There is a moment, at dusk when blue flowers glow in the twilight. A dreamlike world where you see differently. The retina in your eye is between day and night vision. The cones which work in daylight and enable you to sense colour are still able to function in the low light level, whilst the rods, which give you night vision, are beginning to work. In that moment your eyes, if you have full colour vision, have not just three colour sensors, red, green and blue, but four. The fourth sensing the colour of moonlight. In this moment when the ethereal colour appears the blue flowers glow as your visual system alerts you to an unusual stimulus. The sensation of glowing colours is also stimulated by misaligned stereoscopic imagery and the sensation of a red/green mixture that doesn’t result in yellow*.

If you want to see this magical effect, find somewhere away from artificial light in the late spring when blue flowers are at their peak, on an evening where there is little cloud cover, so the light levels change slowly, and wait. I don’t guarantee you will see the magical city that only appears at dusk**, but you have a good chance of seeing glowing colours. Like the moments between waking and dreaming it is a fleeting experience and like a dream is lost from memory if you fail to pay attention.

Recently I have found another way of seeing magical colours. A visual experience I never knew about till I entered queer space, or what I have come to call Q-space after the L-space of the Library of the Unseen University in Ankh-Morpork***. Q-space, like dark matter and neutrinos, can exist anywhere. Q-space passes through ordinary or straight space, occupying it like a cloud of magical colours unseen by most, yet conjured up when two or more queer people meet. In Q-space the restrictions of heteronormativity melt away and a magical glow of possibility fills the air. In Q-space nothing is quite what it seems. We shape shift from moment to moment, changing form in each other’s eyes the world bursting into new colours. A town street can be grey and rainy, but the magical spell cast by two queer people hugging and saying farewell fills the air with colours which hang in the air for hours after, if not days.

I never understood the significance of queer colours until I attended an LGBTQ+ STEMinar in Birmingham. Baby queer that I was, knowing no one else and suffering from imposter syndrome, I took several hours to stop panicking and connect with the people around me. That day I didn’t notice the queer colours appearing, I was blown away by all the trans people around me, and those who just might be. I felt safe in a way that I never had before. I marvelled at the way we could all just be ourselves whilst also discussing some serious science and engineering topics. It was only when, like the clock striking midnight, it was time to leave, that the change struck me. Suddenly as I entered the railway station and descended the steps onto the platform the world went from a rainbow of colour into black and white. The queer people with me melted into the monochromatic background of cis-heteronormativity and Cinderella was back to mopping floors and washing dishes. The abrupt change made me painfully aware of my exit from Q-space and while my disappointment at the loss of this new world was hard to take, I could still feel queer magic running through me.

I am still a beginner in Q-space, glimpsing it here and there, but every so often an encounter will cause new colours to burst into life, filling the air around me and expanding till they pervade the room or street and even the whole town. Like the mechanism which produces new colours at dusk I am slowly beginning to understand the things that allow me see Q-space and cultivate them in myself. I recently met up with someone who I had not seen in over four years, first encountering them at a conference, before my shell cracked. The moment of recognition resulted in hugs and squeals and our time together ended with queer colours and a rainy goodbye. They made me realise I need to practice my queer vision. Rather than seeing the world as straight I need to perceive the queer possibilities in everything around me. I need to be open to seeing queer colours everywhere and like the blue flowers at dusk and fading dreams, hang on to them and lay down queer memories. While the world out there may be seen by most people as a cruel, uniform monochrome, if we can have the courage and energy to conjure up queer space for everyone then more people like us*** can see in colour.

And if you are ever out in the bluebell woods at dusk, stop and pay attention. You never know you may see something really special.






*https://www.indigoimage.com/can-you-see-bluish-yellow-or-reddish-green/



** The city that only appears at dusk features in the story of Tobias and the Snow Tear - https://shonaleigh.uk/stories/tobias-and-the-snow-tear/



*** https://wiki.lspace.org/L-space



**** Kelly Clarkson - People Like Us - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWbMz_aBlMU