Layli Long Soldier Interviews Billy-Ray Belcourt for BOMB

For BOMB's Fall 2020 issue, Layli Long Soldier interviews Billy-Ray Belcourt: "Through his new collection of essays, A History of My Brief Body, I have come to view Billy-Ray as a trusted intellectual and scholar, a prolific creative, and a necessary voice of resistance," says Long Soldier in her introduction. From their conversation:

LLS

Forgive me for this understatement—queer Indigenous love has existed forever. It’s wrenching to think that one would ever need to search for it, its traces, or even its ghost.

BRB

The loneliness of the closet, to feel that one will not actualize what one wants and needs the most, is a structuring experience, unfortunately. But I don’t think that love has to be devastating. In certain instances—because of history, because of politics—love can be devastating, and that sometimes feels inevitable because it is so over-determined.

As I was writing this book (the first essay was written in 2015 and the last in late 2018), all of my experiences of love had ended in heartbreak. Those experiences often had to do with the incommensurability of people coming from different places with different values and desires. Their modalities of relating and loving emerged from distinct and, at times, conflicting histories. What often bound us together, or what defined the experience of intimacy, were dating apps. Dating apps operate partly through the racialization and the eroticization of data, but often in different directions. When one is racialized by dating apps one becomes either de-eroticized or fetishized, both of which are forms of marginalization. So there were all these compounding forces that made love seem like a structural impossibility to me. Of course, that outlook would make me pessimistic, whereby I would write a line that conflates love with devastation. (laughter)

Read on at BOMB.