6  Distance, Desire, and Diaspora Using Ephemeral Trans Territories to Rethink Belonging and Place

Unbelonging and Belonging

Had you walked in the coulees around Lethbridge, Alberta, between May 2018 and May 2019, you might have chanced upon an ethnically ambiguous bearded man in black leather fetish gear flogging the air with a pink leather flogger. Or he may have been thrusting his knee into a hole in the ground, tying himself to tree trunks, rolling down hills in handcuffs, or whipping a stack of vintage books—colonial travelogues depicting the expansion of the West and old-school textbooks glorifying Alberta’s industrial histories—with his black leather gloves. You may have heard him talking smut to the beavers, the deer, and the geese and calling the Old Man River “Daddy.” This strange apparition was named Chico California, a performance persona I created as part of my thesis project, a body of work called “Landscape Is My Sir” (Solís 2019a). Incorporating video, textile, installation, and performance art, the project revolved around a leather daddy who pursues erotic relationships to land, place, and all the entities that are part of these: the flora, the fauna, the rocks, the dirt, the wind. Asking the question of how non-human subjectivities might be pleasured—and failing to find an answer—Chico California stages attempts at having BDSM relationships to landscape, inhabiting the roles of both submissive and dominant.

My partner, Luke, and I came to Canada in mid-2017, our years of lazy dreaming of a life outside the US suddenly made urgent by a predictably destabilizing American election season the year prior. I accepted an offer to complete an MFA in art at the University of Lethbridge, stating in my application an interest in site-specific performance work, having been compelled by the coulees, river valley, and complex local history. This compulsion was puzzling and a little fraught. We had been living in Michigan, Luke’s home state. I grew up in rural Northern California, so to come to the Canadian west was strange in that it was unfamiliar in many ways yet also felt like a kind of return. Lethbridge is not unlike the town of Chico, California, a town near which I was raised located at the base of the Sierra Nevada, traditional territory of the Konkow Maidu and the namesake of my performance persona.

My intent to create site-specific works in Lethbridge was a challenge: site-specific work asks of the artist to have a unique understanding of the site. I found myself confronted with the challenge of wanting a relationship to a place while having little knowledge of it at all. How would I express an understanding of, or relationship to, a place I didn’t know? How should a Chicanx person inhabit Blackfoot land?

The Indigenous metaphysical concept of all my relations becomes relevant here. I recognize the phrase from my childhood as something said after prayers, songs, or ceremonies and always interpreted it as an acknowledgement of human ancestors. But Blackfoot scholar of Native philosophy and science Dr. Leroy Little Bear (2019) offered, during a lecture I attended, a more complex understanding of all my relations. Little Bear pointed out that all my relations honour the relational ties we share with all beings and entities, not simply our human ancestors. This acknowledgement of relational ties rather than individual humans does two things: First, it recognizes that our kin, our ancestors, are not limited to human descendants. Second, it is an acknowledgement of relations across past and present and future. In a way this allows time to be untethered from notions of being linear. In a sense, it is impossible to rethink how we relate to the non-human without entirely rethinking how we relate to core metaphysical concepts like time.

In my artistic process, I began spending a lot of time in the coulees and river valley. But it did not feel like enough to get to know the place on just a surface level. The connections felt incomplete, forced, and impersonal. I wanted to queer all my relations: Why not acknowledge all those relations by sexing the land? Being transgender and also a homosexual, the role of desire in getting to know someone is important, and fucking by way of introduction or as the reason to meet someone feels very natural. Why not acknowledge the desire to get to know better, to relate to, as an erotic attraction, a sexual relationship? A queer longing, a belonging?

Why belonging? Obviously, unbelonging designates a state of not being a part of a whole, of being outside of it. But to say the opposite of unbelonging is to belong creates a binary that implies there is no in-between, parallel, or complex alternative to these states of being. I think of belonging as giving movement or animation to unbelonging. Belonging is about being driven by desire, not necessarily a desire to belong, but just being driven, being in motion. Unsettled. Furthermore, to belong to or toward something, someone or someplace resists the possessiveness of belonging to. This is not entirely good: to belong, as the story of this paper will reveal, is a lonely endeavor. But it is not entirely bad either. It’s complex.

