Interview with Scott Turner Schofield about transgender activism and his play  “Becoming a Man in 127 EASY steps,” coming to Real Art Ways in Hartford, September 18 and 19.

Click here to download the MP3

Click here to download the MP3

Film and Conversation at MCC Hartford “Brother Outsider ~ The Bayard Rustin Story”

Sunday, February 15th at 5 PM, 155 Wyllys Street, Hartford, CT^*

Click to preview trailer

Sarahi Yajaira is a Latina lesbian, and she wants you to know. In a world where few gay Latinas make it into the public eye, Sarahi’s poetry puts it clearly: she’s not invisible, and she’s got something to say.

Her shoulders square in a button down shirt and loosely knotted tie, and with a big smile on her face, Sarahi took the stage at the Studio at Billings Forge Friday night before a crowd of about four dozen to give a goodbye performance.

Sarahi, who has lived in Connecticut since 2002, is moving to the Dominican Republic soon to work on her writing. She credits her urge for self-expression and narrative in part to her childhood, where even the few introverts in the family would start telling tales and doing impressions at family gatherings.

Sarahi’s first poems brought the audience back to her life growing up in New York City, the daughter of a Puerto Rican mom and a Dominican dad, and the 33rd (and the favorite, out of 46) granddaughter of her abuela. Of the 36 cousins, sisters and brothers in the U.S., all lived within a few mile radius of each other, attended the same schools, and called one another best friends.

The childhood she describes is characterized by both the magical world created by a neighborhood filled with lots of kids and the rough realities of domestic violence, when the younger generation played impossible baseball games in tight apartment hallways, made their family name infamous at the neighborhood elementary school, and managed to find the humor in a machete-wielding relative in their Pentecostal church. When her grandmother died when she was 15, Sarahi explains in a poem, she came to realize the event meant the death of her family togetherness as she knew it, the scattering of a once close-knit clan. Another poem expressed the overwhelming feeling of first love, albeit soured by an intolerant church community.

Sarahi’s poems about childhood capture the impossible wish to return to it,  despite its hardships. She steers clear of sentimentality, capturing this yearning in a simple dialogue between herself and a cousin she grew up with, walking around the old neighborhood after having not seen each other for six years. Listening, you feel like you too experienced this “beautiful time in life amidst the chaos” and long for it in the same way as the poet.

Poems grappling with her Latina lesbian identity shed light on the impossible expectations and boundaries of society where Latina woman who are gay are too often invisible. She explained this contradiction in the line, “You have broken the first of the Latina commandments / You should never love your women more than your men.”

Sarahi’s poetry is full of humor, emotional clarity, and vivid scenes anchored in simple imagery – like her grandmother’s hair covered in coconut oil and her first girlfriend’s in a dress at church. Her writing is soon to be published in a collection of Latina Dominican poets, and she aims to have a book published by the end of the year.

Sarahi started her performance by saying that everything is a work in progress, and that nothing is set in stone, a fitting mantra for someone about to take a journey. Hartford will miss Sarahi’s voice, but her experiences in the Dominican Republic will surely leave her with more stories to tell.

If you want to learn more about the Studio at Billings Forge and the events there, curated by Luis Cotto, join the Facebook group. The next event will be Albert Rivera’s quartet on Friday, Jan. 30. The Studio is located in Frog Hollow in Hartford; Broad Street between Capitol and Russ.

Click here to download the MP3

Click here to download the MP3

The group, which calls itself Bash Back, had two contingents. One group, dressed for church and holding Bibles, sat inside the church, seeming to partake of the worship service until the group’s members caused chaos by setting off the fire alarm, confronting parishioners, and scattering leaflets. (full story here)

]]> http://hartfordimc.org/2008/11/13/activists-disrupt-anti-queer-mega-church/feed/ 0 http://hartfordimc.org/2008/10/29/cops-prostitutes-and-growing-up-gay-in-connecticut/ http://hartfordimc.org/2008/10/29/cops-prostitutes-and-growing-up-gay-in-connecticut/#comments Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:16:25 +0000 Hartford IMC http://hartfordimc.org/test/?p=180 by Stephen Bickford

When I was thirteen and going to seventh grade at Sun- set Ridge school in East Hartford, I was introduced to sex by a fifteen-year-old boy in my neighborhood. I didn’t know anything about sex before then but I knew that I liked what I did with him. We had a sexual relationship for about a year and then he discovered sex with girls and that was it for him hanging out with me. So, my sex life was put on hold until I was in my fourth year of college.

