Preserving the bonds of solidarity, at all costs

Dear all,

It has been a busy few months since my last newsletter post, a period of many transitions. Most concretely, I’ve now left my job as an organizer with the Chicago Housing Justice Coalition, taking a much-needed pause before I begin classes at Northwestern at the end of September. That’s not saying I’m sitting at home and doing nothing, but as I’ve begun to build a more consistent meditation practice, these moments of quiet have grown steadier, a blessing that I couldn’t fully appreciate until recently. Yet in trying to make sense of what this summer has meant for me personally, and on a larger level, one theme that’s remained consistent is how desperately we need one another, need these fragile human bonds that s often feel endangered, now more than ever.

I think of seeing Los Campesinos!, one of my favorite bands, for the very first time in June, and the ways the band shows up for others, onstage nods to trans people and Palestinians the most natural thing, as I wrote about for Defector. Even the way the band showed two fists clasped on stage behind them, surrounded by sharp lines pointing directly at this most natural kind of human bond, contained multitudes of meaning: what in one moment reminded me of how imperiled our solidarity can be, in the next made me see these lines as markers of emphasis, there to celebrate these ties as the greatest thing we might ever accomplish as human beings. The band’s new record, All Hell, has been one of my favorites of this year, and the chance to sing and dance along with Mary, Carlos, Mandy, Erik and Elise was one of the high points of the summer.

Another story that meant a lot to write this summer was my deep-dive into the stage adaptation of The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, first written by Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta in 1977, and brought to the stage in two vastly different iterations this year and last. Faggots is a book that lived for many years as well-worn but not readily accessible queer folk wisdom, the kind of story that distilled countless years of the author’s experiences in communal living structures into their aphoristic roots. To see the small crew devote their lives to staging the work, their own lives changed dramatically in their encounter with the text, showed me how much we need to look out for one another, especially when nobody else will. “When you feel pain, fall into your brother’s love,” the cast sang throughout the show, words I’ve continued to sing to myself whenever I need the reminder.

Of course, the sad reality is that the structures that daily bring death, immiseration, and hopelessness into our lives seem to remain firmly entrenched. Having witnessed nearly 11 months of the ongoing Palestinian genocide, it was surreal to have the Democratic National Convention return to Chicago, echoes of the 1968 convention and that moment’s barbarous assault on the Vietnamese people on the minds of many of us protesting this time around. By and large, the police this time around were less violent towards protestors than they were in 1968, or four years ago during the protests unleashed by the murder of George Floyd.

Yet if those in the streets faced less direct harm for choosing to resist this awful killing machine, that doesn’t mean the system itself suddenly found its humanity; indeed, it’s hard not to feel as if the convention-goers did their best to simply ignore the demonstrations, jubilant in the nomination of Kamala Harris, still just as implicated in mass murder as the current president. While I felt at times discouraged that our pleas seemed to fall on deaf ears, being on the streets in protest nonetheless reminded me that countless others still feel sickened that people around the world are being killed in our name, that people will keep showing up until this injustice is fully addressed. (For an excellent recap of the demonstrations, and the ways that the police created an inescapable network of surveillance surrounding demonstrators, I'd recommend this piece by my friend Micco, with whom I marched during one of the rallies.)

Staying goodbye to my work on Just Cause for Eviction, a campaign I’ve been working on for the last three and a half years, has brought a similar sense of bittersweet bondedness, brought together in the name of fighting injustice, yet just as importantly, to remind each other of our shared humanity. My last day came with a coalition retreat a few Fridays ago, and as we shared space, the group moved freely from laughter to tears to excited visions of what the work might become, a new level of closeness brought from the in-person gathering. The recent release of the “Tenant Trap” series by Injustice Watch has underlined just how brutal it is to be a renter in Chicago, especially for Black and Latinx residents routinely met with unlivable conditions and swift evictions for daring to speak up. Yet despite how bleak the picture remains, the act of gathering together to strategize, to commiserate, and, in my case, to say goodbye to this as part of my daily labor was all I could have wanted. To know that the work continues in my absence, that those involved now will hopefully shepherd this critical legislation across the finish line, is all I could hope for.

Even with the daily reminders that we are losing on so many fronts, I am grateful for the work that lies ahead, the chance to dig deeper into my book, which I am calling The City Made Me Trans, now what I get to shape my life around. This Saturday, I’ll be doing two events: first, I’ll be on a panel discussion from 11:50-12:20 at the Bridgeport branch of the Chicago Public Library, chatting about zines as part of the South Side Lit Fest. I’ll be hopping straight over to the Red Line once that’s done to then a brief talk at the Newberry Library as part of a book release event that starts at 1:30, sharing more of what I’m working on now and some hopeful directions for where I hope my projects might proceed in the next few years. (If you're not in Chicago, the event will also be livestreamed! I'll be speaking around 2:20 Central time.) This work only finds meaning when it is done together, and it feels so special to finally be able to bring countless ideas out into the world, to be remade in dialogue with others. Thank you for making that possible, and thank you for the endless reminders of why life always remains worth the struggle.