To commemorate the year that was, we invited an array of artists, writers, filmmakers, designers, and performers to share a list of the most noteworthy ideas, events, and objects they encountered in 2019.
Cyrus Dunham is a writer and organizer living in Los Angeles. His first book, A Year Without A Name, was published by Little, Brown in October. He is a member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.
I.
MOVEMENTS TO END LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE SENTENCING
In the latter half of the 20th century, anti–death penalty advocates proposed life in prison sentencing as a more just alternative to capital execution. This supposedly humane reform, propelled by a fundamentally ableist, classist, and racist criminal-legal-punishment system, exponentially increased the number of people sentenced to die in prison. Popular articulations of criminal justice reform depict decarceration as achievable through the release of “nonviolent drug offenders.” If all nonviolent drug offenders were released tomorrow, the incarcerated population would stand at around 1.7 million—still nearly 20 percent of the world total. And more than 50,000 of those people are serving life without parole (LWOP) sentences in the United States today—meaning they have been told, by the court of law, that they will never, ever, go home. Propelled by a belief that being sentenced to die in prison is a punishment of which no one is deserving, organizers surviving LWOP, their families and loved ones, and allies across the United States have identified ending LWOP as a central goal of the abolitionist struggle. In California, where I live, this coalition has come together under the demand that the state DROP LWOP. Ending life without parole is about leaving no one behind.
2.
GENDER-DEVIANT LIFE-WRITING
Experiments in gender-deviant life-writing have the power to summon a different world into being. After all, people often referred to as “trans” have to imagine themselves into being. The following are a few works from the last year that wrote through, about, and out of modes of gender deviance (across genres, but always rooted in life) in a way that was incredibly generative for me: Time is a Thing the Body Moves Through by T. Fleischmann, The Black Condition Ft. Narcissus by jayy dodd, Trans Girl Suicide Museum by Hannah Baer, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s Slingshot, and the newly published diaries of Lou Sullivan, We Both Laughed in Pleasure. And, of course, let’s never forget that most gender deviants, now and forever before, are writing their lives without ever publishing their words, let alone committing them to the page.
3.
INNOVATIONS IN REVOLT
Across disparate global uprisings and insurrections, we saw new techniques and tactics for resisting the ever-increasing technological militarization of the state. To name just a few: bricks glued to the ground to block intersections or commuter trains filled to capacity by protestors in Hong Kong, hand-held lasers deployed to immobilize riot police and drones in Chile, collective fair jumping during the FTP protests in New York City, roundabouts occupied by the gilets jaunes in France to block the flow of goods. These uprisings coming to light in the media make me think about all the clandestine local organizing that we can’t see but, nonetheless, creates conditions for survival against global capitalism— particularly the organizing done by the sick, disabled, and elderly, who are structurally barred from participation in acts of protest we commonly understand as insurrectionary but, nonetheless, resist the state each and every day.
4.
“AFTER THE QUARANTINE”
Living within perpetual conditions of medical neglect and environmental poisoning, a poetry workshop at Women’s Huron Valley Prison in Michigan utilized collaborative poetics to document a quarantine during which the entire prison population was forced to take medication for an unproven scabies outbreak (refusal of medication was punished with 90 days in solitary). The collaborative poem “After The Quarantine” is its own insurgent counter-documentation. Whose accounts of state violence do we look to for proof, for the truth?
5.
TOP 40
I’ve always been a shameless top 40 bitch, but my love of pop music has grown exponentially since moving to Los Angeles. Sometimes I get in the car at rush hour just so I can listen to the 5 o’clock drop on 97.1. “Lose You To Love Me,” “No Guidance,” “How Do You sleep?,” and “Beautiful People” are my favorite songs on the radio right now.
6.
GAY BARS OF CALIFORNIA’S SECOND CITIES
The Menagerie in Riverside, FAB Fresno, Club Casablanca in Bakersfield, bar-hopping on K Street in Sacramento, and The Boulevard in Pasadena. The most fun I had dancing, seeing drag shows, and attempting falsetto karaoke renditions of “Mad World” were all at gay bars in California’s beautiful but too often unsung second cities.
7.
SEQUOIADENDRON GIGANTEUM
After almost five years living in California I finally went to see the giant sequoias in the Sierra Nevadas. Ignore the patriotic-colonial national parks landmarking and wander off to have a moment in the shadow of one of the oldest, and largest, living organisms on earth. I hugged one of them and wept. Their spongy bark is fire-proof and, after being singed, releases a crimson sap. Giants are real, and they bleed.
8.
PINKO
The gay communist magazine we have all been waiting for. I tore through the first issue.
9.
FILMS THAT BLEW MY MIND, BY PEOPLE I LOVE
My friend Hazel Katz made a short film called Higher Life about trans femmes navigating mental illness, love, and the question of euthanasia. What I wish all romantic comedies were like. Tourmaline’s 25 minute film Mary Ill of Fame chronicles a day in the life of Mary Jones, a black trans sex worker and outlaw in New York City in 1836. Historical fiction as speculative, fugitive magic. Matt Wolf’s film, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, made me think about archives, legacies of Black Communism in the US, and the intersection of genius and mental illness; it also deepened my belief that art arises from honoring, not resisting, our obsessive compulsive impulses.
10.
SCRUMPING
My friend Alison taught me this word a couple years ago. Its roots are in Middle Dutch and technically “scrumping” means stealing fruit from gardens and orchards. But in Los Angeles, you don’t have to “steal,” per se: Los Angeles is full of tens of thousands of fruit trees that reach their branches and drop their food over property lines. Scrumping feels like a vestige of the commons that hasn’t been effectively privatized yet. A scrumped persimmon brings me indescribable joy.
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