On embracing your playful side

From what I can see, you’ve managed to make a living out of transforming your most firmly held beliefs into art across a whole bunch of mediums. How exactly have you charted that path?

It’s funny to know if I’ve charted it or if I’ve stumbled into various parts of it, because there’s been a lot of different chapters. Growing up, I always knew I loved to be on stage in front of people, trying to make people laugh. I feel like that’s the oldest thing in my life. That’s the origin story of anything I’d make now, and maybe it’s [the origin story] of all gay people.

I just have done that in a lot of different kinds of rooms. I certainly did that in plays growing up, but then, I spent 10 years doing it as an organizer leading popular education trainings, support groups, and political education using humor as a tool, as a strategy to welcome whoever’s in the room and be like, “We all have something to contribute, and we can do this.” I think it’s because of my own feelings of, “What do I have to offer,” that I’m highly attuned to that in other people and wanting to disarm that feeling in us that says, “We don’t have what we need to have this conversation,” and that wants to make people feel comfortable. Once I go to psychoanalysis school, I’ll really be able to understand all the ulterior motives that I have.

In terms of charting the course, at some point, I just realized I need to get that need met, to make people laugh, more directly and with less of a utilitarian rationale. That restarted this journey of being like, “What do I like to do on stage? What comes easy to me? What comes naturally to me? How do I let these deep convictions and commitments that I’ve developed inside social movements animate, but not overdetermine, the humor?”

Looking at the current times, I feel pretty despondent about the level of apathy we all have, so hearing you say “humor as a strategy” makes me wonder, what does that entail?

I think the first thing is to recognize that humor has always been a part of our strategies as people surviving Planet Earth and the systems of oppression that seek to destroy life. Even growing up, I remember my mom always used to be like, “We have to laugh. We just have to laugh.” And that phrasing is so interesting: “We have to.” Know what I mean? It’s essential, it’s a survival strategy. I feel like, for so many people navigating an unjust world, humor is a way through, a way to tell the truth and find agency where we feel like we don’t have any and disarm rooms that feel scary. It’s always been a part of a strategy of liberation, survival, whatever word we want to put to it.

I think what happens in many social justice spaces is that—and I think it also can happen in artistic spaces—we’re like, “Now is the time to be serious. Everybody be serious now.” We think that the playful part of us has nothing to offer to the tasks ahead, which is either to dismantle something horrible or make a piece of art. And I just know over and over again that not to be true. I’ve seen over and over again in so many organizations, groups, collectives, teams, and relationships that, when we welcome the playful part of ourselves and make the space hospitable for ideas that seem impossible, irreverent, useless, and pleasurable, we sometimes stumble into tactics, strategies, and group cultures that are really inspiring and empowering, and that take people by surprise and offer a vision of the world that is really compelling.

I always think about Toni Cade Bambara saying that the job of the cultural worker is to make the revolution irresistible. So much of what the right [wing] is doing is manipulating our fear and our desire for belonging and safety, and we have to reclaim feeling good and being like, “Actually, it feels better over here.”

A lot of what you’re saying sounds, to me, like a much less cliche, more thought-out version of “joy as an act of resistance.” Maybe even “creativity as a form of resistance.”

I mean, certainly when I see that online, I do sometimes want to bang my head into a wall…the irresolvable space between the hard work of resistance and the irreverent commitment to joy is where I think the juicy spot is. That’s why I love working with organizers whose life is dedicated to the mostly invisible work of building organizations and campaigns and being like, “You also get to have a good time along the way.” It’s amazing when people who are committed to the fun parts also get to learn about the unfun parts of movement work, which is organizing the meeting, taking the notes, facilitating the meeting, planning who orders the food, organizing the jail support team, organizing the logistics. Those are the unfun invisible parts, and I think we all have a lot to learn from the parts that we think we’re not entitled to.

You mentioned the environment of fear, the way the right wing wants us to live in that. Given that we’ve been in an environment of ongoing repression since long before the second Trump administration—the Biden administration attempted to shut down all the campus protests to support Gaza—have you had any moments where you’re like, “I shouldn’t do this anymore. This is getting too scary, the consequences could be too real”? How have you motivated yourself to keep going if doubts have emerged?

To me, a much worse fate is to do nothing or to feel like you can do nothing. A feeling of powerlessness, of not moving with others toward change, to me is a fate worse than death. Spiritually, emotionally, sitting at home alone watching MSNBC sounds scarier than anything I can imagine, because we get to be here in this time on Earth, and that means we have agency, and…there is nothing as life-affirming as taking collective action with other people toward justice. I truly believe there is nothing on earth more life-affirming than saying, “It is worth us being brave together, fighting for something we may not achieve, risking failure along the way, but giving ourselves to it.” That is, to me, an ecstatic, erotic, spiritual, life-affirming, joyful, deeply connective experience that is also reparative. It’s healing of the false idea of false separation between us. I want to keep choosing that every day.

To talk more about who you are within your creativity, from the creative work of yours that I’ve encountered, it seems that there’s an ironic persona within it. What kind of work do you have to do to maintain that persona? Why is that persona important to who you are creatively?

