Queer joy
Queer joy is not just two words.
It's the most radicalizing experience in life.
It's why I'm here, and I know it's why a lot of you are here.
Imagine this, we are at the dinner table, everyone is sharing a cake, you are allowed to have at it. You eat it, and you find it tastes like shit.
But everyone around you appears to enjoy deeply this beautiful cake.
What's going on?
It keeps going, the cake is served nonstop, everyone takes more cake. Again and again and again. You are dumbfounded. You look at everyone around you, they take more cake each time, with a smile seemingly expressing pure bliss. Maybe it was this particular slice you ate? You try it again, and same taste: it's shit.
You all know what I'm talking about.
Each day I ate the cake. I learned to ignore the taste, to disconnect my tastebuds from my brain. Nothing in the world had any taste anymore. Each day was a day survived. OK I guess. But was it worth living? Was it worth fighting for that cake? Giving, putting life into this nonsense?
I was at a loss. I didn't understand. Were all my friends lying? Pretending to like this drivel? Was I supposed to act as if I liked it too?
For three decades, I ate at the cis table. And for three decades, I was confused, lost. It felt wrong. I suspected my friends of lying to me. I suspected that it was the social norm to pretend to be what you are not. I was taking part in a weird theater, where I ate each day the cake, and each day said, unconvincingly, that it tasted delicious.
My friends were no dupes, they saw me lie, they didn't understand what I was lying about, since they trully loved the cake. But they suspected me: I was a pariah, isolated, alone. I was trapped in my own mind. An isolation chamber, sitting in the middle of the crowd.
Then one day I saw what was going on at the other table. The queer table. They had a different cake. It smelled so nice, a smell totally absent from the cis table. I had the luck of being allowed to leave the cis table and go to the queer table. And I tried the queer cake. And I finally experienced what all the folk at the cis table experienced every day in front of me: pure bliss. Joy. Peace. Finally seeing what it was really all about.
Suddenly, the grey world became the gay world. From a colorless, isolated life, to a full color painting, brush still wet. More colors than the rainbow can offer. Surrounded by friends, people I could understand, eating the same cake, having joy, sharing joy.
I broke isolation, I wasn't a pariah anymore, I was welcomed. Not just by my queer friends, but also by my old friends, to whom I could finally be honest, and who could finally trust me, I stopped acting suspicious, they stopped suspecting me.
I finally found joy, I finally found the cake I needed in my life. But I had to wait 30 years.
Why wait 30 years? I knew it was all a mascarade. I knew it since the very beginning. As soon as I had my first slice, the cake was shit. I even knew, in theory, that there was another cake I could try. Occasionally, I would take a tinny crumb, alone, hidden from everyone's view. This is what kept me alive. But each time, I was deadly afraid of being discovered. I thought the queer cake was not for me, that it was forbidden. That it was shameful to go to the other table.
I was told that the queers were weak. That queerness was a transgression. An inherant danger, that can only be tolerated if contained. A sort of concession to our sins.
And this is what I told them: This is a lie, this is total bullshit. Containment is death.
Queerness is transgression, but only for your sick society. It doesn't need to be!
It's not a concession, tolerance is free, you aren't giving anything at all. You are just taking everything away from us, and giving use mere crumbs and pretending to be generous about it.
We ain't fooled. We see through your ruse.
Your story doesn't hold up. Every single right we have today, we fought for it. Not just without your help , but despite you fighting against it. Every. Single. Rights. During the HIV crisis, you closed your eyes, by fear of seeing your closest ones among the damned.
It's too late now, we see the world as it is, and there is no going back. We won't be fooled again.
We ate the queer cake, we are here, we are queer, and we aren't going back to the cis table.
This isn't just about the queer cake. It's about everything: A tinny ruling class, taking away what you made, what you deserve by right. And giving back breadcrumbs, expecting applause and praises. Our cake, our body, our work, our planet. Every single thing.
Every single thing, they take away from us, and hand a fraction back to us, fainting generosity. While really, they just give us the minimum to stay alive so that we can make more cake for them to take away from us.
This is the cis-tem. This is what we are fighting against. Us queers are not the only targets of this, every single living creature is.
But we have force, we have energy, we have something that we love, something to fight for.
Queer joy.
We see it, we have it in front of us, we remember all the people who fought for it. We are thankful. But we know they fought for something much grander.
We also see beyond. We see another table, that is not just for queers or the cis, but for everyone.
This is the world they took away from us. All that is left for us is to rise from our chairs and move to the new table. Leaving behind the worthless clowns who demand our submission. They are moving hell and earth trying to make us believe that we are weak, but it's nothing more than just another lie.
We can rise up and take what is rightfully ours. Our cake, our body, our work, our planet. A place to breath and finally get a break.
Let's go beyond queer joy and find joy for everyone.
Post scriptum: What I mean by "Containment is death" can only be described by someone who lived through the HIV crisis, please read this: https://jcrenshaw.dev/posts/say-their-names/