Beyond the Wound: Queer Trauma, Memory, and Resistance in Rainbow Milk

Abstract

This paper explores how trauma functions not only as a mark of suffering but as a generative force of memory, agency, and resistance. Traditional trauma narratives often confine queer bodies to sites of pain, overlooking their role in reshaping history and reclaiming identity. Drawing on Ann Cvetkovich’s concept of queer trauma as an anti-pathological force, this study examines how Rainbow Milk portrays distress not as an individual affliction requiring clinical intervention but as an insidious, intergenerational experience that circulates through familial silence and socio-cultural marginalization. At the same time, the novel illustrates how trauma can open pathways to self-expression and historical reclamation. By uncovering his family’s hidden past, the protagonist embarks on an unconventional healing process that links personal memory with collective histories of exclusion. In doing so, Rainbow Milk reframes trauma not as a fixed wound but as a dynamic, lived experience that enables identity reconstruction through remembrance, connection, and resilience.

1. Introduction

In “Choosing the Margins as a Space of Radical Openness”, Bell Hooks reconfigures those voices outside the dominant space as radical sites of imagination and resistance (Hooks 1989). For Hooks, the margin offers a position that both affirms and sustains subjectivity, becoming a vantage point from which those historically silenced can “articulate [their] sense of the world” (Hooks 1989, p. 23). Although her work emerged amid the stigmatizing climate of the 1990s, Hook’s insights resonate more than ever today due to the resurgent conservative ideologies that are harming marginalized groups. In the face of regressive policies, such as the executive orders of 14,168 and 14,183 in the United States,1 the urgency of speaking from and about the margins has only intensified. Within this climate, cultural artifacts such as literature have become vital mediums for creating these radical spaces and contesting stigma. As Anne Mulhall notes, narrative has been a potential source for queer writers and theorists “to reconceptualize the cultural workings of sex, gender, and sexuality—not to mention race, nation, indigeneity, and class among other categories” (Mulhall 2020, p. 142). Among the key motifs emerging from these texts is trauma, which queer writers use not only to register harms but to explore how marginalization is reworked into new forms of meaning, resilience, self-transformation, and even joy.

Building on this motif, queer writers’ engagement with trauma has culminated in a distinctive body of literature that reconsiders memory, identity, and relationality through its lens. The trauma genre, or what Anne Whitehead terms trauma fiction, is especially resonant for queer authors, as attention has shifted from the content of memory to the mechanisms and motivations underlying its recall (Whitehead 2004, p. 3). This orientation enables writers and critics alike to move beyond reductive causal narratives in which trauma is imagined to generate queerness, or queerness itself is cast as traumatic. Instead, as Jahin Kaiissar notes, works have begun to display “how trauma can influence queer identity itself” (Kaiissar 2025, p. 69). While this formulation emphasizes the difficulties of asserting queer subjectivity when entangled with trauma, it also points to the new modes of identity that emerge through this imbrication. These emergent subjectivities cannot be disentangled from the socio-political conditions that shape the LGBTQIA+ community’s experiences of harm and survival. For instance, a queer trauma novel may illuminate how intimate forms of violence, such as abuse, intersect with broader historical and cultural frameworks, including massive deportations, wars, and even environmental migration. At the same time, critics such as Kevin Brazil have emphasized how queer literature’s engagement with trauma can disrupt its conventional association with negativity by challenging what he calls the embodiment of queerness as being “mortgaged to unhappiness” (Brazil 2020, n.p.). In this sense, literary works at the intersection of trauma and queerness are not simply narratives of psychic wounds but also of reconfiguration. They interrogate trauma’s affective and narrative possibilities by exposing how harm is historically and politically produced, while simultaneously insisting on the creative and relational modes of life that can emerge through its transformation. The critical challenge, then, is to account for how these texts resist the foreclosure of queer identity within trauma, instead opening it toward more expansive, and at times paradoxical, forms of survival and becoming.

This dynamic is exemplified in Rainbow Milk (Mendez 2020), a semi-autobiographical novel by British writer Paul Mendez. The novel unfolds as an intergenerational meditation on trauma, identity, and queerness, weaving together the stories of Norman Alonso and Jesse McCarthy from the 1950s to 2016. The narrative first transports readers to post-war Britain, where Norman, a former Jamaican boxer and passionate horticulturalist, struggles to achieve a stable life for his family as part of the Windrush generation, a wave of Caribbean migrants invited to Britain to rebuild the country after World War II, who often faced entrenched racial prejudice, precarious work and limited social recognition. Written in a distinctive broken English, Norman’s story captures the pervasive impact of this structural marginalization, from hostile encounters at work to the violation of safety within his own home. These experiences prompt Norman and his wife Claudette to question whether it was a mistake to migrate to Britain, particularly in light of what it might mean for the futures of their children. However, the narrative leaves this question unanswered since it abruptly transitions to the story of Jesse McCarthy five decades later. Born and raised in the Black Country (Birmingham) within a strict Jehovah’s Witness household, Jesse is disfellowshipped after his queerness becomes visible. As a result, he decides to move to London, where his desire for reinvention and economic survival ends up revealing a different set of vulnerabilities. Jesse finds himself caught in cycles of sex work, substance abuse, and emotional dislocation which point not only to immediate forms of queerphobia and racial discrimination but also to deeper, and intergenerational, traumatic wounds.

