New York, December 2023

Political/poet, activist/artist, and organizer/musician are social roles that are only just becoming speakable within common parlance, with the work of organizer-artists such as adrienne maree brown on the rise. However, proud Black lesbian “warrior” poet, Audre Lorde, anticipated these identities in her 1978 paper, “Uses of the Erotic.” She laments that “it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical.” She ventriloquizes possible reactions to those moving in these liminal spaces: “What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gun-runner?” Indeed, this imagined reaction was my actual one when I encountered “Uses” as an undergrad. Until then, I had imagined political life as empirical, scientific, rational, and unaffected by matters of the heart. Politics were for the public, emotions were for the private. Encountering Lorde’s work taught me differently. The chief lesson I have learned from my Lorde scholarship is that emotions are anything but apolitical, and affective relationships — friends, lovers, parents — are at the heart of the revolution for a better world.

I was reminded of  Lorde’s lesson over the summer when a dear friend, ‘G’, confessed to me that a friend of my partner’s had made her uncomfortable at a previous gathering. O had insisted, drunkenly and aggressively, on driving her home, alone, to the other side of the city and in the exact opposite direction that he lived in, after shooting down his advances all night long. My partner had stepped in and escorted my friend home, but the interaction left her feeling shaken. What follows is a summary of three conversations I had with friends, spanning over the summer, about handling the conundrum I found myself in: to speak to my partner about G’s discomfort, for O and G would certainly encounter each other again as part of our shared friend group, or to remain silent as G requested I do. I care deeply about all my interlocutors and the mentioned parties, and this intimacy is perhaps what allowed us to speak so freely, incisively, and directly with each other. These conversations are a series of stories about holding each other in community and holding each other accountable across identity lines.

I did not realize it then, but the late Audre Lorde's work informed much of my approach to these dialogues. Lorde, born to Grenadian and Barbadian immigrants in Harlem in 1934, was a forerunner in the 1970s and 1980s feminist movement. Her work was not made specifically for me, as she wrote with a Black and queer audience in mind, and I am white and straight and was born long after her death. However, Lorde would likely argue that our identity differences are precisely why we (I) needed to engage with each other (her). Lorde is, in large part, responsible for my feminist and anti-racist awakenings. She helped me realize my sphere of influence was much larger than I originally thought, and her work taught me how to responsibly wield my privilege of whiteness and straightness within a racist and queerphobic culture. Because of her work, I am a better friend; I am better at being called in by those I care about and, in turn, at holding them accountable. According to her, this is the grandest political action I can take.

I

G told me about her interaction with O the night before I was to meet B for coffee, a friend of my partner’s who was quickly becoming the first man I would ever call a close friend. B had met my partner in theater school, but I often imagined that he, my partner, and I had met, in another life, at the small liberal arts college on Canada’s East Coast where I attended undergrad. In other words, B was an intellectual who had accidentally fallen in love with musical theater. He is not what you would envision as a typical artist: he is grounded, practical, and concise. These qualities came to the fore a few weeks earlier when he said to me, in plain terms, “I resent women,” without a hint of shame but a subtle yet palpable degree of self-consciousness. Feminism, the possibility of friendship between men and women under patriarchy, and literature are what B and I like to discuss.

Also, our friend O. My partner tried to make O and B into quick friends. O had even taken B out for pizza. Alas, B was unnerved by the intense quality of O’s resentment, which was ironic. At least, that is what he told me when we sat down for coffee that summer afternoon. I have known G longer than B, and I felt a duty to protect her secret. At least, to not share it with a member of the gender that had discomfited her so. But I was concerned and wanted to speak with someone I knew shared my concern before I spoke with my partner. So, I brought up O again. I remember saying something about masculine resentment. B initially thought I was referencing our prior conversation about his resentment:

B: You know that I don’t hate women, right?

B left our last conversation on this note. It was interesting that he would pick up right where we had left off — it was unlike him to return to an argument or a proposition. I had reviewed the ends of our last conversation over and over. I deeply regretted my silent nod and smile in response to that claim. I have learned a lot about the way misogyny functions since then. Still, even last summer, I had a robust enough feminist vocabulary to know that “resentment” and “hatred” are synonyms in the misogynist’s mouth. I felt conflicted over whether or not I could be a friend to a man who felt such a way toward my gender. I felt conflicted because B had opened up to me, and “admitting you have a problem is the first step to getting better,” so the saying goes. However, a strange courage overtook me when he repeated the sentiment during our coffee:

NB: I know, you just resent us. (I said this rather sarcastically.)
B: And that’s different.
NB: I’m not so sure that is, [B].

When I think of this conversation now, I think of Lorde’s seminal essay, “Poetry is Not A Luxury.” The essay was published in 1977 in the feminist literary magazine Chrysalis, where she served as poetry editor between 1977 and 1979. Lorde ultimately left the magazine in scandal. A key, often overlooked, concept of the essay is the “intimacy of scrutiny”. Within the context of the essay, Lorde is discussing intimacy with the self and self-interrogation. But, given that, as Dr. Roderick A. Ferguson writes, “for her, excellence is the outcome of passionate engagements designed to produce visions of […] a just and compassionate world”, she does not intend this idea to be solipsistic in a Cartesian fashion. Moreover, elsewhere in the essay, she demands that the reader ask herself this question in every interaction: “am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams?” In this way, Lorde challenges her readers to demand accountability in each one of their relationships, even the seemingly apolitical and private bonds of friendship. Intimacy and scrutiny are mutually fulfilling prophecies in a relationship: scrutiny requires intimacy, and a certain level of scrutinizing mutual accountability is necessary for intimacy to be just. Without knowing it, this thought in the back of my mind propelled me to stand up to B’s misogyny.

After a beat of silence, he smiled knowingly. Then he coughed, perhaps sensing what was really on my mind:

B: At least I’m not [O]. Those are some anger issues he’s got.

Perhaps that was all I needed from B because I did not push him further on the subject. It was enough for me to know that someone else, most notably, a man, saw, too, O’s aggression and anger. And while I hate to admit I needed a man’s authority to propel me into further action, I will attempt to paint myself more charitably. Lorde was a champion of friendships across differences. I would like to think that I needed not a man’s authority but a friend’s compassion.

II

“Compassion” is the word I associate most with my friend, V. V is the type of friend who does not compliment you on your lipstick when it has smudged onto your teeth; she tells you that it has stained your smile. We met at a poetry reading in my hometown, Toronto. I was looking for community after moving back to the city post-undergrad. I signed up for open mic nights downtown, and V was at one of them.

V is Filipinx, queer, genderqueer, and 19 years older than me. She revealed this to me on our first friend date. We had warmed up to the in-person meeting with a string of hours-long phone calls in which we talked about everything from poetic craft to shared religious trauma from the Catholic Church to the violence of colonialism. V is one of those people who has an infinite capacity to listen with an open mind. So, I should not have been surprised by what we could share when we finally met up at the Members’ Lounge of the Art Gallery of Ontario, a place within the gallery I had never been but had always dreamed of setting foot in. I told them I struggled to write the more promiscuous scenes in the novel I was working on; she told me to think about the objects in the room. I told them my partner was going to propose to me; she was the first person to ask how I felt about that. It was not until our second meeting, though, at F’s Kensington Market-adjacent apartment with walls filled with their friends’ artwork, that I told them about O and G. 

The idea of race had not come up yet in our friendship. Nevertheless, we would both be lying if our differences had gone unremarked. My friendship with V is not my first or only interracial friendship, but it was the first one in which we both had the vocabulary to describe the dynamic between us; my understanding of intersecting identities had existed long before the events of the summer, but a crystallization was occurring, rendering them urgent and, at last, speakable. Something that often goes unnoticed about the Lordian concept of the intimacy of scrutiny is that the wielder requires as much bravery as the object of it. We might not always like what we see when holding a friendship up to a scrutinizing gaze. And yet Vis always demands that I be the best version of myself, constantly calling me in — their favorite phrase is, “Can I offer a reframe?” I sense that she participates in this emotional labor because she believes in our friendship and wants me to be happy. She knows she can alter my aura, ideas, and dreams to borrow Lorde’s words, and so she does. 

As much as I was satisfied with the compassion I received from B a few weeks prior, the bodies we live in are subjected to a profoundly different set of assumptions and dangers. V and I had spoken at length about the very real dangers of existing in a body gendered as a woman and sexed female. While their experience of gender differs from the assumption of “woman” that is often placed on them, she understands what it is like to live under misogyny because of cis-normativity. Unlike B, she likely had experiences with O similar to G’s throughout her lifetime. F’s aspirational internal age is five, and I have always taken this to mean that she wants to approach life with a beginner’s mind: without dogma and assumption. She has life experience to draw from to give advice, but she does not wield it over their friends domineeringly. I think this open-mindedness is why I came to them: because she embodies Lorde’s sentiment throughout her work–that all women and queer folk have is each other, that more will get done from collaboration than divisiveness. So I told them about G and O, and their response was unexpected.

Truth be told, I underestimated F. I thought she would give me what I thought was the feminist line: that I ought to convince my partner to cut O out without explanation as a show of solidarity with G. But the advice she actually gave rings true when thought along with this assertion from “Uses Of The Erotic”: “as women, we have come to distrust the power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge”. However, this resource, what Lorde calls the erotic, “offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.” Very clearly, thinking (hoping?) that V would tell me to tell my partner to cut O out of our lives over his interaction with G was an appeal to male authority instead of the erotic desire and power for change in me. I was scared I did not have the authority to talk to O in person about his treatment of G, so I desperately wanted the solution to be action on my partner’s part, not mine. 

What V told me went something along the lines of the following:

V: You’re his friend —
NB: — yeah, I guess there’s a kernel of friendship at the core of our partnership —
V: No, I mean [O]’s.
NB: Oh.
V: I think it’s time you own your privilege.

It sparked many conversations about my whiteness and straightness, and about the responsibility to act within my spheres of influence to create change. But, at the time, I did not understand what she meant. Seeing my look of confusion, V said:

V: Can I offer a reframe?
NB: Of course.
V: You know, privilege can be a weight or a lever. It can weigh others down, or you can use it as leverage to lift other people up. I think it’s time for you to step into your power.

I had never thought of privilege like that. I have spent a lot of time since V said that phrase — “step into your power” — and what it means for how I show up for other people, and how my white guilt often gets in the way of doing so.

Lorde says in “Uses of the Erotic”: “only now, I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the erotic's electrical charge without having to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange.” Since mulling over the events of this summer, I have been thinking about the concept of being woman-identified and the bravery required in taking on what I take Lorde to mean by this turn of phrase, which is, “women who take the liberation of other women seriously, women who understand their liberation is bound up with others’.” The second part of the phrase disconcerted me, too, in a productive way: being brave enough to “risk sharing the erotic’s electric charge [...] without distorting the enormously powerful [...] nature of that exchange.” The erotic, the marriage of will and action, the desire and hope for a better world, married with the pleasure of making it so in tandem with others, was precisely what I was afraid of. Looking back on these exchanges, I realize something deeply troubling about this period over the summer: in the languor of waiting for a something to start — that something being a move to New York and the start of my graduate school career — I had become deeply afraid of the erotic’s demand that we act and that we do so across time and difference with others.

III

After much hemming and hawing about what to do with her request that I not tell anyone, I ended up telling my partner what G had told me. The issue was that I knew my partner loved O as a friend. I knew that I loved my partner. Also, I knew that through knowing my partner, I had come to love O as a friend, too. Part of that love was wanting him to be the best person he could be. What he did to G was not a manifestation of his best self.

Finally, I also knew that I loved G as a friend. I cared about her and her well-being. I knew there was no way I could keep him out of our friendship circle. Balancing these two friendships meant some difficult conversations. With B’s compassion and F’s exhortation, I’m setting off to have them. My partner was receptive — but that was what I expected of him. Not only is he a feminist and someone who cares deeply about his friends — women, men, and non-binary — but also because of some observations Lorde made about trust. Lorde said in a letter to her long-time friend, Adrienne Rich, that she did not trust a woman she had not slept with. 

Lorde’s observation of her is manifold, and much of this context has been excavated from Dr. SaraEllen Strongman’s work in Feminist Theory. The first element was that Rich, like Lorde’s partner at the time, Frances Clayton, was a white lesbian. However, unlike Clayton, Lorde had never slept with her, despite a purported attraction between the women. The other important element is the exchange of letters in which the observation occurred: Lorde had been writing “to Rich in an attempt to repair the damage to their relationship [...] undergirded by race and racism, between them”. Lorde had left the magazine, Chrysalis, at which both she and Rich had been editors, over concerns that her desire to publish more Black woman poets was going unconsidered. Additionally, Lorde had written a letter to Mary Daly, a close friend of Rich’s, over the publication of her book Gyn/Ecology: Lorde believed Daly had excluded Black women’s experiences from the book, only discussing them in the context of female genital mutilation in Africa. Rich refused to take sides in the dispute between her two friends, and this equivocation deeply hurt Lorde. And yet, and yet: Lorde wrote to Rich. She was the one to reach out through her hurt because she chose to trust in her friendship with Rich, built across and through differing identities, which could grow. As Strongman observes, Lorde’s unpublished 1979 poem, “Outlines,” on the subject of cross-racial solidarity among women, contains verbatim phrases from her letter to Rich. 

By way of beginning the end of these reflections, I will quote the final stanza of this poem, later published at the end of “Age, Race, and Class” in Lorde’s 1984 prose collection, Sister Outsider:

With honor and love

We have chosen each other

And the edge of each other’s battles

The war is the same

If we lose

Someday women’s blood will congeal

Upon a dead planet

if we win

There is no telling.

I had planned on ending this essay with some thoughts on my conversation with G. And then I thought of the first two lines of this stanza: “with honor and love / we have chosen each other”. I concluded that sharing what happened to G was one thing, as her sharing it implicated me, but sharing her private reflections on it was another. I held B accountable in my conversations with B and F, and V did the same for me. I hold myself responsible for the honor and love that I have chosen G as a friend by not sharing the details of what she said when she came to me about O. Besides the uniting narrative thread of what to do about O, the common theme of these conversations is nicely summarized by the line “we have chosen each other / and the edge of each other’s battles”. My liberation, symbolized by my comfort in my womanhood in my shared friend group with my partner, is bound up with G’s liberation and comfort. On the same token, mine and G’s liberation rests on O’s and B’s ability to dismantle the misogyny lying within them. I have decided to help them with that, and while I am home over the holidays, I will talk to O. Maybe not directly about what happened with G, but about his anger and resentment, which are far more intense and less articulate than B’s. It might be a lost cause, and perhaps my partner and I will lose him as a friend when I do so, and “someday women’s blood will congeal / upon a dead planet.” But if what I say to O comes through in its love and compassion for him, if “we win,” then “there is no telling.” I want to live in the hope of not telling.

Postscript: on cynicism

New York, October 2025

I have become a profoundly cynical person since I wrote this essay. The experience of reading and editing it for this project has been strange, almost as if my younger self is holding my older self accountable for the events that have transpired since I wrote this paper.

That Christmas break would be the last one I would spend with my now ex-partner, ex-fiancé. We would break up three months after the writing of this essay. Moreover, I did not have a conversation with O. I invited him to my birthday party, and he mysteriously got sick at the last minute. Knowing the kind of person my ex-fiancé is, I wonder if O was warned off. V and I remain good friends, although some chronic health issues mean she is harder to reach these days. B has officially worked through his resentment with women and is far more open to the use of the label “feminist” to apply to him and his actions. The most regretful update I have to report is that G and I no longer speak.

Friendships sometimes end, just as relationships do. This I know. G and I just stopped talking after my partner and I broke up. Within the essay's context and the events I choose not to share, I wonder if it has something to do with differing political commitments. I wonder if she found out that I was going to speak to O and didn’t appreciate that decision. 

There is a way of understanding this turn of events as an “unhappy” end to this story. We did not win, so there was telling, which meant the termination of my friendship with G. Perhaps there was a period after the dissolution of some of these relationships where I was very cynical and had forgotten Lorde’s insistence on pragmatic hope. Part of writing this post-script has not only been a reminder to me of the importance of Lorde’s work and the impact she has had on my life, but also that no one has “won” yet, maybe it’s wrong to configure the stakes with the word “winning” and “losing”  if the consequence is “women’s blood [congealing] / on a dead planet”; too much is at stake to gamify the terms. Perhaps the brushing of history against the grain to find examples of hope, optimism, and ultimately, resistance, is important now more than ever.