by Patrick Milian
I’m sixteen years old, and my dad has plans to murder me. Night’s falling, and he’s silently driving me out of our subdivision and into the foothills. He hasn’t said anything since coming into my bedroom and instructing me to put my shoes on. I did as I was told and followed him into the garage, where we sat alongside each other in the truck’s cab for a very long time. Eventually, he backed out of the driveway and headed south toward where the city disintegrates into scrubby wilderness.
*
We haven’t spoken to each other much at all these last couple of weeks. Instead, we’ve only had yelling matches since I came out. That announcement—made in the kitchen at six in the morning because I knew my parents would both be home and both have to leave soon after—has led to nothing but chaos and danger. When I told them I was gay, my mom seemed to be following a standard script: I had a feeling, but this is still surprising, and I’m shocked, but I still love you. For his part, my dad went icy. His face hardened at that moment, and though he tried his best to follow my mom’s lead by hugging me and saying he loved me, he was obviously thrown into a state of confusion mixed with contempt. It took a little time for his initial shock to wear off, and then all that was left was disgust.
“It makes me sick to my stomach to think of you with a boy,” he said soon after I told him the truth, “I don’t think I can live in the same house as you.” I had heard stories of kids getting kicked out after telling their parents they were queer, but I never expected it to happen to me. At least we were still communicating, but it wasn’t long before our conversations were replaced with senseless shouting.
“Am I going to have to beat the shit out of you for this to stop?” He stood at the opposite end of the hall, spewing threats at me. I yelled back that there was nothing he could do to make it stop, but eventually, we both choked on our words and retreated. My voice cracked and faltered out of fear, his out of rage. My mom stayed out of it and told me I never should have said anything at all.
*
When the day comes that my dad has switched from loud vitriol to seething silence, I feel abandoned by my own mom to the violent will of a man who finds me disgusting. From the passenger side of the truck, I watch the houses get further and further apart. The lawns and medians go from manicured and lush to gravelly and bare. Craggy hills rise up against a purple night, and we’re unequivocally in the middle of nowhere. He pulls off of the dirt road and into a gravel parking lot. Every space is empty. I’m too scared to move or speak, which is just as well because he continues to sit in silence. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I’m wondering if he's going to strangle me, stab me, or just beat me up and leave me out here for the coyotes.
Eventually, he gets out of the truck and heads toward a trailhead. I follow him—I can’t say why—out into the wilderness in the dead of night, not knowing what kind of violence I’ll find.
*
I was eight years old, standing in a grocery store checkout line, when I spotted a girl in feathers, beads, and white-gold velveteen. She and I were opposites in most ways, and I could tell even from that vantage point: too small to fully make out the tabloid covers, too young to understand why she was on the covers in the first place. I was a mixed-race second-grader in the suburbs of Phoenix, clinging to a grocery cart stuffed with Hamburger Helper and bagged cereal. She, on the other hand, was famous—a rich, white girl on the cover of magazines. Still, something resonated between us. I was old enough to know that boys weren’t supposed to be transfixed by high heels and bouffants, so I sneaked glances at the photos on The National Enquirer and InTouch. Each trip to the Albertsons or Wal-Mart was a chance to look and look again. I furtively peeked at her infinite supply of outfits and accessories as I started to catalog my favorites: the black and white derby hat, the rhinestone microphone, a spray of baby’s breath in her hair. More than once, my mom caught me gawking and told me to stop. I don’t know if she was trying to shield me from the story of her murder or those costumes.
The nineties iconography of JonBenét Ramsey helped me to trace the outlines of my own queerness. I was learning about the vital tawdriness that comes along with being gay. Tastelessness offers a means of survival for a lot of us because we take ownership over what’s othered and, by extension, take ownership over our own place as outsiders. JonBenét helped me comprehend the terms of how taste, gender, and sexuality were something you could do and that could be done to you. Her portrayal helped me give shape to an understanding that taste and identity were in no small part only a costume and a hairdo. The danger lay in how these trappings could trap you. She enabled me to understand the undercurrent of violence that courses through the queer experience—the insidious kind that leaks from respectability and aspiration.
Patsy Ramsey denied ever bleaching her daughter’s hair. Instead, she insisted that she only “lightened” it. That kind of double-talk doesn’t exactly incriminate Patsy, but it was the kind of thing that fueled speculation she was involved in her daughter’s murder. It also showed that JonBenét’s victimization came long before the killing, regardless of who did it. She was sexualized and exploited by the people who promised to care for her. It was a form of violence, the contagious kind white upper-class heterosexuals are great at inciting.
