Stories Set Love and Fury Loose

Out of the Closet and Into the Pews

‘Stories Set Love and Fury Loose’ is an audio and written series that focuses on what it means to think of pausing as part of a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. Whether I was aware of it at the time, COVID-19 gave me an escape and chance to pause to save my existence. A chance to leave an abusive partner. Having my identity dismantled, marginalized, and regulated by experiencing intimate partner violence led me to critically engage in audio and writing, and ultimately grapple with love as a point of radical openness. I want to invite you in and set forth in you love and fury as I express my feelings and let my story loose. In this ongoing project series, I reflect on how COVID-19 gave me the opportunity to pause and separate myself from an abusive partner. While language isn’t always sufficient to convey our experiences of trauma, this project utilizes both audio and written work to convey to notions of self, existence and violence. In this audio and writing, while I put forward only a fraction of myself into your view, I draw upon imagined community - how community is always in some part imagined - to show how the safety of this imagined community is integral to our journey of healing and love. Wading through my work, you must understand multiple layers and meanings of what it means to be queer and experience violence with someone who makes up part of your identity while simultaneously being able to destroy it. Having experienced intimate partner violence influenced the ways I viewed myself and the imagined queer community, which led me to investigate the ways our identities have been imagined and shaped by queer experiences of violence.

This project utilized both audio, visual, and written art to unpack moments of our lives that have necessitated pausing. Whether aware of it or not, this work addresses how moments of pause have been doors to radical openness that allow us to explore the impact of systems upon our bodies and love. In acting in dialogue with each other, Malchijah and I unpack what it means to have our identities dismantled, marginalized and regulated and how to refine love at our center of that journey.

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