dyke drama at the end of the world 💥
an interview with Davey Davis, author of X and the earthquake room
If you are a writer prone to bouts of despair and fantasies of quitting forever, I really recommend becoming friends with another writer who is both unbelievably talented and incredibly kind. For me, that friend is Davey Davis. Davey and I met on Twitter early in the Trump era and since then, they have talked me off the ledge about a short story or some other odious writing project more times than I can count.
If you’re not already familiar, Davey is the writer behind
, a newsletter about sex, art, and queer internet discourse. They’re also the author of two novels, both set in near-future dystopian landscapes: the earthquake room and X. In the earthquake room, a dyke inadvertently infects her girlfriend with a herpes-coded infection and then loses herself in a search for redemption against a backdrop of extreme weather and political instability. In X, a sadist and unreliable narrator named Lee searches high and low for X, a femme dom who really, uh, did it to them at a warehouse party. Lee lives in the novel’s version of Brooklyn, where climate change has turned coffee into a scarce, unaffordable luxury item and the government is in the process of “exporting” anyone who threatens white hetero-hegemony: sex workers, political dissidents, queer and trans people, etc. Lee must find X, or else risk losing her forever.
Davey’s novels use the mundane to build upon terror and dystopia. Even at the end of the world, there is small talk to endure and rent to pay. Familiar elements of queer life like gossip, friendship, and parasocial relationships with podcast hosts exist snuggled up alongside mortal danger. I recommend them wholeheartedly to horny freaks and others interested in catching a glimpse of a plausible future where things are even worse.
Last month, Davey and I met up in a GoogleDoc to discuss dyke drama, the perks of being a little illegible online, and what makes a good literary sex scene. I learned so much from this conversation and hope you do, too.
Maddy: Hi Davey! I’m a huge fan of you and your work. When I was getting ready for this interview, I headlined a blank notebook page “Davey Books” and immediately wrote the phrase, “dystopia and the pressure it puts on lesbian relationships.” the earthquake room and X are set in a familiar, not-so-distant future where climate change and a fascist U.S. police state mean that the characters move through their lives and relationships with a persistent, suffocating sense of doom. As I read them, both novels are also love stories with tragic elements. In X, Lee is wrecked by their breakup with Petra, and in the earthquake room, bea and k are nearly undone by each other. Can you talk about the specific hell of lesbian breakups, or why you keep writing dyke drama at the end of the world?
Davey: Hi Maddy! Likewise. It’s an honor. And I love this question!
I grew up with a lot of sisters, and being a dyke has always felt like an extension of that: a forever slumber-party with my sister-wife. (Yes, I’m opening with incest. Bear with me.)
As gay people, we are often forced to reconstitute straight notions of “the family” in order to survive, and many of us do that by integrating it with the sexual and romantic, which are present in the straight white nuclear family but in ways made invisible by heteronormativity or, in my opinion, perverted by nonconsensual power dynamics. Our chosen families, as some call them, are made up of relatives that are rarely related to each other in a way that straight people recognize. In my families, we fuck our siblings or parents or (adult) children, or maintain relationships with our ex-lovers, or engage in platonic romances, or raise children (minor and otherwise) alone and with non-romantic partners in beautiful, creative, and resilient communities that are nevertheless considered dangerous and deviant by straight standards. They really kick you out of normalcy and then punish you for not being normal!
Because so many of us have been traumatized by both the nuclear family and our expulsion from it (not to mention other stuff that may not touch me personally in the same way, like white supremacy), we often come into our queerness with bad boundaries; with issues around trust, intimacy, and regulation; without the tools or resources we need to be good to each other and ourselves. Combine it all together and things tend to get dramatic. That feeling that the world is ending when your girlfriend dumps you, or your friend refuses to respect your gender identity, or a lover has made you feel disposable, or someone you trusted implicitly suddenly betrays you…when that happens against this backdrop of literal world-ending—from climate change to genocide—I think that’s a fascinating place to explore, because that is where I live.
