iStock // gnagel

ATLANTA, Ga - “As a pastor, I want to affirm that sometimes healing means moving on [from Christianity] and that's okay,” said Kimble Sorrells. “My experience with God and the Divine resonated with finding more affirming aspects of Christianity that focus on social justice.”

Queer people experience religion differently than straight, cisgender people. Nowhere is this better exemplified in the U.S. than in the conservative south. When queer people are raised in southern Christianity, most are exposed to homophobic and transphobic language, most don’t feel safe coming out, and this often causes them to leave Christianity altogether. 

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

For Edwin Ashurst, who said he was traumatized by growing up gay in a southern Baptist church during the 70s and 80s, healing that trauma came through the teachings of the Buddha and the community he studies those teachings with. 

“I felt failed by Christianity,” Ashurst said. “It was difficult for me to say the word ‘Christian’ without it invoking resentment and anger. Even though I knew there are wonderful Christians, I was developing my own resentment … I was hating George Bush and the culture, hating everything, working 80 hours a week. ... I found a church where I found accepting people, but I was doing a lot of cherry-picking [of] the Bible. With [Buddhist teachings], I don't have to cherry-pick. I am encouraged to carefully examine everything we teach.”

Sorrells response to a repressive Christian childhood was different. After being sent to a conversion camp and spending adolescence believing God wished they were straight, Sorrells reclaimed their religion as a trans pastor spreading love. 

“I believed that I was an ex-gay [or a religious convert from being homosexual] for a while in high school and college,” Sorrells said. “[Then I] questioned things [when studying] religion in an academic setting. It helped me [realize] these texts we use are set in a different place and time, and difficult to interpret with accuracy. I came out as gay In college. I reclaimed and affirmed my faith during college … I was stubborn at times thinking ‘I’m not gonna let them take [my faith]  from me.’ During and after seminary was when I started to transition and examine gender identity in a faith context.”

Survey Says 

Ashurst and Sorrells experiences of abrasive homophobia and transphobia in southern churches are very common. I conducted a survey for queer people who either grew up in Georgia or live in Georgia now, or both. 

Of 22 respondents, 13 grew up in Georgia. Of those, only two said they were not exposed to language that demonized queer people in religious settings. The two respondents who said no also grew up in Atlanta and Metro Atlanta, meaning all the respondents who grew up in mid-size, rural and desolate Georgia towns experienced homophobia and transphobia first-hand as children. 

18 of 22 respondents grew up with Christianity, and of those 18, only five remained Christian. Seven currently don't identify with any religious theology or practice and four identify as atheist. Of the remaining two, one is Deist and one is optimistic agnostic. 

In the survey, 15 of 22, or 68%, of respondents said they did not feel safe coming out to their parents and local religious community in their youth. 

When looking at genderqueer and trans identities specifically, 8 out of 9, or 88%, of respondents said they did not feel safe coming out to their parents and local religious community in their youth. 

Overall, this data affirms that most queer people in Georgia grew up Christian, experienced trauma, and decided to leave the religion. 

Of 22 responses, only four people said that they currently are not out and do not feel safe coming out. Of those four, one is an Atheist, one is Christian and two don't identify with any religion. One respondent said they currently are not out and are unsure how the community would react. That person is Christian. 

Six of 22 respondents said they are currently exposed to language that demonizes their identity and other queer identities. Of those respondents, three don't identify with any religion, two are Christian and one is atheist. 

It should be noted that just because a respondent practices atheism or does not practice any religion doesn't mean their community is like-minded. It is likely these respondents are not out to their Christian communities and/or families, and they may even hide their religious beliefs. 

Another particularly upsetting find is that 18% of respondents had teachers teach them religion at a public school.  

Suffer No More

Ashurst is one of the many who escaped Christianity, and has since started his own Queer Dharma group at the Atlanta Shambhala Center. The Dharma is the sacred teachings of the Buddha, the studying and application of which is a main part of Buddhism. The purpose of the group, which still meets but is mostly online, is to serve as a safe space for queer people to discuss the Dharma and form a community, or Sangha. 

Every Tuesday, Ashurst volunteers at the center for an hour and meditates at the center for two and a half hours every Sunday. Ashurst also regularly takes classes at the center. He maintains that there is no one correct path, so long as the goal is peace. 

“Dharma is dharma no matter who’s hearing it,” Ashurst said. “Suffering and dissatisfaction are universal. The path is the goal, and the path must be one of kindness, compassion, patience, wisdom and generosity.”

Sorrells is one of the few who stayed, choosing to instead reclaim Christianity. Sorrells also sees the value in other spiritual paths, incorporating meditation and yoga into their spiritual practice. Sorrells explained that Christians can benefit from healing through bodywork and meditation, noting that the type of prayer Sorrells practices, centering prayer, is very contemplative and similar to mindfulness meditation. Most of the work they do is centered around LGBTQ issues, including serving on the board of Atlanta Pride. 

“I do a lot of visiting preaching,” Sorrells said. “Some churches ask me to speak about LGBTQ topics specifically. Most of the time, churches I serve have a set of readings that go by the seasons, so I’ll preach from those. Sometimes something on the news [LGBTQ-related] might make its way into the sermon. It’s just a part of the conversation in the way you might talk about helping people or relationships.”

As LGBTQ youth and adults today continue to struggle in the dark confines of conservative Christianity, those who choose to come out as queer are faced with another choice: to stay and reclaim their religion, or to escape and find something new, whatever that is for them. Sorrells and Ashurst have proved that both choices provide a light at the end of the tunnel, and they have made it their mission to share that light with others. 

—

Luke Gardner is a radical journalist and student who lives in metro Atlanta. To see his work or for contact information click here.

iStock // Valeriy_G

It’s the holiday season, AKA time to indulge in the capitalist practice of showing people you care about them by purchasing material things. Amongst all the gifts out there, you may find trouble for that one person on your list. She’s “alternative” but trendy all the same. She probably has a mullet or has considered getting one. She’s a lil’ dorky, a lil’ sexy, a lil’ dirty. The easiest way to sum up this aesthetic is by asking “do they look like someone who owns or could possibly own a pet rat?” If so then she’s a Rat Girl.

  The idea of cool girls with rats isn’t new. There was the iconic 80s indie film Skate Witches  (“If you don’t have a rat you can’t be one of us!”). Goth girls have had pet rats in TV and film for years. Billie Ellish, Rico Nasty, and Ilana Glazer are all celebrity examples of the Rat Girl aesthetic. There’s even a viral clip on Twitter of some NYC girls embodying this subculture with actual rats. 

Obvi since Wussy is a Queer publication, I need to make a point that gender is a scam and anyone regardless of gender can identify as a rat girl. So if your hard-to-shop-for person is an emaciated fag with green hair, rest assured all these gifts still apply. So without any further ado, here’s my gift guide for the girl who looks like she owns a pet rat.  

Checkered Clothing

The Rat Girl’s preferred pattern. Check out these overalls from Unif, and crop top from Dolls Kill or these skinny jeans from Hot Topic (the home of rat girls for decades now).  

Pleated skirt

For the girly Rat Girl. This one from Lazy Oaf has cute heart details that will pair amazingly with a Rat Girl’s gross pet. 

Chain Jewelry

Much like the Rat Girl keeps rodents imprisoned as pets, it’s popular for her to sport industrial chains to reflect her pet’s imprisonment. You can find them as bracelets/ necklaces at trendy places like Doll’s Kill, or honestly Home Depot.

Sephora Gift Card

It takes a lot of money to look this cheap. Help your rat girl stock up on glitter, dark eyeliner, peachy blush, and whatever else she wants to smear on her face with a Sephora Gift card. This site lets you customize one! 

Surfbort  T-Shirt

Dani Miller is the Patron Saint of this aesthetic, and while her band Surfbort’s t-shirts are sold out online, here’s a hand-drawn portrait of her on a shirt.

A Tape Deck

Ok boomer listen up: tapes are back and the bands/noise projects Rat Girl’s listen to put stuff out on tapes. Here are two that can also play music via Bluetooth or an aux cord.

https://www.hammacher.com/product/classic-cassette-player-radio-1?cm_cat=ProductSEM&cm_pla=AdWordsPLA&source=PRODSEM&gclid=CjwKCAiAlajvBRB_EiwA4vAqiOR8CRq7TQAmIOMRwLaxAEKAZOzjteMaEg4fTCfi1vpKYgR6OwgyURoCs7gQAvD_BwE

https://www.google.com/shopping/product/753408065912440768?q=tape+deck&rlz=1C1JZAP_enUS703US703&sxsrf=ACYBGNSj0vrZvCG3SUwErMfttOkTCX1smw:1575676013528&biw=1422&bih=588&prds=epd:17147297374681085612,paur:ClkAsKraX_VQ1-wbEDGe2DryMZekkfKtxN9SZaVDEHJfU_IsxfRH-v1sJxBsZNG5G0wDpjWUuL3JlcXJPUrRzoXcHdQo96_LlMiEyyxTmi6_QtFcji03YRZpoBIZAFPVH73ZWRPDwPhd7F5e2jeMXVDKaj5u_A,prmr:1&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiasNnLmqLmAhWmxFkKHU3ZB2gQ8wIIrQQ

Tarot Deck

Not all witches are rat girls but all rat girls wish they were witches. Let her feel her fantasy with a tarot deck. She can give her friends readings while she looks up what each card means online. This deck has rats on it! 

Bath Bombs

Your Rat Girl may not NEED a bath but she probably looks like she does. Make it fun and Instagramabble with a Lush Bath Bomb. This Elf or Pirates Chest will fit her aesthetic. Lush if you’re reading this please sponsor Wussy. 

A Weighted Blanket

iStock

Odds are the Rat Girl you’re shopping for doesn’t ever want to leave the bed, so get her a weighted blanket! Don’t worry, her lil pet will be able to squeeze and crawl underneath it like a normal blanket. Here’s one from Walmart.

A Good Book!

Odds are the rad is looking for something to read while her pet crawls all over her. If she doesn’t know about Riot Grrrl (ask her) get her Girls to the Front by Sara Marcus. Her history of the 90s feminist punk movement should be required reading for Rat Girls everywhere. If she’s already read it (likely), Throwing Muses frontwoman Kristen Hersh has a memoir fittingly called Rat Girl. It’s snarky and graphic, with Hersh describing how cool watching blood flow into a sewer is. 

You can find a copies of both online but check your local bookstore!

