When Work Doesn’t Love You Back

For decades, through the windings and diversions of a distinctly non-linear career path, I’ve been chased by that canard, “do what you love . . . ” and its variations. Trying to find my footing through the shifts in our economy towards a service paradigm, staggering devaluations of labor under neoliberalism, the disruptions of the digital age, and personal struggles with my sexual identity, I’ve repeatedly found myself shouting back to the imaginary advisor dispensing this advice: What if the thing I love  doesn’t love me back? I’ve tried and failed a number of times: in my college years, under the tutelage of a wealthy decorator; as the owner and designer of a photo studio in Brooklyn in the early 2000s; as a sex worker. Despite the brief sparks of happiness these endeavors brought me, I wouldn’t place any of them in loving-me-back territory.

Now, when I’m not traveling for work, I volunteer labor advocating for such causes as health care, social justice, and transportation infrastructure at home in New York City. When I meet new people in these contexts and they ask what I do for a living, they react with genuine surprise at my reply. A traveling salesman, really? Sounds like a job from another era . . . And it’s true, it doesn’t seem to fit into our boundary-less digital age. When I explain further that I sell the branded merchandise of a major American motorcycle company to dealerships throughout the northeast United States, they are, to use a word, gagged.

My work takes me away from the familiarity of my queer/urban context and onto the road half the year. Normally, during riding season, I work rallies, talking to customers about the products, helping my accounts with sell-through. I’ve earned my keep in this distinctly hetero-normative context for nearly a decade; in my work shirt, I may or may not pass as a biker. The customers are a varied bunch—club members, weekend warriors, biker chicks, working stiffs—but skew towards white male boomers, and certain vocal and visible cohorts with libertarian leanings.

I mostly avoid politics in this context, although I’ve refused custom to a guy with Nazi insignia on his leathers, and have wondered aloud about flying the confederate, or “loser flag.” My main tactic for dealing with the differences between my politics and theirs is to smile brightly and take solace in knowing that the money I’m earning fuels my queer art. For these reasons and more, I find myself loving this work because it loves me back.

Having serpentined through many art/finance divides, I find that this unlikely gig sustains my writing practice in ways large and small. I love traveling through my territory, and the places and spaces it affords for writing: Amtrak and commuter rail cars, airplanes, small-town coffeehouses, anonymous motels. I feel something akin to Maya Angelou, who said of writing in hotels, “I go into the room and I feel as if all my beliefs are suspended.” I value the perspective on my environment I’ve gained from getting to know the 400-mile radius around me.

Because of the nature of my product lines, most of my account contacts are women. This, too, is a blessing.

*

I launched into professional life with an education from the Cooper Union. Founded by industrialist Peter Cooper with the mission of giving working-class people education in the arts and sciences, it offered full scholarships at the time I attended. For an artistic kid raised in the suburbs, acceptance to Cooper was like winning a golden ticket. In my sophomore year, my roommate introduced me to a wealthy Englishman, a society decorator with an impressive roster of past clients. His style was lifted off the British aristocracy; classic interiors evoking the glories of nature, careful arrangements of coveted objects acquired from the farthest reaches of the Empire, projecting a veneer of status. Over dinner one night, he proposed that we enter an arrangement: dates and evenings together in exchange for a weekly stipend. Naïve to what was being asked of me, I made a counteroffer to be his draftsman, drawing up the details of classic interiors, the paneled libraries, the marble-clad bathrooms.

We started out on my terms but ended up on his. Despite his storied past, his decor business had stalled as his drinking escalated. My role transitioned from draftsman to cocktail companion. I worked in his studio by day, and was his male arm candy by night. Though I was ill-prepared to deal with his ardor, I stayed, even as boundaries eroded and eventually crumbled. We drank at crossed purposes: He wanted me drunk enough to fall into bed with him, and I wanted him to pass out so I could go home. Most nights it was a draw. We also traveled together in high style, visiting the gardens and palaces of Europe. It was an invaluable education in a specific, queer esthetic, although in retrospect it had a cost. I’d spent a formative period—my twenties—in the cage of his romantic obsession. This emotional entanglement (to say nothing of the heavy drinking) ultimately tainted my professional experience. This work may have loved me back, but definitely not in the way it should have. Perhaps this among all other experiences set me up to ultimately thrive in work without emotional investment.

The decorator left me some money, and I struck out on my own. The business I started was a photo studio in a loft in downtown Brooklyn, with views of New York Harbor, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the World Trade Center. I designed and built the space myself, designed the marketing materials, and ran the website. I opened the doors for fashion shoots, television and film productions, and special events. I collaborated with photographers, art directed shoots, landed art department work for film and television, and took on graphic design projects. I’d go on to art direct a feature film, produce a fashion show, and even produce a compilation album of down-tempo tracks. The loft fulfilled a dream of boundless creative work. Though I faced the maddening freelancer struggles, as well as nagging doubts about pimping out my creativity, I was doing what I loved and managing to scrape out a living, at least for a brief idyll.

Despite the brief sparks of happiness these endeavors brought me, I wouldn’t place any of them in loving-me-back territory. 

Then 9/11 happened. Standing dumbstruck at the loft’s windows, I watched in horror as smoke trailed over Brooklyn from Ground Zero. All the creative work that had been coming through my door disappeared. Production companies fled the city, unable to ensure their shoots. I’d recently started booking the space for more events, and wondered if anyone would ever want to look out upon that view again. What followed was wholly unexpected. Post-9/11 human interest stories ran about a surge of marriages; it may have been more perceived than factual, but the loft was suddenly in high demand for wedding receptions. Those weddings kept me afloat, and it was genuinely healing to host these intimate celebrations.

