Don’t go gentle into that dance floor: On alienation, hedonism, and queer nights

In high school, Acxell learned that safety was choreography. Speak affably and be comedic. I wasn’t out—not exactly—but I was visible like a sanitized mascot. The kind of queer they let orbit the circle because I looked cute in pictures, not because I said anything worth hearing. I blurred myself into the background, and that made me palatable. Maybe even lovable.

Then he cut his hair. He let his voice grow louder. Let his silhouette stop asking for permission. Suddenly, he wasn’t readable—and that was fucking confusing. In a society shaped by colonial scripts and Catholic dogma, identity is supposed to make sense. Queer theorist Judith Butler wrote that to be unintelligible is to risk social death. I didn’t need to read her to know that.

This isn’t a coming-out story. it’s an anatomy of contradiction—of how queerness here is both a spectacle and a sin, both currency and curse. This is about the kids who wear defiance like perfume. Not to mask the pain—but to make it linger. And again, Judith Butler says gender is a performance. But she forgot to mention it’s usually unpaid. We ad-lib our survival daily, in scenes we didn’t audition for, on stages no one built for us. Still, the show goes on.

And maybe French philosopher Albert Camus got it wrong. Or maybe Sisyphus wasn’t just happy—maybe he was a faggot. Pushing that boulder in scuffed Doc Martens, side-eyeing God, dancing endlessly to Pette Shabu, Charli xcx, Lorde, and Lady Gaga—streaming his crisis flawlessly.

Not because it meant anything. But because giving up felt cliché.

The syntax of skin

Josh is a visual artist from Makati. He’s proudly brown, full of piercings, and fucking exhausted. In many Filipino queer spaces, colorism doesn’t just exist—it curates. It casts. From dating apps to drag shows, the visual economy of queerness still worships the mestizo fantasy: Smooth skin, aquiline noses, and a brightness filter strong enough to colonize a ring light.

A 2021 study by the UP Center for Women’s and Gender Studies reported that darker-skinned LGBTQ+ Filipinos often face dual marginalization: They are hyper-visible and invisible. Perform desire—but never be desired. Zainab, 27, a morena trans woman from Zamboanga City, says she’s felt this her whole life. “People would say I’m ‘exotic’—but never ‘dateable.’ It’s like I’m an archetype, not a person.”

This is what Judith Butler calls the politics of recognizability—where only certain bodies are granted coherence, made legible, allowed to be intelligible. If you don’t fit the aesthetic grammar, you’re misread. Misgendered. Misunderstood. And then, just... missed.

But this isn’t just a glitch in the algorithm. It’s structural. French political philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote that colonialism colonizes the mirror. And here, the mirror has been preset to Eurocentric symmetry. We still hand out desirability by proximity to whiteness. And the damage isn’t just digital. When whiteness becomes the filter through which queerness must pass to be seen, brown queer bodies become unreadable. And when you are unreadable, you are unloveable. Unhirable. Ungrievable.

Queer poet Gloria Anzaldúa called this the Borderlands: Where we are too much and never enough. Where we speak in tongues no algorithm can translate. Where queerness, like color, becomes both target and camouflage. But American academic José Esteban Muñoz reminds us that queerness is not just what is—it is also what could be. Queerness, he says, is a horizon. A forward glance. A longing for a world that doesn’t yet exist, but still insists on itself.

So maybe Josh, swiping through Tinder in Makati, isn’t just looking for a date. Maybe he’s looking for a rupture. A refusal. A glimpse of utopia. Maybe every left swipe is a solemn rejection of a system that was never built for him. And every right swipe—hesitant, hopeful—is a small act of imagining otherwise.

We call it “just a preference,” but what we really mean is: Just a pattern. Just a hierarchy. Just another way the world decides who is lovable and who is leftover. This is the banality of queer exclusion—how discrimination hides behind the most ordinary words. How “not my type” becomes a script passed down, color-coded, and rehearsed. It’s nothing personal, we’re told. Just taste. Just instinct. Just centuries of internalized colonial aesthetics packaged as swipe logic.

And yet—even when the mirror lies, we still dance in front of it. Even when the world erases us, we keep showing up—unglossed, unfiltered, unreadable, alive. Because as Muñoz reminds us, queerness is not only the now—it is the not-yet. And sometimes, all it takes is showing up to the algorithm as you are: brown, queer, and still believing in the possibility of being seen.

Don’t ask, don’t fag out

Is the bass the loudest sound in a queer club? Or is it the silence after you laughed too effeminately?

There was a night with my estranged friends when I let out a laugh that could’ve snapped a wrist in half. You know the kind—high-pitched, winded, unapologetic. My crush turned to me like I'd farted at a funeral. “Is you…” he muttered. That night, I realized something stupidly profound: Being queer isn’t the same as being free. You can be surrounded by rainbows and still feel like a glitch.

