Interview with Riley Valentine
Date: 5/10/20
Location of interviewee: Baton Rouge
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SL Ziegler talks to Riley Valentine.
Riley is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. We talk about moving to Louisiana from Atlanta, Riley’s Catholicism, and how great SOPHIE is.
Interviewee: Riley Valentine
Interviewer: Sophia Ziegler
Transcriber: Sophia Ziegler
May 10, 2020
[Interview transcript edited slightly for length and clarity]
Ziegler: This is Sophia Ziegler sitting down with Riley Valentine. Riley is non binary and uses they/them pronouns. Today is May 10, 2020 and we're meeting remotely using zoom because the covid-19 pandemic is still very scary. Riley, as you and I discussed before this interview is a part of the Louisiana trans oral history project. The goal is to gather real world examples of what it means to be trans in Louisiana here in the early 21st century and to donate these interviews to the T. Harry Williams Oral History Center at LSU, and to put either portions or the entirety of these interviews on the project's website. So please do know that you can stop the interview at any time. And if you have questions about any of this or anything else, you can always reach out to me at any time. Please also know that these interviews or a joint project between me and you. So you'll have a chance to review the transcript before they're donated in any portion of the interviews can be de-identified or restricted that you deem necessary. Do have any questions about that?
Riley Valentine: no.
Ziegler: Fantastic. Well, I'm just absolutely delighted to be doing this and to have you as our very first interviewee for this project. So with all that being said, with all of that preamble. I'm just sort of hoping that we can start at the very beginning. And maybe you can tell us where and when you were born.
Valentine: I was born in Savannah, Georgia, September 19, 1991
Ziegler: And so how long did you live there?
Valentine: Like approximately like two years.
Ziegler: Do you have any memories from that?
Valentine: No.
Ziegler: No, no, nothing from Savannah. Where did you move after that?
Valentine: Georgia. [Laughs] Athens, sort of like out side of Athens,more like Watkinsville, a small neighbor … not neighborhood, it's like a small town. It's kind of like when people from Hammond will say like they're from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, you know. Then we moved into Athens. We moved around a lot, in like 30 square miles.
Ziegler: You felt like he covered that area very well?
Valentine: [Laughs] Yeah.
Ziegler: So what can you tell us about moving around so much? Was this because your parents’ jobs?
Valentine: my mom and my dad got ... I guess they got separated when I was like 4. Let's see the first house I remember ... So it was before kindergarten, maybe life 4ish. So then we moved into the country and to a house. We lived there for like two or three years and we move because there was definitely lead poisoning and the water. You know, it was fine, but it was in the country. It was really sweet. I really loved it. It was great. The education wasn't great. But it was pretty fun. And then we moved to like an apartment complex in Athens.
Went to one school and that wasn't great. So my mom lied about where we lived. So then I could go to the better public school, which was across the street from the Montessori school which looked very fun. And then my mom bought a house that was really cheap because a meth clinic had blown up on the street over
Ziegler: So, your family split up and you went to live with your mother?
Valentine: Yeah.
Ziegler: What does your mother do?
Valentine: She did a lot of things. When I was younger, she had been a nurse and then stopped being a nurse to raise kids while my dad worked. And then she needed to get her certification again. So while she was going to school for that she also watched Erin Brockovich, and decided that being a paralegal seemed exciting. So she went to school for that too. It went nowhere. But she does have that degree, but she also like worked at JC Penney's and worked at a bunch of other places. She had like three or four jobs. She cleaned hospice houses for a while, too. And that was … I liked it because I got to go hang out with people. So she always had a lot of jobs and when I was in high school she simplified to being a nurse.
Ziegler: What was your father doing?
Valentine: He is a nurse. A nurse anesthetist or an anesthesiologist. I think he was a nurse anesthetist and then became an anesthesiologist after I stopped … I voluntarily stopped seeing him after my 12th birthday.
Ziegler: So they were both in the medical field. And so I gather that you're not very close to your father now.
Valentine: Yeah, I'm also not close to my mother.
Ziegler: So you already mentioned a little bit, but let's let's talk about what school was like in the early years. So you were an Athens, all the way through high school? Is that correct? What was high school like?
Valentine: I went to a Catholic High School for two years. Interestingly enough, it was more conservative than the Catholic middle school that was attached to. The nuns in the Catholic middle school were extremely left-leaning, most of them were communists and they were great. The Catholic High School was kind of the exact opposite. And I was asked to leave after I brought my friend who … it was like that weird queer thing we're like you both have a crush on each other. But you don't tell each other and so your interactions are just awkward. So she came to the dance with me and they kicked me out.
Ziegler: Did you also attend that middle school?
Valentine: Yeah
Ziegler: How long were you in Catholic school?
Valentine: I went for second grade. And then we left. So, second grade. How long is middle school there, like three years? Yeah, three years. It's like six years.
Ziegler: Six years. So when in high school, did they ask you to leave?
Valentine: Sophomore year. Okay, yeah. So then I went to Athens Academy. And my mom was like, this is great because your father pays for your education and it's more expensive.
Yeah, they give you a laptop. Well, you pay for it. But yeah, so it was it was extremely nice
Ziegler: And so that was for your last year and a half or so?
Valentine: Yeah, I didn’t have very many friends because I was super weird, but also at the same time, I was dealing with an undiagnosed mental illness which ... bipolar 2 makes it pretty hard to hold onto friends if you're not like actually taking adequate medication. So you're just depressed all the time and then randomly very happy. So I understand why the friendships were not sustained.
Ziegler: Are you comfortable talking more about this friend that you brought to the dance?
Valentine: She was very cool. We became friends because she was friends with someone I went to school with, and we just started hanging out all the time. Yeah, she was ... I became really into Amanda Palmer, and the Dresden Dolls because she was really into them. Yeah, she invited … she performed in The Vagina Monologues and invited me
And I was like, I don't really like this play but I do like you
Ziegler: That's lovely. Are you still in contact with her?
Valentine: No, she … her life went a little wild. She got married to some guy she knew for like two months and moved into like a farm or something. I don't know, small towns.
Ziegler: You identified this earlier as sort of hanging out and both having crushes on each other. Were you openly queer? Was a queer presence at your high school?
Valentine: Well, it was me. And then one other person and everyone was like, well, yeah, Rose is just lesbian. She’s not gonna be kicked out because that's just her. And I was like, well then why am I getting kicked out?
Ziegler: Did you get an answer to that question?
Valentine: No.
Ziegler: How did your mom take you being queer?
Valentine: She told me that I needed to go back in the closet, or I will be kicked out of the house.
Ziegler: I see.
Valentine: Yeah.
Ziegler: so was she was she never really comfortable with this?
Valentine: Oh no, not at all. She would like randomly talk about how she knew a lot of gay people when ... because she studied dance in college and how they stopped being gay. And how it was a lie. And I was like, well, I'm bisexual. So I don't know what this story has to do with me, in the first place. Very confused. But it was odd because like growing up in that house we lived in for two years, her best -- my childhood best friend … and I forget her name because I was like four — her moms were a lesbian couple who owned this land and they were really great and really cool and my mom loved them. And then we moved and she just like never mentioned it again.
Ziegler: So you are already out to some extent in high school.
Valentine: Yeah.
Ziegler: Was it before high school? I guess what I'm trying to get at is, is there a coming out story that you would like to share?
Valentine: I came out and then was told to go back in the closet. So I did. And so I came out when I went to college. So I went to a women's college which, you know, very, very queer place and like they had just rewritten their gender policy so that if you were a trans man and you transition during school, you could stay because that had been a huge legal contention. If you're a trans woman and admitted like it was fine. Everyone would stay in the same dorm. It’s okay. I just suppose like there wasn't a massive coming out. It was just like, oh, I'm with all these people who are also just like yeah I'm queer. What do you mean? And everyone was really open about their sexuality and their gender. And so it wasn't as much a coming out as just being like, Oh, okay. I could just be myself, and no one ever announced that it was really interesting because no one really ever talked about their sexuality, because it was just assumed that everyone was queer on campus.
Ziegler: And that was Agnes Scott College, right outside of Atlanta? That's a Presbyterian affiliated school, right?
