JACK MACCARTHY: Hi Yoseñio. Do you feel ready to go?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Yeah. I mean, no, but I will do it. I'll relax as we get into it. I'm a little nervous, but it's more, I'm just really, really tired. And so that's Keeping my enthusiasm down, but I know what we're doing and I know the importance of it

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and I have a stage persona, so once I'm on, I'm on.

JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah. Yeah. I'm nervous too. So everyone's in the same boat there. Let's start --

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Can you see my paperwork?

JACK MACCARTHY: When you lifted it just now, I can see it.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Okay. It's just helping me to remember things.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: But since I don't have my glasses on, I can't read 00:01:00it, so I'm just trying to figure out how am I gonna rig this so I can actually read what I wrote down, but not make it look like ... Oh, and the next thing I wanted to say was --

JACK MACCARTHY: I don't think it's terrible if we see the papers sometimes. I think it's okay. For that to be part of it.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: All right.

JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah. And am I saying Yoseñio correctly?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Yes.

JACK MACCARTHY: Okay.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: If you're not a Spanish speaker, that's absolutely correct.

JACK MACCARTHY: Okay. Could I have you say and spell your first and last name please?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Yoseñio Y O S E N I O,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Lewis L E W I S.

JACK MACCARTHY: My first question is about your name. Why do you spell your first name with both an I and a tilde?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: If you speak Spanish, you know that you don't need both. It's redundant to have an I and a tilde on the end because the tilde takes the place of the I. However, I know from where I've grown up

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and where I live now, that it's very difficult for 00:02:30people to pronounce my name. There are too many vowels. It's just so foreign to people that they just don't know how to pronounce it. I put the I and the tilde on the end to force people to work their tongues, to make the enya sound. Even if they don't say it the way Spanish speakers do,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: they still have to use their tongue in a way that is 00:03:00similar to what Spanish speakers do and what Spanish names basically require.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I want people who don't speak Spanish or who have attitudes about non-waspy sounding names, I want them to have to work. If they can't say Yoseñio, or they can't say Yoseñio, which is how it is done in Spanish,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: then I want them to have to challenge themselves to 00:03:30come up with some form of enya in their pronunciation. Number one, they learn a new way to say a word. Number two, they recognize that names are names and they don't have to come in a certain fashion in order to be palatable or appropriate or acceptable. I just want people to have to work;

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: work to know my name, work to say it correctly. 00:04:00That's a way you show me respect. That's a way you show respect to the people I come from.

JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah, absolutely. When and where were you born?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I was born in October of 1959 in Newport, Rhode Island, the smallest state in the union that used to have the longest name, but does not anymore.

JACK MACCARTHY: I'm gonna go sort of chronologically today. One of 00:04:30the earliest memories that I wanted to talk about was a moment when you were three with your friend Bobby, and there was this moment of knowing yourself and recognition and being validated by Bobby at the time.

JACK MACCARTHY: Do you mind sharing that story?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: When I was three, my best friend was Bobby. He lived across the street from my grandmother. And because we were three, we weren't in school yet, I don't know that there was such a thing as pre-K or anything like that. You, at least with my family, spent the time with your relatives. There was always some relative who was available to watch you. I spent mornings and part of the afternoon with my grandmother

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and Bobby and I would hang out, we'd play in the 00:05:30street, we'd play under the houses. We'd have a ball. One day, we had to go to the bathroom and we just decided we were gonna go together because it would save time.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: We went into the bathroom, we pulled down our pants, he stood up and I sat down and I did not understand. I was completely flummoxed. Why is it happening like this? What does this mean?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Why do you have something that I don't have? You can 00:06:00pull something outta your pants, and I can't. I just was very, very confused. Then I got scared and I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought I was sick and I thought something had fallen off and other part of my body were going to fall off. We had to get to the hospital so I could get fixed. In my three year old mind and with my three year old voice, I told Bobby, "We need to go to the hospital right away. Something's wrong with me?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Take me to the hospital." He's just looking at me 00:06:30like, first of all, we're three. How am I take you to the hospital? And then it just kind of dawned on him, you are freaking out. I don't know why, but I don't wanna stay in the bathroom with you anymore because it's this small little space and you're getting weird and I'm just insistent that we have to go to the hospital and he finally recognizes, he needs

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: to ask me why, so I can explain to him what's going 00:07:00on for me. I tell him we don't look alike and I don't understand why we don't look alike. I don't understand why you seem to have something that I don't have, but we both have it. How can that be? I didn't know what I was saying. I was just like so shocked and he started laughing and he said, oh, I know what's going on. I took a shower with my dad one time

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and, and I asked him the same thing, because like 00:07:30what we have, his is way bigger than mine, and I didn't understand how that could be. And he said it's because when you grow all of your body grows as you get older and you get bigger. He said to me, so you're just smaller, but you're gonna grow just like I'm gonna grow. When you get older, it's gonna grow and you'll be fine. I'm three, this is my best friend, and he's telling me,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: okay, you are a little lacking now, but you won't be 00:08:00forever, so I'm cool. I'm happy. My best friend has saved me and we go out of the bathroom and go back to the street to play. I probably went under the house because we would love to go under the house and explore. That's how I found snakes and snails. No, I definitely found snakes and snails, definitely the snakes though.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: A lot of garter snakes when you'd pick up the rocks 00:08:30under the house. We would hang out down there and have little adventures. It was really nice, and Bobby just always saved me. He always made me feel okay. He never made me feel that I was wrong or bad or different or that there was something wrong with me. I was the only one who thought there was something wrong with me. Bobby thought I was perfectly fine. We were able to go out and play and keep playing for the rest of our time together without incident.

JACK MACCARTHY: Was your childhood full of a lot of exploring like 00:09:00that? Like what was going on? What was your life like as a child?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Life as a child was actually very difficult. It was filled with a lot of harm. I was sexually abused from five years old to 13

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: by five of my six uncles, my grandfather, friends of 00:09:30the family and female cousin. I don't really have a whole lot of happiness in my childhood. I have a lot of things to be recovering from and I continue to recover from them. There's a part of me that's hesitating because I wanna say I don't regret what happened to me.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Of course, I regret it. But what I'm saying is 00:10:00because it happened, I learned new skills to survive and to be a helper, to be one of Mr. Rogers helpers and to recognize when people need help and to offer it rather than waiting for them to ask for it.

JACK MACCARTHY: First of all, I'm just so sorry that that happened 00:10:30and it's not right. And I also am curious about the age 13, because I've read you say that you have been a social justice activist since you were 13. Can I ask what happened that made you an activist?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Yes. You can ask that.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: But I do want to reflect back on being 13 and being 00:11:00pregnant and being in school, and that 13 or that age 13 to 14, because I turned 14 while I was pregnant. During that time I went into labor while I was in school,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: In my Science class, at 11:30 in the morning, and I 00:11:30had no idea what was happening. I just knew something was happening, but I also knew I was in school so I could not leave. I had to be bleeding to death in order to leave school. I wasn't doing that, so I remained until school was over, but by the time I got home, I had started bleeding and I was hemorrhaging, and I could not get up the stairs to my room,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and that's how my condition became known to others. 00:12:00Nobody knew previous to that, but it was at six and a half months and she was a stillborn. It was difficult. It was very difficult to be 14 years old, to not really know what was happening to my body, but to know something was, and then the actual experience of having the excuse me,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: of having the child of going through labor and having 00:12:30the child and having people pretty much dismiss me, either the assumption that I did something to be in that condition or I deserved it or I was loose, and immoral because that's how those people are. The assumptions made that this is typical for black families, for Latin families

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: to have Children who are having children. There was a 00:13:00whole bunch of stereotypes that I had to deal with, in addition to the actual delivering a child that was already dead, and all of what that did to my psyche, that was part of the 13. The other part of 13 was going to a day camp in the summer because I lived in the projects and this was an opportunity for me

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: to do what was in New York. They had this thing 00:13:30called the Fresh Air Fund and people who were poor and never really got fresh air because they lived in the city and they lived in the crime and the grime and all of that, those unfortunate kids would get sent to fresh air sites. They would get sent to camps. They would get sent to lakes. They'd experience nature and a new way of being,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and learn an appreciation for the world. But my camp 00:14:00was just a day thing and it was, you didn't go off to the woods somewhere or some other state, you went to a building and you did arts and crafts and things like that. Basically you stayed occupied during school hours basically, so you didn't get in trouble. I went to this and because I grew up on an island,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I knew so many of the people that were born when we 00:14:30were all in the same schools. We were all doing the same events. You're on an island, so you see the same people over and over again, and I would see people that I had grown up with and a few people that I had not seen. There was one kid who was there, who was also 13, but who had the mental capacity

