For Episode 6 of “PopSmart NOLA” we focused on transgender issues in New Orleans.
Our lineup included:
Wesley Ware,co-founder and and co-director of BreakOUT!, which builds the power of LGBTQ youth most impacted by the criminal justice system to affect concrete policy change to fight the criminalization of LGBTQ youth in New Orleans.
Katy Reckdahl, New Orleans-based journalist who profiled BreakOUT! for the New Orleans Advocate.
New Orleans stage performer Brooklyn Shaffer, who recently transitioned from male to female and returned to the stage after a nearly two-year hiatus to co-star in “Steel Poinsettias” at Rivertown Theaters for the Performing Arts.
AJay Strong, co-producer of Bella Blue Entertainment, which presents an average of 20 burlesque shows a month around New Orleans, including “The Blue Book Cabaret” at Bourbon Pub and the “Dirty Dime Peepshow” at the AllWays Lounge.
I profiled Shaffer and Strong earlier in the week with my “Trans, Planted” feature.
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“STEEL POINSETTIAS”
WHAT: Holiday spook from the creative team behind “Ditzyland,” featuring Ricky Graham, Varla Jean Merman, Jefferson Turner, Sean Patterson, Brooklyn Shaffer and Michael P. Sullivan
WHEN: Dec. 2-18
WHERE: Rivertown Theaters of the Performing Arts, 325 Minor St., Kenner
TICKETS: $30
INFO:Rivertown Theaters website
“POPSMART NOLA” WHAT: This week’s show will focus on transgender issues, with guests Brooklyn Shaffer (“Steel Poinsettias”), AJay Strong (Bella Blue Entertainment), Wesley Ware (BreakOUT!), and journalist Katy Reckdahl WHEN: Sat. (Dec. 3), 3 p.m.-4 p.m. WHERE: WHIV (102.3 FM); www.whivfm.org
Sitting in between Brooklyn Shaffer and AJay Strong in the back of the CC’s Coffee House in the French Quarter this week was watching, and listening to, one of most bizarre and fascinating mirror images one might imagine. There sat AJay Strong, the co-producer of Bella Blue Entertainment who, after transitioning from a femaile during relocation to New Orleans a couple years ago, discussing how his transgender journey has finally helped him feel comfortable in his own skin.
Across the back table from him sat his friend, Brooklyn Shaffer, the actor who, just a few years ago as Brian Peterson, was one of New Orleans funniest and campiest performers — often in drag. And, after having transitioned to female at almost exactly the same time, Shaffer could only nod her head in agreement with Strong and expressed her own improving sense of self. She feels so comfortable, in fact, that Shaffer returns to the stage with her current co-conspirators that include Ricky Graham, Varla Jean Merman and Sean Patterson in the holiday spoof “Steel Poinsettias.” It’s got the same kind of campy fire that Shaffer used to produce in Running With Scissors’ annual “Grenadine McGunkle’s Double-Wide Christmas” as well as the Graham-Merman concoction, “Ditzyland.”
When one was speaking, really, the other would nod their head. For even though these are two people who have transitioned from exact opposite gender to the other — conjuring the image of two genders crossing in the night — they both appear to have landed in the same type of contentment one gets when they better recognize themselves in the mirror.
Backed by the support of the community advocacy group BreakOUT!, a crowd of about 200 people rallied at “Transgender Day of Remembrance/Resilience/Resistance” to show solidarity for trans and gender non-conforming youth of color on Sunday (Nov. 20) at Congo Square inside Louis Armstrong Park. Advocates delivered speeches, provided informational brochures, staged healing demonstrations, handed out inspirational signs, led a small march into the French Quarter as a side project, handed out symbolic roses, and even staged a “mannequin challenge” as part of the event.
(Check out a Facebook Live scene from the event below.)
The symbolism of the roses was multi-faceted, especially in light of the murder of 25 trans people of color in 2016. Working on the theme, “Our Roses, While We Are Alive,” advocates handed out roses to encourage participants to become allies in the fight for “quality education, affirming and accessible healthcare, safe and stable housing, and sustainable employment,” as the event announcement read.
“In New Orleans, Louisiana and all across the country, trans and gender non-conforming youth of color continue to disproportionately represent youth affected by homelessness, unemployment, and the criminal justice system,” organizers said on their Facebook page. “While New Orleans and other parts of the country face an affordability crisis for housing across the city and neighborhoods continue to become gentrified and stripped of their culture, trans and gender non-conforming youth of color continue to struggle to find spaces to call our own.
“We recognize that safety means accessing the spaces we need to survive, free from criminalization, incarceration, transphobia, homophobia, racism, heteropatriarchy, and the many layers of oppression we face in the world,” the statement continued. “In these conditions, it is a political act to take space and be seen. It is a political act to say:
We deserve jobs!
We deserve housing!
We deserve education!
We deserve to self-determine our gender!
We deserve to uplift our “trancestors”!
We deserve space to come together and to heal from centuries of trauma.
We deserve space to create, to laugh, to be!
That is why this year, on the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), Trans and Gender Non-Conforming (TGNC) youth of color in New Orleans are calling on those aligned with our values all across the country to demand the space that we deserve.”
A sub-group of about 20 advocates and allies broke off from the event to march into the French Quarter and set up at the corner of Bourbon and St. Ann streets to demand a safe space.
BreakOUT! builds the power of LGBTQ youth most impacted by the criminal justice system to affect concrete policy change to fight the criminalization of LGBTQ youth in New Orleans.
INFO: WHAT: Bianca Del Rio, Not Today Satan Tour WHEN: Fri. (Nov. 4), 8 p.m. WHERE: Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts TICKETS: $37.50-$75 MORE INFO:Visit Ticketmaster
When Roy Haylock’s alter-ego Bianca Del Rio stormed through season six of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” she did so leaving a trail of withering one-liners behind her — not the least of which was the cautionary missive, “Not today, Satan!” It worked on so many levels as Haylock captured the title and has gone on to increasing fame and recognition.
So it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that Haylock’s “Queen of Mean” persona blows into town on a career high with her Not Today Satan Tour that his the Mahalia Jackson Theater on Friday (Nov. 4). The tour has cut across Europe, Australia and the United States over the course of 2016, with a Nov. 9 finale set for San Antonio.
It’s one of the few times Texas might be better place than Haylock’s hometown of New Orleans to end the tour; his theatrical film debut, “Hurricane Bianca,” which blew onto Amazon Prime in September, is set in Texas. And, as outsized as its locale, it’s surprisingly hilarious and affecting, and shouldn’t live under the admittedly out-sized shadow of Haylock’s cutting live performances.
Written and directed by Matt Kugelman, “Hurricane Bianca” tells the story of Richard Martinez (Haylock), a likeable but harried New York City high school science teacher looking for a better teaching situation and thinks he’s found it thanks to a program that lands him in a small Texas town. His homosexuality quickly exposed, Richard is fired, only to come back with a vengeance in the form of (you guessed it), Bianca Del Rio, who takes the school by storm, improves her students’ classroom performance, inspires a bullied gay student, reunites the football coach with an alienated sibling, and wins the Teacher of the Year award in the process. (To say these are spoiler alerts would be an insult to Kugelman’s script, which telegraphs every possible happy ending in the sweetest possible way.)
It’s a fairly conventional inspirational education story that basically puts a drag-queen, lightly satirical spin on such familiar works as “To Sir, With Love,” “Stand and Deliver,” “Dangerous Minds,” “Summer School” and “Up the Down Staircase.” But it should come as no coincidence that Kugelman and Haylock have chosen the trope as the setting for Bianca’s first movie comedy vehicle. After all, the teachers in these movies are all outsiders, fish out of water who learn to earn the trust of their students — many of whom are alienated themselves. The students of this particular high school are generally popular and snarky, but they’re uninspired academic under-achievers, and Bianca fights fire with a fire that Richard couldn’t muster in the few days he had in the classroom.
Where Richard easily let them roll over him, Bianca fires away the kind of digs that only a drag queen could summon:
“I know what we’re going to call you: White trash that won’t burn!” “You’re the prettiest girl on the planet … of the apes!” “Shut up! Your parents are siblings!”
Got a problem with the way she’s running things? “I’m fucking this cat. You just hold the legs!”
There’s definitely a tradeoff in Haylock’s departure from the stage to the screen. Bianca’s rapid-fire, caustic, voluble delivery needs a live setting, if for no other reason the way her insults tear from the speakers and bounce off the wall, and an audience that practically begs to be a target. So there’s an energy gap in her “Hurricane Bianca” performance that Kugelman has difficulty in filling. But what’s lost in energy, Haylock fills in with intimacy and charm, and this comes in unlikely moments. It gets particularly, surprisingly sweet when Bianca initially tries to fend off the football coach, Chuck (Denton Blane Everett), but then befriends him when he learns that he has been estranged from his gay brother — now a transgendered radio host, Karma Johnstone (Bianca Leigh).
“Hurricane Bianca” also provides a steady stream of familiar and often iconic faces in cameos roles once you get past the hilarious casting of Rachel Dratch as the lip-gloss-addicted assistant principal, Deborah Ward. From there we have fun appearances by stars such as Alan Cumming as a school administrator, RuPaul (sans drag) as a meteorologist and Margaret Cho as a wig-shop owner, and supporting appearances by gay, transgender and drag queen performers: Markus Kelle and a bunch of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” alumni including William Belli, Alyssa Edwards, Joslyn Fox and Shangela Laquifa Wadley. (There is even an appearance by New Orleans theater veteran Brooklyn Shaffer!)
But the most affecting performance comes from Bianca Leigh, arguably the hardest-working transgender actor (“Transamerica”) before Laverne Cox burst onto the scene in “Orange Is the New Black.” As Coach Chuck’s long-lost brother who’d left the family to transition to female, Karma is a believable character at a time when transgender issues have jumped to the foreground of discussion in American culture.
Kugelman deftly dances in and out of and around such issues, starting with Richard’s being legally fired for simply being gay — one of the many charms of Texas’ homophobic laws. More than a fun gay-movie indie romp, “Hurricane Bianca” comes off more as a cheeky but endearing parable about acceptance and tolerance. And as New Orleans will learn yet again on Friday night, if you mess with Roy Haylock, well, you had it coming.
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