playing our violins while the titanic sinks

If you're on this website, you may or may not know that my whole thing is that I make music about being dumb and gay and dramatic. I love to dress up in silly little outfits and dance around. I do it to honour my inner little freak -- the kid who stayed up all night on inkpop.com reading and writing amateur horror stories and watching Angel and drawing on my nails with black sharpie (because I wasn't allowed to have black nail polish, u know the vibe). I know so many of you feel the same way. I see my music as a bridge for us to get to live out our fantasies of being something larger than life, embracing the parts of ourselves that love those dark aesthetics and revelling in the camp of it all, being our unapologetically queer selves that maybe we didn't get to pour into back then.

All of that is freeing and healing and lovely, but sometimes I also feel silly and dumb for pursuing a career in music while the world is the way it is. Some of you may know that I'm pulling a Hannah Montana - while I'm making music, I'm also getting my MA in History studying the correlation between times of moral panic and criminalisation of gender expression. I'm interested in the ways in which hegemony would rather stretch to include some while doubling down to exlude others rather than break so nobody has to be excluded. I'm doing that work because I feel called to stand up for what I believe in in a moment that frankly scares the shit out of me. From Palestine to Congo to Sudan to Ukraine to my home in the States to global climate crisis and so much more besides, I am engraged by the unspeakable violence inflicted on the most vulnerable in our global community that is born out of the inability of the few to allow a more equitable share of resources.

So why would I keep making music?

I wonder this a lot myself. Certainly, it's not all I do, but I still believe it matters. Because when I look to our elders in the queer community who made it through ACT UP or the Lavender Scare, I'm reminded that we need to hold on to our joy just as we must hold on to our rage. They are not mutually exclusive. We must hold each other close. We must love one another radically in the face of hate. Spending time with our queer elders helped me understand that as queer people -- as people of conscience, as dreamers who want to see a better world in every sense of the word -- our resilience is tied to our joy. To paraphrase Dan Savage: in the day we march and in the night we dance.

We have been through a hell of a ride together, and yet it's far from over. Through it all, we may bend, but we will never break. Our communities are our lifeline.

So no, I don't think that by continuing to love and value queer art, we are playing our violins as the Titanic sinks. I think that we are patching our holes, getting ready to fight another day.