This process of finding and naming alternatives to binary logics is important to keep in mind throughout this paper, which concerns itself with hybridity in many forms. Thinkers like Sara Ahmed (2006), who has discussed gender and sexual orientation spatially, argue beyond the female/male, gay/straight binaries to point out that to separate gender and sexual orientation in itself is binary thinking. Homi K. Bhabha (1994) names this non-binary-ness spatially as a third space in a discussion of racial, ethnic, and cultural mixing, hybridity. Mary Louise Pratt (1991) talks about contact zones, naming the site of Indigenous and colonial presences intermingling and commingling as a place not only where genetic and cultural hybridity is happening but also where philosophies,1 aesthetics, and modes of language production come together and mutate.

Because of the prevalence of binary logic, I am cautious about introducing new structures of this-or-that thinking, such as the idea that I can only belong or not belong in a place. In this way, unbelonging and belonging resist the idea that there is no value in being an outsider or that one should rush to become an insider. These terms ask the question What can I learn from being a stranger? A guest?

Bearing all this in mind, I began “cruising” on Grindr in Lethbridge. Grindr, whose geolocation function serves to mark the distance between yourself and potential hookups, served as a tool for mapping—possibly unmapping—desire. I thought of this process as part of my research, both a collecting of data and a part of an embodied education, a way to understand this place with my body and desire. What parts of town did the gays and MSMs2 live in? Were they interested in a transgender man looking for both cisgender and trans men? What kind of encounters were they looking for? This act of using Grindr as a kind of horny echolocation was an example of belonging, of using desire to (un)map territory. I was using sex to weave myself into the relational fabric of the area. I was getting to know a place by fucking it.

Distance played into “Landscape Is My Sir” (Solís 2019a) in other ways. Performances were typically viewable only from a distance, the audience watching me perform as one might a wild animal, through binoculars or with eyes shaded by a hand. Distance and landscape have a complex relationship. Landscape as an aestheticization and commodification of land, a framing of the land, often requires a distancing from place. The desire to encapsulate a whole place, site, or landmass also requires the assumption of knowing where a place begins and where it ends. This framing of landscape creates relational distance, and it must be underscored that there is something deeply sadomasochistic at work here, a bondage, a restriction, an order. In this way to put a frame around a place is to be not so much in relationship to place as to be in relationship to the distance between oneself and that place.

To this effect, Chico California’s affections extend beyond land, place, and all its parts to depictions of these, particularly depictions presented in a romanticized way. In “Landscape Is My Sir” (Solís 2019a), this idea of fetishized landscape and nature included vintage plaques and other wall decorations depicting pheasants, deer, lakes, and mountains, which had been altered in perverse ways. A mounted buck’s head wearing a black leather garrison cap and leather muzzle, a resin lacquered photograph from the 1970s of a pretty mountain scene turned into a glory hole, a decorative platter with a painted pheasant ornately bound in black rope. In a sense, it is the fetishization of Nature and Landscape that Chico California himself is fetishizing. The intent was to bring together various imaginaries that corresponded with aestheticized and eroticized power: colonial aestheticization of the West and glorification of westward expansion, the eroticization of hypermasculinity in the gay leather cultures of the 1970s–’80s and contemporary nostalgification of foliage mimicking camouflage and hunting paraphernalia. Critiques of these imaginaries as commodification of body and land exist across multiple fields of study, and the question has been taken up by artists, writers, and scholars including Adrian Stimson, Rebecca Solnit, Dayna Danger, Kent Monkman, and Kyle Terrence, just to name a few whose work I’ve engaged with. This is especially relevant in regard to the imaginary of the West as a project to excite and entice the eastern colonial settler westward as well as the imaginary of recreational hunting, which entices the consumer to put money toward an idealized relationship to land that may never be realized beyond Cabela’s3 gloriously themed interiors.

But I, the perverted artist, am more interested in understanding these interpolations of power as the fetish that precedes fetishization. The thing that happens in between knowing of a place and being there, the impulse to stop at a vista point to photograph a particular landscape from far away, between imagining a dead goose across one’s shoulder and parking one’s car beside the field in which it will be hunted. It is that fetish, that ephemeral state of desire, that I ask you to hold in your mind as we move through the next sections.

