Tisa Bryant, Author/Scholar

TISA BRYANT, AUTHOR/SCHOLAR Tisa Bryant, born in 1966 in Tucson, Arizona. Interviewed on March 13, 2005 by Ana-Maurine Lara As you know, this project is really about hearing your story. I would love to start with an earlier part of your life, asking you about some of the defining moments from before the age of 20 that have really influenced who you are. I’ll work in reverse chronological order. Moving out of my parents’ home, a couple of days after high school graduation to New York for a very, very short stint. I didn’t know you lived in New York. Yeah, it wasn’t to the New York that I envisioned `cause we ended up in Long Island, so it was very, very different and very black, actually. I didn’t realize. I hear `island’ in this country and it kind of means something different. But yeah, being 17 in the summer, moving into and ended up in Boston and we were in the second term of Ronald Reagan. It was at that moment of really having to confront the world. I waited to finally be free to make my own decisions about life and it was really bewildering to really try to understand the systems that comprised the world and what they actually meant to me. I always knew that there was a lot of power in the world that I didn’t have, but then the kinds of interactions and being completely broke and really young and working a job and living in an apartment with a whole bunch of crazy kids who were just completely transient, you know. My father would check in on me, meet me in Boston Common every once in a while to make sure that I was not bleeding, [laughter] was fed - you know - and a little cash. But really, being out in the street in this very unstructured way while a lot of the last remaining social structures that would protect the smallest vestige of quality of life for people of color, for working class people and poor people were being dismantled right around me and I didn’t really understand what all of that was about. Just the rise of homeless populations, AIDS, the kind of illusion of AIDS and the illusion of the homeless population where we’re seeing all this stuff happening. I was seeing people on the street, I was hearing about people dying from a mysterious disease, but it wasn’t being talked about in the news. And also at the time when I was living in Boston, I was living in the Fens – the Fenway area – I’m not quite sure if it was a serial killer or what but there were a lot of murders during that time in the mid 80s. I graduated from high school in 1984. So at that time, every spring and summer bodies would be found in the Fens; there were stabbings, there were lots of bashings and also a lot of clubs then, too. Was this something people were talking about in your groups of friends? Yeah, and I lived in a rooming house so out on the front steps is where the news happened. And I would just sit, I felt like a little kid again, trying to pretend I was invisible at the big people’s table. As long as I was quiet I’d be allowed to stay. But that’s how I got my information. The Boston Globe was pretty good in reporting on it because there was a burgeoning sense of urgency among white gay men in that area, so there were more community watches that were forming, public meetings and protest. But at that same time, and this isn’t actually a memory that I have and it’s disturbing to me that it’s not a memory that I have and I can’t quite track when it was happening, but in several texts by feminist women of color there was some sort of serial killing of black women going on in Boston during that time that I’ve been unable to find any documentation of. I found two stories in the Globe and one story in the Herald. Again, these seemingly unrelated cases of black women found murdered. I don’t remember how they were murdered, if that was any connection that way. Angela Davis had cited it, Barbara Smith had cited it. Between Home Girls [A Black Feminist Anthology], Women Race and Class, This Bridge [Called My Back], all of these women of a certain generation all kind of recalling this moment. And I don’t know if I was still in high school while all this was happening or if I had just gotten out and moved to Boston. But this kind of atmosphere of being completely unsafe, even though as this...totally full of that adolescent arrogance and sense of freedom. But it was a split consciousness in a way of feeling completely free and able to do whatever I wanted and then again feeling very bound by invisible systems and invisible dangers that were made quite palpable through AIDS and through all of the different kinds of bashing. And that, in terms of coming out, is a very slow and retrograde process for me. But at that moment it was a forward motion right into clubs, right into lesbian clubs when I was 17, 18, 19, 20. How did you get into all the lesbian clubs in Boston? With a little 15 year old. A little 15 year old baddie. I met some girls who lived in the Fens, right across the street from me and they took me out to Somewhere Else, and to the 1270 and to The Loft even though it wasn’t always gay, though I knew a lot of gay men did hang out at The Loft. To the Ramrod...We should not have been in there `cause they were just like, “Why are you here?” We would go into ManRay. Campus at ManRay. It’s still there. (NB: it’s gone now!) It’s still a province of young gay people. Yup, it is. It was interesting. So many of the older lesbians who were in these clubs, almost all of them were twelve-stepping. And that - you know my parents drink a little, well, much too much for my taste, so that put me on a weird alert. We were talking earlier about role models and how behavior can be modeled - I don’t know how to describe the process - but it just happens. If you’re not paying attention to your behavior you may not know how you may be influencing somebody else. And coming out into clubs where I was watching a lot of kids my age drinking too much, doing all kinds of drugs and there’s this whole generation of women who were substance abusers and they were at various stages of recovery or total damage. And that created this unfortunate narrative that this is what it meant to be a lesbian. To be in recovery or to be somehow... Right, because it was so wrong. Everybody I knew, they were people that I mostly saw at night. Not really friends I saw during the daytime. It was all about the twilight; it was all about nights and weekends. I didn’t really see them too much during the day. And there were a lot of other reasons for that, too. To back up from that...what would I say? It sounds like this time period in Boston is so critical and in some ways it was informed just by leaving your parents’ house. It served as a sort of break and that had to do with your coming out process. Yeah, I mean I wasn’t particularly happy living where my parents lived in Plymouth, Massachusetts. And that wasn’t the best time. I went into the cave, and didn’t quite come out of that until I moved out. It was fraught with a lot of problems. Because I hadn’t quite actualized as an adolescent. I was very recessed. I felt very recessed the whole time during high school. I still have a physiological image. It makes me understand how teenagers like to wear hoodies. They’re just really shrouded. And shadowed and you can’t get to them. That’s how I felt. I didn’t wear a hoodie, but I felt like my eyes were way back from the surface of my face. Wow. You felt that. Yeah, I really felt it. And it was really wild. I know my high school experience was shaped by coming out. [But for you] was there any connection there? To being queer? Yeah. Sure. To being queer, to being black. I was surrounded by white girls. I rejected assimilation at that point, which is something that’s really hard and it’s something that trips me out. I don’t feel like I rejected my intellect, but in rejecting a certain mode of assimilation, I didn’t leave myself any choices because I didn’t have a sense of what education could be for me. The educational process was all caught up in a kind of assimilation, period. That you fully rejected. Right, because you know I just wasn’t very sophisticated. I didn’t know how to think about it and I didn’t have much help in thinking about “Well, look, don’t worry about anybody who will make you feel...”.

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