It's Time! The Living Room Archive Is Ready For You!
For those of you ready to jump right in: click here to sign up and get access to the Living Room Archive!
For those of you who'd like to hear me wax poetic:
“Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”
- José Esteban Muñoz
How is queerness like astrology? Or perhaps astrology like queerness? And why does this matter right now?
This past weekend, when I wasn't getting the Living Room Archive cleaned up and ready for guests (you all!), I was out in the world doing gay things with my community. On Saturday, I went to a fundraiser/art show for a mutual aid org that supports trans asylum seekers. I saw some of the most beautiful, collectively-made quilts (that will get donated to trans people), I learned how to "tie in" a quilt, reconnected with old friends, and watched performances ranging from burlesque and an ambient DJ set to massage therapy as performance art. On Sunday, I danced with some friends to a bad DJ with sheep grazing below us. This weekend also marked the one year anniversary of the death of a young trans person in my extended community. May her memory continue to be a blessing.
Sunset with the Sun at 0° Cancer, Moon at 0° Libra / Sheep grazing. Look closely to see a little bird sitting on the shoulder of the second sheep!
I share this all to say that being queer for me has always involved all of this - gathering, dancing, collectivity, art-with-friends, strange and beautiful performance art, a sense of loss of the people I'll never get to know, grief for all the people I have known who aren't here anymore, moments of connection with strangers in the bathroom line, wrestling with complicated relationships of land/place/race/capital (how did those sheep get there, who maintains the land, who was displaced to make that possible?), fundraising because community is what keeps us safe when the world does not - queerness is all of this. There is no strange and beautiful performance art without loss without joy without connection without dancing without fear without community without without without
Queerness is the thread that strings all of these experiences together and helps me make sense of them. It is the thread which strings me together and helps me make sense of myself. It is the way that I know that other worlds are possible. It is my transport to "new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds."
When Muñoz talks about queerness, he talks about it like time travel. Queerness, he says, "allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present" - it gives us access both to the past, in the form of queer ephemeral archives, and to the future, in the form of the queer utopian horizon.
Astrology is like queerness in that it offers us a roadmap out of the quagmire of the present. It shows us the unfolding of time, forwards and backwards, in a thousand spirals. It shows us where our individual spiral inserts into the cosmic web of spirals, where we rub shoulders on the dance floor, where we make a crumble to drop off in celebration and in grief, where we invite friends over to our living room's to read together the tomes of our queer ancestors. If queerness gives us access to desire, astrology give us a map to get there.
And art?
Art shows us the vision. It allows us to not just think, but to really see and feel. To inhabit, for some finite period of time, something else, somewhere else, someone else. It breaks us open (hopefully) to make space for new mycelial connections to form.
The Living Room Archive is my invitation to you to join me in this process of being broken open again and again to make space for more. It's my invitation to you to join me in the process of deep devotional work to queer ancestors. It's my invitation to you to co-discover new and better pleasures and other ways of being in the world. It's my invitation to you to deepen your astrological practice through in-depth chart study and community exchange. It's my invitation to you to create just a little more space for the queer utopian horizon, that we might fall towards it together.