Taking Thirst Traps to Preserve Myself—and My Transition—in the Middle of the Pandemic

There is something attractive about being the subject and the artist all at once; of being entirely in control of how I am seen, who sees me.

“I mean, you would be surprised how many women like getting fucked by an unclassifiable monster. [Relax: I’m reclaiming the term. I like it. I mean, when uttered in certain contexts out of certain mouths. Must I justify everything?]”

—Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg

*

In California, it is month two of lockdown and I’m early on testosterone—about four months—so I’m breaking two cardinal rules: We, the trans mascs, don’t talk about early transition because it will be embarrassing for my people and eventually for me; we, the writers, don’t talk about the pandemic because everyone is talking about the pandemic.

And here I sit, extremely proud of myself that I finally thought to turn on the timer to take a photo of myself with my phone. That without asking anyone, or admitting that I would like to reproduce an image of my body, I thought of filling a jar with water and propping my phone against it. I took a whole-ass armchair out onto the porch, which is really a balcony, but which I call a porch because “plague porch” makes for good alliteration. The sun sinks into evening; the people who occupy the plague porch above me are smoking weed. The scent curls around me like a settling dog.

I am locked down with one cis person in an apartment that isn’t mine, having been on the West Coast before the pandemic struck us all down and now stuck here after. I usually live in New York City. I am extremely sad. And somehow all I want to do is take photos of myself in which I look hot, and send them to other people to show them how hot I look. That is a thirst trap: It initiates desire, one’s own and others. A deeply horny act in the face of global tragedy. I can’t really explain the cognitive dissonance away.

I search for theory. Theory is a category of reading I’ve been able to keep up with, even as the pandemic depletes my ability to pay attention. I feel like I only understand a quarter of it at the best of times, so nothing has changed. I look for the theory that explains the thrill of thirst trapping, that contextualizes my transness in my desire to artfully examine the shapes I make in physical space. A newfound ability to look at my own body and an obsession with doing so. When I chopped my tits off, I could finally look in a mirror. Never before have I wanted a photographic record of what I saw there.

I cannot find any scholarly papers on the taking of thirst traps and the trans body. I turn, instead, to Susan Sontag.

I oscillate wildly between wishing Sontag were alive to write about Instagram and being very glad that I don’t have to read Sontag’s On Instagram. Instead, what I think I will use to process my newfound obsession: “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.” It is from the first essay in On Photography, titled “In Plato’s Cave.” I am reading it in the bath.

There are plenty of other seemingly relevant nuggets, of course, from that essay and others. Things that seem to speak from the past to right now, that use the new buzzwords: “What is surreal is the distance imposed, and bridged, by the photograph: the social distance and the distance in time.” I should be fixated on those, as well.

What I actually cannot stop thinking about: Sontag’s writing about Diane Arbus’s “thing” for “the Halloween crowd.” People Sontag calls freaks. People about whom she writes: “Do they see themselves, the viewer wonders, like that? Do they know how grotesque they are? It seems as if they don’t.” Even a cursory look at Arbus’s body of work answers the question—yes, me and mine would be included in “the Halloween crowd.” I don’t love thinking of us this way; also, I do. The freedom from normality gives one permission to do anything. To break any rule.

*

4 26 20. The date is stamped on the subject’s inner thigh, directly on the subject’s body hair. The subject sits on a fluffy blanket, the pile of which is clearly synthetic. It is grey, which contrasts the blue-stitched red boxers nicely. It puts the subject’s wide-legged seat—a crotch-bearing seat, honestly—squarely in the foreground. It is, perhaps, where the eye goes first. Directly between the legs, though only one leg is visible. The other falls out of frame. The subject’s arms rest behind the head, elbows arcing up toward the sky—the elbows are very pointy. The subject wears glasses and smirks at the camera, stares directly at it, with fingers resting softly on the neck. The subject has a massive, visible chin zit. The faintest shadow is present above the lip; essence de mustache.

The subject’s gender is indeterminate.

*

In California, I text friends from the plague porch in the dark. Friends whom I know very well and to whom I send my thirst traps; acquaintances I only casually know from the internet to whom I do not send my thirst traps. All trans, all with vastly different understandings of their bodies, their genders, all also staying at home but in very different circumstances—by themselves, with cis people, with other trans people, with partners or friends or roommates they cannot stand.

They thirst trap in different ways. They do it for the internet, for romantic friendships, for platonic group texts, for significant others, for prospective dates in the After Times, whenever those might happen. And they’ve all noticed a difference. They fall into two camps: those who want to thirst trap more—a desire that mirrors mine—and those who feel it impossible to feel oneself. Nearly everyone’s relationship to taking sexy photographs has changed.

