"Expectations are premeditated disappointments" - Katya Zamolodchikova

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When I watch Hamish McIntosh's newest work, Like a Knife, the Horizon, I think about how when I came out to my dad, he cried. He didn't get angry, which was the normal, practiced reflex for him, but he cried. He had never cried. I had never seen him cry. I said, dad, I'm gay, and he immediately mourned a future lost. Months later, he would tell me that he'd had so many dreams of what my future would be, that I'd marry a girl, that I'd have a family, and in three words, it had all fallen away. He didn't say he was disappointed, but it was there, the subtext of that rare, teary emotional reaction - I was the greatest disappointment of his life.*

As a mostly OK adult human homosexual, I am struck by the realisation that not only did my dad mourn the loss of his dreams for who and what I could become, but that he also mourned the revelation that I had no future - because many queer people have no future. Well, perhaps that used to be the case, back when dad was born in 1950 in country NSW, but these days we have pride and representation and all love is equal and meditation and queer parents and chosen families and smiles and laughter and dancing and bumps of K and did you go to that night that was on, that DJ was playing, and faggots bash back. But watching Hamish's McIntosh's work, I am reminded of the way I lived for so many years, dissociated from reality and a discernible path forward.  

Every queer person is forged in pain. Those who say they're happy are lying. For how can you be happy in a world that views you with disgust? A world that blockades your self actualisation? Make no mistake, this is queer people's greatest power and the source of our capacity to drive radical change and to be fair, happiness is a myth anyway. Disarticulated from a cishet teleology, we're free from futures we do not choose. And it's great. I, personally, love it out here in the twilight zone. But getting there, getting to the point of generative nothingness, is painful and any queer person who has found any modicum of peace can tell you of the price they have paid to take that exhausting journey - the nics, the cuts, the wounds they have gathered as they go.

Hamish McIntosh's work is a performance of that journey. Arranged in cruciform, four performers run on treadmills for five hours, dressed, depressingly, in bright primary colours, facing toward each other, no destination, no arrival. It's a simple work with an elegant, visceral premise. Four hours and fifty minutes in, the performers are shells, faces empty, steps getting smaller and smaller. The last ten minutes are agonising. The end is near.

Beyond my inherent taste for the dirgelike, what drew me to this work was its elegant formalism. It's very accessible and clear. For all the sweat and aching tendons, the work is presented in a chic frame via title, set design and program notes that tell you exactly what the work will do, if not what it will be, but certainly what it will look like. We are told that the work "explores queer time through self-destruction". Thankfully, at the end, the performers are still alive, but the journey has depleted them, they are exhausted and they cannot go on.

Growing up queer exposes you to a unique set of traumas that pattern and whorl your disposition forever. You can cope, you can fight, you can reclaim, but the pain will always be a familiar companion. What I enjoyed so much about Hamish McIntosh's work was that it creates a simple container to hold in real time our difficult becoming, the genesis of that companionship. The marathon shows you how The Pain has a physical effect, exacts a metabolic toll and leaves you emaciated from the effort. Hamish McIntosh's work is a rare manifestation of productive queer nihilism at a time when public messaging signals that we should be strong, we should love, we should push. In attempting to do The Work, Life A Knife The Horizon shows how The Work might also fail - it performs the failure of growth and change and adaptation.

This work hits square in my ruminative core. I've been thinking a lot recently about the way The Pain persists. In service of hope, and we should always have hope, we are told that there is no injury we cannot heal from, no obstacle that cannot be overcome, no bright future that cannot be legitimately imagined. But increasingly, I'm not so sure. There are many in the queer community who reel in the wake of their damage and never recover. Some of them runaway, some are consumed by rage and bitterness, some resign to the safety and comfort of their bedroom, some to the consistency of the street and some are engaged in an endless debate in their own head. We live in a queerphobic world and in the race to become an expected future, to sparkle, to *do something*, many queers trip and fall and drop out. I have been a sex worker for almost 6.5 years working with men, mostly gay men, in intimate safety, and I have held countless broken people. My friends and acquaintances and I have been consumed by our pain, or tried to consume our way out of it; sisters, brothers and other siblings have been chewed up and spat out, crumpled by the incessant mastication of expectation. After a while, a good while, they have been mostly ok, I have been mostly ok; but we have been forever changed by the experience. And then, there are some who have not been ok, and have with heavy hearts, departed.

When we talk about healing, finding form again when you hit your limit and the race ends, we have to acknowledge that for some of us, healing just isn't possible. It doesn't matter how many books you read or write, how much yoga you do, how many rules for life you follow - there are some injuries that no convalescence will ever repair. It's just a fact and the evidence is all around us. Broken, battered, desperately sad queers are everywhere. And I applaud the agency some are able to find, I do, the ability some have to conjure wellbeing through the love and support of friends and chosen family and a steely resolve - but that positivity is contingent on so many external factors and many slip through the cracks. I worry sometimes that we have lost patience with those who for so many justifiable reasons cannot or will not recover, that we speak in one ear of deliverance and in the other of a new expectation, that actually we are fostering a rush to what is fundamentally normative success and that we have forgotten the raw, explosive power of 'fuck you, leave me alone'. Have we forgotten the lessons from the wounds we collect along the thistly journey - the anarchic gift of trauma, the humiliation and importance of total failure, the crucial, critical distance of nihilism? Healing isn't the right word to describe what I, maybe what we, need to persist. Maybe it's evolution or maybe it's acceptance or...Idk.

Whatever it is, it must carry formative loss because when I finally lift my heavy head from my pillow, I know that loss and disappointment is my greatest power. Loss and no. Releasing the expectation I will ever truly be ok, accepting the pattern of my persistent, years long depression and witnessing the way ephemeral moods pass through my blood like an embolism, I am free. Integrating, accepting, working with (whatever the word is) rather than removing the black-dog violence inside of me, I embody the disappointment, I dissolve into trillions of particles and I know peace.

Hamish McIntosh's work is a reminder that being okay, being happy, believing in a future, isn't a realistic or helpful goal - for me, for many in our community. His work witnesses and validates my experience, an experience that I know is quite mild by some standards. Proving once again that the simplest ideas are the fullest ideas, Hamish and his collaborators have made something very sad, very comforting, very open. After the race, it is time to rest, maybe forever. Thank you Hamish and co.

*PS I love my dad. He's a complete cunt sometimes, but so am I, and I know I have no option but to love him, and I've worked hard to arrive at that place.