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I met Jai while we were at Naropa together. We lived in the same dorm, and were both members of the students of color group. I remember admiring Jai's strength, writing talents and amazing body movements. I reconnected with Jai when I noticed hir video "Tomboi Gatoey Mango," was impressed by the work,  and got in touch with hir to find out what se's been up to.  Here's a bit of our chat.

Creative Loafing: What is your passion?

Jai Arun Ravine: I am a writer and a dancer. I have recently become more interested and able to experiment with video as a bridge between text and the body moving through space, as an alternative to spoken word performance. [NOTE: See Jai's video "Strata," about "the first crush I ever had," after the break.]

I am obsessed with the relationship between silence and hunger, and the illegibility and erasure of desire as it relates to colonized desire. My meditations are currently on verbalization, transformation and embodiment.

CL: Where do you live?

JAR: San Francisco Bay Area

CL: Where did you grow up?

JAR: West Virginia. This is the part where you say, "Really? Wow. I drove through there once. It's beautiful."

CL: What do you think is significant about West Virginia and why did you choose to relocate?

JAR: The Appalachian Mountains have definitely shaped my relationship to space, silence and desire. I have missed that landscape ever since I left, but I know that I will never be able to live there because I am a gender non-conforming, queer person of mixed race and the kind of community I need is nonexistent. West Virginia is relatively rural, white and conservative.

CL: What do you like about the San Francisco Bay Area?

JAR: I like the Bay Area because, despite hipsters and overwhelming gentrification, I have been able to soften and access my own truth around identity and desire and find a community of folks who are working through similar things in their art-making. San Francisco is relatively urban, with a larger concentration of folks of color with radical politics.

CL: What motivated you to move there?

JAR: I moved here because I had lived in Colorado for a couple of years and wanted to get the hell out. I was beginning to question a trans identity and realized that being landlocked and isolated in a high altitude desert underneath the Rockies with a bunch of wealthy white folks was not a state that was going to allow me to soften enough to explore that part of myself. Both the queer and people of color communities were very small and because of that, very traumatized. I had never identified as a person of color until moving there, but began to feel excluded because I was hapa or mixed race. I further felt excluded from the queer community because my relationship to queerness was beginning to be more about gender than sexuality (not to mention the ways it was tied to being hapa). I heard that San Francisco was near the ocean, had more Asian people and was the place you went to find other trannies and to figure things out, so I went.

CL: What did you like the best about your childhood?

JAR: Walking from my house to the top of the hill and into the sprawling cemetery. Listening to my father recite Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" and his walls covered with stacks of science fiction paperbacks. When my mother made chicken nuggets in the wok, and her wire spatula. Fireflies. Playing spotlight tag.

CL: Are there any insights or reflections that you wish you had 10 years ago, or that you would like to impart to people 10 years younger than you?

JAR: When I was 17, on August 22, 2000, I wrote this:

"I had a dream where I stumbled into Mike Piazza with his friend. Two people died, and I stole a big disposable camera of someone else's that was laying on the ground because I needed to take pictures. I was with a friend in a big Days Inn type of business meeting gothic hotel with carpet kind of place. One man was inside a flat bag of cardboard and his guts kept dripping out of the holes. The other man died to protect me. Didn't even get Piazza's autograph. The first picture I took was of a field covered in colored flowers everywhere."

When I was 17 I spent a lot of time behind a camera, completely terrified. I observed, rather than participated in, my life as it unfolded. If I could visit my 17-year-old self today, I would put my hands around the camera between us, and remove it. I'm not sure, however, if the 17-year-old would be ready to listen.

CL: How have your relationships with people changed over time? What kinds of relationships are you seeking now?

JAR: I think my relationships with people have deepened because I have become more able to authentically access the place inside me from which connection manifests. Due to this, I am finally able to forge lasting connections with artists in my community and foster support and collaboration.

CL: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

JAR: Riding a motorbike in Thailand, and stopping at a food stall on the side of the road.

CL: How has/does being gay affect your life? Does it propel you, hold you back, etc.?

JAR: I identify as queer, as well as trans/genderqueer. But I also really love being gay, in the fag/phag/femme sense of that term. This question is way too broad. I will say that being read as gender non-conforming by those with which I engage greatly affects how I navigate and move through the world — the pressure is sometimes paralyzing. What I make is rooted in my relationship to gender, and how gender complicates my relationship to Thai-ness as someone of mixed race. Rather than having gender work on me, I am, as you say, searching for gender propellers.

CL: Your world in some ways seemed overwhelmingly complicated from the outside; what is it like for you? Can you talk more about these gender propellers you are looking for? and how this search has informed your relationship with the space in which you exist?

JAR: Yes, it's complicated, but it's what I have to live with. Also, it's not like I can just "remove" some of the overwhelmingly complicated things I have going on. Like the fact that my mother is an immigrant who, for whatever reasons, keeps most of her history silent. Or that I tried really hard to pass as Thai when I went to Thailand, but couldn't hide the fact that I was American and "luuk kreung" (half-white). Or the illegible ways I desire masculinity as a fag/phag. Or how I've had to separate my reclamation of Thai-ness from cis-gendered femininity. Or how anxiety producing it is to use public restrooms. Do [people] "choose" to conform? My conformity or non-conformity on any given day has nothing to do with "choice" and all to do with the particular structures in place that decide what types of people have more access, and can slip in with relatively little notice. I would guess that [people who conform have] an inner sense of identity that aligns with what others perceive, so that they can navigate social spaces with perhaps more ease than I. For me none of these things align, and I must constantly hold myself together through my writing, video making, dance and performance, because without that nothing makes sense. I have been working on accessing and identifying the places inside myself from which I speak, act and desire, which has helped me be truer and more comfortable with myself. Consequently I am able to navigate the spaces in which I exist in ways that feel honest, authentic and empowering.

CL: Who are some of your mentors/role models?

JAR: My mentors during my undergraduate years were professors Donna Faye Burchfield (dance), Pauline Kaldas and T.J. Anderson III (creative writing). During grad school, teacher and poet Akilah Oliver was my strongest influence, including Bhanu Kapil (even though I was always waitlisted for her courses), as well as being able to meet and work with poet Myung Mi Kim for the first time. After attending the annual poetry retreat in 2009, Kundiman, an organization that fosters emerging Asian American poets, became one giant family of mentors for me and has played a large part in encouraging and supporting me to continue what I do. Kundiman co-founder Joseph O. Legaspi is a powerful mentor, as well as Sueyeun Juliette Lee, who published my first chapbook through Corollary Press. Currently, I look up to poets Ronaldo V. Wilson and Craig Santos Perez as models for the kind of work I want to create, and the kind of impact I want to have on the world.

For more information about Jai, visit:  jaiarunravine.wordpress.com.

If you want to participate in the Queer Personalities project, and think you have an interesting story to tell, e-mail me.

Jai's video: "Strata"