Elena Rose

Welcome to We Want the Airwaves. My name is Nia King. This month on the podcast I
interviewed Elena Rose, an amazing performance poet who I am proud to announce is also the
co-editor for my forthcoming book, Queer & Trans Artists of Color, Volume 2! That should be
coming out in fall of 2016. I have a reading coming up in Seattle at Left Bank books on August
29th. I also have two readings coming up in October, the first one at Glad Day Bookshop in
Toronto on October 15th and the second one at Burning Books in Buffalo, New York on October
20th. I am still looking for queer and trans writers of color to read with me in Buffalo, so if you
are one or know any that might be interested in reading with me on October 20th, please hit me
up on Twitter, @artactivistnia or by email at niaking@zoho.com. As always, the best way to
support the podcast is by becoming a monthly sustainer at pateron.com/artactivistnia. $5 a month
gets you access to over 45 of my interviews with queer and trans artists of color and even a
couple cool straight artists of color, like Hari Kondabolu.
This Elena Rose interview is part of one of two. The second part will be available exclusively in
the book, Queer & Trans Artists of Color, Volume 2, so be sure to buy that when it comes out.
Without further ado, heres Elena Rose.
Elena Rose: I identify as a woman of color, specifically not just as an identity category but
as a political identity, as a political affiliation of solidarity. I think its really important that
thats a term that continues to be a political term, rather than just a sort of an identity
category or a feeling. My dads side of the family is white, is Ashkenazi Jewish. And my
mothers side of the family is from the Philippines. And were both Spanish Filipino and
Chinese Filipino and indigenous on both sides. So, I am a mixed, light-skinned person of
color; that is relevant, always, in these conversations. Likewise, I identify as queer as a
political identity of coalition and solidarity, and thats another one thats sort of just
become an identity marker, which freaks me out, you know?
Nia: Can we talk about that?
Elena: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like in the last few years queerueer absolutely. I feel
ltting used as an umbrella termhas started to be like an identity category that you can just
sort of feel queer rather than a political category that person of color, or woman of color,
was originally reclaimed as an act of resistance, and as an act of saying Whichever people
you think are weird and unacceptable, Im with them. That instead of doing this
assimilationist run for the finish line, and kick at anyone behind you in order to get there,
that queer and woman of color were both about saying, No, my place is with whoevers
back is against the wall, to borrow a formulation from Howard Thurman. That these were
identities that were about refusing to be the divided from the people who were most at the
business end of oppression. And theyve become these politically-neutral feelings
categories, which is very strange to me.
Nia: Can you say a little more about that? Like, what you mean by that.

Elena: I mean that weve gotten into, I think, an era of our identity politics where
identifying an adjective that describes your experience in the world is seen as equivalent to
activism, and equivalent to a politic that you canthat coming out, which is politicized and
is politicalis, in a lot of ways, divorced from the context of greater social structures of
power. So that if you can find an adjective that describes your experience of sexuality, and
the only oppression that you can identify as applying to that identity category is that people
havent heard of it, you can position yourself as oppressed in some ways, as identically
oppressed to say people who are experiencing violent police oppression, no right to work,
no right to medical care, murder with impunity, right?
And you can say Well, my identity is less known of than yours, I am more oppressed than
you. And if youre not accepting me you are an oppressor. And you see this in discourse
around sexual privilege versus asexual oppression. And obviously, asexual is an identity
category that explains and describes a lot of peoples relevant experiences and structurally,
in terms of greater social structures of oppression, operates very differently than say being
trans or being orientationally queer, or leave alone other kinds of categories like race and
class. And were in a lot of our conversations, I think, lacking the nuance between what
kinds of identity categories are what, what is putting us at the brunt of cultural and social
violence, and what is a really good descriptor for how we feel and how we live our lives, but
is another kind of category.
Were not defining our terms very well a lot of the time, and I think a lot of that is because
of the slippage of terms like person of color and queer away from political categories
and into categories of emotion and experience. You know, this category like we can do a lot
of hair-splitting, for instance, of who counts as a person of color and who counts as white.
But when you make it about who is punished by racism on a structural level it gets a lot
clearer all of a sudden. We see this in terms of a lot of edge cases of how we, in the US, deal
with racial diversity among Latinos, how we in the US deal with where Asians like me fit
into categories of racism. If you just look at structural and social consequences, and
concrete benefits and harm, everything becomes much clearer.
Again, this is, I think, what the discourse of privilege was invented to discuss. To talk about
concrete categories of structural benefit and punishment, and repression, and weve let it
mutate again into this discourse of are you in or are you out? Which group do you belong
to? Which categories you do belong to?i When in the first place it was a thought
experiment to get white people to think about structures, and to think structurally, and to
think communally about communal problems and communal solutions. And weve
individualized them, which is what were taught to do in capitalism. Weve made queer a
matter of individuals rather than groups. Weve made person of color a matter of
individuals rather than groups. Weve made privilege an issue of individuals rather than
groups. And all of these are to describe communal experiences, and communal problems,
and communal solutions, rather than matters of individualism. I think thats missing in a
lot of our conversations. So, thats one thing that I suppose unpacks from my identity as
queer.
Im a woman who primarily loves women. Depending on spaces, I describe myself as a
lesbian in part in resistance to the fact that that term has been denied to trans women

