A Personal Manifesto of Queer Resistance and Rebuilding
There is a weight to understanding history. When you know, when you really see what the world did — still does — to people like you, it’s a heavy burden. The pain is hard to describe but it’s an ache, a longing for things to be different than they were. Better. You want to, as Walter Benjamin put it, “stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed”. But you can’t, and the future’s rushing towards you like a hurricane. And you can’t move out of the way in time.
Benjamin describes the past as a pile of…
[Content Warning: This essay contains descriptions of genocide, holocaust-denial, and homophobia.]
Genocides are always painful to consider. Even from a distance, when no one you were related to or whom you could possibly have been was involved, it’s among the most difficult things to do when looking at history. It’s even harder keeping your eyes clear witnessing the horror second-hand, if only for tears, when it could have been you.
I’ve always had more of an emotional reaction to historical events than is strictly standard. Something about an overabundance of mirror-neurons and an overactive imagination, as well as more than…
What Performance Theory Gets Wrong About Gender
This essay is not directed primarily at trans or agender people, who will likely get this on a visceral level (though please feel free to tell me if I’m wildly off-base anywhere). This is for cisgender people who don’t. Because I think it’s something that gets missed, even in otherwise excellent discourses around gender, and we should talk about it.
So with that out of the way, I’ll dive in. This is going to be a long one.
There’s a creator on YouTube called David J Bradley, to whose channel I was recently introduced. He makes videos giving a broadly…
When I was a child, I spent most of my Summers and Easters on a little island off the southern tip of Ireland called Sherkin. My family has had a home there since the ’70s, and three generations of us have forged indelible memories on the beautiful, windswept archipelago and frigid seas we learned to sail. I can take myself back in an instant, if I close my eyes.
It is also a place of not-so-ancient horror. You can see it in the sparse landscape, dotted as it is with ruined cottages. Most of the islands are deserted. The inhabited…
How Millennials Rediscovered Duty in an Age of Selfishness
You don’t hear much about duty these days. It seems perhaps a little old-fashioned, a little reminiscent of bygone ages. It can feel quaint, even dangerous. After a century of conflicts, beginning with one supposed to end them for good, the word echoes with the sound of young men marching off to die for no reason other than that their country asked.
But no soldier ends up fighting for their country. Not really. They certainly don’t die for it. They’re willing to give the last full measure of devotion for the men and women next to them, for their families…
Like most of us, I’ve spent the last few days trying to process the news. Holding onto some semblance of composure as the abject horror, revulsion, and fear roar up through the pit of your stomach to crash against the heart of you is hard. It’s impossible in some cases. You know there’s nothing you can do, no point in giving in — that tears won’t change a thing. You’ve dealt with worse than this, damnit. But they come nonetheless.
Last weekend I wept for my new home. For what might happen to my friends and family. For the dead…
“That’s just absurd!” is something I hear and exclaim with increasing and upsetting frequency these days. Things are somewhat fucked. The President of the United States is a reality TV star, possibly working for the Russians, who praises dictators for murdering their own people. Children full of life and hope and joy die at concerts and in refugee camps to satisfy the homicidal whims of madmen. A young, black student is stabbed to death by a white supremacist in the most gun-crazy country on earth, one of many in a campaign of violence which somehow isn’t labelled terrorism. Extremists want…
Watching someone at prayer is a strange experience for someone who never prays themselves. It is an act both intimate and fundamentally disconnected from the other person. You cannot peer into their consciousness and feel what they do, but you can glimpse their conviction and their faith. It is, on occasion, humbling to see the strength some draw from theirs.
Last night I visited a mosque for the first time. My friend Doug and I, horrified with the hatred now infecting the US government, decided to reach out and see what we could do to help. …
My best friend, Doug, has cancer. He’s 25, and this is the third time in as many years.
Doug is one of the strongest, bravest, kindest people I know. He’s faced everything thrown his way with as much grace as you could ask of any ten of us and somehow managed to maintain a wicked sense of humour about the whole thing — his cancer ward stand-up material is honestly killer.
No matter how you deal with it, though, having cancer still really, really sucks. Simply not being able to rely on your body to carry you through the day…
You are not alone
Dear LGBT youth in America,
When Donald Trump won the election I spent most of the night cradled in my husband’s arms, sobbing. Then I got so angry with the world I put my fist through our kitchen wall. I can only imagine what it must have been like for you that night and in the days since, without anyone’s arms around your shaking shoulders, with no one there to help you grieve.
For those of you living in Trumpland, I can only imagine how it must have felt to watch your family, friends, and neighbours celebrating the victory of…
Bran Keane
A firm believer in the power of a good story, well told.
