In spring of 2021, queer/disrupt, a UK-based media collective, sponsored an online talk by trans scholar and performance artist, Migueltzinta Solís, on his research into the history of queer motorcycle culture. From the start, Solís acknowledges that he is a bit of a rogue historian, someone who didn’t set out to mine the archives in search of his queer ancestry but who, nevertheless, had been drawn into this study by circumstance. His story begins on a fateful night in 2012, with a description that is undoubtedly familiar to other queers of my generation: Solís and a friend plan a night of “looking for hot guys in the Castro,” only to be let down by a bar scene dominated by “young corporate twinks.” Solís admits that the encounter they’d sought was mostly a romanticized projection of gay, urban life from a bygone era. “I feel like maybe in a way we were hoping to fall through some magic gay Narnia portal,” he explains, “into a Tom of Finland fantasy of leather daddies, AIDS-free barebacking and handlebar mustaches.” 

Despite the initial disappointment, a magic portal appears to open after all, when later that evening Solís walks into a vintage clothing store and finds a leather motorcycle jacket whose proportions are perfectly fitted to his own. A rip in the seam of a pocket produces a playing card inked with the moniker Solitaire, presumably the jacket’s previous owner. What follows is an odyssey through the history of queer motorcycle culture as Solís attempts to unearth the identity of this elusive figure. Solís presents the audience with a number of photographs from the archives of gay biker groups like the Satyrs and the Oedipus Motorcycle Club, where a partially obscured Solitaire lurks in the background, made distinguishable by a diminutive stature, a jacket emblazoned with the words Gay Villain on the back and the fact that, unlike the other club members, his ride was not a motorcycle but a customized bicycle made to resemble one. 

Curiosities like this one add intrigue as Solís attempts to piece together a narrative that might reveal more about the identity of his subject and his relationship to the other club members. Given the limitations that the bicycle imposed, how could Solitaire have realistically kept up on runs with the other bikers? Was his place on the margins of these social gatherings voluntary or was it an indication that some other aspect of his identity prevented his full integration into these groups? Other interviews and photographs included in the talk by Solís link Solitaire to a network of lesbian motorcyclists who were part of San Francisco’s Dykes on Bikes in the 1970s, calling the gender of this figure into question. Was Solitaire a gay man or a lesbian? Or, like Solís, someone whose gender identity compelled participation in both communities?

The whole project dissolves as Solís discovers photos of Solitaire from the early 1900s, making it impossible to organize a record of their life within a logical time sequence and raising questions about the authenticity of the sources Solís presents. Indeed, the final photographs he includes, the only ones that reveal Solitaire’s face, contain more noticeable evidence that they may be fabrications. Solitaire looks suspiciously like the young, Latinx transman the presenter describes himself to be, though the audience can’t be sure — he has remained off camera for the entirety of the presentation due to “technical issues.” 

However, Solís upholds the premise of his investigation through its conclusion, offering two possible theories for this disjuncture in his research: either Solitaire is a hoax, “a falsity manufactured by someone with a total disregard for historical accuracy and factuality,” or Solitaire “is a time traveler, likely using their bicycle as a time machine to queer-hop from run to march to protest to participate in key movements and specific queer social eras.”

In effect, Solís pulls off a card trick that allows both of these theories to stand. While the elements of fiction in his study have begun to show by the end of his talk, his commitment to this imagined character bring Solís and his audience through a historical journey with more texture than what could be experienced from an objective vantage point. In the after-talk, he describes how he staged pictures of himself in the outskirts of Alberta, running back and forth to the camera on a timer as he tried to capture images that would allow him to stitch a fabricated Solitaire seamlessly into the archives of gay motorcycle clubs. This use of spectacle, camp, and ephemera alongside his research is what he terms a “methodology of fandom,” which he employs to “get past the ‘security guards’ that ke[pt] me from my idols.” 

If we consider the frame he begins with, a contemporary queer figure in search of a subculture he feels affinity with, then it’s reasonable to conceive of his immersive performance as less of a farce and more of a way to resist the strictures of time and location, an interruption in the temporal order that, as Elizabeth Freeman writes, “propose[s] other possibilities for living in relation to indeterminately past, present and future others” (xxii). In his creation of Solitaire, Solís is able to gain access, to some degree, to the “specific forms of knowing, being, belonging and embodying” that are otherwise limited by “structural and visceral” experiences of the body (Freeman 11). Yes, he tampers with history, but his intent proposes an understanding of queerness that is in line with what José Esteban Muñoz calls an “ideality that can be distilled from the past…an educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” (1). 