historically. I shied away from it for many years. I was very hesitant to call myself that
because it was so strongly associated with people who dehumanized me. And I actually was
reading Sappho. [laughter] I was reading Sappho because I had fallen for a girl, and theres
this really wonderful poem that Sappho wrote about aching for someone across a room, and that
feeling of falling for someone from across a crowded room, and she just talks about like, My
tongue is thick, and theres a buzzing in my ears, and I cant think straight, and I envy and hate
the person who is talking to you. And all at once, a subtle fire burns stealthily beneath my skin.
And its just this list of the sensations of just yearning with desire for someone, and I remember
reading it in that moment and going This feeling has felt the exact same way for how many
millennia? It felt the same to you as it feels to me. And I went, Maybe considering that
lesbian is a word that we use because of Sappho that lesbian just means to look at a woman
and feel that thing. Then probably you count.
So, the other relevant thing there, in terms of identity, is that I am a trans woman, and that is
always complicated.
Nia: How so?
Elena: Well, gender is really complicated. And as a gender educator I can do that thing for hours.
I work a lot educating, particularly on trans liberation issues and particularly in places that
havent heard it yet. I do a lot of this work and we can get to this a little bit later. I do a lot of this
work in our own queer communities, and in our own radical communities, communities of color,
and I take it to religious communities that are new at it. In the places that I currently work Im
often peoples first trans person, and very often peoples first trans woman, because trans men
have a lot more access to a lot of the spaces I go than I do. So I try and give them good discourse
to begin with that is accessible, and is kind, and pulls no punches. Especially on how wrapped up
gender is with race, how wrapped up gender is with colonialism, how wrapped up gender is with
commodified hierarchies, and that our system of gender is very much a product of postenlightenment white modernity. And our system of what is a man, and what is a woman, is very
wrapped up in our conceptions of whiteness. So, woman is a complicated term, and I
acknowledge that as a Filipina I come from an ancestral culture that has a much more
complicated understanding of gender than the 20th/21st century white-dominated American
culture in which I was raised.
Nia: Could you say a little bit more about that?
Elena: Absolutely. I have a great aunt who was trans. Theres actually a picture of her right there
on the shelf. She came of age and transitioned at a time in the Philippines where there was still
an understanding of what she was, but the social role had changed. So even conservative
religiousthat side of the familys Catholiceven fairly conservative old-fashioned Catholic
members of that side of the family called her she and her and had words in Tagalog and Spanish
for who she was and what her experience was. But due to the influence of Christian and Muslim
missionaries in the Philippines, and due to the influence of globalized, particularly Spanish and
American culture projected onto the Philippines, it was no longer a thing to be really proud of, to
have someone like us in your family. We were no longer people who had access to any job.