Karl, 18, understands this glitch intimately. He's a psych major by day, con artist by night, and a part-time contortionist in the circus of masculinity. “I still lower my voice at the door,” he says. “Like I know everyone’s gay as fuck here, but I still feel too gay.” He tried it once—eyeliner , a crop top, a giggle that refused to stay closeted. But those aren’t always safe. “Suddenly, I felt like I was doing too much,” he tells me. “Like I was fucking up the vibe.” Karl adjusted. Deepened his voice. Muted his palette. Desire, as we’re sold it, favors simplicity over subversion.

It’s not just aesthetics—it’s ontology. Gender, as Judith Butler wrote (and probably sighed while writing), is a performance without an origin. But here, the stage is glitchy, and the audience carries trauma. We perform masculinity like a script we never auditioned for, mouthing the lines for safety, not applause. And if we deviate? We risk becoming unintelligible—what Butler called the “unrecognizable subject.” But Karl's tired. And so am I. Because the algorithm doesn’t care if your gender is a scream or a hymn—it just wants symmetry, silence, and swipeable masculinity.

But Karl? Karl's done. “Fuck it.” he says.

Fuck the fantasy once and for all.

Where yearning goes to starve

Heinrich, 19, is a walking contradiction. Just like me. Heinrich wants to strip a soul—but also clothes. He’s like Fleabag if she had an existential crisis at a vape shop and cried during French new wave films. Too esoteric for hookup culture, too horny for monastic solitude. He scrolls through Grindr like he’s reading Baudrillard—not out of arousal, but alienation.

“I don't even want the sex half the time,” he tells me over iced-coffee in Cavite. “I want someone to hurt with. Or heal with. Or at least say something interesting about death before they kiss me.” His dating app bios are poetic. Literally. One just read: “I want to be loved like a theory you misquote but still believe in.” This is the paradox: He craves contact, but not transaction. He wants desire, but not consumption. He wants intimacy that doesn’t feel like a retail experience. And the world keeps offering him bundled traumas with ripped arms.

“These faggots talk to you like they’ve already imagined fucking you,” he says, “Then ghost you like you were just Max’s bad draft.” What Heinrich wants is difficult to monetize, and therefore impossible to locate. In a culture where hookup apps flatten identity into tags and angles, he becomes illegible. Not hot enough to fetishize, not masc enough to disappear into the algorithm, not soft enough to sell.

Michel Foucault said power doesn’t repress—it produces. Here, it produces desire as spectacle. It streamlines who gets to be wanted, and edits out those who want too much. Heinrich wants the wrong things. He wants someone to look at him and say, “I see you,” not just “wyd.” He wants proximity without performance. Vulnerability that isn’t aestheticized.

Lauren Berlant would call this cruel optimism: The belief that if you keep showing up, keep curating, keep compressing your soul into a palatable JPEG—then maybe, one day, you’ll be loved correctly. But love isn’t coded into the UX. But the philosopher Sartre would say that Heinrich isn’t broken—just in bad faith. Not because he lies, but because the world keeps asking him to be something he’s not, and he keeps trying anyway.

He wants to unlearn that performance. He wants to return to a self that hasn’t been optimized. “I just wanna be held without it, meaning I owe someone something,” He tells me. And yet—he still opens the app. Still writes prompts like sonnets. Still shows up, asking questions that don’t fit into character limits.

Maybe that’s the most radical thing about Heinrich: He’s still yearning in a system built to starve you. And that yearning? It’s not naive.

It’s resistance.

Sisyphus was a fag—and he gagged

And Camus didn’t go far enough. Sisyphus wasn’t just happy—he was a faggot. Not just absurd, but fabulous. Not just resigned to fate, but voguing against it. Pushin’ that boulder in vintage Doc Martens, smoking a Juul with the flavor name existential ennui and dancing endlessly. He isn’t just enduring; He’s performing. and maybe that’s the point. Camus wrote: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” But what if the struggle isn’t silent? What if it vogues? What if it cries in falsetto and still makes it to brunch?

Because in queer spaces, absurdity isn’t just philosophical—it’s choreographed. We don’t stop until we get it, get it. And mourn in selfies, spiral in close friends stories with glitter under our eyes. We post thirst traps. I rebel—therefore we exist. Sometimes we call it coping. Sometimes, it’s just Friday.

Butler said gender is a performance—but didn’t say we had to stick to the original script. So we work it out on the remix. Break rhythm. Fuck up the lighting. Exit mid-monologue to kiss someone mid-crisis. Fuck the fourth wall—make it a mirrorball. Kierkegaard called it the leap of faith—the idea that absurdity doesn’t kill meaning; it creates it. That repetition is not stagnation, but devotion. When the world makes no sense, we choose to love anyway. Again and again. No applause. Just glitter and guts. Queer theologian Patrick Cheng writes that queerness is divine in its scandal. That our contradictions aren’t flaws—they’re sacraments. That every time we choose joy without permission, we make the world more livable. Queer survival isn’t about being legible. It’s about being unreadable—and still divine.

We’re the glitch in the plot. The parentheses in the canon. The glitter bomb in the cathedral.

And when the lights go out, we’re not reaching for heaven.

We’re just reaching for each other.