Q Magazine 2014 Issue

A Royal Drag Gay men at Yale Mental Health in the 1930s

Two takes on ‘queer’

Exclusive Interview: M. Lamar

State of the Union + state of the city qmagazineatyale.com 1

Generation Progress educates, engages, & mobilizes a new generation of young progressives.

Learn more at GenProgress.org.

2  Q Magazine  Spring 2014

Letter from the editor

Outside the dining hall my freshman year, I picked up a magazine, Q’s first issue, and read it cover to cover. Ten students in Y-emblazoned sweaters were arranged on the front; their stories were inside.

The cover reflected the mission: to give a voice to those who wanted to speak, not just to their accepting personal yales, but to all of Yale.

Those students came out with that issue, and many more gained the courage to begin their own queer lives here. I did.

Four years later, I find LGBT issues everywhere in campus discourse — queer reportage, op-eds, and personal essays appeared regularly in every large campus publication and wonderful online ones in 2014. Q’s first issue was a salve for a sense of isolation and a center of gravity for queer voices. Though we do not and cannot claim to represent any definitive “queer perspective,” we hold that center today.

The existence of Q speaks to a desire for a publication that is affirmatively and exclusively queer, as expansive, undefined, and sometimes troubled as that label — any label — is.

I used to say call myself gay, quietly, only to myself. Now I have dandy femme, ultra-soft butch, or tweedy suburban queer to choose from, depending on the day. Queerness expands. While people with alternative gender and sexual expression push for formal legal equality, many seek no such recognition. We are too many, too diverse to be conscribed to a single movement, single word, or single letter.

After the last students who saw Q founded graduated, in producing this issue, I struggled to justify the magazine’s existence, and it is here today through a tremendous effort on the part of very few people.

It may be that queer students no longer need a formal center to have a voice and a presence, but it would be a shame to see Yale’s only LGBT publication fade into the archives. As un-radical as a full-color, glossy queer magazine may seem, we are not ready to archive ourselves. I will say nothing as cliché as “unite” here. I merely say: speak.

The archives, but also the blogs, zines, and Google glasses await. Q — but, more importantly, what it represents — is in your hands.

— Rachel Lipstein ’15

qmagazineatyale.com 3

Two takes on ‘queer’ How does it look? 6 Who does it sleep with? 9 2014

Volume 4

A Royal Drag

A cat-walking tour of New Haven’s kings and queens 12

State of the Union and of the City The Rights Map Today & How New Haven Stacks Up

20 4 Q Magazine 2014

DROP ME A Q Q tackles your questions on dating, sex, and relationships at Yale

28 Reviews Dallas Buyers Club 30 Welcome to Night Vale 32

and the queer Yalies who sought its services

Yale Mental Health in the 1930s

37 Graphic Designer Rebecca Sylvers

We kindly thank the Undergraduate Organizations Funding Committee and the Yale History Department for their generous support. This magazine was also made possible with the support of GALA, Yale’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Alumni Association, and Generation Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress, online at GenerationProgress.org.

Ron Gregg sits down with performance artist M. Lamar for a conversation about slavery, opera, and the Negro Gothic 34

Managing Editor Ben Kline

23

Editor-in-Chief Rachel Lipstein

From the Archives

Yale’s LGBTQ Magazine

Elle Pérez

Q Magazine

Q is printed by Turley Publications, Inc., Palmer, MA 01069

For subscription or advertising inquiries and letters to the editor, email editor@qmagazineatyale.com.

Q Magazine at Yale is published once each semester of the academic year. It is edited by Yale College students. Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Three thousand copies of each issue are distributed to the Yale University campus. Subscriptions are available upon request.

Artist Spotlight

qmagazineatyale.com 5

Dress Codes

by Santiago Sanchez ’15

6 Q Magazine 2014

I

started using the word “queer” to talk about wanted by white men. I tried to hide my othmyself after my first year at Yale. It was a erness, my browness under oxford shirts and term absent from the working class Latino leather loafers. I messaged guys on Grindr whose neighborhood of South Florida where I descriptions read, “White only,” introduced grew up. Few words were available to talk about myself as James (the English biblical translation sexuality, and the ones that were—gay and bi— of my name). I hoped that my academic and arwere sufficient when explaining my identity to tistic interests would make me read as white. my immigrant family and friends.

I chased after these boys, thinking that in This ceased to be the case when I got to Yale. I sleeping with them I would be more like them, counted the Burberry on Broadway during Par- be brought closer to the white center of the ents’ Weekend in between puffs of a Newport in gay community. It only took two years to realmy sales-rack Burlington Factory coat. Through ize that sexual desirability had little to do with this first year, I dragged myself to 168 York for actual inclusion into a community. Sexual capievery Co-Op dance, only to find myself too tal, it turned out, didn’t translate to social capital. uncomfortable to engage the tall, white, well- Yale’s representations of the gay community condressed Yale men crowded around the bar who tinued to be particularly white and wealthy, with looked unlike anyone I had grown up around. I a certain classical Gant preppyness that I didn’t was getting dressed in my room one day when I and wouldn’t own. During this time, my friend overheard the white boy that had just laid kisses groups continued to be distinctly brown, while down my tan back tell my roommate that I wasn’t my sexual partners were almost entirely white. white enough to be taken to the Elizabethan Club (he said “the Lizzie”) for a cup of tea. ot long into my freshmen year, the term “queer” started coming up in Identifying as gay since middle school, I had conversations, in talks organized always recognized my otherness, wore it like a by student groups and even in lecbadge through school corridors that had never seen a boy’s ass in such tight jeans. In a city of tures. The range of when and how “queer” was spray-tans and Latin-American machismo, rep- used mystified me. I learned about its derogaresentations of gayness were few. To identify as tory uses, its reappropriation, its status as an gay was an act of difference that placed me out- umbrella term for sexual and gender minorities. side of the normative community, so I was free Yale’s intellectual environment, its vocabularies to be weird on the margins of society. At Yale, for theorizing race and socioeconomic status, however, gayness was better represented; it was forced me to reconsider how I talked about my more cohesive; it was more about fitting into the identity. Suddenly “gay” was no longer enough shapes, forms, faces, and colors of a well-estab- to describe who I was. lished community.

In the concept of “queer,” I found an ideoI measured my inclusivity and desirability logical shift in how I thought about identity and within Yale’s gay community through my race sexuality, how I understood otherness and comand class. I heard my brown friends fawn over munities, real or perceived. I’ve shaved my head white boy after white boy. I asked myself what twice in the last two years, a personal ritual of it was that made these white men so desirable celebrating difference. Both times, I was asked, to other gay men. Seeing friends toss back drink “Did you think you would look better?” Both after drink in tears over the a capella boy that times, the answer was “no.” Instead, in the words didn’t text back, wetting my own eyes over one- of a friend, I felt “ethnic and dangerous.” night stands, I felt an inescapable desire to be The process of identifying as queer involved

SANTIAGO SANCHEZ

N

I chased after these boys, thinking that in sleeping with them I would be more like them, be brought closer to the white center of the gay community. qmagazineatyale.com 7

SANTIAGO SANCHEZ

detangling sex and desirability from identity to recognize that whom I slept with did not determine the community to which I belonged. Gay at Yale had turned out to be all about this: whom you slept with, whom your friends slept with, who was sleeping with whom. This “community” I encountered was for the most part imagined through sex. Inclusion was a function of desirability, of fitting in, of being attractive through skin color and class.

Through a queer understanding of my body, I became able to celebrate the differences that marked it from the tall, white, well-dressed men I had

8 Q Magazine 2014

observed during my first year at Yale.

I ceased to feel pressure to be part of a gay community in which my race and class had little place.

D

riving down I-95 to South Beach on a visit home, I asked my friend, “What would someone here understand if I told them I’m queer?”

With his eyes still on the road, he responded, “They wouldn’t. They would probably think you’re a bit pretentious.” He said he only had one other friend that identified as queer, a girl who I was not surprised to hear had

studied at an upper-tier university in Boston. Some languages that contemplate race, class, and sexuality are tongues of privilege, from which many, especially those from marginalized backgrounds, are excluded. These languages allowed me to both articulate my exclusion from certain privileges and to find new privileges in identities like queer. I could be gay at home and queer at Yale, and still be my same self.

With the wind bristling my buzzed hair, I had found a shifting code that fit, unassimilated and at home.