I probably keep writing dyke drama for the same reason you keep giving people advice about their dyke drama: because it keeps happening, even in the face of all this. That being said, my third book is a heterosexual novel with only, like, one dyke in it, meaning there’s almost zero dyke drama. My project is shifting along with my sense of myself. I’m also in the longest and most stable committed relationship of my life, and the biggest drama between me and my girlfriend stems from, like, arguments about when Italy became a country. It’s 12:30 am and I’m trying to sleep and she’s over there looking at Wikipedia and yelling at me about Tuscany.
M: Yes!! The way you’re describing the overlap of interpersonal drama and apocalypse reminds me a lot of social media, where images of Palestinian children trapped in rubble are interspersed with like, some dyke vagueposting about their breakup and your friend from college’s wedding that looks mid as hell. I’m not saying this is a new phenomenon. People have always had to reconcile their personal sorrows and joys with war and death happening elsewhere, just that an entity like Instagram Stories offers a more consolidated experience.
I want to ask you about Cyte, the app that Lee uses to communicate with other trans, kinky, and politically dangerous people throughout X. Cyte, as I understand it, is like Signal, Backpage, FetLife, and Grindr all rolled into one. It’s a place to disseminate news and protest videos, as well as advertise sex work and meet up for dates. I’m curious how you imagined Cyte and the role it would play in the novel. X is not exacly science fiction, but it is set in the U.S. in the future–and I imagine you spent a lot of time building the world, including its limitations and logistics.
D: The funny thing about this question is that I came up with Cyte for a short story that I wrote years before X, and it’s not actually like how you describe at all (which makes sense, because I don’t explain the mechanism of Cyte in X).
Cyte is an app that recaptures ambient surveillance footage of the user, generating feeds of personal content that the user may not even have been aware of when it was being created. It’s basically the normalization of warrantless wiretapping for the purposes of social media, of adding “your FBI agent” to your IG close friends. The anti-BeReal. You navigate images and videos of yourself in all the places where you’ve been on camera, and not just legally—at the gas station, on the sidewalk, in AirBnBs, via your own phone or others’—through a slick, intuitive interface. Then you reshare and maybe customize these violations of your privacy with your friends, or whatever.
I don’t know how Cyte would work practically or legally, and in my opinion, I don’t need to, which is my attitude toward world-building in general. It’s nice of you to assume I spend any time doing it at all, because I don’t; it’s neither a particular interest nor a strength of mine. I’m not smart enough to construct my own cuckoo clock of languages, technologies, and cultures. I’m just neurotic. But if you leave the right breadcrumbs, a reader can do a lot of the work for you (like you did with Cyte). They’ll either fill in the blanks themselves or be confused, which they’ll find either compelling or boring/alienating. Managing the information they receive is just one component of this. You also have to lead with confidence, which is to say: if you’re not giving them the satisfaction of an intricate and comprehensive new world, you’d better be giving them something else. A noir like X is a fun place to practice that element of craft.
In any case, Cyte as well as the real social media platforms that are found in X are inadequate for the task of real communication in the novel. In light of misinformation and government censorship inspired by FOSTA/SESTA and similar whorephobic legislation (impacting sites like Backpage, RIP), Lee and the people around them are increasingly reliant on analog forms of communication. That was my intention, anyway.
M: On the topic of surveillance and having a bad time online, I want to ask you about your pen names. Your newsletter, David, began as a series of essays about people named David. You write it under the name David, while your books are published under the name Davey Davis and your Twitter name is LikeTheStatue. As a title, X invokes censorship and anonymity. There’s a lot of pressure for authors to build and maintain personal brands/web presences that are extremely obvious and Google-able, but you seem more interested in playing with the idea of authorship and what it means to pick a name, either for yourself or a creative work.
D: I guess my legal and professional name is Davey Davis, but these days, most of my friends call me David. “LikeTheStatue” is a reference to a character named David in Dennis Cooper’s Closer, which I discovered around the time I decided to go full-blown transsexual, and to which I give some credit for that choice.
There are boring personal reasons for my midstream transgender name change (because Davey is not my given name, although it’s hilarious when people think my parents named me Davey Davis), but you’re right—I’ve found it difficult to keep my brand, such as it is, streamlined in order to make more money. I wish I could say that it was a choice to, as you say, play with the idea of authorship, but I’m rarely that (consciously) calculated about anything.