Solís is quite deliberate about the gesture he is making, citing Freeman’s work in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, as well as Muñoz’s writing on queer futurity in Cruising Utopia as the theoretical underpinnings of this performance. This makes his project a particularly well-articulated example of instincts and techniques recurrent in the approaches that other trans artists and writers have taken to works that deal in some way with the past. Given the problems posed by systemic exclusion of trans people from most social spaces and public narratives, other disharmonies created by the gender-binary and even, I’d speculate, the historiographical chasm created by the devastation of the AIDS crisis, it’s not surprising that sequential time, documentation, and evidentiary process, in their most conventional forms, can’t bridge the gap between what could be true and what’s been represented. In other words, if we are to see ourselves in the past enough to understand how our experience has been shaped by it, a revision or re-envisioning may be necessary.

In this essay, I offer Solís’ work as context and introduction for how I’ve interpreted queer temporality —Its application and significance — in my reading of three contemporary trans poets: Ari Banias, TC Tolbert, and Jos Charles. For the remainder of this critical analysis, I’ll look at what Freeman describes as “textual moments of asynchrony, anachronism, anastrophe, belatedness, compression, delay, ellipsis, flashback” and other rhetorical devices employed to disrupt “homogenous” time within their poems (xxii). Drawing on the same theory that informs Solís’ project, I’ll explain how the poetics demonstrated by these writers serve to expand our reading of personal and collective histories and the potential for relationships, repair and belonging that would not otherwise exist.

Walking Into Their Us 

Ari Banias’s debut collection, Anybody, by its title suggests an expansive and transversal treatment of identity that resists the specificity of labels, time, and location, suggesting all the ways one could experience oneself and our contact with others. While the title’s implied erotics and reference to the body is significant to the poems that deal directly with aspects of Banias’s gender transition and queer sexuality, what reads as most central to this collection is its exploration of community, intimacy and connection that is or isn’t able to exist within the social or physical locations that the poems introduce. The primary tension of this work occurs when the universality hinted at in the title comes into conflict with the boundaries established by various histories and cultural norms — the “we” that might be gained or compromised as the poet attempts to find an expression that can hold the complexity of who he is.

In poems like, “The Men,” Banias approaches this tension as a trans speaker at the Fire Island Pines, known for its long tradition as a place where gay men could gather without fear of being outed or policed:

The Men

Fire Island Pines

It seems necessary to say I watch them.

It seems necessary: them. This distance

between us. How at times it can shrink, then grow

with the removal of clothing.

Proximity.

From here, it seems necessary to say I didn’t.

Join or belong but

there where mouth meet

crotch, I did

want to, I did. Walk along the paths,

part marsh, part dune,

exchange glances.

Someone said

how old are you but I didn’t

answer him. He’s still vivid

in only a cowboy hat

combat boots & trunks

Follow him:

grey t-shirt, baseball hat, blue eyes.

Shoulders burnt by unending noon

he places his hands on while

he works on him, a kindness.

Someone says take out your dick,

I want to see it.

I lose him on a forking path.

I’m standing some yards behind the men

who watch the men; we’re watching us

pose

ass-up on a blanket.

“A boy’s a man 

who can’t get hard.”

Prowl daily 

in only a towel.

Suppose I could, I can.

Find a way

Of walking into their us

the sounds of their pleasures. As though

it were an ocean.

Find a different

spot where we do our thing. We two

who are alike.

A few crouch to look but

we’re positioned just so

No one sees exactly,

though one could imagine

a hole is a hole is a hole is a hole—

fanning out to the nameless

late afternoon—

what isn’t there. Isn’t there

a sweetness to that. (31-33)

At the outset of the poem, Banias is more hesitating onlooker than participant in the cruising that takes place along the beach. “It seems necessary to say I watch them,” he writes, “It seems necessary: them” (31). Much like Solís attempting to find a foothold in a gay subculture that’s beyond his immediate reach, Banias confronts the distance between himself and the other men, which he describes as a starkly binary “I” and “them.” While his position as observer in this poem might be related to his inexperience, it’s also attributable to a heightened awareness of trans exclusion in cis-gay communities and the interpersonal tensions that persist in those circles. If his trans identity becomes apparent “with the removal of clothing” (31), he’s likely to feel his marginality even more.

The caution expressed here is easily validated by examples that exist outside of the poem as well as the statements directed at Banias in his narration of this scene. In these first few lines, however, I’m most interested in how his use of the word “seems” functions to disturb the notion of what might be “necessary,” implying that his assumptions hinge on perception and interpretation which could later be disproven. The need to stay at a distance, the anticipation of rejection, the acknowledgement of his outsiderness in this crowd “seems necessary” to the speaker — but what if it isn’t? This slight imprecision in his diction is a subtle gesture but one that adds a “potentially transformative charge” (Muñoz 25) and opens an interstitial space in which expectations could be rearranged.

