consummation

This piece was debuted last night at the National Queer Arts Festival show, Girl Talk, in San Francisco. Thank you so much to Gina and Julia for putting the show together, to everyone who came together for an incredible set of performances, and to everyone who came out to support us. It was a pleasure and an honor.

The day they took the silver spoon out of my mouth and replaced it with a gun barrel, I learned a lot about hunger. And hunger taught me far too well.
I came out at nineteen and lost my family when I began transition, lost my way home, my plans, my everything. No small-town hometown, any more, no talking Family Business shop with Mom in the kitchen. In an instant an entire childhood with full cupboards changed, and I was a nineteen-year-old girl whose parents cut off her food supply, who couldn’t even get a job washing dishes, and at the same time as they started refusing to tell me they loved me without qualifiers and started with “you can never have a family,” I learned that the garbage is a pretty decent place to get a bite to eat.

Sometimes we are ghosts in orbit, too afraid of burning up on re-entry to ever go home, unwilling to abandon the sight of it for the cold vastness to which we turn our nervous backs. Circling around each other, stately, flash-frozen at the moment of grief, we wait for gravity to make the choices for us; we pretend we don’t know what else to do.
Bitterness is a waltz.
It’s easy to end up lost in the upper reaches of the air when the ground goes out from under you, you know? When the road you planned crumbles away and, brave Fool, you just walk off into the airy emptiness instead.
Sometimes that bridge you bought is under your feet after all. Sometimes you just join the wind-skating dusty dead, out at the edge of the atmosphere.
We’re all up here, the ghosts and strays, needlethroated, thirsty, waiting until we have mouths enough again for a meal. It’s easy to get lost in that moment of loss.

Family was where the food came from. It was where the love came from. And I lost both, and had to learn, in only the way someone who hasn’t already had to grow up without these things must, where to get nourishment on the fly. The poor little rich girl got an abrupt education in what she thought she was entitled to before, and what could be substituted when all that plenty went away.
In all the things I didn’t used to think were food, or love, that I could take because I suddenly discovered I needed them.

It is no mistake that I learned to eat the scraps from other people’s plates and make ugly compromises for handouts in the same season I entered a relationship where I lost count of the times I was raped. I learned what I was good enough for. I learned to settle for what I could get. What I could digest. What I could endure, in order to have someone touch me and say they wanted me, in order to get a full belly. Food poisoning and abusers both reach a fist into your guts and pull out what they want, after all, but you don’t see either one coming when you’re so hungry you can’t think.
The things we learn to survive are just that: survival. They keep us surviving, for better and for worse.

The thing is, if you go long enough scrounging, snapping and snarling at the edge of the lamplight, it becomes part of everything you do. You learn to hoard every little bit you can get right now, even if you don’t want it, because you don’t know where your next meal will come from. Better to gorge yourself on way too much discarded bread, half of a stranger’s sandwich, or enough abandoned bacon to make you sick, and store it up in case there’s nothing but a carrot, an egg, and hot water tomorrow. It doesn’t matter whether or not you like it, or whether or not it’s any good; it’s something, and the just-in-case justifies everything. Discriminating by quality or desire is a luxury, and when the emotional Dumpstering starts—when you start believing that solidarity’s scraps are enough to make it on, and give up on thriving—you start to packrat every touch you get, even the violent ones, you beg even the friends who degrade you to stay.

I have a steady paycheck now, enough to put food on the table without worry, with no kids to feed and tastes made simple by the school of make-do. I have a ring on my finger from the person I love most in all the world, and we have made a warm safe home where I sleep every night.
But I still eat every scrap in front of me and wipe the dish, even if I’m feeling sick, because part of me can’t look away from the shaky precipice of my life as a queer trans woman of color who’s making it. I’m the monster of the story, lurking at the margin, and it can all be taken away in a heartbeat: that’s what I learned. That it might be safer to be someone’s dog, and at least get the scrapings from the table, but I’d better beg. The ground is unsteady under my feet, and the job, the pantry, the door that locks, I can get pulled off it just as fast as I can be locked up for soliciting for walking down the street for groceries. My mismatched ID is only a sign of how quickly anyone can figure out that I’m a nonperson, a mismatched thing on the edges, the kind of thing that takes scraps or blood to survive. And no matter how steady things get, no matter what I build, I learned that lesson well and it’s just as hard to shake as any lesson about how you can’t eat dignity, about conditional love. Do you see? I’m still gorging on every abandoned plate I pass, just in case the next paycheck doesn’t come. I’m still begging for leftovers of closeness I can stitch into my monster heart. And somewhere, way past that fresh gorgeous produce and piping-hot pie in my kitchen, I still retain the terror that, like Lamia, all that I am will be seen through, and the real people will tear unacceptable me from the feast and my love, that even the woman who knows me all the way to the bottom will somehow someday discover the discarded skin of her selkie bride, and I will lose everything on my way back to the sea.
When I went off the map and up into the ionosphere, I stopped trusting anything good was real, was any more lasting than my breath, and a litany of loss taught me too well to heal right. When I went from scholar to scavenger, the precariousness of my position was a reasonable lesson to learn, but I’m not there any more, not still cobbling together a life from the bits I could sneak off everyone else’s plates.
My mistress with a monster is in love, and I am still learning to trust that she knows what she’s getting into with a fierce conviction and devotion I never thought possible, still learning that leaning on her, the first real family I ever had, is less shaky than I first supposed. When I didn’t know I could be taken care of, she insisted on reaching for my needs. When I was shivering sick she spoon-fed me medicine. At half my size she stood up for me against the whole world without hesitation, and loving her is the truest thing I could possibly know. We have done the work to be family—solid ground—for each other. So why is part of me still waiting for the other reality to drop? Why am I so unable to let go of the hunger, so ready to allow a starving status quo to dictate my life when I am filled daily with love and strength and hope? Where is the trust in a world that can change? In the possibility of feasts, so long as I let them spread out before me, and in a future that is more than a threat? What day will be the day I stop waiting to lose this miracle?
I am planning a wedding, planning motherhood, even as I hold tight to someone who finally told me that I don’t have to accept the leftovers, that I can ask for a brimful cup and watch it sometimes arrive, that I can be not just sated, but satisfied if I let go of believing I don’t deserve it. And at the end of the day, I still fight to remember that it’s not that she’s real and I’m in tenuous human guise, but that she’s cis and I’m trans and that love can be realer than any of those divides, that we can be back-to-back against a whole world full of loss and deprivation and feed each other every day and in the home we are for each other, there is nobody who can stop us now. I’ve come in from the cold and there’s soup waiting.
It is no mistake that when I learned I couldn’t have love, I learned that I couldn’t have a warm meal, either. It is no mistake that in our home, I cook as often as possible.

I’ve been up here in the cold upper air for a long time, with the ghosts and the strays. Needlethroated, thirsty, waiting until I had a mouth enough for a meal again. It’s easy to get lost in that moment of loss. But sometimes one of us can look down and see a soft place, a warm kitchen. And then, all alight in that hopeful embrace, we are shooting stars, rushing home, consumed.

fair

So I want you to imagine something. It's going to be pretty awful, and it's probably going to be a trigger for some people. If that's a risk you don't feel up for, take care of yourself and stop now.


The first thing you need to understand is that masculinity, maleness, is inculcated and enforced with violence. It's either actual violence, or the threat of violence, or the implied threat of violence. Constantly. It's how men and boys are taught to train each other into maleness. This is true even at a very, very young age; go to a kindergarten playground, and you will see little boys shaping each others' masculinity, according to the rules they're taught by older boys and by grown men, with violence. It starts very early.

Take a little girl and throw her into that group of boys. Leave her with them and only the instruction, "Do whatever you want with her. Shape her into whatever you want to. Your scalpel is violence." Just sit with that for a minute. The image of handing a little girl who doesn't understand the world yet to a group of boys who are given carte blanche to use violence to shape her into whatever they think is appropriate.

It's a horrifying image. It's hideous and disturbing and wrong and it makes my flesh crawl thinking about it. And that's the way we, as a society, ought to react; if something like this scenario went public, there would be newspaper headlines.

It happens every day. Every hour. But while decent people automatically find this scenario a yawning, shocking evil when the little girl we envision is cissexual, this is considered the normal and proper way to treat a little girl who's trans. I knew I was a girl that early; I was kicked out of preschool for refusing to admit that I was a boy. And then they handed that little girl to the boys for the next fifteen years and said, "Do what you want with her. We will look the other way or cheer you on as you turn her into whatever you want to. Your scalpel is violence. It's only proper if she screams."

This is a horrifying story. This is the kind of story that, when you really look at it, represents the kind of abuse that the average person would respond to with, "Lock that sick bastard away and throw away the key." If it's a cissexual little girl. If she's trans, it's things running as they ought to be. There is no censure. There is applause.

This is one of the revealed, naked faces of oppression: if it were done to the privileged person, it would be considered abuse. If it's done to the marginalized person, it's the status quo. But it's not only that. It's not only about oppression; it's about how and why we internalize oppression.

This is a horrifying story. It's the kind of story that threatens to break your mind if it's your story. And you have to protect yourself somehow. You have to hold yourself together. You have to make it make sense. Because a world where that can be done to a little child who never did anything to anyone, who's not even old enough to understand why she's being hurt this way even by her parents until nowhere is ever safe, that's not an okay world. That's not a world I think a lot of us, including me, are strong enough to hold as true. So we defend ourselves by believing what it tells us.

