When I first read Darryl—Jackie Ess’s 2021 novel about a cuckold’s entanglement with a dangerous alpha—I gobbled it up and threw it onto my Instagram with the impulsive caption: “an achievement in Bottom Lit.” I was, at the time, growing fatigued with bottomhood as a sexual identity slash personal brand, and Darryl answered my wish for inventive writing about submission, self-abasement, and searching for truth within sex. Divided Publishing has released a fine-tuned new edition of Darryl in Europe and the UK, which prompted me to revisit this delightfully strange book and talk at length with Ess about queer fiction, identity, and connection.
—Ty Mitchell

Ty Mitchell: I think we wanted to do this interview just to bring us together in conversation. And also to talk about the, I guess, new edition—or reissue?

Jackie Ess: I would call it a new edition. I wasn't sure how much editing we were gonna do. It’s possible to just kind of Queen’s English the thing, but I ended up editing a lot. Compulsively. A lot of these sentences are new, and a few are gone. And good riddance. But it’s not a new book if you’ve read it before.

TM: Our few interactions prior to this have had to do with the culture and politics of Twitter and digital space. So I guess when I was revisiting the book, I was thinking a lot about a moral kind of life. And I think Darryl’s moral life is shaped independently of the kind of disciplining that happens in digital spaces, or the disciplining that happens even in any kind of community. And that was something curious to me, both of us being Twitter expats, even though that’s where we more or less met...is this something?

JE: I mean, it is, and for me actually, part of why I wanted to establish Darryl as having money, was that’s another thing that insulates him, not only from the judgment of others, but from the task of adapting to them. He doesn’t work. There’s no one telling him how to be for essentially his entire life, like how do people get together and get things done? There’s a strange way that the world is only there tomorrow because it is remade today—by some of us, and Darryl is not part of that “some of us.”

I think that that kind of isolation from the reproduction of not only the economic product, but from reality itself is something that really marks him. But I think that many of us can fall out of that. We can fall out of the more essential circuit. And that’s one piece of it. My sense is that Darryl has a pretty strong sense of other people that is just not checked against anything. He often wants to present himself as an ordinary or conventional guy.

No matter how crazy what he says is, he believes his position to be the moderate one. He will say, “Oh, well I’m not too much into politics, but…” There’s always this idea that there’s something that is called “being too much into politics” that he isn’t. And likewise, when he meets the polyamorous, kinky people, when he meets a few trans people or meets a few sex workers. It sounds so schematic, I don’t think I meant to line them up that way. But in all of these interactions, Darryl believes himself to be the total square, because he doesn’t answer to the counterculture. But he’s certainly not conventional in terms of what he does or what he needs, nor apparently what he’s willing to do. He’s quite a bit crazier than most of the people he talks to and in a sense, dangerous.

TM: I think you established that in the opening of the book, that this is a character for whom normalcy is incredibly important, if not the most important value in his life. And to much comic effect, he is decidedly not living a normal existence. But what is interesting about the value he places on moderation or his self-image as a moderate person is that he is the connective tissue between these really disparate people.

JE: I think that he is able to do that partly because he doesn’t totally see people and isn’t deeply accountable to them. I mean, for many of us, those kinds of interactions can tear us apart a little bit. And I find it kind of difficult to answer to people who are fundamentally opposed to each other. Who do you answer to? Darryl doesn’t answer to anybody, and he seems to draft people into a therapeutic process very easily. He often has an initially condescending apprehension of someone. And then as he overcomes that condescension, he has this beatific moment where he begins to realize that there’s something opening in his heart to the way that this person is.

So he dismisses Satori as this “hippie chick” or something. For a moment she’s a tossed-off character in a Zappa song (“Camarillo Brillo”). But then suddenly she’s the goddess, and he’s laying the goddess trip on her so hard that he can’t really see what she’s doing, or who she is. There’s no real communication in that. Or he has a resentment of his wife’s lesbian lover, and perhaps a slightly negatively polarized view of lesbians, a bit scared around them. And then it’s wow, I wish more people could be like her. He turns over with people, and falls in love with them. But he could be said to love the churn, not the person who is the object of second thoughts. It’s all in his head, and it’s basically condescending in its structure. I go from seeing you like a sinner to seeing you like saved, and you don’t see anything except that I was staring at you for a long time from across the room, and now I seem to be crying, and now I’m saying that I love you. That’s actually kind of a disturbing encounter.

