Caro De Robertis felt blown away when they began interviewing BIPOC queer and trans elders for the I See My Light Shining oral history project.

Hearing stories from elders, De Robertis gained insights into how these elders created community and chosen families, even during challenging historical periods, including the AIDS epidemic, the early drag scene, and queer-led social justice movements.

“I heard treasures. I heard riveting anecdotes, rare intimacies, keen beauty. I heard behind-the-scenes tales of what it meant—and still means—to forge an authentic path through the world against the odds,” she writes in the introduction to her latest book, So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color. “The more listening I did, the more I was astounded. I sat in awe of what I was hearing, and its potential to delight, entrance, and heal.”

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So Many Stars is the result of De Robertis’ continued interviews with 20 queer elders. They span Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian/Pacific Islander identities; they hail from Mexico and the Philippines, Panama and China, Chicago, Texas, and throughout the United States.

As a Latinx immigrant who went on their own long journey to claim the many gender terms that personally resonate with them — genderqueer, gender fluid, nonbinary, transmasculine, butch, and woman — De Robertis and her publisher wanted to share these elders’ stories as a response to the incredible attacks on trans rights and binary rights, De Robertis told LGBTQ Nation.

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They also felt compelled to tell these stories because stories from BIPOC queer and trans elders are often absent from mainstream media depictions of queer life, especially since there’s a persistent myth that transness is an invention of the young, a “fad” that can be easily dismissed, De Robertis added.

“I feel like it’s incredibly urgent that we have access to a really deep understanding of the fact that we have always existed,” De Robertis said. “Gender variance has always existed. Trans and nonbinary people — even if a different language was used for who we are — we have always been here in the fabric of every society, race, and culture. And so these particular stories, I mean, I feel like, for me, I’ve been so moved to bear witness to these life experiences because it’s true that there is so much silence in the archive.”

De Robertis’ interviews demonstrate that trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, two-spirit, and gender-variant people have long been actively involved in blazing sociocultural trails, establishing LGBTQ+ organizations and groundbreaking arts spaces that still exist in various forms today. Even more importantly, De Robertis wants these non-cisgender individuals to know that they have a lineage and an inheritance, and are part of radiant cultures and histories.

“As for elder trans and gender-nonconforming folks of color, they are right here among us with plenty to say,” De Robertis writes in the introduction to their book. “Their lives are testaments to our true histories, and to the intersectionality at the heart of real freedom. Their voices are essential to a full picture of who we are as a society, and who we might become.”

(The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)

LGBTQ Nation: In your book’s opening chapter, many of the speakers say that they knew their queer sexual orientation or gender identity from a very young age. The fact that children have sexual orientations and gender identities seems to freak a lot of people out, even though the medical consensus says that it’s completely normal. So why, then, does that seem such a radical thing to acknowledge?

Caro De Robertis: I think there is a kind of moral panic about the idea of supporting kids in their full gender and sexual identity expression, especially around transness. And of course, that moral panic has been weaponized by the right-wing in this country to strip so many of us of our rights.

I’m speaking as a queer person, as a trans-identified person, and a genderfluid person. I’m also speaking as a parent. I have two teenagers. I can understand, of course, we want to protect our kids, and at the same time, that is something that gets exploited and weaponized by this kind of moral panic.

I hope that the testimonies in the first chapter of this book about childhood can help—certainly cis and straight parents, perhaps—to gain a deeper understanding of how common it is for children to know so much about themselves and to express it. Social transition doesn’t cause harm; it can only help and support. And when kids feel free to express their whole selves, they do better.

In another early chapter, one person posits that their gender and another form of queer difference are sacred. What do you think would happen if we started to see our own queerness and our other differences as this sort of sacred thing to be cultivated, instead of with the shame and fear that it looks like we’re usually saddled with?

That is essential. This is a story from Tupili Lea Arellano. They are a Chicanx and indigenous trans-identified, butch-identified elder, and they talk about being in middle school and being forced to wear a dress at school and basically blacking out and being traumatized because it was an insult to their sacred gender — that’s the way that they put it.

As a Two-Spirit identified person, they’re really kind of framing their queer gender identity as sacred, and their transness is sacred. And I think that is essential in the face of the vilification that some parts of society throw at us. And it’s also a subversion of this assumption that Christians or Judeo-Christian culture has the monopoly on what is sacred or what is morally good.

We are living through a time where we see people who are part of evangelical Christian movements that are absolutely not embodiments of goodness or what should be sacred or kindness. They’re targeting and dehumanizing immigrants and trans people. I think this is an excellent time in our cultural history to reflect more deeply on what sacredness is in human experience and to subvert those Christian assumptions about what is sacred.

What it means when I say sacred doesn’t have to adhere to any particular religion, but can refer to what is precious to us, what is meaningful to us, which is, you know, being human with each other, being kind.

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Your book features a decisive moment in which a person recounts standing up for her mother, who is a little person, after hearing other adults make insulting remarks about her on the bus. There’s also another moment where someone joins a gun club after being queer-bashed by a gang of teens.

