Darkness needs a face. Humans need myths to make sense of the unknown world around us. All myths are man-made. Thought by thought, pixel by pixel, one idea after the other, one figment of imagination at a time, a monster is born, real and sobbing in front of us. Who, then, created the devil? Who first spoke his name, owns his story?

Clovice Holt’s out of your arms, I gotta go daddy gives Satan a new body. Holt challenges religious doctrine, and creates an alternative narrative for the fallen angel to exist. The devil’s appearance, history, and purpose is subverted into the image of a sad, soft victim of a cruel joke.

Holt gives him cartoony dimension, like a clumsy villain from a Saturday morning kid’s show. His Satan has plastered strawberry-candy skin, bulbous insect eyes, baby-blue tears, swelling and deflating like old balloons. He also has a penis like an elephant trunk and a massive booty to match. The sight of it is at once hysterical, shameful and chilling. Our emotions towards Satan get confused. Our feelings trip on top of one another, as the bedtime tales we were told try to make sense with the angel dangling in ropes from the ceiling in front of us.

Satan is unique in the way he seeps into the human experience, an inner voice digging its way inside. He is a beast, feeding off the pain of others. He is inherent shame. When we are taught to deny our own earthly pleasure, the devil steps in. He is the voice of suppression, a symbol of temptation, the fear or celestial punishment. This fear devours the soul, it shadows our willingness to understand each other, or ourselves in ways outside of what we’ve been conditioned to believe. 

“Satan cried the day he left heaven,” Holt declares in his statement. “Positioning God, not Lucifer, as the onus of failure, I relate to an allegory of a son deciding to venture off into the world, leaving his home to journey on his own adventures.” In both digital space and sculpture, Holt takes control of the narrative, the most vilified figure of the bible is now in colorful queer hands. 

Was Lucifer’s plight inevitable or did God expect his faltering? Like original sin, was it meant to go wrong? God sets the world in motion and hell awaits its master, anticipating the one fateful act that will send Lucifer, beaten, to his kingdom. Lucifer’s narrative from scripture echoes the queer narrative. He is a man cast out, deemed unworthy of heaven. He has forfeited his chance at redemption. In the eyes of some faiths, queer people, too, are rejected from eternal paradise because of who and how they love. 

This idea of queer people as hell-bound souls, like Clovice’ image of Satan, is a silly one. How silly it is to believe that we are inherently what’s wrong with this world. We are brave souls, not tragic, as we reach for what we believe makes us happy in spite of the consequence. After all, queer love has existed long before the devil was ever conceived.

Less than a week ago, Lil Nas X gave Lucifer a lap dance, fell from the sky on a pole. As queer people, mentioning the devil, particularly in a religious audience, is a radical act. Because of work from artists like Holt and Lil Nas X, an old conversation is happening again. Now’s the time to reevaluate our ideas of good and evil. 

What if the devil could be reimagined as a gift, divine power in man’s hands? What if there was a space where we as queer people, sinners, condemned, can be our own source of power wisdom and cunning, existing outside of judgment, where we can find sanctuary in our own perverted treasures and twisted endowments. Artwork that pokes fun and exaggerates the absurd nature and solemnity of a figure like Satan gives us room to think about what informs our faith. We can decide what moves us more, fear or pride.

‘out of your arms, I gotta go daddy’ was up at Haul Gallery in Brooklyn, NY from Feb, 20th - March 21, 2021. Check out the exhibition artist talk here. For more of Clovice Holt’s work visit cloviceholt.com

—

Nicholas Goodly is an Atlanta-based poet and the writing editor of Wussy Magazine.

Often has had a similarly rough ride with religion. “I grew up in a subset of Christianity that for lack of more eloquent words, truly fucked me up“ she shared. Even after coming out, she had trouble feeling pride at a deep level. “I was adamant on hiding the deeper parts of myself that would offer me true release because I was told so much of my identity was wrong.” 

In fact, Often’s identity proved key in their journey towards self-acceptance. “I've always been naturally interested in my ancestry, as I think most Black folks are since we've been systemically disconnected from those who came before” she said. It took moving to North Carolina during the pandemic for Often to feel the full spiritual effect of those ancestors. North Carolina is where her grandmother lived before dying during Thanksgiving of 2019. 

Often felt those family ties acutely while living in North Carolina. “This had been their home for generations, as far back as I can uncover, and I couldn't deny their gentle pull” Often said, continuing “There was a lot of self work to do in order to be the person they wanted to support me to become.” Often spent a large portion of 2020 doing that work through spiritual mentorships, even writing a song with her ancestors on her upcoming album called “Don't Wait." 

With her ancestors by her side, she’s ready to move forward with new music. “By Summer”  arrives on her grandmother’s birthday, along with a music video. Often had this to say about the video:

 “I briefly went to film school at a Christian university where God was pretty much expected to be part of your artistic narrative. That's something I haven't quite left behind...I wanted there to be this energy of something ‘else’ you can't quite place.” 

That otherworldly energy comes most clearly during the gospel choir sound in the chorus, something that Often said was deliberate. “So much of my life was spent in the church, facing God and "the end," and I wanted that (choir) presence there. God is not what God used to be for me and I'm so thankful for that. I see now that God is actually our collective positive energy. God is our investment in each other's well being.”

—

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

Ci Majr’s pop sensibilities are pure sunshine and the underground non-binary artist is anything but amateur. The self-written co-produced 5-track collection of Side Effects showcases the incredible talents of one of the brightest upcoming stars in music. Ci Majr is not an indie pop ingenue; they are an infectious songwriter and memorable vocalist, bolstering new work thanks to the recent socially-distanced downtime. 

Hot off the early January dance frenzy “Summer Drug”, the Atlanta-based artist further revealed their hyper-catchy melody-making with March’s follow-up single, “Guillotine”. Its emboldened plea of compassion and change was fashioned from the frustrating circular conversations surrounding the social injustice of 2020, applied to the dynamics of a relationship faltering. Along with a remotely configured music video via Danie Harris, assisted IRL by Ci’s partner Anna, limited circumstances were utilized for true creative induction (shown in the BTS video), all collaborations and photography sessions of the smallest teams providing an intimate result. 

Side Effects explores “the unforeseen complexity of the romantic experience”, untangling the web of mess humans enter, not just with our partners, but with ourselves, in love. Ci’s current relationship jump-started an honest realization through these difficult layers. Reaching deep to both analyze and be accountable to the ways in which we can easily become toxic amid tumultuous confrontation, the EP notes the heaviness that bears down on partnerships with the weight of our own lives and even the subconscious programming around us everyday. 

“You have TV, movies, and books setting this expectation of just automatic happiness and bliss but in reality building a deep, real, and healthy romantic relationship takes work. And more likely than not, at least one of you is going to mess it up and people are going to get hurt,” Ci explains. “I was always so quick to jump ship as soon as the slightest thing went wrong, and I’ve learned so much in the last 4 years about conflict resolution, unpacking past traumas, and in general, getting comfortable in the moments of discomfort that can occur in healthy relationships. Before, my brain always told me that everything would be effortless once you found ‘the one’, but just because things aren’t perfect it doesn’t mean you aren’t doing things right.” 

As a night time creative, late evening euphoric immersion helps to devote fully to writing waves, opening options for raw honesty and for “go time” to strike. Production and songwriting sync hand-in-hand:  “Sometimes one comes before the other but the feeling and the energy behind it is always the same. I don’t know what to compare it to, but I think it’s whatever they talk about when athletes ‘get in the zone’. That ‘zone’ is a heightened version of me where I can extend and share pieces of me musically.” Lack of activities and distractions became a help, not a hindrance, for scheduling sessions and feeding innovation.

“Before 2020, I’d say my creative energy was pretty uncertain, but the last year gave me the time and mental space to devote to solidifying. Now my creative energy feels more confident; it has a direction,” Ci shares. “Often, writing a song feels like birthing a part of me... cathartic and pure, but also fragile.” The base layers of their compositions are always made solo in an environment of authenticity. “When people listen too soon or have comments too early in the process it can really kill my excitement about what I’m creating. And that’s my favorite part of the process. That excitement of creating something completely new! It’s like a high!” 

Side Effects emits an overarching theme stating, yes, love is a dreamy drug, but to truly experience its fairytale bliss, surrender is necessary and acceptance is key. “You’re going to have to endure your fair share of the side effects,” Ci explains, a nugget of wisdom which provided the inspo for the EP title.  Fans of Toro Y Moi and The Weeknd will relish in the tender yet cool hooks throughout. Along with the two earlier 2021 singles, Ci Majr shows both epic range in “After Midnight”, an introspective pure honesty on “Softer” and stirs with “Ultraviolet”.  Within, superb storytelling garners full immersion into familiar turmoil, acutely felt by the listener, and yet irresistible to listen to, as only great emotional pop music can do.

The Side Effects EP is released today April 16th, 2021. Follow Ci Majr (similarly pronounced as “C Major”) on Instagram, Spotify and Soundcloud for more music and news. 

—

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

When Joan E. Biren (better known as JEB) was putting together her 1979 monograph of lesbian portraits, Eye to Eye, she developed all the negatives by hand in her apartment. She didn’t dare send them to a commercial studio: had the developers taken issue with the images of women’s intimacy – and so many naked women that! – they could have simply confiscated the originals under obscenity law, and never given them back.

“So many of the horrible things that could be done to you were legal,” JEB told Slate recently. 

Today, after many years out of print, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians has been re-issued by Anthology Editions. The new edition springs into a wildly different world than the one in which it was first published, where visual images of queerness were nearly non-existent. Yet the vibrant energy of JEB’s images and the sheer breadth of the project feel as fresh – and as necessary – as ever.

JEB set out to create Eye to Eye because there was no other book like it. “I couldn’t find images of lesbians that looked like any lesbians I knew,” she told a virtual audience in February at a Charis Circle event. At the time, visual representations of queer women were limited to whatever straight white men saw them as – and mostly, they saw them as sinister predators or vacuous, sexualized objects.  “It was all monster scary porno images,” she noted wryly.

So JEB, who was living in Washington, D.C. and photographing the burgeoning gay liberation movement, decided she would document real lesbian life herself. She would make pictures of her friends, her friends’ friends, and friends of those friends, all over the country. In 1978, she drove coast-to-coast in a beat-up car, sleeping on acquaintances’ couches, flat broke and determined to give queer women a portrait of themselves. 

The resulting collection, widely acknowledged to be the first photo book about lesbians, by a lesbian, is at once tender and resolute. Its scale is mighty. “We didn’t have the word then, but our politics were intersectional,” JEB told Slate’s June Thomas. Here are women of all ages, Black and white and indigenous, rural farmers and dyke chefs and a sexy hard-hatted butch repairing an electrical wire from a cherry picker. Black lesbian activist sisters Beverly and Barbara Smith – legends of the day – lounge in their office, framed by a typewriter. A woman named Connie crosses a New York City intersection in her wheelchair, grinning into the sunshine with her hair blowing in the breeze. “There is a disabled closet as well as a Lesbian closet,” she writes in the text opposite her photo. 