My family looked nothing like the Ramseys. My dad immigrated from Cuba as a teenager, and my mom came from a working-class background, so instead of embodying it, we were infected by the germ of white heteronormativity. Shaped by the false promise of the American Dream, my parents had to negotiate a tension between authentic self-expression and a heavily policed performance. My mom stretched the budget to approximate what she found in Sunset Magazine. My dad spoke English with a Cuban accent and Spanish with an American accent. Every marker of race and class was marked as inaccurate and inappropriate, so it follows they’d be anxious about having a son marked as queer. They enforced a kind of frantic gendering as they dressed me in khakis and polos for our Sears family portraits. Our lives were ruled by empty signifiers, and I began to understand that these signifiers–if they were fake and glittery enough–could also undermine the exact structures that made them. Kitsch, camp, and garbage could be forms of resistance, but JonBenét never had a chance to figure that out because she was too young to turn tackiness against the people who used it on her. She was turned into trash when she died and was robbed of the chance to realize how we can survive on trash.
That’s why I don’t think it’s cruel of me to obsess over the treasure trove of tacky memorabilia dedicated to her. I’m queering her legacy.
Of all the junk for sale online, nothing compares to one particular black velvet painting of her. Bill Robison commissioned a series of velvet paintings that comprised his American Tabloid Heroes collection in the late nineties. The likes of Monica Lewinsky, OJ Simpson, and Dr. Kevorkian were all commemorated in relief against the fabric, but JonBenét, starting at $1,800 on eBay, is the most sought-after piece in the series. At first glance, velvet seems like a strange medium of choice, but how many American myths have also been immortalized in it? John Wayne, Jesus, dogs playing poker, sad clowns, and, of course, Elvis Presley have all been rendered in acrylic on velvet. JonBenét, a symbol of white girlhood innocence annihilated, is a way for the culture to reflect its love of whiteness and wealth back to itself. But, when I look at the painting on eBay, am I looking at a result of the mythologizing or an ironic critique of it? The painting’s stance is indiscernible.
It isn’t one of those pageant portraits, the kind with the piles of bleach blond curls and splotches of blush. Instead, the painting is based on a more candid photograph of the six-year-old in a pink sweatshirt. The image itself would be familiar to anyone who’s looked into the case, but the artist has set aside realism in favor of something ghoulishly distorted. Every feature that made her both cherubic and creepy is exaggerated against the soft oblivion of velvet. In the painting, her eyes pop like sapphires against the black fabric of a jewelry case. Her teeth are six gleaming chiclets. The outline of her shape blurs into the fuzzy void behind her, but I look at her hair and notice her roots are a deep brown sprouting up from under the golds and yellows—a crack in an otherwise Aryan façade.
As for the medium itself, I don’t know if there’s any other fabric as semantically rich, one as loaded with so many connotations and metaphors: the Velvet Divorce, velvet ropes, velvet curtains, and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. The fabric functions as a boundary that withholds something exclusive, sexy, and often violent. That’s the same kind of aura that shimmers around David Bowie’s B-side “Velvet Goldmine” and its gender-bending flavor of kink. With their panther princess naked on a chain, Bowie’s lyrics transform the fabric from a barrier to be transgressed into the act of transgression itself, into a sex organ with more possibilities than any one gender can contain. Velvet signals softness, so when it’s used to reframe rough, painful sex as pleasurable, the fabric becomes kinkier than leather. The act of penetration is actually the primary feature of how velvet is manufactured. Two layers of fabric are woven together, and then a blade slices through the space between layers, splitting the fibers to make a low, tight pile. The soft fuzz of velvet results from connective tissue cut in half, so to run your hand over its downiness is to feel the effects of penetration and rending. It's no wonder velvet has become a kind of master metaphor for queerness as well as one for the borderlands.
The black velvet JonBenét comes from Tijuana, where thousands of artists have been creating millions of “Tijuana velvets” since the sixties. Over the decades, a rich borderland culture of velvet paintings emerged alongside the mass-produced one. Chicano artists who took jobs in the factories began to adopt and adapt the medium to their own personal ends. Artists, many of whom remain unknown or anonymous, created works centering on indigenous themes and representing Mexican landscapes far from tourist destinations. The medium became a way for Mexican and Chicano artists to voice their narratives and reframe this mass-produced art form into cultural expression, one that retains, instead of rejects, the medium’s roots in bad taste.
The black velvet JonBenét stands at the center of a complicated nexus of exploitation, taste, and politics. Rasquachismo is one way of understanding that nexus. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto unpacks rasquachismo as “neither an idea nor a style but more of an attitude or taste.” It’s a Chicano sensibility that manifests as an aesthetic. Rasquachismo tends toward the hyper-saturated, high-intensity, and low-brow. It’s all about ornamentation and elaboration built on the mass-produced, discarded, or trashy. Unlike camp, which is another stance premised on bad taste, if something is rasquache, it’s unfettered by both restrictive judgments and economic realities. It’s about more than Schwinn stingray bikes and flower planters made of old tires; rasquache is a DIY aesthetic that turns the castaway and shoddy into the exuberant and expressive.
Rasquachismo was a sensibility my family often unintentionally trafficked in but, like whiteness, couldn’t fully claim ownership over. Instead, kitsch offered a way for us to participate in the negotiation of belonging. We didn’t have any black velvet paintings growing up because my dad wanted to be the kind of Latino who didn’t speak Spanish and who didn’t shop at K-Mart. Despite his best efforts, though, he had a few glaring blindspots, like his Ford Ranchero. When he bought the strange car/truck mashup, it was a charmless gray, but he decided to give it a custom paint job. He hired a couple of guys to paint it navy blue except for a broad stripe of sky blue running along the sides. On either side of the light blue, my dad attached cheddar-colored wood trim himself. He was so proud of how he customized what he called his “hot rod” that he wanted to get a vanity plate for it. His initials are R.A.M., and he thought, it being a hot rod and all, a license plate that said RAMROD would be perfect, even though he didn’t know what the word meant exactly. Something was lost in that blurry middle ground between English and Spanish because he couldn’t understand why the lady at the D.M.V. insisted that the word was absolutely unacceptable to have on a license plate. My dad came extremely close to driving around in a tricolored El Camino knockoff with a plate that said RAMROD, but there’s something even more on-point about driving around with a standard plate and not totally grasping why it had to be that way.
My parents’ ambitions meant the times rasquachismo did appear, like in that car, or in old wooden furniture revived with multicolored sponge-painted shapes, or in a game of dominos played with scraps of paper, it announced itself with a bright and tacky exclamation point. To restore something broken, to revive something old and worn, to just make do with limited means were opportunities for a brand of creativity that was always too bright and too out of sync with what we saw around us. That black velvet JonBenét speaks to a collision of white wealth and borderland self-expression, and that’s a tension I grew up feeling but lacking the words for, but I knew it when I saw it.
Now, my parents’ home is scrubbed clean of anything as crummy as we had growing up, but the same kitschy taste is still on display in my extended family’s homes. In my aunt Marisel’s backyard, there’s a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary surrounded by fake flowers and rocks she hand-painted orange and turquoise. She built a shoddy little chapel and now has to scream at the dogs to keep them from pissing on it. Up until she died a few years ago, my great-aunt Candy had a hologram picture hanging next to her front door. As you left her house, you could see Jesus shift into Mary and back into Jesus and one last Mary before you made it out. My second cousin Chachi packed her semi-finished basement with fiber optic lamps, a tank with plastic fish, and—yes—velvet paintings. It’s with the women of my family that something akin to rasquache persists.
The artist Amalia Mesa-Bains calls this domesticana, a Chicana rasquache that’s something like a feminized version of the stance. She points out that rasquachismo involves being defiant and inventive in equal measure, and the domestic sphere of how women defy and invent involves the creation of altars and embellishments that transform the home into a site of creativity and healing. Mesa-Bains points to the capilla, the little chapel that's erected in the yard as a space where spirituality, healing traditions, and a personal feminine pose or style are put on display. I’ve never thought to ask Marisel what role she thought her piss-splattered Mary served. Does she see her little altar as a tether to the healing arts, or is it just some stuff?
I’m drawn to the domesticana, but I feel doubly alienated from it. All the women in my family—who spoke a different language than me and were firm about which spaces in their houses I wasn’t allowed into—seemed to have been practicing a secret art of accumulation and display. While my dad was souping up his ramrod, my aunts and cousins were engaging in something softer and almost occult. Their crocheted toilet paper covers and porcelain figurines populated hidden corners of their homes, filling them with a cozy kind of excess. We went to these houses for holidays and parties, and while adults congregated together in designated gathering spaces, my siblings and I trawled around, exploring all the crevices of the home where rainbow doilies and fruit-shaped candles could be found. In closets, we found beaded gowns, satin negligees, and countless lace fringes—clothes that were embellished with the same soft and rounded details as all the other concealed spaces of the house. Once, my dad found me hidden away in Candy’s bedroom closet, standing up inside one of her beaded dresses. He grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me out of the closet and through the front door to where our minivan was waiting. Jesus and Mary swapped places as they watched me get dragged away.
