A Conversation with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Meetinghouse published a selection from Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door in our first volume this past December. I called Sycamore’s Seattle landline after a three day bender inside the book. 

This interview has been edited for brevity, clarity, piety, etc. 

Frances Mize: And so what would you say the book is about?

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: I would say it’s about desire and its impossibility. And through that lens, it’s about gentrification, it’s about the failure of queer dreams, and the persistence of those possibilities anyway. It’s about the tyranny of the suburban imagination onto urban life, the hypocritical allure of gay male sexual culture, dancing, chronic pain, trauma, the body itself, and language. And the search for connection and the actualization of the dream of the city as the place where you find everyone and everything you never imagined, even if that possibility has been foreclosed by many of the other themes I mentioned.

FM: As someone who just finished the book, I’m like ‘it’s exactly about all of those things at once.’ It comes through. I hope I don’t sound too sycophantic, but it’s how I feel.

MBS: No, I want to hear that. Because for me, in writing a book that is so much about the felt sense, I do want to hear what other people’s experiences are in reading it. That’s been one of the things that has been great in this moment of profound isolation, is to have people engaging so deeply with this book that is in many ways about isolation. And in that engagement, I feel a closeness and also in some ways the actualization of what I’m looking for.

FM: What was it like to publish a book right now?

MBS: It’s been fascinating. I wrote the book in what I consider the present, but then in March, April, May of last year, the present changed dramatically. And so the book came out at the very end of the year, and I was thinking as it was approaching, ‘what the hell is this going to be like?’ People who were reading it ahead of time were telling me that they felt like it was very relevant to our current moment. And I really did not know what they meant to be honest. Until it came out, and people responded in such a deep way to these themes of loneliness and alienation and the search for connection. They even the broader terrain of gentrification of the landscape in which the book takes place, and the problems of trying to search for all of these things within that walled off mentality. In that sense, in some ways I don’t think it could have been better. The only thing missing is live events where I’m in a room just feeling the energy, and where afterwards I get to hug people, chat with people I know and people I don’t know. All of that is missing, but I feel like I have been able to conjure some of that in these virtual events.

And of course that’s another theme of the book, the alienation created by technology. And so ironically, here I’m relying upon technology for connection. At the beginning of the pandemic, when people first started talking about Zoom, I was like ‘there’s one thing guaranteed, I’m never going on Zoom.’ And here I am doing an entire book tour on Zoom.

FM: It’s a book that I guess at once extols the possibility of physical connection and also sort of laments, like you were saying, its impossibility. It’s so much about dancing with and touching strangers, and reading it right now I’m like ‘I can’t remember the last time I did that, and it’s hard to imagine the next time I will.’ It was a nice reminder of how beautiful that is, before we all forget. 

Shifting gears a bit: In The Freezer Door, there’s a disappointment in the way that we popularly talk about working towards progress or even progress as a concept, and maybe even a disappointment in the language that we use to do that. Could you talk about your dissatisfaction with, and I’m borrowing your words, “politicized queer worlds”?

MBS: I have been formed by radical queer outsider cultures. All of my analysis and my ways of being in the world originated there, and that for me was in the early 90s when I moved to San Francisco. I found other queer weirdos and outsiders, and freaks and sluts and whores and vegans and anarachists and direct action activists and runaways and dropouts and incest survivors. And we were all coming together to try to create an alternative to the violence of the world that we had grown up in. So I think now almost thirty years later - I laugh because I think wow, how could that be thirty years and yet it is - my disappointment is in the failure of politicized queer worlds to actualize their potential. 

I think there is this incredible rhetoric about accountability and mutuality and negotiation and gender fluidity, but I find that oftentimes people use that rhetoric to enact other kinds of violence. You know like a very sophisticated - ‘oh I just ditched my best friend and decided to never talk to them again without telling them, and this is self care.’ Or like, ‘I am a prison abolitionist so I couldn’t have possibly abused my partner.’ I feel like people hide behind that rhetoric, and also the rhetoric of inclusion. Because that’s one of the themes in the book that I explore.

I was formed in these worlds, and I have helped to form these worlds, but if I go into a politicized queer space in Seattle, where I don’t know people, where they aren’t like ‘Oh, that’s Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore,’ I don’t feel welcomed. And part of that is just what my body reads as in those worlds. And even worlds that are against binary gender essentialism, there still is that ‘oh, well what’s this body doing here?’ And I think it mirrors mainstream gay worlds, with their misogyny and racism and body fascism. Different bodies are allowed in different spaces. And I think for me, the dream of queer is an end to all hierarchies. And not the creation of new hierarchies. Flipping the hierarchies doesn’t change anything. Or it does change something, I should say. Because different people are welcome. And that is a positive step, but it’s not enough. And so for me, as I say in the book, I don’t want to become the police. I want to end policing in all of its forms. And that’s still the dream that I’m searching for. 

FM: You write, “I worry that queer spaces have become places where the illusion of critical thinking hides the policing of thought...I don’t want any team to win. I want to end winning.” What does real, inclusive critical thinking look like to you? Because this book to me really insists on critical thinking, not even as a mode of analysis but even as sensuality. 

MBS: For me, the book is structured towards feeling. I’m searching for connection, but on that search I might find devastation and desperation and loneliness and hopelessness and craving, and also those moments when suddenly the light changes. Or there is a sense that ‘Oh, I can exist in this world.’ And so for me, all of that is what I want. To explore everything at once. Because as soon as we decide that one way of thinking is the way to go, then we’re foreclosing all the other options. Sometimes we decide things and we come up with great ideas, but eventually we want to challenge those ideas too. So that we can get somewhere else. 

