ABSTRACT
In the 1950s, a practice emerged in the United States in which some lesbians in Buffalo NY began tattooing a small, blue, five pointed “nautical star” on their wrists. Queer creativity can never turn away from or even miss the harm that necessitates it, or the harm it may recreate, which requires both vigilance and humility. Rather than a turning away, queer creativity requires real and focused attention to what is so that it can foster what might be. Fueled in part by vigilance, humility, and attention, the virtuous element of queer creativity energetically rushes toward the production of what is good, holy, and righteous. The virtue of creativity is not exclusive to queer communities, but it has a particular resonance in the tasks of living before the reader. In the end, Lorde admonishes the reader to accept the whole complexity of creativity and, in a sense, to embrace both the darkness and the light of it.
