SECTION I
2015 | The battery light shines red on my dashboard, a warning jolting me out of an obsessive sing-along. I am alone in my car again, repeating the hook of “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’,” as a way to offset the numbness that comes with the unremarkable parts of a road trip in progress. On the highway I’m just another heavy heart lifted by song, imagining loved ones shrinking in the distance with each stolen glance at the rearview mirror.
My reptilian brain is low on dopamine again. It wants its queer family. It wants to hit Steve Perry–high notes next time it does karaoke. It wants to be on to the next occasion.
The possibility of my car breaking down and preventing me from orchestrating the next occasion sends a chill. My car has never broken down before and certainly not in the big, bad, scary desert.
I travel west on the 10 heading back to Los Angeles, trudging through 103 degrees of Arizona’s unsparing desert heat. As soon as I touch down in Quartzsite, one of the last towns near the state line, I go for my car owner’s manual. Just how screwed could I possibly be with three hundred miles still to go?
The electrical system is on the verge of shutting down. I decide that if I am going to break down, I want to do it in a blue state. I have more than twenty miles to go before I hit Blythe, California. I get back in my car, take a deep breath, roll down the windows, and head west. To Blythe.
Blythe is a place I have newly begun to appreciate as the last bastion of chill brown Califas. I don’t want to be an irredeemably spoiled Californian brat and call bad vibes, but it was 2016 and the wound of SB 1070 was still fresh. The “show-me-your-papers” law was first a bill that included provisions that gave law enforcement the power to determine anyone’s immigration status during any lawful stop. SB 1070 also pushed for the requirement for all “alien” noncitizens to carry “registration documents.” Undocumented people couldn’t seek employment. Arguably the worst were the warrantless arrests. Folks could be arrested for just being suspected of being undocumented. If we didn’t see the seeds of fascism being planted in this 2010 series of planned violences, then we weren’t looking hard enough. How, in 2010, could we not know that people we knew (or knew of) were already being disappeared?
This has been the way political structures permeate the sweeping views of Arizona’s stunning terrains. State power is always present in the natural environment. But it’s not confined solely to Arizona, just as every state in the union claims a flower as its own. This occurs to me as I pass the Welcome to California sign. I haven’t seen the golden poppies that adorn the sign but know they bloom year-round. It is the poet’s job to make you fall in love with the idea of state flowers—its promise of a shared identity built around a regional flower that relies more on bee pollination than water. Who could be unmoved by such a seduction?
I grew up seeing those beguiling orange poppies while making the drive between California’s deserts. As a kid, I was taken to see members of my mother’s family eking out lives as casino mechanics and shopowners in Las Vegas and Boulder City, Nevada. Or we would take family vacations in Lake Havasu or Bullhead City in Arizona. There were always golden fields ablaze with these funny-named flowers. It was the homonym for the name my sister and I used to address our father—papí. Our father. He was our first, intrepid navigator through these southwestern desert roads in hardy vehicles, like our plushed-out Econoline van, carpeted and upholstered in cobalt blue and replete with antenna television.
I see the familiar date palms in the distance. This is how I self-soothe while anticipating the imminent moment of vehicular collapse. I pray that we (my car and I are one) will make it there in one piece.
Just as I cross the Arizona-California state line checkpoint, I rev the engine and shift to hit seventy-five miles per hour before the car begins to shut down on me. Blythe: next four exits. I just need the first one. The lights on the odometer begin to flash, the digital clock flicks all zeros and the stereo pops through my speakers. It feels a little Back to the Future, and my improvised DeLorean is tearing through the desert’s spacetime continuum. The first exit finally appears and I coast across lanes and make my first “California Stop” since high school in order to peter out in front of a tractor tow lot. I’m good. It’s not a miracle by any means, but I made land art with that descent.
I call for roadside assistance, check that my phone is charged and that I still have two big bottles of water to get me through the next couple of hours. A sigh of relief that I’ve been careful with my recent expenditures as I have just enough credit limit to pay for whatever damages my car is about to cost me. I thank Tucson for being so cheap. And I’m glad my lover and son are not in my car.
Parting was hard.
