calamity's child

This is an excerpt from a work by my good friend Ariel ”Speedwagon” Federow, which she performed recently at the “Pre-Tax” Benefit for ACT UP at Dixon Place. It’s a brilliant piece of work, about the legacy we are living into as young(er) queers in NYC, about the fights we are waging, about the impact of the epidemic on our queer lives and histories, and about all those who have gone before us. It is a worthwhile, and important read.

Listing the martyrs is so easy. They are static and behind us. It is harder to engage with the people who are here not as myths but as complicated realities. I want to honor the people who I have learned from, whose cigarettes I have smoked, ideas I have wrestled with, and work I have seen. These people are here, and exist despite a tragedy the depth of which I feel almost disrespectful trying to talk about. I can’t imagine the world as it might have been if all of those people did not die. Instead I have the people who lived, who got kicked down into the literal shit of the people they loved, and got up and didn’t just keep walking but kicked back. I don’t want to idolize them, or romanticize them, or write them into legend because better than romance is offering respect. Instead of a myth, I want to write a thank-you note.

See the full text here:  Instead of a Myth…

A quick note about Visual AIDS, the site that this work is up on: Visual AIDS is an awesome organization that uses arts to fight the epidemic by producing and presenting visual arts to provoke dialogue, support HIV+ artists, and preserve a legacy, because the epidemic is not over.  Know them and love them: they do amazing work.

I’m on the B, on my way into work this morning. I had forgotten I’d put Whitney on my ipod: the greatest love of all came on.

My gramma listened to the soft rock and power ballads station. My musical life at her house was the Beatles, Elton John, Boston, and Whitney, to name some. We would sit at the dining room table, me doing homework or coloring or reading and always singing under my breath, her needlepointing Renoir replicas* or reading. We would talk intermittently, stop for meal preparation, sometimes I’d get bored and go to my grampa who was inevitably at his computer with the local jazz station playing.

This morning, maybe there was something about the light in the train that reminded me of her home in Spokane. Or maybe I caught the right phrase at the right time, but there was a lyric, a breath, a pause, and then my heart broke again.

My gramma died on April 19, 2004. I miss her madly all the time, but more in these weeks leading up to her yarzheit than ever. I mark her yartzheit not on the lunar calendar, because she was not Jewish. But it is right to honor the dead. With lights and prayers and memories and heartbreak years after the fact, reminding me that mourning is never really done. It just becomes part of me, healing over as a scar, becoming part of my skin and bones and daily life.

So singing along to Whitney this morning, this song is for you, Shirley. May your memory be a blessing.

———

* Really, my gramma did this. She also made needlepoint replicas of blue and white china patterns and British tapestries. Because she’s British, and apparently this is what my people do.

this interview, from queer gnosis, is a fantastic read. roseanne has long been an idol (is that the right word? who even knows) of mine. she’s brazen, her show was the only one on tv when i grew up that had a family that looked and felt like mine, she’s sassy. i wanted to be as unapologetic as her when i grew up. wanted to know that even if people looked at me and thought “poor. that person is poor.” i would be able to look them right in the face, say something sassy, and keep on walking.

i love reading her, reading about her, as an adult. she is a little full of crazy, a lot full of judaism, and even more full of radical vision and sass. i could only hope that i’m as awesome as her as i get older.

TW: I look back on my life and I wonder how I became a raging leftist, and I remember as a teenager watching Roseanne Conner standing up to her boss and walking out of Wellman Plastics. That had a huge impact.

RB: I was hoping it would.  I raised this generation and now I must command them.

http://queergnosis.com/2011/01/16/roseannearchy-the-roseanne-barr-interview/

so, it’s been a minute. since my last post, i have gotten in my second bike accident since moving to philly & broken my humerus. 2 surgeries later, and i’ve both had pins in my arm and had them removed. i’m just barely back to using two hands, now, so i can type again. hence, i’m back.

i am reading heidegger right now, his book poetry, language, thought. i only just started to be interested in aesthetics when i was in grad school. i remember taking a nietzsche class in my undergrad, which completely transformed how i understand ontology, history, and the nexus of things that xian theologians call “the economy of salvation” (grace, redemption, the project of being a living human being, “sin,” and responsibility). it was through that class that i finally had some structure through which i could talk about wanting the locus of responsibilty for human being, in all its greatness and all its terribleness, to be on human being itself, not on god.

