Essays and Conversations on Community & Belonging
Essays on belonging, and how communities are built, kept and broken.
I write two publications, Leather & Lavender reads the history of the leather subculture through political economy. Social Signal looks at communication platforms and what they do to the people inside them.
Writer and Builder- Washington, DC
Substack - Essays, Notes, and Responses
Leather & Lavender
Social Signal
Substack - Numbered Essay Series
The history of the gay leather subculture and it's institutions read through the lens of thinkers such as Hayek, Ostrom, Boettke, and Hirschman. How guests become owners, and what a community owes to the people who keep it.
Platform dynamics, information theory and belonging. Why feeds flatten intimacy, how context collapses, and what it takes to stay connected anyway.
From the blog
Work in Progress
The Antithesis Project
This project is a goal set at the beginning of 2026 to test the theory that the content we consume influences how we navigate our environments - and to break a streak of 6 years where 80% of my tracked listening being of a single, dead, artist. The project is a reminder that the soundtrack of our life can't always be perfectly curated, but music should be a fluid art leading you from emotion to emotion and not a prison of rumination.
Each playlist is the soundtrack for the corresponding month.
About
I'm a writer based out of Washington, DC. I write about community from the inside - both the physical and digital spaces.
My writings draw on classical liberal economics and history, and on my own life in these communities. I also love to provide pet sitting care in the DC metro region.
