Queer in Quarantine
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Queer in Quarantine.
Capturing Northwestern students' thoughts on sexuality and gender after a year in isolation.
by Maia Spoto
If gender and sexuality are a performance, what do you do when you have no audience?
This project focuses on the geography of identity. It wonders how abrupt physical and social pandemic displacement has affected the way Northwestern students experience and perform gender and sexuality. This project also questions what might come next. Queerness defines itself in part through its unboundedness and unpredictability. In a world that is similarly in flux, what will happen when the audience returns?
I am a queer person who came out during the pandemic. I spoke with 12 other queer Northwestern students on the record this month, and I present slices of eight of their stories here. Through our conversations, we mapped out the pandemic’s queer geographies and its ensuing series of performances. We discussed virtual relationships, clunky earrings, yellow shirts, unsettling mirrors, homemade haircuts, gay posters, flirting in bars, childhood bedspreads, ear piercings, queer-coded Instagrams, and more. We laughed, cried and thought together.
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The most common geography that knit their narratives together was the video app Tik Tok. Gay Tik Tok, specifically. One student told me the app’s algorithm ultimately pushed them to come out: ““My For You page was like, ‘Oh, this video is here because you’re bi. And I was like, ‘Sure.’” Queer digital space is robust, but queer physical space was shrinking even prior to the pandemic. Between 2007 and 2019, 37 percent of queer bars and nightclubs in the United States closed, and as of 2020, fewer than 20 lesbian bars remained in the United States. At Northwestern, the current Gender and Sexuality Resource Center only holds 10 people. As vaccination rates rise and people begin to gather in person again, I wonder how our geographies will continue to evolve.
I am grateful for our queer communities. I am hopeful for the future.
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Some names have been changed for safety reasons. All pseudonyms are indicated by an asterisk.