Sinclair Sexsmith Columns

Despite my increased travel and more and more frequent visits to the West (best) coast, despite making less money this past year than I have in the five years prior, despite my apartment rent increasing again this year, despite the current (beautiful) spring meaning that the (unbearable) summer is just around the corner, despite the ever-present dangers of the economy ... I almost like it here. I am learning to like it here. I just might like it here. I can’t imagine a better place to come in my late twenties, to throw myself into my self-made graduate studies, to casually toss myself into the fires of my Saturn Return, to break my own heart, to get reconnected to my callings, to begin to forge my own path through the ever-evolving box of tools I am gathering as I learn not just to #stayalive, but to thrive. There are always moments when I don’t know if I can stand it anymore, when I worry that the vice grip of this demanding tense cement roller-coaster of a place will crush me. Those moments happen weekly, if not sometimes daily. Lately, I’ve spent a go...

Last weekend, I turned 32 on April 3rd, and my other girlfriend Kristen took me on a romantic three-day getaway to Salem and Cape Ann, Massachusetts. I often forget what it’s like to travel while butch. While there are various neighborhoods in New York City where I get a few odd side glances and where I feel out of place, the majority of the places I navigate through, in this eight million, people city completely ignore me. This is, in part, because while my gender presentation may be queer and unexpected, my presentation in general fits in: Levis jeans, H&M corduroy jacket, loafers, white iPhone headphones, Kenneth Cole black day bag. I don’t mean to credit designer consumer products with fitting in, but in this city it certainly helps. My freshly cut hair and fairly deep knowledge of the unspoken social rules in this region means that I fit in just fine. But I don’t, in many other regions. Regardless that I am wearing the same outfit as 90 percent of the men in this bar, I don’t blend in—in fact, that’s what makes me stand out. I am rarely reminded of...

Everything about this city is penetrative. From the dicks that run Wall Street to the majority of the global corporations which headquarter on the tiny island of Manhattan to the people darting through the midtown crowds to the artists and activists clawing their way to recognition to the skyscrapers themselves standing tall and erect, thrusting up into the sky, everywhere you turn in this city is invasive, inserted, hard, forceful, opening, hollowing out, ecstatic. At first, it frightened me. It felt non-consensual, intrusive, making me an object, a hole, something to be taken or filled up. But that was coming from me, and my position of being unable to keep boundaries and properly dominate simultaneously, a skill I have tirelessly worked to perfect (or at least be capable of) ever since. I had to work for my cock confidence. It did not come “naturally.” It did not come easily. But it aligned deep within me as right, and as mine. Something about it clicked. Something about the extension of myself, my desire externalized, aligned and corresponded with so...

But it’s all anybody is talking about these days. “How is it so cold?” a friend asked, rhetorically, as I presume she doesn’t expect me really to answer that, at a reading this past weekend. “Killer weather we’re having,” the guy at the grocery store says. I hesitate to agree because, well, there has been some literal killer weather on this planet recently, and this is no tsunami, but I get his point. And, most importantly, “Where did our sixty degree weather go?” my next-door neighbor asked as we tried not to awkwardly bump into each other while passing in the hall this morning. Yes, that—Where did our sixty degree weather go? Didn’t the entire city just collectively breathe a big sigh of relief when we thought, for the love of all things sparkly and unicorn, that Punxsutawney Phil and Staten Island Chuck both did not see their shadows this year, and come on, didn’t I see espadrilles? Bare legs? Short, swingy skirts? I trust those signs of spring far more than I trust those little groundhogs. Plus, equinox has come and gone—that holiday which is the roo...