Artist, filmmaker, and writer Tourmaline on cultivating your intuition

In your Marsha P. Johnson book, you say, “So much of my practice as an artist has been about following these dreams to find the imprints and traces, which taken collectively can profoundly inform us about past lives.” Can you say more on that?

There’s been so many moments that have really concretized my knowing that. One was having a dream about Sylvia Rivera and her friends in a bar near Times Square and waking up and being like, “I need to find that bar,” waking up with a feeling of enthusiasm and clarity that this means something.

The fact that I dreamt it while I was asleep means I was tuned to a particular frequency, a feeling, an impulse that would guide me to a next and a next and next. I was living in Fort Greene, and I took the Q to 42nd, and then I walked around Bryant Park and back to Times Square. Sylvia spent a lot of time in that area living and petitioning for LGBTQIA+ rights in front of Bryant Park before getting arrested.

I remembered in the dream, it was a dive bar from a different era of New York, maybe the ’80s or ’90s. I remember being like, “Where are those imprints and traces of it?” and following that good feeling and that knowing, the intuition.

It was the African American Day Parade, starting in Harlem, coming through down to Midtown. I ran into this Black trans elder I know from the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Sheila Cunningham. She was so happy to see me and so happy to be marching in the parade, and she was talking about how powerful it was for girls to be loudly and proudly part of the African American Day Parade and how much that meant to her. I was like, “This must be the dream, Sylvia’s friends. I know Sheila from the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, that must be the connection. I’m so glad I got on the train this morning and went uptown.”

Years later, I was doing this event for Visual AIDS and it was about trans elders. It was Miss Major, Jay Toole, Kate Bornstein, and Sheila Cunningham. I was moderating, so I was talking to each of them about the goals of the panel. I was talking to Sheila, and we had known each other for years by this point, but this conversation, for whatever reason, had never come up. She was like, “I was best friends with Sylvia Rivera, and we hustled together, and we were living together in the ’70s.”

The pieces started to click into place that this was the person who my dream led me to have a beautiful rendezvous [with]. It took me some years to have a full sense of clarity about that. It’s been a series of experiences where I’ve started to deeply trust the impulse, the calling to go this way instead of that way, that has largely defined my creative practice.

You said something about feeling an intuition. I’d love to hear more about that.

I can tell my proximity to clarity, and a state of flow that allows for a power in my creative practice, based on how I feel. The more enthusiastic I feel, the more I can tell I’m really in sync and intertwined with my intuition, with this larger perspective that’s guiding me through. The more confused or dissonant I feel, the more I can tell I’m somewhat removed from my state of intuition. Over time, I found that my best art and life comes from being in an action place, a resonant place, with that intuition.

So much more of my work happens in a place of meditation, rest, or ease than sitting down to write a book, write a script, interview someone, or photograph something. That work is pre-paving the vibe through which I do the action. My creative practice is about tuning to the intuition so that I can pre-pave a beautiful rendezvous, a lovely conversation, a moving image, a still photograph, a performance, all of that.

It sounds like you’ve cultivated a process, if not a life, where your intuition is present almost all the time when you’re in creative mode. If it’s still the case that, sometimes, you aren’t quite in that intuition when you have to create—maybe there’s a deadline racing up—how do you handle that?

The more I can give myself a break when I’m not there, the easier it is to get back there, so I just say, “Nothing serious is going on. I’m not feeling that clear.” And that’s okay. There are times when I’ve gone from not feeling clear to feeling clear. There are times when I had to wait a week, a night, or a few hours, but eventually, it comes back, and then, the thrill is just moving in that direction. As long as I’m flowing downstream, moving in that direction, it’s all good if I’m giving myself a break. But, I mean, I’m here to have an experience where I’m not always tapped in. That makes being tapped in so much more juicy, so it’s all part of the creative process.

I think that contrast is how I supersaturate my work in a literal way. If you look at Happy Birthday, Marsha!, I work with this amazing color grader. In a literal way, I use color from almost black-and-white to technicolor, Wizard of Oz or Alice down the hole, because I love the contrast. The contrast of not having intuition, and then having it or awareness of it, is just as thrilling as moving with it.

Can you talk about archiving and preserving as a creative practice? I ask this with the notion that maybe folks don’t see those as creative practices all that often.

I think it’s a hugely creative practice. It’s foundational to my work. The creative process is the sifting and sorting across timelines for resonance and emotion that moves me. Whether that’s going through a formal archive like the New York Public Library or—so many archives were used to support the biography of Marsha. The LGBT Center has a beautiful archive. NYU has the Hot Peaches archive. Cornell has Larry Mitchell’s archive. [He] started a documentary about Marsha weeks before her body was found in the Hudson River that was finished in some ways and, in other ways, really wasn’t, so the archival process, to me, is a beautifully creative, juicy, unfolding, sifting [process] that helps me get clear on the stories that I want to tell and the importance of them.

Saidiya Hartman writes [that] the archives aren’t a neutral place. So much of the work, too, is, in these formal archives, there only being traces of a person’s life, and that is a valuing process. If there’s scant evidence of the importance of who we are, we know that’s not a neutral perspective. Archival work is deeply entangled with the work of knowing our own value and the value of our lineage, which really helps us understand our right now.

