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“This is my son’s taqdir,” said my father—my destiny. “If I kicked him out for being who he is, then I reject what Allah has destined for him, for my family.”

My father’s supportive words came eight years ago, when I started gender-affirming hormone therapy after being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, confirming what I had known for a long time: that deeply I have always been a man.

It is a complicated and mixed reality to be queer in Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population. But despite some conservative interpretations of Islam here, I have leaned into my faith and my family in order to understand my trans identity, and to practice an inclusive theology.

Because I grew up expected to be a girl by my family and society, I wore a hijab beginning in junior high school. Being dishonest and untruthful to myself was suffocating throughout my childhood—everything felt disoriented. I became riddled with anxiety and depression. I did not know who I was, and I did not understand why my body, my identity, and my faith felt disjointed.

I grew up in a traditional Muslim neighborhood in Java in the 1990s. Since 1973, my family has owned and operated an Islamic school. As a kid I stayed in a girls’ dormitory, engaging in religious activities both in and out of class: memorizing the Quran, performing tahajjud (prayer), attending Islamic studies classes, practicing the rebana (a traditional percussion instrument similar to a tambourine).

Apart from my confusion surrounding my gender identity, I enjoyed my experience growing up with rich Islamic and Indonesian traditions and I felt part of the ummah, the community of believers I called my chosen family.

At that time, people in Indonesia could not easily access information on gender and sexuality. It wasn’t until I attended a local college that I learned to think critically about gender in Islam. This was a turning point, for I started to understand that Islamic theology is not a monolith and to question faith-based queerphobia. Ultimately and inevitably, I began to accept my true gender identity.

Still, with this newfound clarity came more questions. I decided to seek out professional help.

It took me a while to find a queer-friendly psychologist capable of understanding my experience. Several told me I needed to be “cured,” that there was a demonic, monstrous desire within me that I had to dispel.

The legal dictates of queer life in Indonesia are a mixed bag. While same-sex marriage is illegal, Indonesia does not have a law that criminalizes gender and sexual minorities, despite attempts by conservative groups, including after a moral panic in 2016. But in December 2022, under strongarm President Joko Widodo, the newly revised criminal code limited various human rights and outlawed extramarital sex, which critics have argued will disproportionately affect LGBTQ people.

Indonesian families commonly force a therapy called “ruqyah” on queer people, wrongfully citing it as an Islamic practice of conversion therapy. A trans man friend of mine was abused through ruqyah, which used “corrective rape” as a method. The “therapy” was initiated by his own family.

I was scared to come out to my family. I thought my parents would disown me. Instead, things went unexpectedly. After I came out, my mom hugged me and said, “I love you more than before.” And I did not expect my father’s supportive words about my own taqdir.

Not everything went so smoothly, though. My brother and sister tried to discourage me from continuing my transition based on their religious and cultural understanding of how Islam interprets my identity. Eventually we agreed to disagree—except on the fact that we are family no matter what. They disagree with me but they support my right to live my life and to practice what I believe. “My duty as a brother is to support him,” my brother told BBC Indonesia in an interview. “And our duty as human beings is to be kind to one another.”

And my sister provided testimonial support during a court hearing to change my legal name. Indonesian people can submit an application to the local court to change their name and gender as long as their family provides witnesses to support the application—a doctor, a psychologist, and a theologian.  The first successful name and gender change in an Indonesian court took place in 1973 with an Islamic scholar’s support. But even today, many judges reject the gender and name change due to their personal religious views.

When people mocked and questioned my mom for accepting me, she always cited a Qur’an verse (36:82) that translates to: “All it takes, when Allah wills something to be, is simply to say to it: ‘Be!’ And it is!”

She died in 2018. This verse has a special place in my heart—because it shows how Allah created diversity and because it helps me to remember my mom’s love.

If it was not for my family’s acceptance, I would have left my religion. Instead, I am pursuing an academic career in theology and religious studies and have become firm in my faith and thinking about gender diversity in Islam. I always tell people that it is demeaning to believe that God could not create gender and sexual diversity. Faith communities of all kinds—particularly patriarchal ones—do not realize that these queerphobic narratives make their religion irrelevant, inhumane, and unjust.

Those of us who are part of such communities, or who have left them as a result, have let our faith give up when it can be a powerful source of solace and empowerment. It is thus a divine action to reclaim the narrative around queerness and make space for an inclusive theology where everyone, regardless of their gender identity, expression, and sexual orientation, is welcomed and embraced with full dignity and unconditional compassion.

Perhaps this is my taqdir.

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In 2018, I was interviewed for Univision’s morning talk show ¡Despierta América! (Wake up, America!) to discuss the meaning of the identity label Latinx. I was nervous because I had never discussed gender and sexuality in a “formal” Spanish setting, let alone on national television—I mean, my 92-year-old abuelita was going to be watching! At the end, the reporter asked if I identified with the term Latinx. I knew what he was asking: Are you, personally, gender fluid? I surprised myself when I replied “yes” without pause. It was the first time I had publicly affirmed my non-binary identity.

In the months that followed, I would have several conversations with family and friends about what this meant for me, what pronouns I would now use, and how we would have patience with each other in learning and moving forward. Patience was necessary, given that the debate over the use of Latinx (and more recently, Latine) to refer to people with origins in Latin America has gone in dizzying circles. Since the term Latinx gained popularity in 2016, it and its variations (for me, Latine offers more phonetic fluidity)—have become a source of fierce disagreements among Latine people of all races, ages, genders, and sexual identities.

But the debates largely miss the point: whether one prefers to use Latinx or Latine, both terms recognize and honor the presence of gender-fluid identities. What is most striking about these “debates” is that they rarely (if ever) center the voices and experiences of those who do identify with the term—namely, transgender, non-binary, and gender-fluid Latine communities.

The linguistic debate on Latinx, then, serves as a useful example to understand the transphobia prevalent in our community and the importance of adopting language that better reflects our communities writ large.

Critics of the term Latinx often cite linguistic purity and Spanish heritage for their critiques. Some claim that Latinx is an abomination to the Spanish language because it does not follow proper grammar or phonology, noting that the “o” in Latino—or any other identity label such as dominicano, chileno, mexicano, for example—is already inclusive of the collective.

While this argument may be grammatically “correct” according to mainstream Spanish, it does not take into account the invisibilities the “o” creates. Latinx provides a linguistic vehicle to represent gender fluid experiences and to organize these communities under an inclusive umbrella. However, some people use Latinx as a catch-all term since the x can be a stand-in for any of the other identities: -a, -e, and -o.

The critiques also ignore the political context. In my research on queer and trans Latine communities, I first noticed the use of the “x” in my fieldwork in 2016 when community organizers were debating more inclusive language in their social media presence. Some have also cited the emergence of Latinx after the tragic Pulse shooting in Orlando, Florida, when media outlets faced having to accurately represent the diverse gender identities of the victims.

This expansion and reconsideration of gender, it turns out, is of vital relevance to Latinx communities. In 2018, the GenForward Survey, housed at the University of Chicago, published a study on Millennials’ attitudes surrounding LGBTQ issues. The study found that while approximately 14% of Millennials in the U.S. identify as something other than straight or heterosexual, a greater number of Latinx Millennials identify as LGBTQ (22%) compared to African Americans (14%), whites (13%), and Asian Americans (9%). These numbers are also worth noting considering that Latines make up 19% of the U.S. population and are the youngest of any ethnic group in the country. As of 2019, the average age of a Latine person is 11, while the average age of a Black person is 27, 29 for an Asian person, and 58 for a white person. From this perspective, the future of Latine communities in the U.S. is looking a lot less heterosexual and cisgender.

But this inclusivity is exactly what critics of Latinx dislike. Last year, the Atlantic published an article claiming that staffers encourage Latino legislators to avoid the term because it is “divisive.” But the rationale of avoiding being divisive aims to create the illusion of a politically unified Latine voting bloc, as opposed to choosing to understand the complex experiences that are categorized unilaterally as “Latino.” For decades, both Congresspeople and Hollywood have discussed “struggling” with understanding the vastly diverse group of people that the terms Latina/e/o/x include. Calling attention to this diversity is precisely the point of Latinx.

Negating the term Latinx also contributes to an erasure of trans experiences that perpetuates violence. Currently, the rights of transgender communities across all races and ages in the U.S. are under attack—a forceful effort to erase the experiences of transgender people and deny them protections from discrimination. Trans women already experience greater employment discrimination than any other demographic: According to the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute “nearly half (48.8%) of transgender employees reported experiencing discrimination (being fired or not hired) based on their LGBT status compared to 27.8% of cisgender LGB employees.” On top of that, there is a growing rate of murders of trans Women of Color in the U.S.—In 2021, the Human Rights Campaign tracked a record 50 fatalities, an overwhelming number of whom were Black and/or Latina. In 2022, at least 38 trans people have been murdered; many additional cases go unreported or misreported.

Latine transgender communities also include a significant undocumented population, who face not only employment discrimination but further marginalization due to their legal status. For instance, in their study on trans Latinx health in California, trans activists and scholars Bamby Salcedo of TransLatin@ Coalition and Jack Caraves found that of the 129 participants they surveyed, 37% were undocumented, 26% were unemployed, and just 20% had full-time employment.

The insistence on rejecting the use of Latinx is a transphobic act because it denies trans Latine and Latinx people a term that represents them. When conservative leaders in our communities are the first to double down on that denial, it shows that they don’t see trans Latines as part of the communities they represent. For instance, the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which is the oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization in the U.S., claims that we should drop the use of the word altogether since so few people like it.

More recently, Republican congressperson María Elvira Salazar of Florida introduced an amendment to the House appropriations bill that would prevent the executive branch from referring to Latinos as Latinxs in official, public-facing documents, and preventing any funds from being allotted for producing documents that use “Latinx” or “Latin-x.” This tactic has also been used by non-Latinx leaders: Last month, on her first day in office as Arkansas governor, Sarah Huckabee banned the use of the term Latinx in all official state use. And early this month, a group of Hispanic Connecticut Democrats introduced a bill to follow suit.

Untangling fluid social constructs like language and gender can be challenging. But perhaps the point is not to untangle. Linguistic expressions hold so many possibilities in how people affirm themselves, their communities, and more importantly, how they can imagine other ways of identifying, loving, and being in the world. That’s where I see the power and hope in these language practices—the power in recognizing someone else’s beauty and their humanity. Whether the terms Latinx and Latine become widely adopted or not, both resist the urge to fall in line with the collective “o” in Latino and both enforce the idea that trans people do, in fact, exist in our communities. While changes in language may seem “difficult” for some, or unimportant for others, language is constantly shifting and evolving. The move to gender-inclusive language is a reminder and a call to action for all of us to actively engage with and recognize the experiences, struggles, and joy of transgender communities.

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On September 8, 1943, Hans Heinrich Festersen was hanged at Berlin’s Plötzensee prison. Festersen, 35, had been arrested almost a year earlier, on October 12, 1942, for violating Paragraph 175, the German law prohibiting sex between men. He received his death sentence on July 13, 1943.

Though the Nazis had broadened the law and increased its severity, gay men were not usually killed for violating Paragraph 175. So, why was Hans Festersen killed, and how did his letters from prison to his sister Ruth Marie end up in a museum exhibit in Berlin today?

From January 1940 until August 1941, German “health courts” deemed 70,000 disabled persons to be “unworthy of life.” They were murdered in gas chambers as part of the Aktion T4 program. After the program officially ended and until the end of the war, 230,000 more people with disabilities, including infants, were killed by gas and other means, including starvation, medication overdose, and neglect.

Letter from Hans Heinrich Festersen to his sister, written at Plötzensee prison, December 14, 1942. Photo courtesy of the Schwules Museum.

Festersen, the son of noted ceramicist Friedrich Festersen, was physically disabled due to cerebral palsy. He used walking aids to get around. The police arrested him along with three other gay disabled men who had been living with Festersen at a Protestant institution for the unemployed and homeless.

Crucial to the case against the four men was the 1933 “Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals,” which allowed indefinite imprisonment and castration of sex offenders. But according to the memorial site at Plötzensee, by 1943 “wartime criminal laws allowed for death sentences for almost any criminal offense.”

The four gay disabled men’s trial records, as historian Andreas Pretzel reports, are filled with biases against, and misrepresentations of, both disability and being gay. The court’s judgment described Festersen and his co-defendants as being “mentally weak” and “not fully sane.” Their sexuality was deemed “unnatural fornication.” Pretzel concludes that their “death sentences were aimed at the destruction of life allegedly unworthy of life.” The phrase “life unworthy of life” was the term the Nazis used when deciding which of the disabled would be killed.

Ultimately, does it matter if Hans Heinrich Festersen was killed because he was gay or because he was disabled or because he was caught up in what the Plötzensee memorial site calls “a reign of judicial terror”?

I know firsthand the challenges of interpreting a life at the intersection of identities—I am both gay and disabled. I’ve written three books with my intersectionality as a focus. I’m also Jewish. Now, living in Berlin, I’ve too often been asked which of my identities is the “most difficult.”

I’m deeply interested in Hans Festersen’s story, which is at the center of “Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer,” the exhibit I curated on queer/disability history, activism, and culture, at the Schwules Museum in Berlin through January 30, 2023.

Disability arts and culture scholar Carrie Sandahl coined the phrase on which the exhibit’s title is based in a 2003 essay. “[S]exual minorities and people with disabilities,” she writes, “share a history of injustice: both have been pathologized by medicine; demonized by religion; discriminated against in housing, employment, and education; stereotyped in representation; victimized by hate groups; and isolated socially, often in their families of origin.”

Queer history and disability history, though similar, were not quite parallel. However, with the advent of eugenics, from the late 19th century into the 20th, these histories more often ran together, culminating most dangerously during the Nazi regime in Germany.

Hans Heinrich Festersen and his sister, Ruth Marie. Photo courtesy of the Schwules Museum.

It’s relatively easy to find information on the fates of Jewish people with disabilities under the Nazi Reich. But researching the history of those killed who were both queer and disabled is far more difficult. When I asked Petra Fuchs, an expert on Aktion T4 who worked on the T4 Memorial and Information Center for the Victims of the Nazi “Euthanasia” Program in Berlin, if she knew of any, she asked if I had found anyone.

So it was quite a surprise when Birgit Bosold, my co-curator and member of the board of directors at the Schwules Museum, shared with me a 2008 local newspaper article about a commemoration of the murders of Hans Festersen and the men arrested with him. The article alluded to the men being disabled, though it mainly focused on their sexuality and their life at the Protestant institution.

It was even more surprising when, a few weeks later, Birgit informed me that five letters Festersen wrote to his sister from Plötzensee were in the museum archive. In these intimate letters, Festersen talks about his future, wanting to end his “wandering around in institutions” by marrying a “slightly disabled classmate,” whom he calls “Miss Hanna.” In his last letter in the archive, dated May 22, 1943, he wonders if he’ll be sent for sterilization. His letters included rhymed poems for his young nephew, Peter, who, decades later, donated the letters to the museum.

Clearly, amid the most difficult circumstances, Festersen kept his humanity. And when we remember the history—the lives—of those who were both queer and disabled, we humanize those who are too often looked upon as doubly “other,” or whose intersectionality is not recognized or understood.

Many (most?) of us live at the intersection of more than one identity. Exploring the connections between our multiple identities provides a deeper understanding of how our intersectional lives are lived, as well as perceived.

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We think the ghosts will come to us as we sit in Kaitlyn’s car, once our car, on top of the man-made hill that houses the only mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery. Small blue orbs dot the landscape. Ghost hunting shows often cite orbs as a sign of a haunting. But these are just battery-operated lamps that families have left next to their dead’s gravestones.

We figure this spot under the tree is a good place to hide from the few cars that might drive by in the night, going from Urbana to Champaign or vice versa. I turn the ignition off.

“Now what?” Kaitlyn sighs. Our ghost hunting inexperience is evident.

Three months ago, I had stood in our kitchen, now my kitchen, and said: I’m gay. At first, I had said I would find a new place because she had loved the garden in the backyard. But she wanted to go because she didn’t want to be in a house haunted by our former togetherness.

Over the remains of our marriage, we both wanted to create a celebration for our new friendship and a new tradition—one last ours. Inspired by the then-new show “Ghost Hunters,” we’d search out ghosts on Halloween, our shared favorite holiday. We decided to call it Wake the Dead.

Fog from the cold creeps up the windows. Silhouettes of the tree’s branches knock against the back window.

“What was that?” Kaitlyn whispers

“What was what?” I look around, afraid. The idea of seeing a ghost seemed fun, the increasing possibility as we sit in the dark cemetery, not so much.

“Thought I saw something moving across that way.” She points towards a row of graves.

I don’t see anything. Still, as the cold bleeds in through the vents, making everything feel even creepier, a thought whispers to me that we shouldn’t be there.

“Want to go?”

She nods. I drive as fast as I can on the twisty cemetery road in the dark. We go back to my apartment to eat pizza and watch a comedy. We laugh hard at anything slightly funny.

The author’s ceramic figurine in Chicago’s AIDS Garden—a place he believes is crowded with gay ghosts or ‘lavender apparitions.’ Courtesy of author.

Maybe we didn’t see anything because ghosts don’t hang out in cemeteries. According to Shane McClelland, co-founder of the Stonewall Columbus Ghost Hunters, they tend to return to places they associate with happiness or a place where they experienced trauma.

McClelland’s group hosts a YouTube show called “Queer Ghost Hunters.” In contrast to regular ghost hunting shows, all the investigators on “Queer Ghost Hunters” are queer, and the subjects of their investigations are queer ghosts.

I started watching Stonewall Columbus Ghost Hunters in April 2022, while researching my memoir about my relationship to ghosts. Like my queerness, ghosts have always been with me, even when I didn’t want to acknowledge them. I started to notice my father’s ghost standing behind me three years ago when I remembered that he had molested me. Those memories brought on PTSD, major depression, and generalized anxiety disorder. I stopped showering. I slept with the lights on. No matter where I went or what I did, he was there, his hand hovering above my left shoulder.

But just as ghosts can haunt places of pleasure or trauma, that “you are not alone” feeling can be scary or be a comfort. Like I once accepted being queer, I eventually accepted being haunted. My once-casual interest in ghosts has become a full-fledged fascination. Now, instead of fearing being haunted, I devote much of my free time to seeking queer ghosts and writing haunted memoir, a term I coined, about the lived experience of being haunted. Ghosts have led me to a community of others also welcoming ghosts into their lives.

I’ve found that queerness and ghosts go together in fundamental ways. For one, our lack of queer history is a haunting. Rather than camera-ready scares, the hunts on “Queer Ghost Hunters” are a vehicle for finding and sharing queer history. By seeking out our ghosts and telling their stories, we defy erasure.

But in “Queer Ghost Hunters”, the Stonewall Columbus Ghost Hunters focus their searches on places of trauma, like prisons and abandoned asylums. They don’t go anywhere the queer ghosts might have had fun. If we are to memorialize places of queer trauma—and I believe we should—we also need to memorialize places of queer joy. For me, the power of queer ghost hunting lies in the way that it offers a means to acknowledge the co-existence of loss and celebration in queer, haunted spaces.

AIDS Garden Chicago balances this coexistence. Built on the ruins of what used to be a cruising and queer gathering spot known as Belmont Rocks in one of the city’s gay-friendly northern neighborhoods, the garden’s site memorializes a joyful part of Chicago’s queer history. Chicago Reader described Belmont Rocks as “the rare spot where the queer community could mix and mingle in broad daylight all summer long” and “nothing short of a gay paradise.”

Opened this year, the AIDS Garden’s centerpiece is a 30-foot, green Keith Haring sculpture titled Self-Portrait. Its defiant, joyful figure has its left leg and arm raised, as if photographed mid step. The park that circles the sculpture has concrete walking paths, benches, and pink and orange flowers. Through QR codes, visitors can scan to hear a still-growing collection of stories from those who lived through the crisis years in Chicago, as well as stories about those who didn’t make it. Because not a lot of storytelling exists about the Midwest during the height of the AIDS epidemic, the park is vital in making space to witness queer history and lives.

The author’s ceramic ghost stands in front of a 30-foot Keith Haring sculpture at AIDS Garden Chicago. Coutesy of author.

On the day I visit, the garden is busy: Cinnamon fills the air from the churros being made by the nearby food stand; closer to the lake, the air smells of sweat and sunscreen. People picnic under the shade of the trees surrounding the garden, while others hurry by to get a spot on the grass close to the lake. Some sunbathe on the concrete lip between the garden and the lakefront walkways just like in the historical pictures of Belmont Rocks. All of it feels like a way of honoring the space—laughing, taking in the sun, being with friends by the lake, just like the ghosts who haunt this space did when they were alive. It is a communal space for the living and the dead where the feeling that you are not alone is a comfort.

I’ve brought my own ghost to the garden, a ceramic figurine. I lie on my stomach on the crisp summer grass right in front of the sculpture to get a picture of the two together. The garden, I imagine, must be crowded with gay ghosts—or “lavender apparitions,” this more delightful descriptor courtesy of the podcast History Is Gay’s Halloween episode featuring the Queer Ghost Hunters. Just as ghosts are evidence of history, lavender apparitions prove queer people have always existed—even when we didn’t have language for queerness, even when some try to make us vanish.

Wake the Dead was a one-time event. Kaitlyn started her own tradition the next year: a Halloween costume party. Eventually, we phased out of each other’s lives, and I moved out of central Illinois to find my new home in Chicago, a city that provides space for queer history, celebration. Here, through searching out queer ghosts, I’ve reclaimed the ghost for myself just as I have the feeling of being haunted—two things the frightened version of me hiding from ghosts in that car in Urbana-Champaign would not have thought possible.

My new home is also walking distance to a local gay beach on Lake Michigan. I walk along the sand-covered concrete ridge that separates the beach from the preserved prairie dunes, the tall yellow-green marram grass stretching out towards the dark gray-blue water, towards the lighthouse with the rainbow base, on one of the first warm days. The dunes are themselves an unofficial cemetery of those lost to settler genocide. As I sit on the beach, the Chicago wind picks up, and sand swirls in the wind as if it’s dancing. I try to record it on my phone, to document what feels magical. I know I won’t capture it, but that’s OK. I let myself enjoy this lavender apparition, enjoying movement after being frozen for the winter. A gay ghost, as in a happy one.

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It is early August 2022 and I am in San Francisco for a few days. In urban areas with large gay populations such as Los Angeles, where I’m from, and here, monkeypox is on the mind of all my gay friends, and a topic of great interest among my straight ones. As with the first days of COVID-19, this consciousness seems to have come out of nowhere. Only weeks ago monkeypox seemed like a minor issue. Now there are more and more stories of friends of friends who have contracted it—experiences of the worst pain ever, like broken glass scraping on skin, and of the horror when the lesions travel to the genitals and anal canal, where the pain is constant and agonizing.

For those of us who are sexually active gay men, the timing seems particularly cruel. It was only recently that the shadow of COVID lifted a bit, giving something of a return to normalcy in regards to sexual practices. Monkeypox spreads through close contact, particularly sexual contact, and many gay men have contracted it. Sex and physical intimacy are dangerous again. It’s time to once again limit sexual contact—to heave another sigh, accept the new reality, and try and find a way to get the vaccine.

It isn’t easy. I had registered for the vaccine in Los Angeles and in nearby Long Beach, but had been unable to obtain it. Now, in San Francisco, at a little after 8 in the morning on a Tuesday, a friend texts me that he’d gotten out of bed at 4:30 a.m. to get in line at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Rumor was, they had a batch of monkeypox vaccine—maybe 600 doses, no one knows for sure—which they were going to start giving out at 8 a.m.

When my friend arrived at 5:30 a.m. there was already a two-block line, and he was lucky number 125—assured he would get the vaccine that day. His text urges me to get down to SF General ASAP. I pull on some clothes, call a Lyft, and rush out the door. I haven’t had my coffee yet, and I have a work Zoom scheduled later, but this may be my only chance.

When I get there, the line is down to one block long, and there is a moment of joy and relief when a smiling health outreach worker hands me a paper slip: number 531. I will get my first monkeypox vaccine dose that day! She also gives me a questionnaire to fill out and a small, bright yellow pencil, as if I were about to commence a round of miniature golf. I try to remember the last time I have used or even held a pencil. Filling out the form in faint graphite feels somehow inadequate to the importance of the moment.

The vaccine line snakes along slowly but constantly. It is a warm day in the city, and it’s nice to be in the sun. I look around at my companions in line. We are all of us gay men, most alone, some in pairs. I have flashbacks to the early days of the AIDS crisis. The desperate waiting for initial treatments, taking an early HIV test and waiting an unnerving two weeks for the result, struggling to get the first doses of combination therapies. We were stigmatized in those early days, and we fear we could be stigmatized anew.

And of course there are more recent flashbacks, to COVID-19—the confusion and anxiety for everyone seeking to get vaccinated and the glorious memory of getting that first dose, and the sense of liberation and newfound safety that came with it.

About halfway through the line, an earnest young activist hands each of us a card urging us to sign a petition demanding the government take more urgent steps to fight monkeypox, including making more vaccine doses available immediately. Later, near the vaccine site entrance, I come across a huge pile of petition cards discarded on a bench. Political apathy will always exist to some degree, but I wonder how much this castoff mound may also speak to the number of gay men who feel exhausted and overwhelmed in the face of a seemingly endless barrage of political and health threats.

Getting the vaccine goes amazingly smoothly. I walk to a numbered table where an intern in scrubs greets me warmly and transcribes the information on my penciled questionnaire into a database. I go upstairs to receive my vaccine. An older, jovial male nurse smiles broadly at me, offers me a seat, and asks: Which arm? The injection is painless, and I do not at first realize it is over. I see the nurse toss my used syringe into a gigantic red sharps box, on top of hundreds of other spent doses. There we are, thrown together, as we were in line.

I think of all the death and suffering among gay men that the organized, friendly health professionals at San Francisco General Hospital must have seen since the first days of the AIDS epidemic. In some ways this is just another response to a health crisis, offered generously and efficiently, without judgment, and mustering the greatest resources they are capable of providing.

I walk out of the vaccine facility with a lightness in my step, knowing that I am one of the lucky ones. There are still vaccines available today, just as there had been when my friend texted me a few hours earlier. I text other friends to tell them to come down here, and see other men doing the same. We are in this together—men who are still in many ways outsiders to mainstream American sexual culture, who have achieved a certain level of liberation in our celebration of the joy and intimacy of sex, and who, if we are lucky, have good friends who reach out in a time of crisis and tell us to get our ass down here right away.

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May 2013: CMA CGM Dalila, offshore of Yokohama, Japan

The flat sea glimmers like a disco ball and it’s warm enough to sit outside without a puffy coat. All day long there have been whale sightings. … WHALES! The watchmen called me in the gymnasium where I was playing ping pong with Ian and Cloyd, crewmembers from the Philippines. WHALES! Each time I’d race to starboard or port side and scan the sea, squinting for a splash of a fin or tail. Finally this evening I saw the whales on port side, basking in the warm, peach light of the sunset. We saw two that floated like black logs along the calm surface. And another on the starboard side, the perfect outline of a tail descending into the deep.

In 2013, I quit my publishing job in New York City to travel around the world as a passenger on container ships. My trip was generously supported by a fellowship from my college for recent graduates who demonstrated a “strong desire to travel and a deep love of beauty.” I planned to talk to crews, communities, and organizations involved in maritime shipping, and to raise awareness of the industry’s rising social and environmental impact. In truth, my motives were far more selfish. I was in awe of container ships, and drawn to the unpredictability of the ocean. I was also compelled to do something a little reckless, just for me. Mostly I wanted to be far away.

I had been living two separate lives for some time. In my hometown of Seattle, I was a mostly closeted version of myself, so as not to bring any embarrassment or discomfort to my devout Greek Orthodox family. In New York, there was another version of me, figuring out who I was and what I wanted out of an adult romantic relationship, and on the verge of falling in love with a woman. I hoped that time on a big, slow-moving boat might give me space to reimagine how I would navigate the future.

A view of Marsaxlokk Port, Malta. During her journey, the author often walked around the ship, past rows of multicolored containers. Courtesy of author.

July 2013: Westport Business Center, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

It is 12:25 in the morning and I am waiting in an empty business center in Port Klang. It’s a cement box of a building with scuffed walls, cold metal chairs and tiny television sets playing American westerns. … I’m not certain I am where I’m supposed to be. Hopefully my ship will arrive in the next hour and I can begin the immigration process and board the boat before sunrise. Earlier in the day I was told it would be here at 8 p.m., and then later, 11 p.m. When I arrived at 11 p.m., I was told the boat would not be here until 1 a.m.

As a passenger on a container ship, you are the least of anyone’s concern—insignificant in comparison to the millions of dollars’ worth of cargo on board. There is a lot of time for quiet reflection—with no cell service and only intermittent access to email. Days are punctuated by mealtimes but are otherwise entirely free of programming. On the ship I had a surprisingly spacious cabin with a double bed, desk, loveseat, and coffee table, my own bathroom, and one porthole looking out over the containers. I spent my mornings reading on the couch or writing diary entries at my desk. Sometimes I took a break to climb the several stairs to the bridge, where officers and crew take turns manning the ship, to stare out at the sea or pester whoever was on watch with questions.

In the afternoons I could walk around the perimeter of the ship, past the rows and rows of multicolored containers, a half-mile distance around. After lunch, I often slept. Some afternoons I ran on the ancient treadmill in the “gymnasium,” a small room with some athletic contraptions from the ‘80s. Or I’d play ping pong with any off-duty crewmembers.

The officers were from the countries where the ships were flagged—in the case of this trip, France and Germany. The crew were mostly from the Philippines, but there were others from Romania, Russia, and Kiribati, an island I had never heard of. All of the officers and crew that I met were men.

July 2013: CC Rigoletto, Straits of Malacca

There is one other passenger on board, Victor from Sweden. It’s so cute because no one has really introduced themselves to us, but nearly everyone we’ve passed lets us know that there is a barbeque on deck tonight. They are roasting a whole pig and there will be tiger prawns and merguez sausages as well! This will be the last barbeque for a while because we will be passing around India and it is the monsoon season. I think they are going all out for the occasion. Every day the menu is posted on a printout taped in the stairwell to the mess hall. And every day someone pastes up a different photo of a scantily clad female celebrity between lunch and dinner. Day 1: Cameron Diaz. Day 2: Christina Aguilera. Ironically, the steward also includes on the printout the name of the saint who is celebrated each day.

Before my trips I had assumed I would be one of few women, if not the only woman, on board. I was careful in my dress not to invite any unwanted attention. And when asked, I avoided all conversation around my personal and romantic life—I certainly never revealed that I was dating a woman. One day I was playing ping pong with one of the officers, and he asked me why I never wore skirts—then jokingly threatened to steal all my trousers while I exercised so that I’d have to wear a skirt to dinner.

In some ways, the journey amplified my inclination to hide and my growing frustration with the disconnect between how I presented myself to people of my past, and to strangers, and who I really was. Even thousands of miles away from everyone I knew, with the entire space of the ocean and the anonymity of an experience unshared, I was still building a wall. I had the courage to do so much alone, and yet even alone I didn’t have the courage to be me.

One remarkable day—the day we sailed through the Suez Canal in the first hazy blue light of dawn—the beauty of the experience was punctuated by an email from my family. They were planning a wedding for my sister, a big fat Greek wedding, and I just couldn’t be happy. I was mourning the love and support I feared I would never receive from my parents, and felt guilty for my lack of joy for a sister I loved so much. Waves of anger and jealousy and anxiety swelled up so strong that I felt sick to my stomach. That day, I vowed not to be the same when I returned.

Elena Legeros aboard the CC Rigoletto on the Straits of Malacca, during a barbecue on deck with the ship’s crew. Courtesy of author.

August 25, 2013: MSC Uganda, offshore of Boston, United States

Today will be my last day aboard and it could not be a more glorious day. There isn’t a breath of wind and the sea is a shimmer like static on a deep blue TV screen. We are ahead of schedule and at midday we came to a complete halt in the middle of the ocean and I went outside to suntan, taking dips in the pool of icy seawater. Every time I go outside I sniff to see if I can smell the smell of the Cape. My phone is getting intermittent service and I can hear the Boston-based coast guard over the radio in the wheelhouse.

It’s been nine years since my voyage. In that time I’ve moved from New York to Seattle to Los Angeles to San Francisco. I married the woman I love, and we’ve had two children together. We recently decided to move our family to Long Beach, where we rented an apartment that looks out over the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two largest ports in the United States. Long Beach drew us for a variety of reasons, but I was excited to be so close to the container ships.

These days I feel rooted on land and glad to be close to my family—the one I grew up with and the one I’m building. I don’t feel the pull to venture far away, but I love to see the ships in the harbor, to think about where they came from and where they’re going. Sometimes I check online to see what they’re carrying and the route they’ve taken. I think about the officers and crewmembers on board and how long they’ve been away from their families. I’m reminded of my smallness, both relative to the size of these ships and the expanse of the world they sail. But I’m reminded of strength, too: the strength I found in the middle of the ocean, not in the face of any danger or adversity but with the space and time to discover it fully.

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On June 25, 1983, two distinct marches set out from Mexico City’s Monumento a Los Niños Héroes. One was a traditional march, with a serious tone in line with the established patterns for Mexican leftist marches. The other included not only queer Mexicans but also sex workers and punk-like chavos banda, who laughed, danced, and wreaked fun havoc—or, in Mexican parlance, engaged in desmadre. This second march also included a stop at the U.S. Embassy to burn Ronald Reagan in effigy to protest U.S. interventions in Central America.

The two contingents were at odds. In 1984, they even came to blows, pushing and shoving each other at the marches’ end point, the Hemiciclo a Benito Juárez.

Many contemporary queer Mexicans don’t know this history, yet it is more important than ever today. In 1983, queer Mexicans faced turbulent times, grappling with the effects of the crushing 1982 debt crisis, early news of the AIDS epidemic, and fallout from U.S. interventionism in Central America. Today, queer people face a parallel conjuncture: economic recession, contentious politics, and a War on Drugs that has increased violence against women and LGBTQ Mexicans, and now COVID-19.

In both historical moments, economic and political crises fractured the queer community. Why? Because queer activists are shaped by class and other factors. Around the world, they wrestle with economics, politics, and with what those things have to do with sexual and gender identity. When economic crises accentuate class-based tensions, it plays out as conflict over how to be queer and how to fight for queer liberation.

As in many other parts of the world, publicly visible queer activism in Mexico began in the 1970s. While same-sex acts had been technically legal in Mexico since the late 19th century, individuals who identified as jotos, vestidas, lesbianas, homosexuales, travestis, mujercitos, and bisexuales (terms that refer to people who engaged in same-sex acts and/or questioned gender expectations, and do not map perfectly to today’s LGBTQ categories in the United States) faced ostracization from family and friends and harassment, arrest, and extortion by police via public decency laws.

In the face of this, Mexico City queers of the mid-20th century created class-based, largely hidden social lives. Wealthy gays gathered in private homes or in clubs with expensive entry fees. Some searched out hookups with poor gay men in bars or on street corners, slumming in what they called the “guetos lumpen” or “lumpen ghettos.” Poor homosexuales, especially the vestidas or cross-dressing men, engaged in sex work.

Though “hidden,” these queer social spaces were never fully out of sight—interested people could go to the right public spaces, department stores, restaurants, and clubs, look the part, and ask the right questions to find others like them. The Mexico City police knew where to find them too, and subjected gay and/or cross-dressing men to verbal harassment and razzias (raids) at bars. Murders in the community went uninvestigated.

So, in the early 1970s, inspired by the 1968 student movement as well as the recent rises of feminism, anti-imperialism, and the civil rights movement, Mexico City’s queer people began to organize. But just as past gay social life had been class-stratified, so was early organizing. Cosmopolitan middle- and upper-class queers traveled to New York City in 1969 in the wake of the Stonewall Riots and to Europe to meet members of the French front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire. Inspired, they returned to Mexico and formed the Frente de Liberación Homosexual de México (Homosexual Liberation Front of Mexico, or FLH).

The FLH operated within the confines of homes, largely in the form of reading groups. Many knew from experience in other kinds of political organizing that the police and military often targeted activists to squash dissent. Some worried further that taking their queer activism public would alienate them from their comrades in other activist circles, who often saw homosexuality as irrelevant to political organizing—or worse, bourgeois and anti-revolutionary.

Eventually, a group of frustrated ex-FLH members got fed up with secrecy. In 1978, they branched off to create the Frente Homosexual de Acción Revolucionaria (The Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action, FHAR) and joined a march celebrating the Cuban Revolution—marking the first time an openly queer contingent marched for change on Mexico City streets. The following year FHAR joined forces with Lambda, a Trotskyist gay liberation group, and the lesbian-feminist Oikabeth to organize Mexico City’s first marcha de orgullo homosexual—or gay pride march.

Poster from the First Marcha de Orgullo Homosexual. Courtesy of Colectivo Sol.

At first, the three groups worked together to push back against police raids. They wrote letters to officials and op-eds to counter criminalizing and negative portrayals of queer individuals, and they talked with newspaper reporters about using respectful terminology. They marched to uphold their constitutional rights to expression and assembly. They also collaborated with activists demanding justice for the desaparecidos (the hundreds of activists and allies kidnapped, tortured, and secretly incarcerated or murdered during the Mexican government’s Dirty War from 1964 to 1982). The activists’ queer identities intersected with their activities as unionized laborers, student activists, party militants, and members of other political organizations.

Yet as the economy plummeted in the early 1980s, class-based tensions surfaced. The activists argued about the meaning of homosexuality, the role of travestis (cross dressers) in the movement, the appropriation of homophobic slurs, and how best to present their movement in the world and demand respect for their rights. When middle-class LAMBDA ran candidates for legislative bodies, others critiqued them as assimilationist. When working-class-aligned activists—whose coalitions included sex workers and chavos banda—appropriated slurs and expressed their queerness flamboyantly, they put themselves at odds with lesbian groups, who argued that cross-dressing gay men and transvestites made a ridicule of cis-women. These tensions divided the march into two fractions.

Debates over assimilation and respectability still haunt queer organizations. Today, there remains a divide over capitalism, assimilation, and “selling out” at Mexican Pride. Mexico City hosts two Pride marches. The first is larger, and the kind you see around the world: filled with floats sponsored by LGBTQ organizations, NGOs, government offices, and multi-national companies such as Visa and General Electric. The second is much smaller, and its participants are leftist queer activists.

The movement is splintered. As in the U.S., the mainstream face of Mexican queer activism focuses on “sexual diversity” and has focused its attention on marriage, representation within government institutions, and the creation of gay-themed consumer products such as Levi’s’ Pride collection. Meanwhile, a smaller group of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist queer Mexicans organize around ideas of “corporeal and sexual dissidence,” seeking specially to address violence against trans individuals. This violence has been exacerbated by the increasing visibility of separatist feminists, some lesbian, who reject transwomen with a discourse that resembles that of the country’s elite right-wing party. On the surface these can seem like simple disagreements about respectability politics, but as in the 1980s, the factions fall along class politics as many transwomen in vulnerable situations are working-class.

These divisions are not uniquely Mexican. Around the world, many queer activists are tired of the pandering by multi-national corporations who sponsor floats but prop up destructive business and war efforts. These activists reject mainstream Pride and argue for organizing around efforts that prioritize trans individuals and working-class queers.

It’s important to remember that the queer movement emerged out of precisely these coalitions—solidarity between middle-class and working-class queer activists and with other groups fighting for liberation such as workers, immigrants, and oppressed racial groups. In 1979, Mexican queer activists chanted, “Nobody is free until we are all free!” That spirit must animate today’s queer activists.

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Today, it peers out from above the kind of gastropub where you can order a $16 cocktail, easily fitting in with this gentrifying part of Sunset Boulevard, once known as a working-class Latino neighborhood and gay enclave. By the end of this year, the space next to the Black Cat is slated to become a Shake Shack, joining the likes of luxury supermarket chain Erewhon a block west.

Fifty-five years ago, though, photographs captured a different Black Cat, a gay bar that inspired civilians to gather under those large feline eyes and protest the unfair treatment of LGBTQ people. The photographs unsettle the mainstream LGBTQ rights narrative that begins at Stonewall and ends in marriage equality. They place Los Angeles at the locus of the fight, in addition to other cities like New York and San Francisco. They anchor the gay bar not only as a place that once scandalized society with the tenderness patrons showed one another, but also as a site of political struggle.

At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve into 1967, the mood at the Black Cat was joyous: a trio of Black women called the Rhythm Queens sang a rock version of “Auld Lang Syne,” balloons fell, and imbibing bargoers, some in drag, embraced and kissed—men kissing men, women kissing women—as is wont on that night, at that hour.

Few knew that a dozen plainclothes cops scattered about the bar —part of what were called vice squads—were about to inform their uniformed partners outside to come in, raid the bar, and arrest its patrons for dancing and kissing one another, which was then criminalized as “lewd” conduct.

What happened next has since been characterized as a riot, but those who were there at the Black Cat describe an assault, a sudden and violent raid with little resistance. Uniformed police “rushed in and began to swing billy clubs, tear down leftover Christmas ornaments, break furnishings, and beat several men brutally,” one witness later recalled. Fourteen people, patrons and employees, were forced face down on the sidewalk and arrested. Police chased two men down the street to New Faces, another popular gay bar, and beat the owner, a woman named Lee Roy. They had mistaken her for a man in women’s clothing, having heard the name “Leroy.” When a bartender stepped in to protect her, they beat him as well, until he lost consciousness.

