DEADLINES AND DIVINE

Eileen Myles

New York, November 2014

Dear Sam Shepard,

Things have really changed around here since when you were balling Patti Smith. I guess that’s ineptly ambitious of me to say since you guys actually had your thing in Chelsea not the East Village. If I am to believe Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids. I suppose I’m showing your ass, Sam and Patti’s too as a way to show mine. A moment ago I was walking along Houston Street darkly in the rain my dog lunging at the people moving away from Whole Foods with their goods and I thought “my dog keeps lunging at bags full of meat & cheese” and I didn’t so much think it, I thought about tweeting it. I walk in the dark with a gorgeous dog an aggressive pit bull named Honey and later I think: “My dog’s name is Honey and when I pull her away from jumping on people and say Honey—I think people think I’m mommying her and I feel emasculated.” I don’t truly think that. I think about tweeting that. I feel like you never felt emasculated Sam. Tonight I started writing to an imaginary Sam and suddenly he became you who I’ve never met. Where are you living now, Sam Shepard? I live in New York and have for forty years & often I think about you & people like yourself who lived here and then left to live in London & then elsewhere to live more obscurely. With a movie star. I often wanted to live more obscurely but when I do I am actually obscure or feel that way which is not what I had in mind. Dear Sam here’s the report on New York today. People right over there on Houston St. are buying food and today I was thinking while I was walking my dog I thought I will only go there once a month. That felt good. “There” is Whole Foods. There’s a more generic old age supermarket on Avenue A Key Food & I really like shopping there. I bet it was here when you were here. Were you ever here? I feel certain you lived in the east village in youthful poverty in the 60s. One thing about Key Food is that Paul Thek worked there at the end of his life bagging groceries. Seems really saintly. The thought of living obscurely in New York (and dying here too) is an oddly warm & beautiful thing but I am certain if I think “that” then what I am doing today is not living in New York obscurely. But honestly I am most interested in that part of my life in New York today. Always that’s the report. I go over the bridge at Delancey to the river with my dog. Next day I go over the bridge at Grand Street. I call my agent Emilie who lives over there and I propose I pick up that book. Hours later she calls back and says she can drop it off at the dry cleaner’s now or nowish and I text back and say great I will leave two infernos for you. I skulk into the dry cleaners hoping they do not despise me for leaving things there and having them picked up and having other things left and they do seem mildly annoyed. On the wall at the dry cleaners there used to be pictures of famous show business men. Musicians, guys in tuxes who have their tuxes mended & dry-cleaned here probably. Philip Glass’s picture is up there. I remember trying to get them to frame one of my book jackets. I gave them a book and they just sort of smiled at me sadly. I don’t try anymore. I took a cab over to The Swiss Institute for Hans Ulrich’s book party tonight & later on I hung out w Anna Bozicevic & Sophia La Fraga. Sophia is part of Hans’s 89 thing so at some point in the reading the whole room turned and looked at the wall immediately behind me & there was Sophia’s piece projected on the wall. It was very awkward to read that angle so I read my phone instead & sent messages out like a prisoner. Later I hung out all night at the party at Soho Grand with Anna & Sophia & I now pledge to read Sophia’s work more obscurely in the future. Mainly we were obsessed with Marina Abramovic at the party. With her & with getting food which kept arriving in tiny morsels all night. Finally large fierce sliders arrived & we wolfed those down, not Sophia who does not eat meat. I kept seeing Andrew Durbin all day, at McNally Jackson and finally culminating in his reading at the gallery & later at the party. Anna Bozicevic is Croatian & at one point she said something in Croatian to Marina & I think it wasn’t acknowledged. I felt Marina looking at me at another point so when I passed her I said hi and she looked through me. When I reported this I thought privately this might be how I relate to the world. I think it’s looking at me & then it looks through me. Later on we all wound up in a karaoke bar on Canal where Sophia got food & I said I’m going home now & did then I brought Honey down into the yard to pee did not continue writing this and did not watch Kelly Reichert movie in bed as I claimed I would when I was leaving but instead leaned into the light reading Emily Gould’s novel but not finishing it yet. Nothing has changed. Goodnight Sam.

Nicola Tyson

New York, November 2014

Dear Beavers,

I noted your arrival back in August, when you took down an Eastern Cottonwood that I’d planted seven years ago, a slender tree that had managed a magnificent growth spurt since surviving Hurricane Irene, righting itself—after being all but washed way—by adopting an elegant curve over the fast flowing shallows. It’s generous leaves would gently clap in the summer breezes, in self-congratulation and with the promise of a relatively fast ascent to at least seventy five feet. Now it was a pointed stump and I grieved. The water gradually slowed and gathered, more trees came down, and the landscape began gently flooding as your dam rose. Now, as I write this three months later, it’s at least four feet high, a sturdy, crescent-shaped wedge of sticks, logs and mud, strategically positioned by you within the imperceptibly descending topography of fields and woodland, through which the meandering Humpo Creek snakes to join the Walkill River. You beavers get called ‘industrious’ and ‘expert engineers’ and so on, due to your impressive—yet absurd-seeming—skill and hence our nervous projections. I mean why go to all that elaborate effort? You only eat foliage… why do you need to build a giant pond, indeed swamp? Other rodents get by without one. Plus, how do you know how to… and why do you know? Why any of it? Why Birds of Paradise for that matter? It doesn’t add up, beavers, and I don’t buy the so-called ‘scientific explanation’. Instead, I have decided to rejoice in your ‘pointless’ creativity… creativity unburdened by the oppressive demands of whatever-posterity and of course terminal capitalism. Your dam, knitted into the banks, water tight, save for a measured trickle from the base—thus allowing the creek to resume it’s character beyond—now holds back a colossal amount of water, already pregnant with possibilities, and not just for you and your offspring. As ‘a work’, it exhibits the perfect balance of nonchalant authority, playfulness, lawlessness and formal rigor and embodies the art experience that I crave. Oh beavers—transformers and masters of process—I surrender to this, your temporary apocalypse! Can I sing to you whilst you work?

Yours, Nicola

Andrew Durbin

New York, November 2014

Dear You,

Have you ever been to sothere.com? It’s a website-started in 1998-that hosts anonymously written letters to former lovers, friends, enemies, dead family members. The latest one, published sometime this month, begins: "You don’t understand why I would break up with you. I don’t think I do either." It’s that kind of thing. As a conceptual project, sothere.com is ambitious, acknowledging (and rehearsing the cliché) that life "never takes a break" and so the web site doesn’t either. They will continue to host your letters forever, a permanent receptacle for our great but ephemeral dramas. It’s disgusting, to revel in that emotional wreckage, but sometimes I’m so there. Last night I finally watched the new music video for Taylor Swift’s "Blank Space," a song about a relationship that’s either "gonna go on forever or gonna go down in flames." It’s totally unimaginative, mostly a recitation of hackneyed phrases. (At one point, Swift sings a line-"Got a long list of ex-lovers"-that sounds to me like "Got some Starbucks lovers.") Before the song played, an uncanny advertisement for a YouTube user and Elvis impersonator named DonAnthony11’s channel aired. In the ad, DonAnthony11, dressed as Elvis from his 1973 Aloha from Hawaii concert, sings "Can’t Help Falling In Love" on a green screen beach. "Blank Space" and "Can’t Help Falling In Love" are more or less the same song: upbeat speculations on the nature of complex love that thrives on ambiguity. They are similar to the sentiments you find on sothere.com, too. The false Elvis on the holographic beach brought me "so there," where I suppose you are not. You should come. Find me when you get here. xxAndrew

Lynne Tillman

New York, November 2014

Dear You,

The problem about writing you (I know I’ve been bad) is figuring out how to explain my situation. You’re right. It’s gotten out of hand. Every morning, I get up, have my tea, and plan to do X and Y, and tell myself I’m really going to focus, and then that clear sense of what to do starts slipping away and away. I doubt myself, I am full of doubts. Then I’m not sure what happens, proverbially, not sure where the day goes, and then it’s night. The days are so short now that happens even faster, and darkness feels like a rebuke to me, the night says, you didn’t get much done. I wish I were French or Spanish or Italian, not an American Calvinist. But it could be my dreams, they have such horrible stuff in them. Anxiety dreams. I feel disoriented. Do you feel that way, that’s there some other way to do it and you could, if you just could get on track. That there is a way, a track, and maybe it’s nearby, but it’s out of reach. I could do what I am meant to do, if I wasn’t disoriented. Maybe that’s the dream, and I am living it. Anyway, it feels good writing you, it always does. This isn’t good news, it’s not even that new, but letters aren’t for news, really. I miss you.

Love, Me

Johanna Fateman

New York, November 2014

Dear,

I'm at the salon today, at the front desk, just until Craig gets here at 4, so I'm writing to you in between the phone and sweeping hair. It's cold out all of a sudden. We had to turn the music up over the hissing radiator and I don’t want to go pick up the towels. The new thing here is the painting. Shaun and I got Sam McKinnis (maybe you met him at my birthday party?) to paint one of his boys with glow sticks for us. We wanted one to fit in the archway over the plaster and chicken wire wall that separates us from Walter's clock shop. Max in Ecstasy is beautiful. It's like a Velázquez—a serious face against deep brown—but gay and druggy. Max is shirtless with bendy neon rings around his neck. It’s a kind of memorial, maybe. Now the West Village is about a different kind of hedonism (luxury candles). Our lease is up next year and we looked at a bigger space just one block over, on Christopher Street, right between the Hangar—that bar—and a sex store. Perfect, right? Neither of those businesses will hold on much longer, I’m sure, but we would be so happy, even for just a year, with Seagull next to that shop window full of dildos! Unfortunately the space we saw is trashed. It took years to get the fortune-teller out, the broker told us. We would have to spend too much to renovate and we don’t want to ruin our lives again. Oh, well. . . Sturtevant and Gober will still be up when you get back (I’ll go again with you, and finish my Christmas shopping at the museum gift shop like my grandma!) but you'll miss Young Jean’s play Straight White Men. I went with Becca and JD. I don’t know what to say, I’m still thinking about it. YJ is such a genius. I mean, in our stupid moment of “shit girls say” and “first world problem” memes she comes out with this exquisite, compassionate, almost ethnographic portrait of bro culture. And it couldn’t be more different than the last thing she did. She takes real risks. Makes me think of that conversation we had standing outside Banana Republic that day. . . Anyway, Goldie is great. Totally grown up. She twerks :/ And I can’t wait for you to meet Cookie. She sleeps with me under the covers, stares into my eyes, follows me to the bathroom. Now I’m that person looking for tiny dog jackets online! I love you, miss you, can we skype sometime? Jo

Jennifer Krasinski

New York, December 2014

Hello my love,

I’ve lived in this city for a little over two years now, and one of my favorite things about New York is how much you can get up to when it feels like you’re doing very little. It’s one of the fun fallouts of living in the eye of the sturm und drang, I tell you.

A couple of weeks ago, Jason McBride camped out on my couch for a few nights while in town to conduct interviews for his forthcoming Kathy Acker biography. Every evening he would come home with new stories he’d collected and was puzzling over. I’ve never really thought about how strange it must be to piece together a portrait of someone from the odd shards their life left behind. What’s in a diary, or a letter, or a bit of gossip, or someone’s hazy (and sometimes, in Acker’s case, hazing) memories? I thought about this as Jason and I leafed through a photo album he’d been loaned of Acker’s family pictures, and there she was: a round-cheeked, bright-eyed wee baby. Strange, but no matter how long I looked at the photos, I couldn’t recognize her future face in any of them. It made me wonder how soon you can see a person’s destiny, and if destiny is still a thing to see.

(Aside: did you ever read Twyla Tharp’s self help book? You know I’m a glutton for that form of punishment. I’ll say only this: success—not to be confused with destiny—is, according to TT, all in a name. Do what you will with that sparkling gem).

For some reason I thought of you when I walked around 80WSE’s “Recycling Atlantis,” a sort of celebratory incantation for Jack Smith, where there were gorgeous slide projections of Himself lighting up all four walls of the show’s second room. Seeing him captured near the end of his life, all robes and glitter and nose, I remembered an artist once telling me that the only thing he ever liked about Smith was that “he was a lesson in creating something out of nothing.” Something out of nothing: the most difficult. Divining portals out of here and into an alien elsewhere. I’ve been trying to wrench my words our from under the world for so long now, and without any luck as of late. Long story short: I’m stuck. (See below).

I promise I’m not in a morbid mood, but more than Los Angeles, New York seems to teem with the dead—kept alive, if not necessarily well; preserved, if not always protected. Have you noticed? It’s a particular and sometimes uncomfortable charge to be here, now, connecting to an unfamiliar then. And yet Greer Lankton at Participant Inc., Elaine Sturtevant at MoMA, Klaus Lutz at The Kitchen, the Jack Smith and (soon) the Acker book twist time around so beautifully, and prove once again that you can’t count on youth to deliver the new.

So what am I reading? James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work. What am I re-reading? Inger Christensen’s Azorno. What am I working on? The book. What am I putting off? The book. What’s my obsession? Making something out of nothing. (See above). What’s spiking my boredom? Privilege in the guise of Realism. Who am I at war with? I’ll send the names under separate cover. Who do I love? You, as always, of course.
Jennifer

Francesca Lacatena

Houston, Texas, December 2014

Dear history,

I'm going to strip you bare today.

history-in-the-making history-to-be-made

history, essentially a creation – creation and destruction.

I have since long realized to be under the double imperative to think freely, and to think under the constraint of you. And I don't mind it after all.
Living within your western region, I could always touch two spheres, two matrices: a Judeo-Christian matrix and a Greek matrix.

Immortality, progress, future-as-the-place-of-hope. The immortality of the soul was a genial move: Christianity was able to metabolize pain... the whole christian culture actually managed to assume the maximum of negativity, which is pain, and turn it into something positive - christian iconography, in its entirety, is an iconography of salvific pain. Nature appears as the product of a will, the will of the God who created it. Nature is then consigned to the human kind. In the Genesis, we read - “you will dominate upon the fish of the waters, upon the birds of the sky, upon the animals of the earth”.
Man is at the pinnacle: the dominator. And there is a long theological preparation for the dominium of man on earth.

Before all of this even existed, the Greeks had two different words to call man: antropos and anèr. But they didn't use either. They always seemed to prefer the word mortal > protos, we can find it in Homer's poems, everywhere. Clearly, the Greeks took death quite seriously. To them nature is the immutable background that no god has ever made (Heraclitus). The universe isn't built for man. Quite contrarily, man is in the universe as a part of it and needs to adjust to it - “you'll be just if you adjust to the universal harmony” Plato says. Man does not dominate the whole.
Here in Houston since two days, everything constantly reminds me of this.

Philosophy, an activity as natural to me as the color of my eyes, is deeply historical – and not cumulative, like some dull scholars/teachers might think. As self-reflective activity of thought, philosophy entails that, ideally, any form of thought is obligatorily relevant for it; therefore also, for a philosopher, is obligatorily relevant what other philosophers have already thought. But self-reflectiveness means of course critique: a philosopher critical of past philosophers is exerting, so to speak, self-criticism (rightly or wrongly is another matter).

Among the creations in our greco-western history, there is one that we usually judge positively and take credit for: putting things into question, criticizing them, requiring a logon didonai....
We situate ourselves as critical actors in relation to what is, what could and should be, and even what has been. Reality possesses no privilege, neither philosophical nor normative; the past has no more value than the present, and the latter exists not as model but as material.
That's the way I see it.

In Greece, the philosopher was, during a long initial period, just as much a citizen as a philosopher.
Then everything somehow rolled down the hill, more and more precipitously, and the more I strip you... my dear history, the more I look through you... the more I come to the conclusion that Christianity is definitely responsible for the fall. Christianity, from its very inception, was the explicit creator of the spiritual, affective, and existential postures that will, for eighteen centuries and more, provide a basis for the sanctification of the powers-that-be. The dictum, "render unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's". Exploiting for its own ends the Greek philosophical instrumentarium, Christianity will furnish, for fifteen centuries, the conditions required for acceptance of the "real", such as it is.
It is the same universe – an essentially theological, apolitical, acritical universe – to which belong both Nietzsche, when he proclaims the "innocence of becoming", and Heidegger, when he presents history as Ereignis and Geschick, advent for Being and donation/destination of and through the latter.
Along this way, conflicts, contradictions, struggles among philosophers are ignored or covered up, and the whole history of philosophy is linearized so as to reach its destined result – the closure of metaphysics and its thinker, Heidegger. With Heidegger, all philosophers are reduced to the same.

Let us be done now with this ecclesiastical, academic, and literary respectuosity! Let us finally speak of syphilis in this family, of which half the members are clearly suffering in general paralysis.

I am here to strip you bare, history. Although, time is running short.
It seems to me that Socrates was the last urban philosopher. He discussed matters with all his fellow citizen in the agora. He had a life. He took part in three military expeditions, took up the supreme magistracy, and he was the epistates of the prytaneis (president of the Republic for a day) at perhaps the most tragic moment in the history of Athenian democracy: the day of the trial of the victorious generals of the battle of Arginusae, when, as president of the people's assembly, he braved the furious crowd and refused to initiate illegal proceedings against these generals. Similarly, a few years later he will refuse to obey the order of the Thirty Tyrants to arrest a citizen illegally.
His trial and conviction were a tragedy in the proper sense of the term.
Basically, Socrates's practices transgressed the limit of what, strictly speaking, a democracy could tolerate.

Plato, on the contrary, wanted to be above the city. He related to a tendency that began to take hold of philosophers during a certain phase of history – namely, the tendency to rationalize the real, that is, to legitimate it. Plato didn't serve as a citizen. He calumniated Athens to the most extreme degree, and thanks to his immense genius as a stage director, a rhetorician, a Sophist and a demagogue, he succeeded in imposing, for centuries to come, an image of the politicians of Athens – Themistocles and Pericles – as demagogues. He knowingly falsified history – and in this domain he is the first inventor of Stalinist methods. With Plato starts the Platonic torsion which has dominated, ever since, the history of philosophy – or at least, its mainstream.

Finally, in Greece, adoration of the fait accompli remains unknown and impossible as an attitude of the mind. We must move ahead to the Stoics to begin to find its first seeds.
The actual reality is that we, as thinking humans, belong to the trans-historical agora of reflection: where there are no authorities, no revelation, no general secretary, no fuehrer, and no Geschick des Seins; we belong to where different doxae are confronted and where everybody is entitled, at his own risks and perils, to express disagreement. Yet the system-building, reality-sacralizing, looking-down-upon-the-collectivity attitude remains, in various guises, the predominant one, with sometimes the most paradoxical outcomes. The main contribution of philosophy to the emancipatory movement during this whole period is to be found not so much in its content, but in its maintaining an open debate and a critical spirit.

The reflective belongs to the effective – and the effective can bear the reflective.
Is that too much?
No. I think you can handle it.

Francesca

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Ari Banias

Oakland, February 2015

Wilder,

Thank you for the drawing you sent in the mail (it looks to me like a dandy’s hat with thoughts rushing into it) and for the photocopied passage about Agnes Martin & the self in art, gendered values of assertion vs. quietude, and where we expect to see what’s deemed ‘political.’ Reading it improved my mood, which had been gloomy (and admittedly returned to a state of gloom again later), but that paragraph helped lift me briefly out of a despair I’d been living inside of with some irritating regularity. The kind of irritation that never quite naturalizes itself, which may be its best quality, how unwieldy yet somehow consistent it is, like counting on being the one guest in the large homemade costume at an overcrowded party in a small sleek NY apartment. Yesterday while sitting on my floor I began looking deeply into the living room rug, an old rug that’s new to me, and thought I’d really like to disappear into this rug’s dark blues and rusts and pinks, strange wobbly patterns that the more I look at them the more unsettlingly familiar they become, reflecting something both of this world and not, stiff flowering plants with geometric berries, robotic crabs wearing crowns, circuitry edged in spectral auras, coins on stems, spiders on crosses, pixilated like some crude early video game (only wool and warm and totally still), with four enormous blue ocean barges along its edge carting the rose-hued cargo of the soul – where to? Someplace. Terrific trees throughout laden with books and lamps and lumpy top hats, red bejeweled boots, droopy scepters, ghosts with bowtie eyes, wafer cookies on legs, alligator-faced roosters atop bronze trays…On either end of the rug a giant cat maestro presides (as ‘the man of the house’ might at the head of a dining table) levitating two plump cherry bombs, aimed at the four enormous ocean barges (carrying, remember, our souls!) which most of the time I don’t give consideration to and so step on daily. Yours, A

Gini Alhadeff

New York, February 2015

Dear Pati, after Negar gave me a deadline last night for Divine Deadlines this came: Deadlines really are divine. A book, or piece of writing, knows when it wants to be written or finished. I don’t write it, I am its employee. A deadline is writing’s uncanny knowledge of its own projected date of birth. Then there is the dead-line, the line on reaching which one will be dead. Being dead will be easier than being alive, probably, or writing, though dying, like finishing a story, can be complicated, requiring nerves of steel and a submission to the end of the story. I tell myself this when I can’t finish a story, or continue it—when I don’t have a deadline to keep me company. When I do have a deadline I am happy. The deadline impatiently waits for writing to be written. And if one goes beyond it without having met it the deadline recedes into the past performing a magic trick: it looms in the present—larger and larger. In meeting the deadline one can only do what is possible up to a minute before it comes. Or, as an aunt of mine used to say, quoting from Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers, “The most beautiful woman in the world can only give what she has.” You can only give a deadline what you have. I love a deadline. So thank you, Gini

"La plus belle femme au monde ne peut donner que ce qu’elle a."

Pamela Sneed
New York, February 2015

Beloved

“I know in the future you will build many walls against yourself.
These words are an attempt to reach over.
I hope you will take a moment to listen.”

Dear Pamela,

It is ironic that I draft this letter on Mother’s Day, reminding me of how you at such a young age in the absence of responsible adults have parented yourself, learned to tie shoes, climb, scale obstacles, and eventually to overcome them. Though painful, these experiences will make you fiercely independent and enable you to lead others. I want to tell you from this vantage point, though many times you will feel so – you are not alone. One day you are going to have a family and it will be much larger than a mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins. It will be full of people from many places, different backgrounds. You will be part of many movements, freedom struggles and history. It will be full of students because one day you will become a teacher. You will travel, the furthest place so far being Africa. You will go to a place in West Africa called Ghana, stand in the actual prisons, places where slaves were shipped to America and Caribbean, you will look over the Atlantic Ocean, see yourself and your people’s journey, learning what’s never been taught in school. You are from a strong people who survived and endured many hardships. For this reason and all you yourself will endure, you have earned every reason and right to be proud. Be proud.

I’m sure the thing that will make you most happy to know is that shoe stores are going to carry sizes 11, 12, and 13 – not just the so called dainty sizes 7 or 8 with styles and fashions that you would like to wear, platforms even high heels. You will have so many choices. You’re even going to find pants long enough to fit you and sleeves that come down to your wrists. You’ll never again be laughed at for wearing “high waters” or having mismatched fabric added to pant hems. You are going to be even taller than the 5ft10 you are now and grow to be 6ft 2 ½. Believe it or not people, boys and girls will not see your height and darkness as ugly, but beautiful. Wherever you travel you will be stared at in a good way. I want to tell you to keep reading, and expanding your mind. For all of the education you will have and places you will love and travel to, regardless of all the teachers you will have, the greatest lesson will be told to you from a character named Baby Suggs in a novel about slavery called Beloved by Toni Morrison. Baby Suggs, an elderly grandmother, slips away from master and holds a church for slaves in the woods, much like your own grandmother, a church lady.

“Finally she called the women to her ‘Cry,’ she told them – ‘for the living and the dead. Just cry’ – And without covering their eyes the women let loose.”

“Yonder they do not love your flesh – they despise it. They do not love your eyes they’d just as soon pluck them out. Nor do they love your skin or your back. Yonder they flay it. And oh my people they do not love your hands, they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands. Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, put them together, stroke them on you face ‘cause they do not love that either – You got to love it. You!”
Learn to love yourself Pamela, this is the greatest lesson and foundation for all else.
There are so many things you’ve yet to discover. One day you will find out that you love women. Don’t be afraid. No matter what community you belong to or discover, make your own choices. Stay independent. Don’t let anyone dictate to you who you love. You are free to love women, love men. The world is limited in this way, but again one day you will have choices.

I want to tell you in closing, I traveled to South Africa recently and I visited Robben Island. It was the prison where Nelson Mandela a great Black African leader was held. One day you will know his name, he will be of great influence to you and a lot of people. He is a Black man who fought valiantly for Black people to attain equal rights and freedom. In South Africa, I met so many people, Black, White, Colored, of every age, who dedicated their lives to fighting against Apartheid, a system of racial discrimination. And again, I want to tell you something that won’t be read in the history books: it was a revolution led not just by Black people and Mandela, but a revolution led by queers.
Keep Courage.

My great love,
Pamela