40 bones: letters from Lullandunde to London
40 bones is a monthly letters series tracking the correspondence between D Mortimer and Kasra Jalilipour.
Two trans writers and artists trying to MAKE WORK IN THE HELLSCAPE. The letters are candid, humorous and cover a range of topics including medical transition, sex, gossip, money, shame, the act of writing, and the weirdness of being.
Follow along as Mortimer and Jalilipour somehow!!!!!!!!! get through the day
By D Mortimer and Kasra Jalilipour
10/10/2026 – From Lullandunde
Dear Marlo,
I was staying at your home in London, you were out, we missed each other like ships in the night, by the time I had come back again in the evening, you had already gone to sleep. I emptied myself of several heavy steel chains and my binder, and I could finally breathe for the first time that day. The irony of getting rid of my bras only to wear a binder. Ridding myself of high heels to wear chunky new rocks, just to get an inch taller! It’s so alien to think of myself even wearing high heels! Can you imagine? I wear these things to get a message across, but sometimes I forget what the message is. The message I am trying to communicate is not for everyone to understand, but those who get it, get it. Like a secret code. The codes to differentiate myself between: queer or straight; lesbian or fag; top or bottom. The size of the chain and the style of its links can say a lot about you to the right set of eyes. The flatness of a chest can distinguish me from a dyke to a gay boy, on a good day. The days I give up on the binder and the chains as a fuck you, are rare. But sometimes the literal back pain makes me give in. It’s very silly. My partner says she can’t have any sympathy for my back pains when I chose to wear these ‘accessories’. The thing is she knows me inside out, no amount of what I may add on top of me will fool her. No smoke and mirrors between us and our genders. It’s like that with my mom too. No matter how thick my moustache gets, I am still the little child whose pictures she holds on to like treasures from the past, wearing a tiny poofy skirt and my hair tied on top of my head, like a fountain.
I think often about this old gay man I met on the bus, during Pride a couple days ago. He clocked me as a queer, not as a gay, but some sort of queer, and that made him want to tell me his life story. I’m not sure what gave me away! I was on my way to perform at Duckie’s Trans Daddy, which was held at a church. I invited him but he said he has other pride plans. Before he said goodbye, he grabbed my chain, softly and firmly, and said, “I love a boy in chains”. I received a variety of responses from friends whom I told the story to that day. Some seem concerned for me, asked me if I was ok. Some encouraged me to write him an email (he had given me his business card). I found the whole thing amusing, I felt seen in a coded way, it felt validating to be seen in that way by an older gay man, who has seen it all. Even though he may have not meant to validate me in any way, but validation doesn’t work like that, the intention and the outcome don’t always align. I like surprise validation tho, it teaches me a lot about myself. And for the first time in my life, I am willingly accepting validation from men.
My dreams can get very violent, but I feel like I am more powerful in my dreams! Physically and emotionally. Like you, I am also sometimes fighting people, or seeking justice somehow, or bringing people together to fight a common cause! I have visions of kicking people into the distance like in a video game. Actually a lot of my dreams are like video games, violence without consequence. I like that my dream self is a fighter, because my awake self is a flyer! Last night I dreamt my mouth was full of blood, but at first I thought it was some sort of fruit, like those red plums, it was all mushy and kind of rotten, and no matter how much I spat out, there was more. It was like my mouth was producing it, and as I was spitting, I noticed it was actually blood, but like period blood, clotted and thick, constant and never ending. That felt violent, but in a different way your dream was. I don’t think there’s a need for an interpretation because I was on my period. Sometimes my dreams can be funny! My partner has told me that she has heard me laughing in my dreams several times. Have you ever awakened yourself from laughing? I think I have, once or twice.
