P-Valley Has Changed the Rules of Black Queer Storytelling
Last Sunday was our last trip “down in the Valley” for a while, as the second season of P-Valley came to a close. Set in the fictional town of Chucalissa, Mississippi, the show chronicles the life of the framily at The Pynk and, for some, the season’s end brings happiness. Everyone else, though? Molly, you in danger, girl.
The club’s proprietor, the non-binary revelation that is Uncle Clifford, got her happy ending: her Grandmuva free from Covid, outright ownership of her club, the likely influx of new patrons from the town’s forthcoming casino and the man she’s coveted since the show’s start, loving her out loud. Mercedes, Clifford’s bottom bitch — the longest serving dancer at the Pynk — finally got what she wanted: her daughter, her gym, her money and a retirement performance worthy of her legacy.
But not everyone made it out of the season unscathed. Hailey leaves Chucalissa — and, presumably, the father of her future twins — with far less money than she thought she’d have when she took the Pynk off the auction block. Lil’ Murda might think he’s won, now that he’s been welcomed back into Uncle Clifford’s arms, but a rival gang is coming for him. Asserting control over a world that’s done nothing but take from her, Roulette steps fully into pimp mode, recruiting girls from the club for her stable. And just as Keyshawn (AKA Miss Mississippi) is about to escape her abusive husband, the rug gets pulled out from under her. And let’s not even talk about Diamond… poor, poor Diamond…
With so much going on, we had to take a trip to the Valley. Shelli, A. Tony, Carmen and Natalie got together to talk about P-Valley’s queerer second season and how the show is truly changing the game.
P-Valley
A lot of people, when they hear that P-Valley is a TV show about a strip club, they think about spots like The Landing Strip from Friday Night Lights, Bada Bing from The Sopranos, or Xavier’s from Hightown… but P-Valley really has changed the game on how strip clubs are depicted. How does The Pynk fit in with both your understanding of strip clubs, both in real life and how they’ve been depicted in pop culture? What do you think P-Valley’s doing that’s unique and/or interesting?
Shelli: I am not familar with any of those other shows’ strip clubs but what I do know is that The Pynk is inherently Black. Real life strip clubs that are white are so boring, they are lackluster and it is folks doing the bare minimum and it being celebrated as being the best. Their dancers hide behind fancy lighting, top shelf booze, songs that are on some top ten lists, and sometimes celebrity chefs. In pop culture though, they are shown as the sexiest places. Like, I’m supposed to be enticed by a barely there white girl swaying side to side to some slowed down version of a Panic At The Disco song?
I’m sorry but in so many parts of life I still get very upset when white folks are celebrated for doing the very, very least and when white women get like, all the praises for simply being white. And I’m also very sick of being labeled as a hater or bitter Black woman for feeling that way and announcing it — but that’s for another roundtable.
What P-Valley has done — what The Pynk has done — is shown us that Black women fucking do work. It’s shown so many variances of size, color, ability, sexuality, and more of strippers and shown that Black strip clubs are simply far superior. Whether it’s big and fancy like Magic City or local and small like The Pynk. I don’t know if what they are showing about strip clubs could be labeled as unique to many of their Black viewers who are already familiar with what Black strip clubs are like (a strip club is only as good as it’s wings), but, it is hella unique in the aspect of what is usually shown of strip clubs in pop culture.
A.Tony: Oh my gosh, this question unlocked a memory for me. I was like “I’ve never been to a strip… ohmygosh, how could I forget!” (it was very white :sad face:).
As Shelli said, I’m not familiar with those shows’ strip clubs, but P-Valley feels extremely special because this felt like a place that I already knew. When you love Black women and Black queer people and you are a Black queer person yourself, just about any place where they live, you’re just gonna feel at home there. There is no other strip club depicted in pop culture that I’d rather be at than the Pynk.
Shelli: It’s also shown us the history of some of these places and their evolution. From the jook joint to the shake shacks to the blind pigs and discos… that was cool as fuck. These spots are more than buildings and the booty that’s in them. For some, it’s their family history and, for a lot of Black folks of the millennial generation, specifically in or from the South, we don’t have a lot of family shit to hold on to.
Nicco Annan as Uncle Clifford Sayles and Elarica Johnson as Hailey Colton / Autumn Night
A. Tony: Yes! Seeing Grandmuva Ernestine and Uncle Clifford through the years, with the Pynk as their sun, was extremely important to me. There is consistent violence against Black people, not just in the very obvious ways, but in intricate, almost subtle ways. Most of us don’t have family shit to hold on to and many of us can only count as far back as our great grandparents (if we’re lucky). I love seeing something that Uncle Clifford loves, respects, and works to keep alive not just because it means something to her but because it means something (everything) to her family too.
Natalie: Having spent most of my life in the South, the Pynk echoes with familiarity. Not because I was a fixture in the clubs — though there was that period where my brother valeted for a local club and my visits became more frequent — but because its so embedded in the culture. But no one’s showcasing that on television, especially not with blackness and queerness and southernness at its center… no one but Katori Hall.
The thing about nearly every other show that features a strip club is that the women and the club itself are just scenery. The club is just a front for some shady business, most of the strippers — who are mostly white and almost always rail thin — go nameless and, in the moments where we get to see the women work, the focus is exclusively on whatever person is consuming the product. P-Valley really upends all of that.
The women are the center of the story — their work, their effort, their art — and P-Valley and its stable of all women directors, respect that like no one ever has on television.
There was a lot of time spent this season on establishing the club’s lineage, as Shelli pointed out, so the Pynk becomes more than just a building to its audience. Uncle Clifford works hard to shape the Pynk into a legitimate business, even if Hailey, Big L and Roulette’s machinations test her on that front. The strippers have names and different skin tones and body types… and they each have their own story of what brought them to the Pynk. Even as the floor of the Pynk floods with every-damn-body in Chucalissa, the focus is on the performers.
The central love story of P-Valley has been between Uncle Clifford, the nonbinary owner of the Pynk, and Lil’ Murda, the closeted up and coming rapper. What do you think about how the show — and, in particular, the season finale — handled that storyline?
Shelli: I LOVE IT. Like, to see two niggas on TV — dark, thick, tatted, southern, street niggas — in a situationship that evolves into something more? GIMME GIMME GIMME MORE. I think that we all know these relationships exist in the Black community, but I’ve never seen one in pop culture that was handled this way.
Carmen: I kept comparing it to my first loves, Noah and Wade in Patrik-Ian Polk’s Noah’s Arc in the 00s (Polk is also an executive producer on P-Valley), which is already awful because 20 years later… how is it still somehow only Noah and Wade that we have to reach back to? But Shelli, you’re absolutely right! Because Noah and Wade still weren’t this. Uncle Clifford and Lil’ Murda are simply unrivaled. The specificity of seeing such deep storytelling, hard fought and loving, set in the Black South? Nothing like it.
Shelli: When Uncle Clifford said that she was not about to be loved in the shadows, but still kept up with what Murda was doing, it felt the opposite of toxic. Clifford knew why Murda couldn’t come out and love her out loud. She knew he wasn’t capable of loving her in the ways that she needed and she didn’t do what a lot of Black women and femmes are taught to do in love, which is to hold fast to what someone is capable of doing and be hella cool with it even if it’s the crumbs of what you deserve.
Then seeing Murda pine over Clifford — the postcards, the texts, the fucking someone else even though you wish it was them — was this sorta odd sweetness. I was so hopeful that life would let go of the hold it had on Murda, and that Uncle Clifford would keep their boundaries but still let him back in slowly.
So when they got back together and then had that personal moment in the finale. That kiss and that look… where you can be in a room full of people but it feels like it’s just yall… it was beautiful. Then when they both looked at everyone like “I know y’all ain’t surprised but also what the fuck are you looking at?” I screamed with laughter but I also have that tinge of fear. Yes, they can be accepted by framily but also, they are two queer niggas in the deep south and there are lots of folks Black and non, who are ready and willing to hurt them in a million ways.
Some scenes just stick with you. Shoutout to @AllDayNicco and @JAlphonse_N for bringing this one to life. #PValley pic.twitter.com/coN4TeSjye
— P-Valley (@PValleySTARZ) August 16, 2022
A.Tony: Have Uncle Clifford and Lil’ Murda made me believe in love again? Low-key Ryan Wilder and Sophie Moore already did that, but they have definitely made me twerk in rejoice of the good news!
I am incredibly obsessed with this love story! Every damn Sunday night, my friends and I have been in the chat crying over how these two have invented love and I am STUCK on them. I cannot even fully articulate how much it’s meant to me to be full ass wrong about my initial thoughts around Lil’ Murda. Remember in the first season when he was cutting in line and everybody told him his music was slaw? (Y’all we were so young!). And now, I had to have tissues at the ready whenever he came on screen.
I knew I was gonna love Uncle Clifford as soon as I saw them holding Keyshawn’s baby in season one, but I was so not prepared for them to get a really good and true love. Like Shelli said, their love is definitely not without a shit ton of pain and hurt, and there’s no promise that that is not on the horizon for them both — God, I hope it’s not — but to see them in love inside all of the places that they love most has been really important to me. It may have been more articulate for me to just scream for five minutes straight with intermittent sobbing ’cause that’s all I do when I see them.
Nicco Annan as Uncle Clifford Sayles and J. Alphonse Nicholson as LaMarques / Lil’ Murda
Natalie: No, that was perfect, A. Tony. You and Shelli both really laid out the reasons I (and everybody who watches P-Valley) love Uncle Clifford and Murda together. I will say, though: for all my love of this pairing, I didn’t love the season finale for them.
Do I think there would come a day that one day Murda would be willing to walk away from the life he was building and love Clifford out loud? Yes. Would there come a day when Clifford would be willing to accept the love being offered to her, without fearing that the rug would be pulled out from under of her Louboutin clad feet? Absolutely. From the first time they connected in season one, there was never any doubt in my mind that Clifford and Murda were endgame. BUT, was I convinced that endgame should’ve come this soon into the show’s run… or that the both characters were at a place, mentally and emotionally, where they would step out on faith? Not at all… not even a little bit. I know that’s not something that matters to a lot of folks. People just want to fast-forward to the end and get their happy ending but the journey matters… and I think it matters for folks who see themselves in those two characters.
Here’s what I think happened: for some inexplicable reason, STARZ hasn’t renewed this show. Why this network persists in delaying the renewal of female-fronted properties while giving renewals to all their male-fronted properties (even the ones with lower ratings), is anyone’s guess. They can give us fifty-eleven Power spin-offs but they can’t give fans an early renewal of P-Valley? Dammit, STARZ, I just forgave you for canceling Vida… and now you’re playing with my emotions again?!
But I digress… it feels like the network’s indecision impacted the storytelling…l ike, maybe the show will be back, maybe it won’t… and in the event that it won’t, the show chose to give happy endings to its fan favorites: Clifford and Mercedes. There’s still plenty of story to tell with Cliff and Murda — chief among them, whether Murda will even survive to enjoy his happy ending — but to me, it felt like the show rushed to get to this place and it wasn’t as satisfying as it should’ve been.
In part because of the pandemic (but also because of her triflin’ mama), Mercedes had to go outside The Pynk to find a way to make money this season. She ultimately agrees to a sponsorship deal with one of her clients… and eventually the client’s wife wants her own piece of The Mercedes Experience. It’s the first depiction of a lesbian relationship on P-Valley. What’d you think about the storyline?
Shelli: DOPE, GREAT, SWEET, MEAN, SEXY, WILD, BEAUTIFUL. Like, I think it really hit for me when Mercedes and Farrah were at her art show. When Mercedes was like, that was business… but then said it was a little bit of pleasure. I don’t know if Mercedes is lesbian but I do think Farrah is queer because in her telling off of coach she said she loved pussy more than her husband — but he never knew ‘cos he was not paying attention to her.
I think I was more entangled in Farrah’s side of it, she was a woman who put her dreams and life aside to satiate her husband, something many Black women of a certain generation did and then taught a lot of their daughters to do as if it were the norm. Yes, seeing the two of them together was beautiful, but I always read it as more work than reality, Mercedes doing what she had to do and this part of it maybe wasn’t so hard but it was still work. I liked what came of it, that the two of them realized some things in their personal lives as a result of their tryst. Farrah stepping away from coach and going back to her own dreams, and Mercedes doing the same.
I’d like to see a storyline between lesbian characters who are written as queer from the very start, but this was still very dope, incredibly beautiful, and written as lovely as could be.
Shamika Cotton as Farrah and Brandee Evans as Mercedes Woodbine
Natalie: That’s an interesting read on the story because I saw it so differently. I don’t think it was all about the money for Mercedes.. in fact, after their night together, I think she’s genuinely surprised to wake up and find those stacks on the night-table. The moment in the art gallery was really perplexing because, it seemed like the show wanted to both have this relationship be strictly transactional but also have it be this thing that fundamental changes both their lives. That seemed incongruent to me… both those things can’t be true.
To your point about Farrah, Shelli… based of what she says to Coach (“you don’t even know that I like pussy just as much as you. Hell, maybe even more!”), it’s not hard to imagine her having these quiet lesbian affairs throughout her marriage. But, for this — for the Mercedes Experience — she breaks free from a mask she’s been wearing for 19 years? She leaves her husband and the security of his money, to embrace happiness… over a transaction? Over a fuck? That strains credulity to me. I think she found in Mercedes someone who saw her and her talent and who showed her what strength looked like. I don’t think that evolves into a lifetime love affair or anything like that but it was meaningful and I was disappointed in the show for treating it like it wasn’t.
Carmen: I genuinely wanted to love Mercedes and Farrah, but I couldn’t. I think that Shelli brings up some very important points from Farrah’s point of view — about coming breaking away from Black compulsory heterosexuality late in life. And I agree with Natalie that it wasn’t all about the money for Mercedes. But this was my breaking point, and the show never repaired it: PAY SEX WORKERS FOR THEIR WORK!!
When the coach realizes that Farrah and Mercedes have had a tryst together — he refuses to pay Mercedes for their previously contracted time as a threesome. Mercedes signed an NDA and everything. And because he got his feelings hurt, he literally took her 40 stacks, cash, off the table in front of her! And Farrah just… let him do it? And gave Mercedes “I’m sorry” eyes? Absolutely not. Mercedes should have sued. If you don’t pay sex workers for their work, that is an assault as far as I’m concerned. Do not pass go.
I do think the show tried to clear up their mess in the finale, when Farrah sells artwork she made based on Mercedes’ likeness and pays her for the rights. But confusingly, Farrah goes out of her way to say that it’s not the money she’s owed from coach?? Ok great, so then Mercedes is still out her original 40 grand? You said this woman changed your life? Then show respect. Pay! Her!
Brandee Evans as Mercedes Woodbine
A.Tony: Listen, damn near anything Mercedes wants to do, I am in full support of. Her leaning into some Sapphic situations? YES, MORE PLEASE. When they were holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes through Mercedes’ orgasm, after Farrah moved her husband out the way ’cause he wasn’t doing it right? I AM HERE FOR IT.
To be quite honest, I really didn’t think we’d get more than one queer character/storyline this entire series, so they were already exceeding my expectations. I’m really glad that there are multiple queer people in this show because it feels reflective of the Black South *I* know, and it is just really good.
Natalie: That’s such a good point, A. Tony. So often, shows only tells one type of queer story at a time — a gay or lesbian relationship, most often — and there’s no thought about community, but P-Valley builds that in season two. In addition to Clifford, Murda, Farrah and Mercedes, you’ve got Clifford’s queer friends — her Ace Boon Coons — who show up to celebrate Clifford’s birthday. It looks like one of her ABCs, Nineveh, is going to play a bigger role in future episodes… as she agrees to be part of Roulette’s stable at the end of the season.
Carmen: There’s a scene in the finale where Clifford, Murda, and Mercedes are all holding each other in the Pynk’s locker room and my heart leapt. This is my chosen queer family, I’m moving in.
There’s an episode of P-Valley this season (“Demethrius”) that features two queer sex scenes: the first, between Farrah and Mercedes, two feminine cis black women; the second between Lil’ Murda and Big Teak, two straight-passing cis black men. After that episode aired… whew, the homophobia jumped out… social media was just awash in it. How did you process that response, just as someone who has to exist in this world as a black queer person?
Shelli: The hold homophobia has on niggas is tight and probably not letting go anytime soon, lol.
I’m gonna guess that most cishet Black men who watch the show do so in the hopes of seeing the girlies strip and bounce and shake ass. Those of them who are watching it with their straight partners may be doing so out of obligation and didn’t think that the storylines would go where they have.
J. Alphonse Nicholson as Lil’ Murda and John Clarence Stewart as Thaddeus Wilks / Big Teak
They were probably weirded out by Uncle Clifford, but because she wasn’t doing anything “very gay” they tolerated it. And they had no issue with Mercedes and Farrah fucking because cishet Black men often think queer women are being sexual or romantic with each other for their pleasure and approval. BUT, when they saw men who probably looked like themselves or reminded them of their friends, fucking? That was too damn far and they had to take to the Twitter streets and meet up at the intersection of Loud and Wrong.
Same with a lot of cishet Black women who watch. They love to kiki with their gay male friends and love to be hit on by their dyke friends and called pretty by their femme friends. They love Uncle Clifford because they see her in the ways they see those same friends they have, as a spectacle. People who they don’t actually see as a real humans with real feelings and real lives. So I was also unsurprised when they hopped online to talk about how disgusting it was or how shows like this are adding to the erasure of “real Black men.”
EYE WAS NOT SURPRISED BY ANY OF THOSE THOTS AND OPINIONS, LOL.
A.Tony: I hadn’t caught up to P-Valley when this happened, so thankfully, most of the stuff kinda passed over my head as regular, shmegular homophobia within the black community. I got through it as usual: going to my group chat and being gayer in there than I was the day before in like some kind of lil resistance. I mean, it’s not little, it is often the difference between my survival and the absence of it, but yeah. Afterwards, when I’d caught up and remembered most of what had been said, it still didn’t really register ’cause like, that’s my family and what I grew up with so. I don’t know what to say beyond that.
Natalie: Unfortunately the hate hasn’t stopped. The rapper Plies dropped a video earlier this week about this — I guess he waited for the entire season to drop and then binged it — and, while it’s not surprising, the shit’s just so disheartening. While the bulk of the comments weren’t about the two women… there’s still a sense that if either of those women weren’t sufficiently femme, they’d be cast out as well… I’d be cast out.. and my friends would be cast out too.
It’s easy to convince yourself sometimes that we’re further along towards equality than we actually are — especially when you’re in community so often — but then something like this happens and snatches you right back to reality. Like, you can’t even revel in the value of this representation, without a reminder of the world’s bigotry. It’s just fuckin’ disheartening.
Shelli: I didn’t process it at all lol, because those people don’t matter to me and their opinions are not ones I care about. I am no longer in the game of helping homophobic, transphobic, and non-binaryphobic (is that a word?) straight, conservative (even though they won’t admit it) Black people change their ways. That is no longer my ministry. So while it saddens me sometimes, it’s not up to me as a Black queer dyke lesbian to teach them and use my platform as a writer to write think pieces that will inspire them to change. There are enough of those out in the world, there is enough information for them to teach themselves and instead what I will do is watch moments like this in pop culture — where two nigga ass niggas — kiss, softly touch, pleasure and escape into each other.
This season of P-Valley dealt with so many different issues: Covid, police brutality, Big Teak’s mental health, the abuse Keyshawn deals with (both from Rome and Derrick), Terricka’s pregnancy, the colorism that Roulette experiences, just to name a few. Which story resonated the most with you and why?
Natalie: When we close the books on this year in queer television, P-Valley will undoubtedly rank among my favorites. It’ll rank among the best of 2022 not because it told one affecting story… but because it told so many, in smart and compelling ways. The writing was brilliant and deserves so much recognition. And what’s doubly miraculous about it is that the show never seemed overstuffed or like it was doing too much… it was all just real shit people go through…
Carmen: That part.
Shelli: For me, the story that hit hardest was probably the colorism, because again, every time I bring it up there is a chance I get called a bitter or hatin’ ass Black woman. Colorism against dark skinned Black women exists but also some light-skinned people are cool. BOTH OF THESE THINGS CAN BE TRUE, LOL. I really don’t wanna dive into it anymore, but I will say that Roulette is my favorite character on the show, and Gail Bean has always been a phenomenal actress.
John Clarence Stewart as Big Teak and J. Alphonse Nicholson as Lil’ Murda
A. Tony: Big Teak and Keyshawn got me in my chest, man.
Big Teak’s face when he sees the postcard Murda prepared for Uncle Clifford and he says, “you ain’t never write me no postcards.” There’s a lot that can be said (and has been said by others more knowledgeable about it than me) about feeling left behind due to incarceration, due to mental illness (this one I get). Then to see that walk hand in hand with a love that cannot exist in the same way it did before — a love that just could not grow into something else because one of the lovers was just left behind — just really kind of messed me up.
I get Big Teak’s reasoning on a lot of things a lot more than I’m comfortable with acknowledging. And even though I want the people I love to live forever, I felt relief for Big Teak in that car. At least the last thing he saw and knew was that he was loved. There’s such an emphasis on “getting better,” especially within the Black community — if they acknowledge that you’re not doing well at all — that just isn’t the story for a lot of us. The world is cruel, especially to Black queer people, people who’re mentally ill, people who’ve been incarcerated and especially those who live at those intersections. But our collective suicide prevention practice is to not acknowledge that and push people forward in spite of it.
Our attempts at prevention are rooted in our own fear of mortality. We avoid looking too deep, fearing that we may see ourselves in that the suicidal person… after all, any person can run out of options at any time. It’s not always an inherent failure on being unable to keep people alive, there are systemic barriers that keep us from being able to show up in community the way we want to, the way our people need. To see Big Teak say, “no, this is too much” and just end it and Murda knows that there was nothing else he could do to help him, except just, be with him, I think says a lot not just about how we need community in both the difficult places in life, but as we get to our ends, and do whatever it is we do on the other side. I don’t know. I’ve struggled with passive ideation since I was a kid, and this doesn’t make me want to do anything, but it offers a kind of, “I see you” in a way I can’t explain. To have someone not shame you for giving into the things that have weighed you down, to have someone still sit in that car with you, anyways: it’s a story I’ve never seen for my people and it’s a story I need.
