The Treacherous Felicity in Relentless Dissent

J Mase III, October 2013

Brooklyn, New York

QTPOC Portrait and Prose series in-progress

entitled “The Treacherous Felicity in Relentless Dissent”

______________

‘Josephine’

She asks if she can talk to me about Jesus at 3 am on the C-train

Because something about my queer face means I am on a sure path to

Hell I have come to expect this behavior at least once a week

from strangers since I was first exorcised at 16

So today I’ve decided it’s my turn to proselytize

Have you heard the good word about

Joseph of Genesis?

I use to hear this story

But never the cries for help

Told holy books

Were meant for anyone except me

Joseph

Josephine

Jo of Genesis

Favorite child of Jacob

Aka Israel

When asked

What you wanted

You desired one thing

A kethoneth passim

Pastor called this a royal coat

And Jo

I had never read a Bible before

But found you

And kept reading

Josephine

I got to 2nd Samuel

And realized your coat of many colors

Was a princess dress

Joseph

Your father really loved you

He got it for you

You wore it with pride

Jo

Your brothers saw you

In your flowing dress

Your glory

And became enraged

Sorry for the beating

You received

Sorry they destroyed your dress

And smeared it with the red paint of your swollen veins

Josephine

Did you know they told your father you were dead

So he’d never come looking for you

Never knew your brothers

Sold you as a slave into Egypt

And once you were stolen from your home fields

The earth dried up

Jo

The ground on which you walked

Mourned the loss of its genderqueer child

And all the plants died

And the animals no longer had the will to live

Josephine

Your family nearly starved

Began to see the formation of ribs

Where once grew flesh

And belly fat

And they

Hungry and desperate

Traveled to Egypt

And what must they have seen Jo?

See in Egypt people discovered you

Not as fag

Not as tranny

Saw you in totality

Went from slave

To a leader over lands

There you were Josephine

You looked magnificent

As you

Your brothers couldn’t recognize you through the glare of divinity

You saw them shivering in fear

Waiting to hear what this regal leader

Might say

Wondering if the spirit would move you

To grant them grain

Needed to survive

And Joseph

Love broke through

The darkness of resentment

And for the first time

Your family saw you

As you

As Magnificent

For it was your word

That saved them from starvation

Dear Joseph of Genesis

Aka Josephine

Aka Jo

I am claiming your story

For every queer kid told

They are unholy

For every queer told

In order to love

We must let our faith die

I am going to put it in a pocket

Over my heart

Next to Ruth & Naomi

Next to David & Jonathan

Next to Haggai & Deborah

And seat them at the last Passover

With Jesus and Lazarus

Yes I am taking Jesus with me too

Ruth 1:16

Wherever these stories go I will go

These are my people their stories have been allowed to die

And my spirit was once buried there

Dear pastor

To you who claims your words are from God

But whose book is pledged to King James

Know what allegiances you keep

You’ve been lying about my people for too long

J Mase III says:

I wrote this piece for a few reasons. Firstly, as a young child, even before I had language for what it meant to be gay, or trans or queer, I had a pretty strong conviction that whatever I was dealing with in regards to my crushes and my gender meant I was going to Hell. Before I even had words to talk about my experience, I had gotten the impression that I was in some way evil. This belief made me hate myself for a long time and then when I did come out I had still heard almost no good words coming from the religious communities I was a part of, so I left them behind. I felt I had to. Which is different than not believing. I was forced to let go.

Secondly, I wrote this piece, because as someone who has worked with medical professionals, teachers, students, lawyers, detention centers, group homes, faith communities, etc…the number one question I get about whether or not someone will choose to be an ally to the LGBTQIA community is “Well, what does my religion say?”. For many, that is a question that must be answered in order to move forward and many of us as queer activists are afraid to answer it, even if that is the question everyone is asking in regards to whether or not we deserve rights.

Finally, I wrote this piece because of 5 people. The first being Peterson Toscano, a theologian, an actor and playwright. Peterson wrote a play called Transfigurations which looks at trans* people within biblical text. When I saw that play, I nearly fell out of my chair!! (The interpretation of Joseph’s coat comes from that play.) There are actually queer people in the Bible?? I had to do more research! It changed the way I looked at religious text because until that moment, I had just been trying to refute the “clobber passages” instead of finding affirmation.

