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thechangeling · 3 years

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But you like her better: Part 2

Sorry it's been a minute! I hope you like it.

Cw: Some brief ableism, mentions of internalized biphobia, and self injurious stimming.

2013

It was raining when 16 year old María Machado Sotomayor first met Kit Herondale.

Marí had always loved the sound of the rain. It was peaceful and rhythmic, creating a nice tingly feeling in her skull running straight down her spine. It also good for the plants. Which meant that Marí arrived (on time for once) at her favorite class in a pretty good mood.

Marine biology was their one of their three special interests, the other two being lacrosse and Base guitar. So Bio was usually pretty fun for them. However this time was different.

Her mood was instantly dampened when she walked into class and saw someone new sitting in her usually seat. A blond, short and white kid who looked far too pretty for his own good. A new kid most likely.

A new kid who didn't realize that Marí always sat by the window every single day. It was their spot. Still Marí was determined not to overreact. They marched over to the new kid and approached him with their best masking smile.

Remember eye contact. She told herself. Keep your tone light and breezy but not too lifeless. Smile. Appear friendly and non threatening. Try not to sweat. Try not to scream.

"Hi excuse me," Marí began in a sickly sweet tone. "That's actually my seat! Sorry!"

The boy instantly looked embarrassed and apologetic. "Oh I'm sorry!" He blushed. "I didn't realize there was assigned seating." He had an American accent, California maybe?

Wonderful. A white American boy. Just what they needed.

Marí chewed their lip and fought the urge to rock or tap. "There isn't actually," they admitted. "I just usually sit there. So can you please move?"

Now the new kid looked a little offended. A cold look settled over his face. "Well why should I?" He bristled. "This seat isn't really yours. It's not like it has your name on it."

Marí rolled her eyes in frustration. "I tried that already but then I got in trouble."

He stared at them curiously for a moment. Marí took the opportunity to break eye contact finally and scuff their heel against the floor. They were wearing the new black suede chunky heels with the gem stones that Marí had gotten when they went thrifting with their friends.

"María!" The harsh voice of her teacher snapped her back into reality. Everyone had arrived and taken their seats while she was arguing with the American and now everyone was staring at her. "Could you please explain why you are not seated young lady?" She snapped in her extra pretentious sounding posh English accent.

The one that said, "I'm better than you."

Marí tried not to growl at being called a young lady. They weren't feeling particularly female today. Not that Marí was going to bother explaining that to some old British hag.

"He won't get out of my seat!" Marí protested. Instantly laughter broke out around the classroom. Cruel mocking laughter that made Marí feel like her skin was crawling.

"It's ok!" The new kid cried out, practically jumping out of Marí's seat. "I'll move! I'll go sit over here." He grabbed his bag and moved to the back of the room as quickly as possible.

Marí smiled in spite of themself. His random act of kindness was surprising, but they were grateful. They took their seat near the window and sighed in relief.

Marí would always look back on that day with fondness no matter what. It may not have seemed like much to him, but it meant the world to her. After Bio class she had asked Kit to come eat with her and her friends. They had made their introductions and the rest was history.

They became close friends very quickly, bonding over movies and music. They sent each other playlists of their favorite songs and songs that reminded them of each other. Marí made Kit a queer playlist with songs by queer artists and told Kit that they were bisexual and a demigirl. They hadn't even told their friends that last part yet at that point.

Marí also told Kit that they liked to use she/they pronouns, but so far was only using them online. Kit asked Marí a lot of questions then confessed to Marí that he was also bisexual but he was still kinda getting used to it.

"I grew up in a shitty situation," Kit had told them. "I guess I still have a lot of shame."

Marí didn't hold it against him. She bought him queer literature and resources for queer history including "Bisexuality and Queer Theory" and her printed copy of the article published in the 90s called "The Bisexual Manifesto." She gave him advice on websites and people to follow online.

They also just talked. Talked about life and their experiences. Their feelings and their relationships with their sexualities. Bonding with another queer person was always special but spending time with Kit always made Marí feel so...light.

Despite how close they were getting, Marí didn't always want to touch him. They were touch averse in most cases unless they were very comfortable with someone. Sometimes it just depended on the day. On the days where Marí found they could not hug Kit they had invented their own way to show affection.

They would place a hand over their hearts and tap it, as if to say "I care about you" or "I love you." Sometimes Kit would say "tap my heart" as a substitute for actually doing it.

He introduced her to his close friend Janessa, the wayward vampire who was incredibly hot and kind of made Marí all nervous and tounge twisty at first. But as they got to know her, Marí realized that she was also incredibly kind, passionate and clearly cared at great deal about Kit. Janessa was a gamer who had named herself after a video game character. She drank cups of warm blood in novelty mugs with giant swirly sparkly straws and was pretty good at making people laugh.

Janessa, or Nessie as Kit had affectionately nicknamed her, was flirtatious and charismatic, but also brutal and deadly in a fight. She was full of surprises. And maybe, just maybe Marì was a little bit into that.

However as much as Marí didn't want to admit it, they were also were starting to realize that they were way more into someone else. Someone with perfect golden curls that Marí wanted to curl their fingers into.

Eventually Kit came out to Marí as genderfluid and requested that she use alternating he/they pronouns for them. They both made the decision to collectively tell their friends their pronouns. Marí, Kit and Nessie sat around her gorgeous leather couch and talked for hours about gender, identity and transness. Kit pointed put that they may never be able to fully explain their gender to the other two, just like Kit might have a hard time fully understanding Janessa's relationship with gender, or Marí's because everyone was different.

"It's personal Nessie," he had said. "Everyone has their own unique perspective on gender and every trans person has their own complicated feelings about gender and what their own gender identity means to them, and those feelings might not completely match up with another trans person's. But that's ok. You don't have to understand the other person but you do have to respect them."

Janessa's understanding of gender came from being a trans women. It was about a strict binary with clear lines and rules. Rules that Kit was starting to make a habit of fingerpainting all over and Marí could tell that it was stressing her out.

And Marí had no idea where the hell they fit in these rules. They had stopped playing the game.

But those two loved each other more than anything, and Marí knew they could work anything out. And sure enough approximately seven hours and four margaritas later (only two for Marí,) they had come to an understanding.

2014

She kissed Kit for the first time a month into the new year.

They had been trying on clothes in Marí's room and Kit was wearing one of their old dresses that Marí thought they looked amazing in, but Kit wanted to give it away. It was dark navy blue and sparkly with spaghetti straps, coming to about mid thigh. There were cut outs on the sides, filled in with black sheer fabric, and it had a low v cut at the neckline which was also filled in with black sheer.

Kit had been infodumping about one of the Marvel movies again, Marí couldn't remember which one, and she had kept getting distracted by his tan smooth skin peaking through the sheer fabric and fullness of Kit's moving lips. He smiled excitedly and Marí had stepped forward and kissed him.

Their first thought was that Kit tasted like chocolate. Their second was that they should have done this months ago.

Kit had melted into the kiss, smiling slightly against her mouth and pulling her closer. They kissed her feverishly, sliding their tounge inside Marí's mouth and moaning when she deepened the kiss eagerly. They moved against each other with almost lazy, comfortable precision, kissing each other for what could have been hours or days or maybe only seconds.

Marí couldn't have said.

When Kit finally broke the kiss and pulled away from Marí, his eyes were practically gleaming with joy and love. And that was when they knew.

I love him.

2015

I love him.

Ty's words ran in her ears. Repeating over and over again, maddenly bouncing around inside of her skull until she was forced to utter out loud,

"I love him".

They whispered it under their breath but Marí could tell that both Alyssa and Ty had heard them. It was so quiet you could probably hear a pin drop.

But of course. Of course he does. It was obvious. This whole time Marí had noticed there was something wrong with Ty. Just like there was something wrong with Kit. The way they stared after each other when they thought the other one wasn't looking. The loving and worshipful glances mixed with the bitter glares.

Marí had already known that Kit was in love with Ty of course. But the way they had told the story made it seem like they were positive that Ty couldn't be in love with them.

But then again maybe that made sense. Given Kit's history and who he was. But then Marí couldn't help but think of Ty and how confused he must have been. God it was a giant mess.

Speaking of...

The room was still silent. Marí found that she couldn't read Ty's expression as he stared back at her flatly. But his body was shaking, his fingers fluttered at his sides. She wanted to soothe him.

They stepped forward carefully. "I'm not mad at you," Marí assured him. "I was hoping we could talk?"

Ty's left eye twitched. "We are talking," he pointed out. Alyssa snorted.

"Ty, they mean about the proverbial bomb you just dropped a few seconds ago," Alyssa said with a laugh. Marí smirked to themself slightly.

It wasn't really a bomb. More like a flare.

She really needed to talk to Ty. The only problem was Alyssa had an annoying tendency to never leave his side. It wasn't like she had a problem with the girl. Of course not. But her presence meant that Marí hadn't had the opportunity to talk to Ty one on one.

They cleared their throat. "Alyssa could you please give Ty and I some space to talk?" They asked. Marí hoped they didn't sound too rude. Alyssa looked to Ty and he nodded slightly, signaling that he was ok with her leaving.

That was so strange to Marí. Their relationship. The way Alyssa, a werewolf who hated shadowhunters even more then Marí did, essentially took orders from him and clearly trusted him more than anyone else. But perhaps she wasn't one to judge.

After all, she loved Kit.

Alyssa left the room with a pat on Ty's back and a quick, "call if you need me." Marí shifted their weight back and forth as they rocked slightly from side to side as they waited for Ty to speak.

He stared back at her silently, most likely doing the same. Marí blew out a loud breath and forced herself to stay still, crossing her arms.

"Are you going to say something or should I?" Ty asked expectantly. Marí bit their lip and shrugged.

"I'm still thinking of what I wanna say," she admitted.

Ty smiled at her softly. "So am I."

There we go. Cracks in the armour.

"I'm sorry," Ty whispered suddenly. "I never meant to-"

"You don't have to apologize!" Marí blurted out. Whoops they had interrupted him. "Oh shit sorry you were still talking!" They reached for their hair nervously and realized that they were wearing that Morticia wig for their costume.

Great. Marí moved on to chewing on her knuckles.

"It's ok," Ty reassured her. "I don't really know where I was going with that sentence. And you shouldn't do that." He pointed to her hand.

Marí scoffed, "yeah well you shouldn't dig your nails into your palms." He glared at them and they laughed.

"Not so fun playing a game of Mirror Image is it?" They teased. Ty didn't respond, just stared at Marí solemnly.

"You know I really admire you," he said, aiming his gaze close enough to hers to create the illusion of eye contact. "I always have. I never wanted to hurt or upset you."

Marí wished for a brief moment that they could touch him and then shrugged the impulse off. "I know love," they cooed. "Me too."

Without really understanding why, she pressed her hand to her chest directly above her heart and tapped, just like how she did with Kit. Ty studied Marí for a moment and then followed suite.

Marí in spite of themself, actually felt bad for him. They could clearly see the toll the last three years had taken on him, specifically the last few weeks. Maybe his family couldn't see it, and they definitely knew that Kit couldn't, but Marí could.

Marí of all people could see past the mask because they knew what masking looked like. It wasn't just about appearing normal, whatever that word meant. It was about hiding your feelings. Taking that heart you wore on your sleeve and locking it up tight. But everytime Marí looked at Ty, they could see it. And it was bleeding.

Ripped and bloody and broken, just like her own and yet they both still had the sheer audacity to keep breathing. Marí was proud of them both.

"You need to talk to him," Marí prompted. "You both need to be honest with each other."

Ty furrowed his brow. "Honest? About what? He doesn't feel the same way." He had gone back to flicking his fingers as he stared at her, looking puzzled.

Bloody hell between the two of them, Kit and Ty were giving Marí the mother of all headaches.

They took a deep breath. "Yes they do Ty," Marí tried not to sound exasperated. "Kit is in love with you, believe me. They told me."