So by that sort of 1930s, 1940s era there was already a presumption that if you were what we
would call a trans woman in English, and theres a lot of other language going on there, that you
were going to be doing sex work or cosmetic work. There are a lot of hairdressers and florists,
but not a lot in other professions. And so, people didnt mistake thinking of her as a woman, but
they did derogate her for it, which is an interesting cultural tipping point - that there is still room
in the discourse for us existing, but also for us not being a good thing to be. And she was, I
believe, the first born in her large Catholic family, which underwent heavy trauma during the
Japanese occupation in the Philippines in World War II. I had a number of family members in the
resistance and in the Bataan Death March. You know, she was there during it. And she actually
got together with an American G.I. and travelled the world and, I believe, ended up living out her
last years in the states. So theres precedent for that kind of thing in my family.
I was raised without understanding that trans was a thing I could be, we didnt talk about my
great aunt, this was not a thing I got to be aware of until I started doing genealogy research with
my mom as a teenager. I wasn't aware that transition, such as we understand it, was an option,
until I was maybe 18. My access to the internet was really limited, I grew up in rural Oregon in a
town where when you came out as gay you were run out of town. So, there werent any trans
adult role models that I had access to. It meant a lot to me to discover that I had history for
people like me in my family. Discovering this thing, that gender could be more complicated,
because of the context of my ancestral culture, it felt amazing, and refreshing, and also like Id
been robbed. It felt like if that thing had not been destroyed in my family by outside violent
forces, my life would probably not had to be nearly so terrifying. I couldve had cultural context
and role models letting me know that what I was was an okay thing to be, and a thing to be proud
of. And that feeling of knowing that it didnt have to be this way, that it was this way but it didnt
have to be this way, that it couldve been another way, that I couldve been a lot less frightened
of myself, really broke my heart and broke it open at the same time, and made me really even
more dedicated to this work of building a discourse that more people had access to.
It was really refreshing when Janet Mock and Laverne Cox came on the scene as sort of a tag
team. This conversation that they had of being possibility models, I really love that frame
because there were no possibility models for me growing up. I have certainly, though I didnt use
that phrase, tried to be a possibility model in my adult life. The thing that Ive always said about
it is that when I was them, I didnt have me, and they deserve better than that. Being a trans
woman is complicated, and if I were in a different cultural context I dont know if thats the
gender I would identify with, but I know Im not a guy, so. [laughter] At one point I determined
that it was better to be complicated as a woman than complicated as anything else. [laughter]
And I ran with it.
Transcribed by Acacia
Elena: I guess in terms of other identification I was raised by an upper-class person and a
working-class person and it meant that I came up with a certain amount of economic
privilege
and I grew up with a piano in the houseand also with a lot of working class values from
that baggage of having a sort of first-and-a-half generation working-class parent who
married a white person with money and who wanted me to grow up tough and to

understand what it was like to be in need and to be hungry and to work. In my adult life
which has all been blue-collarthat certainly served me well.
Nia: Could you say a little bit more about what the values were that were given to you by
your parents?
Elena: Absolutely! My mom was really worried that we would grow up soft and unable to
deal with a difficult world, a world that she understood as much more difficult than my
dad did. My dad's a really nice guy, and I think fundamentally lives in a nice world, and I
know a lot of people like that. I don't know if I envy or I pity them, but it's not a world I've
ever lived in and I have a lot more in common with how my life has gone with my mother
than with my father. She wanted us able to work hard, past the point of exhaustion. She
wanted us tough and independent and able to handle grief and trauma. Me specifically,
because I had brothers and I was supposed to be one but I was clearly something else. I
think there was a real effort to strengthen me to deal with the world and some of those
methods now I don't agree with and some of them I'm grateful for.
There was a sort of fiction about money being tighter than it was so that there wasn't a
sense of entitlement, to just having what you want or taking groceries for granted. I was
certainly expected to work early.
My model of womanhood, that my model of femininity is very much a hard-working,
immigrant model, which has actually been really interesting in terms of transition. There
were a lot of ways that I felt like I was failing the expectations of womanhood and of
femininity. People were projecting that onto me, and I realized that what I wasn't doing
was white femininity. I was following the model of the women in my family who get things
done and lift heavy stuff and protect their families. The image of woman as something
delicate and in need of protecting was not a kind of womanhood that I had access to as a
kid, and was not a kind of womanhood that I aspired to. A lot of people saw that as
unwomanly, especially in terms of professional gatekeepers who were there to determine
transition care for me.
Nia: Like doctors?
Elena: Doctors, therapists, all of those folks who had to put stamps and letters on things.
Yeah, it really mattered to be in community with other women of color and to realize that
our model of womanhood was not that thing and that it wasn't womanhood that I wasn't
doing, it was whiteness that I wasn't doing. It certainly served me well when coming out
went very poorly for me and I was on my own [laughter] and had to support myself and
Nia: At what age?