The New Year’s raid on the Black Cat came at a time when every state in the country had anti-sodomy laws and on the heels of anti-gay McCarthyism known as the Lavender Scare, a witch hunt that had reverberations in the upper echelons of the nation—President Lyndon B. Johnson’s closest aide, Walter Jenkins, was even arrested on a “morals charge” and forced to resign in 1964. And in Los Angeles, the Black Cat raid was one of many documented instances when the LAPD harassed, entrapped, and assaulted LGBTQ people. Often these raids resulted in plea deals, or a fine running from $1,000 to $1,500. But that wasn’t the case at the Black Cat. Six of the people arrested there were tried by jury and found guilty of lewd conduct. Two had to register as sex offenders.

Gay Angelenos’ anger and frustration toward the system had already been reaching a breaking point. Just two years prior, there had been an uprising at a popular 24-hour diner downtown called Coopers Do-nuts, complete with a crowd throwing donuts at arresting officers. What happened at the Black Cat now inspired a new coalition of gay rights organizations, helmed by Personal Rights in Defense and Education (PRIDE), and other groups facing harassment by police—hippies, anti-war activists, club owners targeted by curfews—to join together in protest two months later, on February 11, 1967. 

The gathering of several hundred people marked a watershed moment for the gay rights movement—one of the first times LGBTQ people made such a large public demand for recognition, and a promise to push back against police harassment and repression. The demonstration reframed the struggle as a fight for the civil rights of gay people and other minority communities who faced police abuse.

Although gay activists intentionally left the word “homosexual” off of their signage to appease protesters who were not prepared to take an explicitly gay rights stance, organizer Jim Kepner gave a rousing speech that called for gay people to stand up as gay people. Kepner called for building a coalition, with Black and Latino communities across L.A., to fight police violence, but found it unacceptable that even in struggle LGBTQ people weren’t recognized as such: “[T]he time has come when the love that dared not speak its name will never again be silenced. We’ve been copping out to society for centuries.”

Raids targeting gay people in Los Angeles continued after the Black Cat, and so did resistance. But the histories of this civic protest are largely neglected in the mainstream origin story of gay rights, which usually starts with the demonstrations that rocked New York City’s Stonewall Inn in 1969, and forgets altogether that it took moments like the raid at the Black Cat to make Stonewall happen. It’s a reminder that the most important framing in struggles for liberation should not be “we did it first” but rather “we did it, too.”

Today, the Black Cat serves as a more visible monument to a pre-Stonewall past. In 2008, working with longtime Silver Lake resident and activist Wes Joe, the Los Angeles Historical Conservancy designated the Black Cat a Historical-Cultural Monument for its “early and significant role in the LGBTQ civil rights movement.” The group installed a plaque that sums up the progress wrought: gay people won the right to patronize bars openly, to no longer suffer legal or labor repercussions for their sexuality, and, eventually, to participate in the institution of marriage. The plaque also reminds us that Silver Lake was the “gayborhood” before West Hollywood’s “Boystown,” populated by leather and dance bars, and the fruits of a good, if unfair, fight.

The site’s profile was heightened in 2017, when city officials and gay rights organizers reenacted the historic protest on its 50th anniversary. Mayor Eric Garcetti and several officers from the LAPD attended. One of the officers approached activist Alexei Romanoff, who had helped organize the 1967 protest, and thanked him. It was a moment that showed how far things had come, Romanoff later said.

The deep irony is that this recognition came at a time when the space no longer identified as a “gay” bar. In some ways, the Black Cat in its current resurrection stands then as a metaphor for a movement that made long strides toward equality only to have seemingly dead-ended in marriage.

Back in 1967, the media didn’t cover the demonstration outside the Black Cat, but unknown participants took photographs, which are now housed at the ONE Archives Foundation, the oldest operating LGBTQ organization in the United States, at the University of Southern California libraries. These rare photos help us begin to piece together a longer and more accurate history of the movement for gay civil rights.

Today, the Black Cat, too, displays these photographs of the protest, amid walls crowded with art. The images demand we think more deeply about what the struggle for gay bars was actually about, and what the struggle to preserve them means. Signs from 1967—“BLUE FASCISM MUST GO!” “POLICE LAWLESSNESS MUST BE STOPPED” “END ILLEGAL ENTRAPMENT”— echo the slogans calling to “defund the police” and “end police brutality” that appeared on the same street in 2020 after an officer murdered George Floyd and sparked nationwide protests.

Such glimpses into the past beg the question of whether the new Black Cat could use its history to expand that fight. Could it become a site for political action against police brutality, “Don’t Say Gay” laws, anti-trans violence? The photographs ask what fight has been lost, now that the space is no longer so anchored to its queer history.

Outside, the ubiquitous cartoon cat may still hang, but its shadow these days is dark and elongated, stretching long and thinning out at its head—having mostly run its course.

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With triple/triple jump combinations at her disposal, Bell—like the rest of the elite women’s field she’s going up against—is considered a women’s singles skater. (Remarkably enough, the International Skating Union dropped “ladies” from the moniker only last June.) In figure skating, “adult” designates something different: a huge community of athletes, 21 and older, who aren’t competing for Olympic rings, but contribute to the lifeblood of this sport.

Adult skaters can range from casual participants to those who arrange their entire lives around the ice. Over the past 20 years, I’ve come to fall into the latter category. When my work schedule allows for it, I’ll squeeze into my schedule practice sessions, a late-afternoon coaching job, and trips to New Hampshire from Portland, Maine, for an edge class or a lesson with my pairs partner. And that’s just on a good week. On a great week, add on training as a solo skater, cross-training, taking and teaching other classes, skating in a performance group, and participating in those local recitals known as the annual and holiday ice shows.

I never saw any of this coming. While I skated some growing up—enough to learn beginning jumps and spins—my family didn’t have the money or parental availability for serious training, nor really any notion of it. When I hurt my knee on a botched half-revolution jump at age 15, I thought I’d hung up my skates for good.

That changed during my 40s, when I moved to Portland—which was 35 miles further away from work and, consequently, my refuge from it: aerobics at the Y. I decided to try skating again, largely for exercise. I bought my first pair of skates in almost three decades, found a rink four blocks from my apartment, and ventured out onto the ice. This time around, the pleasures of the glide hooked me instantly. Assisted by beginner adult classes, dim muscle memory, and generous tips from others at public skating sessions, I re-acquired the basics fairly quickly.

I’ll never forget my first ice show. Just a few months into starting those adult skating classes, my classmates and I talked ourselves into participating. At the first rehearsal, our coach-choreographer explained that in the adult group number, Artists and Models, the men would play artists while women played models. Eek. As a feminist cultural critic by trade, I have spent my life combatting those stereotypes. But damn: to wear that sparkly red and black mini-dress costume, to watch skaters my age or even much older jumping and spinning, to experience the joy of moving to music, forming a kick line, making new friends, joining a community. Wow. Twenty years later, I still get emotional when I think about that week. It transformed my life.

