No Queer Monuments
There's a queerness that begs to be a part of empire, and a queerness that longs to live outside it.
In my final year of grad school, I took a Latin American film course that was meant for undergraduates. Most sessions were spent in a darkened theater classroom as one of the only students awake enough to take in the films, but it’s also where I first watched one my favorites, Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate, 1993).
The film, directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea1, tells the story of David and Diego. David is a straight university student and communist revolutionary who is somewhat overreliant on the talking points of the party; he meets Diego when the older gay man tries to pick him up at an ice cream parlor. Their friendship is never consummated (don't go looking for any gay sex in this film, which visually and ironically reifies the straight male gaze). But David returns to Diego’s apartment at the insistence of his militant classmate who is sure Diego’s homosexuality is indicative of counterrevolutionary beliefs. As he’s spying, David has many conversations with Diego about art, politics, and whether freedom is really all it’s cracked up to be if one can’t love who one loves and read what one wants. During a particularly heated conversation, begun when David is trying to figure out what in Diego’s past made him gay, Diego erupts in a fiery monologue: “I am a part of this country whether you like it or not, and I have the right to do things for it,” he says. “Without me it would be missing a piece!”
The great irony of the way the world is set up now is that you have to have a country in order to have rights, but loving a country is a great mistake, not to mention very dangerous. Try, like Diego does, and you will end up chewed and spit out to serve the ends of political discourse, borders, safety, and ultimately serve as a sacrifice on the altar of art. The film’s politics aren’t tidy, but it tries harder than any other film I know to put this particular thorn in front of our eyes, the thorn of being an artist with a country that demands representation. Wherein every work you make is subjected to the moniker of “American artist” or “Cuban intellectual.”
When I first watched Fresa y Chocolate, circa 2017, trans people were rising in visibility in American media. The idea that the country was “missing a piece” without us resonated for me in a different way then than it does now. In the film, as David is tutored by Diego in the art and architecture of Havana, we see the young revolutionary gain a new appreciation for his adopted city (David is from the countryside, the son of campesinos, and he feels greatly indebted to the CP for his chance at an education he otherwise wouldn't have had access to), the message being that without the aesthetically inclined homosexuals, the artistic heritage of a country is harder to see. It sounds trite, perhaps, but I still feel similarly about trans writers in particular, and our ability to convey truths about change and biology and belonging in a time when every person on this planet, not to mention this country, has to wrestle with great change.
But the longer I live and create art in this country, the more convinced I am that it doesn’t deserve the pieces I have to give. I couldn’t have asked for a better example to slot into this point in this newsletter than the removal of the T in LGBT of the Stonewall National Monument’s website. Actually, before researching for this article, I didn't realize it was just the website where the change had been made; I pictured the signature drab brown sign of national parks and monuments with an awkwardly large space at the end, a sunfaded absence in the shape of a “T.” Not that the removal of the T from the online presence for the first national monument honoring LGBT history in this country is insignificant; to be certain, it’s become even more important to safeguard online queer heritage in this moment (though a govt website surely doesn’t count.) But I question what it says about the LGBT community—and especially the capital-T Trans community—that seeks validation through a national monument in the first place. Although national monuments and national parks come to be in different ways—through executive action and an act of congress, respectively—they are administered, defended, and their rules enforced by similar combinations of federal and state law enforcement, which, yes, includes the National Parks Service, Bureau of Land Management, and others.
I am not an expert on parks, or monuments, or the Antiquities Act of 1909, which initiated the process by which presidents could bypass congress and create national monuments, ostensibly in order to protect tribal heritage and artifacts belonging to indigenous nations. But I do know that long before and after the Antiquities Act, the National Parks System has been used as a blunt legal instrument to further facilitate the seizing of indigenous lands and restriction of hunting and fishing rights on these lands. Looking to the state to validate our queerness as a worthy part of the nation via a monument is a devil’s bargain, one that demands we uplift our nationality and commitment to the colonial project in order to admit our queerness through the side door.
I will not subscribe to a worldview in which I can be turned on or off, deleted at the whim of a government employee. I won't beg to be included in any monument, and I suppose by extension, any nation, which are monuments writ large into the land. I think the more national monuments we have, the less queer we are. The less outside of the mainstream and the less strange and otherworldly we are, and the less committed we are to the freedom of movement for people across nations and borders.
I don't know. Maybe Stonewall is the thing you've devoted yourself to, or the thing that makes you fiery mad and gets you out into the streets. Who am I to take that away from you? But I hope we haven’t suffered through ~10 years of saccharine internet memes blaring “Stonewall was a riot” for nothing. It was a riot against the police—does that need to be stated? I guess it does. No one seems to wonder if a national monument is really the best way to honor the legacies of Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson and the trans women at the root of the movement. I think they wouldn't care one whit.
As for Diego, he ends up leaving Cuba. It's a bittersweet ending. As terrible as it is to belong to a country, it's still fucking hard to live without one, or outside of the only one you've ever known spurred by the possibility that you might be able to live more openly inside another, but only if you play by the rules and try as hard as you can to be like your citizen neighbors.
