Avidly Reads Making Out by Kathryn Bond Stockton

Author:Kathryn Bond Stockton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004160 Literary Criticism / Lgbt
Publisher: NYU Press

God-Kiss on a Chairlift?

If a text’s surface can be a negligee to my strange reckoning—and our group attraction—I am curious about my love of theory. What makes anyone desire to conceptualize on behalf of others?

A depth of contradictions at and in my skin seems my own answer. Since I felt my knottedness, I was led to theorize? I prepare to laugh, to splash each sentiment in the face with irony, since my contradictions have always held the flavor of absurdity—for me. Mine, moreover, are amped by tangles involving divinity, the God-kiss being a contrapuntal scene of communal collisions.

There’s this guy.

I wasn’t kissing him so much as kissing God. God requires this kiss. From my reading, I’m believing this divine requirement, so I’ll kiss this boy on a night deep in March.

The fragrance of the air is making the moment laden with sensations. Night snow in springtime has a particular density and glide. Even from a chairlift, you can sense this surface and smell the changing compactness of snow.

I recall the chairlift and lure of the snow more than the kiss. (The brittle bits of ice exchanged between our lips made strong contrast with our heated mouths. The kiss was the transfer of a temperature contrast. That’s what I remember.) I think we had joked about kissing on the lift, dared by a couple in the chair behind us, but we kissed on the crest of a run, both of us cocky since we were skiing dangerously fast. Quite an aphrodisiac. And quite a singular setting for a God-kiss that’s becoming an existential bind.

Do I kiss for God? Do I obey the dictates, as I grasp them, that I am daily reading in God’s book? I hadn’t foreseen that my reading would drastically channel my kissing, throwing God to a place between my lips. Something, even so, has turned before this point. A watershed moment has already arrived, for which there is an indelible image. (As with all such images, this one is suspect.)

Perhaps you can imagine how sexy . . . I wasn’t.

I’m thirteen and, really, quite the looker: pageboy haircut being grown out, ill-fitting shirt, sad-sack skirt, and ridiculous knee socks. I’m on a swing set, of all the weird places, talking to the world’s most appealing girl, whom I’d like to kiss. Why in the world is she talking to me?

Jesus is our topic. She wants me to want him. I want her, so I want him. I really want to want him.

So I did. With a speed that seemed immediate, green with presentiment, Jesus became a pocket of the possible. (Truth be told, I didn’t know him, didn’t grow up with him. My loving parents were cerebral Unitarians—whatever a Unitarian is.) The point is this: “accepting Jesus in my heart,” as the saying goes, advanced me, propelled me, catapulted me, toward my own queerness.

Evangelicals nurtured a queer side they didn’t know I had. It was elementary: they hailed me as a girl. I became a leader and lover of girls.

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