An Introduction

(From the August Issue of the Quack!)

And Gloria cackled, let there be sparkle: and there was sparkle! (Genesis 1:3)

What better way to open the Quack!’s first issue than with a word from the beginning of all beginnings? Or, at least one of the beginnings from the Book of Genesis: that cosmic dance in which God’s ruah, God’s spirit, struts across the great abyss and laughs creation into existence. A tough act to follow*

*the toughest act to follow (Now sashay away!)

And yet I am reminded, as I populate these words across the great blank nothingness of my google doc page, and my mouse hovers over the vast expanse of this white-pixeled wilderness, that to engage in any act of creation, however insignificant, is to partake in the ongoing creation drama alluded to in this first chapter of Genesis.

(Co-)creation is (just) one of the things that we queer people do particularly well, despite what official Church teaching may say. We reinterpret, we redefine, we reinvent. We use what we have around us to make new and fabulous things. Queer people are the great collage-makers and text-interweavers, using pre-existing elements and resituating them in new contexts to create something altogether quite novel.

Which brings us to this particular translation of Genesis 1:3. If this version of the Genesis verse seems somewhat peculiar, unfamiliar, or queer, it’s because it is. It’s a translation of the Bible into Polari, an underground cant popular among the queer community in the UK in the early twentieth century. The language pieces together terminology from a variety of languages – Italian, (Polari comes from Italian parlare, to speak), Yiddish, and Romani – and utilizes somewhat cheeky vocabulary to express everything from the mundane to the raunchy. If you’ve ever used the words butch, ogle, zhuzh, and camp, you have Polari to thank.

So, with the following glosses, we get a Genesis translation that looks a little more familiar:

gloria (n.) God

cackle (v.) to speak, to say

sparkle (n.) light

Languages like Polari demonstrate the (pro-)creative resilience of queer communities in the face of violent intolerance and the power we find in speaking new ways into being.

But to analyze Polari in this distant, analytic way is to ignore how much of Polari’s vocabulary is downright funny: fart crackers for pants, orderly daughters for police, chicken for young men. Gloria doesn’t just speak, She cackles.

As these examples demonstrate, Polari wasn't just a cold, calculated subversion of language demonstrating “the (pro-)creative resilience of queer communities” ; It was loud, it was boisterous, it was jarring, it was silly. It was a joyful, hilarious, often jabbing way to laugh – to cackle – in a world where queer joy was to be hidden or tampered down. As Paul Baker says in his study of Polari “as well as being funny, gay slang is often subversive, assigning bold new meanings to words that already exist, tackling taboos and laughing in the face of adversity.”

Polari is a vernacular poetry that reminds us that petty jokes and potty humor can be just as powerful as academic treatises and “serious” forms of art; that joy and laughter and slang and sex do not have to be flattened in pursuit of making something meaningful; and that queer experience doesn’t have to be sanitized with theory and academese in order to for it be legitimate or revolutionary.

The title of this zine itself – the Quack! – isn’t meant to be serious. It’s a comical combination of queer and Catholic. It’s giving more Aflac or Donald Duck than it is a serious-exploration-of-queer-catholic-experience. And that’s because I wanted this platform to accommodate the full range of my experience – my goofy self, my joyful self, my naughty self, my sexual self, my petty self, my overdramatic self. And, yes, of course, my serious self as well. But in a small discourse landscape dominated by “serious,” “academic,” or Church-controlled explorations of faith and queerness, I wanted something that didn’t require me to check parts of myself at the door.

This first issue of the Quack! is a reflection on queerness and creation. It interweaves episodes from Genesis and the Divine Comedy to explore my experience as queer Catholic – or Qatholic (pronounced the same as “Catholic”) – through quotes, collages, poetry, and creative writing. As you pass through its three canticles – (Disco) Inferno, Pur-GAY-torio, and His/Her/Their-adiso – you’ll see references to people and works that that I have found meaningful in my own journey to understanding my faith in relation to my queerness, not the least of which is Dorothy Day, whose newspaper The Catholic Worker, started 100 years ago, first inspired me to create this zine.

As we continue to elevate the voices of queer people of faith, I hope this outlet becomes just one of the ways we breathe across the vast, dark, shapeless abyss of our modern age to breathe a novus ordo–a new, beautifully queer order–into being.

And God looked at his creation and found that all God’s queer children were oh so fabulous!

Larlou (Amen)!