I was delighted to be in such company, and immediately reached out to him to see if he’d be up for having a conversation. We met the same month the magazine was hot off the presses, on a sweltering Houston afternoon in May at Black Hole Coffee House, a neighborhood cafe surrounded by writers and artists, where I often camped out with my laptop and a latte for hours. He immediately felt kindred. Even our accessories were cousins, as we met outside despite the oppressive (for there is no other word for it) sun, with the same line of mint green loungefly backpacks draped over one shoulder, mine sporting Hello Kitty <3 Pusheen and Zach’s Star Wars, a film whose significance for Zach’s love of design would come up again and again throughout our conversation. As we wiped our brow and cooled our skin with our iced lattes, Zach tells me about how his fandom of Queen Amidala and a family that embraced his flair for making moments of clothing brought him to Cirque du Soleil.

Can you tell me your fashion backstory?

I was born in Edwards Air Force Base, California. My parents moved out to Phoenix, Arizona shortly after I was born, where I was raised for the majority of my life. I grew up in a rural community where I went to middle school and high school, in a place called Rainbow Valley, which was phenomenal. If Goodyear’s here, the farther you go up into the mountains, it’s tucked away surrounded by mountains. It’s very wild. My high school was a thousand, a couple thousand people? It was enough that you knew everyone, and everyone knew you.

Clothes and costumes have been a huge thing for my entire life. My mom was always very welcoming when it came to my personal sense of style, and she always encouraged me. I took bedsheets and draped them around myself and pretended to be a Disney princess, or Michelle Yeoh in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, leaping from couch to couch. The imagery and the costumes were so elaborate. My first big aha moment was when I saw Queen Amidala in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in theaters. That visual of her coming up. Who is this person that is taking a stand for her planet and is going back to fight for everyone?! That was such a big YES, and she did it fabulously dressed. She’s running around in this velvet skirt and these high boots and this giant ponytail. Ever since then, I was like, what is a costume? I was a big wig collector for a time, and when I was starting a costume box, in middle school and high school, my dad built me these shelves in my room so that I could put my wigs on Styrofoam heads on them.

I made my first costume my senior year of high school for Pirates of Penzance. Leading up to that, I would make small things. Draping a blanket around myself. Taking pieces from thrift stores and combining them. Nothing too extravagant. It wasn’t until college when I started to make costumes and work in a costume shop, and know what it’s like to work with a sewing machine that I realized I could make my own stuff.

I always felt I had a voice to express myself. Even in high school, even growing up in a rural community, I wore what I wanted. I had my faux fur vest from Charlotte Russe, my size 00 skinny jeans, my black tank top. My parents were always very accepting.

What’s their background?

My mom was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. My dad was born in rural West Virginia. My mom’s family is massive. She has three sisters and a brother, and our entire family migrated from the Philippines to Hawaii in 1920 to be sugarcane farmers.

Is your dad also from the Philippines?

My dad is from Poland? That’s where Ancestry.com said that we’re from. We get some Polish and some Irish in there.

Did performing ever become part of your costuming world? Or were you coming at it solely from a designer standpoint?

It was performing. That was the big thing.

Theater and dance combination. In high school I played in a lot of school productions. I danced in the dance concerts, and when I got to college I was encouraged to look at costuming after I auditioned for the musical theater program in college. I didn’t make it in, but they still liked me so I took the costume route. They encouraged me to audition for the drag show. I got in. My creative outlet during college was four years doing drag and performing and being a part of that community while focusing on design which led up to designing my own show senior year. I would work on projects in the costume shop until late, and then work on a drag show piece and perform it the next day and do it again. That time was very organic and fluid and expressive. I auditioned for a couple of pieces in Columbus, Ohio for Nina West’s So You Think You Can Drag. She was very big in Columbus at the time, people called her our Columbus drag queen. She was very supportive. I came in second place for her competition, and she wanted to book me at other shows. But I just wanted to focus on my schoolwork. I wasn’t looking to make drag my sole thing. I was working two jobs already. There were people I competed against that had made this their life, their expression. I felt they should have the space. I just wanted to come in and dance every once in a while. I did a few things here and there at the local bars. Fashion has always been something I’ve looked at as a source of inspiration. I like this silhouette, what can I make it out of? One of my favorite fashion designers is Jean Paul Gaultier. Especially his costumes for The Fifth Element. Amazing.

And then I got an internship at Cirque du Soleil, which changed everything for me.

How did you get the job at Cirque du Soleil?

My senior year, I went to an event called USITT (the United States Institute for Theatre Technology) that was held in Fort Worth. I had just applied to be at the The Glimmerglass Festival. Didn’t make it in. I was wondering where I would go after college. I thought about Disney. I could pursue a graduate degree in costume design. I went back to the Cirque booth because I didn’t feel prepared when I chatted with them the previous year. I didn’t ask the right questions. My portfolio wasn’t where I wanted it to be. And so, I went to the Cirque booth and started asking the costume shop manager of La Nouba at Disney World questions. What’s the company like? How inclusive is it? Are there artists from all over? How is the costume shop run? She was so welcoming and open to my questions.

We went through my portfolio, and I showed her my senior year design show, which was Sweet Charity. The message behind the show was about finding your inner light and having the audience relate to Sweet Charity in a new way. To separate the two perspectives, I bought vintage for everyone in the background, and as we got closer to Charity, all the characters started to blur the lines towards more modern. So when Charity came into the forefront, she was wearing this dress I found at Macy’s. I wanted something super relatable but that referenced the 1960s.

She really liked that I bought vintage. She said, “We’re all about reusable and recycling things.” Then we moved onto my drag outfits and I told her about using zip ties as boning because we didn’t have access to spiral boning and I used all the fabric I bought in this Goodwill center in California where you can buy by the pound. I used this curtain I always wanted to reuse because that’s core to my mission as a designer: reuse and recycle! She loved that. I couldn’t believe I was vibing with this Cirque du Soleil employee. She encouraged me to apply to the internship. She told me they worked with designers from around the world, and that I’d be more of a technician learning to make things. She thought my views and methods aligned with Cirque’s and how they think about the costume and preservation and lifespan and materials. So I applied. I interviewed with RuBen Permel, the costume shop manager of Zarkana. He opened the interview with, “So, I saw your resume and I wasn’t quite sure about it so I put it in the pile. I was running into a lot of lighting designers who wanted to try an internship. So I remembered you and picked your resume back up so tell me about yourself.” Oh my god! So not scary at all!

That’s such a weird opening.

I gotta fight for this! I gotta prove that I’m not a lighting technician. I’m actually interested in costume. I said, “I don’t know quite what my journey is, but I was inspired by the costumes from Star Wars, and Jean-Paul Gaultier’s design in The Fifth Element. By taking an internship with Cirque, and exploring a costume shop at this level, I will be better able to work as a costume designer with the team and understand the job that they do to create the things I draw.” I was sweating through my three-piece suit!

I thought I blew it! A couple of weeks later I got the call from Cirque Headquarters that I got the internship. As soon as we hung up the phone, I stood up in my little dorm room, on cloud nine. Cirque du Soleil was my last option. I had no idea where I was going to go. There was something about going back to the West that felt like home for me. I was raised in Phoenix. Nevada has the same climate. The summer before I moved I worked at David’s Bridal doing alterations and at White House Black Market as a personal stylist. I love all their items. I would buy their cardigans. I love dressing people. I made costumes during the day understanding designer motivation and attention and then I would do drag where I made what I wanted and told my stories and was as goofy as I wanted to be on stage. But then I had my other outlet at White House Black Market where I got to dress people and have them come in and tell me their favorite colors, what silhouette they’re going for. I’d ask them, “How can I dress your energy and elevate you to where you want to be for your event?” That was my whole outlook. I was doing three different roles all revolving around fashion and costume, which for me, are almost synonymous. It’s just all manner of dress. Costume is a theater term and fashion is an everyday term, but to me, it’s the same. The way you dress is the way you dress. It’s all about self-expression and identity. You could tell everything about someone by what they choose to put on in the morning. Every morning I would ask myself: What’s the story I want to tell today? In high school, theme days were my favorite because I could align with people. Through my expression, I could code to the norms or go outside of the norms? Or queer code.

What was a day like for you at Cirque?

I was hired as a Crafts and Shoes intern. I wasn’t a wardrobe intern, per se. I was focused on the creating and upkeep of the shoes, working on headpieces, and so on. I would get there around 9 and work with Paul Franklin and Kim Reale, two of my favorite mentors. They were quirky storytellers who were both so open and artistic. Paul Franklin was a dancer in Vegas for the longest time in one of the longest-running Vegas showgirl performances on the strip. He would tell dancer stories that blew my mind! Kim is a painter who used to be an ice skating rink showgirl. She would do ice shows and dance the lead and ice skate when the venues had ice shows. She’d been all over Broadway. She did the touring circuit and then ended up in Vegas. And both of them were in this shoe shop painting shoes for Cirque, having the time of their life.

That’s how Cirque is, though. A lot [of the staff] are ex-performers or have been on tour for a long time and somehow ended up there. One of my bosses used to be a television show hostess or an actress, and then my other boss RuBen used to work on Miss Saigon. I was surrounded by all these fabulous stories with fabulous people. They all know someone who knows someone who did the costumes on Phantom or Lion King. One of my coworkers, Maria, was on the technician crew who painted the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park and she had a picture of her inside the dead, or the dying, rhinoceros. She painted it!

What was your relationship to shoes and accessories before you got to Cirque?

I’d paint shoes occasionally for my drag outfits. Accessories and shoes was all I would do at White House Black Market. It would be pulling jewelry here, pulling shoes there, not actually creating. But to get back to a typical day—at Zarkana. In the morning, we’d go through all the dressing rooms and check the artist shoes. Some were typical ballet flats, we called them bleyers. We’d check the paint job on those, because they get scuffed up and gummy from the trapeze artists so we’d have to repaint those. We’d also pull a lot of the clown shoes. At Zarkana we had this group of ghosts that embodied 1920s/1930s, not stereotypes but icons, so we had a bride in a 1920s dress with really cute shoes. We had a mad scientist. We had a mad scientist assistant. We had this jester character. We had this clown character. All of their shoes were so specific and painted to match their costume. So we’d pull all of them. And then, once we checked them in, we would start painting. We played Diana Ross in the shop, Whitney. It was an amazing environment. We would rub the shoes with alcohol to remove any scuffing. Then we would airbrush the bottoms and the tops. We would hand-paint the details back in. We did this every single day. We would have to get it done by the afternoon, before the artists started training. It was a quick turnaround. I learned very quickly the art of doing a fast, good job when it comes to painting. It was a look into the importance of a good shoe for an artist.

Did you learn how to build shoes, too?

I did. One of my projects was building a shoe from scratch. We used an Asics running shoe as a base. I learned to mold and wet the leather on top and then create a shape and build upon it to create a specific look and feel. Before I started, my boss told me I could make whatever I wanted. So I came in with a rendering and this idea of Ghost #13. There were 12 ghosts. If I added this character on the show, what would it look like? I thought about how each character had an individual look and represented a different person in this world. So I created a 1920s/1930s football player, and explored what their shoe would look like in the circus. What if you had a raised bit the football would sit in that the actor could use for his act? My boss was into it. I was so excited! I built it with Paul’s guidance. I asked Kim for references, and then I airbrushed it and painted it and finished it. One of my favorite projects was making those shoes!

So we would clear coat them to make sure that the paint, if they got scuffs, could be washed off the next day. I was creating the foam tops for the shoes on the base shoe. And then I was adding the leather. Number 17. So those are the shoes I made for the show.

They didn’t get put into the show. I want to preface that.

Did you get to keep them?

I did.

You did! Oh my god!

I still have them!

That would be so sad if you would have had to leave them there.

They fit me too. They might make an appearance. Cirque was one of those super creative environments where practically every country was represented. An artist from China and Japan, Russia, Ukraine. We had a group of flag guys from Italy that had this beautiful flag act. The cool thing about Cirque is that in each theater they have a flag to represent every performer from their country. And hang them in one of the big community spaces, so it always felt like a good community. Even within communities, there’s drama. But that’s a family.

Was that the first real multicultural community you’d been in?

Honestly, yes? I’ve been thinking deeply lately with all the talks about discrimination and especially against the Asian community. My mom always said, “If someone says something bad about you, you don’t talk to them.” So, I think that was my perspective. If mean people are mean, it’s because they’re hurting. I never understood the significance of some of the words they would say. If it was actually racist or rooted in stereotype. It wasn’t until two years ago I began to think about those experiences and realize, No, that was actually incredibly intense. When I was in elementary school, mostly everyone was the same color, and I was the only person of color. During middle school and high school I found the few other people of color and we all hung out again. It was just us. I remember the Latinx community was really big at Rainbow Valley because we were so close to Mexico. I remember having friends who would talk about vacationing in Mexico. But I remember friends who would talk about going back and then I would never see them again. On the playground one day my friend Jorge said, “I want to let you know that I’m an illegal immigrant and I’m not here legally.” I nodded, not realizing what that meant. “I hope you don’t look at me any differently.” I just thought, You’re cool to me, so we’re cool. To me, it didn’t matter. He was looking to reach out and talk about his experiences. I had no idea. It wasn’t until I got to Cirque I felt the community was at such a level of diversity.

So, Star Wars. Are you a fan, or a fan through design, through costumes?

Ooh, I’ve never been asked that before. I think I’m honestly a fan through design because I saw the original trilogy on VHS. My dad loved them. But it wasn’t until that moment when Queen Amidala made her appearance, that I was hanging on my seat. It had to do with the design. There was also some sort of relatability to it, because once I read that Trisha Biggar was referencing Mongolian and Eastern culture, and the Jedi costumes were Japanese inspired and George Lucas got a lot of his references from there, I felt this is where I belong. This is where I see myself. It wasn’t until later I realized how problematic it was, through the conversations I began to have with other friends of color. I still think about that when my Asian cosplayer friends are told they can’t be Padme.

Yes! It’s very disarming to love something so much and realize how problematic it is, but we have to talk about it.

What do you think about the racialization and cultural appropriation in clothing, especially as a designer of color?

Sometimes I feel it and sometimes I don’t. I’m still learning. In fashion, if we look at Star Wars, we talked about how Trisha Biggar used period Mongolian headdresses as inspiration for Amidala and some of the kimonos. All of it references a particular Asian influence. For me, as a costume designer in understanding intention, the problematic thing is that there is no one of Asian descent in those films. There was something empowering about seeing something I recognize while also acknowledging how problematic it is in that setting. For something culturally specific, don’t touch it unless you can talk to someone with direct insight. Just leave it alone.

There’s also practicality of the silhouette when it comes to a robe. There’s a huge difference between a kimono and a robe with wide sleeves. It’s about understanding that words have cultural significance and are used inaccurately. When fashion designers label something a kimono, it might just be a robe. I’m still discovering how careful I need to be when it comes to designing off a silhouette. There is a fine line. It comes down to intention.

The education is ever-evolving in terms of knowing what’s assimilated into mainstream fashion from another culture.

There was a conversation in the costume community about Fennec Shand on The Mandalorian. She’s a bounty hunter played by Ming-Na Wen. I remember a cosplayer wanted to wear her costume. Some people said, “You should rethink this and leave it for people of Asian descent who want to cosplay this. Give them their space.” I would never want to tell someone they couldn’t dress up in a costume that is not, of course, culturally specific. But, then again, if Asian cosplayers are told they can’t be Padme because they’re not white, then I would want to make space for non-Asian cosplayers to play with an Asian bounty hunter to get full representation but then again, is that saying, So here’s your Asian character. This is what you can do. It’s very tricky. It’s not getting easier.

Going back to childhood, did playing with costuming come together with your understanding of your sexuality?

I have always looked at fashion and what I wear as universal and unrestrictive. I’ve always loved and owned corsets. I tried on my mom’s heels at one point. She shared her makeup with me. The only items that were restricted were super feminine, like skirts. I didn’t know what gay meant until high school, and that’s when I felt there was a difference in society for gay people. In middle school, I would wear an Air Force shirt with my Arwen Evenstar necklace and not think anything of it. I wore whatever I wanted to. I remember doing the joke, Well, I’m gay! And everyone would laugh, but I didn’t feel the weight of the words until high school. That’s when I started to find my self-expression. I remember dressing up with my friends to go to McDonalds and wearing a velvet hood and a skirt. But to me it was just what I wanted to wear at the time. But because it was a rural environment, I always felt different and I was okay with that. In a school where everyone knows everything about you, I learned quickly you just gotta go with it. Being outgoing and having support from family to wear whatever I want, to have Barbies when I grew up, prepared me to realize, some people are not gonna like me and that’s okay.

Are you still designing? Are you designing for your own drag shows? What do you see going forward for queer design in particular?

I design for DNVRMX which is a local circuit group here in Houston. I find that my design aesthetic pushes the boundaries of circuit wear. The first looks I designed for them were Planet Pink and the theme was Design for a planet. I created four looks. They’re very skimpy, of course. I wanted to add more of a storyline to create ambience, instead of just having guys on stage in a jockstrap dancing. A lot of the friends I have in the circuit are not just into the intimacy or sexuality of it, but also the escapism. In Vegas, you want to have an escape moment. To me, that happens through clothing, too. This sense of the otherworldly. A safe space where anything is possible. That’s what I want to create when I design these outfits. I want to shout out the circuit queens that come out in beautiful drag. They bring their wings. There are people at these circuit events you can tell come authentically. That’s who I design for. The people like me, who came into the circuit scene asking if I have to be sexual. Is there something for me here? But to a lot of people in the circuit scene, dressing up is 50% or 70%! They go for the music and to have their moments. I design for the people who make moments. I like creating moments for people.

What is your fantasy Pride outfit?

My first Pride was in San Francisco, the summer before I started college. Such a game changer. It was a completely freeing experience. Scary but freeing at the same time. I created a fop character. 18th century wig. I wore a white button up with lace shorts. It was a moment of authenticity. Every Pride I try to find another moment of my authentic self. One of my best friends from Vegas had a theme for his wedding, Dress as Your Authentic Self. I wore my Jedi cosplay. I had just finished it, and I was proud of it. My cosplays are everyday wear because they’re just clothes. Why can’t I wear them every day? My fantasy Pride outfit is maybe a chiffon moment.

Do you have thoughts around sustainability in fashion and costume design, particularly using recycled materials and upcycling?

I’m totally for it. Now, with fast fashion being faster, everything happens so fast. I don’t think people realize the clothes that are still around from the 60s and 70s last because the materials are so fantastic. Yeah, polyester is terrible. When you use something that has a cheap weave to it, it cheapens it. It falls apart faster. After three washes you want to throw it away. I’m a big supporter of thrifting or making something out of gently used clothing. especially costumes. But there’s much more individuality, and more choice, when thrifting for your own creative endeavor. You can cut it apart. You can make it. One of my friends found this suede skirt and didn’t know what to do with it. We cut it up, distressed it a bit, and then we had a Ren Fair skirt. I encourage people to – if not for everyday wear – but for costume, cosplay, search the thrift stores. You can find good stuff. Something someone would be like, Oh this choice I made once doesn’t work for me now, but that choice could totally work for someone else. I love it.

—
Zachary Paugh is accustomed to most climates, having grown up in Goodyear, Arizona and graduating with a Bachelors of Arts in Theatre from Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio. He led the costume shop at the Houston Ballet in 2021 shortly after working at both Zarkana and KÀ by Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, Nevada from 2016-2020, and now is Sewing Operations Manager at Axiom Space, helping to build the next-generation spacesuit. At home on the fringes of space, Zach is a creative with a big heart and a hopeful perspective.

“Years Flow By Like Water” by Anita Mui is a digital drag act I created in 2020. I filmed this at the end of summer as the city started bracing itself for a second shutdown. Because of COVID, I filmed it alone. It was the first week where I noticed myself wearing the same light jackets & sweaters I wore the March where the city first shut down. Sad and amazed by the passage of a full year in bubbles, where life changed irrevocably for millions, I spent that fall evening hauling aux cords, mini speakers, LEDS, & feathers up and down the ladder to my rooftop. I moved barefoot in my qipao trying to rig the right light, taping a sawed-off protein powder container to create that circular stage halo.

The song is about time’s passage—it’s an incredibly poetic song. You can look up the lyrics. Like a lot of Cantopop, the ballad is melancholic, sung bittersweetly and with a low, poignant strain. I was born in Macau, so Cantonese is my first language, a language I began losing when I came to the States. Whenever I hear it spoken though, something aches inside me. It’s fundamental, large, & open, like a well that still holds water.

I always try to be sincere in my art, even when I’m being absurd. I pair the song with excerpts of my own incantatory poem, which I pose as lower thirds. Cinematic language tells us that an Asian face onscreen paired with English words is subtitling, but these aren’t really that. I don’t literally understand the Cantonese lyrics when it’s sung, but my impulse isn’t to try to translate them. They’re not trying to be explained. Who is the audience who gets to understand everything anyways? Maybe words can do drag too.

But this is a nakedness I can’t intellectualize, at least not meaningfully. I’m painfully aware that I’m an Asian drag queen in the US performing as a femme dressed in the vintage clothing of most likely dead white grandmothers. I’ve never seen myself on screen lip synching Cantonese. I can’t even speak it anymore. And it’s the first thing I knew. It’s a lot of feeling, thinking about another life I never had.

To take something like drag, a medium poised for cleverness, poised for campy recontextualizations, & to turn it towards something mournful—it scares me. Whatever impressionistic idea I have of my first culture, this fabled key that unlocks where I truly belong—it’s gone, and in its place is the negative space of diaspora. What do you do with that? Is it pure absence? I think you play in the mystery of it. You can’t let it overwhelm you. You have to enjoy it as the most precious and meaningful thing that you have yet to learn about yourself. And you never have to translate it if you don’t want to. That’s poetry isn’t it?

—
Wo Chan, who performs as The Illustrious Pearl, is a poet and drag artist. They are a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of Togetherness (2022).

This is actually a question I’ve been trying to answer myself in a new textbook I’ve been working on. The project is tentatively called Ready-To-Wear: Teaching Poetry and Fashion in the Classroom. But lately it’s been feeling more essayistic in certain spots. I have been trying to pinpoint the moment when I knew I had an interest in fashion. And maybe it’s not so much an interest in fashion as an interest in masks. Or fashion-as-mask. Poetry-as-mask. My earliest formative fashion memory actually comes from Tim Burton’s Batman Returns. I was probably 6 or 7 when I saw it. There’s a masquerade ball scene filled with elaborate masks.

Can you say more about what you mean by “poetry-as-mask”?

When I think of “poetry-as-mask,” I think of persona. Or what the “I” is doing in a line of poetry. The “I” in my poetry is not necessarily me.

I love that framing–the speaker of the poem as a “mask”–thanks for sharing! How was the concept for Seam Allowance born? Tell me about the origin of that idea.

Total whim. Total and complete compulsion. Earlier this June I was watching Phantom Thread for the umpteenth time. (The protagonist is a couturier played by Daniel Day-Lewis. In the film he uses seam allowances to hide secret messages like ‘never cursed’ into the dresses he makes.) I went to bed. Woke up in the middle of the night with the idea. Within 48 hours, Seam Allowance was live.

Wow, you work fast! What does the name Seam Allowance mean to you?

Yes, it just kind of came to me. The way I wanted the site to look. The pairings were the driving factor. As far as the name, so, seam allowances are what join pieces of fabric together. On the submissions page of the website, I say that Seam Allowance, as a literary fashion webzine, represents an “invisible expanse between the cutting line and the stitching line.” I appreciate the contradiction of the phrase “invisible expanse.” A presence in absence. Something hidden. Something sublime. For me, I feel most excited about art when I feel like I’m in conversation with the sublime. So, first and foremost, Seam Allowance is a space for experimentation. A space for formal risks. But also a space for contradictions. Camp itself.

