JVB: So, you can get to that platform.
MB: Right.
How do you hope that the queer performance space [and] the way that mainstream media interacts with your performance continues to evolve? What do you hope comes next?
JVB: Well, when I was young, there was no way that I could even imagine being queer and being a pop star. You know, it was during Reagan, it was during AIDS, the people that had come before were dead or were going back into the closet. They didn’t show queer people kissing on TV, none of that was happening. So what I thought of as being possible was really so much smaller than what young people now can see as possible, and I think that’s wonderful. On the other hand, they are also catering to corporate presenters and to a smaller, more conservative world in a way. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that everything’s a lot more cute and palatable than a lot of the underground stuff that I was able to see when I was young, because people were doing all kinds of crazy shit because they could do it, and they didn’t have any expectation of ever going into the mainstream with it. I would like to see more diversity, I guess, and a lot more freedom to be unique and as mainstream or as outrageous as you want to be without fear of not being successful, whatever successful means. Being able to survive, having healthcare, having a nice place to live, being treated respectfully, showing up and not being patronized by people.
MB: I think, for me, I would finally like to see the same opportunities that the mainstream, white gay population enjoys extended to trans women of color, to people of color, to trans men. Because I feel — and this is something that people have been screaming about since the 70s — that after certain rights were won by a certain class or race of people within this LGBTQ diaspora, everyone else was left to fend for themselves. And even within the media, and even within LGBTQ media, I still see so much of only a certain kind of queer person being represented.
JVB: You have to be young, you have to be beautiful, you have to fit into a certain stylistic narrative.
MB: There seems also now to be only a certain number of boxes, like if you’re a queer artist of color, somehow you have to be comedic or a caricature or funny. And if you’re not funny, and if the white gays can’t find you funny, then there’s no place for you. I would just hope that this changes and that we really start to see a real visibility of other body types and forms.
JVB: And ages.
MB: And ages. I was just doing this thing with Madonna. The way that people talked about her age, I was just like, oh my god, ageism is such a real thing.
Could you talk about what you would hope young queer people can learn, especially if they’re hoping to be performers like yourselves?
