#as a small town queer who had a lot of Feelings with a capital F about attending pride for the first time. well

[mamawasatesttube]

a tuppence for your bi4bi Clois thoughts 🪙... I'm luv them so much and I'd love to hear if you have any specific headcanons about them 🥺

YESSSS!!! i DO have some thoughts. i love them,

generally i think lois has her bisexuality figured out by the time she's in her mid-20s. she and cat grant have had some rage-filled makeouts on at least one occasion, but an actual relationship would never in a million years work out between them. they respect each other but do not see eye to eye nearly enough. she never bothered to come out to her father, but just knows it's one more thing about her that he'd hate.

clark, by contrast, does Not have it figured out. he has spent his entire life repressing every single thought, feeling, and ability that set him apart from the classic good all-american boy because he had to fit in. and being superman, exploring his kryptonian heritage, etc., has helped, of course, but he is still. so repressed. he has no idea that he's ever experienced attraction to guys before. he's got some internalized homophobia to work through, about himself. He Has To Be Normal. so as far as he's concerned, there was lana, and then there was lois.

to me, clark's journey toward self-acceptance is very intrinsically tied to his family. there's kara, talking about how sexuality and gender stuff on krypton wasn't like it is on earth, especially in western culture. there's kon, suffering through his own repression and depression and trying to pretend he's fine. there's chris and jon, both too young to fully grasp it all (probably), who make clark incredibly aware of every step he makes in terms of parenting them.

so one day, after kon's finally come out to the family, and kara's muddled through trying to figure out earth labels that she's comfortable with, the two of them decide they wanna go to pride, and ask lois and clark if they want to make it a family affair. lois says hell yeah, and clark says yes of course he's happy to support them! and jon says YAY, GLITTER!! CAN I GET STICKERS? and chris says if you get glitter all over my nintendo ds again i will punt you into the ocean, baby brother or not.

and there's just this innocuous moment while they're out when kon goes "here i got you these!" and hands lois and clark two simple lil heart-shaped bi flag buttons. and lois is like aw thanks squirt! and ruffles kon's hair. clark meanwhile goes oh i think there's been a misunderstanding... ... . . . .. . .. .. . or. has there?

and that night he's just sitting on the edge of the bed holding this tiny like $3 button in his hands having a whole crisis. lois hooks her chin over his shoulder and asks what's wrong? and he's like. lois i'm not. i'm. except maybe i'm not not. but i don't know, i thought i... i never thought i could think about it. clark kent is supposed to be normal. i... i'm already an alien, lois, i thought i was already set apart enough, and if i'm... if i'm this, even when i'm clark, not superman, then... then...

and lois digs her matching little $3 bi flag heart button out of her purse and bumps it against his and says, even if you are queer, you're still not alone. and then clark gives her the patented kent family big soft puppy-dog eyes. that night, he falls asleep in her arms with his head tucked snugly under her chin. it's where he feels safest.

but the next year, he lets kara get him a flag, and lets kon tie it around his shoulders like a cape. and he's here as clark kent, but it's kind of funny when he looks at his shadow. because he might not be superman right now, but the silhouette still looks the same.

[bogkeep]

i remember the shift, when i went from being "some random kid online who likes to draw" to "popular fanartist within a small community". it was on the fan forum for a webcomic nearly a decade ago. i had been posting my art on tumblr for a couple years already, usually getting between 0 and 15 notes on each, with a couple exceptions here and there. as you can probably imagine, being an awkward queer and autistic teen had never made me feel particularly popular before. i wasn't really lonely, personally, though many of my peers are and were, but the idea of many people actively wanting to be my friend and thinking i was genuinely cool - that was incredibly novel.

i have always loved getting attention for my work and find people interested in what i have to say. like, who doesn't? it was a very fulfilling and inspiring experience when it started happening to me on a regular basis, to the point where i could expect it. i went from being constantly apologetic about how annoying i imagined myself to be to others, to feeling confident that at least some people were excited to have me around. absolutely revolutionary to realize that people weren't just pretending to like me, they liked me for realsies, and that putting myself out there and being sincere and genuine in my enthusiasm and interest was actually a positive trait many people valued. wild!!!!!!!!

