by Anthony Le | June 2024
This article was originally published in the Aqua Plums Substack. Subscribe to get new blogs sent to your email.
I’ve been reflecting on community as we approach the VAGABOND launch Saturday and with the opening of the 2024 Queer Art Salon at Playhaus which I co-curated.
My art practice gravitates around turning shame into a weapon through self-love. I created the zine as a way to try that on a communal level.
It feels strange to be a leader of this gathering of Viet artists because I often feel disconnected from my heritage, especially because I can’t speak Vietnamese fluently.
My internal dialogue is always questioning if I’m Vietnamese enough, Queer enough, assertive enough, sexy enough, supportive enough, trying hard enough. When we compare ourselves to monolithic ideas of what is enough, we put our self-worth in the hands of others in search of external validation.
But does anyone owe you anything? No. So why do we care and why can it hurt so much?
In bell hooks’ book All About Love, she uses this mantra, “I’m breaking with old patterns and am moving forward with my life.”
This mantra has guided my queer journey and a renewed interest in being in community after the isolation of the pandemic. I go back and forth about what I should disclose or keep private as a nonbinary and gender non-conforming person in a hetero-presenting queer partnership. And boy, I was not excited to share my pronouns at work, but it’s been ok so far.
I used to tell myself that sexual orientation was more Gay than gender identity, which now that I understand the language more is actually true, yet the word I was really looking for was Queer. I embrace how Queerness is an umbrella term that represents both sexual orientation and gender identity. I appreciate my Gay, Lesbian and Pansexual friends who embrace me and my constant questioning of what Queerness is without only talking about sexy times. More and more things become Queer to me each day.
I truly value my Queerness as a philosophical stance against heteronormative patriarchal values, against the canon. In this way, I believe that anyone could be Queer, and humanity would be better if everyone was.
Even when I only considered myself an ally in the past, it made sense for me to align myself against the canon that shames me for not being a cishet white man or supporting constrictive conservative values. hooks wrote about how the patriarchy wants you to be obsessed with death as a form of control, so you focus on fearing others instead of loving and understanding others. Capitalism makes a lot of money this way.
How do we break out of this cycle?
hooks wrote that in the practice of self-love, “we not only accept and affirm ourselves, we’re able to accept and affirm others.”
And RuPaul says:
Writers like bell hooks and therapy are raising my consciousness to the daily choices I can make to support the self-love of others. And you dream of what can happen with all of our powers combined. This is what I lean on when I have self-doubt and still decide to claim space and actively be part of my Vietnamese and Queer community.