Each image is gorgeously specific, but the sum total of Eye to Eye approaches a unified whole. And in its gestures of intimacy and desire, that whole is avowedly queer. The title is lifted from the poem Transcendental Études by Adrienne Rich, an excerpt of which features as an epigraph: 

two women, eye to eye
measuring each other’s spirit, each other’s
limitless desire,
a whole new poetry begins here.

The book’s unapologetically lesbian lens is congenital to the era of its birth. By the late ‘70s, the feminist movement had become a political maelstrom, rent from within by factionalism and the stubborn hegemony of middle-class white women. The lesbian movement sprang out of the women’s movement largely because straight women refused to acknowledge the existence of queer feminism. Though never a perfect ecosystem of power sharing, lesbian movements often achieved greater intersectionality than the mainstream women’s movement. And their politics were decidedly more radical. JEB herself helped to establish The Furies, a separatist lesbian collective in Washington, D.C unified by the belief that lesbianism was the most essential form of feminism. (Like many collectives, the Furies splintered after several years, and JEB was kicked out – according to the author and fellow Furies member Rita Mae Brown – for spending too much time with her lover). 

Despite its radical context, Eye to Eye reads less like an act of political defiance and more as a quiet affirmation of lesbian existence. “We’re right here,” the photos seem to breathe. Here are queer women fixing cars and cooking dinner; here are queer women bathing and laughing with their children; here are queer women doing not very much at all. Of course, simply presenting lesbian life as quotidian was a radical political act, subversive in its undeniable realness.

“I did it because I wanted us to be able to see ourselves,” JEB explained at the Charis Circle event, in conversation with the poet and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs. JEB told Gumbs she was inspired by Audre Lorde’s radiant exhortation to name things. “Poetry,” Lorde wrote, “is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” 

JEB made the photos in Eye to Eye as an act of visual naming. “If you show somebody something, that opens up possibility. That is transformative.” Gumbs, who is writing a book on Audre Lorde and whose work is grounded in the speculative literary traditions of Black queer women writers, called JEB’s work “lie-abolishing technology.” On the Zoom screen, she pulled up the photo Priscilla and Regina, in which two Black women sleep peacefully in each other’s arms, evidence of the truth-telling power of a single picture.

“Look at us!” Gumbs exclaimed. “It’s our life!” 

In the years JEB was making her photos, those lies she set out to abolish were pervasive and totalizing. They were part of the psychic border wall that divided the moral from the deviant, the possible from the unimaginable. 

Part of naming things, then, was to dismantle that border, to make possible the unimaginable. “People did not believe you could be a Black lesbian, or a lesbian mother,” JEB noted. 

And yet, each photo murmurs. Here we are.

In Darquita and Denyeta, love shimmers. The breakfast spoon Denyeta holds levitates in the air; she is, quite literally, feeding Darquita the truth about who a person can be. “She is a child of the world,” Denyeta says of her daughter in the accompanying text. “It’s like having the sun shine on me every morning.” 

The women in JEB’s book did not reveal their lives without risk; to put their faces and names in print was to effectively out themselves to the world, make them vulnerable to disownment or eviction. They could have lost their children, their jobs, their lives. JEB spent days with each of the families and communities she photographed, building a relationship of trust before ever introducing a camera. She eschews the violence of traditional photography vernacular – armed with a camera, aiming the lens, shooting photos – as an inherently oppositional approach to photography, opting instead for the gentler syntax of “making” a photo. She never posed the individuals in her photos, and never dressed or undressed them. In fact, she told June Thomas, “if they were topless, I’d ask if they wanted me to be topless as well!” 

Every woman in the book signed a consent form and chose how their name would appear in the text. When the printing house balked, terrified the women might sue the printers for outing them, JEB and her lawyer went back to each woman with another form giving the printing press immunity. (She could have published the book through a small gay & lesbian publishing house, but it would have meant printing the images on cheap newsprint, and JEB was determined to put them on high-quality, coated stock). To pay for publication, she gathered small loans from friends in the lesbian community; she saved money by camping out at the printers to check the proofs herself, rather than risk costly reprintings. If she’d she had any money, the project would have bankrupted her – but she was never in it for the money. “Capitalism isn’t going to reward you for doing things out of love,” she told Alexis Pauline Gumbs. “But the reward is so much better than that.” 

And it was. The first 5,000 copies flew off bookstores’ shelves, selling out in three months. A second printing sold out shortly afterwards. Many books disappeared without being paid for, stolen by people who needed to the images but couldn’t afford to pay, or be seen paying. “I’m glad they did,” JEB says. That has been her goal, after all. To make the images more accessible, she printed cheap postcards, which sold across the country and became quiet semaphores of lesbianism, pasted to dorm walls and refrigerators doors, signaling to anyone who was looking for a sign.

When JEB set out on a distribution tour, her mentor and fellow queer photographer Tee Corinne suggested she use some of the photos for a slide show. That slide show turned into a full-scale presentation, “Lesbian Images in Photography, 1850-The Present,” which JEB delivered all across America, often teaching women’s photography workshops along the way and making photographs for her next book. 

“The Dyke Show,” as it came affectionately to be known, showed audiences hundreds of photos dating back to the earliest days of photography. Lacking definitive “proof” of the queerness of these long-ago artists and subjects, JEB’s slide shows instead invited their audiences to read the queer potential within the images; to impart, as Sophie Hackett wrote in Aperture Magazine, “a new, queer way of looking.” Carol Seajay, who cofounded the Old Wives Tales feminist bookstore in San Francisco, wrote that at the Dyke Show she’d seen “images I had never seen before, images I had seen and not perceived. Images on which to build a future.” 

If in those early, heady days of gay and lesbian consciousness-raising, JEB’s photos helped lesbians imagine a future, those same photos have evolved into a record of the past. “I wanted lesbians in the future to feel like part of a lineage,” JEB told Alexis Pauline Gumbs. “To have some history.” 

In that sense, the reissue of Eye to Eye joins the larger movement to bring long-sequestered queer history into the light. Archival projects have begun digitalizing their contents to share on social media; popular accounts like @lesbianherstoryarchives and @lgbt_history are teaching younger queer generations the stories of their elders. In a world now abundant with imagery, and amidst a revolution of visibility for marginalized communities, we owe a great deal to those who bravely showed themselves when it was safer to stay hidden. “We were right here,” these pictures breathe to us now. “We have always been here.”

As a photographer, and as an activist, JEB understood the imperative to make a record of that existence. Without careful preservation, how easily a history is eliminated, a legacy erased, a truth abolished in favor of a useful lie.

“Talk to the old people,” she reminded us. “They take the stories with them.”

You can order a copy of Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians from Charis Books here.

—

Rachel Garbus is a writer, satirist, and oral history podcast-maker based in Atlanta, GA. To keep up with the lesbian Joneses, she co-parents an anxious dog with her girlfriend and goes too far out of her way to recycle glass. Follow her on Twitter @rachel_garbus.

Darren Rosenzweig is based in Los Angeles, CA. Find Darren on twitter at @earthtodarren

Photo by Alex Conradt from Unsplash.com

WUSSY is proud to present poetry by Atlanta Artist, Kayla “Kiki” Goldstein. 
If you would like to send in a writing submission, please contact Nicholas Goodly. 

Cheers to Cheap Beer

Shards of glass scatter fast across old wood

and muttered curses fail to clean the stain

of fluid that, if given the chance, could

strip paint from walls and thoughts from once-young brains.

In the summer of parties and white drugs,

writing history into our bookshelves,

no one could have guessed that the ornate rugs

we created, curated for ourselves

would be torn out from under us. Thunderous,

as the winds of change alter time and space.

The familiar sip, crisp and wondrous

takes me back to the times of throbbing bass.

Of friends and strangers and that same cheap beer

pumping temporary joy through our veins.

If only we knew how fleeting the years

were and as another rose gold moon wanes

I fear we have taken it for granted.

Another rainy day spent all alone,

the old stain on the rug turning rancid.

You cannot turn a tomb into a home.

Kayla "Kiki" Goldstein is a writer and visual artist located in Atlanta, Georgia. Common themes in her work include the femme experience, queer nightlife, and activism. Instagram: @horsefacelesbian Twitter: @danrduffdiva

Our modern television landscape has led to basic cable conversations being silenced. While streaming platforms prosper, our previous television consumption patterns are slowly becoming extinct. It’s a tree-falling-in-the-forest thought experiment: If your show isn’t on streaming, does it even exist? 

This is a shame for broadcast and cable shows that have been airing in the past few years without an online platform. Some of the most creative, thought-provoking, and engaging content we’ve seen in recent memory has called cable its home and, unfortunately, it has led to less eyeballs. Queer representation on screen has also seen a recent boom, but again, without a major hub to stream, the conversation just isn’t there. Luckily, Comedy Central’s The Other Two has moved homes to HBO Max. Now on a more accessible platform, the show deserves the acclaim it seldom received during its debut season in 2019 for its break-neck comedic speed and rich queer storytelling.

The Other Two, created by former SNL head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, follows Cary and Brooke Dubek. These siblings are trying to succeed in life, all while dealing with their younger brother becoming the overnight internet singing sensation ChaseDreams. The show is able to balance being referential and deeply funny, all the while wearing its heart on its sleeve without treading into sappy waters. From episode one, I fell deeply in love with the family dynamics, the satirical look at fame in modern times, and the abundance of Molly Shannon exclaiming “It’s my year of YES!”

While I have added quotes from the show into my daily vernacular (Kate Berlant exclaiming “I am GAGGING for you, faggot” is verbal perfection) and recommend it to everyone I know, Cary Dubek’s entire storyline has stuck with me as so...normal.

When we watch queer storylines on television in recent memory, they usually land in one of two camps. The queer character either comes out (Love, Victor, The Real O’Neals, Grey’s Anatomy, etc.) or they are in some deep sh*t. (How To Get Away with Murder, Scandal, etc.) Nothing is wrong with either plot trajectory, but there’s something to be said about coping with queerness years after the coming out, without the inclusion of covering up a murder or rigging a presidential election. Luckily, we’re slowly working towards “queer normalcy” on screen (Pose is a wonderful example) and The Other Two continues the path.

Cary Dubek (played perfectly by Drew Tarver) is confidently gay, but needs the confidence to find his place within the queer community. The normalcy of watching a gay man navigate relationships and reaching for queer clout was enlightening, heartbreaking, and beautifully banal. Viewers didn’t have to go through the coming out process with Cary, as that was done years ago in his life. We had to watch him deal with the “after.”

Of course it’s a sitcom of a fantastical situation, so everything is heightened. Yet, watching Cary struggle to “ride the wave” of Chase’s fame successfully in the hopes to gain prominence was simultaneously a cringe fest and relatable.

