Last week, the final episode of our series, @afieldguidetogayanimals , officially dropped. It features one of my favorite scenes in the series: a guided tour of the Adelaide Zoo by drag queen Gertrude Glossip. Unsurprising to anyone who has been tuning in, Gertrude was inspired by Biological Exuberance, the first inspiration for our series and the ur-text for all that we do. Biological Exuberance is a tome lovingly and rigorously compiled by Bruce Bagemihl when he was a young researcher. He scoured the scientific record for all the instances of animal queerness that had been masked, maligned, and marginalized. In short, Bruce’s work put an ultraviolet light up against centuries of science and revealed the cum stains of queer nature hidden in plain sight, just beyond the reaches of the human eye.
One of the best parts of working on this series is getting to encounter these ardent stewards of the gay animal record, like Bruce, Gertrude, and so many others. They are the torch-bearers, comrades, and celebrants of queer nature, insisting that nature is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose – magnificently abundant, diverse, and joyful in its very being.
If you listened to our series, then you’ve gotten the opportunity to meet a gaggle of gay animals and their biggest fans (often gay animals themselves), so you know just how special they all are. I feel pretty lucky that I got to play a small role in this large, not-so-secret society of Gay Animal Lovers.
(Proper thanks for all involved in the comments!)
In these last few exacting, domestic years of the pandemic, I have more or less lived a perfectly fine life. I fell in love, blissfully, gratefully. I made a home. I worked honestly even as I watched my time get ground up into the machinery of an industry I was no longer sure I believed in. Sometimes I sat down to write, to animate my inner life, but when faced with a blank page, I stopped. Instead I poached eggs. I folded laundry. I stared off into space.
Friends called me to say their relationship ended, or they lost their job, or another friend took their life. I drank coffee. I bought myself a pair of green platform Crocs. I slept through parties. I scanned the headlines portending apocalypse — climate change, nuclear fallout, supply chain shortages. I recycled the newspaper, unread.
I grasped any excuse to feel belonging, to feel useful: I cooked for new parents and grieving friends. I screamed at basketball games until my throat itched with exhaustion. I hosted dinner parties. I debated ideas. Many times, I was happy, ridiculously so, but I also could be lonely, incurious, and — more often than not — tired.
I don’t know how to reconcile these “little disturbances of man,” to use Grace Paley’s phrase, with the ambient catastrophe all around us. And I find it difficult to wed my hope to a new year.
“That’s why I hate these New Year’s that fall like fixed maturities, which turn life and human spirit into a commercial concern with its neat final balance, its outstanding amounts, its budget for the new management,” writes Antonio Gramsci. “Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself.”
Reckoning. Renewal. That’s what I want every day. And yet… here I am, drinking and dancing and kissing someone at midnight, all in gratitude for the small, persistent grace that the next morning I will wake up anew.
Happy new year.
from the archives: snapshots of a 24-hour layover I spent in doha, qatar back in 2014.
“Architectural gigantism has always been a perverse symptom of economies in speculative overdrive, and each modern boom has left behind overweening skyscrapers, the Empire State Building or the former World Trade Center, as its tombstones.” #MikeDavis
On our third date, I nervously asked Nathan, “Do you think you might be looking for a relationship… with me?”
And Nathan answered, in the most nonchalant matter-of-fact way, “Yeah, I think it’s pretty clear that’s where this is going.” He then confessed to me that before we officially met, he had had a crush on me and long thought I was, and I quote, “girlfriend material.”
In the last two years of dating, I’ve asked Nathan about moving in together, having kids, maybe even getting married, and Nathan has always answered as if the fact that we are going to do so is the most blindingly obvious thing — not something he has to convince himself of, but the only inevitable outcome of our relationship.
Loving you and being loved by you is - and always has been - the most obvious choice. Yes, I will marry you, my love. ❤️
happiest of birthdays to my sweet love, Nathan, who is a friend to all creatures, an eater of all oysters, and an evangelist for all scooters 🦔 🦪 🛵 any opportunity to celebrate someone as curious, goofy, and caring as him is an opportunity I relish. HBD @brernathan !!! 🥳
