7. Andrew Brett

Andrew Brett and I dated during one of the two or three hardest times in my life, but I never told him about it.  I love Andrew Brett precisely because I didn’t have to say anything; he, just because of who he is, was sufficient to show up as disaster relief.

The problem, of course, is I didn’t realize it at the time.  Not that it probably would’ve made any difference in the end, nor should it have; I think what we share now is fathoms better, or at least wiser, than what we shared then.  Our origin story was weird enough to give us a shot: like most gay dudes who came out in the ’90s, we met on the internet; we encountered each other again, years later, when I’d moved to Toronto and he caught my interest by inviting me to an NDP karaoke party.  I’d decided I wanted to date him before that, though, and I helped him marshall a tuition protest the next week, and so we did.

Look, things were bad.  I’d lived through a really difficult relationship back in Vancouver that hurt a lot, even if the phone books thrown across the apartment actually missed my head, and really, if secretly, living through that defined everything I thought and felt for a good long time afterward.  Andrew and I started dating only a few months later, and the guy was in Toronto and living up the street, and he was saying some really shit awful and untrue things about me to lots of people we knew in common, and every day I was worried I’d wake up and everything I had and meant and felt would be taken away.  And while some of the threat was present and true, too much of it was living in my head, and I was panicking a lot behind the closed door of my bedroom in this house I was sharing with some really sweet people.  Oh, and it was my second term of graduate school, and I was shifting between pretending-to-know-about-things to actually-knowing-about-things, but the fear of being-found-out was still there.

So, I started dating Andrew.  And it was really lovely.  He introduced me to lots of progressives, and we had really nice brunches and sushi and Dundas St. nightcaps, and he took me to his parents’ house for Easter even though I was a vegetarian and apparently that was the biggest deal, and missed work one morning to come up to York for me to give a talk about federal granting agencies that “bit the hand that fed us.”  He spent money on me because he had it and I didn’t.  He brought his sleep apnea machine to my house so I could actually get some rest.  No one had ever done these things for me before.

Things didn’t work out.  The shitty place I was in took over, and I couldn’t just accept his kindnessess and loveliness.  In another life, I would’ve been crazy not to.

We work in the HIV movement together, now.  This means sometimes we get to go to meetings, and we’ll end up at a bar or a bakery, sitting across a table together, just the two of us.  Such times are some of my favourites.  I get to look into Andrew’s big eyes, and we get to talk about everything progressive, and I get to meet his quiet integrity with the boundless gratitude I have for him.  There is no other person in the world I so understatedly appreciate as Andrew Brett. 

6. Kai Nagata

Love can also be situational, especially when it’s necessary.  While such incidents are rare, a few times I’ve been called upon to love to mitigate emergencies.  At these times, I’ve found myself cooking and cleaning and hugging and processing and remaining silent in a flurry of activity that actually seems calm, casual, as what else can be done?  My body involuntarily shuttles more energy than it knew it had to its nerve endings like it’s the easiest thing it’s ever done.  My body becomes more of a body, taking up the air and enveloping and pulling up or becoming small and cowering or sitting beside and witnessing and settling.

Kai Nagata and I did our undergrads together at UBC, but he was a year behind me.  Maybe we did a class together?  But we certainly imbibed relatively frequently with the marvelous Stephen Guy-Bray, and Kai would reveal he was really in literature for something and I would talk around books to dig into the politics of inquiry and departments because I didn’t really know very much about anything — but I sure liked to peacock and it got me into graduate school even though it should have been totally transparent (and probably was) but I was lucky that people seemed to like me enough and allowed me to camoflague my other agendas while playing “serious budding academic” and got me into graduate school so I could actually start becoming a real person.  A few years later, Kai and I were in Montréal at the same time, but we only saw each other once at a party.

