round-up: 10/26
updates, resources, recs, quotes, etc.
Happy hump day, all.
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
Love letters
Resources
To read
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
Just a reminder that I’m always happy to take suggestions re: this newsletter—if you have any questions, or want me to address something in particular, please feel free to reach out via email (you can respond to this email directly!) or, if you prefer, via this forum. I don’t know everything but would be glad for us all to learn together.
Also!!!!
I’ll be selling a bunch of fun stuff at a vintage market in Berkeley on Sunday. Please come if you live in the Bay Area!
I’ve started to get back into translation lately.
It’s so hard. And I’m having fun.
& I am once again thinking about ethics.
What else is new?
I’ve talked about my issues with some journal/press practices in the past:
& also on the level of the individual:
Love letters:
I love y’all. Thanks for being nice to me. I cherish you.
Resources:
To read:
Quotations:
I sometimes think that a bigger part of my queer identity than my gender or sexuality is the deep importance that chosen family has in my life and its inextricability with my survival and thriving. Finding chosen family or kin was a very early impulse in my life, and in my adolescence making these connections absolutely kept me alive.
I wanted to be in a place where networks of care existed and where I could also reciprocate that care and grow older with people with whom I had a lot in common and who would accept me.
Not seeing people like me represented anywhere in media or art until I was an adult was harmful and alienating.
The portraits defy the binary; the figurative front of the embroidery is interdependent on the abstract back. They are the same piece—one object—and one would not exist without the other. So, we get to have both: representation of queer and trans people that is vital, and the understanding that there is much more to our “selves” and our identities than just our physical bodies. The figurative representation is contained in the physical, but the abstraction on the other side is messy, chaotic, and beautiful. Oftentimes this chaos of threads that forms organically feels like a more accurate portrait of my friends and is one that I embrace—and they embrace this too.
Stormé at Stonewall (2019) simultaneously mined the archive and critiqued the formation of narrative in the present. In 2016, the New York Times published a very poorly written article on Stonewall becoming a national monument that only credited gay men for the Stonewall Uprising. A few days later the Times issued a very passive-aggressive correction that begrudgingly stated that there was “at least one lesbian” present at Stonewall and “not just gay men.” Soon after the “correction” was issued, the New York Times added some very important trans revolutionaries, such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, but Stormé still did not surface. Ironically, the New York Times published a beautiful obituary on Stormé only two years earlier in 2014. Stormé at Stonewall worked to visibilize and honor Stormé, to face her erasure and then to illuminate her. Stormé was a remarkable person in queer, trans, US, and world history with a huge list of accomplishments, of which Stonewall was just one, imbued with fierceness and generosity. I wanted to bring her into the room as a ghost and guardian who was still very present.
Tweets:
That’s all for today. Hope you’re having a great week!
Please buy things so that I can pay my rent. Love you.