To Cage A Yellowbird.
A gay man's golden handcuffs.
I’m very excited to announce that my new essay, “To Cage A Yellowbird,” is now ready for you to read at this link here. It’s been published at Qstack by Mr. Troy Ford, who assiduously maintains Qstack for our collective benefit.
Here are the opening lines of “To Cage A Yellowbird,” and the rest is available at Qstack. I hope you like it as much as I do.
I remember how I locked Jim into his very first chastity cage.
It was a small thing shoddily made out of metal, sold to me on a cheery spring day by one of the innumerable adult toy stores in the heart of New York's West Village. I had told him to wait for me there outside of the shop before our second hookup.
We had met just the week prior via Grindr, on which I was looking to move past a recent breakup that had too quickly followed an even bigger breakup. I wanted to find someone new to fill the vacancy in my life, and my clandestine introduction to Jim had hinted at our potential compatibility: he was intimately submissive where I preferred to be dominant. Instructing him to meet me at the shop was, therefore, also a test of his submission and how far he was willing to go. When I arrived at the shop and saw him standing there next to its entrance, I considered him to have passed with flying colors.
Qstack provides directory listings of LGBTQIA+ writers, serving as a navigable, living library of our works. In effect, it also functions as a community space where our stories, our lives, can have some breathing room. I’m thankful that A YEAR WITHOUT WATER has been included within because it’s an honor to exist and thrive alongside my tribe.
I’m so pleased to share that “To Cage A Yellowbird” has also been featured in Memoir Land’s Memoir Monday. It means the world to me to have my writing shared anywhere and especially here among all the standout pieces from other writers as well.
Below, I’ll discuss the essay with some spoilers, so I suggest pausing here to read it before moving on.
Well, there’s no hiding the truth, so I may as well say it outright: this essay is sexy. I don’t mean to imply that it’s a work of erotica, because it’s not intended to fulfill that function, but it does examine a very physical activity between two consenting adults. To that end, it’s a little bit salacious, a little bit emotional, and a whole lot of fun.
The idea for “To Cage A Yellowbird” came to me either very late last year or very early this year, I no longer recall with exactitude (and I don’t think it matters enough to go digging through my files to confirm). I had been thinking about a—for lack of a better word—relationship between someone and myself that had recently ended, and I wanted to explore how I felt about the situation.
The essay is supposed to feel like a confessional, an open secret of sorts. Although I have already undergone my own coming of age with respect to my sexuality and orientation, such that I really don’t feel any shame about my personal life, I imagined the conversational tone of the piece as one of shy questions and whispered, snickered answers. Intercourse is a fact of humanity, and I don’t believe that obfuscating its occurrence or practice does anyone any good, yet I also understand that it’s a topic with which some people are still coming to terms. Thus, couching it as a confessional essay with pops of informational context serves to ease readers into the subject matter, told through the framing of my (a stranger’s) memory for the purpose of giving my words a proper narrative structure.
Without going on too long of a tangent, it’s important for me to mention that history has proven that demystifying sex is paramount to improving our collective health. Understanding how sex happens is precursory to establishing safe practices, because abstinence-only “education” is an unrealistic [Christofascist] fantasy. From the right to abortion to STI prevention and everything in between or beyond, personal health is also community health because we interact with each other. Our lives affect one another’s. Therefore, we are obligated to keep one another safe, and that is improved by an equitable, fair dissemination of crucial information; lacking that information makes one susceptible to exploitation and control. (PrEP [pre-exposure prophylaxis, a preventative against contracting HIV] and Doxy PEP [doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis, a preventative against bacterial infections such as syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhea] should be made commonly available, sexually active adults should regularly test for infections at least every three months, etc.)
I directly referenced the so-called gay-famous micro-celebrities of (East) Asian descent named within. The role of representation in media, even niche adult media, is to reflect the realities of our existence, and I do think their presence has at least somewhat spotlighted our experiences within the gay community. Insofar as I am a gay, cisgender, Chinese American man writing about my own circumstances, there are some parallel aims in depicting our lives as they are lived. Moreover, because Jim was experimenting with the archetype that they so readily embody, it’s also to give readers aid in visualizing the person about whom the essay was written.
