“At the core of homonormativity is an erotics of whiteness, which designates some bodies as undesirable, too submerged in the dirty waters of signification to rescue. This was one of the hardest lessons to learn—that a persecuted people could reinscribe the violence of ontological shaming. Judith Butler probes the limits of “outness”. “Who is represented by which use of the term (queer], and who is excluded? For whom does the term present an impossible conflict between racial, ethnic, or religious affiliation and sexual politics? What kinds of policies are enabled by what kinds of usages, and which are backgrounded or erased from view?” Queers who ride the advantageous waves of whiteness slide smoothly into the depths of the norma-tive. This is done at the expense of racial flourishing. On dating apps, where white men hide behind a veil of anonymity but discriminate out in the open, this identity crisis wages on- “NO FATS, NO FEMS, NO ASIANS” is a banner under which white men build a dystopia. I could recite the vulgar speech that's been hurled at me, but I won't. There's too much to mine in them from those who feed, like vampires, on the spoils of injurious information. Of course this doesn't negate the violence entirely—it lingers as a spectre, tied to the bank of memories we have about vicious language. Perhaps that spectre is politically volatile enough to arouse a sense of injustice to end the slow making of a queer future replete with racism. Maggie Nelson: “And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?” Has anyone ever managed not to mould the body into an archive of their own degradation?”
— Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body, pp. 68-9
the snow kept everything quiet.
even the city below.
as if the cold had pressed pause.
i wasn’t looking for anything.
just letting the light reflect off the ice
and the railing hold my weight
for a minute longer than usual.
a counter.
a cortado.
a book that doesn’t let you look away.
the sugar on the pastry barely held.
like the light outside—thin, unsure.
there are days when survival is this:
coffee warm, pages open,
grief in the margins.
the sun was generous.
the grass didn’t mind.
but the quiet felt too practiced.
i spoke because not speaking
would have been a kind of surrender.
not to correct.
not to clarify.
but to stay present,
even when presence felt like exposure.
this is where the wealth came in.
sugar. cotton. tobacco.
extraction and enclosure made into ornament.
the names are still here—
merchant, plantation, st. vincent—
this city remembers through what it refuses to rename.
i walk this route not to map it,
but to feel where the archive ends.
my drift isn’t about finding answers.
it’s about tracking the infrastructure of forgetting.
what the buildings obscure.
what the street names naturalize.
what passes for neutral.
these façades:
they’re policy.
they’re inheritance.
they’re proof that the empire never left—
just rebranded.
i wasn’t here for this.
just passing through—
a few hours between panels across town,
a few steps off schedule.
but the building held something.
not promise exactly.
just presence.
age without apology.
history without invitation.
found in glasgow.
a plaque for john a macdonald.
quiet.
official.
the story is familiar.
lawyer. prime minister. nation-builder.
but here, the stones don’t pretend neutrality.
they know what they financed.
the plaques change languages,
but the story stays the same.
the empire loops.
it reappears in bronze and sandstone,
across oceans,
still naming itself as legacy
instead of violence.
spotted in a museum across the ocean.
a totem pole
far from the coast from which it came.
the plaque talked about artistry.
not land.
not theft.
not how many hands it passed through
before arriving here, under spotlights.
i didn’t read the full description.
didn’t want to.
the object already said more than the label ever could.
some things don’t lose power
just because they’ve been displaced.
the symmetry felt like a question
no one was answering.
sometimes the wait stretches
longer than the journey.
sometimes the quiet
is what stays with you.
i sat and cried.
not loudly.
just enough to feel it leave my body
a little at a time.
an older woman beside me
was crying too.
i passed her a tissue.
we didn’t speak.
above us: the water fell,
the light held.
a circle that didn’t ask anything from us.
grief moved between strangers.
not for explanation.
not for closure.
just to be felt
together.