Natalie: As someone who’s dealt with ideation myself (and written about it) and who also understood Teak’s mindset in that car more than I’d care to admit… I really appreciate you being vulnerable and sharing that.
Shannon Thornton as Keyshawn Harris
A. Tony: Keyshawn messes me up because — Lord, have mercy! With her, everywhere she turns, it’s abuse: a step-mother at home who hated her and kids at school who hated her, knowing what her father probably did to her step-sister, domestic and sexual abuse not just from her husband but other men she trusted. The abuse is everywhere and it feels like she’s stuck… even more so after the bullshit Derrick pulled in the season finale.
It’s hard watching Keyshawn’s story because it’s true. Being stuck, for Black women, especially in abuse, is not a new thing. The people who love you, trying to get you out, but not knowing the extent in which your abuser will work to keep you, it is not a new thing. I don’t know a Black woman or Black queer person who hasn’t been abused and though some get community support, it’s so hard to be able to escape in a way that allow you and your loved ones to live.
I worry, though, that Keyshawn will turn into a meme or a joke like Tina in What’s Love Got To Do With It. I’m already seeing Black women saying they wouldn’t let someone beat their asses like that — an assertion that’s rooted in fear that they’d respond exactly like Keyshawn if they were in the same situation — and it’s dangerous for this cycle to go on.
Keyshawn’s story fucks me up because all it shows is that we do not protect Black girls and then people get mad at her for not knowing how to protect herself when she becomes a woman. I know Keyshawn grew up, but all I see is the high schooler who molded herself into whatever she needed to be to be loved by Derrick, to be loved by a lot of people who quite frankly do not deserve her, and after spending so long doing that, how do you learn to be anything else?
I’ve heard some people claim that too much of this is for shock value, but I can’t quite agree. So many of Black women’s stories are ignored and by the time people pay attention, it’s too late. I think, the constant tensing of your shoulders whenever Keyshawn comes on screen, the measured breaths when Derrick is in the room, the keeping your eyes on all exits at all times, is the entire point. Black women, Black queer people live in this way all the time and I think it is our responsibility not to look away (and I mean this solely for people who have the space to, not for anyone to re-traumatize themselves).
Gail Bean as Roulette and Psalms Salazar as Whisper
You’re heading to the Pynk with a couple stacks in your pocket: who are you inviting to the Paradise Room?
Shelli: ROU—FUCKIN—LETTE and she MUST chew gum the entire time.
Carmen: Absolutely Roulette. No question.
A.Tony: Whisper, I have no idea what she’s doing half the time and I am intrigued as fuck by her.
Natalie: I hope, in this imaginary scenario, I made it to the club before Mercedes hung up her floss… ’cause she would absolutely get all my money.
Favorite piece of wisdom from Uncle Clifford and her Rules?
Shelli: Rule #2 — “Always Know Where The Exit in This Bitch is, Cause You Never Know When You Gotsta Turn a Window Into a Door.” I always know where the exits are in every place I am in. I have a mother who is from Detroit and raised by her southern mother and when I first started going out partying every time I left the house she would say “Dance near the exits ‘cos niggas is crazy and you never know when you need to leave.”
A.Tony: I had to look them up, and I found this one — which was made up by the fans, the Pynk Posse, and is not officially from the show. But I loved it, so I wanted to share it! — Rule #94: “You Can’t Keep Getting Mad at Folks for Sucking the Life Outta You When You Keep Giving Them the Straw.”
Natalie: She said it in the season finale: Uncle Clifford Rule #88: “Don’t Ever Forget: Just ‘Cause a Bitch Good at Keepin’ the Peace Don’t Mean She Ain’t Good at Wagin’ War.” I like to stay quiet and keep to myself a lot, and people like to make all types of assumptions of what I can and can’t do.
Better Made for TV rapper/rappers: Lil’ Murda or KaMillion and Aida from Rap Shit?
Shelli: I’m sorry but KaMillion and Aida HAVE YOU HEARD SEDUCE AND SCHEME?!
A.Tony: I’m sorry I don’t pit bad bitches against each other, I cannot answer at this time.
Natalie: I’ve got to represent my home state — J. Alphonse Nicholson is from North Carolina (#EaglePride) — and say, “it’s Murda!” Besides, I’ve had “When I Get Out” and “Get It On The Floor” on constant rotation.
Megan Thee Stallion as Tina Snow (who is also Megan Thee Stallion)
This season gave us guest appearances from Big Freedia and Meg Thee Stallion. Who’s your must have guest for season 3 of P-Valley?
Shelli: Saucy Santana.
A.Tony: This fits nothing, please know I’m aware, but please imagine Beyoncé’s “Alien Superstar” playing while Janelle Monáe as Cyndi Mayweather just descends from the ceiling. Whisper would be really into that shit and I just want to know more.
Is Autumn Knight Lakeisha Hailey Colton the Jenny Schechter of P-Valley?
Shelli: Lol, HELP, but yes.
Carmen: THE SCREAM I JUST SCREAMED
Natalie: Abso-fuckin-lutely.
A.Tony: I don’t even know Jenny but I know this is true, except I guess that Hailey lives? Jenny doesn’t make it.. right?
No Filter: Simply the Betts! Happy First Anniversary to Niecy Nash, Jessica Betts, and the Greatest Day of Our Gay Lives
Welcome to No Filter! This is the place where I fill you in on all the celesbian gossip from Instagram!
This week, though, something more momentous than usual has happened. Today, well yesterday when you read this, is the one year anniversary of when Niecy Nash and Jessica Betts announced the to the world that they had wed on August 29th, 2020. It was a day that shook all of us to our core — a previously assumed heterosexual actress dramatically announcing that she was not straight via stunning wedding photos??? I was beside myself.
https://twitter.com/carmencitaloves/status/1300527285339131911
And because Niecy Nash-Betts possesses even less chill than I do, her IG has been a celebration of this momentous day in history for a solid week. If there is anything in the world I love more than celebrities being extra, it’s celebrities being extra for extremely gay reasons.
Thus, I present to you a special edition of No Filter: Simply The Betts! (the crowd goes wild)
A week ago, we began loading. Note the contented, even slightly smug look in Niecy’s eye. Incredible.
Frankly this caption says it better than I ever could. “In fittings because we fit!” Okay!
Would it surprise you to know that they started celebrating their anniversary early? No, of course it wouldn’t!
This is not explicitly about the anniversary but let’s be honest, why else would one be heading into a new week with such a pep in their step? Exactly!!!
Here, the anniversary vibes are still loading, but never fear! The twosome has clearly begun to celebrate, because, well, why the hell not!
It is very possible that this image will go down as simply my favorite? Flim-flamingos!!!! Actual live ones! Posing amongst them! This is so extra!!! I love it!
A carousel of scuba diving videos! Unexpected, adorable, adventurous! What can’t they do?
Now you might think, this is clearly the anniversary post! And you would be dead wrong! This is the day before, the countdown lives!
Now this is an anniversary post! A blonde wig moment, because why the hell not! An animated gif sticker that…. I actually have no idea how she managed to do that on a grid post?? My guess is screen recorded the sticker on top of the still image? Innovation in the IG space!
Oh, I bet you thought we was finished! HA! The Betts are still living their anniversary life, and we are living along with them!
That’s right, they got dramatic oceanside photos to take and videos to make glitter! This is not a drill!
Real talk the video of Niecy crying with joy in her No Fake Orgasms shirt as she looks at the book of their wedding photos made my heart grow two sizes. Simply The Betts indeed.
It’s Time to Talk about It, “Never Have I Ever” Has a Race Problem
Never Have I Ever has returned to Netflix with a new season, and, much to my surprise, the series improves substantially in season two. It’s clear that Mindy Kaling and the show’s creative team took much of the criticism about the first season to heart, re-examining and removing some of the most offensive elements and adding much-needed depth to many of the characters. But while the season pulls off some incredibly touching and thoughtful stories, it continues to badly mishandle the issue of race.
Season two of NHIE portrays Indian communities with much more nuance than season one, but it takes some time to get there. It starts by making some of the same mistakes as its predecessor: barely two minutes into episode one, Nalini shares an instance of her “emotional exuberance” when she once hugged a stranger after hearing about a discount on a damaged printer. It’s an unnecessary moment, dripping with stereotypes about Indians being cheap and emotionally detached.
Her visit to Chennai is similarly full of racist presentations of India: for instance, the ridiculous notion of winning favors with family through Trader Joe’s snacks and the dig about losing power don’t square with Nalini’s wealthy family. As with season one’s depiction of Indian community, the writers scatter kernels of truth here and there, but they’re unexamined and not properly fleshed out: taking just one example, Nalini’s family probably would have servants — but also, so would the ostensibly middle-class Nirmala. However, as the season progresses, the show thankfully moves away from making sweeping statements about Indians (that are pretty much always offensive) and focuses on developing the characters instead.
Nalini, in particular, undergoes a complete transformation between the two seasons. Throughout season one, Nalini was the type of emotionally abusive Indian parent who only ever berated her child. In season two, she shows much more willingness to see things from Devi’s perspective right from the start. Multiple times in the first few episodes, Nalini lets Devi off the hook without any real punishment or lecture for breaking the rules. I’m not convinced that the type of parent Nalini was in season one changes so easily or quickly into one who can admit her own faults or when her daughter is in the right. Honestly, though, I think this shift is for the better because the show is actually able to develop a storyline of Nalini’s own, as we learn more about her office, see her interact with her professional colleagues and grapple with the challenges of being a single parent.
Kamala’s arranged marriage storyline also gets a much needed reckoning. The show had previously presented arranged marriage in a shallow way by having Kamala dump her East Asian boyfriend to date Prashant, the man her family was arranging her marriage with, because he turned out to be hot. But in season two, Kamala starts to reconsider her relationship with Prashant as he continuously downplays the rampant misogyny at her research lab. The problems she faces at the lab and what that tells her about Prashant become the main tensions of Kamala’s story in season two, offering a thoughtful re-examination of the sexist expectations placed on Asian women in both American and Indian culture.
Never Have I Ever also broadens its representation of Indian community with the addition of Devi’s classmate Aneesa in episode four. The writers make a point of stating Aneesa is Muslim when she’s introduced in class; other than that, her religion is mentioned only one time when she shares with Devi and her friends how she struggled to fit in with the cool kids at her previous school as the only Muslim brown girl. These references feel pointed: it’s clear that Aneesa was added as a specifically Muslim character to correct NHIE’s poor handling of Indian Muslims in season one, which had no Muslim characters at all and portrayed the latent Islamophobia in Hindu communities without actually calling it out as a problem. But what would it look like for Aneesa’s religion to be more fully integrated into her character? Honestly, I don’t know, because I can’t speak to the experience of being Indian Muslim and American. The way NHIE handles it currently definitely feels tokenizing, though.
This question of how to incorporate racial, ethnic and religious identities of non-white and non-Christian characters into their stories is one that Never Have I Ever has to tackle repeatedly because of its diverse cast. In some ways, it’s hard for me to not hold this show to a double standard because plenty of American media that centers white characters fails to address the racial identities of side characters in any kind of convincing way. But seeing Devi as both clearly Indian and clearly Hindu (even when the show does this poorly) makes the gaps in the other characters’ identities stand out even more.
In season one, Devi’s best friends Fabiola and Eleanor were two of the most obvious examples of nonwhite characters whose racial identities are completely ignored. In season two, we briefly see Eleanor perform with her Chinese acapella group; much like the references to Aneesa’s being Muslim, it feels a little like a token. Fabiola’s Afro-Latina identity, however, remains unacknowledged, and, in the context of Fabiola’s season-two story, this becomes a glaring omission.
Out of the closet and dating Eve, Fabiola is engaging more with queer community, but she’s struggling to fit in. Eve and her friends casually reference queer media and celebrities all the time, leaving Fabiola lost asking questions like, “What is a Vilanelle?” and wondering if King Princess is a play. Eve’s friends don’t hide their dismay at Fabiola’s ignorance. Eve herself is the embodiment of every woke white lesbian trope you can think of: she’s a leather-jacket-wearing vegan, her leftwing political views are buffoonishly on display constantly and pretty much the only thing she and her friends talk about is white queer culture. But in the story that unfolds, Eve also represents The Queer Community that Fabiola feels like she doesn’t have a place in.
Much like season one, what NHIE portrays as The Queer Community is limited to white queer community, and the addition of Eve’s friend Sasha as the only other queer character of color makes that even worse. Played by none other than Niecy Nash’s daughter Donielle Mikel Nash, even the very cool, very queer Sasha never once mentions a single Black queer celebrity. It’s hard not to watch season two without seeing the substantial disconnect between the diverse cast of queer and trans actresses (including Lee Rodriguez as Fabiola, Jasmine Davis as the nurse in Nalini’s office, Alexandra Billings as the school’s college counselor and Niecy Nash herself as Devi’s therapist) and the show’s entirely white and cis depiction of queer culture.
In many ways, I can relate to Fabiola’s struggles. Before I started writing at Autostraddle, I had peripherally heard of The L Word but had no idea how iconic it was and certainly couldn’t tell you anything about the show beyond, as Fabiola says, “the ‘L’ stands for lesbian.” So I understand how it feels to realize you’re gay and then realize that there’s an entire culture and history that seemingly everyone assumes you also must be immersed in simply by virtue of being gay. I’ve also seen how knowledge of these cultural markers can be used as a shorthand measure of a person’s queerness, even within the queer community. And while some of my experience has been tied to having different interests (for instance, I’ll never be into bar culture or astrology), most of it is about race.
With Fabiola’s story in season two, Never Have I Ever is putting a spotlight on the narrowness of mainstream lesbian culture, but the show fails to address how race factors into that narrowness. NHIE repeatedly shows Fabiola being alienated by her queer peers because she’s too nerdy and not cool enough, and the person constantly driving that point home is Sasha. The show erases the racial identities of its two Black queer characters and yet uses them to tell a story about exclusion. This story plays out in a predominantly white space and participates in the fallacy of whiteness as the unstated default culture in a post-racial world. So a story that, on its face, feels somewhat relatable to me as a queer person of color instead ends up denying the existence of racism as part of the experiences of queer people of color.
Ultimately, Fabiola’s white classmate Jonah encourages Fabiola to be herself (fulfilling the trope of the gay fairy godmother — the writers also fail to give Jonah’s character real depth, though they toned down some of his stereotypical flamboyance). The crux of Jonah’s motivational speech involves comparing Fabiola’s attempts to fit in with the queer community around her, to being in the closet. If Fabiola’s struggles over the course of the season had even peripherally involved her racial identity, I would have had no problem with this comparison. As a queer South Asian woman, I often think about the similarities and also overlaps in how racism, sexism and homophobia have shaped my life. But what should have been a profound moment fell completely flat because the very real issue of the othering of people of color in queer spaces has been completely side stepped. It’s hard not to feel like Never Have I Ever has inadvertently elevated “making fun of nerds” to the level of systemic oppression, instead.
Fabiola’s story tapped into a real dynamic in queer communities, but the show couldn’t bring itself to actually identify the problem for what it truly is: racism. And this brings to light an issue with NHIE as a whole. Like so much mainstream media, Never Have I Ever flirts with the existence of racism but doesn’t want to seriously confront it.
This even applies to the show’s South Asian characters. We see Devi experience the occasional microaggression but, beyond embodying the model minority, systemic racism isn’t something she really has to deal with: her unpopularity at school is chalked up to the excesses of her own actions, instead. (John McEnroe, narrating Devi’s internal monologue, actually says this explicitly when Aneesa is introduced: “[Devi] had always assumed her unpopularity was because of racism, but this new kid was proving that Devi might just be objectively lame.”) Racism is stated as the reason why Aneesa had previously developed an eating disorder, but the show treats the racism as a problem of Aneesa’s past, left behind at her old school. Instead, as Aneesa’s mother points out, the only other Indian girl at the school is the one to spread a rumor about her (in some ways echoing the ongoing dynamic between Sasha and Fabiola) and effectively denies the existence of race-based bullying.
The issues in Kamala’s research lab are also more about gender than race. Kamala makes one passing reference to having been forced by her boss to play a woman kidnapped by a maharaja in multiple LARPs, but her colleagues don’t say they can’t understand her accent and her boss doesn’t allege that her “poor” writing skills are the reason why she was left off the journal publication. The fact that what Kamala’s going through is not about race is further reinforced by the fact that Prashant clearly can’t relate to her experience at all.
The show’s non-South Asian and non-white characters don’t even get the microaggressions; for them, racism is a historical artifact. I was touched by Paxton’s storyline of connecting with his grandfather and learning about his Japanese family’s history of internment in the U.S. for a school project. But, Paxton also doesn’t have to navigate racism in the day-to-day. There are a couple of passing references to the erasure of his biracial identity, but the larger story about people failing to see his interiority is that his family and friends assume he’s not studious. Once again, the show is side-stepping race.
The only time the topic of anti-Blackness is skirted is when Fabiola’s mother shares that she and Fabiola’s father were the first queen and king of color of their high school dance. While I appreciated that this became the impetus for Fabiola and Eve nominating themselves to be the high school’s royal couple at this year’s dance, I was also disturbed by the implication that racism against Black and Latinx people is squarely a thing of the past. And, this is yet another instance where the interplay between racial and queer identities within queer community and culture is completely white washed.
I don’t believe that every story about people of color has to be about our traumas. If Never Have I Ever wanted to center positive stories about people of color, I could understand that. In some ways, it pulls this off most successfully with Nalini’s storyline, which was one of my favorites in season two. The show glosses over many things, like the anti-Blackness that is persistent in far too many Indian communities and Nirmala’s easy acceptance of Nalini dating (and dating a non-Indian man at that), but we also get the rare joy of seeing two non-white characters of different backgrounds connect with each other over their shared experiences and not be bogged down by racism. (Arguably, though, Dr. Jackson’s Black identity is also nonexistent.)
But in so many of the other plot lines, Never Have I Ever walks right up to the line of racism and then makes the story about something else. It makes for an unsettling viewing experience as a person of color. All of these characters of color are trying to find their place and come into their identities in ways that really deeply resonate with me. And then that connection slips away because, in the real world, these struggles would be very clearly related to the characters’ racial identities, but the show insists that what’s happening is really not about race — a claim countless white people have made in my life. I do recognize the feat of representation that NHIE is pulling off, but it’s hard to watch a show that’s so much about race — that clearly wants to engage with racism — repeatedly undermine the reality of structural racism, instead.
Somebody Loves You Baby: When Patti LaBelle Taught Me Black Femme Desire
Feature image by Joe McNally/Getty Images
I knew I was gay from the small, innocuous moments in my childhood. There was no big, life-changing event like seeing deviant homosexuals on television, the way conservatives imagine children become gay. For the most part, I watched music videos featuring video vixens and would sweat through them, hoping no one noticed the way I was looking at these women with such intent and starvation.
I went to war with my emotions for women. I denied them, examined and scrutinized them, pretended that I had boy crushes in an attempt to convince myself that I was “normal.” I would sit with my headphones on, music blaring through my walkman, and contemplate a life with the girls in my classroom, or teachers I had crushes on. In my fantasies, if I wasn’t in a relationship with women, I was alone.
I would sit with my head pressed against the glass as my mother drove us to church, a place where I knew there was talk of hell and damnation. I don’t remember specific sermons about the evils of homosexuality the way some of my friends experienced in church, but I do remember that being a central tenant of the Christianity I was raised in. I listened to music that was angsty and defiant, what my parents would call “devil” or “white people music.” It was one of the only styles of music I felt encapsulated the turbulent emotions within me.
There was one artist who also was the soundtrack to this time in my life. One woman whose voice would often make my chest swell, my heart beat faster, and threaten my eyes with tears. That woman was Patti LaBelle.
Patti LaBelle rose to fame in the 1960s as a part of the group Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. They later changed their name to the simple LaBelle with Patti LaBelle as the lead singer. The group was composed of Patti, Nona Hendryx, Sarah Dash, and Cindy Birdsong. If you’re unfamiliar with LaBelle as a group, you may have heard their 1974 hit “Lady Marmalade,” either performed by the group themselves or one of the covers of the song like the 2001 cover with Christina Aguilera, Pink, Lil Kim, and Mya. LaBelle was a funk force and broke records as an act together, but split in 1976 following the release of Chameleon.
All of the singers in LaBelle were talented, but Patti’s voice, in particular, was one that stood out for its strength and range. Patti LaBelle’s self-titled debut album left little to be doubted about her talent and staying power. Songs like “Joy to Have Your Love” and “You Are My Friend” cemented her as a talent to keep watching. Over her decades-long career, Patti has had many hits, with 18 studio albums, 8 compilation albums, and 3 live albums. Her prolific discography includes Christmas and gospel albums in turn with her soul and R&B albums. Winner in You is one of my favorite Patti albums and includes “Kiss Away the Pain,” a song I listened to on repeat during the formative years in my life.
I was born in 1992, so my experience with Patti LaBelle’s music was from her solo 80’s era, and I was introduced to her music by my mother. My mother was the third person I came out to. After coming out to my friends Kate and Shanai, I went to my mother to tell her my big secret. I remember kneeling down beside her as she lay in bed, the way we would before bed when we prayed together; I put it as simply as I could, “Mom, I like girls.”
My mother loved Patti LaBelle, if not more than I do then equally. On our car rides to the grocery store or to my brother’s house, it wasn’t uncommon for Patti’s voice to be heard booming through the speakers. I grew up on R&B from that era and despite my impulse to rebel and listen to rock and metal, I found myself still clinging to vocal divas like Patti LaBelle, Diana Ross, or Chaka Khan. What I sought in the music I listened to was passion, something that matched the overwhelming force of despair and yearning I felt as a child. I often felt like the emotions I felt were much bigger than my age and my body. As I listened to Patti, I felt an equilibrium between the bigness within me and outside of my body.
