What is love? What is holy? Inside ovals of radiance, two girls holding hands, nearly matching—white tank tops and jeans, narrow sliver of sun on their cheeks, their left arms. I want to know if they are lovers, sisters, or friends. Their bodies are frank and factual, their bodies are surely sexualized nearly everywhere they go, they are just at that age of turned-enough-toward-adulthood,turned-enough-toward-curves to no longer be entirely their own. Their faces give nothing away. I wonder what it is to be two teenagers in New Mexico. I wonder what they have seen, their gazes as direct as the sky itself, its blue matching their pants, color of cornflowers and baby boys, color of hope after winter and a blessed break from the spring winds.
I want to read the image as queer because I am queer, and I hunger for more representation. I hunger to belong. Forty-three and still hungering, a lifetime of wanting more. I wonder what these girls hunger for. In my imagination, they hunger for each other. In my imagination they hunger to be seen, the photographer’s exposure a vindication that they exist and deserve to be recorded. In my imagination the photograph precedes a moment, a moment when they fall into each other outside the camera’s reach, soft and laughing, ready to let go of the courage of standing so unflinchingly, of being witnessed as they are.
They are an image of romance and bravery. Refusing to hide. Unbowed by church or family. Insisting that two queer girls can be saints, standing inside their mandorlas, gently luminous, reminding us of Guadalupe herself, if Guadalupe had ripped jeans and a girlfriend, dignifying an old fence and an expanse of weedy gravel with the proud certainty of new love.