Hope

Sometimes I do not know how to find my words. Sometimes I don’t know what to else do but turn to God. The late Chicano poet Francisco X Alarcon says, writing a poem is like entering a temple of prayer. I must remember to find God in myself and love her, love her deeply .

I have had to face how much I do not have a bad memory, and how the struggle to find my words reflects brutal and hateful things no one has wanted to remember .

Hence, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about To Wong Foo, thanks for everything Julie Newmar: I remember when it came out I went to see the movie by myself. It was the first time I went to see a movie alone. The film was too personal to watch with anyone because at the time I couldn’t even begin to explain what I intuitively felt the film would mean to me. And indeed, To Wong Foo made me laugh, made me cry, and made me see what I always knew: Drag Queens empowered not just the queer community, but everyone.

Those few hours I spent watching the movie in the theater in 1995 were a metaphor for Wong Foo’s metaphor, a metaphor for God, “because you have to thank God for everything. You have to be grateful for life. You just have to stop where you are and say thank you for everything.”

I was twenty-one years old in 1995, and although I started at UC Davis in 1991, when I was sixteen years old, I was still far from graduating. I had been a triple major of English, History, and French. Though speaking and writing in French were easy for me, I decided to major in English, because there was a story I had promised God that one day I would find my words, words in English, though the words I needed most were the ones I was told in a language I had forgotten, necissitas recordar: There had been a new parade, a parade that would one day become very famous, with a flag, with all the colors of the rainbow, like The Wizard of Oz. And once upon a time there was a poet, a poet of the world, from Andalusia where our family was from. I was never told that the poet had been killed and I imagined that Andalusia was like the It’s a Small World attraction at Disneyland.

In Spanish there is a fine line between the words for despair and desperation. Yesterday, I found myself writing the synopsis for a sequel to To Wong Foo, where Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo reprise their roles as Ms. Noxeema, Ms. Chi-Chi and help a 47-year-old high survivor of Provo Canyon school, who had been a gutter punk in Peoples Park in the early 90s, and her two cousins, one of them a really annoying poet, who is always quoting other poets and losing the notebooks she writes in, and the other, a 52-year-old grandmother and glitter artist- find their beloved uncle who had been a queer icon and legendary drag queen, labor activist, human rights activist, and harm reductionist during Spain’s transition to democracy. And in the sequel to To Wong Foo there will be more discussions about the symbol of To Wong Foo, as well as a conversation about the late actress and dancer Fredi Washington’s courage and activism, and how though truth is stranger than fiction, and beyond our control, art can help us find hope.