As part of our 2019 Queeroes awards, we’re proud to honor Kate Bornstein and Kay Ulanday Barrett in our Literature category. Check out the rest of our Queeroes honorees and interviews here.
You’d be forgiven for believing that our modern Pride celebrations commemorate a war that’s already been won. In the 50 years since the Stonewall Riots, the tone of Pride has turned from one of anger and uprising to one of joy, celebration, and, increasingly, corporate sponsorship. But as our annual queer party becomes more rife with marketing slogans and prismatic swag, our LGBTQ+ communities remain vulnerable to the same structural injustices that sparked Stonewall’s first contentious brick. No number of rainbow bank facades can change the fact that for many of us, survival remains a daily struggle.
For Kate Bornstein, a white, Jewish, nonbinary writer who has been documenting the trans experience for over 30 years, and Kay Ulanday Barrett, a disabled, pin@y-amerikan, transgender queer poet whose work bridges education and performance, making and sharing art is one of many strategies they use to survive. For this reason, it’s impossible to discuss their art without also discussing transnormativity, emotional burnout, and racist and transmisogynist state violence; nor is it possible for them to talk about aging, death, self-care, and mutual support without acknowledging how these concepts are commodified and often withheld from the most marginalized among us.
In 2019, as Pride is marketed to our community alongside “diverse” vodka and “inclusive” military contractors, intergenerational dialogue between these trailblazing artists is made all the more potent. Knowing our past is essential to creating the cultural strategies, as Barrett terms them, that will ensure all LGBTQ+ people have a future in our society. For them.’s Queeroes awards, the artists discussed their current projects, what drives them to create, and what it means to be queer creatives at the intersection of marginalized identities.
I was very excited to talk with you both, because while you’re both writers, you’re also multidisciplinary artists. What are you working on right now?
Kay Ulanday Barrett: My current project is basically staying alive. I have a publisher for my second book, and then I have a third and fourth book in play, so I’m working a lot. I’m a homebody and a Virgo, so I’m writing so much. I also collaborate with sick and disabled trans people of color, nonbinary people, and people with chronic pain and disability, working cross-culturally with them on things like peer support and access to meds. My next book, More Than Organs, continues the conversations of those projects in poetic form.
A lot of my work revolves around undoing ableism, especially in the trans community and in the POC community. What does it mean for our art when we’re facing multiple avenues of oppression at once and how do we navigate that on a local level? How do we move art in that way? We can’t rely on health systems, medical systems, the police state. We have to create our own independent systems and use them to change the trans narrative.
Kate Bornstein: It was May 2014 when Time magazine came out with Laverne Cox on the cover and said that transgender people had reached a visibility tipping point. But all the trans people I knew still had problems getting a job; they were thrown out by their families, couldn’t get an apartment. I realized there was a big divide between “respectable” segments of the trans community and those who just remain the way we always have been, which is, “Oh, them.”
And this highlights the fight we’ve always had with the binary gender system. The structure itself begs for conflict; I wanted to get to the bottom of it while I was still alive and see if I could help combat it, and I’ve been working on a book to do just that for the last five years. It’s called Gender Just for the Fun of It: Compassion and Gender Strategies for Divisive Times.
My next question is, why is it you do what you do?
KUB: [Laughs] I’m not really good at anything else.
KB: I’ve been consciously fucking with gender for 35 years now, maybe more, so I’ve discovered a lot of ways to have fun with it. Dress up, go delight people, become the gender of your dreams, fall in love. The only real way to have fun with gender that lasts — everything else fades — comes in using your knowledge and experience of it to ease someone else’s suffering. That’s fun! That’s why I do it, because it feels good. Which goes along with Kay’s comment about not knowing how to do anything else. What I do know how to do, I put into service. I know how to write and I know how to perform, and I put those both into service.
KUB: I really connect with that. I grew up really poor, without a lot of resources. I was a kicked-out trans kid. I was young before cell phones happened, so all I really could do was find a pen and paper and write. In my communities, as a person of color and as a Filipinx person, word of mouth, conversation, and storytelling are so critical. I learned early on as an organizer that you can get anybody in a room to talk about creating change if there was food and if you could all just talk story.
I would look up “transgender Filipino writer” when I was younger and nothing came up; if anything did, it was super transmisogynist or violent or talked about the U.S. military, but it wouldn’t discuss my experience. I think there are places into which I have always had to navigate, to carve out and make new, and the people I love to read and watch — Kate being one of them — know that we live in nuance.
Even before I was disabled, I couldn’t do a 9-to-5 job. I can’t work in the ways the world demands of productivity. The disabled life is very isolating, which compounds with my being trans and a person of color. But if, as a performer, I can carve out that space and make spaces accessible and create a formula for other disabled queer trans nonbinary people and people of color to thrive — for me, I feel like that’s why I do the work I do.
Indya Moore said at the Layleen Polanco protest that we can’t rely on the empathy and understanding of cis hetero people for basic human rights, and I believe that. I believe in allyship, but I also believe that we are what feeds each other.
You’ve had to create spaces for yourself where they didn’t exist, and that can often be exhausting. The prison abolitionist organizer and educator Mariame Kaba often says that hope is a discipline. I was wondering if you could talk about how you cultivate hope.
KUB: My family survived martial law, the Reagan regime, and both Bush administrations, and it’s been constant, always, the despair. I haven’t had a choice to opt out of the despair. I can self-love all day, but I don’t think there’s a way I can self-care out of this empire. I’m for collective care. If we’re talking about interdependence and disability justice for trans folks, we have to look at Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson. That’s what S.T.A.R. was. It was an interdependence that was there when people were houseless or in the hospital.
KB: It seems that we have disability in common, Kay. I’m mostly on a cane these days. I’m 71 years old and say “I’m old,” and people say, “That’s not old.” Yes, it is! On top of that, I have come through five different kinds of cancer and all the different treatments. Unless it’s for a gig, I’m pretty much in my house. Learning to navigate my mind in solitude seems to be a really good practice and rehearsal for dying and death, which is approaching really fast in my case.
And I’ve been curious as fuck about death all my life. I want to be as conscious as I possibly can when that step over the edge happens. I’m learning how to embrace the lonely times, the heartsick times, the despair. So many of us get to a point where we wonder if life is really worth living, and I wrote a book that addresses that about 10 years ago. It’s called Hello, Cruel World, and it has all my strategies for staying alive, how to make life a little bit better and, ultimately, worthwhile.
That question — “Is life worth living?” — often forces another — “Is art worth making?” — to take a backseat. At that Layleen Polanco rally, I was thinking about how important it is to do the concrete things that keep people alive and safe and out of jail. How do you balance the work of material support and the work of spiritual support and creation?
KUB: In a world that’s so binary, we’re supposed to compartmentalize. If I’m talking about interdependence — or “intersectionality,” as the Combahee River Collective had it — my art is cultural work. I’m sharing new ways of life with the rest of the world, and it expands ideas of what trans is, what disabled is, what being a person of color and a kid of migrants is. It also creates a new imagination. It shifts what people think about these identities, and they’re never mutually independent of one another.
For me, being an artist means strategizing ways to share my stories, my life, and my tools for how to survive, how to grow, and how to maintain chosen family or an art practice. Like, real talk — when we talk about Layleen, everybody is fund-raising for her death, but can we just invest in Black trans women’s art while they’re alive? Can we invest in disabled trans people when they’re alive? Can we invest in women of color and trans women in general when they’re alive?
KB: At least a dozen times a year, very lovely, well-meaning people tell me, “We’d like to include your work in this collection of work by women.” No, that doesn’t work! “We want to give you an award as Woman of the Year.” No, but that’s very, very sweet of you. Similarly, I get asked to contribute to different trans anthologies, and I’ve said it a lot already: Please include somebody else’s work. I'm trying to step back right now. I’m trying to do my job as an elder. It’s a teaching responsibility, a contextualization.
I hear the funniest stuff. “Look at Generation Z, they’ve come up with something that’s not man and not woman.” No, it’s just that nonbinary identity is breaking into white middle class culture right now. A component of gender that we very, very rarely look at is space-time. Gender doesn’t exist outside of space and time. In the public rules of gender, the only space is here and the only time is now, and so we blinder ourselves — not just to race and age and how gender plays out in race and age, but to how gender plays out in different times and cultures. Teaching that kind of thing seems to be my job as an elder, and when I’m not napping or in too much pain, I get to do that, which is fun.
Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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