So I read that you grew up in Santa Barbara area, you went to UC Santa Barbara, you’re a first generation college student coming from an immigrant background, can you kind of tell us what that was like going in and did you know how passionate you would be about what you chose?
It’s actually pretty relevant- knowing that even as a Chicanx Mexican-American, that I get questioned, “Why don’t you speak Spanish?” And it’s like, well, when my grandmother, who is an immigrant from Miacatlán, is sending her 13 kids to American schools in the 50s, the schools said, “Mrs. Hernandez, are you speaking Spanish to your kids at home?”
And she goes, “I speak Spanish, then they go to school and they learn English.” And the school officials told her, “no, like, absolutely not. You have to speak English, they need to know English, they need to become American citizens and Americanized. And we know that you’re not a citizen and there will be consequences.” That threat totally cut off her expressing or exchanging the language to her kids and therefore her grandkids. So we became somewhat detached from our own culture because of this. We also know that in my family history that I am an eighth generation Santa Barbarian. So there’s one thread of my ancestors that was a Spanish soldier who colonized and conquered California on behalf of Spain. Any Latinx person knows this if they are mestizo or they’re mixed blood, they know that we are the product of on the one hand, Spanish imperialism, as well as other indigenous people who were conquered. Knowing that my history is part of that and it’s documented and it’s celebrated in my hometown, that awareness fed into knowing my narrative, knowing where I’ve been, knowing my history really did feed into understandings and concepts about justice, about racial justice, about groups in history and the stories- the power of stories. Because I know my story and what if other people knew their story?
My grandmother is a devout Catholic and she’s always opened her doors to everyone. I remember being a child and, and she would speak out against people’s casual anti-blackness. She would always welcome people, like friends of the family, friends of my aunties and uncles who were clearly gay. I knew they were gay- I didn’t know I was, but she knew and the family knew and she would never bat an eye to accepting people into her home and to providing a space. She tried to really be the best of what God intended with her openness. She’s 93 and still kicking with a new hip, so she’s great! I look at things like that and I see how instilling that kind of ethic and moral approach to other people can definitely influence the work that I do as well as who I am as a person.
I know you work a lot with nonprofits in the area too, so that’s your area of focus aside from ColorBloq as well?
Yeah, when I was working for Safe and Sound, one of the things that came up in the initial interviews that I had was like, “well why us? why this space?” You’re doing good work, you’re doing things for the community. I don’t have to think about the work that I’m doing, or if I’m just a cog in a wheel and saying, am I somehow supporting something that is marginalizing, oppressing, taking advantage of, or exploiting something? I don’t have to do that with programs like Safe and Sound. Even with ColorBloq, we collaborate with the SF AIDS foundation and their Strut Program and it’s specifically because they are trying to reach out to communities of color. They’re trying to reach out to queer and trans folks in order to make sure that everyone has a sense of community. Because that also factors into things like- will they get medical help, will they get tested, will they get treatment, will they take whatever regimen they’re on, whether it’s prep or pep or folks who are HIV positive and are they making sure to take care of themselves? The sense of community is really going to feed into that so that’s why we continue to engage in that space. And when we do engage with for profit or when I personally do, there’s a thought to that. It’s along the lines of, “what is this person doing? What is this company doing? Are they at least trying to bend the arc?”
What is one way a queer person of color can begin to take up space in a new environment?
By being unapologetically who we are, unfortunately that’s a matter of safety and a lot of that sense of safety, the confidence that knowing who you are, can come from stories. If you don’t know queer history, if you don’t know trans history, if you don’t know your history as a person of color, and our histories are political. So if you don’t know those, there’s probably a good chance that you’re not going to understand the political nature of your presence in any space. And if you don’t understand that, you may not know that you have power. You can lean into your power and actually take up room but on the other hand, if you’ve experienced trauma, you’re going to understand that visibility, taking up space, that’s not what you necessarily what you want to do. Sometimes you actually want to do the opposite of that because you need to seek safety. And so it is something that some folks, even myself when I was younger, it’s like, “well, no, be out”. Because being out as the biggest thing you can do. And it sounds nice, but it’s not safe for everyone to be out. Visibility isn’t necessarily safe for, you know, trans women of color, especially black trans women, they don’t need visibility. They need safety, they need resources. So for those of us who can, someone like me, I walk into a room, I can do that, I don’t fear. I have had experiences where they were extremely negative and where if I wasn’t who I was and didn’t appear who I was, that there might’ve been harm. So I do it because I can, and I think those of us who can, should, we should be unapologetic about it.
