Queer Intentions

by Amelia Abraham

  ‘What about you, when do you use it?’

  ‘I use the vernacular but I don’t overuse it. I use it in moments that I feel it. It’s something I came into in my late teens. I grew with it, kind of, but it’s bits and pieces here and there.’

  ‘Why do you think ballroom culture is so borrowed from?’ I asked, simultaneously understanding that this was a huge, complex question, and having no doubt Kia would give me an answer.

  ‘It’s been happening over time, you know? But so many people have romanticized what ballroom is based on what they’ve seen in Paris Is Burning. It looks very glamorous – it is quite glamorous in its own way. It’s a lot about fantasy, about embodying who you feel you are, being able to express one piece of you for that night. Whether it’s a runway diva or a grandiose performer or a fashionable person, it gives you a chance to play, in a world where it sometimes feels like everything can be so serious.’

  I told her that a lot of my friends told me they experienced something similar when they did drag. It was easy to see the appeal.

  ‘And why do you think the culture of queer people of colour in particular is so appealing?’

  ‘I think it’s because black American people have so often been left with nothing that they’ve had to be very creative. This creativity, this language, these attitudes, these stories we carry, they become interesting to people who are not of colour, or people who have privilege. And when you come from a marginalized group of people, or from spaces where you don’t have as many opportunities, or situations where your economic background isn’t as affluent as others, or where you’re not accepted by your family, all these different things that queer people of colour have to go through, that’s what creates the best art. People fall in love with any romanticized struggle, and queer people of colour have struggled because they’re in two marginalized groups. I think people are attracted to that, the art that comes from the struggle.’

  As we carried on talking, Kia explained to me that while Madonna didn’t necessarily take credit for coming up with the concept of voguing, people still thought they were indebted to Madonna for it. ‘Because it was on the body of a white woman with the platform to put it in a big place in media and in history, people think voguing comes from her,’ said Kia. ‘I’ll say “vogue” and people will go “Madonna Madonna Madonna”. They don’t remember that Queen Latifah was one of the first people to put voguing in a video, or Jody Watley in “Still A Thrill”. But these are African American women. It’s about visibility – and who has the most of it.’

  ‘Couldn’t you say that, when it comes to language, or dance, it’s all bastardized?’ I asked, playing devil’s advocate: voguing itself had evolved from the Old Way to the New Way; one language was usually derived from another.

  ‘In this day and age you can’t say anyone owns anything,’ she conceded. ‘Voguing comes from poses in Vogue magazine. LaBeija comes from “beautiful” in Spanish. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy – a mirror image of something else. But there are so many influences in ballroom that ballroom has become its own thing. Borrowing will happen, it’s just the way it goes – the problem is when people aren’t getting credit where due.’ She gave the example of when big companies or brands co-opt trends from marginalized groups and take the credit, or when something is taken from a community and popularized – be it a fashion trend, a dance style, or a word – and the origin is forgotten.

  ‘At first braids, dreadlocks, hoop earrings, gold teeth and long nails are “ghetto”,’ Kia continued, understandably more pissed off now. ‘But then it slowly gets picked up and one person influences one person and suddenly it belongs to them [white people]. Especially in America. Black art in general, not just queer art, started so many of the most appealing forms – jazz, hip hop, R&B, blues, all this kind of stuff – and it all comes from pain. Hip hop started out of the South Bronx when they were literally burning down buildings and kids had no place or nothing to do, and kids started gangs, started fighting each other and all the other bullshit, but the music came out of it. Fighting became about dance forms, breaking, MC’ing, DJ’ing. And now that doesn’t really exist any more because it’s a commodity.’

  In other words, the sense of community or culture these things represent comes to be diluted. The appropriation or commodification ruins something pure – it’s a kind of colonization. Kia linked this process back to the very beginning of American culture: ‘It’s one of the biggest problems with this country,’ she sighed. ‘Christopher Columbus came over here and said, “This is my land now,” and that’s how this country works – off taking, stealing and appropriating: that’s our history. The entire foundation is based on taking what does not belong to you. Not only are things appropriated and stolen but we [people of colour] are written out of the history.’