That’s so interesting! You’ve done a great job with the visuals on the website. The pairings of writing + fashion pieces/looks is definitely what drew me into each piece you’ve posted. I’ve been really interested lately in ekphrasis–how written word becomes visual and vise versa. I understand that you receive submissions of written work that you then pair with a garment, which I see as a kind of reverse-ekphrasis. Do you consider Seam Allowance an ekphrastic publication? Why or why not?

Thank you! I’m not sure if I view it as reverse-ekphrasis, but I think I see what you mean. I need to think about it more. Perhaps if writers were sending me their work and I was pairing their pieces with my own hand-sketched conceptions of original garments, maybe that would be closer to a reverse-ekphrasis. In any case, I think Seam Allowance could be a great teaching resource for those interested in including fashion in discussions of creative writing. It might be interesting to show students one of the featured garments, have them write an ekphrastic response, and then conclude by revealing the original piece of writing. Would be interesting to see if there are any parallels.

How do you go about selecting an image to pair with each piece? What guides you in that decision?

As I’m reading submissions (and usually people are sending me more than one poem), I kind of wait for that moment or spark when the piece of writing reminds me of a certain designer’s aesthetic. Or collection. I think about color, texture, abstraction, but also concrete images. Do I see Valentino red or Thom Browne grey? Is scale important? I think about so many things, but I also try to pull from past collections and contemporary collections. I would like readers to discover new writing, but also maybe learn a little bit about fashion, too.

Has working on Seam Allowance changed your approach to your own dress and wardrobe?

Not really. I think editing Seam Allowance has only tested my personal knowledge of fashion history. So far, everyone who has contributed has praised the pairings. To date, my biggest challenge has been Jess Liu’s poem “diorama.” I think because it was a long poem. But I do love a long poem. So much. So I had a lot of factors to work with in that poem. And that’s another thing about Seam Allowance: I am providing personalized editorial commentary for every single published piece. I don’t know many other journals out there doing that.

How generous to give such attention to each piece. Do you find yourself doing a lot of research when you’re writing your commentary, selecting images, etc. or are you pulling from knowledge you already have?

Sometimes. It depends on how far back I want to go. Sometimes it’s difficult to find descriptions of older garments and what materials were used. But I’ve been able to find whatever I was looking for so far. I’m definitely learning things I didn’t already know. I like falling down these rabbit holes sometimes.

I admire your eye for design and hunger for knowledge and history. What is a memorable look you’ve seen recently and why did it stand out to you?

This is a difficult question because so many exciting things are happening right now. But I was pretty blown away by Thom Browne’s women’s and men’s couture 2024 collection. One particular piece that folks online have been calling the “muscle dress.” One of my favorite things about Thom Browne is his continued celebration of asymmetry. Imperfection. Blurring gender roles. Other favorite living designers currently include Sarah Burton, Daniel Roseberry, Jonathan Anderson, Iris van Herpen, Robert Wun, and Rick Owens.

I just did a quick search of the “muscle dress” and it is truly phenomenal. I definitely see what you mean about blurring gender roles, embracing imperfection and asymmetry. Do you think of fashion as something more abstract, tangible, both, or something in-between?

Something in-between. The fashion I’m most interested in tells a story. But I prefer when the story feels more abstract. Or sculptural. I think haute couture is something closer to sculpture. Some haute couture garments have inspired me as much as paintings hanging in museum galleries. Maybe it goes back to Phantom Thread. I like that film because it seems to imply that every garment has a soul. That clothing contains depths. Maybe aura is the word.

Maybe this is one of the intersections between fashion and writing–the depth of a soul, what’s beyond surface level. A poem has an aura, too, so I see how a project like Seam Allowance could literally come to you in a dream.

Yes, I think writers and fashion designers have more in common than is realized. And we share similar frustrations and fears. Robert Wun has been very critical of commercialization and thinks more like an artist first. And writers typically want to publish books. When the book finally happens, the writer finds themselves in the awkward position of having to ‘sell’ and ‘market’ the book. So it’s important for me to continue thinking about whatever it is that lies beyond the surface level. Whether that is soul or aura or whatever is pushing us forward to continue making art. To express something bigger than ourselves.

Tell me, where do you see queer fashion in relation to mainstream fashion?

These days I think mainstream fashion is always-already queer. Like it or not. You see so many men wearing Thom Browne skirts. Dwayne Johnson, Walter Goggins, Russell Westbrook, Oscar Isaac. I appreciate men who are in touch with their masculinity. Fashion feels more timeless and slippery than ever. Especially for Gen Z. They appear to wear whatever they want to wear. And seem obsessed with the 90s. And other artists have taken notice. I just saw the pilot of Ryan Murphy’s The Shards, and, fashion-wise, the series could be set in 1996 or 2026. Who knows. I love that.

Do you believe there was ever a strong distinction between queer fashion and mainstream fashion, or is it a more recent development that they’ve come to resemble one another?

Clothing has always been gendered. But now fluidity is more celebrated. People feel more comfortable to dress however they want. I think it boils down to semiotics. What makes a skirt a skirt? And a kilt a kilt?

It’s so interesting to think about this resurgence of 90s and Y2K fashion, but now being more fluid gender-wise. Given your knowledge about fashion history, can you point to other times that styles or trends have resurfaced and been regarded or applied differently, especially in terms of gender and queerness?

I see a lot of silk returning. Especially in menswear. Exposed seams. Transparent purses and bags. And a recent YSL show also attempted transparent shoes for men. The sight of exposed feet caused quite the uproar. The way people were reacting to visible feet felt alarming to me. Even locally, I’ve been seeing a return of wide JNCO jeans. That’s also very 90s of course. I really think people are latching on to a specific era, decade, designer, and just embodying whatever feels right to them.

Would you say this is a kind of liberation fashion can offer us?

Yes, absolutely. I think about something the feminist psychoanalyst Manuela Fraire once said. About clothing being a “second skin” informed by language. To bring this back to masks, I see the mask as something that extends beyond the face. Mask can include sleeves, pant legs, accessories, shoes. I think fashion can be a way to differentiate. To reveal one’s true self. Fashion can also be used to rebel against what might be considered ‘fashionable.’

Often masks are seen as something that obscures the truth or reality, so I’m intrigued by this perspective on masks revealing something true about oneself.

To bring us back to Seam Allowance before we wrap up, what would you tell someone who is interested in fashion writing but not sure where to begin?

Yes, I think there’s a lot worth thinking about there. Especially in terms of the closet. Like, what is the relationship between masks and the closet? There’s a great book by Nicholas De Villiers called Opacity and the Closet.

As far as the other question, if you think you have something new to say, say it. Maybe start a blog. Or Substack feels suddenly popular. I’ve heard from a number of Gen Z, who are studying or interested in art, that they are frequently told “It’s already been done. Don’t bother. That idea has been done too.” But that’s simply not true. That’s so limiting. So much has yet to be written. So much has not been done. Uninspiring mentors and incapable teachers (who likely gave up on their own creative careers long ago) have convinced younger generations that originality is a stale concept. I think that is unfair. Cruel, even. I say write that story or poem. Show us your never-before-seen. Give us ‘your’ take. But we don’t need any more sequels. Or prequels. Or spinoffs. Etc.

Thank you for that fantastic pep talk! Lastly, what are your dreams for the future of Seam Allowance?

I’ve been overwhelmed (in the best way) with the response to Seam Allowance. And couldn’t be more grateful. I might be interested in adding a small press component one day. But we’ll have to wait and see what happens. At this moment in time, I’m feeling pretty excited about the direction things are moving in. Thanks for this opportunity to chat with you! I love what’s going on at just femme + dandy!

Thank you so much for your time, Paul–and for everything you’re doing for the literary scene and fashion-lovers everywhere!

Paul Cunningham is the Creative Writing Program Manager at the University of Notre Dame, where he also co-manages Action Books, an international poetry and translation press. He is the recipient of the 2021 Diann Blakely Poetry Prize and the 2015 Sparks Prize Fellowship. He is the author of A False Tongue (forthcoming from White Stag Press in 2027), Brillo (Lavender Ink, 2025), Sociocide at the 24/7 (DIAGRAM, 2025), and two titles from Schism Press: Fall Garment (2022) and The House of the Tree of Sores (2020). He is also one of the collaborators in Katrine Øgaard Jensen's Ancient Algorithms (Sarabande Books, 2025). From the Swedish, he is the translator of Helena Österlund’s Words (OOMPH! Press, 2019). He has translated two chapbooks by Sara Tuss Efrik: Automanias: Selected Poems (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2016) and The Night’s Belly (Toad Press, 2016). His most recent poetry chapbook is The Inmost (Carrion Bloom Books, 2020). His interests include literary translation in theory and practice, decadent poetics, fashion history and design, and ecocritical studies. He is also a board member of co•im•press, NonfictioNOW, and a faculty member of the International Network for the Comparative Humanities (INCH).

(he/him) is a Chicano poet, photographer, and musician. Everywhere he goes, Felix travels with at least one kite in the trunk of his car. When he’s not writing poems or flying kites, he’s in the garden with his husband, building a fire to gather round with friends, or beating his high scores on Clone Hero. His work appears online and in print: Poets.org, Oyster River Pages, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. Felix is currently pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at Randolph College. Find him on IG at kite.wings.

Eaten out of house and home
Choci Loni starts a roam
Putting on a bandolier
Hearing through a nudie ear
Choci Loni roams… Choci Loni roams…

—“Choci Loni,” Young Marble Giants (1980)

This song (which I’m newly obsessed with) is described as “absurd” and “minimalist” by several niche internet music critics. At first, the song is just a percussive heartbeat. Then, the Welsh “post-punk” band provides a twangy backdrop so intangibly queer I thought it might be Orville Peck before vocalist Alison Statton chimed in. The lyrics, which appear in their entirety in the epitaph, seem like the kind of simple meaningless rhyme someone creative might make up after finding an inconsiderate roommate put an empty carton back in the fridge. But who on Earth, the internet critics cannot help but wonder, is the mysterious Choci Loni?

Of course, I have my answer already. I found the song while researching performer Diane Torr, who lived from 1948-2017, and posted her Banana Dance on YouTube in 2014. Torr embodies Choci Loni, roaming toward center stage with a John Wayne gait.

Torr’s drag absolutely compliments the song. The minimalist outfit—turtleneck, tights, and dance shoes— is the “bass, vocals, drums” of costumes. The starkly black outfit contrasts against the white background and the two yellow banana pistols Torr gestures with, one moment guns, the next as a telephone pressed between the shoulder and ear. Then as phalli-as-sex-objects, now as phalli-as-ego. And then, for a second, they’re fruit again. The flash of realness is what certifies it as drag.

This is also highly skilled drag; it queerly expands the meaning of the original text. The performance somehow ruminates on the absurdity and fluidity of gender without straying from the base image of—some sort of Wild West food bandit? I’m avoiding pronouns because Torr isn’t made up with facial hair and a suit (as she appears in footage of many other performances) and because she’s fluidly moving between movements she’s defined as (culturally constructed as) both masculine and feminine. Torr self-defined as an “in-between,” someone who dated men and women and who liked to experiment with variously gendered performances. In this piece, Torr’s performance feels almost biographical—reminiscent at times of her work as an exotic dancer, and at others of her most macho drag characters.

Speaking of biographical information: Torr was Scottish, born in Canada to a military family. She pursued work as an erotic dancer after over-staying a visa in the United States. She was critical of systemic structures that made that work the most viable option for her survival, while men in her situation had more options. She was also critical that the form of dance catered entirely to the male gaze, so she worked to imagine a woman-centered version of the genre. Her primary concern remains relevant today, as we’re in an era where all migrants, particularly if undocumented—and especially non-white, European, or Anglophone, unlike Torr—are incredibly vulnerable in the United States and worldwide. In the early ‘80s, Torr performed “Go-Go Girls Seize Control,” in multiple countries. This performance gave voices to erotic dancers and ultimately—in Torr’s words—“paralleled the colonization of Scotland with the colonization of women’s sexuality.” Her co-star Rebecca Furious performed a similar piece about “a Chilean emigre working without a green card. As she dances, titillating the clients with her chain, she says what is on her mind but never revealed – her anxiety about the molesting of her younger sister by her white schoolmates.” Both performances center on the intersecting violence of colonialism, anti-immigrant systems, and systemic misogyny.

Some sources, including Stephen Bottoms (who coauthored a book with Torr in 2010) say one iteration of their performance started a riot. Torr’s official website only says that non-Scottish audience members were “puzzled but entertained.” Angry audiences evoke an era where many mainstream feminists were so anti sex work they heavily erred on the side of anti sex worker, as well as any kind of pornography or sexualized femininity. Today, Sex Work(er) Exclusionary Radical Feminists (or SWERFs) often overlap with TERFs, the anti-trans sect that similarly justify their beliefs and actions as protecting women. Both movements eschew liberation or any form of real agency over a kind of condescension that ultimately affirms patriarchal power structures. Time and time again, these “feminisms” are used as excuses to systemically bully, disenfranchise, remove care and support options, and ultimately kill people. Even without footage of the performances or their various receptions, I can say that it does sound like a radical piece that would still make waves today.

Torr’s most well-known feminist effort  “Man for a Day” project, which took the form of masc drag workshops and inspired a documentary film (2012) and a TEDTalk (2016). Through these workshops Torr practiced theories of gender performativity that were concurrently, even somewhat later, articulated by Judith Butler. Torr parodied a chauvinist man in order to communicate the core idea that men tend to take up a great deal of space, not because they need it or can’t help but receive it, but because they continually communicate that they expect it. Many people participated in the workshops—aspiring drag artists, feminist women, trans men, and others. Ultimately, Torr’s primary motivation was anti-patriarchy, seeking to encourage participants to scrutinize subtle power grabs and take up more space themselves.

Torr created a vast archive of performances (including those that remain on her YouTube channel) and far more are collected in the memories of those who saw them. These performances take many subjects, too many to get into. The theme that stays with me is that of mourning. Torr’s biological brother Donald, a gay man who did drag, died of AIDS before they could swap characters in a dual act. In 2015, Torr performed “Donald as Dusty,” recreating her brother’s love for the singer Dusty Springfield. In the same vein, Torr would impersonate other deceased friends and visit their favorite nightclubs, using performance to let her loved ones live on in death. Torr once performed the Banana Dance at a celebration of life honoring her friend and sometime collaborator Ian Smith of the performance group Mischief La-Bas. His widow remembered it as hilarious and perfectly appropriate in a quote in The Herald’s obituary of Torr—which indicates to me that Torr is remembered as a rememberer, as someone who really, truly knew the people she loved and would never stop. She was not only an artist and a friend, but the kind of friend who would use all of their skills to keep the community going—whether that be through coaching workshops, resurrecting lost ones, or helping folks laugh through grief.

What a wonderful way to be remembered.

[All em-dashes are 100% human generated.]

—
is a drag king and PhD student in American Studies at William & Mary. They research popular media, audiences, and subcultures. Teddy’s current work places the disco group Village People in a broad inquiry into gay American imaginaries.

which is all to say: let’s take one big green breath together?

before i green breathe with you, thank you for what you wrote about my essay. what you wrote about how actual vibrancy moves us from force and urgency resonates with me. ease often opens true vibrancy, like flowers opening in their own time in morning’s light, adorning the day with their color and cuteness and vibrancy, adorning bee’s legs with pollen. the light adorns the flowers, the flowers adorn the day. and then there’s our bodies, interconnected with all this life and light, with the vibrancy of the natural world, a part of that same vibrancy, casting playful shadows on sidewalk, shadows awaiting our attention like all the other vibrancy around us.

jj, when i breathe in green, my eyes close and i witness my garden, somehow still surviving through the drought in colorado. green breath is the cucumbers vining up, the tomatoes not ripening from the extreme heat, the eggplant leaves growing purple-green, the peppers that, even this year, thrive. green breath is in my limbs, i breathe it into my arms, my feet. green breath flows back out as i feel roots growing from my back and legs that now touch the couch beneath me. i like these roots, i like the thought of them extending below the couch, into the floor, into the earth beneath the house i rent, into dirt which is not green but allows green to grow up from it. i breathe green in and out and do a small dance with my feet, rolling ankles, pulling toes forward and back, toes delighted by green and dirt and roots.

i’m curious where the green breath takes you?

i’m going to keep breathing green to see where i go, where green takes me. while i follow that curiosity, let’s talk about what’s adorning your creative practices? what’s lit up? what casts shadows?

i’m writing a novel. next year will be my tenth year writing it and much of that time, the writing was extremely slow and mysterious. in these last couple years, much revealed itself to me in the novel, though i don’t yet know everything. what a thrill to not know. the novel is a book but also a way of being. the novel is living parts work, living grief work about the loss of my cousin to suicide, becoming chronically ill and disabled, being queer and gender fluid in this country, climate change, the genocide in Palestine, and the loss of community in the country we live in. the novel is time travel and world travel. it’s a process of waking up so i can live in the right relationship with all beings through intentional action. the novel is opening to the interconnection of all beings and ecosystems by considering different perspectives - animal, plant, fungi, water, landscapes, other humans - and the ripples cast from each of those lives that intersect with other lives in wild ways.

my creative practice now feels the best it’s ever felt, akin to when i was a child, making for the joy of making and nothing else. adorning my practice is ritual, careful tending, mindful grief-work. i’ve spent years reclaiming my creative process from what i was taught it should be like. now my practice is cripped, honoring my chronically ill and neurodivergent bodymind.

my creative practice begins with two questions: do i want to create right now? what are my bodymind’s needs right now? if i think i should write, i don’t. if i want to write, i do. if i’m unsure, i often try to write and pause periodically to check in. this basic consent practice transforms my creative process by removing force and centering desire.

within the second question, i receive information about my access needs in the moment. even when i want to write, i find that within the want is clarity from my bodymind: i only want to create if creating looks like [ this ], where [ this ] might be anything from creating for 15 minutes, to moving my body while i write, to having a snack before and after, to being screen free and resting on the couch after i finish. viewing access needs as creative portals helps me untangle myself from ableism, instead centering my bodymind.

with the novel, i’ve spent much time in research, where research is expanded greatly. i created a playlist for the novel that i listen to each time i write, and i pause often to sing and dance, letting the music and lyrics remind me of what i call the heartbeat of my novel - what matters most about it. this heartbeat is both light and shadow, born from grief which is born from love. i write with rocks on my legs, river rocks from various rivers in colorado that are characters in the novel. i write with a stick on my desk that my best friend gave me. the stick has an eye and they watch me as i write, as they tell me their own story which lives in the novel. i adorn my practice with light and shadow - lighting candles that smell like the forest, turning the green light on as needed, playing with my own shadows cast on the wall. i open a sea-shell box i got at ren faire. inside are small pieces of glass that when i was a child, i picked from under a plum tree in our backyard from the genuine belief that if i gathered all these pieces and put them together correctly, i would world-travel to Tolkien’s Middle Earth. i don’t travel there, but i do travel to other worlds in the novel. i adorn my practice with my grief, pulling up photos of my cousin, letting myself feel the weight of missing him.

research and adornment extend into other moments, not just the actual writing. the novel is everywhere. i find the novel in my garden, where i tend the plants and pour water in small baths for pollinators. when i’m able, i find the novel on walks to the creek nearby, on trips to the mountains where the novel drips from trees in the form of sap or in caves where the novel clings from the cave ceiling in the form of stalactites. the novel is in the workshops i teach, where we relate to our bodyminds anew, creating with them as collaborators, rather than tools we extract from. recently, a book found me at the library - Joanna Macy’s World as Lover, World as Self - and in this book, i found that much of my novel is the Work That Reconnects, a beautiful type of work that helps us to be with our climate despair in community, as a way of helping us remember the infinite choices we can still make to help bring a just and equitable world into being, a world that centers climate solutions brought forth from heart.

in writing group, TC Tolbert’s trans/space is expanding, the care and compassion of that space enter the novel, showing my characters other ways to travel worlds to help each other. this is true, too, in my friendships, the light of my life, where tending to and being with each other through the weather of life in this moment, as horrors and crises befall this country and our world, as loss and grief befall our personal lives, save me over and over.

perhaps in this season of my life, i am finally feeling that i am living creativity. writing and dance and films and embroidery and visual art happen. this is, of course, art. but more so, i feel like my life is the artwork. i am weaving with each move i make, with each choice i decide on, with how i show up for myself and my bodymind and the humans, animals, plants, fungi and ecosystems i love. what’s lit up is viewing everything as creative - how can i imbue creativity into my daily routine, into the mundane, into relationships, into the soil, into the meals i make for my family, into activism? how can the shadows, which to me feel like the grief that’s left when a loved one passes, be loved just as much as the light? how creative can i be in loving myself whole, in loving all the parts of myself - the shadows and the light, and in loving all the parts of those i’m in relationship with? i adorn myself with this gift of creativity, letting it flow through me, transforming me over and over, making me braver and more compassionate. this is the novel and the novel is a book, but also a way of being. i let myself be written as i write it, as i live it.

i let myself be written as i write it, as i live it…oh, friend, i feel that stern little instructive voice in me that isn’t my voice at all, the one that says there’s a particular way i should behave in the interview space, even with someone i feel tender kinship with - maybe especially so. why would i ever want to keep my cool in connection? i feel alive in your paragraphs the way i’ve felt alive in your workshops, in community with you, in friendship with you. i, too, let myself be written, here where we mix our words together in the dirt to grow the field up past our knees, dancing the grasses.

jj, i feel alive when we’re together in friendship and community, in workshop spaces, through your poems and dancing. this era in the history of the planet earth is really calling on us to stop playing it cool. there’s so much at stake for humans, animals, plants, entire ecosystems. our tenderness is medicine. our aliveness in relationship to each other is medicine. thank you for being tender with me, here in this interview space and in all the spaces we dance through together.

i’ve known you to speak consistently about grief work in a way that i remember as i do my own, as a way of remembering to do my own. you wondered where the green breath takes me and wow, i thought i might need to still myself in the literal green light to find out where the breath is going. i’m in a week where grief has come loudly, and i let it. it’s not permission, exactly: it’s leaving the door open. it’s tending my way as i intentionally route grief through being alive.

lauren, the green breath takes me up the mountain, first in the enormity of feeling but then literally into the woods and up and up. grief wants my hands free in a way i sometimes misunderstand: it’s not actually trying to overfill them, it’s trying to flow together with everything else. with my hands open i remember to touch the trunks of trees, let green sort between my fingers branch-wise. my open hands palm rock, curl fingers, and pull. my hands model openness so my body can slide along the mountain, duck into it, seep through, liquid self. i move from one deep green sprouting loss into another, emerge making a bright green sound. this goes on for hours.

in the spirit of not playing it cool, i’m crying as i read this. my grandmother passed this week after a very difficult final two months. it’s not actually trying to overfill them, it’s trying to flow together with everything else. grief feels like this for me too. sometimes i worry it will overtake me, overfill my body. my system is still learning to trust that we can hold more than we think we can, and that holding is not stagnant. jj, we’re poet dancers, so we like movement, but does it ever happen for you, that you forget you can move? grief can feel like that, for me, at first. stuck in my body. but it always flows, sometimes so subtly that i really have to be quiet to notice it. the forest is central to my novel, a main character. you went to the forest and i close my eyes now, feeling distant the last few days from my novel as this new grief asks for my attention. i close my eyes and feel my hands touching pine tree bark, inhaling the tree’s delicious scent. wind flows through my hair and i inhale, wrapping my arms around the tree, palms open, wind touching palms, grief flowing out of my hands and then back in. there are tears and the tree absorbs them, transforming them into sap. my grandma grew up in baltimore, never thinking she would leave the city. her husband’s job took her to europe, all over the united states. i write from colorado where she spent her final years, hugging a tree in my mind(body), and the tree shakes their branches, noting the wildness of movement on the earth.

thank you, lauren, for not playing it cool with me. i do forget i can move. for all my knowing what movement does and can do, for all the ways i build my life around the practice of moving, all the surrender to movement’s wisdom, i forget over and over.

thank you for all the ways you remind me i can move. you do this often.

i think green is a state of my body(mind) just as green creates my body(mind). green is my body(mind)’s output and throughline. green knows about movement. isn’t that neat? haven’t we learned so much about embodiment together? i had the beautiful experience of taking your creating with our bodies series last fall, the tone of which is captured so beautifully on your website. i’d love to know how your bodymind moves into and within the workshops you facilitate. i know what it’s like to be held in that creative space and i can’t help but wonder if/how that space holds you in return?

you are my friend in all things and certainly a deep one in embodiment. workshop space is a space i tend with great care, much like my garden. like many others these days, i long for workshop spaces that feel anti-academic, that feel trauma-informed in an embodied way, that feel more akin to experiencing and sharing with one another rather than one person acting wiser than the rest. when i design a workshop, i think of how i can create something that helps artists come home to their own wisdom while kindling their own creativity. what i love about these workshops is listening to the participants share about their experiences as they come home to their bodyminds, letting go of how they think they should be embodied and instead, letting themselves better flow with the reality of their bodyminds. in this series, we share our embodied art in the final week, and i leave feeling inspired, learning more ways i can better collaborate with my bodymind. the workshops feel like going on a journey together. each time i teach, i move through all the prompts alongside the participants. we’re journeying together and each time i offer this series, it’s a little different, because what happens in that workshop space is so specific to the folks taking the workshop that time. i love that kind of magic. i’m just opening a container and tending it so that we can go on this unique journey together - this holds me.

on a literal level, just like when i write, i listen to my bodymind as i facilitate, inviting movement when needed, setting rocks on my legs, pausing to breathe. it isn’t all glamorous - i live with chronic illness and some of symptoms show up in the workshop space - a rash i get on my neck, shakiness in my voice and hands, pain comes in. i try to just let it be there, not forcing it to mask itself, connecting to compassion and curiosity for those symptoms, using them as real time prompts for myself and weaving them into the prompts i offer the participants. i try to live what i want in the world - i don’t want us to have to hide the pain and symptoms of our bodyminds because the masking of our suffering just amplifies it. instead, i let my symptoms arrive in that space, not taking over it or centering myself, instead just letting what’s there be there, letting it shift how i collaborate with my bodymind and the participants in the moment.

