“Symbols of Resistance: an Exhibition Celebrating the Convergence of Black Artists and their Stories” opened on the first day of Black History Month, and will be on display at Galerie Mile-End until February 28. The exhibition is the culmination of the Montreal Black Artists-in-Community Residency, a twelve week residency created in response to the lack of spaces and opportunities for Black artists to make and showcase their work. The residency provided space for eight Black artists to develop work centred on Black identity, to engage with, and to create for and with their communities. The artists interweave their own personal stories with the histories of their communities and ancestors. The theme of resistance was common to all of the artists: resistance expressed through the everyday and ordinary aspects of Black life, self-care, hair-care, textiles, and head wraps. These artists centred their work around Black identity by reclaiming history from erasure and (re)creating their own archives.

At the vernissage on February 1, we heard from Annick MF — one of the organizers — and from all of the artists about their work. We welcome you into the magic of the evening through their words below.

Annick: For those of you that don’t know, this was an exhibition that came out of a 12 week residency, and the goal is to also take this artwork on tour for a year. One of the things that we felt is that often these conversations are only held around Black History Month, like “Oh, this is the nice time to talk about Black folks,” and then it’s like, “Oh, they just don’t exist anymore.” So we want to make sure that this conversation goes on further, and that Black artists have opportunities long term, so we’re trying to take this artwork on tour. If you know anyone who wants some art and has money [laughter], they can holla at us. Also, we invite you to come to the Finissage which is going to be on Monday the 26th. Come back to the space to close the ceremony with us! I also want to mention that a lot of the artists in the space decided to use new mediums. And that was one of the most interesting experiences for us as organizers of the residency — to know how much work goes behind these artworks that we see. I think sometimes we come into an exhibition and think, “Oh wow, this is really beautiful!” But we miss the amount of hours and hours of conceptual and literal physical work prior that comes into that. How much work goes into the process of even just picking a medium, like is wood the best medium, is canvas the best medium? A lot of care and attention was put into that. All of these artists worked together and in parallel to make this project come together and we’re really proud of them and really excited for you to be here experiencing this, and you’re going to meet the artists right now!

Reclaiming my time space: G L O W Z I

G L O W Z I : My piece is called Reclaiming my time space, and what I wanted to represent is the idea that even though we’re not Beyonce, or people who are victims of police brutality directly, such as Trayvon Martin, we’re still important, our experiences are still important. So the idea with my piece was to reclaim the space of ordinary Black folks, because I feel like when we look at the media we have this pressure to be like, “Okay, so now I see Beyonce and Kendrick so now I have to do something.” And you’re in your room, which is all messed up, and you’re like, “I’m not going to be Beyonce, but I’m not quite like other people I see in the media, so where am I?” So the idea was just to remind Black people while they look at the piece that no matter what they’re doing, they’re symbols of resistance. Because just going to school, just having a job, just following your dream is something that is pretty hard to do here in a system that doesn’t necessarily want you to be able to do that.

Audience member: Why particularly self-portraits?

G L O W Z I: It comes from a story where my mom always told me, “You’re a canvas and you can model yourself however you want.” And it seems like it has just followed me all my life, because I keep changing styles, changing the way I look. And I keep using my face or my body as a medium of art. So, I would say that it’s pretty much that the first canvas that you will have — and that you will have until you die — is your body, so why not use it?

Audience member: Why do you use the golden metal wires in your work?

G L O W Z I : The golden wires represent the idea that on a regular basis, we are still slaying. We don’t need to be walking in the halftime show like Beyonce to be doing amazing stuff and to be slaying. I see Black people slaying everywhere, I see them right now! [laughter] And also using metal, there’s the idea that it’s resistant but it also knows how to move. It’s the idea that even though it’s hard to move it, it can still move around and change shapes, just like Black people change their way of acting in order to cope with what we’re being exposed to.

Natural: Kay Nau

Kay Nau: About my piece — instead of talking about the symbols and all that, I’m going to talk about the stylistic choices I made, which is comic art. All my life I’ve been told that comic art is not art, by teachers, by people. So at first, when I got this residency, I was like, I’m going to do realistic renderings, because that’s what I’m used to seeing in galleries and what my teachers always tell me, “This is what art is.” And then I was like, “Nah.” [laughter] “Nah, screw this, I’m going to go with what I normally do for myself.” And it’s kind of like a little slap in the face of, you know, me being a little sassy and being like, “This is comic art and it’s on the wall of a gallery now.” And that’s kind of awesome!

Audience member: Was there a choice for the really striking red and blue?

Kay: Yeah, actually. Red and blue is not only the colour of the Haitian flag, blue is also the colour of the Quebec flag, red is the colour of the Canadian flag, it’s also the colour of France and England’s flags, which are colonizers not only of Haiti but also of Canada and Quebec.

Montreal, 1985: Po B.K. Lomami, Carl-Philippe Simonise, Valerie Bah

Po: We noticed that there isn’t a lot of Black representation in the public archives from the eighties. We started from that fact, like, there were Black people in Montreal in the eighties, like obviously, but they aren’t in the public archives. So from that we started to think, “Okay, we can find those archives.” We started to ask questions like, “What about personal archives?” And that’s where we started finding a lot of answers, like people opening their personal albums to show us what it was like in the eighties. From all that research, we decided to create our own archive with all the information we have, all the research we did. And also with our own experience, including the fact that we were wondering, “Where are Black queer people in the archives?” And they are nowhere. We went to Archives Gaies du Quebec and we couldn’t even find them there. So we were like okay from my own experience, queer Black people, they’re kind of everywhere. Like, even if you go to church, we’re fucking everywhere [laughter]. From that we were like, okay, let’s restage a scene from the eighties, ’85 in particular, with all the information we have or we want to recreate. I think we can connect to Black struggles throughout history, like it’s always the same questions asked again, the same issues. Nothing is new, it’s just new vocabulary. It’s the same discussions, the same questions. So from that we started to do that for the art piece, just starting in an apartment that was built in the thirties in Côte-des-Neiges, which is like, I don’t want to say a non-white neighbourhood, but like, white people are not the majority there. Then we went to Balattou, which is a club that was created in the eighties or so, and from there we started a scenario, a story-board, with what could be Black activists talking and Black activists gathering. But not just about the struggles, it’s also about enjoying life, having a romance, just being people that have struggles sometimes but are still people. And they’re there because we can’t find them in public archives so we needed to make them visible with our own research and imaginaries, so we intertwined the archives with Afrofuturism and our own perspective. So we end up with our photo series, made in the apartment in Côte-des-Neiges and then in Balattou — we want to thank Papa Touré who opened the Balattou for us on Monday night, a really cold one, just for us to do the photoshoot. There’s also a personal photo album and a zine that includes the dialogue of what could be a discussion among Black people in Montreal in 1985, discussing about politics, or about wanting to flirt with somebody, or just having a life.

