In 2019, Chris was able to attend the opera Stonewall, commissioned by the New York City Opera to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots during World Pride in New York.1 The Stonewall riots refer to the uprising at and around the Stonewall Inn – one of the few gay bars in New York at that time – that began in the early hours of Saturday 28 June 1969, and lasted for several nights as more and more people joined this protest against a ‘random’ police raid. Since then, that revolt has been remembered and institutionalized in annual pride marches in many places in the world as a symbol of ‘gay’ liberation. The opera, composed by Iain Bell with a libretto by Mark Campbell, is not meant to be a docu-opera, but rather an enactment of the event to make the audience feel the affective forces that came with this act of collective resistance (Bell and Campbell, 2019). Precisely because of this evocation of the variety and ambivalences of feelings, this chapter seeks to emphasize how this performance can be thought of not only as a ‘queer opera’ but as queering our thinking about identity and identity politics. Queering or thinking beyond the binary (Henderson, 2019) and challenging and resisting expectations and norms (McCann and Monaghan, 2022) is helpful when considering multiplicity as a core concept for reimagining the practicing of diversity, rooted in political attempts of queer worldmaking.

It is thus no coincidence that this chapter on queer theory starts with the Stonewall riots (and its artistic version), as queer theory – like feminist and decolonial theories – is distinctive among most forms of theorizing because it is strongly interwoven with various forms of activism, highlighting the continuous need for political alertness, especially in the current times of LGBTIQA+ backlash.