The Struggle For Self-Love: What I Learned From Watching “AIDS DIVA: The Legend of Connie Norman”
Announcing a Free Monthly Public Talk Open to the Community the first Wednesday of each Month, 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. at the Antioch University Library. Refreshments Served. “Dr. Doug’s Talks on Community Depth Psychology.”
On February 7, award-winning queer Dante Alencastre showed his “AIDS Diva: The Legend of Connie Norman” at Antioch University, where I am a professor and founded the LGBT Specialization in Clinical Psychology in 2006.
This was the very first time our school had opened its doors to the community in the last three years following the shut-down due to the pandemic. We used to have movie and lecture events all the time. We reveled in building a bridge between the community and new innovations in queer psychological depth and mental health. I had handed the reigns of the LGBT Specialization over to Dr. Tenika Jackson in 2016, a voice of clarity and fresh energy, and she now welcomed everyone warmly.
I spoke then briefly, and attempted put Connie’s life in some context as I had known her in my street activist days. She was one of the first trans people many of us sequestered gay people had gotten to know on an intimate basis and she enjoyed teaching us the ways of people who had the courage to walk in the third way outside the gender binary. I got to know her especially well during a week-long activist demonstration, curated by the radical activist group of which I was part. That was ACT UP/LA, or the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, a national group whose origin I witnessed in NYC and then spread throughout the country and the world. ACT UP got shit done. It fought for drugs that saved peoples lives. There were die-ins, kiss-ins, sex-positivity. The lesbians, who had separated from the toxic masculinity of gay men, returned to fight for the lives of their brothers and also nurse them. Connie knew this history and was part of it. For months, now, ACT UP had been applying pressure to establish an inpatient AIDS Ward at County/USC, which treated one-third of the AIDS patients in L.A. County. They had dispersed patients throughout the hospital where many met with doctors ignorant about the disease and homophobia among the patients. ACT UP finally had enough. We needed a dedicated AIDS ward not a year from now, but today! Activists camped out on the steps, vowing not to leave until change took place immediately. The motto was Silence=Death. The Vigil lasted ten days. It proved true another motto: Action=Life. The AIDS ward would be called 5P21.
Connie emerged as an important spokesperson during that time. She was right person to speak before the cameras. She translated the message of ACT UP to the collective consciousness. She could scream bloody murder through a bull horn and then to make sure all her people weren’t trampled by the police on horseback. She was a natural born STAR before the cameras. An angry drag queen, a self-possessed trans activist, a leader for her people, a voice of calm reason and of heated passion. She could summon anger and outrage without pushing people away, but drawing them close. The force of Lady Liberty blazed through her speech. And her writings, as she began to write columns, put these feelings into words. She could think on her feet and address homophobic hatred and transphobia with a snap of her Queen’s Finger. Before our very eyes, she set to work to heal the Judeo-Christian split that anger is evil and should be suppressed at all costs. Emerging as something of a wellness therapist, she taught us that anger, when handled wisely, emerged, rather than a force for truth and justice—and community engagement and integration. She never meant to hurt anyone. She was too ribald for that. Her truth, not unlike Manjusuri’s, was to expose the lying that was going on that was allowing a generation of young people, and people from marginalized communities, poor people, people of color, to die premature deaths, abandoned deaths, painful deaths, from abject governmental neglect and millennial-old social homophobia.
As you can see from the above picture, Connie had a deep love for her husband Bruce. Bruce proved a Nelly Queen if there ever were one. During the AIDS Vigil, I learned about Connie’s personal life. I recorded her biography in a cover story for the LA Weekly in 1996. I can send it to anyone who is interested. It’s a bit dated, the language, the terminology, but a record of me and Connie at that time. Connie had survived the streets and found her clarion bell of a voice in ACT UP. She talked to me about why she decided to go on the journey of transition. She was trans-affirmative years before that consciousness-raising movement came of media age. She had done a self-study about the fact that most Native American tribes honored the mont-man, not-woman gender non-binary folk. These were the TWO SPIRIT folk, because the Great Spirit had bestowed upon them an extra spirit. They were supposed to use this sacred gift to teach the tribe and bring medicine to the tribe. One famous Two Spirit person Connie admired was We’Wha, the Zuni Man-Woman. We’Wha was a Lhamana (Zuni Two Spirit) individual, who took on both male and female tasks as a Zuni cultural ambassador and pottery and textile artist.. Will Roscoe wrote an important book on her! Connie was learning about her long-lost history.
Connie invited me to the Altadena home she shared with her husband Bruce several times. Bruce was a designer—so the two queens made such a warm and aesthetically pleasing home. I put this in the LA Weekly story that esteemed editor Kit Rachlis really helped me to write, word-for-word. That was a Cover Story, a 6,000 word story, organized into five parts. I learned how to write then. That was the era of the Great Editor. Kit was a heterosexual man, but he also loved queer people. Kit and I spent hours pacing the office, often till 3:00 a.m. in the morning, going over word-by-word. He challenged me to learn how to ZERO IN to the granular facts of Connie’s life. And then he showed me how to ZOOM OUT 30,000 feet high to view the entire story from the lens of history and the zeitgeist of Gay Liberation, which is what we called that movement of freedom back then. He made me recite my thesis statement over and over again. He made me devise topic sentences. How to shape a paragraph in my imagination. And then to reshape, and how to make sure the paragraphs reflected the thesis statement, and how the five parts worked together. What a queer enterprise: to think up thoughts in words about a person one admired, Connie, and then to set it down. He made sure to cherish each quip Connie told me and to show the reader how she was both a firebrand but also a Altadena Lady, as pictured above.
