Emilia Fireweed
Queerness, Camouflage and the ideas of Home and Attack
As queers who must confront society, we must always cloak ourselves with a camouflage of sorts, even if this camouflage is purely an objective reality put on the individual by the other. In this sense the most “closeted” and “flamboyantly out” manifestations become synonymous as means to which to cloak ourselves for the viewing and inevitable judgment by society.
In every place I have ever lived, I have always found a place in which I can see myself dying. I do not think that this is some sort of morbid fascination on death, a statement on my mental health or social well being or what ever the fuck you want to call it, but rather a statement on the safety I felt with the idea of home. In Toronto, it was the rocking chair that overlooked an ancient old Maple Tree that had yet to be cut down by the expanse of condos and subway expansion. At my mothers house, it was in the forest where I created a secret shrine dedicated to the spirits of the forest, or in the garden where I spent the majority of my time on house-arrest, burying my hands into the dirt to forget the fences of suburbia that reminded me of my situation. And here, as of where I am writing currently, it is the sun-room that I spent the summer joyously singing songs of love and anarchy with friends and co-conspirators new and old. This idea of a space, of a home, of a comfort, where the camouflage we must put in place as queers in society fades, where invisibility, becomes emptiness, and then becomes anything that we desire.
This idea of blending, either for safety or for community, is one of self preservation, but one, that in the spectacle only holds up an image of ourselves as an exchange-value within society, to this I say fuck it. My performance as a queer has no lineage to society, but only finds its manifestations in the struggle of living, and the joyousness of my revolt has brought me to the queerest of possibilities. Camouflage as a tactic for survival and attack, my queerness like water, my nakedness entirely my own, and a comfort of home where ever I am given roots to conspire.
I am a devotee to the dance only.
Through the ecstasy and terror that ensue, I am but a mere follower of its ebb and flow. Flawed but perfect- to question the next step is unnecessary if ones spirit is not in it, to perceive it like this is only to see the lesser realities of it. It is a dance that transgresses planes, that leaps whole galaxies to favour one where ones spirit can be ones own.
This face in the mirror is not my own.
It is a lesser reality of it, altered by the position of the reflection opposite the self. I do not claim fires when there is barely a spark.
I dance knowing each movement, each flow on the worldly plane of my queer body in this momentous rhythm has the potential for more then just a spark- it can be a flashing comet in the twilight, a dagger plunged into the darkness of morning and an embrace from a lover in the afternoon. I embrace this queerness knowing its full potentialities. Gender is not a duality or a plurality, but an athame set to pierce the void, and cut through the veils of space and time and spirit. My realization of this, has become a reclaiming of my autonomy- of a sexuality defined by me alone and an external body hardened to a critique of gendered norms and expectations that appear in the mirror of society. The glass, once shattered becomes sharpened and a method for attack, may each shard pierce exactly where they need to.
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