Dan Fishback

My Tenderqueer Years

I assume Dan Fishback, the gay Jewish singer-songwriter and playwright, wouldn’t like me.

But if I could wish or write anyone famous (besides myself), it would be him! As it is, my power of publicity is limited to places like Tablet, where, as a superleft anti-Zionist, he definitely wouldn’t want to be praised (not that my praise there of people I know like Maral Bolouri or Alexis Carré or Itay Lotem has given such a boost to their careers).

Maybe I wouldn’t like him either, in person—his interests outside of art and ending Israel include podcasting about his chronic fatigue syndrome. His partner designs avant-garde sweaters. It’s amazing he’s not a they (that there are any artfags left willing to identify as things so retrograde as gay and male I suppose is something to be grateful for; when the butch lesbians started transitioning I said nothing [ok, I laughed], but when the sensitive bottoms started there was no one left to speak up for me).

I went to a hippy little liberal arts college where we loved Sufjan and protested at the School of the Americas, so I get why you might want to build a self around a particular kind of quirky petulant seeming-softness, but none of my friendships with such people survived. Being a bitch—as in nasty rather than just taking it—feels so much more vital. But as much as I’d love to be the Violet Chachki of belles lettres (now there’s a drag name), I’m still a semi-tenderqueer.

I’ve loved Dan’s work since I discovered it in high school. I was secretly watching ‘gay media’ of a certain kind (porn, that episode of MTV’s ‘Next’ where the boys all make out on the bus) and reading what we could call ‘homosexual literature’ (Death in Venice, Edward II—I didn’t know there was such a thing as a gay novel) and psychoanalysis (I guess it was because I was raised in the provinces that my childhood reading sounds so early-20^th-century; I assume no teenagers now are looking for answers about their etiologies and destinies in Oedipus and Aschenbach!)

I don’t remember how I started looking for gay music, or hardly any of what I did find. Although since at the time I thought shit like this made for an excitingly transgressive banger, I’m very lucky freshman year of college my boyfriend could turn me on to Marc Almond, who of course can’t sing or play an instrument either, but he makes it work (thank you to Soft Cell for showing me that you can be successful and even genuinely brilliant as a talentless pretentious faggot as long as you bring that sizzle I strive for).

Fishback’s song, “Sweet Chastity” was probably the first piece of contemporary gay art that spoke to me in a register that was neither more-or-less commercial sex fantasy nor pre-gay tragic rumination, nor even the kitsch of pseudo-transgression, but the voice of a recognizable person with his own particular gay life in a world of other gay men.

Musically, well, it’s a bit unlistenably tinny, as it struggles to work itself through static-crunchy singing-through-a-soup-can energy into a bittersweet bop.

But then still unable even to guess what a relationship would be like, I found enormously thrilling—because funny, possible, human—its up-beat lament:

Eighteen-year-old boy comes out, I comfort him

He goes out, they fuck with him

Now I have to ask him for dating advice!

…

I’m so un-kissed, I’m so un-fucked

I’ve got plenty of time

To fight for the rights

Of the boys whose dicks I want to suck

…

But odds are

I’d be a slut if I were hot (I’d be a slut if I were hot)

I’d be the kind of boy I hate if I just had a shot

Maybe it was having watched too many Woody Allen movies (at the time my model for what an adult life could be—and here I am, dating a younger Asian!) but I didn’t find the ‘I’m too serious of a person to let laid’ shtick insufferable. Instead, it was a pleasure to imagine that there was a gay world with many different types in it (guys who are political or not, sluts or not, dating and fucking and comforting and giving advice)—that one’s stance within it could be complicated, ambivalent, ironic, longing—that fortunately entering gay life would be just where my real problems began.

I say fortunately because, after all, porn or Death in Venice make homosexual eros seem like an ecstatic break from reality into unworldly extremes—so one could get the impression, watching and reading within the closet, that exiting it will be a fatal undoing or, more positively, an utter transformation. Instead, “Sweet Chastity” seemed to tell me that I’d still have/get to be figuring out how to be myself, what kind of man to be loving other men (and other kinds of men who love men).

