WQQF

"…The question … is … located on the level of tolerance or intolerance toward the enjoyment of the Other, the Other as he who essentially steals my own enjoyment. We know, of course, that the fundamental status of the object is to be always already snatched away by the Other. It is precisely this theft of enjoyment that we write down in shorthand as minus-Phi, the matheme of castration. The problem is apparently unsolvable as the Other is the Other in my interior. The root of racism is thus hatred of my own enjoyment. There is no other enjoyment but my own. If the Other is in me, occupying the place of extimacy, then the hatred is also my own."

"Most spaces identified as radical queer spaces, unless they are explicitly for people of color, generally lack any significant attention to or inclusion of struggles that are not specifically queer. In this context, unfortunately, those spaces are not radical alternatives to gay identity, but a continuation of the legitimization of white identity that exists in gay mainstream culture. This has led to deep-rooted forms of racism in alternative sites of resistance. Organizers of these spaces may give lip service to an anti-racist agenda, but in practice their actions maintain the status quo. I have tried over and over again to be a part of these radical spaces, but unless they are specifically for people of color, I am generally the only brown face in the bunch."

"At this moment it seems that queer visual culture needs to nourish our sense of potentiality and not reinforce our feeling of disappointment. If we are to go on, we need a critical modality of hope and not simply dramatization of loss and despair"

"It’s part of my queer optimism to say that people are affectively and emotionally incoherent. This suggests that we can produce new ways of imagining what it means to be attached and to build lives and worlds from what there already is—a heap of conventionally 
prioritized but incoherent affective concepts of the world that we carry around. We are just at the beginning of understanding emotion politically.
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MF> As far back as I can remember, to want guys was to want relations with guys. That has always been important for me. Not necessarily in the form of a couple but as a matter of existence: how is it possible for men to be together? To live together, to share their time together, their meals, their room, their leisure, their grief, their knowledge, their confidences? What is it to be ‘naked’ among men, outside the institutional relations, family, profession, and obligatory camaraderie? It’s a desire, an uneasiness, a desire-in-uneasiness that exists among a lot of people.

Q> Can you say that desire and pleasure, and the relationships one can have, are dependent on one’s age?

MF> Yes, very profoundly. Between a man and a younger woman, the marriage institution makes it easier: she accepts it and makes it work. But two men of noticeably different ages – what code would allow them to communicate? They face each other without terms or convenient words, with nothing to assure them about the meaning of the movement that carries them toward each other. They have to invent from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship: that is to say, the sum of everything through which they can give each other pleasure

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