It hurt Marí's heart to have to say it, but it was true and Ty deserved to know the truth. And they knew deep down that Kit wouldn't really be happy, he wouldn't be Kit until he had Ty. And Marí had to make their peace with that.

Ty looked understandably confused. He ran a frantic hand through his hair. "But why are you telling me this? Why are you helping me?" He asked. "Don't you love them?"

She fought the urge to cry as tears gathered in her eyes. She found herself digging her nails into her palms despite chastising Ty for doing it a few minutes ago.

"I'm telling you all of this because I love them" she cried desperately. "Because Kit cries out your name in his sleep Ty! Because everytime he sees you, he stares at you like you are the moon the sun and the stars! Because everytime you speak they hang onto absolutely every word, and when you laugh-" Marí cut herself off.

They squeezed their eyes shut and took deep long breaths. Ty said nothing. Marí opened their eyes to see Ty staring at them in dismay. He looked like he was trying to think of what to say to help.

Marí shook their head. "I know Kit loves me. And they probably always will. We were close friends even before we started dating." Marí groaned and shook out their entire body this time, jumping up and down a few times as well to get rid of the tension. If Ty thought this was weird he didn't comment on it.

Marí wiped her eyes carefully trying not to smudge her mascara. "But you Ty?" His eyes refocused on her again at the sound of his name. Marí chuckled humourlessly. "Fucking hell, he is in love with you. And right now he is thinking that you hate him and I know it's tearing him up inside."

Ty stared at Marí hopelessly, looking overwhelmed and exhausted. "So what do I do then? What am I supposed to say?"

Marí shrugged. "I can't help you with that I'm sorry. It has to come from you." Ty looked even more panicked.

They gave him what they hoped was an encouraging smile. "Don't be scared Ty," they murmered. "It's Kit remember. They're not scary. You have nothing to worry about."

Ty didn't answer her. He had wrapped his arms around his body, squeezing tightly. "Marí do you remember those dead moon jellyfish we buried on the beach?" He asked.

She was a little confused as to why he was bringing this up now. "Yeah? Why?"

"That's what I feel like right now," Ty admitted. "Like I've washed up on the beach and now I'm just waiting for someone to come along and step on me."

Marí's heart sank. "Oh Ty," they breathed. "I promise that won't happen with Kit. I can't make any promises for anyone else, but I do know that Kit has absolutely no intention of hurting you again love."

Ty looked pensive. Marí could only hope that Ty would make the decision to trust them.

With a sudden jolt Marí remembered the party.

"Hey we still have the Halloween party to go to," she said, shaking Ty out of his stupor. "Do you still wanna go?"

To their surprise, Ty nodded. "Sure. I think Alyssa might kill me if I back out now."

Marí snorted. Alyssa Reyes could be pretty terrifying at times.

With surprise Marí found that their spirts were lighter having cleared the air with Ty and with the prospect of a party being renewed.

She smiled. "All right then let's head out!" Marí smoothed down the long black wig over her shoulders and quickly smoothed out the long skirt of her black slinky dress before turning and exiting the training room.

She knew that she would have to talk to Kit at some point and that conversation would be brutal. But at least they could have one last night together.

It's better this way. Marí told themself as they walked back towards the main living room where everyone was gathered. At least now Kit can be happy.

It's for the best.

It has to be.

So I'm actually planning on writing a part 3 from Kit's pov because the drama isn't over yet! 😏

Tag list: lmk if you wanna be added/removed.

@playwithravenclaw @lavender-scented-rat @jazzkaurtheglorious @waterlillies @nott-the-best @stxr-thxif @magnus-the-fabulous-entp-bane @foxglove-airmid @littlx-songbxrd @clarys-heosphoros @queenlilith43 @arangiajoan @hardlymatters @thomas-gaypanic-lightwood @tired-vin @phoenix-and-dragon @the-blackdale @adoravel-fenomeno @the-wckd-powers

#tsc #twp #kit x ty #marí the werewolf #the wicked powers #maría machado sotomayor #we stan autistic bonding #we stan queer bonding

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betweentheracks · 3 years

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LGBTQ+ and Queer Operated/Founded Brands

A composite list of some of the notable brands I have worked with or been in contact with throughout my time as a stylist. Rooted in queer communities, founded by LGBTQ+ designers, and dedicated to pursuing gender inclusive styles as well as providing an uplifting community committed to showcasing the talents of LGBTQ+ persons. A number of these also have a deal of activity in supporting POC or black owned and operated fashion brands and design studios.

Otherwild: Los Angeles, California.

Queer identified and woman-owned, Otherwild was established in 2012. It is a store, design studio, and event space. They offer apparel and accessories, as well as lo/no-waste home cleaning products and personal care products. Very grassroots and have a foundation of ethics and sustainability, working in earnest to establish a countercultural relationship to exploitative, extractive, and excessive consumer capitalist culture. They’re quite cost-effective with fair pricing on their range of products.

Rebirth Garments: Chicago, Illinois.

Entirely gender non-conforming, Rebirth Garments caters specifically to all non-binary, trans, and disabled. Their clothing line is custom made upon order, touting a distinct lack of standard sizes since part of their mission and manifesto is to tailor their styles to exactly the consumer’s specifications regardless of body type. Their party line is “Radical Visibility” and have a zine under the same name; their manifesto expressed as a desire to establish and nurture a community of people that have been excluded from mainstream fashion but are still deserving of an outlet to feel confident in expressing pride in the intersections of identity. Their materials are all vibrant and wild, bold and exuberant as a means to challenge the ableist and sizest ideals of mainstream fashions which still centers on gender and binary conforming styles. -- They also offer virtual lessons on accessibility, entrepreneurship, and much more.

Automic Gold: New York City, New York.

Queer owned and queer operated all inclusive jewelry, Automic Gold promotes their products as the most comfortable and versatile jewelry available. The founder is genderqueer and makes a point to create truly genderless accessories and does so with designs that specifically mix and warp the essence of masculinity and femininity, bringing together that which is both outside and inside to form that which is beyond. Sustainable and eco-friendly, all of their jewelry is made from reclaimed gold and 100% recyclable material. Automic Gold is the only known jeweler that carries rings in sizes 2 to 16 and utilize this point to shade the fashion industry for being so constrained by sizing standards.

Wildfang: Los Angeles, California/Portland, Oregon.

Women found, women run, women oriented. Wildfang is seated in the belief that women can and should wear whatever they want and be whatever they want. They give much of their profits to charities and organizations that center on the rights of the oppressed communities, namely queer, reproductive, and immigrant activism. Their collections offer full suits tailored to a female body, workwear made of truly durable materials to outlast even the worst of working conditions, and button ups that won’t gap at the boobs and are not super form-fitting. They promote the sort of modern feminism that holds no underlying toxic ideals of woman’s superiority, and works in the name of women having their rights unrestricted so that they can live their fullest lives with a true sense of self and self-worth alike.

STUZO CLOTHING: Los Angeles, California.

Steeped in the ideals of love, people, and life STUZO celebrates existence without emphasis on identity. Women owned and black owned, STUZO offers apparel with no gender bias with designs meant to invoke thought and feeling; an experience of the self, expressed without boundary. STUZO looks at clothing as being without life and therefore cannot be limited by borders of gender; textiles worn and filled out by consumers breathing life into them.

PYRAMID SEVEN: Chicago, Illinois.

A niche brand; they provide boxer briefs for periods, not gender. Their philosophy and belief is that regardless of where you fall on the gender spectrum or identify yourself as, if you menstruate you should be wearing their briefs. Designed with comfort and protection in mind, PYRAMID SEVEN briefs offer assurance that there is no longer a need to worry about leakage or bagginess - discomfort does not exist in their brand. These briefs are made to be used either in tandem with menstrual products of all kinds or even for free bleeding, it’s all at behest to comfort during an uncomfortable time. They are also advocates of privacy and neither reveal themselves too freely nor make comments on their consumer base, only expressing the validity of their representation being that of all who menstruate.

Fluide: Brooklyn, New York.

Beauty brand founded by a mother’s goal to establish a gender-expansive beauty line to celebrate under-represented faces and voice, supporting young people’s self-expression and creativity. Fluide is queer oriented and offers a full range of vegan/cruelty free cosmetics for all skin tones + types and gender expression. Their belief is that makeup is joyful, transformative, and meant to be inclusive of all with a wish of being expressive and to invent themselves as they want to be seen. They are a platform of queer voices showcasing queer beauty and work with many LGBTQ+ non-profits and advocate for revolutionizing the world of fashion and all of it’s mainstream conception of beauty standards and create a style space of authenticity.

Official Rebrand: New York City, New York.

A unique brand founded by a non-binary artist, Official Rebrand revives discarded clothing and remakes designs by breathing life back into what was unwanted. The mastermind behind the concept paints or otherwise alters (rebrands) items that have been cast aside and turns them into works of art which in turn proposes an anti-waste alternative. The rebranding process strips clothing of their proposed gender categories and promotes the fluidity of identity. Official Rebrand dominates the medium where art and fashion overlap, reintroducing his pieces without any sense of today’s arbitrary societal constraints.

PHLEMUNS: Los Angeles, California.

Black and queer owned/operated, PHLEMUNS is a non-binary all inclusive brand that seeks to merge elements of nostalgia and modern contemporary fashion. With a goal of bridging the gap between high fashion and every day communities, this brand takes what is called a slow-fashion approach to their designs and crafts meticulously and intentionally on styles meant to be seen as accessible, inclusive, and wholly unisex. This is a brand which exists in the grey areas of society, fashion, and thrives on the idea of intersecting identity.

NO SESSO: Los Angeles, California.

The brand name itself is Italian for “no sex/gender” and the fashion it produces truly encompasses this meaning. This is a fashion house that cranks out collections specifically targeting conventions of art, fashion, and culture. Their lines offer ranges in color, fabrics, prints, and reconstructed materials but their true signature is hand embroidery. Much of their collections are made from upcycled fabrics and materials found at flea markets and make use of patchwork designs as a motif of their community-based foundations. Think streetwear but couture, and this is what NO SESSO is defined by.

gc2b: Maryland, USA.

Trans-owned, founded, and operated. gc2b produced the first chest binder and snapped off transitional apparel and established themselves as the first gender-affirming company in the industry. The credence of the company is comfortable, safe, and accessible binding options designed by trans people for trans people and to accomodate the vast spectrum of humanity. gc2b has donated over 6000 binders to those in need and sponsors over 100 LGBTQ+ organizations while working extensively with LGBTQ+ communities and charities to raise funds and awareness.

Likely I will revise this post from time to time and update the listing.

I really like being able to use my position as a platform to provide notice of undervalued communities within the fashion industry and world of style. I have often purchased outright and incorporated many key pieces of some of my most notable styles and ensembles from LGBTQ+ brands that deserve recognition and think of it as a soft promotion of their talent and falls within the conduct my company expects me to abide.

Originally I did intend to have links in this post to make checking them out easier, but I was having some issues with tumblr being crotchety and had to forgo them sadly. Still, I encourage anyone interested to take a peek at their online sites or social medias - they’re all very lovely and inspirational!

#racks chats #lgbt fashion #lgbt brands #style

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kaimactrash · 3 years

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The second pride image is my pan babies...and rilo...they are not a baby, they are a very bad person. XD

Also no, no I do not know how to even make my style cohesive for two images! I am a messy artist at heart.