An Exican Hiding from Aztlán

My mother and father, if asked, would assert that they are Indigenous and that I, by proxy, am too—that I am not a colonizer. My parent’s analysis is based in Chicano/a scholarship, cultural practice, and thought that developed during the 1970s and ’80s. My father, the son of a Baptist preacher, was a psychiatrist, one of the few Mexicans in his field at the time. My mother, daughter of Mexican farmworkers who immigrated to Southern California, was an academic and community organizer who worked with migrant families and did AIDS education during the height of the epidemic. Both were living in Los Angeles during the Chicano/a Movement and met through cultural gatherings and lectures that discussed and experimented with a process of reclamation of pre-Hispanic spiritual and cultural practices. This cultural-political context in which my parents met and came to know each other represented a longing toward a new cultural paradigm for being a decolonized Mexican living outside of national Mexico. This is the world and process that Gloria Anzaldúa ([1987] 2012) wrote about in Borderlands / La Frontera, a manifesto for a borderless, feminist, post-colonial nationhood for Mexicans as a race of culturally and racially hybrid entities. Based in the Nahuatl name for a promised land in Aztec mythology, Aztlán has come to represent diasporic4 sovereignty to an amorphous place, a roving metaterritory for the landless.

But Aztlán is often framed as a political territory and not one that provides tools for creating a relationship with ambivalent territory that is yours and yet not at all yours. Aztlán as a mytho-political territory is justified by Anzaldúa and other Chicano/a and Chicanx5 thinkers with the historical fact of Mexico’s annexation by the US in 1848. But that land was already the sovereign territory of a multitude of Aboriginal nations. Mestizxs like myself are quick to claim Indigenous belonging using Aztlán as justifying rhetoric. While this is a powerful political gesture of reclamation, it has the potential to overlook nuances of power and privilege as well as a diversity of Mexican Indigenous communities that are currently in high stakes political battles over land rights, survivance of Aboriginal languages, citizenship and protection from persecution, and access to essential resources. This political reality is radically different from the reality of the Mexican American millennial—my reality—who is sussing out what it means to have Indigenous heritage within the context of their academic pursuits. This flattening of identity narratives, along with pervasive homophobia, was why I felt I had to leave Aztlán and its attending discourse in order to seek out a more nuanced understanding of Mexicanness as a diaspora.

I grew up primarily in California with some lengths of time spent in Southern Mexico and, as an adult, have not lived in the same place for longer than four years. I spent the first twenty-five years of my life as a butch dyke and then transitioned into a gay transman. I pass as a man with my clothes on but am visibly not cisgender without them. While the land I was raised on was Konkow Maidu, and later, when I moved to California’s central coast, Ohlone territory, I was simultaneously growing up in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Aztlán. I am racially Mestizx, the visible manifestation of what happened when the Indigenous body and the Colonial body came together repeatedly for generations, a mixing of already mixed people over time, a hybrid of hybrids. You can see why it’s far more comfortable for me, and in many ways more interesting, to be in a perpetual state of unbelonging. But instead of unpacking the overlooking of privilege or other reasons for my dissatisfaction with Aztlán, I packed up and ended up a very safe distance from the major centres of Chicanx scholarship. I became an Exican.

Aztlán was not the only placeless place that Anzaldúa wrote about:

Nepantla is the place where at once we are detached (separated) and attached (connected) to each of our several cultures. Here the watcher on the bridge (Nepantla) can “see through” the larger symbolic process that’s trying to become conscious through a particular life situation or event. Nepantla is the midway point between the conscious and the unconscious, the place where transformations are enacted. Nepantla is a place where we can accept contradiction and paradox. (Anzaldúa and Keating 2015, 56)

Anzaldúa’s Nepantla brings together notions I’m trying to describe as unbelonging and ephemeral trans territories (ETTs). I have created a Nepantla for myself wherein I ask myself what I’m doing in Blackfoot territory every day. This process has been fruitful, but I have to wonder, Am I hiding from the excruciating spectre of California, a place whose own imaginary is entirely about the chaos of colonization? And what do I—one of Anzaldúa’s ([1987] 2012) “half-breeds”—have to contribute to this conversation? Can’t I just hide here in Canada from Aztlán’s knowing eye, make my own corn tortillas and fill them with mushrooms, steak, and No Frills kimchi in peace? No. Aztlán demands my extradition from my northern Nepantla. It has ways of calling you back to the original site of its placelessness.

