Tourmaline is a writer, activist, and filmmaker, involved in projects like Happy Birthday, Marsha and Atlantic is a Sea of Bones. In this interview, she recounts her childhood in Boston, where she attended a Black Nationalist church and formed intergenerational relationships with the queer and trans individuals in her neighborhood. After moving to New York for school, Tourmaline became heavily involved with organizations such as Queers for Economic Justice, Curb Resistance, and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. She also discusses the power of subject-driven grammar, the pitfalls of trans visibility, and the potential of film to function as memory.