Dear Community,

Many of you are aware of the issue that has arisen in the last week around the title of our project and our use of the word, ‘colored’.  It is really important to us to be accountable to people in ways that are about facilitating healing and community building, rather than dividing our communities or reproducing hurt. Our use of the word ‘colored’ was never from a place of anti-Black sentiment, but from our own relationship to postcolonial thought and anti-colonial histories where movements have used the word across racial lines to build solidarity on a global scale between non-white peoples. The use of it was meant to be a critique of the word. That said, we very much understand the weight it specifically has for many Black people in the U.S., and ultimately, we do not wish for it to continue to harm our fellow POC community members, or anybody. It is less the group’s name that is important to us to keep, than the project’s mission of building spaces for collective healing and social justice through community-based creative endeavors that are focused on Queer and Trans* People of Color experiences, histories, and struggles.

We have decided to reschedule the REVERIES AND RAGE event after careful consideration and feedback from numerous people about this situation, and taking stock of our capacities and resources at this time.  Thank you to everybody who has offered time and energy to think these things through.

Our plan is to change the name of our project, and make this show happen in the near future. We hope you will all still be able to join us when it does happen, and will be in touch about that as specifics are worked out!

Our hope is to have the event, when it does occur, be a space within which to also have collective dialogue about solidarity-building across differences within QTPOC community. Our experience of how this particular issue has resulted in a lot of pain on all sides, has foiled the complicated racial politics within QTPOC Bay Area community, and makes very clear to us a deep need for community dialoguing that may assist all of us in understanding differences and resonances between us and our unique experiences of racism in this world. There is such a long history rooted in colonialism, of divide and conquer as a strategy to further break down networks of resistance within and between non-white peoples, and we can’t learn to refuse that strategy, (a refusal that feels elemental to collective healing,) unless we are able to listen to each other, respect each other, and sit with what is difficult, complex, and inevitably painful.

We are very sorry for the ways our project’s title was experienced as anti-Black, and for any pain this has caused any of you. And we move forward with hope for continued work together that is powerful, creative, and healing.

Sincerely,

Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes and Thao P. Nguyen

NOTICE! This event has been POSTPONED! Keep an eye out for updates!

Please share our facebook event page with bay area folks!

http://www.facebook.com/events/325950884187885/

FCQ! (For Colored Queers) presents:


REVERIES AND RAGE: On Colonization and Survival
An evening of live performance and community building!



FCQ! is proud to present the first event in our live performance series! Come enjoy an evening of poetry, storytelling, comedy, music, and spoken-word. After the performance, we invite you to stick around for fellowship and conversation with the artists.

REVERIES AND RAGE: ON COLONIZATION AND SURVIVAL

_________________________________________________________

and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

-Audre Lorde

______________________________________

As Queer and Trans* People of Color (QTPOC), our lives are rooted in deep histories as well as present-day struggles, against political, economic, psychological, and spiritual forces that have sought to assimilate and annihilate us along with our peoples. The world has been systematically configured to undo us, to wretch us from local knowledge, to colonize our lands and our imaginations. The tenacity of hegemony means that as QTPOC, every day of our lives is in some way or another confronted with the pervasive violence of systemic whiteness, heteronormativity and homophobia, cis-normativity and transphobia, all configured through other elements of our diverse lives: religion and/or spirituality, class, nationality,…the list is long.

As Audre Lorde reminds us, ‘We were never meant to survive.’ And we mourn that many of our own have fallen. But we are here. We have survived, we continue to fight: for rights, for visibility, for equity, for decolonization, for our own places in the world, for our voices to be heard and listened to.

We rage. We rage big for the heartbreak of our ancestors that still rings deep in us; for the violations of our bodies, our spirit practices, our livelihoods-violations that have worked to sever the fabric of our communities. We rage at the nightmare of conquest as it bears down on our shoulders. We rage at the mandate for our docility; our insipid mediocrity; our forgetting, our submission. And we refuse it.

And we dream. We dream of change and beauty and self-love and loving others and full bellies and clean waters and growing healthy, fierce children and community prosperity, of not just cultural survival but cultural thriving. We dream of a more just world all around us. And we see dreaming as a vital birthplace of social change. Dreaming begets thought and action.

Two elements of our ongoing practices—for our survival, our defiance, our blooming, for justice. With the vigor of our loving fury, this is: REVERIES AND RAGE.

______________________________________________

This evening will feature performances by:

- Thao P. Nguyen
- Mauro Osborne
- Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
- Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes
- Yosimar Reyes
- Manish Vaidya

and will be hosted by Jezebel Delilah X!

ALSO, our feature band for the evening is GEM TOP (formerly Panda Army)!

GEM TOP is a trio of awesome folks performing “Gaysian Electro-Pop”. They are: Kyle Casey Chu on groovebox and vocals; Alice Choe on guitar, and Ami Nashimoto on keys and vocals.


Important notes: Our goal is to make this space accessible to all Queer and Trans People of Color. Toward that end, this event will be a fragrance-free and substance-free space.


::: DATE & TIME :::

TBA
Saturday 8pm-10pm
Doors 7:30pm


::: VENUE :::

Audre Lorde Room at the SF Women’s Building
3543 18th Street
(Between Guerrero and Valencia)
San Francisco, CA 94110

(3.5 blocks from 16th street BART station)


::: TICKETS :::

$15 At the door
$12 In advance
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/318739


::: WHO WE ARE :::

FCQ! (For Colored Queers) is a community-based Queer and Transgendered People of Color (QTPOC)-centered project. Currently, FCQ! consists of a blog where we publish QTPOC work that is socially and politically relevant to our diverse communities, through addressing social, racial, gendered, economic, and Queer justice. Additionally, FCQ! is producing a performance series featuring QTPOC artists, addressing various themes as well as creating space for facilitated dialogue around those themes. The first evening of performance is set for March 2, 2013, and is focused on issues of Colonization and Survival. We recognize the paucity of QTPOC-centered spaces, and aim for FCQ! to play a role in filling a need within our communities, by becoming a tool for social and creative justice, radical healing and politics, and genuine community building.


