Invert(e)

Switch Hitter

Tired of “watching trans movies where everybody dies or is really sad,” filmmaker Brooks Nelson felt compelled to film his own, Switch: A Community in Transition. 

The documentray suggests that comunities shoulder much of the “responsibility” for their trans memebers’ gender transformations.

“I didn’t change,” Nelson insists.  “I became more who I am—so really, the burden falls on everyone [else].  I peeled back stuff to reveal who I really am.” 

Meanwhile, he says, friends and family members—and the tightknit progressive community in Portland, Oregon—were forced to switch gender pronouns, incorporate new names and examine their own assumptions about what it means to be male or female. 

 “In all the different spheres that we all occupy,” Nelson argues, “People in them have different responsibilities to the person who is transitioning.  My boss’s responsibility is really different than my partner’s responsibility. I’m expecting different things from him…like[to] step up as an employer and say, “This is a bad law for some of my employees,’which means a lot more to somebody making those laws than you or me calling in.”

  “I feel completely blessed to live in this kind of amazing community. If anybody is going to have a stab at some of these frank conversations we wish would go on, it would be this community.  Its age diverse, its race diverse, its got class diversity—ability—everybody gets to bring this kind of unique perspective to the table.”

Collective Denial

“I felt lost as a queer artist in the world,” laments Smitty Amabilis.  “I didn’t feel like I had any mentors.” 
  

Amabilis founded the Portland, Oregon art cooperative Collective of Geniuses (CoG), which aims to empower artists to create economically sustainable art and challenge hierarchies of class, gender and privilege.

To combat the “erasure” marginalize artists face, Amabilis says, “We hope by creating a history—through art—that we’ll become more visible; and through visibility will come acceptance and understanding.”

“Our purpose is to create a voice for marginalized artists [especially those] who identify as trans and queer,” adds CoG technical director Jack StockLynn  “We chose this population because it’s who we are.”

StockLynn prefers gender-neutral pronouns ze and hir and says, “I identify as a transfag, as a gay man, as queer and as a weirdo. I have a female body, and mostly don't mind.”

 

While attending Cornish College of the Arts, StockLynn founded a performance ensemble and established a recital space, which ze subsequently facilitated, organizing events for three years and presenting five of hir own original works.

Since then, StockLynn has continued producing original pieces, including Jack Castle, PhD and The Container Projects.

Two-Spirit Drag King is None of the Above

“I’m telling the truth as I saw it—because that’s all I got,” says actor Jennifer Lanier of her autobiographical performance None of the Above—in which truths aren’t black or white. Neither is she. The African American/Native American actor also known as the drag king Bruce, identifies as a two-spirited woman and says, “I really do walk around with both [genders].”

That dual-presentation makes people uncomfortable, Lanier contends. “People feel such a strong need to identify us in some form or another and to come up with a cause…‘Is the reason you’re a lesbian because of your father and the sexual assault thing?’ I’m always like, ‘No. I’ve been a lesbian ever since I was born.’ [People] need a reason. [They] need to see this connection as being direct, black and white. [But] who I am as a person…is so not black or white—quite literally.”

The performance deals with her real-life experiences with racism, abuse and sexual assault, but Lanier argues, “that’s not the end all be all of this human being that I am. And I don’t wear that all the time. I can still laugh. My biggest survival technique has always been to laugh.”

Which is why Lanier likes to “keep a lot of humor involved” in heralter ego Bruce TD King: “Bruce thinks that he’s slick, but he’s not. Not getting the girl is way funnier than getting the girl.”