Sunday. April 23rd . I’m sitting at a local restaurant, having Cuban food for the first time in ages. I’m not Cuban, but when you grow up in Miami, Cuban cuisine represents home as much as Pupuserias do.
It’s 2pm, I’m having breakfast, and I am fucked up. A combination of allergies, a late night, waking up way too early, and not eating for 16 hours. My dad looks at me and laughs, just as fucked up himself. He tells me I look liked I had a rough night. I correct him. Fun night, rough morning.
I catch a patron, fresh from Church, staring at me in disgust. I look totally hungover, on the Lord’s Day of all days, a true picture of degeneracy. Sadly, the reason for my fucked up-ness is far, far less cool.
I didn’t drink at all last night. Instead, I spent it video chatting and streaming with friends, up till the sun rose. Having only slept 14 hours the past 2 days, this doesn’t treat me well at all. But I don’t regret it.
And as I’m telling my dad this, my phone buzzes. It’s a friend, telling my group chat about an idea they’ve had with some other friends. It’s #GayTheFourth, of course, though it wasn’t named that yet. And as I sit there, feeling terrible and yet somehow better than I have in years, I think about last night. I think about when we cried, and how I truly meant it when I said “I love you.” to everyone on the stream. That’s when it hits me.
Star Wars, and I’m sorry if this sounds cheesy, kept me alive.
I’ll rewind.
I didn’t grow up with Star Wars. Barely gave it a passing thought. I watched The Clone Wars occasionally, and played Knights of the Old Republic, but beyond that I never found myself drawn to it. Personally, I blame my dad. He grew up in the 70s! He should have fallen in love with it like everyone (including my abuelo) did. He even watched it when it came out, all of 14 years old, dragged to the theater by my abuelo, who left work early to go see it. And what did my dad do? He fell asleep. Terrible.
I forgive him, though, because many years later, when the films were released on DVD, he bought the original trilogy. I was all of 6 years old, and we sat down and watched. This time I fell asleep. Just awful.
More years pass, my parents get divorced, my mother never lets me see him. I go from a sleepy little girl to a terrified teenage boy. Terrified of my mother, terrified of life, terrified what it meant to be a gay trans latino. And in those years, life wasn’t kind, and when my dad finally got to see me and helped me escape my abusive home, I found myself in a strange place. When you’re living in an abusive home, survival is all you can think of. You go through the motions, you repress what’s happening to you and your body, you don’t sit and survey the damage. But once you’re free, well, you start to find that the damage is far more extensive than you realized. You peel back the layers of repression to find a broken thing, barely alive, and you realize everything that made you you was created as a coping mechanism. And that’s when you fall apart.
It took a while for that, of course. Took a while to start peeling back the layers. I started school in March, went through the motions, and had fun at the school GSA while stealth. I somewhat passed as cis, and my new high school was absolutely brilliant in letting me use Antonio instead of my birth-name, and keeping my transness on a need to know basis for my comfort. They’ve saved my life more than a few times, and I’m extraordinarily lucky that they cared. But instead of processing my trauma, I pushed it all down. Foolishly, I thought that once I was out, once I was living as a man and was away from my mom, I’d be okay. I wasn’t okay.
When my senior year started, I stopped going to classes, stopped doing any work, and started self-harming for the first time in months. I was constantly on the verge of suicide, unable to function. I hadn’t processed my trauma, and now that I was out to the GSA, I was alienated. Was it intentional? I don’t know. But once everyone knew, I was isolated. I felt so unbearably alone. This went on for 2 months before a counselor noticed, and something compelled me to accept her and the school’s help. I started seeing a therapist, started being home schooled, meeting up once a week with teachers, giving me time to recover but also ensuring I’d have the credits to graduate. Once again, this school saved my life. And while those months before The Force Awakens was released are a blur, I remember being comforted with the realization that for once in my life, no one stood between me and happiness. No one but me. No one but my own stubborn belief that I wasn’t worth happiness, wasn’t worth living. At every step I was essentially asked a series of questions. Do you deserve to be alive? Do you deserve to be happy? Do you think you’re worth something? And at every step I found myself unable to answer. Every so often I would feel as if I did deserve to live, but more often than not I was on autopilot. I had programmed myself all those years ago to survive, no matter what it took, as some “fuck you” to my mother. I never factored in taking care of myself, or actually liking myself. Self-love? Out of the question.
Those 3 questions followed me everywhere, taunting me for being unable to answer. And that’s where Star Wars came in. I was already a fan of Oscar Isaac, and A Most Violent Year was important to me. It was the first film I saw after escaping, and the first time I saw a latino main character that wasn’t a raging stereotype, someone who looked and sounded like the people I grew up, like my family. And Oscar-as-Joseph in The Nativity Story was an old elementary school crush, of course. But he lead me to Star Wars, and in preparation for The Force Awakens, I took a crash-course on all things Star Wars. I marathoned all the films, re-watched The Clone Wars, read the comics, etc. Essentially, I was distracting myself from my own collapsing life.
I went into The Force Awakens with a million and one different theories swirling around in my head. Yes, I’m that kind of fan. I guessed that Luke was hiding in some Ancient Jedi Temple (if that’s what Ahch-To really is), I guessed Kylo was Han and Leia’s son, but I was wrong in my assumption that Rey was a Solo, and really we all were. We all thought she was gonna be a Solo, admit it. But, more importantly (to this article anyways), I predicted Finn rescuing Poe, and Finn keeping both Poe’s jacket and the name he offered him. It wasn’t a far-off theory, but I’m still proud I guessed that, even before the stills were released. More than that, I was under the impression that Finn and Poe would have a lot of screen time together, but nothing deeper than some witty banter and brotherly hugging. I fully expected coming out of the theater shipping them, because I read gay into everything, but I didn’t expect to see what I saw on the screen that day. Instead of spending most of the film together, they spent at most 20 minutes together — and yet. And yet. I saw a man flirting with another man, in Star Wars of all things. I saw someone like me, possibly, for the first time in my life. A gay latino man. Along with everything I was going through, my sexuality was something I was struggling with. But seeing Poe flirt with Finn, however brief, made me feel human. And of course, I wasn’t the only one who saw that. For months all everyone talked about as That Scene ™ and That Lip Bite ™. And those months… those months made me feel alive. Everyone was buzzing with hope, everyone wanted it so badly. Wanted Finn and Poe to fall in love, wanted to see Poe be openly gay, wanted to believe that it could happen. Those months were fun.
In those months I met some incredibly important people. I was alone and isolated, still working through my issues and my stuntedness, and Star Wars gave me both a way to connect, and a small glimmer of hope that I’d see a gay latino and a bisexual black man possibly fall in love, or even just exist, on the big screen. Seeing men like me exist and love other men. Both are long shots, sure, but it feels good to hope. And the people I met influenced me in the best of ways. We’ve grown close in the past year, and the small group chat we made has been a constant source of humor, support, and solidarity. I graduated high school, started testosterone, and all around became a more stable, happy person. I’m starting college next fall and changing my name. I have a boyfriend, and a dog, and I find myself able to answer those 3 questions finally, on The Good Days, and on The Okay Days too. Do I deserve to be alive? Do I deserve to be happy? Do I think I’m worth something? Yes, I think I do. These people gave me a reason to believe I was worth something, and they would have never been brought into my life if it wasn’t for Star Wars.
So, George Lucas, J.J Abrams, Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, Disney, and Lucasfilms,
Thank you.
Please cast more women of color. And give me gays.