QUEER ENOUGH?

by Larissa Pham ’14

H

ere I am, age fifteen, hair baby pink and shorn like a lamb in springtime, reading Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan, reading What Happened To Lani Garver, reading Brideshead Revisited for Sebastian Flyte, reading about queer angels, stashing all these once-banned books in my locker because my Vietnamese immigrant parents didn’t want me reading gay things. Here I am, age fifteen, wearing stripes on top of plaid, painting my nails blue-black and shiny, imagining a romance between two girls and writing it in undiscovered detail in fiction class, dreaming of boys yet never been kissed, thinking of boys, thinking of boys, thinking of girls.

When I was fifteen I thought I could be bi because it seemed like the best option for weird girls like me. Let me explain: awkward girl with pink hair growing up in Portland, Oregon, famed liberal mecca, with a gay best friend; drawn to YA novels with sleek, dark covers and chunky titles that talked about love outside of heteronormativity. If I’d known the word for queerness and its infinite flexibility I would have embraced it immediately but back then I was still sliding along the Kinsey scale, gay, bisexual,

straight, as if each were a fixed, immovable peg and I only needed to find my place.

*

“I’ve never hooked up with a girl before, but I’m open to it.” She’s sliding her finger along the rim of her drink in slow circles. “Would you?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Have you?”

I pause. It’s the beginning of my sophomore year and my sexual history still reads like a litany of coltish firsts. I’m eighteen and trying out one iteration of sex-posi, drifting through beds, trying to figure out what I don’t like so I can figure out what I do. And have I slept with a girl before? Do fumbling threesomes count, me the awkward third tangled up in XL twin sheets? What about making out with my friends in a caramel-candle-scented dorm room in Davenport College?

Am I queer enough?

“Sure,” I tell her. She smiles.

When we slip into her bed later that night I keep floating in and outside of myself, letting her hands rove over me while I stare at the off-white ceiling of her bedroom, wondering if this is politics or if it’s pleasure. I put my hands in her hair and feel nothing. I’m re-

minded of what straight people say to gay kids who come out young: “Maybe you don’t really know yet; maybe you just need to find the right person.”

My toes curl. It’d be fun if I could stop feeling so disassociated, scrutinizing my motives as she tugs my underwear down with her teeth. Maybe I just need to find the right girl.

*

For a long time, queerness—back when I only knew of bisexuality,

LARISSA PHAM

qmagazineatyale.com 9

JENNIFER MULROW

before it was about sex or even desire, enter. was a space for me to think about I slept with a guy, and all of a sudden being other. About being non-nor- my sexuality was no longer a blank mative, about being a weird girl with slate. Because there existed physical pink hair who liked books where the proof of my interest in men, suddenly I two main characters weren’t white needed proof of my interest in women, and heterosexual. I don’t know if I too. To identify with queerness was to was weird because I was queer or if I find myself in a space that felt safe and was queer because I was weird—that’s right, but it was also to make claim on a loop that could write itself all kinds a terrain I hadn’t proven myself in yet. of ways—but I miss the flexibility of You’re probably familiar with the way the heteropatriarchy frames that space.

I went to college and let my hair women who sleep with women, espegrow out, and the pink washed away cially bisexual women. There are two and went back to bleach blond and options: either you’re dead to phallic then I cut the ends off of my old self. culture and deemed ugly and unfuckMaybe I looked hip, but I also looked able by arbitrary standards of beauty straight, even if I didn’t feel like it. and femininity, or you’re catering And as I started to actualize with my to the male gaze with performative, body the things that I’d imagined, the “fake” bisexuality. Fifteen-year-old simultaneous comfort and inarticula- me didn’t kiss anyone, but she looked cy of labels began to make itself clear: queer. Eighteen-year-old me kissed queerness and its community became girls, but she looked straight. confused; a place I had to work to The queer community is ideally an

10 Q Magazine 2014

inclusive space, but it can fall prey to the same binaries that affect any cultural construct. When I began sleeping with women, or trying to sleep with women, or trying to figure out if I really wanted to sleep with women, I was often dismissed as a straight girl playing queer by those more firmly entrenched in the community. “You’re really bi?” asked a gay male friend, when I mentioned an interest in a female grad student. To be honest, I shared those doubts myself—wondering if I was faking it, wondering if my motives weren’t genuine, if I was just opening my legs to be open-minded.

I floundered for a few semesters.

Then I met the right girl. (Or maybe a right girl.)

*

She was frank with me about her interest, and I appreciated it. In bed I kept giggling, breathless; she asked

why I was laughing.

“I like you,” I said.

And as we moved in the middle dark I rolled the thought around and around in my head. That I liked this, that I liked it, that I liked her. That I liked what we were doing. That it felt comfortable and safe and warm.

The next morning I cobbled together a weird, hipster brunch out of Brussels sprouts and shallots and chévre

from Edge of the Woods. And we went to potlucks together, and sometimes I kissed her on the street, and sometimes we spent nights together, and it was nice. And it felt right.

*

So it made sense then—that night and that girl and those days were a year ago as I write this. Here I am, age

JENNIFER MULROW

LARISSA PHAM

twenty-one, with my queer identity finally something within reach, a relief; my bisexuality made clear and evidence of pleasure.

But even now, my queer roommate casually refers to me as the “straight girl” of the house, despite how well he knows my history. And when I kiss a boy goodbye on my stoop, I am, to all appearances, a straight girl. Even though I’m queer. Even if he is, too.

And until I enter a long-term, public relationship with a woman—which might be tomorrow or might be never—I’ll always be read, to some degree, as a straight girl. It’s a mix of my straight-passing privilege and the queer community’s tendency toward bi erasure; the fluidity of this identity impossible to describe or handle.

So how many women do I need to sleep with before I stop seeming straight? Do you fail as a queer person if you’re not queer enough, not radical -looking or -sexing or -seeming enough? Queerness shouldn’t solely be about whom you fall into bed with, so why do we demand evidence?

Basing our perception of identity politics and queer capital exclusively on sexual experience isn’t just irresponsible, it’s heternormative: by reinforcing the idea that a person is straight until proven otherwise, we neglect to create a safe space for sexual experimentation and self-exploration.

When queerness is constructed as something you must work to gain entry into, we run the risk of constantly demanding proof, when identity is in actuality a shifting, evolving thing. Instead of allowing ourselves the space to safely explore our desires, we demand praxis of each other; we demand evidence of sex or something like it, even as our desires may constantly change. Fluidity is a scary thing, the lack of words to describe what we feel daunting: just look at the open ocean, terrifying in its endless possibility. But I’m nostalgic and hopeful for a time where my acts and lack thereof don’t cast identity into harsh, unrealistic lights: where queerness is as simple as reading a book, and dreaming.

qmagazineatyale.com 11

A Royal

DRAG Gabriel Deleon ’13 takes a cat-walking tour of New Haven’s kings and queens

12 Q Magazine 2014

“Okay, keep your eyes straight ahead,” whispers a dolled-up Edyn Panache.

It’s a particularly icy February night; she, in heels and a feathered wig, and I, in battered Army boots and a gold head-wrap, are tacitly marching down the street. We’re half-dressed, in skirts and knee-length jackets, carrying bags laden with the scattered remains of our recent war with our wardrobes. With her directives, you’d assume we were in danger: but this is just the crammed road in front of Toad’s on a Saturday night. The crowd of rubes and boobs finds its reactions to us flutterbys somewhere comfort-

ably between ribbits and applause.

This walk—this night—marks my first official time in drag. Tonight, I am Derrierykah Badu, fresh on the scene at Partners Café, as part of a spontaneous “Dragapalooza” event. I am joining the mighty and mellifluous pair, Edyn Panache and Kyra Fey. Kyra is a Vietnamese vixen, Edyn a Mormonraised minx, and me, an all-black mess. Tonight, we are serving the Yale community a global grace matched only by a Unicef box, covering the color spectrum in skin and skein. After

opening the door to Partners Café, ascending into the lasers and fog of the second floor stage, chugging my two surprise free drinks, and sounding the alarm for a wardrobe malfunction in the ladies’ room, I’ve learned one valuable lesson: drag requires a fine blend of deviancy, delicacy, and destruction.

C

ut four months back to a basement on an October evening: this wide-eyed cisgender boy with a DSLR camera. While Fall tucks itself into Winter, the bricks around him shake with Beyonce’s “Girls (Who Run the World),” and dollars flail in time with the locks of brunette wig atop Miss Naomi LongLegz. Buried in the crowd, a prominent white-wigged maven with tattoos and dark lipstick grins toothily, a drag queen off the clock. Behind her, a macho middle-ager with muscle shirt and skinny jeans can’t quite hide his pudge, and a sistah with bangles empties her lungs in celebration of the Amazonian performer at the front of the room. This is 168 York Street Café, just around the corner, where the clueless take their parents for morning hash browns and the clued pay about $5 at the door for, amongst others, the black man wearing the mini-skirt.

