Arts & Entertainment
Strong’s concordance
Alabama football superfan and D.C. resident comfortable with new role as a trans-masculine role model
At 30, Eli Strong has become the local face of trans-masculine men for all who watched last week’s ‘American Transgender’ on the National Geographic channel. (Blade photo by Michael Key)
Eli Strong is a Washington-based trans-masculine University of Alabama fanatic and family man who became a television star and local hero last week thanks to a groundbreaking National Geographic documentary, “American Transgender.”
“I really appreciate all of the attention its been getting.” Strong told the Blade this week via phone when we called to chat about the reaction to the documentary, which took audiences into the lives of three transgender people living in different places around the country.
“It’s been a bit of a whirlwind for the last few days,” Strong says. “It’s been a snowball. I was already working with (National Center for Transgender Equality), but as soon as they posted about it, Huffington Post Tweeted about it, [the Washington Blade] Tweeted about it, GLAAD, and suddenly when you Googled it, it went from 10 hits, to just before the documentary aired it was pages and pages.”
Strong sounds both humbled and invigorated by the positive attention the documentary has received in the transgender community.
“I think the documentary can and did do good.”
Strong — now a database coordinator at Avalere, a health care advisory services company in Dupont Circle — came to Washington for an internship at Human Rights Campaign several years ago and followed that with a five-year stint at NARAL Pro-Choice America. However, Strong’s heart is in his home state of Alabama where his accepting family still lives.
We talked Strong’s obsession, football at his alma mater the University of Alabama.
“We lost a couple of good players,” he says, lighting up, recalling being at last season’s national championship game in New Orleans. “But I think It’ll be another good year.”
Strong studied social work at Alabama and received both his bachelor’s degree and masters degree from the University Alabama, as did both his parents. He says his wife — whom he’s celebrating his one-year anniversary with next week — knows that weekends in the fall belong to Alabama football in their house.
“Even in the darkest days of Alabama football, if you put us up against some of the best teams in the country, every year I look at that schedule and I go, ‘We can beat every team on the schedule’ and I feel the same this year.”
When it comes to his involvement in “American Transgender,” though, Strong says he and other trans leaders were “gun-shy” about the special before it aired based on prior television portrayals of the trans community that had been deemed “distasteful” or that “pushed someone to answer questions that they weren’t comfortable with.”
“I have every confidence that its going to turn out positive,” Strong says he told friends concerned about a sensationalized portrayal. “I had been very up front with National Geographic about what I didn’t want to discuss, and they very much respected those boundaries.”
“Those same people have said that it did turn out really well, and that they thought it was very well done and very respectful and very educational,” Strong says. “Some people have even said they’d hoped it be an ongoing series, rather than a one-off documentary show.”
WASHINGTON BLADE: What’s the reaction to “American Transgender” been like since the premier?
ELI STRONG: Everything that’s been said to me directly has been positive. I’ve seen one or two negative comments, but these weren’t people that have probably ever known a trans person. But for all the people that have contacted me directly, it’s been really positive for them.
I was up until about 12:30 that night talking to people all over the country on Facebook just saying, “Thank you for sharing your story and putting that out there.” They said it really meant a lot to them to see someone that had a similar path that they did. I heard from a lot of my family that thought it was really well done.
I feel like in general from the trans population and my family that everyone feels that not only was it a good presentation and that they enjoyed the stories, but that the way that National Geographic actually went about it was very tasteful and respectful of all those involved.
BLADE: You said some people were “gun-shy” that the depiction might be distasteful. What where they afraid of?
STRONG: A lot of people in the trans community had a very large problem when [Thomas Beattie] had gone on “Oprah,” where Oprah said, “Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty,” and asked about his genitalia. I was very upfront and said, “If you’re not married to me, its not really any of your business.” As a trans person, I’m a whole person, I’m not the sum of what surgery I have and haven’t had.
One of the things that I really enjoyed about this project was when I first discussed my participation in the documentary with [the producers] one of the things that made me feel more comfortable was that other than that opening segment on the show, there was no narration. Everything that was narrated was taken directly from mine and Jim and Clare’s direct interviews, and I thought that was a great way to do it, because there would never be a question of, “Is that how they really felt or is NatGeo putting words in their mouth.”
