Come Talk To Me

[0:00:02.00] Dan Taulapapa McMullin: As we say in Samoa, lo'u fatu, my spirit, and I love to hear from you. [0:00:05.10] The fear of powerlessness, I mean, to learn how to experience your own power in your own way. [0:00:12.06] Bits here and there. I think I always kept some things... [0:00:18.40] Speaker 2: To yourself. [0:00:19.32] DTM: To myself. Maybe from a way sort of enter the subject of me that we're voyagers, because they went far, sky. [0:00:32.18] And I've always been close to the transgender community, but I've always never felt transgender. [0:00:44.02] I've never felt like a man. I've never felt like a man. I've never been comfortable with that. It was a very macho environment. [0:00:50.80] I had an interesting childhood. I mean, to me it was normal. [0:00:56.93] I had very bright, beautiful times in my childhood. [0:01:03.21] You know, I idealize, but I do know there were very beautiful times in my childhood. [0:01:12.50] And I had dark times in my childhood. And I do know one thing is I never wanted to grow up. [0:01:23.01] I just wanted to stay a child. I hated the idea of growing up. [0:01:28.49] And I think partly that was because even as a child, I had an idealization of what my childhood was. [0:01:36.74] I had a kind of vision of my childhood. Even when I was a child... [0:01:46.42] It's funny, I'm 64, but I feel young. I don't feel like I look young, but I feel like I, and my body gets… [0:01:53.76] I almost feel like I'm doing a new thing. I mean, in my painting, in my poetry. [0:02:01.60] You know, once I, the only good day I had, I played softball with my sisters, and they pulled my, coach pulled me out and said, you can't do that, you can't play with girls. [0:02:10.54] So I never... In Samoa, I'm a Fa'afafine, which means the way of a woman. In Samoa, the queer community is led by the transgenders [0:02:20.24] men who live as women and women who live as men. They're the center of queer culture. [0:02:25.04] And then if you're a woman who is, I don't know, it's so complicated in Samoa. [0:02:33.34] It's so complicated. But in general, I know it's so complicated. [0:02:43.24] But I was, in Samoa, I'm always hanging around with Fa'afafine. But before she died, she said, [0:02:50.13] I forget what we're talking about, but she got on to the subject of heaven, [0:02:55.20] and she goes, I'll see you there. And then I knew that she had finally, had [0:03:03.74] fully reconciled to her feelings about whatever verse in the Bible about abomination. [0:03:10.02] She had reconciled to her God that she was okay, and that we were gonna be okay. [0:03:17.41] Well, I had an idea of what to have from childhood. And I think I always wanted to recapture that. [0:03:24.92] The first time I taught, I was an American Samoan. I had become an artist. [0:03:28.50] Yeah, and I don't know that I've ever grown up. I was in my late 30s. [0:03:31.71] I've never, for instance, been good at making a living. I've never... [0:03:37.40] I got a job with the American Samoan Humanities Arts Council. Part of, [0:03:41.61] quite had my act together. It was sort of, coming out was, through therapy, was a teacher. [0:03:54.60] Coming out as I was an Islander. You know, about my culture and about my color, [0:04:00.03] but also my interior color, so to speak. My genealogy, my DNA, my family. [0:04:10.70] Most of my family is just transgender. And so I'm very, I can be more feminine, [0:04:20.08] somehow, and kind of relaxed in that. But they don't see me as transgender, [0:04:25.51] but they don't see me as male. So I have that release of not having to identify in the male environment. [0:04:33.08] …issues. Coming out, and it was the height of HIV AIDS, so there was no reason to come out, I thought. [0:04:42.94] Because I wasn't being sexual. I was just being private. [0:04:54.06] But I came out, and so I became an artist, stopped working in television. [0:04:59.45] I'm like, God, what was I doing? [0:05:04.30] Yeah, it feels good. It feels, you know, Fa'afafine, they're not women. They don't take the place of women. [0:05:11.46] They don't take the place of men. They just have the place of the Fa'afafine. [0:05:15.96] It's kind of a middle place, but it's kind of a different place. And it's kind of connected to the women, and it's kind of connected to the men, but it's not really. [0:05:23.59] It's just its own thing. It's definitely connected to feminine powers, [0:05:29.73] if you will, but it doesn't claim the space of women. [0:05:36.16] It's very strict to roles, to feminine roles, but women are very supportive of the Fa'afafine. [0:05:47.93] So, Fa'afafine more often in a social situation, hang out. But the social situation in Samoa was also very comfortable for Fa'afafine. [0:06:00.27] So, if you go to church, you can dress as a woman going to church. [0:06:05.26] If you teach Sunday school, you can dress as a woman. If you sing in a women's choir, you can dress as a woman. [0:06:10.42] You just have to make your voice falsetto. I fell into it by chance. [0:06:16.43] My first job was in the American Samoa Arts Council. [0:06:20.72] When I was a child, I moved every year because my parents were in the military, my father was. [0:06:24.99] And when your father was in the military, everyone's in the military. [0:06:27.80] I remember when I was in the States, some Fa'afafine visited us, [0:06:29.86] but they dressed as men to come visit my mother because my parents were born again Christian. [0:06:33.78] And they were very evangelical, they were very anti-gay, anti-gay marriage, anti-gay. [0:06:43.57] When I came out to my mother, even though that situation had gone, it all got buried under the carpet. [0:06:49.94] That childhood situation had come up, it was all buried under the carpet. [0:06:56.84] Later in life, when I started having relationships with men, I came out to my mother, I was so nervous, [0:07:05.71] and she said, gay is an abomination in the eyes of God. So I was like, okay. [0:07:11.27] And then I took her to a restaurant, she started throwing everything. It was someone, I remember the waiter (laughter) [0:07:17.33] I think he was gay. Fortunately, it was midday and it was between lunch and dinner, and there was no one in the restaurant. [0:07:23.46] And the waiter, I remember him peering around the corner, and he knew what was happening because you could hear us. [0:07:31.43] And he very quietly, my mother had calmed down, he very quietly walked around us and he picked up everything [0:07:38.49] and he reset our lunch very quietly, didn't say a thing to us. [0:07:43.62] And I'm sure he just looked gay, and he was very tender to us, [0:07:50.00] and it helped the situation. [0:07:52.13] That presence of somebody there who was not going to freak out, he was not going to say, “you broke our dish.” [0:07:58.88] He didn't say anything. Then we had our lunch, and I took her home, [0:08:08.30] and I caught the next flight back to where I was. I'd gone to visit, I was in LA for something. [0:08:13.88] Well, usually what I would do, I would visit my close gay friend, and we would just... [0:08:19.51] I had a really close couple of them, I was very close to them at the time. [0:08:24.96] I would visit them and we would go do LA. So we would have these amazing times together, because they were into art. [0:08:33.26] I was not an artist, but I was into art. They knew everything, they knew everyone and everything. [0:08:41.24] So I would just go, and so I would spend a week with them. Anyway, when I began living in San Juan again (cough) [0:08:48.25] I got this job with the American Samoa Arts Council, [0:08:52.66] and the woman who ran the program said, you should teach, and I said no. [0:08:58.43] And she took me to a school, and there was these Fa'afafine children, [0:09:05.16] these transgender children, and they were doing a play, and they were all in drag, and their parents were clapping, [0:09:09.98] and it was this beautiful thing of these children kind of having some gender choice. [0:09:20.33] And this was about 1990, early '90s, but that's how Samoa has always been, [0:09:27.65] and I kind of remembered when I was a child in Samoa how easy that was, [0:09:34.36] and how when we went to the United States, it became an issue. [0:09:37.93] And my father, maybe because he was in the military, I mean he had a lot of issues. [0:09:45.28] He looked white but he wasn't, you know, and he always tried to [0:09:49.05] kind of sort of pass as white. [0:09:50.99] He was in the military, and he left because his commanding officer wanted [0:09:56.41] him to read this diatribe against Martin Luther King to his troops, [0:09:59.79] and my father refused, and he decided it was time to retire. [0:10:02.66] The army was very racist. My grandfather, who was part Jewish, Irish and Jewish, [0:10:08.60] that's where I get McMullin from, [0:10:10.75] he concealed the fact that he was Jewish, because he couldn't go to officer school. [0:10:17.04] My father couldn't go to officer school because he was from Samoa, he was from territory, [0:10:21.94] which probably was strange for my father because he passed as white all his life, and suddenly there was a glass ceiling. [0:10:30.45] But he was from a territory, and he wasn't a citizen. [0:10:32.25] But he could join the military, but he couldn't go to officer school. [0:10:37.44] He was in the army, he got as far as sergeant. He was very violent, [0:10:44.96] used to beat the hell out of me, but he was never sexually violent. [0:10:52.66] I mean, I did experience sexual violence when I was a child, [0:10:55.01] it was from an older cousin in Samoa, but I don't remember it. [0:10:59.97] All I can say, all I know is that my sisters started complaining about this cousin of ours [0:11:04.63] so I went to my mother, my grandmother, and my grandfather, and I told them. [0:11:10.71] Well, I don't know if he was molesting me, I don't remember. [0:11:16.39] I just know that we always used to go in the forest together, because Samoa was just like one big rainforest, [0:11:24.05] and when we were kids, we used to go just walk through the trees [0:11:28.80] as a pack of kids, and we would just pick mangoes and guava. [0:11:37.73] It's funny, I was talking to someone here in upstate New York, and [0:11:41.54] he was telling my partner about how when he was a kid, he would just go through the woods [0:11:45.91] and find stuff to eat. And I said, wow, I had that same experience, [0:11:51.14] because he grew up on a farm, and he knew what to eat and what not to eat. [0:11:54.34] (Silence) [0:11:56.54] I got the hell out of there, but then we didn't talk for a year. [0:12:01.92] Speaker 2: You and your mother? [0:12:03.23] DMT: Yeah, and then she would keep calling me and scold me. [0:12:10.28] And then she got over it, and then she called me and said, [0:12:15.01] because my parents were Republican, born again, [0:12:20.14] they would go to the Republican National Convention as delegates for American Samoa. [0:12:24.87] They were in Washington, D.C., and she goes, “the cherry trees are blooming. [0:12:32.89] Come and hang out with us.” [0:12:37.60] I said no. [0:12:40.41] It was funny. But we reconciled that night. [0:12:50.13] I went to Samoa the last year of her life, the last few months, [0:12:58.49] and then we hung out. Yeah, she wanted to die in Samoa. [0:13:03.43] She always wanted to go back to Samoa. She would go to Samoa. [0:13:07.69] She would tell my dad, oh, I'll just be gone for a week. [0:13: 11.04] Six months later, and he's like, where the hell are you? [0:13:16.62] And it was the same thing when he would go overseas. She would say, [0:13:21.49] you better come back or we're going to be done, and then he would come back. [0:13:24.85] But for him, it was the world. That was his thing, and for her, it was Samoa. [0:13:33.71] Because my father went to Vietnam, and then he was involved in intelligence, [0:13:40.21] so he was gone for, he was supposed to be gone for a year, and it just prolonged. [0:13:44.06] So we were in Samoa for a while. And then we had a beautiful... [0:13:53.47] That was actually, for me, that was the happiest part of my childhood. [0:13:56.16] I always say about Samoa, it's your highest highs and your lowest lows. [0:14:00.42] That's the thing about Samoa. Nothing's in the middle. [0:14:03.23] I've had the best days of my entire life in Samoa, golden days [0:14:08.01] as a child and as an adult, and I've had the worst days in Samoa as a child and as an adult, [0:14:15.20] and that's the contradictory nature of Samoa. [0:14:22.24] It's why people kind of yearn, Samoans, like, every time I go to Samoa, I know, as I get closer, [0:14:31.28] I know this look on everyone's face of this homesickness. [0:14:35.35] And I know that kind of angst of all the pain and all the joy of Samoa, [0:14:44.14] because it's a very beautiful, very traditional place. [0:14:50.62] I don't know what happened. I just had this memory of, as a child, [0:14:54.60] lying under this tree alone, which is different from my other memories, [0:15:01.96] because all my memories are of me with all the other kids. We're always together. [0:15:07.15] So why was I alone in this memory, and why don't I remember anything