For the Love of Monsters
Monsters Show Us What White Men are Afraid Of (Me)
When I started this newsletter, I promised you monsters. It is my “esoteric newsletter of love and monsters.” I haven’t given you enough monsters (can there ever be enough?)
Let’s talk about some fucking monsters (and monster fucking??) This is an 18+ newsletter, after all.
Table of Offerings
Introduction to My Monstrous Philosophy
3rd Place Winner! The Life Cycle of the Blastophaga psenes or An Awakened Child
A Queer Material Lab(Rat)‘s Solar Communion
He is Our Prince of the Forest - Monstrous Erotic Story for Paid Subscribers (at the end!)
TW: mentions of colonization, violence against trans and esp black trans women, transphobia, racism
If you’re gonna or read me/what I write, you should understand my philosophy about monsters. This is a BRIEF summary of my thoughts.
Embracing monstrosity is critical to liberating queer people, especially those of black and brown experience. There is evidence of this in the growing surge of monsters and chimeras in queer art, fashion, and music.
Afropessimism teaches us that the fight for black life in comparison to other marginalized people is different because we are not seen as a lower rank of people; we are not seen as human.
I value this idea as a framework for deep acceptance of the worst realities of our condition, a tool to understand what we’re truly up against to transform it. It’s like accepting you have a disease so that you can treat it.
However, I also ask what it means to be human. Do I even want to be what they define as human if human is merely a manifestation of who fits a white supremacist standard of beauty, intelligence, and existence?
No, I want to be a monster.
Today queers own their monstrosity—a creature or being that has undefined, uncategorizable, unnatural, and/or hybrid characteristics that exists or behaves outside of the “natural order.”
This is a very, very small list of examples, and I’ve chosen to pick more “mainstream” options to showcase that this is a widely permeated phenomenon. I have seen so much work regarding monsters these days:
Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ 2023 Grammy “Unholy” performance, Juliana Huxtable’s chimeric photo series, Ashnikko’s and Melanie Martinez’s music videos, and the increasingly popular illustration of art twink. Even drag and costume artistry has elevated beyond human aesthetics through artists like Hungry and Phlegm.
Even through these reclamation forms, the “market” has decided there is profit in monstrosity. The horror industry depends on them. We have been scaring each other since the beginning of imagination with visions of monsters.
Capitalism can feed on the glamours we shapeshift into. There’s money to be made in the controversy of monsters. Just look at Lil Nas X’s devilish campaign.
These same stories also shape who and what we see as a monster—that idea is key to my philosophy of monsters. The concept of monsters cannot be separated from colonizers’ fears.
It’s not enough to look like a monster to rattle colonialism. We must live in opposition to the values and oppressions of those who have defined what monstrosity is for so long.
Generations have been trained to recognize monsters in those who reject, question, exist outside of, or subvert Christianity.
Colonized concepts of monstrosity directly manifest as the anti-drag and other transphobic bills. They deny us healthcare because they want us to die, as a monster is something killable.
The ancestors had their own ideas of monsters, like the Wendigo of the Algonquian people. People who are murderous and greedy are described as possessed by the Wendigo's insatiable hunger—a monster ripe to define colonizers and capitalism.
Monsters have been used to understand unexplainable illnesses and tragedies or as ominous cautionary tales. Definitions of monsters most likely include the words “ugly,” “evil,” or “frightening,” and a monster can be that too. But who decides what is ugly?
A monster is a technology. Technology shapeshifts by the hand and will of its user.
It starts to become a confusing ouroboros eating itself because most of what we see as a monster is not a monster at all.
Most of what is seen as a monster does not want to cause harm; in fact, it’s divine.
Early humans drew themselves merged with animals, like “The Sorcerer” cave art. Most deities and spirits of almost every culture on Earth have some level of hybridity between animals and/or plants and the human form, or they can shapeshift. Even if they’re not the dominant gods, those who attend to or exist alongside the gods exist with the hybrid. An example is the human-looking Greek Pantheon working with centaurs (half horse/half man), dryads (women that can turn into trees), and 100-eyed giants.
(This argument connects to my “we have been furries since the beginning of time” hypothesis, but we’ll discuss that some other time.”)
I question why the most human-looking gods have survived throughout history. How many more bestial and nature-bound gods were cast out, destroyed, and replaced?
I am a child of the Orisha Obatala; what that means to me is I have a profound connection with the energy signature of Obatala, which also exists in many other names/forms. I say this to clarify I’m not criticizing Yoruba. I simply wonder about the lasting survival of Yoruba Orishas, often depicted as very sexy humans, over what I’m sure was once the massive shapeshifting pantheon of the Motherland. (Though some still have some hybridity, such as the snake form of Osumare).
Merging “man and nature” was demonized by colonization. Monsters became synonymous with liminality. This theme of merging was demonized by colonization, and monsters became synonymous with what is liminal–in between. Every demon or devil illustration you have ever seen utilizes hybridity.