Elena: It was complicated. I came out right before my 20th birthdayin collegeand it
went very poorly with my birth family. We tried for some years to reconcile some things
and to negotiate and eventually it became irreconcilable. By the time I graduated college,
my tuition was paid for I thinkin partbecause it just wasn't done to have a kid not
graduate from college, but after that I was on my own.
I couldn't get hired, it was 2005 and I was a brown trans woman in Portland, Oregon and
early in transition and I couldn't get a job washing dishes. It was, I think, the worst
unemployment and escalated into the worst since the Great Depression. I drove a dump
truck, I was a secretary, I sorted pipe parts in hardware stores, I did graveyard shift
security, I did an emergency dispatch. There were there were definitely times I had $35 a
month for groceries and I made it work. It was a complicated time, I had to kind of rebuild
my life from the ground up.
I often talk about it as a death, in that when it came to interacting with people from my
hometown, leave alone the idea of going there, I was a ghost. People could have kind of a
sance and call up this image of someone they used to know and have a brief interaction.
But there was no grasping. I was walking through the walls of those houses because they'd
been in different shapes the last time I'd been there. I was kind of living in my own afterlife
and I finally realized that it was time to make it a good afterlife. So it was a complicated
time, I had to rebuild who I was, and how I lived my life, and what I was sure of in the
world.
Nia: What did that look like for you?
Elena: Part of it was finding a vocation. Of the things I was really sure of growing up, the
things that I knew with a certainty, they were my womanhood and my calling to ministry. I
thought that they were mutually irreconcilable, that they were contradictory on an
inherent level and that either one would keep me from being the other in the world. That
tore me up as a teenager and as a twenty-something. I finally realized that unless I was telling
the truth about myself and living with integrity there was no way I could serve others, and
that there would be people that I would not be able to serve as a trans adult, and that there
were people I would not have access to, and there were people who would not want to be
anywhere near me. I finally realized you can't serve everyone in any life. You meet a limited
number of people, you touch a limited number of people, and so this dream of being there
for everyone was fictional to begin with, and meanwhile there were people who weren't
being served by those who were already in the profession, and they deserved better. I
actually was equipped to do better service for people like me who were outside of what was
already being done than maybe anyone else. I realized that being who I am made me
better-equipped to serve rather than worse.