Certainly I might like people to have less private drama about who I am—people who don’t know me, I mean. People who know me, sure, let’s have the feelings together. When people don’t know me and they have massive shifts in their feeling about who I am or how they relate to me, I often think, “Well, Feeling A, that you started with, was not based on reality, but Feeling B is also not based on reality. And even if B is a better place to be, now you feel like we’ve been through something together, and that might be a problem.” I think that that ability that Darryl has to be very convinced of this simulation of life and emotional development with others while not depending on real interaction with them, is something that is a little bit frightening about him.

It’s a fault I find with myself in some ways. I don’t find myself to be very much like Darryl, but I think that I’ve certainly had moments where I go through some deep sense that I’ve reconciled with someone by thinking about them differently. But I haven’t, and so I’ve definitely been guilty of calling somebody up after a couple of years not talking, “I’ve realized that I was wrong about everything in the conversation I had with you in my mind last year and I miss you after all.” What the fuck? I thought you didn’t want to talk to me. Oh yeah, I did think that. Nobody wants to get that call, you know? But I’ve gotten that call. And I’ve been the one making the call. Probably not for the last time, I’m sad to say.

How did we get here?

TM: Something I appreciate about the book, especially in the context of gay, trans, or queer fiction as a category, is that there’s this re-mystifying of queerness that takes place over the course of the story. That as I learn more about this character, I increasingly abandon the need or desire for a coming out narrative or a trauma plot, that where you land at the end of this book is with a person who simply is, and does good things and does bad things and is connected to at least one person by the end of it in a way that is meaningful. What do you think of that assessment?

JE: I like it. I do think also that maybe the book does not end in a way that really suggests a genuine resolution. I think that he’s allowed himself to have a couple of genuine encounters. He’s allowed himself an encounter with genuine curiosity or genuine fear, or, he has met the drive in strange ways. And there are things that he’s thought through. But I think we’re still in motion.

I guess to me, one of the things about the book that I wasn’t sure how much it would challenge people or what they wanted to do with it, is that this is a book in which someone is relating to sexuality and gender and all of that in a very contingent way. Like, Darryl was a guy who could have transitioned, and maybe that would’ve been the answer. I kind of don’t think it would’ve been, but he is somebody where if you started hearing these crazy stories about his life—and then he was like, yeah, I’m thinking about transitioning, you’d might say, yeah, man—or not-man. I mean, that might make you happier. I don’t know. Good luck. I mean, why not? But it’s not at all a sense of, I’m certain that that is who you are and who you’ve always been, rather a sense of, maybe you will, maybe you won’t.

Would he have been happier as a gay man? There’s some indication that he would’ve been, but actually there’s a lot of indication that he wouldn’t. Because if he’s somebody that worships gym bodies and big dicks, and hates his middling body, his unflattering obsessions, his all-around castration, is he really gonna have an easier time as a gay guy? Or is he crying in the parking lot at Equinox? If you feel unfuckable, inferior, of a coarser clay—will gay life cure that? If you believe that some bodies are inherently better than others, and court the punishment and contempt of the strong? This is not gonna be an easy world for him unless he can actually deal with the emotional development, which actual gay men do. You know, actual gay men are out here and they work it out. They work it out about the bodies that they actually have and about the sex drive that they actually have. Everyone has to do that.

I often think about these old hustler novels—like I loved City of Night and I love The City and the Pillar. These display a rugged, beaten-down but slightly heroic gay life—you know, unlike these old silk scarf fairies and johns, unlike these, shall we say, Noël Coward sorts? There’s actually hate in those books, for the kind of man that they fear to be, the kind of man that perhaps they might inevitably end up as. But they have this attitude, which is a little bit like, I’m willing to step over those people.

