I am out. A postcard from a stranger that I imagine to be queer or trans*[1] or both tells me that they find home in having made it to the point we met. That having lived and fought to be there was no mean achievement. And it is not. I imagine it was the person whose gaze I met for a few seconds, in a fleeting smile, across the room. One of those ‘I see you’ looks. I have to push myself to venture out of the house into ‘social’ situations – read anything that involves a whiff of humanity. They petrify me to the point of not being able to relax my throat enough to speak, to the point of silence in my head that otherwise has seven parallel dialogues with itself. I read this card and I am happy that I did and know it is because I have a friend who came with me. I wonder if the stranger whom I will probably never meet again, even though we might live in the same city, has a friend too, who came with them.
It is my greatest fear, the thing that haunts me in academic work, in fiction, in actual nightmares, that we – forget the we, that I, personally – will miss the opportunity of queering and transing as political acts, because of how quickly and conveniently we are assimilated. Because of the simultaneous drudgery and ease of it. Today is no less frustrating than it was 20 years ago – when I believed for quite some time that I was the only queer person in a first-tier metropolitan city! I continue to negotiate the cis-het interactions of every day – it is not the cis-ness or het-ness of the people, it is the way in which they sneak into each corner of life, from the eye of the ‘family’ that holds its members in check, to the gendered labour that takes the food on the plate from seed to the vendor’s handcart and from there into the frying pan (if not the fire). Much, though, has changed. Queer community is one WhatsApp group away – not everywhere, for everyone, clearly. Most of my queer and trans* community is scattered across cities, not too far to meet, too far though for the casual togetherness of queer, trans* labour.
It was never about access, though access for sure seemed like a big deal. In the very beginning, in 2004, I remember quite clearly, what I wanted was not access, but revolution in its entirety. Granted, some may say I was young in my dreaming. I wanted, quite shamelessly, an ethic of living, a complete upheaval, a life in which queering didn’t just fit because it was pushed in, sneaked in, quietly manipulated. I wanted the whole caboodle, a narrative with its coherence, drawing everything together only to shake it loose and free of its current obsessions and failures: the sense of self, being, desire, autonomy, agency; the spectrum of friendships, loverships, relationships, and aloneness to boot; the labour, making, capital and culture, the being able to; the shelter, the refuge, the safety; the sharing, the disagreements, the struggle and the collective workings through things. It’s a coherence that has the quality of a utopia, and also its impossibility – but there’s no crime in that either, I think. And I have stopped apologising for needing it, even as daily living feels like being a particularly unskilled developmental editor to a life narrative that refuses to fall into place transly and queerly.
My strategy for survival is drowning in work, which is to say – given the nature of my work – drowning in words. This is an established method, dysfunctional though it may be, and it functions. Words are unforgiving about what some around me would like to call ‘neutrality’, ‘objectivity’, or ‘balance’. It is not all the same whether a student draft or a sample text speaks of encroachment or informal settlements, whether it speaks of queer and trans* family, kinship, affinity or something else. It does not interest me to change the word – I confess it interests me greatly to change the world, no matter how little. It interests me, in that word, to taste that moment of choice, where I know even when the interlocutor may not have articulated it yet, that political lines have been drawn, around which we dialogue and do battle. Words on the page strip the pretence, reveal the interstices of the worlds we imagine.
I know things are beginning to go wrong when, before I realise it, the furniture in my room begins to move. The books are piled up in a different corner, a different sequence in which they wait their turn to be read, looking to find a way out of the latest suffocating crisis – these are outside of work, for the most part, but often also entail words: in newspapers talking about genocide and war, in messages seeking urgent support in a crisis situation in a network that does not seem to exist. I lie. They are at work as well, though outside the ‘purview’ of work. What are you doing, I ask myself, in words again. Failing.
I spend the little time that I have proofreading pages of an incomplete life narrative, irked by my failure, ironing out kinks. It feels too much like complicity, these fragments and pages that don’t come together and don’t coalesce. It feels like living five parallel lives, with their respective priorities, five parallel lives all needed to keep at least the broad strokes of the narrative together. Even when they are at loggerheads. One is to just be able to live in this city – the room of one’s own, roof over one’s head, the privilege of locking the door, of private property (however temporary and rented), of a space for books. From deep within its recesses, labour lurks. The privilege of locking the door comes complicit with someone else’s exploitation. I think back to a long-forgotten model in a former socialist, second world nation, where housing was seen as an employee’s fundamental need in order to be able to lend their services. Not posh subsidised housing and bungalows for those whose salaries can anyway pay for them. I dream, in the present, right here, of living with strangers. Brought together quietly, kinlessly, by the circumstances of our location. Shared housing, shared services, shared amenities, shared costs – by choice, all negotiated. Yes, I know it would be a disaster. Remember the line above about my ability to deal with sociality. I imagine I might just shrivel and shrink but think about this – the queer, the trans*, the underpaid, the unhoused, the migrants, the ethnically or politically wrongly placed, whose tongues speak words in the wrong dialect, whose surnames spell rejection. Think of us living together, not in ghetto but in negotiated affinity of otherwise strangers, who might become comrades and friends.
A house I have watched sit quiet for years has just been demolished. In no time, blocks of flats that most of the people I know won’t be able to afford will appear in its stead. In the time it’s lain vacant, I thought a couple of times, why don’t I get the address of the owners, write them a letter. Tell them let’s make it into a shared living space, the kind where the landlord isn’t peering over your shoulder (directly, via neighbours or well-meaning CCTV cameras) to see who comes and goes. The kind that people new to the city who don’t have other support networks to fall back on can come and live in. The kind that queer and trans* people come to, that working class, Dalit, Adivasi people come to – the kind that makes a shelter out of strangers. A simple revolution, really. One that gives some point of collective (in)stability. I didn’t write the letter. Another failure added to a long list. Now I look once in a while at the rubble and think.
It is in spite of myself, in struggle with myself that I have come to realise that queering and transing as politics, are infinitely more difficult in isolation. It is not an ideological problem, not at all; it is also not a lack of comrades, across the board, because they are present, just elsewhere. It is a logistical problem, plain and simple. It is a problem of enough bodies in the same environment to be able to make a dent. And that is why each time I read something new about queer friendships, about moving away from the monogamous or even romantic relationship patterns that often organise our lives towards something else, I think yet again of the queering and transing failure, that gap between now and utopia, that space where living together and care might possibly push beyond friends, to absolute random strangers willing to construct together, building the comradeship as lives are built.
I am in. Once again. The furniture has shifted. I hear of a friend in a different city talking about work they have done. I catch a glimpse of a friend in another city, marching in the ‘pink block of grief’ at Pride – a friend with whom one of my last conversations was about putting bodies on the street. Another one, as we speak, is hopping cities, constantly turning words into action in her trail. I look at them and I fall in love all over again with how we can – how we will – live the world together, both failure and change.
[1] I use trans* to refer to all those who claim this identity, within and outside the binary.