Like for a lot of queer kids, moments like this were common. Whether it was to apply makeup or try on dresses, I regularly slid away to quietly mutiny against the gender confines my dad prescribed for me. When he caught me in these hidden corners, whether I was trying on a dress or just cradling a flamenco-dancing doll, he was outraged enough to brutally haul me into the light. I’d be drawn toward the domesticana as someplace secret and unknowable, but I’d always be pulled away from it before I had a chance to fully embody it and understand that secret. In my particular Catholic Cuban-American family, gender roles were rigid, and queerness was unequivocally forbidden. The only thing worse than being gay was to be a gay man, to not fully lay claim to the inheritance of machismo. The rasquache I saw growing up, though kitschy, was irrefutably masculine, and its feminine complement lay just out of reach.
*
He disappears down the trail, so I follow him a few paces behind. My dad still hasn’t spoken, but I get the feeling that staying in the truck might be more dangerous than heading out into the hills with him. I’ve never been here before, and I don’t know if my dad has either, so as far as I know, we’re going down a foreign trail that goes nowhere at all except away. Our feet crunching on the gravel is the only sound—not even cars in the distance. He doesn’t carry a flashlight, so we both do our best to navigate the trail by moonlight. At least having to pay close attention to every step I take distracts me from imagining whatever waits at our destination.
But then the trail starts to curve. Even though there are switchbacks and dips, I can tell the trail creates a loop through the hills. Slowly and deliberately, we wind our way back to the parking lot, where my dad unlocks the truck, gets inside, and waits for me to climb into the passenger seat. He drives us home.
Nothing happens that night—no murder, no drag-out brawl, no violence of any kind, not even a conversation—but that nothingness is the space where all kinds of terrors can take shape. I don’t know what my dad is thinking, what sort of darkness—or maybe forgiveness—he’s harboring and too afraid to let out. I can’t believe the plan was just to go on a night hike, but I can only guess what he intended.
I hold the memory of that night closely and privately. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained from revisiting it with him, so instead, the memory just persists as the night I fully believed my dad was going to murder me in cold blood. Whether or not that belief comes near the truth, I honestly don’t know. Sometimes, I think it’s ridiculous to have ever thought my dad was capable of something like that, but most times, I’m confident it at least lurked in the back of his mind. Sometimes, it’s what I think of when I see pictures of JonBenét Ramsey or when I consider how the depth of that black velvet speaks to how far a family’s violence can be buried.
Jorge Terrones was the artist Bill Robison commissioned to create the American Tabloid Heroes. On Terrones’ Facebook page, there’s a wide selection of velvets, everything from the standard sad clowns to the Sleestaks from Land of the Lost. There are also loads of conservative politicians, including Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County sheriff and fascist hard-liner who became famous for unconstitutional border enforcement and for sending offenders to labor camps in the desert. It seems Terrones is happy to project whatever you ask for onto the blank, black screen. Whatever kind of iconography, whatever sort of mythology you want to see produced, he’ll do it. The black velvet JonBenét, when I think of it in those terms, is evacuated of meaning. She’s just marks on fuzzy fabric, nothing like the generative field of friction I want her to be. I’ve been turning to her to understand myself, but Terrones may not have even known who she was. When he made her dark roots stand out against the rest of her bleached hair, maybe he was just taking advantage of the high contrast the black fabric offers. Is it a kind of erasure to misread what is, at the bottom, a commodity Terrones produces to make a living? Does the surface of such bad art ever need to stay simply that?
Or is it a different kind of erasure to insist a product like this can’t be read as anything other than a semantically worthless object? Rasquachismo means that just because something is mass-produced doesn’t mean it precludes genuine creativity. Through style and pose, ordinary stuff is refitted into a statement of defiance and assertiveness. The black velvet JonBenét—tacky to the point where bad taste becomes atrocious—offers a hinge between the sensibilities I was barred from growing up. It represents something queer, something mixed, something that emerges in the collision of aspiration and erasure, but also something patently ordinary. It short-circuits the standards we use to judge the extraordinary. It reveals how those standards too often leave out the queer, the accented in both languages, the soft and hidden areas of the house you aren’t meant to find. I think the ordinary is the most commonly wielded tool of oppression. It’s what makes someone like Joe Arpaio—someone like my dad—possible. It’s also the most powerful defense against it.