—May 1, 2014—

Comrades, loves, & shakers: Int’l workers day is for all of us y’all! Please remember that noone is less or better in the compass of labor because they aren’t in “the streets,” son. Not all lives/bodies fit the dynamic of productivity & racist cis american scripts of “normal” labor.

To my loves achy in bed, to the coughing wheezing aching healing, to homies who can’t leave, to the mad brilliance shaken with anxiety, to those with revolutions that have to ascend the physical blocks or barracades of the body, those surviving with chemicals or cleaning in the underbellies, the lonely workers, the ones who can’t can’t can’t organize but sing to themselves, those whose lives are told their work is a waste, shouldn’t work but uphold the wizardry of survival as first language, to the loves whose deliberations don’t get status in cultural capital but make waves in chosen fam, for those deemed too lazy but forever the crux of all the little things taken for granted, for homies who coordinate who juggle public assistance/cops/intimacy with loved ones like a chant, to my poor homies too imaginative for the comprehension of money, for anyone whose dreams may not match their pay stubs, for the workers whose hands and spirit are the concoction of rough tenderness, whose hustle fucks with sterile white picket fences, those tackling street or multiple gigs that don’t balance a clock but create a new time continuum, for those whose connections or work aren’t seen as interview worthy, those with no nest, those with no back up plan, those who bargain like breathing air, those who love themselves a break even when they are forced to workhorse it out, those who bend hours & don’t get paid, those whose sweat is forgotten due to placards or protest etiquette.

For spoonies whose simple math is a critical campaign for living. For the hands that hold you with the ancestor’s loud speakers reminding you to eat/sleep/pray, for the chewed up and burnt out brunt of people who were mistaken as dispensable. For y’all with juggernaut hearts that feed us & can’t log in hours for payment, for those whose worthy isn’t a title or a press release but a constant check in, we work daily breath for each other and often times, there’s no income bracket to capture that wealth. I offer you gratitude and hope you ease. I offer you my blessed thanks for your efforts. You deserve health care, dignity, self-determination, laughter, good food and good love makin’. We all struggle for those things and our beauty is valid. Let’s de-bunk and debate our dependence on american white cis straight able-bodied dynamics of capital. In bed, in the streets, at the kitchen table, in long lines, in our dreams, in love songs, our work is on-going, deliberate, our work deserves dimension, and please remember, long after the contingents and slogans have raspy throats— we deserve each other.

—April 28, 2014—

[Performers/teachers/singers/dancers/organizers from Asian Desi Pacific Islander American Freedom School in Eugene, OR. Hosted/organized by @webstersofia! Photos taken by the sweet & mighty, @mightyfemme/Esther Kim! So much love for this.]  #apia #qapi #pacificislander #qtpoc #boi #desi #asian #hawaiian #nativehawaiian #pinay #spokenword #Kaybarrett #boihustle #freedomschool #sickdisabledqueers #sickqueertimes

—April 8, 2014—

[Description: a brown trans genderqueer guy with big spiky short hair, spectacles, red t-shirt, & red patterned sweater holds chopsticks at a table. His expression is one of elation and anticipation. On the table is a plate of kimchi fries and a bulgoki platter with rice and salad. | Food from Bop n’ Grill in Chicago’s northside. Photo taken by Rebecca who does not believe in the bookface, Spring 2014.]

1) Chicago how you manage to jostle the old guy and the younger one in me.
2) No work this time. no gig or poetry said aloud. I mainly had self work, talking with pamilya at cemetaries, introducing my old life to my new.
3) When your people meet, they seriously meet and eat and go in. This is always for you. Also, best thai food on the northside is PS Bangkok. This restaurant has survived the onslaught of Lakeview gentrification in the last 20 years and it would behoove me not to mention how their food is just bomb-ass.

—April 5, 2014—

“What you don’t tell them is how you can crumple and pour without warning or watch. How in pain you wake, tremor, laugh, how you pause, grasp, buck and brace, as you move move move with and rebel it. Whether it’s the knock of a rib cage or a highway of nerves in bumper to bumper traffic— no childhood scraped knee can prepare you for this.” [Morning pages: 18, April 2014] #emoboilikewhoa #sickanddisabledqueers #disability #self

—March 3, 2014—

OH, OSCARS.  I am only a fan of the food people prepare at your celebrations, by which I never pay for. However, my tweet did feature in a Gay Section. It wasn’t about the Oscar celebration snacks, sadly. It’s okay sport, maybe next year!

—February 28, 2014—

[Previously in #Portland with my #homeboi, healer, cook, & brother extraordinaire @diegodelfuego69. All the travels were easier to survive come tour when I could ground in parts of kindness. This homey right here offered sweetness and poached eggs. We’ve weaved in and out of broken hearts, empty plates, & many random chats. The perks of portland include him! I’m in ache right now but this moment caught in frame is dope pain alleviation.  #boiswag #sickanddisabledqueers #transcriplove#sickqueertimes #boichronicles #tqpoc #transmenofcolor#transmenofinstagram #queerpeopleofcolor #selfie #qtpoc#qtpocsupremacy #qtpochustle #portland]

—February 24, 2014—

So. I was stopped and questioned at gate check point in Chicago O’Hare for over an hour. I almost missed my flight. My nunchaku are a terrorist threat. Though, it’s not on their list of weapons. It doesn’t have a blade, an explosive, and isn’t included. Their questions & treatment have been real ableist and racist. Ex: “How could YOU possibly use these?” Gender shaming is just an addition. Send kind intentions, please. I’ve had these nunchaku for over a decade. No other cities have stopped me but of course, Chicago has to. Note: All white douche TSA security are getting a kick out of this. I could destroy them. Fact: U.S. Law Enforcement frequently have not streamlined/appropriated nunchaku as an applied weapon due to numerous medical self-injuries and difficulties mastering the weapon. Get the fuck outta here, asshats. They want to confiscate my/our shit because they can’t handle it.  #cripbrucelee? #brownboiproblems #sickanddisabledqueer#yesyesiam #ableism #racism #fuckthapolice #queerbrownsupremacy

—February 13, 2014—

An update in life. Princeton IvyQ was hilarious and lovely. Hilarity rooted in me being the final Keynote Speaker to close out the entire scene and to pull from my speech, “being on every identity– trans, crip, brown, immigrant’s child  & poor who isn’t meant to belong here.” The crowd was marvelous and seeing dope cultural workers and queer awesome people like Ngọc Loan Trần, Imani Henry, Sinclair Sexsmith, and Jiz Lee is always such a wonderful gift. Special goodness to Andy Cofino per usual holding it down at Princeton’s LGBTQ Space. It was an amazing supportive crowd and with familiar API/A trans queer faces that made it feel like home.

Leaving Mangos With Chili for a moment to recuperate with family, partner, and dog have been much needed.  Show after show, it’s becoming harshly obvious how access and collective access is a real deal necessary element to political work, hosting, performance, and movement building. I’m going to be in Austin and New Orleans y’all, so please send some goodness our way as we navigate new ways to advocate and showcase cultural work.

—February 8, 2014—

this group of dope ones, right here. photo is courtesy of our touring road manager, suze! the week has already been tiring and taxing for an antsy crip  like myself. i think i worry about so many things that have t do with privilege, but also my worries about the broader QTPOC movement.  i’m worried we are etched in trauma that we lose one another, that we siphon such monumental heartbreak until we can no longer reach out to one another to heal.

questions i have for us are:
how can we not compete with one another? what does it mean to illustrate and center disability justice in our progressive QTPOC frameworks? why do people oversimplify struggle and why must we lose one another to this without embracing larger nuances in working together? why do cis and trans white men ruin everything? how come when i tour, i don’t eat enough protein?

additional curiosities:
why am i living anywhere where there is snow? how can i be a romantic unromantic person? i wonder, what my dog is doing? why can’t i just teleport from city to city? i wonder, what their hands feel like? when am i going to eat pilipin@ food next? where is my partner and why does she have to be surrounded in a polar vortex? what is it about cis people that think that they are the center of every damn thing? why do people wear such vicious cologne? can’t i just lay down down down down on desert dirt splay across a buttery bed?

OBVIOUS STATEMENTS:
brown queer trans crip people all day, everyday.
make love in this club by usher is one of the best van songs to sing to with homies, ever. EVER.
i love potato chips in ever state in the u.s. empire.
performing a found poem shakes my body to stillness.
i miss my lady like so many many many.
i need to draw more.
healing medicines from every city feels like community healing all delicious.
brunch is a queer state of resilience.

—February 7, 2014—

touring archives go as follows:
1) Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene to Kay Ulanday Barrett as archived by  Beastie Salih:
“You’re so soft!…wait do you want me to say you’re hard? You are hard, you are, I’m just not focusing on that right now. #lifeinthevan #therealmwc2014#qtpoc

2) “This is the city of hustle, son.” –Kay Ulanday Barrett
“You cannot stain me.” –Askari Luna González

3) IN OAKLAND:

This is my —oh shit, what city is this? Am I in a van? Is that a cat, dog, ______ on my belly or…? Where’s the snacks? Where did everybody go? Is this a hotel? House? Gas station? Couch on a stoop? It’s pretty scent-free. That’s so nice.—- face. #therealmwctour2014 #TQPOC #boihustle#sickanddisabledqueer #imissmydog #qtpoc #tourlife #aynako with the taurean hosting love of fam, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha to re-orient me back to the worlds.

Photo taken by my boi & family, Cris. Me getting all up in the nunchaku for Oakland.

I feel the blur, the whiz, the swift, and the circle whenever anyone says some microaggressive
type ridiculuousness, this is what is happening in my spirit.

—February 4, 2014—

When you wake up in your chonies after writing lavishly for hours, then altar, then window gazing at trees trees trees clouds clouds. You hear clanking and shuffling of kitchen makings and blues of Billie and nina. You wake up then, again chonies only, and see an exquisitely colonial imperialistic #brunch setting complete with daily and wildflower servers are. Fuck doilies but mmmmm to wildflowers. You notice like a messy ass epiphany that there’s a pile of fancy ass donuts bigger than giraffes or at least bigger than your torso. As you flash conservative Eugene, Oregon with your trans #tenderqueer parts you move toward the donuts. You chant to yourself, I have arrived. It’s complicated. #food #donuts #qtpoc #oregon #therealmwc2014 #tourlife #qtpoc #tqpoc #currently #kaybarrett #baconmapledonuts #bacon #bandb #breadandbreakfast #brownsupremacy #boiswag] Shouts out to Sophia, Sachi, Leau, & Chithira for being the sweetest students in all of Eugene Oregon! The dinner and brunch following the performance festivities filled my heart with such bold hope even surrounded by ableism and scary colonial doilies in the bed and breakfast.

—February 2, 2014—

Langston Hughes Performing Arts had a stage, & lights that were beyond & with a crowd even more hype. As a performer, let’s just say my spirit was thrilled by it all. Have you ever went to a buffet style homemade homeland meal where everybody be sharing and crying and getting their hands in the food with delight? How about breathtaking sunrise as you wake up? Okay, then you got a grasp of this sense I felt. Thanks to Seattle for showing us deep hospitality & such an honorable space. #qtpoc #therealmwc2014 #queer #performance #culturalwork #kaybarrett #boiswag #transboihustle #qtpochustle #gendernonconforming #langstonhughes #POC #qapi #transgender #transmasculine #Tpoc cc: @lakshmiintheworld @cherrygalette @myloveisaverb @merbabegoddess

—January 31, 2014—

Unceded coast salish territories / Vancouver was pure medicine. Having old school sick, #disabled, #queer, & people of color is a resplendent thing. Setareh gifted me with so much medicine and balm for pain, as well as beach glass she’s collected on various shores from Victoria and others since we were baby queers—- I’m talking early early twenties circa 2004. They in Victoria and I in Chicago, our conversations went like this: we need more queer people of color, talkin’ about mama/grandma recipes, 10 page letters in the friendster era. That’s right. I’m on tour and I just aged myself. Needless to say, with all the mics that I rock, every city where I open & unfold, what is most solace are the love, are the homes after the hype. Feeling in pain but feeling so loved in my cities and in new places just traveled. When gifted with the freshly picked native sage & beach glass, seta said the following two things: 1) I figured the Virgo in you would appreciate the packaging. 2) When are we going to cook together? We have to cook together. | #QTPOC #healing #sickqueertimes #queersicktimes #queer #gendernonconforming #transmasculine #jar #chosenfam

—January 17, 2014—

[Cue that time when you go in for a check up and they tell you to have to be in the urgent care, have you fill out am application that oddly gives you “Transgender” as a check box option. Happy Friday to one and all. I don’t care what they say, I’m taking myself to donuts after this adventure.  #mylife#sighs #queersicktimes #sickqueertimes #medicalindustrialcomplex#transgender #eek #self #nyc #paperwork.]

—January 12, 2014—

Kicked it in Brooklyn (I know, rare occasion right?). Technically, I was driven to Brooklyn with my roommate because
this cold weather doesn’t accept any other commute from me. I was thrilled to be performing with the likes of Kelli Dunham and others on behalf of Jay’s House, an upcoming LGBTQ Homeless support space for adults. It was a privilege to spit poems in closed doors and between lofty walls, have  the stuffy and balmy laughter all the while we were hitting colder temperatures outside. Thanks to everyone who came out, showed up, supported, and listened to amazing people like Jay Toole. It gives us a sense of queer history that more often than not, is blatantly ignored. What better way than to ignite some real storytelling? Afterwords, a lovely person, a woman of color came up to me, tears in her eyes and tears in mine, strangers of a spark understanding. Maybe it’s the emotionally somber of wintry cold or the crowds of people we can surround ourselves by yet still feel singular, could be the idea of shivering and poetry, but strangers– please do keep warm, keep your fur and your human loved ones close.  Possibly consider poems while you’re at it? Okay, not poems? Netflix and a fluffy blanket will also do wonders.

@brownroundboi at Jay’s House fundraiser at ginger’s bar in bk#gaysiansgohard — with Kay Ulanday Barrett.
By Elliott Fukui

Kay Ulanday Barrett brings the house down once again! You killed it Kay!! Thank you!! Jay’s House – Warming Party. — with Jay’s House and 3 others at Ginger’s Bar. By Syd London.

—January 2, 2014—

Happiest New Year, yall! Here’s to winter making & shifting:
1) to wake up without pain today is a brilliant luxury.
2) snow days for me as a kid meant west side chi-town streets bejeweled with chairs, lawnmowers, wood planks, & an assortment of appliances to “reserve” parking spots. If able, youth made a good dollar with a shovel & neighbors knocked on doors to see if we were all alright. Everyone’s inner macgyver came out below 2 degrees F. If you were the wiser, you wouldn’t dare fuck with the chair duct taped to a rake. The cold does things to people in the Midwest. Power and honor involve improvised yet secured car parking while my basement home snowed in, guaranteed a tide of snow over a 3rd grader’s head. Still had to go to school though.
3) my biggest love goes out to those stuck in the cold, those surviving homelessness, those who cannot just consider the mounds of snow as a photographic landscape.

—December 25, 2013—

Please try to remember holidays/this time isn’t the easiest time for some of us. If you’re like me, you might balance ghosts with platefuls of hunger & memory, toss & turn in blankets that used to be concrete, hang xmas lights for any kind of shimmer. You know trailer rust & city smog coughs can do a person right despite their stigma. You know people who must gamble debt, never have days off, or never a kiss goodnight. “Family” isn’t the stuff of stability or yearly newsletters of accomplishment. You aren’t invited to the dinner, you are the avoided, or “that relative.” You come from people who are told not to dare touch the glass counters of stores or to clean them to spotlessness afterhours as Santa still counts his reindeers. You are seen as charity during this season but a lost cause without better bootstraps the rest of the year. Santo Niño or specs of food on a bookshelf are an altar for people like you. You know being prodded for just breathing & you learnt coping in a myriad of ways. Props to those who can still love. A candle to those we’ve lost to the state, to the pressure, & to ourselves.

[excerpt: morning pages, december 25, 2013]

—December 21, 2013—

Dear mama, I’m making your favorite: pineapple upside down bundt cake. It smells like mackinaw city & chicago all in one caramel rich inhale. Based on the sheer amount of butter and brown sugar I used, there is no other conclusion to make but the obvious. No matter the disdain or curiousity we may keep for one another, I am your child.  #diasporabelly #notabaker#cakecakecake #childhood.

—December 18, 2013—

1) That time where a couple of API youths began to sing the chorus of “same love” while my girlfriend and I sat on the bus dressed quite cutely. “Is that directed at us?” said Sarah Kurien. “I think so. Ugh, damn you macklemore.” In the background, a gutsy ‘she keeps mee waaaarrrm. she keeps me waarrrrmmm’ continues til we reach our stop. / do you think that’s cute or obnoxious? #reallyson? #weirdshit #mackleless #awwyouth #ourdatenight

2) Hey guess what! Bois, trans men, & masculine of center queer people face trauma and can be survivors. We endure violence that happens to us via intimate partnership violence, domestic violence, & state violence. Conventional binary gender limits the understanding that this all is sadly possible, and continues to constrict access for folks through out the gender spectrum. Please consider how rigid our understanding of healing can be in the queer/PoC/progressive community. Consider how heteropatriarchal racist ableist wealthy cissexism is evasive and can limit our ability to heal as well as limit our movement work. Thank you so much. *yo boi, K.

—December 8, 2013—

Dear Queer & Transgender spaces:

fuck your sick/crip panic! we/I am not your sicko disabled sob story or whiny downer isolated incident crippled menace to the movement. Learn accessibility. Live interdependence. We’ve always been here. You cannot erase our contributions or try to fix us. You know this. We will not let your isolation & internalized colonization ostracize us. We love you, but we love ourselves more. Be the goodness we can be!

*your boi,
K.

—December 1, 2013—

I do class talks virtually, son! Special thanks to Professor Gem P. Daus for his invitation to speak with his class last week. Students read my writing from Filipino American Psychology: A Collection of Personal Narratives and asked questions about ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. This is me performing & speaking via Skype for his Filipino American History & Biography class at University of Maryland! This is what happens when you ask a class to give you their “don’t mess with me” face. Also, I did an online virtual call & response of Isang Bagsak! while talking about intersectional#pinay/#pinoy-am movements. Ah, making a living. #queer#transgender #boi #qtpoc #tpoc #asian#asiamamericanstudies #filipina #spokenword

To have me speak and perform for your class, organization, collective— go here and we can get all into a Q & A, and talk some liberation strategy!

—November 20, 2013—

Activist and spoken word poet Kay Ulanday Barrett shares his thoughts on how food can build
community in “Food from the Cusps.”  Excerpt:

No matter how many cooking shows, culinary degrees, or fake bamboo huts, there is no replacement for the spirit of home cooking. It comes from the daily festivity of practice and ingredients that build a home. It comes from struggle, comes from history, comes from the people.

Continue to read more here.

—November 7, 2013—

Today’s lesson: My job isn’t to change minds. If some people’s hearts are so closed, if some people deem us invisible- there’s nothing I can do. What I can try to do, is explore power already within us. What I can try to do, is welcome healing and action. What I can try to do is fuse the past with the present. Remember: we come from legacies and we are dynamic.

—November 4, 2013—

white people who profusely use polysyllabic words in theoretical analysis and/or in discussion of artistic aesthetic, but consistently misspell a brown or immigrant person’s name.  #whitequeers #whitetranspeople #racism#sighs #possiblexenophobia

—October 28, 2013—

How amazing is that?!# Big shouts to 18 Million Rising for nominating me as a National FILIPINO AMERICAN History Month Hero. I mean, I am utterly honored to even be considered. Love to 18 Million Rising crew for constant support! I wouldn’t be where I am without pamilya out there to nourish me with kindness, compassion, & support! ♥ Props to Sabelo Todo for the photograph too. Here’s their description:

Kay Ulanday Barrett, poet, performer, organizer, and educator, is today’s Filipino American History Month Hero! Kay was included in The Trans 100 this year for their incredible work advocating for disabled, queer, Pilipino young people, on and off campuses. They make art with the hopes that not only will it help their communities survive, but also thrive. Check out their website at http://kaybarrett.net

For Filipino American Heritage Month, we’re highlighting Fil-Ams who are carrying on a proud legacy of activism & organizing. Who’s your hero?

—September 17, 2013—

To every obstacle, ache, institution, & struggle: I am officially 32 years & 1 day old. I bet you didn’t see that coming (Sometimes, me neither!). p.s. age 32 tastes like sticky pecan buns, turon, & fruit smoothies. age 32 = holding what loves you & what you love with tenderness… & cuddling. There shall be astronomical amounts of cuddling. #survival #ableismcansuckit #tqpoc #sickqueertimes #brownroundwobblyboistyleson

—August 30, 2013—

dear aaliyah: when i was a wee teen/secret queer with dark black cherry lipstick, tight ponytail, big polo (collar up), & parachute jnco jeans, i searched far and wide for all kinds of hard femmes to be (and actually, to want). though, who knows how you identified w/ your gender presentation, at that time youth of color like me paid clise eye to the smallest gender transgressions. aaliyah, rest in power. you being produced by timbaland & missy, baggiest pants off popping hips, give you thanks.

—August 18, 2013—

1) To whom this may concern: when you gander at a brown, wobbly, pudgy, gender-odd homey such as myself, I know you are perplexed & barraged with questions like “is that a she or he?” Or “is that bow tie self-tied? Please refrain from rude stank faces, use the pronouns/name I use for myself, & no, I’m not keen on you either. I’m sure your day is long, possibly excruciating. If so inclined, commentary on my broke boi, on-point, eye for the marvelous apparel is welcomed. If not, let’s keep it movin’. To the lola who bothered to thank me as i opened the door, called me anak, even said I was guapo— that was pure medicine. Salamat po den. Ko talagang kailangan na. #saymyname #respecto #transboiwoes

2) That awkward instance when you text your homey “how are summer programs going?” However, instead of “programs,” you catch that autocorrect typed “orgasms.” Ah, I see you phone and your very specific and admirable priorities.  #queeramusement #sexpositivecommunication#unintentionedsextinggoneawry

—August 13, 2013—

[disability justice collective]

been greatly blessed to talk with various sick, chronically-ill, crip, krip, and disabled community about the impact of multiple oppressions. my current and avid learning from people like Patty & Leroy, co-founders of Sins Invalid  to songs from the effervescent Nomy Lamm (from my punk rock queer youth days before i knew was disability rights or justice even were), to my admiration for such brilliant queer APIA/South Asian crip & disabled love from Mia Mingus, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Stacey Milbern, i’m thankful be learning from these people and to be at the table with people from the current disability justice collective.

with my heating pad in tow and several pauses, productivity is a loving and malleable ordeal.  I missed my dog, my guy whose helped me heal and really continuously allowed for me to devise so many of the thoughts and art and love that has been crucial to my awareness and growth. I thought of every sick person in a bed right now whose partner, wife, parent or sibling isn’t giving them what they need and harbors privilege seething in resentment. I thought of all the poetry and paintings created by sick cultural workers and songs sang in dissonance to flow with whatever physical and spiritual pain ebbed in their bodies. thinking about the black bodies, the brown ones sometimes too who get roughed by the cops more and targeted invariably because of the cane or mental disability they experience that result in re-traumatizing. I thought of all the skills people have that I don’t when it comes to getting basic needs met, about the sordid dance with medical practitioners who are transphobic and healers who tell another person something is wrong within them for not healing.  I think about the court systems who think genderqueer or trans women must be lazy, burdensome, and that transmisogyny limiting access to healthcare.

I think about you, about how we may not have met yet, about the assumptions I’ve made about your own awareness, about how we settle with a caring that is thirsty for love that doesn’t tide us over in guilt or power dynamics. I think about you and i want clarity for us, for the ways in which this world succombs to the sharpest deadliest tropes and fallacies far easier than we all care to  admit.

 

—August 10, 2013—

free write on longing the fantastical:
My secret dreams Craigslist ad: “brown amerikan mixed-race tender queer tibo (former teenage beauty queen) at heart transman seeks kindred yet platonic times w/ someone similar. If you have stances on palabok recipes or the emo nature yet sexism of pinoy rock music, appreciate the patterns of bow ties and banigs, please give me a shout. priority will be given to those who don’t want any political bullshit, who are for justice without the righteousness. Would love someone who has a thing or two to say about contemporary pinoy cuisine via diasporic interpretation or mixed race manhood. Rigid gender assumptions and amerikan vegetarians who wont dabble in lechon once in a blue moon, will not be contacted.”

—August 8, 2013—

excerpt of free write & bargain plus super duper pinky swear:
“Tell you what body of mine: allow yourself the great inhales, the biggest peaks of laughter you got. Maybe there, no doctor’s robotic cadence or team of bills or 3am nightmare have the upper hand. Your own cackle believes in you. Even if you are a ramshackle of twine and quake, even if you are highway wreaking of busted bolts, you came from earth once…”

—July 24, 2013—

SHOW:

MONDAY
July 29, 2013
7pm-9pm

7pm-9pm Bluestockings Bookstore, Café, & Activist Center 172 Allen Street, New York, New York 10002   If you missed the NYC reading for Kelli Dunham’s FREAK OF NURTURE in May, or maybe just thought it was creepy because it was at a funeral home, here’s your chance to hear her read from the book that folks are calling “hysterically funny, brutally honest and poignant and heartbreaking” (The Flannel Files), “laugh out loud outrageous storytelling” (Kate Clinton) and “so compelling I read..almost the whole book…in one day”(Danika, The Lesbrary). PLUS readings by some of the hottest queer authors with cool new work: KAY ULANDAY BARRETT MORGAN GOODE RED DURKIN ELLIS AVERY

—July 14, 2013—

“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”
— Pablo Neruda. [thanks to, Cece Carpio for the reminder]

 

1) dear white people: don’t dare come at us with this post-racial mess. 2) “The fundamental danger of an acquittal is not more riots, it’s more George Zimmermans.” — Jay Smooth (Source: Son of Baldwin)

 

—July 11, 2013—

 

how much do i love you champa garden in oakland? i love that laotian and malaysian food is affordable so so close to the lake. i love the sunny daytime date at a library reading children’s books and progressive magazines. oakland with gorgeous company and chosen family are stellar times in my heart after an extensive residency for TEATRO QPOC, a radio interview for KPFA,  and douses of queer pride events. i’ve been eating well. i’ve been eating REAL well. there have been three gardens in my life that each that i hold a bit of a crush for. i’m sort of dreading NYC/NJ hapless hustle and lack of nature. there is something magical about eating from the earth and being very close to a body of water that makes each breath fuller, stronger.

 

 

—July 9, 2013—

Angela davis, emiliano zapata, dolores huerta by rupert garcia at KPFA Radio. Getting ready to do an interview with Ever Bolden speaking on transgender queer brown crip/disabledness!

 

 

—July 8, 2013—

K: what’s good, #goat? Goat: I’m chillin’. // At jim’s farm run by mindful #crip and #queer people in #Berkeley. I felt sick all day, but goat time was the best time. We learned so much about goat’s milk, trusting relationships between farmers & animals, and sustainable #farming. The land had several goats, squash, apples, onions, beans, eggplants grafted with tomatoes, all kinds of greens, and so much more! Secretly, this was all my dreams. #livestock #qpoc#farming #bayarea. I missed you, @criswordsmith! Photo to the Left by Mia Mingus.

 

 

 

—June 30, 2013—

 

i’m in Sf staying at the mission for an arts residency, specifically an actor residency , TEATRO QPOC hosted by Adelina Anthony. i feel incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to work from a spirited and centered place that really amplifies my work as full-scale access to my emotions as a qtpoc. how can we use our aches, pains, and surviving to examine critical cultural work? i’m overjoyed to be working with the likes of Thao Nguyen  and KT Shorb, whose work respectively has really moved acting and API/A art to another level. I can’t wait to grow and learn from dynamic artists even in this short and very concentrated time. I want to eat and sleep art, somedays. I want to live it hard and live it well.

sf update: 1) this is what content feels like. 2) horchata is THE business. 3) what does it feel to drive that moment, experience it like its never happened before? 3.3) ain’t nothing like qpoc vulnerability as it makes discoveries. 4) transgender and crip ancestors be like, “you got this, anak.” 5) kilig = ecstatic. smitten.

—May 28, 2013—

during a break from writing, i’ve developed a new way to take gross medicine or say supplements like emergenC. i suggest to do a spoonful chaser of garlic chili pork belly & coconut rice from sripraphi. 1) it was delicious. 2) problem solved.

 

—May 23, 2013—

a newly written essay excerpt: “able-bodied supremacist spaces can be your meeting and your bedroom. spaces like this are invested in the alienation and destruction of the fierce unconventional crip. able-bodied privilege latches on to obsolete mechanisms of fear, love, sex, and support. from inherent ableism, abusive behaviors either in intimate partnerships or organizational infrastructure are valorized. the way crip and sick disabled are treated in ableist settings are informed by gender binaries and unrealistic expectations. a trans disabled man like myself is not a strong leader if he’s in not in the march and could never face abuse in the hands of an able-bodied femme cissexual person. a trans woman crip is seen as less effective if she is not at all the pivotal events. polluted with ableism and outdated gender tropes, our everyday ways of love and movement building are in devastation. until people realize this, people will continue to harm, abuse, and invisibilize transgender crip/disabled/sick people.”

 

 

—May 15, 2013—

1)
“I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry ‘home’ on my back.” — Gloria Anzaldúa.
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa September 26, 1942 – May 15, 2004. Thank you so much & Rest in Power.

2)
I chose an espresso frappe and writing in the sunlight over the shaming medical industry today. How blessed to even have that as an option for today.

 

 

—April 28, 2013—

 

Sarah Joseph Kurien & I at NYU Student Diversity‘s Ally Week. I mean, how cute are we? I think allies could be knocking on all  the doors just at the very view of this photo, right? Thanks to Celiany and LGBT Center at NYU for a great event. It was so awesome to see the ever hilarious and thoughtful, Kevin Nadal too!

 

 

 

—April 22, 2013—

Looking forward to performing for Princeton soon! I have had a weekend of sheer gluttony with chosen family where we our hearts away. I’ve spent quality time with my dog kid, written new poems for the spring. The train ride into Princeton was dreary, but brief. I freakin’ love naps on trains. Something about the vibration and the on-going shifts of land and sky that bring something tranquil that a subway train just doesn’t do. Food, check. Cuddles, check. Poems, checkity check. Hey, LGBT Center at Princeton are you ready for me? I’ll see you soon soon with new work!

