Queerness

Queerness is not so different from decolonization. If you read enough theory, you circle around and you end up right back in the same place.

Begin with the body. Start with the body. Start with where the story ends. Start with the edge of the map, then keep going.

Walk forward into the forest. Don’t be frightened because if you are afraid, the surrounding beasts will smell the fear and torture and taunt you until you turn tail and run. The forest will push you to turn tail and run. The forest has no time for cowards.

Keep walking.

Queerness is a route to re-engagement with the world, the true world, the one our culture has urged us to forget. If you are a nation of conquerors, it is vital that you disengage with the senses, that you forget the smell of home, that you forget there ever was a home to return to. It is vital that your wife be a symbol of the nation to whom you are loyal. It is equally vital that this symbol be a flesh and blood person who you have never known, never felt inclined to get to know. You cannot love your wife, and invade other nations.

You cannot love your wife, and rape and pillage and destroy other men’s lives. You cannot be happy, and live your life dedicated to the slaughter of other people’s happiness.

Colonialism makes monsters of us all. Women freeze up and become performers when men are around, surround ourselves with other women only to dominate them, can only be our true selves when we are alone. And men..

I am in mourning for the boy he used to be.

I once tried to be in mourning for the man he might have been, but the mourning never felt quite real to me. We always have a choice, about who we become. Who we are becoming is always in process, never landed. Hope remains. So long as we are alive, we can change.

That seems a painful fact to me, at times. I once hoped to wait out my biological clock. It seemed safest. Now I feel the weight of time pressing down, I feel how slowly I am changing and I want to urge myself, faster faster, but also I am afraid I will get to the end of this race, finally, that I will limp to the finish line and no one will be waiting for me.

We are all afraid of that, I suppose.

Queerness says, to hell with them. Queerness says my life is mine and always was. Says he studied opera and I used to dig my hands into the dirt and smear my face with soil because it felt so good. Says my life was my own, once. Gender norms seemed alien and useless and beside the point of living.

Queerness says, I was once entirely convinced that I would be loved for myself. Regardless of how well I impersonated a woman.

Says, I do not care how well you impersonate a man, and I never will.

Says, they told you I cared about that, so that you would go to war for them.

They lied. They are liars.

Says, they are the liars. Not me.

Queerness insists we begin from the beginning, from the real beginning, the one we were never allowed to pursue because always there was gender in the way. Says you can be sensitive and need me, says I can be strong and need you to fight beside me. Queerness says you can be anything you want to be, anything at all, and I will still love you.

Queerness says that strategies exist to form relationships rooted in ethics and values that live apart from winning or being good soldiers for patriarchy. Queerness says we can, we must, develop skills to build these relationships. That is not the same thing as working to be lovable. It is working to be heard, and to hear. To rely on communication where we once relied on violence.

Queerness to me was never about the kind of sex I was or was not having. It’s about how to create a relationship that feels like paradise, built in the ashes of the empire that came before. It is my answer to Philip Pullman’s terrifying and devastating intonation, ‘we must build the kingdom of heaven where we are.’

Lyra lost Will, and I cried and cried. Perhaps I knew that someday I would lose you.

Yet. This is not a book. I am not a child-maiden written by a man who wants to keep her for himself. I am my own true heart, and I have control over the story I am writing.

I have control over the story I am telling. And I have control over who I tell it to.