Episode 26 - Queer Futures

Thanks for Hitting Play and then listening to Hit Play. The New York Neo-Futurists have been celebrating Pride all week, and we’re capping it off with episodes of Hit Play featuring some queer queer plays. This week: lineage, dreams, texting, and introductions!

We ask that if you find this work meaningful, you donate to a cause that is meaningful to us. Check out Black and Pink, a prison abolitionist organization that  supports LGBTQ and HIV-positive prisoners. 

Some of the plays in this episode may contain sensitive topics. For more specific content warnings, check out the timecodes below.

If you like what you hear and want to support the New York Neo-Futurists, subscribe to the show, consider making a donation at nynf.org, and join our Patreon. Patreon membership gives you access to bonus content like video plays! We’d really appreciate any support in these difficult times. Contributing to our Patreon helps us continue to pay our artists. 

Take care of yourself, slide into our DMs, and tell us your favorite iconic queer villain on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.

2:20 [CW: references to anti-Semitism] - If You're Hearing This, I'm Doing Fine by Lee LeBreton

5:17 - CollectiveFutureDream by Katie Kay Chelena featuring Rob Neill, Anooj Bhandari, Annie Levin, Shelton Lindsay, Yael Haskal, Michael John Improta, and Michaela Farrell

8:20 - Queer Fantasia (or a bunch of texts sent that we are now reading here) by Anooj Bhandari featuring Lee LeBreton

13:36 - Hello, my name is… by Sergio Maggiolo

Our logo was designed by Shelton Lindsay

Our sound is designed by Anthony Sertel Dean

Hit Play is produced by Anthony Sertel Dean, Julia Melfi, and Léah Miller

Take Care!

Transcript 

Episode 26: Queer Futures

Show Intro

Percussive tinny electronic instrumental music plays underneath.

Lee: 26. Queer Futures. Hi! I'm Lee—a New York Neo-Futurist. While our on-going, ever-changing, late-night show, The Infinite Wrench, is on hold for the foreseeable future, we wanted a place to keep making art for you. And thus, Hit Play was born!  

If you’re already a fan of The New York Neo-Futurists, or any of our sibling companies, hello! God, we cannot wait to share a dollar pizza slice with you. If this is totally new to you—welcome to it!

We play by four rules: We are who we are, we’re doing what we’re doing, we are where we are, and the time is now. (Sound of Lee taking a bite, the next lines are said with a mouth full of fruit) Simply put: we tell stories, and those stories are our own. Everything that you hear is actually happening. So if we tell you we're recording while eating the last slice of watermelon, we’re really recording while eating the last slice of watermelon. Like I am right now. (Lee finishes chewing and swallows)

The New York Neo-Futurists have been celebrating Pride all this week, and we’re capping it off with episodes of Hit Play featuring queer queer plays. You can head to nyneofuturists.org/prideweek to check out the rest of our art we made. 

We ask that if this work is meaningful to you, that you donate to a cause that is meaningful to us. Check out Black and Pink, a prison abolitionist organization that supports LGBTQ and HIV-positive prisoners. You can learn more and donate to them at blackandpink.org. That link’s in the show notes. 

Just a heads up that some of the plays in this episode may contain sensitive topics. For more specific content warnings, check the timecodes in the show notes.

Lee: And now, Sergio will Run the Numbers!

Sergio: Hello, ami-gays, I’m Sergio! I'm a Degenerate Fox and director of Un Intento Valiente. We’re sibling companies with the New York Neo-Futurists. 

In this episode we’re bringing you 4 plays by Lee LeBreton, 

Katie Kay Chelena featuring Rob Neill, Anooj Bhandari, Annie Levin, Shelton Lindsay, Yael Haskal, Michael John Improta and Michaela Farrell,

Anooj Bhandari featuring Lee LeBreton, 

and me--Sergio Maggiolo.

That brings us to 107 audio experiments on Hit Play. Muy bien! Enjoy!

Music winds down with a snap!

Play 1: If You're Hearing This, I'm Doing Fine (2:20)

Lee: If You’re Hearing This, I’m Doing Fine. GO!

Gentle piano/guitar underscore

Lee: I’m gonna get some of this wrong. We haven’t taken very good notes.