You can see the delineations easily in old bestiaries.
Monsters show us what white men fear: fatness, transness, femininity, nonbinary/hybridity, blackness, the natural world/death, and the like.
Queer people across the spectrum of experience have known, felt, or have been projected upon some feeling of being unnatural, unwanted, uncategorizable, and killable.
It is also a pulse of many queer people to look beyond Abrahamic religious colonization and into the beliefs and beauties of our ancestors, and we see ourselves there; we are seeing the trans, intersex, shapeshifting, expansively loving beings that have been relegated as monsters.
This experience compounds with the experience of blackness, of being seen not as human, and the festering narratives of the “spook,” or the black person in the shadows, the crime waiting to happen, the brute.
This combination of colonial narratives around monstrosity and the hatred of divine femininity, blackness, and liminality is why 320 trans people were killed in 2023. “The vast majority of those killed (94%) were trans women or trans-feminine people. Most were Black, and many were sex workers too. 80% of those killed were of trans people affected by racism, an increase of 15% from last year” (Forbes).
I see two responses:
We can flip the monster narrative back onto our oppressors. Valid. Potent.
Instead, I’m choosing to lean into being a monster, so much so that I melt between the cracks of perception and propaganda and into the truth of who we are supposed to be and who these monsters really are.
Queers are reclaiming their ancestors’ dreams and spitting at the oppressors' judgment. It’s in our art and our aesthetics, our “monster-fucking” fan fiction, and personas. It occurs to me that supposed “queer icon” Lady Gaga calls her fans her monsters? Right? Mercy, it’s everywhere. This path hides in the shadows and stares directly at us in the face with overstimulating, sparkling lights. Don’t let capitalism distract you from the truth of monstrosity.
Maybe someday I/We will find a better word for this transmutation and reclamation process, but for now, I say:
I am a monster.
Being a monster is sacred. Being a monster is our ancestry and the key to the future we want to experience in the present. Monsters hold the identities and concepts we need for healing, especially our fear of death.
I want to be what white men are afraid of until they are consumed by my teeth and bow to my claws, only to be ripped apart and reborn anew as beings worthy of calling themselves children of Earth.
Yeo Writing Prize - 3rd Place
On a whim, I edited an old gay poem to make it even gayer for a queer-themed contest for Evanescent.
Some judges thought it was good enough and gave me a 3rd place prize, my first writing prize since 2017—Not my last!
The poem is a bit heavy-handed with the gay metaphors, and it’s a bit denser/more obscure than the things I like to write these days, but this sticky poem about fig wasps was the first poem I wrote in college that I really connected to. It will always have an ooey, gooey place in my heart. I’m glad it’s found its “publishing home.” It felt like a ghost I had to appease.
The Life Cycle of the Blastophaga psenes or An Awakened Child
Here a new testament:
\
The fig tree.
The one in our playground. It was stout and ugly
I found it unnerving for its unchecked curving branches–its false fruit.
An inflorescence: a cluster of many flowers and seeds ingrown within a bulbous stem.
Its fat leaves slapped your cheeks if you passed too close.
The tree and I shared the opinion that children are raised to be unhelpful,
shitting in porcelain vases, straining and sweating, instead of planting the fig’s
fertilized seeds in the earth’s dark.
We were taught–Don’t make a sound. Don’t disturb the ground.
The tree warned us. Adults whispered about us. Made my ears itch
and yours too,
Emily Rose Grubb.
\
You were blonde and a fortunate one.
You held a whole fruit for yourself. I watched as you decided not to eat
but crawl into the bushes with me to let ants creep over your toes and up your capris.
You had grass in your teeth, so I knew how you beat long-limbed big kids for an entire fig plump. I didn’t want to ask and didn’t have to
because one side of the fig was caving in. I winced.
You had picked it off the ground.
You dug your dirt-caked thumb into the soft vessel
to split and share the bulb. It squelched and, for a moment, sighed as you tore it.
Said: For you, and dropped it in my lap.
When I saw the insides, I knew it was wrong.
It’s not fruit, it’s carnivore. Flesh begetting flesh.
The insides a chewed, bleeding cheek, the moist skin shredded and pooling
in its own fluids.
Embedded in the soggy wall, a preserved wasp, half consumed by the fig, half twitching.
I got sick and
ran away.
\
You and I got locked in the art classroom bathroom. We were washing our hands
and open-mouth kissing at the same time, lips barely touching.
We didn’t know how grown-ups made open mouths close in on each other.
The fire alarm pierced. We pulled apart. Panicked.
Our soapy hands couldn’t turn the knob or think to dry themselves.
We banged on the door. With each pound, I knew this must be what it feels
like to be a fig wasp.
\
Here a superb example of coevolution or savage dependency:
\
The fig’s ostiole is so tight that the queen wasp often loses an antennae or wing wriggling through. When her eggs hatch, the girls will scrape pollen
and the boys will dig, dig, dig to tunnel their pregnant sisters out of the fig.
