Spotlight on Queer Con Leche: ‘My role is to pour into joy.’
At Oakland Bloom, we believe that food is political expression and healing. Food is culture, and it’s community.
Our community hub in Oakland Chinatown, called Open Test Kitchen, is a place for neighbors to gather and be themselves. If you are anything like us, whenever we invite people over, we all end up crowded and laughing in the kitchen. Over the next few months, we want to introduce you to the partners and collaborators who have brought more people to our kitchen and made it their own.
Supernova is a queer, disabled, Latine dancer who has studied dance for over 25 years. They talked to us about Queer Con Leche, a new queer Afro-Latin dance day party at Open Test Kitchen.
The next Queer Con Leche is on Sunday, March 22 from 12pm to 4pm. Grab your sliding scale ticket!
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Oakland Bloom: Hello! You’ve already held several queer Afro-Latin daytime dance parties at Open Test Kitchen. How did Queer Con Leche start?
Supernova: I’ve studied dance for over 25 years, but I was burnt out and stopped dancing for a while. I went back to school for a degree in women and gender studies. Still, I was really struggling mentally after pushing through for so many years.
One day, my partner asked me, “why don’t you dance again?” They had noticed that when I came back from dance rehearsals, I was happy. At the time, though, I broke into tears and said, “that’s not possible.”
I realized that I couldn’t jump back into the dance scene in the same way as before. I had come out as gender fluid and came to terms with myself as a disabled person. I wanted to create an accessible space for disabled folks and where binary doesn’t exist.
I had heard about Open Test Kitchen and Café Con Cariño. As soon as I walked in and saw the mural on the wall, I felt like I had to do something there. I’m a very colorful person and there’s so much color in the room. It’s a space built for diversity.
I just put myself out there and asked if they’d be interested in Afro-Latin dance. And, I’m in my 30s, so I want to gather with others, but it has to be in the daytime. *laughs* So, we landed on daytime dance parties.
OB: What goes into creating accessible dance spaces?
Supernova: I think about how we are teaching the class, the language we are using, and how we ask for consent and acknowledge the difficulties with saying no. It’s about deconstructing the hierarchy within dance. The dance scene will never grow if we can’t bring beginners in. It’s important to come however you are.
I hire queer DJs and I don’t charge my vendors for their spots. I will do that for as long as it’s sustainable. In school, I learned about systems of oppression and gendered violence, and now I work with the Disability Cultural Center. That work gave me information on how to accommodate people, and I’m open to thinking creatively.
I started with masking, and our dance parties are mask-required. Masks can be a trigger for some people, reminding them of collective pain in the pandemic, but at our events, we bridge that gap. We show that you can be in this space and dance and have a mask on, and it can be okay.
OB: Thank you for breaking that down. Okay, last question. What would you tell people who might feel nervous about coming out to dance, especially if they haven’t danced bachata before?
Supernova: My philosophy is that everyone can dance. Everyone moves differently. I have been trying to be better lately at looking like a beginner, and at failing.
In my classes, if you need to take a break, take a break. If you need to modify, modify. If you need help to modify the dance, ask me. You can come into our space and be whoever you are. You could even be real mopey and still dance. Be whoever you are.
We are going through a collectively hard time in the world. I constantly think about my role in that and what I am supposed to provide. My role is to pour into joy and create spaces of community where people can recharge. In the 1980s, Dan Savage said, “during the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”
If we are going to fight the good fight, we need to have moments of joy to keep going. We need spaces to dance and spaces like Queer Con Leche.