There is a way of talking about ‘the wilderness’ that belongs to the believers in the great man theory of history. I want to steal it from them because we can all find ourselves in the wilderness. In the version you’ve heard, the wilderness is where a Churchill or a Nixon waits out the years between triumphs; their exile proves an eminent, fated destiny. It’s flattering and mostly a lie, because it implies that only a certain kind of person gets lost on the way somewhere. I believe the opposite. Anyone who has organized their coworkers, packed a zoning hearing, or talked a scared friend into taking action has been on the road, and history gets made by those people, mostly unnamed, in numbers. June Jordan wrote that we are the ones we have been waiting for. If that’s true, and I think it is, then the wilderness isn’t reserved for VIPs. It’s where agency goes when it loses its route. Anyone can end up there, but you have to have tasted agency first. The person who was always too scared to try anything isn’t in the wilderness. But they could be if they found the courage and then lost it along the way.
The best portrait of that condition I know is a book about a man I don’t think is all that great, and whose story is conversely about as ‘great-man’ as a narrative retelling of history gets. Robert Caro’s Means of Ascent covers the seven years after Lyndon Johnson narrowly lost an election to the US Senate. What makes it hard to read isn’t what happened to him, which by most standards was nothing bad. He kept his seat in Congress, got rich, stayed in the papers. It’s what the waiting did to him. It’s a juicy story about a man unbelievably tortured by his own ambition, whose biggest grievance is that things weren’t going according to his plan. Everyone could still see him. Nobody, least of all him, knew where he was going. That is the wilderness's particular misery. You are visible and stalled at once. You know too much about the destination to forget it and too little about the route to move.
And still the wilderness is where the means get built. That’s Caro’s pun and his horror, because the means Johnson built in those years ended in an election that, well, let’s just say, didn’t end in a Kosher manner. I’m taking the first half of that lesson and leaving the second. I want the part where the years that look like nothing turn out to be the years that made the rest possible.
I am in the wilderness. I know it’s the wilderness, not just my life, because I remember the road. This is the first thing I’m putting on HAG MAG, so I want it to do two things: tell you who I am and make the case that my condition is worth thinking about, because I don’t think it’s only mine.
In my early twenties, I was elected to an Advisory Neighborhood Commission in Washington, D.C., the lowest rung of government this city, or any city, has. In a town full of dorks, we have invented a level of government that's, in many ways, nearly 350 dog catchers. We get a semi-formal say on things like zoning and liquor licenses, and not much else. I represented part of Woodley Park, a leafy, quaint neighborhood in Northwest Washington that most tourists know only as the metro stop for the National Zoo, and I ended up Vice Chair of the commission. It was small. It was also something. I showed up to evening Zoom meetings with neighbors twice and three times my age, fighting over boring process bullshit.
It also taught me that small powers are only small if you use them small. The day after I won, I posted this. I didn’t exactly have this authority, but I was somehow convinced I did:
An unfair labor practice, if you’re lucky enough not to know, is what the law calls it when a boss breaks labor law to stop a union. A few days later Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, quoted it:
That exchange is my politics in miniature, and the idea under it is the one thing I would take from Johnson without a second thought. Power is what power does. It isn’t a title, a salary, or a seat. It’s being the first to come up with a creative use that no one told you you could, but more importantly, no one told you you couldn’t.
So there I was, a dog catcher who believed falling on the sword of a protected bike lane would somehow be more powerful than a Congressman scared of his donors. Or something. At the end of the day, I was still figuring it out, and nobody was helping me find my place in all of this. The point remains that the bosses, the landlords, and the enforcers of the state count on you to believe the levers within your reach are for show. It’s not ‘libbing out’ to acknowledge that they're not just for show!
My job is to organize workers. Right now, that means resident physicians, doctors fresh out of medical school, who run American hospitals overnight for the pay of a decent paralegal. The system tells them it’s an honor. Organizing them looks less like The Pitt than you’d think. It’s phone calls to people coming off a twenty-eight-hour shift, finding the one resident in every program whom everyone else trusts, and then asking that person to do the scariest thing they’ve ever done at work. At the end of 2024, the residents at George Washington University Hospital voted to strike. The hospital spent months insisting it had no money to improve pay and working conditions. The night before hundreds of doctors were set to walk out, it found millions of dollars in new investment it had previously insisted didn’t exist. The deal came in on December 16. The strike would have started on the 17th. If you want to know what I believe about the world, look at the gap between the 16th and the 17th: The money is always there, the power is always there, and when we stand together, we can accomplish anything. Standing together sounds simple, but getting people in formation, much less class formation, is, well, NOT EASY!
That was the biggest week of my career so far, and it took 18 months of work to make it possible.
It was also, as it happens, the same year I got married in the Champagne region of France in mid-August, broke up with my now-ex-wife three weeks later, and finalized the divorce by Black Friday. Now, I know how that sounds. It sounds chic, and some of it was. It also meant flights back and forth to sort out paperwork in a language I don't speak, in the middle of the biggest boss fight of my career. I don’t want to say much more about it than that, except this. For a while, I was convinced there was no way out. There was, and walking out the door with my bags led to some of the greatest moments of my life, ones I wouldn’t trade, well, for the right of French citizenship.
