Today, my mailbox contained (1) a postcard from Niagara, taunting me to return (should I?); (2) the hard copy of a book I’ve been reviewing, taunting me to finish my work (I should…); and (3) an excessive number of flyers for big-box retailer Canadian Tire.

Briefly embarrassed, I stuff the flyers back into my mailbox, trying — yet again — to lock it and leave them behind. Junk mail is relentless in Halifax. What is that — willful ignorance?

I feel mostly annoyed, over-capacity, before I pause to remember that for years, my American ex routinely confused Canadian Tire with the much more chaotic surplus store, Princess Auto, making her own portmanteau: Princess Tire. Clearly, our mail carrier once respected the sign: “No flyers, please.”

Were those simpler times or places?

Either way, I smile at the memory before turning to walk “home” away from the mailbox, and from my smile. My headphones dangle around my neck, their sound still audible: I feel stupid, and contagious …

I stop the song and walk in silence.

Disoriented, I strain my ears to listen for Niagara Falls as a way of being in relation while feeling strewn. I do not like rainbow crosswalks, but goddamn, I miss the Rainbow Bridge across the US-Canada border, and Princess Tire, too.

Cruel Optimism is also the most widely cited book in the humanities, so there’s that. The point of this piece isn’t to convince you to read it — in fact, maybe it’s the opposite? Frankly, I’ve been stuck on this paragraph for a month. Time to move on. I laugh at a meme of a long and winding road that calls to me: “Thankfully I have my headphones and have never gotten over anything in my entire life.”

Berlant (2011) says: “Cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” Here are some examples: The American Dream, the perfect lover, hard work that leads to success, a sense of place, the ever elusive then and there. How are you still holding onto ideals that are both unattainable and holding you back?

Suddenly, I don’t want to teach theory to the masses.

Honestly, fuck this. What’s the point?

Classically, queer theory is devoid of class analysis. I have to table the thrust of productivity to learn to write like a person again, or something. For now, I want to write to the city that I am writing with. And, I want to write to the city that I am writing about.

More than ever, I have to watch it on both the pacing and the jargon.

Today, I want to introduce both a concept — queer negativity — and also introduce a format for working with other concepts I’m calling “queer theory.” As a writing project and public performance of the oftentimes private, my pacing will always be too fast for some and too slow for others. Awkwardly, my goals involve writing theory that is both more accessible and engaging. As I see it, queer failure is something of a precursor to queer negativity (Halberstam, 2011, p. 123). And although it doesn’t seem it yet, queer negativity is still generative.

No Rainbows includes my own unpublished academic writing and fieldwork on the topic of rainbow crosswalks. But my orientation to the rainbow crosswalk is as follows: I’m not thrilled. As such, I anchor my critique in accessible examples or case studies, layering them with explicit components of queer theory. In this case, queer negativity is offered as my orientation to the rainbow motif in general. This posture is annoying to some and explicitly threatening to others, though neither are meant.

This work takes up my so-called open-palmed encounters with rainbow crosswalks in cities across Canada and the Atlantic Seaboard of the United States. This is an ongoing project. I am caught up in what Berlant and Freeman (1993, p. 167) described as “‘the urban redecoration’ project on behalf of gay visibility.” These ideas are mostly written elsewhere as queer theory, but without such practical examples. No Rainbows takes up the rainbow crosswalk as fodder for thinking about public art, power, and placemaking. This negative posture is important because burnouts and defacings are a regular addition to most rainbow crosswalks. No Rainbows brings a leeriness to pride flag painting budgets that is protective. “Progress”?

The queer negative does not vie for inclusion. The queer negative is more passive than it is insurgent. I read Bersani’s (1987) essay Is the Rectum a Grave?, and the academic debate that followed, so that you do not have to. Its main offering is the “antisocial thesis” in queer theory. Today’s queer negativity might ask: How is “hope” an imperialist project? (Halberstam, 2006). Radical passivity involves unbecoming, or defiance to become (e.g., academic, woman) (Halberstam, 2011, p. 173). My move out from behind the paywall and into the public domain isn’t an attempt to restore (or renaturalize) queer theory to its rightful place. I’m not being corrective. There is no pure queer theory (Berlant & Warner, 1995). As an academic genre or discourse of critique, queer theory shouldn’t exist — certainly not in the university (Berlant & Warner, 1995). But it does. I think it’s in my email signature, for now.

So, as political and philosophical stance, queer negativity presents a mode for queer existence in an era that promises “it gets better” as things actually, get much, much worse.

Next concept: cruel optimism