I haven’t seen Camp Miasma yet! I have requested our local cinema to put it on and have been messaging all the queers to make sure they go see it. The local cinema is a very cute place, made up of 40 seats only! And I work there two days a week, it’s really cute to see queer crowds coming out of the woodworks of the countryside to watch queer-coded films. Months ago, there was an older gay man who came in to watch Devil Wears Prada, and he had this wonderful clear resin glitter cane, and an amazing all-white beard that was perfectly kept! I wanted to talk to him, but I was shy. I get very shy around men, especially men with a strong sense of their queer selves. I don’t know how to talk to them. With straight men, it’s much easier, because the conversation doesn’t mean as much to me. But maybe also because I don’t have to prove myself to them. I have realised if I mention I have a girlfriend, straight men seem to be more at ease with me. And I have noticed I then tend to not mention being bi, or say anything about men in a romantic / sexual way, because I have seen the way the bubble bursts for these guys, it‘s like they think they have me all figured out and then realise there is still more to me. Sometimes I overshare about my dating life just to get a reaction out of straight people. I like to see the look of shock on their faces if I mention my attraction to men, and how hard they try to hide it.
On the eclipse I was working at the cinema! All our friends went up a hill, some of whom also work at the cinema, but I felt like taking one for the team and working that night so they could catch the eclipse. As the time of it dawned on me, I was getting very nervous, I don’t know why; I find space and planets and stars really terrifying.
I remembered when I saw the eclipse in Iran last time it happened. I must’ve been 5 or 6. The whole family gathered on my grandmother’s roof. In the part of Iran where I grew up, all houses have flat roofs, so it was the perfect spot. I remember all of us putting the special sunglasses on, I remember it being hot, I remember saying “I can’t see it”, but I don’t remember what the eclipse looked like. I guess I missed it both times!
I love your photos of the sunflowers, and something about the graininess of the photos actually reminds me that there were some sunflower farms near where my grandmother lives too, I have this vision of small lambs and sunflowers! Do you remember a picture of a sunflower I sent you in our last series of letters? In the middle of the seeds, there were petals growing. I’d never seen anything like it, but apparently each seed on the sunflower is a petal, but for some reason only the outer later grow petals! But this one sunflower that grew in our garden went against the grain!
I’m thinking about how much a trans body and also trans and queer sex is body horror to ‘straight-forward’ people, not straight people, but people who act and live on a straight line. If straight people knew about details of queer sex, about kink, they wouldn’t proclaim love is love, and the older I get the less I care about love is love; I don’t want my love, my pleasure, and my bodily autonomy to mimic theirs, I don’t want to be accepted by them. Because, I think if it does become normalised, then it might lose its thrill for me. I told someone recently that I would find living in a stigma free world boring, and to want a world like that, just goes against human history. Our history is full of body horror, and violence and grief, and our purpose is to keep fighting for what we want; so without that urge to fight, I don’t know what we will have left. I guess I’m a nihilist. Or maybe I’m just playing the gay devil’s advocate!?
I would love to go to the sea with you. I went to the sea this week in Lullandunde, in Wales. I had to go quickly before a talk I was doing, because I have become a bit superstitious about not paying my respects to the sea! I found even more holey stones! I also picked a lot of seaweed that I’m learning to press and dry! I can’t stop beach combing! It’s what I did a lot of at Dungeness, and I still have a box full. All seas make me think of Dungeness somehow. I think we should go there soon.
15/10/2026 – London
Dear Kasra,
I wonder whether our shared affection for certain older gay men is also a desire to be thought among them; part of an economy of desire that involves our variety of fag. Brutalist Urinal says, “I love older men because they make me feel like I am part of gay history.” It excites me to hear about the gay man’s cane you mentioned. I picture it amber-coloured. Was it? I think it is a generous thing to be snappily dressed; to do things like carry a special cane and be dandy. I like what Dudley says too about the dandy through time. I believe that queers are related, not by blood but something metaphysical that shows up in our bodies and our aspects, nonetheless. It’s what accounts for the flash of recognition in the archive. A few years ago, I wrote about seeing Derek Jarman everywhere one summer and the single earring as gay emblem through time. You sent me a picture of a Jarman doppelganger this week. It feels clear to me that people and personas and energies resurface, and that our bodies aren’t our own. You can donate to medical science backwards!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can donate your face to gay medical science forwards!!!!!!!!!! It’s a spiral. A gag.
Do you believe we come back here?
Apparently Nietzsche groaned at his own idea of eternal recurrence, “I do not want life again! How did I endure it – creating.”
