My Fellow Shennyer:
Back home. Travel-weary, but feeling very lucky to’ve been able to just sit on the couch with my family, apparently an old pastime for Jenny and me:
It was an odd experience watching basketball in my parents’ living room when my essay about watching basketball in my parents’ living room got published on Defector. (Registration required, but reading is free.) This is the second time I’ve published something in a place where readers could comment. The first time, every other essay in the issue got comments but mine, and it felt like farting in the living room when nobody’s home.
Publishing is vain, and vain people publish. (I’m including Shenny in this broad view.) One thing you often hear from such people: ‘Never read the comments.’ I’ve always felt that a bunch of trolls spewing hate at me was at least evidence that I’d been read, and getting to have your words put in front of others’ eyes is to me a total privilege.
Lucky for me, Defector understands that making people pay for the privilege turns out some good comments. On pub day, I kept refreshing and reading things like ‘I really connected to this in a way I wasn't expecting to,’ amazed at how much strangers were moved by my little essay about myself and my family.
Personal essays may be the vainest thing to publish, but you can’t deny the effect such essays can have when readers see shit they’ve felt or gone through put in words. In that spirit of connection, this issue launches a new feature of Shenny: ‘3Q’s w/’. The first one, with photographer and video artist Jonesy, is our Main Matter below.
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements: Travel Tips Edition
1. Seat 26D on Alaska Airlines’ Airbus A321 Planes
Okay so it’s an exit-row seat, which you can’t just select usually. But around 48 hours before check-in, Alaska will sometimes open up for free the seats it’s been trying to charge upgrade fees for. When I saw this on offer, I wondered, Will I have underseat storage in front of me for quick access to my backpack? Will overhead storage be filled with, like, safety equipment or whatever? Yes on both counts, I learned after peeping some dull-as-hell YouTube videos, but I felt I’d made the right choice with 26D because look:
And six-foot me is stretching to get my feet up on that seatback. There’s backpack space and a literature pocket I can tuck the cover of my iPad case in, for optimal Columbo watching, and a tray table that swings up out of the armrest for the laptop I’m currently writing this on. Best of all worlds. Also: the only good seat in the row. 26B and C (there’s no A) have no underseat storage, what with that midcabin bathroom (though it does leave it easy to make eyes at the cabinmate you’re sweet on as they step inside to pee, which as everyone knows is the most prosperous time to make eyes at somebody). 26E is a middle seat, and 26F has neither underseat storage nor a window to look out of, and you have to look dead-on at a flight attendant during takeoff and landing, because there’s one of those seats there. So 26D is your friend.
2. Tipping Hotel Clerks $20 at Check-In
Having worked ages ago delivering room service in a grand hotel in Pittsburgh, I can confirm that every visible hotel worker gets tipped but check-in clerks. So when you tip them you’re already standing out from the crowd, and they will likely upgrade your room at no cost. How does it work? They’ll need to see your ID to check you in. I hand mine over and also place on the counter a folded $20 bill, and I look them in the eye and say this, word-for-word, every time: ‘If there’s any way you can set me up in a nicer room, I’d really appreciate it.’ Every time, they say, ‘Let me see what we have,’ and after some clicks I get upgraded to a bigger room. Or the club level. Once, N & I were even given the top-floor suite AWP had reserved for the head of one of the nation’s leading poetry presses, with a fruit bowl and everything. Is this, as many of my friends and colleagues ask, my privilege showing? I’m a tall, able-bodied, cis white man, so it very well may be, but no one’s ever given me feedback about their tipping attempts. So next time you check in, please tip and let me know what happens. Because if these upgrades are only going to white guys, then I’ve got some Whatever The Opposite Of A Karen Is–style emails to send to some hotel managers about injustice.
3Q’s w/ Jonesy on Art & Cruising
In 2019, I met David Jones while on residency at the Vermont Studio Center. I couldn’t resist making a joke about not being able to resist making a joke about Davy Jones. David wore plaid shirts w/ pearl snaps, big belt buckles, actual cowboy boots. I assumed he was a straight guy with an affectation. But we became fast friends after sharing the work we were doing: me writing a memoir on queer sex and shame, David taking photos of himself in cruising poses against every streetlight in Johnson, Vermont.
David was also doing these staged erotic thriller photos that he asked me to pose for with our friend Joshi:
He didn’t know where these were going, he just wanted to make them. Since Vermont, we’ve kept in touch, and I’ve watched this work evolve into his current project, staging stylized scenes of cruising. Or ‘cruising’? I myself have been thinking a lot about cruising, so I reached out to David—who goes professionally by the name Jonesy—to get some of his thoughts.