Having somehow fallen backwards into the role of wedding planner, I quickly learned that it’s a fraught, high-stakes enterprise to which many people bring emotional baggage. Several years in, as I was closing out one such reception, the bride’s drunk, shoeless mother attacked me, spewing homophobic venom. Though it was clear her rage was not about me, a looming suspicion that market forces and disaster had conspired to pigeonhole me into performing a gay stereotype solidified. The business I’d started with such promise had run me into a ditch.

Not long after that drama, the condo boom forced me out of that space, and then the recession put me out of work entirely. My boyfriend kicked me out of his East Village apartment, telling me I was “emotionally unavailable.” My answer—“This is as available as I get”—was not persuasive, so I moved into a sublet around the corner. Facing uncertainty and loneliness, I shed my relationship weight running around Tompkins Square Park. I snapped some photos of myself at peak fitness, and used a pirated Wi-Fi account to cruise AOL’s chat rooms, seeking validation. One persistent guy whom I’d turned down repeatedly—mainly because he lived on the Upper West Side—offered me money. The rent on the sublet was due, and I didn't have any better prospects, so I took the train uptown. I gave him what he wanted, then returned home with a stack of twenties and a business plan.

The skills I’d developed running a space rental business served me well in this new work. I kept a spreadsheet to track my regulars, travel logistics, and scheduling. I was willing to travel further afield than the more established working boys, and covered the tri-state area. There was a lot of on-the-job learning. I made a decent living, although it was an isolating work experience: hours alone in the dark in front of a computer screen, waiting for a ping. When I did meet clients, my body was rented, and I was inhabiting a protective fiction. I also kept a diary, documenting each encounter, tracing the contours of desire throughout my territory. Writing kept me sane through the strangeness and the isolating routines. It was a new paradigm for the art/work relationship: I worked to survive, and wrote to survive the work.

For all its challenges, I enjoyed sex work; I was able to set boundaries and have agency I lacked in my twenties, when I was beholden to the decorator’s romantic fixation. However, the work simply wasn’t sustainable. I think of it almost like a career athlete, or a dancer: the body often only gives us a few good years to thrive. I applaud those sex workers out there upending common assumptions about age and working well into their 50s, but I sensed my expiration date looming.

After a few years as a by-the-hour escort, I was offered a sales/management position at one of the largest real estate firms in the city. I quickly came to appreciate the regular hours, the health benefits, the 401K, and even the dress code. It was most I’d ever earned, though the furthest from a creative occupation. My first bosses were two women I adored, and under them, I cultivated a service-oriented approach to sales. Unfortunately, that bliss was short-lived; in my next position, I was cast into a male-dominated corporate hierarchy that implored me to be “aggressive,” to “do whatever it takes,” to close deals. Fighting to carve out space for my approach was exhausting.

Perhaps this among all other experiences set me up to ultimately thrive in work without emotional investment. 

I got laid off from that last management position in ’11—another decade, another recession—and was replaced with someone younger, at a lower salary. After being unemployed for a stretch, I took my current gig over from a cousin who’d fallen ill, thinking I’d be helping him out temporarily. I never once thought it would become my next career shift, and fuel my creativity in ways I hadn’t fathomed.

On days when I’m not on the road, I make my own hours. Working from home, I can toggle between activism, work, and writing. I find that by tracking and chronicling tasks—my past habits of using spreadsheets and diary-keeping coming into play—I enter into a generative state which dissolves the familiar and opens up the same suspension of beliefs Angelou described, even at home. The rigor required for each endeavor informs the others, so all of these areas—creative, activist, sustenant—cease to exist in silos, instead more like trees with networked root systems.

Lately, in order to center my creative practice through all the turmoil we’re facing, I’ve drawn inspiration from the lives of queer artists who came before me. The late Alvin Baltrop worked serially as a navy striker, taxi driver, moving man, and bouncer, all to finance his photography: the equipment, the film, the paper, the chemicals. His work was unappreciated in his lifetime—the art establishment of his day did not believe that a working-class Black man could produce such evocative photos—but he’s since been recognized as a preeminent chronicler of queer longing, a project that aligns with my own. Undertaking close readings of his photographs, I’m left with the impression that his labors didn’t just fuel his art, they also informed it.

Reflecting on my own work history keeps me mindful that the next person I encounter in a uniform, at their service position, may have just as intricate a story, or an even deeper struggle. I acknowledge my privilege in being able to shift so many times; it allowed me to survive until I could thrive. I recognize its conditionality as well, understanding I may not have another shift left. Another canard that has stalked me over the years is the one that asserts that a true artist shows a singular dedication to their art, and must pursue it with unbroken focus; they simply can’t do anything else. The resilience that artists display through adversity suggests that we can make all kinds of unlikely circumstances work for us.

I’ve drawn inspiration from the lives of queer artists who came before me.

Complicating this further is the lifelong scrutiny that queer people face about everything we do, not just who and how we love. Our professional lives can perpetuate the need to protect ourselves from that scrutiny, or they can be the catalyst to liberate ourselves from our own cages and center our full truths. I’m still working out my own liberation on the road. Being loved back by any job—be it blue collar, white collar, or no collar—may well be a quixotic quest, but at least I set out my terms. My odyssey through the working world has taught me that creativity, sustenance, and purpose is attainable, if elusive. For this traveling salesman, this alchemy has rarely aligned with the preconceptions embedded in that problematic canard, as if a recipe to happiness is as simple as doing what we love.

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