The Dream of Queer: A Conversation with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
By: The Seventh Wave
Tags: Queer, Interviews, Authors, Intimacy, Writing

Sarah Neilson: In the very beginning of The Freezer Door, you write about kissing hello as something defined by, or textured or experienced, as both fear and art. Can you talk about this connection between art and fear, and how both are embodied in queer legacy or inheritance?

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: When I moved to San Francisco in the early ’90s, when I was 19, there was this sense that coming of age as a queer person meant that everyone around you was dying — of AIDS, especially, but also as a result of AIDS, of drug addiction, suicide. As a kid, the first time I ever heard of someone in the world who was gay, it was Rock Hudson dying of AIDS on the cover of The National Enquirer. Moving to San Francisco as someone who was a radical queer, I was searching for radical outsider queers as in anarchist and sluts and whores and vegans and weirdos and dropouts and activists and visionaries.

Let me pause for a second. The question about kissing… it was universal, it was just the norm. I remember meeting people decades older than me and they would just kiss hello right away. And I think in that moment, it just felt like part of what it meant to be a queen, in particular. The kissing, it could be totally mundane, but it was also in a way performative. It was like, We’re not part of this straight world. It was like, We have our own world. So, even if you were uncomfortable, you would kiss someone. Also, it was an act of rejection of the idea that any physical contact would lead to death. So even if people knew that you couldn’t get HIV from kissing, there was still this message, like, “Don’t touch. Stay away from one another.” And it was the rejection of all of that. We can be intimate and we can be public and we can be flaming. But it was interesting because it was just across the board. It wasn’t just radical queers, it was actually a pretty mainstream thing.

I feel like it started to disappear. I can’t say for sure there’s a connection, but I would say once HIV slowly transitioned from people thinking of it as almost certain death into a manageable condition for many, somewhere in that transition, kissing as just a basic normal [disappeared]. Mostly, I don’t see that many connections between gay and queer worlds in many ways, but kissing hello, it was just what you did, at least in the worlds that I was in.

SN: I really like what you just said about there not being very many similarities between gay and queer worlds. I agree, but can you talk about that a little more? What do you mean by that?

MBS: I would say I came of age in queer world. The way I was able to create a sense of self that was visible to the outside world was by saying that that world did not matter. So, like all the people that call me fag didn’t matter. And also that was how I connected with people, by finding the other kids who everyone was refusing to see and saying to them that the people who told us that we didn’t matter, they were the ones that didn’t matter. And so words like freak or outsider, I think even before queer, that’s what spoke to me.

I developed radical politics, or I was developing them, before I identified as queer. Queer, to me, especially when I was first embracing it, was rejecting dominant norms of straight or gay normalcy. Now, gay normalcy I didn’t know anything about until I moved to San Francisco when I was 19, in 1992. But I remember the first time I went to the Castro, which everyone said was where I was going to find everything, that’s the gay neighborhood in San Francisco, and I remember just seeing these fags who were exuding a hyper-masculinity, a total mirroring of one another, and a very assimilationist frame of reference, and I knew I was never going to be a part of that. I didn’t recognize that immediately, but to me that’s gay. It’s like assimilating into the dominant culture without changing anything about it. And that includes racism, misogyny, body fascism, ableism, self hatred, homophobia itself, and transphobia, of course. So queer, to me, is a rejection of the violence that we grew up with, and a refusal to become a part of it, and a refusal to see an acceptance into straight normalcy as progress. So, things like gay marriage or gays in the military, that’s not progress from a queer world view. It’s a way to conform in order to get basic needs that we should all have. Well, I would say that about marriage. There’s no positive thing about gays in the military because there’s no positive thing about the military. So, if the military needs to go, we don’t need anyone in it.

I developed radical politics, or I was developing them, before I identified as queer. Queer, to me, especially when I was first embracing it, was rejecting dominant norms of straight or gay normalcy… queer, to me, is a rejection of the violence that we grew up with, and a refusal to become a part of it, and a refusal to see an acceptance into straight normalcy as progress.

SN: Sometimes I feel like when I’m talking about marriage as hetero bullshit, I find that I offend people more than I think.

MBS: Yeah, because people have bought into the whole structure, right? It’s like marriage was on its way out, and then gay people swept in and saved it. It’s like a floundering institution based on patriarchy, child abuse, and seeing women and children as property, not to mention white supremacy through inheritance laws. You don’t hear this anymore, but people were like, “Marriage is a dying institution.” No one says that anymore because when gay people can marry, it’s progress. But we need to get back to the place where we see it as a dying institution and kill it.

