transgender

by

GALA, Ready or Not

 

Phoenix

Bad ass choir t-shirts

 
Ok. So, for anyone who has been like “Angie / Gayan / Verdana Leviathan Strong, WHY have you not replied to the email I sent you two months ago / done the thing you said you were going to do??? I’m WAITING!!!” I have a four letter word for you:

GALA. 

(Warning – that wasn’t one, but there are lots of f-bombs below.)

The GALA International Choral Festival that’s being held in Denver this weekend, where queer choirs (LGBTQetc) from around the world get together at the Performing Arts Complex and sing to each other for like 5 days. 

This time, I’m singing with Phoenix: Colorado’s Trans Community Choir. 

It’s a very new group founded by my partner Sam less than a year ago. We’ve been busting our asses to get our set ready since we found out in April that we could actually get on the program. 

Our rehearsal schedule has been steadily increasing in the fashion of a snowball rolling rapidly downhill. 

And our set, which is made up entirely of original pieces written by choir members, includes one of my songs, for which I wrote a choral version, with parts & everything. 

We’ll be performing right before a choir from Beijing, for an audience of a couple thousand people. 

I think it could safely be said that one of the unofficial themes of our set is Everybody Outside Their Comfort Zone (Together).

For some folks, this is about being in a choir at all … Singing with a group … Learning to blend and taking the risk that someone might hear their voice. For others, it’s about discovering a whole new vocal range after beginning the hormonal journey of transition, and the uncertainty of opening one’s mouth and not knowing what sound will come out. 

I’ve often said that one of the things I value about this group, and my personal experience in it, is that it’s an equal opportunity comfort zone challenger. I really mean that. Although I’m pretty at ease with group singing as a general concept and I’m not dealing with any big changes in my voice (or my gender presentation), I sometimes feel like I spend almost as much time resisting the process as I spend engaging with it willingly. (And yes, that’s my excuse for being slow to attend to other commitments, like that email I really do intend to reply to … )

For me, the stream of resistance looks like this:

– OMG what do you mean I’m the lead/only instrumentalist on this song? What if I fuck it up???

– OMG I’m fucking it up!!! It’s happening!!! In front of people!!! What do I do? How can I even continue living after this horrible fuck-up???

– OMG. Sam wants us to perform this song that I wrote. How can I possibly make other people sing something I wrote? What if no one but Sam even WANTS to sing it? Maybe they think it’s dumb, or just not choral, and we’re only doing it because I’m Sam’s partner. How can I bear the shame of people hating my song and being forced to sing it?

– And – ok, if I DO agree to do it, I/we (really “I” because I’m too afraid to let go of control) have to come up with an Arrangement. And write it out. In notes. On a staff. Like a, you know, I think the technical term is real music person. That sounds HARD. And very time consuming. And intimidating. And I am bound to fuck it up. 

– And speaking of intimidating, how am I supposed to teach it? I don’t know how to teach a harmony. And don’t I also need to play it on the piano then? Like, 2 parts at the same time? Um, I can’t. I especially can’t in front of these, you know, real music people.

– Geez, and then there’s, what is my relationship to trans-ness, anyway? I have a transgender partner. A fair number of trans people in my life. I’m part of the “trans community.” When I am singing in a trans community choir, this aspect of my identity/life comes to the forefront for examination in a way it doesn’t usually. Are there certain things I should be doing? Fights I should be fighting? There’s an odd feeling of responsibility that comes with contemplating these things. A feeling that I should be … standing up more. 

And then there’s … gosh, GALA itself. 175 choruses. That sounds really fucking BIG. In case you haven’t noticed, this year I’ve been embracing my tendencies toward introversion. This is going to be thousands of people in a smallish area downtown, which is already full of humans. That’s a hell of a lot of small talk. And don’t get me started on the parking! Plus, I still have to work my day job. I’m going to be exhausted. 

SOOOOOOOOOOOOO that’s been my inner monologue over the past few months – I’m sorry you had to witness that.

But. 

It’s getting close to go time. 

In fact, it’s happening this weekend. 

And …

Ok, I’m excited. 

The resistance is still there, an underlying mutter. 

But there are these spikes of … This is going to be cool. 

The tide is shifting. The things I appreciate about GALA are coming more to the surface. The great concerts. The solidarity. Performing in this incredible space. When I think about it, how did I get so lucky?