My mother had a very common reaction to my coming out, she said girls my age often went through the crisis of attraction to their friends and other girls. She assured me I would grow out of it in those days after I came out to her. Later, becoming curious, she would ask me how I knew and who I was attracted to. She once asked me what two girls did together. At 12, I wasn’t exactly sure and told her as much. I didn’t tell her that I had seen two women having sex on TV the year previous, I wanted to maintain the veneer of perfect daughter and not sully her image of me. When she wasn’t questioning me, we were silently listening to Patti together, the both of us, I’d imagine, singing along to all the lyrics but only in our heads.
Patti LaBelle taught me about desire in those days, what made you want to cling to a person you loved or what made you grovel when the relationship ended. I think of course of “Kiss Away the Pain,” “On My Own,” “Somebody Loves You Baby,” “If Only You Knew,” and “Love, Need, and Want You.” Many of these ballads were about falling and staying in love, or the end of a romantic relationship. Listening to this music is probably why I’m a poet now, why I used to write about falling in love before I had ever even experienced it. Of course I had crushed on girls, especially the ones that I had considered friends. Love songs like Patti’s were the soundtrack to those minor crushes that I fancied into being the big loves of my life.
In “If Only You Knew,” the chorus goes “if only you knew, how much I do, do love you.” sung by Patti in her characteristic smooth soprano. Not one to be outdone, in the song, she can go from the bottom to the top of her range. The climax of the song comes in around 3:49 where Patti reaches the highest she’s gone in the song, singing “if I love you, you don’t know, you don’t know how much I need you.” It’s hard to describe the vocal performance that takes place here, the passion and talent it takes to sit at this register, the way the lyrics hit you even more because of the way they are sung with such power. Patti LaBelle sings like her very heart depends on it, like the listener’s heart is dependent on it. I understand how old heads say that this era of real singers has gone. It’s not that there aren’t great singers anymore, but the way singers like Patti care for and nurture their talent is hard to come by.
Patti’s hit duet with vocal powerhouse Michael McDonald, “On My Own,” is probably one of her most recognizable songs. The iconic lyrics sung by McDonald: “Now I know what loving you cost, now we’re up to talking divorce and we weren’t even married.” The song was written by Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager, but there’s something so lesbian about talking divorce when you aren’t even legally married to each other.
Though many of the songs performed by Patti LaBelle are classically woman to man, as a lesbian I can see my experiences with love and romance reflected in them in ways that I don’t in other similar songs. The kind of love described in these songs feels bigger than sexuality, it’s the stuff you write poems about. It’s grand, heart-stopping love that is almost all-encompassing. Patti LaBelle also hits another note for me — especially as a femme — her performance of feminity is almost outlandish, defying a look that catered to the male gaze. In the ’70s and ’80s, she was known for performing with lavish and creative hairstyles piled to the top of her head. She wore sequin gowns and dresses with robust shoulders and ample cleavage. Her makeup was dark and sharp, highlighting her beautiful features. It’s not that men didn’t find Patti LaBelle attractive, if you’ve watched any of her live performances you can see them sweat and fall at her knees, it’s that her fashion choices, her style made it seem like she didn’t care if they did. Whether decked out in feathers or pearls, she dressed to please herself.
Growing up, I did have an older sister who was also black, but my mother was white and most of the family I grew up knowing was white. In that sense, I didn’t have many black women role models to look up to. I instead looked up to the R&B, disco, and soul divas I listened to. I marveled at their beauty and fashion in a way that was informed by my lesbianism. I wanted to sparkle and shine the way they did, I also felt a desire for them. The way I perform femininity now and the women I am attracted to is informed by this aesthetic. I will fall on my knees for a black femme wearing a bold lip and something that highlights her curves and her nails perfectly done. I think about women like Patti, Diana Ross, and Donna Summer who defined a generation’s fashion and how they have impacted my identity as a femme, though they themselves were, as far as we know, straight women.
I’ve never seen Patti LaBelle perform live, though she has been to my city a few times, but I’ve watched many of the performances available on YouTube. Watching Patti perform live is a treat in itself. Her fierce femininity and attitude come across so well in that realm. She’s been known to kick off her shoes as she dances across the stage, or lie down on it as her voice climbs and wails. One of my favorite live performances of hers can be heard on the Essential Patti LaBelle album, it’s a live recording of her cover of “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” originally recorded by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes (which was the starting point for one of my other singers, Teddy Pendergrass). The song was actually originally written for LaBelle, but they didn’t record it, so it was passed on to the Blue Notes.
My favorite part of this performance is how you can hear the audience yell, “tell em bout it Patti!” and other shouts of encouragement before and during her performance. These moments are accompanied by Patti’s unscripted aside to the audience where she stops to muse for a little bit with them in the middle of the song.
She says during this intermission: “you can break your back and you can break your legs and you can break your face. Trying to make these people know you in life but somehow they just don’t want to try to. So you say to yourself ‘was it something I said, was it something I done, was it the way I look, was it the way my clothes come unfastened.’ And if that turns you off baby you ain’t worth me anyway.”
I wish I had heard these words as a younger lesbian, as someone who ran from woman to woman hoping they would see and accept me, only to be rejected or treated poorly. I always thought there was something inherently wrong with me, not that there was just a lack of chemistry or respect coming from that other woman’s end. I always defaulted to believing I was the problem.
These lines before Patti explodes into singing once again and carries into the end of the song. Her voice slowly fades off stage until we only hear the background singers singing “if you don’t know me by now, you will never never never know me.”
Patti LaBelle makes my heart swell. I can feel the blood rushing in my ears, the heat rising in my cheeks, the feeling of intense excitement almost like the feeling of falling in love.
Patti’s live performance of “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” is only rivaled by her performance of LaBelle’s hit, “Isn’t It a Shame” live during her 1985 Rainbow Tour. Her expressiveness and miming as she sings “you’ve got to laugh before you cry”, followed by the characteristic Patti move of flapping her hands as if she were a bird. At one point she kicks off her shoes and prances across the stage, leaping and ascending before she falls to the floor where she rolls along while singing. She rises onto her knees in her all-white outfit, her hair proud and curly, her shoulder pads sparkling; the performance is absolutely dazzling.
Patti has a knack for singing in a way that makes you feel like the song is just for you. No song embodies that more for me than “Somebody Loves You Baby.” When I listen to that song, I feel love and feel loved. I think of my mother when I hear that song, a woman I love despite not speaking to her, a person who has hurt me and who I have hurt. Love is not an easy thing, it is its own animal.
After the song’s gentle teasing passes, Patti exclaims, “it’s me,” the somebody who loves you. I think of the women I have loved despite the ways we have hurt each other and remember this. Love itself is not pain, but it does have its trials. While there are trials in love, there is no substitute for it, for the feeling of heart touching another heart and exploding at that contact. It is in that contact that Patti’s music rests for me, the turbulent intimacy of feeling another. I learn from and grow into that space as I continue to love myself and others, for there is no greater love affair than the one we embark on with the truest version of ourselves.
Whatever You Thought “We Are Lady Parts” Was Going to Be, This Ain’t It
A few seconds into We Are Lady Parts, you think you know what the show’s going to be: Amina Hussain (Anjana Vasan), a mousy, hijab-wearing PhD student, sitting across the room from her potential spouse and his parents. But just as the consternation starts to set in — ugh, another arranged marriage story — We Are Lady Parts starts to let you know what kind of show it’s actually going to be.
As Amina fantasizes about her potential spouse, her parents regale him and his parents with the most embarrassing details about Amina’s life: her premenstrual breakouts, her tendency to sweat and her nervy disposition that induces diarrhea and vomiting. And even after the potential suitor and his parents denounce Amina’s music as haram, her father persists in recounting a past performance… and then breaks out in song with Amina’s mother.
Whatever you thought We Are Lady Parts was going to be, this ain’t it. And just in case those first few minutes didn’t make it abundantly clear, the show cuts to band practice for the eponymous all-girl, all-Muslim punk band, and the band’s lead singer shouts, “I’m going to kill my sister!”
Lady Parts is unlike anything you’ve ever seen on television but it’s not without its contemporaries.
Created, written and directed by Nida Manzoor, We Are Lady Parts has the feminist sensibilities of Fleabag while echoing some of Chewing Gum‘s comedic ones. It has Ackley Bridge‘s foregrounding of multiple Muslim characters, so that none have to shoulder the burden of representing an entire community on their own. It parallels Derry Girls in its structure: showcasing five central characters but spending more time with some than others. But, while it shares some of its DNA with other British exports, We Are Lady Parts has its own voice… and it is loud, raucous and unapologetic.
The band channels the ethos of what riot grrrl began — Dickless, Le Tigre and Babes in Toyland all get a shout-out in the show’s first episode — and presents it all through the lens of a racially diverse group of Muslim women. The band’s is driven by its lead singer, Saira (Sarah Kameela Impey). The James Dean-eseque singer/guitar/Halal butcher channels her anger — which lives just beneath her steely veneer — into the Lady Parts’ aggressive sound. She’s supported by Bisma (Faith Omole) on bass and Ayesha (Juliette Motamed) on drums, while Momtaz (Lucie Shorthouse) acts as the band’s manager.
“We’re sisters who pray together, play together, speaking our truth to whoever can be asked to listen,” Saira explains.
Initially, Saira determines that the band’s sound is missing something: a lead guitarist. Lady Parts finds their unlikely new member when Amina shows up at their audition looking for the boy who handed her the band’s flyer. The band extends an offer: a short stint in Lady Parts in exchange for a date with the man she’s lusting after (who happens to be Ayesha’s brother). Amina’s so desperate to find a husband that she readily agrees, despite “a nervy disposition that induces diarrhea and vomiting.” Over six episodes — oh, those cursed abbreviated British seasons — the band begins to forge its identity and, in the process, the band members discover more about themselves.
For most of Lady Parts‘ first series, Ayesha doesn’t seem like the self-discovery type. She’s confident, navigating the world with an enviable swagger. She’s prickly and quick to insult but, in the quiet moments, her callousness recedes. Even as she laments how annoying Amina is — “you do get on my tits though,” Ayesha says — she works behind the scenes to ensure that her brother doesn’t break Amina’s heart. But it’s a band meeting with Zarina Zee, a social media influencer and the culture editor at Yellow Tongue Magazine, that stops Ayesha in her tracks.
Seconds before Ayesha spots Zarina, she’s outside mocking her — ignoring Momtaz’s pleas to behave — but when she sees her, she’s left slack-jawed. It doesn’t even matter that, in that first meeting, Zarina turns out to be every bit the caricature that Ayesha imagined. Suddenly, she’s every bit as romance obsessed as Amina, with Chavela Vargas’ “Paloma Negra” soundtracking her daydream. Her quick wit gives way to stammering. Gone is Ayesha’s confidence. Gone is her swagger. All that’s left is a girl with a crush.
Aside from some heartfelt teasing about her newfound softness, Ayesha’s feelings for are a non-issue within her Lady Parts’ bubble. But when Zarina questions Ayesha about how it feels to be a queer Muslim woman for the article she’s writing about the band, Ayesha clams up and asks Zarina not to go there. Sensing a story, Zarina pushes: first urging Ayesha to be a role model for queer kids, then reminding her that the essence of punk is not caring what people think. But this time — and for what, I imagine, is the first time — Ayesha doesn’t give in and Zarina allows it.
I longed learn more about Ayesha. Why does this ostentatious Muslimah whose style announces her before she can even say a word recoil at the idea of being out? Why is she every bit as desperate for love as Amina? What drives her to play this particular genre of music? And what’s with her weird fascination with Blink-182? We Are Lady Parts frustratingly, leaves a lot about Ayesha unanswered. If you watch Lady Parts solely looking to invest in the queer representation, you may well leave disappointed.
But the strength of We Are Lady Parts doesn’t just lie in its queer representation, it’s in the show’s ability to tell stories that resonate with queer audiences. Amina’s story is, on its face, a story about a woman obsessively searching for a husband. She’s a fixture on the apps, she creates elaborate fantasies about her would-be suitors. But beneath the surface, Amina’s story is one about being caught between expectations of who she should be and her true passions. She, quite literally, hides tributes to her passions in a closet.
Likewise, Saira’s story is, at its core, about finding your chosen family and allowing yourself to be loved by them, after experiencing hurt and disappointment at the hands of your biological family. At one point, she returns to her familial home to discover that it is not longer hers and that time’s passage has made strangers of them all. She glances upon the family pictures on the wall — trying to remember a moment when home felt like a place where she belonged — and her mother interrupts.
“You were my good girl,” she laments to her wayward child. “It was Ruksana that was always getting into trouble. You were my sweet, quiet girl. What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” Saira answers plainly. “I’m just not what you want.”
It’s such a brilliant juxtaposition to the night she spent at Amina’s. Saira enters Amina’s home timidly, expecting the same rejection that she’s experienced at her own home, but she doesn’t find it. Amina’s parents are welcoming. They embrace their daughter’s eccentricities, celebrate them even. Saira’s dumbfounded by the whole thing, as if she had never imagined a world in which supportive parents existed.
We Are Lady Parts‘ debut coincides with a broader conversation about the dearth of Muslim representation on the big screen but it obscures problems on the small screen, where representation still remains paltry, particularly for Muslim women and especially for queer Muslim women. That said, between Ayesha of Lady Parts, Adena El-Amin’s return on The Bold Type, Rahim’s emergence on Love, Victor, it’s been quite the summer for queer Muslims… and I hope that we’re at the start of a real sea change. Hopefully, the success of these shows will expand the types of stories that get told and our capacity to see ourselves in them.
The storylines of We Are Lady Parts echo stories that we’ve told about ourselves. They fill an often undervalued aspect of representation: offering a reminder that inside each of us, is all of us.
We Are Lady Parts is now available for streaming on multiple platforms: All 4 in the UK, Peacock in the US and Stack TV in Canada.
Queen Latifah Honors Eboni, Her Love, and for a Moment Heals the Black Queer Kids BET Never Loved
I’ve been waiting almost two days to write about Queen Latifah not only receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award at Sunday night’s BET Awards, but also sending a heartfelt “Eboni, my love,” to her longtime partner Eboni Nichols from the stage and then wrapping it all up by wishing us a “Happy Pride” with a peace sign (whenever I do a peace sign I look super corny, for I am not Queen Latifah). But first, I want to tell a quick story about my eighth birthday.
You know that running joke with your friends that usually goes something along the lines of “how gay are you?” One of my most common answers is that I’m so gay I had a Queen Latifah themed birthday party when I was eight years old. Living Single had just finished its first season on FOX and I was the only second grader I knew obsessed with it. Specifically, I was obsessed with Queen Latifah. The only thing I wanted for my birthday was her Black Reign album, which required a bit of negotiation because it was going to be my first “adult” CD (errr, it might have been a cassette tape). My mom finally agreed and one of her friends bought it as a surprise, a huge deal in my eight-year-old brain because she bought the version with the Parental Advisory sticker and all the curse words, because you canNOT listen to “U.N.I.T.Y.” without the full chorus of “Who you callin a bitch?”— “Who you callin a [record scratch]” simply will not do.
“U.N.I.T.Y.” was the first rap song I memorized. Our cassette player was in the car and my patient mother rewound it over and over again until I had every refrain picture perfect. It took me an entire month worth of car rides; I can still do every inflection from memory. In fact, Sunday night when Lil Kim and MC Lyte paid tribute by rapping her most iconic lyrics while Queen Latifah wiped tears of wonder from her eyes, I did just that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXS93smlLtw
Of course, a lot has changed in the last 27 years. For one, I came out. For another, Queen Latifah never really did.
How do you talk about the multiple (almost) coming outs of a celebrity who’s never really been “in” to begin with? How do you write about her partner when she rarely mentions her in public? And that’s the point, the “hiding in plain sight” of it all. The expectation or belief that we could possibly be owed anything more from Queen Latifah beyond what she’s already shared, just by living her life.
In 2013, while accepting her Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes, Jodie Foster came out. She did without ever saying “I’m gay,” nstead acknowledging, “I already did my coming out a thousand years ago, in the Stone Age… But now apparently I’m told every celebrity is expected to audit the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a primetime reality show.” She went on to thank Cydney Bernard, her former longtime partner and the co-parent of her children. “There’s no way I could ever stand here without acknowledging one of the deepest loves of my life: my heroic co-parent, my ex-partner in love but righteous soul sister in life.” I thought about that a lot on Sunday as I watched Queen Latifah sit center stage with her partner (and presumed mother of her child) Eboni on one side and her father on the other.
And what a show she got to see from her perch. Women’s rap is having a renaissance. It hasn’t been as prominent or met with as much popularity since Queen herself was rocking a mic, with Sunday’s award show having Cardi, Meg thee Stallion, City Girls, and Flo Milli all making appearances (not including Rapsody, Monie Love, Lil Kim, or MC Lyte, who all performed during Queen’s tribute). In May, Lil Nas X manifested on Twitter that he wanted to perform the Black gay anthem “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” on the BET stage and even though every Black queer person I know RT’d it, I think we all assumed that BET would never.
Even when Lil Nas X showed up on the BET red carpet in a dress — the very same red carpet where less than a decade ago B. Scott, a non-binary performer and gossip columnist, was quite literally forced to change out of their femme fashion, despite being an invited host — I didn’t believe it. When the opening chords to CMBYN began to play, I held my breath. I thought to myself, even if he performs a “toned down” version of the song, given the overarching circumstances, it will be worth it. Then, just as the song was wrapping, he made out with one of his male dancers. I don’t think you hear me though!! On the fucking BET stage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgfsn1vOoNQ
Later, Lil Nas X reflected, “It took me a lot of time to mentally prepare for this performance. While on stage I was trembling knowing that I was performing something like that in front of my straight peers. Even during the performance I was having a hard time calming my nerves.”
Maybe you had to grow up indoctrinated by BET to really get it. To have been a queer teen who came home from school and put on 106 & Park only to be reminded that you didn’t exist. To have watched Sunday’s Best and be told you were a sin, every single week. BET reflects back Black culture, and while I’d fight anyone who makes the racist assumption that Black people are somehow more homophobic than anyone else, our community is not perfect. By playing to Black America’s most conservative base over its 40 years, BET has been no small player in allowing that hate to continue. Sunday night felt like whatever was opposite of death by a thousand cuts — freedom by a thousand small breaks.
On Sunday night Mj Rodriguez took to the stage, smiled, and twirled in a white floor length gown with a thigh high slit to her own damn song before presenting an award. Freedom. The Queen got to see it all from the front row.
And I do think now it’s different. I think Niecy Nash and her wife Jessica Betts helped make it different. I think Janelle Monáe helped make it different. I think Lena Waithe helped make it different. Hell, I think Lil Nas X performing that song to that audience, being his fully gay ass Black ass self, less than 40 minutes before Queen Latifah made her speech made a difference. To be honest — I think 30 years ago Queen Latifah herself helped put the studs in the walls (pun not intended) that all those other people tore down, and that made it different. I’m also not a 50-year-old Black woman who’s walked in her shoes. I have no idea what was going through her head when she took that stage. It did seem that she felt loved. I hope she felt loved. Because… just wow, how much we love her, you know?
As her four minute speech crescendos, the audience is cheering so loud that Queen has to raise her voice to get over them. “Eboni, my love. Rebel, my love. Peace! Happy Pride!”
Queen’s been with Eboni for so long at this point, it’s hard to remember them apart. About a year ago, it was reported in some gossip circles (because with Queen Latifah, gossip is often all we have) that Rebel is their son. If you listen closely, she’s indirectly referenced him before in Rapsody’s 2019 single “Hatshepsut.” Still I wondered, did she have a rush of adrenaline before publicly committing his name to the history books in the last seconds of her speech?
On Monday a lot of websites were breathless in their declarations about Queen Latifah, that she came out or that this moment was somehow a watershed compared to the private life she’s lived before — but they didn’t get the story right. Not really. Not in its fullness. Because it wasn’t about her and it never really was.
Sunday’s BET Awards was the closest the network has ever come to finally embracing queer identities on its largest stage, which is simultaneously saying very little and saying absolutely everything with your whole chest. It was the closest Queen Latifah has come to coming out, if that matters to you, which is certainly something.
But I kept thinking about myself at eight years old, writing the words of U.N.I.T.Y. into the air of the backseat of my mom’s Ford Focus, trying to commit it to memory. I’m pretty proud of how that kid ended up. Looking at Queen Latifah, and the grown family woman she’s become, I’m pretty proud of her, too.
Exclusive Trailer Drop! Con Todo Netflix’s “Visions of Us” Is an Absolute Love Letter to Queer Latinx TV and Film
Con Todo, Netflix’s home for Latinx storytelling, is honoring Pride this weekend with a four-part video digital documentary series Visions of Us that unpacks and gives space to groundbreaking moments in the history of queer and trans Latinx television and film. Queer Latinx stories has never been seen in full quite so lovingly or with such sharp reflection and analysis, created from its very roots by Latinx queer and trans creators behind-the-scenes as a love letter to the hardships, creativity, and triumphs we’ve faced — the connections we’ve found to each other through a screen. How do I know all of that? Because I had the chance to be a part of it.
When I was originally approached about being a consultant on Visions of Us, to be honest I didn’t really know what to expect. I’ve been working in queer media for more than a few years at this point, and it was the first time I’d ever seen a @netflix email in my inbox. What I found in Jordan Diaz, who brought me onto the team, along with trans Dominican-American filmmaker Kase Peña and bisexual Venezuelan-American writer Francisco Cabrera-Feo was a group of ridiculously talented, smart queer and trans Latinx artists with a genuine passion for our communities and desire to tell our stories the right way. The kinds of nerds for whom a zoom call about story mapping and fact-checking questions lead to fits of laughter about the history of bisexuals in leather jackets and goodbye besos before closing the screen.
What I imagine in other hands could have been a corporate side project for Pride (and listen, I know we have all had our FULL of corporate Pride this year, so I wouldn’t say what I’m about to unless I believed it) instead became a space — and literally, to the best of my knowledge, the only space on film like this — to study the power of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans Latinx stories from the actual queer Latinx people who created and experienced them. To ask what hasn’t been done yet and where are we going next. It’s one thing for white gays to line us up and tell our stories for some scorecard of “diversity points,” it’s quite another when we’re given space to really do it for ourselves.
