Writing
iO’s books have been published in multiple languages by Ecco/Harper Collins (US), Clarkson Potter/Penguin (US), Prestel (UK/US), Editions Du Seuil (France), Suhrkamp Verlag (Germany), Virago (UK) and Il Saggiatorre (Italy).
His written work has appeared in The NY Times, LA Times, NY Times Magazine, T Magazine, Interview, Vogue, New York Magazine, Oyster, Glamour, Refinery29, Lenny Letter, etc. He was a featured columnist for T at The New York Times, and has contributed Op Eds to various publications.
He is represented for literary by Billy Clegg at The Clegg Agency.
selected essays
“Apricot Chicken", for “My First Popsicle”, by Zosia Mamet (Penguin Random House, 2022)
The problem came from an app called Dinner Spinner. You selected a protein, a serving size and how long you wanted to pretend to know how to cook, then the spinner would make you a suggestion.
I was 25, living in a Brooklyn shoebox with a “roommate” who paid to sleep in my closet. I couldn’t fit a dinner table in my apartment, but I yearned to feed my friends. We subsisted on deli sandwiches for every time of day – egg and cheese in the morning; salami and mayo in the afternoons; and meatball subs after the bar. So I wanted to make something special, a home cooked meal.
I chose chicken, for eight, ready in an hour, and spun the spinner. The horrifying confluence of elements it asked me to purchase, mix together, and serve for human consumption would haunt me for over a decade. They were:
3 packets of powdered onion soup mix 2 can apricots
1.5 bottles of Russian dressing
8 chicken breasts
All I had to do was mix everything but the chicken together in a bowl. Pour the mixture over the meat and cook it in the oven for 1 hour.
I’d never heard of Russian dressing, or powdered soup but I took my twenty dollars and left the house with an open heart.
I should have known something was wrong when my local Bushwick supermarket sent me to the dollar store to find the dressing. Ever optimistic, I thought, “Oh. Obscure. Chic.”
The small Korean woman at the dollar store cocked her head strangely when I asked for Russian Dressing, then led me to a section high above the rest of the condiments. She gestured aloft at a beige metal shelf bending at the center. I peered into the crevice above her scalp and there, at the back, between 12 year old bottles of Newman’s Own and something cubed in Spanish and cloaked in dust, were the two bottles I needed for my feast. I took them, two boxes of couscous, a 99-cent disposable turkey roasting tray and trotted home, triumphant.
I like sweet and savory. I like sauce. I didn’t know the difference between moist chicken and the mouthful of hay I served my friends, I thought I was killing it. I was a poor artist kid, high on benevolence. To be fair to them, they ate it, shoveling forkfuls and sputtering conversational kernels of couscous, until the heat-snarled roasting pan was bare. I mistook their enthusiasm for enjoyment, not raw need, and felt quite pleased with myself. So much so that for the next four years, I made a bi-monthly tradition of chosen family dinner and made the same dish every time. The dollar store ordered more Russian dressing for me, I bought a real glass baking dish, and I deleted the Dinner Spinner. It had retched forth everything I needed in the perfect dinner party dish – we were done.
A few years later, I moved to LA. Buckling under heartbreak, I taught myself to actually cook. Family dinners became elaborate experiments with recipes from real chefs, often taking hours to hit the table, often missing the mark. Apricot chicken was quickly forsaken for dishes that required specialty grocery stores, and I made a new crop of friends who had never experienced my signature masterpiece.
I progressed into my thirties, in which I built myself a nice life. Some of those friendships solidified, new ones cycled in, I moved to the desert, constructed a home, and then, like an old lover, Apricot Chicken reared its syrupy head. I went home, six years after moving, almost ten years on from the tiny apartment with the roommate in the closet, and I threw a family dinner. I was excited to cook something special for my friends, and for them to get to know each other. There was a new version of me to meet too, replete with bleached hair and clear skin and a penchant for the phrase “Saturn’s Return”. The crowd was a mixture – new and old friends, people from New York, California, and other countries. Many were meeting for the first time.
I stood at the stove as the first guest arrived - Kashi, a small, formidable woman, with butt-length onyx hair and an all-black wardrobe. As she came down the hall of my friend Bryn’s loft she lobbed, in her Australian accent, “What’s for dinner? Aye-pricot chicken?” I laughed. Only a real friend could pull that reference.
Then Hayden appeared, like a glint off a crystal, suddenly towering at my elbow, and in her cosmic near-whisper said, “Are we having apricot chicken?” My mouth smiled but my eyes rolled.
