When my Dad, who was just here helping me move, chose my bookshelves as his zone to unpack, i braced myself. Over the years, he has often expressed to me his inability to understand why i think i need to carry so many books around. As i’d anticipated, some time on the second day of his visit, he called out to me while i was in the kitchen: “You sure do have a lot of books about sex!” i took a deep breath and called back a solid, ‘Yep,’ and walked slowly toward the bedroom, waiting for the rest. He was holding a copy of Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre and Postmodern. “You must be some kind of expert or something?” Hard swallow. ‘i guess so. Unfortunately there’s, like, a surplus of us.’

i text the conversation highlights to someone i sleep with sometimes. Immediately channeling his inner teenage girl and reading my mind, he shoots back, “Dad!” Needless to say, a teaching moment presented itself and i totally lost it. i was sick. i had laryngitis. i wasn’t in the mood for the sex equals gender equals sexuality equals fucking lecture. i’d meant there was a surplus of academic investigations of desire, but i think i was understood to just be agreeing to a degree of proficiency in the general field, and i’m guessing that’s why Dad responded with an amused, “Ha.”

As a young adult, i was prone to missionary-like zeal–another occasional family trait. With no god to speak of, i sacrificed myself to school. In college, i was basically a straight-A student until i found literary theory. Then everything started taking a lot longer. In a class taught by Amitava Kumar ostensibly about ‘Black Britain’ i had my first experience of cultural studies. Paul Gilroy, Louis Althusser, Donna Haraway, Amiri Baraka, Dick Hebdige, Hanif Kureishi, Fredric Jameson, and Salman Rushdie dropped a boatload of former unspeakables in my lap. i was in over my head. He gave me a B. i was hooked.

The following semester, Kumar taught a class called something like “Writing Desire.” i would have enrolled regardless of the curriculum, but this was ideal. There were now more and more narratives attempting to articulate constellations of desire in ways i simply hadn’t known were possible. He was constantly bitching at us about form, about what was problematic about writing as usual, about not writing enough. “Carry around notebooks, motherfuckers,” he sneered one day in class. “You think you’re going to remember how you wanted to remember what’s happening? WRITE IT DOWN.” i wrote something fantastic for my term paper. i applied to grad school. Kumar told me to start thinking of myself as a writer. i didn’t know it yet, but he’d taught me how i would teach.

Dad, i never could have told you about it at the time. i couldn’t even explain it the other day, which was a mistake on my part. i had a teacher once who taught me how to peel right into the world. i can’t say that i don’t forget all the time how to do it, or that i don’t spend a lot of time on auto-pilot. But in those books, in all of those queer, strange, sexy, difficult books which are as much about what is wrong as they are about getting it right, i do taste the revolution.