After fretfully ignoring my phone for a full day of teaching, I watched its screen flicker to life with guarded optimism. Surely, he’d written back, this spindly guy from Queens: a psychologist-in-training, whose goofy grin and giddy guffaw were already making me swoon. We’ll call him F. Our conversation began on Hinge and, though we hadn’t yet met in person, we’d been texting for nearly two weeks. The plan was to grab a drink that Friday.
By way of preparation, I’d shared a detail that my profile strategically omits: I walk with a limp, supported by a cane and brace. Not everyone reacts well to this news, which often leads to ghosting, breadcrumbing, or politely indirect rejection. But F seemed different: there was his career, for one thing, and our steady communication, for another.
Probably, there was nothing to worry about. By then, he must have Googled me, read my writing, maybe even watched me walk, in a video Princeton produced in the last year of my Ph.D. Yes, there was reason for hope.
Only his name never popped up. He had not, in fact, texted me back, nearly 10 hours after I’d confided that I’m an openly disabled man—but don’t worry, I quipped: I’m active and exercise, too. (So, really, I’m just like everyone else!)
Another 120 minutes crept by before F replied: “This is probably something that should have been brought up earlier”—though whether he was thinking of my confession, or his own, I was never quite sure. That second one came apace: “A big part of sexual attraction for me is when a guy is physically stronger than me/can physically protect me. In this case I don’t think things would work out in the bedroom for us.”
There was nothing to say to that. Feelings preceded words: they were clenching me up, moistening my eyes, making me feel puny and small and weak as I fell back on my bed. (Falling is what my body does best.) At least, I reasoned, he spared me the usual anguish over what I’d done to disinterest this apparently generous man.
After all, he was making everything so very clear. “You’re one of the sweetest guys I’ve met on here and I know you’ll find someone that appreciates all your beautiful qualities.” But of course, he focused on only my uselessness—to his safety, arousal, and hopes for romance.
The takeaway? Coming out as disabled to those who have come out as something else is not for the faint of heart.
The reason for this difficulty is hard to explain—period, and especially in an essay—without succumbing to stereotypes. But partly, the problem resides within gay pride. Nobly, it celebrates the bodies of two men doing things society tells them they shouldn’t be doing, and doing them with the neat muscularity of Greco-Roman physiques. (This is essential, often, so that things can be physically done to begin with.) Greco-Roman because antiquity lent cultural authority to homosexual desire, as it was being conceived in the nineteenth-century. It’s also given gay men a telos—an Apollonian cultivation of the self—absent more practical considerations like having kids (on which front lesbians have always had a leg-up). Meanwhile, such neatness has proved a defense mechanism—an important counterweight to the miasma of decay and degradation swirling around us at the height of AIDS.
All of this brings me back to pride: the voices of gay men may not be as low nor their interests as rugged as those of straight men, but goshdarnit, they can still look better in a Speedo. Despite myself, I’m thankful so many do.
Except, of course, many of us cannot, objectively at least. Many neither move with grace nor sport bodies that are slender by any sense of the word. As a result, we exist beyond the prefabricated categories—of twink, otter, bear, et al.—by which gay desirability is assessed. For proof of this, we need look no further than F’s rejection.
At the same time, however, we can’t look only to F, or to the type of judgmental gay man he represents. That’s because experiences like mine reflect a broader failure of imagination—one extending far beyond a community that, for all my cavils, has also become an important source of solace in my life. (Partly for the work of gay and disabled artists like Ryan Haddad and Ryan O’Connell.) I’m talking about a broader sociocultural impotence to frame the disabled other as anything other than undesiring or undesirable. Such associations stretch far back, to the symbolic castrations of Oedipus and Gloucester, when their eyes are gouged out. (Andrew Leland speaks of them poignantly in his memoir, The Country of the Blind.). But these stereotypes collect in every corner of culture, even now, in as many guises to boot, whether as the ever-infantile Tiny Tim or the paralyzed husband of Mrs. Chatterley. (His inoperable lower-half accounts for why she takes a lover at all.)
