Queer Latina Tiffany Cabán Is Running For NYC Council, Bringing Hope To 2021
Tiffany Cabán and I grew up loving people who in the eyes of society were deemed “bad”, and therefore scapegoated simply for what their circumstance allowed them. It’s a tale as old as time for plenty Black and Brown folks and while the anguish consumes us to varying degrees, there are people like Tiffany who chose to do something about it. As I write this, my father is preparing a funeral for his brother, my uncle, who passed away last month. Roberto was his name and he was one of thousands of people in this country caught in-between the vicious cycle of homelessness and our criminal “justice” system. His death, and the pain now being felt by those he left behind, could have been prevented.
It’s difficult for me to comprehend how little attention is being paid to the reality in which we find ourselves in 2020. It’s alarming because, if anything, this year has brought forth a multitude of facts we must confront as a country if we don’t want to end up in the same place we’ve found ourselves before. What does it mean when we can elect the first Black woman as vice president, but can’t reach the 70+ million people who still voted for Trump? What does it mean when the Black Lives Matter movement becomes a summer trend, but the deep roots of white supremacy continue to prevail?
It is these questions that brought me to this interview with Tiffany Cabán. If you’ve heard the name, it’s probably because just last year, the then 32-year-old public defender received significant national attention for running a progressive campaign for Queens DA that may just have put New York’s establishment on notice. Which is why after her narrow defeat for Queens DA, the number one question she got from folks was ‘so when’s the next campaign?’
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Tiffany Cabán had no plans to run again until COVID-19 hit and, as they did for the rest of the world, her priorities changed. She is now running to represent NYC Council District 22 in the election set to take place in November 2021. I could sense the urgency behind her voice as she shared with me her campaign’s vision. The recognition that this is not a problem for tomorrow, this was a problem for yesterday and there is not one more day to be wasted.
Hearing her also casually reference trauma without a hint of shame in her voice, speak on the origin of identity politics, and even sit in bliss as she told a story about coming out to her mom after being asked by her Tia if she had a boyfriend made me giddy. I realized the giddiness was actually hope. Here was someone whose experiences reflected mine. This is what the voters will see: a reflection of themselves in her.
Christian Becerra: What is the vision of your campaign?
Tiffany Cabán: It is so similar to the vision of my last campaign. The first time around, we said we were running on the idea that it’s not about good people or bad people, it’s just about people; that we needed to divest from policing and incarceration and invest in the true sources of safety, which are a robust public health infrastructure and community led accountability processes that foster feeling and maintain human dignity.
After the results of the last election, I just wanted to put my head down and continue to work. I was not planning on running again until the pandemic hit and then obviously the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. In the midst of all that, we had a city council that refused to defund the police in any sort of meaningful way while gutting all of these other resources we needed. You could see the way that our people were struggling, so really the core of our campaign is creating the kinds of communities that foster true safety.
That can be done through ending our carceral systems, through creating a care economy, and bringing a green new deal to our city. Those are the biggest pillars and understanding when we look at every single pillar, goal, or policy platform, that we’re doing it with a really strong race and class analysis; that we’re doing it by centering the experiences of the most marginalized folks that are affected by these systems. So approaching housing, healthcare, education, from the perspective that those things are queer issues, Black issues, Brown issues, immigrant issues, working class and working poor issues, being issues for the disability community. We are making a very intentional and conscious effort to view all of these issues through an intersectional lens.
Christian Becerra: You speak of your time as a public defender as such an integral part of your identity in a way that makes it so obvious that it’s not just a job for you. Can you share with me a little bit about your upbringing and how that impacted the way that you approach your career?
Tiffany Cabán: When I introduce myself in spaces I will often say I am queer, I am a Latina, I am a public defender. I say it in the same breath because it does feel really tied to my identity. Public defense work is trauma work, like being a nurse or a teacher can be trauma work. I think what brings you to trauma work is your own trauma and the desire to have reparative experiences.
There were a couple of really significant things in my life that both politicized me and moved me towards the work that I do now. I went to law school knowing I wanted to be a public defender. My parents grew up in public housing here in Queens. At the core of my campaign is this idea that there aren’t good people and bad people. It’s just about people, access to support, and opportunities to heal.
My grandfather was somebody who was really physically abusive. He was someone who struggled with alcoholism to the point where my grandmother left him and my mom dropped out of high school to help take care of the family. As a little girl, my experience with him was so different. He was my favorite person on the planet. He was patient, kind, and would tell these incredible stories. I loved him so much. Long after he passed away, I think back on who my grandfather was. He was somebody who did a lot of harm but he was also this incredible grandfather. He was a Korean War vet who entered the service as a dirt poor kid from Puerto Rico, came home from war with PTSD, and self medicated with alcohol. He was somebody who could’ve been cycling in and out of our criminal legal system and the question that we should be asking is ‘where were the substructures in place to support him so that he could support his family?’
I think that that’s something that I’ve really internalized from a pretty young age. Then my own personal experiences with certain kinds of harms. Certainly what was modeled for my mother were unhealthy relationships so it’s not surprising that what she found were unhealthy relationships. I’ve also been open about the fact that my father has struggled with alcoholism and a lot of other things that come along with that and I look at my trajectory in life and think about how on any given day there really is nothing that separates me from my clients that I represented but for a couple things that I can point to.
Probably the biggest thing is that my father got a union gig which meant I had a certain level of stability. I had access to an education, I had access to healthcare, and probably most important to me is that I had access to therapy services. I’ve also had the luck and good fortune of being in relationships with women who have been very patient and kind around my traumas.
The other thing that deeply politicized me was that I went to public school from elementary to junior high and private catholic school for high school. Two buses, an hour, and some change away and it was like two entirely different worlds. I grew up in schools that were majority Black and Brown. Most of the kids were on assisted lunch programs, suspension rates were high, and there was a lot of over policing in the neighborhood. Then I went to high school and it’s the same dumb kid shit that goes on, but the responses were different, the access to resources and activities and supports were different, and the investment was different. The combination of those things led me to doing my work as a public defender.
Christian Becerra: I want to talk about growing up queer in a Latinx household. Our parents come from a very different time and place, and I think a lot about the young queer Latinas growing up right now, who perhaps don’t know how to navigate those two identities. Do you have any advice for them based on your personal experience and how you’ve grown into becoming so comfortable with both those identities?
Tiffany Cabán: We find support where we need to. I’m a firm believer that if you’re rooted and grounded in yourself, that the universe will bring you the community that you need when your family isn’t there to hold you down. There’s plenty of family to be had around you. That is something that I consistently experience, whether it is finding community with other queer folks, abolitionists, or anyone that finds themselves on any sort of margin.
Christian Becerra: I think it’s one thing to be open and proud among your group of friends and family but I can imagine it’s a whole other thing to claim that identity as a person running for office. Do you ever consider how being openly queer affects the way voters perceive you subconsciously or consciously?
Tiffany Cabán: A lot of folks told me that I shouldn’t step into certain communities and say that I was queer. That I could talk about being a Latina, that I could talk about being a public defender, but that maybe I should leave out the queer part. I made a very intentional and conscious decision to say ‘no, absolutely not’.
I am bringing my whole self to this. There are a couple of reasons for that. One, I entered the last race not for a second thinking that I could win. All I wanted to do was to disrupt, to call people out on their bullshit, to hold people’s feet to the fire, and to uplift the stories of my clients, my friends, my family, and my neighbors. It obviously turned into something much bigger than that. I still maintain in this very moment the fact that I can move unapologetically because at the end of the day, worst case scenario, I go back to being a public defender and I’m good with that.
That was work that I loved and was so proud to do and felt so privileged to do. I have also seen, and it’s been affirmed for me over and over again, how important it is to have that visibility. We did this big rally and this woman came up to me and said ‘I’m thankful that you’re running on the things that you’re running on but even more important than that, I have an eleven year old daughter at home that identifies as a queer Latina. You don’t know what you mean to her.’ I get emotional just thinking about it now. I just remember hugging, thanking, and crying a little bit with her because that is so real.
People like to weaponize and twist around the word “identity politics” but when you look back at its origin, when you look back at Barbara Smith and the Combahee River Collective, you understand that identity politics are actually incredibly important. It is the idea that we get to and must bring our whole selves into our politics because it is our experiences at the margins, with systems that have oppressed and shaped the way we think about policy and the way that we think about implementing policy and how it affects our lives, that is so important.
It was really important for me to also be really clear that I identified as a queer woman. Political spaces are often spaces filled with privilege. LGBTQIA Democratic clubs and all of those things are overwhelmingly white cisgender gay men. It was a hard thing navigating and feeling rejected in those spaces; feeling that queer people of color and the issues that are unique to our experiences weren’t being validated, centered, or understood. So that’s another reason why it felt so important.
Christian Becerra: What do you think is the largest barrier to your campaign?
Tiffany Cabán: What I think of as the challenges are the goals that I have set for myself, this campaign, and our movement beyond just having the privilege of representing my district. This is about making sure that we’re using all the resources and momentum that we have as an organizing opportunity. That when we are talking to our neighbors that we are creating more onramps to civic engagement. So that we’re meeting people where they’re at and easily getting them involved. That we’re creating different pipelines and also that we are coalition building across council districts. That’s going to be a challenge enough. It’s not going to be enough for me to win here. I don’t want to be a lonely vote in the council. I want to make sure that we have a crew of people so that we could not just drive the objective but set the agenda.
Christian Becerra: Kind of like forming a squad!
Tiffany Cabán: It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a good, dope city council squad.
Christian Becerra: If someone wants to get involved in the campaign, how would they go about doing that?
Tiffany Cabán: So many ways. They can go to our website and sign up for our emails. You can also check out our social media; on Instagram and Facebook I’m @cabanforqueens and my Twitter is @tiffany_caban. Even donating a few dollars to the campaign goes a very very long way in our organizing efforts.
Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: November’s Sister Love
Year of Our (Audre) Lorde is a monthly analysis of works by queen mother Audre Lorde as they apply to our current political moment. In the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, and just generally leveling up, we believe that the Lorde has already gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.
As much as I love reading Audre Lorde’s brilliance on its own, it’s an entirely different experience to read her in conversation with someone else. In some ways it helps to put Lorde in context as a more revealing look at who she’s dialoguing and thinking with, it gives an immediacy to her writing.
This month I’ve been reading her letters with Pat Parker in Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989. A birthday gift from my partner, I approached the letters as a welcome reprieve from the stress of the election and the renewed surges in Covid cases across the country. The letters between the two poets are funny, frank, and intimate above all else.
Their relationship is a testament to the enduring and life-affirming power of queer kinship. The correspondence spans 16 years, the ongoing resistance against Apartheid in South Africa, turbulent US politics at home and abroad, and the emergence of the AIDS crisis. The political and social climate they endured eerily aligns with the same genre of issues that have defined this year in particular, with the specific precarity of Black queer lives at the forefront.
This hilarious interlude from one of Pat Parker’s letters is one of my favorites, an explanation of sorts for her delay in responding to Lorde:
“Once upon a time there was this woman named Audre and she met this woman named Pat And she faithfully wrote her a letter. And for a long time she waited, but there was no answer. So Audre who knew that Pat lived in the land of the poet-killers assumed that her friend must be dead: for she knew that that was the only reason Pat hadn’t answered her letter. She knew that Pat wasn’t one of those ‘lazy n***.’ And one day out of the great smoggy blue a letter came and lo and behold it was from Pat and Audre rejoiced, for she knew that her friend wasn’t dead, but alas she had to admit and realized that her friend was indeed a ‘lazy n***.’ And the moral of this dyke tale, children, is that Pat Parker is alive and well but just a little more crazier.”
During the period of this collection of letters, both Lorde and Parker were diagnosed with breast cancer that went on to claim both of their lives — Pat Parker in 1989 and Audre Lorde in 1992. Yet even as they faced their own mortality, both encouraged the other and found moments of humor and triumph. In a 1986 letter, Lorde proudly informed Parker:
“Health wise I’m hanging in, gained 10 pounds which makes me feel really good (I was not born to be insubstantial and that’s how I was feeling last Feb when I saw you).”
Parker playfully responds, praising Lorde’s weight gain and saying she appeared “flat out skinny” and that Parker was ready to break out “chitterlings and hog maws” to help her regain weight. Yet the humor doesn’t mask Parker’s concerns and theories about her own diagnosis, as she speculates her anger, and primarily anger at their shared forms of oppression, led to her cancer:
“Why am I angry? Who am I angry at? And what can I do to change it? […] From the monumental thought of overthrowing the system and ridding my life of capitalism, racism, sexism, classism, to the smalles nuisance of getting Marty [Pat Parker’s partner] to put the toilet paper on the spool with the sheets unfolding outward, there is simply too much for me to handle. […] Sister love, sister love, sister love. We are not talking anything simple or easy here.”
Through it all, their enduring love attests to the power and beauty of Black queer sisterhood.
In particular, Lorde is attentive to her needs in a way that feels especially present as we move our actions back indoors, burrowing into colder weather and, arguably, an even more present sense of the increasing risk of Covid as cases rise to the worst numbers we’ve seen since the start of the pandemic. And while I’m leery of easy metaphors and making each moment a teachable one — I do think there’s a resonance between this season, this time we’re living in, and the attention that must be paid to what our inner selves for our collective survival.
Parker and Lorde’s relationship is like a mapping from inside out, directing us on how to build a life based on principles, writing the narratives you need to see out in the world and also radical love, vulnerability, and community as what makes it all possible. Sister Love is a window into a bygone era of coalitional politics that’s all too easy to romanticize in such a way that obscures the incredible amount of work it took to sustain their efforts. But it was without a doubt the best kind of work, with both Lorde and Parker mentioning organizations like Gente Latina de Ambiente and bygone lesbian/feminist publications such as Amazon Quarterly and off our backs. And while economic struggles were also discussed, it’s in the spirit of sharing resources. Lorde, as the older, more established poet, regularly tried to get Parker published in a journal or scheduled to perform at an event. She would also tuck bills into her letters for Parker. They both made sure to mention and promote the other and their work whenever possible, understanding that a spirit of competitiveness would never serve their shared cause of queer freedom and prosperity. Lorde laid it out explicitly:
“I have always loved you, Pat, and wanted for you those things you wanted deeply for yourself. Do not think me presumptuous—from the first time I met you in 1970 I knew that included your writing. I applaud your decision [to quit her job and write full-time]. I support you with my whole heart and extend myself to you in whatever way I can make this more possible for you. I hope you know by now that I call your name whenever I can and will continue to do so.”
Their sameness and shared sense of Black, lesbian identities reflected their most intimate selves, the fiery personalities and poetry both came to be known for. Their relationship teetered with multiple combustible elements, and what I love is seeing how they address whatever tensions arise head on, making it plain how much they loved and needed the other. One of Lorde’s letters speaks to this tension and this need with beautiful clarity:
“When I did not receive an answer to my letter last spring, I took a long and painful look at the 15 years we have known each other and decided that I had to accept the fact that we would never have the openness of friendship I always thought could be possible being the two strong Black women we are, with all our differences and sameness. Then your card came from Nairobi, and I thought once again maybe when I’m out there next spring Pat and I will sit down once and for all and look at why we were not more available to each other all these years.”
The balance Lorde strikes between love, candor, and vulnerability genuinely startles me; how much more “real” would our relationships be if we were able to state what we desire from the other in utter vulnerability?
It has felt hard to state how much I’ve been missing my family lately — both originary and chosen. For weeks now I’ve semiconsciously opted to power through, convincing myself that the experience of the sudden lockdown this spring had prepared me for the sharp wave of loneliness that’s appeared. But in reading Sister Love I came across a necessary reminder that it’s in articulating what we’re feeling that we’re able to name our pain and reclaim ourselves from it. Parker’s words perfectly capture this realization:
“Started seeing a therapist with Marty and individually and it’s proved to be quite helpful despite my resistance. It’s hard for us strong Black women types to admit we’re fucking falling apart at the seams as you must well know.”
Ultimately, what I appreciate more than anything is how Lorde and Parker illustrate the importance of never losing sight of our work as artists and creators, what we put into the world, nor losing sight of each other. At each turn, they encouraged each other to speak her truth and the importance that each woman’s work carried.
In a particularly loving exchange where Lorde affirms Parker’s recent decision to quit her job and write full time, Audre Lorde gifts her with a timely message that speaks to the need to hold steady — and guard fiercely — the shared space inside ourselves as the place where we can live and flourish:
“Things you must beware of right now–
A year seems like a lot of time now at this end—it isn’t.
It took me three years to reclaim my full flow. Don’t lose your sense of urgency on the one hand, on the other, don’t be too hard on yourself—or expect too much.
Beware the terror of not producing.
Beware the urge to justify your decision.
Watch out for the kitchen sink and the plumbing and that painting that always needed being done. But remember the body needs to create too.
Beware feeling you’re not good enough to deserve it
Beware feeling you’re too good to need it
Beware all the hatred you’ve stored up inside you, and the locks on your tender places.”
The Angsty Buddhist: “Avatar” & Telling Our Own Stories
This is the fourth and last essay in The Angsty Buddhist, a series about being Chinese American, nonbinary, and finding my own relationship with Buddhism, in a country where so many of its ideas have been whitewashed.
I started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender because everyone I knew seemed to be binging it to soothe their pandemic-related anxieties. By the first episode, I was hooked. Instead of wallowing in my own thoughts, I got caught up in the story of Aang traveling through the four nations so that he could master the elements in time to defeat the evil Fire Nation. I loved Appa, Aang’s sky bison, who reminded me of a giant flying mop dog. When people asked how my day was going, I sent them screenshots of Appa eating hay.
