L

iminal
N ature
A Queer Anthhology

Edited by Katya Pilkington

Liminal
Nature
A Queer
Anthology

Edited by
Katya Pilkington
 Compiled for
Salt Lake Community College’s
ENGL 2850: Intro to Queer Studies
Spring 2021
To all those who exist in borderlands
and the liminal spaces of identity-
We See You.
 Contents
Introduction
Katya Pilkington i
Zaina Arafat
You Exist Too Much 2
Tommy Pico
Nature Poem 4
Gloria Anzaldúa
Borderlands/La Frontera ##
Carmen Maria Machado
Her Body and Other Parties ##
Sam Hirst
Homesick ##
Hal Schrieve
Out Of Salem ##
Andrea Gibson
Lord of the Butterflies ##

ii
 Lee Hirsch
## Invisible Man

Emil Ferris
## My Favorite Thing is Monsters

Lil Nas X
## Montero(Call Me By Your Name)

Mary Lambert
## Shame Is An Ocean I Swim Across

Mason Deaver
## I Wish You All The Best

Jasmine Mans
## Black Girl, Call Home

Halsey
## Strangers

girl in red
## i wanna be your girlfriend

Owen White
## Tripping Over You

iii
 Author’s Name
On A Sunbeam ##
Author’s Name
Heartstopper ##
Carmen Esposito
Save Yourself ##
Author’s Name
Queer: A Graphic History ##
Closing
Katya Pilkington ##
Supplemental Texts
Various ##
Glossary ##
Index ##
Colophon ##

iv
 Introduction
At times thrown as a slur -harmful and
hate-filled - now reclaimed by many it was used
against; I find the word “queer” to be particularly
beautiful. Full of fluidity and liminality, it can be a
placeholder for the future or its own free-standing
descriptor. “To queer” something is to defy binaries
that seek to define us and to resist the regimes of
the normal that have othered us. It embraces those
cast out by hegemonic societies and binary thinking.
It calls to those in borderlands - the liminal spaces
of identity and physicality. And it empowers those
who have systematically been deprived of power.

Queer ecology is an important concept in
that it seeks to show that queer nature is human

v
 nature , that LGBTQ+ identities are human
identities - natural and to be celebrated as part of
humanity’s rich diversity. Heterosexuality is not
the default, it is not the “normal” to a homosexual
“abnormality”. Sexual orientation, gender identity,
and biological sex are not things to be pathologized,
“cured”, or othered - they are to be embraced as
natural and healthy differences within a miryad of
ways of being. This anthology seeks to show what
can be done when society fosters a diverse ecology
of queer identities instead of engaging in tokenism.
There is no single way of being gay, of being bisexual,
of being non-binary, transgender, or genderfluid, of
being any label that calls to you. Nature thrives on
diversity, and it’s about time society embraces that.

vi
vii
viii
1
Liminal Nature

“In acquiring my gender,

I had become offensive”
(Arafat, You Exist Too Much, 5)

Zaina Arafat
Zaina Arafat is an LGBTQ Arab/Muslim-American
writer and editor. Her fiction work includes the
widely-anticipated You Exist Too Much, and her
nonfiction essays have been published widely. In
addition to her writ-
ing, she has worked
as an editor on
multiple projects
and platforms and
has taught writ-
ing at several loca-
tions (Arafat, “Bio”)

Portrait of Zaina Arafat.

Zaina Arafat, 29 May 2021.
www.zainaarafat.com/bio

2
 A Queer Anthology

You Exist Too Much

You Exist Too Much tells the story of an
unnamed, bisexual, Palestinian-American wom-
en’s struggle with a love addiction that stems
from a desperate need for her mother’s love and
approval. From cheating to going to a residen-
tial treatment center and beyond, readers fol-
low this unnamed narrator and get a look into
the life of a queer women living in the border-
lands between Palestine and the United States.
Arafat’s work invites discussion of hybridity
and borderlands - both of physical borders and of in-
ternal identities. By having the narrator be a bisexual
woman whose partners are both men and women,
the story is told from a point of view that is both het-
erosexual and homosexual, yet neither at the same
time - an identity that cannot be described by a bi-
nary but by a hybridity of identity. Throughout the
novel readers get a glimpse of how life can be for Pal-
estinian-Americans as they navigate the borderlands
of identity and the policing of physical borderlands.

3
Liminal Nature

“Facts are fallacies , created and curated by

authority figures w/ / agendas…. Facts are
used to subjugate, intimidate, enslave, and
/ kill entire “races” of people reproductive
rights etc”
(Pico, Nature Poem, 49)

Tommy Pico
Tommy “Teebs” Pico is a queer, indigenous poet,
podcaster, and tv writer. Originating from the
Kumeyaay nation’s Viejas Indian reservation and
transplanted into the Los Angeles and Brooklyn
scenes, Pico brings his unique experiences and
views of nature and humanity together within
his creative works.
Part stream-of-
consciousness, part
hecticly living-life-
to-the-fullest, Pico’s
writing will run off
without you if you
don’t keep up
(Pico, “About”)
Portrait of Tommy Pico.
Tommy Pico, 26 May 2021. www.
tommy-pico.com/about-1

4
 A Queer Anthology

Nature Poem
Teebs refuses to write a nature poem. Ev-
eryone expects him to, of course, as the queer
NDN, but he won’t. Yet, in the fragmented poetry
of Nature Poem, Teebs does, in his own sort of
way, write about nature. Yes, some of it is about
stars - both the kind in the sky and the kind in
Hollywood, but a lot of it is about how we’re fuck-
ing up the earth and colonization and erasure and
those ugly parts of humanity. That’s nature, right?
Nature Poem speaks of queer ecopoetics
using techniques such as fragmentation and dif-
férance, alluding to the Earth and what we typically
think of as nature, as well as highlighting human-
ity’s non-central place within it. As a gay indigenous
man exploring the cultural borderlands between
life on a reservation and life in the city, stuck be-
tween two cultures, two sets of expectations, Tee-
bs voices the life living between binaries - of living
within borderlands - and the need for diverse rep-
resentation that this anthology hopes to represent.

5
Liminal Nature

6
A Queer Anthology

7
Liminal Nature

8
A Queer Anthology

9
Liminal Nature

10
A Queer Anthology

11
Liminal Nature

12
A Queer Anthology

13
Liminal Nature

14
15
Liminal Nature

16
17
Liminal Nature

18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35