Stoned with Covid, R and I were chatting about nihilism in the middle of the night. Your mention of nihilism made me get my copy of The Gay Science off the shelf. (Spoiler: not that gay 🙁 ). Using Girls as a vehicle, we decided Jessa was a nihilist and Marnie was a moralist. I think as perverts we make excellent nihilists. But my love of the poetry between things and people, as well as a deranged attachment to rituals, means my body must believe in a design… but even as I write this, I realise that any jolt of oneness, elegance or alignment is as much derived from our own bastard drives and instincts as anywhere else. The illusion of oneness might chiefly emanate from how we fashion what we have at hand, interact with people and things and how we write, steal, falter, and deviate from the life expected of us.
Ronald M. Schernikau, the author of the book I just finished reading, died from AIDS aged 31. SMALLTOWNOVELLA was written in 1980 and follows b, a teen communist who starts an affair with school jock Leif. The boys are found out and dragged in front of a school committee. b does not have the luxury of returning to cosy heterosexuality as Leif does, and faces the brunt of the morality police. The book ends with him boarding a train bound for Berlin.
This is b:
“My needs are not, and have never been, the ones that society finds acceptable, that’s why, while I have never undervalued the significance of sexuality, I’ve always viewed it as fluid, simply because I exist: the world belongs to the perverse.”
We must continue to be insufferable and scream about our sex lives for those who came before us and whose faces we recognise everywhere. Our nihilist irreverence, is a reverence to all the gays who died fighting, murdered by morality. Like b, I want to reserve the right to be surprised by my desire. This still feels unacceptable. I don’t always know how to parse my own bisexuality. I remain ambivalent to labels bar butch. Butch is claimed by both fags and dykes, and something I’ve found freedom in. But it doesn’t belong to me. I don’t own it. I think it’s a life-affirming thing to be a nihilist queer, or as you say, anyone who veers from the straight way of life. For Nietzsche, Christianity was life-denying because it valued another world, the eternal world, over this one and placed asceticism, the denial of the self, over letting the self run free. To be nihilist is to be attuned to suffering outside the private borders of religion. And to recognise the error of over-identifying with anything.
Nothing matters = : (
Nothing matters!!!!!!! = : )
I was sick this week but doing better now and I think I’ll make it to poetry class tonight. We are doing Ted Berrigan! I am grateful for my week on the sofa though. I felt too crap to have a bath, but not too crap to read. I liked it when Nietzsche said that we “require the sick soul as much as the healthy” and the “will to health” must be abandoned. I take the sick soul here to be both the perverted and crip soul. Shernhau’s b knows his needs will never be acceptable to ‘normal’ society and so too does Nietzsche, who abjures the “dogma of the equality of men” and the concept of “normal health”.
Love is not love and thank the death of God for that.
Last month I took a road trip to the caves with Jesse, Ames and Jenn. As the caverns got narrower and darker, I got the heebie jeebies, and left the others to find the exit. I went to the carpark and huffed the air, glad to not be in the cave anymore but also a little lonely and like I was missing out. When I went back into the café there was a sign that read, ‘the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek’’. Huh, I thought. Gotta point.
I want to tell you that your candour, in your letters and when we speak, makes me want to seek out the truth of how I feel – even if it’s shit scary! Michael Silverblatt says the first thing a writer learns how to do is how not to avoid the baring of private grief. I’d add private revelation. Being your friend edges me closer to caves I fear to enter. And when we don’t enter, I like our talk of not entering too. I am thinking about what you said about hiding in the cinema from the planets. I wanna ask whether it’s their cosmic indifference that’s scary or whether there is something they know about you that you can’t hide from? Or both – cosmic indifference and cosmic knowing?
When I was reading Gay Science I saw this and thought of you:
“I count it part of my good fortune that I do not own a house. But if I had to, then I should build it as the Romans did – right into the sea. I should not mind sharing a few secrets with this beautiful monster.”
I wonder if, as well as to each other, all our letters aren’t also letters to that beautiful monster — the sea.
In sickness,
Marlo
Kasra Jalilipour is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist, writer based in the East Midlands. In their creative writing practice they use methods of speculative and auto-fiction. They are interested in the re-imagining of histories through a queer lens, in particular the erotics in depictions of intimacy and violence.
D Mortimer is a writer and artist from London. His first book Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life was published by Pilot Press in 2021. Speed Glum Hero, their monograph, came out with Sticky Fingers Publishing in 2024. They are currently working on their first novel.
