This is an unstructured response to the idea of imagining queer futures. It is a collection of musings about the past, present and future, attempting to queer the concept of time itself. With excerpts from Hina’s collection of queerfuturistic tales, personal histories, lists, memories, questions, observations and a fair bit of rambling, the author attempts to deconstruct the anxieties of our day and age and how they impact our imaginings of the future.
It is nearly time for fajr when Hemzl walks out of the musallah. They know they only have a short break before they must return to the prayer room, yet they stop to admire the crystals worked into the mosaic walls. It’s not like they haven’t seen them before. Crystals are as common as dirt – embedded into walls and floors, regulating ambient temperature, recording vital signs and health and glowing to announce the daily calls to namaz. In fact these specific crystals come from their phuppo-joon’s labs and so Hemzl has even seen them being created. But they are still pretty to look at. And it is still delightful to lean in close and examine their own reflection wrapped around the multiple facets of the stones.
Even more fun is pretending they don’t see Mannat waiting for them down the secluded hallway.
They smile, holding themselves in anticipation, as Mannat predictably makes her way towards them. They pretend to be surprised when she wraps her arms around them, lifting them away from the wall and twirling them around, sending their kufi flying. It flutters and lands on the glass floors. Almost immediately a maintenance bot moves to retrieve it.
“Let me go, baleed! Before that thing eats my cap!”
Yesterday, I wanted to give up.
It has been a strange few months. We’ve been having a few of those, haven’t we?
In February, I lost my job.
It was a case of Neuroqueerness vs Patriarchal Capitalism.
(Spoiler Alert: Patriarchal Capitalism won)
For someone coming out of a massive burn-out to rediscover their strength and reclaim their identity – it was a shock to the system, an entirely unnecessary one if I am being honest. Work has been a defining feature of my generation. Not in the same way that it was for generations before us. I am sure I don’t need to explain. You can just look at us and know. People like me – we like being productive, we like making things and contributing to society – it’s more than just the capitalistic delusion, though we do like the money. Work, in a large way, is how I make meaning of life. And how I connect with other people, through shared tasks geared towards achieving a common goal.
Losing my job meant losing all of that and not just my next pay-cheque. I wish the person who fired me understood that. There is no understating the sheer insignificance that can be inflicted on you by those who do not see you for everything you are and can be, those who are only interested in your work-product, but not your work-process or your work-personhood.
I wish this was just a “me” problem. But our strings are being cut down. Systematically. Maybe in the future we will learn better to float. I want to imagine a post-capitalist, ecological future centered around queer joy and found family where I can never ever be discarded so easily. But…
How do we construct a future that decentralizes power and instead allows people to be?
In March, I attended an AI Art Festival.
(Spoiler Alert: AI is not coming for our jobs. At least not in the way we imagine. Straight cis-men still remain the biggest reason why we are all f**ked.)
I am a writer. On good days I call myself a transmedia storyteller. On the not so good ones, I shrug and confess, often under duress, that I like telling stories. My story from this festival is, unironically, not from the festival. It is the story of the quiet smoke I shared on the balcony of a Bangalore pub with a fellow neuroqueer. I asked if they wanted to engage in conversation. They said no. I was more relieved than I imagined I would be. We stared at the pretty lights and smoked our cigarettes. And everyone lived happily ever after.
The conflict in this story was ensuring the ashtray that I was holding was equidistant from us both. I want a future where this is the only kind of conflict I have to endure.
The festival was great. The fear of AI (and calls for its regulation) was greater. The patriarchal gaze was the greatest. Jake Elwes, an artist-speaker – I met at the festival is doing some great work with AI, Drag and Queering the Dataset. You should definitely go check their work out.
Can the future we imagine be just one big gay afterparty?
In April, I attended India’s first Kink Convention.
(Spoiler Alert: I now own a flogger.)
There is a surprisingly large number of engineers in the kink community. Or maybe there are just so many engineers in India that they are unfairly over-represented in every space. Or maybe I just have an engineering-kink and kept noticing the BE/BTech after everyone’s name.
There is a trauma our education system inflicts upon us, made more insidious the more serious and tangibly productive the course of study is. I mean, have you ever met a happy engineer? We carry it with us. This pain. And it perpetuates in the systems and complexes we inhabit as adults.
Point being, I feel bad for engineers. They deserve more hugs. But they have been taught too hard to resist all attempts at hugging. So much so that they won’t even realize that hugging is mostly a metaphor here. These people programme the technocracy that we all live in.
How can we be gentler for those we entrust the architecture of our future to?
I have written at length about my emotional and physical experience at Kink Con. But the biggest takeaway from this event was that the reality I (and a lot of us) imagine is possible – in moments at least. The question though is, how do we make these moments last?