By the time Fabiana loped in, I was braced. I beat her to the punch. “What do you think is for dinner, Bobby?” Without a pause: “Apricot chicken.” Her staccato laughter peppered me like a burst of Venezuelan gunfire. “You guys! I know how to cook now!” I showed them the delicious offerings on the stove, in the fridge, already on the table. I’d spent years developing past my earliest culinary forays, but I had miscalculated; I thought it would be a tender moment of nostalgia to bring back the old bull. I had wandered blissfully to the slaughter. It took me 40 minutes to reveal that in the oven was a hefty rack of none other than everybody’s favorite guest star.
That night my friends roasted me. We sat around Bryn’s corner windows overlooking the Williamsburg bridge and lower Manhattan and they laughed so hard some of them cried, at my expense, about the many instances of apricot chicken they’d endured. They recounted the time I had to make my own Russian dressing because it was impossible to find; the times I burnt it but we had nothing else; the shared horror of discovering what the ingredients were; the times they had to explain to new lovers that this was a rite of passage in our family, not an example of our actual tastes; and ultimately, how, so many of those times, it was the only meal anyone had cooked for them in such a long time that, not only did it give them sustenance, it kept them alive. I learned that night that a roast is my love language, but...
I hope every one of you fucks reads this book and hears me say definitively: we may not have a worn leather armchair to come home to every holiday, but when you need something that makes you feel oddly seen, slightly sick, and overwhelmingly loved, I’ve got some apricot chicken for you in the oven.
“You Are My Kind”, published in “Radical Hope: Letters Of Dissent in Dangerous Times”, by Carolina De Robertis (Random House, 2017)
I can see you, there, a sliver of your leg on the carpet visible through the bathroom door. You, with your sinewy frame and keen mind, waiting for your father to appear and give you something your mother can’t. You, who will have grown up acclimated to an unorthodox way of naming things – addressing them as they live, rather than as they are classified by science, you think in a different way than most.
I don’t know what you want, but I know I will have probably have caused in you the same urgent desire for approval my father created in me. You probably are waiting for my opinion, my direction, my collaboration on something. Maybe you want to tell me about a crush. Maybe you want to watch a show, play a video game, build something. Maybe you just want to spend time, and I will make a point of it.
Your world will be a free one. The circle of normalcy you will grow up in will include every kind of person, and so many animals. I will close the loop of neglect that can continue on like an unwieldy double helix if it isn’t wrestled into submission. I will set meals in front of you, every day, growing your bones. I will tell you about every book I’ve read, every talk I’ve seen, and show you every landscape I’ve walked through. I will take you on trains through Europe, by camel to the pyramids, and to swim within the glowing plankton in Puerto Rico’s coastal bathtub. We will play soccer in the squares of Havana and you will meet the street boys who taught me compassion, you will eat sea urchin in Italy, and freeze your nuts off in Colorado.
You, as a tiny child, will see the ink on my forearm that tells you, over and over, that no matter what you are, no matter what you become, you are my kind. You will have a home, a meal and a companion with me, at all times, anywhere.
You, your skin covered in nicks and marks from your explorations and adventures, will sit and wait for me, the dog in your lap, a finger scratching his chin. I will see you before you know I can, and I will admire your natural calm, your grace, your effortless presence. I think of the hatred in the world you will be born into, the shrinking resources, the overcrowding, the violence and division, and I get a pang of protectiveness in my heart. I will always take the job of protecting you very seriously.
As I swing the door open and greet you, you look up at me with eyes too knowing. You are witty. Your crack comes swiftly, and it lands.
Your sister is in the next room.
I will love these times, just you and I.
It’s normal, you tell me, to have a sperm-less, dick-less father. To have a father with scars where breasts once were, and a forever sense of displacement, to be the grandchild of mental illness, and the heir to addiction’s ravaging. It’s no more extreme for you than my realities were for me. You will be well versed in my tale. You will have spent your life in handmade costumes, drinking tea that keeps you up for three days, going to the second half of Broadway shows and being finger-fed broccoli doused in soy sauce and garlic by your grandmother. You will have seen her insane house. You will have put your tiny hand in mine countless times, intuitively aware that your parent needed a stabilizing reminder of his independence. You will have reminded me, since you were tiny, that I can scoop you up and we can leave if we need to. We are safe, because I made it safe. That hovel is not our home. We have our own warm, safe place to go back to. No one will shake either of us from our sleep with violence, because I won’t allow it. You will remind me that I protect you, and always have.
You, raised by a tribe, aware of the beauty of multiplicity and difference, will bring something to those around you that others don’t. You will know this, and feel a sense of purpose because of it. You will be a testament to the fact that we can move toward each other and not fortify ourselves in echo chambers of like-minded politics. You will be eager to discuss, to listen, to learn.