Notice how he organizes his sentences and lineation in the next statement where a repetition of “seems” occurs: “From here, it seems necessary to say I didn’t. / Join or belong but // there where mouth meets / crotch, I did // want to, I did” (31). Banias splits these phrases so that a reader might see “I didn’t join or belong” and also “but…I did.” By deconstructing the syntax and giving the sentence a dual meaning, he is able to reposition himself in the scene, asserting a more active participation in the sexual rituals playing out there. 

Though it isn’t possible for both actions to occur simultaneously — Banias either joins or he doesn’t — we might appreciate how the lineation interrupts this statement so that the reader’s imagination is steered toward an image of his acceptance among these men, even as one might interpret the absence of such a possibility. Banias’s (dis)ordering of the present gives us a glimpse of what could occur, an impulse that’s in keeping with Muñoz’s suggestion that a queer rendering of time and location allows us to see beyond the limitations of the “logical real” in order to “enact new and better pleasures” (1). “We may never touch queerness,” writes Muñoz, “but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” By activating his desires and creating a new temporal map of the present, Banias makes such a horizon observable within the poem and claims, if only momentarily, the belonging and sexual freedom that a queer utopia promises.

Given the significance of Fire Island in the mythos of gay social life, this gesture could also be thought of as an act of queer hauntology, a way to “jam historical sequence,” much like Solís does, “by superimposing his own image as a spectator onto a scene already containing a trace of earlier spectators, with that trace in turn present only in the negative gaps and repetitions” (Freeman 13). In that way, trans men, whose counterparts may have previously been excluded or erased from the record of these spaces, “figuratively join a community of present and past-tense viewers” (13). 

As the poem unfolds, the dualities that Banias introduces in the opening stanzas allow for multiple interpretations for how a reader might understand what first appear to be hostilities directed at him. “Someone said how old are you but I didn’t answer him,” and “Someone says take out your dick, / I want to see it” and also, “‘A boy’s a man / who can’t get hard’” (31-32). For someone who is already vulnerable and conscious of their difference in this context, these statements sound threatening, and in this poem, where meaning is filtered through the point of view of the speaker, that “seems” to be the primary implication. Yet the hiccups in perception and temporal order that Banias has created casts enough doubt that a secondary reading is warranted. Since the poem withholds an explication of tone and even leaves open the possibility that parts of this dialogue aren’t directed at Banias, just overheard within the scene, it’s conceivable that these interactions, while louche, might just be part of the lexicon of the cruisy subculture that Banias has entered. Is this targeting? Or is it a form of erotic exchange that the speaker, understandably, does not yet have the confidence to contend with or embrace? The question of acceptance and belonging, as Banias has scripted it here, does double work by inviting the specter of a parallel or anticipatory reality, “an enclave in the future…not beset with feelings of nervousness and fear” (Muñoz 25).

The poem ends with movement toward that future. Banias and a trans lover find “a different spot” where they too can participate in public sex, “positioned just so // no one sees exactly, / though one could imagine // a hole is a hole is a hole is a hole— // what isn’t there. Isn’t there / a sweetness to that” (33). Enacting a similar strategy with the lineation as he does with the poem’s opening, Banias flips the dynamics of the scene so that he and his lover are now the center of a world they have recast through their creativity, involving others in a fantasy that hasn’t negated their transness or their affiliation with the cis men around them. Banias re-envisions, for himself and others, what inclusive or collective belonging could look like at the same time that he challenges gender constructs. His invocation of “holes” that could be “imagined” engages ideas of universality, facsimile, interchangeability and artifice, implying that there might be gaps in the justification for the rigid expectations that gender places on the physical body. 

The repetition on that line creates such a gap or run in the spatial fabric of the poem, what Freeman might term as an instance of “‘temporal drag,’ with all the associations that the word ‘drag’ has with retrogression, delay, and the pull of the past on the present” (62). The ‘drag’ of the past is felt in the echoing of  “what isn’t there,” an absence that extends beyond the immediacy of the body. Despite that, absence is transmuted into “a sweetness” through the fulfilled moment of pleasure. Citing Cesare Casarino, Freeman explains that such an exchange “would constitute the point at which desire folds back upon itself so as to go on producing other such points, other such moments. Pleasure is in the fold of desire: it is the immanent point of tangency between our bodies and the force of desire…It is only deep from within the folds of such temporality that one can begin to ask…what the body can do, what a revolutionary and liberated body might be” (55). 

Another poem in this collection, “Gay Bars,” stands out as a complement and contrast to “The Men” for how it departs from the use of narrative and deploys a different set of techniques to explore intergenerational queer lineage, putting Banias’s individual experience into a broader social context.