I don’t know, necessarily. I feel like this is part of what I always joke about: “When I go to a psychoanalysis school I’ll understand, I’ll have an answer to your question.” I don’t really know which part is me, but I do know what that persona does. It catches all the things I think are bad or not the right way to react and says, “Maybe there’s something really useful and funny here.” It’s like the compost of me. It’s like the refuse that you’re like, “Wait, maybe there’s something deeply relatable, human, and true here that so many of us, including me, work so hard to hide.” We’re like, “Oh my god, don’t you dare show that narcissistic side of you. Don’t you dare show that self-involved side. Don’t you dare show the mixed motives that you have in any given interaction or commitment.” What that persona gives me is a place to plug back in all the things I’m trying to vow about myself and the fact that…what’s funny is what’s true. I think what people are responding to is also like, “Oh, that resonates. That just seems that true.”

I have this other totally earnest [persona]—I just have both those things in a domestic partnership between me forever. I have an odd couple inside me that’s both deeply earnest, deeply sincere, and also deeply like, “What the fuck is anybody talking about, and what the fuck am I even talking about?”

I want to go back to what you said earlier about how you think it’s something that all queer people have in them to just want to be on stage and be funny—that sounds like me. Can you talk more about that?

I think that’s what Can I Be Frank? is about, in a lot of ways, that we could approach [the link between queerness and wanting to be funny on stage] from so many different angles. We can pathologize it and be like, “We’re trying to get the love we didn’t get,” or say we’re trying to get people to delight in us in a way that maybe we didn’t feel delighted in earlier in our lives—people delighting in our full expressiveness and extent. There’s also the kind of superhuman power that I think so many queer people have of being so hyper-vigilant, so hyper-attuned to the microclimates in the room and the micro-facial gestures going on in hundreds of people. We are able to play with that almost like an instrument. That’s a story that we can pathologize, but we also can be like, “Oh wow, actually, you can make music that way.”

And then, I think it’s just a beautiful part of our heritage. I mean, that’s part of what Can I Be Frank? is about. It’s about solo performance and queer people, gay people on stage being like, “Let me try this other thing. You want songs? If you want jokes, I’ll do jokes. You want me to do a monologue? I can do a monologue. Whatever you need that…gets us there, let’s get there.” All of this, I resent that about us, I wish we were free of that. And I also think it’s been the source of so much creation.

You do so many different things—music, writing for the stage, writing in other capacities. It makes me think you’re probably a very curious person, so I wanted to know what your curiosity looks like.

I am promiscuous. I’m a deeply promiscuous person where I’m working on a song and I’m like, “God, I’d love to write a book.” I’m like, “Can I do this at the same time?” And again, this is something we can pathologize or see as a source of methodology or a source of whatever. I find myself needing to work on many things at once. It just soothes my brain to be working on many things at once. I can’t ever sit and focus on any one thing, and I start to get obsessed. I do start to get upset in terms of the curiosity. I start to get kind of—it sometimes feels like I’m in a folktale. I’m like, “I’ve got to keep following this, a breadcrumb. Oh my god, I’ve got to keep following this.”

Each show or project has its own kind of learning involved, its own kind of thing that I need to confront inside myself, or its own kind of invitation that it’s asking of me. And as much as I love to talk, I also love other people talking…for Can I Be Frank?, I interviewed 30 people who were friends, family members, lovers, and collaborators with Frank [Maya, subject of and inspiration for Can I Be Frank?]. One of the most delightful things to me is listening to people talk about something that they care about. And that’s certainly a thread in a lot of my projects, is making people talk to me.

One of the things I discovered about you specifically by researching you for this conversation is that you also do somatic coaching. This is something I had never heard of. It feels completely in earnest rather than at least somewhat steeped in your ironic persona. What does somatic coaching fulfill for you creatively?

I find something really pleasurable about putting my focus on other people. This is probably connected to the joy of interviewing people for me. Some may call that a very deflective personality—certainly if you interviewed my exes, you might get the consensus that it’s easier for me to ask a question than to answer a question.

Also, my mom’s a therapist. It feels like it’s really matrilineal in me. It’s this kind of sitting with people one-on-one and reminding people that the things they think are bad, horrible, and shameful about them are…perhaps sites of incredible wisdom, creativity, and humanness, because I need that. There are so many parts of me that feel so bad and wrong that, somehow, we just need to keep passing this back and forth with each other in as many conversations as possible.

It’s also a really nice counterbalance to being on stage, because being on stage is so much about me being the center of attention. It feels almost like when you’re stretching the other complementary muscle. It feels like…when you do the backbend, then you do it the other way or something where you’re like, “Oh, this is the counter stretch” … It’s the other side of the pleasure of giving attention.

I think the other way it’s useful is—and this is from years of leading workshops and support groups—I’m very attuned, but not always fully, to what’s too much for an audience and what’s not enough. [I’m always] trying to find that juicy middle ground where it’s like, “Let’s do something, but let me not blow out your system.” The somatic work, or the healing work, you’re always listening for that sweet spot between discomfort, challenge, affirmation, and rest to find that kind of juicy tension. That’s the place where interesting stuff can happen.

That’s everything I wanted to ask you today, but if you have anything more you want to say on creativity, your creative process, or in response to my questions that you didn’t think of when I was asking them, go for it.

[Amid] the fascism of…the moment we’re in, we are right to be terrified and overwhelmed. And I think we bring so much to it. We bring soul with us that’s going to help us get through this period. I think it’s right to be terrified. I don’t think we should minimize fascism and be like, “It’s fine.” … No, actually, it’s very scary, and it’s going to get worse quite rapidly. And we have so many tools, strategies, spells, relationships, jokes, alternate endings, and alternate futures that are going to help us get through it.