(cont.) "Growing up, I was a fairly typical kid as far as I could tell. I watched a lot of television and hated school without really understanding why. My parents were divorced and I spent weekends with my father across town. They both got remarried and I got along okay with my step parents. There wasn't tons of affection but there wasn't a lot of drama, either. We were very Midwestern in that respect. Life was always a 'three' on a scale of one to five. Like always. It wouldn't have made for good television, I guess. (Laughs.) I played some sports -- mostly baseball and soccer -- and was never really great, although I wasn't terrible, either."
"The only thing that made me different, in sort of an obvious or categorical way, was that I wasn't interested in girls in -- well, you know -- a romantic sense. What? No, I didn't think of myself as 'gay' or 'homosexual' or anything that might be classified as an 'identity' or 'orientation' for a long time. 'Cursed' is probably a better word for it. (Laughs.) Like in third or fourth grade, when all of my equally unremarkable friends started talking about girls or whatever, I couldn't understand why I wasn't feeling it. Like I didn't relate to them at all, and it made me angry and probably a little judgmental for reasons I didn't understand at the time."
"I remember this one kid in my grade -- his name was Devon -- and he was more openly rebellious, one of the kids who never did his homework and laughed at the teachers and smoked cigarettes behind the school. I didn't like him at all, but what I really couldn't understand was when, one day, some of my friends happened to go over to Devon's house and they drank some vodka and got wasted. I don't know where I was, but I remember hearing about it the next day. It wasn't like anyone got caught or got into trouble -- this was the 1970s, so there weren't any adults anywhere that I can remember, except for our stupid teachers -- but I remember feeling really betrayed that some of friend's went to Devon's house and got drunk."
"And my friends couldn't understand why I was upset. They were like 'what's your problem -- it was fun' and I didn't know what to say, which I'm sure made me seem like some sort of 'Goody Two Shoes,' which was not how I was or even how I wanted to be. Which made me angrier, because I couldn't explain why I was angry. And there's nothing worse than being out of touch with your emotions, especially when they're making you say dickish things."
"Looking back, it's obvious that I was angry that they weren't afflicted with the same problem that I was, which -- in case you forgot -- was not liking girls, because that was a rule I could never imagine breaking -- like literally I couldn't even imagine it -- and yet here were my friends going around breaking all sorts of other rules without suffering any consequences. It just seemed unfair to me, and like many suburban kids who don't lack for food or shelter, I didn't realize that life was inherently unfair."
"I wanted my friends to feel as constrained and uncertain as I did. Or maybe 'uncertain' is the wrong word because this was when I began to suspect that I was seriously fucked up. Like defective or unhealthy, almost like I had a fatal disease, but one that only I knew about. Which at first I tried to compensate for by seeming not-at-all fucked up in other ways. But I knew I was fucked up, which after a few years or decades will change your outlook on a lot of things."
"It's like you want your exterior life to resemble your interior life, so you make decisions that allow that to happen. You effectively engineer some bad or ridiculous shit. There's a tendency toward or desire for consistency between the internal and the external."
"Except then -- if you're lucky -- it finally dawns on you that what you thought made you fucked up actually makes you better. Not in like an objective sense -- like I think I'm 'better' than anyone else -- but in a subjective sense of knowing that you are a more interesting person than you otherwise would have been as a result of what you thought was once a curse."
"And then, in keeping with my whole internal/external consistency theory, you stop engineering so much shit, and the world becomes more interesting. More beautiful, more fascinating, more extreme. Again, not in an objective sense but in a sense that you can now see things that you previously were beyond your capacity to see. There's an intensity to it that you never understood before. It's not completely inaccurate to say that it's like being on drugs, or certain kinds of drugs that make you see things differently. Which being here is something that I can say with confidence has advantages and disadvantages, but I wouldn't have it any other way."
"I often think what my life would have been like if I had been straight. Would I be in some middle-management job spending eight to ten hours each day looking at spreadsheets for a company actively ruining the world just so I could make enough money to support my children and pay my mortgage? Would I be divorced and remarried, having the kids on weekends and for a week at the beach in the summer? It seems possible, because that's what my friends from elementary school ended up doing. I mean, sure, they were able to fuck around for a few years and have some fun I guess, but that's all condoned and expected, meaning they never really 'stepped off the playing field' if you know what I mean. It used to be that saying you were gay was like getting a red card in soccer, like you were done playing in conventional society, which was one of the great things about being gay back then. Now it seems like it's getting more difficult, like being gay isn't enough to get you off the field. Maybe you need to see things, like I do. (Laughs.)"
