La Voz de Galicia – May 10, 2024 →
I was reading a couple of articles this week about Cynthia Carr’s biography of Candy Darling, which led me to reflect on my own way of understanding the realities around me over the years. During my adolescence, I developed a passion for biographies that led me to discover a multitude of worlds from Ourense, and which had much to do with my current life in New York. At that time, among the characters I devoured was Andy Warhol, and precisely in my travels in the nineties, I collected a series of VHS tapes with Warhol/Morrisey movies, which I later watched at home, and all I remembered was the harshness emanating from the lives of the protagonists. Among those protagonists was Candy Darling, an icon not only of the Warholian universe but also of the history of LGBTQ+ visibility. Darling (1944-1974) was an American transgender actress who lived a complex life, and precisely through the study of her life, one cannot help but think about how the reality of trans people has changed, how we have progressed in some countries regarding their rights, but also how much we still have to progress.
In my adolescence, I probably didn’t stop to think about the life reality of an artist like Darling. And perhaps what I envy most about today’s adolescence is their access to the documentation of all these lives that help us understand the society of the past and the present. And I simply hope that this access will help us not to turn back time, not to question the fundamental rights of all people. Because as some American states show, anyone can come and take them away.
