February's Letter
"I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar." Christina Sharpe
Please consider reading this letter on Substack’s site by clicking the banner or the title of the letter as sometimes the letter gets clipped for length. Clicking the banner is also the only way to view the most up-to-date version as I fix all of the many, many grammatical errors that seem to magically appear after I send the letter to your inbox.
2.25.24
Hello again and a very belated welcome to 2024!
I decided against putting out a newsletter in January as I was truly overwhelmed, so here we are.
I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on friendship, something at the very core of my life. I’ve gotten into the habit of saying that friendship is actually my life’s work. It is the greatest influence for living that I’ve known, and it has been one of the central themes of my photographic and written works. I quite literally would not be here without friendship, and I’ve been lucky to have had friendships that defy all convention, all expectation, for the bulk of my life.
I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather this last week, battling Covid after catching it on a trip back to Baltimore. I wanted to surprise my mother who is losing her best friend, Mr. Al, to stage four cancer. Although I pray to the universe that he’ll recover, his rapid deterioration and the doctors’ orders that he be made comfortable, as there is nothing else that can be done, has diminished my faith. My mother, a woman as fierce as she is tender, is not ready to deal with this loss in any way. It’s bringing up far too much and it’s been difficult for me to be away from her as she goes through this.
The last time that my mother sat at the bedside of a gay man that she loved, as he lay wasting away and dying, was my Uncle Joe Joe in 1996. I’ve written about him before, as this was the most substantial loss of my mother’s life, her baby brother and her best friend. I believe entirely that the reason my mother has never been homophobic with me, embracing every version of me instead of shunning or shaming me, was because of him. I remember watching through the reflection in my grandmother’s china closet as my mother cried, rubbing ice chips across Uncle Joe Joe’s lips while he slowly disappeared from the hospital bed in the living room. Now, sitting next to her while she coaxed Mr. Al to drink from one of the myriad cups and straws at his bedside table, was the worst kind of flashback. It was agony. When my mother would take her cigarette breaks, crestfallen and strong-willed, I would insist on holding her in my arms. She would begin to cry, then immediately stop, sealing it back up inside. She’s had more hurt in her life than she’s had joy, and it’s calcified, hardened into a shell. So many Black people can relate to this very particular mélange of extreme trauma, grief, suffocation, and isolation. It is rampant in our community. I see it so much in myself.
When I got home, my dear friend Luis was coming to stay with me for a few days, but that sweetness was cut short after a cough lingered a bit too long and I tested positive. I never feel sadder about my life than when I’m sick and have to bear it alone. Every year, like clockwork, I’m knocked on my ass for a few days, and in the darkest parts of this forced isolation I wonder if I’m failing in my life because nobody has kicked in the door to bring me soup, or to stick a thermometer up my ass. I know how illogical it is, but it happens each year, without fail.
The other day, feeling about 85% improved, I woke up early and sat at my laptop for the first time in days. I started working on pictures and listening to an episode of The Ezra Klein show that Rafa had recommended, one that speaks about the importance of friendship in our lives. As I was listening deeply, I noted a family photo album that I hadn’t looked through in a few years. I had promised to send my kid brother a photo of us, one from when we were children, that he hadn’t seen. We didn’t grow up together. He was raised by my father and he has always felt such tremendous sadness having grown up there alone. When I looked through the book, a haze of nostalgic sweet feeling came over me; I could have floated right out of my chair. I found another photo that he hadn’t seen, from his first birthday party, me and my older brother squatting down below, him seated in my grandmother’s lap, my cousins and aunts surrounding us. I remember this day well: it was 1998 in Latrobe Projects at my aunt’s house, a few months after Uncle Joe Joe had died. I remember it was the first time that I ever saw someone cook crabs. They came out of a box very much still alive and kicking, and I was terrified but enamored by the fact that they were blue. I remember refusing to eat the crabs after my aunt added beer to the pot because by then, even at eight years old, after seeing what alcohol did to my mother and father, I swore I’d never drink. And to this day I never have. My younger brother was happy to receive the photos. He was sitting next to my mother who was also very happy to see them. She sent me a sweet text: “I love you. Thank you for these memories. I thought they were gone or lost away.” It made me so happy. I sent her a few more. Pictures that I took with a disposable of her ex-lover, Mr. Eddy, a tall, slender, mixed-race man who was very refined and VERY clearly a homosexual. I sent her another image of my baby sister, Melly, a few days old and coming home from the hospital.
I stumbled across a picture of me at 13 years old, a few months after experiencing the suicide of a dear friend. In the picture I am trying. I appear sadder than I’d ever been before, but it’s clear to me that I’m trying to be well. I’m seated next to my best friend at the time, Juan, though I eventually cut him out of the picture. As I look at the image, they begin to share a story on the podcast about two best friends, one straight and one gay and celibate, attempting to choose his faith over his homosexuality. I start to cry. Juan had such an unquantifiable impact on me. He was my first gay friend, and he was a beacon of beauty, confidence, and fearlessness. He had a freaking belly ring at 14. ICONIC! He opened up my world and taught me absolutely everything about what it meant to be gay, that one must have a daily skin care routine, a seasonal signature fragrance, and be able to fight at least three people at once. In another picture from the next year, I am a totally different person, fake Chanel sunglasses, braids with a middle pompadour, a brown leather motorcycle jacket that I had gotten from Juan’s sister, Danielle, and a cute powder blue and white sweater. I was feeling very cunty! I remember being so excited to wear this look but scared to leave the house with it. It felt like drag. I wanted so badly to be confident like Juan, to live up to his great beauty. Sadly, I scratched Juan’s face out of the picture. I chuckled as I noticed the trend. Juan was many things, but a good friend he was not. He abandoned me for literally any person that caught his fancy. He would steal my friends and cut me out. He would disappear from my life for months to hang out with older kids. We would argue and he would say the most horrible things to me. Once, his sister Alexis literally stole my Nintendo 64 and all of my games while I was staying the night at Juan’s house. Those games were my last connection to my father, and it broke my heart. I’m sure Juan was in on it and if he wasn’t, he certainly did nothing about it. Our friendship was on again and off again, close and then far, until I started at Towson for college and we officially grew apart.
