At Certain Points We Touch

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The following is from Lauren John Joseph's At Certain Points We Touch . Joseph is a British born American-educated artist and writer, who works at the intersection of video, text, and live performance. They have written extensively on contemporary culture, art, performance, pornography, gender theory and the Golden Age of Hollywood, including Everything Must Go (ITNA Press in 2014), and the plays, A Generous Lover and Boy in a Dress , which were published by Oberon in 2019. Many of the lifestyle descriptions reminded me how peacefully quiet - and very different my own life is. JJ was a transgender performer and writer. He describes a hapless dalliance with a gorgeous lover (first love) from London.

JJ was in love once, that is what they suppose, though it’s with uncertainty & something like a catharsis that they type out a book formatted recollection of their time with the man who was an obtuse villain whom everyone enjoyed sexually encountering but whom no one desired to know on a deeper level. Perchance should you wonder, as JJ does, what is deeper than the confines of our physical insides, I feel that the discussion is pointless. There are two sides of the same coin & neither is necessarily wrong. One can be in love with a soul, a body, an entity’s whole; none of it really matters because in the end we can drop dead at the flip of a crusted silver dime & be gone forever after. I do like to think, however, I’d have recognised the voice. Because there is something about Lauren John Joseph that has always resonated with me: a combination of superficial similarities—like being born in the north and (over)educated in the south—coupled with their profound capacity to articulate queerness, a sense of queerness, that feels both specific and universal. Lauren's debut novel is so exciting. The writing is so fresh, funny and gripping - and carries the trademark wit that I have always loved from Lauren' TRAVIS ALABANZA

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Overall, while I wouldn't necessarily recommend the book, I'd definitely recommend the author, and I'm interested to see what they bring out next. there in the gallery, i think i finally began to understand that you and Adam really were just what you said you were, just two gay men, just two guys who have sex with guys, that’s all. i had thought that your predilection of for transfemmes and androgynes would serve me well, keep me safe, but in reality you didn’t ever consider any of us as serious candidates, did you? there was no place for us in this mirror world. my own incongruous physicality, flat chest, long hair, the feminine dominance i possessed marked me as an intruder in this uncomplicated universe…” A phenomenal eulogy to, presumably, a fictional gay lover from a trans woman in what appears to be the early oughts almost coming-of-age story nested in the (again, fictional, I presume) London queer scene of the time. On the anniversary of her lover's death, she descends into a fit of hypergraphia—chronicling—through an open letter directed at the deceased reader—her life predominantly through the lens of the tremulous and exultant relationship with the complex rendered dead. The definition of unflinching really, since it’s as much about characterizing the narrator as it is him, Thomas, now 4 years gone. But there’s also no opportunity to grow. There’s grey space in their time in the most formative years of adulthood. Jetting off to people who don’t treat each other poorly. Intersections of poverty and queerness and internalized socialization are complex. It gives a lot of space to show all the characters, including Thomas, in a very humanistic light. One that makes it really difficult to condemn anyone, even when they ought to be perhaps, especially in this day and age of cancel culture though, when you have the full measure, or near it, the ability to shun seems to allude to a fate worse than death. Before it was even fashionable. It’s four in the morning, and our narrator is walking home from the club when they realise that it’s February 29th - the birthday of the man who was something like their first love. Piecing together art, letters and memory, they set about trying to write the story of a doomed affair that first sparked and burned a decade ago.

You know from the start that it is building towards Thomas James' death, and you really understand how the narrator wants to hold off getting there and telling a death they weren't there for as much as they want to unfold the story. The book is also a knowing wink towards writing and autofiction, considering what is memory and story even when something is meant to be 'what happened', but this is combined with exploits and community and stumbling into things whilst young in ways that stop it just feeling like a book about writing a book. I’ve been performing, and so I’m dressed as some sort of nymphomaniac Christ; I have on a pink bra and a crown of gold laurels, strappy high-heeled sandals, and a burgundy sash which I’ve fashioned from a bedspread, or a curtain. I also have a streak of fake Halloween blood from a tube under my nose, though I don’t know why. You regard this ensemble quite apathetically, with that upwards bob of your chin, the same kind of gesture you see from an otherwise static buyer bidding on antiques at an auction house. Lauren John Joseph writes with such wit, glamour, and style! I haven't read a book that so powerfully evokes what it's like to be a wild young artist among other wild young artists since the Bright Young Things' TORREY PETERS, author of Detransition, BabyWould it insult your pride to know that I began to entertain your advances because I wanted you to replace Lulu with me; so that I could, in a way, become her, even if only in my mind and in your arms? So that I could take on the beautiful transgender body that I still could not admit to wanting.