These moments reminded me how rare it is to hear stories about queers fighting back. Often, the media depicts us as struggling to be resilient against intersecting oppressions of identity, especially in the face of fascism. So, in some ways, I began seeing your book as an invitation, not for violence, but a reminder to stand up for our own dignity or that of our queer family members. What do you take from these two moments in your book?

Those moments of resistance that are vivid and visible in these narrators’ stories speak to us about how resistance has always been integral to our collective survival as queer and trans people. And fighting back does not have to be advocating for violence. Tina Valetin Aguirre speaks in the book that “I learned from this that I can stand up and protect the folks I care about, and that people do not have a right to bully us and target us, that we have every right to push back and to resist and say, ‘No, we’re worthy of dignity.'”

Sometimes in queer and trans communities, there can be so much preoccupation with respectability. We saw that with the gay marriage movement, which, you know, I appreciate that we want to have those rights. I think there was often discussion in our movements about assimilation and respectability, seeking to demonstrate that we are just as good and worthy. So people can be very sort of careful, and we don’t have to stay in that lane — we can also be fierce. We can also be warriors for justice.

Your book also mentions different kinds of parents, including some who feel scared or conflicted about having a queer kid or just don’t know how to handle them. Some queer ideological purists think that if a parent isn’t entirely accepting of their queer children, or if they feel conflicted about it, then that means that they’re an unfit bigot who deserves to lose their kid.

While I understand that protective impulse — because we want queer kids to be raised in supportive environments — that outlook also seems to demonize and castigate parents who are still somewhere in their journey of understanding and accepting their own queer children. As a parent yourself and the creator of this book, how does that all strike you?

Speaking as a parent, I appreciate how complex our relationships with our children can be, and how many parents are doing their best and are hardworking. In that context, I am also somebody who’s experienced a great deal of familial homophobia and familial transphobia. So I am somebody who has been estranged from my parents for 25 years.

So I also hold that perspective of definitely understanding that these kinds of ruptures can be real and sometimes necessary for many of us in queer and trans communities. However, it’s not an all-or-nothing circumstance, and I do think that this is one place where race comes into the conversation. In queer and trans communities of color, the conversation is often a lot more nuanced, because — as we see in some of these narrators’ testimonies — the narrators might simultaneously be aware of the homophobia or the transphobia that’s going on in their their original family, but also be aware of the way that their family has experienced oppression, anti-Blackness, systemic racism, redlining, xenophobia as immigrants. So there could be a lot of different layers there that people are grappling with and also acknowledging.

I think it’s important to give queer and trans folks grace, and to give queer and trans folks of color especially grace about finding their own particular path in relation to those bonds, and to not jump to conclusions that project assumptions onto someone that if you’re maintaining contact with these problematic relatives that you know you’re not completely down or you’re not completely doing the work, or, you know, that liberation looks like breaking ties with those people.

Things can be a lot more nuanced, and everybody has to figure out their best possible path, and all those paths are valid, as I hope this book conveys. That’s part of why it was important to me to create a multi-voiced book where there are 20 narrators. Even 20 narrators cannot possibly be definitive of a cultural experience, but it at least allows for different refractions on the themes and for showing that there are many different possible ways to navigate issues.

The book also contains some other kinds of uncomfortable truths. For example, there’s a story about a person who, during their early teen years, has a sexual awakening after reading a lesbian erotica collection. There’s another story of a young person finding their chosen family among older dykes at a queer bar and another about a young trans person who starts transitioning using black market hormones.

Even though we might not want these exact sorts of problematic, real-life experiences for future generations of queer children, I imagine stories like these are more common than we’d like to admit. And at the same time, I think we’re also understandably worried that these sorts of stories can create negative depictions of queer life that are sometimes weaponized against us. Did you feel any conflict about including these sorts of stories in your book?

Certainly, they can be weaponized. And I don’t know that I felt conflict because I felt committed to conveying these narrators’ own truths in the fullest way possible. And I felt that these narrators, with their lived experience, deserve that level of portrayal. But I certainly did grapple with it and reflect on how these narratives might land for people and how to put them in a context where the authorial voice of the book is still acknowledging that, you know, kids have the right to be safe and that some of these pathways are not ideal.

Some of the narrators, even when they’re telling the story, reflect on that. Like, one of the trans women says, “I got black market hormones on the street. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the only way to access hormones at the time…. I did sex work on the street. That’s it wasn’t ideal, it wasn’t entirely safe, but that’s how I was able to survive when I became an undocumented immigrant in the United States, so that I could have more gender freedom.”

And then there’s another narrator who says, “My first kiss, my first queer, same-sex kiss, was when I was 15, and it was an older woman. And I know now, looking back, that that was inappropriate, but it was part of my queer awakening, and that’s also true.”

Yes, these are absolutely complex realities, and we don’t want them weaponized against us, but I will say the cis-heterosexual world is also full of complexities and messy realities, and cis-heterosexual people get a lot of grace for those realities being present, and I think we deserve equal amounts of grace and spaciousness and access to cultural complexity while still being respected in our full humanity.