BLADE: What’s it like to go through that process in the D.C. area?
STRONG: I think it makes it both easier and harder. The easier part is something that I find that most people understand immediately. It’s a more liberal place to be. You have more access to groups and to people who are like you and like minds so you can discuss these issues or find people who have gone through the process and things like that. So in that way it’s a little easier. There’s a larger queer community, there are surgeons that are in the area, there are doctors at Whitman Walker that have experience so you don’t have to worry about — like say — had I gone through this in Alabama, with a doctor that may have never treated a trans person, and having a very hard time finding those that do.
But its also harder because living in a much more liberal area, and a much more politically correct area, people in D.C. are much more accustomed to gender variance. That being the case, when I lived in Alabama, even before I identified as male, I was “sirred” constantly. “Yes sir,” or “Can I help you sir.”
I was seen as much more male in Alabama, because the way I presented my gender, was not the way that they saw, it’s how they normally saw male, so to them it’s like, “You fit into this box.”
While in D.C., it’s both positive and negative that they are used to gender variance, but it becomes very frustrating for trans men that when I used to walk into a place and be completely presenting as male, someone would still “ma’am” me, because they would think, “This is a masculine lesbian and I don’t want to offend this person by saying ‘he.’”
It took at least three-and-a-half years of being on testosterone before people completely stopped saying “ma’am” to me.
I will tell you this though, I will take the negatives of D.C. over anywhere else any day when it comes to transition.
BLADE: What kind of legal hurdles does the trans community still face in D.C.?
STRONG: I don’t know so much if it’s the laws as it is the adherence to those laws. In D.C., I am protected from discrimination when it comes to employment, I am protected as far as the fact I can relatively easily get my drivers license changed, get my name changed.
And with outlets like the Washington Blade who have always made it much easier to post your name change documentation at a much lower rate than, say, a regular paper would, that does make it easier, and those laws are all there.
The problem comes in adherence to those laws and training employees on those laws.
There’s a law in D.C. that says you use the restroom as the gender you present as. There’s also a law that says if you have a single-use restroom, they have to be gender neutral. But just because that law exists, doesn’t mean that every business in D.C. follows that law or is even aware of that law. So do you want to bring it up and fight the good fight, or do you want to not make yourself the center of attention, and point this out? Now you’ve just outed yourself. The main factor in making that decision for me is safety. If I feel unsafe in that moment, I’m not going to say anything. I’m not going to do anything. I’m going to find a way out of that situation. While bathrooms should never be the central issue, its still a big issue, because, in my view, it’s the one place in public where you’re at your most vulnerable. There are a lot of restaurants that I will frequent because they will adhere to that law, without question.
BLADE: How did your involvement with “American Transgender” come about?
STRONG: I am on the coordinating committee for a D.C.-area trans-masculine social and support group. They found us and they simply sent the webmaster and myself an email and said, “Here is our project, can we email your group and ask people to participate?” and we said absolutely.
I think the reason they told me that they really like my story is because it was kind of ironic that I’m from the state of Alabama, and my entire family is about as Republican and very conservative and Catholic — not just Catholic as in I go to church every week, but as in my stepdad is in the Knights of Columbus and my mother is a Eucharistic Minister, and she does announcements every week and they are very involved in the church — and to have as much support as I have had coming from that environment, I think that they really found it very engaging and very hopeful and interesting to show.
BLADE: How did you feel after you watched the full documentary?
STRONG: Proud. I was very proud of not only how it was done, but how it came through once it was all finished. I was proud of my family for stepping up and putting themselves out there. I was very proud of all of the people that had spoken out. I looked around the room and had a lot of friends at the viewing party and I was very proud of them for being there the whole time.
BLADE: Are you a role model?
STRONG: If it’s a positive role model, then sure. I would like to think that I’m a role model, without that sounding really self-centered, only in so much as if something that I say or do can shed a positive light on the community or help somebody out … then sure. As long as it’s a positive one.