I get out of the car, light a cigarette, and take in my surroundings. I had places to be but now time splits open for me. I’m stuck—in my career, in my relationship—and now en route back to the couch I surfed in Los Angeles County when all I wanted was to be in Tucson. But I don’t have a community there with couches to choose from. Trucks and tumbleweed and the hum of the interstate a few yards away—the sturdy stuff that can occupy the same space as the desert without totally melting. I’m melting. I used to be sturdy but now I melt. And between huffs of nicotine smoke and rivulets of sweat forming on the small of my back, I feel myself seesawing between sturdy and molten in the desert heat. The tow truck and technician finally come and, after the last call with the third auto shop, I know there is no way I’m going to Los Angeles anytime soon.
The desert isn’t ready to let go. This is just the first battle in the video game called Someone in Tucson Hearts Me, named after the threadbare yellow vintage T-shirt I had bought even though it was an extra small. The desert and I have only just begun.
________
In the summer of 2015 my young adopted son returned home from San Francisco and threw a party for me. Due to the cancer, I couldn’t throw a party, get the beer, barbecue and girls together. I could only appear, dressed dapperly, walk haltingly around the poolside with my mermaid-headed cane. I wanted to give away to other masculine-of-center younger women thousands of dollars’ worth of almost-unworn men’s shirts and pants. It was butch bonding.
Big Poppa was a writer.1 She was on the heels of her memoir, When We Were Outlaws, winning a Lambda Literary Award four years before she died. The section above is from an essay she tried to pen about our relationship, but the cancer in her cerebellum made it hard to finish. I read it from time to time when I start to forget what Big Poppa sounded like; when I forget what I might have meant to her. Her illness is why I’m so desperate to get back to Los Angeles to see Big Poppa, who was finally starting to receive visitors after an intensely taxing round of chemotherapy. I’m traveling back from Tucson just a few weeks after having moved back to Los Angeles from the Bay Area. I had been living out of boxes and tote bags prior to this break down in Blythe. Desire pulled in so many directions—ending relationships, starting relationships, doing art full-time. This plus the needful act of performing some kind of discernible adulthood for my parents and their concern for my negative net worth. It was an anarchy of coping with so much change afoot, and I had yet to get on Big Poppa’s calendar.
I had last seen her in early July to coordinate and host her big butch clothing swap and early birthday party. Big Poppa—or Jeanne, as I had known her before our intimacy—wanted to see the clothes that hung on her now-thin frame go to the younger butches in our lesbian Los Angeles world. That meant I was tasked with going into Jeanne’s closets and pulling out custom-made suits, brand-name blue jeans, finely tailored shirts with French cuffs, polos, and slacks, and creating a temporary clothing post. And I was more than happy to accommodate all of Big Poppa’s wishes—no whim was too big or small. This was my way of honoring her and doing so in the comfort of her home. Jeanne and her spouse of twenty-six years, Lynn, lived in a beautiful Mediterranean-style house in the hills of Los Feliz, a neighborhood near Griffith Park and the Hollywood studios. Many houses in these famous hills are anything but ordinary. This was the Farrell House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. in 1926. It was a glorious place that felt like a bit of Hearst Castle had chipped away and fallen into this corner of Los Angeles, an elegant retreat for Big Poppa to hold court, where she could both rest and be as convivial as she was kingly.
We had become close five years earlier, in 2010, our relationship sealed after I played “Jeanne Córdova” in a short play Big Poppa wrote based on excerpts from When We Were Outlaws. Big Poppa had earlier come to know my performance work with the ensemble Butchlalis De Panochtitlan. She and Lynn would come to see our original performance art compositions illustrating different brown butch histories lodged in the lore of the Los Angeles neighborhoods the four of us Butchlalis either grew up in, or near, or currently lived in. The short play Big Poppa wrote would become the cornerstone of her Los Angeles book party for When We Were Outlaws. I loved the idea of forgoing a reading and staging lesbian history onstage. Big Poppa enjoyed my portrayal of a youthful, brash, blustering journalist and free-loving seducer she had created with her younger protagonized self, Young Córdova. My performance was received so well that lesbians who came of age politically with Big Poppa called me “Young Córdova” for several years after. The experience pleased Big Poppa so much, and the love and affection that grew between us was so palpable that, like a lover chasing another, she declared to me that she would be my father. And I, her son. We were a dying breed, she said. Aside from the hard fact that she actually was dying, Big Poppa was a dapper butch dandy—someone who fought long and hard to own that identity, only to live out her last days seeing it carted off to the elephant graveyard of queer self-determination. The gender binary was losing its luster as a desirable barometer for queer gender, which meant that butch was falling in and out of fashion, a complicated monolith awaiting its meteor or sanctuary. Butch was often that category of queer ontology that had to be periodically rescued from the bin of bad punchlines. Queer sociability was slowly pulling the curtain back on what felt like the diminished relationship to an identity Big Poppa and I shared. I wanted to age gracefully in the face of perceived disappearance. Big Poppa was actually disappearing though. The butchness between us was ultimately a feeling of recognition that granted us language and confidence despite the generation between us. It was a quotidian inspiration—and not everyone gets that in their daily lives. It’s why Big Poppa proudly snapped her cufflinks into place every day she had left with us.