I hadn’t heard from him since, so imagine my surprise when, on a Friday afternoon in early July, I got an e-mail from him saying he’d be in Southwestern Ontario that night, and it’d been a long time, and did I have time for a drink?  Not one to turn down beer in summer swelter, especially if it occasions catching up with an old friend, I said, “Sure!” and offered him my spare bedroom.  He wrote back, sending along a link that narrated his highly public resignation as Québec City Bureau Chief for CTV.  I read it and was immediately reminded of Kai’s stunning sincerity and commitment, and wondered how he had found himself working in mainstream journalism with its impoverished theory of representation, fairness, and its location in the ever-accentuated capitalist conglomerates that continue, as they always have, to ruin whatever might have been redeemable about Canadian colonizer culture.

Kai arrived at my doorstep about 11 o’clock that night, clearly tired but also inhabiting a sense of wonder.  I hugged him and he came in, I opened him a beer, and we worked to connect on where he was at and what had led him to leaving his job and showing up at, of all places, my house.  His open letter was that of a soothsayer, exhibiting rare  bravery to engage in the basic minimum standard for us as citizens to live in something called a democracy to do his due to witness the world scenario as it is, witness and be driven out by its gut-wrenching hypocrisies, and to call it out as a sham.  And while Kai is special in that he’s brilliant and writes amazingly well, we both concurred that the-world-as-sham is something everybody has to contend with to a lesser or greater extent, but people are incentivized from grasping any possibility and console themselves with idols — like mortgages, or fucking children.

After we’d talked awhile, Kai checked his e-mail.  There were hundreds, all supportive.  Some were sent privately from similarly frustrated journalists, some were from bloggers, many from citizens engaging with Kai’s articulated moment of beautiful clarity.  I sat and watched as he was on overload — an unthinkable energy shooting back on the circuit’s return.  We managed to bike to the hipster bar, but he couldn’t keep his hand off his iPhone as we sat with Greta and Nicole because he was getting tweeted and e-mailed by Margaret Atwood and Michael Ignatieff and Elizabeth May.  Yes, people were responding to Kai’s unsettling bravery and the substantive elements of his discursive move, but what was flooring for me to witness was the outpouring of loving support he was getting from unknown others.

I made lots of kale and quinoa and espresso and boozy lemonade, and it felt like thousands of others were feeding him with me as his piece surpassed ten-, fifteen-, twenty-, thirty-, forty-thousand views.  He slept a lot, and then would wake, and read, and respond, and eat, and sleep again, and call his loved ones on the phone walking up and down the street making sure they knew he was ok.  He left that Sunday morning after a brunch with a truckload of only the most necessary things, off to Detroit, and Chicago, and somewhere in Colorado to see where he’d lived when he was young. 

Very quickly, people started pushing him to say what he’d do in the future.  I most admired him for the elasticity and possibility without limit he saw far ahead, grounded in his body with legitimacy and wonder.  It was a privilege to be in a position to witness the importance of Kai’s actions and his being — to accidentally be called in to support and offer space and care. 

5. Mikiki

My life is better when Mikiki is on the next barstool.

Of course, there are many reasons why I love Mikiki.  Not loving Mikiki was a hard proposition after he screamed out “YOU’RE THE MOST POPULAR PERSON IN THE ROOM!” across a 300-person conference after I asked a bratty (if substantial) question to dreamy David Halperin, or when in his own presentation later that afternoon he said some HIV-negative guys for sure have a place in the movement, especially because a few of them are really fun in bed (and then I said to myself, “well, I do know that I’m really fun in bed”), or when we pursued each other to Woody’s and then back to the Hyatt and then from hotel room to hotel room across months and meetings and conferences, or when he passes out without warning and takes up the whole bed and almost snores you out, or when he puts up with baseball and nosebleed sections even though we both get vertigo because I love the Yankees and he loves me, or when he set up Anthea Black and I because he knew we could stage queer transformations and radically love together, or when we were in Kensington Market last month and he pulled two beers out of his backpack to share with Aaron and Jordan and I because the bar was boring and he wanted to open his fly and show us the new pearl in his oyster.