::: WHY WE DO IT :::

Queer and Trans* People of Color need more spaces that are centered on our needs, our healing, justice in our communities. We need more spaces where our voices can be heard, where our politics can rail, where our love can glow. By investing in intellectual, creative, and literary art, as well as anti-oppression-based dialogue, by QTPOC, for QTPOC, we are reinforcing the fact that our communities matter, that we are talented and powerful and should be heard, and that social change begins in small but meaningful ways that change us and our worlds.


::: HOW TO GET INVOLVED :::

Submit your written work for the blog! Email forcoloredqueers@gmail.com to submit! http://fcq.tumblr.com/

Support our Indiegogo campaign!
We’re trying to raise $500 to kick off our performance series! Any amount of support will help! http://www.indiegogo.com/FCQ/x/2117054

Help get the word out about FCQ!, our fundraiser, our webpages, etc! Use the Indiegogo share tools, share on facebook, twitter, and other social media!

If you can donate materials, photocopy access, color printer access, or other things like this, please contact heidiarhodes@gmail.com


::: A NOTE TO NON-QTPOC GUESTS :::

If you do not identify as a Queer and/or Trans* person of color (QTPOC), please be respectful of the fact that this event is primarily about QTPOC, with intent, and for a reason. We will not tolerate any form of bigotry in this space, or ever, anywhere. We recognize the need for allies, and welcome you to come, listen, learn, and share this evening with us!

Thank you and can’t wait to see folks there!

Thank you to the people who have contacted us or posted to address the issue of our name. We are aware that this is an issue that has come up in the community, and since the first moment it was brought up, have been working on coming up with an ethical response/changes, as it is really important to us to be accountable to people in ways that are about facilitating healing and community building, rather than dividing our communities or reproducing hurt. Our use of the word ‘colored’ was never from a place of anti-Black sentiment, but from our own relationship to postcolonial thought and anti-colonial histories where movements have used the word across racial lines to build solidarity on a global scale between non-white peoples. The use of it was meant to be a critique of the word. That said, we very much understand the weight it specifically has for many Black people in the U.S. While other Black people in the community have been very affirmative of the name and the project, we are truly, truly sorry for any hurt it has caused anybody, and are working on how to address this with as much care as possible. Ultimately, it is less the group’s name that is important to us to keep, than the project’s mission. Please give us a day or two to respond further. Thank you.

By Fabian Romero

__________________

My last conversation about gender with my mom ended like this, she cried to me, “please do not return to Mexico, people like you are ridiculed and hurt there.” She wants to protect me because I will always be her daughter. Although I feel that intention does trump impact when it comes to oppression, I also know that learning about oppression and liberation takes time, it takes skills and I am not about to tell my mom to work on her shit. When it comes to family and to people who do not have the time or energy to learn about oppression because of their own survival, I try to understand where they are coming from. My parents are surviving. They both have major health difficulties, still rely heavily on their kids to follow through on plans or decisions and to fill out paperwork and make it to appointments. They are not at a place of analyzing their place in the world if it does not come up in their everyday life. Compassion.

I haven’t always felt this. Coming into my boihood came with cultural blocks. I came across images of trans-men in a world that idolizes whiteness and my undealt with internalized oppression flourished. The inferiority programming in my body took this as an opportunity to prioritize gender over race, over migration, over poverty, over language barriers, over every other identity I could hold and I wanted my family to understand my gender now. Impatience took over compassion. I wanted to be seen as really genderqueer, as really trans and the only images and examples of genderqueer and transmen didn’t look like me, but at that time it did not matter. I don’t know when I noticed this hold on my compassion it must have been when I stopped visiting or calling my worried mom because “she does not understand.” After a few avoided calls her voice in a message struck me, she loved me more than these images of queer transmen who could only offer me the competition of masculinity. My return to my roots continues slowly; after a year of struggling with my identity I finally owned it; I stopped focusing on the ways that my gender is an obstacle in this world and have taken hold of masculinity and its unearned privilege. I have to own my privilege or else it slips away from me and I can revert back to prioritizing my oppression, wearing myself out and pushing away my familia.

Let me back up and talk more about my family and roots. I was raised in an interdependent family. We got by with borrowing money from relatives, buying cars from each other, staying for months in family members’ homes, paying little to no rent and being there for one another as much as our energy, health and finances allowed us. We still do this. I grew up with a sense of community that I see anti-capitalist people strive for, that I experience queer community work to get from each other. My mother’s experience is different than mine in the US, she did not come here to go to school, in fact most of the years here she has worked underpaid jobs. I have seen her work til her hands hurt, the health costs are high for underpaid and exploited labor. While I learned to read and write, to analyze texts, my mother cleaned doctors offices, prepared food and managed a household. My father worked long hours as a mechanic and would come home too tired to be in our lives except to discipline us. Years later when I learned the language for my oppression at an anti-oppression workshop, I left feeling ready to share my discovery with my folks. I expected my parents to be as angry as I was about privilege and their oppression, I expected them to want to learn more and was shocked when they looked at me blankly. My father defended his white friends and I couldn’t believe it. I left thinking that they didn’t “get it.” 

Every time I learned something new I came to my father with it. He loves to argue and we would get into it, each time I proved to myself “he doesn’t get it” and also “my folks are more homophobic than white folks.” My mother on the other hand just listened and asked me to stop bringing it up with my father. I didn’t listen. I kept on, the arguments got worse and I stayed away longer each time I left my parents house.

If there is one thing that I was never told, it was how having information, education and skills about anti-oppression require some privilege to attain. I wasn’t told that the superiority that came with the information was also a result of privilege. I know now that I wasn’t ready to see the complexities of learning about anti-oppression while my parents worked their lives the same as before I attended college (I am writing this over 6 years after it happened).  I was not aware of how my dismissive attitude toward my parents’ survival is my internalized oppression; I was engaging in superiority thinking and treating my parents as inferior to me because of our difference in experiences. Today I do.

Today I prioritize staying aware of how privileges have afforded me opportunities to learn about social justice. I have learned the language of social justice, become comfortable in speaking about my experiences by attending workshops, built skills for getting beyond survival by reading books, started writing groups and intentionally worked to decolonize myself by seeking out healing opportunities. All the work I have put to get where I am wouldn’t be possible without the privilege I have that my parents do not have. I am in my 4^th year of undergrad, I speak English without an accent, I was raised in the US since the age 7 and have been given the opportunity of following my dreams. I also realize that my parents may not need these things, for instance my mother embodies interdependency and cultural connections without ever stepping foot in a decolonization workshop, she understands oppression and because of her place in the world she does not have the time or energy to analyze it.

