Sara Jaffe's article on Jstor daily - Queer Time: The Alternative to "Adulting". January 10, 2018.

• Adulting (the verb form of the word adult) speaks about a series of behaviours associated with adulthood: Get a job, become financially stable, get married, buy a house, have kids...
• For whom are those goals accessible? For whom are they a matter not of choice but of economic reality?
• Sociologist Pamela Aronson suggests that these behaviours are based on outdated assumptions about class and gender.

"Queer lives are notable for their lack of chrononormativity, starting in childhood."

• Jack Halberstam in his book In a Queer Time and Place argues that the queer experience of time and space in a heteronormative society is inflicted with time-warping experiences like coming out, medical transitions, and generation-defining tragedies (like the AIDS epidemic) that ultimately change how queer people relate to adulting.
• "The concept of queer time offers an alternative to the notion that one ought to discontinue particular practices or behaviours simply because one has aged out of them."
• "In The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, the literature and gender scholar Kathryn Bond Stockton suggests that the very ways we understand growth are predicated on a legible and linear concept of maturation that many queer kids do not experience."
• Stockton writes that gay children often do not make sense their desires, pleasures or experiences as "gay" until they are older enough to understand what gay means. This way, gay children can't "grow up" the same as cishet children and, by consequence, they end up growing up "to the side of cultural ideals".
• In Michelle Tea's novel Black Wave she writes: "It was so hard for a queer person to become an adult... They didn't get married. They didn't have children. They didn't buy homes or have job-jobs. The best that could be aimed for was an academic placement and a lover who eventually tired of pansexual sport-fucking and settled down with you to raise a rescue animal in a rent-controlled apartment."

In Tea's novel, being queer offers the possibility of a potentially liberatory relationship to time. But as Halberstam notes, the historical, political, and economic conditions that produce these new temporal logics do not offer the same "hopeful reinvention of conventional understandings of time" to populations that have always been considered expendable.

• White gay men writing about AIDS might foreground the shift in temporal thinking that comes about when one's sense of the future is altered by death. But, in contrast, the premature deaths of poor people and people of colour in the US is seen as business as usual.
• Recent work by queer writers of colour, like John Keene's Counternarratives, broaden how we might think about queer time.

There's a latent homophobia to this mis-aging, a blinkered vision of what it means to look one's age.

• "In part because of my gender presentation, personal style, and slight stature, I’m often read as younger than I actually am [...]. Now I’m a parent, and, when I'm out with my child, the visual of mom seems to signal my adulthood. While I do go by mom, I don't think what they're seeing is what I mean when I claim it. To the well-wishers at the playground, I am, I suppose, adulting, yet queer time still clocks my sense of myself in the world."