The Brooklyn Rail

I’m writing the introduction to this month’s Critics Page as the year 2023 is coming to an end, a year in which I’ve spent much time with the idea of queer heartbr(ache). It began when my friend and cosmic mirror (our birthdays are exactly six months apart) Le’Andra LeSeur and I had our first significant heart to heart about recent breakups that had left us tender. We were eager to challenge the meaning of “heartbreak,” as it implied a finitude; a fixed, irreversible occurrence. Instead, we were interested in the space of potentiality activated by hearts breaking open, and the productive process of aching. This ongoing conversation allowed me to articulate my thinking around heartbr(ache) as a precondition to living a queer life. For so many of us, coming into queer identity has been accompanied by feelings of rejection, loneliness, grief, and betrayal. The very first heartbr(ache) is the early realization that we live in a heteronormative world that condemns our existence; our private desires are subject to public scrutiny, our histories have been willfully erased, our graves haven’t been marked. Our difference is considered a threat. We inhabit a political space.

In order to navigate the world around us, and envision an alternative in which people co-exist not despite but because of their differences, we queers have to constantly identify the power structures that suppress us. When love becomes politicized, the political realm obtains an inherently romantic quality too (romantic meaning anything characterized by love). This intertwining of love and politics has of course been brilliantly articulated by bell hooks, who argued for the potential of love as a form of radical resistance and political activism. Queer identity cannot detach itself from politics, and I would suggest that all our political engagements—environmentalism, decolonization, animal rights, anti-ableism, to name a few—are at their core romantic. As the contributions to this Critic’s Page demonstrate, queer heartbr(ache) expands the definition of romance far beyond the limited heteronormative understanding of the term.

When Jean Genet referred to himself as a “prisoner of love” (un captif amoureux) in his eponymous final book narrating his years spent in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, he highlighted the queer interlacing of love and politics. His commitment to Palestinian liberation was both romantic and political; the attraction he felt for the fedayeen informed his understanding of their plight, and vice versa. The latter is critical to add, not only because political dissent is sexy, but because it could be easily misinterpreted that Genet was swayed into the cause by his desires, and that matters of the heart (and other organs) skewed matters of the intellect. But this would be a very heteronormative interpretation, for it exhibits the kind of binary thinking that plagues our society. The distinctions between emotion, intellect, and physicality aren’t that sharply defined—in fact they’re beautifully blurry.

Queer people around the world are currently mobilizing through heartbr(ache) to demand a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. While this is manifested in different ways—on social media, in the streets, in the classroom, in our artistic output—the queer solidarity with Palestine is undeniable. Queer people are particularly aligned with Palestinian liberation because we know what it’s like to have your identity be considered a threat. We know what it’s like not to have your existence be “formally” acknowledged, or to have the dominant image that exists of you be created by someone who is not you. We know what it’s like to be denied the kind of political power that is actually reflected by the systems in power. Whether you call it a war or a genocide, we are witnessing the ongoing mass murder of Palestinians—an ethnic cleansing. To call for a ceasefire is not to ignore the atrocities of October 7, to criticize Israel is not to support Hamas violence, to oppose Zionism is not to be anti-Semitic. To have Palestine at the front of your mind—and this is something I have to work through every day—is not to forget about Ukraine, which Putin continues to bomb, now using Gaza as a distraction (however, the United States is not sending money to Russia—quite the opposite; it is, however, sending money to Israel). The non-linear way of thinking that queer politics aspires to steers away from the tendency to create a hierarchy of atrocities, which implies that if one faces greater pain than another, it is excused from inflicting pain in return. As Masha Gessen told New York Magazine after their controversial New Yorker piece (not surprising that a queer political theorist would articulate this particularly well), “every atrocity is, in fact, singular” and “if the whole rationale for maintaining Holocaust memory is the promise of “Never again”—is the pledge to learn from history—then how in the world do you learn from history if you place an event outside of history; if you say that it cannot be compared to anything that is going on now?”¹

Like Jean Genet, I often find myself feeling betrayed by language, particularly in moments of crisis when language utterly fails. Despite its theoretical embrace of failure, queer politics shows little patience for the awkward and slippery ways language can operate, how it can stick out its leg and make you stumble. I too am guilty of this. Yet as Genet wrote, “we’ll always need words whose meaning is shaky and uncertain.”² In fact, I would argue that it’s in this shaky and uncertain space that truly productive discourse happens.

I might’ve never turned to Genet if I hadn’t once been in love with a woman who loved Genet. She was someone who positioned herself as a sealed book in our relationship, yet demanded close reading. I studied the shape, the texture, the smell of her—but I couldn’t access what was inside. In my desperate effort to read her, I started reading Genet. And in my search for her, I found the search for a FREE PALESTINE.

1. Eric Levitz, “Masha Gessen on Israel, Gaza, and Holocaust Analogies,” Intelligencer, New York Magazine, December 23, 2023, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/12/masha-gessen-on-israel-gaza-and-holocaust-analogies.html.
2. Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1986), p. 178