1 While there are important differences between COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS, queer groups at the beginning of the pandemic recalled the latter virus crisis that decimated our communities in the early 1980s. In a 13 March 2020 article about Pink Triangle Press closing its offices temporarily due to the pandemic, Rachel Giese notes that queer communities could handle the current crisis by learning from the AIDS epidemic:

In the United States, leftover fabric from the AIDS memorial quilt was used to make cloth face masks (Browning). Queer activist group ACT UP, initially created in response to AIDS, launched actions to address the particular needs of LGBTQIA2S+ people during the pandemic: responding to queer and trans teens being outed to their parents during quarantine, advocating for queer homeless people, and providing support and advocacy for racialized queer people (de la Cretaz). Queer people drew on existing community structures, many of which were created during the HIV/AIDS crisis and include art, activism, and other community projects.

2 In the face of increasing uncertainty and being stuck at home, on Monday, 16 March 2020, I started a daily pandemic art project on my personal Facebook page. It was meant to distract me, occupy my time, and help me feel connected to my communities, especially the LGBTQIA2S+ ones. For forty-seven days, on a daily basis, I engaged in a small-scale, creative project (including writing a poem, making a video, creating a dance, and doing a drawing), and shared these pieces on my Facebook page. Because of its social media success, I was inspired to submit an application with my creative collaborator Alison Taylor when I saw that the local artist-run centre (ARC), Connexion, had a call out for “isolation”–themed projects. From 6 to 15 May 2020, Alison Taylor and I ran a social media takeover on the subject of isolation.¹ Every day we offered a prompt, created a simple piece of art in response, and invited others to share their work in the comments sections of Facebook or in an Instagram message. In this paper, I use autoethnography to examine my experience of the ARC Connexion residency, titled “Queer Environmental Futures: Isolation,” in the context of the pandemic in New Brunswick. My specific objective is to critically situate queer community art practices as part of the history of resilience that marks the LGBTQIA2S+ communities.

3 The Isolation residency is a part of a larger project called the Queer Environmental Futures (QEF). The project considers how queer histories of art and activism can inform climate change mitigation. Its output involves a video trilogy, residencies, installations, and public talks. Blending academic research and creative activity, it engages with queer ecologies and queer futurity. For our residency at the ARC Connexion, my collaborator and I were particularly hoping to engage members of various LGBTQIA2S+ communities in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and elsewhere, who might have been feeling the COVID-19 isolation in specific but similar ways: cut off from community and support, and, in some cases, housed in predominantly hetero- and cis-normative places.

4 Some members of LGBTQIA2S+ communities have embraced the global rainbow movement, with its “We will be okay” motto, which was created to help us cope with the COVID-19 pandemic challenge (Verge). However, for many of us, it is a problematic appropriation, for it co-opts the rainbow, a queer symbol hard fought for through decades of queer activism combating homophobia and transphobia (Wareham).² These varied reactions are particularly important given that queer people have been affected by the pandemic in distinct ways. An April 2020 EGALE report finds that, compared to the rest of Canadians, LGBTQIA2S folks have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 on various levels, including financial, mental, and physical (“National Survey Results”). Research on emergency planning demonstrates that it does not consider the specific needs of LGBTQIA2S+ people, which results in these individuals tending to rely on chosen family members and on their own communities rather than official channels to gain access to medication, financial support, emotional care, and transportation (Cianfarani 49). In 2020, the Fredericton queer community had suffered some crucial losses of space, including the closure of Boom! Nightclub³ and Clinic 554, a medical clinic that specialized in queer and trans health care (Morin; Edgar). In other words, the LGBTQIA2S+ communities in Fredericton were already dealing with significant blows when the pandemic began.