BLADE: What advice would you give to young people realizing that they are transgender?
STRONG: Be patient. Be patient with yourself. Be patient with those around you — particularly your family. I feel like a lot of people in the queer community, not just trans folks, but even when I came out as a lesbian at 16, one of the things that I lacked was patience. Even though I’d only kind of admitted it to myself three days before my mom found out, it was me, so I was OK with it so much faster than anybody else was. I didn’t understand, and said, “Well, I’m fine with this, why can’t you be OK with it?”
Just giving those around you the time to sort through it and just talk to them as much as you are able and they are willing.
And having patience with yourself and having patience with the fact that while you feel you weren’t born in the body you should have been, you can’t change that overnight and it can get very frustrating, because it’s expensive to transition and it’s not easy to transition. Just be patient and enjoy the process and try to learn from it as much as you can.
I found that having that patience with a lot of folks has brought us closer together and has made me a lot more sure in knowing who I am and being comfortable with who I am.
I really tried to figure out in that process of, “OK, there is a certain amount of time that I’m going to have to wait to save money and really figure out who I am.” I took advantage of that time to really explore who I was and what kind of person am I going to be. Because this isn’t just the end, just because you go through surgeries and hormones, that’s the beginning of your life, so what kind of life do you want it to be?
BLADE: What’s been the most fulfilling part of transitioning?
STRONG: Two things. One is feeling much more whole and who I am. For a long time, when I realized I was attracted to women, I thought, “Well I must be a lesbian,” and that was it, but I think I wasn’t happy with me. I constantly was battling this screaming voice. Now I feel so much more whole and much more calm.
The other part is not just feeling it myself, but having other people see it. A great secondary plus is that’s how other people see me now, especially my family. It’s great not to be “ma’amed” by a stranger, but to have my mother love me not as her oldest daughter, but as her oldest son.
Highball Productions held performances of a drag musical, ‘Defrosted,’ at JR.’s on Friday and Saturday.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
Movies
Intense doc offers transcendent treatment of queer fetish pioneer
‘A Body to Live In’ a fascinating trip into a transgressive culture
Once upon a time in the 1940s, a teenager named Roland Loomis, who lived with his devout Lutheran parents in Aberdeen, S.D., received a hand-me-down camera from his uncle. It was a gift that would change his life.
Small and effeminate, he didn’t exactly fit with the “in” crowd of his small rural town; but he had an inner life more thrilling than anything they had to offer, anyway, and that camera became the key with which it could finally be unlocked. Waiting patiently for those precious hours when he was alone in the house, he used it to capture images of himself that expressed an identity he had only begun to explore, through furtive experiments in body manipulation that incorporated exotic costuming, erotic nudity, gender ambiguity, and what many of us might call (though he would not) self-mutilation, including the piercing of his skin and other extreme forms of physical modification.
Young Roland would go on to become famous (or perhaps, notorious) in the decades to come, but it would be under a different name: Fakir Musafar, the focal figure of filmmaker Angelo Madsen’s documentary “A Body to Live In,” which opened in Los Angeles on Feb. 27 and expands to New York this weekend.
Like Musafar himself, who died of lung cancer at 87 in 2018, it’s a documentary that doesn’t quite follow the expected rules. Eschewing “talking head” commentators and traditional narration, Madsen spins his movie from his subject’s extensive archives and allows the information to come through the voices of those who were close to him: collaborator and life partner Cléo Dubois, performance artists Ron Athey and Annie Sprinkle, and underground publisher V. Vale are among the many who contribute their memories and impressions of him, while evocative photos and film footage create a hazy “slide show” effect to provide a guided tour of his life, his art, and his legacy. Less a biography than a chronicle of profoundly unorthodox self-discovery, it details his development from those early days of clandestine self-photography through a continual evolution that would see him become a performance artist, a central figure in the burgeoning BDSM culture, a seeker who espoused eroticism as a spiritual practice, the founder of a “Radical Faeries” offshoot for the kink/fetish community, and ultimately an elder and mentor for a new generation for whom his once-taboo ideas and explorations had essentially become mainstream – thanks in no small part to his own pioneering efforts.
It’s a fascinating, hypnotic trip into a culture which might feel disturbingly transgressive to those who have never been a part of it – yet will almost certainly feel like being “seen” to those who have. It opens a window into a lifestyle where leather, kink, BDSM, gender play, and non-monogamous “situationships” are not just accepted but viewed as natural variations on the spectrum of human sexuality; and in the middle of it all is Musafar, on a deeply personal quest to connect with the deepest part of his essence through the intense and ritualistic pursuit of an inner drive that keeps pushing him further. As one reminiscing cohort remarks during the film, it’s as if he is “trying to find an answer to a question that” he “cannot form.”
Indeed, it might be said that Madsen’s movie is an exercise in forming that question; bringing his own “transness” into the mix as he examines the various aspects of Musafar’s ever-evolving relationship with self, identity, and presentation, he evokes a timely resonance in which the imperative to make physical form match psychic self-perception becomes an irresistible force, and draws a direct line between his subject’s fluid ambiguity and the plight faced by modern trans people over the bigotry of those who think gender is strictly about genitalia. Perhaps the question has to do with whether we are defined by our identities or by our physical form – or if both are malleable, adaptable, and in a constant state of flux.
In any case, with regard to Musafar, “A Body to Live In” is unquestionably a film about transformation, not just of physical manifestation but of consciousness itself. In his journey from being little Roland, the outcast schoolboy with a secret fetish, to Fakir, the spiritual psychonaut for whom sex and gender are only walls that separate us from a true and eternal essence, he is embodied by Madsen’s reverent documentary as a being in the process of breaking free from the restrictions of physical existence, of transcending all such distinctions by letting go of life itself – something underscored not only by the section of the movie dealing with the impact of the AIDS epidemic on Musafar’s deeply-bonded community, but by his own words, spoken in a deathbed interview that serves as a connecting thread throughout the film. We are kept unavoidably aware of the mortality which – for Musafar at least – seems little more than a prison that keeps us from the unfettered joy of our true nature.
But while Madsen honors his subject as a pillar – and an under-sung hero – of contemporary queer culture, he also addresses the aspects that made him a “problematic” figure; in his life, he drew criticism over perceived cultural appropriation from the indigenous American tribes whose sacred rituals inspired the kink-flavored practices which facilitated his own spiritual odyssey, and which he popularized among his own acolytes to give rise to the still-controversial “Modern Primitive” movement that has been criticized by some for turning meaningful cultural traditions into an excuse for trendy fashion accessories. Even Musafar’s survivors, whose love for him exudes palpably from the stories and memories they share of him throughout the film, make observations that point to his flaws; yet at the same time, Madsen’s documentary makes clear that Musafar himself never saw himself as perfect, either – just as someone willing to endure the kind of suffering that most of us might find unbearable in order to get closer to perfection.
Of course, it probably helped that he enjoyed that so-called “suffering,” but that’s perhaps too glib an observation in the face of a film that so clearly makes a case for the deep and sincere commitment he held for his quest for transcendence; but it’s also a helpful reminder that his practices – which might seem macabre and twisted to the uninitiated – were also an experience of joy, an exercise in rising above pain and making it a vehicle toward enlightenment, and in achieving a deeper understanding of one’s own place in this confusing place we call the universe.
Full disclosure: “A Body to Live In” is an intense experience, replete with candid sexual conversation, frequent nudity, and graphic scenes of extreme fetish practices – like suspension by metal hooks through the skin – which might be hard to handle for those who are unprepared to be confronted by them. Even so, as dark and menacing as it might be for the squeamish outsider, the world revealed in Madsen’s eloquent portrait is full of treasures and steeped in dark beauty, and it’s hard to imagine a more fitting way than that to portray a queer pioneer like the former Roland Loomis.
Nightlife
In D.C. comedy, be sure to shop local
A thriving patchwork of queer-friendly stages in Washington, Baltimore
Most people know stand-up comedy from Netflix specials or late-night sets on Comedy Central. The reality is far different for local working comics like me. A few times a month, I might get paid $50 for a 10-minute set and my photo on a bar flyer to show off to the ladies in my scrapbooking club.
