Photos of Jonathan Hohensee

This was taken the night before you were born. I had no clue that your other biological mom was pregnant at the time.

In 2011, I lived in a hipster part of town in Orlando Florida. I just got out of film school and I started what was called a "terrorist Nickelodeon," where I would screen movies in public places. For example, I screened this movie that was a critique of consumer culture called Ghost World in front of a an abandoned big box toy store called Toys r Us.

This was the early years of YouTube, and at one point I downloaded 10 different videos that were tutorials on how to tie a tie, and I screened them in the backyard of one of my friends. And for the screen, I took a bunch of old t-shirts I had and sewed them together.

I was kind of being art-y and pretentious, but at the same time I think that fancy art should be for everybody. At one point I screened these very beautiful experimental films by a guy named Norman Mclaren in a bar that is mostly populated by homeless people, and I was really proud that the homeless people really appreciated it. this one drunk woman who had a reputation of panhandling in the neighborhood kept on saying the word "wow" in a really craggly voice.

I had a reputation for this, and the "coolest" house in the neighborhood was at the end of the block of this alleyway, for the holiday that you were born before, they asked me to do a video display, and so I set up this old 1970s security camera to be watching a Mickey mouse watch as it ticks through the night.

I struggled with substance abuse at the time, mostly alcohol. The next morning I woke up and I was really hungover (alcohol is a poison, and also a dehydrates you, and so when you drink too much it causes headaches and a sort of existential misery when you wake up the next morning) and I got a couple of messages from your other birth mom. I can get into that story if we ever meet in person

The year before you were born, I was very involved with farmworker organizing. My group is called National Farmworker Ministry. Farmworkers often have a lot of political struggles; after slavery, when our country was building its first labor laws, the jobs that slaves with traditionally do (domestic work and farm work) where excluded from those protections for the usual racist reasons.

That meant that people had to use collective action. Collective action is basically, if you can't bring about political change with a bunch of money, you get a bunch of people to work together to scare the people with power. Think about a protest or a boycott.

One of the things that makes political mobilizing for farmworkers tricky is that they are in rural areas. Imagine if you have beef with a farm, are you going to stand in front of that farm with a picket sign and yell loudly at the one car that would drive past once an hour?

Meanwhile, in the city, we had visibility and resources and connections, so basically what would happen is we'd go out to the fields, talk to the workers, ask what their political needs were and then we went out and acted on those needs. Everything from voter registration drives, to getting them blankets, to fundraising, to protesting fast food places to make sure that they pay the workers more

I think people have this starry-eyed vision of what activism is. I have been doing activism for 20 years, and never ran into a group that wasn't fully of messy drama bullshit (sorry for cussing). My time in farm worker organizing was really messy; it was a lot of hard, heartbreaking work, and the people in my group was both like a family to me, but also things can get really toxic. The leader of our leaderles organization had an ego and was really insecure, and a lot of times I'd be a whipping girl for their anger at the world. It lead me to burn out of organizing for a time and adapt a really nihilist black-pill mentality.

The burnout happened in 2012 or so, and I don't think I really put my full self back into organizing until 2020, to put things in perspective. I am happy again, and found a sense of hope. But I guess that's a story for another day.

Early in my transition,