By guest blogger poet Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

I suppose what I’d like to write about for this blog series isn’t a single image, really, since it’s a music video. Image after image after image. And sound. But I’ve been obsessed with queer musician Perfume Genius’s song “Slip Away” and the glorious music video for it, directed by Andrew Thomas Huang. The video is part friendship adventure through a fairy tale forest and part ferocious queer political statement.

The two friends (and they could also be lovers) are played by Perfume Genius (a.k.a. Mike Hadreas) and dance choreographer Teresa “Toogie” Barcelo. They’re both unruly femmes, dressed in the brightest and most ruffle-happy of outfits, while running from another duo, decidedly more menacing—two clownish schoolboys who look like Trump but drawn by a French surrealist.

The beautiful pair runs, seeking a yet-to-be-defined freedom from the confines of learned, societally acceptable behavior (for which the schoolboys harass them). As Hadreas sings, “Don’t look back, / I want to break free / If you never see ’em coming / You’ll never have to hide.” The goal is to run, to push so far into the direction you want to go in that normative societal pressures can’t touch you and you never again have to suppress the fullness and in this case, femme-ness of who you are.

“They’ll never break the shape we take,” Hadreas sings (at around the fifty second mark of the video) while his trusted companion makes pretty shapes with her fingers around his face. At the same time—and this is my favorite image from the video—Hadreas readjusts his amazing pink top with his amazing pink gloves, pulling the garment tighter on as if to say, Yes, this is what I’m wearing on our quest for freedom. The garment seems to glitter in agreement.