At some point during Pride Weekend I was prowling around a near-ending party alongside a close friend of mine, looking for a guy I have had sex with before. When I found him, he and my friend exchanged a look of naughty recognition.
“I take it you know each other?” I asked/groaned.
“This is the guy that breeds me!” answered the guy who I wanted to breed me. He looked back and forth at the two of us, trying to ascertain the viability of a threesome. Then they started making out, so I walked away, not particularly jealous or dismayed, mostly amused.
A threesome was not viable, by the way, because my friend sees me as “like a brother,” which is a strange excuse considering how much he seems to get off on a big bro-little bro dynamic. I don’t really want to fuck my friend, but I think it’s a bit silly how gay men are only ever incestuous when it’s inconvenient for other people.
Speaking of incest, I was reading Missouri Williams’ The Doloriad that weekend, a sick and twisted story of the last family on Earth carrying the flickering torch of humanity through inbreeding. If you have ever wondered about that pesky tenth chapter of Genesis, how the only family to survive a global flood repopulated whole nations, Williams fills in a few unsightly blanks.
The dozen or so “children” of the story— their ages are unclear— are largely deformed and disabled. They are led by their mother, The Matriarch, whose enterprise is fueled both by hope and by ego. An attempt to make contact with another clan, which probably does not exist, sets off a slow crisis of succession and a series of escalating cruelties, but these scenes of abject violence are met with indifference by all onlookers. Nothing sticks. Nothing stirs. Affronts to God abound in mankind’s undeserved coda. In the periphery, siblings idly fuck.
There’s not much of a plot, and the sentences are lofty. But I like how Williams manages to be daring and dark without being noble about it. You are not a better person because you endured reading these terrible things, and she is not a better person for pressing you to confront them. She is just a medievalist, weaving a mythic tapestry of degeneracy and delirium, even recruiting a cartoonish Thomas Aquinas in bizarre interludes. It’s not all doom and gloom, though. The novel is premised not on its bleakness, but on the strange and striking points of view spawned within that bleakness. Notions like “human body” and “lifeless object” melt apart, as they should.
I am a sucker for a post-apocalypse. Trudging through pride festivities that felt more vacuous, more perfunctory, and more blah than ever, I found Williams’ landscape of abandon well-suited to my state of mind. That may sound melodramatic, given what I’ve just described. I just mean that I have been feeling fatigued by a social world high off its own exhaust fumes, stuck in a cultural renaissance that has yet to actually come up with anything new. The same people fucking in different combinations. Maybe not post-apocalyptic, but at least post-cataclysmic.
I am not the type of person who hates from outside the club, who gripes about “the gay community” failing to live up to some childish and utopian expectation of belonging. I have loved gay nightlife for a long time, and nearly all of my most enduring close friendships first emerged out of it. And perhaps I am just growing away from it all, because I need different things in my life right now that nightlife can’t provide me. I just remember there being something gooey and bright at the center of it all, and I don’t see it there now.
Suffice to say The Doloriad is a weird one. There is one character in it that doesn’t belong to the family, a legless amnesiac known only as “the schoolmaster.” He is The Matriarch’s harshest critic, and he spends much of his time in his moth-infested apartment building a mound of rotting cloth, which he’s imbued with mystical properties. Hope I’m not becoming that guy.
XO
TY