A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

My theory of aesthetics is that if you’re queer you’re predisposed to the condition of overwriting because when you come into your identity after a time of closetedness excess becomes a way of plotting yourself in a different story than the one you inherited. It’s literally gay to be a bad writer!

Earlier I’d spotted her boy among a group of preteens. He did indeed have an air of femininity to him, though it was subtle, as mine was when I was his age. Sexuality was something other people had, a place others visited, though many thrust the label onto me all the same. This drive to identify my non-normativity always confused me. Because I was consumed by hobbies and school, I wasn’t thinking about whom or what I desired. For a while, I was squished inside an identity others imagined for me based on fear and stereotypes. As an adult, I had to dig myself out of myself, had to make myself into a ruin from which something new could grow. I hoped Lena’s boy wouldn’t have to go through the same existential struggle. Perhaps instead he would come of age fully grounded in his queerness, wouldn’t feel the urgency to repress it the way I did. Times were changing, however slowly. After all, Lena was the kind of mother who, like Donna, like Mary, would architect a world with whatever materials were available in which their children’s joy could be infinite.

Already the ruling party had implemented austerity measures the only survivors of which would be the upper classes. Secondary school curriculum was being demodernized, teachers and nurses were being fired, health care was being privatized, amenities and resources were being deregulated, climate change was being accelerated. From the outside, from a leftist standpoint, it appeared as if it were a marker of political action to endorse the cheapening of one’s quality of life, that it was normal and a generational birthright to vote on the side of structurally induced hardship. Perhaps some wanted to conjure a scapegoat, something (a government) and someone (a politician) to blame when one’s individual or familial struggles to live a good life fell short, acting on a suspicion that the game was rigged against them, though a culture of anti-intellectualism would prevent them from diagnosing why. A punishing government was a burden they could choose, one that would keep them from installing too much optimism in what a future could reap. From year to year things changed very little, one’s threats to existence remained the same, and so liveliness coalesced as the negation of change, of difference. A common enemy, in other words, is another name for social cohesion.

The Conservative base was being held together by always-intensifying emotions, by heteropatriarchal feelings of possessorship and nativism in particular that found expression as rage and self-pity.

rather than build a political system that by definition would democratize institutional care, conservatives chose again and again to live in a dead world, one that was programmed only to amplify its deadness. It seemed to me that their dogma could be summarized like this: If we’re all subject to planetary catastrophe, if we experience the same intensity of existential fragility as the downtrodden, let us descend into madness and disaster, but we will govern the pace! What a brutal legacy to be a recipient of by virtue of geographic fate, I thought. It’s a miracle anyone escapes it.

As I emptied my pockets, I was struck by another realization: everything that made up the texture and mechanics of the prison—total control, alienation, an atmosphere of fear, the ever-present threat of violence—existed in the world outside it. In fact, the idea of an “outside” was untrue, misleading even. There were many kinds of legalized violence, practiced by people every day. There were many kinds of arenas for punishment and surveillance, and we lived inside them our whole lives. The prison was where all of these tactics and arenas existed in their most monstrous forms.

It is all of our duty, I thought, to rebel against the beautification of violence. I recognized this straightaway as the raison d’être of the countercultural novel.