Before Exposure: Edmonton’s Queer Arts and Culture Festival started, I sat down with a journalist to talk about the festival. As the interview wound down, our coffee cups long emptied, we began to talk about what it is like to feel a part of the age you live in.
I have never really felt a part of the time in which I live. I think partially it is because I am part of a small cohort, an echo that came between generations. I am too young to be considered Generation X and, depending on the source, too old to be a millennial. I fall through the cracks. My tastes, my prevailing philosophies and default inclinations are not reflected or in line with mass culture. Only in the last few years of getting involved in queer politics, art and culture have I begun to see myself as part of something bigger than my own existence.
It started when I was a teenager, drawn to reading about HIV/AIDS as a way of connecting to a generation of gay men who came before me but who made a huge impact on my life. My interest in HIV/AIDS later led me to be more involved with the gay community and, in time, open myself up to the queer community. In recent years, through my involvement with Exposure and in writing this column, I have begun to meet like-minded individuals and see my place in the grand scheme more clearly.
That is not to say I am now part of a community where I agree with everything, but I am part of conversations in which I understand what is being said and I care passionately that it is being said.
I have found a space and place in time where I feel as though what I do matters, and that what is happening locally to me has global ramifications. A few days into this year’s Exposure I was moved by the photos a friend posted on Facebook of the Proposition 8 rallies that he was a part of in downtown Los Angeles. Gay men and women and their allies were gathering thousands of kilometres away to protest voted-in discrimination at the same time that I and a room full of people were listening to artist AA Bronson weave his tale of art, activism and survival in the face of lost loves, a culture often apathetic to art and a passion to heal and be healed.
The symbiotic nature of being part of the talk at the same time the protest was happening meant that in an essential way Exposure was a part of the protest. Through promoting queer conversation and contribution through the lens of art and culture, Exposure is activating voices, thought and resistance to heteronormative patriarchal systems. Exposure is part of a time in which we are currently living, when the world is again being reminded that gay rights are human rights, and that no matter how we as queers choose to express ourselves—be it through art, culture or marriage—we have the right to do so, and that we do it in the name of all people.
Almost a week after AA Bronson’s talk, poet, activist and academic Eli Clare began his Inside Out keynote address by asking why does he, someone who has walked across America in the name of peace and nuclear disarmament, focus his time on trans and disability activism when a part of him knows that he could be using all his time to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? He answered his own question by speaking about his belief that in fighting whatever issues we choose to fight we are fighting for justice for all. As I understood him, our fight to ensure that we as people who find ourselves gender queer, disabled or any other way in which we exist must ensure that when justice comes for all we can partake—that we are part of the conversation based on who we truly are.
In a speech he gave the previous night at the Transgender Day of Remembrance, Clare spoke of “fierce love”—something that now seems to be the antidote to war—not only as an offering to bring about hope and liberation, but also as an action and, for me, a form of activism.
It was during Noir, Exposure’s closing gala, that I really began to understand fierce love—to feel it heat my veins and open up spaces in my brain. A cramped and transformed Starlite room became, for one night only, a cornucopia of queer tribe delight, with all eyes feasting on the diversity and connections of what we liberally call the community. From the coiffed perfection of the drag king and queens to the seemingly careless thrown-togetherness of hipster homos and everyone in between, the room was a study in differences, allegiances and the best and worst queers have to offer.
While on the dance floor surveying the closed-eyed smile of bodies in movement I realized that the night was right, that all people should have the opportunity to express who they are, in all their complexities, possible offensiveness and beauty. That the feeling of protection and connection that came over me is fierce love, and that is what I am a part of. Fierce love is the time that I belong to.
No comments:
Post a Comment