Let's start with them, since they're in the top left, with the bright green skin and big black coat. Rilo is a gender fluid pansexual elder demon, theyre a primary antagonist in my story, but not due to either sexuality or gender. You may notice this mirrors my sexuality and gender, I kind of liked the idea of going out my way to have them be representative of a kind of intense feeling i get. So to explain, I hate hate hate when someone of any trans identity misbehaves, people tend to misgender them while angry at them, even though their misdeeds are nothing to do with their gender identity. I want rilo to be a character people have issues with not because of their identity, and that helps encourage people to not give shitty people the excuse to call your critisism about them invalid when you misidentify them intentionally and maliciously.Across the flag is another pan genderqueer character? YES, that cuz this is my neo sona, called Skeith Kai until I can make a better name, haha. they are joined by their pet meowclops, based on my pet cat toulouse...he has two eyes irl. Bellow Skeith Kai, with the huge maw of a mouth splitting her torso is one of my FAVOURITE EVER OCS, I don't draw her enough but I am so enamored by her. She IDs primarily as Non-binary as her umberella term, but the base one would be gender apathetic, she doesnt care or really see anything as gendered, she is fine with all pronouns, but having been called she by her family her whole life she tends to use it as second nature. She's a pretty cool girl, having began the story as essentially a merc for the bad guys, she quickly quits them cuz they kept getting their asses kicked, plus she and beefy get on like a house on fire.Beside moira with also pink hair is dylan! ...okay so shes a littler more complex than Moira in terms of redmeption, BUT!!! There are reasons for that are important in her story arc, and I'm not ready to explain my plan for her multichapter involvement in the story, but...give her time, she plays off as the typical high school cool bully girl stereotype, but theres a lot of work for me to do before dylan even apears in my comic. TT_TT Someone please give me potion of improved production times!!Lil teal skinned demon to the left of dylan is Greip Tavros, another fave oc of mine! Shes my only cyclops oc so far and she has really challenged me in recreating her look, shes short but buff as fuck, also no not inspired by bea, who i also LOVE btw, but yeah just a coincidence of some very slight simialrities in colour pallets. Greip is very laid back and chilled out, she cares little for the demon realm or the elders who run it, she pretty much takes her leave to return to Frenrar, because before she died, she lived on frenrar, the demons take people from earth and frenrar. She joins in the rebelion and traveling party lith is part of. Shes aromatic and pansexual EMESH, hes the armless deer... is centaur the right word in this case?? but yeah them! So basically frenrar is the planet of failed gods, emesh is one of them and if youre curious about I reccomend you read this profile of him: www.deviantart.com/kaimactrash…Lastly we have Melisa, a extremely under utalised character of mine, but shes quite fun, I have her and her husband basically as like my comfort oc couple, theyre super in love, super suppportive, and they litterally just wanna settle down and have kids. Shes a fantastic potion brewer, due to her high sense of smell, this is heightened because she is both partially blind and partially deaf. She has Open-angle glaucoma, which has left her with only central vision with colour blindness there, the rest of her vision is essentially blacked out from her perspective. Heaing wise shes hard of hearing due to noise damage as a child, she may need people to speak up, and with her husband bruce, they have developed some signs akin to the real worlds deaf blind signing, but much more basic as they've just developed it together, Bruce has actually enjoyed finding non-verbal ways to communicate with his with and others in his life.and thats all folks! hope you enjoyed this art, and enjoy the second half of this pride! Happy pride my fellow pan fanatics, it's a tough year for every memeber of this community, and I will never pretend we suffer the majority of the strife this community recieves, but we have our issues, and recently theres a amplification of the same anti-m-spec retoric people like myself who have id'd as such for some years now have had to hear way too frequently. Tho, dont get too down, the growth in pride and understanding of the variety of M-spec identities has improved so much! Hell, I'm still learning much about the other identites and the indivuals that experience them, and i hope to include more of my characters in the less mentioned identities in this group! Okay I'm gonna get off my soap box before some one pushes me off it.

#ocart #oc art #pride art #oc pride #pansexual #pansexuality #lgbtqia #pan

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thecorteztwins · 4 years

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Something I’ve noticed in fiction and RP backstories is that when a character is LGBT, the parents/family react only one or two ways: Total acceptance with no issues, or rejecting/disowning/beating/attempting to kill their kid/etc And both these things do happen in real life. But what’s also very common, and which I rarely see represented or discussed, is a lot of places between the two extremes. For instance, many families are homophobic, but don’t want to lose their child, and the child wants to be themselves but not cut contact with their family. So you get scenarios like having bachelor Uncle Ted and his also-bachelor roommate Rob, who has been his roommate for 20 years, and may even get invited to Thanksgiving and Christmas. Everyone refers to him as Uncle Ted’s roommate or his friend, and Uncle Ted introduces him that way too, and it’s not until you’re 25 years old that you realize “oh, fuck, Uncle Ted is gay and Rob is his partner!” As bizarre as that scenario seems, it’s a VERY common story. Again, a great many families will, for the sake of keeping the peace, just reach an unspoken agreement that they won’t acknowledge it or bring it up, and that will do the trick. Another common scenario is that Uncle Rob and Ted have been together for 20 years, but you never knew because in this version Ted was never introduced to you, let alone invited to Thanksgiving and Christmas. In this version, the family will still accept Uncle Rob, but he has to do more than just say Ted is his roommate, Ted can’t be in the picture at all and Rob can’t mention him to anyone, especially not his parents or to you kids. You don’t find out about Ted till you’re an adult and between homes and need a place to stay and shack up at their place. It’s totally surreal but it happens. It happens a lot. There are also many parents who will be fine with their kid being gay in theory, but upset at the idea of the kid bringing home a partner. Or they’re fine with that, they just can’t let the partner meet the grandparents or extended family, who aren’t as accepting as the parents are, that’s very often the case. They may also “accept” when their teen or twenty-something comes out, but that’s because they expect it to just be a phase, and become concerned when it proves NOT to be. Or, if the kid is bisexual, they may assume they were proven correct when the kid brings home an opposite-sex partner. There are also parents who have nothing against homosexuality or bisexuality or being trans in themselves, but who have concerns related to what risks their child will be exposed to because of it. I once read an interview with a black lesbian who came out to her mother, and her mother’s reaction wasn’t to condemn being gay itself, but it wasn’t positive either---her mother said “You’re already black and a woman, why do you want to add being gay on top of that?” Her mother’s concern was the oppression her daughter would face. Likewise, a family might love their gay son no matter what, but be worried when he comes out as gay because they believe that this means he’s very likely to get AIDS, and they don’t want that to happen to him. My mother’s very accepting of ALL people on the LGBT rainbow, but she has said to me that she is less worried about me as a lesbian in this regard than a gay man, because STDs are harder to spread between cis lesbians. Speaking of my parents, they’re about the most accepting pair I could ask for. My sexuality is a non-issue to them, and they support all forms of gay and trans rights. But they’re also in their 60s, and not part of the LGBT community itself, and certainly not actively following how rapidly terminology and ideas are evolving now in the age of the Internet; the accepted view and words used around trans people, for instance, have changed really radically just in the past 10 years. So, my folks do hold some ideas that modern Tumblr would deem “problematic” such as my mom feeling that gay men are inherently more artistic and nurturing, because that’s what the gay men she’s known were like. Also, while she does NOT believe this anymore, she used to believe that men became gay because their fathers were bad or absent, because that’s what was the common view when she was a young woman in the 80s, and matched the situation of the gay men she met. She likewise asked me if I was a lesbian because sex with women was more gentle. Again, she knows you’re born gay NOW but in the past, those were common ideas, and the ideas that she therefore was exposed to. It didn’t make her hateful or bigoted, she was accepting of gay people even before I was born, let alone before I came out, but it did make her incorrect and going off stereotypes that corresponded to her own experiences and perceptions. So maybe your character’s mom didn’t have a fit and throw them out, but maybe she did also think that now her son would want to go shopping with her or that her daughter would want to take up golf. Also, while both my parents are very accepting of sexuality, they do get a bit more problematic in terms of how they judge gender expression. My mom is uneasy with butch women, and my dad kind of scoffs/is amused by femme men (yet oddly, has no issue with trans women, nor does my mom have an issue with trans men) This is another VERY common viewpoint I encounter---people not having an issue with the idea of same-sex activity and relationships in themselves, but in how “flamboyant” the person is. With many people, they disapprove of flamboyant gay men and butch women, but oddly in some cases it can go the other way around too; there are people who are just fine with the idea of flamboyantly gay makeup artists, drag queens, talk show hosts, fashion gurus, and hairdressers, but are more uneasy at the idea of perfectly “normal” businessmen or soccer moms who just also happen to be queer. There’s entire articles (probably essays) out there about how gay men in particular are marketed by shows like Queer Eye as basically being cute happy helpers to straight people, the cliche Sassy Gay Friend who just exists for the sake of supporting his female friends, etc. I’ve often wondered if lesbians don’t get the same media presence because we’re not seen as “useful” to heterosexual people in the same way (not that it’s any fun for real gay men to be pigeonholed that way either) So your character’s family may accept them but also start expecting stereotypical behavior from them, like giving their girly-girl daughter a tool kit after she comes our, or they may not BELIEVE them when they do because they’re NOT stereotypical, and that’s the only exposure to gay people that they have from media. You’ll notice I’ve thus far given examples only for a kid being gay or bi. That’s because I’m going off things I’ve personally encountered or heard of. I don’t have a lot of stories on how people react to their kid coming out as trans, but I imagine there’s just as much variation; I would check places like AskReddit for coming stories if you’re looking to find examples of reactions that are likewise somewhere in between total acceptance vs total rejection. For people who are asexual or non-binary, I reckon the biggest issue is just that the parents don’t know what the heck that even is, or don’t believe it exists, but I may be wrong, since I also don’t have much experience with this nor heard much secondhand either. Again, I’d seek out real stories from people and see what ideas you can get from those. Everyone’s coming out story or story of a family member’s coming out (or how said family member never came out, etc) is a little different. I hope this was helpful!

#writing #rp stuff #rp tips #writing tips #lgbt #writing lgbt #out of cortez

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alexsfictionaddiction · 4 years

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Alex Recommends: May and June Books

I must apologise for the late arrival of this post. It should have been up days ago but I’ve been struggling to read much for the last month or so. My head has been very foggy and dark with all of the confusion, anxiety and hate that has been filling my news feeds and I’ve been filled with a desire to combat it. Before this month, I’d have run in the opposite direction from any kind of confrontation but recent events have given me the kick up the butt to actively do better. I’ve been calling out bigotry when I come across it and I’ve noticed that some people, notably my older relatives, haven’t necessarily reacted favorably to the changed, more outspoken Alex. It has been pretty daunting and I’ve worked myself up into fits of rage and tears several times over the last couple of months.

A lot of things have changed for me since my last Alex Recommends post. I’m currently temporarily living in Staffordshire with my boyfriend because my depression got too bad for me to stay at home for much longer. I missed him unbelievably much and I knew that spending some prolonged time with him would help -and it has. Both him and I have spent 12 weeks religiously following all of the rules, so we’re both extremely low-risk for catching and spreading COVID-19 and being together was something that we simply really needed to do. Please don’t hate me for it! In other news, I have also started writing again, which feels amazing. I’m now a few thousand words into a queer Rapunzel retelling that I have lots of ideas for. Maybe I’ll even post an extract or two, when I feel it’s ready to show you.

In the centre of the renewed energy of Black Lives Matter and the undeniable exposure of the horrors that is police brutality, the book blogging and BookTube worlds vowed to uplift Black voices. I wrote a very long, in-depth blog post full of Black-written books and Black book influencers. Please check it out to diversify your TBR and educate yourself on Black issues, which is what every white person should be doing now and always.

June was Pride Month and I tried my best to compile a series of recommendation posts in honour of it. These included gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, ace, pansexual and intersex lists. I’ve had some great feedback on this, so I hope you find some fantastic new reads. It felt especially poignant to put them together the same year that one of my childhood heroes came out as an ignorant trans-exclusive feminist. As a lifelong Harry Potter superfan and someone who has repeatedly publicly supported Rowling in the past, I feel the need to clarify where I now stand. I do not support or agree with a single thing that she has said in recent times with regard to transgender people. I’ve never felt my own status as a cisgender female threatened by trans people wanting more rights or believed that children or women were at risk due to their existence.