I worked in downtown Hartford as a security guard for the Traveler’s Plaza building. The other guards used to joke occasionally about the gay bar across the street but I was afraid to go there. I didn’t tell them that I was gay but they still suggested going across the street to the Chez Est for a drink after work. I never took them seriously, although deep inside, I would have loved to have gone to the Chez with them.

I remember going to the East Hartford public library on Main Street, near ‘Church Corners’ in East Hartford and finding just one book on the topic of homosexuality. It was called, The Sexual Outlaw. Lacking any books to read about sexuality, I read every woman’s magazine that I could get my hands on. There was Redbook, and the Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. They always had articles about sex that were for women to read. I guess for women and sexually frustrated teenagers and young adult men.

I had heard about gay men in San Francisco once on the radio when I was in East Hartford in 1976 but that was about the only place that I knew of to find gay men besides perhaps in the parks along the Con- necticut River.

So much for growing up gay back then in East Hartford.

In psychology and sociology books you can find statements like, ‘the governments have no business regulating human sexuality.’ But, of course govern- ments love to regulate human sexuality. They try to control it but they don’t often succeed. Thank goodness that adulterers no longer have to wear a scarlet letter or be put into stocks for sexual misbehavior. Thank goodness we don’t kill people for having the wrong kinds of sex like they do in countries in the Middle East (for example) or as is recommended in the Bible. But you have to wonder about the sex police who try to catch people ‘illegally’ having sex.

When you think about it, a human’s sex life is com- posed of their thoughts and experiences concerning sex. Therefore, when the police are paid to control sexual activity in the parks and in the alleys and along city streets, the sexual activity that they are attempting to monitor becomes part of their own sex lives. What actually happens to police officers minds when they spend time driving or walking around the city trying to locate and stop prostitutes? What happens to police officers’ minds when they walk through the fields and trees in parks trying to find and catch people in the act of having sex?

You know that their brains must switch into high gear when they find someone doing the wild thing. Thus, the police officer becomes highly aroused by at- tempting to monitor and control sexual activity. So, the police officer becomes a professional sexual voyeur. The police officer has to take his experiences home with him. Does he begin to think about prostitutes while he is having sex with his wife? Does he dream about finding gay men having sex in the woods? It’s interesting how the police officer’s mind becomes similar to the minds of the ‘sex offenders’ that he is trying to control. He gets turned on by the same things that he is trying to stop.

Have they ever done any studies on this? It was interesting to read in a University of Chicago study published recently that an estimated three percent of the time prostitutes spend working in

Chicago is devoted to giving free services to police- men. What’s up with that? Excuse the pun.

Another subject that I would like to talk about is the mainstream media’s resistance to publishing studies about homosexuality and its nature or genetics. There is a coordinated effort not to publish such information in the United States. I have read about twenty different studies over the last dozen or so years that show that homosexuality is biologically connected. Homosexual brains are indeed wired that way. But, of these twenty or so studies, only a couple have made it into press in the United States. They are almost always picked up by the press in Canada, England and Australia. They even print these studies more often in India.But, these studies often do not appear in a single newspaper in the USA. If you want, you can go to ScienceDaily.com and do a search for “homosexual” and find news reports about almost every one of these studies.

For some reason, when the subject of homosexu- ality comes up, the mainstream press goes and finds someone that has an almost 2,000 year old book called the Bible and sees what it says that is newsworthy. Interesting how these almost 2,000 year old writings if the American people knew the real facts behind homosexuality, they wouldn’t continue to think that it is just something that young people do to annoy their parents and the pope.

Selected Sources:

O’Hara, Carolyn. “In the Windy City, prostitutes sleep with police more often than get arrested by them.” Foreign Policy blog. 7 Jan 08. <http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/7582>

Associated Press. “Study: Chicago Prostitutes Say They’re Forced to Service Police Officers for Free.” Fox News. 11 Jan 08. <http://www.fox- news.com/story/0,2933,322032,00.html>

Braslavsky, Andrea M. “Pointing the Finger at Androgen as a Cause of Homosexuality.” WebMD Medical News. 29 March 2000. <http://www.webmd.com/news/20000329/pointing-finger-andro-gen-cause-homosexuality>

Brody, Jane E. “Homosexual Study Cites Hormone Link.” New York Times. 21 Sept 1984.

“Genetics Has A Role In Determining Sexual Orientation In Men, Further
Evidence.” ScienceDaily 8 Nov 07. <http://releases/2007/11/071107170741.htm>