In A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, Anne Boyer writes that “[h]istory is full of people who just didn’t.”
“They said no thank you, turned away, escaped to the desert, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light.”1 In our current climate, many of us are living into that lineage through our own capsizing chorus of hell fucking no.
Ours is a chorus of both refusal and creation, of not this but that. In practice, it looks like organizing mutual aid networks to ensure our neighbors have the essentials, marching in the streets to stand in opposition to the genocide of Palestinians, and coordinating watch groups to protect each other from the deployment of ICE death squads. As expressed in “Be Gay, Do Crime: An Introduction” by the Mary Nardini Gang, “This world conditions us to lose things easily because it is always taking them away.” Right now, we’re choosing to take it all back: our communities, our humanity, our power.
But the work of refusal can’t happen without others. Grandmothers tell us stories of how they organized without suspicion and surveillance before we were born. Friends text us flyers about actions happening in our neighborhoods, and later send DJ sets to swing by to celebrate our wins in the streets. Mentors remind us to hydrate and eat well, because sustaining our movements requires sustaining ourselves. Our ancestors beam transmissions on how to fight fascists. Citationality is the bedrock of how we show up for each other.
For the second conversation in our series, we turn to two organizers — Dean Spade and Morgan Bassichis — who embody citationality.
Theirs is a politics of refusal, but also reimagination, generosity, and grace.
Dean Spade has been working in movements for queer and trans liberation, anti-militarism, and police and prison abolition for the past 25 years. He’s the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, and Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), and is the director of the documentary Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back! His new book is Love in a Fucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up and Raise Hell Together, and he is the host of a new podcast with the same name.
Morgan Bassichis is a comedian, musician, and writer who has been called “a tall child or, well, a big bird” by The Nation and “fiercely hilarious” by The New Yorker. Their show, Can I Be Frank?, about the groundbreaking queer performer Frank Maya and directed by Sam Pinkleton, won a 2026 Obie Award. Their book of to-do lists, The Odd Years, was published by Wendy’s Subway in 2020, and they also co-edited, with Rachel Valinsky and Jay Saper, the anti-zionist anthology for young people Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah (Wendy’s Subway, 2023).
Although we are both students of Morgan and Dean’s work, we came to understand the extent of their collaboration after listening to an episode of theirs from the Love in a Fucked Up World podcast (if you ever want to sweeten a Sunday morning, make a podcast playlist of their six stellar conversations and settle in with a cuppa tea). They are both good company, and their joint episodes explore many of the subjects — art-making and community organizing and interpersonal repair — that are so integral to the Resplendently Citational thesis.
Across continents, Morgan and Dean joined us to discuss friendship as theology, sustaining connection over decades, and making art with and through collapse. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
KATE: What’s the origin story of how you two met? How did you become creative collaborators and thought partners?
MORGAN: Well, this is our first time meeting, so I appreciate you facilitating. I actually approached Dean. He came to my college to give a lecture on a panel for a trans academic conference in maybe 2003. And I went up to him afterwards and said, You now control me, so tell me what to do.
DEAN: (laughs)
MORGAN: And that began a long, blessed enmeshment.
DEAN: And then, at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), Morgan was an intern and had a very distinguished role. I was able to see that Morgan was in the work in a different way than a lot of people are, and we stayed connected. We were already acting like friends — more than lawyer/undergrad intern. I’m recalling your 21st birthday at my apartment where we made fondue — which was very fancy for us!
MORGAN: But I didn’t think about the logistics of how you do that at all, which is a major character flaw. And so I think that was a lot on you, like having to go get burners or something —
DEAN: You had gotten a fondue set or something at a thrift store or a yard sale.
MORGAN: I think I had found a fondue set at a thrift store, that’s right. And then everybody had to leave the party because we found out a bunch of people got arrested at the RNC or something — or DNC. They’re pretty similar. (laughs)
DEAN: Everything seemed to end that way every day. There was always an emergency. But also my apartment was a ten-by-eight room — tiny — but we managed to always have all these parties and many people sleeping over on the floor.
AMIRIO: I love how you can already tell that you both have such a sense of camaraderie between you two. And I’m wondering for you, Morgan, what drew you to Dean initially? What about his work spoke to you, called out to you? And Dean, over time, what drew you to Morgan?