the thing with nietzsche is, he’s a poet. the point of his writing is partly the things that he’s saying – his intent – but just as important is his style. he uses fiction, aphorisms, and allusions to make his important points. and so i became interested in aesthetics. just a little bit. just in little inklings. not so much in the way where i want to talk about art history or what makes a beautiful piece of art technically, but in the way where i want to talk about what is art, what makes it, what’s its ontology and it’s place in the order of the universe, what does it do, what is its source?

the fascinating thing about reading this heidegger book is that, through it, i am beginning to see that my interest in aesthetics and my interest in theology, specifically in the economy of salvation, are the same. i am interested in: how do we identify a Thing With Meaning (for example: human being, art, god)? what does its meaning do? where does it come from? what is its source? what does the thing do in the world? is it separate from its author? does it matter? how does it fundamentally change/challenge/alter/confuse/question the structure of the world in which it lives? is it a part of the world in which it lives? does it just happen or is it made? how do you know it when you see it?

i am excited to read more and try to sort this out in my brain more. i want to see more clearly this connection that my brain is making, between aesthetics (especially w/in phenomenology in the lineage of nietzsche and heidegger) and christian ontologies and the economy of salvation. i think there’s something really compelling here, and i want to be able to see it and say it.

the thing is, i’m fascinated with this topic not because of the xianity, but because this is part of how i see revolution. the most compelling thing about nietzsche, for me, is that he really really really believed that people are capable of anything. that we are locked in cycles of history, and if we want redemption, we have to see our lives for what they are and make the changes that we want to make. willing that to happen is revolutionary. and so, seeing aesthetics in christian theology & the economy of salvation, is actually part of this larger process of de-centering jesus as the sole figure on whom the redemption of the world hinges (in the modern, christian, colonizing/ed west). what would it look like to make a process of making art in the place of jesus? if we do that, how do we decide what counts as the art we mean? what are the ethical and ontological effects? not only to people, but to everything. that’s what i’m after here.

i have started to work at the queer kids’ drop in center in philadelphia, and it’s amazing. a lot of the people with whom i work there are publicly religious – like, public about their religious beliefs. a lot of them are christian and muslim, and then smaller numbers are jewish or pagan/witchy/hippy woo. one of the staff members is thinking about putting together a series on homosexuality and religious beliefs, and has asked me to help her/be in the series.

when i was a christian, in seattle, i organized these events all the time. when i was a candidate for ordained ministry in the united methodist church (which does not ordain “self-avowed and practicing homosexuals”), i put on a panel discussion on christianity and homosexuality. one of the panel members was a person from metanoia ministries, which is part of exodus international, the main christian ex-gay movement. at one point in the evening, she looked at me directly, and asked me if i was queer. we were in public; i had already been clear about the risk queers pursuing ordination faced. it terrified me, to be in a space that i had constructed, in which ground rules had been set, to be singled out like that.

i am excited to help put on this series. i know a lot more now and am clearer on how to put things together that won’t put me personally at risk; i wonder about whether or not putting this on will put any of the youth at risk. will we inadvertantly ask people who are members of worshipping communities of which they are a part? one thing that i know for sure is that i don’t want to ask people who are not already supportive. we can get enough input about homophobic and transphobic religious perspectives from the people we invite to be part of this discussion who are religious & invested in supporting queer & trans youth.

the other thing about this series is that my friend who’s the staff member/primary organizer of it mentioned wanting me to be on the series, too. so i’ve been thinking about that. i do know an awful lot about christian theology and what’s going on there. i also am starting to think more and more about my position as a former christian who’s just trying to figure out a faithful path in this world (not a xian faithful path, but a faithful to myself and whatever sense of divinity i can figure out). i think that there is a bunch of stuff i can say about that, but it feels so unstructured. i don’t know how to call it in a series. septa’s motto is “we’re getting there” and that’s all i can think about regarding my spiritual path. i don’t even know where i’m getting, though. just that i’m going somewhere.

similarly, one of my friends who is in seminary in philadelphia and i started talking about organizing an interfaith retreat for radicals who are or who have trained for religious/theological leadership, to talk about what we do, our senses of isolation, what we’re thinking about, how we live our lives. i am eager to put this on.

if you had asked me a year ago if i thought i would ever put on another event or retreat for people of faith, i would have laughed at you. i have proven myself so wrong, and i am so thankful for it.