As an antidote, we need more narratives (besides say, Alice Wong’s fabulous Disability Intimacy) that tell a different kind of story—about being desirable not in spite of a disability but because of it.
*
Thankfully, Rob Macaisa Colgate’s new verse play My Love Is Water minds these representational gaps, and their real-world implications, from a subject position that’s clearly crip. This is something of a theme for Colgate: his debut collection of lyrics, Hardly Creatures—also out this year—likewise explores the nexus of queerness, disability, intimacy, and desire. (I reviewed it for the LARB.) But there, it’s addressed in a radically different tone. Hardly Creatures isn’t Pollyannaish, per se, but optimistic about how the mundanities of disability—taking medicine or helping a friend piss—can foster connection and pleasure alike.
By contrast, My Love Is Water broods, sometimes to despair. It challenges us not by modeling an aspirational relationship—as Hardly Creatures does—but by displaying how one might fall apart thanks to disability. It’s the apter interlocutor, then, for understanding F’s reaction to me.
As unstructured as it is bleak, the drama defies summary. Briefly put, it tracks a single night in the life of Danilo, a “Filipino Amerikan schizophrenic baliw”—i.e., crazy—“boy,” who is likewise “bakla”—i.e., genderqueer—and reeling from a breakup with someone named Jason. To cope, Danilo throws a party for his colleagues—other Filipino nurses—in Chicago’s gay neighborhood, called Boystown. “What follows,” we’re told, “is everything Danilo knows about the night,” though this isn’t quite right because, “Actually, this is everything that Danilo knows about himself.”
The couplet highlights Colgate’s thematic priorities: exposing the mixed, muddied, even mangled sense of pride among those who are both gay and disabled. As important, however, the two lines prime us for a strangely uneven style: on the one hand, wise, oracular, and gracefully unadorned while on the other, abstract, repetitive, and willfully monologic. As a result, the play’s characters are often pointillistically rendered, sometimes with too few dots, existing only as voices on the page.
Even so, we can’t deny their poignancy and panache. Danilo, for his part, begins by apostrophizing Jason, amid a party that’s exacerbating the loneliness it was meant to abate. “Back when things were good / between us, Jason, I would fall / asleep dreaming of my own,” he begins. The tercet perfectly balances colloquial vigor and rhythmic lilt, those three lines pointing to the love triangle that will occupy much of the book: Danilo, his partner, and his mental disability. This craziness appears in the next stanza, dramatically delivered by enjambment across the break.
In the apostrophe, Danilo’s not dreaming about his “own” wedding or home but “future psychosis and how I / would be able to text you: Hey, tonight is really bad— // can I come over?” Again, the enjambed tumble from one stanza to another tellingly mirrors a central difficulty for disabled folks like me, though one that follows from the earlier issue with F: after someone knows about your disability, at what point do you enlist their care? How do you do so? In Danilo’s version of events, you don’t always wait for an offer; you ask for what you need. “And you would say / yes and I would come / over and we would be // overwhelmingly together,” he imagines.
That phrase, overwhelmingly together, is among the best in My Love Is Water. It’s exhilarating not only for juxtaposing these ordinary words but for projecting how an overwhelmed individual, either in body or mind, might create an intimacy that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Indeed, their “bodies,” Danilo fantasizes, would be “made tangible by the streetlights shining in on us like sweaters.” In its Dahli-like mixing of metaphors, this last bit tacks in a more disappointing direction; but then again, its surrealist sheen might be exactly the point, reflecting the verbal texture of schizophrenia, when “function runs from … form,” as Colgate writes in another poem. It might also suggest that everything about this image has been hallucinatory, cast into the subjunctive. Danilo is, for certain, not currently reaching out to Jason with such candor—and he might never have done so.
In fact, the more we learn about Jason—often in Danilo’s voice, sometimes in what passes for Jason’s own—the clearer it becomes that he only ever tolerated his partner’s disability to retain the proverbial upper hand—to have a boyfriend, on his own terms, when he wanted one. “Well, Danilo,” Jason chides at one point—in absentia—“it just seems / like you want / a lot more of this relationship … than I do.” It’s a rejection Danilo attributes to his bodymind, his craziness, and “stupid ugly massive hands,” which become a defining characteristic. At his worst, then, Jason is maniacally good at saying the quiet part out loud: “I don’t want anyone to think / I am so desperate for a boy / that I would be willing to date // a crazy person.” No wonder that—at his worst, too—Danilo frenetically accepts, “I need to be—cured—of myself.”