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lauren’s next virtual workshop series – creating with our bodies – begins on Sunday, September 6, 2026. limited spots are available, with sliding scale pricing and scholarships.

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lauren samblanet (they/she) is a hybrid writer who cross-pollinates with other forms of making and other makers of forms. They are disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent, gender-fluid, and queer. She received her MFA from Temple University, and currently resides in Colorado, the ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute people. Punctum Books published their first book, like a dog. Some of their publications include: Wordgathering, Fence, Passages North, Just Femme and Dandy, Dreginald, Bedfellows, and the Tiny. They produce films, most recently co-producing the short film, Trip Ziggurat, directed by Usama Alshaibi, which is part of Homegrown, a regional short film initiative presented by Firelight Media for PBS Digital Studios. They are a teacher and guide, offering workshops and creative guidance through Reinventing Creative Process.

To underscore singletons’ stakes in our identicalness, we call to mind a post on ‘X’ that was sent to us over and over again, from a few years back: when twins arent identical im like ok then what was the point of all that (@carterhambley).

For many reasons, none of which are especially healthy, as we, among a small handful of other twin scholars, including William Viney (Twins, 2021; Twinkind, 2023), have worked to dismantle, the untwinned have a longstanding vested interest in preserving our, that is, twins’, identicalness. At one level, we suggest this external pressure to maintain our identicalness is a frantic endeavour to contain and minimise our frightful difference, or ‘otherness,’ at the social and symbolic levels. If we are dressed the same, our twinness is more easily spectacularised, and thus interpreted as the charming ‘exception’ within a neoliberal age that privileges this hegemonic ‘individual.’ A wonderfully fitting example of this are the Grady sisters (played by Lisa and Louise Burns) from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film The Shining: the girls’ matching baby blue chiffon dresses, with puff sleeves and pale pink bows cinched around their waists, not only emblematise their famous roles as ‘uncanny’ doppelgängers, but have since been reproduced on greeting cards, enamel pins, in couples’ costumes, and much more, to be readily consumed by fans.

Aestheticising us as ‘cute’ similarly allows for singletons to sentimentalise their relationship to us, taking on the symbolic role of the ‘guardian’ whose duty it is to safeguard us from worldly harms. Sianne Ngai (Our Aesthetic Categories, 2012) points out that this image of paternalistic benevolence toward the cute ‘object,’ such as identical twins who dress alike, is frequently part and parcel with sexual violence, our seeming helplessness perversely warping us into “objects of potential seduction or even rape” (61).

The trope of the ‘Double Dutch’ twins, more recently represented in Nick Kroll’s hit animated sitcom Big Mouth (2017-2025) through the Dutch characters of Mila and Lotte Jansen, reflect just this.

‘Double Dutch’ twins are frequently ‘cute-ified,’ with stereotypical Dutch features, including braided white-blonde hair, pale skin, big blue eyes, upturned noses, broad foreheads, and even, sometimes, in matching Dutch cultural costumes. It is worth pointing out here that some of these physical characteristics, such as upturned noses, big eyes, and prominent foreheads, are commonly associated with babies and children, which further punctuates the predatory ambivalence of such a trope. ‘Double Dutch’ twins are characterised, moreover, as jointly seducible, or are, conversely, a pair of ‘seductresses,’ offering themselves, sexually and romantically, as a ‘package deal.’ This particular depiction of ‘twincest,’ notably rooted in white supremacist ideals and pedophilic fantasy, is widely portrayed across more mainstream literature, film, television, and art, as well as in fanfiction and pornography. Its consummability epitomises what Ngai understands as the cute ‘object’s’ perceived “lack of power to resist man” (Marx 178, qtd. in Ngai 62).

As a result of such grotesque, culturally ingrained fantasies, dressing identically — to no fault of our own — can leave us, as twins, more vulnerable to being commodified and fetishised by singletons, among other forms of sexualised violence. This proves especially true for AFAB, femme, girl, and women twins, and is compounded considerably by factors such as disability, class, and race.

The simultaneous aestheticisation and sexualisation of twins has even extended into queer culture. It has happened more than once that we have been asked by complete strangers whether we are dating one another. Whether or not these questions were ‘candid’ or rooted in more perverse and problematic imaginings of twinship, they speak more broadly to a culture where the separation between queer and twin identities has become noticeably blurred. From ‘doppelbanging’ to the less overtly suggestive concept of ‘gay twinning,’ the notion of queer partners who look alike, twins and twinship pervade queer culture at the social and aesthetic/material levels. The connection between twinship and queerness is admittedly multifold, as both are ‘non-heteronormative’ intimacies characterised by perceived ‘sameness’ (whereas heteronormative intimacies are marked by perceived sexual/bodily and social ‘difference’). The connections between these identities, however, have taken on more grotesque dimensions through pornographic and filmic representations of ‘twincest,’ whether actualised or implied (e.g. David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers), fuelling singletons’ desires to find a partner or bedfellow who is their own mirror image.

Bobby Benedicto points out that fantasies of ‘sameness’ underpinning the phenomenon of ‘gay twinning’ are equally steeped in problematic racial logics which favour racial ‘sameness’ (2019). Twinning as a relational ‘aesthetic’ thus runs the risk of reproducing other reductive imaginings of identity and intimacy, including of twinship, and is therefore deserving of our interrogation.

The models were notably scouted at the annual Twins Days festival in Twinsburg, Ohio. This is the same festival we attended as young teenagers at a time when we were reckoning with our own twin identities, having our individuality eclipsed on a regular basis by our classmates and teachers, in an effort to make sense of what it meant to be a twin in a singleton-dominant world.

While we located, at the time, a sense of greater belonging through participating in the festival, which included being scouted as models for Martin Schoeller’s photographic study Identical (2012) and the National Geographic issue, “Twins: Alike, but Not Alike” (2012), we have come to understand the the complexities of twins engaging in self-spectacularisation and objectification with further nuance in our adult lives and as twin cultural researchers. At Twins Days, twin festival participants are encouraged to dress alike: the more identical the better.

The year we attended, the festival’s theme was fittingly ‘circus.’ The Twins Days parade even included a set of twins dressed up as conjoined. While holding the potential to be subversive, fashion and costuming were oftentimes instrumentalised by twin festival-goers to ‘prove’ their essential sameness and proximity in ways that reified twin stereotypes and directly evoked oppressive histories, like the freak show, which played a critical role in shaping past and present perceptions and treatments of twins as well as higher order multiples.

In a perverse twist of fate, our own self-spectacularisation came back to haunt us upon discovering that Wieland Schwanebeck’s Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning (2020) opens by describing the portraits from Schoeller’s Identical series as “truly uncanny” (1). While Schwanebeck’s analysis of the portraits risks reproducing tired, and even harmful, twin paradigms, he is not entirely wrong that Schoeller’s portraits are fundamentally unsettling. However, these photographs are unsettling in a way that is markedly different from the author’s understanding. What Schoeller has ultimately captured, not unlike Diane Arbus’ iconic 1967 twin portrait (which notably inspired the twin characters in The Shining), among other famous twin photographs, is the performance of identicalness, through the same clothes, expressions, posturings.

This ‘uncanny’ staging of identicalness by singleton artists is notably supported by our own self-spectacularisation and objectification, putting us on display for all to question, fantasize about, and ravenously pick apart.

The common practice of researchers and other agencies recruiting twins at the festival equally gestures toward its predatory undercurrent. While ‘Gucci Twinsburg’ no doubt represented a valuable opportunity for twin models, the fashion show nevertheless relied upon the reduction of twin identity to a palatable and even titillating spectacle for the ultimate purpose of generating capital. As one ‘X’ user put it bluntly: If u r an identical twin, congrats ur the seasons hottest accessory (@vogueheroine).

Twins are often used to convey essential ‘truths’ about the human condition, and ‘Gucci Twinsburg’ was no exception. Inspired by his being raised by his mother and her identical twin sister, ‘Gucci Twinsburg’s’ creative director Alessandro Michele has described twins as being representative of humanity’s inherent inner multiplicities (Keller, 2022). Twinship thus served as a convenient metaphor for queerness through its symbolizing of multiple ‘selves,’ representing the many possibilities for being and becoming. Punctuating this idea further, twin models carried plush gremlins from the 1984 film, known for their Janus-faced characters. Twins were thus stereotyped (again) as having the potential to be both ‘naughty’ and ‘nice,’ ‘cute’ and ‘scary,’ or downright duplicitous. Like the gremlins, the twin models playfully symbolized the multiple dualities we all hold within ourselves.

While twins were leveraged by the fashion show as a tool of political disruption by advocating for queer rights and gender fluidity, ‘Gucci Twinsburg’s’ message nevertheless reduced twin identity to a medium through which queer identity could be fashioned, reimagined, and ultimately commodified.

‘Gucci Twinsburg’ literalised what Hillel Schwartz described as a “culture of the copy” (21), wherein twins personify the “likenesses” and multiplicities intrinsic to late capitalism’s climate of mass production. An uptick of twins used in advertising in the first half of the twentieth century served as a means of “doubling the visual impact” of commodities (33). Similarly, Gucci Twinsburg’s models were employed to communicate specific ideas about the fashion house to imbue it with legitimacy. The “magic” of ‘Gucci Twinsburg,’ according to Michele, is that the “same clothes emanate seemingly different qualities in seemingly identical bodies” (Bailey, 2022). Michele suggests that underlying visual sameness are the irreducible spirits of individualism and ‘difference’ to generate capital. The troublesome illegibility posed by the ‘aesthetic’ of twinship is ultimately resolved with this rectification of ‘difference’ for the benefit of singletons.

Oddly, there remains a glaring under-discussion of twins in the realm of aesthetics, despite fashion and clothing being so foundational to who we are as twins. Perhaps more than any other facet of our identity, our twinness has shaped the direction of our fashion — from small children in oversized turtlenecks and corduroy overalls, to tweens in leopard-print leggings, leather jackets, and aviator goggles, to adults in crushed velvet suits, Liberty print button-ups, and Fluvogs. Over the years, our fashion expressions have not only reflected who we are as individuals, but who we are in relation to one another, a dynamic similarly in flux. They have equally informed how others perceive us as twins, from peers expressing early in our childhood: you can’t be twins, you don’t dress alike! to strangers arguing with us and our parents about our gender identities: but why are they in boy clothes? Fashion has allowed us to destabilise others’ expectations of (our) twinship, and its many attachments (e.g. gender expression). We both find our twinship amplifies the various qualities that makes us ‘other’ including our queerness, our gender diversity, and transness. Certain distinctions between us, such as our gender identities, are made apparent through our dressing differences, drawing further comparison and inviting prurient questions, such as whether we are dating one another.

From Cathleen and Colleen Wade’s matching corduroy dresses and lace stockings in Arbus’ famous photograph to the transgressive runway looks of Nigerian Canadian twin brothers Whak and Mo, twins’ clothing and fashion has served as both a body politic and a sign of the times. Whether dressing alike or not, we, as twins, dress as a personal rebellion against the strictures of a neoliberal culture that has no room for two.

Works Cited

Bailey, Jessica. “Seeing Double: Gucci Sent 68 Sets of Identical Twins Down Its SS23 Runway.” Grazia Magazine, 2022, https://graziamagazine.com/articles/gucci-ss23/.

Benedicto, Bobby. “Agents and Objects of Death: Gay Murder, Boyfriend Twins, and Queer of Color Negativity.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 25, No.2, April 2019, pp. 273-296.

carter hambley, @carterhambley. “when twins arent identical im like ok then what was the point of all that.” X, 12 December 2020, www.x.com/carterhambley.

Friedman, Vanessa. “Playing Twinsies at Gucci.” The New York Times, 27 September 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/09/25/style/gucci-versace-bottega-veneta-milan-fashionweek.html.

Keller, Erin. “Twinning: Gucci Puts 68 Identical Twins In Matching Looks at Milan Fashion Week.” 23 September 2022, www.nypost.com/2022/09/23/milan-fashion-week-gucci-puts-68-twins-in-matching-looks/.

mar, @vogueheroine. “If u r an identical twin, congrats ur the seasons hottest accessory.” X, 24 September 2022, www.x.com/vogueheroine.

Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin Classics Edition, 1976. 178. Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Harvard University Press, 2012. 61-62.

Schwartz, Hillel. The Culture Of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles. Zone Books, 1996.

“Twintastic! Gucci Dresses 68 Identical Twins in Matching Finery in Milan.” The Guardian, 23 September 2022, www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/sep/23/twintastic-gucci-dresses-68-identical-twins-in-matching-finery-at-milan.

Works Referenced

Arbus, Diane. Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey. 1966.

Cronenberg, David. Dead Ringers. 1988.

Dante, Joe. Gremlins. 1984.

Kubrick, Stanley. The Shining. 1980.

Kroll, Nick. Big Mouth. 2017-2025.

Schoeller, Martin. Identical. 2012.

Schwanebeck, Wieland. Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning. Routledge, 2020.

“Twins: Alike, but Not Alike.” National Geographic, 2012.

Viney, William. Twinkind: The Singular Significance of Twins. Thames and Hudson, 2023. Twins: Superstitions and Marvels, Fantasies and Experiments. Reaktion Books, 2021.

(they/them) is a PhD candidate in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. They are currently completing their dissertation, titled “Contagious Likenesses: On the Consumption of Uncanny Cute Twins in the Gothic Anthropocene,” prompted by their experience as an identical twin, navigating their day-to-day in tight lockstep with their sibling, Emma. Marta received the Barbara-Godard Award (ACQL) in 2021 for Best Paper by Emerging Scholar.

(they/them) is a Vanier scholar and PhD candidate in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Emma’s dissertation, “Is There Life or Death on the Horizon?: On National Storytelling and the Mythologization of Twinship,” engages with twin literary, digital, and cultural productions, as well as representations of twins, for what they impart about national ideals and formations. Emma is the twin sibling of Marta Croll-Baehre; their research is intimately informed by their lived experience of twinship. Emma is also the former graduate student representative of the Canadian Studies Network-Réseau d’études canadiennes (CSN-RÉC), and Canadian graduate representative for the Network for Emerging Scholars in Canadian Studies (RIJEC/INES-Canada).

Hey there, I’m Brooke Ashley Eden and I am here today to show you how to turn your T-shirt into the perfectly cropped top! Now for a super, super brief history lesson on the crop top. Evidence shows that the crop top existed in ancient societies, particularly in societies that lived in warmer climates, which makes perfect sense. Hotter weather, less clothes to combat it. Lines up, right? But the introduction of the crop top didn’t exist for modern day society until the World’s Fair in 1893 and that introduction went about as smoothly as you would expect it.

The crop top was considered “immoral” and “inappropriate” so it was reserved for undergarments and unmentionables. The crop top that we know of nowadays wasn’t really introduced until the 1970s and 1980s, when pop culture became a fan of the cropped top.

Now, I have been a fan of the crop top for quite a while, and I’m also a fan of thrifting and DIY, so, I started taking scissors to my clothes, and I’m going to show you today how to do it with a few simple steps and absolute minimal supplies!

Now, my method of cropping tops is super simple and super customizable, and you can do it with things you most likely already have around your house. In fact, it only takes three objects to make this happen. First one, of course, is going to be the top that you would like to crop. Today, I’m going to be cropping one of my favorite Sleater-Kinney T-shirts that I’ve already done a little DIY on by tie-dying it, so I figured it was time to take it to the next level with a little bit of a crop! The next supply that you’re going to need is a pair of scissors. These are fabric scissors, which I would recommend if you have a pair to use because, of course, they’re made specifically for cutting, you guessed it, fabric! But I have used everything from hair cutting scissors, to kitchen scissors, to crafting scissors, to even children’s safety scissors to make this happen in the past. As long as it’s a pair of scissors, you can make it work. Now, the third and final supply! I prefer to use is either masking or painter’s tape to mark off where I would like my cuts to be. You, of course, can use anything to mark the fabric in terms of a pencil, a marker, a Sharpie, what not. I prefer tape, however, just because when I am trying to find the exact spot I would like it cut, I can move it around and not worry about making a permanent mark in a spot that I end up not cutting.

All right! So, step one is to throw your T-shirt on and figure out exactly where you want it to be cropped. I recommend, if this is your first time doing it, standing in front of a mirror and using your piece of tape to see and feel exactly where you would like to crop your top. I have done this quite a few times at this point, and I know that my personal preference on cropping spots is going to be pretty much right at my belly button and my waistline, so, at this point, I don’t even need to consult the mirror I just go by feel and know what’s going on. You just pop that tape on wherever you would like it, take a peek in the mirror, move as needed, which is why I prefer using the tape. Then after that, comes the next step: slicing!

The fun part! The cutting! All you have to do, again, it’s not perfect, it doesn’t have to be perfect! That’s the fun of a little bit of a grungy DIY! Take your scissors, I always use this as a reference point, slide it back to the edge of the T-shirt and then you start the big chop. I would suggest taking your time with it, again, you can go as fast or as slow as you want! I’m not worried about a perfectly smooth edge. I prefer a little bit of a grungy DIY aesthetic, so I’m not too worried about it being perfectly even. That’s what makes it unique! I prefer unique pieces to something perfect and looking like it was made in a factory, even though it is. And voilà, your shirt has officially been cropped!

Voilà! You are now the proud owner of a cropped top! Cropping your top is a super simple way to bring new life to old favorites or to zhuzh up a thrifted find! It’s super simple, if I can do it, you can do it, I promise! Just grab the scissors, take a deep breath, and chop away! Bring new life to your wardrobe. I can’t wait to see all the baddies and their new crop tops! Thank you for watching! Go crop some tops, y’all!

—
is a thing maker & feeling haver who makes things about having feelings & has feelings about making things. Based in Los Angeles, California, they are definitely not just 4 possums in a human suit. You can find them busking as Sir Madam.

We curl up in the bright folds of today
The shape of our bodies softened
Into a velvety pool of sky
Aglow with studded fistfuls of stars
And shaded in the breathtaking possibility
Of this summer.

— Ripple, “Painted With Our Breath”

Beyond its pages, you might find the writers and artists of the Spring 2026 issue of Chrysalis Magazine dancing, playing baseball, attending protests, or exploring nature. They live in California, Chicago, Florida, Massachusetts, Sweden, and beyond. They might be enjoying some waffles, chocolate, or salmon onigiri. They write and make art for comfort, to stay hopeful, and to engage in belonging. They make things that examine this world and that envision worlds beyond. They are poets, painters, storytellers, illustrators, and more…and they are all trans youth.

In late July, High Five Books – a gem of a kids’ community bookstore in Florence, Massachusetts – hosted one in a series of events celebrating the publication of Chrysalis, a literary magazine “by trans youth, for trans youth,” as they released Issue 2.

I’ve never been anywhere quite like High Five. It’s maybe the warmest building I’ve ever walked into as a total stranger (no, I’m not talking about the thick-hot air of this particular New England summer day, though I was offered both water and popsicles upon arrival), and immediately I wasn’t a stranger at all: Lexi Walters Wright, the shop owner, greeted me like every other person who entered that evening, as a dear friend. The shop is a vibrant extension of this welcome, alive with an incredible selection of books, art supplies, and cozy nooks, with a mural-adorned studio space that will be the backdrop to tonight’s event.

I’m also greeted by Kyle Lukoff, a Stonewall Award-winning author and one of the Chrysalis fiction editors, who will facilitate the reading. He talks about working with youth for the magazine and we connect through our mutual awe of the brilliance and imagination of young writers and artists.

High Five highlights: “We specifically stock books by historically marginalized creators–especially BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and disabled/neurodiverse folks–about their lived experiences.” There’s a display celebrating Disability Pride Month at front and center, and as I browse sections curated for different ages I can see these intersectional goals realized throughout.

At this point, I’m also distracted (in a good way). Folks have started to filter in and one young attendee is dressed: the mostly-black outfit complete with a sharp black blazer is complemented by tall brown boots and a tan straw hat decorated by a colorful beaded cord. There’s this tone of someone who takes their art seriously in a way that doesn’t sacrifice play, how our clothes can be such an expansive canvas on which to explore and express. I can’t help but hope I get to hear this kid share something tonight.

We all gather to begin the event, which feels like coming together in someone’s living room. The format will be fantastically informal, a community conversation, with the opportunity for anyone to read from Issue 2. A beautiful fact of the magazine is that its contributors are from anywhere and everywhere, so we get to honor those who can’t be with us in person by lending them our voices.

Kyle introduces us to Chrysalis, its history and its mission. As the magazine’s website shares,

“Chrysalis was created so that trans, non-binary, intersex, genderqueer, agender, two-spirit, and otherwise gender expansive youth can speak for themselves – and most importantly, speak to one another.”

Kyle explains that founding editor Jacob Romm envisioned this space for trans youth to speak as a real journal, with a desire to create a professional book object that respects youth artists and writers just as much as it would adults. Kyle also points out that the contributors work with trans adult editors, creating important mentorship opportunities in the editing process.