It's a similar story for “Make Out,” in which the singer plans to “make out with everyone who philosophically disgusts me.” The persona, like the real Fishback, is a bit of snotty progressive looking down on everyone for having bad politics, but, art being art, I think it’s totally redeemed by his ability to make fun of himself, and to populate the world of the song with human types longed for and loathed.

I’m sorry you went to Brown

Instead of Yale

I’m sorry they didn’t want you

Because you’re male?

I’m sorry no one told you

You control the world

But if you want to bitch about it

You can be my girl

Because I’m gonna make out with everyone who philosophically disgusts me

For young me the pleasure was not having this specific type (or the others in the song) dissed—I’d never met such a person!—but in hearing that, apparently, there were many different types of gay guys, annoyingly going on to each other about their bullshit and semi-ironically kissing. Sign me up! No really.

How much richer—how much more fun, because serving so many ways to shift internal perspective and social location—such a world appeared than what had been on offer before: pining with Eloise-and-Abelard crushing intensity over an inaccessible straight friend (who now is a doctor in Mississippi and getting puffy), whom in the intensity of my longing I couldn’t even see as a type, let alone one about which to let myself feel contemptuous, connected and horny all at the same time (because, ultimately, the gay types are all still gay guys, and might fuck).

I also found inspiring and hopeful his songs about being an artist—which are again, addressed to other artists in a common, queer world:

Don’t say that I imagined it

You are beautiful

Don’t say I had a hand in it

You just sparked a universe inside this room

You’ve got the Michaelangelo touch

You’ve got Audrey Lorde eyes

You’ve got Minelli hands

And I’m a fan, I’m a fan

Don’t say that you’re untalented

You have got the moves

Don’t say other people do it better

You could eat them all for breakfast

You’ve got the Gilda Radner touch

You’ve got Edward Albee eyes

You’ve got Rue McLanahan hands

And I’m a fan, I’m a really big fan

I wanted friends who told me that. And the amazing thing—for which am I ever grateful enough?—is that now I have them, and even get to be that friend in turn. Here I am, the center of all beauty—Imagine!

Since then my world is bigger and gayer, and Fishback’s music isn’t the only bit of cultural debris I can grasp to keep from drowning. I’ve kept following his career, though, which, if it’s never quite taken off, happily hasn’t stopped either. Being whiningly in love remains part of his shtick, although from a wider range of perspectives.

Anti-folk seething that your hot fuckbuddy doesn’t like you that way:

What a good boy, oversweetened and conceited

I-don’t-need-it I don’t-need-it I don’t-need-it I-don’t-need-it

I could give you everything you want!

I can make you feel like you who you want to be!

But if you don’t know what you want, you don’t me

And in a Liz-Phair-seque ladies-who-rock mode dissing and resentfully simping for other gay-artist types (my fans are helping people! And yours just want someone to fuck them)

His best work musically—both for production and lyrics—is his 2018 album, in the duo Cheese on Bread, The One Who Wanted More (their earlier albums also have some gems). I don’t know what role his female partner in the group has with the lyrics, but the themes follow from his earlier songs. Circling back to “Sweet Chastity” for example:

I’ve been feeling time

rubbing up against my skin and I

can do without my drugs tonight

I can do without my armor

right?

…

How much hotter do I have to get

before the boys I like will like me too?

How much cooler do I have to get

before my desperation seems aloof?

More often than any other contemporary songwriter, I find myself hearing Fishback describe recognizable but specific social situations, like kissing one friend who ought to be off-limits or ineffectively and angrily ‘encouraging’ another increasingly distant one (He was wrong to write that/ but his writing is so boring!/ Too stupid to incite/ This symphony you’re scoring/ You’re too old for shit this small/ But you’re much too young to abandon it all/ Meanwhile I’m screaming all the time/ ‘You’re perfect! You’re fine!’)­—actually they have two songs about this! Or trying to silence the mental echoes of voices from gay Twitter (Cutie quoting Stalin?/ Yo, it’s not your problem).

