[CHRISblog] Interview: Wu Tsang

What a week! I’ve been sick and depressed and this rainy SF Bay Area weather is making me feel like I’ve been living in my pajamas since the start of February. Ugh! What happened to the glorious warm days of January?! Yes, this is the crazy logic we’re living with here in the Bay Area.

The beacon of light for me this week was the anticipation of posting this interview I’ve been working on with my dear friend, Wu Tsang. I met Wu when he was living in Chicago, where he worked with many other talented individuals to organize the temporary autonomous television studio, PILOT TV. (Go HERE for a great interview about that event in the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest). That was way back in 2004.  Now Wu lives in Los Angeles and is still a glowing, awe-inspiring ball of energy and action. In LA he continues to open up dynamic spaces (physically and online) in which to dance, share food, organize, and discuss intersectional politics. And he looks so incredibly hot doing it! You’ll see…

Wu Tsang photo by ren'yo hwang

Chris Vargas: Hi, Wu! will you please introduce yourself by way of where you live and what you do?

Wu Tsang: My name is Wu. I live in Los Angeles. I’m an artist and I produce ‘social’ stuff—like parties and performances, and food experimentation and dancing.

CV: Do you identify as FTM?

Wu: I identify as trans feminine but also sometimes I like to call myself a “trans guy” because I am also that. Or a MUCH more straightforward ID would be: butch queen in heels.

CV: How long have you been working on your film DAMELO TODO? How was it originally conceived and how has it grown and changed from the project you initially thought you were doing?

photo by Paul Monroe

Wu: I’ve been working on DAMELO TODO for about 3 years. In fact we just announced that the film’s title is changing to WILDNESS, which is very related to what it’s about and how it all came together. 3 years ago I went to a bar called Silver Platter with my friends Ashland (TOTAL FREEDOM) and Daniel (1-half NGUZUNGUZU) and we were super over the moon about the vibe, it was packed with more trans women than I’d ever seen in one place– a LOT of waving ponytails. I was turned on in every way. They had like an hour-long show and a full spread of food, and pretty much instantly we were like, HERE is where we want to do SOMETHING.

I don’t know if we were even on the same page about what kind of THING—I mean, we were all out and about in nightlife, but we had really different friends and interests. So that’s how WILDNESS started—and then it also took shape as we got to know the people who welcomed us into their bar. Around that time, I got really close to the owner, Gonzalo, who was like the elder of the community, and she started whispering to me about the bar’s amazing history… so I started seeking out people’s stories.

CV: How long into the life of WILDNESS–the club, did you start filming?

Wu: I guess the first week WILDNESS happened I was already filming without much thought about it. But the project really started out of conversations with the bar owners, when I realized the place had this incredible brown queer history that dated back to 1963- pre-Stonewall. In my fantasy, WILDNESS (the club) was conceived in the spirit of radical transness, and it was like this new little chapter that we could add to the bar’s history. But the rest of my crew, we all had different fantasies. I think that’s what made it work—all the different wants and needs—which collectively birthed a new community for a brief period of time- 2 years to be exact.

WILDNESS film still

CV: What about your blog CLASS? I really appreciate your seamless meshing of style, nightlife promotion & documentation, and intersectional politics in your writing. What was your initial motivation in starting that project?

Wu: I started doing CLASS at a moment of crisis. Our party was suddenly getting a lot of attention, negative and positive. I’m generally horrified by the way the mainstream deals with trans stuff, and on top of it we were trying to be ‘under the radar’ for some heavy reasons having to do with the safety of the women at the bar—so this attention totally freaked us out, perhaps naively at first. Ultimately, I started doing CLASS because I felt like there had to be SOME WAY to talk about what was going on in a way that ANYONE could understand. I like the blog format because anyone can come across it, and it’s like a permanent trail of how you’re thinking about stuff, so it can be a way to check yourself. It was hard at first. Very personal, very emotional. But basically it was a response to what frustrated me: that I didn’t see enough INTERSECTIONAL thinking happening around race, gender, and class stuff in a way that was accessible and entertaining. That was something WILDNESS taught me:  you can be dealing with the HEAVIEST stuff but still in a way that is passionate and fun.

Maluca performing at WILDNESS

CV: You’ve also written about the complications of documentary filmmaking, the idea of “discovering” something awesome, and gentrification. Can you talk about WILDNESS–the movie, in relation to some canonized queer film works from the past, like the documentary Paris Burning (dir. Jennie Livingston)?