Darryl would for sure be on the purchaser side of the hustler/john dynamic. He’s not a person that people are going to desire or admire. One can’t picture him as the romantic hustler. But he’s actually just the opposite. He’s one of the people that the romantic hustlers live off of, and I don’t think that he would be able to live with himself like that. By all indications in the story, he’s failing to live with himself like that. And this idea that others do the living and the fucking is a pretty common one.

TM: I often find myself trying to salvage or recover the place I was at when I was an adolescent, and I was negotiating identity. I sometimes joke that maybe the definitive or constitutive quality of queerness is that we don’t like having identities at all. And that there’s at least a phase, if not a long-term response to identity labels, which we all at least resent, or even hate. All of us claim these identities with some pride when it’s appropriate, but ultimately chafe against them in a way that straight people likely don’t. Maybe what makes us queer is that we actually hate having any label to live up to.

And this feels maybe kind of rudimentary, but also kind of urgent when you’re talking to a generation or communities of people who are so overwhelmed with representations of queerness that hinge on identity, that there’s not really a strong way to navigate it without it. I guess what I’m trying to say is, even a character like Darryl is navigating sexual identity in terms of, “What do I want?” In terms of, “What do I like? What feels good?"”And to lead with those questions rather than, “What is the name for what I am” starts to feel like a lost art.

JE: That’s interesting. And I mean, yeah, I see it. Although I don’t know if I agree that Darryl does that. He says what he is, and his answer to what he is is a cuck. He has a pretty exotic map of identity, but he’s pretty into claiming his identity, at least in the early part of the book. And I think that he moves into the position that you’re talking about more in the back half of it, which certainly is a part of it that I like more and feel better about years later. Maybe this is part of why, because I think the first part of the book is a bit more like a formal exercise in transposing these sort of identity discourses onto something which is too ridiculous to be a real identity.

TM: Yeah, maybe that’s why I discounted it. [Laughs]

JE: This is something that we emailed a little bit about and I had wanted to talk about, which is that I don’t have quite as functional a view of identities. I’m a little bit more optimistic, you could say, about identity as a language. And this comes from this sense that, if I am simply using my identity to get what I want, who is that person who’s doing the using? How do I stand aside from it, and even constitute some of these desires? I have to think about this a lot because I feel like I occupy a category of people that is always on the brink of not quite existing.

I think that most people that are experiencing sex hunger or sex dissatisfaction do not experience it as a desire for specific sex acts or with specific people. It’s a more diffuse misery: Life sucks. I hate myself. I resent everyone else. I feel the creepy crawlies. I don’t like how I feel when I go to bed. But it’s not because they want to do something, the desire isn’t spoken. It can’t be dreamt. It’s a “beta-element.” Because that desire actually depends on a lot of social articulation to really make sense. I think of desire as an achievement.

Darryl approaches this question when he asks about sex in a world without lube. Perhaps I wouldn’t invent it. Likewise, in a world without my identity. I might desire not only differently but less. So I don’t quite stand apart as a user of identity. Maybe when I am more separate from that, it also loses its meaning very quickly. I think part of the reason why we bother to mutually constitute these sexual identities is because of the fear that it all could fade back into a diffuse sexual misery.

Or that it could say fade back into that and then reconstitute as something more unpleasant. Darryl’s point of view is that he somehow stands beneath both men and women, but lost in the gender system—such feelings are not really desires. That’s not the feeling of somebody who wants something. Desire has the unspeakability not of a forbidden word, but of life bare of language.

TM: I guess what I was saying about identity was inspired less by, “Why do we claim an identity,” and more so about why people might not. The example that comes to mind is the gay-for-pay porn people that I’ve worked with, who genuinely and authentically just love cock, love sucking cock, love getting fucked by cock. Often those gay-for-pay guys prefer that cock to be attached to a woman, and yet they don’t identify as something other than straight most of the time, I feel, because it doesn’t really seem to help them find sexual partners that satisfy those desires. Do you understand what I’m getting at when I’m trying to make this argument about some identities being actually very inconvenient for getting what we want?