Building on the novel’s unusual portrayal of trauma, this article explores how a combination of queer theory and trauma theory can challenge dominant understandings of queer embodiment as deeply traumatic. Rather than framing the experience of trauma as a pathological and isolated event, the novel points to its entanglement with structures of race, sexuality, religion and displacement. This perspective aligns with the theories devised by trauma and memory scholars like Balaev (2012), Buelens et al. (2014), Craps (2013), and Cvetkovich (2003), who emphasize the relational, cultural, and situated nature of psychic distress. Together, these theories open up possibilities for thinking about trauma as a cumulative, embodied experience shaped by historical and social conditions. More specifically, these frameworks illuminate how Rainbow Milk (Mendez 2020) constructs queer auto-identification as a living archive of inherited wounds that are refigured through narrative, memory and the body. Cvetkovich calls for an approach that acknowledges trauma’s “specificities and variations” (Cvetkovich 2003, p. 3); she informs this article’s critical engagement with her notion of queer trauma. Through close attention to how Mendez reshapes the relationship between trauma, queerness, and blackness at the level of the everyday, this article seeks to expand the idea that trauma only brings about psychic dislocation, suffering and distress. In other words, it examines how trauma extends through time and place, turning into an affective archive that circulates through racialized, sexualized and familial silences.

2. Towards a Depathologized Version of Trauma: Queer Trauma

Contemporary clinicians and theorists largely agree that trauma is best understood as an unassimilable experience accessible only through disruptive symptoms rather than through direct memory. Intrusive nightmares, recurrent flashbacks, states of hypervigilance, emotional withdrawal, and a range of psychosomatic disturbances are among the most common indicators of traumatic exposure. At the foundation of this perspective lies the medical–psychiatric establishment, which not only delineates the diagnostic boundaries of trauma but also codifies its symptomatic expressions and prescribes therapeutic interventions. This paradigm took definitive shape in the late twentieth century, particularly with the classification of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in 1980 (American Psychiatric Association 1980) and has since exerted a lasting influence on both clinical practice and broader cultural understandings of psychic injury. In this framework, trauma began to be framed as “a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind” (Caruth 1996, p. 3). Developed in response to the rising numbers of psychologically afflicted war veterans and survivors of large-scale political violence and a broader social imperative to restore a sense of order, this definition designates catastrophic events, such as wars, genocides, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters, as the paradigmatic sources of traumatic disturbance. Consequently, psychiatric discourse, deeply influenced by military medicine and postwar political concerns, established a clinical classification that also shaped the cultural conditions under which individual and collective suffering could be recognized and addressed.

What originated in the clinical realm as a narrowly defined psychological condition has now become a “big business” permeating Western sociocultural discourse (Craps and Bond 2021, p. 5). While influential, this perspective fails to capture the complexity and multidimensionality of trauma, particularly regarding chronic and structurally embedded forms of suffering. Physicians and psychologists such as Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Maté have challenged this monolithic framework and the rigid protocols it has produced. The dominant paradigm continues to define trauma primarily as the inescapable aftermath of catastrophic events, such as terrorist attacks and genocides, overlooking the reality that “[…] our social and economic culture generates chronic stressors that undermine well-being in the most serious ways […]” (Maté 2022, p. 17). For instance, Maté links structural racism and related psychic wounds to somatic manifestations, including asthma, to highlight how the cumulative effects of governmental policies, economic recession, and sociopolitical inequalities are systematically ignored when spectacular events are prioritized. Moreover, contemporary clinical discourse has often assumed that trauma must be addressed through therapeutic intervention, but van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, expanded the therapeutic repertoire to include bodily practices and creative expression as legitimate modes of overcoming trauma. Building on this, Maté situates relationality at the core of recovery, arguing that “[…] it is the case that centering on the self’s evanescent desires to the exclusion of communal needs results in a diminished connection to our deepest selves, which is to say the parts of us that generate and sustain true well-being” (Maté 2022, p. 313). Together, these insights underscore the necessity of understanding trauma as a layered, dynamic, and socially mediated phenomenon.

Nonetheless, van der Kolk and Maté are not the only figures to have departed from the dominant Western clinical models of trauma in search of more expansive frameworks. Before their contributions, scholars in literary and cultural studies argued for the necessity of trauma theory “to travel further and add a whole new series of destinations to its agenda” that an effective change has been made (Buelens et al. 2014, p. xii). Under the label of pluralistic trauma theory, this intellectual movement reconceptualizes trauma as a fluid, culturally embedded, and historically contingent experience. Such an approach makes it possible to account not only for non-Western experiences of trauma but also for the quotidian disruptions that fracture both individual and collective psyches. Through the analysis of cultural artifacts, critics in this field have demonstrated that trauma is not a fixed entity but a phenomenon that takes shape in specific contexts and through particular representational practices. For instance, in The Nature of Trauma in American Novels, one of the precursors of this movement, Michelle Balaev, illustrates how trauma can be articulated and potentially transformed through landscape imagery, semiotic processes, and the survivor’s social role. This cultural-studies approach complements—and in some respects anticipates—the critiques later advanced by Maté, but situates the debate firmly within the humanities, where the meanings, representations and transmission of trauma continue to be contested and redefined.

Cvetkovich’s notion of queer trauma stands at the forefront of this critical reorientation. In her 2003 monograph, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, Cvetkovich foregrounds the silenced traumas experienced by a particular subset of the queer community: lesbians. She critiques the inadequacy of traditional frameworks in accounting for these forms of trauma, which do not always result from discrete, catastrophic events but instead occur “in the vicinity of trauma” (Cvetkovich 2003, p. 278). In response, Cvetkovich brings together insights from queer theory, trauma theory, and affect theory under the conceptual umbrella of queer trauma. Historically, queerness has been pathologized as a psychological aberration in need of correction due to psychoanalytic and medical models of sexuality. It would be paradoxical, then, to analyze queer experiences of trauma using the very discourses that have contributed to their marginalization. The notion of queer trauma, thus, emerges as a critical alternative that resists medicalization and embraces cultural fluidity and indeterminacy to make visible other realities where trauma can also emerge.

