https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/07/20/gatekeeping-fiction-bryan-washington

Bryan Washington’s “Gatekeeping” is a story of queer-intersectionality and multiculturalism explored in a Houston terminal and through its workers. Washington’s story, as with many of his others, has an autobiographical tinge to it—the story is set in Houston, TX, follows a Black American Gay man as he, through little vignettes, deals with his identity, his romance with a Taiwanese flight attendant named JT, and the things that prevent him from moving beyond his frame of understanding of the world. Washington’s story is a mosaic of gentleness shown through vignettes, between the “I” narrator and one-off encounters with a stranger the “I” narrator is pushing through the airport terminal (the exception being an older man, Carl), vignettes showing the gentle intimacy between the “I” narrator and JT, and the occasional scene between the “I” narrator and his brother.

The story is densely multicultural, mirroring the perspective of Washington—Washington living currently in Japan as an expat—but also the experience of being, and I assume working, in an airport or another intersection. The vignettes of the “I” narrator pushing the passenger’s wheelchairs often signify a crossing of culture in a specifically unifying and gentle way.

Washington’s prose is minimalist, having the effect of not over-dramatizing or sentimentalizing the characters more typical struggles, but too reflecting a sort of blasé the character feels in relation to his lot in life, his rooming with his brother, the conflict he feels between a desire to travel and expand beyond his insecurities. The style also helps when Washington describes sex scenes:

That night, the chubby Taiwanese flight attendant—JT—finally comes on my belly, and I do, too. Then I roll onto my side. We’re silent except for the television’s drone, and then he chuckles, exhaling.

and

JT sets a palm on my belly. Our cum is still on it. When I make a face, he rolls his eyes, wiping some of the mess on his stomach, too.

This version of the sex scene is humanizing, not fetishizing, but, thematically, gentle.

Washington, in his story “Gatekeeping,” speaks mostly on place. The terminal the “I” narrator works at is a multicultural and multi-sexually oriented place—the “I” narrator finds his lover at the terminal, who then, in part, helps the narrator take a leap towards agency and desire and away from the sort of apathetic lifestyle he lives in Houston. The narrator feels that living with his brother is apathetic: “So I drive home. My place is twenty minutes from the airport. And my brother’s on the sofa, because he is always on the sofa.” Multiculturalism is core to the story, and a reminder to the closeness / similarities of the narrator and those who he interacts with.

As part of Washington’s minimalist prose, the narrator and his queer experience are stated matter-of-factly, and the characters who interact with the narrator are too, for the most part, without internal bigotry. Although there is conversation about JT’s closeted brother, for the most part, the narrator does not have to justify himself to others—this is shown when the narrator is providing service for a woman named Rose:

The woman I’ve been wheeling, Rose, wears gargantuan glasses. Three times the size of my own. After one margarita, and then again after her third, she asks if I have a wife.

Must, Anne says. Looks like you eat well enough.

No, I say.

Then a husband, Gladys says.

Since the story is told in the present tense and is a contemporary story or a story set reasonably in the now, Washington is making a statement on what being Gay is like in this setting.