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If you’re looking for support around healing your relationship with your body, deepening your relationship with a partner, unpacking your desire, and finding more pleasure, I’d love to work one-on-one with you. Learn more at dawnserra.com.
ALOK is here. It’s time to question everything.
ALOK is someone I’ve long admired and learned so much from. Their talk at Explore More Summit 2018 was a fan favorite by a landslide. And for good reason. ALOK is not only an incredible thought-leader, but they are utterly transparent about the violence, harm, and vulnerability of living in the world as someone who is gender non-conforming – the rawness of how they show is important.
We start our chat by fielding a listener question from SC who is struggling with HSV, PCOS, and hirsutism which means SC has body hair in a lot of places that cause distress and shame.
ALOK talks about the ways the body positivity movement has failed to account for body hair diversity. Also, the ways ALOK was animalized and othered for their body hair, even as a younger person.
What does it mean to be gender non-conforming and why is the gender binary so violent? ALOK has such honest, raw truths to share here.
We also talk about why so many movements leave the most marginalized behind and why liberation and freedom are not conditional. Those folks who are cut out are the ones we should be centering – if the most marginalized are free, all of us are free. But framing queer freedom around gay marriage or body positivity over only cis “healthy” bodies actually reinforce the violence.
Read the interview ALOK did with Mia Mingus on ugliness here. IT IS SO GOOD.
Let’s talk about why we want validation from people and institutions that do not see our worth and humanity, and why that’s so scary. How art will set us free and imagine new worlds. And much much more.
Follow Dawn on Instagram.
About ALOK:
ALOK is a gender non-conforming writer, performer, & fashionist@Listen and subscribe to Sex Gets Real
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Episode Transcript:
Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra. That’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships from a place of curiosity and inclusion, tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love as you to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it., we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happened here in service to joy, connection, healing, and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.
Dawn Serra: Hey you. We are here with a very exciting episode featuring my chat with the incredible artist and activist, ALOK. Before I get to my chat with ALOK, I wanted to remind you that there is a new year’s giveaway. If you want to enter to win Allison Moon’s, Girl Sex 101 and Bad Dyke: Salacious Stories from a Queer Life, plus a handwritten note from me, you can head to sexgetsreal.com/ny2019/ for New Years 2019. The drawing is through January 15th, 2019. You can throw your name in the hat if you want to see if maybe you’re one of the randomly selected winner. The person who wins will get a copy of both of those books, a note from me and hopefully a nice sexy start to their new year. You can enter to win at sexgetsreal.com/ny2019/ for our New Years giveaway. I’d love to see you over there. Plus, that gets you on the Sex Gets Real newsletter, so that in case something ever happens, I have a way to contact you, plus let you know about all kinds of fun stuff I’ve got planned for 2019.
I also wanted to mention that I would love to see you in my coaching practice. I do one on one work and couples work around intimacy, desire, connection, kink, bodies, and all of the things that keep us connected and communicating. If you could use a little help getting unstuck, you want to dive deeper, explore things in new ways, or really strengthen and re-prioritize that connection with self or other head, to DawnSerra.com to check out my coaching options. I would love to be able to support you, to witness you, to honor you, to validate you, and to help you feel like you’ve got the support you need.
Dawn Serra: This episode with ALOK is really special to me. Anytime I get to chat with ALOK, I feel cracked open. I feel raw. I feel gratitude. There’s something that really intimidates me about speaking with ALOK because as you’ll hear, the way that ALOK moves through the world is simultaneously heartbreaking, for all of the violence that they experience, and also tremendously generous in the ways that they share themselves through their art and the ways that they think and talk about the gender binary and body hair, and the ways that the gay movement has left behind the most marginalized, and the way the body positivity movement is failing so many. We also talk about the power of friendship and why so much of what we are looking for answers around starts with friendship. We also talk about art and pleasure and so many other things and I’m really excited to share this with you.
I should note, we recorded this several weeks after the Trump administration released that memo saying that they were going to try and eliminate the word transgender from all of the health departments and science departments. We recorded this sometime in November and it’s just now airing. I had a backlog of questions and things to get through for the end of the year. You’ll hear us at one point in the episode mention the memo, and that is the Trump administration’s memo around eliminating transgender. I hope that you savor this. I hope that you feel it in your bones. I hope that you listen to it multiple times. I know that I have and I’m still walking away with so many things I really need to grapple with and sit with, such good stuff. I also want to mention that Patreon supporters, your bonus this week is a listener question that says, “I would rather masturbate and fantasize than engage intimately with my wife. Is that okay?”