5 In his introduction to a collection of queer New Brunswick poetry, RM Vaughan reminisces about Richard Hatfield, New Brunswick’s longest sitting premier.⁴ He describes Hatfield as an “everybody-knew/nobody-cared out gay man” who “wore gorgeous foulards while flipping pancakes at country fairs” and “was friends with Truman Capote and danced at Studio 54” (Vaughan). In Vaughan’s judgment, New Brunswick queers are “tough as kelp.” This is a fitting ecological metaphor given that the larger QEF project engages with climate change and the environment more generally. Interestingly, kelp is often overlooked as boring old seaweed, but it actually plays an important part in aquatic ecologies, acting as food for sea urchins and nurseries for sea otters. It is also farmed for human consumption globally, including in New Brunswick. It is thus enmeshed in its larger aquatic and land-based communities. One of our QEF residencies took place at Anima Casa Rural, a permaculture farm and cultural centre, in Jalisco, Mexico, as reflecting on plants and other non-human entities is part of the larger project. Although this paper largely focuses on the ARC Connexion residency, I return briefly to the question of climate change and non-human relations in the conclusion.

6 In Queering Autoethnography, Jones and Harris insist that autoethnography be “tethered…to current events,” and thus critically engage in challenging the status quo of historical events (5). While some autoethnography methods suggest a waiting period before writing about a particular experience, I follow Jones and Harris’s approach in using autoethnography concurrently with the COVID-19 pandemic to think through the social media art projects in which I engaged during the historic early days of this global event. I am persuaded that some of the reflections about the ever-changing and ongoing personal and community reactions will be more difficult to access once the pandemic is contained. Furthermore, because autoethnography emphasizes self-reflection and personal experience, I argue that it is a more appropriate approach to have adopted during the mandatory seclusion in the early days of the pandemic than resorting to other types of research methods that would have required interaction with people or institutions. From March to May 2020, while the online art projects were developing, New Brunswickers were required to isolate with their households and only leave their homes for socially distanced essential shopping and exercise. Pandemic protocols meant that we could not travel, visit people, go to our workplaces (in many cases, including mine), or engage in our usual daily and seasonal activities. It meant that we were stuck with ourselves: our bodies, our thoughts, our moods, our movements or lack thereof.

7 Autoethnography uses personal experience to make sense of the larger culture. In this case, I use my experience as a white, cis, middle-aged lesbian artist to intervene on dominant assumptions about the pandemic, many of which place at the centre heterosexual, nuclear families. Queer theory and autoethnography share similar impulses to disrupt dominant hegemonic notions of what constitutes appropriate research sites and how to conduct scholarly investigations. The daily experiences of many LGBTQIA2S+ individuals are defined by how our bodies and lived experiences do or—more typically— do not fit with the expectations of our families, workplaces, places of worship, institutional contexts, and public spaces. With its focus on personal experience, queer autoethnography enables insights into queer life that are unavailable via traditional approaches and research methods because it makes space for those aspects of daily life that can be marginal, fleeting, or otherwise hard to quantify. In these ways, it can capture the embodied, the emotional, or otherwise difficult aspects of quotidian queer life.

8 Dunn and Myers note that “contemporary autoethnography is digital autoethnography.”⁵ Autoethnographers typically select research documents from personal materials including photographs, diaries, and letters (Adams et al. 49). Increasingly, autoethnography uses digital materials, especially social media, as research materials. While Dunn and Myers are interested in the ways in which our devices are woven into the fabric of our everyday lives, the focus in this paper is on how Facebook enabled art and community building during the pandemic.⁶ The public Facebook page from the ARC Connexion residency is a key source for this research. For both my personal daily pandemic project and the ARC Connexion residency, Facebook provides a rich and detailed source of information on how I was feeling, what I was thinking about, how each post was received, how the community participated, and what art pieces and commentary were posted on a given day. However, given that the project on my personal page was limited to my Facebook friend community, with no intentions of it becoming public, any data from that source is heavily anonymized (following Adams et al. 70). I am also discussing personal notes that I took during and after both projects. This paper uses these sources as part of a critical autoethnography that theorizes LGBTQIA2S+ experiences of the pandemic in the context of New Brunswick.⁷