The elaborations that moved beyond butch as a category didn’t stop me from trying to live each day with similar aplomb either, but it was also the cancer that had viciously followed her for the last decade that made our bond that much more immediate and necessary. My reavowal of a butch identity felt like re-enlistment—I was following Big Poppa into war as her loyal subordinate. There was so much I wanted to know and experience through Big Poppa’s five senses, and I felt the time ticking away from us. I wanted to be who she saw. But I was still cautious with Big Poppa—her declaration of butch fatherhood meant a lot to me, but as an adult child of an alcoholic father I was so used to being disappointed that I didn’t want to set my heart on anything with anyone new. Anything by way of love? Acceptance? Recognition? Validation? It was my cautiousness that had always been the cornerstone of self-sabotage as far as my relationships went. I struggled to make them last. These tools were the things that my own father could not provide me when I was a child and teenager. And each year the distance between us widened—he, a Mexican immigrant who had a penchant for staying out late, philandering, and making bad economic decisions that would impact his family. He, a Mexican man who for one reason or another couldn’t remember the names of his grandparents whenever I asked him about our family. It wasn’t until I learned that my grandmother had birthed her firstborn son out of wedlock that I understood the murky connection to our larger family tree in Mexico. My dad tried to instill a bond the best way he could, by talking about the outstanding things of his hometown, Pachuca. Whether it was his drunken exaltation of Reloj Monumental, the watch tower built to commemorate the Mexican revolution, or of Club de Fútbol Pachuca, one of the oldest soccer teams in modern-day Mexico, my dad found ways to keep his Mexico alive in a country that tried to cannibalize him. Yet, in the space of our home it was easier for me to adopt more of my mother’s Salvadoranness, even though I would travel to Mexico more often, free of any fear about what my queer gender might attract in terms of violent attention. My queerness never bothered my Mexican dad. It was the fact that I was born in Los Angeles, had a handful of college degrees, and yet still couldn’t muster a net worth he could be proud of. He couldn’t make sense out of me, unable to be self-made in the way he had to be out of necessity first, and then out of the will to feed the greed that follows when success is achieved. Me—a struggling artist-convener-writer and what? A professional queer? What is it that I actually do?
I was afraid of becoming a known figure in activist Chicanoville because I mostly grew up in white culture with my white Irish mother. I wasn’t working class in the age that identified most Latinas as such, afraid I didn’t have the street credentials, that I had only a Mexican father to teach me.
I devoted myself to Jeanne. We saw the traces of Mexicanidad in one another in ways that were important to us—that we had the troubled marks upon us thanks to our complicated Mexican fathers, who would work themselves to death not in the fields but in maintaining the wealth they had won against the odds.
Big Poppa. My Big Poppa.
Our relationship meant that I was in charge of inviting the assortment of butches from L.A.’s queer and lesbian communities to Big Poppa’s swath of paradise. And they came—a young brown butch from Riverside, a professor butch from Echo Park, a handful of older butches from Big Poppa’s West Hollywood days, a few hipster butches, and a couple of artist butches, too. They came and tried stuff on but only about half of the clothing swap attendees went home with a number of items. Big Poppa had been fairly robust in size, and wheelbarrows full of fine duds were left on the tables and hangers. We both lamented that I wouldn’t be able to benefit from her generous offering since I wore a men’s medium in shirts and had a thirty-three-inch waist. My ample bosom and big mouth had fooled Big Poppa into thinking I was much larger, but I’m actually just petite but portly.2
We were more than halfway through the afternoon barbecue gathering when Caleb3 strolled in with a princely bottle of bourbon in hands that resembled little league baseball mitts. He arrived confidently, the only visually pronounced trans guy in the room. His usually unkempt beard was trimmed and his mustache was now shaped handsomely, accentuating the angles in his jawbone and framing his bright white awkward smile as he came into a party space with all lesbian eyes on him. I wasn’t the only one dazzled by how well put together he looked—how comfortable he seemed in his body—leaner, stronger, and anchored in dark denim and a sense of inner calm. People notice that stuff. It’s what makes us fall in love.
The only trans guy who came was Caleb. He got a whole wardrobe for his first-in-the-family try at graduate school. His valet? The party-planner and my son, Raquel. Being a proper Chicano butch, she fussed over him, buttoning unknown buttons, straightening a lapel, tucking in fine shirts.
I encouraged Caleb to try on a couple of the long sleeve button-ups that hung in excess on the makeshift clothing rack I had jimmied between two branches of a white alder tree in front of the pool house. The first shirt he tried on, a baby-blue gingham long-sleeve, fit his barrel chest and short, thickset arms perfectly. I ooh’ed and ahh’ed every time one of Jeanne’s tailored shirts hugged his body as though they were tailored just for him. What were the chances? Each shirt—the pink oxford, the navy stripe, and the madras checks in monochromatic neutrals—wrapped around his body with ease and elegance. He was no longer the nervous baby butch dyke in punk, patched denim jackets with cut-off sleeves and dilapidated combat boots. He was no longer the homeless baby butch dyke kicked out of a religious home, disowned by a homophobic Jehovah’s Witness family of cannery workers. He was no longer the baby butch dyke living out of a car outside the orchards of Riverside or sleeping in tents following the Occupy movement up to Oakland and back down Interstate 5. He was our young man now. And a part of me felt the pang of losing the feral quality of his iconoclastic youth as I saw Caleb transition into a legible adulthood by way of a respectable wardrobe. His maturation meant I had to double down on my own. But I would be damned if Caleb wasn’t the best dressed guy in the graduate program he was due to leave for in a month.
I beamed with pride.
But in that moment Big Poppa lacked the jubilance I was emanating. She had a cloudy look about her that I had trouble reading. Was this a well-worn panic playing out before me, I wondered. Was there a sudden rupture in familiarity? Was this a case of losing butches to unexamined male privilege? I was more anxious about Caleb treading the troubling waters of class mobility once he left Southern California, but maybe I was alone in that concern. Was I misreading the furrowed brows on the faces of the other butch elders? I was reminded of Cherríe L. Moraga’s reprimand in a 2009 essay called “Still Loving in the (Still) War Years/2009: On Keeping Queer Queer.” Moraga polarized queer audiences with her candid take on the fear she had of lesbians abandoning feminism to assume commodified masculine identities as brown trans men. But aren’t all of our identities imbricated by the sticky annals of empire and capitalism? Hasn’t that identification with accumulation burdened us all to arrive to legibility through wealth and structural platforms?
It is these moments that seize me with my own fear. These are the particularities that clarify the ways in which we need each other, how we might midwife for one another the image we form of ourselves. These are the moments that have shown the limits of community, much like the limits of families of origin, in that we are always some reflexive extension of someone else and thus captive to their expectations. And that there’s something about these expectations that leave the individual other ontologically exhausted.
I tuned out the noise but not the history that grounded Moraga’s sentiment. I was tired of pitting butch dykes against trans men in some imaginary gladiator arena that haunted the dreams of butch elders. Big Poppa fought for the right to wear her custom-tailored suits in a time that marked the butch as a patsy for patriarchy. Now her queer grandchildren were fighting for the right to transition genders or to do away with the binary altogether. And I was going to hold open the portal that allowed for the old-school butch lesbian camaraderie and the new school in gender self-determination to coexist and cross-pollinate.
There would be no lesbian activism on the West Coast without Big Poppa, who played a huge role as organizer and commentator. She was part of the collective that organized the West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference, the first ever convergence of its kind in 1973. Even then, in that political and cultural milieu, being a butch lesbian was suspect, and I was well aware of how much Big Poppa suffered in keeping that major part of her identity at bay for the comfort of other lesbian kin and comrades who held misgivings about anything remotely butch.
