A History of My Brief Body. Billy-Ray Belcourt

      To be queer and NDN is paradoxical in that one is born into a past to which he is also unintelligible. I wasn’t born to love myself every day.

      There is a dead future with my name on it in the territory of my people. There isn’t much one can do but run when the future becomes roadkill. I didn’t wish to find out what it might take to incorporate roadkill into the everyday, to drain it of shock value. One would likely need to sacrifice inner life, uninvent it. In Introduction to the History of Art, which I took years ago, the instructor informed us that photography, much like portraiture, enticed many to rethink the contours of the self, also sometimes called the soul. Perhaps in leaving I didn’t choose to be soulless. I chose instead to continue looking at myself.

      Is there anything left to say about the closeted gay kid? Sometimes I think, without pathos, that the coming-out story is endangered, and rightfully so. Best left in the previous century, where it teemed with subversiveness. Back then, to confess to desire in a different direction was to expose oneself to existential risk, among other types. The avowal—you are gay—had everything to do with a refusal of the world-as-it-was. (This calls to my mind Foucault’s Beauvoirian insistence that homosexuality isn’t what one is but what one does.) There need not be new narratives of this sort because they are already there, archived, fixed in the zeitgeist. Other days, I’m desperate for everyone to know that I sat, seasick, overcome by lightheadedness, in the closet, imagined and material, like all feral metaphors. I thought I was to drown. I drowned. YOU’RE SPEAKING TO A MANNEQUIN, I wanted to shout to everyone within earshot. I was arrested by my own tragic story. I took pity on myself. Édouard Louis: “I didn’t want to carry a pain that I didn’t choose.”¹ I see it everywhere on the rez, when talking to men on Grindr—the aftereffects of surviving a struggle against oneself, against an identity you’re squished inside. I didn’t know what to do with my agony, so I did what most do with the at once unknown and menacing: I waged a war on it, on myself. Desire appeared around me as a flammable entity. I ran around with my hands on fire. I have died. I have lived. What glory!

      Symptomatic of the loneliness of the closet was how devoted I became to the prospect that I would die at a young age. At thirteen or fourteen, I discovered a lump on my right testicle while masturbating. I already felt that I’d come into the world in a frenzy the way a volcano’s eruption creates an archipelago. I believed that my longing was poisonous and thus I had begot the lump on my genitals; in a biblical fashion, my punishment was meted out on the body. I took a vow of silence. I lived terribly in a village of no one and nothing. I’ll always have one foot there, in the wet, shimmering grass.

      I didn’t know where to go, but I knew I had to be in flight. I slipped out the bathroom window. No one was looking. No one knew how to look at me in those dying days. I went to what many in northern Alberta affectionately call “the City,” Edmonton. I was non-existent, yet to come, and alive in a hypothetical tomorrow. I wished to assassinate history’s version of me, put him to rest, let him soar into the clouds like a floating lantern. I wanted to be there, below him, with a single candle, crying for the last time.

      As a teen, I devoured dystopian and queer novels to put to use the existential deferral that narrative elicits. Teens don’t read for beauty, but to practice the art of disappearance. Today, I read and write for beauty, and live so as to disappear.

      If I’m more of a toy to be wound up than a man, can I write beautiful things? What I mean is that I don’t subscribe to the fantasy of self-sovereignty, knowing fully that the past starts into my brief body like a knife.² My hands are made up of a set of hands that puppeteer me. The hands aren’t God’s. They are History’s. Its sores are mine.

      The past came with me to Edmonton. It’s like a layer of dust on everything, so granular it encases me.

      I have found myself a number of times driving in the direction of the old apartment in which I spent many weekends with unlovable men out of neither nostalgia nor habit but a yearning for revenge. I believe it is a writer’s job to tend to memory in its last hours, as though a nurse in an infirmary. Lately, however, I want to hunt memory, to sink my teeth into it, to transform it into a gangly creature I might terrorize. In undergrad I was taught that horror films enflesh worldly anxieties, enabling us to confront and thus banish them into the unreal, after which we return to “reality” with a non-violent disposition. This displacement of volatile emotion wasn’t what I was after. I wanted to watch memory squirm. To torture it as it had me. I wanted it to lock eyes with me in a pale, trembling light.

      The eyes of a man I sleep with are dead, like an empty street, always on the verge of mutinous activity. His face emits an explosive kind of impressionability, so much so that I suspect a man—any man—could get him to drop his underwear once more were he instructed accordingly, even though he has just orgasmed. Strangely, this makes me think of a special viewing of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight I attended in Oxford. The film hadn’t been widely distributed in the UK outside of London, so the theatre was full of queer and black students, all of whom were there not passively to consume a film but to be bodiless for ninety minutes, to have the unbearability of their longing momentarily suspended or supplanted with another’s. (This is also the closest I’ve come to a definition of love.) When the credits rolled, I realized that even though the film had gotten under my skin, ruptured it, eviscerated it, the experience of affection wasn’t mine, wasn’t private. Sometimes when I fuck, I fuck not in the name of futurity but as a symptom of a romance with the negative, a romance with my own injurability. Perhaps there is something queer to be said of the act of running around without a skin. Lee Edelman: “The queerness of which I speak would deliberately sever us from ourselves.”³

      Fucking won’t rescue me from my longing.

      This revelation came to me as though ventriloquized from a part of my consciousness hidden in the apartment. My hands sweat with it. Add this to the evidence that I’m innately and intricately fucked up.⁴ A pop psychoanalyst (which is to say that I read a bit of Freud in undergrad and queers are melancholics writ large, so I speak with experiential authority), I suspect that this kind of indefatigable longing can be the origin of an artistic disposition. “Loneliness is a kind of dysphoria with the world” is a refrain that repeats in my body of writing. It’s a hunch of mine that no one can apologize for or administer a cure for the racialized and sexualized condition of existential ennui. The sum of all political actors, of all the puppets of the state, can only render the apology an ever-engrossing work of fiction, an all-consuming atmosphere of white noise, something to which I would be bound against my will. Apologies for an engineered catastrophe, constrained by a fetishization of the present, threaten to pin me to reality, and I’m interested in something far more real. The cure isn’t conjurable in government offices. It’s a matter of time, of temporality. An anachronism, I’ve spent my youth in a tale of contradiction. My outsider status is the price I pay for a mode of attunement and perception that compels me to write into the airless grip of an unattainable object of desire. Utopia, of course, is an impossible love object. But as such, it is also an incitement to write, to run with pen in hand into the negative space of the future. Would I have it another way? What a danger to creativity, after all, to find oneself fitting neatly into the world!

      If I’m a writer, it’s because to be an NDN is to be a concept that speaks. I live in the world of ideas because it’s the world of my people. If I’m a writer, it’s because to be queer is to worship loss—and what is a book but a losing game?

      Back to fucking. When I first downloaded Grindr in 2014, I wielded the app like a weapon in a war of emotion. I was a soldier slippery with regret. In each new bed, hungrier than the last, I surrendered so much. I surrendered with fevered surety. To and from each bedroom I went with my wounded shadow hanging over my shoulder.