9 On 15 March 2020, I received an email cancelling the arts residency that Alison Taylor and I were supposed to run from 16 to 30 May 2020 at Anima Casa Rural in Jalisco, Mexico. The cancellation was not a surprise given the global impact of the pandemic, but it was nonetheless disappointing. It would have been the second iteration of our Queer Environmental Worlds residency, run in collaboration with Anima Casa Rural. The main objective of the larger QEF project, of which that residency was a part, is to draw from histories of queer art and activism in order to grapple with climate change (LeBel). The ARC Connexion residency emerged as a chance to forge connections between the pandemic and climate change, and to examine their effects on LGBTQIA2S+ people in New Brunswick, through the lens of QEF. While it was not a replacement for the Anima Casa Rural residency, it helped to fill the void left by its cancellation. In part, the project proposal we submitted to ARC Connexion read:

ARC Connexion accepted our proposal and we met with Executive Director Kelly Hill in a socially distanced backyard meeting to discuss its specifics. We decided on a ten-day social media takeover, posting daily prompts on ARC Connexion’s Facebook and Instagram pages.

10 Over the ten-day period from 6 to 15 May 2020, we posted a short, daily prompt on a particular theme: self-portrait, thirst, groupings, power, blur, waking up, drag, dream, isolation, and future. We also posted related articles, including an interview with science-fiction author NK Jemison on her creative process, a piece by climate justice activist Mary Annaïse Hegler on climate grief, and an article by Elise Taylor about vivid dreams during the COVID-19 pandemic. On average we received from three to six responses to our prompts on the ARC Connexion Facebook, as compared with up to thirty responses when I had done the project that inspired it on my personal Facebook page. There are several possible reasons for the limited response rate, including the following: lack of interest in the topic or engaging; the fact that I was a relatively new, and therefore somewhat unknown, member of ARC Connexion; and generally low page views for the ARC Connexion Facebook page. Most responses were from friends, students, or acquaintances of mine. These responses are fascinating in that they reveal the raw and precise concerns and perspectives of queer individuals during the early days of the pandemic.

11 On the first day, the theme was the self-portrait and it was intended to facilitate introductions amongst participating artists. For my self-portrait, I reused a plastic bottle holder to create a strange, six-eyed, queer, high femme selfie. In response, others posted images such as a dirty studio apron, a to-do list, a comic, a queer paramedic in PPE gear, and an erasure poem. One of the most moving posts was an image of plastic mannequin hands with the following caption: “Thinking a lot lately about the things we touch, or don't .” At this point in the pandemic, we were all required to be in single-household isolation and our bubble of physical contact was drastically limited. A friend jokingly said to me at the time: “Public Health doesn’t understand that lesbians come in packs.” It was difficult for us, as with the larger public, to suddenly reduce or eliminate our contact with our community.

12 Those who were living alone had to isolate alone, which created a heavy burden for LGBTQIA2S+ individuals who are more likely to reside on their own. Considering the deep isolation and widespread loneliness in the LGBTQIA2S+ community, the sentiment expressed about touch in the first day of the ARC Connexion residency resonates deeply. Some LGBTQIA2S+ people were marginalized during the pandemic in significant and impactful ways. For example, LGBTQIA2S+ seniors are more likely to face loneliness than their cis or straight peers, and this has been exacerbated during the pandemic (Renner). Queer families with children are less likely to have extended family support, and COVID-19 isolation regulations worsened this inequity. Queer youth make up a third of the homeless youth population in Canada, typically because their families are transphobic or queerphobic (Jasmin Roy Foundation); during the pandemic many young people were housed in unsafe situations in homophobic or transphobic living arrangements (Mayor). The necessary pandemic isolation regulations imposed by Public Health thus inadvertently ended up further isolating many LGBTQIA2S+ community members.

13 Sara Ahmed suggests that queering practices “disturbs the order of things” (161). As the residency continued, participants offered queer interpretations of many prompts. For the thirst theme, a young queer couple posted a short video of themselves misting their seedlings and giggling, thus visually conveying a lovely image of queer domesticity. Their post also speaks to how our homes are intertwined with human and non-human beings, and how these connections often deepened during the pandemic as people took up gardening, foraging, and adopting pets. Another interesting example, on the same theme, was a collage submission with an image of two teenage girls horsing around with the following text: “I know all about sex,” “Congratulations!,” “I see it as a physical thing,” “You’re a romantic.” The connection between thirst and sex, especially during the isolation phase of the pandemic, speaks to the ways in which sex lives were interrupted. The verbal inscriptions also offer a queer feminist understanding of sex, suggesting that it is a physical need, connected to community relations, and complex to navigate. In sum, these submissions offer a queer interpretation of thirst that disrupts heteronormative ideas of home, sex, and community. Rather than interpreting thirst as deprivation, these responses show how our needs are deeply connected to our relationships with one another, while emphasizing an ethics of community care that is reminiscent of practices developed during the HIV/AIDS crisis.