“Gay Bars” is a found poem created solely by cataloguing the names of gay bars, some of which are no longer in existence:

Gay Bars

| Best Friends Club | Hideaway | Chameleons | Just Us |

Somewhere in Time | There | The Edge | Nevermore 

| Someplace Else | The Other Place | Utopia | Cell Block |

The Other Side | My Sister’s Room | Crossroads | Sugar Shack

| Lion’s Den | Stage Door | Maneuvers | Questions |

Tramps | Legends | Brothers | The Flame

| One Love | After Dark | Heads Up | Panic | 

Buddies | Innuendo | In Between | Out of Bounds

| Backstreet | Masque | Wild Card | The Odds |

Club Detour | Vice Versa | Outskirts | Above and Beyond

| Uncle Elizabeth’s | Five Cent Decision | Chances R | The Park |

The Right Corner | Paradise Inn | Temptations | The Trapp

| Bambi’s Bottoms Up | Manhole | Charmers | Blendz |

Alias | Alibi’s | The Backdoor | Faces

| Touché | Temple | Nutbush | Club Try |

Monkey Business | The Closet | Hush on Congress | Why Not III

| Bubby’s and Sissy’s | Drama Club | Different Seasons | Oz |

The Eagle | SideKicks | A Man’s World | ‘Bout Time

| Equals | Exhale | Esquire | Exile |

R House | Ain’t Nobody’s Business | Heaven | Crazy Fox  (64-65)

I’m struck by the visual organization; the bar names that fall side by side and stretch four per line across the page, a more relational arrangement than if they’d been written as a list, each name isolated on its own line, one on top of the other. While these establishments are disconnected in time and geography, by organizing them the way that he does, Banias validates the important role that gay bars have historically played as hubs for gathering and communion, often providing the only sites where queer people could escape from repressive environments and be open with their desires. In his discussion of ghost theory, Muñoz notes that when histories and names are conjured through representations like this one, so are “networks of commonality and structures of feeling that link queers across different identity markers…as well as bodies separated along generational lines” (47). The blending of bar names that are currently in operation with ones that aren’t, squares with Muñoz’s notion of “ephemeral trace” (42) in cultural spaces and performances, the idea that even the temporal leaves its mark on the present. 

With this in mind, one could argue that Banias’s poem is less like reading a list and more like looking at a family tree, a “choreographed display of simultaneity effect[ing] a latitudinal, extensive set of belonging to one another” (Freeman 28). The glyph that serves as a partition between each name makes a nod to the ways in which the communities who are or were present in these bars might be cut off from one another — either by age, location or inter-community divisions related to race, gender or class —  but as a whole, the poem asserts queer family and lineage as an alternative to biological family, implying that these bars and their patrons, however forgotten, all have a filial relationship to one another. In his “production of a generational peoplehood,” Banias is able to make the necessity of these bars and the groups that congregated in them, “legible not only [to] themselves but also [to] the history thought of, in simplest terms, as the passage of time beyond a single life” (Freeman 21).

His latitudinal arrangement again evokes the horizon that is central to Muñoz’s concept of queerness as an ideality that is not yet here but that can be glimpsed through “the ornamental and the quotidian” (1). The names of the bars that Banias selects for inclusion in this poem adds to that temporal map of queer utopianism through their fantastical qualities. Names like “Hideaway,” “Above and Beyond,” “Heaven,” “Out of Bounds,” “In Between,” “Paradise Inn,” and “Oz” (64-65) signify the “potentiality imbued within an object, the ways it might represent a mode of feeling that was then not quite there but nonetheless an opening” (Muñoz 9). While these places could never guarantee full protection for their patrons, they were sites where a degree of liberation and fantasy could be achieved, if only fleetingly, at times when society policed and repressed queer sexuality. 

One might assume that the sentiment driving this piece is purely nostalgic and that Banias, like Solís, is directing his imaginative attention at gay bar culture in hopes of recreating an experience of the past that he wishes to be closer to. However, I’d posit that his thought process here is more critical than that. Banias’s focus on gay bars as symbolic object takes on meaning in light of the fact that, while trans masculine, trans feminine and non-binary community members have always been part of the gay bar scene and social milieu, they have also been and are still actively marginalized in those spaces, and in some instances, written out of their histories. If we consider representations of the gay bar in American poetry, we’re presented with plenty of examples that distill utopic depictions to interactions among cis men, where the only figure with a non-normative gender presentation is the lone “drag queen” who occupies an isolated and novel role; muse but not exactly kin, participant or the focus of sexual desire. This makes Banias’s claim to the gay bars in this poem slightly subversive; his role as the speaker in this poem serves to highlight how the “performance of synchrony” involved in representations of the family, as Freeman describes it, “may seem to consolidate collective life, but the coherence they provide is fragile” (28). 

A parallel could be made here between Banias’s understated and unobtrusive voice in this poem as a parallel to the image of Solitaire that Solís inserts into the background of gay motorcycle clubs, casting a shadow that makes us ask new questions about what we’re viewing, without desecrating the image itself. This poem values and celebrates the necessity of gay bar culture in queer life but Banias’s poetics ask a reader to consider where reality might fall short of the vision of these utopias and helping the reader, “see beyond its ‘what is’ to worlds of political possibility, of what ‘might be’” (Muñoz 38). 

I Wish You Had / Never

Between 2016-2019, the poet TC Tolbert published a series of poems that are framed as letters to himself, pre-transition. The “Dear Melissa” poems intentionally invoke Tolbert’s former name, what is sometimes referred to as a “dead name,” a choice that risks personal vulnerability, as well as community taboo, since most trans people don’t disclose the names we’re assigned at birth out of fear that it might destabilize the validity of our present identities.

In these poems, however, Tolbert uses his dead name as a site of unexplored potential.  “A posterior glance at different moments, objects, and spaces might offer us an anticipatory illumination of queerness (22),” writes Muñoz, who is particularly concerned with how a reparative or imaginative process of looking back can be achieved through various aesthetic modes. In Tolbert’s case, this posterior glance begins from the poetic gesture of address that he builds into the title of the “Dear Melissa” poems, what could be read as a “refusal of a certain kind of finitude” (Muñoz 65) involved with naming and identity. 

The personal history revisited in these poems is not a rosy one nor one that immediately centers optimism. For example, “Dear Melissa: [I wish you]” is a poem that occurs within the space of the single sentence, “I wish you had never been born,” a statement that can be understood in two ways: as a direct quote from Tolbert’s mother, spoken in reaction to their queer/trans identity and also the implied self-loathing that might have been felt by the poet as a result of this rejection:

Dear Melissa: [I Wish You]

I wish you (my mother once told me—mother of my child-

hood—even though water is water-weary—what is prayer if not quiet

who has made me—what hands you become when you touch—

who laid down on whose body—whose face and whose shoulders

worth shaking—what will I not hear when I look back

at you—who is not the mother of a daughter—who is not 

the mother of a man—we are right to be afraid of our bodies—wind

is carried by what is upright and still moves what has) had

(been buried deep enough in the ground to be called roots—

when will this be the world where you stop—whatever broke

into you was torn by the contact—a face wears a face it can see—

what is alive is unrecognizable—need it be—who is my mother,

mother—no one—who hasn’t killed herself by

growing into someone—I’m sorry you have) never been born.

Tolbert recasts this sentence in the poem by creating whole chains of new insertions at two different junctures with parentheses and em dashes, a mode similar to the one that Freeman describes in her analysis of lesbian experimental film as, “engaging in the temporal politics of deconstruction to arrive at a different modality of living historically, or putting the past into meaningful and transformative relationship with the present” (56).

Tolbert begins by foregrounding the conflict with his mother, “I wish you (my mother once told me—.” Though this poem operates within a framework of queer temporal logic, the impulse and intent here is not quite the same as it is in Solís’s work, which maintains a stronger attachment to the past. Instead, the conceit of this poem is less about “the desire for a fully present past, a restoration of bygone times” and more in line with Freeman’s notion of erotohistoriography, “which does not write the lost object into the present so much as encounter it already in the present, by treating the present itself as a hybrid (96).” 

Tolbert recreates the moment of harm in order to encounter Melissa and his mother from the perspective he can bring to it as an adult. The parentheses act to wall off the voice of the past and allow Tolbert’s current voice to enter the poem, like an incantation, almost every utterance between the em dashes beginning with a “who” or “what” that echoes through the poem, as though Tolbert is the specter of the future speaking to these figures in the past. That phrasing and the phonetic w sound is reminiscent of other moments in literature or film that we associate with haunting, particularly scenes where a reckoning is in process. The phrase, “mother of my childhood” adds to that hauntological relationship between speaker and subject, almost as though Tolbert is beckoning this memory of her out from under the shadows. 

We might expect that Tolbert’s aim here is retributive, but his ability to move in and out of present modes in this poem is used instead to re-establish closeness. He writes, “—who has made me—what hands you become when you touch— / who laid down on whose body—whose face and whose shoulders // worth shaking,” a poignant, erotic and devastating moment in which the poet claims the mother as his physical origin, as one and the same body, even as he recalls the violence done to him at her hands. The hurt and need for accountability is palpable in Tolbert’s language but the intimacy created by the imagery and his choice of where to break each utterance makes it impossible to interpret these lines as purely accusatory. The em dashes appear in the poem as literal connectors and allow for an associative progression that prevents these phrases from landing too forcefully. Instead of a stony silence or a hard stop between each one, the poem conveys the measured space of a breath or the pulse of a heartbeat.

Tolbert builds on this sense of repair in the next sequence, where he writes, “what will I not hear when I look back at you—who is not the mother of a daughter—who is not the mother of a man—we are right to be afraid of our bodies.” The interruptions, as well as the repeated negations serve as a refusal to re-internalize the abuse that was suffered in this instance. Tolbert’s voice is assertive but the tone he adopts is inclusive, questioning and possibly forgiving, especially when read in contrast to the harshness of the original statement. The “performative force of the gesture” of Tolbert’s new sentence, “interrupts straight time and the temporal strictures it enacts” (Muñoz 85), rewriting history from an empathetic stance without dismissing the impact of the original harm.

