 Linda Quinlan. I'm Ann Charles and before we continue with the show I'd like to say that we at All Things LGBTQ would like to publicly express solidarity with the protesters on the streets of this country and around the globe in their fight for a just and equitable world for us all. May we all prevail. I'm Keith Ghostland and indeed this is All Things LGBTQ. It is Thursday June 4th. We are taping in Montclair which we recognize as being unceded indigenous land. So let us start now with a few headlines. So Linda back to you. Take it away. My first story is about Chicago mayor Laurie Lightfoot who didn't hold back when asked if she had anything to say to President Trump during a press conference. I have a story about a New York City fire department gets his first lesbian battalion chief and a black trans man Tony McDade was killed by police in Tallahassee, Florida. I have a human interest story about Arlene Hamilton. Another story about Chris Cooper the bird watcher in New York and let's see and journalist Keith Boken who was arrested and a little story about Larry Kramer. So who died in 84 last week I believe. So now we will move to Ann. Okay. I have many headlines. I'm not going to get to many of these stories but I have pictures for you. The story I will get to concerns scientists who discover gorillas engaging in lesbian sex for the first time. It's the first discovery. I'm sure it's not the lesbian sex for the first time. Costa Rica this is good news. Costa Rica allows same-sex marriages in a first for Central America. News from Poland. Liberal Warsaw mayor injects suspense into the presidential vote. This is about Rafał Trzałski he's 48. I have a picture before you now of him. He is giving the right-wing president a run for his money in the upcoming election. I hope he prevails. Ikea made manager charged with firing pole over anti- gay remarks. So this employee of Ikea said terrible things about gay people that they were damned they deserve to die etc. The manager fired him and now the prosecutors in Poland have brought charges against the manager. So who may face fines or time in jail but we'll see how that develops. Hungary and this has been a long time coming. It's a terrible outcome. Hungary votes to end legal recognition of trans people. Two years in prison for gay sex in Turkmenistan. The Zambian president pardons gay couple jailed for 15 years and the backdrop of this story I've told you about these two this gay couple was arrested and charged with being gay basically and the ambassador from the United States the ambassador to Zambia Daniel Foot protested publicly and condemned the arrest but then the Zambian president contacted the White House and asked Daniel Foot to be asked that Daniel Foot be recalled. So he was recalled. He lost his ambassadorship over this but it was a righteous action and now the president has pardoned the couple that he arrested originally. Happily ever after eludes Taiwan a year after Asia's first gay marriages. What this means is a petition is going around now because Taiwanese nationals can't legally marry somebody from another country if the country doesn't approve same sex marriage. So for example a Taiwanese wants to marry a Chinese national couldn't because China doesn't have any it hasn't legalized same sex marriage. So there's a petition circulating about that. We'll see what the outcome is. South Korea activists form a task force to fight the coronavirus fuel discrimination. And I have a picture before you now of some members of the task force. Remember last time I reported that South Korea had made progress in terms of the coronavirus but then one person a gay person allegedly went to a lot of bars in the gay section of Seoul and triggering a renewed outbreak of the virus. Whether or not this can be proved is irrelevant because the gay community was then blamed. So in response this these activists have formed a task force to fight against discrimination. A couple of more stories. North Macedonia activists protest as court scraps anti-discrimination law. This law was passed and a technicality occurred. It was passed with a majority of the people in the parliament as opposed to the majority of members. So it's been recalled the problem is that everything is at a standstill because of the pandemic. But when the courts reopen if this ruling party who is favorable to LGBT people is still in power then they can just pass the ordinance again. One hopes that's the case. Now good news from France. I'd like to share a picture now of Marie Koh 55 the first transgender mayor elected in France. Here she is. Now let's see a picture of Philip Normal who is 38 the UK's first openly HIV mayor HIV positive mayor. He teams fashion with politics because he's a fashion designer and the picture shows you he's kind of an interesting dresser. He's got a smart fashion shop in Brixton a fashionable area of London which is closed now of course but there he is. Two more stories. Manipur in India plans to set up a quarantine center for the transgender community and have a picture of that center. And finally got the La La Taiwan's first LGBT streaming platform launches and I just want to you know there are a lot of recommendations and they're ready to go but I don't want to forget this last story that I'm going to cover in detail next time the Land Literary Award winners have been announced on June 1st. So that's exciting news that we will explore in detail the next time. Keith. Thank you Anne and I'll be waiting to see if there's any names that we might recognize on those land awards. So looking at headlines here locally I want to start with last night the Montpellier City Council did enact a mask requirement in businesses in Montpellier and I am told that this had the full support of the business community because it sets a uniform standard. It will not be one business trying to enforce while another isn't. It's uniformed through downtown