Ephemeral Trans Territories

In order to understand what an ETT is, we must time travel. I’ve included months, years, and a few dates of the Gregorian calendar to guide us. Pay careful attention and try very hard to follow the timeline, lest time should reveal itself to be non-linear.

It is November 5, 2018. A friend has flown me down from Alberta to San Diego, California, to perform as Chico California at an art party they have curated. It is here that I meet Simon. He and I stand close to hear each other over the music, and I notice immediately that our laughter sounds the same. He’s handsome, young in trans years, just filling out of his medically induced boyhood. He is eager and smart, a flirt. This is one of those good-smelling hipster motherfuckers, I think to myself, recognizing the essential-oiled musk of a particular kind of white trans guy I love to hate and hate that I love. I don’t remember how we start talking about it, but we find out immediately that we are both trans intellectual interlopers crashing Grindr to overthink male intimacies. I perform my set, Chico California stripteasing and fellating an inflatable deer hunting decoy. I feel disoriented. The performance isn’t very good: Chico flounders in the eucalyptus duff outside the venue. Why is this? Hasn’t Chico California come home?

It’s a good question, but I don’t think much of it. Simon is distracting me. Texting me over Grindr—although we are standing a few metres from each other—he invites me to look at his art. He shows me, pinned to the venue wall, a storyboard for the film he is making. His film is a discussion of power and landscape (which interests me) but seems to revolve around grassroots activism (which bores me) in a particular rural town near the US/Mexico border. Text wraps around diagrams and grainy archival stills: a group of people walking down a desert road holding signs, a blueprint for a private military training facility that was never built because those same protesters shut it down. Simon’s writing is interesting, and he is clearly obsessed with his work, which I find hot. This wordy motherfucker, I think, our racialized dynamic predetermined in my mind. I’m just starting to glaze over—there is quite a bit of text—when a cluster of italics catches my eye, and I find that it’s a sex fantasy, a little corner of dirty talk, hard, masculine, and gay, inserted at the end of the theoretical discussion, the film notes, the historical context. It changes everything for me, because a real discussion of power and land must absolutely include sex. When I pull away from that wall of history and theory, I know we will fuck. I won’t realize he’s Jewish until after I’ve learned his last name. He won’t get a good look at the Virgin de Guadalupe tattoo on my chest till after I have undressed in his bedroom and he is taking in my chest hair and scars. I am four years older than him, but his diaspora is two thousand years older than mine.

It is December 29, 2019, and I am editing another draft of this chapter, which is due in two days. Outside, Alberta is winter blue. Funny how very much stock we place in time, as if it were linear, a solid, when it is in fact a fluid, an ocean, a series of tides. Two thousand years? When exactly did the Mexican diaspora begin? I look over at Luke, my partner of nine years, who, like Simon, is Jewish and trans. “Baby,” I ask, “how long ago did the Jewish diaspora begin?” They laugh and roll their eyes. “I don’t know historic facts,” they drawl, “just biblical ones. It began with the fall of the second temple? I’m sure you can find it on Wikipedia.” When does a diaspora begin? Do we become a diaspora when we become a we or when we become a them? Does it begin in the moment a we is severed from their land, their sites of knowledge and traditional food sources? Or is it the effects of this severance across movement and time? It is critical that we talk about time, for it is time that shapes diaspora, it is time that carves hybrid bodies out of the polymorphous block of composite origins.

It is mid-February 2020. I am completing yet another draft of this chapter. I have a dream that I’m stuck in a time loop where I must walk into a gay bar at exactly the right moment so that I might catch a glimpse of myself, and through seeing myself, I am able to keep on living. It is late February 2019, and Simon explains time to me. It is dreamlike, but it’s not a dream. I’m visiting him in California. We lie side by side, him drifting off, me lying there knowing something unarticulated is going horribly wrong between us. He explains time to me by way of a poem he has composed for someone else, which begins with the line time is water. The poem is a list of all the fluid things that time is, the only one of which I remember being a dog’s water bowl. His mouth softens around the words, and he is asleep. I stare at the concrete ceiling, listening to the rain outside. If water is time, within a week of this moment, our brief, intense relationship will have fucking drowned. I will have held it underwater until it has stilled.

It is November 7, 2018, and I have flown home after the art party, after sleeping twice with Simon. When my plane lands in Calgary, I text Luke the word here, as we all do these days when announcing the arrival of our corporeal bodies. When we arrive in Lethbridge, I am taken aback when the words I’m so happy to be home come out of my mouth. It isn’t untrue. A feeling of relief at being immersed in the familiar, or, an experience of familiarity, is flooding my body.

But over the next few days, it becomes clear that I am not entirely here and that this is not entirely home. And if it is home, it is an uncomfortable home, an uncanny one. Nael Bhanji discusses Anne-Marie Fortier and Avtar Brah’s understandings of queered home. Brah’s (1996) homing desires speak to longing as a moving toward, and Fortier (2003) asks for a complication and desentimentalization of home as an experience of comfortable belonging. Bhanji considers these from a context mapping migrational desires and the uncanny, or unheimlich, potentials of home. Bhanji points to “the (un)heimlich specters that continue to haunt the oft-cited metaphorical borderlands of corporeo-psychic uninhabitability” (2012, 159).

Given that Luke and I are in a non-monogamous relationship, I don’t think much of what I perceive to have been a two-night stand with Simon. Yet in the days and weeks that follow, I realize that a part of me has remained in transit, has remained in California. A part of me is still sitting on the front seat of Simon’s Toyota Corolla, left there after he dropped me off at the San Diego airport. A part of me is not present in Treaty 7 territory as I begin a manic pattern of waking up too early, reading the messages Simon has sent me in the middle of the night, then leaving the house to run compulsively through the coulees in minus ten degree weather, as if through speed I could collapse the distance between my here and Simon’s. Is it possible that this is not the first time I have left a part of myself behind? And if this is the case, is it possible that every settler, every newcomer arrives in Indigenous territory incomplete? Is this why non-Indigenous people are sometimes called ghosts?

Simon and I continue texting. We send each other photos and voice recordings. Time warps. We cram so much into each interaction that a week of fantasizing and promise making feels like months of knowing. The correspondence between Simon and I speaks constantly about distance. How could it not? It’s so palpable given that we are still messaging over Grindr, which displays the distance between us over the chat box: 1,917 kilometres. He tells me he’s falling for me, that he loves me. Same, I say.

Simon writes me into his film as a leather daddy, his fantasy, our shared imaginary, of ’70s pre-AIDS gay cruising culture. It is an act of love that unfixes me from time, bifurcates my storyline, me. Simon is also a character in his own screenplay, and these projected selves of ours take on a new here that exists only on the page and in our minds. In his screenplay, film-me emerges from the dark, from the desert, appears in film-Simon’s Corolla to tease him, elucidate him in space, and force fingers into his mouth. Dominant, anachronistic, and feral, I recognize film-me as the parts of myself I fear the most yet long to know better. This hyperreal version of me, of us, fills me with the hope that Simon’s ability to inhabit California, to be an outsider to it looking in, somehow means he can inhabit me too. In our sexts, I tell him I want to bury him in the desert, put dirt in his mouth. I want to eat you, he says.

It is December 2018. Luke’s father offers to gift us his like-new Honda Accord, and we decided it’s worth it to take the train to Michigan and drive the car to Washington State to give it to my mother, whose car has been in a dangerous state of disrepair for years. By way of maintaining connection, Simon and I have begun a shared Google doc with the intent of writing together what you are reading now. During the train ride between Montana and Michigan, I write,

Living in Canada where discourses of territory, Indigeneity, and settlement are alive and tense, I find myself wondering what trans territory looks like, what its range is, what its borders are. I find myself wanting to test these bodies of imagined space, taste them, fuck them experimentally. I have moved so many times, have travelled so much, have compulsively built then destroyed relationships with place. My territory is ephemeral and is not made up of a place, a here. If a trans territory exists for me it is made of in-betweenness. Of course it is. But it’s not a female to male distance. It is the distance between my body and my desire. The distance between location and relocation.