I let the world tell me lies. I let myself believe that I was so bad and wrong and monstrous that I deserved what I got, that I even let someone rape me just because I was so desperately craving to be touched at all, because even abuse was more closeness than I felt I deserved. I let myself absorb the idea that I was completely delusional, and that all my knowledge about myself was false twitchings of a sick mind, because the alternative to that painful lie, the lie that I was a monster living in a fantasy world who was inherently freakish and unlovable? The alternative was worse. The alternative was that I didn't deserve it, I wasn't disgusting and unworthy of love, that I was a child put in an abusive situation and forced to stay there for no good reason. I wasn't strong enough to let that be true, as a child. I wasn't strong enough to let that be true as a teenager who couldn't sleep, who worked out on a punching bag every day after school until her hands bled, who spent every day thinking of newer, cleaner exits from living. I wasn't strong enough to let that be true as a college student who was fetishized and mocked and treated as a contaminated, essentially pornographic animate sex toy unworthy of any kind of closeness that didn't have the tinge of "dirty" and "perverted" seeping into it, who couldn't hug people or say "I love you" without fear that it would be considered creepy.

I wasn't strong enough to accept the truth of how strong I was. Acknowledging and owning my vast strength meant acknowledging that I was holding up something very heavy all the time, that I had been through hardship and not just normal life, the natural order of things. What I wasn't strong enough to accept was that I was a good kid, a strong kid, a brave kid, because that meant admitting that I was going through something that required virtue, strength, and courage, something that would make an inspiring TV movie about human resilience if it were happening to a person considered real by her society. Accepting that I was okay, that I was even beautiful, meant admitting that what I went through at school and at home, rather than being normal and good, was a horrorshow.

So I bought the lie instead. I let them convince me for a large swath of my adolescence that I was, really, a boy. The idea disgusted and horrified me, but not as much as the truth, that I was right, that I was trustworthy to myself, that it wasn't my fault. It was better to live in a world where I was a boy--or even a boy who wanted to be a woman someday--and had lived a normal life, than a world where I was a girl who was systematically stripped of her sense of self, subjective reality, and personhood, subjected to near-constant violence or its threat, and treated as a contaminated, dirty thing. The lie--even the lie of "boy who wants to be a girl" or "woman in a man's body," as though my body was someone else's--as skin-crawlingly painful as it was, was nowhere near as painful as the truth of being a girl trying to find her way to womanhood and living through this on the way.

This is how we internalize the lies. This is how we accept the yoke of oppression. By living in a world where the truth that we are beautiful and worthy and lovable is even more painful to accept than the lie that we are none of these things, because all sense of fairness or order vanishes when you look the truth in the eye. If we are beautiful, we are in a world that does not care about our beauty, and even grinds it in the mud. If we are strong, we are living in a world so heavy that it saps our strength until we are tired all the time. If we are ourselves, we are living in a world that systematically strips away our selfhood like roast chicken scraped from the bone.

Until we are strong enough to look this in the eye and fight it, to stand up and fight and make the part of the world we stand on more okay no matter how hard it is or what it takes--until we are so very strong that we remember we are strong, and beautiful, and true, worthy of no end of love, no matter what--it's just too much to bear. So we accept false stories instead, about how we're dirty and ugly and weak and unlovable. We have to. I had to.

I am writing this down because I know that in an hour, or a day, or a week, I will be listening to the lies again for a while. How else do you live? How do you go on in the world without accepting that the injustice is just, or not your problem, just a little, just for now? How can you walk in a world where the truth is true instead of breaking down and crying? So we internalize the lies for a while in order to let things make enough sense to get through the day. Gravity pulls comfortingly down. The alternative, the raw, vulnerable, pulsing truth can only be taken in doses, even if they're bigger doses every day. It's so hard to just let it be real. How can you let it be real? How can you really pull off the lid and look down into that darkness and let the truth--that you live in a world where you're not considered fully real, fully human, and that if you were considered real, what was done to you would be considered unacceptable, retch-inducing, but you're not and it isn't?

You have to tell yourself the stories. Just for now. Just until you're strong enough to bear the weight of the truth and see with clear eyes, if you ever get that strong. Just until you are so full of overwhelming bravery and power that you can finally insist that you are lovable and loved, that you deserve it in every cell of you, that beauty shines through you as a conflagration of glory. When you stand there, blazing in your awful wonder, you can move the whole world. You just have to get through the pain of knowing that you are true, that you know, that you are everything you will ever need to be.

It hurts to say this and it hurts to hear: you are lovable. So am I. The chasm between that truth and the world we allow ourselves to live in every day is deep and dark, but it is still the truth and always will be.

You are everything you ever hoped you would be, and I love you. When you are strong enough, please, shine.

the quick and the dead

EDITED TO ADD--IMPORTANT: It has come further to my attention that HRC is not in fact doing any of the planning for Portland's Trans Day of Remembrance, which is, of course, a glaring error. I am retaining the current text to preserve my inaccuracy rather than pretend it never happened.
Having checked with one of this year's organizers--someone who did work I admired a great deal for last year's event--I had it confirmed to me that while HRC lobbied hard to have involvement and control over Portland's Trans Day of Remembrance and in fact announced to their listserv and on their website that they were so involved, the organizers from Portland State University took a stand and chose to limit HRC's involvement to a display table.
I find this news both heartening and reassuring. At the same time, I also think it remains important and disturbing that HRC tried to run the Day of Remembrance, and is doing so in many other cities and towns across the country. Additionally, I think it remains important that HRC continues to claim their heavy involvement in Portland's commemoration even though they were not invited to do so--they are supposedly presenting the commemoration "in conjunction" with the people who have actually put it together.
This information indicates that while my point regarding Portland specifically can be set in part aside, to my great comfort, it still stands in all the places where organizers were not able to stand up to HRC as Portland's did. I commend PSU's organizers and chosen speakers, and again apologize for repeating HRC's inaccurate publicity in this piece.


It has come to my attention that the Human Rights Campaign has got its hands on Portland's Trans Day of Remembrance.
Yes, that Human Rights Campaign.

It's being touted, along with many events across the U.S. this year, as a change of emphasis from "Trans Day of Remembrance" to "Trans Awareness Day," something much more upbeat, much more focused on feel-good celebration of the community, something much more acceptable to upper-class, culturally-normative assimilationists you can put in the newspaper without making anyone feel threatened.

Last year's Day of Remembrance in Portland featured a young, poor, politically-radical trans woman of color (hi!) as an invited speaker and was organized, grassroots, by a multiracial, cross-class, cross-generational group of locals, largely students. This year it's HRC, a Democratic Party flack, a local therapist, and the executive director of an advocacy organization, two of the three white, all binary-identified, middle-class, and middle-aged--all acceptably-photogenic Spokespeople For The Community. This is not to disparage those speakers, some of whom I've worked alongside personally--I just find the choices telling. They may all be good people who do good work, but the diversity seems to have gone away in who we're presenting as our community's face, at the same time that we're supposed to be de-emphasizing commemoration of the dead and trying to re-focus on the sunshiny bits. I cannot imagine that has nothing to do with our inviting a national GLb organization in, one whose goals have largely been assimilationist, white, middle-class, and yes, anti-trans--to "present" us.

The Day of Remembrance is not about being photogenic. It is not about fundraising or lobbying or recruitment. It does not need the HRC.

The Day of Remembrance is ours, and it is sacred. It is the one day we set aside to honor those in our community, overwhelmingly poor trans women of color, who were killed due to bigotry and hatred. It is a single day in the year where we make certain that the names of the murdered are heard and held up, so we can all remember that these people mattered, were real, were loved, and are missed. It's a day to gather the community together and call attention to the violence directed against us and the caring we have for each other. It came from us. It was built by us. It was never supposed to be flashy or glitzy. It is a solemn mourning for the dead, a place to hold hands, and a promise to those who violence took away from us that we who are still living will hold together, take care of each other, and push forward together into a world where that violence is only a painful memory.

We can do better than this, for our sacred dead. We can do better for ourselves.
We need better than this.

Our community is constantly looking down a gun-barrel, and organizations that don't honor or support us continually ask for more of our money, our time, our hope, and now, even our events so they can push their own agenda--one that often leaves us behind. It doesn't just leave us behind deliberately, as in the ENDA fiasco. It also leaves us behind by prioritizing goals that many of us simply don't have on the radar because we're too busy surviving. An inclusive ENDA would have helped guarantee jobs and homes for the most marginalized in the queer community, a bare chance to just have a table to put food on, let alone the food. Instead, we're focusing all of the queer community's resources on what, marriage equality? That's a worthy goal. It's just not on the docket for many of us--working-class queers, queer people of color, trans people--who're often more worried about keeping our families alive than having full legal equality for those families. That equality would be wonderful, as would the public affirmation of us as full citizens. But those of us who aren't even considered citizens--those of us who aren't even considered human, or important enough for an organization that purports to speak for us to advocate for--those of us who are denied votes, livelihoods, and more--we have a much more basic agenda. Make it till tomorrow. Make it till next week. We're dying out here, this year at a rate of more-than-twice monthly, and we are not such a large community we can afford that. This month alone, as many as six trans people--again, almost exclusively poor trans women of color--were reported murdered, and the month isn't even over.

Where are our priorities? Where are the priorities of our so-called allies? You were all out on the street, in the hundreds of thousands, protesting Proposition 8. Where will you be on Thursday night?

