the punchline
homeless fuckability, human dignity, desire/desirability, and street harassment v community.
My boyfriend has a lot of confessions. He uses a Keurig (even though it’s wasteful), he thinks the Amazon Go stores are cool (even though they’re rendering corner stores obsolete), he’ll buy it online even if he could get it in a store (because it’s easy). He doesn’t get why I hate this one joke (even though he thinks he knows why).
This one joke is a hallmark of one of his favorite comedian’s stand-up routines, and now, a brief feature in her recent memoir. The Comedian* makes a joke about fucking homeless men. “I just fucked a homeless dude…again!” she exclaims, and the man that enters stage left of your mind looks like a caricature—unwashed, unfortunate, uncouth; unfuckable. The audience laughs because the idea that anyone with an address to their name would ever sleep with a homeless person is so far out of their reality that they can only conceive of it as a joke. The joke is funny because the audience doesn’t see homeless people as viable erotic beings; doesn’t allow them to have desire or sexuality. The joke collapses every person experiencing homelessness into this caricature, erasing their dignity and turning homelessness itself into a joke.
I’m hyper-conscious of how contemporary writers or entertainers reference homeless people in their work because of my work— I work at a soup kitchen/ food pantry/ homeless and low-income resource center in Downtown LA that I’ll call The Kitchen. We serve breakfast to around 150 homeless Angelenos every day except Sunday (in a to-go format since the start of Covid-19).
We have men and women (but mostly men) who show up every morning at our doors from all walks and wheels of life. We do see The Comedian’s caricature shuffling up from the line, clothes falling off his body, hygiene ignored for weeks, a blank expression occupying his face. This is who the audience pictures when The Comedian says she slept with a homeless man and they wince and they laugh uproariously in shock because who could ever?
These men’s dignity is less hidden than it is buried; their cognitive ability obliterated by ACEs, PTSD, physical and/or sexual abuse, untreated disability, and other traumas (reminder that currently around 13% of people experiencing homelessness are veterans).
Then there are the men who show up with their dignity on full display: in their work uniforms, in their button-down shirts, in the finery they have cobbled together from donations and from past lives. These men wash your dishes after you go out to eat, refill the paper towels before you use the restroom, sweep the floors after you leave a building, and you would never guess they were homeless. Because they don’t look like what you think about when you envision a homeless man.
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There are many men at The Kitchen who could seamlessly blend into the fabric of society, due to the way they look and dress and move. There is one man who has started coming recently for breakfast and he is so handsome I have to look away, afraid of making eye contact. He has effortless hair and piercing eyes and looks exactly like JM, my 10th grade crush. I catch him staring at me when he’s waiting in line for his meal. He lingers for extra long to thank me for the food. I try not to look at him because I know he’s looking at me.
He stands out because he’s unusual for our demographic—a clean, young, white man who could pass for an outdoorsy Instagram influencer. We had another man like this come two summers ago, when I was still a volunteer—a blonde boy with a large backpack that he carried around everywhere, looking like he could have just come from an REI photoshoot or a Hot Chris Pratt Lookalike Casting Call. His eyes kept searching me out too; I avoided him too.
There is another man who comes every week and picks up two meals, one for himself and one for his mother. He is tall and still and looks like Lakeith Stanford from Sorry to Bother you but even taller and with longer dreads. He is quiet and sweet and his eyes widen with thanks whenever he receives an extra small kindness from us.
And another guest, a silver-haired man with a curious mouth and ink to match my own, who’s not comparable to any classmate or celebrity but is beautiful in his own right.
These are all men who—I believe, based on modern standards of attractiveness and desire—are inherently fuckable.
Then there are those whose fuckability isn’t inherent, but it’s there for some—tattooed bike punks; hard rock retirees; clean-cut dad-figures; middle-aged men with permanent smile lines and kind faces; men who look as beautiful as they do dangerous. These men have been lovers, partners, boyfriends, one-night stands, fathers; they have desired and been desired, as every allosexual does; they may even have slept with a woman they just met, like The Comedian, only for her to rework the way she sees them as soon as she sees their tent.
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I don’t want to pretend like I don’t understand the visceral reaction women have to men in tents on the street. Like I don’t understand that people experiencing homelessness have agency too—agency which sometimes leads to harmful, misogynistic choices.
