We’re weird friends, but we are friends. I would have you at my wedding. You’d be one of the first people I’d invite. I wouldn’t think twice about it.
Your bodies are dangerous to the status quo. Your bodies bust through the armor of the gender binary and the patriarchy. Your bodies fuck up neoliberalism. Your bodies are ending white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. Your bodies are evidence that the colonial project has failed; you are here despite it all. We are here despite it all.
Lesley Gore was a great pop singer, a powerful feminist, a devoted partner and an inspiration to many. She will be greatly missed.
When Geneva and I were driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in a rented convertible, I saw an entire cloud floating next to the highway in the sky over the desert. I could see it spanning what looked like the whole of the sky to the right of us, almost touching my shoulder. I watched it graze the universe on top and I saw rain pouring out of it in the distance and somewhere in the middle, there was a lightning bolt like a heartbeat.
I could have fit my entire life in that cloud. My entire fucked-up, tiny, timid life.
It only took us five minutes to drive past it.
This is as close as Looking gets to introducing an oppositional queer politic, one that believes in articulating a queer identity as a challenge to both straight and gay normalcy. But with two words, the conversation is over before it begins. There’s no mention of the violence of gay powerbrokers in San Francisco, who are more than happy to push aside queer and trans youth, elders, HIV-positive people without money, homeless queers, drug addicts, disabled queers, people of color, migrants from smaller towns and other countries, and anyone else unable or unwilling to conform to narrow notions of white middle-class respectability. In fact, San Francisco is a textbook example of what happens when gay people become part of the power structure—they engineer the election of anti-poor pro-development candidates over and over and over again; they advise property owners on how to get rid of long-term tenants; they fight against the construction of a queer youth shelter because it might impact community property values; they arrest homeless queers for getting in the way of happy hour.
In an ideal world, the internet should be fun and edifying, something that makes your life better. Being online isn’t your job (unless it is? In which case, okay, but to the extent that we’re talking about personal interactions and personal time on social networks), and it shouldn’t be about obligation. We have to put up with things and people we’d rather avoid in almost every other part of our life; the internet, for all its faults, is one of the only places where you can just press a button and take a break from them. This is a long way of saying that if you’re finding that you’re feeling weird or gross or bad in an online space that you’re meant to be able to curate according to your preferences, it’s okay to unfollow them. Seriously!
I was her first. In fact, before me, no one — girl or otherwise — had fucked Marta. No one had plied their lips to her clit, no one had fingered her, no one had made her come. My index and forefinger broke her hymen. We spent long, luxurious hours in bed, stealing off when we could to cheesy hotels — we met as counselors at a Catholic girls’ camp run by nuns. When we didn’t have time away, we would find each other in bathrooms and closets; Marta would rub my clit until I came, mouth upon her shoulder. I’d leave spit trails on her polo shirt.
Like holy shit could she be more articulate, insightful, confident in her own self journey? This is kinda when I knew how smitten and lucky I was.