Let’s roll around in what that means and all of the different things that might be at play. If you go to pateon.com/SGRpodcast, new URL, SGR podcast for Sex Gets Real. You can either support the show at any dollar amount that you’d like. If you already do at $3 a month and above, you get exclusive nowhere else to be found content every single week. Make sure you pop over there and hear the bonus. I got some wonderful emails from several supporters that did the new year’s ritual with me last week and your emails touched me so deeply. If you haven’t had a chance to do that new year’s ritual, please do head over. There are some really yummy stuff that I think you’ll enjoy. ALOK is gender nonconforming writer performing and fashionista, and here is our conversation.
Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, ALOK. I am so excited to have you here with me this week and I know the listeners are too.
ALOK: I’m so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Dawn Serra: Your talk and explore more summit last year was the most popular talk of them all by a landslide. I got so much feedback from people about how in love with you they were and had several requests for replays. I know lots of people tuning in also attended the summit and will be ridiculously excited. This is something I’ve been looking forward to for several weeks.
ALOK: Awesome.
Dawn Serra: The reason that I reached out, I’ve been wanting to have you on the show for forever. I got this listener question that I thought maybe this is a good place for us to start. I would love if I could read the listener email to you and then maybe we could roll around a little bit in femininity and body hair, and shame, and all the stuff that comes with that.
ALOK: Sure.
Dawn Serra: Okay. SC wrote in and it says, “Dearest, Dawn, I want to emphasize how incredibly much your podcast is truly changed my life and enhanced my liberation in the world of kink and sex. I listened nearly every day during my commute to and from work. Your words truly are comforting and put my heart at ease. I have some current struggles that I’m really dealing with and if you have any resources or information, please send it my way.” SC listed a number of things around an abusive relationship they’re in and being a single mom. But the thing that really stood out to me was this part, “I have HSV, genital herpes, hirsutism, which causes excessive hair growth all over my body. My butt, my arms, my face, my legs, and I have PCOS. These ailments have debilitated me and are destroying my self-confidence. I can barely walk into a room without wanting to cry, especially seeing other couples, families or women who probably aren’t suffering from anything remotely close to these things. I’m in so much pain. It is truly horrible to be in this body and feel like I cannot use it or channel it because of shame and embarrassment. I love that your episodes have really explored and expanded on body shaming and fat shaming, but this is a whole other spectrum of feeling ashamed. I feel so hopeless and truly feel like I will never find anyone who will truly accept me for my body and being a single mom.”
Dawn Serra: ALOK, you’ve written beautifully and painfully, and with such rawness and vulnerability over the years around, one, your experience of the violence of the gender binary and being someone who exists outside that binary. But also your relationship with body hair and the stories that we carry about that. I’m wondering as you hear SC’s email, what comes up for you? What would you like to share?
ALOK: There’s so much to say. I think the first thing that feels really important to say is that’s so real. It’s a particular kind of pain that I feel like even our efforts around body positivity, that we have not really thought through the question of body hair really seriously. What I noticed in dialogues around body hair is there are appropriate regions of the body that are being reclaimed for body hair. Like, “Don’t shave your legs,” and that’s a feminist act. But what happens when the hair’s on your face? What happens when the hair is in places that it’s not supposed to be? I think that for me it’s been really sad that we’ve not been able to really have these kinds of conversations. I’m always interested in the parts of positivity that we bracket away and we say, “This is too much for now.” I think that’s one of them.
I really appreciate being able to talk about this because I think that it’s really absent. I think after that validation, what feels really important to say is I have struggled with my body hair since I can remember. When I was really young, I used to pluck out my arm hair and leg hair, and shave all the time. I later found out there’s like a medical condition called Trichotillomania, where you’re removing your body hair like that. But I don’t really need that diagnosis or framework to understand what was going on. I know what was going on. I felt like I was treated less than human and animalised because of my body hair. I felt if I removed it, then I would be more palatable, desirable at that level but then also even me, more regarded as a human being, which is really sad when I think about it now.
ALOK: I struggled for a long time even before I came into an understanding of my gender identity right now, even when I thought that I have to be a boy and that was the only thing I was, I still felt like I couldn’t have body hair like that because of race. There’s this idea that because I was already brown and also was hairy, that meant I was animalized. I was always teased, called a monkey and all these other racial sort of epithets. Which is to say, I’ve struggled with this for a really long time and only in the past few years have I actually found a way to come into harmony with that. I would actually say the way that I learned to embrace my body hair came through accepting myself as a gender non-conforming person. What that means to me is, I became really politicized around thinking about what do we mark as feminine, what do we mark is masculine, and why are we constantly taught that these two things have to exist in polarities and an oppositional relationships. I would really look at myself in the mirror and I would look at myself having a full beard and lipstick and I’d be like, ‘Why do I find this unsightly?”
