TV Shows, Queer Spaces, and Organizing: Part 1 with Sara and Renae!

Renae and Sara are some of the fiercest supporters of students at our old high school. Working as Parent Coordinator and Student Activities Coordinator, respectively, Renae and Sara make the front office a welcoming and safe space for all students.

In addition, they continue their wonderful work into the summer at a transition program for underrepresented incoming ninth grade students. Renae and Sara are widely known at our high school for being work besties and the best school trip/prom chaperone-duo of all time, so we thought it would be fitting to interview them together! Read the following for a discussion about decolonization, police brutality, the future of queer spaces, and more :)

[Trigger warning: discussions of sexual assault and police brutality]

At the beginning of our conversation, Sara introduced her girlfriend, who’s good friends and studied in Greece with someone Zoe went to elementary school with (Zoe was in kindergarten and she was in third grade when they met). We laughed about the coincidence:

Sara: When [my girlfriend] told me that, I was like, “the world is so small!”

Zoe: It’s soooo small!

Renae: It’s creepily small.

Sara: And it gets smaller and smaller once you’re queer, I feel like.

Zoe: That part, yeah. As a kid I wondered why I was like, “wow, I want to do everything that [she] does,” and then when she came out I was like, “ohhhhhh.”

Sara: I have a person who was older than me in my community like that too, who was also Muslim, and I was like, “why was I so obsessed with them? Oh…”

Zoe: “Oh, that’s why!”

…

Miriam: I have a favorite [question] that feels good to start! What media has been getting you guys through this time? I feel like my life has turned from being a very social thing--residential college--but now it’s like, how do I interact online in different ways? And also I just love getting recommendations!

Sara: Media right now--it’s interesting because it’s super heavy, but I just got really into the new series I May Destroy You. It’s by the same person who did Chewing Gum and it’s gonna be a series that she’s doing. I guess it’s basically her recollecting a sexual assault that had happened to her, but it’s almost set up like a comedy as well. It’s just so fascinating; it’s so many representations of sexual assault I’d never seen before, and there’s a moment she sleeps with somebody and he takes off the condom while they’re sleeping, and then he’s like, “oh, you didn’t feel it?” And then she’s listening to a podcast later and in the podcast, two women are talking about how that’s a form of rape. You see it on her face as she’s in this dude’s house, and she’s wearing his clothes, and she just walks out without underwear and leaves the house.

But I don’t know, that show has just been--it’s super heavy, which is like, why has it been something I turn to right now? But it’s just so fascinating right now to see how everyone’s talking about things. People are talking about sexual assault in new ways, people are talking about police abolition in new ways, so TV has been super good for me. Just watching how people are talking about these things.

Renae: Sometimes [social media and entertainment] blend; I’m a big Twitter person.

Sara: Nae is a big Twitter person. And Twitter has been funny lately!

Renae: Twitter has been hilarious, what? Okay, so this is kind of weird, but part of my daily routine is watching old TV shows, and right now I’m kind of hooked on In the Heat of the Night, which is so bad. The acting is so bad. But I love Howard Rollins and I love Carol Connors, so it’s kind of fun in that sense. But in terms of other stuff, I’ve been doing a lot of weird episodic stuff on Netflix, which is completely removed from any part of my reality. Kind of like In the Heat of the Night. So I’ve been doing like Scandinavian mystery series--I go between that and very bizarre things like The Floor is Lava, which is the stupidest show ever.

Sofia: I’ve been wanting to watch that!

Renae: I’m totally engaged, it’s so ridiculous, and I could see tons of people I know teaming up and being like, “We could do that, we could do that.” And it’s this weird obstacle course show where you have to climb around a room and make it to the end and you get $10,000 but you can’t touch the floor because the floor is lava.

Sara: Honestly, I don’t know who doesn’t sign up for those shows! If you had an offer for potentially winning $10,000 and worst case scenario making a fool of yourself on TV, I don’t know who turns that down.

Renae: It’s totally ridiculous, yeah! You get to do it with friends and siblings or whatever, and you get to hop across. I guess it’s hard but not terribly hard. So that’s what I’ve been occupying myself with, that and reading dark memoirs lately.

Sara: Like whose!

Renae: (laughs) I don’t even know the woman’s name, but it was one of those free Amazon downloads and it’s about a woman growing up in West Virginia, so it’s kind of a piece where you’re understanding what life was like in that part of the world.

Sara: Yeah, Amazon would make that shit for free. Just to placate people and gaslight them. Like Amazon does not care but look how people in Africa are doing!

Renae: (laughs) true true. I try to spread my reading around, you know, I want to hear the dark stories from all corners of the earth. From the weird Scandinavian villages where old ladies turn out to be dead for fifty years already to, you know, women in the hollers of West Virginia.

