Queerness, New Orleans, and the Musa Alves Appreciation Post
or, Home, If You Believe In That Sort of Thing
In January of 2023, I’m going home, though I use that word as convenient shorthand: I’m agnostic about the concept of home. I have not been back to New Orleans since 2019, when my monument of a grandmother died that July (the same month as my father. July has it out for my family!) This will be the first time in remotely-recent memory that I will not be returning to fulfill family duties. My trip to New Orleans is the brainchild of the brilliant author, editor, and commentator Addie Tsai, whose remarkable queer Asian retelling of Frankenstein, Unwieldy Creatures, will break your world open. A little while back I was whining about how I couldn’t go see Anne Rice’s archives, on exhibit through February at Tulane University, and Addie said, “What if we did go?” The proposition reminded me that as queer horror writers formed by that ruthlessly imaginative and egomanical diva of contemporary Gothic letters, we basically have an obligation to peruse those coveted letters, euphemera, and early drafts. Ultimately? We’re doing it for you.
So I’m going back to where I’m from, Spring Break style, which is to say, with a friend, not to give a eulogy or introduce my partner to my family (who approved long ago) or for my grandmother’s final Christmas, which is what brought me there before the funeral. This time? There could be actual fun on the horizon, provided I’m not plunged into despair by the transportation-of-white-suburbia cultural destruction that Midwestern transplants have wreaked on the city where I was born and where my father was born and raised. You’ll know I have a lot of feelings about this when I tell you that I mentioned this trip to my personal trainer in a very short sentence and he said, “Oh, wow, this is a really big deal for you, isn’t it?”
I’ll be reuniting with Musa Alves, whose enthusiastic permission I’ve been granted to tell you everything. I won’t say I’d have been straight if it weren’t for Musa — if I’ve got my own chronology right, Marcy came first. But that’s because my dad and I moved back to New Orleans from Santa Fe halfway through my 7th grade year. In 8th grade, I started at De La Salle High School, more or less for reasons unknown. At the time, they had only been admitting girls for 5 years, so my dad wanted to take advantage of the opportunity, I guess? He had gone to De La Salle himself, and had been intimately acquainted in his own adolescence with Brother Jefferey, a once hard-nosed teacher who, by my time, had become the mild-mannered principal. (Apparently my father once asked to use the bathroom one too many times in the same class and Brother Jefferey barked, “Neilson, tie a knot in it!” which I could never imagine him doing, but such is the softening effect of a school full of girls, one assumes.)
Very soon I’ll have an essay published in Just Femme and Dandy magazine about Fashion and Disability, and it will detail the sartorial nightmare that was my self-image-scarring De La Salle uniform. Suffice to say here that on our mad spinning planet there existed one person who could actually make something stylish out of that abstinence-promoting mess: Musa Alves. She wore the same unforgiving maroon cardigan as the rest of us, but it was fashionably ripped in all the right places and held together with safety pins that had all the elegance of gleaming jewelry. Her knee socks were always black. And something about the way she carried herself broadcast the fulfilling assertion that nothing about this uniform intersected in any way with her adventurous spirit and artistic talents.
When I put on that uniform, you could believe that all I really wanted to do was be good. And that’s basically what people thought, a fact that perpetually caused me to stain my pillow with tears. (I wrote reams of poetry to the effect of, ‘I will never escape this prison.’) Musa knew me better, because we would often run into each other on weekends at Kaldi’s, a café from another planet on Decatur that was sadly turned into a Tourist Information Center long before Katrina. She saw me in my cleavage-advertising tank tops and short skirts and my baseball-cap-style hat made out of silver-and-black sequins with a checkered pattern on the top and a Yin-Yang symbol on the brim, who has two thumbs and is cool in the 90’s, yeah I thought so. One of her friends that I met there told her I was cute, which obviously still makes my day if I’m relating it here.
In a lot of ways, I didn’t understand why Musa talked to me, given how clear it seemed to me that she was cool and I was not. I gazed at her punk take on our uniform with longing, but what really turned admiration into a crush was her art. Her absent-minded “doodles” were masterful depictions of fantastical complexities, and I was overcome with disbelief every time I happened to look over her shoulder. I also remember a discussion of Daria, MTV’s paean to teenage intellectualism, when we all admitted to sharing Daria’s crush on her best friend’s older brother Trent. What made this crush a little odd was that it was an animated show.
“I would totally go for him if I was a cartoon,” Musa said. I loved that. I still do. Instead of turning him to flesh, the way my more-mundane brain did, she made herself into a cartoon. This, for me, seemed to be a microcosm for her existence in a far, far more magnificent universe than the one I that and my sexual frustration were condemned to inhabit. This frustration was unwittingly aggravated by a piece of 8th-grade boy stupidity when I happened to mention that my lips were dry.
“I have some chapstick,” Musa said, reaching for the cherry-flavored antidote and handing it to me.
“You’re sharing chapstick?” this boy confirmed as I put it on. “Isn’t that kind of gay?”
I distinctly remember thinking, I wish, which is probably why I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t have to. Musa declared, with a conviction far beyond her years and a look that, itself, could put anyone in his place, “Chapstick has absolutely nothing to do with being gay.”
And so it doesn’t. Unfortunately.
Maybe Musa understood that, despite our conflicting “images” according to the student body, we were operating from a shared value system. My dad, who knew and adored Musa, was a musician who raised me to understand music as a vital component of existence: a way of processing emotions, of navigating the world, a form of healing. Brother Jeffrey, in his deceptive coolness, obviously understood this too, because he gave Musa his permission to show up late to the mandated 8th Grade retreat (on which we did NOT have to wear uniforms, Glory be to God!), so that she wouldn’t have to miss the 311 concert. She was due to go backstage to meet the lead singer, an all-too-lucky lad to whom she had written erotic pleas all over her arms. (There’s a part of me that still thinks that’s the coolest fucking thing ever.)
I did write a romantic poem to Musa, there was nothing hetero about it. I was legitimately shocked when we ran into each other years after we’d attended school together and she said, “I still have that poem you gave me.” I thought hang on hang on hang on I gave you that?!?! in what fever dream did 8th-grade me get that set of balls? I still couldn’t tell you. I don’t remember doing it. But she had it. So I did it. All hail my split-second of confidence at a time of life that I can only remember as cloaked in self-loathing, with a few dazzling exceptions. (I actually remember the 8th grade realization that, while my life overall is terrible, when it’s good it’s REALLY good. Every moment of that dazzle is entirely thanks to my father, who couldn’t balance a checkbook or remember where his keys were but sublimely knew how to live.)
When Musa and I first made contact again last year after decades had gone by, she said, “I can’t believe how much you remember.” I can’t either. Why is it all so viscerally there, in my head? Is it because of how much I miss my dad? Is it because of how much I miss New Orleans from back when The Big One was an abstract fear? Is it simply because it’s taken me this damn long to cast off the unfounded self-loathing from those years? All of the above?
I truly, truly have no idea, but thank you for wading in it with me. My 14-year-old self is particularly gratified that I need no longer do this alone.
Oh, and check out Musa’s art (not at work, though). Unsurprisingly, she grew up to kick even more ass. And if you have anything to say about the concept of home, I would love to hear about it. I was silently furious with my Creative Writing teacher, Mr. Fuchs, when he told me that “home” was clearly going to be a topic I would continue to return to for the rest of my life, but he was right. I will never understand how he knew.
You are brilliant, beautiful, and superhuman. We creatures who walk this earth do not deserve you. Love you.