What’s Good About Good Friday

Some of them say that we're sick, or crazy, and some of them think that we're the most gorgeous special things on earth. -Venus Xtravaganza

Then saith Jesus to the disciple: Behold thy mother! -John 19:27

​I found Venus Xtravaganza’s grave thanks to the Catholic Church. And like the Catholic Church, their help came in the most Catholic Church way possible: play-for-pain. 

It was Good Friday. My service on one side of the Hudson had let out, but I had to get to Jersey to pick up my family from the airport. So I decided to make a stop on the way. Jesus died at 3 o’clock. I was in my car by 3:10. 

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I have a strong relationship to historical spaces and not just like a Civil War battlefield or Grant’s Tomb. If you tell me something amazing happened on an exact spot, I don’t care what’s there now, I have to see it. I don't care if, like the building where Chester Arthur got sworn in, it's now a grocery store. 

My favorite memory from visiting London many moons ago was coming across a wall Londoners built to fortify against the Romans, a wall that predated the birth of Christ. Right there in the middle of London’s urban chaos was this makeshift defense of humanity against imperialism that was multiple millennia old. 

I don’t profess any connection with the dead but there are spaces that make me feel a kinetic energy of which words fail to articulate. I acknowledge the possibility that it might be psychosomatic but I’ve chosen to let the mystery be. 

I’ve stood in the spot where Paul Castellano caught the bullets parmigiana that made John Gotti a household name. My steps creaked on the same wooden floor where burlesque legend Blaze Starr lit her fire on Baltimore’s once legendary Block. I ate dinner at a home Dutch Schultz hid at in Bronxville during the Prohibition Wars. I love it.

I need to know that momentous things happened on these sites. History is made in banal spaces, thus history can keep being made at any time and in any place. It’s not just a matter of feeling a presence, it’s a matter of acknowledging existence. Carrying something else in my life that’s bigger than me. 

Then factor in queerness. 

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I lucked out on the drive to Jersey. There was minimal traffic on the GW and the local roads moved well enough, allowing me to shave about 8 minutes off the ETA. I didn’t know I’d need every one.

Holy Cross Cemetery and Mausoleum closes at 5. I entered the front gate at 4:11. According to the map, Venus’ grave is in section 70. After some maneuvering, I found where I was supposed to look.

I got out of my car, my view of the brilliant Manhattan skyline obscured by trees and Newark. I was prepared to go to the grave, pray, observe and come back.

But what stared back at me in section 70 was hundreds of grave stones in unmarked rows. I had no idea where to start.

And about a half hour to finish

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In a session with my therapist this past week, I talked about my plans to visit Venus Xtravaganza’s gravesite on my way to the airport. And when asked why I wanted to do it, I told them flatly that it was for me and only me. 

I feel a deeper bond with queer/trans historical spaces. These spaces are not just history, rather they have an energy that emanates from what was, passed down by our queer and trans ancestors. It can only be felt by those who have a similar experience, we whose bodies go from being categorized to scandalized to criminalized by society.

Venus’ body was one such. I make an effort to remember murdered trans people at their best and not their death. I close my eyes to recall her scenes from Paris Is Burning and I hear her harsh femme tones and amped Jersey City attitude, mixed with the softness and calm of her reflections. I see her walking a ball with all the confidence of the world, making the universe her bitch. I picture her back on Chelsea piers as she was, smoking a cigarette by a boombox, trans beauty and coolness personified. 

A blue, white, and pink flame in blonde hair and neon clothing that I seek to keep sparked. 

———

For fifteen minutes, I scoured section 70 with no luck. Seven months on estradiol have helped me find peace in tricky situations. You’ve walked down Broadway with your wig askew and no makeup, babe. This is nothing. 

But inside, I was roiling. I don’t go out to that part of Jersey often and when we do fly as a family, it’s usually at LaGuardia. I did not know when I would be back. 

I took a deep breath and did some web sleuthing. Fortunately, the Diocese of Newark has a comprehensive record of every person buried in its cemeteries. And not only that but a small map next to each name with the location of their grave to help assist you. 

The map showed me I was on the right path. That was the good news. 

The bad? It showed Venus’ deadname. 

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What happened as I stood over Venus Xtravaganza's grave site is a moment I'll reserve for me and whoever was on the other side. I have an idea of who that is but it is rooted in faith. Yours might be different. It might have just all been in my mind. Again, I'm content to let the mystery be.

Two things I will share...

1. I cried

2. I didn't want to leave

Good Friday is a church observance I usually detest as it comes with a kind of performative grief that I've never been good at. You either feel it or you don't. To top it off, my church does a Seven Last Words service so I had to preach for close to three hours, covering all sorts of social angles while constantly reminding people that Jesus is hanging from the Cross.

I'm a sinner in the same way Venus was and all trans women are. Our transition does not exculpate us from being in broken relationship with God and neighbor. But being trans also makes my existence a sin to many, even most within my nominally-affirming ecclesia. 

So it is difficult to think of Jesus on the Good Friday Cross: violated, penetrated, a victim of a cis-masco-phallic obsessed empire whose pillaged body is on display for the world to see, and think Wow, I really screwed up in life. There are other ways God shows me I screwed up in life and there are other ways I see the Cross. I don't need to set aside a day in which I feel especially bad about how I harm Jesus by harming my neighbor. God will make that time for me. 

In that moment, standing over what remained of Venus Xtravaganza, a once lively and vivacious person reduced to a memory of fleeting beauty and horrific violence, I could not help but think of that energy that binds us as trans people. Of the scandalous nature of our bodies and how they are, at this moment, being recriminalized in a new manner as Jesus' was criminalized to justify his death. 

I acknowledge the scientific fact that what I am likely standing over is a mass of decaying DNA in a coffin for a person who no longer exists. 

Yet as I did, I could not get over Jesus' exhortation for the beloved disciple to take His mother in, an exhortation delivered moments before He died. When preaching on those words, I was able to sneak a little trans magic: for as the disciple beheld Mary, so also he beheld the degendered Jesus. That His image on the Cross and His rejection of Roman uber-masculinity is inseparable from the woman who brought Him into the world. 

In that moment, over Venus' grave, I beheld her. Time was flat and she was still dancing in the ballroom, in control of her body, her hopes and dreams in front of her, that home with a nice man and a white picket fence in the Catskills still a real possibility. 

It was an experience that I am convinced could happen only on Good Friday. In an institution that glorifies a torturous form of death while ignoring so many others who are similarly and mortally tortured, my own bond with Venus and every other trans person who came before me felt powerful and real. 

I have seen too many Golgothas and not enough empty tombs. And so I wept for her. Standing at the foot of her resting place, I beheld what she left behind. 

I have no rational reason why Venus' would be empty, only faith that it is or shall be. That she is more than just bones in a box, or even a celluloid memory. That her dance is eternal, her spirit free, and her existence more than how she died. 

Faith is a foolish thing. Good Friday did not fall on April 1st. I will claim it all the same. 

___

I had to force myself to leave the site. I've done enough funerals to know how hard cemetery folks work and they didn't need me keeping them from their happy hours and evening Good Friday services. 

But when I stepped back on the path to my car, there was an eerie feeling about what I was seeing in the sun. I hadn't considered it visually when I was stumbling from row to row of gravesites. It was oddly symmetrical as if daring me to come forward while knowing it has laid a trap.

My Palestinian Lutheran siblings were not allowed to carry the Cross on the Via Dolorosa as they do every year on Good Friday. I have many words in anger for another blog and another day. But as I thought of that image from years past, I thought of the smoothness of the Jerusalem streets that I see in the pictures. And the similarly symmetrical way the Stations of the Cross Progress to the Place of the Skull. 

This was not my day, this was not my Golgotha. But it was as if I had crossed the boundary from the safety I had standing over Venus' grave to go back to the world that still had so much hate for me and my trans siblings, me and my fellow women, me and other lesbians and queers and genderqueers. A world that had so much hate for Jesus that they put Him on the Cross because the message of Love Thy Neighbor merited a violent response to maintain Pax Romana. 

I keep this flame because I will not let us be forgotten. I do not know what will happen to me. I do not know what will happen to people I love. Fear is not an excuse. 

I have no choice but to proclaim the transmogrification of Jesus' body in grotesque overtones every Good Friday. It's what the people expect to hear. But as I try to nudge my institution away from being a death cult to one that proclaims life in Creation, so also I will remember Venus that way. I want her to live. I want to live. I want to just be. I want that for all of us. 

I will keep the flame lit until all the tombs are empty. Or I am sent to my own. And I will wait for someone else to hold my light.