Making Embrace Possible

When QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking launched in 2013, I was still drinking and would continue doing so for three more years. By this time, it was apparent to those close enough to me—a group whose numbers I kept intentionally low—that my drinking had become a problem. I was not always unhappy during my last three years of drinking, but those periods of despair grew steadily darker. By the time I ceased drinking and sought help, I was suicidal and woefully ill-equipped to navigate the affects that booze could no longer tame.This may strike readers as an odd way to open a forum article commemorating QED's ten-year anniversary. It certainly does not resonate with my published contributions to the journal.1 But I find myself reflecting on QED's first decade through the lens of my experiences with addiction, anxiety, and depression—experiences that have spawned an intellectual interest in such topics.2 And it is impossible for me to reflect on my own queer becoming without visceral memories of, for example, sipping dirty martinis in Bloomington, Illinois's only gay bar during my undergraduate years.3 Nor can I fathom a queer sense of self without taking stock in the psychological toll of living in a heteronormative world—albeit from a more privileged position than many of the intellectuals whose work has filled QED's pages. For me, booze, mental illness, and queerness are intertwined. And I am heartened that QED's decennial archive contains many powerful insights into the ways many queer and trans kin navigate such ravages. What I found often gave me life. Occasionally, it kicked my ass. For both, I am grateful.In their inaugural “Queer Editorial Overture” that opened QED's first issue, Chuck and Tom write, “We understand this journal's mission as centrally concerned with praxis, which is to say that we believe the success of QED generally . . . shall be determined by its demonstration, by the difference it seeks to manifest in the world.”4 The work they have published in and since that first issue seeks in various ways to deliver on this ambition. And although much of the QED archive focuses on conspicuously activist, aesthetic, performative, and/or rhetorical topics, others examine often-quiet experiences of despair, or the intimate balm of holding each other in care. For example, in a powerful meditation on queer healing work in Uganda, Kakyo Katusiime Trinah writes in a 2020 issue of QED, “I think a good way to heal is to look within.”5 Part of me winces at this kind of language. Injunctions to “look within” often strike me as disavowals of the necessarily political character of queer suffering.6 But if the project of queer worldmaking is at least, in part, to trouble normative notions of relationality, then any clean bifurcation between looking within and without warrants critical scrutiny. And QED has been an outlet for work that does precisely that. Dana L. Cloud offered insights into the inherently political nature of mutual aid, observing that it functions to fill what she calls “neoliberal capitalism's void of care.”7 Writing about queer grief, Pavithra Prasad observes, “Queer identity binds us in various configurations of kinship because this kind of family helps us survive daily microaggressions, dismissals, or invalidation by hegemonic institutions.”8 Such contributions to QED underscore how the deep emotional work of intimacy, reflexivity, and community are themselves functions of the crushing violence of the normative.9An especially powerful and resonant piece in QED's archive regarding addiction and despair is the 2017 Queer Conversation featuring Morgan M. Page and Sarah Schulman. Facilitated by Tom, this Queer Conversation occurred at a live event in Montréal. It dwells heavily with the ways Page and Schulman experienced the suicide of their friend, the writer Bryn Kelly. A central theme in Page and Schulman's conversation is the social character of queer and trans suicide.10 Schulman reflects on how the “political funeral” functions as a rhetorical genre that articulates queer and trans death through the lens of structural critique.11 In this case, giving Kelly a political funeral meant explaining how her suicide was a response to the precarity of living as an out trans woman. Regarding Kelly, Schulman explains, “She died because she was poor and could not afford the sophisticated level of treatment and support that someone so intelligent and complex needed in order to fully live their life.”12More than any other document I encountered while cruising the QED archive, this Queer Conversation kicked my ass. That is largely a function of deep recognition. Some of the article's resonance seemed downright mystical. Like me, Kelly was born in 1980.13 She completed suicide in 2016, the year I got sober. A common phrase in recovery spaces I occupy is the adage, “There but for the grace of God go I.” With origins in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestantism, the phrase speaks to the role of unearned grace in avoiding the tragedies that befall others. Often made in reference to struggling alcoholics and addicts by those among us who have assembled more than a few days of sobriety, it functions as a reminder that although long-term abstention requires some volition, it is also a matter of basic luck. I forget that I am an alcoholic at my own peril. Equally dangerous is indulging the delusion that I am immune to relapse.Of course, sometimes what we call luck is the