Queering Healing

Vigil for Victims of the Pulse Shooting in Orlando, FL - June 13, 2016

Roxanne Zech (interview March 15, 2018)

"My twin sister who goes to school in Cleveland lives in gender neutral housing because their roommate is nonbinary and also polyamorous so my sister has gotten to talk to them a lot and honestly seeing them in the background of facetiming my sister and talking to them about shit has been amazing and it's not a physical space but it's totally a queer space"

"When I walk by Stonewall I think about my much older coworker at the library who is very gay and who had this man who he loved who died of AIDs back in 1982 and it makes me think of those kinds of stories, the suffering that had to happen for us to be at a place where today I can walk with my boyfriend in the street holding hands. And yeah we get stared at and sometimes we called out, depending on the neighborhood, but it's clearly not how it used to be, it's much more okay. And Stonewall is a testament to that, look at how far we've come. So it's like sadness in that my coworker had to lose all his friends and get fired from his job for being gay and all that while at the same time he has a partner today and he is gonna get married and he has a good job. You know, it's a story of progress. Stonewall is a place where I realize the privilege I have living in this decade. It could be so much worse. And it used to be."

Ashley (interview on April 21, 2018)

we only have so many spaces

http://www.mcnallyjackson.com/event/16-pills-carley-moore-dawn-lundy-martin-and-stephanie-k-hopkins-prince-street

"I actually don't love Cubbyhole though because I think a lot of women there are very aggressive and just because it's two women you can still be a predator. I feel like I was kind of taken advantage of there because I was so young. So I don't really seek out those spaces... I don’t think that I limit expressing my identity to a physical space but I do feel like social media is the best place for me to express my identity. I reach the biggest audience through technology and that feels powerful to me.”

Avery Bonner

"When Pulse happened I was in DC with my girlfriend at the time, we had just gone to pride so when we found out we were devastated because that could have been any one of us. And pride had just happened so it was really happy and then to have that happen was crazy. So when we got back to the city I really wanted to go to the vigil at Stonewall but I didn't end up getting there."

"There are not too many spaces where you do have people of low income or black and brown identified or people who are not able-bodied to occupy these spaces but they also experience trauma as well. It also comes into this other question of whether there should be a new queer agenda. Like what would it mean to encompass these different narratives and making sure that everyone's heard. And even looking at homelessness as well, like marriage equality was all about assimilation to being in a civil union but the queer agenda never had a conversation about homelessness and how we're able to take care of not only queer youth in homeless shelters but everyone who is displaced."

"When I think of a queer space I think of... as lame as it sounds... Tumblr. I think it was probably the main factor in coming to terms with my bisexuality. Besides the fact that I had a crush on a girl. It's so open and nonjudgemental about LGBT things... On Tumblr you're either a leather jacket bi or a denim jacket bi and like obviously I'm a denim jacket bi... it's just really easy to identify with those things because its such normal stuff, like we're talking about clothing, not the big lofty fact that we like people of the same gender. It normalizes it and it becomes easy to go there."

Lee Edelman (The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive)

"Pulse is what made me come out. I knew I was bisexual from like junior year of high school probably, not in so many words but my freshman year of college I was like yeah cool that's what that is. But I kind of thought I was one of those people who was like 'straight people don't have to come out so why do we have to come out?' ... but then after Pulse happened it made me so deeply sad and I thought, 'there are still people being literally murdered for being queer and the least I can do is make myself visible."