Julia Maria

I Am From Nowhere

And we were popular for a little while. As muses. As specimens. As celluloid and dreams. Maybe Warhola saw a little of himself in us, with his dumb blonde twink toupe and his ancestors from one of the bad parts of Eastern Europe that no one wants to remember. The same forgotten language, по-нашому, in his blood and in my own. As if that matters, after our great enfolding into whiteness. After we memory-holed our language and cast out the queens. The first and last essential trait of an American citizen is ignorance, a great blazing 1776! The Founding Fathers! We Hold These Truths––steamroll-stamped across all the ugliness that making a nation-state entails. Like the part about the boats, or the part about the rapes, or the part about the women who went into the bonfire. I suppose we were popular then too. Yes, when lurid reports of auto-castrates shared the cheap newspapers with reports of runaway slaves, and when Warhola put us in his movies and Lou Reed ventriloquized Candy Darling, and when cis people decided to vacillate between explaining why we weren’t actually women and gushing about how funny Detransition, Baby was. Yes. We were popular for a little while. And I admit, maybe we liked it. Maybe we wanted womanhood even if it meant defying the cis until the end of the world. Maybe at the end of the world all we wanted was our own fifteen minutes of infamy. Maybe we wanted to go to hell together. Maybe we wanted to die loud.