It’s the 1920s and Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld proposes that helping the transvestite population alter their appearances to align with their gender identities is a good thing, is a doctor’s responsibility, in fact. But his work is disrupted when Hitler names him, quote, “the most dangerous Jew in Germany,” and in 1933, young fascists destroy his Institute of Sexual Science—

—But then in July 1966, Dr. Harry Benjamin publishes this book resurrecting Hirschfeld’s approach, which spawns medical transition programs in Baltimore, in San Francisco—

—so that the month after that, when a street queen throws coffee in the face of the cop who is trying to remove her from Compton’s Cafeteria in the Tenderloin, and someone else smashes a window, and someone else sets fire to a cop car, the regulars know they aren’t grotesque criminal oddities, but people, deserving of dignity and care, and are being treated as such with increasing frequency by people and at clinics around the United States—

—Including one, however, that, around 1976, actually denies Lou Sullivan hormone therapy on account of his insistence that he is a gay man as well as a transgender one, sparking Lou’s life’s work advocating for the plurality of sexual orientations represented in what was coming to be known as the, quote, “gender” community—

—So that by the time it’s 1994, and I am six years old, sexual orientation is no longer a part of the diagnostic criteria for gender identity disorder—

—and when I am eight or nine on a trip to the city where I will one day live I drive past the spot where in 1969 a handcuffed Storme DeLarverie turned to the crowd at the Stonewall Inn and said “Why don’t you guys DO SOMETHING?,” and they did, near that spot I see two men kiss each other for the first time in my life and with so much tenderness that the sight sears itself to the back of my eyelids—

—and then 21 years after that I swish into a doctor’s office for a consultation with a surgeon and no one asks me who I like to fuck.

What’s on my heart is this: Time feels broken right now, stagnant, and we cannot see the future even if we strain; we cannot see what all this toil might yield, what justice we are helping push up the great hill; we are little and short-lived; and we want to believe something is nudging, we have to, but we won’t ever be sure. But the pushing is the point. The book, the smash, the lighted match, the shout, the kiss. The pushing is the point.

If you’re hearing this in June of 2020, then I am lying in a comfortable bed in Brooklyn recovering from top surgery. And many long-dead people made this possible.

Here we are in Pride Month. I’m proud of you, and myself, and those of us not yet born, for whom we push.

Music plays out

Play 2: CollectiveFutureDream (5:17)

Katie: CollectiveFutureDream. GO!

CollectiveFutureDream

C. katie kay chelena 2020

Buzz of silence. Inhale. Several people hum different tones, cutting between them and the tones. Gentle guitar underscore.

Rob and Anooj: In my dreams

Annie: In my dreams

Katie: In my dreams, all the doors burst open

Anooj: In my dreams I pour out of myself and into the ground beneath me. 

Shelton: I’m at a buffet with friends and lovers and everything is decadent

Michaela: I am dying flying sweating

Yael: the planet is whole

Rob: it is so vibrant

Annie: In my dreams, there is water, always water

Katie: In my dreams, all the spirits are throwing a party, and you are there, too

Rob: In my dreams we have pancakes with berries, and butter, and real maple syrup.

Shelton: In my dreams I am dancing and sweating with a thousand people in the streets.

Anooj: In my dreams my love handles are bitten.

Yael: everyone is free.

Everyone (staggered): In the future

Rob: In the future I will not be here

Annie: In the future, children will carry seeds in their palms as though they were diamonds.

Michaela: In the future I wake up and drink good coffee and read a good book and my kid comes downstairs wearing their pajamas and they ask me,  "What's a police department?"

Katie: In the future, I walk out of bed and into the dewy grass and it stains my feet green

Anooj: In the future I will use less words and more skin to express liberation. 

Yael: In the future

Michael: there are different people

Yael: and we hold each other up

Rob: things will be different, I hope, better, a better different

Katie: In the future I am less exhausted and more curious.

