GLR July-August 2024

enough to be the object of satire. Unlike gender-nonconforming people today, the castrati had their gender status forced upon them by a society that valued them as performers but diminished them as human beings. In this respect their status was not unlike that of many gay drag per formers and transgender artists today. The latter can make a decent living and even be come famous, but those venturing across gender lines, whether to entertain or to live

extraordinary, enthralling painting uniquely represents the personal charm of an individ ual castrato and evokes the pleasant mem ory of an intimate concert. Thus, for once, the gender-ambiguous outcast is humanized and treated with dignity. Lee Lanzilotta, a transmasculine writer originally from Virginia, is currently based in Rome, Italy, where he studies Classics and archæology.

one’s life authentically, are always risking social disapproval and even violent assault. Caravaggio’s painting is interesting be cause the artist neither degrades nor glori fies his subject, the lute player. Even if the work is not specifically a portrait of Mon toya, it does seem to depict a castrato . There is a naturalness to the picture that suggests empathy. Caravaggio chose to por tray an intimate musical performance, nei ther flattering nor mocking his subject. His

Not every doubt-drenched southern boy who had to wash someone else’s cum out of a What Would Jesus Do bracelet makes it. Not every boy who was taken under the mud-streaked creek water and hoped it would wash away the pictures of hair-covered men in their underwear flickering in his head throughout his baptism while family members flung their singing voices at the wheeling clouds makes it. But I did. The transparent Sunday flute of orange juice and champagne flattening my bottom lip, the table garnished with friends with degrees and dill- and rosemary-sewn organic brunch casseroles— they hover over the surface of the hushed and grammarless echoes of boys who took off their shoes while folding their flickering bodies into Madonna and Britney of boys who never danced to Gaga who never heard a straight person say my partner who never knew affirming or deconstruction or DEI or Modern Family who never even had the chance to grow tired of their blond-tip highlights or to say it was time to quit smoking. Boys who are no more. Sometimes in the early morning when time is still wet and wavering to and fro— I can recall the hope that glitter brings the light, like music, knocking down church walls and I can see them riding eternally softening soundwaves across the waking universe.

HotDay

The countryside sweltered in the heat. Thirsty trees dropped leaf after brittle leaf, too tired from years of working at the nursing home to pick them back up. The slack creek slowly curved around the hillside dragging mud had to be the Mississippi. I liked the way you looked when you took off your shirt and threw off your shoes you were all lines and fine clean edges things I could fall off of things I could hide behind and we would tiptoe into the creekwater that got to touch your feet and sometimes even run its cursive hands across the fresh muscle of your tanned-cream legs. Today it was too hot to even look at the creek. So long as I didn’t tell the other boys, you and I blew dandelions into an imaginary wind from under the trailer where dogs had torn loose the underpinning. Your lungs were stronger than mine. Your wispy, parachuted dandelion-seed men spiraled fast and reckless into the heat. I said I couldn’t do it like you because I was missing my front teeth. Mine arched dead toward the gravel at our feet while your seeds dared for the sky. Saved and pushing garbage towards what we knew

W ILLIE E DWARD T AYLOR C ARVER J R .

July–August 2024

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