Queer joy, queer hope, and poetry

A response to the Supreme Court Judgement

It’s only been a few days since the Supreme Court Judgement, but it feels like a decade. It’s as if one sunny April day, I stepped through time, back into the atrocious overt everyday homophobia of the eighties, the days of protests and marches. With each headline and every piece of guidance from the EHRC, the world gets darker.

This time, of course, it’s trans people – specifically trans women - at the centre of the storm. But we are a community, and we are in it together. In the 1980’s, as gay men were demonised in newspapers and hospitals even as they died, lesbians and trans people were alongside them. LGBTQ+ people are united by the anger and hatred directed at us through the decades. It echoes around us, it lives within us. I have been spat at, shouted at more times than I can count. I’m scared for myself, but I’m more scared that that we will lose more people, that the damage it does a person to be told that the identity they have painfully built for themselves is over. I’m scared that it will be too much for some people to bear.

And because of that, I want to think of joy. Queer joy, and queer hope. Because by its very nature, being queer – even, or especially, at the darkest times in our shared histories – has joy at its core. After all, our desire for love and freedom is what brings us together. To come out, to transition; to love when you’ve been told you cannot; to be yourself when the cost is horribly high - you have to be hopeful. You have to be deeply committed to joy.

If you want to celebrate queer lives and queer poetry, you could start with 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022). Edited by Andrew Macmillan and Mary Jean Chan, it gathers together queer poems from across the last century, from Charlotte Mew to poetry so fresh it feels like it was published five years in the future. Good poetry is rarely all light or all dark – and this anthology takes in the pain and violence of queer lives - for example, in Jay Hulme’s In the Future:

In the future people like me

will not be able to distinctly describe

the scent of the floor in the men's toilet

that time they were slammed into it

But at the heart of the anthology is the fact that queer people walk over hot coals just to love, to live honestly, to be happy. We are hopeful.

Here's an extract from one of my favourites, Reasons for Staying by Ocean Vuong:

“Because this mess I made I made with love.

Because they came into my life, my brothers, like something poured.

Because crying, believe it or not, did wonders.

Because my uncle never killed himself—but simply died, on purpose.

Because I made a promise.

That the McDonald’s arch, glimpsed from the 2 am rehab window, was enough.

That mercy is small but the earth is smaller.

Summer rain hitting Peter’s bare shoulders.

Because I stopped apologizing myself toward visibility.

Because this body is my last address.

The moment just before morning, like right now, when it’s blood-blue & the terror incumbent.

Because the sound of bike spokes heading home at dawn is unbearable.

Because the hills keep burning in California.

Through red smoke, singing. Through the singing, an exit.

Because only music rhymes with music.

The words I’ve yet to use: Timothy grass, Jeffrey pine, celloing, cocksure, light-lusty, midnight-green, gentled, water-thin, lord (as verb), russet, pewter, lobotomy.

The night’s worth of dust on his upper lip”.

Today, I’m concerned with the subject, but there is so much craft in this poem – from the exquisite imagery; the dense, lush, sensory detail; the deep, pulsing flow of observation and reflection. How it's held together by repetition: because because because. How this simple scaffolding takes us back again and again to the title which carries such terrible, beautiful weight - especially once we've heard about the uncle, who “never killed himself - but simply died, on purpose”.

And now it’s over to you.

Exercise –

Reflect on that title – Reasons for Staying. And write your own. Let it be as loose and free-ranging as Ocean’s poem appears to be. Allow your line lengths, your tone, your references to vary. Tie your poem together with repetition: start each line with a phrase such as “Because”. Right rapidly, with permission, with fury or love or excitement or whatever feeling drives your pen. Trust your pen. Write rapidly, without pause, for 10 minutes. Then read what you've written, cut it, reorder it. Allow a narrative to emerge if it wants to dash but if it doesn't, don't force it. Write the poem again tomorrow, and the day after that, and for as many days as you need.

And for anyone who needs it, here is one of my most beloved poems – Hope, by Gaia Holmes. I hope you love it too. For my queer siblings - we will get through this. For our allies - thank you. For our paying subscribers, I'll send a separate article featuring “Gratitude” by Jon Davis, with an accompanying exercise.

Hope

Though it seems so dark
and the ceiling of the world’s a wound
and so many hours have been bruised,
and so many lives have been broken,
there are stars up there tonight
and we must name them,
we must love them,
we must whistle them down like dogs
in faith of their shine
and they will be loyal.
They will show us where their bones are.
They will teach us
their soft, bright tricks of devotion.

And even on the blackest nights,
when hope and protest
are knotted in our throats,
when our smiles have been tarred
and buckled with the weight and stain
of shadows,
we have to remember they are there,
those glittering sky-hooked prayers,
prickling and humming,
embedded in that thick and lovely blue,
guarding us from spite,
keeping the moon from slipping,
herding the pale lamb-like dawns
into our sleeping houses
where they flow
through all our rooms
fluent and loving as milk.

Gaia Holmes