Pandemic Queers 

i.    the cancer patient and the homosexual 

In 1973 homosexuality was removed from the American Physiatrics Association’s list of mental illnesses. During the 47 years thereafter, illness and queerness have performed an interweaving dance; its staging and choreography tumbling out from our cultural imagination in dizzying metaphorical pirouettes. 

Three years later, Foucault writes in The History of Sexuality of a peculiar new emergence: the homosexual as an individual. Rather than isolated actions exterior to the core of the self, after its departure from the category of illness, homosexuality materialized as a wholistic category of being (Foucault, 43). No longer referring solely to sex, modern queer sensibility thrives in the mundane semiotics of everyday life: 
A hairstyle , a branded sweatshirt , a certain gait , a vacation spot , a favorite musician. 

When I was eleven years old, my friend Simon passed away from Leukemia. It was the summer of 2010 and my family was spending the day at a waterpark. From the back seat of our blue rental car, I heard my mom strangle a sob as we received an incoming phone call. She scrambled to disconnect the bluetooth speaker function we had used that morning to listen to James and the Giant Peach on audiobook; this one instinct emblematic of my entire experience perceiving, or rather trying to perceive, Simon’s cancer. Hushed whispers, fleeting facial expressions, standing on my tiptoes to glance at text messages. I missed Simon. But long before his death, Simon the ten year old boy (who also happened to have cancer) had vanished. In his place stood Simon the cancer patient, a figure too somber for a child to understand, much less be burdened with the task of continuing to love. 

In Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor she describes cancer as “not so much a disease of time but a pathology of space” (14). She groups its metaphors - spreads, proliferates, diffuses - as language of topography (15). But what about the metaphor of pathology itself? While the word technically refers to a scientific study of disease, a quick google search reveals this example of it’s verb form:

Regard or treat as physiologically abnormal.
“Most of the previous theories pathologize same-sex attraction” 

The dictionary blatantly betrays a previous synonymity between homosexuality and illness. Yet queerness continues to flourish as a metaphorical disease. So I wonder, is there still relevance in mapping queerness and illness as co-constituting societal discourses? Perhaps an articulation of the “cancer patient” births new potential for meaningful community building. Or does it merely increase the stigma of disease? According to the Foucauldian understanding of power as always creative and repressive, the answer is probably both (Foucault, 86). Navigating our world, I feel acutely aware of how societal understanding of queerness operates along a parallel logic. While there may be power in “gay” or “bi” or “trans” as coherent, intelligible categories of people, I can’t help but feel a lingering sense of unease. What happens to our ability to feel truly held by queerness as it becomes partitioned into palatable, linear narratives. 

Sontag writes, “Throughout the nineteenth century, disease metaphors become more virulent, preposterous, demagogic … Disease, which could be considered as much a part of nature as is health, became the synonym of whatever was ‘unnatural’"(74). Through mainstream ecological narratives in Western science, the realm of the “natural” has been rendered in perfect adherence to anthropocentric conceptions of normality. In turn, this has naturalized the fragile demands of cisheteronormativity. Sontag continues, “before the city was understood as, literally, a cancer causing (carcinogenic) environment, the city was seen as itself a cancer—a place of abnormal, unnatural growth, and extravagant, devouring, armored passions” (74).  As illness is simultaneously unnatural, abnormal, extravagant and inherent to the body, queerness is just the same. 

ii.   lesbian epilepsy 

This kinship is made painfully obvious in the plot devises of new lesbian cinema. A twist on the trope of supernatural occurrence as an expression of female sexuality, Joachim Trier’s 2017 film, Thelma, positions violent seizure fits as direct allegory for lesbian desire. The film’s climax depicts Thelma - a timid first year university student coming to terms with her sexuality - at the Norwegian National opera with her confident, snide love interest, Anja. As the curtains draw and the lights go down, Anja begins to rest her hand on Thelma’s thigh. Their first moment of physical contact, from this shot onwards Thelma is shuttled into a series of horrific and uncontrollable seizures which inexplicably render her loved ones either set on fire, drowned, attacked by a fleet of crazed birds, or simply vanished. 

