When I dream now of our queer future it’s masked (willingly and joyfully), with a free Palestine. The masks – or to be more accurate, respirators – are essential in the face of a deadly and disabling virus, violent surveillance states, and increasingly hazardous air quality due to the potent combination of capitalism, colonialism, and climate change. To have a queer future we first need to survive.

This illustration is a shout-out to a pivotal (to me) scene from Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke where San (shown here with lesbian hair colors and a clear N95*) tends to her wolf mother’s gunshot wound: her palms are bloody, her mouth is bloody, and she is unflinching and steadfast, made strong by love.

I do not have the words for the sheer amount of grief, but I feel strengthened in solidarity with my queer siblings when we acknowledge COVID and mitigate the risks together; there is no such thing as individual risk when it comes to public health and aerosol-transmissible diseases. Every mask bloc gives me hope. Every gay and trans person protesting and loudly refusing pinkwashing gives me hope. We must build a world where every person has the resources and freedom to live a full life with safety and dignity, to grow old having been all the iterations and versions of themselves they can possibly imagine and more.

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• I haven’t seen these, a “patent-pending design” by Ford, for sale or on the market, but with an antifog wipe these could be useful for people who lip read; to be…clear, this wouldn’t be effective against surveillance.

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