and there were all of the necessary inappropriate exemptions for those individuals who cannot wear a mask due to medical condition or other circumstances. So I'm going to give a plug again. The census if you haven't done it please do. One of the issues relative to the census is that this is the equation upon which federal funding is based and it is estimated that there will be between forty three and forty five hundred dollars per Vermont or counter counted that comes into the state. Now while the LGBTQ plus community may not have been included in the demographics for the census as we had hoped Vermont's government and infrastructure certainly knows we're here. We can have a voice in what happens to those federal funds once they get here but the money needs to get here and it was estimated that after the 2010 census that Vermont lost more money than any other state due to under-recording. I also want to acknowledge that on Sunday there is a rally planned state house in response to the incident in Minneapolis. The homicide by police. There will be a speakout and I believe there will also be a march associated with it. Friday June 15th which is if you're watching this on Saturday was yesterday was long-term HIV survivors. The epidemic isn't over. And just to note the names project the quilt the leftover fabric that they had for making panels acknowledging people who had died relative to HIV they're using that material to make masks for first responders in the San Francisco area. June is also Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. You thought I was going to say Pride Month. So there may be some questions coming up about what you know about Asian Pacific American history. Start your Google research now. Tuesday there were primaries that were held in New Mexico, South Dakota, Washington, DC, Montana and rescheduled primaries occurred Tuesday as well in Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Let's talk about it Super Tuesday. I will be doing more extensive reporting on future shows but the early assessment is the same as the 2018 election women candidates seem to do exceptionally well. And there were some well-known controversial conservative candidates that may not have made it through the primary. Here in Vermont there has been acknowledgment that in the House race within the Democratic Party there are three transgender women who have filed petitions. We will do a more extensive reporting on this in future shows. And you might want to look for one or two interviews. Could be interesting. And then I really do want to talk about what's happening in the legislature. Some of the bills that are of interest to the LGBTQ plus community and then a bit about how Vermont has responded to the homicide by police of George Floyd and the acknowledgement that there was a almost identical incident that happened in Tacoma Washington in March. So with that, Linda, it's back to you. Hey, thank you, Keith. Chicago mayor, lesbian, Lori Lightfoot didn't hold back when asked if she had anything to say to President Trump during a press conference. I will encode and code what I really want to say to Donald Trump and his two words. It begins with F and ends with U, said Lightfoot. The first out LGBTQ plus mayor ever elected to the city of Chicago. And we must stand firm in solidarity and say this is totally unacceptable no matter who the speaker is. We see the game that he is playing Trump because he's transparent and he's not very good at it. Lightfoot's message was in reference to Trump's Friday tweet that targeted protesters across the country who were demanding action against Derek Michael Chauvin, a 44-year-old white police officer who reportedly has 18 complaints on his record and only two ended in any kind of disciplinary action. Trump had referenced the racist phrase, when the shooting starts, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. In his comments, the phrase was previously used by former Miami police chief Walter Hedley, who in 1960 Miami vowed to control black protesters and crack down on the hoodlums. According to the Washington Post at one point in December 1967, Hedley said in reference to black protesters, we don't mind being accused of police brutality. They haven't seen anything yet. So she didn't hold back on that and good for her. Betsy DeVos's Department of Education threatens funding for pro-trans schools. High towns Monica Raymond is playing a fully realized lesbian lead in a Provincetown series on Starz. She plays a woman grappling with addiction and is trying to solve a murder. The series was created by Rebecca Cutter and is dark, sexy, and very queer. So you might want to tune into that if you can. I hear an interest story about how Arlene Hamilton went from homeless to Wall Street. She's the founder of Backstage Capital, a venture capital firm, which was founded in 2015 while she was homeless. The firm seeks to address disparities in technology industry by investing in companies that are high risk potential entrepreneurs who are women people of color and LGBTQ people. Backstage Capital has raised over $10 million and has invested in more than 130 startups. She is a proud gay woman and she really did a good job. So congratulations to you. Then we have a story by Chris Cooper about Chris Cooper. The bird watcher and sometimes substitute for Ann Northrop on AUSA was a man in Central Park who had a confrontation with a woman who was walking her dog without a leash. Dogs must be leashed in this part of the park, the ramble. At this time, be it to protect the birds, you migrate there. Cooper started to videotape her when she pulled on the collar of her dog and refused to leash him. Then she threatened to call the police and tell them she was being harassed by a black man in the park. What seemed to be a deliberate racist act. Who knows what the police would have done had they actually arrived on the scene in time to deal