Whether a reconciliation is possible with his mother in real life, we can’t know, but in the poem at least, Tolbert enacts an approximate death and rebirth that results in a new outcome. What had “been buried deep enough in the ground to be called roots” emerges. What “is alive is unrecognizable” and “need it be” asks the poem. What is unrecognizable could be understood as Tolbert in his current presentation, but it could also be the former, wounded self, intervening in the situation with new agency, and/or the mother, who herself may have changed in intervening years, prompting Tolbert’s sense that healing might be possible.

Tolbert’s reworking of the original sentence has shifted the trauma bound up within it and the relationship to the mother who first spoke it, delivering on the aspirational “wish” for Melissa that the poem’s title signals on. By doing so, he calls into question the binary logic that trans people must disassociate entirely from the past in order to exist in the present and proposes that to arrive at wholeness, one may have to face the moments and the people who have caused them the most pain. 

 This assessment by Muñoz may also be applied here: “the refusal of total repudiation—a gestural enduring/supporting… shows us that relationality isn’t pretty, but the option of simply opting out of it, or describing it as something that has never been available to us, is imaginable only if one can frame queerness as a singular abstraction that can be subtracted and isolated from a larger social matrix (94).” Tolbert’s thoughtful consideration of the mother in this poem demonstrates attention to the larger social matrix of gender oppression. Embedded somewhere in Tolbert’s gesture is a consciousness that his mother may also have suffered, either from direct forms of gender-based violence or from social messaging that caused her fear and repudiation of Tolbert’s transition. So too is a belief about the agency each of us can gain by refusing the posture of victim and taking responsibility for our own healing. In many ways, the desire for relationship expressed through this poem is less about a need for total resolution with the mother herself, and more about the power each of us has to forge new relationships with the fraught dynamics of our past.

Tolbert ends the poem with: “who is my mother, / mother—no one—who hasn’t / killed herself by / growing into someone—I’m sorry / you have) never been born.” Again, the line breaks and em dashes here add complexity to what’s being said. The “mother” in this address could be an address to Tolbert’s actual mother, but it also welcomes the possibility of Melissa, Tolbert’s former identity, acting as a proxy, a mother figure to the person Tolbert is now and also a “no one,” the previously abusive mother whose voice has been transmuted to the extent that it no longer holds any charge in scenario.

These possible readings occur in one breath: all three can be true and those simultaneous truths aren’t in contradiction to one another. Melissa as “lost love object,” in an erotohistoriographic reading of the poem, “serves as the mean through which the subject reworks its originary erotic autonomy…creat[ing] a permeable self, capable of integrating the new (Freeman 118).” By positioning Melissa as the beloved in this poem and speaking to her through the past, Tolbert achieves a voice that is free of shame and capable of showing compassion– fractures between all three figures are mended. The conclusion of the poem, “you have never been born,” no longer threatens disavowal but suggests instead that poet has arrived at an actualized and secure identity in the present, one that has disentangled from the toxic messages he once internalized.

I With Mye Ppl Gathred

Jos Charles’s long poem, feeld, breaks from the more conventional poetics of Tolbert and Banias in its experimental style and its non-confessional, non-narrative discussion of trans experience, but advances an understanding of queer temporality that is consistent with many of the ideas present in these other works.

 For the purpose of this book, Charles crafts a language that challenges any expectations a reader may have based on the accepted rules of modern English. The words themselves are a blend of the archaic and contemporary. “Thing” becomes “thynge,” “these” becomes “thees” language that mimics a Beowulfian English but doesn’t appear interested in any kind of loyalty to the past. Charles uses spelling like “u r” for “you are” and “2” for “two,” weaving current day text-speak into her linguistics. Also present are words that don’t conform to one definition or another, “copse” could mean “cops” or “corpse,” “hiv” seems to indicate “hive” in some places but possibly “HIV” in others. Words like “hole” and “hemorrhage” which repeat throughout the book, take on a migrating and abstract way of speaking about genitalia, change, surgery, other physical or emotional wounds. 

The identity of Charles’s language is neither old or new but a hybrid that draws on both, just as cisgender, trans, or non-binary identities aren’t “new” but an expression of historical, contemporary and inventive understandings of gender that have evolved through various social contexts. Hers is a process that Muñoz describes as disidentification, “the way in which dominant signs and symbols, often ones that are toxic to minoritarian subjects can be reimagined through an engaged and animated mode of performance…a world-making project in which the limits of the here and now are transversed” (169). 

Charles’s work is less about finding belonging and reconciliation with a troubled past and more about introducing an alternative to it that scrambles the values of capitalism, patriarchy and related forms of structural oppression that exist at the root of how gender is policed and controlled. Rejecting a homonormative posture that prioritizes respectability, acceptance within the establishment and access to privilege over more expansive and inclusive freedoms, Charles’s project “turns to the fringe of political and cultural production to offset the tyranny of the homonormative. It is drawn to tastes, ideologies, and aesthetics that can only seem odd, strange, or indeed queer next to the muted strivings of the practical and normal desiring homosexual (Muñoz 26).”

While it’s a bit of a digression, I think it’s worth noting that feeld, published in 2018, was written during a key era in queer politics, just as marriage equality for LGBTQ people was being codified into law and the struggle for trans rights was finally gaining mainstream visibility. However, these gains often came at the cost of pushing the most vulnerable members of these communities further toward the margins. Trans scholar Francisco Galarte points to one such example that occurred during a reception for LGBTQ leaders hosted by President Obama in 2015. During Obama’s speech at the event, trans Latina activist Jennicet Gutiérrez, interrupted to criticize Obama for his administration’s treatment of LGBTQ immigrants in detention, a spontaneous call for accountability for his collusion with forms of violence he claimed to oppose. Obama responded by publicly admonishing Gutiérrez, who was ejected from the event amidst boos from other LGBTQ leaders. Galarte writes, 

In that moment, national identity congealed around the negation, silencing, and expulsion of Gutiérrez from the White House…Gutiérrez’s comportment, specifically her affective projection of outrage, interrupted the affective protocols of pride, gratitude, and respect that had cohered into an imagined homonormative nationalist affect. (2) 

The violence of that negation is unforgiveable, but Galarte notes that it also “brought to the national stage a mode of ‘belonging in difference’ for people who might recognize themselves and others through this kind of negation” (3), creating the space for continued agitation and the advancement of a vision for trans justice that could be shaped by those not deemed acceptable by dominant LGBTQ movements. 

feeld and its linguistics takes a clear position on the politics of its day, joining with those in the community who might be rendered unacceptable for their failure to conform to the respectability that was being shaped and articulated along lines of race, sexuality, gender and citizenship. “being tran is a unique kind off organe” (24), writes Charles and in feeld, she conveys that experientially, by creating a form of contact in which the reader must engage with a language that she defines. Not unlike Solís, Charles resists the pressure to make her identity legible and to commit instead to the conceit of the world she creates. While Solís’s performance might be best understood in the tradition of camp, “a mode of archiving, in that it…brings back dominant culture’s junk and displays the performer’s fierce attachment to it” (Freeman 68), Charles’s project operates from a premise that is more aligned with the Surrealists. Her poem is a kind of “think[ing] as if dreaming,” one that “seiz[es] the revolutionary energies of outmoded objects, juxtaposing them with the natural, mythic, or futuristic signs, making them touch one another, sensing the ways in which objects from different times or domains inadvertently repeat one another or exist in metonymic relationship” (125). To the impatient reader looking for an explanation of trans bodies, she asks that they spend time with the body created on the page, the instrument it becomes, the music it produces. 

By insisting on a language that has no utility outside of her own project, Charles withdraws from the modes of capitalist production that assigns something its value. The non-normative text and the self that she presents on the page is rendered valueless by its inexplicability and failure to deliver on a narrative that can be easily digested by a mainstream audience. This “planned obsolescence built into commodity-time” refuses a dominant order’s systems of violence and instead provides multiple historical contexts from which we can understand conventions, bodies and identities (Freeman 89).

A close reading of the poem reveals that this challenge to the dominant culture isn’t arrived at accidently but done with a consciousness that Charles makes explicit: “we knu a historie off feeld / r reckage off treees existing tot & securelie / the wharing masckulin economyes / the wite pryeing off eech berch tree” (11). Charles speaks to a physical and political landscape of destruction in which toxic masculinity, white supremacy and capitalism all play a role. She goes on to say, “i was ur perfeckt lil imperealist…i was hote shitt / amonge the downd crop off mare.” The entry of the “i” here puts an earlier version of the speaker directly in the landscape she remarks on. The (mis)spelling of imperialist emphasizes the word “real” contained within it, reflects the performance of a normalized identity, ostensibly a masculine one. Charles was “perfeckt,” “hote shitt,” implicated in the violence she describes but also rewarded for it. The word “mare,” as opposed to a more neutral, “horse,” genders this violence as something done specifically to that which is identified as feminine. This offers a possible explanation for why Charles isn’t satisfied with the movement from one gender to another within the current paradigm. Her writing advocates for radical forms of change that upend that system altogether. 

