ISSUE ONE - SUMMER 2015 by QYA Magazine

QYA SUMMER 2015

THE QUEER ARTS MAGAZINE ISSUE ONE - SUMMER 2015 QYA Magazine is an independent online magazine by and for queer, trans, and nonbinary artists and activists. The magazine accepts submissions of photography, photograph visual art, poetry, ďŹ ction, political writing, and reporting. The magazine is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is published periodically. qyamagazine@gmail.com issuu.com/qyamagazine Edited and curated by Anders Billund-Phibbs

ProďŹ le A Word With Hieu Minh Nguyen Maya Morales Isabelle Genis: other people can fall in love!! Mackenzie Monk Expo Hobbes Ginsberg Portfolio: Yonci Jameson Safety & Invisibility: An Interview Mercy: Rosie Amato

PROFILE. The value of queer space in a new world We are at a fatal crossroads in queer politics; not just the crossroads of “equality” and the continuation of violence against us, but a crossroads of space, community, and the constant commodiﬁcation of our identities. Mainstream LGBT activism’s focus on marriage, family rights, and the military has created an inhospitable environment of assimilation and fake progress. p In this environment, straight “allies” engage in a selfafﬁrming game of superiority wherein they take up queer space, speak for queer people, and push their brand of sanitized social change while refusing to examine their own behaviors or challenge paradigms of oppression which exist person-to-person in heterosexist society.

In this environment, authentic, democratic queer spaces are more needed than ever. The tide of exploitation and tokenism can only be remedied with an equally powerful wave of uncensored expression and reclamation of space. The question is: How can we achieve total autonomy? How can we assert ourselves? How can we take back our voices and narratives?

In an Internet Inte age, it comes down to who is talking, who is sharing, and who has the firmest grasp on the flow of information. Constant sharing and uncensored, fearless speech on social media have created a sense among some that all narratives are up for grabs, anyone can raise their voice on any topic, and all voices matter equally. While in some cases this mindset is constructive, it tends to serve more Text by often as a mute button for speech Anders Billund-Phibbs deemed too brazen for the discourse of the dull-edged knife that is ally Artwork by activism. In essence, the Internet Inte which Dana Saari was supposed to amplify all voices has failed to change paradigms of censorship and silencing that existed This is the disturbing dilemma of 21st-century queer activism; in what is long before its inception. said to be our “golden age,” we have no real voice. Corporations and the Democratic Party swallowed the movement, and what they spat out was In this age, it isn’t enough for queer artists to lean in. Inserting oneself a designed, carefully-planned replica, wiped clean of authenticity and into straight society has the dual history. In the past decade, this bandwagon has attracted a huge flock effect of making institutions seem of liberals, most of them white and straight, whose interest and inclusive and “diverse” while diminishing the profile and power of the involvement is questionable to say the least. Do straight liberals care about the violence inflicted on queer and trans people, especially people individuals involved. It’s a death wish for any queer, trans, or nonbinary artist to make themself a pretty face for an apparatus that has not, of color every day? Do they care ca about dismantling day-to-day heteronormative behaviors and power structures? Furthermore, do they does not, and will not ever consider them a whole and powerful person. Our actions end up being dictated by the environment. You are in the know the history of the queer and trans liberation movements? Or have culture, or you are not. The question facing us is: Do we want to cultu they taken up the “LGBT cause” as a way to “be on the right side of “include ourselves” into the existing culture? Or do we want to make history”? Many of the straight “allies” who have “joined the movement” the harder, more worthwile choice of carving out or own spaces, seem to talk more than they listen, and boast more than they honor. raising our own voices, and reclaiming?

