Adinah Dancyger & Mykki Blanco

Hold These Truths

• Still from I Want a Dyke for President, 2016
  Video (HD)
  Duration: 2:02
  Courtesy of Dazed & Confused

The video I Want a Dyke for President, and the poem it recites, suggests socioeconomic and political disempowerment as a valid starting point for a president.

Mykki Blanco, a genderqueer, HIV-positive performance artist and rapper, recites activist Zoe Leonard’s poem “I Want a President,” written in the midst of the 1992 presidential election when poet and activist Eileen Myles ran as an “openly female candidate.”

Particularly relevant to our current crisis—a year after the election of Donald Trump—the video shows how the re-contextualization of past texts has the power to offer critical re-examinations of what may often be considered self-evident.