Valerie: It was very important to us, in staging Black folks in the archives, not to try and establish our place in this empire, this white settler project on unceded land. So the discussion in the actual scenario is of the activists arguing and disagreeing about Black liberation struggles around the world, and it ties back to their condition in Montreal.

Po: Yeah, you should read the zine, there’s drama and everything.

Audience member: Did you use technology from ’85?

Carl-Philippe: A budget from ’85. [laughter]

Sisterhood, Crown, Vasso: Aïssatou Diallo

Aïssatou Diallo: (translated from French) My name is Aïssatou Diallo and I am originally from Guinea. I have been drawing and creating art for the past ten years, and I started doing digital graphic design two years ago. I made the three pieces there, the first is called Sisterhood, the second is Crown, and the third is Vasso. This concept was not what I originally planned to do; there were many modifications during the process. But in the end, that, the art, is me. I am comfortable with and feel liberated using the medium of digital art because it is involved with my work. My main idea is to express who I am as an individual, but also express codes that represent the symbols of resistance. You can see these codes by what you wear, your hair, these things, and so my pieces are made by you and are visible to everyone. My pieces are not only a claim of the symbols of resistance, but also show how we share culture. I am looking for an answer to these questions and interrogations of resistance and this is what I expressed in my three pieces. For the first piece, I show that you must know yourself and others in order to share culture. It’s based on a photograph I took of a woman’s back, I was asked if the two women are the same person, and I am leaving that up to interpretation, but the idea behind the piece is “Watch your back” and “I gotchu” as well. The second shows that you must be proud of who we are, where we come from, and that it is important to share these different sides of us with other people. The third shows a mother and child, and it is also essential to show how we pass down and share ideas with the children of the next generation. We explain what it means to be a woman, and especially what it means to be a Black woman from Africa, and so on.

Baggage & Navigation, Stretched Strength, In the Search of Home: SIKA

SIKA: (translated from French) My works here are essentially an introspective exploration based on an emotional congestion that I carry around like every other person in society. I decided to visit this congestion again through three different dimensions: emotional, physical, and spiritual. I wanted to make visual material to combine with another project of mine involving musical expression. I wanted to mix the disciplines of both projects together. I wanted to reflect the presence of Black artists in Montreal, to see how this has affected me, and what carries me forward. I wanted to develop a new technique and explore unfamiliar methods for this specific piece. I benefited from working with a new palette: shades of blue. I also wanted to generate content about the strength and endurance of the Black community. I wanted to show our views, values, and marginality in society. I felt the need to create, so I benefited from the residency. It strengthened my work and formed it into an introspective scan I used to inspect the facets of my reality and my identity.

Crowning: Chelsy Monie

Chelsy Monie: Hi everybody. I’m very nervous, I don’t know what to say. My work Crowning focuses on the headwrap and just trying to take back all the histories and all the places the headwrap has been. Initially I knew I wanted to work with headwraps, and I knew I wanted to work with history and location, but I didn’t know how to translate that into my work. So I did a lot of research and I spent a lot of time looking at maps and thinking about the idea of mapping. What I ended up doing is using topographic maps, which are maps where lines and curves are used to represent the reliefs on land, which means mountains, rivers, hills — all represented by lines, which is what you can see in my work. What this allows you to do is to read the headwrap as showing a location that is in space and time and this is only emphasised by the grid, or lines of longitude and latitude. I’m really trying to have the real question of how we can look at space, not only as places we may walk through but we can look at space through the clothes that we wore, through the things that we did in those spaces. I used wood because, based on the histories and based on what I found out, headwraps are so tied to Black bodies and wood is a natural fiber, so to me, the way I see it is headwraps are in a sense natural to the Black body. That’s what the wood is there to represent. As you can see in the images my eyes are blacked out, and as much as that’s because that looks really cool [laughter] it’s also because I want viewers, other Black people looking at my art to see themselves within it. Blacking out my eyes really removes my soul from the art, right now it’s a canvas for you to look at and see yourself in any given space and time. My work necessarily is very involved with Black identity and I really want to show the Black reality as something that is artistic and something that is specific to us, so I like to take things that Black people do every day and they think, yeah, this is just us, and project it and put them in spaces like these where people can actually come and visualise them in a different way. In part of my work I am doing multiple, multiple things and one of them is I wear a headwrap everyday for this month. This was really to question my relationship with headwraps, because usually I find myself wearing headwraps when it looks nice or I don’t wanna do my hair. But what I’m really wondering is how will my relationship with my body, as well as headwraps and time and space, change when I wear a headwrap every single day. And today is a lot! [laughter] This is my headwrap for today, tomorrow I’m going to leave my house and have to wear another one, and go on and on. I’m really interested to see what it is that happens to me and how I perceive myself and also perceive headwraps. I grew up in Cameroon and then in Tanzania, and women all around me wore headwraps. I grew up with my mom going to church on Sunday and she would always have a headwrap, but I never thought of it as anything more than that. I think wearing a headwrap every single day really pushes me to see beyond that. Another part of this project is I have collaborated with photographers around the world to bring actual representations of headwraps to you. What the photographers have done is they have taken pictures of people in headwraps in the spaces they navigate. That’s what I want to share with everybody, because headwraps, like I said earlier, are natural to the Black body, and it’s very interesting how, though we live on many different continents and many different countries, we can still be identified by this one singular thing. The last part of Crowning is on the 28th of February. I am inviting Black people everywhere to wear headwraps. I think this is really a mark of solidarity and also helps us to connect to all the histories we may not necessarily connect with on a daily basis. This is really a chance for everybody to decide that okay, today we’re going to stand up and celebrate this one thing we think maybe is just a mundane thing we shouldn’t pay attention to. I am circulating two hashtags because you know, I’m a millennial, it’s 2018. [laughter] So the hashtags are #UbuntiCrowning and #UbuntuTalks. What I’m inviting people to do is wear a headwrap on the 28th, take a picture of yourself with the headwrap and you can post it on any social media platform using those two hashtags and those will be projected onto my website, which is Ubuntutalks.org. The reason it’s very important for me to project it is so as to archive this day in time. And when you look back, Black people, or POC in general, have not always been given the ability to archive their activities. It’s very hard for us to look back in history and find out what did this Black person do, and that’s something we have to change. We have the resources now, and I think it’s very important for us to start to archive and document our activities so that future generations may be able to look back and see what we’re doing today. That’s it!

“Symbols of Resistance: an Exhibition Celebrating the Convergence of Black Artists and their Stories” is on display at Galerie Mile-End, 5445 Avenue Du Parc from February 1-28, 2018.

This artist talk was significantly edited for clarity and length.

