“It’s true I’m all talk & a French tuck / but so what. Like the wind, I ride” – Ocean Vuong, “The Last Prom Queen In Antarctica”
Happy Pride Month! I have some Lists Of People & Art To Check Out coming, but as I started thinking about writing them (and which one to start with), it hit me—there is no humanity—well, you read the title, right? And the epigraph?
Humanity is nothing without queerness.
“Well hang on, Chris, what do you mean by that?”
You know how people say USian popular culture is just Black culture, appropriated/stolen? I’m saying that without queerness, there wouldn’t be human culture, period. Fascists and business school grads and weird Christians love to ask what the point of things without immediate value is. Why get a creative writing degree when you won’t make any money? Why do you wear clothes that are more than purely functional? Why do you have sex for any reason other the procreation?
So many people want everything to fit in its neat little box. So many people want to get their Rust Cohle on and talk about consciousness being a tragic misstep in human evolution. The very fact that some people are gay or trans or intersex or asexual or anything else is a refutation of that. Queerness is, on the most basic level possible, an assertion that sometimes things be the way they are because of how they do.
Without getting all white ally about it, the first thing I think of when I think of queerness is joy. Irreverence, humor, strength, resilience, goofballality—these are the adjectives I think of when I think of my LGBTQ friends. Our society makes it really difficult to admit to yourself that you might be anything other than straight or cis. That awakening can be a confusing process, and once you come out, you face a whole new set of fears and dangers. From where I’m looking, I don’t see how you go through that process and come out the other side thinking the human experience is anything other than at least a little silly.
Being straight and cis and having the Obama/McCain election be the first one I could vote it, I’ve watched USian society drift from “casual ambient homophobia” to “more or less cultural acceptance, at least, We Have Gay Marriage Now.” Where I’m at lately, I wonder how much straight cis people think about why they identify that way. You’re attracted to people of the opposite gender? That’s it? Your gender matches the one you were assigned at birth? Are ya sure? These thoughts are worth thinking. A lot men act stupidly and angrily and violently because they feel like their manhood is under attack and can’t even come up with halfway articulate statements on what makes them men.
Why are you the way you are? Why do things have to be the way that seems prescribed? I don’t mean this to trivialize in-born imperatives or make it seem like being gay or trans or intersex or ace is a choice, these things are not choices. The existence of queerness, though, proves that the human experience is not uniform. That we are not those 24-lifespan bugs, we are alive for more than brutally efficient reproduction. We are alive to love, to play, to experience. At the absolute barest minimum, go to a gay bar or drag brunch sometime. Read Sappho’s descendants. I promise you, if you can’t bring yourself to at least experience queerness peripherally, then your world is tragically small.
At this moment—and every other moment in the US’s history, save for like 15 minutes after the Obergefell decision—LGBTQ people are under attack. Draconian laws against medically transitioning, Christian Nationalist ghouls and the Tradwife movement, the spirit of Matthew Shepard’s killers never really dying, all kinds of depressing examples. Any time a marginalized group makes gains, there’s going to be a backlash, and we’re seeing a serious backlash to Obergefell, Drag Race having multiple seasons, and the mainstreaming of ‘they’ as a singular pronoun (even though it’s been used that way for hundreds of years), among other things.
It feels necessary, then, to say it with your chest (whether or not you’ve had top surgery). We love our LGBTQ+ friends, family, and neighbors. The world would be unbearably pallid without you—food less delicious, flowers less fragrant, rainbows less thrilling, poetry less gay.
And what’s poetry, if not gay?
Glitter bomb a Republican this month.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris