Rain Valdez & Geena Rocero NYC’s LGBT Community Center Trailblazer Awards
Photo Credit: LEXIE MORELAND/WWD

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@michaelnoel
Rain Valdez & Geena Rocero NYC’s LGBT Community Center Trailblazer Awards
Photo Credit: LEXIE MORELAND/WWD
Geena Rocero. Founder of Gender Proud. Trans Activist. Model.
On being single 4.7.18
Friend (who is 2 months out of a breakup and has been dating 2 different guys as rebounding): How about you, have you been dating?
Me: No, wala..
Friend: Oh, so that’s why you’ve been so sad..
NAH NOT REALLY. Sorry you don’t know how to be alone. I’m living my best life.
On being Filipinx 4.7.18
I miss my motherland. The land of my ancestors.
My heart breaks when my non-Filipinx friends tell me they get to travel to Pilipinas.
I haven’t been able to travel there since I was in my early teens, with my family. I have not been able to travel since because I have not had the means. I have been tied down by capitalism. Not only unable to afford the flights to and from, but also unable to take time away from the belly of the beast. I have been stuck on this path of either being in work or school, or work, or school. Of unstable housing. Of food insecurity. Of trauma and pain and oppression.
I miss my lola the most, and she has been visiting me more often through memories. When I travel to Pilipinas next, I hope to connect with my ancestors and re-member them in a new way. I hope to connect to the land, and all the spirits of revolutionary resistance. I hope to connect with the queer and trans spirits of my ancestors who have always paved the way for others towards liberation.
My heart breaks for all my Filipinx kasamas, kaibigan, kapwa, who are tago-ng-tago in the belly of the beast. Who had no choice and had to flee to find better opportunity. Who have not been able to go back home, because it is for their survival or their family’s survival. Who did not know, how much “The American Dream” was a lie and a trap. Who did not know, that it meant to be pushed further into colonization. Who did not know, that it meant to lose connection to the land, and our ancestors spirits.
I do not know when I will be able to travel to Pilipinas next. But when I do, it will be such an act of resistance for me. It will mean that I will no longer be tied down from connecting with my ancestors and connection to my land and culture. It will be my time to reclaim what has always been mine. This is how much I yearn to see, feel, touch, taste, smell, ang aking inang bayan. This is what it will mean to me, when two worlds collide.
On adulting 4.3.18
Idk if it’s mercury in retrograde or what, but the past couple weeks have been extremely challenging and trying. I miss having my steady work schedule, being able to sleep in, go to the gym before work, and not have to deal with train traffic.
I had trainings the took up most of last week, which meant I had to be up early and deal with morning commute traffic and crazy packed trains. I had an almost all-day meeting today so same situation, and another half-day training tomorrow. I haven’t been able to make it to the gym in a while. I could have gone today after work, but instead I took a nap.
I need to schedule a doctor’s appointment. I need to schedule a dentist appointment. I need to schedule an eye exam appointment. Mind you, I’ve been putting these all off for the past couple weeks. I guess one thing at a time, lol.
I’ve been an adult for what seems like has been a while now, but why does it seem to only get harder? When working with youth (ages 13-24), it truly makes me remember what it was like when I was in the 21-24 age range. Emerging adulthood is real.
I’m just a couple months into my new job and still haven’t entirely found my footing. It’s been fulfilling and rewarding, but also extremely challenging. Definitely growing pains in every direction. I’m trusting the process, and trusting that I am in the right place for all the right reasons. I love many of my co-workers who make such great company and the struggle more bearable. They keep me in a good mood, and definitely keep me going.
Queer Eye’s Karamo Brown stopped by Tumblr HQ earlier this week to 🙏🏾 bless us 🙏🏾 with his advice. Stay tuned to your dashboard! Over the next few days we’ll be releasing a fun GIFerview with Karamo and more fun #content here on @stardom. We’ll also share his #WhatWillYouDo video over on @action with his pledge for making this year the best version of 2018 it can be.