The post Symbols of resistance appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, spoken word artist, therapist, wicked witch, and lasagna lover who divides her time between Montreal and Toronto, unceded Indigenous territories. Her poems and essays have been published widely in print and online, and she has performed in venues across the country, including Verses International Poetry Festival and the Banff Centre for the Arts. Her first novel, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir was released by Metonymy Press in 2016, and her debut poetry collection, a place called No Homeland, was released by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2017. Her book for children, From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea, was published in October of the same year. Kai Cheng was also a featured columnist for The McGill Daily from 2012-2014, writing about race, sexuality, and gender. She sat down with us on a sunny Saturday morning to talk about queer community, #MeToo, sinning, living in diaspora, dreams, love, and radical healing. This interview will make you laugh, cry, and really want to sit down and talk with Kai Cheng.

The truth of the heart

Arno Pedram (AP): Hello.

Kai Cheng Thom (KCT): Hiiiii.

AP: So my name is Arno.

Tai Jacob (TJ): I’m Tai.

KCT: I’m Kai Cheng Thom. I wrote some books that all came out at the same time. I didn’t mean for that to happen, but they all came out last year. I also write for the internet sometimes. I used to be very much involved in, like, Montreal activism and queer activism culture, and now I’m not so much, partly because I moved to Toronto, and partly because I am getting older, and I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life! Also, I’m visiting Montreal right now because my wife Kama La Mackerel lives in Montreal.

TJ: That’s a name drop! (everyone laughs)

KCT: Giant name drop. I’m married to someone famous! And yeah, Montreal is always going to be the city where my heart came into being and where I found myself and also was destroyed, and found myself again.

TJ: That sounds a lot like the story of Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, which was one of the three books that all came out at the same time. I was wondering, in what ways is this book an allegory for your actual life experience?

KCT: Oh, not at all.

TJ: Really?

KCT: I don’t know, it’s really funny. People ask this question in different ways a lot and I love answering it. So Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, the subtitle of this novel is “A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir,” and when you put the word memoir in the title of your novel, people are always like, “Hey, oh my god, I’m excited to read your memoir!” And I’m like, “It’s not my memoir, it’s the memoir of the character who is fictional.” But of course, people notice certain superficial similarities, like this character being an Asian trans woman growing up in a city where it’s always raining on the west coat, and moving to a city where everyone is speaking French and smoking cigarettes. I used to be an English major in theatre, and my favourite play that we studied was Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, a classic play about an aging Southern belle who’s also, like, a deep racist and you know, a horrible person. But Blanche DuBois, that aging Southern belle, has a line where she’s being accused of being a pathological liar, which she is, right, she’s lied to everyone in her life and kind of tried to trick everyone into seeing her as something that she’s not. And she says, “I never lied in my heart.”

AP: “Never inside, I didn’t lie in my heart.”

KCT: Yes, oh my god! (Laughter)

AP: It’s my favourite line.

KCT: I love it, I love it. And that’s what Fierce Femmes is about. You know, it’s the truth of the heart. And so, nothing that really happens in the novel “happened” — and I have to also say that for plausible deniability, which is the joke I always make — but that novel is the truth of what happened to me in my heart.

Sin and punishment

AP: Okay, so let’s get into activism and queer spaces.

KC: Sure!

AP: Having read your article “Righteous Callings,” I was wondering: how do we manage accountability in social spaces, activist space in particular, in the context of a call-out culture, and how does shame fit into that?

KCT: Mhmm, just like a nice, light question. Oh god, I don’t fucking know, but I’m gonna take a try, because you asked me the question. Whenever this question comes up in any kind of interview context, I’m like, let us set the stage, why am I being asked. And I think people are asking the question because I write about it a lot, and I just want to make it really clear that because I write a lot about accountability does not mean that I am an expert in accountability. It just means that I think about it a lot and, also, that I put these thoughts on the internet. All that to say, I think we live in a culture, in addition to call-out culture, of celebrity culture, in activist space. And we do this thing where we’re like, oh my god Kai Cheng Thom, Kim Katrin Milan, Mia Mingus, all the big names, and some names are bigger than others obviously. And we’re like, “Those people are perfect and the example of how we should live our lives.” And that is terrifyingly similar to certain religious communities, where beautiful ideas around accountability and goodness are then pinned to people who are actually very fallible. Because, I mean, scratch the surface of any celebrity and you will find a sinner. All this to say, I have done bad things. I’ve been called out for some things that I think are fair, others that I don’t think are fair. So take everything I say with a grain of salt! Coming back to accountability in social space, the truth is, I think we’re obviously going through a crisis of accountability in all space right now. In so many countries, in so many places, with the #MeToo movement. And I think the powerful and amazing thing is that the veil is being ripped off of the shame of survivors, and, like, the shame of people who have experienced violence, who have been silenced for such a long time. Maybe this is the first time in history that this particular kind of movement is happening. But I think we are conflating the conversation of punishment with the conversation around accountability and justice.

TJ: I have questions about this actually. Specifically, about that really good article you wrote for GUTS, called “#NotYet,” in response to #MeToo. How do you work at the intersections of the work surrounding sexual violence and work surrounding prison abolition?

KCT: So I think we have a really powerful and beautiful statement, a beautiful activist truism, now blowing up in the mainstream, which is: “I believe women, I believe survivors.” This is a really important statement, in that survivors and women have not been believed for a long time. And that statement, I think, finds its greatest use in situations of support. Whether you’re providing a social service in an institution, or you’re providing support for your friends, the thing you don’t want to do when your friend is like, “I’ve been hurt,” is to say, “Really? Can you tell me exactly how? Does it fit into a legal standard?” And this comes from a history of women’s shelters operating in the United States and Canada where, by law, the definition of sexual assault excluded sexual assault and violence between married partners. But believing survivors has taken on, I think, and maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think it’s taken on a different kind of meaning when we talk about justice and accountability. I think in the mainstream there is a move to conflate, “I believe survivors,” with, “And that means the person who is the perpetrator should go to jail, or go through some kind of punishment.” And we really have not figured out how to separate the idea of punishment from the idea of justice. So like, if I have been harmed, that means the only way for me to feel like that harm has been seen and addressed is that the person who hurt me is being punished. And that is really hard to let go of. To be honest, like I really wish that some of the people that have hurt me would be punished. But from a place of values, when I really think about that, then I’m like, okay, that doesn’t solve the problem of violence. Carceral solutions to violence only displace violence into the prison system and also disproportionately affect vulnerable people, because the truth is that punishment doesn’t happen to the powerful. Punishment only happens to people who can’t stop it, who don’t have the power to stop it. And the activist response to that, which is shunning, or to remove people from social circles, only displaces violent people into other communities, and those people are then angry and traumatized by the loss of their community and so the cycle just spins and spins. And then the secret truth, I think, about activist communities, in the same way the secret truth about religious communities is, is that all of us are sinners. And the extent of the sin varies, it obviously does. But I think all of us, if we were to look into our past, would find something bad that we have done. And it’s so important to talk about this. I’m actually really happy, in a weird way, that the Aziz Ansari story is unfolding the way it does, because the reason there has been so much pushback around that story is that Aziz Ansari, who in his own way is sort of like a figure for liberal and leftist communities, what he did is actually normal — not good, but normal. And when we start to understand that violence is normalised and normative, and happens all the time, we can realise that, actually, most of us are participating in it in some way, from either colluding with the perpetrator to being the perpetrator. Then, I think we can start having a discussion about shame: shame is a normal and healthy response to having done something bad, but it cannot stop there, and we cannot let shame silence us. The most important truth that we need to come to terms with, as believers of justice, is the truth of the harm that we, ourselves, have caused, and not the harm that we think other people have caused — because the truth is, the place where we will have the most impact is in our own hearts and relationships. And I say that as someone who has, you know, a trail of shattered relationships behind me. So there you go.

