Can we play Fun Gay? Disjuncture and difference, and the precarious mobilities of millennial queer youth narratives

This article takes up the complex project of unthinking neoliberal accounts of a progressive modernity. The authors position their anxieties about an ‘after’ to queer as an affect modality productive of both an opportunity and an obligation to think critically about the move to delimit historically, and as a gesture to an entirely different futurity, the time when queer, and therefore, gay, were organized in a relation of explicit politicization. The authors interrogate celebratory, modernist readings of millennial queer youth narratives where the potentially democratizing significance of the Internet as a cultural technology is deemed constitutive of mobility, play, and possibilities for a redistribution of rights of recognition, communality, and knowledge in a significant public sphere. Drawing on an analysis of research interviews that is framed as ‘anecdotal theory,’ the authors discuss four properties of networked publics – searchability, replicability, persistence, and invisible audiences – not uniquely as properties of technological interfaces, but rather as ‘technologies of otherness.’ Within a modality of critically queer attention, the authors consider the varied and complex precarious mobilities that constitute millennial queer youth narratives.