From having to act more straight for a commercial role, to falling in line with “instagays,” to crying into a fireplace a la Call Me By Your Name, all of the sitcom-iest scenarios are all firmly planted in reality. There are buckets of insecurities that I feel on the daily by being out and open about my sexuality, and I know I’m not alone in that. Am I too femme? Do I look as decent as these Instagays? Am I being straight enough right now? Are people judging me for wearing too bright of a color? Am I relatable? Am I down-to-earth? Am I too much, and will that lead me to being alone? 

All these internal questions are discussed with a light hand and the perfect amount of hilarity throughout the series. It was completely refreshing to connect so deeply with a character on screen that had already gone through his coming out years. Just simple tidbits, like his refusal to come out to his grandmother for her sake, is simultaneously a laugh line and a frequent truth.

This month, the first season of The Other Two was placed on HBO Max. Its new home will also house the soon-to-be-released second season, after COVID delays pushed back production. Even after a two year delay since its debut, I still keep returning to the show for a healthy dose of truth amidst a wackadoo series of events. With the genius of Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider at the helm, I know for a fact that season 2 will be just as poignant and funny.

—

Marshal Knight is an entertainment writer out of Orlando, FL. He'd like to thank Sandra Oh.

WUSSY is proud to present poetry by Shore Grae.
If you would like to send in a writing submission, please contact Nicholas Goodly.

Abomination

He called me an abomination
and at first I laughed
at the time he wasted reaching out to me the energy
he wanted to hurt me
to cover the shame he felt
in thinking I was attractive before he read my profile
found out I’m trans
how funny I thought when I blocked him
I’ll save this to laugh with my friends later
over drinks over dinner
but the picture didn’t come up in casual conversation
it stayed hidden in the album of memories on my phone
only weighing on my mind revisiting the word
picking at it like an acne scar

abomination

I’m not the monster he makes me out to be
but the more I let the word sit on my tongue
the worst it tastes
I should just swallow it
like a shot
process and move on
but it sits in my cheeks until I choke it back up
I’m not a monster
I deserve to be myself
free, safe, and happy
I’m not a bad person
I think
when was the last time someone looked me in the eyes
to say they loved me
when was the last time I believed them
am I an abomination
no
when they leave it’s their choice
not because I pushed them away
I can be loved
despite him saying I’ll never be loved
unless I change, grow
even though they say I’m a danger to myself
to other women in bathrooms
I’m not a monster
I’m human

it’s easy to let the words hurt like sticks, stones, or pitchforks
someday I won’t have to lick my wounds alone
but with the tender words of a lover
who chose to stay
who looks me in the eyes
contradicts what the men before him said
they’re wrong they took you for granted
took advantage
you are not a monster
then finally I’ll be able to agree
move on from the words in the past
focus on the future
but until then I’ll keep the pictures on my phone
to look at in bed another night
with another guy

The Morning After

I woke up this morning earlier than I expected
sorer than I expected
though considering how long we spent curled up together
how long I spent with my legs in the air
as I was curled under you, while you were inside me,
I should’ve expected to feel this sore
this empty after you had left me so full

this morning I could still taste you on my lips
I could still smell the sweat in my hair
the smell a mixture of mine and yours
rose and musk

you texted me good morning
I replied to tell you I wished you had said that to me in person
I wished I had stayed over last night
for a couple more hours of you last night
a couple more hours of you this morning

the morning after spent with you
you could’ve massaged the soreness from my muscles
could have made me feel less empty
you said you could still smell me on you
you could still smell me on your skin
still lingering after your shower

this morning you said you could still smell sex on your blankets
on the sheets you put down on the couch
the smell of us still lingered
and you grew excited at the smell
the memory of what we did

I wish we weren’t just imagining what we did last night
but it could repeat on and on each night like a habit
each night like an obsession fueled by our needs our passion
I want for more mornings after you
for nights spent with you
I want for more time with you

Shore Grae is a poet who resides in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work has been previously published in Tributaries- A Creative Journal. You can find her on Instagram @shoregrae.

When our creative virtues come from institutions that we now want to dismantle, what do we do with the skills that we have cultivated? How can we play within the disciplines we have been shaped by when those disciplines shape the body of hegemony in its most dangerous forms? In which ways can we honor the traditions that we carry while deconstructing and remixing our histories toward the futures we want to author? When virtuosity turns us into commodities for the highest bidder, what can we do to reorient virtuosity now? In his work-in-progress performance of this room is a body for Fly On A Wall’s Excuse The Art performance series, Sean Nguyen-Hilton raises these questions to great effect. 

Excuse The Art is a yearly works-in-progress series presented by The Windmill Arts Center in partnership with Atlanta based arts platform Fly on a Wall. Sean Nguyen-Hilton is a co-founder and team member of Fly on a Wall and presented his work-in-progress in the recent Excuse The Art group showing alongside other local artists. This year the Excuse The Art show was organized in a covid conscious way by presenting the performances within a white box dance studio with the audience positioned in the parking lot outside, allowing us to view the evening through the glass store front windows of the Windmill space. This iteration of Sean’s this room is a body is a work-in-progress of a project that he is building into an evening length piece to be performed in the coming future.

In this room is a body, through a collage of action, sound, and language, Sean examines his life as a professional dancer and moves through questions of how to perform himself now. He decidedly rubs up against what the overculture expects of him as a dance maker while tending to his form; accessing his deep knowledge of contemporary dance while offering new possibilities for how one might experience it today. 

Sean’s performance begins with a direct address to the audience, sharing with us that he has challenged himself to grow his hair out and create a solo work for himself to perform. He shares that the work is cultivated from researching his own body dysmorphia as he reflects on his identity as professional dancer, and distances himself from the idea of his body as a commodity made of his virtuosity. He shares that he is thinking through these feelings with philosophical texts by Gilles Deluze, Felix Guttari, and Paulo Virno. From the beginning of the piece I am thinking about his body existing inside and outside of the space of performance, and its performance existing inside and outside the space of institution; thoughts around the personal, the formal, and the systematic are amplified by the performer-audience orientation of the evening. After his introduction, Sean shifts the lighting in the space and settles in on center stage, music plays and he begins to dance. At first the movement resembles one of those toys with a string inside where you press and release a button to make the whole thing collapse and resurrect. He drops in and out of the floor, dismantling and reconfiguring the shapes his body is making. Grounded yet fluid, Sean’s awareness of how his body moves, and what this movement might offer a spectator is clear and strong, no doubt honed from his lifetime of working in balletic and contemporary dance forms. The dancing and sound throughout the work evokes a sense of trance, a merging of the material and spiritual worlds, mirroring the amorphous shape Sean and the audience are creating inside and outside of the Windmill’s white box space. While he moves, Sean’s recorded voice reads what feels like a diary entry in the second person, transposing us as audience members for him as we move through his thoughts, feelings, and actions. Through this smart manipulation of language, we become the writer and performer of the piece we are watching, creating a queer sense of personship as we merge with Sean; a collective body as a room with and without walls.

Between sections of his expertly clear and precise dance movement, Sean creates the representational shape of a body pieced together from Matise-like paper cut outs that he tapes directly to the windows of the performance space. He projects a tiny rectangle of light into the stomach of his frankenstein monster showing his dance reel from over a decade ago. A dance reel is a video made of clips of a dancer dancing in different performances across their career, in Sean’s case, a career across competition, ballet, and contemporary dance traditions, creating a sort of visual CV that can be used to audition for work. The use of this video material of Sean as a younger dancer being digested in the stomach of his fragmented body becomes a meaningful symbol for the work that Sean is doing in this performance: processing his body’s histories through the shape he and his art practice now takes. The fragmentation of the body is a recurring theme in my experience of the work. Often only portions of Sean’s body are made visible while the facade of the building sometimes obstructs the audience’s view. He isolates the movement of one body part at a time in the choreography itself. The overall form of the performance is full of interruptions and breaks. All of these choices point toward the relationship of the part to the whole, a metaphor that satisfyingly works on many levels as Sean asks us to think through how we perform ourselves as individuals within the larger systems of control that we function under.   

In this room is a body, Sean’s writing acts as an integral guide to the work. Not common to all artists working in dance, Sean’s access to language is one of his many virtues. The words Sean uses offer a dramaturgical landscape for the actions taking place in the performance, revealing an organic and slippery syntax beyond one disciplinary form. Sean actively performs the labor of putting on the show for us, creating a technique for sharing his actions and language while changing technical aspects of the show, revealing the apparatus of the performance itself in real time. Sean displays his virtuosity by including the making-of with the thing itself, controlling theatrical elements with ease, exactitude, and grace, humble and elegant in his skillful presence and clear expression of truth.  

For the finale of this iteration of the work, Sean creates an electronic sound score in real time, mixing electronic beats and melodies with a robotic voice reciting text by french philosophers Gilles Deluze and Félix Guattari from a piece titled "How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs". The text and the phrase “Body Without Organs” originally come from the writer and experimental theater maker Antonin Artaud. The phrase in its expanded meaning by these philosophers, refers to a structure or zone, inanimate or sentient, without imposed organization; a form without structure, a fluid container. He opens curtains on the back wall of the whitebox exposing a mirror and interpolating the bodies of the audience into the performance space, further blurring the organization of the show. Another transposition of personhood and authorship as the room becomes a collective body: breathing, moving, processing, witnessing and speaking it's messy living experience into existence together.  

While dense with information, heady in its concept and design, and philosophical in its approach, this room is a body maintains a sense of entertaining theatricality and a commitment to body oriented expression. With unquestionable presence, Sean accesses his expertise for eloquent, complex, and fearless movement while using it to question the very form he is working in. Dancing like a professional, writing like an academic, and greeting us like a friend, Sean’s performance of this room is a body is in fact virtuosic while asking us to see his body and himself (and perhaps our bodies and ourselves) as something more than a mere commodity. this room is a body is a meditative swirl experienced at a satisfying clip, an astute work functioning on many levels, leaving me excited to bring these questions to how I perform virtuosity in my own life and to experience how Sean grows as an artist and a human through his work to come.

Learn more about Sean Nguyen-Hilton at:
https://www.seannguyenhilton.com +
https://www.flyonawall.buzz

—

Erik Thurmond is an Atlanta based artist, teacher, and writer. He is on instagram: @actionboardservices and so is his band who he loves: @purepandemia

WUSSY is proud to present poetry by Benjamin Rhein.
If you would like to send in a writing submission, please contact Nicholas Goodly.

Small Moments

I miss you most
In small of moments
In food you love, half eaten
Your toothbrush, still wet
Your hair still with me,
its scent, softly drifitng
from your pillow

Vices

Fingers trace a line
Your habits touching mine
Smoke like silk
Two wet lips
Clinging

His Smile Sings Truths

His smile sings truths
In a room stained with lies
Soft, suede brown hair
A quiet, in the curve of his thighs

Found in You

I found in you
a quiet place
A peace
in the small of
your back
Filled up on comforts
Bathed in the smell
Of your sweat,
and cotton socks

—

Benjamin is a queer poet/aspiring writer, with a soft spot for caffeine, and duo chrome eye shimmer. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his husband, and their dog

Photo by @raphaellovaski

The mind of a poet is usually a secret place. How a writer receives stimuli and turns it into art is typically a meticulous and personal process, informed by one’s own identity, experiences, and environment. In Michael Chang’s chapbook Drakkar Noir, Chang lets us into their interior world. The reader is brought into a collection where Zayn and Alice Notley are in dialogue, sex and art history are explored from one line to the next, and a sincere heart speaks in punchlines and fierce, albeit brilliant, shade.