Yes, all that, and all the anecdotes about how life has been wonderful in the course of knowing him, but wonderful anecdotes, even if limitless and approaching infinite, do not adequately reflect the quiet entrenched solidarity of renovating presents and calibrating better futures from looking each other in the eyes and holding hands and kissing in the beerlight.

We got put on a committee, which was a gift.  I got to come to Toronto every few weeks for a few months, and it was a hard time.  I was amid ideological growing pains brought on by my work, feeling radically under-valued by everyone around me in a town that I can’t stand to live in.  It was winter and cold and dark and I was barely resisting despair by surfing cool, dull, empty pain instead, and then I got attacked and no one around me saw it and, to make it fucking worse, piled it on, “generosity of spirit” be damned.  I would come to Toronto and, as though cosmic, Mikiki always would have also have had such a day, and we’d meet in similar states of defeat.

Five beers later and talking art and politics, the sex workers would come to talk to us and the Portugese guys would offer to protect us from the homophobic dudes in front of the bar and suddenly we’d be a bunch of notes coming together in a chord and things would start to seem better.

Something turned a few years ago, after August 2009.  I had the opportunity to be in love for a short time with a wonderful man, and then I had to leave Montréal, and then I was depressed from the Recession and now I do my work differently.  I have been alighted to other ways of living in the world; I’ve stopped taking so seriously the stony white agnosticism of my youth and found that maybe, just maybe, some of the things I used to deride out of ideological purity and all that foolishness might do me some good.  Like chiropracty.  And therapy.  My back hurts, to say nothing of my heart. 

Mikiki has been one of a few critical interlocutors in this process.  He is someone I admire, who I also love, who loves me even though I’m not always sure why that is or how I’m relevant, and yet, then and again, there he is, just when our worlds have broken a little and we figure out somehow to love our way out.  After, we go to bed and he sleeps and snores and his warm body occupies a space, carving out a reminder of the things we can do tomorrow, even at rest.

4. Leah Stephenson

There’s something of novelty about love, of course.  After all, what would love be if not for the hyperbolic pangs back into feeling generated in short course after meeting someone new.  New love or fascination or infatuation (whatever you wish to call it) is most potent – an arrival back into something oceanic, nearly primordial – so much so I have certainly given up familiar love for novelty more times than it’d be polite to admit to.  When I was in my early 20s, I fell in love every 20 minutes.  Now time has passed, new love comes less frequently, but when it does I feel as gloriously impulsive and curious as I did when there was too much love to see and feel (and inevitably discard) to ever stay anywhere very long.

Moments in the last several years when a new person has managed to enter my horizon, making company with me in such a way as I detect the potential for true friendship and real love, I have felt this same exuberance.  In my experience, initial contact feels slightly reserved, but that fact would be unclear to any onlooker who invariably witnesses a visceral instant connectedness – gazing, handholding, stealing wicked laughs at epidemiologists we both hate like we’ve hated him together for years.

Leah and I met a few months ago at a big deal research conference I’d snuck my way into – running into each other at various sessions and breaks, and inseparable by the time we reached the gala.  There were shoe photographs and too much bad wine and I confessed crushes and she and Len cited erasures and we talked about the future and we talked about what’s been taken from us and we planned infinite coups and insurrections and (at the very least) another conference.  We piled into a cab and a whole bunch of us talked more as we went to dance and drink more and dance and kiss people indiscriminately and I forget what else.

Aristotle teaches us true friendship is the friendship of people who are good and alike in virtue, and that in such friendship we love without self-interest, for loving the other is a good in itself.  This is because “those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of their own nature and not incidentally”; and because of this, “their friendship lasts as long as they are good – and goodness is an enduring thing.”  This has to start from somewhere, though.  What might it mean to historicize true friendships – not just ones currently in existence, but emergent ones as well?  I think an applicable measure might be exuberance – the excited outpouring of efforts to shift around schedules to arrive in each other’s lives by plan or by whim, to pick up and head to cottages together, and when the weather fails, to absolutely make lunch plans another few hours down the road where we’ll sit and re-structure things we know need changing.

