Tuckahoe NY Pride

Emanuel Xavier is a Bronx-born poet whose work is defined by a fearless, intimate voice that merges confession, protest, and performance. Writing from a lived queer, Latino, working-class perspective, he turns streetwise candor into lyric urgency, often addressing desire, faith, stigma, and survival with directness and musical drive. His poetry is shaped by New York City’s ballroom culture—its language, swagger, and chosen-family ethos—where competition and care sharpened his sense of rhythm and persona. In the 1990s he also worked the Piers on Manhattan’s waterfront, experiences that deepened his witness to intimacy, danger, and community.

Excerpt from “Legendary”

There are Gods amongst us in these ghettos
so black, so fierce,
so brown, so beautiful,
Their time on earth may be as oppressive as ignorance
limited to the demons flowing in their blood/but after safely passing over back to the clouds
the wind will still carry their auras and prophecies
their bones will still beat drums
for their children to dance