Americans generally don’t get much exposure to Native American culture — its traditions, its deeper historical impact — and so we aren’t always really aware of what’s been lost in our long and oppressive history against indigenous cultures. And yet, your book has stories of Indigenous people keeping Choctaw language alive through daily prayer, and another of a Native American queer organizing the first Two-Spirit powwow and doing the Grass Dance. Why is it important to keep a record of these kinds of Native American experiences?

Well, first of all, recording Indigenous culture and reality is important in its own right, because Indigenous people are the original people of this land and their cultures matter and exist that should always be included and are often erased. Even when you’re talking about communities of color or multiculturalism within any particular region of the United States, all too often, the presence of Native Americans is either erased or underrepresented.

While it’s not appropriate for someone like me, for example, [as] a non-Indigenous person, to claim the term Two-Spirit, I do believe that all of us can learn an immense amount about what is possible in the realm of gender from the experiences of Two-Spirit people and Indigenous people.

[At] that Two-Spirit powwow, that … she talks about in the book, there’s a beautiful story in there about a grass dancer who wasn’t allowed to dance in their own tribe, and then they came to the Two-Spirit powwow and was able to dance and come into their own trans-masculinity in a deeper way that was contextualized within their culture.

I think for a lot of people of color, there has been a feeling of having to choose between our queernesses and our cultural roots, right? That we have to leave our community of color in order to live our full queerness or transness. That can feel like ripping ourselves in two inside. The reality is that queerness and transness have existed in every culture, and so it can be a very powerful form of healing and intersectional understanding and empowerment to fully breathe in our own context.

Your book also has an entire chapter on the importance of creating cultural art spaces for queer music, queer tango, queer storytelling. Some people shortsightedly see cultural organizing as frivolous. But in some ways, your book is, in and of itself, its own kind of queer art space for storytelling and making community connections. What is the importance, the power of creating these sorts of spaces?

Of course, I am a writer primarily, a novelist, and I am currently co-curating this museum exhibit about queer and trans movements. So clearly, I am biased towards cultural work as as being valid. But I also I am an activist, and I have been involved in activism in many different ways throughout my life, and I deeply believe that the transformation of culture and the expansion of our cultural understanding through art and other forms of community building and collective spaces and storytelling is essential.

We will never move forward to that bright future that so many of us want — a world where all are safe and free — without cultural change. If one examines the history of political and liberation movements in this country, cultural change always precedes political change. So you know, before we could have gay marriage, we had popular film and television where figures started to come out and where LGBTQ voices started to become visible, beginning to change the hearts and minds of people.

If you look at the civil rights movement in this country, we had incredible, groundbreaking writers like James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright who did the cultural work of making those essential voices and stories accessible to people in the country. So changing the culture is always part of what makes it possible to gain our rights and change society.

Your book also has an entire chapter on personal stories from the AIDS epidemic, including many stories I had never heard about, like activists cobbling together health and social support systems to care for the trans, Black, and Latino people who were regularly excluded from other AIDS service organizations, people finding housing for immigrant families who visit the U.S. to care for their dying loved ones.

It seems like sometimes younger generations don’t spend much time in that sort of historical space, because they think we have PrEP and HIV seems or less solved; “It’s no longer a death sentence,” as they say, even though hundreds of thousands of people still contract HIV and still die from it each year.

What do you think are important lessons that are still worth keeping from that era?

How lucky and wonderful that now we have PrEP and we are no longer in that AIDS crisis. But I think that the AIDS crisis is actually one of the periods of history that we can most learn from as queer and trans people right now, given the authoritarianism that we’re facing in our current national government. Our lives are under threat in a very different way, but our lives are very much under threat in our trans communities, especially right now.

So younger generations are in danger of thinking that this is something we’ve never done before, or of reinventing the wheel, or wondering what tools they can possibly use. It’s very easy in a time like this, when we are experiencing so much violence from the very systems that should be taking care of us, like the government, it’s very easy to fall into despair. And one of the greatest antidotes to despair is remembering that people who came before have faced equally dangerous times — in some ways, more dangerous times — with fewer resources, and have collectively prevailed and developed the tools to resist and to support one another.

One of the core lessons in that chapter is when Sharon Grayson talks about being a Black trans woman and seeing that Black trans women were getting contracting HIV and AIDS, and that the AIDS activism community, including gay people, were not showing up for Black trans women. And so she started organizing and spearheading services and resistance, because she said, “Nobody is going to come to rescue us. We have to do this for ourselves and each other.” And I think those are very inspiring examples to draw strength and hopefully inspiration from, for all of us who are in the younger generations.

I think the last big idea I would offer, if I may, is just that we collectively, actively, not only can shape the future of culture, but we collectively are shaping the future of culture every single day, with every word, every step, every word at a time, every action at a time. And these narrators in this book demonstrate that, in our ordinary lives, we can achieve extraordinary outcomes that build the future we want.

And that is still true today, despite everything we see going on around us.

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