In recent years I have come across studies that support my conclusions with my family. For instance Lourdes Torres was interviewed for CNN and said, “The notion that Latino people are more homophobic and its men more macho is not only false, but tinged with racism.” She also goes on to say that Latino men’s patriarchal behavior is the only one to be coined as “macho” while this behavior is not unique to Latino men. Lourdes Torres is the president of Amigas Latinas, a lesbian and bisexual support group in Chicago and a professor. Macho was coined in the 1940’s by white anthropologists. Matthew Gutman, an anthropologist, wrote The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City in an attempt to write about his findings and remove the negative connotation with this term in 1996. Unfortunately the term is still used today. I have also studied Leticia Nieto’s book Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment and have had conversations with her about the material. I have gained awareness, thanks to Leticia Nieto, and an endless list of fierce people in my life, of how my passion to share my knowledge with those that I love has prevented me from meeting them where they are at.

Meeting where my parents are at has been essential to maintaining our relationship and continuing on with our interdependent and cultural bond. My mom has slowly been exposed to more and more of my genderqueer and trans friends and it is through that she has started to ask questions. In the 6 years that I have been building my liberation skills, we both have built a growing mutual vocabulary that we use to talk about complexities. I don’t need my mom to use the right words or understand that most people use “they” as my pronoun. I have told her that I am changing my name to Fabian eventually and to prepare herself for that change. In my heart I know that she may never call me Fabian; that she may choose, like the people in my life who aren’t ready to accept my name change, to call me Fabi; or may at times call me by my birth name. I have faith that just like she grew to accept and let go of me being queer she will do the same with my name change and my gender.

Prioritizing family and my culture has been a step towards my decolonization. To me decolonization is taking steps to move away from supporting the systems that oppress me and my people while loving and embracing my marginalized identities and all the gifts they offer. One of the biggest gifts from choosing to continue my relationship with my family is the constant connection to my roots and culture. I also grow compassion with each conversation that I have with my parents. My mother does not speak fluent English and my father speaks English with a heavy accent. When we speak to each other we are all speaking different survival languages and the compassion comes when something is lost in translation.

_________________________________

Fabian Romero is a Queer Chicano poet, performance artist and community organizer. They co-founded several writing and performance groups including Hijas de Su Madre, Las Mamalogues and Mixed Messages: Stories by People of Color. Their sincere poetry and stories arise from their experience as an Economic Refugee, speaking two languages, queerness, gender-queer identity, brown skin, time as a migrant worker and childhood in poverty. Currently they are the Co-Director of Education at Bent Writing Institute and are a pursuing their BA at Evergreen State College with a focus in writing, social justice and education.

You can read more of Fabian’s work at FabianRomero.tumblr.com and contact them at FabiOrtizRomero@gmail.com. 

Ten questions with QTPOC community leaders, activists, artists, musicians, and others who inspire.

FCQ’s Heidi Andrea interviews Cristy Road on her art, politics, and the complexities of the closet.

 ____________________________________

H: You mentioned that since I last interviewed you in 2005, a lot has changed about your politics. Can you say more about what direction your politics have taken and how that has affected your art?

C: Well, I’m 30 now and I think that people just grow and become less idealistic cause of challenges we face. I think that I had a lot of community-oriented goals, and I had a lot of stress as far as compromising my identities (queer, Latina, punk); so these utopian visions on punk and queer communities were not really something I could pursue, without falling into a trap or deep isolation. I think that what I’ve learned is that I need to follow movements that honor the things I care about, but also the things that I identify with. I got tired of feeling like the smelly punk as oppose to the sassy Latina —- I found that feeling balanced, without compromising any of my identities; required this rigid critique of mostly-white queer communities; as well as mostly-male punk rock communities. A lot of my politics and communities have made me feel isolated and unsafe, so forming these connections over art and politics now requires an additional connection through trust and cultural collaboration. 

H: Your new graphic novel, Spit and Passion, specifically addresses the issue of coming out as a person of Cuban ethnicity living in the United States. What has this meant for your own growth as a person, an activist, and artist?

C: The general idea of being in the closet is what urged me to find an alternative world; aside from my family/Cuban community and Miami in general. It was difficult to find other gay people who felt completely discomfited and had no interest in assimilating towards mainstream/straight culture. And although punk was heavily straight—- it also paraded around “outcast” culture; and my discovery of punk included the discovery of a hugely queer punk scene in San Francisco/Oakland, CA. So basically, this inability to be out and this desire to exist somewhere outside of what I knew additionally sparked my interest in raising political and social awareness around gender and sexuality. That experience has snowballed through the years; urging me to raise additional issues of race and class. Of course it took a billion years of developing my art and my political aspirations, as well as challenging my occasional stints with burnout and self-hate, to fully merge all of my political values and articulate them in writing. In Spit and Passion, I don’t even come out—- the goal of the book is to shed light on the experience of choosing to stay in the closet because of the compromise I’m hesitant to make with my ethnicity. I eventually came out to my family when I was about 25. I realized all the reconnections that came before that were these subconcious actions designed to feel closer to my culture. Growing out my hair, getting a bunch of family-related tattoos, and eating meat and the food I ate growing up were all totally empowering and helpful tactics; but also completely redefined once I came out. As soon as I felt fully out and safe; I definitely started cutting off all my hair again (very gradually); but with a much larger awareness of gay visibility as opposed to “punk visibility”; which was my excuse for cutting off all my hair at 14. I must say that things feel pretty balanced now; despite the quirks and awkward dynamics that will always be there… 

H: Your website’s description of Spit and Passion describes it as a “graphic interpretation of a queer punk Latino (accidental) ‘It gets Better’ campaign; in order to shed light on the painfully unwarranted and sometimes demonized experience of staying in the closet.” I think as people of color, when we are in the closet, we often face a very white homonormative insistence around what ‘coming out’ is supposed to look like, and without larger networks of support, many of us struggle to figure out what that process should be for ourselves in the context of our own cultures, families, communities. Does your work confront this specifically, and how?