about it? [0:15:10.59] But my sisters were complaining about this cousin of mine, because he was making advances at them, [0:15:17.02] and they were, like, six years old. They were just kids. [0:15:23.85] And I was a couple of years older than them, but I knew something was wrong. [0:15:27.33] They might have been five years old, and I might have been six or seven, [0:15:31.84] but I was a precocious kid, and I knew something was wrong. [0:15:37.49] And so I went and told, and that ended it. I mean, it was this huge scene. [0:15:44.68] I told I think I told my mother, or I might have told my great-grandmother, because [0:15:48.71] I was really close to my great-grandmother. I was like her pet. And she was... [0:15:53.46] She didn't speak English, so I had to learn some Samoan to speak to her, [0:15:57.96] and she was, like, really tough. [0:16:00.91] She was small and tough. And the first day we got to Samoa, [0:16:05.52] I saw her, and I just thought she was an old witch, you know, because she was talking to me in this language. [0:16:10.21] I didn't understand Samoan. We had grown up in Germany, and then California, [0:16:15.32] and then Hawaii. I didn't know any Samoan. I knew German. [0:16:31.35] We spoke German as children. I didn't know... I knew English and some German, [0:16:26.38] and I didn't know any Samoan. Although by the time we left, I knew some Samoan. [0:16:31.68] My sisters, you know, they were worried. And what was I going to do? [0:16:35.73] I don't know. And he, I couldn't remember. You know, I was kind of a feisty kid, so [0:16:42.27] I could see that if maybe I tried something, maybe. So then we kind of all forgot it. [0:16:48.66] So fast forward years later, my younger brother had gone to therapy, [0:16:56.12] and we were sitting in his living room talking, and the subject of this cousin came up, [0:17:02.27] and he said, “I have something to tell you all. I was there with my sisters.” [0:17:08.90] Oh, what? And that cousin had (bleeped expletive) [0:17:12.6] my younger brother, and he showed me, he gave me this picture that he had drawn [0:17:17.26] of himself with this rock on his back. [0:17:21.71] And he felt like he had... All his life, he had this rock on him. He was carrying a rock [0:17:26:65] and none of us knew that that had happened to him. We knew my cousin was like that. [0:17:35.66] (Silence) [0:17:42.42] So we were all shocked and kind of understood my brother better. [0:17:49.55] And he had children and he had gotten divorced. [0:17:58.54] He was trying to figure out why he was having problems with relationships. [0:18:05.93] It kind of went back to that time. So that's all I know. [0:18:15.29] I didn't know what to do. It was in San Pedro, California at the former military base. [0:18:22.07] And so I walked up and down this... I think that's when I walked [0:18:26.42] to that boy's house since it didn't happen with the other boy spitting on me. [0:18:30.44] I got my bike. I went to the playground. I left my bike there and then someone stole it. [0:18:37.58] I don't know if this all happened the same day. It was just weird. [0:18:40.51] Speaker 2: What a day. [0:18:42.03] DMT: It was like, what a fucking day. [0:18:43.71] And then night fell and I was like swinging on the swing. I was like, what am I gonna do? [0:18:48.21] You know, like some kids hung around with me but then they had to go home. [0:18:52.89] They went home. And then I fell asleep in front of the front door on the porch. [0:18:57.90] And then I could hear my mother and sisters coming down the stairs. [0:19:02.00] And it was like angels coming. And then they opened the door and my mother [0:19:06.07] put her hand on me and everything was okay. And then we went upstairs and went to bed. [0:19:11.54] And then a couple days later my father apologized and he cried. [0:19:18.37] You know, it was this thing. I think my father felt this pressure [0:19:26.45] because he was in this very macho environment. [0:19:36.24] And that's all. And then I didn't have sex again [0:19:46.07] until I was almost (unintelligible cross fade) It's a long time now. [0:19:50.10] And it had a lot to do with HIV AIDS. But I got involved with ACT UP, I got involved with Coronation. [0:19:55.47] I was so separated from that. [0:20:00.13] I was so detached. And it took me a long time also to be receptive. [0:20:06.40] It wasn't until my present partner that I felt safe with someone.