Recently, there has been a concerted effort amongst queer bodies to consciously reject the narrative that queerness is inherently tragic. Whilst many have a somewhat melodramatic understanding of trans experiences, derived from observations of films such as The Danish Girl (2015), as well as media exposure to pro-conversion therapy mobs in the UK and USA, this is insufficient representation of the mundanity of joy in the normal life experience of a queer person.
In this piece, I am inspired by two works. These are Gender Euphoria (2021) an anthology of true stories on the topic of gender, edited by Laura Kate Dale; as well as the coming out video-poem of the YouTuber Sophie from Mars (2020). In no way critiquing these works, I intend to comment on the inherent trauma held within.
The first, while successful in getting close to the stated goal of creating a work defined purely by queer joy, is to some degree still a record of gender variant individual’s trauma. This landmark work is most certainly a fundamental change in the evolution of queer media’s campaign to make queer joy more accessible. Nevertheless, I would like to see if I can go further in the pursuit of beautiful queer joy.
As for the second work, the attempt at finding a form of literature which can adequately express the time required to perceive the distributed truths of gender identity in one’s own life, at least one better than the timeline, was remarkably successful. However, there were limits to the style being so closely tied to the lament; a style for wistful reflections on tragedy. Being modelled on the style of monologue Dr. Manhattan utilises in the Watchmen comic series, the emotional tone was often more hiraeth than unfettered joy. This is a pairing that was connected by the D&D actual play series Dice Funk, where both do well at playing with tropes of queer tragedy. I would like to contribute my own take on their style, in a piece of queer comedy.
Art is in one sense an abstraction of imagination. In human imagining, the personality of communities is maintained by the sense of self shared by a whole. For the trans community it often works differently than communities with biological relations, yet within that, purity of meaningfulness can be found in the family discovered. The art is found in the dance when queer family is the subject. A dance of passing items that feel more useful in another’s hand to give a new childhood meaning, of discovering meaning across continents and oceans between strangers that are also somehow sisters. Art on families who are all only family because of the bond, where the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb is something beautiful, and even outside the history of queer media is beautiful recurrent, age after age.
With this in mind, here is a poem, and an analysis, which explores theme of queer familiar joy:
Neighboursons of land and below
We are not just allied, we are
Standing one rainbow not un-
Weaved inseparable undivide-
D
Neighboursdottir in place surr-
Ound of a thousand ear held voice
Know they are with next other
Telling truths put together and
Unhid
Neighbourschild and
Neighboursiblin and
Neighboursparent are
All in set no bounds all overlap as manifest
Interlock of instance ‘pon sort of know it
ABC alphabet stew XYZ xe xenotruthful
Pit to height get onto each other’s instinct
Alien are we?
Cool space folk within the ocean of experience
Sense of pace not fooling us that simple prog-
Ress is enough to describe, bound and define
What the whole of we are
Beyond an
Imagined
Of one alone
Goin’ to sit with a more of truth of more bold below we know more of that whole is soul known deep down
Ace intersects with the strange and quiz folk transport beyond genre bicycle through at least gaieties poetry of Greek Lesbic Sappho
Thunderblush as we recognise one in other who don’t know what we know but here we do get that all beyond the taking of a thousand sounds as one which tis
Written by
Grace D.A. Hardy
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