Queer Praxis
Questions for LGBTQ Worldmaking
Edited By Dustin Bradley Goltz and Jason Zingsheim
10. Queer/Love/Yawp: Meditation Aloud
Extract
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10. Queer/ Love/ Yawp: Meditation Aloud
CHARLES E. MORRIS III
Latin isn’t one of the romance languages, but it’s got tug (its vulgar form, after all, begat them), especially when one licks one’s lips and speaks.
Despite three years of seemingly endless rote at my all-boys Jesuit preparatory school in Baltimore, I can’t remember a single Latin declension. This is ironic, in a metonymic way. Myself not having been engaged during those years in any man-on-man declension (alas, the elusive genitive: I was not, in the biblical and biblically prohibitive sense, homo hominis, man of/in the man), yet at the same time strongly animated and constrained by whatever comprised the affective nether-realm of “The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name,” circa 1987. Thus, speech mattered. Not only in the compensatory sense that I was a fucking loquacious Loyola boy, which happened to be the case, but, more to the point here, I got off on and emerged through not my own but other people’s sex narratives. I wish now I’d heard more, more directly, of the cacophony, my ears largely and limitedly attuned to slim acoustic shadows of the libidinal boom. I’ve never forgotten an exchange with my classmate Joe, the veritable clown, whose own undoubtedly compensatory sexualized logorrhea riveted me (naturally I blame him for the paltry “2” I received on the AP Latin exam: Virgil who?). Once amid a small circle between classes, Joe...
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