MORGAN: I mean, right away I was like, Why is this person talking so fast? No, just kidding, I thought, Oh my god, I resonate so deeply with the connections this person is making. He was naming these kinds of liberal fantasies and falsities that I had grown up with and talking about the core systems of white supremacy and capitalism and prisons which I was getting politicized around. Dean immediately brought everything together and showed how everything’s connected, in this kind of mad scientist way. I also remember he would be cracking jokes throughout his talk. He just made radical politics seem fun and accessible and welcoming, which is no easy task. The way he rooted trans stuff not in abstraction and acceptance but in abolishing prisons and poverty really resonated with me. I went up to him after and said, I want to come to New York this summer and get involved, and he gave me his landline (he famously resists the cell phone industrial complex) and told me to intern at Housing Works, with their trans, HIV+ advocacy group, which was a formative experience for me. He’s bossy, in an anti-boss kind of way! I can’t overstate how much Dean has completely shaped my political understanding of the world and of what’s possible when we take collective action. What I’ve learned from him has guided me at every single step.
DEAN: It’s so ridiculous because when I met Morgan, I was like, Okay, this person is 18 and so much smarter than me. Morgan, you were already writing things. I’m pretty sure you told me what the word “homonationalism” meant. (laughs) We’re in the early 2000s. You know what I mean? These things that are maybe now an obvious form of politics for radicals were harder to come by. You introduced me to Joy James’s work.
Around the time when we met, I was looking for intellectual community and for a theoretical framework for what I was doing in my day-to-day of SRLP collective and coalitional work in New York City politics. My work was fed by a theoretical basis from things I’d studied both in school and in movements — trying to make a practical, action-oriented, critical, racial and economic justice trans politics based in organizing. But I wasn’t an academic. I wasn’t in that realm. I needed to find intellectual company through friendships.
I had some of those already that were important. But Morgan took it to another level. Do you remember we went to the ASA together or something — the American Studies Association conference — neither of us being in that world at all, looking for this intellectual food, looking to find the other abolitionists who were making an account of things that we could understand, looking at people who were making interventions informed by Indigenous studies and different kinds of critical ethnic studies and feminist and queer and trans politics. And this stuff was hard at that time, especially the trans stuff. It was not in a lot of the work that we were inspired by. We were really making it up.
I’ve had this few times in my life where I’m like, Oh, wow, this person’s so much smarter than me. They’re going to guide me to figure this out. I remember reading stuff you’d read that you shared with me. And I remember the early piece you published with Mari and Anna, “Homonormativity, Global Lockdown and the Seductions of Empire.” I remember these kinds of clarifying moments, the dots are connecting. And also the article we wrote together when we were trying to understand how Afropessimism related to our politics about the family form and marriage. It was so helpful to collaborate with you in that way.
AMIRIO: Can you remind me, how long have you two known each other and been in each other’s orbits?
MORGAN: 23 years.
AMIRIO: Wow. 23 years. That’s a lifetime!
DEAN: I feel like Morgan’s only 23. (laughs)
AMIRIO: Part of this project is really understanding over the course of decades, for example, what are the mechanics of being in friendship, of being in creative partnership. A question that we have is how do you sustain that sense of exchange when life “lifes” and there are so many ebbs and flows? I’m sure over 23 years you two have changed so much. Looking across your portfolios, you’ve worn so many different hats and lived so many different lives. In Kate and I’s decade of friendship, I’ve gotten married, we’ve both moved, and we’ve really had to adapt how we work together just given how life changes and pulses. So for the two of you, I’m wondering amidst these ebbs and flows over the course of the past two decades, how have you two adapted your friendship and how you work together in a more creative capacity?
DEAN: It’s interesting. I think that we share a style, maybe. I don’t know if you agree with this, Morgan. We both are capable of having very spacious friendships that don’t require us to live in the same city, to have dinner the same day of the week. I have some friends who really want that. And we’ve both moved a ton during this time. And also we have lived with other people who are part of our extended queer family. There’s just been lots of things that bring us together over and over again. We’ve become close friends with each other’s prior close people, that kind of thing has happened. That means there’s lots of opportunities to gather because we’re going to the same places to meet the same people.
Also Morgan has always left me these incredibly supportive messages. They used to be on voicemail on a real phone. (laughs) If I’m really uncertain about my direction, Morgan will give me grounded advice, and the way that Morgan sees me and what I’m doing is in the best possible light that I can be seen in. It’s a huge relief. Even if we are so busy or living in different places for a while and not getting together in person, there’s actually extreme continuity, in my experience, even though it’s very spacious. Sometimes we’re living in the same house with our other friends, sometimes we’re thousands of miles apart for most of the year. There’s a range of spaciousness, but there’s so much continuity.