Yael: In the future we are together

Rob: and we will have a bourbon drink, or a tequila drink with ice

Shelton: In the future I go somewhere I haven't been and I just smile and smile and smile

Shelton and Michael: smile and smile and smile 

Annie: smile and smile and smile 

Katie and Anooj: smile and smile and smile 

Katie and Yael: smile and smile and smile 

Music plays out

Play 3: Queer Fantasia (8:20)

Anooj: Queer Fantasia (or a bunch of texts sent, that we are now reading here) GO!

Lee: ever since I read your meeting notes I’ve been thinking about the relationship between retributive justice and BDSM. 

Text ding!

but when I tried to search “carceral state + BDSM” just now, google’s new context algorithm substituted BDSM for “bondage” 

Text ding!

And now I have even more questions! 

Text ding!

Anooj: Wow. 

Text ding!

I originally read your text as BDS. 

Text ding!

Lee: haha. Potentially also relevant 

Text ding!

Music underscore begins

Anooj: I think something that I would throw in to think about, with the BDSM conversation... is that retributive justice calls on external bodies to define law and order.  Whereas forms of justice that sit within a community all involve consensual agreement and participation in deciding what action and response can look like.  

Text ding!

Lee: ya absolutely 

Text ding!

Gonna think about the external factor 

Text ding!

Anooj: i think alternative modes from retribution aren’t about “no rules” but rather about tuning in to the silent agreements that we live by everyday when we are around those we trust... and like, putting words to them, and actively engaging in what they mean for our autonomy

Text ding!

i think “silent agreements” is a phrase that feels really deeply rooted as a queer person, which is why i chose it, haha  

Text ding!

but i think something that queer folks and folks of color share are these moments of like... looking somebody in the eye and being like... i trust you to keep my body safe. and while we don’t say it, there’s almost a contract spilling out of that 

Text ding!

and a part of this for me is like... how do we maintain the power and beauty of these silent contracts, while also naming spaces and parts so that the nature of them can build some more collective power. idk 

Text ding!

I’m rambling lol 

Text ding!

Lee: you’re not this is what I like! 

Text ding!

Anooj: i think its why it hurts more when im hurt from “within the community”, you know? It feels like something i hold sacred is being scratched at  

Text ding!

Lee: YES. makes me withdraw into the cynical perspective of “queer community is a naïve fantasy” 

Text ding!

Anooj: Yeah… if feel that, hard 

Text ding!

I think my resistance to calling myself gay is rooted in understanding its embodied fantasy as something my body rejects

Text ding!

and at the same time... a different version of it still exists on a very interpersonal level that retains a lot of beauty 

Text ding!

Lee: interesting that “queer” has different connotations 

Text ding!

Anooj: Yeah 

Text ding!

Lee: Anooj navigating the silent agreements with other queer men is one of the most mysterious experiences of my adult sexual life, I don’t know how you navigate 

Text ding!

Anooj: I don’t navigate well 

Text ding!

I think... I’m mostly left feeling let-down. In a combination of others actions and an assimilation of my own

Text ding!

I think like... queerness is the continual making of something new in a given moment, that draws from a history that needs to be let go of as an archive of pain and suffering.  And I’ve found that the hardest place to actually “do that” in, is with queer men   

Text ding!

and that really not-good outcome of that, is that then, my sexual history turns into my own personalized archive of pain. and i don’t want it to be that!!!!  

Text ding!

Lee: ya!! you deserve less painful connections!! 

Text ding!

Anooj: We all do! Truly! 

Text ding!

and the thing about it, is that at the end of the day, the power to do that is something one gives to the self. 

Text ding!

its just hard to center that in the heat of any moment

Text ding!

especially when you think that moment might give you alignment with some larger form of queer fantasia hahah 

Text ding!

Lee: right. “this person is so beautiful, they’re probably a portal to an evolved queer fantasy existence” 

Text ding!

Anooj: Zomg. yea. 

Text ding!

Lee: Upside down smiley face emoji. Clown face emoji. 

Text ding!

Anooj: i need to maybe make a guidebook for myself that’s like... when i say any variation of this sentence, what am i to do 

Text ding!

Lee: Hahahahahaha 

Text ding!

Anooj: lee there was this BEAUTIFUL man who went to my college  

Text ding!

and was known as being really beautiful. and he was gay.  

Text ding!

and i got a little drunk one day and was texting him  

Text ding!

