We are here, we are queer, we won't disappear
A glory hole is a sexual device well-known from cruising stories, but it can also be the hole through which queer people can attain glory and belonging, through which naked bodies can be shown and identities canremain, return and be reaffirmed. We’re here, we’re queer, we won’t disappear.
Nancy Brooks Brody, 2012. Oil and Venetian plaster on wood panel, 71 x 71 cm. With permission of the author.
Lukas Avendaño, 2017. From the performance Réquiem para un alcavarán (Requiem for a Stone Curlew). The performance explores "muxe" as a possible genre, not a third gender.
Photo: Mario Patiño. From private collection, used with permission from the artist.
Angelic Rebels: Lesbians and Safer Sex by Tessa Boffin, 1989. First published in Tessa Boffin and Sunil Gupta, Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology, Rivers Oram Press (1990).
From the archive of Tessa Boffin, with permission from the estate of Tessa Boffin / UCA University of the Creative Arts, Special Collections.
@RealMuniRiki, 2022.
By Yoav Tirosh and Natalia Soler Huici the the Decriminalizing History.
DECLARE INDEPENDENCE
We queer citizens have suffered injustice just because of the way we are. Our human rights, and all other adjectives applying to the care of a human being, have been neglected. We have always been here, no matter the names others have given us. We say enough is enough! We consider all past insults, humiliations, aggressions and bullying reason enough to lawfully, historically, politically, existentially, intersectionally and institutionally, à la Foucault but with lots of glitter, to declare the Queer Republic.
Queer citizenship, its pussy feathers, butch-ways, perversion, vice, alterity and make-up, has more than one thousand years of history. Queer people have created their own institutions for many centuries. They have been systematically harassed, stalked and tortured by the hegemonic cis-authorities. We reclaim the role of these institutions as liberating, lascivious, liquid and our only chance to be happy. Fuck Polite, Fuck Authority!
With this declaration, we queer citizens proclaim our independence from the inquisitorial oppression, transphobia and homophobia of the intolerant cis-patriarchal powers. Rather than allowing us to live, they kill us, they pathologize us, they criminalize us, and profit from us, with no feelings and no humanity.Since the deaths of Saint Ocaña, Saint Gloria Fuertes, Saint Gil de Biedma, Saint Amelio Robles, and under the protection of the archangel Orlando, we have experienced tolerance and open-mindedness as a way of keeping us silent and submissive. There are no laws for equal marriage or adoption that can compensate for the lives lost to AIDS and the machinations of the pharmaco-powers that even today define the existence of many of us, both legally and illegally.
The cis-powers criticize us for being too much of this or that, for being promiscuous or for not wanting sex, for who we fuck, for thinking this or that, for using our tongues (language) and our lips (ways of bonding), and limit us with on the pretext of abnormality. Abnormal is the one who aspires to be like others want them to be.
Following the demands of a shameless, promiscuous and brave minority of queer citizens, Proces Cuir, Alianzade Pasivas Putasy Zorras and whoever wants to join, in this letter, we proclaimQueer Independence
We are too Queens to go for a monarchy. Greetings to all the closeted real Queens and real Kings out there.
God save you.
Declare Queer Independence, fanzine produced by Procés Cuir, queer organizacion. Designed by @MxComan and written by David Carillo-Rangel, 2022.