QUEER LASTING

Learning from queer history.

Ensor, a scholar at the University of Wisconsin, examines the correlation between climate degradation and environmental futures and how the enduring qualities of the queer community have enabled its resistance and survival across decades of turmoil and demonization. Her primary concern is the future and the sustainability of humankind amid environmental deterioration beneath an increasing limitation of critical resources. With an academic’s eye, Ensor juxtaposes dire “futurelessness” scenarios encountered and eventually surmounted by the queer community and contrasts them against deteriorating conditions within our modern world in order to gain a deeper understanding into methods of repair. She focuses on two particular historical periods and their inherent literature: the 1890s, which saw “the birth of the homosexual ‘as a species,’” and the 1980s, when the global LGBTQ+ population confronted “extinction events” and was threatened and then decimated to great degrees. Yet, she notes, as patchworked communities, they became resilient enough to overcome terminal circumstances and, somehow, thrive. To Ensor, these lessons can be applied to more modern and troubling instances with regard to environmental cataclysms such as nuclear disasters or when considering the “futurelessness” of a global pandemic. The author draws inspiration from exploring the intricate choreography and “urban intimacies” of gay cruising and from “queer extinction” texts by Willa Cather, Samuel R. Delany, Paul Monette, poet Melvin Dixon, and many others, and she is consistently and dramatically informed by vast archives of AIDS literature. Ensor’s prose is scholarly, so much of the text is best suited to a more academic readership. Despite this, her message remains vivid as she effectively speculates on how the future of environmentalism and humanity in general can benefit from intensively and thoughtfully probing episodes of queer pain, struggle, resistance, and resurgence.

A provocative and insightful look to the past for solutions to enhance and survive the future.