We shouldn’t let people get away with jokes. We shouldn’t be afraid to fit ourselves into conversations, even conversations that are very conventional in terms of gender, in terms of sexual orientation, in terms of race and who fits in and what you can do. I had a friend one time tell me that he was in Burlingame and there was a trunk of a Mercedes, a brand new Mercedes, and it was open and my friend is black. He was with his white friend and his white friend said, “Oh, let me check it out”, walked up to the Mercedes and was like looking in on, around like opening doors. And my friend who’s black and queer, he was like ducking in his car because he said if he were to do that, in that particular neighborhood- he wouldn’t be safe. Immediately it would be assumed.
I know I’ve had certain experiences where you know, being in this area you think everywhere is going to be safe and then when it’s not, you have situations where guys ask, “Oh what do you do with girls?” And then you report them for sexual harassment and months later their dad is threatening you over Instagram DMs.
Yeah, reporting somebody or even standing up to people. Sometimes you just have to breathe and go on because like if you’ve ever been a part of any marginalized identity or community, you know that it’s not just here in this moment that you’re starting to think 10 moves down the lane because you have had to operate differently your whole life. If you are out, you’ve had to consider “what are my movements? What is my dress? What is my style of speaking? What kind of things can I consume- art media, etc. because I don’t want someone to find me out”. So we’re very aware of our presence. The same thing goes for situations when we are out and we are leaning into our power, if someone says something or does something, we’re doing that kind of calculus- we’re considering further than people who aren’t of marginalized communities. We’re doing that thinking about what are the consequences of this? If I stand up right now, what’s going to happen? 10 moves down. We’re constantly playing chess because we have to, because it’s our safety. And sometimes this is just the narrative psychology. We operate on this wavelength where we’re trying to always protect ourselves even when we exist in space spaces where we no longer have to protect ourselves and that can be debilitating and can affect how we develop friendships, relationships, et cetera.
What was the main inspiration behind conceptualizing and creating ColorBloq? I know it was originally Efniks and you guys rebranded.
Yes, I started Efniks in 2016 and at this time, the spring of 2016, there was a Twitter mutual. And he had started the hashtag “#gaymediasowhite”, and he was doing it because cover stories, people commenting- it was like incessant. Just a few months later, Out Magazine, which has changed under Philip Piccardi, thank goodness, put Nick Jonas on the cover who is not only white, but he’s not even queer. And this is during the pride month edition. These are the kinds of things that went into it. And seeing that there was no real space for queer people of color and having the experience that I had where all of gay media is so white, that even growing up I couldn’t articulate to myself that I was gay because I didn’t see anyone like me. So how could I be that? If I see white men who are upper income, consuming things that I could never even think of, then how could I be? So it wasn’t actually until I found a message board online where I saw people who look like me, who were queer, who were Latinx, who had chains, who wore fitted hats and white Air Force 1’s. I saw people who I grew up with, in terms of their look and their style, their aesthetic, their approach to family and the things that they consumed. So when I saw that, I said, “wow”, so this thing that I’ve actually struggled with a little bit, like understanding is this an attraction to men or is it not? Can I even reveal this to my family or not? And then I saw people who looked like me. I started to really internalize that experience and to say, “what can we do for other people to feel validated by reading the stories in order to find out there are people like them going through it. Even as ColoBloq we say this, “you may not know the solution you may have gone through or maybe going through something and you may not know the way out, but that’s going to mean so much to someone else who’s going through it”. If you admit, “I don’t know the way out, but we’re still gonna get through this together” they’re building community in that sense of uncertainty and that’s giving them strength to eventually just get out of it.
