Beyond the Rose
How the death of Larry “Latisha” King and Dandelions Became New Symbols for Love in My Life
Life is consistently filled with dichotomies. Last July, I celebrated the born day of one dear friend, while mourning the death of another — all on the same day. And some years ago, my childhood best friend’s grandmother passed during a week-long sojourn to Los Angeles for another friend’s wedding.
During my adolescent years, every morning I’d leave the two-bedroom apartment my mother rented and would walk ten minutes to my friend’s house so we could be taken to school by his grandmother or grandfather — parents in the village passing the baton of sorts. I did this for nearly seven, maybe six years, so his grandmother, and grandfather, fondly became a staple and a pillar in my life.
I always wished I had not waited so long to call his grandmother as an adult, but I do have a fond memory of us laughing on the telephone when I called post-college and some years before she passed on. The memory is faint, but it is there. And two years ago, I celebrated the majesty and 80th birthday of my maternal grandmother. But during that visit, her sister, my great aunt, had passed just days before. My grandmother decided to have the burial of her baby sister on her own birthday. During her birthday luncheon she told me, “I want my future birthdays to be shared with my sister’s memory, too.”
Reaching 80 years wise, she was beaming with pride, but now her birthday would hold a new significance — forever more. By that decision alone, her birthday would require new rituals. Her very own birthday would now coincide with death, partially by her own choice. Her statements in that conversation brought many emotions over me, but it also reminded me of the strength of humanity, the strength of my grandmother, the many, many things we all overcome, or simply put — the dichotomy of living.
The dichotomy of living reminds me of the dichotomy of dandelions. They grow wildly, in many variations, have healing properties, but they are also considered weeds.
Love is faceted like this too: like a weed. It grows wildly out of order. It heals. It grows fast. It grows quick. It grows thick. It gets chopped at a moment’s notice. It is fleeting yet attaches itself vigorously to the foundation — like a bud onto the stems of dandelions. But just like the bud on those cloud-like dandelions we romanticize and know so well: a blow, a whisk, a cold night, or breathy poof, and it’s gone, cascading through the air far, far away.
The dichotomy of living in our bodies, in this time, in our vessels, is a beautifully-borrowed moment. And yet, even in the beautiful magic of living, we shall still suffer as part of that process, so as they say: two things can both be true.
Every February, particularly on February 14, I think deeply of this dichotomous living on St. Valentine’s Day. The litany of essays has been written about love, capitalism, grief, light, overcoming miscarriages, divorces and unions, loss and gains, and the ever-present Coronavirus pandemic that still has us in its grip. And each story should be written, should be told, and should be versed and recited, so we may capture the sentiment, the dreams, and the harrows of how love persevered during this age.
Love is always in the air. It’s not shining brightly for everyone, if it is shining at all, but it is always there. Always, in all ways. It is quite simply a baseline emotion that has known our humanity since its inception. Love, as Plato wrote, was quite beyond our physical manifestation. However, holidays are contentious and bring on the full brigade of “feels.”
Today in the United States alone, we are approaching the loss of nearly 500,000 lives by the hand of the Coronavirus. The declaration of a global pandemic was made less than a year ago and it is far from over, and unfortunately, the weight of it all is set to claim more lives before we can put it in our rearview mirrors.
And in that vein, today and this month is like every St. Valentine’s Day I’ve known since 2008 — I remember and think of Larry “Latisha” King. The story holds a special place in my heart for many reasons, but also because of the symbolism behind such tragedy. When Larry (15 years old) asked another classmate, Brandon McInerney (14 years old), to be their Valentine, he was killed the next day. Brandon, who still currently resides in prison, was embarrassed when Larry made such a declaration to him in front of others. What kid doesn’t yearn for love? Larry yearned with good reason and Larry declared their crush. But speaking it out with courage and vulnerability resulted in death.
