Night

This photo is called Night. I have talked about how I have a horrible sleep schedule before. That's not a surprise. Literally all my best work is at 3am, sadly. And this photo is called Night. And it represents my relationship with the night. Basically, this is a beach near my campus that I go to around 3am when I'm feeling nervous, scared, or overwhelmed. I usually go to this beach to take pictures, and here's one of the pictures I took. And this is a place during the night that have brought me so much comfort and has been a space for me to create art. And this photo is edited in a way to make it look colorful and not as it usually does. Because one thing I love about photography is that some people like to tell me that the world isn't a beautiful place and that missing beauty in it is a falsehood. But with photography, I can take a picture and prove that, no, this world is beautiful, You're just not learning in the right places. And when I edit a photo like this and make it look surreal, I don't think of me creating something fake and making it so that this bland thing is colorful. I see it as I'm just making, these colors already existed when I took this photo. Me editing it is literally just a way to bring out the colors that already existed in this photo and making it so other people can also see them. And like, that's my view of like photography and when I edit photos like this. But when I see this photo, I think of safety. It's odd. Sometimes I feel crazy that I feel safer at night and I feel safer to be weird and myself. And basically, with panopticism, it's this concept of this prism where people are under constant surveillance or at least the idea of being constantly surveilled and because of that these people self-discipline and self-regulate their behavior to match with that because they think they are being constantly observed and I feel like this concept can be applied to queerness a lot and so many other minority groups of how because we face a legitimate threat of violence and often are threatened by people's perceptions of us, how we act as queer people. We often have to regulate ourselves in like straight cis spaces in order to be safe. And I can't be this weird drag performer slash photographer in my daily life. And most of my numbers that I have done for drag, I have rehearsed them at 3 a.m. in my dorm hallways. Yes, I'm a horrible roommate. and literally have performed entire drag numbers in the middle of the night before, and that there's a safety at night because there's less people observing me, therefore less chances of me facing a legitimate threat of violence. And this place represents a safe space I have found at night. This beach that I go to when I'm stressed and overwhelmed to create art and to exist at night without being observed and to exist while being myself while not having to be observed by people and being safer to express myself. And I just want to let people know that the night, I love it. It is a sanctuary for me. I have always felt safe to go at night, even though some people think I'm crazy for that. Because the darkness gives me the ability to hide from those who want to cause me harm. And people are afraid of the dark because they don't know what hides in it. But on the other end, you can also hide in the dark to keep you safe. We are both entities in the dark. We are both scary things in the night. The night is what keeps us safe in that situation. And also, historically, queer spaces have tried to prevent an observation from inside to fight this legitimate threat of violence. Like, Granville Anvil is this gay bar that's about to block away from Francis Hall. If you go up to it, you would not know it's a gay bar. It's a brick building with just one little sign. You would not know it's a bar. Mainly because it's a gay bar that has existed since, I think, the 1970s. I could be wrong. And also... Oh... There's the Leather Museum and Archives, which you would not know is a kink museum if you looked at it, and that it prevents a lot of people from observing inside, and it's not a public space. And, like, there's Jeffrey's Pub, which is this historically gay black bar in Southside that the age limit to get in is literally 30 and you have to be at least 30 to get in and like that exclusion helps keep that place safe and that this idea of like creating spaces without being absorbed without being judged is a way so many safe queer spaces have been created. And just this idea of night, I feel like encapsulates this idea that a lot of queer spaces do drive safety of being hidden from non-queer people.