This is, after all, New Haven—Connecticut’s cozy mecca of drag.

If you haven’t yet been drafted into our drag culture, descend the unassuming stoop of the unassuming bar off the corner of York and Chapel and glimpse into the dusty grated window on a Friday night. Find the queerest crowd returning your gaze. This room brims over, the scattered chairs and pews full with the fervor of any Baptist assembly. Locals and students, sweating out their weeks, tune in to the cramped camp of female impersonation. Queer couples wave singles and, at the song’s hook, thrust upon Ms. LongLegz some proudly snatched bills. She is one of five queens this evening at the Robin Banks Show, run and operated by part-time bartender, parttime hostess Robin Banks.

Robin (Shawn) Banks is your proverbial godmother, a wish-fulfiller with wings and a signature flaming

Kyra Fey / photo by mckay neild

qmagazineatyale.com 13

Dandy lions / photo by Larissa Pham

red wig. One would never describe her look as flawlessly feminine, or even just plain feminine. Yet, she is truly (in her own words) pure “hometown homespun goodness.” Her name derives from an early moment with her drag mother Dandy Lions (another local favorite). Where Shawn’s shtick was once “Barbie Q: The Barbecued Barbie”—outfitted with facial grill marks and a fake grilled tilapia in her palm—now he is Robin Banks, after zipping up a hoodie he brought to this bar, looking like he was, well, “robbing banks.” Ever since, she’s been pawing at the repertoire of Judy Garland while maintaining a haven for drag in an infamously dichotomous city, bringing town and gown down the same steps.

Robin’s work is wrangling and wooing crowds, and keeping them around, be they gay or straight, black or white.

14 Q Magazine 2014

She hires her talent based primarily on their magnanimity. This translates to a queen’s ability to invite, invest, and invigorate an assorted audience, rather than invisibly puttering about in a dressing room until her number’s ready. A smile goes further than a smolder, at least in New Haven. Here off the haunches of Yale campus, these unabashed and outgoing queens get their share of well-earned royalties.

D

rag is a moveable feast for Connecticut performers, the industry once again regal in a revived gay bar scene. In the past four years, 168 York Street and nearby site Partners have stayed mostly unchanged in a melting economy. Most gay or gayfriendly bars have largely rebranded themselves in the new decade; see

Centre Street Lounge and Gotham, now Exhibit X and Empire just downtown. Newer locations such as Pulse, just a block from Yale’s own iconic vein, Phelps Gate, attempt to seduce otherwise untapped queer male markets. With three floors, the club congregates and segregates by virtue of musical taste, the older white patrons on the top floor from the younger people of color in the basement. With these new sites, the avuncular wall-towall crowds of the smaller older bars in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s have been dispersed, as they scout out territory for new conquests.

168 York Street, with its pragmatic name, proudly claims its title as the oldest gay-owned and operated bar in Connecticut, officially for twenty years and unofficially for over forty, and showing no stretch marks. Bi-

weekly, its humble storied dining room is converted into the sequined spectacle I now behold. Apart from the feminine mystique, the space hosts leather nights, karaoke, and barbecues. With spare arrangements and no actual stage, each queen must be her own choreographer, makeup artist, prop, set and costume designer. Behind each performer, on an unremarkable dining table, a handsome bespectacled woman tickles a computer’s spacebar, playing new tongue-incheek drag classics such as “Love Your Vagina.” The crowd is always in on the joke.

Partners, on the other hand, infamous for its unflinchingly phallic portraits above the second-floor bar and thick crowds smoking plumes on its street corner, overcompensates in space. With its cozy stage hugging the side of an otherwise open dance floor, outfitted with mirrors, fog, and lasers, the bar hosts a notably more flexible drag scene. Neo-souled neophytes like me, Derrierykah Badu, can belt out “Tyrone” on one night, while fishy femme fatales like Lucia Virginity flex their thighs on other more composed occasions. Partners’ drag can smell of urban lust, when not opening the gates for the student rushes.

Lucia Virginity, like most parttime drag entertainers, has her day job(s). Along with organizing drop-in shows at Partners and participating in dozens more around the state, Lucia, otherwise known as Tony co-runs a flower shop with his parents and teaches cardio kickboxing at a local gym near his hometown of Thomaston, CT. “Drag is an outlet for me,” Tony tells me, but “there’s different ways people do drag.” This is clear: drag culture is possessed by fresh wit and a spectrum of styles. Adopted from the Philippines by an Irish dad and Italian mom, Tony, who lives at home with his parents, plugs in to drag partially as a needed escape.

For Tony, however, along with a number of local drag aficionadas, performance is not always for the personal or financial payout. Sometimes, it’s for the greater good. He is a member of the Imperial Sovereign Court of All

Connecticut, a chapter of an international organization of seventy Courts where queer, allied, genderqueer and gender-nonconforming entertainers perform for free and donate all collected funds and tips to sundry charities. The Court and its respective titles are loosely based on systems of European monarchy; members of varying degrees are Dukes and Princesses, Baronesses and Viscounts. Queer womyn affect drag dukedoms; cisgendered men fulfill emperorships. Every year in February, the Court holds a coronation for the next “Emperor” and “Empress” (not “King” and “Queen,” for, as the FAQ section of the Court’s site asks, “Don’t we already have enough queens in the world?”). The monarchs of the Court—including outgoing royal couple, drag diva Morgana Deluxe and his husband Taylor Reynolds, and Q Magazine alumnus Damiana LaRoux—organize meetings and plan events, as well as figurehead the operations of each region’s Court. Lucia, a Viscountess, has been a member for almost three years now, meeting once a month with the Court on Orange Street at the New Haven Youth Center.

They are always recruiting new members. The Court community is unsurprisingly small with about sixty active members split between the male and female line in “All Connecticut,” only counting a small proportion of drag performers in the state amongst their ranks.

the room itself, like a sauna, seems to sweat. Glitter from fresh and unfamiliar new favorites gets stuck in the air, and eager faces scrutinize their wallets for tips. It’s the mid-2010s, and drag is probably the best paying job a young marginalized queer can get, if he’s up to snuff, with an estimate of eighty dollars (with tips) for as little as half an hour of wig-wagging. For the Robin Banks show, new talent rises from the ashes of retired queens, but to even qualify as “new talent” you have to be willing to prepare four to five lip sync numbers a week, versus the standard two. To hustle into this roster requires time commitment and humility. “Bitchiness” is not allowed, which translates to competitive energy, diva self-possession, and excessive shade.

The cycle on this Friday night makes all this need for camaraderie clear: Naomi, with two other queens including seasoned Dandy Lions and Robin herself, deliver with a bevy of wigs and costumes. Some looks warrant such a financial response that queens can’t even finish their song without spilling stowed change onto the floor.

No one would argue for drag’s untimely death; in fact, drag, caught up in the mainstream machine, has become a hot ticket for entertainers of various disciplines to make a living wage. Robin Banks, before donning the diva, sought out a simple career in stand-up comedy at first, and still dreams of pursuing a one-woman

A smile goes further than a smolder, at least in New Haven. Here off the haunches of Yale campus, these unabashed and friendly queens get their share of well-earned royalties.

While RuPaul, half patron saint and half businessman, and her hit Logo television show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” have been gaining momentum (and #hashtags), small cities like ours with small city drag scenes have been booming. At York Street in October,

drag show. Another staple of the scene, Dixie Normous, has worked as a male stripper, a governmental corps musician, and a boxing announcer, amongst heaps of other gigs, before breaking into drag because he needed the money. Dixie Normous, since his

qmagazineatyale.com 15

robin banks / photo by Santiago Sanchez

initial desperate measure, has been prominent in pushing the envelope.

Generally considered the Queen of Raunchy Drag in Connecticut, she hosts and organizes burlesque shows in rented out restaurants and pizza joints all over the state, usually with a dildo in hand. At a show of his at Palmeira restaurant on Orange Street, after a stirring rendition of “Fuck Me”

by Wendi Ho (a parody of Brenda Russell’s “Get Here”), burlesque dancers offer strip skits to a cozy crowd of fifteen. Dixie’s drag approach is all an unabashed post-Stonewall libertinism. After fifty years of performing rigid straightness, raising a family with a wife, he came out without any time to waste. Now, he is always front row at drag shows around the state,

16 Q Magazine 2014

powdered and prompt, if he’s not raking in the tips himself.