Queer trauma challenges the pervasiveness of clinical models of trauma by drawing attention to subtle, less spectacular forms of distress. In this view, trauma is not always tied to singular or catastrophic events but to the slow accumulation of daily injuries such as microaggressions, erasures, and silences. These experiences are frequently excluded from dominant trauma discourses precisely because they leave “no sign of a problem” (Cvetkovich 2003, p. 46). However, their persistence do not diminish their impact. The everyday can become a site of affective intensity, where power and vulnerability are constantly negotiated under experiences of queer trauma. Therefore, recognizing the specificity and varied nature of trauma that emerges on a daily basis adds nuance to how psychic distress is experienced in queer bodies. It illustrates how these everyday injuries are inscribed into the body through self-censorship, disidentification, and affective fatigue. And most importantly, this specificity demonstrates that trauma is deeply entangled in socio-political structures of normativity that produce ongoing harm.

This new critical approach to trauma is also valuable for understanding how trauma unfolds across a continuum between the individual and the collective and over time. By framing queer trauma as an ‘archive of feelings’, Cvetkovich disrupts the clinical tendency to confine trauma to the private realm of psychic disturbance. This reorientation does not simply foreground the everyday textures of trauma as opposed to the more event-based ones but positions it as a transmissible phenomenon. Queer trauma can be carried across generations, bodies, and communities through silence, storytelling, and creative expressions. To better illustrate this perspective, it is useful to turn to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, or “[…] the inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience” (Hirsch 2008, p. 106). While originally theorized in the context of the Holocaust memory, postmemory offers a valuable framework for thinking about how queer trauma is reimagined and shared across temporal and social boundaries. When queered, postmemory extends beyond biological inheritance or direct witnessing to become a mode of affiliative memory that circulates across public cultures around queer trauma. In this sense, queer trauma unfolds not only through individual experience but also across broader networks of cultural memory, where personal pain intersects with inherited histories throughout time.

The interplay between Hirsch’s notion of postmemory and Cvetkovich’s queer trauma also highlights the multidirectional nature of remembering queer trauma. While Hirsch’s framework illuminates how trauma is transmitted across generations through family and affiliative networks, its emphasis on vertical inheritance can foreground lineage at the expense of broader relational and dialogical dynamics. When memory is framed in this one-directional, hierarchical way, it can reproduce what Rothberg calls a “zero-sum game” (2009, p. 3), in which minoritized memories are forced to compete for recognition. In contrast, Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory stresses that “[…] collective memories of seemingly distinct stories are not easily separable from each other, but emerge dialogically” (Rothberg 2014, p. 176). This notion productively complements the link between queer trauma and postmemory described above. It extends Hirsch’s insight by showing how transmissible memories of queer trauma emerge through relational and dialogical encounters across different histories of suffering. For queer trauma, this combination is particularly generative, as its harms often go unnoticed precisely because these dialogical encounters are silenced due to their nature, which is neither spectacular nor catastrophic. Thus, when situated within a multidirectional framework, queer trauma bridges the individual, collective, and relational dimensions of memory while simultaneously forcing memory studies to take into account the cumulative and often invisible harms that shape queer subjectivity.

3. Tracing a Double Story of Queer Trauma

Rainbow Milk begins in the summer of 1950, three years after Norman Alonso emigrated from Jamaica to England. Norman is outside watering the plants with his son, Robert, when his neighbor, Mr. Pearce, passes by. Pearce warmly addresses Robert, praising him for helping his father while trying to have a conversation with Norman. What initially appears to be a neighborly exchange about the weather soon gives way to a subtler form of racial prejudice, as Mr. Pearce comments: “[…] It’s alright for you, coming from the West Indies” (Mendez 2020, p. 4), implying that Norman should not mind the English weather due to his origins. Norman calmly rejects the assumption, but Pearce persists in expressing a veiled racist perspective by referencing the White Defense League, a British neo-Nazi political group known for targeting non-white residents in post-war Britain. Devoid of empathy and respect, Pearce casually remarks on the hate-fueled graffiti that the group left on Alonso’s front door and expresses his apologies. Notably, Pearce does not mention any attempt at preventing this act from happening, which highlights his passive complicity in the racist structures surrounding him.

Cvetkovich points out that “[…] migrations of all kinds are the scene for traumas of cultural diaspora” (Cvetkovich 2003, p. 29), a statement that resonates deeply with the Postwar Britain depicted in the first half of Rainbow Milk. This era, characterized by economic reconstruction, the arrival of the Windrush generation from Britain’s former colonies, and the consolidation of a white, Anglocentric national identity, becomes a charged backdrop where cultural dislocation and trauma intersect. Immigrant communities, especially those racialized as non-British, were frequently subjected to polite but insidious forms of racism that functioned to reaffirm their outsider status. This dynamic further unfolds in the seemingly casual exchange between Norman and Pearce, which ends up revealing the underlying trauma that shapes the diasporic experience. As their conversation continues, Pearce inquiries about Norman’s wife, Claudette, and upon learning that she works, he condescendingly remarks: “It’s a shame, isn’t it, in your culture, for the wife to be out doin’ [sic] all the work while the husband’s at home?”(Mendez 2020, p. 5). Indifferent to the fact that Norman is visually impaired, Pearce’s remark masks a narrative of Othering that proves extremely damaging to those excluded from the dominant culture. Thus, what appears to be everyday small talk becomes a vehicle for transmitting trauma in ways that may not leave visible scars but that resonate across generations.