The part where you were talking about the emotional aspect of archiving made me think, what is creativity if not trying to connect emotionally? Is that what you’re getting at—archiving so you can scratch the same itch as somebody making a song or writing a work of fiction?

Absolutely. It was so thrilling to be moving in the footsteps over many decades of Marsha’s life and watch how the archives have changed with a deeper knowing of her value. For instance, in the New York Public Library in the early 2000s, Marsha didn’t have a dedicated archive. I found a lot of writing from her and Sylvia Rivera in Arthur Bell’s archive. Arthur Bell was a journalist with the Village Voice and wrote a book, Dancing the Gay Lib Blues, which has been a key part of the work. But it was in Arthur Bell’s box, because he was deemed more important, that I was able to find their writing, their very first papers like the STAR Manifesto or any of those things.

To me, it’s really thrilling, and ultimately, the reason I create art is to share an emotional experience. It’s an embodied emotional experience. That’s why I listen to music. That’s why I will watch a TV show or a movie. That’s why I’ll read a book, because I want to have something that moves me, and I hope to create in that way, too.

You’ve worked in a lot of different mediums. How do you feel that your process stays the same or varies across mediums?

It doesn’t necessarily stay the same because I don’t stay the same. I have this idea that we’re all expanding and growing, and my job is to stay up to speed with that growing, that expanded version of myself.

Going back to the conversation about feeling and intuition, if I’m moving in the direction of the expanded me, it feels thrilling, invigorating, and lovely. If I’m pinching it off, it feels dissonant. All of it’s okay. It’s not a value judgment about any of it. But that’s part of why my work changes so much.

The work of creating conditions that are a reflection of our value is art. When I was an organizer with Queers for Economic Justice and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, we were making art of our lives and conditions. It was a really creative process to say, “Actually, we deserve housing” or, “Actually, we deserve healthcare because we deserve to live” or, “Actually, we deserve freedom and ease to move about the streets.”

It’s a similar experience with making a photograph or a series. The Pleasure Garden series about Black pleasure gardens were also self-portraits and a reminder that all of us deserve to be present in any given moment, including ourselves as we caretake and cultivate for our community. The writing, the Marsha biography, was also about that. It was important to put myself in it at various moments because that was a material, meaningful representation of Marsha’s legacy and impact on the world—a life made possible because of the deep work and huge desires of someone who came before.

With my film work, those were the dreams I had when I was a child, going to the movies and being like, “I want to be doing this. I want to make my version of this thing.” It’s world-building, it’s immersive, and it’s the kind of scale that I love to play with.

I love the recurrence of dreams here from the first question I asked you. What more can you say about the role of dreaming, whether literally dreaming overnight or daydreaming, plays in your creative process?

I’m the beneficiary of so many people who dreamed before. Marsha and Sylvia, in the ’60s, would rent these hourly hotels. They used to call them “hot spring hotels” because whether it was winter, spring, summer, or fall, the rooms were boiling in Times Square in these hourly hotels. But in them, they were doing what the writer and theorist Robin D. G. Kelley coined “freedom dreaming.” They were imagining a world filled with conditions that they wanted. They were using what wasn’t wanted, the harshness that would happen immediately when they left the hotel, as a jumping off point to dream the world that they deserved. That practice is one I really have come to understand the value of. If I’m having an experience that I don’t like, I’m immediately knowing, whether I’m clear on it or not, a dream for what I do want. Dreams are a central part of my practice, and I’m also the beneficiary of all of the dreams of people who came before.

To rewind a little bit, when you were talking about your different mediums and creative processes, I was reminded that you do a lot of things. How have you managed to avoid burnout?

I go pretty slow. My work that is at the Australian Center for Contemporary Art right now is a series of photographs that I started working on in 2022 in Venice, when I was showing work at the Venice Biennale. I’ll just sit with the work and be in a real timeline so that it’s not about content production. It’s about moving when something guides me to it.

It’s, as much as possible, knowing that there’s always going to be a next iteration of a desire or dream that I want to materialize and share. The rush to get to that place isn’t—there’s always going to be a next marker. To the degree that I can remember that, it takes [away] the immediacy of, “I have to do that now,” which is the thing that inevitably leads to my burnout.

Was that a lesson you learned over time, or was it something you knew from the beginning?

I think it’s a lesson I learned over time. There were some things that felt urgent and still do, like political campaigns that I’m on around increased access to Medicaid and healthcare for transgender and gender non-conforming people. The real urgency of that is felt by so many of us. At the same time, there’s also going to be a next campaign about the conditions we want to transform. I think it’s just been a balance and a slow unfolding of that knowing.

How have you managed to pave your path toward being somebody engaged in all these manners of creativity and able to make a living off it all?

So much of it has been through the mentorship and care of community. For Happy Birthday, Marsha!, the film I made with Sasha Wortzel, we did multiple Kickstarters and Indiegogos. It was real community support.

I was part of a queer art mentorship. I was a mentee, and then for two years, I was a mentor. Those experiences—I didn’t go to film school, but I was Dee Rees’ assistant director. Dee is an incredible director and writer who wrote and directed Pariah, and I was Dee’s assistant for Mudbound. Arthur Jafa was my cinematographer for Happy Birthday, Marsha! and has been a friend for a very long time. It’s through those kinds of mentorships that I’ve come to be able to know my craft.