A cycle of stories linking queer memory, activism, death, and art in a transpoetic history of desire and touch.
Dances of Time and Tenderness is a bold, sensual cycle of transpoetic stories that blend memory and movement in an innovative choreo-text of rage, sweetness and sorrow. A dance hall where the dead and the living meet, the tales take us from the dungeons of 1990s San Francisco to the goldsmith’s forges of the earliest cities, tracing a transgenderational lineage of queer carnality. Not a memoir, but a collective memory, Julian Carter invites us to join artists and AIDS activists, sailors and skeletons, to fulfill the trans promise: “what we do with our bodies changes worlds.”
A cycle of stories linking queer memory, activism, death, and art in a transpoetic history of desire and touch.
Dances of Time and Tenderness is a bold, sensual cycle of transpoetic stories that blend memory and movement in an innovative choreo-text of rage, sweetness and sorrow. A dance hall where the dead and the living meet, the tales take us from the dungeons of 1990s San Francisco to the goldsmith’s forges of the earliest cities, tracing a transgenderational lineage of queer carnality. Not a memoir, but a collective memory, Julian Carter invites us to join artists and AIDS activists, sailors and skeletons, to fulfill the trans promise: “what we do with our bodies changes worlds.”
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Overview
A cycle of stories linking queer memory, activism, death, and art in a transpoetic history of desire and touch.
Dances of Time and Tenderness is a bold, sensual cycle of transpoetic stories that blend memory and movement in an innovative choreo-text of rage, sweetness and sorrow. A dance hall where the dead and the living meet, the tales take us from the dungeons of 1990s San Francisco to the goldsmith’s forges of the earliest cities, tracing a transgenderational lineage of queer carnality. Not a memoir, but a collective memory, Julian Carter invites us to join artists and AIDS activists, sailors and skeletons, to fulfill the trans promise: “what we do with our bodies changes worlds.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781643622347 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nightboat Books |
| Publication date: | 06/04/2024 |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
AN OPENING, A CLASP
I wonder if this is our most accessible way into history—not through grand narratives or identity politics, but through a simple one-to-one connection that we partially read and partially imagine.[1]
—E.G. Crichton, Matchmaking in the Archive: 19 Conversations with the Dead and 3 with Ghosts
Every chain starts with an encounter: one link joins another.
On the winter solstice I opened my email to find a cold call from lesbian artist E.G. Crichton. She was starting a new show in her ongoing series of queer archival matchmaking projects. This time she was pairing artists, activists, and scholars with specific issues of OUT/LOOK: The National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, which she had helped found in San Francisco in 1988. I was one of the 38 people she solicited to “dive into the OUT/LOOK archive, think about queer history and use your matched magazine issue as a score for creating something new and provocative.”
E.G. gave me Issue #11, “Birth of a Queer Nation,” from Winter 1991. She couldn’t have timed it better. I got her invitation just after Trump’s election set the whole world reeling. Things were bleak all over in the winter of 2016, and that bleakness landed in my whitequeer transsexual life like a whole graveyard full of ghosts.
A short list to set the scene:
** 2016 replaced 2015 as the deadliest year for US trans people on record, with 6 more Black trans women murdered than in 2015, and we all know that record is always incomplete.
** 2016 featured the deadliest event in the history of violence against LGBT people in the US, which was a mass shooting at the Orlando queer club called Pulse. 49 mostly Latinx people were murdered while out dancing.
** Police used fatal force against 916 US civilians.
** Upper-income families held 75 times as much wealth as lower-income families.
** ER visits for opioid overdose rose 30% and 42,000 people died, and honestly, I can understand just wanting to stop feeling.
I could go on but who wants to linger? If you weren’t there, then, you aren’t sorry you missed it. The point is that the winter of 2016 was the close of a trainwreck year and everyone I loved was feeling the weight of our collective vulnerability.
