I have an odd fondness for manifestos. So I was overjoyed to be shown this manifesto for a queer art festival in Romania.
Really, it is a manifesto for queer identity and queer community:
Our bodies can still feel the cold creeps of the jail bars from the jails that we’ve visited. We could have sought revenge for all this misery of ours, but, instead, we chose to use our bodies as tools to imagine an utopian future, where all of us, absolutely all of us reproduce to infinity and beyond their most deeply hidden identities.
Queer because it encompasses all our identities without imposing a predetermined norm and assigning us to predefined houses. Queer because infinity.
Reading something like this is, just occasionally, the jolt I need to pull me out of melancholy complacency. Most elaborately in 2008, when reading Laurie Penny’s first, angrily political dive into blogging pulled me out of a months-long depressive slump. More problematically when the manifesto thrills me despite being politically objectionable. The fascism of Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto fits here, as does the violent anarchism of the catechism of a revolutionist