So one of the ways I rebuilt myself was with an understanding of my social responsibility
and my responsibility to my people, to mold myself into someone who was resilient and
courageous, if not fearless, because fearless was never an option. But to mold myself into
someone who had the strength and the resources and the knowledge to serve better to be a
force for kindness, and someone who makes safe havens and homes where people can be
called their right names. I went alright, transition is a process of figuring out who you are
and deciding who you're going to be and if I get to do that I may as well decide to be better.
[laughter] I may as well decide to be my bravest self as best I could, and to be someone who
helped other people be brave.
Nia: And for you that meant becoming a minister?
Elena: It did, it did. I ran away from that for a long time. I first really felt sure of being
called to that work in the chapel of Doernbecher Children's Hospital in Portland, Oregon.
I'd done a fundraiser for them as a teenager. Something just sort of hit me where I realized
I wasn't scared of other people's suffering, and I wasn't scared of death, and other people
were scared, and maybe they deserved to have someone who was there to help them be less
scared without an agenda, without wanting to convert them to anything or make them
believe anything.
The more I thought about it as much as I considered primarily teaching, as much as I
considered social work, I realized that it was the best place to use the gifts I have for my
community, for my people, that the abilities I had as a public speaker, that the abilities I
had as a writer, that the abilities I had to care for people who came to me for emotional
support, that those could actually be combined into one profession and it was a profession
where I didn't have to explain myself if I wanted to help people. There are a lot of lines of
work where if you go out of your way to be kind to people or to look after them, they want
to know what your agenda is, and in religious leadership that's your job, so you know you
can get away with it. [laughter]
Nia: Get away with being kind to people?
Elena: Yeah, I think especially in our capitalist culture, they're really conditioned to be
suspicious of kindness and to wonder what you plan on getting out of it, to wonder sort of
what your agenda is. The thing that got me interested in working in religious community,
and I do make big distinctions in religious rather than saying spiritual, a lot of people
identify as spiritual, not religious and I don't. Spiritual is something you can do by yourself,
you know? Your own breath, in and out. You have access to a new-age bookstore and some
private space and you are all set. Spiritual can be individual and it can be incredibly

powerful, especially as sort of a set of tools for self-healing and self-actualization. It's also
incredibly commodifiable.
Nia: You think more so than religion?
Elena: Absolutely! I mean, because spiritual is a thing you can do as an individual by
yourself, you go to the new-age bookstore and you get yourself some books and some fancy
rocks and maybe some fancy sticks and you can get all the accoutrements, you can get the "I
am a spiritual person" outfit and this is all stuff you spend money on.
Nia: Yeah.
Elena: You go to yoga, you get your yoga gear
Nia: Well, yoga actually does have religious
Elena: Yeah well this is the thing, right? Yoga, in its origins and in its, I think, proper
practice is something much more complicated and interesting than mostly we make it in the
States but it's one of those things that, you know, like punk rock and the revolution gets coopted and turned into a series of products. [laughter]
Nia: I guess I'm just not sure how religion is
Elena: This is what I'm getting at, right. Spiritual is, it's something you can do by yourself
but religion, the way that I talk about it, is the thing that you have to be in context for, is
the thing you do with other people. It's about the ties that bind, to be a nerd about Latin
etymologies.
I don't think it's necessarily sensible to separate religion from culture the way a lot of
scholars do, it's an artificial separation that mostly dates back to the Romans. The idea that
you can draw a line around what we count as religion and a line outside of which is
everything else that's culture from food to farming to labor to family life. Like, it's
comprehensive. In most cultures, what we call religion is integrated into all of that, it's not
separate. But if we're talking a thing we can call religion it's the thing we do communally. I
know some of this comes from my Jewish heritage and some of this comes from this sort of
Confucian flavor of my heritage. For better and for worse, it's a thing we do in groups. It's
about the agreements we come up with for how we live together. It's about the kind of
ritual work that you do with other people, it's about what we can talk about when we're
trying to figure out what we believe and what matters to us. It is about theology and not in
that sort of airy speculation way that a lot of people think about theology but in terms of
like, what do we believe the shape of our world is? What do we think is Master over that
world? And it doesn't have to be a deity. What do we think holds the sky up? What matters

in the world? And these are questions of meaning-making and religion is about the
meaning-making we do with each other, it's about when we all come together to share what
we've been doing on our own. [laughter]
If you look at religious communities especially congregational communitieschurches,
synagogues, pagan circles, masjidsthey're some of the only institutions left in our society
that are intergenerational, aside from private homes and since the advent of the sort of the
post-40s nuclear family, those homes are not generally generational. At least, people who
are trying to assimilate with whiteness, there's usually parents and children and the
children leave. We have very few spaces that young people are speaking to their
grandparents' generation, we have very few spaces that people who we often put in nursing
homes are interacting with their children, leave alone their children's children, and that
means our places of cultural transmission and our ability to build intergenerational
solidarity, especially as movements, is deeply hampered. And it's one of the reasons that so
much really powerful organizing has come out of the Black church is that there's
continuity, there's memory that happens there. It's one of the reasons that I'm so in awe of
work that's being done by the Allied Media Projects in Detroit. It's that there's five
generations of people in conversation everywhere from people who are literally 100 years
old, may Grace Lee Boggs be blessed, to babies and that conversation is a conversation that
is very rare outside of religious communities.
We have very few spaces where that is considered normal, we have very few spaces left in
our society that are not commodified, that you can explicitly access without paying for it.
Places that we're encouraged to go to meet each other are places like coffee shops and bars
and dancehalls, all of which require that you buy something in order to be there. Our
public spaces, from parks to sidewalks, are increasingly made private by the use of
surveillance, right? You pay a private surveillance company and a private security
company to police your "public spaces", whether it's a park or a mall or what and it's not
actually a public space and we're reminded of this when we have mass demonstrations and
suddenly they say, this is private property and you're not allowed to do this here. It's how
they get away with the erosion of the commons of public land, of our ability to publicly
protest is to divvy it up among ownership, you know? The sidewalk gets owned, the street
gets owned.
Transcribed by Harmony

Elena: So it's also, religious communities and their, sort of physical footprints are often
some of the only places that you're welcome to be without paying for it and some of that
has been eroded by places like mega churches that tend to expect a lot of money to be
moving around.

Nia: Like, charging admission?

Elena: There are places that charge admission but there are also places that don't explicitly
charge admission, but they make you feel less welcome if you're not pledging money to support
the institution. Most religious communities in the states are essentially on a volunteer budget.
Most of their labor is vastly underpaid and volunteer, like most of the non-profit industrial
complex, and most of the budget comes from pledges. The collection plate is actually a very
small part of that budget, and mostly it's from pledges of money to support the institution.
Actually, I've known Buddhist communities where the clergy don't even do any of the work of
upkeep of the temple. You know, there's a group of women in the community who cook all their
meals, and that's not a model that we have as much in, say, Judaism or Christianity, but like, the
way that religious leaders who are professional clergy get paid or not paid is essentially based on
whether or not the congregation feels like it which is a really weird system and morally
complicated, but also unusual in the context of how we normally do pay and compensation for
labor in this culture. But we have these spaces where people are supposed to meet, like every
week, or at least every month in a space that is intergenerational, that is sort of by donation if you
feel like it, and it's a place where coincidentally people are supposed to be pooling small
contributions of resources and labor to do collective workthat people are putting a dollar into
the collection plate or volunteering for an hour at a bake sale, and raising thousands of dollars for
community betterment projectsdoing things like street clean ups, doing things like supporting
homeless shelters and emergency clinics.

When I was first in transition, the way that I got access in the end to medical transition care was
through a clinic for low income people that was supported by the Unitarian Universalist Church
in Portlanda shelter called Outside In, that's how I got medical care, and this is basically
volunteer supported.
One of the things that I do is educating theologians, so a few years back for instance there were a
couple of Catholic theologians who teach particularly theology about sex to Catholic clergy in
process, and they realized they didn't know anything about trans people and they asked in their
circles if there was anyone they could talk to, and a wonderful nun called me and my friend
Aidan Dunn who is a wonderful organizer in San Francisco, and we sat down in a little room
with this elderly Catholic straight couple, you know, straight cis white people who write sex
theology for the Catholic church, which is historically very complicated, and they sat down and
they were like, "So explain trans people to us, and explain what position you think we ought to
have as Christians," and I...

Nia: Sorry, when you said position I thought you were going a different direction.
[Laughter]

Elena: Yeah, fair enough, fair enough, fair enoughand we sat in this room for at least a couple
hours just hashing it out, you know we talked about our lives, we talked about what we face in
the worldand I in particular as a scholar of scripture was like, alright, if you take the bible as
authoritative, let's talk bible, you know let's talk history, and hashed a lot of stuff out about
gender and trans identity and bodily autonomy and they got weepy, they were like, "We had no
idea that your lives were like this, we had no idea about how wonderful you are and how normal
you are and how much we didn't understand about the world and what kinds of oppression you
face and what part we've taken in it," and then they went back and that's become a part of what
they teach to clergyand so I realized that there's this pipeline right? I'm like an infection...

Nia: [Laughter]

Elena: in this distribution system right? The body of a church is often going in the wrong
direction, right? Like most of our religious institutions are doing some pretty destructive stuff in
the world, but it's this really powerful distribution for culture change because ritual, on a
neurological level, rearranges our brains. When you do the same thing over and over again,
especially if it involves a lot of different sensory informationif it involves a way you're
moving and a thing you're smelling and you know maybe musicthose experiences stack in
your brain and whatever experience of awe or pain or togetherness or beauty that you have is
then plugged in to the next time you smell that smell or do that movement, so if you're standing
and sitting and saying and also with you, and there's maybe some incense, and you're doing
that same thing every week, whatever someone is saying to you about what matters in the world
is going to get just sort of likeplugged into your brain in this really intense, kind of creepy
way.

Nia: [Laughter]

Elena: and that's a power we can exploit, like [laughter], because that tool set is just as
possibleit's just as available to tell people to care for each other better and to be kinder and to
reach across lines and, you know, to make the world more justas it's available to make the
world more horrible and to teach people to be suspicious and cruel, and frankly I think we're
more inclined toward the former than the latter. Here I got to talk to these people who didn't

know any trans people and then sat down in a room with me and a friend of mine and we gave
them a talking to, and they teach clergy.
We talked to them about, like, interpretation of bible verses, so that affects how they teach those
bible verses to people who will be clergy and then each of those people goes to lead a religious
community somewhere, and every week is doing that neural-programming to who ever is sitting
in the pews and if they learn from their teachersthis way of teaching about trans people being
alright Maybe it comes up once a year that that verse comes up in their lectionary and is the
thing they're supposed to be writing a sermon on the third week of Marchand that's an
interpretation they learned of it and they're racking their brains to come up with a sermon, it
means that like, the message that I gave to those theologians is going to get hammered into
thousands of people who I have never met, over and over again through ritual, and that's a
culture change distribution center that I'm not willing to see to destructive terrible bigots. That's
something we can use and that's a model we can useespecially as activists.
So I'm really invested in that thingin the power of religious organizing as a tool for culture
change and especially for culture change in a context of intergenerational diverse communities
that care about things like feeding the hungry. You know if you look at things like services for
houseless people, services for hungry people, services for people escaping domestic violencea
lot of them are explicitly linked to religious organizations. Those religious organizations don't
speak our language, the language we speak as secular activists. We can come at them and talk to
them about privilege and oppressionwe can talk to them about our liberatory politic and it's
irrelevant to themthat's not the language they speak and that's not the priorities that they have,
but I realized that if I could be a person who learns to speak their language, if I could get in, if I
could alter them, then... maybe I wouldn't look as impressive, maybe I'd never be famous or
wealthy, but I could change a lot of lives in a way that I wouldn't ever get credit for, but that
would matter, and that would matter to people like I had been, who were really isolated and
scared.
I didn't have access to the cultural information that I needed as a young queer trans person of
color in rural Oregon and our discourse isn't getting to a lot of those placesit's changed now
that the internet is what it is, it's changed with the advent of Tumblr, but still a lot of those folks
are isolated and they're not getting this information and it doesn't have to be that way.
I remember when I first started lecturing and reading and performing as an out trans person about
liberation, I had people who where three times my age coming up to me crying and saying no
one had ever told them there was nothing wrong with them before. No one had ever told them
that they didn't mean something awful. No one had ever told them that they weren't
fundamentally broken, and it made me really realize that there are a lot of people who aren't
getting to be part of the conversations that we're having, that we need to carry them to places that
they aren't yet, and so my working in religious communities is one of the ways I do that.
I work in Jewish communities, I work in Muslim communities, I work with a lot of Christians, I
work with a lot of pagans, I have some Hindu colleagues that I've worked with and I try and get
people working together on it. There's this wonderful book, Qur'an Liberation and Pluralism by
a religious leader named Farid Esack from South Africa, and it's about the building of the

interfaith coalition against apartheidof bringing together Hindus and Muslims and Christians
through the language of the liberation theology movement, which came from South American
Catholics, and how to build a common language for liberation that meant that their commitment
to justice mattered more than their differences. I look at work like that; I look at work like
Howard Thurman's.
Thurman was an extremely influential early 20th century theologian who was one of the first
people to really articulate the structure and effects of segregation in the American South, and he
was one of Dr. King's mentors. He wrote a really phenomenal analysis of how oppressed
communities behave, of how people respond under colonization and under occupation, and how
we can come together across lines of difference via our common ground to fight to change it and
it's really beautiful, loving work that mostly we're not reading in the queer community because
it's filed under theology, but he invented a lot of stuff that we've been reinventing ever since
and we don't have to do that. I look at models like Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker Movement,
which has fed millions and millions of people since its inception (in what, the 20's?) on a very
simple model and we are not touching that in our radical communities because it says religion
and that's icky to us. They're a radical, essentially anarchist organization [laughter] for feeding
people that's operating in nearly every city, and...

Nia: you're talking about Food Not Bombs?

Elena: No, I'm talking about the Catholic Worker Movement!

Nia: Oh! [laughter]

Elena: The Catholic Worker Movement, that's what they're called and they're doing what Food
Not Bombs then reinvented decades laterthey've been doing it. They start what's called
Catholic Worker Houses and people live there essentially rent-free in exchange for laboring to
make more housing for people who can't pay for housing and make food for people who can't
pay for food. You go there and you get a meal and they're like, "If you like what's happening
here, you can stick around and help feed more people," and it just essentially metastasizes and
they just take over, like, cheap store fronts in downtowns.
They started in Manhattan via Christian anarchists and the Catholic church was very grumpy
with them at first and tried to shut them down and they said "Oh! Well, if you want we would be
really happy to let everyone know that the hierarchy of the Catholic church told us to stop
feeding people in the name of Jesus, so we can do that press release right now if you want," and
the church backed down and let them call themselves Catholic and sothey've slipped under the

radar in city after city and they're doing very similar stuff to what Food Not Bombs is doing plus
sheltering people, and we don't even know about that stuff in most of the queer communities that
I've worked with. I didn't get to learn about that stuff until I went to seminary.
There are people who have been doing this work, I mean, you want to look at a distribution
system for feeding the hungry, look at any Sikh Gurdwara they're feeding people every day. One
of the biggest components of the golden temple is the kitchen, they have this massive, massive
roti-making machine; they feed millions of people and it's because that's their values. That stuff
we could emulate, we don't have to have any kind of theism to do that thing; we don't have to
believe in any kind of deity to do that thing, [laughter] but those are models that work.
I feel like a lot of the time we're embarrassed to speak in terms of morals or we're anxious to
speak in terms of morals because that discourse has been really owned by terrible people, but our
commitment to justice is a moral thing, it's a meaning making thing, it's theologicalWe are
saying these people are sacred and they deserve better. It's not a scientific argument, it's not an
academic argument, it's not a legal argument, it's an argument about what we mean as people and
adopting that and then acting it out on a communal level is a thing anyone can do. It allows us to
build structures that let ordinary people do extraordinary things.
If you look at the biographies of any of these great civil rights leaders, they were profoundly
flawed, frightened human beings who had lots of days where they thought it was not going to
work and who were scared and ready to give up. They weren't different from us and we make
them into saints so that we don't have to be them, you know, we pretend they're flawless so we
don't have to be them, but if they're like us, it means we can do extraordinary things tooWe
just need to support each other.
Transcribed by Oscar Gutierrez