Big Poppa wasn’t the first person to convey how important my butch identity was. I had had enough random bar encounters with a range of queers telling me unprovoked that I was a unicorn, how fleeting and unique I was because “all of the real butches” were transitioning. This was queer culture for a good chunk of the early aughts, when butches and femmes began to decouple. Like the dollar to the gold standard, we were finally determining our own currency in the new century. By the time I got to New York for grad school in 2003, everyone around me had not quite had enough with binaries even as gender was getting another pass through the meaning-making machines of liberal East Coast colleges, or a few years later through social media technologies like Tumblr. We found new ways beyond the bar to connect. Our desires for recognition were similar. We started building language together, agreeing to the terms and acknowledging the harms from there within. But moving from Chicana lesbian Los Angeles to queer futures New York meant inhabiting new social circles with tier-1 queers of color who had graduated to new ontological vocabularies informed by queer theory.
I was excited by the coupling of queerness to theory, but I had been a commuter student trying to make each credit count for my journalism major at a state university in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California. I couldn’t imagine new forms of desire because butch-femme coupling had been my lesbian norm, although I likely would have transitioned myself if I had grown up in an environment that valued mental health and had access to culturally sensitive mental health specialists. But that wasn’t available for me. Good healthcare is hard to come by and I was scared to amass more debt. I also balked at therapy. When I got back to Los Angeles in 2005, I paid five dollars for sliding-scale therapy with a salty Bostonian logging her hours at the Gay and Lesbian Center in Hollywood, in an office decorated with Red Sox paraphernalia. Her best advice was to break up with the person I was dating at that time. Throughout my twenties, I had been cautioned to remain queer and resist whatever spoils came with being a warrior for mainstream and binaristic masculinity. In hindsight, as if in the Cher Horowitz register, it was another battle of identity—legibility against ambiguity. Who would nurse me back to health if I got top surgery? I learned to be comfortable not with my body but with always being at odds with it. The situational incongruence was the price of being queer.
In my mind, I have been too plenty, too eager to offer myself, and so of course I was delighted for the attention from Big Poppa. Yet, I felt the burden of that affirmation and what it meant to respond with assurance to her that this was my path, hoping to remain vigilant against casting my own monolithic mold.
Maybe the term “butch” will, like the dinosaurs, become extinct this year. Women who see ourselves as women yet keep our masculine ways, thoughts, dress, and body language will always be a staple of lesbian life. Like I feel silly on this super-hot day sitting here in sleeveless … err … ok … blouse. That feeling won’t change with time, though the term might.
I soul-coughed back into the here-and-now and it was still a gorgeous mid-July day with temperate heat and the sunrays dancing with the epitome of cool, Southern California mellow. I made myself remember that Big Poppa was lounging topless in her pool, glistening with a sexy insouciance, smoking her favorite brand and remaining faithful to the way she had lived all the days leading up to that moment. She was among a set of younger, awed dykes who brimmed with curiosity, asking her what it was like to push against the violent currents of a time before they all existed. I made myself remember the feeling of gratitude at being the nearing-middle-age butch who mans the barbecue pit, turning the browning chicken and rare skirt steak shish-kebabs, reveling in my own contentment with being able to share Big Poppa with my friends and peers and let them bear witness to our parent-child relationship. I knew that Big Poppa had a political capaciousness about her that made it possible to understand and embrace where transgender identities and material realities stand along the spectrum of lesbian and queer ways of being. She pushed back against transphobic radical lesbian feminists (her peers and friends in some cases) who wanted to ban trans women from feminist space and discourse. If I lived with the same specter of mortality that she lived with in those days, it would certainly saturate my fantasies of wanting to leave behind a strong butch genealogy. To leave a manual of my experiences as a blueprint for fighting every shade of misogyny. A code of ethics for younger trans masculine queers and butches to abide by while walking the earthly plane. Things happen so quickly that we’re all cautioned to put our affairs in order when it’s time for the final transition. But to name how we inherited our politics feels important in the here and now, while we can still enjoy one another.
And Caleb, who embodied the blurring between butchness and transness, all the while holding a strong presence in my intimate relational making, complicated that desire, spurring me to stretch myself beyond what suddenly felt like comfort.
I kept myself busy to keep that tension light and productive.
I focused on being a good Party Dad—that is, serving the perfectly grilled animal protein and salads, and making sure the beers, hard seltzers, and sodas were chilled and filled. It was time to bring the red velvet birthday cake from the kitchen to the backyard. This event summoned everyone at the party to stop whatever they were doing and get ready to sing hard and loud.
I would realize later that this would be the last time I’d sing “Happy Birthday” to Big Poppa.
