The Daddy Returns!

the unexplored spaces between desire

In the week that Pedro Pascal was intimately photographed potentially dating a man, and the tabloid response being “is he gay?”, I thought I would share something explicitly bisexual to counteract a little of the bi erasure in the world.

It has been announced, whispered through the vents of the internet on a hot desert wind carrying glimmer warnings / trauma / unresolved teenage longing, another film in The Mummy universe is coming, with the original cast / chemistry / biochemical weapon of potential mass bisexualisation, and suddenly an entire generation of emotionally literate, therapy-fluent, oat-milk-drinking elder millennial queers has collapsed back into the living room carpet of 1999, pupils dilated / palms sweaty / brain chanting yes yes yes yes, because we know what this means, we know what is about to happen to our bodies / timelines / carefully curated adult selves / respectable footnotes / bibliographies / mortgage spreadsheets, we know we are about to be spiritually waterboarded by nostalgia / desire / competence porn / dusty romance and we are welcoming it with open mouths (read: hearts), because this is not “just a film”, (how very dare you!) this is a mass reactivation event / stored bisexual memory being violently thawed / the archive opening itself and screaming / chaotic academia at its finest / cultural theory in linen shirts & leather accessories / queer historiography peering over its reading glasses, this, this, is the moment when we finally, finally become whole, when the last straight person on earth will accidentally feel something shift during an intimate sandstorm scene and whisper “oh… oh no…”, because yes, yes, yes we are about to convert the world, gently, thirstily, respectfully, with salty & sweet popcorn and communal panting, and Brendan Fraser alone now holds this power like a benevolent bisexual demigod, capable of reorienting global desire with a single smirk and a well-timed growl, and the cinemas are woefully underprepared, the seats are not waterproof, the drainage systems are insufficient, Ofcom should be alerted, because we are coming, dehydrated / desperate / scholarly / feral, clutching our reusable cups and our unresolved feelings, ready to be drenched in memory / meaning / moist-eyed reverence, ready to scream internally about how this franchise shaped our entire understanding of attraction, multiplicity, longing, and aesthetic devotion, ready to admit that no, we never recovered, we simply learned how to carefully cite our trauma.

Take me, take me now, Bembridge scholars!

Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell

Let us begin with the original offender. Rick O’Connell. Ugh, that man. Carefully orchestrated bit of late-90s scruff, Brendan Fraser. Emotionally available in unbearably long bursts. Wearing that linen shirt as if it was stitched directly (tightly, and ever so rightly) onto the collective queer unconscious like a patch on a Fjällräven backpack, and then saddled with a leather harness (save a horse, yadda yadda…). This man single-handedly taught us that masculinity could be brave & soft & funny & terrified & loyal & sweaty & still deeply attractive, that you could rescue someone and also listen to them, that you could scream in the face of mummies and still respect a woman’s intellect, that you could be a himbo with a soul. And for many of us this was the first time we realised that our desire did not sit neatly in one box, that we could want strength & tenderness & chaos & safety in the same body, that attraction could feel like admiration & laughter & panic & reverence all at once, and now he is coming back, older, warmer, deeper, with supreme dad-energy and cultural sainthood, and we are simply not strong enough for this second wave, we are about to be emotionally reset to factory settings, updated to a new operating system, and have all our apps frivolously toggled.

Rachel Weisz as Evelyn Carnahan

Evelyn. Look, she may not be an explorer, or an adventurer, or a treasure-seeker, or a gunfighter, but she is proud of what she is. Yes. She. Is. A. LIBRARIAN. Genius, one woman catastrophe in sensible shoes. The woman who made half of us realise that intelligence can be erotic, that clumsiness can be charming, that glasses can be a weapon, that you can drop an entire bookshelf and still be the smartest person in the room. She was a divine lesson in loving women who know things, women who read, women who think, women who argue, women who grow into power without losing softness, women who can translate ancient languages and still flirt in the romance of ancient candlelight. She gave us permission to desire brilliance. She gave us permission to be brilliant and desirable. She gave us permission to be both & all (but mostly both, for the continued sake of my argument here). She is returning, older, sharper, more luminous, and every bisexual who ever fell in love with a teacher, a librarian, a poet, or a woman explaining something passionately is about to relapse. English teachers are not safe.

