We each posted one GAY INCANTATION per day for the month of February in 2012. And now we are doing it again in 2017! This time, we have added the inimitable Kristy Harcourt, Celeste Chan, and Elliat Graney-Saucke to the team of daily posters. Please read below for more info, via the 2012 mission statement. The designs you see on this page are done by Nabeela Vega, Nico Lim and Tabitha Swans. The new team currently span the countries of Singapore, Germany, Canada and the United States.
GAY INCANTATIONS: MISSION STATEMENT (Feb 2012)
In 2010, transgender artists and thinkers Coral Short and Lucas Crawford were wading their respective ways through loads of life-bullshit! As a way to bolster each other, they began writing each other encouraging Facebook messages, which always ended with several one-liner pacts or “gay affirmations.” “Let my gay self shine! My bruised gay heart will heal! Let me be open to change!” these early affirmations read. As Coral and Lucas wound their way through many challenging months, they penned almost one hundred affirmations.
They started to wonder if the form of the “affirmation” denied the emotional complexity of queer life. Affirmations insist on positivity. Transing or queering are critical forces. They use negativity, refusal, resistance, and middle-fingering to clear space for new things. Our genderqueer lives depend on criticism, differences of opinion, and the constant trashing and mulching of the past and the present.
An incantation is a magical utterance that brings into being its own wish. Something repeated ritually until it becomes “true”? Yes, some people might also call that performativity! Incantation crosses queerly into incarnation.
We offer these incantations in a spirit of collaboration and empathy. These incantations were created in times of urgency, friendship, depression, and struggle. The GAY INCANTATIONS are not, therefore, delivered from a stable place of “advice” or it-gets-better-ism. (Down with adulthood-superiority complexes; down with upward-mobility as a substitute for a meaningful life; down with the trend of adults giving up on queerness, we say!) These incantations do not aspire to help anyone become better acclimatized to a wrong world. They aim to remind people who are fighting that world that we can’t lose our wellness in the rage and the shuffle and the meetings and the bars and the deadlines and the bills and the and the and the!
As Ann Cvetkovich has pointed out in many wonderful ways, depression is a public feeling, and a political one. The world presses on many of us, rather firmly. Dealing with depression might take the form of directly combating harmful enterprises, but it can ALSO take the form of queer language, ritual, insistence, and magic. We fight depression from all angles. We fuel our artistic and activist movements against depressing political milieux with our chorus of incantations. We drown out the white noise of easy gay goals that change nothing. We drown out voices that would seek to validate baby steps that only placate. We drown out much depressing racket. And we hope – yes, hope – to be better able to HEAR and CREATE remarkable things because of it. We invite you into this ritual.
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