Pausing for a moment of queer joy.

This world is stone-cold hard. It’s too easy to sink into that grayness. To see nothing but what paves over all we love, all we desire and yearn for.

To always feel, as the hauntingly beautiful new album from @blackoxorkestar phrases it in a song that could make a rock cry, that “there’s something missing that could make us whole.”

Queer joy makes whole. Not always, and for many, not often. Or not often enough.

Yet it never abandons the desire for that nonbinary messy beautiful wholeness, complete with cracks still visible and honored.

And when those moments come, queer joy knows how to revel in them, dance with them, share them; squeeze out every ounce of delicious, self-generated, spontaneous, otherworldly time-spaces; dream forward about more euphoric moments.

So one has to pause each time, and leave a “note to self” etched across the barren landscape. As remembrance, as fuel and fire. As shared wink to others of what’s possible. As concrete evidence that those moments aren’t mere moments. They are the connective tissue of lives worth living.

#QueerAsFuck
#BeGayDoCrime
#BeGayDoJoy
#ArtOfRemembrance
#ArtOfResistance
#TryQueerAnarchismForLife

(photo: purple circle A spray painted across a sidewalk leading into @defendatlantaforest, because #QueerNotCops, paused by in mid-October, and woven—through friendships new and older—into the queer-joy pause of the few days in Oberlin and Cleveland, thanks to too many fabulous anarchists to name here)