O N A

P A G E :

W O R D

H I E U

M I N H

W I T H N G U Y E N

How did you get into poetry? I'm not sure if it's a very interesting story, it begins how most stories begin, with an angsty teenager. In junior high, I was a really big theatre kid, but when I got to high school, the only theatre class available was a social justice theatre class. In the program, we created our own plays revolving all types of social justice topics. It was a really important time in my life. It was when I realized that theatre/ performance can be more mo than just reciting lines that someone else wrote for you. How has your upbringing affected your work? Entirely. It's actually really hard for me to separate my upbringing from my work. My entire catalogue of language comes from my upbringing. Much of your work has to do with intersections between race, sexuality, and femininity. What to you is the importance of highlighting these intersections? I don't want to say that I'm not interested in poetry that ignores how identities complicate each other, othe since that closes so many doors, but I still might have to say it. If I ignored the conflicting identities for the sake of a easier poem, the poem would be lying. Unlike many queer spoken word artists whose work can be confrontational and brazen, yours tends to take a muted, emotionally raw approach. What's behind the voice in your work? When speaking, I'm not the most articulate person. I stutter, and fumble my words all the time. When writing a poem, I try my hardest ha to be intentional with each word, and that also applies to performance. I believe every poem has a different voice, and so I try to be intentional about how each word comes across. What is your focus, and what is your intent? I like to think of poetry as telescope or a flare gun. As a person whose identities often complicate each other, I find myself feeling extremely alone. I just want to see who else is out there.

Hieu Minh Nguyen is a poet and spoken wo Hieu Minh Nguyen is a poet and spoken word artist based in Minneapolis. His book This Way to the Sugar was a ﬁnalist in the Minnesota Book Awards. More of his work and credentials can be viewed at hieuminhnguyen.com.

NOT TO SOUND LIKE A JERK but I don’t think I can love a boy who doesn’t give up THE FAMILY BUSINESS playing at least five instruments or a boy who isn’t brave or careless enough to sneak downstairs while his mother sleeps to steal the songbird from its cage releasing it, only to hope for its return & I have to wonder if it matters if I’m the bird or the cage or the song, now lost, now fleeing. Where does this come from? The story, stor still the same: my mother alone on the top floor of a highrise. The story, a saltless wound, even today it laps its long tongue behind my ear. If she dies, you can stop worrying. If she dies, you can blow out the candles lit in your name. If I had to choose between flight & love, I would consider jumping to see what saves me first.

The trick to staying young is lying about your age at All You Can Eat buffets. Sent away to live with my uncle while my mother packed boxes I sat there the in my child body rolling silverware for a party of thirty funeral-goers half of them crying, half getting their money’s worth. Chu Nam in the kitchen smoking a cigarette & peppering the pork. If I admit, my father’s gone & my mother wont talk of anything but the river if I say tomorrow & truly mean when my mother passes if I say, love & know a stranger will ﬁnd her body if I forgive the dream for being only a dream will you ﬁnally let me sleep? O Grief, good friend, will you help me clear this table?

A COMING OUT STORY A spinning blade of wheat between my teeth. I close my eyes & focus in on I-35. The cars, circling the nest of a city. cit Buzzing by. Buzzing away. I imagine: cicadas, fireflies nothing. Nice, right? To be nowhere. A line to nowhere. A climb to nowhere. Downstream. Up? Downst Maybe somewhere with stars. Anywhere but here. Everytime I bring a bottle to my lips, it disappears. The cigarette & the pills too. Vanishing with every touch. I rush inside to test this theory by kissing my reflection goodnight.

HIS CAT WAS WATCHING THE ENTIRE TIME When it was over, he gave me a towel to dry off my hips. The television hissed awake to entertain the ghosts rattling in my knees. Who needs to be entertained once you’ve juggled the loose parts of a crash test dummy in your mouth? When he left me in the thick air on top of his bed to shower my salt & effort off of his leather canvas, he covered me in a blanket, as if done identifying a corpse. I didn’t need to be made comfortable. I already planned on taking off my shoes. When I heard the shower pelt his skin like matchsticks or bad weather it was my cue to ﬁnd my clothes in the thinning darkness - I am lucky. The TV was on. The ﬂoorboards only whispered goodbye. I am lucky. This one lives in walking distance to everything - & by everything, I mean a shitty little bar named Everything, where I swallowed shots of old paint, chased away that sharp taste with the salt left on my palms.

M AYA M O R A L E S

photos by maya morales

You mentioned Frida Kahlo, in the sense that she’s the kind of artist that you would see yourself being compared to. Do you feel like Latinx artists / artists of color are put into roles based on previous icons? Yes, of course. Of course. An example is black modern artists will be compared to Basquiat, and then Latino/Latina/Latinx artists will be compared to Frida Kahlo. They’ll even put you next to Salvador Dali, even though he wasn’t from Latin America. And those are a great artists, I love those artists, but when white people are artists, it’s like, “Wow!” They don’t compare them to previous artists, they’re their own category. It’s like we’re entrenched into this idea of “you’re just another mexican girl trying to do Frida Lahlo art.” Frida was anti-government, anti-system, she was pro-brown, pro-black, pro-POC, anti-white. She was just, a really important icon for me. It’s not necessarily bad that they put you in the same categories as them, it’s that they’re saying, “That’s all we’re allowing you to be. You can’t branch beyond that.” If a Black person or a brown person or an Asian person were to go out and do full-on nudes, to do something out of the ordinary, that wouldn’t be seen as okay compared to if a white person were to do it, because white people are born with the freedom of creativity. White people can easily tell people what kind of artist they want to be, and society will easily accept that. But as a person of color, you’re told what kind of artist you are. They put you in a category, as opposed to you choosing what to be. Since whiteness is the default in the cultu Since whiteness is the default in the culture, it’s not much different in the art world. Do you feel that artists of color are always spoken of in reference to their identity? I don’t think we’re in a time where we should be colorblind, like “Oh, why do you have to say she’s a Mexican artist? Why do you have to say she’s a Black artist?” We have to say that because we have to represent ourselves. This generation here, we have to put up with that shit because we’re the foundation for our children and our children’s children. They’ll be able to not have to state the color of their skin or their gender, gende because we will have set that for them. We will have normalized the idea of POC and queer people creating. That’s basically my plan for my life. I don’t really know what job I’ll have, or what I’ll do, or where I’ll go, but I do know what I want to change, and what I want to happen. I think of this generation of people of color as the foundation-setters. We’re putting it there. The previous generation were the dismantlers, out there in the streets, dismantling things. We’re still doing it in this generation, dismantling structural racism and the default normativity of whiteness, but I think we have a different di role.

Looking forward for people of color in art, do you advocate for higher representation in the existing art world, or would you seek to build a new art world? If you think about it in the terms of the existing establishments, it’s everything. Everything is white. Everything is white. When we have people like President Obama, a man of color, in a system created by white people for white people, it doesn’t change the problem. We’re just there. It doesn’t change the actual rooted doesn problem. I feel like if we, as young creators and artists of color, want to do this, it doesn’t make sense to go in the footsteps of white people. It’s gonna be much harder for us, and it would take longer. It’s just like public school systems. You’re in the same classrooms, you’re doing the same things, but it’s not built for you. You’re not meant to achieve, and they don’t necessarily want you to. They might tell you that, and the individuals can mean it, but they don’t understand the lengths people of color have to go to, and how exhausting it can be. It’s It the same in the art world, where white curators, photographers, etc. will think it’s great to include artists and models of color, but they lack a larger context. For the actual people of color, it’s hard not to run out of effort.

Maya Morales is a 16-year-old student and activist. She attends Patrick Henry High School in Minneapolis.

other people can fall in love!!

make judgements and survive!

drawings and text by isabelle genis

new things hurt and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s okay, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ok, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s here

be nice, laugh at your friends' jokes or they will leave you for someone else or feel sad all the time or both

you cant understand anyone by just listening to them, you have to put it inside your head too

my faces

we all make sacriďŹ ces. the best thing about love is that it's not a sacriďŹ ce. when you make yourself better for someone else, you do it for yourself as well.

listen to yourself or die

m a c k e n z i e

m o n k

So what’s your musical background? I did guitar lessons for a little bit in seventh grade, but that’s as far as it ever went. I just got more into the production side of it. I wanted to do my own shit, so I just kind of started. I bought a little ProTools, P a half-ass version, and an inexpensive mic, and started messing around with guitar and midi effects and stuff. That was my sophomore year. What was that early music? What was it about? At ﬁrst I was just recording stuff for a friend, singing a chorus here and there, stuff like that. I’d say the writing back then was pretty much the same as it is now, but I’m trying to lean away from that stuff. It’s moving from a stu sadder tone to a more angry, bitter tone. But that also comes from growing up.