The other four people that made me write this poem, was my slam team for the National Slam 2013. When they heard me prepping for a talk at a church and sharing these affirming passages, they were like, “Mase! You HAVE to make that a poem! That poem needs to be heard!” So, I wrote it, they helped me edit it. And here, but for the grace of all things in holy poetry form, it is.

J Mase III a Black, Queer, Trans* poet, educator, and activist. He is the creator of the national performance event, Cupid Ain’t @#$%!: An Anti-Valentine’s Day Poetry Movement. He teaches workshops in various youth facilities, universities, and community organizations, and also does educational outreach within communities of faith with people of all ages. Check out his website at: http://www.jmaseiii.com/

Fredrick Douglas Kakinami Cloyd, Photoshoot, February 7, 2013

San Francisco, California

QTPOC Portrait and Prose series in-progress

entitled “The Treacherous Felicity in Relentless Dissent”

____________________________

I have had the privilege of knowing Fredrick for over 6 years. He identifies, in part, as Blackanese Amerasian, and has produced beautiful work, including an as-of-yet unpublished critical memoir, addressing the racism and nationalism behind United States Imperialism, specifically through his experiences growing up both outside and inside military bases in Japan and the United States. He was born in Japan to an African-American/Cherokee father who was an occupation soldier in Korea and Japan, and a Japanese/Chinese/Austro-Hungarian mother from an elite Japanese nationalist family. The stories I have heard of his growing up are rife with the pain of encountering  everyday forms of U.S. imperialism at home and abroad, and rich with the poetry and beauty that comes from a life of building resilience, of cultivating the intellect as a form of, and tool for, resistance.

The English language is known for being very noun-centered, as opposed to other languages being more verb-centered. One effect of this in the United States is a focus on identity as a thing we are or have which also has us, rather than what we conduct or perform, practice or endeavor, what we live or do or move within.

Fredrick tells me, “I’m not gay. I’m not heterosexual. I’m not-heterosexual. ‘Queer’ has its own cultural implications…. I haven’t even begun to write much about my experiences with all this through my life, because it feels like people can only take in so much about who I am. The mix of experiences I have had connected to race are already a lot to contend with for readers.”

Claiming these labels, and all their complex intersecting- it is strategic, political, historical. They help us tell stories. But they can’t be reduced to any sort of monolith. We are not monoliths. Black. Japanese. Blackanese. Amerasian. Not-heterosexual/Not-Gay. Military child. These are words loaded with stories, of intense violence, assimilation, forgetting, remembering, and resistance. We live in them, with them, through them. We survive them. We loathe them. We embrace them and love them.

Fredrick offered this piece, below.

______________________________

POEM (kind of):

For My Mix

For awhile, I was ‘they,’ and self-hypnotized myself into the 'other.’ Subject. Object. What is that place/space in-between—or really beyond those labels themselves so that there aren’t things to be placed between?

There was a time in the dark-moment of darkness, I tried to do away with these visions and desires, this body that carried so much. So much I couldn’t articulate. I was displaced from myself. Desires cajoled, unforgiving, ruthless in their forms and heat.

Displaced from self, realizing that others are. To be alive is to be displaced.

The privileged and ignorant scream so loudly about their integration and wholeness. I see it as a pack of lies, internalized, like me before.

I took zen practice, in a cold monastery in Upstate New York, to flip me, turn me inside-out. Now I see the outside in me and the inside out there, here in my walking and talking and gestures. Clearly I paint the world without hiding the brush. The brush that soaks in pain. Dripping pain given to me by the war of nations, whistling casually, crashing. That which makes pain is here while all of us walk, talk, breathe……in, out.

My mother through the tears and body-parts of China, Christian missionaries from Europe, Japanese imperialism in China, Tokyo and Osaka under war crime bombers, US bombings and take-over by the US afterward. Escape with Him, the American, to America. Him—the African-American occupation soldier, forgetting his Cherokee ancestors too, so little time while trying to survive the normal…….crushing American anti-Black, doing his duty in stars-and-stripes uniform—in Jeju-do of Korea, the military bases of US-run Japan, the jungles of Vietnam, shot-down from the helicopter and left for dead, all the while remembering Klu-Klux Clan raids through his child-eyes, displaced from himself in his journey to empowerment. Love in-between them, through them.

I was born to them, through them. Rocks and bats and cutting words that made me reminded me taught me formed me not-nation bad, not the look bad, not the hair, not the bombed, still the enemy. Words and concepts: bombs.

In American pre-language it was the same: nigger, queer, jap, gook, mutt, confused, mongrel, insect, fucked-up, half-thing, impure? Americans seem happy with these words they use. Gay, straight, bi, trans—might-as-well be mutt, confused, insect, fucked-up, half-thing, “imp.”

Fist for ears, crying heart, praying with my heart for a space without that which came as wind from others through my little body, raising me. Into love, desire, loins that were more than these categories of other, nation, the big missile-penis glory of what should-be, made-to-be, with weapons. Women, men, children, queers, in-betweens, all carrying that giant penis now. Spewing out whiteness culminated from its its its…….Patri-hardness. All over the world. Why aren’t we happy?

Educating myself, Zen practice, postcolonial-feminist thought, taking care of that which I am still learning, through tactics of care invented by Masters of colonial and imperial projects.

Everyone forgot. Most of the world is criss-crossed, multiple, beautiful colors and ways, forgotten in the nation’s projects. Displace and normalize. Displaced, normal.

Recognize not-self, Recognize the normal, the not-you. It’s probably you.

Mixed is an invention. Not-mixed are those who refuse: The Big Walking of the ancestors.

Remembering in pieces, my ancestors’ lives and gifts……walking.

Ghosts live as Fist, as Tears, as Open Arms, as Love, as Life.

Remembering comes as every breath, my own walking, yours.

Fredrick D. Kakinami Cloyd is an independent scholar/writer/artist, who was born in Japan shortly after the US occupation of Japan officially ended. His work focuses on memory and its processes through resisting normalities, examining tactics and legacies of inside/outside and hierarchical norms in nationality, race, sex, gender, caste/class and proximities to militarism and globalization. He has been published in Kartika Review, Oakland Word, The Pacific Reader, and Nikkei Heritage (Japanese American Historical Society Journal) and has been the subject of interviews for numerous cable television, radio programs, newspapers and journals since 1975.

The websites for his auto-ethnography project, Dream of the Water Children: A Black Pacific Memory Journal can be found here: http://ainoko.wordpress.com/dream-of-the-water-children/ and http://swordglint.wix.com/waterchildren

Tiara, Photoshoot, January 23, 2013

San Francisco, California

QTPOC Portrait and Prose series in-progress

entitled “The Treacherous Felicity in Relentless Dissent”

 _________________________________________________________

Tiara, otherwise known as Creatrix Tiara, is a Bangladeshi performing artist who grew up in Malaysia, attended university in Australia, and currently resides in Oakland, California. We had been acquainted through online networks, but we met in person for the first time for the purposes of this photoshoot. Her energy is fervent, matched by the shock of fiery pink in her hair.

We talked a lot about Queer politics and identity politics in the Bay Area, unexamined privilege, oppression olympics, and some of her experiences of ethnocentrism from Queer and Trans* folks, white and POC both, in the United States.

The “LGBTIQ/Queer Movement” in the United States is experienced by many as a colonizing force: particularly by folks of color within the U.S. and various people from outside of it. Queer politics, like so many elements of society, is subject to the forces of globalization, and therefore, carries a weight when non-heterosexual, non-cis-gendered, non-U.S.-white folks encounter the very white identitarian and individualistic aspects of U.S. Queer culture. The non-hetero-sexualities and third and fourth and multiple genders of other cultures are often subsumed under the frameworks of U.S.-based Queer and Trans* imaginations, and otherwise rendered illegitimate and unrecognizable. This is a form colonization, of ideology, as well as processes of subject-formation, that is readily invisibilized as the dominant elements of the Movement make high stakes of certain priorities more relevant to white, middle and upper-class LGBTIQ/Queer people (like Gay Marriage, for example.) In other words, what constitutes “Queer” and “Trans*” to some does not translate for many others, and those of us working for Queer Justice in the United States need to check the U.S.-centrism of our work, and reflect on what and who is left out when we assume our concerns are relevant to all.