From the very first page, Chang’s words present a challenge to the reader. Essentially, how can the language of our cultures, whether learned or inherited, become tools to better understand our purpose in this life? What language do we use to make sense of our relationship to others? How useful is language as a tool in a country whose values undermine our existence? Through formal experimentation, balancing a sense of order and play, these poems don’t settle for easy answers, will not end unsatisfied, until they “uncover some grand truth.” In this way, Chang is defiant, “picking things apart, searching for a solution”. Language is revered and scrutinized at the same time, both sacred and plaything.

In Drakkar Noir, words moves like the mind moves, fast and fluid. The poems have personality. The language is spontaneous, effortlessly switching codes and vernacular from one instance to the next. Several poems incorporate Chinese in either the title or body of the text. Thoughts flip on a dime, the tone shifts according to circumstance. The mind behind these poems are thirsty, in search of something without a name. Desire is seen from the inside out, brimming with color, from a clever and sharp tongue.

This mind processes anger and sadness with style, snaps back, is witty as hell in its delivery. These poems don’t hold their tongue, rather, everything is worth trying to express. Chang’s use of pop culture in their poems turns specific references and figures into effective loaded symbols able to withstand the depth of the collection. A kind of cultural equity happens when everything is weighed and considered equally. A poem leads with an epigraph from Cornel West, another poem starts with Drake. Everything is capable of holding space, has value, and is accounted for.

While the material of the poems are dense with meaning, Chang’s voice is cool, the poems thoughtfully crafted. Chang’s great sensitivity and empathy toward their subjects is evident, allowing them to be both biting and loving. Here is where Drakkar Noir shows the great versatility of language, how much fun it can be, its inherently flawed nature, and ultimately, its value as we make efforts to define ourselves and our story in this world.

MOOSE KNUCKLES

You have your speed-dial pussies, pregnant as possum
Split second, black palms, an instant

Aren’t you trying to support me, husband me up
So I can be a trophy

I am my own trophy
& didn’t yo mama say that need & want are different things?

Nikki says most rabbis Jewish
You claim to hate it here but I don’t like it anywhere

I call you Adam, take your light-skinned
white-passing bush leagues

your gratuitous apple-bobbing
insane clown posse

your pale here’s-a-suggestion narcissism
sweet meaning screwed up

breath spooky on my earlobes
tongue swimming between my cheeks

your howling cosmology
pug nose closer than it appears

Your second & third waves
My. Postman’s dick hanging out his shorts

Whiteboys in puffer coats, arm in arm
Blond, cream-smooth legs ready to break some hearts

Down to keep me out like the cold
Their eyes wander, accents blur, hard to place

I could use a little fortune in my cookie
[raucous laughter, aggressively virile]

When Raegan was President
P.Y.T. meant pretty young thing

Why doesn’t Tyehimba Jess write a book
called Infinite Jess?

Now, Chelsea Clinton squinting, this glow really slaps
The je ne sais quoi, these notes on fear

The one who made it out / / / the one who got away
(Same one?)

A big rabbit, actually a horse
How the hell did we learn to care for small animals?

Light me up monstrous & milky
Anything is possible here in the cosmos

The moon icing over
Your rimless dark, ever-present & empty

The trick to gardening is ample patience
& an elaborate staff

Drakkar Noir is now available to order through Bateau Press here.

Michael Chang (they/them) is a Lambda Literary fellow. Their poems have been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, & the Pushcart Prize. Their collection CHINATOWN ROMEO is forthcoming from Ursus Americanus Press.

“I feel like a gerbil smothering in Richard Gere’s butthole.” Jordan White states somewhat nonchalantly in The Doom Generation, and honestly, more often than not, same.  

The year 2020 (still heavy on our hearts and holes) was an infinitely fluctuating mobius strip, lasting for both mere seconds and countless centuries, depending on your current mood and/or level of horniness and/or commitment to “unpacking.” 

Mass hysteria was a common side effect of institutional failure. Altered perceptions of reality are a widely reported symptom of cabin fever. Sensory deprivation was a direct result of the monotonous slurry of zoom conferences many of us were subjected to. As a longtime service industry worker (bartender at a queer venue) the sudden lack of tactile engagement left me thoroughly high and dry.

While first learning how to navigate this abject temporal vacuum, there were several stumbling blocks I encountered on my own path to equilibrium; prolonged melancholy masturbational odyssies, followed immediately by sharp pangs of Saggitarian wanderlust. Late night interpretive dancing or harmonizing with the radiator could only take me so far. How I longed to cruise the open highways and crowded bathhouses in search of unbridled gay whimsy yet again.

Before isolation, queer folks already had a nuanced and singular relationship to the concept of time (a phenomenon that my platonic amorous throuple affectionately refers to as “Gay Delay”) which was inevitably complicated by the cruel bureaucracies of contagion:

*forced separations from chosen family.

*state-mandated immobility.

*barely disguised (read: blatant) housing discrimination.

*perpetual risk of infection.

*the reemergence (commodification) of hygiene theater for capitalist gain.

*the fatalistic implications of bodily autonomy.

While false equivalencies have certainly been made between COVID-19 and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, there are certain parallels that were unavoidable in the cultural consciousness. Oblivion is not only mass-produced and televised, but also swept under the rug and just beyond your bedroom door.

The banality of oblivion is perhaps one of the many reasons why the “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy” by New Queer Cinema pioneer Gregg Araki has received a resurgence in popularity throughout the pandemic.

Araki, arguably the spiritual godfather of bisexual lighting, the Patron Saint of West Coast Fag Nihilism, made three distinctly Californian contributions to cinema: Totally Fucked Up (1993) The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997) each a stylized exploration of queer teenage malaise and eroticism amidst the futility of the nineties cultural wasteland.

I had the pleasure of revisiting these films during quarantine via This Light, a communal online media archive created by the artist Andrew Norman Wilson, a project that “emerged out of a desire to make private viewing habits public, as common space continued to dissolve into private property, and our attention was pulled towards the monetized distraction of streaming content in solitude.” This Light, at the height of ubiquitous panic and turmoil, was an invaluable resource for emotional decompression and a cloistered cinephile’s wet dream. 

The Doom Generation in particular was a formative film for me in my senior year of high school, when I brazenly began to identify as a “wayward pansexuale.” Watching it again, while basking in the virtual presence of my queer companions in a time of unprecedented generational crisis, was unexpectedly cathartic.

The Doom Generation (infamously promoted as “A Heterosexual Movie By Gregg Araki,” perhaps to troll the stodgy and easily flummoxed film critics of the time) follows a bizarre fuck triangle between casually callous Valley femme fatale Amy Blue (Rose McGowan in an immaculate black bob) her timid and good-natured boyfriend Jordan White (the effortlessly dreamy Araki mainstay James Duval) and amoral interloper Xavier Red (the carnally unhinged Johnathan Schaech). This hapless teenage trio is marked by incidental violence, satanic numerology, and multiple cases of mistaken identity as they take to the open road to flee persecution, with armageddon lingering lackadaisically on the horizon.

The morose glamor of aimlessness, of neon-streaked hormonal entropy, is intrinsic to the film’s design, as is Araki’s signature incorporation of shoegaze music, featuring such bands as Cocteau Twinks (ahem, Twins*) and a particularly memorable usage of Slowdive during a breathless finale sequence. The endless desert highways navigated by these sexually inquisitive flaneurs provide a purgatorial backdrop for the growing pains of fluidity. The emphasis on transience, both erotically and geographically, serves as a pointed critique for the often hostile trappings of heteronormative domesticity. It was all too easy to seek refuge in this romanticized and wistful wandering while confined to our apartments or stuck in our parents basements, anxiously awaiting the distant promise of a vaccine from a rapidly eroding administration.

Both The Doom Generation and the final film in the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, Nowhere, explore the complications of queer polyamory while suffused in a pervasive yet playful ambience of existential dread. James Duval is once again front and center as moody sweetheart Dark Smith, who is conflicted about his non-monogamous relationship with Mel (a savvy and ephemeral Rachel True). This time the apocalypse is rendered as candy-colored extraterrestrial invasion, the encroaching fear of the adolescent unknown. Described as “90210 on acid” at the time of its release, Nowhere presents to a modern audience a queer nostalgia that is both prescient yet inaccessible, with an ensemble cast of chic and sexually ambiguous Los Angelites in multiple sensuous configurations. It was a vicarious thrill to see these chaotic arrangements unfold while actively challenged to negotiate new modes of intimacy in the depths of gay cyberspace.

For many of those made involuntarily celibate under the strictures of quarantine, Araki’s cinema invoked the beguiling messiness of modern queer polyamory, in all its myriad aches and dizzying splendors. Viewers took solace in the kinetic physicality of these angst-ridden lovers, and derived remote pleasure from their tempestuous infatuations. These films made the queers yearn for all the sparkling intricacies of entanglement, and actively crave the logistical pathos of not only fisting your therapists’ partner at the sex club, but then processing the encounter with them over lavender oat milk lattes the morning after.

“It's like we all know way down in our souls that our generation is going to witness the end of everything. You can see it in our eyes. It's in mine, look. I'm doomed. I'm only 18-years-old and I'm totally doomed.” Dark scrawls in his diary, a sentiment that is truly timeless, irrespective of age or subjective cataclysm.

We all need the highly stylized drama of personal catastrophe, every now and then.

—

Kamikaze Jones is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and amateur porn detective currently based in Connecticut.

Follow him on Instagram @kamikazejones_

A few blocks before my boyfriend and I arrive at the theater, we run into two dear friends on their way to the same show. After masked hugs we make our way to the parking lot behind 7 Stages where we are given red carnations and rainbow bracelets by the kindly box office crew and head toward the large audience gathered outside. More friends and community members to run into and catch up with, some I haven’t seen in years. The experience is both moving and jarring. I used to experience this sort of thing all the time, bumping into friends at art events, catching up and kiki-ing, and yet this hasn’t really happened in over a year. The coming together of community in, around, and for art is central to my experience of Corian Ellisor’s dance work Charmed Ones, performed April 28th, 29th, May 1st, and 2nd at 7 Stages in Atlanta, GA. 

When I think of Corian, I think of community. Corian was one of the first people I danced with when I was just getting involved with dance in Atlanta in 2012 where he was already a central presence. Alongside his role as pillar for the dance community, Corian is also crucial to the Atlanta queer scene with his drag persona Ella/Saurus/Rex. These two communities (with plenty of overlap) are fed, nourished, and inspired by Corian’s creative drive and heart felt presence. I felt this all deeply in his most recent dance work. 

