covid 24 in progressive dystopia

pandemic year five emotion feelings, super expensive chokeholded pharm and ghosts of progressive utopia/ dystopias

what I feel about Pride month this year

Hi all,

Happy full ripe nervous weird late spring/ almost summer in the northern hemisphere. No pride during genocide. Our survival and beyond, all ways. (And- welcome to the ton of new subscribers I got last month, in particular from Kai Cheng Thom’s Substack.)

First- and I never put this first, but one of these events is today and I’d like to let people know about it- some self promotion:

I’m reading tonight (Monday June 3 2024) at a rescheduled launch of Disability Intimacy, edited by Alice Wong, alongside Alice and contributors Ellen Samuels and Nicole Schroeder. It’s at the Harvard Book Store, online, 6 PM ET, with ASL and CART, and the link to register is here, you can also reg and listen to the recording later if you can’t make it tonight. As a Worcester kid who would come into Cambridge to look at the other kinds of freaks and read stuff in the bookstores as a teen and hang out in the pit, it chuffs me that this is where we’re launching.

Second, I’m a part of the legendary I wanna be with you everywhere crew’s annual (thus far) summer solstice jam, June 21. IRL in NYC and URL like we do, in person space is at PS NY and online space is everywhere with internet. Cyree Jarelle Johnson and me will be co-hosting in a fun, Cyree and Leah Show talk show format.

Here’s some more about the event because I’m in love with this shit and us and watching how we do it gives me joy and life, and maybe could be a possibility to others:

I wanna be with you everywhere

Organized by Amalle Dublon, Jerron Herman, Carolyn Lazard, Park McArthur, Alice Sheppard, and Constantina Zavitsanos

IRL/In-Person

Performance Space New York is located on the corner of First Avenue and Ninth Street in the heart of New York City’s East Village.

150 First Avenue,
New York, NY 10009

Courtyard
June 21 | 4 – 10pm

Free with RSVP
 
URL/Virtually

Zoom
June 21 | 4 – 10pm

Free with RSVP
 
Performers: People Who Stutter Create (Jia Bin, Delicia Daniels,
JJJJJerome Ellis, Conor Foran, Kristel Kubart) and Crip Movement Lab (Kayla Hamilton with Elisabeth Motley).
 
Emcees: Dickie Hearts + Special Guest with online hosts Cyrée Jarelle Johnson + Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Johanna Hedva + NEVE, and Chella Man + Oliver Stabbe
 
I wanna be with you everywhere returns to your bedroom, hospital bed, backyard, kitchen table, living room, back room, no room, Zoom room, and Performance Space New York’s outdoor courtyard on Friday, June 21 from 4pm–8pm EST. The hang features Kayla Hamilton and Elisabeth Motley (Crip Movement Lab), Jia Bin, Delicia Daniels, JJJJJerome Ellis, Conor Foran, and Kristel Kubart (People Who Stutter Create). This hybrid-online pop-up solstice gathering is the third iteration of IWBWYE and this third time’s a real charm: we’re conjuring up an even chiller vibe than before.
 
On the solstice, I wanna be with you everywhere celebrates disabled activist, author, writer, editor, and community organizer, Alice Wong, for all the ways Wong has spread the wealth of k/crip love, knowledge, and resistance. Disability Visibility Project, the media platform Wong founded, is “an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture.” IWBWYE honors Alice Wong for her writing on Palestinian liberation as an urgent disability justice issue. Wong’s new anthology, Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire, is available now.
 
ASL interpretation (on stage and floating for conversation), CART captioning, Audio Description (AD), Image Description (ID), and creative sound description are all in our hybrid access ecologies in-person and online; Zoom hosts and Access Doulas will keep us together.
 
Planning to join in person at Performance Space New York? Many of us will be wearing masks with the understanding that not everyone can mask. Free food truck out front. ADA all gender bathrooms, an indoor Low Stim-Room (masks highly encouraged and provided), and a haptic platform (This is d/Deaf Priority seating but all are welcome).
 
