Dear Ryan,

It’s been a few days since I came to your rehearsal, invited to write on you, to you, of you, here. I’ve been winding my way through the East Village to try to find a place to match my reflection of Hold Me In The Water to language. There we were in the studio, bare bones, just you performing the script, moving a foot or two from one taped square on the floor to another. I won’t get to see this work as a production – no set, lighting, music. The memory of your performance in that studio will stay with me as an act of transmission from your gay, disabled body to my queer, disabled body. I tear up as I write this, fused to the viscous, elusive felt-sense of having shared in your love story with my own past: the lover who sponge-bathed me, the first to do this who was not my mother or a nurse, the lover who would swaddle me in blankets like a baby during the winter, and the subsequent lovers who learned how to massage my hip, either as an accompaniment to sex or as its own activity. 

My hip bears this archive of touch, which offsets the archive of medicalization, or the warm-up before physical therapy to make room, not for pleasure, but for more or different kinds of pain. But my body bears the loss of this touch, too. Even now, in the past year, I am grieving one such friend turned lover, who might be the best masseur so far, which of course, I believed on some level, must make us soulmates. 

When someone connects to you, to your body, and that connection makes you feel even more like yourself, it is a type of remaking, a type of revolution. When so many experiences of being queer and crip in the world are born out of invalidation, or exist on the level of pure transaction at best, or pure threat at worst, the delicious moments when care, desire, passion, and curiosity can commingle feels like a breakthrough to another galaxy. This is where we belong, and surely where we are meant to stay, aren’t we? And when we’re not there, when we can’t stay there, where do we go? Do we forego the idea that it can happen again, tell ourselves we don’t deserve it? 

I remember when you and I were on a call with Mia four years ago, one of many marathon zooms where we opened up to each other about our experiences of Access Intimacy and our desires for more of it. She shared this old bread analogy. She said that when you’re used to asking for bread and not getting any, someone can give you 26-day-old bread and you’ll take it. She asked, “but what if you could have the actual bread you want?”

I still go back to that all the time, when I feel like I’m afraid to ask for what I want out of fear of not getting it, and I already start to bargain before I’ve put the ask out there. Like, surely I will have to pay in some way, and I should know better. I’m reminded of this when, over lunch after rehearsal you said to me, “I will be seen as a bad gay [in this show] because I wanted a fairytale.” I’ve turned your remark over again and again, perplexed. Who dreams of one day getting a piece of stale bread? Between your gay and disabled selves, surely, one of you, or both of you, must be allowed to go for the mouth-watering. 

I’ve been thinking lately about “coming out” being an iterative concept, instead of a one-time, in or out kind of decision or breakthrough. Our sense of what it means to be “out” in the world changes as we grow, as our perception of the world shifts, as people come into our lives and remake or reshape our understanding of who we are. Hold Me in The Water bears many different types of coming out, some synchronous with age and experience, and some asynchronous with these things. 

It’s a portrait of a young man (you) who knows many things in his body that he has yet to share or express to someone else, yet he knows. He knows who he is, he knows what his desire means to him, and he trusts in that enough to open up to someone. Something about that really hit me, and it inverts an implicit hierarchy between disabled and nondisabled forms of knowing; oneself, and one’s body and emotions. What’s possible when the invitation into our vulnerability is power? Because it is ours to hold, it is ours to name and to open. 

Thank you for this invitation, for opening up your desires and questions to the page and now to all of us. Here’s to swapping stories (a.k.a. performances) with our mouths full.

Love,

Perel