This conclusion stems from a prevarication, of course, that able and disabled are stable categories in the first place; that one can go from the latter to the former in a kind of way that sticks. And that even in an ideal world, cure would be the best means of dealing with the wisdom, insights, and aesthetics of unwieldy bodyminds.
Still, these are lies that the world has taught us to take as gospel truth—Danilo and me, alike. Colgate’s language, in this sense, works like a ouiji-board, conjuring up such wraiths so that their ghastly presence is clear—so that they might be vanquished, as well. If only for a time.
*
But while the various scenes of My Love Is Water are often pearl like in their linguistic polish, they’re organized less as gems strung carefully on a necklace than as tapioca floating about in a cup of boba tea.
The cup, I’ve mentioned, is a single party on a single night, which unites the time and place of the play. It’s the third unity that Colgate snags on: that of action.
Speaking charitably, there’s a reason for this. The self-discovery that’s promised from the start is less the stuff of a dramatic plot revolving around a central conflict between characters who duke it out than of an older, allegorical sort of morality play known for tracing the moral journey of its protagonist, Everyman. As such, Colgate’s scenes are often redolent of vignettes—portraits of Danilo ruminating on his identity with other nurses (who sometimes monologue themselves). At the center of these conversations is frequently the question, what does it mean to care for oneself, loved ones, and others?
To his credit, Colgate avoids the easy trap of framing an answer in the pat terms of Instapoetic mantra. Rather, he juxtaposes various ideas about care, and leaving us to sort through the qualifications and implications arising from the text.
Consider, for instance, Danilo’s confidence to his colleague Lilia that he “cared about him”—i.e., Jason—“so much.” When he’s pushed about whether the love was “About or for?,” Danilo sighs that it “[d]oesn’t matter. It was so much. So so much.” Lilia responds oracularly, in one of the most evocative, if unrealistic, apothegms of the book: “Care is about leaving, not staying. / I patch up everybody dreaming of its departure.” This makes sense coming from a nurse—and someone who’s emigrated from her home country to support the family she left behind. In one soliloquy, for instance, we learn, “I must care for this / country to care for my own.” But it’s only a partial truth. From a different angle, we could imagine these words as part of Jason’s solipsistic noncommitment, his headgames: I need to leave you so you can focus on fixing yourself. F might be a fan.
There’s another implication of Lilia’s lines, as well: to care for someone else requires softening one’s individuality. Certainly, this can be one of the great joys of life, but the process—unevenly and asymmetrically enacted—poses problems. We cringe, for instance, when Danilo tells Jason, in a flashback, “the sum total of the universe is care / and everything else that exists that isn’t care. // Or, the sum total of the universe is you, me, / and everything that isn’t us.” The equation is painfully ironized, of course, because much of the book points to Danilo and Jason’s relationship as a case study in care gone awry.
The larger point, in other words: real care that’s ethically viable, sustainable, and generativeis incommensurate to any one intellectual framework, any easy gloss. It defies straightforward framing as a matter of course.
For a moment, Danilo’s party seems like just the place for this care to unfold as interdependent relationality. Maybe, then, the dichotomies of patient/provider, able-bodied observer/crip other, ableist boyfriend/crippled pity case would mist up into the liquid fictions that they are. But such is not to be; characters talk past each other, and Danilo never finds the redemption or insight he desperately needs.
I’m of two minds about why. On the one hand, Colgate teaches the valuable lesson that thinking—and even talking—about a value is never quite enough. The real work begins when that value is put into collaborative, humble practice.
On the other hand, Colgate abjures the chances to dramatize these dynamics organically across the larger structure of his playtext. What we get, instead, are snippets and snatches of language—fragmented conversations that rarely cohere into more than interlinked monologues.
