The next Keep Colorado Springs Queer open mic is next Wednesday, March 18, at Switchback Coffee Roasters on Institute! Doors at 6:30, show at 7. The open mic turned ten as of February, which is wild to think about.
The students at the Press at Colorado College created an absolutely gorgeous broadside of my poem, “thoughts on starting testosterone.” I am in awe of their work. Thank you: Linnea Anderson, Luana Cooper, Olivia Madden, Jeslyn Nguyen, Jillian Sico, Gray Simanson, and Ciara Wiesner. You all elevated my poem with your skill and talent.
Also, Exist without Approval patches are restocked! Get your own here.
Last year was a big and beautiful whirlwind, in spite of the horrors. The first half of the year was devoted to publishing my book The Weeds Grow Anyway and the second half of the year was devoted to the mentorship of 4 UCCS students as we created a collaborative gallery exhibition at the Heller Center, which opened November 6th.
In the months since then, I have found myself unexpectedly exhausted, though I probably should have expected it. Winter always creates a slowing. The cold creeps in. Without the distraction of deadline-constrained projects, I am frozen before the enormity of the horror and grief. Anything but action feels a bit like painting a burning house, and yet, action feels at odds with my body’s ability at this time. So, I have found myself researching, reflecting, and archiving.
Specifically, I’ve been collecting research about Colorado Springs LGBTQ+ History. It might stem from a desire to remind myself: we have been here, fighting through a whole lot of shit, for decades upon decades. This desire has sent me digging through the archives, back into the past where our legacies are blips in the crime sections of newspapers. Impersonators and sodomites. Hushed whispers of weirdos. Unending defiance.
The question I asked myself the most this year was “What is in my locus of control?”
I can’t change every bigot’s mind about trans people, but I can use my organizing experience to help launch an activist network that creates change in local school boards by fighting anti-trans policies.
I can’t bring Renee Nicole Good back to life, but I can imagine her at the IHOP on Stetson Hills and Powers, because I have been to that IHOP. I can share her poem. I can be one of many digital dots trying to ensure her life is not reduced to the actions of a small, fearful man.
I can save. I can share. I can dig through the crevices of history to uplift the accomplishments of my queer ancestors.
I have been finding myself obsessed with archiving lately as a necessary protest against erasure, as well as the flipside of archiving: remembering. My gratitude toward those in the past who have saved pieces of history inspires me to consider what we’re leaving for the future.
What materials don’t get saved, because someone believes they are not historically significant? Which people don’t get saved, because the majority doesn’t believe they are worth saving? These questions feel inextricably linked.
What books and thoughts and ideas have slipped through the fingers of time? Especially in the ephemeral, digital age?
From rediscovered lost media to nuclear semiotics, I find myself obsessed with communication through time. I think it feels like the closest thing I can find to hope, because to archive means to believe there is a future to communicate with, one that we will fight to persist into.
I think about the AIDS Quilt panels I was able to connect to names of those who succumbed to AIDS mentioned in the February 1988 issue of Gayspeak, the former local Pride Center’s newsletter. I think about the little peek these panels offer into the lives of those lost, a snapshot of the lives they lived through the media of textile, time, love.
It feels like paying respects, in a way, to piece together the remains of a tapestry of a person’s life. Patches: An excerpt of an interview with Ricky Morris in his west side apartment, teeming with plants and light and cats, about living with HIV, a couple years before his name is mentioned as one of the names memorialized in the quilt. Li’l Ricky Morris, who hoped he would see another spring.
His name is one of so many that - strangers of the past who I am trying to get to know through the traces left behind. People who existed where I exist, who worked where I work, who lived and loved and fought right here.
The beautiful side effect is that now, as I drive basically anywhere, I can look and see just how steeped in queerness this city is and has been for decades. It is inextricable. It is in the soil.
I am obsessed with this process, with connecting the dots, literally, as Obsidian creates a graph of the links between the people, organizations, places, and events.
(The current graph view of my research, as of February 2026)
This research has looked like digging through the internet archive, sending messages to strangers on Facebook, phone calls with activists from the 60s and 70s, sitting in PPLD and Colorado College special collections going through issues of the local gay newsletter from the 80s.
Every open door leads to a hallway of more doors. Every name is both a star in a vast galaxy, and a sun to its own solar system.
The scariest part of it all is the knowledge that we are all ephemeral. Some doors are closed, and will never open again. All I have is what was left behind. The beautiful, yellowing scraps, that someone, somewhere, thought to save.
The project, which is essentially an open notebook, is open for your perusal. You can also contribute to the project. I don’t just want to include what is archived through newspapers. I want this to be a place to make memory external and connected.
As I look at the year ahead, making any predictions or goals seems almost futile. What I can say is that I plan to keep researching. I plan to keep creating. I plan to keep…well, exactly that. I plan to keep the things I find safe, and share them with those who care in the same way I do.
If I were to define this last year as a color, I’d say I see it as green. It was a time of growing outward. Now I find myself in a blue space. A space of looking inward. Reflecting. Researching. How did we fight then. How will we fight now.
I’ll leave you with this advice, especially for this digital age: save. print. store. archive. Believe your story to be one worth saving. One day, the future might reach out. Wouldn’t you like to reach back?
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.