Arnold Vosloo as Imhotep

Imhotep. The perfect combo of dead and juicy. The original underground gothic boyfriend. Moist. Rehydrated. Devoted beyond death. Willing to dismantle civilisation for love. A walking dissertation on obsession & grief, alongside the limitless power of the cuffs, cloak, and loincloth combo. He taught us that villains could be hot, that longing could be monstrous, that devotion could be terrifying & beautiful & deeply queer-coded, that desire could cross time & flesh & morality, and somewhere in there many of us learned that attraction does not always arrive wrapped in safety, sometimes it arrives wrapped in tragedy and drama and ancient curses, and we say yes anyway. Cos why not? We’ve got more than enough time.

Patricia Velasquez as Anck-su-Namun

Anck-su-Namun. Eternal lover. Warrior queen. Ride-or-die reincarnated icon. She taught us about dramatic loyalty, drama first, naturally, choosing passion over comfort, wanting someone so much you will defy gods & empires & common sense, femininity as power / danger / devotion, being soft and lethal simultaneously. She is bisexual energy distilled into gold jewellery and eyeliner. She is what happens when desire refuses to be reasonable. And the outfits! The Ancient Egyptian remake of The Cranberries’ Zombie music video we never knew we needed, desperately.

John Hannah as Jonathan Carnahan

Jonathan. Minor chaos gremlin. Bisexual ally in spirit. Human disaster with excellent cheekbones. He taught us that cowardice can be charming, that failure can be funny, that you don’t have to be the hero to be loved, that mess is allowed, that some of us survive by wit and wine and sheer audacity. Every queer who weaponised humour to survive saw themselves here and felt seen. If you loved Milo from Atlantis: The Lost Empire, this is also your guy.

Oded Fehr as Ardeth Bay

Ardeth Bay. Honour. Mystery. Leather. Spiritual authority. The quiet gaze. The warrior mystic horseback riding monk fantasy. The reason half of us developed a thing for stoic protectors and desert aesthetics. He taught us about restrained intensity, about devotion without noise, about beauty that does not beg for attention but commands it. He is the reason many of us are attracted to people who appear to possess deep, eternal secrets (as long as they never open their mouths)(and ride bareback).

And now, with all of them returning, with this entire erotic and emotional syllabus reactivated, we are facing the inevitable truth: this film will complete us. This is the final boss of bisexual validation. This is our Stonewall, our Magna Carta, our peer-reviewed proof that yes, this sexuality is real, yes, it is powerful, yes, it has cultural consequences, yes, it can shift box office numbers and fashion trends and internet discourse. After this, nobody will ever again ask “but are you sure?” because the answer will be projected in IMAX with surround sound and great swathes of communal sobbing. This is what we have been training for. This is what all the poetry and theory and late-night identity spirals were leading towards. This is bisexuality achieving its final form. We will walk out of those cinemas glowing, baptised in dust and desire, speaking in citations and thirst tweets, bonded forever by shared endocrine chaos. Somewhere in this piece, dear reader, is where I will insert my poem, the one about watching the space between them and calling it desire, the one about exquisite disorder and motorway multiplicity and shared custody attraction, because it belongs here, because it is part of this archive, because this franchise lives in my metaphors and my syntax and my nervous system, because it made me who I am, because it taught me that wanting more than one thing is not confusion, it is abundance, it is range, it is a scholarly position, it is a creative method, it is a lifestyle.

We are thirsty. We are unapologetically thirsty. We are historically thirsty. And holy fuck, are we about to be drenched. We are about to be flooded with memory / meaning / longing / laughter / orchestral gasping. This is not regression. This is the return. This is the past shaking hands with the present and saying “you survived, now let’s ruin you again, gently.” This is what we always needed. This is what we always deserved. This is our pilgrimage, our symposium, our sacrament. We will attend. We will swoon. We will cite. We will cry. We will emerge changed.

And when it’s over, when the credits roll and the lights come up, and we’re all blinking, fresh again like newborn scholars of desire, I will stand there in my emotional dampness and intellectual triumph and whisper, with love and vengeance and footnoted satisfaction:

Take that, Bembridge scholars.

A single The Mummy film might make your day, but a NEW The Mummy film will make your whole week. Speaking of weak holes*, which we weren’t, but double entendre, ahoy! here we now are. To read more poems like this one from an explicitly bisexual book of longing, desire, and all-round sauciness, may I recommend to you my latest collection Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel.

I was going to rewrite the movie tagline (The sands will rise. The heavens will part. The power will be unleashed.) to make it even more bisexual, but I’ve tried, and I’ve tried to find a version that isn’t just pure filth. So, use your imagination with bi abandon, something will rise, something will part, and something will be unleashed.

The poems don’t always write themselves…. but some days, some days I have time for a second biscuit. The knob gags don’t always write themselves. Sometimes I wake up, and they’re already there waiting for me…

*There are no weak holes, only friends you haven’t avoided eye contact with yet.