“Just give me a second,” I tell Jordan Tannahill at the start of our Zoom interview as I turn on my backup voice recorder. “You always got to double record!” In response, Tannahill recounts a recent interview he conducted with AA Bronson, the artist and co-founder of the legendary collective General Idea: “We were naked at Teufelssee, my phone was between us, and he was offering up these incredible koans of wisdom. At one point, I looked down at my phone and realized it hadn’t been recording for half an hour.”
We both laugh about this moment of connection, now lost to time, between two wildly talented queer artists. Tannahill’s new novel The Living Realm plays on this very theme, of connections lost and found. It is also set primarily at Teufelssee, a small glacial lake and historic gay cruising ground in the Grunewald forest on the edge of Berlin.
Tannahill’s third novel centers on an aging and unnamed protagonist who begins to see ghostly figures in the forest that look like his former lovers. As the story unfolds and we delve deeper into his psyche, we also fall into what Tannahill refers to as the “hauntology of cruising”—the idea that connection unfolds across time and pleasure, linking us to those who came before.
Tannahill is quickly becoming one of the rare voices that can cut through queer time, space, and history. The Living Realm—which the author Douglas Stuart has said “belongs in the firmament of great gay fiction”—comes on the heels of a seven-month off-Broadway run of Prince Faggot, his award-winning play that imagines a future in which Prince George is gay.
Ahead of the release of The Living Realm on Sept. 8, we talk about the importance—and danger—of making art about the underground, the limitations of chosen family, and why skill sharing, sometimes by way of fisting workshops, is integral to queer survival.
The first thing I wanted to ask was about the character of Birgit, an archaeologist and academic who is a friend and mentor to the protagonist, and their sort of girl-girl or fag hag relationship.
I’ve long been fascinated by the history of relationships between lesbians and gay men. Historically, that relationship has been fraught but there is also this deep kinship and sense of mutual support. I was deeply moved by a story that I heard from a friend some years ago about how lesbians were running workshops about fisting in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. They’d hold these workshops in bathhouses and bars, as a means of decentering the phallus as the sole focus of sexual gratification.
That story also played a role in your play Prince Faggot. Can you tell me why it has been such a throughline for you?
For me, that anecdote really encapsulates the idea of mutual care and a community built around mutual survival, survival through pleasure, and how skill sharing is an essential part of that. Birgit is the kind of woman who would have taught a workshop like that. She is someone for whom access to a sexual underground and liberatory politic is at the core of her life. She is someone who lives amongst queer people on the vanguard of political and queer liberation. She is someone who supported gay men through their battle with AIDS and ultimately saw them through the end of their lives.
There are so many women like that and that is who Birgit represents. But I also wanted her not just to be a kind of historical artifact. I wanted her to be a fully three-dimensional human being. She is an archaeologist who is essentially our protagonist’s boss and she’s quite a no-nonsense sort of in terms of how she runs her digs and what she expects from her colleagues.
And there is a third character: the Hungarian dissident Gabor. The three of them make a trio.
They really form this family, I suppose, to use a well-trodden cliché, this chosen family. But now Birgit is at the age where she’s also seen some of the limits of this chosen family. At the end of the day, she comes home to an empty apartment and she openly expresses the pain of that. That pain is deepened when she sees an ex-girlfriend now married with children living the kind of normative life that she previously, or even still to this day, dismisses as being kind of drab and heteronormative. But she also yearns for that house animated by other people. And what happens when Gabor and our protagonist die? I mean, she really will be left alone. She’s thinking very heavily about family kinship, our responsibilities to one another.
Many of us know the limits of blood family. This book explores the limits of chosen family.
Absolutely. And the limitations that arrive are not from a lack of love or care. They are just structural limitations and that is something that Birgit is really contending with in this book. I wanted to portray this very long-standing, very functional, very loving chosen family as they age into their senior years. The nature of any full portrait means the inclusion of some of its limitations. It wasn’t my desire to lift up the shortcomings of the chosen family, but rather just simply to create a portrait in its fullness.
In our community, there is a longstanding debate about whether we should be speaking loudly, writing, photographing, or creating art about certain sacred spaces. Sometimes shedding light on something precious can hurt it, or make it disappear all together. At what point does writing about the underground make it above ground?