“It was kind of like I alienated myself, but I was pretty content with my choices.”

What were the reasons behind your lyrical content? It was mostly just the alienation, I guess. I went to school in the suburbs, in Eden Prairie. It’s the “#1 place to live” with the “#1 sports team,” 3,000 plus kids in one high school, with a not-so-modern mindset. So I guess I kind of just stuck to doing my own thing, and tried to ﬁnd different hobbies, rather than sports. it was kind of like i alienated myself, but I was pretty content with my choices.

After sophomore year, you decided to go to an arts school. What came from that?

Going deeper into that, how does your bipolar affect making music?

It actually turned out to be way different than I thought it would. Going into it, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. and I didn’t really for the ﬁrst year. I was still only playing guitar, I wasn’t singing. We were put into ensembles wasn and I would just do whatever everyone else wanted to do. Senior year was a little different. That’s when I did more research in general, kind of narrowing down on what exactly I wanted to do artistically. I always wanted to combine live instrumentation with electronic music.

It mostly affects the process of making the music, because sometimes when you get into lows you don’t want to do anything, and nothing really happens. But then, when you’re able, you feel like you’re you’ really able. You’re just happy to be out of that low, and you feel good about just feeling any kind of motivation, or of feeling capable at all.

How exactly did you start to make your own music and be more independent? I guess it was just going for it. I had the supplies, luckily, to do it. I guess I was just, really determined to ﬁgure out how to work it, because I just really enjoyed doing the stuff that I did, on my own. What kind of personal background is there to Origami Bones’ sound? It’s reﬂective of mental health. That was the main reason for One. I did a lot of the production for it, because I just wanted to make sure that I kept the melancholy feel to it. I did most of the melodies, too. It mostly just comes from growing up bipolar.

How do you feel Origami Bones’ music addresses identity? For the upcoming stuff that I’m working on, it’s just about the idea of beginning to become it a part of seven billion other people, which I feel can harm you. I feel like at this point, I’m nineteen. The transition between eighteen and nineteen mentally is a pretty surreal thing. It’s transitioning from the childish reality of watching the world, to then trying to advance and become a part of that world, trying to pinpoint where you stand in terms of all these other people. Does that go back to alienation? Yeah. On a bigger scale, you can be a part of what’s going on, or you can withdraw. I feel like right now is a really important time, a really revolutionary time, both personally and in a deeper sense.

Does Origami Bonesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; music have a goal? The more you do, and the deeper you go with your craft, the more people are gonna ďŹ nd meaning in it. I just want people to be like leeches and take in as much as they can from the music. I want people to dive in as deep as they want. People appreciate app the people who dive in, and go deep into the process. Our music is for people who pay attention. Mackenzie Monk is part of the Minneapolisbased groups Origami Bones and Pseudoubt. More of her and their work can be heard at https://desoplex.bandcamp.com/album/one.

