Dr. Garcia attended the memorial service for Will at Wells, which is where we first met and became friends. He also spoke at the memorial service for Will at SU. Below are the remarks Alejandro made in Hendricks Chapel, an enormous place that for a little while was our small place of comfort. Thought you might enjoy reading these words, too. Gracias, Profesor Garcia.
By Alejandro Garcia
Director and Professor, School of Social Work
Syracuse University
Will Liberi was a charmer, a rogue, an independent thinker, an activist, an educator. He was my student, but I have a sense that I learned more from him than he did from me.
He taught me about the challenges of being a transgender person. He taught me about transformation and change, about metamorphoses.
He taught me about being uncompromising in maintaining one’s integrity.
He taught me about the need to be oneself in spite of everyone else’s demands to conform to their expectations. He knew who he was and he constantly worked to get the whole world to come to the same understanding.
He challenged my thinking, although not always with the greatest of social skills. In fact, he challenged the thinking of the many people he touched.
At Wells College, he unwittingly became the first male student in the College at a time when the college was not yet coed.
When he sang that song of himself by changing the name on his door at Wells from Joy to Will, he told me that he met resistance from his fellow students, and his name sign was often mutilated and the name changed back to Joy, but he persisted. He simply refused to allow others to define him.
Taking into consideration his status as a transgender student and the difficulty society has about persons using gender-assigned bathrooms, he also pushed to have Wells College create bathrooms open to all, regardless of their gender, and he succeeded.
While at Syracuse University, his hormone therapy finally started to work and he began to grow facial hair. He had a few hairs on his chin and he was pleased with that change. But he worked in one of the University’s cafeterias and he was forced to shave. He was frustrated. He told me that he had spent several thousand dollars to grow those few hairs, and how he was being forced to eliminate them in order to keep his job. But the issue was more than a few facial hairs. It was about his integrity being violated.
As I was thinking about Will the last few days, I remember my guru, the noted family therapist Virginia Satir, whose words of personal affirmation are fitting as we remember Will today:
I am me.
In all the world,
there is no one else exactly like me -
everything that comes out of me is authentically mine,
because I alone choose it - I own everything about me - my body, my feelings, my mouth, my voice, all my actions,
whether they be to others or to myself -
I own my fantasies, my dreams, my hopes, my fears -
I own all my triumphs and successes, all my failures and mistakes. Because I own all of me, I can become intimately acquainted with me - by so doing I can love me and be friendly with me in all my parts -
I know there are aspects about myself that puzzle me,
and other aspects that I do not know -
but as long as I am friendly and loving to myself,
I can courageously and hopefully look for solutions to the puzzles and for ways to find out more about me -
However I look and sound, whatever I say and do,
and whatever I think and feel at a given moment in time is authentically me - If later some parts of how I looked, sounded, thought and felt turned out to be unfitting, I can discard that which I feel is unfitting, keep the rest, and invent something new for that which I discarded -
I can see, hear, feel, think, say, and do.
I have the tools to survive, to be close to others, to be productive,
and to make sense and order out of the world of people and things outside of me -
I own me, and therefore I can engineer me -
I am me &
I AM OKAY
And finally, as we wish Will a self-fulfilling journey to advocate for wayward angels and other spirits, I have a blessing from Fred Small, the folk singer, that I thought was especially appropriate. It is from a folk song that he dedicated to a friend who is a folk singer. It is appropriately titled “To Willie:”
Night falls hard in a faraway place
When you never knew the name and you can't recall the face
Your timing's off, you're tired, you can't imagine why they hired you
We are there in the silence by your side.
May the rain run off your shoulder when you're caught in a storm
When the frost comes a-calling may it find you safe and warm
May your place be set, may your promises be kept,
May you never forget you are loved.
From "Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond"; Produced by Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui, WESU
Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui is Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at Wesleyan University, Connecticut and produces the radio program, "Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond," at Wesleyan.