Flashback to 1991: the CDC announced that one million Americans were HIV+ and AIDS was the 3rd leading cause of death among people aged 25-44 years. Death rates for Latino and Black men were double and triple the rates among white men and the straight state was still in bed with the Catholic Church to let us all die and they still didn’t give a shit because it wasn’t happening to them, and a handful of celebrities started wearing red ribbons to advertise their earnest compassion for their gay friends who weren’t junkies or whores or dark or poor, and nobody was even gathering data on trans people as such—and in all that ghastly mess, during my first year in graduate school, world-making trans historian and activist Lou Sullivan was one of the 29,840 people who died of AIDS-related causes in the US.
There is never peace without justice, and there will be grief as long as people keep on dying. Again and again, we learn: we can both mourn and organize. We can also throw legendary parties. I’m not hanging up my eyelashes just yet. Dancing was always part of this revolution and why shouldn’t it be again, and still?
Through our actions the trans promise—what we do with our bodies changes worlds.
************
If there’s a theory in here, it’s simple: things circle back around. We don’t need all of time’s wrinkles ironed smooth. It’s pointless work anyway, because no starch survives a good night out.
My friend Susan is one of the mothers of trans history and theory. Back in 1991, though, she was an archives volunteer, busy transforming Lou Sullivan’s paper trail into the Louis Graydon Sullivan collection at the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Historical Society Archive and Museum. Susan had just finished her doctorate in history, I was just beginning mine; but we met in a dungeon outside of time and language. The worlds emerging there were uncontainable. Oh, the explosive beauties, the resistant joys that flower in traumatized times: our bodies, our buildings, were molecules in a wild vortex, gathering and streaming and merging with others into fields of power, streets and coffeeshops and bookstores charged, all vibrating new worlds into being. We left footprints in memory, in concrete and fog all across San Francisco. In 2016, when I told Susan about E.G.’s invitation, I was fretting over the question: how could I bring that passionate movement forward? Writing didn’t seem like it could hold us. She gave me a crooked smile to match her broken ankle, shrugged, and said I dance on the page.
She was saying we always work with what we have. I smiled back and said I write on the dance floor. I’d rather touch than theorize, but who’s to say we have to choose? Back then I might have met you outside the modest purple Victorian on 14th St; presented you to my leather daddy Edward at the front door; ushered you into the dungeon with a sweeping arm as if to say Behold our laboratory, our theater, our temple. The venue’s changed but energy’s neither created nor destroyed. A body in motion tends to stay in motion, and there’s no way to know what we’ll find when we enter streets and buildings and bodies in the name of love. Transformative intimacy. Grip sliding and risk rising as sweat mingles, we can give ourselves over to pasts we shared and enter lineages we’ve never heard of. This is not a book, it’s a series of swoons.
********
********
E.G.’s invitation was too good to turn down. Even before the manila envelope arrived, I was awash in memories of 1991. I unwrapped OUT/LOOK #11 with a thrill of recognition. I remembered this issue, cover and contents; I knew at least a dozen people quoted there. I spread the pages eager for a reunion kiss-in. But as I read, I cooled and shrank. Like the lights came on in the club and everyone else had already gone home: this object didn’t recognize me.
It didn’t seem possible. I remembered OUT/LOOK as a print utopia where activists and scholars and artists converged in the sexy-smart culture I shared and loved. I remembered Queer Nation as a gloriously polymorphous node where politics met cultural production met the leather underground. There were blocks in my part of the Mission where you couldn’t swing a bookstore cat without hitting some kind of gendernaut. Surely some of that magnificent creativity was still present here? I flipped through the pages again, reread the article about the difference between lesbian sex and gay sex, and the one about the jack-off club. Table of contents, contributor…nothing looked back at me. I turned it backside front to read it in reverse and only then realized I’d imagined the recognition I’d thought we’d shared.
A CHARM, A POINTER
Every index is
a time machine. It sets
coordinates; you shuttle
dog-ear to ribbon, or to
your finger, half-forgotten, holding
a moment wedged
half-closed and open to the spine.
Every index says
link here
and here.
Lined up in lists, words wait
their turn perforce
but facts and stories want to chase
each other’s tails:
Hands, spread wide to hold their play.