Then I got to the high school section of the photo album. Looking at all these pictures of me as my young trans self always makes me laugh. The evolution of my ghetto girl style antics to a sexier, more adult look by college is one of my favorite experiences. For those who don’t know, from freshman year of high school to sophomore year in college I identified as a woman. There was no gender non-conforming, no non-binary language at the time. I was a little femme queen in the making. Whenever I get to the high school nostalgia, I usually call my high school bestie, Daisha. I paused the podcast and called her up, pointing the camera directly at one of my senior portraits when she answered the phone. She exploded into laughter, the correct response to such ridiculousness. In one of the senior portraits, I cut Daisha out of the picture during one of our many, many breakups. We both laughed at this detail. At one point during the call, Daisha lamented the fact that she doesn’t have a large community of close friends and that she envies that about my life. I noted that it is likely because she’d spent so much time pursuing romance and quite frankly, I envied that about her. No matter the complicated outcomes, there has been no shortage of men falling in love with her over the years. We both arrived at balance as the necessary remedy but I doubled down in my stance that friendship is the most important pursuit we can commit to in our lives.
After the call I listened to a bit more of the podcast. It spoke about how there has been a steep decline in male friendships and Ezra Klein mentioned specifically about how his gay male friends have really figured out how to have deep and impactful relationships, but his straight friends really struggle. I paused the podcast again and returned a missed Facetime call to Clark.
Clark is a newer friendship in my life, but one that brings me so much joy. He’s a pain in the ass 24/7 but someone who felt like family from the first time we ever hung out. He and his brother Jesse are my brothers, and we each have such a blossoming relationship. I miss them both constantly when I’m on the East Coast. On this particular day, Clark was working on set. He grabs this very cute silver bike, with Tiffany blue on the wheels and it reminded me of this image of Elizabeth Banks taken for The Times by my photo-friend Elizabeth Weinberg. Clark was on the Warner Brothers lot in Hollywood. Suddenly, I was all lit up. I could not stop smiling. Clark, a mostly serious, stern, bearded straight man was frolicking. He was on the bike, with his bag in the basket, giggling and riding through the empty streets of New York, Paris, and Philadelphia, or, at least the fake, film set versions. He was beaming and so was I. Clark drove past the film set of Abbott Elementary, a show that makes me so unspeakably happy. My eyes started watering. I had no clue that the show was filmed on a lot. The large paintings of two Black children on both sides of the fictional school's entrance, was suddenly right there on the other end of the phone. Gregory’s garden that he shares with Barbara and the kids on the show, to my delight, is real! There are huge heads of cabbage growing there. It’s unbelievable. Clark drives a few seconds down the block and there’s the Friends couch and water fountain. A few more seconds on his bike and he’s in front of the legendary WB water tower of my youth and we start remixing the Animaniacs theme.
I was so deeply moved by this experience, not just because seeing Clark this happy and in his element made my heart sing, but because, as you may or may not know, I’d like to write and direct television and film. This year I’ve taken and plan to continue taking serious steps toward this goal. So seeing him there, in this land of dreams, felt like looking into my future, after having spent so much of the morning sorting through the past and the present. I left the call feeling buoyant and so grateful to have lived so many lives and to have always been surrounded by love, even when that love devolved into violence or betrayal. I was grateful to have had the foresight to always have a camera handy and to always keep record of my life, even when I was too young and immature to understand that you never destroy a picture you don’t have copies of.
Now, a few days later, I’m sitting on the bed in my studio at Yaddo. It’s 1:46AM, and I’m on Facetime singing and dancing with Elliott and enjoying the best crème brûlée I’ve ever had in my life. My sheets are canary yellow and even at night my studio feels bright and spacious. Earlier today it was 63 degrees. I finished reading 100 Boyfriends by Brontez Purnell while lying in the grass and getting tree sap on the elbows of my favorite grey turtleneck. I feel sophisticated, accomplished, and proud.
I’m at Yaddo for the next few weeks where I’ll be digging through the archive and writing every day. This is perhaps the most prestigious residency that I’ve done so far. Alumni include: Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Truman Capote, Dee Rees, Boots Riley, Noah Baumbach, Walter Mosley, Ira Sachs, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Samuel R. Delany, Miranda July, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, and Terry McMillan among a million others. Absolutely crazy.
There are moments in life where you are forced to sit down and reflect on how far you’ve come. This is one of those moments and these memories are all around me, to my left and my right.
March’s letter will return to form because I’m anxious to share all that I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to. In the meantime, here’s a playlist that I’ve been building over the last couple of months while working in the studio. I hope that you enjoy it and I pray that you are well!
Talk soon!
brb clicking on the identified as a woman hyperlink
you make me so happy