sometimes I reach my hand out into it
radical love letter #41
*content note: discussion of suicide*
Dear ones,
This is a love letter about a boy named Jesús, and also it is about grief.
The day I’m writing this marks five years since we got news that Jesús was on life support. A few days prior he had posted a picture of himself exploring a cave in the desert. He’d been on a road trip with a friend I didn’t know. I was alone at a wedding when I saw the photo of J, scrolling Instagram at a table on a patio in Wisconsin, about to post a picture of the moon that was full in the sky. I was technically single, still wounded from an excruciating breakup that coincided with a C-PTSD diagnosis, but also freshly in love with someone I’d met while teaching a study abroad class in England earlier that summer. I remember feeling melancholy but also romantic. I remember the picture of J interrupting my emo indulgences, and smiling so big at his sweet face, grinning at his spelunking adventure. Being under the moon that night is one of the most vivid memories I have in relationship to Jesús’s death - it was the last time I knew for certain he was alive.
Jesús and I were part of a friend group formed in graduate school that we dubbed “Queerworld,” partly in homage to José Esteban Muñoz’s (J’s favorite scholar) notion of “queer worldmaking” and partly in reference to MTV’s The Real World. Both felt apt, especially on the nights we’d gather at Angela’s house, gossiping, talking about sex, making jokes that often involved Foucault, and eating Pizza Luce. Jesús was known in the group for being a true Sagittarius - he wasn’t inclined to like many people unless they really earned it - and for being a little uncomfortable with effusion. His dissertation was about gay Latinx artists in LA. He liked riding his bike and wearing high heels around his apartment (and sending us pictures to document the occasions). He loved men, but was quick to point out racism, fatphobia, and transphobia on Grindr. He was incredibly handsome. Like, stop-you-in-your-tracks-handsome. He was helping raise his nephew, and was also a plant parent and a dog dad. He fought tirelessly for immigrant justice, an issue that personally impacted his family, alongside being involved in many other social justice causes. He once said both earnestly and sassily: “Chicana feminism taught me that I am amazing.”
After our last Pride together, J texted the Queerworld group thread with a bit of an advance apology for the feelings he was about to drop; and then: “You are the horizon.” This a version of a line from Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, about queerness being a “warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” He was saying, in our nerdy grad school critical sexuality ontology, that the community we prefigured everytime we were together was as close to utopia as we might get on Earth. (After he passed, many of us in Queerworld got the phrase tattooed on our body.)
The details of Jesús’s death are tragic and enraging and complex. My narrative - and the narrative of his political comrades - is that Jesús died at the hands of the State. But it’s also more layered. Jesús, like many people - especially marginalized people living under capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy - struggled with mental illness. He was having a lot of trouble coping with the defeats that all activists experience. He texted me about using pot to numb out from the world that was “just too much.” He was in the throes of dissertating, and the pressure of a racist academic system was getting to him. During his road trip that July, he had some kind of mental break and walked away from the friend he was with. She didn’t know what to do, so she called the police. When they found him, they found an “unstable” queer Latino man with pot on him. They threw him in jail. Hours later, Jesús was found hanging in the cell. He was pronounced dead in a hospital three days after. Jesús did die by suicide, but it was a suicide triggered by the trauma of police violence, and the culmination of a lifetime of being Brown and queer in America.
We are socially conditioned to feel extra-significance on particular anniversaries, and it’s worked on me because there is something about this five year marker of his death that feels tremendously heavy. So much of grief has been noticing his absence, and every year he’s not here is like another boulder stacked on our aching, longing chests.
That grief is about absence seems obvious, but it shows up in very specific ways: feeling the ghost of a text he would have sent about a new hookup; feeling the ghost of his voice the last time Queerworld got together in person; feeling the ghost of his body at the protests this summer, where he would have absolutely have been on the frontlines. Sometimes grief has been full-body sobs, shaking from the sadness of how much pain he was in, spiraling back into bargaining, wondering if we could have done more. But more recently it’s been this gnawing empty space that he would have filled. Five years of spaces he would have filled. Sometimes I reach my hand out into it. Last night, I swear I felt his palm in mine.
I don’t know if we are meant to make lessons out of every tragedy, but I do know that Jesús understood that nothing existed in a vacuum separate from power, certainly not his life or his death. Some of our last texts were about the horrors of the prison system - eight months before his death, I lost my friend and pen-pal to medical neglect in a prison in Virginia, and J was one of the first to reach out to share in my sadness and rage. And less than a month before his death, he was posting articles about Sandra Bland. Jesús knew his death would be politically charged: his livability was precarious, his death would be testimony.
