As part of the exhibition Inner Heat, by Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby, writer Donna Marcus Duke was invited by the artists to respond to the ideas of secrecy and exposure which animate their works.

​​1.
I’m so into gooning right now. Not in practice but in theory. Here’s my favourite definition of gooning from Urban Dictionary: 


“‘Gooning’ may be most simply defined as that state usually achieved after a prolonged edging session, when a man becomes completely hypnotised by the feeling radiating his penis. Since a gooning state can only be achieved after edging, the man’s dick will have become mightily aroused at this point and every caress the male genitals are subjected to will trigger potent elation. As the man keeps edging, and thus keeps experiencing intense pleasure, he enters a state of trance where his mind intimately merges with his cock: the gooning state, where he and his dick become one. To be even more accurate, when the gooning state is achieved, the man’s body becomes, for all intents and purposes, an appendage to his erection. When this state is achieved, the male becomes freed of all social codes of conduct, and his arousal, alone, dictates his reactions. As a result, a gooned out man will become very expressive and demonstrative: he may become very vocal, while his body and face might take on undignified expressions and poses, all in response to the intensely exquisite caresses his penis is exposed to. Hence the term ‘goon’, since at this point the man effectively looks like a silly, foolish, or eccentric person.


Gooning is not a narcissistic manifestation. Narcissism is extreme selfishness, with a grandiose view of one’s own talents. Rather, gooning is closer to a meditation experience, where the mind and the body align, focused on a single thought (or feeling, in this case).”

Gooning understands the mystical importance of wanking: when the mystical is the ineffable, affective experience of having your understanding of reality challenged. It holds wanking like some monastic practice whereby spiritual knowledge is reached, not from abstinence, but excess: a knowledge arrived at from the overwhelm of affect and bodily feeling rather than thinking.

Masturbating is a particular type of reclusiveness. Though it can be done communally, its power is most concentrated, most charged, as a habit of isolation. When wanking, you have nowhere to hide: it’s just you and the pornographic image as the algorithm takes note. In the masturbatory realm you throw your quotidian performance of identity onto the floor, jump under covers, and open yourself to see what else you are beyond the social. This is the epistemology of the wank.

But wanking’s knowledge can be dangerous and threatening, as the best spiritual knowledge often is. The space of masturbation becomes a refuge for you to be seen by yourself alone — a sphere of terrifying personal confrontation. When approached with insecurity and anxiety, the masturbatory sphere can feel like a place of reckoning, where you might rub against aspects of yourself/identity that confront and shake you. Wanking’s knowledge can often expose the crippling fault between private sexual desire and the public image you wish to project. For the ill-prepared, this shaking can threaten the fabric of selfhood and, accompanied by residual shame and fear, can thrust one back into the world to violent ends.

It feels like every year PornHub reports how many transphobic US states have high viewership of tranny porn, so the confrontation of arousal must be a powerful motivator for their antagonistic political action, right? When someone’s dad sneaks away from his wife to beat one out over the idea of some 10-inch gock busting open his Republican chaser bussyhole, the image he holds of himself as some respectable-2.4-kids-and-a-white-picket-fence citizen is obliterated, and he’s instead exposed to himself as a pathetic cuck simping for the trans woman he can never have. The trans woman, who privately he obsesses over, then becomes the threat against the conception of his own manhood. In this case, the trans woman must be hidden from public, lest his arousal reveals who he really is. If the trans woman has public freedoms then his hidden identity, as the simping cuck, has greater chance of escaping from the masturbatory realm and into his quotidian life: a slippage, he imagines, that could wholly undermine his life and reputation.

And so, the power of the masturbatory realm cracks the cuck and he is unable to wield the confronting nature of desire for his own development, opting instead to use it to diminish another’s. It’s easy to mock those closeted chasers for being cowardly when faced with their own desires, to goad them as sissies, in every sense of the word. But you, having an equally fragile relation to gender, empathise: you too understand how destabilising the world of private arousal can be, for your masturbatory brain is often in total opposition to your rarified, political, theoretically-informed, woke tranny brain. That’s to say, when you wank you’re not a girl, you’re a faggot. And that faggot’s a threat. Just as the Republican chaser’s fantasy of normatively is shaken by his love of the dolls, your fantasy of womanhood is shaken by that faggot. Like if the wank is a source for knowledge, how do we value or use this knowledge? How much does it identify who you are? ‘Cos if your Twitter porn algorithm is anything to go by, you’re a faggot who likes to see boys beating up other boys. How does this measure to your public desire to be seen as a woman?


For you and the Republican, wanking exposes the conflicting delusions of identity by revealing its absurdity. There’s definitely personal liberation to be found there, maybe a practice of facing your own conflicting desires: an embrace of the mutability, multiplicity, contextual dependence of selfhood. But I fear that translating this complexity, this threatening exposure of identity’s delusion, from the private to public realm, when not harnessed properly, manifests only as violence. 


