So, to support the strange mood I'm in, I'm listening to Amy Ray's "Laramie", which is a song about Matthew Shepard, who was killed in Laramie, Wyoming because he was gay. I was also reading a passage from Leslie Feinberg's Drag King Dreams a little while ago. I read the part about the funeral of a good friend of the main character (Max) named Vickie. She was a cross-dresser, and she was murdered.
"I was the last friend to", I hesitate, "to be with Vickie. Just before she got on the train to leave me, she asked me a simple question. She asked me where I live in relation to where we were standing. I told her it wasn't far, just a few blocks away.
"But I've gone over and over that question in my mind since her death--thinking about where I live in relation to her life. And now I wish I could go back to that moment and answer her differently."
Everyone in the church is watching me. It's so quiet in the room.
"I live in Jersey City on a corner where two streets meet: Maple and Birch. I'm on Maple when I'm in my living room, and Birch when I eat my breakfast. Across from my window I can look out and see the skyline of Manhattan. Most days I spend more hours on that side of the Hudson River than I do in Jersey.
"But as I kept hearing Vickie's question in my head, I began to dig deeper. And the more I searched, the more I discovered that I live where flesh has been torn and scars still bleed. And scars are memories.
"I discovered that I live on top of a seam of pulverized rock that may be the wound where Africa and North America tore apart 220 million years ago. It's a giant geographical scar where red-hot magma bled, and when it cooled, it rose to form the precipice on which I live.
I live on land where, just a few hundred years ago, the Lenni-Lenape still hunted in the forests. Their blood, spilled by settlers, still drenches the soil. And a short walk from my apartment is a small, overgrown park where the end of slavery was first announced in my town. All around that little park today live people who still yearn for freedom.
That one simple question Vickie asked me just before her death led me to feel connected to this past. To see how it shapes my present. I'm lost until I figure out where I live in relation to others.
But my relationship to Vickie, that was hard for me to figure out. Vickie was the kind of person other people just couldn't help but respect. She was so principled. So clear in her political vision. I loved that about her. And I loved her as a friend. But deep down, I never felt a connection with her as a cross-dresser.
"Which you might think would be the most obvious." I look down at my own suit and tie, "because so am I.
"But Vickie and I weren't the same kind of cross-dressers. She was fluent in two gendered languages. That's how she conveyed who she was. But this is the only way I articulate who I am."
Estelle nods, head still down.
I take a deep breath. "I regret my last interaction with Vickie. I saw her going home to a good job, to someone who adored her."
Estelle looks up at me, yearning for more information, her hands tightly clasped in her on her lap.
"And in that instant, jealously flared up in me because I thought that she could just take off her wig and her dress and move through the world another way--a way I thought of as closeted. But it takes to pronouns to even approximate Vickie's life. And she wasn't just half and half of anything. She was trying to be understood for the whole of who she was.
"Now I wish that Vickie could ask me again, once more, where I live. I would tell her: I live at the intersection of oppression. And you and I were neighbors. The same sky above us. The same earth. The same red blood, metalic tasting on our tongues. You lived under the sun. I live under the moon. I was sometimes envious that you could walk in the daylight, welcomed by smiling strangers. And I wasn't a very good neighbor sometimes. For that, I am truly sorry, Vickie.
"My aunt Raisa taught me an old Sephardic Jewish proverb: Dime con quien conoscas, te dire quien sois--Tell me who you know; I'll tell you who you are."
My voice cracks. "I knew Vickie."
Part of my Extended Literary Analysis that I wrote for my English class was about this book. I compared a relationship in Feinberg's other novel, Stone Butch Blues, with another relationship from Drag King Dreams. But the relationship that I used from Drag King Dreams was not this one. Now I kind of wish it had been.
Maybe it wasn't the fact that I wanted to do some physical activism today that made me listen to "Laramie" and read this passage from Drag King Dreams. Perhaps, instead, it was the song and the part in the book that evoked passion from me. It may sound strange, but hearing that song and reading the words in Feinberg's latest masterpiece make me want to fight for the person that Vickie was based upon, because even if Feinberg didn't personally know anyone who was a cross-dresser and killed like Vickie was, I made the promise when I became an activist to avenge the members of my Chosen Family who die at the hands of people who despise the GLBT community, not just to do my best to love and protect the ones who are still alive.
2 comments:
elliot, You constantly impress me with the education you are giving yourself, the people you connect with, the reading you do, the thinking. No doubt you will do real good in this world.
Thank you, Peterson. That really means a lot, coming from such an accomplished, brave warrior as yourself who also happens to be a great friend of mine.
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