That was the basis for Efniks. It started as an open blog- anyone could submit, I would edit, give them feedback and then we post it. It was essentially anything that came to mind. This was based on my own social media platform. Slowly we were growing, but then pulse happened. When pulse happened, it became really difficult to comment on anything. Did it seem relevant? Could you really talk about queer representation in comic book movies anymore when this just happened? Nothing seemed to really respect the memory of our 49 angels. The blog paused. There was nothing going on, no one really submitting. We tried to, but the muse was gone the following year. I was in Santa Barbara for a short time, then I had returned to San Francisco and I decided that we really needed this space. So we decided to do it differently. Instead of a blog we were going to feature as a digital magazine, we had a fundraiser on Indiegogo. We decided to come up with collection- every month we’d have a central theme. We would separate it into articles, analysis, cultural criticism, and then personal narratives and personal essays. So on the one hand you have scholarship and on the other other hand you have community knowledge and we decided to sort of merge those two- “a quilted narrative” is what our editor in chief likes to say. It’s important for us to have that quilted narrative because people of color, especially queer and trans people of color don’t necessarily have access to the scholarship. We don’t have the funding to engage in research so all we have is oral tradition, we have our stories and experiences and then sometimes people say “wait there’s no study on that” well I’m here, I lived it. I’m telling you and my friend is telling you and my family is telling you and if you keep talking to enough of us, you know, I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but you will eventually arrive at a common thread with this narrative that we are all experiencing these things. That’s why we decided to do that because the community knowledge is just as important as the scholarship for people of color. This formed the foundation of the digital magazine and we knew from the beginning that we wanted to do certain things. We wanted to not just have this but also turn it into a real experience. Come a year later we pushed with the SF AIDS foundation and with their Strut Program in the Castro, to have an event there, like a community event to have a panel talk on our theme at the time. Our theme was intimacy for queer and trans people of color. A lot of people thought at first, “what do you mean like sex?” And I’m said, well maybe, I don’t know, you can have non intimate sex, but there are many different kinds of intimacy. There’s emotional, there’s intimacy with your friends, there’s inside jokes when you’re in a community place where that’s a form of intimacy. We decided to have this talk and we decided to do it a little bit different. We had a DJ at a panel talk, we ordered Popeye’s rather than the typical sandwiches, and we served beer and wine. We had about 30 to 40 people, all people of color in this space. And they loved it because they said they felt seen and especially the panelists, we didn’t choose those with purely academic backgrounds and we also didn’t choose people off the street with a random opinion. We tried to be representative and inclusive of experience and community and people who can speak to different things. We had a mental health expert, we had a porn star, and we had a party promoter and the conversation centered around in their spaces. How do you approach the concept of intimacy?
At this point, we’ve probably put on maybe nine or 10 events with the SF AIDS Foundation and these have been wildly successful events. People have come, they felt seen and validated because there’s only so much validation that the publication can do when they’re actually in a room full of people like them. So this was the development of the idea and I know you asked about the rebrand which came about at the end of 2018. We had always known that Efniks was not easy for people to understand what it meant even though it’s just ethnic, but with an F and a K, correct. Some people thought it was just an affectation and I said, “Oh, okay, I could see that”. Our logo, because it was all caps, people thought that the E F N was something and that the, I was a separator and then it was K S so they’re like, “what acronym is this?” It was hard for people to say and it was hard for people to understand. Some people would say, well I’m not ethnic. Different means different things to different people like if you’re thinking in terms of critical race theory and all these other things, ethnic doesn’t really capture everyone in the community. So we underwent a whole process, we came up with a list of things and we bounced it off each other as a staff. Then we put out a survey where people were asked about queer media consumption and what do they read that’s queer and not queer. And then, which of these options really resonates to them? And ColorBloq was the one that worked.
The idea for ColorBloq was suggested by somebody who was on our advisory board now and she is a black trans woman and she suggested ColorBloq because if we looked at our community flags- the bi flag, the LGBT pride flag, the trans flag, all of these flags are just essentially color-blocked. This speaks more to the different perspectives of community rather than just the rainbow flag, which everyone knows. So again, we tested it and we liked it. This is also a step up in terms of the appearance of the platform itself. We’ve got a chosen font and Sean Paul is our design director, so he did everything.
We have a look to the website—it’s consistent, it looks more uniform. It does look like a magazine. People go to the website and they are impressed with it and they ask us, “Where are your offices? Who funds you?” We’re donation-based community, so we don’t have all those resources. We want to present it in a way that our community community can be proud of because our community deserves it.
Activism and being socially aware are the key pillars to the ColorBloq platform. What are some local issues or policies that people should be paying attention to in the Bay area?
