Returning to Eachother - Reflections on Honcho

Queer spaces promise liberation, but often run on invisible labor and unresolved conflict. If we can’t return to each other here, how will we do it with our families and the people?

At Honcho, I spent my days in the kitchens along with other cooks—feeding hundreds of people in a space that many of its attendees imagined as utopian. On the surface, it felt like a celebration of queer joy. And in a lot of ways it was—but beneath the music and curated menus, I couldn’t ignore a reality I’ve seen time and again: the labor holding it all together was overwhelmingly Black and brown folks, women and trans folks, tucked away in the margins, working long hours for little pay.

It’s a contradiction that gnaws at me—patrons paying hundreds of dollars for a ticket while the very people cooking, cleaning, and sustaining the festival walk away with barely enough to cover their rent or expenses. If queer utopia is built on the backs of this type of labor, then what exactly are we celebrating?

And that’s the thing: conflict and contradiction doesn’t just show up in our personal relationships—it’s baked into the structures of our spaces. The imbalance of who works and who enjoys, who is seen and who remains invisible, shapes how we treat each other. Organizing, cooking, loving, caring—these are human relationships, and they get messy. Sometimes labels are thrown around that flatten us. Sometimes people stop talking, and fractures feel irreparable. But what I’ve come to see is that those labels, while real, don’t tell the whole story.

Beyond the Queer Bubble

Anti-Blackness, patriarchy, and other systems of harm are not just out there in the world—they creep into our kitchens, our collectives, even our most intentional queer gatherings. And yet, that doesn’t define us in total. What matters is the lifelong work of unlearning and choosing to come back to each other.

But here’s the harder question: if we can’t find ways to heal and return to each other in queer community, how are we supposed to do it with the world beyond?

How do we imagine organizing with the working class as a whole, including our families, our neighbors, our “ignorant” aunties and uncles, if our first instinct is to cancel, cut ties, and exile people from community? The truth is, we can’t build anything lasting if we only practice care with those who already “get it.”

Unlearning is part of this, too. Many of us were raised with anti-Blackness, racism, or other harmful conditioning that lives in our bones. Naming that doesn’t make us irredeemable. It makes us human, shaped by histories we didn’t choose. The work is not pretending those parts don’t exist, but actively dismantling them, in ourselves and with each other, over a lifetime. That’s the only way we can expand beyond our small circles and create a politics rooted in solidarity across difference.

Food as Witness

Feeding people at Honcho taught me that food is both witness and participant in this process. A plate of rice or a shared piece of bread carries contradictions. It can reproduce hierarchies, or it can open space for healing. What’s at stake is how we choose to use it.

For me, food is not neutral. It’s a medium for memory, for contradiction, for struggle. When we cook together, we’re practicing something larger than ourselves: a possibility of return.

The Dialectic of Return

This is the dialectic I want to sit with: queer and community spaces can replicate harm, even as they dream of liberation. But they can also become training grounds for the larger struggle—places where we practice returning to one another, where we refuse to let conflict or cancellation be the final word.

Because if we can’t learn to return here, among our own, how can we ever hope to do it with the broader working class, with our families, with the millions who make up our people?

The work is not to erase harm but to recognize it, hold it, and transform it so that what we build together isn’t just a mirror of the systems we claim to resist, but a glimpse of something freer.

Closing Note

How do you practice returning—to yourself, to your people, to community—when harm shows up? Drop a comment or reply; I’d love to hear your stories.