Flaunt and Flail Queer Art in the Age of Techno-Fascism

Some Thoughts About Making Queer Art Right Now

How can queer art help us to survive, and maybe even fight back, during this bloody awful moment in history?

What I do have is a bone-deep sense that we need to be twice as wild, twice as flagrantly ourselves — and at least three times as experimental, honest, and weird as before.

One thing that is super obvious to me in this moment is that respectability is a slaughterhouse.

Respectability inevitably leads to conceding that some LGBTQIA+ people are a bridge too far, and don't deserve human rights.

The same way that going to queer events and being surrounded by my community fills me with hope and strength for the fight, consuming the work of uncompromising queers reminds me that I'm not alone and my dreams don't have to be compressed to fit the space that craven pundits and politicians are willing to allow.

Recently, I was emailing with the wonderful Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. I asked Mattilda about trans art and resistance, and she replied:

I think it’s about refusal — refusal of conformity, refusal of complicity, of complacency, of normalcy, of assimilation or blending in or just going along. It’s about taking this horrible hypocritical world and flipping it. Creating something so absolutely ridiculous or enticing or contradictory that it undoes the horror around us, or at least gives us a moment to see what needs to be undone, because sometimes if we have that moment, that’s a starting point. For getting somewhere else.

To me this is the potential of trans identity, right? That we can imagine a way out that isn’t about fitting in or blending or conforming to the violence of the world around us.

So we’re in this moment of regression, and I think the most important thing is not to internalize the violence. We have to resist in whatever ways possible, in everyday life, in our interactions in the world, in the way that we live and love and try to dream in spite of everything that is always against us.

The people who are in power right now want us to be quiet and cowed. So we need to be noisy and defiant to show that we are not going anywhere. And we need to show each other that we are going to survive this — even if it gets dark.

I keep thinking that there’s a role for queer art and artists in jolting straight people into waking the fuck up and paying attention.

But one of the things I believe in the core of my being is that art can help reach people where political rhetoric and facts can’t.

My evidence-free gut feeling, though, is that you need a lot of ACT-UP and Queer Nation shocking the pants off people before you can achieve any results with something like Will and Grace.

I want to believe that queer creators can do more than provide comfort and inspiration to our fellow queers — that we can take part, meaningfully, in the struggle against fascism. I know in my bones and sinew that this is possible, and that bringing our full outrageous visions to the world can help create a change. But I also know it has to be more inclusive this time, and that white people shouldn’t be the only ones leading the charge.