“It is not mine to hold that you’re afraid of me and you think I am wrong because I exist. I have a right, me and my family, my chosen family, my friends, we have a right to live happy lives.”
-Tina Valentín Aguirre
“You think the queers are gonna go back into the closet? No child. Queers are gonna say fuck you, get off my dress.”
-Adela Vázquez
So Many Stars, collected and edited by Caro De Robertis, is the cosmology of trans lineage of color we desperately need right now. Trans history does not come easily accessible in our world. As trans people, we are deprived of our history. We don’t learn it in school, we don’t learn it at home (unless you’re lucky enough to grow up with parents who teach you about Martha and Sylvia). Trans lineage and history is mostly still existing tucked away in living rooms, at the kitchen table, in bathrooms, at the gay bar, on the streets. It lives inside our elders and in the oral histories we pass to each other whenever we kiki, en cualquier breteo.
So Many Stars gave me life in ways that I didn’t know I needed. This collection of oral histories by trans, nonbinary, genderqueer and two spirit people of color, this fabulous archive of incredible ways of existing and inhabiting the world beyond what we’ve been taught is possible, is a reclamation of our history. Our collective knowing. Traversing gender expansive childhoods, epic drag nights in forbidden mansions, AIDS, cross-dressing when it’s illegal, chosen family, exile, hormones through the black market. More importantly, it shows us how deeply trans people of color have loved—themselves and each other. This is a piece of us. Que nadie nos diga que no tenemos historia, que no venimos de ningún lado.
Full of humor and urgency and a complete mastery for storytelling, three pillars of transness—So Many Stars confirms we are fierce, gorgeous and endlessly resilient.
Julián Delgado Lopera: This book touches on so many elements dear to both of us. Everything about this project felt so close to my heart. Some of the people in it are part of my trans family. It’s also very Bay Area based. You and I have also known each other for a while, so I’d like for this to be more of a conversation. How was this project born?
Caro De Robertis: The project was born out of a fellowship I received from Baldwin for the Arts, founded by Jacqueline Woodson in collaboration with the Emerson Collective and Columbia University Center for Oral History. Jacqueline invited me to participate and create a collection of queer and trans BIPOC voices of the West Coast. Once it was under way, I was going into people’s kitchens and offices and living rooms, putting up my microphone, and listening to folks’ memories and insights. I was absolutely blown away not only by the power and beauty and dignity of people’s stories but also by the depth and richness of what they had to offer: an essential part of what should be our collective archive, and yet it’s missing. The original project was to create an audio archive that is now available online. But I am a novelist, and as I was seated in front of people, stunned by what I was hearing, I couldn’t help but start to imagine a book and really want to hear these voices on the page.
In this book, there are 20 narrators, and they are Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian. There’s transfeminine people, transmasculine people, trans men and women, people who identify as genderqueer, nonbinary, butch, genderfluid. That is a lot of different ways of knowing and being and existing. Even a wealth of 20 voices is not fully representative of trans BIPOC people, 20 is not enough, but it does open up the possibility of creating some range, and recognizing and celebrating how many different ways there are to be trans, to be gender noncomforming, to know yourself as a person of color, to walk the world with your whole authentic truth.
JDL: Structure plays an important role in this book. Why did you decide to divide the chapters by theme? Why those themes specifically?
Connecting with trans elders is enormously important.
CDR: At first, I thought I would create a chapter for each person as a sort of mini biography. Then I started reading more widely and took a very nerdy deep dive on the work of Svetlana Alexievich, who won a Nobel Prize in Literature for her oral histories. She really opened for me the possibility of building a broader narrative arc out of a collectivity of voices so the community is the protagonist. I then set out to do that, partly because I wanted there to be a broader narrative arc that people would be immersed in, that would be a satisfying, fulfilling read. Another reason is because I really would love for this book to be utilitarian. I want it to be useful to people. We have such a tremendous need to make transness visible in our own terms, to hear trans and gender nonconforming voices of color around themes of trans and gender liberation. This structure means that one person can look at it and say, oh there’s a whole chapter on activism and a whole chapter on how people respond to the AIDS crisis. Or I am a cis parent and I would like to know what it is like for kids to experience their gender in childhood, how they might navigate family, and how I might see my own possibilities as a parent trying to be supportive but not understanding everything. Or I am a young trans nonbinary person, here’s a chapter called “Thoughts for Younger Generations.”
JDL: I was thinking of the importance of trans lineage because most of the folks in the book are over 50. Trans lineage is something that I am constantly articulating for myself in a lot of the work that I do and something that is very relevant to this book.
