Queer Joy & Resistance

 From an article in Salon:

When progressive political commentator Keith Edwards recently turned the New York City Pride March into a two-hour livestream of queer joy, he put a name on what he was doing. The GLAAD-backed broadcast was built, in part, for people watching alone in states where Pride can feel dangerous. “One of the most radical things you can do in a moment of extreme fear and a moment of authoritarianism,” he told The Advocate, “is to experience joy and happiness.”

Weeks earlier, RuPaul had posted that the only response to fascism was to party and dance, and was sharply criticized for it. Two moments, weeks apart, but the same uneasy question beneath both of them: Is joy resistance? Or is it what we call avoidance when we want avoidance to sound principled?

In a country where LGBTQ+ people are watching their rights stripped away in statehouses, drag performers turned into political targets and trans people used as campaign-season fuel, “go dance” can sound almost heartless. But queer people have had this argument before.

In a 2013 Washington Blade essay about coming out during the AIDS crisis, Dave Purdy remembered older gay men telling him it was wrong for his generation to dance, party or enjoy themselves while their gay brothers were sick and dying. He and his friends rejected that view. For them, the dance floor was not an affront. It was survival, self-love and something close to church.

…

The dance floor was not where the crisis disappeared. It was where the living found one another inside it. That is the part America often forgets. Survival is not only the refusal to die. It is the insistence on remaining human while threatened.

This is the sort of journalism that gets people excited: by just partying and doing whatever you want, you are caring for yourself and this is a valid way of staying centered, and even of… Resisting! 

But the funniest aspect of this is that we are talking about two self-inflicted crises: 

AIDS: Gay men giving each other a lethal disease through fornication. 

Conservative Ascendance: Liberals pretending they are fighting fascism because conservatives have power and are using that power to enforce the law. 

It’s so melodramatic and comical to paint continued engagement in self-destruction as self-care. 

Self-care and resistance during the AIDS crisis is not fornicating. 

Self-care and resistance during the MAGA era is staying informed, debating, participating in the marketplace of ideas. 

But all these guys know is how to justify their vices. Their entire political worldview is based on it.