Valentine: Yeah.
Ziegler: Did that have any effect on anything?
Valentine: No, I didn't realize there was a chapel, which was a huge building. I was like, oh, they must like do some stuff in there. And I didn't realize and one of my friends was like, you know, that's like a church and they have services. And I was like, oh, never would have known.
Ziegler: I love it. Is it fair to say that you chose that school because it was women’s liberal arts school?
Valentine: yeah in my last my second-to-last year. Yeah, junior year. My friend, Maddie, she had this book and she was like, I used this book to figure out what college I went to. It’s like Hundred Colleges … 50 Colleges … some colleges, You Wouldn't Know About, something the title. And it was all these really cool small liberal arts colleges all over the country. That's how she found out about Hampshire. And so she went to Hampshire. I saw Agnes Scott and I was like, this seems great and I was like, it's right outside of Atlanta. It's a liberal arts college, which was what I was looking for, and it would also have in-state tuition as a liberal arts college.
Ziegler: What did you major in?
Valentine: Political Science
Ziegler: It was a very queer environment, did you identify as non binary at that point?
Valentine: I didn't, because this was like 2010. I knew people who were trans men and trans women. I didn't know about non binary identities until Occupy Atlanta happened and I met someone who I would later live with. And then she turned out to be a terrible alcoholic and I left. But at the time … she identifies as non binary woman who uses female pronouns, but she used gender neutral pronouns and before she came back, because she's Brazilian and had been living in Brazil, my friends who live in the like anarchist co op house there were like, oh yeah, like --’s gonna be like coming back. And I was like, Wait, what, what's happening gender neutral pronouns? So when I was 21 I like found out about non binary identities and was like, this is cool. I didn't realize there was a name.
Ziegler: It's so cool to find this out. You were living in the anarchist house while you were at Agnes Scott?
Valentine: Yeah, so, um, I was having really bad seizures and I wanted to live off campus, one because it would be a lot cheaper and that's mostly it. I wanted to pay less money. But you have to petition. So I wrote a whole petition and then … --'s dad owned a house and I moved in with them and I paid like he, he was like, you can pay whatever you want for this House and so I paid $250 to live in the middle of Edgewood where rent was usually like $1,000.
Ziegler: And you said you met folks at Occupy Atlanta.
Valentine: Yeah.
Ziegler: so when you graduated high school that was right about the financial crash of ‘08/’09.
Valentine: Mm hmm.
Ziegler: So you are getting to the outskirts of Atlanta, like right at the Occupy Movement.
Valentine: Yeah.
Ziegler: Can you tell me about that, like how involved, you were?
Valentine: Yeah, I was super involved. So I had done Food Not Bombs in Athens, mostly to impress another person I had a crush on.
Ziegler: Like so many of us. Just for the sake of this interview Food Not Bombs … Could you just say just a little bit about that?
Valentine: Food not bombs was the project started in the 80s, you know, the whole idea of stop dropping bombs, feed homeless people, take that money. So it's mostly run by anarchists and a lot of what they do is they'll get dumpster food, they'll get food donations and they just cook food and provide it for free. And usually we would go to places where there were lots of homeless people or sometimes where people … for a while, we went to where there were a lot of like folks who would stand around looking for work just to be able to feed people before they would do some manual labor. Because, you know, that's exhausting. Seems like this seems like a good thing. So I got involved with them in Atlanta, and they also taught like whole things on like Know Your Rights. So I learned, like all of this information about, you know, just what your rights are with police. I did join Cop Watch trainings. Which talk about how to film the police safely, which mostly is like groups of four, one person takes notes. So when someone says their badge ... So anyway, lots of things. And so when Occupy Atlanta happened everyone there the tear down became a really motivating part of it and I joined the medical side, the first day I was like, I'm going to join the medical side and we got street medic training, which is was like started with mass mobilization like in the 80s, mostly, and it's pretty much focused on how to provide medical training or medical assistance during mass mobilizations and protests … how do you keep people safe. And then how do you keep people safe until you can get them to EMTs. Stuff like that.
Ziegler: How long were you active with Occupy Atlanta?