—

Mo Wilson is a writer and sometimes DJ living in Brooklyn. He also throws indie rock/punk shows with the booking collective Booked By Grandma and loves plastic jewelry. You can find him on Twitter @sadgayfriendx and Instagram at @djgaypanic

PHOTO: Alejandro Carvajal

In Petaluma California, at the age of 14, a queer performer was born. Starting as a teen performer in Petaluma’s cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Hollow Eve became introduced to the world of John Waters, BDSM and drag while attending college in San Francisco. 

Eve’s first time in drag was a parody political performance as Rush Limbaugh around 2003, as they recall it. 

Fast-forward to over a decade later, where one night at a club in L.A., Eve found themselves in conversation with season one winner and friend Vander Von Odd. Odd brought up Dragula and the need for Eve’s voice to be heard, but Eve remembers being hesitant, joking about how season 6 might be their time. It turned out that Vander’s influence did encourage Eve to try out, and the rest is history. 

On Dragula

“I am grateful to have been given the platform I was,” Eve said of their experience on the show. “I get a lot of hate but also a lot of love. I’m post-binary but polarizing.” 

Eve explained that they wanted to go on Dragula, not just to compete and display their art, but largely to have hard conversations about privilege and gender and to discuss the representation of AFAB, non-binary, trans, and women drag performers. 

One of these moments came in the form of a passionate monologue where Eve discussed competitor Priscilla Chambers’s use of the term “fishy,” which is used regularly by drag queens to refer to queens who look “feminine” or “passable.” Eve’s point was that the word reduces what it is to be feminine to an offensive trope of a vagina, thus stigmatizing vaginas as “gross” and perpetuating the binary idea that vaginas are required to be feminine or a woman.  

“I didn't say, ‘Priscilla, you're canceled,’” Eve said. “I just explained that using the term hurts people. Now it's [her] choice, knowing it hurts people, to continue [using it] or to stop using it. I'm not here to cancel people. Cancel culture is not good because we have to continue having conversations.”

When it comes to tone, Eve jokingly explained: “I’m Italian, passionate and intense.”

“I don't make art to appeal to everyone. I make it to unpack my life.”

Eve’s final episode was complete with another fiery monologue, this one explaining their costume and the beauty of celebrating menstruation in a world that so often demonizes it and the people who experience it. Since the show, Eve has made several apologies on social media for only speaking about women in their dialogue.

“Being on a reality competition is very straining and …. by the time I got to the finish of it, I felt there was a part of me that was lost a little,” Eve said. “I ended up using language to refer to the menstruation cycle as only for women. That excluded even my own identity, which I feel was just lost in the stress of the competition and the extreme circumstances that it takes to film reality television.” 

On Identity

Eve identifies as post-binary, meaning they don’t identify exclusively with any gender, and that they believe one day there will be a world without gender, a world where people aren’t men or women - people are just people. 

“Gender cant destroy itself until everyone is equal because then over-defining gender becomes meaningless,” Eve said. 

Not surprisingly, Eve’s identity and ideas about gender directly influence their drag. 

“What my drag concept was - when I named myself Hollow - it’s a space to be filled, a space to unpack all genders, a space to be able to embody any identity that I want,” Eve said. “I call it a space to be filled. It also turns into a cheeky pickup line: ‘Hi I’m Hollow, a space to be filled.’ I don’t want to be limited by one or another - I wanna be whatever I wanna be. People who walk through the world see me as a woman - that’s how I get treated, but I just wanna be seen as a person … or maybe  a creature.”

Throughout Eve’s career, they have been redefining what it means to do drag. Eve explained that their goal is not to shock but to incite hard questions and meaningful conversations about identity in the queer community. 

PHOTO: Eric Magnussen

“Shock for the sake of shock isn't interesting unless you’re into electrocution,” Eve said jokingly. “To limit drag and say it’s only one thing, is to erase most performers. I don't make art to appeal to everyone. I make it to unpack my life. A lot of people think what I do promotes self-harm, [but] that hasn't been my experience, to release through pain. It can trigger people, which has been a conversation.” 

For one performance, Eve covered themself in bugs and killed hundreds of cockroaches before placing them in mini coffins. A funeral was held for the roaches, and Eve explained that the performance asked ‘what is the volume of life’ by killing.

Eve described their most intense performance, an installation done with fellow performer God’s Little Princess. The 45-minute project won the pageant they were performing for. 

“We decided to unpack the shame of gender bathrooms, the shame of breastfeeding in public, and the shame of queer sex being pushed into bathrooms by building an outhouse,” Eve said. “We had to do it outside because it would be illegal to do it in the bar. And it was illegal to do it on the street as well, but we did it. 

It started with me sitting on the toilet, naked, masturbating. Once I came, God’s Little Princess was born out of the toilet underneath me. 

She started to explore her dysmorphia by gently touching my breasts until she started breastfeeding from me and that made me really uncomfortable because I have body dysmorphia with my breasts.

She starts getting more and more upset, wanting breasts of her own. She starts scratching and tearing at my breast that she’s feeding from while I start cutting my other breast because I don’t want children, I don’t want this breast, I don’t want this ability to make children, I don’t want this responsibility. 

Then she gives up and slaps my breasts and gets up and stands above me and pisses down my breasts that I had been cutting. So there was blood and piss dripping down my body. She stands above me and masturbates while I push my boobs behind my body then let them hang [over and over]. And when she’s done masturbating, or gives up because it’s futile, she starts tucking her penis and then letting it hang [over and over]. 

And so we’re both sitting there just trying to change the body that we have, then we face and watch each other do that. Then we can see each other’s dysmorphia and we can see the way that we were the same. So I helped her down from standing on top of the toilet then we proceeded to destroy the interior of the outhouse until nothing was left but a box frame and a toilet. We were just literally kicking shingles out and screaming in rage, breaking free from the little structure. 

At the end of it, she was shaking with fear, and I just held her while I sat on the toilet and rocked her and told her everything was gonna be okay - in front of everyone with no shame, no walls to define who and what we were.”    

The Changing Scene

PHOTO: RJ Muna

Since the show, Eve has had the ability to travel to new and exciting places to perform and meet other queer performers, making sure to go to Boston monthly. 

“I was just in Denver performing KOVEN, an entirely trans show, being run by trans and non-binary POC,” Eve said. “San Francisco has a pretty diverse scene, it’s not amplified as much as other scenes, [but there is] a long history of women on stage.”

Eve also regularly asks that trans people be able to attend their shows for free, a concept in practice at different queer bars. Eve believes this is an important step to making trans people feel comfortable in spaces where they may otherwise feel pushed to the margins.

Eve believes the drag scene is changing as visibility is given to AFAB, women, trans and non-binary performers. Eve now lives in L.A., and said that diverse stages can be regularly found in L.A. and San Francisco. The real test to if a club is diverse is not just when they have AFAB, women, trans and non-binary performers, but when AFAB, women, trans and non-binary people are running and producing the show. 

Despite the gradual reckoning of the ‘other’ types of drag, there is still much work to be done in the areas of inclusivity and justice. 

“We need spaces for people to fail without being shamed, spaces where they can learn and grow,” Eve said. “The solution to building community and family is storytelling. It’s how we created language. It’s who we are.” 

—

Luke Gardner is a radical journalist and student who lives in metro Atlanta. To see his work or for contact information click here.

While on the phone with my mother, a previously ill-informed and naïve adopter of queerphobic ideologies, I had a revelation. She, in the most earnest tone, asked me, “Now look, don’t jump down my throat. I don’t know the best way to ask this, but why, in your opinion, is the trans community included in the ‘LGBT’? I mean, transgender is not a sexual orientation.” 

I paused. 

Realizing I had never given much thought to the reason behind “transgender” being included in the acronym, it took me a minute to give her a solid, no-nonsense answer. I mean, she had a point! From the outside looking in, it would be kind of confusing to see a gender identity lumped into a group of sexual orientations. Why is the “T” included in “LGBT”?

“Well…,” I started. I was stumped. I didn’t have the words to explain to her that yes, being transgender has no influence on a person’s sexual orientation. And yes, transgender people can be straight, gay, bisexual, lesbian, and any other categorization of sexuality there is out there. 

Picking up on the hesitation in my voice, she offered some assistance: “is that what transsexual is?” 

Cringe mode activated. 

After I calmly informed her that transsexual is an outdated and, to some, offensive moniker for trans women, I came to a sorta-kinda, almost-but-not-quite, half-baked conclusion. 

So, what’s the T? And the Q!

For decades, the trans community has been pushed to the back of the queer rights movement. Despite trans activism being the source of many of the triumphs the community has seen, from the decriminalization of queer nightlife spaces in the late 70s to the legalization of gay marriage in the 2000s, many members of the “LGB” fail to realize all of the work the “T” has put in. 

We have fought, bled, been jailed, and killed for daring to speak out on behalf of gay, bisexual, and lesbian people as a whole. We have scraped the walls of a community we’ve helped to build, to receive but a crumb of solidarity. We have asked for protection in gay spaces and had it thrown in our faces. We have exhausted all options but to fly to a new planet, establish our own rules and protections, and call it “Trannytopia” or something like that. 

Queer, though it can be classified as both a sexual orientation and a gender identity, has held a negative connotation amongst gays and lesbians for years. It’s great that in recent history, the LGB community has made efforts to be more inclusive of trans, queer, and gender non-conforming people. In some way, we are all connected by the experience of having a societal disadvantage due to an aspect of our identities. But, do we not deserve more visibility within our own home? Are we not worthy of the same privileges our non-trans/queer counterparts eagerly enjoy? 

These are the questions I asked myself while on the phone with my mother. I continue to ask myself these questions every time I see gay men and women perpetuate transphobic behavior. I continue to ask myself these questions every time gay men and women refuse to hold their friends accountable for the mockeries they make of queer individuals. I continue to ask myself these questions every time I am met with scorn or disdain for entering predominantly gay spaces (which, by the way, I’m getting paid to be there, sis!). It’s almost laughable to think that anyone gay, lesbian, or bisexual could be so hateful towards a group of people that helped build them up. Sadly, it happens every day.

By the end of our call, I had explained that the “T” is included in “LGBT” because a shared sense of solidarity, at equal levels, exists between the members of the community. Looking back over my premature answer, I realize that I’d made a mistake. 

A better answer to her question, Why is the ‘T’ included in ‘LGBT’ would be, “Why do so many people try to act like it isn’t in the first place?”

