The Art of Not Knowing

 

It rained on the way to the museum, the kind of autumn rain that loosens the leaves from everything they thought they belonged to.

Inside, the walls held questions disguised as art.

A father wore authority like a paper costume. Bodies bent themselves into the shape of belonging. Faces blurred, refusing the small violence of being made recognizable.

I wandered between what I could name and what would not let me.
And wondered how many things we have mistaken for truth simply because we've seen them that way for so long.

Perhaps the queerest thing was not the art at all,
but the space between looking and knowing.

That brief, unruly moment before the mind reaches for a category, a conclusion, a place to put things.

Outside, the rain had changed nothing and everything.
The trees stood half-undressed. The leaves lay scattered, no longer obliged to resemble themselves.

And I walked home thinking how beautiful it might be
to let the world remain unresolved.

 Transformation

Swimming Through Prejudice

 The relationship between queerness and sport has always been important to me. I used to be a swimmer, arguably the sport where trans inclusion is debated most fiercely. I wasn’t out as trans in sports until my freshman year in high school, but everyone knew I wasn’t the ‘normal’ athlete. I was often ostracized by my peers; they were uncomfortable changing around me because they believed I was a lesbian who were going to prey on them. This got even worse when I came out as transgender. Honestly, I understood part of their discomfort, if I were a woman, I wouldn’t want to change next to someone who identified as a man, cis or trans. Since I’m from Wyoming obviously, I wasn’t allowed to be in the male’s changing room (not that I really wanted that anyway due to the harassment I already received from them) and I wasn’t allowed to be in male events. That last season I swam was probably one of the darkest periods of my life. I had lost a community because of my identity. No one would talk to me I was excluded from the group. Bus rides to and from events were a nightmare I would watch all these people I grew up playing games and sharing dinner while I would sit in the back by myself. We don’t hear a lot of stories of trans man athletes and kind of forget we’re part of the conversation as well. I believe that if I wasn’t so alienated I would have continued participating in a sport I loved.

↑ above is a collage of new articles about trans rights and statistics with a picture of me from high school before my event. The time I had the most struggle with identity and community. 

Colored Museum Design Work

Colored Museum Design Work

 This is some design work I’ve done for another class. The play colored museum is about a metaphorical museum, each exhibit tackles different aspects of black identity and culture. This play aims to make audiences uncomfortable by confronting Black issues and ideas, treating them as relics that the cultures must both embrace and outgrow. Gospel According to Miss Roj features a drag queen who talks the audience through themes of survival, pain, and empowerment as a queer person. Attached is my design work for what her costume, makeup, and set would look like along with some inspiration photos.

↓ Below is the scene this design is based on ↓

If you can find the rest of the script I really recommend reading it!

What the Floor Remembers

The ball floor knows bodies by weight.

Some arrive already belonging.
Others learn the choreography of survival.

Under the lights: beauty, gender, joy, grief.
A boy in a blue shirt, thirteen or fourteen, already learning which bodies are safe.

Decades later, queer kids are still learning versions of the same lesson.

Some can move closer to normal.
Some can assimilate.
Race cannot be taken off at the door.

The floor holds all of it at once:
race, gender, class, sexuality, belonging.

And it remembers this most:

some people leave the room and disappear into the world.

Others have to keep dancing to be seen as fully human.

For the Ones Who Were Never the Problem

What would you say if I stopped being normal?

If I stopped making myself understandable.
If I stopped shrinking the strange parts, the soft parts, the changing parts.
If I let my body age without apology.
If I let love be complicated.
If I let my child become who they are without asking them to make it easier for the world.
If I stopped calling exhaustion responsibility and silence kindness.

Would you think I had lost something?

Or would you notice how much of me had been spent trying to be recognizable?

Maybe normal was never who I was.
Maybe it was just the price of belonging.

And maybe queering the norm is this:

choosing, finally, to belong to oneself.

Queer in Art - Rainbow

This is an art piece I made for my color theory class. It is a collection of items I own that cary significance to me. I took a series of pictures that all contained colors of the rainbow.