I really spent a lot of time thinking and surrounding myself with other visibly gender non-conforming people and starting to realize, “The only reason that I am upset about this is because of other people’s projections.” It’s not at all organic. It’s other people’s anxieties and fears that they’re mapping out onto my body, that have nothing to do with me. That recognition was so spiritual for me because I was able to really recognize there is beauty in all the parts of me that people dismiss as wrong or shameful or not supposed to happen.
I’m not saying that I was ashamed and now I’ve learned to love myself linear narrative. It’s much more complicated and it ebbs and flows. But I think that was really helpful for me is recognizing the ways in which people will constantly do things with their own jealousy and their fear. Oftentimes, people will respond to their jealousy and fear by shaming other people. Once I started to recognize that connection, I think that the sting of all of the harassment I experienced on account of being hairy and gender non-conforming, became much less. Because I actually was like, “Wow, these people are also really struggling. They somehow think that policing my body will give them freedom.” That’s not actually true. I’m actually free. I started to view my gender nonconformity, not as something that was an impediment or an obstacle or holding me back, but rather as an invitation and opportunity or an exercise to fundamentally reimagine beauty, to fundamentally reimagine gender, and to also fundamentally reimagine myself.
Dawn Serra: I’d love to start with this piece around the ways that movements and I’m thinking specifically about body positivity and queer LGBTQIA movements do that, “This is too much right now., so we’re going to hide it, erase it, pretend it doesn’t exist.” Often what’s getting erased is anything that’s quote unquote “too non-normative,” or that’s too far away from whatever that binary is that needs reinforcing by the dominant culture. It’s like the folks who conforms the closest to the dominant narrative or the ones that are scrambling for that last bit of power, then everything else gets pushed to the side and said, “Wait, it’s not your turn. You’re too much. We can’t make space for you.” That seems to always be the case.
ALOK: I have been thinking about this a lot. Often when we have this conversation, we try to cohere these politics around certain identities. We’ll say things like, “In order for gay cis-men to get equality and acceptance, they had to leave trans people under the bus or in order for cis women to be recognized, they had to erase trans men.” But what I actually want to push us to do is to understand this impulse as a self sabotaging impulse that affects even the people who are trying to get recognition and respect. Because what they’re doing is they’re mistaking conditional acceptance with freedom. They’re not the same thing. If the only way that you will be accepted is by your worth being negotiated by conforming to a certain set of parameters. that’s not actually what freedom is. I look at gay cis-men who have had to pretend as if the gay movement is about love and not also about gender nonconformity and difference. I’m not saying, “Wow, you’re messing over trans people almost like you’re messing over yourself.” The reason you’re experiencing violence is because the world is treating and perceiving you and a gender binaristic way, and you not fighting the gender binary also is hurting you.
I think that what I’ve tried to reframe the dialogue is that actually those of us who are cut out as excess, the reason that we are so deeply repressed, silenced, and invisibilized is because the freedom that we are offering is a freedom that actually impacts everyone, not just us. I think that there’s this thing that we do where we make this about a small minority of people who are cut out. But what I’m trying to reframe that is to be like, even the majority is not experiencing true freedom. They’re just experiencing conditional acceptance.
ALOK: When it comes to body hair and body positivity, I think what I always say is it’s really interesting to me that when white cis women choose not to shave their legs. We’ll call this a feminist act, but when trans and gender nonconforming people like me, maintain our body hair. We’re just called men. That’s a double standard and I’m like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be more prudent if we rejected these really arbitrary gender designations and saw gender nonconforming people like me, as exemplars for what femininity could be like even for cis women?” I think so many women struggle with body hair and there’s a vast reservoir of selfies, images, representation, art from trans and gender nonconforming people finding ways to celebrate and affirm our body hair, but we’re somehow not eligible for that connection on the basis of us not being cis women. That feels really silly to me.
I always tell people, when I’m fighting for gender nonconforming visibility and representation, I’m not actually just fighting for gender nonconforming people. I’m fighting for all people to be able to look different, one. Two, also for our physical appearance to not have any bearing on our worth as human beings. I recently did an interview with my friend Mia Mingus, for a publication called Them. Mia wrote a really foundational essay to me about the politics of ugliness in 2011. Seven years later, I wanted to talk to her about how ugliness was operating. This is what she was trying to get at in her work is an ordinary in order for certain things to become beautiful, other things have to become ugly. That there’s always this relationship. We say plus size is beautiful, but then we create parameters on what do we mean around plus size. If you’re bigger than what we think plus sized palatable is, then you’re too much.
ALOK: I think a lot about that dynamic. I’m not interested in fighting for that because at the end of the day, who’s norms, whose value systems, and whose economies of desires are we upholding? What Mia writes and speaks about is the actually rather than the pursuit of beauty, which we can understand is already always a pursuit of incorporation. What if we reorient ourselves towards finding magnificence and that which they call ugly. That for me has been, foundational to reconciling and accepting who I am as I don’t feel the need necessarily to say, “When I am visibly hairy and femme, I am beautiful.” Why should it have to be beautiful to prove that it’s not ugly? This is what I am and I’ve been really trying to sit with the entirety and the poetry, and the power of being able to articulate this is what I am versus what I am is good. Why can’t I just be what I am?
Dawn Serra: That feels really interesting, but also unsettling. Because I think so much of what we are given with the world around us and also we’re expected to perform gender and relationship and everything else is this quest to prove that we’re goodness, that we’re enoughness. I mean it’s deeply anticapitalist and in all kinds of other yummy things. But if we were to give up the quest of proving goodness and worthiness, and instead saying this is what is, and I don’t have to justify that at all. That creates a huge shift in the ways that we think and talk about ourselves.
ALOK: Right. But I think that it’s where we need to be going because what I would always ask of us is, good on whose terms? I think validation is really powerful and important. I’m not trying to say that this is who I am, comes as a declaration of self love. I think that’s foolish. I think that we need each other and validation is wonderful. But what I would ask is, why are we seeking validation from foundationally abusive concepts and structures that are never actually going to love us for us, but will only love us in so much as they can instrumentalize us? I’m interested in receiving validation from people who actually care about me. I think that’s what I’ve really tried to practice in my life now. I need validation. I experienced a lot of harassment. I experienced a lot of dysphoria. I experienced a lot of fear. I need people in my life to tell me, “You’re beautiful. I love you. What you’re doing is important.” But I don’t need random strangers to say that to me. I need people who actually know me and care about me. What I started to incorporate in my own relationships with my friends. It’s like affirmation culture with each other.
One of the things that I do that is really silly but I love it is I feel like there’s so much harassment and vitro in the world that I try to do the opposite of that and I compliment people. My compliments, I think a lot of time about. I don’t want it to be something silly. I like silliness. I don’t want it to be something vapid. I want it to actually be something that shows that I’m really thinking about you and what you mean in my life. That’s what validation looks like for me, I can call my friend or I can have my friend over and I can say, “You are such a force. I completely love spending time with you. Every part of you. It makes me feel so wonderful. I know that you struggle and it hurts me that you struggle and I’m always here for you.” That’s the kind of validation I want.
I do this performance piece sometimes called my love life where I run into a mattress on a wall repeatedly. What I’m trying to suggest with that is why do we keep on running into the wall versus recognizing there’s a door inside the wall, and we can open the door and there’s one another. What the funny contradiction of the world is we’re all running into walls without recognizing that there’s a door in between those walls that we could run into each other in. When I really think about how I survive because for me these issues are about survival. I think that we constantly dismiss issues of the body and issues of appearance as somehow superficial or less than or not real. But for me what I look like literally impacts my physical safety in terms of people literally being turned to violence when they see visibly gender nonconforming people.
ALOK: I’m not trying to belittle at all what physical violence happens to those of us who are perceived by society to be quote unquote ugly. But what I’m trying to suggest is that we need somewhere to put the pain and having to put that pain in an abusive structure doesn’t work. We need to put that pain with people who actually care about us. I think the next question for me that comes up from that though is, and I think about this with myself too, and it’s something I’m still trying to work out, I don’t have all the answers, is what happens if people aren’t ready for what you’re giving? Even saying, “Take it to your friends,” presumes that you can get friends. But there are some people who are so disqualified from regimes of beauty that they’re often left behind. I’m thinking here about people with disabilities. I’m thinking here about gender nonconforming people. People who are seen as so unsightly. Remember we exist in a country where there used to be ugly laws that prevented people with physical disabilities from existing in public because they were quote unquote unsightly. We tried to disappear people and criminalize them for being quote unquote ugly.
There are material histories that inform the disappearance of people who look different, so many times people are so disappeared, that they can’t even build intimacy with other people. I think then also the question for me is not about, how am I thinking about my own physical appearance? How am I creating spaces where I love and support, and care for people no matter what they look like? How do I establish that people know that I’m one of those people? Because we’re so far between. We’re really trying to work on ourselves to actually be like, “Your appearance has no bearing on my ability to love and show up for you.” We need to be more vocal about that. That’s why for me, it’s about always thinking, how am I creating spaces, language, vocabulary, parties, social settings, intimacies where people don’t have to feel the pressure of beauty? Because it’s a form of pressure.
Dawn Serra: Yes. Yes. I think that pressure of beauty, I think it shows up in a lot of ways that we don’t even realize it’s showing up. I think a lot of us wouldn’t even know how to relax into a space where someone says, “It really genuinely does not matter how you look.” The love is still gonna be here and the respect, and seeing them with dignity. I think a lot of people wouldn’t even know how to trust that
ALOK: Totally. But I think that’s where we have to figure it out together. I honestly feel like a broken record at this point, but I feel like most of the answers to the biggest questions of the world are just friendship. Friendship for me is where we began to experiment with another world and another way to relate to each other. Because our families didn’t really do that well and romantic relationships didn’t really do that well. Friendship, for me, takes a space of, “Let’s actually figure out how to be with each other. Let’s create systems of accountability for when we mess up,” because we will mess up. We’ve been so indoctrinated into the ideas that the binary is purity, that your physical appearance has direct impact on everything. We’ve been so thoroughly inculcated with this real toxicity, of course it’s going to come out, none of us are outside of it. We’re constantly reproducing it. But we need people in the world who can literally hold our hand and be like, “Hey, that’s not cool. We’re trying to do something different and work through that together.”
For me, I’m committed to the process. I think also part of central to doing this kind of work is recognizing that it’s not going to be linear. It’s not going to be like, “I wake up tomorrow and accept my body hair.” It’s going to be actually surround. It’s a life shift. It’s not a shift of the gaze. It’s a shift of who we’re spending time with. It’s a shift of where we’re putting our energy. I think one of the things that was really helpful for me is I started to realize I only need people in my life who are really committed to me. Because I found myself in a place where I was in totally unreciprocal relationships, where I felt like I was giving, giving, giving, giving, giving but not receiving validation, care, and comfort. I actually really let a lot of people go for my life, shifted the way that I was living, and really tried to focus and deepen relationships with people so I could do this intimate work and that’s been so rewarding for me.
Dawn Serra: I’m wondering as I hear about this intimate work of cultivating and inviting in people who offer that validation, that care, and that comfort and really letting the rest go of these are the people who can show up for me in this way. How does pleasure factor into those dynamics and those relationships? How is pleasure showing up inside of inside of friendships?
ALOK: I think this is something that’s really on my mind right now. I think that things get really complicated when we start to talk about sexual pleasure in this conversation. When it comes to forms of nonsexual pleasure, it’s often totally there. There’s so many forms of pleasure that are about eating together, celebrating, laughing, joy, going out for drinks, going bowling. I love doing that. There’s always a commitment to pleasure there. But then I think what I’m still trying to hack at and figure out in my life is that it really feels like the discourse around and the practices around the nexus of desire, beauty, and sexuality need to be parsed through much more.
The way that we talk about desire as some sort of biological, organic thing is something that I really am so hurt by because I’ve experienced firsthand watching how certain bodies are seen as and rendered as desirable over others. That has everything to do with ideas of race, ideas of class, ideas of ability where certain bodies are rendered structurally undesirable. I’ve saw that happen in my own life, which is that the only way people have been taught to really express sexual desire, is within the parameters of a binary. This is not to say, I think when I have this conversation, people often trip up and they think that I’m saying that everyone should be necessarily attracted to all people and that preferences are inherently exclusionary. I’m not saying that, what I am saying is that I do believe that desire is produced through regimes of power that render certain people, especially black people, people of color, indigenous people, people of size, people with disabilities, gender nonconforming people as structurally undesirable. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t think the onus is on shift your desire. That doesn’t feel right. I think the first step is really about naming that to actually, “This is happening.” Because I think what feels so painful is that so many times people will tell people, gender nonconforming people or people with PCOS or people who are visibly gender nonconforming or have body hair, “Go out, be confident. You’ll find someone,” and that just doesn’t happen. Because of how violent and exclusionary economies of desire are. People began to feel gaslit because they’re like, “I’m trying everything but people don’t see it for me.” I think the first step is really about saying, “Yes, the marketplace of desire is so deeply exclusionary and violent, racist, gender binarist, femmephobic, fatphobic, and all of these things. Yes. Let’s stop trying to pretend that it’s not, but I don’t know where to go after that.”
Dawn Serra: Yeah. That’s a question that has been circled around on the podcast several times where we’re really grappling with these desirability traits that we are all indoctrinated into, that certain bodies get to be desired and certain bodies don’t. When we come up against that, it can feel really unsettling. It can make people super defensive, it feels like it’s so inherent to us, and yet everything that we’ve used to inform our opinion about who gets to be sexy and desired was given to us by outside forces. The solution isn’t to, “I’m going to grin and bear it with this person that I don’t find sexy to prove that I’m confronting my desirability politics,” because that’s terrible for the person.
ALOK: Right. That’s dehumanizing.
Dawn Serra: Exactly. I think ultimately it’s going to come back to we have to have some pretty massive structural shifts.