Part of how these dynamics of power play out is in the social regulation of identities. Tiara shared some about how her experience of being a Queer migrant has been during her time in the Bay Area:

‘It’s been really interesting to see the multiple perspectives of being a Queer Woman of Colour, having lived in multiple continents and travelled worldwide. A lot of it is subtle: for instance, trans* women are much more visible in Malaysia (though still rather persecuted) while the one Malaysian trans* man I met was in the Bay Area! “Queer” as an identity label is more casually accepted in Australia, with larger government bodies and non-profits using that term, whereas in the US it still has a more contentious history. There isn’t quite as strong a consciousness around race in Australia compared to the US - and a large part of why I moved to the Bay Area was to connect with QPOC in a way that I couldn’t back in Brisbane. However, even within QPOC circles I feel like an outlier, because I’m a recent migrant who had to deal with racism, gender, and sexuality in very different ways than American QPOC who can sometimes get stuck in their US-centrism even while working on anti-oppression. I’m pretty used to being the outlier, as uncomfortable as it can be - I’ve never really fit one category or another neatly, existing more in liminality, a collection of characteristics that shouldn’t go together but somehow manage to.’

Mauro Osborne, Photoshoot, January 3, 2013

San Francisco, California

QTPOC series in-progress

entitled “The Treacherous Felicity in Relentless Dissent”

________________________________________________

Mauro and I have known each other for over six years, and been housemates for a good while. He is one of the most linguistically adept people I know; he is a mixed-race Chicano, scholar and activist, a violinist, a Brown Boi, a self-identified trans* person, Queer, and somebody I respect a lot.

For this photoshoot, we discussed how to approach it, and I left it open to Mauro, whether it would include nudity and/or clothing. As somebody who strives to be an effective ally to trans* people in my life, I wanted to leave open the option to do a nude shoot, as a way to use the medium of photography to celebrate trans* bodies, and intervene on gendered normativity and body normativity. Simultaneously, I wanted to refuse the spectacle that is often made of transgendered and racialized bodies, and the question of how to do so, despite having had my own experiences of degradation and exotification, was something that felt incredibly challenging to me.

I have long admired Mauro’s approach to his own gender expression, performance, and experimentation. I have watched him refuse to fit himself within a binary that is imposed by hegemonic society, as well as, all too often, by queer and trans* communities. Specifically, what is understood to be legitimately trans* is often framed through a queer and trans* culture of whiteness, thereby deprecating those trans* black and brown bodies that do not fit into white imaginations of permissible gender-variance, when it is considered permissible at all. The psychological and physical violence that this does to Queer, Genderqueer, and Trans* People of Color is immense. The refusal of such inscription into standardized notions of acceptable genderedness is a risk for all genderqueer and trans* folks, and especially one for those who are not white.

In the end, we did a number of nude shots, as well as clothed, and, while the Not Safe for Work (NSFW) images are not shared here, online, for reasons of Mauro’s professional concern, my hope is that they may have impact elsewhere. By conveying the message to a public audience that there are infinitely diverse forms of bodies, of being embodied, of being—within and beyond and around and through the boundaries of gender, race, and so many other aspects of our identities—and that this is a beautiful and wondrous element in this thing we call ‘life’, my hope is that peoples’ imaginations will be opened, making more room for their own difference, as well as that of others. I believe that it is with the imagination we begin to make shifts that then allow for larger, more political, legal, economic, and social shifts that are central to Trans* Justice, and in general, to social change.

That said, the images that are here, for me, convey an intensity, and a bit of playfulness, both of which feel fundamental to Mauro’s presence, and work. Even clothed, I think there is a nakedness in Mauro’s gaze back at the camera that lets the viewer in on something of the quiet and feverish magic that is at work in a writer-musician’s mind, vulnerable and defiant, and armed with a language of transgression that will speak itself to you if dare listen.

