#untitled queer period piece!!!! LETS GO

[anyataylorjoys]

HELLO??????

[president-vladimir-poutine]

Petekey at the museum in 2023

I submitted this as a final paper for one of my uni classes. I got an A and everyone on the bus clapped

Anonymous, “Untitled” (Transcription of Pete Wentz’s Livejournal Entry from June 28, 2005), permanent marker on bathroom wall, ca. 2010. Chicago Leather Museum and Archives.

My first visit to the Chicago Leather Museum and Archives in February 2020 was nothing short of a religious experience. In the midst of swelling discourse amongst chronically online teenagers and young adults with regards to whether or not kink should be “allowed at pride” (though, unbeknownst to us, the argument was about to become utterly moot and stay that way for a period of two years), going to the museum was reprieve, a breath of fresh air that materialized the historical enmeshment of queerness and kink: kink has been part of queer relationality and organization in the United States and beyond since at least the Second World War, and arguably long before that. However, through a combination of the massive loss of life due to AIDS and movements towards assimilation with straight society, much of that history (despite efforts towards preservation) has been lost. The people who collected our belongings after our deaths, not wanting us to be remembered as “perverse,” discarded the kinky trash; those of us who wanted to distance themselves from the other, degenerate queers insisted that this wasn’t a “normal” part of gay life, and that their sexual practices were “just like anyone else’s”—vanilla, sanitized, monogamous, and, more likely than not, infrequent.

Admittedly, the emotional impact of my first visit can only be attributed in very small part to the validation I felt seeing the efforts made at preserving this “taboo” facet of queer life: the museum was the backdrop of learning I had received a grant from my university to fund an installation piece I had proposed that would question the legal system’s, academia’s, and even lay society’s insistence upon empirical, physical proof, when so much of the queer and disabled experience are either swept under the rug, intentionally obscured for the sake of survival, or not recorded in the first place. For one of the first times in my life, I felt understood and appreciated as a person who had something to offer. I was being recognized by my department for my work, I was going to transform what had been a lifetime of suffering into something of greater value, I was surrounded by evidence of a life I never thought I would be able to embrace, and was going home to my partner to tell them the great news.

This all blew up in my face. Not even a month later.

The COVID-19 pandemic sent me back to a world where expressions, let alone enactments, of queerness, particularly transness, would have immediate material consequences. And I’d managed, in the beginning, but only because that was how I’d already lived my entire life up until that point: queerness was something for my online diary, to be performed only in the virtual spaces of tumblr.com and Archive of Our Own, and maybe, maybe in a playthrough of The Sims every so often. But as I watched the people around me continue to grow past these strategies of survival, even in explicit times of crisis, I found myself sinking further into them. In my childhood home, I grew isolated from the LGBT “community.” My way of being was now a sign of immaturity, no longer needed now that ~SoCiEtY~ had grown so much more “accepting.” There was no reason to continue burrowing in the world of fannish space and slash fanfiction when it was okay to hold hands with your same-sex partner in public, no value of creating an imagined reality wherein queerness was possible in any context when gayness and trans being were now supposedly allowed in every context. I covertly took part in a virtual study, partially because I needed the money but moreso because I needed someone to hear me, on the psychological, social, and financial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the LGBT community, but even in those focus groups, I felt there was a profound disinterest in what I had to say.

When I was reunited with my partner later in the year, I clung to them the same way I had clung to anyone who was even remotely tolerating of my queerness, as I had done in high school. Confused as to why I had become so dependent, and deeming it unacceptable, they cast me off and joined Tinder (but, ironically, not Grindr) within a number of days.

In the wake of this loss, I retreated even further into the safe space of fandom. The strategies of relationality I’d learned living most of my life as a closeted kid on the Internet were no longer desirable in the “grown-up” world, but in fan spaces, these attachment patterns were treated as core features of queerness: clinginess was taken as evidence of true love, and the more obsessive a character (or real person) was, the more likely it was that their feelings towards their object of affection would be read as romantic or sexual. I fell into a rabbit hole of pairings that helped me understand and express my own obsessive tendencies, including the alleged affair between Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance bassists Pete Wentz and Mikey Way, or, as it is better known, “Petekey.”

Without getting bogged down on details, the core evidence for Petekey’s “canonicity” comes from a series of posts Pete Wentz made to his Livejournal account while on Warped Tour in 2005, in which he spent a lot of time (and, on numerous documented occasions, traded clothes) with Mikey Way, including overnight visits made by each band member to the other’s tour bus. Many of these entries either describe the amount of time spent with Way or suddenly finding new reasons to live or appreciate life due to being in love, the most salient being the following:

“Amazing new mexico sunset. I’m hanging on a bridge with my friend mikey way from my chem. Its all orange and pink above us. We went to another waterpark again. I love high fives again. Totally back in love. Saw the most amazing movie… I think its called spirited away. Watch it.”

-Pete Wentz, June 28, 2005

Shortly after the end of the summer they spent together, these themes stopped appearing in Pete Wentz’s Livejournal posts, but near-direct quotes pulled from these posts began appearing in songs written by Wentz about heartbreak even 10 years after the end of that summer. And, as the cherry on top, while introducing one of these songs at the Reading Festival in 2016, at which Way was in attendance, Wentz proclaimed (to no one in particular), “I’m sorry. Every single song is about you.”

The appeal of Petekey isn’t in the notion of emo boys making out or speculating about the sexualities of real people, but in recognizing and appreciating through their interactions the value of one’s own covert performances of queerness—especially as the noxious, caucasious notion that one must proclaim their love for their partner loudly and in public to prove they are not “ashamed” of them runs increasingly rampant. And what can only be interpreted as Wentz’s perseveration on the loss of this relationship mirrors the grief that underscores the entire (admittedly small) body work I’ve created since experiencing my own loss.

Needless to say—a lot of things had happened between my two visits to the Leather Museum and Archives. Still, when I returned to the museum, I expected my experience there would be much of the same as it was the first time I had visited (save for winning the grant). However, I was quickly informed there was a key part of the museum I had yet to see: the bathroom.

Anonymous, “Untitled” (Leone Abbacchio, Nude, Tied to a Tree), permanent marker on bathroom wall, ca. 2020. Chicago Leather Museum and Archives.

Though not an “official” part of the Museum’s collection, the bathroom at the Leather Museum itself is an archive of contemporary queer modes of being. The walls are nearly covered in graffiti, some expressions of sex-positivity, some decolonial and abolitionist political slogans, lots of cartoon penises, and shorthand descriptions of appearance and preferences accompanied by contact info for the sake of finding hookups. We had spoken at length, both in class and in the Archives itself, about how coded contact books, zines, and bathroom cruising had become “things of the past” with the advent of the Internet, implying we had somehow moved past all of these things, but here was the Leather Museum bathroom—referencing the Internet, sure—very much following the same analog traditions.

As I’ve reintegrated back into on-campus life following my sabbatical spent back in time in the most homophobic little corner of Los Angeles, I’ve become keenly aware the ways in which my experiences differ from those of the other queer urbanites of my generation. That my own methods of using online, “cringey” fan spaces to survive have themselves become “things of the past” makes me sometimes try to pretend they aren’t still major parts of my life, distancing myself from them in hopes I can be accepted by those who fundamentally do not understand me, and who may not want to understand me.

I’ve always understood the importance of the Leather Museum as a testament to the importance of resisting the urge to assimilate, of embracing the parts of yourself that have helped you find community, survive, and thrive in a world that seeks to eliminate you—even if others may see them as “dirty”—but recognizing my own, more day-to-day experiences in the Leather Museum and Archives’ collections wouldn’t have occurred if I hadn’t spent 20 minutes worth of my most recent visit next to the toilet. I had already found myself totally enraptured in the graffiti, in the contemporary, DIY expressions of self-love, community care, and desire for intimacy that would now be permanently stored in the Museum’s bathroom walls, but the Petekey graffiti, the transcription of the Livejournal entry that I’ve always seen the most of myself in (but would never, up until now, publicly admit to doing), made me cry the way my first visit to the Museum should have.

Sometimes I wonder if the more things change, the more they stay the same. We claim that things have improved for the LGBT community and other marginalized groups on the whole, but drag performances are being banned nationwide, transness is becoming criminalized, young girls must go through genital inspections before being permitted to participate in school sports, and our government has allowed a deadly illness that disproportionately affects the working class and other marginalized groups to run rampant for the sake of “protecting the economy” while not batting an eye when these populations die or become further disabled. And while insisting that one must distance themself from the fannish spaces they inhabited in their youth to find reprieve from homophobia and/or transphobia because it’s embarrassing and we’ve since “moved on” pales in comparison to the discarding of important personal belongings following a loved one’s death due to AIDS, at the core of both practices is the misguided belief that denying one’s right to embrace that which has been crucial to their lives or acknowledge it as a part of them simply because it is “weird” will somehow improve material conditions for the community as a whole.

I’d always seen myself and the strategies of resistance I (theoretically) believe in, in the leather and denim vests preserved in the Archive; I’ve always understood that leather and kink spaces have been key sites of organization and community for queer people; I’ve always understood that trying to paint these spaces as no longer necessary for queer survival does more harm than good. Yet, when it comes to my own generation’s survival tactics, like many others, I too tried to distance myself from them and act (at least, in public) like they were not an inherent part of me. Maybe this is why the “kink at pride” discourse became so prevalent amongst people my age: we’ve convinced ourselves based on our very limited experiences that we aren’t treated any differently from anyone else, thus we no longer need to rely on or even appreciate anything “too queer.” But the care the Archives and its staff put into maintaining the collection of vests, patches, dildos, and other paraphernalia is for more than the preservation of leather culture: my own, personal archive of things I have done, places I have been, and feelings I have felt deserve the same care and maintenance—especially when others tell me to stop doing so and cast them away into the sewage.

Even if my own survival tactics have now become “passé,” and the ephemera associated with them are now themselves beginning to be considered “historical artifacts” by people my own age, they are worth preserving because they tell the story of how I have managed to live for as long as I have, and how many others have done the same. The notion that we “outgrow” these strategies, that being “stuck in the past” always inherently holds us back insists upon a very unidirectional—and, dare I say, straight—conceptualization of time. Change can be good, but denying the skin we shed as ever having been part of ourselves isn’t necessarily a sign of growth.

Maybe we don’t need to constantly “overcome,” to reject our past in the name of becoming “better” than we were before. Maybe there is value in embracing the things we did, no matter how embarrassing or obscene, to get to the place we are now. And maybe continuing to practice them can get us through the next crises we will inevitably have to face.