Clement Hil Goldberg has returned to my house in the Southwestern desert yearly to develop the hybrid art event Our Future Ends. I recall quite clearly when they sat lemur-like on my couch and explained how “lemur” is a word that means ghost. They were sitting with their knees to their chest, arms gesticulating wildly, back effortlessly straight. They took a good hour to deliver what felt like a holy transmission, a medicine story and mythology, an artistic vision that attracted collaborators and devotees like myself, who have come to view it as a collective ceremony of resurrected queer cultural space on the astral plane.
“Lemurs exist but also don’t,” they said. “They are lemurs and also Lemurians, a race of androgynous psychics from a lost continent at the bottom of the Pacific Rim of Fire.”
Clement had just returned with footage from the Duke Lemur Center, a place that was also of great inspiration to William Burroughs, who after visiting had a period of falling into fugue states in which he received visions of ancient Lemuria. He was working on The Western Lands at the time. Part of the novel was written in Madrid, NM, right down the road from my house, where Clement returned yearly to work on their project.
It’s these magical points of overlap that make one want to chart a spiritual map—an origin story for queers—who have no actual earthy original home, much like the lemurs and Lemurians. It might be best to conjure a wild collective hallucination, a castle of stories of a not-so-earthly plane—underwater even—alive and beautiful enough to hold all of us here on Earth. We were dying once, remember?
They returned to the desert with artistic collaborators, folks who helped resurrect The Stud, the legendary queer bar in San Francisco. Fresh off the plane, they unwound from the harsh imprint that living in a gentrified city puts upon a body, only to find the still-open wounds of the Pulse mass shooting and the Ghost Ship fire. It was easy to see in-between worlds, and it was hard not to wonder if we’d crossed that line to where there were more of us in the land of the dead than on Earth. Wovoka’s vision of the Ghost Dance and the first channeled transmission about Lemuria happened in the late 1800s. Both are visions that hold an intention for the safe passage of an endangered and sacred race of beings.
In Clement Goldberg’s joyous and funny Claymation web series The Deer Inbetween, interdimensional deer weigh the souls of humans who have died, while a panel of mushrooms gather to discuss the possibility of taking over the earth. Here too, they center the non-human—crystals, magnetite, and even psychoactive centipedes—as a way of reminding us we live in an ecosystem. All things exist in relationship, and by recognizing this we might learn something about how to be in community with each other.
Clement and I made a practice of walking in the desert landscape that was once San Marcos Pueblo, making offerings in the four directions. Here, I watched them come to terms with the grief at the heart of their project, in real time, as they conjured a vision—a golden chalice with no bottom in which the grief of the ancestors pours through and is turned to light. Their attitude was, “Ok, if it’s going to be about grief and the end, it has to have great comic timing, all our friends have to come, and it has to be sexy…there must be dancing, and it has to be kind.”
— Bett Williams
Bett Williams is the author of #Girl Walking Backwards and #The Wrestling Party. She has recently completed The Wild Kindness, a memoir about growing psilocybin mushrooms in New Mexico, while in community with queer writers and other outlaws.
The Platinum Centerpiece at this year’s Outfest, SSB is proud to present the Los Angeles premiere of Clement Hil Goldberg’s satire, Our Future Ends, Friday, July 13th at REDCAT. For tickets.