"Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of negative and toiling in the world. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that the world is not enough, that indeed something is missing." — Jose Munoz, Cruising Utopia
On Dec. 3, 2013, queer theory critic and visionary thinker Jose Esteban Munoz passed away in New York City, at age 46. Young.
Munoz was already the kind of academic that many aspire to bethe author of two highly influential books on queer theory, race and performance studies: Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics and Cruising Utopia: The Them and There of Queer Futurity, among other powerful articles and edited books. He was a professor and former chair of the Department of Performance Studies at The Tisch School of the Arts, a great teacher and admired colleague.
I had the chance to meet Munoz a few times when he was on campus to share his work. I appreciated his quiet focus, his eye for the weird, the grotesque, the vulnerable in queer performance. In my own writing, I have looked especially to his work Disidentifications as a way of pinpointing the queer contrarity that I hungered for in the music I listened to, the performers I watched, even in my own life and my own family. In his book Cruising Utopia, I found articulated the spirit that keeps me writing and teaching: the desire for an elsewhere that is both critical and hopeful. That spirit I hear in Michael Jackson's performance of "Ben," his love song to a rat, in the writing of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, in the critical sass of my students who always steps ahead of me, in the activist spirit of the folks who recently fought to keep the Broadway Youth Project successfully alive and visible to the youth who need it most.
I remember feeling this desire for the world to be something different, this feeling that I in fact belonged to another time. Not just another familyI felt very much like my family was mine, but that I was waiting for my adult self, and for a world to catch up with me. For people who saw things like I did.
Rebecca lived down the street from us, in a sprawling avocado green house made of stucco with Spanish style wrought iron railings. She had a big laugh, and long skinny legs, and hair that would often twist out of their braids, in their kinky might. She often smelled of oranges.
One day, Rebecca and I were walking through the vacant lot that led to an old abandoned railroad line that was across from our houses. If you got in far enough, the houses and the everydayness of our street became invisible. You could find old wooden tracks. There were tall pines, and when I heard country music, something that my family mocked, but I secretly loved, I would think of the field, with its Queen Anne's Lace, and soughing pines. Sometimes I would hear the fiddles and the lonely slide of a slide guitar, when I was out there, alone, and I would listen for the birds, too, and squint my eyes so that the sun refracted through my lashes, like the start of a Mountain Dew commercial. Normally, ( especially when I was with other Black people ), I'd keep this movie of another life in check, staying in the now. But with Rebecca that day, with the rhythm of our steps, I let myself keep daydreaming, dream melding into right now, and I could hear that music.
We were walking along, where the plants got wilder, the bushes a little more entangled, and sometimes our hands would hit together, just briefly, letting them swing back again. There was shade, and a deep smell of green things both growing and dying, and then a breeze and the chill of my own drying sweat.
We entered an open space, framed by the trees and briars. It looked like someone had tried to chop down one of the pines, and there were other signs of people, too. Our chatter stopped. There, just to the rear of an old campfire, was a pile of tattered pages, some dried out and faded in the sun, some still holding the pooled wetness of last night's rain.
Rebecca ran ahead of me, and whooped excitedly.
"Playboys!"
The Playboys, as it turned out, offered few surprises about the future. But it was the walk itself, the searching, that I think I held onto, that propelled me into my own queer future.
Thank you, Jose, for taking the space of academic writing to dream on paper, to walk with us, hands not quite touching, as we continue our search.
Francesca Royster is a Professor of English at DePaul University, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, Popular Culture, gender, race, sexuality and performance. Her books include Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era ( University of Michigan Press, 2013 ) and Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon ( Palgrave, 2003 ).