Queer
Queer
I don’t know if I am queer. Who gets to be? 1994. Wooster, OH. The only male Women’s Studies major on campus and reveling in the disturbance and confusion it caused. “Is he gay?” “It must be to meet girls.” “Why else would he be studying that?” The voices of suspicion. Was I? By then I knew that my desires were not simple. Was I queer? I was queering. I’m interested in performing gendered disruption, the subtle subversions of making people not quite sure...
Straight-Queer masculinities, “. . . outside hetero-normative constructions of masculinity that disrupt, or have the potential to disrupt, tradition images of the hegemonic heterosexual masculine.” (Heasley 2005)
Heasley’s typology of straight-queer masculinities:
Straight sissy boys
Social justice straight-queers
Elective straight-queers
Committed straight-queers
Males living in the shadow of masculinity
I can’t imagine who claims these as their identity, but maybe there is revolutionary utility in defining queered or queering masculinities. 1993. “Some people think I’m gay.” She laughed. “You’re the straightest student in the department.” What did she know about me? She seemed so certain. Champneys said I was a tragic non-initiator.
Queering is a method….
I don’t know if I can queer. Who gets to? ADT queered me. ContraPoints queered me. Maybe the hernia and Laurel Lynette. The Women’s Studies degree. Wait, no, it must have been the Mapplethorpes. Queer, cuir, cohere. Queered, qweird, queried.
….to develop generative and ‘diffracting’ ways of knowing. (Ireland, 2019)