I read her words more than once and struggled to find any semblance of the woman who wrote the books that have most defined my life. I’m hesitant to say that we can always successfully separate the art from the artist but I will say that it makes sense to me that the Rowling of 2020 is not the same Rowling that wrote Harry Potter. She was a destitute single mother when Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997 and of course, she is now a million worlds away from that lifestyle. It breaks my heart but it makes sense to me that she has changed beyond belief because her life has changed beyond belief. I’m not and never would make any excuses for her recent behaviour and I have stopped supporting her personally but I will not be getting rid of my Harry Potter books and I will undoubtedly re-read them several more times. However, I am now hugely reluctant to buy any more merchandise or special editions of the books, which saddens me but at the moment, it feels right. There is no coming back for her from this and I will make a conscious effort to keep Harry Potter and Rowling away from my future content. It can be really tough to admit that the people you once really admired aren’t great humans but it’s something that we all have to acknowledge in this case, in order to move forward with our own quests to become our best selves.

It didn’t feel right to post my May recommendations last month as I didn’t feel comfortable promoting my own content in the midst of boosting Black voices. So today I’m bringing you a bumper edition of Alex Recommends. Here are 10 books that I’ve enjoyed since the start of May that I’d love to share with you. Enjoy! -Love, Alex x

FICTION: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Set in the affluent neighbourhood of Shaker Heights, Ohio in the 1990s, two families are brought together and pulled apart by the most intense, devastating circumstances. Dealing with issues of race, class, coming-of-age, motherhood and the dangers of perfection, Little Fires Everywhere is highly addictive and effecting. With characters who are so heartbreakingly real and a story that weaves its way to your very core, I couldn’t put it down and I’m still thinking about it over a month after finishing it.

FICTION: Get A Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert

When coding nerd Chloe Brown almost dies, she makes a list of goals and vows to finally Get A Life. So she enlists tattooed redhead handyman and biker Red to teach her how. Cute, funny and ultimately life-affirming, this enemies-to-lovers rom-com was exactly the brand of light relief that I needed this month. The follow-up Take A Hint, Dani Brown focuses on a fake-dating situation with Chloe’s over-achieving academic sister and I can’t wait to get my hands on that.

FICTION: The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart by Margarita Montimore

Just before her 19th birthday at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1983, Oona Lockhart finds herself inexplicably in 2015 inside her 51-year-old body. She soon learns that every year on New Year’s Day, she will now find herself inside a random year of her life and she has no control over it. Seeing her through relationships, friendships and extreme wealth, this strange novel has echoes of Back To The Future and 13 Going On 30 with a final revelation that I certainly never saw coming.

NON-FICTION: The Five by Hallie Rubenhold

Atmospheric and engaging, The Five details the previously untold stories of Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate and Mary-Jane -the women who lost their lives at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Full of fascinating research and heartbreaking accounts of what these women’s lives may have been like, Rubenhold paints a dark immersive portrait of Victorian London and gives voice to these tragic silenced lives. Although we can’t know for certain if these accounts are entirely accurate, they feel very plausible and in some ways, The Five exposes how little time has moved on, when it comes to the public portrayal of single, troubled women.

NON-FICTION: Unicorn by Amrou Al-Kadhi

From a childhood crush on Macaulay Culkin to how a teenage obsession with marine biology helped them realise their non-binary identity, Unicorn tells the story of how the obsessive perfectionist son of a strict Muslim Iraqi family became the gorgeous drag queen Glamrou. Packed full of humour, honesty and heart, this book will give you the strength and inspiration to harness what you were born with and be who you were always meant to be.

MIDDLE-GRADE: The Super Miraculous Journey of Freddie Yates by Jenny Pearson

When fact-obsessed Freddie’s grandmother dies, he discovers that the father he has never met may actually be alive and living in Wales. So he has no choice but to grab his best friends Ben and Charlie, leave his home in Andover and go to find his dad! I laughed so many times during this madcap adventure and I know the slapstick crazy humour will hit the middle-grade target audience just right. It’s also a wonderful depiction of small town Britain with a focus on the true meaning of family.

MIDDLE-GRADE: A Kind Of Spark by Elle McNicoll

When Addie learns about her hometown’s history of witch trials, she campaigns tirelessly to get a memorial for the women who lost their lives through it. This wonderfully beautiful novel gives a unique insight into the mind of an 11-year-old autistic girl with a huge heart. Busting myths about neurodiversity while tackling typical pre-teen drama, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry but most of all, you’ll close the book with a huge smile on your face.

HISTORICAL FICTION: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

In 16th century Warwickshire, Agnes is a woman with a unique gift whose relationship with a young Latin tutor produces three children and a legacy that lasts for centuries. This enchanting, all-consuming account of the tragic story of Shakespeare’s lost son, the effects that rippled through the family and the play that was born from their pain will send a bullet straight through your heart. Wonderfully researched and beautifully written, Hamnet is worth all of the hype.

HISTORICAL FICTION: The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

When a vicious storm kills most of the men of Vardø, Norway, it’s up to the women to keep things going but a man with a murderous past is about to come down with an iron fist. At the heart of this dark tale of witch trials, grief and feminism, two women find something they’ve each been searching for within each other. Gorgeously written with a fantastically slow-burning queer romance, Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s first adult novel is an addictive, atmospheric read with a poignant, tearjerker of an ending.

SCI-FI: Q by Christina Dalcher

When one of Elena’s daughters manages to drop below the country’s desired Q number, she is sent away to one of the new state schools and Elena is about to find out something she’d really rather not know about the new system. Packed full of real social commentary and critique of life as we know it while painting a picture of how things could be even worse (yes, really!), this pulse-racing, horrifying sci-fi dystopian gripped me from the first page and refused to let me go.

#book recommendations #recommended #recommendations #may #june #books #bookworm

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mueritos · 5 years

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gosh I started to follow you for that amazing sidlink fanfic and now you deliver an ASTONISHING modern Crowley, trans non binary AND ACE? holy fuck you're fucking suberb. I'm like the ace-est ace to ace and I didn't notice the ring before someone else noted! I'm so used to our community being excluded and for other artist over-sexualising the ineffable husbands that I overlooked that detail completely! Thank you so much! (1/2)

(2/2) Being ace is hard, a lot, and I've been wearing my black ring + eventually a tattoo on that finger for years for comfort. Comfort of knowing I'm not alone, I'm not *broken* and I don't need to be *fixed*, no matter how much society tries to make me believe in that. Thank you so much for that representation again! You're amazing! 💕💕💕🐍🐍🔥🔥🔥

Hey there friend! so glad you liked the Crowley piece. I figured since the ace community really saw GO as a perfect example of their type of relationship that I’d give him the black ring. Im aspec myself (aromantic), so I totally understand how y'all feel (feeling broken, needing to be “fixed”, etc). I didn’t point out the ring mostly cuz I felt people probably wouldn't recognize it cuz I gave it studs, but Im glad someone did! Just keep being you my friend and that's all that matters!!!!

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writemarcus · 5 years

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Black, Queer, and Here

In a post-‘Moonlight’ world, writers like Michael R. Jackson and Jeremy O. Harris are making the case for LGBTQ stories that go beyond the gay white experience.

BY MARCUS SCOTT

Last month, when Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop earned unanimous praise upon opening at Playwrights Horizons, it was a pivotal moment for me as a spectator. As someone who is also a Black, gay, musical theatre writer, I saw myself and my story onstage for the first time. I guffawed, clapped my hands, snapped along, celebrated the pageantry of Black excellence, and even teared up a bit during the play’s climax.

For the first time I didn’t have to undertake the mental gymnastics all marginalized people are basically required to do once they enter the theatre; to empathize with the white, often male protagonist as default. Not to mention, there was additional apprehension. Any time I saw a story centered on LGBTQ characters, I could usually predict what I was getting myself into: either comedic NutraSweet schmaltz with heart, or a maudlin tragedy where happy endings are laughable and everyone dies in the end.

But this was different. Led by a colossal, virtuoso performance from Larry Owens—not to mention anchored by an all-Black, all-queer ensemble of multitalented, triple-threat featured players—A Strange Loop (now extended through July 28) is a singular, seminal Bildungsroman that casts a subversive, critical third eye on both mainstream and nether regions of the Black gay American experience that had not been shown before.

The show follows Usher (Owens), a young, NYU-educated, overweight Black gay man working as an usher at a long-running Broadway musical and struggling to write a musical about a young, NYU-educated, overweight Black gay man working as an usher at a long-running Broadway musical and struggling to write a musical (hence the loop in the title). A Strange Loop is a visceral, soulful, psychosexual panoramic pièce de résistance that may just be the most radical Off-Broadway musical of its kind. Contextualizing everything from #MeToo, Moonlight, Tyler Perry, Stephen Sondheim’s Company, and second wave feminism, Jackson’s show is a potpourri of popular culture, existentialism, and metafiction—a dazzling coming-of-age artistic journey of self-discovery.

My sentiments for the show have been shared. In a post-show talkback on June 19, “Pose” star Billy Porter joined Jackson, choreographer Raja Feather Kelly, and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins onstage to discuss the musical. The event, which was attended by top names in the theatre community (such as Lin-Manuel Miranda), was presented by Ucross, a prestigious residency program in northeast Wyoming. Porter choked back tears as he began the panel: “To sit up there and see my life onstage, when everybody said that my story wasn’t valid—to see that up there, to see it so brave, and to see it so bold. To see it so truthful, so complicated, so honest, and so unapologetic, has been one of the most wonderful nights for me in the theatre.”

Over the course of the 2018-19 season, I saw 100 shows, and few of them affected me like Jackson’s musical. None of those other shows centered on queer bodies of color. In all fairness, it’s not like a lot of theatres are producing plays by or about queer people of color. And when they do, it’s sanitized, ambiguous, and not complex—for example, Celie and Shug’s neutered romance in The Color Purple.

Earlier this year, in a lively panel about the state of the American play (copresented by American Theatre and Signature Theatre), playwright and director Robert O’Hara wryly offered some insight into the queer POC experience in American theatre. Speaking about the 2017-18 season, O’Hara pondered the state of Broadway, which was littered with prestige London transfers or star-driven assembly line revivals of treasured classics. But he also noticed a third trend: “the amount of gay white men we have on Broadway this year.” Naming Angels in America, The Boys in the Band, and Torch Song, all of which were written by white gay men, O’Hara remarked, “There’s too many white gay people, particularly white gay men and their struggle being white and gay and male. Do we really need that many conversations? To some people, that’s diversity. But to me, that’s just more white folks onstage.”

Though theatre prides itself on being a space for outcasts, and most of its preeminent artists are gay men, their visibility often comes at the expense of other members of the LGBTQ community. In the theatre, LGBTQ plays have often centered solely on the experience of gay white cis-men and (only recently) cis-women, while people of color war in the margins for mainstream acclaim.

Whether it’s about the gay civil rights movement (Mart Crowley’s seminal The Boys In The Band, Dustin Lance Black’s 8), the HIV/AIDS epidemic (Larry Kramer’s definitive The Normal Heart, Tony Kushner’s iconic Angels in America, William Finn’s neurotic Falsettos) or communal inherited trauma (Moisés Kaufman’s triumphant docudrama The Laramie Project, Matthew Lopez’s Broadway-bound The Inheritance), gay white men have dominated queer stories, creating nuanced characters and becoming the epicenter of the narratives of LGBTQ culture.

Openly gay Black artists like O’Hara and George C. Wolfe have created work about Black queer life over three decades, but their numbers were fewer and far between. The difference now is the sheer volume of diverse queer voices. Some are even calling it a renaissance.

I trace it to the film Moonlight. Released in 2016 to universal acclaim under the helm of director Barry Jenkins, and based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unpublished semi-autobiographical play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, Moonlight became the first film with an all-Black cast and the first LGBTQ film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The victory was a watershed moment in popular culture, sparking public interest in Black art and queer stories.