EXPO

HOBBES

GINSBERG

Hobbes Ginsberg is an LA-based photographer. QYA spoke with them about struggles, contradictions, and reclamation in queer artistry. On your blog, you talk about the duality of getting recognition from major publications while struggling to pay rent. What do you see as the defining issues and contradictions that queer artists have to face right now? There's a situation now in the media where queer people (especially certain kinds) face a hypervisibilty. hypervisibilt It’s something I think we're seeing with trans women a lot and has been culminating in the past few years with Laverne Cox on TV / Janet Mock with her book / Andreja and her contemporaries in fashion, and now Caitlyn Jenner and her media frenzy. It’s hard to distinguish representation and visibility and genuine compassion with fetishization and exploitation. Within a lot of the young / hip Internet art scene there's a big push for "female identified" artists and "feminist art collectives" and this and that. They generate buzz and people love it, but it’s it hard to tell for me if the gatekeepers of mainstream success and the ones giving me these articles and this promotion but never hiring me really care about me or my peers as full individuals or if they’re here because "feminism" and "trans girls" and the like are the thing to do right now. Saying "tumblr it-girl makes art for millenials and doesn't care about gender" gets clicks and gets these publications traffic, but do they care about the realities of queer life and queer struggle? Do they care as much about the trans girls who are homeless and poor as much as they care ca about the trans girl who is cute and takes art selfies and has an Internet presence? Do you feel like some of the attention you’ve gotten comes from that paradigm? Yeah. it’s something that a lot of people within art have to deal with. Whenever I get asked to do anything, it’s like “This is cool, I’m getting this attention, but why are you contacting me?” It’s almost like, wondering about the sincerity. Yeah, and judging by the ways you’ll often see queer artists and individuals represented elsewhere, it never seems like there’s a lot of sincerity or humanity or compassion a lot of times. If you read the way that I‘m introducted in a lot of interviews, it always seems very like “Look at this cool fun little thing we found.” It’s not some dumb little game. This is what I’m doing with my life, this is who I am as a person. I think a lot of the ways that queer people are written about or portrayed, they tend to be coddled, fetishized, or infantilized.

Cishet media has a focus on representation, above all else, when it comes to queer and trans artists. What do you see as the implications of that focus? It’s short-sighted. Representation doesn’t necessarily mean positive influence or even positive representation. Yeah, sure, someone’s on the cover of a magazine, or someone’s got an article that’s in a big fashion magazine, but the way they’re being presented maybe isn’t honest or doesn’t correlate to how they’d present as an individual, and that fits into all kinds of intersections. When we have that kind of representation, the general public says, “Oh wow, look at all these trans people that are getting articles written about them! What are you complaining about? You were on the cover of i-D!” And maybe there’s validity to that, but it’s always like, “We did our one trans person, and we’re good, so we’ll go back to posting 80 features a day of people who aren’t queer, and we won’t write about their identity.” Which is another thing in itself: as a queer and trans artist, if you look at the work I make, there’s the not that much reason to see my art as dealing with those issues. I’m not necessarily making super political work, I’m just making personal work as a queer person, but no one ever gives you room to have your narrative exist outside your identity if you have a marginalized identity. You always have to fit into the story they create for you. No matter what you do, all the press, all of the things people talk about when it comes to you and your work is gonna come back to your queerness or your womanness, etc. For everyone else, the identity comes secondary, and you can actually focus on what the work is. For me, those secondar questions get ignored, because everyone’s just asking questions like, “So, you’re queer. How’s that?” Do you see trivialization as an element of this? For sure. Everything’s very surface-level. I’ve rarely had an interview where it really felt like someone’s looked at my work, analyzed what I’m doing, and then asked questions that could be specific towards me, and not specific towards “Here’s a tumblr girl who’s who trans who we just found because they have a lot of folowers, so we’re gonna put them on our site, because teenagers will click on the link, but not really put much effort or thought into how that’s gonna happen.” A lot of times, they’re focused on mining attention. The power of the internet is a big deal nowadays, and they can capitalize on that in a way that makes them look good. I’ve been interviewed by Vice, but have they ever called me up to do a job for them in LA? No. They haven’t given me any money. They haven’t hired me to do any work. But they’ve put my face all over their website, and gotten who knows how many clicks from that. And yeah, that exposure is good, but what good is it gonna do me if they way I’m being talked about isn’t in-depth?

