What makes a pervert? What unmakes one? “I want people to notice the libidinal charge of the term,” Kay Gabriel writes. “Which, of course, means that it’s fun to say, whichever side of the disgust you land on.”
Her book Perverts, out now from Nightboat, is a long poem that insists on the epic while satirizing its pretensions. The perverts here, somewhat saintlike, somewhat sedated, have dreams full of “waste and love,” debt and liberation, all amidst the anti-trans panic. Gabriel, “the heiress of all those who, since Rimbaud, sought the good life” (McKenzie Wark), collages their dreams with our political discontents.
—Dante Silva
Dante Silva: Who, what is a pervert?
Kay Gabriel: Everyone, and I mean that.
Though I’m interested in pervert as a word that nobody calls themselves. Even gay people are much more likely to call something perverted than they are to say, Me, I’m a pervert. As if to label oneself a pervert were a self-slur too far. And I’m interested in the force of that disgust.
There’s of course a sense in which “pervert” in the book becomes something dignified rather than something wretched, though it’s not so simple a process as reclaiming a slur or whatever, that’s much too cheap.
Instead I want people to notice the libidinal charge of the term. Which, of course, means that it’s fun to say, whichever side of the disgust you land on, and whether or not it’s a joke.
Dante Silva: You describe the project as “an epic poem stitched together from the dreams of / friends or strangers, delegates / of the dream assembly.” The work invokes these traditions of the epic poem, and then deliberately disturbs them.
How did it start?
Kay Gabriel: I wanted a durable, capacious structure for a poem where I could actually think about a lot of things at once and pull a lot of people into that conversation. I’m a woman who loves to talk. I don’t love to dominate a conversation, but I love to be in one. And I crave a structure where I can stretch out and think out loud with other people.
The straightforward sense in which “Perverts” is actually an epic is that it’s a long poem. And it’s got a canto structure, its internal sections, which each have something of a theme, and which I added to give myself some structure for sequencing people’s dreams together and putting them into conversation.
On the other hand, “Perverts” does a lot to disavow or make fun of its own epic pretensions. It’s like: epic!—but not too much, Mary. I didn’t want it to be self-serious or bombastic or cosmic. I didn’t need to map out Hell. Whatever ambitions “Perverts” has for scale and insight, it can only achieve in a collective way, through the language and the minds of many people doing something together. And because people do it with a certain levity and a commitment to the gag.
I experimented with dream writing in my first book, Kissing Other People or the House of Fame. The experiment of that book’s title poem was to collect a year of my dream journal with very little editing or rearranging. And I felt I wasn’t done with dream language, but I didn’t want to just sink into my own, which would’ve felt too narrow. So I invited other people to tell me their dreams and I built an argument out of mine and theirs.
Dante Silva: What was that process of collaboration like?
Kay Gabriel: A joy. I mean, it was a total delight. I loved inviting people to give me something for the book. I loved transcribing other people’s dreams, or playing on repeat a recording of someone else narrating a dream while I figured out where to put it in and how to write around it. I loved getting somebody to be a repeat collaborator. I have some friends who wrote down five or ten dreams for me, and for months their dreams would punctuate our regular conversations. I loved recording my husband Seva when he would wake up in the morning and come into our kitchen and tell me something vivid—he never remembers his dreams long enough to write them down, so I had to capture the audio.
I loved noticing how some friends would organize others into sending me their dreams. They’d tell me: We know you think you’re done editing this book but here’s a good one, we got you a good one, you have to include it.
I loved seeing people work through the creative challenge of figuring out what to put in the book.
I loved deepening my relationships with people through the weirdly intimate, compulsive act of sharing. And when near or total strangers gave me their dreams, I loved that, too.
My collaborators and I sometimes dream back and forth, “Here’s one I had about you,” and sometimes they dream each other. So the book starts to feel like a densely organized social structure, where other people have relationships with each other that aren’t mediated through me, and that invites a reader to enter.
Dante Silva: Is there a politics to the collaborative form?
Kay Gabriel: Definitely. It’s very important to me that this book could only have happened because a lot of people decided to do something together. Participating in this project meant that people assembled a collective language that they couldn’t have developed on their own. And then the infrastructure of the project made it possible for people’s individual contributions to mean something and do something, for their insight to radiate and their language to activate thought.
Something I find particularly meaningful is putting people into contact through the book, people who may not actually know each other well but whose dreams are a lot more illuminating in proximity to each other than they would be without that unorthodox context. So there’s something of an organizer’s instinct in that as well: you and you don’t know each other yet, but you ought to recognize each other through this thing you have in common.
That’s a lesson that I learned from and put into practice with Patrick DeDauw, the book’s dedicatee, who I regularly collaborate with, in writing and in other projects. Getting people to wake up to each other, to notice each other, sometimes through a shared relationship to a third party. Getting someone with something amazing to contribute and some trepidation about herself to step with more confidence, to notice what she’s already serving and to do it with that much more cunt because she’s never gonna have to do it alone.
Dante Silva: In the poem “TRANNIES, by Larry Kramer” (a reimagination of Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots), you ask, “am I / still a faggot, theologically, and does it matter if / and when he thinks so, too.”
What makes a faggot, theologically?
Kay Gabriel: First perverts, now faggots! No, no. I won’t say. They’ll never catch me.
That passage is about a trans woman who’s hooking up with a straight man but she doesn’t know whether he’s clocked her. So she’s running through every possible permutation of how his perception of reality might be colliding with his sense of himself and what he wants out of her. She’s especially weighing the possibility that he might clock her and then if he does he might react as if sex with her has brought him into contact with homosexuality, and if so he might be into it or he might be disgusted or both—he might experience it as perversion. And then there’s an insinuation that she doesn’t entirely know how she feels about that possible scenario, if she would feel affirmatively recognized or thoroughly distorted or maybe both if the man who’s fucking her thought she was a faggot.
People seeing themselves through each other, people coming to know themselves only through each other, people experiencing a destabilizing misrecognition or coming into focus as a subject and thereby having a basis for taking individual or collective action, that’s the link between “Perverts” and “TRANNIES.” How do I know I’m a pervert? How do I know I’m a faggot? Well, what do you think about me?
On the other hand, kind of like Holly Woodlawn said: a theologian I am not.