Evans and Allen engage with Ghandi’s question of “what might a queering of community, kinship, sociality, and association entail?” Their first answer is to
present themselves as who they are naturally as an act of agency, as an act of freedom. Their invocation of Nina Simone’s musing on the inability to articulate
freedom provides context to the ways that Evans and Allen visually encounter each other together yet separately as they look inward. The choice to have Kanye
West’s “Ultralight Beam” in conversation with Simone’s is also a testament to the imagery of searching for answers in solitude yet within community, especially
in the ways that West’s “I’m tryna keep my faith, but I’m looking for more” echoes through Simone’s “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear… I mean,
really, no fear. If I could have that half of my life… no fear” even after it has stopped playing.
Evans and Allen also saturate scenes with Ghandi’s “nineteenth-century homosexual” via the intensifying of natural greens, browns, greys, and blues: “liberated
from the dull monochrome of sexual dimorphism, this constitutively doubled and hybrid intermediary was endowed with variegated sympathies and desires.”
“His asceticism” tinges the spoken word pieces as Evans and Allen struggling push against the self-denial they have learned as an oppressive second nature while
not wanting to give up the aspects that “likewise equipped him for the complex affiliative demands of friendship.” Evans and Allen attempt to situate the
audience in the “nonnormative and marginal position” that Cohen considers as the source truly progressive and transformative work. They don’t present
themselves as “punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens” but that is part of the disruption; there are aspects of their marginalizations are both invisible and
tangible. The juxtaposition of scenes that evoke feelings of surveillance with their decontextualized voices present the instability of legible identity.
The temporary scene reversals also allow the discourse of queerness as inversion to engage with ideas that index various queerings of space and time, such as
disruption, instability, and temporal shift. The shift between girl and warmth is sudden and acts