Avidly Reads Making Out

The more one considers making out, the more it seasons, the more it opens up. Just how promiscuous is our reading? As a kind of sex, does it have protected and unprotected forms? Is it any tamer for the reading child?

Kissing is the ultimate act of estrangement, queer in the stretchy sense of “strange” that many queers prefer to distinctions between straight and gay.

Those of us said to be “girl” or “boy,” without any way to ditch our one word and get the other word, were impaled upon both while falling between them.

Some of us, in retrospect, were a linguistic prequel to “trans,” though transgender was happening and being somewhere around us, out of our grasp. We were crafty creatures, but unlike the gender scene now evident, ours felt denuding, maddening, stranding.

know for a fact, feel for a fact, that slices of this film have lived inside me.

Gender is always a scene of making out.

The word enters me. The image enters me. From this penetration, there’s immediate birth. The word, for example, births other words (as my mind makes meaning, making out the word), upon which birth there’s partial death or at least decay (words start fading in my brain or disappear, as do many images). All from a kiss?

A kiss on a text? Such kissing renders a penetration-birth-death-decaying experience? Whatever one’s gendering? Yes, it does.2

not quite of me, yet so alive. Why, then, do objects—feathers, of all things—come to my mind? I can’t locate the substance of a kiss, what it’s made of (though I’ll try).