******
I put OUT/LOOK #11 on my nightstand to marinate while I attended to the politics of the present. I spent Trump’s first hundred days in oscillation, turning toward the public in streets and airports, then turning in, toward home and kids and the question of what on earth I was going to make for E.G. One day I was walking to an anti-fascist protest when I saw a sign someone had put in a window: NEVER AGAIN IS NOW. It was written in thick Sharpie on a bright pink background like the Queer Nation stickers we used to make back in the OUT/LOOK days. A penny dropped, mine. Yes, I thought. That’s right. That’s where I’ll start.
I stayed up till dawn stenciling Never Again is Now t-shirts, black paint on my hands slick and viscous like an oil spill, or the memory of state violence. Queer Nation had brought itself into being in the summer of 1990 when already 120,000 people had died of AIDS in the US and there was no sign that the epidemic had peaked or that anyone but us cared. By that time ACT UP was intervening in government policy and exposing all the ways the state was in bed with insurance lobbyists, pharmaceutical giants, and the Catholic Church; I wasn’t surprised when my friends in ACT UP dismissed Queer Nation’s relatively small-scale cultural interventions as superficial, even frivolous, responses to the emergency. It’s true, we weren’t organized for policy change and we didn’t call meetings with the men in the suits. But that was the point. We were enacting different strategies toward the shared goal of a nation that recognized and valued queer life. ACT UP directly challenged national power structures; Queer Nation claimed queerness as itself a kind of sovereignty, our presence already integrated into the fabric of the everyday. We targeted the micro-political, multi-issue, and mundane. We showed up at pro-choice and anti-war rallies, protested police brutality and the first Gulf War, staged kiss-ins at tourist sites and shopping malls. And everywhere we went we advertised our presence with bright neon Queer Nation stickers.
There were hundreds of them, cheaply made in copy shops by anyone ready to put in the work. We slapped them on street signs and buildings and wore them on our leather jackets to advertise the intersection of our politics and our sexuality. The one on the cover of OUT/LOOK #11 said VISIBLY QUEER. Others said things like FUCK YOUR GENDER and ASSIMILATE MY FIST and DISEASED PARIAH. Those stickers framed our bodies as protest signs and served as visual pheromones to attract like-minded queers. Our every movement was a critical intervention in public space. I wanted to bring that performance of solidarity and resistance forward.
Past and present keep overlapping. It is unnerving, not to say tragic, how many slogans I could recycle intact from 1991: PEOPLE OVER PROFITS; AIDS IS NOT OVER; HEALTH CARE IS A HUMAN RIGHT. Newer ones address newly desperate situations: NO KIDS IN CAGES, NO BODY IS DISPOSABLE, REFUSE FASCISM. I gave the stickers away at rallies and protests. They traveled around the US, to Canada, to London and Berlin and Sydney. I made t-shirts and phone calls and affinity groups. I summoned artists and academics and activists in coalition, just as E.G. and the other editors of OUT/LOOK had done back in the day.
And I tracked down the Queer Nationals who had been interviewed in OUT/LOOK #11. Miraculously all but one is still alive as of this writing. We’d never have imagined our survival back in 1991, when the obituary list in the Bay Area Reporter—San Francisco’s fagrag of record—was growing week by week. Now, over 30 years later, those Queer Nation veterans are well-respected world-builders in their varied contexts: a public health official, an AIDS nurse, a middle-school counselor, an antiquarian and archivist, a lawyer, three performers, an essayist. . . Most of the dykes in that crew were still around SF. I got in touch. They couldn’t quite place me, in the way that follows transition, so they weren’t sure what to do with some strange friendly fag who acted like he knew them. But political action was urgent in that spring of 2017, and I organized good rallies. Everyone still likes free stickers. The Queer Nation dykes recognized the scent of my activism from our shared youth; I recognized their recognition when the air relaxed against my skin and they started sharing my cell number with their friends.
I never did explain how I knew them when they didn’t know they knew me. I’d prioritized political affinity on purpose. You don’t (I don’t) build a movement by putting your ego on the front line; but my best efforts to bring OUT/LOOK #11 into the present kept reproducing my own trans marginality. That wasn’t a part of the ’90s I missed or wanted to bring forward. I called Susan to tell her my time machine was caught in an invisibility vortex. She said drily there was a reason she’d helped to found Transgender Nation back in the day: the queer nation alone has never been big enough to hold us.