There is a photograph from this gathering that shows me from the shoulders up, arms outstretched, holding the cake while Big Poppa’s eyes sparkle with effortless butch charm at the tasteful display of lit birthday cake candles. She blows them out while flanked by Lynn and a few younger butch and femme dykes who came out to pay tribute—younger members of our community who I hoped would one day go on to tell the story of Big Poppa’s last birthday party.
I needed to put my hope into Caleb that afternoon. And I needed to quell Big Poppa’s anxiety about whether or not I would be next to transition. I saw how these worrisome pangs tumbled out; her agitation that none of the other brown butches in our midst would inherit her sartorial bearings—the material evidence that bolstered her confident swagger for the last three decades—became visible that afternoon. Big Poppa wanted Caleb to stay butch, and because I wanted to keep the family happy, I would tell her that he still identified that way—the stick-and-poke DYKE tattoo on his left shoulder proved the point—but that he needed, for his own sense of self-making and ultimately sanity, to flatten his chest, deepen his voice, and connect with a center that had eluded him for the twenty-some years of his previous existence.
Yet, there were moments where Big Poppa would surprise me during our conversations about transitioning and “remaining” butch, as if the two were categories and not spaces we could walk in and out of in a given situational context. “My doctor put me on testosterone,” she would tell me matter-of-factly over chain-smoked menthol cigarettes and her second Diet Coke. “I loved it. But I was afraid that I did.”
They are now changing the definition of “butch” to fit more neatly into the present lexicon of trans. They say that “butch” is now a trans term that refers to a masculine woman. I’m glad masculine is no longer necessarily a bad word like it was in the lesbian feminist 70s and 80s. I had to hide my butchness back then, not that friends say, they were fooled one iota. Now we butches are seen as the perhaps last bulwark of sisterhood. Ain’t that strange?
Big Poppa, my big poppa, Caleb’s conceptual butch grandparent, a choosing I was facilitating, maybe didn’t in that moment understand that Caleb was both whom and where I was moving toward. I steeled myself, knowing that I would need him as her illness promised to progress intensely and swiftly in the coming months. I needed them both. I needed Big Poppa as my queer butch dad because she gave me a sense of where I came from, and she helped me understand that I make sense as I am. Keeping superhumanly busy was my way of coping with the reality too painful to articulate for all of us who knew this would be our last summer with Big Poppa. But I knew I couldn’t stay busy forever.
Jeanne—Big Poppa—was whom I had emerged from, as if I were Athena springing from Zeus’s head. Zeus was dying though, and our wise Caleb was taking flight soon, into the desert, wearing his father’s father’s clothes on his back, and we, the earthbound, certain that his wings weren’t fixed by wax but by something more ferociously real. We had his back now, and we were preparing ourselves for when he left, needing to keep his back turned on the two of us—his feet moving forward to the place where our love had propelled him, our blessing. Our curse. Big Poppa was bound for a place where she wouldn’t need her body anymore, as her pain would no longer contain her. Caleb was bound for the desert.
And I would soon follow.
________
I was feeling closer to Caleb in the days leading up to Big Poppa’s community birthday bash. He had been keeping me company throughout the week while I house-sat in my high school best friend, Valentina, and her husband Josh’s sweet, seventies-era, modern A-frame in Mount Washington. I was there seeking refuge in my hometown from a Bay Area breakup that was taking its toll on me in the currency of guilt and gutlessness. Back in March, when I thought everything in my life was fairly sedentary and secure, Valentina asked if I would watch her dog and cat and water the succulents while she and Josh and their three-year-old, Ari, traveled to see Josh’s family in Michigan. Her trip fell right in the middle of summer, and with a full-time job in one of the biggest arts institutions in San Francisco, I really had no way to do it. But then I got laid off a week after she had asked me, and I knew I didn’t want to spend my birthday at another summertime pre–Dyke March picnic at Dolores Park, which had become a customary ritual and one I was growing resentful of as I needed a break from queer whiteness.
“I’ll bake you any cake you want,” Lila said the previous year when I protested that, as a Stonewall baby, I had spent too many birthdays in Dolores Park during Gay Pride weekend in San Francisco and wanted to go on a trip, maybe just this once. But I relented because Lila loved the “Gay Christmas” that San Francisco offered its local, national, and international LGBTQQIAA community once a year. And I had been the type to just let things happen to me.
