THE DREADED “UNITY CHAPTER”

the next portrait in the gallery of “cyberwriters” from my non-fiction book on outsider lit in pandemic year 2021

THE DREADED “UNITY CHAPTER”

“It’s annoying that to be an artist and say the things that need to be said, that there even needs to be some sort of ‘free speech movement.’” The multifaceted, multilevel, multi-persona known on this plane as Unity said this on the phone with me in December 2021. We had been talking about the apolitical free speech zones that publications like Misery Tourism and ExPat Press had tried to carve out of the raw terrain of Twitter lit, at some cost to their reputations. Unity, a writer/singer/drag performer, described to me his arrival at a position beyond politics, or as beyond politics as was possible in our present media environment, Nature abhorring vacuums as it does.

I asked him if politics could ever be separate from art and literature.

“I very much would want that to be the case,” he said. “I used to be very political, to an extent that was really unhealthy for my mental and spiritual health. Since then I’ve developed a much more negative view of politics, particularly since developing my art practice and becoming more creatively unblocked. I think about politics, that whatever it is—be it party, candidate, grassroots social movement, or whatever the case may be—is a hustle. Someone’s trying to sell you a fantasy version of reality in order to gain something for themselves, whether it’s power, money, or both. Stature.”

Unity described the well-known maneuver of selling a “really compelling villain” which gives people no choice but to join in celebrating a hero who is going to save the day. “That’s all well and good,” he said, “but as an artist I want to be the least invested in any kind of fantasy story like that as I can be. I want to strip away those layers of deception and be able to experience and interface with the world as it actually is.” Political stories can be the source of tremendous comfort because they put people together into groups that think alike, and make people feel more safe and secure. “But at the end of the day there’s nothing safe about the world.”

Unity’s writing is a gritty, hallucinatory three-dimensional space which reflects his experiences in the unsafe world, as he has spent ample time on the prickly, ragged fringes of society—down and out in NYC squats, hitchhiking, prostitution, drugs, countercultural queer communes in Tennessee, mental health run-ins with the law, aborted excursions into academia. We didn’t dwell on these things in our conversation—I don’t possess the journalistic surgical equipment to make such incisions—but I had read about it in his writing, and the frankness of his literary output pushed the envelope.

I might not have taken the steps I took farther into the gallery of Misery Loves Company, the weekly zoom reading series put together by Misery Tourism, if I had not seen Unity there. Unity is a person I recognized from a life pre-pandemic; of all the people I will describe here in these pages, he is the only person I have physically met, IRL (the rest are apparitions on the screen, at most postal correspondents sending and receiving packages). Unity was a link to the previous open mic series I went to in my previous life, called Word Thursdays, in Treadwell, NY. (To me he once called it “Turd Thursdays.”) I’d been going to this open mic about a half-hour away from where I live since 2011, to read my poetry. A pretty tame crowd. A lot of blue-stocking energy, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Until Unity showed up.

At the Bright Hill Center every other Thursday night, he was a performer, telling imaginative stories of a hard-luck existence that he seemed to have barely survived. At the time he was in his thirties. He had (still has) a slightly snarling comical speaking voice, like a streetwise James Merrill, that I later learned could give way to a beautiful ability to sing. He wrote his own songs (I think they were his own creations, he also sang a lot of Lana Del Ray which not being a fan I didn’t recognize at the time, maybe he was duping everybody, maybe just me, what does it matter). I saw him perform in drag once at an arts fundraiser; he looked like a heavily made-up, feminized King of Siam. On Instagram in his stories he would post moving clips of himself playing piano and singing that, like so much of the ghostly online ephemera of our time, would disappear, temporary portals to a private torch song lounge.

Unity is a nom de plume, or nom de guerre, or nom de vie. Aliases always seem to be personally deployed survival mechanisms, rebirths, and I got the feeling that Unity was meant to be a catch-all amulet-charm reigning in a turbulent set of competing personas through integration, amalgamation, federation. He was a mysterious character, like a rapper or graffiti artist tagging himself on a wall. I think I spotted his real name once but that has slithered away into the recesses, a memory eel going to its hidden lair among the digital coral reefs. In my palsied recall of the pre-pandemic times, Unity at Word Thursdays often made references to a fantastical made-up corporate being that he represented, as an agent, that was a harbinger of world dominance. He told stories that either hinted or explicitly made mention of gay hustling in New York City, living in squats and suffering extravagant meth-induced hallucinations of lizard people. The sedate crowd at Word Thursdays, I think, didn’t know how to take his bizarre quasi-Burroughs routines, brutal autobiography heavily tainted with dark fantasy. To say that Unity, with his contrarian sense of humor and natty clothes, reminded me of a younger John Waters might be an instance of me flailing and reaching for a facile example of gay icon status, but I still think the allusion holds.