with this. His sister apparently has put the video on camera, on social network and got a lot of hits. So after the event went viral, she lost her job and has gotten death threats. She has since apologized to Mr. Cooper who has accepted her apology. So journalist Keith Boken was arrested and detained in New York City over the weekend while photographing by photographing and filming the protest against police brutality and recent killings of black people by police despite being identified himself as a member of the press. Boken said the police did not read him his rights. A contributor to CNN and a former White House aide Boykin who is gay said he sat in a van for more than an hour before being taken to the police station where he was placed in a cell with about 35 other people who had been arrested at the protest. He was finally let go with the summons to a parent court for blocking the highway. So and also I have a picture of him which you will see now and and also he was in a cell that you know with 35 people no masks no anything so hopefully he's okay. And lastly I just want to give a quick shout out to Larry Cramer who died at 85. He saw it to shock the country into dealing with AIDS as a public health emergency and foresaw that it would kill millions regardless of sexual orientation. Larry Cramer is a noted writer and playwright and his husband David Webster said the cause was pneumonia. So anyway we will miss him. He was a huge force to be reckoned with in the LGBT community and we'll miss him a lot. So okay we'll move on now. To me well let me I hate to correct you but he was 84 Larry Cramer. Okay I have a story of great interest to me involving lesbian sex with gorillas. A scientist has reported what seems to be the first occurrence of same-sex passion among female gorillas and I am certain this isn't the first occurrence it's the first time the scientist discovered it. Associate professor of Dr. Cyril Groyder, primate expert from the University of Western Australia, was examining the feeding patterns of gorillas in Rwanda when he made the stunning discovery not so stunning to some of us. He told Daily Mail Australia instead of seeing aggression between females over food we saw them engaging in sexual behavior which was quite surprising. Dr. Groyder learned a majority of female gorillas would turn to each other for sexual stimulation when rejected by males and obviously derived sexual pleasure from the act. Now we don't know that they were rejected by males either I think this might be Dr. Groyder's assumption. Of the 32 of the 22 female gorillas examined from 2008 to 2010 18 engaged in sexual activity with other females including genital rubbing genital closeness and mating calls during intercourse. Now let's pause and see to see a picture of two female gorillas engaging in sexual activity. He also explained that the behavior of the female apes appeared to be motivated purely by sexual arousal rather than attraction and they were equally aroused by males and females. Bisexual gorillas apparently. The study published in the journal PLOS ONE states that 12 out of 43 homosexual events 28 percent involved at least one female that was also involved in the heterosexual act or the same preceding on the same preceding or following day. He told Daily Mail Australia it's not necessarily it's not necessarily that they have the same same sex orientation is purely sexual behavior. Dr. Groyder also observed that females engaging in same sex intercourse would often seek privacy by hiding in dense vegetation you can't blame them. The academic said the study was significant as it might contribute to an understanding of the evolution of such behavior in humans. He said gorillas are closely linked to humans and we thought by looking at this behavior we could learn a little more about our own evolution. So there we have lesbian gorillas in World Wanda. On to Keith. It's nice to know that the penguins have a bit of competition now. Yes. So looking at our legislature some of the things that we're going to be following and I will report more extensively on future shows is there's a bill that had been stalled within our legislature that people now believe will get additional momentum and it has to do with law enforcement's use of force and related the Burlington police department after the demonstration that was held in Burlington over the weekend immediately rewrote their policies as it related to what is and is not justifiable use of force. Use of force when it occurs will be investigated very positive and immediate response. There's the older for Montress Act that we're going to be following closely because a piece of the conversation surrounded reconstituting or bringing back the older for Montress Task Force. We need to advocate that both consumers and advocates from within the LGBTQ plus and other represented communities are included on the task force and not merely representatives from agencies and nonprofits who provide services to Vermont's elders. There is also an initiative started in the Senate that has actually passed the Senate that would give the Secretary of State's office total authority for mail in voting. The Secretary of State could investigate and establish a protocol by which mail in voting could occur in Vermont and looking at COVID mail in voting everyone could be equally represented. People would get a postcard saying you're entitled to this is how to do it etc. There was actually move on a national level to try and institute this across the country. It is getting a pushback from conservatives as one might expect because this would have a great impact on those districts who on preview shows were reported were jury-mandered and that communities of color people living in poverty their districts were spread spread across a wide geographic area polling places were not accessible and were not open the hours that would accommodate people's work schedule or