Content warning: identity-based and medical violence, trauma
An excerpt from a virtual reality teleplay that's been transformed into IRL blueprints for a QTBIPoC mental health respite center
+ A crip love letter/fantastical rendering of a first date indefinitely postponed by star-crossed metaphysical planes/grief therapy poem/requiemic prayer/Ancestral offering and litany of Future wishes,this piece facilitates an ongoing process of queer healing by experimenting with time travel and VR (“Visionary Reality,” remixed from Walidah Imarisha's “Visionary Fiction”).
Stacey Park Milbern's words and spirit make an appearance in the accessible font, . The excerpt of Tendr's fourth episode is included in a landscaped orientation as a Disability Justice praxis of defamiliarization, compelling [more abled/sighted] readers to shift the way they see/literally hold a copy of this writing.
“Let's go on an adventure.” // “The adventure . . . is home.”
These are the first and last lines of the opening scene of Tendr.
In an alternate Universe, Tendr is a queer VR dating app where folks can explore new people and places from the comfort of their own homes.
In an alternate timeline, Tendr was/is the animated television series that I was developing in 2018.
On this branching timeline's trajectory, I was only months away from coming out with Tendr's pilot alongside gender-affirming surgery and a legal name change.
In 2019 of this Earth's reality, I survived an identity-based violence that completely changed the way I see, hear, think, feel, move, breathe, organize, co-create (and most tragically for me, eat!). This assault on my bodymind put an undetermined hiatus on my physical gender transition and animating days, actualized fears of food/housing insecurity, and hurled me into a parallel healing journey with Tendr's disabled protagonists. With/through these characters, I coped with Western medicine's failures to accommodate bodies like ours, invented community-powered technologies that let us party with our friends again, and imagined worlds wherein Disability Justice was simply common sense in everyday culture. Along this path of “Visionary Fiction,”1 two major junctures of mythos and material reality bring me here:
- (1)
unearthing my Ancestral roots and finding that the Home/healing praxis I longed for had already been built by ancient Indigenous Corean gender-benders and
- (2)
meeting/loving Disability Justice activist, Stacey Park Milbern, whose home-building superpowers propel me into possible Futures.
Against the backdrop of José Esteban Muñoz's conceptualizations of the present as a quagmire-like prison to reject, I remain cautiously optimistic about the “potentiality and concrete possibility” of VR (rather, my utopian imaginings of how VR could work in Tendr) to create the aspirationally queer new worlds about which Muñoz theorizes by facilitating “a total transformation of your mental state about where you are.”2 In other words, VR can enable presence—often defined as the phenomenon of “being there” or “the feeling of transportation” to an immersive environment or embodiment—in a place that does not exist in the “real world” . . . or perhaps one that has yet to exist. In a sense, Visionary Fiction can storyboard the theory while VR can serve as a vehicle to prototype the praxis of the “then and there” of Queer Futurities. Remixing Imarisha's take on Visionary Fiction, I coin “Visionary Reality” as a tool to bridge the liminality of time between fiction and reality and the liminality of space between the virtual and visionary in this metamodern era, wherein Sci-Fi-levels of absurdity already characterize the here and now.
Whether inadvertently or with intentionality, [my] queer art, queer healing, and queer EXISTENCE=RESISTANCE both mediates and is a mechanism of consensual time travel. Especially when it comes to multiply marginalized identities—as a disabled/Mad/sick/ neurodivergent/deaf/crip person of color, low-income survivor, queer and trans intimacy labourer, or what have you—our fragmented histories and intergenerational inheritances of trauma make time move differently than for the ‘average’ person. Many of us are forced to grow up at an extremely young age, while our childhoods are stripped from us, such that there may be parts of us that remain innocent, selfish, curious, silly, and immature while our bodyminds play catch up. We are complex, multidimensional [human] beings—oftentimes too radically so—rendering us illegible by the systems/MIC that kill us while purporting to serve us. Mobilizing disidentification3 to defy [straight] time and [cisheteronormative/racist/ ableist] space[s], I wish to tell stories that speak truth to both the pain and the resilience—and all the nuances in between—of my People: we are time-travelers, and it is up to us to pass down, dream up, and reify logbooks of our journeys that are accurate and respectful of our pasts, reflective of both our magick and hurt we are capable of, as well as celebratory of our soon-to-come justice. Whether via media representations or interpersonal care in real-time/real-life human connections, our queer healing is possible when we witness and hold our wholeness, as we weave meaning into/across/throughout our spliced chronologies.
Amidst the chaos of COVID-19, I found myself lucky fighting tooth and nail to access a wheelchair-accessible living space on Ohlone Land—strolling distance from the birthplace of the disability rights movement. This is also where I met and grew a very gay connection with Disability Justice activist, Stacey Park Milbern. While I was not yet privy to the foreshadowing that Stacey would later be murdered by the same violent institution that took my legs and brain bits, I feel so much gratitude and heartsickness—like the nervous laughter that immediately follows surviving a Near Death Experience—that I got to live long enough to know Love.
Stacey understood me before I ever had to explain myself. Stacey taught me what it feels like to belong—as my first queer crip Corean friend, Elder, and now Ancestor; as my first Love. Through blurry eyes and heaving sobs, it feels impossible to put to words how profoundly beautiful and truly alchemical it is when your hero loves you back. À la Sailor Moon, Stacey teaches me queer healing not only by co-loving the Moon, transforming this crybaby into a healer, stopping time with just one unprecedented moment of feeling like
, and even visualizing possible futures via Pinterest boards of queer haircuts and chocolate-dipped fruits—but also by championing a kind of justice that can exist outside of self-replicating cycles of scarcity and semantics. Rather than reinculcating or making over what is already there, transformative justice requires a complete out-of-the-box reimagination of what could be. As restoring conditions to where they were prior to the injustice would actually be reinforcing the injustice itself, justice that is truly transformative must model that which does not exist. Because, in a way, many of our non-normative, expansive identities are believed to “not exist” according to the algorithmic hegemonic structures designed to exclude us, we hold the missing outside-the-box puzzle piece to engender what is to come; ergo, transformative justice flourishes on the queer healing process of owning all our parts, especially the parts we're trained to hate, hide, or morph into something more palatable. As we slip through the cracks between the words and systems that cannot contain us, it is here that we may find ourselves and find each other, instrumentalizing that which makes us different as a beacon and template to imagine a livable world and kinder futures.
Empowering me to ground my dreams in an accessible reality wherein joy for people like us IS possible, it is Stacey's love and guiding spirit that move me, to this day, to translate my screenplay into actual blueprints. In other words, Stacey showed me that the hopes of my fictional characters to establish a holistic QTBIPoC-affirming mental health respite center would actually be those of my Future self—and that we could make such a space possible in this Earth's reality! In both virtual and visionary realms, we can plant seeds to fill the liminal space between Queer Utopias and Queer Futurities with interdependent People Power, abundant critical connections, radical rest, and playtime for the inner children we never got to be.
When I first drafted Tendr's pilot in 2018, its genre began as somewhat of a queer anarcho-romance set in a dystopian sci-fi/fantasy, but I think its/our story has been evolving into more of a hopepunk speculative fiction piece, as this following reworked scene—aka crip love letter; fantastical rendering of the indefinitely postponed first date currently incarnate as Signal voice messages and daydreams; grief therapy poem; requiemic prayer; Ancestral offering; Future wishes—will illustrate the pillars of a possible physical place of healing that shall exist in a near and queer Reality.
We're almost [then-and-]there!
So without further ado,
I channel Stamen and Ghost in this sacred space today;
I conjure their Dream,
brought to life by and a Future me, and speak into existence:
our collective wishes for the crip respite center that we call “Activist Church”—
Notes
Co-editor of Octavia's Brood, Walidah Imarisha, created the term, “Visionary Fiction,” “to talk about fantastical writing that allows us to imagine new, just worlds . . . at the intersection of science fiction and social change.”
In the words of Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab.
“Disidentification” is what Muñoz calls the minoritarian survival strategies that work on/against dominant ideology to manage and negotiate historical trauma and systemic violence.