😃
A prison taking off into red winds as we fuck, COS we fuck, what can I do with this image now that I’ve seen it?
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I wanna squeeze your thighsÂ
I wanna kiss your eyelidsÂ
And corrupt your dreamsÂ
I wanna crash your carÂ
I wanna scratch your cheeksÂ
I wanna make you sick
I wanna sell you outÂ
Want to expose your flawsÂ
I wanna steal your thingsÂ
I wanna show you offÂ
I wanna tell you liesÂ
I wanna write you books
I wanna turn you onÂ
I wanna make you cumÂ
Two-hundred times a dayÂ
I wanna dry your tears every time you're sadÂ
I wanna be your what's happening
Feb 9, 2024
😃
upset? grrrrr. horny? grrrrr. late? grrrr. needing to fill the void? nothing a little growl can’t fix. grrrrr
Feb 10, 2024
Top Recs from @greeneyedlocoman
Frank leaving me bereft, coiling, somehow so gay isn‘t it, wanting to stay drunk on friendship, impossibilities, language shared always shared. No more language to come here just the poem to read.
5d 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.Â
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.Â
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.Â
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.
5d ago
Bob, I don’t know how you do it but my body responds in this fucked up way to your language. It’s actually one of the greatest feats in artistic history I think. I want your mind in mine and I bet you were a great fuck back in your day.
4d ago