LACA

The first time I met Johanna Breiding, I was station managing a show on KCHUNG, Kean OBrien's Conversations with Trans.audacity. Johanna was one of the guests and I thought she was super cute so the next day I sent her a message on Facebook revealing my attraction to her and asked if she'd like to get together sometime. Johanna, impressed by my honesty and openness, kindly explained that her hands and heart were full at the moment. However, my reaching out in such a frank manner created an immediate sense of trust for Johanna. And now, nearly two years later, I am psychically merging with Johanna, writing about the death of her mother, as if I am Johanna, for one of her pieces in Johanna's deeply personal and expansively political, multi-media exhibition, Epitaph for Family, which explores love, intimacy, loss, and queer family-making. This intimate collaboration between Johanna, me, and Cary Cronenwett required a giving up of self, a death of self, a queering of self—letting go. Johanna had to let go of herself to let me in and I had to let go of myself to access Johanna; and all three of us had to let go of any attachments we had to the story, the text, and the editing. What is queer family-making? Perhaps this is it. Listen to Johanna and me in this frankly lovely episode to adventure further within the possibilities of queerness and queering! Robert's queer love playlist.