Memo

Queer worlds change, disrupt, grow, die and renew. From the first inkling that we don't belong, we find and build families, communities, and homes for our queer selves with each other. Education and advanced degrees never completely protect from homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, ableism, or classism. For this article, we have purposely blurred the I in our autoethnographic explorations as means of demonstrating collectivity.What can a journal do?QED: A Journal in GBLTQ Worldmaking has been a home for academics, artists, and activists that do not fit in. Some of it has been uncomfortable, the voices discordant from other academic outlets, arguments and diatribes against the pervasive normativities that belittle our feelings, experiences, pleasure, pain, and thoughts about this world, as well as our visions for another.We take on the editorship at a tumultuous time. Antirights movements have risen globally under familiar insidious “protect the family” slogans, authoritative regimes are coming to power again, and violence against trans and queer people is palpable and visible. They hate us so much they pass laws that surveil, criminalize, and otherwise dispose of us.What can a journal do?Since the start of QED, we have lost so many queer scholars: Dan Brouwer, Jose Quiroga, Jeffrey Escoffier, Urvashi Vaid, Jim Chesebro, Amber Hollibaugh, Horacio Roque Ramírez, and more. These are just the ones we knew. One lesson of the HIV movement is to commemorate our losses and mark our histories. No one else will do it for us. In this spirit, we are launching Queer Legacies, a section for academics, artists, and activists to revisit a departed queer scholar's work. Whose work should be brought forth? Who needs to be revisited today? Jeffrey hired me for a job in 1995 at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. We became trusted colleagues and fast friends through our tenures at the Office of Lesbian and Gay Health Concerns, various positions with assistant commissioners, before landing at the Health Media and Marketing Group and advancing the health department's social marketing imprint beyond anything the city had ever experienced.Jeffrey Escoffier was a legend to me. His magazine Out/Look was instrumental to my growth in college. As we got to know each other, I discovered his presence in gay liberation organizing in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York. We shared stories about our versions of these places, the people we had known and the sex we had. For us, the sex was a vital part of why we did our work: from random street encounters to long-term relationships. Our communities grew from these passions. In New York, Jeffrey introduced me to gay and lesbian studies circles: I was amazed to meet people whose writing had inspired me through the 1990s. As our relationship grew, we shared our own work for feedback and support. We imagined the next parts of our lives and helped each other dream bigger.In some ways, Jeffrey existed outside of many academic circles. He did not pay the final bill for his PhD so the degree was never conferred. Therefore, he never had a tenure-track job. He was always working in and on behalf of the growing LGBTQ communities, writers, and academics; he had a difficult time finding time to write his own books. As his peers got awards and recognition, Jeffrey wondered how he would be remembered, what would be the signposts left behind. The stable employment at the health department gave Jeffrey the space to write, and he produced five books while there. Still, there was no university position, nor a Wiki page. Finally he realized he could get it done himself, and had a couple people look into creating a Wikipedia entry and populating it with his information.When Jeffrey passed in 2022, he had two more books on the way. He had been retired for several years and had begun having sex again. He was experimenting with looks beyond his bookish presentation, sporting flamboyant gold jackets, nail polish, and tattoos. At the time of his death, Jeffrey ran a monthly salon for young academics and cultural workers interested in sex and sex work. Of these accomplishments, only his early gay liberation work, death, and the books are in his Wiki page.1Queer lives are ephemeral and vulnerable to erasure. Dorothy Allison writes, “. . . if we cannot name our own we are cut off at the root, our hold on our lives as fragile as seed in a wind.”2 Jeffrey demonstrated a way to actively create a signpost. In Queer Legacies, we invite you to engage a past scholar's work in today's contexts: what still applies? What doesn't? How has this work been vital for you? Queer Worlds will highlight organizations across the globe that are actively engaged in queer worldmaking. What do these worldmaking acts look like across contexts and groups? How do GLBTQ people create families and communities where we are criminalized and persecuted? Our organizations have been a vital part of our movements, yet how are they known? In this way, we want to highlight and document how queer worldmaking happens through organizational efforts big and small. 1990, Bay Area.At college, I meet other queer and racialized people like me. Some of their roots were working class and first generation, too: we do not have any previous knowledge of how the big educational bureaucracy works. We talk to each other for directions to financial aid, advice on professors and instructions on how to add/drop courses. We had no one else.Our professors included June Jordan and Cherríe Moraga. It was a web of creativity and politics, a way to understand the world and change it. I start to read my writing in public, with these others. I had wanted to be a writer but did not know how. With this group, public acts of writing and reading were vital for us to mark our place and form a community.An LGBTQ Youth Center hires me to run creative writing workshops. These are shaped by the mix of identity, community and politics I found in college. Instead of doing the workshops in the Center and its location in the Castro, I partner with homeless youth shelters and people of color organizations, and collaborate with another artist. Together we create from things found in art stores and thrift stores: collages of bodies from magazines with our “perfect body shapes”; a box of things that would make you feel safe during sex; a shooting range target with every reason we feel vulnerable stuck on it; letters to someone who died. This flurry was undergirded by the HIV epidemic. It was a time when the disease seemed just under the skin of everything in the Bay Area.After working in HIV for 3 decades, I see that the interventions that are institutionalized are the ones that follow established rules: randomized control trials, publication in high-impact peer-reviewed academic journals, and access to a network of other scientists and acronym organizations like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The other work is not seen as valuable, not recorded nor packaged and distributed. As people look back into the history of HIV