We’re here. We’re queer.
LGBTQ people from Northern New Mexico reflect on their diverse past and shared future
Hank Tafoya came to Taos to die.
He grew up in L.A. and in the 1980s, when he was in his early 20s, Tafoya discovered he was HIV positive. He’d seen lovers and buddies disintegrate while trapped in their bodies. The test results felt like a death sentence.
“That was the belief then, that you had six months and then it was gruesome. The doctors didn’t even want to touch you. You really saw the strength of the gay community coming together. You had to learn how to do IVs, change diapers of grown men, deal with people’s fears.”
He decided to come home to his extended family in Taos. He moved from West Hollywood to a cabin in Taos Canyon, planning to chop wood and carry water “until the other shoe dropped.”
That was 30 years ago. These extra years — of teaching HIV prevention in schools, biking and rafting, becoming the favorite uncle and getting old-man problems — have been “this whole bonus life.”
The utter devastation of AIDS was a horrid hallmark of queer history that left a hole in the community. But like Tafoya, the survivors pressed on. The LGBTQ community, in all its iterations, continues to remake itself with an
eye toward the next generations of queers.
Tafoya, a gay man who recently turned 58, is among a council of queer elders and LGBTQ people in Taos County who felt it was important to share their pieces of this history and their dreams for a queer future because, as Tafoya said, “As far as we’ve come, we have so much further to go.”
‘I’ve always just been me’
Billy Stewart can rip on the banjo with the best of them. Accordingly, he picked up the nickname Banjo Billy.
He’s also a transgender man. Plenty of people know this about him because it was six years ago, after living in Taos and establishing a presence as a badass banjo player, that he medically transitioned.
But Stewart, who recently turned 60, unfurls his journey with queerness back to his childhood.
“I was a boy when I was a kid,” he said. He played with trucks, wore jeans and got love letters from girls at his new junior high school. “I was able to be a boy even in my generation. That’s kind of unusual,” said Stewart.
But as he got older, changes in his body didn’t sit well. “I got more feminine. Especially my voice bothered me,” he said. “I was this more feminine-looking thing, but I was still the same thing.
“So I was looking in on [myself] from this side. That was very uncomfortable for me, and that’s why we transition.”
“I always wanted a hairy chest, and I got it.”
Nastassia Kee knew she was “like that” when
she was in kindergarten.
“There was this hygienist that used to come and teach us how to brush our teeth,” said Kee, who grew up at Taos Pueblo and also has Diné heritage.
“She would come in and I’d just look at her. She was an Asian chick with long beautiful hair, and she was always did up. And she always smelled like Extra spearmint gum,” Kee said.
“I wouldn’t brush my teeth fully well just to get her assistance,” she said.
Leatrice Lujan, Kee’s wife, looked over with a thin smile. “That explains why you like spearmint so much,” she said.
Lee is a hairdresser in Taos, and Lujan works in TSV. “I’ve always just been me from the beginning,” Lujan said. “I never really let myself feel those feelings until I met her,” she said. But when she spent time with Nastassia, “it made sense of who I was.”
Lujan and Kee came into each other’s life 23 years ago. “A lot of people don’t believe in love at first sight, but it happened for me,” said Kee.
“When I met her, she saw me, and that felt really good,” she said.
Coming Out
“I realized I was different when I was very young, [but] I didn’t have a word for anything I was feeling,” said Salman Lee, a 28-year-old who identifies first as Salman, and then as a sexually queer, gender nonconforming Taoseño and musician who hosts a radio show about queer folks on KNCE.
Lee was born in the old midwifery center in Taos and lived the first nine years of his life in a closed-off community in Questa, which he describes as “the classic hippie Northern New Mexico kid” story — “cult style.”
“When I was finally like, ‘I’m gay,’ was around middle school,” after his family had moved to the Washington, D.C. area.
But the conversation was largely out of reach for his religious family. “A lot of Muslim lore puts homosexuality as the last level of hellfire,” he said, so “no one talked about it. Period.”
His grandma was the first person he came out to. “She would just poke her head in my room every once in a while and say, ‘Hows that problem?’ I was like, ‘Fine, grandma!’”
His second coming out wasn’t by choice. His mom walked in while he was looking at men on the desktop computer in the family room. “It was probably a blessing in disguise,” he said, “I never would’ve come out to my mom.”
During college, “all bets were off” and Lee embraced his journey of “being unapologetically me and not feeling any kinds of ways about it.” But his dad still didn’t know.
“I knew I had to say something before I moved [in] with him. I was like, ‘Hey, Dad, there’s this thing I got to tell you,’” Lee said.
“He just started laughing. He was like, ‘Whatever you do in your bedroom is between you, God and your partner. If it’s love, then there’s no issue whatsoever. If it’s not love, then maybe think something’s going wrong.’ That’s literally all he ever said about it,” Lee said.
“I think, still to this day, it is that simple. Love is love. That was the beginning of me taking back my spirituality, and taking back the fact that being gay doesn’t mean God doesn’t love you. My dad had a big role in that,” Lee said.
“I didn’t have this whole thing of coming out,” said Ki Holste, who lives in the village of Peñasco with her partner, Kai Harper. They’ve owned Sugar Nymphs Bistro, a little restaurant between the school and the Family Dollar, for 17 years.
Holste, who is in her 50s, has roots in the Midwest. But when her mom, “a personal freedoms kind of girl,” graduated from nursing school, she took the family to New Orleans. Queer people became a normal part of life. “They were just the grown-ups in my world. All I know is we lived around a lot of lesbians,” Holste said. “I remember no one’s name, but I remember the rugs — that’s childhood for you.
“I don’t have the coming-out story because I didn’t think there was anything to come out to. This was my girlfriend. That’s all there is to it. I didn’t need to talk about anything.”
Bright lights, big city
Harper, aside from being the other half of Sugar Nymphs in Peñasco, is a Buddhist priest in her 70s who grew up in rural New England.
“When I look back on that, it was very confusing for me, because I didn’t know how to be who I wanted to be,” said Harper. “Except for knowing that I loved women, I didn’t know what to do.”
She moved to New York City for art school, but her real queer awakening came with a move to the other side of the country and into the flamboyant, carnivalesque culture of the Castro.
“I took a Greyhound bus to San Francisco with a duffel bag full of clothes and money in my pocket from selling my truck,” she said. “I got in to the city at 7 in the morning and got on a bus. I sat down between these two people in cocktail dresses. I glanced at one and I glanced at the other. They both had really big Adam’s apples and I realized they were drag queens. I don’t think I’d ever seen a drag queen in person.
“Somebody dropped a bottle of poppers and the driver just swerved and hit the curve and said everyone had to get off. I was thinking if I should go back to Maine.”
She went ahead to meet her friend, a Navy veteran. “He answered the door and he had on a long skirt and said he’d changed his name to Tulips and he’d made me a pie. He was always a little domestic.”
Though she would go on to work at a famed vegetarian restaurant, Harper’s first cooking gig was in “this little gay diner” called Orphan Andy’s. She worked the late-night swing shift, after all the gay bars closed and hoards of men in half-buttoned, button-fly jeans would come in for omelets and coffee.
At the same time, Harper was sinking into her spiritual practice. She lived and meditated at the San Francisco Zen Center. “There were all these people, very quietly smelling like incense in black robes. And then I’d go spend the night in the Castro with crazy — just crazy — people.”
“It just felt like changing channels on the TV,” she said.
After finishing high school, Williams, who was The Taos News editor from 1991-1995, moved to Houston. It wasn’t the queer metropolis of New York City or San Francisco, but it was big enough.
“I remember going to my first gay pride parade and there were 80,000 people there. It was eye-opening,” he said.
“I was in my early 20s and I was from rural New Mexico. So I didn’t know shit about living in the city, much less about being gay in the city,” he said.
Luckily, he found the Texas Bay Area Gays. “They gave me a tutorial in gay culture,” he said, and that gave him “a sense of confidence that I carry with me today about how I walk through the world as a proud gay man.”
The group of older men clued Williams in to the practical do’s and don’ts of living the gay life in Houston — where to go, where not to go unless you wanted to get beat up, how to “mind your p’s and q’s” while working a straitlaced job and how to meet guys in a time before the internet and phone apps.
“They taught me the hanky code. You could go to a bar ... and based on what color hanky you’re wearing and what pocket it was in, you were sending a message to people about what you were interested in. And it worked,” he said.
More than how-tos of hooking up, the men showed Williams how to organize and gather a community of queer folks together in safety and joy.
It would prove valuable when Williams returned to his hometown in the 1980s and founded the first organization for LGBTQ people in that area.
“It made us not invisible,” he said.
‘You can shed your armor’
So much of being LGBTQ is about the intensely personal experience of gender, sex and sexuality. But queer communities are places where, through no specific formula but an undeniable alchemy, people can explore what it is to be what they are, in all its complexity.
As Tafoya said, it’s where people can let their freak flag fly.
“Go to any kind of subgroup in the community [and] there’s that safety you crave. You want to feel like you can shed your armor and not have your dukes up like when you do out in public,” Tafoya said.
Tafoya found such safety, whether it was for weekly beers at the Taos Inn, or at the gay and lesbian spirituality conferences at Lama Foundation in the 1990s.
One year, a synchronistic group of men at Lama came to call themselves the Bad Boys and decided to “break the rules we are squashed under out there down the mountain: don’t let your gayness out,” he said.
“Big gay planets collided in the darkness and safety of the sauna,” he said.
“Picture it: wood-burning sauna at Lama and all these spiritual people,” he said. Each night, they’d gather a la gay bathhouses of San Francisco and “a whole other arm of our myth came to be for that time.
“It was that hunger for something, a hunger that’s satisfied and you didn’t know you were hungry for that thing that satisfied you,” he said. “It didn’t happen until we were all together.” Gone are the days of the gay bar. The LGBTQ community has lost most of its common spaces, said Holste during a recent interview, playing with her dogs before her shift at the restaurant.
“It was the bars and social scenes,” she said. “Those common spaces – where we came together on a regular basis – are actually what gave some oxygen, some energy, to our activism.”
No one thing caused hemorrhaging of these spaces. There’s the financial strain of running a business, and technology has certainly moved more social worlds online. And as queer people have gained more visibility and acceptance in the larger culture, those spaces were no longer the only safe ones.
Losing them is not without consequences.
“That can be a tipping place of danger; the people who don’t want us to be out and queer do still have their common spaces,” said Holste. “In some ways, we’re going to have to figure that out because ritual, even if it’s just drinking at the bar and dancing with each other, is an important part of bonding.”
It’s how queer culture gets made. Holste and Harper have still “gone in and out of creating rituals,” like weekly cookouts. “Without ritual, how do communities feel cohesive? When you expand the idea of ritual beyond church and into the potluck spaces and dancing spaces …. those were all actual rituals that fed people.”
Young people, Holste said, “have inherited a different world. At the same time you’re figuring out identity, you have to figure out different ways of getting back to each other.
“You never know when our world will flip and the only way to get a girlfriend is getting the nod.”
Harper knew the threat of police raids in gay bars.
A “morality” squad would periodically descend on dive bars frequented by queer people, and that could lead to someone being arrested or outed, which could be worse.
“I was always a little bit nervous when I went to the bar,” said Harper. “It wasn’t being outed as a gay person, it was the violence of it.”
Though Harper was living in New York City at the same time as the Stonewall riots in June 1969 — a police raid that became a catalyst for the LGBTQ rights movement — she didn’t know it had happened until much later.
Besides, she says her “Stonewall moment” was the day Harvey Milk died. The openly gay San Francisco politician was killed in 1978 “in what today we’d call a hate crime,” she said.
