"How I loved your love."
The First Time | Why "branding" may replicate, but will never replace us.
This knife | fork | book postcard, tenderness, by Montreal-based artist/friend Billy Mavreas has become my calling card of sorts. I take it with me everywhere I go, gift it at my readings, a li’l reminder of what I’ve come to know as my core strength, what keeps me here.
One recent morning I wakened to this in my message box from a dear friend:
About Baldwin, Toni Morrison said, “Your tenderness—a tenderness so delicate I thought it could not last, but last it did and envelop me it did…You knew, didn’t you, how I loved your love? You knew.”
Now I do.
“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light.” - James Baldwin, Nothing Personal
There is but one struggle, the struggle to be here, damaged and all. “There is no hierarchy to oppression.” (Audre Lorde) It’s a courageous act to continue.
And this is nearly impossible without “accurate reflectors.” Trusted intimates, perhaps a stranger, in whose naked radiant faces we see ourselves.
“Magnifying each other’s light.”
I also refer to them as “touchstones,” those [people/things] that immediately connect us to/remind us of a self we misplace at times that in this reflective light, brings us to the here & now. Our exquisite selves. My fairy.
“I see you.”
Branding/marketing, AI will have none of it. What we see is a fabrication of what it’s supposed to be, look like, sound like, but strangely not feel like. An idea of the dream. Not the dream itself.
Your dream.
“And I heard that there's a special place
Where boys and girls can all be queens every single day”
I only recently came across Chappell Roan’s Pink Pony Club online, not her official video (which is a hoot) but by the positively infectious viral lip-synching duo TrinoxAdam on TikTok (@trinoxadam). Goodness, the rapturous love these two share.
And the joy of a good pop song.
As Langston Hughes quickens:
“We / Who have nothing to lose / Must sing and dance”
Why wait? There’s Nothing Left To Lose (EBTG), much of this summer (the year, ffs), “poof” gone, or as my dance buddy Christopher says, “Lay it all down babe.” And I do, dancing my tits off to RuPaul’s The Realness, around 6pm daily.
Oppressed peoples have always found ways to dance in the face of adversity, often as an act of defiance, a means of survival, the express purpose of ecstasy, joy. Anthems. To rise up.
If anyone was to tell me in 2024 I’d be enraptured in my living room movin and groovin to one the the best Pet Shop Boys’ albums EV-VAH, the gift of a lifetime, with these opening Neil Tenant lines from the first single, Loneliness:
There is a better fight
A cause close to my heart
The struggle against loneliness
That's tearing you apart
Lush strings and orchestrations swell to one of the most recognizable beats/sounds in queer music history, and a video to pine over. Who else but PSB to make your lonely-ass get up and dance?! “Get over yourself, Cher!”
Here’s a playlist I made to dance on my 65th. A springboard of sorts.
Maybe it’s not your cuppa, and you’re worth finding out what your lifelines, your reflectors, your touchstones, your cuppa is. What moves, keep you here.
Jimmy (honouring his one-hundreth this year): “Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all. That’s the only advice you can give anybody. And it’s not advice, it’s an observation.”
James Baldwin, at 100, on high beam.
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