pragma. From the Ancient Greek root πρᾶγμα (prâgma, “a thing done, a fact”). A matured, compassionate and enduring love. This love requires patience and compromise from all parties involved, and a commitment to staying in love, not simply falling in love.
Speckled sunbeams shining through smoke-filled canopies, a world tinted momentarily pink and heavy with the familiar scent of protest. Pride flags waving in time to queer anthems, bathed in disco fireflies – reflections off sequinned ballgowns and leather armour. Witty placards and bright pink banners, spray-painted, smudged, scrawled, embroidered: “OUR KIDS WILL HAVE TRANS PARENTS”. The repetitive hum of the drums, the rousing rally of the hoots and the cheers. And the love, oh so much love. Hands held, cheeks kissed, videos posed-for, cigarettes smoked, snacks passed from hand-to-mouth – as the air fills with echoing chants: “Whose streets? Our streets!”
This, to me, is hedonism. This collective action that is rooted in authentic love, in agape, that empowers us to demand better for our communities and to enact solidarity with others. Our Pride will always be a protest first, whether embodied in the dungeon, on the dancefloor, on the canvas, or in the streets – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be saturated with pleasure in all its forms.
The ruling class would prefer us to be contained/ containable, to remain boxed up and categorisable. To limit both the expansive potentials of our physical selves and the horizons of our imaginations. To let the heavy walls close in on us – seemingly impossible to push back – and for the smallness to wear us down. To ultimately give up the fight due to exhaustion and despair. But through hedono-futurism, we can know that we don’t need to fight their fight with the master’s tools – we can find another way. We can take up the space historically and systematically denied to us. We can let our pleasure be the guiding light – as seen on a banner from the first Pride in London march in 1972 – “out of the closet and into the streets”.
Taking up this space to create untested alternate worlds is not an easy task. Everywhere we look, public access to cities is being ripped apart by developments and stability is increasingly difficult to afford; it’s no surprise that our right – and confidence – to roam, linger and lounge feels shoved in a corner and forgotten. As the heavy hand of capitalism tightens its fist around our barely surviving necks, hustle culture seeps in all the gaps and distorts the romance and transformational potential of failure into something undesirable. We can’t afford to pay our bills; the weekly shop has doubled in price; we don’t have the time to call our grandparents. Convenience is king. Indeed, the instant gratification of apps like Grindr and Tinder sings a siren song amongst a sea of detachment. There’s less chance of a let-down; no walking home alone after “time wasted” exchanging small talk in a bar or waiting around in a filthy toilet. Why would we support a grassroots club night that’s still figuring out its sound when it’s much easier to tag along to the mega-club, especially if it looks good on our social media? Sometimes, showing up through donating money, food or our time – or sacrificing personal comfort to occupy and protest – just doesn’t seem doable (or worth it, because why would we even bother if change feels impossible?).
Hedono-futurism not only shows us that pluriversal futures are possible, but also directly challenges “the tyranny of convenience”, as outlined by legal scholar Tim Wu in his 2018 essay. Although presented to us as a route to liberation, convenience culture – especially in the ways modern technology has commodified individualism and connection – instead can become a “constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.” When we let convenience be our priority, over our other values, we become more susceptible to the whims of those who have the power and want to keep it. We give away the key to our freedoms in the name of superficial ease. We let governments and corporations constrict the fullness and complexities of our identities, relationships and imaginations. But, when our own day-to-day lives can seem so unmanageable, how do we resist buying into the “cult of convenience” – the siren call of “whatever I want, whenever and however I want it”?
“The instant gratification of apps like Grindr and Tinder sings a siren song amongst a sea of detachment”
We can resist it through activating, strengthening and enjoying the pleasure mycelia. Rather than buying into self-care that requires us to buy infinite products, when we choose instead to experience joy, rest and healing in community, we build the relationships that help us pick connection and liberation over convenience and conformity – that lighten the load so that we may choose our own adventure. Your friend may cook dinner so that you don’t have to grab a McDonald’s, or know someone who has a spare bed so you don’t have to use AirBnb. You might be able to borrow that sound system for your party rather than ordering it for next-day delivery. A DIY dyke might just pop round and fix your chest of drawers – so you can instead donate to a trans person’s healthcare fundraiser. Or you might be able to access a community mutual aid fund yourself to help pay rent – freeing up your Saturday to pick up a placard instead of another bar shift. Through these pathways, pleasure-rooted activities that are inconvenient build anti-capitalist, radical and revolutionary foundations. As Wu writes: “Sometimes struggle is a solution.”
As a community with a shorter actual or perceived life expectancy than our cis-heterosexual counterparts, it’s little surprise that we tend to live moment-to-moment. A generation of queer elders was taken from us by a negligent and biased society – we still carry within us the memory of losing everyone we loved. But it’s through practicing hedono-futurism rooted in care and solidarity that we can come to believe not only that a better future is possible, but that we’ll live long enough to see it. Writing on our defence against the rise of fascism, McKenzie Wark proposed that our vision for “the good life” is to be “found in fragments of the everyday when we live without dead time… When we glimpse another city for another life.” These are the heterotopias we model when we’re fucking, dancing, painting, feeding our friends, setting up camp in protest. These are the sites where we create longevity for our communities through practicing love as action over and over again – through pragma. Where we embody and realise the creation of queer pluriversal utopias.