  ‘So what’s the solution?’ I asked.

  In the age of social media, Kia pointed out, when anything pops up that feels exclusive or unrepresentative then, in her words, ‘your shit’s gonna be on blast’. Brands should be wary. But there was more that we could all do, she said: ‘It’s all about knowing your history and digging deeper.’

  ‘I suppose if people dig they might be pleasantly surprised by what they find.’

  ‘Exactly. Because the people that take and don’t make things their own might get the credit, but the people who don’t will always be the creatives, the trailblazers, the true avant garde.’

  I agreed. But the problem was, when it came to the people who pioneered ballroom, most of this true avant garde weren’t around any more to claim credit where due. Many had succumbed to HIV, homelessness, or homophobic and transphobic violence. Pepper LaBeija died from complications related to diabetes in 2003. Willi Ninja died from AIDS-related heart failure in 2006. Meanwhile, Paris Is Burning lives on via Netflix and RuPaul’s Drag Race appears to be immortal. The language of ballroom permeates memes across the Internet and circulates the globe. Some people see this as a beautiful thing, others as a travesty. But while we could never all agree, one thing was clear: that when it came to the mainstreaming of queer culture, certain people were forgotten.

  Much of what had been sanitized and corporatized came from spaces of collective safety and support that arose out of desperate situations. When Kia described ballroom houses as ‘self-sustaining, underground communities of queer black and brown folks’, what she meant was that they provided safety to people who may not even be safe in their homes, or, for that matter, even have a home. Appropriating from ballroom meant cherry-picking the good parts of a culture and community of poor black and Latino queer people with none of the risk that came with those politicized identities. Madonna might have sung the words ‘It makes no difference if you’re black or white / If you’re a boy or a girl’ in the song ‘Vogue’, but whatever her intentions, the fact was, it did matter. Or, as Kia aptly put it, the reality for many of these people ‘wasn’t always that fabulous’ – for every bit of visibility for queer people, there was and still is someone that is invisible; for every fabulous moment, one when your life could be thrown into danger.

  With this in mind, on my last day in New York I decided to pay the NYC Anti-Violence Project a visit. The organization had a simple goal: creating a world where all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, HIV positive people and their allies are free from violence. Not so simple was trying to achieve it.

  The AVP started up in 1980, in response to violent homophobic attacks on gay men in Chelsea (a predominantly gay neighbourhood in New York), but today they aimed to look after all sections of the community. From their base, a modest floor of office space on a small street a couple of blocks away from One World Trade Center, where Meredith worked, they offered a twenty-four-hour bilingual hotline, legal advice, counselling and support groups, and organized community outreach and educational programmes. They also produced reports on the state of violence towards LGBTQ+ people in America, which could be used to lobby local and national governments (theoretically,
at least) to implement protections.

  Before my meeting, I sat in a Starbucks around the corner and read some of their reports on my phone. One of the most recent was an emergency report, released in August 2017. NCAVP (a national coalition of around fifty LGBTQ+ organizations coming together under the banner of AVP to share vital information) had found, despite being less than eight months into the year, the highest annual level of anti-LGBTQ+ homicides on record in their twenty-year history of tracking the information. After August, I read, the problem had continued to worsen, and we now know that in 2017, there were fifty-two hate murders of LGBTQ+ people in America. That’s the equivalent of one a week. And those were just the ones that were registered; it is likely there were more. Of the 2017 deaths, 71 per cent were people of colour, 67 per cent were thirty-five years old and under, and 42 per cent were trans women and femmes of colour. It was no coincidence that these demographics largely described the people who had found refuge in the ballrooms that Kia and I had talked about.