AIDS Diva Filmmaker Dante Alencastre
Oh, and the movie that Dante made from all this. A masterpiece. We will have to show it again at Antioch.. It’s been all over the world. What a great man that Dante he. He is helping to resurrect Connie, doing a great service not just to her valiant memory, but to the consciousness of our world. Dante is from Peru and he went to Columbia College as I did. He is one smart guy, and with a fiery wit and a great heart. Dante did a great job of capturing economically Connie’s fire and her love. One felt as if she were speaking to us through the movie. Do you believe in channeling? The movie challenged the idea that when people die they go away forever. They do not. Dante proved they do not. Dante was able to offer a kind of Lazerus experience, proving that the soul is immortal. Hats off to Dante. He should get an award or something. He found that balance of humanism and urgency of any great documentary so one is not offered didacticism but a heart-felt experience, what the Greeks called “a catharsis.” He is doing also a great job for the young trans folk coming up. Now they have a leader to hold in their imagination as they struggle with a new round of trans phobia. In my therapy work, it’s very important to help queer clients locate an “ancestor,” not one just from the family-of-origin but from their queer origins. Connie could work for younger people as a kind of ancestor. Dante allowed for that to happen, otherwise Connie may have been forgotten. We should also make special commendation to his tireless and brilliant producer John Johnston, who did a heck of a lot of work going into the archives. That man is an angel and a saint and I am so proud of Dante for being a good gay brother to John and giving him his due. When you meet John, you see such a warm and brilliant man, and so modest. What an odd couple, a creative couple, that Dante and John are.
I am also deeply honored that I am one of the talking heads in the movie. I am proud that I sought to emphasize what at trailblazer was in articulating the need for a trans-affirmative vision in the queer community and the world-at-large. I felt very close to Connie, still do.
What an honor it was to be part of the panel that included Dante and the Great Torie Osborn, pictured below.
Torie Osborn is recognized nationally for her community-organizing approach to solving problems and for being at the leading edge of major fights for social justice for four decades. She has guided some of the nation’s most effective non-profit organizations as they tackled tremendous challenges – including the AIDS crisis, LGBTQ rights, racism and poverty. Since 2014, she has been Chief Strategist to LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, responsible for labor, immigration and social justice portfolios. Torie served as the first woman executive director of the Los Angeles LGBTQ Center from 1987-93, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and then headed up the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington D.C., where she organized the historic gathering of LGBT leaders meeting in the Oval Office with President Clinton in April 1983. For 8 years she led the Liberty Hill Foundation, one of the nation’s most admired social-change foundations. You could tell she is a kind of historian. She is one of our great and wise elders. I remember hearing her speak to thousands at the March on Washington, bellowing out: “We are coming home, America!”
Also on the panel was Drian Juarez. Ms Juarez is a consultant on Transgender issues in the workplace and assists in developing programs for communities endeavoring to help Transgender people. Juarez is the Vice President of Learning Development and Employee experience for FOLX Health, founded the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center’s Transgender Economic Empowerment Project (TEEP), and is the former Global Partnerships Manager for Grindr’s Grindr for Equality program. She spoke with wisdom, gentility and fierceness. I would love to get to know her more.
Our panel really got Connie in a new way. What stood out was how Connie had emerged as a pioneer for trans-affirmative civil rights but also spirituality. But also she spoke about gender as a fluid spiritual value for all human beings. What struck us all was how Connie harnessed ANGER. And also she focused on DOING THE WORK. And then, on this psychotherapeutic notion of, no matter what the fuck you are in terms of gender or sexual orientation, even if you are a goddam GOB (good `ole boy as Connie was from the South), the job was to learn how to listen to that quiet voice within that will tell you who you are.
Self-study. Inner work. Listening to the quiet voice. Sustaining a journey iInside is hard activist work too. She said, not exactly, but something like: “all the struggle around gender and so on is less important than stopping everything and listening to that quiet voice within. Everyone has it, but it takes hard diligent work to listen deeply.”
I found this concluding comment most moving. I had seen the movie but had missed that final and most existential conclusion. I had not heard her words in quite that way before. A trans Kiekeegaard. Agitating for change had to be an inner project. It is, in a way, much harder to face the enemies within that without. I feel that Connie was one of my teachers who guided me to the path of psychotherapy. My Sunning, Aries, is also in the 12th House, the House of the unconscious and of healing. Connie whispered at the end of the movie that, when all is said and done, all the activism in the world will amount to little if you do not work very, very, very hard to get to know and love yourself. As we know from teaching our students in the LGBT Specialization, and training our counselors at Colors LGBTQ Youth Counseling Center, minority stress is an inner issue too. The bullies do their dirty work from the innermost regions of the person’s personality and harm the trans child within. We have to ACT UP psychologically for our own behalf, and for the love of the world.
I am going to start giving a free public talk at Antioch the first Wednesday of the month from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. on these matters. I got that idea watching “AIDS Diva” and moderating the panel that followed. Something like “Dr. Doug’s Monthly Community Depth Psychology Talks.” Hopefully I will come up with a better title. Free. Refreshments. Email me at dsadownick@antioch. edu for more information. I will probably be joined by Dr. Enrique Lopez. Enrique Is helping me write the WORKBOOK for my forthcoming “Education of the Heart: The Art of Queer-Affirmative Inner Work and Therapy.” He and I will probably do a lot of these talks together .Come learn and talk with us. Let’s dream Connie’s dream for an inner and outer activism forward. Free talk. Free food. What’s not to like?