Queer has the bad reputation of being undefinable, but we will nonetheless offer three or four ways of understanding “queer,” here organized from the most general to the most narrow.1 The most general understanding of queer* is as an umbrella term* that includes categories referring both to sexualities and to gender identities – gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, and straight-but-not-narrow, but also intersex, transgender, transvestite, genderqueer, two spirit, etc. Queer also includes the refusal of all and any categories. It can also include practice based identities like top/bottom/switch, femme/butch and other relational and role based identities too numerous to list. These forms of queerness can be combined in an infinite number of ways: “transgender lesbian fierce femme,” or “asexual genderqueer top.” I find queer identities to be animate by a playful rebelliousness. There is a lot of hard earned joy there.

For many queers, identity is context driven and changes over time and in relation to others, so these queer identities can be largely provisional, although for some others these identities do solidify and become more or less fixed. Finally, while many of these queer formations are no more than variations on the binary structure of the sex/gender system, to the extent that some identity formations move beyond these, they also become “unbelievable,.” I’m thinking about sexualities that are premised on animal identities (horses, bears, and cats, for example), or ones that take non-human objects as beloveds (like streams, lamp-posts, statues or other works of architecture, art, or nature), or which otherwise fail to be “coherent.”

Now, consider the “unicorn” known as the “male lesbian” (sexuality), the “straight fag” (gender) or the “Log Cabin Republicans” (class), for all of whom a place in queer communities is contestable. Thus, clearly the queer umbrella does not provide cover for all non-normative sexualities, but the tent does hold a motley crew. There is no one thing that unifies queer “identity,” no essential characteristic, but it is a series that depends upon always changing sexual-aesthetic and political practices for its coherence.

The use of queer as an umbrella term is both the most general, colloquial, and the least precise use of the term. The second way to understand queer is in reference to postmodern and poststructuralist theories of identity. This refers us to David Halperin’s definition of queer as* “identity without essence,”*2 a rejection of identity as natural or given.3 What it means for queer to be an identity without essence sometimes aligns with the existentialist view of the radical indeterminacy of our existence, and sometimes also with identity as it is produced through social relations, and manifest in the organization of social spaces and of life. In its simplest form, this queer is a refusal of the causal link between sex/nature and gender/culture. It represents the unhinging of the sex/gender system of compulsory sexuality. ** **

Finally, and more specifically, queer refers the re-appropriation, by Queer Nation, of what was once a term of derision. Officially formed in 1990 in New York City in response to the rise of anti-gay violence in the wake of the AIDS crisis, Queer Nation became known for their controversial tactics, including the outing of public figures like Forbes publisher Malcom Forbes (outted posthumously) and the Mayor of New York Ed Koch (sort-of outted). They got a lot of attention for an infamous die-in action at NYC’s St. Patrick’s Catholic Church against the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to safe sex education and reproductive rights.

Shortly thereafter, in the context of a broadly activist context, queer was a word that started to be used in the San Francisco Bay Area to refer to new kinds of political coalitions that included multiple social justice movements. Historian and transgender theorist Susan Stryker describes the emergence of queer through her phenomenological description of an underground S/M sex party that was called LINKS:

LINKS, as its name suggested, forged connections where they otherwise might not have existed. I first encountered there the word queer, as it is since has come to be used in academic and community discourse, in chill-out conversations after dungeon sessions, in the summer of 1990. We used to name the previously unnamed social formation taking shape at our parties, which we saw as part of a larger political and conceptual shift in identity-based movements, related to the AIDS crisis and, few moths later, to anti-Gulf War activism. “Transgender” was a word I first encountered on a flyer advertising a LINKS “Gender Play Party’, early 1991. For most of us there, gender was something we explored, analyzed and experimented with in the context of a broader engagement with bodily practices and power; people came at questions of gender from many different angles and emotional investments, with no one right way to proceed (Stryker, 2008).

In this sense, queer is a term around which activism and community coalesced at a particular historical moment. This moment can also be read as a repetition of other eruptive moments, other activists coming together in the face of the threat of having “no future," as Lee Edelman put it. I think often of his book these days, *No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive *(2004), as a whole new Generation Z grows up under the threat of having no futures.

Queer has been used anachronistically to extend the sprit of queerness back through history, bringing to relief a lineage of queer kinship that includes the lives, works, and ideas of those in the past whose radical non-conformity informs our contemporary queer aesthetic. For example, take Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s collaborative work. Together, they produced a photographic archive in the years before and following World War II, much of which was destroyed by the Nazis, that arguably imagines a lesbian and queer iconography and aesthetic long before the birth of Queer Nation.

There is also a forward looking, futural, and utopian use of queer for what is yet to become. Jose Esteban Muñoz and Jill Dolan, amongst others, have been developing this queer sensibility in a performance studies context. Queer points us to what we have yet to become, and to what we can imagine beyond the here and now.

But for me, the sense of queer that is most present today is that of life under no future. For those whose HIV/AIDs diagnosis meant a certain and difficult death, life went on in a liminal state between being and nonbeing. This is captured poignantly in the documentary “Silverlake Life: The View from Here” (1993), in which the filmmaker Tom Joslin documents the death of his partner Mark Massi, capturing Mark’s passing, the coroner’s arrival to take the body, and continuing to film after Marks death as he himself becomes ill. (The full film is on Youtube and linked here, viewer discretion strongly advised. There is a view of Mark’s body as the coroner comes to pick him up.) I still think about this film regularly, and what it means to be alive during a live-streamed genocide. The everyday takes on a different cast. Our futures are compromised.

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