The outsider
Why are we attracted to some outsiders but turned off by others?
“A stranger. From the outside. Oooooo.”
We will never fully know what the aliens in Toy Story meant when they said this. They were trapped in an arcade grabber machine, and Buzz Lightyear had just climbed in.
The aliens respond to Buzz’s arrival with a fever, grasping for him with their little green hands. Outsiders are hot, even without deployable space-wings like Buzz. In episode 1 of Karl’s Kaschemme, my podcast, my interviewee Matteo talked about two men, Dmitris and Rami, who open up a conversation about the figure of the outsider. Recording the podcast got me thinking about the outsiders I’ve desired.
An outsider can be hot, but also loathsome. Buzz, or buzzkill. I want to think about how and why.
Many of my thoughts on desire begin with Queer As Folk, a British television show that first aired in 1999 when I was 15. In the opening episode Stuart Alan Jones, a rampant gay clubber, desires Nathan Maloney, who is on his first gay night out. For Stuart, Nathan is fresh meat. “Rimming?” Stuart offers. “Yeah?” says Nathan, not knowing what rimming is. Hot.
I think it’s fair to say that Matteo was not quite so green about rimming when he arrived in London from Italy, but, like Nathan, he was desperate to feel comfortable. After meeting on Grindr, Matteo and Dmitris walked and talked for hours. “It was quite a new thing for me to go out with someone in London,” Matteo says, “and I realised how different people were from Milan and from the countryside.” Finally, for Matteo, here was someone in this vast estate of a city who wanted to do the same things. “It was liberating because I could be myself with him.”
In the podcast Matteo and I talk only about how he felt towards Dmitris, but I wonder how Dmitris felt towards Matteo. Could he have been attracted to Matteo the fresh immigrant? The green arrival? The outsider?
Perhaps Matteo was as alluring as another Italian immigrant, a man named Rodolpho. He’s a fictional character in Arthur Miller’s play A View From The Bridge. I was studying the play at school around the same time as watching Queer As Folk on the telly. My teacher took her class to see the show. I remember feeling annoyed by my classmates when they were audibly scandalised by the same-sex kiss. (It was probably the first time I’d seen two people of the same sex kiss in real life — thank you, Arthur.)
Rodolpho turns up at Catherine’s house in Brooklyn, seeking shelter as an illegal immigrant. Catherine, who lives a mundane life learning stenography, gets all hot and bothered for him. “I don’t know anything,” says Catherine, as she falls in love with his singing and tales of a distant Italy. “Teach me, Rodolpho, hold me.”
I admire Catherine’s neat transition: she’s all “help me” one second and then “shag me” the next. But that’s the kind of spell that an outsider can cast — not just on Catherine in A View From The Bridge, but on me too. I’ve definitely experienced being bored and aimless, only for a sexy peach to wander in and make me instantly dream of a more colourful future. It happens frequently to me on public transport. But it’s not cool to turn to a fellow train passenger and say: “Hold me?”
It’s always worth asking where this desire for the newbie comes from. Is it all just relative? When Catherine’s heart beats for Rodolpho, is it for his unusual blond hair and his songs? Or is it that her grey life is now exotically accented with some cured Italian meat?
Matteo, in the podcast, moves on from Dmitris to Rami. The tables were turned with this one. Matteo was already established in London; Rami was the outsider — an immigrant, again. This time from Lebanon, where it is far less easy being gay. Matteo wanted to make Rami feel welcome “because that’s what I wanted when I moved to London”, he says.
As it happened, Matteo could easily make Rami feel welcome because they shared an outsider bond over Harry Potter. “British people don’t tend to like it as much as foreigners [do],” says Matteo (please feel free to comment on this).
In his Grindr profile pic, Rami wore a jumper featuring the symbol of the deathly hallows, a beacon that drew a conversation from Matteo, who has a tattoo of the same. Most Potterheads who project this symbol to the world only want to show that they are a Potterhead. When asked what the symbol means, they say it represents a wand, a cloak and a stone. How deathly shallow.
