Tag Archives: CHINOIRE

I Ain’t Reading All That; I’m Happy For U Tho, or Sorry That Happened

“Doomscrolling is nothing new, people used to do the same with tv remote, switching channel after channel, rarely settling on any one program. And heads buried in social media news feed is nothing new either – before smartphone and internet heads used to be buried in actual physical newspapers. Only the means have changed, not the habit. This is not advancement, it’s recurring derangement. I’ll call it progress when you put down your phone or remote and actually listen to another person. Sure, phones can be a supplement to organic conversation, but never a replacement.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science

Graphic Dreams: China-Based Artist Reimagines Anime and Queer Beauty

“This is a story of art without markets, drama without a script, narrative without progress. The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

So, Uhm…: Voicing the Crushing Silence of Depression

“If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.

Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.”
― Stephen Fry

Silent Scream: Conversations Rarely Had About Suicide & One Activist’s Mission

“It’s my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

Fake-cation – Tracing Illusions of Black, Queer Luxury in China

“To subject to scrutiny the mechanisms which render life painful, even untenable, is not to neutralize them; to bring to light contradictions is not to resolve them. But, as skeptical as one might be about the efficacy of the sociological message, we cannot dismiss the effect it can have by allowing sufferers to discover the possible social causes of their suffering and, thus, to be relieved of blame.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society

Queer Sexual Economics: Tracing Shame and other Fun Activities

“What we have invented, Hans, is a new religion. Oh, not the moralistic and old-fashioned theological kind with that God who does not want us, but one with brutal splendours, magnificent contemporary rites and rituals, scenes, gestures, sacrifices, humiliations, terrors, tremblings, mortifications, degradations, phantasmagoric transfigurations into other realms of feeling, new realisations that will come from this cleansing purge, and then transcendencies unto a New World of our own making, with our own new rules and rewards and justifications.”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

Domino Effect: What Lumumba’s Murder Mean’s to Queer Kenyans Abroad

“Today I wore a pair of faded old jeans and a plain grey baggy shirt. I hadn’t even taken a shower, and I did not put on an ounce of makeup. I grabbed a worn out black oversized jacket to cover myself with even though it is warm outside. I have made conscious decisions lately to look like less of what I felt a male would want to see. I want to disappear.”
― Sierra D. Waters, Debbie.

Gays and Girls Behaving Badly: The Dynamics of the GBFF Relationship -Podcast Episode 3

“This is my game within our game—to try to come up with the scenario in which it would work out better. Maybe if I met him now. Maybe if I met him in college. After college. Once he’s comfortable with who he is. But every time I do this, I feel awful. Because I’m sacrificing our history. I don’t love him for who he is now. I wouldn’t love him for who he is two years from now. I love him for all the hims he’s already been with me. I guess that’s the contradiction. I want a fresh start. I would fight for that fresh start. But I also want it to be a continuation.”
― David Levithan, You Know Me Well

The Importance of a Chosen Family – Episode 1

“ten reasons to love being queer

viii.
the people within our community are so supportive and so caring and so loving, most of the time towards people they don’t even know
and it is in moments like that when you realize that the queer community is more than a community
we are a family”
― Courtney Carola, Have Some Pride: A Collection of LGBTQ+ Inspired Poetry

Mama’s Boy: A Queer Son’s Love Letter to His Mother

“I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.

We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

Invisible Leash: Realities of Living Abroad as a Queer African (Pt 2)

“One miner at Robinson Deep Mines, Daniel, […] claims that as an induna or “boss boy”, he had sought the company of a “girlfriend”, that is, a young Basotho man, because he was not authorized to go in town to “see women”. However, when he got special permission to leave the mining complex, he recalls with barely suppressed emotion that, during such leaves, he would soon long to be reunited with his “boy-wife”. He and his peers claimed that “[they] loved them better” and preferred them over the experienced (female) city streetwalkers.”
― Chantal Zabus, Out in Africa: Same-Sex Desire in Sub-Saharan Literatures & Cultures

Invisible Leash: Realities of Living Abroad as a Queer African (Pt 1)

“There is such a thing as too much loss. Too much has been taken from you both – taken and taken and taken, until there’s nothing left but hope, and you’ve given that up because it hurts too much. Until you would rather die, or kill, or avoid attachments altogether, than lose one more thing.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

It’s Not You, It’s Me: Meditations on Imposter Syndrome Within Beijing’s Queer Community

“We are hunting the demons that haunt others. We get a smell and off we go. And you know why, Sunil? You know why we are so good at hunting the demons of others? Because we are so good, gifted even, at stalking and evading our own. But all demons hunters think that they are really heroes, and you know what all heroes need?”
― Chris Abani, The Secret History of Las Vegas

Druid in the City: One Black Woman’s Loathe Letter

“I said, “No, I don’t see why.” After a moment I realized that I did know why. The reason was suddenly obvious to me. I said, “Actually, Mama, yes, I do see why. The men offered up the women because they were cowards and the worst kind of men possible. What kind of men offer up their daughters and wives to be raped in place of themselves?” Mama stared wide-eyed at me, then, very calmly, she said, “Ijeoma, you’re missing the point.” “What point?” “Don’t you see? If the men had offered themselves, it would have been an abomination. They offered up the girls so that things would be as God intended: man and woman instead of man and man. Do you see now?” A headache was rising in my temples. My heart was racing from bewilderment at what Mama was saying. It was the same thing she had said with the story of Lot. It was as if she were obsessed with this issue of abomination. How could she really believe that that was the lesson to be taken out of this horrible story? What about all the violence and all the rape? Surely she realized that the story was even more complex than just violence and rape. To me, the story didn’t make sense.”
― Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees

Dune – Of Barren Wastelands and Meditations on Touch

“Up until then, i’d never understood how people could just keep on living (…) Maybe I had a place to belong, but it wasn’t something definite, like a seat. It was flowing and formless… Perhaps inside of me, perhaps outside of me. A reason to live, the power to live, a place to belong in this world… I think the essence of that sweet nectar varies from person to person.”
― Nagata Kabi, My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness

Translating Black Femaleness Through the Chinese Gaze Pt 2

“We watch them dissolve in the air. They move through the sky, all at once. And bits of them sift, until they melt away so small that the eye can’t see, caught in the bridge’s wooden slats or in the river or into nothingness altogether, until we’re the only ones who’ll take the fact of their ever existing at all on with us, until we end up losing those memories, too, although even then they’ll still probably be around somewhere. It isn’t very beautiful.”
― Bryan Washington, Memorial

Stuck: Black, Unwell, and in Need of Care

“The real question is: Why would a person rather have an enemy than a conversation? Why would they rather see themselves as harassed and transgressed instead of have a conversation that could reveal them as an equal participant in creating conflict? There should be a relief in discovering that one is not being persecuted, but actually, in the way we have misconstrued these responsibilities, sadly the relief is in confirming that one has been “victimized.” It comes with the relieving abdication of responsibility.”
― Sarah Schulman, Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

Translating Black Femaleness Through the Chinese Gaze

“My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

Great Sexpectations: Musings on a Convoluted Sexual Journey

“There’s this phenomenon that you’ll get sometimes—but not too often, if you’re lucky—where someone you think you know says something about your gayness that you weren’t expecting at all. Ben called it a tiny earthquake. I don’t think he was wrong. You’re destabilized, is the point. How much just depends on where the quake originates, the fault lines.”
― Bryan Washington, Memorial