She already knows she’s going to fake it. The first time they fucked, Maria was scared that Steph would pull a shoulder muscle. She doesn’t really say anything when she comes, or yell or make noises or anything, but you can feel her shoulders tense and then untense. The end part is great, the wine and cuddling and stuff, but the hours of insecurity and tears and feelings leading up to the reconciliation are totally not worth it. You can try to fake it but if you don’t convince anybody, nobody gets off, and then you spend the afternoon talking about your relationship. Now Steph’s eyes are closed but you can definitely still fuck this up. Her attention is on Steph’s fingers at her throat, Steph’s substantial hips against her own bony ones. Anybody can tell that a parade of porn star squealing and panting is just acting, but convincing somebody who loves you, who you definitely at least used to love, that you’re present and choking and hot for it, you kind of have to make yourself believe it. Then one of her hands is off Maria’s throat, at her own crotch, and Steph is getting herself off. Not that hard, although Steph is probably stronger than Maria, so it’s not like Maria could physically make Steph stop if this were for real. And Steph is turned on. She’s thrashing, hands at Steph’s wrists, pulling. There was a time in her life when this was new, when she was at least as hot for being choked as Steph was for choking her, but now they’ve got an apartment together-a cat, good lighting-and Maria can’t even muster a shiver. She’s really in there, fingers on cartilage, mashing my trachea and I can’t breathe, Maria thinks. She truly can’t breathe, but she can’t bring herself to care. Welcome to Nevada.Įditor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and MCD There’s never been a better time to discover, or reread, Imogen’s novel, a classic of queer literature that hits as hard today as it did nine years ago. We still have an orange cover, just with a new spin.
Nine years later, it’s coming back into print on June 7th. Nevada is so many things: a punk send-up of late-stage capitalism a love letter to New York the great American road novel sprinkled with heroin and hormones a wrenching exploration of identity, youth, and community a celebration of trans life. Terribly, appallingly, sarcastically, uselessly and pointlessly sorry. Maria is totally exhausted by it and bored of it, and if you’re not, she is sorry. Trans women have the same exact shit that everybody else in the world has who isn’t white, het, male, able-bodied or otherwise privileged.
I love Nevada for the way it allows transness to be boring, funny, and imperfect yet free of melodrama or self-seriousness, despite the undeniably painful subject matter. Or something? But Maria is like, dude, hi.īeing queer is, like being a human being, often mundane, and yet impossible to essentialize. People tend to assume that trans women are either drag queens and loads of trashy fun, or else sad, pathetic and deluded pervy straight men-at least, until they save up their money and get their Sex Change Operations, at which point they become just like every other woman. I love Maria for so many reasons, mainly because she is simply over it, and her narration–sardonic, cynical, unpredictably poignant–is at its best when digging into what it’s like to actually be trans, from her point of view:
This is literally the first three pages of the book. Nevada’s opening pages sum up everything that makes it so special: it’s a sex scene that finds our disaffected narrator, Maria, being choked by her girlfriend, Steph, as she disassociates and neurotically contemplates the perils of domestic life, her frustration with her genitals, and the right way to fake an orgasm. I encountered the novel in 2018 on the recommendation of Torrey Peters and was captivated from the first page, which is excerpted here along with the novel’s first three chapters. Since then, despite going out of print, worn copies of its iconic orange cover have been passed, and lost, between thousands of friends, lovers, and frenemies. Originally published in 2013 by the brilliant, and now-shuttered, Topside Press, Nevada shattered whatever expectation of what trans literature “ought” to do. For a disproportionate amount of my trans friends, it’s Imogen Binnie’s Nevada. For me, it was James Baldwin’s explanation of the significance of eye contact between queer men in Giovanni’s Room and Jonathan Groff attempting to prepare for gay sex in an episode of Looking (I know, leave me alone). It can be both deeply unnerving and extremely affirming, a recognition of being included in a community bound by shared experience beyond rainbow flags. Most queer people remember the moment, or moments, they first experienced a piece of art that accurately, and honestly, reflected their own life back at them.