Zoe: One question that we all really like--we know that things are different right now, but we were wondering if there are any queer spaces or other spaces you feel affirm you in New York; it doesn’t have to be explicitly queer, but are there spaces in New York that you guys love?

Renae: That are open? No.

Sara: Renae can go first because she knows a bunch of places that don’t exist anymore!

Renae: (Jokingly) Aw, shut up. You know, I don’t even think about queer spaces anymore because we don’t go anywhere. I guess queer community...like Sara’s part of that community for me, but yeah I don’t think about queer spaces in the midst of a pandemic. I’m here in my house with my child, my dog.

Sara: Living your queer life either way.

Renae:

Living my queer life! I definitely visit queer websites, and follow news, and I’ve been very intrigued at how queer folks are finding more of a voice within BLM, so that’s pretty cool. And the fact that there are some queer voices out there that when we talk about Black lives mattering that have really shifted some energy to Black trans lives in particular, and the number of Black trans women that are killed. So that’s kind of queer space for me right now.

Sara: And it’s so interesting when you say that, too, I’m thinking about how queer space outside of the home becomes necessary because people can’t be queer at home. And so right now, people probably need queer spaces the most because we’re stuck at home, either being isolated or not surrounded by queer community and then watching all this violent shit happen at the same time.

So I don’t know, I was just talking to [my girlfriend] about it, and I was like, “I really don’t know what queer spaces we went to will still be open after the pandemic.” Just because so many things are going out of business. And I was just making fun of Nae for it, but it’s real, that’s how queer businesses go in the city. They really just do come and go this way. And in one way I’m really sad, but I’m also just like, there will be more that come. Queers are always building space for ourselves.

But before the pandemic, me and [my girlfriend] actually met at No Bar, which is the queer bar on the Lower East Side that just opened like a year ago, and I’ve had fun times there. And if you’re in Brooklyn, you can’t not go to Mood Ring, so Mood Ring is the other queer bar… (Renae shakes her head) You can [avoid] Mood Ring, I guess! I could never go out on a Saturday night and get out of ending up at Mood Ring or whatever.

So there’s Mood Ring, they’re cool, I guess. I’ve read some weird stuff though, about even queer spaces and how their employment is shitty. Recently a Black trans person who was working at Mood Ring came forward about that.

I’m trying to think of any other queer spaces...The Woods! I’ve had good times at The Woods on Wednesday nights. The Woods is a bar in Bushwick and on Wednesday nights, it’s queer night.

Renae: Terrible. Terrible idea.

Sara: (laughing) Wednesday night is a pretty nasty night to have a queer night, as you can imagine.

Renae: It’s not the ‘80s where you could do that.

Sara: If I’m ever late to work on Thursday mornings (laughs)...But yeah, those were my three places I’d recommend if they’re still open.

Zoe: I hope that they stay open! That’s something that we talk about a lot, because now that we’re finally old enough to start doing that kind of stuff, now we’re in a pandemic, so it’s kind of tough!

Renae: I recommend the one that Sara didn’t mention, which I keep saying I want to go to and I haven’t gone, but I will go at some point, because my new motto is a meme I saw, which was a guy saying, post-COVID, somebody says “you wanna go--” and before they even finish the sentence, the guy’s like “I’m there, I’m there.” So, Papi Juice…

Sara: How did I forget!

Renae: I don’t know how you forgot our buddy Adam.

Sara: Oh nooo, cut this out of the recording! Obviously I’ve had the best times at Papi Juice. Papi Juice is one of the things that will not be happening after the pandemic; me and Adam talked about it, because usually, Papi Juice is in a three-story space called Elsewhere in Brooklyn. And I kid you not, in this three-story space, they have seven rooms for different DJs, and in every room you cannot breathe. Like in every room, you’re just jammed packed with queers everywhere. Like I’d say on a Papi Juice night, you’d probably see like thousands of people, like five thousand people a night in the space. And that’s not even accounting for the people who come, they leave, more people come in--probably throughout the night, in Elsewhere, like ten thousand people go in and out throughout a Papi Juice show. So me and Adam were talking about it, I was like, “Boo, I don’t know how you’re gonna…” Even the line goes around three blocks when you’re waiting to get into the space. So Papi Juice is probably gonna struggle to get back up and in the nightlife scene, just because they’re so popular.

Renae: I’m wondering, too, what the nightlife is gonna look like. I feel like it’s gonna be years before your generation gets to know what the nightlife is really like. Because, I definitely was going to clubs when I was your age, probably starting at 17 I could sneak in, even though I looked like I was 12; right person at the door, they’ll let you in. But that’s a whole other piece of queer life that has its value. It truly has its value. It’s definitely something you phase in and out of, like I’m so over that scene and bodies everywhere and dancing and meeting strange people and all that kind of stuff.

