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‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching A lot Ariana Grande is dressed in hot pink—tight cropped vest and high waisted trousers She is on her knees, leaning backwards, in a tiny room with white walls and a little curtain Maybe it’s a doll’s house, maybe it’s a closet, maybe it’s a cage Her trademark oversized ponytail, which seems to have been designed for the purpose of making her appear even smaller than she already is (in the world of Ariana worship, smallness is akin to godliness), splits at the top knot and falls in two directions Half over her breast, half drawing a line south With the index finger of her right hand she flicks a miniature chandelier that is dangling from the ceiling, making it swing lightly back and forth GIFs are the internet’s present to erotics The best ones, like this one, exist in a seamless loop, enabling the viewer to remain suspended indefinitely in a moment of aesthetic bliss Flick, flick, goes Ariana, for a sweet eternity   I’m aware that this is a dirty crush (One shared by a lot of the world, admittedly, but since when did populism ever make anything cleaner) My Ariana-lust is treated by certain friends with the sort of stretched tolerance usually reserved for the bad politics of elderly relatives Which is another way of saying I just about get away with coveting a mirage of hyper-femme youth, sex, and tininess, because in the political and pansexual new dawn of queerness, at age 32 I seem to have become the equivalent of Stonehenge: a heritage lesbian artefact to be handled with curiosity and compassion I could try to intellectualise my love of the flicking GIF, by claiming it in the lineage of queering I could even try explaining the chandelier in relation to Roland Barthes’s ‘punctum’, which has always seemed to me an unfortunately dry metaphor for the clitoris, anyway: that small locus of power, the magnetic point of attention around which photographs, like certain bodies, are organised But fuck