Matteo and Rami both knew what the symbol means: we cannot escape death, we can only accept it. Discussing this over Grindr is how they came together. It is the kind of story that shows how megacities like London are like the gay community — incoherent and disconnected but full of possibility for new communities. Matteo and Rami, both outsiders, became their own community. A circle, like the one in the deathly hallows symbol, formed around them. For each other they became “someone else that you can hug, and you can touch, and you can spend time with”, Matteo says.
Matteo’s desire to welcome Rami into his city became a sexual desire for the man himself. I’ve felt the same desire to make someone feel at home, and sometimes this is a sexual desire too. Recently I was in a familiar gay pub in London with friends when I saw a man who was more formally dressed than the other patrons, drinking alone, an apparent outsider. I was desperate to talk to him. “What if it’s his first time in a gay bar?” I asked my friend, practically licking my lips when I added, “He needs to have a good experience.” As it turned out, the boy was from south-east London and had just popped into the pub for a pint after ditching his dull workmates.
I’d forgotten about that guy until I came to write this, but there is one actual outsider who I think about a lot. Chris McCandless was a real person, well known for the depictions of him in the book and film Into The Wild. He was young, idealistic, smart. I fancy the fuck out of him. But I’m not sure I should, because he’s the kind of outsider who’s also really infuriating.
McCandless chooses to be an outsider. He is very much on the ‘inside’ of the American dream: white, male, straight, intelligent and wealthy. But he sees these privileges as bad for society as a whole. “I don’t understand why every fucking person is so bad to each other so fucking often,” he says. His aim? “Getting out of this sick society, man,” he says drunkenly in the film. “Society! Society! Society!”
Sobering up, he sought a solitary life in the mountains of Alaska, away from the hypocrisies of other humans. He could not live with himself otherwise. Moving himself to the outside became his only option — and it is this shift, this audacity, that makes him desirable.
McCandless does something that I sometimes wish I had the guts to do too. To escape, to check out of society’s trappings. When I watch Sean Penn’s film of McCandless’s story, I live it vicariously. And I also lust after the film version of him because it is embodied by the actor Emile Hirsch. The film was made in 2007 when Hirsch was adorable, well before he tried to throttle a woman at a party.
But McCandless is also an idiot. He hurts his loved ones in pursuit of solitude. He rejects the wisdom of others because he thinks only he has it right. He discovers too late that “happiness [is] only real when shared”.
Although I desire his clarity of thinking, McCandless’s arrogance in how he distances himself from society is unattractive. I didn’t have to go to the wilds of Alaska to find that out for myself — I just went on a date with a writer in London. When we met in a bar, the guy explained that he doesn’t like to say he is a writer because he thinks the term has become debased. Anyone who tweets is a “writer”, he scoffed. Everyone who posts a snap on Instagram is a “photographer”, he moaned. These pursuits are now just lifestyle choices, my date explained, unfurling his hands over our drinks, but the point of art is to be outside all of that, to observe, to chronicle, to comment.
How unbearable. Throughout our conversation he seemed to imply that there is an attainable purity in life. That detached artists are the ultimate heroes. And that emotional distance from others is a sensible goal. It is the same level of objectivity that McCandless sought. But even if it is possible, it will kill your spirit and maybe even your body.
I think my date’s wish to be the outsider was inauthentic. Similar to McCandless’s. They were both superior shits. But those outsiders who are genuinely estranged from a certain context are, ultimately, more attractive. Part of Matteo’s desire for Rami was to welcome him. Part of Catherine’s for Rodolpho was to be made more worldly by him.
Outsiders are hot to me because I feel that I can help them and that they can help me. I give them a warm welcome while they give me lessons from the outside. Just imagine what we’ll learn about desire when the aliens land on Earth.
Subscribe to Karl’s Kaschemme on Apple Podcasts for the full interview with Matteo.