However imperceptibly, though, these musings work toward a conclusion all the same—one that’s gutting but shouldn’t be given away. Nevertheless, it’s still worth considering what enables the wallop Colgate’s ending packs. To do that, we need a better sense of the verse play as a form.
*
Some caution is called for because critiques of closet dramas haven’t always aged well. Take, for instance, a tetchy quip from Samuel Johnson, who complained that John Milton’s Samson Agonistes—itself a dramatic poem on the blinded and battered biblical hero—lacked a proper beginning, middle, and end. Of course, his curmudgeonliness has provoked many a response, including from me; but then again, I’m making a similar argument here. And in any case, Johnson is sort of right: it’s difficult to pin down what, exactly, the central conflict of Samson Agonistes actually is. That’s because it’s structured less as a stepwise progression to Samson’s tearing down of the Philistine temple than as a series of conversations about big ideas—of freedom and bondage, resistance and revenge, toleration and oppression—that bear on the strongman’s cataclysmic suicide obliquely. To glean the connection, then, we must read for subtext; we must approach these colloquies on their own terms.
This means appreciating how closet drama is a hybrid form that embeds lyrical flights of fancy in a dialogic mode. Johnson seems not quite to grasp this point. In deriding Milton’s Samson, he prioritizes performability, like an imperious dog show judge who faults the beagle for not being a lab. Is this my critical sin, as well?
Admittedly, My Love Is Water works much as Milton’s Samson Agonistes does, testing out various ethical positions—on care and love, service and fidelity—while foregrounding how they collide with various identities; these, in turn, collide with one another. One of them, of course, is disability—especially Madness—but others recur throughout the book, especially in the figure of Danilo, who frets about being large, effeminate, genderqueer, and a racialized person of Asian descent. These concerns come to a head in the gutting scene “No Fats No Fems No Asians,” a familiar refrain among gay men (of a certain kind). Here, Danilo is “alone in the corner on Grindr” with “[e]very face turned away,” “[e]very greeting fallen silent.” The stage directions invite an inevitable question: Why turn to such an app in the first place, when so many living, breathing, and heaving humans are there in the flesh? It offers a tentative answer, too, because Danilo is “tr[ying] to understand his own body, his own limbs and their dark stains.”
Deftly, Colgate shows how various forms of dis/ability, mindedness, shape, and race can mutually inform—and amplify—one another. The effect is to transform the othered body into even more of a spectacle. I know how this works from personal experience: a figure both fat and limping, as mine once was, is more noticeable than it would be as only one of these things. Spectacularity of this sort leaves you feeling alone and dejected—needing validation, in writing, from people whom you want to fuck. Commonly, these are the same people who snubbed you to begin with—and snub you they will again. On some level, you know this. And so, what you’ve wanted all along is confirmation of just how undesirable you actually are—since everyone else in your life is too kind to share this shattering truth.
Apps such as Grindr satisfy this itch by allowing you to elicit responses from many men at once, in an easy grid-like formation for optimized access, even as it intensifies the yearning for validation further: the grid continues, and there are always more men to please. More men to elucidate just how much, or little, you’re worth.
Grindr makes something else easier, too: the splaying of personal details like donuts in a box of assorted Krispy Kremes, which can never add up to a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. These details include not only height, age, weight, and body type, but also ethnicity, HIV status, position, gender, et al. Some of these labels have a larger impact on one’s fuckability than others.
When we find him, Danilo has dispatched various overtures that sound across the page. Messages sent to profiles that never respond, spaced out in escalating refrains of desperation, from “Hey cutie” to the plangent, “heyyy”; “hey”; “heyy”; “heyyyyy.” The trick of the scene, however, is that Danilo needs to alter only one thing about himself to change his luck. “Back on his profile,” the pithy stage directions read, “Edit > Ethnicity > White. / Everything else stays the same. / If you believe his white lie, that is your fault.” Peppering the book as they do, these kinds of repetitions—which adjust the angle on a single word—can sometimes feel gimmicky. But I came around to Colgate’s device for moments like this, where verbal play not only flags how whiteness pervades our lexicons but also forces us to question whether the lie is all that white to begin with: what is Danilo gaining? What is he giving up? And what is identity in the first place, in a digital age, when it can so quickly be rearranged with a click or two?
