There is not, and never will be, complete alignment among queers, but there is room for dialogue in places of intersection that can help with learning and teaching — the core of Grinnell College’s mission — especially beyond queer-identifying communities. Ultimately, ‘queer’ is never comfortable with limitations in its definition.

But here I must affirm that queers are not broken, as a holey sock is, though they are often paranoically interpellated as such, and that to darn a holey sock is, in my practice, not a repair but an opportunity to make its queerness more gloriously visible...

"Far from being worthless, a holey sock has a lot of life left, perhaps even a uniquely gorgeous life, and maybe this is why they seem to me worth holding on to. For at least a decade, I have been stowing my household’s holey socks in a bag in the bottom of my closet, and there, in the shadows, they have assembled into quite a community waiting for something like what José Esteban Muñoz calls, in the subtitle to his book Cruising Utopia, “The Then and There of Queer Futurity.” Left exhausted but wanting by the rigours of academic rule last semester, my hands found their way to darning these holey socks over the winter break, which, conjunctively, while being what I see as more of a queer embellishment than a normative repair for my socks, was reparative for me."

I really believe that we work from our experience...

"...and that's kind of our default mode. I think that the responsibility, or burden, or however you want to ... Or privilege, is to be true to that and reflect that in the most honest and direct way. And I think that the times where I feel like people are betraying their responsibility is when they don't work from their experience or they assume that their experience is universal. Or when they are evasive about who they are and what they are. I think that, to me, is an important point. When queer artists make bro abstract paintings it upsets me because it's like, why are you claiming neutrality when neutrality just means straightness or heteronormativity? You know what I mean? I think this kind of acknowledgement that we all have a position, and that position is colored by our experience, to me, is where the responsibility lies. More so then this affiliation or that affiliation."

For me, the work is about asserting queerness.

"The thing that I'm interested in is asserting queerness as fundamental to the formation of photography, and looking at the things that the medium can attempt to hold on to; what it reveals as constructions of a set of desires that have been put together through technology, looking more closely at what we choose to look at, how we look at it, and how we find ourselves in relationship to it.

All the other stuff, I don't care about, because there's all these waves of exhibitions around identity. When I talk to friends or mentors who are older and have gone through the clusters of the late 80s, the early 90s, or the early 2000s. The backlash was late 90s or early 2000s. When I was in school, identity politics work was so out, and then came this moment that we're in where it's like everyone wants QTPOC artists. We just keep adding new acronyms or...what do you call them? Is acronym the word, I don't know."

I don't depict black figures in pain.

I'm not interested in seeing more of those images circulate throughout the world. I think they bring a lot of trauma and they circulate enough through social media. In works like For Tamir, it's a way for me to celebrate their life, and bring attention to the tragedy that was their death, without disrespecting their family and loved ones by pumping more of these images out and hurting other Black people by reiterating it. 

I think it's important to try to have these dialogues about this but not have the majority of images you see of Black people, or Black trans women, or any of these people being dead or memorialized. I don't think that's something I'm interested in. So I'm thinking more about representing people's bodies; how I want to celebrate and put out more images that are positive of those people that we so often think of as just automatically dead in our minds.

I want to see more living happening.