A History of My Brief Body

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

I’m quick to identify with the victims (who were much more than victims, unjustly reduced to that flat form of subjectivity by McArthur and the media).

Men who seemed to have given up on care, whose touch wasn’t touch per se but something sharper, something heavier.

There have been hookups I’ve abruptly left out of a sense of impending danger, ones I’ve counted myself lucky to have escaped.

What happened in Toronto in McArthur’s apartment, how the police poorly managed the case—this all refracted out into the world and thus into the bodies and minds of queer men of color everywhere in Canada.

Where does grief go when it is barred from institutions of justice? What do we do with our surplus rage and fear?

How will we ever look white people in the eyes and not periodically see our mangled bodies? This isn’t hyperbole. We have Canadian citizenship, of course, and as citizens we will remember how to participate in the world, but we are still the hunted.

I didn’t yearn for anything but privacy, because it is an embarrassment to be a wound in public.

the Orlando shooting was “the deadliest mass shooting in the United States” and “the nation’s worst terror attack since 9/11” (this “deadliest” has since been used to describe the Las Vegas shooting).

we need to take shelter under an “us” to become “resolute against terrorists,” if the families torn apart by Mateen “could be our families,” then the interpellating call of this “us” and this “our” couldn’t be answered by those killed on the dance floor of Pulse, those who were always-already banned from the territory of American futurity.

“All the Dead Boys Look Like Me”

“All the Dead Boys Look Like Me” registers an affective structure that US government officials like Obama couldn’t,

“Yesterday, I saw myself die again. Fifty times I died in Orlando.”9 Here Soto confesses that for people like him, living on felt impossible in the wake of the Orlando shooting, that people like him are stuck in an interminable grief, that they’re ontological misfits made to live, love, and dance near death.

The Orlando shooting was a heartbreaking reminder that the world isn’t for queers of color, that “the whole world” wasn’t ours “for the choosing.”

We can understand doom as the ways in which the knowledge of one’s killability sits in the air, menacingly, and how that brutal information is renewed by quotidian and spectacular acts of violence in daily life.

They hate our freedom, so only freedom matters.

What determines our lives as NDNs and/or queers are pain and trauma, love and hope. Death looms at all scales, individual to planetary. But there is also an ecology of creativity,

In the face of an antagonistic relation to the past, let us start anew in the haven of a world in ...