They cannot nail us to a Pronoun.²
Scarcely a Man’s voice, and Scarcely a
Woman’s either—but what is it Saying?³
I’m a Not-Boy—and maybe a Not-Girl …⁴
We are neither Women, happy to be like men—
Nor Men, blunt and flat enough to feel no Lack.⁵
He’s a She—he’s not a he or a she—he’s a He
And a She—She-he—He-she hee! Hee! Hee!⁶
We call ourselves Bi a Queer
Tangle of free-form dreads …⁷
If an explorer should come back to bring
Word of Other Sexes looking through the
Branches of other trees at Other Skies,
Nothing would better serve humanity.⁸
Queerness is the open mesh of possibilities, gaps & overlaps,
Dissonances & resonances, lapses & Excesses of Meaning,
When the constituent elements of one’s Gender & Sexuality
Cannot be made to signify Monolithically.⁹
If that’s being Queer then we could
Do with a bit More Queerness!¹⁰
¹ George Eliot, Middlemarch
² Fran Lock, On Insomnia
³ Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
⁴ Foster Noone, Fostering
⁵ Sylvia Plath, Three Women
⁶ Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
⁷ Akwaeke Emezi, Disclosure
⁸ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
⁹ Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Tendencies
¹⁰ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring