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 have another bump, and foam party on the crazy train. Biden’s campaign bus was just highjacked outside of Austin, the Trump administration has been soliciting ex-military and retired police officers for months to be “poll watchers,” and Trump started talking about the 12th Amendment out loud at rallies, without ever having read the Constitution. (If neither candidate achieves 270 electoral votes, the election heads to the house where each state gets one vote. Trump would likely retain office by one vote in this scenario.) This has been one colossal, Republican incel, D&D script for thirty years and they think it’s finally Thunderdome time.

What will the Slytherin takeover actually look like? We will not even be able to assess the wreckage of the last four years before the next protracted disaster begins. Gird your loins stable Queers, they’re coming for you first. The Supreme Court will overturn marriage equality as fast as they can shove a new case through the…