HRC just recently put out a new line of designer wear. (Hey, look, it's Christian Siriano, who made his fame spitting on trans people and encouraging the public to use bigoted slurs!) As a young, queer trans woman of color with a white-collar education and a blue-collar job, I can't afford new shoes, and I'm one of the more privileged in my community. Do you get it yet? Do you get why this is such an obscenity?

I am all for marriage equality, believe me. I proudly wear the ring that displays my engagement to my partner, another queer woman, and I look forward to our wedding, whether or not it's legalized. I want those legal protections for my family, and I want the security of knowing that my society places equal responsibility, honor, obligation, and sacred meaning on my marriage as anyone else's. As the law currently stands--and until we achieve marriage equality in the United States--as a trans person with mismatched government ID, I can't legally marry anyone.
But I have to live long enough to get married, and I have to know that my partner won't come to harm for loving me, and I would like to no longer have to carry the knowledge that as marriage is for people, until my society considers me fully human, it will never consider me "marriage material."

Listen, I know marriage is important, but it is not the only issue, here, okay? Because, per the studies even HRC cites, as a trans woman I have a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered. 1 in 12. To put that in perspective, as a member of the general population I have an approximately 1 in 100 chance of dying in a car crash. I am almost ten times likelier to die of murder than a car crash! How many people do you know who've been in traffic accidents? How many of you know someone who's lost someone to a car wreck? Because they're extraordinarily common. And they're accidents. Murder is not. A population ten times likelier to be victim to violent crime as the general population, with a more than fifty percent sexual assault rate and a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered, is not an accident. It is a pattern. It is an epidemic. It is an all-out war. And marriage won't protect us from that. Neither will cocktail-party fundraisers.

You know what else won't protect us from that? Mainstream queer organizations. Not "GLBTQ" newspapers that purport to serve a whole community but list themselves, when not being called out, as "Gay and Lesbian News"--and give the Trans Day of Remembrance an almost two-inch blurb, a whole page to a gay men's drag show, and half a page to a gardening column. Not the Human Rights Campaign with its consistent pattern of taking trans people's money, time, and hope only to cut the legs out from under us when they think it'll make them a buck, who're keen on replacing our in-community, vital Day of Remembrance with an upbeat "Trans Awareness Day" that's easier for cissexual and straight people to swallow without feeling guilty about that long, long list of names, easier to organize parties with keynote speakers around, easier to pass the collection plate during. We need more of that, after all; the greater community only has Pride Festivals and a couple of TV channels to work with, right? All those dead people are such a downer. We should focus on our accomplishments and what makes us feel good, not dwell so much on the overwhelming epidemic of violence directed at our community and what to do about it, not take a whole two hours of a whole day in the autumn to solemnly commemorate the passing of hundreds of people who often never even got a decent funeral, to honor those so disparaged and degraded as sacred, missed, and important--
Where's the champagne in that?

You know what else won't keep you and you and me off that crack-of-doom, heartbreaking list? Hiding the freaks, sweeping the genderqueers under the rug, putting only our most privileged out front, bowing and scraping, and constantly apologizing for existing in a way that might make someone uncomfortable. That won't save my life. That won't save the lives of my friends. Trusting cissexual organizations to represent us and choose who represent us because they have money--that won't save our lives. Considering ourselves less than the cissexual people around us--that won't save our lives.

This isn't a matter of "reasonable people can disagree" or "it's just politics."
This is life and death.
This is whether or not you and I find a world where my fiancée has a 1 in 12 chance of being a widow due to murder alone acceptable, and whether or not watering down the one chance to honor those our community has lost to violent crime, the one chance to call attention to the constant violence aimed at my trans family and especially young, poor trans women of color, is the way to change such a world.
This is a matter of "allies" who turn out in the hundreds of thousands to protest for civil marriage equality staying home and dead silent, a week later, when it comes to advocating for and honoring murdered trans people and the great loss to all of us now that those beautiful people are gone. You want us on the street for your "Day Without Gays" or cheering for a group screening of "Milk"? Show up. Just once. For us. We're not just getting made fun of out here, and it's not just our relationships being invalidated--it's our basic humanity and right to live another day. Hundreds of thousands were in the street for marriage equality last week. Last year, at the Day of Remembrance in Portland, I saw fewer than forty attendees.

I would love to get married. As a trans woman, especially a queer trans woman in a same-sex relationship, I have just as much hurt and yearning about marriage equality as anyone. I plan on living that long, and I plan on living long enough to grow old with my partner and, heaven willing, children. Whether or not that happens may just be up to you.

My right to stay alive is more of a priority than my right to get legally married. And right now, as this society and its culture and its legal system stand, I'm one of many people who don't have either right. You want to fight for my right to marry? Wonderful. Thank you. But those hours protesting, those donations, all that outrage and community support and work--I'd prefer they went, for a start, to keeping me alive out here. And I think the "GLBTQ" community in the United States, such as it is, needs to take a long, hard look at why they have money and time to fight Measure 8, but nothing to give but silence, co-opting, and more requests for us to pipe down and lighten up when it comes to the more than monthly murder of trans people. Show us our lives and deaths matter to you. Show us you acknowledge that the violence against us is worth paying attention to, that our dead were real people who deserved far better, and that our living shouldn't have to live in fear.

See you in the street.

wake the dead

We're coming up on the Day of Remembrance, but I'm old-fashioned: I prefer to start honoring the bygone dead here, at the sundown of the year.

It's a time of straddling and blurring lines, of the constant presence of mortality. Fertility crosses into decay, and we gather a harvest, of sunlight, of sustenance, of memory. Identity blurs and stretches and we take our false faces on and off, swirled all around by falling leaves made remarkable as they flash sunset colors in their dying moments. We take stock of a summer and autumn gasping their last and prepare for the season of cold and dark and deprivation, unpacking the quilts and sweaters in the top of the closet, drawing thick curtains, looking inward. We take a long, lonesome stairway down into the anterooms of the Land of the Dead, lighting lanterns, wary of whispering spirits long ignored. Some of us erect altars to those we've lost, offering them some of the food and memories we've gathered, celebrating them in steady flames and bright colors against the increasing outdoor gray.

There's a magic to it, here as the curtains go down on the twilit remains of the day. Looking over what's ripe and what's rotten, we take in what will keep us warm and full as best we can. We look back because looking back is a necessary step in going forward. Without that harvest, we will never leave the time of masks, the place of skulls. We will never be able to move through the hallways of the living until we look at what is dying, what is dead. Without this pause at the moment of gathering darkness, when we gather our own close to us, we remain forever in that place of whispers and illusions.
There is plenty in this hour of the dead to appreciate, plenty to live for. We can put on faces that are often truer than the ones we had before, even in their transparency, be other than what we were, explode into behavior we would never feel free to enact in the sunlight. We can embrace mystery, letting shadows and bright decoration go dancing arm-in-arm. Nonetheless, it's simply not human to live forever in the liminal. It's not a place: it's the blurred line between here and there, now and then, alive and dead.

There's only one sort of creature who can live long in that borderland. Monsters are alive and well here, half-obscured, given their only chance to roam the streets unmolested. This hour of the dead is the only time we welcome monsters into our homes and neighborhoods. For once, they're celebrated, and their uncanny presence causes forbidden thrills.
It's the end of the evening, the moment of the dead, when the lines between worlds grow blurry. And monsters run free.
In order to move on into the night, we have to look them in the eye. We have to hold our monsters close. We have to acknowledge our dead. We have to look back.

There's an old story you've probably heard, but let's look back at it. Once upon a time, a God made a new being, split it into halves, and called them Lilith and Adam. That God insisted that they follow an order: that, though equals made of the same substance, one submit beneath the other. And she refused. The dialogue is simple:
"But I made you. Do what I say."
"No."
And she refused to participate in a system that marked her as less, and moved away to another place, there to couple in unthinkable ways with forbidden partners, there to set up her own way of being, there to become a mother of monsters. But there was a price, because that God had already replaced her with a newer, less proud woman, there to be a mother, too. And all Lilith's children would be taking a world they were not promised from Eve's children, you see, by simply living. The monsters would be taking human land and human food and human work away. They would suck the very blood from human infants. Teeming and multitudinous, they could not be trusted simply to thrive harmlessly, and so they were condemned. The children of the outside, of the otherworld, of pride and wrong attractions and unacceptable sex, the children part this and part that, were condemned to death. No matter how many came to this world each day, hundreds of Lilith's monster children were condemned to die daily so that the children of Eve, the planned children, the race that behaved and stayed in the lines, could thrive instead. And their mother, the defiant first woman , was doomed to an infinite and never-ending bereavement, screeching cold vengeance in the wilderness.

Generations have heard this story told as a warning, that the Mother of Monsters and her children were out there to take anyone who stepped outside the lines, outside the city, outside the rules. This is their time, the place of outsiders and border-riders, the hour of the dead. The monsters have their dead, too, after all. They loom close at our shoulders in this one moment of the year we invite them in. Some of us, given that warning as we stand on the brink of the dark, look out on our history and our dead, and we recognize that when we are systematically stamped out for competing with real people, when we are pushed out and starved and hunted for living unavoidably outside those lines, when our place at the blurring between here and there, us and them, merits a death sentence over and over...maybe we didn't have the mother we thought we did. Maybe we were simply listening to an unreliable authority who told us we belonged underneath, and needlessly complied. Maybe when the Mother of Monsters comes to breathe down our necks, the right response is take me.