Being bad

KCT: As a therapist I have the privilege of speaking to people in an intimate way about things that they’ve done that are abusive, that they know are abusive, and the pattern that always comes up is, “Look what you made me do!” The desire to shift blame onto another for one’s own personal pain, trauma, behavior, taken into its extreme, is an abusive pattern. The best part of the movement/moment we’re in is the part that says, “Look at yourself, and also love yourself.”

TJ: Something that I value so much about your work, specifically the article “Righteous Callings” is the way that you incorporate yourself into your analysis, and you start off “Righteous Callings” with this line, “I have always believed that I’m a bad person,” and that’s also been a theme in this interview, the idea of sinning, being bad, and religion. It keeps coming back! But I wonder if perhaps this is the wrong framework, if perhaps we could move beyond sinning and badness to just, “This is who we are.” Because sinning still implies that it is wrong, what if it isn’t wrong? What if it is just who we are and we’re constantly working towards something… ?

KCT: What I’m terrified of about this thought, what I struggle with in moving towards this thought is this: “What if I’m just trying to let myself off the hook for being bad?”

TJ: I know, that’s exactly why I stopped my question halfway, because I thought, “We’re actually bad.”

KCT: So much of the righteousness, self-righteous part of social justice is like, “See how you’re bad! See how you’re racist!” and the right response is, “You’re right. I am a racist,” and that’s of course true in some ways but also, there is this desire in me to be like, “But also, this is a human being human and growing up surrounded by a giant fucking terrifying system of trauma and systemic oppression, and this is all of us!” Does that mean I’m not being accountable? I guess we could question the framework of accountability itself, that, you know, we should do at some point. But also I’m like, “If I said that, what would happen next?”

TJ: I’m wondering what the motivation is? I guess the desire to be good, constantly, actually is a utopic desire — a place that is actually no place. What if we can think of goodness as always inaccessible, and that being okay?

KCT: That would be amazing! And you see people trying to create homelands that are free of sin: like with the Islamic State, a perfect caliphate, similarly with the cultural revolution in China, creating a communist land free of the sin of bourgeoisie. Whoever is doing that is creating this trap of desperately trying to be good, never getting there, blaming everyone else, hurting everyone else. I would love that to be able to say, “It’s okay…not to be good,” but then how do you respond to things that are violent? That need to be changed? But I think those two things are not incompatible!

Kill your heroes?

AP: I feel like a lot of queer culture has built itself around guides, and the history of queer communities often is: in your life you meet certain people who allow you to get further and further into your exploration of queer identity. Should we seek to have no more guides? Or should we try to keep it in a spiritual, social, kinship way?

TJ: That’s really interesting when looking at the similarity between religious communities and queer activist circles.

AP: And also in relation to fame.

KCT: I think it’s always most illustrative and interesting to talk about how I’m actually impacted by this. I often talk about the hypocrisy of celebrity culture and how much I hate it, which is, you know, kind of burning the ship that you’re sailing in, because, obviously, hello?! So much of what I have in my life is because I’m a micro-celebrity. I became a micro-celebrity, basically, as an alternative to becoming a sex worker. I’ve never said that out loud before, but that is true. The options that I felt were open to me in my life, as a trans woman of colour, were sex work or doing the queer celebrity gig. And I chose queer celebrity because, honestly, I found sex work too difficult to get into; I didn’t have the skills. I also found a different career path in social services, but that too is really tied to my queer celebrity. Part of the problem with queer celebrity is that it’s a neoliberal culture — it’s a brand! I’m sorry to pick on fellow micro-celebrities, but most of us are making anywhere from a tiny amount of money, to a moderate size amount of money from speaking, running, touring, modeling, all these other things. And so many of the queer youths that I work with have this in mind: “Oh I could be a YouTube celebrity, I could be a speaker/ writer/ artist/ whatever lifted by the activist community into the realm of fame.” Because it’s neoliberal, and we have to make money, so we’re always trying to be the next critical thing. And I just want to be suspicious of that as someone who is also, supposedly, anti-capitalist, and also, this is how I pay most of my rent guys! When it comes to guides: who doesn’t look up to someone and say, “I wish that were me/ could be me?” That’s so powerful! I don’t want to take that away from people! And I couldn’t!

TJ: And it’s more than that too, that person is helping you survive.

KCT: Yeah! This person is helping you maybe not harming yourself, or ending your life. What I do want to speak against is the concept of infallibility. Because that is so scary both for the people who have idols and for the idols. “Kill your heroes.” The thing queer communities love is celebrities, but the community also loves to hate celebrities. What if we set up a system where we don’t kill, or eat, or burn anyone? Inherently, the idea of having a hero that you then kill, or burn, or eat is disposable, disposability culture. So I’m wondering if we could allow for there to be guides, celebrities, with an understanding that people are humans and actually do some terrible things in life to survive, and also humans do some shitty stuff in life all the time, because they’re human.

No homeland

AP: I’m wondering how identities of queerness, being in a diaspora, not being able to speak your language as you would like to, intersect. I found this in a place called No Homeland, and I particularly resonated with the part where you have this recognition of someone that you see as part of your (diasporic) family, and you feel the need to bond because diasporic identities are so lonely and unique. But even then, we come to feel a tension between our diasporic identity and queer identity, we could ask ourselves: is queer identity a Western identity, a white thing?