For my new sisters, Kyra Fey and Edyn Panache’s side money was an enjoyable asset, an approval of what both of them expressed as a much-needed aesthetic outlet. Edyn particularly highlighted drag’s influence in her life: “I think drag arrived in my life as a

way of me finding my own power, and it was power in relation to a [Mormon] church that taught me to be ashamed.”

For McKay Nield ’14, the powerhouse behind the panache, “Edyn” is a denial of inscribed notions of paradise, an affirmed “eating of the apple.”

Kyra, known to undergraduates as Timmy Pham ‘13, follows in the

It’s the mid-2010s, and drag is probably the best paying job a young marginalized queer can get, if he’s up to snuff, with an estimate of eighty dollars (with tips) for as little as half an hour of wig-wagging.

footsteps of Karma LiLoLa (Alejandro Bustillos ‘12), both alumni with the biggest splash in drag in recent memory. Both Kyra and Karma worked part-time on weekends, driving to other drag meccas in Connecticut, like Bridgeport, before enjoying a night with Yale friends. Kyra noted her entrance into the scene as a selftaught young Southeast Asian performer from Seattle in a concretely whiter and hyperlocal milieu. “I think New Haven’s drag scene is older than most drag scenes and draws an older crowd.” Despite the flashes of fresh faces, the older crowd remains the primary source of patronage for the majority of talent in the city.

Both Kyra and Edyn had recently ceased their contributions to the larger drag marketplace as of last summer until February’s Dragapalooza event. For Kyra, the gender-play had become too much of a job while she tried to finish her senior thesis, requiring excessive prep and commute time to other townships. Edyn was a fan of New Haven’s fluid sense of community, noting that she “didn’t have to be inducted into the club in order to go dance and get paid at the club,” but she too ceased performance for other artistic endeavors. Unable to stay away for long, however, the young donnas were back at Partners. We reeled in a spectacularly smooth-faced crowd, from Yale Whiffenpoof to MFA Art Student: these are the pop-up shows that have pulled drag from its homespun web into the performance cogs of the Yale culture machine.

N

ew Haven genderplay has recently seen some heavy exploration in Yale spaces.

Apart from Edyn and Kyra pulling in campus interest, the Bad Romantics, a queer cabaret group, has strongly situated itself in the undergraduate attempt to widen queer expressivity in recent years, despite fledgling membership. Crystal Liu ’16, current HBIC (head broad in charge), initially frustrated with the depleted creative team, realized “usually the people who need us find us eventually,

robin banks and dandy lions / photo by GABRIEL DELEON

and then we just let them do whatever they want.” Their biannual show is a niche for “‘misfit’ performers,” she says, “people who aren’t as polished or experienced” The radical potential of this space, of course, depends on the volume of its operations, and unfortunately, according to Crystal, the demand for this presentation “honestly doesn’t exist en masse.” With such an eccentric and dynamic crew, Bad Romantics shows are characterized by their critical generosity.

The graduate circuit has recently adopted its own genderfuck tradition called the “Yale School of Drag,”

birthed by then-Yale Cabaret artistic director Ethan Heard MFA ’13. Initially planned in correspondence with GALA’s snowed-out reunion last February, Ethan planted the seed that has led to a second showing this winter. With a wide trawl for talent, from enrolled actors to designers and dramaturgs, the show is exclusive to Yale Drama School affiliates. To be involved, unlike the Robin Banks Show orientation, one need simply reply to an email. Seth Bodie MFA ‘14, or “Crystal Seth,” one of this past year’s emcees, goes “with the flow with Drag,” as it seems the majority of the

qmagazineatyale.com 17

Yale school of drag / photos by Christopher Ash

Yale School of Drag players do: high heels, highlights, high femininity. Yale School of Drag did one thing different from their professional club and café counterparts: the inclusion of female performers has stretched the veins of New Haven’s scene. Women played drag kings and jesters, drawing laughs with the buffoonery of male impersonation or—a revelation—the gloss of female-bodied fem drag. Rather than Marx Brothers-esque nightgowns and clumsy suits, in a rendition of “We Will Rock You / We Are The Champions,” a troupe of female performers played cheerleaders through the lens of drag: women playing men playing women, reclaiming a site of sexualization with power and human pyramids.

18 Q Magazine 2014

When the casting call for drag expands, a delicious foggy space for genderqueer drag unfolds Rooting for team “Queer,” the performance split the difference between what, for the majority of the show, were sexy women played by men and goofy men played by women. When the casting call for drag expands, a delicious foggy space for genderqueer drag unfolds.

Unfortunately, drag culture—outside Yale spaces—doesn’t attract crowds far beyond the wealthier white male gays of local townships or stu-

dents looking to support their immediate circles. Dandy Lions has noticed the shrinkage of the older scene; he sinks a lot of money into the materials to upkeep his jaw-dropping collection, yet still questions on grayweather days why he does drag. Even with the inclusion of people of color, younger queens, and new talent, the camp bell can only ring so far. Drag as it had been traditionally done is not vogue, not genderfuck, not queer

rap, not “urban,” not avant-garde, not grassroots politics, not really even trans-awareness. For many male performers, it is just a tickle at androgyny.

What would save our scene from falling into the sludgy straits of lounge singing and burlesque is an introduction of larger currents of talent, the type introduced by the Bad Romantics, Yale School of Drag, and the occasional Dixie Normous’ show.

Of course, Southern Connecticut is a fairly stagnant demographic. Culling up battalions of genderqueer performers is a longshot. Nonetheless, I’ll take this space to make the request formal.

Girls, giys, bois, and boys: flood the gates, steal the shows! We are already performing self, let us be complicit in our stage. Until a regime change, long live the Queens. We’ll warm the throne until the rest of court comes to play.

Yale school of drag / photo by Christopher Ash

qmagazineatyale.com 19

Los Angeles, California Nintendo faces controversy for refusing to allow gay characters in a new life simulator game. In the world of “Tomodachi Life,” virtual avatars may shop, play, and encounter celebrities such as Christina Aguilera and Shaq, but may not pursue romance with avatars of the same sex. Leader of the online protest, Tye Marini, stated that his only options were to marry a female avatar, change his avatar’s gender, or “completely avoid marriage altogether and miss out on the exclusive content that comes with it.”

Phoenix, Arizona In February 2014, Republican governor Jan Brewer struck down SB1062, the state bill sanctioning businesses to refuse service to LGBT people on religious grounds. The bill was passed by the state legislature, and immediately ignited passions on both sides of the issue, leading Brewer to conclude in an official statement that the bill would “create more problems than it would solve.”

LGBT Arizonans still remain unprotected from employment, housing, or by law.

20 Q Magazine 2014

State of

the Union Niantic, CT On April 8, 2014, a 16-year-old transgendered girl was sent from the state’s Department of Children and Families to an adult women’s correctional facility, and is now threatened with a transfer to a correctional facility for males up to the age of 20.

Though she has not been charged with a crime, “Jane Doe” is held in a cell for 22-23 hours a day in connection with an assault on a staff member in January. Her affidavit before the court details the extensive physical, sexual, and psychological abuse she has suffered in her early childhood and under DCF custody.

Around 50 protesters gathered outside DCF headquarters in Hartford in late April holding a banner reading “No More Trans* Lives Destroyed.”

The case is pending.

Philadelphia, PA Giovanni’s Room, thought to be the oldest gay bookstore in the United States, is closing its doors in May. Named after the James Baldwin book, the bookstore had been a home base and tourist destination for queer bibliophiles since 1973.

States with legal same-sex marriage States in which district courts ruled bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, but decision stayed pending appeal States with constitutional amendments restricting marriage to one man and one woman States with law restricting marriage to one man and one woman

States that prohibit housing and workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity States that prohibit housing and workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation only

qmagazineatyale.com 21

State of the City New Haven’s perfect score

Human Rights Campaign gave New Haven a perfect 100 across six categories in its annual Municipal Equality Index. In some categories, it rides on the coattails of Connecticut’s progressive laws, but New Haven beat out Hartford, Bridgeport, and Storrs on its own merits. It scored 5 bonus points, but missed out on 15 more, several of which we consider minuses.

Let’s break it down.

100 Vulnerable members of LGBT community • New Haven, once a primary locus of the AIDS epidemic, particularly shines in city HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs. The city's Ryan White Office oversees the distribution of $6 million in federal grant money to agencies such as the Yale-New Haven Hospital AIDS Program and AIDS Project New Haven.

• Ryan White Office looks to additionally provide mental health services, substance abuse treatment, housing and food to vulnerable populations, particularly young gay black men, the hardest hit demographic for new HIV infections in New Haven.