Wu: Of course there have many touchstones for making WILDNESS, also including Born In Flames, Salivation Army, and Young Soul Rebels. I’ve had moments of being both reactionary to and celebratory of Paris Is Burning—particularly because it’s one of the top grossing documentaries of all time, so in the film industry it’s like this impossible bar that they set for all films about queer people of color. But I hope to meet Jennie Livingston some day, because I have tremendous respect for how she was able to craft a previously invisible subject matter into something that could be grasped and widely appreciated, which is no small feat. It took her 7 years! What I have learned from working with the more conventional movie format is that you have to trade on complexity to tell a good story—there’s almost an inverse relationship. So it’s always a compromise. You figure out how many people you want to reach, and that determines what is possible in terms of the story you tell. So I wanted the challenge of entering into this process, to be like, “How can we can we use a conventional format to intervene on its limitations?” Every format has limitations.

Calling the film WILDNESS and dealing directly with the story of the club felt like the most honest way to implicate myself as the filmmaker and to talk about how my presence was affecting the bar. WILDNESS is basically HOW I tell the story—which is anything but objective and that’s what documentary usually wants us to think—that there could EVER be an objective perspective.

Club Looks, photo by Asma Maroof

The drama with the club seemed to be this central QUESTION MARK of like: “WHAT is going on here??” Cause some people thought it looked like “hipster artists” taking over a “tranny dive bar” (sigh). Initially I think we would have preferred to just skip the gentrification question, because we wanted the conversation to be more evolved. But that conversation definitely needed to be had – we just needed new words for it. What did we think we KNEW, that didn’t need to be articulated? Obviously SOMETHING did need to be said that wasn’t clear to enough people.

So it seems like the club WILDNESS, CLASS, the movie, everything basically shares this question of “what is ACTUALLY going on here?” Because class differences still create the biggest divides, even within queer and trans communities. I think artists have a lot of cultural power they don’t always acknowledge, the power to create representations and lead culture. Queer people definitely have that power – even if they think of themselves as oppressed in general – and it gets especially complicated for trans men. I would hope that the experience of being trans could enable us to act differently when we are offered that power.

CV: In your blog you talk a lot about representation. How would you categorize the kind of representation you are making of the Silver Platter and WILDNESS (the club) in your film?

Wu: I think being a trans filmmaker means having to take into account mainstream representations of trans identities (generally disappointing), and trans film as its own genre.  You can’t avoid contending with certain clichés, like stories of personal transformation, putting on lipstick in a mirror, getting brutally murdered, getting tragically left alone in the world unloved, etc. Working as a trans artist in the contemporary art world too, I’m also familiar with press stigma. Journalists are quick to sexualize your content, talk about what you’re wearing instead of your work, or just be completely fucked up. So WILDNESS the movie references some of these clichés and scenarios consciously, hopefully as a way to invite people to see them for what they are. Representation always has an agenda. The weirdest part about making the movie is that I was never really an outsider to the community, and in fact I got so personally involved it led to strange plot twists at the end of the story, and some of my subjects maybe even dislike me now, because I took sides in a conflict. So I try to make all of this obvious instead of invisible, like it usually is in documentary film. It gets messy, I hope in a good way.

CV: You and I have talked about nightlife as a safe place for you to inhabit your gender exactly how you like. What opens up for you in that world that isn’t possible in the daylight?

Wu: I found a home in LA nightlife because most of the scenes here are thick with amazing queers of color. One thing I’ve noticed is that universally there are a lot more options for being fabulous if you’re feminine, no matter what kind of body you inhabit. It’s a double standard that’s endlessly fascinating to me. Like if you’re a boy dressing up- no matter how REAL you are- you’re still “fierce.” But if you’re a trans guy passing as a dude, you just kind of disappear. And if you’re flashy, like drag king-style, it tends to be a joke—like fashion-wise it’s not as respected or something. And in fact queer nightlife can totally be a NOT safe space for trans men. The other night this queen came up to me and was all, “Honey you totally had me fooled, I thought you were a REAL gay boy.” (Generally people read me as a trans woman). And I was PROFOUNDLY like, um what do you mean? FUCK YOU. Because basically all she meant was I’m not hiding a REAL dick?? Confusingly painful.

CV: What art works from the past or present are currently blowing your mind?

Wu: I guess daily right now, it’s mostly sound: the stream of news about social movements in the Middle East, and the sounds of TOTAL FREEDOM, NGUZUNGUZU, and LIGHT ASYLUM. Another thing that changed my brain was this video called EL DORADO by Bosnian artist Danica Dakic (which I saw at Documenta 12) where she worked with migrant teenagers in Kassel at a wallpaper museum. Also: the short film SALIVATION ARMY by Scott Treleaven about his 90s homocore punk zine, which has a truly profound voice over. The list could go on forever. I also feel truly indebted to ongoing conversations with Dean Spade and the folks at SRLP (Sylvia Rivera Law Project), and the awesome lesbian artist community that grew out of LTTR.

Thank you, Wu!

**Go read Wu’s blog CLASS!

** Watch out for WILDNESS–the movie!