*****
Twin rivers flow through me. They carved the eager channels of my identification with the queer nationals and they flooded me with that old dysphoric loneliness when I could not find myself in the pages of the magazine. Each time my time machine/political performance stalled out, I felt my muscles bracing in the tide of my impulse to correct OUT/LOOK’s omissions and claim my place in the documentary record. Perhaps my old gay and lesbian movements should take a turn around the transsexual dancefloor. I could come out, assert my presence: for sure that’s what my students would want me to do. They value disclosure as a sign of integrity and an affirmation of trans presence in the world. Their drive toward recognition speaks to my own and yet—I also understand my, our, illegibility as historically and psychically appropriate. Wriing me and my kind into the historical record requires honoring aspects of trans/historical experience that evade documentation, and for which truthfulness is never simple.
It’s not that we trans people are inherently deceptive. We were pushed. During the second half of the twentieth century, medical and psychiatric and legal professionals built tall walls to funnel wild trans potential into a very narrow range of possible expressions, all conforming to white middle-class ideals. If you didn’t tell the doctors and psychologists stories about your yearning to be oh so normal, they could and did block your access to medical transition technologies.
When I moved to SF in 1989 that regime was just beginning to shift. Over the next few years, as hormones and surgery became more available to more queer peoples, a raft of my peers headed directly to the clinics. A few I knew transitioned into nondisclosing normativity as fast as ever they could. Others, like Susan, began to solidify trans presence in scholarly and political arenas. Still others immersed ourselves in a cultural aesthetic of shimmering indeterminacies, in cinema theorist Eliza Steinbock’s lovely turn of phrase.[2] Maybe we were dabbling in black-market hormones, maybe trying to avoid being diagnosed, maybe just broke or busy working out original paths toward the beings we wanted to become. Some of us did our level best to become illegible according to the existing rules. I for one was ambivalent about becoming recognizable as Man or Woman. I had nothing to disclose; my nascent transness aimed at excavating the materials of sex and embodying them in new and changing ways.
By the time you document my presence I’ll have moved on. Come out, come out, wherever you are, but don’t look directly at me or I will disappear. Shapeshifter. Try checking your peripheral vision. I’ve never been what you’d call closeted, and I’ve polished the skill of hiding in plain sight. I splice the gay liberationist imperative to come out with the venerable trans interrogative: who needs to know?
Recognition is a high bar like
a pike across the road. Hurtle over,
limbo down—
They say it is a basic human need, like
shelters, which
have rules called men and women;
no animals or sex, no dancing friends:
no shelter this, that can’t survive
the means of my survival: no, recognition
is not always what we’re after
or before.
Must I give
myself a name? Do you need to see my face
to know I’m real? I’d rather share
the motive force of change.
Spin me, Daddy. Our strong wrists crossed
and clasping, you redirect my energies,
you bring me in to let me out again.
Recognition implies that the me you can encounter now is the same as the one you encountered then but it just ain’t so. One definition of history is change over time. One definition of art is representation, re-presenting. We do both when we’re dancing. When I say I’m a social choreographer I mean I’ve had some practice reassembling bodies and spaces into recognizable new forms without ever letting go.
That’s why this work encircles trans activist Lou Sullivan but isn’t centrally about him—he wasn’t my type, nor I his, and anyway he was already sick when I first came to San Francisco, and we didn’t move through the city along the same paths. He didn’t dance or organize rallies, and if he ever played at the 14th St dungeon, he didn’t write about it in the famous Diaries where he documented his transition, activism, eroticism. Our connection is indirect. Nobody who moves with me ever met the guy. But we are linked by the carnal love you can find threaded through queer and trans archives—in particular through the archive presently known as the GLBT Historical Society Archive and Museum here in San Francisco, where Lou deposited his papers, where my young friends Zach and Ellis co-edited his diaries for publication, where Susan and I volunteered in different decades, where E.G. was artist-in-residence, where Queer Nation ephemera is preserved and my pink and black Never Again is Now t-shirt is housed. What brings Lou into this meditation is his participation in a history written in desiring flesh.