The set for the piece is centered around a large rectangle of dirt on the concrete of the 7 Stages parking lot, delineating an earthen stage, an empty garden bed with sticks of incense smoking around the periphery. Circling round the dirt stage is a giant wreath of sticks with red string and red carnations woven into it, creating a nest that the stage is settled in the center of. Behind the dirt stage, as a large-scale sculptural backdrop, there are the remains of a large fallen tree, also decorated in red string and flowers. This simple ornamentation of the barren, a crafty celebration of the broken, suits the themes of queer magic in the work. Much like drag, there is an approach that creates maximal theatrical effect via minimal simple means.

While still catching up with old friends, I notice the piece beginning out of the corner of my eye. The performers slowly appear like spirits drifting outside the dirt stage. Angelically dressed in long white t-shirts cut into sleeveless tunics, bare legged with white underwear and white sandals, Alex Abarca, Leo Briggs, Patrick Otsuki, and Corian Ellisor begin the meditative ritual of Charmed Ones. 

The top of the performance completely blurs my sense of time. The dancers move confidently in slow motion, ceremoniously floating about the space, splashing water from a giant chalice and removing their sandals before stepping on the earthen floor. They create a somber court dance with their graceful movement and direct eye contact, bringing an ancient magic to Corian’s great sense for contemporary aesthetics. Once on the dirt stage, the movement very slowly picks up momentum as the performers transform through static postures, creating ephemeral living monuments for their cause. The use of posture brings to mind sculpture as well as the tradition of vogueing; the taking on of shapes of elevated beauty standards by the othered subject position of queer persons, accessing the power of fantasy to transform one’s reality.

The dance builds in momentum. The dancers become increasingly dirty as the movement becomes larger and more athletic and they throw their bodies in and out of the floor, The movement itself speaks directly to resilience as the consummate dancers continually bounce back from the movement journeys that they find themselves on. Gently, campy pop vocabulary mixes with the more abstract contemporary dance forms. The stately ritual makes space for humor and spunk, winks and jokes for the audience (and for the performers themselves) creating necessary levity in this celebration of queer strength. Charmed Ones has an enchanting arch, moving from a stoic sense of liturgy to a feeling of candid intimacy, a serious ritual as party, a spell cast with fun.

Throughout the piece, the individual identities of the uniformly dressed performers becomes clearer and clearer. Each performer's distinct strengths and personalities have room to shine: Alex’s fearless abandon, Patrick’s coy mystery, Leo’s grounded elegance. All the while Corian’s role as director is woven in and out of the piece. Ptar Flamming’s mysterious and ever shifting sound for the piece gorgeously adds to the palate of Charmed Ones. The score drifts from ambient sound, to spoken word, to more beat driven dance tracks. Poet (and WUSSY editor) Nicholas Goodly contributes a recording of a powerful poem they wrote to the altar of the work. The poem reinforces the themes of queer resilience, the complex amalgam of grit and fabulousness we become as queer people. The sound score includes developmental conversations with the cast about the work while Corian performs the role of director in real time, revealing the making of within the final result. I love these meta elements that fully display the power dynamics of the group scattered throughout the piece. From the refined unfolding of dance phrase work to moments of snapping for each other and slapping their own asses, the performers of Charmed Ones take these classical and pop influences, smartly deconstruct and put them back together, and share much about themselves and the importance of queer sensibilities in our world through the process.

As I watch these performers I realize that we (as audience members) can no longer separate our understanding of a performer's identity from that performer while we witness them move through the shape of a performance. I am privileged to know, to varying degrees of intimacy, the performers that Corian worked with on this show, a privilege I recognize not everyone came to the theater with. However, through the language in and around the piece and the dancers’ performance itself, it is the identities, the personalities, the histories of these humans that became meaningful material for me alongside the formal choices they are making together. No longer can a performance be read merely by its compositional qualities, yes, these are of interest, but only in relationship to the people taking up the chosen forms. We are not just bodies, we are somehow much more than that. Corian and the cast of Charmed Ones bring their whole selves, their great technical prowess as well as their lived human experience to the stage to create a mesmerizingly powerful performance.

Once the show ends it is more beautiful social interaction with the vibrant audience and performers of the work. We smile and laugh in the springtime sunshine with our red carnations and rainbow friendship bracelets as we awkwardly and eagerly reemerge into the space of collectivity we have been so deeply missing. This performance acted as an important turning point for me in the pandemic. Thank goodness for Corian as magnet for this familial gathering, bringing folks together to celebrate the necessity of queer fantasy to life in all of its messy and wonderful forms.

—

Erik Thurmond is an Atlanta based artist, teacher, and writer. He is on instagram: @actionboardservices and so is his band who he loves: @purepandemia

In 2015, refusing to pay the exorbitant entrance fee to a lesbian party at Pensacola Pride – and drunk enough to think it was a good idea – my friend and I scaled a 20-foot beachfront wall to sneak into the party from the back. I made it up the wall, but tumbled onto the bar floor while climbing over the railing, and my shin bled in  celebratory fashion for the rest of the night. I still have the scar to remind myself what a cheap little shit I was. 

Is that my most embarrassing pride story? Not by a long shot. Any queer who’s been out for more than two cycles of pride is bound to have gotten entangled in some rainbow-themed nonsense, be it thanks to an excess of poppers, an excess of complimentary Smirnoff, or an excess of exes (my typical downfall). “Fresh pride!” my friends like to say whenever we attend pride in a new city – an opportunity to debase yourself thoroughly in front of a whole new audience. 

Saturday Night Live’s digital musical sketch, “It’s Pride Again,” which aired this past Saturday, sends up the hot mess that is Pride in a rambunctious pastiche of Madonna’s Holiday and Charlie XCX’s Girls Night Out. It’s been well-received by the queer community (as expected, Twitter is aflutter with haters, though no one can seem to articulate what exactly is to hate). The song features a highly relatable drunk meltdown from Bowen Yang (“I don’t want to be funny, I want to be hot!”), Kate McKinnon and Anya Taylor-Joy as a lesbian couple who moved in way too fast, Punkie Johnson lamenting a plethora of lesbian-passing straights, and, of course, an iconic Lil Nas X exhorting us all to post hole, posthaste. 

Of course, nothing is less funny than writing about why something is funny, so I won’t – the sketch is funny, and you should go watch it. What I found word-worthy about “It’s Pride Again” was not its content, but its audience. This sketch, more than any other sketch, and this SNL season, more than any other season, features queerness unfiltered through the lens of a straight audience. “It’s Pride Again” is for us. 

That’s because it’s both written by us – enby writer Celeste Kim co-wrote it with writer-turned-actor-and-forever-gay Bowen Yang, along with straight-but-we-stan-her Sudi Greene - and performed by us, with Yang joining the other two openly-gay cast members and Lil Nas X for a glittering queer alliance. (Taylor-Joy managed to turn chess into a heart-hammering competitive sport for a full season, so we accept her allyship.) 

Pride is familiar enough that the sketch’s satirical tropes land universally. But its deeply specific references, and the authenticity of its queer performers, signal a shift in the way queer content gets portrayed on SNL. Watching “It’s Pride Again,” I was struck by the way being gay has gone from the essential joke, to becoming the essential lens through which the joke is the most hilarious. Simply put, “It’s Pride Again” is funny for everyone, but it’s most funny for us, and that is a pretty big deal.

SNL has come a long way from its early comedy-bro days, when simply seeing men in dresses was a legitimate basis for a sketch. The entire premise of “Lyle, The Effeminate Heterosexual,” trotted out twice by Dana Carvey, is that an obviously gay man is allegedly straight. In the long-running bit, “It’s Pat,” Julia Sweeney is a person of uncertain gender. That’s it! That’s the whole joke! (In her tender autobiographical series Work in Progress, Abby McEnany confronts Julia Sweeney about the toxic impact Pat had on her as a young masc-of-center woman). 

These embarrassments have thankfully gone the way of the dodo; NBC no longer even displays them in their digital archives. As American culture evolved, SNL trundled along with it: gay representation on the show shifted to the sort of benevolent otherness that typified the post-“Yep, I’m Gay!” era. Sketches like “Jeffrey’s” – in which two withering gay men demean their sartorially-clueless customers – and the beloved recurring guest Stefon, who offers an endless stream of ever-more-ludicrous nightlife intel – manage to employ queer stereotype with warmth, not cruelty. It’s hard to miss, however, that these sketches are all written and performed by straight men. I’ve laughed myself into cramps at Stefon, but I never once felt that his antics were for me or my gay friends. The joke doesn’t float entirely on that fact that he’s gay, but it’s a pretty flimsy vessel without that signature sibilant lisp. I felt the same way about the lesbian who serves as a foil for Kristen Wiig’s Target Lady. Target Lady’s reaction to meeting her first lesbian is positive (“Stereotype busted!” she cheers at learning not all lesbians wear vests), but I guarantee you no young lesbian comic has ever lay awake at night, dreaming of the day she’ll pen a sketch where a straight woman meets her first real-life lesbian. 

That’s what changed. Seeing Punkie Johnson – a bona fide, masc-of-center, Black lesbian, blessed be the gods – nod towards a queer-styled woman, balefully punctuating “she is also a straight” – it just hits different! Punkie knows! She knows we’ve been there! (Did I not, one time, bully my improv team into letting a cute cyclist chick audition for us, only to learn she had a boyfriend?) There is a thick stratum of queer tropes that are funny to everyone, but beneath that layer lies a quarry of insider knowledge that gleams with a particular kind of fun. That’s what we mean when we talk about representation; our stories are better when told by ourselves. Deeper, truer – but also funnier. 

Johnson is only the sixth out SNL cast member; the fact that half of those queer actors are currently on the show (and Kate McKinnon its biggest star) is a testament to how much SNL has changed. The writer’s room has shifted alongside: arguably, no one signifies SNL’s cultural shift more than Julio Torres, who wrote for the show between 2016 and 2019. Torres – a young Latino comic the New Yorker described as a “twink-from-space” – brought an ethereal, fabulist style to his sketches that makes earlier gay male representation look like Talbot’s dress shirts. One of his viral digital sketches, “Wells for Boys,” advertises a plastic well from Fisher-Price where dreamy, sensitive boys can sit and whisper secrets. Torres and Yang overlapped on SNL as writers, and they co-wrote The Actress, which features Emma Stone as the one-liner scorned wife in a gay porn. While gay porn enjoys endless life as fodder for straight male comics, The Actress is a cleverer inversion, the creation of two gay writers for whom gay sex is not a sufficient premise for a joke. While Torres has moved on from SNL, Yang (who we interviewed for WUSSY Vol.09) joined the onstage cast in 2019, and arguably stole the 2020 season with his impersonation of the fey, aggrieved Titanic iceberg. Meanwhile, sketches like “Lesbian Period Drama” and “It Gets Better” lampooned dynamics of queer community that feel instantly relatable to those of us within it. This season was gay – a deeper, realer, funnier kind of gay.