KCT: a place called No Homeland is my favorite piece; I wrote it over ten years! That topic is the primary theme of the book, as the title indicates: feeling connection to different places, but also massive disconnection from those same places, and language and identity is so much a part of that. I do not really speak Chinese very well, even though I’ve taken some courses, but there are many different kinds of Chinese that vary between generations, even within my family. What we’re trying to access is a homeland that is frozen in time, a fantasy, that actually doesn’t exist anymore: you can never really go back. But there are different ways of accessing homeland. In some ways the homeland that is really yours is your immediate family: parents, siblings, uncles, which can also be full of trauma for some people. And there are different things we do, like making different foods, trying to access different pieces of culture. The truth is, living in diaspora and being queer means we are so many shades removed, and that can be a terrible and painful thing. It also is, I think, an amazing and powerful gift, when you realise that what is happening to you is the result of your family’s resilience, and a breaking of the narrative of nationalism and homonationalism that entrap most people and most queer culture. When you walk into a queer community, you immediately disrupt it as a person of colour, and when you walk into queer cultures in “the homeland,” you bring this Westernness. I think something interesting is that contemporary Western identity politics are actually very based on essentialism, which feminism and post-modernism tried to break out of for a while. People now are really hammering down, “Are you a POC? Are you a BIPOC? What kind of person of colour are you? How much do you pass? What is your white skin privilege? What is your adjacent-ness to whiteness?” All these terms are coming up, right? I think if you just take a second, it’s easy to realise that everything is fluid and that your experience is your experience, the story you carry is the story you carry, and there is something very freeing about that. When I run into queer Chinese people from the mainland, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong: it’s always different, and there is always a point of connection. What you get to have is a memory, the ghost that your parents gave you, and you get to let the past go, and I think that’s really important actually — to embrace living in this “place called no homeland” is to be able to let go of the past.

TJ: Also living in diaspora is constantly living in a liminal space.

KCT: Exactly. I am of the opinion that all things are happening at the same time — that all traumas are happening past and future, and I love that — when we are talking about diasporic people, the past is always going to be with us but the future is with us too! And we’ll always be a part of that.

AP: I have a hard time writing in my first language, French, or my second, English, in relation to what I am discovering now about this whole part of my Iranian heritage. It doesn’t have to be, but it’s like English allows at the same times that it limits diasporic creativity. How do you feel about English, what do you think English has allowed you and what do you think it is pushing away?

KCT: Another hard hitting question. I love it! Yeah, I have a complicated relationship with English, like most diasporic writers. And English is so much my first language and my best language. So I was raised speaking Chinese and English, and then, you know, more and more English, and then I really stopped speaking Chinese at all, and then I learned French when I moved to Montreal. But yeah, language is so complicated and does have its limitations, and is such a form of colonization, right? And I think the truth is, I might not be a writer if English were not my best language, because I feel like with English I’m always trying to figure out how to say things that don’t exist yet. And maybe they would exist for me if I spoke my mother tongue more fluently. So I think English pushes me, to find more ways of expressing meaning, and to find new ways of saying things. Also, most of my literary exposure has been through English, some through French also, but like, all of my major references are to English writing, even if the English writing is diasporic or post-colonial. I’m so shaped by that. And I actually do sometimes wonder how limited my politics are because so much of them are in English, and therefore also from the American canon.

Dreams and nightmares

TJ: What are your dreams?

KCT: So, I’m not gonna lie to you! I have a really strong dream that keeps coming up. Literally, when I’m sleeping, but also its a fantasy life. So I am currently married to Kama, but I am also dating a white guy, whom I love, who is definitely the dude who has treated me the best in all the world of all the dudes I’ve ever met, and he’s in tech. And I have this fantasy that he’s going to become a tech millionaire, that we’re going to live in Silicon Valley, and that I’m going to be like a tech millionaire’s trophy wife, and host parties and be disconnected from the world and just float in this billionaire’s palace for the rest of my life.

TJ: Wooow. Wait, I’m sorry, but this happens for a moment in Fierce Femmes.

KCT: It does.

AP: It does.

KCT: It does. And sometimes life is very fascinating because I didn’t meet this boy until right after Fierce Femmes was published. And like, the names are also very similar. Anyway! So, I have this fantasy dream of being lifted into wealth and into heterosexuality and into safety, out of queer community, out of activism, into like the 1 per cent, living a life of safe luxury. That’s a fantasy. It’s also kind of a nightmare, obviously. Because what happens in the book, Fierce Femmes — oh, I guess I can’t spoil what happens in the book — but you know, the character in the book who has that for a moment, doesn’t really enjoy it. And I don’t think I would enjoy it if I had it, either. But I think this says a lot about what I fear right now. And to be really honest, what I fear is queer community and I fear this political moment. At the same time, all of my loves are in queer community, and all of my strengths and all of my gifts come from queer community. And all the potential to change the world in a positive way comes from this political time. But it’s terrifying. Let’s be honest, I think we’re all fricking fucking terrified!

TJ/AP: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

KCT: Because, you know, a despot, like a nationalist despot, is in control of the most powerful nation in the world. All of our idols are falling from the stars, for good reasons maybe, but are still falling, and I think we’re all kind of falling with that. And the longing for safety is ingrained in us, and I think it’s an essential thread in white, queer American community, this idea of safety also being tied to economics and if you can just be wealthy enough and married enough and heterosexual enough, then you can be safe. When of course, everything that Fierce Femmes is about is releasing these ideas of safety to seek out transformation, to seek out justice, to seek out connection, to seek out magic. So I guess the shadow dream to my dream of becoming a tech millionaire’s trophy wife is the dream of continuing this life and finding more freedom in that. The dream of being a tech billionaire’s wife is embracing the unknown, and I think that’s what we all grapple with, right? And we have the choice of being assimilative or upwardly mobile, in the same way that my parents really, really tried to fit in — this is like the dream of a different kind of world.

Forgiving and being forgiven

TJ: What is the role of relationships and friendships in healing in social justice movements? We kind of touched on it before, but could you expand? I’ve been thinking about friendship as the root of freedom and the communities that we form being alternative universes.

KCT: If we can return to a cliché for a moment, it’s been said that love is the answer, that our relationships are the answer, that within the microcosm of our intimate partnerships and chosen families we create these spaces of not constantly having to experience otherness, of not having to experience non-consent. But we know the truth about a lot of our friendships and family relationships, especially at this age, is that of course violence is replicated in queer family, how could it not be? We are traumatised creatures trying to build, and when we are doing that we are going to fuck it up, a lot. So I think the revolutionary potential in relationships is the potential for honesty, for saying, “Wow you really fucked up and hurt me badly,” and for forgiveness. And this is what trauma takes away from us: the potential to be forgiving and forgiven. When we live in traumatic environments with parents or caregivers, we are taught to believe that making a mistake will erase us from the possibility of having love. There’s this horrible, beautiful quote in the God of Small Things where this child is being chastised by her mother, and her mother says, “Do you know what careless words do? They make people love you less.” And there’s this terror in queer communities of being loved less because of careless words. You say something that’s a microaggression, or you do something that is politically incorrect, or is problematic — that’s the word, right — then we will be loved less and less and less, we live in terror of this, right? And one thing I wish was more present in queer community, that actually was present in a weird way in the Christian community I grew up in, is this idea that you could be forgiven if you were honest about your mistake. I mean, it didn’t work out for the Christian community that I grew up in, but it was an idea that was around, and I feel like it is actually not that much around in queer community right now. But now as a therapist, what I know is important for recovery from trauma is the ability to break a relationship and to repair it again, and to have faith that we won’t lose each other.