And then it basically turned into a booty call. 

Text ding!

but between the time that he said he was gonna come over, and the time he got to my place

I got SO drunk 

Text ding!

and so when he arrived, do you wanna know what i did?  

Text ding!

Lee: way. 

Text ding!

I mean, wat* 

Text ding!

Anooj: I yelled, “I’m a burrito!”, and wrapped myself in a blanket and literally rolled around on the floor 

Text ding!

and he just had to sit on my sofa with my roommate and watch my drunk ass.  and the next day he texted me “I’m sorry I shouldn’t have come over”... but I’m like, no, I’m so, so, so glad you did.  And to this day, I’m so happy that I turned myself into mexican food in the face of potential of queer fantasy.  

Text ding!

Because as dumb of a memory as that is, it also is like... a direct expression of just like... an unhinged self, hahah, and I mean unhinged in the best way possible  

Text ding!

Lee: Holy shit hahahaha

Text ding!

Awww this is moving. 

Text ding!

Anooj: lee  

Text ding!

is it awful if i build a hit play piece from our conversation?  

Text ding!

i have my own complications about using genuine friendship text for the sake of art Haha.

Text ding!

Lee: Absolutely. 

Text ding!

Nothing about my side of the convo would be uncomfortable to share  

Text ding! Music fades out

Play 4: Hello, my name is... (13:36)

Sergio: Hello, my name is... GO!

Staticky background noise, slowly fades up in volume

Sergio: 10 years ago I moved from S.America to the US to go to acting school and I remember sitting in a circle in studio B, during my class’ first ever roll call, thinking: I’m gonna try it. 

Static cuts out

"Hello, my name is ‘Sergio’" I said, loud and clear, so it was easy to understand. 

What happened after was horror. 

Background noise of whispering crowd

Odd looks, nervous laughs. Well-intended yet laughable attempts of phonetic emulation. Chaos. 

Noise cuts out

My name was chaos. So I changed it. SIR-GEE-OH That’s the american version, right? It’s easier. It seemed too much to ask my white american actor friends, to uncomfortably roll their tongue. It was much easier to modify my identity.

After all, I really wanted to fit in. I WANTED TO PASS. I wanted to be perceived as a straight-acting gay italian dude with no accent, rather than the queer, latino, brown chaos I am. And so…

Underscore sets in

I have been inside the Ser-gee-oh closet ever since. But that's enough. Today I'm coming out again to my Anglo-Saxon friends and family. Because the thing is, ser-gee-oh is not who I am. I’m SERGIO.

And because I understand the need for compromise I offer you: sehr-khyo. I will take no less than Sehr-khyoh. Because I don't want to pass anymore. I don’t want to make it any easier for you. I actually think it is important that I don’t. I’m exactly who I say I am. Embrace the challenge. Embrace the chaos. 

So… Hello, my name is SERGIO. Goodbye!

Music fades out

Show Outro (16:07)

Percussive tinny electronic instrumental music plays underneath.

Lee: Thanks for Hitting Play and then listening to Hit Play. If you liked what you heard, subscribe to the show and tell a friend! If you want to support the New York Neo-Futurists in other ways, consider making a donation at nynf.org, or joining our Patreon–Patreon.com/NYNF. Patreon membership gives you access to bonus content like video plays and livestreams. And if this episode gets over 1,000 downloads, we'll order one of our Patreon supporters a pizza on us. We’d really appreciate any support in these difficult times. Contributing to our Patreon helps us continue to pay our artists. 

Take care of yourself, drink some water, slide into our DMs and tell us your favorite iconic queer villain on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.

This episode featured work by: me--Lee LeBreton; Katie Kay Chelena featuring Rob Neill, Anooj Bhandari, Annie Levin, Shelton Lindsay, Yael Haskal, Michael John Improta, Michaela Farrell;

Anooj Bhandari featuring Lee LeBreton; and Sergio Maggiolo.

Our logo was designed by Shelton Lindsay. And our sound is designed by Anthony Sertel Dean. Hit Play is produced by Anthony Sertel Dean, Léah Miller, and Julia Melfi. Take Care, y'all!

Music plays out with a snap!