on public transportation systems. The other piece that we're going to look at with the Vermont legislature is there's an initiative going through to provide economic relief to Vermont's Latinx farm workers. These are people who come in on an annual seasonal basis. They are essential workers. They have been excluded from any effort on a federal level to be included within the stimulus package. Vermont legislators have recognized how essential they are to our farming communities and they're looking at trying to put a provision in place to provide them with economic relief. So looking at how Vermont responded to the homicide by police and the response is fairly uniform you know both from within the current administration and from within law enforcement itself. Statements came out that it was barbaric inexcusable reprehensible that it was their belief that the officers involved all to be tried in charge for murder and held fully accountable. There was this statement that was given by Mike Schirling who is the commissioner of public safety that sort of summed up Vermont's law enforcement response. If you're in this job for any other reason then community service with empathy and to provide a requisite level of protection to those who need it you should be looking elsewhere. We're past the point where this is something we should be discussing and the Scott administration has actually put in place an equity task force to look at racial disparity within Vermont. Vermont's infrastructure is the systemic response and looking at what it's going to take to effectively respond to it and Zana Davis who is Vermont's first director of racial equality made a statement about everyone accepting their responsibility for stamping out white supremacy. I always try to ask people to remember white privilege doesn't mean that your life isn't hard. It means that your skin color isn't one of the things making it harder. White silence equals violence. So and I also want to acknowledge that there have been some reports about an incident in St. Johnsbury where during a demonstration four of the protesters were taken into police custody and from the report it seems as though what had occurred is the demonstrators had moved from the sidewalk to blocking traffic and that's when law enforcement had stepped in. However the St. Johnsbury police department has said the incident will be fully investigated and appropriate response is taken. So with that I'm actually going to turn this back to Anne because she conducted a recent interview that she'd really like to introduce for us. Thank you and before I introduce the interview I'd just like since we're up to the minute with our reporting I'd like to add to Linda's story that of course three other officers in Minneapolis have been arrested and I'd like to start I'd like to introduce the interview with a clarification if I may. It was my great honor to introduce to interview Huli Lapera. Huli uses they them pronouns and in the interview I used the wrong pronoun a mistake that I deeply regret and apologize for. That said enjoy the interview. Hi everybody I'm here with Huliana Delgado-Lopera Huli as she likes to be called who is a first-time novelist and writer of great promise and influence so welcome. Thank you thank you Anne for having me. It's great to have you here. I'd like to just do a bare bones biography if I may speak of you in the third person Huli was born in Columbia moved to the states in Miami when she was 15. I may say has ambivalent feelings about Florida as many of us do and now lives in San Francisco and we were just saying that this is a benefit of our being able to telecommute now because we can you know talk to people all over the country and that's a great strength so I'm very pleased and thank you for joining us. Yeah I'd like to start with your earlier work just so the audience has a little more information about you. In March 2017 you wrote Kyureme which is kind of not imprecise but a cross between love me and like me and that foreshadows some of the experiments with language that appear in your current novel and we'll talk about that. The second collection that you edited is Quentin Melo a bilingual collection of oral histories and that was published by Ian Bluth also right in 2070. I love that publication I love small presses and I love the feminist press that produced your novel which is Fiebre tropical and that came out March 4th 2020 unfortunately at the outset of the pandemic so all your a lot of your face-to-face book events probably have been cancelled. Yeah all of them. Yeah before we continue though I do want to say that you have two events that are coming up in June one is at the LGBTQ center in New York City which many of us have been to and we applaud their work and you're going to be talking with another distinguished writer Sarah Schulman whose work I certainly admire and this is she was involved she did a reading at Sister Spit that I saw on the Bowery in New York several years ago and you were involved with Sister Spit I was involved with Sister Spit yeah I was running writer productions for four years right and you're no longer doing did you want to take time to write and yeah I left last year and so I did four years there was wonderful we did the Sister Spit tour for four years we didn't go to the East Coast but we did West Coast and the Southwest and it was just one of the most magical things I've done it's also just a lot to direct and lead an organization it's quite a lot of work and what's happening with it now oh Imani Sim so she was the managing director then and she took over as the executive director and is doing a wonderful job with it they're probably having a lot of different contingencies so not because nobody can really get together anymore yeah I mean it's a huge challenge oh yeah well the next thing I would like to talk about is February Tropic Cal and as I was saying to you earlier I first