SN: This brings me to another line that you wrote in Freezer Door where you wrote, “Part of the dream of queer is that it potentially has no opposite. Straight is the opposite of gay. Queer is a rejection of both.” I’m really curious about this idea of queerness in opposition. What is your queer dream? And to maybe take it further, how can we stop talking in binaries all the time because to be in opposition is kind of to be stuck in a binary, right?

MBS: I guess what I would say is the dream of queer is for everyone to be able to create, sustain, negotiate, and transform their gender, sexual, social, political identities. It’s self determination for everyone, and it’s creating new ways of living with loving, lusting for, and taking care of one another that are not predicated on dominant institutions of acceptance. It’s creating something else, creating alternatives. In the book, I feel like I’m actually talking more about how that dream has failed me because I feel like now, when I’m in the world that might identify in that way, I see the same problems enacted with a much more sophisticated rhetoric.

This is also what I would say about accountability, mutuality, negotiation, transformation. Often what people are doing is using kind of the most marginalized parts of their identities as ways to establish a different hierarchy. So, for me, queer is also about abolishing hierarchy. It’s not about creating a new hierarchy, it’s about getting rid of them all. In the book though, what I really want to get is the felt sense of all this because it’s more about a search for embodiment and where that fails me in a certain way. And I think one of the places that has failed me is in a validly queer world where I think bodies like mine are so rarely present that now I don’t even know if I’m welcome, even though I lived in these worlds for at least 25 years. When I go in them, especially here in Seattle, I’m like, “What am I even doing here?” So, the book in some ways is about going into worlds that I already know are corrupt because I’ve given up on the idea that there will ever be a world that isn’t corrupt.

The dream of queer is for everyone to be able to create, sustain, negotiate, and transform their gender, sexual, social, political identities

SN: You’ve given up on that?

MBS: I think so. It doesn’t mean I’m not still searching for it and not still trying to create it, but I know it doesn’t exist. So, I don’t mean I’ve given up on trying to create it, but I definitely know it does not exist. At least I have not found it.

SN: In your essay for the Seattle City of Literature anthology Seismic, which came out just a couple of months ago, you write that you “hope that this city could still be a place where people on the fringe can survive. Isn’t this why we come to cities?” That got me thinking about the idea of a soul of a city. Does that idea of an urban soul resonate with you? What do you think is the soul of the urban or what would you want it to be?

MBS: For me, the dream of the city, and I say this in the book, but it’s the place where you find everything and everyone that you never imagined. It’s that unexpected thing that happens on the street that changes you. The city, for me, is about public space, not private. It’s about unexpected interaction. It’s about finding ways to survive and thrive. But the difference between the city and somewhere else is that density of experience. I think what happens in so many gentrified cities… I think Seattle is a great example because here, we even have a term for it, but people don’t even recognize what the term means. So, people will call it the Seattle Freeze. To me, the Seattle Freeze is the gentrified gaze. It’s like looking at someone walking down the street with a white picket fence in your eyes. It looks like a city, but people walk around acting like they’re in the suburbs. They don’t want any unplanned interaction. They don’t want something that might make them uncomfortable, and they don’t want something that will change them. It’s just a consumer niche. I’m searching for the moments when there are gaps in that gaze, that tyranny really. The tyranny of the suburban imagination in urban life.

The city, for me, is about public space, not private… the difference between the city and somewhere else is that density of experience.

SN: Pivoting a little bit to craft, your writing uses a lot of questions. You question yourself and the reader a lot, and it also uses a lot of alliteration and word association. Can you talk about your style and your use of questioning and of word play, for lack of a better phrase?

MBS: I love talking about craft. I will call the book a lyric essay because it circles around itself, and the themes in the book are, one might say, search for embodiment, desire and its impossibility, gentrification, longing… let’s just leave it at those for now. I think it’s structured by feeling, rather than any kind of plot or narrative arc; the feeling is actually what structures it. And so when the text breaks — because there are pages where there’s just one sentence, and the rest is white space — the breaks in the text happen when the text can no longer hold. What I love about form, whatever form I’m creating, is that it can incorporate all these different things. So memoir, and fiction, and critical analysis or poetry, criticism itself… It’s all there at once. Another theme in the book is the text itself. That’s the other way that it has this kind of elliptical structure because even in the sentence structure itself, as I’m writing the sentence, it circles back around itself. In a way, I’m trying to say with language what language cannot say, and the way to do that is to rework the language as I’m writing it. I want the felt sense of the text to be there as you’re reading it.

Photo credit: Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times

SN: I’m also curious about intimacy and what your ideal urban intimacy might look like.

MBS: When I go outside, I’m looking for something magnificent and surprising to happen. And what I want is an unexpected experience with someone else who I don’t know. Again, to me, that’s what it means to live in a city. In Seattle, and many other places as well, but people are walled off to that. There’s such a walled off mentality. To go back to queerness, I think another part of queerness is that desire is a part of everyday experience. So desire isn’t just like, “Oh, I want to have sex with someone.” Or, “Oh, I want to have this kind of sex.” Desire is how you feel when you’re looking at a tree, or what you’re feeling when you’re on the bus, or what you experience when you notice the light and shadow in the world as a way of staying embodied at all times. But, of course, it also is about physically connecting in public. So, like having sex in the park, to me, feels like what it means to live in a city. I think more than anything else it’s that presence. And I guess I asked this question in the book. For me, I think desire was a formative way that brought me into queerness. But I feel like now my desire leads me to a dead end.

Desire is how you feel when you’re looking at a tree, or what you’re feeling when you’re on the bus, or what you experience when you notice the light and shadow in the world as a way of staying embodied at all times.

And so, that could lead me in two different directions. One is to question this idea; maybe desire isn’t the central thing about queerness. And the other is to say that something needs to change. And maybe it’s both. But I think living in a world where everything is mediated by technology, by a gated mentality, by a middle-class orientation, by a fear of anything different from yourself, is not sustainable in any holistic way. That’s the world we’re living in. So, I guess the possibility, for me, is finding the cracks in those walls that everyone is putting up. I feel like we have an opportunity [right now] because this is a moment when people realize the necessity of public space for all of us in order to survive. We have an opportunity to make the public space public again.

I’m trying to say with language what language cannot say, and the way to do that is to rework the language as I’m writing it.

SN: I like the way you’re talking about desire. It reminds me of how Audre Lorde writes about the erotic as a life force beyond just sex, which is the context that words like desire and erotic are most often used in. Desire and the erotic is also about joy. Where are you finding joy and hope right now? Especially like at the edge of this COVID winter?

MBS: I think it really is being out in the world, just experiencing the world. And so often it isn’t with other people in this particular moment. So, it is really about like looking at the flower or something. For a while, I would lean against this one tree, and I was looking at this other tree, and I was watching every day the different leaves. It started with all green, and then there was a little bit of red, and then there was yellow. And I watched it day after day until now all the leaves are on the ground. And now I watch, often at night, the angle of the sky beneath or behind the branches. Things like that bring me into my body.

I think living in a world where everything is mediated by technology, by a gated mentality, by a middle-class orientation, by a fear of anything different from yourself, is not sustainable in any holistic way.

I will say though, now that I’ve started my virtual book tour for The Freezer Door… usually, I go on tour, and I have such an opportunity to be in these rooms with people who are relating to my work. To feel the laughter, to feel the commonalities, to feel the sadness and the empathy, and the loss, and the grief, and the connection, and hugs. And I thought, “Well, what the hell is this even gonna feel like?” The first thing that made it feel like, “Okay, I actually have a book coming out,” is people writing about it. And writing about it in deep and meaningful ways where I actually feel like, “Oh, wow, this is really connecting.” And then I had my virtual book launch, which, you were there. I think this is the theme of the book, where I’m like, “I don’t want to live in a world virtual world. I want to live in the world.” But now that’s what we have. I did this virtual launch, and I actually did feel connected, and I did feel the sweetness. That itself felt intimate, and it felt real, and it made me feel connected. It’s hard for me to look at the chat during, but I asked them to save the chat, and I printed it out. Just reading the chat, it felt sweet. Or people calling me right after… My publisher called me right after my launch and was like, “Oh, that was so great. And I just feel weird that I’m not able to tell you that right after.” Those are deep moments of connection. Which is the reason I make this work, or one of the reasons. So, I think that’s the other place where I feel joy and possibility. And I hope it continues.