When Your Body Is Like My Body
On symmetry and queerness
Sometimes when your body is like my body, we are queer. Other times when it isn’t like my body, your body is maybe straight. Like it’s having a period and mine isn’t. Or maybe your body is healthy and mine isn’t, or thin and I’m not. Queers are two bodies that are more alike than not, so we can’t be queer at these times. Queers and bodies are spacetime sensitive. Except when they aren’t and then they stay the same (depending on who’s telling their story), because they are dead.
But then, in time, our differents align and we call it symmetry even though no two things can ever be that alike even in physics (see: symmetry breaking). We are not twins or clones. We are not even related. Closely, anyway. Because all humans are more closely related than a family of chimpanzees. Did you know that? See, that’s another symmetry even though you knew it the other way around: There is more genetic diversity in a family of chimpanzees than in the entire homo sapiens no matter how different we think we are from each other. So even knowing can be queer — or maybe all knowing, all faith, is a kind of queerness. All of these bodies, these minds and souls aligned, moving, together, parallel. Symmetry.
People love to talk about lesbians and mirrors, but I have fucked myself and it wasn’t you. Not even close. You don’t…