On queerness 03.22.18
Content/trigger warning: addiction, substance use, methHow do we hold our community accountable about substance use, more particularly meth use and meth addiction? Why is no one talking about how broken our community is? It’s heartbreaking to see so many broken people, choosing meth to cope with and medicate their pain? How easy it is for people to still stigmatize addiction and substance use. We have an opioid epidemic that no one is talking about. Fentanyl. Can you just imagine, your worst feelings of pain (your lowest of lows), and that someone’s worst is possibly a much deeper abyss below yours? I wish I could give all my love for this world to help heal every broken heart. I wish we could all have a little more love and compassion to give to one another, our community, and our world.
This is why I have no patience or room in my heart for cattiness or shade. When broken people just try to tear each other down. We should be trying to uplift one another. We don't have to be the crabs in the barrel, when our real true enemy is the white supremacist capitalist cis-hetero-patriarchy.
Silence=Death
Third World Liberation Front
Anti-War Movement
Collective Liberation
on HIV 03.18.18
When I think about PrEP and the decline in new HIV diagnoses, I think about how there will be less and less people I will find who share a similar experience of living with HIV. I think about my clients who I worked with who are long-term survivors of HIV. One of them described the honor and privilege it is to find another long-term survivor, someone who lived through the massacre and plague. He described it as it is like finding another person floating by in a sea of debris, and finding another person who survived and is holding on to their raft for dear life.
I imagine that this is what it will be like for me as time goes on.
I hope for a day that there will never be another 20-year-old diagnosed with HIV. I hope for a day that there are 0 new infections and 0 new diagnoses.
I’ll process these thoughts further another time.
more 3.18.18
One of my co-workers died last Friday morning. The day before, someone very connected and involved in the community that I serve for work died. One of my friends from San Diego’s mother died. One of my friends had a very good friend die.
I am being intentional about the use of the words death and dying instead of “passing away” or “loss”. In grad school I took a course on grief, loss, and bereavement, and learned that we live in a very death denying society and age-ist society. People use products to look younger, even go to the extent of facial and plastic surgery. People are afraid of getting older and afraid of dying. People are afraid of dying alone.
Death and dying is hard for everyone. Harder for some. I think about death and everyone’s mortality quite often. Not in a suicidal way, just in an existential way. Life is so short.
It’s very grounding and humbling for me. Some people have too much pride, and anything can be taken from them in one foul swoop or the blink of an eye. Reminds me to be grateful for what I have, and try not to take certain things for granted.
With my co-worker’s death it was especially peculiar. He was in my office the day before, commenting on how much he loved our beta fishes that we had in our office. He shared a couple fun facts about them. He asked me how my transition time at work has been going over the past month. We spoke a little bit about my program, and he said he read about it, and that we would definitely have to meet and talk more about it in the future. I was not close with him, nor did I know him well, but we had such a meaningful interaction of humanity and kindness to one another. I will always remember him. Just like I will always remember one of my previous co-workers from San Diego who came out to me about his HIV status, and his cancer diagnosis. He found love before he died, and he found someone to love him while they knew he was dying.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about everyone in my life who has died. Most especially my grandmother and her impact on me and my family. How much she sacrificed and did for us as a family. Remembering her is a lot more easier now, when I take the time to process and be kind and patient with myself. It’s amazing to think about how much we shut out and forget. It hurts to remember, but it’s also beautiful to remember.
random thoughts 3.18.18
I really appreciate reflecting and looking at everything and everyone front and center in my life and pondering about what lessons I’ve learned from them. Something as simple as my plant and the purpose of repotting for better growth. As simple as my friends who inspire me, support me, and hold me.
Love has never been easy for me. I’m definitely not in love with anyone at the moment. But the idea of pursuing in someone (or two) and everything that comes with doing that, is always a lot to think about. Expectations, boundaries, what ifs, etc.
I think I’ll start using Tumblr again as an outlet for my thoughts.
HITRECORD is an open-collaborative production company, and this website is where we make things together.
New poem. Reblog from my post only, hearts are welcome.
the Pacific
When tourists talk of the Pacific, they think
white sand - bright colors.
Soft, easy living.
Me, a second-gen American,
I think
of the deep
water
where the devilfish and crocodiles live.
where the Spanish galleons are torn to pieces
spilling our gold back into the Pacific.
Haik, my people’s sea-god
laughs, as deep
as an earthquake
and thick bracelets on his thick arms glow
like he raided them back
like a pirate.
