Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour Histories of Toronto

By Between the Lines

Toronto has long been a place that people of colour move to in order to join queer of colour communities. Yet the city’s rich history of activism by queer and trans people who are Black, Indigenous, or of colour (QTBIPOC) remains largely unwritten and unarchived. While QTBIPOC have a long and visible presence in the city, they always appear as newcomers in queer urban maps and archives in which white queers appear as the only historical subjects imaginable.

The first collection of its kind to feature the art, activism, and writings of QTBIPOC in Toronto, Marvellous Grounds tells the stories that have shaped Toronto’s landscape but are frequently forgotten or erased. Responding to an unmistakable desire in QTBIPOC communities for history and lineage, this rich volume allows us to imagine new ancestors and new futures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Release date: Oct 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781771133654

Book preview

Marvellous Grounds

Queer of Colour Histories of Toronto

Edited by Jin Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, and Syrus Marcus Ware

Between the Lines

Toronto

MARVELLOUS GROUNDS

"Marvellous Grounds is a beautiful gathering of QTBIPOC artists, organizers, activists, and cultural workers that achieve the Morrisonian [Toni Morrison’s] task of creating a map outside of the mandates of conquest, specifically its homonormative archival practices. Speaking across time and space, the Marvellous Grounds collective lovingly curates visual art, prose, intimate conversations and tender caresses taking place on Toronto’s street corners that have the potential to heal both the ancestors and the generations yet to come. Creating marvelous ground in Toronto, this stunning collection resists inclusion into normative and homonationalist queer Canadian archives. It also refuses to help repair this archive. Instead, Marvellous Grounds beautifully disfigures the colonial project of archiving as it yearns and reaches for what the co-editors call the something yet-to-be-done. Marvellous Grounds is a healing praxis that QTBIPOC communities can bask in as they soak up the sweet balm it tenders. This collection is a gift."

—Tiffany King, Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Georgia State University

"As the lead singer of the radical duo LAL and co-organizer of the DIY QT2S/BIPOC space, Unit 2, I am so happy to see this important book that highlights some of the amazing work and stories by QTBIPOC/friends in Toronto. More than half of the contributors have shared space or gathered at Unit 2, so this book resonates in my body and soul. Marvellous Grounds is a necessary piece of writing that documents and helps keep our stories alive, in a way that is for us by us. This book will share important perspectives with a new generation of QTBIPOCs and friends, while honouring the stories, people, and places that fought and fight for justice and freedom, in this amazing but complicated meeting place, Toronto."

—Rosina Kazi, LAL / UNIT 2

"The authors, artists, and activists gathered in this extraordinary book invoke an insurgent and untameable queer and trans history, one which confronts both co-option and self-congratulation. Boldly making space for the silenced, criminalized, and displaced voices of queer and trans Black, Indigenous and people of colour (QTBIPOC), Marvellous Grounds disrupts queer nostalgia, complacency, and white fragility, and testifies to QTBIPOC resilience, resistance, and healing. Whether you come to this book in search of a radically transformative decolonial theory and praxis, or to reclaim a displaced queer/trans lineage, these stories are guaranteed to move, challenge, and inspire."

—Julia Chinyere Oparah, provost, dean of the faculty, and professor of ethnic studies, Mills College and author of Birthing Justice, Battling Over Birth, Activist Scholarship, and Global Lockdown

"Marvellous Grounds is an incredibly important critical intervention into the ongoing creation and theorization of queer counter archives and their frequent whitewashing. The artists/activists/academics whose work is collected here offer a multilayered, sharp, original, and touching take on queer Toronto past and present that will be relevant to scholars and practitioners far beyond the local context."

—Fatima El-Tayeb, professor of literature and ethnic studies, University of California, San Diego

"Upending white supremacist, neoliberal narratives of ‘gay progress,’ Marvellous Grounds shows us Toronto’s QTBIPOC communities surviving and thriving in the midst of violent forces of erasure. The essays, dialogues, and creative interventions gathered here offer an invitation to remember and learn from rich and resplendent stories—of organizing and activism, of dance parties, reading groups, performances, and everyday life. This is the history we want and the history we need."