If I could cite a changing moment in my history, it would be the way this iteration of exuberance has manifested by Leah and our initial commitment-making – toward each other, toward futurity, to the absurd, and to reconstruction, above all.

(Digression:

After dinner tonight, A.B. and I reflected on something a friend of ours shared with us a few months ago about his lover. He said his lover was the kind of person who didn’t really listen, and instead, he was waiting for his turn to talk.

Thinking about what this meant, especially if it was said about either of us (and precisely because it wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility for someone to say this about us — if, for whatever reason, the sincerity either of us had put on offer wasn’t being recognized) made us profoundly sad.

Processing, I said, “If a lover ever said that about me and it was true, it would mean I had so failed at expressing my love to that person that he would’ve come to doubt my very respect for and affirmation of his humanity. And if a lover ever said that about me and it wasn’t true, it would mean that his love and respect for me would have been so thoroughly degraded that he was no longer interested in listening to or connecting with anything I said.”

Right now, I can’t think of much else more grim.)

3. Gaïa Orain

Longevity in love often means revisiting old texts.  In my history, texts have mostly been scrap sheets of paper I find in drawers years after phone numbers or lists or ‘I love yous’ were scrawled on them by old lovers.  They show up out of what seems like nowhere, and unlike a memory, whose stubborn presence you can defiantly insist away scraping layer of cement over layer of cement, texts insistently keep track that you were, in fact, loved in such and such an actual way by a real person in the world at one discrete time, and sometimes others.

I will go on for years about how I love Gaïa Orain, but I may never say it better than how I did it here.  I wrote this for a project she was working on in 2009 that, if I recall correctly, involved an incorigible amount of pink flock and if she ends up with a fatal lung condition from it I will be as mad as I’ll be sad.  This love I have for Gaïa warrants innumerable inscriptions for posterity, and so this repetition is an expression pursuant to making it historical again and again and again.

—

Gaïa Orain lives by the CN Rail tracks, like she did when she was 17, but somewhere else.  There, amongst other things, she recovers furniture; she recovers.  She took and takes spaces that were once dismal, commodities that were once alienated and overproduced, and does things that only the most impoverished understanding of the world could name ‘making them her own.’  She makes, but doesn’t own; she engages, never possesses; she is at best a, or as I think it, of the best fellow travelers eking out a spot with things we think of as ‘the built environment,’ or ‘aesthetics,’ or ‘love.’

Gaïa marks and inscribes as much as she transcribes, translates, or places things together.  She makes line drawings that from other hands would look pedestrian, but she drapes them across LCD screens and bodies and wheat pastes them on rue Lambert-Closse.  When she was younger, Gaïa once described her aesthetic as ‘making the world look better,’ but I don’t think she meant it.  She probably meant that she’s a conduit (but not a mystic, because she’s far too calculated and deliberate) that works at making the world be better.  Prettier sometimes, but only as a pleasant coincidence.  Her practice is too much a terrain of struggle that pushes into the beyond past media and black boxes and street corners and so-called limitless networked virtualities.  She is keenly aware of limits, even if she provisionally insists on tension and consequence in the momentary, or three and a half years, or eight months.  This fact is clear to anyone with whom she has acted as an interlocutor, negotiating subjectivities, asking questions that are always right if not appropriately generous or soft if the person at her doorstep has had a rough week.

Gaïa translates as a subject, and not just from free-floating thought matter to sign.  She locates herself in Québec, but is French and isn’t.  She’s from London, but really?  But really, in the way one is haunted by the past but knows it, darts away but comes back because the past is inescapable and, after all, we like it.  She is by the tracks, but somewhere else.  And how could she not be?  How could you not be?

