LGBTQ Youth of Color Video Making as Radical Curriculum: A Brother Mourning His Brother and a Theory in the Flesh

Abstract

This essay examines a video poem curriculum for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) students of color at a continuation school in Los Angeles, California. In this close reading of a video poem that draws from a larger research project of a community‐based learning curriculum, I have found that for LGBTQ students of color whose lives often intersect multiple oppressions, it is in the reflexive pedagogical work of “storying the self” (Goodson, 1998) where they develop a critical consciousness through an interrogation of their own bodies as they confront HIV, survival sex, and violence. The racially queered self/body, particularly in media work, becomes a rich representational tool used to facilitate reflection and praxical thinking about the multiple, often simultaneous experiences of Latino and African American LGBTQ students. It is in this pedagogical space where the urgency and necessity of a radical politic emerges from the analysis of intersection and intermeshment in student experiences, and where a “theory in the flesh” that is derived from youth bodies may literally save your own life.

Notes

Notes

1. The “Q” of LGBTQ—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer—is interchangeable with “questioning” and the term “queer.” These are terms which youth used interchangeably and reflected how students in this ethnography named themselves, or refused to self‐designate at all.

2. “Video poems” are 1–2 minute visual narratives of an autobiographical youth poem.

3. Maria Lugones has insisted that the term “intermeshment” offers a more nuanced description of intersectionality, one that emphasizes the interrelatedness and simultaneity of multiple forms of oppression. In a 2012 essay, Lugones writes, “Recently I have been looking at the need to rethink gender in a historical and global manner so that one could no longer separate gender, class, sexuality, and race but could not think of them as intersecting, either. The relation of intersection still requires conceptually separable entities, categories” (Milongueando Macha Homoerotics: Dancing the Tango, Torta Style, in Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands [edited by Arturo Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter Garcia], p. 51). In essence, we need new conceptual language to describe outside of this problem with the categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.

4. Greene, Ennett, and Ringwalt () define survival sex as the selling of sex to meet subsistence needs. It is an economic survival strategy linked to the circumstances and duration of an individual’s homelessness.

5. The 1970s–1990s were a very productive time for women of color writings with a small but growing infrastructure of women’s presses, journals, and bookstores to support a strong network of feminists of color writers. Other texts such as Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers by Barbara Christian (), Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa (), Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis (), Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (), Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (), and The Last Generation (), Asian Women United of California’s Making Waves: An Anthology by and About Asian American Women (), and Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (), among many others, provided a theoretical foundation from a feminist of color, often lesbian of color, perspective.

6. Women of color writers such as Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Chrystos, Audre Lorde, Barbara Christian, Doris Davenport, Cheryl Clarke, Maria Lugones, and many of the writers of Bridge, Combahee River Collective, and Haciendo Caras make lesbian identity and heterosexualism one of the central themes in the theorizing and writing of literature of U.S. Third World feminisms.

7. The Combahee River Collective is writing in response to the impunity of police and the media to the murder of women, particularly Black women, in the Boston area in 1979. It was a recognition that a Black feminist political analysis was required in understanding the racially gendered sexual politics of violence against women of color.

8. I am not saying that AIDS decreased through the 2000s, yet the public discourse (and funding) of safe sex education did after 9/11, and HIV infection rates have consistently been high among young Black and Latino youth through the mid 1990s to 2012. During my time working for a community youth HIV clinic, where we primarily tested and counseled, our numbers in 1998–2001 among LGBTQ street youth were between 24%–28% positive test results.

9. These statistics come from the CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, November 24, , pp. 849–853.

10. Although this work was developed and documented in 1996, this essay was prompted by the November 27, 2012 report by the CDC that young people between the ages of 13 and 24 in the United States account for more than a quarter of new HIV infections each year (26%) while 60% of these youth living with HIV are unaware they are infected.. The most‐affected youth are gay and bisexual men of color. Public schools must address these issues of the health and well‐being of LGBTQ youth of color in innovative HIV education curriculums and policies.

11. Continuation schools, dropout recovery programs or community day schools are often one‐teacher sites scattered throughout the district. These schools exist primarily to provide interim educational opportunities for K–12 students who have been expelled, are at high risk for dropping out, or have been referred by probation or a School Attendance Review Board. The goal of these credit recovery educational spaces is to provide a challenging academic curriculum, develop social skills, and return students back to traditional schools.

12. Participatory observations are primarily structured and semistructured interviews and field observations of students, teachers, and staff, and my research notes and teaching journal document my time as a teacher facilitating the video poem projects. Public observations are my own thick descriptions outside of school of the participants, where “public” is not the classroom or the video project setting but often the street, a park, public transportation, or a drop‐in center that was not the school site.

13. In the Greene, Ennett, and Ringwalt () study of youth staying in youth shelters, the study found that 28% of street youth reported having participated in survival sex. An earlier study of Los Angeles street youth reports that 43% of participants have a history of trading sex for food, money or shelter (Kipke, O'Connor, Palmer, & MacKenzie, ). Other reports assert that homeless LGBTQ youth were more likely to engage in sexual survival strategies than their heterosexual counterparts (Cochran, Sullivan, & Mays, )

14. This line is borrowed from Alice Walker’s essay “Saving the life that is your own: The importance of models in the artist’s life,” where the author “discovers” the work of Zora Neale Hurston in a footnote from an anthropological study of Black ritual.

15. This conversation happened during the question‐and‐answer session when Peter John Cord presented his final cut of the video.