FREE AGAIN BY LA STREISAND AS A BILINGUAL TEACHER

The morning I woke-up with the song in my mind and the vision of the last performance by the drag queen who used to mimic La Streisand at the Roundtable in Midtown served to understand that freedom is not only an internal sensation, but one to be judged in relationship to the external world where it takes place. At that grand performance night, many decades ago, the Puerto Rican “draga” (dragas is how Puerto Rican in the City refer to tranvestites) that used to do La Streisand announced that it was going to be her last show at the gay disco, since she had gotten a State certificate to work as a bilingual teacher in Queens, beginning that coming term. At the time, if you were out of the closet and, more so, a drag queen, no way a school was the place one would even try to get a full time job. We, in the dance floor, laughed and clapped. Many of us were also bilingual teachers. Our freedom at the disco was not the same as it was in the schools where we worked surrounded by all kinds of political, social, economic, moral questions and needs. Free again was sung and experienced once more that morning when I woke-up and saw the list of bureaucratic things I had to do: none of them related to a new certificate, but to a different set of circumstances, determining how free I was going to feel -or allowed me to be- during the rest of the day or the following weeks before moving onto my next phase as a very old aging man.