The four episode series begins rolling out on Friday on YouTube and Con Todo platforms (you can find them on Instagram and Twitter). It will continue through Monday, featuring interviews with Stephanie Beatriz, Tanya Saracho, Wilson Cruz, Steven Canals of Pose, Aurora Guerrero (the writer/director of perennial Autostraddle favorite romance Mosquito y Mari), Garcia (from Tales of the City), Carmen Carrera and so many more.
It… ugh… there’s no other way to put this… it also has some interviews of me? The series also features former Autostraddle Senior Editor Yvonne Marquez, so the extended AS fambam is accounted for — we’re both in the first episode (shhhh!), and if you stick with the series throughout the weekend you might see my face pop up a few extra times throughout.
So here it is! Your EXCLUSIVE trailer drop (for the next hour at least, until it premieres across Netflix’s various social media channels), for Visions of Us. I hope if you have time this weekend, you find your way over to Con Todo and watch. It was a project of love, made by Black and Brown, queer and trans Latinx people about the stories that have shaped us. If you’re reading this website, I have a strong feeling that might be something that you’re into. Just saying.
We've got an✨exclusive trailer drop✨for @contodonetflix's "Visions of Us"!
Visions of Us — featuring Autostraddle's own @yvonnesm12 and @carmencitaloves(!!) — is a digital documentary series unpacking queer Latinx representation in TV/film.
Read more: https://t.co/hQijkiBxlY pic.twitter.com/GWr4SkJ3mS
— Autostraddle (@autostraddle) June 24, 2021
Listen Ok. When Netflix comes to your house to film you with their fancy-Netflix lighting, you take the selfies. I don’t make the rules.
Building An Altar to Honor Pulse on Its Fifth Anniversary
Today marks the fifth anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub Shooting. On June 12, 2016, 49 people were killed during a queer Latinx dance night at the Orlando gay club. An additional 53 were injured. This piece was originally written to honor the third anniversary of the shooting, but is being republished. Today, and always, we give remembrance to those lives lost, and those others whose lives were irreparably changed
“Never — ever — blow out the candle. Blow out the candle and you will blow out the intention from which it was lit. You will blow out the prayer. Understand that?”
Those were the first instructions I was given about building an altar. It was Día de los Muertos. I was 17. I nodded, eyes focused on the layers before me. Deep blue and cloud-white candles, wooden statuettes engraved with images of goddess whose brown hues matched my own. Plastic saints that would never smile. There were old photos of family members, rum, tea and ripped sand colored paper with tiny typed prayers printed to look like quill’s ink. An hour before my living room had just been my living room. Now everything felt sacred. I inhaled and tensed my body, feeling that even the smallest misstep would rip apart this delicate beauty.
The practice of building an altar, an ofrenda, differs slightly across Latinx and Latin American cultures. Hell, it even changes between families. There is no wrong or right way to offer up gratitude, to give remembrance. Some parts remain constant – a cleaned, tall or wide space to display in your home; candles of course; photos of your loved ones or those you’ve lost. I was always taught that altars should have all four elements represented: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Beyond that, they are personal.
Building ofrendas unite the living and the dead; they give space for our stories to be held. I light candles and kneel before them to say prayers because doing so reminds me, even when I’m my most lost — I’m never alone in this world.
The morning I built my ofrenda for Pulse, I started in quiet. I cleaned off the tops of the furniture I was going to use to remove any lingering bad spirits (and dust). I covered them in a white cotton sheet. I set my heart towards intention. Normally anxious, I willed myself to be still. Calm. A fresh slate so that I could welcome back home those we’ve lost.
The morning of the Pulse shooting, I was sleeping on my couch in a pair of boxers. The living room was the only place in my apartment with an air conditioner — and even then, my skin sweated against the rough wool below me. The heat made the air hazy and when I reached for my phone’s texts, I remember how it was hard to breathe through the makeshift smog. I had no idea what was coming.
Carmen, you awake yet?
Fuck.
Fuck wake up!
There’s 50 dead. They’re gay.It was Latin night. They’re black and brown.
Oh God. Oh God.
It was two weeks before my 30th birthday.
There’s this famous poem from the 1970s by Pedro Pietri, one of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets Café. If you’ve studied (or grew up around) Puerto Ricans who love books, you’ve probably encountered it. My mom used to read it to me as a teenager. It’s called “Puerto Rican Obituary”:
Juan
Miguel
Milagros
Olga
Manuel
All died yesterday today
And will die again tomorrow.
That’s what I first thought of in the days following Pulse, when the names and faces of those who’d died became public. Edward. Franky. Stanley. Xavier. Javier. Shane. Luis. Juan. Eric. Peter. Luis. Kimberly. Eddie. Darryl. Deonka. Anthony. Jean. Luis. Amanda. Martin. Jerald. Cory. Brenda. Christopher. Rodolfo. Luis. Leroy. Jason. Frank. Akyra. Mercedes. Gilberto. Simon. Oscar. Enrique. Miguel. Juan. Juan. Tevin. Jonathon. Christopher. Paul. Joel. Jean. Yilmary. Angel. Antonio. Geraldo. Alejandro. All died yesterday today. And will die again tomorrow.
After a mass tragedy, almost inevitably someone says “It could’ve been me!” The Pulse shooting happened in a gay club on a Latin dance night in a largely Puerto Rican city. Those same theme nights are how I built my queer family — drinking house rum and Pineapple while dancing in silver heels on sticky floors. Finding the one chair in the corner to sit on because I’m a grandma at heart (and my feet hurt!) and no one else was ready to go home yet. Eating empanadas and bacon Mac-n-Cheese at three in the morning. That’s how I found myself. It’s how I learned there was a map for my queerness that didn’t have to include a whiteness that was foreign to me. Queerness could be home.
There’s one photo in particular — of Kimberly Morris, the Pulse bouncer and former basketball player. She’s the mirror image of my friend Marisol. It’s been three years, and I still can’t look at her face without feeling it. This wasn’t a “It could’ve been us.”
This was “It was us.” As far as I’m concerned, the attack at Pulse nightclub was an attack on a church.
Not everyone who died that night was Puerto Rican (though most were). Some were African American, some from other Latin American countries. Still, in this, on this day — we’re all hermanxs fighting.
My Uncle Rey means King in Spanish. My mom gave him the nickname. They were best friends, and I think, soulmates. He died when I was just a kid, long before I got to know him more.
I think about him a lot now. Growing up, he must’ve been the first gay Puerto Rican that I knew. I remember sleeping tucked between him and my mom on his cramped futon in a ‘90s Brooklyn apartment that had more mixed tapes piled high than wall space. I remember his smile and the gruff of his mustache. Sometimes I think maybe I can remember more? But it’s fleeting.
In another universe, in another timeline, I wonder if I would’ve come out to him first. Would we have gotten close enough that I’d ask him to take me out for pancakes? Would the whipped cream from his hot chocolate coat his nose and his eyes widen in surprise when I whispered my secret? I bet he would have hugged me until the air popped out of my lungs.
Or at least, I like to think so.
The morning of the shooting, would he had cried, like I did, from recognition? Would he had seen siblings scattered among YouTube memorials? Would he had made them a playlist, poured out some Bacardí Añejo, and toasted them from his cramped Brooklyn apartment a half a country away? They were his family, too. At least as much as they were mine.
An ofrenda should have all four elements: Water, Air, Fire, and Earth. The candles have fire covered. These small potted plants will serve well as “earth.” Air? That’s all around us.
But the water? I bottled it myself off the shores of Luquillo. There the water always feels warm, sun-kissed. The bubbles of the ocean fizzled against my ankles as I waded as deep as I could without wetting my cheap Old Navy turquoise dress, sighed deep, and then bent down.
Now the water sits on the altar that I always keep next to my bed. It’s small glass jar is navy blue. In the right light, it beams and dances the same way that lights shimmers off a disco ball in a gay club on a sweaty summer night during Pride. It’s rich and full, like how you feel when you take that last drink just a little too fast and have to hold yourself up on your best friend’s shoulders while giggling. The color is stunning; the jewel toned bodysuit of a drag queen about to take center stage.
I bottled it less than a three-hour flight from Orlando and roughly ten years before the shooting. But right now, laid out before me, it all feels connected.
On June 12th every year, I light a candle for Pulse. And I never — ever — blow out the flame.
Pa’lante.

Five Years After Pulse, Queer Nightclubs Still Bring Both Freedom and Fear
Today marks the fifth anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub Shooting. On June 12, 2016, 49 people were killed during a queer Latinx dance night at the Orlando gay club. An additional 53 were injured. Today, and always, we give remembrance to those lives lost, and those others whose lives were irreparably changed
The first time I had a panic attack in a gay club I tried to deny what was happening. I was on my second date with the first woman I ever really dated and we had finally arrived at Duplex in the West Village after a long day of texting each other about how excited we were to dance all night together. We ordered vodka sodas at the bar and walked to the small, crowded dance floor where my date was soon surrounded by tourists who wanted to dance and take selfies with her.
In the quiet moment when I stood on the dance floor alone, I noticed someone grab a backpack from the booth along the wall. As this person reached into their bag, my heart began to race and my eyes darted franticly across the room, looking from queer person to queer person to the backpack and back to my date again. As my breath quickened I braced myself for what I thought was inevitable — in the five seconds it took for this person to reach into their backpack and pull out their wallet, I prepared myself for what I would do if they pulled out a gun, like I had so many times before in malls, and movie theaters, and schools, and more. I looked around the room for where I would hide, I imagined what I would say, I thought about who I would call.
When I finally saw that person was just searching for their wallet, I was already crying and hyperventilating. I left the bar apologizing through shortened breath as I cut my date short and walked quickly to the subway at 10:30 PM, before most of the club kids had even finished getting ready. I cried on the A train as I processed the residual trauma I didn’t even know I had.
There are so many details that I can’t seem to forget. Brenda Lee Marquez McCool was a single mother and a cancer survivor. Luis S. Vielma worked at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Edward Sotomayor Jr. loved to travel. Luis Daniel Conde and his partner Juan Pablo Rivera Velazquez owned a salon together. Akyra Monet Murray had just graduated and was on vacation with her family. I remember their names and their smiles in the photos that have now been memorialized. Five years later and on my worst days I can still see the collages of their faces when I close my eyes — their 49 faces fit perfectly into a square.
On the morning of June 12th, 2016, I woke up to a New York Times push notification. I read the words “nightclub” and “shooting” and ran downstairs to my living room and turned on the news as details emerged and the death count rose. As a young, Puerto Rican, queer person, I wasn’t used to seeing myself or people in my community on television screens. But, as the day progressed and the names and faces of the victims became known, it was clear to me: this was my community. The shooter came to Pulse Nightclub on Latinx night and killed 49 people — that has never felt like a coincidence.
That summer, back when I was just a really good ally at 19, I worked as an intern at an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. My first two weeks at this internship started the way most do — I got acclimated to the office, met with my colleagues, made friends with fellow interns, and tried to keep myself busy. I was beginning to come into my own queerness and saw this internship as an opportunity to move past allyship and into self-advocacy and community building.
On the Monday morning after the shooting, the 45 minute train ride from New Jersey to Manhattan felt different. I sat on the train exhausted by my own hypervigilance. I tried to look away from the increased police presence in Penn Station that I had grown used to seeing after mass shootings. I tried not to scrutinize every backpack or large bag I passed by.
When I arrived in the office, I was grateful to be in a space where I didn’t have to process my grief alone. Over the next few days, my fellow interns and I contributed to the organization’s response by compiling obituaries for all the victims. We spent hours in our small office looking at Facebook pages and news articles, staring at photographs of them with their families and loved ones, trying to find the small details that made these beautiful lives more than just a name in a list of many.
I got too drunk at Stonewall that summer because I couldn’t stop staring at the entrance. I spent many evenings crying on the NJ Transit rides home. From thousands of miles away, I felt the loss of my community in every way, even before I allowed myself to live into my identity enough to feel a part of it.
The first time I felt fully safe and seen when I was at a gay bar was on Latinx night. A few weeks after I first moved to Brooklyn, my friend brought me to Yas Mama at C’mon Everybody in Brooklyn. It was one of the first times I had been to a gay bar — especially since being out and more actively living into my queerness. In the back of the crowded bar, I looked around and saw a fairytale: my skin glowed rainbow colors under the light of the disco ball, people kissed while they’re dancing, and the music wasn’t only by white people.
A number of Latinx drag queens performed that night, lipsyncing to Selena and Shakira and J-Lo, and I felt, for the first time, like I could be at home. But for queer Latinx people, that feeling can be hard to find.
In my own home, where my identity has been met with love and support, I still am not out to much of my Puerto Rican family members, and I don’t know if I ever will be. White queer spaces are often not safe for people of color. Too often, white queer people forget the power their whiteness holds, and act violently against people of color — with the worst violence being against Black trans people. Spaces where we feel fully able to be ourselves and not shroud any parts of our identity literally save lives — and yet, that same space is the place where so many lives were taken.
For many queer people of color, spaces like queer nightclubs on people of color-centered nights are the only times where we can be fully ourselves. In these community spaces, I don’t need to make myself whiter to be celebrated by queer people. I don’t need to make myself straighter to be celebrated by Latinx people. I can be safe in the comfort of knowing that all of me is welcome and all of me is loved — not just the identity most shared by those around me.
But, since Pulse, the places that have become where we feel the most safe also remind us of this collective tragedy.
When I walk into clubs now, I can’t help but brace myself. I can’t help but be reminded of the tragedies that have happened in spaces just like this. It won’t ever matter how long it’s been — I don’t think I’ll ever forget their faces, their names, and the way they were taken from us.
Five years later, I’m working to redefine what safety means to me. Maybe I can’t find safety in the places where I feel most seen or even the places where I feel most hidden. Maybe feeling unsafe is inevitable: instead of feeling safe, we all need to make difficult choices about what is worth risking our safety for.
Before I go out to queer clubs or other queer spaces, almost every time, I ask myself: do I risk my physical safety to feel free, or do I risk my mental health to keep myself safe at home?. The decision isn’t easy, but it’s one that we all must make.
It’s taken me five years, but the feeling of joy, freedom, excitement, and fulfillment that I feel when I can dance to bachata with my queer kin, when I don’t have to choose between being Latinx or being queer, when I can honor all of my identities at once, is worth risking my safety. My fearless and unwavering presence in these spaces is both a prayer and a promise: to honor my freedom, honor my community, and to never forget the lives that should’ve never been lost.
Stephanie Beatriz and Daphne Rubin-Vega on “In the Heights” and Queer Latinas Finding Love in the Everyday
This was a first. I mean, when you are talking about In The Heights there are already a lot of firsts to chart. It’s the first movie of its size and platform to be made not only with a majority Latinx cast, but also a Latinx writing and producer team (the incomparable Lin Manual-Miranda, whose bio basically writes itself at this point, and the Pulitzer Prize winning Quiara Alegría Hudes who wrote the book of the Broadway musical and now returns as scriptwriter). For an incredible 96% of moviegoers, it’s expected to be the first film that brings them back to theaters. But those are not the firsts I’m talking about.
No — In The Heights marks the first time I’ve been requested to do an interview in the middle of the night. And on a Saturday.
Stephanie Beatriz and Daphne Rubin-Vega behind the scenes during the filming of In The Heights in 2019.
Ok so “middle of the night” is slight literary license, but I dare you to put on a full face of make up and a bra at 7:30pm on a Saturday night after a year that’s been most defined in terms of “no hard pants” and tell me that it doesn’t feel like the middle of the night to you! But I’ve loved Daphne Rubin-Vega since I was a tween memorizing the orange liner notes of the Rent soundtrack after school (and if you’re gay and love musicals and grew up in the 90s, chances are high that you were right there with me – legend does not begin to cover it). Stephanie Beatriz, a modern bi-con, is beloved by queers one and all. Daphne and Stephanie joining forces together as an everyday gay Latina couple, in what might be the biggest movie event of the year? Worth putting on a bra for.
Daphne Rubin-Vega is Daniela, the pint-sized ruler (with a massive-sized voice) of In the Height’s Washington Heights block. Perched from the top of her five-inch tacones as she delivers hot gossip and a loving touch in equal measure. In the original stage production, Carla (Beatriz) is Daniela’s comedic sidekick, working alongside Cuca (Orange is the New Black’s Dascha Polanco) in Daniela’s beauty salon. In the film, Cuca and Carla’s antics remain, but Carla is also re-developed as Daniela’s romantic partner with quiet, lived-in moments across the week of one block’s summer heatwave.
So the three of us got together as the sun was setting on the East Coast to talk about the history of Latinas and lesbians in musical theatre, welcoming the ancestors into our space, and finding love in the small moments of the everyday. (We talked over each other a bunch, but if you’ve ever sat across from a table of your tías and primas on a Saturday night in the summer, you already know the vibes.)
Carmen Phillips: First of all, I just wanted to say before we got officially started, I mean, I’m just beyond myself to be able to meet both of you! It means just the most to me. Daphne — I saw you in Rent when I was 12 years old and it was something that changed my life, which I’m sure you hear all the time and it’s not unique anymore, but it did.
Daphne Rubin-Vega: [brings hands together] Thank you. It’s a pleasure.
Carmen: Hi. Okay. We can start!
Daphne: Hi!
Stephanie Beatriz: Carmen. I’ve literally done the same thing to her. I feel I might’ve done it on the first day I met her. I was just… [is at a loss for words]
Carmen: I feel probably lots of people tell you that, but I will never get a chance to tell you.
Daphne: No, you’ve gotta tell me! Yeah.
Carmen: Thank you.
And obviously, Stephanie. I mean, you’re a huge… Autostraddle is just a very big fan, all the time, so you already know that. Thank you both.
I wanted to start this interview at sort of the beginning of the process. I’ve been trying to read what you have said thus far about playing Daniela and Carla but I haven’t seen anyone ask this.
Obviously both characters are presumed straight in the original stage production of In the Heights. When you auditioned or otherwise introduced to the roles, were you already aware that they were being re-imagined as queer women? Or was that something you found out after? What was that process like?
Stephanie: I found out after!
I found out that it was even on the table — it was, “This might happen” — And I was so excited! And I voiced how excited I was IMMEDIATELY! I was like, “I think this is a great idea. I absolutely support it 100%. If you try to do that, I’m 100% in support.”
Daphne: Yeah. Yeah. For me, I had already gotten the role and so Daniela’s sexuality didn’t factor into a performance at all. Her humanity certainly did.
So after I got the role… Quiara [Alegría Hudes] called me and said, “How would you feel if Daniela… Instead of Carla just being her business partner, she’s her life partner as well.” And I remember being jolted by the change and thinking, “Yeah, fuck yeah. Of course.”
Quiara never ceases to amaze me with her elevation of the storytelling and humanity in its different incarnations.
Carmen: I think this really brings me into this next question. Daphne what you were just saying — for you, it was about elevating this humanity. And in one of the interviews I’d been reading, Stephanie had the chance to talk about [the relationship between Daniela and Carla], and she said “So much of the film is about where home is. And for Carla, Daniela is home.”
Stephanie: Yes.
Carmen: That got me thinking about what a moment this is that you’re both of entering into.
I did some research in our database and from what we can tell, in all of film history, there’ve only been 18 movie musicals that have had lesbian or bisexual characters. Period. Not even 20!! And of course, when you start thinking about…
Daphne: I was in three of them.
Carmen: Oh You sure were.
Daphne: Oh, whoa.
Stephanie: That’s… I just…
Carmen: And there’s nothing like In the Heights, when we shift our focus to think about the history Latinx film. And I’m sure you all know, the entire community’s buzzing, right? My mom is going, it’s the first movie she’s going to see in a movie theater in 18 months.
People are just dying for it, and I think going back to the conversation about what home is… I’m wondering what it feels like, for both of you, to be kind of sitting in this historic intersection, right?
This is going to be a film that really is going to exist on a planet of its own. And we’re going to see queer Latinas represented in that moment. I wondered if that’s something you’ve thought about? Or if it’s not even a thing that’s on your plate at all.
Stephanie: I’ve thought about it a lot!
I’ve thought about how this moment means something — but it will be so much more meaningful in 5, 10, 15, 20 years, when even more titles are in that database. Even more of these films have been made, even more of these stories have been told. Even more of these characters have been represented on screen, in television, in film, in all types of media.
It’s very exciting to think that we could possibly be a part of… a moment of someone looking at these performances or this film and going, “Oh, of course. Oh yes, yes. Of course. Why not? What was I thinking? Of course that exists in the planet.”
That’s a really thrilling thing to have the privilege of being a part of.
Daphne: Yeah. I fully agree. I mean, as an actress, it’s what we do. It’s my calling to embody characters that are not like me, to represent the humanity of who they are. And I think, that’s a really loaded thing for me, in my culture [Rubin-Vega is Panamanian]. Not my culture, in Latino culture, in particular.
In my country of origin, I find it’s struggled very much with homophobia and racism. Colonization, it changed the entire country, right? That’s our history. So without putting judgment on it, I think it’s really incredible, what we’re able to do here.
And Stephanie said it before, how queer stories, or stories of people who were marginalized, are made to be othered in certain ways. The stories of those who aren’t centered are then either shown as dramatic or traumatic, she said.
And in this instance, it’s neither dramatic nor traumatic! It’s so regular, it’s so basic, it just is. It’s just… “Yeah.” Yes, and it’s really not that deep and so we’re not playing queer characters, we’re playing human.
Stephanie: Also queer.
Daphne and Carmen in unison: Yeah!
Stephanie: There are people who miss it, honestly! I’ve definitely had the experience where I’m perhaps reading a review or I’m listening to someone’s experience about watching the film and they’re not even… They’re not even… [gestures like a plane flying overhead]… “Whoop.” It just flew by their face.
Whereas, for those of us who were paying attention because we’re trying to find ourselves on film, we see it immediately.
Carmen: I mean, this interview will run the day movie comes out, so I don’t want to reach too far into spoilers. But there’s a scene! It’s before the opening number, right? It’s before “In the Heights” begins. It’s intimate, playful. And I zeroed in right away, I was like, “Oh, we’re really here.”
