A Somewhat Divided Trans-Unity

Trans-Unity Pride. LA Gay & Lesbian Center. 6/2/06.

My first complaint about Trans-Unity was the fact that there was virtually no available information online for this event, and what was out there both conflicted and seemed to have no connection to the reality of the event. The FTM Alliance page says one thing, while the LA Gay and Lesbian Center's flyer is not easy to find and offers very little information whatsoever. In reality, the Queen of California Pageant started sometime after 8:30pm, which seems to be a good hour and a half to two-and-a-half hours after its publicized start time. The tragic result of this delay was that the second show of the evening, the Living Legends show, began around 10pm while the Queen of California Pageant was still occuring, forcing audience memebers to choose one event or the other, and effectively dividing the transmen from the transwomen or one generation from another.

First of all, congratulations to Miss Nikki, who won the Queen of California Pageant. Her costumes were magnificent and her stage presence was quite compelling.

I was there for the Living Legends Show, however, which was a produced as a Transgiving Express event. Both the performers and the audience were relatively young and most were FTM or genderqueer identified. Dan* acted as MC and also did most of the organizing, I believe. He did a great job and is completely adorable as MC, but I'd love to see him rock the mic and take charge a bit more. A little more info about some of the performers, some of the other Trans-Unity events, etc., would have been nice.

The Living Legends show was a tribute to some past performances of gender, beginning with the fabulous Stephan Pennington singing and playing banjo to some great Elvis songs. His rendition of "Love Me Tender" made me wish there were more girls there to scream and swoon. Truly a heartbreaker. And Phil, his fabulous backup guitarist, rocks in his silent, steady way.

Next came Dan and Bryan performing songs of the Indigo Girls, which was fabulous in its nod to the affinities between lesbian and trans culture and even more wonderful in Bryan's heartfelt rendition of "Get out the Map" dedicated to his boyfriend. I would have liked to hear Bryan singing alone (with guitar backup or an instrumental track) rather than with the CD because he has a lovely voice which deserves to be heard on its own. I also would have liked their set to have culminated with an audience sing-along of "Closer to Fine" rather than beginning with it; the audience was too shy to sing along when they really should have milked the audience participation. I loved this act, however; their spirit was great and their act was sweet. Seeing transboys perform the Indigo Girls totally made my day, and I think these guys could work it if they wanted to. I'd love to see this again at Transgiving or elsewhere soon.

kale* performed as Roy Orbison, complete with a truly amazing wig and a delightful stage persona. He really worked his three songs, ending with Candyman. This kid has a great stage presence and seemed to be having a lot of fun up there.

The zeatles* closed out the show. They claim to be the first genderqueer Beatles tribute band, and I think it would be hard to argue against them, though a seemingly-now-defunct Beatles cover band from New Zealand seems to have used the name first. Anyway, they're very fun performers and they totally got the audience up and dancing, which matters a lot. They played a couple of Beatles songs or songs the Beatles had covered, and one original song as well, though the vocals were hard to hear so I don't have much to say about their original work. I would have loved to hear them tackle more of the Beatles more familiar repetoire. Mostly they were a cute, energetic group of people who seemed to be having a lot of fun onstage, and that alone could get them pretty far.

So despite the organizational disaster that one has come to expect and these events and the questionable policy of having the boys and the girls performing at separate events in the same night, I'd say the show was a pretty strong success. It was fun and community-building and a little wacky. I'd say the next goal is to get transwomen and transmen performing tributes to their respective legends together.

*NB: These links for performers link to myspace pages, as these performers generally lack full webpages and without a program, last names, or much identifying information, this is the best I could do in terms of finding their online presence. I apologize for this, and if anyone would like the link changed or removed they're welcome to contact me.