I don’t believe in a world without critical thinking because what’s the point? But at the same time, I don’t want critical thinking without an embodied self. It’s easy for me to find worlds where people are thinking critically. Or at least that’s their goal. But it’s way harder to find worlds like that where I also feel like I have an embodied self. And so in searching for that embodiment, I’m searching for a way to bring everything together. 

My goal is to feel, just in every day experience, like that moment right before you’re about to makeout with someone. That to me is total embodiment. And it’s that potential - it’s not even when it’s there. It’s the potential for it. And that’s how I want to exist in the world, even when the world doesn’t allow that. And so I’m constantly sort of pushing against, and pushing toward, the possibilities that maybe can exist anyway. 

FM: So thinking and physicality are not two different things to you?

MBS: I hope not. I can’t say for sure, but I hope not. 

FM: I love when you write about David Wojnarowicz smashing out the walls at a gallery that’s showing his work. You write, “what a clichéd, masculinist triumph. If he had lived, would he have unlearned this?” Could you talk about what it means to love an artist that you also want to unlearn things?

MBS: When I first read David Wojnarowicz, it was right after I read his obituary. He had died of AIDS. I first heard of him through that obituary. And this was true for a lot of gay and queer artists in that time. I would hear about them either as they were dying of AIDS, or right after. In the case of Wojnarowicz, it was right after he had died and I read Close to the Knives. It was the first time where I saw my sense of rage at the world, and also maybe a little bit of hope in a world of loss, in print. And also a sense of public engagement with desire as a central part of living in the world as a fag, as a queen, as a queer person. And I think that I probably never had that same experience at such a deep level. It was something that really just shook me.

And so over the years, I would give his books to people as kind of a litmus test. Close to the Knives and Memories That Smell Like Gasoline in particular. And then also his art. I had photocopies on my walls, like the burning house image in particular. Even though I don’t believe in icons, he was the closest thing to an icon for me. And over the years, I’ve experienced his work in different ways, and I’ve learned a lot more about him. 

To come back to that question of critical engagement, I don’t believe in icons because I don’t want to make something living dead, and I don’t want to make someone who is dead into a flattened, streamlined product. So for me, I still want to examine his work as if he’s alive and as if the work is alive. His writing is totally alive for me. And so learning more about him, and knowing that he did in some ways inhabit the kind of masculinity that is everything that I despise, makes me want to ask that question.

He died at thirty-eight. He didn’t have time. He was killed by a government that didn’t care and a culture that was more than happy to let fags and junkies and whores and migrants and people living on the streets die and disappear. 

So I can’t say what would have happened. I only have the incredibly vibrant and varied and beautiful and transformative life that he lived, and the work that he left. But, knowing more about him in the world, I do want to question those things. I want to hold him accountable, and I also want to hold the broader culture accountable in the context of posthumously making him into an art world celebrity. And I can’t say for sure who exactly benefits from that, but I do know that it’s not him. Because he’s dead.

So I want to continue what I believe his legacy was, which was to challenge everything. And that means challenging his legacy itself. 

FM: I have written down right in front of me what you wrote: “the commodification of creativity is a dead end.” Letting his celebrity rule over and kill the living aspect of his work seems to be another kind of dead end. 

In the book, you attend a Q&A of two “great, straight, white male writers,” and then you say “it’s hard to imagine anything more damaging to literature than literature.” We’re a new magazine and you were gracious enough to let us publish your work in our inaugural issue. We’re still asking a lot of questions of ourselves. So how do we not become like the kind of literature that’s damaging to literature? 

MBS: First of all, I think it’s an open question and always will be. And keeping it open is the important thing. We have these literary magazines that are culturally hallowed and just become kind of like these dead objects that live through their own prestige. And they exist to further that prestige. They will pull in whatever is going to increase that, and keep out anything that is not going to work towards that goal. Prestige should not be the goal of writing. For me, I write in order to stay alive. And I think the goal of writing should be to challenge the culture that we’re living in. And try to imagine something else. 

Another thing that happens with publications is that there is like one thing that they’re known for, and then they get stuck there. For me it’s more interesting if it’s not so solid. Maybe solid is the wrong word. If it doesn’t become brittle - and sharp at the same time! Some of these publications will cut anyone that tries to get close. 

There’s a part in the book where the two “great, straight, white male authors” are talking to one another and they’re asking all the typical questions you’re supposed to ask. One of them asks “Who is your ideal audience.” The other answers, “everyone in my ideal audience is dead.” 

FM: Yeah, what a douche bag.

MBS: Right? And that’s how it is. Then he says, “you know, Milton, Homer, Virgil.” It’s literally just saying ‘none of you matter. None of this matters. I’m just thinking about Virgil, Homer, and Milton.’ And that’s the mentality of most literary magazines. So I think it’s about opening the gates, not closing them. It’s about pushing through walls, not creating new walls. I would say similar things about this gentrifying mentality in the world. You’re walking down the street and someone looks at you and you think ‘oh, this could be an interesting interaction.’ And then they turn and look at a wall! 

I feel like in the book I’m searching for embodiment, and also the text itself is searching for embodiment. And that’s why in some ways the text is constantly circling around itself. This questioning creates more questions. There may be answers there somewhere, but I think the questions are often the most important part.

And that’s what I want writing to do. 

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of The Freezer Door, one of Oprah Magazine’s Best LGBTQ Books of 2020, released from Semiotext(e). Sycamore’s next book, Touching the Art, will be published by Soft Skull Press in 2023. 

Frances Mize is the editor of Meetinghouse.