Valentine: Oh, the whole time. Until until we were kicked out. And I had to take all of my stuff in a bag on the train back to Agnes.
Ziegler: This is while you are attending classes?
Valentine: Yeah, I was writing my papers at the park. I'm reading all of my texts and we did shift at the clinic and I would do, like, five hour shifts, usually a day.
Ziegler: And what was the name of the park y’all were in?
Valentine: Um, we called it Troy Davis park. I don't remember what it's called outside of Occupy. It's in downtown Atlanta. It has ATL in like a playground things set up. It has speakers in it that they played music 24 seven really loudly as a way to try to get us to leave.
Ziegler: What kind of music did they choose?
Valentine: A lot of just smooth jazz and I didn't like smooth jazz to begin with, but now I hate it. Oh, they used to do the Democracy Now intro sometimes.
Ziegler: Oh wow, okay. Were there a lot of other Agnes Scott college folks there like your classmates, colleagues?
Valentine: Not really. Most Agnes got folks. I knew that were doing activism. Were doing it usually on campus. They were focused on the campus community. And I loved it. There was ... I love Agnes, there were parts … I didn't feel as connected to the campus as a lot of people to because like I came from a working class background and couldn't afford things like … there's a ceremony of everyone gets this black ring and it's just like a thing that everyone does. And I couldn't afford it. So I felt y out of place with some of the class dynamics.
Ziegler: So thinking again about your time at Agnes Scott, you're in poly sci there, are there particular fellow students or professors that were really important to you.
Valentine: So my mentor Cathy Scott whose initials are CVS. She would sign all of her emails CVS. This is gonna be really embarrassing because I'm going to try to apply for a job there. And I was like obsessed with her. I thought she was like the coolest person I've ever met. But at the same time she was kind of just like a big nerd who would laugh at her own jokes really loudly, like extremely loudly. And she was just super weird and all over the place. But she was just like, I'm a Marxist and I don't care.
Ziegler: And she was in the political science department?
Valentine: Yeah, she taught comparative politics. So that's where we read like Francois Wretched of the Earth Edward Said Orientalism Judith Butler, Shulamith Firestone, Angela Davis. I was great.
Ziegler: Yeah, that sounds lovely. So you're politically active in undergrad, but you are also active in Food Not Bombs and presumably in other ways, even in high school.
Valentine: Yeah, I was. I helped Food Not Bombs until it kind of fell apart in Athens, and I was mostly like hanging out with the punk kids. Because Food Not Bombs is usually what the punk kids kind of are involved in. And so I would go to the house shows and we would also cook food together. It was all the artists. So it's like an enmeshed kind of groups.
Ziegler: Were you part of any other of those types of enmeshed groups?
Valentine: I have zero artistic talents, so
Ziegler: And then you brought that with you to Agnes.
Valentine: Mm hmm.
Ziegler: And you got active in Occupy Atlanta and that's and then you started living with the anarchist houses ...
Valentine: Yeah. Oh, sorry. So I already lived with them and then we kind of made our own house with --. Yeah, sorry. Timelines. Quarantine.
Ziegler: If they ever meant anything before they don't now
Valentine: Basically … what was the question, I'm sorry.
Ziegler: I guess I really just wanted to hear more about the house.
Valentine: Yeah, so I lived with -- and -- at the Dandy Den short for dandelion den and that was a really … -- and -- were dating. It was a three bedroom house. It was cool, because they each had their own bedroom, because they were like, yeah, we love each other but kind of want our own spaces. And I thought that was really cool and I still think that's really cool because it is nice to have your own space now like living in a studio with my partner in 600 square feet. It's hard. But yeah, it was a little weird, because like we had all had sex together a few times before we moved in and it was like switching from one type of relationship to ... now we're roommates, but it was also like we transformed the yards instead of lawns into being gardens and we hosted free school workshops. And that was really cool. We hosted street medic trainings at our house. It was also like because we were very cheap and didn't want to pay much for utilities, It was a clothing-optional house, which basically just meant in the summer no one wore clothes. It's expensive, central air. Yeah, so it was an interesting house -- moved out when they broke up. And we had like a bunch of different people moving in and out. My favorite roommate was ...I don't know ...She still does this type of work. So I will call her Naomi, that feels fine. Um, yeah, Naomi, who was a dominatrix and that was great. She was wild. She was also getting medical training to do nursing work because you are required to have a certain type of … I think you are required to be a CNA to be a dominatrix at where she was working. Just in case anything happened, you can at least do some sort of first aid.
