Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Bird of Paradise: Bidding Adieu to the Phoenix



Will of Imperial Teen/Hey Willpower with new band Psychic Friend at Little Victory's welcome home show in June

The show I organized at the Phoenix for this year's Pride was, no fooling, absolutely the most fun I've ever had in my life.  Everyone was so brilliant, so excited, so totally pumped on the experience I was quite literally overcome, fighting back tears that were threatening to make an ass out of me.  I'm all for emotional honesty but I draw the line at crying in public because you can't believe your own good fortune.  Smile for fuck's sake, I thought, This is your life and you get to live it.

Horoscope playing Gay Rage/Gay Magic III, Pride Sunday '11
Including the farewell show Sunday Little Victory played the Phoenix maybe 5 or 6 times.  It seemed like a lot at the time and now it seems like not nearly enough.  It's gone too soon from our lives, this miracle.  I don't mean to exaggerate: It was a total miracle for me to have a venue that was not only bullshit-free and totally supportive but 100% gay all the time.  Such a big deal.  Such a major thing to see disappear after only a year.

Isabel of Household at Courage My Love
The Phoenix gave me the confidence to put together shows and have faith that people would show up for them.  Putting those shows on gave me the opportunity to shine a light on my friends' projects, to play with at least one of my musical heroes and to realize how special and exciting the people I surround myself with are.  The audiences at those shows gave me a renewed faith, inspiring me to believe that this sense of community I'd grown up with that I thought we'd all maybe outgrown did exist and could succeed.  

B0DY H1GH at Sunday's ONCE MORE WITH FEELING show
Though people frequently find this hard to believe I am actually quite shy as a performer.  Anything you see or hear me do onstage is almost exclusively the result of nervous energy.  All my life I've wanted to write songs and sing in a band but before Sunday I've rarely enjoyed it so completely.  When I took the stage at the end of Skeleton Head's set to sing with Leo on the Pet Shop Boys' "What Have I Done to Deserve This" I could feel myself enjoying myself.  This was a really big deal for me.  When Little Victory came to the end of our set I realized that the Phoenix, in all of these incredible ways, had given me something phoenixes normally save for themselves: A rebirth.  I'll miss you, old girl.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Sing Them Blues, White Girl



How does one describe a dream?  Such is my dilemma trying to write about this Making Friendz record, Social Life.  Leading lady Friend Tami Hart and I were roommates and best girlfriends for the larger part of the time this thing has been a thing.  Her onetime bandmate and my current Little Victory co-conspirator Daniel Erickson has been my best friend and occasional musical partner for years.  They are no longer together as a duo, although he is featured on this record, and as someone who is so close to both of them I'm finding it difficult to express myself in regard to this thing that they created.

This is the is the sound of two people I love as much as anything coming together and coming apart.  Listening to it, I am gripped by a tension I wasn't quite prepared for.  Every beat and melody is a memory, every note a reminder of a time in my life both magical and awkward.  I remember being at so many shows watching the two of them performing these songs and seeing the crowd loving them so much.  This was before I had a band of my own and I wished I could trade places with them, live inside these songs and trade energies with a room as easily as they seemed to.  Maybe it wasn't as easy as it looked.  For whatever reason (it's their story to tell or not tell) Making Friendz is now Tami's alone.



Dreams are a private phenomenon that can only be experienced by human beings individually.   One can rarely remember them completely much less fully describe their magic or their mayhem to others.  I feel very close to this record and though I had nothing to do with its creation, very proud as well.  I'm glad to have it as a memento, a monument in some ways, to such an important time in my life.  Articulating a particular place in my heart, it is a testament to the powers of the people I surround myself with.  I wish I could bring all of you inside my head to hear it the way I do.  It is beautiful and exciting and a little bit sad, just as it should be.  It reminds me that finding the truth is never as important as looking for it.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Pride Is a Many-Splintered Thing

In the summer of 1995 at the age of 15, in my hometown of Chapel Hill, NC, I attended my first Gay Pride festival.  Maybe there was a parade, I'm not sure.  Still, I remember having my mind blown at the thought, much less the reality, of having so many gay people in one place.  Who knows how many there actually were.  Hundreds?  Certainly not thousands. This being a very self-consciously progressive town, who knows how many of them were even gay?  In any event it didn't matter at all.  To have so many gay people, or at least such visible gay acceptance, in my hometown was enough.  That there was even more than one (me) was cause for celebration.

