Queer Liberation
Happy Pride. In Celebration of a Complicated Q.
Dear Readers:
Welcome to Issue 17 of Obsessions, one femme lesbian’s obsession with the body and culture. If you’d like to support my work, promote it on Twitter, forward it to friends, and feel free to comment on the posts. Until I am able to offer a subscription service, you are welcome to venmo me ($Renee-Greiner) to buy me a coffee, or pester your local congress person to put more money into the arts.
Queer is the little kid who will get labeled a boy and wear dresses despite the taunts. Queer is the little girl who will be labeled bossy and who will fight tooth and nail for her own little piece even when her nuclear family fails her. Queer is thick, smart rectangular glasses and the mind of a wunderkind. Queer is pink suits. Queer is how somehow Brentwood is connected to Hollywood and then to Silverlake and Echo park by one long road that snakes and refuses to disconnect itself from it’s own snake rhythm as the buildings and the chemicals and the heat push down onto it. Queer is that person who passes as a woman at the supermarket, but refuses to do dishes or clean her house not because she’s writing sonnets, but because she doesn’t want to.
Queer is the inability to simplify basically anything for sound bites, and in that refusal, a decision to remain constantly evolving. Queer is a decision to chose your own autonomy over sometimes safety or ease like Valerie Solanas did or the comic book character Hot Head Paisan did in the 1990s. Queer is the houseless people in L.A. and the people with houses who give mutual aid. Queer is also Fiona Apple slowing down, practicing pleasure activism or whatever her special lyric for slowing down is because she just wasn’t that good at capitalism. Queer is the uncomfortable idea that we do not owe capitalism our bodies or our worth or our best parts. Queer is everyone who fought for trans people in Boys Town when some of us were too scared. Queer is Marsha P. Johnson and black liberation at the center. Queer is the philosophies of the nerd squad and post-modern ideology about gender and basic understandings of Marxism and the general belief that the NYTimes is kinda conservative.
Queer is Gia screaming “give me back my God damn knife” in Gia. Queer is every God damned thing that Natalie Wynn has done for the internet and Lindsay Ellis and Jade Fox. You’re welcome, sweethearts.
Queer is the idea that you can kinda understand that it’s not a great idea for a white woman to adopt children from three wildly different countries and that anorexia is not good either and still feel heart heart pounce wet down there heart yuck cuz….it’s Angelina Jolie. And to also know that she’s been trapped by the fame monster so that’s why she acts a bit weird.
Queer is fat healthy heterosexual mothers who refuse to go on diets. Queer is velvet violet dresses. Queer is Sexton’s line, “yet I’d risk my life on that dilly dally buttercup called dreams.”1 Queer is Andrea Gibson’s lines “because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away.”2
Queer is Amber Hikes fighting for the brown and black stripe on the new flag because black and brown liberation is at the forefront of queer liberation. 3 Queer is Elle Hearns fighting for black trans lives like a boss.
Queer is the refusal to believe that born this way is anything but an attempt to tell us to be motherfucking smaller, wear less velvet, talk quietly because you’re at the dinner table with a bunch ‘o scaredy cats and they’re afraid of their own scorpionic shadow that they lay in the nighstand the week they got married. Queer is the affirming work of Adrienne Maree Brown and the history of Aude Lorde’s words and James Baldwin. Queer is Chavela. Queer is enough for all before there is plenty for a few. Queer is the concept that what’s inside your underwear should not define where you can go and how you should be valued. Queer is coming back after the flood to rebuild a city. Queer is questioning why we are so obsessed with genitals. They are taking astrology too seriously and making it sexy while she does it. Queer is non-binary and non-binary is fanny packs. Queer is ladies’ night melting and disappearing and going underground. Queer is everything that frightens and also everything that liberates. Queer is the parts of you that truly believe we are all connected, the parts of you that feel sensual and emboldened and unafraid to fight for someone else, whether the houseless or the working class mom, because you know that we are one. And that is NOT some sorta Taylor Swift anthem.
Happy Pride! Particularly to those who live at the margins or who have traveled to the margins and have been changed. May your revelations lead to your liberation and may our liberation lead to liberation for all.
xo,
Renee
What I’m reading now:
“Is a Cervix Cis?: My Year in the Stirrups.” Emma Heaney. Asterixjournal.com. February 18, 2021.
‘The Criminalization of the American Midwife’. Jennifer Block. March 2020. Longreads.
“Getting Pregnant with Michelle Tea: I Had a Baby.” Michelle Tea. Human Parts, Medium.com. February 11, 2015.
‘Michelle Tea and the Betrayal of Queer Memoir’. Alana Mohamed. August 2018. Longreads.
What podcasts I’m listening to right now:
Episode 3. Min Jin Lee. May 25, 2021. Asian Enough. Open on spotify here.
Episode 150. Elle Hearns. August 2, 2020. Queery.
‘January 24th.’ Anne Sexton.
A poem by Andrea Gibson that I can’t seem to locate. Please forgive me as footnotes and click links and pictures and yadda yadda, well it’s a lot!
I would normally feel weird sending you to a site to buy shirts, but I don’t because it’s a very queer business, and these are great pictures of Amber Hikes, and that all matters.