But I wonder a lot about nightlife because that is a big part of the queer community. And I don’t know what that’s gonna look like. I don’t know what queer bars are gonna look like. It’s the kind of stuff that everybody took for granted pre-March 1st. Just knowing, I could be anywhere in town and google, “gay bar nearby,” stop in and have a drink or whatever. But you can’t do that.

Sara: I just wanna also say, nightlife is great, but I think also the hard thing to remember about it is that bad shit happens in these queer spaces too. And so even right now, I don’t know if you guys follow certain people, but a lot of the queer organizing spaces I frequented in are falling apart because there have been allegations that have come forward about different folks in the circles. And a lot of these things have happened at queer events; people have been sexually assaulted at queer events by queer folks.

And so I think that’s also interesting--while you guys will not know nightlife as we know it, for years, when it does come around for you guys, I think something will be really different. Because something about right now is changing, even the way we build community guidelines. So three years from now, when you’re partying, your community guidelines could be better than what Papi Juice already has. And Papi Juice already has: “we center Black and brown trans people, and then we work around that.” And so I think you guys are going to have much better parties than we ever did. Because everyone’s doing the work to make sure when we go back, it’s like a hundred times safer and better.

Renae: Every generation thinks their parties are better than the previous generation’s. As someone who’s spent a lot of time in queer spaces and straight spaces, queer spaces do tend to be safer in terms of the club and party scene. Which is a nice thing. People are a little more conscious of it. Not completely, obviously, but it feels much safer than being in a straight scene.

Sara: I think more people will speak up in queer spaces than they will in straight spaces. Because that’s a part of being straight, right, like keeping things going.

Zoe: I definitely got that vibe at school; the parties that my friend group and I felt comfortable going to looked very different from some of my other friends’ party scenes. Like I remember one time, me and all my friends weren’t allowed to go into a lacrosse party--our judgement for trying to go to a lacrosse party was probably a little bit skewed, but they wouldn’t let us in, and my friend group is majority Black folks, and it just got to be a really gross situation. They were yelling at us for no reason. So we quickly learned--we only go to BSU parties, or there’s a queer frat we’ll go to. It’s just interesting how you find those spaces where you actually feel safe.

Sara: Or where let you in, quite honestly. They let you in, [that’s] the first thing, and then once you’re in, are people even talking to you, are people hanging out with you? What’s the point of going to a party if people are working around you the whole time, like, you’re there to be social. And the third is, then are people going to get violent? That’s the last resort, but the first two also fucking matter!

Zoe: Yeah, absolutely.

Sara: I hear that. College is probably where I got pushed to find my community even more, because you end up going to these spaces where people own community, and then you have to find yours.

Sofia: I also wanted to mention that Zoe and I went to a Papi Juice zoom, which was really interesting! It was adorable and fun, because they spotlighted different people dancing so you got to see everybody with their families and dogs and stuff.

Sara: I may have been there! Me and [my girlfriend] went to one.

Zoe: They’re so fun!

Sofia: So I guess that’s what people are trying to do amidst the pandemic. My question was, Sara, is you said you were a part of organizing in New York, which I guess is now sort of falling apart. But what does that look like? What kind of organizing have you been involved in?

Sara: Yeah, so most of my organizing happens with NYCORE, which is the New York Coalition of Radical Educators. So NYCORE is one group, and they have a POC coalition as part of NYCORE, so I’ve done working groups with them in the past. One of the working groups [came to] fruition with me doing the Youth Social Justice Summit at the People’s Forum. So a lot of my organizing is just at the intersections of being a person of color, having been a student of color, and also being an educator. And also the city just being such a wonderful place to be in a classroom with folks. City classrooms are just so generative of imagining new possibilities.

But I just also--a lot of my folks are really passionate and have their own organizing circles too, so I’m tangential to a lot of folks who organize with ALP [the Audre Lorde Project], Safe OUTside the System, a lot of doulas are in my circle, so I just get to see a lot of the work that’s being done in different parts of the system. But yeah, Decolonize This Place--I’m not an organizing member of their movement, but I do show up to the FTPs they do. I think they’re fun to show up to when you can. I went to two of their Whitney events; it’s just showing up when you can. Another one to pay attention to and try to give money to is Equality for Flatbush.

Renae: Yeah.

Sara: Yeah, they’re doing really good work. It’s mostly just giving my coins when I can, when I’m not able to go to something because we’re in this [pandemic].

Note: Interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

[Click here for Part 2 to read Sara and Renae's discussion about being queer educators!]