—Craig Willse, author of The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States

"Marvellous Grounds describes a Toronto that makes sense and feels right. It doesn’t suffer from impossible racial homogeneity or glib hollow triumph. This gentle, trusting, personal collection lingers over homelessness, racial profiling, protest, worship, and the struggle of queers of colour starting families, and so is a Toronto origin story that feels real."

—Elisha Lim, M.A., M.F.A., graphic novelist, 100 Crushes

"Marvellous Grounds is a compelling and transformative site of queer of colour creation and ongoing creativity, collectively confronting and refusing dominant white queer archives. Together, the essays build queer counter-archives as their own form, where writing and genealogies of thought emerge in collective organizing, art practices, abolitionist work, disability justice, poetics, healing justice, performance, anti-racism, and spirituality. In this long-awaited anthology, the authors make possible the kinds of depth and life that come from an effort to pause, and take hold of what emerges in our struggles to find new ways of being with one’s self and amongst others."

—Lee Ann S. Wang, School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington Bothell

"Marvellous Grounds is a foundational book for gender, queer, postcolonial, and critical race scholarship. Archiving and reflecting on four decades of queer and trans Black, Indigenous and people of colour (QTBIPOC) historiography, collective organizing, cartographies of violence and building communities of care and healing in the city of Toronto, this inspiring book is a must-read for activists, artists, and academics alike who radically question who the subject of queer history is and more importantly dare to ask What kind of ancestor do I want to be?

—Onur Suzan Nobrega, Institute of Sociology, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany.

Contents

Marvellous Grounds: An Introduction

Jin Haritaworn and Ghaida Moussa, with Syrus Marcus Ware

Part One: Counter-Archives

1     Organizing on the Corner: Trans Women of Colour and Sex Worker Activism in Toronto in the 1980s and 1990s

Syrus Marcus Ware interview with Monica Forrester and Chanelle Gallant

2     It Was a Heterotopia: Four Decades of Queer of Colour Art and Activism in Toronto

Jin Haritaworn interview with Richard Fung

3     Power in Community: Queer Asian Activism from the 1980s to the 2000s

Alan Li

4     Loud and Proud: The Story of a Brown Callaloo Dyke Coming Out in 1970s Toronto

LeZlie Lee Kam

5     Speaking Our Truths, Building Our Futures: Arts-Based Organizing in

2SQTBIPOC

Communities in Toronto

Aemilius Milo Ramirez

6     Time Capsules

Laureen Blu Waters

Part Two Cartographies of Violence

7     Cops Off Campus!

Alexandria Williams

8     Migrant Sex Work Justice: A Justice-Based Approach to the Anti-Trafficking Movement

Tings Chak, Chanelle Gallant, Elene Lam, and Kate Zen

9     Queer and Trans Migration and Canadian Border Imperialism

Kusha Dadui

10     Queer Circuits of Belonging

Asam Ahmad

11     Collateral

Melisse Watson

Part Three Communities of Care and Healing

12     Toronto Crip City: A Not So Brief, Incomplete Personal History of Some Disabled

QTPOC

Cultural Activism in Toronto, 1997–2015

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

13     Healing Justice: A Conversation

nisha ahuja, Lamia Gibson, Pauline Sok Yin Hwang, and Danielle Smith

14     A Love Letter to These Marvellous Grounds: Living, Loving, and Growing in a City Called Toronto

Shaunga Tagore

15     Race, Faith, and the Queering of Spirituality in Toronto: Reflections from Sunset Service

David Lewis-Peart

16     Creating Community and Creating Family: Our

QTBIPOC

Parenting Group

Audrey Dwyer

17     The Mourning Dress: Creating Spaces of Healing for Black Freedom

Nadijah Robinson, with Amalia M. Duncan-Raphael

Photos

Acknowledgements

Notes

Contributors

Index

Marvellous Grounds

An Introduction

Jin Haritaworn and Ghaida Moussa, with Syrus Marcus Ware

On May 28, 2016, activists, scholars, and artists gathered at the University of Toronto for a day-long symposium entitled Paper Trail: The Legacies of The Body Politic, marking the 45th anniversary of the paper’s founding. White queer historians, activists and some founders shared largely congratulatory reflections on the Body Politic’s impact and historical importance, performing a distinctly white version of the public archive that has become recognizable as queer Toronto. Few speakers offered critical reflections on the ways that anti-Black racism repeatedly played out within the paper’s content and collective publishing process, e.g., a 1985 advertisement in the paper by a white cis gay man calling for a Black houseboy.

