As part of a residency at Wendy’s Subway, NYC TOHP reflected on the role of organizers, historians, and artists as responders both in moments of heightened crisis and throughout the history of movements for trans liberation—especially for Black trans liberation, prison abolition, and resource redistribution. Two discussions revolved around the cultivation of networks of care, mutual aid, and alternative social support systems in organizing, as well as the speculative work of artists and archivists who document contemporary struggle and reflect on past moments in historical time.

The first conversation Second Response: Historical Time and Speculative futures was inspired by the notion of the second responder—the historian, teacher, and artist who is engaging the ethically complex field of preserving a moment which is unfolding in front of us. In this conversation, artists Chloë Bass, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, and Geo Wyeth addressed the role of the artist as part of the second response to the dual and dueling pandemics of anti-Black racism and the virus, alongside the ongoing climate crisis.

The second conversation The Way We Need Each Other-- On Trans Infrastructures of Care was a conversation featuring organizers Jamie Lee of Black Trans Femmes in the Arts Collective and Ianne Fields Stewart of The Okra Project and discussed their experience cultivating care networks, their relations to the history and genealogy of trans mutual aid projects, and the world-making artistry at the center of organizing work.

The NYC Trans Oral History Project was represented by collective members Xiomara Sebastián Castro Niculescu and Jeanne Vaccaro.

Xiomara Sebastián Castro Niculescu is a trans Latina writer, artist, organizer, and performer based in Queens, whose work across media considers the relation of her own marked body to many others, in written and performed meditations on trans embodiment and racialized flesh.

Jeanne Vaccaro is an arts writer, curator, and teacher at the ONE Archives in Los Angeles. Her work explores the textures and felt labor of queer and trans world making.