I delivered a modified version of this speech for the National Coming Out Day dinner at Michigan State University on October 11, 2018, on the theme of LGBTQ+ mentors and community.
It is so good to see you all here. This feels like a sacred space; Michigan State has had many wonderful LGBTQ+ activists and thinkers come and go over the years. This gathering is a continuation of that legacy of activism. Regarding gathering, I think of the words of activist and writer Sara Ahmed who said this: "If anything, I would see queer as a commitment to an opening up of what counts as a life worth living... To inherit the past in this world for queers would be to inherit one's own disappearance... The task is to trace the lines for a different genealogy, one that would embrace the failure to inherit the family line as the condition of possibility for another way of dwelling in the world." (1) This is one dwelling here. I think of the other places I have dwelled among trans and queer people. In the Resource Center, laughing and playing games. In Esquire and other gay bars where 50- and 60-somethings share their stories of the terrifying but necessary paths to survival. Backstage during drag shows, hearing the stories of trans women who did not feel it was safe for them to be out. Online after the death of my drag sister, Pacifica Rim, wondering why this happened. These spaces don't always last long and like the far-apart platforms in a video game level, it's hard to know sometimes how to get from one to the next. Little things like affirming words, reflection on the good times, and tiny, lovely little things like a mug of cocoa or seeing a happy dog feel like power-ups that help get us from one to the next. Our community spaces can become more frequent too, so that the jumps are smaller and more easily made. When we commit to Ahmed's conceptualization of queer, "a commitment to an opening up of what counts as a life worth living," we commit to crafting space - within and around our bodies, between our bodies and others. We commit to bringing other queers around our family tables and cobble together our makeshift, ever-shifting families. My mentors have done this for me - and my mentors aren't just the people whose offices I inhabit to get career advice. My mentors are the people who open up possibility. My advisor, a queer person who moves through the academy that has narrow concepts of what family is. My colleagues and friends whose gender-expansive identities laid a new path for me to take when I left my home as a domestic violence survivor and charted new territory as a transfeminine person. Just as Ahmed suggests we create a different geneaology, drag queen BenDeLaCreme famously declared, as she left the show RuPaul's Drag Race, "If you don’t like the rules, make your own. We create our own beauty. We define our own success." Our failure to conform to certain rules, to certain families, to certain pre-dispositions is exactly where our potential lies to live a rewarding life. This is not easy. But I hope you all, who are my heroes and my beloved for being here with me tonight, will continue to craft the space you and your loved ones need, and will continue to break the rules you don't need. These are how we will continue dwelling and make a new world for those who are yet to come. (1) Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenomenology. https://www.dukeupress.edu/queer-phenomenology
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AuthorI am a higher education professional and sporadic blogger. I have opinions and tell puns. Archives
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