“Transition Journey,” the final poem of this issue, is where Kyle begins our sharing. Written by Louis, the poem’s final line marks the journey forward with a nod to the journey already completed: “I’ll say: I came a long way to get here.”

Lexi reads “I would say,” a poem by Eila Kittikamron Mora, the 2025-2026 Chicago Youth Poet Laureate who has six poems featured in Issue 2. This selection of poems delivers the personal with humor and bite alike. Mora’s drive in making art holds hands with the Chrysalis mission, as her bio states, “so all the young trans girls like her, and anyone who feels like they don’t belong, can finally feel understood and seen – and also so they can laugh and cry it out.”

Remember the killer outfit from earlier? It’s worn by Phoenox, 12-year-old author of the story “Evil Sunflower,” so I get my wish. Phoenox really seems to be in their element, speaks confidently into the room as they read their story to us. It’s a playful tale, but not without its lessons. “This world keeps getting more and more ridiculous,” states protagonist Sarah – and, faced with the ridiculousness of the world, Sarah stays curious.

In addition to being the featured youth contributor of the evening, Phoenox and their parents arrived with a homemade cake, which features a rainbow chrysalis-and-emerging-butterfly scene I got too swept up to capture (it was delicious, and you can see it here, alongside excerpts of “Evil Sunflower”).

Chrysalis publishes work from trans writers and artists who are 18 or younger, with the very important detail that they are not required to speak about gender. Making room for trans youth to “speak for themselves” means their whole selves, speaking exactly as they want and need to, which can address gender and well beyond it. As a result, we get to read expansively, too.

We get to read about the complexity of being a young trans athlete beyond the lens of legislation with Liam. We get to consider how we can bring more tenderness to the world when Lindy writes, “I would like someone to be gentle with me.” We get to read Lucky’s exploration of solarpunk as “a more hopeful vision of the future,” and peek into the shadows of Spirit’s dark future and the glimmer naming makes inside it nonetheless.

I’m invited to close the event by reading “Blessing for Trans Youth,” a loving message written by Chrysalis poetry editors Noa Micaela Fields and Imogen Smith that finishes the book. It’s like reading through time in all directions. The blessing begins, “I did not know I was a trans child until I became one as an adult.” I’m reading to little me, to all the people in the room with me (and all the people not in the room, too). I’m reading into a future I’m desperate to imagine.

I can imagine a lot because of that night at High Five. After reading, we sit around eating cake and chatting. Everyone I speak to speaks so sweetly of everyone else. I learn about their lives and they learn about mine. I get to witness parents in their own becoming, weaving protection and community, stepping back to hold the space around the fullness of young lives so they can be. I drive home with the windows open, the hot edge has fallen off the air, and I’m so full all the feeling won’t fit in my car any other way. “Finding yourself in any given moment is a blessing,” wrote Fields and Smith. I didn’t exactly set out to locate myself tonight, but indeed here I am.

In the days to come I’ll take my time with the whole of Issue 2. I’ll even take it for a walk, documented in some of the photographs you’re seeing as you read this. Chrysalis feels like a collage of being and becoming. It considers what’s come before and what might be next, exploring so many futures and possible realities, some dark and some reaching, all cracked open in the uniquely inventive light of youth. It’s almost like we can flip the pages to crawl inside the collective goo of making our wings.

—

If you’re a trans writer or artist age 18 or younger and you’re interested in submitting work to Chrysalis Magazine, you can learn more here.

If you’re anyone else and you want to support trans youth and Chrysalis Magazine, you can learn more here.

—
(they/them) is a trans nonbinary writer and dancer working in a web of fusion-based movement practices, diary, correspondence & collaboration, intuitive ritual, and traveling scraps of (sometimes wearable) paper. Their chapbook, a simple verb, is available from Bloof Books. Find them on Instagram @stepswritely.

It’s July in St. Louis and I’m throwing a strange party. There will be Jewish ritual immersion; there will be trans celebration; there will be crawfish.

I purchase two vessels: a propane-powered 30-quart seafood boiler and a black blow-up pool shaped like a cauldron. The pool, made by a company called Summerweenie, is on sale because ‘cauldron’ is spelled wrong. This is the first of many errors.

The crawfish are clearly unkosher, the cau(l)dron un-halakha. It breaks nearly every Orthodox Jewish law for a mikvah or ceremonial tub: not large enough to submerge my upright body; transportable instead of built into the land; not filled with the required quantities of Mayim Chayim (living waters—rainfall or natural spring). I will use the same garden hose as for the pawpaw saplings.

I’ve lived in this house for five years, in St. Louis for ten. I’ve been “out as trans” for six years, found my name in May. Sidney still feels like a wary cat circling my body, yet to turn close and sweet and mine? How do we know when we’ve truly transformed?

On the party app, I anxiously watch RSVPs. My middle school self warns rejection, humiliation. She insists, despite all the other parties, the memories woven across late night kitchens and grimy couches and karaoke stages and readings that, in fact, no one is coming.

When does a city become home? Why can’t I savor this queer life I’ve made?

Girl-me was raised on cul-de-sac loneliness, Zionist Reform Judaism, and low carb diets. When I was twenty-five and moved to Lafayette, Louisiana for grad school, something shifted. Weekends, our raucous group of writers gorged on elaborate potlucks, po’boys, eggplant pirogue, tipsy hookups that soured before the next workshop, and in February and March, crawfish boils.

I still remember my first one, the shelled bodies dug from a nearby farm, then plunged into a spicy broth red with cayenne. The host spilled the bounty across a picnic table. We dispensed with individual plates, hunching and cracking open and devouring. A cold, tight thing around my chest released.

Years later, I would recognize this feeling when I left heterosexuality for queer, womanhood for nonbinary, breasts for two crescent scars. None of these moves garnered ritual. For the last, I was uninvited from one: my uncle’s funeral. While my family gathered back east, I wept on my kitchen floor. Just as transness has given me new pleasures, it has taught me new forms of pain.

I want this party to have both heaviness and pleasure, to contain intimacy and flamboyance. I want what my Yiddish-speaking grandfather and namesake, Sidney Cass, might have called “a whole gemish.” An ostentatious mélange. A ‘more is more’ mixture. A complex festivity.

I can’t procure live mudbugs in the Midwest, but I find andouille, fresh corn, red potatoes. I look at old pictures of my Roxy-dressed self and smile. I give the party a name swirling with 2000s pop culture and witchcraft and pun-craft: Spell My Name. I try not to worry about boiling from frozen though the Cajun reddit comments are not good: “I wouldn’t try it,” “No one in the gulf would,” “Nooooo,” “that stuff is so rank, in general.”

II.

The Orthodox mikvah aspires toward purity. There are many precise guidelines; Jews and more particularly cis Jewish women are recommended to immerse before the high holy days, before their weddings, and after menstruation to prepare for heterosexual married sex. The Mikvah.org preparation checklist includes instructions for fasting and “internal examinations,” white undergarments and bed linens.

I no longer desire marriage. My most elaborate, somewhat sanctioned Jewish ritual was my 90s "Save the Planet" bat mitzvah. This consisted of a teal velvet dress, transliterated Hebrew, a DJ who bestowed blow-up electric guitars, and moss topiaries spray painted to look like the earth and surrounded by plastic animals (deeply unsustainable).

Perhaps I was always destined for an unholy mikvah. A kitschy, schlocky, plastic mikvah. A filthy, slutty John-Waters-esque mikvah witnessed by lovers and friends of many genders.

In creating my transplant Jewish ritual, I’ve warped (tainted? corrupted?) two highly specific practices. But maybe this is also a form of re-imagining. I’m emboldened by the ways other queer and trans Jews have invented new mikvahs to hold our communities through transitions. In the Queer Mikvah Project, created in 2015 for “Jews at the fringes because of their identities or anti zionist politics” the mikvah expands into the ocean. Rabbi Maggid Jhos Singer says in the trailer for a film about their work: “the queering is how we see [the mikvah], and how we end up approaching it and being in relationship to it. It becomes a mikvah when we say it’s a mikvah.”

In the final hours before the party, I delve into Teffilat Trans. It’s a gorgeous trans Jewish ritual guide my friend Max sent me, created by a community of trans Jews and Rabbis through a series of workshops. I find a few short blessings in Hebrew and in English, assign one to a lover, one to a partner, one to each of three friends. They will read these aloud as I stand beside the cau(l)dron, an anxious, sexy, joyful transexual in pickle-patterned briefs hoping to feel more real.

III.

As the boil heats, I throw stray peppercorns into the pool. It will be a brothy, seasoned mikvah. A middle-aged mikvah. I’m forty-five and it’s taken me exactly this long to know who I am. There are many reasons for this, and most of them fill me with anger. I’m a little embarrassed, I tell my guests. A name change party as my first beard comes in silver. Though perhaps my “late-in-life” body further queers this mikvah. It is that much more obvious that time breaks us down, that we are always a transition in process.

Transdisciplinary artist Nicki Green transes the mikvah with “fermentation and the culinary crock as a sort of stand in for the mikvah.” In her work, the mikvah is especially connected to the liminal, the earthy, even the bacterial. She writes in her “Blessing for Fermentation” for the Queer Mikvah Project’s pride ritual at Baker’s Beach (2017):

Below the surface of the water is liminal space, matter transforms here - and as queers, we know this place of in-between-ness, we are liminal people. When we taste pickles, what we are tasting is microbial life in all it’s glorious complexity and nuance and layering.

I love Green’s emphasis on the materiality of the mikvah, how it can be both sacred and tied to something as humble and funky as the pickle. Or as rot-loving as the mushroom. In her piece “Mikveh for Mycotheology” (more pun-craft!) a clay tub less than two feet tall is cracked in half across the Star of David in its center, it’s walls held together by metal bolts and epoxy. Within, a painting shows the same figure (an image of Green?) falling to their knees to pick the mushrooms that grow in abundance, rising up, lifting their arms to the sky in what might be praise or joy or thanks. The spore print moon encircling them is itself in transition, waxing and waning between crescent and gibbous and full.

I ask my guests to make my name material. They do not disappoint in their creativity, wit, and sweetness. My name is scrawled on a St. Louis City parking ticket (I’m a new crime!), elaborately carved into a piece of blond wood shot through with blue veins, looped across a tiny sign held by a plastic rat, gold stitched on a patch. My name co-authors an 80s lesbian resource guide called Our Right to Love. My name is an office stamp encircling a flush of fairy tale mushrooms.

IV.

My favorite part of the filthy Missouri transexual crawfish mikvah blessing reads: “When I enter the living waters, I bring all of myself to be enlivened and made holy. When I leave the living waters, I walk away connected to all of myself and to my ancestors.” The living waters can be anywhere and can bring us backwards and forwards in time. Like trans intimacy in its many forms. Like cooking an old, storied dish for new loves. Like a Jewish culture capable of caring for us all and fighting for justice.

Do’ikayt, us antizionist Jews often say, invoking the Yiddish word for “Hereness.” Bundist Jews of the early 20^th century named this concept. They wanted to challenge Zionist nation building as well as bolster the more equitable world they were creating in Eastern Europe. In Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of The Jewish Bund, Molly Crabapple makes legible this intentionally obscured history of Jewish socialist organizing. She writes, “they irreconcilably opposed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The diaspora was home, the Bundt argued. Jews could never escape their problems by the dispossession of others” (11).

Bundists rejected a vision of liberation founded on another people’s subjugation. They knew it would not vanquish the racism they faced in Russia and Poland, the legal discrimination, the murderous pogroms, the ravages of capitalism. They fought for labor rights and organized sweat shop strikes. They forged robust networks of mutual aid, offered education and meals and healthcare and childcare and strike funds. They refused to abandon their homes or their culture. They wanted revolutionary world making in the now and Here.

Missouri is one of the most transphobic states in America. We are a kind of Christo-fascist testing ground: they try their anti-trans legislation here first. In 2023, our trans youth lost the right to healthcare and to play sports with kids of their gender identity. On July 8^th, 2026, our governor took away HRT from trans prisoners. Susan Stryker has compared these kinds of administrative attacks to other forms of “paper genocide.” Through denying a group social and political existence, through withdrawing material resources, they erode their existence entirely. These violences are compounded exponentially when combined with other forms of marginalization. Anti-Black racism, poverty, and xenophobia all make a transphobic regime more deadly.

Crabapple rightly points out that for the Bundists, living do’ikayt involved great risk. “Bundists would fight for freedom and dignity in the place where they lived. Hereness was hard-won in eastern Europe. It had nothing in common with the fuzzy tolerance beloved by liberals. Do’ikayt meant defiance, backed by arms.”

I haven’t yet faced the level of danger that stalked my ancestors. I am white, tenured, nestled in the imperial core. Yet as a trans Missouri Jew, I’m still sustained and emboldened by do’ikayt. My community shares life-saving trans knowledge increasingly off the internet as we navigate hostile hospitals, apathetic-at-best doctors, oligarch-operated insurance companies and a murderous police state. We must work more in coalition. We have clinics for name changes and needles, offer free closets, food pantries and book groups. We are not doing enough for the most vulnerable among us. We have learned or are learning how to fight.

V.

The boil is spicier than I intended, by which I mean just right. I stand on the patio with a giant spatula in one hand and an Abita in the other, feeling simultaneously like a middle-aged dad and a bar mitzvah boy. Friends help me time the final, tender ingredients, pour it all across the paper-bag-lined table.

Bundist Jews often flaunted kashrut, or Jewish dietary laws. They liked good food and they liked to start trouble. Crabapple excavates this image in her history: “To be a Bundist meant to break with religion. At a bundist gathering, the pastries might be fried in pig fat, just to prove a point. For the new revolutionary man, the synagogue was only an edifice on which to slap up posters (which they did on Friday nights, knowing the laws of Sabbath forbade the synagogue guardians from removing posters until Saturday at sunset).

I teach several people how to suck craw head: twist it off, suck the briny juices. The tails are fatty and succulent. The potatoes are infused with andouille’s smoky depth. Cayenne sparks the corn. We stand above the steaming sprawl picking and eating and chatting. Our conversation slows and relaxes this way, stories pausing and restarting around the rhythm of our work. Hands and mouths redden. We have not bothered with bibs. Our feast speckles my thrifted soccer shorts and a sequined butterfly top.

For a traditional mikvah, nothing should come between the body and the water. All clothing, jewelry, nail polish, makeup, and sometimes even scabs and callouses must be removed. Perhaps because they are already forbidden, tattoos go unmentioned. I have many featuring rats, worms, angler fish, and spiders. These creepy filthy creatures are as part of this vessel as my freckles and top surgery scars. They accompany me into the cau(l)dron water, as do an amber necklace I found on residency in Arkansas and the jokey phallic pickle briefs.

None of my dicks are purely ‘natural.’ All were concocted through complex chemical processes, from translucent blue and purple silicone to bottom growth.

Stripped down, I step into a foot and a half of water, slide onto my knees. I dunk my head, lie back, kick my legs. The party cheers. I am very unclean. Crawfish guts and spices still stain my hands, stick beneath my fingernails. My belly is full of delectable meats. Back on the soft grass, my briefs drip. I invite guests to enter the pool themselves, to speak of their own chosen names. Some share and others prefer to simply stand in the water. In a few moments someone will bring me a towel.

We’ll cut the cake, a cheap vanilla sheet I’ve embellished with an edible thirst trap. As the pieces go, the photograph wrinkles. My half-naked body looks less trans GQ, more David Cronenberg. I hawk pieces of my crotch, crack myself up.

On lying billboards around our city, trans youth are made monstrous to sell voters on an anti- abortion ballot measure slated for November’s election. Our “progressive” Rabbi with the trans child still hesitates to condemn Israel’s genocide. The nearest antizionist synagogue is six hours by train. New York’s mass mobilizations, trans cabarets and t4t play parties feel much further.

Here in St. Louis, I name the lies and betrayals. I write, canvas, coalition build, and protest alongside comrades even though it mostly doesn’t work. We create a trans housing organization. We get the Board of Alderman to pass a divestment resolution. We create flawed, delectable rituals.

The morning after the party, I throw crawfish shells into the garden to nourish the soil. I take a lover to a drag show. I canvas a wealthy neighborhood with a friend who is very good at this. My name whispers to me across mediums and generations. I stamp it on my inner thigh. I do not feel more real, but I feel more Here, which is better. Mosquitos swarm the Summerween mikvah. I empty and fold up our misspelled magic—just until we need it again.

Sources

Tefillat Trans: Rituals and Blessings for Trans Lives by the Trans Halakha Project at SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. Edited by Binya Kóatz, Franco L. Martinez, and Rabbi Becky Silverstein.

“Blessing for Fermentation”, 2017, by Nicki Green. https://www.nickigreen.net/ferment-bless-text

“Mikveh for Mycotheology,” 2018, by Nicki Green. https://www.nickigreen.net/mikveh-tyco

The Queer Mikveh Project Film Trailer, filmed and edited by Chani Blockwinkel, directed by Rebekah Erav. https://www.queermikvehproject.org/film-trailer

Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of The Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple. 2026.

An Anti-Zionist Path to Embodied Jewish Healing by Wendy Elisheva Somerson. 2025.

Taharath Israel St. Louis Mikvah Association. https://stlmikvah.org/

Mikvah.org

—
(they/them) is a trans fiction writer, teacher, and sewist. Their collection Griefover: Stories and Invitations is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press (January 2028). Recent stories have appeared in Smoke and Mold, Ecotone, ANMLY, Foglifter, Black Warrior Review, and Passages North. Their first book, ActivAmerica (2017) was chosen by Claire Vaye Watkins for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize. Their flash fiction has been anthologized in the Best of the Net (2025), Wigleaf Top 50 (2024, 2012), and The Best Small Fictions Anthology (2024). Their writing has received support from the Jentel Artist Residency, the Ragdale residency program, and Dairy Hollow. They co-founded and co-host Changeling Queer Reading Series and the Queer Skate Party, and teach creative writing, queer theory, and publishing, among other things, at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Hey babes! I’m Alison, and my column FUTCH ENOUGH follows my journey towards an authentic gender identity and expression. As a biracial Asian person who was socialized as female, I’ve been shedding the personas and performances of femininity that I thought had kept me safe in favor of embracing my genderqueer identity. I’m eschewing imposter syndrome and rejecting the binary. Regardless of where you call home in the genderverse, thanks for joining me on this adventure!

The black cat x golden retriever dichotomy of relationship identity is the only binary I subscribe to. Though the interweb cites the earliest emergence of this memeification of couples in 2021, its origins predate TikTok.

In simplest terms, the black cat x golden retriever pairing typically refers to one partner as a black cat (mysterious, dark, moody, fickle, frequently femme) and a golden retriever (happy-go-lucky, playful, sweet, loyal, most often masc). This dynamic is primed for many popular series pairings in a multiplicity of queer identities (see Heated Rivalry), but also has embraced much earlier stylistic models.

My earliest black cat archetypes were decidedly femme, and stereotypically Cat Woman. By Cat Woman, I mean Eartha Kitt’s Catwoman, the original Black Cat Femme, independent and confident. Though I could also cite Audrey Hepburn in slim cigarette pants and ballet flats, Kitt is the blueprint, with a crop of photos that emerge every few weeks on Instagram showing her with feline companions. What is feline, though? Selective tenderness, and by that, I mean intentional. Purposeful. Measured. Not gratuitous. Precise.

Now as less femme and more futch, and forever reaching towards that portmanteau of identity, what does this sharpness, mystery, and precision mean? I’ve never felt more myself than when I dressed up for a friend’s 33rd birthday costume party, which was martyr-themed. To prepare for a night as Yoko Ono, I spent half a day researching her most famous looks. A hat was a must, ditto to sunglasses, insofar as much as I could recall from childhood tales of “The Woman Who Broke Up the Beatles.” Oh Single Story, how many histories have you violently simplified (if not completely maligned)? (Adichie does say that the problem with stereotypes isn’t that they’re untrue, but that they’re incomplete.)

Ono has had a stunning career in activism and the arts. Photographs of her reveal an affinity for menswear. I realized that I had finally found a futch icon. She was more than the white dress & hat, more than pajamas, more than a “band-wrecker.”

I dressed in all black linen for the party—a cropped button-down, shorts, and blazer—topped with a black felt hat, sunglasses, and of course Doc Martens. This was at once femme empowerment and masc swagger, in alignment with both anti-surveillance culture, feminine mystique, and implicit boundaries for consent. I spent the whole night in sunglasses, blissful at the removal of forced eye contact and socialization in a room full of new friends and acquaintances. My statement as a martyr was polarizing, but I didn’t want to talk to anyone who loved the Beatles anyway. (And to be fair, Drew Afuelo from The Comment Section did just interview MUNA and explained why they’re better than the Beatles anyway—but more about MUNA after I report on their show in September.)

It matters who tells the story, and it matters what happens when you’re misunderstood. As a Genderqueer Black Cat Lesbian, there was nowhere I felt more at home than at CATS: The Jellicle Ball, which I had the honor of attending in its first iteration at the Perelman Theater in 2024.

Let me be clear: I have always been a stan for CATS. It was my first broadway musical. I wore out my cassette tape and VHS of the 1998 recording (see the trailer for that below). I had an illustrated copy of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. From Rum Tum Tugger’s first gyration, I knew who I wanted to be. CATS has always been queer to me, and a barometer. If someone hated CATS, I knew I couldn’t be myself around them. (Just like if someone hates cats, I know that they’re not a safe person to be around. Re: consent.)

CATS: THE JELLICLE BALL is a macrocosm of Grizzabella’s journey of reincarnation through the necessary love of community. She has already lived the majority of the heroic monomyth, and became a tragedy that Aristotle would envy (if he had any taste). It’s about reinvention and rebirth. Even the first words of the Prologue, “Are you blind when you’re born? / Can you see in the dark?” imply the evolution, ineffability, contradictory pleasure of being a Jellicle cat and, in this sense, part of the Ball—this is a biological and social transformation—we hold contradictions (we contain multitudes!). To be a genderqueer black cat holds the same freedom in expression and presentation, grounded in an air of reservedness, reverence, & revelry.

And magic. The hero of CATS is undoubtedly Mister Mistoffelees, who brings back Old Deuteronomy. In some versions he is catnapped by Macavity and crew, but in CATS: THE JELLICLE BALL, he is “mistakenly” arrested for Macavity’s shoplifting escapades (reminiscent of the pilot of Pose, when Elektra and her daughters raid the fictional New York Museum of Fashion and Design for appropriate attire for the night’s ball). Tommye Blount has written an exceptional piece for just femme + dandy already, detailing CATS: THE JELLICLE BALL’s connection to the Black & Brown ballroom scene and criminalization of queer life that you can read here.

The Magical Mister Mistoffelees is played by Robert “Silk” Mason, blissfully nonbinary themself. When asked about the future of Broadway, they’ve said: “I don’t adhere or perform to any gender.” As a neophyte of a ballet dancer myself, I was absolutely dazzled by their artistry. Untouchable yet gracious, aloof and heroic, they are the embodiment of the Genderqueer Black Cat.

It is also important to acknowledge (and celebrate) the “othering” of the black cat archetype as frequently being (QT)BIPOC. Mason continues, saying “and I would like to see more people like me onstage as well: more trans people, more people of color. Our voices need to be heard; our faces need to be seen. It shows everyone that we’re not going anywhere and we’re going to continue to be the revolution…This is our protest. We deserve to be here, and this is clearly something that everybody wants – so let’s give it to them.” We are who we are, and we belong everywhere (despite of, or rather, because of the they/them recession).

