Thank you for this fascinating post. Although I didn’t get a chance to see “Across Queer Time,” I am really interested in the provocative questions you raise here, especially around the possibility of viewing time and space as “queered.” Much of what I feel you are engaging with is the idea of telos or genealogy and this feels especially prescient during Gay Pride month in San Francisco. You mention the juxtaposition of both “Dyketactics” and “Little Sheep” and “Ronnie” and “Samstag Abend im Eagle (Saturday Night at the Eagle)” as revealing something about the legacy of the AIDS epidemic and our current moment of living queer in an (erroneous) “post-AIDS” queer landscape. Gay Pride month to me has always seemed a moment to critically reflect both on our current activism and historical legacies. How can we see queer time critically in these contexts? Have we moved from a place of death and disease to a place of safety, and if not, why do we feel this false sense of security?

I was also really interested in your discussion of “coming out” as no longer static or fixed but possibly mutable or fluid. In the 1970 the rallying cry during Gay Pride was always about coming out as an issue of safety, to make the queer community visible as a political force (and consumer class). Have we moved away from this? I agree that in our immediate social networks, it seems less and less important how individuals identify and our relationships are often organized with greater flexibility than in past queer configurations. But is coming out no longer necessary politically? How, then, can we reenvision our queer political allegiances and who holds the right to claim a queer politic? Could this be a call for a stronger and more complicated queer political community, one which sheds some investment in personal identity over collective unity?

I also see the utility of Gay Pride as an opportunity to actively critique the larger gay mainstream agenda which privileges capitalist doctrines of hetero-assimilation through marriage and the patriarchal family etc. etc. We have heard this one before, no? But what your essay brings up for me are more complicated questions of living simultaneously in the past and present, engendering investment in a queer critique that starts from a historical perspective like the arrest at an ACT-UP protest or even one we feel less compelled by (like 1970s lesbian wood sex). What would our activism look like emerging from this historical perspective, utilizing a kaleidoscopic gaze of queer moments?

I am not sure if that makes any sense at all.

Thank you for your work.

I was reminded again this weekend of San Francisco’s role as an safe place for GLBTQ communities as thousands of people from out of town poured into the city for the PRIDE festivities. The gathering at Dolores Park on Saturday for the Dyke March was, indeed, multigenerational. I agree that the Bay Area is in its own league, however struggle still exists and however, I think because of this there is an incredible amount of activism and art practice that expands what we think of as queer or queer related. There are many more thoughts on this – I will leave it here for now and hope to continue the conversation in future posts and/or comments.