"Then again, I'm stuck in here for the foreseeable future, so I guess we're all incarcerated, just in different ways. But I'm not working for anyone, either. Nobody believes what I can really see -- or maybe you do, since you're here asking me about it -- but I can promise you that I spend a lot more time thinking about stuff than most people my age. The mind is the ultimate drug, is something one of my friends in here used to say. He's gone now, though."
"So I live in my head, but I still see things. We have grounds here, and sometimes I go out and stand next to the fence and I just watch the forest. And I wouldn't say this to anyone because it would just lead to a lot of scrutiny and other practical problems, which is not something I want to engage in with 'the authorities,' but I can assure you that they're out there, moving through the trees, and I can see them."
"So that's my other gift, I guess, and I'm not sure I would have had one without the other. Maybe one day I'll find out, in which case I'll look forward to talking to you again."
Pictures taken in Fort Tryon Park on May 28, 2016. Text excerpted from The #Gods Project: A Training Manual (Section 2, "Interviews with the Institutionalized.")
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05/28/2016
ORDER HERE
A RADICAL NEW MYTH ABOUT SEX, FAITH, AND THOSE OF US WHO WILL NEVER DIE
A young boy wanders into the woods of Harlem and witnesses the abduction of his sister by a glowing creature. Forty years later, now working as a New York City homicide detective, Gus is assigned to a case in which he unexpectedly succumbs to a vision that Helen is still alive. To find her, he embarks on an uorthodox investigation that leads to an ancient civilization of gods and the people determined to bring them back.
In this colossal new novel from the author of The Metropolis Case, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice collides with a new religion founded by three corporate office workers, creating something beautiful, illogical, and overwhelming. Part sex manifesto, part religious text, part Manhattan noir—with a dose of deadly serious, internet inspired satire—#gods is a sprawling inquest into the nature of faith and resistance in the modern world. With each turn of the page, #gods will leave you increasingly reborn.
Praise for #gods
“#gods is a mystery, an excavation of myths, an index of modern life, a gay coming-of-age story, an office satire, a lyrical fever dream, a conspiracy. One of the most ambitious novels in recent memory—and a wild, possibly transformative addition to the canon of gay literature—it contains multitudes, and seethes with brilliance.” —Mark Doten, author of The Infernal
“Matthew Gallaway’s #gods is a novel so brilliant, so funny, so full of strange and marvelous things, I couldn’t stop writing OMG WTF I <3 THIS SO MUCH in its margins. It’s rare to find a novel that so dazzlingly reinvigorates age-old meditations on faith and f&!*ing, art and eros. Luminous, enterprising, and sublimely cheeky, #gods tells the story, the myth, the dream of the human soul in all its glorious complexity.” —Suzanne Morrison, author of Yoga Bitch
“Matthew Gallaway’s storytelling manages to be both dreamy and serious; lean and luxurious. His words carry an incantatory power of mythic storytelling where beauty and savagery wrap around each other like bright threads in a gorgeous tapestry.” —Natasha Vargas-Cooper, author of Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America
“If the ancient gods were just like us, only more so, then the same could be said for this strange, wonderful book, in which the mundane sorrows and small triumphs of very ordinary lives glow ever so slightly around the edges, sometimes quite literally. At once an oddly romantic send-up of dead-end office culture and an offbeat supernatural procedural, #gods is terrifically weird, melancholy, sexy, and charming.” —Jacob Bacharach, author of The Bend of the World
'It’s to the credit of Matthew Gallaway’s enchanting, often funny first novel that it doesn’t require a corresponding degree of obsession from readers, but may leave them similarly transported: the book is so well written — there’s hardly a lazy sentence here — and filled with such memorable lead and supporting players that it quickly absorbs you into its worlds.'
-- The New York Times
Music: Death Culture at Sea and Saturnine
Listen or download songs and records from my indie-rock past with Saturnine here and Death Culture at Sea here.
Music Video: Remembrance of Things Past
Watch the rock opera Remembrance of Things Past written and performed by Saturnine and Frances Gibson, starring Bennett Madison and Sheila McClear.
Video: The Chaos Detective
The Chaos Detective is a series about a man searching for 'identity' as he completes assignments from a mysterious organization. Watch the first episode (five parts) on YouTube.