i grew up in spokane, washington, the second largest city in washington state. except that it’s surrounded by the palouse and the other by what leads, slowly, into the desert. spokane is a little urban island that has never quite moved out of the mid twentieth century. i grew up, largely, in an environment in which the cold war had not yet ended. we knew what to do in the event of an air raid. the city’s predominant white, working class to middle class inhabitants have worked hard at maintainting the bubble of white supremacy that keeps them supposedly “safe.”

more importantly here, that culture of self-protection, which fueled the length of the cold war’s threat in spokane and still fuels the illusive “safety” of white supremacy, tied absolutely into a pervasive cultural christianity. i went to public school: we prayed there. my earliest friendly debates in high school were about whether or not (1) you could be feminist and christian; (2) homos were damned to hell; and (3) abortion is murder. i established myself firmly as the only liberal christian in my high school, but still: i took a virginity pledge, i prayed at the pole with the rest of my high school, i went to young life and to young life camp, i bowed my head before our orchestra and band performances, led in prayer by our conductor.

as i reflect on this formative spirituality as an adult, i’m freaked out by the melding of faith and education in my public school. i’m equally freaked out by the absolute equation of patriotism, ethical living, and christian faith and practice in my hometown. i’m also struggling not to be surprised that, in a brief perusal of myspace, four of my closest friends in high school (including myself) have been through theological education and/or committed themselves to theological education or christian missions. more broadly than that, most people from my graduating class identify themselves as christian; at least another 10 people in my graduating class have also been through theological education of some sort. this seems outrageously high to me. except on reflection of the environment in which we grew up.

my 10 year high school reunion will be next summer. i’ve struggled since i left spokane, about whether or not i want to go to it. more importantly, i’ve struggled since i came out as a trans person about whether or not it’s safe for me to go to it. but part of me, too, wants to have conversations with these people. what makes theology so important to you? why do you do what you do? don’t you think it’s weird that so many of us have taken this path? i wish that there was another person who had politics similar to mine to analyze some of this with. the closest there is the boy who tried hard to convince me of the sinfulness of homosexuality in high school; he’s now out, and has gone to the methodist schools that were always in the running for me. clearly we’re more on the same page than anyone else in our graduating class.

what is it about small-town isolation that breeds this kind of defensive, insular, patriotic christianity? and what does it do, really, to the young people who grow up in it? how is it that i, in my athiest family, ended up in church, with a faithful christian practice? and that, through my theological education and finding my way out of christianity, i can’t shake the call of ritual practice, faith, and devotion in my life? is it possible to start conversations with these people about these experiences, shared across lives that are so very, very different from each other?

I’ve recently started taking classes with a new teacher, Joan White, who’s a teacher in the Iyengar tradition of Hatha Yoga. This yoga is new to me, though I like it better than Ashtanga. I’m still learning what it’s all about.

Anyway. We were doing a lot of pelvic opening poses in class on Thursday, and at one point, we were just sitting there with our legs askew and she started talking about differences in flexibility and hypothesizing that adults who are tight in their groins might have heard “no” a lot in their childhoods.

I don’t really buy all that – that all young people who experience x manifest it as y in their adulthood, or that people who don’t then experience x are more open, more flexible, whatever. However, the larger point stuck with me – young people who are shouted at or neglected store that negative energy in their body somewhere, and it will have to manifest at some point in our lives. So I spent my time in our poses thinking about where some movements are easy for me and some movements are hard. Wide-angled sitting forward bends, as well as sitting forward bends themselves, and standing split-legged poses (like warrior three or airplane or the one where instead of having your arms up like in wIII or airplane, you have one arm on the ground and one in the air or any of those derivative poses) are all TERRIFICALLY hard for me. my pelvis seizes up and it’s really painful, in a way that isn’t true for other poses, including standing forward bends, triangle pose, and the lunge pose in which you come down on your forearms on the inside of the forward leg.

I wonder what it is I am storing in my groin, because I know there’s something there. And I *did* grow up in a home in which I was both neglected and yelled at. I am pretty familiar with how that effected my self-esteem and body image directly, but haven’t really spent a lot of time examining how all that interacts with how I move my body in yoga and the kind of release work that I have before me.