At the time, the ensuing controversy became a catalytic moment of consciousness raising within both the Body Politic collective and Toronto’s wider queer community about racism, classism and the sexualization of Black and racialized bodies. As David Churchill ¹ chronicles, the collective’s members met for three hours with community groups, including Lesbians of Colour, Zami, and Gay Asians Toronto, to discuss why the ad was offensive and had no place in the paper.

During the symposium, talks by Rinaldo Walcott, Lali Mohamed and Syrus Marcus Ware contested the evening’s celebratory and nostalgic tone. Both Mohamed’s and Ware’s talks called the work and organizing of Black activists and ancestors (including that of Black trans women Sumaya Dalmar and Monica Forrester) into the room and into the conversation about what rises to the status of a queer archive. They highlighted how queer archives celebrate white queer subjects as the only historical subjects and erase queer and trans Black, Indigenous and people of colour (QTBIPOC), thereby treating us as perennial newcomers with little historical agency and oversight of our own. ²

In the question period following these talks, there was a dramatic backlash from white audience members who responded by explaining that the Body Politic had been under pressure at the time, facing raids and homophobic backlash, and there had simply not been time or energy to address everything. These comments excused the lack of racialized content by imagining queer content as essentially white. They also ignored the very real issues facing racialized queers, many of which already existed at the time.

For example, LeZlie Lee Kam’s chapter in this book discusses frequent raids and harassment against lesbians and gay men of colour in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to a lesbian-run protest outside the police station at Dundas Street and McCaul Street in 1977. The Black community, meanwhile, was facing ongoing attacks by the police. Is it a coincidence that the alliances Black queer organizers formed then gave rise to an abolitionist movement that outlived the brief period of white queer antagonism with the criminal legal system?

Around the same time as the Paper Trail symposium, the distance of many white queers from their anti-carceral history was brought home by their violent responses to Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO) actions against police racism and its pinkwashing. In the same tradition of Black queer revolt, BLMTO resisted the Toronto mayor’s apology for the 1981 bathhouse raids, as well as the presence of uniformed police in the 2016 Pride parade. They enacted a very different queer genealogy, where Stonewall is remembered as an abolitionist moment led by Black and racialized transgender women. ³

The Marvellous Grounds collection renders problematic the ways in which dominant queer historiographies archive and remember white queers as the heroic makers of history. These whitewashed and supposedly impartial records of history leave out the longstanding contributions of nonwhite subjects and communities to queer life, art, political organizing, and spaces in the city. Out from the fabric of time and space, they rip racialized and colonized folks, whose ever-evolving attempts to intentionally name ourselves and our complicated and sometimes conflictual relationships with each other currently take the shape of QTBIPOC (queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and people of colour)—the acronym used by many of the contributors to this book. ⁴

The resulting white(ning) queer archive disappears us from the origin stories of queer life—from past accounts of art, research, and activism. In the event that QTBIPOC are mentioned at all, we form the check-mark-diversity objects of white queers’ benevolence. We are there not because we fought to be part of the struggle, let alone lead it. Our incorporation is a gift, and the achievement of white people, who remain the only makers and recorders of queer history. Our exclusion and inclusion thus work together to assure that we remain strangers to the white queer archive, mobilized, modified and improved in the service of a Eurocentric story of time and progress.

Regardless of these politically correct gestures, the archive, understood here both in a Mbembian ⁵ sense—as the house that stores historical documents—and in a Saidian ⁶ sense—of the colonial canon that socializes our work, and our world—begins and ends with whiteness. Its whiteness is inherent not only in who is centred as the subject of history, but also in what moments are commemorated and memorialized. The historical horizon that arises from this is as colonial as it is presentist. More often than not, the road to progress that opens up on it leads us to rights (gay marriage), protections (police contingents at Pride and in the gaybourhood), and inclusion (gays in the military and the corporate world). Its milestones thus resemble white, cis incorporation into national, global, and neoliberal subjecthood.