The Guardian writes the headline: Telekinetic Lesbian Drama is Scary, Sexy and Cool (Bradshaw, 2017).
This begs me to ask the question, is it really? What is effaced when we use fiction to fuse the concrete concerns of living with epilepsy and living as a lesbian? Equating the two in our mediascape seems to perform a dual othering: queerness is dangerous (just as disease), disease is abnormal (just as queerness). 

iii.  queens of corona 

Underneath this copious metaphorical rubble, the physical intertwinement of disease and queerness creates tangible risk for queer bodies. Worldwide, the AIDS epidemic forced LGBTQ communities to face a terrifying new temporal reality. Protestors turned caretakers turned mourners turned lifeless bodies themselves. Today, the risks of covid19 travel along existing avenues of intersecting marginalization - race, class, sexuality, geography, religion, gender. 

During the pandemic it is increasingly difficult to access hormones and surgeries involved in affirmative medical transition; at the detriment of many queer youth, the biological family unit is employed as a method of isolation to halt contagion; a disproportionate amount of individuals experiencing houselessness are queer; and much international travel rests on heterofuturist values (i.e. do you have a child with the individual you wish to visit?).

Four months after my initial experience of lockdown in New York City, I was able to see my first friend since the pandemic’s onset. When I spotted Cyan smoking a cigarette on her stoop I began to run. She spotted me back from down the block, and as soon as I was in earshot shouted,
“Being a pandemic queer! It’s so lonely!” She laughed through a mouthful of bread and cheese.

We embraced and I laughed too. I laughed at my sense of relief in this semblance of non-virtual queerness. I laughed because I felt an overwhelming giddiness bubble up from my toes. She held my shoulders and I held hers, wide-eyed we took each other in. Pandemic queers. 

Cyan began to tell me of her experience living in the Netherlands during covid, choosing not to return to her family in South Korea. She had been drafting letters to her little sister Chaemin, explaining how, at age 20, she fled Seoul with her girlfriend to experience a new and disorientingly “free” embodiment in Berlin. Hearing from friends about the tracing of a covid outbreak to a gay bar in Itaewon, she was incessantly worried about the resulting ostracization of the LGBTQ community in Korea. Media outlets were lightening fast to blame gay people for a health disaster - labelling coronavirus a “gay disease” or joking "the queens of corona" - further exacerbating the problem by inciting a fear of getting tested. Hundreds of people were outed to their loved ones and gay bars at the crux of the queer community in Seoul are now in the process of closing their doors. 

This rhetoric is all too similar to that of the Cholera outbreak in 19th century Europe. Parisians scrambled to locate the threat of Cholera in bodies and neighborhoods of poverty (Kudlick, 52). To stay healthy, all one needed to do was drink champagne - or in other words, gain access to symbols of status and wealth (Kudlick, 59). Conditions causing poverty were not the derivation of evil themselves, but rather the type of person found living in them. In the current South Korean articulation of covid19, the culprit may be LGBTQ people. However, in Rotterdam, the city in which Cyan resides, it is people who appear to be of Southeast Asian descent. For Cyan to stay in the Netherlands was to be shouted at, “Hey, corona!” when she went to the supermarket. She was stuck between state surveillance and state sponsored xenophobia. Spending months in a digital limbo, she felt she could no longer uphold the ongoing reconciliation of her identities. 

Just then a biker rode by, their portable stereo blasting Paul Simon’s Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,
“Goodbye to Roooosieeeeee, the queen of Coronaaa”

We looked at each other yet again, this time in disbelief. Cyan cracked a small, half lipped smile as we silently wished the best for the queens of corona in Seoul. 





Works Cited:
Bradshaw, Peter. “Thelma Review – Telekinetic Lesbian Drama Is Scary, Sexy and Cool.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 2 Nov. 2017. 
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Penguin Classics, 2020. 
Kudlick, Catherine. Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris: A Cultural History. University of California Press, 1996. 
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1978.