-Anonymous (Owen Sound, Canada)
What I love about being queer
living how you want
Oh mama
in this stillest corner
mine your heart
listening to resonance of organ beat
bone blood
blood memory
Hopes
pumped
over and over
pumped
over and over
hopes pumped
over
and over
body cycles
round trip fares
on a journey
always trying to get it right
constant rush and pressure
it’s amazing
how
our bodies fare
resilient rib cage
of mine
still attached
still intact
still takes the physical
always used to the beating
of hearts
used to holding it all together
pulsing this
blood memory is a gift of lives lived
for us
who hold on
so tightly
to memoryimaginationmemory
rippling every which where
we look
within ripples of time
Right now
in present
I love
that I can affirm you and I promise
I will love your queer as private
or
as public
as you want
actively choosing
choosing always
always actively
actively choosing
receiving
forgiving
for ever giving
within here
Here
it’s in
this place of love
that I learned to
let my mama know
I see her
mama
I see you
found
you amongst
mountains of expectations
decoded you amongst
assumptions of normal
realised my femme footstrides
and streams of glitter were
trails I left for
you in plain english
phone calls
from far away places
gave you
your memory
gave your imagination
something tangible
mama do you smile
when you hear my words over the phone
when I tell you every ounce of queer
that I dance with
in life
in show
Here
showing
my mama queer
doesn’t always
mean elusive
doesn’t always
mean giving up
doesn’t always lead
to the shadow of a life you
look for in the burnt ashes of prayer
mama
love
it’s was then
love
it’s yet to come
love
it’s here
love
again
mama you are
why I conjure
why I appreciate
why I cherish
why I love being queer
Gein Wong (Toronto, ON)
Written a thousand miles apart in separate cities, the night my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer but didn’t immediately tell me.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT BEING QUEER IS A LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST!
Huge thank you to all of YOU who have contributed to this project. This truly wouldn’t be possible without all of your beautiful words!
WILABQ UK Screening
“What I LOVE about being QUEER” is screening @ Queer Media Festival (UK) this weekend!
- Being intentional about my gender and sexual identity
- Believing in magic and watching it happen
- Being intentional about creating community and having a chosen family
- Realizing that femme was a thing and that I am femme (so that’s the reason I wanted to wear a dress everyday when I was 5)
- Knowing that I don’t know everything and learning, growing and sharing all the time through conferences, gatherings, workshops, performances
- Trying to be inclusive of everyone (those with (dis)abilities, those who are underemployed, those who have children) in our events and planning (we are working on this and there is a lot of work to be done, but the work has started)
- Partying with sexy people (Queers know how to party!)
- Finding and being with my love (she is amazing!)
- Being my loud, quirky, high femme self and finding a group of people who love me as I am
- Conversations that open my mind and heart
- Femmes!
- Butches and Genderqueer folks too!
- Constantly challenging and questioning the status quo
- Knowing body hair is a choice
What I love about being queer is that I can dissolve myths and stereotypes about what a girl who likes girls looks like, sounds like and behaves like. I love that I can educate people on queer issues and I love that I will always have that story, that thing that makes me different and interesting. I love that being queer taught me invaluable lessons about myself and the world and its people.
-Kate (Tasmania, Australia)
<3 Queersilver & Ira Briones - PHILIPPINES <3
What I love about being queer is people ask me real and honest questions they have about the way I live and love. Most people might find it offensive, but I sincerely enjoy educating them! Also; Females. I mean just wow!
With love,
Hedwig Elektra Spindler, 19 years old, Stockholm, Sweden.
What I love about being queer is evolution. The spaces we hang out in, the people we meet, our lovers, our sex, our souls, our visibility. Forever evolving. I recently went on a trip and met a younger queer from the QPOC community in New York. The laughs, the knowledge, and huge plate of dumplings shared made me realized that we’re moving in the right direction. There’s nothing more inspiring than hearing someone much younger than me discussing safe space, sex positivity, and creating more events and parties for queers of colour with a passion and dedication as he did.
Being queer means I can watch my younger brothers in the community pave their own lane. Drive their diversity, passion, and creativity into projects and spaces that educate and help the ones that’ll come next.
The sex is good because queers are bosses. We know what we need and respect what our partner needs. With queer sex there’s no compromise. We as a unit set the tone, explore each other’s mental and physical state, unlock doors that are kinky and taboo. It’s pretty unreal and I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything else.
-Max (Toronto, ON)
My opinion on the “Born This Way” debate… everyone is entitled to their own opinion—this is mine!
I also talk about Vivek Shraya’s new book “What I Love About Being Queer”
What I LOVE about being QUEER featured in ELLE Magazine - MUMBAI. December 2013.
“We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality…an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’ domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see the future beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of the moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds … Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”
- José Esteban Muñoz - Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (via Alok Vaid-Menon)
What I LOVE about being queer is constantly finding joy and exuberance in the journey of learning that my hued skin, spirituality, sexuality, politicks and values are not contradictory, but harmonious in the community I have within myself.
Also, I can fully appreciate Beyonce’s Get Me Bodied (extended mix).
-Rafay Agha (Toronto, ON)