I befriended some people that day, two guys and a girl who must have been in their very early 20's.  They sort of adopted me for the day and I have a very vivid memory of being driven around town in the one boy's Jeep.  I don't remember much about the boys honestly except that they seemed very tall to me at the time and were both naturally blond.  The girl, a fat femme lesbian with glitter make-up, bleached blond pigtails and fairy wings was leaning out the window waving both a wand and a small gay pride flag while shouting at passersby, "Be gay!  Show your colors!"  No Doubt's "Just A Girl" was blasting over the stereo.  I was both mortified and exhilerated.

At the end of the day I bid my new friends farewell and never saw them again.  I wonder now if they remember me and if so, how.  I don't remember having a lot to say that day.  I just remember being relieved that anyone was paying me any attention at all.  I recognized in their dandy swagger and lack of inhibition a certain possibility.  There's this great line from a SinĂ©ad O'Connor song: "There's life outside your mother's garden/there's life beyond your wildest dreams."  It seems incredibly silly, which must mean it's true, that I started believing those words on that day.

Contrary to the Book of Morgan, this child was not given a choice.


With the exception of last year I have not missed a Gay Pride since.  I have heard and support all of the arguments about body fascism, lesbian/trans denial, political opportunism, corporate vampirism and racial erasure and I still can't help that dammit, I love a parade.  I am a Mexican-American man who has struggled with gender identity and body dysmorphia.  On the rare occasion I visit mainstream gay parties/spaces I feel at best marginalized and at worst invisible.  When I hear that a political candidate supports "civil unions" I cringe.  These issues mean a great deal to me indeed but they do not stand in the way of my Gay Pride.

By way of some kind of magical thinking I am able to enjoy Pride in spite of its flaws partially because those flaws to me represent some serious first-world problems.  Whenever I think of all the ways Pride seems to have been compromised I think of Russia, Uganda or even the places in my own country where our people must live in fear of persecution.  Such people don't have the luxury of complaining about corporate sponsorships or political opportunism because support, however flawed, from these entities is hard to come by if even imaginable to begin with.  I think of how we are among the last acceptable punching bags and how Tracey Morgan is totally going to get away with his homophobic ranting despite the outcry.  I think of our rights to our partners and loved-ones' legacies being routinely voted down year after year (if you need a hyperlink, you need a lobotomy).

I think of all of these things and I understand why being gay and having gay pride still matters.  Maybe there is a place in Canada where it's all just a cute memory of Will & Graces past but repeat after me: "Toronto is not the world."  There is no post-gay reality anymore than there is a post-feminist or post-racial one.  There is life outside your mother's garden, babe, and for some people it ain't wine and roses.

Horoscope performing at last year's Gay Rage/Gay Magic NYC Pride music show.


Pride is a concept open to interpretation.  It is a tool we use to let others know how we feel about ourselves and our community.  It is shapeless and very much without focus until you give it one.  I missed my first NYC Pride parade last year because I had organized an event called Gay Rage/Gay Magic featuring four gay bands including my own playing live at the East Village's Phoenix Bar.  With soundchecks and everything I wasn't going to be able to do both and how bummed I was.  But how thrilling it was that by the time we took the stage the parade had more or less come to us.  I couldn't believe my luck.  I had had a vision of pride and carried it through and people had responded in kind.  It was one of the most complete joys of my whole life up to that point.

However you celebrate, please know that it's important that you do.  Whatever your feelings about the big parades and overpriced festivals, remember that it is completely in your hands to foster your own unique vision of pride.  If you can't create your own event for whatever reason you are always welcome at mine.   In a way I'm personally rather glad that gay pride parades are so often so big, so flamboyant and so tacky, however little they speak to my life in particular.  I continue to be both mortified and exhilerated but the meek will not inherit the earth, darling.  The hidden thousands are watching around the world and here at home and they need to know this is possible.

Come one, come all!  Sunday, June 26 at the Phoenix in NYC.