Or, in what’s maybe the most touching number from the album, feeling the doom in a polyamorous long-distance arrangement:

Getting too old for this

Getting too old for my face

Animals never plan this far

Getting too old for the twenty-year-olds

In this sticky, sunny place

Getting too old for the things that you said in your car

But I’m getting used to it

I’m getting used to the thought

That nothing in my life is gonna last

So you’re the perfect teacher

As I’m learning how to lose

Because you’re gonna wreck me

But for now I’m having a blast.

Even when the content is basically lyrical—the exposition of a feeling—there are referents to distinct settings. There’s something representational. But it’s not meant to give us a ‘correct line’ about the ‘commuity’ that’s represented. I’m sure for example, Fishback approves of polyamory, even though the song feels like a pained—and correct—critique of it; he celebrates it in another song!

Well, actually, in the latter song, he does explicitly mean to give the audience a correct line (he says he wrote it in an “evangelical spirit” to encourage non-monagamous whatnot)—but luckily art, too, is queer in the sense of being excessive, anti-normative, counter, original, spare, strange, even when we mean it to be Queer in the sense of the latest translation of the gospel of progress towards the horizon of universal polymorphous inclusive diversity (which is of course relentlessly homogenizing—although it hardly need to be said that most of the modes of ‘resisting’ ‘globohomo’ are at least as cruelly out to suppress difference, which, after all, no one actually likes).

I suppose a task to give myself is to think and write more—although I don’t know where to put it except here—about the gay art I like, and the ways (although Fishback might hate to hear it!) it does the sort of Zionist-inspired world-building gay intellectuals and writers from the 70s-80s generation like Michael Denneny, queering its Queerness.

Because I still want to think—not least for the sake of my seventeen-year-old self, but indeed because in some way our collective political future depends on its being true—that there is, generally, a non-retarded kind of identity politics, and, specifically, a gay male culture that is not made of marketable sexual fantasy or validating glances from the gaze of Capital or our own flavor of culture industry sludge (or our own generations-late histrionic reenactments of the dead avant-garde, as if sexmurder were still to be invented after Bataille and Musil who were already late to Sade’s party—or as if the Nth iteration of free love experiments of 19th-century utopians were still on the edge of anything—if Agnes Callard is doing it, you know it’s not interesting) but, in that Arendtian sense, both a perspective on a world, commenting on its inhabitants and common objects of perception, and inviting new comment on itself but also—and this is why it’s not just a take or even a thesis but art—a little world in itself, with corners and circuits of pleasure unseeable from the central promontory of its supposed Point-of-View.

To think of two not-gay (but also not-not-gay?) poets writing about gardens, there is a dialectic, as Marvell says, whereby:

The mind, that ocean where each kind

does straight its own resemblance find

yet it creates, transcending these

far other worlds, and other seas;

annihilating all that’s made

to a green thought in a green shade.

And back again—in a pulsing, shuttling motion between representing reality and recreating it, between the play of patterns of identification and their ecstatic suspension in a thrill of plentitudious self-emptiness (between being gay in the sense of being someone in a world of types of someones and somethings, and being queer in the sense of ‘self-shattering’ unity-dissolution-with-the-world—this is the argument, I take it, of Bersani’s Homos, in which, for a moment, he seemed to find within the emerging field of queer theory a way of making sense of how gay male culture and sexuality, in their difference from and relation to each other, compose a distinct sort of experience).

Or as Winters puts it, echoing Marvell’s garden and his wish elsewhere to “tear our pleasures with rough strife,” wanting the slow acsesis of iterative acts of always flawed and partial world-making by which we move through the continuous present of cultural production but also dreaming of a shattering finality of accumulation by which one at least breaks through and apart into something realer wilder and perhaps unsurvivable:

These will advance in their due series, space

The season like a tranquil dwelling-place.

And yet excitement swells me, vein by vein:

I long to crowd the little garden, gain

Its sweetness in my hand and crush it small

And taste it in a moment, time and all!

These trees, whose slow growth measures off my years,

I would expand to greatness. No one hears,

And I am still retarded in duress!

And this is like that other restlessness

Restless, retarded, in duress—the condition of the (or at any rate this) critic!