When I was fifteen years old, my mother found out that I was gay by reading my journal. It was four am and her cries echoed heavy in the basement. For a while, we were trapped in our own world. A world that words got me to and would eventually help me escape from.
I make this confession because I hope it shows that I know the power of writing and the destruction people can bring to it when they don’t love it, when writing just becomes an evidence of conflict and not a portal to a deeper truth. When words become a destruction.
I tore up that journal and faced what felt like oblivion at the time. Throughout the rest of high, I kept writing. I attended a two-week writing workshop in gambier Ohio, where the trees flowed green on The Middle Path, where my new friend and I sat in the bookstore’s aisles and talked about how we loved writing, what we were afraid of, what we’d been through.
At its best, I think writing is intimate. I think it is physical. It’s desire realized through language. It’s time travel. A portal to the enemy’s brain or the buckle of a lover’s hips in bed. Writing is a dismantling of a world while giving birth at the time; in a sense, it is the conundrum of the grim reaper living forever. The ultimate consequence that lasts an eternity. If you have the courage to write, how could it not be true?
But yes. I know I ask this question with a sense of the answer but it should be asked anyway. Just as we can lie to ourselves, we can lie on the page. Art can be truth or propaganda. A reflection of subjectivity which is an illusion from the start, a forever moving target.
If I were to relate the courage it takes to write honestly with something else. It would be the fact that desire, which can be beautiful, is not truly aflame until we give it life. Breathe it into existence. Beauty requires action, commitment, and fortification. This is why when we are writing about intimate things, it is important not to lie about the beginning, middle, end, or what precedes the intimacy, what allows it to even exist in the first place. Intimacy is an untangling, a clarifying, especially when two or more people are unraveling it together, like a knotted muscle.
Across the genres, I’ve explored as a writer (fiction, nonfiction, journalism), I’ve been told that I write through intimacy well and with clarity. Sometimes I’ve been asked why. My response?
If I’m being honest, it’s because those moments of intimacy are what I craved as a young kid. Because of books, because of the conversations, I got to witness on those pages, and how I learned that intimacy can be a plot point, an explosion, a confession; a way to feel more alive. What’s more beautiful to strive to write about than that?
But can intimacy be world-building? Yes, I believe it can. I think of the power of the intimacy in certain books that have moved me. In 2018, I read Call Me By Your Name for the first time and fell headfirst in the scattered thoughts of a young lover while I was living in Europe, embarking on the beginnings of my own romance. I marveled at how doggedly Elio observed his lover, how marooned he was in his own mind by his insecurities, what is dismantled once we allow our desires to live,. and what happens once we reach that intimate space.
From the book to the film, this tone of intimacy is achieved. The different colored swimming trunks on the bathroom faucet. The necklace around Oliver’s neck. The crunch of bicycle tires on country road. The buzz of an Italian summer.
Intimacy, at its best, is a language that breaks structures and form. It appears everywhere.
This piece is beautiful. It reaffirms all that I desire to explore within my work. Thank you for writing this.