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1) makes me think of ketamine
2) book about downtown new york
3) book about insufferable people in the “culture industry“ of downtown new york - clout chasing during aids
4) aids literature showing the literal and metaphorical dangers of love and the risks entailed. to get close to someone is to risk contagion. the hedgehog’s dilemma. jesus and judas ‘when i kiss you i damn us both’ (another thing i’m into is poetry that draws parallels between jesus / judas and gay lovers)
5) reminds me of giovanni’s room
6) writing about getting peed on but in a beautiful way somehow
Jan 5, 2024
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Started reading this book 8 months ago and haven’t been able to pick it back up. It made me feel insane about falling in love and the feeling of obsession. Hope to one day finish but it’s really moving.
2d ago
‘They’re faggots. They’re writers—quelle surprise!’
I had to ask Gay’s the Word to order Castle Faggot in for me. I used a £7.99 discount token from their pay-it-forward scheme to buy it when it arrived, povo that I am. I spent that £7.99 on one pint at some Bloomsbury pub and read it all in one sitting, twisting the book upside down, inside out, trying to make sure every toff in a gilet could see what I was reading. This is one of the reasons the book is such a powerful object: it branded me. It’s by a faggot, for faggots. No hetero would be caught dead with it in his hands.
In the book’s afterword, Dennis Cooper says ‘It does everything it’s doing in three-dimensions.’ Castle Faggot is a real space, an orgy of dead faggots and an amusement park. It’s a scatological Disneyland and a place for faggots to die. It’s a book that at once inspired and destroyed my own work, took a real big shit on it. Derek, as I try to, leans into consumerism with joy and horror simultaneously, locates us in the products we buy and the sugary cereal we crave. It’s also totally absent of literary goop, full of human goop, faggot goop; it’s slender ninety pages make it the perfect artefact. He doesn’t mince words, but he’s a mincer. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted to be.
I hold a real space for myself in my writing and feared it came off as forced, the I character always some more handsome version of me. Derek doesn’t need to include his name for us to know what sickly disturbed fag is talking. When he does do it, it comes off as a joke. As if we didn’t already know. His input is never conceited or dishonest; he pushes out from every shit-smeared hole laughing, screaming, self-loathing. He made me better at inserting myself into my writing and inserting myself into another man.
Castle Faggot isn’t just one of the most important pieces of post-AIDS writing, it’s one of the most current pieces of post-AIDS writing. It writes to a world which, honestly, didn’t really experience that tragedy, but which is littered with its bodies. Derek McCormack saw a dead faggot and thought, I’m gonna write on this, or I’m gonna write in this, or I’m gonna write with this. The whole book is a dead faggot crying out against our century, lost in an amusement park, how is this even possible? It’s a mass grave of a book.
At some point in the book you have to flip it upside-down, be reminded you’re holding an object; but you’re also forced to read backwards, rescind into a haunted past of faggotry and debauchery. He plays physical tricks with his work that make him a sort of architect. Nothing has ever been written like it, but we need more, and that’s why this book is so important. It sets a precedent. Derek takes the faggy artists of old—the fin-de-siecle writers, or ‘fag-de-siecle’—and transforms them into post-AIDS monuments, puerile shit-filled replicas. It’s a children’s book for faggots. It’s the children’s book I always needed as a child but didn’t know I did. It’s a book that reminds us that, as faggots, we’re already dead; but in being written, existing, it encourages us to go on and create. It’s like the faggots’ nuclear bomb, our weapon of mass seduction. It’s hot enough to melt Walt Disney.
Castle Faggot is, to me, the logical progression of all faggot art, the consolidation. It’s an exhibition piece on communal existence with AIDS and a call for young faggot writers to acknowledge that they come from a lineage of shit and death, that it’s inescapable, but that there are new things to be done. It explodes traditional narrative expectations and arrives at some other end of the novel, some new territory. It faggots the writing process and the book itself is a dead fucking faggot.
When I finished reading Castle Faggot I held it the whole way home. On the tube I wore it like a band t-shirt. By this point, though, I didn’t just want to be branded, an obvious faggot where I’ve before been called ‘the straightest person’ gym bro in my art class had ever seen; I wanted to be a model for Derek’s work, for someone, anyone, some faggot, to look it up, read it, and start writing, start breaking the mould.
3d ago
Picked this up at McNally Jackson based on premise alone & realised halfway through that it’s a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic! Beautifully written, harsh and gory, a great translation from Jeffrey Zuckerman.
Jul 1, 2024
Top Recs from @izzycapulong
every ig update reminds me of how far i am from the life i was promised. i was supposed to be working at buzzfeed making six figures writing listicles wearing those studded steve madden pumps and posting only squares with the rio dijanero filter.
every ig update is like a new gunshot to my already bleeding body. they’re useless and unwanted. idgaf about turning my feed to rectangles. show me who unfollowed me. next update is gonna be a tab with two buttons: one sucks your dick and the other shoots you in the face except you don’t know which one is which. honestly i’d rather have that instead of the rectangles. Modernity I Rebuke You.
Jan 17, 2025
🚶
i feel like an 80s mobster. or a 19th century bachelor with an unfortunate attraction to bohemia. someone who would’ve been called a rake in those days bc i was dancing with married women and gambling and learning french instead of carrying on the bloodline or courting duchesses.
Feb 9, 2024
i fell up the escalator at the union square station and ended up with this bruise on my thigh that quite literally spells out HI. if it is who i hope it is then thats cool. if its not then thats also ok too because this is the coolest shit ever. i feel like that guy in glee when he found the grilled cheesus. here’s the bruise with the photo edited for clarity i promise im not unwell just turn up your brightness. let me think about the dead people i know whose birthdays could be coming up.
Feb 6, 2024