"Closets" Re-Release: revelations and absences
Hello,
Happy upcoming Father’s Day.
I wish for you Ocean Vuong’s gentle voice telling you bedtime stories. (It’s okay if you start to silently weep.)
I wish for you Alok’s voice telling you fierce truths sandwiched in-between jokes and joy. (And so much glitter.)
Today is the anniversary of my father’s passing in 2004. Sunday is Father’s Day. I had a good long cry this morning. TBH, I think our father-daughter relationship has progressed more in the past month than it had for a long long while. Wishing you all love and spaciousness in the lifelong non-linear relationships we have with those who made us.
***
In honor of Pride month and Father’s Day, and what would have been my dad’s 72nd birthday, and what will be the 21st anniversary of his passing…I’m re-releasing a story I wrote in 2015 called Closets.
Closets is a lyric essay comic about my dad, the mysteries he left behind, and me trying to make sense of my own identity in relation to his absences. I’ll be sharing a few sections a week over the next four weeks with updated commentary.
Part 3: The comfort of closets
Part 4: Skeletons in the closet
Part 5: The absence of broken presence
***
Director’s Commentary, 10 years on
Of course when I first wrote this story, I was very concerned about spilling someone else’s secrets. It’s a constant worry for the memoirist or the autobio essayist. I have haunted many a creative nonfiction writing class who have asked this question and mostly (not) answered it with: it depends and it’s your decision…as with anything that deals with the specifics of your particular relationships and your cultural contexts. What do I owe the dead? (What do they owe me?)
Twenty years after the events of the original events, amongst the queer culture of 2025 vs whatever we had learned in the 80’s and 90’s, as an adult with enough compassion for complexity, the edge has come off the revelation that my dad might have been gay. I want to tell my dad: There is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s okay if you’re gay straight or other. I am too. I’m mostly concerned with how unhappy y’all were in your marriage. Can we talk about that?
Companion media/links:
…alongside Part 3:
This chapter features Zhu Jinshi's "Boat", which was on display at the SF Asian Art Museum the summer of 2014 when I lived there. Here is a photo and a timelapse video to give you a sense of this amazing work of art.
Ann Hamilton’s “The Event of a Thread” and “Habitus” installations are also enveloping and soothing in this same vein. I saw Habitus in Portland the same weekend as an XOXO Fest.
…alongside Part 4:
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel is a braided literary narrative of her own gay awakening and her closeted father’s death by suicide.
In terms of unpacking the unspoken traumatic pasts of immigrant/refugee parents and grandparents, I recommend: Tessa Hulls’s (Pulitzer-prize-winning!) Feeding Ghosts about the communist revolution in china. and Vinh Nguyen’s The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse about the Vietnam war.
These days, HIV is yet another STI and not a death sentence: you can live a long and healthy life with the proper treatment, and you can prevent the spread of HIV with PREP. my dad didn’t have to die from complications related to HIV/AIDS. The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDs by Elizabeth Pisani is a book about how our medical treatment, research money, and accessible sex ed are misdirected and hamstrung by the stories we tell — and the stories we are allowed to tell in our culture. The lack of a palatable narrative around who deserves care and who doesn’t can mean the difference between life or death.
For oral histories of AIDS activism in queer communities: Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 is a 2021 oral history written by former ACT UP activist Sarah Schulman. And UNIDAD: Gay & Lesbian Latinos Unidos is a documentary following the org GLU, available to watch on PBS.
The stunning Our Work is Everywhere: an Illustrated Oral History of Queer & Trans Resistance by Syan Rose.
Some contemporary queer sex educators you can support right now, who really need the support right now: become a patron of Oh Joy Sex Toy and/or Stevie Boebi. (In this video, Stevie outlines how hard it is post queer sex ed content on YouTube without becoming demonetized and shadowbanned due to an oppressive algorithm. Over the years, OJST have written about the challenges of publishing sex ed content given restrictions of some payment processors, but I can’t find the specific pieces. Here’s a Vice article about similar.)
…alongside Part 5:
While I wanted to upload part 5 this week alongside parts 3 and 4 for the story arc of it all, I might write more about the apology bit next week (with resources and links, because boy howdy has it still taken me ten years to learn true accountability.)
In some ways, part 4 of “Closets” and my comic “Unspoken” about my mom’s death are companion pieces. In both traumatic medical cases, no one told me what was happening until it was too late, and these comic essays were about me-in-my-30’s grappling with my 20-year-old’s guilt and (ir)responsibility amongst defensiveness and gobsmacked shock. Writing to try and give my younger self some compassion, some space to acknowledge her experiences and her regrets. The mess of it all.
Okay, that was an unintentionally hefty tome. Subscribe or stay tuned for the re-release of parts 6 + 7 of Closets next week.
Hugs and solidarity,
Christina
OTHER OFFERINGS
🐰Foment, a podcast sharing possibility models from the solidarity economy. (Our ep. about yogurt coop drops Friday june 13.)
🌱Wandering Grace, a substack newsletter about place and (be)longing.
📚Zines for sale in my online store.
🌸Read more comics about grief, home, and identity.