Brief reflection on Samuel Ace--and Meet me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash., by Samuel Ace and Linda Smukler

(I wrote this for an internship I didn't get--ha! But I really hope there is enough persuasive lucidity to get you to read this book. Samuel Ace's earlier work is so so so good.)

Samuel Ace is a master of writing transformation—and the longing to transform from one body to another, and the contradiction of loving—and loving in—the body you want to transform from. His poems, in this collection, are the price we pay—the loving and fucking and getting our hearts broken that is transgression, as Kay Gabriel writes in her essay on Ace’s poetry, Philosophy in the Water Closet, included at the end of this collection, “[no] morals left standing, just the feeling that animates play, a quasi-religious fervor of the senses” (Gabriel 174). These poems, originally published in 1996, cannot be parsed from the Sex Wars of the 1990s, as Gabriel notes—wherein the project, harming sex workers and trans people, was to moralize sex. Ace’s poetry is stinky, messy, gooey, dirty, rotten sex. It is shit stains and the smell of lubricant and spitting on acne cracked skin. As I read, I thought of the moment in Lou Sullivan’s You Make me Swoon, when he is lying in the park, cruised by a gay man who knows he is a trans man. And again, reading Ace’s “Friendship INN,” “… I find my finger in your ass and here you are loving me touching me through my underwear,” I think of Lou sleeping beside a man, waking up and fingering his ass, masturbating beside him, and rubbing his face with his own cum. For trans people, sex is space of transgression—and wouldn’t you do just about anything to feel yourself as something else?