Given the current uncertainty around renewing, replacing, and applying for U.S. passports that match one’s gender as a trans person2, I’m again looking into applying for a World Government Passport, a document of the World Service Authority, a nonprofit started by peace activist Garry Davis in 1953. A bonafide “fantasy travel document,” i.e. will most likely not get you into a country on its own, its longevity is a testament to the tantalizing glimmer of a world in which borders don’t exist and the universal declaration of human rights and freedom of movement actually means something. For me, a World Passport also says, ‘I do not belong to you, I belong to the world, and therefore whatever letter you decide should be on my passport is irrelevant.’
Documents and monuments are evidence, reminders, and instructions for how we are meant to live our lives within the dominant power structure. They are the pieces that make up our lives and identities, according to the state. It may be impossible to live without them in our lifetimes. But they are not truth. Here I can do nothing except turn to Le Guin, in her essay “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?”:
“For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.”
You could replace ‘fantasy’ in this quote with trans people (“transgenderism” if you require a barf-worthy, terfy noun for grammatical correctness) and you’d get an equally valid reason for the widespread fear of trans people in our culture. Of course, this is a favorite talking point of the brainrotted: “Changing one’s gender is a fantasy!” To which I say: yes, it is, and it’s a beautiful way to live. Nations and the concept of a self are also fantasies; which fantasy we choose says a lot about us.
Upcoming
My last independent short fiction workshop until at least the fall, Speculative Shorts, begins on April 10. On zoom, sliding scale.
Starting April 1, I’m running a series of monthly classes called Climate Journaling in the End Times, via Corporeal Writing.
Keep your eyes on smoke and mold. We’ll be open for submissions throughout the month of March, and our long-awaited 11th issue, Disability Justice, is also publishing in March.
Gutiérrez also founded the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, Cuba’s national board of film under Castro, a fact which struck Roger Ebert as odd, and is indicative of the way this film slips in and out of discourse.
Many people seem to think changing one’s birth certificate is the way to get around this. I’m not so sure. Comments from border guards and security agents over the years has led me to believe that the record of my gender and name change is perennially attached to my passport and SSN, no matter how long ago I did it. Of course, what would be really helpful in this situation would be a few “whistleblowers” from TSA etc. letting us know the whole breakdown, but I’m not holding my breath.
A very thoughtful and important position on this. Your articulation reminds me of the debate over same-sex marriage. Articulate and stirring discussions over why would we want to adopt this terrible relic of chattel or property. But for me, my support for both of these imperfect honors comes down to harm reduction and joy. I start by defining queer "monuments" to include the uncountably huge collection of queer-themed artwork, murals, statues/those bronze plaques/curated walking tours. It's the whole thing and not just Stonewall National Historic Monument or other historic sites.
After all, I was a kid who noticed if the waiters serving me at a hamburger stand were queer. I noticed their lisp, their pinkie ring fingers, the extra long finger nail, the length of everyone's hair in that much-policed era. Whatever it was that "signified." Because I grew up in a time when the search for community was in some ways easier than ever, but also suppressed in some ways and expensive to navigate in others, and therefore so many entry points remained hidden.
So, even if those stores, bars, restaurants, bookstores, meeting places have vanished, why not mark them with love and memory in the shape of bronze signage or artwork? Why not have more LGBTQ references in our built environment? Things in the public realm, the public square that don't just wink and nod but shout, gesticulate, and inspire? Adding something clear, direct and not coded to a landscape otherwise saturated with advertising or wayfinding navigation?
That said, there's a whole bunch of other places where the park, the courthouse, the writer's workroom, the home, the pier, the boat--whatever it was--are still there. Why not reveal a layer of what happened at a spot? I realize everything decays--no one can speak to that better than you. At the same time, every spot contains clues to its own history and evolution. Why not fight to save those spots and inform everyone what happened there, once upon a time? Why not give us a chance to shape and share our own version of the story?
What catches my attention about NPS/Stonewall National Monument is all the contradictions. The layers of bureaucracy in this country when it comes to historic recognition and protection. (It's a doozy!!) And I love how the story of Stonewall exists far beyond any boundary set by the Executive Branch putting pressure on the NPS. It's in libraries, archives, social media photos, media of all sorts, songs, movies, memories. They cannot possibly contain it. Also, the way "Stonewall" is not only about the bar and who threw the first glass or rock or yelled at the patrons (hello to Stormé DeLarverie who we loving remember along with Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson). It's also about the weird zig-zag streets of Greenwich Village that enabled the enraged residents to gather in the little parklet and surrounding streets to trap the policemen inside the bar for 6 days or whatever the historic record says about that 1969 summer uprising.
It was a battlefield, in other words. And it still is. In fact, the good people of NYC LGBT Historic Sites used the same criteria as a previous generation used to mark out the Gettysberg Battlefield to call that little park (not the bar!) as a Historic National Monument. I think that's really interesting to know. And worth sharing with others and fighting to keep whether it falls into obscurity for reasons of empire, politics, the bulldozer and gentrification, or the march of time and the fragility of memory.
Every place holds stories important to someone or something. Whatever prompts us to remember those stories, I suggest, is worth holding close and lifting up.
Very intriguing as always. My passport expires end of this year. I'm thinking about renewing soon, however, since I have little doubt the orange menace will eventually get around to destroying the passport process somehow, along with everything else.