Last week I attended a 60th birthday celebration for my friend Joanna Labow, percussionist and one of several singer/songwriters for the groundbreaking lesbian rock band Girls in the Nose, which reunited for the occasion. Nose co-founder Kay Turner will also turn 60 this year. But--as Joanna noted in a song that she wrote for her party--this is not a version of old ladydom that you hear about in mainstream culture. These sexagenarians are still making music with their buddies, still eviscerating sexism and heterosexism with their lyrics, and still getting down (and taking it off) with the notorious Girls in the Nose dancers.

In her thought-provoking book In a Queer Time and Place, Judith Halberstam theorizes queerness as an alternative way of using time--one that departs from bourgeois heterosexual itineraries of reproduction and inheritance. One of the great attractions of queerness, Halberstam argues, is that it opens up "imaginative life schedules," which do not dictate that we abandon our youthful subcultures, take our place in the generational transmission of goods and morals, or devote ourselves to practices of longevity.

To ruminate on the concept of queer time, check out the video for the Noses' song "Come and Die" after the jump.