Queer Joy
Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.
Jeanette Winterson
You told me to write about queer joy
You ask me questions that make me stop and behold
I don’t know if you know that
I’m telling you now
You bring queer joy
Like when I named my puppy after a bird that brings joy and it confuses everyone but she does
So much joy
And so much queer joy, it turns out
Take her to queer spaces, and she brings all the joy, and she finds joy
Like I do
But I think we were talking about
How you made me stop still and think about
Queer joy
If I get to use those words
Because that’s the honest truth
Queer spaces
Queer words
Queer joy
Is still something I tentatively touch
Carefully turn over in my hands and wonder
Is this mine now?
Some new landscape
A pilgrimage
Here’s what I know so far
Queer joy is standing at a bar at a gig in a basement in Manchester and feeling the bass pulse through all of me because I’m all here
Last time I was in a Manchester basement
Trying to tell stories
Trying to make something
Under my skin was -
Let’s not be poetic here -
Conversion therapy
Self destruction learned at church and prayed for by well-meaning people who love God and loving God means people like me need conversation therapy
Alone at night and faithfully in the morning and choosing what to wear and watching what I watched and
Eggshells when a conversation strayed too close and zealous tears in crowded tents and upper rooms
Pleading and working and praying I tried
And leaders and counsellors and pastors and friends
We tried together
To rip out one of the best parts of me
Sorry, did that escalate quickly?
So here I am
A Tuesday evening
Bar
Manchester
Bass
Wondering at it all
Just thinking about how I spent years and beautiful moments and strained-mercy days
Here
In sticky basements of bars and full-of-life fringe theatres
Made many stories and walked these very streets and
Was partly part of this place
This city of
Protest and pride and passion and poetry
Shared stories here that still fill my heart to burst with things that matter
And
Also
I was working even harder than working-in-theatre-hard because alongside all the work on all the other stories, I was doing immeasurable unbearable overtime to erase my own story
Like I was told to
Like that God longed for me to
So it’s a mixed feeling
Being back here
A queer feeling
You could even say
But you know what breaks through
What survives it all
Unbelievably beautiful and strange and alive
Growing like something from a tiny seed
Like a sunrise spreads until everything is lit
That’s right
Righteous
Holy
Queer joy
This singer is so inside her skin
And now I know how that feels
And I find myself writing about queer joy
Where do I begin
How the land beneath my feet as I ache my way up mountains that my grandparents walked Is ancient and fresh and frightening and delicate and full of love and endlessly beautiful all at once
The orchestra of accents you hear just in one day and the zebra stripes and fingerprints and rings in tree trunks
And all the eyes I’ve looked into and all the ways that viola petals can look
I don’t have words to describe viola petals
Have you seen one?
That’s queer joy
Seeing another someone in the street
At the train station
On a stage
At the next table
Leading a room
And I’m not scrabbling around inside to stay hidden and act normal and hang onto racing thoughts
Seeing another someone and thinking
You too
Here we are in this world
And we hold these stubborn
Full-hearted
Intricately beautiful
Day in day out faithful
Fragile and hopeful
Stories in our hearts
Queer joy
Glitter and fury at the Globe and tender communions led by queer clergy laying their lives on the line
And hearing across a room the voice of someone who’s story it isn’t
Speaking up for justice
Seahorses and slime mould and stars and sweet and salty popcorn
Harmonies and dissonance
The richness of so many different bodies inching into Yorkshire waterfalls
The kin of climbing
The oneness of gritstone and finding your grip
The way words feel in my mouth
The aching beauty of sunsets
Skies and bark and newts and freshly made cake and blending colours and paint under my nails and running to collect armfuls of conkers because now I can just be
Who I am
Under this skin
Queerness to the brim
And the stories of others
The bashful beauty of a women who has worked a lifetime to be herself
The wholeness and brokenness of a man wondering if he did the right thing
The niche and whole hearted sincerity of a teenager building a fresh place in this broken world
The pebbled shores and roasted chestnuts and huge marshmallows and awkward laughter and moments of belonging in so many kitchens with new queer friends
Finding our way into queer joy
And
Jesus
Incarnation
Grace
Tearing through binary curtains and walking on water and water into wine
A cup of queer love overflows
What else?
Jumping and shrieking in the sea
Feet burning from the holy ground
Battered by the waves and loved just as you are in your shivering shining queer skin
Do you know that feeling?
Freezing sea and heart bursting
The way a firework feels when it fills the sky and thunders through your heart
Hearing a cello
New shoes
Being home
You know that feeling?
If you don’t know how queer joy feels, I’m telling you it’s like those
And like standing on a Tuesday at a tiny bar in a brave hearted Northern city
Inside your own skin
Just being alive
Just a few more words to end. Not mine, this time. Part of a liturgy from Enfleshed. If you’re someone who likes liturgy, a massive treasure trove is to be found there…
Every time the word “gay” rolls off my tongue…when the words “queer” or “intersex” or “trans” or “nonbinary” or “bisexual” bless my lips…no matter what I’m talking about, I am also, always, sending a love letter, casting a lifeline, praying a prayer, and yes, obviously, waving a flag. So many generations of silence and slurs, of words of violence and of quiet, lonely does-anyone-else-in-the-world-feel-this-way? My heart could burst every time I speak the imperfect but earnest attempts at finding ways to communicate lineages of “us.” Every word, a reaching toward each other. A “you’re not alone” or a “we got each other” and a “isn’t it divine, being this way?”
(From, on speaking queerly in public, by M Jade Kaiser)