—

Ivana Fischer is the Culture Editor of WUSSY and a film and media enthusiast who specializes in cultural studies. You can find her across all socials @iv.fischer

The terms “trans” and “queer” are often lumped into one category of gender expression and sexual identity. It is a common belief that anyone who is trans should inherently adopt the label of being queer, and that the two terms are synonymous. Admittedly, the multi-faceted nature of being queer, and the freedom of what that could mean to different people, makes the label a lot more palatable than it has been in the past. But what does “queer” mean to trans people who simply are...not?

In many ways, the idea of what queer identity and trans identity can look like are actually quite similar.  Both have been used as a reclamation of power. Both are considered umbrella terms within their respective communities. Both imply the denouncement of societal expectations of gender presentation. So why is it inaccurate, and potentially dangerous, to conflate the two?

Queer has historically been used as a slur, so while it has largely been reclaimed, not everyone is comfortable with the term. For trans people who exist on the more binary spectrum of gender presentation, it can be triggering to be referred to as such. The distinction between what it means to be one or the other, should and must be respected.

To be queer, or not to be queer? That is the question.

Watch as Culture Editor Iv Fischer delves more into this topic in the newest installment of the Trans Agenda.

We desire to be real. We want to feel alive, whether through pain, pleasure, or love. Yet we invite so much into our lives that pulls us out of our present reality and into virtual ones, specifically the glitzed and spot-treated worlds of social media. For their choreographic debut, Benjamin Stevenson presents Person(a), a show that seeks to engage with our existence beyond the shouts into the void that is the noise and illusion of the internet.

Stevenson’s work questions presentation in digital spaces. “Where does the line between our true selves and our personas blur?”, says Stevenson. Person(a) is particularly concerned with the effects of technology among the queer community. “It has become an online stage for us queer folk to pull stunts and receive the validation we might not get from the outside world.”

The brilliance of Benjamin's work is its ability to critique social media platforms as well as to gather information from its tools and devices. The assemblage of the various elements of the piece draw upon a comprehensive knowledge of what is dynamic to the eye. The work pays attention to how images are portrayed to an audience, whether captured in-person, on film or in photos.

The white floors recall the harsh blank wash of popular Instagram art posts while the lighting’s intensity mimics the unrelenting brightness setting of a beauty mirror or time-reversing filter. The performers (Courtney Lewis, Laura Briggs, and Patrick Otsuki) exude androgyny as their silver sheen leotards magnify every articulation. Each movement is refracted back onto the viewer. The dancers’ opera-length red satin gloves splash color across an otherwise serious chromatic scheme. Their gestures become vibrant, eye-catching, while also sleek, seductive, a sign of an artist hyper-aware of visual composition.

The space of the bare stage appears deceptively vast, even cold. Like a party stripped of all its color, there is no pretense, disguise or projected ideas of self. The rug of artificiality is swiped from under their feet. This is all that is left. Flamboyant costume separates, thick cuts of mylar confetti, and each other.

The production's design is minimal yet intentional with all its aesthetic queues. Benjamin’s poetry projects along the wall, creating a backdrop of SMS-style text. The words are sparse, wanting, adding another layer of exchange between audience and performer. The sonic world is eclectic and unique. Peter Flamming composes the atmosphere with sounds from familiar safe spaces to bizarre energetic terrain.

Nostalgia rings through the opening of the show's trailer as When You Wish Upon a Star plays over the trio. Pinocchio comes to mind. A puppet chases his unceasing desire to become a real boy, for the surface of his wooden external surface to crack and break, unveiling a true authentic self, an image of youth and jovial spirit. Our own journey may not seem as remarkable, but it is ours to share. The truth beneath our surface may not be as pretty, but perhaps there is something there we can also learn to like.

Person(a) premieres on February 1st, 2020 at The Windmill Arts Center in East Point. Tickets can be purchased at the door and online here.

Nicholas Goodly is the writing editor of Wussy Magazine, guest blogger for Georgia Writer's Association, and team member of performance platform Fly on a Wall.

PHOTO: Adam Ouahmane (@adamouahmane)

“I remember as a kid wearing makeup and putting on tribal paint and costumes,” said drag artist Maxi Glamour. “I feel like I was born to do drag.”

Glamour’s first drag performance was at a 2009 amateur show in St. Louis. 

On Dragula

Almost a decade later, Glamour tried out for Dragula because they knew they wouldn’t be expected to change who they are. 

“There were times to make sure I was a good role model,” Glamour said. “I wanted to be kind and do my art. If they like it they like it, if they don't that’s okay.”

In the very first episode of the show, Glamour found themself in an extermination challenge, the winner of which gets to remain on the show. The Boulets’ opened the season by letting the contestants and viewers know they simply weren’t fucking around. So, for the first elimination challenge, Glamour had to jump out of an airplane. 

“I felt like I was playing fallout - a game where you fall from the sky,” Glamour said. “It was really cool, being in the clouds and seeing the mountains peek through the tops of the clouds. I was disconnected from reality to an extent, my emotions were so high. I was separating myself from my fears, [thinking], It doesn't matter if I go home, I might die,” Glamour said chuckling. 

“I told people the only thing I wouldn’t do was eat dead animals, [that I] only won't do challenges I felt were morally wrong,” Glamour said. I wouldn't have done the second challenge, its very punk rock,  but I [only] cheat on cookies, Baklava, and dick. I’m vegan.”

In the second extermination challenge, the contestants had to drink cows blood and eat raw cow flesh and organs. 

On stage

Glamour still resides in St. Louis and regularly performs in Chicago.

“I like doing acts that push boundaries, tell stories, separates from reality, and [allows the audience to] disconnect from their current position and look at life through allegory,” Glamour said. “I do acts where I’m twirling upside down 10-15 feet in the air, acts where I get completely naked and paint my genitals green. In one act, a politician [played by another performer] summoned a demon, played by me, to create wrath. I couldn’t do it because I wasn't as evil as the politician.” 

Glamour may be at home on the stage now, but coming into the scene wasn’t easy. 

“I’ve kinda carved my own place in my local scene,” Glamour said. “I wasn't welcome in most circles... As a black performer, I was expected to do Beyonce or Rihanna. Some circles think black drag is supposed to by hyper-feminine with curves and I think that's fab … [but] I'm not a boy or girl, I’m just Maxi. [Being] Non Binary, I wasn't what people would expect as a stereotypical black drag queen... Drag is filled with privilege... I think my drag is reactionary to that. [Queens should ask:] ‘is this drag valid because it transcends what I think it should be?’”

Glamour said they never really liked to wear pads, and they point out the problematic nature of suggesting that to be feminine is to be curvaceous, and suggesting that for drag to be valid, a performer must wear pads. 

PHOTO: Adam Ouahmane (@adamouahmane)

On Diverse Lineups

Glamour’s shows are diverse, making sure to include people of color, trans folk, and AFAB people.

“I think we forget to book cis white drag queens, but they’re already getting coin so it’s ok,” Glamour said jokingly. 

Not all shows are so committed to diversity, though. Glamour explained that some producers think that since they booked an AFAB or non-binary performer one week, they met their quota and feel no need to the next week. 

Glamour believes people need to be able to see their own privilege in order for the drag scene to become more open to trans people. 

“There is a social dichotomy of young radical queers and older producers,” Glamour said. ... “I do think a lot of gay culture is neoliberal and centrist, ran by moderate white cis gays. That’s the hierarchy of the power structure… There can be an age gap, where older queens might not understand new language and identities and understand how they are complicit in oppression without it sounding like a personal attack.”

Glamour started the hashtag “where are the black folk” to challenge producers’ lack of diversity in casting and points out that combatting oppression is an ongoing and multi-faceted process. While there is still a much-needed change in the drag scene to reflect performers other than cis men, Glamour recognizes that progress has been made and is currently being made.

“Language evolves, subgroups come together and use these words,” Glamour said. “Through language people understand ideas and talk about them freely… Now we have non-binary people on TV and in Teen Vogue, when I was growing up they would barely talk about being gay.” 

As the popularity of drag increases and performers like Glamour fight for platforms on stages around the world, it’s up to the clubs, the TV shows, and the community to open those stages to something different. The versatility of Glamour’s work has shown that once a community accepts a performer for who they are, there’s no stopping them.

—

Luke Gardner is a radical journalist and student who lives in metro Atlanta. To see his work or for contact information click here.

When was the last time you acknowledged your otherness? I think on my skin’s limits and imperfections, its historical context and ancestral roots, as well as its healing, durability and strength. Where blackness exists, there is no neutrality. Queerness, too, is an inheritance of code-switching and posturing learned through the body, a working vocabulary as means for survival and self-acceptance. Being black and queer comes with an array of connotations, stereotypes, and assumptions, but the lived experience of each individual is special, exceptional, and meaningful.

Let Black Fxlk Be is an art show presented by the Bakery in Atlanta that takes a close look at vulnerability and community inside black queer life. Local queer artists Chiomma Hall, The Color Cienna, Talecia Tucker and more, create art that interprets and represents blackness according to their own perspective. Each work presented acts as a vessel into the experience, personhood, and growth of each individual artist as they reflect on queerness within the South.

Chiomma Hall

Held at a distance, the queer experience appears magical, but it is in fact complex, challenging, and full. I think about our voices as 3-dimensional, our blood rich, our fat supple and our muscle just as permeable and robust as any other human’s. Art allows us to exist in all our colors, shapes and hair textures as we weigh our joys and grievances. Love, friendship, community and identity grow wild from this space.

This show, as countless others have proven, and as we as black people will continue to prove, is that black folks don’t need permission to be beautiful. Queer people don’t need permission to see ourselves rendered as art. We make it happen. We deserve the visibility these artists give us. What a gift to see ourselves refracted through watercolor, vivid in illustration, or plainly through film photography. Our tapestry is complex, bountiful, it fills the room. There is value in everything about us; these artists aim to bring every piece of it to you. Make time to witness all this show has to offer.

Chiomma Hall

Let Black Fxlk Be will be on view at the Bakery in Atlanta from February 13th-March 5th 2020

Opening Reception: February 13, 7:00-10:30pm

Artist Talk & Closing Reception: March 1, 2:00-4:00pm

Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday 12:00–4:00pm

Nicholas Goodly is the writing editor of Wussy Magazine.

