This is an essay about panic. 

In his 2020 piece about disappearing queer spaces, originally published in The New Yorker, Bryan Washington writes, “Some of us waited a long time for a space largely free of threats. Some might not mind waiting a bit longer. Some of us don’t have time to wait.” 

In the introduction to Richard Siken’s Crush (Yale University Press, 2005), which revolutionized the way that queerness is represented in literature, Louise Gluck writes, “This is a book about panic.” Panic, for queer people, is nothing new. Neither, unfortunately, is erasure. This essay, which is both about panic and erasure, is also about being seen. In addition to being about panic, this essay is about being noticed. 

*** 

“Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure,” writes Siken. His book was integral to the way that queer poetics has shaped, and been shaped, by the mainstream. Crush, which won the Yale Younger Poets Award, has both savvy mainstream appeal and a kind of cult following rarely seen in poets and writers. In a profile of Siken, Nell Casey wrote, “The tone is always pitched at a shriek, though, and Siken aimed for that.” Yet perhaps a shriek is the most effective way to be noticed. Perhaps it is the only way to advocate for oneself. As queer people are increasingly under attack, the shriek becomes more and more vital, an outcry which is both necessary and warranted. In Tennessee, drag shows are policed; all over the country, gender-affirming care is more and more difficult to attain. “History is a little man in a brown suit / trying to define a room he is outside of. / I know history. There are many names in history / but none of them are ours,” writes Siken.

Siken is one of the first poets to portray gay relationships in anything resembling a postive light, and even his characters are flawed in their way. His speakers are head-over-heels in love with slender, wine-flushed boys offering handfuls of pills, boys who drive fast cars and don’t think twice about pushing him hard against a brick wall, leaving bruises. As a poet, Siken is unafraid, and his speakers are similarly unflinching. 

He tells us, point blank: mone of the names are ours. We, the reader, have no place in his book except as voyueristic observers. Explaining, as promised, becomes an admission of failure. In mentioning history so explicitly, Siken is writing himself into the lineage, stanza by stanza, line by line.

*** 

The first time I had a panic attack, I was thirteen and had just won an award for creative writing. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. I was at YMCA camp. An older camper named Wade recognized my symptoms, and talked me through the experience. The adrenaline of winning had sparked an emergency response in my system. It was a warning to me for future experiences. The body and its processes cannot always be trusted. Sometimes, the signals get crossed. 

*** 

In her introduction, Gluck writes: “If panic is his groundnote, Siken’s obsessive focus is a tyrant, the body.” And the body is certainly present in this book, around every corner, lurking in every line. In the first poem of the collection, for example, Siken writes, “Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake / and dress them in warm clothes again.” This refusal to accept death, the blurring of the lines between what is possible and what is impossible, is constantly present in Siken’s poetry. And it is no surprise that most of the existing queer literature ends in tragedy; it is a trope of the genre, even when one expands into the greater realm of media, including film and television. Siken is writing with this in mind, but his book is not tragic, even as it is simultaneously painful for both reader and writer, and as Gluck points out, pressurized. Like the body, Siken’s writing is honest. It is inescapable. 

Like the body, Siken can be a tyrant. In his poem, “You Are Jeff,” he takes us on a pages-long journey through space and time: love, sex, and death, which often melts into the absurd. But, in rewriting the tragic queer narrative, Siken does not end with a moment of pain. As with many of his poems, the pain is threaded throughout, often in an ironic way, and what emerges is a narrative of jumbled love and stars and wishes, beauty and the bittersweet. The ending of “You Are Jeff,” is nothing if not hopeful: 

You’re in the car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you don’t even have a name for.

This is explicitly about the body—the way the body can feel things that the mind has no name for, or cannot fully verbalize. Many queer people throughout history have found that their feelings and desires predate language, and we all know, instinctively, that desire is felt first in the body, not necessarily in the mind. Siken knows this, and he is telling us, loudly. He wants to be noticed. He is shrieking. 

*** 

I didn’t have panic attacks as an adult, thinking I had grown out of them, until the death of my friend Michael. Two days after his death, standing in my living room, my vision tunneled. I couldn’t catch my breath. My then-partner noticed that I had stopped talking, and asked me what was wrong. I think I’m dying, I said. You’re having a panic attack, he said. Just keep breathing. He sat me down on the couch, and slowly, my breathing slowed. Something about the death caused a faulty wire, dormant since childhood, to re-ignite within me. It was one of the few times in my life where I’ve felt truly out of control inside my own body, pure fear. 

*** 

In his New Yorker piece, Washington speaks of the physicality of gay bars, the way that people are uninhibited from touching each other in these spaces. Washington notes: 

One night, in New Orleans, I sat with a straight friend who had never been to a gay bar before. We vaped on the balcony, and he noted the physical proximity of the space. Everyone stands so fucking close, he said. Just then, a man slipped between us, cupping our elbows, not even looking at us.

There is a question of proximity—tight, steamy spaces with loud music, as many bars have—where we naturally commune. But there is also the shared community aspect; in a space where we feel safe, we will come closer to each other, hug, touch, kiss each other on the cheek, on the mouth, even people we don’t necessarily know. These are meeting spaces, and it is not inherently sexual—it’s an admission of affection, but also of safety—a way of saying, I am here and you are here. I will take care of you. We are here together. 

Siken’s work, too, has a sense of proximity: “Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow / flat on the wall. / The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.” Later in the same poem: “The light is no mystery, / the mystery is that there is something to keep the light / from passing through.” Washington’s essay may take place in gay bars, music pounding in your chest, but Siken’s work takes place in seedy motels, bedrooms, backrooms. Regardless, the effect is the same. The hush, the panic, the fear of being lost and the manic grip to hold on—each writer is fighting for the same space that they feel is slipping away from them. 

*** 

I no longer have panic attacks. At least for now they have subsided. They have turned into a low-grade anxiety that hums under the surface as I go about my day, reading and writing and editing, and in short, living. 

Without naming identities, I can tell you that I am no stranger to wanting a space of my own, a place where I feel safe and can be myself. I am lucky enough to have found such spaces in the city I live in, but these spaces are not guaranteed. Washington writes, “It’s worth wondering how a space largely free of threats evolves when every space becomes a threat.” As the world is continuously shaped into a place that is more hostile to anyone who does not fit a certain mold, how do we continue? 

I wish I had answers. I don’t. 

*** 

So what is left? In his poem, “Litany In Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out,” Siken makes his own edits to the world around him, and says, “But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats. / There were some nice parts, sure…I’m sorry it’s such a lousy story.” He is speaking of course about his own desire and the desire about those around him, but there is a kernel of truth there. The parts of the poem that are “crossed out,” are Siken’s way of taking back control over his body, the bodies around him, and the powerful feelings that wrack him. We can all hope we are so lucky. 

Erasure does not work, Siken says. It will never work. Love will leak through, and desire, and all of the messy human bits which are more powerful than the cultural, political, and socioeconomic forces that are against us. His is the shriek heard round the world. 

In moments of doubt, I find it helpful to think of the lines that Siken writes in the final poem of his collection:

 We are all going forward. None of us are going back.