in-between intimacy

3/23/19
the other day my friend asked me if she could meet me outside my hotel & travel to the airport early in the morning with me: “you give me life & love and if you're awake enough and feeling social, it would be nice to hang out & make your trip a bit of a celebration for you. with maybe coffee & croissants in the car?” at first i wanted to say no: it’s so early! it’s in the opposite direction! i don’t want to inconvenience you! but isn’t care about inconveniencing yourself for others? or rather: isn’t intimacy about relating to one another outside of an economy of inconvenience & obligation? there are things more important than convenience — rather, there are people who surpass it. so i said yes (sheepishly) & there she was waiting for me downstairs early in the morning with croissants, a smoothie, & a wry smile. have you ever had a conversation with someone at the back of a car? the landscape moving in the background. it’s one of my favorite things: that sleepy glow of the morning inscribed on our faces, the sun peeking through, the wind animating every hair, like the things that are dead, they are not dead, they are alive...here. everything in motion. the crumbs & tears left in the car: a monument to being alive, together. as if being together is the only way we are alive. so often we only show up for the event, the episode, the meal. but what about the in-betweens? i feel most lonely in the in-betweens: after a party, after a show, after an event. how do we come down from that? how do we return to the tedium of reality? when we grow up: who tucks us in? i spend a lot of time in airports. what i like about airports are the people saying goodbye & the people saying hello. sometimes i come early or stay late just to watch the ritual of it all. there’s something about it that makes me feel at home. which goes to say i want to be holding a sign for you on the other side: “welcome home.” i want to be there for the journey. i don’t just want to take you home, i want to be that home. i don’t just want to see you, i want to move beside you. being beside in the in-betweens feels like the love i need & am only now learning to accept.

rooting for you

3/21/2019
I just want to let you know that I am rooting for you. I want you to become your best self. I want to be your soccer mom cheering you on forever! I want a banner drop outside your window saying “THAT’S MY FRiEND!!!!” I am so committed to your healing! You mean so much to me! I am so grateful to have you here! You bring so much worth & dignity to my life simply for being! This world is so terrible and isolating and makes me so scared but I feel less alone knowing that you exist. Thank you for being honest, being present, being vulnerable, being messy. Thank you for needing & giving & needing & giving. I am constantly enriched by your presence, your artistry, your composite. I appreciate you so hard for trying and failing and trying again. Thank you for your paradoxes, your idiosyncrasies, your contradictions, your imperfection, your excess, your becoming. Thank you for your inconvenient & difficult parts, your stubborn parts, your celestial being! You give me hope & joy & tenderness and it means the world — no, it is the world. When you’re feeling like no one cares remember that you have a girlboy in your court who adores you & cares for you very much. Love & need you amsterdam, holland, world, universe.

queer interdependence

3/17/19

After my performance in Austin two trans femmes escorted me to my car & wouldn’t leave me alone on the street to make sure I was safe and followed up to make sure I got home okay. After my show in Toronto a group of folks walked with me and @artstarkiley to our next destination to make sure that we got there without being harassed. I was so touched & grateful, truly. I’m so used to having to safety plan by myself, and having other people care for me in this way moved me so much. This is what I want and need — queer interdependence. This idea that queer people have to be “strong” & “liberated” is a straight projection on us so they can be “lazy” and “complicit” in our struggle & not have to actually do anything to make our lives less awful. Transmisogyny means that queer & trans life only matters for its visuality, for its entertainment value, for its ability to overcome. We internalize this & treat each other as disposable. But we have to imagine and practice something else for each other: kindness, mutual aid, interdependence. So often when people ask me if I need anything I say no because I’ve become so accustomed to self-reliance & having to rough it out myself. But when people offer what they can provide — something tangible — it makes it so much easier for me to accept. I felt safe those two nights because of the love of queer strangers (potential friends). Safety is something I rarely feel and I do not take it lightly. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for protecting me, for caring about my life beyond the stage or the screen. Vulnerability comes from “vulna” which means wound. In other words: vulnerability is our willingness to be wounded. Are we willing to be wounded for each other? That’s what love means to me. Means I will inconvenience myself for you, I will put my body on the line, I will walk next to you, I will lose power by being with you...because there are things that are more important than power, aren’t there? This is the world I yearn for: one in which intimacy is desired more than power, one in which we are never lonely because there is always someone there. Always someone there.

my beauty is tremendous

originally published 2/27/19

my beauty is so tremendous it has to be edited out of magazines & movements
whitewashed from history
evacuated from the sermons, the schools, & the streets just to prove that it does not exist!

my beauty is so tremendous that they try to confine it
build health & science — gates around it
but my beauty, you can still peek through & see it!

my beauty is so tremendous there are no words for it, or rather
the words — they are too ugly for my beauty
the men — they are too ugly for my beauty

my beauty is so tremendous they had me believe so long it was not there —
so when i finally found it, here:
in all of the places i was taught to hate
here: in all of the curves & creases,
bulges & breaches, here: in this
body, not theirs
i finally figured out:
my beauty is so tremendous that the men
the men: they have to kill me for it
but my beauty, my beauty is so tremendous
that it will still be there when i am gone
it will still be here when i am gone.