I have always lived a 10-15 minute bike ride from The Kitchen, so I live in the community where many of our guests reside. When I ride around town I pass homeless encampments or sleeping individuals on almost every block, wondering if someone I know is on that sidewalk but never wanting to pause. Guests have seen me around town before—I know it because they mention it the next day at breakfast (I used to be visible from afar—for several years I had a helmet I painted to look like a brain, until it was stolen). I never see them, though, because I ride looking straight forward, with my headphones in and my music up as loud as it can go. I’ve made the mistake before of lowering or pausing my music because it looked like someone wanted to speak to me, wanted my help.
“Where you going sweetie? Can I come with you?” “You look goooood on that bicycle!” “You wanna suck dick?”
I sacrifice building community or connection with our guests as a way to stay safe. In this way, I worry that I dehumanize them as well; that—even though logically I know I don’t—I am reducing every man sleeping on the street to a threat. To a caricature.
I try to challenge this defense mechanism, often to my own detriment. The other day I was Trying To Make An Effort and asked a guest how the breakfast was as I was walking past. He looked me up and down and called me baby, following me with his eyes. Later he wheeled over to the front door and asked me if we were serving dinner. “Dinner?” “Yeah, at your place later tonight.” Once, when I was a volunteer, leaning against a wall and waiting for the next round of breakfast guests, one of the beautiful, dangerous men with cool eyes looked me up and down, pinning me to the wall with his gaze, drew close and whispered, “You are so beautiful.” I started volunteering in the back of the kitchen after that.
I constantly weigh the guilt of not doing enough to get to know our male guests against the pain and violation I feel every time when a man on the street catcalls me. This mental balancing is further complicated by my refusal to want to conflate homeless men—especially homeless men of color—with harassment and misogynistic behavior. I have experienced some of the most truly terrifying moments of street harassment from young, suburban, white boys.
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Sometimes I talk to my friends about street harassment and they nod their heads sagely and we exist in a moment of mutual understanding and then shift away from the topic. No need for details. We both know how it feels. Once, though, I brought it up with a beautiful friend who shared with me she had never been catcalled before. My first reaction was surprise, because she is beautiful; I had to remind myself that street harassment is about power, not beauty, although the terrible double-bind of it is that it feels that way (more on this later).
I reminded my friend that I am exposed to unwanted attention every day when I go out into the city, a different Los Angeles from hers; that, even now, as we live in the same city, she lives in a quieter corner of it, transported from place to place in her own car, while my body shares a train car with strangers, or passes through public on foot or on my bike. My body is an easy target just because it’s there.
The other day, I read a comment in a queer Discord group that I lurk in the corners of—a trans woman posted, “CW street harassment- just had my first experience with street harassment/unsolicited advances while walking home and presenting femme; is it bad that all I’m feeling is gender euphoria right now?” Another responded, “My first time getting gendered correctly by a stranger was also harassment. For me it was a weird combination of total euphoria + being so angry with the world and scared so i think you’re totally valid.”
Street harassment is an inescapably self-doubting thing. It puts you in this double-bind where receiving it validates your desirability/presentation (while simultaneously making you feel unsafe and scared and, counterintuitively, less attractive), but escaping it makes you wonder if you’ve somehow failed in your being—if you’re undesirable, unfuckable. Not even a man on the street—the lowest purported standard—would have you.
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Maybe this is also part of the joke in sleeping with homeless men—their desire can be so loud that it envelopes everyone who passes into its range. Even those of us that are deemed fuckable by others’ desire are unfuckable because we’ve decided their desire doesn’t matter.
If a man wants you but he also wants everyone, that means there’s nothing special or desirable about you. If a man who wants everyone doesn’t want you, that also means there’s nothing desirable about you.
The punchline is that The Comedian fucked a man who was supposed to be unfuckable, and that in turn made her a little more unfuckable too. The punchline depends on the years of set-up that taught the audience to view homelessness and desire/desirability as mutually exclusive, to deny homeless people their humanity just enough to make it funny. We forgot that losing your home doesn’t mean you lose your charisma, your hotness, your vibe, all the things that make you desirable; and that you don’t lose your desire either. When we remember that people experiencing homelessness are still people, the punchline doesn’t land very well.
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*I’ve refrained from naming the Comedian because, generally, I find her to be a good comic (albeit with some questionable perspectives), and was very impressed by how her spoken comedy translates into the written word (something I think has fallen flat with other stand-ups’ memoirs). She just has a few jokes that… make me wince, a lot. This is one of them.