interventions, they piece together what they think was happening or what they remember through the decades. Alexandra Juhasz describes the video interventions popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s in HIV work to Ted Kerr in We Are Having This Conversation Now. She stumbles through vague recollections of the intervention; she views the video and pieces together more with him.3 I remember these interventions and my memories are somewhat different from Juhasz because we both have only our own incomplete versions of them.The creative 1990s moment in Bay Area HIV work is captured in only a few places, a couple articles and in Juana María Rodriguez's Queer Latinidad.4 It happened, and we did something but queer organizing is as ephemeral and vulnerable to erasure as the rest of our lives. In Queer Worlds, we invite organizations engaged in GLTBQ worldmaking to profile their work. As part of the world, we are seeking out organizing happening both in the United States and throughout the globe. In addition, we are eager to continue to include a Queer Conversations section, which will feature transcribed dialogues between junior scholars and established queer academics, artists, and activities reflecting on the “doing” of queer scholarship in dire times. This campus is massive, a land grant institution of higher education. And I am lost roaming its hallowed halls, endless paths, and bumping into students upon students. It doesn't help that my nervousness is the result less of being lost on a massive campus and more that I am preparing to attend my first convening of queer scholars sharing their research on queer topics.I am a master's student who attends an underresourced state school that does not provide a focus area in queer studies nor are the queer scholars on my campus supported for their contributions to queer cultural understanding. Rather, their research and mentoring are called into question. My undergraduate mentor, Angela Bowen, a Black radical lesbian feminist, was denied tenure while promoted at the state school precisely because she centered Black lesbian women's voices in the English curriculum. In my own graduate program at the same state school, the heterosexual professors regularly draw on antiqueer tropes to make their pedagogical points while ridiculing the out queer professors across campus. Antiqueer sentiment was so normalized on my campus that seeking mentoring on queer topics felt impossible while meeting with queer elder professors and thinkers felt risky at best; after all, well-meaning heterosexual professors cautioned me, it matters who you align with if you're going on to obtain a doctorate—these words were often offered when inquiring about prospective letter writers and support. The message was clear: avoid queer professors and thinkers, especially if you are considering long-term work in higher education.And yet I craved nothing more than just that: access to queer professors and thinkers who might challenge my assumptions, broaden my intellectual horizon, and provide shape for my own queer becoming in and beyond higher education. None of my personal goals aligned with the concerns the heterosexual professors projected onto my person; indeed, my desire to access queer professors and thinkers was less to improve my chances to be a competitive candidate for a graduate program. I simply craved access to queer elders, folks who've “done it,” who've managed to shake the grip of heteronormativity while thriving somehow. And folks who were, frankly, still alive! Born in 1981, I grew up queer in the shadow of mass queer death. The messaging I received was often this: avoid queer people, don't be queer. But all I wanted was to be surrounded by queer people, queer thinkers, and indeed queer professors who might embody the boldness my own budding queerness required.I enter the wooden lecture hall and take a seat toward the back of the room; I'm late. Nonetheless, I sit and scan the room, while the senior queer scholars (all names I've encountered in my DIY queer study) take turns sharing their research and thoughts. The audience, a sea of what must have been over a hundred, vibrant queers from multiple campuses nod their heads while jotting occasional notes, their collective gaze transfixed on the panel of queer thinkers. I spend the remainder of the session contemplating queer subjects in a room full of queers for the first time—their sense of “professional” queered by virtue of their bodies donning chic clothes, prints, and sparkly jewelry. I fit in for the first time.As soon as the panel ends, senior scholars rush the stage to congratulate the queer thinkers, their comrades and long-time pals. I stay back with the other awkward queer students, hungry for the opportunity to engage the queer elders just the same. Alas, it does not happen in this session as the window of opportunity has closed and the next set of queer thinkers are entering the space in preparation for the next panel. Time and again, I find myself near queer thinkers but unable to find the words to engage them earnestly. Battling between normative academic decorum and a want to simply cultivate community with queer thinkers who made it to elder status leaves me silent and isolated in a sea of vibrant queers taking reprieve from the antiqueer battles they are no doubt maneuvering in their own communities and institutional work settings. QED started from scholars mostly in the Communication discipline with its interdisciplinary particularities—rhetoric, intercultural, health, performance, media, and pedagogy have all been central concerns. We see possibilities in engaging larger queer studies spaces like American Studies, CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, Disability Studies, Gender Studies, and Ethnic Studies. These can enrich discourses and build more queer worlds.We come at this from our own positions: both involved in academia and in health and human rights, having struggled through tenure and promotion in hostile environments, racially mixed and from working class backgrounds, people whose queer transformations radically altered our support networks and communities. In conversation with adrienne maree brown, Cara Page recalls her childhood, “I used to say, ‘I don't know if I love myself.’”5 This is a lesson burnt deeper than any tattoo into us. It is a mark only visible in certain lights, yet constantly present.This journal can and has done many things. It has provided the intellectual grounds for imagining and realizing queer worlds, it has amplified radical queer messages and visions for more just futures, and it has empowered queers to take seriously the work of GLBTQ+ worldmaking beyond cisheteronormative metrics for success, rigor, or merit. In short, QED does queer things for queer scholars, artists, and activists and it will continue to provide this space in service of GLBTQ+ worldmaking efforts

Amateur · Autoethnography · Object (grammar · Power (physics · Queer · Section (typography · Vision · Feminist Theory and Gender Studies · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism