This video is part of a performance/video/installation piece called Past Present Future. This project serves as a both a visual and activist model for asking questions that have no fixed answers but instead embrace difference as a form of anti assimilationist queer politics.
One starting point for Past Present Future is the 1993 rape and murder of my friend, Mia Zapata. For a decade her murder was unsolved. It remained one of Seattle’s biggest murder mysteries throughout the 1990’s and captured the nation’s imagination as episodes of Unsolved Mysteries and America’s Most Wanted repeatedly aired re-enactments of Mia’s last night alive. Due to advancements in DNA technology and the foresight of a medical examiner on the case, the fucker who killed her was found, put on trial, and sentenced in 2004. City Confidential, 48 Hours, Cold Case Files - Mia’s death morphed into a story rather than a memory as more and more reality crime shows came on the air and titillated our need to be armchair detectives, amateur lawyers, and voyeurs. Voyeurs who are always watching women’s bodies, queer bodies, gender defiant bodies, being raped and brutalized; murdered.
It wasn’t only the media who appropriated the story of Mia’s death for ratings. Alberto Gonzales, yes Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, serving at the pleasure of the president noted Mia in an official Department of Justice address during the 2005 National Crime Victim’s Awareness Week:
"The President and I know that DNA can also help solve crimes long after they were committed-allowing victims and their families come to terms with a crime, knowing that justice has been served.
Last year, thanks to DNA evidence, police and prosecutors solved the decade-old rape and murder of singer Mia Zapata. After 10 years of waiting, friends and family of Mia cried with relief when the perpetrator was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to 37 years in prison."
The story of Mia’s death was a national tragedy. The reality of Mia’s murder crossed national borders. The fucker who killed her, it turns out, was a part of the Mariel Boat lifts. After an economic downturn and a deal cut between Carter and Castro that created an opening in the highly militarized 90 miles between The US and Cuba, tens of thousands of Cubans left the island for the US in 1980. Castro didn’t expect this mass exodus so as a form of retaliation he released a number of prison inmates and wards of mental hospitals. This included the insanely violent misogynist piece of shit that killed Mia. This also included a number of queer Cubans who had been locked up because being gay was considered a scourge on this imagined utopia in a similar fashion as being a violent psychopath.
When is the political not personal?
Another starting point for Past Present Future is the day in 1995 that Home Alive, the women’s self defense organization we started in honor of Mia, received a call from Rosie a trans woman who wanted to register for one of our classes. This group that was comprised of women who came of age during the feminist backlash and did not consider itself a feminist organization was directly confronted with the “women question.” Answers that seem obvious today took us a long time to reach. As I began to put Past Present Future together, I thought of the controversy surrounding the 2002 Dyke March in
"The upcoming Ladyfest Bay Area celebration of all things good and girl nipped the "what is woman?" debate in the bud with its progressive 'past, present, and future women' policy, which states that you count as female as long as you were female at one time, are currently female, or intend to become female in the future."
Past Present Future is a way to explore the relationship between the individual (myself) and the collective (the nation, the queer nation, the women’s nation). It is a way to reclaim my memories of Mia from the mediated narrative of her death and remember why I am always ready to kick someone’s ass literally and figuratively. It is a way to queer femininity and feminism while looking fabulous.