Published in Issue 62.4: Fall 2023
January 2017, and I’m sitting at my desk in my home office in Denver. It’s a cheap thing from Target that I put together myself, but I love how my forearms—thanks to my lousy typing form—have rubbed away the finish in oblong, peach-colored patches on the edges of the dark particleboard. On the bulletin board over the desk, I post a rotating mix of postcards, quotes and doodads that I can look to whenever my brain starts flagging while I’m writing. Larry Levis’ “Gossip in the Village,” torn from a copy of The New Yorker, is currently top center: “My fate, I will think, / Will be to have no fate.” A slender, eight-inch grayish animal bone of unknown origin dangles from a white ribbon, secured with a plastic pushpin. It’s next to a large postcard of Judith Godwin’s abstract painting Woman, full of black slashes and heartbeats of warm yellows. I’ve printed out a photo of the poet Elizabeth Bishop in which she bears a weird resemblance to my mom; no one else agrees. A small pin with blue, purple, and pink triangles that I’ve had since my freshman year at Yale exclaims “BISEXUAL PRIDE!” And in 36-point font, I’ve got the closing line of Lucille Clifton’s “the making of poems”: “these failures are my job.”
I’m planning, for the coming fall, my sabbatical trip to the Yale campus, where I haven’t been in over twenty years, to learn more about my ancestor Thomas Beer, who graduated in 1911. I’m going there to examine Sterling Memorial Library’s Thomas Beer Collection of the Beer Family Archives—none of which I’d been aware was there during my years as an undergrad. For a week in September, I’d be paging through a few dozen feet of correspondence, photographs, manuscripts, and clippings related to Tom’s life and career as a writer, hoping to get enough material for some poems about him for my next book. I find him prismatically fascinating: a popular writer in the 1920’s and 30’s, very likely queer, whose short stories appeared regularly in the Saturday Evening Post, and who rubbed shoulders with Cole Porter and his set. He died in a Greenwich Village hotel at the age of 50 from a “heart attack” that may have been a depressive drinking binge, and was exposed by scholars in the 1990’s to have fabricated portions of his once-groundbreaking biography of Stephen Crane. Beyond these basic facts, though, my sense of him is patchy at best.
The way Tom has faded from literary history arouses my empathy—being a poet means obsolescence is always breathing down your neck. Given that it seems no one’s really looked at him, his life, or his work in years, I’m hoping I’ll have the perspective—due to our family connection, or just my own 21st century vantage point—to see something others may have missed. And perhaps the silhouettes of my own past will look a little clearer, a little more sharply drawn.
I love reading and writing research-driven poems, but until now, it’s never occurred to me to research any of my ancestors. Part of this is simple logistics—I’m only starting to comprehend how much information which once seemed permanently lost can now be summoned online with a few keystrokes. But also, I’ve always felt reluctant to ask direct questions of my own family about the past, as if it reveals a vulnerability I’m not willing to admit. Both of my parents died young, and as I grow older, I only become more and more aware of how unknowable so much of their lives are. It’s a truth I hate to look at for too long.
And honestly, I’m feeling queasy about the fact that I have no idea what I’m doing: I’m an English professor, not a historian. Even now, clicking on link after link on the “Archives at Yale” website, trying to plan my on-site days, feels uncomfortably random. How will I have time to sift through forty letters from Tom written to someone named Alexander Royal Wheeler? The two boxes full of notes of condolence to Tom’s sister and mother after his death in 1940? Oh, Jesus—catalog of Thomas Beer’s art library. Correspondence, Willa Cather, undated. Correspondence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, undated. Shit. Shit. Shit.
Just as I’m getting that crackle down the back of my neck that happens whenever I’m in over my head, I notice an oddball link that’s come up in my latest search. It’s not from the Beer Family Archives, or the Thomas Beer Collection, but the Yale University Objects Collection. An object? I click.
“No. Fucking. Way—!
* * *
The Yale University Objects Collection is stored in 355 boxes, covering 296.67 linear feet, and includes objects from over three centuries of the school’s history. Among the items that you can sign out and examine in Sterling Memorial Library’s Manuscripts and Archives reading room are:
- a chamber pot used by FDR during a visit when he was presented with his honorary degree in 1934,
- an 18th century gold mourning ring ornamented with a coffin-shaped stone bearing the picture of a skeleton,
- a blue necktie adorned with small embroidered pigs and the acronym “YCP” (Yale Chauvinist Pig), worn by members of the class of 1940 on the occasion of their 30th reunion, to protest the undergraduate college’s 1969 admission of women, the 25th anniversary of which was celebrated during my freshman year there,
- a 1752 letter opener made from an oak tree on campus, which was taken into space on the Columbia Shuttle in 1981,
- a painted windowpane, circa 1930’s, of an African-American man wearing a pair of overalls and eating a large slice of watermelon, formerly installed in the library, where I waited for the librarian to bring me:
- a wooden fraternity paddle once owned by Thomas Beer.