What would it mean to archive beyond such inclusion? Toronto, home to the largest independent LGBTQ+ archives in the world, ⁷ is clearly gripped by an outbreak of archive fever. ⁸ Recent documentations of queer pasts—from the white-washed commemorations of the bathhouse at white-centric symposiums to the erection of the pompous monument for Alexander Wood at Church Street and Alexander Street, the gay pioneer whose settler activities in the area are cited to territorialize it as the Gay Village—celebrate white cis-gay men (and occasionally white cis-lesbians and trans people) as the heroic foreparents of gay Toronto. ⁹

The subjects, places, resistances, artistic contributions, and momentous events that we are made to remember in these narratives belong to the architectures of European settlement. ¹⁰ QTBIPOC, in contrast, are often absent from these feverish mobilizations of the past. At most, we appear as bystanders or newcomers to queer history, tagged on as a footnote or invited as an afterthought to join projects that otherwise perform the archive and its keepers as white. We seemingly follow in the footsteps of white subjects who are positioned as worthy of remembering, and who have apparently paved the way for what queer is and where we came from.

These victorious commemorations are shaped by what Haritaworn ¹¹ calls queer nostalgia: an attachment to oppressed pasts that now appear overcome. They follow a progress narrative whose temporal binaries are palpably imperial. On the one hand, a Toronto that is touted as one of the most LGBT-friendly cities in the world—a beacon for the world, for the over 2.5 billion people in this world who are gay, lesbian, bi, trans, intersex, who are not safe in the countries that they live in, as Ontario’s first openly gay premier Kathleen Wynne said in her World Pride address. ¹² On the other hand, BIPOC populations and communities that are stuck in time, and needing to be incorporated into civilizational time. In this temporal frame, QTBIPOC are either absent from queer movements or trying to catch up with their movement. We remain the annex to a homonationalist and gay imperialist story that is palatable precisely because it reassures its cis-heteronormative publics that this city, province, nation and the West, those interchangeable, familial scales, are superior to the West’s rest: other countries and communities whose queers are not quite there yet.

This archive remains entrenched in colonial voyeurism, persistently obsessed with the Other’s sexual and gender transgressions. QTBIPOC remain to be found, and found again. In order to become an object worthy of inclusion, we must claim our own newness and allow ourselves to be collected and classified. Not only are our communities considered anachronistic and diametrically opposed to progress (then too queer/not cis-heteropatriarchal enough, now too queerphobic). ¹³ We are ahistorical subjects who, as Marx ¹⁴ claimed in his articles on India and China, cannot make history but must be brought into it, by force or collection.

The resulting colonial archives, and their hetero-, homo- and transnormative sections, are fetishistic in Sara Ahmed’s sense. ¹⁵ They appear as though by chance, without accounting for the affective and material labour, and the displacement and dispossession that are at the root of their production. It is noteworthy that one of the first queer of colour archiving projects that reached a bigger public, the beautiful blog series on Stonewall warrior Sylvia Rivera by Black trans feminist Reina Gossett, was instantly plagiarized by white anarchist zinesters. Having lifted whole sections from her blog without attribution, they accused Gossett of identity politics when she called them out on it. ¹⁶

To archive against these erasures, we propose a counter-archiving methodology that is not unlike Sherene Razack’s concept of unmapping. Razack’s theory of race and space is intended to undermine the idea of white settler innocence (the notion that European settlers merely settled and developed the land) and to uncover the ideologies and practices of conquest and domination. ¹⁷ Similarly, Marvellous Grounds counter-archives QTBIPOC writing, arts and activism, both to challenge colonial logics of time and place, and to re-engage with the past in order to denaturalize the present. The counter-archive proposed here thus does more than find ever more diverse subjects in unlikely times and places. It refuses a curatorial approach that collects QTBIPOC objects and subjects for an ever more colourful archive whose foundations remain firmly white. Instead, our counter-archive renders visible the logics that reproduce QTBIPOC as randomly interchangeable or entirely forgettable in the first place.

