After the Party. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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of private property.
Simone’s conclusion, that “you’d see and agree that every man should be free,” resonates with Marx’s suggestion that the transcendence of private property could lead to emancipation and, in particular, the emancipation of sense: “The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all the human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human.”91 A world where “every man [is] free” would necessarily be a new world, one that would reterritorialize what it means to be “man” or “human.” Indeed, the concept of Man itself might simply wither away in such circumstances, giving way to new and better ways of being a being, and being together, in the world.92
The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division. New York, New York. July 29, 2016.
There is one thing that no one can be fully emancipated from. Death, like performance, is a central site for the production of collective being, and in the face of death’s unjust distribution to black and brown queer and trans people, minoritarian performance becomes a means for sustaining life—life that is still living, as well as the lives that we have already lost. Of central concern throughout this book will be the world-making dialectic of queer life and death. Sometimes, minoritarian performance is about freedom. But much of the time it is simply about survival. And we need the latter to get to the former.
Even before a performance begins, the world of the audience begins to come together. Voices converge, fall apart; bodies brush up against each other, repel each other, collide back together in new configurations; old friends talk in clusters, and new acquaintances exchange awkward banter; exes avoid eye contact, which is hard in such a small space; there are drinks and there is noise and art in weird places. And then people start to take their seats in folding chairs arranged in rows, stretching from the screen and microphone at the front of the room to the book display at the back. People without seats gather at the perimeter, they line up along the ramp that stretches up the length of the room. Someone takes the mic and an anticipatory air settles in as the audience turns the volume down and the faint parameters of a world flicker into being.
The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division is a queer bookstore, exhibition space, and event center located in a compact room at the back of (but autonomous from) New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center. The Bureau’s representative at the mic explains that the Bureau is part of a government that “doesn’t exist yet.” In the meantime, the Bureau has been itinerant, moving through a host of different spaces since its founding in 2012. The evening’s events celebrate the launch of the seventh issue of Apogee, a literary journal featuring the work of writers of color, queers, feminists, and other workers in the minoritarian subcultural sphere. Apogee is proof that in dark times people are getting together, and they’re making a plan.
There is a fundamental relationship between what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call “planning” and the work of minoritarian performance. “Planning,” as they use it, must be distinguished from the forms of central planning enacted by the regimes of historical communism, in which “the plan” was often a means for subordinating the multitudes to dictatorial state authority.93 Against this, Moten and Harney define planning thus: “This ongoing experiment with the informal, carried out by and on the means of social reproduction, as the to come of the forms of life, is what we mean by planning; planning in the undercommons is not an activity, not fishing, or dancing, or teaching, or loving, but the ceaseless experiment with the futurial presence of the forms of life that make such activities possible.”94 The planners are neither a ruling elite, nor a vetted aristocracy. They’re the kids in SNCC listening to Simone and throwing a party. In planning, rather than being ruled by the plan, the planners “are still part of the plan,” and they are planning because the plan is to change the world.95 Both planning and minoritarian performance are the continuum of “ceaseless experiment[ation]” through which minoritarian subjects materialize life-sustaining futurial forms of life that don’t yet exist.
Early in the program the playwright moves to the front of the room to read a section from his contribution to the issue, “Notes on Returning to San Francisco Twenty-Five Years Later.”96 Jorge Cortiñas stands behind the microphone holding his text, a few sheets of paper stapled together and creased in the middle. The paper is recycled and printed on the back are pages from a New Yorker article about (then-candidate) Donald Trump’s (lack of) reading habits. He speaks with a steady tone, moving through an enumerated sequence of observations about a return to a city full of ghosts and, even more, full with the people who have built luxury condos on the grounds where the dead lived and died.
“One.” San Francisco? “It’s changed,” he says. It’s no longer a brown frontier at the edge of the edge. Today, capital is rapidly reterritorializing the city for the financial elite, bringing with it the whiteness that gentrification aggressively imposes upon increasingly imperiled black, brown, and queer urban lifeworlds. “The people you moved to the Mission District to get away from? They live there now.” He pauses for emphasis and then, forceful, precise, sharp: “Two.” Little pause, followed by “It doesn’t matter where you walk; you keep walking past the apartments of dead people.” Three and Four. He wonders at the intermixture of the beauty of the landscape, which is populated by the ghosts of the no longer here.
The playwright uses performance to bend time, taking us back to the first wave of the AIDS pandemic, when death was every day, and the “city was full of vacant apartments”: “That battered city suggested you might be left alone and back in 1989 the hope of being left alone was the best your country had to offer you.” Only a few years before, in the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, the United States Supreme Court declared itself “quite unwilling” to recognize a “fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy.”97 In effect, queers had no right to be left alone, even and especially when fucking. But the desire to be left alone is not the same thing as the desire to be alone. Fucking doesn’t usually happen alone, nor does one move to a city, even or especially a “battered city,” to be alone, although cities can certainly be lonely.
The playwright’s fugitive flight to the Mission might have been to get away from the people he had to get away from so he could have some chance of survival, but it was also to get to the people he would need in order to survive. There, he helped to produce a world as much as this world helped to (re)produce him. As he writes in the penultimate “Note,” which he did not read that night in the Bureau, “When you were young and moved to San Francisco, new friends took you in and made you anew. San Francisco and your friends made you anew.”98 They made each other anew to keep each other alive. And when More Life was no longer an option, they carried each other to death, and beyond it. They had to. The country would rather they die, and when the plague came to take them, the country was happy to let it. Five. Six. “You can’t stop crying.”
Seven. When the plague came, they got in formation, got organized, and got to planning. Moten and Harney insist that planning can happen in “any kitchen, any back porch, any basement, any hall, any park bench, any improvised party, every night.”99 It used to happen in coffee shops as well: “You and your friends went to coffee shops to hold committee meetings and always found a large table to commandeer. In exchange for, say, an Orangina, you wrote press releases and planned acts of civil disobedience.” Of course, they were already being disobedient. Queerness, blackness, and brownness is itself disobedience, the swerve, the ontological and historical priority of resistance, and a break from the standard measure, the constant, the straight line, or of the major. Eight: “Turns out you had realized fairly quickly that being left alone was not enough.” When we haven’t got anything else, we’ve still got each other and ourselves. And we need each other in order to keep each other alive.
Nine. Ten. Twenty-five years later, the coffee shops in San Francisco are no longer the sites of planning, but extensions of the techno-economy. The playwright can’t find a seat. Eleven and then the final note, “Twelve,” with which the playwright concludes the performance: “You can’t remember the names of everyone who died. None of your friends can. You have to ponder old photographs. You ask each other. Remember him? What was his name?” Quiet. A beat. A rumble of applause passes through the Bureau. He pulls the paper to his side and shuffles