‘Chérie’, Chez Unglee à Paris, May 16–18, 2025
Artists Kévin Blinderman, Sico Carlier, Dani d’Ingeo, Inès Michelotto, Kim Jakobsen Tô and Unglee
Too Long I Roam in the Night
I thought of my bedroom as a place of sanctity, but it was also somewhere where I felt at my most vulnerable. Not in a sexual way; mostly when I’m on my own.
We all have a public and a private side – to evoke that famous dictum, both are political. When I was on my own, however, often in my room, I wanted to be liberated from the responsibilities of facing the world in a way that mattered.
I hadn’t felt myself for a while – by which I mean felt my body, felt inside of it. Infact, I’d felt ravaged by the need for a public face, and the personal – my more tender belly – had been jettisoned or neglected. It’s the things we do in private that regulate us.
After I finished my bar shift last Thursday, I felt overcome with emotion at the pressure of existing in the city – a rawness of thought that I rarely reveal to people in full force. On the underground home, the notoriously slow District Line, there was only onesolution.
She comes to the rescue of all queer people at some point in their lives. She makes gay men, in particular, feel the things the conditions of masculinity had maybe made us think we shouldn’t. I inserted my headphones somewhere between Temple and Cannon Street and listened to a voice Jack Halberstam once described as ‘a woman impersonatinga woman’: Kate Bush.
As ‘Wuthering Heights’ blasted in my ears, undoubtedly audible to those around me, I was reminded of when I first heard the song at twelve years old. My mum is very conservative, and she didn’t like Kate at all. Maybe she was too expressive or something. In turn, I felt shame – that most core of emotions – about my love for her. We like what we most shouldn’t.
The song makes me feel now as it did then: a complete swooshing and swaying of guttural emotions. It’s absolutely perfect. In my bed that night, I thought about beds. I thought about all our need to be held, at least for a moment, by someone we imagine loves us – and how important that is. I thought about Kate’s voice holding me.
Sometimes, I feel held, and I wish I could convincingly hold myself. Sometimes – often – I need to be held for a long time, longer than it would be reasonable to ask someone to do. The city can make me feel un-held in a way that I sometimes worry risks my sanctity.
Sean Burns, 2025
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