A Eulogy for Sissykins (aka Babes Simone Harper Victoria Trust)
August 9th, 2023
I lost a sister, a true sibling this last weekend. Over the last few days, I’ve struggled to encapsulate all there is to say about her role in the community, the gall, the gumption, the glamour, and the grit.
I didn’t intend on this journal becoming so much about queer death and memorializing, but then again earlier this year, after intuitive Asher Hartmann told me I had a debt to my dead community, my cousin Peter extended that concept to “all our loved ones living in the margins, on the edges, the ghosts to be”.
Babes Trust was a self-made Jacké-of-all-trades, co-founder of the internationally renowned Bushwig alongside Horrochata, an integral figure in community organizing, a true punk who truly gave zero fucks and never asked for permission. She was a genius artist, a bitch with a tongue so sharp it could cut glass. Our relationship formed when I moved to New York and started throwing Clump. She brought the community together and understood that even with all its faults, the queer community was how we would create meaningful experiences, survive, fuck up, and try again.
Honoring her legacy means also honoring her complexity, her struggles, her beauty, her humor, and how much she loved to stir the pot. Albeit starting more fires than she could put out, she never stopped organizing because of her love of community and the legacies that had come before her. I feel indebted to her rebellious spirit of “let’s just fucking do it” and her role as a facilitator. She understood that making some space is one of the most powerful things a person can do, and Babes was proof that facilitation didn’t require expertise, it requires being kind of out of your mind, and believing you can change the world. “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” - Angela Davis
Babes was my favorite person to FaceTime with because she always had gossip or wanted to gossip. She would pick up the phone, lips pursed, taking a moment to make sure you acknowledged how cunt she was looking before the conversation began. We would cackle and she would ask “Babes do you think I’m trons?” somehow, albeit living in Brooklyn, her British accent really came through when she said “TRONS”. I said babes yes, duh, we all know you’re trans, go for it, and she would celebrate her stages of transition by sending me photos of hot guys with big dicks she had hooked up with. My friends and I would pretend to talk like Babes, and she would imitate us imitating her, which became a hilarious feedback loop of her idiosyncratic mannerisms and voice. This self-parody as a form of showing love for her friends perfectly encapsulates for me how Babes was.
I’ll never forget one night while we were throwing Clump, a huge crowd came in around midnight just as shows were about to start. Babes leaned in and said:
“Babes…. I think it worked!”
”What worked?” I replied as people poured into the bar.
”I called in a bomb threat to Ladyfag’s party so that people would come to Clump, isn’t that fab?”
I SCREAMED in shock, hands over my mouth. ”GIRL, ARE YOU INSANE!?”
”Yeah but it looks like it might have worked babes! Cheers!” and then took off to the dance floor.
One of our longest-running jokes-turned-project was a TV show called “Drag Farm”, a kind of Paris & Nicole’s Simple Life meets Rupaul’s Drag Race, hosted by the infamous farm master, Merrie Cherry. Participants would not only learn the hard work of farm life but still also have to give shows and develop a narrative of interdependence. There are more projects like these where NDAs had been signed, and I can’t help but wonder what will come of all the projects we had on the horizon. Unfinished ableton sets. Exported mp3 demos. She was an integral force behind the powerhouse trio that is bottoms:
For a long time, I wondered why I had so many deceased friends. What about my life put me along a path to encounter so many deaths — and the encounter of spirits of deceased friends?
It wasn’t until I read Douglas Crimp’s Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics that things started clicking. The precariousness of queer life extends beyond the AIDS crisis. I began to grasp a larger portrait of why so many friends of mine had passed. There are the realities of class and racial inequities, housing and income instability that come with countless queer people who do not have a stable home to go back to, the necessity of sex work and its risks, and the spaces we convene in which are filled with substances we use to celebrate, to escape, to explore, to have sex, to play, to perform, to dream.
Charlene wrote a beautiful and eloquent eulogy for Babes, articulating some things I have struggled to put into words about queer/chosen family and the struggles that come with learning how to love each other.
There are countless more stories, more voice notes, troubled timelines, and interpersonal dramas that couldn't fit into a single entry. Something tells me Babes isn’t going to die quietly and will take great pleasure haunting and messing with everyone who knew her far into our elder years.
Rest in power sissykins, I love you and will miss you deeply.
Love,
Colin