And I think… so much of the movie is moving in ways you don’t expect, because it is so the everyday. But we never get to see OUR every day on screen. You know what I mean?
Daphne: Yes.
Carmen: The entire movie is just… it’s crazy that we’ve just never seen it. And I think particularly, for someone like me, I’m Puerto Rican, my family’s from Brooklyn, New York.
Daphne: [snaps]
Carmen: That is what my summers looked like. You know? And it was so moving, in ways I did not expect. And I have gone… [mumbles to self] off interview… but it really touched me so much.
Daphne/Stephanie/Carmen: [Everyone starts crosstalking excited at once]
Daphne: It reflects how much the absence of it matters.
Carmen: So much! Because there’s two things that are happening right now with this movie.
One is that it’s going to be, I suspect, a massive hit, right? It is this major movie musical, a multiple Tony winner — In the Heights was already one of my favorite musicals — and it is starring this incredibly talented-Latinx cast. It’s Lin-Manuel Miranda. It’s the whole thing.
So it’s already very big, but it’s also very small.
One block. One week in the summer. You know what I mean? It is “what they got on the corner?” and Timbs on the concrete and it’s just…
Okay, I know I have very little time left. But I’m going to ask a question for Daphne and one for Stephanie.
The question I have for Daphne — there’s a scene in “Carnaval del Barrio” [a large ensemble number in the film]. And it ends with you kind of lifted almost above the crowd! You’re standing on this table, above everyone.
And it was really moving for me because when we think about histories of Latinas on Broadway, you’re just in such storied company. As far as I’m concerned, it’s Rita Moreno, and Chita Rivera and you. It’s….
Daphne: Priscilla Lopez, and Karen Olivo.
Daphne/Stephanie/Carmen: [There’s even more excited crosstalk]
Carmen: Okay! That’s true, Yes!
Stephanie: Yes.
Carmen: I wondered what it felt like for you to be able to play this really iconic role in Daniela. It felt like such a perfect role for you because she is so revered in her community, and you are so revered in ours.
Did you feel any of that emotional connection? Because watching you, I felt it. And I was like, “Oh, I’m so glad she’s getting this moment on this big screen.”
Daphne: Thank you. I appreciate that very much. Yeah. I did feel it. There’s a sense of… in certain spaces, we really recognize our ancestors.
Carmen: Yes.
Daphne: We recognize our ancestors in the space.
And so, to go back to the fact that I am an immigrant and my mother was an immigrant. And my mother is not here on the plane of earth to witness the film in the way that living people are. I could feel my mother’s and my ancestors’ presence through Daniela and through whatever message it is that I had gotten in the past about being “a little bit less than” or needing to pull it in. Some form of diminishment, the microaggressions that happen in the world that we live in.
To really be in a moment where I could fully inhabit and celebrate all those things that we call limitations. Or let me say that better, what we perceive of as a limitation, being an incredible source of strength. I love that.
Carmen: And Stephanie, the question I wanted to ask you is, obviously you are very aware of how, again revered — which is why I say these last two questions for last! — you are in queer women’s communities. There’s the iconic Rosa Diaz in Brooklyn Nine-Nine. And I think one of the things that everyone, at least everyone I know, is really excited about is to get to see you play a queer Latina again.
I was personally excited because it’s just a different way to use your comic timing. Carla’s very different from Rosa. I was very curious about what that felt like for you to create these two really distinct queer Latina characters.
Stephanie: That’s really kind, first of all. So thank you for saying that.
I think, one of the things that’s been really fun for me about the process of shooting In the Heights — and creating my iteration of that character — was that it brought me back to the feeling that I used to have in Repertory Company, when I did a lot of theater. And I’d have a season where I was playing a bunch of small roles in a funny, new comedy by Culture Clash. And then I also was playing Maggie the Cat in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Carmen: wow.
Stephanie: And then maybe the next season I was Isabella in Measure for Measure and also playing another… I mean, Rep Company really teaches you… It can teach you how to use yourself in all of these different kinds of ways. And it’s one of my favorite things about being an actor is kind of using different facets of myself to help create these characters and bring them to life. And turning up the volume on certain parts of my personality and turning it way down on other parts, right?
I’m really excited for audiences to see me in a different way, I guess, it’s cool.
And I’m pumped at the confusion factor that comes along with that, right. Because I think people get confused when they meet me in real life sometimes because they expect Rosa Diaz.
Carmen: Right.
Stephanie: And I’m excited for the confusion factor that will come with, “Wait, that can’t be the same person that plays that character, right?” I love that, I live for that. I live for the confusion of, “Wait a minute, what?”
Carmen: I knew you were going to kill it. When I heard you got cast as Carla, I was, “Oh, that’s perfect.” Because, I mean, I really think your gift for comedic timing, it’s unparalleled.
Stephanie: [mumbles to self] Thank you very much.
Carmen: And Carla’s a small part that, I mean, is already memorable. It’s a small part with a big bang. You know what I mean? Like that is… [Carmen and Stephanie crosstalk, there’s never enough crosstalk].
Stephanie: I’m lucky, I’m very lucky.
Carmen: So I’m going to go ahead and just wrap us from here! I wanted to say again, thank you both so much. I know press days are very long and you guys have had a lot of them, I’ve seen them on your social media! Thank you for making this time for us.
Stephanie: Thank you, Carmen. This was a really awesome interview, one of the best of the night.
Daphne: Yes. Thank you, Carmen.
Carmen: I wish you both a good night!
Starting this very day (!!), In the Heights is now streaming on HBOMax and playing in theaters. If seeing in theaters, please follow appropriate COVID-safe protocols.
Leah Johnson Is the Toni Morrison of Queer YA, It’s Time We Get Real About That Fact
When I first hopped on a zoom call with Leah Johnson, I didn’t know what to expect.
I’d devoured her breakout hit You Should See Me in a Crown (as of this week, now available on paperback) in the fall, immediately falling in love with the teen rom-com and promptly yelling the house down to scream its praises to anyone that would listen. On it’s face, the premise of Crown is light: A Black queer teen girl living in Indiana, Liz Lightly, runs for Prom Queen in hopes of winning the accompanying college scholarship. Along the way Liz encounters all the iconic hallmarks of a teen comedy; she has great adventures with her best friends, she falls in love, she beats the mean girl, and she ultimately learns to cherish her herself most of all. But in practice, reading You Should See Me in a Crown as an adult was profoundly healing — words that I imagine doesn’t often get used in relationship to “teen” and “rom-com.”
As queer adults, and I think, especially as queer Black women, we so often never got to experience that as children. We weren’t allowed the permission to experience big, sweeping rambunctious hormonal high school adventures where we are our own heroes and get to kiss the girl. Leah Johnson was not fucking around. I was terrified to meet her. I also couldn’t wait.
Leah showed up to our call in a bright orange t-shirt spouting an Angela Davis quote on the front and her infamous raised fist on the back (definitely not the first thing I assume someone thinks of when they hear “YA author”), along with a life-size Starbucks in hand (ok… maaaybe that one tracks). She sat in front a magnificent collection of books covering corner-to-corner of the screen.
Even within our first seconds of meeting each other and awkward speaking-over-each-other Hellos, the unexpected complexity that’s already become the calling card of her writing was perfectly encapsulated by her own image — Angela Davis, Starbucks, books. “I think a lot of people believe young adult literature, but specifically young adult rom-coms, to be inherently frivolous. And I think that one, obviously that’s rooted in misogyny and also in a hatred of teen girlhood. But also I am not interested in subscribing to any of these ideas about the limitations of a love story. No, this is a playground for liberation. Y’all not hearing me!! I’m trying to explain to you that when we tell young Black girls what they’re capable of, when we allow them to feel seen and heard and cared for, what does that do to their mind??”
It’s electrifying to watch her trade references between John Hughes Brat Pack movies and Ta-Nehisi Coates with the ease I’d have rattling off Beyoncé albums in reverse order (and I got the feeling that if I had asked, Leah could’ve done that, too). Even when I didn’t immediately know the names of every person she discussed, I found myself enraptured, eagerly nodding along, my mind sparking as she took sips of Starbucks between long breaths, “Y’all have really limited ideas of what this work is capable of… shout out to Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, y’all not able to look through the windows and the doors, you know what I’m saying? You’re hitting a wall. I’m just as interested in blowing the door off the hinges. I don’t even want doors anymore.”
If we’re going to talk about blowing the door off the hinges, then it’s time to talk about Leah Johnson’s next YA novel, Rise to the Sun (coming out on July 6th, and we have an exclusive excerpt for you to read on Autostraddle right now).
The follow up to Crown isn’t a direct sequel, though both books take place within the same broader universe. In it, two Black teens, Olivia (“a messy, chaotic, bisexual disaster. She’s all over the place, but I love her. She’s one of my favorite characters I’ve ever had the opportunity to write because it’s in that complexity that we finally dig deeper into these ideas about what it means to be a young, queer Black girl”) and Toni, a handsome, stoic musician reeling the loss of her father and at the crossroads of her future, fall into a weekend of romance, vulnerability, and adventure while at a music festival during the waning days of summer.
And much like You Should See Me in a Crown, Rise to the Sun is deceptive in its first look simplicity. Admittedly Rise is thematically darker, though no less full of joy. I’d still easily recommend it as your queer porch read of choice for the summer and feel confident you wouldn’t have any regrets in that good choice you are about to make. I found Rise to the Sun to dig deep into my bones, and I couldn’t as point to what made difficult to shake off. Much like You Should See Me in a Crown, I walked away feeling like the characters had made themselves a part of me. In truth, at least some of that is because there are heartbreakingly few books starring Black queer women protagonists to begin with, let alone with the richness and dedication to their joy and possibility that Leah Johnson has provided in her work. But it was in talking to Leah that I realized why Rise was impossible to let go:
“When I wrote Rise to the Sun — mind you — I wrote, revised and did all this over the course of the pandemic. The entire book was made in 2020. My first book (Crown) came out a week after George Floyd had been murdered. And so, I was thinking a lot about Black joy, what it means to be free truly, and also questioning my decisions to write Blackness as it exists in relation to whiteness. In Rise to the Sun, I wanted to eliminate whiteness. They’re at a music festival, which is arguably one of the whitest spaces in the world, but I didn’t want to talk about white people. I’m not interested in talking about them anymore. I want to talk about Black girls. I want to talk about Black love.”
I don’t know a Black creator, hell a Black person, who hasn’t had a some form of a seismic shift over this past long ass year of our collective lives, so it’s not surprising that Leah Johnson was interested in exploring what it means to be a Black girl divorced from the realities of whiteness. It also doesn’t mean that she takes any less jubilation in the characters she already wrote in Crown, many of whom were white, and which centered on an interracial queer romance (though she’s rightly insulted with the honestly, pretty racist, critics who have taken it upon themselves to uphold Crown as proof that queer media needs a white protagonist in order to be successful within the community — and yes, to my gasping horror during our conversation, those people exist. People really will say anything). Liz Lightly is a Black girl who lives in a small town in Indiana, and her story is her own — but it’s the story of Olivia or Toni. That’s the point.
“It was important to me to double down on what I’m trying to do in all my books, which is that it is possible to be Black and queer and whole, and have that Black queer wholeness separate entirely from whiteness.… I want young Black girls to know it’s possible to fall in love with other Black people and you should. We’re taught to be ashamed of these things that represent our Blackness in ourselves. It’s really important to me to make Black girls desirable, not only to each other, but to ourselves.” It’s something that I’ve also talked about in my own writing multiple times on this site, the rarity of having Black queer women’s stories focused on our own lives, reflecting back to us that we are enough to love — just on our own. But to take that conversation and then move it back into Black girlhood? That’s how we mend wounds. That’s how we make sure there aren’t wounds to begin with.
And in creating her own constellation of Black queer girls, Leah is quite literally changing the face of YA (she also just sold her debut middle-grade series, described as “a superhero origin story in the tone of the Baby-Sitters Club” to freaking Disney — and yes it also stars a Black queer girl coming-of-age. And yes, I’m already ridiculously excited). She’s also changing the narrative of precisely how our stories are told, specifically the narrow assumption that there’s only one Black story to tell in the first place, “I think people have already such limited imaginations about what it means to be Black, what it means to be queer, what it means to be femme, any of the above. I want to upset the the preconceived ideas that people have already established about who we are. I want to complicate them further with every book.”
I wasn’t even halfway through our interview when I knew what I wanted to title this feature. I was a nerdy Black girl who grew up to be a Black woman who takes comfort in books. Who built her apartment to be full of them. I don’t throw around words like “Toni” or “Morrison” lightly. But then I sat there, watching the seriousness and dexterity with which Leah Johnson moved as she approached her craft. I watched her talk about writing books about young Black girls, about Black queer joy and romance, about purposefully setting those books within the a genre most known for tropes and sleepover movies and instead, in those corners and crevices, finding deliverance. There’s simply no other comparison.
“I want people to know that at the core of every book I write, I just want to center Black girls and show that you can flawed. You can be scared. You can be beautiful. You can be smart. You can be a little dumb. You can be whatever you need to be and you still deserve to be loved, not in spite of those things but because of all those things.”
Ashé.
Rise to the Sun, Leah Johnson’s sophomore novel, is currently available for pre-order in advance of its release on July 6, 2021. Johnson’s award-winning debut novel, You Should See Me in a Crown, was also released in paperback this very week! We also have an exclusive excerpt of Rise to the Sun that you can be reading right now.
Editor’s Notes: On AAPI Heritage Month 2021
An inside look, just for A+ members, from Autostraddle’s editors on the process, struggles, and surprises of working on what you’re reading on the site. We learn so much from this work before it ever even makes it to your eyes; now you can, too!
The last time I did anything remotely like this was fifteen years ago, when I edited my high school’s literary journal. And then I graduated, set my sights on other pursuits and stopped writing.
But, now, I’ve found my way back.
Fifteen years ago, I had deeply disconnected myself from being Asian. By that point, I had long stopped watching Bollywood movies, hated eating Indian food and never told anyone I was obsessed with anime. The notion that I might actually be queer was beyond anything I could possibly imagine. So, I can’t help but smile, albeit a little sadly, that what’s pulled me back into this world of writing and editing is my desire to make sure that the stories of queer and trans Asians and Pacific Islanders are told in ways that feel true to us. It took me fifteen years to bring all these threads together, but I suppose — at least, I made it?
I haven’t been on the queer part of my journey for very long, but when my relationship ended two years ago, the first thing I did was look for queer Asian stories. I wanted to know that I wasn’t alone, that the things that felt impossible to me were things others could relate to as well. I found some of what I was looking for, but what quickly became clear was the scarcity of API perspectives in queer and trans discourse. API identity is, for better or for worse, a massive umbrella covering large swathes of the world, and yet the breadth of it barely registers in a cursory search for queer/trans Asian/Pacific Islander content.
When I started thinking about the theme for this year’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, I was reminded of words Karen Lee had shared with me in an interview about the pandemic last year. Karen is one of the co-chairs of Q-Wave, a NYC-based community organization for queer Asians who identify as women, nonbinary and/or trans. Reflecting on what it means to be queer and API she said:
“Often times, you think of queerness as a white thing, and then when you think of Asian-ness you don’t see any room for queerness in that.”
Her words resonated deeply with me, and I’ve held that thought for well over a year now. As I watched anti-Asian violence come to the forefront in the wake of the pandemic and saw Asian communities contend with their relationship to policing after last summer’s protests, I witnessed both the vulnerability and the strength of being queer/trans and Asian/Pacific Islander. Some of the most marginalized members of the API community, facing the dual or triple threats of racism, homophobia and transphobia, were also the ones trying to move their communities to find new ways to protect themselves from violence without relying on increased law enforcement. What does it mean to exist in that liminal space, constantly pushed to the margins on both sides, told that you are neither Asian enough nor queer enough, and yet to be the one propelling both of these communities forward?
As we discussed the theme for this year’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, Autostraddle’s trans subject editor and co-editor for the AAPI Heritage Month Series, Xoài Pham gently nudged me to move past mere reconciliation. She said:
“We are always reconciling our identities as queer Asians. What happens when we move beyond that and begin taking up space as our whole selves?”
And I realized, this was Karen’s point as well. That to exist as a queer/trans Asian/Pacific Islander means to put your stakes in the ground and to say, “I am all of these identities, and I exist, so therefore these identities are me. They must be.”
From start to finish, this year’s AAPI Heritage Month has been about queer/trans Asian/Pacific Islanders laying their claims to all of themselves. Over the course of the last month, over a dozen queer and trans writers and artists from all over the API diaspora have shared what it means to them to hold all their identities in all the pain, pleasure and power that entails.
It’s truly been an honor to have been trusted with these stories, and the stories of dozens upon dozens of others who pitched to be part of the series as well. There is so much richness and so much nuance and so much depth to being queer/trans and Asian/Pacific Islander. In this year’s AAPI Heritage Month, we’ve been able to hold space for a small sliver of it in the hopes that through sharing this work, queer/trans Asian/Pacific Islanders from all over the world feel a little less alone in taking up their own space, as well.
The Right to Breathe
Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.
I’m struggling. More so than usual. What over a year of grieving through a pandemic has given me: the courage to let go of the stories I told myself as coping mechanisms.
I am not okay. Most of my life, I thought I would be okay if I got pretty enough, successful enough, had enough friends. If I looked like I had myself put together, maybe it’d be real somehow. But I’m not okay. I am scared. And many days, I think happiness is impossible.
The average person, at rest, breathes 12 to 16 times a minute.
A few weeks ago, a Vietnamese man in Indiana offered two men a ride home. He was then killed and dismembered in his own car.
“Did you hear what happened to Shane Nguyễn, Ba?” I ask my dad. “Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t let anyone near your car. Don’t go outside alone.” He’s the type to be generous to strangers. There are many people who want to see my father dead more than anything else. I tell him I’ll be ordering self-defense keychains for the family.
Babies cry when they’re born in order to expand their lungs and eliminate fluid blocking their airways. They cry to breathe. “Your baby will cry as long as he needs to in order to start breathing normally,” pediatrician Ana Machado told Romper.
I cry at least once a day, sometimes wailing. I think of the moment I was born, how I must not have cared at all how loud I screamed. I needed to breathe. I needed everyone to know I was here. At times, I wash my face before bed and the sight of my face, so exposed like I’m seeing myself for the first time, brings me to tears.
It’s been six months since I decided to download a dating app. After being in a relationship for two years, I forgot how bleak romance is for trans women. I am distorted, bent into different shapes by the whims and fantasies of men. Some men find trans women repulsive. Some just want to know if I have a dick. Some want to experiment to see if they’d like what they see. I am a sex toy expected to have endless customizations. And all I want is someone to hold me. All I want is to know what someone out there will hold me. I admit to myself, wholeheartedly for the first time, that I want a storybook romance.
At the moment, there are over 100 bills restricting access to public life and healthcare for trans youth in U.S. state legislatures. They don’t even want us to have healthcare, let alone experience love.
I walk home, my thumb on the trigger of the pepper spray. I stroll past a family playing music on the sidewalk, the children’s giggles making the air lighter. Then, two bikers speed along my left, the rush of air from their bodies brushing across my cheek.
I turn the dark corner, and here is my light-strewn block. My relief ends quickly when a man also turns the corner. I look back at him and he says, “Hey, baby.” My breath quickens.
I start to walk a little faster. Sarah Everard‘s name crosses my mind. In March, she was walking home from a friend’s house in London. She was last seen on a main road at 9:30pm before she was reported missing and later found dead. I pull out my phone: 9:42pm.
His voice feels close, “You’re so beautiful. Come talk to me.” He says other things I can’t make out. I pretend to be observing something to my left and try to catch how far he is from me with my peripheral vision. I’m only about 20 feet away from my building. I observe how far a bystander might be. There’s someone on the next block who’d hear me if I screamed.
“Let me get your number, beautiful,” he continues, even though I have yet to say a word in response.
I turn into the entryway of my building and sprint, scrambling to get the key fob to scan. I’m frantic now, I can hear my heavy breathing. I look back to make sure he hasn’t caught up. The door buzzes and I crack it open just enough to slip inside quickly, so it can close and lock.
It’s been shown in studies that marine mammals, like bottlenose dolphins and pilot whales, synchronize breathing to reduce tension and stress. The synchronicity increases in highly social situations where many whales are present.
In humans, strong bonds produce what scientists call “interpersonal synchronicity.” Couples sitting together would unconsciously align their breathing rates and heartbeats. Dr. Pavel Goldstein’s study with the University of Colorado, Boulder found that when one partner experiences pain, it interrupts the synchronicity. But when the couple is allowed to hold hands, physical touch reduces the pain and allows them again to fall into sync.
“Aloha is not just a greeting,” my sister explains. “It means we’re exchanging breath, or what we call hā. Our breaths are connected.”
Derek Chauvin was a rare case: police officers are rarely convicted of the murders they commit. In his last moments, George Floyd said “I can’t breathe” more than 20 times. The final words he uttered were: “They’ll kill me.”
Mhelody Bruno was a Filipina trans woman who died of what the court called “erotic asphyxiation” in 2019. Her boyfriend at the time, a corporal in the Royal Australian Air Force, pleaded guilty to killing her by choking.
Five years earlier, in October of 2014, another Filipina trans woman named Jennifer Laude was killed by asphyxiation at the hands of a U.S. Marine. She was found slumped lifeless over a toilet.
Three months prior, in July of 2014, Eric Garner‘s last words, too, were “I can’t breathe.” Like George Floyd, Eric Garner was a Black father. The police officer who killed him with a chokehold, Daniel Pantaleo, was not indicted.
In November of 2020, my dad caught COVID-19. Luckily, I was home for the holidays. His condition worsened quickly. He spent all day in his bed, reading and eating the little bit that he could. We delivered food to his door and he’d hobble over to retrieve it. We started placing the tray of food on a high chair when it was clear he couldn’t bend down.
I bought a pulse oximeter to measure his blood oxygen levels. “Ba, can you breathe?” I asked him every morning, afternoon, and evening.