After barely 5 months of performances, 9 Tony Award Nominations, and 3 wins (including Qween Jean as the first openly trans person to win a Tony award), the final show is scheduled for August 8th. I am devastated. I wish I could clack my fan three times to return, and for CATS: THE JELLICLE BALL to have an infinite number of lives.

The black cat archetype, CATS: THE JELLICLE BALL, and Yoko Ono are connected through others’ misunderstanding; yet all have given me a sense of belonging and my own moments of gender euphoria. For those still beguiled, know that you don’t need to fully understand us to love and respect us (just ask our golden retriever partners).

Even more than that is a testament to community. What is meme culture, if not to unite us in humor (or cringe)? The genderqueer black cat is not unlucky. Yoko Ono deserves an autonomous identity outside of her partnerships. Ultimately, that’s the lesson and hope of CATS: that even at our most desperate, isolated, or extraordinary, we’re worthy of yet another chance to begin again.

—
Contributing writer and FUTCH ENOUGH columnist Alison Lubar is a queer, biracial Nikkei poet and educator who teaches literature to teenagers, writing to adults, and yoga to all ages. They’re the author of two full-length poetry books, The Other Tree, winner of Harbor Editions’ 2023 Laureate Prize, and METAMOURPHOSIS (fifth wheel press, 2024), as well as four chapbooks: Philosophers Know Nothing About Love (Thirty West, 2022), queer feast (Bottlecap Press, 2022), sweet euphemism (Mouthfeel Press, 2023), It Skips a Generation (Stanchion, 2023), and a microchap, American Kintsugi (Bull City Press, 2026). Alison is also a board member for Philadelphia’s Blue Stoop. Find out more at http://www.alisonlubar.com/.

My mom costumed New York City Ballet dancers—and never taught me a damn thing.

To be fair, due to unmedicated ADHD, 12-year-old Syd also got bored after learning how to thread a machine, and hated to sew straight (prophetic!) but I digress.

Baby Syd also apparently stated that they didn’t want to learn because of seeing how “everyone always asks you to sew stuff for them” after countless all-nighters spent sewing for others. What a fascinating corollary to now, when sewing and craft has become the main mode through which I am joyfully inconvenienced by my humans.

Sewing circles and queer craft clubs are how I make kin. They are the center of my artistic practice, and mode of sociality. They are also where I theorize from as an academic. Above all, they are vital sites of queer unworlding, that have saved my bodymind in so many splendidly transformative ways. Let me take you on that journey with me, on how I stitch together community.

Making has always been a central practice of my life, with all sorts of crafting supplies spilling from every corner of my family of origin. It’s a deep love instilled by my mom, not only as a creative practice, but also as a connection to community. Every week, my grandfather would come over to babysit, while all the women in my family gathered to craft. We knew this time was a magical place where women were freed from the expectations of “mom” and “grandma” to “indulge” in creation. In retrospect, it was an object lesson on femininity. But, it was also a nuclear family solution to the larger issue of isolated domesticity. Outside women were never involved- after all as I heard countless times, who needs community when you have family? Even as a queer kid, I sensed how this paltry care network was woefully insufficient.

It is through a second site of craft that my heart was opened to the vitality of community. Backstage, holding my mom’s pins as she costumes countless productions, I begin to find queer kin. Yes, sad to say, but I was *that * musical theater gay ™. There I met families with two fathers, or none, deep fabulosity, and queer celebration. Those particular modes of interdependence demonstrated not only the joy of queer connection, but also our DIY nature. Craft was not only a mode of access, and curation of the self, but a way to do so with the resources you had available- to stitch and bitch about your ex while sewing new ribbons on pointe shoes, or the fabulous fit you will walk in next.

It was not for another decade that I would find the deep healing in craft.

New community- no partner, no friends. isolated in the pandemic. I found my kin in the library makerspace, filling up every space moment I could grab. Making became a tactile site on which I was able to project inner turmoil and a profound loneliness. Seemingly everyone there was riotously, loudly, queer. Not only in the everyday mechanizations of this site but also the formal programming. Take a population enmeshed in self making, couple that with free supplies to make joyful adornment and gender affirming alternations, and just to really push it over the edge, add in the library location?! Both everyday and institutional programming was of course resplendent with rainbow drenched babes. It was also my first interfacing with an explicitly queer craft club- a site which became the most vital, life giving gathering of my week. Participants shared stories of navigating the medical industrial complex, medication regimes, and marriage benefits in a conjoining of craft and care.

In my academic scholarship, I deem these moments the intimate infrastructure of queer kinship, following in the theorizing of Dr. Teagan Bradway. Surprisingly there is a dearth of scholarship in this area specifically focused on fabrication and the handmade. As craft is so central to my own and many queer communities’ identity, it was baffling to find few academic studies on the area- and none from a kinship or performance studies lens. There is extensive scholarship on queer fashion, and the decorative arts, but this is largely art historical analysis and parsing of adornment in material cultures. Grad students are aware- the few resources I was able to uncover directly speaking to queer crafting communities were almost exclusively MA thesis published in the last few years-but scarce professor interest. Queer folxs know how we build community, but the ivory tower is still catching up on documenting our kinship networks.

That lack of scholarly consideration is where my work is birthed from. Like my queer kin throughout the ages, in the absence of ancestors to commune with on this topic, I rolled up my glitter drenched sleeves and dove right in. In interrogating these spaces, un-visible mending as a figuration of trans textile epistemology was born.

The motif of stitches can be found across the trajectory of trans life- and specifically located in the nexus of social relations that coalesce around moments of community care, weaving together kinship structures. The sutures of top surgery, the slow stitch sewing socials, the diy creation of gender affirming alternations necessitated by the social and economic insecurity that all too often features in trans life- these incursions of fabric and fabrication can be found at seemingly every turn. Indeed, such practices “materializes the inherent queerness of textiles” by “crafting queer futures”. In one of the objects of study which anchors my archive, the group exhibition of Crafting Queer Futures, one such embodied material artists notes that is is the cocooned proximity to making the body, the communal practices, and the kinship structures of creativity and care that curate this inherent queerness of textiles. From this creative cosmology, I pluck the practices of slow stitching and visible mending as particularly fertile material modes for theorizing queer liberation.

In recent years, visible mending has gained popularity as a practice of highlighting the textured becomings of repair. Instead of attempting to return the garment into a facsimile of its originary and presumably factory produced perfection, visible mending turns the seams inside out, crafting artistic interludes from repaired rupture. Mastery is not the goal- and often it is the beginner’s colorful crazy stitching which is most celebrated. Like other modes of slow stitching, this is a profoundly anti-capitalist, communal materializing practice, and navigating the imperative of visibility through simultaneously emphasizing both the un- and hyper-visible mobilizations of trans bodies and visible mending practices. Cognizant of the communal resonances this practice has amassed, I offer (un)visible mending as an proposed embodied figuration of the labor of trans self-fabrication. I hope you will step into this space with me, to craft care and hold harm through trans unworlding with our queer kin.

—

A QUEER CRAFT COLLECTIVE with just femme + dandy
led by Sydney Paluch
Every First Saturday Starting September 2026
7:00-8:30PM EST
$10 Suggested Donation via Venmo

The girls, gays, and theys need a third place—and we are building it one stitch at a time! Craving craft space or queer connection? Looking for a body double to get through your latest WIP (cause you KNOW all the cutest enbies be autistic…). Need some trans unworlding as the skies burn and the ice caps melt ? Sounds like you need a Queer Craft Club, boo, and have I got the space for YOU!

Stitching circles have always been subversive spaces for kinfolk and particularly femmes. From slow stitch sewing socials, to late nights piecing together mopped fabrics to walk a realness category, these incursions of fabric and fabrication can be found at seemingly every turn of queer life. They can become sites of shared knowledge, swapping passing and medical tips, building mutual aid and community collectives.

After years of participating in and leading queer craft collectives, I am delighted to bring this experience to just femme + dandy! Join us as we craft queer futures, finish all those half done projects, and maybe even find some collective liberation along the way. Open to all levels, all crafts, or just to hang out, come as you are, and stay as long as your heart needs. I hope the space will become a valuable part of your care network as we stitch in community together.

Please sign up here!
—
Sydney Paluch (they/them) interrogates the intimate infrastructure of queer kinship at sites of craft, kink, and care. Working at the intersection of English Literature, critical trans studies, trauma and, performance studies, their research traces how pain is incorporated into the body in the afterlives of violence. Across projects, Paluch questions how queer kin are made through traumatisms held in embodied archives, forms of violent intimacy, and stitching together community. They are currently focused on curating figurations of kinky kinship, masochistic paraontology, and trans textile epistemology.

I started seriously painting science-themed clothes in summer 2025 when I was struggling to find full-time work. After barely making it through an undergraduate physics degree and burning out of three research lab positions, I realized that my true passion lay in science education and art, and I was desperate for an outlet to combine the two.

A few months prior I was wrongfully evicted from my old apartment in North Carolina, and everything I ever owned was thrown out in the midst of a tropical storm, including the collection of fun, masc, nerdy apparel I amassed over my previous year of novice genderfuckery. With my newfound closet of oldhand-me-downs my friends donated to me in crisis, and loads of newfound free time, I saw a blank canvas and went for it.

I bought cheap puff paint and fabric paint from the craft store and free-handed any science-y thing that came to mind. Space, anatomy, dinosaurs, axolotls, etc. I looked at the selections from popular science fashion retailers like Svaha for inspiration, but I was grounded in the vision of making something that looked hand-made, realistic but still imperfect. Not like figures on a lab poster; more like doodles in a lab notebook.

I started posting some of these pieces on Instagram, and was overjoyed at folks’ overwhelmingly positive responses. Not just in regards to my drawing/painting skills, but also in how excited people felt to experience scientific concepts in this understated, stylish, and relentlessly c*nty way. I loved when people came up to me to talk about how cool songbirds are, their favorite butterfly species, or their other nerdy special interest or research focus. And by “people” I mean everyone from the kindergarteners I teach at one of my day jobs, to the drunk gays I meet at my shows, to the dude-bros smoking outside the venue, who I didn’t know (until now) f*ckin’ love tardigrades.

As a young chronically-ill QTBIPOC science communicator, I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t do a lot of traditional science education work without compromising my health, safety, or values. And that has come with a great deal of grief and guilt. But it has made me all the more passionate about the need for novel art-science collaborations to make science truly accessible and enjoyable for everyone. As science communicators, there is enough work out there that asks people to seek out science: magazines, shows, YouTube videos, etc. What about the art of bringing science to people, meeting people exactly where they’re at, and sharing a beautiful moment of wonder, exploration, and awe without having to do anything but wear a jacket?

I love science fashion not just because I think more people need to understand or like science to go about their lives. As queer/trans/neurospicy/disabled people, our histories of oppression are intrinsically linked to histories of scientific misinformation, and the weaponization of scientific institutions to normalize or legalize harm. On the flip side, it’s often our experiences in nature, with animals, or with other kinds of science where we feel the safest and most seen.

When we’re able to claim science as a personal style, not only do we communicate that our lived experiences are a fundamental part of the natural world, we also affirm that those experiences are beautiful and worth showing …and showing off. We demonstrate that our lives are part science—the illnesses, the medications, the idiosyncrasies, what have you—and the story we’ve had to create for ourselves in order to survive.

How wonderful is it to be a product of natural science and a figment of human imagination?

What started as a relaxing unemployment hobby and a desperate effort to revitalize my closet quickly became an obsession, a praxis, and in some capacities, a business. As my closet has overflowed with science clothes, I’ve had the privilege of selling some of these pieces online, primarily to other queer nerds around the country. I’m currently working on new pieces when my body and energy allows. Like any experiment, I have no idea where any of this is going. But I’m too in love with the process to care.

—
Nik Narain (he/they) is a science communicator and multidisciplinary artist living in Durham, NC. By day, Nik organizes and leads science programs for folks of all ages across the state. By night, he performs stand-up, music, and drag around the country, often incorporating scientific themes in his work. You can find his work on his website and his art on his Instagram (@n1k_creat3s)

To celebrate our first issue of POCKET SQUARE, our fashion album of queer journalism accompanied by a 7” vinyl of a queer musician, we’re holding a contest!

POCKET SQUARE is inspired by 1990s fashion magazines, independent queer journalism, and featured inserts packaged with vinyl, especially by indie musicians. Launching this fall, we’re celebrating this brand new venture with our first just femme + dandy POETRY CONTEST!

just femme + dandy’s POETRY CONTEST is open for submissions, and we’re thrilled to welcome 2020 National Book Award Finalist Tommye Blount as the judge for just femme + dandy’s inaugural contest.

Tommye Blount will select one winner to receive a $100 prize and publication in just femme + dandy’s POCKET SQUARE this fall, our physical album of queer fashion journalism and art, featuring a 7” vinyl from a queer indie musician. The winning poem will be printed as a small broadside as part of POCKET SQUARE. Second and third place receive a $50 prize and publication online. All entrants will be considered for publication.

This year’s theme is: POCKETS.

This call for submissions takes its name from our publishing project as well as its own inspiration, a square of fabric folded in a jacket’s breast pocket, starting in the 19th century. Pockets first emerged in clothing as purses or pouches attached to the outside of people’s garments. By the 16th century, sewn-in pockets appeared in menswear while women were given no choice but to continue using pouches for at least another two centuries.

Beyond the gender disparity of who gets to have pockets, they immediately became distrusted as a hidden danger, given that pistols were the first objects men stowed away in them. As fashion historian Hannah Carlson writes, “Once the wearer places something inside their pocket, that thing disappears, enfolded and seemingly absorbed into uncertain depths.”

Not only are pockets a source of intrigue for what they are able to hide and covet, but queer people also used them in order to signal to one another, such as the historical Hanky Code, a system of color-coded handkerchiefs tucked into a back pocket to identify the wearer’s desires, and it’s long been believed since the early twentieth century era of the Hays Code that lesbians (aka Marlene Dietrich) would reveal themselves by placing a single hand in their pocket.

We’re interested in reading poems about pockets, and what one stores in them, in all of their forms and meanings. Tell us about how long you searched for a dress with pockets, or the most unexpected gift you forgot you’d left in your favorite suit jacket. What secrets or joys would you hide in them? Recount the first time you learned how to sew one with your family’s sewing machine, or the love notes you tucked into your trapper keeper from your first crush.

How to Submit to the Contest

• Submission period: August 1, 2026 to September 1, 2026 (at 11:59 ET)

• Reading fee: $5

• Each submission may contain no more than five poems and no more than ten pages.

• Simultaneous submissions are permitted as long as you notify us if your poem is accepted elsewhere, but the fee is nonrefundable.

• Note: Images are allowed as long as you have permissions to reproduce them.

SUBMIT HERE!

About the Judge

was born and raised in Detroit. He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and is the author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue (Four Way Books, 2020), a finalist for the National Book Award, and the chapbook What Are We Not For (Bull City Press, 2016). Blount is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from Kresge Arts in Detroit and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 2023, he received a Whiting Award in Poetry. A Cave Canem Fellow, Blount lives in Novi, Michigan.

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Tell me about your relationship to Sex and the City. How were you first introduced?

You want to hear how a Halloween costume changed my life? So I came to Sex and the City quite late. I almost was dragged there. I first watched it as a sophomore in college at Northwestern. I had HBO in the fraternity room I was living in. A bunch of girls wanted to watch the season finale of Sex and the City. Because I was embodying a particular type of man, I pretended to hate it. They were watching it, and I was rolling my eyes. Oh, this woefully feminine show. Inside, I was, like, Oh my god! This woman is fabulous! That was my first exposure. It was years before I found it again, when I moved to New York. As luck would have it, I moved into an apartment on Perry Street, which is the street her apartment is on in the show. I had a friend come visit, and she was like, I can’t believe you live on Carrie Bradshaw’s street! I said, Oh, I’ve never seen the show. We stopped everything and started watching it.

Honestly, those first few episodes, which I watched when I was single and first dating in New York, felt like a documentary. This is my life. These are my relationships I have with men. These are my friendships. It felt so real. I have a much smaller apartment, and shoe budget. But, aside from that. [Laughs] Once I actually watched it, it was love at first sight. I was such a Carrie intimately. Her faults are very similar to my faults. Her strengths are similar to my strengths. Her passions are similar to my passions. I’ve always dreamed of dressing up like her for Halloween. But it took a long time to muster up the courage to wear a tutu. Because even when I was younger, I thought coming out was a moment. And then you’re out. And then it’s all over. But it’s been so gradual for me in terms of coming out and coming into embracing all the different sides of myself. I dressed like Carrie on Halloween in 2016. It was a very special moment for me. I think so much of seeing [the show] in my frat room when I was not even close to coming out to finally feeling confident enough to do something I had always wanted to do. It was such a fun day. I took a ton of pictures with my friends. I posted one on Instagram. Not even once did the thought cross my mind that it would be anything other than something my friends would see. I went out that night. I didn’t even bring my phone because I didn’t have a purse. I didn’t want to ruin my perfect outfit. It was so perfect. I went to Patricia Field (who was enlisted to design the costumes for Sex and the City after meeting and befriending Sarah Jessica Parker during the filming of Miami Rhapsody) for the tutu. I tried on 18 different tank tops to make sure I got the perfect one. I can’t walk around with a tote bag! I just went footloose and fancy free.

Then I got home the next morning and my phone exploded.

Oh my God.

I still don’t understand how it happened. It was just crazy. Reading comments in foreign languages and from HBO and Sarah Jessica Parker. It made me so happy. The next day I posted another Halloween picture. No one started following. Tongue-in-cheek kind of thing, Remember how I went viral yesterday? That one went crazy also. It was right toward the end of the Hillary/Trump presidential race. The internet was this dark intense place. I thought maybe it’s an opportunity to 1, have fun and not overanalyze every single decision I make and 2, spread a little bit of love and sunshine in the world. That’s how Carrie Dragshaw was born. I want to keep doing this. It’s making people happy. I seem to have been given a gift from the algorithm gods and it’s reaching a bunch of people. I kept doing it, thinking I’d do three or four more outfits. That was seven years ago.

Tell me about the posts themselves. Do you pick an outfit you remember Carrie wearing in a specific episode, or do you get inspired by looking through her archives? Once you’ve settled on a look, how does it come together? How much do you already have in your closet, and how much do you have to shop for?

By now, it’s all of the above. When I first started, it was my top looks, the outfits I remembered and instantly connected to. I think any Sex and the City fan has a running list. But as I kept going, I started searching, or rewatching an episode, and thinking, Oh, I’ve never done that. Then, as the account grew more attention, I started asking people. What can I wear next?

Oh that’s so cute!

It’s such a passionate little community. Everybody had their own favorites. When I was doing it a ton, I would mix outfits that would take a ton of work with outfits that were easier, to manage my sanity. I had zero drag or sartorial skills when I began.

So this is the beginning of your drag?

Very very beginning. I had no idea what I was doing. But it was part of the fun for me, learning as I go. Oh, fuck, she has a smoky eye in this one? How am I gonna do a smoky eye? And just trying. Meeting proper drag queens who gave me indispensable drag mother guidance, Oh, that’s how you’re … ? No, you gotta do this. All of these skill you don’t acquire in your daily life.

I think my favorite part is the captions. My favorite part about the DIY of it is that feeling of—there’s no way I’m gonna be able to imitate this $90,000 Versace gown.

Then you take it bit by bit. How can I get something that looks like the thing she’s wearing on top? What might embody the layers? It’s become so rewarding. I have a very professional career. I get to use such a different part of my brain which is so exciting. There’s such an escape when you’re trying to learn something brand new. The world is falling apart, but I gotta learn to put fake eyelashes on. That is my task right now. I feel so grateful for the happenstance that created it all because it has led to so much connection. There’s so many pluses and minuses to social media. I feel so grateful I have this oasis of positivity and connection with people over this really fun show.

Who’s taking the photos? You also do this amazing mirroring of the actual shot, which I know is hard to pull off.

In the beginning, it was just any friend I could convince to come over. There was a period in between when it was a Halloween costume and something else where I just thought, Even my friends are gonna think I’m absolutely out of my mind. So for the first few pictures, I hired a TaskRabbit.

[Laughing] I love that so much.

Once they get to my apartment they won’t be able to say no or else they’ll be homophobic.

What did you tell the taskers they were doing?

I need a photographer for a few hours. It was so weird. I wouldn’t even acknowledge it. I pretended it was the most normal thing in the world. I didn’t acknowledge I was in bad drag.

Total commitment.

One was the bandeau top and the cowboy hat. It’s such an out there outfit. It had to be outside. Okay, follow me. [Both laugh.] We went to this park. The very beginning was touch and go. Once it got energy people wanted to take them. I have a bunch of friends who just enjoyed the creativity of taking the pictures.

Asking for help is hard. You realize the limits of your capabilities. But asking is what allows the project to expand and other people get to enjoy it, too. It goes from being this isolated project to something that connects me with my friends, too, and new people. Now I think, that’s the one where this friend taught me how to sew inside the Dolce & Gabbana robe, and that’s the one where that friend taught me to make a flower out of coat hangers. Each one has its own personal story.

Tell me about the evolution of the captions, which are inspired by Carrie’s voiceover as she writes in her column. How do yours diverge from the original?

After that second picture from that first Halloween, I decided that if I’m going to continue doing this, I was going to make a list of rules. One was that I had to do whatever it took for people to not think it was a parody because it was important to me that it was a project of love and admiration and adoration and respect because I love the character. There are so many amazing sides of drag. Some of it is exaggerating and some of it is reading. This has to feel like a project of love. The other side for me was at the time I was starting to think about writing. I write for my professional career and I wanted to explore more of it. One of the rules I made for myself was No drag without writing. I can’t just do tutu Tuesday and post a cute picture of drag. All the posts have to include a message, which was related to what was happening in the world then. I don’t want this to just be silly. I want everyone to get a giggle, a thought, and a boost.

That’s so sweet.

The outfit is cute, fine. I also want a little bit of thought, and to end with positivity because it was such an intense time. Carrie Dragshaw is not gonna have any thoughts on the G20 summits. [Both laugh.] All of that is obviously important. I wanted to be very clear about my role in the online landscape. So I made this list of rules. Then I watched 15 episodes back to back to back. Documented how Carrie writes. What are the clues that would make it sound like Carrie? I made this spreadsheet of rules. Multiple questions in a row. Obviously her catchphrase, I couldn’t help but wonder. Transitioning from her individual experience into Maybe all women are… Never making declarative statements. There’s something so brilliant about the way the show invites you in. One of the reasons it’s so rewatchable is her monologues include so many phrases, like, maybe all of us are, that have you lean in, nod your head, have your own reflection. I wanted to rewrite Carrie a little bit because though we do have a lot in common, I also thankfully have a little bit of a firmer grip on things. [Both laugh.] What if I accentuated the Carrie characteristics that I love—that fierce independence, not being so dependent on the ebbs and flows of men’s attention for her self esteem? So I remade Carrie Dragshaw to accentuate the Carrie I wanted to push into the world. I’ve stayed very true to that original intention of a giggle, a thought, and a boost.

I love that, that’s so good.

I’ve never ended without a boost. Even when I wanted to, when I’ve been going through my own struggles. All the captions are autobiographical. When I reread them, I think, Oh yeah, that’s when I was ghosted by that guy, and that’s when that book deal fell through. They’re all thinly veiled memoir. It’s been an amazing exercise because the self-reflection I share with Carrie can be a virtue and a vice. The fact that I have to force myself out of the moment to reflect on it, and ask myself, What is the lesson? How would I advise someone to move on from ghosting?, has been really helpful. Creating this character that has the confidence I wish I had has given me that confidence. It’s been a very drawn out therapy for me that hopefully has added light to other people’s lives.

Was this the first time you dressed in drag your whole life?

