going to church with rayne fisher-quann

secrets are sexy! reflections on the Substack "secrets reading"

I didn’t get a ticket to

rayne fisher-quann

’s

Substack

reading. I’d seen her post about it and planned to RSVP, but I’ve been so forgetful of anything I don’t write down lately that I missed the sale, which sold out almost immediately. I rarely check Substack chats either, but felt possessed to clear out my chat notifications one morning when I saw someone ask if anyone wanted their ticket, to which I replied, “meeee!”. They didn’t ask me for money or anything, they just emailed the ticket to me in good faith with a 🤫 in the subject line.

After work yesterday, I made my way from the Lower East Side to Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in the Upper West Side, where the reading would be held. What a choice of location—to read secrets out loud, like confession to a priest, to a crowd corralled online, in a church. I’ve never noticed so many people standing in line alone. You’d think I would have given in New York it feels like everything is either done in a large group or solo. I grew up going to Church and always saw people there alone. While standing in line, alone, I thought, “maybe we all have something in common with those lonely church people—maybe we’re only comfortable telling God our secrets when there’s a chance another sinner might have something worse to say.”

The speaker who introduced the readers remarked on why they chose “secrets” as the theme for the reading, “secrets are sexy,” she said, and immediately I heard a bottle pop somewhere near the back of the church (we were drinking in a church and not in the ceremonial way we drink the blood of Christ! actually, maybe it was exactly like that.) Secrets are sexy. Anything kept in the dark is sexy. Like sex, sharing a secret is, or should be, “an act of intimacy” and “generosity.” There’s heat in sharing a secret and in sex. There was heat in the church too. We were given foam flyers on sticks to fan ourselves for relief from the June heat and subjecting ourselves to another person’s vulnerability.

Rayne said it in her opening speech, and so did the person sitting next to me, a girl from Long Island who teaches Jiu-Jitsu, and I’m sure it was the case for many of the people in the pews; it was our first time back at church in a long time. Rayne, mentioned something about how being in a church makes her want to cry. I thought back to one of the last times I went to church with my mom. I was eighteen and hungover from the night before and for some reason that very description of me made me cry. Part of me wishes I’d lied to the girl next to me about who I was and where I was from, just so I could add another layer of secretiveness to this moment. The ticket I entered with didn’t have my name on it. I could’ve pretended to be Laura, but maybe that wouldn’t have been fair to her. I told her my name is Natasha, I’m from New Jersey, and I’m rewatching Jersey shore, all of which is mostly true.

Substack and I have a relatively new relationship. I’ve been on Instagram and Twitter for over ten years, I was on Tumblr from the time I was twelve to seventeen, but me and Substack have only been together for about two years, and only in the last eight months did we really get serious. No other internet space has brought me to an event that celebrates what the platform is all about, in Substack’s case it’s writing and listening to what other people have to say. My Substack bio reads “I have no one else to talk to,” and though I know I’m wrong, maybe that’s what brought us all to Substack and that church yesterday; having no one to share our thoughts with, feeling the need to put them out there to see if anyone actually cares, or just being incredibly fucking nosey.

An organist played songs between essays to transition us into a new secret. Most notably I heard “Video Games” by Lana del Rey and “Like a Virgin” and “Material Girl” by Madonna. The essays written for the event were switched between writers so that no one’s secret could be connected to their keeper. The reading wasn’t recorded because of the confidential nature of the essays, which, in hindsight, makes the memory of last night feel all the more ephemeral and the reason behind it so much more disconnected from its digital origins. Reading, writing, keeping a secret, telling one, praising someone we know only from text, in that church we kept these rituals alive. And in the middle of it all, my mind flew elsewhere like it did when I was little and I was listening to a sermon that had a point, but would rather exercise my free will to hear an idea and fly away from it to something that had more to do with me. What would my secret be if I were reading on stage right now? Maybe that I hope to end up a divorcee or that I only ever watch… I can’t finish that. It’d only be cool to say if I had way more people reading, but I know a former fashion YouTuber shared the same secret once.

We all have our reasons for keeping secrets. We convince ourselves that if we don't say it aloud, maybe it’ll stop being true, we try to spare someone's feelings, or we're simply waiting for the right moment. Growing up, my mom would catch me in a lie and tell me on Sunday God would see all the secrets I’ve kept from Him. At the Secrets Reading we reveled in this shared dance of confession and concealment. In the fact that in private rooms and ostentatious catholic churches, people are both confessing and safeguarding their secrets, whether with someone else or repeatedly inside their heads. Sitting there, listening to each reader, it felt like returning to a communal altar, where Substack readers and writers formed a new congregation.

This is what I imagine playing on the organ as I walk down the aisle to spill a secret: