Illusgaytion by Jacob Gong
Reporting by Mark Stoll

Like all your favorite corporations, The InQueery is in relentless pursuit of departmental synergy. In fact, nothing gets us harder. So when we realized we’d never once had a meeting where our full staff showed up on time, we decided that more research was needed into the community’s experience of concepts like “10:00 AM.” Eventually, after a battery of rescheduled Zooms, we tasked renowned Clockwatcher & Totally Theoretical Physicist Quinn Schweizer with delivering a comprehensive analysis and brief history of Queer Time.

Until recently, Queer Time (QT) has proved difficult to study due to its highly chaotic and nonlinear nature. It took Schweizer cracking a career-defining equation that solves for “drag queen time” (time on the flyer plus 50 minutes divided by the height of the queen) for a universal understanding of QT to unfold. “To the straight establishment, Queer Time is indistinguishable from ‘pathological lateness,’” says Schweizer. “However, standard time was invented for straight people by straight people. Take, for example, the AM-PM binary, the brutal literalism of military time, the calendar named after that pope. So while queers may appear medically tardy, they’ve actually dropped off the hetero timeline altogether, adopting their own…more ‘creative’ relationship to time as we know it.” 

According to Schweizer, QT actually starts quite early. When young queers miss out on hetero-social milestones like attending the school dance with someone of their preferred gender, the “thermodynamic arrow of time” starts to veer. In liberal arts terms, this is when the queer youth zags from their peers on the museum field trip and wanders into the Antiquities Wing. Here, one wrong look at a Corinthian column and time may go hyperdrive, fast-tracking the queer’s initiation into sex, drugs, and the Criterion Collection, while their straight counterparts struggle over the collected works of the artist called “Banksy.” For others, a stroll through the Jurassic Exhibit may halt time altogether, preserving the queer like the iconic Mosquito in Amber with her deferred maturity, frozen features, and perennial tan. For others still, QT can appear latent, a kind of “exit through the gift shop” moment, in which a life of dutiful contribution to a Roth IRA is suddenly replaced by an endless loop of poppered-out Sondheim Nights at the local piano bar. With different, gayer laws of physics governing QT, temporal possibilities are endless: midnights may feel noon-like, the weekend covers Wednesday, and “two minutes away” can mean virtually anything. 

These time divergences, coupled with a recessive gene found in gays that causes “analog clock blindness,” explain the queer’s use of non-normative time-telling devices, like the sundial. “There’s really nothing like employing the drama of shadowcast to divine whether you should’ve already left for Aerial Silks Class,” says Schweizer. Other popular instruments include the hourglass, preferred for its “show don’t tell” sensibility, and the astrolabe, an ancient disc-shaped device oft-seen dangling from the punctual lesbian via carabiner. More than a handsome accessory, the astrolabe aids in tracking celestial bodies, a practice used by queers since prehistory to answer the question of “when?”. While henchmen of the heter-o’clock often malign the science of astrology, or “asking the stars for answers,” for some queers, this is the only way they can tell if it’s February or March. 

Other modes of Queer Time-telling are rooted in music. It may be impossible for the queer to calculate an ETA in hours or minutes, and yet, when measured in “Padams” or any Janet Jackson song, they exhibit the accuracy of an atomic clock. Music also serves a record-keeping function in QT, situating past events in eras based on the Pop Queen who reigned at the time. By way of example, Schweizer offers: “My ex first sued his herbalist in the year of our lord Beyonce: Self-Titled, but he didn’t go to trial until Lemonade.” It should be noted that an endless onslaught of “Taylor’s Versions” has visited significant confusion upon an already convoluted system. Schweizer cautions that this mode of timekeeping is why so many of his friends were nine months late to his 30th birthday party.

Of course, whenever an aspect of queer culture evokes joy, straight society will try to assert its tragic dominance. Over the years, desperate attempts have been made by the het establishment to delegitimize QT and deter their youth from adopting an “atemporal lifestyle.” (God forbid they experience eternity on the dance floor.) In their latest research, Schweizer discovered a plot to demonize the dearly held QT custom of arriving late with a fresh iced coffee, with the ultimate goal of making it a jailable offense. There’s even some evidence to suggest Daylight Savings Time was specifically engineered to foil the gay agenda and realign deviants with the straight time continuum. Still, in spite of it all, QT ticks on. 

What’s next for Queer Time? Despite Stephen Hawking’s position on the matter, new reports indicate that time travel is not only possible, but that it’s on the rise in the queer underground. Through a combination of Inner Child work and black market drugs, queers have begun revisiting their pasts to liberate moments previously lost to straight time, recovering countless hours wasted on things like crushing on straight friends, self-harming with 2-in-1 shampoo-conditioner, and pretending not to like the Spice Girls. “It’s a really exciting time for Queer Time,” says Schweizer. “I think in my next EMDR session, I’ll reclaim the 96 hours I spent in high school watching the Entourage series and get a head start on learning the lyrics to Wicked instead.” 

Our conclusion: If time is a flat circle, Queer Time is a juicy little Rubik’s cube. 

Gay rating: Using one candle to light another candle.