OLO (One Love Oceania, Oceania queer women's group) at San Francisco Dyke March, June 2009. Jean, in the middle, designed and painted this banner.
Displaying this banner in San Francisco, against Prop. 8, was crucial to OLO members. We wanted Pacific Island people to know that it's possible to be against Prop. 8 and still have a PI community behind you, and we wanted mainstream media and the white gay press to see that Pacific Islanders are critical, political people who are also very capable of organizing social justice movements for ourselves and our communities.
It's been a while. I've gotten off the lsat studies and thinking-about-law-school path for over 3 months now. It's almost September, the month when most law schools begin accepting law school applications. September, the month that I envisioned turning in my own application.
I didn't take the June 7th lsat exam because my score was still low. And I haven't studied since June 7th either.
June and July were turbulent, scary and exciting months. There were the events of my sister and her husband, my roommates, separating. I worked together with friends to create a Bay Area Oceania queer women's organizing group called OLO, One Love Oceania. A lot of our organizing required eating, drinking and partying together to create support and trust. I attended some queer women of color events that challenged and shifted the heteronormative narratives I had for my own sexuality and the ways that I identified myself as a woman. These included Pride week events, the Queer Women of Color Film Festival and events that OLO organized.
At the Queer Women of Color Film Festival in San Francisco, I met a queer Chicana woman who I am in an intimate relationship with now. This is my first intimate relationship with a woman but I feel that I've known this way of loving and living all my life. To me, being a woman who is in love with another woman and the everyday acts of caring and being responsible for each other, is what I've learned and practiced my whole life as a loyal confidant to my sister Fui and a friend to my sisters Moana and Amelia; befriending and taking care of my brother David when he was young; being a daughter of my father Tangata and a daughter of my mother Litia; being a hard working and chaste wife to my ex-husband Filipe; struggling hard to be a decent caretaker to my son Nikolasi. I know the everyday survival of queer, gay, dyke loving well. I've been fighting to love and live on my own terms since I was a kid growing up in over developed Tonga and Mormon Utah.
The London Missionary Society and its Wesleyan counterparts, the trillion-dollar-profiting Mormon Church, prevailing White Supremacy and omnipotent Patriarchy could not kill the dyke in me. I wasn't studying my lsat in June 2009, but I reclaimed my queer, beautiful, handsome dyke self! If I can reclaim my dyke self as a dyke who spent almost 40 years growing up as a heterosexual woman on this planet, as a Wesleyan girl and woman in Tonga and a young Mormon woman in Utah and can still be humble and courageous enough to accept queer love, then I will, steadily, one day at a time, turn in strong, solid law school applications.
I would not have been able to recognize this love if it were not for the strength of my sister Fui, my son Niko, my sisters Moana and Amelia, my dear OLO homegirl/boys, my fellow thunder beings Tree and Venus and facebook friends Luisa and Sangeeta, my mother's relentless joy and hard work in challenging the status quo although she feels defeated today, the spirit of my grandmothers and grandaunts who have past, my father's allegiance to the arts and creativity, and that matter-of-fact dyke who follows her intuition, Elisa.
I wish my relatives and Tongan colleagues, both Wesleyan and Mormon, could be shocked by this, but they've known I've been pequeerlier all my life. I feel that for most folks, they're relieved that I've returned to myself. I called my mother and told her about my girlfriend. She was "very happy that you're happy." She said, "So you don't want to be a lawyer any more?"
at QWOCMAP picnic. laura, elisa's sister; loa; elisa; emily
