Queer, Loud, & Legally Entangled

Queer Sainthood Now: A Canon for the Unclean, the Unbroken, the Unburied

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains the name of a deceased First Nations person.

We were never meant to be sanctified. We were meant to be statistics. Shadows. Side notes. Slurs. We were meant to die in silence, to perish politely, to vanish without vigils.

But we didn’t.

We danced. We disobeyed. We drag-marched into churches and kissed in the pews. We lit candles not just for the dead, but for the defiant. For the ones who said fuck you to quiet erasure and amen to the glorious mess of survival.

So why shouldn’t we have saints?

Not the sterilised kind. Not the ones with halos scrubbed of sin and lives clipped down to palatable parables. No. I mean our saints. Saints who overdosed and rose again. Saints who fought cops and cradled crying boys in back alleys. Saints with prison ink and HIV tattoos. Saints who never apologised for their lipstick, their fists, their loneliness. Saints who loved recklessly, publicly, impossibly, and dared to name it holy.

What would it mean to canonise the queer dead? Not just mourn them. Not just archive their lives in academic tomes or activist footnotes. But to sanctify them. To say: this life mattered not despite its chaos, but because of it. This one saved me. This one showed me how to live.

A New Canon, A New Church

Let’s start by tearing down the velvet ropes of respectability. Let’s build a church from the bones of nightclubs and needle exchanges. Let the altar be a battered kitchen table where six friends shared their last meal. Let the relics be sweat-stained binders, cracked leather harnesses, chewed pens from poems unfinished.

No incense. Just poppers. No sacraments. Just secrets. And instead of miracles, we mark moments:

We don’t need Vatican vetting. We have oral history. We have protest scars. We have love letters in shoeboxes and voicemail recordings we can’t delete. We don’t need divine intervention. We had chosen family.

So, what do we call it?

Not canonisation. Reckoning. Resurrection. Recognition. Reverence. A Queer Communion. A Fellowship of the Fallen. The Order of the Sacred Disobedients.

The Criteria for Queer Sainthood

Forget chastity. Let’s make audacity our metric. Let’s elevate those who:

Let’s recognise the ones who didn’t get state funerals, who didn’t trend on Twitter, who weren’t deemed tragic enough or tasteful enough for televised tears. The ones whose ashes were scattered under club floors or flushed down hospital toilets by estranged families too embarrassed to bury them.

Let’s say their names. Not just at rallies, but at rituals. Annual queer liturgies. Days of remembrance that don’t just grieve — they exalt. March 2nd — for Marsha. October 12th — for Matthew. June 27th — the day we reclaim Stonewall from rainbow capitalism and give it back to the Black and brown trans women who bled for it.

Our First Saint

Let me nominate the obvious: Saint Marsha P. Johnson — Patron Saint of Pay It No Mind.

Saint of spontaneous generosity and stubborn joy. Saint of flower crowns and bricks, of mental illness and miraculous survival. Saint of the Hudson, whose body was pulled from the river but whose spirit never sank.

Her miracles? Countless. She housed queer kids when the state wouldn’t. She fought off pigs with a purse. She turned trauma into theatre. Her martyrdom? Ongoing. Exploited, ignored, iconised posthumously but rarely resourced while alive. A fate shared by too many Black trans women still.

Let her be the first. Not the only.

Who Else Belongs?

Saint David Wojnarowicz — Patron Saint of Anger As Art. He spat into the open wound of America and called it intimacy. He taught us that AIDS wasn’t just a virus, it was a political decision. He didn’t want to be your metaphor. He wanted to burn your institutions down.

Saint Pedro Zamora — the Real World’s realest one. Saint of televised tenderness, of HIV-positive romance broadcast in a world that wanted him to die quietly.

Saint Leslie Feinberg — who gave language to the unnamed and arms to the unloved. Saint of working-class trans power. Saint of stone butch blues and revolutionary reds.

Saint Candy Darling, Saint Divine, Saint Bayard Rustin, Saint Gwen Araujo, Saint Billy Porter while he’s still breathing — because why wait till they’re gone?

And yes — Saint Peter “Bon” Bonsall-Boone — Patron Saint of Public Kisses. Long before Mardi Gras had floats, he was flung from the ABC for daring to kiss his partner on national TV. Not in porn. Not in protest. Just in love. He helped found CAMP Inc., opened queer phone lines in the 70s, held vigil while churches spat on his love. When marriage equality passed, weeks too late for him to legally wed Peter de Waal, we wept. Not for tragedy. For triumph too slow.

Saint Mandy McLean — Patron Saint of Trans Liberation in the Prison-Industrial Hellscape. Warramungu woman. Trans trailblazer. Survivor of both the gender binary and a brutal system. She became an activist behind bars, a lightning rod for justice, suing the NSW prison system for refusing to acknowledge her identity. She taught us that liberation starts in the cell. That a woman is not made less holy by concrete, by charge sheet, by chains.

Saints in Waiting: The Living Gospel

Saint Nayuka Gorrie — Patron Saint of Queer Blak Rage. Writer. Wielder of words like weapons. They drag settler colonialism into the light and demand we look. Not blink. Not flinch. Just reckon. Saint of decolonial dreaming and queer survival on Country.

Saint Mama Alto — Patron Saint of the Tender Torch Song. Cabaret celestial. Gender transcendent. When she sings, ghosts gather. She makes elegy an art form, makes defiance sound like lullaby.

Saint Jackie Leung — Patron Saint of Queers in the Clinic. Doctor. Advocate. Fierce mother of many. She queered medicine from the inside out. No more cold stethoscopes and colder stares. Just care.

Saint Casey Conway — Patron Saint of Tender Masculinity. Tattooed, Aboriginal, ex-footy player, openly gay. He makes softness look strong, makes queerness look like home. His mere existence reshapes the myths we were handed about Blackness, about maleness, about what a hero’s body can hold.

These saints aren’t waiting. They’re working. Still building, still burning, still birthing futures we’ll inherit.

What Do We Offer Them?

Not just hashtags. Not just lectures. We offer pilgrimage. We offer praxis. We offer praxis as prayer.

We carry their teachings in our tattoos, our voguing, our refusal to assimilate. We build shrines not out of stone, but in dance floors and zines, in binders passed down and names spoken over hormones. We keep vigil with every protest, every ball, every drag brunch that says we are still here.

And when we light candles, we don’t ask for miracles. We ask for memory. For rage that stays righteous. For softness that resists shame.

No More Martyrs Without Memorials

This is not nostalgia. This is necessity. Because they’re still killing us. Still mocking our grief. Still legislating us out of bathrooms and into body bags. And when they do, they don’t even give us saints. They give us silence.

So we make our own heaven. Not in the clouds. But in community. A heaven loud with laughter, sex, protest chants, and karaoke. A heaven where you don’t have to be good. Just honest. Just kind. Just alive, until you aren’t. And then we carry you.

Our kin will be canonised. Not despite the mess. Because of it. Because they dared. Because they mattered. Because we say so.

And that, my loves, is gospel.