Photographer: @bronson.photo
Assistant: @cameroninthecity
HMU: @dmitrypuchnin
Art Direction: @samcan_vin

because we are alive, we remind them that they are not

originally published 2/22/19

the day after being called a tranny in this outfit i had a photo shoot. i saw this dress, still stained with the tint of their laughter, discarded on my living room floor like a fruit rind…or an ex. it reeked of both fear & sweat, pungent, unforgiving. perhaps it was a whim (or death drive) but somehow i decided to bring it with me. touching it: i felt their loneliness. their shame. there is a magic to navigating the world in this body: i see things other people don’t see: exit signs, gestures, denial. i listen to the biographies of objects: stop signs & metro cards. there are libraries in every nook & cranny in this city, tomes in every look. in minutes i can establish the energy in a room & whether i need to leave it. this is how i have survived: by sensitizing myself to everyone & everything. when i walk outside i have to decipher the invisible tongues of thousands. is this stare curious or lethal? is this invitation genuine or genocidal? in split seconds i traverse universes. so when the camera invited me in: i surrendered to the ritual & found myself smiling on the other side. reclamation is turning destruction into joy. joyous in my pain: i find it impossible to hate the people who hate me. i love them & worry about them, their gum recession, their dysmorphia, the ways they have mistaken misery as masculinity. disgust comes when the boundaries of life & death are unsettled. it is directed to us not because we symbolize death, but because we symbolize life. they have marked us for death — but in their squalor, we find glamour. we proliferate it! we birth it! we reproduce it! it overflows from us: gorgeous & grotesque, seeps out of our pores into the garments into the words onto the streets so that there is always a trace of us there, lingering. the reason they want to kill us is because when we are alive we remind them that they are dead. but i, i have learned how to make communion with everything: you, a dress, this body hair cursive written all over my skin: a love letter to me, a love letter to you: “hi my name is alok. i am alive. are you?”

portrait by bronson farr

valentines cry-in

originally published 2/16/19
On Valentines Day I hosted a cry-in where a bunch of strangers got together and talked about heartbreak, loneliness, fear, trauma, dysphoria, loss, and so much more. Yes we cried together, but we also giggled and sneezed and hugged. It was one of the most powerful nights of my life. Where do you go when your heart is broken? Where do you go when you need to scream or grieve or cry? There are so few spaces in the world where we can be honest about how terrifying living is. I wanted to create a space for this kind of honesty, where we could — for a moment — stop trying to be digestible & palatable, and instead be honest. What I have learned is that performance is one of the few spaces left in this society where we can be honest anymore. Why do we call people dramatic simply for expressing their feelings? The night was about dramatic intimacy: that something about performance, a microphone, a spot-light gives us permission to be more honest & bare witness to each others’ pain. I want to give everyone in the world a microphone or a spotlight & bear witness to their expression: the good, the bad, the everything. I think that’s what it takes to heal: to re-sensitize ourselves to our pain & the pain of others. Hosting this on valentines was even more important: on a day where love is concentrated & uplifted in one direction, we proliferated it. We found ways to love strangers as friends. Thank you to everyone who showed up. You changed my life. 📸@simoncourchel @theinvisibledog

individualism is loneliness

originally written: 2/13/19
spent all day today texting with 10 strangers (potential friends) at @theinvisibledog ! we talked about anything & everything: finding home, how to negotiate boundaries with family, the apocalypse, how to get over heart break, worrying, energy, gender, kindness, forgiveness, spirit guides, becoming, grief. at one point someone taught me how to breathe through anxiety attacks! after they left i wrote each person a love letter. this week i am celebrating alternative forms of intimacy to challenge the glorification of normative romantic love. today was about stranger intimacy. stranger intimacy is especially important to me: so often we can talk to people we don’t know more candidly than the people in our lives. for a moment we get to re-invent ourselves anew, try something different — not just introducing ourselves to them, but to ourselves, too, every system of oppression is predicated on the production of strangers — that place where we hold all of our anxiety, fear & rage. the construction of the modern individual requires loneliness — the framing of others as threats, not friends. when we actually meaningfully engage with each other the divisional & fear-mongering logics which lubricate the status quo dissolve & we are confronted by another jug of stories, tissues, & bones just trying to figure it out. stranger intimacy is also important personally to me because i have been harassed & attacked so many times in public & had no one defend me or ask me if i was okay. sometimes it feels impossible to go outside as myself because of this violation of trust. today was also about exercising trust in strangers: remembering that there are people in the world who i do not know who care about me & would defend me (& i them). i am so grateful to everyone who came for taking time to bear witness to each other & i love & need you very much