I knew that the show’s creators and most of the voice actors were white, but I didn’t think about it much. I’d read a couple articles online about how the show drew from Inuit and Asian cultures in a respectful way. I really can’t speak on the way any other culture was represented, but I couldn’t find anything egregious about the ways Chinese culture was used (also I’m fourth-generation U.S.-born, so what do I know?). Some of the accents certain characters had, like the tour guides in Ba Sing Se, bugged me — If they’re speaking their native language, then why would they have accents like that? — but no one was running around bucktoothed making “ching chong” noises. I can’t have standards that are too high, right?
I read in one essay that the show’s creators had been getting into yoga and wanted to do something “Asian influenced.” This was followed quickly with assurances that they had carefully researched the cultures they had based the show on and had approached them with a great deal of respect. I know that was supposed to put me at ease, but I couldn’t help but think of the white boys I’d met while studying abroad in Beijing, how they were meticulous in their language study, knew a lot about Chinese history, and still didn’t have any sense of the privilege their whiteness and U.S. passports gave them. Knowing that being into yoga had partially inspired the show made me rethink the way Aang was portrayed as a nonviolent, vegetarian monk and the tropes about Asian spiritualities these choices played into. What kind of fantasies about finding enlightenment in the East went into imagining Aang’s character, whether or not these fantasies were conscious or not?
Still, I enjoyed the show. It was fun, and I liked the fact that it was Asian-ish. Even though there wasn’t much culturally in Avatar that I related to — the parts of the Avatar world based on imperial China was, for obvious reasons, nothing like the hipster neighborhood in LA where I grew up — there was something empowering about characters who looked sort of like me being heroes who save the world. Besides anime, where many of the characters look white, I almost never encountered TV shows with Asian heroes as a kid.
There was something empowering about characters who looked sort of like me being heroes who save the world.
“Should I watch it?” my friend Shubo asked over video chat. “A lot of people I know grew up watching it. It’s like an Asian American cultural touchpoint, right?”
Shubo was one of my first close Chinese American friends and someone from whom I’ve learned so much about what it means to defy assimilation. We met our freshman year of college and bonded over cooking lap cheong in the rice cooker my mom had gifted me when I left for school. Unlike me, Shubo grew up around lots of white people, the rich conservative kind, and I’ve always admired how she insists on being Chinese. For her, eating Chinese food and listening to Chinese music were not just about hanging onto culture in the liberal, diversity-training sense but were more a refusal to give herself up..
Talking to Shubo about Avatar, I suddenly felt self-conscious. “Oh yeah it’s really fun,” I said. “Except, like, it was written by two white men.”
“What? I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, two white men. Sometimes, they name things in Mandarin and it’s kind of hilarious. Like…” As I spoke, it dawned on me how much these parts of the show had bothered me. “Like there are these two fish who are spirits and they’re named ‘push’ and ‘pull,’ ‘twee’ and ‘la’.”
“Oh.”
“Like, y’know, ‘tuī’ and ‘lā’.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“Also, they swim around in a yin and yang shape.”
“Oh god.”
“Yeah, actually maybe you won’t really like this show?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Part of me wishes I were more like Shubo, firm and insistent in who I am, but I’m still an Avatar fan. My partner and I recently discussed buying an expensive Appa-shaped rug on Etsy for our new apartment. Like many other people who don’t see themselves reflected in mainstream narratives, I am good at picking out the pieces that seem like they kind-of-maybe fit and making it work.
I’m sure someone who is better at describing the difference between “appreciation” and “appropriation” could beat me in an argument about whether or not Avatar is “respectful,” which is code for whether or not it is racist. I don’t think this matters much. I think the show is racist, and also I like it. That doesn’t make the racism okay, but that’s where we are.
I think it’s more interesting that Avatar was such an important show to lots of Asian Americans growing up. I use the term “Asian American” cautiously and only when there isn’t a more specific term to use. Most of the friends who I’ve talked to about Avatar are East Asian but not all. This might have more to do with who I am friends with than anything else. These friends all mentioned liking the fact that the show seemed Asian, that there was something empowering about watching a show that elevated cultures they’d been told were inferior to white ones. There wasn’t much else that provided the same sense of recognition. I still don’t think there’s much now, besides things like Crazy Rich Asians and Fresh Off the Boat, which I mostly feel embarrassed to be associated with. It makes sense that Avatar felt special.
I also wonder how it affected the Asian American people who grew up watching Avatar to feel so connected to a white fantasy, well-researched though it might be. If stories are both reflections of and guideposts for our lives, then what does it mean for these stories to have been created by white men? Maybe the important question isn’t whether or not the creators of Avatar were “respectful” but why two white men were allowed to create and profit off of an “Asian-influenced” show in the first place? Especially when that would have been impossible for an Asian or Asian American person to do at the time, probably even now. What stories have we lost because they couldn’t find a platform? I think that’s the most fucked up part.
Maybe the important question isn’t whether or not the creators of Avatar were “respectful” but why two white men were allowed to create and profit off of an “Asian-influenced” show in the first place?
I think Asian American stories are difficult to narrate because our histories have been erased and the stories we’ve been given to understand ourselves are inadequate. When COVID gave rise to increased xenophobia against people perceived as East Asian, there were bizarre articles in the white liberal media that talked about racism being a new experience for Asian Americans. There were also calls for solidarity from some East Asian people that failed to acknowledge the ways we have failed to be in solidarity with other communities. In the second example, most of this is about people owning up to their privileges, but I think that for some, this would be easier if they had more access to our histories.
We also don’t have enough stories that allow us to understand the smaller, lighter parts of our lives. Like the time in high school my friend and I went to a Thai restaurant. The waiter warned her that the noodle dish she wanted was spicy, and my friend laughed. “I can handle spicy. I’m Korean.” She pointed at me. “They might not be able to, though. They’re Chinese.” The food ended up being way too hot for my friend, and she spent the entire meal fanning her mouth and drinking water. I was fine because I didn’t order anything spicy.
I want more stories like this — the kind where race and culture are not just about trauma but about the in-jokes that exist within and between different Asian American communities. These are the kinds of stories that cannot be learned from academic research, and even if they could, it would be offensive if anyone else tried to tell them.
The best stories, even ones for children, reflect the world that we live in and provide lessons for how to live our lives. What if instead of watching Avatar, there had been not just one show but many shows created by people with a variety of “Asian American” experiences? How would that have allowed us to articulate our own stories, both the larger political narratives and the funny moments? Could this have been a small part of how we imagined a different future?
In college, I wrote short stories about lesbian preteens growing up in the Japanese American Buddhist Church. I was starting to figure out that I wasn’t exactly straight and writing these stories were part of how I processed this. When I think about these stories, though, I’m struck by the fact that they were nothing like my life. The girls in these stories were beginning to recognize their attraction to other girls, usually in some sort of suburban middle school locker room setting. The narrator always had an illicit relationship with another girl in the Buddhist Church that she had to hide from the community. When I workshopped these stories, my mostly white classmates highlighted things like the descriptions of altars or the time we made mandalas at summer camp. This is fascinating, they said. I want more details.
I realize now that I was recreating narratives of queerness, Asian American-ness, and Buddhism that I had absorbed from mainstream culture. I don’t identify as a lesbian, mostly because I’m not a woman and fall somewhere along the lines of bi/pan/fluid/generally queer. But back then, I didn’t know what nonbinary meant and everything I heard about queerness involved realizing that you were attracted to the “same sex” at a young age, so that’s what I wrote. I’d also heard that coming out was hard and that Asian communities are more homophobic than white ones, so I wrote that into my stories, too. I remember feeling guilty about this because I knew I was lucky that the community I’d grown up in wasn’t really homophobic, more like the cishet equivalent of white liberals. I wasn’t sure how to write about that, though. I wasn’t even sure if it was a legitimate story to tell at all.
I knew I was lucky that the community I’d grown up in wasn’t really homophobic, more like the cishet equivalent of white liberals. I wasn’t sure how to write about that, though. I wasn’t even sure if it was a legitimate story to tell at all.
This essay series is about Buddhism, but mostly, it’s been my attempt to tell parts of my own story that I haven’t known how to explain, the parts of myself that are obscured by stereotype, erasure, and fantasy. I think that this is an important thing for all of us to do, so that white men who are into yoga don’t get the final say in imagining our realities.
I still like Avatar and will occasionally put on an episode when I’m stressed. When the show came out, it was one of the few representations of something vaguely Asian on TV, which is ridiculous, but I think that’s still important. This isn’t because I think we owe anything to the show’s creators. To me, they’re like other white people who profit off of BIPOC cultures without regard for the actual people these cultures come from. But I think Avatar is important because for all of show’s problems, it allows people usually excluded from our narratives to see themselves as heroes and protagonists. What I’m interested in is not Avatar itself but what we do with the sense of agency it gives, how it allows us to critique the structures that exist and envision our own worlds.
In the end, I’m more excited about the stories Asian American people tell about ourselves: the books and poems and histories that are buried but still there if you look, the artists that are creating work today, the conversations with friends about dating apps and the food we ate as kids — funny and sad and angry and joyful stories that all contradict each other as they unfold.
“A New York Christmas Wedding” Asks You to Believe in the Power of Love at Christmas
The following review contains light spoilers for A New York Christmas Wedding, now streaming on Netflix.
I’m a firm believer that, among us who are obsessed with All Things Christmas, there are only two camps of people: 1) there’s “Christmas Begins The Day After Halloween” people, and 2) there’s “Christmas Begins The Day After Thanksgiving” people. And I am strongly the latter. I have never listened to a single note of Mariah Carey nor dusted off my Christmas movie collection out of the streaming queue until the turkey has been stuffed, then stuffed into my belly and the last slice of pecan pie has been served cold with annual Day After Thanksgiving coffee. That was, until I saw the trailer for Netflix’s A New York Christmas Wedding.
In Christmas of 1999, in Queens, a teenage Jennifer Ortiz is busy baking cookies and prepping eggnog for her best friend Gabrielle Vernaci. If you’ve ever been a teenage girl who was madly in love with her best friend — which, if you’re reading this review on this website, the odds are pretty high that you know exactly what I’m talking about — it’s easy to recognize Jenny’s nervous energy immediately. And once you realize that Gabby is equally busy at home making out with Vinny, the fight between the two “best friends” could be predicted right away as well. Jenny, now a mess of tears, writes a very dramatic teenage letter to the girl she hasn’t quite yet worked up the courage to say that she’s obviously madly in love with, and storms off to the mailbox.
A grown up Jenny (played by Nia Fairweather) now lives in Manhattan and is engaged to her fiancé, David. Jenny’s going through a lot of major changes and something about her life with David doesn’t quite fit. A twist of Christmas fate brings Jenny together with her guardian angel — excuse me, her guardian gayngel — Azrael (Cooper Koch), tall, willowy, full of graceful strides and just a hint of flamboyance, topped off with perfect messy curls on his head.
“You shouldn’t underestimate the power of love around Christmas,” promises Azrael. “If you look around, if you really look, you will see endless possibilities.”
Jenny goes to bed that night next to David, but when she wakes up — she’s engaged to a grown up Gabrielle (Adriana DeMeo) back in Queens on Christmas Eve. Alternative timelines have been set and we’re set-up for the kind of “magic of Christmas” love stories that take over Lifetime, Hallmark, and now even Netflix and Hulu this time of year. Except instead of some far-off Snow White Christmas Village, it’s an queer Afro-Latina looking for love in a very not whitewashed New York.
When I first saw the trailer, I literally hand over my mouth squealed and stomped my feet. I love Christmas. I love having a guardian gayngel. Despite probably better instincts, I love Sex and the City and Mr. Big (did I mention that Chris Noth has a starring role as Jenny’s priest? He also served as an executive producer on the film for his friend Otoja Abit, the director and writer). I LOVE A QUEER AFRO-LATINA IN NEW YORK GETTING A GAY CHRISTMAS LOVE STORY!!!
And yes the all caps are necessary, because when have you ever in your life, and I truly do mean ever, seen a gay Christmas love story with a woman of color lead? Considering there are currently less queer Christmas movies than you can count on one single hand and just last year Hallmark tried to ban lesbian kisses from their supremely straight Christmas network altogether, the answer is you haven’t.
A New York Christmas Wedding delivers on its promise of its title. Believe it or not, a Christmas Wedding does in fact happen in New York. What’s most sublime is that it is a New York I recognize. I’m a Black Puerto Rican who’s spent almost every Christmas of my life in the city. And listen, I just love when Black people speak Spanish on screen, which is pretty much the most superficial sentence I could ever write — but even within Latinx stories, representation as an Afro-Latina is a desert and when that happens, damn you will drink the effing sand. I loved that they got the details of this very caribeña Christmas right. That they had their big family dinner on Nochebuena. That dinner had arroz con leche for dessert and plátanos maduros piled high on the plate. That Jenny’s mother had a big 1970s Afro, just like the kind my mother had, in her photo on the ofrenda. In any other film, those details could be taken for granted. But Black, Caribbean, Latinx families — we’re not often seen. Instead, we’re asked to piece ourselves together from other people’s stories. It matters that A New York Christmas Wedding took seriously what this kind of Christmas would actually look like.
Any kind of Christmas love story can’t get far if the love story between the leads isn’t believable. The chemistry between Jenny and Gabby — both as teenagers and adults — is so tender and sweet. At one point, Gabby takes Jenny’s hands in her own. “Do you trust me?” She asks, quietly searching, even though she already knows the answer:
“Always.”
Just like that, despite A New York Christmas Wedding’s pretty overwhelming flaws, I couldn’t help but clutch my heart and smile huge and wonder what if Christmas love is real after all?
Unfortunately, Christmas love can do many things — but it can’t always cover the cracks in storytelling, and A New York Christmas Wedding has some pretty egregious, if not outright offensive, ones. The chemistry between the leads aside, this is not a film that’s well acted — and it’s better you know that going in. It’s definitely made on a shoestring budget with the kind of off-kilter camera angles that will take you back to the early 2000s. That will be a turn off for some people, and was almost certainly a turn off for me. There’s an utterly unnecessary political plot swerve towards a woman’s right to choose in the third act (a friend’s wife called it “gay Christian propaganda” and while I wouldn’t personally go that far, I also… well, you know).
I love good indie queer art. I think sometimes we unfairly chide it, and I certainly don’t think we need lots of money to tell our stories well. We can point to queer and trans creators like Jen Richards, Tourmaline, Zackary Drucker, Fatimah Asghar, or Patrik Ian Polk, among so many others, to see that our stories can be lovingly crafted and told with heart and enthusiasm, no matter the genre, even with only pennies-to-the-dollar. I absolutely don’t judge that Otoja Abit didn’t have more money to tell this story — but damn, I wish he would have taken more time with the script to tell it well.
What’s most unfair is that A New York Christmas Wedding is an early career, low budget, production of a filmmaker with tremendous room to grow, and it has recently been shoved onto a much larger and unfair playing ground because it just so happened to get released at the same time as a better-funded star vehicle from Kristen Stewart and Clea DuVall, in what’s being heralded as the first major production (white) lesbian Christmas rom-com in history. I don’t have any strong opinion about Happiest Season, but I echo the need to see Christmas love stories, and in particular queer Christmas love stories, that reflect the actual diversity of our queer communities, you know? We deserve that.
I really wanted A New York Christmas Wedding to be better than what it is. But ultimately, Christmas movies like this aren’t about being good — this is a genre that’s defined by cheese. It’s about that gooey warm feeling, deep in the pit of your stomach. It’s about heart flutters and snow falling and itchy sweaters and sparkling red dresses and cute dogs and being in love through it all. If you’re able to overlook its flaws, A New York Christmas Wedding will still somehow provide that. And if you don’t like corny Christmas movies for the face value of what they are… that’s between you and the lump of coal in your stocking.
The Angsty Buddhist: Chronic Pain & Trying Not To Be A White Yoga Lady
This is the third essay in The Angsty Buddhist, a series about being Chinese American, nonbinary, and finding my own relationship with Buddhism, in a country where so many of its ideas have been whitewashed.
I usually think of 23 as when my body started to rebel, but it could have been earlier. Before that, there was the drive between San Francisco and LA where I felt like my entire body was being contorted by the seatbelt. There was the way I couldn’t understand how other people carried shoulder bags — didn’t that make them feel lopsided? There was the way I flinched when other people tried to touch me. My mom always said I was tense, even when I was a little kid. She’d squeeze my shoulders, and they’d be like cement. When I tell people about this, I laugh. Isn’t it funny that I’ve never been able to relax?
But 23 was when my body and its tension became the center of my life — how I scheduled my day, chose what I wore, and spent most of my critical thinking skills trying to figure out how to manage. More than my angst about gender, what propelled me towards men’s clothing was that the pants have pockets and it hurt too much to carry a purse.
I also thought I was making it all up and didn’t mention it to my friends, even ones that I saw almost every day. You’re just doing this for attention, I told myself, even though I wasn’t getting any attention because I refused to talk about it. The couple of times, I did bring it up vaguely, people dismissed me by saying I probably spent too much time on the computer, which I’m sure I do, but not more than anyone else my age.
In the midst of this, or maybe because of it, I started going to meditation sessions at an acquaintance’s Zen Center. The Zen Center practiced a type of Buddhism that a Korean monk had started in Providence, Rhode Island because he thought Brown students would be the most receptive to his teachings (And they have money, I thought). This type of Zen gained popularity in the U.S. and Europe before making its way back to Asia. At the time, I was living in Hong Kong, and even though I didn’t connect with this version of Buddhism and chafed at the fact that many of its leaders were white men, I reserved my biggest judgments because there were many people I met there whom it seemed to be helping.
