don't eat ants

Tanka Diary

The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You  know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.

Compulsory heterosexuality works most powerfully in the most casual modes of conversation. One asks: ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ to a girl, or one asks ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ (to a boy). Queer subjects feel the tiredness of making corrections and departures; the pressure of this insistence, this presumption, this demand that asks either for a ‘passing over’ (a moment of passing, which is not always available) or for direct or indirect forms of self-revelation (‘but actually, he’s a she’ or ‘she’s a he’, or just saying ‘she’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘he’ instead of ‘she’ at the obvious moment). No matter how ‘out’ you may be, how (un)comfortably queer you may feel, those moments of interpellation get repeated over time, and can be experienced as a bodily injury; moments which position queer subjects as failed in their failure to live up to the ‘hey you too’ of compulsory heterosexuality.