Only fifty pages after the depiction of Norman’s encounter with microaggressions, the story moves to London in 2002. The narrator and focalizer is now Jesse, who is on a bus towards a sexual encounter. In a rapid sequence of impressions, Jesse offers readers a glimpse into Brixton and his stream of consciousness: the crowded streets of white people, a drunk man nearby, and ultimately, his internalized racism. He wonders “[…] what these perfect white people must be thinking about him and whether it was obvious he was rent on his way to have sex with a client” (Mendez 2020, p. 52). This moment marks the first instance of Jesse’s inner racial anxiety, even as he appears to exercise a form of sexual agency. Avenatti and Jones claim that sex work can function as a site for developing “a new language for bodily autonomy and consent” (Avenatti and Jones 2015, p. 92). However, sex work becomes a site of alienation and self-erasure for him since his clients expect him to embody a hypermasculine and animalistic stereotype assigned to Black men. As the narrator admits, they assume that “King Kong’s coming to see to them” (Mendez 2020, p. 52), a projection that reduces him to a racialized fantasy rather than a person. Yet, this particular revelation leaves readers questioning what circumstances, histories, or needs have driven him to tolerate such dehumanizing treatment.

In traditional trauma narratives, jumps in time are used to account for the “splitting of the self” that traumatized individuals experience after a traumatic event. Nonetheless, Rainbow Milk overuses flashbacks as a means of contextualizing Jesse’s past and the socio-cultural roots of his trauma. In 2001, Jesse lives in the Black Country with his mixed-race Jehovah’s Witness family, where he devotes himself to becoming a role model member by preaching, adhering to doctrine, and preparing for a pre-arranged marriage. Beneath this devotion, however, lies a carefully concealed truth: Jesse is queer and acutely aware that revealing his sexual orientation could lead to severe punishment, including social exclusion (Holden 2012, p. 79). Unknown to him, his fear is made painfully real in a seemingly casual encounter with Fraser, a fellow witness who questions his place in the community. While smoking weed and drinking during his break at McDonald’s, Jesse suggests to Fraser that they rent a flat together and jokingly asserts a lighthearted comment that outs him: “I’d be like your girlfriend, or summat. I’d look after ya!” (Mendez 2020, p. 80). Rather than responding playfully, Fraser decides to leave quickly, making Jesse feel not only unsettled but also worried that this playful expression may carry a terrible outcome.

Jesse’s preoccupation following his interaction with Fraser reveals the traumatizing effects of embodying queerness within strict religious communities. After the strange situation generated by Jesse’s joke, he realizes that members of his congregation have caught them drinking and smoking. Initially, his panic is fueled by a fear of punishment for minor transgressions. However, the narrative soon reveals that his symbolic and social death results Fraser revealing his queerness. That is why when he is visited by the elders, ostensibly for pastoral reasons concerning alcohol, the visit quickly turns into a disciplinary tribunal. When questioned, Jesse lies to protect Fraser, prompting his mother’s furious denunciation: “I’ve never been treated so badly by anybody! Me own son! He’s disrespectful, a liar, a cheat, and a thief […]”(Mendez 2020, p. 98). Immediately after hearing his mother, the elders decide to expel Jesse, forcing him into a public reading of a scripture: “But to persons defiled and faithless nothing is clean, […] because they are detestable and disobedient and not approved for good work of any sort” (Mendez 2020, p. 100; italics in the original). This passage functions as a theological condemnation of his queerness, foreclosing any ambiguity in Jesse’s identity through moral absolutism. Jesse reflects that disfellowshipped individuals are even treated “as if they had leprosy or AIDS” (Mendez 2020, p. 101), evoking the long-standing association between queer identity and social contagion. Echoing Judith Butler’s notion of ungrievability (Butler 2004), this withdrawal of social recognition renders Jesse both exiled and ungrievable: the disciplinary practices and moral judgment of the congregation operate as a form of queer necropolitics, socially and affectively erasing those who transgress normative codes of sexuality and embodiment.

At this moment, the trauma of exposure does not introduce new pain so much as it reactivates it when Jesse migrates to London. In his recollections of childhood while in London, he comes to understand first-hand the psychic impact of the rigid racial and gender roles of his community, which were most severely imposed by his mother. In one significant passage, Jesse remembers being violently beaten by his mother after discovering a picture of his biological father. She never disclosed his father’s identity, allegedly claiming that “[…] his father rejected Jehovah and would never be getting a resurrection”(Mendez 2020, p. 147). However, as the narrative later reveals, his father is a renowned queer painter, which suggests that his erasure stems both from religious doctrine and deeply internalized queerphobia. Jesse’s mother fears that he may inherit the queerness associated with his father, and this fear becomes a justification for repeated abuse. Indeed, after the photograph’s incident, she scratches his neck in an attempt to take it away, and Jesse hides under his bed in terror, “[…] waiting for her to come upstairs with the belt, the slipper, the hairbrush, the air freshener, the net curtain cord, anything to beat him […]” (Mendez 2020, p. 149). As Judith Herman notes, children subjected to chronic interpersonal violence may develop a complex trauma that profoundly impairs their sense of self and capacity for relational stability (Herman 1992, pp. 119–21). In Jesse’s case, this trauma is initially compounded by the intersection of religious intolerance and queerphobic violence, which marks his identity as a source of shame and punishment.

The familial environment in which Jesse grows up is also marked by pervasive psychological violence due to his race. Cvetkovich explains that when addressing queer trauma, it is essential to remain attentive to race, which can be equally, if not more, damaging (Cvetkovich 2003, p. 6). In Rainbow Milk, this intersection comes to light through the racist attitudes of Graham, Jesse’s adoptive father. Although Jesse develops a form of affection for Graham, their relationship is shaped by an underlying racial tension. Graham’s racist beliefs position Jesse and his mother’s racial identity as something that needs to be “corrected, exposing how systemic social, institutional, and economic structures impose constraints that render blackness as a site of limitation and marginalization. For a brief period, when Jesse’s mother is hospitalized after a miscarriage, Graham exhibits paternal care by comforting Jesse while they watch television together. But this closeness ends when Jesse is sent to live with Graham’s parents, where the racial prejudice that shapes Graham’s identity becomes more evident. Jesse starts to discern Graham’s frequent use of openly racist language, especially around his colleagues, where he refuses to talk about his wife and even insults her. Jesse is most hurt by the discovery that Graham’s racism extends to him personally. Graham maintains a superficial politeness in public, especially within the religious congregation, but this façade fails to mask a deeper hostility: “how could a white man raise a black boy to be anything other than white, and to consider his blackness as a disability to endure?” (Mendez 2020, p. 178). This moment crystallizes for Jesse the emotional cost of being raised in an environment where love is conditional and blackness is treated as a deficit.

