Alongside Us: An invocation at the start
a conversation between A Life We Braid initial schemers- Jess St. Louis & Grover Wehman-Brown.
Who are you calling alongside you as you start this project?
(In the wooest sense or the practical sense)
Jess: I am calling alongside me the people who have made my life in the form that it is, more possible. My ancestors, biological and chosen. The lesbian, queer, and trans women who have existed for millennia who spent time surviving, resisting, loving, building family. My mother. The butches and femmes and queers and trans folks who built families and protected each other in bars and on porches, in factories and church pews, picket lines and mass mobilizations, in encampments and in consciousness-raising sessions, in our homes and while our loved ones work and live on the streets. The friends, chosen family, and lovers and who loved on me when I doubted my own beauty, worthiness, and belonging so I could better love on myself and relish in being fully alive amidst the harmful conditions we live in. I am calling alongside the authors, both living and ancestors, whose words I found many parts of myself in and shaped my understandings of the world and who created previous versions and explorations and legacies to ground this conversation: Joan Nestle (A Restricted Country, editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader), Leslie Feinberg (Stone Butch Blues), Minnie Bruce Pratt (s/he), Gloria Anzaldua (Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza), Ivan Coyote and Zena Sharman (editors of Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme), Amber Hollibaugh (My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home), Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home), and Kai Cheng Thom (Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir), among many others.
Grover: I am calling alongside me the bramble-picking women of my ancestry. The forest dwellers, the fruit-tree tenders, the tough daughters. I am calling alongside me recent predecessors that created previous versions of this conversation in book form, namely Chloe Brushwood Rose & Anna Camilleri who edited the book Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity and Ivan Coyote and Zena Sherman who edited the book Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. I am calling alongside me white, working-class communist revolutionary Leslie Feinberg (always on my shoulder these days) and the Black performer, bouncer, and Stonewall Veteran Storme DeLarverie. I call alongside me the glimmer of every other trans & GNC young person who slept on the street, in their storage locker, in a car, in a construction vehicle, on their friend’s couches, in a tent pretending it was chosen and fun, in the boiler room of their workplace, and engaged in survival sex to stay housed. That’s not all, but its who is pressing at my back right now.
What are you afraid of?
Grover: I am afraid of losing our people to violence and the impacts of isolation and unfettered, uncentered critique and harshness. I am afraid that so many of us do not have our basic needs met while so many others hoard resources; I am afraid of what that does to our bodies and our souls. I am afraid that we as a community sometimes get lost in disputes over language for so long that we forget to keep our bodies aligned with and pushing against these two aforementioned fears. (I also know that language and story are my islands in rough ocean waters. I am afraid of being harshly judged for that seemingly dichotomous truth. Except I know that Audre Lorde said poetry is not a luxury. It is not. I am afraid of losing touch with that truth when we have to fight so hard and fast.)
Jess: Yeah, I am afraid of losing our people to violence and isolation, too. We are — and have been — in terrifying times. We might not be erased, but we are not coming out unscathed. I am afraid that we will not shift our material or narrative conditions fast enough to protect our people in the ways we all deserve it. I am afraid of this conversation becoming a forum of trying to plead our worthiness, to say ‘we exist’, to people who aren’t invested in our liberation or wellness and we get small instead of unleashing our power, creativity, and brilliance onto the world. I am afraid of the ways whiteness works to center itself and co-opt our project towards its ends as two white people, and also the ways we can shrink from offering what we can to the world and making impact against racial capitalism and patriarchy for fear of making mistakes, for the ways we might not trust our ability to move effectively against white supremacy.
What do you hope this project does?
Grover: I hope this project provides a space of contemplation, witness, and reflection during these intense political times that are operating on top of already often intense, overwhelming personal lives as targeted people.
Jess: I hope that this project creates a space for engaging with femme/butch in a way that honors our legacies and hirstories while making so much room what our futures could look like and what claiming or reclaiming femme/butch on our own terms might make politically possible. I also hope that this conversation helps drive a wedge between trans-exclusive feminisms that trade on white supremacist understandings of gender and intergenerational communities of cis and trans lesbians, butches, femmes, as well as trans and queer people of all genders. Particularly in this time, when Trump’s administration names their wishes to legally make trans people not exist in a memo that will give more fire to right-wing anti-trans feminists, strengthening a collaboration that started with the creation of white womanhood and got explicit in the feminist sex wars that targeted TGNC people, butch and femme women, sex workers, and people who practiced BDSM — this intervention feels important and needed right now. It’s not just about my love for femme/butch and writing and shaping back a world that erases so many of our stories (even though I really do) — it’s that I hope this conversation might deepen possibilities for coalition building and shared analysis so we can fight for our lives and transform the material conditions of our lives.
What do you know?
Grover: I know that I am glad to be doing this project with you, Jess. I know that I am excited to read what other folks will write/sing/draw. I know that I am grateful that it is Fall in the Northern Hemisphere and that humans are still alive on the planet and that my kids exist and call me Baba and bring me rocks from outside and that my wife brings her femme powerhouse no-nonsense discernment, kindness, and laughter into our home each night. I know that we will click “publish” and this will be visible to other humans.
Jess: Same! I know that I am so excited to be doing this project with you too, Grover and to see and read what other people will contribute and share! I know that what we are doing has value in this world. I know that I love butches, femmes, and trans people of all genders and am so very glad that we exist. I know that I am so excited to see your kids and so many of my friend’s kids grow up and get older and school us and for us all to grow and learn alongside them. I know I am committed to helping bring another world into existence, I know that I am committed to being fully in this life, to loving this stone femme lesbian trans woman body so fully that I am worth the world I am living in and the world we are fighting for. I know that I am loved. I know that this life we braid, is and has been, strong enough to one day, tear down every prison wall, every lie that upholds transmisogyny and homophobia, every monument to oppression and tear into existence — as the Zapatistas said — a world where many worlds fit, from the bottom and the left.