Having made a habit of renunciation (of home, of genders), I own nothing. And yet I feel compelled to control my body distance, to ribbon its boundaries and militarize its borders. This is a resistance of intimacy born out of an urgent need to both run to and run away from. I am writing this on a train. It doesn’t matter where the train is going. I will get there and the betweenness will be over.

Because the ETT has closed, I cannot include Simon’s writing, but I will mention some things. He writes in the shared document about driving and being a driver. He writes about how before he learned to drive, he was sure he’d die driving. He tells about how his dad told him, when he came out, that he had always thought of Simon as existing in-between.

Luke and I begin the drive back west toward Washington State. A novelist, Luke is fun to travel with, witty, an excellent planner, and full of what writer Patricia Lockwood (2017) calls gleeful noticing. Eating salami and grapes, Luke and I essay out loud about how the South Dakotan tourist trap, Wall Drug,6 is weirdly a queer fixture. As we approach from the east, we begin seeing the signs for Wall Drug spaced miles apart, each with a unique hand-painted style, each with a clever slogan promising novelty and refreshment. Free Ice Water, Wall Drug: a painting of a cartoon donkey drinking from a trough where a cartoon man lies cooling. Something to Crow About, Wall Drug: a painting of a cartoon rooster calling into the dawn. The space between the signs is an ETT, a fleeting moment between a here and a there, the literal manifestation of the urgent distance between desire and the realization of a promise.

Queer theorist Aren Aizura’s important work on trans movement, migration, and mobility unfolds within a context of gender reassignment surgery and other transition related motivators. Aizura, building on the work of Jay Prosser (1998), points productively toward the flattened narratives of arrival in a “new” gender and the way in which travelogues use the movement from a here to a there as an oversimplified metaphorical device for transition (Aizura 2018). But I am a basic bitch, and my focus is far less productive and far hornier. My focus is on the erotics that must be (un)mapped as its own temporal territory when a trans body spreads itself lustily across landmasses. It is less about travellers and travelogues, non-arrival, and metaphor and much, much more about the pictures of my transsexual junk I took in the cramped train toilet to send to another transsexual thousands of kilometres away.

I write to Simon in our shared doc,

ETTs must be moved through, felt through. I am a Californian and driving comes as naturally as breathing, as eating, as fucking does to me. I’m not giving a car to my mother. She is paying me for my time and expenses after all. But perhaps I am gifting her the trans ephemeral space that opens up and stays open between us for hours and hours and hours. Hours during which I think about what my mother will do with the car. Will she care for it? Or wreck it? Will she allow herself to be helped by me? Loved?

What a useless gift, this ephemeral trans territory: as soon as I arrive at her house, the trans territory will close and the gift will mean nothing, will not exist. “He is on his way here” is so different, so much more poignant than “He drove from Michigan to Washington.” When I started growing a beard years after going on testosterone, I was on the way somewhere again, after having already arrived in “being a man” and being sad that wherever I’d arrived, it was now a here and no longer my beautiful there.

He writes about driving around the deserts of southern California in his Corolla, about all the things one can do in a car when in motion and when not. He says driving makes him feel powerful. In a sentence, he lists fear, desire, and driving, in that order. Writing this, I wish desperately that I could quote him for this paper, but it just isn’t possible at this very moment.

It is early June 2019, and I am faced with the task of writing a chapter about an ETT that has closed, has ended, has been erased from the map. I have just finished my MFA thesis show—the Chico California work—and I am exhausted, empty, and suicidally depressed. I think daily about throwing myself from the High Level Bridge or hanging myself from the river valley cottonwoods or even just walking into the prairie with a bottle of whisky on a very cold night. What better way to know a place than to know all the ways you can die in it? But I don’t do any of these things. Instead, I task myself with writing about someone who spoke to me every day for three months and then spoke to me not at all. I seal a rent in trans time, an escape hatch in the geography of belonging, and in doing so, acknowledge that when I chose the word ephemeral, I meant it.

