It was there among ghosts and exposed beams that I sat with my mom and dad to come clean. My mom sat at the head of the table, I sat to her right, my dad to her left — a holy trinity.
“So I’m seeing someone, and it’s not a guy,” I said.
My mom furrowed her eyebrows and examined me intensely. “Well, you still look the same.”
“I mean yeah, mom, I’m still the same person. I haven’t changed,” I said.
She narrowed her eyes and paused. “Leticia. You’re a lesbian,” drawing out the word as if it were a murder charge. Toward the end of the conversation, she quietly cried, explaining, “It’s just a reaction, Leti. It’s just a reaction.”
A few weeks passed and my dad came to meet me for lunch near my job in the Mission District of San Francisco. He had a lot of questions.
“Did I do something that gave you a bad image of a man?” he asked.
“No, dad,” I said. “You were a good dad.”
“Ok. Did anyone hurt you?”
“No, dad. No one hurt me.”
He sat quietly, thinking. “Well, I guess you always have been hairy.”
I laughed. I didn’t correct him because it’s true and it seemed to give him some peace. He found the answer for how his youngest daughter — the girl, the feminine one, his curly-haired brown-skinned princess who danced around to Selena — could also be a member of a tribe of perverts. A woman whose heart pulses between her legs for other women, moans into their necks, presses her tongue to the throbbing wet nubs between their legs, clutching their sweaty thighs during musty sex he couldn’t imagine, didn’t dare to imagine. “I don’t care what other people do in bed,” he’d say. “It’s none of my business.” My queerness and carnal desire for other women could be explained — I was part man, part beast, part monster. I felt ashamed.
The texts I saw myself in changed dramatically between my girlhood and early adulthood, from Gregory Nava’s “Selena” to the radical women’s anthology This Bridge Called My Back, co-edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, and the work of academics like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Angela Davis. I was no longer the daughter of my family’s American Dream, but part of a movement of radical women of color feminist thinkers. And I was as self-righteous and obnoxious about it as I was about the particulars of my outfits as a kid.
I had new eyes through which to understand Selena and Yolanda. I was out to my family, and as a professional reporter, I was in a place to see Yolanda’s story differently. One day, I came across a photo I had never seen of Yolanda and Selena at Selena’s sister’s wedding. The two women smiled brightly at the camera, clutching each other’s waists in white dresses. Selena’s dress exposed her shoulders, while Yolanda wore a white suit jacket with hers. It struck me. Yolanda looked like the proud short butch newly wedded to her tall, statuesque femme lover. They looked like any couple I could scroll past on Instagram. I could have been invited to their wedding. Or maybe I could have seen them later at a party, or at one of the few remaining lesbian bars where I’d congratulate them and buy them a round of drinks to celebrate. They looked like family.
There isn’t much when it comes to texts that complicate the widely known narrative of Selena’s life, but the one I’ve found most revealing is Justice for Selena. Valdez described Yolanda’s act as a “crime of anger” and revenge motivated by greed and control over Selena, “the person that everyone loved.” He believed she released her intense hate for Abraham Quintanilla by “killing what was most precious to him: one of his children.”
It’s difficult to really know Yolanda’s motivations leading up to Selena’s murder. Yolanda didn’t respond to a letter I sent requesting an interview or comment. But at one point in taped recordings of Yolanda sequestered in her truck right after the murder, she cries, “I don’t want to be embarrassed…I don’t want to live anymore…You know why? I don’t have any dignity. I don’t have any dignity at all.”