Back in 1985, before B and T got on the guest list for the LGBTQ-etc. acronym party, Lou was a founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society. At the end of his life he knew that his Diaries were important historical documents and he made some gestures toward editing them for publication. But when Lou had to choose between making himself legible for future researchers and keeping the memory of his own dead loves alive, he gave his last strength to his biography of Jack Bee Garland, the late nineteenth century sailorman who lived and died in and around San Francisco Bay, and whom Lou claimed as his transcestor.
These past two days I read the entire text aloud, while proofreading it, and even now, five years after I began researching the story, it moves me deeply. I can almost feel Garland reaching forth from the netherworld and embracing me.[3]
—We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991
History makes the special kind of bond between people who met at a funeral. There is a transhistorical community of people who tend the same graves; strangers bearing flowers have been your kindred all along.
*****
A CHARM: Winter 1973
For my seventh birthday my mother covered a small, fat blank book in red bandanna-print corduroy and gave me my first journal. On the flyleaf she wrote a dedication:
You become a writer by writing
a lover by loving,
a dancer by dancing.
How do you become a supper or a sneaker?
Mama, I figured it out! You find the right kitchen, and the right feet to wrap yourself around.
*******
Transfer and transmission are complicated and vibrant. Our bodies have their own relationship to evidence. Eyes receive light as information; skin handles electrical knowledge; cities and fashions store memory in their own textured ways, and imagination has its place too. What archive are we engaging when I come eager toward you with my leather jacket open? When we hug we lean into an earlier way of being sexy, of living gender. It’s stored in the sensual contrast between fog-chilled hide and the human warmth rising from within; if you were there, then, you might recall that thrill; but here and now that embrace would be a re-enactment, not least because these days we’d both be wearing hoodies. Sometimes transmission is a question of style. It’s my job to edit and compose the past. What you feel through me won’t be the same as it was, is now, or will be, but that’s part of the point and anyway nothing is the first time twice. What remains consistent is that I am not a reliably reliable narrator (you’ve been warned).
I decided I’d done my OUT/LOOK assignment. I’d made my stickers and political performances. Minor work, I thought, but sufficient. I wasn’t going to embarrass myself or let E.G. down. Yet I ached with the memory of the joy, the boldness of that past movement springing lively in my body, connected, the dance emerging between us in streets and bars, coffeehouses and dungeons. I could not let that vital rush die with me. Something remained undone and still, the magazine sat stolid by my bed. Clearly I wasn’t its story to tell.
Then one night I dreamed I saw my middle-aged self romping hand in hand with a trans boy young enough to be my son. We were off to visit his lesbian grandmother. This still seemed like a good idea the next morning, so I made it happen and called it the Transgenderational Touch Project. For 3 months I forged connections between beloved young transsexuals and dear old queers, the dykes and fags and kinksters who were the big kids in town in 1991, when Lou Sullivan died and OUT/LOOK and Queer Nation and Susan and I were all hot young things in cool scenes.
Reader, follow me into relationships and dreams that happened then and next and before and in a few alternative chronologies, looping and crossing as they wind to and from early 1990s San Francisco. Some take place in those plague years, some take us back before history begins. I’m offering an alternative way to think about lineage and recognition by describing how historical kinship works, how it feels in all its looping complexity. Consider me a case study. I’m kin to Lou Sullivan through people I love and who love him as kin: Susan who mothered me through transition; Zach my beloved transling youngman now grown; Susan who carved and curated Lou’s remains and set him on his way; Zach who edited the Diaries, repeating her gesture decades later. Through them Lou’s lineage twines into my own, and I am passing it on, passing it down, mouth to mouth and memory to memory.
But none of them—not Lou, not Susan, not Zach—took first form in dyke worlds. None of them began with poetry and motion. And I did, I did.
[1] E.G. Crichton, Matchmaking in the Archive: 19 Conversations with the Dead and 3 with Ghosts (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UniversityPress, 2023), 183.
[2] Eliza Steinbock, Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2019).
[3] Lou Sullivan, We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961–1991, ed. Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma (New York: Nightboat Books, 2019), 402.