He didn’t have the air to speak. So he started texting me. “Oxygen level up and down today,” he’d write. My childhood nebulizer, a hulking machine that felt like a hospital’s version of hookah, was placed in his room. He spent 15 minutes inhaling vaporized medicine every night before bed. I remembered all the times he was the one preparing the medication for me, when my asthma was a daily pain.
The roles were reversed.
I wrote him letters every day. It felt urgent to tell him everything I wanted him to hear: I love you. I’m proud of you. I want you to forgive yourself.
Kehlani’s Virtual Concert Was My Queer Full Circle Moment
On May 10 of this year, I got in my bed and prepared to watch the Oakland born & raised artist, Kehlani, in their first virtual concert, It Was Live Until It Wasn’t. They would be performing their most recent album, It Was Good Until It Wasn’t, in its entirety. The emotional intelligence and vulnerability of Kehlani’s music truly came through in this project, and it was exciting that a visual element was going to be added to deepen my admiration of it. I was excited to see what songs would be performed and how they would be sequenced throughout the set. I was consumed with anticipation to see if her raw emotions would come out through the performances, and wondering if I would connect to them even more than I already did. When they stepped out onto the stage after Lexii Alijais’ intro — a sense of calm seemed to illuminate off of them. It Was Good Until It Wasn’t is an album soaked in the beauty, pain, and lust that can often fill a relationship, but as she performed the feeling of catharsis was ever-present. It wasn’t just a concert, but a gift for her younger self — wrapped in a melodic embodiment of empathy and present-day wiseness.
Kehlani has always been a master of fluidity and queerness. Both in her varying style of dress, but also in her overall demeanor. She never seems afraid to carry herself in a way that aligns with masculinity in things like posture or interactions with those around her, while dressed in a more femme presenting way, or vice versa. She has always acknowledged that her appearance does not fit the mold of what is typically envisioned for a female pop star and unapologetically embraces that at all times. I am a highly femme presenting cis woman looking to tap into more of my fluidity openly. So when I watched them confidently adorn a striking white jumpsuit while onstage, It was a glimpse at what could be ahead for me. For the entirety of the time that I’ve been out to myself as queer, I have battled internalized homophobia. I wanted to steer clear presenting in any way that may present as masculine because I thought it would be a sign that gave away my identity. It was something nice for others, but not for me. I have begun imagining myself incorporating gender-fluid clothing into my wardrobe, and being less cautious about always moving through the world as strictly femme. To embrace the grey space between masculine and feminine would be to embrace all of me and I’d be able to breathe a sigh of relief.
During the concert, I felt especially connected when they began to perform songs off their previous works and It brought me back to their first project, Cloud 19. A friend sent me the Soundcloud link to the album in 2014 and at the end of the eight-track mixtape, I was in love. Captivated by its sleek production and escaping into the even bolder lyrics. I was introduced to the album at a time that coincided with me having an inkling that I might not be straight. I hadn’t yet come out to myself or even accepted queerness as a part of my life.
On the track 1st Position, Kehlani sultrily sings “Girl let me put you on with something real, wanna show you how it feels — to rock with something trill..” Their unabashed delivery of this one lyric was startling but comforting and was enough to make me want to explore this artist’s world. She was singing to a girl in the song and in doing so was being open about being part of the LGBTQ+ community, both of those were mind-blowing to me. Being openly queer wasn’t something I’d yet to consider as an option for myself, but listening to (and often replaying) this three-minute song was making it a possibility. 1st Position presented me with the idea of accepting my queer identity but Honey — that song made me feel like once I did I would blossom in it. When they performed the song during the virtual concert, I realized just how much Kehlani’s music is a soundtrack to my personal growth. Released in 2017, the song has a simple guitar melody and may have been written about their lover at the time. During the concert, it was one of the few selections that had no choreography, maybe to match the sweet vibe of the song. It allowed me to focus on the soft vocals and gentle lyrics, helping me to escape into it just as I had before. The song has always felt both hard and soft to me, matching how I felt about queerness as I grew into it. Queerness was presented as this safe space, despite any imperfections I had. I would imagine a time when it would no longer be something I needed to get acclimated to — but part of my self-actualization that provided refuge.
A song that equally contributed to my growth, but wasn’t performed is What I Need, a high-energy pop-esque song with Lesbian Jesus Hayley Kiyoko, about not settling in relationships. They sing about being someone who is not afraid to publicly proclaim a queer relationship. The song made me reevaluate myself during my coming out process. I was out to myself and my friends, but not to my family. The song helped to bring up necessary concerns about what I wanted my future queer relationships to look like. And it made me ponder what I’d be able to tolerate in one should I end up with a partner that wasn’t out. It talked about boundaries and deserving more, instead of the shame and self-deprecating narrative that I usually heard when closeted queerness was the topic. It would have been great to watch her perform such empowering lyrics with the ever-present aura of peace that was surrounding her.
As I watched Kehlani end the choreography to the song Water, with her background dancers of varying gender presentation, and an all-girl band — the concert came to an end. As the concert ended and the live stream faded to black, I felt a sadness in my heart. Those songs and the memories that I have attached to them, helped me express or process parts of myself that I otherwise could not do. To be able to watch it play out in front of me was comforting. Having that be over, meant there were parts of myself that had to go back into hiding, even within the four walls of my room — I wished there had been an encore. I, like Kehlani, have not had the traditional parental figures in my life due to death and unfortunate circumstances. Although I have a support system in my other relatives, I’ve had to map out and envision a life without those figures. There are also many preconceived notions that are placed onto me because of the way that I physically move through the world. I have not let these characteristics make me jaded, but let them make me into a resilient and optimistic person. Those are attributes Kehlani has helped make me feel like they were within reach for me due to their openness about their own life.
Being comfortable in my queerness was not something that felt attainable to me, mass media fed me images of queer that were all much older and white. Very few people in pop culture lived or spoke about life in a way that felt familiar to me, until Kehlani. They were one of the first people that made queerness — especially in music — feel accessible to me. I’ve used their music over the years as pillars of inspiration and strength. Their artistry has shown me that evolving is nothing to be ashamed of but something to proudly build upon. Most importantly, through them, I’ve learned everyone’s journey and realization of queerness is valid. No matter your age, stage in life, or previous use of labels — your story is valid, and there is always more love and joy to be found. What a beautiful message for a queer Black girl, like me to carry around.
There’s a Little India in South Africa
Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.
Five years ago in Colaba, Mumbai, my jaw dropped as I surveyed the artwork in a Maharashtra gallery depicting Hindu deities with dark skin. In a state of bewilderment, I complained, “Back home in South Africa, in all the years that I snuck into my grandparents’ prayer room, I’d never seen anything like this. They were always depicted as light skinned or blue!” A Mumbai based artist herself, my friend Priyanka nodded her head and explained the whitewashing and colorism in Indian art history and society. It didn’t surprise me, given the frequency with which I had personally experienced this from Indian family members growing up.
“Tell me something I don’t know!” I said, and she explained how Raja Ravi Varma’s artwork circulated India and the Indian diasporas. Born in 1848, Varma gained acclaim and criticism for his work depicting his interpretations of Hindu mythology into the European realist historicist painting style. Amongst his extensive collection, works like Shri Rama Vanquishing the Sea offered viewers an opportunity to put an image to moments in mythology as Varma interpreted the stories of Hindu deities and characters in the epics and Puranas. In 1894, he set up a lithographic press, allowing his work to be reproduced en masse at a low rate. The innovations in technology created an affordability for ordinary people and his work began to circulate homes of people on every continent. While some write him off as a “calendar artist,” his work has had a significant impact on Indian popular art, influencing Indian religious art for generations after his death.
Raja Ravi Varma, Saraswati
“So white Krishna is like white Jesus, then?” I asked. She laughed, explaining that although Varma’s work was far more contemporary than the depictions we’ve come to know in Christianity, it could lead to the same type of white-washed depictions that have no grounding in scripture.
We left the gallery and walked around Apollo Bandar until we reached the gateway of India, which arches over the Indian Ocean, creating what feels like a portal. Inscriptions on the wall read, “Erected to commemorate the landing in India of their Imperial Majesties King George V and Queen Mary on the Second of December MCMXI.” I sighed, heavy-hearted, wondering what secrets those waters held.
On the Southernmost tip of Africa, the East Coast is met by the Indian Ocean. Salty and humid winds pass through the hills of greenery, which seem luscious and never ending. Whenever I land in Durban, South Africa, there’s no feeling as sweet as home nor a drive so bitter, as we pass through sugarcane plantations for miles on end. Outside of India, Durban has the largest population of Indians in the world. The population is heterogeneous, with each family line arriving at different times and under different circumstances, ranging from people who were enslaved during the Dutch colonial era, to “indentured laborers” who worked on the sugarcane plantations, to “free Indians” who immigrated at their own expense.
Apartheid-era laws had segregated the population into racially homogeneous areas. Due to the notorious Group Areas Act, Indian communities quickly formed their own worlds within South Africa, almost completely separated from the experiences of other populations and cultures within the country. To create further division amongst people of color, the Apartheid government insidiously established a racial hierarchy which placed black and indigenous people at the bottom of the rank, enforcing superiority complexes and anti-black stereotypes. To suffocate less under the Apartheid regime, one had to try their best to gain a closer proximity to whiteness through assimilation.
The caste system within Indian culture adds fuel to the fire of white assimilation in South Africa. While the caste system is specifically related to a hierarchical system of social organization within Indian culture, colorism becomes intertwined as privilege and esteem is often assigned to lighter skinned Indians. Although skin color diversity exists within each caste, historical biases towards dark skinned people remains prevalent to this day.
South African Indians have also creolized the rhetoric around the subcultures within Indian culture. People are identified amongst the group through their surnames and family histories to name a few factors. For instance, Tamil people became known as Porridge O’s (Porridge people) for their involvement in prayers known as Marie Amman Poojay. While the experiences and history of Tamil people in South Africa is not homogeneous, colorism and caste bias arise within the Indian community through anti-dark skinned slurs which are used to stereotype and demean Tamil people by associating them with the embodiment of evil from the Ramayana. And, While Roti-O’s (Roti people) are broadly defined as Hindu people, there is a distinction between religion, culture and caste as Hindu Tamil people are not considered as a part of the group. Roti-O’s are often stereotyped as lighter skinned, more affluent and while the group is not homogeneous, there is a potential for a more privileged historical introduction to South Africa due to their higher social status within the caste system in India.
When I was born, my grandmother tried to squeeze the blackness out of my nose. She was horrified at the size and shapes of my features, scanning my infant body to find evidence of “non-Indianness” as quickly as possible, while I was still malleable. My mother walked into the room one day in protest, to which my grandmother responded, “There’s no bridgebone! You must pinch it like this everyday while the baby is still small, and it will form!” Astounded yet unsurprised, my mother pulled me away and yelled, “You’re suffocating the child!”
As the years went by, I slowly grew into my skin with a sense of pride. At school, kids bullied me for my features. “Hey Phuthu lips.” (A staple in black communities in South Africa, Phuthu is a dish made from ground maize meal.) When I told my mother about my nickname at school, she laughed, “Tell them it’s called Hollywood lips,” and although I never did, I watched closely as she affirmed everything she was criticized for, wearing it like a crown.
My high school had an Indian majority population, with students from different castes and historical backgrounds. As people aged and entered the dating scene, an underground market for skin whitening creams emerged at school. The “boys” bleached their hair blonde and secretly sold whitening creams out of their backpacks, in an attempt to win the attention of “girls,” with their Jonas Brothers inspired aesthetics.
While I witnessed high school cisheteronormativity and colorism dominate the scene, I was met with an array of people across the color and gender spectrums who stood proudly in themselves amidst the noise. From owning their sexualities in a homophobic climate, to acknowledging the beauty in being dark skinned, the process wasn’t neat, with negative self talk recurring in the process of affirmation. Regardless of the tumultuous nature of the cycle between affirmation and negative self-talk, it’s impressive to imagine the generational cycles that high school children were beginning to break with their shifting perceptions of self.
Deep within queer confusion and grey asexuality, I found myself in pockets of LGBTQ+ community, avoiding the dating scene and the school culture altogether. As I recluded into myself, I connected with a Hindu non-binary femme, who told me of her acceptance within the temples of Durban. Growing up, I’d quiver to imagine Muslims or Hindus in my family responding positively towards my transness. She explained, “I’m not just accepted, I’m celebrated. I’m in charge of all of the food preparation, and I’m part of the rituals for certain prayers like Kavadi.” She explained her process of praying and fasting as she prepared to embody the goddess Kali and carry chariots during the festival.
I began to notice the gaps between the transantagonism I experienced in daily life and scripture as I learned about the existence of trans people within Indian and African societies throughout time. There is a pattern in the way colonization has distanced people from affirming the diversity within their own cultures. On one hand, colonial influence had led to a progressive cultural whitewashing, and on the other hand, it buried the layers of gender diversity that was accepted in ancient culture and religion.
Transness, though often stereotyped as a Western innovation, has existed on the African and Asian continents for as long as humans existed. The more I spoke about LGBTQ+ elders amongst friends and studied the history through articles and photographic archives, I saw the way my ancestors looked down on me with love, instead of shame. In a similar way that my jaw dropped when witnessing dark skinned deities represented in Mumbai, I find myself enamored at the richness in gender and sexual diversity, which has been buried under years of colonial influence across cultures.
The streets of Coloba, Mumbai are lined with Banyan trees that hold offerings in their trunks. Garlands of flowers are hung in ceremony as sages and ordinary people pass them by. Priyanka had said that it’s a holy tree that sages sit beneath in prayer. In Durban, there is a Banyan tree in my mother’s backyard. It had been there for years before we moved there, and in all the time that passed us by, we never guessed it’s origin until Priyanka had explained its significance in India. Somewhere down the line, someone from India tried to carry a piece of home with them to South Africa for familiarity and possibly, a place to pray under.
“Master of None” Roundtable: Sparks of Queer Black Brilliance in an Unsatisfying Story
Dani Janae, Natalie, and Shelli Nicole linked up to chat about Netflix’s Master of None: Moments of Love. The latest season stars Lena Waithe and Naomi Ackie, and is the first to feature a story that focuses entirely on the relationship of a Black Lesbian couple. Let’s get into it!
Shelli Nicole: I kinda just wanna jump into it and ask — How did you feel about the show? When Episode five was done and you were left sitting on your couch or laying in bed as the credits rolled, how did you feel about what you just watched?
Dani Janae: I watched all five episodes in one sitting. At the end of it, I felt… satisfied but also kind of pissed. What unfolds in the episodes is very simple in that we are all flawed and I think the story hit a nerve due to some personal things going on in my life. I wanted more of some things and less of others. I was happy I watched but also felt a way about what I had seen.
Shelli Nicole: I too watched it all in one sitting. I felt like I had to, I wanted to take it all in at once for some reason. Maybe because I knew there would be some trauma at some point just due to Lena’s history as a storyteller or producer, so I wanted to just get to it and get it over with.
Natalie: I finished it all in one sitting as well. I had mixed feelings about it, to be honest. I go into every Lena Waithe project wanting to love it — this has been true for The Chi, Boomerang, and Twenties — then I end up loving some things about it, but not really connecting with the rest of it. Like, I thought episode four was one of the best things Lena’s probably ever written, maybe even better than “Thanksgiving,” but then episode five came along and I was just like 🤷🏾.
Shelli Nicole: Damn that’s high praise because so far, “Thanksgiving” is still at the top of my list of anything she’s ever created. Why did episode four make you feel like that though? For me, it was the one that hurt the most, as it probably should have given the content.
Natalie: Oh, it absolutely did hurt. It felt like the writing and the performances just aligned beautifully in that episode. I thought that the story of navigating the fertility process is something that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough, especially when it comes to queer people and particularly single queer people.
Dani Janae: Yeah, I’ve never seen a queer woman trying to conceive a child on her own on a show before. Alicia’s story kept me coming back even when it hurt, I wanted resolution for her.
Natalie: Episode 4 really worked because it had an arc, in the same way that “Thanksgiving” did. It was really building towards something in a way the other episodes didn’t.
Shelli Nicole: That’s true, It’s something in the next few years that I might be looking into and I know it’s going to wildly difficult. So seeing that on-screen was an interesting call but I still feel like it was — so much pain? Like, at a certain point I was just like “Damn, I get it.” I understand the difficulty of this process, but I wanted a point in the story where she could have a break.
I am not negating the nuance of that storyline nor the importance of it needing to be told but, I was waiting so long for a break for her that the one we finally got didn’t feel like enough to make up for all the pain I just saw. It was layers and layers of just — pain. Giving up a dream, worrying about finances, physical trauma, being away from her mother, losing eggs, and I was just like WHEW.
Natalie: I would’ve definitely preferred that she wasn’t so isolated the entire time… it was hard to watch her deal with this all alone and with the nurse being her only real source of comfort. I’m genuinely curious to know if that was the original vision for the story or if COVID dictated that story choice?
Shelli Nicole: I don’t know. I feel like I wanted something sweeter. I understand that we are to use Film & TV to tell Black Queer stories — things that happen to us, things that affect us, things that go on in our communities, and more — in order to bring awareness to these things. But perhaps it’s because I (we) actually live it that sometimes, just fucking sometimes, I wanna escape into a world where that stuff isn’t.
Dani Janae: Totally get that, it was very painful to watch. I thought they used the relationship with the nurse to assuage some of that pain but it was still very hard. I agree with Shelli in wanting something sweeter. All around I wanted something sweeter. We so rarely see two BLACK women loving each other I was hoping it would be triumphant. I get that love and relationships are complicated but I feel like you can portray that in more interesting ways.
Shelli Nicole: Did y’all have a favorite moment?
Dani Janae: I really liked the “bad bitch” moment Alicia had with her doctor. Like that resolve and strength to just do it alone and continue after the first attempt was so affirming for me. I don’t want kids but I feel like that attitude of “I’m a bad bitch and I will succeed” is so translatable to various life endeavors.
Shelli Nicole: Mine was the sweet scene in the laundry room when they were folding clothes. Doing the partner shit and connecting with each other through their love of music. Everything about it was beautiful. The way they were openly silly with one another — which is something I think you only really do with a great friend or someone you love like, romantically. There wasn’t any murky space between them and they were just living, loving, and laughing.
Natalie: I was going to say the same thing, Dani. That and the moment where Alicia found out her eggs were viable felt relatable. That viability moment felt like one of the few moments of pure joy in this season.
Dani Janae: I think as a start to finish project, I didn’t mind watching it. Like I wouldn’t say I regret those hours. I will say I thought it could have been executed better. I wanted more powerful love and happiness for all but the way it ended…Really derailed it for me. I don’t want to be too hard on Waithe, there were some great scenes that I enjoyed. Would I recommend it to a friend? Not really. But I would talk about it with a friend if they already watched it — Maybe that’s the end goal to get people talking.
Shelli Nicole: I am proud that there is a piece of work in the world that has hours worth of focus on two Black lesbians that also present in different ways. I am happy that some young dyke 10 years from now will use scenes from this to inspire them in their own work, and that there is even something around like this for them to be inspired by. I wish there was more romance, less pain, and copious spoonfuls of gentleness — but I am a secret hopeless romantic, an eternal optimist, and have always moved thru the world wanting more sweetness so… this is very on-brand for me to feel this way — I’m not watching it again though.
Natalie: Moments in Love feels like a missed opportunity… Episode four was incredible and showed the potential for what this could have been. I see the sparks of brilliance there but they never connect for me in a way that felt satisfying — and I say that as a committed member of Team Love is a Lie.
Shelli Nicole: Also — so much of this felt like a love letter to cheating.
Dani Janae: !! I think portraying a couple that disagrees on having kids or not would be a dope examination of conflict in relationships, but then the cheating storyline came in and I was like oh no.
Shelli Nicole: From the MINUTE her friend showed up I was like “I know EGGZAKLEE where this is about to go.”
Natalie: I definitely wished they’d done more to deal with the emotional fallout from the miscarriage but then the friend showed up and like Shelli, I was like, “oh, I see where this is going.”
Can I ask did you guys connect with Denise and Alicia as a couple from the beginning?
Shelli Nicole: Not in any way, shape, or form.
Dani Janae: I wanted to as a Black woman that loves other Black women. I thought they were a cute couple but I didn’t really connect with either of them in that way.
Shelli Nicole: They felt like two separate people, living separate lives but just in the same space. Like friends who mistook their deep friendship connection as a sign to create a romantic one.
Dani Janae: I feel like that feeling was heightened by the lack of physical intimacy between them.
Natalie: That was the big stumbling block for me, right from the start. Despite the cute interactions between them, there wasn’t enough to make me really care about the fate of the relationship. The fact that they were in this house that, I guess, they called cozy but just felt suffocating to me… I just wanted to get out of that space.
Shelli Nicole: I love that you bought up the house because it def felt like it was this major glue that was holding the relationship together. Like they thought if they filled it with enough things that they both loved, then they could be comfortable enough to live there while they just moved through the relationship.
Dani Janae: I feel like I came to this wanting to see some blooming love but what it felt like was what Shelli said, two friends who mistook the relationship for more. The most in touch they felt in the five episodes was when they were both cheating on their respective wives.
Shelli Nicole: Absolutely Dani!!!!
Natalie: That’s absolutely right. Also, I would’ve taken that stained glass out of that damn window before I sold it.
Shelli Nicole: Lol I thought they were going to low-key! When they were in that tub in the final episode, It was the most connected and the most honest they had ever been. It was also the most, in-love moment during the show.
How did y’all feel about Aziz’s quick presence in the show?
Dani Janae: It felt unnecessary. Like that could have been another cute lesbian couple that appeared in that scene. I get it’s his show technically but I was like, meh I could go without seeing him.
Natalie: I mean, there’s a conversation to be had about Aziz and his history and whether he should have appeared in front of the camera…. but I think they needed something to ground Denise. Dev comes in and they drop back into this easy rapport and it just highlights how strained things really are between Denise and Alicia. I would’ve rather seen Denise’s mom come through or maybe her aunt — but I appreciated that juxtaposition.
Shelli Nicole: It just felt out of place for me. Like, they needed to ground her but I could have done without it being through him.
