The First Openly Gay Profession

Reading Hawk Mountain Between Zoom Calls

I got pretty lucky and started working a big-kid WFH job for the first time in five years. I say ‘lucky’ because the opportunity came along just in time for monkeypox to make in-person sex work dramatically more harrowing, so I turned off my ad and pulled the ol’ human suit out of the closet.

It’s nuts. I’m scheduling Zoom calls, maintaining spreadsheets, following up on emails, circling back on emails, as per-ing my last emails! Decks, it turns out, are just PowerPoints! A sales rep, it turns out, is just some guy! Nobody suspects a thing about my secret identity, though I’ve lost track of which is the secret one.

It is a very flexible part-time job, but still it probes at the harrowing dissonance between the life I wish to have and the life for which I may have to settle. I was never going to be a porn star forever, and I have always been aware of that, trying all along to build some kind of professional foundation for myself. I have mostly wound up with very outdated headshots and a blog, but at least I still get recognized at the gay bar.

For that reason I have often looked to Conner Habib as not only a supportive friend, but also a role model for the possibilities of a post-porn career. I take solace in his oft-stated goal for a good life “to read, write, and have sex”— that these aren’t the shameful and circular whims of my twenties but things that are completely fair and achievable to want for myself in the long term. When I drift into a doom spiral about my inevitable poverty (or worse, a gaping blankness where my future self is supposed to be) I look to this person as proof that there are places for a life like mine to go without compromising the integrity of who I am and what I want.

When I cracked open Conner’s new novel this summer, I was prepared to exaggerate liking it if I had to. Not that I didn’t think he could write a good novel, I’m just a ride or die bitch like that. Lo and behold, Hawk Mountain is, without exaggeration, a phenomenal book.

On his podcast Against Everyone with Conner Habib he has interviewed experts of magic and morbidity (and me), which may prompt expectations of a far more esoteric or extravagant work of genre fiction, but instead Habib focuses his breadth of knowledge upon a chillingly common sphere of anxiety and experience. His debut is a story about a single father whose high school bully abruptly and intrusively reenters his life, already made hectic by a new teaching job and the ill-timed efforts at motherhood of his ex-wife.

Without giving away much more than that, Hawk Mountain is a thrilling and heart-wrenching tale of wounds, cruelty, and the treachery of normal. Habib drops striking lines of prose amid storytelling that unfolds fresh emotional dimensions at a masterful pace, along with marvelously twisted turns of plot. Suffice to say he tore.

I’ve worked in an office, in a cafe, and in countless hotel rooms. I took the GRE and I practiced the LSAT, but something inside me jerked violently from these trajectories as I inched in their directions. I’ve done drag and I’ve done karaoke and I’ve done lots of performing in front of a camera. I’ve written songs and stories and essays and takes, publishing enough of that work for the people around me to think generously of me as a writer.

Only in the past few years have I come to conceive of myself as an artist, or at least, as someone committed to an artistic career. And maybe that sounds cringe or pretentious, but it has kept me alive to consider how each present moment is unprecedented, and so are the lives we build upward and outward from the possibilities of the past. In other words, I believe I can press forward into a future of my own making, authentic to my truest ambitions, however uncharted, as long as I put in the work for it.

Such a conviction must be an artistic one.

That being said, times is hard. It’s good to have an Emails Job to stabilize both my schedule and my wallet. In some ways it feels like yet another hustle while I work on creative projects that are not as immediately profitable. And hey, I still have a blog.

XO
TY