT UP. But at this stage in the Democratic primary, I worry that it’s too late. As the Trump administration continues to dismantle our legal protections and challenge our rights, Buttigieg has failed to position queerness as a defining feature of his political platform. And we should be free to express our disappointment in him without fear of censorship — dick jokes or not.
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The Dale Peck is Over Party: Mayor Pete, Dale Peck, and the Limits of Queer Rhetorical Flourishes

<a href="https://qroberts.tumblr.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-auth="NotApplicable">Quinn Roberts</a>&nbsp;is a writer from New England. He is at work on his first novel.

Quinn Roberts

The Death and Life of Blond Ambition: Madonna’s Entrancing Contradictions

"I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds." — Dizzy Gillespie

Music

"Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors." — Simone Weil

Cultural Studies

"As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag." — Patti Smith