The new gay science has me as qualitative rather than quantitative heir of a family business in building;

The new gay science prioritises the technology of story over the false determinacy of seed to interpret the light and lovely blond hairs that adorn your small bodies, forming pathways for new alphabets we are learning;

The new gay science is wet as a gene pool that becomes a wave pool that we ride in autumn, learning to bob and float and sometimes dive into, in our patterning to conceive along this particular current;

The new gay science appropriates early cuneiform, using wedges and degrees of embossing into wet tabular to abstract economic language. In this new cuneiform we position song and pillow, fluid and feeling to break language down into constituent sets—much like the act of growing muscular mass back doubled, we carefully balance destruction with growth to create our art. We close the body’s outer windows off to rave against bedframe; we sculpt tiny lives made before language so that we might give birth to new syntax;

The new gay science is Fred Moten’s babies making grammarless babies;

The new gay science includes the addition of a fifth book along with an appendix of song, which documents the poetry of our priapic equivallency in the syringe, expropriating the tools that medicalised us towards a reclaiming in world building. It is the same syringe that sits adjacenct to ‘syrinx’, both meaning a shepherd’s pipe, the latter being also the vocal organ of birds;

The new gay science is a warble of dawn chorus that can be heard into the day on the lightest of breezes and doesn’t ascribe, necessarily, to the climactic tropes we have come to expect of modern literature;

The new gay science is Jackie Wang harmonising with the girl in the audience who sings the warbling anthem for lost souls;

The new gay science undoes the language of general and pithy truths applied to the conditions and expressions of our lives in order to render us homogenous where we are not all homos;

The new gay science is ALOK laying plain fact to the critique of the creation of any number of new pronouns to describe diverse experiences of gender and sexuality as nothing more than a continuation of all of the world’s history, with all words and terms having been created, even the word ‘created’;

The new gay science is Claire G. Coleman declaring that the terms ‘homosexuality’ and ‘transgenderism’ did not exist or need to exist before heteronormativity because peoples’ gender and sexuality were every bit as complicated as they are now, but that diversity was so normal there was no need for words for it;

The new gay science is actually an ancient science in which kin structures are expressed in the form of enjamb
ment with the world against the way herds were and are        property was and is made to        separate;

The new gay science is Ross Gay’s belief by which is meant many others’ belief that the practice of poetry must always defy the logics of property—always already the art of a ‘we’ rather than an ‘I’;

The new gay science comes after the dialogue that occurred between the shadow and the wanderer, such that both the shadow and the wanderer are now addressed as ‘they’ and no longer by an ‘I’ [formerly the Wanderer] being followed around by a ‘we’ [formerly the Shadow];

The new gay science [so-called Australian Edition] centres the marginalised periphery as a place of sovereign belonging that is camp and where we frequently glamp, and that obviates the need to determine who is a top and who is a bottom as we roll around in the voluminous top soil next to the fire place where we fossick for small gems by day;

The new gay science is a zinnia elegans—crowns of flowers within flowers—endlessly blooming into its own domain of powerful unfolding. Us, the inner or outer circle of flower, is no longer for you to choose.


—line 8 refers to Kathy Acker’s thinking in The Language of the Body.
—line 11 is Fred Moten in The Little Edges, Wesleyan University Press.
—line 17 is Jackie Wang in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void, Nightboat Books.
—line 20 is from a video posted by ALOK on their Instagram account.
—line 23 is Claire G. Coleman in QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection.
—line 28 is Ross Gay in Be Holding, University of Pittsburgh Press.