Over time, I’ve given a lot of thought to how my writing should and would be perceived. It’s seldom that I go out of my way to ensure that my work is firmly and boldly queer or Asian American, but I also know that I’ll be inevitably placed in those categories—regardless of any efforts to the contrary—because that is who I am. So, I endeavored for “To Cage A Yellowbird” to achieve a balance of providing background info wherever necessary while still being straightforward about my story. It’s true that I don’t exclusively look to be with men of my race (in lieu of a full-on digression, please allow this parenthetical remark to serve as my acknowledgement of race being a social construct and a legacy of scientific racism), just as it’s also true that I’ve felt the most seen by men who had cultures and upbringings similar to mine. Perhaps (in)famously, I’ve already written about many such men within A YEAR WITHOUT WATER; indeed, the essay opens with a reference to my breakup after another breakup.
Word limits and my fear of going on for too long resulted in a decision against fleshing out too many memories of the time I shared with Jim, and I relied instead on the insertion of more colorful sentences to illustrate the tiny world in which we had cohabited:
“With him, I would be someone new; for him, I could be someone else.”
“I had just started a new job at which I strove to excel, and he had received a promotion to a demanding position that required him to work unsustainably long hours; suffice it to say that I needed release, and so did he.”
“He introduced me to Fred again.., California burritos, and the infamous TikToker Pinkydoll; I planned visits to Michelin-starred restaurants and even met up with him on the other side of the country.”
“Our interactions felt kind of lacking, like a prescriptive, dispassionate sort of blandness. He had few interests besides exercise and electronic dance music—and, given his workaholic tendencies, he didn't have much free time to do anything but his job anyways. Dating him felt perfunctory.”
On the one hand, I could claim that we didn’t do much together. On the other, I could reflect upon the experiences we did share, like running down Tenth Avenue to our favorite pizza joint every other week or attending a Boiler Room set on a boat jaunt around Manhattan. But, if there’s any habit I should divest to prove my maturity (I mention within the essay that I struggled with reconciling my own behavior with what I expect from adults, and I continue to reckon with myself to this day), I think it’s that I shouldn’t constantly measure one relationship against others. What we had was what it was.
Of course, that all came to an end, influenced in part by the pivotal event chronicled within “My Grandmother’s Daughter,” another essay of mine about how I became “darkly estranged from my mother” and within which I “had a complete breakdown, choking back tears” partially because my hypnotherapy was happening at the same time of my separation from Jim. There I was, at the juncture of yet another breakup—yet this one didn’t sting as much as my priors. Jim had never told me he loved me, nor did I ever say that to or expect it of him. I hadn’t allowed myself to become fully invested in our situationship, as a reactive defense mechanism that had been engendered by the Henry and Beau relationships.
“To Cage A Yellowbird” also serves to journal my attempts at reconnecting with intimacy and self-confidence. The aforesaid big breakup had really shattered my sense of self, and I was left feeling fundamentally undesirable. Additionally, being socialized as a gay man has often resulted in me feeling pressured to hook up, to prove my worth, the predictable outcome of that being situations in which nobody has any satisfactory fun. Ergo, for me, the “reliable consistency” Jim and I provided each other was about more than just release. I was chasing the sensation of being desired, even needed. Ultimately, it’s not about the cage itself but rather what it represented: fidelity, power, commitment, and yearning. It wasn’t that I owned him—it was that he wanted to belong to me.
My original working title for the essay was “The Birdcage” (pun fully intentional), which I later relegated to subtitle status after I settled upon its formal name. It is a time capsule of the person I once was and a boy I once knew, self-contained such that I can let myself move on from the associated recollections with the assurance that it’s still somewhere out there, to which I can return if ever I so desire. Should it be of any interest to anyone else, I’m happy to have been able to share.