It's time to look back. It's time to embrace the monster as a lineage of the defiant oppressed made powerful, suffering heavy losses but never, ever backing down.
It's time to remember our dead. And it's long past time to refuse their place, and our place, underneath. The authority that condemns us to die for our defiance of rules we never made is not an authority worth listening to, and we do not honor those who fell before us by rolling over below our so-called betters and taking it.
Once a year, the dead rise from below and speak. We ought to learn from their example.

make a call (phone booths, 0)

A phone booth is a place of change, and a place to use change to send a message, to make a call. The phone booth is the place behind the magician's waving hand, where Clark Kent can become Superman, can peel off the quavering mundane and transform into something extraordinary and inhuman. It is the modern dovecote, a home for all the heartbeats to which we will attach slips of paper saying, Here I am. Hear this. Here: this. Hear: I am.
The phone booth is fundamentally a non-location, an unplace. It's a negative space we briefly occupy in order to be, on a basic level, somewhere else: in the room we wish to call, in the place with which we need to communicate, with a loved one, with a business associate, with someone who can help. It's a space to overcome Here and There being separate by being There in voice while Here in body. You don't call a phone booth; it's not a place. You only call from a booth, in order to bilocate, in order to traverse distance and be somewhere else for the time a quarter or two will buy you.
Phone booths are always, always in-between, in that moment of transformation, transubstantiation, telephony, teleportation, all these functions across, through, beyond. It's not a place, it's a motion, a lacuna, full of longing for something and somewhere else.
The phone booth is, was, and always will be a monster's place, adrift in that conjunctive space, a liminal twilit between where distance and difference collapse for the moments that change will purchase and connect unconnected things. The phone booth always reaches out toward the real and concrete, the legitimate world, but it remains its own, mythicized, while we spin and spin in them until our brightly-dyed insignia and alien heritage flash into view, just for a moment, just for a moment.
Phone booths are tenuous, transitory, reaching. Phone booths are a monster's space. They are a place in which we can isolate the moment of change, make it an eternity, and can put that change into the hole of our location and reach out to speak.

Make a call. Where aren't you? To where and what do you reach out? And most importantly of all: if they pick up over there, what are you saying?


(Previous Phone Booths installments here, here, and here.)

the sky is falling

It is time for us to acknowledge that our love is an act of war.

It seems distasteful to say. It feels wrong. Our love, our lives, our nurtured gardens and families, we say, these are not weapons. These are not acts of violence. To us, they are not.
Nonetheless, there are those who insist breathlessly, endlessly, that they are. That our families are destroying their way of life. That our existing in public shocks and harms them. That attending school, sitting in a restaurant, having to hear at all that we exist is an affront that threatens to annihilate them. And they gather their stormclouds over and over, they teach their children, they shout from the pedestals and rooftops and radio waves that we are, by virtue of drawing breath, destroying them. That we are at war, and that our heartbeats are a sword at their throats.
I think it is time to admit that they are right. Whoever started this, however much those of us who abhor war and all it means cannot go near the word, there it is: there are people, many, many people, who believe that by existing alone we wage war on them. And in response, they gather arms and preach daily that our threat must be removed by any means necessary. By their believing it, it is made so; bloodless though it may be for them, we are at war. And each of our acts of war, each exposed inch of brown skin, each held hand, each public footstep of an unacceptable body and each child raised in a home they abominate, each of our acts is met with a salvo of invective and violence, and our people die and die and die.

There is a war on, and the stakes are infinite, because the only outcome acceptable to the mustering many who believe that your breath or mine is an act of war is for us to be forever wiped clean from the face of the earth. We have to stop speaking where any of them can hear us. We have to stop being seen. We have to stop loving and conceiving and using precious resources stolen from their mouths. And in this world, as perhaps there has always been, there is the destructive power to achieve this. In this struggle, we have only two options: to prevail, or to find none of us in a position to care any more. Those who would annihilate will eventually find that they cannot exist much longer than we do, but it doesn't matter. They won't be in a position to care any more either.

There is a war on. All we can do is succeed, or find ourselves no longer in a position to care. Daring to continue living, let alone daring to speak, will be considered an act of war until there are no more battles to fight, and no one to fight them.

So let's admit it. Our lives? Our lives are an act of war. They are open defiance. They are invasion. They are insistent violation of the borders of a world that desperately pretends we do not exist. They are rude gestures and thrown rocks at the rumbling war machines of systems who choose to write us out of history, beginning only a moment ago and stretching back to the beginning of all things. By standing here and living, we defy the notion that we have no right to, and we scream out that no world where we are torn apart into nothingness can continue. Every seed we plant, lover we kiss, drum we beat is indeed a grave and mortal threat to the entire world as they know it, because our reality forces it to crash against us over and over only to find us still here. Even when we die of it, we are dead, but we are still here, we still are, we still were.

We can call it linking arms. We can call it embraces. We can call it a garden plot or a home or a marriage. We cannot concede that it is war. We cannot look at the arrows fired by our adoration of our loved ones and the mortars launched by our still-real, still-abhorrent bodies. We look into the furtive, fervent trenches dug by those who call our lives war and shake our heads, wondering what they're on about.

Here's what they're on about: they live in a world where we are monsters. They live in a world that trembles daily, because we snake our faultlines through its foundations and each time we move more crumbles and falls over the yawning edge of the flattened sea. In their world, once near us, their children can be lost to them, and just seeing us represented fills them with the rage of people struck in the face and deprived of their birthrights.
That world needs to end, and we know it. That world will end, and they know it.

There's a war on. Either we succeed, and their world ends; or they succeed, and ours does. Does it matter that we want them to go on living in our world, that our world has room for them to build cities and parks and futures? Not really. The very act of not getting to define everything for the rest of us is the end, for them. The fact that none of them would actually die, that their children would be fine and their blood unshed, is irrelevant. We can abhor and condemn violence and torture, and this too is an act of war. We can love them depthlessly as people and wish them no harm, but we cannot avoid the implications. If we are considered equals, their world is over. Our lives are the explosives that end it.

So, okay. Let's sit that knowledge down on our kitchen tables and give it a good look. There are two possible worlds: one where we prevail, and get to live side-by-side, and one where we do not, and are annihilated. And side-by-side looks like annihilation to the folks who have to live next door. There goes the neighborhood. We might think it's a really nice neighborhood to raise our kids; doesn't stop the neighbors from thinking their lives are over because we continue to exist yards away.

I say let's call down the thunders, then. Let's stand and fight. Let's own that our love is a matter of artillery, and fire salvo after salvo. Let's hold hands and kiss and fuck and dance while all over, rock shears from the cliff-faces of their shuddering world and it frays at the seams. Let's defiantly exist, exist hard, right next to them, public, brazen, beautiful. Let's drill and march and right on their doorsteps let's have unacceptable bodies and loud music and food whose aromas they find foreign and offensive. Let's fucking sing.

We can call it jubilation. They can call it war. Either way, the results are the same. We succeed, and walk hand in hand into a new world where our very existence is not considered a violation, or we do not--and are no longer in a position to care.

comfort

"Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. Look, the tears of the oppressed--with no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun." --Ecclesiastes 4:1-3 (NRSV)

I woke up to bad news today. It didn't stop coming.

It was a bad story, and badly told. But the point is straightforward: another sister murdered today. Another name for the Day of Remembrance. Another young trans woman of color, stabbed to death. Another voice we're never going to hear again. Another world, another way, another life, stomped on and punctured and torn open ragged and wet and, in the end, missing.

And another set of jeering, contemptuous onlookers. Another bunch of cops whose first sympathy is with that poor, traumatized ex-convict who stabbed her to death and got her blood all over him, poor shaken guy, duped, tricked, threatened, violated even, though God no, it's no reason to murder someone, it's just, well, you can understand why he would. Another crew of reporters willing to sensationalize and abuse the story of another murder victim, to spin it and twist it until she brought it all on herself, until all the facts of her life and hopes and dreams and loves, her favorite foods, her warm breath, her days and nights and days again--until all of those are reduced down to nothing but a list of exploitable physical flaws, a flock of whispers and insults, a splashy, lurid headline. Until it's all just her shoes and her measurements and a name and idea she worked so hard to leave behind, as though the past years of her own making, besides the snide references to her breasts, can be undone--chipped from the record of history like the name of a hated pharaoh or a long-since-disappeared political rival, scrubbed clean from anyone's having to deal with the complexities of her situation.
Until the public can be satisfied that it's finished the murderer's job. He ripped her breath and blood out of her, after all, but her body remained, in an abandoned pile of meat and bone and contemptible breast implants. Her name remained. Her memory remained, even in neighbors who assumed she could only have so many callers because she must be a whore like all her kind, even in family far away, even in the simple things left behind in her Bronx apartment.

