Any utopian vision based on identity politics and authentic Subjects exists in straight time. I'd argue that that's why they fail. Queer time, however, offers the potentiality for being-with and always-emergent becoming—a speculative revolution of "educated hope," as Muñoz would have it. According to Muñoz:

Practicing educated hope, participating in a mode of revolutionary consciousness, is not simply conforming to one group’s doxa at the expense of another’s. Practicing educated hope is the enactment of a critique function. It is not about announcing the way things ought to be, but, instead, imagining what things could be. It is thinking beyond the narrative of what stands for the world today by seeing it as not enough. (qtd. in Duggan 278)

Practicing educated hope is a hallmark of queer time. If there’s a best sense of what that means, it’s partially in Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, where the author argues against the “reproductive futurism” inherent in heteronormative temporality. Edelman is a key proponent of what Mari Ruti and others have called the “antirelational” or “antisocial” negativity of queer theory, a strand that emphasizes social transgression, personal abjection, and the idea of the queer antihero (Ruti 5). Ruti opposes queer negativity and its adherents to the “ethos of positivity” that undergirds “the popular ‘It Gets Better’ campaign” and the drive to demand equal, “normal” participation in civic life (gay marriage, etc.).

Muñoz falls somewhere between, neither embracing negativity nor advocating assimilation (in a sense, he queers queer here). However, in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, he does challenge the negative sense of queer time, arguing for a queer futurity that is distinctly at odds with the antirelational stance of Edelman. For Muñoz, queer futurity is decidedly relational and collaborative as we blend the “what is” with the “what could be”—in this way, queer futurity is a potentiality rather than a mere possibility. He writes that “Unlike a possibility, a thing that simply might happen, a potentiality is a certain mode of nonbeing that is eminent, a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense” (9). The potentiality is by necessity a being-with; he argues that

We need to engage in a collective temporal distortion. We need to step out of the rigid conceptualization that is a straight present. . . . What we need to know is that queerness is not yet here but it approaches like a crashing wave of potentiality. And we must give in to its propulsion, its status as a destination. Willingly we let ourselves feel queerness’s pull, knowing it as something else that we can feel, that we must feel. We must take ecstasy. (185)

Muñoz’s provocative middle way helps me see the potentially queer work of new materialism, the rupture of convention and the insistence on emergence and becoming and entangling.

NOTE TO SELF: Take the ecstasy of belonging-with,
and engage queerly and perversely in the world,
and dis/identify with the "found archive" of Lesbian Land,
and work against and through, cutting together-apart the entrenched politics of authenticity.