Subscribe to Nonviolence Now Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.
Join Alisha for a “museum tour” as they delve into a wide variety of queer artistic expression and illuminate each one as a unique form of nonviolent action. From inventive dance forms to personal portraits to anonymous journalism to one hell of a jacket, get a sampling of what pride has meant over space and time.
—
Intro, Alisha: Hello everyone and welcome to the Nonviolence Now Podcast, brought to you by Pace e Bene, where we explore the principles of nonviolence, where it all started, and how it shows up in today’s digital world.
Alisha: Hey there, listeners. Today, it’s just you and me. I’m Alisha, and for this episode we’re going to be discussing LGBTQ art as a form of resistance.
Think of this as a tour through a museum, a little auditory exhibition where I’ll be your tour guide. And, of course, anything I reference on this episode, we will link in the episode description for you to check out.
First, before we head into the exhibit, let’s take a moment to acknowledge that this is an extremely insufficient overview. In terms of time and space, New York City in the ‘80s is going to be heavily overrepresented. There are entire genres we’re missing out on. And, of course, we’re only looking at art that has been recorded at all. There are oral histories and conversations and doodles in people’s notebooks that we’ll never get to know, but that are still part of LGBTQ art and resistance.
We’ll start off our tour with a dive into the history of drag. Think of drag today, and you might immediately jump to the high-production value televised competitions like RuPaul’s Drag Race. But drag had much more humble and high-stakes beginnings.
Imagine you’re a queer kid on the streets in New York City in the late ‘80s. You’ve been disowned. No one wants to hire you for anything. You’re surrounded by images of fame and beauty, but if you dress how you want to, someone will probably try to beat you up. Under situations like these, queer youth of color would band together into found families called “houses.” And these houses would compete in underground drag balls.
Each competition had a theme centered around some kind of aesthetic or persona. And competitors essentially had to take on this high-class opposite-gender persona and do it better than their opponent. If you’ve ever heard the term “serving realness,” this is where it comes from. You have to present yourself with such poise and confidence that could sashay onto some rich person’s yacht and have no one so much as bat an eye at you, even though you’re actually a broke bi-racial teenage boy in a dress you stole from the store yesterday.
So in order to cope with the violence, both the systemic and interpersonal, that they faced on a daily basis, those in the world of ballroom culture created an art form that said, “Even though we’re the most vulnerable and spat-on people around, we can transform ourselves into celebrities—the people you respect and revere the most, who you wouldn’t lay a finger on.” Which I think really serves to highlight the absurdity of queerphobia, how based on perception it is. If the most downtrodden can put in some elbow grease, put on some eyeshadow, and become the highest of high society, well then why have those distinctions at all?
As drag evolved into the more stylized forms we see today, with huge eyelashes and extreme contours, it also departed from its roots in desperation and survival. Back in the day, the point of drag was to appear like you weren’t in drag so that no one could “clock” you as poor and crossdressing. Most of today’s drag, you take one look and you know that this person is in drag just from the style.
While this freed up the artform of drag to become more wild and inventive, it has also lost some of its ability to sharply critique the socioeconomic inequality and gender-based violence from which it originally sprung. I highly recommend the documentary film Paris is Burning to learn more about the history and development of drag.
So let’s continue our tour through LGBTQ art as resistance. We’ve talked so far about drag, the idea of for one moment becoming someone else as a spectacle for others to see. But what about the private moments when you are just you? What about the day to day experience? For this, we will turn to the variety of LGBTQ portrait projects out there.
There is “Faces and Phases,” a project of Zanele Muholi featuring black and white portraits of lesbians from South Africa. We have Sarah Deragon’s “The Identity Project,” pairing people with their self-chosen labels. Though there are many more, I’ll end with my personal favorite, entitled, “To Survive on this Shore.”
Created by Jess T. Dugan, this is a series of photos and interviews with trans and gender-nonconforming older adults. Between the direct interpersonal violence and the eroded social safety net trans people face, our average life expectancy is not long. Add the obsession over gender pronouns being “a new fad amongst the youth,” plus the oversexualization of trans people in media and advertising, and you get a social landscape where the elder trans person is rarely seen or heard from. I’ll link “To Survive on this Shore” in the episode description, of course, but let’s get a small taste of the photos, and these are just my personal descriptions.