I think there is tension whenever we write about our community or places that are sacred, private, and part of our subculture. It has to be done sensitively, particularly about spaces in which we are sexually vulnerable, like cruising grounds. I try to obscure the path, as it were, in my descriptions within the book, to the actual cruising ground. I don’t think the book would give you as clear a guide as you can probably just find on Reddit. There is a sense that you have to be brought in, initiated, or led there.
But still…
Still, there is danger to creating art about these places. But I am so grateful for the art that exists about Fire Island. I am so grateful for Dancer from the Dance [by Andrew Holleran] and the novels of Guillaume Dustan, who wrote about gay clubs in Paris in the 1990s. I am so grateful for these portraits of spaces even though they do create greater awareness which isn’t always good. My sense is that, generally speaking, the readership of this book is probably queer people who already know Teufelssee or will someday benefit from going there and enjoying it. I doubt that a large straight readership will try to actively seek out this gay cruising ground just because of the novel, but who knows?
Much of your work focuses on the queer underground but you are increasingly finding a mainstream audience. How do you toe the line between radicality and having so many people see your work? If Prince Faggot went to Broadway, what would that mean? Is it your goal to have an increasingly large platform?
I feel grateful to be able to write the work that I want to write with very, very few compromises. I don’t really believe in or understand what a mainstream audience really is. My audience, I suppose, is whoever encounters my work. But I’m primarily writing for myself and perhaps my immediate friend group. Thankfully, there are enough people out there in the world who are also into what we are into. If the readership of this novel is 1,000 people, then it found its readership. And if it somehow becomes this runaway bestseller, which I highly doubt it will, then color me confused, but great.
Would you make compromises to have something go more mainstream if given that opportunity?
I guess I just don’t see the need. I have enough money to live in New York City, which is all I really want to do. I have no secret source of money beyond what my art generates, but it generates enough for me to live comfortably. I think the existential cost of selling out would be [higher] than any possible financial reward. I don’t think you can make an immense fortune making the art I make, writing what I want to write, and I see that as something to safeguard.
The book has an element of danger in it. Cruising brings the characters fulfillment, community, and beauty, but that comes with a price, as we see multiple times. What are the stakes? How does that danger impact you and your characters?
Whether in the Meat Rack [the cruising ground at Fire Island] or Teufelssee, cruising is always animated with risk of infection or diseases, whether that is an STI or frankly, nowadays, a tick bite. We’re making ourselves profoundly vulnerable to one another, and these are public parks, which are patrolled to varying degrees. Those are some of the risks that exist around cruising and I touch upon them within the novel. But for me, and I think for our protagonists, the rewards far outweigh the risks.
This book is partially about ghosts, whether real or imagined. What ghosts haunted you while writing this book? Who or what were you communing with?
When I’m cruising, I often think about time. I’m not looking at my phone and I’m not in a rush—time seems to slow and distend. I become aware of my surroundings in a sort of moment by moment way that I so rarely get to do elsewhere in my life.
But I also think about time on a larger scale. I’m encountering men of all different ages which makes me aware of my body and perhaps where I am in the arc of my life. How many more summers will I have with my body looking the way it does now? How many more summers will I have to feel pleasure, to feel the things I do on Earth? And on an even bigger scale, I think about all the men who have come through this forest before me and have felt pleasure in that very same place.
I think cruising is an inherently hauntological act. It’s animated by the past, the ghosts, the bodies that have been in that forest, feeling those very same sensations decades or even centuries before we have. Just as I will one day also be a ghost or specter of that space. I think of the boys, the people who are yet to be born, that will also feel the pleasure that I did in that same space.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
Everything You Need to Have On Your Cultural Calendar for Fall 2026
How Cow’s Milk and Missing Checks Brought Down Brooklyn’s Burgeoning Vegan Empire
Which Film Has the Best Fashion of All Time? We Asked Our Editors to Weigh In.
America’s College Dream Is Dying. Why Is the Campus Novel More Tempting Than Ever?
What Does It Really Cost to Be an Artist in New York? Here Are the Numbers.
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