More or less. I lived in DC before RuPaul’s Drag Race and there was something called the Drag Race there. It was a race of drag queens. That was the first time I’d ever actually done drag. It really lit me up. But I wasn’t ready to ever do it again. One year for Christmas I was Eight Maids a Milking. I was a really snatched maid. I loved it but never wanted to be the one to do it. Carrie was the first time I was the instigator. Even that year for Halloween, my friends had a group costume idea. But I told them I wanted to do my own thing.

Tell me about meeting Sarah Jessica Parker.

One, it was totally wild. From the very beginning, she was so kind. One of the reasons I continued doing it. I can’t remember when, but maybe three or four pictures in, she started following me. I can’t go back—

—You can’t stop now! [Laughs]

—to posting pictures of my nephew or thirst traps. I’m in the presence of an icon now. It was pretty unbelievable for this regular person. From the beginning, there was this burst of publicity. A lot of it is just timing. A lot of articles were going around about the one bright spot of 2016. It was just a very love-and-sunshine kind of thing. All of the headlines would say SJP approved. Her support from the beginning is 100% the reason it took on the life it did. Throughout her career she has provided so much joy for me. Then she would write these messages that this was providing joy for her. I couldn’t even wrap my head around it. For me celebrities lived in a different sphere of existence so the idea that she connected to them was unreal. Then she mentioned the account in an interview somewhere. Oh my god, she really knows what’s going on. Then I get this very casual Facebook message from someone who worked on Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live. It said, Hey, we’re having Sarah Jessica Parker on the show, would you be interested in coming on? [Both laugh] Would I be interested? I would give my left arm. So I called. Yeah, we’re gonna do this pageant of drag queens impersonating her. I thought maybe you could do the Sex and the City one. Maybe?! It was so crazy. Then the joy. And then instantly, debilitating fear.

I was wondering about this!

One of the only things I regret is how impossible it was to enjoy the lead-up because I was so terrified. It was everything. When a car slams on the brakes and the luggage comes forward. You’re going to be on TV, in drag. Not just drag, but silly. Every insecurity. I’m gonna be on TV in the most public way possible embodying everything that’s ever made me insecure in my life. And then just the fear of not being a good drag queen. My wigs aren’t that good. My makeup isn’t that good. On Instagram it’s fun and DIY but they told me who the other drag queens were, and they’re amazing drag queens. Drag queens I see in the city, so I was terrified of that. And then, there was a ton of fear around, how they say, don’t meet your icons. She’s not gonna make the connection that this Carrie Dragshaw is the same person she follows on Instagram. Or she’s gonna see me and be this diva and it’s gonna be really crushing. So afraid. Then the show started. I walked out. I’ve never had eye contact like this before.

That was one of the lessons I took away from the experience. When you’re famous, there’s this swirl of people everywhere you go. It was interesting observing it because it’s so not my world. There’s somebody who opens the door for you, somebody who drives you. Every single person she interacted with, she gave them this moment. She even talked to the friend that came with me. She was just so kind. In an instant, it was this acknowledgment of everything. It meant so so so so much to me.

I noticed she interrupted the moment to talk about the Instagram account—

The no drag without writing! She mentioned the writing which was so meaningful to me. I even had this whole existential crisis about changing the name of the account. When it started growing, people were like, you have to change the name to Carrie Dragshaw. I went to do it and I couldn’t do it because yes, obviously this is a character, but it was also far and away the most authentic thing I had ever done in my entire life. If anything I should change my name to Carrie Dragshaw.

It’s not a persona.

It is more me than anything I’ve ever been. The captions have the guise of talking like Carrie but everything that’s being said is something I wished I had the courage to say as myself. Even having her—not at all in an ego way —say my name. She was extremely kind. I’m relatively put together. But after the show, I was such a rollercoaster of nerves and emotions. As the show was ending, she said, Wait for me. So I stayed. I thought she meant, Just wait, don’t go anywhere. So I’m standing behind the bar on the show. This person is like, It’s over. You have to go.

[Laughing] This is exactly what I would be doing.

Sarah Jessica Parker said to wait!

So I’m not doing anything else.

So I can’t go anywhere? [Both laugh.] Then I went backstage and she was so unbelievably kind. I was word vomiting about the manicure I got and how I had to draw marker on my wig to make highlights. I was just talking talking talking and not saying a thing, and she was so extravagantly kind. It was the best day of my life for so many reasons. It was such an embodiment of all my insecurities and a validation of them. I had my best friend there. I knew I wouldn’t be able to articulate myself so I wrote a note beforehand, This is what I actually want to say to you. It just meant the world to me. You should meet your heroes, if your hero is Sarah Jessica Parker.

What do you do as your day hustle? How did you get from that life to Carrie Dragshaw to your debut novel, Becoming a Queen? What was the evolution?

I think one of the late-in-life lessons I’ve learned is that while growing, you’re asked, What do you want to be growing up? As if there’s one thing. Right now I’m five things. You can actually be them all. My career for 13 years, and still, is I work at a brand agency called Lippincott. I also consult for this climate change nonprofit that started inside Lippincott. It was basically operating from the realization that climate change has a brand problem. Even people who care about it don’t prioritize it in their voting. So it’s an ad agency for climate change. I work for that, and obviously Carrie. It was very clear from the first message I received very early on that people were connecting to the account through the writing. It was so saucepan-to-the-side-of-the face obvious that this is what I’ve always wanted to do. This is what makes my heart sing. So for a while I just channeled that into Carrie. Then as I got excited about Carrie and the captions and connecting with people, I started exploring writing outside of the project. First I thought, maybe memoir about the Carrie project. I experimented. I’m sure you feel this in your creative pursuits. My career is so structured that it was amazing just trying things and seeing what worked and what didn’t. It started to feel like something I could do seriously. I started taking online classes. I’d recently graduated from business school. I’m not going back to school. Still paying off the loans from that. So I can’t actually go to school. Same way you can learn online how to do a smoky eye, you can learn online how to structure a chapter, how to transition. Writing fiction was lighting me up. Then I went to a course called Highlights. An in-person school where there were teachers and published authors.

It’s such an amazing program. It changed my life completely. It introduced me to people that didn’t know anything about Instagram and didn’t know me. I took this novel workshop and the other participants would say it was clear the novel as a whole wasn’t good. But parts were. Well if I can write that part well, then I just have to do that 900 more times. Having strangers validate it, saying, okay, you can do this. You just have to keep learning, keep trying. I met a publisher who gave me a list of agents she thought would be relevant for what I was trying to write. I got a suggestion from someone in the literary world about Young Adult and I was inspired by that because a big part of Carrie was wanting to help people skip past the completely unnecessary years of shame. Can they, really? I don’t know. I just wasted so much energy hating parts of me. It was a total waste. I did not need to do that. With Carrie and this young adult book, I could get there earlier. Adults are pretty set. I loved the idea of getting to people earlier because, Lord knows, I hope school is different from when I was there.

Do you have a favorite designer?

Oh great question. Do I? Probably Comme des Garcon.

They do such wild stuff.

Wild stuff. My personal style looks expected and then you get up close and it’s a twist? And Comme does a ton of stuff like that. Oh it’s a blazer—wait, it’s a skirt? They play with form and I have so much fun in my own life with clothes and just experimenting and expressing.

Favorite cosmetic product?

My overall takeaway is it is insanely expensive to be a person who regularly wears makeup. I got by at the start with the generosity of friends. The first night I did my makeup one of my girlfriends did it and she said, oh take this, take this, take this, and sent me home with a ton of products. When those ran out, I went to Sephora and got foundation or something. I looked at the price and was like, Pardon me? I’m glad I am impersonating a woman of the fresh face. Sarah Jessica Parker obviously wears makeup but it’s relatively simple because I don’t have the skills to contour. My thoughts on makeup are less about favorite brands and more just respect for how people do it. The tips I got from drag queens I’ve met along the way have been really helpful. But mine is pretty lazy.

As Dan, what’s your favorite fit to wear?

Out and about? I would say probably this Nike Ricard Tisci collaboration piece I own. It’s a black mesh pleated long skirt and then I wear that with exercise tights and some sort of blazer on top. One of my favorite things with clothes is that – I don’t even like masc/femme – it’s all everything – the conventional pairing. A muscle tee with a skirt. I like that butch queen tension. Something skirt-esque on the bottom and something manly on the top.

Even in my day-to-day life it’s my drag. Gay guys are addicted to masculinity in so many ways. We all have the things that pull us towards them that shouldn’t. Oh would that guy walk home with me if I would have been in jeans instead of a skirt? So I try to dress in a way that forces me to be authentic to myself.

Drag is accepted within gay community, but this hold on masculinity for cis gay men in particular, you see that push.

We have some things to sort through. We have some work to do.

If you had all the money in the world what would be the fantasy look?

I can’t get any more fantasy than the Versace dress Carrie wears in Paris. It’s just so good. I did this picture with Patricia Field and she was so unbelievable. The outfits are such a huge part of it so to be talking to her about it was incredible. She described this moment during one of the very last episodes they were filming here in New York. It was one of her last shoots for Sex and the City. Carrie was sitting on the dress. Patricia Field was like, STOP! She needs to be drowning in the dress. Enveloped by the dress. So she fluffed it and gave it this iconic moment with all those layers.

What is the most life-saving tip a drag queen has given you?

I was at a party with Milk and really self-conscious. I wasn’t even in drag. I said that I wasn’t very good at makeup and I wasn’t wearing nails and you’re not really a drag queen unless you wear nails. She said to me it’s what you want it to be. Your drag is your drag. If nails aren’t part of it, then they aren’t. The moment that I light up is so simple: any time I put on blush, I think, now I’m a pretty girl! I love it so much.

I love that. What I love about Carrie Dragshaw is that it doesn’t feel over-perfected and over-produced drag. I imagine part of what’s made it so acceleratingly popular is that it feels like anyone could do it. Which is not how drag feels.

I am obsessed with drag queens and I love them and worship them and through the minimal drag that I do, I’ve learned that whatever you’re tipping drag queens is not enough. They’re dancing while tucking. It’s unreal. On Drag Race they will do quick drag. They only have twenty minutes. I’m constant quick drag. Then I’ll spend ten hours on my Couldn’t help but wonder part of my caption. So we all have the parts we have patience for and those we don’t. Your drag is your drag. I like that I’m still visible. It means something to me that I’m still in there. I’ve always wanted it to look like a guy who’s just scrounging things in his apartment and trying to embody his favorite character.

It doesn’t have to be a stage performance or lip sync. You don’t have to know how to sass in a queer bar.

That’s something you learn living in New York. There are ten bajillion ways to be a queen. There’s the conventional beautiful drag queens. There’s the Bushwick bearded queens. There’s the fashion queens. There’s just people living their life not performing queens. That gave me more confidence to just be. You try different things. Now it’s this steady source of joy. I’ve had the opportunity to wear unbelievably beautiful dresses but it didn’t feel right. Me in actual dress isn’t my drag. But redoing it in my own DIY way with a ten-dollar fabric from Walmart and a flower I found from a garbage can. That’s me. I’m a flower-in-a-garbage-can drag queen. You find out what you actually are.

—
Dan Clay is a writer and drag queen thrilled to be making his debut as a novelist with the young adult novel Becoming a Queen. Until now, he focused on spreading love and positivity online through his drag persona, “Carrie Dragshaw.” His writing as Carrie has been featured in hundreds of magazines, newspapers, and television shows—from Cosmopolitan to People to Watch What Happens Live—and his TED Talk on being your “whole self” details his first-hand experience with the healing power of drag.

Dan graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in philosophy and went on to get an MBA from Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. When he’s not writing, he works for a climate change nonprofit and a New York-based branding agency. He lives in New York.

I love this collection so much, not only because I feel so much of myself within the same worlds as Roripaugh (biracial, nonbinary, queer), but especially with their tenderness for all creatures, the humble banana slug and majestic moose, kinship with armadillos and clams, TikTok beekeepers and hermit crabs with doll-head shells. Writing as a type of freedom. The liminal space of a roadtrip. Hours and hours and hours of piano, and the underlying fear and crushing pressure of being an only child. Our current anthropocene, rife with dying empires and ubiquitous genocide.

I hope you, Dear Reader, find as much joy and sparkle and affirmation in Roripaugh’s answers as I have.

I was at first startled, then quickly comforted by your use of a second-person narrator. Did your collection begin with this voice, or did you consider other points-of-view? Is this part of your drive to fully dismantle conventions of gender you mention in the book like the roller derby girl names?

Some of the earlier essays used a standard first-person narrator, but eventually, I found myself gravitating toward using a second-person narrator and discovered that I really, really liked writing in second person. When I assembled the book, I then changed all of the essays into second person. “I” can feel so isolationist, in some ways, so singular, whereas “you” feels more permeable and more collective. “You” feels more intimate to me, in that the reader/listener has been invited to stand alongside, in collusion with, the narrator. “You” insists on a kind of human commonality that overcomes subject positions such as race or gender, but at the same time doesn’t erase or ignore the significance of these identities to/for the narrator. And so yes, absolutely! I do feel that second person narration becomes a subtle way in which to fully dismantle conventions of gender!

Is gender presentation more of an evolution or a coming-back-to-your-childhood-self? Do you still want to be a cowboy?

I no longer want to be a cowboy, in the same way that I no longer want to adopt the ultra-feminine mid-century Japanese presentation my mother insisted on, and which I was never able to successfully perform. For me, gender presentation is definitely an evolution, and it fluctuates with my mood, where I am, the climate, how I feel about or don’t feel about my body, etc. But as far as the sartorial aspect of gender, it always, always feels like drag to me. And perhaps this has something to do with being a late-realized neurodivergent in that I’m constantly sifting through the distinctions between performativity, drag, and masking.

You write, “The process of shedding false selves is complex and multivalent.” When did you shed the “obligatory performativity” of gender, or is this, like your earlier experiences with wanting to be a cowboy, a continual process?

The shedding of false selves is a continual process. I believe this is true both as a person and as a writer. I believe in flux, exploration, and transformation. Everything is performative to a certain degree, but the moment the performance hardens into a mask or a shell, it restricts the capacity for movement, growth, and transformation. That hardening—whether it’s internalized conditioning, or external expectations—is the moment that a self becomes obligatory, as opposed to authentic. Gender is always already performative, and as a child, my mother always managed my performances of selfhood, which included gender, and so it always felt obligatory. I began to rebel against all of those performances when I was around 10, or 11. For me, there was always joy and freedom in being able to manage my own self presentation: to clothe and adorn myself either for my own comfort or for my own self-expression.

How has your style evolved since childhood? From cowboy to __________, or is there still some of little-Lee present in your presentation?

I think that little-Lee is present in my presentation in terms of having the freedom to dress myself in ways that make my interior Lee happy. For example, I love the color purple (and also turquoise), and sparkly things make my brain happy in a fizzy, dopamine-giving way, and so wearing my purple rhinestone Skechers fills me with delight. I love the shape and movement of soft bell sleeves because I adore exotic Japanese goldfish. The sleeves remind of the silky movement of their fins and tails so when I wear them I can pretend I’m a goldfish all day long.

Because I love insects, my favorite ring is a turquoise bee (whose body is carved into a skull—a memento mori) with mother of pearl wings. My personal adornment oftentimes is a totemic reflection of things that I love, in other words.

In “Sixteen Views of the Bourgeaus” you write, “You always have an uncanny sense of trespass– a sense of having intruded someplace not necessarily meant for you, or maybe even for human beings in general.” Then, in “Swarm,” you reflect on the relationship between your tenderness for animals and your half-Japanese identity: “Maybe it’s because you’re half Japanese, but you adore large aggregations of animals– particularly when they intersect interestingly with humans.” I read into both of these sentiments a sense of belonging (in a group) and being out of place (intersection with humans). Who and what place now gives you a sense of belonging?

I aspire to be, as much as possible, someone who treads gently, and respectfully, on the earth. It’s an immense privilege to be able to visit and see interesting and beautiful places, but I think one needs to be conscious about moving through and across stolen Indigenous lands, and to be cognizant about the potential for disturbing, displacing, and/or damaging ecologies. So when I’m moving through and across the stunning landscapes of the North American West, I’m grappling with the ethics of what it means for me to have access to those places, and what this access reveals about the legacies of Manifest Destiny, settler colonialism, and the careless, violent extractions of empire. That’s what I mean by intrusion. Same thing with the delight afforded by interactions with large aggregates of animals, especially when they’ve been displaced from their natural habitats—the joy of witness, combined with the sense of human trespass into habitats that don’t belong to me, or a combination of delight and grief at the tenderness and care in which the animal aggregates have been given space and sanctuary. Clouds and sky, particularly that of the American West, give me a sense of belonging to a beautiful, shared vastness, and art, the sharing of creative expression, gives me a sense of belonging to a different kind of beautiful, shared vastness. But I also feel like I belong best and well with fellow weirdos, the delightfully strange, the divergently unique.

How does that sense of belonging show up in your style and the way you dress?

The clouds and sky belonging to a vastness shows up for me as a comfortable home uniform: soft oversized tee shirts without scratchy tags and soft fleecy pants. Clouds don’t like to squeeze themselves into clothes and perhaps clouds also find their own bodies perplexing? But the fellow weirdos, the delightfully strange, the divergently unique? That sense of belonging shows up by wearing things that delight me. Does it have a moth, bee, cicada, or a snake on it? Love it. Is it kawaii? Yes, please. Is it black, or a little bit punk rock? Please and thank you. Does it SPARKLE in a way that makes my brain happy? OMG yes!

I can hear the poetry in your prose, which is something I love about your collection. Do you have a different relationship to prose than poetry? How did you decide on the genre of this body of work?

For me, poetry insists on a materiality of language, an insistence on sound/music/patterning, a more intense reliance on image and symbol that, even within the rolling lines of a prose poem, requires a kind of distillation. I choose prose when I want or need more spaciousness: space for exposition; space for historical context or back story; space for research; space for character, scene, and dialogue. If the distillation process for a poem can’t occur without losing something crucial, then I turn to prose, and if the spaciousness for the elements listed above relinquishes an intensity or power that I feel necessary to my intentions, then I turn to poetry. Sometimes I get very lucky and I might end up with two completely different versions of a creative impulse: one in poetry and one in prose.

“Swarm” is one of my favorite essays in the collection. What would you call a collection of writers? Of poets? Of fashionable people? Or, what word would you give to a group of others like you (like us)?

I’d love to call a collection of writers “a click-clack of writers” (in honor of the sounds keyboards make). And a collection of poets “a hallucination of poets.” Because of, you know . . . reasons. I think a collection of fashionable people could be “a kaleidoscope of fashionable people,” acknowledging that a swarm of butterflies is also sometimes called a kaleidoscope. A group of others like me, or like us, I would call “a shimmering web.”

“Meditations on an Emergency” is another one of my favorite pieces in the book, and I wish all creative people (all people, really) would read it. What is the connection between “creative force” and hope? What role do we, as artists and writers, have in the world at this moment? Or, if that feels too large, what do you feel is your role?

I feel that my role in this moment is to find ways to put my “best self” forward as much as possible. For me, my best self is my writerly self, or perhaps it’s that my writerly self clarifies what it means to be my “best self.” But I think it’s imperative to be kind, to be of service, to challenge violence, hate, and systemic oppression. I think that any sort of creative force renews, reifies, or reinforces the presence of hope. To dream, to imagine, to make, to create, to build, to nurture, and to grow are all affirmative acts and, to my mind, serve as a powerful, and hopeful, antidote to destruction.

You mention the iconic Mothra across several essays. What draws you to her (in addition to the sensitivity of her antennae)? Can you talk about your experience watching her on screen? Is she a style icon?

Mothra is by far my favorite character from the Godzilla universe, and in addition to the sensitivity of her antennae (which in my mind posits empathy as a superpower, as well as a neurodivergent superb sense of pattern recognition), I also love that she’s dangerous: with her deadly lightning bolts, and the scattering of poisonous scales on her wings. Known as the protector of earth, she deploys her danger to protect humanity. The other thing I love about Mothra is that she’s heralded, or announced, by a pair of tiny twin fairy priestesses who sing a song to summon her when they’re in danger! What could be more epic than that? And so yes, she’s definitely a style icon for those reasons. Also moths, like butterflies, have exquisite, colorful patterns and designs on their wings, but because they fly at night and are less likely to be seen, they’re stealth fashionistas. Secret style icons, in other words.

Who or what are your style icons?

Yayoi Kusama. Stevie Nicks. Yuzuru Hanyu. Horses-era Patti Smith. Hello Kitty.

So much of the world is vulnerable: animals, children, unshelled mollusks. What is the role of vulnerability in your writing, your gender presentation, and your sense of fashion?

It’s interesting because I struggle mightily with allowing myself to be vulnerable, yet I firmly believe that any kind of authentic self expression relies on vulnerability in one way or another. It’s very vulnerable to reveal one’s creative interiority, even if exclusively imaginative and non-confessional. To nurture relationships and friendships, one must be vulnerable for understanding, trust, reciprocal care, and emotional intimacy to truly deepen. I think that gender presentation and fashion, as a form of self expression, rely on vulnerability to be expressive of the self, as opposed to merely functioning as a kind of masking, or social armor.

Can you tell us more about the title of your collection, such as the specific choice of using “un” rather than “de” in unMothered, unTongued?

I wanted the title to convey something of the grief, loss, and violence, even, of not being mothered by one’s own mother; of the rift in language between a non-native English speaking mother and a first-generation daughter; and the linguistic and cultural severing that occurs when a mother stops speaking Japanese to her toddler, and that toddler is suddenly cut off from her mother’s language. I love the question of using “un” rather than “de”! I think that for me, “de” semaphores a removal of something potentially dangerous, or toxic. “Defanged,” for example. The use of “un” on the other hand, felt more like a systematic undoing or unraveling, or a withholding, of familial and cultural roles and practices, and as such, the “undoing” or “withholding” was a reflection, too, of larger cultural pressures and systemic oppressions.

You write about the liminal space of driving in “Drive(n),” and in “Dream of a Two-Headed Turtle,” that an only child is “both golden child in public and scapegoat in private.” There is so much of the in-between in this collection (even in the title), including nonbinary presentation and biracial identity. What is magic about liminal space? Is it that “you are in the driver’s seat, and you are free, free, free”?

For me, liminal space is the space of transgression, of movement along a varied spectrum, and yes, of freedom. It’s the space where one can be unlocked from the oppression of having to adhere to false binaries (which are always externally imposed, systemic, and represent the either/or, the 0s and 1s of computer code) and can move fluidly and organically—a space where one is free to explore one’s own preferences and choices.

What is your favorite thing to wear when you are: spending time in nature; existing in urban, metropolitan (concrete, steel, etc.) environments; and feeling most yourself? What gives you gender euphoria?

When I’m spending time in nature, I like to have on sturdy hiking boots or sneakers with excellent support, jeans, a tee shirt, and a hoodie. Also a camera around my neck to take pictures. When I’m existing in urban, metropolitan environments, I prefer dressing in all black: pants or leggings, a flowy top, boots, a cross-body bag, and then signature accessories or pieces of jewelry for little pops of color or interest.

I feel most myself when I’m at home in my fleecy pajama bottoms and Hello Kitty t-shirts or Marvel superhero t-shirts, and a soft hoodie if the climate is cool. That’s the sartorial presentation that gives me gender euphoria because I don’t have to think about or consider gender at all, I can just be me, and I don’t have to use up bandwidth in masking or monitoring my self-presentation. This is the self that is my writing self, as well. I can be completely lost in my head and not worry about what my body is wearing or doing. As a neurodivergent, being perceived can be exhausting.

