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I’ve been working on new styles you guys

These are all from the winter, Oakland, 2016

The top one is from the day Coffins was supposed to play but got denied entry, @milkbonedampxerox texted me “FUCK USA” 

no of course not why would i have anything against cis gay men dressing up as women and illegitimizing my identity? Its not like because of them my mom can’t see me as anything other than one of them because their presence overshadows actual trans women’s lives. Its not like they actively erase trans women’s identities like that of Marsha P Johnson and claim they were drag queens. its not like they get to wear my identity as a dress when they want to and not experience any of the struggles of trans women, again illegitimizing my identity. 

I need you white women, you white queers, to understand the history of drag before you decide to decry it. You all clamor about “protecting ~poc~ at all costs” but rarely do you ever critically engage with our histories, which can be seen here and in the white feminist/queer demonization of drag culture in the west.

Drag is not intrinsically an attack on your identity as a woman, as a white person. I hate to break it to you, but the world does not begin and end on the backs of white identity. The drag culture you know absolutely nothing about was primarily pioneered by working class black and latin@ gay and transgender people as early as the 1940′s and earlier. It was, and still is, and will continue to be, despite all of your ahistorical rage, a space and a practice that served self expression, safety, and a form of self-employment for these communities since it was impossible for black and latin@ lgbt people, especially black and latina trans women, to maintain typical jobs. Storme Delarverie, the black lesbian Stonewall veteran, used to perform in drag as an entertainer to produce a living for herself since she was in poverty. Marsha P. Johnson, the black trans woman you and the rest of your detached white queer ilk liken yourselves to in the most grotesque, self-serving and voyeuristic ways possible as though she’s your personal political pawn and not someone who threatened the white supremacist LGBT hegemony you all exhibit every single day, made a living performing in drag shows and being a drag queen as she was homeless. Read up on her history before you invoke her name to support your historical revisionism and your anxious attacks on black and latin@ history.

It’s a testament to white queer selfishness that you can get up on your little tumblr platform and proclaim how you hate drag queens while ignoring how mainstream Gay Inc had pilfered the lives and bodies of black and latin@ people who pioneered drag in this part of the world. Critiquing the transmisogyny, misogyny, and so on of drag queens like RuPaul and others who have stolen drag from its origin and have turned it into mainstream Gay Inc fanfare is fine, but the fact that you all believe that this is the entirety of drag culture and therefore demonize it based upon that erroneous assumption is a repulsive display of the white supremacist onslaught upon black and latin@ gay & trans female history. 

i've realized that this is representative of how i feel about personal success too. stay with me here for a minute. i don't trust people who seek careers (duh, capitalism), but i'm also skeptical of anyone who knows what they really want and are working hard to get it -- like, getting published, or doing cool work in grad school, or making terrific art or music that gets seen/heard, or writing and sharing good poetry, or running a neat activist campaign/ organization -- unless they're like specifically about anarchy, or, like, the end of gender/ white supremacy/ capitalism/ the world.

i waffle on whether this skepticism is misplaced, since so many of my 'peers' seem to believe in these life choices for the purpose of self-expression, self-fulfillment, 'art's sake', 'resistance's sake' (i.e. the notion resistance is inherently worthwhile, because we must resist), or survival against all odds.  i waffle on this because my life/ work are oriented on the same lines as what i don't trust: i do activism (or 'organizing') that calls itself more radical, less compromising, more authentically community-based, less about representation, but is framed in the same more or less liberal/ reformist/ positive terms. and i've chosen this to try to survive, and to feel something meaningful.