These logics are inherent to racial and colonial capitalism. ¹⁸ Our absence from the archive, as well as from the spaces and times that it covers, directly intersects with racist border, welfare, policing, and military regimes. ¹⁹ QTBIPOC are missing from times and places that are legible as gay, queer, LGBT, and trans as a direct result of policing, gentrification, eviction and other processes of exclusion, erasure, displacement and dispossession. It is impossible, therefore, to read the current archive without investigating, in its creases, whose work has been pillaged, whose land has been stolen, who has been lost or left behind, murdered or displaced, erased or deemed disposable. To counter-archive thus means to investigate the racial and colonial logics that shape which subjects, objects, conducts, events and histories are heavily inscribed and remembered, and which are forgotten, erased, or denied altogether. ²⁰

And yet, the counter-archive that is assembled in this book reveals these erasures to be imperfect and incomplete. Attempts to violently erase us often fail in the face of our communities’ collective brilliance and persistence, at times consciously remembered, at others hauntingly felt. As such, the Marvellous Grounds archive has affinities with the palimpsestic timeline that Jacqui Alexander describes. The palimpsest is a parchment that has been inscribed two or three times, the previous text having been imperfectly erased and remaining therefore still partly visible. ²¹ Similarly, our counter-archive senses earlier traces and memories. Imperfectly erased and overwritten many times, these animate and enable our renewed attempts to remember what happened, to mourn what was forgotten, and to renew our commitment to what might still happen.

This palimpsestic counter-archive contrasts with the nostalgic archive identified above. It asks us to pause and consider: What archiving practices are required in the face of the growing chasm between those who progressively move with the times and those who pathologically remain stuck in a past that is antithetical with progress? What subjects and methods rise to the status of the archive, and what futures do these practices orient us towards? How do we remember, what is deemed worthy of archiving, who is deserving of remembrance? How do we acknowledge that we are not the first, nor the first to remember—that attempts at archiving are themselves often subject to erasure?

Diana Taylor’s ²² distinction between the archive—written and recorded—and the repertoire—transmitted through performance, orality, activism, and other embodied and everyday uses of space by subaltern subjects and communities—is insightful here. The stories assembled in this book resemble the repertoire rather than the archive: many of them have long been traded orally but never before in writing, let alone print. Relegated to the untimely, these belated archives lead us to different pasts, but also presents and futures. ²³ They bear the potential to open up futures beyond homonormativity, transnormativity, and gay imperialism.

In contrast to the presentist archive, which celebrates the victors of colonialism, the pasts that our authors orient us towards are not finished. On the contrary, they haunt us with a something-to-be-done. ²⁴ Racialized, Indigenous, working-class queer and trans people have been at the forefront of movements across North America, leading the Compton Cafeteria riots in 1966, the Stonewall riots in 1969, and the riotous activism in the wake of the 1981 Toronto Bathhouse Raids/Operation Soap. These events are often told as a story of white gay heroism. In Toronto, QTBIPOC histories date back to at least the 1970s, and they encompass a diverse range of political and collective issues, including anti-apartheid, homelessness, HIV/AIDS, and disability justice. QTBIPOC wrote letters in support of activists fighting against apartheid on the continent, including to South African gay rights activist Simon Nkoli, and were involved in political arts initiatives like Mayworks Festival of Working People (since 1986), Desh Pardesh (1988–2001), and the Counting Past Two transgender film festival (since 1998). Groups like Gay Asians Toronto ²⁵ supported racialized queers found in the 1981 bathhouse raids.

The current generation of organizers, some of whom have contributed to this book and its online sister forum, are actively stepping into this legacy. ²⁶ They frequently use artistic and performative expression in order to build a counter-archive that reflects a "permanent readiness for the marvellous," in the prophetic terms of Afro-Surrealist Suzanne Césaire. ²⁷ Indeed, we view the QTBIPOC spaces that this book is dedicated to as marvellous grounds in Césaire’s sense, where alternative timelines are forged, and liveable worlds prefigured.

