Fellas, Is It Gay? The Excavator
On processing with your tiddies out
An introduction:
The most difficult part of this task is resisting the urge to declare everything gay, or to declare things to gay based on obvious or stereotypical criteria; I can’t deem something gay just because it’s soft, or uncanny, or a void, or just because I like it. Moreover, the status of not gay—and yes, we will determine some things not to be gay!—needs to be awarded just as thoughtfully. Something can’t be straight just because I find it brutish or boring or simplistic or because it is associated with straight people, particularly straight men. Yes, war is obviously straight, but so is the sun. One of these is worth discussing.
We considered posing, as our first question, Is the ocean gay?, and then realized that task was pointless. The ocean can mean anything to anyone. Gazing at waves as they lap the shoreline can pry profundity out of even the drunkest beach volleyball player. The ocean can swallow cities, birth new ecosystems, float a single delicate leaf for thousands of miles. It is elemental and impervious to time, yet also full of garbage. Of course it’s gay.
Instead, we’ve tried to seek objects that actually ask the question, objects that are instantly intriguing, but whose gayness has to truly be parsed. On the beach where the idea for this series first came to us, as we sat on a warm blanket eating hand pies and deciding what to select as our first subject, we grudgingly had to dismiss the ocean. We scanned the sand on either side of us to see what else might be gay, but given that we were on a literal gay beach, this was too overt. A glistening naked torso? A discarded Juul pod? A speaker blasting Nicki Minaj? We needed something else.
We turned back to the ocean. But then we looked slightly to the left. There was a jetty that separated this part of the beach from the next part. This wall of rocks and sand jutted out towards the water. On top of it, a large macaroni-hued excavator was picking up scoopfuls of sediment and placing them several feet away. The excavator looked hard and dirty, like all construction vehicles do, but it went at its task slowly, methodically, cradling each scoop as a pair of hands might cup a caught frog. We looked at the industrial excavator, framed against sky and water, and decided it was gay.
Each edition of this newsletter will present new candidates, deeming many of them gay—and some of them not! We plan to have lots of guests, because there are lots of gay people and no two will approach queerness from the same vantage point. We will likely even disagree sometimes—my gay excavator may not be gay to everyone.
Here ends my intro. I’ve read very little queer theory but I have asked Jeeves which ear piercing is the gay side at least fifty times. I’m excited to begin.
— Emily Mester
#1: The Excavator
Suppose I fell in love with an excavator? I saw her in the gayest place. Is that cheating? Maybe it’s setting alone that makes her irrefutably queer, but I don’t think so. The concept for this newsletter was conceived in part by a tendency to wax poetic on which non-sentient beings are actually kinda gay if you really think about it.
Emily and I sat by the ocean (a lesbian) on Jacob Riis beach the weekend before pride.
After two years together, one of those years spent thousands of miles apart, we’ve decided to open our relationship. In the moments between conversation, I notice Emily and myself scanning the crowd of queers. A frisson of excitement and anxiety at the possibility that one of these hot people might be a potential future lover.Â
The humidity and sudden anxiety make me restless. I trot, tiddies out, into the ocean, feeling more watched than usual, but also more comfortable. I watch the excavator work as I walk further into the waves to pee. Her yellow hydraulic arm flexes into the side of a large sand dune, creating a gash in its smooth surface, a small plume of dust forms. I’m calmed by her sturdy dedication, her slow purpose as she hoists piles of rock into the air. How something so large can perform such tedious and careful work amazes me. I want all things to work like this excavator: gracefully and forcefully at once. Just last weekend I peed behind her cover—(it feels like most of my time spent at the beach is just looking for a new place to pee.) Two queers pose for a photo in front of her, the massive pile of boulders that stood behind her just a week ago, now reduced to a small pile of rocks. They too see something worth documenting.Â
I think of my own boulders as of late, the heavy lifting Emily and I have done to imagine a different kind of relationship. Our openness has come with a lot of excavating, but we’ve always been best at talking. Our first date was six and a half hours of nonstop chatter and we haven’t slowed yet. We talk about the same things over and over, which has always felt monotonous and boring in other relationships but feels somehow exciting in ours.Â
Processing feels almost like a sport to us, which is not to say it isn’t taxing. Emily has always loved hypotheticals, some of them truly deranged. Would you still love me if I had no skin? Emily would sometimes ask me. Or, Would you rather break up or kill your cats? Openness has given us a new set of questions to parse endlessly. This time, though, the questions we ask aren’t all hypothetical or outlandish. Some of them could actually happen.Â
I walk back to our spot and notice Emily watching the couple in front of the excavator in an amorous embrace. I imagine that she wants to fuck them, but she looks at me with a worried expression and it becomes clear we are having the same thought. What about them? she asks. Would you fuck them?
This kind of thing is gnawing work and it sometimes feels like we are entering rabbit holes of anxiety, even if they sometimes bear fruit. For the entirety of our relationship Emily has asked: Would it hurt you more if I dated a man or a woman? Before, when it was entirely hypothetical, I would answer woman. Now the question makes my stomach hurt because I’m not so sure. One never knows what they will receive from processing: a thrilling discovery, or the fatigue of a tedious labor. Growth often feels like a war of accretion.
Which is to say, we’ve made some messes with our digging. A friend suggests maybe it would be best if we processed less.
Indeed, the concept of processing less has become more and more desirable to me. And I don’t think I’m alone. I recently talked to another friend about the nature of our desires—we both had weird sex dreams and suddenly feared that a new identity lurked inside us, clawing to get out. My subconscious is just fucking with me, she says, and I know exactly how she feels. The idea of enduring another personal discovery feels exhausting.
My queerness has always demanded constant excavating and transformation. Little questions like Which haircut will make me more visible? or Should I meet my ex for coffee? sometimes feel unworthy of the effort, like I’m lifting heavy loads only to move them six inches to the left. On the surface, it might seem meaningless, but their answers help determine larger realizations like How important is visibility to me? or How do I imagine a family unit? When you’re doing self-work you can barely see the point of it, at times, like emptying out your entire closet to clean it only to end up with a messier room and an empty closet.
 The excavator, too, was doing something unsexy but vital, the seemingly cosmetic changes adding up to something very crucial. I later learned that she is busy working on a $336 million dollar construction project called the Atlantic Shore Resiliency Project designed to stanch the rising tides of the ocean, to keep it from swallowing the beach. Resiliency refers to the project’s dual aims: to undo the damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy and to avoid repeating it in the future, as formerly unprecedented climate events become the norm. But it’s also called a resiliency project, I suppose because it’s the best descriptor of what a reinforced beach does—weathers time and tides without succumbing to either.
— Alyse Burnside
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