I ask him,
“Why do you love me? I don’t know anything about you.”
This is not merely lack of information
For my people were ordered
by gunpowder
to follow a foreigner’s God
leaving me with wounds
five hundred years deep
where there should be stories
of a god
who comes out of the Pacific
tattooed with crocodile scales
and covered in pagan gold.
I ask
Haik, my people’s sea-god
to tell me his stories
so I can make fifty thousand copies
and sail them
across the Pacific
locked in the wounds in my chest.
He laughs
(but sadder this time)
wrapping gold-heavy arms across my shoulders
and whispers to write new ones.
To my fellows Pilipinas.
This is my message to you, Pilipina to Pilipina.
Since the Spaniards arrived in the late 1500’s to early 1600’s we have been subjected to follow the ideals and image of what our colonizers wanted and saw their own women to be. We were told our ways were sinful & lustful. They degraded us, we who were equal with men. We, who were spiritual leaders, who were respected, who inherited land rights, were educated, were able to take on positions when our husbands couldn’t. We who had the right to divorce our husbands, take charge in our sexual acts and pleasure, and keep our own properties. We who were not treated as properties but as fellow humans with rights and freedoms as men.
They changed the strong and independent women to the Maria Clara image, of submissive, modest, god fearing, soft spoken, obedient, and quiet. They raped us, broke us, stripped away our freedoms and rights, and changed our societies from an egalitarian to patriarchal society.
They stripped away our identities, they taught us that our brown skin were ugly. Since then we have this ingrained notion that light, white skin is beautiful and that our proud kayumanggi skin that used to glow as we wore our tattoo’s and gold bracelets, necklaces, and earrings that complimented our beautiful sun kissed skin was inferior.
They killed our babaylans, katalonans, bailan, mumbaki, mamaluyan, because they feared the spiritual power and leadership of these women who were second to that of the Datus, Lakans, Rajahs. They turned the communities against these women and labeled them as brujas and feeding them to the crocodiles.
Over 400 years of colonization and of self internalized racism, we still face this today. Our mothers, tita’s, lola’s, manangs, yell at us for getting to dark and to stay in the shade or use skin whitening soaps like Papaya. We are told to act like a woman, to clean the house, to be graceful, to be a lady and not be masungit and to be mabait.
We face sexual harassment, exploitation, abuse, and fetishization by both our own men and foreigners. In telenovelas constantly you see women portrayed as weak, to be slapped around and abused physically and sexually by our boyfriends and husbands. This along with the fact we don’t have the right to divorce anymore due to the church’s grip hold on the law and politics, thus so many are stuck in abusive relationships.
We have been through so much but I call out to you, my kapwa, to tell you a message. That we are all beautiful, whether you are a light skinned mestiza to a kayumanggi whose roots all come from the islands to even those who are mixed with other ethnic groups, our Mexipinas, our Blackapinas, our Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc. mixed Pilipinas. All of you are maganda and your roots and blood stem from the islands no matter how far removed you are or how distant you are from the islands and culture.
They have called us monkeys, seen us as sexual objects, as maids, as nannys, as domestic help, as dogeaters, as plenty of other stereotypes that our people have faced and continue to face.
Fuck them.
We are beautiful. Brown. White. Black. Straight hair. Wavy hair. Curly hair. Skinny. Fat. Thin. Thick. Tall. Short. We are all beautiful, molded from the centuries of living off the islands we call home and of our ancestors.
Be empowered, recall the strength of our mothers, sisters, lolas, titas, our ancestors, who flow through your veins. Recall their strength of being a strong, independent, woman, of being the providers of life, of spiritual growth, of warriors.
Close your eyes, take a deep breathe, and then open them and look into the mirror at your reflection looking back at you. Look at her and smile, laugh, and embrace being who you are, of throwing away all the colonial mentalities that have been ingrained in us since birth that we should be a Maria Clara, that we are inferior to men, that we have no voice. Look at the young girl, woman, elder, facing you and see the beauty that is you, as a Pilipina, as someone hailing from the rich, diverse, warm, and blessed tropical islands of the Southeast Asian Pacific and let no one try to take that away from you ever again.
We will never stop fighting for our right to live our lives in peace. We will keep holding hands.
Constellations / Signs of the Zodiac.