I called Valentina and told her I could be in Los Angeles for three weeks to house-sit. I told Lila by phone that it would be my writing retreat and the best birthday gift I could give myself after enduring a most unceremonious layoff earlier that day. It was the second day of Lila’s three-week-long stay in Wyoming. She was there to tend to her father’s second knee replacement surgery when I told her that I had lost my job. I would be home alone for the next three weeks and had thirty days before I would close out my program manager position. There wasn’t anything else she could tell me in that moment except what I wanted and needed to hear: do what your heart needs to heal.
Seven weeks after this conversation, Lila and I ended our relationship.
________
Caleb had first presented himself to me three years earlier as a community organizer who wanted to bring queer performance art to the part of Riverside he called home. He had a different queer mode of identifying himself—he aligned himself with brown and Black feminists committed to ending systemic and gender violence and loathing toward themselves and one another. He barely scraped by on his part-time job at Planned Parenthood while agitating against the clumsy ally politics of the dominantly white anarchist space in downtown Riverside. He invited me to present some of my performance work to his friends and peers inside the walls of Tikal, the Guatemalan bakery near the University of California, Riverside.
To say I was charmed from the jump would be an understatement.
It was three months after my bakery performance (where I poked and prodded the feedback output of an electric guitar that Caleb had secured for me) when I next heard from Caleb in Los Angeles. He drove out to see me in Pico-Union, west of downtown Los Angeles, to pick my brain about pursuing an advanced degree in Performance Studies, a degree I had obtained almost a decade prior to this meeting.
The meeting was supposed to be easy and uncomplicated—the most I would say is how much New York had changed in ten years and how competitive that program had become. I would push back on grad school and convey as best as I could the ways in which the institution beats the rasquache out of us. But it wasn’t uncomplicated. This meeting became a pivot point in our relationship. Caleb, who at this time had a different name not of his choosing, blurted out that he had been living in his car for six months.
He came home with me that night. I had a quick house meeting with my one roommate and her girlfriend, who didn’t live with us but didn’t not live with us either. They both agreed that Caleb should be with us where he was safe. He lived on our couch for two months, and when he found a full-time job, we turned the office into his new bedroom and he became our third roommate, which was good because he had already become my child.
Now Caleb was two weeks away from leaving Los Angeles for Tucson. I found myself simultaneously asking if he was sure he was ready to leave behind a steady, well-paid position with benefits, and rooting for him as he knocked out the last days of his stressful and demanding job as a patient advocate at the only low-income transgender health clinic in South Central Los Angeles. He did that nonprofit work during the day and was also an active volunteer corps member for the new space for cutting-edge performance and visual art situated in Chinatown. He had come a long way toward finding a meaningful foothold in the communities that mattered most to him during the short time we had known each other.
Some nights Caleb would come up to Valentina and Josh’s mountain house to smoke cigarettes on the patio and process his intensely religious upbringing and subsequent disownment when his queerness became too hard to hide from his aunt and uncle, leaders in their local Jehovah’s Witness chapter. In turn, he would nod his head as I broke down the reasons why my relationship didn’t work after five years of trying, mainly that, while I wanted Lila to pursue her medical school dreams, I knew I couldn’t follow her into another potential decade of nonchalantly letting things happen to me. Going with a flow that didn’t belong to me had begun to weigh me down. His eyes widened as though he were hearing a cautionary tale of failed adulthood. Other nights he would come over to partake in his Xanax stash or my Ativan stash, drink beers, and fall asleep after roaring along to the bloody battle scenes in Braveheart and Gladiator. We were biding our time with these two-man bachelor parties, for we both knew the grains in the hourglass were quickly moving away from us. The only difference between us was that my body was decomposing faster than his.
We would head to Tucson when he finished his clinic work the first week in August—to sweat it out together during the hottest time of the year.
As the departure date neared, I began to panic.
________
The end of the summer saw me back in Los Angeles after dropping Caleb off in Tucson to be in his new habitat. I was on to another house-sitting gig, alone and bereft in Silver Lake. I was unemployed and trying to shake off the depression I felt setting in after returning to a new Los Angeles reality that still seemed so foreign to me. A new sheen of wealth had appeared over the neighborhoods where I had lived in my early twenties. Silver Lake felt so alienating as everyone was thinner, whiter, and more open about striking gold in one of the city’s many cultural industries. Cultural workers flipped houses on the side. I was spiraling into an abyss, waiting to see who would climb down after me.