CDR: Connecting with trans elders is enormously important. We live in a society in which there is a mainstream notion that transness and gender noncomforming are inventions of the young, and if it’s something that they just came up with, if it’s a fad, [then]it is easily dismissed. This hurts young people and erases the fact that trans people have always existed in every era of history, every culture and place in the world. The systemic silence of the archive has not allowed that to be visible. Our own lineage has become invisible to ourselves. In mainstream media, much representation of trans and nonbinary people is disproportionally white, and so for people of color, having that visibility of transness within our own racial and cultural and linguistic cosmologies and understandings is incredibly valuable and important.
Many trans people are not raised in trans households. We don’t automatically receive our cultural inheritance in our home and upbringing. Which is different from other cultural inheritances. I learned Uruguayan in my home growing up, but as a queer person with straight homophobic parents, I didn’t receive my queer culture as part of the way I was raised. I had to go out and find it.
JDL: I love what you’re saying. I always think about the spiritual connection in feeling a trans lineage, the big need to call on an ancestry. That has come very into focus with the passing of my trans mother, Adela Vázquez. We too have ancestors. We have a culture. A language. There’s something for me deeply spiritual to knowing there’s something so much larger than us holding us, especially during brutal times like this.
I’m amazed of the ways in which for so many trans people, the world shuts our light—institutionally, structurally, familialy—and how remarkable it is that we’re still here and we’re still trans. There’s that instinct of self-preservation and survival, that deep fierceness. Nelson D’Alerta, for instance, who’s my tía, creating drag shows in the middle of a homophobic dictatorship in Cuba, getting arrested and tortured for this. Adela Vázquez, also, coming from Cuba on a boat into a refugee camp in the middle of nowhere Arkansas and still managing to transition, be a San Francisco underground star, survive every single day walking down the street as a trans woman, and still be fierce and fabulous. I don’t want to romanticize it too much, because it is also problematic. But there’s something there.
CDR: One of the things that really struck me with these stories was the way the trauma often went alongside the joy. The transjoy, the incredible rocket fuel of gender euphoria and happiness that came from embracing one’s true gender, often came meshed with experiences of pain. Nelson being a perfect example. Putting on these shows to these packed houses of people hungry for these drag shows. You can see her descending from the staircase in these mansions at this Cuban beach, 17 years old, all glamorous, surrounded by her friends. And then she’s also getting arrested and tortured by the Cuban government because the drag shows are illegal at that time. The pain of that oppression is very clear. She described that vividly. And she equally described the beauty and power of those shows and how she wouldn’t trade those experiences for a second, even knowing the cost. It speaks for a really remarkable spirit.
These stories hopefully are for people who care about what it means to be fully human and alive, but they also have really great insights on what it means to live authentically, even when that means going against the status quo. The way the world is going, it’s something that everybody needs, and trans and gender queer people of color are experts at. We have a lot to offer there. These stories illustrate how our current lives are made possible by past acts of everyday blatant courage, and that means we can commit acts of everyday courage and thereby have a hand in shaping the future.
JDL: A lot of what folks are narrating are not only experiences relevant to trans people. The experience of having to deal with your body, of having imposed notions of what your body should look like, wanting to belong, wanting to be loved, wanting to be seen for who you are—we all people experience this. A lot of the stories are universal, they’re just being told through a trans experience.
CDR: That’s absolutely right. In the chapter “What Is Gender?” C. NJoube Dugas speaks to this when they say, “We’re living in an nonbinary world.” The world itself defies reductive categories of gender. If we look at the possibilities of liberation that gender expansive thinking offers, it offers a great deal for trans people and those who may not identify as trans, but who have felt their identity reduced. I’m constantly hearing from cis women and girls in my life and strangers at book events about how reductive and diminishing it can be to be treated like a woman/girl in society. And those of us assigned female at birth are no strangers to some of this. Gender liberation for trans people does catalyze gender liberation for everyone.
Gender liberation for trans people does catalyze gender liberation for everyone.
JDL: In plenty of conversations I’ve had as a queer historian, I’ve been asked about the need to have more transmasculine representation in the conversation around transness and trans history. I have had less access and knowledge of transmasculine elders—my direct ancestral lineage is mostly trans women—so it was such a joy for me to read so many transmasculine stories, to see myself in some of it, and not myself in some of it.
CDR: I really wanted to have a balanced representation. Transmasculinity has been less visible, and we have such a tremendous need to see ourselves. In terms of masculinity, it was so beautiful to hear people compare notes. In the chapter “Transitions”, I really appreciated how people’s understanding of masculinity built on each other and contradicted each other. There were a few transmasculine folks that shared very generously about their relationship to testosterone and to top surgery, as well as folks like C. NJoube Dugas, who shared about their decision not to do any medical transition, and another trans guy who is living completely as a man and chose not to use testosterone.
