David Lynch Built Queer Worlds For Me To Thrive In

Iwas13 when the original “Twin Peaks” came out in 1990. It would be convenient to say that I was so cool that I watched it on purpose, an artsy queer suburban kid desperate for culture. I happened upon it by some mysterious channel surfing synchronicity and kept watching, in part because I was completely befuddled by its bizarre hold on me. I didn’t really understand “Twin Peaks” as an avant garde televisual phenomenon, just as a very strange way to spend an hour.

As it turns out, that hour would be the proverbial match that lit my heart aflame. Watching “Twin Peaks”in the context of a sea of banal television felt like dropping acid on a school day. It gave you a glimpse of a bizarre, fantastical world living right beneath the surface of everyday life — a very queer world that you maybe never wanted to leave. 

There have been passionate debates about the potential queerness of characters on “Twin Peaks” for decades. And many have opined about the representation of trans people. Denise, an FBI agent and lesbian trans woman played by David Duchovny, was the first trans character I saw on TV. Denise was, to put it briefly, a problematic character. The problem of Denise was solved for many in the 2017 release of “The Return,” when David Lynch as FBI deputy director Gordon Cole tells Denise, “When you became Denise, I told all of your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.”

From that moment forward, “fix your heart or die” became a trans anthem, a plea-demand for empathy. 

But the truth is that at 13, I didn’t care if Denise was a perfectly rendered trans character. I didn’t care that she was played by a straight cis man. I didn’t care that people jeered at her. I cared that she existed, and by the sheer fact of existing on primetime, she called gender into question. 

I also didn’t care whether Donna was really in love with Laura Palmer or if they were just best friends. I was in love with the way Donna loved Laura, in that “does she want to be her or does she want to be with her?” kind of way that is queer-coded no matter what. I was smitten with every inch of Lynch’s world: the endless cups of coffee, the unsettling pauses, the discontinuity of events, the infinitely malleable characters, the absolute irrelevance of linear narrative. Lynch crafted a world that I belonged to in a way that I didn’t actually understand. 

After “Twin Peaks,” I became a fan, a Stan, and perhaps on my best days, a disciple. As a teen, I watched every movie that Lynch came out with. After spending a weekend with my bestie watching “Blue Velvet” on repeat when we were 14, I told everyone I was bi. Isabella Rossellini is my forever first love. She was weird and beautiful and dangerously fucked up, and like all the men in the film, I simultaneously wanted to destroy her and to save her. 

Clearly, I have relationship issues. But the point is that the combination of Rossellini’s unattainable beauty and the dream logic of Lynchian aesthetics made it seem possible to be queer, and possible for being queer to be just another blip in the reality vortex instead of a “big deal” personal identifier. As funny as it may sound from a person who is basically gay as a profession, I still feel the same simultaneous ambivalence and awe about being queer that Lynch helped me uncover.

I happened upon “Wild at Heart” close after “Twin Peaks.” By that time, the Lynchian worldview had already done its work on me. I remember the day I went to see the film at a theater outside Los Angeles in vivid surrealist hues. I went with Alba, a young woman from El Salvador that my aunt paid illegally low wages to clean her house. Walking to the theater, I could feel the scuttling underworld around us on a day too bright to be real. 

After the film, I was destroyed and confused, and so horny I couldn’t walk right coming out of the theater. Afterward, Alba and I got frozen yogurt, and as she licked green melted pistachio cream off her hand and smiled at me, I knew I’d never be the same. Romance blazed in my heart then and, to this day, that movie epitomizes all my ideas of love. If you aren’t going to sing “Love Me Tender” to me from the hood of a car, then what are we even doing?

As an adult, David Lynch helped me accept the incongruity of the disparate parts of myself. His book on creativity and meditation, “Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity,” was a balm for my bruised and brittle sense of self as a writer, meditator and seeker. I made my now ex-wife go to transcendental meditation training and kept the book by my bedside like a bible. 

Lynch was not, as know him, queer himself. But all his work was somehow queer, not just in the original sense of the word as weird, but also because we loved him. He built worlds and words that we could exist in in all our complexity and contradiction. Or, perhaps more accurately, he saw the world we already live in, the mad beauty of otherness glinting right below the mundanity of everyday life. 

I am scared of a world without David Lynch. When I read about his death, I texted my friend Kevin, another queer art-loving meditator.

“I don’t even know what to say,” I said.

“Now we have to do it,” Kevin wrote.

“Oh,” I said. “Yes, we do.” It’s our turn now. It’s our turn to be brave and maddening in our commitments, and compulsively in love with the world. We all must fix our hearts or die.