Queer Manifesto

To queer is to trouble.
To queer is to widen.
To queer is to say: fuck your neat little boxes—
and also to whisper: we deserve more than this smallness.

Queering is not decoration.
Not a rainbow sticker slapped on the same old system.
Queering is a blade, yes—
but also a balm,
a hand outstretched,
a breath that steadies the trembling.

We ask: Who built this? Who profits from it?
And who was left outside the door,
shivering in the dark,
still waiting to be called in?
We name what empire tried to bury:
the theft, the silence, the suffocation.
We do not forget. We refuse to forget.
Our remembering is love.
Our refusal is devotion.

To queer is not chaos for chaos’ sake.
It is creation in the rubble.
It is ritual in the ruins.
It is grief that will not be rushed.
It is joy that bursts in anyway,
like flowers through concrete,
like laughter at a funeral.

We will not only endure.
We will sing, we will fuck, we will dance, we will mourn,
we will tell stories that make the dead smile.
We will make kinship out of ashes,
and still offer tenderness to strangers who arrive at the fire.

Feminism asked who was excluded.
Queerness asks: what if the categories themselves dissolve like salt in water?
What if the walls are rubble and the horizon is wide?
What if liberation feels less like entry,
and more like wind on your face at the edge of the sea?

Decolonization reminds us: the world was built on theft.
Of land. Of bodies. Of breath.
To queer is to spit in the face of erasure.
But it is also to cradle what was lost,
to hold it close,
to rock it back into song.
To queer is to dig up what was buried
and water it until it blooms again.

To queer is to remain unfinished.
To hold the ache, the rage, the tenderness—
to sit in the in-between without running away.
To queer is to breathe where breath was stolen.
To breathe until the lungs of the world expand again.

Listen.
We queer because we must.
We queer because we burn.
We queer because we ache.
We queer because we love.
Because our hearts are too wild for cages.
Because our joy is too unruly for borders.
Because our grief teaches us how to care.

And still—
we queer for each other.
For the hand in ours.
For the beloved who sees us.
For the ancestor who dreamed us.
For the child not yet born,
who will one day ask what we made possible.

We queer because freedom is not a gift to be granted.
It is a fire we tend,
a river we enter,
a breath we keep giving back to one another.

To queer is to trouble.
To queer is to widen.
To queer is to imagine otherwise.
To queer is to live as if the otherwise is already here.

And so we vow:
We will not shrink.
We will not silence.
We will not stop.

We will queer—
with fire in our bones,
with water in our grief,
with air in our lungs—
again and again and again—
until the world opens wide enough
for all of us to breathe.

With the willingness to return, again and again, to what has been broken—and to believe it can hold us still.