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: of maybe an eight year old, and he was being bullied. 00:15:00I did not like that, and I didn't know what to do, but I thought, 'there are staff here, they should know what to do. They should be able to protect any child that comes through those doors.' So I went to the staff and talked to them about what was going on, and they dismissed me. And I said, "No, you don't get to dismiss me like that. Someone's being hurt.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Your job is to protect us." Don't even begin to ask 00:15:30me where all this energy came from at 13, I have no idea. I just knew something was wrong. I recognized it, and I had a responsibility to try to fix it. The staff did nothing. This kid kept getting bullied. I kept getting more and more angry. I decided, you know what? This is a government building. That means the government pays for this to run.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: That means taxes pay for this to run. That means I'm 00:16:00writing to the governor because I don't like my taxes being used like this. I am 13, I don't pay any taxes, but I am determined to turn this into a tax issue so that the governor will have a responsibility to address the issue. I write a complete letter to the governor explaining exactly what's going on and that our tax money should not be used to bully other children,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and you need to do something about it. Full of 00:16:30myself. I send the letter to Providence, to our state capital, and I think maybe a month or so later I got a response. I don't know if it was actually the governor or somebody in his office or what, but I got out a letter that says 'Governor of Rhode Island',

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: so I'm cool now. I get the letter and it says, 00:17:00"You're absolutely right. Thank you for writing me. This should not happen. There will be an investigation, and I promise you, if you go to this camp again, next summer, you will not see this happening." I'm thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. I'm so used to adults saying one thing and doing something else. I don't believe any of it, but I have this letter. The next year I'm going to the camp again,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: he was right. Things were different. There was no 00:17:30bullying. There were all kinds of little programs put in place. People who were a little slower had needed a little more attention and time to comprehend things, they got that kind of training. It wasn't just, Ooh, look at the flower, go find up in the field. It was nice things, but it wasn't addressing their needs and the way they needed to be addressed,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and that changed. I became drunk with power. It 00:18:00became, oh, you see a wrong, you acknowledge that wrong, you try to fix that wrong until it's right. That's what started me as an activist, that I knew if I saw something wrong or something bad or something incomplete, I had a responsibility to try and fix that. I didn't know exactly what that meant.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I learned later through my association with the very 00:18:30few Jews that I grew up with that I was embracing a notion of tikkun Olam, that I was embracing the notion that I don't have to repair all the ill in the world, but I do have a responsibility to try, at least. For me, I've taken that on wholeheartedly that I do have that responsibility.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I've come into this world. I've experienced all kinds 00:19:00of drama and trauma, but I've also experienced a tremendous amount of wonderful happiness. I have a responsibility to try and ensure that others can feel that as well. I have a responsibility that when I see harm occurring, I step in to try and mitigate that, to try and eliminate that if possible. That's how my life has been, but it started with me being 13 and seeing someone getting bullied and thinking

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: that's just not right, and it has to change.

JACK MACCARTHY: I love that. I love that you went straight to the top.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: But I started with the staff and they were ignoring me. It's like, oh, well, if you're not gonna do it, who's next? I don't wanna stay with everybody who's here. The next person would be like the city council, but eh, the money's coming from Providence, let me contact Providence. All right, the governor's in Providence, I'll contact him.

JACK MACCARTHY: That's amazing. You also mentioned Earth Day, 1972 as 00:20:00being a significant event for you.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: It was pretty darn significant. That's pretty good because I will usually swear at the drop of a hat and I'm trying to keep this clean. I don't know how long I'll be able to do it, but I'm trying. I was 12

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and it was Earth Day. There was gonna be a tree 00:20:30planting, and I had been asked to write a poem because I had been writing since I knew how to write. I had been writing short stories and essays and poems and share them with my teachers because I love their approval. I would do anything for my teachers. One of them decided you're a good writer, we need some kind of activity, create a poem

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: while we are doing this whole tree planting and Earth 00:21:00Day recognition. And I was crazed. In my hometown, this was in sixth grade for me, and there was one sixth grade on the entire island. There is three cities on the island. In the city of Newport where I was, there's just that one sixth grade.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: No matter what other school you might have gone to, 00:21:30if you went to private school, if you went abroad for a year or something like for sixth grade, everybody came together. So to me, everybody on the island is gonna see me doing this. I better write something really good. I better not mess it up. I stressed on writing this poem, but I did it, and I read it to the entire class. We were all outside around this tree.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: That was this sapling that was getting planted, and I 00:22:00felt nervous, but so proud that someone recognized that I was a good writer and wanted me to showcase that. That was my first my first let me say public recognition of my writing. There had been bits and pieces where I recognized,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and bits and pieces where other people were saying, 00:22:30oh, you write well, I can see that you've made it. You've made this vivid picture for me. But I never really thought it was just another thing that I did. And honestly, I used it more as therapy. This is how I'm gonna keep from killing anybody else. If I just write all this stuff out, rather than holding it inside. Basically, it was therapy for me, but I was good at it. People recognized that

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and I got to showcase myself. I got an award. 00:23:00Everybody had to clap for me. I was like on cloud nine for that entire day because it was my day, was me and that sapling getting all the attention. I really liked it. I really liked being validated as a writer and as someone who cared about the environment, as someone who wanted a future where everybody could breathe and breathe freely and take in lots of oxygen, because we had trees all over.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I felt really proud of that. And that was another 00:23:30moment where it was clear to me that there's a trajectory that I'm on, whether I recognize it or not to be an activist and to be a writer, to tell the stories, and to right the wrongs.

JACK MACCARTHY: Is that kind of what you mean when you say

JACK MACCARTHY: there's no activism without art and no art without activism?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Yes. Although that did not really come to fruition for me, I wasn't steeped in it until I was in college. I took an art history class and a world religions class at the same time. I believe there was not Western Civ, but there was some other kind of history class in addition to the history of world religions and art history.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: It all came together for me. I began to see the 00:24:30connections between the type of art in a particular time in history and how that was able to motivate people to get involved in activism. I noticed how activism was reflected in the types of art that manifested. I recognize there's a connection here and there's particularly a connection for me. Like, I can go out and picket

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and walk the street with the best of them. But when I 00:25:00can create a visual image with my words and I can create a call to action with my words. That is what makes my activism so much more real and so much more necessary because I incorporate, I recognize that there are intersections and art is one of the intersections of activism. Art is a way that

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: those who want to be activists, but can't be marching 00:25:30in the streets and can't be doing die-ins and can't be all the things, the big attention grabbing things. I'm not the kind of person who, now, can go to the Golden Gate bridge and block it because I wanna talk about immigration or I want to have people recognize that homeless people are not all bad.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: If I want to do those kinds of things, when I was 00:26:00younger and healthier, perfectly fine. Now you'd never catch me going to the bridge to try and block it. You catch me going to the bridge, trying to cross it, that's about it. But When I was younger, it really made a big difference to me to be able to see the connections and to embody the connections.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Art really means a lot to me. Writing means so much 00:26:30to me and I love to sing and I love to listen to music, and I love to pretend that I can play instruments when I can't. I love to pretend that I'm on stage and I'm singing this song with such passion that it makes people cry or it makes them smile the biggest smile they've ever smiled. When I was in a gospel choir, I loved it because people would get so excited

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and I didn't have to beat them over the head with 00:27:00religion. I could just beat them over the head with music. I could beat them over the head with love and compassion and with opening my arms and saying, we belong and you belong. We all get to be here, and we all get to have some type of relationship with God. If we believe in a God, whatever it is that we believe in, we get to have that relationship, and others cannot tell us we don't belong because we don't look a certain way,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: because we don't sound a certain way, because we 00:27:30don't love a certain way, because we don't live in a particular place, because we don't make this much money, because we don't have these kind of clothes, et cetera. None of that matters when you are in relationship with someone or something. And you have that opportunity to share that energy, to have that ministry between the two or amongst the many.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: That's what art brings to me, the connection, the 00:28:00struggle, the victory. That's the activism and that's the art. I bring them together because that's essential. I can't do one without the other

JACK MACCARTHY: We might be jumping around chronologically a bit, but this feels like the perfect time to ask about the first time on stage.

JACK MACCARTHY: What was that? When was that?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Oh gosh. Okay. You see these gray hairs? There's some age here and with age comes forgetfulness. The first time I was on stage, I mean, besides the tree planting, I think the first time I was on stage, I was in my late twenties.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I mean, I had been on stage previous to that because 00:29:00I ran groups and I tried to teach people how to engage in safe practices when I was educating about HIV/AIDS and how to prevent becoming positive. I had this whole thing of I'm gonna get up there and I'm gonna act a fool, or I'm gonna be so big that they can't ignore me and they're gonna get the message.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I started doing that early on, but actually getting 00:29:30up, reading my poetry, reading my short stories engaging people in that way was in my late twenties. Then really, really when I was 33, I went from not knowing myself to knowing myself and being afraid to say anything to anybody, to being exposed to myself and having to have to acknowledge,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: to then losing my mind. Here's something that I have 00:30:00noticed with some people when they come out, they have spent so much time being inside and closeted that when they come out, everybody has to know and you make it a huge, huge deal. I came out to everybody at 33. Previous to that, a few people had known. Most people did not know because I had gotten such negative responses

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: that I just decided, why put myself through this? But 00:30:30when I was 33, I had a friend who informed me in no uncertain terms, "You're trans." Back then, it was, you're an FTM, and you need to be around other people like you. I was like, "I'm not that, what are you talking about?" But she saw me when others did not see me. She saw me,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and she gave me a newsletter, which was the FTM 00:31:00newsletter. I read it, cover to cover about a million times. I kept seeing faces, and reading stories that resonated so strongly. I didn't understand how is this happening? How can this be? I thought I was the only one in the entire world and there's a bunch of people like me.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: At 33, I got the newsletter, I found out about the 00:31:30support meetings, and I went to my first meeting and that's when I really got to know myself. That's when I really got to come out, and that's when everybody had to know, and when I say everybody has to know what I'm talking about is, I get on the bus, "Hey, how you doing? I'm FTM." "You don't know what that means? Let me tell you what that means." Nobody on the bus needs to know this.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Nobody on the bus cares, but I'm so full of myself, 00:32:00and I'm so excited that I finally get to say these words, that there are words now. I just feel different. There's just something about 'I'm clear and I get to use clear words and I'm using them with everyone.' Hi, I'm trans. You wanna know what trans is? Let me tell you what. Oh, you're just buying your stuff when you wanna leave? Okay, go ahead. All right. When you come back though, we'll talk about me being trans. Okay.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Just nuts with telling everybody who did not need to 00:32:30know and did not want to know, but I was so proud of myself for being out that I had to do it. Then I calmed down and I recognized, okay, you can be out, but you don't have to tell every single person you encounter because not every single person wants to know this about you before they even know your name, so I calmed down and I read there was a time

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and a place for the coming out and the excitement and 00:33:00the I'm this and I'm that. Isn't that great, and isn't that wonderful. Of course, because I'm an activist, and because the support group decided we were going to have a conference so that we could all gather, I jumped in, helped to organize the conference, met a bunch of people like me and just decided, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm out there and

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I'm being an activist for trans issues. Even though, 00:33:30still at that time, we really didn't have the word that would best identify us, but we saw each other. We knew we weren't alone. We knew we had a community and we just needed to work to organize ourselves better. We had several conferences. I got to know more and more people. I came out more and more. I started doing work around policy changes

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: for the city and county of San Francisco so that 00:34:00trans people could get insurance, and they could have insurance that wasn't ridiculous costing. They could have insurance that had the same stipulations that any other employee could have. Meaning there weren't restrictions on trans gender care, because those restrictions -- Let me back up.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Previous to the expulsion of these restrictions, they 00:34:30were called exclusions to insurance policies and anything to do with transgender people was considered cosmetic, therefore experimental and unnecessary. When I say anything, I mean, anything. If you had a tumor

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: And you needed that tumor removed, but you had begun 00:35:00some type of physical transition, either you were taking hormones or you had had some actual surgeries, Every single medical thing that happened to you subsequent to you beginning your physical transition was attributed to your physical transition. You could have your arm hanging off its socket, "You think the testosterone might have caused

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: the muscles to get too big and that made your arm 00:35:30fall off?" No, I think the fact that I was in a car accident and my arm was injured. That's why my arm is injured, because I was in a car accident. Not because I'm taking testosterone. I had to go to the emergency room once because I had pneumonia and I was having difficulty breathing. And again, "Do you think maybe the testosterone is causing this?" And in my gasps of air it was, yes,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: that's probably true because all men get pneumonia. 00:36:00That's part of being a man. You have to get pneumonia because you have so much testosterone running through your body. That's correct, right? Well, no, not every man gets pneumonia really. Then maybe it's not testosterone that's making it difficult for me to breathe right now, which is what you should be focusing on. Maybe an x-ray is what's best right now, rather than discussion about

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: how much testosterone I take. There were a series of 00:36:30medical encounters where it became clear to me that being trans was not gonna be all nice and accepting and rosy and wonderful. It was a trial, it continues to be a trial, but it's a trial I would do over and over and over again. I have no regrets at all about coming out. I have no regrets about being my full, authentic self.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I have regrets about people not wanting to accept that.

JACK MACCARTHY: How are you feeling physically? Do you want to take a break or do you wanna keep chatting?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: We can keep going. Okay. I'll let you know. It's coming up, but I'm good right now.

JACK MACCARTHY: Okay.

JACK MACCARTHY: Since we're talking about medical, I know that 00:37:30receiving pretty terrible medical care while you had cancer was also a major event. Can you talk more about that?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Yeah, I can talk about that. But overall I want to say that medical care has been a challenge for me because I'm black.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: That's the number one reason because I'm black and 00:38:00number two because I have a female body and female bodies mean next to nothing in medicine, since medicine was created by, for, and about white male bodies.

My skin throws people off, my genitals throw people off, my general build throws people off. It's easier to just say, I don't know how to deal with that,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: or that's too weird for me than it is to say, oh, you 00:38:30have two arms and two legs. What I'm used to, you have two eyes, you have two ears, you have one nose, you have one mouth. You probably have one heart and two lungs, two kidneys, and all the other things that people have that I'm supposed to know about and help to treat. So perhaps I should just look at you as a human being rather than end this oddity that I can't possibly fathom how to treat.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: So medical care has not been great for me my whole 00:39:00life. When I started bleeding, having a period that would not end and did not end for a year and a half, I was so caught up in being ashamed of myself

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and being afraid to have to be put in stirrups that I 00:39:30did not go to the doctor. I just bled every day. I would go through pads, a bag of the pads a day. I became anemic. I had to have a few blood transfusions, but it was like, oh, you're just so anemic, you need to eat more stuff that has iron in it.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: You need to eat more. You need to work out more. You 00:40:00need to do all this stuff. How am I gonna work out when I can barely keep my head up? I'm in trouble here. I finally went to my doctor who was furious with me and said, why didn't you come to me sooner? We could have taken care of this sooner. I explained how I was embarrassed. Actually had to come out to her to explain why I hadn't come to see her,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and she said, "I'm glad you told me, I'm sorry that 00:40:30you went through this by yourself. You don't have to do that anymore. I am here. We might have to follow a certain protocol. If you keep bleeding like this, or there are other occasions, we may very well have to resort to a hysterectomy." A part of me was kind of excited about that, but the main part of me was

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: then that means I'm really sick. If you have to take 00:41:00something out of me, I'm sick. I don't wanna be sick. Please help me not to be sick anymore. She tried, she did the best that she could, however she was pregnant, and she had to go out on maternity leave. Because she had to leave, I was then passed around to different people within her practice, and then referred to people outside of the practice.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I did not have an experience as affirming as I had 00:41:30with her. I had people who just kept referring me because I'm the oddity. They don't know how to deal with me. Why is my voice so deep? Why do I have hair on my face? Why, why, why, why, why? And now all of this was before I actually started taking any hormones, I just happened to have been born with some kind of hormonal imbalance

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: where I had too much testosterone for a girl, and I 00:42:00had way too much estrogen for a girl. At one point I was told that I was producing just below what normal males produce for testosterone. But I was also producing three times the amount of estrogen that women produce, so I was all kinds of messed up. YOSEÑIO LEWIS: When it came time for me to 00:42:30address the issue with the talking to my doctor, finding out what my protocol was that I had to be put on birth control for six months to see if that would regulate my period. If it didn't, then there were other steps. If that didn't work, then there was surgery. I'm taking the birth control pills and hating it because I don't wanna be on birth control of any type,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and I have to go see other doctors and I have to go 00:43:00see other doctors and I have to go see other doctors and I get referred here and I get referred there. Finally, I get somebody who says to me, I think you're just trying to get free surgery. I think you believe that if we believe that you are really ill, you'll get to have this hysterectomy, because you're telling me that you are what a transgender, that's what you call yourself.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: If you are, then that means you want surgery. I think 00:43:30that you're trying to manipulate us to convince us that you should get this surgery, that we would sign off on it and it would be free for you. I'm gonna refer you to a psychologist because you need to talk to someone about this and why you're trying to go down this path. Now I really didn't know what the hell was going on.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I'm just being told that I'm forcing myself to bleed 00:44:00every single day to the point where I think I'm going to die. This man thinks I have that kind of power. I really wish I did have that kind of power because I could change so many things for the better. Clearly, I did not have that kind of power. I got passed around some more. I got referred to a psychiatrist

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: because they wanted to put me on meds, which I 00:44:30refused. I got referred to a therapist who would do biofeedback with me and try to do some kinds of mindfulness with me, which I appreciated, but still was not addressing the issue of I'm bleeding every day. Eventually, I got referred to a fertility specialist.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I go to his office, I'm in the waiting room with all 00:45:00these women who are desperate to get pregnant. I'm there, I'm desperate to get rid of the thing that would allow pregnancy. It was so surreal to be in that space with them and to actually feel sorry for them because I knew what I had worked because I had a baby.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: It might not have worked appropriately, but it did 00:45:30work. It was like, I wish I could give this to you and then you could have your babies and I wouldn't have to worry about that. I would stop bleeding, get into the doctor's actual office and he tells me he's gonna do a water ultrasound. I had to drink like a gallon of water real quick and then not go to the bathroom, hold that water so that he can get good pictures.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: All I can think was I have to pee. I have to pee, do 00:46:00not pee on this man's table. Don't pee on this man's table. That will be very inappropriate. I'm holding it, I'm holding it, I'm holding it, and he's taking the pictures and he turns the monitor to me and he says, look, you see all this white that's all cancer. My very first thought was,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: this is the first time in my life, and I was 36 when 00:46:30this happened. I was 35 when I started bleeding. I was 36 when I finally got the diagnosis or the initial diagnosis, and all I could think was this is the first time in my life where seeing black being black, having black is a good thing.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Being white is bad. At 36, that's when I had that 00:47:00experience, I had to go and get the biopsy done to confirm it was confirmed. I was told you need to have a hysterectomy yesterday. I said, "I'd love to have a hysterectomy yesterday, however, because I wasn't believed for over a year

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and I kept bleeding and kept bleeding and kept 00:47:30getting sicker. I lost my job, which means I lost my insurance, which means I have no way to do this. I have no money saved. I have nothing. I have to go and get a job and get insurance so I can get the care that I need." I found a friend of mine who ran a drug treatment program and I was very honest with her and I just said, "Look, I'm gonna completely use and abuse you. I need insurance.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I want you to hire me. I will work for three months 00:48:00and then I need to have a hysterectomy and I need for insurance to pay for it because I have cancer. She hired me. She let me do my three months probation at that 91st day, my insurance kicked in. I went to a doctor and I said, "Look, this is my situation, and I just got health insurance.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I know you're gonna to do more testing because you 00:48:30need to verify everything. You do all that, but I'm telling you, I need to do this. I have insurance now, let's get it done." And that's what happened. I ended up having the hysterectomy because I ended up with stage two uterine cancer. Everything is out And I'm recovering. Now, because I only have my adrenals producing sex hormones,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I have to have some kind of hormone replacement 00:49:00therapy. I get put on estradiol -- Not estradiol. Yes. Which is testosterone and estrogen, a combination. I get put on that to stabilize me. Then I'm told, well, you can go on estrogen or you can go on testosterone. Which one? What are you interested in? I said, "I'm not interested in estrogen.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: That's for sure. I mean, I don't wanna take the 00:49:30testosterone. I don't want to be on anything, but if I have to go ahead, put me on testosterone." That's how I got on it because I didn't have anything flowing through me. I didn't have enough flowing through me. I had had any number of hormonal issues throughout my life And this was just another one and it became clear that there needed to be some remedy.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: So I was put on the testosterone, and I've been on it 00:50:00since then, since '98 actually is when I got put on it, but it was not my choice. It was not something I wanted just like having a hysterectomy is not necessarily something I wanted. But because I was sick and people weren't believing me, I was getting sicker and sicker and sicker. Then I knew what

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: the course was that I had to take and I had to have 00:50:30the surgery. I had it. Later on, I had a lump in one of my breasts and it ended up being breast cancer. I had the mastectomy because of that. But because they were doing that, I was like, no, you're not gonna just take off one. I want all of it gone,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and I couldn't afford that. Of course, insurance was 00:51:00not gonna pay for all of that. I cobbled together some money to have part of what I wanted done done. Years later, I still need to have more surgery done and I still can't afford it, so it's not happening anytime soon. But my surgeries and the hormones were the result of illness, is not the result of me wanting to physically transition.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I was not interested in doing that because that meant 00:51:30that I was saying to the world, there's something wrong with me and I need to fix me, that you'll accept me. I didn't think there was anything wrong with me. I mean, I certainly thought that when I was younger, but at that point in my life, in my late thirties, early forties, no, I didn't think there was anything wrong with me. I thought the world was not willing to see me. And so I had to stand up as I was to be seen.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I did that. I tried to do that, but then I got sick 00:52:00and I couldn't do that. Once I got better and all of the effects were happening because I was taking testosterone because I had had certain surgeries, then it became, you know what, I don't want to kinda be out and kinda hide and kinda anything. I just want to go ahead and be me.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I want to challenge people for believing that I had 00:52:30to do this in order to be valuable to them in order for me to have value in their eyes. The activists went back to art and I wrote a series of poems and short stories about being multiples, having multiple sides, that all sides were valuable. All of it needed to be

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: valued and seen and appreciated. I was cheating the 00:53:00world and I was doing a disservice to the God that I know by hiding myself and hiding my talents. I was given this gift and I was hiding it away and that was not appropriate. So I had to come out. I had to be seen, I had to let people know that I existed because God put me here to show that I exist

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and to be a teacher, to be a healer, to be a helper, 00:53:30to be a mentor, to be somebody who people could come to for help, without judgment. But I had to do that for myself. First, when I was younger, I was very much, I'm not telling anybody, this is wrong. This is an abomination. I hear this every Sunday in mass, I'm disgusting. I am an abomination unto the Lord.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I cannot say anything to anybody. It wasn't until I 00:54:00got older and I got to learn more and I began to recognize, no, God didn't make a mistake with me. I didn't have a birth defect. There was none of that. I was born exactly as God wanted me to be born. I have the body that God wanted me to have because he wanted me to use it to teach people. To help people learn. There are different ways of being,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and that does not make you bad. That does not make 00:54:30you an abomination that makes you in God's image because that's how he made everyone, in God's own image. Now, if I am a representation of God, how dare I say I can't shine, I can't show my light, I can't be in the world, I can't take up space? That is the abomination unto the Lord, when I don't use the gifts that I've been given. That's how I walk in the world.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Now, I was given this body and I was given this gift, 00:55:00and I cannot hide it away as I was given the gift to write and to express in that fashion. I can't hide that away. I can't pretend that I don't have that skill just because it can be challenging at times.

JACK MACCARTHY: I feel like that's a perfect note to take a break on.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Yeah, I'm getting a little verklempt here. Need to 00:55:30towel off a little bit.

JACK MACCARTHY: Shall we come back at five after the hour? Is that long enough?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Yes, that'll be good. I just leave this as it is, right?

JACK MACCARTHY: Yes.

JACK MACCARTHY: Welcome back.

JACK MACCARTHY: I am curious about the Trans Ams. How did that come about?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I'm trying to remember who actually came up with the title. I really don't remember. It's a quartet, so there were four of us and we liked barbershop music, we liked that harmonizing. We decided we'd create this group,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and I think it was T who came up with the name, 00:56:30because he's into cars and he knows everything about cars. We wanted a name that was kind of a play on words, that was also another way of us being out.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: We were gonna be the trans, and Trans Ams is a car. 00:57:00We were just Trans Ams. Our whole thing was we wanted to harmonize and we wanted to sing and we wanted to have fun, but we also had our serious moments and we actually really, really came together when we were performing a fundraiser for a friend of the group who had Ovarian cancer,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and like me, got tremendously horrible care to the 00:57:30point where she became terminal because of the lack of care, because she was a poor, fat queer woman who people just decided wasn't worthy of their time. If she had had money, if she had clout, if she had known people,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: maybe she would've gotten the care that she deserved, 00:58:00but she did not get it. Once again, I watched someone that I cared very deeply for lose their life because of inaction on the part of medical people. It's still seared into my soul for a number of reasons. I mean, I'm remembering when

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: she had to move out of state because at that point 00:58:30there was no as assisted suicide in California. She had to move, give up everything that she had worked for while she was here, but go someplace else where she could do what she needed to do. What I remember is her calling me. "Why are you calling me?" And she said, "Because I love you

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and because I want you to know what I'm going to do 00:59:00and I want you to be okay with it." I had never had that kind of relationship with someone where in such a profound moment of life, I was being included. I still can't wrap my brain around the fact that she thought I was important enough.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: In her moments of dying, she thought I was important 00:59:30enough to call and ask me if I was gonna be okay with this, and to reassure me. She's the one dying and she's reassuring me. That's the thing that stays with me. That's the art part that stays with me and the activism is that she had to move herself away from her home to get the kind of care that she deserved. Even when that care had to end, that she was able

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: to end her life the way wanted to, with the dignity 01:00:00that she deserved. That was the activism part. I was so proud of her, but I was so angry that she had to lose her life because when you're poor and when you are queer or LGBTQIA+ you are less than, in a lot of people's eyes and out of gatekeeper's eyes, you're less than.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: It's okay to treat you a certain way or to not treat 01:00:30you a certain way. My experience, H's and a guy who also died of cancer because people would not take care of him, would not treat him with the dignity and respect that he deserved, a trans man who also died of cancer. Those people became a big part of the impetus

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: for me to do the work that I do now. H was a white 01:01:00woman and still got treated the way she, because she was poor, because she was fat, and because she was queer, those were the reasons that she didn't get the care that she deserved. R was a trans man, a white man, but a trans man, and so when he kept going to the doctor and saying, "There's something wrong, there's something wrong."

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: He would be told, "You look fine to me. I did this 01:01:30test, everything's fine. You're good." He died. Those people along with what I experienced and what I had seen other people experience is why, now, my job right now is teaching medical students how to work with transgender patients. I could not, in good conscience, continue to allow

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: what I saw happening and what I experienced to keep 01:02:00happening. All I would do was complain. Okay, take up some air, but you're not taking up space. You're not making a difference. You're just screaming into the void. I decided at that moment, I gotta do something different. It just can't stay like this. That further pushed me into the activism

YOSEÑIO LEWIS:

that I was doing and that I do do now. Also, the paid work that I do. I teach students, medical students at Stanford university and a couple of surrounding colleges, how to work with people like me, how to not be put off by bodies like mine or declarations like mine, how to get the information that you need,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and stop seeing us as such oddities, that you can't 01:03:00possibly work with us. We have blood and we have bone and we have tissue like everybody else, and those things break down and they need care and you have the skill to take care of it, so do that. If there are places where you're confused, ask questions, but don't outright turn me away from the care that I need.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I think I'm making a difference. I think I'm making a 01:03:30difference because I've been doing this for almost six years now, and I'm seeing more and more people who come into the room. I mean, we are in an actual clinic when we're doing these simulations. They are the doctor and they are walking into their office to see their patient, and I'm the patient. When I first started this,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: the character that I play has a female name and is 01:04:00going to the OBGYN clinic, so there's already stress. When I first started the medical students who would come in to do the simulation, had that deer and the headlights look, some of them would open the door, look at me, look at the chart, close the door, and I wouldn't see them again.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Others would close the door and then come back. 01:04:30Others would act like I'm not even looking at you. I'm just gonna read my notes. I'm gonna ask you questions and we're gonna get this done, and then I'm gonna go see another patient. Then others would say, I'm a little confused. And that opened the door for me. As soon as they would just admit their vulnerability, their confusion, that allowed me to teach them, okay, let's go through this. Then when we get to the feedback, I'm gonna tell you how to deal with that. Deer in the headlights, look

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and deer in the headlights feeling, how you can have 01:05:00that because that's authentic, but, I, as the patient, don't need to know about that. There are ways that you can have that experience and I never know about it. I'm gonna teach you how to do that because when you are in a real situation with a trans patient, we are not there to take care of you and your confusion and your frustration and your fear. We are there to get care from you and to provide you

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: with the information that you need in order to give 01:05:30us the best care you possibly can. My job is to ensure that I'm really providing them with those opportunities and I'm giving them the feedback that they need. We have gone from, when I first started, where people were just rude and obnoxious, and "I'm a doctor, how dare you say anything to me?" to, "Hi, my name is so and so, and I use these pronouns. How should I address you?"

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: That is amazing. To me, in almost six years, we've 01:06:00gone from, "I'm running out of the room, because there's that weirdo in the room. I don't know how to deal with that" to "Hi, my name is Yoseñio and I use he/him/his pronouns. How should I address you? And which pronouns would you like for me to use in regards to you? Okay. Today, I'm seeing that you have these symptoms and we're gonna, we're gonna address those." "We definitely are. I just need to ask you a few questions and I want you to know some of these questions

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: can be very sensitive and some of the language that I 01:06:30might have to use can appear offensive. I want you to know, I am not at all trying to offend you. I just don't have other language. I have the clinical language that I have to use. If you have other language that you would prefer for me to use, please tell me that. I'll be happy to use it and make notes in your chart so that everybody who encounters you will also use this language." That's where we've got to,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and that makes my heart so happy. It makes me so 01:07:00happy because that 35, 36, 37 year old me would have loved to have had a doctor like that. And I did, my primary doctor was like that, but she was on maternity leave. I didn't have that comfort, and I didn't have that. I see you as a human being, rather than I see you as a collection of body parts, that don't make any sense to me.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I don't know how to fit it together. Let me refer you 01:07:30to somebody else, so I don't have to deal with you. I don't have to have that now in my life because I've stood up for myself and because others have stood up for me, and because we've created this container where the new doctors can learn how not to treat their patients like shit. They can recognize, okay, you're trans. I got that. Don't quite understand it all, but you're here with a condition that I know about

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and I know how to fix, so let me address that. Let me 01:08:00deal with that. And if I have questions, I will ask them in a respectful way and you can choose to answer or not, because this is your time. I'm the doctor here to care for you. I am not the doctor here for my in-service on the trans 101. That's not why I'm here and that's not why you are here. I don't want you to think that your 15 or 20 minutes has to be spent explaining to me

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: what transgender means for you, when the reason and 01:08:30you're here is because you're having difficulty breathing or you have an annual physical, or you have to do a UA for your job, whatever it is that you're here for. I don't need to have you explain to me about your body and your gender and what you think and what you feel. I know your body, because I studied bodies. I know yours might be a little different, YOSEÑIO LEWIS: but in the 01:09:00overall scheme of things, yours is exactly like what I have studied. And so I just have to get over the visual dissonance and get to the heart of the matter. I'm so grateful that I get to be in a position now where I get to help train people. They've already got a lot of training because it's happening in other parts of their training and other parts of their school is teaching them.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Okay? We're gonna be meeting with trans patients and 01:09:30these are the things that you need to know. These are the ways that you can get rid of that, that momentary fear that you might have. We're gonna do a little role playing now so that you can understand what I'm talking about. When you get that little butterflies in your stomach and you don't quite know what to say or how to say it, or we're gonna help you to understand that. Then you're gonna actually have a simulation where you're with somebody who's trans and your job is to figure out why are they in your office?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: What kind of testing they might need? What kind of 01:10:00initial diagnosis you can make and what is your treatment going to be and what will their prognosis be? All of that in 15 minutes. You're gonna learn how to do that. The same way you'll learn how to do that with older people, elderly people that you never had to encounter. You never had to ask a 75 year old woman about her sex life before, but you had to learn how to do that.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: The same way you had to learn how to deal with babies 01:10:30when you're scared, you're gonna drop them, but you had to learn how to work with babies the same way you had to learn how to work with people, developmental delays, the same way you needed to learn how to work with people who did have obvious abnormalities. They might have had one arm. They might have been born with no arm, any number of things, but they still have internal organs. They still have a basic body and you know how to work with that.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Keep doing what you do, learn how to incorporate new 01:11:00people and new ways of being. And you're gonna be fine. I am so happy that I get to be a part of that. I am so happy because I know all the struggle that I went through was worth it. If I can have one medical student who says, thank you for teaching me this, thank you for this experience. I am not going to forget it.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: And when I do have my first actual trans patient, I'm 01:11:30going to remember you. I'm gonna remember what you taught me and I'm gonna treat that person with the respect that they deserve. What more could I ask for as a trans activist? What more could I ask for than the people that harmed me are turning around and helping others like me, that's just win, win, win, win, win.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I will never get tired of that kind of winning. 01:12:00That's the good kind.

JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah, that makes me so happy to hear about. I, also, am seeing the through line because the way that you are training people to treat those they work with, I hear echoes about in the way

JACK MACCARTHY: that you talked about working at the halfway house 01:12:30and how you got involved in HIV advocacy.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Yeah, absolutely.

JACK MACCARTHY: We're rewinding a bit.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Yes. That's totally fine. That's my life, forwards and backwards and in between and all around, and that's how life is. I started working at -- I actually was working in a school for autistic stick children and adults. I love that.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I loved, loved, loved working with autistic people. 01:13:00Maybe I resonate a little too closely with them. I don't know, but it worked, it worked really well for me. I got to watch people blossom, given opportunities, instead of being told that you are less than, or you'll never amount to because you can't do. And you aren't.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Instead of all that being told, you know what? At 47 01:13:30years old, if all you can do is learn how to dress yourself and figure out, on your board, what you wanna order at a restaurant. That's what you're gonna learn. You are not gonna be hidden away in an institution and be treated like you don't have anything to offer the world. You can dress yourself, you can go and order some food. That's what you have to offer the world, and somebody else like you can see you and write.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: They can do it. I can do that. I can do that. Hell 01:14:00yeah, I'm gonna provide those opportunities. I was at the school and I was greedy. I wanted more money. I mean, that's the whole thing. I wanted more money, so I started doing midnight shifts at a halfway house for federal offenders. I was working seven days a week, big emotional, sensitive, important work.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: That just took a lot of my energy, but I got some 01:14:30money, so I was happy. There was a moment where I was asked if I wanted to work as a case manager at the halfway house and doing that would mean not working at the school because it was a conflict. It was same hours. I stopped working at the school. I was working at the halfway house and then I got asked to work at a group home.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I was doing again seven days a week, working every 01:15:00day, doing lots and lots of stuff. And with the halfway house, I got to a place of Recognizing that more and more people were coming out of jail and prison with no understanding about HIV/AIDS. None. They weren't being taught wherever they were housed because of this.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: How can I say this in a nice way? I can't this 01:15:30ridiculous, stupid notion that sex did not happen in sex, segregated prisons and jails and drugs were not used in jail and prison. We don't have to teach people about HIV/AIDS and how to protect themselves. They come out to our halfway house. They don't know what they're doing.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: They're out there having sex with any and every, and 01:16:00no protection and no understanding of how HIV is transmitted. This is in the mid-eighties. It's still, oh, it's just the gay people who are getting AIDS or the drug users who are getting AIDS. Okay. But you just came from prison where drug use is happening and sex is happening. So whether you want to act like you are following the rules,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: or you want to act as ignorant as the people running 01:16:30the asylum, that's your business. But if you're gonna come be with me, you gonna learn about HIV/AIDS. You're gonna learn how to protect yourself and the people out here that you're having sex with, it is not okay to me that you are out there possibly infecting people, because you don't know your own status because you don't know how you might have become infected. You don't know how to protect yourself and others from further infection.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I asked my boss, can I do an HIV/AIDS education 01:17:00group? That's what I did, I set up this group. For a while, we made it mandatory, because we needed to have people there so they could get the information. I would sit there with the guys and I, and at this point it was just men that I was working with in the halfway house. And I would explain to them and I had my banana and I had my condoms. And I would explain, this is how you protect yourself.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: And then if you're gonna shoot up, you need to have 01:17:30clean works. And I would just use their language. I would explain what you needed to do to protect yourself. Most of the time people would just laugh. Like I don't do that. That's not me. Why am I here? I don't wanna be here. This is r I'm not gay. Why you asking? I don't. Ugh. And I just kept plowing through because that's what people need when they're in that moment of being scared and being nervous so that they proclaim all of this crap just because

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: they don't know how to regulate themselves. That's 01:18:00when you capture them, you don't let them get away. You don't let them think, oh, I just had a little tantrum, so now I don't have to learn, learn about that stuff. I don't have to be responsible. No, you had a little tantrum and you still have to learn about this stuff and be responsible. This is part of you being able to come out of prison or out of jail early and reacclimate yourself to society. If you are gonna be re acclimated, that means you have responsibilities

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and part that is to keep yourself and others healthy. 01:18:30Sometimes, I'd have to do the party line of you are still government property and they can take you back to wherever you came from, whenever they want to, because you still have time to serve. I want you to stay out here. I want you to get a job. I want you to be with your people. I want you to be happy. I want you to go off and thrive in the world. That's not gonna happen if you end up back in jail or prison,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: that's where you're gonna end up. If you don't pay 01:19:00attention in this class. So it was mandatory and then grumbling and "I don't want to do this" and I'm not gay,? But the more they look learned and the more they went and took it to their people, the more they took it to their roommates, the more they took it to their coworkers, the more popular the group got. Every time we'd have a new crop of people coming in, they'd have to take the class, but they had already heard about it

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and they were eager to take it because they wanted to 01:19:30learn just like if they would've wanted to learn in jail or prison, if someone had taken the time to teach them. Well, I taught them when they were out and rebel that I am. I found a way to, how shall we say allow for the entrance of, how shall we say condoms into the jails and prisons before it was allowed.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I found a way to bring in an example of clean works, 01:20:00shall we say to explain to the guys I know you're using drugs in here. I don't want to hear about it. I don't care about that. What I care about is you being safe. I know that you're getting needles. I know that you're getting syringes. I'm begging you not to share them. If you absolutely must share, get bleach,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: clean everything with bleach several times over 01:20:30before you reuse it or somebody else uses it, simple as that and no judgment and "no you must" and "you have to" and "you better". It was just do what you need to do to take care of yourself and to take care of your loved ones. I would just keep saying that and keep saying that and more and more people were appreciative of that and were teaching others about that,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and that's all I wanted. I wanted the information to 01:21:00get out and to get spread because it didn't make any sense that we were sending people out into the world and we were not equipping them. I'm talking people who had been in jail for 25 years because they robbed a bank or they had been in prison for 25 years because they robbed a bank. They come out, they don't know about electronics. They don't know about how, why do I have so many forks on the table? I don't know,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I'm not eating. Because they don't know how to choose 01:21:30which utensils to use. They don't know about how you go and apply for a job. They don't know how to deal with their anger or anxiety. They know how to get angry and they know how to act out, but they don't know how to stay calm and say, "All right, you're talking to me like I'm 12 and I have to just swallow this because I need the job. Then I can show you who I am and

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: you'll stop treating me like a child. You'll treat me 01:22:00like an adult." Not knowing how to balance a checkbook, back when we had checkbooks, different things that they didn't know how to do, but they were expected to know and to do right and never cause a problem or go back to jail. I just didn't think that was right. We were setting them up. We weren't giving them the skills. And then we got upset when they did something that they knew to do,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: they knew how to commit crime. They knew how to fly 01:22:30off the handle. They knew how to drink and drug because that's what they had been taught to do to deal with their issues, and here I am saying, you don't have to use that as your fallback, that doesn't have to be your crutch anymore. You can use your education. You can use your own intelligence. You figured out how to Rob a bank. You can figure out how to get a job, same skill set, it's just applying it differently.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I would tell them you have to have intelligence to be 01:23:00a freaking criminal. Not everybody can do that, people think they can, you really can't. Robbing a bank is a big -- You gotta do logistics. You can apply that in a different way. Just decide to do it differently, and there will be tons of people there to help you, but you've got to be willing to do it in a different way. That's what I would say to them.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: 9 times out of 10, I would get, "Nobody ever told me 01:23:30I had choices. Nobody told me that I could choose not to do crime. Nobody told me I could choose not to use drugs. Nobody told me I had more to offer the world than labor my back. Nobody told me that. Then you come along telling me and putting stuff in my head and making me think I can do what I wanna do."

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I met a guy who was in prison for wire fraud. He did 01:24:00stupid shit, but he wanted to be an architect. He had never told anyone because he thought people would laugh at him. I said, "If you wanna be an architect, why don't you go to school and be an architect?" "Nobody's gonna want me now, I've been in prison and I'm a drug user." "But you know about shapes, and you know how

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: to create masterpieces out of this little dream, this 01:24:30imagination that you have. You know how to create buildings and whole city blocks of beautiful architecture. You should use that." "Nobody will want me." Nobody will want you as long as you don't want you. When you recognize your value, you can't help but show that to others and they can't help but be infected by it. That can't help but move you forward.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Find the love and joy in yourself, you will shine 01:25:00naturally, and that will attract the people that you want. In the same way, when I ended up getting a promotion that brought me up here to work in a halfway house here in San Francisco, I encountered a trans woman who'd come outta prison and

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: was very timid and scared and all of that. I did her 01:25:30intake I had asked for it. I mean, I was the assistant director of the halfway house. Doing intakes with new residents was not in my job description anymore, but because she was trans and because I wanted her to have a good first impression, I did the intake.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: The first thing I said to her was, "What name would 01:26:00you like for me to use with you?" And she stared at me like I don't know. I said, "But do you have a name that you would prefer people to call you?" "Yeah, but nobody calls me that. I mean, I just came out of prison. I have my eight digits and I have my last name." I said, "Okay,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: but here we do things a little differently. If you 01:26:30have a name that you would like for people to use to address you, that's the name that we will use. I just need for you to tell me what it is." Again, that blank look on her face. Like, are you actually allowing me to be who I want to be? Are you actually saying I can do that? We just kind of stared at each other for a while. Then she finally said, "I want to be called B."

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I said, "That's what you'll be called. Because I am 01:27:00the assistant director, all of the staff will call you B, all of your co-residents will call you B and I'll do my best to make sure any vendors or any other people who come into the building call you B. For your first week or so. You're gonna be in a room by yourself." "Only because I want you to just

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: get acclimated to this place. And I want people to 01:27:30get acclimated to you when another trans person comes into the program, or if a person who identifies as a woman comes into this program, you two are gonna meet and figure out if you can share a room. If you can, then that's that. If you can't, we'll work it out. But eventually you are going to have a roommate and that person will be female-identified."

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: "I don't understand what are you doing?" "I'm 01:28:00treating you like a person." She said, "Yeah, what are you doing that for?" I said, "Because you deserve it." And I get that she couldn't understand. I couldn't understand, somebody was treating me the way I wanted to be treated. I balked at it because, "What? You're giving me what I want?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: That possibly happen. You need to back up," and here 01:28:30she was getting what she wanted from somebody who at that point still wasn't really out, still wasn't really authentic, but knew that she needed to know that she could be authentic. So B the people who died, other trans people that I met,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: all of them helped me to recognize you are not being 01:29:00authentic. You need to come out fully and be fully yourself. You've had all these experiences where you have helped others. I mean, I set up a system with the city and county of San Francisco, whereby residential drug treatment centers had to provide services to transgender people, or they would lose their city funding.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: But that came about from a lot of work on my part and 01:29:30other people. We got the insurance for trans city employees that eventually became citywide, so anybody who lived and or worked in the city and county of San Francisco could have the insurance that they needed, could be protected, could get the care that they needed and not be discriminated against. Very proud of being a part of all those things. But it also pulled me to say,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: you can't keep hiding. You can't keep pretending, 01:30:00like you're not a part of this group that you are so adamant about serving. I had to come out fully. And when I did, I had somebody by my side who loved me unconditionally. That was my first time experiencing that as well. Being trans was new, being out was new and having somebody who knew

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and accepted me and fully accepted me and advocated 01:30:30for me, completely new, but all of those experiences were what propelled me to recognize once again, my art and my activism walk hand in hand end. It is imperative that I use both to do the work that needs to be done to make the world better, to heal some of this harm that has occurred.

JACK MACCARTHY: We have about 20 minutes left and there's four 01:31:00questions that we ask every OUTWORDS interviewee. I'm going to ask you one more question and then get to those final four.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Okay.

JACK MACCARTHY: One of the questions you said you wish people asked you more

JACK MACCARTHY: was tell me about your daughter and what she 01:31:30represents. You also mentioned that writing about her has opened [inaudible] for you. I was hoping you could talk about that.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I can talk about it. I hopefully will not break down, but if I do, it's all good. It's in service to her,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: so it's all good. Aurelia was my daughter. She lived 01:32:00inside of me for six and a half months, but I was too damaged internally and too young and not developed enough to be able to carry a child to term. At six and a half months, she stopped breathing. At six and a half months, I went into labor while I was in school,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: in my science class at 11:30 in the morning. I don't 01:32:30really recall the time, but I want to say somewhere between six and seven is when I had the baby. I want people to ask about her because she's so significant in my life. Because of her, I can actually say that I am a parent rather than using that term to refer to my siblings who I raised,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: but I'm not their parent. As much as I feel that kind 01:33:00of connection with them. I don't have that. I had that with her, but because of the way that she was created and the way that she came into this world, and the fact that I am a trans man, I think people are afraid to ask about her or afraid that somehow

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: they'll be invalidating me as a trans man, because I 01:33:30was pregnant and had a child. I think people are just afraid because it's such a touchy subject. Like, how do we ask you about having a child without remembering that you were barely a teenager when you had that child and that that child was the result of incest and rape. How do we ask you about that? And for me,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: it's any way you can, I want to talk about her. I 01:34:00want to talk about how she came to be. I want to talk about how she died. I want to talk about how she still lives in me. I want to talk about the poem that I wrote for her, which is my signature poem. You know, like how singers have their song that people know them by. Whatever success Tony Bennett has had in his life, everybody knows him from, I left My Heart in San Francisco. If he starts to sing that song,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: that's Tony Bennett's song. If somebody else is, 01:34:30"Hey, that's Tony Bennett's song." You don't sing that in the same way. She's mine, and I want to be able to talk about her. I don't want to be muzzled because I walk in the world as a man. I don't want to have my experiences denied. Because people have to wrap their brains around it,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: they, therefore, question how much of a man are you, 01:35:00if you're so willing to talk about being pregnant and having a child? Now, this was way, way, way back before there was any kind of acceptance of trans men. Having children Like birthing the child themselves rather than their partner or someone else having the child.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: But this was my baby. This was my life. Of course, I 01:35:30wanna speak about her. Of course, I want to cry about her. Of course, I think about all the things that she have done in the world, given the opportunities. I want people to ask about her. I want every February 4th that someone says, "Oh, this is the day that Aurelia was born. How are you doing? How are you feeling?"

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I want someone to allow me to share those feelings 01:36:00And everybody walks on tiptoes. Everybody is very -- Like on eggshells around me in regard to that. I don't know why, because I don't believe I've ever created a situation where people could not ask about her, could not talk about her, could not celebrate her with me. But instead I've had people who have shied away and people in my family never ask about her.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I think, I don't know, but I'm thinking it's because 01:36:30they're afraid they'll have to talk about incest and how prevalent it was. Unfortunately, I believe, still is, within my family. We're just not gonna talk about it. We're just not gonna mention her at all. But what that does is take a big part of my heart and keep it hidden. I have to keep bringing her up.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I don't get a mother's day card or a father's day 01:37:00card or some kind of acknowledgement that I had a child within me, that I birthed a child, that I went through that experience. There's no acknowledgement of that unless I provide it, and that hurts me in the same way that I would imagine it would hurt others who have lost children

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and those children are never acknowledged. I want to 01:37:30be able to talk about her. I want to be able to smile like I am now, when I talk about her, I want to have all that love that is still residing in my heart to have a place to burst open. That only happens when people ask, so that was my baby girl. I had big plans for her. She was going to be adopted

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: because there was no way in hell. I was gonna let her 01:38:00come into the craziness that she was gonna be born into. It was like, you get born and you go be with people who will treat you right, and who will love you and inspire you and celebrate you. That was my plan. She just wasn't able to stay alive long enough for that to come to fruition. I still blame myself. I got no prenatal care. I didn't really even know that I was pregnant for a long time because I had such irregular periods.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I could go for 9 months, 12 months and not have a 01:38:30period and then have a period every month for a week, the entire year, and then not have a period again for three months, and then have a period that was two days and was just spotting. I mean, I never knew how to plan for it, so I didn't know I was pregnant for the longest time. Then when it finally dawned on me,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: there's something going on in here. I didn't tell 01:39:00anyone. I didn't know what to do. I was ashamed. I thought it was my fault. I thought if I said anything that I would be sent away somewhere that I would be judged, so I said nothing. Because of that, I still carry some guilt that she might have had a better chance if she had gotten some care during her gestation and she didn't get that. I feel bad about that,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and part of my art and activism is to atone for not 01:39:30giving her the care that she deserved. Not doing the best that I could to keep her alive so that she could then go off and be with a family that could love her. What I do now, the work that I do now, the art that I do now, the activism that I do now is in service to her.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: In service to what she could have been in the 01:40:00opportunity. In service to what I could have been knowing that she was out there changing the world, doing just like her daddy-mom, which is what I called myself in relation to her. That she was gonna be out there making the world a better place. That I had a small part in that. I wanted that so much. Now I try to make the world better for other babies

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and other baby girls and other little kids, and 01:40:30others like me who just needed somebody older to say, "You matter, you're important. I really value you. I see so much good in you and whatever I can do to support you, to spread your wings, I'm going to do because you deserve that just because you're you, not because I can get something out of it, but because you are you and you deserve it."

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: That's what she brings me. She brings me that hope 01:41:00for better days and for my life to become a little more stabilized than it is right now. The chance to just to say I did some good in the world.

JACK MACCARTHY: [Inaudible]. As a trans guy who did place a kid for 01:41:30adoption, it's very meaningful for me to hear you say that.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: And I'm very happy that you had that opportunity.

JACK MACCARTHY: Me too.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I believe that child will grow and thrive because of the opportunity that you gave them, because you love them enough to do that.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Somehow you're gonna know somehow they're gonna 01:42:00contact you in some future, even if it's that they're gonna write some great thing and you're gonna read it, and they're gonna say, "This is for the person who brought me into the world. I still love you." You're gonna get something like that because Aurelia does that for me when there are incredible ocean waves, when the sun is so bright. When I see a flower, when I see a child smiling,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: when a child just runs into somebody's arms and 01:42:30they're so happy, that's my baby girl. That's my baby girl telling me I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm alive. I'm doing what I need to do. That's what I believe, and that's how I carry her with me. All the work that I'm doing now is because she continues to inspire me. She does. The God that I know does, tells me that I'm doing good work,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: even though I'm struggling now because of my health 01:43:00issues, I have those two protecting me. I didn't have that when I was a kid, but I have her and I have God and I know I'm gonna make it might not be exactly as I want it, but I know I'm gonna make it. I know that she's a big part of why I'm able to make it.

JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah. Yeah.

JACK MACCARTHY: Feelings. Who's chopping onions in here?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: But I'm a manly man. There are no feelings. What are you talking about? I love that part of me. I love that. I'm able to embrace my femininity that I'm willing to say, yes, I will cry. Yes. I will have long hair that makes people wonder. Yes, I will embrace the part of me

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: that loves to snuggle and loves to hug and loves to 01:44:00kiss and loves to be gentle. If those are feminine qualities, then please give me more. I am totally open to that. That's again, part of that twoness, being black, being Latino, being male, being female, being trans, but not trans enough being Latino, but not Latino enough being black, but not black enough, being female, but not female enough.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: All the things where I'm not enough of something, but 01:44:30I live in multiple worlds. I'm not ashamed of that. It's what makes me who I am. My twoness and my Aurelia and my God combined to create this magic.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: While I used to be ashamed of this magic, and while I 01:45:00tried to kill this magic when I was 16, that's not an option anymore. It wasn't an option after I tried. I'm so proud of myself that I've been able to in the depth of, I despair my depression of my believing that life is not really gonna work out the way I had hoped it would, and the depths of all of that, there's always this glimmer,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: this little light, that shines that says to me, "You 01:45:30are my daddy and my mommy, you can't go anywhere." "You are the one who helped me to believe in myself, you can't go anywhere. You are the one who told me I was great just as I was, you can't go anywhere. You're the one who made sure I got to eat and I had clean clothes when I went to school, you can't go anywhere." I love that I have all of that within me

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: because I am willing to embrace all of me. I'm not 01:46:00ashamed of having been pregnant. I'm not ashamed of having had a child. I'm not ashamed of things that are supposedly uniquely female in origin. I'm not ashamed that I can cry, that I can access my feelings. That I'm not the stereotypical guy that I didn't try so hard to be seen as male that I killed the female in me.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: She is still there. She will always be there because 01:46:30she made me, she made who I am. I couldn't let her go, if I wanted to. She's my embodiment of love and of hope and of the future, so I keep the feminine side of me. I will keep the female part of me like I keep my birth certificate with my birth name and my birth gender on it,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: because in Rhode Island you have both the name and 01:47:00the gender on the birth certificate, and I won't change it. Lots of people are telling me, "This it's confusing." I don't care. My life is confusing. Welcome to my world. This is how it is and I'm not gonna make it all nice and neat and tidy for you when it's been messy for me and it's gonna continue to be messy for me, and I'm all right with that because that's my life.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: My baby girl, my God, me and the people who have 01:47:30loved me and nurtured me and the people who have harmed me, all of them have combined to create what you see in front of you. How dare I say, I'm gonna cut off this part of me and that part of me? I'm not gonna acknowledge that and this doesn't exist and that never happened. It will pretend. No, no. I was raised as a girl. I was given a girl's name.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: My name was Yolanda Veronica. Even if you don't know 01:48:00about Yolanda, because that's a foreign name, you know Veronica. Yolanda Veronica is not a male name, and so there's confusion. And again, welcome to my world. It's full of confusion, but that's what makes it exciting. That's what makes the possibility so great,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: as you cut through the confusion and get to the 01:48:30awareness. But it's cutting through that's difficult, but it's what you have to do to get to that light. You gotta go through the muck and the mud and the slime and the horribleness to get to that joy, to get to that warm, gentle hug that lifts you up and tells you can go on one more day and then you can go on one more day and then you can go on one more day

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: because you've got the baby girl and God and yourself 01:49:00to move you forward.

JACK MACCARTHY: Yes, yes. Okay. I'm going to ask these final four questions

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: The final four? March madness.

JACK MACCARTHY: Okay.

JACK MACCARTHY: If you could tell your teenage self one thing, what 01:49:30would it be?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: It's good that you weren't successful at 16 because so much goodness, so much joy and love will be coming into your life before you know it. It's really good that you didn't succeed at 16 and it's really good that you decided

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: that could never be an option again, because it's 01:50:00forced you to think of new ways to deal with your stress and your sorrow. You've learned how to be creative. You've learned how to use your art and your activism to keep yourself alive.

JACK MACCARTHY: Do you believe in the notion of an LGBTQ or trans superpower? And if so, what is it?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I think if we did have a superpower,

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: definitely that we're resilient, because we go 01:50:30through so much and yet here we are. I think that we know we have the capacity for, and we know how to be vulnerable because we have to be because people put us in those positions and we have to survive it. And we do. That's a skill because a lot of people can't survive, but we do.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Our creativity, our innate creativity is what allows 01:51:00us to survive and sometimes move to thriving. I wanna say we have one more superpower and I believe, I wanna say

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: we are really full of compassion, except when we're 01:51:30not. But normally we're really, really full of compassion because we know what it's like to have that in our lives, so we want to give it to others. We want so much to help others. We wanna be the helper, so we're resilient, we're vulnerable and we're compassionate.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: And those are things that get us through and that 01:52:00help others to get through.

JACK MACCARTHY: Absolutely. Why is it important to you to share your story?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Because old FTM, sorry, just, can

JACK MACCARTHY: You just restate the question in your answer?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: This is why it's important to me to share my story

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: and for OUTWORDS to have honored me by allowing me to 01:52:30share my story, because my story's important, because people need to hear it and see, feel and hear themselves in the story, because I'm tired of people saying trans and only thinking of trans women. I don't mean in any way to disrespect trans women, but we exist as well.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Trans men exist as well and we get sick and we die 01:53:00and we get discriminated against and we get good, great jobs. We pave the way for others and we create these great inventions and we do all those things and we don't get seen. It's important for me to utilize this opportunity through OUTWORDS, to be seen, to say to other trans men, you're not alone.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: We are here. We are making strides. We are doing 01:53:30amazing things and you can be a part of this. You don't have to hide yourself away. You don't have to act like you don't exist. You do, you exist, you are important, you're vital, you're necessary. You just need for somebody to tell you that and to crack the door open a little bit so you can come running out, but you just need a little help. I believe that now

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: in service to Aurelia my job is to open that door a 01:54:00little bit for a variety of people, but especially queer people, but just like I'm opening the door for the med students. I wanna open the door for the trans person who is not sure they want to use that term. They want a whole different term for themselves. I want to open the door for the person who's gonna tell me

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I challenge the way you think and make me have to 01:54:30work. I wanna open the door for somebody who says I have a completely different way of doing this and here I go and I wanna support them through that. I want to hear the person who's saying, I'm gonna make sure this law happens so that people are protected. I want to support that person because somebody supported me when I was out there tilting at windmills.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I want people to know this world can be theirs. They 01:55:00don't have to suffer, but if they do suffer, they can do it in a grand way. And I don't mean dramatic. I mean grand in that it's with your whole heart, the way you love with your whole heart, suffer with your whole heart, bring your whole entire body into it, make it yours because then that suffering can be something that

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: you can accept because it's yours and you can tweak 01:55:30it so that it doesn't hurt as much and you can tweak it so that it's kind of fun and you can tweak it so that you actually find joy in the sorrow And you know how to express that to others. You know how to give that to others. You know how to give that joy to others because it's been given to you and you've been shown it's all right to do that. It's all right. It's necessary for you to do that.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: This is how you give back. This is how you do 01:56:00something for the world. This is how you honor whoever it is that you're carrying in your heart. I can honor my daughter by going out and doing the world in the least harmful way, and I can honor her by going out and doing the world and filling it with love and creativity and beauty and all the things that I thought

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I didn't possess, and I didn't have, and that nobody 01:56:30would want from me. I'm so clear that I have those things and I'm so clear that others have them and they just need to have a little light shown on them. They need to have a little encouragement given to them. That's what I want to do with the rest of the time that I have left. I want to encourage people. I want them to know their value. I want them to know that they're loved and

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: they're absolutely necessary. Thank you OUTWORDS for 01:57:00providing this opportunity.

JACK MACCARTHY: And you already answered the fourth question.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Look precocious. Did I tell you I was a precocious kid?

JACK MACCARTHY: I had gleaned as much.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Yeah.

JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah. Is there anything else that you want to share 01:57:30before we wrap up the interview?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I just wanna say it's okay to have a variety of components that make up you. Like, I get to be a black man in this country. In the 2020s, I get to be a Latino who doesn't speak fluent Spanish.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Who's never been to his home country, but who feels 01:58:00all the history and all of the love and all of the platanos and all of the food and the music and the culture. It's all in me because I'm the first in my family to be born in this country. I have all of that inside of me. I get to share that and I get to remind people

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: just because you have a certain view in your mind of 01:58:30how this label looks doesn't mean that that's really how this label looks. I might not look Latino to people, but I am, and I might not look like there's anything feminine or female about me, but there is. I might look like I'm totally healthy and fine, but I'm not.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: There's so much about me just like there's so much 01:59:00about everybody else. If we can just take the time to recognize that, recognize it and honor it and celebrate it. Let me be the black, Latino, trans, disabled poor man that I am. Let me be all of that. Plus the artist, plus the activist, plus the person who really likes swinging and really likes sliding on the big slides

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: that half your skin would come off. If it was 01:59:30summertime and you went down that cement slide. Who likes sitting at the water, who loves watching the waves. Let me be all of that too. Let me be that little kid who literally can sit and stare at a blade of grass for hours and come up with a whole story for how that blade of grass came to be and its significance in the world. Who does that?

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: This kid, this kid does it.

JACK MACCARTHY: That's perfect. Thank you.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: You're welcome. It's much easier to do when I can't see what the hell I'm looking at. I can't have those responses to whatever emotions you might be experiencing, because I see your face, but I can't see nuance.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: I can't see detail.

JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah. I'm just like blur of enthusiasm.

YOSEÑIO LEWIS: Yes.