POST, SENTENCES, and (analog) CRUISING by Leo Herrera

Check out Leo Herrera's online shop at https://iftheylived.myshopify.com/ 

 

Leo Herrera is one of those people that I follow on Instagram but I am not sure exactly where I first encountered them, was it just the algorithm pushing them into my feed – if it was, all I can say is, the algorithm sometimes gets things right!

POST is made up of the text of Instagram posts Leo made between June 2020 and November 2023, a period shaped by COVID, HIV and Mpox, and BLM, seen through the Mexican eyes Leo in the USA.

A couple of the posts

10.18.22

To study Queer history is to scavenge for pieces of us. To compensate for the lack of records by finding crack where Queer light might come in. To read between the lines, to find irregularities. What we lack in historical date we have to make up in imagination. We’re in there somewhere.

An extract from 10.28.23

Home, is not a static place, but a goal.

Many LGBTQ folks leave our birthplace and chase cheap rents and physical safety. The Queer experience is an immigrant one. What does ‘home’ mean to you and how has it changed as you get older?

SENTENCES rewords some of the material from POST and I tagged so many pages as as it is so strong in it message LGBTQ empowerment.

From it ...

Prayer

Queer people

are not taught to think about our future.

We spend so much of our lives

digging up our history,

focused on the legal and sexual economy

of our present.

Queer people

are not taught to think about our spirituality.

We spend so much of our lives

banished from religions

and focused on our bodies.

In this time of plague,

climate and economic crisis,

when making plans feels futile

and overwhelming

remember this:

Imagining your Queer future

is a form of prayer.

(analog) CRUISING is something different. It is a reaction to the rise of hook-up app like Grindr and the loss of Queer physical spaces. It is a celebration of cruising, of casual, even anonymous, sexual encounters between men (who may or may not identify as Gay/Bi/Queer or anything other than Straight). It is a how to guide, with some very practical tips, the dos and the don’ts of cruising in a range of different settings.

In a sauna (or bathhouse) Leo catches sight of himself in a mirror. And for a moment doesn’t recognise himself, “lithe and alert, stoic and simian”, because “I’d never seen myself hold my body like this. In the outside world, I hunched over and shrunk in front of other boys… here, I carried myself differently. I felt relaxed, patient, grown… It would take me years to understand that it was not some secret, extra version of myself, but the real one.” I have found that same sense of liberation and empowerment in a mix of different Gay/Queer sexual setting.

There is also a line I just want to share because I think it could have been the opening of a song by Bright Light Bright Light “Nature is not always fair or kind, but she’s delicate, random, and beautiful.”