According to Cvetkovich, and as happens in Rainbow Milk, queer trauma rarely manifests solely at the individual level. Jesse’s decision to engage in sex work while working as a waiter brings back his own internalized racism, functioning as a painful reminder of a broader, collective trauma. Although Jesse was raised during a time when official statistics indicate a decrease in hate crimes against black people in the United Kingdom, this decline does not necessarily equate to the eradication of racial marginalization in public spaces.2 At school, for instance, he recalls being ridiculed for his physical appearance through racially charged insults like “skinny li’l Biafran” (Mendez 2020, p. 178). Initially, he attempts to report this abuse to his parents and teachers. Yet, as he claims, Graham instructed him to ignore the harassment and instead “[…] left [him], a black man’s son, to the Bible” (Mendez 2020, p. 178). This dismissal leads Jesse to disengage from education, as he comes to recognize that his classmates, his white adoptive father, and the school system operate as mechanisms of exclusion. In history class, he explains how Black history was systematically erased in favor of narratives glorifying the British Empire: “The history of the black people was not a mainstream subject and would therefore become a weapon in the wrong mouth” (Mendez 2020, p. 179). Together, these experiences reveal how systems of education, religion, and language are mobilized to suppress cultural memory and reinforce white, heteronormative authority. As such, Jesse’s psychic distress starts to become a product of the structural conditions that position racial and sexual minorities as incompatible with the dominant social order.

As already evident in his childhood memories, trauma, for Jesse, does not stem from a discrete event. Rather, it emerges from the cumulative impact of systemic behaviors in which queerphobia and racism intersect to inflict harm. It is, therefore, unsurprising that during the time spent in London, Jesse continues to encounter these oppressive forces in his daily experiences. As Edwin Hodge points out, “[…] successful flight from homophobia and transphobia is more difficult than simply fleeing one nation for another”, or in Jesse’s case, relocating from one city to another (Hodge 2019, p. 84). In London, queerphobia is compounded by racial discrimination, eventually entrenching Jesse in a state of social and economic precarity. He lacks the financial resources to secure housing, afford food, or obtain stable, well-paid employment. This precariousness is not the result of a personal failure, but a structural condition disproportionately imposed on racial and sexual minorities, whose access to housing, jobs, and safety is systematically undermined (Kinitz et al. 2022). Even when Jesse experiences a temporary sense of stability after securing work as a waiter, he is subjected to persistent racist microaggressions that continuously exacerbate his trauma: “Oh, isn’t he just like a young Michael Jackson! What is your name? […] I just want to put him in my handbag” (Mendez 2020, pp. 172–73). This relentless dehumanization leaves Jesse with few viable options but to turn to sex work as a means of survival within a socio-economic system that denies him dignity and security.

A dramatic turning point in the narrative compels Jesse to confront and articulate the emotional distress that he has long been suppressing. Following an abrupt temporal shift, the narrative situates readers in the Christmas of 2002. Jesse appears to be doing well: he has an apartment and has made friends with his housemate, Owen, a middle-aged university professor who has recently come out as bisexual and is divorced from his wife. Despite Owen’s vibrant presence in the apartment, he remains unaware that Jesse has not left his bedroom in six weeks. Jesse has experienced a traumatic sexual assault where a client coerced him into unsafe sex and injured him. The protagonist’s isolation resonates with Staci Haines’ claim that experiences of sexual abuse shatter survivors’ physical, sexual, and emotional boundaries in a way that lead them to keep their integrity by “living within their own destruction” (Haines 1999, p. 217). However, when Jesse visits the hospital to learn that the injury may be more dangerous than anticipated due to a resurgence of HIV diagnoses, he breaks down and starts to confront the painful truth that his idea of sexual freedom is based on unequal power dynamics. He acknowledges having been exploited by white men “[…] to demonstrate their own strength, power, and supremacy […]” (Mendez 2020, p. 191). And, most importantly, he begins to recognize that his trauma is not merely a product of personal circumstance but is deeply rooted in, and perpetuated by, entrenched systems of racial and sexual domination that foreclose any possible resolution.

In this context, Owen becomes a vital source of support for Jesse. Isolated over the Christmas bank holidays, the two strengthen their bond through shared experiences and emotional vulnerability. Both have endured hardships and have found in music a means of reconnecting with themselves and the world around them. However, Jesse has yet to share his background, particularly the recent sexual assault that he has suffered. The welcoming atmosphere that Owen creates gradually transforms into a safe space for Jesse, enabling him to finally expresses his anguish in a prayer before dinner:

Thank you for bringing Owen and me into each other’s lives so we can at least spend this day suffering together, when really, we should be with our families who should love us unconditionally, but don’t, because of the rules you set, and because we don’t wish to live our lives by the lies You would rather told [sic] […] I will ask You to wake up from your slumber, come to understand that we all just want to love each other and be happy, and stop letting people be taken advantage of, raped, killed, starved, made homeless, impoverished, bullied, scourged, and all the other things You let Your creations suffer

(Mendez 2020, p. 214)

In attempting to make sense of his experience, Jesse reconfigures the traditional Christmas prayer as a vehicle to articulate his trauma and release emotions through anger. As Cvetkovich argues, “[…] anger can emerge as a necessary component of psychic resolution” (Cvetkovich 2003, p. 87). This angry outburst does not offer immediate relief to Jesse, but it represents a pivotal movement from silence toward agency in the aftermath of distress.

4. Healing Queer Trauma: A Turn to Memory and Relationality

Rainbow Milk challenges conventional, pathologized understandings of trauma by presenting a protagonist whose pain resists institutional recognition and therapeutic resolution. Jesse’s emotional shift during the prayer scene, where he begins to articulate his sense of dissociation and feelings of not being enough, marks a crucial moment in his relationship with trauma. As Judith Herman observes, survivors of childhood trauma often internalize blame because they believe in their own “badness” as a way to rationalize abuse by caregivers (Herman 1992, pp. 102–3). Jesse embodies this psychological pattern in his confession to Owen: “He was angry because he’d made it impossible to go home. He was angry with himself for getting found out” (Mendez 2020, p. 223). However, when Owen suggests therapy, Jesse reacts with discomfort and internally dismisses the idea. This resistance speaks to a broader disidentification with institutional modes of healing, which have historically excluded queer and racialized experiences of psychic pain. By rejecting therapy, Jesse does not refuse healing altogether but rather gestures toward the need for alternative modes of repair grounded in radical acts of self-determination beyond the clinic.

More specifically, the novel underscores what Cvetkovich theorizes as queer healing practices: forms of repair that reject conventional psychological models in favor of public, affective, and creative engagements with trauma. Traditional therapy’s emphasis on linear progress and psychic resolution fails to meet the needs of those whose pain is inseparable from structural forces such as racism, homophobia, and class oppression. In response, Cvetkovich proposes alternative healing mechanisms that are collective, improvisational, expressive, and public, such as art installations, performances, protests, writing, and the reclamation of silenced histories. These practices do not aim to resolve trauma but to hold space for its complexity until creating what she calls “a public culture around trauma” in which affective experience can be shared, witnessed, and honored. (Cvetkovich 2003, p. 1). This perspective also mirrors insights put forth by Maté and van der Kolk, who highlight the importance of relationality, social context, and bodily forms of recovery outside institutional therapy. In this way, Jesse’s journey in Rainbow Milk can be read as an instance of unconventional healing grounded in creative survival, meaning-making, and relational care.

The novel portrays Jesse’s complex healing process following another, more substantial, leap forward in time. Fourteen years after his life-changing conversation with Owen, and after Owen is badly injured in a car accident that night while trying to visit his family after using drugs, the two reconnect, begin a romantic relationship, and move into an apartment in Brixton. Jesse works as a waiter in a well-regarded coffee shop, while Owen has established himself as a successful poet. This emotional and financial stability enables Jesse to achieve a high level of critical awareness regarding his queer trauma. His understanding primarily comes through writing. Although the narrative does not explore the specifics of his writing, it illustrates that the act of writing can function as a method of scriptotherapy, a term coined by Suzette Henke, which involves employing writing to access, process and heal traumatic memories (Henke 2000, p. xii). At the beginning of Jesse’s section, when a coworker asks him about the future, Jesse verbalizes for the first time his desire to become a writer “to make sense of everything that has happened to him” (Mendez 2020, p. 177). This aspiration has materialized in the present: through auto-fictional writing influenced by authors of color such as James Baldwin, Jesse begins to process the roots of his trauma. In fact, in a moment of introspection after writing, he confronts the emotional impact of maternal absence, admitting, “[…] Every mother he sees at the bus stop, with her children, he looks her right in the face and hopes she makes them know they’re loved” (Mendez 2020, p. 284). By projecting his own yearning onto strangers, Jesse externalizes and names the psychic weigh of familial abandonment and rejection. While not offering resolution, this moment of clarity signifies a departure from unarticulated suffering to a reflective awareness achieved by writing in isolation.

The newfound awareness of his past trauma encourages Jesse to evaluate his internalized racism and cultivate positive relationships that challenge his previous self-rejection. As Bessel van der Kolk claims, language, and by extension storytelling and cultural engagement, opens up “the possibility of joining a community” (van der Kolk 2014, p. 353). Through his engagement with Black art and literature, Jesse begins to do precisely this: he connects with queer people of color like Ginika, who becomes both a supporter of his creative work and a maternal-like figure in his life. According to Kath Weston, kinships “may offer intimacy, care, eroticism, and dependency in other forms […]” (Bradway and Freeman 2022, p. 13), a model embodied in Ginika’s nurturing role. This relationship enables Jesse to move beyond internalized racism and self-rejection by reorienting his sense of self through shared cultural experience and community. His engagement with Black literature and Ginika’s social circle creates the conditions for no longer retreating inward or viewing his trauma as purely individual, but rather to recognize its systemic roots. This is particularly evident in his conversation with Jean-Alain, where he recalls his adoptive father’s racist reaction to the murder of Stephen Lawrence and ponders how “[…] white supremacy permeates every aspect of our society” (Mendez 2020, p. 330).3 In this way, Jesse moves beyond isolation and self-reproach toward a shared understanding of trauma, where pain is recognized, contextualized, and collectively acknowledged.

Nonetheless, Jesse’s partial healing comes when he unexpectedly discovers information about his biological father. During a picnic organized by Ginika, Jesse meets Conroy, a curator of Black British collections at the British Library, who expresses a keen interest in Jesse and Owen’s relationship, particularly in how they manage to share a creative space. However, what truly captures Conroy’s attention is Jesse’s striking resemblance to a painter he once met: Robert Alonso. According to Conroy, Robert was an outsider in the art world, known for his nude self-portraits that documented his experience living with AIDS. Initially confused, Jesse becomes increasingly intrigued as Conroy provides further details, such as Robert’s involvement with a black collective, his frequent depictions of naked male figures holding flowers, and his residence in Wolverhampton, all of which begin to resonate with Jesse. Though not yet fully conscious of the connection, Jesse begins to consider the possibility that Robert may be his father, and the pieces start to cohere: “Robert Alonso. A painter. A black male painter of nudes. Self-portraits, mainly, with roses, documenting the progress of his illness […] Nude… Nude with Othello…” (Mendez 2020, p. 299; italics in the original). Jesse concludes that Robert is the author of a painting he previously saw at a friend’s home, unknowingly beginning a process of emotional and genealogical healing.