What surprised me was how much meditation soothed my chronic pain. Afterwards, I walked back to the minibus feeling light, reveling in the fact that I was not thinking about the knots in my back, at least for the moment. I started researching mindfulness after that, trying to see if there were other things I could do to manage my pain. Yoga was something that always came up.
I started doing those white lady yoga videos everyday. Sometimes, when the teacher would start chanting or say “namaste: at the end, I would groan performatively or mutter “fuck you”
I felt conflicted about this. I didn’t want to be like a white yoga lady whose life centered around cultural appropriation. As someone who grew up with Buddhism and feels pretty pissy about white Buddhism, it felt hypocritical to try yoga. In the end, though, my own self-interest won out, and I found a short yoga video on YouTube. The teacher was a white lady who liked to talked a lot about self-love. I followed her instructions about when to inhale and exhale grudgingly.
Afterwards, my muscles did feel looser, and I could go a few hours without really thinking about my body. I started doing those white lady yoga videos everyday. Sometimes, when the teacher would start chanting or say “namaste” at the end, I would groan performatively or mutter “fuck you,” which made me feel a little less embarrassed about how much this was helping me.
Two of the most common questions I get when I tell people about my chronic pain are “Have you seen a doctor?” and “Have you tried yoga?” I hate both of these questions.
I have seen a doctor, many times. Because I’m privileged to have insurance, I feel bad complaining about the care I’ve received. Whenever my doctor doctor finishes examining my spine or the x-ray comes back clear, I feel like a fraud. “You should just take more breaks when you’re working,” she says, misgendering me often during our conversations because I’m too wimpy to tell her my pronouns and the intake sheet only offers two options for gender. When I say that I do take breaks, something that always makes me nervous because I don’t want my boss to think I’m slacking off, my doctor says, “Are you stressed? It’s probably stress. Try getting a standing desk.”
Being asked if I’ve seen a doctor annoys me because I feel like the people asking think that I’m being lazy or silly for being in pain — just go see a doctor, as if this will fix everything. When people ask if I’ve tried yoga (or meditation or acupuncture), it’s usually because they don’t know what else to say. I think it freaks people out to have to sit with someone’s pain and not be able to do anything. It freaks me out, too. That doesn’t make the questions about yoga any less irritating.
I find it interesting, though, that many of the miracle cures that people offer up when there isn’t a clear diagnosis are from “the East.” It feels connected to the ways we are always trying to find healing in the Other.
I find it interesting, though, that many of the miracle cures that people offer up when there isn’t a clear diagnosis are from “the East.” It feels connected to the ways we are always trying to find healing in the Other. So much of the way we characterize Eastern medicine in this country, regardless of what culture or spirituality it comes from, is as something spiritual and holistic, collapsing the divide between body and mind. Probably this is sometimes true and someone will whitesplain why this is so in the comments. But I think a lot of this is orientalism — Asia is too big of a place, with so many different and conflicting peoples and cultures, to make sweeping generalizations like that.
I think that these ideas do not tell us anything about what defines “Eastern” cultures and does tell us more, at least subconsciously, about what we’re lacking. What do we do with pain that is ongoing? What is the connection between emotions and the physical body? How do we talk about this in a way that is not gaslighting and dismissive of the often very physical causes of pain? I don’t know, and I see how it seems so easy to look to the Other — the Buddhist nun, the Hindu goddess, that incense burner on sale at Ross — and ask them to hold that for us.
“Healing” is a buzzword in queer and trans spaces. This makes sense, given how much there is to heal from. The first people I felt comfortable talking to about chronic pain were other trans Asian Americans. They seemed to understand, without explanation, the way that the body is shaped by everything it has experienced, its traumas and its joys.
I hear a lot of people talking about ancestors a lot, about lineage and intergenerational healing. I’ve been told I should try to reclaim my ancestral healing practices, and this is something I would like to do. When I try to learn about Chinese things, it feels performed. I wonder if me learning qigong is any better than yoga, and the other day while my partner and I were trying to learn how to make an herbal soup, we were more amused by the fact that one of the herbs was called “Semen Euryales” than anything else.
Sometimes, these practices helps relieve the pain in my body, and sometimes they also help quiet my anxieties. Other times, they don’t do anything at all. It always seems like a bit of a crapshoot. But even when I don’t feel the immediate effects of these practices or if I’m not doing them “correctly,” there’s something healing about learning practices that were taken away from me and my family because of the violence of white supremacy and assimilation. For me, this makes learning Chinese healing practices feel different than doing white lady yoga, at least just a little.
Once, in a BIPOC writing group that I am part of and love, we had a guest host, who led us through some exercises that we’re definitely culturally appropriated from yoga, before instructing us to free write. The host didn’t mention the cultures that these practices came from or from whom he had learned them. I don’t think he was South Asian, but I could be wrong. I reluctantly did his breathing exercises and felt the muscles in my neck ease.
There was one point where he led everyone in chanting “Om.” When this started, one person left the Zoom call. I am assuming that this person was South Asian because of their name, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe they just left because they had something else to do. Maybe I was just projecting how uncomfortable I was feeling. I should private message one of the hosts and tell them this is a little weird, I thought but didn’t.
At the end of the session, many people thanked the guest host, including me. I was grateful that he’d taken the time to be at our group. I was thinking about how so many BIPOC spaces are held together by people giving their labor for free. Other people liked the exercises. This is the first time I’ve been able to be in my body, someone said, and I felt guilty for being judgy because BIPOC folks are so often cut off from the resources they need to heal. Why would I want to take this away from anyone?
Still, I think it’s important to connect to our own ancestral practices, even if this process is imperfect. I don’t want to become a white yoga lady.
During a recent pain flare, I tried taking a new medication, but all it did was make me drowsy. I tried to meditate but after a few minutes got frustrated and crawled back into bed. I went through my normal procession of unhelpful thoughts, you’re faking this, you’re lazy, get up, but this time, it seemed like it was more out of habit than anything else. Instead of spiraling, I let the thoughts pass. Instead of trying to get up, I let myself cry until I fell asleep.
I think a lot about my own body, whose pain I often try to aggressively breathe and stretch away. What would it mean to stop trying to find a way around this?
I think a lot about how disability justice activists critique the idea of cure. That it is ableist to treat cure as the end goal, that the disabled body is not something to be fixed. I think a lot about my own body, whose pain I often try to aggressively breathe and stretch away. What would it mean to stop trying to find a way around this? This is not to say that I enjoy being in pain. I want to be in less pain — but not in a way that only makes me better at capitalism or that allows me to dissociate from the histories and traumas that caused me to be in pain in the first place.
This is similar to how I think about culture. Even if I am trying to connect to my own cultures and histories, I don’t want to return to an identity that existed before imperialism and diaspora. It would be impossible to erase the ruptures that have already occurred. I’m not sure what the end point of this kind of healing is, or if I should even be thinking about this in terms of end points. I don’t think anyone knows for sure. I still think I need to try.
Black Women Organizers Deserve More Than Just Your Flowers and Thank Yous
Feature image, from left to right: LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, Stacey Abrams, founder of Fair Fight and Nsé Ufot, the CEO of the New Georgia Project.
It’s starting to become a little bit like clockwork. There’s a major national election, and all over social media there are overflowing streams of stories about how for Democrats, Black women voters are a lifeline. That without their over 90% voting bloc, Democratic agendas would die at the ballot box. Then well-meaning non-Black liberals and progressives write “Thank you Black women!” or “Listen to Black women!” or “Black women will save us!”
It’s true that Black women, no matter the age demographic, lead in voting percentages at higher rates than any other racial and gender groups in the country. It’s less reported that Black women are never voting to save “America from itself” — we aren’t voting to save your democracy. We’re voting to save ourselves. We’re using the most powerful collective tool available at our disposal to save our own communities from the racist, racist (yes I said this twice on purpose and not a typo), patriarchal, violent system that we’ve been saddled with by design.
This year in particular, as so many celebrated the election of Joe Biden and the defeat of the racist human horror show that is Donald Trump, one story began bubbling up — that for the first time since 1992, and after nearly 15 years of “almost purple” promises — Georgia was likely to vote for a Democrat for president (as of the time of this writing President-elect Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by 14,057 votes in the state, 49.52% overall, a number that is going to be hard for Trump and the GOP to overcome, though they are trying their hardest to distract the media with their lies). More than that, the strong turn out had also forced a double run-off for Georgia’s two Senate seats — keeping alive the admittedly slim, but not yet impossible, margin of hope that the Democrats might still be able to gain control of the Senate and therefore Congress as house warming present for the Biden Administration. Giving us a real chance to finally have decent values in the laws of our federal government.
Black women organizers, like former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams of the organization Fair Fight or LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, and Nsé Ufot, the CEO of the New Georgia Project, became the focal point of this year’s “thank yous” — with Melissa Harris Perry, professor of Black politics and the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest University, going as far as to make a biblical joke on Twitter that, “I’d like to see Joe Biden wash Stacey Abrams’ feet with his tears and dry them with his hair.”
When Stacey Abrams lost her 2018 gubernatorial race after rampant voter suppression cost her 55,000 votes — she didn’t just get mad. In a 2019 Vogue feature (aptly titled “Can Stacey Abrams Save American Democracy?”) she told the magazine that she “sat shiva for 10 days” and then she picked herself back up and “started plotting.” Her plotting lead her to start the voting rights organization Fair Fight, which along with the efforts of so many other Black women organizers, registered more than 800,000 new voters in Georgia. Abrams told NPR that 45% of these new voters are under the age of 30 and 49% are people of color. But Stacey Abrams and these other powerful women first started organizing to turn Georgia Blue more than a decade ago. Georgia’s demographics don’t match its leadership, that’s a problem of voter suppression, and not a lack of desire. Organizers knew that with increased voter participation, as well as eduction around elections and voter rights — another future was possible.
A thing about America is that we like to celebrate our victories by saying a quick “thank you” and then just as quickly forget the past. But democracy doesn’t work like that. It requires that we remember. It requires that we work. Honestly, it requires that we never stop working. So if you’re excited that Black voters and organizers in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta, and Indigenous voters/organizers in Wisconsin and Arizona, and Latinx voters/organizers in Arizona and Nevada, saved America from the majority of white people in this country who felt perfectly fine voting an incompetent, dangerous, racist, misogynist, wannabe dictator back into office — please remember these four things.
First, that none of those communities — who overcame forces looking to discount their vote at rates that are unfathomable and positively dystopian to the majority of white Americans — did that work to save you. Second, you can best honor them by championing (and pressuring your elected officials to champion, especially if you live in “moderate” or “swing” districts) progressive values like economic justice, Medicare4All, Indigenous land rights, worker protection, climate change, and a radical transformation for how we imagine “policing” in this country that isn’t scared of words like “defund.” Third, that none of those values can be enacted until Democrats take control back of the Senate.
And finally, Number Four — much like Stacey Abrams, still stinging less than 10 days from her gubernatorial loss, there are only 55 days left until the Senate Georgia run off and it is time we get to work.
Look, I am not Autostraddle’s strongest political analyst. And that’s OK! We have a lot of very smart humans on our staff, and I’m proud to be their colleague and editor. I also believe in the good of our community to do actionable work. I believe we don’t have to be experts to help. And there’s still a Senate race to win in Georgia (two of them, in fact!). So that’s why I am here today.
If you are reading this, and you are not Black, please heed my words: Black women do not need your flowers. We do not need your Thank Yous. Those overly effusive tweets and Instagram posts? We’re good. Being acknowledged is nice, it’s a beginning. But what we need is for you to follow the example that Black women have set for more than the last 200 years: Roll up your sleeves and Get. Back. To. Work.
Here’s a few places where you can start.
Fair Fight
“Fair Fight Action engages in voter mobilization and education activities and advocates for progressive issues; in addition Fair Fight Action has mounted significant programs to combat voter suppression in Georgia and nationally.” (Founded by Stacey Abrams)
Volunteer Local in Georgia // Volunteer Nationally
Black Voters Matter Fund
“We seek to achieve our goals with the following 5 core beliefs in mind: 1) The key to effective civic engagement and community power is understanding, respecting and supporting local infrastructure. 2) Black Voters Matter not only on election day, but on the 364 days between election days as well. This means we must support individuals and organizations that are striving to obtain social justice throughout the year. 3) Black Voters Matter *everywhere*, including rural counties and smaller cities/towns that are often ignored by candidates, elected officials, political parties and the media. 4) In order for Black voters to matter, we must utilize authentic messaging which speaks to our issues, connects with our hopes and affirms our humanity. 5) The leadership, talent and commitment demonstrated by Black women in particular must receive recognition and, more importantly, *investment* in order to flourish and multiply.”
The Black Voters Matter Fund does work in Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Alabama and Mississippi. (Co-founded by LaTosha Brown)
Volunteer Local in Georgia and also Nationally
The New Georgia Project
“The New Georgia Project is a nonpartisan effort to register and civically engage Georgians. Georgia’s population is growing and becoming increasingly diverse. Over the past decade, the population of georgia increased 18%. The new american majority – people of color, those 18 to 29 years of age, and unmarried women – is a significant part of that growth. The new American majority makes up 62% of the voting age population in Georgia, but they are only 53% of registered voters.” (CEO Nsé Ufot)
ProGeorgia
“ProGeorgia brings together the power of existing non-profit groups to work in a more strategic way, with new tools and technology, to change the policies of our state. ProGeorgia is building infrastructure by supporting, connecting, and coordinating civic participation efforts of our non-profit member groups. And ProGeorgia is implementing ways to win policy and electoral battles for progressive social change.” (Executive Director Tamieka Atkins)
Georgia STAND-UP
“Georgia Strategic Alliance for New Directions and Unified Policies (Georgia STAND-UP), a Think and Act tank for Working Communities, is a Georgia alliance of leaders that represents community, faith, academic, and labor organizations that organize and educate communities about issues related to economic development. With the goal of alleviating poverty and encouraging regional equity through the empowerment of leaders and the inclusion of community benefits, STAND-UP empowers residents to ensure economic development meets the needs of their neighborhoods.” (Executive Director Deborah Scott)
Where My Black Witches At? Using Black Ancestral Magic Against White Supremacy
While I was raised Christian, I currently do not have a spiritual practice. I have, however, always been drawn to all things witchy, magical, and metaphysical. I’m attracted to the darkness and power of witchcraft, and the subversiveness inherent in a practice traditionally attributed to rebellious women.
Unfortunately, witchcraft has a whiteness problem. From pop culture and Halloween stores, the prevailing image of “witch” is still a white woman in a pointy hat. In reality, witchcraft and traditional spiritual practices are a rich tapestry developed by people from people all over the world. In Black American communities, paganism has seen a resurgence in recent years. Black American women, in particular, have been fleeing the church in favor of ancestral spiritual traditions and many identify as witches. Like every sector of society, the witch community is subject to racism and white supremacy, but Black American witches have long been tapping into generational power in resistance to that which has been stolen from them by a violent system of oppression.
Anti-racism in witchcraft has become a major topic of conversation since the uprisings of last summer in response to the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, along with countless other Black civilians murdered by police. From actual hexes and binding spells, to the resistance inherent in practicing non-Abrahamic spiritual traditions, witchcraft continues to forge its place in the fight to dismantle white supremacy. Black witches are taking part in the resistance through a combination of ancestral practices, ideologies, and modern technology.
Tapping Into Ancestral Power and the Power of the Internet
Black witchcraft in the United States draws from ancestral West African religions and spiritual practices and exists in the intersection of Christian and West African faith traditions. Some of these traditions, while they may inspire and influence Black witches, are independent religions whose followers do not consider themselves witches. Followers of the Yoruba Orisha, with religions like Santería, Lucumí, Ifá, and Candomblé have an intertwined experience with Black American witches, who often draw from these traditions in their practices.
Two of the best known Black American spiritual traditions are Louisiana or Mississippi Valley Voodoo and Hoodoo.
Hoodoo, also known as rootwork or conjure, was first created by enslaved Africans as a way to regain power, protection, and comfort. Much of the spellwork in Hoodoo stems from the innate need for security brought on by necessity from the violence inflicted upon enslaved people and continues to draw from a protective power today. Hoodoo spellwork is primarily based in nature, deriving power from herbs, minerals, and animals.
Voodoo draws from similar roots to Hoodoo but is a standalone religion, while Hoodoo is often classified as a form of folk magic. Both practices, and many other African Diasporic traditions, draw from West African Vodun, which centers around vodun spirits and other deities and originates in what is now modern-day Benin.
Both Voodoo and Hoodoo also draw from Catholic and other Christian beliefs, both out of necessity from assimilation and through cultural diffusion, and from indigenous spiritual traditions. Hoodoo practitioners in particular are often also Christian. And much of Black folkloric traditions (like making black-eyed peas and greens on New Years Day) are rooted in Hoodoo and African traditions, even when our folks don’t realize it.
For queer Black witches, like Haylin Belay of Femiwitch, reconnecting with ancestral power is also a way to decolonize ideas about gender and sexuality that have been passed down through many religious institutions. Many Christian churches have had a devastating effect on queer folks, and witchcraft gives people an opportunity to connect with spirituality in a way that allows them to be their fullest selves. For folks living at an intersection of marginalized identities, the ability to forge a personal spiritual path is deeply freeing.
If you’ve been on a certain side of the Internet for a while, you’ve probably encountered accounts posting emoji love potions and ~*witchy aesthetics*~.
While I’m a sucker for a kitchen witch mood board, magic on the internet goes deeper than the glossy images and 1-minute videos, #BlackWitchTok on TikTok is a window into modern spiritual practices that, although the content is to be taken with a grain of salt (always do external research!), are helpful entry points for many people looking to build community and learn more about pagan practices. There are also many online communities for education, like groups on Facebook where folks can learn more and connect with other practitioners. While no replacement for real-life connections, these platforms are important for folks who have been disconnected from their culture through generations of oppression and suppression.