Still, it’s a joy sharing laughs about my well-worn Washington career arc — from conservative reporter to openly trans organic grocery store worker and nightclub comedian. Or, as I like to say onstage, from Fox to foxy.
Stand-up is hard. Offstage, it’s even harder. It took more than a year and nearly 80 open mics to land my first paid set. Since then, I’ve performed in coffee shops, bars, restaurants and even on a city sidewalk. I once performed in the Catskills, which felt like a big deal — even if it was a bigger deal in the 1950s.
As an older trans comic in Washington, I’ve found it nearly impossible to get stage time — or even the courtesy of a returned email — at the big, corporate-owned comedy clubs. Fortunately, there’s a thriving patchwork of queer-friendly producers in Washington and Baltimore creating shows that reflect the diversity of our communities, instead of straight male-dominated lineups that look like the cast of “Ice Road Truckers.”
“There are so many kinds of funny people, but a lot of barriers exist for women and queer people because it’s a very masculine culture,” said Dana Fleitman, who runs the Just Kidding Comedy Collective and is helping produce the Woke Mob Comedy Festival in April, featuring many women and queer comics.
Full disclosure: I’m not performing in the festival. But I am proud to be one of more than 50 women and nonbinary comics Fleitman and her colleagues have helped “train up” through an incubator program she first ran through Grassroots Comedy and now through Just Kidding Comedy Collective.
Another trans comic, Charlie Girard, who splits time between New York and Washington, runs an incubator program called Queers Can’t Take a Joke. He has trained more than 100 comics in Washington.
Girard has one rule: no punching down.
“The best comics speak truth to power,” Girard said. “Making fun of marginalized communities is simple lazy writing based on tired, old stereotypes.”
Ultimately, Girard wants to prepare students not just for queer rooms, but to find their voice and expand into all kinds of spaces.
Comics trained by Girard and Fleitman have gone on to produce or help run shows like Clocked Comedy, Backbone Comedy, the Crackin’ Up open mic and Funny Side Up. Several have found a home on Barracks Row at As You Are — one of my favorite places to perform. In Washington, comic Jenny Cavallero’s show Seltzer is a sober comedy night frequently featuring local queer comics.
In Washington, performer and producer Arzoo Malhotra, who runs Zoo Animal Productions, said it’s a critical moment to support community-based comedy producers, often the first hit by worsening economic conditions.
“We’re losing spaces faster than we’re creating them,” Malhotra said. “We are in the use-it-or-lose-it stage. If there’s a restaurant you like or a performer you want to keep seeing, patronize them now — because they’re going away.”
I’m also grateful for producers in Baltimore, which has a thriving queer comedy scene. Comic Hannah Alden Jeffrey’s monthly “The Really Cool Open Mic,” created for women and trans performers but open to all, regularly draws up to 100 people.
Hannah’s mic and Kenny Rooster’s “Dramedy” open stage have provided safety and opportunity when other stages felt out of reach. Comedians Michael Furr and Jake Leizear also produce shows regularly featuring queer comics.
“We started the REALLY COOL Open Mic because every other mic in town catered toward straight dudes that dominated the Baltimore scene,” Alden Jeffrey said. “Contrary to the lineups of many shows today, people don’t want to see a show of eight guys being bigots. Go figure.”
One of the most important moments for me came when I attended a free showcase at a well-known Adams Morgan club. Like other big venues, it hadn’t responded to emails from a new comic looking for a shot. I sat in the back row thinking maybe these comics were just way funnier than I am.
Then a straight male comedian — with hair even more gorgeous than mine — launched into a long joke comparing eating pizza to performing oral sex on a woman.
At that moment, I walked out feeling better about myself. I remember thinking: nope. I absolutely deserve to be on that stage, too.
Lots of us do.
Jamie Mack is a stand up comedian, speaker and writer. Follow them on Instagram at @jamiemack_blt or email [email protected].
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Comings & Goings