14 Day Four was a Saturday and it snowed. My notes from that day show that I was feeling down. I was tired of being cooped up and the only reprieves were walks and infrequent trips to the grocery store. The May snow was depressing. The prompt for that day read:

Although my low mood was only indirectly connected to the line about the power of snow, I was thinking about how the weather can have an impact on our feelings. I decided to make lesbian-themed collages that day. The text on one read “lesbian interdimensional alliance” and the other, “femme power.” A queer couple sent in a picture of their child nursing. In our correspondence, they commented that the child was “being overpowered by breastfeeding.” While these interpretations may not queer notions of power, they certainly break from ideas of power as oppressive and aggressive. They demonstrate the power of nurturing and of self-knowledge, while directly engaging with queer empowerment.

15 Other prompts, like drag, were intended to speak directly to queerness. Dance and drag are staples of queer resilience, celebration, and community. The community histories of these creative queer practices inform the QEF project and inspired the ARC Connexion residency in fundamental ways. The drag prompt read:

Because it was the first day when New Brunswick was allowed to “double bubble” or extend our household isolation to another household, I did a drag dance video with Alison Taylor and our friend Kelly Baker. We ordered food and drinks from a local restaurant. After deciding on a Backstreet Boys song, we worked on the dance steps for hours. Then, we finalized our outfits, practised some more, and recorded the video. We were giddy with excitement at finally being able to eat, drink, and dance with each other. Touch and dancing matter.

16 Although public displays of affection can be dangerous for LGBTQIA2S+ people, queer people have used physical touch as a way to resist hetero and cis society norms and to build community. As Giese notes in her comparisons of the COVID-19 pandemic and the early AIDS activism in New York,

The politics of queer touch is not just intimate but politically potent; imposed by isolation protocols, its absence was powerfully felt.

17 Two days after this collective and creative reflection on drag, the theme was isolation, and the prompt read:

I was missing dancing with queer people and feeling the isolation very deeply. My body was aching for it. For this prompt, I created a short dance video. I recorded myself singing a very slowed-down version of Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself” and created a slow, sensual dance. I wore gloves and a mask to reinforce the isolation theme. It was embarrassing to hear my own singing voice and to see my middle-aged body with no dance training perform. But that was the point. My art practice over the last twenty years has often dealt with “difficult” emotions like anger, grief, or anxiety. While it has largely involved short and experimental film and video work, attending art residencies in the last several years has helped me begin to embrace the awkward, ugly, embarrassing aspects of the creative process. This has meant sharing terrible sketches and drawings on my social media and creating work outside of film and video. I turned to my art practice and social media during the early days of the pandemic to deal with these difficult situations.

18 Queer bars and dance spaces have often been safe places for LGBTQIA2S+ people to come together, to be ourselves, and to express our gender and sexuality more freely than we could in other locales (Wortham). As Kelsey Adams affirms: “The dance floor is one of the best community-building spaces we have.” During the pandemic, there were many online queer art events, some private and others public. One online Canadian party, Club Quarantine, became popular internationally and hundreds of people joined via Zoom (Iannacci). As a Club Quarantine regular noted,

In many cases, queer communities were strengthened or even grew during the pandemic. It is a potent reminder that queer community building and activism often happens in times of duress.