I went to see Big Poppa before the blues became more than just a vestigial function. She was thinner this time around and her mobility was beginning to wane. She sat me down, handed me a can of diet cream soda, and lit one of the many menthol cigarettes I would bum that afternoon.
“So are you sure you’re not seeing anybody?” Big Poppa cocked her head at me, a smile slowly unfolding. “I just can’t believe that you’re really only focusing on your writing.”
“You got me, Big Poppa. There’s nowhere else to run,” I joked between puffs.
I told Big Poppa about her—how we met ten years ago and reconnected recently; how we left our white partners to be with one another because that sense of lost familial connection could still be salvaged if we walked one step at a time in each other’s direction. I told Big Poppa I wanted to spend what remained of my days with her even if the possibility of being physically together seemed realities away. I told Big Poppa that this was the hardest thing I could do—be with a femme who left a perfectly well-formed and lived life with another—and that I—a pauper, essentially—wouldn’t do it any other way.
Big Poppa just kept repeating “Gee … whiz,” like we were a panel in some queer Archie comic and I had finally chosen Veronica over Betty. I was disarmed by her surprise, as if she were entering her own memory-laden reverie of dyke drama. She was caught up in my conundrum, but I also knew it was the cancer making Big Poppa stammer out the words she wanted to say.
“Did I ever tell you about …” Big Poppa finally piped up though her voice trailed off, her bushy salt and pepper eyebrows raised as she turned her eyes toward the window where the light of the magic hour was softly gleaming.
“What was that Big Poppa?” I felt my face flush as I asked her to repeat herself, looking in the same direction that she was. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. I’m not sure if it was the intimacy we had created between us that was shaking me, or my continued doubt of being able to stand by my admission of ache and desire for fear of losing Big Poppa’s love and recognition. But here she was, unable to articulate that reassurance I struggled to receive. I don’t know if it was the disease or just the years of naming desire, left and right, like we were marching toward freedom that left us mute with exhaustion the rest of that afternoon.
________
Big Poppa met Sandy the day after Christmas. I brought Sandy into the musty-yet-magisterial bedroom that had become the medical unit-cum-social hub in Jeanne and Lynn’s home. A Christmas tree stood in the corner of the room and CNN was muted on the big-screen television. Big Poppa couldn’t walk anymore. The cancer had completely settled into the folds of her brilliant brain. In the days leading up to Sandy’s visit, I would lie next to Big Poppa and watch Vikings, her new favorite show. This afternoon Sandy sat closest to Jeanne by her bedside, holding both her hands. I went and laid down next to Big Poppa, an ashtray between us, her hand making its way to the top of my head where she patted it awkwardly, a cigarette barely hanging on between her index and middle fingers. She and Sandy talked for about an hour, bonding over their Tejano roots, Big Poppa touching on her own Sephardic Jewish identity.
The pieces finally clicked and I don’t remember how we left Santa Fe. The pieces, his over-emphasis on the girls that we must all finish college, the broken nose-bump on his nose, the same on Grandma Estella Hinojosa Córdova, the piñatas, my long talk with prima Professor Madga Hinosa from Dallas, my father’s early death-bed conversion from nothing to Catholicism, his Latin parents’ life of no religion, Grandpa’s belief in voodoo figures. My part life as a Sephardic Jew began to make sense.
Sandy was charmed by Jeanne’s tales of lesbian historical dramas, gossip, and failed separatist utopian fantasies. I begged Big Poppa to tell Sandy an abridged version of the story of a drunken Kate Millett coming out to address a group of ornery lesbians at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference at UCLA.
I longed for her final blessing.
“I didn’t think I was going to, but I really like her,” Big Poppa said to me between her burdened breathing and the next drag of her menthol. Sandy had left the room to use the bathroom down the hall. “But,” she started, her eyes fixed upon me, so unwavering and glossy that I braced myself for what I hoped would be what I needed to hear, knowing that this would be one of our last visits.
“You’ve got a lot of growing up to do.”
1. The depth of impact Jeanne Córdova had on lesbian culture and human rights activism will continue to be measured for decades to come, but to me she is a child of southern California, of multiple lives and deaths, vision and reinvention. I urge you to read When We Were Outlaws to begin to understand the mission of her life.
2. I suppose I have to cite Zach Galifianakis in his portrayal of Chip Baskets for the apt description of those with my body type.
3. Not his real name.