To recognize and embrace oneself in a world bent upon one’s erasure is a radical and liberative act — an act that everyone in the MiC community bravely engages with every day. The experience is heightened for Queer minorities, who are buffeted by hate from their own communities, the white majority, and the white Queer community. Black Queer people are pushed out of spaces that they have created — ballroom and cunt become appropriated by ravenous white mouths that try their hardest to imitate syllables that do not belong to them. In this storm, they must find solace in their own communities and histories. In this America, which profits off and encourages violence against their bodies, they must somehow create community and learn to love. “We are … queer bodies moving around in spaces that look less like a home and more like desperate lodgings, trying to make our beds with other people’s garbage,” Joshua Whitehead writes.
Queer people of Color understand that this country was built against them and works to grind them to the bones of their existence, that rainbow-colored corporate logos are pushing kin out of their homes and that countries that promise to give them rights are flimsy covers for apartheid. In America, they speak and write in the language of colonialism, trying desperately to mold the garbage of English letters into spaces that can convey an inkling of their true selves. They are forced to turn words that subjugated entire civilizations into blankets and roofs. “Queerness has a type of architecture,” Aisha Sabatini Sloan writes in her essay, “Borealis,” and this is the architecture of Queerness of Color: redlining, pain, liberation, colonization, violence and love.
In the 2023 edition of Queer in Color, LGBTQ+ MiC staff and contributors have crafted architecture from the letters that once erased them. Seven new pieces, ranging from lyrics to articles, celebrate Queerness in all its forms, inconsistencies and beauty.
MiC Columnist Audrey Tang writes about Queer history in “A conversation in precedents.” Writing about Queerness is transformative and liberative, and so is the experience of recognizing faces of Queer figures of Color in the past. “I come from a long line of people who have recognized themselves in others, and that fills me with warm, warm self-importance,” Tang writes, a reminder that our Queerness is a mirror, reflected and legitimized by activists who paved the way for our love.
In their short story “The secrets of an orange,” Pass the MiC Content Producer SJ Shin describes a journey of Queer self-acceptance through a citrus fruit. First, there is aversion, then reluctant acceptance, then love and healing — the orange stripe of Pride. Shin illustrates the confidence and safety that arises from recognizing and accepting Queerness, how the identity becomes “self-soothing, self-loving,” and allows us to be “cocooned in (our) own assurance.” To accept our Queerness is to become whole and ripe.
An anonymous MiC contributor struggles with self-acceptance in “May all things dissolve in an ocean of bliss.” They navigate the paradox of being Queer and religious, of being fated to love someone only for that love to be deemed a sin. Traditional religion forces an impossible choice between vice and virtue, between the warmth of temporary love and the eternity of heaven. “I truly believe I am deserving of both,” the contributor writes, refusing to make the choice that straight people never have to contend with.
MiC Columnist James Scarborough also writes of religion in his essay, “Hopeless romantic,” in which he chooses earthly love above all else. He contends with his Christian upbringing and his Queerness — how they are seemingly at odds with each other. “Maybe that’s why I dance so hard and ignore the sweat,” he writes. “I’m practicing for everlasting burning.” In Scarborough’s essay, the dance floor becomes a type of church, the act of loving other men a type of worship.
Another anonymous MiC contributor describes the metaphysical nature of love between two men in “Phallus and the fears of coming out (loud).” For the contributor, Queerness imagines a reenvisioning of the fabric of society, a deconditioning from social and sexual norms that restrict our creativity and love. The contributor writes, “to be gay and a guy is to be in godly amalgamation with all aspects of our human nature” — to embrace the femininity, masculinity and androgyny present in each and every one of us.
Queerness can still be incredibly isolating, though, especially in a predominantly white institution. “The human eye is god’s loneliest creation,” Ocean Vuong writes in his novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” “How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.” Because of the intersectional identities and unique experiences of marginalization held and faced by Queer people of Color, it can seem like they are alone in the world. The dangers double when it comes to “coming out,” a ritual that is often unafforded to LGBTQ+ minorities. Hugo Quintana, former MiC Assistant Editor, and former MiC Columnist Karis Clark explore the phenomenon of homoscarcity — the lack of presence of gay men — in relation to Queer men of Color in “The homoscarcity chronicles.” To do this, they interviewed eight Queer men of Color who are students at the University of Michigan, illustrating the lives, loves and anxieties of gay youth today.
An anonymous MiC contributor also grapples with romance and isolation in their essay “To sit with myself.” Eurocentric beauty standards and hookup culture riddle our dating scene, making true love and a worthy romance hard to find. “I crave a love that subverts the trivial games that young people have been conditioned to play with each other’s hearts,” the contributor writes. Waiting for true love is agonizing, but they know they deserve the type of cotton candy romance that Queer people of Color are rarely able to experience.
We are incredibly proud of the brave work these writers of Color have created in order to share their stories with the world. During Ramadan, Michigan in Color is excited to celebrate a type of love that embodies the sacrificial, revelatory and liberatory spirit of this holy month.
With great reverence, we present the 2023 edition of Queer in Color.
Sincerely,
Safura Syed
MiC Managing Editor