Trans* Temporal Resistances: Emji Saint Spero, Leila Weefur & friends

The Poetry Center co-presents, in conjunction with TurkxTaylor Initiative and with co-curation by Emji Saint Spero and Leila Weefur, Trans* Temporal Resistances, in which writers and artists are invited to deconstruct trans archives and architectures through textual and movement-based approaches. Situated within a district in which desire has historically been boundaried and confined, these performances engage Queer Time as an embodied strategy of resistance. The performance series, mirroring an open assemblage model, invites three local writers, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, Mason J., and Rowan Powell. Text-image by Leila Weefur. 

The Tenderloin Museum is located at street level on the corner of Eddy and Leavenworth in downtown San Francisco.

VIDEO for this program will be posted after editing at Poetry Center Digital Archive.

Trans* Temporal Resistances is the closing public program for Transition Times: Re-Membering Anticarceral Resistance in the Tenderloin, an archival exhibit contextualizing the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot, a queer grassroots uprising against police brutality in August 1966, as recovered by historian Susan Stryker. Her decades of research and her documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria provided the evidence to write a new and urgent chapter in an emerging history. The exhibition shows selected material from the outstanding collection that Stryker has compiled since the 1990s, including when she was the executive director at the GLBT Historical Society. The exhibition examines the urban space around the riot’s site, a four-story building at the intersection of Turk and Taylor Streets in the Tenderloin. 

Featured writers:

Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is an anarchist artist and poet interested in ways of living and telling. They are the author of two books of poetry: The Easy Body (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2017); and La Movida (Nightboat Books, 2022). They are currently at work on another book of poetry, as well as on a speculative acid western lesbian romantic ethnomusicological history of Chicana country music & revolution on 1970's Valencia Street. They have written non-fiction essays on things such as Latinx youth activism in Idaho, Central American migrant families in Tijuana & those that support them, and Angeleno psychogeography. A Latinx Jewish person of mixed indigenous & settler descent from the unceded lands of the Tongva people east of the Paayme Paxaayt, they are a long term guest in Yelamu, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands, where they garden with their partner & bake challah every Friday. 

Mason J. (he/they) is a Blaxican-Indigenous and Sephardic Jewish artist, historian, and community organizer based on Ohlone Land (San Francisco). As a queer writer, visual artist, and disability justice advocate, Mason amplifies marginalized voices. They served as interim Executive Director of Radar Productions 2021-2022, contributing to projects like SFPL's Show Us Your Spines residency and teaching for the Queer Ancestors Project. Mason's work with Still Here SF reflects their commitment to challenging societal norms through innovative projects.

Rowan Powell is a writer and Ph.D. candidate at UC Santa Cruz. They grew up in rural South West England, and spends time between Oakland and London. Rowan has recently published work with Nightboat Books, PSS Press, STRIKE! and Stir Magazine.

Co-curators:

Emji Saint Spero (they/them) is a transqueer writer, performer, and pervert living in Los Angeles. They are curious about the potential of creative intimacies to queer the familiar, mapping the boundaries of collective en-gagement through movement, documentation, personal ephemera, and collaborative performance. Saint Spero is co-founder of the Oakland-based small press Timeless, Infinite Light and co-developmental editor for We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan (Nightboat Books x Timeless Infinite Light, 2019). They are the author of disgust (Nomadic Press, 2021) and almost any shit will do (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2014), and have work featured in Trans History in 99 Objects (Hirmer Publishers, 2024).

Saint Spero is the curator of Communicator Series, a language-curious queer and trans* performance series at Poetic Research Bureau, and is currently working on two poetry manuscripts, Exhaustion and A Retching. saintspero.com @homopathetic

Leila Weefur (He/They/She) is an artist, writer, and curator based in Oakland, CA. Through film & installation they examine the performative elements connected to systems of belonging, present in Black, queer, gender-variant life. An entanglement of beauty and horror evokes concepts of sensorial memory, architectural psychology, hyper surveillance, and the erotic. Weefur has worked with local and national institutions including the ICASF, CCA’s Wattis Institute, McEvoy Foundation, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco Art Institute, Museum of the African Diaspora, The Kitchen, and Smack Mellon. Weefur’s writing has been published in SEEN by BlackStar Productions, Sming Sming Books, Baest Journal, and more. Weefur is a lecturer at Stanford University and a member of The Black Aesthetic. leilaweefur.com @spikeleila