Natalie: Had either of you watched the first two seasons?
Dani Janae: I did watch the first season I believe.
Shelli Nicole: I totally did. I liked them and was a fan. It was my first intro to Lena actually. I was like “A Black Lesbian? On Netflix? Show me and give it to me now — NOW!”
Natalie: I think the other thing that’s interesting about Dev’s appearance is in the second season he seems like he’s on the cusp of breaking through but things falls apart. Obviously, by Moments in Love, he’s at a low point and it kind of foreshadows where Denise is going.
Shelli Nicole: This just wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted Black Lesbian romance. I wanted sweetness and kisses. Do you know what I wanted? A full five episodes of that scene in episode five when they were dancing to Back II Life. I understand relationships are hard and that difficulties will arise, moreso with us given our identities. But I also deserve moments in film & television where there is a couple who looks like me that isn’t bombarded with trauma, breakups, or sadness. I wanna see that and I don’t think I’m a fool for asking for it.
Natalie: They called it Moments in Love so that wasn’t an unrealistic expectation.
Dani Janae: I feel like they could have gotten away with it if the final action wasn’t both of them reveling in being cheaters. Like I would have loved to just see Alicia move on as a mother, find a partner, and be happy.
Shelli Nicole: AND BE HAPPY. And have Denise beautifully partnered, grounded in her life living as a creative on her own terms (or non-creative), and them in each others’ lives as the true friends they seemed to actually be.
Natalie: I’m curious about what you guys thought about the first instances of cheating. Denise hooks up with her friend and then gets into the accident and Alicia, who’s supposed to be in Baltimore, rushes back but we find out really she was out cheating. Did that strike either of you as odd?
Dani Janae: Very odd!
Shelli Nicole: lol yes! They were like, let’s have both of them be somewhat terrible people.
Dani Janae: We as viewers also didn’t get to see Alicia cheat so it was like… what??
Natalie: Which is fine… birds of a feather and all that… but like she was really upset about it and I just didn’t get it.
Dani Janae: I wanna say I think there are far bigger betrayals in a relationship than cheating, but it just felt so forced and unreal.
Natalie: One of the things that struck me about this (and Twenties as well) was how the story parallels Lena’s own life. Obviously, this was written before her marriage ended so I won’t dig into the personal, but I was curious about how you feel about the pressure that Denise felt as a queer creative… because, at least, that part felt true to Lena’s life.
Do you feel that pressure as a queer creative, especially as a queer creative of color? Did that portrayal resonate for you? It’s been something that’s been rattling around in my head since I watched the show.
Dani Janae: That’s a really interesting question. As a poet, I think there is a pressure to create art that is about your deepest darkest pains and secrets. Like everyone wants a piece of you on that level, for everything to be raw and guttural. So I definitely feel that pressure for sure. I think Denise’s character really grappled with that even being a fiction writer. Publishers and readers kinda want you to bleed on the page. And when you have a first big success as she did, the pressure is even higher for a second release.
Shelli Nicole: I think I felt like that at the very start of my creative career, I had success very quickly and was writing at publications that I’d only dreamed of. So many places only wanted me to only write from a traumatic view – which I did for a while because I thought it was the only way to have success as a Black Queer writer. But I had to stop writing things I didn’t want to out of fear that the opportunities would stop. It was hard but when I did, I found better success than I ever could have — and I’m not fucking traumatizing myself and others for some coin and a few followers.
Natalie: Denise carries the weight of trying to live up to the first thing she wrote… and that becomes so consuming, it blocks her from writing. I think Lena does as well. Thanksgiving is one of her first big solo swings and she knocks it out of the park, winning that historic Emmy. Now everyone’s kind of expecting that from her.
Shelli Nicole: I don’t think I am expecting Lena to live up to that — what I am expecting her to do is have some reasoning behind her work and to keep in mind the very folks she says she is creating it for. To find her own happy blend of writing things for herself and for the folks who will be watching it.
The Birth and Death of a Name
Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.
I.
This is the story of the birth and death of my name, which means that it is a story about transition, which means that it is necessarily a story about the border between two places and the force with which one rends it. Which means that if you must trace this story to the very beginning, back across three languages, two continents, and countless bodies of water, you will find that this is the story of a boat.
The first boat left a hundred and ten years ago. It left alone, and at night, from a few boards nailed into the dirt with the audacity to call itself a port. Those who stepped on it would never return. All the songs that remain from that time are lamentations. The destination of the boat was not west, but south, toward the equator, where seasons were rumored to have disappeared and even the rain fell warm onto the ground.
If you were the Dutch men in the port awaiting the boat, here is how you would describe what you saw: a small sea of bobbing black heads within a larger sea. Shallow mud in shallow mud. Fair skin, cheekbones that melted into their faces, taut little mouths that crowed even from afar. They were different from the natives of the land you were colonizing, and so they posed a different kind of threat. You had plans for them.
The boat swelled with men and then spat them onto the land. These men tumbled out, dragging their wives off the boat by their wrists and into the land where the ground steamed with heat and seeds sprouted from it unbidden.
They birthed their children and tied red string around their wrists. They did their best to fill their mouths with the language they brought with them. They built churches. They built schools. It all worked: though they never returned home, the language persisted. Among the children of these people were my grandparents.
Illustration by Joyce Chau
I call it the first boat, but this boat was not first in any meaningful sense of the word. It was not the Mayflower, though the people came for the same reasons. It was small and cramped and almost certainly very smelly. Shit wedged its way between the floorboards. Phlegm dried into the railings. The ledger is long gone. So there are no records of this story I can show you, no proof it occurred.
Nevertheless, my grandfather is here, and I am here, and this is what he told me when I asked. And so, at least in this story, this is how it happened. Whether you believe it or not is up to you.
Indonesia was dark and warm. The streets were lined with palm trees and cracked dirt. You could buy fruit that sliced into stars, build yourself a thatched room with a dirt floor, find a body of water anywhere you looked. Nevertheless, Indonesia was not a paradise for the Chinese. Tiffany Tsao, a Chinese-Indonesian scholar, translator and writer, notes that common perceptions of the Chinese in Indonesia were as “money-minded, shrewd, and hoarders of wealth.”
Though people of Chinese descent have migrated to the 17,000 islands that comprise what we now call Indonesia since the thirteenth century, systemic national discrimination only began in earnest with Dutch colonization of a place they named the Dutch East Indies. It was an undignified name for a country, derived from the capitalist and colonial enterprise that was the Dutch East India Company. Like many other colonized places, it could not even name itself.
Tsao notes that when the Chinese immigrated during the early twentieth century, the “Dutch administrators segregated Chinese areas from the native population” and deployed “Chinese traders as merchant middlemen” to reify the reputation that they’d invented. This is how the Chinese came to be perceived as a wealthy, penurious, grasping people, a belief that still continues in Indonesia to this day, long after the Dutch have left.
The Chinese found ways to keep their dignity, as people always have, and perhaps even more in more dire circumstances. One of these was through their names. In China, neither women nor men changed their names, even upon marriage; this tradition continued in Indonesia. So though my grandparents were born in Jakarta, they were given Chinese names, and each could well expect to keep their name for the rest of their lives.
Amidst the loathing, the discrimination, the humiliation and ignominy of having a Chinese face, a name was that inviolate thing that would reverse the motion of the boat, slow the inexorable crush of history. Nothing — not migration, adulthood, family, privation, or even death — could take it away from you. In an environment with so little record-keeping to tie one to their past, the name was a way to remember.
In the parts of China I came from, all the members of a family’s generation would share the same first syllable of their given name. So with little else than a name and patience, you could approximate a person’s age, reconstruct what village and province they belonged to. More than being the contents of an archive, the name was a small, complete archive unto itself.
This changed in 1965, when Suharto, the general of the Indonesian army, wrested power over the Indonesian government in a military coup. Scholarly retrospectives of his 32-year reign would call him the most corrupt political leader in modern history, as well as the orchestrator of wholesale cultural genocide of Chinese-Indonesians. Suharto did not delay in fashioning such a reputation: in 1966, the Indonesian government passed Cabinet Presidium Decision 127, a law that commanded all Indonesian citizens of Chinese descent to change their names to Indonesian ones.
Theoretically, there was no consequence to disobeying this law. Yet the staggering majority of people still changed their names, that thing that had once been sacrosanct. There are many forms of consequence that do not require penal intervention, and to not change one’s name came with a steep social price that could lose a person their job, get them rejected from university, turn them into a social pariah.
The stakes were too high for most to keep their names. There was, however, some form of preservation, however meager. The Chinese snuck their old names into their new surnames, often by concatenating the old surname with an Indonesian-sounding prefix or suffix. The name “Wong” might become “Widjaja;” “Lim” could turn into “Halim.” In this way, people tried to remember themselves, even if through a poor rendition of what they once had. The name itself would become that marker of a distinct Chinese-Indonesian identity, separate from both a native Indonesian and a mainland Chinese one.
At the ages of 26 and 30, shortly after the birth of their first child, both of my grandparents sent in their name change papers. My grandfather tucked his old surname into the first syllable of his new first name. Other than that, however, every other syllable was new. It sounded strange in his mouth. It still does.
Sometimes I wake up in a panic, hands clawing at my chest. I think of how it must have been to be called something new that far into your life; how a foreign name was precisely what made you not a foreigner anymore.
Sometimes I wake up in a panic, hands clawing at my chest. I think of how it must have been to be called something new that far into your life; how a foreign name was precisely what made you not a foreigner anymore. One night, I called my grandfather to ask him if he would have given my mother a Chinese name if the 1966 law were not passed. He laughed when I asked this, as if it were obvious.
In fact, he had prepared for her a Chinese name, when my mother was still gathering herself in her mother’s womb. He did not consult the elders in the village as to what the generational syllable of her given name would be. That particular ability of a name to tie a person to a set of similar people was already gone, the process of assimilation well underway even without Suharto’s intervention. Nevertheless, it was a Chinese name, and perhaps even a good one.
But my mother was born in 1966, the year that Cabinet Presidium Decision 127 was passed. So when it came time to write her name down for the birth certificate, they followed the government’s orders. They made something else up. My mother was the first person in her family to have an Indonesian name. The Chinese name lives nowhere now. It exists on no document, on the heading of no school paper, on no birth or marriage certificate. My own mother does not know it.
I asked my grandfather if he still remembered what it was. He told me the name, and I wrote it down. He said it was the first time that anyone had ever done so.
II.
The word “slur” comes from the Middle English “sloor,” meaning “thin or fluid mud.” The mud, and the dirtiness that mud entails, led to the word’s modern, prevailing definition of “an insult or slight.” And the fluid nature of the mud, conferred that other definition: that of a set of notes or words to be played legato, without the cruel interjection of silence. Drunkards slur; so do violins. A slur is a crucial element of music, and not just any music, but the most beautiful kind, where notes gather together to form the raw material of hymns and lullabies.
It is a difficult form to perfect, the slur. Much constrains it. It demands brevity: one, two syllables at most. You must be able to spit it, also whisper it under your breath. It must stand as a complete sentence unto itself.
In the United States, there are all sorts of slurs for East Asian people. Few stretch the imagination; few have that fulminant energy that really reveals the dual nature of the word, explodes an insult into song. But still: the English slur has always demanded at least a minimal form of creativity.
Not so much in Indonesia. Over there, it’s sufficient to use the name of the thing itself. Specifically: Cina, spelled just like that, with a hard “ch”, untempered and uncompressed by the “ai” the way people say it in English. “Chee-nah”: the inflection is all it takes to move it from innocuous descriptor to a mouthful of splinters. It is propulsive — say it enough times, and it will send you back to where you came from. Sometimes, it will even send you forward.
After the 1966 Decision, an identifiably Chinese name would itself become a slur. To keep such a name immediately outed a person not only as ethnically Chinese, but also a law-breaker, a person actively opposed to assimilation and the new government under Suharto. It was only right that as the name itself was the evidence of the crime, the name would become the thing spat at its owner.
With all that regulation, there wasn’t much room left for dignity. Our names were gone. We were still targets for extortion. Our schools were shuttered, our churches razed. Dignity was not given to those who were vilified by their colonizers, loathed by the colonized, respected by no one. Dignity could not be traded, sold, hoarded, packed away in vaults. No, it was no longer economically viable to traffic in dignity.
We trafficked in vulgarity. Hands shoved into pockets, skin that withered in the sun, mouths in a constant state of rudeness. We went into business, exactly what they had accused us of doing. The myth was building itself.
First, the Dutch had helped. Now, Suharto’s government was helping. Tiffany Tsao notes that during this period, the Indonesian dictator “cherry-picked a small handful of ethnic Chinese businessmen to build the nation’s economy, utilizing their capital, networks, and expertise.” In return for the prosperity of a few, Suharto used them as examples to prove malignant stereotypes of Chinese people.
My father tells me what people said to him when he was growing up in Jakarta. Or rather, he tells me what he would have said back to them, if he had the nerve. Instead he only ever says it to me. When he says it he looks so far away.
You call me Cina, Cina, tapi saya yang punya uang; kamu enga punya uang, he gloats.1 He does not say it in Chinese. No one in my family speaks Chinese anymore.
There is both glee and intense bitterness in his voice. It almost emits a smell. His shirt is full of holes where the sleeve meets the armpit. He has worn this shirt thousands of times. I was the one who benefited from it. He used that money on me.
I find him both very desperate and very brave. But I wish he would behave better.
Here is how the Dutch would have written his story.
There is a Chinese man. And Chinese men crave money. This one is no exception.
He has no money. All he does is think about money and how far away it can take him. He applies to the university. There is a quota for people like him, but he is bright and shrewd, all the weakness wrenched and natural-selected out of him. So he makes the quota. He studies; he studies so much he stops having dreams. He graduates. He becomes a businessman. Of course he becomes a businessman.
Whenever he visits us in America, he buys used textbooks online, back when books were one of the few things you could buy online. He tapes them back up in tattered cardboard boxes, wraps the whole box in tape, leaves not a single inch of cardboard exposed. He ferries them back to Indonesia, sells each book, piece by piece. He hoards the money. He devises a long, patient, multigenerational plan to protect his children from ever being called <em>Cina</em> again.
We permanently moved to America shortly after I was born, sixteen months before the 1998 riots that marked the end of Suharto’s regime. Or, rather, my mother and I moved. My father stayed in Indonesia. He had a business to run.
But he gave me a white name to take with me. It was a prosaic name, a common name, a cautious name, and he gave me no other one. The sort of timeless name listed on the top 200 girls names in the United States for a hundred consecutive years. The sort of name that could be worn like armor.
It worked. I learned the reason for the name’s enduring popularity firsthand; it was practically unweaponizable. I received no slurs. The smell of my Asian lunch offended no one. In America, my parents had found one of those sufficiently affluent neighborhoods for me to grow up in, full of enough well-to-do immigrants, that rendered such concerns as overt racism, at least toward Asian-Americans, obsolete. Even in those early days, we were poor but not vulnerable. And then, time passed, and we weren’t poor anymore.
I have never been called a chink until I moved into a city well into my twenties. I have only been spat on once. I frequently walk alone at night. To say I fear for my safety would be disingenuous.
I have a young, able body that answers to me, and I know the terms of this game. I know not to open my mouth and reveal the ugly surprise of my voice. And so, for the most part, when I follow these rules I do not feel fear.
III.
Life, however, always finds a way to introduce new kinds of shame. The first was the shame of a girl. The second was the shame of a disobedient girl, the kind who wielded a razor on her hair both too little and too much. The last was the shame of a girl who stopped being a girl at all.
I don’t want to justify myself. But my mom laughs whenever she sees me. She tells her friends her daughter looks like a boy and every time it feels like rubbing sand into my skin, turning myself into liquid by the sheer force of it. But I stay quiet. I keep cutting my hair. Sometimes I think of doing more.
After I had meditated on the idea of my transness for a sufficiently long time, I thought that I should change my name. It felt like the trans thing to do. For many trans people, it is the right thing to do. These are the people for whom transition feels like “coming home.” For these people, changing a name can prevent a person from getting misgendered. It can assure a person’s safety. I’ve been told that it feels a lot like walking from shade into a hot square of light.
But what does it mean to change your name when your home does not want you? And what does it mean to change your name when you know nothing of your home? To change a name also feels so violent, hurts so much. It feels like not remembering, when all that I want to do is remember.
To change a name in the service of one’s transness is that act of transforming one’s birth name into a slur. The “birth name” becomes a “dead name”, and to call a person by such a name is unconscionable. It can destroy a relationship. It can end a family. It could end my family. And, however much white people say it, it is not true that I owe my family nothing.
So is this what I want — to end a family?
I don’t consider myself to be transitioning anymore. I’ve stopped trying to go home; I get things all mixed up. It physically tires me to read Indonesian. I use a translator whenever I have to read anything with a word longer than two finger-spans length.
Cina, jorok, berisik: these are the sorts of small words I know; I use them to become someone else. I was not taught them, but I heard them anyway. I know how to be furious in this language. I know how to call a man an idiot four different ways, and the exact degree of nuance to each of those words. I know the words for foam and dirt and spit and water. Also pain. It is so easy to be angry in this language with the few words I remember.
I have a friend, a trans man. A trans elder, really, one of those people who transitioned long before any of our modern day trans influencers came into being. When he transitioned, he sloughed off the name that his parents gave him. But not the first one; the one they gave him when they moved from China to the United States.
He changed his name back, or perhaps forward, to his birth name. For him, transitioning was not migration. It was a return from exile.
He changed his name back, or perhaps forward, to his birth name. For him, transitioning was not migration. It was a return from exile.
I am jealous of him. I wish that I had an Indonesian name, or a Chinese name, or a true birth name, and not this white thing, all sanded edges, all watered-down mud. I want a name that burns the back of a throat. I want to dismember a man using only my blade of a name. I wish I had something more true to come home to.
The story of the birth and death of my name ends here.
In it, I have a name that has sewn me to a history of migration — one of those ageless tales of power and violation. It is not a particularly superlative story, but it is mine.
All of the family photos are gone. My grandfather threw them away this year when my grandparents moved in with their daughter, my aunt, to live the quiet years of their life. It was too late to stop him, but in the end it didn’t matter. He did not weep at their absence. He did not mourn those incinerated paper faces. He forgot about them. His memory was loosening its grip. And the documents — well, those were long gone, lost to time and the wastebasket. There was so much to remember, and so little to hold onto.
So here it is: the remembering, the last archive of what I have left. It’s small enough to fit in your mouth. Hold it there — this name that contains an entire girlhood, and my grandmother’s disappeared name, and the last name my dead violin teacher would know me by, which makes me cry every time I think of it, and her. A name that holds the whiteness thrust upon me, and all the hope of my family — to move us forward, also to stay the same.
My first name, my given name, my birth name, that small poor shriveled unwanted thing — I want to cup it in my hands and tell it: Do not be afraid. Do not rend yourself. Do not falter. I’m here. I will stay with you, just a little longer. And so I answer to it, and so I will answer to it for as long as my body allows. This is the name with which I tell my mother I love her. This is the name by which my mother summons me. Whenever she does, she slurs the words, spits a little. Every time, it sounds like singing.
1 “But I’m the one who has money; you don’t have money.”
Lena Waithe on “Master of None” and Making Messy Beautiful Black Lesbian Art
I’ve wanted the opportunity to interview Lena Waithe since the minute I started writing about television professionally. I realize that sounds some kinda way to say out loud (which kinda way? I fear someplace between braggadocious and a “speak your truth into life” motivational Twitter post), but there are few things I love as much as I love Black television, Black film, and queer shit — and Lena Waithe exists smack dab in the middle of that Venn diagram. When Lena Waithe’s Master of None press tour came with the offer for even the slimmest five minutes to sit with her in front of a camera, I nearly broke my wrist I responded so fast.
“We are… Human. Beautifully. And what I hope I also do, is never try to make it seem as if we are perfect.” We maybe only had five minutes together but if it’s one thing lesbians are gonna do, it’s get the job done and so we immediately got to the meat of what matters. In Autostraddle tradition, this is usually the part of the introduction where we give an explainer on the person we’re interviewing. But there are few queer creators working who have a reputation that enters the conversation before they do quite like Lena Waithe. In fact, chances are high that when you saw her name in the title of this piece — especially, though not only, if you’re Black — on some gut level your mind was already made up on what you’d expect.
Sitting on an utterly lush copper-toned couch in an equally lush copper button up with a polo collar — in the middle of a discourse hurricane where everyone who as much as knows her name has an opinion about her, and 240 characters ready to say them — Lena Waithe is remarkably at ease. Press days are defined by their hectic nature, but she moves at a pace of her own. Even in our tiny time across a blurred screen, her confidence captivates.
Lena Waithe as Denise, “Master of None” Season Two (2017)
Since charming hearts as Denise in the OG seasons of Master of None and in 2017 becoming the first Black woman to win an Emmy in comedic writing, proclaiming from the awards stage, “to my LGBTQIA family. See each and every one of you. The things that make us different, those are our superpowers… because the world would not be as beautiful as it if we weren’t in it” — Lena Waithe set a bar that’s been hers alone to surpass. Whether or not she’s met that bar depends on who you ask. Her 2019 feature writing debut Queen and Slim became somewhat of a community shorthand for Black trauma on-screen (it remains one of the most hurtful moviegoing experiences that I’ve had) and her most recent production credit, the television series Them on Amazon, has quickly become yet another bat signal in conversations about violence and trauma (though it’s worth noting that despite misperceptions, given that her production credit was all over the promo material, Waithe wasn’t a creator or writer on the show). Fixation on violence also circles Waithe’s The Chi on Showtime, along with behind-the-scenes harassment between cast members in the show’s early seasons.
But The Chi also happens to have the largest single cast of Black LGBT women characters ever on television. And that’s Lena Waithe in a nutshell. Her work is never just one thing. In addition to creating the largest cast of Black LGBT women characters, Waithe also created the first Black butch protagonist on a television show in BET’s Twenties, which alongside her take on Boomerang, is credited for changing the face of the notoriously homophobic network. There are very few other creators — by which I mean literally none — who’ve seemingly single-handedly remolded the landscape of Black lesbian representation on television.