Traveling to Performance Space from within NYC? Please fill out this form by June 19 for a free Lyft/Uber voucher or reimbursement from our travel fund made to bring you here. Or see you online where we have talk show vibes and cameo crushes, a lively monitored chat that we break to read out, and break out rooms for smaller hangs and quiet space.
 
Attendance online and in person is free with RSVP.
 
IWBWYE is a celebration of nonlocality, roaming, peripatetic (traveling) passions. It’s a stranded, stuck, slowed, stop-time love scene. 2024’s Summer Solstice launches our upcoming K/Crip School pilot with deepened invocations from kin and collectives. Our study is the get together. There won’t really be an end as this is actually just the beginning (again), third round around, encore before—in continual rehearsal.
 
Our General Access page has info on access provisions in the URL space + IRL space, our audience travel fund for those who reside locally, how to make general access inquiries, plus so much more information about the event.”

edited to add after I hit send yesterday: I have two poems in this horny porny latest issue of Foglifter, get it at link. I am in general surly about literary journals but was pleasantly surprised by liking the writing I found in here.
 
 now to the writing- which I’m sharing with slight trepidation because I’m still on the mend and worried it’ll seem navel gazy or two long, but am sharing in the spirit of sick imperfection and documentation.

I went to Oakland for the first time in four years and all I got was this shitty variant: a particular disabled grief feels

I got COVID- for the first time with a hard confirm - two weeks ago. I am in the “novid” (never had COVID) boat of mostly disabled shielders who managed to mostly avoid getting COVID so far. I was in a liminality. Last September, I felt unwell after hanging out with a friend outside who had tested negative before our hangout and pos 2 days later, had one indeterminate PCR and a bevy of negative rapids and one scammed free negative NAAT. My antibody test six weeks later was positive so I treated myself like I had presumptively popped my COVID cherry. But I still hadn;t gotten much sicker that my usual flares, so I stayed unsure.

This was different. Someone at the work retreat (where there were tests and air purifiers) texted sorry, they just tested positive. I went and got the last free PCR in Oakland because of an Asian community health center whose origin story is from 1960s Chinese communism and radical health movements. The next day not only was Alameda County Health texting and emailing me telling me to put a mask on and stay inside, but two hard lines popped on my morning rapid right away. None of that squinting and texting friends “is this a faint line?” just, bam, total confirmed positivity.

Nobody talks about the feelings of getting COVID in year four. Nobody talks about the ghosts in the machine of early COVID reality memories popping up. No one talks about the emotions that come with “COVID 24.” OK maybe not nobody, but not enough.

My feelings though: I was furious. I was mad as shit that I finally got it. I was full of rage at the wholesale abandonment of almost all testing and public health as this brand new FLIRT variant got person after person sick and there was barely a blip of news about it and hospitals weren’t even required to report COVID anymore as of May 1. I was enraged at all the gaslighting - that my PCP took a week to call me back and didn’t even ask how I was doing, at people being surprised I was “still sick” after a week. I felt like total shit that I got a loved one who is high risk sick before I knew, and that I put other friends at risk who were high risk disabled Black and brown people because I was testing negative and following my usual protocols and I thought we were ok.

I was spit nails mad that, on my first trip back to the Bay in four years, because all my friends are disabled and many of them are higher risk than me, it meant that on a rare crip trip, I couldn’t see some of them, even with masks, because the risk of getting them sick and/or killing them was too high. Not just to them- but because of the web of crip interdependence or whatever, there were friends who were other friends’ first responder if they had to go to the ER, so they couldn’t get sick because it would put other friend at risk. Or their kid is disabled and has a port so they couldn’t risk seeing me because if they got sick their kid would also get sick.

The web of disabled relationship goes both ways. Saves us, lifts us. And when we keep each other safe, we can’t see each other. Again.

I was lying there on my borrowed sick iso bed, in memories of year 1 of COVID. The mentality of: we just have to isolate and survive as disabled/ high risk people, to get to the point where it’s gone. We’ll stay inside as much as possible for a year or two. x to get to the point when vaccines arrive and they make it gone. Or when there’s something like PrEp or protease for COVID and it’s “manageable” ( if you can get the drugs.) Our work is to survive for a future.

I made it to that future, sort of. And it was bittersweet. Bitter and thankful and mindfuck.

I had just enough room on a credit card to pay $1420 with a GoodRx coupon for Paxlovid when my insurance said I was out of network because I was out of state and they wouldn’t pay for it and the government stopped paying for this lifesaving medication months ago. The pharmacy techs couldn’t change my categorization as “cash pay” in the computer no matter how hard they tried, so the nauseatingly named PAXCESS BY PFIZER “zero co-pay!” program didn’t work. I had the tech dystopia of “pay $33 to chat with a Walgreens medical staff to see if Paxlovid is right for you!”:

I had friends sending me NIH studies about metformin as a possible long COVID preventative and a friend who put a mask on and brought me his extra stash. I had a bevy of supplements and herbs. I had a safe place to isolate for free in friends’ pre-gentro house where they’ve lived for over a decade . I had rapids for free from the library in my suitcase, and the ability to buy more. I had friends and loves who checked in, dropped off food and sent money. I had some friends who were willing to put on an N95 and hang out outside with me in the park from a distance so we could see each other after four years.

I had rage at, this is where we are.

I had rage at my opportunity for us to hug each other being stolen from us.

I had a good Paxlovid outcome. The second day on the pills, I texted a friend, it’s wild I’m lying here and it’s like I can feel this shit undoing all the enzymes that are the building blocks of COVID in my body. I could feel my viral load dropping so fast. They said jeez yr real cyberpunk I said yeah, biohacking my body with scammed pharm and a friend’s off label meds. Crip is cyberpunk OG.

Four days after the first solid double line, I tested negative in time to put on an N95 and get on my scheduled 9 AM plane home. And I had whiplash. Four day rollercoaster within ablist racial capitalism.

I went from standing in the Walgreens feeling my fever rising like a freight train barrelling up my body, that feeling of, I’m getting really fucking sick as I stand here to, four days later, feeling “okay.” I’m not complaining, it’s far better than the alternative.

But it’s wild, feeling the freight train of expensive chokeholded big pharma miracle drug arresting the worst outcome- but you are still really sick and potentially forever changed. Not “oh, ho hum, that’s over, no big deal, back to work!” But the crip real of waiting to see what the long term ripples are, whether I will develop light sensitivity or have a mini stroke or get so fucking tired for years or the rest of my life. Feeling the outside world pressure of, you’re better because you’re testing negative, get back to work, and needing to push back with the crip reality of, I’m still really sick, I’m still healing, I’m still needing to hold the crip slower time of naps, breaks, only two hours at a sit down party not four.

Porch hanging with one friend the week I got back, I murmurred no long Covid no long Covid no long Covid. They asked, why are you doing that? I said, because I basically already had it in my early 20s when I have ME/CFIDS. I had the sleeping for 17 hours a day and waking up exhausted. I had the crawling to the bathroom. I had the one hour of energy a day. I had the difficulty thinking. I know how scary it is and how hard it was to survive.

I recovered. I live a sick life where I can work. My other friend said, if your brain changed it would be ok and I was like I know it would be in the ultimate sense and I could figure things out, but I also need my brain to survive this world.

And the thing is: I know how to be sick. I’ve been sick for 27 years. I’m a chronic illness veteran. I understand the surrender. The relax into, all I can do is sleep and accept, and hopefully get well. I know how to listen to my damn body. Not the standard way, but the rebel unintellgible way, the way that says, refuse. I did it with little resources and I do it now with more, and more years. When people exclaim, wow that covid recovery, I got winded walking down the block! I nod but I also note that getting winded walking down the block is new to them.

And; I am sick of knowing how to be sick. Just because I am good at it, have cripple skill, doesn’t mean I like it.

Finally, I have survivor’s guilt. Because I have friends who didn’t make it to the not-cure. I have friends who got it in wave one and it’s not all of what killed them but it sure sped it up. I have friends of friends who died early, or right before the vaccine. Why did I make it and they didn’t.

And I have friends who are lying in a dark room right now, not moving, sipping Ensure and texting once in a great while. I want to bring one of their words into this missive.

“Don’t forget about us,” my friend Amber Vora texted me. They wrote:

It feels like there's the healthy able-bodied planet and then there's the sick and disabled planet and then there's the severely disabled planet... And people from the healthier planets don't want to visit the others. I used to live on the middle planet and now I live on the farthest one and even other sick and disabled people don't want to visit. Meaning, it seems like they're scared of or just repelled by my experience, like it's too severe, it's too awful, it's too scary, or they just have no idea how to engage because it's so different from their experience, so they just don't engage... A lot like how people from the able-bodied planet treat people from The Middle planet. My planet is too close to death I think, and that's why people stay away. It's hard because we assume that people from the middle planet, who have some experience with sickness and disability, will make the trip..

A few do..more than from the healthy planet for sure.

I'm lucky to have two friends who are in almost daily contact with me, not surprisingly both have very severe illnesses that have at times brought them close to death, although never have they been as limited for such a prolonged time. I also have one healthy, witchy mindfulness therapisty friend who stays in touch and she's a gem.

It's a hard place to live because sometimes it's also self-limiting, there are weeks when I can't use my phone at all and I have to limit my speaking to two word phrases and as few of them as possible and even having somebody in the same room makes me feel ill.

It's a strange place to live.

I mostly just want people to think about the sickest people who are the most isolated. The thing is there are tens of thousands of people like me hidden away in dark rooms. Very severe me/cfs. Ron Davis, a top researcher for severe mecfs, says that it's like the severe me/cfs patients are the day before death, but they keep on living. And it's kind of true. We're suspended in this bizarre world between life and death or sometimes we can't even communicate or eat or do anything but lie and be aware

Witness these words. Remember. Stretch towards. This is the future that is disabled. This is our work to not be separated from each other. In a time that is dissapearing many of us, where many of the rest of us fear that we will be dissapeared, to continue to reach.

Naming the Lost is doing import memory work remembering the COVID dead. So is Millions Missing and the Long COVID Justice Project. Peep their work at the links. You can check out Naming the Lost’s Big Slow Majestic Covid Memorial, which drew on some lines from my work, here.

How do you do memory work?

This writing isn’t meant to be a circle jerk or naval gaze even though I worry it’s coming off that way. But a documentation of these feelings at this moment in both personal and collective time. Because change comes out of naming the feels, and figuring out what actions can come from them.

After I got home, in my bed, I wondered why I didn’t just reach around the spit guard and grab the meds and run the fuck out of the Walgreens. What would happen if we all did.

co packaged for oral use.

a brief disabled TV review sidenote: watching POSE while in COVID quar

I’m nothing if not a 90s queer heroin-town child of AIDS and so of course I started rewatching POSE on the plane home and kept it going as I recuperated. There’s a lot of ways to watch that series, one that pops out is watching HIV+ characters travel through the treatment options and medical moment of having HIV or AIDS of the 80s, 90s and beyond. Watching folks game their bodies, try different treatments, take their vitamins and Chinese herbs, take AZT, go off when the toxicity fells them, do shit that might or might not make sense to others. Make it to protease or die before protease, make it to undetectable, are still sick even if they are living their lives.

POSE is a disabled trans Black show. The scenes of characters navigating the hospital, taking their supplements and Chinese herbs in the morning and schooling a younger, newly poz person in these ways, slowly cleaning the house or working while sick and moving slow and underwater, surviving improbably to an elderhood, sharing info about some med that the doctors don’t know about but they can get off label, medical activism and public grief. Strong choice of crip TV for my recovery, I was like, maybe I need to not watch Pray Tell die after he gives Ricky his meds right at this moment. But maybe I do.

ghosts of progressive utopia/dystopias

I had whiplash too from visiting a place that used to be home a decade ago, that I hadn’t seen since right when COVID was starting. I lived in Oakland for almost a decade from 2007-2015. It was the place I moved to after leaving the U.S. when I was 22 and staying away for a decade. My last time in Oakland was January 2020, our first stop on Beyond Survival book tour (of what would be only three stops in person before we went into lockdown.) It was a month since I’d first gotten the news my father had cancer and the last time I would see Stacey alive.

That visit, I saw only a small number of friends. I spent a lot of time at the Berkeley marina, sitting on the pier looking at the water. Thinking, if the next year was going to be all about parental grief and death, I needed to live someplace beautiful enough to hold it. I thought the year would be about losing my parents, and I thought that come June, I and my partner at the time might move to the Bay and I would pick up where I’d left off six years prior when I left- kink, organizing, flowers, joy. I in no way anticipated what that year and years after would bring- global pandemic transformations that made it so I wouldn’t return for almost half a decade.

I used to not think about getting on planes. I did it all the time. I identified as a traveller, not in the hippie globetrotter way, but as a disability justice strategy. I was ambulatory, a walkie/limpie, a privilege and body experience not all my comrades had, so we made a strategy that I could be part of the front guard: get on planes and traines to go to places to speak and teach and recruit, sometimes solo, sometimes with them on Skype. I never stopped feeling what a privilege it was. Even on the shittiest multi stop red eye planes, it has always been a ridiculous miracle to me that people pay my airfare to perform some poetry or speak or teach. I know what it is to not leave a place for years, maybe decades because you are sick and don’t have money. To inhabit your bed, your backstoop, your neighborhood but not further. I know the strengths of staying in one place. And I also appreciated the fuck out of the opportunity to tour, be a road warrior, go all over.

COVID grounded all of us and then some of us more than others. I travel more than many of my friends and comrades, I wear my N95s and trust in the plane HEPAs a few times a year. But I stopped doing most in person events, and I don’t fly casually or multiple times a month anymore. I drive within the Northeast. I have respect for the impact flying has on my body. I stay steady and I write more steadily and with less burnout than I did for years, but I see long distance friends much less.

Coming out into SFO four years after my last visit, I step out into a tech fascist/eugenicist aesthetic and reality. The airport somehow got reno’d in the last four years and it feels like an IPhone 40 turned on its side. Everything is clean, white, austere. Six kinds of sanitized “San Francisco” style ethnic restaurants you order via touchscreen not people. It’s too quiet. The baggage claim has been redesigned so each carousel has an Escher like three tubes spitting out luggage that makes me dizzy.

Outside I breathe in and touch tears, because it’s the same smell. Diesel, weed, sunblock, saltwater redwood. Sky always blue, sun too bright, always a little too cold, no humidity whatsoever or the wrong kind, no seasons so the days pass the same. A regular cab to North Oakland is $150, Lyft is $70. I get in and roll down my window, stick my head out, cinematic. The prodigal hag returns. Feel comforted by this trip I’ve taken a thousand times, back to when I moved here, back to the US, almost twenty years ago. It’s still industrial south San Francisco, but there are differences. Three upmarket hotels in a row for tech workers who want to fly out early- Sofitel, A Loft, another. Billboards advertising safer AI strategies and new code.

Tech kicked me out of the Bay along with most of the community that was my community. In 2012 our collective house got illegally evicted by our landlords (who wanted to move in with us) and all of a sudden I couldn’t find a place to live. It was the era of tech workers rolling up to open houses and offering the landlord sixty grand in cash to rent a modest house for a year that six of my friends had been about to sign a lease on , but the landlord shrugged and said, I can’t say no to that kind of money. People without wealth left, either to the far working class exurbs or to backhome. It became suddenly even more obvious who had a secret trust fund because they were a lot of who got to stay. My friends who stayed hang on by their teeth, are precariously housed, work all the time, don’t go out much because it’s too expensive.

All the week of my visit, I felt myself resisting the land, this place. I stayed mad. I feel like a brat and I’m trying to practice gratitude but I’m fucking mad. I see the shit that is still real and vibrant but I’m mad. The wealth divide is beyond. It feels like either you’re making 300k minimum or you are one of many people living under a tarp and being swept off the streets, and there is very little in between. It’s like a neutron bomb went off and killed all the people but left the pretty buildings and iconographic signs.

I can remember what it was before, and I’m mad. And what it was before was also complicated.

I lived in Oakland from 2007-2014/15, and visited and had serious connections there for a couple years before and after. When I lived there, for a lot of the time, I was all in. I believed in the Bay Area dream- the multiracial Black and brown radical paradise where you could live well and vibrant for not a lot of money, where there were some things- like healing justice by and for QTBIPOC, like disability justice- that were happening there in ways it was hard to find other places.

When I first came, Oakland in 2006/2007 was referred to by many people I know as “QTPOC paradise.” It’s hard and not hard to remember how culturally different that moment was. Pre-”visibility” and marketing of QTBIPOC bodies, aesthetics, tokenization, the snapgrabbing of our cultures to sell things. Pre seeing us as a market. There were only a few places where it felt like there was a critical mass of us as queer and trans BIPOC. Of course we were everywhere, but queer spaces that said “queer” still were default almost all white in so many places. 2006 was the year there was a queer and trans contingent for the first time at the big immigrant rights march and it was a huge deal.

In contrast, Oakland was “the good life.” Not just because of the QTBIPOCery of it all, but also the class survival reality. You could be working class or poor or not much money and have a beautiful life. I was stunned that I could rent a share in an apartment with a big yard, a ten minute walk from BART, for $475. “In New York, you live like a cockroach!” a friend who had just moved from the Bronx said. “Here you can relax.” The Bay was full of QTBIPOC who were from there and equally full of runaways who had left our hometowns and tight white spaces and cockroached nonwhite spaces to come here. There was a lot of beauty that happened there I couldn’t find anywhere else then: three day all free working class AF queer women of color film festival. A different show or party every night. Cuties slipping you $5 bags of organic veggies at the farmer’s market.

And: the Bay multicultural salad bowl loved people with my skin tone of ambiguity. I was a light brown non Black person in a Bay Area that boasted of a multiculturalism that liked to lift up the Black Panther birthplace legacy but erased and disrespected Blackness time and again. Something that would only get worse as tech expanded and gentrification expanded all the way to deep East Oakland, as the Black population of SF dropped to just above 3% and Oakland’s Black population dropped from 47% in 1980 to 21% in 2022. I didn’t always get how it was playing out at first. Oakland was so Black and brown and poor and working class, and it felt like it couldn’t not stay that way forever. White people weren’t present or the reference point most of the time, they were always on the margins and usually afraid. Histories and narratives of Black and brown coalition in the Bay were lifted up constantly and unquestioningly, and felt so powerful. It’s not that they weren’t, it’s that there wasn’t enough room to complicate the ideologies of “unity” and “power in numbers.” Or talk about the real of the small big things that went down between us, Black and brown, in conversation, on a street corner, in an action, where anti Blackness popped.

I didn’t imagine that power would want us- the Town, the land- because they seemed so afraid of us. Raised on multiracial coalition politics, I didn’t always know how to see the complexities and pitfalls coalition could bring, especially as neoliberalism' shifted its eyes to a growing light brown mass as a base to tap. But coalition politics that assumed “we were all in it together” and didn’t name and uproot colorism, anti Blackness and anti Indigenousness started heaving with cracks, being challenged, and falling apart.

Savannah Shange in her book Progressive Dystopia captures the ideology and failures of a lot of Bay Area progressive experiments- ones that promise a multiracial project of radicalism and solidarity but remain grounded in anti Blackness and thus fail. Her focus is on anti Blackness within attempts at progressive pedagogical frameworks of experimentation in public radical schools in the Bay, but expands outwards to capture similar dynamics in broader movement and cultural spaces. From the back cover:

The Robeson Justice Academy opened to serve the few remaining low-income neighborhoods of the city, with the mission of offering liberatory, social justice--themed education to youth of color. While it features a progressive curriculum including Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde, the majority Latinx school also has the district's highest suspension rates for Black students. In Progressive Dystopia Savannah Shange explores the potential for reconciling the school's marginalization of Black students with its sincere pursuit of multiracial uplift and solidarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and six years of experience teaching at the school, Shange outlines how the school fails its students and the community because it operates within a space predicated on antiblackness. Seeing San Francisco as a social laboratory for how Black communities survive the end of their worlds, Shange argues for abolition over revolution or progressive reform as the needed path toward Black freedom.

Shange writes:

Progressive Dystopia attends to the tensions between coalition, anti-

blackness, and the state by documenting the afterlives of slavery as lived in

one corner of San Francisco. The argument of this book turns on the gen-

erative antagonism between “our” and “Black” in the mattering of lives. By

examining a series of successful progressive reforms, and what they cost

Black communities, I critique “winning” as the dominant logic of social

justice work. I ask, “Who loses when ‘we’ win?” not so much to expand the

“we” of winning to an ever more inclusive list of deserving subjects, but to

ask what becomes impossible when we engage in contest as the primary

mode of Black politics — this is the differential between revolution and abo-

lition. Revolution seeks to win control of the state and its resources, while

abolition wants to quit playing and raze the stadium of settler-slaver soci-

ety for good.

Progressive Dystopia is brilliant and necessary, check it out if you can.

Being back in the Bay this visit was to sit in the afterfuture of a radical community(es) and experiments that are by no means all the way gone, but have been sandblasted by anti Blackness and tech capitalist eugenics. I’m still sitting with what it means to go back to a place that was home for a long time, that was lifted up as a utopia and a revolutionary utopia in the making, that welcomed, taught and grew me, that has decades of radical struggle and continues to have it- but where so many of the conditions that made it possible for those who created those resistances to live here, have been deliberately destroyed. The differences in the class feels of certain radical spaces were huge- it just plain felt like you had to be upper middle class or up to really participate in a lot of them, just because of how goddamn expensive everything was. And that didn’t used to be true. And that difference in feel- when it’s gone, it slips between your fingers. Hard to name, it used to feel and be so different when this was a place where it was a lot more possible to be poor or working class, and live. I kept feeling everyone who would have been there, the houses, community spaces, the loudness on the street, that held me and my sick different a decade ago. How it felt different with it missing.

AntiBlackness and tech eugenics are not separate, they are intertwined and support each other in their collective death project. The Bay is a particular laboratory of conditions of Californian antiBlackness and Golden Gulag contrasts. And , it’s not unique, those techniques are coming to every locale, and already here. Our ability to push back on that lies on understanding those connections, how we with our specific ass positions are implicated in them, and how we can fight them. In big gestures and in the everyday. There are people fighting those fights in the Bay, and everywhere.

There’s more, but my thoughts are still in progress so I’ll hold them for now. Watch this space, though.

some things I’m getting life from and vibing with right now:

the one million experiments podcast and project, which focuses on ways people are experimenting with creating alternatives to police and prisons in real time. esp this bonus episode with Martina and Matt from Seattle’s Collective Justice, because it centers the voices of two people who are (as many people are) both survivors who’ve been involved in the criminal legal system and people who have been locked up, raised and charged within prisons and the criminal legal system- voices that I’ve always witnessed within transformative justice work but can also be hard to find in public documentation of that work. I’m sharing this even though I couldn’t find transcripts yet because most Interrupting Criminalization projects I’ve seen are transcribed.

re-reading Assata Shakur’s autobiography specifically thinking about both the ways she documents how she survived imprisonment and the time in the 70s when things were falling apart in the movement and both militancy and repression were increasing.

sitting on my porch.

oh also: I am gonna be a mentor at the Queer Artists Mentorship thing for 2025, deadline to apply is July 31.

til next time, thanks for reading this long-ass dispatch. be sweet to yourselves. stay in it.

Free Palestine and all land,

Leah