Seeking Representation.
In a world which can still treat queerness as new or novel, how do we find ourselves?
Decisions stress me out. Big ones, small ones, they’re all the same –– whether you’re asking me to pick a restaurant or sign a 24-month contract, I will inevitably panic, overthink and end up making a snap decision. Later, I will ruthlessly dissect that decision.
This was the case a few weeks ago. I’d had a shit few days mental health-wise, so I decided I should find some kind of passion project. Something to excite me. I just didn’t know what that should be. Now burdened by this suddenly-burning desire to try something different, I bought myself a pint and started thinking about what I enjoy. After the first few sips, an answer came quickly: books! Not just any books, queer books!
The next stressful choice came in choosing a name. Again, I panicked and, after approximately five minutes and a few frantic WhatsApp messages to friends who kindly tolerate my bullshit, I settled on the name ‘just queer books’. You know this, of course –– if you’re reading this, you’re probably subscribed. (Thank you!)
It only took a few days to start pulling this title apart. Just queer books? Surely I was boxing myself in too much? What even constitutes a queer book? What about if there are no queer themes whatsoever but the author happens to be queer? Does that still count?
I’m obviously outing myself as a deeply anxious over-thinker, but the irony isn’t lost on me that, in pursuit of queerness, I felt like I’d boxed myself in. This feels –– at least to me –– like the ultimate queer dilemma: we need language to define and understand ourselves, but that language can start to feel stifling when it no longer feels like it’s working on our terms. It’s how I sometimes feel about describing myself as non-binary, or queer –– these labels feel like they fit in the moment, but over time they can start to feel like an itchy turtleneck jumper, the really rough kind that eventually rub your skin raw.
This mental spiral nearly ended in me deleting this Substack and its corresponding Instagram account, but I’m glad I didn’t. Now I’m past the initial panic, the ‘queer’ aspect of this project feels like something to interrogate; something fluid that I can shape on my own terms. It’s what we’ve been doing for centuries, millennia –– before we had a language for queerness, we had ways of being that were either queer by today’s standards or queer back then.
Sula by Toni Morrison is a good example. It’s a story about many things: families, tragedy, mental health, legacies of institutional racism, intimacy and betrayal, to name just a few. It’s known as a lesbian classic, a reading Morrison herself has denied. “Friendship between women is special, different, and has never been depicted as the major focus of a novel before Sula,” she said. “Nobody ever talked about friendship between women unless it was homosexual, and there is no homosexuality in Sula.”
So that’s that, right? Morrison said Sula isn’t a lesbian book, so it’s not a lesbian book.
Well… not exactly. Representation is complicated, and the more marginalised you are, the harder it is to find obvious examples. This is especially the case when it comes to history. Most societies didn’t even have words for homosexuality until the early 20th century, and before then the only references to queerness we had were in court documents, oral histories and executioners’ records. William Dorsey Swann –– the earliest recorded example of a self-identified drag queen –– was only described as a drag pioneer in 2020, when an arrest record following his 30th birthday celebrations were unearthed.
It’s representation for sure, but it’s damn hard to find, and it’s often only possible to find it by sifting through records of our historical traumas.
This isn’t always the case. There are historical examples of queer love, joy and community, but they’re usually heavily-coded. Incidentally, lesbian relationships are exemplary. Historians could find in-depth diaries filled with deliciously filthy stories of women fucking each other and write them off as “just friends” –– it’s a phrase used to erase lesbian relationships so often that there’s an entire subreddit dedicated to it, r/SapphoAndHerFriend. So, when we hear “they were just friends,” we often don’t take it at value. Truthfully, sometimes we just don’t want to. In a world where obvious representation is so scarce, the urge to weave our own narratives from subtle details and queer-coded language can be irresistible.
So it’s unsurprising that, when Toni Morrison said there was no homosexuality in Sula, die-hard queer fans of the book found their own queer narratives anyway. Black femmes have written dissertations about Sula’s homoeroticism; others have mused on the mastery with which Morrison depicts queer sorrow. Black feminist icon Barbara Smith –– whose Home Girls anthology houses some of history’s greatest writing on political solidarity –– unpacked the novel’s lesbian representation in her 1977 essay ‘Toward A Black Feminist Criticism’. Morrison might not have intended Sula as a queer book, but it’s read widely as one –– and a vital one at that.
This is the beauty of writing. Words are open to interpretation, meaning we can reframe them through our own lenses to seek out queer representation, even when it wasn’t intended. Embracing this ethos of fluidity has helped me enormously.
I don’t feel trapped by the notion of centring just queer books anymore. Instead, I feel excited at the possibilities of sketching out how wildly expansive queerness can be.