Notes on the Queer Art of Failure – 35th Birthday Reflections

Last year, just after New Year’s, I started reading “The Queer Art of Failure,” a book by Jack Halberstam where he argues:

“Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing, may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.” Halberstam believes we should “read failures for examples, as a refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit.”  

Before reading this book, I had never necessarily thought of failure as a uniquely queer area of expertise. Halberstam writes: “Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well.”  

Queer writer Ocean Vuong admitted that he wrote his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in part to honor the queer “tradition of learning through failure”:

“For queer folks, failure becomes a necessary praxis towards success,” he said, “We fail forward; we keep returning to failure until it triumphs in the site of its fumbling —which is what being queer feels like.”

The stereotype of millennials — and especially, bisexual millennials — is that we’re all confused and lost, but I’ve always seen us as just less afraid of failure. Our seemingly noncommittal flightiness to me has always actually felt like a commitment to living a life that always aligns with our desire, even if that means making decisions that traditionally look like failure from the outside: ending relationships, leaving jobs, losing money. Looking back, so many of my “failures” were simply moments I could no longer deny that I wanted something that life, in its current form, was not giving me. In that way, each failure became, as Vuong said, a failing forward. 

On my 31st birthday, I questioned whether this determination to chase authenticity and desire was even worth it. I wrote about the “loneliness of knowing something to be deeply true, but fearing you won’t be able to handle acting on it. It’s the loneliness of coming to terms with your own life, but knowing it will make everything harder.” Turns out, I was right: authenticity did make everything harder. Within months of that birthday, I had come out to everyone, and become estranged from close members of my family. Under the isolation of the pandemic, I suddenly found myself having to rebuild a sense of community seemingly from scratch. 

When I was younger, the only way to stomach failure was to immediately latch onto some other more romantic, idyllic alternative I would deem “better,” something that would prove my failures were “worth it.” And when that idyllic life also (inevitably) failed, sometimes I stayed in it too long, too afraid to admit to anyone that the next “better” direction I had chosen for my life had also not worked. For all we talk about the power of “living our truth” the reality is there was not necessarily always a quick and visible reward on the other side of those moments. Queerness, specifically, gave me no happy endings. If anything, it instead delegitimized endings. It taught me to continuously be skeptical of arrival.

Four years later, I am more settled in the idea of failure without anything next to show for it; failure not as a question of whether it’s “worth it” at all, but instead as my only option, as even an intentional option politically. Failure, as Halberstam wrote, as an “active and continuous refusal of mastery,” a refusal to succeed within the standards of systems we do not believe in. Failure as an act of resistance against capitalism, the American Dream, and every other story we have told about success. 

Jamaica Kincaid wrote “I am not at all— absolutely not at all — interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing the truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite.” 

I don’t necessarily agree that truth is the opposite of happiness. Sometimes the very definition of euphoria for me is a truth given the space and permission to be expressed fully: on a hike, on a dance floor, in an intimate conversation, in my car with the top down on the highway.  

And yet, at 35 years old, after changing jobs, and moving cities, and coming out, and ending and shifting and rebirthing relationships with so many people I love, honestly, nothing necessarily feels easier. It just feels more, as Kincaid said, aligned with truth. At 35, my life’s alignment with truth is the most important and most honest “success” I can claim for myself. 

Alexis Pauline Gumbs defined queer wisdom as our ability to speak the truth of our desire: “To in all areas of our lives be able to say ‘I want this. I want it. And it’s possible.’ I have tried to practice this every year of my life, even when I want what I’ve never seen before. Even when the failure of what I want is still my only example. 

And then, as always, over time, the examples eventually show themselves: a new community, a new creative practice, a new eroticism, a new kind of intimacy, a new way of being in my body, a new kind of home. Everything I finally allowed myself to admit that I wanted, slowly emerging as possible. Today, on my 35th birthday, I believe so deeply what Halberstam believes: my failure is creating something so beautiful. My unbecoming is as powerful as anything I’ve become. And slowly, it’s showing me a more creative, more surprising way of being in the world.