Queer artists are driving cultural content forward on their own steam. It’s no longer enough to devise a character whose sexual orientation is the essential joke. Younger generations of queer people are creating new ideas and modes of being; these, in turn, ripen into fruit for satire. Did my girlfriend and I move in too quickly? You betcha! Does my twink friend read theory? Probably not! Watching “It’s Pride Again” felt like being ragged on by my friends. This family is a big old hot mess – but it’s ours. 

So I’ll see you at Pride, fam – sunburned, mad, and ready to debase myself thoroughly in front of an audience of my exes.

—

Rachel Garbus is a writer, satirist, and oral history podcast-maker based in Atlanta, GA. To keep up with the lesbian Joneses, she co-parents an anxious dog with her girlfriend and goes too far out of her way to recycle glass. Follow her on Twitter @rachel_garbus.

I want to take the time, if I may, to address how queer cartoons are. Many of you will probably be saying, “Duh, knew that!” But really, do you know? You may have shipped Peppermint Patty and Marcie and stuck around until the end of Adventure Time for the ultimate payoff of, spoiler alert, Princess Bubblegum and Marceline. You may remember Ren, of Ren & Stimpy, and his pectoral implants. And sure, you’ve seen icon Robert Crumb talk about his childhood sexual fixation with Bugs Bunny and how his entire œuvre may stem from a picture of Bugs in drag that he kept in his pocket that got so wrinkled his mom had to iron it until it turned brown! 

But queerness is on the rise in animation. Or perhaps it never wasn’t? Forgive the double negative but I’m here to encourage, nay demand, radical readings of queerness in cartoon. Look no further than Abbi Jacobson’s character in the recent Netflix release of The Mitchells vs. the Machines. The queer reading of this film, Jacobson’s Katie rebelling against her dad’s dad-ness, was somewhat revolutionary for a computer animated film when all seem to rely on the straight, white, male gaze of dad-ness (i.e. the work of Pixar’s John Lasseter, Brad Bird, Pete Docter, etc.). In the end, I would argue that Katie learns to celebrate what makes her family queer while honoring her own individuality. 

There’s something to be said for the queer experiences of childhood viewing habits. For many the touchstone has always been cartoons. Growing up, animation is something of a parent-free zone, generally too weird or zany for scrutiny. Generations of parents have depended on the dreaded Hays code & arbitrary/authoritarian MPAA and its “G” ratings to the point that all animated work, as long as it betrays some anthropomorphic cuteness or seeming “princessant” moralism, will end up lumped under the catch-all descriptor, “Family.” There’s a great line from John Waters’ outlaw-cinema manifesto of a film Cecil B. Demented, “‘Family’ is just a dirty word for censorship!” Queerness is genre work, an outlier or aberration in anything “family”-oriented because parents don’t want to explain to their kids what queer is, rather preferring to wait until it’s weaponized against them at school or on the street. But queerness is like the message hidden in the show that only those with the secret decoder ring can unlock. Queerness involves making space for those characters operating outside the hero/heroine and, for the audience, feeling kinship towards them.

I think the most productive way to understand and track queerness in cartoons would be to look at the historical presence of drag, a radically transformative expression of gender, in cartoons, an artform that is all about the transformative. Both are all about embodying that magical possibility. Listen, drag and cartoons have been in a serious relationship for a long time, longer than you’d think. Both animation and drag culture, as we know it in the American realm of entertainment, both have underpinnings in the vaudeville circuit. Early female impersonating superstars like Julian Eltinge and Bert Savoy took to the stage at the same time that early animated novelties like Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), the first keyframe animation, swept across American vaudeville stages, sandwiched between the live acts. Over time, both artforms would take routes of both overtly subversive and mass cultural appeal. 

There’s a reflexive, intertextual relationship between both drag and cartoons in how they both do the work of signifying gender, and to the back of the house at that. From Morticia Addams (originally a New Yorker cartoon!) to Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, or anime to any number of current drag superstars, the mutually symbiotic relationship is clear. Depression-era star Mae West (of “Why don’t you come upstairs and fuck me in the ass sometime?” fame), when not lampooning herself, was lampooned in cartoons frequently. An early Looney Tunes short, Buddy’s Beer Garden (1933), is a pre-Bugs entry in what would become a long-standing tradition of the brand’s drag as beguiling stagecraft, this time through the lens of Mae West-style femininity, perfectly suited to the subversive wink of pre-code film and animation. Bugs Bunny would turn representations like this of genderplay on its head by utilizing drag as a queer survival tactic. I’ve always read Bugs’ evolved queerness as allowing the character to outsmart all others.

I have to bring up Looney Tunes again because this summer will see their first wide-released film since 2003 with Space Jam: A New Legacy. In 1996, Space Jam was a big deal for me growing up. Living in Chicago, even a queer kid like me couldn’t escape Jordan idolatry. There’s something to be said for cartoon characters sharing space with live actors. In films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) or, to a queerer extent, Cool World (1992), it is queerness embodied in showing what sets these characters apart from the quotidian reality of straightness and, at times, their failure to assimilate. 

This is all not to say that cartoons are completely free of straight tropes and that they don’t frequently traffic in grotesque stereotype. But queerness is still a fundamental aspect of animation as a form and should be recognized and championed as a channel for queer expression. And likewise, as drag becomes more mainstream as animation did long ago and seemingly less of a countercultural touchstone for the queer “community,” I believe it’s important to hold onto the ideals that made us freaks and use that to continue to build our queer utopias.

—

Philip is a writer, theatre-maker and PhD student, from Chicago, living in Atlanta.

The following interview and photo set appeared in WUSSY vol.09.
To see the full feature, order your copy at the link here.

Ryan O’Connell describes himself as the “Nora Ephron of gay sex” and delivers. His conversational style of writing, spotlight on personal subject matter, and wit, he’s kept the late writer alive for a new queer generation. 

“I just love all her essays. She was sort of like the original blogger,” O’Connell remarks. “Her voice was so bloggy.” 

O’Connell shares Ephron’s same bloggy voice that permeates everything from his Instagram captions to the dialogue in his show to the way he speaks. With his genuine grin and openness to any topic, talking to O’Connell is like chatting with your sexually experienced friend at a sleepover. A voice he’s had from the beginning and one that gained him a following online. 

As an editor and contributor at Thought Catalog a decade ago, O’Connell produced hundreds of blog posts sharing intimate and comedic details about queer life, love, and pop culture to an audience that grew with him. With a massive portfolio of writing that includes some viral features and essays, O’Connell had a book published at twenty-five. That same memoir would then go on to inspire the script for Special that landed him a deal with Netflix. Now, O’Connell gears up for the release of the highly anticipated second and final season of his show this spring. 

Taking a look back at his blog posts that started it all, O’Connell says, “...sometimes I do revisit and most of the time I’m embarrassed by all of the writing I did, but sometimes I’ll read something and I’m like, ‘She knew what she was doing’... the person that wrote all those pieces had so much to say and had so many feelings and just felt the need to express every single one of them. I can’t really relate to that. I felt like a huge, big gaping wound in my twenties, which luckily I don’t feel anymore... I mean I was dealing with a drug problem. I was mostly celibate. I was closeted about my disability.” O’Connell says the community created at Thought Catalog made him ‘feel less alone’. 

In 2015, O’Connell published his lauded “Coming Out Of The Disabled Closet” piece to Thought Catalog that would make waves and garner positive attention online. In the blog post, O’Connell writes that he has a book coming out that wasn’t the “Urban Outfitters Book You’d Put In Your Bathroom And Only Read If You Were Really Desperado” proposal that he had originally pitched to Simon & Schuster. Instead, he wrote a memoir called I'm Special: And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves that discussed his cerebral palsy for the first time. 

“The response from [the blog post] was so overwhelming,” Ryan shares. “Honestly, I felt my first initial reaction was like, I felt kind of stupid because I had been carrying around this secret and this weight that caused me so much pain. And what I realized through publishing the piece was that no one cared at all. I could have been out of the disabled closet much sooner. That being said, regrets aren’t my journey.” 

The piece caught the attention of The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons (or Jimbo as O’Connell calls him), who would go on with O’Connell to produce the eight, fifteen-minute episodes of Special. Semi-autobiographical, the show revolves around a fictionalized version of O’Connell who also has a disability and is gay. The main character, also named Ryan, deals with his relationship with his overprotective mom, first sexual experiences, and him not telling the full truth about his disability to his co-workers and friends. 

Immediately, the show broke new ground in disability and queer representation. In particular, the third episode portrays an incredible sex scene between Ryan and Shay, a sex worker played by Brian Jordan Alvarez. In the scene, Ryan hires Shay to have to have sex for the first time. As difficult as a sex scene between two (or more) actors can be to accomplish on its own, O’Connell explains that he faced additional challenges as a person with a disability. “When we shot that scene, we shot it in half a day. It was really intense, honestly. What I didn’t realize about acting is that you have to do something eighty times. So if there’s a scene when you’re getting undressed from a suit per se, that means you’re going to have to get undressed 80,000 times. And as a disabled boy, that’s a journey. Having to actually unbutton your shit and get out of your pants and get naked over and over again, I mean holy shit, by the time I was on my back I was officially on a Club Med vacation. I was overjoyed.” 

This intimate moment would go on to be called “revolutionary” and “trailblazing” by the press for its positive portrayal of sex work and a queer person with a disability having sex. In response to whether or not O’Connell knew the sex scene would become such a big deal, he recounts, “I think when we were shooting that it did feel, for lack of better word, special… [then] you get your first cut of the episodes, and you kind of want to cry because the first cut is the deepest...she’s not runway ready and even at its most bare form that scene was incredible. I watched it and was like ‘Oh, my god. This is without the bells and whistles. This is without anything and it’s still so fucking good.’ I’m really proud of it.” 

Looking at the second and final season, some excellent news is that the episodes will be thirty minutes long. We’ve been promised the expansion of Ryan’s world and more gay sex, so the more time the better. From the first teaser of the new season, the plot and guest actor roster looks juicy. Ryan seems to be in a love triangle with a new character played by Max Jenkins and the beloved Leslie Jordan also fills out the cast. 

While getting season two of Special off the ground amid a pandemic, O’Connell is also in development with Parsons and HBO Max for a project entitled Accessible. Described as a teen “traumedy,” the show follows a fifteen year old girl who attends a boarding school with students of all different disabilities. On where he is at in the process, O’Connell shares, “I’ve written the script, so actually right now we’re just waiting to hear back to see if we can get the okay to shoot the pilot….I was really inspired by what Pose did for the trans community in terms of employing so many trans actors and having the narrative really be focused on them. And I really wanted to do my version of that with the disabled community. If it does get made, it’s going to be fucking major. And I really hope it does because it will change some things in the business and the industry. First and foremost, the set will be accessible which is unheard of.” 