Ziegler: That seems really responsible
Valentine: Yeah, It was really cool. I learned so many things I was like I was like, I'm not interested in any of us, but I'm very intrigued about the business side.
Ziegler: I feel that way about so much. I’m just like, I'd like to just talk about the logistics.
Valentine: She would also do phone sessions and it would be really wild to see her just like cooking eggs and telling someone that they weren't shit on the phone.
Ziegler: And you were in this house, all the way through your years at Agnes.
Valentine: No, so I lived there for two years and -- was … so she was an alcoholic and she started becoming as soon as we all moved in together ... She started becoming really emotionally abusive and so near the end. I was just, I was talking with some friends and they were like sounds like she's abusive and I was like, hey, --. I feel like some of these things are abusive and like not cool. And then she asked me to tell her the names of every person who said that and also was like, I can't be abusive because I've been in abusive relationships was like that doesn't seem to make sense. But then my coworker, because I was working at the Atlanta International School. He was like, well, I have a space in this weird ledge off the side of the stairs, in the second story in the house that has a hole in the wall where there's a bed inside. So if you want to have a curtain room, you can live there. So I lived there for six months and then I upgraded to a real room.
Ziegler: In the same place?
Valentine: Yeah, I lived there until I moved for grad school.
Ziegler: And where did you say you are working? Atlanta international?
Valentine: Yeah, the Atlanta International School, and then I got a better job offer at some bicycle mechanic, mechanic-y things, I was really bad at being a bicycle mechanic. But I was really good at selling things
Ziegler: What were you doing at the school?
Valentine: I worked at the after school program and because it was a fancy school it was still an educative program. So we had like a lot of different programs happening like we had weekly lesson plans. So we would do things on like food ... a lot of things around like food justice. We would do things like nonviolent communication with the kids, that it was cute. It was really fun.
Ziegler: What age group was it?
Valentine: I worked with mostly the fourth and fifth graders, we would have them together. Second graders were really cute. I liked when I could substitute in there, when someone was sick, they were so sweet. Really cute.
Ziegler: That's really neat. And so you lived there, up until graduate school, which gets us to: Why did you choose to attend graduate school?
Valentine: I always wanted to attend graduate school as a kid. I was like, I want to be a professor. Which is weird because the working class background, you know, I don’t know, but I was reading a lot of books and I was like, this seems like a great life. You read and you teach and you write. Amazing. Love it. I took nine months off. so Agnes Scott gives you funding and because this wasn't what I was using it for, I couldn't use it, but they give you a year off in the program that you can use, you can like say you're going to use it or not, but you can use it and they give you $2,000 so you can use it to do a study abroad or you can use it to do an internship. I knew someone who moved to New York City and worked at the AFL-CIO, I used it to go medic protest across the country. And do that because I was having a crisis of like does education matter, is college where I'm supposed to be? What am I doing, am I wasting thousands of dollars at this liberal arts school? What's happening? And then I was like, Oh no, I love school and I should pursue that.
Ziegler: What year did you do this?
Valentine: When was Hurricane Sandy? It was that time because I went to Hurricane Sandy.
Ziegler: 2012
Valentine: yeah so, 2012. That fall semester I took off. And just traveled. It was pretty great.
Ziegler: So that's how you decided to go to graduate school, you were thinking, is this even worth it? You took the fall semester and that convinced you that it was probably the thing that you wanted to stick with. So what brought you here?
Valentine: Well, I applied to so many places. One of them was that LSU was the one I got into but also I really wanted to study with Dustin Howes. He ended up dying right before I got here. Which is, you know, a bummer because he studied … he was an amazing political theorist who studied non violence and democracy and all of that. And I came into grad school really interested in studying violence and neoliberalism and neoliberalism as violence. But he was dead, so … ALS, you know, so it was fast.