It seems like actual opportunities are nonexistent, despite visibility. Yeah. I’m using myself as an example in this, but among my friends I’ve heard countless accounts of the same kind. There was a show that my friends were doing in New York. They’re trans performance artists, and their school was using their photos and their bodies in all the promotional material for this big show. It was everywhere, like “Look at us! We’re doing a really progressive graduation show! We have these trans people in it!” But when it came time for them to actually put on their performance, they said the performance would be too provocative for the people in attendance, and they weren’t allowed to perform, despite the fact that they had used their image to promote themselves. When it comes to actually providing opportunities, no one comes through. I hear those stories all the time, of people being used for their look and their image, and then not being compensated or given any real opportunities. Why do you think success is so ﬂeeting for queer artists? Because nobody is creating an environment where queer people are actually seen as a viable force in the industry. Instead, we’re just like, a fun trend that everyone is hopping onto, and then never giving anything back. What do you think can improve the situation for queer and trans artists? I think one of the most important things is taking some introspection. If you’re a person who’s in a place of power to be perpetuating these things, take a step back and think about why you’re you’ giving exposure to the people you are, and how you’re doing so. I think a lot of people sort of glaze over being gentle or compassionate or humane, in favor of a spectacle. It’s not to say, treat everyone the same. It’s more so, treat everyone with a certain level of respect and don’t treat people’s identities as the only thing that matters about them, especially when they’re marginalized. On top of that, if you’re a photo editor, or a curator, someone who is calling shots about who gets into an industry, take some time to think about what kind of representation you’re providing. When it comes down to it, are you only giving jobs to the straight white dudes? And what are the reasons that that’s happening, and how can you start to take a look at who you hire and provide for? What active steps are you taking to dismantle these systems in places where they have a real effect? What are you doing to move away from a self-serving mentality?

So, those in power should self-interrogate more? I think nobody’s gonna solve anything themselves, but everyone plays a complicit part in this system. Everyone needs to start checking themselves, and start critically thinking about what decisions they make and who they continue to give power to. Whether or not they’re they’ purposefully doing it, or just not thinking about it, they perpetuate those systems. They’re not doing the work.

PORTFOLIO: YONCI JAMESON

TIGHT LIKE ROOTS HAIR MY HEAD MAPS THE UNDERGROUND

SHOOTING STARS OUR TRAINS

AND SWEET SMELLS PERMEATE THE WHITE MARBLE TUNNELS I ’ M NOT SURPRISED . I RECOGNIZE MY HOME WHEN I SEE IT SO I REALIZE THESE TIGHT KNIT STREETS WHITE SNEAKERS STIFF SHEETS AND IN WORDS YOU CAN UNDERSTAND GOUTTE D ’ OR DANS MON COEUR TON RUE TON VILLE

I WOULD NEVER KNOW IF MY SKIN WAS SOFT UNLESS YOU TOLD ME UNLESS YOU MADE A MAP OF MY MELANIN WASHED WAIST MY WOMANESS GET TO KNOW THAT SIDE OF

REPLACING HUMAN GENUINE EXPERIENCE AN IMAGE PERCEIVED YOUR IDEA IS YOU MOCK HUMANITY SO YOU CAN EVADE IT HOW DO YOU RELATE RELATIONS NON - EXISTENT EXIT THE RELAY

WHEN LOVE IS TAKEN OFF YOUR CHEST IT IS SURPRISINGLY MUCH LIGHTER

AND IT MEANS NOTHING TO YOUR EYES YOUR WALK IS STILL THE SAME

NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST LOVE YOU NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST LOVE

DON’T KNOW HOW TO CONVEY

YOU NEVER FORGET YOU NEVER FEEL NEVER FORGET NEVER FEEL

AN EPIPHANY

NEVER FORGIVE NEVER FORGIVE NEVER FORGET NEVER FEEL I’M GLAD. I HAVE H MOVED MOUNTAINS INSIDE I AM THE TRUE HUMAN I HAVE FELT FORGIVENESS FEARED FORGETTING NEVER

