Queerness is Everywhere
You can’t tell me this caterpillar isn’t as exuberant as a drag queen
I’ve been revisiting the idea of queerness a lot recently. In fact, this is a bit of a sequel to a blog post I wrote a couple years ago exploring my relationship to the idea of being queer, Since then, sadly, there has been a significant onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation — specifically anti-trans and anti-drag legislation — in Republican-controlled parts of the country. This whole thing just baffles me.
On the surface, I am not a threat to the current paradigm. I’m a white, masculine-presenting dude who just so happens to be gay. Most of the laws being passed now aren’t targeting me directly. Just below the surface, though, I can barely contain my weirdness, and I seem to be unfolding in ever-queerer ways as I get older. I’ll gladly start talking anyone’s ear off about how amazingly strange and absurdly cool the world around us actually is.
Ironically, I’d argue that the demonization of gay people when I was growing up gave me the freedom to pursue weirdness wherever I found it. If I was already going to hell, why not go there in a rainbow-studded hand basket? This manifested as my interest in nature, other religions, and so much more.
While this new breed of demonization is heartbreaking to witness now, I’ve got hope that it will wake a sleeping dragon dressed in drag with tits for days and a wicked red lip. As a collective, we’re just going to keep getting stranger in response to all of this, and it will be beautiful to witness. Conveniently, this means that we’ll keep mirroring the world around us in ever-grander ways since the Earth is queer as fuck.
Queerness Found in Place
Considering the concept behind my website and the magic and thinking I’ve been up to the last few years, everything with me unsurprisingly comes back to place. I’ve been in Florida for about three months now, and there’s some queer-ass shit in nature pretty much everywhere down here. For the love of fuck, one of the most-revered symbols of the American South is the combination of live oak trees wearing wigs of Spanish moss, and they’re fabulous.
Just look at that fabulous Spanish moss!
The first formative thoughts for this blog entry came on my journey to and within Little Manatee River State Park. Manatees are some of the weird-ass, fish-like mammals that started off as underwater beings, came above land for a little bit and said “nope, this isn’t for me,” and then went back to the seas. Except when they went back below the surface, they had evolved away the ability to breathe underwater, and now they have to hold their breath for ridiculous lengths of time just to survive out there. That is badass and absurd.
Today, meanwhile, I spent some time watching an absolute drag queen of a caterpillar in a park. There were dozens of them in this one spot near a live oak, and they were bright yellow and fuzzy with ornate antennae and vibrant, red faces. I’m sure one of the contestants on Dragula would have an absolute field day with these things as inspiration. These caterpillars got me thinking about how incredibly bonkers — and thereby queer — moths and butterflies are. They start off as these crawling things, turn themselves into soup for a little while, and then emerge as beautiful flying insects with curly straws for tongues. What the fuck.
These examples demonstrate that those of us in the LGBTQ+ community are not aberrations of nature. We are reminders that the world around us does not and will not fit into neat little boxes. It is so much more wonderful and complex and amazing.
The best part about everything happening now is that the world around us is practically begging us to remember how amazingly queer it all is. Sadly, the disconnection from nature that Western and Christian culture is founded upon requires a near-constant policing of one’s own thoughts to ensure human supremacy over everything else. The same structures that pressure us to not think about the weirdness in nature are the same ones asking us to constantly adhere to very rigid expectations when it’s clear that life and the world around us are anything but rigid.
The Magic of Pronouns Makes it Even Weirder
One of the interesting focal points of the queer, trans, and non-binary movements draws attention to the words we use to describe each other. Language can be very constricting, and the particular constrictions of English are a rabbit hole that some of my favorite thinkers have already covered.
For years now, I’ve been tempted to add “they” to my pronouns simply because doing so would help me remember who and what I actually am. In fact, all of us are simply giant living sacks containing trillions of other living beings that are somehow aware of themselves as larger collectives. Despite being literal porous bags of cells, we are somehow able to talk to each other and convey thoughts and meaning. What even is that as a concept?
Wild Mind, Wild Earth by David Hinton is helping me to trouble the idea of perception and the self. To put it another way, it’s helping me to trouble the pronoun of “I,” something Western culture and Western minds are into using pretty much every damned moment of every damned day. Hinton’s book takes a look at the Zen / Ch’an Buddhist perspective of “wild mind.” Buddhist practice tries to bring awareness to the fact that there is no self. There is no “I.” Besides being sacks of cells capable of talking to each other, when you get down to it, we’re just the universe experiencing itself. In addition to the temptation to have others think of me as a “they,” I’m very much drawn to thinking of myself as “the universe itself.” Instead of “I am writing this,” it actually should be “the universe itself is writing this.” While I find language to be limiting lately, it can also be a great tool to help us all remember the sheer queerness of the world we’re a part of.
Despite the absurdities around language and the current legal setbacks, those of us within the LGBTQ+ community will go on existing and thriving. Thankfully, our mere existence will conveniently continue to poke holes in all of the bad metaphors and assumptions and beliefs that are in some very painful death throes. More specifically, Conservative Christians can try to legislate us away all they want, but they’ll just continue running up against a world so weird and so beautiful that the boundaries and borders they keep trying to imagine will simply crumble to dust. One day, at least.
In the meantime, I think every single one of these wrong-headed lawmakers needs to go touch grass and watch some fabulous caterpillars in a park. It’s a much better way to spend one’s time than poring through the Bible for ways to make other people miserable.