I get really scared when people do this thing where an equation is made between some specific kind of trauma and its manifestation in adult lives. It’s so easy then for people to talk about how people “overcome the misery of their past” or whatever nonsense. I’m not interested. When my groins open up, it will be interesting and exciting, and I’ll be thankful for the extra space, but it will not be an overcoming; it will be a claiming of myself and my body, yet again. Not in the face of struggle, but through and because of and with struggle. I hate it when people can’t see the struggle as part of the beauty. I know that my tight groins are related to a lot of emotional processes in my life, but I also know that the opening of my groin will not correspond with a healing of the stuff whatever is blocking me up. Those struggles will always be part of my life, thoguh pieces of them will heal, shift, break open again, or move on to a different part of my body. I’m learning to be okay with that; I’m learning to co-exist with struggle that emerge out of my family and to not try to heal them, cover them up, deny them, or pretend they can ever be anything other that what they are. It might not be pretty, but it’s the family and life that I have. I want to be able to be proud of it, and proud of myself in it and because of it. But I have a long way to go.

it’s been almost two years since i last posted here, and i’ve determined that now is a good time to start up again. i’m in a completely different place, though, and i’m sure that while some themes from the past will re-emerge, there will also be a whole host of things that are unique to where i’m at now.

some of the things that are capturing my imagination these days: tarot, astrology, juvenile fiction, libraries and information access, law libraries and legal reference, eschatological questions in a non-theistic context, liberation and justice-making, depression and loneliness, and family. i don’t know that i’ll write about all that, but it’s more than an adequate starting place.

mostly, this is just so that i make sure i’m writing again. everything was better when i was writing often. i want to try to write 2-3 times a week, ideally. we’ll see how it goes.

to start with: some thoughts on food.

i grew up poor and working class. we never really had enough food in our house. throughout high school, we would only ever have scraps of things: cereal and no milk, tortillas with nothing but margarine to put in them, cans of vegetables with no protein to go with them. i got through that phase of my childhood eating canned cream of mushroom soup with noodles in it and “fajitas” that i would make out of frozen vegetables, refried beans, tortillas, and cheese (when we had those things). otherwise, i worked at taco bell, so i got food there, and i made sure to go to friends’ houses a lot. i think that’s also when i started eating out a lot, since i had a job, i had some money to spend. i bought groceries to round out what we needed at home, and also did what i could to stay out of my house as much as possible.

but here i am, 10 years later, and i am still stuck in the same eating habits. i confronted this squarely last week, when i realized that i hadn’t really eaten anything fresh in two weeks, my housemate and i hadn’t been grocery shopping in as long, and i was still reeling from a conversation about food politics with some friends over, dinner. conversations about food politics have always been touch-and-go for me. i inevitably leave them feeling judged because i’m not “choosing to prioritize” health food. the “choosing to prioritize” piece feels to me no different from the familiar mantra surrounding poverty – people choose to be poor. if folks just chose to work harder, put more effort in, etc., then there would be better jobs and more money. if i just chose to eat healthy, everything would be better (for the earth, for my body, for organic farmers, etc.)

the thing is, if i learned anything from my 5 years as a vegetarian in high school and college, i learned that it is not that simple. being vegetarian was stressful for my relationship with my family. all of the sudden i had these dietary requirements that were *absolutely* classed. my family, we buy what’s on sale (this is a different, though similarly economically located, family then the one that i grew up in: this is my dad and step-mom and her three kids, plus my sister. i didn’t live with them, but they’re the people that i continue to build and struggle with re: family and class). cheap and healthy, often on-the-go, though there are weekly family dinners (whenever they can be managed). my eating didn’t make sense to them. there was never really anything around that felt good to eat, and it definetly feed into the seemingly apparent class division i was making between them and me. it didnt’ feel good. i didn’t feel healthy. and i couldn’t really afford to be vegetarian, either. between being in school full time, working three jobs, and church work i was doing, i couldn’t come home and cook, so i was constantly eating ready-made vegetarian meals, which are astronomically expensive.

so, inevitably in these conversations, i reach a place where people tell me that it’s just about what you choose to value, and i have to wonder, how much is it really about that? i mean, i theoretically value eating well. it’s only at this point in my life that i really have the leisure time and extra money to do so. and that’s going to do the same thing to class dynamics in my relationship with my family, as far as i can tell. this will be something that will never be easy or clear for me, and it will never just be about what i value: it will always feel to me like i’m betraying my family, and conversations about food in which people can’t imagine all the possible class implications break my heart.