Ever since, queer Black theatre artists have begun to storm the proverbial tower in droves: McCraney recently returned to Steppenwolf in Chicago with Ms. Blakk For President, and his Choir Boy had an acclaimed run on Broadway after making the rounds of the nation’s regional theatres. Donja R. Love, an HIV-positive gay Black playwright, saw the world premieres of his queer period dramas Sugar in Our Wounds and Fireflies. Jordan Cooper’s Ain’t No Mo earned an extended and lauded run Off-Broadway at the Public Theater. Hailed as “The Queer Black Savior the Theater World Needs” by Out magazine, Jeremy O. Harris became a literary sensation and enfant terrible of the theatre world after Slave Play and Daddy had their world premieres this past season (Slave Play will transfer to Broadway in September).

What makes these plays radical is their candor, addressing the audience with frank depictions of queer Black life. Most importantly, these are plays that are creating discourse on what artist Lora Mathis calls radical softness, or “the idea that unapologetically sharing your emotions is a political move and a way to combat the societal idea that feelings are a sign of weakness.” In one of the most pivotal scenes in Choir Boy, one of the boys chooses an a cappella rendition of “Love Ballad” (originally by Jeffrey Osborne of L.T.D.) to express his love for another boy, but imagination ends up being the closest he’ll ever get to confessing his feelings. In Sugar in Our Wounds, an enslaved man offers another reading lessons, but the subtext is that of romantic yearning. In Slave Play, an interracial gay couple undergo therapy, in an effort to reconnect. These writers subvert and comment on the oppressive systems that affect disenfranchised and marginalized people without attacking or distancing mainstream audiences.

Not to mention the playwrights who identify as queer but whose plays aren’t chiefly about LGBTQ life: Colman Domingo (Dot), Marcus Gardley (The House That Will Not Stand), Jonathan Norton (My Tidy List of Terrors), Timothy DuWhite (Neptune), Keelay Gipson (#NewSlaves), Korde Arrington Tuttle (clarity), Jirèh Breon Holder (Too Heavy for Your Pocket) and Derek Lee McPhatter (Bring the Beat Back). Chief among these is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who was listed among the Top 20 Most-Produced Playwrights of 2018-2019 and has been honored as a two-time finalist for the 2016 and 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, respectively.

As writer-activist Darnell L. Moore noted on Twitter: “In the past few months, I’ve witnessed displays of brilliance—Black queer men who have created theatrical works that dig into the complex interior lives of Black characters. Their works disrupt & reimagine all we believe to be true about the limits of Blackness, of gender. They poke at the grounds of Black radical politics by illuminating how the freedom dreams conjured by some of the Blacks often function as nightmares for some others—trans folk, queers, drag queens, the not-respectable. They remind us about the futility of white liberalism. They refuse the white gaze.” He characterized these plays as “Black folks-loving art works” which “preach and sing and lament and celebrate and bear witness and take up arms and push and pull us.”

At the same time, Moore does wonder “how these works might be received if the creators and/or main actors weren’t Black gay men.” He has a point: Queer women, trans, or gender non-binary writers still struggle to be seen, with only a few receiving recognition such as Aziza Barnes (BLKS), Tanya Barfield (Bright Half Life), Tracey Scott Wilson (Buzzer), Nissy Aya (righteous kill, a requiem), and Ianne Fields Stewart (A Complicated Woman).

While many Black artists are generating work that are nuanced and empowering, and even dissecting of the white gaze, there are still just as many works that default towards “enterpainment.” Coined by playwright Aurin Squire in his play Zoohouse, “enterpainment” is a trope that calls for historically oppressed people to be forced into situations where they must put their suffering and victimhood on display for the education and edification of the masses. This exercise in emotional masochism has been at the forefront of many Black plays, with this trope being weaponized and commodified. Many Black characters in general are defined by their pain, and in plays that center on LGBTQ people of color, too often that pain is doubled because of their race and sexual orientation.

The “bury your gays” stereotype is still very much the norm for these plays, including some of the ones mentioned above. For example, in Donja R. Love’s Fireflies, the protagonist is a woman who clings to the memory of the woman she loved who was horribly murdered in the streets. The main character in Chisa Hutchinson’s She Like Girls is a 16-year-old lesbian who is shot and killed at the climax of the play.

Most stories featuring queer characters of color forefront the atrocities that inherently arise from the stigmatization of one’s sexual agency and one’s race. Rather than showcasing the beauty within the full expression of queerness—such as falling in love or (in A Strange Loop) standing up to your parents—too often writers are defaulting to trauma.

But this is part of a larger issue: that of Black artists working within a primarily white system who feel they must commodify their pain for white consumption. And of white producers not feeling like they’re able to challenge artists of color to look deeper, of them thinking of these artists as a single diversity slot or purveyor of issue plays, instead of artists whose careers and ideas need to be invested in. At the live event, Robert O’Hara had some advice for white producers: “You have to be able to live inside the power and the privilege that you have, and also continue to demand the rigor, intellect, and dexterity that the work requires so that it does not just become a play but a [major stepping stone for a] career.”

Recently I ran into Jackson at Musical Theatre Factory’s High Five, a gala hosted at Town Stages; he was being honored that night. Before I could congratulate him, he kindly rebuffed. “There’s still work to be done,” he said as he was greeted by eager patrons and admirers. He’s not wrong. In 2017, Pew found that younger, non-white, and low-income people (lower middle-class people of color) were more likely to self-identify as LGBTQ than whites, debunking the myth that Blacks and Latinos are overwhelmingly homophobic.

Reality is more complex than we give it credit for. And considering that Broadway is in need of new musicals in it’s 2019-20 season, there really is nothing more topical than, to quote A Strange Loop, a “big, Black, and queer-ass Broadway show.”

Marcus Scott is a New York-based playwright, musical writer and journalist. He’s written for Elle, Essence, Out and Playbill, among other publications.

#A Strange Loop #Slave Play #black playwrights #black gay men #black gay playwrights #black queer playwrights #gay playwrights #queer playwrights #Michael R Jackson #Robert O'Hara #Donja R. Love #Aurin Squire #Darnell L. Moore #Terrell Alvin McCraney #Branden Jacobs-Jenkins #Sugar In Our Wounds

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xemidatwospirit · 7 years

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All-Male Taming of the Shrew: or female erasure & transmisogyny in 2016 US Theatre

Open letter to Shakespeare Theatre Company Leadership, Yeyek tunal, nutukay Xemi. Good day to you all, my name is Xemi. May this message find you in a place of understanding and receptiveness. I am a mixed race Amerindian (Nawat) and Western Asian (Sephardic), bigender Two-Spirit theatre artist in the Washington DC area. I aim to foster safe spaces for Native American artists in DC Theatre, and work towards a decolonial future where all voices and bodies are welcomed.

I am writing you this open letter because I firmly believe that your company is an ally to DC’s LGBTQIA+ communities; I believe that any action your company has taken against DC’s LGBTQIA+ communities has been out of not knowing or being fully and accurately informed rather than out of malice; and I believe there is still time to repair any harm, erasure, or gendered and sexual marginalization committed against DC’s LGBTQIA+ community before it manifests on stage. I am writing this open letter to your company because the erasure of female and non-binary voices and bodies in your upcoming production of Taming of the Shrew is an act of transmisogyny, and needs to be addressed. A general note given on the Taming of the Shrew casting notice can be found on backstage.com .

“This will be an immersive, ALL MALE production of The Taming of the Shrew. The production will take advantage of the recent advances in legislation toward gay marriage, retaining the original genders of the characters (the women will be women) while simultaneously providing a world where the values of Love and Marriage are evaluated within a queered perspective.”

“This production will be tonally provocative in addressing issues of sexuality, violence and exploration of identity.” The casting notice for the show raises questions about STC’s understanding of gender, sexual orientation, representation, and holistic queer history:

1) How can this production “take advantage of the recent advances in legislation toward gay marriage” by “retaining the original genders of the characters”? By definition, the “original” or canonical relationship between Kate and Petruchio, as well the relationships between Bianca and her suitors, are heterosexual. If gay marriage was actually being celebrated, Petruchio and Kate would be the same gender, out of the innumerable genders that exist. Homosexuality, or same-sex attraction or same-gender love or gay-ness, requires that those involved in the relationship be of the same gender. A male Petruchio and a female Kate do not celebrate gay marriage as the characters are of different genders. That is to say, canonically, the relationship between Petruchio and Kate is a heterosexual one; where a canonical male role and a canonical female role are romantically intimate with one another. In sum, the fact that the gender of the actors playing the roles are the same does not change the canonical relationship. It is still read as a heterosexual one in the Universe of Taming of the Shrew. In contrast, casting a women in the role of Petruchio and having her play the role as a woman creates a story that celebrates gay marriage; however, maintaining the couples canonical hetero-relationship does not add the desired provocativity or nuance to the production.

2) Does casting cisgender men as women to celebrate same-gender marriage, homogenize LGBTQIA+ identities? A huge red flag for Trans issues and representation is risen when Producers inadvertently try and queer hetero-relationships in this way. Transgender women who date cisgender men are by definition heterosexual. Oftentimes cisgender heterosexuals, who don’t examine gender and sexual orientation as often as transgender folks and cisgender sexual orientation minorities do, don’t distinguish between gender identity and sexual orientation; defaulting to define all as “queer” by proxy of the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. This practice has been documented to erase cisgender lesbians and trans folks of all genders.

3) Why cast cisgender men as Transgender Women? “Exploration of identity” suggests exploration of gender since male actors are called upon to represent these female roles. Though the casting notice does not call Kate, Bianca, and the Widow, Transgender Women, given the framework laid out by STC, it is clear that these women in Taming of the Shrew are not cisgender. It is so unfortunate the tradition of casting cisgender men as Transgender Women continues considering DC is home to Casa Ruby- the only Bilingual Multicultural LGBT Organization providing life saving services and programs to the most vulnerable in the LGBT community; and that Trans & Queer specific talent agencies such as awqward talent exist. Finding queer and Trans talent is so easy in DC.

4) What are the repercussions of baring Non-Binary people and Women from these financial opportunities? Reserving those three female roles that could go to Transgender women, Non-Binary people, or cisgender women, for cisgender men instead, does not only erase women from Taming of the Shrew, but it also strips the financial opportunities for said women. Three Principal AEA Contracts at $909/week minimum for Kate, Bianca, and Widow means that in the 12-14 week contract period, three cisgender men will be receiving a combined total of over $32,700 that could have gone to women. These three opportunities could have gone to Transgender Women. According to the DC Trans Coalition Access Denied: Washington, DC Trans Needs Assessment Report,

“…over 46% of our respondents made below $10,000 (per year), compared to only 11% of Washington, DC residents. Trans persons of color, particularly trans women of color, face the greatest economic hardships of those we surveyed, with 57% making below $10,000”

and

“36% reporting unemployment compared to just 9% of Washington, DC residents, (with) Black trans persons (having) the highest rate of unemployment at 55%.”

It is unfortunate to see these roles be denied to LGBTQIA+ women; Black Transgender women of color in particular.

I am thrilled that the company has broken it’s 25 year old tradition of all-white directors for mainstage productions. Ed Sylvanus Iskandar’s perspective as an Indonesian director is one that would be very enriching to DC as other Asian directors’ influences have been to DC’s professional theatres, as well as considering the struggles of Asian-American Theatre Artists, but that does not change the transmisogynistic nature of this vision. I can only imagine what a Taming of the Shrew with DC’s LGBTQIA+ communities included in telling this story would be like.

Transgender actress and activist Laverne Cox says regarding the entertainment industry that “market forces can’t be dismissed when casting decisions are made.“ Distinguished Professor bell hooks calls those forces “Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy”. Where systems ��support, uphold, or perpetuate” a Patriarchy that is Imperialist, White Supremacist, and Capitalist. This is about systems. Not individual people or individual groups. Systemic oppression are those forces that must be combated.

This open letter is not meant to be an attack on Shakespeare Theatre Company, but rather a conversation starter about the Colonial nature of our theatre community. How can Shakespeare Theatre Company be a better ally to DC’s LGBTQIA+ Community’s decolonization processes from the Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy?

I encourage Shakespeare Theatre Company and all allies of DC’s LGBTQIA+ communities, to evaluate on how to create, and do their part in creating a theatre community where all voices and bodies are invited to participate.