State has non-discrimination laws in housing, employment, and public lodging 18

Yale pioneering employee benefits • After the passage of same-sex marriage in CT but before the repeal of DOMA, Yale was one of only a handful of universities to compensate married employees for salary lost in federal taxes, or grossing up their benefits.

• The LGBTQ Affinity Group, a social and professional organization for queer employees and faculty, advocated for equal benefits on all planes and worked to educate members about them. After taxes, it is now focusing on negotiating healthcare and spreading the word about Yale's sexual-reassignment surgery and transgender-inclusive coverage.

• Fun fact: President Salovey, a Justice of the Peace in Connecticut, has officiated at least one same-sex marriage of Yale employees.

State recognizes marriage 12 City employees have: • Non-discrimination protection • Domestic partner health benefits • Legal dependent benefits • Equivalent family leave • City contractor non-discrimination and equal benefits ordinance

No bonus

• Grossing up of employee benefits • Transgender-inclusive healthcare benefits • Deemed a “welcoming place to work”

26 Bonus

• Services to vulnerable members of LGBT community

City services include: • Human rights commission • LGBT liaison in Mayor's Office • State anti-bullying policies

18 Fair enforcement of the law including a: • LGBT Police Liaison • Task Force Reported 2011 Hate Crimes Statistics to the FBI

18 Bonus

• Openly LGBT officials, including two alders and several officials at the time of the study 22 Q Magazine 2014

Leadership with stated pro-equality position 8

No bonus

• City engages with the LGBT community

Artist Spotlight

Elle Pérez

Elle Pérez depicts gender at its borders, individuals fixed in moments of focus even as their identities blur beneath our gaze. A first-year photo MFA at Yale, Pérez was born and raised in the Bronx; her first photographs were of kids at punk shows. In high school, she was able to graduate because she could escape, finishing classes at noon to work rock shows at the Knitting Factory.

Four years ago, she photographed people who were radically transgendered; since that project, she has been struck by the different directions their transitions have taken and the photographs that remain. Making a portrait, she says, “is about the person, and it’s not about the person at the same time. Photography is a fixed image, and people continue to move through the world and get complicated. Their identity is not fixed. The idea is completely at odds with the medium.”

This paradox—trying to capture something as shifting and ephemeral as identity— runs throughout her work.

Most recently, she has been photographing aspiring pro-wrestlers in the Bronx, who live dual lives between normal guys and hypermasculine costumed performers; she discovered the scene after her cousin’s in-ring alter-ago sent her a Facebook friend request.

Periodically, she still returns to rural Tennessee to photograph Radical Faerie and feminist communes she first began visiting as an undergrad. The pictures capture the transience, whimsy, and warmth of the intentional communities, in a pursed-lips moment pausing on dirt path or in the winking lights of the barn.

Several aunts and uncles have her photo of a barn hung on their walls, believing the banner to read, “Welcome Home.” It actually says, “Welcome Homo.” That confusion is part of the pleasure of the photograph; the welcome is all the rest. ­— Rachel Lipstein

A (from Conversations series) 2011 qmagazineatyale.com 23

24 Q Magazine 2014

Into the Woods series Clockwise from left: Welcome Home (Welcome Homo) 2011 Tripp at breakfast (Picked it Themselves) 2011 Bodies at the Waterfall 2011 Emilja 2012

qmagazineatyale.com 25

All photos Untitled, 2014

26 Q Magazine 2014

qmagazineatyale.com 27

DROP ME A

By Nathalie Levine ’14 and Anjali Balakrishna ’14

Q “My girlfriend and I keep trying to figure out how scissoring actually works. Every time we’ve tried though, one of us gets kicked in the face. Any suggestions on how to make it work?”

Before I drop any gay genius on you, I want you to know: we’ve all been there. The first time your straight best friend asks you about sex is to ask if you scissor all the time. You’re eager to try it.

Things get steamy, clothes come off, and before you know it…one, or both, of you is nursing a black eye. Scissoring attempt failed, and pride (and face) wounded.

Well put that bag of frozen peas down, because I’ve got the solution to your scissor struggles.

28 Q Magazine 2014

I’ve always thought that scissoring was a misnomer. It encourages you to engage in a delightful act in a very awkward orientation – I mean how many beds (or other love making surfaces) are the length of two people? Instead, think of it more like a pretzel. Grab a chair, and sit down on it. Your girl can then pretzel her legs with yours, which allows the moving parts to fit together in a beautiful way. As one of my friends likes to say, “you’re in the perfect orientation to scissor and hug!” It’s also much easier to communicate with each other this way – face to face rather than foot to face.

I hope it works out for you! And if you figure out how to do it lying down, drop us a Q. We’d love to know!

I worry that I’ll be judged by my radical queer friends because I fantasize about getting married in a white dress in a hipster event space. I can’t help it if I’ve been socialized to want monogamy and a big cake. What do I do?

Sincerely, Say What to the Dress Dear Say What, If you like dreaming about your perfect wedding – the converted warehouse/mill/barn/museum, the clothing, the first dance, the cake – then by all means, dream away! But remember that this dream doesn’t come true for everyone – on a personal level, we want to make sure that you can feel fulfilled in life and love even if this particular brand of romance or celebration never comes your way.

And moving on from your feelings for just a second – your friends shouldn’t make you feel bad about your fantasies, but they are right to question the politics of marriage in general. Even when same-sex marriage becomes legal in all 50 states, lots and lots of folks will still be systematically excluded from the privileges of marriage – whether because of their gender identity, economic situation, number of partners, or whatever. And that’s not right. I don’t want to rain on your parade, but we all need to remember that marriage is still a problematic institution that deserves our criticism, and that there are many people for whom marriage rights are not the most important issue.

If your friends are giving you a hard time, make sure they know you’re committed to justice for everyone – not just you, and not just gays, and not just people who want to get married. And make sure you are committed to it. Then enjoy your cake, and eat it too!

My boyfriend desperately wants me to top him but I struggle to be dominant in the bedroom.

How do I get on top?

When thinking about how to answer this, the first person who came to mind was my girl Tyra.

Faced with hundreds of beautiful women, she pushes them to think about one question: “Do you want to be on top (top top top, fades out, etc.)?” She pushes them to want it – to be in the mindset to take charge and be on top. Because gentlemen, being a top is not just a physical position; it’s a state of mind.

I met this really amazing queer person the other day. They’re smart, funny, and successful – but the only problem is, they’re my professor/TA/boss. I would love to hear about their experiences and ask them for advice, but how do I go about asking them on a role-model coffee date.

Sincerely, Young Queer of Today Dear Young Queer, It’s so easy to be like, “Dear Professor , You’re a woman in science. I’m a woman in science. Could we have coffee and talk about my career goals?” But somehow it seems way more awkward to go, “Dear Professor

If your partner is asking you to really fulfilling. If this is a boy you top him, he might want you to be love, keep in mind that you’re prodominant. And that can be scary. viding something beautiful to him; But it doesn’t have to be dominant, if it’s a newer boy, it’s your chance or scary. Remember – if he’s asking to decide the dynamic of your reyou, he should also be affirming lationship. you, and making you feel proud of It can also be a beautiful opporyour body and of your abilities in tunity for new communication. the bedroom. So while I can’t say Talk to him about your hesitations much about the mechanics of it, I - and if he isn’t receptive to them, will say this: use this opportunity in the words of Liz Lemon, that’s to empower yourself in your rela- a deal-breaker ladies! At the end tionship. Think about what you like of the day, do what makes you feel about being topped, and ask your sexually and emotionally happy partner what he wants from you. – after all, sex should be affirming This is a chance to give him plea- above all! sure in a new way, and that can be

, You’re queer. I’m queer. I wanna talk about it.” When I meet queer grownups who I respect and admire, I spend some time strategizing about how best to pick their brains and get them to be mentor figures for me. (Even advice columnists need advice sometimes!)

I think the best way to do this is to pick a specific question you want answered, and just approach them.

For example: “I’m thinking about grad school and would like to talk about what it’s like to be queer in academia,” or “I had an uncomfortable encounter while working on this project and would like to discuss it with you, if that’s okay.”

Make it about you – and if they feel comfortable, they might share

some stories about queer Yale back in the day, or their old activist pals, or something else. Be persistent, be respectful, and be appreciative, and you might just gain a new friend.

Don’t be scared. If they reject your advances, it’s probably because they’re busy, not because they think you’re awkward. It is awesome to have adult mentors who can understand how queerness fits into your thoughts about the future, your family, social relationships, your senior essay, or anything else. And chances are, they’re grateful to a queer grownup they once knew, and will be happy to pay it forward by chatting with you, Young Queer of Today!

