No Homo, But I’m Platonically In Love With You: Zine Fest Edition
Long Beach, California. November 27th, a Saturday. It’s cold, like the kind of cold that crawls into your skin and stays there, spreading to all nooks and crannies and just general places southern Californians shouldn’t feel cold. Like that kind of cold. But on my left and on my right I have some of the most wholesome and warm queer brown femmes, my roommates, my friends; we laugh and scurry into Main Library, out of the cold, out of the very straight and very white glances. We lasted about 3 days since we last saw each other and then rendezvoused in Mariachi Plaza (and not to be dramatic, but seeing each other again felt like that first blare of a trumpet: like honey set on fire, sweet, fulfilling, something that slides out of you like air, like it is air) — we buckle up and brave the fog and tumbleweeds that had made their way onto the 710 South. We’re going to Zine Queens.
Zine Queens was a zine fest at Main Library in Long Beach for queer and trans folks to showcase their work, talent, creativity, and magic. As Darcy Crash Disco described it, Zine Queens exists to create a space for zine writers and artists that are often invisibilized in the punk, hardcore, and DIY scene. The event was a small haven for us in a sea of people that eat curated and gentrified tacos and think wearing a safety pin is a radical act of solidarity with non-white, non-cishet folks. We spent our time going table to table to appreciate and buy other folks’ work, holding hands, and sitting in an auditorium with queer punk bands blasting fast and angry music. However, what I loved most about the event were the people encouraging me to engage and reassuring me that no matter how shy I was, they would be there. That space of love we created between and within the four of us, I believe, Foucault would consider to be part of the underground spaces used in the Victorian era to escape “the triple edict of taboo, nonexistence, and silence”; our friendship, in and out of events, is a way to escape the policing of how queer brown bodies exist and love.
Being platonically in love with your friends, with queer brown femmes, is bringing to the public what was so long driven underground; it’s “reinstating a pleasure within reality”. This love can be as simple as walking down the street together, it’s giving each other a kiss on the hand — it’s declaring that if the cheesecake you ordered for each other doesn’t taste like perfection, you will fight the entire world with your bare fists; we are honest, straight to the point (and yet, for some reason, I know someone out there will say “What do these gal pals actually mean? Is this some kind of Millennial Code for Queer Pickup Lines?”).
I have a lot of questions to pose, and while I don’t expect you to completely understand or be able to answer them, I want to use them to counter the questioning glances my friends and I so often get when we go out:
If we bring our “coded” methods of love out onto a surface world, out of the figurative and literal Victorian brothels and mental hospitals (and the like) that our existence had been confined to, why do people assume our honesty with each other is romantic, even sexual? Is it because heterosexuality is so fragile that y’all can’t even compliment each other without saying “no homo”, and can’t comprehend us celebrating our friendship as something innately part of our day, like having breakfast? Is it because you hypersexualized our safe havens and now we can’t even have breakfast without you immediately asking if offering each other syrup is a queer mating call?
Why can’t we just offer each other the damn syrup?
Of course, we can talk about how revolutionary QTPOC romantic love is, and that’s a conversation many have had and will continue to have, but I want to suggest a wild idea: what about love outside of “traditional” romance? What of the friendships that consist of running out of the closets and into each others’ arms? What of friendships that, even after all the heart-breaking family dinners spent in silence, the harassment and assault on streets, the toxicity in straight (and queer) spaces, the leaving out, the struggles with mental illnesses and suicide, the systematic killing of queer and trans people of color, the world turning a blind eye when you’re worn and have no place to truly call home… what of those friendships that take that socio-historical and personal trauma that had been lodged deep within you and say “Hey, want some syrup?” Those friendships feel like coming home.