Sincerely,

Xemiyulu (a proud Transgender Two-Spirit of the Nawat-Maya-Lenca Nation known internationally as El Salvador)

#TWOC #transgender #TMOC #QPOC #queer #QWOC #QMOC #trans #dctheatre #theatre #pinkwashing #lgbtqia #transmisogyny #female erasure

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thecrookedgavel · 4 years

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The Black Box Readings - Ep 4 Transcript

Here’s the transcript for episode 4 of The Black Box Readings, the podcast where I read to you the backup of queer blogs that have gone down.

See Other Episodes

An: Hey, all! And welcome back to The Black Box Readings, the podcast where I read to you the backup of queer blogs that have gone down! I’m your host, An Capuano. At this point, episodes one, two, and three are up, I’m super happy with some of the responses I got. People said a lot of encouraging things to me about my own stories I told. It’s really gratifying to bare your soul and have people respond positively. It’s strange that I wasn’t even planning on telling such stories when I recorded episode one, but I’m glad I decided to be real with you all. Obviously, I got some negative responses too, but in cases like these, they’re best ignored.

So let’s get on to the episode! Today’s episode continues with the vibe of the previous one. Lots of positive energy to go around. Last time, Emmy starting dating Selena, came out as trans, and started loving herself. It was great to see her perspective on such positive things, but there is a clear difference this time around. Emmy has started conversing with Selena through reblogs on her Tumblr. So we get to see how they interact as a couple, and the things that they do together.

We’ll start off with a rather affectionate series of posts that contains a bit of cool news. I’ll try and do a distinct enough voice for when Selena is talking, but just in case it’s not enough, I’m going to say when the switch happens outloud.

Starting off with Emmy,

“Here’s my newest piece of art that I made! And it’s a very special picture, too! Can you guess why?” There was likely a photo that started off this thread, but again, I didn’t save any of Emmy’s art. Selena responds with,

“Omg bae, this can’t be what I think it is? Could it be the one you were telling me so much about?”

Emmy Continues,

“Yeah, it is! It’s my first commission! Someone wanted me to draw their OC in my style, and so they gave me a 20 dollar Steam code in exchange! I feel almost legitimate now!”

Then Selena writes,

“Emmy, don’t be silly. You’ve always been a legitimate artist. From the time you started drawing until today, you’ve always been legitimate. Your art is wonderful, and I can’t wait to see your next work!

Emmy responds with,

“Aww, you’re the sweetest! Maybe I’ll dedicate my next piece to you.”

And it continues a bit, but that gives us a good idea of their chemistry together. Now, I don’t remember these posts from the time they were first written, so I only really saw the picture once. I don’t remember it well, but I think it was a full-body shot of a punk character in Emmy’s sort of feminine style. I sort of regret not saving the pictures, but then again, how would I show them to you?

But I want to point out how natural and sweet these two are together. They’re good for one another, and it really shows in this post. I’m also noticing that Emmy’s imposter syndrome is toned down at this point in time. I think that’s mostly due to Selena’s influence, because it can still crop up even when you’re getting paid. Though we should take a minute to celebrate Emmy getting paid, because getting commissioned is a big deal! Normally discussing prices associated with your art turns people off it completely. So I’m really glad she made some progress.

Next up we have another post with both of them talking, and the topic is rather serious. This time, they’re advocating for trans rights. They’re both against Bathroom Bills being passed. For those of you who don’t know, every once in a while, America tries to legislate where trans folk are allowed to use the bathroom. In Emmy’s state, they want to force people to use the bathroom labelled by their “birth sex”. I’ll let Emmy and Selena explain further. Emmy starts us off,

“I know I’m a little late to the party, but fuck this bathroom bill bullshit! I can’t believe the government wants to decide where we can pee yet again! I don’t go out much, but when I do, I obviously have to use the boy’s bathroom because I’m still in the closet to my dad. But when I do, it just feels awful. It’s another reminder that I don’t look like how I feel on the inside. It may sound dumb, but I honestly feel defeated every time I get misgendered by that dumb sign. I hate it, and I know other trans girls like me feel the same way. To make it illegal for us to use the girl’s bathroom even if we pass is straight bullshit! Fight for trans rights and oppose this stupid bill!”

Selena reblogs this, writing,

“I agree entirely. And I feel the same way when I’m forced to use the men’s room. Like, I am not a man??? So I don’t think that works for me. People say that without this bill, trans women will attack cis women in washrooms. However, that’s just a fear tactic that relies on the idea of trans women being predatory. Which is not the case!!! Say no to this bill! Trans rights are human rights!”

You tell them, girls! Trans rights are indeed human rights. And humans have the right to use the bathroom without fear of being arrested or beat up. Because that’s the choice a lot of us face when we don’t fully pass. Like, sometimes I go out in dresses or flannels with the buttons on the other side, and if I have to use a public restroom, *sigh* I face a difficult choice. Do I go to the men’s room and risk getting beat up for dressing a certain way? Or do I go to the lady’s room and risk getting kicked out of the building? Honestly, it’s not so bad for me, because it’s illegal to be beat up or kicked out due to one’s gender expression in Canada, but just because it’s illegal, doesn’t mean someone won’t try it. In America, under these types of bathroom bills, people who are mid-transition or non-binary would have to make very difficult choices if they needed to use a bathroom in public. Even folks who fully pass would have to risk getting arrested in order to use the washroom they would appear to belong in. *Sigh* Trying to hold it in may be safer sometimes, and that’s honestly messed up.

These two posts I did see when they initially posted them. I was very proud of them for advocating for trans rights. Though honestly, when you’re trans it’s kind of hard not to advocate for yourself. It’s a position without the privilege to turn a blind eye to injustices, you see. You can’t help but see how badly people like you are treated, so many of us speak up and try and be heard. We often fail.

Sorry, I don’t mean to be a downer. *Sigh* These topics just get to me sometimes, and I think it’s important to share what I’m feeling about this, especially in case you don’t have a trans person in your life at the moment.

Ok! So our next few posts are about a less serious topic, but one that Emmy and Selena are both very passionate about: Overwatch. I should explain that in competitive video games, developers will change the power levels of their characters in order to make the game more to their liking. Or, as it usually goes, to try and make it so that the community likes it more. The two of them are talking about one of those changes. Emmy starts us off with a post titled,

“Not My Girl!

Nooo, I can’t believe they’re nerfing Mercy! Blizzard just announced that they’re changing it so that mercy can no longer do a 5-man rez. In fact, she can only rez one hero at a time now. Why? What was the problem with how it was before? Now her ultimate is flying around, which she could already do in a pharmercy! If she’s really, really different I probably won’t even play anymore…”

Then we get a reblog from Selena,

“Noooo, bae! If you stop playing, who will I play with? You can’t seriously want to quit playing! Maybe new Mercy will be really good, we don’t know yet. Let’s at least wait until the patch comes and see what everyone else thinks.”

And we get a final response from Emmy,

“You’re right, I wouldn’t want to stop playing with you over this. That would be weird to not play Overwatch together anymore. I just hope that Blizzard knows what they’re doing this time. I mean, I may have to pick a new main, but I swear I’ll still play with you!”

It can be common for changes to Overwatch to be met with a lot of resistance. A lot of the time, when something you love about the game changes drastically, it can make sense to want to play something else. It is a little ironic that Emmy is worried about Mercy in this particular change, as it actually boosted her power level to the highest it ever was. So much so, there was like a year following it of nerfs to bring Mercy’s power down. I wonder what the two of them would think about the newest changes to the game?

Although, I didn’t save any of her art, I do remember her personal art being a lot more light hearted at this point. There’s the obvious couple-y pictures but then there’s the more abstract stuff. Let’s just say that the imagery with chains and the like were gone from her work. That is, until after this post I’m about to read. *Sigh* I feel the need to warn you all first that it really changes the tone of the episode. If you’re not up for it, put this episode aside until you are. The post is titled,

“My Dad Read My Discord Messages

Sorry I haven’t been posting the past couple of days, some awful shit has happened to me. So I was a complete idiot and left Discord open on my phone. My Dad was suspicious of me, I guess, so he went through my phone and read through my conversations with Selena. And what he saw, he really didn’t approve of. Not only does he know I’m trans, but he knows I’m dating a latina girl.

He was really fucking mad, I could tell from his handwriting from the letter he wrote to me. I can’t tell if he was more upset about me dating a girl, or that she was latina. After I confronted him with a letter of my own, he yelled at me. He knows I can’t understand him when he does that, but he did it anyways. In his first letter, he said it was a sin against God to have thoughts like this, and I’m sure he repeated it a lot out loud, too. I’m really afraid that he’s going to send me to conversion therapy or some shit like that, but then again, that would mean sending me out into the real world. What if he tries to convert me himself? I’m scared that he’s going to try and hurt me. But Leelah’s Law makes conversion therapy illegal right? But still…

He’s taken discord off my phone, which sucks, but at least I still have Tumblr. I’ll just have to make sure I log out every time now. I’m really happy that I have Selena on my side, my Dad can’t stop our love!”

Remember when I said Emmy’s Dad was kind of a piece of shit? This is what I had in mind. The fact that Emmy isn’t even sure that he won’t try and convert her forcibly really shows what kind of person he is. And I hate to say this, but Leelah’s Law only makes conversion therapy Illegal for minors. Emmy is over 18 at this point, so it’s not illegal if she is coerced to accepting the “help” needed to make her no longer trans. Not like conversion therapy actually makes you not queer, *sigh* it’s all a load of shit anyways.

I don’t really feel the need to discuss why violating your child’s privacy is an awful thing to do, and I don’t think I need to explain why using religion as an excuse to hate doesn’t absolve you of being a bigot. I’m kind of not in the mood to do so either way. We have more episode to get through, and it’s not going to be pretty.

Our next post is another one of Selena’s poems. But before I read it, I need to give a little context. I debated including a post before this one that talked a bit about Selena’s family situation, but I decided against it because this podcast is supposed to be about Emmy. It’s easier if I give a few facts here instead.

So Selena doesn’t really have the most understanding family when it comes to queer issues, so although she’s been identifying as trans longer than Emmy has, she too has been completely closeted. Selena has several siblings, including some sisters, one of which is about the same clothing size as her. *Sigh* You may see where I’m going with this. I remember seeing a post on Selena’s tumblr where she talked about secretly wearing her sister’s clothes a couple of times, and getting away with it. I have a feeling she pushed her luck too far shortly after she made that post. Again, if you’re not ready to hear a post like this, there’s nothing wrong with putting the episode aside until you are. The poem is called,

“My Truth Reduced to Lies

What do you do when the punishment doesn’t fit the crime? Or if there was no crime in the first place?

When all I wanted was to appear as I feel,

How dare you tell me what I did was wrong?

My radiance ripped into timidness

My dignity pushed into shame

My integrity beaten into obedience

My daring smashed into fear

My truth reduced to lies

You tell me that being draped in belonging is worthy of this punishment?

I tell you you’re the evil ones

If my mistake was to be as I feel, it’s something I will never do again

But if I’m forced to live a lie, should I live at all?”

*Sigh* And then Emmy reblogged it saying: “Please don’t tell me this means what I think it does...:”

I’m so sorry Emmy, but I think it does mean what you think. *Deep breath* I feel so awful about this, because this poem never crossed my dashboard. I would have said something! I would have messaged Selena and… I don’t know, what I could have done… but it would have been better than doing nothing! *Sigh* I’m not really in the mood to give my usual analysis or whatever of the post, and I definitely don’t have some magical story from my life that will tie it all together in a neat little bow.

*Tearing up* Like, people treat trans kids like this, and then wonder why our suicide rate is so damn high! The life expectancy for a trans woman is like 40 years! Things aren’t magically fixed because we’re now trending on Twitter or some shit! They beat her. They beat her because of who she was, and I can’t… *sobbing* I just can’t right now, this episode is over.

