Spotlight on Bobbie Hondo: Trans Femme Dancer & HIV/AIDS Advocate (PART TWO)

By: Fernando Cerezo III, Queer Latinx Writer

<- Click here to read, "Spotlight on Bobbie Hondo: Trans Femme Dancer & HIV/AIDS Advocate (PART ONE)"

New York is a polarizing city, where the privileged brush shoulders with the impoverished. A city that promises to chew you up and spit you out, to test your will to stay. And the reward for sticking it out? Excess, temptation, accessibility and a city that honors the individual. At just 16, Bobbie was newly independent, to figure this city out on her own. After declining a dance program overseas and against her parents’ wishes, she landed in Queens, only a short train ride from Manhattan. She still held the struggles of her past on her shoulders, but it was a new day and Bobbie was determined to once again see her body as an instrument rather than a detriment. She briefly enrolled in Parsons School of Design and if she wasn’t in class, she was in doctors’ offices and clinics all over the city. “You have to be proactive or you will just become a ticket number.”

Bobbie arrived in New York unsure about her Cd4 count, the most important laboratory indicator of immune deficiency. She was taking Abacavir, an HIV medication that severely affects your REM sleep. But what six different hospital visits cost her in Texas was treated at a New York doctor’s office in just one afternoon. She learned about the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, a supplemental program that provided her free medications for treatment. She realized that the key to her health was specifying a formula that worked best for her. “If you’re trans and you’re taking hormone medication, then you have your HIV pills, then if you’re on psychotropics those pills all pile up… These are daily medicines and you feel them working in your body to help your cells function at half the degree they would.” So instead of the 12 pills she had taken for years, Bobbie found medications that were much lighter on her body. Her health was progressing, but she was lonely. Though during these routine visits to clinics, she met fellow patients who saw themselves in her. “I would go to all these AIDS clinics and I would get tidbits from these older queens who would give me books to read and songs to listen to. They wanted to help me grieve [the life I had] then celebrate the life I was taking on.” 

Photo by Marquale Ashley

Bobbie kept up with her health, signed up to a gym and started going out dancing in the West Village nightlife scene. Fatefully a 19 year old Bobbie came to befriend drag artists Mistress Formika, Joey Arias, Hattie Hathaway and the cheeky, southern-born, mother of Wigstock, Lady Bunny. “When I got to New York and saw them in real life my heart dropped… I was like ‘wait you’re the person from my TV set.” They saw potential in Bobbie and took her in, encouraging her to foster a relationship with drag. “I’d get to see and hear all these references and I’d just study these queen’s banter. I wanted to join the repartee but wasn’t ‘polished’ enough and they knew that… so they turned me out.” But there were queens that felt Bobbie was cramping their style and would go as far as blackballing her from gigs if she didn’t sleep with them. “Bobbie is here and she’s one of us” Bunny and Hattie testified. “I really believed I was worthless until Bunny was like, ‘do you know who the fuck you are? Show these motherfuckers how you do it!’...They gave me room to breathe for the first time, to help me get to a place where I can start creating my own history rather than being told [what to believe.]” Bobbie stepped in front of the mirror looking like a vision of herself, in voluptuous black hair, her glamourpuss face, wearing latex catsuits and Vivienne Westwood heels. 

In 2015, Lady Bunny thought it was time to bring Wigstock back. She was approached by HBO to do a contemporary look at the drag festival in the new documentary, Wig. Bobbie remembers the honor of Bunny choosing her as the cross generational gap for the film. Not only was this one of Bobbie’s wildest dreams realized but this also served as her coming out ball. She took the opportunity to share her experience with AIDS, in hopes of inspiring those who continue to struggle from lack of access and stigma.

Along with the boom in recognition, Bobbie received backlash from within her community. One older queen accused Bobbie of ruining the documentary by speaking about AIDS. “No one cares anymore. Why does everything new and gay have to be about AIDS?” she remembers him groaning. Bobbie was piercingly reminded of the exclusionary nature within the queer community.  “I spent a lot of years wearing the term faggot as a badge of honor. But when I came out as trans, suddenly all my gay friends were like ‘sorry sis you’re no longer in this circle group.’ It’s because I’m still too gay to be trans and too trans to be gay… I know a bunch of gay men and trans girls who hate me not because I’m a bitch but because I’m positive.” Some would go as far as outing Bobbie’s status in front of her and prospective lovers. They would say ‘Don’t think you’re something. You’re just AIDS on a stick’... I’m forced to realize I’m in this pocket bubble of living life one way that doesn’t scale to a large portion of people… I have been separated from the pack.” 

