thesis: homofascism

i love power. way before i read Foucault as a confused 17yo, i had found power as a muse, as an endless wrestle, & of course, as work done per unit time. i have only ever been as attracted to a man as i am curious about the underlying mechanisms of the powers that move him. call it the powers that be.

& in all my years studying power, nowhere is the work done per unit time so circular, wasteful, and meaningless, as in good old homophobia.

see, i live my everyday life like i know everyone is bi & nobody can convince me otherwise, cuz i do & they can't. so the men in my life know better than to pretend. but every now & then, i get a reality check. like recently, my younger cousin brother, who i’m not really out to, was scrolling through reels on my lap & a pretty common meme genre lately is the homiesexual or brosexual genre of humor where the entire source of the comedy is that it is men in love. haha so funny. anyway, my cousin paused at these type of memes, waiting to see my reaction before deciding how to react.

what men really like about such reels is that they are relatable. they are in love with their bro, they love touching their bro, & they wish they could kiss their homies goodnight. so i wondered, for a split second, what would have happened if i didn't laugh any time soon. i imagined him faking confusion and catastrophically, even disgust. so i laughed a short laugh. & finally, so did he.

all homophobia is internalised. it is, first, a bullying of the faggot within. how could i desire a man if i am already a man? is there a lack of masculinity in me for me to desire it in another? the first chapter of giovanni’s room describes this crisis best in the post nut clarity of a teenager’s first experiment with homosexuality. if you haven't read giovanni’s room, what are you doing with your life honestly? get off substack. james baldwin will fix you.

another way to phrase this is bioessentialism. bioessentialism is the idea that all bodies of the same sex are essentially the same. when conditioned to think so, a person engages with another body of the same sex, at best, in a comparative capacity. the thing about comparison is that it flattens difference. every difference between your body and the body of another of the same sex is no longer simply difference- it becomes a measure of some essential feature of the sex- culturally, how we talk about everything from penis size to height is a result of this idea.

using penis size as a jumping off point, i would like to theorize the social phenomenon we call dick-swinging competitions. inversely, why do you think the one piece of queer media that tasted ridiculous mainstream success in recent times was called Heated Rivalry? men love to channel their homoeroticism into competition. may the best frotter win.

if you, like me, have the brand of autism that you could call a sociology degree, or if you, like me, are obsessed with power, you have noticed all this. the question, of course, is still about power. is power, as the orla garland song about testosterone puts it, “a game to win”? is it Great Responsibility’s plus one at the party and if so, would either have a lighter?

power, in my experience, is one of many ways to explain movement. work done can be described as energy expended. work done can also be described by your boss in a bad mood as whatever output he wants to value. something like F*dcosθ but he keeps changing the angle just so that the force you apply never has any consequence. but what the fuck is the game he's trying to win? is Great Responsibility throwing up in the bathroom?

if power is a game to win, my question is: is the asshole gonna turn around and say, “it's just a game!” any time soon? i thought the winner got to fuck the loser, man, that's why i played!

my boy, listen to me, desire and shame are a dangerous mix. you move towards something at breakneck momentum and you can't even bear to look at it properly. of course you're gonna crash. soft landing?

yk that popular house of cards quote abt how everything in the world is about sex except sex, sex is abt power? i have always hated it. for one, everything in the world is hardly about sex. & power? well actually, power might just be about sex. per unit time. & more often that you think.

hold fast, boy. we're crashing.