when you come from a place like that, of course you try to be everyone's friend. that's the scarcity mindset. you have to hold on to every friendship ever offered to you because it's such a rare and precious thing and you don't know when or even if it might happen again. but if you get Popular, well, at some point you learn that you can only nurture so many friendships at once, and that you can't click with everyone. like, it only makes sense. but it sucks!! learning the necessity of rejecting people and letting them down is a harrowing journey, but one that must be made.

there's many deeply lonely people out there, especially online, a space of Connection. connections to other people are so good and necessary and being lonely is an awful thing to be. this means there's a lot of people who can't even imagine not wanting more friends, let alone not be constantly looking for some. it's always a bit of a tragedy when a Very Lonely Person tries to attach themselves to someone Socially Overencumbered, as that's highly unlikely to end satisfyingly for anyone involved.

anyway, i think capital f Fame is like that, but times a hundred thousand. it's deeply fascinating to me how Fame is treated as this deeply aspirational state when it's proven again and again to be a cruel and abusive mistress. like, i understand - don't we all want some attention, some validation, for someone to recognise us on the street with stars in their eyes, like OH you're the COOL PERSON who did the COOL THING and i want nothing more than a HUG and a SELFIE and also i made you this HAND MADE GIFT and PAINTED A PORTRAIT OF YOU... that's the dream, isn't it!! to be recognized for your skill, to be admired, desired! THAT'S WHAT EVERYONE WANTS, ISN'T IT.

but it isn't.

there's a limit to everything. there's a whole spectrum of Getting Attention and Validation between "literally everybody ignores you and everything you do" and "paparazzi follow you everywhere you go" - and i can promise that you can find a lot of fulfilment and joy on the lower end of that scale. it's difficult to explain sometimes, especially to people who get No Attention - it's like telling someone who is starving that the most expensive restaurant in town isn't really worth the hassle, a good affordable sandwich will make you so much happier, trust me. like maybe it's just personal preference and what i can personally tolerate! but i had merely a whiff, a crumb of what they serve at that place, and it's Not That Good. easy for me to say huh!!!!

i'm basically a nobody on the wider web, but i've still had my fair share of unpleasant stranger interactions both of the rude and overly familiar variations. i've been treated as a commodity rather than a person. i've been put on a pedestal and dragged through the mud by the same people. it kinda sucks!! and i don't want to tell people that they should never ever put themselves and their art out there because people might be cruel, because that shouldn't be the expectation! yet for some reason, it is!!!! people experiencing Fame have to deal with all kinds of inhumanely horrible things literally no human person is equipped to experience. many people say that's the price people pay for fame, but that's said by people who haven't experienced even a Fraction of the stochastic terrorism an Audience can do to you if they choose. not all attention is good attention.

i know none of this is a fresh new hot take. i know we all know stalking is unethical and traumatic. but i am still so fascinated by the divide between people who don't understand why anyone would reject any form of adoration and those who have to work very, very hard to keep their boundaries intact.

[nofomoartworld]

Art F City: Long Live Dusty Whistles’s New Flesh (with no apologies to David Cronenberg)

Dusty Whistles

It amazes me that we still talk about drag as if it is anything but performance art. Yes, there are degrees of drag, which makes it hard to pin down, to make institutional, and there are many, many styles: night club fancy drag, high end theatre grade drag, quick-draw men in dresses/women in suits “rough drag”, and the still alive tradition of “female/male impersonation”, to list only a few.

We understand the performative nature of gender itself, and from that how our daily gender performances can so easily become creators of further performances. The very term drag is in many ways just another descriptor of life itself (“it’s all drag”, as RuPaul famously remarked of so-called gender normative presentation). Why then do we still regulate drag to “entertainment” and not discuss it with the same bookish, hushed, churchy-schooly gaze we apply to more official, more self-declaring forms of performance art? Is it simply because drag shows mostly happen in bars and performance art generally happens in art galleries? Is it simply a class thing? Well, fuck that.

Berlin-based, NYC-born artist Dusty Whistles practices a purpose-driven drag that blends futuristic post-gender, post-human iterations with front line political messaging. In Berlin, where mainstream drag can be boiled down to two show types, Cabaret/Sally Bowles re-castings and Hausfraus in bad wigs low comedy, Whistles is part of a new drag generation that wants to put the pocket knife back in the queen’s purse. Drag is political, and always has been. Sometimes, however, drag culture needs a bit of a tune up. Whistles is here to help.

In a series of monthly events, Whistles and their colleagues take the non-essentialist truth, that gender is a fluid construct, to the front lines of Europe’s current identity crisis. How, Whistles asks, can the innate in-betweeness of drag be a lived example in the promotion of understanding between “born” Europeans and “arrived” Europeans; in particular to the increasingly difficult situations lived by displaced and migrating people who come to Europe seeking asylum?

The connection is so clear – people who live between binary-based gender assumptions and people who live between nationalist identities and those sets of assumptions have a lot in common. To be always both and neither in a world that demands singularity is damned exhausting. Watching Whistles in action, one marvels at the sweet truth of the parallels they present, dissect, and make beautiful.

Dusty Whistles

Dusty Whistles: I’m the child of immigrants in North America; my parents arrived from Venezuela and the island of Madeira to a suburb of New York City, cycling distance to the 7 train in Flushing Queens. My parents gave a shot at a more typical North American lifestyle, and we lived in a nuclear family constellation, that is, till the apartment building which I spent my early childhood in was condemned. In solidarity with an old neighbor my folks refused to move as our building became slowly empty. Memories of my early childhood were composed of running around stairwells and empty flats of a crumbling building, and my father taking down a wall to give our small flat an open floor plan feeling, even though we, my parents, brother sister and I, still all slept in one room. Later we moved in together with 3 generations of my family, in the same town, surrounded by the parking lot for the LIRR train. I feel like these experiences of urban decay and reinvention, as well as collectivism, made for an easy transition into my life in the squats of the LES and in the collective houses of the DIY Punk scene of Brooklyn.

New York City at the time in which I grew up was still full of experimentation and a rich culture of poor people, very much unlike it is today. I started my relationship with the city, being young, out, and gay, and sneaking out of my family’s home in the night to partake in the vibrant club culture of the late 90’s, where difference and wit were celebrated above all. I saw the city I love change into a safe homogenized corporatized and heavily policed playground for the wealthy. Sometime shortly after the increased police powers granted in the wake of September 11th and the Patriot Acts 1 and 2, and the brutality of mass arrests during the Republican National Convention for Bush’s second term, I got the hell out.

RM Vaughan: What was it like to start over in a new country?

I had a limited connection to drag in Berlin, outside of an awareness and admiration of its history in the Polittunte movement, an intersection of drag and politics reaching back to drag’s history as a culture and artistic practice connected to resistance. Back in New York, drag was club kids, and piano bars, and the odd visit to Lucky Cheng’s with tourists.

[After much exploring] I found a community in [Berlin, with encouragement from the legendary drag artist/provocateur Olympia Bukkakis] in which I could interact with a political discourse that was not heavy with the weight of a lecture, a reading circle, a panel discussion, a workshop, or the dry and tired performance of a demonstration. I saw an art form that was interactive, vulnerable, ripe with the potential to experiment and play, and entrenched in a long history of resistance struggle.

It hasn’t stopped since then, contrary to my life and poverty, bouts of homelessness, and working two jobs as a carpenter and cleaner. And though I don’t confuse it for political action, I see it as an important part of my political practice, in the exercise of recreating a commons of sorts, exploring the possibility of collective emotional processing, and at times the fabulous simplicity of agitprop.

Dusty Whistles

Your work conflates the questions of gender identity, and of binaries, with the situation(s) of the dispossessed. To put it plainly, you embody in your performances the intersectionality between being multi-gendered and being multi-national. How did this parallel come to you and how do you continue to grow these representations in your work?

My drag persona is a living network of relation expressed through a point of multiple intersections of lifeforms and experiences. Sometimes I am a cloud and folds of atmosphere, sometimes the process of photosynthesis, or red volcanic earth and a field of orchids, sometimes more human in form but not in expression. It is somehow, also, an extension of what I would consider my spiritual life. Off the stage I am fluid in my gender presentation, often wearing wigs as prosthetics, and make up. The borders between my performance practice and my life are thin, and my life and its experience always bleeds through.  The practice of performance is often for me a space to explore the struggles that I find myself and my community within, not to find answers to my questions, but to explore them in a space of play.

Do dispossessed, multi-national people (I hate the word “refugee”, aren’t we all refugees from something?) come to your performances? What do they say to you?

