Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston, 1973 by Nan Goldin
In August 2012, then-Brooklyn-based comedian Red Durkin announced a free event, Trans Ladies Picnic. The idea was simple: trans ladies, picnicking. “TLP exists because we hold a basic truth to be self-evident, that trans women can have a really, really hard time making friends,” Durkin later explained. Brooklyn had reached a certain critical cultural mass — spawning its then-latest iteration of a trans culture in publications like Original Plumbing, PrettyQueer, and Topside Press (launched that same summer) — but many trans women felt excluded or alienated from the cis femme and trans masc-centred social scene that had sprung up around it. Freshly politicized by Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, a largely white cohort of girls were doing it for themselves: etching out a shared perspective through essays, in-jokes, relationships, jealousies, and a desire to bring our online friendships into the parks of our cities and towns.
Trans Ladies Picnic offered an opportunity for “low-pressure simple socializing” outside of the bars, brothels, and tedious support groups that were then the primary spaces where trans women intentionally gathered en masse IRL. The picnic spread online through Tumblr and Facebook posts, with accompanying photos of trans women laughing and at ease, and quickly spawned dozens of copycat picnics across the continent: Oakland, Toronto1, Philadelphia, et al. A movement of autonomous trans fem pleasure.
In studying, thinking, and writing about trans history over the past decade or so, one of the things I’ve been so struck by is its cyclical nature. As I’ve said before, we’ll never be new again, there is no trans first and perhaps there never was. Thirty-nine years before Red Durkin and her friends in Brooklyn met up in Prospect Park, another group gathered along the Charles River Esplanade in Boston, Massachusetts. Captured mid-laughter, someone has just said something witty or devastating, the five women or queens2 are eating cake. Is it someone’s birthday?
Nan Goldin’s classic photo has travelled the world and across time through her masterwork, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The Ballad is a motion picture without motion, a slideshow set to a soundtrack that mixes The Velvet Underground with Dionne Warwick, Bronski Beat with Maria Callas. The seven hundred or so images document her friends and lovers from the mid-1970s to the very beginning years of the on-going AIDS epidemic. Goldin had spent the ‘70s living with drag queens and trans women, including a long affair with her best friend, but things take a slowly turn as she moves into the 1980s. Intimacy, aggression, sex, drugs, and fresh bruises bloom across the grainy, often out of focus images. These darker moods mingle with the joy and vibrance of lives lived against culture. Unlike Diane Arbus’ “freak show,”3 trapped in the merciless gaze of a permanent outsider’s eyes, you cannot walk away from a Nan Goldin print with anything but the impression of deep love Goldin shares with her subjects.
The Ballad’s snapshot aesthetic is so copied as to verge on cliché — HBO’s Euphoria, lauded for its visual language, is at best an uncredited homage to Goldin’s work. But for me, her work is a poignant connection point between my body and the bodies of the girls who came before. It is not just that the girls have been girling forever, it’s that our desires and our joys repeat themselves across time. We have struggled the same and we have found the same small moments of liberation, together.
Picnic on the Esplanade or Trans Ladies Picnic, both remind us that, however imperfect, together we can make worlds.
xx
MMP
Full disclosure, I organized a number of them. I believe the Toronto one was co-organized with jia-qing wilson-yang. I also held at least one in Montréal, and attended another in Philly at the Philly Trans Health Conference. Most recently, in 2018 and 2019 I co-organized more with Sadie (of strap-on dot org fame) in London, UK.
Honestly who knows how they identified then, or would today if they still were alive. History is in the reading of it, and this is how my best educated guess chooses to read.
As per Sontag.