That being said, I think messiness and illegibility can be so generative. They tend to reveal more of what I didn’t know I was thinking, and force me to put more trust in my readers, fostering a stronger connection with them. I also live as someone whose gender is never trusted: no one believes I’m a man, and no one believes I’m a woman. People have been second-guessing the names I use for myself for 15 years. This often hurts my feelings, or can cause bigger problems, but it’s also a kind of freedom. More freedom to than from, but hey, that’s how it is sometimes.
M: I know there’s a lot of wisdom in that kind of “you’re an author with books to sell, you need to send handwritten book announcements to everyone you’ve ever met and also be active on Goodreads, but not too active on Goodreads” PR advice. But in my experience, it’s a lot more fun (and profitable) to write for a smaller, self-selecting group of readers. You’re so prolific and talented—your audience is going to get larger and larger no matter what, so why not ask your readers to be a little more intentional?
I love talking to you, as always, and I want to end this interview with a craft question. Across your fiction and non-fiction, you’re really good at writing about and describing sex. Sex is famously one of those things that writers stress about and get wrong, so I’m wondering what makes a sex scene interesting, if not hot, and what makes a sex scene feel corny, overly mechanical, or just sort of blah?
D: I also love talking to you. Everything you write makes me laugh in a way that takes me by surprise—which it shouldn’t, by this point. But that’s what comedic timing is, I guess. I don’t know how you do it. I also admire so much how you can make even the most fraught or abstract subjects seem real and simple. Years of watching you develop your natural talent to give people joy and help them navigate their complicated lives and feelings is a real pleasure for me, as I’m sure it is for everyone who follows your work.
This is a great question! And I have a provocative answer that I’ve been cooking on, but that I’d rather not share here because I’m in the midst of writing about it. However, I think you’re getting at something with this framing: interesting, if not hot. I think knowing your purpose for the sex scene you’re writing can help resolve a lot of the anxieties about getting it wrong.
This is not to say that “sex scenes must drive the plot,” as puritanical reactionaries would have you think. If they really believed that, they wouldn’t distinguish between scenes on the basis of their content, but rather by their effect. I don’t know how any writer can take for granted the primacy of plot, anyway. Like, grow up. Nor do I understand observing a debased or devalued or stigmatized topic and thinking anything other than, How fascinating! Let’s write into this, since it’s so challenging! I’m an artist. Embracing these challenges is my job.
But I’m sympathetic to these anxieties. People fear writing sex badly because, in this climate, the stakes are just higher. Writing sex, like having sex, is vulnerable in a way that writing, I don’t know, brunch, is not. I fail at it all the time and I’ve embarrassed myself a lot. That’s okay. Mistakes are how you get better. And anyway, you can’t please everyone. As I think every day of my life, There’s no accounting for taste.
If you need help feeling confident about writing sex, thinking about what you wish to accomplish—whether it’s driving the plot or making a beautiful (or ugly, or scary, or horny, etc.) but pointless thing—will help you locate the scene within your larger project and feel more sure of what you’re doing. The latter can be really hard in an anti-sex culture like ours, even if you, like me, think sex is fascinating and important. If, as Isabella Hammad recently wrote for The Paris Review, “Novels reflect the perpetuation of a human impulse to use and experience narrative form as a way of making sense of the world,” how can you exclude human sexuality? It’s a part of our worlds.
M: Yes!! When people criticize sex scenes for being gratuitous, it’s just like…isn’t sex usually pretty gratuitous? Not that fiction needs to be realistic or real people don’t have sex that results in new plot developments like pregnancy, divorce, or an STI, but personally when I think about sex–it’s a very general, simple act and probably not a big deal.
Thank you so much for chatting, Davey, and for being such a pal! As always, I’m screenshotting your kind words for this folder on my desktop called “don’t give up” that I look at when I feel like quitting writing forever. 🌖
X and the earthquake room are available wherever books are sold or from your local library. Follow Davey on Twitter and subscribe to their newsletter today.
Great conversation!!! Loved reading this, and I need to track down Davey’s books, pronto!