There’s so much I can’t remember, to the point that one would think I am not suited for this job, chronicling the times. Everything is fading, eroded by abrasive tectonics of social media geology and the profound psychological disruption of the pandemic that came in 2020. COVID-19, with its initial lockdown forbidding in-person events indoors, assassinated my open mic existence at Word Thursdays, the crucial artistic outlet and vestiges of a social life. This was to be replaced with something a thousand times more beautifully lonely and self-consciously miserable. A vital transition.

Like the chink in the wall between Pyramus and Thisbe, all online relationships, society, dating apps, transactions, and conversation happens through a small hole, even tinier if you are on your phone. The world is crammed through bottlenecks that are prone to glitches, delays, feedback, struggling fragmented wifi. Misery Loves Company was made possible by the letter Z: Zoom. Others will write the books about the impact Zoom made on our global microhistory as a species hiding from the specter of coronavirus. Everybody with a computer became familiar with the bored grid of faces staring back at you, the surrogate society that can’t hug, can’t kiss, can’t quite speak words with the vibrational density of soulful, in-person conversation, the pheromones and sixth-sense of being in the physical presence of a fellow human being. My only other experience with Zoom was covering town board meetings for my local rinky-dink newspaper as a gig economy freelancer. It didn’t occur to me that it could be used as a renegade literary salon, an embattled oasis for, as Unity himself tweeted on September 4th, “oddballs, losers, loners, schizo freaks, nerds, fags, psychos, punks, brawlers, bastards, drunks, stoners, bimbos, and beyond.”

In the first volume of Brian Boyd’s biography of Nabokov, The Russian Years, the Russian writer lived in his exile years in various cities around Europe, among other exiled “White” Russians, emigres. Sirin, as he was called, was throughout the 1920s and 1930s a habitué of literary salons where the literati of the Russian emigration living in Europe stood up to read their works to each other. In 1922, at the Berlin apartment of Gleb Struve, a secret literary circle including Nabokov and other emigre poets and writers met and called themselves Bratstvo Kruglogo Stola, “Brotherhood of the Round Table.” They at first wanted to publish a satirical journal and raid the offices of Spolokhi, another emigre journal which had begun as apolitical but had been infected by association with a pro-Bolshevik writer at one of its events. Politics and their influence on writers led to schisms in the emigre literary scene in Berlin. Eventually the Brotherhood’s meetings consisted of gatherings of literary friends reading their works to each other.

I have always read about such meeting places with envy and wished I could have lived in such an environment, and rubbed elbows with intelligentsia reading their chapters and poems and acting out plays, sometimes for hours on end. But the crucial element, besides living in an urban environment (I live in the country), is missing: exile. The condition which, as I had learned in my reading at college lit courses, was all but necessary for writers like Joyce in Trieste, Faulkner in Hollywood, Byron in Italy, Hemingway in Paris, Nabokov in Berlin. Alienation from one’s home, self-examination in a foreign land, often bitter discomfort and disorientation amongst unfamiliar natives led to creative literary fervor and masterpieces.

Where would English speakers of a globalized digital array of interconnected continents be exiled from? Nowhere. Until the coronavirus. COVID-19 hounded people indoors, exiling them from their own countries, a fearful uprooting, sheltering in place. Who can say how this public health exile-of-sorts stacks up against Nabokov’s and other emigre writer’s exile from their home country of Russia? I never met an inept comparison I did not want to serenade and take into the night, make a love object out of, take to a loud nightclub and grind on, so I will take this comparison and impregnate it. Zoom allowed reading spaces like Misery Loves Company (and Performance Anxiety and others) to flourish in a state of pandemic exile and become the new literary salons for dispossessed writers fucking around in their own living rooms, kitchens, basements, desperate for connection, drinking and getting high, reading their poetry and fiction and philosophical treatises to each other.

Back to Unity: the guy writes under many further aliases, cells have undergone division, characters have been assigned roles. Unity expressed admiration for Charles Dickens’ dramatic performances of his work and his “insane menagerie of wild and grotesque characters.” Fiction intersects with reality at the point of the efflorescing persona shedding identity petals. I’m sure everything Unity writes has at least some granule of truth to it, truth crunched down into rocks and smoked through a glass pipe. I have never wanted to look too deeply into what’s true and what’s make believe about Unity: it’s too chilling. All I can do is respond to his writing.

