No Future For Who? | 49.1

2026

No Future For Who?

We are really asking. We are coming in hot. We are causing a scene. We are being unreasonable. We are not fucking around. We are not taking “no” for an answer. “No” is the only word we still know. For who? For who? No. 

In the late ’90s, having survived an apocalypse, Lee Edelman theorized gayness as a way of living with no future. Those who do not reproduce, who do not reproduce the status quo—feared and hated and punished for our “appropriately perverse refusal[s]” of a straight world that wanted us dead. And if our refusals heralded “the undoing of civil society”? 

If only. Civil society continues, begging us to be civil in these “unprecedented” times. The AI speculators dump money into data centres that dump carcinogens into the desiccated soil. Canada double-doubles down on oil and gas. Israel wants to pave over Palestine to bury the bodies of the martyrs. But Palestinian presence is a problem. A U.S.-funded future for “New Rafah” and “New Gaza” offers an old solution: Tantura, again. We must be uncivil in these very precedented times. 

These existential crises, these states of emergency. What are we to make of, or in, them? The poetry, prose, and art in this issue offer us an analytical lens and a challenge to power. As Noor Nematt’s gorgeous painting shows us, “Love is Resistance” and resistance is love. Nour Abi-Nakhoul’s excellent (and perfectly-titled) story, “Abundance,” explores how fantasies of plenty move us with and against each other. The El Mashup artists “imagine the future together” by mixing forms without hierarchy in their work with Latine/x youth. As Edelman wrote, if not this, what? Perhaps: “the antitheticals we are set to become,” writes Judy Thorn. Naomi Watkins’ beautiful installation, “Her Stories Have Always Been a Part of Me,” reminds us that the past is a story of impossible survival. 

This issue almost didn’t exist. I’m grateful that it does. Many thanks to natasha, Fran, and Chimedum, and to every person at Room who said, no, it can’t end this way.

⎯ Sadie Graham