There is an incomprehensibility of nonbinary identity to someone who is cis, and regarding this othering and marginalization, you write “[to be nonbinary] means that you are ‘illegible’ to the terms of the empire, to the terms of power”. Is this (being “illegible,” unreadable) a sibling to being “unTongued”? Or if not, what’s the relationship between the two?

What a great question! This illegibility, unreadability is a sibling perhaps, or at the very least a step-sibling to being “unTongued,” in that there’s a breakdown of communication with and to the terms of empire and power. Becoming “unTongued” creates a a similar state of illegibility, or unreadability to the terms of empire and power and agency that can only be recuperated through learning the language of and culturally assimilating to the terms of empire and power. In the case of nonbinary identity, empire and power have the capacity to fully understand, or read as legible, non-binary identities, but to do so, would destabilize the (arbitrary and false) terms of empire and power.

How do you balance the “presence and absence” of being a writer?

It’s an ongoing challenge, I think, for me to maintain the balance of presence and absence of being a writer. On the one hand, presence involves curiosity, active perception (and a willingness to be perceived), seeking out and being hungry for the world, which involves being in the world, even if and when the world is bewildering, cruel, dangerous, overstimulating, and overwhelming. At the same time, at least for me, writing requires a kind of quiet, solitude, and space to really hear myself think—an active recusal from hubbub and distraction. I’m a person who is both too easily distracted/enchanted by the world and too easily overwhelmed/overstimulated by the world. For me, being in the world, and being a writer in the world, relies upon both presence and absence, and neither one is possible without the other. And so I have to actively push myself to seek things out within the world, and also protect my peace from the world. Each can be a struggle. Each can be a space in which I hide/lose myself. But each can also be a complex, rich, exciting space in which I discover more of myself.

—
(she/they) is a biracial Nisei and the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019), named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library and listed as a poetry finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Her book of lyric essays, unMothered, unTongued, winner of the Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction in the 2024 AWP Award Series, was published by the University of Georgia Press in September 2025. Their fiction collection, Reveal Codes, winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award, was published by Moon City Press in 2023, and her chapbook, #stringofbeads, a winner of the Diode Chapbook Competition, was published by Diode Press in 2023. Horikoshi Roripaugh received the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004 and was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. Seven of their essays have been listed as Notable Essays in Best American Essays, and her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Story Magazine, Terrain.org, Hotel Amerika, and North American Review, among others.

On my first day of class, I knew that when I entered a room full of freshmen from largely midwestern suburban or rural towns, my flagrant queerness and masculine appearance would in itself be something of a teaching moment. My anxiety about the first day manifested itself in a recurring nightmarish fantasy in which, upon my entrance into the classroom, a student muttered the word ‘dyke’ under his—for it always was a ‘he’—breath.

No such thing happened on the first day of class when I stepped into the room wearing a floral polo and stained Carhartt jeans, though I could see my hands shaking as the printed syllabus vibrated in my nervous grasp. Who knew 18-year-olds could be so terrifying? Alas, the students said nothing of my home-bleached hair or my dirty-brown steel-toed boots. In fact, it was a miracle that I could get them to so much as tell me where they were from.

It is a tired truism that as a teacher, I learn from my kids as much as they learn from me. There is another, more complex side to this old teaching aphorism: I begin to see myself through my students’ eyes. And this seeing of myself through others is inflected by my own views of myself.

What does it mean to see oneself through another’s eyes, when all we possess is our own stilted sight and our own insecurities?

Teaching, when done right, is not hierarchical, but rather a reciprocal-relational act. It is an exchange of projections. I understand that my fears of my students have less to do with them as people and more to do with my egocentric anxieties of being butch in a gender-normative state.

In my ideation of their vision of me, I am the butch caricature my internalized homophobia has always made me fear I’d become—slouching, self-doubting, absent of charm and appeal, existing on the margins of society or in the dark, smokey corners of dive bars.

Though no student has directly questioned my gender or sexuality, my imposter syndrome as a young teacher was tested one day when I gave my students flashcards on which to write anonymous feedback.

“Before you leave today, write one thing that is going well in the class, one thing you don’t understand, or one question you have,” I said to the students who were already packing their backpacks in a rush to get out of the classroom. “You don’t have to write your name on them.”

After they all left, I looked through the stack of unsigned cards and read through them. They were mostly after-thoughts about class going well, or questions about assignment due dates. But on one card, written in the faintest pencil, was an observation that I realized I had quietly feared and expected all along:

I left class wondering whose handwriting it was, wishing I was a graphologist and could ascertain the identity of my critic merely by the slant of the letters. Was it one of the two sorority sisters who enter and leave class together as if joined at the hip? Or one of the boys who always wore huge crosses dangling from their necks? Was it the agricultural engineering student with long legs he hasn’t yet grown into like the paws of a Great Dane puppy?

But this was anonymous, just as I wished it to be. I would never know who wrote that observation on the notecard. But I wanted to know who. I thought that if I knew who it was, I might better discern their meaning—might be able to read between the lines of the note to either my secret fear (angry, homophobic students, taking note of my every mistake) or my secret hope (that I might be inspiring a student to dress and exist as they truly wished).

I put the unsigned note in a drawer in my office. It brought up in me too many questions that I could not answer. It’s hard to let go of unanswered questions.

*

This card was in actuality but a blip in one long semester that consisted less of existential crises and more of the humdrum habits of a classroom. Each class period, three times a week, my students enter the room and sit for 50 minutes half-listening with their laptops open as I lecture them on how to communicate. We read the script of the classroom: them, playing the hesitant-but-willing learners and me, the part of enthusiastic instructor.

And it is a stage play. Stepping into the role of teaching also means stepping into the role of performer, of object, of spectacle. Standing under the fluorescent institutional lights, it is difficult for me to move past the feeling of being ‘on-stage’ as a transmasc lecturer. Being butch in the world is hard enough without 46 young eyes trained on you. To add to all this, professionalism has never been my strong suit. Before returning to academia, I worked for a time at a food pantry, then doing conservation work, and finally construction—a series of jobs that tailored my dress to increasingly less formal wear. I moved from white t-shirts and jeans, to a dirt-covered-Carhartt-sponsored-assemblage, to sweat-stained hole-ridden shirts and pants patterned with industrial glue and drywall mud.

Unlike many of my well-groomed, clean-cardiganned colleagues, I enter the classroom looking like a punk-rock, sheet-rocker; this is the aesthetic that best agrees with my anti-authoritarian temperament. My short, but shaggy, bleach-blonde hair; my baggy, stained, carpenter’s pants; my flannels and graphic-t-shirts; and my dinged-up work boots—all of this undermines the normative image I have of what a teacher should be: a plain-looking woman in a modest dress and flats, or a middle-aged man with a button up tucked into slacks.

Being different is in some ways, exactly as I like it. I am rebellious by nature, a kid who broke rules just because I disagreed with the principle of them. At the same time, I am terribly aware of social norms and the potential dangers of breaking them. These two versions of myself—the revolutionary, idealistic queer and the paranoid closet-case—clash when it comes to occupying the space of the classroom.

Before the gaze of so many still-developing minds, I am aware of myself as a queer teacher to a group of mostly straight, cis students. A juxtaposition arises between my butch accoutrements and their gender-normative college wear each day when they shuffle in dressed in oversized t-shirts, sorority sweaters, and athletic shorts.

Through all this, I’ve begun to view the presentation of my body and the clothes I dress it in as a literary text or artifact that can be analyzed much in the way my students analyze advertisements, short stories, and poems. I say this in the rhetorical sense of the words:

nouns. ˈär-ti-ˌfakt + ‘tekst

• a group of symbols that is meaningful to a culture

• a thing created by humans which gives information about the culture of its creator and users

It is not uncommon to view fashion, and especially fashion and the body, as rhetorical artifacts. The overlap of the body and text is clear even in the language we use to talk about writing. Consider: the essay is constructed by ‘body’ paragraphs, ‘footnotes,’ and ‘headers.’ And writing, when done well, has much in common with good fashion: it has texture, color, movement, and meaning. Together the body and clothing form a web of symbols and signals.

I think often, too, of the connection between the words gender and genre, and how the two terms can feel confining and restrictive. Gender says, “This is what it means to be a woman.” Genre says, “This is what it means to write an essay.” And yet both gender and genre can be bent, expanded, and tailored to the individual.

French theorist and essayist Roland Barthes argues in his books The Fashion System and The Language of Fashion that fashion is in many ways a written thing, a fountain of symbols, a transmitter of culture, power, and subversion. In the history of queer fashion, clothing has often been used to send subtle or overt messages. It is a way to mark oneself as belonging to the queer community; to communicate desire (like in the case of the handkerchief code); or to express gender.

When I teach rhetorical analysis, I ask my students to identify the audience, author, purpose, and context of a rhetorical artifact. In this manner, I begin to think of myself as an author as I swipe through clothing in my closet. Getting dressed is much like writing. It is a process of selection, editing, and consideration of flow between components—all in order to communicate a message. As in writing, you must be aware of context and tone: Does the tone of this Unabomber t-shirt match the context of the campus? And of purpose: Do these Birkenstocks with my blue, mushroom-printed socks convey ‘teacherliness’? And audience: What will the students think of my thrifted jean cap that reads “WAILIN’”?

The answers to these questions are ones I’m still searching for. In reality, the answers may be a more embodied thing. My audience is the world I move through—a world of academic advisers, coworkers, friends, family, students, lovers, and strangers on the sidewalks. That which I wish to convey or achieve varies daily. Sometimes I desire attractiveness, respect, a certain suaveness I’ve always admired in older butches, a vague vibe of intelligence, or a punk-rock, fuck-it-all ethos.

Ultimately the question of fashion a queer author must ask is the question of subversion and safety. It is a line constantly walked between self-hood and conformity. Some days I wish I could dress without an audience and without purpose—wish that my fashion was hermetically and hermeneutically sealed. But I have to go to work. I have to go to class. I have to leave the comfort of my apartment, walk the streets, and be perceived.

The class period after I received the notecard, I played dress-up as a teacher listening to the quiet people-pleasing impulse that had been nagging at my mind since I read the note.

I wore a collared shirt peeking out of a crew neck sweater and my least-stained pair of khakis. It was, what I believed to be, a teacher-esque outfit. I felt slightly stiff in the preppy clothing. It was the sort of clean-cut outfit Ellen popularized for lesbians when she made gayness a palatable thing in the early 2000s. It recalled my own days as a freshman, back when I was still in the early stages of finding clothing that didn’t confine me or make my body feel like it wasn’t mine.

I told friend after friend about the unsigned note, hoping to be witnessed in some way. Here were my fears, confirmed. But the more I talked about it, the more I realized that though it said outright that my fashion was ‘not a bad thing,’ I had read past the words and into my own psyche. Really, my friends assured me, my open queerness might even be good for students who might be hiding their own otherness behind baggie ISU hoodies and backward hats. My queerness might embolden them to step into themselves.

I soon returned to my normal cycle of outfits, relaxing into the comfort of men’s jeans. The comfort of my un-teacheresqueness. Being queer often means existing outside of normal boundaries and space. Whenever I resist my own otherness, I end up feeling like a fraud. I feel my body like a Polly Pocket in the hands of the little girl I never was, dressing me to her taste in plasticized, pink dresses. In academic institutions, I’ve decided it might be best to dress just as I please, allowing my simple, queer existence to stand as a challenge to the institutional structure.

In Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing, Stacey Waite writes, “Queer bodies have certainly the potential for pushing up against what is possible, and this potential can cause us to be deemed impossible. That is not necessarily a problem; in fact, it is sometimes desirable to be impossible, illegible—to become a difficult text.”

In writing, as in life, I find the most liberating practice to be shirking prescriptions and ‘pushing up against what is possible.’ As a teacher, I want to encourage my students to do the same. I want to teach them how to break the script, to veer from the prompts they are given, to write themselves into existence, make up their own definitions, and be their own authors. I want to teach them how to do this in spite of what their audiences may want.

I want to show them how to be a difficult text, even if I’m not sure what that looks like in my day-to-day life. I’m choosing to aspire to illegibility and, like all aspirations, it is a process, not a product. It will take practice to continuously own my body, my clothing, and my space. It will take holding myself back from editing the parts of me that might bring unease to my readers. It will take persistence in dressing and moving through the world just as I write: honestly, vulnerably, and without fear.

All illustrations by Bethany Labit.

—
is a writer and educator from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. She is the winner of the Baltimore Review Winter Prize in flash nonfiction. She was shortlisted for the Breakwater Review Fiction Prize. Wenger earned her MFA at Iowa State University’s program for Creative Writing and Environment. She is founder and co-editor of Okie Modern: A Journal of Contemporary Oklahoma Literature.

At the same time, actor and director Zhailon Levingston was growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana. Born in 1994, Levingston was obsessed with the musical’s 1998 filmed recording, directed by David Mallet. Levingston also had a vision for the musical. What if the cats were human, he later mused to theater peers in New York City. On The Playbill Podcast, Levingston points out how, especially in the mid-20^th century, the hip street crowd often referred to each other as “cat,” so the material is ripe for this kind of reimagining. When Rauch and Levingston finally came together, enlisting the help of Josie Kearns (gender consultant and dramaturg) and Omari Wiles (choreographer and Ballroom member), the idea of moving CATS from Webber’s English scrapyard into the Black and Latinx Ballroom community began to take shape into CATS: THE JELLICLE BALL, which premiered off-Broadway at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in 2025 and reached Broadway this past April.

Taking the slang a step further, the production’s title refers to the human characters who have arrived to compete for the coveted spot in the Heavyside Layer. Structured like a Queer Ball, each category introduces a new character. With “Body,” Sydney James Harcourt’s Rum Tum Tugger struts the runway with a silver cat head medallion—reminiscent of the original character—and black sequined jeans that can’t unzip fast enough to reveal a beaded jockstrap.

In “Virgin Vogue,” Xavier Reyes’s Jennyanydots strips away a tiger-striped coat lined with pink satin to reveal a white polka-dotted figure-hugging dress with a “Mom of the Year” sash running across her torso. Through the discarding of clothes, of labels as it were—each character forges an identity.

In this reimagining, the creative team has found nuances in Webber’s original that prove timely and relevant. Rauch and Levingston create a queer utopia as distraction against the other world not too far over our shoulders; the one within earshot of our applause; the one with all of its unimaginable horrors out there.

—

“That was great, but there was no plot,” someone says behind me as I exit the theater. Every musical has an I Want song. Usually at the beginning, it’s where the hero states their desire, or disdain. Desire becomes the engine behind it all, the reason an audience sticks around after intermission. As an audience, we feed off of the tension that comes with desire. If it’s something the hero wants, how do they go about getting it? Conversely, if it’s something they want to avoid, what are they willing to do to run from it? Is the outcome what they expected? These are the questions an audience expects to be answered. CATS upsets this expectation to the frustration of decades of theatergoers; to my everlasting joy.

The production upsets this expectation through its polyvocality, the way the characters often speak as one. It’s the communal that makes the greatest impact as in the opening song “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats.” Not one hero, but many sing this collective I Want song. It’s a kind of round-robin in which each character adds another definition to who they are; how they want to be addressed. But what to make of the second—yes, second—I Want song?

Grizzabella is a faded beauty—think Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard—who lurks and longs in the background, while the blissful, young, and naive Jellicles go on about this or that in the foreground. We are meant to see her yet not see her at the same time. It isn’t until the bottom of the second act, four songs from the end, that we hear her, alone, in “Memory”—immortalized by Betty Buckley from the original cast. Embattled by the travails of night, metaphorically speaking, she wonders what life a new day might bring. Even in her dire situation, she dares to imagine what can’t be seen in the dark.

—

The first time I saw Qween Jean, the costume designer for CATS: THE JELLICLE BALL, was during a livestream of a vigil for a Black gay dancer, murdered because someone didn’t like seeing him vogue.

A crowd already forming outside the Mobil gas station in Brooklyn, they’ve made a circle in the middle, enough room to breakdown and break down choreography. In a white hat, a white dress, Qween Jean shouted for justice into the black megaphone, singing a dead Black man’s name loud enough for me to hear all the way in Detroit: O’Shae Sibley.

—

“I need enough space to wiggle and jiggle,” the security guard, a Black woman, shouts as she cleaves our single-file line in two, her walkie-talkie body chirping down the block. It doesn’t surprise me that, even an hour early, the line is already spilling around the corner onto 7^th. Like everyone else, I am giddy about what is to happen inside of the Broadhurst Theater; ready for my imagination to fail in the face of the unimagined wonder unfolding within.

I want to forget, if only for a few hours, about the world all too willing to kill me like O’Shae. I unholster my joy, walk through the metal detectors, smile as I enter the theater’s dark house.

—

It was July of 2023, so it’s no surprise that O’Shae Sibley and his friends were voguing to Beyoncé’s Renaissance album while pumping gas. Still hyped from their day at the beach, I imagine them spinning into dips, chopping the air with perfectly Black gay hands, their sneakers kicking the air as if breaking the thing that wants to break their souls.

Let me stop here, please? Why should I have to imagine the unimaginable? Why can’t I end the night here, before the white boy called them out of their names? And let a queer Black person call themselves what they wish to be called?

—

The further away from whiteness—I’m speaking to the power systems whiteness has historically built as well as racial lines—the more vital naming becomes. I’m thinking about my Black family. The way, with each succeeding generation, a first name might rhyme with the mother’s name, or combine both parents’ names, or even bridge the living with the dead in a name. I’m thinking of names one must sing to get out. These are spells that tell the world, “You can’t harm what you don’t know how to utter.” A name like O’Shae.

Nowhere in the previous iterations—Eliot’s collection nor Webber’s adaptation—does naming move me as much as it does in CATS: THE JELLICLE BALL. Naming in queer communities, as with my family’s practice, can mean the difference between existence or non-existence; life or death.

We’re told a Jellicle cat has three names: the name used to keep up appearances, maintain social norms; a self-chosen idiosyncratic name that doesn’t belong to any other cat; and the name the cat “will never confess,” the name which refuses language’s unimaginative arithmetic, defies gender, resists labels. In the original production, this taxonomy reads as a bit of playful lyric whimsy.

Yet, in Rauch and Levingston’s reimagining, Ballroom’s queer context raises the stakes. Because the characters are human beings as opposed to cats, that barrier between the audience has been removed. This is fantasy, yes, but also a human drama playing out that closely mirrors something familiar. To be sure, the message was always there, but it needed these vessels, these queer Black and Latinx actors, to say it all in this climate, at this time. The best theater shows us who we are—whether we like it or not.

—

O’Shae Sibley and his friends were called out of their names that day at the Mobil gas station. The white 17-year-old—don’t make me name him—and his friends began taunting with slurs for Black and gay people. A heated exchange ensued. Sibley, in an attempt to de-escalate, moved closer to the knife-wielder. The knife-wielder stabbed all 28 years of O’Shae Sibley in the torso.

O’Shae died as the murderous white knife-wielder fled.

—

Three years after I saw her in the livestream of Sibley’s vigil, Qween Jean’s name flashed twice on the Tony Awards broadcast for Best Costume Design: one for her work on Bess Wohl’s Liberation; the other for CATS: THE JELLICLE BALL. As the first openly Black Trans woman to win a Tony for CATS, in her acceptance speech, she said, “We have to take up space. We have to shift the paradigm.”

A few days later, O’Shae’s killer was charged with manslaughter as a hate crime—the jury acquitting him of a second-degree murder charge.

—

I shouldn’t be a poet. I lack a certain kind of imagination. When it comes to an optimistic vision about my Black gay future, I can’t see in the dark. That’s why it is always some succor to see Black gay men happily aging—in real life, yes, but also in fictive depictions. Growing up in the eighties and nineties, I am sure it’s all of those cautionary narratives I was fed; the ones about how all gay people are lonely and will die alone…after they get AIDS. Buried deep in my wiring, there must be some belief that my place is in the margins; a belief that, like Grizzabella, I am to lurk and long in the back, while those with top billing get to go on in the spotlight. To my pessimistic thinking, CATS: THE JELLICLE BALL has much to say in its presentation of three Black gay elders.

As with many cultures, I am thinking specifically of Black ones I know, where communal happenings can’t begin without an elder’s permission. In my family, one can’t eat at a reunion until an aunt or uncle has prayed over the food. I have a hunch the creative team had this in mind with CATS: THE JELLICLE BALL’s opening, eschewing the traditional pre-show soundtrack.

—

After 25 years, Ken Ard—who originated the role of Macavity, the mystery cat, in Webber’s production—makes his Broadway return at age 66. What was a minor character, a lady cat named Griddlebone, is now DJ Griddlebone—a high-top-faded brother in a multi-colored denim jacket that calls to mind ‘90s clothing brands like Cross Colours, Damage Jeans, and Used Jeans. At least, that’s what I mistakenly assumed. Even that, thanks to Qween Jean’s design, I would learn was not the end of the textile’s story. What I thought, from my vantage, were hodgepodge swatches of denim were the collaged faces of Ballroom pioneers like Pepper and Crystal LaBeija, Dorian Corey, and others.

He begins digging through a crate of records, holding each cover above his head like stone tablets. Diana Ross’s Diana, Beyoncé’s Renaissance, before finally lifting the original CATS album cover: from its black background, two yellow cat eyes lock on to a reflection, each body frozen in a spin, suspended movements enveloped in, not cat eyes after all, but yellow spotlights piercing through darkness, holding the dancers fixed in the golden yolks.

The party can’t start until this elder-god deems it worthy. DJ Griddlebone blesses the production when he drops the needle, as if to say, “We have been here, we are here now, and we will be here in the future.” Webber’s xylophone tiptoes its way into the orchestra of the overture—drowning out the traffic noise from 44^th street.

—

In 8 to 25 years, depending on the sentence, O’Shae Sibley’s killer will go free.

—

Costume, in this production, isn’t just a kitschy nostalgic reference, but it functions as a metaphor that says, The ancestors are never far away. Within these present bodies, if one pays close enough attention, are those who came before. They are the fabric of who one is; who one wants to be. Taking up this mantle of ancestral work is Gus, the theater cat—masterfully played by 83-year-old Junior LaBeija, pioneer of Ballroom. Appearing beneath a projection of the word Opulence, a word synonymous with LaBeija’s appearance in Jenny Livingston’s Paris is Burning, Gus appears—draped in an orange opera coat, tucked under a pink feather boa that reaches up toward a gold turban, a la Gloria Swanson, swaddling a crown of gray locks—brandishing long painted nails it must have taken a lifetime of fabulousness to grow.

—

“I have every right to show my color,” Crystal LaBeija proclaims in the 1968 documentary The Queen (directed by Frank Simon). It’s the (white-run) Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant, and LaBeija is calling out the racist judging panel. This scene, and scenes like it, is what pushed LaBeija to form pageants, later known as Balls, and house systems, which fostered queer Black and Latinx people in ‘60s Harlem. She could see in darkness what those queer white people, in their unimaginable imaginations, could not.

—

In Webber’s original version, the young Jellicles hang back while Gus regales the audience with tales of his large and fabulous life. In this production, Gus holds court as the Jellicle youth crowds in at his knee, each hanging on every word. Gus becomes a queer elder not simply telling tales, but passing along knowledge to the younger people. Gus is their griot, their poet, their living archive. It isn’t just a character, but Junior LaBeija—and all that he represents—speaking in this moment. He isn’t just speaking to the ensemble, he is speaking to all us, to me in row P—in the dark, scribbling as fast I can in my notebook.

—

In 25 years, the maximum length of his murderer’s sentence, O’Shae Sibley would have been 53.

