THIS SPECIAL ISSUE seeks to open up intersecting perspectives on queer lives, desires, death, and grieving. Collectively and on their own terms, the contributions in the issue invite dialogue across their respective themes and empirical contexts, while also troubling a range of normative assumptions about how grief is lived, navigated and felt. They offer carefully crafted entry points into the emerging field of queer grief studies – building upon, and extending from, the still-nascent field of queer death studies. Our aim has been to conceive of queer grief as a research terrain that evolves in concert with longestablished themes in queer studies. We envisage a field of thinking, being, and collaborative creating that has the potential to express queer life projects in concert with attributes that are anyway already present, aiming to evoke how grief may be intrinsically encoded into the histories and structures of being-in-the-world that continue to inform (im)possibilities for queer liveability. Queer being, we suggest, is also queer grieving. This is not to refuse joy, pride, or everyday capacities. Rather, it is to encompass queer grief as a vector toward working with death and loss as prefigurative of possible futures, pasts and presents.

Cover photo: Daniel Monk