mistress for the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, an all-girls school affiliated with the college, working there for 28 years. After retiring, she moved to New York with Reid, one of the first female stockbrokers, and began writing. Toward the end of her life, she and Reid moved to Washington, D.C., where they were part of a social set involving politicians, journalists, and educators. Although generally living quietly, Hamilton had moments of drama. At college, she fell deeply in love with another female student, who sadly could never fully reciprocate. Reid, nearly thirty years younger than Hamilton, had been a student at Bryn Mawr School; their relationship caused some controversy at the school and tension with Hamiltons sister, who also worked there. After Hamiltons death, Reid published a memoir that glossed over many of Hamiltons female friends. By the same token, Hamiltons works on the ancients does not address the topic of homosexuality. CHARLES GREEN WHEN LANGUAGE BROKE OPEN An Anthology of Queer & Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent Edited by Alan Pelaez Lopez University of Arizona Press. 320 pages, $30. The contributors to this anthology span Latin American and Caribbean countries and territories and their diasporasBrazil to Borikén, Liberia to Hispanic USA. Their essays interrogate conformist binaries (out vs. closet, nostalgic past vs. survived present, homeland vs. diaspora) and rebels against the confinements of ethnicities, genders, and nationalities. Some standout essays include the memoirs of Charles Rice-González and Lorraine Avila that navigate between the meditative and the narrative. No reader can escape the irony in Darrel Alejandro Holnes poem-manifesto IdAlways Promised Id Never Do Drag: this boy dressed as a girl,/ boy dressed as girly man, boy dressed as man/ enough to drag, man dragging on,/ man moving on, man gone. The prose poems by Andrea Alejandro Freire F.where the rules of ungendered verb tenses and gendered social constructions are challenged, braided with Brazilian Portugueseare gripping. And so are Darriel McBrides Disonancia on being a Black Boricua; the poignant stories of Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera and Josslyn Glenn; and an illuminating Alejandro Heredia essay on Dominicanidad. SAMDAPANAS FRAMING AGNES Directed by Chase Joynt Fae Pictures; Level Ground Trans director and co-writer Chase Joynt has expanded his twenty-minute 2019 short into a 76-minute feature thats still not nearly long enough for all he hopes to accomplish with it. Most members of todays LGBTQ community know very little about the transgenders who make up the T, hardly more than most cisgender heterosexuals know. Thats a lot of ignorance to correct in 76 minutes, especially when youre being so creative the viewer can hardly focus on whats being said. In the early 60s, a person who called themself Agnes went to the UCLA Gender Clinic for reassignment surgery, falsely claiming to qualify because they were intersex. Unlike Christine Jorgensen, who became famous a decade earlier as the first person Americans had ever heard of receiving a sex change, Agnes got no publicity and soon disappeared from history. The records of UCLAs Dr. Harold Garfinkel, which included Agnes story, were unearthed in preparation for Joynts films. Five other subjects were chosen, and transgender actors were picked to portray them. Joynt took the role of Garfinkel, but interviewing them as a 60s talk show host rather than a doctor or scientist. The question-and-answer scenes, mostly from real transcripts in Garfinkels files, are shot in black-and-white to distinguish them from contemporary scenes in which Joynt as himself talks to the actors, sometimes comparing their own stories with those of the people theyre portraying. We learn some of what has and hasnt changed. Historian Jules Gill-Peterson narrates, adding context by filling in general details and putting things in perspective. The six characters and the actors who play them are humanized to some extent, but theres too little time to get to know them. Still, if Framing Agnes werent so good, I would not be left wanting more. STEVE WARREN the deterioration of their health and looks from living on the streets. However, many of them found or formed street families,fellow streetworkers who hung out together, pooling their money to secure housing for a night or a meal at the diners, warning each other away from johns who got violent or didnt pay, taking sick friends to the free clinics, and otherwise caring for one another in ways their families had never done. Plaster refers to this as the moral economy, based upon reciprocity and fairnessthe street kids all had each othersbacks.Many individuals and groups offered services such as free needle exchange and communal dinners provided by religious groups. Clergymen such as River Sims and Raymond Broshears organized street churches complete with Catholic-inspired rituals; they ordained some of the street kids to offer aid to other street kids. Other reformers, social workers, sociologists, LGBT organizers, and Protestant ministers also intervened in the lives of the street kids. Organizations such as Glide Methodist Church and Vanguard (a mutual aid group founded in 1966) provided resources to street kids as well. The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 90s decimated Polk Street denizens. Queer businesses suffered a decline in patronage. The market for hustlers also diminished as many succumbed to AIDS and johns grew wary of contracting HIV. Many hustlers who once prowled Polk Street turned to the burgeoning internet as a means of advertising their wares. In the early 2000s, as the tech boom drew more affluent people to San Francisco, rents and the price of everything else skyrocketed. Gentrification of the Polk Street area forced many businesses to close and displaced the hustlers, transgender women, and other queer folks. These days, Polk Street is nearly devoid of queer culture. There remains only one gay bar, The Cinch, at the northern end of the district. The once-queer spaces have been replaced by straight bars, nightclubs, high-ticket restaurants, upscale condominiums, and expensive boutiques. Only fading memories remain of Polk Street in its heyday. The ghosts of my friends at the long-gone Polk Gulch Saloon still haunt me whenever I walk by. Kids on the Street is an admirable, thoroughly researched, and carefully documented history of the once vibrant queer culture of the Tenderloin and Polk Street. Featuring scores of interviews with one-time Polk Street denizens, it is also a lament for the displacement of the multiracial, multigender culture of San Franciscos first post-Stonewall queer district. Drawing attention to that once-thriving, often overlooked culture, the book is a valuable contribution to queer history. SeptemberOctober 2023 37
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