On the Lateness of Pandemic Time

Abstract:This article applies the Black queer vernacular form of “late” to interrogate arrival the of a privileged group into a consciousness of crisis and recasts the actions of Black LGBTQ+ people during the pandemic as part of a longer history of surviving catastrophe. The colloquial usage of late demonstrates Black queer awareness of the interconnection between the definition of time; its variable valuation; and the multiple, sometimes competing temporalities in which Black queers live and die. Racial disparities to the response of policies implemented during the rise of COVID-19, as well as the ways in which the habits and pace of Black LGBTQ+ life remained relatively unaffected by the pandemic, reveal the ways history and time unevenly impact different populations within the same crisis. Using Black studies theories of time, Black feminist theories of touch, and Black queer theories of gender and sex, this article illuminates the continuity between constructions of state-sanctioned notions of progress, a contemporary development of pandemic time, and the timing of whiteness as ontologically late. Through a reconsideration of the habits of Black queer life as always already attending to one urgency or another this article argues for building toward a crisis-oriented futurity with less concern for or and impulse to redress the lateness of other people.