Working and singing with the trans choir over the past year has been a really wonderful experience. This group is so vibrant. The energy of each rehearsal is uplifting and energizing. Every member is truly bringing their heart. And even though it seemed at first like Mission: Impossible, we have really pulled together on this set of brand new songs that didn’t even exist three months ago. And it’s sounding good. And they don’t hate my song. A lot of them seem to actually really enjoy it. Astonishing! In fact, when the choir joins me (in harmony) on these lines that felt so idiosyncratic and personal when I wrote them … It’s like … Man. An amazing feeling, actually. A wave of joy spreading through me like warm, gentle surf. 

I love singing with this group so much. I am really looking forward to our sharing this moment, well, this fifteen minutes, together. 

It is going to be fucking awesome. 

And after that … Sleep. And, yes, email. I promise. ❤

Angie - I Encompass All Pronouns - Colorado Trans Community Choir - Phoenix

Other side of our bad ass t-shirts

by

Disruption

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post.  I had planned a whole 3-part series of posts about the meanings of Easter,  putting together and balancing the interpretations I heard in the Baptist church and at the Sufi dances, and exploring the meanings of Easter for my own life.  Well, those posts (along with any other writing projects I had going two weeks ago) never got written, due to an interruption of life.  But my original vision was for this blog to be more about the day-to-day spiritual journey and less about abstract theorizing, so I’ll write about my process as I live it — messy as it is, petty as it no doubt will sometimes seem.  This blog is designed to be a place where I can sort things out as they happen.

The interruption — or perhaps irruption is a better word — of life is that my partner was fired from his job as a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies.  Surprising and emotionally devastating to my partner, this would be disruptive enough to our life together, but it’s much bigger than that… As I mentioned, my partner is transgender (specifically, female-to-male transsexual) and numerous aspects of the review and termination process he went through made it evident that discrimination was taking place, whether intentional or not, and that he was negatively impacted by trans invisibility and lack of knowledge about trans issues (transgender studies being also the field in which he’s beginning to pursue research).  First a student and community letter-writing campaign, and now an international protest by trans, queer, and allied scholars and academics emerged to protest his firing.  It has become a full-time campaign.

I mention all this by way of update — I’ve written elsewhere about my opinions on all of this and the reasons I believe it’s a trans issue (and a gender issue generally) — and the reasons are many.  But this blog is not a place where I want to bring those arguments and discussions — though I’ll probably talk about them in relation to my own values and passionate commitments.  Instead I really want to use this space to talk about marriage, partnership, disruptive life events, and the ways these trigger my emotional processes (for the purposes of healing, I have to have faith) and the ways I’m dealing with the emotional and practical upheaval.  In other words, how it all affects me and what I’m doing to cope and, in my better moments (sometimes woefully few) to flow. 

Selfish?  Perhaps.  Self-indulgent?  I hope not.  I want to share my experience honestly — not whining, but illuminating the ways we humans are interconnected (especially in our intimate relationships) and events that supposedly “happen to” one person touch off or initiate processes in others around them — processes which are both related and independent, another seeming paradox of our simultaneous oneness and uniqueness.

This is also not the same as saying that I am a victim of someone else’s actions or of circumstances beoynd my control that don’t even have me as a target.  None of this is meant to imply an abdication of personal power — my own responsibility for my own life.  Rather it’s to say that none of us is an island; that many seemingly unrelated events in our lives show up to further our own “individual” soul growth; and that the more we open up to intimacy (intermingling of energy flows) with any other beings, the more we complexify the array of influences on the winding course of our life path. 

This seems like a good time to introduce my partner by his very own pseudonym (of course, if you live in CoMo or are aware of this story then you know who my partner is — but it seems to be standard blog protocol).  He suggested “Frank” because, well, he doesn’t hold back when he has something to say.  (After he had written and submitted a book proposal for a memoir about his sex change, it occurred to him to ask me if I minded him telling all my business.  I said, Ha ha ha!  Wait until you read my blog.) 

I couldn’t really imagine calling him Frank on all occasions good and bad, though.  I think I’m going to call him Hawk instead.  I know he strongly identifies with birds of prey like hawks (and eagles) because of their high, soaring flight and their clear vision, and that the hawk is a special totem for him.  It seems to suit him as a pseudonym, simple and dignified.  Also it reminds me of Hawkeye from M*A*S*H — not really that much like my partner in personality, but I always had a big crush on him.  And like that Hawk, my partner can be very fun and silly.  And he stands up for his values, which are values of humanity and compassion, although his nontraditional methods are often not recognized by authority.  Okay, come to think of it, he iskinda like Hawkeye. … Hot! 

All right, on that note, I know this is already a very long post so I will bring it to a close.  There will be more to come on this topic.  Until next time,

Peace,

HS