Written Commission: </love>Jinghua Qian

In my conversations with Jarra Karalinar Steel and Ciwas Tahos (林安琪 Anchi Lin) for BLEED 2024, I was struck by how both their works foreground romance, desire and community, using sensual and digital elements to imagine a sanctuary that is both transcendent and embodied.

That, of course, made me think of sex and the internet — maybe I am always thinking about sex and the internet — and especially of Lex, a text-first queer app that has grown over the last five years from a platform for personals ads (modelled on the back pages of old-school lesbian magazines) to a sort of community noticeboard or queer Twitter. It can be gossipy, claustrophobic and clout-chasing, as any small community can be, and the app is glitchy and uncomfortably commercialised, yet it’s also a digital sanctuary of sorts, especially as other platforms become more openly and violently anti-trans. I have spent a lot of time there and it’s fed me, surprised me, and prompted me to think more succinctly about who I am and what I want, absorbing the economical jargon of vintage personals ads (“ISO” means “in search of”) as well as the contemporary sociolect of overly-online queers. So I have elected to write my responses to love.exe and Finding Pathways to Temahahoi in the style of Lex posts – 300-character bursts of desire, intention and invitation, in the IRL and URL.