MORGAN: It’s exactly how I feel about you. And because we are both out of our minds, we evangelize to each other about the latest healing technology. I remember Dean once said to me when I was in my early 20s and I was kind of depressed and very anxious, Dean said to me, You can try everything. You’re allowed to try everything. I think you maybe gave me my first tarot reading and you were like, You’re allowed to try everything. You’re allowed to do pharmaceuticals, you’re allowed to do witchcraft, you’re allowed to do Al-Anon. Whatever. That really helped me.
You’ve had such faith in every iteration of me, and let me change and how I want to contribute to movement change. I feel like you really modeled that we get to let each other evolve. And the other thing for Dean is that — friendship is your theology, it’s your politics, you know what I mean? You’re so devoted to friendship, no matter how much space or time there is between us.
Queer friendship can be such a miracle in that way. It’s like drop everything and be like, What does your friend need? And I feel like Dean and your sister Lis and our friends Colby and Craig and many others have really modeled that for me. I’ve learned so much about how to show up for each other from you all.
DEAN: When you said the thing about letting each other change, I was thinking about how you are really good at academic writing. And it could be that if you’re good at that, you have to do it for life. You know what I mean? And you’re really, really, really good at doing anti-violence organizing or doing abolitionist policy work. And instead you’re like, No, I’m going to focus on performance and comedy and music. And for me, that’s incredibly freeing to be released from all of our former jobs, G-d willing, to let each other and to encourage each other. And we have some other friends too who’ve quit things that they’re really accomplished at because life is so short, and where is the spark coming from? Your shift in focus towards creative work was a transformative experience for me and I think everyone in our circle. Because you’re so good at the stuff you were doing.
KATE: Thank you so much for sharing all of that. And I love friendship as theology — what a beautiful way of thinking about it. I also love what you said, We just have the same style, because that’s so true — when you vibe with somebody, you just have the same style. So thank you so much for that.
One of the things we wanted to hear from you more about is you both have been in movement spaces for a minute and are really committed to relationship-building not only across difference, but also across generational divides. And we’re curious what you’ve learned from your elders about maintaining friendships and relationships in this space.
DEAN: I’m thinking about how Miss Major would just call you out of the blue. Eric Stanley always calls Miss Major a phone queen. (laughs) And I do think that’s a quality in some of our elders that is hard for people to maintain. The phone has a different anxiety around it — people talk on the phone less and text more. But we share some beloved elders who will call you up.
MORGAN: That’s right. And the conversations were always very short. You’re getting off the phone as soon as you get on the phone and that’s so great. It’s like, Okay, well, good talking to you! She’d call you on every holiday. Using the phone is definitely part of her legacy.
And I remember, Dean, when we worked together in 2007 to plan this conference in San Francisco with Miss Major and Alex Lee and Beck Major and Vanessa Huang and Lala Yantes and Kelani Key and so many others called Transforming Justice, which brought together trans people who had been to prison and other abolitionists to think about how to grow the trans anti-prison movement, maybe for the first time that we knew about. It was anchored by the Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), and so many groups helped organize it.
A bunch of people were traveling to attend, coming to town — and you wanted to make sure everybody was well taken care of and comfortable. Tourmaline and Joo-Hyun Kang and Rickke Mananzala and Andrea Ritchie and a big crew was there from NYC, Cheryl Courtney-Evans and DeeDee Chamblee were there from Atlanta, Valerie Spencer was there from LA, and so many Bay Area legends — Bobbie Jean Baker and Jazzie Collins and Melenie Eleneke, all three of whom have passed on, as well as Billie Cooper and Veronika Fimbres and Malachi Larrabee-Garza and Eric Stanley and Nat Smith and so many more. Every one of these people made it possible for abolition to be as popular as it is today.
It was a beautiful gathering, and most of it was just about being together, moving out of isolation. That’s another lesson I’ve learned from you and also Miss Major, for sure: Let there be joy and pleasure and relaxation and nourishment inside of the work. There’s no binary or an opposition there. And I think that weekend got to be special for a lot of people because of that value.
DEAN: That’s funny. I don’t think of myself as being good at that, so I’m glad that you think so.
MORGAN: Dean has been feeding me for literally 20 years.
DEAN: Morgan has been doing my dishes.
