Lights! costumes! award winning score! Transcendent expressions of gender! Finally, the musical of the century committed to subversive, inclusive comedy, calling out boring, repressive, expired ideas that water down the fine art of fucking. Challenging heteronormative scripts about how to have sex, SLoaUA queers desire, pulls together like elements, finds attraction in affinity.
Why a musical? Some history here…
In the 19th century, the first glimmering of the modern gay rights movement cropped up amongst writers who theorized the existence of the Uranian or Urning-a third gender person assigned male at birth who houses a feminine spirit. Music was the expression most closely aligned with Uranian- that said, musicals are the queerest art possible, where subtlety and tenderness- a certain inclination to indulge in emotion- lies nearest to the Urning Nature.
In the 20th century, music’s ambiguity enabled a performative radicalization of queer identity, pleasure and desire. Music uses mystery, an implicitness versus an explicitness, we come out without coming out, reveal without saying a word. With music, we also witnessed how racialized and gay figures already carry the specter of gender subversion since gender ideals are coded white.
The title of this post/performance is a nod to the book pictured above. I first spotted the cover on my grandparents’ bookshelf at age 11. I slept next to it during visits for decades yet was finally drawn in, curious as a teenager. After they both died, house sold and possessions distributed among relatives, I claimed the hardback for my collection. Now as a pleasure activist and sexual health advocate, I feel conflicting emotions every time I return to the pages. Liberal leaning yet racist, the entirely white compilation is a precise snapshot of the oppressive ideas that still govern our bodies, relationships and definition of sex + pleasure. An important, painful nod to my lineage as a white pleasure activist, the authors and scientists called out sex negative societal norms without a willingness to radically challenge white control of brown bodies.
In contrast, SLoaUA aligns with where we are with gender and race in 2021, seeing both not as inevitable, unchanging characteristics acquired at birth but a language, a technology, a system of communication with a full range of expression. I believe musicals (and art in general), against this cultural backdrop, unstitch the gendered and racialized body from its usual schematic of meaning.
Undermining the constraints of physical reality, Illuminating a vision of consciousness unburdened by the body’s narrow social connations, in SLoaUA our bodies are not prisons, they do not close off possibility. The body is not a story completed at birth. The body is a prologue, and its story can be written, sung, performed at will.
When this musical hits the stage, I know all y’all queers are going to be in the front row. SLoaUA is inclusive and brave, fun and curious. We’re starving for art that speaks to us.
While our culture is saturated with endless images of sex, if we were to buy into everything we see, we’d believe that only thin people fuck, only white straight cis folx orgasm, only muscly bodies cum. We’d think sex is only for pretty people, only for baby makers, the young, big boobed, able bodied (spisode 42). We’re misled that sex equals penetration, is always predictable and only happens in drab, perfectly decorated bedrooms at night.
Boring. Lies. In my musical there is sexual truth telling. Bright colored walls. We see bodies who refuse to conform to the gender binary. We see kinky sex, we hear folx address who they are as sexual beings in transgressive, wild, consensual ways. We hear everyone ask “Who am I as a sexual-asexual Being? Who do I want to be?”
SLoaUA invites the audience into the weird, awkward, dirty, queer, trashE. We see positions that don’t work, hear noises we only hear when bodies press against bodies. Pleasure and sweat and fluids and fat.
I can’t speak for everyone especially after a pandemic-ed up year. I’ll share here though the sex life of this unmarried adult feels both tamed and trashE (as in a transgressive casting aside of rigid rules and an intentional embrace of self love). Confusing, spacious, queer (as in subverting the dominant paradigm), it’s me noticing and freeing myself from assumptions expectations implications. I’m desirous of tons of Solo time to please myself and a dab of intimacy with others.
As I reprogram post Covid, I own, this time feels like both a lonely and overscheduled fight to stay embodied. A beautiful interconnected ride, sometimes full, sometimes empty of physical pleasures. It is a practice of internally clarifying and externally asking for what I really want in my life. Over and over again, re-committing to staying curious.
SLoaUA is a tending to my brain and heart. Tenderizing hardened parts and building new muscles. My SLoaUA life is a meditation, polySecure, risky creative practice. It isn’t a defined path, more a way to approach the path I’m on and align with simpler, bolder truths.
Musical-ly here’s to the body choosing itself, to the voice surging up and away from expectations that box it in. Here’s to art and sexual freedom uniting over and over. Happy Pride! I can’t wait to pleasure y’all up with SloaUA on stages soon.