It was a Saturday night in 2004 or 2005, and Cecilia Gentili found herself in a club in Jackson Heights, Queens, meeting someone who would change her life—and the lives of so many other transgender immigrant women.
Jackson Heights is among the most diverse neighborhoods on the face of our planet. A short train ride from Manhattan, its low-rise buildings feel a world away from Manhattan’s skyscrapers. Located in one of New York City’s outer boroughs, Jackson Heights is home to 100,000 residents speaking some 167 languages, expressing gender in all sorts of ways, and hailing from all over earth. Doctors from India, cab drivers from Pakistan, waiters from China, nurses from Haiti, builders from Mexico, sex workers from Argentina—you can find them all living in the unusually racially and economically integrated neighborhood.
Beneath the elevated 7 Train, which hovers over Roosevelt Avenue, a cacophony of sights and sounds dominates the senses on any given night. The neighborhood’s main thoroughfare is filled with the roar of the overhead train, the vision of bright Indian saris, the beats of Reggaeton spilling out of bars, the aroma of Mexican tortas and Nepalese momos being sold from carts, the sight of young men sporting fresh fades so tight they threaten to cut off your circulation just by looking at them, and the rhythm of queer and trans Latinx folks ducking in and out of Latin dance clubs.
“I was an internet escort,” Gentili told me in the summer of 2020, referring to how she earned her living about a decade and a half earlier. A beautiful trans woman from Argentina with blond hair and a mischievous but open smile, Gentili was new to New York City in the mid-aughts. “I was doing very well for myself, and I was making an impressive amount of money” by finding clients over the internet from the comfort of her apartment in Manhattan.
One weekend, she went to a Latin club in Jackson Heights “to hang out on a Saturday night, and there she was.” She was Lorena Borjas, a shorter, demure transgender woman from Mexico who was no less than an icon in Jackson Heights. In cold weather, Lorena would dress in an understated black puffer coat and bright red lipstick, often sporting a necklace covered in writing pens. She had high eyebrows and the kind of smile that made you want to smile back, even through photographs.
And that evening in Jackson Heights, Lorena was doing what she often did on Saturday nights: handing out condoms and trying to protect people from HIV.
Scrunching her nose in disdain as she recalled their original meeting, Cecilia admits that her first impression of Lorena and the women she was serving was not positive. “I kind of looked down at them. I was like, Oh, these girls are like, just street whores.” Cecilia saw what Lorena was doing and thought, I don’t need your condoms, you know. I buy my own condoms! “So, I was kind of like a bougie bitch at the time.”
It came back to haunt her. “My mom used to say, ‘No escupas para el cielo que te va a caer encima,’” which Cecilia translates into English roughly as “If you spit at heaven, it will drop back on your forehead.” Well, “it really came back on my forehead really hard because, you know, my situation changed very rapidly.” Within two years after first seeing Lorena, Cecilia began “using heroin and crack cocaine and crystal meth and basically anything that would get me high. And then, because of that, I lost a lot of clientele, and I lost my apartment, and I lost everything. And then I was homeless, and I ended up on Roosevelt Avenue, being one of those cheap street whores that I talked shit about years ago.
“And there she was again”: Lorena Borjas. Another transgender Latina, not there to gloat over Cecilia’s plight, but to help. “And at that time, I really needed those condoms. So. You know, she saw me, and she spoke with me.”
To Cecilia, Lorena was “judgment free.” By meeting people where they were and offering whatever help they might need, Lorena was practicing harm reduction. “If you get high, if you use condoms or not, she would just give you the condoms, and she would tell you why you should use them,” Cecilia said. “But she wasn’t, like, pressing you.”
Around the time the two women reconnected, Cecilia was arrested multiple times, accused of drug use or sex work. This would happen often after she was “stopped and frisked” on the streets by the NYPD under a 1976 antiloitering statute that, technically, was supposed to criminalize sex work, but in practice allowed police to arrest women based on their clothing or if they found condoms on their person. For this reason, it’s often known as the “walking while trans” law. This put Cecilia, who was then undocumented, in danger of deportation. But through it all, Lorena was there for her. She helped Cecilia get a job working for a community health center, where she was supposed to “get these trans Latinas who do sex work on the corner of Roosevelt Avenue to be able to see doctors.”
Transgender Latin women are susceptible to viruses for all sorts of reasons. Some risks are more direct, such as when the syringes used to inject hormones during the gender-affirmation process can become vectors for HIV and hepatitis C (especially for those transitioning without doctors and getting their hormones on the contraband market). Being at disproportionate danger for arrest also boosts transgender women’s peril of being raped by cops or in jail, each of which increases their odds of becoming infected by a number of sexually transmitted pathogens. But undocumented trans women are even more vulnerable to viruses, as their undocumented status can make it legally risky or prohibitively expensive for them to get medical attention.