became aware of the novel when Miriam Gerba published an essay in The Guardian called Beyond American Dirt the best books to understand Latinx culture and February Tropic Cal was among them and Sarah Schulman describes it on the cover here as breathless, hungry, funny, fun the new immigrant novel in a knowing sea all Colombian lesbian voice this novel is much needed and alive so congratulations it's gotten rave reviews thank you thank you and I I'd like to talk a little bit I mean Gerba describes it as coming of age coming out story coming to America saga all these things wrapped into one and it's written in what a lot of people say is described as spanglish so my experience of reading it was is what you describe it's I I looked up everything and I couldn't find all the words and so I was kind of carried along by the narrative which you say is comparable to the immigrant experience yeah I mean thank you for that introduction and I'm very excited to be here speaking with you um it's interesting because when I set out to write the book I didn't think I was gonna write an immigrant experience I didn't think I was gonna write a queer experience I didn't think any of it I was really attracted to the characters and the story grew out of the baptism the baptism scene that's kind of like where the story started and then it just blew up and I was just really in love with the characters and so I just want to I just want to preface with that because it's really important to me that like I started this just by being enamored by the story and being enamored by the characters and the characters all just happen to be immigrants and so in a way the in the aftermath of writing the book and in retrospect I really see how the blending of languages for somebody who doesn't speak both languages is a way of mimicking what immigrants go through which is we have to be constantly in translation every single day I mean I've been in the States for 16 years and I speak perfect English and every single day I still have to translate a lot of things you know including like idioms humor and so it does it does mimic some of that experience of us having to be kind of like always not quite there with the language and the culture as a whole I remember having a friend who was from Spain and she saw she went back to Spain and saw play and said I understood everything you know because she's been living in the US and speaks beautiful English also but you know it's uh it's got to be a struggle yeah tell me about your influences if you would how did you happen to evolve into writing this novel yeah so I mean the influences I can say that go back to me even being a kid I grew up in Colombia I grew up in Bogota and I come from a family of a lot of women my mom has five sisters my grandmother had five sisters and so there was a lot of women and a lot of women who really know how to talk and who really are great storytellers and so they speak with with their hands they talk with their mouth they use a lot of their body their great are making up words are inventing things and they're just like great narrators and I grew up around my grandmother a lot and I would come home from school and I would go to her house and the bus would drop me off at her house and she would let me like watch a bunch of TV and telenovelas and we would both like reenact scenes from the telenovelas and my grandmother was a seamstress and a cook and so I know that my early years with language really exploded because my grandmother gave me a lot of space to play and experiment as I suffered in my own house my mom's house was very rigid I went to an all-girl Catholic school my mom was like very very organized and orderly but it was when I went into my grandmother's house with a kind of like free flow just really like sparked a lot of creativity for me and then when I moved to Miami I also moved with a lot of my family so I was again living with a lot of women and I was again living with my grandmother and I remember the first few times while I was down there that I heard so Miami is very much built by Cubans people don't know this Cuban started moving there in the 60s and it's like literally built by Cubans and so there's places in Miami that you everything is written in Spanish or is Spanish and you really there's literally neighborhoods where nobody's speaking in English and so I remember when we got there and I heard Cuban people translate idioms straight from English into Spanish and Spanish into English and I was like amazed at what was going on um so it was definitely in Miami that I started really picking up on this playfulness of language that immigrants were doing and it was mostly because like I saw it I first saw it with Cuban people there but then my own family started learning English I started learning English and we started like blending it in in all those different ways into our into the fabric of our lives and the way that it came inside in our lives was through you know mispronunciations different accents making up of words my grandmother never learned any English but she would pronounce everything phonetically in Spanish when you told her to and I would always laugh she knew that it was just funny and now I know in retrospect that I like I will write down all those words that she will make up I was always a little kid with like the little notebook going around and like our um our family gatherings and I would just write down the stuff that they would see because they were so funny and I believe that most human beings have just like poetics in them we just don't pay attention sometimes but if you want somebody to speak like they will come up with some like gorgeous metaphor about something or just something really funny um and so I really started seeing how the English that I was learning in school I got to the States into I think it was eighth grade um was very structured and very standard and I didn't do well