* * *
On a balmy April day my sophomore year at Yale, I dressed up as a dominatrix and spanked my fellow undergrads in the courtyard of my residence hall for a spring arts
festival. My spanking booth was part of the larger “Heavy Petting Zoo” feature of the festival, which included a kissing booth and a “Naked Tent.” There was a photo of me from that day published in the local free newspaper: an action shot, with my flogging arm drawn back, the arc of a bullwhip hovering in midair, while a young man in jean shorts bends with his legs spread in front of the throne-like secondhand armchair I’d dragged from my dorm room and draped in black poly-satin and thick-gauged chains purchased from a local hardware store.
At nineteen, I was hardly an expert about BDSM, but the mid-1990’s internet’s chat rooms and message boards had allowed me to learn at least what lay beyond the crude caricatures of snarling mistresses and whimpering submissives in the popular imagination. What fascinated me in particular was that the lifestyle seemed, on its surface, so dark and menacing, but was in fact organized and careful, in terms of establishing and respecting boundaries. It would take a few more decades for the larger culture’s understanding of consent to begin to catch up to what the bondage community prioritized even back then.
When I raised that bullwhip that day, my mother had been dead sixteen months, her breast cancer having metastasized in my first year of college. My father had died of a brain tumor while I was in high school. I suddenly went from being a skittish, hyper freshman who’d just moved out of her overbearing, overprotective mother’s sphere of influence to being legally on my own, the house I grew up in on Long Island sold, my younger brother living with guardians in New Jersey. There was a comfort and refuge in finding a persona with more swagger than I actually felt, one that justified wearing black leather, spiked accessories, and a wicked grin.
During winter break, the dorms would close, and most students got to go home for the holidays—or make the choice not to. I went to other people’s houses. Please understand that there was no shortage of places open to me. I was loved by so many. I’m still loved my so many. Despite the shocking losses I went through as a teenager, the ensuing years have been full of so many gifts that it staggers me to even try to number them. I write things that people actually read and enjoy. I get to teach creative writing to talented, interesting students. I’ve been with a wonderful partner for over twenty years. My life is full of deep, profound joy. But during those breaks between the semesters back then, I always felt like I was the guest, regardless of all the affection that greeted me at the door.
Mistress Nikita, however, was in charge wherever she went. She was not expected to smile. Even if the frat boys leered, it was clear she didn’t give a shit. Eat my spike-heeled dust, fucknuts. I’d trot her out for parties, for political debates—wherever she could add a dash of semi-comic sexual kicks. In my junior year, I prominently displayed my handcuffs, whips, cat o’ nine tails, and riding crop on a wall in my first-floor dorm room of my residential college, visible to the tour groups that stopped outside in the faux-Gothic building’s courtyard daily—usually just when the guide had reached the James Fenimore Cooper part of their spiel.
The people who came to the festival’s spanking booth were mostly male, and just about all approached their punishment with sardonic smiles and jokey pantomimes of intimidation. Some would leave laughing, exaggeratedly rubbing their behinds for the entertainment of the audience. But what I remember most clearly from that bright spring day: seeing the split-second surprise of the few people, before they turned back to the crowd and arranged their faces, who realized that they had just discovered something about themselves. The pain and pleasure mixed together suddenly becoming a new dialect of their bodies. Did I make that happen? I thought. Me? Really? Maybe Mistress Nikita was letting me witness, in real time, what writers rarely ever get to see: the way a stranger’s private encounter with your work can change them, cataloguing a moment otherwise filled, as Bishop would say, “with the intent to be lost.”
* * *
Object #314, “Carved paddle that reads ‘Thomas Beer ’11 from E.S. Blair, C.W. Davis and J.R. Kilpatrick,’” dates from 1909. I try to keep my cool as the staffer on the other side of the counter hands the gray archival box to me, but I can’t suppress a couple of bouncy steps as I carry it back to my library table.
When I first saw the paddle’s entry online, I knew that I would have to begin my on-site research with it. As intimate and sensual as the handwritten letters and postcards were likely going feel when I handled them, I couldn’t deny my excitement at the prospect of holding something so solid that Tom had owned.
