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if you write in aptos font you get aptos thoughts. and if you write poetry in arial expect arial verse. I saw an Instagram ad this morning that went something like: “We are not all born equal; We always know when witches are born; Click here to find out what kind of special you are”. there was a form that asked you to give it your birthdate (data mining, babey) and where your ‘place of power’ was (choose between the options Forest, Mountain, Desert, Ocean, and I forget. Graveyard?). I laughed a little, thinking about the thought process that goes into deciding where one’s ‘place of power’ is. certainly I have had lovers who have felt that they could not go without being in a body of water for too long. certainly I have acquired somewhat of a distaste for the mountain, as I have been too vocal about to would-be travel companions. I also love the desert, more as a fictional concept than as a fact of being—when Clarissa Pinkola Estes tells me to ‘go into the desert and gather bones’ in Women Who Run With The Wolves, I think I take her seriously, or aspire to. even though I am far and away a tropical girl in all other respects. I started thinking then about what other places of power there can be. N*il G*iman, bless his cancelled ass, talks about this in American Gods, where ‘backstage’, an alternate plane that shapes the nature of reality as we know it, where the cogs of the unseen and hidden world spin, is accessed in the Carousel Room at the House on the Rock, a real tourist attration in Wisconsin, and I’ve never really stopped thinking about that concept, fuelled in part by a Tumblrian obsession with liminal spaces. it also calls to mind the TikTok obsession with ‘shifting’ through alternate universes or realities until you find one where you have the ideal job, the dream partner, the whatever it is you really need to finally be happy. that’s less interesting to me than the concept of manifestation through determined will, which is less interesting to me than the idea that there are certain spaces and states we can enter in order to imbibe from and influence what shape the world takes.

places of power: sitting on the counter at the dingy gay bar, the back of the pickup truck on a night drive, defunct Yangtze cinema, the state you’re in when you’ve been walking and immersed in a conversation for three hours. the psychic blush when you manage to elicit sexual tension with a stranger (rarer and rarer occurrence in daily life). a really good aubergine. rotting turtle shell with maggots rising out of it like a choir. old theatre with stained wood panelling.

in that sense I think a lot of the sanctity of the act of performance and achieving a flow state are derived from my belief in belief, that the shift towards transcendence can happen when we truly believe whatever we’re doing while also piloting the meat suit that allows us to walk the earth in this form. in my conversations with my besties on a recent road trip to kuala lumpur, we were talking about the difference between drag kings and queens, and how drag queens often achieve a certain goddesshood or majesty, whereas drag kings often achieve only a position of object of sexual desire and, more often, aspire to goofiness. non-ironic masculinity is difficult to put on display. when do you see a man being majestic onstage without a certain element of campiness or a shred of the pathetic?

in that sense, as long as performance is tied to objectification, a certain element of failure in the performance of masculinity is almost inevitable. which is what I find so fascinating about the idea of the Butch Hunt (circa early 2000s). as a lover of butches, it is appealing to think about the idea of butches competing in pageantry. but thinking about this a little more deeply tends to draw up the bigger problem of the likelihood of ridicule being high, because masculinity is often tied to normative power—unfortunately—and power does not like to let others pass through easily. protect butches and mascs, always. I don’t know if expanding the definition of what is ‘hot’ necessarily works as a panacea to destabilise reigning notions of hotness (and the value inherent in those definitions), but I also know that there needs to be an intimate knowledge of failure in order to rise above it, as well as a willingness to play. all of these things create a delicious tension with what is possible to achieve and what is audacious to want. and it may be that what seemed out of one’s desirous reach can be grasped through going at it another way, or giving it time—either for yourself, or the zeitgeist, to change.

and of course, ways of thinking about the masculine fascinate me. in this fun (alarming, but a lot of alarming things are fun) piece about the evolution of the alpha male aesthetic by none other than Derek Guy (most famed for his incisive takes on menswear trends and techniques), modern masculinity in the form of the alpha male is much ‘adopting an aesthetic shaped by culture wars and online provocateurs’ as it is about a ‘perennial search for meaning’, with the rise of the alpha male fuelled in part by a general sense that masculinity is under siege, and that only by optimising and dominating, can men protect it.

That forms a delicious incongruity:

“Together, the gym body and the power suit formed a singular ideal: the optimized man. Whether he was lifting weights or managing capital, strength had become something to display, not merely possess. And yet, to be seen as dominant, a man had to conform to someone else’s idea of what dominance looked like.”

I will admit that it seems pressing that men have largely been left out of a cultural conversation that as much derides masculinity as a trait, as well as mocks the evolution of ‘doing’ masculinity in different and perhaps less threatening, more annoying, ways (see the “performative male” competitions). and it worries me that if we are raising small human beings, some of them will be male and identify as male, and it is increasingly difficult to raise a well-adjusted person, especially a masculine one, as grounded, assertive, leaderly, courageous and intentional, while making sure they are also not alienated or pushed towards extreme self-narratives. I’ve recently been published in a dossier called Masculinities in Asia by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which wrestles with the political impact of constructions of masculinity. These constructions are shaped by forces such as colonisation or social pressures—for instance, framing Indian men as effeminate being used as justification by the British to oppress them with colonial rule, or Korean men facing pressures to constantly prove one’s masculinity, giving rise to resentment towards women and radicalisation, moving them away from processes of care. I am glad we are having these conversations. I think we forget that the ‘performative’ aspect of gender performativity is that we must follow a script we often did not have a hand in first creating. (but will intensely try to rewrite, if we are family in the way I think we are.)

the other thing that interests me about performance is the story we tell ourselves. in discussing and comparing standards of drag performances in the region, my fiancé named what is often thought of as ‘dated drag’ as ‘living in the friction’ (referencing Martin F Manalansan’s Global Divas)—that is, the uneasy jostling of cultures and reference points with each other, and how the local culture is always seen to be appropriating from the global one. often we must rescue and acknowledge that it is pleasurable to sit within the space of ambiguity and overlap, where multiple frames of reference create anew a ballad so familiar to all of us (in very specific and varying ways), performed in a completely local and particular manner. in this way all of us come to a work of art and make it again in our image. of course, because I have auditory processing problems, I heard ‘living in the friction’ as ‘living in the fiction’, and thought it equally appropriate. I am against delusions and wilful self-unawareness, but I am always here for bringing a fantasy out of the backstage.

whether you are living in the fiction or the friction, whether you make the irreal your habitual home or weaponising tensions to create the tender, thank you for being out here.

meet me in meat space / where I constantly try to make the body a home:

HAUNTY SPOOKY QUEER POETRY READING
11 Oct 2025, 3-4pm
poetry-masuri.peatix.com

Singapore Writers’ Festival (7-16 Nov 2025):

1. Poetry is Not A Luxury
   “how gender concerns and politics can play a role in shaping and reimagining poetry”
   8 Nov 2025, 2.30-4.00pm
   Asian Civilisations Museum, Discovery Room
   Pooja Nansi, Kim Yideum, Marylyn Tan, moderated by Christine Chia
   
2. The Salon with Marylyn Tan and F.H. Batacan
   “Get up close and personal over a literary lunch with us! We will discuss Southeast Asian genre fiction, the body, the uncomfortable, class divides, and politics. Fun!”
   13 Nov 2025, 12.00-2.00pm
   Brasserie Astoria
   Marylyn Tan & F.H. Batacan