Queer Editorial Overture

With much excitement and anticipation, and anxiousness, we here commence QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. “Overture” is used deliberately. Of course, these brief prefatory remarks, and the voices that make up the contents of this inaugural issue, introduce this new journal. But just as important, they constitute an invitation, a proposition, an appeal to diverse readers to collaborate with us in creating and circulating what will appear in future issues—which we hope will be many issues and many voices across many years to come.

When Gabriel Dotto and Martha Bates at Michigan State University Press shared with us their desire to found a new GLBTQ journal, and then generously invited us to bring it to fruition, we were aware of existing scholarly, trade, and popular publications, some long established and beloved, already doing GLBTQ work. Like the people at these other periodicals, we felt—we always feel—strongly inclined toward narrating, theorizing, analyzing, and imagining GLBTQ lives and communities in pleasure and struggle, within the complex contexts and contingencies that enable and constrain them, then, now, and into the future. Our wish is to complement these publications rather than competitively replicate them. In our hope to make a unique and meaningful contribution, we envision QED as a space of coalitional thinking, conversation, critique, debate, performance, review, and mobilization across boundaries of GLBTQ scholarship, activism, art, culture, and policy making. Such boundary crossing can be fraught and risky business, especially if such a coalitional effort is to be achieved equitably and productively without exploitation, cooptation, or other consequent or collateral violence.¹ With the guidance of our talented and esteemed board members, we look forward to facing these productive challenges, and in any case we cannot resist the gravitational pull of this venture’s promise. At its heart, QED asks: What potentialities might we foment, foster, and enact by bringing together GLBTQ worldmakers from multiple, intersectional domains? How we do so will be an ongoing inventive, material, and political challenge, reinforcing the imperative that queer must always be lived as a verb.

In the recent months of preparing and promoting the launch of the journal, we were frequently asked what QED denotes. It is not an acronym, though, of course, Q resonates queerly for us, as we imagine it will for many readers. We wish our intentional indeterminacy to be playful, productive, propulsive. This configuration will be recognized by some as signifying the Latin phrase, quod erat demonstrandum, meaning “that which had to be demonstrated,” which used to be placed at the end of mathematical proofs to inscribe a stamp of consummation. This connotation appeals to us insofar as we understand this journal’s mission as centrally concerned with praxis, which is to say that we believe the success of QED generally, and of any of the words on its pages, shall be determined by its demonstration, by the difference it seeks to manifest in the world. We hope that this high bar, this idealism, will be constitutive. Other readers, though lamentably too few given the infrastructural deficits vexing GLBTQ history and memory, will recognize Q.E.D. as the title of Gertrude Stein’s explicitly lesbian autobiographical novel, written in 1903 but not published until after her death in 1950.² Stein’s use of the acronym ironically represented the relations among the women that unfolded in her narrative. Activism, archive, wit, desire—our hope is that all of these terms will, among others, characterize this GLBTQ project, and that you will venture to make other meanings and doings of it.

Our use of the term “worldmaking” is much more deliberate in its derivation. Since our first encounter 15 years ago with its conceptualization by queer theorists Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner in their influential essay, “Sex in Public,” we have been inspired and challenged by the still generative and demanding implications of their idea of “queer worldmaking”—creative, performative, intimate, public, disruptive, utopian, and more. Of such a “world-making project,” they wrote: “The queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate...