Kim: My name is Kim Katrin Milan. I identify as a queer, mix-raced black woman.
Tic: I’m Tiq Milan and I identify as a trans man.
Olympia: My name is Olympia Perez and I identify with the pronouns her, she, and they.
Sasha: My name is Sasha Alexander and I use the pronouns he, she, and they and ask that people mix it up.
Janai: I’m Janai and I’m a woman.
Sean: I’m Sean and I’m a man, a man of trans experience, but a man nonetheless.
Tiq: Okay so how we met. We met on Facebook. It was more like I met her on Facebook. Long story short, I was friends with a old friend of hers and you know how you sometimes go through other people’s friends list and I was going through the girl’s friends list and I found her. So, I’m reading her page and I’m like, “Oh my god, this girl’s amazing.” So, I started to send her messages like once a month for months until she finally spoke to me. So, every month it was like, hello, how are you?
Kim: They were really nice messages.
Tiq: Right, nothing too creepy. Nothing stalker-y. Just hey, hope you’re having a nice day and then finally, she finally responded and I think within three days, we had like 3,000 messages between us on Facebook, right?
Kim: Definitely, yeah. I responded and yeah, within three days we loved each other.
Tiq: Yeah.
Olympia: We actually met at an event that he had hosted called Black Trans Love is Wealth and it was speaking to the ideas around love for trans people.
Sasha: It was about bringing together black trans folks and people in our communities to talk about love. Do we feel loved? Does love matter? What role does love play in justice? Because a lot of the black trans media work. What I was organizing was about holding space for black trans people to talk and have these conversation about things that we weren’t ever getting to talk about with each other.
Janai: We met at a party but it was really a ball but we tell everybody it was a party but it was a ball. It was my first ball. It was my first time walking.
Sean: A ball is like a staged competition, right. I hate using this as a reference, but if anyone’s ever seen Paris is Burning, Paris is Burning depicts a ball.
Janai: We were introduced there and I saw Sean and the room stopped and it was like, who is this guy? You know, these people were moving out of the way for him and my friend was like, “Oh, I know him” and you know that kind of thing and I was like, oh okay, and I was just like in awe as to what he was doing there. I asked him to be my friend on Facebook and…
Sean: She admits it. Finally, you admit it.
Janai: I didn’t finish the story (laughing). And for a year, we just were liking each other’s pictures and Facebook statuses. I thought he was really profound and I thought he was really smart and I was like, wow. The day before Valentine’s Day, February the 13th, 2013, I get a message from him and he was like, “I don’t usually do this, this is a bit much for me but I don’t mean to disrespect but I think you’re beautiful but not in a superficial kind of way.”
Sean: Wasn’t that smooth?
Tiq: We fell in love and then two weeks later, I proposed and then a month later, I bought a ring and then two months later, we were married. That’s how that went down.
Kim: Was one of those moments where I realized that for each other, we were each the ideal. Like this was not a possibility. This is exactly the person that we’d both been searching for.
Tiq: I think loving a trans person outwardly, openly, is definitely a revolutionary act — I say this, my mother’s biggest fear was that no one was going to love me. The two things she was really afraid of was my safety and that no one was going to love me and I think that that’s an idea that’s commonplace that transgender people aren’t going to be loved or going to receive love. Our lives are just full of lots of detachment and lots of isolation. And that is true. There is a lot of isolation amongst transgender community. There are lots of trans folks who are not receiving any love from their families and it’s hard for them to create partnerships. So when this does happen, it is a revolutionary act. It’s countering this dominant narrative that there’s a pathology with transgender people that’s showing that we are happy and healthy and we are deserving of love, absolutely.
For me, it was really important for me to be with a woman who wanted to be with a man like me. I wanted someone, a woman who could identify that and really speak to that specifically and say, you are a trans man and I love who you are and how you are and I wouldn’t change anything about you and she did that for me. That was hook, line and sinker for me.
Sasha: She has such a presence and such a spirit and I had never met her before. I have built a lot with black trans community in particular over the years in New York City and all over and so when I met her, I was like, “Who is this woman?” And she had just come from this poetry reading. She was like, “Oh I just read this poem,” and I just fell in love with her from the moment… in the poem, she says something about “having a groom one day who me, the boy/girl, the girl/boy” in this poem.
I remember thinking I wanted to be that groom. I wanted to that person and I didn’t even know her. I was like, oh that’s a little presumptuous of me to be like, I could be that person. The event was like, you speak your intentions into the world. We were talking about how black trans love is wealth and here I was not only with a community that loved but actually meeting the love of my life at the event which was amazing and it was beautiful. It was a testament to how powerful bringing our folks together in love is.
Janai: Sean came into my life during a very… I also feel like Sean saved my life in so many ways. Sean came into my life and he made me believe that all my dreams can come true. He’s the biggest dreamer in the world and sometimes it gets frustrating because I’m like, wake up from this dream and other times, it’s like it’s a fantastic ride and it’s just like, wow. He chose me? Like, I’m his wife and it’s just a beautiful thing to just be with a person who gets you and who loves you and who honors you and you know, a person that I know is as invested in me and us as I am and that’s just something… I go to sleep at night and I’m comforted in the fact that this is my husband.
Sean: I love Janai for so many reasons. She’s compassionate. She’s passionate. She’s so family-oriented. She’s loyal. She’s not afraid to be vulnerable. Well, she’s not afraid to be vulnerable with me. I think that was something in myself that I lacked and she’s shown me how to be vulnerable, right, and be comfortable being vulnerable and I don’t think you can truly love yourself or others if you don’t display a certain amount of vulnerability and she’s shown me that.
Olympia: I said this to him before, I feel like he is majestic. The reason for the word majestic is because there is really no word to describe it. Who he is in the world, the aura that is around him when I look at him for like, five or six seconds, I don’t know. I just feel like he is beautiful. He reminds me of who I am in the world. He reminds that I deserve the love that I am getting, the love that I am surrounded by. He reminds me that I am also a star. I feel like he… the way that he holds space down, the way that he is in the community, for the community, despite of whatever or however things happen, I feel like you have taught me a lot about myself.
Sasha: Olympia to me is that woman who is like, the now, now, now. I have never seen somebody interrupt the gaze of violence on a woman’s body, on a black body the way Olympia steps in. Sometimes I tell her, she’s like Storm. The way that she comes into a space and just, not only exists because we already exist but she resists. Even myself being very active, I can even become very passive to the injustice that I face on a daily basis, but Olympia speaks up and knows unapologetically that now, now, now, is always the moment to do that and in a way that is beautiful. She does that as a activist, she does that as an artist.
Kim: I think maybe for me, when I think about family, Tiq is really my family and my extended community of people who I worked with have really been my family. After my grandparents passed, I don’t really have a connection to my biological family. And I think for a lot of queer people, we can lose access to our family because of bigotry, because of all sort of different kinds of violence and so I think that it can feel really hard when you’re making a family new and people have all these specific ideas of what a family’s supposed to look like. So, I guess maybe really what is always really important to me is wanting to communicate to people that you can start over and I think it’s in falling in love with yourself and learning to respect and value the person that you are. You can start to find people who are also on a similar journey and then start to create a family that actually honors you for the person that you are.
Tiq: Yeah. That is perfect.
Kim: Thanks.
Tiq: Perfect.
Kim: Thanks, baby.
Tiq: You’re welcome.
NBC news anchor: Hey, NBC News fans. Thanks for checking out our YouTube channel. Subscribe by clicking on that button down here and then click on any of the videos over here to watch the latest interviews, show highlights and digital exclusives. Thanks for watching.