Gaïa’s politics are skirts, and her religion is dresses.  She acts skirts, hiking higher when intensifying her agitations.  She is like a missionary for the Dress, carrying out frequent and rapid conversions.  She puts the ‘femme’ in feminism, brushing bodies with fabrics and fingers to reprogram empowerment into a style of embodiment we were only taught was conventional.  She has a strategy of design, not an episteme.  She is an aesthete, but that misses the point.  She knows theory and has the love of wisdom so often forgotten in the signifier ‘philosophy,’ but taken alone, these things just don’t do.  She places things together in a practice of irreducible locality that pure theorists only wish they were doing.  She nourishes with violet, brie, pear, mannequins-over-shoulder, pink cheeks, free haircuts, sleep deprivation, schemes.  We catch on, if we can, and she makes it so we can when she can.  Gaïa is earned in an amorous economy.

2. Darcie Alexis Nelligan

Love has something to do with pacing, too.  How does a person meet you when they meet you?  Does the energy they have or the way they’re existing in their body at that particular point bend, diffuse, curve or transform itself on, around or some other way proximate to you?  Or does that person shift so she or he is also living in their body in such a way that hints to your body that it, too, should shift and meet theirs?  To put it more simply, does a person move when you meet them, or meet you when you meet them?

This may also have to do with our quiet intuition about what we can get away with saying to one another.  Last winter, I was out for dinner with Darcie and, checking in about the state of our relationships, I said (of a guy I was seeing for not much longer), “So, he told me he loves me.  So, I didn’t call him for a week and had sex with ten different guys.  Is that bad?”

Darcie is the person who can meet you with a knowing look when you confess shit like that.

Darcie and I manage to meet each other’s energy when we’re together or anticipating being together.  Yet-another-indie-band-no-one-cares-about-at-the-hipster-bar?  We match each other’s aloofness.  Too-much-work and too-little-sunlight?  We collapse in the same position under blankets on different couches.  Warm-weather-coming and so-much-possibility-for-time-spent-together-after-sundown?  We accidentally get drunk on a patio and make an epic summer strategy for aging hipsters.

I’ve never met anyone other than Darcie whose dating patterns are identical to mine.  All either of us needs to be intrigued (or at the very least attracted) to someone new is 1 feature to latch on to: it could be the length of their neck, it could be the pitch of a person’s voice, it could be that he already has a partner so we know they can commit (right?)  And while such a low threshold may be unappealing to most, Darcie and I have an orientation to others that embraces a heightened inclination toward possibility.  Darcie and I don’t just meet each other, but we find ourselves meeting every other with one quality sufficient enough to solicit our attentions.

Whether those others meet us, or bend or curve in such away that fits around us — well, that’s another story altogether.

Today was beach day, and its anticiption was the only thing that got me through this week, and we giggled as we collaborated and organized beforehand as we did all the way to the beach as we did while we cooked under the July 1st sun.  Tonight we will take our sunburnt bodies out on bikes and watch fireworks and beam like children and watch bands play CanCon and roll our eyes and drink too much and stand shoulder to shoulder and love each other and all our others.

1. Shannon Dougherty

We have a shorthand: we say we must have been separated at conception with my embryo delayed twenty years, gestated in another woman’s uterus, because we obviously must be related.  But this origin story is an abbreviation that, like all abbreviations, just doesn’t cut it.

You could say Shannon is my colleague, and she is, and she is: we work together, and it’s likely we never would’ve met were we not to work together.  In fact, the love I have for Shannon is cut to the measure of our professional relationship: we meet at the head, I spew forth with my analysis and she gets swept up and comes along for the ride, heads back and reflects (as she does) and distills to me what we can, should, and will do — sometimes chaining ourselves to the door of the CMO’s private residence, sometimes working more politely within the limits of the liberal capitalism we socialist feminists deride with every fibre of our beings.