Though there’s been a harmful conspiracy theory from Right Wing internet circles that the queer Black women founders of Black Lives Matter are practicing an insidious form of witchcraft to enchant the millions of supporters they have gathered — there are Black witches who have created protection spells for the movement as well as hexes and curses to slow the police down. This spellwork has become amplified on TikTok and has its roots in African Diasporic traditions. Specifically, in Black witchcraft, the use of hexes — while they come with added risk and require more training — are not taboo the way they are in some Eurocentric witchcraft practices. This misconception has contributed to the racist idea of Black witches as evil or Satanic, but in reality, all forms of spellwork are a way for marginalized people to access power.
These Are a Few Folks Who Are Sharing Their Practice Online:
Rootworker and master herbalist Mama Sunfiyahh is a practitioner who is committed to educating folks about traditional Black spiritual traditions. She includes primers on everything from herbalism and spellwork to divination and traditional rituals on her TikTok.
Sam, also known as JujuBae is a conjurer, Hoodoo practitioner, online metaphysical shop owner, and the host of A Little Juju Podcast, which covers “all things Black Ass Spirituality.” She is committed to Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks returning to ancestral spiritual practices.
Bri Luna’s The Hoodwitch is a blog and online store that covers everything from astrology to crystals and smoke cleansing. Her mission is to make witchcraft and mysticism more accessible to all people. Bri is one of the more well-known witches on the internet, and even launched a makeup line with Smashbox.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CGdTJoIHru2/
Fredericka Turner of Conjuria is a Caplata, Mambo and a Shaman in New Orleans Vodou. She has strong roots in conjure and runs Conjuria, her metaphysical shop in addition to educational Facebook groups Do You Hoodoo?, The Hoodoo Box, and Crystal Conjure.
Tayannah Lee Mcquillar is a rootworker who shares information from historical sources on her Instagram that relate to what she calls “stolen legacies” of Black folks in America including their history, ancestors, and spiritual practices. She has a perspective on Hoodoo and Blackness that differs from some mainstream perceptions and asserts that Black history in America goes back beyond slavery. She also posts helpful information about sustainability, racism, and decolonization.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CGbha4bHKxS/
Soulangie Leeper, aka Òrìsà Child practices Isese, the traditional version of Lucumi/Santeria of the Afro-Cuban traditions. A Garifuna woman who grew up learning about the Motherland, she shared with me, “I am using it to love all of my blackness, to own it completely and unapologetically. I have seen the power of my ancestors, and I am never letting this practice go. Because it’s in my DNA, and I will decode as much as I can while having this experience on earth.” She offers protection oils, divination services, and a guide to ancestral reverence on her online shop.
Also, Deanna Sunshine created an excellent Facebook group, Seems like your Spirituality is just Cultural Appropriation: The ReligionTM that delves into the intricacies of cultural appropriation and racism in spiritual practices. I’ve been in this group for about a week, and I’ve already learned so much from the incredible labor that the members and admins provide. If you join, make sure you check your fragilities at the door.
It is also important to note that the term “witch” is a self identifier and not all practitioners of African/Black American traditional spiritualities consider themselves witches. In some spaces, ‘witch” is seen as a derogatory term. Always defer to the way the practitioner refers to themselves.
How To Spell Resistance
Interested in learning how to tap into your power? Here are a few tips to get started safely and respectfully.
- Read Up. Learn your history to begin to understand the ancestral practices that are open to you. Some of these resources are specifically for people in the African Diaspora. A few starter texts: Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System, Hoodoo For Beginners: Working Magic Spells in Rootwork and Conjure with Roots, Herbs, Candles, and Oils, Magic for the Resistance: Rituals and Spells for Change, A Practical Guide for Witches: Spells, Rituals, and Magic for an Enchanted Life, Orishas, Goddesses, and Voodoo Queens: The Divine Feminine in the African Religious Traditions, Enchantments: A Modern Witch’s Guide to Self-Possession
- Seek Community. Two places to start for learning and community are the Dawtas of the Moon Black Witch Convention and the Black Witch University. You can also check with your local occult or metaphysical shop, try meetup.com, or search for local Facebook groups.
- Start Simple. Witchcraft and spiritual traditions are not to be trifled with. These are sacred practices that folks spend their lives training in.
- Remember that while the aesthetics may draw you in, they are not what witchcraft is about. At their core, spiritual practices are about intentions and energy. Taking the time to honor sacred practices through learning, meditation, and introspection is ultimately far more important than finding the prettiest crystal.
- If you’re not Black, take care with cultural appropriation. Although there are a variety of opinions on culture appropriation in witchcraft, educating yourself on the roots of a practice you are interested in and consider how your place of power relates to practices outside your own culture. Closed practices, typically those belonging to marginalized people, have been criminalized and suppressed by colonization. If you are interested in a practice from a culture outside of your own, make sure to check in with people inside that culture to ensure you do not do harm to yourself or the folks within the group.
Black ancestral magic can be a key to finding freedom, connection and power for many Black folks. For so long, we have been disconnected from our heritages and reconnecting that tether is resistance. My hope is that all Black folks, especially queer Black folks, are able to find their path in a world that insists we ought to be powerless.
Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: October’s Dead Is Behind Us
Photograph of author by Camilo Godoy
Year of Our (Audre) Lorde is a monthly analysis of works by queen mother Audre Lorde as they apply to our current political moment. In the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, and just generally leveling up, we believe that the Lorde has already gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.
A friend once told me that the time around Halloween is when the veil between this world and the next slips away, and our connection to the spirit world is at its highest. (This was before either of us had seen Coco.) It’s a reminder I carry with me, a wisdom I call upon that speaks to the multiple worlds we all inhabit, and the connections that defy common conceptions of time and space.
In her poetry collection Our Dead Behind Us, Audre Lorde contradicts the very claim of her title by revealing all the ways we carry our dead alongside us, within us, into our everyday and into the future. It’s a necessary re-framing of grief and time; and, true to form, Lorde is always in time. This collection feels sankofic; a look backwards, an engagement with history while the feet are pointed forward, headed into the future.
As the end of the longest year in history inches closer, I’ve been challenging myself to sit with the many losses that have characterized 2020, to reframe them as not a lack or a “negation of” — but as a series of ongoing paradigm shifts. Death takes on many forms; it’s not only the transition from this plane to another, but encompasses these shifts — within relationships, understandings of ourselves and others, and ways of being in the world. The poem “Mawu” speaks perfectly to this sense of reckoning and acceptance:
“Released / from the prism of dreaming / we make peace with the women / we shall never become / I measure your betrayals / in a hundred different faces / to claim you as my own / grown cool and delicate and grave / beyond revision / So long as your death is a leaving / it will never be my last.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about an experience I had last year. During a sacred ritual with
some ordained elders, one Baba came up to me and said, “You have a grandmother who walks with you. She’s here with you now. And every day.”
I hadn’t shared anything about my grandmother throughout the ritual, hadn’t even said Nana’s name aloud in the days before. But then he told me she was with me, always, and it was as if I fell into an alignment, like he offered a shape to her in the present moment. I hadn’t even read the poem “Call” by then, and yet I was embodying it:
“I am a Black woman stripped down / and praying / my whole life has been an alter / worth its ending / and I say Aido Hwedo is coming.”
(Aido Hwedo: The Rainbow Serpent; also a representation of all ancient divinities who must be worshipped but whose names and faces have been lost in time.”)
To be Black in this world is to be intimate with a kind of living death. It’s an intimacy no one craves, and yet Black people know better than most that Lorde speaks truth to power in saying “we were never meant to survive.” Whether we lose a grandmother or an aunt, or whether it’s Breonna Taylor, who we only come to recognize in the aftermath of her death, each loss feels personal and tethered to the next. And while we need to attend to the ways in which we #SayHerName, I think it’s important to evoke all those who are gone, especially those who die unnatural deaths borne from racism, queer and transphobia, unequal access to healthcare, and the numerous other ways this world actively tries to kill us.
Lorde, as prescient as ever, offers writing as an act of remembrance, of both engaging with the dead and affirming the truth of our living in “Learning to Write”:
“I am a bleak heroism of words / that refuse / to be buried alive / with the liars.”
I think this sentiment is one she also reaffirms beautifully in “Burning the Water Hyacinth:”
“Plucking desire / from my palms / like the firehairs of a cactus / I know this appetite / the greed of a poet / or an empty woman / trying to touch / what matters.”
Like so many people, for me part of grappling with the torrent-of-everything that is 2020 is acknowledging that this year is an accumulation of misdeeds, misrecognitions, and unaddressed issues all surfacing at once. Under each of the issues we’re contending with is the question of how we got here, and what do we do now that we are still here, certainly for the foreseeable future. The above lines from “Burning the Water Hyacinth,” about attempting to “touch what matters,” could be a banner proclamation for so many of us. Touch (or the lack thereof) has forcibly organized how we engage with one another, show love and affection, and attempt to bridge the distances furthered by the many multiple pandemics of 2020.
What Audre Lorde has demonstrated time and again is that touching what matters is the kind of touch that doesn’t reach wide but rather burrows deep, fingers submersed in the earth in order to get at the root of it all. This extended period of time we’ve currently spent with ourselves has propelled some of the deepest self-reflection we’ve allowed ourselves in years. Like how it took me getting into my thirties and the force of global pandemics to really write about the relationship that shaped most of my twenties. As hard as it is to admit, the death of that relationship was so acute, it took nearly seven years of reflection — rehashing the worst moments, doubting myself, hearing her voice each time I failed or misstepped, and discovering and rediscovering that familiarity — before I finally was able to put the worst of it to rest.
I’m no longer who I was before that relationship. And the process of confronting the myriad implications of that experience is ongoing. As Lorde states in the poem “Outlines”:
“When women make love / beyond the first exploration / we meet each other knowing / in a landscape / the rest of our lives / attempts to understand.”
After my first true heartbreak, it took several years post-mortem to realize I’d been living in response to that experience. My relationship with her was the most toxic I’d ever experienced and yet its ending felt like a death to me, one that foreclosed a future I saw for myself, for us. The self I inhabited was one formed against the sharpness of that loss, one I projected to convince myself — but really to convince her — that I was the antithesis of who she thought I was. From “Stations”:
“Some women wait for themselves / around the next corner / and call the empty spot peace /but the opposite of living / is only not living / and the stars do not care.”
There’s no easy resolution here.
It would be an empty filler to simply gesture at 2021 as a healing balm for all the dying and living we’re experiencing right now. Most years, Halloween season is a deeply welcomed comfort — an annual communion across the veil that fortifies me. I can’t say I feel that same fortifying power this year, certainly not in any way that offers a sense of assurance.
But what I’m realizing is that the ritual I’ve developed in this column, communing with Audre Lorde for these last ten months, has at least instilled a belief in me that our archival, ancestral engagement is part of our lineage of survival. She details this lineage pristinely in “On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verazzano Bridge:”
“I am writing these words as a route map / an artifact for survival / a chronicle of buried treasure / a mourning / for this place we are about to be leaving / a rudder for my children your children / our lovers our hopes braided / from the dull wharves of Tompkinsville / to Zimbabwe Chad Azania / […]History is not kind to us / we restitch it with living / past memory forward / into desire / into the panic articulation / of want without having / or even the promise of getting. / And I dream of our coming together / encircled driven / not only by love / but by lust for a working tomorrow / the flights of this journey / maples uncertain / and necessary as water.”
The Angsty Buddhist: Learning Anger And White Buddhism
This is the second essay in The Angsty Buddhist, a series about being Chinese American, nonbinary, and finding my own relationship with Buddhism, in a country where so many of its ideas have been whitewashed.
My college roommate taped a poster of Dalai Lama quotes on the ceiling over her bed so that she could lie down and reflect on them. I didn’t think much of this at a time. She did a lot of things that I thought were odd, like drinking fruit-flavored tea and insisting we end each day by listing three good things that had happened. I was and still am the kind of person who copes by stress eating potato chips and making jokes about death and was kind of annoyed at being forced into gratitude by my roommate every night, but I just went with it.
Despite our differences, A. and I were close for our first year living together, mostly because we went to a school where neither of us felt like we fit in. A. was the child of Ukrainian immigrants, and I was a nonbinary Chinese American weirdo. The school we went to was named after a former owner of the East India Company who made his fortune off of slavery. The students there were wealthier than I had known was possible, the children of CEOs of huge corporations, and Wall Street bankers. One of the kids in our freshman dorm was the son of the third richest man in India. The university used the protection of the student body to justify the heavy policing of the Black and brown communities in the surrounding city. For those of us on financial aid, we were told both directly and indirectly that we should be grateful to the billionaires who had funded our education. Weren’t they generous for deeming us worthy of becoming like them?
I appreciated having A. around because even though both of us were bad at articulating why exactly we felt so uncomfortable in our environment, it was nice to have someone around who also felt awkward trying to make small talk with the children of corporate attorneys. For the most part, we were both absorbed in our own lives. A. threw herself into her pre-med classes and extracurriculars, always running between meetings and study sessions. Because I had grown up middle class, I had more wiggle room to make questionable decisions, like taking an ancient Greek history class and falling in love with a boy who kept miniature busts of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton on his desk. When our schedules overlapped, I liked hanging out with A. Mostly, we sat on our Ikea futon and drank cheap tequila out of mugs we’d stolen from the dining hall while complaining about classes.
A. had grown up Ukranian Catholic and struggled to find religious community during the time we lived together. Every Sunday, she seemed to go to a new church and reported back each week that something had felt off. At the time, I had started sporadically attending meditation sessions held by the campus Buddhist life organization, Indigo Blue. Indigo Blue was run by a white man but one that I actually liked. He was, for the most part, conscious of his privileges as a white man and didn’t presume to know more about Buddhism than any of the students — many of whom were Asian and Asian American. Instead, he opened up the space for people to practice the way they wanted, in keeping with their own cultures and traditions. We didn’t even have to meditate. I appreciated this because I had grown up with a type of Buddhism that didn’t center meditation and I’d felt alienated before in spaces where meditation and Buddhism were equated. Mostly, I spent my time arranging the candles into smiley faces and chattering at anyone who was willing to be distracted. I felt at ease there in a way I didn’t feel anywhere else on campus.
A. attended one of the meditation sessions one night I wasn’t there. Later, she told me, “It just wasn’t what I was looking for.” She seemed mildly offended by this. I remember thinking, So what? What does it matter what you were looking for? It wasn’t made for you.
A. said a lot of things I told myself weren’t a big deal, like the time she joked about me being a “generic Asian girl” or how whenever I tried to talk about race, she said, “That’s something you’re into. It’s not what I’m into.” I was used to dismissing my own anger.
I brushed this off, though. A. said a lot of things I told myself weren’t a big deal, like the time she joked about me being a “generic Asian girl” or how whenever I tried to talk about race, she said, “That’s something you’re into. It’s not what I’m into.” I was used to dismissing my own anger. Wasn’t she going through a lot? I should be less sensitive.
Eventually, A. found a church, sort of. One Sunday, she came back to our room to announce that she had gone to the Black Church at the campus African American Cultural Center. “I know it’s weird,” she said to my perplexed face. “But I really like the preacher.” There were many things I should have said to her then and every Sunday afterwards, when she came back complaining about how people didn’t seem to want her there. “It’s like I’m the white girl,” she said once.
You are the white girl is something I could have said. Maybe you should think about how you being there makes other people feel? What makes you think you’re entitled to be in a Black space? But by that point, our friendship was strained, and I had given up on feeling responsible for her, though in this situation I realize now that I should have tried. I still think about A. sometimes. About how white people turn to cultures and spiritualities that are not their own when they are looking for solace or trying to fill a void in themselves — how they do this carelessly without realizing how violent that can be.
In college, I was obsessed with white Buddhism in a wrathful sort of way. Whenever I heard someone saying something like “Buddhism is a peaceful religion” or “Buddhism is more a philosophy than a religion,” I felt myself seething. Then I would tell myself to calm down. What’s wrong with them thinking Buddhism is peaceful? Think about Islamophobia. This is not a big deal. And I thought you didn’t like organized religion, so isn’t it better for it to be a philosophy?
I have always had a hard time allowing myself to feel anger. I always think that I am being selfish for expecting more of people, and I don’t want to center my own feelings when there are other people we should be focusing on. When it comes to the cultural appropriation of Buddhism, I feel this especially — if people are feeling like whatever version of Buddhism they’re practicing helps them, then why should I care? Aren’t there more important things to be thinking about?
Then around my junior year of college, Indigo Blue was suddenly shut down. Students arrived at the shrine for the nightly chanting session and found a sign on the door that said, “This event has been cancelled.” Later, we found out that all Buddhist life activities had been suspended without a replacement and that this had to do with some internal politicking and office drama. After a couple of weeks, a group of students got the head chaplain, a white woman, to meet with them. At the meeting, she started crying and said, “I didn’t know there were any of you going to those Indigo Blue things. How was I supposed to know?”
Eventually, they hired teachers from a nearby Zen center who came to give dharma talks and hold meditation sessions. These teachers were, like the head of Indigo Blue, all white and mostly men. I only went to one of their events, a dharma talk given by one of the white men. The talk started with meditation, but I didn’t feel like closing my eyes and relaxing in that room. I remember that it felt overly philosophical and that part of it was about dealing with anger. I didn’t like that a white man was telling me what to do with my anger. There were other Asian and Asian American students at the talk who I chatted with after, and they seemed to like it. But I never went back.
I remember that it felt overly philosophical and that part of it was about dealing with anger. I didn’t like that a white man was telling me what to do with my anger.
