Guest Column: I Love Dick‘s India Salvor Menuez on the Amazon Series’ Queer Gaze

Cooking dinner the other night with some friends, we were discussing all the sticky feelings we have around the corporate sanctioning of “pride month.” One friend made a declaration which surprised me at first, but has sat in me with resonance since: “It’s the shame that connects us; not pride.”

It struck me in how this was a valuable truth, perhaps too often overlooked—that making space for our own shame, to really dissect and process it, could prove more healing than trying to wrap our shame in a rainbow blanket and pretend we are instantly evolved, beaming with pride. What does it really feel like to peel away shame? I land on an image of mulching, our skin underneath the shame is pink, thin and vulnerable—it hurts. There is relief, but it does not come with ease.

Another image surfaces: My dad reads to me from The True History of the Kelly Gang about a man so filthy that when the cops tried to bathe him, sheets of his skin peeled away with the dirt. I remember I was only 6 or so listening to this story—the fear I felt that somehow this might happen to me was so immense.

The first time I fell in love with a girl was in 7th grade. She lived near me and whenever she wanted me to, I would gleefully come over before school so I could braid her hair and ride the train with her. I spent as much time as I could with her, her twin, and our two other friends—we were all closet-queers. We called ourselves the “Love Crew,” and once carved our collective name into a tree. The girl I loved and another girl in our group were seeing each other—a secret we all dutifully kept. I learned to just live in the hotness of restraint.

Sharing a pair of headphones felt as erotic as sharing a bed. Without knowing what they were, I did kegels on the train to keep myself on the edge, then I’d get home and feel unsure of what to do about it. Sometimes the solution was AIM chatting boys to ask how big their dicks were; perhaps this kind of early sexting was actually my introduction to the phantom cock. I mean I always did find pleasure in the role-play of heterosexuality, but there was also something else going on for me. I learned that I could harness my relentless hunger into making work and that this might be easier than seeking real satisfaction with another. By the time I was 13, I was living in this fantasy of total autonomy and felt strongly that I didn’t need (or perhaps that it would be impossible) to feel seen; rather, I became interested in exploring the pleasures and powers of being unassuming (unseen).

I remember so many makeup artists painting up my face like a doll, then telling me how it would read entirely different on camera—natural. I always knew this wasn’t true—maybe if we were shooting super 8, but not in the land of HD, baby.

Shooting my scene in the I Love Dick pilot, series co-creator Jill Soloway came over and said to hair and makeup, “femme hair with a butch face.” Then, later, Jill took the makeup wipes and wiped away the little make up they had put on me anyway—like such a dad.

Was I a femme? I sure as hell had been commodifying myself that way. Modeling became patriarchal validation as a paycheck when I ventured into financial independence at 18. This kind of femme-ing as scamming brought me such funny satisfaction, but I knew it was limited. Like how I knew strictly bottoming would gender me in a way I was used to, but which felt itchy, not entirely like me.