ALOK: Oh, absolutely. I think it’s both about structure and it is about your own personal development. I’ll speak from my own perspective here, I grew up in a very small Christian evangelical town in Texas where the only beauty norms that I had was that white people were beautiful and all the rest of us were ugly. I remember some of my first memories are a deep sense that I was ugly because I was not white. I remember literally telling my mom, “Okay, keep washing my hands. Why isn’t this brown coming off of me?” I remember constantly adoring images of whiteness in the media and thinking, “Maybe one day, I’ll be pure like that.” I remember that being recreated in my own family structure is whenever I was born really much lighter skin and then they started to get darker and the ways that people treated me began to shift.
I think so many of my earliest memories of pain are linked to questions of colorism and racism, and desirability. But the way that that impacted me was I literally only was taught to desire whiteness and I wouldn’t desire my own people, which is so painful. I really sat with that pain for years and I was like, “What do I do?” Then I made it a priority. I was like, “I really need to actually learn how to love myself and love my skin and love people like me.” I really started to actually think, process, shift who I was hanging out with, what kind of spaces I was in, what kind of media I was consuming, what kind of movies I was watching, what priorities I had, and my desire shifted. We constantly want to do this thing. I mean especially, it’s important to talk about this in light of the anti-trans memo that was put out by the Trump administration. We constantly want to do this thing where we make really complex systems fixed and immutable because that’s the easy thing. We say gender is fixed and immutable, not true. We say sex is fixed and immutable, not true. Then we’re also doing this thing where we’re saying sexuality is fixed and immutable. That’s also not true. We need to actually be open to the ebb and flow of everything. What I’ve learned in my life is we are so taught to fear the unknown. We project so much. I think here about how Claudia Rankine says, “Black people are being murdered because white people cannot police their own imaginations.” Jamal Lewis says, “Trans women and transgender people are being murdered because cis people can police their imaginations.” Our relationship with the unknown is we always make the unknown pejorative, bad, scary, ominous. I think that what I really tried to do in my life is fundamentally reframe that and to actually be the unknown is, and returning to that sense of, why must we graphed everything with good bad? Can we just experience and be committed to experience and then figure out in that way?
ALOK: I saw a deep shift in my life and in my desire when I really began to actually name how power was operating. I think that once again people have these knee jerk reactions where they respond and be like, “I’m dating a insert triply oppressed person, so I can’t be a racist or whatever or are you saying that I’m complicit because I’m dating…” I’m not trying to localize individual people. I’m not trying to localize individual identities. But what I am trying to say is that we live in a world that at fundamental level creates designations of who is worthy of living and who’s not. We have to do something about that.
Dawn Serra: Yes. Yes.
ALOK: I think what’s important also is to say that it’s not a one size fits all thing. There’s no one imperative of what you should be doing to quote unquote decolonize your desire. There’s no one strategy. There’s no one way that that looks like or manifest. I’m open to how we’re all doing it differently. I think that what I am trying to really do and practice in my life is to be open that there are many pathways to freedom.
We so often want to do this proselytizing thing of saying, “This is how you get free or this is what liberation looks like,” when actually what we’re saying, “This is what freedom or liberation has looked like for me, and that might not be what it looks like for you.” and that’s okay. I think I’m really trying to also challenge myself to also be like, “This has worked for me, maybe it won’t work for other people. This is what I believe, maybe that’s not what other people are believing,” and that’s fine. I don’t think that it’s that easy where there’s one solution.
Fundamental justice conversations is, how do systems of oppression that are such complex, historic thousand plus year legacies, futures and presence, how did those become materialized and embodied in us? That’s a huge thing. I think that it all happens at different ways because we’ve had different experiences, foundationally different lives. I think what I really want more than anything is the relief of being able to be honest that it’s happening. I think that’s what I feel like I need and was really helpful for me is, can we be honest that it’s happening? Can we be honest that everything, I’m not just saying desire here, but everything is informed by colonization and anti-black racism, ableism and transmisogyny. Can we be honest about that because I feel like so many times, we are constantly trying to once again create this idea of a pure self outside of power when we’re actually so many ways constituted by power.
Dawn Serra: We don’t know what the world looks like when everyone has access to freedom and liberation because it hasn’t really existed, at least not in a world that’s as globalized as technology focused as this world is. Maybe we’ve had small pockets of that in the past in really small local ways. But really thinking about, all of us getting free, we really don’t know what that’s gonna look like or how to get there, and how do we make space for multiple points in the journey and multiple experiences, and the multiplicity of what’s going to be required for that.
I think what comes with that is discomfort. How do I start grappling with, as you said, the unknown is? What kind of existential questions do I have to work through to be able to allow the unknown to exist and uncertainty to exist? To exist in discomfort, and to still show up and connect inside of that?