The way we have committed to processing alongside each other and together cannot be understated, and cannot be underrepresented as anything but love.  Shannon says she hasn’t stopped processing since I came on to the scene.  I have taken glee at every moment we have connected and assumed we were on the same page and figured out we weren’t and bridged the gaps of our experience to understand yes — our hearts do feel for the same thing and our frameworks are the things that need to catch up and hold hands and teach each other a thing or two.  Ok, maybe we are similar, or becoming so. 

When you talk with Shannon, she looks at you straight on and nods her head and says “yes” when she hears you say something, and I do the same thing now, too.  It’s what you do when you really, really, really want to show you are feeling and not just thinking about what a person you’re encountering is testifying (and we’re of such privilege to get to encounter everyone we do!)

Because of Shannon, I can now say “generosity of spirit” and “trust the process” without barfing, and I think I’m better for it.  She will go away for vacation for two weeks, now.  She’ll have emerged from our work and feel like a different human being in about 10 days and re-immerse herself at day 13.  Our clocks are the same, so maybe our abbreviation isn’t such a shorthand after all?  What does ‘relation’ or ‘biopolitics’ mean, anyway, when we’re committed to the kind of self-determination we learned by fighting for reproductive choice.

I’ll miss you when you’re off, pumpkin’, and I’ll sign my ‘o’s with women’s symbols just to keep you present.

Oh hi there!

My most regular and prolific interlocutor about love over the last several years has probably been Lily-Elaine Hawk Wakawaka, and earlier today she decided to spend the next 30 days blogging once daily about a person that she loves.  As one interpreter of my birth chart recently said, I tend to flail or fail at love because I endlessly over-analyze my feelings; needless to say, talking about love for 30 days is totally my kind of thing.

Oh, I should probably introduce myself.  My name’s Paul Sutton.  I live in London, Ontario, although many of the affairs, disasters and Aristotelean true friendships you’ll read about over the next 30 days took place in Vancouver, Toronto and Montréal (and a little bit of Tennessee and Arizona for good measure).  I’m a community developer, educator and writer who works in HIV, doing gay men’s sexual health as well as working with street-involved folks who use drugs.  I have a hard-on for harm reduction, and the idea of harm reduction as a whole way of life will probably find its smatterings in the entries that will follow over the next 30 days.  In a previous life, I thought I was going to be a real academic, so I snagged a couple of Master’s degrees — one in English Lit, the other in Communication Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies.  For that last one, I wrote this thing called Smoking is a Socialist Issue: Health Promotion and Neoliberal Politics in Canada — which may not sound like it was about love, but it was, promise.

While I’m actually quite shy, I’m committing to this project of overexposing feelings of love.  Love, after all, is fraught.  I think it’s something we’re supposed to think about as people of particular classed positions in a wealthy capitalist country like Canada.  There are greeting cards and romcoms and all the cultural artifacts that would be cited by low rent media critics.  In fact, it would be old hat to say we talk about love all the freakin’ time but, and indeed in spite of that, our talk of love is impoverished, even bankrupt.  Of course, this should remind us of Roland Barthes, who started A Lover’s Discourse noting “the lover’s discourse of today is of an extreme solitude.  This discourse is spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects (who knows?), but warranted by no one; it is completely forsaken by the surrounding languages… Once a discourse is thus driven by its own momentum into the backwater of the ‘unreal,’ exiled from all gregarity, it has no recourse but to become the site, however exiguous, of an affirmation.”