It’s interesting, recently there was a headline that said that the number of new HIV positive diagnoses in San Francisco hit some kind of low of 137 or 147. I don’t remember the precise number but it was impressive. But it speaks to something more complex than just we are providing prep to more people. People are practicing safer sex or there are people who are positive and detectable and they cannot transmit. So it speaks to more than just individual behaviors. And what it speaks to is the fact that we’re also seeing demographic change. The most vulnerable populations in San Francisco are no longer in San Francisco. They’re leaving. So if you’re talking about black and Brown folks, if you’re talking about if a black queer person, if nothing changes today, they have a one in two chance of acquiring HIV. If you’re talking about Latinos, I think it’s like one in four, one in three, if nothing changes, well these are the populations we’re seeing leave the city. So that’s wonderful for the city and County of San Francisco. But what does that say for Oakland? What does that say for the suburbs? What does that say for South city or wherever folks are going, no one talks about the comparative thing. That’s one of those major issues that we’re going to see a lot of difference in the numbers that San Francisco puts out and we’ll see it in child abuse and neglect. We’re going to see these things because the safest neighborhoods are not, the ones with the most police they are the ones with the most resources. If we extrapolate that idea and that framework, we’re going to see the people who are here who could afford to be in San Francisco have resources. They’re the folks who are going to have access to prep and to healthcare and to mental health and to all these things- the inputs, developing community ties, having traditional education where they develop the ability to identify emotions and therefore be able to manage emotions. All of these things are just inputs into violence, abuse, and neglect as well as long term health. So when we see the demographic change, we can pat ourselves on the back. There are positive things being done by nonprofits here by the San Francisco Department of Public Health. But are we also considering the fact that the most vulnerable populations with the least resources are actually being forced out? That’s something that should be part of the conversation as well.
What is one of your favorite pieces from one of the collections on ColorBloq? And why does it resonate with you?
Here’s the challenge- we’ve shaped the magazine in a way where no piece is supposed to stand on its own. We’re supposed to view these as collections. These are going to be like a 25 to 30 minute read to go through this entire collection of 10 different perspectives, 10 different views and different points in the queer and trans POC experience. 25 to 30 minutes is like a masterclass and understanding community and what that experience is. And so it’s hard to really pick a piece and I know that sounds like I’m being diplomatic, but the collection that I’m most proud of or that I appreciated more was the one we did last month. It was “Red QTPoC in the South, Red States, and non-urban communities”. And people were just conveying what their experience was and it was beautiful from start to finish. We had people who were talking about being a young poet growing up in white spaces, going from Texas to Louisiana to Indiana and then to New York and to see how their experiences as somebody who presents as a fem, as a queer black person, what is that like for them?
When you have to let go of pain and trauma because you are safe, because you can experience joy and you’re experiencing that moment that you never thought would happen, that’s a wonderful thing. Except when some people who grew up in safe spaces don’t understand that and they make you feel like an outsider for not believing or not thinking that this is, this is really happening. So we really explored that divide between people who are used to cities like San Francisco, the bluest city, and the bluest state. Someone asked me recently, have you ever had to be gay in any other city? And that’s something that is really compelling for someone growing up in San Francisco or even someone like me who’s been in the city for 10 years. It’s different here. And so we compiled this collection of people exploring their identity and their race. Somebody even wrote on being in Florida and not growing up with people who didn’t consider Florida the South. Their version of the South is different than horses and debutantes, they were saying theirs is Latinx, it’s cultural, it’s bright, it’s vibrant, it’s loud, it’s food, and it’s also the South. But that was kind of the point of this collection is that if you see the South, it’s like this sort of white CIS hetero conservative monolith and you don’t make room for queer and trans people of color, you’re gonna miss all the color that goes on, all the culture that exists. That collection concluded with Sarah’s piece, which was really wonderful. It was a beautiful piece of creative nonfiction and it was straddling this line of, “I don’t fit in the city because I’m too country, but when I go to the country, I’m too queer”. It was a love letter to Appalachia and to the home that they grew up in and promising that they will sit on that porch with their partner while their kids and grandkids play in a safer Appalachian. I could not finish Sarah’s piece and I’ve read it about 10 times. I can’t read that piece without tearing up every time. This was everything that we have wanted to do to convey these pieces, these stories in a really emotional way, but also very telling. We didn’t have any scholarly articles in this one, but we have all community stories. We had community knowledge that two months later was validated by actual research. This is the research, this is the report and here are their stories. And the stories were beautiful and they talked about experiences that are underrepresented in traditional queer media. That was our debut collection as color block so that’s a hell of a way to kick the door down under the rebrand. Can you tell that storytelling is what we do?
