“Celia Cruz looked like a drag queen, didn’t she?”

I laugh. “Totally”

“I brought five trannies from Cleveland, Ohio with me,” Gina tells me as she swiftly changes the subject from the Queen of Salsa to the queens of the park. “We used to be terrors in high school. Always the center of attraction.” She names them quickly, but I only catch four. Sharon, Lisa, Brenda, Roxane. “They all died,” she says. One of them “in [her] arms.” At the height of the AIDS epidemic Gina sat with her friend in the back of a cab on their way to the hospital in downtown New York City. Her friend asked Gina for her lipstick, weakly applied it, and then “died on [her] shoulder.” A beat. “I hung out mostly with the Spanish trannies.”

Gina is one of the many senior trans women whose energy and artistry have filled the streets and the very air of the West Village neighborhood for decades. Along with her younger sisters Miss Simone and Miss Monet, she performs every week at the park outside the Stonewall Inn, and often on the corner, the sidewalk, or even the street. Being a drag queen in the Village, however, comes with its costs. As Simone explained, “You have to be a bitch in order to do this.” Simone lives in a shelter in Queens off the last stop on the seven train. She wears the most glamorous gowns paired with beautiful wigs and flat, well-worn rubber sandals. Recently, she has been suffering from unexplained seizures. Her children, many of whom she met decades ago at the park, long before the city ordered it closed at night, worry about her. They sit with her, listen to her, and give her small change to buy something to eat, gratitude for her years of mothering. David, a slender Colombian man, met Simone in the 1990s while sleeping on a bench in the park, a few days after his parents kicked him out for being gay and moments before a creeping stranger approached him. Simone “saved” him and the park gave him a new family. Among them is Tanya, a political aficionado who likes to post memes on Instagram and wear a military-print, “U.S. Army Combat Engineer Veteran” t-shirt. She often stands in the shade to talk politics, frequently indicting those she once called the “nouveau riche” with their “designer dogs.” More than once, she has concluded, “generational wealth, the problem is generational wealth.” Nowhere may this be truer than in trans of color communities where resources are slim and opportunities rare. Whenever I see a tourist give them a dollar, instead of five or ten, I think about where these women go when the sun goes down. What they are like when no one is watching them. How they are when they feel safe. I especially think about people like Tee, a woman with cute stubble who smiles easily and loves the sun. Tee has the prettiest eyes and the kind of solid black boots that tell stories all on their own. I am starting to recognize their creases like the lines of a familiar face. She smells as she has lived and talks as if no one is listening, or ever did.

Trans of color history is still in the making but its roots are deep and plentiful. Like other marginalized groups we tell our histories “at the kitchen table.” Except, for us, the kitchen table is public space itself. Older queers often lament the stark gentrification of the Village. Indeed, the boutiques near Christopher Street look more like magazine clippings of Fifth Avenue than the remnants of their past. At the same time, the Village continues to be a watering hole for queer and trans people of color from communities across New York City. For complex historical reasons, gay neighborhoods like Boystown in Chicago or the Village in New York have developed in whiter areas, effectively spatializing queerness in urban spaces.¹ As Jessie, a homeless trans woman and peer put it, “a whole race called me faggot.” Though she cannot rest there at night, the park is where you will find her. And it is one of the many public spaces where trans of color history resides, although for how much longer we cannot know.

Trans of color history is scattered and burdened by structural silencing. Because wealthier and whiter trans people were able to leave stronger archival traces, their history has often been treated as representative of the trans community as a whole. If we are committed to centering Black trans people and history, and other trans people of color and histories, ethnography and oral history offer essential tools to keep it alive and carry it into our future. Those of us who research trans of color history, however, can attest to its uniquely precarious nature. For not only do we face the challenges of imperfect memory or unease from our narrators, but also the constrictions of a society that deny trans people of color personal safety and economic security in the present. The ongoing gentrification of historically gay neighborhoods and subsequent loss of public space threatens our ability to preserve trans of color history. Therefore, trans oral history research informed by racial justice provides an opportunity to reimagine not only the past, but the present. Long gone is the time of academic detachment. Here and now, we must strive not only to bring trans of color history into the public record but to make our world, finally and fully, hospitable to Black and Brown trans life. Doing so requires a commitment to economic equality that is universal in scope, targeted at scale, and addresses core issues in trans of color communities: homelessness, inaccessible healthcare, insufficient employment, and over-policing. We not only deserve to know ourselves in full, but to remember our collective pasts so we can understand and change our present circumstances. It is our duty and inheritance.

Notes

1. See Timothy Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 

Daniela Valdes is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University studying 20th century social movements and carceral state history in the United States. Valdes’ dissertation offers a historical account of a distinct transgender politics characterized by radical Black, anticolonial, and prison abolitionist traditions. In addition, Valdes also works with the Rikers Public Memory Project and interviews authors on the New Books Network.