JE: I think so.

TM: And Darryl brought a lot of that stuff up for me of what do we do with the chaser, for example, who seems to have this really impossible time finding an identity that we don’t just kind of make fun of or that actually brings them into pleasure and relationships that are not harmful, that are not fetishistic, or that are not so fetishistic that they’re harmful. And I don’t know that I would call Darryl a chaser per se, but like you said, he’s more on the john side of that hustler dynamic in a way where none of these identities that he shops around for seems to really serve him except deductively, being a cuck. And even then it seems to backfire.

I think maybe what Darryl misunderstands—and what many people misunderstand—is that maybe these identities are not about naming something that you are, but naming something that you’re approaching or in proximity to. It’s like a pole or an orbit that is functional enough. And I don’t mean to suggest that identity is entirely functional, but that we gravitate toward these poles of identity not because we like them, but because they’re the closest thing to what works.

JE: I think that’s right. I would describe Darryl’s real desire as—at some point I came up with the term porno-eidetic. The notion that I have here is that Darryl has a sense that the truth is being revealed to him when he’s fucking, and that somehow the truth about sex is the real erotic object. Not what you do. What you know. I don’t think there can be any real sexuality that’s attached to that. You could almost say Darryl has this resemblance to these people who just love cock and he certainly loves saying that sort of thing about himself, but nothing about what he does really indicates that that is true.

There are some people that are just hungry for it, and that’s an unmistakable dynamic. And I salute the great appetites. Yum yum yum. But Darryl’s not that guy. I don’t know where to place him there. I see him as much more obsessed with getting the message about what this all really is and where he really stands, and that somehow saying that would feel very complete. That's kind of what the last line of the book is, in a way, his satisfaction. He says, I tried to say something. And a bit more. He’s a voice, which is occasionally exceeded or destabilized by a body, but he isn’t really there. So his relationship to real sex is always quite confused and negative. And when his “actual” desire gets stirred up and he is able to have the kind of sex that gives him an orgasm, or that gets him excited, it’s actually quite conventional and quite heterosexual, right? And when he’s able to have the kind of sex that seems to be confirming the picture that he’s obsessively elaborating in his cuckness, it turns out that the real sex is a bit of an afterthought, he describes bottoming as like going to the dentist. Just logically, I should get good at getting fucked. I ought to learn to like it. That’s not hunger. That’s acquiring the taste.

TM: Not hungry like Mindy.

JE: Exactly. Mindy seems like a person who—well, we don’t get that close to her point of view—but one has the sense that Mindy has a fair amount of sexual athleticism, and is interested in having a lot of naughty sex. It might be a little naughtier than the sex that most people have. But basically it’s a flavor. And there’s people in this world that are just like, gimme some more of that. I think that seems to be her attitude. It doesn’t seem like she has much of an intense attachment or curiosity to this sort of idealistic version of sex that Darryl is obsessed with having.

TM: I do feel like part of what’s funny about the book is Mindy reads as the more commercial literary point of view. There are popular books from Mindy’s point of view more or less, and I think it’s a fun and cool move to say, well, what about her cuck husband? And so there’s many ways in which Darryl is this unlikely narrator of a work of queer fiction. And I guess I wanted to zoom out a little bit and ask you, why Darryl? And what part of what you wish to do as a writer or are compelled to do as a writer draws you to crafting a character like Darryl?

Do you hate that question? [Laughs]

JE: I don’t, but I don’t know what I really want to say. I haven’t thought about that in a while. I’m not a very calculating writer. I usually have one story that it feels like I can write, and I write that one. In some sense that’s probably true, but I can think maybe about what it was doing for me or where I saw the green light as I started writing this story. Because I have given up on lots of other stories about people that were nothing like Darryl, and have since written stories about people that are nothing like Darryl. One thing I expected at the time—and this is something that really has come and gone—is that I slightly expected to have a lot of difficulty getting past the coding as a “trans woman of color.”