Romance was hardly any different. Anyone drawn in by her magnetism was swiftly repelled by Bobbie’s insistence that she wasn’t human and only the virus. So she began to date people who were also positive, who saw through her defenses and related to her trauma. As these relationships progressed, she found empathizing would fester into trauma ranking, differentiating their experience to hers. “The only thing we had in common is that we were both positive so there's a lot of shame associated there… It was very sad because you know what they’re going through and vice versa yet they’re choosing to perpetuate that self-hate.” Sex was even trickier, becoming a hotbed for insecurities. Intercourse, even consensual, was the ultimate trigger for conjuring up Bobbie’s dissonance with intimacy. During sex, Bobbie would only go on for so long before panicking and putting a stop to it altogether. These trauma attacks would come and go, lasting a couple minutes, maybe a few hours, sometimes lingering for a few days. She let go of these partners before they could inevitably abandon her. “They don’t see that side of the world; they’re not attuned to the same fears I have. For me, I really believed that I could not be loved so I left because of that fear.” 

With the uptick in education and forms of prevention, such as Truvada and PrEP, she’s seeing the veil of stigma gradually lifting. Language is changing with the current generation, differentiating “good bloods”: people who regiment their medications and “bad bloods”: for those who don’t. Living with HIV is no longer the death sentence it was in the 80s/90s. Bobbie remembers confiding her status to a lover whose response was “Well that’s what condoms are for, for people like you to have a chance at a normal sex life again.” This shift in social consciousness has allowed her access to a side of intimacy she’d felt was closed off to her. “Serodiscordant relationships I find are much easier now because people who don’t have the virus don’t seem to care. They don’t have these hang ups, so this gives you more room to not have hang ups either and to accept your whole self.” 

For so long Bobbie had been conditioned to believe her truth would be her undoing. “Tell someone you’re positive and they’re going to kill you,” was said by psychiatrists, teachers, doctors and Bobbie’s own parents. But when tasked to embrace herself wholly she’s learned that honesty is the key to loving and being loved. That to advocate for yourself means you’re advocating for others in the process. “You have to be honest about who you are in a way that is palatable for someone who doesn’t know about HIV, but in a way that’s comfortable for you.” At 26, Bobbie is diligent in reframing how we look at the reality of HIV/AIDS, to find deficiency in the stigma not the condition. “I hated when people would say ‘you’re going to have it forever.’ I always say, ‘you’re going to have it for a long time, so start learning about it.” 

Being a 12-year survivor, she has watched the pillars of stigma gradually crack under the tides of change. She raved about the pioneering work of Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who’s made a reputation of radically preventing and controlling HIV/AIDS. She also boasts about Harlem United, a non-profit organization dedicated to offering social services to vulnerable populations. Bobbie looks forward to a new world that takes the power away from HIV stigma and uses it to uplift the stories of the present. “We’re so wrapped up in glamorizing the 80s AIDS crisis. We’re so subscribed to David Wojnaroqicz’s [work and AIDS advocacy] that we are refusing to acknowledge the voices of today to grow past the 80s. I love Wojnaroqicz but he died in 1992, AIDS didn’t stop when he died. But those seem to be the only stories we continue to hear. That’s why I’ve made it my mission to speak about [HIV/AIDS] as publicly and with as much candor as I possibly can because there is a whole new world out there.”

Disclaimer: Guest blogs do not necessarily reflect the views of the ADAP Advocacy Association, but rather they provide a neutral platform whereby the author serves to promote open, honest discussion about public health-related issues and updates. 

Spotlight on Bobbie Hondo: Trans Femme Dancer & HIV/AIDS Advocate (PART ONE)

By: Fernando Cerezo III, Queer Latinx Writer

The first time I saw Bobbie was on the dance floor at a New York nightclub, a nightlife watering hole for creatives and it people. I watched the sea of bodies darting their eyes, waiting for their liquid courage to kick in. Among them I saw a figure outfitted in black and pink latex, manicured nails with fingerless matching gloves and a long black ponytail held up with a headband of the same material. Her face was made up, highlighting her round Twiggy-esque eyes with hues of pink around her cheeks and temples. She was holding no drink, and her friends looked like they were trying to match her energy but didn’t yet have it in them. So, I watched her with curious enthusiasm as she grew more and more activated by the music, witnessing what I could only describe as her spirit. 