19 During the early days of the pandemic and the ARC Connexion residency, I spent a lot of time thinking about community. The larger QEF project deals with notions of community within the context of ecology and environment. Our prompt for Day Three encapsulated some of these preoccupations:

I had a frenetic art-making day on this day. My post in response to the prompt describes this creative outburst as follows:

Many members of queer communities depend on chosen family, or nonbiologically related people who they depend on as family. Many queer communities also have well-established practices of polyamory. However, as TallBear points out, we have not been as attentive to how legacies of colonialism have affected kinship structures, especially and including those with non-human beings. The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic created a space where many people were thinking about how humans interact with one another and with more than just the human world: pondering the positive effects to the climate of having so many flights grounded, taking walks outside for our mental health, and gardening. On the other hand, it also reinforced deep social inequities, as working people were forced to work with and through COVID infections, and racialized and poor communities have certainly borne the brunt of the pandemic.

20 As a media studies scholar, I am aware of the complex ways in which social media tends to reinforce existing networks. During my personal daily art project, this dynamic impacted the successes of the endeavour. It also undoubtedly contributed to the small response rate during the ARC Connexion residency as much as to its triumphs. An autoethnographical approach makes a connection between the individual and the larger culture. As a white, cis, and employed lesbian, my experience is certainly not representative of the larger queer experience, but it does resonate with much preliminary queer reporting on the pandemic. The ARC Connexion residency did not necessarily answer any questions about climate change or queer futures, but it did offer a platform to make these connections. In writing this deeply personal piece of academic writing, I am sharing the most banal, mundane, and embarrassing aspects of a public art project. The successes are small—a satisfying video developed into a finished piece. The failures are embarrassing—unskilled drawings and low response rates. And yet, I believe they speak to the resiliencies of queer art and community practices. The experience reminds me of the inspirational quotation reproduced above and renders true for me its strong message: “New Brunswick queers are tough as kelp.”

21 Writing about this project after the early days of the pandemic has become somewhat routine. In its early days, New Brunswick successfully managed the pandemic, especially in comparison to other places. However, the gaps in health care became incredibly obvious and frightening as emergency rooms were shutting down due to staffing shortages and masking regulations were lifted, leaving immune-compromised New Brunswickers abandoned. The Conservative government led by Blaine Higgs made no effort to provide appropriate queer and trans health care after community outcry and the closing of Clinic 554. It seems that the pandemic successes have also allowed the current government to double down on racist policies. Indigenous leaders asked for an independent inquiry into the deaths of Rodney Levi and Chantel Moore, both killed by police. These inactions and silences matter, especially given the controversies that have plagued New Brunswick in recent years, including the symbolic acts involving flags—community members protesting a high school in Oromocto flying the rainbow flag and Chipman City Hall displaying the “straight flag” (Fraser; Anonymous). My students often make reference to the “queer brain drain” that affects New Brunswick—young LGBTQIA2S+ people taking their credentials or seeking further schooling outside of the province, in places they believe will be more queer-friendly than New Brunswick or will at least have adequate trans health care. This climate is particularly important given the further isolation that some LGBTQIA2S+ people have experienced due to the pandemic. Nonetheless, there are also reports that the pandemic, in combination with lower housing costs than in the rest of the country, are driving people from Quebec and Ontario to the Maritimes in higher numbers. All of these observations relate to larger questions of community and kinship, which are connected to the insights of TallBear and to the priorities of the QEF project.

22 Throughout my work on QEF, I return again and again to Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands’s essay aptly titled “Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies,” in which she considers artist Derek Jarman’s garden. The acclaimed filmmaker spent the last years of his life with HIV/AIDS and living in a cottage in Dungeness, England, overlooking a nuclear power plant. He created a garden full of survivor species of plants and found objects—a stark contrast to traditional English gardens. Mortimer-Sandilands notes that the “sensual intimacy” of the “juxtapositions of nature, sex, illness, and politics” makes a sort of “queer garden, one that cultivates an ethical practice of remembering as part of a queer ecological response to loss” (351). If, as Sarah Ahmed suggests, thinking queerly disturbs the status quo, then queering gardening and agriculture, especially through sustainable permaculture and aquaculture, has much to offer existing practices of art, activism, and community building in New Brunswick in the face of climate change. It is a powerful reminder of the resilience of queer communities, how we thrive like weeds in spite of neglect, and how this kelp-like toughness informs our creative practice and social engagement. It is also a poignant reminder that we have much to offer the larger society, particularly future building in the face of pandemics and climate change.