Despite offering a worldview that is more pessimistic on its surface, Charles ends on a vision that hints at a kind of hopefulness. “i with mye ppl gathred falln leaves…woake 2 see 1 plum leef hang / lik an eye strayng 2 boys & sirtan thynges / or a waye / 2 a plum / its spoyld tree” (61). These lines suggest a future that is communal and where there is potential for collecting the cast-off fragments of a broken system, the dead leaves of a “spoyld tree,” in order to reach the promise of a “plum.” The promise that Charles calls forth in this last image aligns with Muñoz’s understanding of queerness as a horizon that, “rescues and emboldens concepts such as freedom that have been withered by the touch of a neoliberal thought and gay assimilationist politics” (32). 

Charles’ anti-assimilationist politic and capitalist critique is important if we are to understand trans poetics as having relevance beyond discussions of gender and history as it pertains to LGBTQ identity, just as Muñoz understood his work to be bigger than the community and art from which he draws his examples. Through the lens of her work, we can get a sense of how the application of queer temporality intersects with other political or theoretical currents such as decolonial politics, Afrofuturism and movements for gender liberation that reject trans exclusionary frameworks. 

Conclusion

My enthusiasm for Solís’ performance, the poetics of these three writers and the radical potential in the theories put forward by Muñoz and Freeman are no doubt personal. As a trans man dealing with the social and political barriers posed by my own place in time and history, I too have often turned to art as a means to work through those problems. In fact, shortly before the publication of trans writer Lou Sullivan’s biography in 2017 and his diaries in 2019, I’d gone seeking more information about his life and considered writing more about him myself. Lou Sullivan became known during the 80s for his activism as someone who did not fit the expected transsexual profile because he was attracted to men and identified as gay. Despite the seeming lack of precedence for his personal identity or place in the gay community, Sullivan eventually pursued transition, established himself within San Francisco’s queer enclaves and documented, exuberantly and in great detail, his many sexual explorations with men and trans femmes. Lou Sullivan passed away from AIDS-related complications in 1991 when he was only thirty-nine. 

Previously, I might have denied the extent to which my fascination with Sullivan could be attributed to the isolation I’d felt as someone who’d similarly craved the attention and acceptance of gay (cis) men but, for many years, had been largely unsuccessful in actualizing the experiences I wanted. Some part of that had to do with outright rejection but the barriers were just as often a lack of courage and, perhaps, an inability to project the right social cues. I knew where I belonged but had no way of getting there, it seemed. Sullivan’s example as another trans man who’d been so certain in his desires and his affiliation with gay men put a door in front of me where no others had existed. That door opened first to my writing and the imaginative possibilities made available there. I didn’t write about Sullivan so much as to him in my poetry and the aspects of gay life I could be in conversation with, if not through actual contact, then through aesthetic experimentation. 

This, admittedly, did not always make for good writing but it allowed me to cross the divide I’d felt, enough to begin acting on my attractions. I decided that it was time for me to put myself in the story a bit more — to go have my own encounters with the culture I’d been studying. I did that and in doing so, discovered that whatever insight I’d gained from reading and writing allowed me to engage with new confidence, bringing me closer to the experience of camaraderie and sexual acceptance that I’d longed for. 

I share this because it’s my hope that readers, especially those active in the current political landscape, which is so influenced by narrative, might see how the application of trans poetics and a queer temporal logic could shift our thinking about problems that exist outside the realm of language. If we take seriously (and I do), CAConrad’s assertion that creativity is one of our vital organs, one that “improve[s] our ability to more deeply discern the world around us and make the constructive decisions needed in order to thrive in this world,” then the projects of trans creatives and thinkers shouldn’t be dismissed as having no relevance beyond our specific identities, nor should they be seen as merely rhetorical experiments. In practice, a trans poetic mode of creativity and world-building is about seeking the fissures in the seemingly impermeable realities of the body, institutions, and chronologies that govern our culture, and producing entirely new ideas from them. If we conceive of this instinct as an instructive form of direct action, a way of being with one’s vision in real time, then we can further appreciate the promise it holds for transcending existing systems and re-writing the histories that never served us, so that something else might become true.

Bibliography

Banias, Ari. “Gay Bars.” Anybody. W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. 64-65

Banias, Ari. “The Men.” Anybody. W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. 31-33

Charles, Jos. feeld. Milkweed Editions, 2018

Conrad, CA. “Soma(tic) MANIFESTO, http://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com/2017/06/somatic-manifesto.html

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Duke University Press, 2010.

Galarte, Franciso. Brown Trans Figurations: Rethinking Race, Gender and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies, University of Texas Press, 2021.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia, New York University Press, 2009.

Solís, Miguelzintza. The Gay Villain Rides Again: The History of a Queer Biker, queer/disrupt, April 16th, 2020. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypWlTtdDnvY

Tolbert, TC. “Dear Melissa [I wish you:],” Academy of American Poets, 2016

https://poets.org/poem/dear-melissa-i-wish-you