In Mauro’s words,

“Four surgeries and two bouts of pubescence later, I have made peace with the way life has storied itself across my skin. From temple to torso, sleeve to shoulders, scars have become my archive of survival. Negotiating the pendulum of shame and pride is interminable. Long forgone fantasies of self-harm intermingle with an awkward joy at the sight of my own reflection. For colored queers, embodiment can be about so much more than a body; it can be about a sense of chain-linked history to those whose names we can’t pronounce, whose noses appear on our faces, whose pigments show up in concentrated, freckled constellations over rounded cheeks. Telling my story in text and image alike is not only about proliferating an individual self, but is about an intervention on the convenient forgetting of difference. My lifelong commitments to justice and education - and the arduous work of ensuring their union - are what propel my gaze. I stare back because I have spent too many years with eyes down-turned towards the pavement, and am no longer interested in stumbling over my own shadow. “

~Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

___________________________________

Mauro is a scholar of social justice who is invested in addressing issues of discrimination in CA public school curricula. A native Californian from Fresno, he now lives in San Francisco and spends his spare time dreaming of being reunited with his cat, Oscar, who currently lives in Fresno.

Mauro also has his own blog starting up soon!

http://chicomoreno.wordpress.com/

Kyle Casey Chu, Photoshoot December 11, 2012

San Francisco, California

QTPOC series in-progress

entitled “The Treacherous Felicity in Relentless Dissent”

_________________________________________

Kyle

Kyle and I met while slinging coffee at your friendly local neighborhood café, connecting over bits of postcolonial and race theory in between the sweat of steaming milk for lattes. I was later blown away when, at a Mission Arts and Performance Project event I co-curated in my backyard, he read his poem about the pain and rage of experiencing racism in the workplace, and the strategic choices one is sometimes forced to make- to remain silent in order to keep one’s job: an experience many of us know all too well.

This being the first photoshoot in this series, I was still questioning myself on how to approach this project, aesthetically, politically, and personally. Still, we jumped right in, letting the initial awkwardness melt away, and I soon found myself stunned by the combination of Kyle’s simultaneous vulnerability and power. Conversations ensued in between shots, and this was where the profundity of the experience grew from. We dove together for a couple hours into memories and questions and struggles we had each faced around beauty, body, desire, sex, community, identity… as they are all contoured by race and racism, and our specific experience of white liberal culture in San Francisco. For Kyle, as a self-identified Queer, Asian, cis-gendered man, this means coming up against the norm of the white, Gay, middle/upper-class, body-built, standard. It means having assumptions made about him, and expectations placed on him by other Gay and Queer men, about what his desires are, how he likes to have sex, and how much power he is expected to assert through notions of masculinity-via-sexism, as contoured by racism. It means often being made to feel as though one were disappointing others by not fulfilling the discursively violent stereotypes imposed upon him. It means that often, he feels unseen…

What those hours between us evidenced was that, as queer people of color, despite having the intellectual capacity to critique normative notions of beauty, of desiring and being desired, of body… we still live with very real and present pain in our bodies and selves, and deep-seated and suffocating episodes of self-doubt as we find ourselves perpetually contrasted against white heterosexual and homosexual or queer norms. We know these are effects of the deprecating nature of colonization, and normalization, and yet, how quickly it is we can feel splayed out naked at the social and political guillotines, as we are sentenced by those around us, for the crime of fitting into the stereotypes placed on us, just as much as for the crime of not fitting into them. But there is no victimization here either. To survive the impact of racism both within and outside of our queer communities, is testimony to our strength and resilience. That we are constantly recreating ourselves, that we wake up everyday and risk showing up in the world, demanding that our worth be seen and heard- is a vital act of resistance.

By the end of the evening with Kyle, there was a sense that what we had shared had produced an incredibly meaningful space of healing for us both: in articulating the violences we face together, we recognize that we aren’t alone in them, and we harness our collective power to make refusals that are indispensable to our survival and our becoming. It was from there that I’ve grown a sense of what I want this project to be, and I am so grateful to Kyle for that. It is as much, if not more so, about the process than the final product. It is about healing. It is about taking risks in so many different ways, rendering ourselves vulnerable in order to rise up like phoenix birds from the ashes of former pains and sorrows. It is about a practice of justice, of community, of family, and of growing each other fiercely through the storms we weather.

~Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

_________________________________

Kyle Casey Chu is a San Francisco native queer, cis-male fourth-generation Chinese American musician and scholar committed to fostering public discourse surrounding race, sexuality, violence and the grotesque. He has toured nationally, and has guest spoken on National Public Radio and on college campuses across the US. His current work can be accessed online at:

[http://www.soundcloud.com/pandaarmywww.soundcloud.com/pandaarmy] 

[http://www.soundcloud.com/bellowsmusicwww.soundcloud.com/bellowsmusic]