I read about your story of your incident with Fitness SF and how one of your suggestions to the business was implicit bias training for the employees. Some people are kind of unclear what implicit bias is and what it means. So what are some resources and outlets that people can educate themselves more on topics like this?
There’s a group we work with at Safe and Sound, called Our Family Coalition that host trainings. They will go through things in a wonderful way- they, they did one exercise where it was about pronouns and they all had us all break out into groups and the prompt was, “can you talk about this person?” We exchanged stories about mundane topics like college, coffee orders, everyday things and then we had to tell the story to the group without using any pronouns. People had difficulty with it but it was one of those exercises where it really made people think in a very simple way. They bridged that divide where once you mention, “this is about queer people” or “this is about people of color” then people suddenly get anxious or nervous because there’s a fear of saying something wrong and being “cancelled”. Our Family Coalition was showing people how they already do this day to day- you do this in things that don’t relate to queer people or to people of color and so you know how to do it already.
Their trainings were really good and I think that is a training a lot of people could use. A lot of what they teach from the ground up is about basic communication. They’re trying to teach people to have respect and empathy in the way they deal with others because if you have those kinds of things, the rest of the learning process is going to be a lot easier because you’re not going to be so defensive. These kinds of resources were really good. Our Family Coalition, at least for LGBT folks specifically, I think that their trainings were pretty good.
Then there’s also the inverse of people that think they’re allies but who are kind of doing more harm than good. They always say, “I stand with you, I support you” on social media but then for example, tell people who identify as bisexual, “oh you’re only half gay” which contributes to a larger issue of bisexual erasure. How do we go about correcting them without making them feel unwelcomed or defensive?
Would anyone argue with an electrician? If an electrician came in and said, “you have to do wiring this way, that way if you’re building a house”, how many people would really argue with an electrician? Hopefully not many. If a chef was writing a menu, would people just walk into the restaurant and say, “well, you’re doing that wrong”? Well again, not many. Some people would. But that’s one of those things where if you bridge what people already do with this experience, and tell them to understand that ally is a verb and it’s not something that you get to call yourself. You don’t get to decide when somebody wants to call you “theirs”. You can’t force somebody to do that. You know, Genie [from Aladdin] said, “I can’t make someone fall in love with you” so you really have to talk to people and listen, learn and align. Maybe they won’t ever call you an ally. But these are verbs. It’s one of the reasons why a lot of folks are abandoning the term “ally” and using the term “accomplice” because if you’re an accomplice, then you’re in the trenches. You’re doing this work with me. I don’t have to worry about sticking up for myself and my identity if I’m with you because you’re going to say something.
It’s a sense of humility because you have to listen. You can’t say, “well, I took a class” or “I graduated here” or “I voted twice for Obama” you can’t do those things. Those are symbolic and the symbols are fine, but because it’s a verb, it’s ongoing and you may never get there, but it’s aspirational. The other thing that I think that is important for people to understand is that becoming an ally or an accomplice, it’s going to involve unlearning which is an emotional experience. Even as a person who is marginalized as a queer man of color, going through that, I’m still unlearning things. When I realized things I used to say, things I said last week, that these are problematic or that I was using ableist language because I would say things like, “do you see what I understand” or “do you see what I’m saying?” those kinds of things can be hard. It can be challenging to think, “was I doing harm?” Did I actually offend somebody? It’s like, yeah, you kinda did. People really have to prepare themselves for that. Prepare yourself for the fact that you’re going to go through an emotional time, unlearning these things. But that’s just part of the deal, right? You go to the gym and you get sore, that’s part of the deal. I got these tattoos last week and it was painful, but it’s part of the deal.
