Jerome Murphy

Today, one can walk down to the Christopher Street pier, look out at that water shimmering, and find the walkways populous with so many ghosts—teenage hustlers, homeless youth, drag queens, defiant survivors no longer in the fight—who now only exist for many of us, moving like afterimages through these baby strollers, these bikes, the bodies of leisurely joggers—because Emanuel Xavier, song by song, through his several collections, so devotedly conjures them for us: “Us who created / something from nothing to make it appealing / for those who own everything” (“Gentrification”). Or rather, with his new collection Radiance, he invokes […]