“QUEER, MY DEAR”

“Queer, My Dear” is a tribute performance that honors the embodied queer multivalence of Marvin Gaye, Luther Vandross, Prince, and Tevin Campbell. Highlighting their private truths, artistic performances, and spectrums of masculinity, this series of poems both grieves and celebrates the queerness that defied verbal expression and that which made its way into the coded presentations of selfhood they chose to share with us. It asks us to rethink “freedom” and to deepen our understanding of what it means to be identified as and/or to self-identify as queer. I wanted to amplify their voices while interrogating them—to stitch new narratives informed by memory, music, and the marginalization of truth.