Work Text:
I think sometimes this is the soul of queerbaiting. That below, beneath and through every eerie example I’ve known, there is someone like me. The liminal space of the closet; edited and altered; the performance and the price.
The flesh of queerbaiting is the product, is the polish, and the shine. The place where I see iridescent glimpses of myself. The body of it is narcissus; the mirage-reflection I reach for, dip my fingers through glassy water, drown down within it. The promise of my image, and the surface tension that the promise is only light painting incidental pictures. Only the fool I’ve made of myself. Slipping into the stream.
But the soul. The soul of it is mine. I’m sure of it, that it’s earnest, that it is mine. That it is people like me, with fears and joys like mine.
That it is Sturgeon writing Spock quivering with need and anger, all emotion held in leashed check to a rigid culture. Passion’s mastery. The greek-gold of his captain’s bared chest, cut open under lirpa, a vision that is meant for the unseen gaze of a woman, and not for him. But still he burns, still he hungers, still he wrestles with love as though he wrestles with his own skin.
And all of it perishing with a man's death. All the fire out, the forge cold and spent and Jim’s body, t’hy’la’s body slack below him.
It is the one thing I want and know I can never have; an angel’s parting glass to a father’s pride and shame. Beren’s Castiel’s confession to a Righteous Man. His love and its fall from grace; its surrender to the abyss. The final drink, the last round of whiskey drained empty. The warmth of want against the cold of farewell and the quiet it left in his place.
Of all the faith that e’er I had, and all the harm that e’er I done, alas it falls unto my lot, that I must go and you must not.
And it is the buried love. It is Hayes interring devotion and longing in the earth, and it is Sugar and Daphne sharing a train berth in breathless delight. The dancing line of gender and passion and self, the tangled fingertips. It is a moral statement that rings guiltless across my great combined soul, the one understood, the one I know is not my fault!
My love, my love taken six foot below!
And I know that I am blameless. That tragedy is beauty. I know my longing is a requiem, and my yearning an eulogy. I know this is my song, sung for the likes of me, by those who have heard its same summons.
The soul of queerbaiting was written for the likes of me, and it possesses an unwilling flesh, a mind that loves so thin and fine, but the heart of it is mine. This, I think, is why I touch the water’s surface again, again and again. This, I think, is why I slip, not in Icarus sun-singed and golden, but a delicate, dying bloom bowed between the riverbed and the light.
I know you are me. I heard. And I reached out to hold you close.