there at all but then when I would leave school I heard the English on the streets the English that was like meshed with like other immigrants it wasn't only like humans but like Argentinians there Haitians there there Jamaicans there and so everybody was like building in English in however way they could um and that really solidified my love for for English and then it was when I got to San Francisco I only stayed in Miami for four years when I got to San Francisco 11 years ago the English here then is very different because then it's it's blend with Mexican Spanish so it's like Central American Spanish is here you know Cubans have it over there and if you go to New York it's like Puerto Ricans and Dominicans um but they all have like this beautiful playfulness and I love it because people are just trying to get to understand what's going on in front of them and because the reality doesn't fit a standardized language they just make it up and I you know then I started reading like Mexican American writers and I learned that even at the turn of the 20th century people were already writing in both languages um there's there's like farm workers and there's people who like literally when they're bored across them they were writing still and they started writing in both languages and so I was very influenced by um by Toni Morrison for instance also reading other writers that were not Latinos that were doing beautiful uh work with um slang or dialects um so Toni Morrison I read Beloved many times and I like love that book a lot there's a Chilean writer Copero Le Mabel who writes in Chilean slang and it's queer Chilean slang so he died about like five years ago um he was an opposer of the Pinochet regime and he wrote as like the sissy, faggy, you know indigenous queen um and her his writing was just so so beautiful and it also very playful and very queer um there's another Latin American writer Corita Indiana who's Dominican and she also does she does merengue so her her writing is beautiful because incorporates some of that rhythm of music into it so those books have had a lot of influence when I was writing this one as well as you know who know Diaz uh the way briefly one does life of Oscar wow Jenny Capo who's another latino writer who wrote Living Hialeah and also blends language really beautifully um so some those are some of the influences in the book and also you know I speak a lot about my influence with nightlife in San Francisco and how that really seeps into my writing so drag queens have have had a huge impact in my work well and that made me think you know when you talked about um your grandmother and the telenovelas I in one in an interview I read that after they were over you used to you and she used to perform them and I thought this foreshadows maybe your career as a performance artist yeah I mean I don't know maybe like I just loved and and now you know my mom talks to me now and she remembers being like oh when you were a kid you were always um putting together plays and you were just I was always directing people um and it was definitely my grandmother who just led that creativity like explode um and she did I mean I don't know if that's entirely for shouting that I hope it is I feel that she definitely not sure the big creative person in me by allowing me to just play and experiment um but we did I used to sing the beginnings of all the telenovelas and then she was she was sewing so she always had like a bunch of like textiles in her in her apartment and she would let me like wrap myself around and she would just wouldn't say that everything was messy and disorganized yeah that's wonderful well let's hear a little of uh the novel are you going to read from fiery tropical sure yeah I have a little I haven't read this one yet so I'm excited about reading this part um it's uh page 71 if people want to follow along and it's chapter says it's at the church and can you set the scene for us a little bit yeah so we are in uh Christian church in Miami and she were about to meet this um girl who got laser and her sideburns so she could like marry this lead singer of the church and so there's you know all the women are kind of like around her and seeing what's going on in francesca who's a lead character and the girl that's telling the story has a weird relationship with being so um so closely in this like bodily moment with with them but at the same time she feels pulled in by the idea of just belonging to a group of being welcomed somewhere so we're in the church this girl just got laser surgery and her sideburns and she's very excited about it very good okay chapter says the next Sunday at iglesia cristiana jesucristo rector a crater group of women circle and touch a young woman's face hunger couldn't have been more than 25 years old she just got a laser on her face she had a really bushy sideburns like a man and now miracle she returned her free fully woman and ready to testify about it apparently sideburns on girls are no no for god especially if we want to marry the lead singer dude by the stupid name of art which she did or if you want to join the inner church circle which she did the pastor has paid for the laser church with church money and made a point of telling the entire congregation how they supported this dream art now loves her look at their pure love of course it was an obvious church expense since the girl now will be climbing the ranks with a smooth face the man stood on the other side of the room or the collective female crowd worked as one big microscope on her face we all wanted a piece of her transformation to a higher more perfected female version it was obvious that all these women used to directly indirectly make fun of her it was obvious all the praising carrier with it an underlying feeling of jealousy of anger now we all touch our own sideburns not as bushy as hers but tiny hairs on the last our amount of what we were still not