I wanted to tunnel my Emily Grubb out of the bathroom into the sun
the mud instead of burning alive. The art teacher found us, bewildered by our fear
and sticky, wet mouths.
It was only a drill.
\
The wingless males stay behind to be at once the food and at once the divine,
like laying in your top bunk with no underwear under our skirts, just
our hands bent as cameras taking pictures up and up each other’s thighs.
You always let me be the boy.
We never questioned why things are the way they are.
This is where I did my duty and stayed behind to jellify.
This is where I accepted to be
swollen.
\
Here a newly discovered species!
\
A year later Adults made me move away from you, but this distance could not starve me
and the church could not pluck my roots
that were growing me into the tree’s mutagenic offspring.
Into the one who warned me of sanitized civilization
and that pollination is not reserved for butterflies and bees.
\
Adults expected a beautiful girl who was like a flower, cracked wide in form
but my flowers curl inward as a syconium, as a belly heavy
with forced intergenerational deceit.
I won’t be a liar for them, you, or me.
Split me open, and you will find numerous tiny fruits and truths, each with tiny seeds, each knowing what the tree slapped into us
and it will set my species apart as self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you ask, I’ll tell, and the broken curse will cause
animals and humans alike to clamber for my fruit
only to swallow me, too, as a significant protein
that will never know if Emily and I share these core memories.
\
Teeth and gastro-acids grind my wings, expose my seeds
to facilitate my bloom into knowing:
I’m not fruit. I’m a carnivore
because I prayed this word to you: want.
I rot and grow in want as an endangered lifecycle stubborn in generosity.
I will always become fruit for those who wish to disturb–make sound.
One bite and I will set their faces alight.
I’ll coat their insides
\
a bloody color.
\
A Queer Material Lab(Rat)’s Solar Communion
Part II of my accounting from my first residency at the Queer Materials Lab through Temple University’s Fibers Department. Read Part I Here.
I spent the past few weeks of my residency not in my glass box on Temple’s campus but in the sunshine of South Flordia.
Part of my time was spent with a friend in Miami, and another part was working/living on a queer land project.
I communed with plants/bugs/lizards/etc. to inform how creatures of my planet, Mother Kow, relate to created trades and crafts, specifically fibers, to tie them back into my residency.
As a little reminder, I’m writing the first book of a trilogy about a sentient planet named Mother Kow and all of her children. On this planet, there is no industrialized society and no money. Everything between cultures and species must be negotiated through what you create for a trade or the skill exchange you can offer.
Here are some plants/animals and ideas that surfaced when I communed with them.
Mango Flowers
Mango flower-like structures grow out of the back of a creature. The flowers are actually tiny hands tiny hands that hold multiple threads for an embroidery machine-like stitching process. During the flooding of the wet season, these creatures live under the water, and their tiny hands are used for filter feeding.
Farming Aphids
A symbiotic relationship between a nomadic species and a species of worm that acts more like a plant. Using a process similar to tufting rugs, the species plants these worms into the leather of a cloak. The worms are fed, pruned, cleaned, and their eggs dispersed (excess eggs are eaten). The nomadic species get hydrophobic garments and coverings that also ward off parasites (that the worms eat).
Treehopper Wax
Waxy material grows out of a species' body. This wax is usually shaped into forms of expression, or they dictate your role. Some structure their wax into a loom shape and use their own bodies as looms for making garments, blankets, etc.
May you mutate and flourish within your monstrosity.
we thank you
we thank you
we thank you
In Love & Abundance,
Malachi
they/them
Happy Tropical Pisces season! Take some time to meditate!
P.S.
(paid section)
He is Our Prince of the Forest
This erotic work of monsters, community care, power play, and biological extravagance was originally published in Future Pleasures with my old QTPOC fantasy smut collective Ether Erotica (R.I.P., though we may rise again in a new form).
There are no humans in this story, only chimeras of diverse forms who have gathered to give passionate gratitude to the mighty beast that protects their home.
I’m doing a little experiment and sending this decadent smut story out for paid subscribers only! My price is now $5 a month to be a paid subscriber and access exclusive content, or $50 a year, which is even cheaper!
Once I hit a certain quota, I’ll start doing tarot readings just for y’all’s specific collective energy, do more audio stories, and provide other treats. Audio stories and guided meditations take a lot of work!
I do paid subscriptions cuz I’m out here being a solo entity, a “freelancer,” raw-dogging late-capitalism, so any forms of support keep me surviving! Thank you so much for your tangible, material support. I hope our exchange of energy feels fair.
Fear not, my free subs *hehe* plenty of juicy content for y’all as well!
Without further ado, here is the link:
i love how often you start off with a line to the extent of "to have this conversation, you gon have to understand my philosophy about ___"
ima chew on monstrosity, but right now? feeling a deep urge to merge man and nature in me.