 A lot of what I'm going to share tonight is I like to cross, um, a little boundaries in my work. Um, as someone who is not really, uh, I don't have an artist studio. I use my, um, kitchen. I use my bedroom, right? Like as a trans person of color, I don't have a lot of access to, like, physical space. Um, and then that kind of ripples to the broader, um, QT, POC communities here in the Bay Area. Um, as, uh, gentrification is rapidly changing. Like, increasing on our communities. Where, where do we find space? Um, and how do we fill gaps in history? And what does it mean to fill a gap? What do we use to fill a gap? Should we fill a gap or can we create other frameworks? Um, so I'm going to be presenting kind of an art history presentation, um, using, uh, David Desiree Sabato's scrapbooks, which are in the San Francisco History Center upstairs. You can check them out when they're open. I think most days of the week. Um, Mason, thank you so much for collecting all of the materials for us. Um, if you ever, uh, work with the residency, like Mason, like you choose, you chose like a list of 20 things. I think I only looked at like three. And also one of the videos didn't work either. So, so I don't think that was your fault. That might have been, I don't know who's fault that was. Desiree David Sabato. Where is she? He now. I'm not sure where she or he is or what happened to her or him after their last drag show in San Francisco in the 1980s. When I was flipping through the Desiree scrapbooks for this presentation, I started thinking about the many functions of a scrapbook full of photographs. What do we use scrapbooks for? What is, what does it mean to use a scrapbook? One of the photographs that I chose is David Desiree in her most brilliant regalia juxtaposed against a tree and an image of me on a bar train going to Oakland. Um, it kind of represents the movement. Most of what Desiree has in the archives is only two scrapbooks. And all I know about her and all that's available is that she used to live in San Francisco in the 80s and she moved to the Midwest for some reason. And then she lived her life. And I think that's, that's, that's kind of the basis of this presentation. Um, as I was thinking about the photographs and the two scrapbooks that I was looking at, I thought about what were the original functions that we use photographs for? One of those happened to be we use them to perverse, preserve the memory of the dead to remind humans of our mortality and impermanence. They called it, uh, Europeans and Americans called it a postmortem photography, Momental Maury. Families would basically gather around their loved ones, um, who had just passed away and take a selfie with them. Like literally dressing their deceased auntie or cousin or child in their best clothing, um, and curated a stage for them for their final performance. They say that doing so would help the family psychologically with their own grief process. This is a picture of, uh, former president Marcos, um, in the coffin and they recently, uh, had a giant parade in the Philippines celebrating this dictator. Um, I find this to be a certain kind of creepy drag show. Yeah, hope you too. Anyways, uh, flipping through the Desiree, the Desiree scrapbooks made me think of how as a trans person of color, I was doing more than just looking at photos. It was remembering someone's physical presence, but more of that. It was almost, uh, embodiment, a kind of memory that runs in the water. And they say that water makes up 80% of our bodies. So that's a lot of memory, including our brains. Looking at Desiree, looking back at me, recognizing myself, seeing a future memory, seeing my communities reflected in hear-story, hear-story, our-story, is an act of healing across generations. Medicine for my own healing as a non-binary, trans-masculin-ish person whose roots exist across thousands of islands in the Philippine exodiaspora. Like Desiree David Sabattle, I am from Cebu, Manila, Palawan, the Visayas, Maui, Honolulu, Malaysia, China, Japan. Like Desiree David Sabattle, I am Bakla, Binalaki, Bayog, Babailan, Bayoguin, Babailalaki, Gender Crossing Magic Maker. The only thing I said at the beginning that we know about Desiree David Sabattle is that she was from Hawaii. Somehow made her way to San Francisco and worked as a stripper before doing drag in San Francisco and Oakland in places like Esta Noche. Hey! And Benchen Bar, which was in Oakland. But what I significantly remember through flipping through the scrapbooks is that she was drag royalty. Her name Sabattle, and I'm assuming that's Filipino because a lot of Filipino people in Hawaii have the last name Sabattle, is connected, I think, somewhat to my own personal story. Many of my Filipinx diaspora communities worked in Hawaii, pineapple plantations, pineapple canning factories. My great grandparents worked at a pineapple canning factory in Hawaii before they moved here to California. So Desiree David Sabattle, were you one of my ancestors? When I was nine, I remember digging through an old cabinet in my parents' room looking for a photo of the stillborn baby that my parents had a year before I was born. It wasn't a pretty picture, just an image of a fetus against a white background. Looking back, it makes sense why my mom would keep it, even though it was traumatic to look at. Looking at the photograph may have helped her make sense of loss, of something never returning, or maybe something beyond comprehension. My mom said that baby was supposed to be a boy. A year after the miscarriage, she had a gender-fabulous son who was assigned female at birth. The week after I saw the Desiree scrapbooks, they were on my mind a lot, especially when I was cooking Filipino food. Cooking with my ancestral plants helps me remember that memories don't die without digital or physical form. The water and soil and plants hold memories too. In our age of Apple, photographic memories are a way to hold onto ourselves, who we want others to think we are. We live in a culture of forgetting, a culture of amnesia. Can a photo raise something or someone from the dead? Recessitate memory? Memories of certain sides of ourselves? Not really our full selves. We live in a culture of remembering and forgetting. Why do we remember? Why do we use photos to remember? To fill gaps in history? How does one fill a gap in history? Is it simply a matter of reinserting ourselves into a linear timeline? How can we use our images, our stories, to reimagine new kinds of timelines for our queer and trans histories here in this room? Part of this residency too, I am a visual artist, so I thought a lot about what do we leave behind when we go to the club? And during a period of time it was matchbooks. I have a collection of matchbooks that I got from my grandparents, and I started etching the places that Desiree would perform drag shows like Benchenbar and Oakland, and just her image to try to figure out, I don't know, who she was in relationship to me. David Sabato Desiree, where are you now? When your pictures fade, will you still be here? How can you hold in my memory, how can you stay in my memory, in ways that don't require a photograph?