Denice Frohman Collection - I See My Light Shining
Latina Lesbian Elders: Love and Belonging in the Northeast
This collection gathers the experiences and stories of elder Latina lesbians in the American Northeast—from discussions of family, falling in love, and finding belonging.
This collection gathers the experiences and stories of elder Latina lesbians in the American Northeast—from discussions of family, falling in love, and finding belonging.
Meet the fellows
Denice Frohman is a poet and performer from New York City. She’s received fellowships and support from CantoMundo, the National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures, Blue Mountain Center, and Millay Colony. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNext, Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, and ESPNW. A former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, she’s featured on national and international stages from The White House to The Apollo. She lives in Philadelphia.
A love letter
With this collection, poet and performer Denice Frohman sets out to write a love letter to Latina lesbians in the Northeast, primarily in Philadelphia and New York City. Described by Frohman as part archive and part art, this collection is imbued with the resiliency of these women and their experiences in creating queer futures.
Making space
For many queer folks, finding a place that offers safety, kinship, and freedom cannot be taken for granted—these spaces are fought for, cultivated, and nurtured. These spaces can take many forms, including nightlife, park space or, as we learn in this collection, even barber shops. In her interview, barber shop owner Ruthie Boirie shares how she wanted her barbershop in Brooklyn to be a space of gathering: “I want everybody to feel warm with one another. Don’t just be quiet and sitting like I used to see in barbershops, everybody just looking down, and no one is saying nothing to nobody. And I used to watch that in barbershops. Don’t let anybody say anything to anybody? Where’s the music? You know, get them jumping.”
Described by elders in this collection, spaces for Latina lesbians were breathed to life in clandestine and underground spaces, as gay bars were once illegal in much of the United States. Puerto Rican artist, scholar, filmmaker, writer, cultural critic, and professor Frances Negrón-Muntaner remembers finding sanctuary in the LGBT club scene: “Yes, it was the safest space for connecting to other women. Sexually and otherwise. Because, outside, you never knew, and you may have made a mistake, or maybe the person doesn’t want you to know that or anybody to know that. And then that can get very complicated.[...] [S]o that was the way, if we know everybody in here or almost everybody in here is queer. So we just check that box so you know we forget about that and then we focus on other matters, so, there’s a lot."
In her interview, Iris Melendez recalls opening Philadelphia’s Rainbow Eye on the second floor of Sammy’s Place, an old-school neighborhood bar. Opening the Rainbow Eye in 2008 was a learning experience for the regulars at Sammy’s Place and allowed people who otherwise might never interact with queer culture to learn about it. Melendez explains: “So, my point was, if you’re going upstairs, it’s okay, but you are entering a different world from downstairs, and you will respect it, and if we see you staring or scoping in an odd way—not because you’re curious and you want to know, and it’s a nice place or whatever—you will be asked to go back downstairs. Same thing was, if you came downstairs, you’re going into a straight bar. So, if you put yourself out there with the spit swapping, as I call it, and people are going to stare at you back then.”
Narrator Nivea Castro remembers meeting lesbians at a Women’s Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts: "You just meet each other and just to—just the idea of being able to sit and knowing that all of these women were lesbians, [...] I want to say, we elevated each other in that—we understood, we didn't have to clash with the world. We just didn’t have to do, we were there, we would talk and the other person would understand, and they would have something to share because they knew, they were in the same situation.”
Similarly, Negrón-Muntaner recalls participating in a Fuego Latino in Philadelphia mainly composed of Puerto Rican women, “It was mostly a social group, cultural group. There were a very major range of formations and degrees of comfort with people’s sexuality and being out. There were also women who had kids. I mean, there were all kinds of different kinds of people there. The main political thing, or that we thought was a political thing that we did, was that we organized the first contingent of Latino gay people to March in the Puerto Rican Parade in Philadelphia, and that had been the first time that had ever happened.”
Chosen family
In queer spaces, narrators describe forming communities and chosen families. Some elders recall defying traditional family structures in order to survive and cultivate spaces of community. Silvana Salcido Esparza, a queer chef and activist, states, “I had to go make that and find it…I learned that you make your family, and I always have.”
In her interview, Nancy Rosado describes the bonds she has made with the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting survivors and survivor families in familial terms.
"Q: Would you say the Pulse moms and the survivors you’ve built relationships with are part of your family now?
Rosado: In a really weird sense, yes. [Laughter] Yes. It’s really hard at Christmas with all those people—no, I’m kidding. They are part of my inner circle, and no matter what time that they call, I’m there. They know that. You can call me at 2:00. You can call me at 3:00. I don’t care. My commitment to my two communities is that you call, I’m there. That’s all there is to it. If that’s family, then we’re going to call it family."
As we learn from these narrators, family is not just biological—many narrators describe finding freedom in the refusal of familial structures and institutions that do not accommodate queer life. Laura Esquival remembers how her family and identity clashed growing up, “So, when I ran away, I was like, “I’m going back to my people,” and so I ran away and moved to—lived in East L.A. I joined a gang; I shaved my eyebrows; I got an accent. You know, I started picking up more Spanish, but I wasn’t really—I didn’t really—I was also like an outsider there, too, and it's a shame that that’s what I thought being Mexican was. But on the upside, it exposed me to—there were really loving families that just took me in.”
Performer Alina Troyano shares how for her, familial bonds were formed in jail: “But what I was getting at was that one of the women said, No, we really become family. And the kind of family that we are in jail is really deep. Because outside of that is not the same thing. It’s like we really are attached, as if we’ve gone to war. Like, I can understand almost men at war saying there’s a bond there that you cannot break because you have seen, you have gone through the trenches. You have seen things that other people won’t know. But you know, because the experience is there. And so we become a family, and we adopt each other.”
Kinship bonds are created in a variety of ways, and for narrator Ruth Eisenberg, meeting her partner’s mother for the first time gave her an important connection. Eisenberg shares this meeting: "We’d been together a year or so. When I met Leti’s mother… she literally said to me, mi casa es su casa [my house is your house] [...] It meant she accepted me. It meant, “My house is your house.”...she was reaching out to me and offering herself to me and offering me her daughter."
With similar sentiments, Eisenberg’s partner Letitia Gomez shares her desire for her partnership to be recognized by her family and the wider community: “So, yes, I just think this was—it just felt like something that was a natural thing to want, to be partnered, have the commitment, have the—it recognized by family and community."
Lesbian Love Stories
In this collection, queer love takes on a kind of gravity, pulling the self, family, community, and romantic partners into relationships. Narrators in this collection describe forging these relationships in the absence of media representations of lesbian love stories, as well as filling the representational void with their own relationships.
Narrator Ada Bello felt it was difficult to imagine long-term, healthy queer love. "I don’t think that I ever got totally convinced that it was possible. It sort of seemed like intellectually I knew it was possible and I knew people who had done it. Emotionally I wasn’t too sure. I had lived so long with the instability of the gay couple that it was almost impossible to conceive to be part of a relationship that was going to last forever. How many relationships had lasted forever? But in the case of gay people, none of them could last forever, they couldn’t even start. That instability really was significant.”
Many elders in this collection describe the experiences and effects of falling in love. In her interview, Gina Anderson describes how she matured through relationships. She describes falling in love with her partner: "I feel this is the most grown-up relationship. We really communicate from the heart. I’m not saying I didn’t do that with my other relationship, but the other relationship did lack some maturity... She’s home, she’s family, she’s my family. We’re planning on getting old together, older together."
Nitza Tufiño shares the suddenness of her love story: “Never. I never saw it coming. I can—I never saw it coming. Like I told you, I’m gravitating like a planet near this woman, and this and that, and I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m going that way, and I’m going that way, and I’m going to continue going that way. And I did it because those were my feelings, and I kept saying, you know, gee, man, my children are already old, you know? I don’t have no little kids, you know what I mean? This is me. This is me, and I’m not going to deprive myself of love."
Serina Hazelwood, a scholar and writer on sustainability and decolonization, speaks about seeing her relationship as proof that queer love exists and is possible, and the importance of taking up that space for others to see them and their love:
We’re not going to go sit in the corner. We’re going to take up space. I think that’s really, really important for people to see us in that non-ego way, we have to take up space so other people can see this love. It needs to be seen. I wanted to see people, even as a little girl not knowing that I was queer, needing to see representation of good love.
Hazelwood is empowered by this conception of space, and revels in what it means to love within it. She continues: “I absolutely love that we take up space everywhere we go, that people see us, not only as Chicanas, but as older Chicanas, as beautiful, in love. We’re not going to apologize for being here, for holding hands, for kissing, for being ourselves. I love that when we’re together people see us. You can’t help but not see us because she’s such a presence and I am a presence.”
Against spaces where long-term queer has felt impossible, Silvana Esparza’s interview reminds us of the importance of healing work. “I spent my years, my time, working on myself, feeding my soul, even more. I was already complete, you know, I wasn’t incomplete; I mean, nobody completes me. I complete myself as complete. And I will never be complete, it’s a work in progress.”
Esparza continues: "After the very end of all that, I’m now sixty-one, I’m, like, okay, what is the problem here? I know that I’m not going to love—I know I’m going to love with complete abandonment. I know that I’m going to love complete, meaning, I am complete, and I am going to love somebody complete. And that’s exactly who I met, somebody who’s complete. Somebody who is complete, and yet continues to grow, continues to seek. Somebody who shares many things with me and still is different enough that we can keep each other going. Serina is, in fact, a gift, one of those gifts of right living, of making the right decisions, and being patient, and never giving up on love."
Growing Old
In their interviews, many elders talk about aging as coloring their worldview, often helping them feel more deeply grateful for the everyday beauty of life. Esparza summarizes, “I have a disease that won’t give me that elderly life. So the life that I have has to be concentrated, and it has to be complete. Every single day there’s a sunset to be enjoyed. If you miss it, it’s on you. I make it a point to try to stop, acknowledge the sunset that’s different every—I’ve never seen one that looks the same. Never. Some are—some you say, oh, it’s not going to be pretty. Then all of a sudden it’s pink, orange, purple, yellow, red. You’re, like, where did that come from? So you have to stop, take that moment to enjoy the things that are for you."
Serina Hazelwood expands on the particularities of aging as queer people: “So both of us as older women really embracing our queerness is so beautiful because I think of the spectrum. So then I think about how we flow with each other. Being two water signs doesn’t hurt either, but that flow the queerness gives us, it allows us to ebb and flow. That rigidness of lesbian butch/femme, it didn’t, because that’s the binary. The queerness, I think it makes our relationship really fluid and spacious, luxurious, a permission, unapologetic."
Looking back on their lives, many of these elders have been active contributors to making social change for Latinx and queer people across the United States. While they have helped drive significant progress, narrators in this collection remind us that there is much more work to be done. Esquival, co-founder of LLÉGO, comments, “Everybody goes through this. It’s so weird to find yourself old, or older, or—you know, you’re thirty, you’re forty. It’s hard to imagine you’d be anything else. And I’m sixty-four now, which is mind-blowing. I’m surprised I’m still here, and I’m tired. I am tired of fighting, and yet I have a job that that’s what I do, because that’s what I’ve always done.”
Rafaela Billini shares her experience being celebrated by the LGBTQ+ community while on a Services and Advocacy for LGBTQ+ Elders (SAGE) float: “But after we got married, the federal law, we actually rode on the SAGE’s float. It was like a two-decker bus. The staff, which were much younger, SAGE being seniors, we maybe were some of the youthful-looking, but we’re still older—the staff which were on the street, the advance team that give out the posters as our bus was gonna be going by, they had signs that said thank you. You are our heroes. Our bus had heroes on board because we were the pioneers. There were kids crying when they saw us, that I even started crying and I cry now to see how grateful they were. They were just thank you, thank you, thank you.”
ESTO NO TIENE NOMBRE
Having premiered in the summer of 2023, Esto No Tiene Nombre is a poetic and sonic one-woman show that uplifts the oral histories of Latina lesbian elders and women over 50 from I See My Light Shining. Told through a series of vignettes, the show places Denice Frohman in conversation with her elders to trace lineages of love, desire, and identity. Guided by these first-person stories, from pre-Stonewall police raids in Philadelphia to first kisses, Esto No Tiene Nombre embraces a powerful living history to chart a path of belonging for the future.
Performed by Denice Frohman
Directed/Co-Created by Alex Torra
Music and Sound by Nic Rodriguez Villafañe
Production Design by Nia Benjamin
Interviews ( 18 )
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Bello reminisces about her early life in Cuba, moving to the US for education, and navigating life as a gay Cuban immigrant. She also discusses her activism and experiences co-editing the Daughters of Bilitis newsletter.
Philadelphia, PA
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Troyano reflects on her journey from Havana to New York, the creation of Carmelita Tropicana, her path through performance art, theater, and activism, and the crucial role of community and mentorship in her artistic development.
Atlanta, GA
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Fernandez shares her journey from a childhood marked by a close connection to land in Cuba, to facing repression, to her escape via the Mariel boatlift. She discusses building a new life in the US, her identity, and her family.
Philadelphia, PA
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Negrón-Muntaner discusses her role in documenting and preserving Puerto Rican LGBTQ+ history, the transformative power of community currencies, and her interdisciplinary work spanning film, writing, and academia.
Philadelphia, PA
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From a challenging childhood influenced by loss and abuse to a vibrant life filled with activism and acceptance, Anderson reflects on navigating her sexuality, embracing her cultural heritage, and finding love in her sixties.
Philadelphia, PA
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Melendez charts her journey to Philly, navigating life as a queer Puerto Rican woman, mother, and co-owner of Sammy's Place. She reflects on her relationships, community work, parenting, overcoming adversity, and legacy.
Philadelphia, PA
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Quiñones reflects on moving from Brooklyn to Philadelphia, DJing in the '90s, and embracing her Puerto Rican identity. She discusses the origin of her nickname "Cookie," lesbian Latina parties, and the importance of self-respect.
Philadelphia, PA
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Esquivel shares her journey as a Chicana lesbian activist and mother in Los Angeles, including discussions of gang life, organizing with Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos, co-founding LLEGÓ, her own legacy, as well as her mother's.
Philadelphia, PA
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Gomez recounts her experiences as a Chicana lesbian navigating activism and visibility in Texas and DC. She reflects on her role in the 1987 March on Washington, co-founding LLEGÓ, and her personal relationships and growth.
Philadelphia, PA
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Villalobos and Rosado share their unique love story, weaving through careers in the NYPD and US Army, coming to terms with their identities, navigating challenging spaces, and finding resilience through their relationship.
Orlando, FL
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Rosado reflects on her experiences during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, work in mental health support within law enforcement, retirement, advocacy work, and commitment to documenting history through photography.
Orlando, FL
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Tufiño shares her life journey as a visual artist, educator, and activist. She reflects on her Puerto Rican and Mexican heritage, her transformative love story with her wife, and the career challenges and triumphs she has faced.
New York City, NY
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Castro shares her experiences as a Puerto Rican lesbian in the Bronx, her advocacy as a lawyer for LGBTQ+ rights, and her artistic endeavors in writing and photography while emphasizing the importance of mentorship and community.
Atlanta, GA
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Billini reflects on her AIDS activism and housing advocacy, airline work, law school dreams, and facing pandemics. She shares her Puerto Rican roots, storytelling passion, real estate career, and finding love with Nitza.
New York City, NY
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Drawing from her life experiences in Brooklyn, Boirie shares her journey as a pioneering gay barber, reflecting on opening her own shop, creating sanctuary, and the importance of community, mentorship, and staying true to oneself.
Brooklyn, NY
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Eisenberg and Gomez reflect on their intercultural love story—from their distinct backgrounds in Chicago and San Antonio to fighting for LGBTQ+ rights, navigating family acceptance, and building a life together.
Philadelphia, PA
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Hazelwood shares her love story with her wife Silvana, detailing how their relationship evolved and underscoring how their relationship is a testament to joy, resilience, and the beauty of finding home in another person.
Baja Cali, Mexico
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Esparza shares her story as a Chicana lesbian, including her family history, struggles with acceptance, her journey in the culinary world, connection to her heritage through baking, coming out, and founding Barrio Café.
Baja Cali, Mexico
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Map
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Bonnie and Clyde
Bonnie and Clyde was a lesbian bar that was opened in the basement of Bonnie's restaurant in 1972 by Elaine Romagnoli. The bar closed its doors in 1981.
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Center City
Center City is Philadelphia's business center, home to the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall.
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Las Buenas Amigas
Las Buenas Amigas was an activist group founded in the United States to provide emotional support, education, health information, and political organization for Latina lesbians.
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North Philly
North Philly, or North Philadelphia, is a neighborhood in Philadelphia, directly north of Center City. With loosely defined borders, North Philly coincides with the city's historical industrial heart.
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Rusty's
Rusty's was a famous 1960s Philadelphia lesbian bar.
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Ruthie's Barber Shop
Ruthie's Barber Shop is owned by Ruth Boirie. Boirie describes barbershops as a spaces for gathering, mentorship, and self-discovery—features she sought to create when she opened up her own shop.
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Sammy's Place
Sammy's Place is a bar in North Philly owned by Iris Melendez.