The stories assembled here feature subjects and settings that are rarely named historical. These include reading and discussion groups, endless dance parties, apartment art shows, second-floor poetry nights, and large-scale festivals like Blockorama—the internationally renowned Black queer stage that has claimed space in and beyond Toronto Pride since 1998. Disrupting the privileged place given to the Toronto Gay Village surrounding Church Street and Wellesley Street, contributors foreground different spaces where history was made: the suburbs, the park, the performance stage, the kitchen table, the trans sex workers’ stroll, and the community acupuncture clinic in Chinatown. They remind us what was sacrificed in buying into the neoliberal vision of the Village: such as The Steps in front of the old Second Cup on Church Street, where QTBIPOC youth gathered when there was nowhere else to go, because planners, politicians, and business owners were openly reserving the Village for neoliberal white gay consumer citizens. The queer settings discussed here further include Parkdale, then dismissed as a degenerate space, as Sherene Razack ²⁸ might say. According to Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s chapter in this anthology, 1990s Parkdale was home to marginalized folks before it fell prey to the neoliberal city, including in its queerly gentrified face as the Queer West. It was here that QTBIPOC collectively began to think through what we now call disability justice: a politics that always already occurs on the intersections of racism and colonialism. More recently, this counter-archive has included the legendary roundtable of Arab queers at Beit Zatoun, a social justice oriented community centre, the El-Tawhid Juma Circle and Toronto Unity Mosque, a gender-equal, LGBTQI2S affirming, mosque started in 2009, and Salaam: Queer Muslim Community, a volunteer-run organization and support group originally founded in 1991 and reborn in the year 2000.

These stories urge us to remember differently—to look to a different set of ancestors. They refuse a presentist agenda that selectively highlights and erases in order to increase its own spotlight. Unlike certain white queer temporalities, they do not let go of the past, nor do they belittle our desire to survive, and our demand for a better future. ²⁹ On the contrary, they actively turn to the past and let it incite us with impulses to join unfinished revolutions.

The pages ahead were written with transformative desires in mind. They ask what happens if we start with the affective maps of those who always remain newcomers to the city—who arrive with timelines that must be instantly assimilated and forgotten, precisely because they bring us dangerously close to pasts and futures that threaten and incite. This threat is brought home to us whenever we witness an elder’s memories of exclusion from white LGBT spaces being labelled false. On more than one occasion, we have been pressured by white gatekeepers and their racialized informants to correct QTBIPOC memories, to the point where they threatened to discredit both our elders and our own work as scholars and editors. These pedagogies and performances of the archive are designed to remind us that only white subjects are capable of remembering true history, and of properly recording it.

At the same time, the chapters ahead are testimonies to white supremacy’s failure to quiet, erase, or disappear QTBIPOC. The sites and acts described here rarely reach the status of the event, yet they shape us. ³⁰ They serve as proof that a life truly existed ³¹ and expand our ability to image a future in which our peoples deserve to live and thrive. Mainstream accounts of queer Toronto have dismissed these embodied repertoires, told from ear to ear. Yet the radical educational work of socializing each other in oral traditions of telling and retelling has informed our sense of self, of place, of what happened, of what is possible. It continually equips us with maps and intentions for organizing beyond homonationalism, gay imperialism, and racial and colonial capitalism. These whispers confirm, in the words of Black transgender elder Miss Major, that we are still fucking here—that other ways of living together are possible.

The Book

Marvellous Grounds began as a mapping rather than archiving project. ³² However, it quickly became clear that there is an unmistakable desire in QTBIPOC communities for history and lineage. Younger folks in the city crave elders, who are missing and dismissed from a white archive that passes itself off as "the queer history" while robbing us of elders and ancestors who could give us perspective on what needs to be done in these times of unabashed racism, eroding entitlements, and wars without end. This further stems from a context where QTBIPOC art, activism, and activists themselves frequently disappear from memory, and from actual organizing spaces, as a result of myriad factors, including conflict, gentrification, burnout, and premature death. Elders crave an intergenerational movement that both remembers what has already happened and imagines together a freer future. A counter-archive provides an opportunity to connect and relate across generations as QTBIPOC.

Marvellous Grounds features a range of voices, genres, and methodologies, including academic writing, poetry, roundtables, and photography. By placing academic, artistic, and activist genres side by side, we mirror the wide range of artistic and intellectual expression used by QTBIPOC in the city. Much of this work is happening outside of the academic industrial complex, where it is often reduced to the status of pre-theoretical experience to be mined for the production of proper theory. In contrast, Marvellous Grounds highlights the organic intellectual status of this work.

Our anthology contains new and unpublished work by prominent community leaders and elders such as Richard Fung, Alan Li, LeZlie Lee Kam, and Monica Forrester. It presents one of the first written intergenerational dialogues between older and younger voices, such as the newly emerging migrant sex workers’ movement and the QTBIPOC performance scene that has mushroomed since the 2000s. We also feature artistic contributions by