The Closet Professor

Queer Trivia Night

By Jenny Johnson

for Nica, Mary, Ryan, et al.

A friend on a rival team confesses
they’ve always been into it.
As a kid, they locked themselves in a closet
to read Trivial Pursuit cards.
They wanted to know everything.

Their team is named Shooting Nudes.
We are Butch Believers.
The next category is Famous Dykes.
The whole bar is packed and smells like
bike sweat and Cosmo slushies.

Our best guess is that it was Audre Lorde
in ’89 advocating for Palestine.
On the fly, we struggle to spell
Stormé DeLarverie, but we’re hoping
bad handwriting hides it, huddling closer

so no one hears our answers.
Meanwhile, the National Park Service
erases the letter T in twenty places
from the Stonewall Monument website.
Slime mold? Whiptail lizards? The category is

Queer Ecology. Now, a federal directive
threatens to cut gender-affirming
care for youth in our city.
The category is Gay for Pay.
Will Smith, Tom Hanks, Hilary Swank.

Cleverness I know can feel exclusive
but here I lean into my friends’ literacies,
their wisdoms my shelter.
The forty somethings know the local lore,
the bygone parties: Donny’s, Pegasus,

Operation Sappho, while The Gen Z kids ace
the tech round, scribbling the name of
a translesbian hacktivist on a canceled sci-fi show.
It turns out being an autodidact is
the unspoken prerequisite for being queer in America.

Will we nerd ourselves into futures
of intergenerational knowing?
In our time, the Press 3 option
of the youth suicide hotline
was created and deleted.

In booths with curly fries,
we turn to each other and say:
Kiki. Bussy. Bulldagger.
Kitty Tsui. Vaginal (Crème) Davis.
Truths our bodies internalized arise

in quick crescendos like this one:
Bernard Mayes founded
the first suicide prevention hotline
in the country. I know this because
he was a dean at my college and the first

audaciously out educator I ever met.
Monthly he held a donut hour,
I was closeted then, so I showed up early
to squeeze onto a cramped couch
and listen: In 1961, he leafletted streets

with a phone number safe to dial
and then waited by a red rotary phone
certain that many would call.
The category is Gay Rage.
Name the band and the song:

Bikini Kill, “Suck My Left One”
Bronski Beat, “Why?”
Princess Nokia, “Tomboy”
Planningtorock, “Get Your
Fckin Laws Off My Body”

I’ve always joked that my head is filled with trivial trivia. I have a bad habit of responding to almost any conversation with, “Did you know…?” People inevitably tell me I should go on Jeopardy!—and I always laugh, because I know I’d be terrible at it. The moment a question is asked under pressure, my mind goes blank, even though I can often answer the questions effortlessly when I’m watching from my couch.

I’ve only participated in a Queer Trivia Night once. I can’t even remember the name of our team, but I do remember who was on it: museum professionals and librarians. Unsurprisingly, we won with ease. What stuck with me, though, wasn’t the victory. It was the realization that queer trivia isn’t really about knowing random facts—it’s about shared memory, survival, and the way knowledge circulates within our community. That’s what makes Jenny Johnson’s poem “Queer Trivia Night” resonate so deeply, and why it feels less like a novelty poem and more like a quiet manifesto.

About the Poem

Jenny Johnson’s “Queer Trivia Night” uses the format of a bar trivia competition to explore something much bigger than questions and answers: how queer knowledge is created, shared, and fought for. The poem moves quickly from playful details—team names, sticky tables, categories like “Famous Dykes” and “Queer Ecology”—to the sobering reality that queer history and queer bodies are constantly under threat. The fun of trivia is always shadowed by erasure: the National Park Service quietly removing the “T” from Stonewall’s history, and federal directives endangering gender-affirming care.

What makes the poem especially powerful is how it reframes trivia as survival. Queer people become autodidacts not because they love facts for their own sake (though many of us do), but because knowing is how we find each other and how we stay alive. The poem’s categories—Gay for Pay, Gay Rage, Famous Dykes—aren’t just cheeky; they map a curriculum of lived experience, culture, protest, and grief.

Johnson also highlights intergenerational knowledge. Older queers remember bars and parties that no longer exist; younger queers know digital spaces and activist figures from canceled shows. Together, they form a collective mind that shelters them when laws and institutions fail. Even the list of names and slang—“Kiki. Bussy. Bulldagger. Kitty Tsui. Vaginal (Crème) Davis.”—becomes a kind of chant, proof that language itself carries history in the body.

One of the most moving moments comes with the story of Bernard Mayes and the first suicide prevention hotline. It connects trivia to testimony: a fact becomes a memory, and a memory becomes a lifeline. In this poem, knowing things is not about winning a round—it’s about refusing to disappear.

“Queer Trivia Night” suggests that queer community is built out of shared literacy: knowing the songs, the scandals, the heroes, the dangers. The poem asks whether we can “nerd ourselves into futures of intergenerational knowing,” and the answer feels cautiously hopeful. As long as we keep telling each other what we know, something survives.

About the Poet

Jenny Johnson is an American poet whose work often blends humor, pop culture, and sharp political awareness with deep emotional intelligence. Her poems frequently explore queer identity, community, and the ways personal memory intersects with public history. She is known for writing that feels conversational and accessible while still being formally and intellectually rigorous.

Johnson’s poetry is especially attentive to how knowledge circulates—through classrooms, friendships, activism, and everyday talk. In “Queer Trivia Night,” she captures both the joy of shared culture and the urgency of preserving it in a time of erasure. Her work reminds us that poetry can hold facts and feelings at once, and that even something as silly as trivia can become a record of who we are and how we endure.