If filming the final season of Special and developing a new show wasn’t enough, O’Connell wrote his first novel this past year as well. Just By Looking At Him, set for release in spring of 2022, follows the story of a thirty-something television writer with cerebral palsy struggling with alcohol dependency. When asked about how he landed on a novel instead of another script, O’Connell explains, “I did not set out to write a novel at all. It was April. It was very early pandemie times and Special had just shut down production and I was feeling let’s say a little aimless, a little lost, a little existential dread vibes. And I just thought you know I’d been writing pilots and stuff like that for so long and working in tv for so long that I really kind of wanted to just try a different medium. There was something about a novel that I found so luxurious and kind of fun. I never tried to actually write a novel, I just wrote 1,000 words a day. I didn’t have an outline. I didn’t have an idea for a story. ….It was one of the more blissful writing experiences I had.” 

No matter the medium, O’Connell’s work has always been vulnerable, self-referential, and bloggy. He writes so honestly about his feelings and life hurdles, and that’s what makes him so attractive as a person and talent. Like many of us, O’Connell recalls seeing Ryan Phillippe’s ass in Cruel Intentions as the moment of his gay awakening. When I ask about how he feels about his ass doing the same for a new generation, he says, “As a creator, you always want to make the things you wish you had growing up. Growing up with Ryan Phillippe’s ass, while delightful, you obviously wanted more in terms of queer stuff. All I had was Queer As Folk, which reaffirmed these fears I had about gay society being judgmental and being very focused on looks...and I was like, wow I’m not going to do well here, like message received. So I think if someone watches the sex scene in Special and feels okay about themselves or feels represented… that’s why I’m here.” 

“There’s so much that still has not been examined and still has not been portrayed on screen. And while frustrating as that is, it’s also deeply exciting as a creator who can still not only push the envelope but hopefully cum all over it.” 

Special season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.

Photography by Ryan Pfluger @ryanpfluger
Grooming by Sonia Lee for Exclusive Artists using Kevin Murphy
Styling by Andrew T. Vottero @atvottero
Production Assistance from Meg Chase @videodisease

Sounding a call to goth, anime-loving queers near and far, PRINCXX has arrived with their fully fleshed out project, just waiting to be consumed.

PRINCXX is the moniker of nonbinary, Atlanta-based Blake England, and is a self-described, “immor(t)al non/binary/techno/wraith who's selfishly heavenbent on making nothing but tortured art with their time in the tangent.” The sentiment truly comes together when you dive into their new EP, Sorry It’s My First Time. 

The four dark, instrumental tracks transport you to PRINCXX’s cryptic, otherworldly universe—immediately, track 1 “R3V0L” meshes sinister sounds and electronic samples with a daunting and persistent melodic progression, like getting lost in a haunted castle in a world that is neither present nor past, but something else entirely.

And, like many artists, PRINCXX and their world was partially built as a result the COVID-19 pandemic, though the roots of this project go back nearly a decade.

“I have been writing pretty cringe poetry for as long as I can remember,” PRINCXX said. “In 2011, I splurged and bought the second gen iPad when it came out, solely for Garageband. I fucked around for years making little loops and morphing sounds. I recorded and kept fucking around until 2019 when I finally cracked Ableton on my laptop. A few months later, 2020 happened. So, I had time to really get into it and flesh things out, just trying to make sounds that I liked. Those sounds turned into a couple of weird, little songs that I was happy with and to get it out there, I'd need a name.”

Sorry It’s My First Time is the first release for PRINCXX, also the first time they are releasing material as a nonbinary artist, which they said is inherently part of their music and inspiration for the EP’s title.

“This project helped evolve my identity and got me to accept that I wasn't creating from the perspective of a boy or a girl, and I've never seen myself as either.”

The four-track EP is soaked in PRINCXX’s curated, somewhat sinister and often ethereal essence, tailor-made as the artist slices and dices different sounds, like haunted house effects, destroyed anime clips, even recorded traffic. “G4SP,” a song about “capitalism and being a btich,” and “D0WNR,” a “sad, punchy techno warcry,” act as two complementary sides of a coin, both sinister, persistent tracks with hard-hitting beats. By the closer track, “N1C3 GW4R,” listeners are treated to what is arguably the calmest song in relation to the other tracks, still soaked in the artist’s handcrafted atmosphere and leaving listeners to return to their lives having just transported to PRINCXX’s eccentric universe.

The songs are all bite-sized, just about two to three minutes each, but don’t need any longer to paint a clear picture of PRINCXX’s vision. A big inspiration for the project and aura of PRINCXX is anime. “Anime opening/closing theme songs are pretty important, because they're usually only a minute long but give you the full rollercoaster of human emotion,” they said. “They're so good!” 

Popping on their Instagram page gives you a visual array of inspiration and aesthetic often leaking out of PRINCXX’s music, like a screencap from the cult classic 1982 anime film The Last Unicorn with the closed caption ‘Screaming’ sitting beneath, or varied shots of medieval and gothic architecture.

“The only things I really like always end up being dramatic and/or dark,” they said. “PRINCXX is this hyperbole energy vampire persona that is just barely there, writhing in some abysmal dimension to some very scary techno music that hasn't made its way here yet. For me, that materializes into this nightmare-manic-fairy-princxx-gothic-horror-rave vibe that is just everything I'm about, fatal softness.”

Sorry It’s My First Time is released today, June 1st, 2021, along with the new, Hollywood-horror-themed music video for “N1CE GW4R.” Follow PRINCXX on Instagram, Spotify and Soundcloud for more music and news.

—

Keegan Williams is a freelance writer, copy editor, and artist based in Los Angeles, CA. They are a nonbinary Scorpio infatuated with goth stuff and girl pop.

Ahh, June. The magical month that comes but once a year! Originally meant to honor the rebellion of our elders at the Stonewall Inn in 1969, Pride month has evolved into another kind of spectacle. For many of us, the experience comes and goes in a very drunk whirlwind of glitter and mostly white, gay men in latex booty shorts. It’s kinda fun… But as the years pass and Pride dips its toe ever deeper into the pool of unfettered capitalism, I can’t help but wonder: can true liberation be found at the bottom of a rainbow Coca-Cola bottle? 

FX’s Pride—the just-in-time-for-pride-month, major network show—could easily have fallen prey to the lure of a superficial corporate monolith. Thus far, the mainstreaming of queer culture has, more often than not, resulted in reductive and one-dimensional representation. Thankfully, Pride evades such classification and instead presents a surprisingly conceptual exploration of LGBTQ+ liberation in the U.S. from the 1950’s to now. This is no doubt due to the fact that it is directed by a diverse group of seven queer, trans, and non-binary filmmakers. The result is, dare I say… artistique. 

Pride is composed of six, hour-long episodes, each assigned its own historical decade and director(s). Beginning in the 1950’s and ending up in the 2000’s, each episode acts as a standalone documentary and is unique in its visual style and narrative approach. In episode two, for example, Andrew Ahn utilizes animation to showcase the story of civil rights icon Bayard Rustin. Conversely, in her piece on the 1970’s, filmmaker Cheryl Dunye integrates a more personal storyline, focusing on figures who inspired her own life and work. Later, in episode four, directors Anthony Caronna and Alex Smith rely on the home footage of another pioneer of queer film, Nelson Sullivan, to capture the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the 80’s.

The concept of the series being an amalgam of multiple directorial perspectives is hard to follow at first. The individual episodes feel like deeply personal explorations by the filmmakers; which doesn’t necessarily lend itself to an easy to follow, prime time television show. But this is kind of what makes Pride so great—it doesn’t bow to the whims of a, perhaps more conservative, commercial audience. Pride succeeds where other docu-series like it have failed in that it is distinctly queer. Which is to say, it is subversive by nature. Instead of presenting a singular artistic vision or a clearly defined, chronological account of historical events; it defies norms by opting for a more collaborative and kaleidoscopic view of the people and places who defined important eras in LGBTQ+ history. 

The beauty of this approach is that certain lesser known heroes of LGBTQ+ history finally get their moment in the sun—namely trans men and women. One such hero is Christine Jorgensen, who became famous as the first transgender American to (publicly) medically transition in the 1950’s. In Yance Ford’s episode on the 1990's, viewers are given another perspective of ballroom culture that centers on trans men and highlights actor Marquise Vilson Balenciaga. The series culminates in a final episode by Ro Haber, spanning the entirety of the 2000’s up to the Trans Liberation March of 2020. The series ends on a poignant note, with trans activists Ceyenne Doroshow and Raquel Willis reminding us that no one is truly free until everyone is free.

What’s even more important than the level of inclusion and visibility offered by Pride, is the way that LGBTQ+ experiences themselves are presented. When looking back at LGBTQ+ history, the main take away is usually that “gay equals suffering.” We become so used to seeing all the anger and despair, that we forget, beneath it all, queer and trans people still found happiness. This is the ethos of Pride: to show LGBTQ+ people not just surviving, but thriving, making art, and liberating ourselves. Not a rainbow Coca-Cola in sight. From the secret gay and lesbian parties of the Cold War era, to the vibrant nightlife that underscored the AIDS crisis in New York, to 15,000 people marching for trans rights in the middle of a global pandemic—the series spotlights the complexity, diversity, and beauty of queer and trans history. Pride serves as an important reminder to the LGBTQ+ community that the thing that connects us all, across time and space, is not just our shared pain, but our shared joy.  

—
Megan Murdie is an Atlanta-bred writer living in Amsterdam. She is trying (and failing) to avoid Instagram @meganmurdie.

The following interview and photo set appeared in WUSSY vol.09.
To see the full feature, order your copy at the link here.

“Is that top from LOEWE’s Studio Ghibli collab?” Bowen Yang asks me as he takes a seat across from me at Primrose Cafe in Clinton Hill. I nod as he unzips his floor length puffer parka and reveals the same sweater. 

“Shut the fuck up!” I squeal as the waiter comes to our table and asks us what we’d like. In unison, we say, “an oat milk cappuccino with an almond croissant, please.” We cannot believe the coincidence. 

“Great choice,” replies our waiter. As we all lock eyes and start to lean in for a three way kiss, Yang appears on my Zoom window with a generous smile and hello.  

Although it’s not the ideal setting for my fantasy first chat with Yang, his warmth and gratitude immediately break down the virtual walls. The two of us start by talking about our Lunar New Year dinners, and I slowly reveal myself as a longtime fan. I had to stop myself from asking if he remembered when I went up to him at the queer Asian dance party, ‘Bubble T’, at Elsewhere in New York where I enthusiastically thanked him for opening doors for queer Asians who want to work in comedy like myself. 

