May 2021. Wildness, suffering, pleasure and freedom pulsing through me, my community, our bigLake watershed, the world. Outside, constantly drunk on one million greens, the wild sensory experiences of early summer, I engage trashE (spacious, truth-telling) perceptions of time and justice. Queer, changeable, fluid, invisible, profoundly personal, impersonal and universal.
In my studio, writing reminds me (nod to Bradbury, who brilliantly crafts experiences where time is suspended, in slow motion, otherworldly) to queer time. Queering time is a transgressive practice dedicated to subverting the dominant paradigm, living life on queer margins of linear reality. Queer Intimacy with Time translates to questioning justice, pleasure activism and practice.
Time is changeable, fluid, invisible. Time heals some wounds and ignores others.
This week I’m thinking about gender inequity, the civil uprising, transphobia and especially the Tulsa Race Riots. After engaging a powerful graphic novel and the NYT created 3-D model of Greenwood, I “step” back in time and see Black Wall Street. Transported, a white person, I become intimately part of the destruction of Greenwood, Oklahoma in 1921. May 31st, the one hundred year mark; May 25th, a year after George Floyd’s lynching. I feel and see how time folds in on itself. We are there and here.
Theodore Parker (an American transcendentalist, reformer and abolitionist) penned the words that became the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. Used originally by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., the sentiment was made even more famous one hundred and fifty plus years later by President Obama.
In 2021 I ask, does time truly bend towards justice? In the context of the erotic and trashE pleasures, what is justice and what the fuck is time? In future posts, I’ll explore both questions alongside how Queer Intimacy with Time connects us to our ancestors who used pleasure to create movements committed to freedom.