Thrust: A Novel

Frédéric, my beautiful man-dove,

What a wonderful story! Verging so beautifully on homoerotic sentimentality. Are you, in secret, a novelist? Or merely as fluid as a woman in your erotic torments?

You want to give form to freedom, you say — the abstract idea of freedom? Let me tell you about freedom. Freedom is the body of a woman. The devouring, generating paradox of her body. Every law every aspiration every journey a man takes fails in the face of her body.

The women I know who sell their bodies for cash in this gleaming city are separated from the bourgeois married women by a membrane thinner than a scrotal sack. To wit: by law, any woman who has premarital sex is a prostitute. Our bodies — and by bodies, I mean our sex, our cunts, the sources of our reproductive worth — are held by our legislators at a level just above livestock, a fact I know you tire of me restating. Yes, it’s true, women have and will always provide sex to men for any number of reasons: for food, for clothing, for entertainment, for housing, for a fiction of respectability or a fiction of whore-gasm. The commercial direction of the act, the production of the sex worker as part of the workforce, unveils the tensions and falsehoods embedded inside your precious word and fiction of “freedom.”

Freedom? We need a new fiction that begins with the poor. The hungry. The filthy and the obscene. Not the exhausted bodies that bear the weight of a society’s growth — women who bear children — but women who carry the surplus, the spent seed that adds no number to the population. Women who emerge from crossdressing men. Hermaphrodites and lesbians, nádleehi, lhamana, katoeys, mukhannathun. Look them up, dearest, if I’ve confused you. Bring me Kalonymus ben Kalonymus, Eleanor Rykener, Thomasine Hall. Bring me Joan of Arc. Bring me Albert Cashier and James Barry, Joseph Lobdell and Frances Thompson.

We need a new story of freedom that begins with the body of a woman with neither children nor the cyclops desire of the male penis entering or leaving the hole of her. We need a regendering of colossal scale. A manwoman.

Design that, my love, and you have yourself a kind of freedom.

But let me not leave without giving you a story. The story begins with the image of a naked dead woman whose commerce was sexuality. I have included a postcard — a POSTCARD! Produced from the event, borrowed from my considerable collection.

What event? That season, there was no other in the city, perhaps in the nation. The esteemed editor of the Herald, upon encountering the body of murdered sex worker Helen Jewett, replied that he could scarcely look at it. At it! According to his later report, he slowly began to discover the lineaments of her corpse, “as one would the beauties of a statue of marble.” A statue! Do you see, my dove? If you were here, I would read it to you aloud: “My God,” he exclaimed. “How like a statue!” For not a vein was to be seen. According to him, the body looked as “full-polished as the pure Parian marble.” He is speaking your language! “The perfect figure — the exquisite limbs — the fine face — the full arms — the beautiful bust — all — all surpassing in every respect the Venus de Medicis.”

I give you exhibit A, wherein a dead woman is made eternally beautiful.