White Utopia
Chronicles of Queer Puerto Rican mourning in the Post-Apocalypse, Part 1
I.
Oshun once told me “don’t cry, instead come to me.” So I did.
“Bring peace into my relationship with Mi Jíbaro,” I whispered over the waters that the divine Black mother holds dominion over. I paid her fee and gently tossed oranges and flowers onto the pulsating waves. “Iba oshun olodi.” With an obra for love, the river reprised its role as an encounter point for multiple diasporas, Queer and Boricua.
It’s not that moments of serenity were foreign to us, Mi Jíbaro, but trauma is a periodic resurrection of mental turmoil that consumes even the best attempts to experience happiness. With keen precision I endeavored to keep the tingle of your emphatic and devout kisses on my lips. To store in my mind the elation of your eyes, squinting in adornment, locked onto mine. Like a reluctant poet, you tell me that you feel as if we were also together in a past life. This thunderous romance may indeed span centuries. Whether this is true or not concerns me less than the undeniable fact that I love you with the entire profundity of my soul’s secret longings. I tried my best to live by it, but failed, as did you.
Before the words «I can’t do this anymore» could escape my mouth, I bought tickets to Portland to see Old Friend. I told you I was going to do this. You said you wish I hadn’t. Mi Jíbaro, I will always tell you the truth, even if you cannot bear it. Love can only be known through truth.
Oshun’s celestial intervention worked for a while, but alas we cannot forget that we’re also cartographers in our destinies, and sometimes we draw life’s maps with trails that crisscross until they achieve unity. At least this is what I tell myself as I yearn to again nourish ourselves with laughter and love as we traverse the landscapes of white supremacy together. A new stage of the post-apocalypse is upon us and it is you, Mi Jíbaro, who I want to experience the end of this world with.
II.
On the pavement outside, between the escalators exiting the airport and the light-rail train that crosses the city, stood Old Friend wearing a pink cap reminiscent of the ‘90s, and a joint in hand. We sparked up while defiantly spectating cops patrolling the halls of the airport baggage claim.
“You’re going to help me decide whether I want to stay here or not. I’m tired of all these white people.”
I was surprised by this comment. Old Friend never made an impression on me that he was particularly concerned with racism. I did assume as a Black queer man that it was something he noticed about the society we live in, because most people are actively aware of their social position, especially when they’re closest to its bottom. How could we not when we clearly live in a world where Blackness is systematically engaged with as antithetical to humanness?
We jumped into the train, without paying. He said that’d he’d buy a ticket on an app if an official were to ever check, but they never do. Legal weed and “free” transportation, “What utopia have I entered?”, I asked myself. “For whom?”, is a better start to that question.
Since tomorrow has never been guaranteed to the direct descendants of those whose apocalypse began with La Niña, La Pinta y La Santa María, we embarked on an expedition to unearth it’s every sin:
Gay clubs with hairy dudes twirling their dicks around while exposing demeanors that announced “Don’t bother me, I’m on my lunch break”.
Drunken selfies on a stroll passed homeless encampments surrounded by luxury condo construction.
Newspaper headlines broadcasting, “It Happened Here” and “30 years later, what’s changed?” to commemorate the murder of a Black African immigrant by skinheads. The week before I visited, hipster fascists marched downtown.
Conversations with a morose gay Indigene from the reservation across the mountains desperately searching for a man to call his own.
A cigarette chat with a white transplant from an homogenous Midwestern suburb who defensively proclaimed her colorblind, working-class background when I brought-up Oregon’s once de jure forbiddance of Black people.
Childhood recollections of a Black drag queen priced-out of Albina, the historic enclave of the city’s ebony peoples. “I just don’t think about it” is what she said when I inquired about living in a sea of whiteness. This is a survival strategy I hear often.
I was shocked to witness an entirely gentrified Chinatown. Red lanterns and Chinese characters adorned the streetscape, but actual Chinese people were vastly absent. Like in most of this Empire’s urban centers, historic communities of color were rapidly being mutated to actualize the final stages of “progressive” settler colonialism, where the indigenous population is virtually eradicated, but particles of their depoliticized aesthetics remain.
Nearly half of the Black folks I encountered were experiencing homelessness. White folks were generally friendly, but it appeared to come from a place of arrogant comfort. As if to say, “What do I have to fear? The barbarians are few and cannot overtake the city gates.”
Somewhere in between gleeful indulgence and sociological curiosity, I understood what Old Friend senses about Portland: it’s an insular white Utopia, where superficial liberal politics of solidarity fail, with lots of effort, to drown out the wails of colonialism’s ghosts.
In Old Friend’s eyes, I saw the agony of being an eternal guest in a landscape of hypocrisy. Despite his white mother, Blackness is the categorized identity ascribed to him, which he does own. Maybe not with pride, but not regret or self-hate either. Maybe he is conscious that there’s a view of him as a fetishized poster child of a post-racial future myth. Mi gente particularly embrace this illusion as a national ethos. Or has he come to understand himself as a byproduct of white anxieties about racial purity?
The question that seemed to torture him the most was that of the lonely crowd. He complained that all the gays are in open relationships, which he sort of is in one too. A crave for companionship is a repetitive theme I witness in queer circles. It may not be unique to us, but is clearly a byproduct of the abuse and hatred queer peoples experience, with a range in brutal consequences dependent on one’s embodiment of other despised identities. The gays are very familiar with repulsion, abandonment, and even murder from the heterosexist world outside our safe spaces, which pushes us to simultaneously reject and thirst for one other, to express with and impose onto our suffering.
“If you want to be in a monogamous relationship, you can find that. It’s what you put out there.” This is easy for me to say. I found Mi Jíbaro my first month after arriving in Texas.
His non-monogamous lover agreed. “My partner and I have actually never lived in the same city. He’s my soul mate.” I tried with success to prevent thoughts of dismissal from surfacing onto my face. “Can anyone really know the capacities of love without experiencing the day-to-day of life with each other?”, I reflected. “And did he just tell me that the love of his life is a white man?”
I was excited to meet this Black professor and to exchange takes about this society. Three Black queers in a city designed for our social death? We have so much to talk about! Disappointingly he showed no interest in intellectual engagement nor did Old Friend. Instead, they waited until I was drunk enough to push for sex, ignoring every “no” as an acceptable response. I have come to expect violence from my oppressors, but I struggle to comprehend and heal from the pains inflicted by those who are supposed to be my people. While empathy nudges me to see that we all cope differently with the living legacies of human catastrophe emanating all around us, I am exhausted with the marginalized reinforcing the cruelties that serve only to accelerate our collective destruction.
Thus, my trip to Portland was not a cinematic cliché where some dude experiences an epiphany or appreciation for whom he was once with after the trials of pain or boredom with someone else. It was instead queer sorrow for the loss of Boricua love; a half-embrace of torturous finality, and a diasporic pursuit for my kinfolk. In it, I got reacquainted with just how toxic we can be to each other.
III.
My Mentor, a brilliant scholar of culture, observes that the people of this settler Empire are simulacra and jestingly calls them the “walking dead.” I think the “twerking dead” seems more suitable for those who narcissistically dance to the drumbeats of indigenous and Black murder among the utopian ruins of liquidated civilizations. As the final stages of capitalism thrusts the planet towards environmental collapse, can there be enough time for the love that can liberate the peoples who haven’t tasted freedom in centuries? If there are any answers to find in this period of mourning, I now need to search for them in a peregrination across modernity’s beautiful darkness. Maybe it’ll bring me back into the radiant embraces of Mi Jíbaro again.
Next, Part 2: San Francisco