More indirectly, viral vulnerability is manufactured in the many ways that being trans, undocumented, or both locks people out of the formal economy and keeps them from accessing safe housing and work. For much of U.S. history, and in many ways still, it has been legal to discriminate against transgender people. As a result, transgender people are more likely to face job, food, and housing insecurity. They sometimes have few options for survival but drug, sex, domestic, or manual work in the informal economy.
Though she eventually became a permanent U.S. resident, Jennicet Gutiérrez was a longtime undocumented transgender activist who, like Lorena, was born in Mexico, misgendered throughout her youth, and traveled to the United States as a young person. As she once told me, “Surviving in this country as an undocumented person puts people at a higher risk” for viruses and poor health in ways many LGBTQ political brokers ignore. This happens because undocumented people do very important work, yet do not get “full access to health care that can help people sustain themselves.” Gutiérrez worked for ten years in radiology as an X-ray assistant, intimately tending to the health of other people, but she had to quit her job when her employer said they were going to closely inspect everyone’s documentation.
“People are in so much fear, but also desperate for survival,” Gutiérrez told me, “that they will go to whatever extremes to be able to seek employment” when safe work is unavailable. Unsafe work risks undocumented people’s lives and limbs, taxes their immune systems, denies them insurance coverage, and makes their mucus membranes, lungs, veins, and genitals more likely to encounter viruses—making the workers less likely to survive such exposure. This is the kind of work Cecilia and Lorena did. And it’s the kind of precarious labor the people working Roosevelt Avenue as sex workers, food mongers, and day laborers performed.
In serving their fellow workers, Lorena and Cecilia would hit the streets together around 10 p.m., staying out until the sun threatened to rise on them. Lorena would have lots of condoms in shiny wrappers, and she’d always be pulling “her cart,” Cecilia recalled with a smirk. “God knows what she had in that cart!”
(Everyone who loved Lorena has a story about her cart.)
“Everything was in there,” Cecilia said. “Anything that you may need, you would ask, and it would come out of” Lorena’s rolling cart: legal paperwork, pens, alcohol rubbing pads, sterile syringes, food.
When she first started to do outreach, Cecilia was nervous about getting “the girls” to trust her, a total stranger, to take her referral and “go to a clinic and get their body checked out.” But “because I was with Lorena, I kind of skipped that—because everyone knew her.”
And that was how a beautiful friendship between the two women began. It was a friendship born of trying to help their girls stave off HIV, HCV, illicit-market hormones, and the police—and a friendship that would last for fifteen years, until another virus no one had yet heard of intervened.
The United States has long viewed itself as a nation defined by its lack of pathogens and has required people to be “clean” to lay claim to its lands. This is ableist, revisionist, and ironic, considering that white settlers consciously and unconsciously brought with them pathogens that killed tens of millions of Native Americans; that white enslavers facilitated the widespread movement of pathogens across the Atlantic via slavery; and that, in 2020, the Sioux tribe had to sue the U.S. government to maintain its coronavirus checkpoints.
In the policing of its borders, the United States has created a long association of immigrants as “unclean.” At the same time, the immigration system, via the creation of “criminal aliens,” has delineated a vast underclass useful for American capitalism (in the form of cheaply paid labor), but to which the state claims no responsibility. The state will relax its boundaries to welcome various immigrants into this underclass at certain times and then will demonize those same groups when capital has lost its need for them. The justification for later quarantining these groups, curbing the migration of their families, or expelling them is often viruses.
For instance, Chinese workers were welcomed to help with the California gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century and then, during the U.S. Civil War, to help build the Transcontinental Railroad. It was dangerous work and, as the Guardian put it, Chinese workers “were paid less than American workers and lived in tents, while white workers were given accommodation in train cars.” By the 1880s, the gold rush was long over, the railroads were built, and the Chinese workers were considered no longer useful by U.S. industry. It was then that, as we saw in chapter 4, the Chinese were unfairly blamed for the presence of the bubonic plague in San Francisco—an unjust accusation used to justify the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
This pattern has continued. From the 1980s until 2010, for example, people living with HIV were formally barred from entering the United States, which triggered international boycotts of scientific AIDS conferences happening inside the States and ignored the rapid spread of the disease within the country’s borders. Early in his presidency, Donald Trump was reported to have said that Africans and Haitians “all have AIDS” as an excuse for his xenophobic immigration policies. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged, Trump and various politicians tried to blame the novel coronavirus on China, Mexico, and Hispanic and Asian people in the United States, even as the policies of those politicians—not to mention Trump himself running around the country holding huge rallies—were responsible for transmitting the virus within the country.
The United States doesn’t just use viruses to create national borders; in conflating viruses with nonwhite people, it also tries to create borders of whiteness, where healthy white people are on one side of national belonging and people living with viruses are kept outside it.
For those living undocumented in the United States, just trying to survive can put them at risk of deportation. The criminal justice system and the immigration system overlap for them when the work they do in the informal economy might get them arrested. It was an Obama administration policy embodying this dynamic that made life even more precarious for Lorena’s “girls” and that first brought her into Chase Strangio’s life.
Long before he was known as an attorney who helped free transgender whistleblower army lieutenant Chelsea Manning from prison and worked on the landmark trans Supreme Court case R. G. and G. R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. EEOC and Aimee Stephens, Chase was a “baby lawyer” working at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP). After finishing law school in 2010, Chase worked there on a fellowship focused on “carceral systems and disability.” Named for the groundbreaking activist Sylvia Rivera, the legal aid clinic had been formed in 2002 to serve low-income transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people.
On a Friday in 2010, when SRLP did open intakes, a woman walked in with a rolling cart, yelling, “There’s a crisis in Jackson Heights—these girls are getting arrested!”
“It was at the escalation of the Secure Communities program,” Chase explained to me, referring to an Obama administration attempt to force cooperation between local law enforcement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This meant two dangerous things for the most marginalized, like Lorena’s girls. First, if someone was picked up by the NYPD for drug use or soliciting sex, they could be deported. Second, it scared any undocumented person who was a victim of anything from ever seeking governmental help of any kind—opening them up to wage theft, domestic violence, rape, enslavement, viral exposure, and even murder.
Lorena came to the law office named after a radical Latin activist with a message for the trans lawyers of Manhattan: “My community is completely under siege here. Why aren’t you guys paying attention?”
Put on notice by Lorena, Chase thought, She really has a point, you know? Thereafter, many a Friday, Lorena would show up at SRLP and yell, “CHAAAASE!”
“I don’t give a shit what’s gonna happen,” she’d tell the people in the office. “I’m gonna make sure Chase is here. If I have to wait three hours, I’ll wait three hours.”
And with her, Chase recalled, Lorena would always have her cart. “I have five girls today,” Lorena would say, before pulling legal paperwork about all five of the girls out of her cart.
Lorena turned Chase onto a case involving two trans women ensnared in the legal system in a common way: assaulted by a man, they had fought back and were now themselves being charged with felony assault. Over the next year and a half, Lorena made sure Chase or attorney Lynly Egyes “were at every single court date” for the women. If they ever tried to get out of it, Lorena would say, “Nope, we have to go.” The women facing charges were both undocumented, and Lorena pushed the lawyers to engage in a “combination of working on their criminal cases, showing up in court, and then figuring out their immigration cases.” The three of them “started a very consistent process anytime someone was arrested in Jackson Heights that Lorena knew about, which was almost every trans Latina that was arrested.”
“Okay, who’s writing advocacy letters and who’s showing up at arraignments and who is getting cash in case bail is set?” Lorena would ask as they delegated the tasks. When undocumented trans people were arrested in a city jail, the goal was to get them out not just before they were sexually assaulted (a frequent event when transgender women are kept in jails for men), but also before local officials turned them over to ICE. One of the biggest challenges was convincing judges that the defendants would show up in court, because, on paper, they were considered flight risks.
The questions the judges would pose were: Are you in school? Do you have a job? Do you have family?
“All of those things are things that trans people are way less likely to have,” Chase told me. “Particularly Black and Latina trans women. So, we set up a system where we’re like, we’ll show the judges that they do have a community.”
And that’s where Lorena would work her magic. She’d show up herself and hustle other trans Latina women to show up in arraignment court—even if she didn’t know them personally—so that the judge would always see they had people.
A huge number of people are kept in jail, become infected with viruses in jail, and even die in jail every year not because they are guilty—jails are used mostly for holding people before they have faced arraignment or a trial and while they are still legally innocent—but simply because they are too poor to post bail. Cases of tuberculosis, HIV, HCV, and influenza are high in jails, affecting not only those who are arrested but also their families and social networks upon their release. While even those who have been convicted don’t deserve this kind of death penalty, in November 2020, 80 percent of the 230 people who died of COVID-19 in Texas correctional facilities had never been convicted of any crime.
