Terms of Endearment

Nine cast-glass panels, each a green hand holding something worth protecting, a heart, a key, a sheltered figure, a guarded book. The hands do not grasp. They cradle. They offer. Queer people have been named by others for a very long time, most of it meant to wound. But among ourselves we have always coined our own words, Uranians, Friends of Dorothy, gay, language that let us find one another and claim a self the wider world refused to grant. This work continues that tradition and turns it toward the future. It asks what we might call ourselves next, not in defense but in celebration: Keepers of the Flame, Protectors of our Hearts, names built from love rather than survival.

Each panel is a small proposition, a possible identity held up to the light. Together they insist that naming ourselves is an act of power, that a community which has always had to invent its own vocabulary of belonging will keep inventing, keep choosing words worthy of who we actually are. In the country Imagining Utopia envisions, these are not code words traded in secret. They are simply what we are proud to be called.