Fuck Your Queer Politics
Bottom Betch Issue #2: On Why I Will Show Up To Our First Date as Velma
Dear Gottmik,
Thanks to you, Instagram would like me to calm the fuck down. I am locked out of changing my name and pronouns for 14 days.
Last week, I promised my readers an essay on the historic significance of your being allowed to compete in this season of Ru Paul’s Drag Race. For months now, I have been similarly identifying as “a transgender man in drag.” I was planning to write on the three dimensions of gender — sex, identity, and expression — and argue that the pronouns you use can arbitrarily match any of them. I then went down a rabbit hole of PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome) research, trying to argue that I am intersex and that any gender I identify with is a trans experience. Not surprisingly, I gave myself a panic attack and couldn’t write it.
Instead, on Sunday I ended up watching a movie that changed my life.
What then shall we choose? Weight or Light?
In every romantic relationship I’ve had, around three months is when I start to fall in love. Around three months is also when my partner starts to ask if we can make things “lighter.” I usually react defensively because I know the heaviness I bring to a relationship is on some level, out of my control — my C-PTSD. It’s the same heaviness I brought to my writing on queer politics that worked me up into a frenzy.
“The Incredible Lightness of Being,” directed by Philip Kaufman, tells the story of a young surgeon, Tomas, who attempts to maintain a bohemian lifestyle or one of “lightness.” His best friend and lover, Sabina, similarly seeks purely physical and ephemeral relationships. Enter Teresa, an ingenue from a provincial town who introduces the weight of love to Tomas’s life. Without spoiling the ending, Teresa and Tomas learn from each other and ultimately find a balance of weight and lightness in their relationship. Through Teresa’s journey, Kaufman taught me that I can find lightness in my being by nurturing my inner child.
Kaufman taught me I’ve forgotten how to play.
Give Yourself Permission to Play
While acknowledging the importance of discourse in creating a more equitable society for LGBTQIA people, I am fucking tired of talking about it. Queers have stopped enjoying being queer, as exacerbated by the need we have to cultivate identity-based communities during the global crisis. Queers, and our causes, would benefit if we created more space in our lives and our culture for play.
Evolutionary and developmental psychology have shown that animals and humans benefit from play in ways that have potential political consequences: (1) to practice skills that are essential to survival and reproduction; (2) to learn to cope physically and emotionally with unexpected, potentially harmful events; (3) to generate new, sometimes useful creations; and (4) to reduce hostility and enable cooperation. What distinguishes “play” from politics, however, is that “play” is an activity, from the conscious perspective of the player, that is done for its own sake.
Play teaches us the value of the “thing in of itself” and celebrating who we are without any cultural narrative. As queers, we have come as far as separating sex from “meaning” when we refer to each other as playmates who attend play parties and play together. But what if we started to detach meaning from other aspects of our identity? What if we spent more time dressing up like cartoon characters, knocking each other out in Super Smash Bros, and voguing until the sun rises instead of trying to define who we are? What if I gave myself permission to just enjoy the freedom of being a big, weird kid discovering the world again?
That’s what I love about drag. It lightens the unbearable burden of being queer. It’s political without trying to be.
Love this! Thank you! I was just thinking this week we often lose the joy of being queer Bc we get so wrapped up in claiming space for ourselves. We are allowed to play and enjoy our sexuality, which in and of itself is a form of resistance.