We couldn't have that. We couldn't allow that residue to stay on our daily concrete.
There's nothing new under the sun, okay? But we erase what we cannot stand to remember was here, as best we can. We turn the hose on those sticky bloodstains and try desperately to fence the stolen goods, patch up the places where it's obvious something is missing, make sense of the fact that a twenty-five-year-old woman was here just the other Saturday, laughing, a cheerful fixture of the neighborhood if anything's to be believed in those reports, and now she's not, she's a statistic, she's a corpse, and we can't even afford her the dignity of having been complicated. Because it's not enough that a man more than a decade her senior, with a criminal record, seems to think it was appropriate for him to commit brutal murder, or that for many onlookers, he's the hero of the story. We need to make it make sense. We need to make her make sense. We need a reason that a person might do such a thing to another person, and the truth is just so hard to look at--the truth, and our whole society's complicity in that truth--that we have to turn it inside-out and make it her fault, not his, not ours, just in order to preserve the fragile avoidance of the fact that this world can be terrifying, that it's the people who respond to not seeing what they want to see with knives who often have those knives ready, that those on the bottom fighting for a chance to just scrape out a safe, warm place in this world more often than not do not get that place. The breaking is there, the breach in what ought to be, and we cannot look at it, so we have to sweep at the edges of it, put its weight on those who aren't ourselves, and make them carry the burden of their own oppression so we don't have to know that they are like us, and that we are like them, in how quickly our own breath can be torn out.

We all might die alone. But some of us have to be ground and ground and ground down into the ground so the rest of us can feel a little better about our own chances at avoiding it. We have to make them more alone, even in death. We have to take away their names and their dignity. We have to take away even the chance that they might be mourned as real human beings who are gone and never coming back, who are missed by loved ones somewhere, who meant something. A murder is incomplete, and we cannot stand ending on an unresolved chord. We all have to join together and finish it, so the eyes of the murdered cannot accuse us in our sleep.

We do this to each other.

We did this to Sanesha Stewart, who is dead.

We did this to so many. We could do it to me, tomorrow. How many of you would know, in another obituary about a deceitful boy with breasts who had it coming, that these words were mine, and that I was gone? But the dead are not, indeed, more fortunate than the living, though perhaps they are more comfortable. Oppression still weighs on those of us with breath, but we have a chance to look it in the eye. We have the chance to put our hands against it and push. And maybe this is not enough. Maybe it doesn't make up for our hard days, and our hungry children, and our bruises from the business end of injustice after injustice. Maybe this is all vanity, and chasing after the wind.

The living don't have the luxury to care, because we're here, and most of us plan on going on living. And it wasn't enough for Sanesha Stewart, but it might be enough for me. Or you. Or someone you never knew had it coming until they ended so senselessly that some stranger decided to tell you they deserved it, just to finish that job. In the end, it's still better to light a candle than curse the darkness, even in the face of a darkness that viciously extinguishes candle after candle, light after light, because it has to be done. And we can do it together, we can stop this erasure, we can stop this sacrilege, we can stop losing more and more family, until maybe we can put down the nausea and see the dead waiting for us to pull it together and give them reason to rest.

It has been a long day, full of worry and sorrow and grief and fear. But I'm not alone, and I still have my name, and I still have breath to lend to this, and we can do this so long as we remember that we're not alone, any of us.

I will hold my partner a little more tightly, tonight.
Keep safe, everyone.

"Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone? And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken." --Ecc. 4:9-12

phone booths, v: broken voices on broken phones

(Previous installments of the Phone Booths series here, here, and here. "Phone Booths" part 4 is currently in a vault; I can, indeed, count.)


A while back I lost my voice.
I've been thinking about that, lately. In the long tail-end of my illness, I've found myself laryngitic, stopped up, hoarse. I find myself repeating old nightmares where something important is happening, and I open my mouth, and nothing comes out but a whisper, and it's never, ever loud enough. I find myself revisiting silent childhood hours in the backs of closets and homemade bird-blinds, back when, though nobody now believes it, I was quiet.

But those are moments and inflictions and afflictions and airy nothings, in their way, though they go deep. A while back, not a long while, I found myself losing my voice.

One of the hardest things about the kind of transition I am currently going through is that while the chemicals and processes, laws and re-namings with which I currently reshape and reclaim my body can rearrange a great deal, there are some effects of my history that cannot be edited. One of those is the effect of testosterone on the larynx. It adds flesh that does not atrophy or melt away with simply hormonal treatment or complex practice. That organ is lengthened and thickened and inclined to stay that way.

Sometime around seventh grade, always too quiet except when provoked to long, breathless encomia about my latest scientific obsession or favorite novel, painfully awkward, I became fascinated with music. I had always hidden from music, because I grew up in a profoundly musical family. My father and brothers each to some degree have perfect pitch. They are all talented in the extreme; my father, rusty from years of focus elsewhere, is now only an accomplished pianist and harpsichordist, but my brothers can each play upwards of seven instruments with proficiency and panache, and sing in a way that always leaves you wanting more. Music appreciation came to me from my first steps on, a necessary discipline and source of pleasure, but--surrounded by people who could appreciate a level of nuance and mastery I felt locked out of, like a colorblind child in a family of painters, I found myself embittered, and hid. My fingers were too clumsy to dance on the keyboard. My ear was too impatient to learn the rhythms and the keys. I preferred, instead, to play hooky from piano lessons and cajole the teacher to take me out back, to her stable, where she taught me the care of horses, the cleaning of an iron shoe, the facts of heredity, the pungent realities of mucking out a stable stall, the hard work of training and moving with a creature without a common language.
And one day, weedy, thirteen, freshly bruised from some intimidation, walking down the cement-brick hall, I heard it: harmony.

I began to give up my lunch periods to huddle unseen in the vestibule of the choral hall, ducked out of sight of the window in the door, utterly rapt. They rehearsed--a junior high school chorus, of all things!--and I was fascinated on a level that became religious. There was a piece of heaven there I had somehow missed in my entire childhood drenched in Bach and the Beatles and Bob Dylan and Beethoven. One day, inevitably, I was discovered, curled up outside the door; the rumor was that I was there to stare clandestinely at a pretty girl in the back row. Blushing, I allowed it: how much less embarrassing was the truth? The teacher simply smiled, confused, and invited me to sit inside the room while they practiced. Eventually I was moved into the back row myself, though it was some months before they discovered I was skipping meals to do so, attending an extra class a day just to be near the music, and shuffled nervously to make my devotion legal. I was enrolled in the choir, untrained, strained, croaking, enthusiastic and always struck with headaches at the high notes.

That was when the teacher began to realize she had an unusual child on her hands. Eventually my secret was torn out of me: I couldn't sing the baritone part. It was far too high. I was the first basso profundo she had ever taught. Though I never mastered the technical theory, I could feel chords, right or wrong, in my chest and in my bones. I was used as a secret weapon in competitions, dragged out suddenly to rumble out a low C and grind out gospel and blues with a voice children my age should not have had. Suddenly my voice was the thing--I could not sing like my brothers because I could not sing like anyone we knew my age. I was, however, called on for impressions of Louis Armstrong and James Earl Jones. I was, eventually, cast as a string of stage villains as long as my arm, stentorian, sinuously resonant, and with a few more years of training and practice, able to shake people's chairs, bounce my rumblings from the back of large auditoriums, drown out an entire choir without a microphone. My voice was huge. The casting shifted from petty Shakespearean noblemen to Death, and then the Wrath of God. And I took greater joy in it than I could say. My voice was my own, and it shook my whole body like the sound-box of my brother's guitar, like the string-full bulk of my father's piano. It poured emotion out of me whenever I needed the outlet. It did whatever I asked of it, except for those high notes. It was witchcraft. It was pride.

By high school, it was something else, too. A friend shoved me in front of an anti-war demonstration shortly before my fifteenth birthday, and someone handed me a microphone, which I did not need. And I froze for a moment, and then words came out, words upon words, with a pattern, with a picture. I didn't know how it happened, but they were clapping, they were hugging me, and someone cried.
I didn't just have a voice. I had words to use it for, my own words, not a script's, nor a score's. I could get up in front of people and say things that mattered. It wasn't just pride: it was an instrument of change, a connection to other people, maybe even a calling. I was a preacher, and suddenly the voice was not just my own. It was something I could give to ideas that I felt mattered. I could speak, not just for myself, not just for an audience, not just for the sake of glorious noise, but for standing with others.

And then it was a millstone around my neck, because I trained it lower and lower, for more and more resonance with whatever I asked of it. When it was pointed out that my speaking voice and my voice on stage, in song, were hugely disparate, I caught the hole in my persona, and dropped the speaking voice an octave or so. And when I sang the blues, I meant it. When I sang "I lay down this world" with my best vibrant Gospel exhaustion, I meant it. Because I was trapped in a person I wasn't.

And when I came out, that voice was a problem. I'm not particularly tall, or broad. As my family goes, I came out small, and curvy, really, with long hands and big brown eyes. Even before I started my physical transition, I didn't have a great deal of trouble being read as a woman--at least until I opened my mouth. I heard it over and over: "I'd never have known, until you started talking." "I'd never have known, until you opened your mouth."

The other side of that was obvious: "You can have the life you want, the transition you need, if you just don't open it. Shut up, and you can have the world."

I was soaked in the messages every other young woman gets, of course, by that point. Keep quiet. Nod and smile. Defer and demur. Make your sentences into questions. Keep it soft. Keep it sweet. And while I was proud and relieved to let go of the part of male privilege that encouraged me to interrupt, to talk over, to drown out, I began to drown myself in this. If you want your life, if you want to get by, if you want to be safe, keep quiet. Don't rock that boat. Don't demand your place at the table. Accept that you are unacceptable. Understand that you cannot be understood. Don't push it. Don't push it. Don't push it.

Just. Shut. Your. Mouth.

And I choked back so, so many words.

How many vibrations of my vocal cords did I waste? How much did I throw on the scrap-heap of my head, to rust unsaid for fear that it might mark me less-than-real? How many knives did I force into my voice, like Abraham and Isaac unhalted, desperate to sacrifice it for my undeserved place in the world?

I cannot say. I cannot say. But my breath was held back, eventually, even my gestures growing smaller, as I tried to make myself breathy and unthreatening and demure. And I could not say, though, like another voiceless girl I'd met as a child, my feet ached and burned with each silent step in a world not willing to make room for an immigrant who smelled like the sea.

Something burst within me, over and over. Because I had felt it, singing in me, once, as I sang, as I shook crowds: that my calling in life would require my voice. That my voice would not only carry me, but could be a comfort to others, would not be a career but a lever for a better world, somehow. It seemed big enough, then. Its vibration seemed strong enough. And here I was, faced with what looked like the worst of choices: do you take your calling, your great chance to give something to the people around you, your meaning, while giving away your chance to feel whole and worthy of love? Or do you complete yourself as a human being, make your skin and bones and face tolerable, at the cost of giving up what you feel gives that humanity of yours meaning? Do you seek duty, or love? Words, or the touch of another person? What you feel you must do, or what you feel you cannot do without?

How could I preach, with my own voice always tripping me up, humiliating me, getting in my way? How could I speak warmly to loved ones? How could I sing?

I don't think I really slept, for a while, tossing back and forth, tearing myself up over it, all those harmonies that had intoxicated me becoming discordant, the tones and tunes matching up wrong until the vibrations were ready to shatter my bones and write angry burnt symphonies on my skin. I felt monstrous. How could I want something so badly for myself that took away my ability to use what I saw as my gift? How could I want something that took away what I thought was my best chance to serve?

Of course, I was holding the score upside-down. I was missing part of the script. I had shown up for a demonstration, a pulpit, on the wrong day. I was speaking words of comfort to someone who didn't want them.

I learned many things about listening, while I choked, of course. I learned many things about myself. I learned much more than I thought I ever would about all the things I could do that were not about my voice, but about hands and feet and everything under a rib-cage. But I also learned that I had been a fool.

I never lost words.

And my voice just needed to learn new songs.

The options are limited, as options always are. I could allow a hot scalpel into my throat, for a great deal of money, to edit and excise the cartilage that made my voice what it was, at the risk of losing all ability to speak aloud forever. I could send a different pile of money to people who would promise to make me sound like something else. I could keep silent. Or I could do the painstaking, day to day work of training myself in new ways, so that I could speak in a voice that would not make my life untenable, but that still left room for laughter, for conviction, for range. I could find a new way to raise my voice, out of the depths but without losing the resonance.

I've stumbled, on that road, and it is still a source of difficulty. And I have still not found a way to sing, and it breaks my heart, some days. But I'm looking. I'm looking. And I will, someday. I will someday take it back, all but the bit I cut away some ways back on the road, to let the road know I'm serious.

I will sing again, someday, and it will be my voice, but it will not be the voice it was before.



This is done with saying, for now, but I should say this, anyhow, outside the bounds of what I just made. This place you're reading: this was born, if anything, of fear. This was made by a person frightened she had betrayed words, betrayed her voice, and could not speak. This was made as a proof that I still could. And I give you all the thanks I have for listening.
Goodnight.

everywhere the ceremony of innocence

I was raised to see the future as a threat.

Hard times coming, see. Interesting times. Dark times, war times, change times. I was brought up seeing a world where good and evil would have a big dust-up and things would get decided for once and all, and I was brought up to believe I would matter in the outcome of all of that--that I was special, that I would shelter people, that I would lead them.

I raised myself believing that if I didn't train myself in every field of human endeavor, to the utmost of my effort--from military strategy and martial arts to physics and medicine, occultism and cookery to physical fitness and the memorization of literature, pottery and metallurgy to poetry and mysticism--that someday, that threat would be realized, those big important days would come, and someone would need me, and I would fail them, because I hadn't put in the work. I let myself believe that if I couldn't be a hero, the kind they make statues of, then nothing I did would be worth anything.

Looking back on that, it is both neurotic and arrogant, but most of all, it's a desperately lonely way to look at the world. Training. Everything, even beauty, in the service of pursuing mastery, not for its own sake. Connections to other people only as useful, as practice, as a thing to learn.

It was a world missing wonder. It was a world where I had to be less than a person in some ways so that I could be more than human every way I could, with the hanging threat, always, that if I slacked off for a moment, I would be buying the death and oppression of loved ones. Of course, it was easy to abuse myself and my worldview this way; I couldn't imagine being a real, whole person, getting a real, long life, so going out with a bang as a symbol seemed like an appropriate alternative.

I say all this because, in a lot of ways, it's very easy for some of us to slip into these patterns. They start with this ideal, that we should look forward to the Big Fight That Decides Things. That the decisive battle between good and evil, the Revolution, the great paradigm shift, is something to look forward to.

I don't know about you, but once I did some growing up and some being in the world, I saw the big problem there. When you go to war, people get hurt. And even if you're on the side of the angels, you're on the side that says people have to stop being a mess if they want to come out okay. If you're on the other side, you're saying they can't stop it at all. And either way, you're saying that everything anyone does that isn't part of this cast-of-thousands epic doesn't come to much at all.

When you look forward to a decisive battle, you look forward to destruction and chaos being visited on real people. When you seek heroism too vigorously, in the end, you're seeking a world where heroes are necessary: a world with enough disaster in it, and enough people sitting back, that someone "better" has to step in. Heroism is only heroism if it wants to make itself obsolete, but too often it's about separation from others. Revolutions go 'round and 'round, but heads always roll.

When it comes to the big fight between the white hats and the black hats, I've become a third-party voter. You put on a hat, you're not just declaring your moral authority above others. You're volunteering for a world where regular folks get to die in the name of ideals and prophecies and grand overarching plans. You're volunteering for a world where people need to be different in order to make it, where the ticket to Utopia is bought by changing human nature.

Us people, we're a mess. I used to think we had to stop that to be worth preserving. We had to shift our natures, slough off the ape, embrace the angel, burn away impurities in a vast moral crucible. It sounds nice if you don't think about it too hard: for people to survive, to be worthy of survival, they have to stop screwing up.

The solution isn't in making people not a mess. That's no good, because in the end, you'd be rescuing and redeeming something that wouldn't recognizably be people. You'd be insisting that people be what you want them to be if they want a life preserver. That's what an apocalypse is. That's what a revolution is. You can't ignore who--and what, in all of us--gets to go against the wall and smoke that last cigarette.

You have to be able to do for people as they are--as messes. You have to be able to love them as messes. Can you really love people, really love them, without loving all of them? Without loving them as flawed, mistake-making, stumbling messes? It's not about good not being able to exist without evil. It's not about people being incapable of change, of striving, of improvement. It's about saying that they don't have to be improved already to be worthy. It's about saying that the revolution doesn't have to come before we can love and stand with the people next to us. They don't have to be heroes. They don't have to be angels. They just get to be people.

It's vile to limit people's growth, to poison their gardens and roads and say they can't rise above the places they now stand. But too many of us get burned up in the search for a world without sin, in the name of this cause or that. Too many of us get kicked off the cart because they haven't evolved the way to revolution expects them to.

I think it's dishonest to just love the best of people. And in the end, licking our lips in anticipation of a world without sin, cheering for the downfall of corrupt empires--it glosses over the fact that even a battle against the most noisome of foes has casualties. It leaves a field littered with the wounded and dead. It damns people for nothing more than having their backs turned at the wrong moment.

We can reach for our best selves without expecting that only our best selves deserve compassion and justice. We can look forward to better times without leaning forward in our seats looking for a big shift that makes the unworthy ones fall down. We can fight oppression without needing to make human beings into something other than themselves to do it.

Change always comes with a price. I used to think it could be clean, that you could have simple triumph, vanquish and walk away, happily ever after. But when things fall apart, even foul things, people suffer. Growing up made me finally realize that. It made me realize that the only side I could take was Us.

The future doesn't have to be a threat. It does have to be a place where people can live--not just people shaped and purified for ideologies, but people, in all of their mistake-making, messy beauty. Otherwise there won't be many of us there to appreciate this brave new world--and that's no world I want any part of.

vigilance

So last night I ganged up with Katz of Athens Boys Choir and some amazing folks from Portland State University (I'm looking at you, Tash, Zena) and we had ourselves a Day of Remembrance. It was the first time in more than three years that I've read my work publicly, and I have to admit I shook like a leaf getting up to a microphone and reciting "The Seam of Skin and Scales." There were a few things I had in mind to maybe read for people, and the 'net was well represented; Tash Shatz read a piece from TransGriot before the reading of the names of the dead, and it sent a shiver through people. But I'm meandering.

I got up in front of the largest grouping of trans people, let alone their allies, I had ever seen. And I leaned out and made eye contact and I said it, all of it. "We are not mistakes." "No more being afraid." And whoever it shook out there, I think it shook me the most, after seventeen pages of the names of the murdered were read, in chronological sequence, and minutes in I would recognize a name, finally, and then realize it was someone who'd been killed when I was still in high school, and we had years yet to go in the chronicle of the brutalized and lost. No matter how many of us stood out there in the amphitheater, it was such a tiny, bright candle on such a cold night--this brief moment where we were, once in the year, literally shoulder-to-shoulder, shivering, some heads bowed, some held high.

I think it does something to people, to grow up transgendered in this world. It does something to grow up knowing you are considered expendable if not an abomination, that crimes committed against you don't matter, that laws aren't for you, that futures aren't. It does something knowing that in most places the best you can hope for is to be a punchline, and the worst a pulped, shattered, ragged statistic. It does something to grow up constantly having your perceptions of reality called delusional until the only way to survive is to convince yourself that you are indeed insane. It does something to go so far off the map, even leaving aside our own experiences, the batterings small and large, whether we have families who look out for us or families who cut us deeper than anyone, the endless funerals for people we'll never be.
I think it breaks most of us a little, knowing that sometimes the only time in a year we all get together is to read a thick stack of names of those of us who have been ground into the ground, punctured, stolen, crushed and rent apart, all in order to satisfy someone else's ideas of what the world ought to be--and to tell all the rest of us, look out. You could be next.

And yet we were shoulder-to-shoulder, shivering together, and raising our voices. And all of those people we were assured someone had tried to erase--because that's what so many of those murders were, efforts to erase the fact of a trans person from the world with the crudest and cruelest of instruments--rang out, remembered, even the ones called "unknown trans woman" and "unknown person" and "woman in man's clothing, name unknown." Real. Missed. And important.

No matter how many torches and pitchforks, there were were, refusing to forget. Refusing to allow that erasure. And that's what the day is about. It's about mourning those losses, and about telling all of those murderers and aiders and abettors that we are still here, we are not erased, and we will go arm-in-arm into the next day no matter the threats.

Many of us have lost someone in this struggle, whether they wanted to be part of the struggle or not. Many of us have lost parts of ourselves, and many of us have been hurt by people who wanted us on that list. But we endure, and we continue, and we light more candles, and we refuse to stop remembering, because it must be done.

At the end of the night, when we go our separate ways, we take each other home with us, every one--not alone, not over, not forgotten. We make it another day. It breaks all of us a little, living with the reality of the situation, but we keep it up, those of us who survive, and we live to keep a fire burning for those of us who don't.

Sacred dead, you are not forgotten. You matter. And we miss you.
We will carry this on for you. Let the weight pass from your shoulders to ours, for a while, and we will carry this struggle on for you until it doesn't need carrying any more.
Go, and rest. We will not forget.

things people do

NOTE: After a whole lot of busy, lately, I find myself having a profoundly rough week. It's likely going be another little while before I can bring myself to produce new stuff, or even finish what I've got in the works. So I've decided to bring in a handful of casserole posts (thanks, piny, I love the term) to cover up the shortfall so none of you think I've up and quit. This one is from November 2006, and I meant to import it over here then, but forgot in December's uproar since it was more preachy than topical. Thanks for your patience, everyone. --ll.


Life is an ungainly, terrible thing to behold.
It looks at you, without breaking eye contact, until you become nauseous, until you are desperate to break that gaze any way you can, drowning it in alcohol, burning it in exercise, whipping and sexing and pill-popping and televisioning it away in an elaborate exorcism gloriously peculiar to a people so very afraid of death.
Death is not a frightening thing. Death is stern, and death is dark, but looking Westward, it is difficult to conclude that death is anything but the fairest of all forces, the most evenhanded, the only truly reliable thing.
Death is not what we fear. We fear the moments of life before it, searing or cold, lonely, painful. We fear what our deaths will do to the lives of the living: make them suffer our loss, force them to weep at surviving us and missing us when we are gone from them. And we fear, ultimately, that death will be anything like life.
We can insulate ourselves with promises of golden mansions and green fields, but when it comes down to it, what's the fear of the Avici or Tartaros or plain old Hell but the terror that death is a continuation of life? That our lives keep mattering when we're supposed to be done with them; that we will still be ourselves; that those selves will suffer torments that we can only imagine as being like the torments a living creature may face, but worse, and for longer?
We fear change. We fear the unknown. Most of all, though, I think we fear the known. We fear life.

And rightly so. What is life, after all, but a shadowed valley that we briefly walk through between eternities doing whatever it is meat and bone and spirit do before birth and after death? What makes us think that the peculiar animation of our carbon and breath is the normal state of being?
Life is where we eat, and hunger; life is where we love, and lose; life is where it is cold, and hot, and bright, and bitter. Life is where we gamble at a vast table whose cards are our skin and whose dice are our teeth and eyeballs and hearts.
Life is where we know that we are naked, and know shame. Life is where the story starts, after all, so far as we're concerned. Life is where happening happens.

It is a terrible and awesome thing to behold, this endless cavalcade of life devouring life, of springing-up and grinding-down, of hope and harm. It's a mess. It's an explosion. It's too slow, and too short, and tenuous at best.

It's a special thing, life. It matters to taste the blood in your mouth. It matters. Life, as a concept, as a thing in us, wobbles as a newborn colt, and stumbles along; or it hammers us, as a merciless overhead sun; it never, ever makes sense. The most miserable of the dead are consumed with wishing they still had it, except the worse-off, who still think they do when it is gone. Death that looks like life is no good death at all, no more than life that looks like death.
Life refuses to make sense. No matter how much we want it to, no matter how many patterns we put to it, how many dewdrops and stars we connect up into constellations and highways and stories.
Life is not a narrative. It is not.

It is a terrible, ungainly, gorgeous thing, life.
We're lucky it ends eventually. And we're lucky to get to visit, for a while, even though birth, every time, is an excruciating thing.
We burst through blood and shouting, squirming, gasping, and we never really stop. And every moment we spend, organs and bone and blood wrapped in skin, we are attired for prayer and wonders and darkness, too.
We are here. We may as well act like the living. And that means the terror and the hiding from life, yes, because that is what the living do; but it also means looking it in the eye and meeting that gaze for as long as we can until our knuckles are white and our teeth gritting, and letting it know that we bleed, but we do not run. We know it is terrible. We know that so are we. And we go on, to eat, and to hunger; to love, and to lose; to hope, and to harm.
And we go on.

root cuttings

I had a profound shock tonight.

My grandmothers are troublesome figures in my life. One of them is a sociopathic ex-prostitute of aristocratic extraction who I've never met, but whose features I see echoed in my own--survivor of a brutal military occupation, bitter immigrant wife of a never-present serviceman, badly-treated as a sufferer of bipolar disorder the doctors didn't know how to properly care for. I have never met her, since my infancy, and her only contact with my immediate family is the every-few-years call when she tries to get my mother in on an insurance scam or bilk her out of money. In my difficulties with my own mother, I often hear hers speaking through her. She has become something of a legend--fascinating, terrifying, the source of a goodly amount of the beauty and madness in my own veins, a woman who took up with sea-captains and movie stars and never managed to look after her own children.

And then there's my father's mother, who I grew up knowing, and removed contact with voluntarily. She is a Democrat only by virtue of her Judaism, it always seemed to me--old-fashioned, entitled, classist, racist. She speaks to people of color like children, sends back food three times, told my father in his youth that he might be permitted to date a non-Jewish girl, but never a black one. She travels on cruises and then complains when foreign countries won't speak English and serve food bland enough for her liking. Her treatment of my mother--the brown Catholic working-class woman my father brought home after his first near-arranged marriage failed--has been, by all accounts, years upon years of nastiness, dismissiveness, and passive-aggressive cruelty. I was always surprised when reminded that she had had a career before she stopped to mother full-time--as, of all things, a doctor, which is impressive for the day and age in question. She has softened some, with the years--accepted that her grandchildren are not white, accepted that her daughter-in-law is here to stay, accepted her own frailty--but some years ago, when I was finally old enough to see her behavior as anything but normal-and-acceptable, I disengaged. I removed myself from her sphere.

My father outed me to the extended family the other day, starting with her. By all accounts, she wasn't even surprised. She was kind, compassionate even--and then the shock.
My grandmother, in all of her socially-conservative, old-fashioned everything, was not just any doctor--she was a doctor in women's health and, moreover, the doctor the queers went to.
She had a lesbian patient who she treated--and this was rare in that place and time--with understanding and without laying judgment, and word got out. By the time she retired, her clientele was half lesbian women.

My grandmother.

I was going to write about my connections to the women in my family; I was going to write, in grand cliched fashion, about my mother. I need to let this settle, though. I need to shift the lenses and rearrange my conception of the people my blood comes from.

I think maybe this is the point--not just in our relationships to women, or to family members, but in all of our interactions--not just to avoid forgetting, but to assume there are layers we don't know about. We don't know--especially when it comes to our elders--everywhere someone has been, everything someone has been. Sometimes they surprise us with their venom and cruelty; sometimes they shock us further with the currents of decency, or courage, or sure-sightedness, that we never thought them capable of. When we are situating ourselves--finding context, taking root, a vital project for those of us attempting to move the world--we cannot let this just sit.

We cannot ignore where we come from, and a large part of that is the people around us. And we cannot--cannot--forget where they come from.
Feminism is, as a project, about building connections and communities if it is about anything. When healthy as a movement, one of the most momentous things it does is remind us to listen to each other, to connect us in common struggles and common experiences. It connects women especially to each other by emphasizing that those connections between us matter, and that they are avenues by which we can strengthen each other and, by the slow and steady work of building communities of mutual support, change the way all of humanity moves and breathes and lives. Part of my context has been, until now, a disconnect from the women two generations back of me, because they're hard. They're problematic, they're embarrassing, they hurt. But while self-preservation matters--especially when you're talking about a con woman and a lifelong manipulator--the most problematic thing is my disconnect.

If we can learn from anyone, it's the ones that are hard. It's the ones we'd never go near if we didn't have to--like the woman who looks at my brown skin and cringes, but who I have to know because she is my father's mother--like the woman who would rob me blind and then hex me for good measure, but who I still hope to someday meet, because she is my mother's mother--who present the most opportunity to challenge that reflex to judge, to sneer, to say no, not for me. If they weren't my grandmothers, it would be too easy to cross the street when I see them coming, to duck away and surround myself only with the people who treat me well and make sense to me. It would be too easy to let them be caricatures who never put themselves on the line to care for people they didn't have to, who never made great sacrifices in an unknown land to give opportunities to the same children they heaped abuse on.

We have to look after ourselves, of course. But we have to look after each other, too. If that woman can look at me and still see granddaughter, how can I look at her and see nothing but bigot? In examining these connections, it becomes clear that it's too easy an impulse to deny these people their complicatedness. And isn't that what we're supposed to be working against, in the fight for social justice and equality? The impulse to make simple cardboard cutouts of people and not engage with their wholeness, their difficulty, their own voices, no matter how hard those voices are to hear? It is imperative that we try to forgive the fact that not only does the world put us in places that hurt, but that sometimes those doing the hurting are the ones who are supposed to love us. To remember that even those who stand in our way have stories, and those stories come back around and become part of our history, too.

It's hard to keep in mind that we're all family here. It's hard to look out at the seething mass of humanity and see them all as unavoidable, as hitched and bound to us, as people who, in the end, we cannot just cross the street to avoid. We can turn around and around and around, but the fact of the matter is, people are complicated, and their histories tie to ours, the good parts and the awful, and they aren't just going away. I can hardly think of a better reminder than the ones we're supposed to call family by default, even the ones who don't treat us like family ought to. We don't have to welcome them in just yet, but we have to engage. We have to let them be messy and real. This is radical love. This is the love that acknowledges that we are connected whether we like it or not. It's not about redemption, or deserving, or who's good and bad; it's not about good deeds, or courage in adversity, excusing cruelty and bigotry. It's just about letting it be more complicated than that, and insisting on caring.

Let people surprise you. Take another look.

not blind, but bone-deep

Bear with me here.

I am a religious person. A lot of the things about me--my words, my values, my politics--that many of you appreciate about me come out of this, even if I don't bring it up much. The answer to "what religion, then?" is extremely complicated, and that answer has changed, drastically, more than once, though it is reasonable, as far as reasonability goes, to roughly call me an ancestor venerator. I was brought up essentially as an Abrahamic agnostic, and, following a conversion experience in my early teens, wandered far, far astray.
For right now, though, there is a safe thing to say:

I am a particular devotee of the Goddess Kapo, to whom I do far too little honor, all blessings to Her.


Religious language spooks a lot of you, doesn't it?


That's okay. Part of what I want to talk about is the inherent spookiness. A lot of us scrub our Gods clean of worry and danger and terror and awe, of weirdness. A lot of us want omnibenevolence and omniscience and omnipotence from our deities, all at once, even though these things contradict, we want someone perfect who's always there and always wants for us what we think is good for us. I disagree with the notion, but I respect it, when it comes to others' faiths; I get edgy around perfection, around the absence of the uncanny.

My Kapo, Whose I am, is not scrubbed clean of danger. In Hawai'i She is called sister to the poison Gods, Red Eel-Woman, She Who Paints the Color of the Night Sky. She is invoked by dancers and by curse-flingers, and connected to uncanniness and lightning-storms and magic and often death. Her sister is the fury of a volcano and the kind of creation that burns all it touches. And when it comes down to it, it is Red Kapo Who protects that sister Pele.
Pele was nearly sexually assaulted by one of the Gods, you see, as the story goes. The volcano, She ran, the pig-God in hot pursuit. Uncanniness saves the day; as the story goes, see, Kapo detached Her vagina and sent it flying through the air to lure and distract the offending deity, drawing Him over the ocean and sending him on a wild goose chase after a humming, speeding vulva that finally hit a mountainside with such force it left a dent in the rock and a cave locals still name after Her. So She is also called Kapo-kohe-lele, Kapo of the Flying Vagina.


This is true.
It also means, by many accounts, that if an islander dreams of a woman without a vulva, it is a portent of Kapo. It means that priestesses to Kapo must either have nonstandard genitals or a blessing of protection cast over their vulvas so She will not tear at them.
This is a thing I only learned after nearly a decade of religious devotion to Red Kapo the Eel-Woman of the Storm. I made loud noises of shock, and there was a lot of laughter. After all, I didn't go looking for Her in a book; I stumbled into an initiatory ritual in a holy grotto behind a waterfall, was bowled over and awed and overwhelmed by an experience I still have trouble describing, and then did some looking to make sure that what I had seen and felt, in those moments, matched up to what I could be told about the shrine in that spot, and Whose it was, and what She was like.
For all my neglect, She still finds ways to surprise me. And ways to knock me around. And ways to look after me.


And you're probably wondering, "Does she really buy into this? Wasn't this just a rhetorical device, this 'religious devotion to oldschool Goddesses' thing, to win an argument? Does she really structure important life choices around an obscure Polynesian Goddess Whose remaining devotees can be counted on your fingers and toes?" And I can only spread my hands and say, look, it wasn't my idea. If I were making it up, I'd come up with something much more plausible. I'd come up with a story that doesn't involve following a ghost fish to an underwater coral chapel. I'd come up with a deity you'd heard of, or claim She made me Her special anointed one, or something, or claim that teenage me, sorely lacking in emotional maturity, was instantly transformed with insight.
We found each other, and we worked something out. Gods are, among other things, ideas, and ideas need people, too.
If you want, you can take this all as metaphorical. If it makes you more comfortable. I don't really care what you call factual; I only know what's true.

And that's where we start getting at the heart of things. People often make the best metaphors about religion--metaphors about lattices of metaphors, meta-meta-metaphors--when they compare it to something else we all know well.
"How do you know what faith feels like?"
"How do you know you're in love?"
(You may have heard this elsewhere, too, with its implicit answer: "How do you know what your identity is? How do you know you're a this instead of a that?" "Well, how do you know you're in love?")
You might or might not talk to Gods who might or might not answer back. It's your business, not mine. I can't know what it's like for you, and you can't know what it's like for me. Why? Well, how do you know whether or not you're having a spiritual experience? What's the difference between doing a mundane thing like cooking or ploughing or hiking, and doing it religiously? What's the difference between a loss and a sacrifice, a poem and a hymn? How do you know you're in love?


For me, love informs my faith, and faith informs my love, see. Because I try to treat a deity with love, and hope for love in return. Not endless blessings, or miracles, or sacrificed oxen, for that matter. Love. I think of parents, and siblings; sometimes loving means not saying "yes." Sometimes loving means moving in a way that makes no sense. Sometimes love sits battered in the face of endless disappointments and confusions, but love doesn't care. Love is stupid. Love is a wonder. It has no idea how to bow to what's good for us, or nutritious, or wise; it sings another language, one full of need and connection and burning. No one can convincingly tell you what it will be like, should be like, and it's every time unique, and it never cancels out other love, different love, love elsewhere.

See?

It goes both ways. Because in love, I speak the language of religion. I say, love has sacrifices in it. I hear, if it doesn't bleed, can you trust it? Most of all, I don't expect it to make sense. Nobody can effectively say, "You can't feel that love, because it's not a good idea, because it doesn't make sense, because it doesn't follow the rules." It stays. The feeling stays, in the face of logic, of evidence to the contrary, to everything. It comes from somewhere deeper, somewhere made of tendons and arteries and contradictions and needs. It's a connection that doesn't care whether or not it makes sense. It's bigger than that. You're in love, or you're not. Only one way to know for sure.

I prefer a Goddess Who doesn't make sense. I prefer wondering why eels, and why someone as obsessed with getting the world to hug each other was claimed by a Goddess whose jurisdiction involves a lot of terrifying things, a sister to poison, a hisser-in-the-night. And it doesn't matter what I prefer, anyway, after all--can you decide not to be in love? I prefer a religious life that insists that multiple contradictory truths can coexist, and that the facts are another matter for other purposes, that lets the sacred stay weird.
I prefer to remember that love, like faith, is not tidy, is not a well-scrubbed construct of quartz and white light. It's a mess, a seething, toothy mess; it's worthy of awe, and terror, and wonder. It's worth bleeding for. It's something bigger than anything that can be cleaned up or discussed comfortably.
It's spooky. Certainly it's dangerous. It changes what you are by its simple presence, and by the risks and vulnerabilities it demands. It changes everything, but not how anyone expected. It connects things. And if Love conquers all, it frequently does so armed.


St. Valentine's Day's origins acknowledge this. Its Christian origin-legend is about bucking government control for romance, about risking lives to marry people forbidden their unions, about martyrdom for the sake of connections that exist and throb and grow in spite of the laws and bonds and weapons in their way. The scaffold of Lupercalia it's built on was a Roman fertility-festival involving wolf-howling priests anointing naked young men in sacrificial blood and sending them out to run the city, whipping the women they wanted to be fertile with, restoring the life of the city's foundations with death and bloodstains and outdoor, frantic, ecstatic sex. It wasn't always greeting cards and pink ribbon.



Sacred isn't always pretty, but you always know it when you feel it, the way you know your own skin. You know it the way you know you're home.
How do you know you're in love?