On "Queer Yearning"
What do Hozier, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and cottagecore all have in common?
This year, right before missing each other would come to define our world, I started noticing the word “yearning” popping up across queer online spaces. Yearning-related posts, references, and memes increasingly flooded my timeline and conversations daily and became inescapable in March, as quarantine set in across the globe. To summarize in a meme: “yearn thoughts head gay.”
Almost a year in, as social distancing dominates our lives and people joke that making in-person eye contact feels more intimate than sex, all that yearning seems prescient. We’re yearning for each other, for better news, for better times—and we’re dreaming about what that might look like.
Yearning’s legacy for marginalized people as a defining state of being, one that can either bring joy or suffering, is tied to the resilience of these communities: to continue dreaming in spite of oppression, illness, and death. Before the onset of the coronavirus, the status quo denied us time to dream, because it is a political necessity. In her 1990 book of essays, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, bell hooks wrote, “All too often our political desire for change is seen as separate from longings and passions that consume lots of time and energy in daily life… Surely our desire for radical social change is intimately linked with the desire to experience pleasure, erotic fulfillment, and a host of other passions.”
Pining without expectation of in-person consummation is the semi-universal standard for crushes and new romances during COVID-19. For LGBTQ people, romanticizing the distance—physical or otherwise, like the distance created by the closet—between us and the objects of our desire is a longstanding tradition.
Many of us spent this year identifying the yawning gap between the world we live in and the world we need. Queer yearning’s long years of practice, and sense of joy in the process, can be instructive in pandemic times.
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“The experience of yearning is more acute for queer people overall,” said Eve Ng, Associate Professor in Media Arts and Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ohio University, whose research focuses on LGBTQ media.
Emily Grobe, 21, from the Chicagoland area, who identifies with the trend, said, "I think queer people have had these feelings for much longer than the general population because of the struggles associated with being queer. There's this element of nostalgia for times we haven't been allowed to have.”
I was a baby gay during the late 2000s and early 2010s, where the most accessible depictions of queer women to me were Blue Is The Warmest Color, Black Swan (lol), and the UK show Skins. I was used to seeing relationships between women represented as hypersexual, exoticized, or superficial. But as I watched the two stars make eye contact across crowded rooms in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, my pulse quickened—the two women hadn’t even touched. There’s something rebellious in finding pleasure and excitement in feelings historically meant to frighten and separate us.
After, I noticed a similar kind of yearning in straight historical romances, in the clenching of hands in Emma and the 2005 Pride and Prejudice. This tension and longing overlaps neatly with how queer romantic and sexual experiences can feel for many people, especially now. For Hunter Blas, 25, “yearning” feels inextricable from her identity as a WLW. “What I love about [yearning] is the quietness of it, the subtlety,” she said. “Yearning is subtle and leaves room for interpretation on if it’s romantic or platonic. I love period pieces about love between two women because it feels like that general subtle desire, but dialed up."
If you glance at TikTok, Twitter, or Tumblr (which, since its inception, has kept a home for the gays), queer yearning is everywhere. Through very online yearning queer eyes, Jane Austen manifests social distancing, scenes from Killing Eve and Euphoria and The Handmaiden show women staring at each other in bed without touching, and Tumblr gays create a new visual language after porn was taken away. (By November, even the corporate Twitter accounts got in on the fun.)
The “cottagecore” trend is another visual tie-in to queer yearning, both popular among online WLWs and focused on feelings of softness and romance. Grobe connected the two; to her, both evoke explicitly-queer escapism. "There’s a desire to escape into something simpler—green space, growing veggies, low tech living," she said. "Everyone is going through such a tough time in the world, and there’s this collective wish to strip ourselves of modernity and start over."
In large part, queer yearning manifests through music, with a proliferation of “gay yearning” playlists and TikToks. Bitch's Rachel Charlene Lewis wondered whether or not Taylor Swift's folklore is queer, given how prominently yearning features as a theme. (Swift has since clarified that it was intended from a straight perspective, but not before Vulture's Madison Malone Kirchner, among others, declared it queer canon.)
Last summer, on a drive with some WLW friends, I listened to Hozier for the first time and understood why the internet wouldn’t stop calling him a lesbian. His music is defined by pining, so much so that lesbians feel it belongs to them. No wonder there’s so many videos of Hozier’s voice pitched up, advertised along the lines of "Hozier as an Irish woodland lesbian singing about her lover."
Though representation of queer and trans people in pop culture has spiked in recent years, it’s still the minority, and the long tradition of LGBTQ fans “queering” media continues. “A lot of queer media users continue to ascribe queer identities to celebrities who are probably straight —hello, Taylor Swift!" said Ng. “While these fanworks can provide enjoyment, it's not the same as having canonically queer representation. So even fandoms with hugely productive fan writers and artists are still marked by a lot of yearning.”
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People are still yearning, too, for a way of life that isn't actively punitive, threatening or exhausting. In her newsletter close but not quite, discussing yearning as resistance to life under capitalism, Mary Retta described it as “an act of rare imagination to envision a world where all of your needs are met when you have only known life circumstances of burden or scarcity."
In that way, some see queer yearning as a balm for experiencing homophobia. “It’s seeing the potential for your life as an out and proud [queer person], but also having to live day-to-day as someone completely different from who you are," said Kaye, an 18-year-old in Virginia whose name has been changed here because she's in the closet. "That’s not as much fun as making 'yearning' Pride and Prejudice jokes, but it feels like the same emotion on a different scale.”
“My cat and my stove aren't going to misgender me or question my identity,” said Kira Vishnya, 21, who lives in St. Petersburg, Russia. “I am a male-aligned non-binary person who loves men, and [I've] experienced lots of rejection. Romanticizing yearning and pining is a great coping mechanism: If I get to be dramatic about it, I feel like a period drama character, and they mostly get happy endings. It makes me feel like I'm going to get mine too, eventually.”
Given that queer people of color, and queer Black people in particular, are disproportionately subject to unequal "life circumstances of burden or scarcity," as Retta wrote, it's jarring how much of the content associated with queer yearning features white people. I asked Ng if she thought that race and class might be tied into who feels most entitled to yearn, across the sexuality spectrum; she speculated that might be the case for those who “can yearn for a pastoral 'past' from the perspective of a digital present, or have time and money to buy ingredients to bake from scratch and so on, in ways more likely to be unavailable to people of color.”
In one sense, it is a privilege to take pleasure in yearning, instead of associating it with pain, including for queer folks. During the AIDS epidemic, fear and illness dominated gay romantic discourse; then, too, people of color, and Black people in particular, disproportionately bore the brunt of illness. In an April episode of the New York Times podcast Still Processing, culture critics Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris revisited the 2012 documentary How to Survive A Plague, which is about the rise of ACT UP in response to the AIDS crisis, in the context of COVID-19. “There are a lot of ways in which this moment is similar to what was happening 25, 30, 35 years ago, and one of those ways... [is] the fact that we can’t touch each other,” observed Morris.
Even as our circumstances are limited by government failures and pandemic, yearning is an opportunity for the kind of “rare imagination” Retta wrote about on a political level. “The U.S. sociopolitical landscape in the last four years [has] helped galvanize this new wave of activism and protest, and involves activists imagining and yearning for a better future,” said Ng.
The yearning for some semblance of a just and safe shared future is likely the one that most defines this year. Queer yearning is not just an indulgence, but an imperative: Yearn for a better world in order to see it as possible, romantically, politically, and for yourself and others, in all ways, no matter what feels possible.
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