Submit your questions to editor@qmagazineatyale.com

qmagazineatyale.com 29

Reviews

Dallas Buyers Club

by Andrew Wagner ’15 Amidst the endless stream of praise Dallas Buyers Club accrued over this past award season, an incident at the Santa Barbara Film Festival hinted at the film’s mostly overlooked (at least by the mainstream) deeper problems. At the festival, where Leto was accepting a “Virtuoso” award for his performance, a heckler in the audience accused Leto of trans-misogyny, shouting out, “You don’t deserve an award for portraying a trans-woman, because you’re a man.” To Leto’s credit, after a bit of back-and-forth where Leto rebutted the woman’s comments to the applause of the audience, Leto and the heckler met backstage to more thoroughly continue the conversation. Such a charge of transmisogyny brought some of Dallas Buyers Club’s deep issues of representation to the forefront of the film’s conversation, an important one that the mainstream still has yet to properly deal with. But, another issue of representation looms larger and above this issue of trans representation: that of the AIDS crisis.

Let’s back up a bit. Dallas Buyers Club is the (mostly) true story of Ron Woodruff (played by an emaciated Matthew McCounaghey), a straight Texan man who was diagnosed with AIDS and then founded a buyer’s club to bring unapproved and much needed drugs to the countless AIDS patients who were mostly left to die by U.S. medical institutions. It’s also the (and this is where that mostly comes in) story of a deeply homophobic man who learns through AIDS that gay people aren’t so bad after all. As it turns out, interviews with friends who knew Woodruff reveal that he wasn’t actually as homophobic as the film portrays him, and may even have been bisexual. So, the only mainstream movie about the AIDS crisis since 1993’s Philadephia is told entirely through the actively fictionalized perspective of a straight male, a deeply troubling fact.

Within this story of the homophobe with a heart of gold, queer and trans characters are largely pushed to the film’s margins. Beyond the trans Rayon (played by Leto), who serves as Woodruff’s assistant in the buyer’s club, the only other queer characters are the unspeaking hoards of gay men who split their time between lining up for Woodruff to give them their meds or dancing at the local gay club. Even Rayon largely exists as a foil for Woodruff—first, as a char-

30 Q Magazine 2014

acter for Woodruff to be repulsed by, and later, as proof of Woodruff’s change through his grief at her death. Throughout, AIDS is a problem to be solved by straight men, while homophobia is something they need to learn to overcome.

Some might see this criticism as quibbling, or as even attacking the creative freedoms of the film’s director: shouldn’t he be allowed to tell whatever story he wants to tell? However, I think it’s important to recognize that there is much going into this film that allows it to both get made and accrue the kind of praise it has gotten. It perhaps goes without saying that a film that focuses on the struggles of

Dallas Buyers Club

actual queer AIDS survivors (many of whom also founded buyer’s clubs like Woodruff’s) would not get the same mainstream success. However, even if nothing about Dallas Buyers Club is overtly homophobic, one might argue that lurking somewhere underneath its “progressive politics” is the logic that Woodruff, as a straight male and a non-IV drug user, didn’t “deserve” to get AIDS, thereby making his subsequent struggle all the more heroic.

Beyond this, I would also argue that Dallas Buyers Club actively works to rewrite the history of the AIDS crisis by overlooking the homophobic roots of administrations like the FDA’s reluctance to deal with the disease. The film is accurate in its portrayal of the official government response to AIDS: for instance, Ronald Reagan made no official reference to AIDS until 1987—four years after the disease’s first reports. Such administrative neglect was arguably due to the disease’s largely gay victims—indeed, AIDS was known as the “gay disease” for its first few years. The film does make reference to this: when Woodruff first learns about his diagnosis, he assumes it has to be incorrect given his straightness. But the FDA and its policies are never portrayed as being subject to the same sort of homophobia.

This isn’t to say that the AIDS crisis only affected gay men and queers, but that the film’s narrow narrative focus does a massive injustice to the homophobic realities that propelled the crisis and led to countless unnecessary deaths.

When that film becomes the representation of the AIDS crisis to mainstream America, it does more than just tell a story—it writes history. And such a history allows America to continue to not come to terms with the crisis.

actual queer AIDS survivors (many of whom also found-

qmagazineatyale.com 31

Welcome to Night Vale

by Emaline Kelso ’17

Fans of Welcome to Night Vale fill their enthused reviews of the show with exclamations at its surreal postmodern content. They relish the show for its powerful social criticism, and the uniquely prominent yet uncontrived queer relationship between its central characters. Today, the Welcome to Night Vale podcast is the #2 most popular on the iTunes chart, in between This American Life and NPR. Hearing the plot of Night Vale unfold feels like getting brief glimpses into a kaleidoscopic shadow world where domestic themes are inverted.

Images that seem isolated and strange

32 Q Magazine 2014

begin to recur often enough to hint at a coherent narrative underlying the behavior of Night Vale’s spontaneous and subversive cast of characters. The medium itself, due to the absence of visual narrative, guarantees a variety of subjective experiences for each listener; each person listening to the podcast perceives their own radically different image of the world and its characters.

Creator, narrator and Night Vale protagonist Cecil Baldwin spins his eerie musings to the fictional audience of the town of Night Vale, all the while unveiling the town to the real-

world audience of the WTNV podcast.

Alongside traffic updates about ghost cars and rants about the Apache Tracker’s cultural appropriation (that guy is a jerk), Cecil walks the listeners through his infatuation and eventual romance with the elusive scientist Carlos.

Queer individuals and queer relationships have appeared in the media with increased frequency over the past decade. However, few of the fictional works that reach so large an audience contain a queer central character whose relationships neither consume the larger narrative nor are fetishized within it. The show integrates current issues of race, sexuality, class, and education into conversation without compromising the tone of essential surrealism that makes it so compelling.

In a show liberated from the constraints of visual narrative, audience members have complete control over the shapes that their idiosyncratic Night Vales assume. Audience response to Welcome to Night Vale reflects two primary facts about current youth consumer culture. The magnitude and speed with which the podcast rose to the top of the iTunes chart indicates a large population that is not only receptive to but desirous of queer media representation. Thousands of listeners create Night Vale-inspired art, music and other fanworks, immersing themselves in this new online community celebrating and canonizing the show. Unlike in the show itself, where the main relationship occurs in Cecil’s rambling tangents alongside the regular community radio show, fanworks tend to make the portmanteau couple “Cecilos” their main focus.

The question, however, of how to visually represent these characters has come to reveal the majority collective conception of what a factory-settings

human being looks like. Despite the absence of visual description for Cecil (save being “neither short nor tall”), the vast majority of his depictions are of a white, often stereotypically Aryan, man. Similarly, Carlos, whom Cecil described as having “dark, delicate skin and black hair,” gets drawn with predominantly light skin. There are, in fact, fans who proceed to argue against his being a person of color at all. However, the dominant representation of cis/het/white characters and the absence of other options in contemporary culture has been proven to negatively impact the self-esteem of non-cis/het/white individuals. Not

find the story compelling, Night Vale sparks crucial reflection on the present relationship between the production and consumption of media and the possibilities of seeing and hearing new options for representative fictional realities.

The question of how to visually represent these characters has come to reveal what a factory-settings human being looks like. only that, limited representation reinforces a greater culture of stigma and system-wide oppression. In this context, it becomes all the more important to stop and contemplate both our notions and our representations of personhood and how we imagine the future. Night Vale for the most part places the characters into the hands of the audience, so in terms of racial representation the audience becomes as culpable as the show’s writers in shaping the fiction of the present – and, presumably, creating demand for a new reimagining of future media.

The show has the potential to feel excessively obscure, the quintessential adolescent nihilist’s wet dream.

Nevertheless, it has wide enough proven appeal, and whether or not you

qmagazineatyale.com 33

M. Lamar Interview by Ron Gregg Introduction by Rachel Lipstein ’15 M. Lamar is an operatic countertenor, composer, songwriter, pianist, director, and multimedia performance artist, “born,” according to Jezebel, “to appear in a David Lynch film.” He certainly was born to sing. Lamar’s work draws on the Negro spiritual, black metal, and opera to produce musical pieces that are at once soaring, jarring, and deeply haunting. He received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and left Yale’s MFA sculpture program to devote himself to music. His twin sister, Laverne Cox, is a transgender activist and an actress, currently starring in Orange is the New Black.