To me, A Lover’s Discourse has always sounded a little like the “incitement to discourse” that Michel Foucault describes in The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 which has, for better or for worse, served as the bedrock of queer theory since the 1980s (NB: I could do one of these entries on Foucault, but I’ll spare you; I love him, reflexively and, as with all things, sometimes not so).  A quick and dirty recap: since the Victorian Era, when the “homosexual” came to be known as an identity category rather than “sodimitical acts” being criminal prohibitions, there has been a tremendous vocabulary about sexuality, and that this veritable explosion of vocabulary has witnessed an era in which sexuality appears heavily repressed and like sexuality, strangely enough, doesn’t get any air time.  In this way, like what Barthes is saying about love, we only talk about sexuality as a problem in need of regulation and relegation, merely affirmative, rarely expressive of its multivariant modalities.  And this gets me back to my point about overexposing, being open, making space for love as a utopian queer project.  I take the expression of love to be quite a queer thing, which may be strange for some who aren’t queer and/or are queer and/or don’t spend a lot of time thinking about queer things.

I want this project to be witnessed as a suture between two modes of recent queer theory — that the spewing forth that truly, and non-convolutedly (if you can believe it) comes forth from me as a testament of the experience of the inseparable interminglings of my thinking and my feelings, stitches together two ways of thinking about subjectivity that, forced back together, may allow us to understand how loving is a queer practice all the way down.  The first has to do with shame, a concept brilliantly resignified by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Touching Feeling and David Halperin in What Do Gay Men Want?.  Sedgwick re-describes Henry James’s New York Editions with their ridiculously expanded and embarrassingly effusive prose emendations as a genuine moment in which an author shows his proclivities too much, and we, as readers, know too much of him (NB: Sedgwick’s analysis is brilliant and I don’t totally understand it myself and so I’ve by no means done justice to it here).  Halperin describes a scene in Genet’s The Thief’s Journal where Genet is being spit on by prison guards (he was incarcerated, as he often was) who were simultaneously shouting homophobic epithets; instead of cowering, Genet manages to become sexually aroused because his identification changes from the situation he is in to a recollection of a rather sexually humiliating experience a former lover had gone through via spitting.  To put it another way, two experiences of spitting that were humiliating and oppressive allowed a mental-affective connection to take place that could actually qualify as love.  Shame, in other words, is something that we all experience in a world that seeks to oppress us at any turn.  One of the tasks for us as queers, then, is to figure out — especially when they come as surprises — interesting shit we can do with shame and even more interesting shit our shame does to us.

This turn to “shame” in queer theory holds hands with (thank the dear lord) José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (which, I shit you not, is the most totally life-affirming book I’ve read in years, maybe ever).  Muñoz starts his book by telling us: “Queerness is not yet here.  Queerness is an ideality.  Put another way, we are not yet queer.  We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.  We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.”  Take a minute to dry your tears (I was a crying wreck the first time I read that passage), and let’s keep going.  Muñoz’s turn toward futurity is one that also reminds us how the future is something we grasp toward by feeling in the present.  Muñoz draws on Samuel Delany’s memoir The Motion of Light in Water and how Delany himself strings together two experiences: one of seeing Allan Kaprow’s “Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts” (an installation in which only one ‘happening’ can be seen by the audience and all the others occur through distilled sounds from rooms out of view) and Delany’s experience of fucking amongst ammassed naked bodies in trucks parked on the Christopher St. pier and losing himself amongst blue-lit bodies in the St. Mark’s Baths.  For Delany, that experience of the present made clear to him that “there was a population — not of individual homosexuals… not of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather millions of gay men, and that history had, actively and already, created for us whole galleries and institutions, good and bad, to accommodate our sex.”  To put it another way, our current experience of the world, which often feels too limited, closed-off and alienating, can often lead us to the very glimpse of queer utopia — that we are all around, that there is place for us, and we can and do come together to love each other, radically.  And most importantly, we must do our damndest to ensure, with whatever means necessary, that this glimpse can be our very real future.  That’s when queerness will arrive.

Radical love is the point of this project.  I’m overexposing as a deliberate queer project that feels kind of like an accident, while simultaneously casting a blue light over people and bodies and histories in order to stitch us all together into a queer future rife with becoming.  I hope you’ll take this invitation to join with me the great loves it is my true privilege to praise in the never-abating project of making a better world.