I repeat the same refrain as I speak to them all: I have never been hot before, and I’m afraid I won’t be anymore when quarantine is over. That this state of being is delicate, ephemeral. That I am not quarantined with any trans people, and my slow werewolf transformation from butch to twink will not be properly witnessed, encouraged, or remembered. Some of my friends think I want to hear that I have always been hot; some of them tell me so. But some know exactly what I’m saying—this slice of time feels especially impermanent and I cannot tell if it’s hormones or pandemic or both.

Nearly everyone’s relationship to taking sexy photographs has changed.

Of course, more Sontag. Of physical photographs, she says: “They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced.” This statement isn’t entirely true anymore. Only some photographs disappear, and even then, not really, not the digital ones. They do not become as valuable—there is an ocean of them now, each one a single molecule that makes up the visual internet. Reproduced ad infinitum until, rather than aging, they become impossible to kill.

Is that what I am doing—becoming ageless? In the absence of my meatspace body living in the minds of my people, am I preserving this slice of time to be accessed later? Am I imbuing my early-testosterone body with immortality, marking its existence? Since when did I want my body at all, let alone to make it last for human eternity?

“It feels like a protest against this idea that it’s polite to not find yourself attractive,” my friend A. Andrews says to me over Zoom when I ask them about thirst trapping. A is a writer and a comic artist. They think about the arrival of bodies in digital space quite a lot, usually because they are drawing bodies into existence. A falls into category two—less thirst trapping, more existential crises. But they talk to me about it anyway.

“It’s considered rude or self-involved to think you’re hot,” A says. “This idea that we have to kind of think of ourselves as objectively neutral or below is weird. Thirst traps are a protest against this notion that we should all feel kind of medium about ourselves.”

I consider my adherence to a politeness written upon the hearts of girl-children, the over-emphasis of humble-as-virtue. It is an insurance that anyone with any relationship to girlhood, regardless of gender or outcome, will feel squeamish taking up a reasonable amount of space. Will disparage their own body until they feel less than they are: stunning. Everyone is stunning and I really believe that; everyone, of course, except for me.

Fuck that. I would rather be the Halloween crowd, unshackle myself from the normals. Love myself just a little bit more.

*

5 26 20. Same subject, wildly different house—the viewer can tell because the door behind the person is open to a wall of bright orange, and there was nothing nearly as garish in the last few photos. The left arm reaches up; a suggestion of joy. The hand is cut off at the top by an ornate, curling frame—the entire body is centered in the reflection of an oval mirror. A shining scar is visible, featured even, and extends from armpit to armpit. The red boxers make a reappearance. The subject’s smile seems forced.

The subject’s gender is indeterminate.

*

I am locked down with one cis person and then, suddenly, I am not. I move into an Airbnb by myself. I don’t want to talk about the details. I send thirst traps to a friend. He sends them back. We comment on our respective testosterone-induced babeliness: the cut of our shoulders, the shapes of our faces, the mechanics of shaving our whisker-whispers.

Sontag fights Sontag while I am here, alone: “To photograph is to confer importance. There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value to their subjects.” This idea brawls with: “The photographer’s ardor for a subject has no essential relation to its content or value, that which makes a subject classifiable. It is, above all, an affirmation of the subject’s thereness; its rightness (the rightness of a look on a face, of the arrangement of a group objects), which is the equivalent of the collector’s standard of genuineness; it’s quiddity—whatever qualities make it unique.”

We comment on our respective testosterone-induced babeliness: the cut of our shoulders, the shapes of our faces, the mechanics of shaving our whisker-whispers.

I look at photos of myself. I describe them to myself. By taking the photo, by taking the time, I am conferring value upon myself and my body-in-process; neither would I suggest that the content or value makes the subject classifiable. It is an ouroboros of meaning: I confer meaning upon myself, I affirm my thereness, my rightness; my desire to confer more meaning upon myself increases.

“I’ve never before felt the full intensity of collective skin hunger like this,” says Grace Lavery when I text her and ask her about thirst traps during the pandemic. “It is an unusual experience.”

I’ve never said this to her, but talking to Grace (all two or three times I have done) always makes me sweat; it’s the proximity to her sheer power. She’s one of the most intelligent writers and academics in my extended community and it’s a privilege to live in a world in which I can DM her about the theoretical framework under which my friends and I do or do not get naked for photos. She falls into camp one, like me: never enough thirst traps.