Waiting was hard. Waiting for water to collect. Waiting for noodles to soften. Waiting for the clever lady to give her the signal to enter the bank. All of it. Taka pulled back her sleeve to check the tracker the woman – Lee-san – had embedded in her cavity last night. It was expensive. New. Taka had had a much better one when she was in training. But this one was pretty cool too. Of course, she’d have to extract it soon. To sell. But this morning, when she had gone on her run and used it to track her pace, distance, heartbeat, hormonal map and blood oxygen levels – it had felt like the old days again. Almost. Taka didn’t have much of an imagination, but even if she did, it would have been impossible to imagine how last night would have ended. A million yen to do a 500 metre rooftop run in under 10 minutes. In the dark. With no prep time. Taka had almost not made it. The homeless lifestyle had taken points off of her speed and endurance. Not to mention the rusted crystal girder that had almost taken her out. But in the end she had managed.
Unfortunately though, it was all for nothing.
Today, I wash vessels.
It is a better option than looking at life and wondering what to make of it. It is better than doing anxiety spirals for yet another boi who doesn’t have the “emotional bandwidth” for me. It is better than processing the reality of the latest in a series of “we will not be moving forward with you as a candidate” emails.
Flooding a basin that makes me bend too low, I think of all the stories my people will tell of this time. Of the Swedish Court that decided that a sexual relationship is not compulsory when defining live-in partnership. Of the Ugandan president who legalized state-sponsored homophobia and transphobia by approving one of the harshest anti-LGBTQIA++ laws in the world. Of the Supreme Court of India (SCI) and its reserved verdict on marriage equality.
FYI: Reserved verdict basically means that the SCI will get back to us. Don’t call them, they’ll call us.
Maybe they’ll talk about the beloved children’s author who became the antagonist of a fight that wasn’t even hers. Of the numerous odious instances of bigotry that spring daily from the land of the brave and the home of the free to ruthlessly penalize our self-expression and identity through unjust and unconstitutional manipulation of sentiment and legal machinery.
Perhaps there’ll be notes on how we earned Pride Cosmetics while playing Overwatch 2’s first ever Pride Event?
My clothes are fully wet now. A comfortable feeling in stagnant heat and despair. I think of Nerissa Trindade, a queer life coach and author I follow. Their affirmation of the day is to Move with Gratitude. My hips start to sway as I go through my gratitude list:
M, who called me from New York when I told her about the job
Mi, who was happy that I ranted to them after so very long
G, who gave dubious advice but meant it so hard
G, who set up weekly calls to help me process what I want
R, who is always game to co-work on a googlesheet
L, who sent me pictures of a kitten-mermaid from Thailand
D, who told me to shoot my shot and I did and even though it didn’t land, the sheer confidence boost of having shot it!
K, who spent the day with me and let me teach her how to cook
S, who teases me because she understands
A, who is the kindest editor I have ever known
T, who cuddled my mother when I was away
B, who came back even though she had no reason to stay
My spoons are being rinsed and re-rinsed as I think of a workshop I attended. Where artist-activists Irem Aydin and Oliver Katny (pronouns mew/meow) spoke about Queerfuturistic Utopias – of building a spaceship and a world for it to take us to. They made us wonder and wonder
My answer is, “Yes.”
But then they ask…
“On what conditions?”
There was a group of people gathered around a fire within an old oil drum. He sincerely hoped the sputtering flames and flying embers were holographic. Nonetheless, he made note of them as yet another potential safety hazard. A well-muscled couple wearing loose vests and baggy trousers, their tails intertwined. A tall furry singing something in a soft voice. A fair few mecha-heads, clearly from affluent Houses. And at the edge of the crowd, tail hanging over the boardwalk was a merperson.
Tomorrow, I will wake up.
It is not a promise I make to myself. It is inevitable. I will sleep. I will wake up. Life will go on. Things will get better. Things will get worse. Things will remain the same. I may read salacious fanfiction. I may get a job interview. I may get a sandwich. I may toss my cat into the air. I may practise my ukulele. I may work on my game. I may stare at the wall and think of the stories I want to live. I may be coerced into an argument with a friend about who “controls” the queer narrative and to what end.
Through all of these maybes, I shall remain me.
Because that is truly the only thing we share in our imaginations of our futures. The irrefutability of our own presence across time. The chance not just to be alive in the future, but the chance to live.
To wake gently, sans anxieties that have nothing to do with who we are, but what we are forced to endure.
To make meaning out of work and rejoice in our work-personhood instead of suffering for it.
To control the small things and for only small things to matter because the big things are clear and certain and kind.
To gather in joy in an economy of care instead of whatever bs we have going on right now.
To shed the hurt and fear we carry with ease and support.
To stop paying a per centimeter cost of the distance we travel from typicality.
To create, to splurge, to desire…
A future of being everything we dream of. A future of being everyone we want to be.
Simply to be. Just be.
Because being, afterall, is the queerest thing.
And what would the future look like, where all of us can be?
Author bio: Hina Siddiqui is a Nontraditional Storyteller and Maladaptive Daydreamer. She writes comics, makes games, runs a podcast and edits a homegrown newsletter. She believes in the healing power of domestic rituals, the kindness of the Universe and that we are all here to take care of each other. Hina has 5 (ish) children, is open to adopting many more and is always looking for people to collaborate with on the next great adventure.
Oh and in case anyone was wondering… she is neuroqueer af.
