‘Queerness Beyond Desire’

For as long as I can remember, queerness has been framed to me by and large as whom you desire. It can only be claimed once you’ve created “it” (an electric charge) between yourself and another queer body. The way your queerness becomes known to others is by revealing the intimacy you experienced. As a consequence, my queer legitimacy has always felt contingent on parading private exchanges I had, instead of relating to the way I inhabit my body.

And so I began the series “Queerness Beyond Desire.” These portraits, all shot in Southern California, where I live, capture a subculture of teens who use the way they dress as a form of rebellion against prescribed categories of identity. These kids are hurting as they push up against the walls the world expects them to live within. But there’s also power and possibility in their struggle.

In wearing their inside on their outside, they reconfigure and disintegrate identity boundaries in a way I longed to do when I was a young queer person in pain. Their physical representation of their emotional landscape becomes a call for community: People love them for their pain and their resistance. Vulnerability attracts others who are feeling the same way. This is something I didn’t know was possible when I was younger. I didn’t believe I could be loved if I showed my queerness, my cuts, my pain.

These portraits’ intentional surreality derives from my desire to present these kids as constructing an existence beyond what reality has to offer. I am aware that each of my subjects might not feel as if they alone are able to create something new, but as a web of human beings doing this work of self expression, they hold immense revolutionary power to slowly change norms. Each portrait becomes a mixture of who these teens are and who I am dreaming them up to be—the power I believe them to possess. They are symbols of bravery, change, and resistance.