WITH LIGHT COMES DARKER FLESH AND HAPPIER HAPPIER HAPPIER AND AND HAPPIER

safety & invisibility

You came out to your mom six months after you were out to your peers. What were you able to do during this period? What needed to happen before you could take that step? I was able to do a lot during this period. Mostly my transition stuff i had to keep separate from my home life, which I didn't like much. I just wanted to not be ashamed of myself when i came out to my mom. I guess during this time I tried to really get comfortable being trans. When i ﬁnally told my mom it wasn't because I felt ok with being trans, it was because i was so uncomfortable with pretending to be cis at home. How was it to begin transitioning in high school? What was difﬁcult and what was empowering?

photos by anders billund-phibbs

Transitioning in high school is wild… I've really had to learn to speak up / stand up lea for myself. Its a process. Its a lot of “Don't call me [birth name]” or emails to teachers when they go a few days without gendering me correctly. Weird looks when using the right bathroom, bath invasive questions & tons of gender nonconforming kids wanting me to give them advice. I have to CONSTANTLY check my friends & peers for saying transphobic things. I've had to leave friendships over transphobia which hurts a lot. You've become somewhat of a mentor to younger trans kids at SPCPA. How has that affected your ideas of your identity and your place in a larger community? that a

an interview with léon currie

I think because I have no other option but to openly transition, I've become a huge helping hand to younger trans kids. I deal with a lot of questions regarding transitioning. Most of the time I'm more than willing to dish out advice but I do have days where I’d rather pretend I'm not trans. those are the days that giving advice is the hardest. I’d like to pretend I'm comfortable in the skin I'm in but that's not usually the case. I dont like being in the spotlight for being a trans kid at SPCPA but I am, and I guess I'm trying to use that to help kids like me.

Staying on the topic of high school, how did your social life change (since many in our generation fetishize trans kids)? Did you experience this? I’ve become somewhat of a science project to some kids at school. I think its pretty weird the way a lot of older cis gay guys (who harbor a bit of transphobia) pretend that I'm in the same boat as them now… I guess with me being openly trans I’ve gotten a lot of unwarranted questions about my sex life which is weird! It’s really weird! A majority of the time I feel like I’m transitioning in a glass box for everyone to see and I hate that. I just want to be seen as any other high school boy, but I’m not. Several people who disliked me before [transitioning] have tried to befriend me and it's really telling of the fetishization around trans kids [and our transition]. Describe the di Describe the different aspects of changing your presentation. What were some of the struggles and triumphs of this process? I’ve began cycling out of the clothes that made me feel uncomfortable (which worked wonders!) My mom’s come to terms with me buzzing my hair often. It’s seemed to lessen dysphoria the best out of all of my changes. My binder has become somewhat of a security blanket. Although, during the summer I’m scared I’ll have to either retire it for a bit or face heat exhaustion. Other than clothing I don’t do much. I’m starting to allow myself the privilege of wearing feminine clothes again but that comes with heavy misgendering that I’m not ready for yet.

Since coming out as trans, how has your understanding of your queerness changed? Being with my girlfriend and being seen as a lesbian relationship in public hurts me a lot. I haven’t really explored my sexuality preference since coming out. I’ve become more comfortable with being under the asexuality umbrella but other than that my sexuality has remained steady. I’ve known that I liked all genders since I was very young, so my sexuality hasn’t hasn waivered much throughout my life. What does the future look like for you, and other young trans people? Do you see an upward trend for trans kids who are questioning or coming out? What are some steps needed to ensure that trans youth are safe and heard? I think being trans and exploring gender needs to be more accepted and normal. I struggle with feeling gross about being trans. I wish I felt better about it. I wish for all young trans kids that it was more accepted for us to explore and present the way that made us feel good. We need more access the materials required to transition. We need more information given to us so we don’t do something harmful like try to bind with ace bandages. We need more discussions that aren’t taboo about being trans. I didn’t even know what transgender meant until high school, but as soon as I heard it, I knew that it resonated with me. Had there been education given to me at a younger age, I wouldn’t have had to go through so much confusion. Trans kids deserve representation.

Rosie Amato: Mercy

cover photo by anders billund-phibbs photos below by hobbes ginsberg

issuu.com/qyamagazine QYA MAGAZINE SUMMER 2015

QYA MAGAZINE ISSUE ONE

SUMMER 2015