My "First" Queer Data

The kids today are super into the concept of queer data. Nerdy LGBTQ+ youth and middle-aged folks keep saying to me, "Have you read this Queer Data book? It's awesome." And then a month later, "Oho! Did you know they reference you?" I did because I read it, and I am still honored.

I've always loved data, particularly queer data. I love queer stories and, to me, when the stories add up and add up, they become another type of proof of our lives. I am always and forever a qualitative researchers, but the quantitative is hot too! I mean, c'mon: I love seeing the forest and the trees. You can't queer the binary anymore than that!

This newsletter is a very lovely place to discuss the wonders of queer data. Since I've been writing on queer data for 15 years (gadzooks!), it feels important to reveal how I got here in the first place.

But not so long ago, say the 2000s-ish, the idea of queer and data being together didn't make sense. Here's a vast, humorous, but not inaccurate oversimplification.

• "Data" was a claim to objective-ish truths. Data meant rigor and proof. Data had the backing of science and surity.
• Queerness thrived in the fuck you to assumptions, norms, and fixity. Queerness demanded that flux, possibility, and unknown-ness be centered and recognized.

But data is never ever truly fixed or complete! People who believe such tomfoolery are the same people who think AI will actually understand us or algorithms can run the world. Big data is just that: "big" and "data." The only power behind information concepts like big data, algorithms, and AI are the promotional hype machines and the actual vast power, water, and labor sources they pilfer.

Queer theory, largely driven by the humanities in the past and still now, often had the wiggins to think that "data" could be part of its work. But eventually that changed.

In the early 2010s, I started to think of these archival stories as "data." This was radical shit I and a few dozen others were pulling, y'all. Eventually, many queer theorists–me included!–found out that the concepts of queer + data needed one another. They're a superb couple. They're surely both solo poly and dating openly, but I also think they're quite in love, and they'd cruise each other in a supermarket like this:

The now popular book, Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action, was as of yet unimaginable. I was in too much chronic pain to contribute to that book when the chapters were being collected, and I'm still grateful to editor Kevin Guyan for the invite. I'm so delighted that so many folks are reading it, and it helps me rethink many of my long held ideas, which I'll keep jamming on under the framework of queer data.

May queer data spread far and wide. We fricking need it.