result of material structures. Bodies occupy history in saliently disparate ways. Bryn Kelly was a poor trans woman. I am a white cisgender man with tenure. Referring to Kelly's final days, Schulman describes her friend's capacity for outright cruelty. She explains, “I would call this process ‘cumulative pain’—a combination of anxiety and oppression.”14 Schulman continues, “Where the pain of one's life becomes focused onto the person or people right in front of you, the ones who are there to be blamed because they love you. And therefore the pain gets expressed by destroying these people, these relationships and ultimately one's own life, thereby leaving the exterior structures of oppression fully intact, unburdened, and unaddressed.”15 I recognize this tendency deeply. To be sure, the “exterior structures” that prefigured Kelly's suicide are different from the ones that drove me to drink and contemplate hastening my own demise. Whereas she languished under the weight of transphobia and poverty, I often find that my most difficult moments are a function of normative ideals regarding white masculinity, the nuclear family, and academic labor. But what we shared is the capacity to inflict the resulting misery on the very people and communities whose love stands the best chance of sparing us from the abyss. Later, Schulman comments on Kelly's addictions, saying, “Because of alcohol and depression, the fact that these conflicts were entirely resolvable eluded her completely.”16 Indeed, my worst moments of anxiety and depression, both before and during sobriety, have felt inescapable even when, in hindsight, they were nothing of the sort.As I write, a tension in my throat, chest, and stomach pulsates and intensifies. I think it is largely a function of always knowing where this article was heading. Perhaps some of you know, too. That tension in my body is Dan Brouwer. I have debated bringing our friend and colleague's suicide into this brief meditation. I fear it will strike some readers as opportunistic, or simply too painful to warrant addressing. And in the immediate aftermath of Dan's suicide, I questioned my “right” to grieve him. He was a good friend and queer co-conspirator. I loved him. But others, including Chuck and Tom, as well as many contributors to and readers of QED, were surely closer to him. In nurturing this sentiment, I enacted through Dan's suicide the self-loathing and feelings of being an outsider—a queer—that have fueled my own drinking and suicidal ideations. That I have the permission to feel grief in Dan's wake, and sometimes that I have permission to feel at all, is a discovery I must make in perpetuity.There but for the grace of God go I. To be queer and alive cannot help, at least for me, but inspire occasional survivor's guilt. For I have not made it this far because I am stronger than Bryn Kelly, Dan Brouwer, the majority of alcoholics who relapse, or the staggering number of queer and trans kin who complete suicide.17 I am a financial crisis or health emergency, a misfired synapse, a heartbreak, an intrusive self-critical thought, or to be perfectly honest, a minor inconvenience away from the next drink or an attempt on my own life. My retired therapist and I often talked about the efficacy of making a home for the parts of me that want to die. It is a way of dispensing with the fantasy that such yearning for macabre relief will disappear. Once suicide is on the table, it stays there. Once drinking is an option, it remains one. To employ another common recovery slogan, you cannot unpickle a pickle.Regarding her dead friend, Schulman also says, “I want to make a contribution to this ongoing conversation about how to end the terrible idealized fantasy of suicide that has overtaken our community.”18 There has, in my experience, always been something deeply romantic about addiction and suicide. The mythos of the tortured artist or intellectual, and surely the queer-in-despair, is canon.19 But to have embodied the position of the addict or the mentally ill is to understand, along with Schulman, that such notions are a toxic sham. There was nothing romantic about my binge drinking or depressive spirals. And there is no silver lining to Dan's suicide.So, what does it mean to think about worldmaking in the context of things that are so world shattering? Returning to Prasad, queer grief is indeed an occasion for kinship.20 In our Queer Conversation, which appeared in QED's third volume, then New Orleans-based Black trans activist Nathalie Nia Faulk shared, “People can always learn how to hold each other better.”21 When my drinking was at its worst, I was relying on alcohol to hold me. When I am at my most depressed, it is usually because I am seeking to be held by things, such as my career, that were never designed to do so. In the aftermath of the Pulse Nightclub massacre, many QED contributors reflected on the importance of holding each other.22 When we lost Dan, we sought ways to hold and be held.23 And in the wake of yet another electoral ascent for a political regime whose sadism toward queer and trans communities, especially queer and trans communities of color, seemingly knows no bounds, we will need to hold each other.24 For ten years, QED has provided a queer intellectual space where embrace is possible. I know I have felt held by the likes of Page and Schulman, Trinah, Prasad, and others. And we will certainly need to hold each other tight for whatever lies ahead.

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