I remember the first very girl I thought was cute and I very much remember the first boy I thought was cute. In the second grade, my best friend and I had it out by the monkey bars over the girl after I saw him flirting with her and as you might imagine — we were in big trouble. Mr. Wamboldt gave us a stern talking to for brawling and arguing and made us stay behind for detention. I vividly remember us pleading our cases, to no avail, on the pavement outside our classroom door. As for the boy I crushed on, I don’t know where he is, but I remember where I was when he crashed into my imagination and into my heart on my stroll to school early one morning. I remember his name, just like the girl, though I won’t verse them here. And, I also remember the thought and the crush itself for the boy, at twelve years of age, sent me deeply into a cubicle, a locker, a darkness — the closet. And yet in both instances, declaring both of those loves as a child never brought about the end of my existence.
The following day, after Larry declared their love, Brandon met that declaration with two gun shots to the back of Larry’s head. King eventually passed a couple days later — on St. Valentine’s Day in 2008. So every year when it comes, I teach about love and justice, I think about love and justice, and I think about Larry “Latisha” King. I think about my two rose-colored engagements that did not form into marriages, I think about the love that I have held and the love that has slipped through my fingers, and I think about the different types of love we receive. I think about new symbols for love beyond roses, commercialism, red, and passion. I think and dream about the fragility of love — like dandelions.
And, I always watch Valentine Road.
In so many ways love is compulsory to our existence, yet it is resisted, and I too have resisted. One year, during an 8:30 am class on St. Valentine’s Day, a student begged the question to us all, “Why are we more familiar with violence than we are with love?” And though Brandon has expressed some remorse since the tragic event, the event has happened.
How love shows up and how love doesn’t show up is a consistent consideration because love is both free and a prison. At times, love is a place that can take up too much space. Love is obese, but as Bon Iver put it, it is also skinny. “Come on skinny love, last a year. Pour a little salt, you were never here.”
Never here.
Love is a double-edged sword. It is thorny, it is swift, and it is relentless, so we need first and foremost the love for ourselves to weather anything else. In February of 1987, the same year of his death, James Baldwin told BBC journalist, Mavis Nicholson, “What happens when you can’t love anybody? […] You are dangerous.”
Danger, hate, fear, patriarchal violence, and anti-love killed Larry “Latisha” King on St. Valentine’s Day. Larry was a foster kid, abused, neglected, non-binary in 2008, free, a unicorn, and marginalized — yet still came to school in heels, or not, crocheted scarves for soldiers, and was “loveable” as their best friend said after their death. “I love you” made their adoration for Brandon plain.
But, “I love you” dealt Larry’s final blow.
I suppose that’s why there’s never a year that goes by, I don’t think about why the souls of Larry “Latisha” King had had to lose their life, so that I, so that you, so that we, could be free. The numbers of transgender assaults and murders of 2020 were even more staggering than the year before, and Black and Latinx trans women usually consume the bulk of those numbers, though all trans and non-binary persons are too often under scrutiny and assailing.
Larry was a kid, figuring out an identity and a life, but just like Brandon Teena, Matthew Shepard, Tatiana Hall, and the countless others remembered during Transgender Day of Remembrance, violence was looming over their lives as it still does today for so many who choose to walk through this life on the crux of a perceived normality. King’s death shook up the nation, yet again, and required new bullying laws and protocols for high schools and non-binary youth.
In “Love as the Practice of Freedom,” bell hooks writes, “Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination — imperialism, sexism, racism, classism.”
The patriarchy is tired and so am I. Racism is tired and so am I. Sexism is tired and so am I. Violence is tired — and so am I.
The vulnerability of love either puts us safely tucked in warms hands, but also puts us in harm’s way. There is no one definition for love, even since Plato, Aristophanes, and Socrates were trying to decipher the same complexities at a drunken symposium circa 385 B.C.E. But it is true, that love is complex and far beyond anything physical because its power as an ethos is quite daunting to make visible, to behold, to decipher, and yet we yearn for it — and we always will.
The name, Latisha, means joy and happiness. “Latisha,” was Larry’s name-sake and alter ego, their amulet. Latisha was Larry’s Sasha Fierce. Latisha was Larry’s safe place. And even though they died on St. Valentine’s Day, it was apropos that Latisha would be chosen as Larry’s alternative existence and a name we could remember them by as a catalyst for change— a parting word if you will.
At the turn of the 20th century, the poet William Butler Yeats wrote some parting words, too: “The martyrs call the world.”
