“I have the word ‘Paradox’ tattooed onto my chest,” reveals author, artist, performer, and activist Sassafras Lowrey, who uses the gender-neutral pronouns ze and hir. The tattoo hints at Lowrey’s complicated gender identity. “I came out as trans when I was 18 and lived as an FTM—including several years of being on testosterone.”
“I knew that I wasn’t a girl,” Lowrey explains now. “And that I wanted to play with gender. [But], I honestly thought the only option available for me involved adopting masculinity. I came out into a community that was incredibly femme-phobic. Femmes …were considered to be less queer than the rest of the community. I’d lost everything—family, home, friends, community—to live an authentic life. Being culturally recognizable was very important to me.”
Because of that, Lowrey says, “It took me many years to feel comfortable…playing with my own femininity, and to come out as femme. As a genderqueer femme I see my femininity as being incredibly performative. It’s over the top, complicated, inherently queer, and outside of the gender binary. It’s also very invisible. Folks don’t always know how to see me, and [they] frequently miss the ways in which I’m subverting gender.”
Lowrey recalls hir time with The Language of Paradox—a performance group founded and directed by trans playwright Kate Bornstein—as a “fundamental turning point in my life, both personally and artistically. Working with Kate and becoming friends with hir truly changed my life.”
With hir partner Kestryl Cael, in 2007 Lowrey established PoMo Freakshow (pomofreakshow.com), a queer production company that, by “invoking the spirit of the sideshow,” hopes to challenge norms and subvert assumptions, while producing collaborative and solo works that mix elements of theater, performance art, visual art, spoken word, slam poetry, storytelling and/or filmmaking.
“Much of what we do riffs on the performance of otherness [and] the vivid imagery of the freak,” Lowrey explains. Still, ze admits pondering, the history of sideshows as “paradoxically exploitive and a lucrative sanctuary. There’s no denying the fact that many sideshow ‘freaks’…were abused, used against their will and otherwise exploited. [But some] consensually chose to participate, and found sanctuary within a community of those who’d been continually othered.”
Personally, Lowrey recalls, growing up, “dreaming that I’d be brave enough to run away and join the circus. I had this innate feeling that it…would offer home to someone so—queer. For me, there’s a sense of conjuring that childhood dream, now, as an adult living and working in a community of the freaks I [always] knew were waiting for me.”
PoMo Freakshow’s first piece, Traitors without (T)reason premiered this summer and, Lowrey says, grapples with “the complexities of passing,” and “centers around the idea that we’re a queer couple that—despite our best efforts—pass as straight. Traitors explores the betrayal, invisibility, sacrifice, subversion, and loss that are inextricably tied into public passing.”
A freelance journalist, Lowrey was honored as one of Portland, Oregon’s top emerging authors in 2004. Hir first book GSA to Marriage: Stories of a Life Lived Queerly is an autobiographical exploration of hir multiple gender changes from butch to FTM to high femme.
Lowrey also edited 2009’s Kicked Out, an anthology by current and former homeless LGBTQ youth from around the world who were forced out because of their sexuality or gender identity.
“Kicked Out is realy a dream for me,” ze notes. “I was kicked out when I was seventeen after coming out as a lesbian in semi-rural Oregon. One of the first things I remember doing in the face of all that upheval was go to the library and look at every book I could find on teenage queerness.” But ze was disappointed to find that none reflected hir reality. Now ze’s thrilled to have organizations like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and PFLAG backing the anthology. Matthew Shepard’s mother wrote the foreword.
But Lowrey hasn’t limited hir efforts to combat the “epidemic” of queer youth homelessness, to the anthology. Instead, ze also established the Come Out, Kicked Out campaign (kickedoutanthology.com) to “break down the cultural shame and silencing faced by those of us who were kicked out or left home as teens. Until it’s safe for current and former homeless LGBTQ youth to talk about our experiences we won’t be able to effectivly fight the epidemic. As a community we need to make this a top priority. There’s no reason that some of the youngest and most vulnerable members of our community should be so disenfranchised and alienated.”
Interested in how marginalized people alter society by telling personal stories, Lowrey begins a graduate program in Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College, where ze plans to focus on queer storytelling and the role it plays in “the construction of community.”
The creative femme is also an activist who leads workshops at schools, conferences, and for community groups across the country, and an artist whose work has been showcased at conferences and in galleries nation-wide.
“Visual art is very much activism for me,” contends Lowrey about the connection. “The vast majority of my visual art centers around pushing boundaries, and crossing borders related to themes of gender and sexuality. It’s my goal to make people think, and to leave them with more questions than answers.”
Now a new assistant producer of Woman-Stirred radio—a queer cultural journal aimed at celebrating and preserving the work of LGBTQ artists, musicians and writers—Lowrey is primarily responsible for increasing its social networking presence.
“Social networking…is a really important tool for building community,” ze contends. “The Internet was something that really shaped my experience of queerness. Coming out in a very conservative area and ultimately losing my home and family; though I felt profoundly alone, I knew—from my brief Internet access—that there were others like me.”
* * * * * *
Trans writer Jacob Anderson-Minshall (jake@trans-nation.org) co-hosts Gender Blender, a new show on Portland, Oregon’s 90.7 fm KBOO radio and streaming live at KBOO.fm. Download Tuesday, October 21st’s show on trans youth, free at kboo.fm.
© 2008 Jacob Anderson-Minshall
Visit Sassafras Lowreys’ profile on Trans-Genre to find more info, videos, and links to hir sites!