C: My work has always documented that disconnect, and how the most distinct things like finding a punk scene, to healing from abuse, are all connected to the insecurities that came from holding on to a culture that was only mine; while holding onto a queer identity that I seemed to share with a whole community of mostly-white people. Spit and Passion feels like a solid culmination of not just this process, but also the healing and closure that I came to feel, around the time I turned 27, when I finished taking these steps towards balancing my identity (eating meat, growing out my hair, looking like a femme quinceañera, getting a lot of family tattoos— to name a few).  The most important result of all this reconnection was coming out to my family; which was a long drawn out process that started at 25 and felt complete around 26/27.  I came to see coming out as an adult as valid and real, as oppose to cowardly or internallly homophobic, by connecting with other people who had a similar story, whether it was due to their ethnicity, or just fear itself. Spit and Passion accidentally became this homage to the closet; and I was really happy with that route the book took; because it really sheds light on this Latina experience (of holding onto culture) as oppose to just the experience of being queer and scared.

H: How has your Cuban family responded to your work, to Spit and Passion?

C: They are into it! We’ve all done a lot of growing up between my coming out and now. 

H: You are also working on a Tarot deck with Michelle Tea! What themes are organizing this deck politically and creatively?

C: Since this project has less restriction and more of an artistic flow, I’ve had a lot of freedom with this project. There are a lot of references to queer culture, punk culture, and I get to stay in tune with my aesthetic: A lot of slimy things and dust and Ren and Stimpy looking color schemes and facial expressions; and definitely a bizarre post-apocalyptic vibe. It’s all pretty trippy—- but at the end, I think there is an all-encompassing theme focusing on queerness, dismantling gender norms, and a big fabulous sparkly party full of weird birds and creatures and rats and skulls. 

H: What deck do you usually use for readings yourself?

C: Pamela Coleman Smith! I keep it traditional and simple…. I want to get a CAT PEOPLE DECK, Though. 

H: Your online bio also describes you, saying, “She thrives to testify to the beauty of the imperfect”. What does this mean to you and how has being a QPOC contoured your relationship to the beauty of the imperfect?

C: I wrote that a long time ago, and I think that at the time, I was aware that I would somewhat romanticize struggles and challenges in order to cope with them or, better yet, embrace them and get power over them. I did that with art and songs, etc. But as I’ve gotten older, there’s been an outside perspective that’s described my art as dirty or worn out looking (texture wise) and just generally sad and stressed out; but also decadent and enthusiastic—— I didn’t realize I was doing this by adding little dots on everything—- that’s just how I see the world and how it comes out on paper. 

H: What do you listen to while drawing?

C: Oh, I don’t even know, I have so many moods and I work to anything I like listening to—- lately I got really into this band Lipstick Homicide and I’ll just listen to the album over and over. But I also will spend a whole day on something and don’t really want to think about changing the music; so  I end up listening to so much latin radio like la mega… I get really into reggaetón and pop and the combination of that and I get really motivated. 

H: Name three QTPOC folk who inspire you deeply, who are your heroes.

C: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Osa Atoe, Reinaldo Arenas —- this is so hard, I want to name all of them!

H: Can we talk about rage for a moment? I think as People of Color, and as Queer, and/or as Transgender, our rage is often seen by society as an individualized problem, as a pathology, rather than an effect of a traumatic capitalist, racist, homophobic and transphobic world around us that we are incessantly contending with. So much of your art depicts rage and trauma, as well as survival and hope through it; as does a fair share of Punk music. What are ways you see these mediums opening up space for our rage as a political practice and as a conduit for healing?

C: I see it in spaces where accounts of our struggles are shared and received with a lot of warmth and attention. There was this reading series called Ruckus that hosted QPOC performers and I definitely felt one of those deep healing moments when I saw Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha perform there. I think that as far as punk goes; it has been challenging to feel like our rage, as QPOC, is as important as fighting capitalism or the police state—— but when it happens, it happens in a deep and profound way. When I was on tour with RACE RIOT! and the POC Zine Project there were POC punk bands every night following the zine readings; and I seriously had never felt such an intense affirmation that a community exists, even if we are spread apart so vastly (politically, artisically, socially, etc). I think we just need to continue creating these forums if were able to, and supporting them if we’re not [able to create them]. 

_____________________________________________________

 Cristy C. Road is a Cuban-American Artist and Writer. Blending her political principles, sexual identity, and social inadequacies- Road lives to testify to the beauty of the imperfect. Her endeavors in illustrating and publishing began when writing a punk rock zine, Greenzine, for ten years. This eventually included narratives on race, gender, and eliminating oppression the punk and activist communities. She resumed to illustrate countless record album covers, book covers, political organizations, magazine articles, and more. Road has published an illustrated novel about high school, mental health, sexuality, and Miami entitled INDESTRUCTIBLE, a postcard book entitled DISTANCE MAKES THE HEART GROW SICK, and BAD HABITS, an Illustrated love story about healing, drugs, gay nightlife, and her telepathic connections to the destruction of New York City. Roads work has also been featured in the Baby Remember My Name: New Queer Girl Writing Anthology, Live Through This Anthology, Reproduce and Revolt, and countless other published works. She’s toured nationally and internationally on her own, and with SISTER SPIT, an all-queer spoken-word road-show. She is currently working on a TAROT CARD DECK with Author, Michelle Tea, and her band, THE HOMEWRECKERS. Her latest novel, SPIT AND PASSION (A graphic novel about coming out, maintaining her Cuban cultural roots, and an obsession with Green Day) was recently released this last fall. She hibernates in Brooklyn, NY.

www.croadcore.org

All images, Cristy C. Road ©

by Mauro Osborne

I am often loathe to engage in debates of labels, left only to re-hash arguments, choose a position of righteousness, and dig in my heels. The snares of identity politics entrap even the most careful of thinkers. As a trained anthropologist, I have been taught to develop a keen ear for conversational constraints and to think through arguments in ways that do not re-entrench others and myself in age-old ruts. In an attempt to make space for a different conversation, I am going to make a concerted effort to resituate the current strands of conversation between trans communities and lesbian/butch communities that have come up, precisely as these diverse groups come together to find common ground; the particular strand I’m referring to has to do with providing an umbrella term that does not offend. I do not believe this is possible, and we will have to find another way to be hospitable across generation, gender, identity, and race. It is also important for me to note that it is largely because of the tenacity and hardship of elder LGBTQ constituencies that we even have the social space and freedom to engage in these conversations. For that legacy and continued effort, I am eternally indebted. Supporting dissonance and ongoing struggle within shared cultural space is essential for providing opportunities to challenge one another and negotiate difference. 

