#I'm taking up my old hobby of intermittently changing my URL

[knife-at-a-knife-fight]

the internet has many great things don’t get me wrong, but i do hate that there’s no option to be privately public anymore. 

Let me explain;  if i want to have a public facing career, then not only is my work considered publicly accessible, but my life is considered to be as well. You can google the height of your prime minister or the shoe size of a celebrity, you can know what stores they shop at and the names of their children and parents. Thus if you have a public facing career, information is either completely top secret or accessible to anyone. 

And as someone in performance, this always greatly concerns me. If you are a minority in performance, then your career is either based off of being part of that minority, or specifically on “damn, i never KNEW they were that minority, they’re not like other people of that minority.” There is no are-they-or-aren’t-they anymore. With visible minorities there is no separation of this, that is inevitable. But if you pass as majority, you have to choose; do i want to be typecast for the rest of my career, or do i want to never represent the community i hold dear to my heart in order to have more opportunities?

if you are trans and an actor, congrats, you are a trans actor, you will be playing trans characters. If you are gay and an actor you are a gay actor, here’s a gay character. if you are autistic and an actor, you are an autistic actor, you play autistic characters.  But majority actors still also get to play these characters; it’s fine when they do it, apparently. Minority can only play minority, majority can play everyone. And that’s... fair?

There is no grey area or privacy, if you do anything in public, it is universally accessible information. You can’t do a drag show one night and then be a straight character on a set the next day. Because there isn’t an option for that drag show to only be known about by the patrons present, the line up for the night almost certainly will be on their socials and their website and anywhere else. It’s not contained within the community like it used to be. So you do the show; you’re now openly queer. If you’re openly queer, you’re getting type cast -> you won’t be playing straight characters all too much longer. 

And if you play a queer character; well then you are going to have to make your sexuality public knowledge. Because everyone and their mother needs to make sure right this instant that a queer role is being given to a queer actor, even though it doesn’t make a lick of difference 99% of the time. So they’ll force you out (consider; Kit Connor) or berate you for playing a queer character and not being queer. There is no “we don’t know” option.

Actors are not their characters. Actors are not their characters. If your character is not a visible minority, why does it matter who plays them? 

And with live performance particularly; not all details need to be existent outside of that space. There are queer theatres that i cannot work with because to do so would be to out myself. You cannot exist in those spaces without being queer and you cannot exist in those spaces without being public facing, and thus to exist there is to be publicly queer. There’s no halfway option. 

It’s a detriment to your career and frankly unsafe much of the time. You can’t be yourself even in moderately private settings because “moderately private” is still public. And public is universally accessible. I can’t do a fringe show playing a dyke without that being universally accessible. I can’t write and direct a show for a school festival without that being universally accessible. There are no closed spaces. There are no niche circles and in groups. 

It’s all or nothing. And while there are activists doing important work to dismantle the barriers that being known as any number of minorities creates within given fields, that doesn’t change that it isn’t always safe elsewhere. “We’ve made it so you can be gay here” but i still can’t be gay elsewhere, and there isn’t an “unknown” option. 

I want to be an out minority in some spaces, and stealth in others. And I don’t want those to contradict. I want to choose how and where I exist.  Because the result is that I have to take into account my safety and career with every detail I share about myself, with every person I may be sharing this. Because if someone says something to the wrong person, or if someone posts something on instagram or facebook, then it can tank my career and I can be in a far less safe position overnight. And as soon as I determined - as soon as I considered - that I wanted a public facing career, then public exploration of anything was removed as an option. 

My career may well never go anywhere, but I have spent much of my life protecting that notion of a career and by selectively refusing to be myself.  There are no safe spaces when all spaces are made public information.