Over the past month, I’ve been thinking back to Michael Warner and the late Lauren Berlant’s essay “Sex in Public.” One of the central questions of the essay is how intimate spaces ground community within particular property relations. The club, the public park, the subway, the sex shop—any space unfolds a particular set of intimacies, allowing certain forms of closeness to flourish and others to perish. The relation between intimacy and space is a political question as policy, the economy, and the police shape which intimate spaces are able to exist, particularly in cities where property values are exceedingly high.

The portion of the essay I have found myself ruminating concerns a description of a performance in a sex club:

A boy, twentyish, very skateboard, comes on the low stage at one end of the bar, wearing lycra shorts and a dog collar. He sits loosely in a restraining chair. His partner comes out and tilts the bottom's head up to the ceiling, stretching out his throat. Behind them is an array of foods. The top begins pouring milk down the boy's throat, then food, then more milk. It spills over, down his chest and onto the floor. A dynamic is established between them in which they carefully keep at the threshold of gagging. The bottom struggles to keep taking in more than he really can. The top is careful to give him just enough to stretch his capacities. From time to time a baby bottle is offered as a respite, but soon the rhythm intensifies. The boy's stomach is beginning to rise and pulse, almost convulsively.

It is at this point that we realize we cannot leave, cannot even look away. No one can. The crowd is transfixed by the scene of intimacy and display, control and abandon, ferocity and abjection. People are moaning softly with admiration, then whistling, stomping, screaming encouragements. They have pressed forward in a compact and intimate group. Finally, as the top inserts two, then three fingers in the bottom's throat, insistently offering his own stomach for the repeated climaxes, we realize that we have never seen such a display of trust and violation. We are breathless.

For Berlant and Warner, the performance becomes a place in which a distinct form of intimacy is enacted. The play between “control and abandon, ferocity and abjection” express different forms of trust. Allowing oneself to be the object of the other traces an ethics. Maybe it is the hint of this different moral world that leaves the audience breathless. The thought of a different ordering of things where gentleness exists within three fingers pressed into one’s throat.

Think about the moment of gagging: how loudly did it reverberate through the room? How did hearing feel different for the performers versus the audience member in the back row? Does sound convey the distinct intimacy? Can a gag capture the play between “trust and violation”?

At the core of these questions is a deeper trap performers encounter concerning emotional expression. At the point in which one mediates their emotions through performance, there is a sense of loss. The viscera of the emotion folds in on the performance. The muck blooms, a clouding of emotions and expression. In the moment where a pop star pauses before the stadium audience, to cry at the emotional climax of the song, is this performance or expression? There isn’t a rigid distinction between the two. Instead, there is an endless folding in on itself of emotions and the media through which emotions are expressed. Each layer an echo of the moment in which feeling is grounded.

In reflecting on that scene years later, Berlant draws attention to the role of endurance: “life produces an energetics of endurance—through touch, proximity, and conversation that’s both narrative (against the state and for the collectivity’s self-adherence) and eruptive in particular moments of pleasure.” Endurance is the persistence of life within spaces that cultivate and diminish the intimacies one needs to thrive. It is experienced in both the mundane churning of time and in the ecstatic break from the mundane. It is the connective tissue between who we were and who we become.

For performers, endurance offers an escape from the trap of emotional expression. What distinguishes the milk performances from a potentially similar piece about intimacy is that the piece is not a comment on intimacy. It is not a representation of intimacy. It is not a reflection on intimacy. It is intimacy. Endurance rejects abstraction. Endurance requires a confrontation with visceral feelings.

Gagging is the transgression of performance into endurance. The act becomes the thing itself: the two locked in an alternative form of intimacy. Not abstraction, but expression. The performance stops and life intrudes.