Given this context, I am hesitant to engage debates of labels at all, but when racism is masked as elite queer theorizing, intervention is crucial. I also believe it would be an incredible disservice to assume that elder queer theorists are incapable of shifting their own thinking over time when presented with different viewpoints. Recently, I came across an interview with Jack Halberstam, a highly respected queer theorist who teaches at the university level and has written numerous volumes that are held dearly – and in high regard – by many. The full interview can be found  here, and I have copied the relevant portion below:

Q: What do you think about the term “masculine of center”?

Halberstam: I think it presumes a center, I’m not sure about that. It presumes a scale that we all know and recognize. I don’t always know that I know what another queer person’s masculinity means anymore. I used to think I knew, but I realized I didn’t.  For a lot of young masculine female bodied people who decide to transition, they’re doing so not because they’re so invested in masculinity but because they’re invested in forms of maleness that are then going to be in relation to other forms of maleness. They want to be gay men! In that scenario, masculinity isn’t the most important vector for them, it’s male embodiment or perceived male embodiment. My orientation is very much to feminine women, so butch still seems to have some sort of signifying power, given my set of desires and orientations. But masculine of center presumes that there’s an ideal, and that ideal presumes all kinds of things about race and class, and that we all know an ideal form when we see it. I can’t get into that kind of normative classification system that has a center and has margins. It’s a kind of colonial way of thinking about things, that there is a center and there are margins, and everyone’s aspiring to be center.

And here is one of the biggest problems I see: in many white spaces of resistance, the focus becomes a question of naming something and how proximate that name is to the core of what is being named. The prioritization of the name/naming does not allow for a meaningful engagement with the work that is actually being done under that name. This is one of the most insidious products of (middle class) white culture, the desire to name people and communities in a way that speaks for itself, without having to see what has led to the naming and what are the effects of the actions of those named. It is with this logic that major multinational corporations can carry mantras of “do no evil” and “spreading progress” while simultaneously wreaking economic, political, and social havoc across the globe. There is so much more than what’s in a name.

The term “masculine of center” (MoC) was coined in a progressive, social justice-oriented community of color that seeks to find sustainable and ethical representations and practices of alternative masculinities that can contribute to the empowerment of marginalized genders (including women, girls, young boys, and transpeople). Mincing words between maleness/masculinity/center/margins/etc. distracts from the work that goes on under the label of MoC. To do so takes away from the effects of the groups who take on this label, and the ramifications are especially harmful when such careless speech comes from a respected queer theorist. Additionally, identity and labeling in many communities of color do not usually take on the same priority that labeling takes on in white spaces I’ve observed. It appears to be an epistemological priority of whiteness to be able to identify, categorize, and manage expectations accordingly. Even trying to break identities apart is something that can only be fully carried out in white spaces, where intersections are not something that are necessarily viscerally acknowledged and understood on the day-to-day level (making the statement “masculinity is not the most important vector” an incomprehensible thought in many POC spaces, as it requires imagining that parts of ourselves must always reign supreme over others). To fixate on language, on finding the best and most perfect way to describe something, is to play into dynamics of truth and knowledge production that often marginalize and delegitimize the complicated relationships to resistance that exist within communities of color.

Whiteness is often socially constructed as a blank canvas onto which gender can be painted. Because (white) queer theory is often put forward as the only way to theorize queerness in its lived realities, I find it important to color queer theory so that the rainbow might not become so whitewashed. As someone who has experienced the very real implications of how a body is raced by others as my presentation of gender has shifted over the years, I understand how gender and race are inextricably linked for so many. White masculinities, working class masculinities, and masculinities of color are responded to, privileged, and targeted in very different ways. For white queer theorists to allege an understanding of how a term as ostensibly simple as “masculinity” functions within communities of color is to play into very problematic power structures that allow some to assume instantaneous knowledge through surface recognition of terms, despite claims of not making assumptions about what the masculinity of another person means. Part of the beauty of MoC as a term is the incredible diversity it holds, and that the point is not to label other folks as MoC, but to create spaces where people who resonate with this terminology, for whatever reason, show up intentionally to question ideas of gender, race, and privilege. Additionally, just as MoC is a term used by folks who identify as queer, it also opens up space for alliances between straight men and queer people. A huge barrier to queer organizing is how much time we spend preaching to the choir - which isn’t to say that queer-only spaces are not essential, because they are - and we need to understand that to rock the boat, we need all hands on deck, including straight men (and that includes those transgender people who identify as straight men). 

As I have spent time in these communities out of which the term MoC has emerged, I can confidently say that there is no “ideal” within these spaces. We leave room for one another’s difference. I’ve described white queer communities quite often as spaces where groups of people decide to come together to commit to policing one another’s identities. This is not necessarily a shared prerogative in many queer communities of color. In terms of my own self-understandings, there are few terms that have really suited me. I’ve been described in various moments as a dyke, a fag, a butch, genderqueer, androgynous, masculine, manly, etc., and all of these have been externally imposed labels. I came into the usage of MoC because it was a marker that seemed amorphous, constantly changing, and invested in looking at practices of gender, rather than embodiments/identities of gender.

At the risk of delving into inaccessible rhetoric, I will ask for a moment to respond to theory with theoretical orientations of my own. Embodiment of gender may not be the telos of transgression for many who engage with queer POC spaces; many communities of color have maintained strong relations to body/embodiment as a form of resistance throughout history; therefore, reclaiming a body that has not been alienated in the first place is not necessarily a priority, though it may be for some. This is very different from legacies of (middle class) white relations to body, legacies that possibly necessitate re-negotiations of embodiment, precisely because forms of liberatory embodiment have not been made possible through oppressive relations to disciplinary institutions of the body that proliferate in many middle class spaces. I emphasize “middle class” because, in my understanding, it is a middle class ethos that shapes standards of whiteness, and whiteness has historically contoured dominant queer discourse. For many white queers, there is a racially neutral body that has emerged discursively, onto which embodiments of gender can be authored. For queer POCs, gender is already understood through race, rendering (masculine) POC genders as hyper-visible, with no possibility of parsing out gender from race. 