It is late 2018, early 2019. What I do not realize is that my emotional state is being chemically affected by my acne medication and a too high dose of testosterone. The feelings are real, but they are being amplified to an almost intolerable degree, both the good and the bad. As I have become less present, less here, with Luke, Simon in turn becomes less present with me. He visits his own place of fromness, New York, and there falls for another tran7 he meets on Grindr. Her thereness supplants my hereness, but I won’t know this until it’s too late. Perhaps in that moment Simon doesn’t know it either. I buy tickets to visit him in San Diego when he goes back, reading his reserve as doubt in my affection. It is this attempt to close the distance that ends our shared ETT. It is late February 2019, a few days before Simon explains time. He rents us a cabin in the mountains above the Inland Empire, east of San Diego. He is sweet but also irritable and painfully distant. The cabin is tiny, yet I feel I am the farthest from him I have ever been. We kiss but don’t fuck.

West Texas–based essayist Ray Gonzalez describes the experience of being drawn in by the southwestern landscape across a distance:

Image. Distance. Color. Height. Deepness. They work together to get us there, and we know that landscape way over there will not be there when we get to it. It is gone, and the earth is in our face, surrounding us with a magnetism that drew us to it, but that is now transformed into a living, breathing environment that has taken us into itself. (Gonzalez 2008)

What an idiot I was to think the place I saw from a distance was also the place I’d arrive in once I’d satisfied my perverse desire to get there. When Simon excuses himself to make a phone call, I cry inconsolably on the desert’s shoulder, a living, breathing thing that has taken me into itself. Kneeling in the mud, a hole opens in the clouds above me, the opalescent stars a there I would only die trying to make into a here.

At the end of my trip, Simon makes a final attempt to get me to express appropriately politicized excitement about the photograph on his storyboard, the grainy archival still of protesters walking down the desert road. He talks about power and learning to beat the system, but I’m tired of discussing power. I tell him, you know what, people suck, but when people really love a place, they can transcend themselves. To physically traverse a territory, protesting its weaponization, is to collapse the heartbreaking distance between human and non-human. I tell him what I see is a photo of a people’s love for a place. Does he realize the power that lies in relation? Does he hear that I am not just talking about a stupid picture? Does he know he is the place that I love? You must long before you can belong. He hugs me and tells me I smell like the incense he burns in his car while driving. You’ve marked me, I tell him. He is either a cartographer or a dog.

It is March 4, 2019. The ETT collapses when I look at the Twitter account belonging to the other tran and find out that her and Simon’s relationship is far deeper than I had understood it to be, that she has been referring to him as her boyfriend even after he had told me he was incapable of being anyone’s boyfriend. I realize that she, the other Grindr tran, is also Mexican, and somehow it is this fact that undoes me. Like Ray Gonzalez, the other Mexican Grindr tran is from West Texas, and I hear her speak beautifully of the Texan desert in an interview I find online. Never mind that Luke is also trans and Jewish, I’m too jealous, too insecure, too angry and hurt to handle Simon’s omission of facts. I leave him a series of voice messages, twenty minutes of cruel, cutting rage. Time is water, and did you know, blasted at high pressure, water can slice through steel. Time is water, and did you know, it only takes about sixty seconds for an adult to drown. I tell Simon his project makes me uncomfortable, that I quit. I tell him, You can fuck the entire Mexican diaspora, but you will never, ever meet anyone like me.

Conclusion

Viewable from a hunting blind set up in the middle of the gallery for “Landscape Is My Sir” (Solís 2019a) were three videos8 showing various performances of Chico California. One of these shows slow-motion footage of Chico California in a leather jacket, chest harness, knee-high leather boots, and Levi’s rolling in mud, washing his leather jacket, walking into the river, and floating away. These visuals are accompanied by the sound of birds, water, and Chico California addressing the Old Man River. Chico California’s voice is lusty and begging, somewhere between a whisper and a moan, about to cum, about to cry:

Please Old Man Daddy River take me come on come on you know you want a piece of your boy come take him he wants you he wants you inside come on come on take your Chico California take him take him home [. . .] please take this boy please take him take your boy take your little California boy take me just fucking take me take me take me [. . .]

After filming this performance, the clouds are heavy over the Old Man River, and I feel I have created relation with this here, a love between one human and a place. The wind blows mosquitos against my skin like many small kisses. I may never belong here, but when insects take my blood, I like to think that I am being loved back.

