Julio Revisited

“Be careful walking by 37th Road,” my mother used to tell me when I was a boy growing up in Queens, New York in the 1970s, “because gay men have been murdered there.” In fact, when I was growing up, I remember the murders of six men, but we never talked about it. Gay men were accepted, as long as they acted straight. With the murder of Julio Rivera in 1990 all of this changed and, fortuitously, I returned to live in Queens at this moment of great change. However, while my work up to now has tried to touch upon the nature of this change, to understand its possible meanings, I look now to question my own structures, perspectives and privileges as a heterosexual, and most importantly how these may limit my efforts at solidarity.