Q: Can you recall the initial inspiration for this project? That first spark where you thought to do something with or make something of cruising?
I sat on a panel in Austin a few years back and one of the first questions the moderator asked was about cruising. She looked at the panelists and then looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know why but I want to start with you.’ So I guess you could say I wear it on my sleeve?
The work you’re talking about is a series I refer to as casual Caravaggios. I started them in 2022 when I was getting ready for my residency at Artpace in San Antonio, Tex. I wanted to hyper stage scenarios in actual cruising spaces that mimicked scenes I recollected or took part in, but take them to the very theatrical extremes of tableaus.
The contorted poses in the photos accentuate the action I’ve encountered in these places over a 30-year history I lovingly refer to as 'the trenches’. I’m not so much conscious anymore of its initial inspiration, as it’s an ongoing theme for me. Other than brief periods of monogamy, I can’t think of a time when I haven’t engaged in the many forms cruising takes, whether it’s active looking for sex or the casual chance encounters that happen in the world.
I like to think both art and cruising are at least initially (or a lot) about looking, and therefore the connections between the two seem obvious yet still potent to me. I think that cruising's universal; I imagine we all do it and spend a lot time doing it, whether it leads to actual sex or not. I like how it mixes real life with the daydream and the fantasy, which for me produces adrenaline. I think that’s part of what I’m trying to convey in this work, that moment when the adrenaline really kicks into overdrive.
2. In Cruising Theory circles, there’s this belief that cruising is egalitarian, democratic even. Do you see a political potential to cruising?
There was a lot of talk a decade ago that the traditional idea of cruising was dead due to the advent of hookup apps, which can resemble online shopping and other forms of digital browsing. It seems safe to talk about cruising in the past as a democratic situation where exclusion wasn’t happening, when in fact there was always rejection and exclusion going on based on physical and personal attraction.
I do believe that cruising ‘in the wild’ is more open to chance, and it runs with the energy of what’s happening, and the choices made aren’t as predictable as cruising online. You might make a choice in the wild that you wouldn’t have, and this is part of the democracy people speak about. It’s the unexpected parts of the encounters that often stay with me and live on in my memory of a particular situation. Something someone wore, the way they smelled or the sound of their voice attracted me in a way I could only have chosen by being in person and would not have done in a digital cruising situation.
Maybe that’s just my experience and the time period I entered into cruising, which was the early 90s, when it was for the most part all done in person. I think what I like about the contemporary sphere is all the different options we have to explore it. That to me is cruising’s present potential. There’s enough information out there about the different ways one can look for sex that the search can take many forms and lead us into so many different kinds of experiences. I have spent a large part of my life cruising, and just when I think I’m bored with it something unexpected happens and I get lured back into its potential.
3. Talk about the work of your upcoming show, meaning the verb. What have you done and what do you have to do to put up a show like the one you have coming up next year?
Next year, I’m set to mount a dual show at UC Riverside with the artist Eileen Cowin. The show is part call and response to work Eileen made in the early 90s that was important to my development as a young artist. Her photographic themes of noir and the erotic were something I’ve always wanted to respond to. After a long courtship of discussions, we set off to work with independent curator David Evans Frantz, who put the current iteration of the project together for the show at UCR Arts, Telling Them Apart.
I’m responding to Eileen’s work through themes of cruising while utilizing the tropes of the cinematic erotic thriller. While the themes of cruising are present, looking is a bigger part of the exhibition. We’re trying to create a ping-pong effect between the works of ours that reference each other, the themes we share.
Approximately half of my work for the show was made at Artpace. The other half is in production currently in my studio in Los Angeles. To date, it’s my most ambitious undertaking. When you ask about the ‘work’ as a verb, I can say currently that being in the thick of it is putting me through my paces. There’s a lot of uncertainty and hand-wringing, but experience has taught me getting through this phase is then when the magic happens. Whether it’s successful or not, the choices being made now will affect the show’s outcome. And for me, that’s the labor and the ‘work’ as a verb, equal parts physical and cerebral.
Jonesy’s show with Eileen Cowin opens at UCR Arts in January 2024.
This week’s natatorium is the very utilitarian pool at the Herndon Community Center, in my hometown of Herndon, Va. I recall swimming in it just once. I hope to do it someday again.
