Love in the Time of Banned Books #6 | "We Cannot Fight for Assimilation" by Dominic Xalli Anaya Gulaya
- julian32019
- Jun 4
- 2 min read
Art by Rajveer Parekh
"We Cannot Fight for Assimilation" by Dominic Xalli Anaya Gulaya
"Utopia-Dystopia." Artwork by Rajveer Parekh
46 cm x 48 cm x 3 cm
Mix-media on paper
“Utopia-Dystopia” represents my internal struggle with gender norms, represented by the dragon trapping me in a dystopia to fit the roles represented by the utopian lotus and the landscape. The lotus’s dull hues show the fallacy in this utopia. Dark tones in the decaying body represent this entrapment & pain.
"We Cannot Fight for Assimilation"
by Dominic Xalli Anaya Gulaya
Queerness asks you to crack your heart open like a pomegranate or coconut – to share the love, joy, and hurt that spills from your tenderest vulnerabilities. This can teach you how to survive.
New seeds of resistance unburied themselves from the asphalt on the one-year anniversary of Stonewall: the first queer pride, where our elders clenched their fists with the anger of 167 arrested and the strength of rebellion that refused to quiver under pressure.
We’ve forgotten how to hold that spirit, fostering more hate for each other than love and commanding our communities to assimilate – to be palatable and happy that we're allowed to be at all. This attitude of complacency is precisely what our elders opposed, yet we hold it tight to our chests.
We look back, now, and say the first pride was a riot, forgetting what that really means. We forget Stonewall and the Cooper Do-nuts Riot and the Black Cat Protests and the Patch Riot and the Picket at Whitehall Street Induction Center and Dewey's Lunch Counter Sit-In and Compton's Cafeteria Riot.
We forget, and so instead, we fill the shoes of the Mattachine Society – tasting a hint of acceptance and fearing losing it, embracing assimilation and abandoning or even berating the fight for collective gay liberation.
It’s been 50 years, now, so we must remember again and never stop hearing the echoes of protests and the roars of victories – never stop letting the whispers and shouts of those who fought before us and those who fight beside us guide our futures.
We have fought to be our full, messy selves, and we cannot shut ourselves into boxes again. Queerness must be liberatory, not limiting.
Queerness must let us spill our pomegranate seeds and coconut water with smiles and elaborate makeup and battle jackets and bright hair and weird names – bring us together in pride, pain, vulnerability, and solidarity.
We must fight for our communities and for the communities we hold in our hearts. We must see each other's full selves – soft guts spilled from rough-skinned bodies – and love them fiercely, letting our love know no boundaries.
About "Love in the Time of Banned Books"
In this series, we seek to celebrate LGBTQ+ identities and experiences, while critically examining book bans and how they impact the LGBTQ+ community.
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