letter from the editor

felix valentino salmoran 

Many of us can recall our introductions to the concept of time travel as being purely science fiction, perhaps in Doctor Who or Back to the Future. From a young age, I became captivated by time travel possibilities, long before I recognized and embraced my queerness, and while I still lacked a deep and conscious understanding of grief and ancestry. 

As I’ve become far more familiar with grief in adulthood, the already-sheer veil between my aliveness and other realms has thinned, and I turn to ancestral Indigenous spirituality to make sense of time itself. When I say “transcestors” I call upon my late friend Bennett, born only a few months before me; I call out to the young forest defender Tortuguita, killed by police in “Atlanta” in 2023; to Lou Sullivan, Marsha P. Johnson, the thousands of trans people we remember on Trans Day of Remembrance; to every ancestor in my and my loved ones’ bloodlines who ever dreamed of queer futures. 

Grief is at the center of queer time travel. Though I by no means intend to romanticize grief, I recognize grieving as the child of loving and remembering. One of the most loving (and most painful) things we can do is remember – to reproduce and replay a person, place, idea, or moment, sustained in our memory like a fermata in a symphony. Memory is what keeps us alive, in love, and connected – and it also lies at the core of trauma, nostalgia, and heartbreak. When memory is compromised, so are the present and the future. 

When Addie asked me to write the letter from the editor for this time travel volume, I knew that out would come a choir of voices, generations of coming to understand the passage of time as a spiral we have more access to than this world wants us to think. We travel through time when we select an outfit that appeals to our 5-year-old self, our inner child that we carry inside of us; when we tell stories and reflect memories of our loved ones back to them; when we listen to that song that was our alarm clock sound in high school; when we remember, honor, and become those who make new futures possible for queer people. 

In our cover story, Richmond draglesque artist Qing Blaze shares about taking inspiration from how his grandfather dressed, as well as the styles of other influential figures. He touches on the history of drag stretching back to the late 1600s, and highlights more recent BIPOC drag performance artists and the legacy they create for future performers to honor. In another interview, “drag thing” Rose Butch explores the allowance of coexisting multi-worlds and personas through performance, and speaks about embodying a “drag elder” as an instructor at a drag camp for teens in Vancouver. In this open exchange, drag becomes accessible and inviting to more people as our collective understanding of queer liberation shifts and expands. 

Also featured in this issue is Temim Fruchter’s “Lipstickle” in which she assigns one specific lipstick to each woman across four generations of the European Jewish family in her novel, CITY OF LAUGHTER. This piece spans “across time and space, [and] tracing the ways they are connected by blood, secrets, and the same shape-shifting stranger over the course of a hundred years.” Inaugurating our new section manivestoes, you’ll find Emmeline Kaiser’s illustration of a masked Princess Mononoke, accompanied by a declaration in favor of masking as a critical measure for building a world in which we can all be free. 

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jeffrey Moro wrote the blogpost “Attack and Dethrone Time” in which he writes that capitalism and media technologies have “operationalized time into an instrument of oppression” breeding scarcity mindset and detrimental urgency into our illusions of time and productivity. In this time travel volume, just femme & dandy rejects the rigidity and violence of a colonizer-driven keeping of time, and celebrates a multiplicity of worlds in every direction. 

Physics tells us, undoubtedly, that time is relative to the distortion of the fabric of space-time. Art speaks this into our bodies. If music is in time, and time is a poem is a song, then we can spin the record at different speeds, pick up the needle and drop it back down in different spots. That is what we exercise in this volume – tuning into the ways we can reclaim and reimagine queer futures through a de/reconstruction of time itself. We proudly present to you another volume of just femme & dandy filled to the brim with stunning contributions. We hope that the work herein resonates with your heart, across time and space and selves. 

Now and always, 

felix valentino salmoran 
just femme & dandy 
first mate and print production coordinator