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Ricardo is my long distance boyfriend. We met in the Castro District of San Francisco last year. A place where we were able to find, grow into, and be our gay selves. In the Castro we have made friends with and collaborate with other queer individuals. Some of our friends are old enough to have lived through the AIDS crisis. Some of our friends are HIV positive and have been living with HIV for decades or just a few years.

In In a Queer Time and Place, Jack Halberstam addresses the AIDS crisis and time saying,  “...queer time, even as it emerges from the AIDS crisis, is not only about compression and annihilation; it is also about the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing… Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.”

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Ricardo and I both come from traditional, Latin families, and growing up the pressure to want and desire the domestic bliss that our parents claim they possess really messed us up. We were angry, repressed, and unhappy. Sara Ahmed in the Promise of Happiness claims that Capitalistic and heterosexual norms only justify oppression. Happiness is used as a disciplinary technique and we’re taught to believe that social norms are social goods. It took us a long time to rework the, as Ahmed calls it, “the unhappy effects of happiness” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 2).

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In an anti-social turn in queer theory, Lee Edelman argues in No Future that non reproductive sexuality threatens the social order. He says that, “The embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value” (Edelman, 2004, p. 6). Meaning queerness exposes sex for what it is: just fucking, or only for jouissance.

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In Cruising Utopia Jose Esteban Munoz critiques the antisocial or anti-relational ideas of Edelman. Queerness is not just about sexuality. Moments of relational contact are complex and have viable political futures. By dwelling in the future or the not-yet-conscious by looking at the no-longer-conscious to understand the not-yet-here has the potential to feel and hope for utopia.

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Despite our physical distance and push back from our families for not living normative lives we continue to have hope. In Cruising Utopia Jose Esteban Munoz says to look to our past to critique the present to imagine a better more queer future. He says, “We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (Munoz, 2009, pg. 1).