Followers of Yang know him for his intellectual, coquettish presence on social media, his comedic variety shows across New York, and via his acclaimed podcast, Las Culturistas that he hosts with fellow comedian Matt Rogers. The two met at NYU (connecting over their mutual love of Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass'') and soon became a dynamic duo who’ve gained a cult following in the New York comedy scene. Yang went on to book roles on Broad City, High Maintenance, and Jon Glaser Loves Gear. Now, America knows Yang for his recurring role on Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens and weekly viral moments on Saturday Night Live where he currently resides as a beloved cast member after a season as a writer. Whether it be showing off his Chromatica jockstrap on Instagram or getting Eiffel Towered by Kristen Wiig and Dua Lipa on national TV, he keeps the gays and the girls fed. 

That being said, Yang’s work faces unwarranted online noise and critique mixed in with the praise and love that lights Gay Twitter aflame. When I ask if he can reflect on the positive online sentiment and reactions or if he has to keep it separate, he responds, “I suffer from a disease where I pay too much attention to it, and it’s actually like I hit a breaking point. I posted this unhinged thing on my Insta-stories and on Twitter last night, where I was just like oh wait, it was me releasing the valve in a way that I had to...I care too much, but anyone would.”   

On the stories and tweet thread, Yang shared his candid feelings about the negativity he’s received from his presence on SNL. “It’s so strange for me to do the most innocuous, unremarkable thing on the show and have a bunch of curdled motherfuckers flatten it exclusively along lines of race or queerness. It’s so strange and dissociative when people tell me I should consider not being gay and/or Asian every now and then in the interest of ‘range.’”

 Queerness isn’t even new to SNL. Queers have been in the writers’ room and on the mainstage for decades. From legendary sketches like “Gays In Space” to anything Kate McKinnon touches, there is a queer sensibility. What is new is the intersection of queerness and Asian identity that Yang brings to the mix. Because of this, Yang faces criticism from viewers that his white, straight counterparts would never face. No one would ever tweet how some cast member is always white and straight in every sketch, because that is the comedy default. 

 Yet amid the homophobia and racism, Yang prevails, and his thoughtful care gives us hilarious performances of characters and impressions that transcend his identity. Not only because he can, but because the references of famous Asians, let alone queer Asians, in pop culture are few. He has given us an impeccable Fran Lebowitz and Elton John, in addition to the beloved Weekend Update trade daddy character, Chen Biao. His talent is evident because he has to dig deeper and look closer at reference material and not rely on a similar look. 

“The turning point for me was doing an Andrew Yang impression and having it go over so poorly, specifically amongst Andrew Yang supporters,” he says. “I was just like oh god I need to rethink this...I tried to approach that in a very mechanical way and then it didn’t read. So my takeaway from that was okay, it needs to always be informed by what’s fun about the person or what levers you pull or what things you dial up and down about the person. For Fran, it was the mannerisms, the epigrams, the way New York used to be…”

 It’s not lost on Yang that we’re still in the best time for queers in comedy too. “I’ve arrived at a time when queer comedy or queer perspective on comedy is a widely shared reference point among people. I’m a beneficiary of that timing. I’ve lucked out in a way,” he says. And that’s evident in the sketches that have been greenlit to our gay delight. In particular, sketches that Yang and Julio Torres, former SNL writer and queer comedian, collaborated on together. Sketches like “The Actress” starring Emma Stone and Ty Mitchell (yes, that Ty Mitchell), where Stone portrays an actress searching for her backstory as the wife who walks in on her stepson and husband mid-coitus in a gay porn or “Sara Lee” where Harry Styles plays a gay social media coordinator for the bread brand, but lets his horny comments and captions about “getting railed to death” derail his duties. The week the “Sara Lee” sketch came out Grindr profile headlines changed overnight to “🍆 🍆 🍆 💦 🚂 👻”

That’s not to say getting these overtly queer sketches in the show is easy. Each sketch has to be presented to the host and given a stamp of approval. Bowen reveals, “For [Emma Stone and Harry Styles] specifically, I remember that part of the process very clearly and I remember being like wow there’s a lot hanging on this interaction of pitching it to them and convincing them that it’s a good idea. For Sara Lee, it was already a pre-written sketch that Julio and I had written for John Mulaney in the prior season….then they announced Harry as host. Then we were like oh, wait, he would be perfect for this… so Harry and I sit down and I tell him about the idea… and he is like let’s do it... I truly was white knuckling it until the camera started rolling on it because I was with Julio that night and I kept saying to him I can’t believe this is going to make it on tv..” Yang notes that with “The Actress,” “Apparently Emma really fought for it in the room and she was like I’m really proud of this and if it doesn’t make it to air I will be heartbroken is like the gist of what she said to the producers and then it made it.”  

Yang’s hard work and charisma is undeniably the reason why he’s had major roles in sketches as well. He plays opposite RuPaul in “Coal Miners Face-Off,” a Dynasty parody. In the “U.S.O. Performance,” he and Kristen Wiig perform a duet together to a Whitney Houston inspired bop. With Regina King in “70s Green Room,” Yang and King’s fast-paced banter compliments their undeniable chemistry. We’ve come to expect these intimate scenes where his talent shines. When asked what he attributes to these moments and connections, he humbly notes that “the big sort of goal every week, the mandate, is to make the host look good. And I feel like that’s what I try to organize around. I don’t always succeed.” 

In a previous interview on NPR’s It’s Been A Minute, Yang explained that the goal of his tenure at SNL was to facilitate a better place for the next person. His mere presence has already accomplished that, but when I ask how he is continuing to do so, he states, “I am internally setting some sort of expectation about what the next person can do to voice a concern. SNL is this place where everyone is in constant communication with each other and you’re encouraged to voice a concern if you’re not happy with something....I’ve had conversations with people there where they’ve been like ‘Oh wow, I didn’t realize that was a thing that is part of your sort of like existing here as a queer cast member or as an Asian cast member. I never realized that.’” 

“Hopefully I’m creating some general discourse around how you take care of a queer [person]...I think this is a learning experience for everybody and so that hopefully by the time the next intersexually queer person comes along, and that’s already happened with Punkie Johnson, but by the next time that person comes along or more people come along, that you sort of have some framework around knowing how to check in on this person’s well-being and creative expression and freedom.” 

Through mainstream success and his goals at SNL, Yang has paved a new path for queer comedians, Asian comedians, and queer Asian comedians. While it is frustrating that he is receiving any social media backlash about his work in the mainstream, we’re lucky it’s Yang who is at the forefront of this new representation. Mentioning Yang in any setting where queers and/or Asians are present makes everyone melt with admiration and gratitude. Every time I see him on SNL deliver a fantastic impression or intimate moment with an A-List host, it still makes me giddy. I never thought I’d see a queer Asian cast member on that stage. I know when I get to my first writers’ room, it’s going to be a little bit easier because of Yang. There will be one less explanation I’ll need to give about a joke, premise, or why I deserve to have a seat at the table. My hopes feel more like a possibility because of Bowen Yang. He is a strong metal ox that’s creating a fruitful future for the rest of us.

---

Photos by Justin J Wee (@djdumpling)
Bowen Yang in an outfit designed by Sam Branman (@tenyardsclothing) commissioned by drag queen Baby Love (@babylovebk)

“I felt a little limited only making very pink and sexy Y2K pop,” Slayyyter confesses. “Pop is constantly shifting and changing and what we consider to be pop isn't the same as 10 years ago.” 

Approaching new work with expansion in mind, alongside a wild short years of production, like a siren, the conceptuals of Troubled Paradise resounded to Slayyyter with voracity. “Dante’s Inferno inspired me a lot, thinking about what ‘paradise’ is like, concepts of good versus evil, and how everyone has a bit of both in their personality,” Slayyyter recounts. “I also went through a breakup and some dating troubles over the past two years that led me to write some of the heartbroken tracks on the project. The album embodies so many different emotions.”

Mostly penned within 2020’s chaotic surreality, in spite, Troubled Paradise cradled a creative clarity that Slayyyter found herself craving on multiple levels. “I feel like I was so isolated in quarantine but it helped me tap into my deepest thoughts and emotions in a way I hadn't before with music,” she shares. “I wrote ‘Clouds’ in LA during lockdown in my Airbnb, after feeling like I hadn't seen another human in so long. I took a better look at myself and thought about how I wanted to become the artist I was meant to be.”

The result is an astoundingly versatile record, fertile not only for the catharsis of romantic estrangement, but a complex terrain to explore her full range. Opening with the sonic cyanide of “Self Destruct (ft. Wuki)” and closing with the saccharine lovebomb of “Letters”, the 12-song studio debut showcases just what Slayyyter can do. It’s also a testament of how embracing the unfamiliar can bring favorable logistical change. “Releasing independently is definitely cool and I did it for a long time, but being on FADER Label has given me all the tools I needed to make this album in the vision I wanted it to be,” Slayyyter divulges. “FADER has helped elevate my presence in music so much, but they have also given me creative freedom to make the music I feel like making, too.”

As a truly Internet-risen Soundcloud star, climbing iTunes with “Mine” in 2019 to a wide exposure of fans, migrating from St. Louis to LA, connecting with like-minded colleagues (including previous collaborators Kim Petras and Charli XCX)... the frequent lump with hyperpop became long outgrown. “I feel like I found my sound on this project and experimented with genres and song structures in a way I hadn't before,” she says, delving into deep house, pop punk, trap and dub, to name a few. The 32-line bridge on “Troubled Paradise” alone, crescendo-ing into glory, is just one example of her masterful composition. “I grew a lot and have been able to put my feelings and emotions into my music.” 

Although the decades-long loops of inspired hooks, dance beats and melodies have perpetually occurred for pop artists at large, Slayyyter’s signature is club ready, underground AND chart-friendly. Her music has reshaped perceptions of how “poppy” music can co-exist with alt elements forward. Always remaining true to her core, Los Angeles and its associations have not necessarily influenced Slayyyter, though the setting has been complimentary to her ascent. 

“I am inspired by movies and music I grew up with... and pop culture,” she laughs. “I never feel like I fit in with a lot of people so most of my music and personal style is just coming from my head and things I love. I never really see myself as someone that fits into any particular scene in music or creative things.” Early origins of admiring icons like Britney Spears and the pop cult of girly youth, accessed through a 2000’s Disney lense, juxtaposed by Perez Hilton’s Hollywood heiress scandals, Slayyyter’s beginning bops, once bedazzled with bratty quips, have grown into an epic portrayal of a femme fatale clutching her heart beyond the party girl veneer. 

Easily described as unapologetic, sexually and energetically, now met with “hell hath no fury of a (horny) woman scorned”, Slayyyter’s Troubled Paradise fulfills a complex vulnerability intrinsically empathetic to a bountiful breadth of listeners. Visual accompaniment for both the title track and “Clouds”, directed by Munachi Osegbu, bolster the fantastical frills that Slayyyter’s signature bops deserve, all whilst emboldened by an apex of aching lyrical work. At the utmost candid of her songwriting career yet, Troubled Paradise reveals a side fans have yet to eye, soaking wet with sadness, sin, sensuality, softness and circling back again, full-fledged. Slayyyter has arrived in full form.

Released today, Troubled Paradise is available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon and more with merch available here.