ALOK: I think that’s where I think art is really necessary. I think we spoke about this last time, but I’m not sure. But I say it all the time, which is the idea that there’s a group of people who are artists and the rest of the world is not an artist is so wrong. We all are capable of artistry. I believe that art is where we go to work through what society regards as impossible. I think about how growing up, I felt like who I am now and the gender I am, and the way I look now is impossible. How did I make that happen? I had a creative life where I was able to imagine. What creativity did for me is allow me to turn my imagination into reality, to manifest and materialize the dreamscapes I was creating through my art.
Gloria Anzaldua, an amazing Chicana feminist writes, “We have to create the images in our heads before we can manifest them in the world,” and that’s so foundational to me about what the role of art making and creation is about. It’s like, we’re stuck in this power grid right now of what we’re supposed to be, what we’re supposed to feel, what we’re supposed to do, what progress looks like, what equality looks like, what inclusion looks like. How can we dream and ambition to something else? This is why I think it really hurts me to see how during times of political instability, oftentimes it’s the artists that are the first people who are seen as impractical or it’s the artists who are seen as, “What are you doing? This is so superfluous or superficial.” But actually, this is vital work because what artists are doing is making us reckon an ambition beyond the now.
Dawn Serra: Being able to reckon with what’s beyond the now. That’s really hitting me. For you, how does the way that you survive play out in your art? For people who aren’t familiar with the ways that you do art and the ways that you grapple with surviving in the world, what is that relationship for you?
ALOK: I don’t think I would be alive if I didn’t make art because I feel like I was able to manifest who I am through performance. The thing that I love about performance is it requires the audience. It facilitates this dynamic of saying, “This is what I am or this is what I’m going through” There’s a catharsis to that than having someone else be, “Yeah, or snap or clap or say yes,” just having people bear witness to what you go through is so powerful and generative, and I want to gift that to everyone. I think everyone deserves a spot on the open mic and to literally say, “What are you feeling? What’s coming up for you? How are you relating to what’s happening in the news? How are you relating to your breakup? How are you relating to your mom’s death?” and have a group of strangers literally be like, “Whoa, that’s so real.”
What I learned through performance is that the more particular people stories are the more universal residents they have. I could watch someone perform and tell a story about their life and not know anything about them, but to love that person, and be like, “I see myself in you.” There’s something really magic making about that for me in how I’ve been able to survive, which is I’ve developed what I call emotional alchemy. I take a lot of the vitriol and violence, harassment, misrecognition, and demonization that I constantly experience, and I take all that negativity and I try to turn it into the is. I’m not even going to say turn it into something positive because sometimes it’s too impossible to turn it into the positive. Because who’s to say, I get insulted, I do a good show. Everyone’s like, “You are amazing.” But then I get insulted again. It’s a chronic form of pain. What I try to do is actually find a way to bear witness to the violence and a lot of what I’m trying to do in my performance is experience my own violence and be like, “That happened to me or this is happening to me.”To have other people to say, “I understand or empathize or I know that this is going on.” That’s so helpful to me.
Dawn Serra: Something that you recently wrote about because of the memo that came out and all the other bullshit that’s going on right now politically is, you wrote that sometimes you have to remind yourself that you’re part of a long legacy of trans femmes who have been resisting since the beginning of time. Legacy is something that I’ve been starting to ease my way into recently of what is my legacy? Who can I draw strength from? Who can offer me support when I feel alone or lost? Who am I also fighting for and with? I’d love to hear a little bit more about what recognizing that legacy has been offering to you, especially lately?
ALOK: It’s been offering me so much. I mean, these times have been extremely bleak. Calls to the Trans Lifeline, the suicide hotline for trans and gender non-conforming people have quadrupled in the past few weeks after this memo. Because a lot of us are having to really confront the reality of being told that we’re not real. That’s really painful because for decades we’ve had to literally, continue to legitimize ourselves and we’re still at a basic formulation of saying trans people exist. That’s so simple. Intersex people exist. There’s so many other things that we need to be talking about versus contesting our existence. It’s been feeling really bleak and isolating and sad, especially seeing how non-trans and non-intersex people can move on from this moment as if it’s like business as usual. ‘m like, “ Wait, what? This is so horrible.”
When I’m feeling really bleak and despair, I really try to remind myself that across time there been people scaling this kind of isolation or this kind of pain. I think that really makes me feel like even if I can’t find the people in my life right now to know that there are people before that who’s experience that, it makes me feel so grounded and part of something greater than myself. To recognize that so much of what I love about the trans tradition and obviously across time not everyone was identifying as trans. There were so many different ways in which gender and sex were categorized, and there’s no linear stable archive. I get it. But what I’m trying to say is, it literally used to be illegal for someone like me to walk down the street. You couldn’t wear more than two articles of clothing different than what the gender or sex you were assigned at birth. People got incarcerated because of it and then they kept on going outside. Knowing that their insistence on going against that created the conditions so that I can exist today makes me feel like I need to keep going because even if I don’t see the fruits of my labor and my resistance in my lifetime, maybe someone else will.