as pure and definitely not as chosen nobody was paying for us to become more womanly and therefore more desired by the higher ranks of the church and thus began the jealousy roller coaster ride all of us with hungry tentacles stretching out into her body everyone took turns running their fingers along her silky cheek commenting on her newly acquired beauty she seemed thrilled with all the attention nodding and repeating i've wanted this all my life i've wanted this all my life art is so excited for me we're finally getting the church's blessings ambious miles all around when my turn came to touch her i declined it's okay if you pressed touched it it's so smooth i didn't want to turn somebody else's skin she was already sweating from all the attention and it felt disgusting to run my fingers on both sweat and skin all i suddenly landed on me that that would later update me on the gossip of the girl's church history she was a nobody people spoke of her hairy face as if she was some abomination brought by satan only in whispers only in passing she was evidence of biology going wrong and of the women's innocence of superiority when staring at her hairy body now she had undone every single bitch and clawed her way to the hairless top in columbian girl where this is called arrisa in columbian church world is just called america from the benevolence of papi ideals who refuses to let his daughter suffer amen of the day i remember running two fingers on her cheek the girl's proud smile i remember the feeling of being invited into the circle of joining the women into this ritual as gross as touching her felt it was also an invitation i too went ahead and run two fingers over her skin something about it felt wrong and yet i was inside a circle welcomed in the pastor just called from us from the podium las mujeres please do us a favor and stop the gossip and go sit hairless girl then hug me she said christ believed in me i carry her face inside me that day a weird feeling of closeness great thank you yeah you're welcome that sounds like a little queering of language which is an expression you've used about um your use of language in the novel do you want to talk about that a little bit or yeah we can talk about that i mean i feel um that queering of languages um can can take can take many different shapes and so i feel that this queering is not necessarily because it's talking about queer subjects um which it is but it's also because the language is veering off from the normal and what we assume is a normal way of approaching language and so the the book really picks up on slang immigrant slang and specifically columbian slang and it blends it in with english and so in this way it's moving it away from the standard what i'm calling also white english which is what it's generally um taught as good english and it's interesting because i get asked you know about the language in the book and i and i tell people that um everybody makes a choice as to how they write and when we write when we read a book that is told in a you know a third person objective masculine voice um it is still a choice it's just seen as the normal and so it's it's rarely that question you know and so like spanglish is very much other steel and so i believe that in its otherness it's queering language and overturning the binary of either english or spanish exactly um yes well is there we're coming to the end of our interview unfortunately time is flown flown by is there anything you want to leave us with any final thoughts um well i think you that i mean all i want to say is i would love to encourage people to explore and experiment um and i you and i were talking about how a lot of writers sometimes don't use other like art forms and other parts of their lives into their own creative you know creative practice and so um the way that i arrived here and in my own in my own writing it's really important for me to pay attention to the things that really feel true to me and that really call me and so i talked about drag i also gone into the woods a lot um i see a lot of visual art and i hang out with people that are not that don't read that much and so i just like those although all those things are part of my i just hang out with a lot of drag queens and performance and so uh all those things have such a huge influence in who i am and my ability to be able to craft voice and to craft storytelling comes a lot not from literature i read a lot and i've always been an avid reader and i've read all my life so i think that that's extremely important as a writer to read a lot and at the same time just really listen to the world um that is not language based i remember learning ones that bioluminescence is the most widest like form of communication and it's not language it's bioluminescence which is amazing that light is like what's used the most in the natural world as a communication device and that just really blew my mind because i'm like oh my god i'm such a writer and i'm a gem and i also so i'm like will buy mercury and i'm always just like you know but just really to be able to take a step back and be centered like language and human experience from a mode of communication was just such a beautiful moment for me of like learning um so it's just an invitation to let folks feel inspired by the world itself and see how like the world can seep in into their own creative practice in ways that sometimes we can't even like articulate wonderful well that's a great note to end on thank you holy i hope you're able to come again and we can have another that was a great interview and thank you it was a pleasure so i also understand that the name might not be included on this year's lambda awards because of the timing of the release but we should be looking next year you betcha and i'll be rooting for them yes and with that linda take us home okay let's remember through the pandemic and the riots we must always resist