On this particular morning in the Manuscripts and Archives reading room of Sterling Memorial Library, there are about a half dozen patrons, including me, at the long
tables, with another woman whirling away at the microfilm station in the corner. The light from the September day outside comes streaming through a profusion of mullioned windows. The reading room’s ceilings are high, and the walls partially paneled in ornate wood. The room—indeed all of Sterling—is the Hollywood ideal of what one expects of a university library space: suffused with dignity and pomp, although the small, continuous sounds of industry make the reading room seem quietly brisk.
This is my first time exploring an official archive, and I’m astonished that a simple request plugged into a computer screen begins a sequence of actions that leads to a Sought-After Thing being presented to me. If not to keep, then at least to examine closely, to seek out fingerprints, embedded hairs, and the scratches and dings that testify to habitual use. To share space within time. To savor how a human presence can get bound up in an object in a way that outlives death.
The paddle’s carving appears handmade and homespun. An upper-case “B” is blazoned at the top, and a diamond-shaped insignia made up of Greek letters—psi and upsilon—and pair of shaking hands embellishes the center of the paddle’s front. The reverse side bears the rendering of a building which has a strong resemblance to the one on a postcard I’ll find later on eBay: “New Haven CY Psi Upsilon Fraternity Bldg Yale c1910.” The edges of the paddle are ornamented with short strokes of alternating length all around.
The date on the paddle’s back, taking up most of the space on the handle, is “MAR • 30 • 09,” the date of Tom’s induction into the fraternity. Later, I’ll find a shot in Tom’s college photo album of a fireplace mantel in the Psi Upsilon house, on which several similar paddles are displayed, among a miscellany of beer steins, skulls, bottles, and group photographs. Each neophyte was likely presented with his own paddle made by his elder brothers at initiation—a tradition that persists in some form in many fraternities and sororities.
Because I’m not allowed to remove any artifacts from the reading room, I try to absorb my moments with the paddle: weighing it in my hands (quite light), running my fingertips over the grooves and etchings of its surface. Grasping the handle, I make a few discreet, experimental swoops in the air. I realize that the paddle has not been used on any buttocks in over a century, which seems a shame. Casting an appraising glance around the room, I take in the well-scrubbed, soft-voiced assistant at the check-out desk and the elderly man with the thinning hair hunched over a laptop at the next table, wondering if either of them would oblige me.
* * *
Elsewhere in Tom’s college album, I find a photo of a group of young men wearing a hodgepodge of togas and gladiatorial gear, “1910” inscribed on its slender border. They’re posed in front of an ivy-covered brick building. Six of them are standing, but two are seated in front of them on a crate draped in fabric. One sitter wears a shiny cuff on his bicep, and a small flower crown. His lips are full and his brow is protrusive and heavy, a mix of stupid and pretty that recalls a young James Franco. He’s clutching his companion’s arm, cheek to his shoulder, and has his knees drawn up slightly, as if in need of protection. He seems to be fully embracing the role of the catamite. The fellow at his side wears a wide, massive crown of tiny white blossoms and a guarded expression, legs crossed and covered in leather gladiator sandals that lace to the knee. His jaw looks heavy enough to take a punch fairly well, although you doubt it ever has. He has the characteristic narrow eyes of the Beer line, ones that always seem to be peering off into the distance. This is Tom.
I imagine a cramped, makeshift dressing room where the boys are changing into their costumes. No, not boys, I know—men. But there they are, suspended in the aspic of youth, their features blurred to a blamelessness entirely of my own making. They’re shoving genially in front of a warped, crazed mirror that runs the length of the space.
“Dammit, gents—a little breathing room, if you please!” “Goodman, that better be your leg—!”
“Christ, Aberforth, that underwear’s more moth-hole than wool.” “Eyes on your own work, Beer.”
Someone peels off his socks, a pennies-and-cheese astringency releasing from between his toes. Someone else is quietly turned on by the alien quality of this smell. All of their commonplace clothes are shoved into corners in piles, waiting like tweedy, melancholy hounds to be taken up again when all this nonsense is done with.
Tom finds his own face in the mirror. He adjusts the pile of flowers on his head and squints his face into something he hopes approximates nobility. There’s a fat giddiness in his chest, like a large bubble made of wine. James Franco shoulders in next to him, gives him a gentle kick with his sandal, and blows a soft raspberry. “Wilt thou be my shield, Nero?”
Tom smiles back at him in the unclear glass.
Read the remaining essay in our Fall 2023 isue: Transversions. Purchase here.
Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. She has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.