Be prepared to do a lot of learning. If someone was trying to be a supervisor or a manager or an HR professional, if they were going into any environment, they would want to do research. When people go traveling, they do research to try and figure out where do I go, where do I eat, what do I do? Where do I stay? You’re dealing with people when it comes to identity, why can’t you put the same level of effort into people? I don’t know how many hours people spend on Yelp just trying to find dinner on a Friday night in San Francisco. What if you did that? Took that same little bit of energy and put it into understanding other people and other experiences and not just a meal.
As long as people understand that when you do step on a landmine that you didn’t know existed and somebody is offended, understand that they’ve been doing this their whole life and no one listens to them. When no one listens to you, you’re probably going to be louder every time you get offended so that someone will listen to you. If you are white, if you are cis, if you are hetero, if you are somebody who has privilege, you just need to understand the best apology is changed behavior. So work on that.
We as a community have had a crash course on straight white culture our entire lives. There’s plenty of podcasts out there. You have options. We didn’t have an option. We just knew it. Especially coming from this area and coming from traditional Asian families, what or what do we have? We have Margaret Cho, but unfortunately a lot of the younger generations don’t realize who she is to us.
That’s a representational thing and not to stop at checkbox representation, but if you are doing representation right, then people from that community will get it and people not from that community probably won’t get it. But that’s okay. They can ask their friends, they can do research, they can do all these things. But that’s one of the things that I love about ColorBloq and about a lot of media that’s been coming up. We have told our writers since day one, “write like you’re writing for your community. If other folks who are not from your community engage with this, they will learn a lot”. People have asked, “if it’s in Spanish, do I have to put in italics and translators?” and we told them, “no” because someone can learn, Google translate, works decently well, right? People have really felt validated by that, because writing for a general audience really does mean right for white folks. If you’re not writing for a general audience, that’s probably gonna make your writing even richer. I was telling somebody just the other day about a scene in one of the X men movies, in the film, Magneto comes across Mystique and she’s in her human form while she’s working out. He tells if she were in her mutant form that she would be stronger but she doesn’t believe him. She only learns to believe him when he drops a weight and she turns into her blue mutant form to catch it and she’s incredibly strong. Why? Because she’s being herself. So when you’re talking about writing an article, you have 800 words. Do you really want to spend 300 words explaining yourself to someone who doesn’t get you? Spend those 300 words speaking to your community because they need you.
Who is the person you most for inspiration for your work at ColorBloq?
It’s really hard to say because of the fact that we have a different model. We have a community model and so even if we have the resources, we would never tap a writer on the shoulder and say, “can you write for us?” And that’s by design. We want community voices. I will say that when great writers have passed away, I will have tears in my eyes because words are beautiful and meaningful. Seeing Toni Morrison passing away last month was hard Toni Morrison didn’t write for me. Toni Morrison wrote for black folks and, one of my favorite quotes was something like, “I didn’t fall in love, but I grew in it” to paraphrase. It’s a beautiful line taken out of context. It has specific meaning, but that’s one of those things where it’s just beautiful. The words themselves are beautiful and they’re gorgeous and when people are able to take words, put meaning into words that already have meaning, just because they’re arranging these things so perfectly like that poetry and prose kind of thing. I love that. I wouldn’t say that there’s a single writer per se living or no longer with us. I don’t know if Sarah will ever write for us again, but the way Sarah wrote about being home in West Virginia was amazing.
Are there any final closing notes you want to wrap up with? Anything you want to tell people that are interested in contributing?
We are not a for profit enterprise. We are community based. We rely on community donations and this is really the harder path. In queer media, this is a precarious time for all of us. The for-profit spaces are either owned by a single company or they’re owned by people who are not from our community. And that means anytime they have difficulty paying the bills, they’re going to shut us down- if we question them, they’re going to shut us down. Our spaces in legacy and traditional digital media have been shut down for the last few years. To think that we were operating on the good graces of people donating $5, $10, or some people have donated $1,000, that’s hard. But it also makes us accountable to a community. It doesn’t make us accountable to a venture capitalist or to an investor. It means that if we’re not doing what the community wants or likes or approves of, and that the, the, the community needs, then we will get those donations. This is how we know we’re going to be authentic and doing things right. And I can only say that because of what people have told us and if you stay accountable to community, good things will come.
// Follow Chief on Instagram here. You can also follow Colorbloq here. colorbloq.org; Photography by Anthony Rogers.
