The episode of Sniffies Cruising Confessions Queer Utopia features all of the season’s interviewees reflecting on the notion of Queer Utopia as outlined by late writer José Esteban Muñoz (Cruising Utopia, 2009, NYU Press). One heavily circulated quote from Muñoz describes queerness as felt as “the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” Another is more clear-eyed about the present:
The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”
Asked to describe my queer utopia, I called back to the Wachowskis’ 2015 series/trans parable Sense8 to imagine evolved queer extrasensory abilities. In the same discussion hosts Chris Patterson-Ross, Gabe Hernandez, and I somehow wound up inventing the flying car gay bar.
