Every cut is deliberate, every opening intentional. So, too, are the values we ascribe to both. Theorist Leo Bersani knew as much when he penned the essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” over three decades ago. Writing at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and with as much sustained academic rage as could fit in the special 1987 issue of the journal October, Bersani unpacked the medical and cultural construction of the epidemic, focusing on, among other tangents, the codified forms of penetration that exist within male homosexual activity. Framing his analysis with biased and homophobic medical opinions, he argued that the rectum was a kind of grave where dead ideas were buried; not established ideas of masculinity or femininity or queer men themselves, but forms of subjectivity. For Bersani, the anus was a hollow, a void, a threshold between exterior and interior where the construction of self met its end. It was in this bodily orifice — or space, if you will — that men who engaged in sexual acts with other men could enact the threatening process of ‘losing sight of the self’. Through occupation, intervention and the presence of an ‘invading male’, it was a place that unmade the body, opening it up to other forms of being.