There’s also a discussion among the black transmasculine folks about transition. One of them says that a white trans guy who started passing came up to him and said, “Isn’t the privilege amazing?” And the narrator said, “If by privilege you mean being more likely to be shot on the street as a black man, then no, we’re having very different experiences.” There are very nuanced conversations between black transmasculine people of how they each experienced race in the process of transition. And there’s someone like Andres Ozuna, an immigrant trans guy, talking about how it took him time to figure out what kind of man he wanted to be. It was a hesitation for him because he didn’t want to repeat some of the behaviors that he sees in men that seem unkind. He’s like, I can create my own masculinity in alignment with myself. As we create those masculinities, those of us that identify as transmasculine make a contribution to cultural possibility for all masculine people, including cis men.
JDL: Exactly. I think trans guys and transmasculine people do a lot of work for cis men.
Something else that’s coming up is the role of chosen family. A lot of folks in the book had to leave their birth families or are estranged from them, which is a very common experience among trans people, including you and me. There’s extreme importance in this trans network created for many generations now, this chosen family that is very much part of trans culture of color. For instance, I had a trans mother, and I have trans tías and siblings and an entire house structure. We know that it is something we do for each other. We know we’re going to have to care for each other, even as unhealthy as they get, because they can also be very dysfunctional families.
CDR: Chosen families are real families with genuine bonding and depth and everything. Real families can have dysfunction and conflict and need for repair. Chosen families are one of the great innovations that queer and trans communities have given to the world. Born often out of a kind of brutality, whether a person is thrown out or disregarded or simply not seen by the people who are the original family, who should be the people loving and cherishing a person in their life.
Chosen families are real families with genuine bonding and depth and everything.
There is a whole chapter in this book called “Chosen Family.” The choice of chapters is born partly out of my own want to create a narrative arc but also partly out of what showed up in the interviews. For example, I thought AIDS activism would go in the chapter along all other forms of activism, but there was so much that this generation had done during the AIDS crisis that it insisted on becoming its own chapter. The same goes for art. I was going to put drag in the same chapter as all kinds of artistic expression, but there was so much richness about the art and power of drag that it insisted on becoming its own chapter. Chosen family also insisted on being a chapter, because there’s so much richness and beauty that people expressed. Whether it was being a trans mother or creating siblinghoods or ride or die friendships that carried people through. The story of Chino Scott-Chung being part of the sticky rice gang which looked at the first top surgery scars in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant together. Chino Scott-Chung had a best friend, Christopher Lee, who was the first person within lesbian community that asked Chino Scott-Chung to call him “he.” Christopher Lee transitioned and took his own life, and Chino Scott-Chung was his power of attorney. When he saw that California had insisted on putting an “F” on Christopher Lee’s death certificate even though he had changed all his paperwork, Chino Scott-Chung ended up fighting to change California State law. There’s such a range of ways that people have forged bonds in defiance of what society assumes is possible for us as trans people. We are overflowing with love because we know how important it is in our collective well being.
JDL: I feel chosen family are angels sent to us. We have this deep need for love and guidance. A lot of the times it’s chosen family, the gay bar, and nightlife—which also has its own chapter—where we learn our inheritance, our lineage, and how to be in the world as trans people. It is guidance on how to live in this body, how to survive and how to exist.
CDR: Yes, guidance. It is not just the validation and the love. Some people are lucky, their birth families might support them but not understand. You also need guidance from trans and queer culture. It’s about hearing possibilities through the example of how people have done it before. Throughout the book, I really feel these narrators are saying “Here’s some love, here’s some guidance. I’ll be part of your chosen family.” Some of them say it directly. Donna Personna says, “I’m everybody’s mother. I’ll be your mother too.”
JDL: That’s a great place to end, but I’m going to ask you one more question. Is there something else you learned listening to everybody that could be applicable today with the rise of fascism we’re experiencing?
CDR: Everything. I learned a tremendous amount creating this book, including parts of our collective history that I didn’t know. For example, I was amazed that I had lived my whole life as an open queer person and still didn’t know the extent to which trans women, especially trans women of color, were pressured to detransition during the AIDS crisis in order to access services, because in the 80s a lot of AIDS and HIV services were created for gay men and so a lot of trans women were told, “Come in as a gay man and we’ll get you this life saving treatment.” Sharyn Grayson and Adela Vázquez speak to what it was like to witness this horrifying and demeaning reality and then to spearhead services for their sisters, realizing, oh, no one is going to come rescue us except us. That’s an example of learning a piece of history.
On a deeper existential level, listening to these folks helped make me more possible inside of my own soul. And now that we are living in these brutal times, I’ve gone back to the last chapter of this book, “Visions for the Future”, when I’ve needed sustenance and a beacon to follow, when I have felt terrified and afraid and embattled by the volatility of our current reality.
One of the pieces I keep coming back to is Joan Benoit saying, “The right wing, this is their last hurrah, this is backlash. They know they are a dying breed, which is why they’re being as violent as they are.” And Adela Vázquez saying, “You think the queers are gonna go back into the closet? No child. Queers are gonna say fuck you, get off my dress.”
