Dream if U can a courtyard, with oceans of violets in bloom.Prince
Mid-December, more than a decade ago, I found myself walking the streets of Washington D.C. I was visiting there from the university town where I lived to do some research to write a new book.
By day, I would sit in the musty, radiator-heated spaces of the archive, reading and taking notes, consulting the librarians and having coffee with other scholars, building a new and more independent scholarly life after graduate school. Evenings, I would walk through neighborhoods, looking at the colorful painted townhouses, listening to the rhythm of my own footsteps. I realized I had had enough of the college town where I taught, and that I wanted, and needed a more urban life. I wanted to live in a community of artists and activists and academics. I wanted to build a home with a partner. I knew that I wanted children in my life, though the idea of adopting a child hadn't yet crystalized. I was yearning for home.
There was something about walking in that cool but not yet frigid dusk D.C. air, a place where I didn't know anyone, that helped those yearnings become more clear to me. One night, I visited an African American lesbian bar, thrilled by the variety of styles of butch and femme and kiki realness, though too shy to talk to anyone. I remember going to Kramer Books in DuPont Circle, finding the magazines and books on The Life that I couldn't find in my Central Pennsylvania university town. There I found a copy of Joan Nestle's The Persistent Desire, oral histories and poems on butch and femme lesbian life. Reading those stories helped me in my own searching see myself as part of a history of queers, something that I needed when I felt so isolated.
What those D.C. walks gave me was space to think and dream, to come up with a wish list for the life that I wanted to live. This dreaming led me back to Sweet Home Chicago, the place where I was born and raised.
Anticipating the New Year, I want to write about the importance of making wish lists, and of thinking concretely about the steps that we need to make the lives that we want. For me, walking in a new city helped me to think about what I needed, and Joan Nestle's anthology gave me the vision to go out and make a life. For you it might be cleaning the house, a hike by the Lake, a heart-to heart conversation with a close friend at Metropolis. It might be the persistent blinking of a cursor or the clean white space of a blank sheet of paper.
Here are some of my persistent desires that I continue to yearn for as we reach the end of 2013:
1 ) I am still celebrating the hard work of activists from across a variety of political commitments in bringing SB10, Illinois's Marriage Equality Bill into fruition. And I am inspired by activist Fresco/Angie Brilliance's analysis that the deep possibilities of this work lie in its transformation of a homophobic culture. For me, this means using public spaces like this one to transform homophobia, internalized and externalized. I especially yearn for Chicago to become a space truly supportive of LGBTQ young people, especially young people of color. I am committed in the coming year to help contribute to building more truly inclusive queer spaces here in my own Rogers Park, and to support the work of others in the city.
2 ) I am yearning for a really well-written television show centering on the lives of women of colorones who do not have to be glamorous political fixers or police officers or doctors or even really good singers. I'd love to see a show about political organizers or maybe a show featuring the adventures of Janelle Monae's android heroine Cindi Mayweather!
3 ) I yearn to see more of the beautiful faces of my family and friends around my dinner table. More space just to talk and eat and listen and take our time. Which reminds me of how much I'll miss my friend and activist Aparna Sharma, one of the warm faces I've been lucky enough to have at my brunch table; I'll miss my mother, teller of bawdy inside jokes and my grandmother, Gwen, the wizard of gumbo.
Cesar Chavez once said, "When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines the kinds of [people] we are." The first step of owning our lives is to listen to our yearnings and then make them real.
Francesca Royster is a Professor of English at DePaul University, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, Popular Culture, gender, race, sexuality and performance. Her books include Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013) and Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave, 2003).