I will look at you, sitting there, and, in your eyes, see a burning strength, a hunger for exploration, and I will feel grateful; grateful that we made you, so you can carry the tradition on, of radical acceptance. I will look into your calm face and at the dog completely surrendered to your affections, and I will understand that we will be fine. You are in charge now, thank god.
A comment on queer love, for Vogue Magazine (2017)
It’s because of our love. They say it’s sick, perverse, something to be hidden from children. I disagree. I think it’s something to be shouted from the mountaintops, something to be sung about, something to bring home to mom. We clean up mighty fine, us queer kids. We write eachother love poems in chalk, find romance in nature, and get names tattooed. We like couches and movies, Chinese food and museums. We hold tender hands, we fight, we scream and storm out, we make up and make out. We buy houses, we build homes in vans, we camp. We sleep, we have insomnia, we fuck, we travel, we get sick. We have parents who worry, who want us to give them ETA’s and updates. We have siblings we care for, and dreams of families of our own. We have children and dogs, so many dogs.
We do our best with very little, and we swim in abundance. We are proud, battered, resilient and afraid. We’ve made do with cardboard boxes and abandonment, we’ve been lost and lonely, but we still love. We will always love.
They want to outlaw our love. They say it should be forbidden, hidden, it’s disgusting. Their desire to bend and break us from our nature is disgusting. We won’t be bent, we won’t be broken. We will kiss, we will grope, we will explore, we will break hearts. We will be hired, we will revolutionize, we will be fired, we will get sick. We will dream of perfectly mundane fantasies, and outlandish freakishness. These will be our coveted dream castles, with our loves. We will find solace there, because love lives there. We will always love.
We have other goals and dreams than equality. We are more than just this, but this is all they want to talk about. They point us out in the hall, as if we didn’t already know. Thank you, we are fully aware, and excited about it. We would like to be celebrated for our bravery and innovation, in other things besides being ourselves. Their assumptions are claustrophobic, like a rayon turtleneck. Nobody likes that. Let us breathe. Let us figure it out.
We have questions, we have explorations. We have answers. Ask us.
We find eachother, in corners and out in the open sun, and we stay together. We grow old, we raise others, like us and different from us. We cook them food and talk them through their growth. We write wills and pay things off. We take care of the ones we love, and we leave the world a better place than we found it. We pass through this life holding hands with the ones we love, and we go out that way too. We leave loves behind, but we are never left behind, because we love. We will always love.
A post-Trump, ROUNd 1, call to Action, for refinery29 (2016)
Ok, the unthinkable has happened; the hot tempered reality star with the golden elevator and trigger happy tweeting thumbs is coming in to the most powerful position in the free world. We have handed a drunk teenager the keys to America's Nuclear Party House, he gets to stock the Supreme Court fridge, and crash the Foreign Policy Ferrari. We will watch as he tries to grab Planned Parenthood by the pussy, chuck millions of immigrants over a wall, and turn the Prison system into his own private fight club, while we're left scrubbing Swastikas off middle school bathroom stalls.
It makes sense that this happened. Trump is a divider, and we humans are weak to the temptations of something to hate. We love a good rush, to get worked up in the defense of our way of life, even if the enemy is a fact-free cartoon. We love to pretend that this hasn't reliably happened throughout history, when humanity was pied-pipered away from it's civil decency by the indelible smell of freshly baked fear. Rwanda, Bosnia, World War II, all atrocities with wheels greased by campaigns of dehumanization. The propaganda is "us" vs "them". "They" are all a certain way, which is not "our" way, and therefore, "they" have to be stamped out before they wipe us off the map! And did we mention that they are subhuman monsters? Cockroaches, deviants, rodent scum. Send them back to where they came from.
Wait...
I stepped onto the TED stage in late 2012 a jittery mess. I'd only ever given one hour and a half long public ramble before, and I was stressed about cramming years of ideas into a clean 18 minute manifesto. I was freezing and sweating at the same time.
I was there to tell the world about a project I had been working on, called Self Evident Truths. For it, I had set out to photograph several thousand people in the USA, who identified as anything other than 100% straight, with the intention of humanizing a community that was legally discriminated against. Back then, I had photographed 1700 people in 15 cities, and had discovered that people were moving away from identifying as simple "gay" or "straight". They felt more honestly themselves with nuanced definition of their identity. I was going to use the story of my unorthodox upbringing, identifying as a boy and dating both genders, to humanize my points.
