Trans* Temporal Resistances — Emji Saint Spero, Leila Weefur and friends: Mason J., Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, Rowan Powell: April 25, 2024

Emji Saint Spero and Leila Weefur set the tone and introduce the evening's featured performers, noting they'd asked them each to provide text-based performances that deconstruct the gay and trans archive. They call attention to the fact that the San Francisco Tenderloin-based Compton's Cafeteria Riot of 1966 predates the more famous New York City Stonewall Riots of 1969 by several years, and that the current site of the cafe is presently occupied by the for-profit-prison corporate GEO Group. 

Mason J. reads a series of poems, interspersed with commentary. These include "Good Morning Gorgeous" (dedicated to queer San Francisco disco star Sylvester), "Golden," "3 Poems to Calla Lily" (an erasure poem which uses language from Luther Burbank), "Those Who Believe Are Healed" and "For Palestine." 

Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta invites the audience to cups of water, then procedes to present a tribute to and excavataion of the life of Honduran immigrant and sex-worker Roxsana Hernández Rodriguez, who was killed by the state in May 2018 when she died in custody while imprisoned by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while undergoing deportation proceedings after being denied asylum (she was HIV-plus and refused sufficient water and necessary medical care). Luboviski-Acosta, in place of dwelling on Hernández Rodrigez's death, tells as much of the story of her life as they've been able to find out, illuminating that story with their own autobiographical/family narrative, and creates an ofrenda in the performance space. Luboviski-Acosta's relation indicts ICE, the state and its violently militarized and racialized border politics, as well as the for-profit-prison GEO Group, which now occupies the former site of Compton's Cafeteria down the street in the Tenderloin.

Rowan Powell reads a work that reimagines St. Georges Hill in Surrey, Greater London — the site of an historically important anti-enclosure movement in the 1600s, and now the most expensive piece of real estate in Europe — as if it were "returned to the people whose labor was exploited." Images from photos taken by Powell are projected behind them as they read.