After the divorce and the strike, the people who love me, my friends and my chosen family, told me to rest. So 2025 was the year I was given permission to chill out, and for once I listened. I went to shows, framed things, and spent weekends on the Northeast Regional train to New York knocking doors for Zohran Mamdani.
In other ways, this was always the plan.
That year, I fell in love with someone new and spent so much time hung up on them that it drove me crazy. That person is no longer my partner. They are one of my closest friends now, and we’ve built something steady and good between us. I’m not embarrassed by any of it. It is never embarrassing to try to love with your whole heart. But the honest summary of 2025 is that things were fine and I was suffering, and those are not opposites. Plenty of people are fine and suffering. It’s practically the national mood.
2026 has been harder. Not precarious, not falling apart, just heavier in a dozen directions at once. I want to move to New York, because that is where my people are. My closest friends are a few subway stops away, and I’m doing Amtrak math. The timing at work isn’t there yet. It’s not unfair; I can see New York from here, but I don’t know exactly what my move will look like. Plus, not for nothing, I adore my job and refuse to leave it.
I could stop there and call it a diary entry, but this is Substack entry #1, so give me a break.
The left is in the wilderness too, and for the same reason I am: because it matters now. Ten years ago, the Democratic Socialists of America had 5,000 members, with a median age of 68. Now Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York, Janeese Lewis George is about to become mayor of Washington, a new generation is trying to reinvigorate the trade union movement, and tens of thousands of people have taken action, showing they are willing to fight for people they don't know. They want, in some inarticulate and gorgeous ways, to stop living like this. We are close. And we are also lost in the specific way the relevant get lost, where everyone can see us and nobody, least of all us, can say exactly what the route looks like from here.
The media is having a frenzy over our rise. Congressional Republicans are trying to bring back repressive, anti-Communist laws and name us in their bills to do so. At the same time, how do we get from Socialists running good governance deliverism in the major cities to a society that governs for the many at the expense of, and withering away, the power of the few… Many of us, to quote the 1992 Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei cult classic, My Cousin Vinny, have mud in our tires about that.
Meanwhile, the culture around us is drowning in a fucked up malaise. Everything is slop. The bowls, the doomscrolling, the matcha latte Dubai chocolateification, the arguments, all of it designed so you never feel hungry enough to push back. People aren’t apathetic. They’re full. And the people on our side who are supposed to offer something have mostly retreated into a few bunkers: Folks who are more than comfortable having the living daylights kicked out of them by their dead-end jobs, so long as they can post basedly about how anyone trying to make the world better is an idiot. A scene whose politics have curdled into convoluted social rules that everyone insists on enforcing and everyone knows, deep down, are impossible to follow. Then, we, the enlightened many, are trying to actually be adults and stop suffering. We don’t have to suffer! Fighting back, or dying trying, is on the menu. I hear the revolutionary fajitas are delightful this time of year!
What I want to be is simple to describe and rare to find: someone whose politics aren’t a rulebook but a practice, who does the actual work and doesn’t need to call it praxis, who reads books like a nerd and has an answer, or at least a serious guess, to the old question of what is to be done. I want to write stuff that is entertaining and new, the way the old magazines did before they all got consolidated, chewed up and spit out by the ruling class. And I want to cut the same arguments into reels, TikToks, and posts, because that’s where people actually live, and I’d rather meet them there than wait for them to wander into a library.
That’s what I’m doing with HAG MAG. It’s a magazine with one writer, which is a ridiculous thing to call a magazine, and I’ve decided not to care. I also really like that I figured out how to make a ‘print as a zine’ button on my website.
So, hello. You should know who you’re dealing with.
My name is Hayden Gise. It’s spelled G-I-S-E and pronounced like the plural of goose; yes, I love the band, and no, it hasn't stopped being funny. I’ve been in the Democratic Socialists of America my entire adult life, and I’m in the Groundwork caucus, which means I have strong opinions about things that will bore you and stronger opinions about things that won’t. I’m transgender, and I’m a dyke.
I’m from Long Island, which is a place that sucks. If this offends you, I’m sorry, liberal. I love Washington, D.C., with my whole heart. It’s the first place I’ve ever lived that felt like home, and making it my home has been the privilege of my life. If I leave, it won’t be because I stopped loving it. Love takes miles.
I live to frame shit on my apartment walls. I’ve been collecting vinyl forever. Last week I took up mosaics, the art of breaking something on purpose and gluing it back together, and THAT is what I call a quintessential lesbian hobby. I try to be a sweetie pie; I try to be funny; I like feeling wanted.
That’s the tip of the iceberg.
My favorite quote from Vladimir I. Lenin:
There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.
My favorite part is that he never actually said this. As best anyone can tell, a notable socialist British MP, George Galloway, pinned it on him in 2001, writing in the Guardian, which is about as George Galloway as it gets if that means anything to you. But the fake Lenin is right, and he’s right about the wilderness. The decades where nothing happens are where the weeks get built.
I don’t know exactly where the road is. I know I’ve been on it, and I know I’ll be on it again, because that’s what the wilderness means. It only takes the ones who were going somewhere, and there are a lot more of us than the great men ever let on.
So I guess I’m going to do what the New York City Gay Men's Chorus (NYCGMC) is saying we’re going to do:
We’re going to vote, vote, vote with our voices!