Fish Can Fly

Pride 3. Intersectional Bodies

Yesterday I looked up from my late mom's backyard
absent of her and her orchids. The watering cans, bone dry.

My heart in endings, I saw it not once but twice:
small winged koi flying through the sky.

Impossible angels reopen life’s possibilities.

This past weekend, I attended the Okaeri Matsuri—LA’s Queer Obon Festival—where the qualities of Nikkei culture x queer, trans and nonbinary joy helped late-awakening me to feel all the more possible.

This is drag artist Bibi Discoteca. Isn’t she fabulous and free?

This is Mariko and Cam, defying femme normativity:

I remember once as a beginning taiko player, getting the chance to perform on a big flatbed truck in Alameda’s 4th of July parade. I remember being asked to wear red, white and blue. I remember feeling shy and excited, landing on my navy blue petticoat plus my North Face chunky boots.

I remember someone I loved saying to me that my outfit wasn’t appropriate for the occasion. I remember the embarrassment and sadness I felt as I changed into sensible yoga pants. I remember attending a different event wearing the petticoat and boots, and the very moment a beloved mentor told me how the look worked for me, and invited me to do it more. I remember feeling seen, right into the source of my joy. I remember my inner jaw dropping open when I went to Dolores Park, the gathering picnic-place for the spirit of SF Pride’s Dyke March, where I literally saw hundreds of people wearing tutus, petticoats and chunky boots.

Okaeri is a way to say, “Welcome Home.”

Joy is a body birthright. Our bodies know how to be joy, recognize joy . . . and return to joy

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This is William Dorsey Swann, history’s first self-proclaimed Drag Queen. He was not only fabulous, hosting the first Drag Balls at his home in Harlem. William Dorsey Swann was a formerly enslaved person insisting on complete and total liberation.

The more I learn and grow, the more I decolonize and realize. Intersectionality is not a queer side-dish. It is implicit in queer liberation as well as being, in and of itself, intrinsically queer.

Back at the Okaeri Matsuri, we were indebted to William Dorsey Swann. This is the exquisite trans classical Japanese dancer, Gia Gunn:

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I wondered if I should add this Pride post after the month of June was over. (Gasp!) But suddenly it feels fitting. For it is my trans and nonbinary siblings who teach me how much Love exceeds all we’ve been allowed to imagine, blurring and dissolving empire-imposed lines.

In queerness x culture x koi,

Coke