After many years subverting performance spaces across Europe and the United States, most recently at La MaMa in New York, Lamar began

Speculum Orum Blah blah year? tk tk

34 Q Magazine 2014

making short films and now has a feature-length film in the works. He grapples with black identity and homosexuality through the lens of slavery, bondage, and an encyclopedic knowledge of avant-garde art and queer theory. Hilton Als in the New Yorker writes, “If there’s such a thing as a post-structuralist, transgendering singer, it’s M. Lamar. While songs are his métier, he’s ultimately a performance artist who celebrates and parodies the very idea of the chanteuse: he deconstructs the persona of the diva even as he wraps himself in divalike hauteur.” Yale’s queer film professor emeritus Ron Gregg sat down with the deconstructed diva himself for an exclusive interview.

Interview has been condensed by the author.

Stills from “Speculum Orum”

Gregg: How does queer identity or sexual practice inform your approach to music, your critique that you embed into the music you’re creating, your performance, and maybe then your visual style?

Lamar: I always say that I’m a practicing homosexual but whatever agendas seem to be going on within lesbian and gay discourse don’t interest me; dialogues about marriage, adopting children, the military I find useless. All my analysis begins with what Bell Hooks calls “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Particularly if you are a black person, a black practicing homosexual, why would one invest oneself in notions of a gay identity that I think is prescribed by white gay men? Even that term “gay” is a fairly recent term. {Coyly} I mean the practice of homosexuality is of course, as you know, very old. {Laughter} I’m more interested in the behavior than in ways in which gay political agendas seem to be advanced. I’m definitely very interested in histories of deviant cultures and underground cultures, but I never want to locate any of my work in any kind of bourgeois, mainstream, status quo sensibility.

Gregg: Could you describe your style?

Lamar: I refer to my style as Negro Gothic musically and visually. It is sort of like the Gothic novel: I’m drawing on horror and romance. Horror is definitely the genre in which I’m working. That is really informed by a colonial history in the United States, and

I’m from the American South, so the Southern Gothic aesthetics are poignant to my sensibilities.

Gregg: So, thinking about your film, could you talk about your aesthetic in one video piece—I mean, how you approach it and what you’re trying to accomplish in your short musical video pieces?

Lamar: If you look at “Speculum Orum,” which is the music video for the title song of the requiem Speculum Orum: Shackled to the Dead—and this was before I started directing everything myself—I went to the filmmaker Steven Winter and said, “I want there to be this force-feeding, I want this dude to force-feed me using this device, which is a sex toy.” But the speculum orum was a device used on slave ships to hold the mouths of captured Africans open to force them to eat. So I wanted to use this sex toy in this S&M-like scenario to deal ritualistically with that slave ship moment.

[The final video] is different from my particular vision: I imagined these slow, long shots, where you just had to deal with this force-feeding, and I think it winds up looking like a more conventional video, in terms of all the shooting back and forth, and editing.

But I think that that video has a kind of detachedness about it. Those are very task oriented, opening the pillory and closing the pillory in kind of removed way.

“Trying to Leave My Body” is about a kind of melodrama, it’s this sort of

interior. I mean, I hate natural lighting and I hate nature, and there’s a kind of interiority about “Trying to Leave My Body,” and I think also about all my work. It’s concerned with interiority that you can’t escape.

So “Trying” is also from the larger requiem, from a big moment in the requiem towards the end, where this person realizes that they have to die— this really profound moment of death and loss and despair. In terms of representing that aesthetically, there’s a kind of over-the-top-ness and grandiosity and fantasy-ness. It’s almost operatic. When I showed my sister, she said—she used to do ballet—“Oh, I love the port de bras. I love the ballet hand.” There’s a kind of mannered melodrama that is happening in the very stage parts, in front of the screen in “Trying to Leave My Body.”

I think that something like “Negro Antichrist,” that video, that is definitely about constructing myth around a certain kind of almost fantastical black figure, if you think of like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins—he emerges from the coffin very famously before Alice Cooper ever thought of doing that. So I’m very interested in that blues man history and tradition. It almost magical. Not the magical negro thing, but this other kind of thing. There’s a different kind of agency that Screamin’ Jay Hawkins has in his construction of the magical negro from every Morgan Freeman role where he’s wise, or something like that. I’m not trying to do that so much as a supernatural vengefulness that I think the iterations of the “Negro Antichrist” are trying to evoke.

qmagazineatyale.com 35

Stills from “Trying to Leave My Body”

Gregg: So we wanted to know about your titles…

Lamar: My director always makes fun of me because my titles are too long or too academic or something. I mean, “Surveillance, Punishment, and the Black Psyche.”

I always want to get at these questions of invisibility around black identity. There’s the very famous Ralph Ellison Invisible Man text from the ‘60s, and then there’s Toni Morrison’s very famous response to it. She says, “Invisible to whom?” And in that one statement, all these things unravel.

Who are we trying to be seen by? Are we trying to be seen by whiteness? It’s just so deep to me.

[Invisibility] also seems particularly irrelevant in the context of the ways black men are surveilled and routinely policed and arrested and criminalized.

There seems to be a hypervisibility. I mean, certainly the world can’t see the interior life of the black man. Although I think Toni Morrison’s point was really a good one. I think she and many, many black women—and black men, for that matter—can see the interior lives of black men.

So I want to address this question of hypervisibility against a narrative of invisibility that people like Ralph Ellison have constructed. And even Marlon Riggs continued to perpetuate it to some extent. I think he was right in talking about a kind of invisibility in which black men were not seen or acknowledged within mainstream gay culture or homosexual culture.

He also has this wonderful essay about how negro faggotry is very physical.

And I think that is the thing that ends up being the most appropriated aspect

36 Q Magazine 2014

of black homosexual culture. You only have to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race to see that all the lingo, all of its origins are in black contexts.

Gregg: Could you talk about your current film?

Lamar: The film is based on “Surveillance, Punishment and the Black Psyche,” the music theatre piece I just did, but the title will probably change.

The piece is based on the story of Willie Francis, who was a black boy in 1947 who was famous for being executed twice. In the year it took between the first and second execution by the state, all these people began to interview him, which they didn’t do before.

No one was going to interview this 16-year-old black boy at all. But it was revealed, through those interviews that he was having a sexual relationship with this 53-year-old white man he was accused of killing.

My director said to me, “Do you know about Willie Francis?” I had written all this stuff using Foucault’s idea of the prison and the panopticon from Discipline and Punish and also Franz Fanon’s work, internalized racism, and trying to negotiate these ideas.

But Willie Francis’ story made it very concrete, less theoretical. Then in exploring that narrative, I started thinking, How do we end up in the moment of interracial homosex? I was trying to imagine what it would be like on plantations. So I started trying to research, thinking, Well, of course, all these scholars have looked into interracial homosex on plantations, and apparently they haven’t. So I had to make it up.

So there’s the 1947 discourse of facing death, but then it time-travels

to 1847, trying to imagine what the sexual/cultural context would be around a slave boy who would consent—consent is always complicated in a slave context, what does that really mean?—but who would consent to have sex with the master. What would that look like? And how does that mirror interracial homosexual dynamics in 1947 via Willie Francis and the man he was accused of killing, and now.

The whole piece is about trying to recover a kind of black subjectivity.

Gregg: Having seen you perform, what I love is the combination of the voice and what you’re doing with the voice and what you’re singing. But visuals are such a strong part of it, and your body, how you’ve decided to present yourself. I don’t know if you would call this [gestures at body] goth punk…

Lamar: I would. I would, I would…

Gregg: …but it also is like a haunting Caligari-esque image that evokes the horror, the legacy of what you’re looking at, the lynching, the slave ships— Lamar: It’s just funny because coming out of these kinds of rock subcultures, it always made sense to me that slavery is this particular horror that you would see in that way. I just imagine or at least hope that there will be this whole school of young goth punk black boys making post-colonial work with this particular kind of aesthetic.

It’s sort of strange that this doesn’t already exist now. It just sort of seems like it would have to, but it doesn’t.

