‘Who Cares What Straight People Think?’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
As a writer, and a queer one at that, Brandon Taylor’s essay on queer narratives in fiction rang all the bells in my head. It asks that queer fiction be more than stories of struggle and violence—or, rather, that queer fiction include those stories as well as ones of “bucolic malaise.” It’s a simple but unfortunately difficult paradigm to work toward. The themes of dominant culture (heterosexual, patriarchal, able-bodied) all but demand that anything that cuts against this grain explain and justify itself.
It’s exhausting. I’ve burned through a fair amount of therapy copays talking about what queer struggle means and doesn’t mean to me, and how I position myself in the everyday that surrounds me. The evolution of my queerness doesn’t immediately involve trauma or darkness or struggle, and that in turn has caused partial identity paralysis. When so much of queer fiction/nonfiction/poetry is often defined by trauma, darkness, and struggle, a difficult backwater flows in. It has taken work to free myself from it.
None of this is supposed to take anything away from the vital and incredible queer writing that’s out there, but for me, the essay elucidated my relationship to queer writing as: “I see you; I don’t see me; I want to see us both at the same time.” What Taylor writes about here is a banishing of the sort of binary that exists for queer writing. He writes, “Our comfort and our agony are of a piece. They reflect one another across the length of our experience.” That resonates, as does his call to “stop waiting for permission.”