Reimagining Queer for the End Times

What must Queer apocalypse culture produce?

Photo by Lance Anderson on Unsplash

As I sit down to write on this crisp Halloween afternoon, instead of doing what all Queers should be doing at this exact time every year — opening champagne leftovers from Halloween brunch, putting on our favorite 90s R&B mix and finding drugs and shiny things for our favorite queer holiday — I find myself quarantined, tussling with an imaginary Queer future that could start as early as next week.

What if Republicans pull off the coup they’ve been telegraphing for months? What must Queer become in a world controlled by caricatures of joyless middle-school principals driven mad with the power and money of lizard popes?

Well, my beloved Sodomites, shit’s about to get even weirder. Maybe you’re getting sucked in by the polls, making spritzers from optimism and your box of pinot grigio and doom. I’m down. It’s going to be a bumpy night and all that, bitches. Perhaps the Democrats will forgo performative normativity long enough to salvage democratic institutions. Maybe Elizabeth Warren’s golden retriever, Bailey, has trained to be an elite scrotum assassin, and will be released on the Senate floor in the event of a contested election.

Or, just as a backup, maybe we should embrace the Jerry Springer universe we live in now. Fuck it, let’s…