-----

Hey all, An here. I’m sorry about breaking down before. This is me recording again on a different day. I took a much-needed break from things, practiced some self care, and I’m feeling more centred than last time. I think I got too close emotionally to the subject matter. *Sigh* I doubt I was giving good commentary, I just sort of shut down before I started… well, you know. Anyways, I’m recording this because the episode is in fact, not over. There’s more to discuss here before we can end things off, otherwise the last episode of the season becomes too much to digest in one sitting.

I feel a little dumb for blowing up like I did, but I think it’s important that I leave it in the podcast. I want to take this journey together, and it feels wrong to hide my emotions from you all. I want to be real with you, you know? But yes, I’m feeling better, so let’s get started. The posts are still of an upsetting nature, by the way. That will be the norm for a while. Emmy posts something titled: “I Don’t Know

I don’t know how I let everyone talk me into putting myself out there, I’m such a piece of shit. My art is trash, just like me. It will always be shit, I improve too slowly for it to mean anything. I hate looking at it, so you probably do too.

Things are bad with my Dad. He won’t respond to me, and the way he looks at me now, it’s so full of hate. Not like I don’t deserve it.

To top it all off, Selena dumped me yesterday. Can you blame her? I certainly can’t. Why did I ever believe I was worth dating? So much for fate, I guess… “

Yikes. It’s clear, to me at least, that this isn’t our Emmy talking. It’s her depression from being Bi-Polar talking here. She had several terrible things happen to her in such a short time, that her mental illness has essentially taken over. Selena breaking up with her is sort of the last straw. But I really don’t think it happened because Selena no longer had feelings for Emmy, but because she’s going through a lot right now with her whole family against her. Honestly, being in a relationship with someone who reminds you of being trans was probably too much to handle when you’re being forced back into the closet. I did see this post, and I offered some words of encouragement to Emmy and told her that things get better. It’s something you hear a lot, but I believe it’s true. At least I want to believe it’s true. I don’t know if she ever read it, because I never got a response to that message.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Black Box Readings! I hope I didn’t take you on too much of a ride today. Sending my best wishes to anyone who is feeling down right now. Follow me on Twitter at TheCrookedGavel to stay up to date on this and other queer podcasts. Feel free to contact me there as well. This is An Capuano, signing off!

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criticsofcolour · 5 years

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‘The Hive City Legacy cast on prioritising people of colour and disrupting the overwhelming whiteness of theatre’ by Tenelle Ottley-Matthew

Something special often happens when black women come together and take up space. I have told myself this for years, even though I was unsure of how to articulate this when I was younger. Almost every day, I am reminded of the power of our many voices and stories. They rile me up and fill me with a plethora of emotions including, but not limited to, joy, hope, validation, sadness and anger.

The idea of “taking up space” is one that has been increasingly encouraged by and for those belonging to oppressed and marginalised groups. Taking up space means different things to different people. Within the arts, taking up space can perhaps be tied to increasing the representation and visibility of underrepresented groups and people from those groups telling the stories they want to tell in the way they want to tell them. In an age where words like diversity are often thrown around in public discourse without much substantial meaning or intent behind it, the current interest in black women’s experiences and stories can sometimes feel like a trend. It’s almost as if the music, film, TV, theatre and book publishing industries are eager to get a piece (and some profit?) of the ever-endearing #blackgirlmagic pie.

The last couple of years have seen a noticeable increase in the number of theatre productions, particularly among smaller, indie theatres, addressing black British identity and experiences and what its like to be a black woman in Britain. In 2018, shows such as Queens of Shebaand For A Black Girl at Camden People’s Theatre left a major impression on those who were fortunate enough to see them (including me). Likewise, the more recent, much-talked-about and much loved seven methods of killing kylie jennerat the Royal Court had a huge impact on its audience during its run at the Royal Court, and no doubt it will long afterwards.

In a similar vein to the aforementioned shows, Hive City Legacy is a masterful and refreshing theatre production that explores what it means to be a femme of colour today. One that proudly centres and celebrates black and brown women. Hive City Legacy defies both genre and stereotypes with a near-perfect blend of hip-hop, spoken word, comedy, dance, acrobatics and much more. It tells the stories of nine femmes of colour, played by cast members Aminita Francis, Rebecca Solomon, Krystal Dockery, Farrell Cox, Dorcas Ayeni-Stevens, Koko Brown, Elsabet Yonas, Shakaiah Perez and Azara Meghie. It’s the kind of show that immediately makes you feel at home as a black woman or woman of colour. This, as I found out from the Hive City Legacy cast, is very much what those involved in the show hoped to achieve. By appealing directly to people of colour, they hoped to somewhat disrupt the overwhelmingly white, middle/upper-class spaces that theatres often are.

As Koko Brown puts it, “We invited people [of colour] in by putting it out there on our social media and saying, we want women, brown women, black women, black non-binary folks, black trans folks to come and see this. We don’t just go, ‘Hey the cast is full of black people. How cool?’ By saying ‘We want you here. You are wanted in this room. You are needed in this space.’”

All cast members are aware that the nature of Hive City Legacy is bound to make some audience members, particularly those who are not people of colour, feel uncomfortable. This, they agree, is something those people will just have to deal with for an hour. After all, it’s merely a tiny taste of the discomfort they all feel in their lives, navigating this world as black and brown women.

“…there are plenty of times in the show where we refer to things that, if you’re not a person of colour, you’re probably not going to understand…and that’s not my fault!” Amanita Francis states matter of factly, immediately prompting audible agreement and hearty laughter. “There are plenty of majority-white shows that I go to see and there are references that I don’t get and that’s fine on their side. We’re catering to the audience that we want to cater for and that’s people of colour.”

The nine-strong cast of Hive City Legacy seems to have built a solid, sisterly bond between themselves and the rest of the creative team. It’s a bond that no doubt began to form in the early stages of the unconventional audition process. They effortless laugh and banter among each other and sometimes finish each other’s sentences. “Everybody that has taken part in devising this and making this happen has been a woman of colour, or at least, it’s been a woman,” says movement artist Elsabet. For Elsabet, Hive City Legacy is the first time she’s worked solely alongside women. It’s an experience that has changed her outlook and given her a renewed sense of self-belief. “…between last year and this year, I’ve taken so many more risks when it comes to creating work and I feel empowered to trust myself as a leader.”

2019 is the second year that Hive City Legacy has blessed The Roundhouse. The show opened for the first time in summer 2018 following a casting call that was put out online in search of performers. For a show that contains a multitude of performance art forms, it would be correct to assume that the cast was put through their paces and expected to keep an open mind throughout the audition process. The women were asked to do “random” things like give themselves a superhero name before showing up to the audition to perform lip-sync. “We had to sing for our lives!” recalls Krystal Dockery as the other cast members erupt into laughter. Krystal offers some of the show’s stand-out moments, thanks to her masterful twerking and burlesque numbers. The cast also participated in a catwalk, took part in a speed-dating exercise, learnt choreography with Yami Lofvenbergand came up with creative responses to a Maya Angelou poem. While it was intense and off-the-wall at times, it was an audition like no other, as Krystal explains. “I’ve never been in an audition that was so supportive. It was weird… it felt like everyone was rooting for the other person which was incredible.”

Talking to the cast, it’s clear that there’s a strong rejection of the single story and narrow representations of black women and women of colour. One of the aims of the show is to remind the world that there is no one way or right way to be a femme of colour while highlighting the challenges they continue to face in 2019. “It’s like challenging the patriarchy all the time. Challenging white men, white fragility, white supremacy, all of that shit. We’re out there constantly challenging it by just being ourselves - and by performing as well - by doing things like this [Hive City Legacy] which we should alreadybe getting but we’re having to fight to get these opportunities,” says Shakaiah.

While the show has certain aims and messages it hopes audience members will take away, the deeply personal aspects of a show like Hive City Legacy means that it’s highly unlikely that two people will react to it in the same way. Koko Brown puts it perfectly. “I think the show has multiple messages depending on your background, where you come from and what bits resonate more with you. There’ll be a message you get that the person sitting next to you won’t get and vice versa… It’s a really personal thing.”

Ultimately, this is the beautiful thing about Hive City Legacy. Boy, do the performers know how to put on a dazzling and electrifying show. They command your attention with their talent and individual skills, yet they connect with their audience on an emotional level in a way that feels incredibly effortless and authentic.

I’ve known for a long time that something special often happens when black women come together. That special thing isn’t always easy to describe or communicate but it certainly looks like the nine Hive City Legacy performers dancing their hearts out and revealing their various layers and complexities on stage. Collectively and individually, they exude that special, magical thing that is powerful and meaningful beyond words.

Tenelle Ottley-Matthew is a writer from London with bylines in Huck, gal-dem, Pride magazine and more. She will soon be working in book publishing.

Twitter: @misstenelle / Blog: tenelleottleymatthew.com

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enbyflock2 · 7 years

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CWMEA Presentation-”Transgender Discussion and Music: A Non-Binary Voice” Sketches Part 1

With my Bachelor’s degree from University of Puget Sound, I have hope and anticipation for what is to come of my future. I am at Puget Sound for the Masters in Teaching Program, and after that I am looking forward to becoming a high school band teacher in a Washington state school district.

My life experience as a musician has been full of magic and excitement. My Bachelor’s degree was in music education, and the instrument I studied with was saxophone, specifically alto. Even though my degree was tailored towards education, I still pushed myself towards the highest standards as a performer, and I kept involved with a lot of different groups, ensembles, and competitions. I was in Wind Ensemble, Jazz Orchestra, Saxophone Quartet, and I performed solo repertory. I competed in the MTNA events for both solo and chamber music repertory. The hugest honor I won as a performer was the Concerto/Aria competition, where I performed the Maslanka Saxophone Concerto Movements 1 and 4 with my school’s Wind Ensemble. I’ve also been a performer outside my school settings. I am an occasional singer-songwriter, guitarist, composer, and recording artist.

When I go into teaching, I have certain monikers that I need my students to address me by: Teacher Flock. Not a sir or ma’am. Not a man or woman. Simply a person, buddy, friend, partner. Someone that always found gender binary monikers oppressive and limiting, because of the hard weight of what those monikers meant to me in my life experience. Someone that cannot bear to be called by the pronouns “he/him/his/himself” or “she/her/hers/herself.” Pronouns to refer to me: singular “they/them/theirs/themselves.”

My identity as a musician is inescapably tied into my identity as a musician. Yes, I 100% identify as transgender. But because of the role that music played in my life I’ve learned to love my body. I never want to physically transition, or take hormones, or alter my body with surgery.

When I look at the first time I threw on a dress my senior year of college, I slowly woke up to a scary and beautiful perspective that it was predestination that I wound up studying music. As I hope you are going to see throughout this presentation, music addressed all my problems I was facing as a transgender person. My name is Timmie Flock, and I am genderqueer and non-binary. I am an advocate for the trans, queer, and non-binary community. I have some experience volunteering with queer youth in Tacoma at the Oasis Youth Center. This project is the center-piece of my advocacy work. Music is the place I reclaim my relationship towards my body.

On the sheets I handed out to you, I have provided some definitions surrounding queer terminology that I feel like are important for you to know about. I encourage you to refer to this sheet throughout the course of this presentation when I am bringing up terminology that you may need a refresher on.

A couple things I would like to note about these definitions and terminology: they are flexible. As you can see with the important notice near the middle of page two, there are transgender people that feel the need to bodily transition, but it is not a requirement for identifying as transgender. People can use non-binary, but can still tailor it towards binary language. The phrase “trans and non-binary” is also inclusive of the non-binary folks that consider themselves outside the realm of transgender and cis gender. Using the phrase “trans and non-binary” is not meant to separate them as mutually exclusive categories.

The final thing I would like to note is referring to the definitions that are more psychological, especially the definitions regarding dysphoria. When we are taking a look at body and social dysphoria, it can be complex in that we can talk about the dysphoria in separate levels, but they are also interconnected and extensions of similar concepts. Even though pronouns and a different gender presentation can help alleviate social dysphoria, it can also make a trans or non-binary person feel comfortable within their own body, and alleviate that body dysphoria. Likewise, body transitions and hormones alleviate body dysphoria, as can tucking and binding, and this takes away some of that social dysphoria.

The flexibility within these definitions doesn’t make the definitions shallow or frivolous by any means. Part of the flexibility is that the language to discuss gender is ever-changing and advancing, and some statements that trans and non-binary people may have made 5-10 years ago is now seen as offensive today. One example is that there are folks that are still partial to the phrase “I felt born in the wrong body.” But now there are folks that change it more subtly by saying “I was socialized in a certain way because of the body I was born in,” or an even more brash way of putting it: “Transgender people were treated horribly because of the body they were born in.” What may be language that is flexible is also language that is highly personal. This language holds vast and important significance personally, culturally, socially, and psychologically.

If this language seems frivolous at first glance, let’s think about other language that is flexible, but holds vast and important significance in personal, cultural, and social content: music genres. Jazz, hip hop, rock, classical. All of these genres can be deconstructed and pushed to the edge of their confines, but when we throw something of music into a genre label, we are trying to capture and pinpoint an essence and spirit within the music.

Music genres have never really been historically as linear as we’d like to think, and when music genres have come about, there was never an instance of saying something like: “Okay! Here are the rules of jazz music: swing, horn sections, rhythm sections, improvisation, and only black artists! Follow it!” Instead of that, I would like you to turn to page four in the section “What makes an identity?”

Instead of focusing this question of gender, let’s turn it to music genres. When we eventually come about with placing a genre word expression on particular kinds of music that may be vast, we are not saying these are hard and fast rules that need to be followed for jazz. But instead, we are saying it as a measure of consistency, habits, and patterns in expressions across a lifetime of jazz over the past century. Furthermore, we are measuring how far these expressions have strayed in comparison to other music that had been made across history, and how it warrants a new label. We don’t only stop there, but then we look at how the individuals and communities that created their music, and look at how they interpreted their understanding of self and culture through these consistencies, habits, and patterns in expressions, and simply what the expressions meant to them. Whenever there is a work of a jazz artist that comes about as being considered the best or the most quality, (whether that’s a work deemed best by the artist, the culture, or the fans), it is usually because that work is seen as embodying all the expressions that is regarded as most reflective of a sense of the artist’s identity.

Before I discovered my gender identity, I used to struggle a lot with grasping these definitions for music, and trying to understand the essence and spirit of music in general. I was really challenged to try and remind myself, what are the values we hold towards music in general? What are we seeking out from music?

Some common core values we try to seek out in music are surrounding the organization of the music composition. Rhythm, time, tempo, key signature, scales, etc. All of these are important facets within music that can really capture why we love it so much.

Another value of music we take a look at is the performance. The instruments they are using, the timbres, sound effects, etc. and how all these factors add up into emoting a response and connection from the listener, and even the performer’s purely internal self. How do the performers interact with the organization of the music to emote something reflective of them, and emote something from the listener?

A final value of music to look at is relating to a community, other individuals, the individual self, and culture. Music holds significant cultural context, and are often used as artifacts and by means of relating to the world, communities, other people, and the purely internal self.

I’m going to play this example for you, and I want you to tell me what genre this sounds like, and some other associations you may have with this genre.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwVtq3-4ILHWMnJybjQ1dGhneFE

Can you name some of these artists?

So when I hear this example, I think of hard rock music. We can hear a lot of mid-tempo in these examples, distorted guitar, heavy drums, heavy bass, and abrasive vocal timbre. Compositionally, it’s pretty basic and straightforward. 4/4 time signatures usually, based in pentatonic and blues scales.

Can you tell me what you imagine the cultures, social implications, and communities behind this music entails?

For me, what this music has meant in my lifetime, I consider this to be “music with a male energy” behind it. Many of the social constructions in my lifetime I’ve had surrounding this music is that these tunes were being popularized again with games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band coming into fruition, and so many of the boys my age in late elementary school and sixth grade were coming around and discovering these classics again. I also have fond memories about the movie School of Rock coming out, and Jack Black being an influential icon at the time for a lot of my male friends.

I do critically measure this as “music with a male energy” in my lifetime, because it simply was. I grew up in the town Clarkston, WA on the east side of the state. It is a small town, with many people who, yes, I would throw under a term kind of “redneck.” (Which I say with affection!) While there were women that liked these kinds of artist as well, I felt the weight of it being primarily enjoyed by my male friends in fifth to seventh grade. The way I also interpreted my interactions with them is that they were not the most fond of pop music on the radio, something that many friends that were girls at that age liked instead. I could be dead wrong with this interpretation, and maybe if you were to interact with my friends at the time from those grades, they may tell you I’m wrong. Nevertheless, this was how I very strongly remember and interpreted my environment at the time. And there was a short period of time when I really liked this music as well, especially in the sixth grade.

I’m going to play this example for you, and I want you to tell me what genre this sounds like, and some other associations you may have with this genre.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwVtq3-4ILHWMUxvMUNicnk2bU0

So when I hear this example, I still hear this as rock music. It’s just a little different and warped. A lot of these examples have consistencies, habits, and patterns of expression that you can align with hard rock music. Only there are certain facets of it that are pushed to an extreme. On many of these examples, you hear vocals that can be considered hard rock, but you can hear them being pushed to an edge that’s pretty different, absurd, and satirical from what you’ve heard in the first example. The lyrical topics are slightly different, and are either very politically charged or satirical in nature, or are absolutely nonsensical. When we focus on the instrumentation and the interaction with the harmonies, we hear many common rhythms of rock music being emulated, but then we hear something that is throwing it off: bad, inappropriate sound effects, or an intentional deconstruction of the typical harmonies being used in rock music.

Can you tell me what you imagine the cultures, social implications, and communities behind this music entails?

I consider this to be a “non-binary person appreciating a ‘male energy’ in rock music.”

What I really want to stress and emphasize about the importance of this music sample is that, when I was seeking out this music, I was honestly just trying to be myself. I became very obsessive and eager to seek out this kind of music actively, and always felt this intense sensation that this was the music I needed to listen to during the time of sixth grade to ninth grade. I absolutely loved it every time I found a band or a song that could fit under these categories. “Obsession” was not an understatement. I bought several of these bands’ albums and listened to them all the time. I’d obsessively watch their interviews every night before going to bed. I tried to emulate their guitar playing styles, and the ridiculous vocal stunts. I was mesmerized, and completely engulfed in this sound world.

When I try to place this music sample within frameworks of music appreciation, I would often do it in a self-conscious manner, and really negate myself as a musician for being engulfed with this. The organization of the music composition in this sample was either within that same basic framework of rock music, and not very complex within more serious studies of music such as classical or jazz. Or the organization was sloppy, unfocused, and even if intentionally deconstructing compositional aspects of rock it was not necessarily qualifying as academic.

When we look at the performance, it’s once again something difficult to place under categories. Some of the players heard in the examples are very skilled musicians playing their instruments very proficiently, and perhaps in an arguably more proficient manner than the first example. While there’s arguably more proficiency, it’s undercut by all the absurd sound effects thrown into the performance and the ridiculous vocal stunts. Some of the instrument players in here arguably are lacking in proficiency on their instruments, and are just exploring noisy sounds.

But when I try to look at this music in terms of relating to a community, culture, other individuals, or the purely internal self, there’s a lot that was actually going on here! I will say that teachers and music teachers looking at me listening to this kind of music in general may have really stumped them with thinking about how they saw me trying to relate to my community, or exactly what cultural aspects of school I was trying to participate in. As far as directly relating to individuals through the means of showing them this kind of music… that never worked. As the boys I would play this music to simply didn’t understand it, and thought me to be weird for being so obsessive with this music.

However, once I decided to keep this kind of music obsession as more of a private affair separated from the guise of my male friends, I found this music to be an extremely socially stabilizing force within my life. It was a means of relating to a community, culture, other individuals, and my purely internal self, if not directly through showing this music to my friends.

If you are wondering how so, let’s just say that, because of my gender identity, I always felt different, even from the very early age of five. My first memories I had with gender was when I was the only one in a “boy’s body” in a tap dancing class at the age of five. I was dancing with girls in the class, and many people found this to be a problem. What’s difficult for me is that, somewhere along the way, my parents must have thought I was acting too feminine because I was around all those girls, and then they hopped on board with finding it problematic. It’s understandable, as the household I was raised in was one white, Catholic, rich, and Republican.

They ejected me from the class. This still didn’t keep me from having nearly all my friends be girls in early elementary school, from ages 5-7, as I felt like I understood them most. But, since I was happy and used to girls, I was often called out in later elementary school for being too feminine, and I still remember that kid in fifth grade that looked me straight in the face and said: “You walk like a girl. You talk like a girl. You act like a girl. You ARE a girl.”

Eventually, puberty hit around sometime in sixth and seventh grade, and I discovered I was sexually attracted to those boys that appeared to be all straight and cis gender. I felt absolutely traumatized. It was even harder, as continuing to even relate to the boys within a level of gender identity was a real challenge for me. And that is when I turned to the music.

If there were to be one particular aspect of boyhood growing up into manhood that I felt I never particularly understood, it was a male-centric sense of humor, and those aspects of boyhood that were all about competitiveness and trying to win in a game and argument on who could make fun of whichever boys the most. It’s important to note that I didn’t hate a male sense of humor by any means, if I found it to truly and honestly not be hurting and subjugating anyone, and followed up by something authentically affirming and positive that reassured a friendship. It’s just that I felt I couldn’t express myself that way and be authentically myself.

However, since I had to keep my sexual and gender identity from my parents, I needed to relate the boys in order to socially pass as straight and cis gender for my environment. So when I was discovering that kind of music you hear in the first sample, there was something reflective in that music that I saw within that boyhood: a sense of humor, competitiveness, and aggression. I found the vocal timbres and timbres used within the instrumentation from the first sample humorous and emoting that sense of humor within the boys, and I found the rhythm and beat to be competitive and emoting a sense of male aggression and specifically emoting that sense of competitiveness and aggression within the boys. When I hit puberty, I reached a small point where I simply couldn’t bear this kind of music anymore, but I couldn’t really hold onto anything else in relating to boyhood and manhood.

So when I started transitioning towards music like what you hear in the second sample, I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was socializing myself to be like a boy by means of this sort of overcompensation. In my head, when I was able to hear the ridiculous vocal stunts being taken to that extreme and I could learn to actively love that kind of music, and even the individuals making that kind of music, I honestly felt like I could have a better appreciation for music in the first sample, and I also honestly felt myself better communicating authentically with the boys because I could understand them better. When I was able to spin around in my head all these extra excess noises and commentary in the music that seemed to be competing with itself to get as absurd and out there as possible and actively love this kind of music, and the individuals making that kind of music through their interviews, I honestly felt like I could have a better appreciation for music in the first sample, and I also honestly felt myself better communicating authentically with the boys.

As I just did with my quick analysis with the means of composition and performance, I am smart enough to notice the differences in expressions in these two music samples. As I am sitting here in the room right now absorbed within this interaction of you all, I am honestly hearing this music as being different from each other. But what is so difficult for me to explain, as a trans, non-binary, and genderqueer person is that, when I go home for the day all by myself and not in the presence of anyone else, with only my body and spirit, I completely struggle to hear a difference in these music samples. Even after I still have that grip of quick analysis that I just delivered, I honestly struggle hearing much of a difference. Maybe this is because part of me still feels both of these samples should emote reactions of what I expect from boys. Maybe it’s because, since I was able to use this music as a means to “overcompensate” socially, but also to empathize with other music and characteristics within boys, they both emote very similar reactions within me, even if the latter sample I prefer.

(to be continued)

(hopefully on next sketch, I will be writing about me as a non-binary person appreciating a female energy in pop music, how I grew as a music student from this start as a musician, the psychological consensus surrounding gender identity, and paradigms in art music composition)

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