​​2.
I experienced the consequences of my own delusion on Saturday. Two guys on a moped asked if I was a tranny and if my friend was my man. When I dismissively responded — “yea, kind of” — more interested in how to get home than what some kids had to say about how they perceived me. They scooted off, laughing, scorned — how incredulous, the tranny spoke back. 


My delusion was that my actions were neutral, or even, dare I believe for a split second, nullifying. My delusion was that I thought I’d moved them along to another target. My delusion was that it was kind of fab to be clocked as a tranny in jeans and a hoodie lol. But “They’re going to come back” T said, “They always come back.”

My delusion was that I told T it was okay, that he shouldn’t worry, that we’re safe and good. The sound of the engine and brightness of the headlight jolting back out of the park, expanding with rapid proximity, proved that I was wrong.

The two men tried to mow us down, accelerating back and forth up the street, laughing maniacally with pleasure as they lay in chase. They clipped T twice, he fell to the ground and begged them to stop, offering them money. They tried to go for his phone. “Please, anything but the phone” I started shouting — another delusion, that my voice alone might actually be able to stop material violence.

Wheels screeching, the bike’s headlight darted from T towards me. This is when things really went slow-mo and delusion struck yet again. As I stood, facing a motorised vehicle gunning towards me with two young men who vocalised glee and excitement in their intent on inflicting physical violence upon my body, I couldn’t help but think of Georges Bataille. I’d been reading his book Eroticism recently which links the erotic’s spiritual power closely to violence, especially human sacrifice. I don’t quite get it yet, but it’s something to do with feeling a sense of continuity between one body and another. I get how the erotic does this, but I’m not quite sure how it manifests in violence. With the headlight coming closer, the pale, pubey hooded face of the motorist started to come into view — eyes bulging with excitement, teeth bared at the thrill of the hunt. And in this moment, with my body on the line, with T collapsed on the opposite pavement, with Bataille pondering on my right shoulder about violence, sex and the continuity of selfhood, and with my bra peeping out of my hoodie, I wondered: are these guys horny? Like what is the affect of their excitement? What was the joy they derived from seeing a tranny and a faggot dance round their street to the sound of their moped and laughter? Did this behaviour feel satisfyingly transgressive? Did they feel radical in their treatment of the bodies of the other? Did they cum, just a little bit, from the moped’s vibrations? Or at the prospect of the metal and rubber smashing into my body, mediating touch between them and me? Was this some freaky sacrificial orgy by proxy that affirmed their selfhood as men? Noble rogues? Exercising their power to police the bodies on their territory? Probably not, but delusion helps me treat it this way.

In this instance delusion helps me make this attack less personal, helps me detach from the fact that the sight of *my* body incited such an exhilarated desire to harm. Delusion lets me slow time and zoom out, to think of the structures of media, law and politics that caused in these men this desire to harm my body and any other body associated with it; it’s delusion that lets me attempt compassion, to think what material context led these men to derive pleasure from enacting this violence rather than from some aspect of the supposed ‘good life’ that Instagram told them they’re owed and that class and austerity had stopped them from attaining; it’s delusion that lets me ignore the classist, paternalistic and condescending nature of my attempt at compassion; it’s delusion that lets my anger be tempered; it’s delusion that stands between me and my body, my body and the bike; it’s delusion that’s simultaneously my safety and my danger; it’s delusion that tells me this all might be sexy.

So, the bike glides past, not close enough to hit me but close enough for me to feel it, or feel the air it moves go past me, like the delicate stroke of a lover’s hand on that dip in your waist beneath the ribs, like gentle but with the capacity to destroy, you know? I catch the eyes of the boys, streetlights zipping in the back, and they’re like really bulging, loving it, hating me, but also loving me. Like wanking. No, not wanking, gooning. Tongues agog, teeth snarled, bellend bumped by an engine’s throb, these boys, seeing me, are gooning. They’re fixated, they’re transforming, there’s mystic importance here — this is ritual sacrifice, this is obsession, this is gooning manifested into action. They’re pumped up with eroticism — Bataille’s sex and violence — leaning in, full throttle, into the absurdity of slaughter. And like the gooner, edging into the vortex of impulsive, unmediated action and gesture, they feel compelled by the spirit to carve up the lamb for God.

I’ve often had an irreverent relationship with trans rights and body politics, simultaneously having an unshakeable belief in them, whilst acknowledging some of the self-obsession that it projects. Perhaps implicit delusion, in the form of privilege and therefore ignorance, meant you didn’t always take trans politics seriously: that you knew and believed violence on the street happened, but hadn’t experienced it recently enough to believe it was still a real problem. Even now, as the bike U-turns for another attempted hit, inching ever closer, as the cruel smiles get bigger and the prospect of rubber coursing into your ribs is becoming ever more real, you’re weighing up whether this is actually that bad? Is this that violent? Might this even be the price of your individualist expression and failure to participate in the broadest collective: the ‘public’? Not like you deserve it or nothing, no, but like is this just the logical conclusion of being an outlier? And is it the delusion of entitlement that didn’t allow you to see this before?

What I’m most angry about is how it exposes me as vulnerable. That’s something I don’t want to believe that I am. Delusion strikes back.