The director of Pink Flamingos said a phrase that has the insolence of good aphorisms. It sounds like a joke, but maybe it’s a theory about love. “If you go to someone’s house and they don’t have books, don’t sleep with them.” Waters was not making a plea in favor of literature. Not at all. He was defending something else: the ability of objects to tell who we are. A library does not guarantee intelligence or sensitivity, but it does leave a trace, just like certain lamps, a bookshelf full of records, a fridge, or a wall covered with photographs. The casual and biting Waters, author of phrases like “After 25 you can’t wear skinny pants,” once pointed out his favorite website as the hilarious Lurid Digs, created by Frederick Woodruff to show bizarre domestic interiors of gay men in photos taken from dating app profiles.
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A couple of months ago a friend had a fling and upon entering the lucky guy’s house discovered he only had seven books. That was a silent biography. My friend was surprised, but even more surprised was the other that he was surprised. Why do you want more books? In short, my friend left three hours later and there was no need to talk about Dostoevsky or the essay The Hospitality of Jacques Derrida, in which, precisely, he distinguished between conditional hospitality — inviting the other when you know who they are, where they come from, what they want — and unconditional hospitality, which consists of opening the door to the stranger without previously demanding an identity. Derrida thought of hospitality as the gesture of opening the door to meet the other. Dating apps have reversed the process: before opening the door to someone, we want to know who they are. Maybe that’s why entering their home is still so revealing: there begins, finally, the person who didn’t fit in the profile.
Waters’ quote became a cultural phenomenon to the point of appearing on t-shirts, posters, and memes. In an interview with The Guardian, Waters joked that it had even ended up becoming merchandise and admitted that he himself did not always follow his advice. Which is normal, because by now we all know how desire behaves at certain hours. Roland Barthes said that objects are a system of signs; and that was a sign. Georges Perec turned an entire apartment into a novel (Life: A User’s Manual) and, in Species of Spaces, wrote “We live in space, in those spaces, in those cubes, in those rooms.”
Before Tinder, Bumble, Grindr, or Hinge, it took a little longer to access the domestic space of flings and the wait was a desert in which one imagined things without thinking about the real-world scenery. Today we enter strangers’ homes at the first chance and see living rooms without books, giant TVs, clothes thrown around and mattresses on the floor, a hallway full of shoes, or bookshelves as decoration.
On dating apps we don’t show who we are but the version of ourselves we believe others want to find
In a The Guardian article titled Keep your shirt on! (2022), written humorously, it started from research on Tinder photos to conclude that men appearing shirtless are perceived by women as less socially attractive and less competent. An apparently spontaneous photo is actually a complex self-presentation mechanism. On dating apps we don’t show who we are: we show the version of ourselves we believe others want to find. The profile is a voluntary autobiography; the home, an involuntary autobiography.
Intimate Strangers was a multimedia installation by architect Andrés Jaque and his studio Office for Political Innovation completed after two years of research at Grindr’s headquarters in West Hollywood and presented at the Design Museum in London in 2016. Jaque studied Grindr not simply as a dating app, but as a technology that modifies the architecture of intimacy and the way we inhabit the city. The fundamental idea is beautiful: Grindr turns physical proximity into information. Bodies appear on the screen ordered by distance; one can be at home and, through the phone, know who is a few meters away, in the building across the street, or on the next street. The app makes visible an intimacy that was previously hidden. The city map becomes a map of desire. But Jaque goes further and also points out the political contradiction: Grindr can be a tool of emancipation for gay men living in places where they cannot publicly recognize each other, but that same technology can be used by intolerant governments to locate, persecute, or detain people.
The app not only connects; it also produces categories and exclusions. Profiles allow filtering bodies, races, ages, forms of masculinity, etc. Jaque pointed out how expressions of rejection — for example, towards certain bodies — become part of the invisible architecture of the app. Thus, over time, it also became a platform that could impose a certain idea of normality, beauty, consumption, and lifestyle. You probably already know, but there are apps like Tea where you can rate and review the current lover, which introduces a brutal twist to the idea that a person’s profile is no longer enough: now there can be a user review and a good or bad rating.
Anyway, hospitality, hostility, and domestic interiors. Once I ended up at a girl’s house from the Bar Alfa in the Gracia neighborhood and woke up trapped in a bed that sank in the middle, with a meter of distance between us, each at an end. And nowadays, more or less everyone has woken up in a bed surrounded by cats watching dangerously. Another time, in Vigo, I met a divine girl with the same haircut as Audrey Tautou in Amélie. Her name was Sabela, but she asked me to please call her Sabelie. Then I understood everything, in her room there were eleven posters of the movie, each from a different country, including Japan, China, Thailand… When I met the founding editor of Periférica, he told me that some people called the publisher to buy books saying: “Julián, give me all the brown-spined ones because that collection matches my carpet.”
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Waters’ phrase today could be reinterpreted as “Don’t sleep with someone whose house doesn’t tell stories”
Alberto Manguel, in The Library at Night, argues that a private library is an autobiography. And in The Poetics of Space, Bachelard explained that the house is an extension of memory. Waters’ phrase was born twenty years ago. Then it meant: “Don’t sleep with someone who doesn’t read.” Today it could be reinterpreted as “Don’t sleep with someone whose house doesn’t tell any story.”
Maybe it no longer matters so much whether the books are paper or electronic. The disturbing thing is to enter a house and find no trace of curiosity. A meticulously ordered home can be a magnificent place to sleep, but it’s another thing for it to say something about who lives there and for you to laugh in the prologue.
Walter Benjamin, in Unpacking My Library, notes: “It’s not that the books are alive in him, but that he lives in them.” And when he talks about his library he explains that each book recalls the moment and place where it was acquired.
In Things, his first novel, George Perec writes about a couple defined almost exclusively by the objects they desire to possess. There is a very famous beginning: “The eye, at first, would slide over the gray carpet of a long hallway…”
For several pages he describes an imaginary house before introducing its inhabitants. It is an extraordinary literary device: we get to know the people by their living room before their names. Isn’t that exactly what we do today when we enter someone’s home after making a match?
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Since Montaigne, the essay consists precisely of that: taking an apparently insignificant detail and discovering that it contains a theory of the world. John Waters’ phrase seems like a joke. Maybe it’s a small essay disguised as a quip. Maybe he was never talking about books. He was talking about lives that leave marks. Maybe a bookshelf of novels tells more than any Tinder biography. Essays, like good libraries and good teachers, don’t offer answers, they leave questions open. You enter a room to have sex and end up reading, without realizing it, the draft of a life. And since I’m such a fan of Alain de Botton, I can’t help but refer to one of his teachings: we choose partners because we recognize an emotional landscape. We fall in love with the signals that tell us there is someone with whom we share a way of looking at the world.
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