When “the center” is the place where gender is made unclear, messy, and defies biological expectations, and the margins are where people may be perceived as more clearly gendered, that can be seen as an interesting and powerful re-inscription of binary thinking that is worth trying on before reactively dismissing. In many communities of color, marginality and aspiring to be part of the norm aren’t viewed with the same moralistic values as in many white and middle class spaces; particularly in urban queer spaces, there is a moral binary drawn between the true radicals and the assimilationists. The diverse histories of oppression that queer POCs run from and the futures we run towards are very different than white queers, and this can never be forgotten. The way that POC’s bodies are gendered comes, in part, from a colonial history of bifurcation: the invisibilization/exotification of feminine bodies/women, and the depiction of masculine bodies/men as violent, dangerous, and hypersexual. For someone to describe the usage of the term MoC as “colonial”, a term which relies not as much on embodiments of gender but practices of gender, is to re-invigorate that very colonial history of white scholars endlessly dismissing the complicated forms of resistance that materialize in communities of color. 

Beyond shame and denial, white people are given very few tools with which to respond to accusations of racism. Very few want to acknowledge the fraught history that makes these cultural collisions possible, and it is at this point that I would like to extend the invitation and the permission to put aside individual shame and to refuse a moment of denial, and to instead view this moment of education as a gift that might open up space for reflection on the ways we come to understand ourselves. The most freeing moments I have had in this lifetime have come exactly when I was told I could be something more than what history had allowed me to become. Humble are those who learn to listen, and powerful are those who take what they have heard and learn to invest energy in cultivating hospitality towards difference.

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Mauro is a scholar of social justice who is invested in addressing issues of discrimination in CA public school curricula. A native Californian from Fresno, he now lives in San Francisco and spends his spare time dreaming of being reunited with his cat, Oscar, who currently lives in Fresno.

Mauro also has his own blog starting up soon!

http://chicomoreno.wordpress.com/

2012 was a difficult year for a lot of us. I’ve watched my QTPOC familia go through so much: isolation; displacement; loss; feelings of debilitating invisibility and rage and doubt; criminalization; violence at the hands of the police; violence at the hands of partners or other family; serious physical and mental health complications; broken hearts; unemployment and financial struggle; rape; suicides and other deaths; and the psychological, social, and political effects of living in a racist, classist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist world.

I have also witnessed beautiful things happen in our communities, and believe we should celebrate every flower, every song, every bit of falling in love, every friendship built, everything we have to be proud of, for these are the small moments of revolution, living in a world that is systematically configured to target us and shut us down.

The tradition of New Year’s Resolution has roots as far back as Ancient Babylon. Modern versions of this practice often include individualized, personal goals, like eating healthier or bettering one’s career. The importance of individual goals not withheld, what if our resolutions also included politicized, collectivized commitments for the next year? What if part of our work in the world were holding each other accountable to these commitments, understanding that many resolutions are also challenges which we will struggle to follow through with, but understanding too, that successes will not come without great effort…? Keeping this in mind, I humbly offer a few New Year’s Resolutions I hope we can share in, and encourage each other towards.

1.    We will hold our heads up high

We will not be shamed for our skin color, our gender, our culture, our body size, our poverty, our health status, or who and how we love, or who and how we fuck. We will refuse to be shamed for any of our difference, and rather, will take pride in it. We will remember to believe in ourselves, and each other. We will be entitled, to show up, participate, and be respected. We will work to develop our literacy in the language of our diverse beauty, strength, ferocity, intelligence, humor, and power. We will not be demolished.

2.    We will take risks

We will accept challenges to grow and transform. We will dare to be vulnerable, to create, to think, to move, to put our voices out into the world. We will have the courage to be utterly strange. We will be louder; our voices and passions will swell. We will step out onto limbs and risk the bough breaking, to take chances at loving, at fighting, and diving into our labors for social change. We will fall, and scrape our knees and get back up again. And again. And again.

3.    We will refuse to be fucked with; nobody will make us small.

Period.

4.    We will care for ourselves and one another.

We will practice self-care as a political act that allows us to continue our work, that is continuing our work itself. We will practice care for each other as a political act that allows our communities to survive and thrive. We will be kind and generous with ourselves and each other. We will push and challenge ourselves and each other as care. We will give what we can, and receive what is offered, to each, from each, according to needs and capacities. We will actively listen to each other. We will denounce the violations we have bore, and cradle the traumas effected. We will learn to discern between solidarity and friendship; between liking each other and being committed to justice in each others’ lives. We will not judge, but we will hold accountable. We will share meals, art, poetry, philosophy, and affection. We will seek joy, and make space for sadness. We will learn to draw boundaries when we need them, and learn to let walls fall down. We will face the wind and tide together.

5.    We will continue to invest in our communities and work for social justice and healing.

We will continue to build community, to do healing work, to struggle together for change. We will invest time, money, and energy, into the well-being, and intellectual, political, and spiritual growth of our families (born and made) and communities. We will educate ourselves. We will write our counter-histories and fight to decolonize the processes through which we are made and grown as subjects, as people. We will refuse normativity’s hold on our bodies, our speech, our imagination. We will understand that different kinds of bodies, minds, hearts, people, produce and contribute to society and community-building in infinitely different ways, and will be grateful for that diversity. We will create together, and sing together; laugh together, and mourn together. We will strive against assimilation and recognize that survival is complex. We will value historical memory and refuse forgetting. We will work hard not to perpetuate oppressive language and action within our communities, and will work to repair and heal when we do. We will not alienate each other. We will care for the children and elderly who are also a part of our worlds. We will intervene on capitalist practices of competition with each other, and support each other and rise up together. We will protect ourselves. We will reach out. We will hold each other, and hold each other up. We will ask more of ourselves, each other, and of the world…

***

May the New Year bring a more just world…

In solidarity,

Heidi Andrea

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I once said to somebody near and dear to me, “I am so grateful to have you in my life. I couldn’t ask for a better ally.”