From the Archives

Achieving Heterosexual Orientation

Homosexuality and Mental Hygiene at Yale in the Interwar Years

by Ben Kline ’14 A gay Yale senior, let’s call him boarding school, but now believes Ben, walks into DUH because he is what he did was wrong; that he wants worried about his friend, “Henry,” to be straight; that he dates women who has been too embarrassed to and tries unsuccessfully to have sex ask for help himself. Henry appears with them; that he now drinks to be to be developing a drinking problem, left alone, to make himself sexually Ben tells the psychiatrist who attends undesirable, to Ben, to a female friend, him. Henry desperately wants to get to an older woman that also wants to laid, and drinks for the courage to talk sleep with him; that sometimes he to girls, to “try to make them under- thinks of suicide. H begins treatment. stand him.” He is confused, Ben says, “After several months his personality and needs to “develop a faith in people seemed to be better organized,” his and to find love for himself.” Ben tells psychiatrist will write. “And he was the psychiatrist that he is in love with fortified by a full understanding of H, but doesn’t want to hurt him. H himself, of his relation to other people, finally agrees to talk to the therapist of his sexual experience.” Henry gradhimself. He reveals that he grew up uates from Yale and gets married and in a family with a history of mental ill- is doing fine. He has “made a good adness and a domineering mother; that justment in his personal life.” he had an affair with a gay teacher at We know of “Henry,” because his

case appears – coded only as H5 – in a 1942 book called Mental Health at College, written by Clements C. Fry and Edna Rostow, two psychiatrists with the Yale Department of Undergraduate Health’s Mental Hygiene Division.

The service, which only in the last decade changed its name to Mental Health and Counseling, had been around for almost two decades at the time of the book’s publishing. In fact, the founder of the modern mental hygiene movement, Clifford Beers 1897 was a New Haven native and a Yale graduate; a clinic on Edwards Street, founded in 1913, still bears his name.

As Fry and Rostow explained in the introduction to their book that, the push for mental hygiene in university communities occurred in opposition

qmagazineatyale.com 37

to prevailing thought that adherence why another is a drifter, why a third to “common sense,” not mental well- antagonizes people and rebels against ness, was the path to survival and suc- authority.” It was Freudian detective cess in college.

There was another why that theraWe can tell something about the pist and student alike were seeking in earnestness with which Yale took on Fry’s clinic: why students felt homothese challenges from the fact that sexual desire. According to his own between 1928 and 1932, mental health statistics, thirty-nine percent of the screenings were mandatory for all patients treated in the period under matriculants to Yale. This policy was question had problems with sex. For a scrapped when Yale psychiatrists con- third of them, sexual activity was limcluded that their services would be ited to masturbation. Two thirds of the both more effective should students group engaged with heterosexual foreseek help on their own volition as play and intercourse. About one tenth they began to confront the challenges of the men (“a very small group”) were, of adjusting to college. Yale men in or feared they were, homosexuals. need of psychiatric care, stressed Dr. According to Fry, most of these fears Fry, were not necessarily suffering were baseless. He wrote that while from a mental disorder; in fact, they most boys grow out of homosexual probably weren’t. “All but a few of the behavior after adolescence a certain patients treated by a college mental number never transition into hethygiene department,” he wrote in erosexuality by the time they reach the introduction to Mental Health at college, due to their contradictory College, “are so-called ‘normal’ boys, personalities and abnormal sexual who react at times, according to the development. Of these, some “are circumstances of their lives, in much quite clearly deviates in sex impulse,” the same way as those who are popu- - e.g. “Ben” in the story above – while larly considered ‘abnormal.’” The job others – his pal “Henry” are, by nature, of the psychiatrist, then, as he put it not. Fry sketches the typical case of a to a class of freshman counselors in man who fears homosexuality: He is 1938, is “to learn why one student fails, immature, insecure, anxious, plagued

38 Q Magazine 2014

by religious guilt. He has a strained relationship with his family, trouble making friends at school, so much so that even the smallest shows of kindness lead to attachment and dependence. It is easy for true sexual deviates to prey on them and “become directors of their destinies.”

Visually, one could imagine Fry’s view towards homosexuality in a flowchart. There are those who have and satisfy homosexual urges as adolescents. Of those men who do not grow out of it, some continue this behavior guiltily through college, becoming aware that these thoughts and actions fall under the stigmatizing label of homosexuality. Some of these men, such as “Henry,” respond to psychiatric treatment and “achieve heterosexual orientation.” Some do not, and instead make what Fry calls a “homosexual adjustment.” One freshman, once finding himself in Yale’s homosocial bubble, awoke to his homosexual orientation and accepted it as fact, albeit one that provoked suicidal thoughts.

The purpose of his treatment became, therefore, was not to ‘cure’ him of homosexuality, but to adjust him to an outlook that could begrudgingly accommodate it. Another student who was pushed too hard to “conquer” his homosexuality later suffered a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Fry’s evident preference to adjustment over forced change in his patients’ orientation bears a strong resemblance to that described by pioneering British sexologist Havelock Ellis in his 1897 book Sexual Inversion. “I am inclined to say that if we can enable an invert to be healthy, selfrestrained and selfrespecting, we have often done better than to convert him into the mere feeble simulacrum of a normal man,” wrote Ellis. “An appeal to the paiderastia of the best Greek days, and the dignity, temperance, even chastity, which it involved, will sometimes find a ready response in the emotional, enthusiastic nature of the congenital invert.” He recommended Plato’s Dialogues and, with some reservation, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as books that could encourage

gay men to embrace exclusively the celibate side of their orientation. We cannot believe, however, that Yale psychiatrists encouraged most students questioning their sexuality to trade in their fiancés for Walt Whitman, or that this adjustment was permanent and successful. Many of the patients in Mental Health at College do marry women soon after college. One “consciously established homosexual” sought treatment only upon realizing the professional disadvantages which a post-college gay lifestyle offered; he tells the woman he marries about “the essential facts of his history.”

Fry’s wording is melodramatic, but through his examples and his analysis an administrator’s view of gay life at Yale comes into focus. Homosexuals were popular; they held powerful positions within the campus arts scene.

Delicate, impressionable students, drawn by their interests into dance or a capella, often developed sexual relationships with their older mentors. One undergraduate patient, a during World War II. Among the goals dancer, “found that his work threw of the study was to reassess the milihim with people who were inclined tary’s mental health screening system. toward homosexuality and he feared In an effort to reduce the number of being absorbed irrevocably into that “neuropsychiatric” casualties – i.e. group.” Other students fell in with gay soldiers whose mental health makes social circles in New York, as well as them unfit for combat – the Selective “the older men who make the rounds Service had adopted strict regulaof the academic communities,” both tions to determine whether draftees alumni and visiting scholars. Gay stu- and recruits were mentally healthy dents appear to have been tolerated by enough to fight. Using his own data, the Yale administration as long as they Fry classified his subjects as “severe,” do not “become disciplinary prob- “moderate,” or “mild” sufferers of psylems,” apparently including when they chosis, homosexuality, psychoneu“accost a student outside their group,” rosis, and psychopathic personality. falling in line with the prevalent fear After cross-referencing his diagnoses of homosexual seduction which today with the same subjects’ acceptability might be phrased in terms of sexual under Selective Service regulations, harassment.

Fry concluded: “In all the psychiatric For many of the students seen at the categories, a very large percentage of Department of Student Health under persons who should have been rejectDr. Fry’s supervision, their treatment ed, according to prevailing opinion, did not end with graduation. Starting were accepted for service, the majorin 1943, the year following the publish- ity as officers, and performed their ing of Mental Health in College, Fry military duties adequately, often with received funding from the National distinction.” In other words, the army, Research Council and later the War assuming homosexual soldiers would Department, to engage in a follow- be a liability, had unwittingly accepted up study of 1198 of his Yale patients, many of them for service. “Negative as well as 819 of their Harvard peers, aspects of the individual’s emotional who had entered military service history in civil life are only one, and

Photographs from Manuscripts and Archives Collection “Student Life at Yale”

may not necessarily be the most important of the factors which make him an emotional casualty,” wrote Fry, in the study’s 1950 final report.

It is less than a five minute walk from Hillhouse to Woolsey Hall, a trek Yalies have been making daily for over a century. The names of the war dead engraved in the marble walls are at most merely names, if not blurs in our peripheral vision on our way from this to that. Poor statistics, response bias, and archaic psychological theory prevent us from knowing exactly how many Yale students in the twenties and thirties were “really” homosexuals, how many of those went to Clements Fry’s clinic for help, how many married, how many were accepted into the Service and how many gave their lives. We don’t know how many had lovers in New York, fantasized guiltily about their suitemates, turned to the bottle or the rosary or Plato to try and not feel the way they felt. We don’t know because no one asked and very few told. But they were there.

qmagazineatyale.com 39

Graduating doesn’t conclude your relationship with Yale.

In some ways, it’s only the beginning...

YALE GALA Yale University’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Alumni Association

Yale’s LGBT Alumni Association congratulates the 2014 graduates and welcomes everyone to join us for our Pride events.

For more info, visit www.yalegala.org 40 Q Magazine Spring 2014