I hadn’t realized how much Indigo Blue had meant to me until it was gone, and the way it had been replaced by this whitewashed version of Buddhism made it hurt even more. Still, I felt self-conscious about how much this had affected me. Why are you so upset about not being able to go to meditation sessions where you didn’t even meditate?
At the same time, I got obsessed with proving that white Buddhism is bad. I took a bunch of classes on Buddhism and latched onto anything that suggested Buddhism wasn’t really peaceful or rational, that it was an actual religion and not “more of a philosophy.” I was really into Buddhist depictions of hell, which often involved demons dismembering humans, and would show pictures of Buddhist hell to people in the dining hall who annoyed me.
Courtesy of Uncanny Japan
But it was in learning about how imperialism has shaped Western ideas of Buddhism that I finally was able to articulate a lot of the problems I had with white Buddhism. In one of my classes, I learned about how Western ideas of Buddhism originated in Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century. Leaders there decided to frame Buddhism as rational, not as ritualistic or spiritual as other religions, so that Sri Lanka would seem civilized and worthy of independence from British colonialism. Many of the cultural aspects were toned down in order to be more accessible to a Western audience, instead highlighting practices that we now associate with mindfulness and meditation. These ideas underlie why I think white people find it so easy to claim Buddhism. The version most know was made to appeal to them.I also learned about the violence Buddhists had committed and continue to commit against Muslim and Hindu communities in countries where Buddhists are the majority.
I also learned about the violence Buddhists had committed and continue to commit against Muslim and Hindu communities in countries where Buddhists are the majority.
I also learned about the violence Buddhists had committed and continue to commit against Muslim and Hindu communities in countries where Buddhists are the majority. Once in a class on Himalayan cultures, we talked about the ethnic cleansing of the Lhotshampa in Bhutan. Most of my classmates were white, and I got the feeling many of them were in the class because they wanted to go backpacking in Nepal or had gotten into Tibetan Buddhism. It was obvious that thinking about the atrocities a Buddhist country had committed against a Hindu minority made them uncomfortable, and they quickly rushed through the discussion and onto the next reading. It made me think about how people would rather cling to their orientalist fantasies than start thinking about the real violence that their fantasies obscure.
When I complain about white Buddhism, sometimes people ask me about white people who practice Buddhism respectfully. I’m not sure what people mean by “respectfully”, but I think they mean learning the correct practices and not simply buying into Western, commercialized ideas of Buddhism. I think this is important, but it isn’t enough.
Right now, I’m quarantining with family in San Francisco Chinatown. People have varying and sometimes infuriating ideas of what it means to behave respectfully towards other people in a pandemic, especially the white people. The white people are much less likely to wear masks, and they always seem to be jogging or walking their dogs, oblivious to the people around them. In the whiter neighborhoods adjacent to Chinatown, there are fewer people on the sidewalks. I guess that’s an excuse to not think about how your body takes up space. Occasionally, I’ll see a white person jogging mask-less towards one of the busier Chinatown streets, and I’ll wonder why I’m so conditioned to shrink out of their way than scream, “Wear a fucking mask!”
It is not just how much knowledge you have of the religion, how much you respect the teaching themselves, but also how we engage with the histories that have shaped our views of Buddhism and our relationship to it, how we take up space, how entitled we do or don’t feel to take up space — how this is related to legacies of white supremacy and imperialism.
Then there is the outdoor dining, the white restaurants that spill out on the sidewalks. I try to avoid the streets with lots of these restaurants because it’s impossible to walk on the sidewalk without passing through a large clump of laughing, mask-less white people. I don’t begrudge the restaurants this. It’s not like they have much of a choice. But most of the restaurants in Chinatown don’t have room for outdoor dining. The sidewalks are too narrow. There are too many people walking around. It makes me think again about who is allowed to take up space and the ways in which people take up space can be a matter of survival.
This is similar to how I feel about what it means to practice Buddhism “respectfully.” It is not just how much knowledge you have of the religion, how much you respect the teaching themselves, but also how we engage with the histories that have shaped our views of Buddhism and our relationship to it, how we take up space, how entitled we do or don’t feel to take up space — how this is related to legacies of white supremacy and imperialism. Grappling with this is an ongoing process, and it makes me think about the idea of interconnectedness, not in the white hippy way where we hug trees and braid flowers in our hair, but the kind where we refuse to ignore the complex webs of power that we are all oppressed by and complicit in, the ties that bind us all together.
When it comes to Buddhism and cultural appropriation, I still sometimes worry that I’m making a big deal out of nothing, that I’m angry for no good reason. But I also think that dismissing my own anger is dismissing the histories that have shaped our ideas of Buddhism in the West — that even if my own anger is only a small blip, it still points to a larger system. Ignoring it is not useful because then I won’t be able to see how I fit in.
I mediate now, not in a religious way but to manage anxiety and chronic pain. Sometimes, the meditation recordings will reference Buddhism, usually when they’re talking about finding calm or learning not to be attached to negative emotions. I’m often invited to “cultivate inner peace,” which I think is funny and kind of irritating. If Buddhism has taught me to cultivate anything, it’s anger, the kind that gives clarity. This isn’t always something that is easy for me to access, but I would never give up the moments I can touch anger, even in exchange for enlightenment or whatever. It is something I will hold onto, earthly and overly attached, as long as I can.
What Is Queer Fiction? An Interview with Patrick Yumi Cottrell
My high school creative writing teacher — shout-out to Ms. Hill — gave me a copy of the literary magazine McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern in the early aughts, after I wrote an essay on a pair of soccer shorts I was lusting after. It was my introduction to the idea that the strange ideas I have, that my weird habits and obsessions might merit the careful consideration of literary writing. While it came to my attention, in college, that it was an exceedingly white publication, I have continued to enjoy the beauty and cleverness of each physical quarterly issue and the evolution of the off-beat brand of fiction and essays that are collected within the pages.
I was excited when I saw on Twitter that Patrick Yumi Cottrell — who is among many other things a talented, trans, Korean adoptee writer — was editing the first queer fiction issue that is coming out this November. For those who aren’t yet familiar, Cottrell is a celebrated fiction writer, whose novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace was published by McSweeney’s in 2017. Their book is what some have called a contemporary noir about a woman who travels home after learning her brother has committed suicide, and it won Cottrell a 2018 Whiting Award. I was thrilled to speak with Cottrell because I wanted to hear from them, what they saw as the current landscape of queer fiction (it includes a story from our own AS fave Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya and S L I C K author, Juli Delgado Lopera) and the experience of editing this much-hyped issue.
Photo of Patrick Yumi Cottrell by Sarah Gerard
Kamala: How would you like to introduce yourself to our audience of queer readers — who always want to go deep and might already be wondering about your sun/moon/rising signs?
Patrick Yumi Cottrell: Thank you for these lovely questions. My name is Patrick and I’m a writer. I’m a Taurus on the cusp of Gemini, an Aquarius rising and a moon in Sagittarius. I live in Florida at the moment, but this is subject to change.
K: What was your reaction when McSweeney’s approached you to edit their queer fiction issue? Did you have any mild bouts of imposter syndrome (even though you shouldn’t, you’re a big deal!) or were you clear-eyed and like “Yes, I have been preparing all of my life for this moment”? No, but seriously, how does it feel to have gathered the writers you have in one place? And what do you feel like this issue says about contemporary queer fiction, of what that means these days?
PYC: I always feel like an imposter. It’s a normal part of being a writer or a sensitive person in the world. I considered saying no to editing the issue because I questioned whether or not I understood the idea of what might constitute queer fiction. Also, I have no actual editorial experience. I was talking to a friend and colleague, the writer Joanna Howard (author of the tremendous nonfiction work Rerun Era, which McSweeney’s published in 2019) and she encouraged me to say yes because she said it would be a good opportunity to support emerging voices. I thought a lot about the act of curation. What does it mean to put writers in proximity to one another?
As far as what this issue says about contemporary queer fiction: I tried to let the concept of queer abundance guide me. What would it mean to show open-hearted abundance, or like a great river of language and thought on the page?
K: When you were thinking about this issue, how were you thinking about queerness? What are the qualities of queerness in fiction that most entice you?
PYC: My call for submissions asked the question, “What is queer fiction?”. I asked because I didn’t really know. I tried to be open about what I encountered. I mostly let my intuition guide me. I had this idea that the issue would be gem-like and sharp; it turned out to be sprawling, like a monster with tendrils reaching out. All of this sounds pretty vague and murky. I tried to think about queerness in terms of change, presence, contradiction, and complexity.
K: I love surprise, because I think we’re all such sophisticated readers of narrative and humanity, and it takes something special to twist an expectation and deliver something unexpected — what, without spoilers, were some of the best moments of surprise while editing this issue?
PYC: I’m not really sure how to answer this question. I think the best moments of surprise will be revealed to readers as they encounter them in the text. Having said that, a surprising thing that happened while editing the issue: my feelings about finding the right tone for the issue changed a lot.
Going back to the idea of the issue as a gem: I thought I would want to focus on language-driven work that pushes away the reader or forces them to confront some difficulty or discomfort. I think when a reader encounters that kind of difficulty, it can be beautiful.
At the end of April submissions were open for about three or four days and we received over five hundred stories, if I’m remembering correctly. I was humbled and surprised so many people would entrust their stories with us. I worked with the editor Claire Boyle and the McSweeney’s interns — Alia DeBurro, Emma P. Theiss, Paz O’Farrell, and Alexandra Galou — all of whom did an amazing job of helping me go through the pile. The experience of reading slush shaped the issue and changed things tonally. I decided to pivot and move away from focusing strictly on formally-challenging work. I wanted to think about ease and story-telling. I wanted to think about the pleasure that comes from telling a good story. There’s a spectrum of work in the issue, but it’s thanks to the slush pile that the issue has lightness and some air and sweetness in it.
K: Who did you grow up reading, and do you remember the first time you came across lesbians or queer people on the page? What was your reaction? How were you changed henceforth?
I liked Bridge to Terabithia, John Grisham, all of the Nancy Drew mysteries, and Judy Blume. I remember my mother found Forever underneath my bed when I was ten and she took it away. I didn’t understand why she had to take it away and it made me feel ashamed and embarrassed. The other night I read some of Forever out loud to my partner, Sarah Gerard, and we talked about whether or not we would allow our ten-year old to read it (if we had a ten-year old, which we do not). Sarah said she would’ve done the same thing as my mother, which surprised me.
The first time I encountered a book with queer characters must have been James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. At the time I remember feeling afraid of its intensity. Now it’s one of my most returned-to books along with Lydia Davis’ The End of the Story. I’m reading Giovanni’s Room with one of my classes this semester and I’m looking forward to thinking about how Baldwin utilizes time and perspective in such a decisive manner.
K: As an early writer, when and how did you learn to write about your identities? Was that process ushered along by any particular experiences? What would you say now, are the hallmarks of your style, that speak to or reflect your identities?
PYC: I’m still learning how to write about my identity. I’ll admit it’s not something I feel adept at. I find it to be a challenge because I’ve never really fit in anywhere, and I don’t feel a really strong connection to my identity, possibly because queer Korean adoptees are mostly ignored or invisible. That’s my honest answer. I think the first time I wrote about being a Korean adoptee was when I wrote my novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. Before that, I wrote prose poems and fables and I avoided writing about identity because I didn’t think I needed to. After my brother died, I felt urgency around it. It became necessary. And it changed my life. All of this is to say, I am still learning; I hope to continue to write about identity in my own way.
K: Okay this is niche, but I know you were quite taken with Fiona Apple as a young person, as were many of us here, and I’m wondering if you read that profile of her in in the New Yorker this past March, and if you had any reactions that you want to share? I’ll share that I was both still in complete awe of the deeply transformative creative practice she employs, into her emotional lesbianism, and also like “She’s kinda just a white woman living in the hills?” which I guess isn’t unexpected, but still surprised me.
PYC: Ha! That’s amazing. I did read it, but I read it slowly and over the course of a few weeks. I love Fiona Apple and admire her so much. She’s complex, multi-faceted, an activist, and really cool. I like how open she is about her social anxiety.
K: Lastly, do you have any advice for early queer writers who are still growing into themselves? Tips and tricks? Exercises that have revealed yourself to you?
PYC: My advice: don’t be afraid to ask for help from people you admire.
The best exercise that has revealed myself to me is to stop self-obsessing, and look outward. Become less aware of yourself as a self, and pay more attention to how you see the world.
You can pre-order the 62nd issue of the McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, dedicated to queer fiction — it comes out in late November. For a limited time, when you subscribe to the quarterly, you will also get a free copy of Patrick Yumi Cottrell’s novel, Sorry To Disrupt The Peace.
S L I C K: I Bet It Does
I Bet it Does
I.
Your big, swollen breasts
bloated, in pain
bad pain
how it feels good.
I bet it does.
II.
I feel sad
guilty when I think
about the pain.
Makes me wet-
Your breast, tender with pain
many times they’ve felt that way
because of me.
Bad pain how it feels so good
it does.
III.
I sniff my fingers
Sweet, wet pussy
on my tips
sweet wet pussy on MY tip.
Made me want to
and I did tap
that ass
many times
made it mine.
Distance has made my
heart grow
less fearful.
IV.
Fuck me…
fucking you.
Watch me cum!
the way I’ve had you watch before
I don’t have to touch you to fuck you
I never did.
Why do I feel like I have to now
find our mojo
that mental connection
not just brain sex
those times
when cell minutes were used up
With you giving me your busts.
Mobile to mobile
Please believe I was giving you mine
Cause that’s how it feels to want
I want you
I have to surpass
We can surpass
I bet we does…
Illustration by Lauralee Benjamin
Fucked up Memory
“It’s just like heaven
bein’ here with you
you’re like an angel
too, good to be true”
-Rosie and the Originals
Too, good to be true?
Huh, must be why I forget
I can have you
whenever I want?
You’re my salt.
You make everything better.
Salt.
Sweat gathered
under my breasts.
Skin red
under my breasts.
Titties slapping
your ass smacking
against my mound.
Methodic.
Soft-mounds slapping
Hard!
FUCKEN burlesque
ain’t got nothing
on these.
Don’t make me twirl
these bitches!
Twirl around my thumb
finds your hole
worm myself inside
your hole, tight brown
fade to pink.
Eye squinting
starring at me.
WINK, WINK!
Each time I blow.
Slow, I dig in slow.
My thumb throbs
pleasure-pressure
pressing down on your spot.
I don’t recall
childhood growing pains
ankles never hurt
back no aches
Titties?
Little avocados
overly ripe
about to burst.
Easily bruised
my EGO
the stares.
Here we go!
Get outta your head!
They say.
Nah, nah,
I get’s into my head.
Close your eyes
lean back
get into my head.
Open wide.
Split you open
my tongue
splashes in your cunt.
You feel me?
That’s called inspire.
I get into my head
sucking hard on
hard swollen clit.
Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Look at you, getting into
my head.
Don’t push me out
let my thoughts
get fermented with you.
Filling up my pores
we penetrate each other.
I get into my head
deep
my thoughts
your juices slipping
between my fingers
opening and reaching
for more of you
grab a fist full of you
have your pulse
in the palm of my hand
have you in the palm of my hand.
You look so good
getting into my head,
got you arched
like a rainbow.
Look at all the colors,
wide blue eyes,
flushed cheeks
cotton candy mouth
screaming “PLEASE!”
Your fingers tangled
with my dark curls.
Dig into my head
smash me into your cunt
make me face my fantasies!
suck you like a slut
Can’t get enough?
Who? You or me?
Same!
Sluts.
Juice you like udders
Juice you
till your utters
echo in your throat.
Getting into my head
Cause that’s how I play
YOU
so good
like soft violins by the shore.
Call me prodigy.
My tongue flapping
like a fish,
I’m hooked.
going down
slow, down
like a shot.
Curl my fingers
hold you inside, tight
my finger prints all over
your walls.
Every ridge is alive
in the moment
get into momentum.
Squeeze my hand inside you
Peace!
Pieces
I want to fuck you to pieces
pump that cunt
fuck you hard
uh con gannas,
ay ese feeling!
Got it hot
the center of my chest
a crescent glows
that there
that’s were my good fucking grows
like your throbs I feel
pressing against my knuckles grow.
Shit gets hot
the puddle under my titties grows.
Mercury you slip through my fingers
quick silver droppings on the floor.
Scattered,
feels so scattered
“Being here with you”
Viola Davis Is Iconically Queer Again in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”!
When we are talking movies, there is nothing that I am more excited about this year than Netflix’s adaptation of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. And sure, there have been times when writing for this queer website, I’ve been prone to hyperbole in the in name of… well… hype.
But NO — this is not one of those times.
I am a black queer woman and bonafide history nerd, the kind of person for whom the only thing she loves more than books is theatre. So the countdown clock to Ma Rainey falls directly at the intersection of all my Venn diagram circles. Please let me fully break this down for you:
1) August Wilson is arguably (and for me — there actually is no argument) the most significant Black playwright to have ever lived. His series of ten plays, collectively called “The Century Cycle,” chronicle the lived experiences of Black American communities across the 20th century. Those plays in the include: Fences (for which Viola Davis won a Tony Award for her performance as Rose Lee Maxson in the 2010 Broadway revival and then won her Oscar for the same role seven years later when the play was adapted to film), The Piano Lesson (both Fences and The Piano Lesson won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama), and yes — Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,.
2) In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a film adaption of Wilson’s play, Viola Davis will play Black queer blues foremother and absolute legend Ma Rainey. Remember when Mo’Nique played Ma Rainey in Dee Rees’ 2015 Bessie (one of my already documented top ten lesbian movies!!)!?! Well, now we’re switching one Oscar winner for another! A Black queer historical icon so great that not one, but two Oscar Winners Will Have Played HER??? Send me directly to my fainting couch.