The recent spark in attention paid towards ballroom culture has led to celebrities with bigger platforms, and larger followings, to hop on the bandwagon. Various television shows with queer-coded monikers have vogued and tutted their ways across our screens in the past few years. From Viceland’s My House to FX’s Pose, programs that showcase the underground celebration of Black queerness have claimed a spot of light in the darkness that is the media’s lack of diverse representation. Now more than ever, new displays of queer culture are making their way into mainstream media.

Enter: HBO Max’s Legendary.

A press release for HBO Max’s new voguing competition show, Legendary, announced actress Jameela Jamil as the MC and a lead judge. Queer news outlets and Twitter users alike are up in arms over the casting decision, and for good reason. Jamil faced criticism for taking up space in a community and culture that she has never been a part of-- until recently. 

Hours after the press release dropped, Jamil released a three-slide statement on Twitter, clearing up inaccuracies and accusations. The actress clarified that she will only be a lead judge, while Dashaun Wesley is the MC. Viewers can also expect to see ballroom legends Leiomy Maldonado, and DJ Mike Q, as well as celebrity stylist Law Roach and everyone’s favorite steel-knee’d hottie, Megan Thee Stallion. With such a diverse group of celebs being a part of the project, you would think that there’d be little-to-no backlash. However, along with some poorly written apologies by Jamil, it has also come out that Legendary is being executive produced by the same guys who brought us Queer Eye and The Amazing Race, A.K.A two white men profiting off of the trendiness of underground cultures. Smells like pandering to me!   

✌🏽 pic.twitter.com/YcB6H7YCT0

— Jameela Jamil 🌈 (@jameelajamil) February 5, 2020

In any case, Jamil aims to put her privilege to use, stating that, “Sometimes it takes those with more power to [...] elevate marginalized stars that deserve the limelight and give them a chance.” To some, this was an admirable act of Jamil holding herself accountable for the events that took place. To others, this was an egregious display of her lack of knowledge and non-involvement in ball culture, and the queer community at large. The claws came out as people gave their two cents about the polarity of the situation.

To make matters worse, Jamil came out as queer in a somewhat reactionary and untimely manner, stating that, “This is why I never officially came out as queer. I added a rainbow to my name when I felt ready a few years ago, as it’s not easy within the south Asian community to be accepted…” 

True as this may be, there is a lot to be said about non-Black allies who want to “give a voice” to people who need it the most, so long as they are given credit and/or a pat on the back. Some allies, like Jamil, have a strong desire to hold positions of power in communities that are so often stripped of opportunity and agency. This can, in turn, counteract the progression of the community as a whole. Twitter had a field day with Jamil’s statements, calling out the self-aggrandizing nature in which she “apologized.” It was almost as if she was saying, “Hey, I’m doing you all a favor! Take it or leave it.”

The idea that a show about marginalized people wouldn’t be as successful without someone outside of the community acting as the face of the entire production is flawed and tawdry. If the goal is to showcase the lives and talents of people within underprivileged groups, let it be that! The fact of the matter is that Jamil is sorely ill-equipped for this role. There are a lot of celebrities from within the community, and the ballroom scene, who would be better in a position such as this one. Consider actresses Amiyah Scott, Leyna Bloom, and Isis King, to name a few.  Amiyah Scott even took to Twitter in a heated rant, stating, “I transitioned FROM THE BALLROOM SCENE to network television and you mean to tell me TV shows based around the scene are being created and I’m not even considered to be involved? K.” Her frustrations are completely warranted, especially considering she has the expertise of what it means to judge and be judged in a ballroom setting. Jameela Jamil does not.

An open message to Jameela Jamil or any other ally to the community: step aside and let the people you want to give a voice to, have that voice. With no conditions. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Stop infantilizing the concerns of people in lower positions then you are in and listen to the ways in which you can be a better ally. Congratulations to you for sharing your truth, and welcome to the queer community! Still, you are not right for this show and should turn your position over to a more suitable candidate. 

—

Ivana Fischer is the Culture Editor of WUSSY and a film and media enthusiast who specializes in cultural studies. You can find her across all socials @iv.fischer

Photography by Mateus Porto

This interview originally ran on the cover of WUSSY vol.06, which is now sold out.
To order a copy of our most recent print volumes, click here.

A strobe and a beat fostered queer expressions years before our lives and stories clawed their way into the mainstream. Historically, clubs — and the music they played — have catered to and been shaped by alternative communities. Like all things us, eventually the straights would co-opt it, and the unmistakably gay and black beginnings of house music would eventually (d)evolve into the EDM stylings of Diplo and Calvin Harris. Nonetheless, the dance floor remains an emotional place for queers. This is something Robert Alfons of TR/ST innately understands. 

Since the electro-goth uniform’s debut in 2012, TR/ST (pronounced “trust”) has been compared to fellow Canadian electronic group Crystal Castles. Both create moody, synth-heavy tracks, but while listening to the latter inspires ascension, TR/ST’s work invites you inwards, to terrifying effect. The opening of “Sulk” — synthed sirens followed by a pulsing drum — eerily reminds me of that time I took a double-dose of Molly when I was 19. You know that feeling of sinking, only buoyed by frantic, sweaty movement? Then Alfons’ vocals come in, delivered as if the melody is nipping at his heels, croaking, “He’s bound to fall...”  

But just because TR/ST’s songs can, at times, evoke a bad trip, doesn’t make it bad music. On the contrary, like substance-induced therapy sessions, it’s often revealing. 

TR/ST originally began as a collaboration with Maya Postepski. Their debut record garnered them praise (and an audience) for its dark, Berlin sex club atmosphere. Tracks “Gloryhole”, “This Ready Flesh”, and “Candy Walls” suggest eroticism and drugs, while “Sulk” and “The Last Dregs” make you question whether or not this indulgence is a good thing. Like any proper night out, there’s unpredictability: melodies and lyrics are often ditched mid-track, replaced by vacuous sounds and Alfons making noise. In contrast to most dance music which is built around the idea of release, TR/ST’s early work purposely never gets there; living in the moment before, during, and after you’ve done and taken everything you can to transcend but realize you’re still sad. 

Speaking with Alfons, it’s hard to believe such extremes exist within him. Soft-spoken and polite (he’s Canadian, lest we forget), the 31-year-old is originally from Winnipeg. Growing up in a supportive home in the country’s coldest city, he played piano and listened to Sarah McLachlan. Not exactly a childhood that would seemingly source future lyrics like, “I am naked / I am ravaged” — at least, that’s what it sounds like Alfons is singing in “Bicep.” He tells me websites like Genius often misquote his lyrics. However, he isn’t eager to correct them, writing in a follow-up email, “The last thing I want is people to think there’s a strict way of how to experience and interpret a song.” 

Over the phone, he can occasionally come across as withholding, not eager to expand on his answers. Or perhaps he’s just not terribly comfortable talking about himself. This is his first press interview in a while, he confesses. It’s been over five years since a full album dropped, a delay he attributes to both “professional and personal” reasons. Following Postepski’s departure, Alfons pivoted towards pop. TR/ST’s sophomore album Joyland featured lighter and dreamier production: “Capitol” and “Are We Arc?” are the outfit’s most radio-friendly singles to date, yet Alfons’ lyrics remained obscured, both sonically and conceptually.

Photography by Mateus Porto

When asked if the poetic vagueness of phrases like “Give her lengths of love / But the body is gone” is purposeful, he seems put off by the question. His songwriting process is nonlinear, he explains, shaped around achieving a “feeling” and using melody and lyrics as a means of expressing the desired emotion. While he admits a good deal of his work deals with sexual repression and shame, like most of his verses, he’s not interested in divulging specifics. Are songs inspired by exes? Sure. Which ones? No way. “I can't control how people feel. I hope they listen, I hope they have strong reactions to the music whether good or bad,” he concludes.

Alfons recently moved from Toronto to Los Angeles, where he says he’s spent much of the past five years healing and gardening. He teased new music with “Bicep” in 2017, but it’d be at least another year and half before TR/ST fans got any formal word on the new record. “[The most challenging aspect was] overcoming the voice that says this isn't good enough,” he admits, “I always don't think I’m good enough.” In the time spent not tending to himself or the earth, he’s been working on a new two-part LP entitled The Destroyer, which will see him reunite with Maya Postepski on several tracks. Surprisingly, the lead single “Gone” treats Alfons’ vocals as the centerpiece of the production — not dissimilar to his pre-TR/ST musical experimentations like “Nostalgia.” His voice minimally distorted, he sings to a dissolved love, “Did I ever tell you I need you? / To lead me through the fog.” 

Alfons identity often peaks through in his lyrics. “I am so grateful to be queer,” he says, “it has given me a higher level of empathy and solidarity with others.” A gay listener will often find familiar sentiments: desire, sex, alienation. However, pronouns and narratives are characteristically blurred with TR/ST’s particular brand dancefloor chaos. “I am getting used to the loneliest of sounds,” he sings on “Are We Arc?”

We’re left to fill in the rest of the dots ourselves, but maybe that’s the point. TR/ST’s music is crafted to be evocative, so perhaps Alfons’ cageiness about his own inspiration is to not step on our projections. “I hate… buying an album and flipping through the booklet for pictures, and there are lyrics just right there. I listen to a song for years and years, and then get attached to the lyrics that I thought they were,” he told Electronic Beats in 2012. 

Describing his decision to split Destroyer into two parts, he told me, “I think it's important to be patient and put things out when you're ready,” alluding to how with the advent of digital streaming, individual tracks can be overlooked by listeners, “but there's only so long that you can be precious about things.” By releasing Destroyer as two separate LPs, Alfons is ensuring each track gets its due. A decision that also suggests Alfons is an artist more interested in curating his audience’s experience than he lets on. He appears more comfortable discussing his garden than his music. “My next project is growing olives, I find those trees so incredibly gorgeous,” he gushes, “I'm obsessed with starting the process of growing them and the transformation of this fruit that's essentially impossible to eat unless you salt them or press them into oil.” 

Photography by Mateus Porto

You could read into this affinity for olives as a metaphor for Alfons’ creative process: his raw and bitter emotions only made digestible through melodic salting — but trying too hard to distill the precise meaning of his music seems to be missing the point. By keeping his work’s emotional citations private, he preserves the connections we’ve created: music for us that might has well have been written by us. If our experiences with TR/ST’s music are primarily alone on a dance floor in a club or your room, the only interpretations that matter are our own.  

