6pm, my timer rings. I opened my eyes 2 minutes before, after 5 times of actually being woken by the same ringtone. I switch it off. I feel emotionally drained, any move requires extra stamina. I wanted to sleep for 30min, it turned into an hour. I wanted to work out, never got to it, I need to work but not really starting it. Instead I am beating myself up about the things I am not doing or getting done. There is no getting done without doing.
06/10
07/10/2025
Yesterday was spent reading. I read “narrating the closet”. It was very moving at times. It also felt a bit antiquated. I think queer identity has been through a lot of shifts since the early 2000s. Tony E. Adams talks about a certain obligation to come out. Like society expects you to come out. There is this internal battle that seems very central to the book and his enquiry - the question of when to come out. A question that is constantly asked in every new social setting. Coming out “too early” might make people uncomfortable, like you are pushing your own identity into the situation, almost unasked for, while coming out “too late” brings with it a sense of having lied to the other person until now, regret and shame.
I don’t think in our day and age it is a requirement to come out anymore. I find it hard again and again to strip my experience from the fact that it is made mostly in a setting that is extremely liberal, open and overall queer. Usually, in the bubble I am navigating, I don’t come out to people, and neither do they. I would say it is asumed I am gay or queer from the way I present myself, which in itself feels odd, because ideally I would assume we would move past a notion of being able to identify queer markers in people’s behaviour or looks. I sometimes feel like we are in a post-queer scene. One where everyone just is, besides their gender or sex, and interacts with others on the same assumption of non-definition. Attraction thus could be this sterile thing, a scale of low to high, and whoever feels mutually attracted to another can figure that out through interaction and communication.
I get the feeling sometimes that it is this fickle in-between phase of society, where we are not at the point where everyone is an individual that can feel attracted to another individual. In a way it is utopian - this total dissolution of distinct identity. And the thing about utopias is that they most often hold within them a dystopia, it is usually all in the framing. If we dissolve any characteristics of gender and sex, attraction and its physical manifestations, we end up being fully individuated and fully homogenous all at once. We would be single entities within a total soup of every Other there could be.
It is hard to ascertain if this is something worth working towards, for it would simultaneously be a kind of total assimilation, a silent agreement on everyone being the same that eradicates any claim to equality or lack thereof. Our differences, grouped and packaged as sorting us into different “groups” is what gives us the very reason to fight for being reckognised as the same? Or not the same, rather the same value?
If language constructs our reality, then being able to say “I am gay” or “I am queer” is what enables me to position myself along gay and queer lines. It is simultaneously what makes me similar to my “kin” and different from the Other. This differentiation feels arbitrary in my liberal bubble. I do not feel different there, we are all different in ways and sexuality and sexual orientation becomes a benign thing to discuss, the scaffolding of difference breaks away and there is not much to hold onto anymore. We become solitary in the mass. That’s when I feel it superfluous to point towards my queer identity for validation or recognition. I exist outside this bubble, being perceived by people, called names by strangers, getting weird looks from strangers, strange questions, threats and so on, and then when I reach safe haven, the thing I was so sure was the reason for my mistreatment falls away, my struggle becomes redundant. It feels like hysteria.
We need language to describe who we are, in what ways we are different. And difference can be uniting. It’s an oxymoron and its relational. The difference from one group creates a group. (See the chapter on the orient in queer phenomenology.) It seems to me as though this difference is what is being fought. In queer movements, what is it that we want? To be the same? I guess not. To be equal?
Once we are equal the differences become unimportant. Opression is a form of control, that one is obvious. It’s not fully the core of what is bugging me.
Opression creates hierarchies. The feminine usually being at the lower side of things. The gay man is opressed for his supposed feminine characteristics. I say supposed here, I guess they are feminine point blank. I feel like I am brainwashed because I do not want to call behaviours feminine or masculine, they are read as such by a society that has learned to group them as such, the question is whether they are originally feminine or masculine, is the distinciton synthetic or original?
In any case, once equality is reached and “feminine” features or behaviours would no longer be seen as less than, there would be no reason to avoid them. It seems only people who are straight cis men can avoid them but even they are obviously suffering from this avoidance. The thing is - lets make it tangible - lets talk about nail polish.
Nail polished used to be very gendered. A thing for women. Then queer men embraced it as an act of visibility and resistance in a way. And nowadays it seems everyone is embracing it. And once that point is reached, it loses all its meaning somehow.
Maybe I am desparately clinging onto defining features of my identity, why am I so scared of being equal and then having “nothing left” that could differentiate me?
Wouldn’t that be salvation? Pure being? Or would I feel pained by a loss of marginality? I would want to point at the past and say, look, no, you are getting this all wrong, it was not as rosy as it seems now, my way here was quite treacherous, I swear. I want to victimise myself to get a voice, to be ahead. Maybe I am scared of mediocricy.
A level playing field seems scary to me and that realisation reads to me as an incredibly privileged and egotistical point of view. A level playing field would rid me of all meaning? Take away my status as opressed and what is left are my manifold stati of opressor as a white middle class man.
This sounds like I have never grappled with my own privilege which makes me feel ashamed.
(This is all the problem with the heterotopia, no? I feel like I am unraveling concepts people have been aware of for very long. Don’t know if that makes me stupid or if unraveling them myself is better than apprehension. Experience surely is worth more than apprehension, no?)
A different thought. Both “Insult and the making of the gay self” as well as “Narrating the closet” talk about the flight of rural space as a queer instinct. Flight as a means of re-writing your identity, one that - as a queer person - you have probably betrayed before - towards yourself and others.
Now I want to question flight as a spatial means of escape only and move into temporal flight.
Temporal flight i.e. the urge to be within a different time.
This marks the third year of me staring at my grandmother’s house. Not in physical reality but in digital representations. Digital photographs, 3D scans and renderings, sketches, bread. I am not fleeing there physically. (yet?) It is an empty house, now only inhabited by cats as far as I know. I could go there but that would - i believe - only prompt further projections into a past rather than a different space. Melancholic feelings, a desire to be back in that past maybe?
What makes me want to be back in that past, I can - for now - only speculate. It might be a feeling of ease, one that goes hand in hand with being a child most of the time (another privileged thing to believe, having an “easy” childhood is definitely not the norm). In a way it is bittersweet to reflect on my identity as a queer person within that space - something I have mentioned before. If I am allowing myself to be very cerebreal about it, the thing i revere about that place is how home-y it was, how family existed there in a beautiful harmony. As a kid I was wonderfully oblivious to the