3) In the play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, you sure can bet that Ma Rainey is queer!! The central plot surrounds, in part, her band’s trumpeter Levee (seen here as Chadwick Boseman) catching feelings towards Ma’s girlfriend while the band is cooped up in a recording studio and Ma is dealing with her racist white manager.
4) The film is coming to us from a venerable treasure trove of Black talent! Obviously we have none other than Viola Davis. This was also the last film production that Chadwick Boseman worked on before his heartbreaking and untimely passing last summer. Glynn Turman, someone who’s built quite a reputation of late playing fatherly figures in Black queer productions (Queen Sugar, How to Get Away with Murder), is one of my favorite actors in his age bracket. And if you spend enough time around Black Broadway circles then you know that Ruben Santiago-Hudson (who adapted Wilson’s script for the screen) and George C. Wolfe (the film’s director) both have reputations that enter the room far before they do. They’ve each left indelible marks on the genre; now they get to play in perhaps the greatest sandbox.
5) DID. I. ALREADY. MENTION. THAT. VIOLA. DAVIS. — Fresh off six years as Annalise Keating, the most important Black queer woman character on television — IS. BACK. AND. ONCE. AGAIN. PLAYING. GAY!!!
Ok wonderful, we are all caught up here. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom hits Netflix on December 18th. And I, for one, cannot wait.
How Reading A Queer Latina Writer Helped Me Understand My Mother’s Story
Welcome to Autostraddle’s Latinx Heritage Month essay series exploring the theme of death and rebirth.
Editor’s Note: The following essay includes a discussion of rape in the context of Carolina De Robertis’ novel, Cantoras.
Growing up, my mother had always seemed otherworldly. She had beautiful black hair down to her waist and huge black eyes. She always told me she was a bruja and I believed her. We lived in a white suburb and she was clearly different than my friends’ mothers. She didn’t believe in seat belts, she spoke in rapid porteña Spanish everywhere we went, and she encouraged me to not give a f*ck what anyone else thought of me, especially when I was breaking the rules by climbing on top of the swing set at the local playground.
But when it came to the questions I asked her about la dictadura, she was tight-lipped. She changed the subject, cited bad memory or bluntly asked, “Why are you bringing this up?”
I used to think I wouldn’t be whole if I didn’t know the whole story. I figured if anything would connect me to this place where I’m from, but in which I’ve never lived, it would be my mother’s stories. So I pried for details, desperately hanging onto the shards of information she gave me over the years: the nuns she knew who were disappeared for helping poor people, the tense atmosphere at the university, the revolutionary pamphlets on the street her mother begged not to pick up, how she had to stop volunteering in poor areas because social work was considered radical. Still, my mother maintained that none of this had anything to do with why she had moved to the U.S. She had moved for professional opportunity. She had finished law school top of her class and couldn’t get a job at a law firm because she was a young woman. They told her she’d likely marry or get pregnant and they couldn’t take the risk. So, she applied to an international exchange to the U.S. where she met my American father and the rest is history.
I didn’t learn about the dictatorship until I was in high school. My brother wrote his college essay about la guerra sucia, the dirty war, in Argentina and I learned that tens of thousands of people had become disappeared — kidnapped, killed, and tortured in anonymity during the 70s and 80s. I did the math: My mother was 20 when the military took over the government with a coup d’état. A few years later, she moved to the U.S. and left everything behind.
I used to think I wouldn’t be whole if my mother didn’t tell me what it was like. What was it like to live in fear that you might be disappeared? What was it like to be young and curious and hungry and restless in a time when everyone told you to stay quiet, stay home, stay still or die? I wanted to feel close to the woman my mother was before she left Argentina — to understand what her life was like and why she made the choices she made. I wanted to know if we would have been friends, had we met back then.
In other words, I used to think I wouldn’t be whole unless I knew my mother’s traumas. I had only shards of stories. I felt it wasn’t enough.
Growing up, I felt I wasn’t enough. Not white enough. Not Latina enough. I doubted whether these were my questions to hold, my aches to bear. I’ve tried to look to my mother’s story as my own missing piece. I’ve made her story into a key that will unlock a feeling of place and belonging. In a way it makes sense. As a writer, I look to stories to guide me. Without a full understanding of the story of who came before me and how they lived, how can I know who I am or where I’m going? I’ve felt frustrated with my mother for not painting a more vivid portrait, but these are stories you don’t talk about in Argentina. Even in diaspora, they’re not talked about much.
When I first hold Cantoras, Carolina De Robertis’ dazzling novel about five lesbian women living under the military dictatorship in Uruguay in the 70s and 80s, I instinctively flip to the acknowledgements page at the back of the book. I often begin reading a new author this way, to see which other writers they know that I like and have read. I’m also nosy and like seeing the map of friends, mentors, and lovers whom they usually thank. There, a few paragraphs down, I find a sentence that thrills me. De Robertis describes herself at the beginning of her project, 18 years ago, as “a young queer woman from the diaspora seeking [her] own connection to Uruguay.” I read it again. A young queer woman from the diaspora seeking her own connection back. That’s me. It seems so obvious, but I have never formulated those words before. I feel an unexpected pull to cry.
Sometimes you don’t realize you’re hurting until someone gently pours salve on the wound.
As I read on in Cantoras, it is like this. Like healing a wound. Like drinking bone broth in winter. Nourishing. Rich. Quiet. Slow. I read Cantoras in bed, on the train, sprawled out on my floor, curled up on the couch. My body loosens. As I read about the intertwined lives and limbs of Flaca, Romina, Anita, Malena and Paz, I revel in the complexity of their relationships, how they blur the boundaries of romantic love, familial love, and friendship to form a secret community where they can be themselves in the midst of a ferociously repressive dictatorship that outlawed homosexuality.
At the beginning of the story, the five women are in their late teens and early twenties, around the same age as my mother then. They must quickly learn to silence themselves and their desires, their curiosity, their hunger for life. They are living in a double oppression: that of patriarchy and that of dictatorship. I feel heartbroken and humbled as I read about Romina, an activist who is imprisoned for attending communist meetings and raped by three soldiers — Only Three, she calls them, because she feels she is lucky to only be raped by three, only on one night, while many other women are raped night after night. Here is a woman who was punished for speaking out and for organizing. These regimes systematically stamped out opposition and free expression by kidnapping, torturing and murdering thousands of young people, liberals, intellectuals, artists and social workers. This created a society that was paralyzed by fear, intent only on daily survival.
Paz, who is only 16 when the story begins, describes it this way: “You shut down and mind your own business and you never make waves, since the slightest ripple could kill you.” Flaca, who works in her father’s butcher shop, describes how people walk differently in the streets during the dictatorship. They’re hunched over and tense; everyone appears to have aged immeasurably in a few months. She describes how the capital city has become a huge open-air cemetery, how everywhere everything feels laced with death.
A chill ran through me as I read this. This is what I’d been missing in my conversations with my mother. How did it feel to live through this? How did the numbing happen? How did you learn to stay silent and self-censor? How did you learn to survive? These are the things my mother can’t tell me.
Cantoras was born from interviews De Robertis conducted over the course of 18 years. She talked with queer women in the generation above her who lived through the dictatorship. In an interview with Lit Hub, De Robertis quotes Toni Morrison in saying that novels are inquiries. The burning questions that animated her book, she says, were “How do we create refuge for ourselves and each other? And how do we live radiantly when the world around us seems bent on our erasure?”
As I read, I realize that these are my questions, too, as a fellow young queer woman from the diaspora seeking her own connection back. My frustration at my mother’s silences changes to something more like empathy when I consider the culture of hiding that people had to internalize to survive back then. One of the women in Cantoras describes family as those “whom you protected by hiding yourself.” I had not before considered the protective value of hiding things. That it might be a kind of love. The kind of love born out of a system of real violence, of consequences that are unimaginable to me today, one generation later. It applies equally to queerness as to dictatorship and diaspora.
I used to think I wouldn’t be whole if I didn’t know the whole story. I recognized, in reading Cantoras, that my inheritance is not just the stories I’m told but also what I’m not told, what is unsayable or unknowable, the suppression of stories at a massive scale. This silence is what propels me to write.
I’ll never know what it was like for my mother during the dictatorship. To live inside those memories. But I’ll never stop trying to imagine. To create worlds out of words where I can feel closer to my mother and to my lineage.
As Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa writes, “Soy un amasamiento, I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining.”
The Angsty Buddhist: Growing Up Kinda-Sorta Buddhist
This is the first essay in The Angsty Buddhist, a series about being Chinese American, nonbinary, and finding my own relationship with Buddhism, in a country where so many of its ideas have been whitewashed.
At my Catholic all-girls middle school, I liked to tell people I was Buddhist. It was my feeble attempt at preteen rebellion. When people talked about Jesus, I enjoyed interjecting, “Oh yeah? Well, I don’t believe Jesus was real because I’m Buddhist!”
I didn’t go to a particularly Catholic Catholic school. Many of the students were, like me, the children of gentrifying LA liberals who most likely supported gay marriage but didn’t want their kids going to public middle schools. Our religion class consisted of an old white woman telling us stories about her family and showing us TV movies that she found uplifting. One of our assignments was to draw an angel, and I got an A for copying a picture from a manga.
But it was still more Christianity than I had ever been previously exposed to. Before middle school, I’d only heard a handful of people say they believed in God, and suddenly, the vast majority of my classmates identified as some sort of Christian. At my first prayer service, I was baffled when everyone linked hands and started reciting what I later learned was the Lord’s Prayer. It made me feel out of place and also annoyed that I was expected to know these things. Unlike the Buddhist Church I’d grown up in, there seemed to be an assumption that everyone shared the same beliefs and experiences.
Once, in art class, I told a classmate that I didn’t believe in God because I was a Buddhist. “Oh,” she said, “well, that’s okay. All religions are different ways of worshipping the same God.”
“Buddhists don’t believe in God!” I snapped.
I complained to my mom about this when she picked me up from school. “And then she said, ‘they’re all worshipping the same God! That’s so annoying!’”
“She was just trying to be nice,” my mom said.
“So?”
“Also we’re not Buddhist, just because we spend so much time at the Buddhist Church,” my mom said. “And it’s good for you to learn about Christianity. Most people in this country are some sort of Christian. It’s good to get exposed.”
“Fine,” I said.
I’m still not completely sure how to articulate this, but “all the same God” seemed a lot like the white parents my parents tried to avoid making small talk with, the kind of who liked diversity and holding fundraisers. And even though not all of the kids at my Catholic school were white, there was something about Christianity that reminded me of whiteness, at least in the power it seemed to hold. I was beginning to realize that religion is not just about what an individual person believes, but about culture and race and the larger structures we live in. “I’m Buddhist!” I insisted, by which I really meant, “You don’t know me. Fuck off.”
I went to a preschool at a Japanese American Buddhist Church. My parents chose the school mostly because one of their close friends worked there. Most of the kids my age at the Buddhist Church were fourth-generation Japanese Americans, like I’m fourth-generation Chinese American, and I think that’s one of the reasons why my parents decided to send me there. Most of my Asian American friends, since, have been first and second generation, and though I’m grateful for these friendships, I’m also glad I got to grow up with kids who shared this identity with me.
Mostly, we did normal preschool things like learn the alphabet and pretend to be cats. In elementary school, I joined the church basketball team and went to their summer day camp. The teachers there talked to us about the history of incarceration, and I listened as my classmates talked about how internment had affected their families. As an adult, I learned how Buddhist and Shinto leaders had been targeted during World War II and how Buddhism had sustained people in the camps. After the war, the Buddhist Church was important to supporting community members, many of whom had lost everything. Learning about this has made me think about the role religion and spirituality plays in resistance, how it can strengthen and bond people together.
I was struck by the realization that the pressure I felt so acutely to assimilate, was small compared to what previous generations had faced, what many continue to face.
From being at the Buddhist Church, I learned that preserving culture and community is an act of resistance, even when things like language are lost, and that religion can be an important part of this. I’m nervous about describing these things — the way we used incense, the sound of the chants, the spam musubi we sold at Obon. I don’t want to exoticize anything, especially since this isn’t my culture, but I think these things are important because they are what brought people together and allowed for resistance. .
My first year of college, I used to hide in my dorm room and watch youtube videos of Obon dancing. Surrounded by white people who wore boat shoes and vacationed at Martha’s Vineyard, I wanted something that reminded me of home. I was struck by the realization that the pressure I felt so acutely to assimilate, was small compared to what previous generations had faced, what many continue to face. But there were people who had still chosen to remember these Obon dances, to create new ones, and to pass them on to their children. I wonder about the strength it takes to choose this.
There isn’t an equivalent of the Japanese American Buddhist Church for my part of Chinese America. My own family’s experience of spirituality is fragmented, with no larger community that we’re drawn to. My great-grandparents immigrated to San Francisco at the height of the Exclusion Era. In a time of massacres against Chinese communities that was encouraged by government policy, many turned to Christian charities to meet their immediate needs. My grandmother and her siblings attended Catholic school, where the nuns gave them their English names. As a preteen, my grandma was baptized along with some of her classmates. When I asked my grandma if her mother was religious, she said, “Maybe in China she was Buddhist. She didn’t do that here, though.”
In a time of massacres against Chinese communities that was encouraged by government policy, many turned to Christian charities to meet their immediate needs.
My grandma says she’s a Catholic, though I’ve never seen her go to church. Once, I asked her if she believes in God, and she replied, “That’s what Catholics are supposed to believe.” She does get excited, however, when I ask her about the figurines from Chinese mythology she has around her house. She doesn’t remember the stories behind most of them, besides vague things like, “Those ones are sort of like angels.” I’ve tried to google some of them and learned that many of them are deities associated with both Buddhism and Daoism. I usually skim through their stories and then forget them. Despite my best intentions, there’s something vaguely dissatisfying about learning about one’s culture from google.
The rest of my family is spiritual in a similarly haphazard way. My parents have statues of Guanyin and Guan Gong in the living room. “For protection,” they say, though I’m not sure any of us know what exactly we’re being protected from. It’s just comforting to have them there. At funerals, our entire extended family will baisin with incense at the gravesite, and then someone will mention Jesus during a speech.
After the funeral, I always ask my mom afterwards, “Uncle so-and-so is Christian?” These were people I’d grown up with, and I’d never heard them mention it before.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “He hung around Cameron House a lot when he was a kid. It’s a Christian community center in Chinatown.”
I don’t think most people in my family are super Christian, but at times, like funerals, it’s a piece of ritual we know how to grab onto. I sometimes wonder what might have been in its place.
When I was a kid, I used to wish I were Japanese American and Buddhist. Mostly, I wanted something more concrete to identify with and a community I could call my own. More recently, though, I’ve been learning to embrace the ways spirituality and culture have come to me in more fragmented and distorted ways. I think that embracing this is a way of remembering the history that brought my family here. Like the history of incarceration shaped the Japanese American Buddhist Church, the history of exclusion has shaped my family’s fragmented spiritual practice. There is knowledge and a sense of connection to the past that is lost, but there is the satisfaction in knowing that the things we manage to hold onto have been fought for and that there is the opportunity to imagine new ways of being.
I’ve been thinking about this more lately — how the communities that raised me have survived past apocalypses and the role that spirituality and shared culture played in inspiring people to imagine something different. I think about the conversations we had about internment and the stories my relatives told me about being detained at Angel Island, how this affected my understanding of structural racism and white supremacy.
If anything, I’m thinking of the ways spirituality tethered people to each other — in the joy of a shared ritual or holding onto a myth or a belief in secret, remembering that your people hold wisdom deeper than the violence that white supremacy can inflict.
There must have been something that allowed people to survive these moments and imagine something better on the other side. I’m having a hard time articulating this outside of the simplistic ideas about faith and believing in higher purpose — I don’t think that’s what I mean. If anything, I’m thinking of the ways spirituality tethered people to each other — in the joy of a shared ritual or holding onto a myth or a belief in secret, remembering that your people hold wisdom deeper than the violence that white supremacy can inflict.
This is not to say that these communities are perfect. I can think of many ways I and the communities I come from failed in large ways. We didn’t talk enough about anti-Blackness and the ways we were complicit in the violence against Black communities. We didn’t talk about Islamophobia or the privilege that East Asians hold when compared to other communities that fall under the umbrella of “Asian Pacific Islander” and the violences we often commit as a result. The spiritual and cultural grounding of our communities is valuable and important but only if it is used to fight for collective liberation.
In middle school, I looked forward to Thursdays because that was basketball practice night at the Buddhist Church. I liked changing out of the gray pleated skirt and white polo shirt that was our uniform into a t-shirt and basketball shorts. I liked leaving Catholic school, with all its unfamiliar rituals, and returning to a community that felt like home.
But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I don’t really consider myself a Buddhist. I’m not that into organized religion, and the more I learn about the ways Buddhism has been used in violent and oppressive ways, the more reluctant I am to identify with it. Because I’m not Japanese American, I don’t feel comfortable claiming the kind of Buddhism I grew up with. The Buddhism I’ve encountered since then has mostly been filtered through whiteness: the chapter on Asia in my seventh grade history book, white professors, white queers who meditate, Zen-branded oil emulsifiers, shower gels, and Whole Foods muffins.
Once, when I was a college student, I was wandering around in the snow feeling sorry for myself. I’d heard that the chaplain’s office was hosting a dharma talk, and I went because it seemed like a good way to channel my angst. The person giving the talk was a white man in robes from the local Zen center. I don’t remember what the talk was on, something about being present or dealing with anger or whatever. I do remember it being vaguely self-helpy and mansplainy in a way that I’ve come to associate with white Buddhists and white people in general. I left the talk confused, wondering if I was being melodramatic for disliking the guy so much and also frustrated that he was my access point to Buddhism.