When asked about the group’s mystique in another interview, he responded plainly, “The whole thing doesn’t seem mysterious to me.” Robert Alfons can most likely chart his personal pain, growth, and inspiration — but that’s for him. We’re not entitled to know the cause or cure for his fog. Maybe a feeling is enough. Maybe we should just trust the music and dance. 

TR/ST’s latest albums The Destroyer - 1 and The Destroyer - 2 are now available for purchase or streaming. You can visit www.tr-st.xyz for merch and upcoming tour dates. 

—

Jacob Seferian is a Texas-bred journalist living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @disco__bitch. That's disco, two underscores, bitch.

Photography by Mateus Porto

TAYLOR ALXNDR does not disappoint when it comes to new music and, as their first release of 2020, “Romeo” is the fresh feel we’ve been waiting for. This ATL-based indie artist has mastered pop panache with ease and “Romeo” stands as a shining example of how they finesse minimalist beats with synth and signature heartfelt wist to create love songs that are never overboard on emo. Not only is “Romeo” a bop, but the music video is a clever take on stereotypical romantic roles with a twist:  “Instead of the girl changing for the boy, the boy does the labor to better himself, and earn the girl.” 

The 80’s, 90’s homage of teen cinema was shot in 15 hours, an exhilarating experience that mixed DIY and much planning in a proper studio setting. “This music video is a major step for me. I self-directed it and built the entire set!,” ALXNDR exclaims. “One of my goals for my next album is to elevate my music, my visuals, and the idea that a drag performer can be a serious musical act. As a drag performer who makes music and sings live, I’m constantly fighting a limiting narrative of what drag can and cannot do. I’m a part of a wave of drag performers re-writing that narrative, queering it, and while making amazing music!”

Drag sisters Molly Rimswell and Dotte Com are perfectly cast as ALXNDR’s main crew while rising drag king TJ Maxxx plays the “Romeo”. “I knew I needed someone who can exude really big ‘fuckboy’ energy, and he rose to the occasion,” ALXNDR explains. With many local familiar faces in the prom scene, including ALXNDR’s two partners, the filming resulted as an extra-fun conglomeration of community, folx close to the artist, and the elements of sass in the narrative and the joy in the process comes through for the viewer. 

ALXNDR’s conjuring of this common character, “the type of guys who flirt with you, but are never open, or vulnerable, or honest”, echoes a collective frustration for many submersed in the Sea of Love. Regarding that which keeps true connection at bay, ALXNDR hints at the suspected social wiring at play, commenting, “I think it’s partly due to toxic masculinity, teaching them that any kind of vulnerability is ‘feminine’ and not ‘manly’.” Though there were a few central mixed-signal mascs who inspired this song, ALXNDR is happy to report that their IRL muses have evolved, blocks of behavior can be changed, though the relevance of “Romeo”s will continue to abound for many. TAYLOR has some advice for handling these devilish romancers:

“Don’t waste your energy on someone who doesn’t spend energy on you! Work on yourself and someone truly deserving of your energy and time will come into the picture. You can’t make someone open up, or be more vulnerable. That kind of growth has to be real and honest!”

Alas! “Romeo” is the Valentine’s Day candy heart many of us need, and it’s luckily wrapped in a pop package that will be stuck in your head for weeks. Being a sugary sweet follow-up from Hologram (so beloved a record that we featured it in Vol. 6), the single is a perfect pitstop on the way to their next album, slated for late Summer. ALXNDR describes the WIP as “more internal and personal” than the last:  “Instead of looking outward for inspo, it's more of a snapshot of the last 2 years of my life - more about honesty, mental health, and trying to thrive as a millennial in this day and age.” Always appreciating their ability to candidly craft relatable experience in personal expression, we can’t wait to see what the hard working community organizer for SFQP does next.

Join TAYLOR for their video release and birthday party, “27 in Heaven”, tomorrow Thursday February 13th at the Bakery with performance Klypi and the House of ALXNDR: ARIES ALXNDR, Avana ALXNDR, Molly Rimswell, Rrruby Fiasco, SZN ALXNDR, plus Dotte Comm, Mr. Elle Aye and TJ Maxxx. $8 presale, $10-20 donation at the door. 

—

Sunni Johnson is the Arts Editor of WUSSY and a writer, zinester, and musician based in Atlanta, GA.

We had so much fun last year at Miami’s Wigwood festival that we decided to return for their 4th annual celebration of drag, music, art, and cute lewks. This year, the event was headlined by special guests like Landon Cider (winner of Dragula Season 3) and the iconic Amanda Lepore.

Check out the photos below and be sure to tag @wigwoodmiami + @wussymag + @halalpig

Accessibility to safe, reliable spaces for queer and trans people is often undermined by the gaggle of cishet-dominated areas throughout the city. The “safe havens” we are forced to claim are often riddled with transphobic patrons, misogynistic employees, and domineeringly queer-phobic attitudes from other people we encounter. We receive the most visibility in these self-proclaimed hubs of *queer* nightlife, only to have it thrown back in our faces by the highlighted influence on gay/lesbian culture. We are not seen in these spaces. We are not looked after. There has been an overwhelming lack of visibility for the most marginalized groups, especially Black and Brown trans people, which has resulted in a long-standing lack of resources, opportunities, and funding for the community. 

Where do we go from here?

It’s time for trans people to lead the way. There is a desperate need for more queer-centric establishments, made by and for the people within our community. It is important for trans people to feel protected and respected in the spaces we enter. Oftentimes, we turn to them in search of congregation, love, and acceptance from our peers. Historically, queer and trans individuals have huddled in clubs and bars as a means of survival. These hiding places have become fortresses of defense against a world that refuses to let trans people exist, comfortably, in the light. 

However, we need more. 

We need more outside of the shadows of night life. We need community outreach centers, shelters, and places that provide resources for our betterment. 

Watch as I talk more about this in the newest installment of The Trans Agenda.

A friend of mine has, for as long as I’ve known her, had a photo of Adèle Haenel as the screensaver on her phone. “My wife!” she says glibly sometimes, gazing at Adèle, who is in fact not her wife but an extremely famous French actress and the star of the 18th century lesbian romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which opens in Atlanta this weekend. The photo on my friend’s phone is beguiling: Haenel turns away from the camera, the fingers of her right hand demurely covering not very much of her left breast. She is stunning. 

She’s also a lesbian, which mattered to my friend when selecting her celebrity wife. (Her chances may still be slim – sorry, bud – but at least she’s drafting from the same team). It mattered to her then, and it mattered to me here, watching Haenel lilt across the screen with her co-star, Noémie Merlant, in a film that approaches a love story between two women with an almost unprecedented purity. Written and directed by Céline Sciamma, also a lesbian, Portrait of a Lady on Fire follows Marianne (Merlant), a painter summoned to an estate on the wind-swept coast of Brittany to create a portrait of Hëloise (Haenel), the future wife of a Milanese gentleman she’s never met, who wants to see what she looks like before they wed. Against a spare background and an even sparer score, Marianne and Hëloise slowly take each other in, their intense, tightly-wound love unspooling over a handful of days, without regret or catastrophe – typical tropes of queer film – and with a resolution as electrifying as it is unsentimental. Sciamma’s film, which won both Best Screenplay and the Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, is a testament to what people of all marginalized identities know to be true: when we are allowed to tell our own stories, we tell them better than anyone else. Much better.

I wrote in this magazine last year of the particular sorrow of on-screen queerness performed by not-queer people; specifically, Rachel Weisz, our ravishing icon who is lamentably not queer. Over the past few years, Weisz has captivated us in several lesbian love stories, and while I swooned over her in each, I could never forget that she is not only straight, but married to Daniel Craig, literally Hollywood’s ur-man. And for all the joy of seeing women love each other onscreen, both Disobedience and The Favorite were written, directed, and performed by straight people. It doesn’t make those films any less fantastic, or their contribution to the queer canon any less profound. 

But Portrait of a Lady on Fire is different. It is abundantly clear from each frame of this film that Cèline Sciamma is speaking to us from a language that lives in her blood. She drops her lovers on wild, empty cliffs: the world of men is so far away. Marianne and Hëloise are left alone for a delicious 6 days, in the company only of Sophie, the young, clear-eyed maid played by Luàna Bajrami, whose own story of self-determination inflects the plot with a quiet, feminine strength. Flung out far past the gaze of any man, Marianne and Hëloise are liberated from the patriarchy, and this story liberated from the patriarchal dictum that queer love be ciphered through a veil of sin. This is not another tragic, forbidden love story. This is, purely, a love story. 

That was Sciamma’s intention from the beginning. Her goal, she told an interviewer earlier this month, was “to dedicate a film to love.” She was sure of that, and of one other thing: Adèle Haenel, her former partner and a longtime collaborator, would star in it. The rest – the portrait, the period, the gorgeous meta-narrative of artist and subject – all came later. In dedicating a film first and foremost to love, Sciamma rids herself of that seemingly inescapable fate of queer cinema: to frame a story in the context of the impossible. Instead, she approaches the subject with a fundamental belief in the possible, and she constructs the parameters that make it so. Sciamma explained the film’s lack of male authority to an Australian news outlet in December, “We know about the oppression, about the domination, so we’re not going to lose time portraying this.” Without anyone to intercede on behalf of the patriarchy, these lovers are free to explore each other, in sumptuous detail, at wondrous leisure. There is no “oh god we’re gay” exposition, no moral handwringing on either side. 

And just as powerfully, there is no escape plotted. Hëloise knows her lot is to wed the anonymous Italian; while Marianne briefly expresses anguish at Hëloise’s acquiescence to her fate, the scene is mercifully free of moaning and throwing of paintbrushes. These women know they are suspended in a miraculous and ephemeral freedom. They are not going to lose time fighting the reality that awaits them. Instead, they are going to take this gift that they’ve been offered, and cradle it with exquisite presence. “Don’t sleep don’t sleep don’t sleep don’t sleep,” Marianne murmurs to a drowsy Hëloise on their last night. The two aren’t even touching; instead, they lie face to face on the bed, just gazing at each other. How many lesbian films have been made as alters to the god of female flesh; these lovers, triumphantly, are at their most electric when engaged merely in the art of looking. 

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is, fundamentally, a film about seeing, and about being seen. Sparked into being by a queer filmmaker, and flamed alive by the vivid clarity of its queer star, its gaze feels as honest as it does incendiary. For queer women, it is a rare thing indeed to feel seen at all; to feel seen like this on screen, our own stories told by our own storytellers – that is truly a sight to behold. 