Wonder of wonders, “[m]essages arrive, at first slowly, then all at once, like rain,” in a squall that eventually overwhelms or disgusts Danilo so much that he turns his phone off and “stare[s] at his reflection in the blank screen.” Meanwhile, he waxes reflective, “It is lucky that I can suck it in for the camera, / It is lucky that I know how to speak low from my diaphragm / it is lucky that the boy believes me when I lie about my parents.”
But while I appreciate Colgate’s interrogation of toxic Grindr dynamics, I’m again of two minds about its execution. Helpfully, the scene anatomizes how gay men (and anyone) can levy their marginalization to marginalize others while flagging the stupidity of racism, which disinterests them in someone they’re eager to meet but a few moments later.
Even so, we were promised a cutting look at how the three traits—of fatness, femininity, and Asian ethnicity—collaborate to pull one down market in the cutthroat world of gay dating. And not just in our world, but a wider one, too, where everyone seems to be calculating and measuring the body at all times. In truth, however, the scene is really only interested in the third.
Of course, the racialization of Asian ethnicity is well worth our attention. But it’s so centered here that the other identities seem negligibly to impact Danilo’s treatment. My experience, by contrast, suggests that body size is very much an object of fixation, too. So why doesn’t Danilo change his weight along with his ethnicity? Maybe he doesn’t need to, or maybe it’s not listed at all. And in any case, good for him that he can suck it in. (That luxury was one that never fell to me.) His legerdemain raises a few other questions, though: what happens when sucking it in fails—as, eventually, it must? When the person who’s shown up is disappointed as a result? When he leaves or complains of being deceived or asks that you stay dressed till all is said and done? (Yes, things are getting personal.)
I doubt Colgate is uninterested in these questions. (He has a degree in disability studies, after all.) Rather, the play’s structure doesn’t allow him to flesh them out—not in its patchwork of short scenes and lyrical abstractions. The second of these proves more troubling, in the end. They’re also what saves me from Johnson’s trap.
Indeed, as much as Milton seems to contravene a linear plot, he never forgets that for a text to have a claim to drama at all, it can never surrender completely to the abstract; he never forgets, in other words, that interiority comes off most persuasively in the context of conflict and conversation. Colgate, by contrast, never quite follows through on his dialectical swings: he neither gives himself the space nor realizes his characters enough to do so.
But I’m thankful for this, at least: My Love Is Water broaches the tough questions that too often haunt our minds without anywhere to go. At what point do you give up on yourself? At what point does pride feel, finally, out of reach? And how, on earth, do you bring it close once again? What’s more, Colgate asks them audaciously, with a courage nearly unmatched.
*
As nonpareil is Colgate’s metaphysical wit: his revelatory talent, displayed throughout both of his books, for exploring all sides of a central conceit, illuminating resemblances and realities—as John Donne and George Herbert once did in the 1600s. The effect is that we experience the world in fundamentally altered ways.
The central image in My Love is Water is, of course, the titular substance, a vehicle for the tenor of love. But how deep do the connections go? I’ve struggled to fathom them all.
The obvious one first: just as water keeps us alive, love hydrates the soul. But on a more physical level, water likewise connects to a great love shared by many of Colgate’s characters: the Philippine archipelago. This link is far from straightforward.
Take, for instance, one especially devastating meditation: “Maybe I was beautiful once,” Danilo suggests, “Bongga [i.e., flamboyant and genderqueer] before the archipelago / of my desire was colonized. / Before the truth about home / was diagnosed.” Even in these few lines, the associative range of water flows broadly, as the enjambment and coursing of imagery—that pools and disperses, in turn—highlights. First, there’s the notion of uncharted water, unroiled and pristine, before European voyagers arrived, bringing their ideas of fair beauty along for the ride. Second, of course, is the gender and sexual fluidity—another of those watery words!—that these settlers eventually forbade but that now ballasts the identities of Danilo and Colgate alike. Then, finally, there’s the medicalized significance of this instability, what’s called in another moment mental “spilling over”: the idea that, from a Eurocentric perspective, minds from the global south are undependable—or that, as the DSM insisted until only recently, genderqueer people are de facto unstable—alongside a still older one that has nonetheless pervaded our idioms of mental alterity today. That is, humoral notions of the fluctuating “imbalance” of choppy fluids in the body, of “too many / tears in my bile,” as Colgate eccentrically riffs on this discourse.