One of the better things he may have written is an essay published in Hobart “Fucked Up Love” column entitled “How We Looked Together” where he tenderly describes a down and out love relationship he had with a man named Adac, while Unity was transitioning to be a woman. I think. Unity as a writer is above-average literate and Dickens imagery abounds: “I’m like Oliver Twist and [Adac’s] the Artful Dodger….Setting aside the fact that Oliver is a pure, perfectly Christlike specimen of sinless orphanhood, whereas I was a bipolar, weed-addled, newly transsexual, alcoholic fuck-up who’d stopped going to work meetings and classes while still accepting the $7,000 checks my university’s humanities division continued to lob in my direction quarter after quarter, the analogy wasn’t bad.” Adac lures a willing Unity into the demimonde of prostitutes and urchins where many of his essays and stories take place: squatting, scoring drugs, transactional sex, an interchangeable web of questionable contacts. This interchangeability of borderline-anonymous people as a stylistic and thematic feature might unfortunately return in the work of some other writers discussed in this study, inheritors (it would seem) of Bret Easton Ellis’ practice of holding large casting calls for his fiction, round ups of shallow characters lined up in the hallway outside the rehearsal studio looking over their scripts, characters as shallow as their pockets holding narcotics are deep… Identities are just skin on screen attached to a name, bodies as sites for sexual desire and drug effects—this says something, but what? The Interface governs all, the individuals are just extras offering textures and sensation, which as Byron said, “is the only proof that we exist.”

As an outsider to this all-too-lived-in world—as most of us might be, at least on this exact scale—I can’t judge it although it sounded to my naive ears like a place that was very dangerous, lots of needles, broken glass, pointy things waiting to snag you. Pointy people wanting to puncture you.

“The thing that’s unrealistic about Oliver Twist is that Oliver never really breaks bad,” Unity writes in the Hobart essay. “In a more realistic story, Oliver would have started picking pockets for Fagin, pimping out little girls like Nancy, and smoking crack with the Artful Dodger like seven pages into the book. Then the rest of the story would have been Oliver and the Artful Dodger getting high and fucking, then trying to outsmart and out-hustle one another. One of them would have become the other’s pimp, and one of them would have OD’d or been murdered. They would have taken so many drugs that they began to share each other’s psychotic delusions. They would have thought the lizard people were chasing them, and gotten on a bus to Tennessee without telling anybody where they went. One of them would have alienated all her friends and terrified her family. One of them wouldn’t have been able to stay out of jail. One of them would have detransitioned and gone to live in a mental hospital. One of them would have disappeared without a trace. They both would have gotten AIDS, passing toxic fluids back and forth between each other, each one daring the other to take that bigger hit, swallow that extra pill, snort that other line, hook up with that next sketchy trick. Pushing each other harder, deeper, further over the edge, until they reach one of two inevitable conclusions: the freedom that comes with surrender, or death.”

Unity has many gears but the two most often ratcheted into, that I have witnessed, are shock and almost unbearably plangent and beautiful pathos.

He is also very funny and fearless. Already tripping the light fantastic among the gargoyles, he reaches new heights of outrage with his 17-year old trans alter ego Sybil Rain. Sybil Rain is a shock bombardier aboard a B-52 flying over the bourgeois suburbs filled with straight people, dropping warheads of bad taste, paying no never-you-mind to morality or what’s good for society. I don’t know if we will ever be lucky enough to see her unpublished novel Gag (I’m not sure of the exact title, but I have seen this excerpted a few times online, and discussed at least once with Unity in person) but from the excerpts we have, if we do it will be like the Nazis opening the Ark of the Covenant: blasphemous and face-melting.

John Waters, in a YouTube interview from the mid-2010s, pointed out that by seeking middle-class respectability, gay people were at risk of becoming “squares,” and that “To me gay people were outlaws, we used our wit for fighting words.” I shared this quote with Unity, who said that, “When you are in the fringes of society and you do face particular kinds of struggle, you become more interesting.”

Remarkably, explicit gay content is accepted at Misery Loves Company without any noticeable comment. I hear my brother’s voice, and voices of guys from my homophobic high school, what would they say to this. Is this part of the apolitical free speech zone that has been created? It’s a wonder how much of it is letting the envelope expand to contain the shape of the free speech absolutism and how much of it is honest appreciation of what Unity writes. The same could be said for other readers but his is a stark example. He has blown right by the borders of genre enforced by the tollbooth operators I used to sneer at.