  I climbed the stairs and waited in reception for AVP staff member LaLa Zannell. When I had looked her up on Twitter I saw that her bio read: ‘Goddess, Mother, Lead Organizer #LaLa4President’ (the last part, after having met her, I would definitely get behind). She appeared, shook my hand, and led me to her office, explaining on the way that she was a community organizer, meaning she did activism work through AVP but also on her own, particularly working to empower and inspire trans people, as well as trying to create broader shifts in cultural consciousness.

  ‘What kind of shifts?’ I asked, as we sat down.

  ‘Conversations with LGBT parents, conversations with black men about masculinity, or with men who consider themselves to be trans attracted, to create supportive spaces for them.’ LaLa reeled off these points as if the work wasn’t as important as it was, as if she was describing any old job – but I guessed that was because she’d seen it all.

  ‘At AVP I do a lot of outreach, getting people to our services, to learn about our programming,’ she continued. ‘I have two community action groups here. One of them works on the trans economic empowerment campaign, so we had a survey to collect information on employment discrimination of TGNC [trans and gender non-conforming] New Yorkers to create analysis on why, particularly, trans women of colour can’t seem to get employment here in New York City, why with all the policies we have here folks still aren’t being able to access jobs. I’m about to finish up the TGNC leadership academy, where we taught a group of eight how to get involved in policy or get further education or internships. Paid internships,’ she added proudly.

  Over the next twenty minutes, LaLa told me what she could of her story. She was from Detroit, Michigan. She’d been working at AVP for five or six years. She moved to New York City from Atlanta, where she had been working in a Starbucks and experiencing a lot of discrimination around being trans. She wanted a fresh start; her income wasn’t panning out the way it should and she didn’t want to wind up homeless in Atlanta, where she knew they didn’t have a shelter that would feel safe for her. A friend told her to come to NYC – they had insurance, different services for trans women, things were easier to navigate if you were in that in-between situation. But she wasn’t ready to commit to a shelter, so when she arrived in the city, she ended up getting back with an ex-partner. The situation soon turned violent, and she wasn’t sure how to get out of it, until a friend encouraged her to go to a centre called the Female Spectrum, run by a woman called Cristina Herrera from the Translatina Network.

  Here LaLa was around trans people, but she still didn’t fit in – they were older, had transitioned later in life. She had transitioned at fifteen. They were a little more privileged; they already had jobs, money, things she didn’t have. But they did tell her about AVP, where she set up a meeting with a counsellor to talk about her predicament. That meeting would change everything for LaLa. It was the first time in a long time that someone seemed to actually care about her and be in a position to help. ‘When you’re a trans woman of colour, the chances of people really caring seem slim to none,’ she said. But they were putting words to what was going on with her: the abusive relationship, the discrimination that had happened when she’d been in work, and most importantly, they told her that there were things she could do about it. Her first reaction, she said, was ‘Wow’; she just wanted more trans people to know about AVP, and to have access. They helped her get into a safe shelter, and she ended up volunteering with the charity as a hotline counsellor, then joined as an intern, then got a job at the front desk. From there she moved up to Anti-Hate Violence Organizer, and then Community Organizer. She’s also spoken at the White House – twice – and testified for Congress. ‘I guess you could say there have been a lot of transitions along the way,’ she joked. ‘People reached out to me for help, so it just became my life.’

  Like Kia, LaLa used to be involved with ballroom culture. She compared what AVP gave her to what that experience gave her: community. ‘The best part of the job is coming to work with people who understand you and trying to create a world without violence. When you’re able to help people – get them in a shelter, get them a protection order, get them a U visa [for victims of crimes who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are willing to assist in their investigation and prosecution] – that’s the good part of the job.’

  ‘What’s the bad part?’ I asked tentatively.

