For so many queer folks, this is where we have the most agency. Sometimes we don't have a say in what we do for a job, how our families see us, but we do have a say about where we find pleasure, who goes inside us and who we go inside of. That's when we have a choice, and I wanted to stay there, in a place fraught with fear, terror, shame, but also power. So the sex scenes are repeated. They're elongated.

Desire is a force that coils and brews a storm in us, even when we're just looking at somebody. I wanted to turn desire into the weather, to stay in a moment of potency.

I found it quite radical, especially when Little Dog loses his virginity, and you address the messier moments that can occur doing anal sex. It's so familiar to gay intimacy and yet rarely acknowledged, particularly in literature. What compelled you to write about the underbelly of gay sex?

I specifically wrote that for queer folks. There are rare moments when I know who my audience is. I'm not a writer who likes to write for specific people—I don't like to be a representative of any group—but in that moment I felt like there has to be a moment of recognizability and, further, that that quote-unquote messiness or failure is not wrong. It's part of the coming-of-age of queerness. It's also a moment of mercy. A moment of bodily failure is actually a moment where the queer bodies are their most real. Where they are absolutely standing alone on their own two feet and they start to rescue each other in that moment. Not because they are marginalized or ostracized, but because they are so outside of the frame they find their own power.

Do you recall the first time you ever saw your queer Asianness reflected in a piece of art?

Alexander Chee would be in literature, which sounds absurd because he's contemporary, but that would be the first. But the most emblematic was Happy Together by Wong Kar-Wai, because they were untouched by whiteness, and that's so rare. It's so rare. Not to mention it's just a beautiful story. The energy was always violent and toxic, but they were on their own terms.

I wonder if that specificity can exist in America.

I went to see Crazy Rich Asians here—I didn't love the movie, I thought it was boring—but I walked into this theater in western Massachusetts, and it was packed full of mostly white people at 11:30 in the morning. I sat there, and the first song that came on was traditional Chinese opera. The movie didn't even begin—it was just the song and early credits—and I just sobbed. Because I never thought I would live to see anything like that.

Do you have a thing in your closet, an item that makes you feel the most queer?

I purposefully like to wear asymmetric earrings, one dangly, one stud. It's the one moment when I say I'm purposefully off-kilter. I want people to be disoriented by my face. Even just conceptually, I find joy in having one side be different. Even my eyes, one of my eyes is different than the other. It took me a long time to find joy in that.

I’m curious about your relationship to events like Pride, particularly as a Buddhist?

Well, as a Buddhist, it's almost at times contradictory to notions of pride, because pride is related to ego. Hardcore Buddhism would say there is no such thing as the self, that the body is merely a hotel room we try to care for and then we leave. And in some sense I think that's true. In another sense I think now is one of the most important moments to rethink Pride’s relationship to queerness. A lot of the Pride parades have been hijacked by late capitalism, the commodification of the queer body to sell Chase bank accounts. We've had fucking rainbow Doritos, for God's sake. Now let's talk about safety, health-care rights, laws to protect each other. To me Pride has to quickly translate to care. And if we don't have that trajectory, that bridge from one to another, I'm not that interested.