MORGAN: It’s compatible.
AMIRIO: That’s so incredibly sweet!
We’re also interested in how you sustain relationality in ways that don’t reproduce what’s happening on a macro or structural level. And I’m thinking so much about your book, Dean, Love in a Fucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together, where you’re giving us a field guide for relating to each other without reproducing power imbalances and so on. We can imagine more and relate to each other in these more imaginative ways.
I wonder what that journey has been like for you two. How have you sustained your friendship and collaborative partnership in the face of dominant cultural scripts?
DEAN: I feel like we’re very aligned in our interest in living our politics. And so then it feels more like a collaborative thing like, Oh, Morgan’s doing that. I should think about trying that. More like getting inspiration from one another. When Morgan was very young, they were already asking their parents to donate to SRLP as their birthday gift. They were having this kind of class awareness that a lot of people I know don’t have young or don’t have at all. Morgan’s just incredibly generous and wants to share whatever.
MORGAN: I mean, it’s funny, I think probably this will be a theme of this interview, that we’ll attribute things to each other. I feel like the orientation towards redistribution I learned from you, you know what I mean? And you also have a rare, non-shamey-blamey orientation to bumps that come up in relationships and how we reproduce systems and dynamics of power. Often it can be so cloaked in shame: Oh my god, I can’t believe I feel this or I felt this. And you’re just like, Yeah, obviously, of course we do. We’re stewing in this world and of course we say and feel and do things that replicate that stuff — let’s just keep moving through it and focus on what we can do together to change conditions.
The other thing is politically, you’ve continued to challenge me over the years. I’ve been very avoidant of climate collapse — anyone else? — and I feel like it’s been years of Dean patiently being like, I’m going to keep telling you what I see. And similarly, around political strategy and the relationship to the state and what kinds of power we’re trying to build, Dean’s just led with curiosity, like, Oh, that’s really interesting. How do you see that? That has allowed me to continue to notice where I agree, where I maybe disagree, and where I don’t know yet if I agree or disagree.
DEAN: Yeah, I think one thing that’s amazing about having friends who you respect so much and think are so smart, it’s like, Oh, the disagreement is interesting. I don’t fucking know the answer. Nobody does. So, I would like to find out what Morgan thinks and what six other friends who are all in six other positions think on any given thing that we all desperately wish we understood, especially now when really everyone can acknowledge that nothing we’ve tried in the past is working and we’re under such extreme circumstances. It’s so useful to have friends with whom nobody’s trying to be right. Everyone’s trying to find out what is going on.
MORGAN: One question my friends in Jewish Voice for Peace have taught me to ask ourselves is: Do we want to win or do we want to be right? And I feel like so often being right can just lock us into what we’ve always done, thinking everything will change if we just know we’re right and everyone else is wrong because they just don’t get it. An orientation you’re referring to of we don’t know is very rare. And I think both of us share a kind of spiritual orientation where you can’t think, Oh, I know everything. How dare we?
DEAN: And I think because abolitionism grounds our politics so centrally, it’s not a wishy-washy liberalism. It’s actually this very difficult terrain where we’re not doing purism, but there are absolute lines. And sometimes we learn a new absolute line, and then the question is how do you hold that line in a way that leaves room for new people to enter? These are the questions we’ve been committed to all along.
And I think part of this is because, as Morgan was talking about, our earliest work together at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project was all collaborative work with people just coming out of prison, people currently in prison, and people who’ve never been to prison — really a set of people who had very different life experiences and languages for the work and for the problems they’re identifying and who are seeking to connect and articulate a shared trans abolitionist politics. There is a hard line around not calling the cops, but our politics also has in it lots of room for people to show up new to different parts of one another’s experience or analysis. And that’s the same technique that Morgan’s shows have now. And I think also your anti-Zionist organizing has this in there. It’s like, how can people be invited to join? And also there is a line, there is a boundary, you’re going to learn it. It’s not “anything goes,” but it’s not a kind of purism that stopped you way before you got to the on-ramp.
MORGAN: One of our first collaborations was working on this report about the treatment of trans women in New York state prisons, called It’s War in Here. And Dean, one of the things you said to me that was so helpful was, Write for the biggest audience, cast the widest net. And you went through my writing and you were like, Say this in a way that could cast a wider net. And that rigor towards breadth and accessibility, without losing the integrity of the politics, is so core to me and is exactly, I think, what makes a good anti-Zionist, especially in the Jewish community. It’s like, don’t lose your integrity, but meet people where they’re at and bring them in.
DEAN: Or don’t just use a bunch of jargon to establish your rightness and then you’ve lost because you never explained the basic premise to people who don’t even know why we’re here. I think that’s a common struggle people have: the idea that the thing is only pure or correct enough if it’s really dense and impossible to get into. It’s really a misfire that is common in both academic writing and certain kinds of political work.
AMIRIO: I have so many follow-ups to what you all just said but one big one is around this idea of citationality as a practice. I love how you, Dean, consider citing your friends as a way of being, a methodology, like, Oh, I see what you’re doing and I want to adopt that in my own life and my own practice as a person. And so often, especially in the West, in America, everything’s individualized, atomized such that we don’t really center citationality as being a core strategy for survival. There’s so much around being original. And it seems like you both are so into being citational. How did you come to citationality as being a core practice for you? And how do we invite others into that as being a strategy for living?
DEAN: This is very funny because the ‘90s queer theory and women of color feminist writing and world that shaped my politics was highly citational — to a point where I’ve been edited again and again by editors: You can’t start every sentence with “as so-and-so says.”
Your question first made me think about what it’s like for trans people with each other’s genders sometimes. For me, there’s been so much internalized transphobia and shame, inevitably, as especially coming out as trans in the ‘90s and early 2000s, it’s a while ago now, and just the rigidity and the everybody rejecting you and not being understood, even by other queer people, et cetera. And being around other trans people who are weird and who are not trying to do it right and who are doing something that you feel like breaks some rule that you’re applying to yourself is the survival line for me. And Morgan is one of those people for me.
And especially since we’ve been friends for so long, seeing all the different ways that Morgan’s gender has evolved and that Morgan expresses in different moments and spaces and just being like, Because Morgan does this, I can do this, or something like that, even if we’re not exactly the same. But I feel like that about a handful of trans people who have been fellow travelers for me the whole time in that way, and Morgan is one of them. But it’s funny because I remember you telling me that I told you that you were trans. (laughs)
MORGAN: Yeah, 100%. Dean was like, You’re trans. (laughs) No, the language was, You’re a trans problem.
DEAN: (laughs) Highest compliment.
MORGAN: No, it was so clarifying. I was like, Oh, you’re right.
DEAN: You’re going to mess this up for everyone. Do it.
MORGAN: And again, this is part of what you do in your book and over and over again which is remind people that our relational patterns are structural. The things that you feel are bad about you or wrong about you, these are structural conditions that we’ve internalized. And I feel like that was what you were telling me in that moment. You were claiming me.
And around citationality, it’s the core of our feminist politics. It’s the rejection of the idea of any singular individual. We’re all constituted by other people’s labor, by other people’s reproductive labor, intellectual labor, political labor. And there’s something really gross about the idea of an individual — an original activist or an original artist. It’s like, Wow, how many people’s lives made you possible? You know what I mean? Let’s claim “derivative” in a positive way, which is what my show Can I Be Frank? was about: We’re derivative and that’s not bad. It’s just true.
It’s also important because it’s so easy to see in movement spaces the person on the mic or the person in front of the room, but organizing is not done by the person on the mic or the person in front of the room. 99% of organizing is done behind the scenes, by who’s organizing the meeting, getting people there, making the food, having hard conversations, facilitating disagreement. Years of invisibilized labor. So it’s crucial — it’s not flourish — for us to always be like, We didn’t invent whatever we’re thinking and we didn’t make those things possible. And although Dean and I just have a few years difference between us, the conditions that you were facing around gender and sexuality and being trans were different from the ones I grew up in. And obviously we’re located very differently class-wise and regionally but you navigated risk and sacrifice and challenge in ways that I didn’t have to. And it’s really important for us to never lose track of that for each other. And that may mean that where you’ve landed with your risk and your journey is different and the words you use are different, but it’s so important for us to lead with a deep humility and respect. And we also share that orientation.
DEAN: There’s also an ethical rigor around being curious about what is shaping us. That’s what we’re doing in our emotional work. And I’m like, Wait, what is shaping this response in me? It’s not mine. It’s not me. It’s coming from conditions, from unspoken experiences. And then who shaped me? Who else made it possible for me to be here? That is what Can I Be Frank? feels like. And your work with The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions and your work around the history of the witch trials. I mean, all of it. It’s like who are all the people who have tried different versions of anti-Zionism over the last hundred years?
And then also how that’s a resource because who wants to be a fucking individual? That’s terrifying. I want to feel like I’m part of a collective set of endeavors that are strengthened, that rear their heads, even when they’re pushed back, that can’t be denied, that show up in every generation. And I want to feel like there’s a zillion other people on Earth trying things related to what I’m trying right now. Even if they’re doing it differently or using a different term, I want us to find out how we can be more aligned and more effective. It eases the loneliness of trying to be radical and it provides the possibility of building a larger, more united front.
The other thing that I always want to say is, I know so many people who have something amazing they want to write or do, and they’re like, But it’s already been said or this other person already wrote a book about it. It’s like, you know what? You also can just say whatever the fuck you think and not cite anybody. Get your thing out. You know what I mean? Yes, a hundred thousand people are saying the same thing at the same time. But we need to just let that go. Nothing’s original. Everything’s relational and collective. So take your shot at it. I don’t know if you have friends who are stuck in that place, but I hear that a lot and I just want people to be able to try their thing on.
MORGAN: I’m so glad you said that because especially now as I work with students and particularly art students, as someone who didn’t go to art school and is not really steeped in that art history, I feel I actually treasure my ignorance in a lot of ways. So it’s not about citing everything, but citing what’s important to you.
DEAN: And it relates to individualism because part of what I’ve seen in your work, Morgan, what I’ve learned from you is this work that I’m doing has nothing to do with me. May it come through my hands or my voice or whatever, and let me watch it go down the river and see what happens to it.
KATE: Thank you so much for bringing that into the space. The freedom to surrender attachment to ownership or originality feels like such a gift right now.
Our last question is something we ask everyone in this newsletter which is that we’re curious, in your work and processes, if there’s someone specific right now that you’re citing. This can be ancestors, other artists, animals, but who are you feeling extra close in conversation with right now?
DEAN: I mean, I’m in Athens just talking to all of these Greek anarchists, especially queer and trans people and feminists, people in migrant justice work, learning about what is a much more militant culture of politicization here that’s so refreshing when coming from the U.S. And it has forms of purism in it that are honestly such a relief to hear about, because in the U.S., everything is so watered down and sold out for so long, being as it is a particular type of empire. So I’ve been so moved by hearing about feminist interventions in the anarchist world here, and queer interventions and ways that people have had those battles that are familiar to any movement — all movements have those battles in them. And really moved by the ways people organize for political prisoners here, the ways people organize around refugee camps and detention centers, and just the long struggle and the intense militancy, the way people fight cops, and the determination and creativity and intense solidarity. I’ve been immersed here for two months learning so much.
MORGAN: That’s really inspiring.
DEAN: And the depth with which people are not into any of this work being nonprofitized or funded. If your band has ever played in a commercial space, like a bar, you cannot play at the squat! It’s so different. And that might seem to people as being too purist but I’m also like, That’s kind of amazing. It’s just so opposite of where we live, you know what I mean? There’s whole printing collectives that print books and newspapers. There’s a sense of separation from the NGO world and from stuff that’s for-profit that is cool to hear about.
MORGAN: A person that I have spent the past year or so citing, who I talk about in the show, is Neil Greenberg, who’s a choreographer and teacher and man about town here in New York City. Neil is HIV positive and his brother died of AIDS in the ‘80s and he was partnered with Frank Maya, the artist who my show is about. And he’s just been tending to Frank’s archive for decades, for literally 30 years since Maya’s death in 1995, and just patiently digitizing and uploading and archiving, making sure that Frank’s legacy didn’t get lost, like it did for so many artists who died of AIDS. And he’s still making his own choreography. Now when we think of performance we can only think of the trajectory goal of fame, but what the lineage of downtown performance that Neil is a living part of teaches us is that it’s about making work for one another, because we have to resist erasure and assimilation — we have to keep going. Performance is a devotion to this ephemeral thing that is abstract and confusing and bewildering and urgent. Neil is actually fundraising for his next performance, so you can donate! I’m so grateful for him.
I want us to rally around older artists, older artists with HIV, older queer artists, older activists because they’re still working and that work is just as it was in the early years of the AIDS crisis and earlier moments of crisis, materially urgent strategies to alchemize the pain, the hope, the desire, the joy, the militancy. We must alchemize this world in every way we can.
Boyer, Anne. A Handbook of Disappointed Fate. Ugly Duckling Press, 2018. (1)