collaborative storytelling that is equal parts critical and creative
Dylan Grant
The first time I met Dylan, I said I’d have to kill her. I disliked her because I’m a narcissist; she was flirting with my crush at a gay country dancing night and she was both gay-er and hotter than me. Also, she shared my name.
After we shook hands and laughed about saying “Nice to meet you Dylan, I’m Dylan,” I felt the jealous animal in my abdomen rear its head. Like most newly minted lesbians, I make up for my insecurity about not being gay enough by sizing up every dyke I see. Is their hair shorter than mine? Are their jeans more ripped? How do they droop their arm around the back of a chair with such self-assurance? For me, queer spaces are a torturous mix of affinity and desire.
Having decided Dylan was Frenemy #1 for the night, I noticed her every move. I was acutely aware of the space she claimed and the way she leaned into someone when they spoke to her. The combination of feelings—jealousy, competition, fixation—mimicked a crush, but with an edge. I guess that’s attraction.
When she asked me to dance I realized I’d been waiting for that all night. We made snide comments about the DJ and laughed while tripping over each other’s feet. We were flirting, I realized. By the end of the dance she had charmed me so much that I agreed to be in a band with her (The Dylans!). And after I got home I left her a three minute voice memo. I figued eventually we’d have sex.
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Among the lewd party questions my college friends tossed around (Would you rather have fingers for nipples, or nipples for fingers? Would you rather give up cheese or oral sex for the rest of your life?) one produced more heated arguments than anything else: Would you sleep with yourself?
My gut reaction to the question always was (and is): no. I felt, but couldn’t explain, how the prospect crossed some sort of boundary with myself. Maybe it’s because at some point, I learned that sexuality was not permitted in realms of familiarity: friends, other girls in the locker room, myself. Masturbating felt shameful for a long time and sometimes still does. Sex with like = no; sex with myself = no.
Freud is infamous for claiming that homosexuals are narcissists; something about over-identifying with our mothers and desiring ourselves. This is a crude mischaracterization of his work, a friend reminds me, but the idea stuck anyway. The DSM diagnosed homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1987.
To this, Ocean Voung says: So what? (Though much more poetically.) He recalls an early marker of gayness: following a boy around the playground who had offered to share his lunch. “How else to repay the boy who gave me my first pizza bagel but to become his shadow?” It isn’t until much later, when a college professor makes a thinly veiled homophobic comment about gay men and narcissism, that Voung understands his young infatuation. “It was not pizza bagels, all those years ago, that I wanted from Gramoz, but replication. Because his offering extended me into something worthy of generosity, and therefore seen.”
In love we’re seeking affirmation of our worth. Accepting love from someone else requires us to meld a lover’s vision of us, into our own image of ourselves. (If you decide I’m worthy, then maybe I’ll feel worthy.) Sometimes, our self-image melds with the love object itself. (If I see myself in you, and I love you, then am I loving myself?) Sharing the same gender identity with the person you love might produce this effect more readily, or it may not. “Wanting” implies both lust and lack.
Like many, getting queer coincided with growing self-acceptance. It would be too simplistic to say that loving other women equals loving myself (for one, my sense of self isn’t reducible to gender) but that isn’t not true. Anyway, all love is narcissistic. This is actually what Freud believes, too; that gay, straight, or otherwise, we love because we desire ourselves and sometimes our parents. Not great options there, but if I had to choose, I’d pick the former. So yeah, it’s good to be gay.
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The first time we slept together I kept trying to say our name in bed. It was several months and many semi-flirty hangouts later. Afterwards Dylan would tell me that on that night, she could tell I wanted to fuck her the minute she entered my house. “Dylannn,” I moaned, laughing. I was partly joking and partly earnestly experimenting with the perverse pleasure that it was to say my own name, but it pissed her off. “You’re giving me an identity crisis,” she said. I stopped, but only because I was starting to have one myself. (There’s a reason Oliver waits until after he and Elio finish having sex.)
At some point, Dylan noticed I was keeping my eyes closed a lot. I said it helped me get lost in feeling but she was right, I was afraid to look at her. I was scared to fully give in to what felt like having sex with myself—something that both intrigued and repulsed me. Also, I later admitted, it was because I wasn’t that attracted to her. “You just don’t have my name,” Dylan said at one point. “Like I know it’s the same name, but it’s not my name.” We slept together a second time and then stopped.
In the end I made the same mistake as Freud and his friends. They assumed that the primary vector of our self-identification would be gender and I assumed it would be a name. In both cases, an overemphasis on nomenclature. Do you know the feeling when you consider your name or any word as the verbal and textual object it is, and feel a rush of alienation from any meaning it holds? Sleeping with Dylan was that rush, but it wasn’t enough. Outside of sharing a name, I wasn’t that into it. A Dylan by any other name is just as boring.
After Narcissus rejects the advances of the beautiful nymph Echo, she curses him to fall in love with his own reflection. What kills him in the end is not his self-obsession per se, but the heartbreak he experiences when he realizes his reflection could never love him back. Stricken with grief and blue balls, he turns into a flower. Narcissus, like any lover, was lonely.
