With the “Hear, Here” series, we aim to facilitate conversations around new research in the humanities. Faculty fellows at the Institute for the Humanities will discuss a part of their current project in a short talk followed by a Q & A session.

About this talk: My older brother David was found dead in his car in San Francisco in late July 2021. Unsure how to grieve for someone who I mostly knew as an abusive, sexist, homophobic, drug addict and alcoholic, I turned to old family photos to make sense of things. Among a cache of photos in which he is either conspicuously absent or appears moody, dissociated, or stoned, I stumble upon two unexpected photos of David circa 1984. He is fourteen years old, holding baby me on his hip, and gleefully grinning ear to ear. He is donning a brunette wig and wearing a short, sleeveless baby blue dress. Wherein the other photos in this family archive show a brooding teen marinating in a stupor of anger, drugs, and alcohol, in these photos David is energetic, lighthearted, and radiating joy. It was not until after his death that I understood my brother’s life for what it was: an act. The toxically masculine persona I knew of him functioned as a defensive performance of heterosexuality and whiteness, an elaborate act to distract from his queerness and his Arabness. The Act is a documentary film which takes David’s life and death as a plot device through which to examine the effects of anti-Arab racism, sexism, and homophobia on Arab Americans (queer and otherwise).

Umayyah Cable is a 2024-25 Richard & Lillian Ives Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Assistant Professor of American Culture and Film, Television, & Media.