—

Rachel Garbus is a writer, performer, teacher, and who knows what all else in Brooklyn, NY, formerly of Atlanta. She does live comedy, writes essays, and is woefully inept with all plants. Follow her at @goodgraciousrachel. 

Photo by Mark Morin for WUSSY Mag

With election season quickly approaching, there’s been an uptick in political messaging spread across social media platforms. More specifically, women’s rights have been the topic of discussion amongst people on and offline. One drag queen aims to up the ante by bringing these conversations to stages across America. She’s thin, white, salty and, “she’s a woman!” May I present to you: Miz Cracker.

Since Season 10, this RPDR star has been seen everywhere. From cooking on Bon Appetit to dragging it up on her YouTube channel, Miz Cracker has shown what it takes to be a self-made queen. Touring the world with her previous one-woman show, It’s Time, has led to Cracker being one of the most hilarious, yet influential drag activists of today. Now, she is ready to bring her pro-woman prowess back to the Americas.  

Feminist messaging meets comedic genius in Miz Cracker’s newest one-woman show, American Woman. Coming to a city near you, American Woman sprinkles a refreshing twist on modern feminist conversations. From beauty to birth control, she advocates for women’s rights, in quintessential Cracker fashion. We had the chance to speak with Cracker about the upcoming U.S. leg of her one-woman show as well as other projects she has in store. 

You are gearing up for the American leg of your one-woman show. Tell me about it. How is that going?

Right now, we’re touring through the U.K. I’m finishing up at the London’s Lady. It’s like a major venue that Judy Garland performed at. I’m the first Ru girl that gets to perform there so that’s really a thrill! But I’m ready to bring American Woman to the Americas. 

Tell us about the theme of the show.

American Woman is all about how to be a better ally to women. It’s pointed towards all of the things that women go through everyday, especially in America, that people don’t know about. It covers issues of beauty, sexual harassment, office politics, and more. I realized that at least 75% of my audience is women, so I felt the need to create a show for the audience I have and not just gays in bars.

It’s not too serious. It’s a comedy production, so it deals with all of these issues in a way that everyone can leave thinking, yes, but laughing too! 

If there was one message you wanted to convey through the show what would it be?

That it’s time for a change and everyone needs to be thinking about how to be a better ally to women. Whether you are a woman yourself or you just want to be a better ally to women, this is the time. It’s been a long enough wait.

I think that laughter is a really important way to make change and that we are often so serious about the issues that we think are important and sometimes the best way to explain something beautifully is through comedy! I really hope that’s what American Woman is going to do. 

How does the show reflect/incorporate the issues that we’re dealing with in this country right now?

Obviously, we are under a president right now that does not show much respect to women, and has a history of showing a great deal of respect to women. I think that makes it especially important to speak up right now. Especially because if we don’t we could be in danger of having another 4 years of this crap. 

The question on everyone’s mind...will there be shablams?

Oh yes, cartwheels, splits, coffee grinders, all of that stuff! There will be plenty of shablams. In fact, you know, whenever I need to fill an 8-count, there’s a shablam right there!

The way you started drag was very political, you participated in marches for marriage equality with Bob in Times Square. How have these passions persisted throughout your drag career?

Well Bob always told me that when you’re in drag, people look at you. Since you have everybody’s attention, you may as well use it to do something good. I think that rule has followed me throughout my whole career. I try to use the platform that I have to say things that I think are important. 

It seems like it's going to be a quite political season. How do shows like RPDR enhance your platform or the platform of queer people in general?

I think that if young people see shows like Drag Race or Pose and they get the message that these are acceptable ways to live and these are ways to be beautiful then I think that’s incredibly important. Even if it only reaches young people and doesn’t change the minds of any adults, I think that they’re still something incredible and needed. 

Do you have any future plans/projects aside from the show? 

YouTube! Review with a Jew is the big one. We’re going to be doing more projects with Bon Appetit hopefully this year. It’s been in the works for a little while and people love those videos, so we’re hoping to do that. 

—

Ivana Fischer is the Culture Editor of WUSSY and a film and media enthusiast who specializes in cultural studies. You can find her across all socials @iv.fischer

The Queendom

Ad•verse Fest, created and organized by queer artist and performer AC Carter (Klypi), presents an inclusive play time world that opens up new material sounds through a diverse blend of majority queer and non-binary musicians and performers. These aesthetics are sensual and vibrant with past histories, present forms, and future narratives that are fluid and newly textured. For the second year in a row,  on March 6 and 7 of this year, queer artists and performers will gather in Athens, GA to deliver an exuberant, fluid, queer experience of sound and artistry. Doors open at 5:00 PM at the Athens institute for Contemporary Art, music starting at 6:00 PM. There will be an intermission before doors open at the Caledonia Lounge at 9:00 PM, shows starting at 9:30 PM. Each location’s set is designed by artist Eli Saragoussi, whose work asks how whimsical worlds can enhance the relationship between performers and their audience. These performances, these spaces and these artists are part of a queer resilience in the South that seeks reconciliation with and visibility within Southern culture. 

Ad•verse Fest chooses a majority queer  folks of a variety of political and personal backgrounds. This insistence on intersectionality presents a playing field where everyone can build a part of a fantasy world without being excluded or talked over. This fantasy world building takes imaginative exuberance and pushes it into real life so that the presence and aesthetic of queer persons are no longer othered or considered “alternative” lifestyles. The queer performers get the main stage--they are setting the story to be told. 

AC Carter aka Klypi (Photo: Maggy Swain)

Organizer AC Carter, born in Alabama, fostered a studio practice at the Watkins College of Art, Design, and film, focusing mostly on painting and object making. They had always been singing since they were young, so including audio into their practice seemed natural. As their object making became sculptural during their on-going graduate career at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, so did their audio experimentation until they had formed a fully experiential studio practice that included interests in set design, fashion design, queer visuality, and experience curation through show making and collaboration. They’ve always been interested in breaking down harmful gender norms, but their understanding of the body extends far beyond the body itself. Understanding a show as an interaction with three dimensional space and architecture, AC deconstructs what a body is, what personality is, what art and design are assumed to be in order to make a rigid structure playful and inclusive.  

Ad•verse Fest’s placement in the Southern, music-oriented city of Athens, reveals the strength of a multi-regional queerness. Differently-based artists can mingle in the same space to create a vibrancy that plays with definitions of queerness and gender fluidity. This all becomes about more than just the body (although, it most certainly is about that), it’s about redefining what it means to exist as a human with free agency. 

One of the headliners for Ad•verse is Los Angeles-based Dynasty Handbag (Jibz Cameron) whose stand up comedy and oration bear a satirical feminism that strikes political fundamentalism with makeup and outfits that smear and scream across their body and the stage upon which they stand. Add to that lineup is Oakland-based Wizard Apprentice (Tieraney Carter), who weaves introverted narratives through experimental tech sounds that acknowledge both their gender narrative and their racial narrative within the US. The combination of these two performers, along with other folks like Bustié and the Queendom, show just how eclectic AC’s studio practice is as it interfaces with music festival organization to promote queer folks in the US South. 

Dynasty Handbag (Photo: Allison Michael Orenstein)

AC realizes that Ad•verse Fest becomes political just by occurring in the South and by focusing on queer, trans, and non-binary folks before they consider anyone else. However, this resilience in the face of a culture largely built on rewarding straight, cisgendered persons, and subsequently punishing queer, trans, and non-binary folks, is more than just a simple protest or a recovery from hegemonic systems: it completely bypasses the cisgendered gaze and moved into the most playful realm of identity and community building. 

That the South houses diverse studio practices that engage in intersectionality and interdisciplinarity demonstrates that queer cultures of the South and the contemporary artists that are emerging and converging in the South are relavant and needed within larger political discourses. There’s nothing backwards here--we are expanding and finding new ways to exist. 

There is a privilege that comes with living in dense urban populations where queerness can sink into a plethora of different spaces and an amalgam of cultures. However, the South has always propagated its own culture and its own cultural stereotypes. There is a distinct Southerness that comes with living below the mason dixon line, and it hasn’t always been reconciled with queerness, even with the rising visibility of lesbian and gay southern persons. With events like Ad•verse Fest, QTNB persons and artists are becoming more visible and their entrance into music and performance industries brings a vibrant narrative that is pivotal to intersectionality moving forward.

The lineup for Mar. 6 includes John Kiran Fernandes, Josey (F.L.E.D.), Diatom Deli, Bacon Grease and Wizard Apprentice at ATHICA from 5–9 p.m., then moves over to Caledonia at 9 p.m. for sets by Breathers, Stacian, Bustié, Thank You Please and Mischa Mischa Lively + Mannequin Lover. On Mar. 7, ATHICA will host KAELIN, Secret Friends, Saadia Rias, Ivy Hollivana, Romantic Thriller and LEYA from 5–9 p.m., then Caledonia will feature  Buddy Crime, The Queendom, Home Body, Dynasty Handbag and N/A Dance Party, from 9 p.m. until close. Check out adversefest.space for more details on the artists.

Klypi will be performing as an opener for Shitkid at 529 in Atlanta with Karaoke and Death Hags on March 9, 2020 (http://529atlanta.com/calendar/9204/) and will be touring in April 2020 with Precious Child (https://www.klypi.com/aboutme).

The year was 1985. New AIDS diagnoses had increased by 89% from the previous year. Then-President Ronald Reagan finally addressed the epidemic for the first time—four years after the first public report in the New York Times describing a “rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals.” AZT wouldn’t be available for another two years and the protease inhibitors that would increase the life spans of people with AIDS by decades wouldn’t be available for another ten.

It was a full-fledged epidemic fueled by ignorance and fear.

Also in 1985, Steve Pieters—a proud gay minister and AIDS activist—was sitting down in a television studio in Ontario, California where he was preparing to do an interview by satellite.

Two thousand three hundred seventy-six miles away—in Charlotte, North Carolina—Tammy Faye Messner (then Bakker) was preparing to meet him on the other end. 

The famed televangelist and accidental gay icon, known for her layers of makeup and unfettered displays of empathy and emotion, would be interviewing Steve for a segment on her show, Tammy’s House Party, which routinely aired to millions of devoted evangelical Christian viewers throughout the southeastern United States.

In the weeks before, Steve had gotten a call from Tammy Faye’s producer. She was referred to Steve by an AIDS activist in Atlanta after Tammy’s producers had searched the entire United States for a person with AIDS to speak with her. They had come up dry.

“I’m not really surprised at that,” Steve tells me over the phone 35 years later. “There was a lot of stigma associated with AIDS back in those days, especially in the South.” 

Steve himself had reservations when the producer pitched the segment to him—and of the widely popular televangelism phenomenon as a whole.

“I was suspicious of it. I come from a progressive liberal perspective spiritually and theologically, and so I saw them and other televangelists as being kind of ‘out there’ in terms of—I was kind of suspicious of all of their money-raising and the wealth that a number of them displayed with great excitement, but I didn’t pay a lot of attention to them, because I was busy enough paying attention to what was going on around me.”

Steve had already spent his adult life as a minister for the Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC)—one of the few queer-affirming ministries in the States at the time. This was in addition to his gay rights activism and, later, his AIDS activism.

When Steve was housebound after his diagnosis, he and his caregiver would watch the television ministry of Jan and Paul Crouch. “Frankly, we laughed hysterically at them.”

But as Steve prepared for a broadcast with one of the most recognizable faces in the evangelical community, the influence of the electric church was no laughing matter. He had insisted on doing the interview live, for fear that they would edit his answers deceptively.

And though Tammy’s producers assured him that she only wanted to hear his story and inform her viewers, he was all too familiar with homophobia and AIDS hysteria to take them at their word alone.

“I was concerned that she would try to do a number on me. Try to tell me if I just really accepted Jesus...that she would try to convince me to follow Jesus her way, and confess and repent of my homosexuality. That [repenting] might cure my AIDS. Cause there was that kind of talk going on in conservative religious circles back in those days.”

These fears were somewhat eased when Steve and Tammy exchanged pleasantries seconds before going on the air.

“I sat down in front of this camera and they put an earpiece in my ear and Tammy Faye was on the other end of the line, and she told me, ‘This is like the Phil Donahue of PTL network.’ She said specifically, ‘We don’t talk about Jesus.’”

With that, they were on the air.

“Hello, everyone, and come on in! It’s just so nice to have you here with us,” Tammy began. “We have an experience today that really is touching to me, right here on my right I have a young man named Steve Pieters, and I’d like to introduce you to Steve,” she said, gesturing to Steve’s face illuminated on the television set next to her. 

“Steve is a patient of AIDS and he so generously allowed us to talk to him today. He was going to come to Charlotte, North Carolina to be on our program here, but he is presently taking chemotherapy and I was afraid the trip would be too hard on him.”

Steve was on suramin, one of the first antiretrovirals used for people with AIDS. Like many of the early treatments, it was largely ineffective and the side effects alone had nearly killed him. And though Tammy said they did the interview by satellite out of concerns for his health, he later learned the real reason was fear that the camera crew would refuse to be in the same studio as a person with AIDS.

But to Steve’s relief, Tammy’s questions seemed aimed at combating the very misinformation about AIDS that nearly led the camera crew to strike.

She asked him about when he realized he was “different from the other boys,” and about being in the closet, and about coming out to his parents.

When Tammy thanked God that his parents had accepted and loved him, Steve responded with words that likely seemed revolutionary to Tammy’s millions of conservative religious viewers:

“Jesus loves me just the way I am. I really believe that. Jesus loves the way I love.”

That’s when Tammy began to cry, as she often did.

“Listen, Steve, this is an emotional interview for me. I just met Steve and it’s like meeting him in person here. I want to put my arm around him.”

“My arm’s right around you.”

Even in Tammy’s most cringeworthy questions—such as asking if he thought he hadn’t given girls a “fair try”—Steve knew what she was doing.

“She was asking questions that she knew her audience would want answered...And I think she knew damn well what the answers would be, or what the basic answer would be from me,” Steve said. “I don’t think that she was that naive herself about it all.”

“I know you must feel lonely sometimes,” Tammy told Steve. “With people not being well-informed on AIDS, everyone is so terribly frightened of it, you know? And therefore, they’re frightened of anyone who has it.” 

Steve elaborated to her about how people would refuse to let him use the bathroom in their home and would steam clean any dishes he’d use, if he wasn’t served on paper plates that could be easily thrown away.

Tammy wept as she said:

“How sad that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth and we who are supposed to be able to love everyone are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care.”

“Steve,” she continued. “I just want to tell you something. If there would have been any way...I want to tell you there’s a lot of Christians here who love you and who wouldn’t be afraid to put their arm around you and tell you that we love you and that we care.”

Astonishingly enough, the audience applauded.

After the segment, Steve heard that network executives pressured Tammy to do an interview with a Christian psychiatrist who would give advice on how to “cure” homosexuality or pray away AIDS. She refused.

“She got in trouble for it, and apparently she just stuck her heels in and said no. I think this was an interview that told her that things could be different and that she could indeed be different as a televangelist and reach out to the gay community.”

According to Steve, there was little to no immediate response from the queer community. The only reason the video survives today is because Steve’s caregiver taped it. 

The interaction, however, would change both of their lives.

Tammy reportedly began going to Pride parades and to hospices for AIDS patients. Her son, Jay Bakker—now a queer-affirming minister himself—would later tell Steve that she would take him and his sister by the hand to visit MCC church services.

“She knew right away,” Steve tells me, “that she had a different understanding and a different calling than other televangelists.”

Steve’s ministry changed as well. After the interview, he began receiving more preaching engagements across the globe.

“It kind of launched my career as a professional AIDS survivor at a time when it seemed like nobody was surviving. I did get well a year or so later, and I began traveling and trying to give people hope and help people deal with grief, and that sort of thing.”

Tammy’s embrace of AIDS awareness and acceptance of queer people sadly still remains ahead of its time. Steve spoke on the direction the white evangelical church has taken in the 35 years since their interview.

“It’s a shame that we still have to fight the fight. It seems like religious bigotry is so...I can’t think of the right word. It’s promulgated by fundamentalists and conservative churches. Hatred seems to be part of the discourse going on today...and I think a lot of it is because of conservative religious institutions that continue to promulgate that LGBT people are less than heterosexuals.”

“In the same way I think that racism,” he continued, “is fortified by the sense of white evangelicals being, y’know, ‘the chosen people,’ and I think there’s just a horrible streak of bigotry that is part of the conservative church’s fault—it’s not part of it, it’s largely their fault, I think. So we still have a lot of work to do.”

Tammy remains a sort of queer icon, but largely for the wrong reasons.

I was writing this very article in a sixty year old West Village queer bar. I ran into a friend and fellow regular there, and when I told him that I was writing about Tammy Faye, he laughed and said, “I used to have a tee shirt about her! It has a smudged makeup face-print and says I Just Ran Into Tammy Faye!”

We laughed, but it echoed a point made by Steve in our interview.

“I think that unfortunately there’s a caricature of Tammy Faye that exists in a lot of people’s minds. That she was this kind of comic figure and I think that takes away from the fact that she had a heart of gold; when she really did reach out to LGBT folks long before other people did, and set a real example.”

Tammy Faye’s final television appearance came in July of 2007 on Larry King Live. Plagued by cancer, weighing only 65 pounds, and unable to speak above a whisper, the once-vivacious televangelist even struggled to remember her favorite bible verse. She passed away two days later.

“I heard it on the news like everybody else,” Steve recalls of her death. “And I wasn’t surprised, having seen her on Larry King. I was sad about it. I had a great deal of affection for her and that interview with her played a really important role in my life too, you know what I mean? That changed me and my direction as well.”

Just before we concluded our interview, Steve told me that Tammy sent him a signed bible and a collection of her recordings as a thank-you gift in the days following their interview. A decades-long veteran of the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus, he confessed that he never thought much of Tammy Faye as a singer, yet one song of hers stuck out to him.

Still undergoing near-deadly suramin treatments in hopes of curtailing a virus that seemed all but damning, her recording of Don’t Give Up on the Brink of a Miracle helped motivate him to defy every designation of AIDS as a death sentence—even as he was a “skeleton with skin.”

“That song kind of became a cheerleading song to me. I mean,Tammy became my cheerleader. And I really tried to internalize that. ‘Don’t give up on the brink of a miracle because God’s still on the throne.’ That confirmed everything I’d always said about God being greater than AIDS, about the resurrection being a sign that I could be fully alive in the face of death, and that I could possibly heal from this horrible disease that was killing—it seemed like killing everybody.”

Steve’s interview with Tammy was the first ever recorded by satellite on hers and then-husband Jim Bakker’s network, Praise the Lord (PTL). In a way, that’s more than appropriate. Two people of different theologies and circumstances traversed ideological miles to meet at a halfway point of human empathy and hope, undeterred by false detours of hysteria and fear.

“She opened up her heart as the interview went on, and I opened mine, and it was just a great meeting of hearts between us.”

Original Steve and Tammy Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjXXdQ6VceQ&t=542s

Evan Brechtel is a queer writer living in New York. You can find his body of work at www.evanbrechtel.net. @EvanBrechtel.

Blew Velvet has lived many lives. Whether it be a poet, an activist, a sex worker or beyond, music has been the consistent mainstay and 2020’s Frankie is a culmination of their most recent and significant journey. The last track “Again” pulsates with growing madness, the video equally juxtapositioning frenzied remembrance, playacting poses between vicarious positions as the stages of earnest and eager longing unfold. Illuminating the artist’s precision in electronic composition, Velvet characterizes a doe-eyed ask that entrées into thirst, bursting asunder in synth operatic, trilling with a Rococo wildness that teeters the line of play and psychosis. Musically, vocally and in the visual accompaniment, Velvet and co. have managed to archive the emotional encumbrance of being withheld, attached, floating, waiting. 

Behind the fever of the poetically told 7-song album is a tale of endings deriving from an intensive IRL transformation, both within and without. Years of migrating from place to place, Velvet’s permanent station in NYC came from necessity:  to untangle the mess that had been their life. “I was struggling with addiction and alcoholism and really abusing my community, my friendships, and more importantly myself. Towards the end of it, I went through a very rough relationship's breakup and sort of began what would (hopefully) be my last major spiral,” Velvet recalls. Making the trek with a one-way ticket on a friend’s Sky-miles, a carryon full of nothing but drag and their computer, Velvet’s sobriety taught an overwhelming amount about themself in a short period of time, especially while navigating a high-stress city whose residents emit a nonchalance about it all. Velvet channeled these circumstances, amidst healing and hope, into their music. 

