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CASTLE FAGGOT - DEREK MCCORMACK

‘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.

@greeneyedlocoman

5d ago

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Rejection by tony tulathimutte

i thought, wow is this the first incel novel??? before finding out that this was the internet’s general consensus lol. each character is so gross and will probably trigger my fight or flight irl but it also reads like someone having some kind of obvious cry for help online but you can’t look away because it makes such delicious gossip. like u feel guilty for liking it but you keep consuming their crisis as content anyways.  somehow it has the same vibes as rf kuang’s yellowface, but i couldn’t quite put my finger WHY, but if yellowface satirises the politics of race, rejection satirises the politics of sex. anyway again i thought this was an original thought then found a reddit thread literally comparing the two.  its so chronically online and so smutty, so the recommendation did NOT come from me (but u should definitely read it) I mean look at these hilarious lines

@505grapefruit

Mar 15, 2025

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The Freaks Came Out to Write by tricia romano (2024)

An unbelievably comprehensive 600-page oral history of the Village Voice, formerly the best of all US alt-weeklies and simply the main way anyone marginally cool knew wtf was going on in town before social media. Dripping with details (e.g. after being the only paper with writers/photographers on the ground at the Stonewall riot, the Gay Liberation Front was founded in rock critic Robert Christgau's spare journalism classroom (!)); casually interleaved with jaw-dropping adversarial interview appearances (both Donald Trump and Michael Alig drop in to give their own perspective on events); and unafraid to critique/discuss the Voice's own historic homophobic, racist, and sexist blindspots, I can't think of a better crash course in What People Talked About in 1960-1995 NYC (the Voice's subsequent Craigslist-induced decline era gets comparatively short shrift).

@iconicindex

Apr 9, 2024

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My go to places to be online

UbuWeb - archive for video, text and sound, all avant gard art Marxists.org - archive for marxist texts CrimethInc - archive for anarchist publications and news Aeon - magazine on philosophy and science Eye on Design - magazine on design news Failed Architecture - magazine on critical architecture and urbanism LitHub - literary magazine Anna's Archive - love of my life ♥️ A terra é redonda - magazine of art and politics Passa palavra - news and articles on Brazillian politics Digilabour - news and articles about gig economy and surveillance capitalism

@nanabo

Jan 3, 2025