Ziegler: This question is going to be ill-formed, so I apologize for it, but I’m curious, is your queer identity at all … does that affect your career thinking or your choice in political science? Because you've been active in these groups, all the way from high school and undergrad. Can you say anything about that?
Valentine: Yeah, I mean, political science is a really conservative discipline. And before we moved here, me and my partner sat down and we we're talking and his mom's involved in academia, she's the dean of an art school, things like that. And he was like, do you think that just for, one, physical safety emotional and all of that, that you might have to be closeted when you're in grad school, because the field you're in? And I was like Nah. Not gonna do that. But it was a good conversation. I mean, it was also like physical safety as well, like there's a lot going into it but, you know, I think it is going to limit my job opportunities. My job opportunities are also already limited by just the fact that I have epilepsy. And my doctor’s in Atlanta. So I need to be somewhere close enough that I can get to an airport and I also need to be somewhere where I can bike to a grocery store, and things like that. So I'm already like pretty limited in my job opportunities so I’m mostly just looking at liberal arts colleges because of that. And with who knows how education systems are going to change because of Covid, I'm also gonna be looking at the private sector where they don't really care as much for like policy analysts, like who you are, what you are, as long as you can analyze policy. So I'll be looking at that. And yeah, and also teaching at private schools
Ziegler: And the conversation that you had with your partner about whether or not to be closeted, that was in relation to the discipline that you're studying. Was it also related to the location?
Valentine: It was both. Yeah, it was both. Because my family's from Louisiana on both sides, and they're from the country and growing up very aware of their views on queer people, which are all very negative. We don't speak, which is fine with me. So I kind of, I didn't know what to expect in Baton Rouge and I figured expecting the worst and my partner did a bunch of research and at the time there has just been a bunch of violence on trans people. So it was like I don't know, your discipline is pretty conservative and terrible and also might physically not be safe.
Ziegler: Your parents are from Louisiana. Do you feel comfortable saying where they're from?
Valentine: Yeah. My mom is from the Opelousas/Church Point area and my dad's from Eunice.
Ziegler: Oh wow, okay. So both actually not that far from Baton Rouge
Valentine: Yeah, no. It was, it was funny moving here because my partner was like you look like everyone here and I was like a small gene pool.
Ziegler: When you were growing up, because they were both from Louisiana, did y'all ever make it back over here?
Valentine: Oh yeah, we would come back like every summer. You know, we've tried to make it for big holidays, things like that. And when we couldn't my parents, especially most of my mom like me, you know, we spoke Cajun French when I was growing up, we made gumbo. And we tried to find ways of including both Georgia and Louisiana. So, you know, we would have like collard greens, but we would still have jambalaya. Lot of cornbread, things like that. Just some stuff that feels very Georgia to me. A lot of peach foods and pecan pies and things like that.
Ziegler: So you were familiar with Louisiana, at least those areas.
Valentine: Yeah, that was it. Yeah, because my mom was like, Why would you go to New Orleans? We don't have any family there. We have to pay for everything. So we'd never visit New Orleans. I visited as an adult.
Ziegler: Had you visited Baton Rouge before?
Valentine: No, it was a pass-through. My mom went to school. She's very vague about her life. So I don't really know when this happened, but she went to school in Baton Rouge. I think she went to LSU for her undergrad. She studied dance and she just talks about how studying dance she had a friend who got an illegal abortion and died and she talks about how like that radicalized her so growing up, we would always … that's what I equated Baton Rouge with. I was like, oh yeah, LSU and illegal abortions, at least in the 70s.
Ziegler: And when you say that radicalized her … it radicalized her in a particular direction?
Valentine: Yeah, so growing up we're all Catholic and but she was very much left-wing Catholic. She was very, very pro choice.
Ziegler: You were coming back and forth between Georgia and Louisiana, most of your life, it sounds like. You were in high school when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit
Valentine: yeah
Ziegler: Did that have a big effect?
Valentine: It was really scary because I mean my family was fine. Right? But it was really confusing hearing stories from them because they would parrot racist lies about, you know, people, you know, black people coming from New Orleans into these … into “their” ... communities and bringing crimes and so it was really confusing because I was in middle school and I was like, I don't understand what's true and what's not because the media is not covering things and also I know y'all are bigots, but I have no idea what's happening.
Ziegler: That was chaotic time I think everywhere in the South. I'm just sort of curious … now that you've been here ... and you've been in Baton Rouge, how many years now?
Valentine: Is it four years? Yes, four years.
Ziegler: So I'm sort of curious about your thoughts. How does living here for the last four years compare to what you would have expected?
Valentine: Um, it's, it's different. Some ways like it's much more chill than I thought it would be. If that makes sense. I think I expected it to be like, much more conservative than it actually is just based on my family. But there's a lot less things here than I thought there would be because it's a capital having lived in Atlanta, which is a capital city. I was like, Oh man, that's gonna be like all of these like weird artsy like punk dives. And it's like, no, that's New Orleans.
Ziegler: To focus on the trans perspective, comparing your life here in Baton Rouge to the life that you had In Atlanta, I'm just curious about your ability to find a trans community here and how that compares
Valentine: Yeah, I'm not … I Haven't really like … I met some folks, my first year and we hung out and it was nice, but wanted a community really badly, and I just like didn't. There is Louisiana Trans Advocates, but like the meetings are hard to get to, since you know on a bike and I'm not going to pay for a Lyft, because I don't like paying for anything so yeah, I don't really I don't really have like a trans community here like I did in Atlanta. But Atlanta is easy because they're like every single leftist space had things for trans people like the bicycle co op had a night to work on bikes that was for trans people and women. Yeah, it was like all of the spaces, just like had things built in for like trans people to hang out.
Ziegler: So I'm thinking again about your advocacy work and the role of community building that's built into that. When I first met you, you were doing the Safe Space training for LSU. Could you say what your role was there?
Valentine: Yeah, so the LGBTQ project. When I was talking with the person who'd had the job before me, they said Your job will be to be the queer person on campus. And that kind of sums it up really well. And the job is very much kind of what you make of it. So you're in charge of mentoring any queer person, any queer student, and also overseeing the clubs for queer students, which, like I didn't go to their meetings because their meetings were late and I'm a grad student and I like sleeping and, I'm not gonna go to events late at night. This is not a thing. I'm afternoon or no. I was kind of responsible to do Safe Space trainings, which are kind of like just queer 101 in general, it's just like here's how to assist queer people. It's mostly geared about undergrads, like if they come to you with a complaint or need. Here's what to say. Here's what not to say here's some resources, things like that. So it's very much like a 101, like it's pretty basic. And then advocating for policy changes and things like that. And I took that side, that aspect, more heavily because with all of my activists grassroots work. And like having had worked in New York City with state organizations or state, of state organizations state programs like state like New York state health departments and shit like that. So I felt really comfortable with like that side of it. So I worked on things like that and then also helping to set up the caucus, the Queer Caucus. So I really wanted to do lasting institutional changes as much as I could, when I had the job.
Ziegler: You mentioned the Catholicism that was central to your family. And you've indicated in previous conversations that you are practicing Catholic. I’d love to hear more about that. Can you tell us about the church you attend?