One weeknight over dinner with a handful of friends at Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, East Village I heard “Fernando!”, called from behind me. Wearing an oversized leather jacket Bobbie embraces me warmly. She asks how I’m doing, her big eyes meeting mine from across the table as if we were the only people there. I introduce her to my bewildered friends, to whom she gives a friendly hello and a courtesy before bringing her eyes back to me. Recognizing her affinity for connection I insist we meet sometime one on one. That summer, in the Lower East Side, the two of us were dressed in all black despite the sweltering heat and walked over to the East River. Bobbie’s black wavy Joan Jett mullet encircles her fresh face. She reminds me of Brittany Murphy; skittish and eager but beaming with life. I look for a piece of myself in her to make sense of our unspoken kinship. We talked nightlife, our love of dancing, swapped dating misadventures, and realized we were born the same year. After sharing a few laughs and exchanging notes on managing adulthood, Bobbie starts to open up to me about her past. In late August, we got a chance to speak on the phone and with her permission I share it with you.

They say we’re all products of our environment, the triumphs and struggles of the children we were dictating the adults we soon become. In 2006, during a Bush era America, we find Bobbie as a curious 12-year-old in El Paso, Texas. She joined the all-girl cheerleading team and wore skirts to school against everyone’s wishes, dancing over the boundaries of the status quo. Born into a Mexican American community she was met with disapproving glares from adults, peers whispering about her in the halls, and evasion from strangers altogether. “It was unsafe to be queer, let alone be open about it [but] I wasn’t shameful. I didn’t subscribe to other people’s projections. I was going to live my life, wear what I wanted to wear, feel how I wanted to feel. Nobody was going to stop me.” Bobbie found solace at local gay bars, if not sneaking in, then peeking through the windows to catch drag performances and studying those she considered to be her people laughing, dancing and drinking, envisioning herself alongside them someday.

At 14, Bobbie earned her way into a summer dance program at Pacific Northwest Ballet School in Seattle, Washington. After days of vigorous training, Bobbie would sneak out to gay bars at night, where unlike El Paso she had an easier time getting in, despite being so young. “I didn’t know that I was being fetishized as this effeminate being and how that attracted certain characters into my orbit. I didn’t understand what a ‘tweaker’ looked like and I didn’t know what a ‘chicken hawk’ was.” It was 2009 and gay marriage hadn’t yet been legalized in most states, so homophobia permeated popular culture. These chicken hawks were men shrouded in secrecy who preyed on the young and impressionable. These were clergymen, CEOs and public defenders who had everything to lose, so in exchange for Bobbie’s discretion they offered her an affection she hadn’t felt before. One chicken hawk in his 50s, posing as a 9/11 firefighter, took Bobbie under his wing that summer, driving her around, filling her with alcohol and escorting her to “dad parties” where other men of the same breed would parade themselves with underage dates. But on their last meeting, Bobbie was lured to a bathhouse where the “firefighter” introduced her to meth. The next thing she remembered was waking up to a dozen of these tweakers abusing her 14-year-old body.

The following summer, Bobbie was back in Seattle but noticed a steep decline in her stamina during ballet class. She found herself in a doctor’s office, waiting pensively for the result of an HIV test. She can hear her mother’s warning echoing in her ears, that her behavior would only attract HIV and despair. The doctor came back with her result: positive. As the world drew silent Bobbie’s body had cemented. She looked blankly at the doctor, thanked them and solemnly walked back to class. Her fellow ballerinas detected something wrong, so Bobbie confided in them, “I have something called HIV.” After sympathizing with her, their word spread to their parents, who informed school administration and the state of Washington. It was rare for a child under 18 to be diagnosed with HIV and Bobbie didn’t get a chance to process what it all meant, the ignorance, fear and stigma. She made meaning out of the reactions from adults around her, showing concern for Bobbie with looks of terror and discomfort smeared on their faces. Amidst the dizzying chaos, Bobbie’s ballet director, Peter Boal, shared his experience of living in New York during the AIDS pandemic. “He could see me before I could see myself.” He assured her there was no better place to find access to proper care, maybe finding herself in the process. 