Returning to the body

KCT: It’s so human that we fuck up and people leave us and it SUCKS, right? And then there’s just that moment of totally being lost in the pain, and there’s something about how pains returns us to the body that is so important. And I think we have to listen to that, the body tells us things, that people are important and that it’s bad we fucked up, for one thing, and also that relationships are changing. You know, as we’re talking about this experience of getting into these close relationships, and you hurt each other and you love each other again, I think sometimes people resist that idea for the good reason, because I think a key factor of abuse in intimate violence is someone saying you have to forgive me, and things have to be the way they were again. Like, if I said “I’m sorry, now we have to be friends exactly the way it was,” and that’s actually not possible. When you hurt someone you do change the relationship forever, and sometimes we change it in a way that is better and more close, and sometimes we change it in a way where it’s time for it to be over. And forgiving and being forgiven, or having forgiveness as a value, does not mean someone has to still be your partner after you’ve hurt them or still be your friend, or even that you have to like each other. It just means that you’re allowed to exist together, right? And that grief and that pain is what transformation feels like, but also is what allows us to change. Pain is what tells us, “Okay, I really have to change my patterns,” or “Oh, that person was really important to me, and I grieve that loss.” I think we spend so much time trying to avoid that pain that we end up sometimes locking ourselves into really difficult and sometimes violent patterns.

This interview has been significantly edited for clarity and length.

The post The stories we carry appeared first on The McGill Daily.

In my first year of university I took a course on the history of sexuality, and part of the syllabus involved learning about female romantic friendships. Romantic friendships have existed throughout history in beautifully organic and varied ways, but the term generally describes a deep bond of love and friendship, and an intensely romantic expression of affection between two women. I had never heard the term before, but it felt like something had clicked into place. The more I learned, the more I became convinced that I had found a phrase that explained the complexity of love that I felt at first for one, and then for many other people in my life. What I learned in that class gave me a basis for a personal exploration of the boundaries between love, friendship, sex, and romance.

The rise and fall of romantic relationships

“I love you, I miss you so much, endlessly, more and more.” “All I can say is I love you more than any other existing thing and I miss you more than air.” “You are my life. You are my reason for existing.”

Before going any further I would like to acknowledge that this class centered around the experiences of white women. My knowledge of the history of romantic friendships has the same flaws. While the term “romantic friendship” has been historically applied to white women, similar relationships have existed in various marginalised communities under other names, and with their own rich histories. I don’t have extensive knowledge or personal experience sufficient to speak to those realities, but I should note that white romantic friendships are not unique or solitary in their existence.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, romantic friendships were looked upon favourably – even encouraged – by society. Some believed that men and women fundamentally could not understand each other and should only seek company with members of their same sex. Other times, they were encouraged because, though lesbianism hadn’t yet gained visibility, men found it sexually appealing for women to show each other love. Many believed intense friendships between women allowed women to practice affection before marriage. Thus, romantic friendships became a mark of a noble, genuine, devout and trustworthy woman.

But the main reason romantic friendships were allowed was because no matter how many public declarations of passion, undying love, and displays of affection women bestowed upon each another, society was firmly convinced that sex between women was impossible. It was believed that without male penetration, a woman could not have sex, but also, more importantly, that women did not want to have sex. If women were recognized as having sexual desires, romantic friendships would not have been allowed to flourish.

As it was, in the 17th century, the poet Katherine Philips wrote love poems to ‘Lucasia’ (a woman whose real name was Anne Owen), describing her as “dear object of my Love’s excess,” declaring that she hadn’t lived before loving her, and that in her, Katherine found all the world.

I did not live until this time
Crown’d my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
I am not thine, but thee.

In 1778, Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, two upper-class Irish women, eloped together. They established themselves as the “Ladies of Llangollen,” living together for fifty-three years, and entertaining visitors who travelled to observe their “unconventional lifestyle.” Also, in the 18th century, the author Elizabeth Carter wrote of her love for Catherine Talbot declaring, “Nobody has been observed to lose their way, run against a door, or sit silent and staring in a room full of company in thinking upon you, except my solitary self.”

If women were recognized as having sexual desires, romantic friendships would not have been allowed to flourish.

Women’s passionate love for one another was recognised amongst themselves as something purer, characterised by companionship, emotional connection, and equality. But women also gravitated towards strong attachments to each other in an attempt to become financially independent of men. Ponsonby and Butler’s elopement foreshadowed the Boston Marriages of the late 19th and 20th centuries in the U.S., wherein middle class women would live together, financially independent of any man.

As women gained social power in the 19th century – fighting for education and the right to vote – men grew increasingly anxious about the implications of liberated women for traditional family structures. Romantic friendships, though once encouraged, were suddenly a threat, since they undermined male authority and dominance, and offered women an alternative to heterosexual marriage.

But the final blow to romantic friendships was struck by the rise of sexology – a field of study created and populated by men. Sexology pathologized many sexual acts including, of course, homosexuality and lesbianism. Books began cautioning young women against sharing intimacies with other girls, and prodded parents to discourage such relationships. In 1896, the English sexologist Havelock Ellis published a book, Sexual Inversion, which recounts his conversation with a patient, Miss M. She revealed that she had romantic friendships and always found them spiritually enriching until she read the sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s work, Psycopathia Sexualis, and ‘realised’ that she was unnatural and depraved.

Not only did society now condemn intimate female friendships, but healthy women also began to see themselves as psychologically unstable. Women now had to ascribe a sexual identity to their feelings – while under the additional pressure of knowing that lesbians were ostracized and condemned. How were women who had grown up thinking their love for each other was ennobling now meant to self-identify?

Compulsory heterosexuality and the hierarchy of love

I’ve never since felt such a depth of love. I knew her every scent, every single expression in her eyes. My body remembers the pressure of her legs on my lap, the way she would pinch me and make me scream and we would wrestle, a mess of tangled limbs and golden and black hair, until I inevitably fell on the floor. She would turn to me in the middle of a sentence while talking to someone else, knowing that I would have the precise date and series of events that she was referencing, including our outfits and how she’d felt about the situation. The boundaries between our bodies and minds were unendingly blurred.

As soon as I began studying romantic friendships I knew why I was so deeply interested: here, finally, was some other woman’s deep and passionate love for her friend, a love I knew and felt so keenly in my own life. I thought my friend R and I had been alone in what felt like the truest, most pure, elevated and profound, soul-reaching and expanding, life-claiming love for each other. In actuality, we were participating in a long history of female love – one that is suspiciously absent from common discourse.

R and I were inseparable. On the rare occasion that we would go out without one another, people would stop us and ask where our other half/comrade/associate was. We would write each other declarations of love, we took nude photos of each other and together. I was a planet orbiting around her, my sun. I knew with a deep certainty that she was the only person, aside from my immediate family, that I would die to save (it’s never really clear why exactly one needs to die to save people, but I knew that I would be game to try). But for all this deep and clear love for one another, R and I dated men – obviously.

