Abstract
Why I Love the Door: Essays is an essay collection that traces the nebulous distinction between the real and the imaginary, especially as it figures in transmasculine identity, sexual fantasy, and mental illness. This manuscript employs both received and experimental forms, from braided narrative to an essay constructed in single-sentence paragraphs. Following in the autotheoretical tradition of trans writer/scholars Grace Lavery and McKenzie Wark, Why I Love the Door: Essays blends life writing, researched nonfiction, pop culture analysis, and psychoanalytic theory toward a portraiture of the queer writer and reader in the 2020s.