PULSE: On Jonah Groeneboer’s The Potential in Waves Colliding

I don’t want to be on this planet. I want to live on a cobweb in the Unisphere. I want to get off at Willets Point and walk and walk and not go anywhere and then find myself full of flowers. Dwarfed like Beirut by the Western billboards or laid out abject and tender on a queer planet by Jonah. Where the truth is being told about a place, about what it’s like to fucking live here. I want to think about this for a second.

I remember going to touch my lover’s hand. I wanted to get tangled up in her. She said: We can’t be gay on this block. Wait.

It’s the feeling of forgetting what our job is for a second. Remember, we don’t exist. It’s the feeling of, Oh, we can’t be us here. But we have places we can go, right? Besides this bed. Like the small, intimate space of a gay club. Flung up into the corner of the world. You might miss it if you weren’t looking for it, the security guard said about Jonah’s thread and string. It’s hard to photograph, it’s hard to see, it’s hard to encounter. It’s so beautiful. Well, but we know about it. The gay club. As soon as we know ourselves, we know about it. We have always known about it. How did anyone even know we were here? You would have to know about it to know about it. How do you kill 49 of something that doesn’t exist?

In order to call it homophobia, you have to think those people are people. You have to have thought about them before. Their experience. The way gay marriage disappears us into you. The way we lose our specificity and our desire and our vulnerability. The way we think this makes us safe. We have never been less safe. The way we keep hiding out or coming out or being just like you. And get killed anyway.

To be abject. To be tangled up in that string. Let me think about this for a second.