<i>QED</i> 10 Years On: Founding Editors’ Farewell

As we close our decade-long editorship of the queer experiment called QED, our hearts are full of gratitude for so many colleagues, collaborators, students, and friends who joined us with tireless labor and warmest encouragement. We thank our marvelous section editors Karma Chávez, Shinsuke Eguchi, Godfried Asante, Bryant Keith Alexander, and Bernadette Calafell; our generous board members and ad hoc reviewers, mentors all; a dozen dedicated editorial assistants from the master's program in Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University; and the hundreds of queer worldmaking contributors inside and outside the academy who filled the pages of QED for the past decade. QED came to fruition because the now-retired director of Michigan State University Press, Gabe Dotto, enthusiastically took a chance on us, and because the incomparable Natalie Eidenier, our manager at Michigan State University Press, shepherded us through every issue, every detail, every opportunity, from beginning to end of our editorship; Natalie made so much possible. In every way with QED, we have been so exceptionally fortunate.We like to say that QED began on cocktail napkins at a now closed gay bar, the Boston Eagle Café, in the South End neighborhood in Boston, which is true. But it was Martha Bates, then-acquisition editor at MSU Press, with whom Chuck was consulting on a new LGBTQ journal the press hoped to create, who called one afternoon to offer the inaugural editorship. Our vision was to create a journal where queer academic and nonacademic worldmakers could meet in the same pages for a diverse readership. Thanks to a suggestion from our first book review editor, Karma Chávez, we worked with MSU Press to ensure a modest stipend for nonacademic contributors. From that driving motive we developed a traditional section for scholarship but also for unconventional essays; a “queer conversations” section that brought scholars and artists and activists and educators together to share histories and strategies and ideas; special issues and forums on exigent topics and epiphanic episodes, past and present, local and global in reach; and a wellspring of reviews to sustain and inspire queer work everywhere. We remember sending two copies of our second issue, focused on Chelsea Manning, to Leavenworth Prison, where she was incarcerated; Bryan McCann's 2016 queer conversation with the New Orleans’ Black Queer activist collective BreakOut, who “described a vision for a space that would provide criminalized individuals with reentry services, resources for community building, and other tools to aid them in self-determination”; and Michael Johnson's letter from a correctional facility in Missouri where he was imprisoned under a regime of HIV criminalization. In that same issue we published a powerfully moving forum on Pulse, noteworthy for us in terms of the quick turnaround to print we were able to achieve and the translation of some pieces into Spanish for contributors who wanted to honor those queer dead on the dance floor in their home language. In 2017, in Montreal, Tom hosted a live “queer conversation” featuring activist and author Sarah Schulman with trans artist Morgan Page, memorializing their trans activist friend, Bryn Kelly. We remember contributors taking us to queer destinations in Russia, Asia and South Asia, Armenia, Mexico, Africa, and more. We remember the individual and collective projects we published on debility/disability, allyship, sartorial politics, Moonlight's fifth, Stonewall's fiftieth, queer indigeneity, and the queer 1990s, and the first special issue on queer gaming. We remember this and so much more as QED found its footing, then its stride.We leave the editorship in a time of great global precarity, reminding us that we spent at least the first two years of QED's life fretting about whether it would survive its infancy. In retrospect, we don't regret that anxiety, because it was and remains a wellspring of the hustle, frenetic striving, cruising, and mobilizing to abet in all ways possible queer generation, its joy and promise—its zigzag entrances and exits, to invoke Berlant and Warner's conception of queer worldmaking—the exhilaration and new life in unexpected queer arrivals. Beleaguered, perhaps always, we should nevertheless take heart that queers fit the battle. We would say, too, that queer labor in this context is not just for queers. In thinking about Emerson Cram's recent important forum on transantagonisms in Quarterly Journal of Speech, for example, the sustainability straits of trans work—the gatekeeping and cannibalism, the exhaustion and burnout—could be answered by colleagues and administrators who dedicatedly and fervently use their labor to help make trans work, all queer work, indispensable and livable. In ways that rarely are publicized, QED has survived and thrived in its first decade because of such embodied queer engagement.We'll close by passing the baton. Given all that we have said here, the future of QED—its next chapter, next generation—requires remarkable queer leadership. And QED has found it in Andy Spieldenner and Lore LeMaster. Lore and Andy have spent their careers as queer worldmakers. Brilliant, fierce, creative, generative, compassionate, indefatigable, Andy and Lore have exemplified engaged scholarship, the queer activist scholar. Their sunrise on this queer horizon is a sight to behold. Long Live QED!

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