“I find it hard to trust people who don’t post selfies,” Grace says. “I straight-up don’t trust those who whine about the narcissism of the youth and the click-hungry jackals of social media. The will to objectify one’s narcissism and displace it onto a network of others, to refuse to preserve the face from scorn or fetish, is a drive to begin the work of communalizing the body, to refuse the logics of organicity.”

Naturally, I must Google organicity—I decide this statement means holding only loosely to existence as an individual organic being, choosing to pivot instead to interconnected cyborg, but I could be wrong and I am too nervous to ask her. Is this, perhaps, what we are doing? Or really, something we have already been doing—making ourselves into a super-organism? Is this one way trans people expand our Pando-esque-roots absent communing with each other physically?

At the Airbnb, I try not to kill any of the spiders that share my strange twenty-eight-day home. They are everywhere and sometimes I slip—I accidentally wash one down the drain while I’m showering. One bites me on the toe and I look up what to do if it’s venomous. I give the couch to the spiders and I think that’s fine as long as I can use the rest of the apartment. I cannot kill spiders just because I find them monstrous.

I take a lot of photos. I don’t post them anywhere. I don’t send them to anyone. These ones? They’re only for me.

“I think the taking up thirst traps is the building of a performance archive.”

Ari Monts is the kind of friend who gives out homework. Not by requiring one to do tasks, but by mentioning so many ideas in one conversation that it necessitates further investigation. We are talking on Zoom. (We are only ever talking on Zoom now.) They pull a book out from behind their couch. It is The Sentient Archive, which they tell me is edited by “Linda Caruso Haviland and some guy named Bill.” Ari falls into camp two—for them, thirst traps are about the lead up to a physical encounter. It’s too depressing to take them right now. But their scholarly work is all about performance, gender and ritual; they are a perfect thirst trap discussant.

The Sentient Archive, they say, “talks about an archive of something that’s living and how we are archiving performances that live in our body. There’s something about being both the person behind the lens and in front of the lens in a thirst trap. It puts the subject in charge of the way that they’re being viewed.”

Ari continues to talk and I stare at the screen and I think about Diane Arbus. I’ve been Googling and I find a strange disconnect with Sontag’s imagining of Arbus and what I actually see: participation by the subject, a soft acceptance of naked bodies that fall outside classification—black and white photos of shirtless queens with proto-thirst-trap facial expressions, disabled people smiling directly at the viewer or else mean-mugging rugged, all closed-lips and smoldering eyes. Her photos betray a kindness. An understanding of power. A thirst, sometimes. And yet it is still someone looking into a life, being a tourist, a voyeur. There is something attractive about being the subject and the artist all at once; of being entirely in control of how I am seen, who sees me.

There is something attractive about being the subject and the artist all at once; of being entirely in control of how I am seen, who sees me.

I gently bring my focus back; Ari is talking about what trans people are not afforded in public spaces—the chance to experiment with our performed identities. “In public,” they say, “we’re just seen as strange and monstrous because of being trans or because of being Black or brown or Indigenous.”

I isolate with the spiders for three weeks instead of two, just to be safe. I do not go to the grocery store; I do not go for a walk. I go no further than the Airbnb gate. There are chickens here and I talk to them every day. I celebrate my birthday alone; my friends send me a bottle of Scotch and it arrives directly to my window. Two of them get a Covid test. It is negative. Together they drive ten hours to get me, ten hours back. I now live in their guest room; I don’t know for how long. The house is full of trans people and I have not taken one single thirst trap since arriving, until today.

*

7 9 20. The date stands out this time, against a white wall, grey couch, yellow throw pillow. The subject’s hair is wild, reaching for the heavens (I haven’t seen a barber in months). The eyes are cast down, toward the camera (which I have propped once more against a glass of water) and the wall behind the subject is busy with framed art, mounted nature, an embroidery hoop surrounding the backwards letters “q-u-e-e-r” (everyone else is out camping. I do not go camping. I am watching the cat, watering the garden and taking thirst traps because I am once again the only trans person here and every day counts).

The subject kneels on the couch, knees wide, the arm placed between them. The posture is tall, rocked back on the heels, and their shoulders fill out a tee shirt. The arms are thicker; the fabric stretches over a pectoral muscle (hell yeah, I have a fucking pectoral muscle!). In the right hand, fingers lightly grasp a Kindle (I am still reading Sontag). The skin on the face is alive with zits, crawling like ants around the jawline. The ghost of the mustache is gone (I shaved it off and I shave it off every other day).

The subject’s gender is indeterminate—because it is constructed to be so, for myself and mine; an unclassifiable monster.