Of course, the theory that four constitutive liquids determine health has long been abandoned, along (for the most part) with explicitly colonial rule. But Colgate suggests that the damage has already been done—that the beauty Danilo might once have found in his baliw, bakla self has been obscured by boys like Jason, presumably white, who “spread / seafoam over our eyes,” spumed into being by the keels of European ships. Water is both the defining and liberating feature of Danilo’s ancestral islands, then, as well as the very thing that prevents him from imagining his racialized body as sexy.
As the motif swells, however, its oceanic proportions mark Danilo’s love for Jason more specifically and, in doing so, evince how something that should sustain might also be “too big.”
Colgate works up to this point in a series of carefully sketched parallels, some of the most verbally inventive of the collection: “my crazy was too big—my crazy was water— / my love was tubig—my love was water—”. This is to say not only that Danilo’s love threatened to drown him or was eddying with nonnormative thought but that it slipped right through his fingers. For “who cares— / about a schizo—who cares—for a schizo,” he miserably demands. As the homophonic play of too big and tubig suggests, all of these meanings converge in this Filipino word for “water,” as it’s freighted with the many ambivalences of Colgate’s book. Like a Greek chorus, the other guests intone, “too much love ugh you’re too big for this / don’t stop drowning don’t care drown.”
Faced with this unhelpfully impractical caveat, Danilo never learns how to reconcile these various meanings of the water so omnipresent in his life. But I’m in no position to judge. I, too, have slipped away, gurgling for air.
*
For all my grousing about the undramatic tenor of My Love Is Water, then, I’m glad to have Colgate’s philosophical provocation. I’m glad to learn from his questions about how art might reveal, as much as represent, the complexities of identity, especially at the intersection of queerness and cripness.
Most of all, I’m thankful that he puts pressure on these concepts, by writing a text that bears the dubious distinction F once granted to me: uselessness. After all, it’s play that was never meant for the stage.
With the choice of this form, Colgate joins a lineage of writers who turned to closet drama because they were marginalized themselves, and didn’t have access to public playhouses, or were writing about marginalized characters, or, finally, were writing edgy, experimental, hybrid texts. Many of their names have now been lost to all except specialists—Mary Sidney among the Elizabethans; Elizabeth Carey and Jane Cavendish in the seventeenth-century. But others very much retain a pride of place in the canon: Milton, of course, but also the Romantic poet whom he heavily influenced, Percy Shelley, in his opaque and opulent Prometheus Unbound. More recently still, Ilya Kaminsky published Deaf Republic in 2018, which virtuosically summons a parallel world where autocracy can be resisted only through grassroots collaboration among affected Deafness and communal sign.
But why use closet drama to represent queerness and disability today? Increasingly, depictions of the former are thriving—putting the pall of MAGA momentarily aside—and have been for decades now, especially on stage. Consider, for instance, the iconic mantra from Jerry Herman’s 1983 musical La Cage Aux Folles: “Your life is a sham, ’til you can shout out loud, I am what I am.”
The show is a helpful point of comparison because—as a musical about a drag bar—it embraces theatricality as much as closet drama eschews it. By theatricality, I mean a fully embodied presentation, from heightened gesture and carefully blocked acting to stylized choreography and curated costuming. All of these features have, one way or another, been made camp, and thus queer, especially in their more baroque and exaggerated forms. Yet the physicality they demand can leave little room for the experience or poetics of disability—at least in any realistic sense of the word. (No wonder, then, that many disabled actors have spoken out about the challenges of finding work, even as brilliant artists, dramaturges, and scholars, such as Katherine Williams, are working to make the theater a more inclusive place for all).