His response was, “Oh, but I think you must.”

______________________

Dear beloved Queer and Transgender POC Community,

We need to talk. We need to talk to each other. All of us.  Oh, the impossible task.

I have been reflecting a lot on solidarity and alliance building within queer community- inter-racial, inter-gendered, inter-faith, inter-classed, inter-everything alliance building- as a huge need within our QTPOC communities. We need to be talking about these things, building skills and resources around it, loving each other through it, learning to hold our own and each others’ rage, lifting each other up in ways that make it possible for us all to learn what we need from each other in order to continue our work in the world.

We need to talk about ‘solidarity’, and ‘accountability’ and ‘community’. We need to think together about what we all mean when we say these words, when we evoke them as tools, as weapons, as ballasts for these tumbling ships we sail on, on the tempestuous seas of the everyday.

I am reminded of the poem below, and its call to accountability for speaking out in solidarity, in the context of a larger war we all fight, however nuanced and heterogeneous each individual battle may be:

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

How do we learn to speak up and out with each other, and, as necessary, in times of silencing, for each other? How do we learn to let each other speak up and out for ourselves in ways that bolster our sense of community, rather than break it down? How do we learn to hear each other, amid the whirl and twirl of all our differences, smashing up against one another? Race differences, class differences, gender differences, spiritual and religious differences, national differences, differences in desire and sexuality, differences in ability and wellness, differences which so often separate us all and render us illegible to each other… How, for instance, can we each understand what it means to be an ally to each other across racial differences, in ways that must necessarily be different than what we hope for, ask for, from our white allies? How can we dive deeper into what solidarity can look like from Queer, cis-gendered POC folks, as allies to Transgendered POC folks, beyond the discourse of inclusion/exclusion? How do we make space to consider the infinitely diverse needs of our QTPOC communities, in a way that is sustainable, and not only fixing immediate problems, oversights, etc, but fights for intervention into larger systems that effect those needs? How do we learn to meet each other without obliterating our heterogeneities, and learn to create openings for possibility?

While I think it is important, so very important that more work is done on building and growing possibilities between ourselves and each smaller contingency “QTPOC community” is made up of, I believe that solidarity is never perfect. Cultures of accountability, within a white-influenced (very Bay Area, but definitely not only Bay Area) liberal moral milieu, can easily become cultures of accusation. This often results in us doing further violence to each other: by individualizing oppression, rather than addressing its structural hold on our everyday lives; by centering the work of justice through an ‘oppression olympics’ rather than a genuine desire to listen to each other and learn from each other and share in the work of refusing to let these systemic and systematic forces destroy each other and what potential love and healing and work of justice live between us, in the spaces between our lives, in the spaces where we converge.

And I’m not saying don’t get angry at each other. While I believe that sometimes, as allies, when we are in the position of being allies or wanting to be, we need to just actively listen and take it in, and apologize for the world that is violent and all the ways we can’t fix it, and commit to working as hard as ever, I don’t believe that it is any ally’s job to take all the blame or to allow forms of emotional abuse or projection to be masked as alliance. And being an ally doesn’t mean we don’t ever “fuck up”. Being an ally means we work hard, we own our privilege, we try, we fail, and get back up again to try harder.

But I am not saying don’t have it out. I don’t believe in white liberal notions of some utopic kumbaya-driven world peace. That notion has always felt to me like yet one more condescending, secularized-Christian, manifest destiny, bullshit paradigm of violence disguised as love, and I for one, am not falling for that shit. I’m not even saying we have to all like each other or get along.

I am saying, have it out in an effort at rendering the world and ourselves and communities in it, anew. I am saying we’ve got to show up for each other when the going gets rough. I am saying we’ve got to have each others’ backs in the larger battle, this battle that spans across space and time, which sometimes has us weary, and other times enlivened, but which we have all, in our varied ways, fought to survive within. And I am saying we can’t afford to let our rage shut us down. And we can’t afford to let our rage allow us to shut others down. When we shut each other down, we shut down possibilities for beautiful and powerful work of creativity and healing and justice to happen. When we shut each other down across or because of our differences, we limit the work that can be done, and we deny our communities valuable and rare resources that feed our needs for community, for critical thought, for art and music, for healing work, for racial justice and queer justice and so many other forms of justice. We can’t afford to be divided, because our survival is already a fight against the conquering of our histories, our subjectivities, our memory, our lifeblood, our relationships, our communities, our very sense of being in the world. (A read through histories of state ‘divide and conquer’ tactics between Black and Brown communities offers us poignant examples of the damage this can do, and has done, to our movements.)

We can’t be dumping the entirety of our rage about the whole universe—of racism or sexism or transphobia or homophobia or ableism… and every other phobia and ism—onto each other as individuals in an effort to place blame, to elicit confession and guilt from those we feel have sinned against us. And this is so much easier said than done. I know it is for me at times, especially in the face of pain experienced in response to words or actions, or the lack there of, coming from those we deem allies to our selves and struggles and movements. But I believe that amidst our differences, within our QTPOC communities, as well as stretching outside of them, we must see each other as necessary allies, and to see struggles for alliance and solidarity as never perfect, as deserving of a politicized rage, a tenacious rage, a fierce rage, as well as a fierce generosity that allows us to summon each other from a place of building more possibility, of invitation to think together, to learn together, to grow…

John Paul Sartre once wrote, “We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made us.” The work, the intense labor of solidarity and alliance, is, I believe, a vital component of such refusal. We cannot make our refusals in a vacuum, we cannot do it alone. From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs, we’ve got to take these bridges called our backs, and cross them, you and I both, and find each other on the other sides.

With love and solidarity,

Heidi Andrea

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Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes is a  U.S.-born and raised, Queer, Colombian, scholar, activist, and writer-artist living in San Francisco, California. Her work includes photography, advocacy research in Colombia and the U.S., prose and poetry, and performance. She is the singer in a group called “Casi Pájaros”, is a co-founder of FCQ! and a passionate advocate for social justice.

by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

_______________________________________________________

Dear Queers of Color,

It is by no bit of chance that we are here. We are, beyond doubt, fervent and tenacious survivors of a long, bloody and vicious battle- one of many- against the powerful, daunting, and violent forces of Hegemony, of Normalization, of History. History would not have wanted us here, it would have wanted to obliterate us, as it has many of our fallen. (And it is by no bit of chance that our fallen have fallen, for we are being systematically undone.) For centuries, those who came before us made their way through the thick and thin of it, vigorous and weary. I want to tell you that I am glad you are still here. I am glad you are still here. And I am glad I am still here. Because otherwise, among other things, there wouldn’t be moments like this to risk ourselves within. The world is a jagged place, and that we manage to survive it at all is often miraculous to me. I often think of Audre Lorde’s Litany For Survival. I am often awed that through all the centuries that have been architectured for the genocides of our ancestors, I, somehow, am here and You, somehow, are here. I think about those of us, differently raced and racialized, differently queered bodies, who fight tooth and nail and skin and bone and blood to just find a tiny little space in the world to breathe and love and feel freedoms on our skin and in our hearts in ways that so much of the world would not want us to~ and I am stunned that we are here, nonetheless, breathing, and loving, and creating powerful work, smiling to the sky, even if also, crying rivers from which we learn how to swim.

And I am enraged. I am enraged that we have been made to feel small in the world.

Will we ever learn, completely, wholly, through and through, to stop apologizing for who we are? 

Some of us apologize all the time for who we are, in very loving, self-deprecating humour – confessing with the jolly of forthcoming change, or desire for change, of our sad, alienated, lives in the soil of these United States. Our moralistic subjectivities which we fight tenaciously, our poorly educated intellects which evidence an America bent on an amnesiatic storying of the world and itself in it, infuriating us over the necessity of having to expend energies on learning what we should have been taught since our beginnings. We stand like anti-scouts, queer and tall,  some of us pledging our sincerest apologies for being products of the Reagan era, or for our monolingualisms, or for the blindnesses wrought upon us by our privileges, of skin, class, gender, or nation. And we try so hard to be something else, something less alienated, less violent. Something deconstructive and haunted and responsible and we apologise for failing again and again – if apology can also be read in the unflinching commitment to wake up tomorrow and try again. To give of ourselves, again. To tear open our chests and throw ourselves heart first, again and again, into the wide open terrain of struggle: for something else than this, for each other, for a justice that keeps us awake at night, and that we understand as possible, however interminably deferred.

         But these are not the manifestations, the acrobatics and elocutions of apologetics I am bringing into question. This dance, the fight to always be more for the world, I entirely condone with every particle of my being. No, it is something else I want to evoke here.

         In Colombia, where my family is from, homophobia not only lurks around any bend with an assaulting word or glare or fist or gun, but government-sanctioned programs for social cleansing, Limpiezas, have essentially, extrajudicially, mandated the elimination of particular kinds of queer bodies from the streets: the attempt- in this ‘totalitarian democracy’- at some wicked dream of a purified body politic. Moving through queer spaces both here and there, I look around me, and I think about the Limpiezas, the pinche fucking Limpiezas. I think about the world—a world, this world, chock fucking full of fucking Limpiezas, quiet and loud, and I think about all the different ways we meet the world everyday in the aim to survive-to survive the State, (for State brutality can be so undiscerning, and where it does discern, I fear that you and I are not of the type they would choose to spare. But then, that is in part why we are who we are)…to survive our families, our education, our health system, our economy and its poverties, our prisons, every system, every violence, every heartbreaking assault on our worth, …to survive, even, or also, ourselves… it is all one unbelievably, staggeringly, massive systemic and systematic Limpieza.

But where, I have been wondering, is the space to unapologetically love who we love, and be who we are, however heterogeneous to ourselves we may be day to day, hour to hour, breath to breath? How do we learn to walk through this world, rendering ourselves- skin and bone and heart and soul- completely and utterly unapologetic for having survived, for having remained or become that which a world would never have wanted us to be? How do we stop apologizing- for being queer, for not being white enough, for not being woman enough or man enough or Christian enough or productive enough or sufficiently bourgeois? When did it become so difficult, so challenging, so desperately frightening to claim our stake in what it is to be who we are and live what we live? Against the growing tide of normalization, as it rises and swells in great waves aimed at drowning us all; and against the security of an anaesthetized homogenization of the spirit- we must all fight hard, so hard. And I see us fight all the time, I do! Fighting to grow deep into our difference, completely and utterly unapologetically.

We must grow deep into our difference. We must vow, like Shange writes Cypress, to avenge our kin and kindred, living and dead, blood-lined, inherited, and otherwise, to avenge by way of refusal, by way of staking our claims, by way of following our dreams, by swearing to those who come into the world after us that the world shall not make us feel ugly, or useless, or dirty, or ashamed. That nobody, and no thing shall make us small. That we shall not be made to feel as though our skin is too dark; our speech or bodies or desire too crooked and staining; our rage or intellect or poetry too threatening; our dreams too ridiculous; our histories too long.  We must vow to survive, to thrive, in the always and never aloneness that is this curious hustle we call life.

We must grow deep into our difference. That, I believe, is where our magic is rooted. And we must fight! Always! Warriors of the hither and tither, we carry the past on our backs, the ghosts of places and times and histories: of genocides, and colonization, of revolutions as grand event and as small, intimate refusals- both memorialized and forgotten, whispering in our ears. We collectively conspire with the present, the dead and the living, with those here and absent, towards infinite and hopeful futures. With such resolve and contention, do we revolt, fists and words and passions in the air, holding tightly to our insistence against a violent order on which our politics rail, shouting “We shall not be tempered!!”

For this, and so much more, I am in love with you. You, dear Queers, dear fellow Queers of Color, I am in love with you, because you are so strange. You are exquisite. You are breathtaking. You are beautiful. We are powerful in ways we do and don’t yet see, and I am proud to be amongst you, to fight by your side.

Thank you for being you.

In solidarity,

h.

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Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes is a  U.S.-born and raised, Queer, Colombian, scholar, activist, and writer-artist living in San Francisco, California. Her work includes photography, advocacy research in Colombia and the U.S., prose and poetry, and performance. She is the singer in a group called “Casi Pájaros”, is a co-founder of FCQ! and a passionate advocate for social justice.