Valentine: Yeah, so I attend St. Paul's Catholic Church. It's a predominantly black church. It was built fairly recently with funds that were raised by the black community in Baton Rouge. It is an extremely left leaning church. When I moved here like I'd gone to a Catholic Church back in Atlanta, like I i am practicing. I have like a bunch of Catholic shit all over the house and I’ve got my prayer candles, you know, got a little statue got a crucifix got a rosary. prayed the rosary, the other day, because it's May, Month of Mary. In Catholic school, we would sing hymns like crown the thing, it was, it was great. Anyway, my relationship with Catholicism is I grew up in an extremely leftist understanding of what Catholicism was right. Like, there were all informed by liberation theology. So they were all Marxists and focused on overturning capitalism and structures and very feminist like they had extremely feminist interpretations of the Bible. Which made sense because it's nuns and so I didn't have negative relationships with my faith, mostly just with people who practice the faith in ways that I was like, that doesn't make sense. But yeah, so Catholicism is like deeply important to me. I go to Mass every Sunday. Now it’s zoom. But the first time I went to Mass at St. Paul's it was Pentecost, I love Pentecost, and that's the celebration. The color is red. Great. Love red and it's the celebration of when like the The Holy Spirit descends on the apostles and it's usually like a pretty fun sermon and the priests, there was like talking about solidarity across class groups and faith and gender and race and how like Pentecost calls us to essentially just like revolutionize the world. And I was like, I'm into this and this older woman was next to me and she was like, What's your name, and I was like, hey, I'm Riley. Yeah, like I'm trying to find a church like Catholic Church, but I'm trans and I don’t know. And she was like, Doesn't matter. Come here. And yeah, so I have a pack of like old ladies who love me and they're all like you're our trans kid and the priest is really supportive
“ I have like a bunch of Catholic shit all over the house...”
Ziegler: It sounds like you get a lot out of this.
Valentine: I find it really nice. When I was a kid, I almost I thought about joining seminary and decided not to. But I thought about joining seminary and I am wanting to become a lay Franciscan. Yeah. So I've always been like like pretty pretty religious and for me it's like here's the aspect of it feels really great to connect to, like, a tradition that's been going on for like 2000 years and, on the other hand, like it informed so much of my politics, like there's this Oscar Romero that I think of all the time where it's like something like If you don't take the rings off your fingers. They're going to cut your hands off or they're going to cut them off, which is all about how if you participate in structural sin on a personal level. When you overturn that like when that inevitably becomes revolution, like when there's a revolution and in overturns it then you're going to end up being her as a catalyst of having helped structural sin so like the relationship between helping personal sin is helping structural sin. So it's like it's it's just deeply affects like politics and my understanding of the world. Can't can't imagine not being… I mean, I wasn't Catholic for a while. I went through a Wiccan phase, but mostly it's like a teenage rebellion against my mom to be like what would upset my mom, but I still prayed the Rosary. So like.
Ziegler: So you have this personal tradition of leftist Catholicism and feminist interpretations of Catholicism and that came from your parents. But those interpretations still didn't leave any room for queer or trans people?
Valentine: I guess it makes no sense.
Ziegler: Okay, I just wanted to be sure.
Valentine: It doesn't make any sense. When I read scripture, it's very clear that Christ crosses boundaries that would have been like gender divided and does things that would have been exclusively seen as relegated to like the private sphere which is where women would live so it seems very clear to me that like gender transgressions are part of the faith. So I just, yeah. It never, I never understood justifications against. Yeah, this makes sense to me.
Ziegler: So did did being being asked to leave that high school did that have an effect like a shaking of faith affect.
Valentine: Um, no, it actually influence it made me like the come deeper in my faith in a way of seeing someone who was religious being incredibly hateful and being like, that is not a part of the faith that I understand and insofar as I understand Catholicism. It's a religion of constantly apologizing for the horrible things we've done but in my understanding that is not a part of the way I would interpret or practice my faith. And so it just yeah, that actually was when I started to think more about going to seminary
Ziegler: To bring this back to thinking about being trans in Louisiana: We said before that there's not a large sense of community that you feel, but do you know other religious trans folks?
Valentine: No. Yeah, I've never everyone I know who is trans is has been like very deeply traumatized by religion which I understand. And they're not religious at all. I only know one other religious queer person who's my girlfriend, who's Jewish
Ziegler: This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for being part of this project, and the very first person to interview with us. We’re so honored!
Maybe we'll do this as an ending. Are there any trans artists, writers, musicians, etc that you would like to promote that you would like to encourage other people to look into.
Valentine: Yes, SOPHIE is great her music is like terrifying. It's like Nine Inch Nails pop music and I'm obsessed. It's really scary. Yeah, I love, I love SOPHIE. It's her music. I just like, I don't understand.
Ziegler: You heard it here, everybody. Check out SOPHIE.
Well, Riley, this was this was absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for this.
Valentine: Yeah, no, this is great. I'm so excited to see where this project goes