When I think about the idea of his death as some kind of fodder for the struggle, though, I am uneasy. I would rather him be here, alive with us, than garner any kind of meaning of any of it. But it may be inevitable, in some conditions, that loss is generative.
“Loss,” writes Mirtha Luz Pérez Robledo in Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, “when acknowledged among accomplices in the struggle for a more just world, can assist in both tending to wounds and building together to prevent further wounding.”
Jesús inspires me not because his death was political (although I certainly include it on my list of why I want prisons to be abolished), but because his life was. He was dedicated to the struggle, and he was also joyful and vivacious and funny. (So funny!) He was an activist but he was also a queer Brown boy who laughed, and his being was resistance. It is, of course, no wonder he was so tired.
I am devastated by the loss of my friend, but the thing that keeps me fighting is his life. I am driven by the memories that I’m lucky enough to carry now in my own skin - my body remembering on a cellular level what it was like to dance with him at the gay bar, to talk to him about books, to cook meals and ride bikes together. (You know, what the living do.) I’m fighting for his vitality to be remembered, I’m fighting for a world where a life like his isn’t so excruciatingly difficult to sustain. Five years later, it’s his laugh, more than many things, that compels me to face teargas in the streets. Five years later, he was the first person I thought of when the 3rd precinct burned.
I don’t have a tidy way to end this. Grief is so unfinished, it’s so unhinged. It’s, to paraphrase Jocelyn Anderson, shaking your head back and forth at jupiter or the moon, and announcing yourself to closed doors. It’s clawing your way into some kind of loss narrative that turns starvation from a person into a tiny crumb of sustenance. It’s, as Joan Didion says, a “relentless succession of moments,” it’s experiencing normal things as unconscionably strange; “the ground beneath you gets fragile.”
This letter is about him today not because I have any grand conclusions to offer The Current Moment, but because I couldn’t not write about him. (I tried and failed.) This letter, if we can pull a theme from it at all, I guess, is about love. How much I love him, and how it was love that drove his activism, (how it is love that drives mine too), and how much I hope you know you are loved, and how much I love that you (yes you) are alive.
Thank you for bearing witness to my sweet friend today.
Jesús Estrada Pérez, ¡Presente!
love & solidarity,
raechel
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Read, Watch, Listen.
The high-risk intimacy of the nail salon. Another excellent piece unpacking transformative justice responses to harm. The challenges of being BIPOC in colonized outdoor spaces. An excellent analysis from E. Tammy Kim on the rhetoric of “people of color”. A profile of Conflict is Not Abuse author Sarah Schulman that does not disappoint. Hanif Abdurraqib on Millenials are Killing Capitalism. And this, from Nick Estes: “colonialism is not only a contest over territory, but over the meaning of life itself.”
Support.
Alexandra Halaby is a Palestinian trans woman who lives with Spinal Lymphoma, an aggressive cancer of the spine. She undergoes regular treatment, and as a freelancer, she does not have the money to easily pay her medical bills and other life expenses. Please consider sharing some resources toward her GoFundMe this week and also following her work.
Also, here’s a thread of places to donate to support the people of Lebanon.
Joy.
Camping. Seeing two of our dear Chicago friends. Stars and comets and feeling so small. The wild turkey we see on our Saturday morning bike rides. Making berry crisp with L. Insects, especially sweet buzzing bees. Bonfires. Petting chickens! Late-in-life lesbian farmers. Paul Mescal and his silver chain. Seeing J and her beautiful curly hair IRL, even under less than ideal circumstances. Time off from work. Writing. Reading, especially indulging a stack of zines. Making more progress on the exciting changes that I will talk about soon! Cold brew. Bike rides. Walks to the creek. Acoustic Saves the Day. The new Taylor Swift. EJP sharing pics from our college days, and feeling so joyfully nostalgic. Switching to Substack, holy shit this is so much better than the old platform I was using! Planning with my Black & Pink Mpls crew (relatedly: would you like to become a pen pal to someone in prison? Please let me know!). Poetry. Martha Wainwright. Beautiful, deep, juicy connection in the Dream Hive (& feeling ever-grateful to know and be in community with B). Tarot. Less time on social media. Queerworld zoom reunion/memorial for J. Chilly mornings.