 

—April 14, 2013—

“The thing is this: I knew writing was a tool before every cracked voice lodged in a break up, somber empty plate, pupils fading to harbor escape. Before I knew about puberty or protests, I took what little time that wasn’t shrouded in violence and savored it. i tried to scrape up a stanza, a poem, a thought. In that regard, there was the possibility of something to claw my way out to. If i couldn’t imagine a world that loved a poor kid or protected a queer boi who faced abuse, then the least I could do is make the ink run to grid my shaky maps. If people couldn’t show up, then verbs on a page had to be of company. This hasn’t changed. This is still who I am. I write about her smile. I write about the spoonfuls for dinner. I write about sharing inhales and exhales, about the moments when home has a true meaning. i’ve had to learn systemic isolation can carve something beyond a place wounded in silence.” (journal excerpt, 4/2013)

 

—April 10, 2013—

100 Trans Americans You Should Know

Hard days these days… honestly. I’m hella humbled and thankful to all for your support, posts, shouts and kindness for #trans100. To be included among such a list is a blessing. This work is on-going, longstanding and so many others are not included on this list. http://www.buzzfeed.com/saeedjones/100-amazing-trans-americans-you-should-know

Brilliant movers & shakers whose work has incited/informed/humbled our movements include— Che Gossett, Ryka, Ngoc Loan, Pauline Park, Charlie Solidum, Elliott Fukui, Miss Major Griffin-gracy, Ola Osaze, Ignacio G Rivera, Bamby, Nino D. Dorenzo, Teiji Maeda Okamoto, Janet Mock, Kortney Ryan Ziegler ♥

 

—March 26, 2013—

Above is me post-surgery #2! Thank goodness for pop songs, big slices of pumpkin pie, taxi cab rides with ease. I messed up an assistant’s shirt with “such a a tiny toe, but one of the most stubborn toes I’ve ever seen!” That sounds about right.

 

 

—March 21, 2013—

Above is me spittin’ some ish on some masculine type goodness and to be honest, some good critique for PATRIARCHAL RITES, a showcase curated by the acclaimed Philly poet, J. Mase III. It was an honor to perform at this series and for the supportive people at Pace University. Also, free pizza and critical reflections regarding masculinity should always be paired with one another. I think that liberation would be just a bit more… delicious.

 

 

—20 March 2013—

*interview: POOR Magazine Krip-Hop Nation

Trans Man of Color with a Disability, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Breaks It Down Poetically, Politically & Personally [PART 1] 

 

 

excerpt of interview:

KHN: In a rad magazine, Make/shift you explain your injustice with the workplace and worker’s comp. Can you share some highlights, what is new today and how that experience influence your activism today?

Kay Ulanday Barrett: I contributed to The Azolla Project edited by Stacey Milbern, Mia Mingus, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and it was one of the largescale public ways where I came out as someone receiving public assistance as well as where I explored the multiple affects of transphobia, queerphobia, racism, fatphobia, and ableism. I’m now more akin to realizing how all of my identities are pitted against one another. It seems that I received little support medically from my former job and I’d wager from the Worker’s Comp System (WCS), because I read hella queer and genderqueer. You can’t miss it. I’m gender non-conforming, kinda butch, hmmmm what is that? to people who have mainstream understandings of gender. The evaluators feel naturally inclined tomisgender me and use “she” pronouns when that isn’t how I identify myself. The doctors shame me by talking about how my body is fat or how I might not be healing or hire-able due to my physical attributes of short hair, no make up. I realize that so many of their interactions are based in heterosexism and a “fix it” mentality, that I must be an absolute puzzle to them. Once in an evaluation, a doctor laughed in my face after looking at my I.D. where I presented as femme and actually said, “Is that really you?! What happened?!” Often, this is how I start my all evaluations, already shamed for being who I am. The system quantifies and divvies up your body by assigning you a ratio that affects your compensation. Depending on how kind or thoughtful or say, queerphobic an evaluator might be, that impacts my financial sustenance. One aspect of my identity is used to shame me and reinforce ableism.

continue reading interview here

—11 March 2013—

Photo break for the this year’s Trans Justice Funding Project panel. Above  photographed in striking hipster fashion are Lara Brooks, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Jordan T Garcia, Bamby Salcedo, and Li’l Snoopy. We read, reveled, and had the absolute pleasure to review 100+ proposals from Transgender Justice work through out the United States. Make no mistake friends, Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming work in the the U.S. is bountiful and powerful. Anything said  that questions that is erasure. Be on the look out as we announce the 2013 Grantees. I’m trying my best to keep the secrets.

—March 5, 2013—

Excited to facilitate for Brown Boi Project with Van Bailey & Erica Woodland today. Dare i say it, but Providence are you ready for this?! We’re bringing some critical gender fresh up in there. Hey Brown University’s Sarah Doyle Women’s Center!

Here’s a run down of the events thusly as shown by a snappy hipster collage: