It's Supposed to Be Great Living, It's Supposed to Be Fantastic

“And it should be fun. In work and in life, we’re all supposed to get along. We’re supposed to have so much fun, like puppy dogs with our tails wagging. It’s supposed to be great living; it’s supposed to be fantastic.” -David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity

There’s a story I could tell you about the last year of my life, if I wanted to. It has the gritty transsexual torture porn that cis ghouls will pay decent money to read, the kinds of stories where we’re broke and desperate and in a great deal of pain. I could tell you about getting harassed by strangers, fighting for basic medical care, feeling one of my back teeth rot out of my head while I sat crying at a broken space heater on the coldest day of the year. All of these things are true.

But I want to talk to you about the fun parts of falling in love. And Twin Peaks. 

I am one of many trans people who want to talk to you about Twin Peaks. I often wonder if fictional places are more meaningful to trans folks than our actual places of origin. Most of us have strained relations with our families and hometowns, fragile toxic bonds that often evolve into estrangement once we have stability elsewhere. 

I might feel this way because I am one of those trans people. I will never take my partners “back home” to meet the family, because I don't talk to my family and I have no interest in reliving my formative traumas. Most nostalgia is meaningless to me. 

But fictionalized nostalgia is different. Sometimes I ache for a place that feels welcoming and familiar, or faces from my youth that don't jog unpleasant memories. Loving a place like Twin Peaks can provide a “home” where no other home exists. I find no joy in visiting the place I was born, but I can take my partners to an imaginary town where I have spent many happy years, and invite them to meet a lovable cast of weirdos that will be less likely to call them a slur. 

I also want to talk about Twin Peaks because Lilli was wearing a Twin Peaks shirt the day I met her. I had impulsively invited to a porn screening after she’d confided that she lived in a Chicagoland suburb where she knew zero trans people. We were already casual internet buddies, and I reasoned that if she met me she would know at least one friendly transsexual within the city proper. 

Sometimes being trans means that you open your doors to a relative stranger so they feel less alone. This can backfire spectacularly, though it is worth it when it pays off. I was unsure if we would get along. I did not expect to change my life for her. But if you rounded a corner and got struck between the eyes with some sick tattoos flowing down from the shoulders of a Laura Palmer muscle shirt, and then you looked up and saw a beautiful girl with an easy smile sparkling like the sunshine on Lake Michigan, and you realized that smile was for you? 

You’d have upended it all for her too.

I fell in love with Lilli's brain long before I got to know the rest of her. She's an open and generous person, kind to a fault, eager to share her passions like a puppy dog asking for a game of fetch with a well-chewed toy. We are both trans, both sober, both in love with the sticky and transgressive. 

We were also both emotionally shaky at the time, and we'd committed to remaining platonic. This resulted in the kind of dykey cold war where one does everything possible to protect a promising new friendship from the nuclear threat of a poorly-planned fuck. 

We stayed up until impossible hours watching sleazy movies over the phone, slowly getting to know each other for real on the edges of the media we consumed. Dwelling in the corners of Lilli's mind felt like a luxurious gift, and every time I felt I outstayed my welcome she invited me back inside. Emoji hearts crept into our conversations, and soon she was regularly crashing on my couch while she looked for apartments in my neighborhood. 

Eventually I wrote an essay about the time her cell phone went off at that porno screening and how charming I found it; me, a man who delighted in testosterone deepening his voice so he could more effectively shame teenagers for chatting during matinees! She needed a place to live in the city, and I knew living with sober trans folks who cared about her would be safer than Craigslist roommate roulette. And so I asked Lilli if she'd like to move in, as we had the space and we needed the money and I also missed her every day she wasn’t sleeping in my living room. 

And yes, she arrived in a U-Haul. When you know, you know.

Here is where I am going to lose a few of you: I was also deeply in love with another person the entire time. The home I invited Lilli into wasn’t just mine, but one I had built with another person with whom I had already decided to share my life. My long-time partner and I have always been polyamorous, so they were supportive while I processed my confused feelings for our roommate. And then they fell for Lilli, just as surely as I did, and somehow that was fine with me too.

Eventually we all admitted that we had feelings for each other, and that we needed to do something about it. Lilli wanted both of us, and we wanted her as much as we wanted each other. Egos and jealousy could have gotten in the way, but the sum of our family is worth more. We are three people in love, and that love helped us build a safe and stable home to care for each other in a way we all badly needed. It was an easy choice to bond together instead of breaking apart.

