-Emily Freedman
[republished from The Queer Zine by the 'Harvard Advocate]
Some argue that to “come out” is to bend to the notion that everyone is straight by default. However, while the redundancy of coming out is an ideal to strive for, the heteronormative nature of the world makes coming out important— an empowering act.
It recognises a lived experience of being gay in a heteronormative
context, that is, an experience of antinormativity. This affirms being gay as a political identity by affirming the existence of a political institution – heteronormativity – which acts against it.
The closet is a time and a place and shapes a self. As such, coming out, and the life lived after doing so, creates a series of ontological, metaphysical and temporal messes in one’s perception of their life. What continues, what does not? What gets carried forward and what is left behind? What do we grieve and what do we celebrate?
This project speaks to the experience of leaving your home city and living as out for the first time in your new city, and then returning.
It explores the feelings of incongruence that accompany that experience. It was inspired by my personal experience of moving from Pietermaritzburg to Cape Town at 19. In Cape Town I have lived as an out lesbian for the first time. I returned to Pietermaritzburg during the holidays. The question of how to understand the relationship between my out-self and my closeted self – who was still, in many ways, me – was central in my mind.
The images reflect non-existent and impossible places.
There are two important aspects to them. Firstly, the two landscapes that form each image are similar. I did not want the impossibility to come from absurdity or be obvious. It is subtle, almost imperceptible but undeniable.
Secondly, the pictures reflect parts of Cape Town in Pietermaritzburg, never Pietermaritzburg in Cape Town. To see one’s past self in their future space, a realm of freedom, is healing and comforting; but to go back, “to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast” is when one meets the impossible. One’s growth is intensely and visually felt. Surprisingly it is to realise that one wants a self to betray.
One wants a future to be real.
To depict the return in all of its impossibility is to depict one who has come out.
These landscapes are expressions of grief which in turn empower. They are markers of survival and they claim a lived experience. Impossible as much as being a lesbian is impossible in a heteronormative world – impossible, which is to say, queer.
“If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin... to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.”
- Ocean Vuong
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