Stephanie J responds to Dressing Queer by Loretta Ryan-Krawczyk (2022).
Ga(y)ze: A reflection on being seen
Can I borrow your eyes? To be nude in the golden light of day is such a different beast than what lurks in the blue-red of night. Clothed in nothing but my moles, how the cold linoleum goosebumps my skin. Can I borrow your gaze?
The one which peels off my t-shirt, hands-free. The crop, with the cherub front and centre. Soft black pants which hug me as a second skin. Does it not reveal so much more to be seen in the costumes of the everyday, than in the bare freckled flesh of one’s birthday suit? Loretta’s zine breathes life into these thoughts like balloons buoying about the ceiling. I ask myself the questions she poses to her contributors and find myself laid bare; for my queer identity is as much tied up in the planes of my skin as it is in the fabric that shrouds it.
Loretta writes: “… there are so many different ways to get dressed as a queer person.” Too, are there so many ways simply to be one. In this collection, Charlie’s boots, Estella’s flares, and Will’s t-shirt take on personalities distinct from the bodies they clothe. Identity, in all its manifestations, is celebrated in this zine. Reading it, I feel, at once, a sense of wholeness as a tiny gap in the puzzlement of my understanding of people and their place in the cosmos is filled.
I find myself wondering, how fine is the distinction between skin and cloth? How intimately do the fibres of our clothes nestle against our flesh? Dressing Queer has inspired me to ritualise the banality of dressing myself; of peeling on my socks and lacing my shoes with a reverence that can be so easily misplaced in the hustle of the working day. But, too, has it reminded me how the press of clothes against my skin can itch. My flesh screams to be free. For me, getting dressed as a queer person includes not getting dressed at all.
Can I borrow your eagerness? To demolish what separates my skin from the air? To feel, at once, flayed, yet clothed by the turning of the earth about her sun?