week 7: queer time makes sense now

I didn’t begin to grasp the concept of “queer time” until I read a specific passage of Close to the Knives. (The passage appears on pages 87-89.) David Wojnarowicz describes the division between the “World” and the “Other World.” He has “always felt like an alien” in the Other World. This is the mainstream world – “the world of the stoplight, the no-smoking sign, the rental world, the split-rail fencing…. [t]he bought-up world; the owned world.” Because he has “been born centuries late,” he has been denied access to the Other World, which is the World of “earth or space, choice or movement.” What exactly does he mean by being “born centuries late?” I think this implies queerness; he cannot fit neatly into “calendar turnings” of measured space and time, and he does not belong in the consumer world.

This passage flips the common conception of “the Other” on its head. Simone DeBeauvior separates gender into man – “the One” – and woman – “the Other.” Usually, minority groups are discussed as “the Other,” because they are othered or marginalized by the mainstream group. Wojnarowicz , however, describes the mainstream world as the Other World and the queer world as the World. This unconventional twist moves the traditionally marginalized group to the center. Instead of reaching for the World, Wojnarowicz situates himself in the World, rejecting the Other World– he chooses queer time over straight time.

Wojnarowicz also point out a potential paradox in queer time. “[T]here’s the World where one adapts and stretches the boundaries of the Other World through keys of the imagination. But then again, the imagination is encoded with the invented information of the Other World.” Perhaps queerness is creative enough to stretch the mainstream’s boundaries, but queerness is still conceived of in the language of straight time. In this way, the queer world is dependent upon the other world; a queer world radically restructures the mainstream culture.

I think that Wojnarowicz’s attempt to demonstrate queer time is very effective in Close to the Knives. It is a memoir written in a series of essays rather than linear chapters. The essays are often dreamlike, jumping from scene to scene, dream to reality, exaggeration to realism. The content of the memoir is not unlike much of what we’ve already read for this course – full of drugs, hustling, and sex with faceless strangers– but there is something special about the construction of this memoir. Wojnarowicz taps into queer time by breaking all of the conventional rules of biography and grammar, and despite breaking all of the rules, the prose is still beautiful.

I also wonder if somehow this queer narrative is more true to “nature.” By stepping outside of linearity and strict, boring realism, Wojnarowicz captures more of the human thinking process. If I want to write a “realistic” story about my life, I attempt to dissociate from my present state of mind and look back at that event as if it’s a movie – otherwise, it would be difficult for someone else to picture the story. This is not the “reality” of how my memory usually works – normally my mind jumps all over the place, jogged by present perceptions and interrupted by random thoughts. I do not think linearly or logically in every day life. Therefore, reconstructing a story of my past requires a far departure from the way my mind normally operates. This is what I think Wojnarowicz means when he says that “the invention of the word ‘nature’ disassociates us from the ground we walk on” (p88). Despite the queer structure of Close to the Knives, I think it is more close to the nature of the human memory and thinking process than any “normal” biography – the kinds of biographies that usually achieve commercial success in the Other World. As I read Close to the Knives, I wondered if we’re taught to write and tell stories in ways that are unnatural – logic and sequence are learned behaviors, and queer time is really more natural.

Wojnarowicz’s transition from this paragraph to the next paragraph perplexes me. I think this is the first time he officially names AIDS; in previous chapters, it was a nameless disease. My interpretation of this second paragraph is that the spread of AIDS shows him that he is not the only one walking outside of the Other World – the thousands of people who walk in the World with him finally start to become visible. The AIDS crisis was awful – and that is a gross understatement – but it increased visibility of hundreds of thousands of people who were excluded by the definition of “acceptable” sexuality, allowing them to find each other and band together on common issues. I think that he might mean something much more complex than that when he compares the feeling to “pressing one’s eye to a small crevice in the earth from which streams of ants utter from the shadows.” What else could this final image in the passage mean?