lovely template, kaitlin! just to forewarn you all, I'm about to blow up this blog...

[copy of original email]

Hey y’all,

I wanted to send this to share with you all a little bit of my process from the first part of class today. I had such a huge emotional reaction to the interview we all read!! For a lot of reasons, but mostly I was floored and a little pissed that I had never really learned that piece of my history as a queer person. And obviously I’d heard of the AIDS crisis as a gay issue but the first time I really deeply encountered what that actually meant was like, when the movie Rent came out in my sophomore year of high school!! What the fuck!

I guess what I was feeling, and wanted to express in class but didn’t, was that I can’t believe how hugely disconnected I am to queer history, and am feeling a lot of rage and sense of loss at how watered down/commodified it feels like queerness tends to be now. Was anyone else feeling that mourning really intensely today??

 Anyway, I know that we needed to make a fairly quick transition into break and discussion of our reading, but I personally was needing for there to be some kind of moment of silence or something so we could stop for a moment and just grieve together.

In that spirit, I wanted to share an exceptionally moving & beautiful performance piece by a trans dancer named Sean Dorsey – it’s also a really great example, in my opinion, of a presentation of queer utopian longing. Basically Dorsey choreographed the life story of a gay trans man named Lou Sullivan (back when it was like, realllly taboo for trans folks to be gay – mostly because in order to transition their doctors needed to feel certain they would be as ‘normal’ men & women as possible in their post-transition lives) who ended up dying of AIDS related illnesses. It deals a lot with queer longing and connection and the loss of history. You can watch the ten-minute excerpt here:

http://www.seandorseydance.com/video   (It’s the middle video in the second row, the “Sean Dorsey Dance: Lou - New 10-minute trailer”)

Anyway, thanks for letting me share all that… I love this class so much. I am, and will be, definitely thinking a lot about that interview if anyone else wants to talk more about it too!