Writing as Queer Practice and Pleasure

I started writing psychoanalytically because I wanted to be seen, and thought I had something to say.

Then, and still, I write to honor and in some way emulate the writers who have moved me: Erica Jong (with her voice); Harold Searles (the delicacy and metaphoric resonance in his renderings of how he spoke to his schizophrenics patients); Edith Wharton (the way she puts a sentence together); Russell Jacoby (polemical power); Edward Said (moral passion); Jonathan Franzen (clause by clause, his ability to take the reader deeper into the minds of his characters); Judith Butler (eloquence and moral sesnsibility); Assata Shakur (raw expression of personal and political rage). A motley personal canon (by no means exhaustive), assembled over a lifetime of promiscuous reading.

Most of my writing proceeds from bringing together an idea from psychoanalysis with something I've picked up from cultural studies, and letting them intermingle. Play around with the ways they might fit together, what parts fit where, what linkages might be made and perhaps extended, and whether something new might be brought into being from the encounter. What might a literary critic's musings on postmodernism suggest about the political implications of contemporary developments in psychoanalysis? What light might be shed by a sociologist's work on the nature of contemporary relationships on my current impasse with a patient? Mix and match, seeing what plugs in where, open to the unexpected connection, the queer thought.

When I make reference here to my identity, I evoke the origins of my writing impulse in the detouring of a natural expressiveness that marked me as queer, targeted me for bullying, and that got shut down by early

adolescence. That expressiveness found a safer home in the precincts of the page, with the self-protective distance that writing affords.

Those once-suppresssed feelings