For José
Photograph via Sandy Soto.
From J. Jack Halberstam's eulogy for our advisory board member, José Esteban Muñoz:
José would often quote Jack Smith’s barb about Maria Montez (or was it Allen Ginsburg?) that they were "walking careers”: this was a high ranking insult from José and it was reserved for people who could not remember why they were in academia—people who sought out the “stardom,” the attention and forgot the pleasure, the collaborative potential, the sheer joy of writing, thinking and being in proximity to performance—those people were ‘walking careers.’ As for José, rock star and legend as he was, he was not in it simply for the career, the profession, the attention—José really did believe in something bigger than personal acclaim and that was the queer utopia he continued to cruise until his death.
“We must vacate the here and now for a then and there…” he wrote at the conclusion to Cruising Utopia. “What we need to know is that queerness is not yet here but it approaches like a crashing wave of potentiality… Willingly we let ourselves feel queerness’s pull, knowing it as something else that we can feel, that we must feel. We must take ecstasy” (185). I am pretty sure that José knew plenty about taking ecstasy and about feeling something beyond the here and now. And, because he taught us all how to feel “queerness’s pull,” we are all here now, sitting on the shore, alone, bereft from his loss, squinting towards the horizon and hoping to see the shape of the queer world to come that he insistently pointed us towards. José we miss you, we love you, nothing will ever be the same without you.