For starters, we are not all refugees. As a North American I come from a country that creates and feeds the massive global political instability and war that creates the conditions for people to need to flee their homes and lives, not by choice, but for survival. I am not subject to racial oppression and the violence of national borders and immigration policies. Yes, the nation in which I was born failed me, and the construct of nations fail all lifeforms, but there is an implicit privilege in holding certain markers of citizenship because of the currently insurmountable damage of empire and colonialism.

To answer the question, yes, I’m sure some refugees have seen my shows, especially since I participate in Queens Against Borders, a drag performance night which donates all its proceeds to support queer refugee projects and performers, who also participate in the night’s performances. But do they say anything particularly different compared to other audience members? No. My audiences are often queer, unless I’m in the context of a gallery or museum performance… but even then they are quite queer. I seem to do quite emotional performances, people often cry or open up to me afterwards. I guess I’m that emo-polemic queen. But those moments are quite beautiful, and I feel less alone, and the isolation of modern life falls to the wayside, even if just for a while. As always I feel more like a facilitator, or a channel, they are not my performances, we did it together. It is a sacrament of sorts.

Dusty Whistles

Why is it vital to be doing this work here, in Berlin, and now?

I am doing this work here because I live here. I am doing work about, and for the community I live in, particularly for those who are immigrants like me, but also to keep a culture alive that knows no country. It’s very internally focused work, I guess.

The sexual revolution of the west started here. It survived 2 wars, somehow. And the radical and playful culture of the squatters movement and the radical left laid more groundwork… institutions that somehow managed to survive… the few of them that are still left… and give this city its character. I wish I could be more positive about this city, positive that that energy will survive the meaning and culture-destroying mechanisms of late neoliberal capitalism, but I’m not so sure if it will. Cities are slowly becoming a way of life only for the wealthy and Berlin is no exception. I’m not wealthy, neither is my family, and I can envision a time in which I too will be forced to leave if I want to continue living an artful life.

There is a word in German, lebenskünstler (lebenskünstlerinnen in its gender neutral variation). It literally translates to “life artist” and is more often than not used as an insult for someone with a lack of direction. I take it on as a life direction, an archetype to embody, the fool in the tarot. It’s not the easiest of careers, and by no means the most profitable, but it depends on how you find value in your life.

Drag has always been political, always presented and at the same time messed with certainties and shared experience. Where do you see your work in the larger “canon” of drag (with full acknowledgement that drag defeats systems such as canonization … but everything comes from something, yah know?).

I struggle with this. I look at perfect make up, and the standardized and limited range of contemporary popular drag performance, and I do not see myself there. I enjoy it, for what it is, but it’s not something I can do well or find much satisfaction in. The German Polittunte scene, which also somehow still exists but is separate from the international “alternative drag” scene, doesn’t appeal to me in its current practice, and politics.  I see myself take this art form into artistic institutions and also struggle as it bends and twists with more performance art narratives and an audience that doesn’t necessarily understand all of the subtlety that speaks to the queer community I would find in a bar or nightclub. Just the same in nightlife, I struggle to be heard reciting prose and lip syncing to Monteverdi arias over the clamor of “people wanting to have a good time”.

I’m still a young artist, and I guess I have yet to see where I fall into this “canon” or herstory. I know for certain I seek to preserve the connection of this art form to a herstory of resistance and revolt, to find overlaps in a political practice. Drag Queens in revolt at Stonewall, Drag Queens in the front lines of the Gay Liberation Front, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, my New York City sisters, trans and fabulous, STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) and FEIRCE, and the queens of ACT UP, and the queens of Queer Fist and Gay Shame, the Radical Faeries and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

I seek to realize drag as a continued pursuit of an ideal that is never reached. An art of struggle, play, and failure, and an absolute rejection of things as they are for how they might be. Isn’t it fabulous?

Your work is giving and open, even, I would say, vulnerability-creating, or creating a safe space for vulnerability. Yet, we live in Germany, where vulnerability is almost a taboo. How do you reach a German audience in this climate, one that over-privileges the false face of “strength”?

Haha! I don’t think i do [reach them]… though there are often a lot of German people in my audiences, they are often Germans who feel comfortable in more multicultural/national communities. Still, i don’t really know how I do it, or if it is even something I can affect. It just is. Like I mentioned before the work moves through me and is realized by us together. I’m always so absolutely grateful for that opportunity. Without each other, we are nothing.

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