After getting pulled out of her program early, Bobbie was back in El Paso, sitting in waiting rooms after waiting rooms of medical professionals. Bobbie had contracted anal cancer from undiagnosed HPV and knew her body’s ability to dance was now in jeopardy. But in 2009, insurance companies and pediatricians could legally discriminate against children living with HIV/AIDS.  She had faced rejection from doctors of all kinds before landing in the office of one Dr. Rhonda Flemming. Dr. Flemming, an infectious disease doctor wasn’t trained in HIV care but after hearing Bobbie’s struggles she expressed compassion. So, Dr. Flemming trained herself in order to counsel and care for her. But HIV research was still severely lacking, which resulted in Bobbie’s new costly prescription of 12 intrusive, daily pills thought to suppress the effects of the virus. 

Bobbie returned to face her family and the changing dynamic of the house. Bobbie’s father, a local judge, took necessary measures to protect his child (and reputation) by enforcing the use of the HIPAA privacy act, restricting third parties from disclosing Bobbie’s medical records without consent. He was the most involved in seeking treatment, but he was emotionally blocked, dismissing her when she confided in him. Her mother acclimated no better. “I could be getting purses. But we have to spend money on your medication. So shut up, you don’t get to be upset,” Bobbie remembers hearing. She grew estranged from her three older siblings who only thought up ways to cure her queerness. Certain bathrooms became off limits. If Bobbie would join her family pool parties everyone would scurry out. She became a shut in to avoid facing her own flesh and blood recoiling from her. To this day, Bobbie struggles with her family’s unwillingness to talk about HIV. “I want them to say something so that I can move forward. We can grow together to get back to a time before AIDS was introduced to our lives because it does affect everyone around you.” The once curious, high spirited child had hardened and became a recluse.

The opening weekend of Twilight: New Moon, Bobbie snuck her mother’s car out for a drive. She passed the theater, flooded by her peers, drove past her high school and the gay bars she once frequented. Everything was different now. ‘We know what you have. You’re just going to be a tr*nny with AIDS,” students said to her. “Don’t talk to that person, they have the gift,” they whispered at the bars. There was nowhere to seek refuge, so to supplement her sorrow she started taking ecstasy every night. “I was driving, thinking ‘Am I going to face another year of fighting kids or am I just going to end it all now?’” So that night Bobbie made an attempt to do just that right off the nearest cliff. With the car severely damaged and her mental health slipping, her frustrated parents committed Bobbie into a mental institution without her knowing. Here she was not only encouraged but conditioned to make lying a habitual practice, to lie about her status to any and everyone she meets.

Bobbie survived the public shaming, spiraling drug use and her dance with death and was convinced she was meant for more. “No one would rise to save me until I finally decided--not to quote Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand but I’m going to--‘Enough is enough.’” She took to the then two year old website, YouTube seeking any sliver of queer history, immersed herself in gay texts like City of Night and Dancer in the Dark and, though information was sparse, she took to outlets such as “Susan’s Place” to better understand her trans femme identity. A summer film series spearheaded by queer TV channel Logo had broadcast such films as But I’m a Cheerleader, Mambo Italiano and a lifetime staple of Bobbie’s, Wigstock. The 1995 documentary highlights the irreverent talents of the New York drag festival featuring high spirited queer performers such as Joey Arias, Lipsynka and of course the Lady Bunny, and touched upon the AIDS pandemic. “That’s where I first saw these insanely vibrant personalities and their struggles as LGBTQ+ people,” she tells me passionately. While her environment was failing her, she found hope in Dr Flemming, Peter Boal and her newfound Wigstock idols. There was only one solution. Goodbye, El Paso. Hello, New York City.

-> Click here to read, "Spotlight on Bobbie Hondo: Trans Femme Dancer & HIV/AIDS Advocate (PART TWO)"

Disclaimer: Guest blogs do not necessarily reflect the views of the ADAP Advocacy Association, but rather they provide a neutral platform whereby the author serves to promote open, honest discussion about public health-related issues and updates.