“We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger
we rise and fall and light from dying embers,
remembrances that hope and love last longer.”
— Lin-Manuel Miranda (2016 Tony Awards Acceptance Speech.)
Lately, I’ve found myself thinking about the times we live in. They seem so dark and lonely; I think the feeling of uncertainty and fear is inevitable. I look around me, and in between a rock and a hard place, I feel the need to reach out to people outside of my family to feel some normalcy in my own life and situations. To nobody’s surprise, they’re all queer. I can’t remember a day when my queer peers didn’t meet me at my worst and lift me up to the clouds, all so I could understand that my life was meant to be and I was meant to exist. Being queer myself, I now try to relay that to anyone who needs some lifting up.
JOY
“Queer joy is resistance.”
To say the least, coming to terms with the fact that queer people weren’t appreciated in society was extremely hard for me from an early age. I started to understand that we had a lot of fighting to do, but, instead, I hid. I convinced myself that maybe my infatuation with Christina Aguilera’s 2002 hit music video was just a coincidence and that the pretty girl who sat next to me in homeroom just had pretty bows in her hair, and that’s why I loved to look at her so much. I hid this part of myself for so long that by the time I got to high school, I had forgotten it. Only to rediscover it in a religion class with my best friend and a guy whose opinion mattered the world to me. I’ll never forget what he told me, “Very good, and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, send them to me, and I’ll punch them.” From then on, I lived my life very proudly, but I was a teenager in the age of social media, and hatred was bound to find its way into my life; and it did, vehemently. Trump was just getting into office, and his supporters made it abundantly clear, “We don’t like homosexuals.” I think that was the first time I felt genuine fear for my safety. I let myself be terrified for who I was, and I went as far as to let my hair grow past my so-called “childbearing hips” so that my femininity was never questioned. I never took my sexuality back or made it out to be “just a phase,” but it was something I felt anxious about; so, again, I hid it.
Looking for a place I could feel comfortable in, I found a nightclub in my college town of Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico; It was called Lover Bar. I asked my sister to take me one night, and she did. Needless to say, I don’t think I was ever the same. I remember sitting outside with a beer in my hand and my eyes glued to the entrance door. For the first time in my life, I saw queer people without fear in their eyes. They looked at peace. For the rest of the night, I fantasized about feeling that type of joy one day.
One of my favorite quotes reads, “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn’t look like we were going to win then, and we did. It doesn’t look like we’re going to win now but we could. Keep dancing, keep fighting.” These immortal words were spoken by Dan Savage, a queer love expert who also lived through times when darkness seemed to be taking over. This quote made me reflect on the times ahead. Without wanting to sound like a pessimist, I feel the need to remind myself that the joy I was fantasizing about is going to become harder and harder to reach. I need to remind myself that our collective joy deserves a fighting chance and that we cannot sit still as this administration and its army of bigots rob us of it. Our joy will be our fight, period.
A note to all queer entertainers, drag queens, sex workers, and anyone who exhibits their queerness in the most beautiful light they can emanate: thank you for having the ovaries to express yourself in the way you do. I know that, just like me, a scared young girl is dreaming of feeling like you when you smile with your whole heart behind your teeth. Please keep us in the fight. I promise that one day, that girl will fight alongside you.
LOVE
“The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival.” — Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.
It may be God or some other divine power that has never granted me sapphic romantic love. That concept seems foreign and distant to me. I’ve only been able to feel that way through media. Or so I thought… When I thought about what I was going to write in this essay, an epiphany came to me. Could queer love come by way of platonic relationships? The sharing of resources, of love, of understanding, the mutual agreement of sharing a life together, maybe this is my way of rationalizing the very possible likelihood of ending up alone, but for now, it seems like an ideal life.
A common theme in my daydreams has always been my yearning for love. I have always felt it more than others, I think. (Not in an “I fall in love in an instant” kind of way, more so in an “I’m not afraid of getting to know people so much that I develop a love for them” way.) Undoubtedly, I have always needed to keep that part of myself hidden too, in part to protect myself from people who could take advantage of that, and because society has dictated that love is this thing that has to be worked for and chased after, as if it wasn’t one of humanity’s most basic emotions. I have never had the luxury of articulating it, but like a flower craves sunlight, I hope an admiration worth communicating seeps its way into my life every night when I close my eyes and every day when my mind drifts. It’s the way I’m wired. That is the way we keep ourselves in the fight. We have a capability of loving each other before we lose each other that is unparalleled because very few folks other than queer people have felt how our community has been torn from us. The only power we have right now is exactly this: love before loss; and being queer, we don’t have any other choice.
So, the question remains, is romantic love the only way of appreciating each other? To me, the answer is unequivocally no. For too long we have been taught to think of marriage as an institution and the only way to move forward in life. But for too many of us, that possibility is getting slimmer by the second, so we must find ways to preserve our existence in other ways. That may be by defining platonic relationships as financially and emotionally supportive ones or by simply sharing our time and laughter as if to say, “This heals my soul.” To love is to survive, and to survive is to be free.
With all my might, I hope we get to see brighter days, but if we don’t, may we all understand that the strength to continue fighting lies in all our loving hearts.