Queer people rioted in the streets.
AIDS
The magnitude of the AIDS epidemic, especially in the LGBTQ community, can be difficult to comprehend numerically and impossible to grasp emotionally.
It was first reported as a rare lung infection in five gay men in Los Angeles in 1981, and a year later, about 700 people had died of what would eventually be called AIDS. More than 170,000 people had died by 1990, and by 1995, more than half a million people were gone because of AIDS.
“It was just so devastatingly intense. It was everybody’s focus,” said Harper.
Issan Dorsey, Harper’s teacher at the San Francisco Zen Center and a
former female impersonator, decided to start a hospice for AIDS patients and recruited Harper to provide endof-life care to mostly gay men.
“I had all the typical responses to taking care of people with AIDS. I was terrified that I didn’t know how to relate to a dying person, a young person, a person covered in lesions. I was terrified I was going to catch the disease, even though I had been trained well and knew I couldn’t, not with the kind of contact I was having. It’s just in you. It just scares you, when you see an illness that graphic,” she said.
She saw “all these young men not having visitors, not having parents showing up.” Some had dementia. One guy would throw feces at her when she passed by. “It made you shell-shocked. You could go buy an ice cream cone and somebody would be gone by the time you got back,” she said.
“I remember one day, looking at nature in the backyard with this nice zen garden, after someone died. It was so jarring. How could we have all this beauty and have all this suffering?”
Her teacher, they found out, had AIDS. The week he was scheduled to ordain Harper as a priest, he died.
“Boy, I really had it laid out in front of me.”
Stewart was living in Los Angeles when AIDS hit in the early 1980s.
First it was Stewart’s roommate. Then it was the roommate’s lover. “And then it was just a whirlpool of people getting HIV,” Stewart said. “Within a year, about 30 of my gay guy friends died.
“That’s when a lot of us became even more spiritual. I’d always been a very spiritual kid, but I think a lot of us [were] finding our own prayers,” he said.
When Tafoya came back to Taos, he thought it would be a solitary end to his short time on Earth.
But what he found was a community where he could put his roots down deep and be fed by the community and through his work, specifically around HIV and AIDS.
“People were nervous about that, when I started to come out and talk publicly,” he said. “I would always give people permission to use my first and last name. Because to me, shame was the deadliest disease.”
One of his major initiatives was going into schools around the region with his mom to teach HIV prevention.
“That was kind of like our processing my getting ready to die.
“At first we didn’t know how it was spread. Then we found out how it was spread and we found out it was preventable. My viewpoint’s tainted by watching friends and people I love die, and watching friends and people I loved being so sick we’d pray that they would die. I mean, we would have prayer circles around our friends and say, ‘Please take this person tonight because they are in so much pain.’ It’s so scary and sad; it’s overwhelming, crazy. And then you realize that it’s preventable,” he said.
He was driven by a hope that he could prevent a sliver of the suffering he’d seen.
“All those students were hungry for someone to talk about that kind of stuff out loud,” he said.
At the same time, Tafoya worked directly with AIDS patients in Taos.
The Taos Alliance for Life, active during the 1990s, raised money to give people with AIDS simple comfort in an otherwise impossible situation.
“If you wanted to go buy a plane ticket home, or wanted to go buy some CDs or go out to a fancy dinner — those kind of treats that are essential for quality of life — we’d just give people chunks of 400 bucks,” he said.
“Taos was awesome about that. They were so generous and regretful they couldn’t give more,” Tafoya said.
Though the Alliance for Life only operated a few years, it’s work came at critical time for “a lot” of queer locals with AIDS, especially in this town.
“We had some people — like it is still — that would have their sister’s mother come over, or their boyfriend’s mother-in-law’s step-sister come over because they were so worried about it being such a small town, that someone’s going to find out and they’re going to lose their housing, or they’re family is going to throw them away.”
Making history
The moments that rally people together, especially in rural areas, go largely unnoticed to the outside world. So it was with the first gay pride gathering in Taos in 1993.
It seemed an auspicious time. On the national stage, a debate was storming around gay people serving in the military and a few celebrities had recently come out. In New Mexico, the Legislature was debating a sexual orientation nondiscrimination bill and in the pages of The Taos News, Williams, the editor, laid out his stake in these fights.
“There must come a time, as more and more gays step out of the closet, when prejudice will be undone by knowledge, when suspicion will fall victim to familiarity and when morality will be defined as adhering to The Golden Rule and being true to one’s own nature. In the long run, honesty must prevail,” he wrote in a Feb. 11, 1993 editorial.
A handful of people made up their mind to have a gay pride demonstration on the Taos Plaza.
“We were mad as hell and we didn’t want to take it any more,” said Tafoya. “We decided we were going to stick up for [gay kids], for each other, for the town. Because when that one group has the right, we all get better.
“People were nervous about the machismo rearing up” and encouraged the organizers to have police on hand, in case anyone tried to cause trouble. “It was the opposite of that,” he said.
The first-ever “Taos Gay Pride Rally” was met with a crowd of more than 120 people in July of that year. Tafoya’s mom was a guest speaker, as was Williams.
It would be another 17 years before Robert Quintana, a 29-yearold Questeño, organized Taos Pride, a weekend-long celebration of the LGBTQ community. He died shortly before the inaugural event.
Lujan and Kee had a low-key wedding anniversary this year. They took the day — June 28, the 50th anniversary of Stonewall — to go to Santa Fe for Pride and spent the precious free time just being with each other, as wife and wife.
Five years ago, when they decided to get married, a patchwork of laws made same-sex marriage the norm in some states but not in others. In 2013, a handful of New Mexico counties began issuing marriage licenses to LGBTQ couples and the Taos County clerk issued the first same-sex marriage license to Dale Schuette and Reg Stark on Aug. 17, 2013.
Just days before Lujan and Kee’s actual wedding in the alpine vistas of Taos Ski Valley, the weather had been so cold it snowed. “I told her, ‘Our day is going to be horrible,’” Kee said. “I even cried. But she was like, ‘Just let it be.’”
So they went to sleep the night before, and when they woke up, the day was perfect. “It was calm. It was sunny. People got sunburned. What was I worried about?” she said.
Since getting married, they’ve faced a mix of reactions from family and friends. Some made comments about them “making history,” how they set the example for LGBTQ people from the pueblo.
“It’s nice to see my family happy to see my wife,” said Kee. “Even my grandma, all she does is smile at her. She doesn’t speak much English, but you know, just her expression ... it just made me feel good.”
Some people still aren’t comfortable with it, and make it known by their stares, “name-calling” and what they don’t say.
“We had no idea getting married was going to be a reflection on so many people,” said Kee. “People see us how we are. We’re not looking for any attention,” she said.
Sharing our humanity
Once a month, Lee drives out to the Silver Twinkie, the radio station for KNCE, where he has a show that’s meant to help the broader Taos community see and understand the queer folks who are their neighbors.
“When we don’t see each other as human beings, it’s a lot easier to judge one another,” he said.
A lot to queerness isn’t visible. Though Lee uses male pronouns, he has a nuanced understanding of his gender that is always in flux.
Lee identifies as sexually queer and gender nonconforming. “At this point in my life, I’m pretty secure ... in identifying as male, but as someone who’s gender nonconforming, I don’t really adhere to the standards of what males should do and females should do.” Nonbinary, an identity that exists outside of the mainstream spectrum of male and female, is also making more sense in his life, he said.
“So I’m kind of learning and I’m very fluid about figuring out who I am,” he said.
Yet it can be a struggle to communicate that to the outside world while doing the slow work of helping to make queerness less taboo, especially in his rural hometown.
“I feel like one of only a handful of very, highly visible queer people in this town,” said Lee, whose hair is usually highlighted in blue or green and sculpted into meticulous updos.
“I get a lot of looks of disapproval. I’m usually really, really good at letting it roll off my back. But if I’m not at 100% energetically, then I feel like I can’t leave my house and be myself at the same time. So then I have to codeswitch into straight jeans and T-shirt and sneakers, because I’m not strong enough to deal with those pressures. In other big cities, it’s a different experience. I can walk out my door and not have a bigoted interaction, subtle or blatant. But here in Taos, it’s like putting on the Xena Warrior Princess armor.
“I’m just trying my best of being my genuine self, and then also giving myself compassion. I don’t have to force myself to be a teacher every single day of my life. I can allow myself to be human and have a bad day.”
Transitioning
Stewart always knew he was a man, but he lived a large part of his adult life as a butch lesbian in the punk scene, and then in the world of feminist pagans.
“When I realized I liked women in my early teens, somehow I found out what a lesbian was. I was like, ‘Oh sure, I’m a lesbian.’ That worked for me,” he said. In the late 1980s, Stewart started hearing about people transitioning.
Transitioning wasn’t what scared him; it was losing his friends because of it.
“With my journey, I always had a girlfriend and they didn’t want me to transition,” he said.
His fears were warranted. As he was transitioning, one friend wrote a letter that said, “You’re dead to me.” One of his closest pagan mentors cut ties because of it.
While some of his closest circles of friends could not make room for him in the communities they had long shared, Taos did, he said.
When he first moved here 13 years ago, he couldn’t find a doctor who knew how to help patients to transition so a few locals asked around and came up with a plan for Stewart to get medical care. And when he started going through surgeries, Taos again turned out to help.
“I was so embraced. When I was getting top surgery, I couldn’t believe the money these little gray-haired hippies were giving me on my GoFundMe,” he said. And people, especially some of his
Hispanic and pueblo customers, made a concerted effort to start using his gender pronouns. “This whole spiritually diverse community of Taos came out to support me in my transition.”
Stewart takes regular injections of T (testosterone) in the thigh, something he’s turned into a prayer.
He invokes Cernunnos, an archetypal pagan horned god. “It’s the wild hunt, that wild energy that runs through the woods and runs through us and runs through me now heavily. I don’t really want to call it testosterone so I call it Cernunnos. It is spirit, it is. It’s the spirit of man.”
Getting old
Thinking about himself as an elder, Stewart said, “all came down on me when I turned 60.
“As a pagan, this is when you start preparing for transitioning [into death]. This has been a big deal for me,” he said. “In the pagan community and in the queer community, how can I give back? Who can I give back to? Am I going to be the druid in the woods with my staff, with myself? Or can I give back to the community with all I’ve experienced?
“We have this big history to pass on to the next generation,” he said.
Williams, who recently retired has a penchant for the rainbow flag. He wears one on his belt, flies one in his driveway and had one on his old truck.
“One day, I was running around doing errands. There was this big red four-wheel-drive truck following me. He followed me all the way home and he pulls into my driveway, and I thought, ‘Well, here we go,’” he said.
“But I get out and this guy comes up to me and said, ‘I had to know who drives a Lincoln pickup truck with a rainbow sticker on it.’ He hugged me, right there. And he was a college kid, a college kid who was going through the same struggles I went through … wrestling with, ‘Is there a community?’
“He wanted to hear my story, and I wanted to hear his story.”
Harper, sitting in her house about a mile from the restaurant, mulled the question — does she consider herself a queer elder? — for a minute.
“Maybe a queer elderberry,” she said.
But just as younger people have a tendency to write off the opinions of the elderly, older people tend to disrespect younger folks. There’s no reason for that, she said.
“We made a business that is very welcoming for young people,” she said.
A lot of kids would get their first job at Sugar Nymphs. They would mess up, but they had the chance to try again. Harper and Holste are always telling them to get their education, and welcome them to hang around the restaurant and practice before big tests, get fired up talking politics or just wax philosophical.
“I guess what I have to offer young people is to listen to their experience, and encourage them to keep going — on their path or change their path — but not give up on who they are,” she said.
“That became the reason we were here, and we didn’t know it,” she said.
“It’s so badass to have old-man problems,” said Tafoya, who turned 58. “To have your knees make funny sounds, and have gray hair — to have hair at all is cool, but to have gray hair is awesome. My parts still all work. To me, it’s a miracle.”
He recently went to his doctor in Santa Fe for a checkup. “So what’s the story?” he asked, given the HIV and the drastic effects decades of medication have had on his body. Could he turn 60? What about 70? 80?
The doctor made a face.
“If I make it to next year, I’m cool,” Tafoya said. “I kind of go back to the philosophy of just wring out every drop of today ... You wring out every drop with your homies and keep on trucking as best you can.”
Queer futures
Queer people must share what they have with the “young’uns” in the community, Tafoya said.
“In gay families, there’s not the mechanism to pass on our wisdom and there’s not the vessel to hold that transfer. You take what I’m giving you, use what you can, throw the rest away.
“It’s like that classic story … of almost every movie, of people going, maybe down a yellow brick road ... to find out that where they were and who they were was exactly perfect. Dorothy goes on her thing, meets new friends, she gets those fabulous shoes, she has all these adventures and she learns she’s just as badass and valuable before she left,” he said.
“That’s the part that it’d be cool for young people to know,” he said. “They have their place. Their name is on one of those yellow bricks. They’ve got to go do it and we’ve got to make it safe for them.”
Lujan and Kee think that Taos will be a perfect place for future generations of LGBTQ folks.
“I love that it’s so loving and open here,” Kee said. “No matter how awful you look, someone is always willing to give you a sandwich, a drink, say hello to you in the morning, or just give you a hug,” she said.
That’s not to say people don’t still
say hateful words or try to push queer people out of their families, churches or communities. But they believe there’s a resiliency among LGBTQ people, especially queer Natives, that can survive any of that.
“It’s not going to stop us. It’s not going to stop the next generation, or the next generation. It’s been happening ... how long now? Even before time,” Lujan said.
“People are coming to the fact that it’s just love,” Lujan said. “With this hate in this world, that’s the only love that’s shining through everything because queer relationships have already gone through that hate and that battle ...”
Her wife picked up where she left off.
“... and they’re still pushing out their love and kindness to everybody,” she said.
When Lee envision a future for queers, it’s a wish for the present.
“I’d love to have more safety and visibility and less shame around being gay here in town.”
But when Lee envisions a queer future, his hopes reach for a new horizon.
His favorite episode of “Star Trek: Next Generation” is a campy twoparter about the crew going back to San Francisco in the distant past and meeting Mark Twain, who comes back to the starship and asks what people had done with the world.
“I think what we’ve gained far outweighs anything that might of been lost,” one of the characters responds. “Poverty was eliminated on Earth a long time ago, and a lot of other things disappeared with it — hopelessness, despair, cruelty.”
“I’d love for humanity to aspire to that,” said Lee. “I’d also love that to be the direction of queer, too.”
“In my utopian vision, everyone gets to be whatever gender presentation they are, and whatever sexuality they are, and that doesn’t have to be bound together anymore. In my future utopian world, that wouldn’t be a conversation,” said Holste.
And Harper, though she was shaped in the near-hallucination that was San Francisco in the 1970s, is finding new room to roam in the way young queers are expanding what it means to be queer at all.
“Growing up, I always wanted to be a boy. But I didn’t come up in an atmosphere where I thought I could change my gender. Yet being a woman is difficult for me. I don’t feel feminine, and here I am in a woman’s body. I’m a little amorphous in that sense, in that I really don’t identify as wanting to bend my gender toward male or female. I’m gender neutral, in a way.”
What about nonbinary, a gender identity that more LGBTQ folks, like Lee, are thinking about and living out? Is that a way of being queer that comes even closer to her truth?
“Yes. Exactly.”