Queering Intimacy, Six Feet Apart

Social distancing has become the foundation of the United States and global public health efforts to halt the spread of COVID-19. In the United States, national, local, and state campaigns promoted social distancing as the lynchpin of safety—stay six feet away from each other in order to stay safe. Organizations employed various visualization techniques to make six feet easy to measure. The Centers for Disease Control measures six feet as two arms length¹; the Red Cross asks people to imagine two large dogs standing head to tail²; and the State of Colorado³—always on brand—asks residents to visualize the length of skis. At the same time as we are asked to develop body memory for what six feet looks and, more important, feels like, the campaigns promote the intimacy of connection six feet apart. The State of Texas's public health campaign advertises "Apart We Stand Together"⁴; the World Health Organization promotes "One World: Together at Home,"⁵ and Amnesty International asks us to reconcile the contradiction of "Together, alone."⁶ The same messages of intimacy at a distance are embraced by the New York Times podcast series "Together Apart"⁷ and Time Magazine series "Apart. Not Alone."⁸ Together these campaigns ask us to develop body memory for safe intimacy at a distance. In the words of Sarah Ahmed, we are asked to affectively orient ourselves toward and away from one another, remain intimate, but at a safe distance.⁹ The importance of body memory cannot be understated. In the past four months, we have been asked to inch toward and away, trying to find a space at which the promise of safety can be realized.

What strikes me most about the rhetorical utterances promising safe intimacies six feet apart is how hard they are to critique. To live through a pandemic necessitates a present-moment response. We are spending emotional and mental capacity on distancing to keep ourselves safe, and that precludes the intellectual distancing necessary to make a critical response possible. And we need to have a critical response to the pandemic in order to survive. I would like to challenge this Catch-22 by asking to adopt six feet apart as a critical methodology from which to analyze and critique the assumptions about intimacy and risk during a pandemic. To adapt a six feet methodological and critical distancing from the social distancing campaign is to address the point that these campaigns obfuscate—in order to be political, critical, and liberating, intimacy must be dangerous, precarious, and unsafe. And in order to survive this pandemic, we must be political, critical, and liberating therefore we must be dangerous, precarious, and unsafe. Queer theory can help us think through the necessity of dangerous intimacy as an agent of political change. I am drawn to Marlon M. Bailey¹⁰ and Tim Dean's¹¹ work on the intimacies of barebacking, or the gay male practice of having unprotected anal sex despite and sometimes because of the dangers of HIV transmission. Both authors challenge us to think of seemingly risky health practices as necessary and productively intimate. Tim Dean, for example, argues that a risk behavior such as barebacking cultivates what he calls "unlimited intimacy," or "a distinctive account of relationality, of what it means to be in contact with other human beings."¹² Dean argues that the barebacking subculture ideas about intimacy and kinship emerged at the point where mainstream gay politics focused almost exclusively on marriage and family, and were embraced at least partially as a subversive response to the increasingly heteronormative formulations of kinship. Even more forcefully, Marlon B. Bailey argues that, for Black gay men, barebacking, or raw sex, although marked as risky behavior by public health campaigns, can be essential and necessary to maintaining sexual health in a culture that marginalizes their existence. He argues that "raw sex is more than just about sexual behavior; rather, it is about subjectivity, or what black gay men want, within a context and under conditions of multiple social disqualification, management/surveillance, and exclusion that we navigate and negotiate daily. Raw sex...