It has become something of a truism among my community of queer people of color that the end of the world is nigh. A wave of right-wing and openly fascist governments have been elected to power across the world. Wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of brazenly corrupt few. Climate change and mass extinction are ravaging the earth, largely unacknowledged by those with the political power to do anything about it.

Sometimes it seems like the most painful cuts of all come from within my own
community: Call-out culture. Lateral violence. Puritanical politics. Intimate partner abuse. We know so much about trauma but so little about how to heal it. What would “community” know about saving us from the apocalypse?

In 2016, I turned 25 years old and published my first novel. I became “queer
famous” that year. This was also the year that broke my heart, which has been
right on breaking ever since. This was also the year that Trump was elected, that millions of people were displaced in the Syrian refugee crisis, and that 49
people — most of them queer and brown — were shot to death in a nightclub in Orlando. In the intervening years, more disasters and atrocities have followed.

All around me, the people I loved were also in crisis — psychological, financial,
medical, interpersonal. When you live in a community of queers, anarchists, and activists, crisis is the baseline and stability an outlier. Among trans women, a life expectancy of 35 is the norm.

In the midst of despair, I have come to believe that love — the feeling of love,
the politics of love, the ethics and ideology and embodiment of love — is the only good option in this time of the apocalypse. What else do we have?

I mean love that is kind but also honest. Love that is courageous and relentless
and willing to break the rules and smash the system. Love that cares about people more than ideas, that prizes each and every one of us as essential and
indispensable. I mean love that is compassionate and accountable. I mean love that confirms and reaffirms us as complex and fallible yet lovable anyway, love that affirms us as human. I want to live in love and believe in love. If I have to die, I want to die in love. This whole world might be coming to its end, or it might be in the midst of an enormous and terrifying change that leads to something better. Either way, I want to go through it in love with the people I love.

Love that might not save us at the end of the world, but that might make it
possible to live. I hope we choose it anyway.