“Artistically, I became obsessed with the idea of pattern-breaking, in finding what things in my life were there solely to impede my own growth. I really felt a deep yearning to be able to talk about the insane couple of years I had put myself through, without just being angry about it or feeling disappointed. I wanted to be able to communicate it comfortably,” Velvet explains. “My knee-jerk reaction to emotional pain and trauma is to put it into music. Writing a breakup song feels like a universal rite of passage, or some kind of perfect language that everyone speaks.” On the cusp of 2020’s Pisces and Aries, Velvet celebrates 2 years sobriety, living their most purposeful existence, with the help of emotional expression in their autonomous sonic experimentation and the collaborative filmmaking lushly displayed in the “Again” premiere along with their recent ventures. 

Velvet’s videos especially mark an elemental turn towards artistic actualization:  “A Sacrifice”, highlighting the bittersweet of a break-up, steeps its electronica with sensory scapes while “A Mirror”, featuring drag icon Charlene Incarnate, exemplifies the person you’re forever attached to and never really free from:  yourself. Frankie was released through Velvet’s personal label (with the help of AWAL’s distro). “The rest of the album shifts perspectives often and disguises some complex secret dialogues with innuendo and double entendre, or less comprehensible musical structures that illustrate the confusing moments and shifting attitudes within the story I was telling,” Velvet explains. “The entire thing is a big weird cross-pollinated flowering tree that's sappy and sticky in some parts, brittle and acute in others, and verdant and fruiting elsewhere.” “Again”, directed by Milan-based Altofuoco and produced by Stefano Protopapa, in complete collaboration with Velvet, is a gauzy dreamy glimpse into Frankie’s brazen beauty and breakdown, a portrayal of passion, bolstered by exquisite edits, and proof that Blew Velvet’s predicted rise will be well-deserved. 

Be on the lookout for WUSSY Vol. 8 in the Shop for an in-depth interview with the artist and follow Blew Velvet on Spotify and Instagram for more content.

Directed by Altofuoco (@altofuoco) / Blew Velvet (@blew.velvet)
Produced by Stefano Protopapa / Blew Velvet
Wardrobe provided by:
MARIOS
MIAORAN
Miryaki
Adriana
Hot Couture
Special styling thanks to Leonardo Persico

—

Sunni Johnson is the Arts Editor of WUSSY and a writer, zinester, and musician based in Atlanta, GA.

While COVID-19 affects the lives and livelihoods of millions, rural Queers continue to turn to the internet and social media to showcase their art. We are excited to announce that we are teaming up with Queer Appalachia and Southern Fried Queer Pride to host the “Big Ass Telethon to End Metronormativity” -- a showcase of performance and perseverance below the Mason Dixon Line.

Metronormativity operates upon the false dichotomy of rural vs. urban queer existence. It assumes that while the two existences differ from each other, there is no difference between queer life in different urban areas, nor any difference between queer life in different rural areas – since, according to metronormative queer society, rural queer life does not exist.

Metronormativity erases rural queer life and visibility. We have seen this from the Gay & Lesbians Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) recently, in their choice to give the Vangaurd Award for making a significant difference in promoting equal rights for Queer people to Taylor Swift, despite her trainwreck of a music video “You Need to Calm Down”. This video promoted metronormativity and conflated rural life with bigotry, nasty stereotypes about being ill-educated and poor, and being directly in opposition to Queer life.

Metronormativity dictates that rural Queers do not have the resources and media coverage that many metro Queers are allotted. We fight against the idea that their voices are somehow less important and we choose to uplift their voices at this time, now more than ever.

--- ABOUT THE LIVE-STREAM ---

This special live-streamed telethon spectacular will feature drag artists, musicians, comedians, dancers, and more. The event will be used to raise money for the newly formed Appalachian/Southern Queer Artist Fund, an emergency fund set up to monetarily support the featured artists, not just during the COVID-19 crisis, but further and beyond in the form of micro-grants.

The Appalachian/Southern Artist Fund will be dedicated to our dearly departed friends and collaborators -- Bryn Kelly (1981-2016) co-creator of Queer Appalachia and Matt Jones (1991-2018) co-creator of WUSSY.

We are asking artists and creatives to submit a video for the telethon using a downloadable link. We believe that all art and expressions of creativity are valid. We are committed to inclusivity and diversity and strongly encourage artists and performers from all backgrounds to apply. Artists will be able to accept tips through their Venmo/ Paypal accounts during the telethon.

--- SUBMISSION GUIDELINES ---

- Keep your videos under 5 minutes.
- Must be NEW work, made during quarantine.
- Videos must not be posted anywhere else online.
- We are not currently accepting anything with nudity and sexually explicit content, due to Twitch guidelines. We hope to find alternative solutions to this soon!
- Submissions must be sent by April 4th at Midnight to https://forms.gle/7GtkVufCvSC1k7f5A

—- SUBMIT HERE —-

The telethon will are on April 11th at 9PM EST via Twitch @endmetronormativity

Please contact Jon at jon@wussymag.com or Chelsea at chelsea.queerappalachia@gmail.com for more information.

Hi, Wussy!

Enjoying your queerantine? 

Coronavirus has swept the nation and altered the lives of thousands of global citizens. Having to go from open and free socialization to self-isolation has proven to be one of the biggest culture shocks of the century. In a matter of weeks, we have replaced dine-in-always with take-out-only; holding hands with FaceTime hangouts; and going out for drinks with staying in for… the foreseeable future. 

I guess that medium-cute Tinder date you’ve been putting off for the last few weeks will have to wait a little while longer. Social distancing and chill, anyone? 

To be sure, this is a fragile time in history; especially for queers who struggle with mental health stability. For some, it’s easy to embrace this newly-mandated shut down. For others, the thought of staying in and avoiding human contact is as anxiety-inducing as trying to cut your own bangs on Day 3 of quarantine. Don’t do it, sis!

Although this period of isolation can be stressful-- I know, I’m running out of TikTok dances to learn, too-- it’s pertinent to stay indoors to avoid the spread of this disease. The World Health Organization recommends to do these five things in order to maintain your health and the health of those around you: 

1. Wash your hands often

2. Cough and sneeze into your elbow

3. Don't touch your face

4. Keep a safe distance of no less than six feet

5. Stay home

But of course, we as a human race need more to do than wash our hands every 10 minutes. So, to keep you from going stir-crazy, I’ve come up with a few tips for weathering the coronavirus storm.

Create a Routine

During quarantine, it’s easy to feel like the days just run into each other. Creating a routine might be the perfect remedy to combat the monotony of that dreaded bed-to-couch back-and-forth.

If you have the energy, treat this down time like a regular week. Change out of your pajamas, make breakfast, take your meds, and throw on a look! Even if you’re getting dolled up to binge all 679 episodes of The Simpsons, at least you are able to revive a sense of normalcy into your everyday life. 

Take a Hands-On Approach

Is it just me or is there something about the world ending that makes you insatiably horny? If you have an itch to scratch, but don’t have a reliable, quarantine-approved sexual partner to do the job, stick to masturbation. Self-sex is the best sex to have during this time! The New York City Health Department advises against having sex with those outside of your immediate household. Ergo, the Grindr hookups will have to wait, Mary. You are your safest sex partner.  

Now might be the perfect time to invest in that new vibrator you’ve been eyeing. No partner? No problem. There’s a lot of ways to have a fulfilling sexual experience, even if you are the only person in the room. Set the mood with a few candles for some sexy room lighting. Put on your favorite baby-making jams, or get off to the sounds of your own moans. Nobody’s listening anyway! This is the perfect time to let loose, discover new sexual fantasies, and become more in tune with your body-- no holds barred. 

Unboundbabes has an amazing artillery of lubes and liquids, toys, and accessories for the perfect night--or, two weeks-- in. If self-isolation has taught me anything, it’s that there is power in mental, emotional, and sexual oneness. Take your power, and your orgasm, into your own hands with a trusty collection of toys that’ll get you there, especially when no one else is around.   Use my code “iv10” for 10% off your next order! ;)

Start a New Hobby

Is there a skill you’ve always wanted to master, but have never had the time to get started on? Has the gym been calling your name since that feigned self-promise you made on New Year’s Eve? Well, now’s the time to try everything your heart desires! As long as you can do it from the comfort of your own home. Check out Farrah Iirises’s article on some beginner-friendly body feminization workouts-- all you need is a floor mat and time on your hands.

Learn how to cook, trash people! Don't just go to the Taco Bell drive-thru twice a day for those dollar bean burritos. Get creative! There are tons of recipes for simple, delicious meals that can be made in under 10 minutes. Rice, beans, eggs, and frozen vegetables are just a few examples of some staple grocery items that can be used in just about any dish. We love versatility!  

Eat the Rich

If this pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that the government’s main goal is to look out for big businesses and the top one percent. As indicated by the $2 trillion stimulus bill that lets Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin give $500 billion to corporations without any particularly meaningful oversight on how it gets spent, a substantial safety net only exists for those who can afford it. 

It’s been proposed that every American will receive a $1,200 one-time stimulus check, which is great. But compare that to Canada’s $2,000 stimulus checks for the next four months, and you will see that the American government has sold its people short yet again. 

My solution? Build a Guillotine! 

There’s some super cute and easy-to-follow tutorials out there for constructing a fabulous decapitation machine. Decorate yours with glue-on stars, macrame flowers, or the blood of the most rich and powerful moguls of today’s society who can’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea of redistributing just a teensy bit of their wealth so that we, as a nation, can better our situation, decrease the cavernous gap between the rich and the poor, and overcome this virus. 

Tee-hee! :)

Stay Connected

As a community, we tend to thrive on being able to congregate with our friends, partners, lovers, and chosen family. In any other time period, it would be harder than ever to stay afloat during a time when extensive social interaction is discouraged. Luckily, we live in the age of technology! Phone calls, Facetiming, Google hangouts, live streaming are just a few ways that we can stay connected and feel closer to our fellow queers. 

Play virtual games like Jackbox Party Pack with friends and family or a Netflix Party drinking game while you rewatch Tiger King for the third time. 

These and many other things can be done to quell your antsy disposition. It helps to look at this societal pause as a window of opportunity-- even if that opportunity is catching up on some well-deserved Z’s. 

We’ll do our best to keep you busy, so keep checking back for more quarantine-related content. 

Stay safe and stay indoors, queers!

—

Ivana Fischer is the Culture Editor of WUSSY and a film and media enthusiast who specializes in cultural studies. You can find her across all socials @iv.fischer