There are other reasons for the tensions between queered theatricality and disability, too, but only a few of them can be mentioned here: for one, disability and homosexual identities are fundamentally different, even in an age of fluid sexuality. Unlike same-sex attraction, disability can come for anyone at any time—and in a sense, then, it poses more of a threat, elicits added discomfort, and requires further distance. For another, disabled bodyminds are still pressed into service—as objects of prayer, icons of grace, walking miracles, and cautionary tales—in a way only the most reactionary quarters of our culture invoke gay bodies. That is, at least thirty years on from the AIDS epidemic, sixty years after the Lavender Scare, and over a century since late Victorian fears of homosexual degeneracy. To make matters worse, the features of crips like me are invoked to shore up beauty standards, by negative example, as My Love Is Water points out. And even when we are told we’re sexy, we’re made to feel thankful for such a gratuitously generous review.
More often still, it’s the language of dead metaphors that causes problems: he’s blind to what’s happening, deaf to the truth, crippled with fear, or lame for not going out. These images suggest that disabled folks are still the stuff more of abstraction than real life, reifying a border of ability and disability that doesn’t exist in the first place.
All of which means, come to think of it, that embodied theatricality and disability aren’t opposed at all. On the contrary, bodies like mine are caught up in a protracted experiment with immersive theater—in the worst possible way. (But does anyone actually like immersive theater to begin with?) As the bioethicist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has poignantly theorized, we’re ogled and othered, less for the particular beauty of our performance than for how our movements, mannerisms, and lives can be extracted and repacked into lessons and set-pieces on which viewers might reflect. We’re spectacles, in other words, not to be admired but to be interpreted and tamed—reduced, as Milton’s Samson has it, into “the scorn and gaze.”
In the face of these hang-ups, I’ve often craved not theatricality—the kind associated with coming out proudly as gay—but more words. That is, not the drama of the stage but the contemplative confidence of the closet. It’s from there that I can preempt the cultural scripts enlisted to make sense of me, as a strangely moving, young, and disabled body. It’s from there that I can gloss my own physique—explaining, after a fashion, that it’s active and lithe, lively and limber, despite all evidence to the contrary—before the interpretive methods of others have a chance to work me up. This is performance of a different kind, of course—dialogic, nearly, in its give-and-take of myth and demystification—that works toward the end of mutual engagement and the interdependence such connection allows. This is what Milton, gradually, leads us toward in Samson Agonistes (as I’ve argued, at least). And this is the ethical purchase of My Love Is Water, too—an ethics, we might say, that closet drama is uniquely poised to present.
In short: to come out as gay might mean exiting the closet with bravado; but to come out as disabled—for those evidently disabled to start—might require heading back inside.
Crucially, you can’t stay hidden forever. (Disabled folks have been confined to the home, or institutionalized, for far too long as it is.) But for me, at least, the closet is a place to start—a place from which to emerge as tall as I am halting, as bold as I am feeble and frail, not as a cipher or emblem but as a body of flesh and bone.
And yet, the experience with F—as well as so much of Danilo’s hedging to Jason—suggests that trying to control the narrative isn’t quite enough. Indeed, such control can too often devolve into apology, a mark of concession rather than pride (as I’ve written for Synapsis). What to do then?
Well, one might look to the closet drama a final time, and find solace in its unabashed hybridity, in the possibilities it offers for pride. To this end, we should look to the undramatic structure of My Love Is Water most of all. The point, Colgate suggests, is that his verse play operates as neither of these things, exactly—neither as (a book of) verse nor a play (for performance). But theoretically, at least, this liminality can be a very good thing. That’s because functioning between categories, or the spheres by which we understand literary form—that other kind of embodiment—allows the whole, at last, to become more than the sum of its parts, one that can thrill and captivate in singular ways.
Admittedly, I’ve had my doubts about whether My Love Is Water pulls this off, but I have only respect for the way Colgate teaches us, boldly, to speak of hybridity, within ourselves and the world, all while finding pleasure in what so many think is of no use at all.
