Right after Di died, whenever I would think about telling a friend who didn’t know who she was

that someone important in my life had died, I would get kind of stuck. I would imagine telling

them, “Yesterday I found out my friend died”, or, “Last week one of my friends died”, etc, but that

wasn’t exactly correct - not in the usual sense anyway.

I met Di just one time, at the end of the night of Jazzy, Classy, Queery, an event she

organized featuring queer musicians and burlesque performers. It was half-show, half-ritzy

soiree, a place to celebrate queer artistry and queer life, in the most perfectly joyous of ways, for

no reason at all. Just because we need to. I was talking to another friend who Di was close with,

and she came up to say hey to that person, and we introduced ourselves to each other. But that

was really the breadth of our relationship. We had never interacted on social media, played a

show together and said, “hi”, and really only once before had been in the same place at the

same time. That was the singular time we spoke, and even though it was positive, most people

would be hard pressed to refer to that relationship as “friend”.

***

For the last two years my partner and I have done a winter solstice tradition where we

pick an idea or theme, and spend the following year mapping and orienting our experiences

onto it. Intentionally using the lens of the theme to better understand our lives. The first year I

chose self-love, and this past year I chose friendship.

As many of us find out, friendship as an adult is difficult and elusive, subtly slipping

through our fingers as our lives inevitably become more of our own. We grow, we change, we

partner up, we get pets, we work, we stop partying, we set boundaries; even the people who we

deeply connect with can feel distant sometimes. As much as we want to see each other,

somehow the goings-on life can make it difficult.

Mix this with my previous proclivity of a self-imposed elusiveness, holding people at

arm's length, ghosting and ghosting again, romanticizing being a rolling stone, as well as some

pretty unsavory messaging from partners past, and I’ve had a pretty unfavorable view of myself

in relation to friends. And while sometimes it feels too convenient to look at my entire life

through a trans lens, my long journey of understanding what friendship is to me and learning

how to let people in, did have a lot to do with coming out, really starting years before that even

happened. But this year I wanted to more intimately understand my sense of friendship; to ask

what parts of it are important to me, and why when I think about it do I often feel a vague,

lingering sense of guilt, like somehow I’m doing friendship wrong?

Well, what’s this got to do with Di?

It’s May now, so I’ve been looking at friendship for almost half a year, and something that

came up that I didn’t expect is indignation. I’m doing friendship wrong? Fuck that. I want, and

live in an expansive definition of friendship. I have friends I pour my heart out to, friends who I

soley interact with online, friendships that are meaningful but stay within a certain context like

work or school, and friends who I only see at shows but always with mutual smiles and

excitement to commune in art together. Friends who all hold a shared recognition of love,

catharsis, beauty, and the throbbing present ache of being a human. And maybe Di, someone

who didn’t occupy any of these spaces, was my friend “in”.

She was a friend in art. A friend in music. A friend in queerness. A friend in revolution. A

friend in expansive love. A friend in showing the fuck up. A friend in believing we can, and taking

everyone with us. A friend in radical joy and celebration. A friend in the fight, a friend in

shameless expression. A friend who so fully loved and nurtured a beautiful and present arts

community, and was so willing for that community to love and nurture her back.

- Jan