The week-end's (Sexistentia)List

Between rounds (of sex, of formula, of sanding the same doorframe for the third time) I still find the hours to consume the culture around me. I always have. You can pull me out of the club at 8 a.m., drunk and high, and I'll still have opinions about the last three things I watched. In the immortal words of Coupling’s Jane: “Ooh, I love giving opinions, I've got hundreds.”

A quick word on what this is. The Sexistentialist is, first and foremost and always, a horny gay sex diary. That’s the raison d’être and it’s not going anywhere. This (Sexistentia)List is something smaller. A companion piece, a B-side, a Sunday scrapbook of the things I read and watched and listened to and occasionally wanted while living the life the diary is made of.

Consider it the field notes to the field notes. Same eye, same appetite, fewer bodily fluids. Usually.

It helps that I work at a movie theater. Yes, that cinema. So we'll start there. Movies first.

We're starting, against all odds, with Mary Oliver.

I confess: as a French person, I had no idea who she was until last week, when I projected the documentary and sat in the booth to see what this was all about.

If you were expecting me to lead with something involving a sling, I understand your confusion. Hear me out, because among all the celebrities talking about her was none other than the King of Filth, the Pope of Trash himself, John Waters.

Turns out they were neighbors, and Waters worked for her one summer:

“They had this bookshop where you were allowed to be mean to the customers. It was really fun. These people would come in and say, “Do you have Valley of the Dolls?” Molly would yell, “Get out! We don’t carry that book!” If anyone said anything bad about Norman Mailer, they would snatch the book out of the person’s hand and throw them out. . . . The customer was always wrong.”

I’m not gonna tell you about Mary Oliver, you probably already know more than me. But I will say what I’m sure wasn’t discussed in class: she was an intensely private lesbian and enjoyed spending time getting lost in the Provincetown dunes (don’t we all?)

This was unpretentious, accessible, really lovely. I might even pick up one of her books.

Go see it in your local cinema, and buy some popcorn. This is how we get by.

Troye Sivan dropped a new single this week and, as usual, the visuals could double as a Sexistentialist mood board: horny, sweaty, glossy, and yet somehow still down in the gutter with us.

He knew what he was doing with that opening shot:

Does Nicole ever sleep? Has she ever been more striking than here? Is she going to guest judge on Drag Race now that she knows Sasha Colby?

Anyway, She’s the Best hits so hard because even though I’m a gay man, I love women. Nicole, Julia, Sandra, Lupita, Charlize, Viola, Penélope… Don’t you just find actresses infinitely more interesting than their male counterparts? I have a feeling Troye does.

Anyway, I’m happy to know both Sivan and I think about the same things:

She's walkin' down the street with her little thin cigarette
Great smile and a cum stain on her dress

While the first listen didn’t give me what I thought I needed for this hot summer, a few repeats got me hooked and the visuals made me obsessed. It’s giving me queer Zach Bryan. The same talk-y way of hitting a downtempo melody, until it soars.

If you want to read someone’s way better words about it, here’s a review I agree with wholeheartedly.

She’s the Best is listed as the opening track of Troye Sivan’s upcoming album of the same name, out October 9. I can’t wait.

I have trouble falling asleep, and will read just about anything I can lay my hands on. Earlier this summer I decided to try Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. And while it is indeed hornier than Nolan’s version, it left me cold.

I decided I needed a good ol’ thriller, just in time for the NY Times to come up with its list of the 50 Best Thrillers of the 21st Century (full disclosure: I’m deeply uncool and Tana French is my favorite writer, so the list gave me both goosebumps—I have good taste!—and made me retch—I’m just like everybody else!).

I picked up The God of the Woods (Liz Moore) because something was dripping on its cover, and Lorde knows that always gets me.

I’m hooked. Not as hooked as I was by Straight Married Man^TM’s fingers, but pretty hooked.

I’ve always been a sucker for intertwined timelines, and I guess a story of children going missing now hits that much harder.

I'm leaving you with the perfect long read for a slow Sunday morning: Emi Nietfeld’s “Whose Babies Are These?” in The Cut (New York magazine).

As someone who just recently went through the whole surrogacy process, I could not put this down. I went in thinking I knew how these stories go. I did not.

I won't spoil it, but I'll say this much: it has villains, plural, and I mean more than two. International intrigue. A custody battle that reads like a legal thriller and a set of questions that could genuinely upend an entire industry.

Every few paragraphs I had to stop and text G a screenshot with no context except too many exclamation points. It's the kind of reporting that makes you realize how little you know about a thing you’ve lived through yourself.

This begs for a movie treatment. Somebody option this immediately. There are a couple of roles so juicy and morally tangled that actors would claw each other's eyes out for it.

Anyway. Pour a second coffee, put the baby down, and read it. Then come find me in the comments, because I need to talk about it.

That's the list. Same eye, same appetite, fewer bodily fluids, I told you.

One more thing before I let you get on with your Sunday. Starting soon, I'll be adding something new to The Sexistentialist: an advice column. You bring me the mess (the situationship that won't die, the throuple math that isn't adding up, the “is it weird that…” you can't ask anyone else) and I’ll bring you, well, probably not the wisdom, but the (probably biased) opinion of a man who has made every single one of these mistakes personally, and then wrote about them.

No question too filthy, too tender, or too stupid. That's the whole point.

Send them my way (thesexistentialista@gmail.com), and I’ll start answering the best ones soon.

Back Wednesday with the usual. Bring water.