Now that most of the people around me are trans and queer, everyone I know seems to be honoring their ancestors, making altars, and insisting on rituals. I used to think this was weird and depending on the situation, culturally appropriative. Sometimes, I still think these things. Every time we start a meeting with a grounding exercise, I find myself wanting to roll my eyes.
But as I parse through my own memories of the Buddhist Church and my own family’s scattered rituals, I’m starting to realize the wisdom behind these impulses. In order to create the futures we want, we need to understand the lessons imparted by those who came before us, and we also need the rituals and practices, spiritual or otherwise, that keep us connected and clear in our sense of purpose. I’m not sure if I’ve found these things for myself, but I would like to. I would like to be able to imagine a way forward.
Growing Up With “Mucho Mucho Amor”: How Walter Mercado Defined My Life
Welcome to Autostraddle’s Latinx Heritage Month essay series exploring the theme of death and rebirth.
Growing up, there was always a magical wizard on primetime Latin American television. He was a whimsical figure in beaded, bedazzled capes with giant rings on each finger. “Mucho mucho amor,” he would proclaim with a kiss. Imagine, growing up in a machista, Catholic, heteronormative Latino household that somehow embraced this gender-bending person. That man was Walter Mercado and he changed my life.
Mercado is a Puerto Rican astrologer, actor, and performer. For more than 20 years, his astrology show aired on Univision for audiences in Puerto Rico, Latin America, and the United States. Mercado’s show was programmed between Primer Impacto, a Latin American television news program, and El Gordo y La Flaca, an entertainment talk show. Every day after school, we would learn about the issues affecting the real world like el chupacabra and exorcismos, get our daily dose of celebrity chisme, and learn about our horoscopes. Quality television!
Latin American TV programming can be pretty wild with our news sources creating investigative reporting on actual conspiracy theories and telenovelas with exaggerated acting and strange plotlines. With the unique content on TV, there was a stark lack in queer icons. It was like every topic under the sun was available for consumption except for anything that questioned the norms. Mercado broke all of that.
Mercado was the only glimpse of queer identity that I saw growing up. He is known for his androgenous appearance. In the Netflix documentary Mucho Mucho Amor, Mercado’s hair is described as “a hybrid between really good male hair from the 70’s and really good grandma hair.” He was known for his “little arrangements,” subtle botox and plastic surgery. His wardrobe was praised for its extravagance, jewels, and opulence. Capes were made by internationally recognized fashion designers such as Versace and Isaac Mizrahi with real Swarovski crystals and pearls.
When I saw Mercado, he was a physical representation of everything I felt: Shiny. You know how in heteronormative culture, girls are assigned the color pink and boys are assigned the color blue? I always felt shiny. I felt beyond a color to more of a concept I didn’t quite know how to express yet. I grew up in a conservative family so I never really knew the words to describe who I was but when I saw Walter in his finery and elegance, I knew I was like him.
On November 2, 2019, Mercado passed away. His show had not run on television for over a decade. Three months later, I attended the 2020 Sundance Film Festival as part of the Press Inclusion Initiative where I was fortunate enough to watch Mucho Mucho Amor at its world premiere. The film explores his life and career up into his final years at his home in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Mercado passed away just a few days before the filmmakers learned of their acceptance into the festival. It was one of the most emotional and impactful screenings of my life because of the proximity to Walter Mercado. The directors Cristina Costantini and Kareem Tabsch and producer Alex Fumero wore Mercado’s actual robes to the premiere screening. His entire family was also at the screening. Sitting a few rows over were his nieces and assistant Willie. Seated in the Sundance theater, my life made a bit more sense.
I was raised in a traditional household where women and men had very strict gender roles. These roles were made even more prominent in telenovelas where women were portrayed as sweet virgins or evil seductresses driven by the need to please men. To watch both a representation of traditional values and then see Mercado on screen was an oxymoron. While Mercado represented everything I was and wanted to become, he was also turned into a caricature on trashy talk shows. He was impersonated to tell homophobic jokes. Simultaneously, my television would capture the elegance of Mercado and the cruelty of Latinx traditionalism. How does one grow when they are both seen but also ridiculed?
When asked about his sexuality in Mucho Mucho Amor, Mercado says, “I have sexuality with the wind, with the flowers in the garden, with all the beautiful displays of nature. I don’t need a person. Especially to make me happy, to have an orgasmic experience. I have sex with life. I have sex with everything.” In Latinx culture, there is a popular saying “que lo que se ve, no se pregunta,” meaning “what you can see, you don’t ask about.” While Mercado was a revolutionary queer figure, he never explicitly named his sexuality.
The idea of the unspoken has always weighed heavily on me. All my life, I was never quite sure how I felt about other people. It was something I always kept hidden away in a journal. I knew I was supposed to like the boys in high school and, sometimes, I did but, mostly, I thought boys were too stupid. My eyes sometimes wandered toward girls but I didn’t understand whether I admired them or wanted to be with them. It wasn’t until college that I realized this had a name: pansexual.
I was also never comfortable as a girl. I dislike bras, skirts, the color pink, and everything I was raised to believe a girl was. There was something about being a girl that felt both really wrong and, sometimes, really right. During college, I thought it was important to embrace my masculinity so I took a pair of scissors and cut my hair into a baby queer version of Walter Mercado’s haircut. It took many years to balance my masculinity and femininity and understand why I never felt like either gender. That feeling came to be called: non-binary.
When I finally came out to my parents, it was because I felt like the unspoken needed to be said in order for me to fully be myself. In Latinx culture, people often tip-toe around an issue as to not cause problems for the family: “el qué dirán,” meaning “what would [the neighbors] say.” It’s important to save face and not be too different. However, if my family would allow Mercado to enter our household via the TV every day, it gave me some hope that they might accept me.
At the end of each of Mercado’s shows, he would say, “Bendiciones para todos y que Dios me los bendiga a todos hoy, mañana y siempre, y que reciban de mi paz, mucha paz — pero sobre todo — mucho, mucho amor!,” which translates to “Blessings to all and may God bless you all today, tomorrow and always, and may you receive from my peace, a lot of peace — but above all — a lot, a lot of love!” Mercado would always bless his viewers with wisdom about the cosmos. He would sign off with peace and love yet was never able to open up about his personal life.
Sitting in the dark theater at Sundance watching Mucho Mucho Amor, I cried my heart out as images of Mercado flashed upon the screen. Growing up, you gravitate toward the people on the television screen that most resemble you, even if you don’t know it yet. Every day, I would look in wonder at the man offering me peace and love even when I didn’t quite feel at peace with myself. His visibility on my family’s TV made me embrace my queerness when it came time for me to come out. While Mercado was never able to express his own sexuality, he gave me the wisdom I needed to break the cycle of silence and embrace who I am.
“Walter Mercado is a force of nature without beginnings and endings. He used to be a star, but now, Walter is a constellation.”
— Walter Mercado in Mucho Mucho Amor
Con El Aceite de Coco Nos Sanamos: Lessons From My Elder
Welcome to Autostraddle’s Latinx Heritage Month essay series exploring the theme of death and rebirth.
The start of the pandemic coincided with the death of my late maternal grandmother, Minerva, in the Dominican Republic. She died the night before my green card interview, an interview I had been awaiting for 18 years, hoping and praying that she would hold on long enough to see me in the flesh. My grandmother, as her own children described her, was marvelous; she fed countless children in Barahona, Dominican Republic, helped raise grandchildren and great grand-children all while surviving two brutal dictatorships, the Parsley Massacre, the death of four children. Her connection to her familial roots, was reminiscent to that of Úrsula’s in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude.
We were always close, despite having never met and she also spoke sweet prayers to me over the phone. We had spent the two years leading up to her death retracing her familial past and history. We’d spend hours on the phone, laughing, joking and it soon became a way for my mother to learn more about her mother and ancestors as well. I learned about family members who were imprisoned under the Trujillo regime for being communists and others who were the founders of towns in present day DR. Together, we weaved our ancestral story, the threads connecting us to ancestors and descendants in our lineage, a web so fragile it threatened to cave in every time we tried to remember.
At the same time that I was grieving the death of our family’s matriarch in an immigration waiting room, the astrological makeup of 2020 was reminiscent of catastrophic events that hadn’t happened for over 80 years.
Three days after losing my grandmother, on January 12, 2020, Saturn, the planet of restrictions, karma and limitations perfected his conjunction with Pluto, the planet of intensity, death, and rebirth in the sign of Capricorn at 22°. The Saturn-Pluto conjunction is credited by many astrologers as being the astrological reason behind the COVID-19 pandemic. As the cosmos would have it, this event, which astrologers everywhere were deeming uncomfortably transformative and traumatic, fell directly and very intimately in my natal birth chart. A natal birth chart is an extremely sacred and sensitive piece of information which maps out things like your life’s journey or duty in this life, your karmic debts, your potential health problems and your relationship with figures like your mother, father and siblings. For me, it has become a tool through which I can analyze my ancestral connections, foretell catastrophic events like the Saturn-Pluto conjunction and learn how to navigate through death, rebirth, cycles and karma.
The 22° in astrology has been coined as the “kill or be killed” degree. As a Capricorn degree, the 22° represents extreme, critical, make or break moments and can sometimes refer to death. This degree intensifies themes of death, karma and deep structural change. For me, this astrological climate deeply impacted areas of my life related to ancestry, family, early childhood, my mother and foundations of all kind.
My grandmother’s death completely pulled the rug out from under me. She was in many ways, more than a grandmother, and despite us not having met in person, our frequent phone conversations allowed us to foster an intimate, sister-like bond.
She died during a Full Moon Lunar Eclipse in Cancer, the watery sign representing our mothers, the maternal, and my natal moon sign. Eclipses activate the lunar nodes which represent our karmic duties in this life. Being in the same sign as my natal moon, the eclipse illuminated some aspect of my karmic path and destiny and being that the moon represents the maternal, the eclipse triggered the death (karmic) of my grandmother (the moon, the maternal). This wasn’t the first time I would lose a loved one, during a pivotal moment in my life. My maternal grandfather died on the morning of my middle school graduation, just hours before I was set to deliver a speech, shrouding a happy, celebratory moment in death. My mother sat through my 8th grade graduation in tears, similarly to her sitting through our green card interview in tears. Both times, during critical (22°) moments in my life, my mother had to choose between staying to support her daughter or attending a parent’s funeral.
As grandchildren, we can’t fathom ever losing grandparents but for grandparents, being around for us often means watching everyone they love die. And even still, my grandmother would sweetly, nostalgically recount stories of her family and youth for me, despite having been without them for so many years. Realizing that made me feel incredibly selfish for wanting my grandmother to hold on to life a little longer. Here I was pleading with her on her death bed while all these years, she’s witnessed so much loss and experienced loneliness. I guess that’s why a week after my grandmother passed, her last surviving sister passed as well.
For months, after my grandmother’s death I learned about astrological transits, my own birth chart, planets in our solar system, karmic cycles, fixed stars. What I’ve learned is that having the ability to analyze and forecast tragedy, death, and catastrophe in life rarely softens or even prevents it. Yes, the astrological makeup of 2020 was kind of rigged against me but once you know something like that, there’s nothing much to do but just.. live through it. So I did.
Two months after my grandmother’s death I left the country for home, Curacao, where I discovered a plethora of distant relatives, colonial dissent, sweet feelings of home, and a matriarch whose first words to me were: “I thought I would die before I saw you again.” I’ve dabbled in genealogical astrology, mapping the planets and stars that I inherited from my ancestors. I found out my grandmother and I shared three personal placements which according to genealogical astrology, we can inherit traits in our natal birth chart from our ancestors.
In Ifa, a Yoruba-based religion, we believe that when we die, we are reincarnated into our same family lineage. I’ve imagined all the ways in which it would be possible that my grandmother was once my sister, or my aunt, a friend in a past life or even a version of me. We depended on each other in so many ways. We still do, even after her death. The Pattern, an astrology app, says of my grandmother and I’s friendship synastry: “You and Minerva have one of the most positive and progressive connections that two friends can have. It’s like you brighten each other’s day and boost each other’s confidence. You’re expanding her life purpose and helping her reach her destiny — and Minerva does the same thing for you.” Her death left a void in my life that won’t be filled or replaced.
Following in her footsteps, I began to learn herbal medicine and about healing herbs used in my ancestral lineage. Specifically, I’m learning about the importance of plant allies, how their medicinal properties cure a variety of ailments in life. For instance, la mala madre is good for pain from menstrual cramps while epazote is good for treating stomach ailments. I’m educating myself on local medicinal plants in my area while also learning more about ways to tend to and repair a relationship to the stolen land I live on. Learning herbal medicine is important for me as a descendant of maroons, of people in intimate relationships with the land who also relied on plant allies for existence, survival, and healing. My mother tells me stories of my grandmother who treated almost all her illnesses by boiling medicinal leaves she’d pluck off local guanabana and higuereta trees and by drinking a teaspoon of coconut oil everyday. But as her health deteriorated, it became harder for her to gain access to the medicinal herbs she once relied on, leaving her to rely on local hospitals and clinics.The medical system continuously failed my grandmother who lived in chronic pain up until her last breath. It failed her daughter, my mother, and it continues to disproportionately fail and harm Black women.
Although there isn’t an abundance of epazote or oregano poleo growing in the concrete streets of New York, I am dedicated to continuing my grandmother’s legacy by relying on plant allies to further heal when and where I can. It is not only my birth right to reclaim holistic and herbal medicine in my family but it is also needed for my survival. I realize that life is temporary, is fleeting, is vulnerable and needs to be guarded and cherished. In Ifa and other African Traditional/Diasporic Religions, when you heal yourself, you heal your entire lineage. And healing doesn’t stop once death happens but it remains an omnipresent process that every generation is responsible for furthering. That is why I drink ginger tea during flu season, why I drink bitters for stomach pain, why I smell rosemary to help with ADHD, why I drink spoonfuls of coconut oil in Minerva’s name. Because I know someone loves and cherishes my own life the way I cherished my grandmother’s and that person is me.
The Labyrinth Closet
For National Coming Out Day, we are celebrating the stories of perpetual and continuous coming out — the ways our identities keep shifting and changing as we grow and get to know ourselves even better.
Art by Féi Hernandez
To be Mexican, to be trans, to be an immigrant in the context of the United States is to come out of a labyrinthine closet, one with many doors to walk through — if you are modest — or walls to claw through, if you’re like me. Every day we discover our individual truth outside of imposed expectations, and allow ourselves to meet our edges or what’s beyond them, I present, we step closer to our liberation, individually and collectively.
To come out as Mexican or my case Chihuahuense is to come out of a national or regional identity and assume the blood you were made from. To be Mexican is to know your privileges, know how your white skin has served you. It is to know where your Native or Black blood comes from, not only the trans-Atlantic blood seeped in your bones through acclimation, revolutionary alliance, surrender, rape, or otherwise love that grants you access. To be a white-skinned Mexican is to come out as multi-racial, a mixed person largely tempered with colonial blue blood and Indigenous or Black blood, if there are truly any in your DNA. Your truth can set you free, but more importantly, set our trans queer Black and Indigenous people free.
When addressing coming out as a trans person, I can’t ignore having come out as an undocumented person (inherent in this statement: an immigrant — more specifically a childhood arrival, being classified as part of the .5 generation, in other words half-immigrant, only half-blamed for the decision my/our parents, regardless of what they were). I can’t ignore the ways in which I am part of a first generation to suffer and in the same suspiro have the capacity to experience joy within the context of the United States. I can’t ignore I came out as bi-sexual, gay, queer, then asexual, demisexual, then trans non-binary, then trans, then asexual again, then demisexual, then Mexican.
I have to come out as having been continuously stopped at the airport (for my Mexican passport and my criminal, bearded face), interrogated, but not for my white skin. I can’t ignore coming out as a green card holder despues, then a Citizen of the United States of America. My life could have been a room, housed within another room and so forth –– a fort of rooms around my heart, protected — in other words, hiding. As scared and alone as I was in understanding what, when, and who I was, I opened the first door of my labyrinthine closet, then opened the next, until I started kicking through the walls.
[As I write this essay I see yet another wild ghostly version of myself slipping through, out of closets I didn’t even know existed within me. In this case, it’s the closet of feeling legitimate enough to write about any of what I’ve written thus far.]
We’re always coming out. As an: anime fanatic, manga-collecting Pokémon plushie hoarder; as a giddy, youthful ray of sunshine and not just the dense, American Dream-deprived immigrant, prompted over-thinker — I realize I am more than any of these individual rooms at all times. Through this essay I’m coming out as a sort of acute observer, but without qualifications, such as those from an MFA writing program. I am a philosopher, an anthropologist, an existential mystic, an inquisitive sociologist who can only write from the slice of life from which I live, experience the world. The only true qualification is that I am one eager spirit exploring the existential meaning of true liberation, for all peoples, because this is my only truth, the only glow in the dark path out of my maze.
The only way I’ve found a piece of freedom is to come out — even if it meant risking my life every single day walking out of my house as a trans femme person, even at the expense of my whole Mexican family rejecting me because of violent machista cultural values (so grateful that I grew up in a matriarchal household), even at the expense of clocking my Pi’ma descendent grandmother for upholding anti-Black commentary, because unlike her siblings she inherited the confidence that beauty standards granted her in the city, once she moved from poverty — with her fair eyes and fair skin, but let’s not talk about the nose she couldn’t escape. It’s beautiful, to say the least.