—

With a theater career spanning a half-century, André De Shields, at 80, takes on Old Deuteronomy—played in the original run by his Ain’t Misbehavin costar, Ken Page. Where Webber’s elder cat was stoic and aloof, De Shields’s take is bawdy, smooth, sexy, and fierce. Even though he proclaims “my legs may be tottery,” this version, dressed in a purple suit not far from a Prince silhouette, he balances a miter-like pompadour while sauntering from landing to landing. Even when he is being escorted by Harcourt’s shirtless Rum Tum Tugger, he can’t help but to twist the heartthrob’s nipples in gratitude. In De Shields’s performance, the queer elder is not tragedy or obsolescence, but a lively vessel full of pleasure; a body with much to offer and to still desire; an intricate part of a community.

—

What would O’Shae’s body have desired, if it were not robbed of its movement?

—

Somewhere between theater-in-the-round and proscenium style, this set reminds me of something. On either side of a catwalk, protruding into the orchestra (where the first few sections of seats used to be), the seats climb the set’s back wall like choir pews I remember in Detroit’s Burnette Baptist Church. I mean, yes, this is a Ball—just look at the private tables littered along the catwalk’s length, the lipstick-red banquette seating parked on the stage here and there—but this is a sanctuary too. I don’t have to look far for further evidence. Take this throne, at the head of the catwalk, posted as if waiting for its bishop’s arrival. Yes, this production is absolutely affecting a church.

In this production, Webber’s original music opens up enough to let, not just disco, hip hop, and Ballroom in, but gospel. (After all, “Memory” is nothing but a gospel song.) It’s why the cast, largely Black and Latinx, can’t help but to break out in double-time soul claps while singing “Hallelujah, angelic choir.” I was tickled to see one of the characters even catch the holy ghost.

The back wall of the set, once covered in warehouse brick, changes—via superb projection design—to stained glass when Munkustrap, the emcee, tells us to stand up as Old Deuteronomy is escorted to a throne with a senior pastor-like reverence that would put any church to shame. But shame is absent in this church. A sly subversion, this production uses The Church—a system used to oppress and kill queer people—to celebrate queer life, to teach its queered gospel.

—

Might I have seen O’Shae Sibley donning one of Qween Jean’s costumes? Perhaps not knowing his name, I might have scanned through my Playbill at intermission. Having been transfixed by his performance, I would read his bio; learn what House he belongs to; discover that he performed with Philandanco Dance Company; enjoy some statement about how happy he is to be here.

Skimbleshanks? Tumblebrutus? Rum Tum Tugger? In what role might he have been cast? Who would he have been? What would he want now?

—

Like empire, utopias too can’t last. Eventually, the outside world finds its way in. Stepping out of the Broadhurst Theater, the home to CATS: THE JELLICLE BALL since March of 2026, there was a bit of sadness in me. What of the people depicted on the stage? I wished that everyone who looked like them, like me, could see this production. What good is that mirror if the people depicted in it can’t access it? At the time of this writing, CATS: THE JELLICLE BALL is due to close on August 8, 2026—moved up from its original extension of January 17, 2027. Can a queer future be shortened just like that?

—

Tommye Blount was born and raised in Detroit. He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and is the author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue (Four Way Books, 2020), a finalist for the National Book Award, and the chapbook What Are We Not For (Bull City Press, 2016). Blount is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from Kresge Arts in Detroit and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 2023, he received a Whiting Award in Poetry. A Cave Canem Fellow, Blount lives in Novi, Michigan.

In elementary school, I started wearing a sweatband on my forearm like Allen Iverson. I never once used it to wipe away my forehead sweat. It was there for style, for confidence, for, dare I say, swag. I wanted to be just like The Answer, the dude who didn’t give two shits what anyone thought about him. Just went out there and balled. He was the reason I asked my sister to braid cornrows in my hair back before I knew what it meant to appropriate other cultures. All I knew was that Iverson was the man, and I wanted, somewhere deep inside, to also be the man, but before that, I wanted to be the boy. And well, that’s a different issue, altogether, isn’t it? On second thought, maybe it’s not. Maybe my relationship to myself is and always has been less about gender, or gender how we tend to think of it—woman, man, nonbinary, genderfluid, agender, etc.—and more about basketball as gender, passion as gender, art form as gender.

After a sixth-grade summer league game, my two teammates and I stood at center court and touched our feet in the middle, celebrating our matching And1 sneakers. They were the ugliest things I’d ever seen. I recall them as blocks of black and hunter green, hardly any white space, though I can’t find evidence of them anywhere online. And the shoe itself was clunky, not ideal for sliding on defense or crossing up defenders. But we had to have them. At the time, And1 was the hottest brand out there, a brand that was just for ballers. I mean, it was literally named for what you say when you take the ball hard to the basket, get fouled, and still make the shot: And1, baby! A baby sneakerhead was born that year. A kid, a young, gender-fucked kid, committed to wearing the game on them wherever they went. Like evidence of my identity as baller first—whatever else I was a far second.

A few years after I got those kicks, I started wearing the longest Jordan shorts you could ever possibly imagine, on and off the court. I would show up to practice in these baggy capris that I spent two hours hiking up so I could actually bend my legs, get low on d. These shorts were made for tall adult men, and I stood at 5 ft. 4 ½ in. on a good day (never forget the half inch, bless the half inch). Something about them made me feel powerful, and cool, and sexy. I walked differently when I wore them: head up, ready to take on the world. My mom would relentlessly tease me about these ridiculous, unrealistic shorts, but I think she knew they held a sort of magic for me, proof to myself that I was the real deal. I didn’t need recognition from others, though that never hurt, either. It was enough to embody the sport itself. To know that when I moved through the world, I wasn’t boy or girl, but basketball player. A gender-neutral term if you aren’t sexist or misogynistic.

For a while, I wore this big silver cross necklace and half-heartedly believed in God. But eventually, that “belief” fell away, and with it, the cross necklace, giving way to something far better. The chain itself was small, not like the thick masculine chain my brother wore, though I thought about stealing his on several occasions. On it, I wore a number 12, which was small and unassuming, more for me than for anyone else. I slept in it, showered in it, wore it to school, and wore it under my dress-up clothes on game day or for family functions. I would have played in it, too, if jewelry wasn’t so cruelly forbidden. I was number 12; number 12 was me. And I wasn’t going to let anything separate us, or rather, myself from myself.

After high school, I went to play division 1 basketball at Drexel. Luckily, when I arrived, number 12 wasn’t taken, and it became mine for the next four years. I also continued my sneakerhead habits. The second I got ahold of any spare cash, I was off to Foot Locker, where I’d buy a pair of Jordans in big kids’ sizes, which, fortunately, I could fit into.

Besides Iverson, Chris Paul was my new favorite point guard, and his shoes were dope. I bought the CP3 IIIs, which were black with turquoise and yellow stitching and purple midsole. I wore those everywhere—untied, the shoes so loose they were basically falling off.

That is to say, I gathered and hoarded anything basketball– and Drexel-related. Practice jerseys, t-shirts, hoodies, shorts, sneakers, cut-off tees, baller bands, duffle bags, oh the number of fucking Drexel #12 duffle bags I accumulated. Not to mention, game film, countless DVDs devoted to games I’d played from freshman to senior year. We were also gifted our Drexel jerseys, one of which was framed and presented to us on senior night. When I graduated, when I realized, suddenly, almost violently, that I was done playing elite basketball, I held onto my sneakers and DVDs at first, continued wearing my number 12. These were memories, after all. No, more than memories—they were pieces of me. I watched my games over and over again, compulsively, unable to figure out how else to spend my evenings. Evidence of a past that wasn’t slowly slipping away but had abruptly been taken from me. I needed that evidence, I needed it so fucking bad.

And then one day, I looked into my closet, saw my Jordans lined up waiting to be loved, and felt like I was playing dress-up. Like I was a fraud. I was no longer a college basketball player—I was someone who had, once upon a time, played college basketball. Doesn’t roll off the tongue quite the same, does it? Plus, it carries a flavor of regret and despair. So, I tossed all of my sneakers,, even the ones my best friend had gotten me, into several trash bags and threw them away. I didn’t even donate them—selfishly, if I didn’t feel I could have them, I didn’t want anyone else to, either.

My necklace was the next to go—how could I be number 12 if I no longer wore the jersey and stepped on the court? For years after I graduated, I acted like I no longer had any claim to the sport, the art, the intimacy, the culture. The necklace didn’t go in the trash, not yet, but rather, I stuffed the chain away in a drawer where I would no longer have to look at it.

Without basketball, I had no idea how to dress, what made me feel good in my body and in the world. Most feminine clothes felt wrong, like shitty cosplay. Some men’s clothes felt, do feel, good and correct. Mostly joggers, tees, henleys, waffles, those sorts of things. But unlike many of my masc lesbian and nonbinary friends, formal wear like suits, even from the men’s department, don’t really do it for me. Or, at least how non-ballers wear them, anyway. Uncomfortable Oxfords, button-downs, jackets, the whole bit. I feel like a clown. But I kept trying anyway, because I foolishly thought that if I was going to be this masculine they/them, then I’d better embrace what was expected of me, what I expected of myself. You’ve wanted to some version of a boy for so long now—what’s with the hesitation? Limiting, close-minded loser behavior, for sure. What was the point of rejecting the gender binary (and with it, antiquated stereotypes) if I was just going to do the same old song and dance? I craved masculinity but on my own terms.

That realization brought me back to Allen Iverson, who became a cultural icon for his unapologetic style and self-expression, bringing street and hip-hop fashion to a conservatively-dressed NBA. In the words of AI, “Everybody got on a suit, everybody’s dressed up like they going to Sunday school.” His style influenced so many other players that, in 2005, the NBA introduced a dress code, requiring players to wear “business casual” tunnel fits. Not that AI was going to conform to that; he kept on dressing how he wanted: durags, baggy clothes, chains, all that.

It’s not that I wanted his style, no, no; it’s that I wanted to own my style and agency in the same way that he did. I wanted to understand what made me feel sexy; I wanted to buy two hundred of them. I wanted, though I didn’t realize it for quite some time, the traces of basketball still left in my style—which, for me, is inextricably linked to my gender and the euphoria its capable of producing.

Fuck a crisp, ironed, white button down and a tailored suit. Fuck dress shoes. Fuck conservative colors. The very first suit I bought when getting welcomed into the masc club was this powder blue. When thinking about how to dress it down, how to make it feel like me, I returned to the fashion of basketball players. To the tunnel fits—the outfits the players wear from their team bus to the locker room—that are so intricately linked with the game itself that I cannot open Instagram without seeing countless pictures of WNBA and NBA players showing off their style. Why not embrace a staple of the NBA tunnel fashion in the hoodie under blazer look? The second I had the thought, I didn’t look back. For my very first book launch, I wore the suit, which I left a little oversized, with a tan hoodie underneath the jacket and tan Nike Blazer Mid-77s. And let me tell you, it should have been illegal just how good I felt. Not because trans joy shouldn’t be celebrated, but because my particular flavor of trans joy has made me insufferable. Now, most days, some part of my outfit touches basketball, in some way.

The other night, now on tour for my third book, Perverts, I wore a shirt with the sleeves cut off, which will always remind me of summer pickup in the hot, sticky Philly gym, not a sleeve in sight. On my feet, I wore the signature shoe of my favorite player, Chelsea Gray. When I arrived to the bookstore, the event manager looked me up and down and said, “Wow, you really are a jock,” as if my author bio had been lying. “Yeah, I am,” I said, laughing. I considered the idea of “jock-affirming language.” He might as well have said, “Wow, you really are such a hot, masculine, muscular dreamboat.” He might as well have passed me the rock; I wouldn’t have hesitated to catch and shoot it.

—

is a jock, sweatpants enthusiast, and the author of I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself—a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Indie Next pick, and winner of a LAMBDA Literary Award—and A Sharp Endless Need. They have received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, American Short Fiction, and Vermont Studio Center, and their short work has appeared in Literary Hub, The Sun, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Joyland, and elsewhere. Originally from Allentown, Pennsylvania, they currently live in San Diego with their wife and two kids. Perverts is their debut short story collection.

“Seersucker is a New Orleans invention, a Senate tradition, and brings a welcome moment of unity to Washington every year,” said Dr. Cassidy.

“Seersucker is interwoven in the style and tradition of the South,” echoed Senator Warnock. “I’m proud to continue this stories bipartisan Senate tradition of Georgia cotton, Southern charm and fashion alongside Senator Cassidy.”

The announcement informs its readers that “Seersucker suits were popularized by New Orleans businessman Joseph Haspel in the early 1900s as an answer to the summer heat. Former U.S. Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) brought Seersucker Thursday to Congress in 1996. After the tradition went unobserved in 2012 and 2013, Cassidy revived it and has continued the tradition in the Senate.”

The Senators commemorated the new Southern-tinged resolution and occasion with a group photo.

As someone who both hails from the south and loves my share of seersucker, I hate to unseat such a rich seasonal tradition, but as with many American fashion trends, seersucker’s beginnings stem from outside the United States, and in the path of their migration West, was completely erased.

I don’t remember the first time I saw seersucker, or more importantly, when I learned the light, striped fabric I enjoyed not only had a specific name, but a somewhat dreadful connotation. It brings me no joy to admit that my desire to reclaim my favorite summer fabric from the hijacking of the American South, or the preppy lithe white bodies of the Ivy League, Kentucky Derby, or the country club, came well before I learned that seersucker had been mine to claim all along.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Seersucker has been around for centuries. The etymology of the fabric’s name originates in Persia, from the phrase shir-o-shakhar, which means “milk and sugar,” named for its combination of textures.

The textile is made of cotton, linen, or silk, woven on a loom with threads at different tensions. As the fabric is woven through the tight and loose threads, it creates alternating stripes of texture. These smooth and puckered stripes are what make the fabric especially breathable, because it doesn’t lay flat against one’s skin. Often, one of these stripes is in a color—most often blue, but sometimes gray, green, tan, red, pink, etc.—making the iconic pattern so well known today.—Lydia Blackmore

Most fashion experts agree that seersucker first emerged from the Indian Subcontinent. By the 18th century, the cool, durable fabric drew the attention of English and French men, who anglicized the name. Soon enough, seersucker followed the British Empire as it colonized India, and was exported to the American colonies by the early 18th century for use in curtains, mattress covers, and work attire.

Seersucker’s association as specific to New Orleans travels as far back as the 19th century, during which hundreds of advertisements were published in Louisiana newspapers, selling the fabric in finished items as well as by the yard. It’s worth noting that in addition to seersucker’s Indian history, the fabric’s Black and gendervariant history has often been overlooked or erased.

As the Historic New Orleans Collection explains,

Because of its relative cheapness and durability, seersucker was commonly used for slave clothing. Runaway slave ads offer rare descriptions of personal appearances, behavior, and clothing, as described from the perspective of the enslaver. One 1821 ad described Marie-Jeanne, who was “stout built,” with a dark complexion, very white teeth, worked as a washerwoman, and was wearing “a yellow striped seersucker gown” and a “madras handkerchief when she absconded.” Following emancipation, seersucker was still a common working fabric, used for factory workers’ jumpsuits and the iconic railroad coveralls.

In this digital age, technology, whiteness, and capitalism have contributed to the decentralization of a particular fashion, silhouette, and style, often stripping it from the political histories and bodies of its creators. Largely raised by my single immigrant Chinese father, clothing wasn’t a means of class status or aesthetic taste—we wore what was simplest, easiest to wash, and cheapest to buy. My mother did what she could, but she neither had the time nor means to participate in fashion on a global scale. I learned about clothing—style and status—through watching others, usually on the big screen in the movie theater or on our small television set. Although my style and fashion taste would change across my life, I had no idea why I gravitated to one pattern or another, this particular ensemble or that eye-catching shoe.

As I became more aware of the political signification behind fashion, it took me time to decode the class, privilege, and personality behind a trend I fancied. I loved the whimsy of the bright colored seersucker stripe, and what felt like genderplay between color and cut, but before I could reach that observation, I had to decode the systems of power and privilege at play behind any particular style that caught my eye, and whose bodies I’d seen wearing (or at times flaunting) it. There’s very little in fashion that hasn’t been appropriated, from one continent to another, but at least where seersucker is concerned, I enjoy reclaiming it on the last body you’d think to look at, but on one connected more to its origins than you’d expect.

—

Addie Tsai (she/they) is the author of Dear Twin (2019), included in American Library Association’s Rainbow List in 2021; Unwieldy Creatures (2022), a Shirley Jackson finalist for Best Novel; and most recently, Straight White Men Can’t Dance: American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture (2025). She collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. They are the founding director for just femme + dandy. Addie is an Associate Teaching Professor of Creative Writing at William & Mary, where she is Affiliate Faculty in Asian Pacific Islander American Studies; American Studies; and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Her articles have been published in LO:TECH:POP:CULT: Screendance Remixed (2024), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Dance and Philosophy (2021), Slapstick: An Interdisciplinary Companion (2021), and The International Journal of Screendance.

Hey babes! I’m Alison, and my column FUTCH ENOUGH follows my journey towards an authentic gender identity and expression. As a biracial Asian person who was socialized as female, I’ve been shedding the personas and performances of femininity that I thought had kept me safe in favor of embracing my genderqueer identity. I’m eschewing imposter syndrome and rejecting the binary. Regardless of where you call home in the genderverse, thanks for joining me on this adventure!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but give me an ugly, well-worn leather-lined sandal that knows the loops & whorls of even my pinkie toe and I could dance forever.

My first introduction to the ugly sandal was through my parents. My mom insisted on re-soling her singular pair Birkenstocks, which was a sustainable and cost-effective option in times of financial struggle. My dad wore Tevas, which always felt a little bit embarrassing. A favorite science teacher in elementary school (shout out to Mr. Atwood!) insisted on wearing his with socks, year-round, which was a choice of one type of comfort over the other, especially in rural Pennsylvania winters. These footwear choices initially had me shuffling in an entirely different direction. What ensued was an era of unsupportive, slippery, flat-bottomed, thin-thonged, WASPy, & coastal elite flip flops, if I wore un-heeled sandals at all.

My teens and early-twenties were filled with blisters and moleskin, bandaids on my toes and body-glide on my Achilles. My dad would fondly call me the Little Mermaid not for my love of the redheaded Disney princess, but for Hans Christian Anderson’s original heroine whose newly formed legs and feet were a source of suffering. Before her Faustian bargain, the sea-witch warns her, “Every step you take, however, will be as if you were treading upon sharp knives and as if the blood must flow.“ And sure enough, “Every step she took was as the witch had said it would be; she felt as if she were treading upon the points of needles or sharp knives. She bore it willingly, however, and moved at the prince’s side as lightly as a bubble, so that he and all who saw her wondered at her graceful, swaying movements. She was very soon arrayed in costly robes of silk and muslin and was the most beautiful creature in the palace; but she was dumb and could neither speak nor sing.” What have I born willingly to appear “the most beautiful creature”? And at what cost? My voice, my authenticity, my comfort.

Even better questions would be:

Who am I suffering for?

What do I want to feel when I wear these sandals?

What’s the relationship among form and function and fun?

Who says I can only pick two?

The bright red silver-pyramid-studded stiletto sandals I wore the first day of my senior year of high school certainly made a statement. I dressed defensively. The town I grew up in was decidedly a cage and I felt like an exotic exhibit. A year later, on my first day in Rome on a study-abroad, I refused to wear anything except 3-inch leather stilettos (and spent the subsequent days in street-vendor sandals to let my numerous wounds heal). And yet, when needed, I could run through cobblestone streets (chased by pursuant flirty locals) without my slim heel getting stuck. This has absolutely everything to do with curating a sense of belonging: I imagined myself in La Dolce Vita or as Sophia Loren. Locals assumed I was one of them, and tourists asked me for directions. But that isn’t really belonging. It’s fitting in, and fitting into some ersatz Hollywood moodboard. It’s the femme drag I’d been performing in for the majority of my life.

I’m curious about where this allegiance to discomfort comes from. What am I proving, and to whom? Who am I more visible to, and why does that matter? What’s the connection to conformity, power, and ytcishet patriarchy?

Barbie’s switch from heels to Birkenstocks at the end of that movie was meant to be a metaphor for liberation from the patriarchal pointed-toe and perfect arch. As the girlies slip into something more comfortable (for their own sake, not necessarily under the guise of seduction or for someone else’s gaze), and as “women’s wear” edges towards what some may call traditional lesbian looks, especially on the butch & masc end of the spectrum, how do we also maintain our signals to each other? (Are they queer or just Gen-Z?) Though hankie-code is only for pockets, ugly shoes have a queer kinship all their own.

Choosing a shoe for comfort does not have to be at the sacrifice of fashion—beauty does not have to be delicate, ephemeral, or diaphanous. When we only think of fashion (and beauty) in this way, we miss its multitudes and the intrigue of juxtaposition. This misunderstanding was my own, and mirrored my struggle with gender presentation.

Growing into my queer identity, I thought that all lesbians must choose Birkenstocks, Tevas, or Chacos. (I consider myself a Teva/Birkenstock dyke who married a Chacos/Birkenstock queer.) But if the pantheon of genderqueer identity has taught me anything (and it’s taught me, and continues to teach me many things), it’s that there are no rules.

At my & my spouse’s Muir Woods elopement, I changed into a pair of coral foam beach sandals once we arrived at the shoreline for pictures. (I promptly kicked them off in favor of running towards the awaiting Mother Ocean.) At our home-town reception, I had a pair of rose-gold Tevas to don upon our procession to the gayborhood for more revelry. I’m not sure who I was wearing the heels for in the first place. They were beautiful– pink suede block-heel Stuart Weitzman sandals with a thin toe strap– but were inhibiting. (I hesitate to use the word “practical”-- sometimes I would wear “sit-down-only shoes.” Again, what’s the function & fun?) After I came down from such great heights (a four-inch heel), I felt ready to really celebrate and grounded in both my new marriage and a performance-free presentation.

Now, I wear Birkenstocks and Tevas and purple Doc Marten platform sandals. But I’ve found true euphoria in the humble & magnificent huarache. To me, the huarache is futch, especially with a loose & cuffed trouser. But the huarache is not ugly. It is beautiful, steeped in history (and contemporary appropriation): its pre-Colonial origins in Mexico and South American have turned it into a statement for Indigenous sovereignty. To wear it faithfully is to know its history, and to purchase it from artisans who know its craft & live its lineage. I do not include them as “ugly shoes,” but in the interest of feeling Futch Enough, they deserve attention & love & elevation.

If everything we wear makes some kind of statement, I want to emit a clearly queer one. I want to be left alone AND I want to signal safety to other QTBIPOC (which also can be accomplished by crocheting on public transportation but again, that’s another story). I want my footwear to support my freedom of movement and freedom from expectation.

We do not have to choose two from the fashionable/functional/fun triangle. And as Mary Oliver said, “You do not [even] have to walk on your knees.” Here’s my ode to the ugly sandal– with her, we can have it all without losing our joy or our mobility or our voice.

—

Alison Lubar is a queer, biracial Nikkei poet and educator who teaches literature to teenagers, writing to adults, and yoga to all ages. They’re the author of two full-length poetry books, The Other Tree, winner of Harbor Editions’ 2023 Laureate Prize, and METAMOURPHOSIS (fifth wheel press, 2024), as well as four chapbooks: Philosophers Know Nothing About Love (Thirty West, 2022), queer feast (Bottlecap Press, 2022), sweet euphemism (Mouthfeel Press, 2023), It Skips a Generation (Stanchion, 2023), and a microchap, American Kintsugi (Bull City Press, 2026). Alison is also a board member for Philadelphia’s Blue Stoop. Find out more at http://www.alisonlubar.com/.