At the newly opened YMCA in West Lethbridge, there are video simulations of bicycle paths for stationary bikes, where the rider can choose from ten or so landscapes to watch drift by while pedalling. Only after a couple minutes of biking through a California desert do I realize where I am: a semi-pixelated Joshua Tree National Park moves around me, soft and gold, the 3-D imaging an odd blend of photographs and digital construction, dreamlike, memory-like. I want to see if the simulation will let me ride across the Inland Empire, where my grandparents grew melons, down the mountainous spine of the Cleveland National Forest, into Kumeyaay territory, across eucalyptus groves to Simon’s studio—and it is in this desperate whirling on this stupid bike that goes nowhere that I begin to understand what happened. Through Simon I was able to see my own homesickness as well as remember myself not as a Californian but as a California, a creature made of places and events, a dissident expatriate of Aztlán, a Nepantla, an Exican. Simon saw me as a California he could arrive in, and when I heard him articulate that California, I tried desperately to arrive in him. At the time we met, we had already formed our own temporal territories of longing, our homing desires. Simon had ached across the country for that ideal of grassroots organizing in a small town, for the desert that surrounded it. I had ached into western Canada to come home without the responsibility of going home. Too late I realized Simon was right—I am California. But he has already left me for Texas. And can I blame him? The rent is surely cheaper.

I am not a prairie queer,9 but I deeply appreciate what scholar Jas Morgan says about the prairie wind:

Me, an Indigenous / gender studies scholar: Don’t gender and sexualize nature. The wind is a relation whose gender is fluid and unknown to us, and it still affects everyone and everything it touches. Also me: The prairie wind is gay af. The prairie wind propels the queer body forward in a way shared among queer kin who perpetually followed those sparkling lights on the landscape: that queer lust for the city, that home in the horizon, and that desire for queer possibility. (Morgan 2018, 46–47)

It is possible to be propelled in many directions at once. I know what Morgan means by “that home in the horizon.” I, too, have intimacy issues. What is this ETT that I have built “here” in “Lethbridge, Alberta?” For I am never actually here, am I? Not entirely. Is this bad? Is it excellent?

Consider that this place named Aksiiksahko (Steep Banks), Asinaawa-iitomottsaawa (Where We Slaughtered the Crees), and Sik-Ooh-Kotok (Black Rocks) I have called Lethbridge, the surname of a British lawyer who never bothered to traverse the distance between his colonial here and his colonial there. How can anyone be fully present in this town whose vertices of power are mapped on a racial x- and y-axis in which white bodies stand while not all but many Indigenous bodies lie horizontal? In a place like, this even those who don’t unbelong find themselves having to retheorize and reassert belonging on their own territories.

I wanted to belong to something, said an ex–white supremacist on the radio last year, and I wonder very much if it is possible to be an ex–anything like that.10 It is critical to consider how one relates to place and belonging as nationalist narratives gain momentum, heat. How do we metabolize time and space as treaty agreements continue to be ignored, as people tell one another to go home, as territories are staked out, borders are secured, cultures are defined, and DNA is copyrighted?

It is summer of 2019. The days are endless. Simon and I haven’t spoken for months. If I am a California, my regret is an opened fault line that has split me in two. One half thinks I’m better off without my cartographer, while the other misses desperately that feeling of being seen, mapped, and known. I have apologized for my part in the destruction of our ETT, but Simon has only said he isn’t ready to speak, that the time isn’t right. So come, be with me in this meantime, this meanwhile. Visit me in my Nepantla, this haunted, timeless home. Behold my queer Exican failure: all I can do is theorize my own heartbreak, my own hard-on, my own homesickness, my own tragi-glorious self-dislocation. Come, belong patiently with me.

Running with my dog through the coulees, I am overtaken by a memory of Southern California, my belonging a hysteria: high-pitched tire songs on the I5, crystalline qualities of the desert, the smell of wet sand. I take a moment to reorient myself to the cottonwoods fluttering in the river valley, old clothes rotting pleasantly among thick prairie grass, the thunder of grain and oil cars on the High Level Bridge. Compulsively, I check my phone for new messages. I don’t know who I want to hear from most, Simon, California, Sik-Ooh-Kotok, or Aztlán. I just want to slide the notification open and find a message that says, Here.

References