When the Motif editors invited me to help put together an issue for Pride month, I was initially doubtful. Don’t get me wrong – I was flattered that they liked my weird, rough-around-the-edges short story collection enough to reach out, much less to imagine me (full of ADHD and whatever is the opposite of prolific-ness) up to the intimidating task. But my doubt was less about the editorial role and more about, well, Pride.
Conceptually, whatever, Pride is fine, it’s fine. I like the gays and queers and gender benders in their get-ups, I like public gay horniness, I like drag, and – I’m not a monster – I obviously want LGBTQ+ people to feel proud. No, my fundamental beef with Pride is that it stresses me out!
Pride is noisy, disorienting, throbbing with the cheesiest club remixes, beats divorced from meaning. It’s impossible to have a conversation. There’s too much day-drinking and too many drugs. Judge me – I do – but dancing bores me to death. Did I mention I hate collective emoting? I hate it! I’m sorry! I like to do my emoting alone or one-on-one, ideally in a socially awkward context. Throw in cops, pandering politicians, woohoo-ing, stranger makeouts, and the throngs of cishets come to PARTAY, and I’ll be astral projecting to a quiet bookstore somewhere far, far away, thx.
Luckily, Dana and Meg (the real editors) were happy to follow me into the whispering stacks of this imaginary bookstore, where we spent the last month flipping through pages of real-life queer complexity. I wanted this issue to poke its nose into the messy, creative ways that queers around Providence have and are devising to survive, speak, share, connect. Whether that is the queers getting by on the streets, or unwillingly passing as straight, contemplating middle age, speaking out for Palestinian freedom, cutting and pasting zines, mouthing poems, shyly seeking friendship, or collecting our diverse queer histories into innovative archives.
Consider this issue a collection of missives – letters in bottles, cool, little artifacts and torn treasure maps dug up from Rhode Island’s low-tide beaches and excavated from its lead-contaminated construction sites. This issue is in no way representative of our queer totality – and many voices are absent. Yet each article and artwork and poem in the following pages is a glimmer of something real and alive, declarations of queer invention and that particular fierce imagination our communities are known for.
And you know what? That is worthy of a woohoo. Woohoo!
XO
– Luke Dani Blue
Luke Dani Blue (they/them) is the author of PRETEND IT’S MY BODY (Feminist Press), a Kirkus Best Fiction Book of 2022. Originally from Michigan, and prone to geographic instability, Luke currently resides in Providence, where they are working on a time-travel novel. They are also an astrologer giving down-to-earth advice to queers, creatives, neurodivergents, and lifelong adventurers over Zoom and every third Saturday from the Veiled Crow in Warwick. Learn more about Luke’s writing and astrologizing at lukedaniblue.com and seagoatastrology.com, or follow them on Instagram at @lukedani.
