On Sex and Survival

This essay argues that queer theory's increasing attachment to survival as an ethical and political imperative has compromised its ability to engage sexuality as such. Taking as its provocation the controversy surrounding gay sex parties during COVID-19 lockdowns, it asks why such acts fail to register as expressions of queerness—as forms of queer fugitivity, ungovernability, or world making. More commonly framed as further evidence of the failures of gay male culture, these acts reflect the tension between queer theory's professed alignment with antinormativity and its underlying equation of queerness with the good—and the good with survival. Drawing on psychoanalysis, the essay positions sexuality as structurally indifferent to the imperative of survival and to the social laws that are meant to secure it. What is unsettling about sexuality, in this account, is not its violation of particular norms but its exposure of the fact that there is no law as such—that the laws of man and nature are not binding in any absolute sense. The essay suggests that while the decentering of sexuality is often framed as a way of expanding queer theory's critical scope, it also neutralizes the very force that makes queerness possible and that would unsettle any attempt to place it on firm moral ground. To affirm queerness, in this view, would not simply mean securing a future for those who might be designated “queer” but acknowledging what resists justification and remains inassimilable to normative frameworks in general.