“Debbie, 61, and Danny, 66, St. Joseph, MO, 2015.” Debbie pushes Danny in his wheelchair. She is barefoot and leaning down to plant a kiss on Danny’s forehead. In the dappled sunlight, he closes his eyes and tilts his head up to receive it.
“Gloria, 70, Chicago, IL, 2016.” Gloria stands in the snowy street, grinning proud in a long fur coat. There are snowflakes in her hair.
“Michelle Marie’s hand, Williamsburg, VA, 2013.” We’re looking over her shoulder, where her hand rests next to her earring. The gorgeous maroon of her nail polish has grown away from the base of her fingernails, mirroring the grey roots in her dyed-auburn hair.
“Tony, 67, San Diego, CA, 2014.” It’s just a close up of him. He has sparkling eyes and close-shaved hair that looks a lot like mine. If I tilt my head just a bit to the left, it feels like I’m looking in a mirror.
A simple photograph can do a lot to make one feel less alone. But sometimes, we need the nuance of words too. I’d like to highlight My Kali Magazine, and I’ll read briefly from their About page. “My Kali is a queer feminist bilingual webzine from and for the Arabic-speaking region and diaspora. Established in 2007, the publication covers a range of topics, intersecting with gender identity, sexuality, and orientation. Through its work, it aims to create safe digital spaces for and produced by queer feminist communities to encourage the co-production of alternative queer feminist knowledge and to document the stories and creativity of our communities.”
Some titles of articles include, “How to Dance with a Survivor’s Body,” “Yasaman: Story of a Queer Iranian in Exile,” “Digital Invasion: On the Influx of Israeli Users on Dating Apps in the MENA Region,” and “Bluetooth Queens.” A theme I find running through almost all the articles is one of loneliness and of reaching out against it. The specific intersection of queer and Arabic is often incorrectly seen as a contradiction in terms. You can find Arabic culture, you can find queer culture, but if you can’t find both, well, you might feel that a part of yourself is always out of place. As a platform, My Kali Magazine turns these stories of isolation into their opposite: a shared experience.
It’s an enormous first step to take the seemingly-isolated isolating experiences of people and take them into a uniting force. But, to really expose why isolation and suffering is so wide-spread, that takes things to another level, to the level of protest. So I would like to introduce you all to a queer artist named David Wojnarowicz, who I think did an excellent job of exposing the systemic and political roots of violence to the LGBTQ community. So let’s take a look at two of his pieces.
The first one is untitled, but is usually called “One Day This Kid.” It’s a photo of himself at around 9 years old with texts around it, and the text reads as follows: “One day this kid will get larger. One day this kid will come to know something that causes a sensation equivalent to the separation of the earth from its axis. One day this kid will reach a point where he senses a division that isn’t mathematical. One day this kid will feel something stir in his heart, throat, and mouth. One day this kid will find something in his mind and body and soul that makes him hungry. One day this kid will do something that causes men who wear the uniforms of priests and rabbis, men who inhabit certain stone buildings to call for his death. One day politicians will enact legislation against this kid. One day families will give false information to their children and each child will pass that information down generationally to their families and that information will be designed to make existence intolerable for this kid. One day this kid will begin to experience all this activity in his environment and that activity and information will compel him to commit suicide or submit to danger in hopes of being murdered or submit to silence and invisibility. Or one day this kid will talk. When he begins to talk, men who develop a fear of this kid will attempt to silence him with strangling, fists, prison, suffocation, rape, intimidation, drugging, ropes, guns, laws, menace, roving, gangs, bottles, knives, religion, decapitation, and immolation by fire. Doctors will pronounce this kid curable as if his brain were a virus. This kid will lose his constitutional rights against the government’s invasion of his privacy. This kid will be faced with electro-shock, drugs, and conditioning therapies in laboratories tended by psychologists and research scientists. He will be subject to loss of home, civil rights, jobs, and all conceivable freedoms. All this will begin to happen in one or two years when he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy.”
So we can see here how astutely he identifies various sources of anti-queer violence. We have religious institutions, politicians, the medical system, and individuals conditioned by the larger society. He even identifies that violence against the self is an extension of the things, that they could, “compel him to commit suicide or submit to danger in hopes of being murdered or submit to silence and invisibility.”
Wojnarowicz was around during the height of the AIDS crisis and contracted HIV himself, which marked a big step up in the politicization of his art, which brings us to the second art piece we’ll look at. It’s just a simple jacket that he wore to a protest, and he painted these words on the back: “If I die of AIDS, forget burial, just drop my body on the steps of the FDA.” The FDA being the Food and Drug Administration, a government agency which had dragged its heels on reaching a cure for HIV/AIDS because AIDS was seen as a convenient way to let “undesirables” like gay men and drug users die off.
At a time when AIDS was so shameful and stigmatized, Wojnarowicz wanted to bring it out into the open and direct the shame and stigma not at the victims of violence, but at the perpetrators instead.
So that concludes our little audio tour, our tiny taste of LGBTQ art as resistance. Now I don’t know about you, but whenever I go to an art museum, I always come out wanting to make some art. I encourage all you listeners, even if you don’t think of yourself as queer or as an artist, to think about what you can learn from today’s gallery. How can you poke fun at ridiculous societal distinctions like the drag queens have done? How can you pay close attention to the authenticity of people around you like the photographers behind the portrait projects are doing? How can you invite others to break through the isolation of a marginalized identity like My Kali Magazine does? How can you take a stand against powerful violent institutions like David did?
In terms of this “make some art” exercise, well, I’ll go first. In doing some of the research for this episode, I realized that even though I am out as queer, I’ve still been hiding the parts of my identity that are a bit harder to explain or justify. I use they/them pronouns in most of my personal and professional life because that’s sort of the standard for when you don’t fit neatly into either binary gender. But if I were to get more nuanced, I would actually rather be referred to with he/him pronouns on the understanding that I am also a lesbian but not quite a woman. Starts to get a little complicated, right?
I’ve internalized a lot of shame around this because it feels like asking too much of people or like I’m playing into the stereotype of a young person with a confusing gender. So I’m gonna confront that shame, right here, coming out of your speaker, with a little poem. It’s not some grand stand against injustice, but hey, it’s something.
A chia seed on the pad of my index finger, small, hard, packs itself in so tight. Put it in water, watch it unfurl, cross its own boundaries, viscous porosity. I walk down the street with a hoodie and I am a man. I lay on the crinkling paper at the doctor’s office and I am the checked box next to female. On my resume, a they. Who decides who I am? Who do I let decide who I am? The voices from the phone are screaming, scrolling in the endless void, “Special snowflakes,” “sick in the head.” I become small, hard, I pack myself in tight. Others define me and I don’t fight. When will I unfurl?
Thank you all for indulging me. Now, I think it’s your turn to go out and create something beautiful.
Outro, Alisha: Thank you for joining us on the Nonviolence Now Podcast. We hope today’s episode left you feeling inspired. If it did, don’t keep it to yourself—share it with your friends and community. Together, let’s spread the word about the power of nonviolent action.
Links to art referenced in the episode, in order of mention:
Paris Is Burning (documentary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI7EhpY2yaA
Faces and Phases (portrait series) https://www.yanceyrichardson.com/exhibitions/zanele-muholi2?view=slider#22
The Identity Project (portrait series) https://www.identityprojectsf.com/
To Survive on This Shore (portrait series) https://www.jessdugan.com/tsotsphotographs
My Kali Magazine (webzine) https://wp.mykalimag.com/en/home-page/
One Day This Kid (by David Wojnarowicz) https://whitney.org/collection/works/16431
Protest Jacket (by David Wojnarowicz)https://wojfound.org/scholarship/timeline/1988-activism/
Thank you for this episode.
I’m a crime thriller author and one of the first openly trans authors in the genre.
I was tired of seeing trans characters portrayed as nothing but sex workers, murder victims, and serial killers.
So I started writing thrillers where trans and other queer women are the kick ass heroes.
This is how I resist.