Photo by Eric Edmonds.

Some of the changes were small and sideways. For example, even though I’ve long identified as a queer femme dyke, with skirts and nail polish as standard fare, shaving always felt like an abandonment of feminism. A week of giving myself over to mainstream skater femininity—matching costumes, mandatory make-up—somehow helped me admit to myself that I hated my armpit hair. Other changes were more profound. Immersion in show week extracted me temporarily from the academic value system that I’d trained in since the late 1970s, which offers bonus points for misery, as if working all weekend signals dedication rather than bad labor politics. I held onto that.

Then there was the skating itself. Soon after the show (and undeterred by a sprained wrist from falling on a back three-turn), I graduated to freestyle where I started doing jumps and spins, along with more advanced work on aspects of skating that, despite being sometimes flatly labeled “skating skills,” captivate me. The edges and turns, the power in the push—“Don’t look down!” “Bend your ankles!”—all contribute to flow, grace, and speed on the ice and to the intense sensuality that comes from strength and sweat, wind on skin.

Over time, I’ve come to treat my skating as ethnography—meaning I systematically study skating as a culture, partly to justify more skating as part of my actual academic job. This began in earnest when I decided to compete in the 2006 Gay Games, an international multi-sport event for adult athletes at all levels. Knowing I would have to fight my inherent shyness to perform, I decided to turn the experience into a book project, which not only ensured I would see the competition all the way through, but also helped me meet more people in the skating world along the way.

After the Gay Games, as part of my participant-observation research, I started coaching adult beginner classes and doing more adult competitions, including the annual U.S. Adult Figure Skating Championships, or “Adult Nationals,” where, typically, some 450 skaters compete in around 100 events. You can qualify your way in by passing skills tests. I skate at the low Adult Bronze level in age category IV, the 56- to 65-year-old group, just a few years shy of category V (affectionately known as “66 ‘til death”). These experiences let me share my love of skating and dwell in physical, mental, and artistic challenges of training and competing.

Yet being so involved in skating has also made me even more aware of interlaced problems baked into the sport, including white supremacy, homophobia, and rigid, racialized gender norms. Subjective components in the judging process make it possible to reward looks, music, and choreography linked to aristocratic whiteness. Also, because athleticism itself is often considered male, figure skating culture often favors women who showcase delicate over strong, and men who emphasize heteronormative masculinity. These standards harm and limit skaters, and play out in ways both explicit and subtle.

I can’t prove I’ve ever been downgraded for being an outlier. And my white skin is a shield that brings me in line with most people I skate with and the racialized ideals of the sport. But with black skates and my shortish pink and black hair, I’ve never quite fit in performance group or at competitions, where, to my initial shock, most women compete with hair in a bun or ponytail and a standard costume, involving a flared skirt, matching panties, and traditional sources of sparkle, like shiny tiny stones glued on, while I sometimes find my sparkle through fake metal chains or shiny plastic bustiers. Some skaters love a traditional look. That’s great. But when skaters have complimented my choice of costumes as brave, I’ve occasionally caught a wistfulness in their voices; I recognize they feel pressure to conform to skating norms. And I know that being repeatedly othered—even based on dubious standards—can feel like crap.

That’s one reason I’m excited to see more stories like American ice dancer Karina Manta’s new memoir, On Top of Glass: My Stories as a Queer Girl in Figure Skating, which details the soul-killing image policing she endured, and overcame. Watching the 2019 U.S. championships, where she and her ice dance partner Joe Johnson, performing to Sweet Dreams, got a standing ovation for kickass skating by out queer skaters thrilled me. So does the prospect of watching U.S. pairs team Timothy LeDuc and Ashley Cain-Gribble compete this Friday. LeDuc is the first out nonbinary athlete at a Winter Olympics; Cain-Gribble departs from gender expectations, too. (That people consider her unusual at 5’6” tells you a lot about the “little pair girl” stereotype.) Their long program, Two Pillars of Strength, differs in choreography and costume from common pairs programs that often narrate heterosexual romance and underscore gender opposition. Traditional routines emphasize strength as a male attribute, despite the significant power it takes to be the person who is lifted or thrown, the role officially designated for women.

Photo by Eric Edmonds.

Deep into tricep dips, I have good reason to know. My skating partner, Anna Kellar, is trans nonbinary and I’m a cisgender woman, and together we make up our own gender-nonconforming team of two white queer skaters. Skating together compounds our pleasure, as we learn to skate in relationship, with exciting new tricks and challenges. Doing our throw-waltz jump, I soar through the air and accelerate out of the landing when we get it right. It’s exhilarating. On the ice with them, I see a better future for this sport that has lost its foothold, and the potential that exists to make skating more popular and relevant at all levels. Just the other day, one of my beginning students told me that they’d blazed through that book I’d begun while training for the Gay Games. To discover that other people, including their coach, were thinking about the same issues that they were made them realize that they didn’t have to sideline part of their identity to figure skate.

But I also know there’s a long path to regularizing inclusivity. U.S. Figure Skating being “proud of Timothy LeDuc” might help people understand my pairs team, but it doesn’t help us take the qualifying test or compete together. According to the USFS rulebook, while any two people skating in harmony can make up a pair, and while people can now join USFS as male, female, or “undeclared,” testing requires a male/female pair, and competitions can occur only among like-gendered pairs. Antiquated rules abound.

So do systemic bias and microaggressions against BIPOC skaters, despite new institutional commitments to change.  I’m inspired by Black and Brown skaters, often queer, trans, or gender-nonconforming—and routinely scored unfairly—who have long been at the forefront of figure skating change. Take Rudy Galindo, who won the 1996 U.S. Men’s Championship and has had a long professional career as an out Latinx skater and coach. Or Canadian skater Elladj Baldé, who has become a social media presence in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the uprising against anti-Black violence. His performances on TikTok and Instagram defy racism through music and movement that model the freedom of skating with authenticity.

All coaches, judges, administrators, choreographers, skaters, skaters’ friends and families, and fans need to work for change, not just the marginalized among us. Check out the Figure Skating Diversity And Inclusion Alliance’s  Conversations in Color, including “Skating While Black” and “No I am Not Michelle Kwan: Being East Asian in Figure Skating.” Learn about the anti-trans policies, now on the upswing, that harm athletes from elementary school through professional sports. Watch Open Ice: Visionaries, a 2021 documentary by queer Olympic ice dancer Kaitlyn Weaver, in which  Finnish champion Kiira Korpi, addressing physical and mental wellbeing, asks us to reconsider the common belief that it’s a virtue to train and compete while sick or injured and promotes coaching and skating practices that emphasize self-compassion.

As for me, I continue to bend my life (and my job) around this sport. By now, skating has become baked into my body. When I first returned to the ice after lockdown, I realized, in reacclimating, that I ordinarily experience my skates, even when they hurt, as an extension of my feet. At the rink, I’m a taller person whose feet end in knives. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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