And you know, trans politics 10 years ago were quite different. A bit more “cult of Stonewall.” Very focused on anti-violence. Very focused on the question of intra-queer trans exclusion. And I found that these things were variously either projected on me, or it was projected on me that I had somehow betrayed them, or perhaps I was on my way there but anxious to take up some of these themes that might be my lot but weren’t yet. Those are my coordinates on the map. It’s a factual description of who I am. But I had to get out from under it. Wherever or whoever I am, I find myself looking for ways to speak from the outside. And that I see fiction as one of the ways to do that.

... One wants to know the truth of life rather than live it and know the truth of fucking rather than to fuck.
And rather than be fucked. And that being fucked is, if anything, that’s the gamble, you know? Like, I’m so not into the real thing that I’ll even accept this ridiculous degrading act. Do whatever you want to me, someone might say. I don’t know what relationship that I have to that sentiment, but it’s an interesting thing to think about. Maybe a character like Darryl might actually have something to say to the sexual conversation eventually, not from the perspective of aligning real desires, but from the perspective of maybe there being no such thing as desire for some people or something a little bit weirder in that zone.

Darryl constantly makes these statements about being beneath the entire system of sex and quite mystified by it. He falls out of life, really under it, though he still has a great deal to say about it, especially about an experience of lostness or of thrall. The source of his confidence is a mystery. He doesn’t feel that he has escaped something or become wiser than something, there’s none of that position. And I think that in a way, he believes himself to be in contact with a more fundamental sort of sexual reality, which admittedly is one that seems not to allow him very much sexual satisfaction. But it does. Because language is the thing. Not compensation for the lost thing.

TM: I felt like I was anxious going into our talk about framing the book as a piece of queer literature or trans literature. But it is in dialogue with The Sluts and it’s in dialogue with other gay fiction—you mentioned City of Night and The City and the Pillar. And I want to touch on the relationship this book has to Dennis Cooper’s novel and ask you generally how that came about.

JE: Oh, yeah. I mean, actually it’s kind of funny to be able to talk about this at a distance. I’ve read a lot of Dennis Cooper, but I’m not really a Cooper-head. I looked up to a lot of people that were. I felt for a while that I was running along behind them, and then I didn’t know where I was. I was most interested in his handling of unreality in a book like The Sluts, or in a story like The Anal-Retentive Line Editor. The Sluts is after all a book about something that might not have happened.

I really enjoy these kinds of very delicately simulated stories where people report fantasies to me that are not even their own fantasy. And not only is what you heard from your friend’s cousin not true, but 90% of what you just told me was not even what you heard. You’re just kind of spinning it out, we are in the dream now as we speak. Let’s look around in the dream. I really like those moments. Even as most of our dreams are trash heaps of the drive, the real at its pettiest. I felt that Dennis had found his way to that and he’d used the Internet as a form in this really cute way, and I thought that somehow it might be interesting for this book to meet mine unreality to unreality. Back to back, not belly to belly.

What might have happened in The Sluts might also have happened in Darryl, but very crucially, in neither book is it established that anything ever happened. It’s the same might. There might be some guys on a forum talking about some crazy shit that might have happened, and maybe that’s related? Unconfirmed.

TM: Okay. I think we need to put a cap on things and conclude our conversation, but this has been lovely. Was there any kind of loose end you wanna tie up before we stop?

JE: Um, no, I don’t. [Laughs] I’m thinking back over the ridiculous things that we’ve said, and I don’t envy the task of transcription here. [added later: I turned out to envy it very much.]

—

A few weeks later, on the long stairs, Jackie adds:

I felt after our conversation that I had allowed myself to get away from the book and regress to a character I have too often been: a negative pundit of desire, a scoffer at repression, yet from what heights? Aren’t I the most hung up of all? And how much hate flows here? How much of Contempt’s easy claim on Experience? How bitter green new. Tough tea. I’ve edited my responses here quite a lot in response to that tickle of doubt, apologies if I’ve edited the sense out of them. Take with a grain, I’m a stranger to all of it, pure visitor.