 Hi, oh my goodness, glad to be here with you all. So, I'm gonna preface my own work with this piece by Zo Leonard. It seems really appropriate for tonight. So, all right. I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn't have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a candidate, I want a president that had an abortion at 16 and I want a candidate who isn't the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to AIDS who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air conditioning, a president who has stood in line at the clinic, at the DMV, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and laid off and sexually harassed and gay-bashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth, someone who has eaten hospital food, someone who cross-dresses and was done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. Let me say that again. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience and I want to know why this isn't possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown, always a John and never a hooker, always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught. Thank you. All right, and now I think we need to bring back that breathing exercise. All right, let's do it. Two deep breaths. I meant to do that. You see this girl? He points a wrinkled finger at the woman in the photograph. They wanted to kill her. As I listened to my dad, I imagine that they grabbed burlap sacks full of food, took to the red road, tracking gravel along the way. They nestled into the trees and forest near Singapore before the country divided, before it became Malaysia. They poisoned the river with ricine, killed all the fish, their silver bodies cascaded downstream like an army of tiny ghosts. The Japanese had taken Malaya. They wanted to kill the baby before her cries gave them all away. I imagine they covered her mouth, then her nose, held her when she cried and shook. How do you kill a baby quietly? Two, what is a haunting? Is it tiny silverfish and their glimmering scales? Is it cardboard boxes in the living room or hot pink pastries on the table from Chinatown? Is it a sound, a smell? Does it get stored up in your body? Is it the way you walk and talk? Any of these markers? Is it your yard full of yellow dandelions? Is it your home and island and ocean? Maybe it's hearing from your mom. Maybe it's hearing her say, I wrote my life story for an assignment and handed it to the teacher. He said, just forget about it. Never show this to anyone. Just forget it, just forget about it. Does grief transfer generations? What do you do with a secondhand history? Can you ever transform what's come before? Can you heal your parents' heartbreak? Can you break a double helix? Can you ever transmute the past? How do you crack this code, this cell, this holder of history? There are holes in your body. Thank you, that's an excerpt from Regeneration, My One Woman Show. And now to shift gears a little, I'm gonna show you an excerpt from the Queer Historical Mix Tape, which I made for Raider Productions and it's from the LGBT Historical Society Archives. So, I know I'm like, do I wanna show this? It's such difficult choices, I wanna show everything. All right. Okay, can we get all the artists to come up here?