“So here I am heading out into the cold winds of the canyon streets, walking down and across avenue c toward my home with the smell and taste of him wrapped around my neck and jaw like a scarf.”
David Wojnarowicz — Close to the Knives

My birthday card came a day early from my Dad yesterday afternoon, and like most interactions with my parents, it both (happily) momentarily grounded me and (confoundingly) underlined how far i have reeled from anything my family might still recognize as normality (success). My mother recently called me “eccentric,” and a few years ago my Dad referred to me being “wild” as though it were an obvious fact. That my birth certificate lists my middle name as Sunshine is only a very tame exhibit A in what i at least would describe as a somewhat unconventional childhood EVEN in the poor South EVEN in the Eighties. The day that never came, the time one of my parents sat me down and confessed to being proud that at least one of his or her children had gotten it and was living according to what we were shown as kids, somehow still shocks me by its absence. Learn to love me? Assemble the ways? Let’s just say they are never going to tell me there’s a lack of real spice in my life. My Dad told me years ago that he thought one of his children was smarter than the others, and it was not me. God, has the world changed? i read the lines on the front of the very pretty, serious, card from Dad: “Daughter, you are unique…,” and i bite my lip and swear i’m not trying to stress anyone out. i’m alright, Dad. Surprised to still be on my own. And yes, last night, and yesterday on the train, and the other morning on the kitchen table, i dreamt that someone…

i’ve stopped trying to figure out why it’s quite possible that i maybe…can’t take what i need and just leave, but i do know that i had been feeling black on the inside for a very long time before i came across the fact that Morrissey and i share a birthday. It’s today, in fact: May 22. The first day of Gemini. i started listening to the Smiths when i was in high school. My oldest brother had the shit luck of being in the first Gulf War, and he would send home requests for cds and i would go the Record Bar? Specs? at the Oaks Mall and pick them out and off they would go to Kurdistan with a Tupperware container full of Mom’s fudge. The cover of Meat is Murder made it the obvious choice, but i wasn’t a vegetarian, yet, and so the Queen is Dead came first. The rest followed in a sequence determined by what i could find in cassette form. Strangeways, then Louder Than Bombs. Somehow the first album, The Smiths, my favorite if i was made to choose, came to me last, and i was a freshman in college by then. That grown man shrieking, “I need advice. I need advice.”

Much later, i flippantly said to a boyfriend that we didn’t understand each other because he’d never listened to much Morrissey, and it didn’t go over too well. i was referring to that graceful realization that teenage nihilism can quickly change from boredom to an investment in “politics” that seems to occur to so many Morrissey devotees, but it just sounded like an unfair comparison to ex-boyfriends. The Stones may have opened many a sartorial door to masculinity, but the Smiths shifted the subculture again. Queering hadn’t yet become the verb it is now, but in retrospect the music is so unbelievably queer. What i simply read at the time as semi-gothic romanticism turned out to be apiece of a much larger parcel. The homosociality the music made possible amongst straight boys, often coupled with Straight Edge politics, full blown Anglophilia, and vintage bicycles, bled into a kind of queerness and a politicization of the personal we hadn’t even realized was unusual, and i’ve never really adjusted very well to its absence. Likewise, the suits, the football, the gang and crime references, the student bullying, the pedophilia, the serial killers, the misogyny, the Mick Ronson guitar–all of it was a cohesive reminder of just how gay masculinity had been all along.

As it turns out, the queerest tattoo i have is for David Wojnarowicz rather than Morrissey, but a David Wojnarowicz tattoo always seemed like a very Morrissey thing to me, anyhow. Midway between the wrist and elbow of my right arm, it is a burning house with a heart around it. i wait tables, so this is something customers quiz me on. All the time. “Do you mind if i ask about your tattoo?” they’ll say, with weird grins. i don’t mind, because the answer is easy and doesn’t cost me anything. i used to be really into David Wojnarowicz, i say, and blank faces usually end the conversation right there. Wojnarowicz was true thorn in the side Ruffian Realness–complete with national health/birth control glasses, minus the jangly guitar and the gladioli. With this birthday, i’m now officially older than he was when he died of AIDS in 1992, which somehow makes the tattoo mean differently to me.

i was assigned an essay by Wojnarowicz for a class i took with Amitava Kumar before i ever saw any of his visual art. Sitting in the back of the classroom, i felt my cheeks burn as i read the first paragraph: “So my heritage is a calculated fuck on some faraway sun-filled bed while the curtains are being sucked in and out of an open window by a passing breeze.” i wasn’t working at the Feminist bookstore yet, and i hadn’t really read any queer theory. i hadn’t started reading or writing about sex, but i had listened to a LOT of Morrissey. Here was this first line of the first chapter of a memoir, connecting, in total friction, the dots. The sneering concision and repulsiveness of “calculated fuck”–what i would later learn how to call “heteronormativity” but already knew intuitively would, not then, not never, be for me. My face was still hot, i’d felt this before: the extremely rare pleasure of recognition.