  ‘The bad part is when I come to work and a trans woman has been killed. Nine times out of ten I know the person. I’ve lost lots of friends throughout my life but more so the last few years – or I find friends of mine calling me to get support because it was their friend they lost. When it’s someone you personally know, it’s harder, but then it’s also the ones people don’t know, that don’t have the community or don’t have the support to try to find some recourse to what has happened. The bad part is knowing that when I come to work I’m gonna hear about the pains, the violence, the inter-partner violence, the sexual violence, the police violence, the hate violence, and trying to balance when to feel and not to feel so you can continue to move in the work, to numb what’s going on personally as a trans person or a black woman. The emotional labour is high in the workplace; you never get used to it.’

  When I thought about the nature of the crimes LaLa was dealing with, I couldn’t comprehend how she went to work every day. Especially as they weren’t just violent assaults on a life but violent assaults on a certain kind of life – a trans life, her life. Not only that, but she’d experienced attacks herself. ‘I’d been in fights and scuffles in my neighbourhood in Detroit, nothing to do with me being trans,’ she told me. ‘But blatantly being attacked for me being trans? I didn’t experience that till I moved to New York City, and I was so shocked cause it was not like any other fight I’d had in my life. It wasn’t even a fight like when I was fighting with my ex-partner. It was clearly a hatred of a life. I felt like they were trying to take me out – and I had to fight literally for my life. It felt different. I felt that hate first-hand.’

  I had never experienced what LaLa was talking about, but I began to understand the severity of the hate when I waded through the gory details of the kinds of murders she was dealing with. The website for the Transgender Day of Remembrance attempts to keep a record of all trans people who are murdered. For the years 1970 to 2012, a Google Doc listed more than seven hundred murders globally. You could see the nature of the crime, the brutality of the killings: mutilations, beheadings, dismembering, faces disfigured, genitals removed and discarded in dumpsters. For 2017, around two hundred and fifty deaths were listed, most in Mexico or Brazil.

  Scanning this website, or reading about murders of trans people in the news, it didn’t take long to realize how frequent the killings were, the scale of the violence trans people faced. In the first week of 2017 alone, two trans women were killed in America: Jamie Lee Wounded Arrow, a two-spirit woman living in South Dakota, followed by Mesha Caldwell in Mississippi. In February 2017
, two transgender women were killed in New Orleans within forty-eight hours: one shot, the other stabbed. Another trans woman was killed in Louisiana a week before, bringing the state total up to three people in one fortnight.

  The perpetrators are mostly male. Some victims were killed by strangers, like gender-fluid teenager Kedarie Johnson, who sometimes went by Kandicee, murdered at the age of sixteen in Burlington, Iowa. Others were killed by lovers or friends, such as Ally Lee Steinfeld, a seventeen-year-old transgender woman who was found dead in a chicken coop in Missouri in September 2017. She’d had her remains set alight by a woman she had been dating, who had conspired with her roommates to murder her. Others were killed by cops, such as the twenty-one-year-old Georgia Tech student Scout Schultz, who identified as non-binary and was shot by police while experiencing a mental-health crisis, following two previous suicide attempts. Or Sean Hake, one of three trans men whose murders AVP logged in 2017, who was twenty-three when he was shot by police during a mental-health episode. When I combed the news stories of these particular killings, I noticed that all of the victims were younger than me.

  What was tricky when it came to tracking all of these crimes with the AVP, said LaLa, was how often trans people were misgendered after their own murder, their name wrongly reported, or their lived gender dismissed in favour of their legal gender, which might not have been changed. When LaLa lived in Detroit, she said, she saw girls go missing ‘all the time’, but if there was any discussion of it in the news, it often wasn’t in a way that was respectful to that person’s gender. Of the trans people killed in 2017, several were misgendered. This made things difficult for the AVP, who had to spot the relevant murders in the news in order to know about them, since there was no central database where law enforcement departments around America were required to report these crimes. While there were a handful of trans people visible on magazines, walking down catwalks and writing newspaper columns, these trans people’s lives and deaths were not just largely invisible to society, but to the organizations actually looking for them.