Coming out requires an honesty meant for you, to liberate yourself and get closer to a collective truth. Which for me means claiming I — after so many years identified under the category of Person of Color, in part solidarity, in part finding a place as an undocumented Mexican person, as a queer person in the United States, who grew up in Inglewood — have to understand that our collective liberation requires I come out as a white-skinned (not ANGLO SAXON) Mexican, irrespective of my indigenous sacred antepasadas and irrespective of the Spanish colonial blood that define my creation. And by Mexican, I refer to the national culture/ ethnicity, and by Indigenous ancestors and colonizer Spanish blood I refer to the genetic makeup that makes me, which makes for my ambiguous racial disposition.
Coming out is addressing our privileges in that flight out the door, as much as it means spreading our wings wider. They do not exist independent of one another. So to surmise, I’m 46% Indigenous, descent to Native peoples in the geographical location known as the southwest United States + northern Mexico (Pi’ma and Tarhumara people) and the rest of me, mixed, long-forgotten, long-acculturated to a national identity of Mexicanidad: Spanish and Italian and Portuguese descendants (whom I’ve tracked to be gitanos, Gypsies) (whom we have absolutely no ties to whatsoever aside from the genes we inherited). I missed my fully, untempered Native grandmothers by a generation: my father’s grandmother who held her husband (a war-time nurse who rode alongside Pancho Villa) under a tree as he died during the revolution for independence in Chihuahua. And my maternal grandmother’s abuela who wouldn’t grant her permission into her home of mud near the river in the mountains of Madera because she was white, a mestiza.
I am trans, I have a womb although it bears no children. I am exploring polyamory, and am a huge fan of My Hero Academia. I am a sensitive person, yet simultaneously sensual and like to entice the world around me (you can blame it on my Taurus sun, or Venus in Aries). I am pensive and private, but also really funny and love being around people! I truly believe that every wall I clobber with a Harley Quinn-style sledgehammer I unleash a light to the world that is me. Our wings long for the expansive blue of the sky and we have to be okay with crushing anything in our way to come out, so that we can (with consent) help others (through spiritualemotionalfinacialphysical support or artessaysmusicetc.) break free and seize the present moment in REALNESS, not an arbitrary disguise, covering up our responsibility to ourselves and to our fellow humans on this planet.
The lie of my Mexicanidad, masked in my whiteness and national identity prepared me for the long life of constant coming out. It was by untangling every strand of my DNA, every cuento told to me of our (trans) antepasados, of violence, of migration within Mexico and the telenovela drama flare that landed us in the United States, did I understand where my queerness and it’s valiant strength and dedication to being free came from.
Everything we decide to do for ourselves, from our own volition, liberated from the strains of expectations, from the state, of all kinds, we come out as ourselves a little more and more each time. Borderless, wall-less futures require us to break them within ourselves. Require us to sit at the bottom of the ocean and breathe. The labyrinth closet will, with great work, one day exist as an ancient relic of the restraints that were handed to us at birth. In the new world, from where I write in an alternate plane, the only thing we will have to come out of and justify and love, is our birthing person.
Monica Roberts Remembered Us. Now We Remember Her.
Monica and I weren’t close, but every time I crossed paths with her, I was always surprised by how tight she held me as we hugged. Now I can’t stop thinking of the hug we shared back in January at the Creating Change conference. It’s the last time I saw her before her passing last night.
My mind is running a slideshow of every lucky moment I got to observe her refusal to be modest about her excellence. The way she’d relax into a chair, her arm slung over its back. The way she spoke like she knew exactly what she was talking about — because she did.
Before mainstream publications began reporting about the murders of trans folks, Monica was singlehandedly tracking violence against our community on her blog, TransGriot. The blog started as a column in a Louisville, Kentucky newspaper called The Letter in 2004 and went online on New Year’s Day in 2006, as reported by them. She was a pioneer, a trailblazer. Without her, many of us wouldn’t ever know when a member of our community was stolen. She was working to fill the abhorrent gaps within industry-wide neglect of trans lives in the media. Most publications either chose not to report on the regularity of murders against Black trans women, or they’d misgender and deadname the victim, which disrespected the trans community and delayed news of who had been taken this time. She fought to remember us.
What do you say about someone who gave life to the stories of Black trans folks, with dignity, long before so many others did?
Monica Roberts did it for herself, her community and all Black people. What a gift @TransGriot gave us all.
— Charlene been gone for a while, over on bsky now (@CharleneCac) October 8, 2020
And while she was the first in many ways, she knew she came from a lineage. The name of her blog refers to the West African griots, who were oral storytellers, historians, and cultural leaders. She memorialized Black trans women before anyone else would.
Trans lives wouldn’t be taken as seriously as they are today without Monica’s tireless work — work she often did without compensation or recognition. It wasn’t until years later that organizations began showering her with awards.
When she accepted GLAAD’s Special Recognition Award in 2016, she told the story of a young Black transfeminine child named Trinity who she had met just a few months prior. Monica wrote an open letter to Trinity telling her that “she, too, could be a leader in our community — and she has a proud legacy of Black trans leaders to emulate like Marsha P. Johnson and countless others.” Trinity responded in an email written by her mother: “Miss Monica showed me my history, now I’m going to make my own.”
Now, so many young Black trans people can look to Monica Roberts as an ancestor. Every trans journalist is indebted to the space Monica has carved out for us. Every trans person owes Monica a great deal for forcing the world to see us in our unmistakable worth.
What I’ll remember most about her is her unshakable faith in her impact. We begin to honor her by never being modest about our own significance. She saw the beauty and value in herself, and it allowed her to see the beauty and value in us. Monica documented much of our history. And now, she’s the one being memorialized by local papers in Houston and national publications. She is the history. She’s a part of us. We will never forget.
S L I C K: Duckling
It had been months since she had touched me. Whether she had another lover or not, I didn’t know, although I could have found out easily — a quick look into her eyes when she would come to my house straight from work, her whole body smelling of camphor. A peek into the photos on her computer, if she chose to leave it overnight, as she sometimes did when she decided to stay for two days in a row. I knew the password because she kept it the same for everything — ATEVA004! — and I knew this password because she trusted me with it. She trusted me with everything–money, watches, bills, time. So what right did I, her chosen confidant, have to doubt her?
Her official title was “Topical formulation scientist”, mixing and measuring and melting ingredients to make pain ointment for a famous Chinese company. The work was not enjoyable for her; monotonous, uncreative. At night as I tucked my head into the crease of her armpit, she would tell me what she really wanted to be:a perfumer, developing all the different scents she wanted instead of the same sharp, cold medicinal smell.
The beauty of fragrances, she told me as I stroked the side of her cheek, her stomach, all the parts of her I could touch, was that they came alive in different ways on everyone’s skin. It all depended on the person wearing them. Sometimes, she would make small vials of scents for me — saving the leaves of the tomato plants that grew wild in the field behind the factory, plucking blossoms from the yuzu trees in people’s yards as she walked from the train station, saving discarded orange peels from the compost, boiling these down into different oils for me to smear across my neck, my wrists, the backs of my ears.
Truth be told, I didn’t care much for them. I wanted to smell like myself. Like nothing. But I appreciated the gestures for what they were — offerings of love, or something like it, I told myself, and so kept them in small vials, each labeled with the date she had given it to me and the ingredients they contained in the bottom of my dresser.
If I thought about it now, though, it had also been a long time since she had given me anything like this either. Lately our evenings were as they had been when she first came to me — hours of us clawing at each other, our moans low and desperate as we bucked against each others’ wet lips or fingers or pussies. But we didn’t speak. Even if I tried. Even though I did try.
Maybe it was true that she knew my secret, had heard the rumors, and that was why she had responded to me the way she did at the grocery store, when I asked if she would like to spend time with me one day.
Up until that point we had only known each other in passing, brief chats at our friends’ parties about what we did, our shared interests, small spurts of conversations — underneath which I hoped she couldn’t sense my desperate longing.
One night she had stretched her leg across mine at a club as our friends danced, drunk and illuminated by the purple lights, the clouds of white smoke. I felt like I was going to die if I looked at her, so I tried my best to keep my eyes straight ahead, staring at our friend Jiani as she shrieked and spun and kissed different strangers around her. I managed to work up the courage to look at Min, both fearful and hopeful that she would be looking at me with desire, or anything really. I could have done with anything. But instead she was just looking at her phone, her other hand combing through her hair as if she were distracted.
I didn’t know what to do with the leg on top of mine, wanted to touch it but anxious this would be the wrong move, so I floated my hands above it for a second before I settled on pretending I was on my phone as well. I felt terribly embarrassed and awkward. I told myself the next day it probably didn’t mean anything at all.
But at the grocery store, when I had seen her in the dried food section picking out packets of squid and plum, I had asked her anyway. Would you like to go out with me sometime? I said. I forced myself to look at her face when I said it.
Of course. I’ve wanted you for a long time.
Those were the words she used. She had smiled at me, the dimple on her right cheek showing, and I had felt my face burning as we exchanged our WeChat accounts.
Later, when I went home, I repeated those words in my head, rearranged them into different sentences until I fell asleep.
Wanted me? Did want mean sex or love? Did that mean the leg incident had been real? A long time — how long was that? If she used the word “want” instead of “like” did that mean she only wanted me because she wanted to have sex with me?
Anyway, it didn’t matter. I thought about her leg on top of mine in the club, then what she looked like underneath the tight-fitted black pants she had been wearing that day, then I thought about her lifting my legs above her shoulders and making slow motions with her tongue on my clitoris, around it. I was so lost in the fantasy that I surprised myself that when I came, I moaned her name out loud. It was such a shameful thing. What right did I have to say her name like that?
But that was then and this was now.
She opened the door, which I now left unlocked most nights so that if she needed to get in, she could. She knew the passcode for the building, had a to get through the gate as well. Walking to the kitchen after giving me a brief hello, she grabbed some boxes of food out of the refrigerator and turned around to heat them up on the burner.
When she saw me she dropped everything. The pan, the pork, the eggs, the vegetables, all of it smeared across the tile.
“What did you do to yourself?” Min asked. I couldn’t tell if she was happy or horrified. “What did you do?”
“What you wanted me to do,” I said. I glided across the floor and kissed her. After a moment, her lips kissed me back. Soft at first, then harder and harder until it seemed like we were trying to swallow each other.
First I became a cloud-woman. Min had always liked watching them as a child, one of her only good memories from that period. Laying on the grass with her father, pointing out their shapes in the sky.
Illustration by Lauralee Benjamin
I lifted up my skirts, let her lap up my water. Her mouth was covered in dew when I kissed her. When she slipped her fingers inside of me, she muttered, Fuck. You’ve never been this fucking warm and wet before. I went down on her and my tongue was so soft, like dragon’s beard candy, she actually cried from how good it felt. I absorbed her smell, her sticky residue like a sponge inside of me. It felt good to hold this much.
Next I became a piano-woman. Min used to love to play the piano when she still had time, making up beautiful songs that no one had heard except for me, and even then only a few selected ones. Not even half of the melodies she composed. Her fingers ran over my keys, which had taken my ribs’ place, as she fingered me from behind. Each time her fingers pushed inside of me it was like she was playing again. Music pouring out of me, her music. Again, she wept. I cradled her in my arms afterward, petting her head, kissing her face. The first time she ever allowed me to do something like that.
I was a flower-woman. She loved how I smelled, like hibiscus, like lavender, like roses. Some of the names I didn’t know, flowers I had never seen, so I had her describe them to me. She squeezed my buds until they blossomed, burst, my pollen everywhere, all over her face, the bed, our bodies. We went through a flower encyclopedia afterward, and she pointed out her favorites — peonies, chrysanthemums, orchids — and told me why she loved them. Their curving stems, their large, pink faces.
I was a sea-woman. I was a book-woman. I was a honey and a fruit-woman, too. I loved slipping under her tongue like a secret, and I loved the way her body slid down the corners of whatever body I had. Whatever she wanted, I became. I was learning so much about her I had never known before. It didn’t matter if I disappeared.
Eventually, of course, she wanted me to change back. She said she missed my face. She said she missed spending time with the real me. Going out to bars, passing time with our small jokes, the way I used to talk to the food as I cooked it in order to make sure it was delicious.
I had to explain to her, then, of course there were rules to this. And the rule was that each time I changed, I would have to have someone remind me of myself in order to morph back into that form after everything had ended: Your hair is dark black. You are very tall. You don’t like mung bean. You are scared of heights. You were from a city that you never went back to after age 18. Things like that.
She couldn’t believe it. Her body kept twisting as she screamed with despair, rocking back and forth as she held herself like a temperamental child.
Why didn’t you tell me? Min asked. Why didn’t you say anything beforehand?
I was, of course, another woman now. I had taken the shape of her dead ex-girlfriend — plump lips, sharp bob, beautiful smile. Her final request. Mei Xiang, dead at 20 after a car accident. Her first love. It had made me so happy. Finally, she would want me.
I wrapped a hand around her shoulder as she wept, called her the nickname she had told me Mei Xiang always had — “little duck” because of the way she walked. I was beautiful. I was perfect. I was what she wanted, and she would realize soon that my original core was just a disgusting thing that we had disposed of, together.
“It’s okay, little duck,” I said, kissing her eyelids as she began dozing off to sleep, tired out from all the tears. Soon it would be time for another work day, and she would return to me every night as she had for the last month. Everything was so beautiful. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
Straight, No Chaser
Welcome to Autostraddle’s Latinx Heritage Month essay series exploring the theme of death and rebirth.
The day I return to the Texas Panhandle, where the Caprock Escarpment dissolves into the High Plains, I, like millions of others, had lost my job and a virus had infected enough people globally that entire countries and cities shut down. I quarantine alone in my aunt’s vacant house in Lubbock. I index my desire just to keep track of the infinite present.
Out on the Llano Estacado, sunsets shred flat light of a dusty city. While I run shores of Buffalo Lake, vultures hover nearby. Feast. Wait. Stare. Repeat. After I leave, my aunt calls and recounts my uncle’s chemo routine over the phone. Eat. Wait. Radiation. Repeat. His body is so tired. He just wants to come home, she says. They’ve been in Houston for the past seven or eight months. I don’t offer prayers. Just suck my teeth and whistle low enough for God’s ears.
Doctors in Houston have decided nothing more can be done for my uncle, so I move in with my parents, back to the rural town split by US Highway 385, to the house I grew up in, on a road a mile away from the cemetery where my abuelita is buried. My aunt and uncle return to Lubbock. They have been married almost as long as I have been away from the Panhandle — nearly 22 years. I see him one last time, in good spirits. We hug and he says, keep pushing forward. I assure him that I will.
I learned years ago prairies do not hear prayers. Wind sweeps them up or heat incinerates them. Perhaps even the methane that inflames my nostrils every evening, fog from feed lots swept west by gusts, adding another horizon between sun and cotton fields, poisons the verses lest they go anywhere else.
Before the contagion completely robs our spring, I plant Mexican marigolds. Also known as cempasúchil, commonly found on Día de los Muertos altars, I scaffold a bed from cedar planks and manure, unearth a shallow grave and wait for thunderstorms to bless the land. Relief never comes. Instead, my imagination creates space for a mystic nihilism, and I tend my garden as if it is church.
My father warns me that when I go outside beyond the garden, I should pray. He rarely expresses theology so I ask if something is wrong. People are dying without the chance to say good-bye, he says.
I read an article about the manufacturing of 100,000 body bags. The death toll in the United States is over 200,000. I wonder where they will bury all the bodies. I think of the words dolor and ya’aburnee and how deficient the English language is when it comes to suffering. Grief can’t cover all the holes we now must dig.
In the U.S., mass graves have been uncovered as developers unearth land for future projects. Buildings, parking lots, and man-made lakes have also been built over burial grounds. According to the Washington Post, the largest mass graveyard in the U.S. — Hart Island — has served as cemetery for many epidemics, including yellow fever, tuberculosis, the great flu of 1918, and now, unclaimed or unidentified COVID-19 bodies. Historically, the U.S. does not know how to bury the dead, much less mourn them. People claim we are experiencing the pandemic collectively — but economically, politically, and geographically, we are not. Look where we get buried. Look at who gets buried.
Some days when I remember, I water the marigolds, the peppermint, and the yerba buena outside in the garden. I’ve been reading Robin D.G. Kelley’s interview about the deconstruction of public culture. Thelonious Monk’s Straight, No Chaser album drifts in the background. Monk attended free concerts in Central Park as a child. On summer nights, Goldman’s sixty-piece orchestra played Wagner, Liszt, Tchaikovsky. There is no lockdown in Monk’s melody.
According to the news, Central Park doesn’t sing anymore; white tents serve as stages. Rasps synthesize under leaves of American Elm. I’ve heard birds there now beat along to the ambulance sirens.
By the time you read these words, you might believe me to be defeated. I am not. I just find it easy to be a recluse. Being in public spaces has always given me anxiety. I think about Sayak Valencia’s opening paragraph to Gore Capitalism: “The word Bienvenidos laughing in my face. The word Bienvenidos meaning every entrance is an exit.” Though Valencia described Tijuana, it might as well describe me and the life we now live, in a country that privatizes violence while publicizing democracy. We are given the option every four years to elect executioners.
Meanwhile, in distant skies, birds with metal wings hum under the rocket’s red glare, bombs bursting in air, as if to prove our flag is still there, that banner yet still waving, despite all the ruin.
Someone asked me where I want my body to rest in its final form. I say, carry my ashes to where the ocean is as an archive. The land and water will accept a memory, even when we forget. From space you can find addresses of the dead: Beirut. Hart Island. New Orleans. Juarez. Lake Lanier. Qom. Sugarland. Ferguson.
I promise my father that I will pray.