When I look at my family tree

A poem to honor my transcestors, my LGBTQIA+ activist ancestors, and more.

Content note: cursing, some outdated words for transgender, as they refer to our trancestors’ organizations/ways of describing themselves.

Written and performed by myself at Bas Bleu Theatre in Fort Collins November 1st, 2023.
Filmed and edited by Risking Joy Productions LLC.

Text:

When I look at my family tree, I want to see drag queens. I want to see genderfuck aliens and pansy-boy princes. I want to see men with crescent moon scars on their chest beaming forth with full moon magick. I want to see girls who haven’t learned how to stop their lipstick from bleeding and who had to learn make-up hidden in closets full of stale boy-clothes. I want that girl in the closet to find just the right contour, that when she looks into curved mirror of the Star Goddess universe, she falls in love with the woman she’s always known herself to be.

When I look at my family tree, I want to see Oðinn and Loki in all their transexual glory, not cloaked in aggression, but taking the spotlight exactly when they’re cross-dressing, giving birth after shapeshifting into a female horses, and practicing all kinds of wily feminine magics riding seiðr staffs into the wyrd web of all things.

When I look at my family tree, I want to see Inanna blessing a woman into a man, circa 2,250 BCE incanting her spell into stone, so we would always know — our magic is much older than written language.

When I look at my family tree, I want to see knights who hide tulips in their pants, who became the only earnest prince charming, whose lovers never realized they were smelling flowers.

When I look at my family tree, I want to see writers who bend language, who build a room of words big enough to fit the world inside, big enough for all the queer boys in my eyes to find exactly the right fragment mirror.

When I look at my family tree, I want to see an instruction manual for Molotov Cocktails and the blueprints for a STAR house. I want to see women with 5 o’ clock shadows, who refused to pass, who said “It was always more fun being Sylvia.” I want to see street kids finding the bridge from the piers into queer utopia, some bridge where the officers stopping them for “upper female impersonation” got distracted by the glitter behind their ears, fell into a midsummer night’s sleep and all the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries get to dance a queer city’s decree.

When I look at my family tree, I want to see a stone butch singing the blues. I want to see a ring of keys and dungarees. I want to see gay boys pulling giant condoms over the marquee. I want to hear voice cracks and bellows of a truth finally let free.
When I look at my family tree, I want to see trancestors that broke out of the fucking matrix, that didn’t even need to eat some forbidden red pill fruit, who knew all along this world was not enough, that we could be brighter, that there was still more for the light to give.

When I look at my family tree, I want to see queerness so evident it cannot be denied, I want to see it pulsing through the lifeblood of everything as surely as it already does. I want the silences to twist snakes around this legacy of erasure, twist so tightly, the closets break, jaws falling open with every last queer delight— finally spoken, taking root & taking flight.

With love to our LGBTQIA+ ancestors, who loved us and believed in a world for us, with love to Sylvia Rivera, Leslie Feinberg, Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson, Stormé DeLarverie, José Estaban Muñoz, all the activists of ACT UP, and so many more.