fanning a flame
kiss, kiss, fall in (self-) love!
On Saturday night, a few hours before D and I are supposed to leave for the gay club in Ximending, I find myself still thinking about T. He was at the gathering that D, a friend whose apartment in Taipei I have temporarily invaded, brought me to the previous night. I introduced myself to T because I thought he was cute, but I had tried to avoid getting my hopes up after learning that he came with someone else, another gay man that he seemed a little too familiar with. Still, whenever he’s crossed my mind today, the thoughts of him have lingered like little smoldering embers of desire. Suddenly, a spark catches, and my thumbs tap out a DM to T over Instagram: are you coming to s_____ n___ tonight? please say yes :) The instant the message is sent, I fling my phone across D’s futon, giddy and delirious and a little embarrassed at my own behavior.
Two hours later, we are at the club. D and I wait for shots at the bar; meanwhile, I drink in the scene around us: undulating purple lights, mediocre electronic music, a warm, potent mixture of breath and sweat emanating from a pulsing mass of bare chests and tank tops. (I don’t normally drink, and D doesn’t pressure me to, but the situation — the plot — seems to demand it, so I readily oblige.) The tequila arrives, I force it down my throat, and then D does something involving a lime, which I mimic. This is fun, I think to myself, and it actually is.
We make our way from the dance-floor to the rooftop area, where the air is cooler and the vibe is a little less heady. I spot T. Instantly I know that my attention will be reserved solely for him tonight, and I make a beeline for him. The conversation between us flows naturally. When I tease T about the other guy last night, T insists that they’re really just friends, and I feel a bit emboldened. I’ve never flirted with anyone in public before, but for some reason, it comes easily. First, I am a commander dispatching a small armada of compliments his way. Then, I am a cartographer exhaustively traversing the realm of physical contact that is definitely flirty but could possibly be construed as platonic. The whole time, I am smiling so hard that the muscular hypertrophy ensuing from this mandibular workout may cause me to resemble Handsome Squidward for the rest of my life.
Somehow, my overtures are well-received, and the distance between our bodies closes à la Zeno’s paradox until there is simply no other option but to wrap our arms around each other and begin to kiss. I lose track of time doing this; I expect T to pull away from me at some point, but we both seem perfectly content to belong only to each other tonight. (D tells me later that he was watching us and wondering what was taking so goddamn long for something interesting to happen, and then was wondering what was taking so goddamn long for the kissing to end.) I tell T he is handsome, and mean it. “Look who’s talking,” he whispers back. Our marathon of PDA takes a brief pause when T excuses himself to the bathroom. When he finds his way back to me and we begin our second act, someone shoulder-checks T and shouts “Get a room!” We are momentarily shocked, but then we smile at each other: it’s thrilling to be called out this way, to revel in our minor notoriety.
3 AM seems like a reasonable time to ask T if he’d like to come home with me, an outcome that D has already given his full blessing to. Alas, T tells me, it is not meant to be, for reasons involving geography, needing to get back to his family's home, and Taipei’s lack of late-night public transit options. That, or maybe T has just made up a convincing excuse to decline. Either way, I float back to the apartment, elated and stupid. The drama of the night is over, with a few minor exceptions; T’s friend, the one I thought he was fucking when we met on Friday, DMs me to ask for my address because he wants T to reconsider coming home with me; at 4:30, T DMs me to tell me he’s taking care of a childhood friend who is puking uncontrollably. I wish them both well and put my phone away. It is already morning when I finally slip into a warm, content slumber, but no matter: it feels like I have spent the entire night in a dream.
Writing this, I am reliving the somewhat surreal quality of how I experienced that night in Taipei. I’ve spent so much time, literally maybe every day since the day I realized I was gay in third grade until grad school, believing that I would never access this kind of serendipitous romantic experience. Life was governed by my conviction that I was too fat, too Asian, too scarred from my upbringing to ever be cast as the romantic lead in the story of my own existence.
That belief now seems silly in retrospect. Nonetheless, the process of letting it go has left a bittersweet aftertaste. Of course, there’s a mild sense of regret about the years spent in a poverty of self-esteem. But that shame, as it usually does, existed conjoined with a sense of pride, too: I thought myself to be singularly misunderstood by the world around me, which meant that I was emotionally attuned to the world in ways that most people weren’t. Whatever great suffering I believed I was enduring at least developed in me a certain sensitivity, which I thought was related to the capacity to be a captivating writer, an engaging storyteller, even a soulful vocalist. (In undergrad, I exorcised my yearning by spending countless nights in the music department’s practice rooms, playing sad songs on the piano and wailing Beyoncé. 10,000 hours and all that.)
It is oddly comfortable to be delusionally unconfident, since it means you at least have things to be certain of. Though my insecurities limited me, they also gave my life structure. They would have told me not to go to the club, to instead feel smug about being a teetotaler who sleeps early and studies while his friends go off to party. That version of me wouldn’t have thought it was worth it to kiss T if it meant getting strep throat (it did, and it was), would’ve seen people post pictures of that night at S____ N___ on Instagram and come up with ten different reasons why I would’ve had a bad time, would’ve rather convinced myself of the inevitability of rejection than the possibility of enjoying myself.
I am trying and failing to find anything intellectually interesting to say about all of this; I have just written the essay equivalent of an It Gets Better YouTube video from the early 2010s. I remember watching those videos, thinking Of course it got better for you, conventionally attractive white guy. I played them on a loop anyway, because it was the closest thing I had to someone telling me that the things I desperately craved were possible.
It gets better. What would I have told myself instead? It doesn’t always get better, even after you leave home, even after people learn to not say the word “fag” around you, even after your mother apologizes for saying she would’ve sent you to conversion therapy. The world just hurts you in different ways. But even if the world doesn’t always get better, you get better. Your frontal lobe matures. You start to grieve the things you didn’t have in childhood, instead of pretending you never wanted them. You understand eventually that the psychic self-amputation involved in pleasing everyone but yourself was not an evasion of oppression but a symptom of it. And after you do all this work, of course not every night will be perfect like that one, with the cool evening air on your neck, T’s hands sliding down your waist, the electricity of expectation and the ecstasy of its fulfillment. But it only takes one night for your decades-long desire to cross over from your imagination into your memory, which tells you that all of this is at least possible. Maybe knowing that your joy is possible is what finally sets you free.
endnotes
The sub-title of this post is a reference to the theme song for Ouran High School. That show contains a lot of (homoerotic) nostalgia for me. Simpler times!
My friend W read this and told me the piece reminded him of this song. It’s kind of interesting to think about how the same story or idea can resonate across different artistic mediums.
Like everyone and their mother, I am trying to be less precious about my writing. Please forgive me if this essay is bad!!! (I very much want to cultivate the mystique of a confident and secure writer but alas, no, that’s not the truth, Ellen.) Anyway, thanks for signing up for this newsletter and sticking around. I appreciate it!
I am currently stanning Nymphia Wind, a Taiwanese drag queen competing on Season 16 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. You can watch her perform a gorgeous love letter to Taiwan here and a very touching hour-long Taiwanese news segment about her relationship with her mother here. Also, W and I saw her perform live recently, and she ended up eating a banana that we brought to the bar. So yes, she ate, but maybe just as importantly, we fed???
🫶🏼🥲
i love this