Queer like some sort of fluidity and limitlessness all at once.
Queer like the fearlessness to imagine what love can look like, and to pursue it.
- Poet Brandon Wint
At some point in the thick of 2022, I realized how many people in my inner circle identified as queer. This recognition is important to name as a cishet1 person due to the ways I have benefitted from queer friends and family. In other words, I would not be where I am today, if it were not for the presence and safety queer folks cultivated during my growth and heartache within the last year. In her book “How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community” Mia Birdsong writes that the safe spaces and belonging our LGBTQIA+ community provide us must be acknowledged and reciprocated if we are to commit ourselves to loving queer folks fully. This involves a love that is not transactional, a love that is not limited to the patriarchy and toxic theologies creating conditions for accepting those who identify differently from us. Such a love is not liberating, instead it is crippling, isolating, and unsustainable if we want people to thrive in their truth and in community.
As I look back, I can’t help but find a Divine love in queerness. By queer, I mean living unbound, without limits, and fearless, as poet Brandon Wine writes, much like the unconditional love of the Divine. Queer friends bravely walked with my family and I during Papi’s transition from life to death. Their love was not scared to see a horrific terminal illness dehumanize my dad, it was not scared to watch Papi become like a child before their eyes. They offered him presence and tenderness here, and eased my mother, sister, and I’s anxiety during the times we had to make money leaving Dad home in their care. This is where notions of family expanded for my mom, sisters and I, because what blood could not do at times, queer friends did without hesitation, providing care and support to our nuclear family. I will forever be thankful for the pozole, ponche y lasagna that was brought at our doorsteps and the first flowers I received and shoulders I cried on after Papi’s death, they were queer.
Queer friends also expanded and challenged my co-dependency from a past toxic romantic relationship and offered a healthy interdependency spread across community. In her manifesto pertaining to relationships, queer feminist Annie Nordgren shares that we must question the idea of love being a limited resource only restricted to a couple, love can expand further in our relationships with others that takes different forms. In my case, queer friends became like family and comadres2 in the past year. I was empowered to be more true to myself in their presence and not constrained to patriarchal and heteronormative views of relationships that were exhausting my independent wiring wanting to spend more time outside of romance. I felt validated and heard here, similarly in our comadre connection. As comadres, I gave the chisme3 to queer friends as they welcomed the liberation I experienced in my body within the past year. They cheered me on while I went on dates throughout my hoe-battical4 phase, offering advice and knowing my whereabouts and details of the profiles of men I went on dates with, deep en el chisme of comadre tales.
The list can go on and the loving-impact I experienced in the past year is something I emphasis as we close Pride month and move on. I want to acknowledge the safe spaces that the queer community has fostered for us because this is something that is only practiced and intrinsic in the way queer people LIVE. I humbly share and write from a place of ongoing learning, of ongoing repentance and repair, as I was brought up like many of us, in a homophobic culture and theology that harmed the LGBTQIA+ community. I sipped the sour horchata reinforcing such dehumanizing and spiteful views over queer people in a past life, and repent and regret every bit of it. Today I am thankful for growth, for repair, and activism through relationship with the queer community. I am thankful for the ways the queer community teaches me to love and how to love more expansively much like the Divine. We are forever indebted to them and the spaces they create for us to thrive and belong.
Thank you queer familia.
a person who identifies with his or her assigned-at-birth gender, as well as heterosexual, or attracted exclusively to people of the opposite sex.
a Mexican term usually meaning the best friend of a mother who becomes her child’s godparent as well. Latina millennials use this term as a substitute for best friend and confidant, though they may not be mothers their bond is just as close with their comadres.
gossip
term coined by Multi Genre Theologian and author of Red Lip Theology, Candice Benbow to signify a period of time where a person “is outside”, exploring the dating scene freely - experienced like a sabbatical but within dating life in all it entails emotionally, physically, sexually.