rebel love

on loving like revolution, even when the world is on fire

Queer love has always been dangerous.

Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s powerful. Because it endures. Because it refuses to die even when the world tries its hardest to crush it. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how easy it is to grow tired—to lose hope when politics turn against us, when laws tighten around our bodies, when our very existence becomes a headline again. It’s easy to feel small. Easy to feel like the love we carry can’t stand up to all the noise.

But it does. It always has.

Queer love—whether it’s between partners, between friends, in the softest forms of chosen family—it’s what gets us through. It’s the quiet hand on your back after a brutal day. It’s cooking for someone when they can’t get out of bed. It’s holding each other when the world calls us names and means it. It’s carrying grief together, so no one has to bear it alone. This love isn’t theoretical. It’s survival.

I’ve loved like that. I still do. I’ve seen it in my friends, in my partners, in strangers at Pride who offer water and kindness like sacred things. We build worlds inside one another—whole ecosystems where it’s safe to cry, to rest, to be exactly who we are without apology. That kind of love doesn’t just resist the violence outside. It rewrites it. It says, “You don’t get to define me. I define us.”

This poem is for that kind of love. For the people who still show up for one another, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.

rebel love

She loved like a storm breaking over dry land,
like the first scream of a newborn,
raw, wet, and so fucking alive it burned.
Her love was not polite—it wasn’t soft hands folded in her lap,
it was clawing at the walls of the world,
demanding room to breathe.

Rebel love doesn’t ask,
it doesn’t wait for permission,
it doesn’t tidy itself up to make others comfortable.
It is the fire that melts the locks
and the arms that catch the running.
It says, “I see you, I will hold you, I will fight for you,
and fuck anyone who says I shouldn’t.”

She kissed scars with salt on her lips,
she knew what it meant to hurt and keep going.
Her love wasn’t fragile.
It was the cracked pavement where wildflowers grow,
the heavy drumbeat in a protest march,
the soft murmur of “I’ve got you” in the quiet after.

She loved like Lilith taught her—
fierce and untamed,
a love that didn’t beg, didn’t bow,
but lifted others to stand with her.
Her heart was an unbroken chain,
each link forged in the heat of rebellion
and tempered by every goddamn fight she’d survived.

She said: “Love is resistance.
Love is building a world where we don’t have to hide.
Love is smashing the cage and holding the hand of anyone brave enough to walk free.”

And when they called her love dangerous,
she just smiled and whispered:
"Damn right it is."

…

Sometimes, I think the most radical thing we can do as queer people is to keep loving each other. To keep choosing tenderness in a world that punishes softness. To keep holding space for one another even when we’re exhausted, even when everything outside is telling us we shouldn’t care so much, shouldn’t love so deeply, shouldn’t be so loud about it.

But we love anyway.

We love in the middle of legislative nightmares. We love when we’re scared. We love in the back corners of coffee shops, in protest lines, at kitchen tables cluttered with takeout and tears. We love in texts that say, “Did you get home safe?” and in glances that say, “I’m still here.” That love is not small. It’s everything. It’s the reason we’re still here.

Queer love teaches me that connection isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. Romantic, platonic, communal—whatever form it takes, it builds us. It shelters us. And it gives us the courage to keep going when we’ve lost faith in the world.

If you’ve ever been told your love is “too much,” or “too loud,” or “too fast”—good. Let it be. Let it be wild. Let it be holy. Let it be the kind of love that doesn't wait for approval, that burns bright, that reaches back for the people who are still trying to find their way out of the dark.

Because at the end of the day, that love is the revolution. That love is why we’re still breathing.

As usual, I love you all :3