text

Sam Leo Oscar Shane
Jordan James Gertrude Jessica
Leo never played Dark Souls Two probably
Benjamin Vladimir Magnus Ken
Roger Leo Sam loved the George Oscar
Cassie surprised me when they changed their name
Truman Lou’s nature Lou was as soft as his name as in
Sullivan Jordan Ken Shane loves Glee I want
Harvey to tax the rich Radclyffe I want a lot
Leo cut welfare in Twenty Seventeen
Natalie I want a woman for Taoiseach
I want to give Nell what was given to me
I want love for Dorothy I want a world as in

I want to walk down a street dressed from head to toe
in rainbow and not turn heads I want to see no more
food banks no Shein, Temu, H&M, Primark
I want to see all schools have ramps all have lifts
Leo resigned after Oscar a long weekend
which is gas as in Wilde loves the George Eileen
Sam would walk twenty miles out of their way
as in Myles so you don’t have to wait all alone Harvey
Jessica showed me queer parenting as in
Harvey Milk and assuaged most of my fears Radclyffe
I want a world as in Hall Leo’s balding
I want Truman in rainbows not to turn heads
I want cures for balding before I turn twenty-six
Benjamin I want drugs de- as in Britten decriminalized
I want a world for

James for Jordan has the biggest heart as in
Baldwin I want love for Roger attention for
all as in Casement I know and like Dorothy
friend of Vladimir Natalie Nell as in
Horowitz Clifford Barney McCafferty
Gertrude I want no president as in Stein
Harvey Leo still paved a way
for Jordan Ken Shane is quick with puns
Cassie Eileen Oscar Leo
Nell Lou Truman

note

This piece is called after zoe. It's called that because it's a response to the poem I Want A President, written by Zoe Leonard. We discussed the poem, written in 1992 when Eileen Myles ran a presidential campaign against Bush Senior and Clinton, with members of the IYC. We discussed what a power move it is to open a political poem celebrating your candidate with a word (dyke) that the opposition can't say at all, full stop, whatever about saying it on TV. We discussed how the US still hasn't had a woman president – and how we'd already had one by the time the poem was written, but homosexuality was still criminalised. We discussed how we've since had a gay head of government in Leo Varadkar. We discussed what it means for the wish in Zoe's poem – to have someone who's been at the bottom at the top, as a member of the IYC put it – that, by many measures, life in Ireland got worse while Varadkar was at the top.

No one thought it killed the poem, it's important to say. If anything, the poem seemed wiser to us for its insistence that a leader needs particular experiences rather than a particular identity. (Varadkar is gay but he has not, as Zoe's poem wishes, spent a night in prison for his activism. (As far as we know.))

This gets at something fundamental and strange about queerness and queer community. Because most queer people are born into straight families, they spring up in all walks of life. This makes it difficult to know what any two given queer people will have in common. Consequently, we need to be really careful about any conspiratorial we that implies an easy consensus – however politically expedient it is to look more united than we are. We are various and changeable, differing on more than we share – and we’re not just talking about the Geminis.

The longevity of Zoe's poem is in part down to it being a list poem. Lists are powerful – they're simple, rhythmic, and they unify without foreclosing. A list can always have another entry! Lists allow an artist to sidestep that dangerous we mentioned above. Rather than presuming to sum up a complex social phenomenon, you enumerate its instances. Rather than speak for all queer people, you name them and note where they stand.

Lists are conceptually powerful, but they're politically powerful too. They allow us to name our depth of suffering without getting sucked into the logic of argument, where all too often it is then dismissed. Think of Janelle Monae's song Hell You Talmbout – a recitation of the names of Black people murdered in the US, followed by the call to say his name, say her name. The 2015 version is 6 minutes long, and the 2021 version is 17 minutes long. Each of those names is a full story that deserves full remembrance, but song is not the form for litigating details – it's the form that bears witness to the pattern, that bears us through the endless list as it keeps growing. A similar logic obtains on Transgender Day of Remembrance, where the tradition is to name all those who've died to violence in the last year. You have to feel the weight of your pain before it can be an instrument for you.

For these reasons, our piece is made of interleaved lists. It's easy enough to pick up on the names but they're not a list in and of themselves. Part of the game of the piece is to listen and piece together which names belong where. One list is queer people of significance – loaded term! – both past and present. One list is desires for a better world. There's at least one more, but we might leave identifying it (them?) as an exercise for the listener. Some list entries come from us, and some come from IYC participants. One way of thinking about the piece is that it's a record of our encounter. We didn't want to speak for them – we wanted to speak with them. It doesn't make an argument about queerness, but it documents what sprang to mind in the summer of 2024 when the word queerness was spoken.

You could call it non-narrative, non-linear – but why emphasise what is not there? A better option is devotional, a word that pivots between the political and the liturgical. It enfolds ambivalence as well as celebration, doubt as well as faith, the redoubling of commitment in the face of opposition. This is the harder path, but I choose it gladly. (How lovely it was to write a list of queer names that wasn't, for once, a list of the murdered. How sad it is to reflect on the world you and your community are facing if you find that lovely.) Hence the music not taking a triumphal tone, though it is an ode. Hence one of our musical references being Britten's Hymn to the Virgin. Hence bell-like percussion, open piano sonorities – an accompaniment that doesn't redouble the text so much as it punctuates it.

Another interesting point of friction – the commission for this project was funded by the department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth; the brief said that it should celebrate inclusion. Inclusion and equality get deployed in tandem so often you'd be forgiven for thinking they're interchangeable words. But equality is something you can claim and inclusion is something done to you. You can claim equality before the law – whether you get given it is another thing. But you cannot include yourself in a stranger's dinner party – you can only wait for their invite. A paradigm of inclusivity is one where agency remains with the majority, as though this isn't precisely the issue in need of remedy. So we've tried to follow the spirit of equality throughout this project – to emphasise complexity over consensus, and to insist we need safety not sufferance.

Carys D. Coburn & David Coonan (June, 2024)

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