Good day and good appetite, my delicious donuts and muffins and beignets and yes, even keto danishes! I write to you today with a donut in one hand and my optimism in the other to tell you of all the freshly-glazed treats and cultural sweets that await you on the other side of whatever blinky screen you’re reading this on, here in the future, where that screen can also deliver you a whole world of delights. Read on to discover what delicious and nutritious queer and trans cultural satiations await you in the coming weeks.
Is He Musical? Jude Taylor
As February drags on and saps my queer spirit with every plunge below zero degrees, I fully needed a warm and witty gay musical with snappy numbers full of double entendre. If this is also you, I have good news: from Feb. 17 to 18 you can stream the world premiere of Jude Taylor’s Is He Musical?, a tender and fateful snapshot of late-1930s gay London in the days before it was forced underground (again). I first met Taylor as a student 10 years ago with lots of ideas and hats, so it’s a real pleasure to see this delicious premiere.
Dayna Danger at McGill University
Multidisciplinary queer genius Dayna Danger is McGill University’s Mellon Indigenous Artist in Residence for 2022, creating and considering art and art ways—including traditional, contemporary, and what happens when they’re melded or mated to make something both old and new. Danger, who has made photo, video, durational and craft work (and probably other things I haven’t yet been lucky enough to see) will give their first artist-in-residence talk on Feb. 21 at 2 p.m. ET (registration is required), and I for one am very excited to hear their thoughts on all of it. It’s true that artist talks aren’t always the most fascinating (some artists are way better at making things than talking about them), but I think if you read this interview, you’ll agree that we’re in no danger (rimshot) of that here.
The Fabulous Show with Fay & Fluffy
Anyone who has ever been to Drag Storytime will agree that it’s delightful. (I am, as is my lifetime practice, discounting the thoughts of homophobes and trans antagonists who are hateful about drag queens and/or believe that being around queer people makes children queer.) The best news is, thanks to Family Jr.,The Fabulous Show with Fay & Fluffy’s sweet and empowering vibe will become available to all children everywhere in Canada starting this Sunday, Feb. 20, at 7 p.m. ET! They’ll read books, talk with kids, sing songs and have fabulous adventures to share with you, which you can watch all from the comfort of your couch. As a Fay & Fluffy live veteran, let me just say that even if you are old, cranky, childless and absolutely not the imagined audience for this show, a little drag joy without competition or shade might just uncrick even your crank.
Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis by Grace Lavery
Often brilliant and often unsettling, Grace Lavery has given up on the project of respectability (along with conventions of genre, gender-compliance, and linear time) to make Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis. Where sometimes I eat books whole and then have to go back for a closer view while I digest, I read Please Miss in bites I could chew in order to savour the language-moments and concepts she offers without getting distracted by the wild, nearly alien overall narrative(s). Like a hug with (consensual) wandering hands or a meal with flavoured foam and crickets for dessert, Please Miss expands the concept of a memoir in ways that are challenging but exciting—if you’re prepared for it. Put on your big-kid frock and dive in.
Black & Blue by Karinda Dobbins
Dry, observational comedian Karinda Dobbins has just released a new album, Black & Blue, taking aim at pet people, hiking while Black, tiny houses and even lesbian weddings (well, mostly only the ones that take place in the woods). Dobbins kept me laughing for a solid hour describing a variety of situations in which I have found myself, and also ones I definitely haven’t (my Uber driver has never proudly pointed out Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard while taking me to my hotel, lest I miss notably-white Portland’s slender nod to Black history, for example, but I have definitely been to weddings where obscure 19th-century feminist writers were quoted at length). Dobbins pokes some fun at it all without being unkind, and honestly I’m hoping a tour brings her closer in the coming year.
ICYMI: That’s Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
This morning I read the newsletter from our friends at Come As You Are about whether when people with G-spots squirt it is, or is not, at least somewhat mixed with pee, and who in the world cares one way or the other (put a towel down and get about it, friends!). The enthusiastic exhortation sent me down memory lane to the days before there were respectable gays in branded polo shirts, when we were all just an undifferentiated mass of dirty queers in the eyes of the cops and the government. That made me reach again for Sycamore’s delicious and still-timely edited collection That’s Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, packed with writing by people who’d long since given up trying to be good, even in 2004.
And that, my delicious dandies, fops and fruits, is the roundup for this session of queer and trans cultural delights. May your cakes rise and your feet stay dry and your only falls be into love; may any leaking or dripping the coming thaw brings be delicious and not destructive, and may you have laid a towel down first. As always, if you’re making anything new and queer, drop me an email to info@xtramagazine.com or DM me on Twitter—I love to hear your news.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misspelled Karinda Dobbins’ name.
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