David Lynch has been there for many of the story beats of my relationship with Lilli. The first time I held her hand was during a screening of BLUE VELVET at Music Box, a harrowing 120 minutes where I desperately tried to watch one of my favorite movies while feeling the entire weight of her delicate fingers in my palm. If that wasn’t challenging enough, one of the theatergoers slowly revealed themselves to be the world’s only Frank Booth superfan. They spent the screening slumped over and dropping empty cans of smuggled beer to the floor, shrieking abusive slurs and giggling with delight when Frank raped his wife. It was terrifying and immersive, like an antisocial William Castle gimmick, and it compelled us further into each other’s arms.

(I don't want to judge that person. I have been the loudmouth drunk in the theater too. Nobody in my previous life cared when I got shit-faced and humiliated myself in public, as I often did before I got sober. Now I have a partner that goes to meetings with me, and I will never take that for granted.)

BLUE VELVET is a favorite for Lilli and I, but Twin Peaks is the Lynchian location we tend to dwell in the most. Lilli's spot-on Gordon Cole impression is one of my favorite bits, and the Dougie Jones crop top she bought me was my favorite beach accessory last summer. It seems strange that a television show about a teenager getting murdered is a piece of comfort media for traumatized trans people, but I believe there is a reason it feels so familiar to us. 

Like Laura Palmer, many trans people have learned the hard way that a family’s love is not unconditional, and that violent and perverse cruelties are visited upon the vulnerable with the tacit approval of those who are unwilling to push against the status quo. Many of us have suffered so our family, friends and communities can maintain a veneer of wholesomeness and community togetherness. We are ignored in life and fought for in death, when it is too late. 

People who ignore this aspect of the show are the ones who fixate on coffees and cherry pies, the ones who want the quirky vibes of Twin Peaks while ignoring the tragedy at its core. Trans people deal with vibe vultures all the time, which might be why Lilli and I have a shared disdain for those heartless weirdos. I truly believe that anybody who displays the wrapped-in-plastic Laura Palmer corpse Funko Pop is either media-illiterate or emotionally dead.

The refusal to neaten Laura's pain into something marketable is Lynch's quixotic mission, a thread the show attempted to tie into a tidy knot before Lynch ripped it open with FIRE WALK WITH ME. Some people say that David Lynch delights in torturing women; I often wonder what kind of absolute monster finds FIRE WALK WITH ME delightful. 

Do they have a great ol’ time chowing down popcorn while they watch Laura screaming and snorting coke and begging people to notice her pain during every lucid moment she spends in her last week alive? How many Leland Palmer superfans can there possibly be in the back rows of movie theaters, pounding beers and cackling as Laura realizes that she’s being raped by her own father and nobody cares?

Those people might have loved watching Lilli and I a couple of years ago, before we found hormones and therapy and each other to cling to. They'd be bored with us now. When one of us becomes overwhelmed at the state of the world and wonders aloud if it is time to do something self-destructive, the other sweetly points out that we have promised to split a pack of menthol Camel Crushes between us before we check out for good. Neither of us cares much if we die, but we care deeply enough for each other that we’ll stay alive to prevent the other from picking up smoking again. 

The darkness surrounding us cannot be avoided, no matter how many naive but good-hearted people reassure us of our validity. We can let this darkness swallow us, or we can live alongside it, but we cannot make it disappear. Me and my partners accept each other as we are, and let our inky demons dwell in the corners of our happy home. We are rotted in the same ways, exposed to the same shadows, intent on keeping each other lovingly in the light. 

If you are a trans person who has Been Through Some Shit, being told that someone like Laura Palmer is worth seeing and loving exactly as she is might resonate with you. 

It might make you love the guy who insisted on saying it, too.

One of the plus sides of being in a throuple is having the ability to triangulate your media obsessions. My long-time partner was curious about Twin Peaks, but hesitant to try it because it sounded needlessly confusing. I could not tell them they were wrong, and so I accepted that Twin Peaks may not be a place we would visit. But watching Lilli and I gush about the show piqued their curiosity, and so we all spent the early chilly months of Chicago winter hunkered down with the Bookhouse Boys in the haunted pacific northwest. 

Visiting Twin Peaks with someone who has never been before is always fun, and escorting my long-time partner through it with Lilli's assistance was an absolute joy. We wept for Laura and cheered for super-Nadine and I somehow fell a little in love with Dick Tremayne, villainous bisexual menswear icon. My partner’s baffled-but-delighted summary of Audrey Horne as “and then there’s THIS cunt” was lovingly immortalized on one of our Christmas ornaments, and “Go back to jail, James” has become a beloved running joke as well. 

Everything terrible was still happening outside, just like everything terrible is happening outside right now, just like everything terrible happened in Twin Peaks. We still found warmth and happiness there, as we always do together, seeking joy while we dodge the shadows as a family. 

Every story doesn't have to be a sad one, even when there's a shadow at its core. The light is still there too. It’s worth trying to have fun, and it's worth falling in love. Playing like puppy dogs, with our tails wagging. It's supposed to be great living. It’s supposed to be fantastic.