i just wrote this for fuse magazine, which might publish a seires of photos rachel and i took last winter, of us feeding various fruits to each other. i think its a strong peice of writing, and i think the work is impt (i didnt mention how it was meant to parody the recent food/fucking trend in lesbian erotica)

The pictures lead to a variety of questions, who is this boy and this girl, what are they doing, are they having a laugh, is it pleasurable, who’s home is it, why is this art, are they fucking, is this activity a metaphor or a euphemism or a metonymy for fucking or for pleasure or for more complex and difficult to answer questions of corporeality, how does the fruit taste, is it juicy, is it sweet, how is this like flesh, how do the flesh of food and the flesh of bodies work together, is this paradise, or is this religious at all, how do we sort out appetites, all sorts of appetites?

The boy is I, Anthony Easton. The girl is Rachel McRae. They are eating fruit in Rachel’s boyfriends apartment, in the late afternoon, when the light is perfect. Of course they are having a laugh, many laughs, they recognize the absurdity of the situation. Beckett knew how funny eating fruit was, he put it into Krapp’s last tape: “locks second drawer peers into it, feels about inside it, takes out a large banana, peers at it, locks drawer, puts keys back in his pocket. He turns, advances to edge of stage, halts, strokes banana, peels it, drops skin at his feet, puts end of banana in his mouth and remains motionless, staring vacuously before him. Finally he bites off the end, turns aside and begins pacing to and fro at edge of stage, in the light, i.e. not more than four or five paces either way, meditatively eating banana”.

What about the other questions? Is it pleasurable? Eating is always pleasurable, eating fruit is especially pleasurable: the slick skin pierced by teeth, the sticky juice, the varieties of textures, of tastes, of sweet, sour, tart. Eating it in the company of others, in the company of each other, adds to the visceral feedings. It is Rachel’s boyfriends house, knowing this adds a frisson of tension, because it is almost like adultery, isn’t it—with only half the narrative, it seems decadent, mid afternoon when someone works, ideas of adultery, always connect to ideas of ownership, the owning of a house and a human, and to transgress against one, is to be lazy, to be covetous is not doing the work. It is choosing pleasure over duty. But the thing is, (and not to put too fine a point on it), Rachel is queer and I am queer. Our presence destabilizes, all of those awkward covetous moments, because no one is owned, and everyone is free to leave. The conservative instinct against queers is one of duty versus pleasure, we should be furthering the human race, or capital, or something like that, but we would sooner eat fruit, in the sun, while watching other people scurry. We would sooner be in a nice apartment, with interesting things on the walls, laughing and gossiping, then do our duty, whatever our duty is.

Is this art? That’s the thing—art has to have a purpose, it has to MEAN SOMETHING. But this was just a brief moment of silliness, of fun, but fun is under rated, fun means something. Play means something, I keep thinking about Sharon Olds poem Sex Without Love:
Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies,

But the thing is, (and this leads to other questions) Rachel and I will not have sex, and we love each other deeply, and sometimes we fall through the ice. Pleasure is sex, and Family is biological, is the line—that maybe is what makes this political and profoundly queer, that we love each other, we fulfill the lines written from Ovid to Olds, from David to Dylan…but we are more then friends, or our friendship, with its entangling of family, of commitment, of work, and of love, is a communal thing, a tribal thing, and a thing mysterious and not quite explained. Olds talks about how sex without love, sex as surfaces, this work, with its joy, its pleasure, its fleshy juiceness, its camp, is surface, but layers upon layer, lacquer thin. Surfaces are difficult to maintain, and the cracking a smile is the cracking of the formalized placidness we aspire to.

The fruit is juicy, like Rachel’s tits are juicy, like my belly is juicy. Juicy is the opposite of the tautness of those surfaces. The pears were mealy. The oranges were tart. The cherries were liquid. The apple was sweet, but not as sweet as the mango. Food feeds bodies, makes it fat and complacent, makes it sticky and makes it loagy. Loagy, fat, complacent, sticky—these are not words of politics, they lack the rigueur of our cultural expectations…I think of memento mori paintings, Dutch, 16th century, at the rise of mercantile culture, where plenty lead to rot, and the red of a cooked lobster, and the grey of a skull jostled with fine things. There is a great one, painted about 1670, with the grey of mould and insects visible in the pink health of a salmon. I think, this is an attempt, to avoid the bugs, to eat the fruit, to feed our bodies, for the interlacing of flesh and food to be one, and to avoid that good protestant instinct to be afraid of pleasure, to think that plenty leads to rotting. That is the paradise, in the consumption of something ambiguous but desired with someone you love. That is why the gay meal is brunch, because it is superfluous. (and no one wants to get up before noon.)

All this flesh and food questions, remind one, of religion, or remind me of religion. That’s where we have to be careful, because being feed, or making food a performative ritual, for me, is explicitly religious, if not a parody of communion, has shades of it (like how Piss Christ, makes intractable sacredness and blasphemy). Eucharist is vital to how I understand this project, like we are developing new families, we are finding, through trial and error new rituals to celebrate those families. Rachel thinks differently, I think she views the families, pleasure, and the destabilizing queerness in this project that we share, but the pretty boy Jesus is foundational to me, and not to her. But it is the elephant in the room, and elephants need to be mentioned.

That is how we sort out appetites, for ritual, for flesh, for fruit…though. We go into a room with beautiful objects, with someone we love. Sometimes that room is the size of a coffin, sometimes that room is the size of a city. We take note of our material and our metaphorical hungers. And we feed them. We do not only feed our own hunger, but others as well. We feed until we have no more left, or until we are full. We refuse to fear excess. We risk the wondrous, mysterious enmeshment of love.