Long before the Black Lives Matter movement made famous the use of community bail funds to get people out of jail who might not have family who could afford to bail them out, Chase and Lorena started the Lorena Borjas Community Fund to spring Lorena’s girls as quickly as possible. Often, they succeeded. According to the New York Times, their fund raised more than forty-five thousand dollars, helping more than fifty people get out of jail. But sometimes, they felt frustrated they couldn’t save everyone—such as when an Afro-Latin transgender woman named Layleen Polanco died in solitary confinement in New York City’s Rikers Island jail of an epileptic seizure in 2019. Polanco had been moved into “the hole” for allegedly hitting a guard. But her original arrest had been due to a 2017 charge of sex work, and her bail was only five hundred dollars. If someone had paid it, Polanco wouldn’t have lost two years of her life in jail awaiting trial, and she likely would not have lost her life. But Chase and Lorena didn’t know about her case. They couldn’t possibly know about every case when Rikers, just one of New York City’s jails, processed some one hundred thousand admissions a year.
Lorena cared about people in jail not just because she herself was a transgender migrant who’d been arrested: Lorena, Chase told me, had also been “living with HIV for decades.” People losing access to HIV medication in jail and being abused by law enforcement is terribly common. For instance, though Michael Johnson had been arrested for alleged HIV transmission, he was not given HIV medication during his first seven months in jail—something that is not unusual. The year before he was arrested, an article published in the journal Current Opinion in Infectious Disease found that “a national survey of prison and jail systems suggested” that only “39% of prisons do mandatory or routine HIV testing and only 36% of jails offer any HIV testing,” while a scant “33% of HIV-infected inmates were receiving” medication to treat it. This is to say nothing of gender-affirming hormones. Making sure people got their hormones and their HIV medications in jail was paramount to Lorena.
Lorena became such a fixture at bail hearings that, according to Lynly Egyes, the attorney who would often be with her in court, bailiffs would “stop Lorena or any of the other women from leaving to go to the bathroom” if the bailiff knew the person the women were there to support was about to be called up on the docket.
Like Chase, Egyes met Lorena while she was a young attorney, and she credited her with teaching her “how to be a community lawyer and not be a lawyer who claims to work with community, but doesn’t actually work with community.” Egyes had once “agreed to take on a case of a young transgender girl” charged with allegedly assaulting someone with a shoe. While another young trans girl was also allegedly involved in the same attack, Egyes had the capacity to represent the pending criminal and immigration cases involving only one of them.
“I needed the young person’s birth certificate for part of her immigration case,” Egyes told me, and though she “didn’t know Lorena at the time, somehow it got back to her that I needed this. And one day, she just kind of appeared in my office with her—I used to call it her Mary Poppins bag. You just never knew what was going to be in there.” Then she reached into it and pulled out the original birth certificate of Egyes’s client.
“How did you get this girl’s original birth certificate?” she asked Lorena.
“Well, I’m Lorena,” she told her, before talking the lawyer into taking on both women’s cases.
“You just couldn’t say no to Lorena.”
Egyes was touched that every time there was a court date for these girls, Lorena would show up with a crew of other trans women. “She just really needed the court to know that these young girls were supported and loved and cared for.”
But if no one could say no to Lorena Borjas, Lorena couldn’t really say no to helping others, either. When doing outreach in the early 2000s, trying to get women in Queens to go to Manhattan to get tested, the organization she worked for thought it would be easier to test them in Queens instead. So, they set up a testing site in Lorena’s Jackson Heights studio apartment. The organization didn’t pay her rent, Egyes said; they just gave her some gift cards.
Smiling, Egyes said Lorena would even “go to food pantries and take a whole bunch of food and just hand it out at night. And she wasn’t getting paid for this. It was just what she did because it was who she was.
“It was, as she told me, the right thing to do.”
Lorena Borjas was born in Mexico City in 1960. Misgendered as male as a child, she did not grow up knowing what being transgender meant. “The reason I came to this country,” Lorena told Queens Public Television in 2018, was because she “didn’t have a future in Mexico at the time.
“I considered myself a gay man,” she explained. When she immigrated in 1981 at age twenty, her “main goal was to find a hormones specialist, so I could do my transition supervised by a physician” and live her life as a woman. While she was ultimately successful in her gender transition, she “did not have legal documents,” and her life was extremely difficult in her first few years in the United States.
Lorena wound up in coercive situations, trafficked as a sex worker against her will. When she moved to Jackson Heights, according to El Diario, she was living with twenty other transgender women who were also trafficked. She began to use crack cocaine.
By 1986, Lorena said, she was “able to obtain my documents by President Ronald Reagan,” eventually obtaining a green card under the amnesty program. In the subsequent years, she decided to get sober, and when she did, she became relentless about helping other people. She eventually worked for the Community Health Network. But much of her work was on a volunteer basis.
“Sometimes, our transgender folks don’t even have the self-esteem to think that they’re worth organizing for and fighting for their own rights,” Daniel Dromm, an openly gay member of the New York City Council and its representative for Jackson Heights from 2010 to 2021, also told Queens Public TV. “But Lorena gave them dignity. She went out and said to them, ‘No, you are valuable. You’re worth something. We’re going to fight for our rights together.’”
And once she got her own modest studio apartment, Lorena “would give people places to sleep,” Egyes told me—even if that meant putting them up in her one-room home. “Her goal wasn’t to get people out of sex work,” Egyes said. “That was never it. Her goal was to get people out of situations that they didn’t want to be in anymore. So, if they were doing sex work because there was someone who was abusing them or was exploiting them or coercing them to do it, she just wanted people to know there was another way, there was a way to get away from that person, if that’s what they wanted.
“And she would start, just with a cup of coffee, bringing people a cup of coffee, building relationships.”
AIDS has claimed the lives of many transgender and Latin people in New York City, and Lorena eventually ran a support group at the AIDS Center of Queens County. There, Cecilia Gentili attended Lorena’s group, where people could get sterile syringes to safely inject recreational drugs or hormones. As Lorena’s colleagues doing similar work in Greece and West Virginia explained to me, syringe exchanges have long been known as a pathway for getting people other medical and social support. When Lorena facilitated them for transgender people in Queens, the service didn’t help protect her girls only from viruses. It gave them “an opportunity to have a group and talk about their issues,” Cecilia said.
“Lorena was like really visionary,” Cecilia said of how welcome her friend made people feel, particularly those who didn’t outwardly embody traditional gender roles. “The case with most of the girls in Queens,” Cecilia told me, was “very binary. You know, you’re a girl if you have boobs. And you are looking to get a vagina and like men. And have long hair and a big ass. You know? That’s the definition of, like, what most of us understood as a trans person—and some girls still are there.”
But Lorena Borjas knew better. “You’re a woman because you’re a woman,” she would say to her girls—and that’s where it ended. She accepted herself, her friend Cecilia (who is a lesbian), and the butch and femme girls at the clubs on Roosevelt Avenue alike as women.
While Lorena would always hammer Lynly Egyes to help others, “it took a long time for her to ask me for help” for herself, Egyes said. While she’d gotten her green card in the 1986 amnesty, by 1990, as Lorena told Queens Public TV, she had some convictions that did not allow her to renew her permanent residence or become a U.S. citizen: “I was arrested for prostitution and human trafficking issues, when in fact I was the victim.”
By then, Egyes was working at the Transgender Law Center and was able to get some of Lorena’s convictions cleared under New York’s human trafficking laws—but not all of them. In general, human trafficking laws actually harm sex workers more than they help them. They encourage racial profiling, criminalize the people they purport to protect, and further distance marginalized people from the kinds of public health and community support they need. And in preventing sex workers from conducting their work in open settings with less risk, they do the opposite of harm reduction, as they drive sex work into the shadows and onto the dark web.
So Egyes decided to ask New York governor Andrew Cuomo for a pardon for her client. By the time she submitted the application, Egyes had amassed several hundred pages of testimony on Lorena’s behalf, including recommendations and proclamations from former mayor David Dinkins, the Queens Borough president, the New York City Council, the New York State Senate, and future New York State attorney general Letitia James.
On December 26, 2017, Lorena said that Governor Cuomo gave her a slightly late Christmas gift: “He called me … he says, ‘Congratulations, I reviewed your case and I’ve noticed the honorable community work that you’ve done for twenty-five years. Your arrest and convictions were in the past. You don’t have an arrest since 1998, and your life has been dedicated to serving the trans community, and as of now, I will pardon you.’
“I started crying, and I still couldn’t believe what was happening in my life,” she told Queens Public TV.
Lorena became a citizen of the United States in 2019 and visited Mexico that same year, seeing her homeland for the first time in nearly four decades—and just months before the emergence of COVID-19.
After Chase Strangio moved to Jackson Heights himself, he learned firsthand something all of Lorena’s friends knew: despite all her work in the streets, Lorena loved to party.
“When my kid’s mom was like eight months pregnant,” Chase said, Lorena “threw this incredible baby shower with, like, all the trans Latinas in all of New York. And once, she threw me this party to just, like, say thank you,” Chase recalled, his eyes glimmering and his spritely smile dancing beneath his pencil-thin moustache. “We spent so much time, like, eating together and celebrating, like she was so good at celebrating—you’d just celebrate that you’re there, you’re celebrating because people need joy and space to congregate.”
Cecilia Gentili would party with Lorena most Saturday nights. Lorena would come over, and they’d cook Argentine steaks and chicken together—sometimes alone, sometimes with Lorena’s partner, a man named Chaparro. Sometimes they’d organize for grants and think about community building, and sometimes they’d just hang and be silly.
One Saturday in early March 2020, Cecilia missed their standing Saturday night date because she was in Miami for work. “I was in a CVS, and this woman had like forty Purells in her cart. And I thought that was very weird. I was like, What? What’s this about? And I went on Twitter, and I searched for Purell, and I learned that people were, like, getting all the Purell because COVID was really exploding.”
Cecilia immediately tried to buy some Purell herself, but it was all sold out in Miami. She returned to New York and expected to see her friend the next Saturday. But instead, Lorena called her.
“Cecilia, I don’t think I can go this Saturday.”
“Okay, no problem. Are you okay?”
“I have fever and I have a cough.”
“Lorena, that’s what they said COVID-19 is.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think I have it.”
“What do you mean you don’t think you have it? You have all the symptoms.”
“Yeah, but I’m fine. Maybe it’s just a cold.”
“Well, I think you should go to a doctor—how long have you had this?”
“Like a week.”
“That’s a long time to have that for a cold. That’s a long time even for the flu. I think you should go to the doctor.”
“No, I’m sure it’s a cold or the flu.”
“Lorena, if this is a cold or a flu, you really need to see a doctor anyways.”
“No, I don’t want to go to the doctor.”
“Why, Lorena?”
“I just don’t want to go to the doctor, don’t ask me why.”
“Okay, Lorena. I understand, but this is not a choice for me. You know, you need to see a professional.”
“No, no, no, no!”
“Let me see if I can get you to an urgent care. Would you go to an urgent care?”
“Yes, for an urgent care, maybe I could go. I’m just not gonna go to a hospital.”
Cecilia called an urgent care, but they told her they weren’t accepting patients with COVID-19 symptoms. She needed to call 911, and she needed to go to the hospital. “If I would have asked her, she would say no. So, I did something that I usually regret, which I don’t at this time: I called the ambulance first and then I told her. And she was a little bit upset at me.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Sometimes, you just have to let others do what’s right for you.”
“No, I don’t want to go to the hospital—I don’t know what’s going to happen there!”
Cecilia said she knew Lorena was “talking about being trans, and I knew she was talking about the fact that, you know, her English was not the best.”
As I listened to Cecilia talk about her frightened friend not wanting to go to the hospital—even with the symptoms of the deadly and mysterious virus that was rapidly becoming the most quickly killing organism known to New Yorkers—I thought of a less dramatic experience I’d had seeking medical care myself in multicultural New York City.
A couple years before, I had found a lump on one of my testicles. Concerned, I went to my doctor, a kind man at my university health center. Examining me, he thought the lump was likely a benign cyst, but he wanted me to have a sonogram as soon as possible to be sure, and he scheduled me to get a scan from a testicular sonogram specialist the very next day.
When I arrived at the facility, the receptionist eyed me warily. She asked me the doctor’s name, and I told her. She asked me my name and date of birth, and I told her. She asked me if I was sure I was in the right place, and I said yes (though I was getting uncomfortable). Then, noting that I had been referred from a student health center, she laughed and said, “You just don’t look like what I was expecting. I was expecting someone younger.”
I was forty-one years old at the time, and she thought I was too old to be a college student. I laughed nervously and tried deflecting her doubt, saying, “I am a graduate student, but I’ve taught undergrads who are older than me.” Still, it was an absurd and nasty thing for her to say, especially considering she’d had my date of birth before I came in.
Blood rushed to my face as I was overcome with a wave of shame and humiliation. It is hard enough to walk into an office and say, “Excuse me, can I pull down my pants and have you examine my balls, and then can you tell me if I have something that is going to kill me?” without being made to feel you don’t look the right way.
At a moment of great vulnerability, I was made to feel unwelcome. I remember thinking, What if a trans woman who was femme presenting and had testicles came in, vulnerable and needing help? What if the receptionist said, “You don’t look like what I was expecting”? The person might walk away and leave, maybe with an undiagnosed case of cancer.
This is part of why lethal health disparities plague queer and trans people at such high rates, and why viruses circulate more often in our bodies.
When I heard about Lorena Borjas coughing but not wanting to go to the hospital because she feared what would happen to her there, I thought about that receptionist. My heart hurt for Lorena.
By the time Lorena got in the ambulance, the true center of the global pandemic was not just in the United States or in New York City, but in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens. You could even argue that the epicenter of the epicenter had moved inside Elmhurst Hospital, where the ambulance took Lorena. Her neighbors, the so-called “essential” workers—day laborers, nursing home orderlies, fast-food workers, and sex workers—had not been able to protect themselves by working from home. The climb toward the peak of New York’s first wave was rapidly accelerating, and more than a hundred people were dying of COVID-19 every day.
By the time Lorena got to that hospital, a refrigerated tractor trailer had already been backed up to it to handle the flow of death. Corpses were piling up faster than they could be taken away. Soon, the city would turn to temp workers to move the deluge of bodies and to people locked up at Rikers Island to dig mass graves for them.
The medical staff treating Lorena did not speak Spanish, and Cecilia had to translate by phone for her. Lorena seemed confused, according to her friend. Still, while she was in the hospital, she was also working her phone trying to arrange bail for people locked up at Rikers Island. The jail was already becoming one of the most potent COVID-19 vectors in the nation, and Lorena was desperately trying to free people from it before they, too, got sick.
The Elmhurst staff eventually sent her home. Cecilia kept in touch with Lorena by phone, and for a day, her symptoms seemed to have subsided. But the next day, she started coughing again. The day after that, Cecilia said, Lorena “started having a fever before she didn’t answer the phone anymore. And that’s how I heard that Chaparro had to call the ambulance again.” But this time, Lorena couldn’t be admitted to the nearest hospital, Elmhurst, which “told me that they had to send her to Coney Island, because she needed to be on a respirator, and they didn’t have one.” (Though he’d been repeatedly warned of their shortage, President Trump had yet to invoke the Defense Production Act to order the manufacture of respiratory equipment and had recently told states to “try getting it yourselves”—which made states bid against one another, driving up prices paid like ransoms to unconscionable medical tech companies.)
“When I called Coney Island,” Cecilia said, “they told me that she was sedated and in an induced coma with the respirator. And they also told me that they needed someone to make decisions for her.” Cecilia had to track down who Lorena’s health proxies were. When she found them, neither spoke English, and Cecilia spent the night on the “phone with the doctors translating to them” and “helping them make decisions based on a couple of words” Lorena left saying what she wanted.
There was a sad irony at the end of her life. Lorena always showed up with people. When she hit the streets, she’d do it with friends. When she showed up at Egyes’s or Chase’s offices demanding legal support, she’d bring friends with her. When she went to court for a stranger, she’d have a gaggle of friends along.
But at the end of it all, except perhaps for the respiratory technician and nurses on duty as she drew her final breaths, Lorena Borjas was physically alone. Chaparro, Cecilia, Chase, Egyes, all the thousands of people she’d given condoms and syringes and food to on Roosevelt Avenue—none of them could be with her to hold her hand in the final transitional moments of her earthly journey.
“At five twenty-two in the morning, I got a call from the hospital, and they told me that she had died,” Cecilia told me quietly.
The day she died, Lorena was one of about 330 people known to have died of COVID-19 in New York City. It was March 30, the eve of a kind of trans holiday. On March 31, the U.S. representative for Jackson Heights, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, wrote on Facebook, “On International Transgender Day of Visibility, we honor our transgender siblings and celebrate our heroes. Yesterday we lost the mother of the trans Latinx community of Queens, Lorena Borjas. Lorena immigrated to the United States from Mexico and became one of the greatest activists in Jackson Heights. Our community will sorely miss Lorena and her tireless advocacy for the rights, visibility and safety of the transgender community.”
When I’m giving lectures about the criminalization of HIV, I often ask the audience, “When did the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay become a site of indefinite detention?” Nearly everyone who raises their hand and ventures a guess says the same thing: that this happened in the weeks following September 11, 2001, in the early days of the U.S. War on Terror.
This is incorrect. The War on Terror was begun by George W. Bush, and that failed two-decade war has involved confining alleged perpetrators under the dubious label “enemy combatants” to forty-five square miles the United States has occupied on the southeastern coast of Cuba since the Spanish American War in 1898. But Guantánamo Bay’s use as a site of prolonged, hellish incarceration on land the United States controls (but on which the federal government argues U.S. law doesn’t necessarily apply) was in fact started by George H. W. Bush, the forty-third president’s father.
In 1991, when the elder Bush was the forty-first president, thousands of Haitians who had supported Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled their country after their democratically elected president was ousted in a coup. Intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard en route to Florida, the refuge-seeking Haitians were kept from getting to the U.S. mainland, which, under international treaties, would have forced the United States to accept them as political asylum seekers.
But the United States couldn’t send them back to almost-certain death in Haiti. So, the first Bush administration sent them to Guantánamo Bay, where they’d be under U.S. authority but wouldn’t necessarily have access to civil rights under U.S. law.
Once there—as the Haitians waited to see if their petitions for refugee status would be granted or not—they were screened for HIV. As the scholar Cathy Hannabach has written, “While all Haitian refugees incarcerated at” Guantánamo “had their blood forcibly drawn and tested, it was only HIV-positive women who were subjected to technologies of reproductive intervention. Without their consent and often even without their knowledge, HIV-positive women refugees were either sterilized or forcibly injected with Depo-Provera, a semipermanent form of birth control.” Not all women can birth children, and not all people who can birth children are women; still, the ability to do so is often (if unfairly) used as a defining characteristic of legitimate womanhood. And at Guantánamo Bay, the United States used this definition to draw a harsh border around what it meant to be a woman, and used eugenics to place the Haitians outside it.
The Haitian refugee crisis of 1991, not the attacks of 9/11, was the inciting event that converted Guantánamo Bay into a space for indefinite detention. Much as the Los Alamos National Laboratory has been home to both the Manhattan Project and the Pathogen Research Database, the history of HIV in America is intertwined with U.S. militarism. A fear of immigrants bolstered by surgical eugenics formed the legal architecture for how the base would later be used for accused terrorists. The forced sterilizations weren’t happening in Nazi Germany; they were perpetrated by the U.S. government at the same time as Twin Peaks and The Oprah Winfrey Show were on the air. And when news broke in the summer of 2020 that women in ICE custody had had hysterectomies performed on them without their consent, it was clear that the centuries-long American practice of sterilizing Black, brown, and native women had still not ended.
At Guantánamo Bay, the ostensible justification for this forced sterilization was imagined viral purity. The mere possibility that any Haitians might win their legal appeals and be allowed into the United States was reason enough, the eugenicists seemed to have believed, to sterilize all the detained refugees they thought could carry and birth children with HIV.
Almost three decades later, in 2020, while most international borders were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ICE deported people with coronavirus from its U.S. prisons to Haiti, threatening to overwhelm the impoverished nation. And in a single week the following year, when the Haitian president was assassinated in his own home, the United States was contemplating giving its own people a third booster COVID-19 shot, while no one in Haiti had yet been vaccinated at all; Haiti was the only country in the Western Hemisphere with no vaccines in mid-2021. That fall, the Biden administration continued to exile Haitian refugees under Rule 42, a provision of the 1944 Public Health Service Act that allows federal authorities to expedite deportations during a pandemic (and which the Trump administration controversially invoked to expel migrants seeking asylum). In fact, as the Guardian reported, the Biden administration “deported more Haitians in a few weeks than the Trump administration did in a whole year,” and the administration sought contractors who spoke Spanish and Creole to prepare detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay for an expected influx, once again, of Haitian refugees seeking asylum.
Viruses are used to determine who is deserving of being allowed to cross various borders—of geography, of gender, of Americanness, of worthiness. By challenging the gender norms people are assigned at birth, drag performers transgress such borders onstage, and transgender people transgress them throughout their lives. And while Zak Kostopoulos performed gender as a “personal construction that highlights and mocks other social constructions,” militarized nationalism often tries to reinforce gender borders around social constructions in ways that can be lethal.
As a transnational traveler and transgender activist, Lorena Borjas transgressed many borders herself—borders of gender, of nation, and of belonging. As a woman who lived with HIV and died of SARS-CoV-2, she also experienced how viruses transgressed the boundaries of her own body. But in her rich life and her needlessly premature death, Lorena exposed the entire fiction of borders.
Think about the body you live in: with every breath you breathe in and out, the idea that your body has permanent borders between what’s inside and outside it is revealed to be a fiction. Or, think about the borders of what it means to be American. “American” could refer to being of the United States of America, or it could refer to any space between Canada’s Arctic Circle, at the top of North America, and Chile’s Cape Horn, at the bottom of South America. That harsh border the United States tried to create at Guantánamo Bay between the worthy and the unworthy, and the wall Trump tried to build to create a finite U.S.-Mexico border, and the notion that the novel coronavirus lived neatly outside the U.S. border? These are all fictions. There are no stark borders between races, between those living with viruses and without, between those in the United States and outside it, between being American and non-American (or un-American), between men and women. Borders are myths, and while viruses are used to justify their necessity and marginalize those who don’t fit neatly on one side of them, viruses ironically disprove them.
Truer than the fiction of borders is the messy reality of how life operates in the zone in between binary markers—in the spaces Zak, Cecilia, Gutiérrez, and Lorena have dared or dare to dwell. Borderlands are spaces populated by migrants drawn across fake national borders, by citizens living inside fake national borders, by nonconforming people who have the courage to live in between gender norms, and by people from all over the world speaking 167 different languages in Jackson Heights.
And those borderlands are where Lorena Borjas, mother to the viral underclass she tended to so lovingly, tried to free others from cages in her final days.