Dreaming the Beloved Community

In this strange time when Zoom is the best we've got and almost all community is virtual, at least we can dream. Maybe one of the best things we can do while the routine forms of daily life are out of the question is to put some added energy into imagining the world we might want to live in instead.

What do you think of when you hear the word "utopia"? For some, it suggests sheer, unrealistic self-indulgence. But imagining a world into being that you've never seen can be the starting point of Gandhi's famous injunction: "You must be the change in the world that you want to see."

Utopian imagination can be what queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz calls a "forward-dawning, not-yet-conscious" awareness that we don't have to accept the world as it is. Other realities aren't necessarily unrealistic. They're just unrealized. Yet.

What world do you dream of living in? What would it look like? How would its citizens interact? How might queer men live together in loving, erotically accepting community? What could we build together? How could we go about the healing of our souls and the repair of the world? How might lives lived richly in acceptance, gratitude, and abundance awaken the wisdom and compassion that we're all capable of manifesting?

Give yourself time to dream. Write a story about this world of yours. Or draw a map. Describe its history and customs and rituals. Build a model of the temple or the assembly hall where the community gathers. Do all of those, and create a journal full of those dreams--as Tolkien did, year after year, with Middle Earth. Make it playful. Make it sexy. Fill it with passion and longing and conviction. Fill it with courage to resist injustice and oppression. Draw on the memory of what we created in the years leading up to Stonewall, in the years after Stonewall, in the years of fighting for queer lives in the middle of the AIDS pandemic, in the more recent years when we're still a despised minority in much of the world--and often in danger much closer to home. Honour the half-fulfilled potentials of those times. Cultivate those memories like precious seedlings that can grow into what is yet to be.

The future is queer. If we make it so.