#this isn't the like. clearly-structured post i wanted to write‚ i got mad and florid instead

[aeide-thea]

an impulse i don't get—

or rather, so as not to be disingenuous, an impulse i get perfectly well but strongly dislike when i'm faced with it, which means i need to reexamine it in myself when i generate it—

is the impulse to sit in judgment about What Counts As Queer. like. yeah, okay, i do get it really, we're all disempowered by hegemonic culture and setting ourselves up as petty kings shores up our egos! but if there's anything i've loved about discovering queerness in and for myself, it's been the realization that there were worldviews beyond my own—and that there still are, almost certainly! that the world is a firework show of exploding possibility, and that i and my current understanding of myself and everyone else are just one bright spark in a whole connected series of them, and that more will come after me, bringing new colors and configurations to my field of vision, if i just keep my eyes open…

and so i just always feel. god. how close-minded, to shut your eyes to someone else's vision of queerness, to say not just 'that isn't a version of queerness that i recognize or feel represented by,' but to say categorically, 'that isn't queer'! if someone's saying in all sincerity, 'this feels alien to the framework i grew up with, and exciting or comforting or both to me'—i want to hear them out, and make space in my own understanding for a multiplicity of queernesses. i'm not always perfect at it! but i want to.

because what's the alternative? join with the biphobes and transphobes who would've said my gq4gq relationship with my transfem ex was really just straight, or at least enough of a union of opposites for government work? join with the aphobes and arophobes who are constantly insinuating that if you're not actively sucking or fucking, you're a square—never mind those of us who are isolated, or traumatized, or anxious, or any of the thousand other reasons why our queerness might not be siting itself in sex or romance, right now or ever! join with the people who sneer at poly and flinch from kink, as if reexamining those relational conventions were somehow cleanly separable from reexamining all the other ones—as if we should want it to be?

anyway, this is about a lot of things, really, and at least one of them i pretty actively don't want to talk about in specific; but i just think, god, i wish we could all learn a little more generosity, and a little more humility. we know the world, and the human heart, encompass more than is dreamt of in kyriarchal philosophy; why then are we so resistant to the idea that they might also encompass more than is dreamt of in our own? movement after movement of queers have come, and built, and been built upon in turn; our personal convictions are not, i feel certain, the final course to be laid down on the great work of enlightenment and liberation—and how depressing it would be, if they were!