Then I learned how men had felt threatened by romantic friendships, and had quickly demonized and invalidated them (as men are so quick to do to anything that undermines their dominance). I felt crushed under the weight of this knowledge. It seemed like romantic friendships had never recovered from the fatal blow dealt to them by sexology and the patriarchy in the 1800s. When women were taught that their love for each other was impure, a symptom of a disease, or a sign of lack of devotion to their husband, it reinforced the dominance of heterosexual romantic relationships in society. With it came the idea that a woman’s purpose is to be desirable to men, and her life’s goal to enter a heterosexual romantic relationship.

But for all this deep and clear love for one another, R and I dated men – obviously.

In her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich argues that “women’s choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, tribe, has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding and disguise.” Rich argues that women are forced or coerced into heterosexual relationships through various tactics wielded by men, “ranging from physical brutality to control of consciousness.” Female heterosexuality, according to Rich, is neither a free choice, nor an innate preference.

Part of compulsory heterosexuality is the expectation that romantic relationships must be prioritised above friendships. Even the few romantic friendships that exist today – rare as they are, due to the pathologization of lesbianism – take a backseat to boyfriends.

In an article for NYmag’s series, “Single Ladies Week,” author Briallen Hopper quotes the novelist Hanya Yanagihara, who said “Friendship is the most underrated relationship in our lives […] It remains the one relation not bound by law, blood, or money — but an unspoken agreement of love.” I think “unspoken” is the key word here. We are not explicitly bound to friends in the same way we are to lovers. Unlike in dating, there is never a moment where you have ‘the talk’ with your friends – no one asks “what are we?” or “where is this headed?” Platonic commitment happens in slow, implicit ways. First you start making dinner together, and then you manage to sit in comfortable silence with each other, and eventually you know you can call each other, sobbing, at 4 a.m. I don’t mean to say that explicit commitment doesn’t happen within friendships – indeed it does happen, particularly within romantic friendships – but it’s not the norm. There’s no expectation that you’re committed to living nearby and participating in creating a family or trying to be lifelong partners with your friends.

Even within the communities to which I belong, trusted close friends have disappeared upon starting a committed relationship with a romantic partner, without acknowledging the impact of their absence on their friends. Almost always, an explanation for their disappearance is seen as unnecessary. You’re probably thinking, of course one would privilege their romantic partner above their friends. But this hierarchy of love is, at least partially, the result of men having imposed romantic heterosexual relationships as the highest social concern a woman can have – and this preference for romantic relationships has remained ingrained even outside of cis-heterosexual relationships.

“[Friendship] remains the one relation not bound by law, blood, or money — but an unspoken agreement of love.”

—Hanya Yanagihara

I’ve felt deeply and personally hurt the times that friends have disappeared on me – a hurt that felt hard to express precisely, because society makes us believe that romantic relationships are a more legitimate use of time and energy, and because we want our friends ‘to be happy.’ Maybe I’m asking for a revisioning of the hierarchy of love altogether (though I’m under no illusions that this will happen overnight). But, more immediately and more manageably, I really just want my friends to communicate with me about their priorities, and not to assume that everyone buys into the idea that romantic relationships trump friendships.

For me, the history of romantic friendships is a reminder that the way relationships are currently structured in our society is not the way they need to be. In her essay, Rich brings up the idea of a “lesbian continuum,” and argues that all relationships between women – be they coworkers, lovers, friends, or family – exist on the same spectrum, regardless of whether the women identify themselves as lesbians or not. The continuum serves to de-eroticize loving relationships between women, allowing them to feel more at ease in expressing love to each other.

Rich talks about the very real “constraints and sanctions which, historically, have been enforced to insure the coupling of women with men.” She is not arguing that in a world without patriarchal oppression everyone would be bisexual, but rather that heterosexuality should be recognised as a political institution. I would like us to be similarly critical of the way relationships are structured and prioritized. In my own experience, breaking some of those structures has been incredibly fulfilling, and I believe that most people would benefit from feeling comfortable expressing love in more open and varied ways. But the work of crossing these boundaries can be intensely painful, and I’m still often unclear about whether my heart is hurting because I’m unlearning something or because it feels innate to me – and I think it’s valuable to listen to that hurt.

Queering romance

R and I loved each other platonically for at least three years. One night we went out together, and I stayed over at hers afterwards. But the energy between us felt charged. I remember lying next to her, wondering if I should do anything. The electricity buzzing between our bodies felt so strong, she must be feeling it too, I thought. I would never have done anything, but then she reached for me, and then we were making out, and then I was going down on her. The next day neither of us said a word about what had happened. A week later, it happened again – and once again we never talked about it. I knew that we were on exactly the same page, and in my mind I did not view it as sex – I always described it as a physical manifestation of our love, sometimes as “making love.” We both thought we were straight – in fact, she still does.

The sense of loss that I felt when I first learned about the attempted destruction of romantic friendships is slightly compensated for by my belief that they are back on the rise, and have been for a while.

While I was a teenager in Italy it became popular and cool for female friends to start telling each other “ti amo,” which means “I love you.” The phrase used to be reserved solely for romantic relationships and occasionally family. Traditionally, it was only acceptable to tell friends and family “ti voglio bene,” which translated literally means “I want good for you” – i.e. “I care about you.” Almost all of the girls saying “ti amo” were heterosexual – and yet, they would write each other long declarations of love on Facebook that would be validated by their other female peers with numerous likes and comments.

Romantic friendships have particularly strong roots in queer communities, since queer people – often ostracized from their blood families – have long understood the importance of chosen families. When I arrived in Montreal in my first year at McGill, I had only experienced my love for R. Four years later, I now have four explicitly acknowledged romantic friendships, and I have heard of many more, principally among queer friends. Romantic friendships have historically been a way of eschewing reliance on men, and heteropatriarchal systems more generally – but historical discussions of romantic friendships in the 17th and 18th centuries focus almost exclusively on white women. In a contemporary context, I’ve seen many marginalized people – specifically queer and transfeminine folks, and people of colour – turn to forms of romantic friendship, like Black and trans sisterhoods. Denied the security of participating in white cis-heteropatriarchy, marginalized people sometimes begin to replace these structures with radical alternative families, lovers, and friendships.

Reconciling sex, friendship, and romance

The fact that we had made love did not register in my mind as being reflective of a sexual orientation – it remained an act of love outside of identity categories. But a year or two later I realised I was queer and eventually came out to R. She was vaguely supportive and it wasn’t an issue until a year later, when I sent her a particularly poetic and adoring birthday message. Her reply was a little brusque, and then I noticed she started avoiding my messages. When I confronted her, she told me “it sounded like I was in love with her.”