Through Jesse’s discovery of his biological father, Rainbow Milk demonstrates how postmemory and multidirectional memory can intersect in practices of healing. As discussed above, these concepts emphasize how memory operates not only on an individual level but also gestures toward collective histories, serving as a mechanism that fosters narrativization, affective engagement, and ultimately, healing. However, the transmission of postmemory, or the presence of multidirectional memory, together with their reparative potential has often been inaccessible to marginalized communities, particularly people of color and members of the LGBTQIA+ population. Rachel Gelfand and Anamarija Horvat argue that memory transmission typically depends on intergenerational continuity, an aspect that is frequently disrupted for queer individuals, for whom familial structures are often the original site of trauma (Gelfand 2018; Horvat 2021). Consequently, queer memory, trauma, as well as the possibility of overcoming that trauma, are frequently foreclosed. Jesse articulates this rupture in one of his inner monologs: “And my own mother? Has she been lying to me all this time? […] She belongs to a sect that has brainwashed her against her own firstborn. She has lied to me, all my life” (Mendez 2020, p. 299; italics in the original). Recognizing that such acts of remembrance have been entirely denied to him, Jesse begins the process of uncovering his father’s story, thereby illustrating how reclaiming obscured familial narratives can activate the healing potential of memory.

After learning about Robert’s involvement in the BLK collective, Jesse begins searching for traces of his father in monographs and digital archives only to find that his presence in public memory is practically nonexistent. This absence mirrors Rothberg’s argument that when memories compete to one another, there is a “form of cultural capital that bestows moral privileges” (Rothberg 2009, p. 87). In Robert’s case, the privileging of other event-based traumas has denied Robert’s recognition on multiple levels. As Jose María Yebra observes, he “is denied fatherhood when his wife meets a white husband and he is also denied a family and social space when he is infected with AIDS” (Yebra 2021, p. 791), leaving him disconnected from both familial and collective memory. Nonetheless, this lack of dialogical integration does not prevent the emergence of memory, as Jesse actively traces connections across intersecting histories, drawing on archival fragments and the cultural narratives surrounding him. In doing so, the memories of his father become multidirectional, as recovering these stories prompts him to reimagine the broader context of loss and forgetting in his family history, particularly the forced silences surrounding the Windrush generation: “He wonders what it might have been like for his Jamaican grandparents’ generation, coming to England for the first time, […] unaware that most of the people in the chocolate-box villages they were passing through would rather non-whites turned round […]”(Mendez 2020, p. 318). By not avoiding this silence, Jesse becomes a subject who engages with and transcends memory, taking on the ethical duty to create new ways of relating and remembering. Jesse’s reconstruction, facilitated by “[…] an imaginative investment and creation” (Hirsch 1997, p. 22), can help heal the ruptures caused by generational trauma, racial displacement, and queer erasure.

According to Cvetkovich, when the truth of traumatic experiences is silenced, photographs, homemade movies, and cultural artifacts, together with their contemporary reimagining, serve as a vital archive through which trauma can be processed and remembered (Cvetkovich 2003, p. 7). For Jesse, Robert’s painting becomes the archive that starts to transform his experience of trauma. Although he initially encounters the artwork without understanding its origins, its affective power haunts him for years: the image of a naked, wounded man holding a rose etches itself into his memory, functioning as a visual echo of a pain he could not articulate. Yet, now, this painting aligns with a narrative he can begin to claim. Asking his friend to see it anew, Jesse realizes that it “[…] had the same power over him, the imagined pain of stigmatization in his hand” (Mendez 2020, p. 312). This moment marks a shift in Jesse’s relation to both the image and himself, as he does not passively inherit trauma but rather actively interprets it. By confirming Robert’s authorship and situating the work within a broader family history shaped by repression and silence, Jesse revitalizes his father’s memory and, in doing so, begins to undo the trauma they both carry. The artwork, thus, functions, in Hirsch’s words, as “the medium connecting memory and postmemory” (Hirsch 1992, p. 9), and one may add, multidirectional memory, through which Jesse processes loss, recontextualizes his identity, and begins to forgive himself for years of dislocation and shame.

Once Jesse begins to analyze the patterns underlying his father’s erasure, he experiences a sense of empowerment that alleviates his suffering. As he delves into the hidden history surrounding his father’s absence, Jesse begins to uncover the mechanisms of repression that have defined his upbringing. His mother’s silence offers a telling example, functioning both as a means of emotional self-preservation and as a reflection of the unspoken traumas that structure their relationship. Jesse realizes that discovering the his dad’s photograph has marked the beginning of their estrangement since “ […] they have fought over the photograph, and it had been torn in half. […] They have not spoken one word to each other since he left home at nineteen” (Mendez 2020, p. 319). As discussed above, this object signifies not only a resurfacing of a past weakness but also a betrayal of the moral compromise that Jesse’s mother made with the religious community. In recognizing this, Jesse internalizes the belief that he is the source of her distress: had the community discovered his father’s identity, both would have faced expulsion. Initially, Jesse sympathizes with his mother, viewing his actions as inadvertently harmful. However, he soon realizes that silence and shame have been foundational elements of his trauma. Refusing to perpetuate this dynamic, he chooses to break the silence by calling his mother to share the truth about his father. Despite receiving a distant reaction from his adoptive father rather than her, Jesse refuses to remain complicit and decides to move forward in his healing quest.

That is why the final pages of Rainbow Milk delve into Jesse’s encounter with his paternal lineage. Frustrated by the lack of answers, Jesse turns to Conroy, who facilitates contact with Robert’s sister, now residing in Wolverhampton. Accompanied by Owen, Jesse travels there, where, for the first time, he is not met with silence but with stories, photographs, and fragments of a long-suppressed Jamaican heritage. As Cvetkovich argues in a different context, recovering marginalized histories often requires one to “[…] supplement archival documents with oral history and personal memory” (Cvetkovich 2003, p. 127). Jesse starts to construct his father’s narrative, and his own, with descriptions and photographs of Robert when he was young. More importantly, however, this encounter also connects the novel’s two narrative threads: Jesse learns that Norman Alonso was his grandfather, and that he left behind two children, Robert Alonso and Glorie, after dying of a stroke at an early age. Jesse’s aunt recounts how their mother struggled to survive in a society that penalized her for her race and her single parenthood. This economic and racial marginalization temporarily forced Robert and Glorie into foster care, until their mother eventually became a matron and purchased a home. Demonstrating how “forms of individual and collective narratives are not merely representations disconnected from ‘real’ political life” (Lowe 1996, p. 156), Jesse begins to gain a sense of belonging that counteracts his traumatic dislocation through personal and historical connection.

In this intimate familial encounter, Rainbow Milk constructs a complex interplay between multidirectional memory, trauma, and queer agency. When Jesse’s aunt inquiries about his knowledge of Robert, Jesse reflects on how his father’s life has been obscured both by his mother’s silence and by broader historical erasures likely shaped by stigma. However, as Rothberg argues, “when the productive intercultural dynamic of multidirectional memory is claimed, it has the potential to create new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice” (Rothberg 2009, p. 5). Jesse’s recognition of the intergenerational echoes enacts precisely such potential, as he engages in an act of queer world making by envisioning an alternative future for his father’s history: “[…] if we do find more of [Robert’s art], we might be able to exhibit it and raise awareness of his existence, as a Black artist, as an artist who lived with AIDS, because he’s potentially important to both those narratives” (Mendez 2020, p. 346). Jesse’s statement becomes a form of resistance to dominant modes of remembrance that render marginalized lives invisible. This act of reclamation is further underscored by Jesse’s announcement of his forthcoming marriage to Owen, which symbolically affirms queer futurity on both personal and political levels. Amidst the celebration, Jesse reflects that embracing the future does not entail disavowing the past: “Of course, their parents are out of the question, they belong to the past. This isn’t the past. This is the now and the future” (Mendez 2020, p. 348). Instead of a rupture from his personal and collective history, Jesse reframes the past as a persistent presence that may shape the present but not delimit it.

Yet, even if Jesse’s final claim may seem hopeful, the narrative makes clear that not everything can be reconfigured into generative frameworks of memory. His reconciliation with Robert’s legacy does not restore the fractured relationship with his mother, nor does it recover the voices of those lost to AIDS or fully repair the racial exclusions endured by the Windrush generation. All these silences and absences constitute part of what Avery Gordon calls “ghostly matters” since they become unresolved residues of violence that “produce a something-to-be-done” (Gordon 1997, p. xvi). That is, the novel insists on the persistence of what remains irretrievable, and consequently, unhealed. This remainder complicates trauma theory’s tendency toward narrativization as a form of overcoming psychic distress, as Jesse’s survival is bound to depend not on integrating every loss into a coherent story but on learning to live alongside what exceeds repair. By foregrounding these leftovers subtly, Rainbow Milk underscores how queer trauma and its memory are always shadowed by the unresolved, the spectral, and the disavowed. Far from signaling failure, this acknowledgment resists the closure of redemptive narratives and situates hope not in total recovery of trauma but in the fragile coexistence of endurance, imagination, and the ethical responsibility to remember what cannot be fully recovered.

5. Conclusions

Paul Mendez’s Rainbow Milk succeeds in offering a powerful literary reimagining of how trauma operates, particularly for queer and racialized subjects. Rather than treating trauma as a pathological rupture that can be resolved through individualized therapy, the novel defends an alternative understanding of trauma as a socially embedded and ongoing condition that demands alternative frameworks for understanding and respond to it. Through the lens of Cvetkovich’s queer trauma, this paper has articulated different textures of trauma: while Norman Alonso’s life is marked by the suffocating silence of systemic racism, Jesse’s experience, also mirrored by the absent figure of Robert, traces the entanglement of personal pain with collective histories of exclusion. Both stories illuminate how trauma cannot be neatly healed in these contexts. Norman’s suffering cannot be overcome in the absence of structural change. Jesse’s emotional dislocation, similarly, cannot be reduced to psychological pathology without missing the broader social violence that shapes it, such as familial rejection and racialized precarity.

Most importantly, perhaps, is how Rainbow Milk engages with alternative modes of healing. Mendez encourages readers to question the validity of therapeutic patterns for easing trauma, particularly in contexts where psychic distress is inextricably linked to structural and social oppression. By doing so, the narrative draws attention to the diverse and often non-normative strategies that marginalized individuals deploy to navigate and resist ongoing harm: writing, reading, queer kinships, and the unearthing of familial and communal memory. Of these, unearthing memory is especially significant for Jesse. By reclaiming his father’s past and reconstructing his paternal lineage, Jesse begins to rearticulate a sense of self fragmented by abandonment, religious strictures, racism, and queerphobia. Interestingly enough, this process does not culminate in total healing, as Mendez resists the closure that traditional narratives of trauma impose. Instead, the novel foregrounds the provisional, partial, and iterative nature of memory recovery and identity formation. Jesse’s engagement with familial knowledge constitutes a counter-discursive praxis that allows for the coexistence of enduring pain alongside queer auto-affirmation. It is through Jesse’s acts of memory retrieval that the resistant practices envisioned by Hooks alluded to at the beginning of this chapter indeed take shape, as hope emerges as a commitment to survival, relationality, and the sustained struggle to render visible the histories that hegemonic discourses have long sought to erase.