#alexander chee

[lastparty]

I have a theory about coming out. That you won’t do it unless you fear losing the love of someone else. Everything else is bearable otherwise. But only that which makes it unbearable brings it about, like losing love. There’s a world made possible and real when Shane and Ilya have sex and they discover it together, and they want it more than they want anything else except maybe the Stanley Cup.

The sex is the story and tells the story. It is inherent, and this also is a relief in a year when we saw discourse fomenting against sex scenes in novels as gratuitous and unwanted. These men have sex like two people discovering themselves and each other both, learning what they like, learning what the other likes. They are in the grip of the paradise they are building. Some of the most amusing memes for the show mock the real estate that gets nicer and nicer the more they have sex but this landscape is a metaphor for the sex they are having, the world it is building between them.

Alexander Chee on Heated Rivalry

[anatomiadellamemoria]

Alla fine non conta chi ti trasforma, solo cosa diventi.

— Alexander Chee, Edimburgo

[semperintrepida]

Too much writing about sex tries to either make it prettier or more serious, sexier or funnier or shocking, or anything, really, except what it is. On its own terms, sex is information. This I learned from reading Salter… Reading Salter’s sentences, I saw what I knew of sex, that sex is a moment in which you are known and knowable. Whatever it is you desire appears from behind the veil of shame or fantasy or nostalgia, or sheer impossibility, and in its presence, you are revealed to yourself. Porn obscures this; porn is about the fantasy of the viewer, not the mixed fantasies, realities, and disappointments of the actors in the room. Truth might get you off, but porn doesn’t deal in maybes, was never interested in unreliable, unpredictable truth-telling. When my teacher told me to read James Salter, what she meant was that this kind of sex writing is about you, the reader, in a way a fantasy isn’t. It describes sex so that it tells you something about the story and the characters and yourself, all at once.

—Alexander Chee, "Sex and Salter"

[little-mush]

Alexander Chee, quoting David Wojnarowicz, from Best American Essays 2022; “Foreward”

A quote from David Wojnarowicz, an artist and essayist who shaped me as much as any other, kept me company in 2021 as I made my choices. His friend the artist Zoe Leonard told him she feared her photographs of clouds were not up to the cultural moment of the AIDS crisis. He said to her, “Zoe, these are so beautiful, and that’s what we’re fighting for. We’re being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty. If you let go of that, we don’t have anywhere to go.”

[grandturtleperson]

How many times have you seen a man ask to be fucked on cable television, expressively, politely, urgently? How many times have you seen a man say he preferred it and the story turns on that admission? And he weeps as he says it? How many stories have you seen where a man discovers this kind of sex is his greatest joy and he will risk everything in order to continue to have this with a man he loves? ... The sex is the story and tells the story. It is inherent, and this also is a relief in a year when we saw discourse fomenting against sex scenes in novels as gratuitous and unwanted. These men have sex like two people discovering themselves and each other both, learning what they like, learning what the other likes. They are in the grip of the paradise they are building. Some of the most amusing memes for the show mock the real estate that gets nicer and nicer the more they have sex but this landscape is a metaphor for the sex they are having, the world it is building between them.

— Alexander Chee, 'In Your Arms I Would Start A War: A Heated Rivalry Notebook', The Querent, 17 Jan 2026

[protoslacker]

If I could go back in time to the student I was then, I would say to him, I know this life feels full of murder and harm, but you will meet some of the best people in the world, people better than you can imagine right now. They will love you and you will love them, and together, you will teach each other to change the world together, and it will, unfortunately, still need more change, most likely for your whole life. And you can’t give up because giving up gives your enemies power and hope. But in doing this work you will meet pretty much everyone you will ever love. The loneliness you feel will part, especially when you start this work.

Alexander Chee in The Querent. Homecomings

I was invited to go back to my high school to talk about my work and was asked about despair. The students surprised me and I surprised myself.

[peachpulpeuse]

i'll be terribly interested to read a little life in conversation with alexander chee's the queen of the night, which (I loved and) may operate on a similar logic as the former. per garth greenwell's review of all, "To understand the novel’s exaggeration and its intense, claustrophobic focus on its characters’ inner lives requires recognizing how it engages with aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera [Ed.: and fanfiction!]." chee writes explicitly [in an interview? or maybe even in the foreword or something?] that he wanted to reach for the heightened drama and often cipher-like characters of the opera plot (abandoned orphan, unique talent, dazzling life history, great voyages through gutters and palaces, ingenues and villains, great love affairs, betrayals, long-lost family and sudden teary reunions) to access the same sense of larger-than-life ALIVENESS of the operatic voice itself that my wifey wayne koestenbaum writes about in the queen's throat. so... i'll be interested to read the books..... in conversation

[oldshrewsburyian]

A 🌹, please! - Pinkcupboardwitch

Do you know Alexander Chee's The Queen of the Night? It gets some specific music history wrong in ways that you may or may not find annoying, but it's well-written and beautifully atmospheric. I think you would like its heroine!