Taking her last four years together, plainly speaking it’s almost too much for a single person to be hold. Which is perhaps why the pressure of “positive” representation seems to be at the forefront of Waithe’s mind lately, “none of us should have to bear… particularly when you’re Black and a lesbian… it’s two communities you’re having to live up to, or be a credit to. And in addition to just trying to make it through the day! That can be a lot of weight.”
In Master of None’s third season, Denise finds herself a few years into the future from when last saw her, now married and a successful writer. It’s hard not to read Lena Waithe into her character — after all, Denise was crafted around her voice to begin with. I also reviewed the third season on its own. But for now, here’s Lena Waithe and I talking too fast together with our arms flying to make our points on an extremely hurried zoom call about finding God and humanity in Black lesbians, the uniquely queer feeling of going through your adolescence in your thirties, breaking through brick walls, and so much more.
Lena Waithe as Denise and Naomi Ackie as Alicia, “Master of None” Season Three (2021)
Carmen Phillips: I hope you don’t mind. They only gave me five minutes! I’m gonna hop right to it.
Lena Waithe: Please, go for it! I’m a big fan by the way. Love Autostraddle. I know y’all didn’t love Twenties, but hopefully you’ll like Season Two.
Carmen: HA! I will tell you, we did turn around on Twenties. So…
Lena: Oh? Cool…
Carmen: That was me [who wrote that review]. And I did not love the pilot episodes, but I’ll admit, it did come around on me. That actually ties into my first question!
I wanted to begin with jumping back to your infamous Vanity Fair interview in 2018.
Lena: C’mon! You taking it back!
Carmen: In that interview you said, “Can’t no one tell a Black story, particularly a queer story, the way I can, because I see the God in us.”
Lena: Huh.
Carmen: And in the three years since then, you’ve already given us the first Black masc character to ever solo lead her own television show [Jonica Gibbs as Hattie on Twenties]. And now with Master of None, the first Black lesbian couple to ever lead their own television show. I was wondering, looking back on that — and of course, you know, lesbian characters on Boomerang and The Chi, I’m not trying to leave anyone out! — I’m wondering: How have you been feeling about what you’ve done in such a short amount of time? Do you feel like you’re “showing the God in us?”
Lena: Well, one, thank you for that question and thank you for the… just the thoroughness of it.
I do.
And by that, I mean, we are… Human. Beautifully. And what I hope I also do, is never try to make it seem as if we are perfect, because I think that’s something that is a pressure. None of us should have to bear… particularly when you’re Black and a lesbian or Black and queer, or however you identify — It’s sort of two communities you’re having to live live up to, or be a credit to. And in addition to just trying to make it through the day! That can be a lot of weight.
But I absolutely see it as a responsibility to insert us into the narrative. To always make sure we’re present, but also to not make it about the… you know… how we love. Because that’s just a part of us.
And I think what’s exciting about this season of Master of None is that it’s about life after you come out and that there is no marching band. There is no one there to applaud you, but now you have to go be in a relationship. And for me, I can speak for myself having been born in ’84, I wasn’t allowed to be gay in high school. I was a tomboy — as they like to say, you know — I wasn’t really even allowed to be that gay in college because I lived with my mom throughout college. And I was closeted to my mother throughout those four years. So… it was not until I moved Los Angeles, which is what I did. And then I had her fly out in order for me to come out to her!
And now imagine… That’s in my twenties. So I come out in my twenties and now I have to be in relationships in my thirties.
Carmen: Right.
Lena: So now I’m starting where really, a lot of people began in adolescence.
Carmen: I have two minutes left! But I’m glad I came with the heavy hitter first. And I can’t wait for our readers in particular to be able to read that and have a chance to dig into your work, because I’m also someone who came out late and… I think that really comes through in Denise. So I’m going to go ahead and wrap because I see the one minute and —
Lena: [to the moderator off-camera] Can I get… Can we get like two more minutes? Can we get a couple more minutes, folks? For the question you didn’t ask? Thank you. Thank you.
Carmen: Ok I’m going to get into my second question!
Lena: Go for it, go for it.
Carmen: Which really builds right off [this conversation]. It’s about Denise. I think something that’s really interesting is that obviously, you know, you have this big historic Emmy win. And Denise herself has become so iconic, right? We did a list of the 100 Greatest Queer Women of Color Characters in Television, and Denise landed in the top 10.
Lena: [murmurs graciously under her breath] ‘Preciate that. Thank you.
Carmen: So… What was that process to jump back into her, three years later? Was that daunting? Was that exciting? And I think that this builds with what you were saying. The only other time we’ve gotten to really get to know her was her coming out story.
Lena: Right, right, right, right. You know, it was daunting.
It was daunting because now I got to be Denise as a grownup, as an adult and you know… in my own life, because I think there’s also this thing!
You know, Tre’vell Anderson, they do such great work and just interviewed me recently for Entertainment Weekly. They said to me, this must be a heavy cross to bear because you are someone that doesn’t really exist. You’re… you’re sort of there. And what that means is I’m going to get swung at, but I’m also going to be hugged, you know?
And so that’s the thing, it’s like for me, I embrace all of it because I am first through the brick wall. So I’m gonna get those bruises, but my hope is I will take those hits so those coming after me don’t have to. That’s the goal. Don’t make the hits that I take, be in vain. It’s all I ask.
So my thing is that what I want to always do is — show up as my human self. And that’s what I really wanted to do with Denise this season. I wasn’t afraid to make myself the villain. I wasn’t afraid to make that character not likable at times, because even in doing that, my hope is that you will see yourself. So my thing is, I don’t mind representing the best of us, but also the worst of us sometimes. And I think that’s the only way we really heal and really grow.
And because… I don’t want anyone to sanctify me.
The third season of Master of None released yesterday on Netflix, and here’s my review.
If you’d enjoy watching the video of this interview — in full disclosure it involves a lot of me talking incredibly fast from nerves and moving my arms far too much (which I’m vulnerably hoping you find charming and not annoying) — then wow do I have a present for you!
Lena Waithe’s “Master of None” Could’ve Settled for Being Black and Beautiful, But It Chose Complicated Instead
About three-quarters of the way through Master of None’s third season, formally titled “Master of None Presents: Moments In Love” — which follows Black lesbian previous supporting player Denise (Lena Waithe), as her marriage becomes the standalone focus of a story about love, romance, family, and grief in your thirties — I completely lost it and took to my group chat:
1. “Master of None S3 is so gay and so in a class of its own. It’s very gaaaaaaaay. It’s L Word gay. It’s an Art Film Black L Word. That’s my whole review.”
2. “It’s so depressing and complicated and hard and gay and so, so good. I am floored. I have never seen something this nuanced and GROWN and be just about Black Lesbians before. Just 5 episodes, three and half hours, only about this one Black lesbian couple and no one else. I am so shook. I’m not even sure if it’s as good as I think it is? Or if I’m just that shook? Or is it both? WHO KNOWS”
3. (There’s also a message about not possibly being able to form a professional, critical thought about this series when Lena Waithe is in a bathtub showcasing her tattoo sleeve, but since this is in fact a professional review, we can just let that be.)
I struggled with how to open this review, to be honest, because even more than its predecessors, this season of Master of None is serious business. It’s hard to stretch understanding this work as a comedy — and when so little about the lives of queer Black women is able to make to screen in the first place, well… I want for it be considered with the appropriate gravity. It’s fleetingly rare that Black queer women are able to create work centering our own interiority (the club is so small that it has only a handful of members, Dee Rees and Cheryl Dunye prominently come to most minds, and within television Lena Waithe — for better or for worse — has crafted a lane of her own). The third season anthology within Master of None is quite literally the only time a television series has centered around a Black lesbian couple as its sole protagonists, and in such an intimate close up portrait. I’m starting my review with that fact because in everything else I’ve read about the series, I’ve been stunned that no one else brings it up. So I will.
I’ll also make jokes about grown ass Black lesbians being messy because white lesbians have a canon that stretches literally 100s deep that they can point to and this will very likely be the only time all year where I can take a quiet squeal of joy in watching two Black queer women get high, bake cookies, and wear face masks that unironically match the white face paint of the Dead Presidents that they’re watching on screen. This version of Master of None is BLACK Black. It is GAY Gay. That should be acknowledged because in and of itself, that’s a miracle.
Lena Waithe as Denise and Naomi Ackie as Alicia, “Master of None” Season Three (2021)
But that’s not the same as, is it good?
And that’s the crux of it, right? As I so eloquently put it while typing with one hand and shoving nutritional yeast coated popcorn into my face with other, “three and half hours, only about this one Black lesbian couple and no one else. I am so shook. I’m not even sure if it’s as good as I think it is? Or if I’m just that shook? Or is it both? WHO KNOWS” I’ve been thinking a lot about Black art and Black criticism lately. What’s the role of a Black queer writer who is underrepresented in her field (in today’s scouring of Master of None reviews, so far I found only one other Black queer woman reviewing a work that is exclusively and with no exception, about Black queer women? It’s Cate Young at Vulture, you should check out her recaps) when reviewing work by a Black queer woman creator who is also fighting the same systematic underrepresentation? Especially when the stakes are so high?
In part, I think I’ve been drawn to these questions because our most recent dust up about the role Black criticism plays in evaluating Black art also came from Lena Waithe. First, from her 2019 film Queen & Slim, which inflicted such trauma onto its audience it still looms large in a collective Black imagination nearly two years after the fact. Then recently, the Lena Waithe-produced Them — which to be clear, Waithe herself did not write — became the latest lightning rod for manipulating Black horror and trauma around America’s history of racist violence without a productive conclusion (I still won’t bring myself to watch it). Building on a conversation started by Them, Kathleen Newman-Bremang at Refiner29’s Unbothered notes that, “Black voices writing about Black stories can be just as important as the Black show writers themselves. They both exist in an ecosystem that doesn’t thrive without the other.”
Objectively speaking, the third season of Master of None is great, complicated television. It’s pace is markedly slower than even the already famously meandering first two seasons, but it doesn’t mistake unhurried for a drag. It’s exquisitely filmed with the kind of lingering shots without cutaways and attention to detail that makes even the most ordinary moments feel blushingly intimate. Aziz Ansari’s directing choices seem inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1974 film Scenes From A Marriage, which tracks alongside all his previous art film inspirations for the series (and it’s not lost on me that Ansari’s smaller on-screen role very likely came as a result of the accusations of his sexual misconduct from a few years back. I still found it jarring to his name listed as the director of every single episode and if you chose not to watch it as a result, I wouldn’t personally blame you).
In terms of both writing and performance, the third season of Master of None is the best work Lena Waithe has ever put forth — to my mind, even topping her work in Season Two’s “Thanksgiving” episode, which is a career-defining mountain almost no performer could climb twice. Denise has always been written around Waithe’s voice, more so than ever this year when she finds herself a successful writer whose fame and wealth has isolated her from her friends and in the throes of adultery and divorce (yes, the comparisons write themselves). Yet even within those similarities to her own life, Waithe only brings the audience in closer to her. What could have been an eye roll worthy cliché instead becomes stark and heartbreaking.
Naomi Ackie as Alicia, “Master of None” Season Three (2021)
As Denise’s wife Alicia, Naomi Ackie is the definition of stunning. Every review of this season points to episode four — Alicia’s standalone — as the one that’s not to miss. I’ll join the chorus of those who were rendered speechless. In it, Alicia is going through in vitro fertilization and there’s one scene that has burned itself so brightly into my memory, even a month after first watching. The camera remains firmly on Alicia’s face as her doctor bluntly details the extra financial cost of fertility for lesbians — American insurance companies don’t cover the treatment. The doctor continues matter-of-factly, “they have a code for being attacked by an orca, and they have a code for being sucked into a jet engine, but not for ‘gay and desires pregnancy.’” In a series that’s otherwise defined by subtly, this one minute of cutting through bullshit, shakes.
I’m a Black queer woman who also faces an uphill fertility battle that I often choose to ignore, but for that single hour there was no running away. How could I, when she was me? There was only holding my breath. I had the chance to briefly interview Naomi and she shared that while “most of the characters I’ve play are really far away from me,” in portraying Alicia “this felt the closest I’ve ever been to a character. And you know, that’s not my usual experience. That changed me.” It changed me, too.
And this brings back the question — what’s the role of a Black queer critic in this moment? Because in Naomi’s fear of infertility and nerve, I found a mirror. That’s easy, and powerful or inspiring to say. But I also saw a mirror in Denise’s absolute inability to communicate even as her life imploded around her, and that is much, much uglier.
I don’t think this season of Master of None is a love story that anyone will proudly say “I see myself here!” And for that reason, I don’t think it passes whatever happens to be the latest bar for “good” representation — that narrow and ever-moving definition people are talking about when they storm forward hashtagging #RepresentationMatters. These aren’t wives living out picture perfect domestic bliss. I think some will say that in its own way, this is yet again another Lena Waithe (emotional) trauma production. Others will say that at minimum it plays with the fire of some dangerous tropes. And it might skewer too closely to Waithe’s own life in ways that make it hard to praise its creativity. None of those are my critiques.
The third season Master of None eschews any clean, simple picture. Despite its visual beauty, it chooses to revel in the muck and the mess. When a happy story about Black lesbians in love would have been easier, instead it holds up a mirror of what we don’t like to see.
And — for that? I’m grateful.
The third season of Master of None released yesterday on Netflix. In a partner piece to this review, I also had the opportunity to interview Lena Waithe on making messy beautiful Black lesbian art.
Mourning the Loss of Indigenous Queer Identities
Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.
I recently came out as gender-fluid, straddling the Western gender binary like it’s about to give me the ride of my life. I grew up hearing that I looked more like a boy than a girl, all while being told how I’m too feminine to be a boy. For a while, I thought that was me just being bisexual, though I could never settle into that identity. It was somewhat right but ultimately wrong because labeling my sexuality didn’t feel like enough. I tried pansexual, and after that, I was just queer for a while. Nothing settled. I thought I could find myself somewhere in this rainbow of colors, but something just always felt off.
That bizarre feeling is something that’s a staple in my American life. I say this because there’s still a degree of separation there, like the dash between Asian and American. It’s a zealous reminder that I am somehow incomplete, that the words I’ve chosen to describe myself are not enough. In each moniker, be it bisexual or pansexual or queer, I searched for some ounce of truth to who I am. And as I grow older, I find it more difficult to truly accept myself because I don’t feel like I have the right words to describe myself. It’s taken me years to realize that I likely never will.
I am part of the Filipino diaspora, though my identity is entirely defined by a strictly Western perspective. I am an immigrant, my English is so good, and the words I’ve used to describe my gender and sexuality are words I learned from Americans. There are parts of myself, however, that cannot fit within the confines of Western language. Words have a history and language has connotations that go beyond definitions. English is a colonizer’s tool, so it does not always have the right expression for who I am. As an immigrant, I thought perhaps that looking back into the history of my people would give me a better way to express my identity.
Growing up in the Philippines, words that meant “gay” and “weird” were always synonymous with each other, and bakla was used to describe the sinners who couldn’t be nailed down by “gay.” My mother and her mother, my Lola, were both devout Catholics. They taught me that Jesus hates The Gays and Probably the Baklas Too in tired monologues ripped straight from our local priest’s mouth.
Someone wrote about the word bakla in The Guardian and how maybe Western members of the LGBTQIA+ community could learn a thing or two from Filipinos. Bakla is our third option, they claim, but even then, it’s not a label: it’s a standalone concept, kind of a catch-all for anyone who isn’t strictly man or woman, gay or queer, and one that Western minds should embrace. And I might agree to that if I wasn’t still so incensed by the fact that we ourselves don’t have a better understanding of the term bakla at all. There is no need for the Western gaze to embrace that fact now because they never did in the first place. Why offer up more of ourselves when the rest of the world has already taken so much from us?
Illustration by Leanne Gan
The Philippines is a beautiful country, but it is a world where nothing, not even our language, was nailed down or set in place because our people are so deeply traumatized from centuries of imperialist brutality. We spoke Tagalog with English and Spanish mixed in. Some of us knew other languages, such as my Lola’s Ilocano, though these languages were not widely taught. I was only told that Ilocano was an old language and that nobody except my Lola could speak it in our family. I learned about how wonderful the U.S. was for saving the Philippines from the Japanese during World War II. At the same time, I constantly heard about how unhappy we were that Americans continued to meddle in our government.
Our collective consciousness mirrors our country’s muddled history. The Philippines I knew was a mashup of the charming East and a forceful West. Lola would occasionally tell me stories about her father, about how the Spaniards were terrified of our people, about how I was one of the last of the Ibaloi Igorots. Our people, according to her, were simple farmers and warriors. We used every part of the animal, always prayed to the land and gave the Earth our respects. Apparently, when outsiders first came to our shores, we welcomed them with open arms.
But we were uncivilized. Lola would cite that marriages were not “sacred” to our people before the Spanish came. Our people were wayward. Our warriors were never strictly men, as they should have been. Women may have laid with other women in “unnatural” ways and so did men. There were probably even people “in between,” though that concept went beyond What God Intended. And though the Spanish tried to “correct” this through the word of their god on their muskets, we would kill them too easily when we felt threatened, which Lola would say was “unfair.”
Though we had taken them in, they always called us savages once they got back to their homelands. We were easy pickings since we were so naive not to see the value in our fertile lands the way that the Europeans did. Our soil was perfect for sugar and tobacco. They did not understand how we had so much gold in our mountains but did so little with it. They thought our mangoes and purple yams were the perfect exotic treats, served up on the backs of the few of our tribesmen they took back to their countries in chains. And the location of our islands were perfect for taking on the East Indies spice trade by storm.
The Spanish were the first to take over. The Dutch sent missionaries on Spanish naval vessels, aiding in the efforts to civilize us. Americans took part in their imperial games and proceeded to “steal” us away. By the second World War, we were finally called a “nation” by the Japanese and Americans who pillaged our homes. But by then, we were broken. Entire cultures that had coexisted for ages were wiped out within a century of constant war. Most were murdered in their homes. Some were dragged abroad in chains and cages to be shown off like animals at carnival exhibits. The Catholic God replaced all of our deities, especially the genderless and intersex gods. Buried alongside countless slaughtered natives were languages that no one cared enough to understand or preserve. The word bakla became an umbrella slur with a history no one can remember.
No one wrote down what happened to the people before my Lola. She didn’t have a birth-certificate because that’s how turbulent things were in her childhood. No one knows who my ancestors were, if they believed in genders, or what their sexuality was. Now my Lola is long gone. I can’t ask her.
But the death of our people, our cultures and the true history of our people is a slow and painful process.
But the death of our people, our cultures and the true history of our people is a slow and painful process. Many miles north of where my Lola and I said goodbye for the last time, tourists drive up the mountains to meet Whang-Od Oggay. She is the last of the Kalinga mambabatok, a tattoo artist within her old tribe, and the tattoos she puts on these tourists were meant for the Butbut warriors who fought to defend our people. Those warriors are long gone, but these travelers will go back to their home countries to complain about the smell of our food. They will return West, where they scoff about immigrants stealing their jobs. Those tattoos are just reminders of an adventure that never happened and a people they will soon forget. History is not kind to the losers, but modernity is worse.
This is the legacy of colonization. It is far more painful than knowing just how many millions were murdered because they weren’t good enough for others to accept. It is the mass extinction of identities and languages that can no longer exist because someone else said they were bad.
We only vaguely remember our ancestors being warriors and forget that they died in horrific ways. Their efforts to save their countrymen or fight for their freedom will be watered down to tactical studies for soldiers and myths of bogeymen hungry for blood. No one will bother to spell their names correctly, if at all, let alone remind the world that many among our ancestors were people who were beyond “queer.”
Children are born into their people’s slow and steady massacre and are given “better” names. They are told they are either boys or girls and that’s all there is to it. Schools teach them that their ancestors were barbarians. The society cobbled up around them tells them that their desires must adhere to the rules of their colonizer’s beliefs. They learn that their nation is in ruins, and that it’s better to live somewhere else. When they do live elsewhere, they stop speaking their language. Ilocano is ugly, after all, and so is Tagalog, so it’s better to speak English.
Our identities are built on the graves of perspectives that would have better embraced who we truly are. We gladly spit on them when we leave, but look back with sorrow only if we realize just how much we’ve lost and continue to lose.
I was taken away from my homeland so my mother could find “better opportunities” for us in the States when I was seven years old. In elementary school, white classmates would pick on my “smelly food” and spread vicious rumors that I ate the neighborhood cats. The Philippines was mentioned once in only one of my history classes my junior year of high school. If I ask my friends now what they know about my home country, they ask me how to say “Duterte.” My spouse will tell me about how his mother has traced their family’s name back centuries. And if I google my name, the Brazilian singer I was named after pops up. At home, we only occasionally eat Filipino food because some dishes are almost impossible to make without an hour-long trip to the nearest Filipino store. If my elders speak to me in Tagalog, the best I can do is shake my head and enunciate that I can’t speak it anymore.
Somewhere along the way, I’ve become less Filipino. I am part of a diaspora. This is supposed to be “normal.” Immigrants are bound to naturalize themselves in their new countries. We work on our accents by speaking our colonizer’s languages more than using the tongues we were born to speak. We form better relationships with the “natural” citizens of our foreign homes. We move forward, we continue to forget, and we cannibalize ourselves even more to fit into molds that were never intended for us.
In the Philippines, a large part of our identities are defined by the gender binary of the West. Many in my home country, just like my Lola or my mother, believe we were “saved” by their civilization. It took me years to realize that salvation was just slaughter. The right words for who I am died along with our people, our cultures and who we could have been. We were whittled down to little more than a passing mention in a history book. I’ve already lost so much before I was even born, so there should be comfort in the cold logic of assimilation and taking part in the agonizing death of a people.
I am non-binary. I am queer. I am one of thousands of Filipinos who have left the Philippines. When labeling my sexuality, I still write “queer” because I don’t know what else to say and bakla feels like a slur. I suppose I have the vague luxury of separating my gender and sexual identity from my race if I don’t think about it too much.
This is the best that the West has to offer me after all this devastation. For this identity and language, I am not content. I never will be.