Tag Archives: Deaths

Written on
Author:

Ms. Monica Roberts

I have to get the emotional part out first. I just want to swear a lot. Around 1am last night finishing my day and heading to bed I saw Raquel Willis’ on Twitter saying Monica Roberts had died.

I’m just fucking gutted and pissed and angry and sad and hurting. And I don’t have words the way other people do who speak so eloquently of a loved one’s death.

Monica Roberts was one of the original bloggers, starting TransGriot way back in 2006, Transistahs-Transbrothas organisation in 2004, and keeping a record of and speaking for trans women and people being murdered. Even then she’d been active as a Black trans woman since the early-’90s and was a strong voice in the blogging community contributing to Pams’ House Blend, The Bilerco Project and other early sites, got on Twitter in 2009, and never stopped doing the hard work of proper trans representation and advocacy in cis space — Black trans representation and advocacy in white cis space.

I’ve been reading her that long, fourteen years at least, and she has been one of the very few constants in my online life and my trans life.

And I wanna say her love of Houston and NFL was always there and as much a part of her and important to her, and I can’t find a place for that so I’m sticking it here.

She was important to me because she was Black, because she was a Black trans woman. There were fuck all trans bloggers or writers or journalists back then, and even fewer of those visible trans people were anything other than white. It was way before 2014’s ‘Trans Tipping Point’ with Laverne Cox on the cover of Time, trans people — especially trans women, and especially Black or Brown trans women — were far from welcome in ‘LGBT’ spaces and pretty much didn’t exist in the cis world.

She was always there.

She did the work.

And like so many Black and Brown and Indigenous and migrant trans women and femmes, she faced unemployment poverty and homelessness.

Every young Black trans woman or femme who has a voice or visibility or presence in 2020 has that because she never stopped. All us older ones are here and seen because she never stopped. There is no speaking our trans history which does not recognise the monumental, tireless, ceaseless work she did.

I loved when she’d come no fucks given for some fool. Her Shut Up Fool Awards deserve a monument. I loved too when she named other trans people who brought racism and homophobia and even, yeah, transphobia along with general piss poor behaviour into the room, especially white trans women riding on their privilege. She never punched down but watching her maul someone who deserved it was as terrifying as it was hilarious.

Every photo I see of her with other trans people I see love and joy for them in her eyes. And every photo with trans women, again especially Black trans women and children, they are looking to her with love. She stepped hard for trans kids for decades and we all saw that.

She was a mother and a Mutha to so many, and an Auntie and a sister and Sistah. And now she joins our Ancestors.

Image

Written on
Author:

Krzysztof Penderecki

Someone on ilxor in the Taking Sides: Penderecki or Ligeti? thread:

Messiaen = Prog ov the GodZoR
Ligeti = lame after he found fame (eg by the 80s)
Penderecki = mark-down Lutoslawski = Radiohead for strings

Ligeti and Penderecki hold a special place in my heart, prolly ’cos I’m an uncouth sod who don’t know music good — proper music, I mean, and I feel dead ignorant and embarrassed if I’m ever in a room with people talking up the category: 20th Century Composers Who Rate. Buuut … Ligeti, yeah, some of his stuff pinged me right, and same with Penderecki. I don’t have the education to appreciate, say, Messiaen, I mean, a lot of composers (or any other ‘canon’, theatre, art, opera, etc) don’t really open themselves up until you know a heap about what they’re saying, their context, the decades or centuries-long conversations (arguments) different composers and genres have with each other, so my first response to music is very emotional. Penderecki hit that. The strings in Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima or the whistling in St Luke Passion (I’m naming obvious ones here ’cos like I said, going deep in Western Classical music has never been easy for me), these, the sound, the emotion, I want to be buried in that. (Radiohead though, gotta say, fuck that basic noise.)

Image

Written on
Author:

Gentefied / Camila María Concepción

Loving Gentefied about as much as I love Vida.

Very fucking bummed to hear one of the writers, Camila María Concepción, a trans Latina writer, actor and activist, died by suicide the day of the première.

Written on
Author:

Michel Serres

More than Deleuze (with or without Guattari), more than Foucault, somewhat more than Derrida, so different to Butler, but like her someone I returned to again and again, for the quiet care and poetry, for the love of movement, one of that first group of philosophers I got introduced to by the same person at a moment in my life where they resonated, and — like only Butler from those names — continue to, 25 years on. I knew it was coming, likely sooner, but still, I lost my breath for an instant, I stopped.

The more I dance, the more I am naked, absent, a calculation and a number. Dance is to the body proper what exercise of thought is to the subject known as I. The more I dance, the less I am me. If I dance something, I am that something or I signify it. When I dance, I am only the blank body of the sign.

and

To dance is only to step aside and make room, to think is only to step aside and make room, give up one’s place.
To leave at last the page blank.

and

Laughter is that little noise, uttered in blank ecstasy.

Quote

Written on
Author:

People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what…

People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.

Against a Dark Background, Iain M. Banks

I was going to quote from the same novel, “Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.” I haven't had words these last days. I've had too many words. Too much grief. Too much anger. Too much frustration. I'm not shocked. I'm not “How could this happen here,” or “This is not us,” or any of the others. We all know the truth of those apologies, they're not for us and we all know how this goes. And knowing that, doesn't stop me crying like I have since Friday, doesn't take away the pain. Alhamdulillah. Kia kaha.

Image

Written on
Author:

Jacqueline Pearce

She will always be Servalan to me, Supreme Commander Servalan of the Terran Federation, eternal foe of Blake’s 7, Avon’s nemesis, best-dressed interstellar dictator four seasons running, the woman I wanted to grow up to be.

“a tasteless megalomaniac,” “a credit to her background – spoilt, idle, vicious,” “any attempt to embarrass her personally is an exercise in total futility,” “she has all the sensitive delicacy of a plasma bolt,” “the sexiest officer I have ever known.”