strangers are potential friends

I believe that I can fall in love with everyone in the world. I believe I need other people to figure out myself. I believe that other people are just as complex and contradictory as me. I believe everyone has a fundamental dignity and worth simply for being. I believe Western individualism is killing us. I believe that we shouldn’t have to be in romantic love to be cared for. I believe that care is more important than critique. I believe friendship is sacred. I believe that I am afraid of dying alone. I believe loneliness is a form of international emergency. I believe that we are more connected than ever but have never felt more alone. I believe we sometimes use irony because we are afraid of intimacy. I believe in interdependence. I believe the way that we have been taught is to use, and not to need. I believe needy people are honest people. I believe feeling is one of the most dangerous things I have ever done. I believe sadness is a form of consciousness. I believe we should be able to cry in public. I believe depression is not my fault. I believe we were meant for something more kind and just than this. I believe kindness can be a form of justice. I believe I am heartbroken not by one person, but by the world. I believe that strangers are potential friends. I believe that strangers are potential friends.

support the author

belief beyond the word

in one telling of the story i could say that i am back “home” in New York. but to do so feels ludicrous. how we come to words for meaning only to recognize that they are often obstacles to meaning. like running into a wall over & over again. just because we can call it a wall doesn’t mean we stop hurting. these words they have egos and things to prove themselves, don’t they? we plant them & as they bloom we become intoxicated by their fragrance — so much so that reality shifts. in reality we created the word & yet it creates us. like we created the computers & they us. like we created the distance & it us. how silly it feels to say that i miss india & miss my achamma & miss the warmth...does a body miss the heart when it’s removed? it does not function. there are some forms of loss that carry no potential for nostalgia. they just itch. and haunt. forever. so no i am not functioning. i spend hours lying down looking outside windows in my apartment & windows on my screen furious that we haven’t found ways to apparate & eclipse time & space & all of the things that keep me from her and from you. the first thing she said when she saw me was that my hair made me look like a girl. and then she said. so what. it looked nice. “recognition” doesn’t cut it. i cut it. i left. i did not let her see me cry when i drove away. how to say: i was birthed again that afternoon? how to say it felt like home or rather made me believe in it. how to say that belief is something i am trying my best to hold on to. to give body to. to say there are these things that i may not have the words for but i still believe. or rather: i do not have the words for them & that’s why i believe.

support the author

they extract from us to become themselves

for the past week i have been receiving non-stop rape threats, death threats, been ridiculed & demeaned, called a monkey & monster, told i have a disorder & need to be exterminated...simply for posting a photo of myself in a swim suit.

several memes have been made out of my image: there is something so degrading about an empowering image of yourself getting repurposed to humiliate you. it’s like getting spat on in your favorite outfit: the extremities of joy & the enormity of pain.

this harassment is coming from both men & women, many of whom are south asian like me. they tag each other to make fun of each other: this is your boyfriend, this is your girlfriend, this is you. essentially: they use me to become. become desirable, become straight, become humorous, become men & become women.

i am familiar with this encounter: being extracted from to create the norm and then subsequently being disavowed from it. being foundational to everything & then being erased from it. in times like these i want to disappear - delete the social media accounts that profit off of me but do not protect me, protect my art & my image & my creativity from a world which punishes me for it.

but then i remember that is precisely what they want me to do: erase myself so they can maintain the fiction not only of their relevance, but themselves.

it’s another unremarkable remarkable day of enduring the vitriol of transmisogyny. it is spectacularly ordinary & ordinarily spectacular. today i am here to tell the story of it, to say “this happens to people like me every day.” to ask: “what are you doing to stop it?” and perhaps: “how are you engendering it?”

support the writer

Change the Cistem, Not My Appearance!

Just a reminder that you should be able to look like whatever the fuck you want without having to fear or endure violence and harassment. This means we shouldn’t have to look “normal,” “beautiful,” shouldn’t have to look like “men” or “women.” Neither our physical appearance nor the way we dress should have any bearing on our safety. Rather than putting the onus on individual people to “change the way we look” to make other people more comfortable, instead challenge a system that links our worth to our appearance!!!!!!!!!!!!!