Remnants of Resistance: Honoring the Dead, Remembering the Living

November 03, 2023

As part of the One Institute's Circa Queer Histories Festival, CSUN's University Library and Queer Studies Program have partnered to produce a limited podcast series called Remnants of Resistance. Episodes will be hosted by Queer Studies faculty, and will delve into the unique and hidden stories in queer history contained within the Vern and Bonnie Bullough Collection on Sex and Gender and beyond.

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About the Episode

The ancestors call: “Divas to the Dance Floor, Please!” The siren song of the dance floor beckons Queer Brown bodies to our Church, our sacred space, our Home…to dance, to make community, to hunt or be hunted…yet an unknown presence is making itself known in the bathhouses, the back rooms, and the sex clubs. The young and the beautiful will soon be disfigured and discarded. The faces of the afflicted are all skeletal white while the Chicano Queers scream in a vacuum, “We are dying, too!” Dr. Omar González creates this podcast as a queer amoxtli, the Nahuatl term for codex or writing, that will serve as an historical marker for younger Queer Xicanx men and tell them, “We’ve always been here.”

In this episode, he explores the question of the missing Chicanidad within the history and contemporary analysis of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Unbeknownst to most outside of Queer Gen X and older populations, the epidemic continues to represent an ongoing issue as the numbers rise for gay and bisexual men of color and youth. These thoughts guided Dr. González as he searched the archives for any traces of Brown men, to resuscitate their voices, providing them oxygen through the files of the archive. He tells this story through an Anzaldúan lens, through the process she calls conocimiento, a form of knowing through a Chicana Lesbian Feminist filter, as her essay, “now let us shift…conocimiento…inner work, public acts” (2015) is a Queer codex representing decolonial epistemological methods. She reintegrates mind/body/spirit to make us whole, to awaken us from the Matrix, to begin the painful process of healing from historical, colonial trauma.

About the Host

Omar González is a Two-Spirit, Queer Pocho Xicanx from El Chuco, Texas. He received his M.A. in Chicana/o Studies from CSUN and his PhD in Chicana/o Studies from UCLA, where he worked with Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Alma Lopez, creating Queer Xicanx theory based on various works of John Rechy, the original Queer Chicano author. Omar’s work focuses LGBT Chicanx Literature and the legacy of HIV/AIDS on Queer men of color. Omar has various publications, including two in Queer in Aztlan (2013), and in the recent Fathers, Fathering, and Fatherhood: Queer Chicano/Mexicano Desire and Belonging (2021).