ALOK: I also feel it’s important to clarify that legacy is not just about our own kids. Legacy is about– Being an artist, I think about this all the time, my people are like people who are experiencing a similar emotion for me. The sense of existential dread, the sense of lonely together, the sense of a connection with we were meant for something so much greater than this, like we’ve been scammed. Does anyone else want to talk about how this is all a sham? Those are my kind of people.
When I think about legacy, I think about those emotional dissidence. I think about those people who were always called to be too much. Returning to our conversation on excess. I think about the people were always dismissed as superficial or excessive. I think about people who are dismissed or criminalized this ugly. I think about people who have watched other people get free while they’re left behind in that pursuit of freedom. I think about the left behind. I think about how that legacy also opens up parameters of what community for me can be. My community is not just other trans femmes or other transgender people, but it’s actually people who are really navigating a world that is lying to us and not giving our real work.
Dawn Serra: A world that is lying to us. I feel like so many conversations I’ve been having lately are literally about those lies and the exhausting bullshit that comes out of those lies. I have one more question for you and I love to know, as you orient towards how the world is right now and inevitable existential crisis that comes up around that, what’s pulling you forward over the next couple of weeks and couple months? What are the things that are cracking you open, that are offering you something interesting, that are pulling you forward from this space and place that we’re in now?
ALOK: I’ve been reading a lot, which has been really helpful for me. Reading books is so great to have a break from this world and entering another one. Reading has really helped me and I’ve been performing a lot, which has really been helping me as well to nurturing some new friendships which are really important to me, and make me feel good. I’ve been creating more time to be still, which is extremely hard for me, but also mobilizing me. I’ll be real. In order to exist in this world, we have to do the work of coordinating off or silencing some of our feeling. That devastates me that that’s the case, especially as a Cancer Leo rising. If I was to feel everything that I felt, I could just not sustainably live in this world because I’m emotional all the time. I have to do that work of bracketing, which I feel really sad about because that’s where we’re talking about before with ideas of the norm and the excess. I want to be able to scream the fullest scream. I want to be able to laugh the loudest laugh, I want to be able to cry every single tear. But sometimes you can’t because of survival.
I think that part of my strategy has also been keeping my head focused in front because I’m afraid that if I even was to look back a little bit, I could stumble and not be able to get up. I think that’s the reality for so many of us are at right now. It’s really bleak and I’m not interested in romanticizing that things are getting better or if we love ourselves more, things materialized differently. I think that there’s so much pain in the world. I think that actually for me, a recurrent theme, but being able to be honest about that pain allows me to keep going. It’s not about saying, “The pain is gone or I’m moving towards happiness,” but rather the pain is real and I’m finding a way to incorporate that pain into my day. That’s so much of what healing has looked like in my life, it’s not actually removing the wound because the wound is there to stay, but actually finding the vocabulary to describe the wound because I was hurting, but I didn’t know why. Now I actually have the wounds to be able to say this is why, and that gives me a sense of peace.
Dawn Serra: Finding a way to make the wounds real and there, and something that people can witness and see. I have to say, every single time I talk to you, I feel like I have this out of body experience. I leave my body a little bit because you offer so much, so much richness, and so much truth that the enormity of it sometimes is hard for me to wrap my arms around. I’m very appreciative of that. I want to close. I want to respect our time and I want to thank you for being willing to be here with us and sharing your truth, and helping me to field SC’s question. I deeply, deeply appreciate it and I know everyone tuning in is going to feel challenged and moved in the most beautiful ways.
ALOK: Of course. Thanks so much for having me.
Dawn Serra: How can people stay in touch and find you online? Because I know they’re gonna want to.
ALOK: I think I’m currently addicted to Instagram now. That’s where I stay a lot, so you could follow me on Instagram. I’m @alokvmenon
Dawn Serra: I will of course have a link to that in the show notes for everyone tuning in and I’m going to have a link to the piece that ALOK and Mia Mingus did for Them. It’s so good. I’ll have a link to that in the show notes if you want to read that and grapple with ugliness, a little bit. ALOK, thank you so much for being here with us and to everybody who tuned in. Thank you for listening. If you’ve got questions or stories or feedback that you want to send in and have witnessed or shared on the show, head to sexgetsreal.com and you can send me a little note there. Thank you. Bye.
ALOK: Thanks so much.
Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to the Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured in this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com. Head to patreon.com/SGRpodcast to support the show and get awesome weekly bonuses. As you look towards the next week, I wonder what will you do differently that rewrites in old story, revitalizes stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?