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It is September 2020, and a violent wild-fire in California which resulted in extensive damage, evacuation and land loss, was started by what the news described as a 'smoke-generating pyrotechnic device' used in a gender reveal party.

The result of this news is that I get lost in a YouTube black hole for hours.

Balloons blow up ejecting blue or pink confetti into the air, and awful looking cakes being cut open to show the party guests whether the expectant couple will give birth to a little boy or a girl.

Soon, during my descent into the gender reveal nightmare, I start realising how many of these celebrations went from the slightly to terribly wrong, and I stumble into yet another video and yet another fire.

The video dates back a couple of years. It is 2018 in Arizona, the camera is recording a black shooting target surrounded by tall, dry grass. The words ‘Boy or Girl’ are handwritten on it, and soon the target, which I learn is packed with explosives, is shot by the father-to-be with a high-powered rifle.

A big blue cloud violently leaks out into the air, and shortly afterwards the grass starts burning, all the while the voice of a man nervously suggests packing everything up and leaving, before the video cuts out.
The fire ended up destroying 47,000 acres and resulted in $8 million in damages, not to mention all the people who had to be evacuated.

Never before had I watched unfolding in a slow-motion video, the damage that heteronormativity can wreak.

'We may, ultimately, want more undisciplined knowledge, more questions and fewer answers' (Halberstam)

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I've seen vids of crocodiles in a gender reveal party and I'm like...evolution will do its job.

I was at the archive yesterday, and I read about someone getting off by looking at a National Geographic's cover.

Death queers, old queens, sad butches, lonely hearts, diesel dykes, leather, cocks, straps.

As it was a boarding school, on games day we were able to go to the dormitories together. One day she drew me in through the door and ran her hands over my breast and kissed me passionately. Then she put her hands under my skirt and drew down my knickers. Her hand seemed to shoot to my sex, and she soon had me very damp. She then put me on the bed and proceeded to spank me, slow but not painfully. Ever since then I have always preferred a woman. (Sandra Bellamy, Liverpool)

Is queer desire, radical?

We were sitting in the director’s office at the bank and after a few minutes he asks his assistant to bring the documents in, so my husband and I could sign them.

My.
Husband.
And.
I.

You nor I had (have) any issues in being read as a different gender from the one we identify with, but he knew that you were my wife, he just couldn't (wouldn't?) say it.

It's bizarre how much meaning we attach to words.

Queer unhappiness offers a rather deviant form of fertility (Ahmed)

When I look back at that day, I think about the irony of the whole thing - his inability to let go of normative expectations/language resulted in the sudden fashioning of a much more gender-bending scenario than the one we were experiencing

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What are your biggest turn-ons?

Extracts from 'Make Me Feel, Mighty Queer' (work in progress, 2021)

'We Belong to a Poetry Club', single-channel video with sound, 7'41'' (2019)

'A doorway to multiplicity', Golden lycra 3m x 3m, blue light.
From 'Anomalies in the flux of normal things' (2018)

'Anomalies in the flux of normal things', Installation shot, (2018)

'Anomalies in the flux of normal things', 3D animation with sound, 3'10", (2018)

'A Next Beyond', screen-printed text, 29.7x21 cm (2018)

'This is the place', split-screen video with sound, 6' 4'' (across two monitors when installed), (2015)

'Notes for a new world order', riso-print in metallic gold ,42x29.7 cm (2017)

Whatever sameness I've noted in my relationships with women it is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy. (Nelson)