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sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.
“queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence…. When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.”
we do right by the wronged people of the past without physical evidence of their suffering? How do we direct our record keeping toward justice?
And when we die, our bodies feed the hungry earth, our cells becoming part of other cells, and in the world of the living, where we used to be, people kiss and hold hands and fall in love and fuck and laugh and cry and hurt others and nurse broken hearts and start wars and pull sleeping children out of car seats and shout at each other. If you could harness that energy—that constant, roving hunger—you could do wonders with it. You could push the earth inch by inch through the cosmos until it collided heart-first with the sun.
Would knowing have made you dumber or smarter?
Why is it that badass women who don’t follow the rules always sound like lesbians to you?
Fear makes liars of us all.
After all, they live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived.
by expanding representation, we give space to queers to be—as characters, as real people—human beings. They don’t have to be metaphors for wickedness and depravity or icons of conformity and docility.11 They can be what they are. We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.
the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind.
Who are you? You are nobody. You are nothing.
You don’t understand; you don’t understand so profoundly your brain skitters, skips, backs up. You make a tiny gasp, the tiniest gasp you can. It is the first time she is touching you in a way that is not filled with love, and you don’t know what to do. This is not normal, this is not normal, this is not normal. Your brain is scrambling for an explanation, and it hurts more and more, and everything is static.
You touched me and it wasn’t with concern or love. You touched me with anger.”
This is how you are toughened, the newest wife reasoned. This is where the tenacity of love is practiced; its tensile strength, its durability. You are being tested and you are passing the test; sweet girl, sweet self, look how good you are; look how loyal, look how loved.
A house is never apolitical. It is conceived, constructed, occupied, and policed by people with power, needs, and fears.
Afterward, I would mourn her as if she’d died, because something had: someone we had created together.
It is not an extraordinary thing to claim that some people are more valuable than others to the world.)
on this morning, light seeps into the sky and you are present with your body and mind and you do not forget.
A reminder, perhaps, that abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it.
“No matter how much you love somebody,” she ends, her voice soaked in misery and resignation, “how do you live out the days?”
When I watched this episode, I could only see the way it eerily mirrored Gaslight’s domestic abuse: jealousy, raised voices, commands. “This is a private matter.” “You’re mine, mine, all mine.” All with a sheen of slapstick, of humorous distance. Isn’t this funny? This is funny! It’s so funny! It could be funny! One day this will be funny! Won’t it?
it is important to live in unyielding fear with a smile on your face.
Maybe, when queerness is so normal and accepted that finding it will feel less like entering paradise and more like the claiming of your own body: imperfect, but yours.
She is always trying to win. You want to say to her: We cannot advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other.
Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.
“If you want to be my friend, you must do two things. First, forget I am a lesbian. And second, never forget I am a lesbian.”33 This is the curse of the queer woman—eternal liminality. You are two things, maybe even more; and you are neither.
This is what I keep returning to: how people decide who is or is not an unreliable narrator. And after that decision has been made, what do we do with people who attempt to construct their own vision of justice?