On Queerness and the Body

A Brief Theological and Theoretical Reckoning with Queerness

I have written this thought down twice before. One time on a sheet of paper that I wedged into a lab notebook, and a second time in a little bound journal that could fit in the size of my hand, in the state of Maine. And each time I ripped out the pieces of paper and tossed them, because the essence of what they contained felt shameful. The second iteration never even crossed state lines back to New York. And now, I will immortalize what has brought me shame for what has felt like centuries. It went something like this:

I used to think that queerness, this seemingly innate quality of myself, was a degeneration of the true and whole self. A foul stain soaked into porous marble. A lack of discipline. That what I was, in my rawest, truest self, was a grand degradation of the true self. In recent years, inspired primarily by being alive and secondarily by my rejection of Platonism and realism about universals, I have come to see my queerness as an innovation. Nothing has asked more of me than the truest version of myself. I have come to see my homosexuality is a symptom of a much grander state of being. If someone were to take the essence of me and place it on a cold examination table and vivisect me to remove every trace of queerness, they would not find that this discrepancy is isolated to a single region.

This homosexuality is not like a tumor in the brain that can be removed with one cut and cauterised away. It is instead akin to a blood vessel that originates in the retina and flows down the back of my head, loops through my heart and spine and travels down my legs until it reaches my toes and then circles back again. This queerness is akin to warm blood and nectar; it is life giving and life sustaining. If a board certified surgeon skilled with a scalpel decided to spend an afternoon carving out that vessel from my body, they would discover that after all of the queer has been removed, very little of me would remain. They would see that this vessel is metastatic and that there is no place left untouched by its branches. I do not know what planted the seed of this so-called parasite in my veins, but I know that it is unkillable except by the death of the host. Like many others, my homosexuality and I are one.

I have also come to understand that my attraction to the same sex is not itself the identity but rather a symptom of a much larger revelation. There is something paradoxically different about queer individuals. This is by no means an original rumination but, take, for instance, the idea of art without homosexuals. Imagine no Walt Whitman. No James Baldwin. No Audre Lorde. No Keith Haring or Frida Kahlo or Virginia Woolf. No Tove Jansson. No drag. No disco. No Paris Is Burning. No ballroom. No Joan Jett.

I once believed this vessel was mine alone, a hidden flaw, a private distortion. But over time, I began to see its shape reflected in the work of others. What I thought was solitary was, in fact, shared. Thinkers, artists, and scholars had already traced its outline. Their words did not erase what I felt, but they helped me hold it. I turned to them not for escape, but to make sense of the body I was already living in.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick begins with epistemology, the study of how we know. In Epistemology of the Closet she argues that secrecy and disclosure form the architecture of modern sexuality; the closet is a social machine that produces shame and intimacy at once, so every beat of queer desire carries knowledge of hiding and of seeing through the cracks. In Touching Feeling she turns to affect, showing that emotions such as shame and pride are not private chemicals but social currents that pass skin to skin. Sedgwick teaches that the queer vessel is an organ of perception; its rhythmic contractions let one read the codes of power that shape language itself.

José Esteban Muñoz widens the vascular image in Cruising Utopia. Queerness, he writes, is not satisfied by the present tense; it lives toward horizons that normative time refuses to imagine. When the vessel quickens, it propels the body beyond straight chronology into a utopian elsewhere, a zone where alliances and performances rehearse worlds that remain just out of reach. Muñoz gives the vessel direction: forward, expansive, impatient for worlds to come.

Michel Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, maps how power once named the homosexual a separate species. Nineteenth-century medicine and law pressed diagnostic labels into flesh, transforming a private act into a public identity. Foucault shows that the vessel itself was drawn by discourse; to be homosexual is to travel inside a diagram etched by confession, psychiatry, and surveillance. Yet he also reveals how power’s grip can be reversed, how new forms of resistance flow along the very lines authority tries to fix.

Judith Butler, a personal favorite of mine, moves from etching to performance. In Gender Trouble and Undoing Gender she argues that gender and sexuality are reiterated acts, stylized repetitions that appear natural only because the stage lights never dim. When the vessel throbs it stages a counter-performance, exposing maleness and femaleness as scripts rather than essences. Queer desire becomes a glitch in the sacred order, proof that the binary code has always been patched together. Butler gives the vessel a choreography: each beat is both repetition and refusal.

Leo Bersani enters at the point of erotic intensity. In Is the Rectum a Grave? and Homos he proposes that gay sex can shatter the ego, dissolve bourgeois individuality, and threaten social order itself. The vessel, in his vision, is not polite; it rushes with a pleasure that unravels the neat seams of selfhood. Bersani insists that this disruption is neither nihilistic nor tragic, but it is a crack through which new modes of relation may flow.

Jack Halberstam tunes the vessel to queer tempo. In In a Queer Time and Place and The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam describes timelines that veer from birth-school-marriage-retirement rhythms; failure, delay, detour become creative tactics. The vessel loops and backtracks, discards straight ambition, valorizes the low, the silly, the unproductive. Halberstam offers queer time as a sanctuary where life need not justify itself to normative clocks.

David M. Halperin listens for an ethical cadence. In Saint Foucault he argues that homosexuality is culturally distinct, carrying its own virtues of friendship, irony, and critical distance. The vessel, for Halperin, beats with a style that heteronormativity struggles to translate. It enacts a moral vision in which solidarity and erotic camaraderie blur the line between pleasure and politics.

Audre Lorde cups the vessel between myth and survival. In Sister Outsider she writes that the erotic is a wellspring of power; when fully felt, it emboldens action against racism, sexism, and homophobia. The blood within the vessel is not mere lubrication; it is sacred fuel. Lorde calls it holy fire, a knowing that burns away dead rules and brightens what it touches.

But, I can attest that knowledge is not always enough to understand a condition. What does it mean to live like this, not just in mind, but in spirit? What does it mean that the vessel continues, even when I stop trying to name it?

For since I knew the feeling of the vessel, I dreaded it. For many years, I viewed it like a crown of thorns. I was burdened with this and in term, others were burdened with me. But I know now, I am no burden to God. In a turn of Catholic esotericism, the Theology of the body says simply that the physical body means something. So I ask: what does it mean that my body speaks like this?

The only aspect of my queerness that I lament are the many years I tried to subdue it. For I was subduing a great gift of God. My queerness is like a crown of thorns. I know that to be touched by this particular fire is not to be punished, but to be shown something others never see. I am grateful to be burned. I am grateful that what once threatened to consume me now gives off light.

Ocean Vuong, the Vietnamese-American queer poet and novelist, distills the journey in one line:

Being queer saved my life… queerness demanded an alternative innovation; it made me ask, “Is this enough for me?