I got through my 18 minutes without peeing my pants and went back to my canapés. Then 2.5 million people watched what I had to say and everything changed. I realized I would have to expand my goal to 10,000 faces, shoot in all 50 States, and when I was finished, I wanted to take this massive document of a community to America's great center of protest art - the National Mall.
Three years later, I'm at 9,804 faces, from every State in this Nation, and everything has changed again. I wrote a book about my story, and I realized that despite my accepting upbringing, I had been ignoring an essential element of my self; I was still, at least partially, what I had been since I was born - a boy on the inside. As I traveled the country speaking to auditoriums full of students hungry for answers, I found myself unable to clarify some for myself. People wanted to know - am I transgender? Will I transition? What pronoun do I use? What does it all mean? I inched my way toward "he/him/his", but all I could really tell people was what felt right that day, until finally I made the switch to “he/him” officially.
As it became clear that tangerine Mussolini was actually going to take the Oval Office, many liberal people were overcome with a feeling akin to the flu - a poisoning of the body that would last several days. The only thing that picked me up off the tissue littered floor was a slew of emails and text messages from friends and collaborators relighting the fires of activism and communal gathering that had perhaps fizzled out in recent years.
The question became, "what do we do now?" We are all aware of the dangers of division, but how do we overcome it?
This thrilled me to my core. My phone has been exploding with emails and invitations, groups of concerned friends forming around a need for togetherness. Many of them are women who are interested in gathering groups of women. Some of them don't know that I am using male pronouns. Some of them do, but don't know how to handle it. Am I still invited to sit at a table of women gathered to discuss a positive impact on young girls?
In my original talk, I asked where discrimination draws the line. Where does straight end and gay start? At what point are you no longer entitled to the legal protections of a heterosexual? How gay do you have to be? Now, all this exploration later, I find myself in the same conundrum. Where do we draw the gender line? Is it at pronouns? Or at my breasts? Do I stop being included in these conversations once I have a beard, or is my awareness of a manhood within my spirit enough to leave me at home with the rest of the boyfriends? I don't identify with Trans culture particularly, but if I were forced to pick a label, technically that would be the correct label for my dysphoria. Am I still gay? Am I still allowed in lesbian spaces? I do have a vagina. At what point is this divisiveness more constraining than it is empowering?
In contemplating how this train wreck could have come to a halt in our front yard, many are looking at what “we” could have done differently – us being liberal minded, or even conservative people who draw the line at corruption, sexual assault, and outright racism in the White House. News anchors and pundits spend hours on air dissecting “how the blue wall crumbled”, and why millennials didn’t turn up to vote for “her”. I’ve watched great minds of my generation, thinking people, double down and entrench themselves, heels dug into their belief systems, unwavering in their certainty of “our” rightness, and “their” wrongs. “We” are sane. “They” are dangerous. “They” must be stopped, stamped out, set straight.
Wait…
Who are “we”? Who are “they”? Since when do we buy into this notion of a people who unilaterally believe the same things? When did we jump ship on nuance? Is it really a Republican thing, or just a human thing? Are “we” not just as capable of lumping people together under the banner of the threat they pose to our way of life and trying to ship them out of our field of view?
Essentially, in our eagerness to drink the cost-of-safety Koolaid, we ourselves begin to froth at the mouth, hungering for a taste of savagery. Somehow it becomes ok that Trump is endorsed by the KKK, because he's going to protect us from those rapists across the border. It doesn't matter that his top adviser hates Jews and loves the alt-right, because those Muslims like to blow stuff up. How could these uneducated hillbillies support this charlatan? They must be savage, camo clad, long-bearded beasts waving their AK47s around, protecting their plantations and colonies of white people.
Wait...
Trump did not invent the tornado of vitriol, nor the pack mentality, he simply paved the way for unfounded conspiracy theories to ensconce us like ethnocentric dust storms, because he encouraged us to divide and simplify. He awakened an ever-present tendency in ALL of us, to reduce each other's beautiful humanity to tweet-length summations.
I am calling on all of us, “free-thinking”, “liberal” and “conservatives” alike, to re-examine how we group and dismiss people. I am asking us all to spend some time contemplating the dangers of generalization, and the horrors that follow when we strip people of the details that give them humanity. Will we survive a future through the long lens of assumptions? I doubt it. Will we now, in the face of this surely torrid coming four years, entrench ourselves in our online echo chambers and start twitter wars with those we disdain, never coming to know them beyond their outermost layers? Or will we begin to dismantle the myths, laid in our path like rice krispie treats in front of a diabetic, by getting to know eachother. There ceases to be an “other” when we embrace the fact that everyone is an other to someone else. Everyone’s shadows house someone else’s life.