Queer Issue: From the Guest Editor

When [PANK] asked me to be the Guest Editor for the 2014 Queer Issue, I did a little Snoopy dance. Of course I wanted to do this! Queer writers continue to face issues of representation and appropriation, so I set out to find twelve voices whose stanzas, if I may paraphrase Thomas Sayers Ellis, are not the same.

Writers occupy a strange space in the public imagination. For queer writers, that space is often interstitial, betwixt and between straight/gay, or trans/cis. Sometimes it’s the negative space of being made invisible because you come from the places people forget or choose to ignore when they talk about queers – Appalachia, for example, or Tehran. Whoever we are, and wherever we come from, we have our distinctive narratives. We are tasked with delivering our messages without delivering lectures. And yet. We must be Queer 101 for everyone. And yet.

There is no one way to be queer. Likewise, there was no one type of queer writing I wanted. I found translations, I found illustrations, and I found language that knocked me sideways. Sometimes the work I encountered broke my heart. Sometimes I laughed so hard I scared my cat.

The nearly two hundred submissions I read deepened my understanding of the word queer. Of the lifequeer. They opened me to the wider experience, and I am better for it. Picking only twelve pieces to represent the innumerable ways that we can be queer was awfully difficult, but it would have been no less of a challenge to pick twenty five, or sixty. I don’t know how I chose these pieces, exactly. I said yes because they hit me somehow, because there was a turn of phrase or a combination of words that attached itself and wouldn’t let go.

In the 2014 Queer Issue we have short stories and poems, an essay, a piece that is maybe an essay and maybe not an essay, some photographs. We have prisons and coffee houses, werewolves and bees, Keith Haring and Beyoncé.

I am profoundly grateful to have had this opportunity.

Thank you, [PANK], and thank you, writers.

xoxo

Rafe Posey