She meant I was in love with her as a lesbian would be, and it felt like the lowest form of betrayal. We had both always expressed our love in deeply romantic ways, and we had expressed multiple times to each other how it felt like our love was beyond all classifications, love in its purest form. Looking back, I see that as well as being a betrayal of our relationship, it was also homophobic. We didn’t talk for many months until she eventually apologised, but still refused to talk about what had happened. It feels like the whole incident was directly inherited from the creation of sexology in the 19th century. R used the difference between loving and being in love to leave me defenceless.

It’s precisely this difference that becomes blurred for me in romantic friendships. In some ways I did feel like I was in love with R, but because society inextricably tangles “being in love” with romance and sex, I felt I couldn’t admit to that. There are so many issues with conflating love and sex – including the erasure of asexual folks, and the ways that such discourse condones sexual assault in romantic relationships – that would merit a whole article on its own. For me, the entanglement of the two created a fear of rejection, and held me back from communicating my love.

In every single one of my romantic friendships there have been clearly sexual moments. Two of these friends and I have dated briefly, in very different ways and with varying degrees of success. Each of those times was really hard to navigate in my mind. Why didn’t I feel ‘in love’ with one friend when we were dating, though I had felt like I wanted to fall in love with them when we weren’t? With another friend, I know we have really good chemistry from the times we have been physical, and I would happily date them in theory, but I don’t really feel the need to. With a third friend, I know that some part of me could be deeply in love with them; but that part of me would need specific circumstances to come out, and in the meantime the level of our sexual attraction to each other has oscillated.

One of the many beautiful things about romantic friendships is how they blur the lines of love, sex, friendship, and romance, and how this lack of clear definition gives birth to so many different shapes of affection. But for humans – who adore clear boundaries and unequivocal definitions – the fact that romantic friendships raise more questions than they answer can be disconcerting.

One of the many beautiful things about romantic friendships is how they blur the lines of love, sex, friendship, and romance.

In this piece I’ve been using “romantic relationship” in opposition to “friendship” or “romantic friendship” – but it’s not that simple. When we talk about romantic relationships it’s implied that they are also sexual, though the two are not one and the same. Romantic friendships deconstruct the boundary between romance and friendship, as per their very name, and raise questions about how sex is tied into loving or being in love. If romantic friendships are called romantic because of the intensity of love and the way it is communicated, why aren’t they simply romantic relationships – in other words why does the “friendship” part remain as a qualifier? There is no way I can answer all of these questions, in particular because I believe that the answers are deeply individual or contextual, but they are important departure points for necessary conversations.

What changes in crossing the threshold from romantic friendship to sexual romance? What does the coexistence of all three elements – romance, sex, and friendship – look like? I have endless questions, but I’m learning to tailor each romantic friendship to our specific circumstance.

Living far away from R has affected our relationship and our ability to talk about the nuance of our love for each other. The past summer I went home and finally brought up what had happened and she acknowledged how painful it had been. We still love each other deeply, but honestly, I can’t feel the same way I did. I miss her beyond words – mostly I miss our oneness. But I now have many other romantic friendships that are much more intentionally constructed and in many ways more directly supportive. These people give me so much strength and I cannot see them ever not being a part of my life. We talk about how we want to live our lives and if we can live in a communal situation together, in some cases even help raise children together. I am endlessly grateful for the love we give each other and the deliberate ways we raise each other up and I have resolved a thousand times in my heart to make them an endless priority throughout my life.

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Leon Mustovoy’s work is the most immediately striking upon entrance, depicting various body images that clash with the stereotypes in our minds. The large portraits use images of parts from three different bodies to construct one whole human being. This does more than break gender binaries; it questions our grouping and combining of gender, sex, sexuality, presentation, and attraction, among other heteronormative expectations.

JJ Levine’s photo series Alone Time also disturbs these binaries in a less immediately noticeable but ultimately more powerful way. On first glance, the series it seems to depict heterosexual couples sharing moments that are both intimate and quotidian. After closer inspection (or maybe after reading the artist’s description) it becomes apparent that each photo is two separate photos of the same model, portraying both halves of the relationship and two sexes. According to Levine, the piece’s purpose is to demonstrate “an individual body’s capacity to engagingly and believably embody two genders,” hence questioning “the mainstream depiction of binary gender roles.” In this, Levine succeeds entirely, challenging the viewer’s assumptions and displaying the fluidity of gender expression. Though intimate, the photos come across as slightly staged, a reminder that binary gender roles are as construed and filtered as the photograph itself.

While they are the exhibit’s focus, gender stereotypes are not the only issues addressed in “Trans Time.” Golden Shoe, whose artist is not clearly identified, tackles colonialism and privilege through interactivity. The piece, a golden shoe and a small red flag with a skull upon it, also included a performance aspect, where one participant put on the shoe and stepped on another participant’s neck in an act of oppression. The performance, however, is not necessary to give the piece meaning – the message of Golden Shoe is just as strong from where it sits innocently on its pedestal, shining quietly.

The Number Project (another piece without a clearly labelled artist) also diverted from the exhibit’s themes, bringing to it a historical consciousness. Playing from a TV on the floor of the gallery, the project is a video that shows the artist branding themselves with the same number their mother had in Auschwitz. Its impact is immediate and provocative. Does this rebranding perpetuate the crime? Or, as an aware and individual choice, does it honour the original, unwilling recipients of the tattoo?

These two pieces, along with Nothing Comes In, Nothing Goes Out by Zahra Farhan and Claude Wittman, are the only ones that do not directly address trans issues, linked thematically instead by the fact that the artists themselves are trans. These off-topic pieces do not, however, detract from “Trans Time” – the purpose of the exhibit is to make trans artists visible. This does not mean that their work should be confined to trans politics. Indeed, they relate to the rest of the exhibit in that they portray other systemic means of oppression, conveying themes of intersectionality and suggesting that identifying as trans does not need to define one’s identity. Nothing Comes In, Nothing Goes Out is a tiny scrap of paper upon which both Farhan and Wittman drew when they met in the prison where Farhan is today. The piece of paper is so small because Wittman had to smuggle it out without being caught, tangible evidence of the marginalization of trans artists’ voices, even though the piece is not explicitly about gender.

Downstairs, the exhibit displays various films. Most memorable is the story of Bob and Candace, in which a psychoanalyst narrates the characters’ everyday lives in black and white film. The psychoanalyst, after describing Bob and Candace, goes on to warn the audience that they are in fact “invisible monsters” and not who they appear to be – they are “transsexual.” This film, while stylistically indicating that it’s set in the past, still feels all too relevant. The words of the psychoanalyst linger in the air, long after the film finishes.

This is the importance of exhibits such as “Trans Time”: presenting alternative narratives of trans people. By giving space to the work of trans artists, the exhibit helps to debunk the oppressive societal dichotomy between ‘normal’ and trans. On their own, each individual piece from these international artists is striking and thought-provoking. Together, they make visible a community.

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