The Trans Excellence of Faggotica

Anticipation and intrigue flood the room– a room which both is and is not the club. I and around 120 of the most stylish people I have ever seen have been herded into taped off sections of the Brooklyn Art Haus theater where we now stand shoulder pressed to very stylish shoulder. “Should we be cruising?” I overhear someone wonder, only half joking. Suddenly the lights go out and in strut five performers– no these are the most stylish people I have ever seen. They are decked out in ruffles as shirts, shirts as skirts, and one very sexy “I love daddy” leather vest. This is Faggotica, and it is true trans excellence on display (or at least trans masc excellence). These dancers lay their hearts on the stage as they move through moments of isolation, community, conflict, intimacy, and lust. Aeon Andreas has created a dazzling, heartbreaking, sexy, world that I’d be eager to visit again and again.

Each of the dancers brings so much to the glittering transexual table. Miles Nelson’s seemingly elastic face projects every emotion from horror to glee with a fierce intensity. Akane’s storytelling prowess is captivating and had me hanging on their every word. Noel Olson and Jae Neal brought me to laughter and near tears with their enemies to lovers dance of betrayal. And Maxx Love oozes a quiet, sensuous confidence that had the audience eating out of his hand. All of them are incredibly strong, incredibly sexy, and incredibly talented. Their training as dancers is evident, but the piece is still accessible and grounded in the sensibilities of the nightlife scene many of them inhabit. 

As someone who spends more time in the theater world than in the dance world, I found this take on contemporary dance very relatable and much more welcoming than other offerings I’ve witnessed. I think this is in large part due to the honest vulnerability of the performers and what seemed to be a palpable connection to their material. At the same time the messaging wasn’t on the nose or didactic. The piece walked the line between legibility and abstraction with confident ease, trusting its audience with its more enigmatic, visceral themes.  

Luis Suarez @suarfotos

The one question I had throughout is what does it mean for Faggotica to bill itself as a trans show, a self proclaimed “transgender romp” when it mostly portrays a very narrow range of the trans experience. To the best of my understanding, all but one of the performers are trans-masculine. How, if at all, do trans-femmes fit into this world? For me the name is rather telling, Faggotica is primarily here to explore a gay male experience using gay male aesthetics. This focus on masculinity isn’t necessarily a problem, but I think it’s worth acknowledging that it isn’t a universal trans experience and in fact gay male spaces can be very hostile to lots of people, especially trans women. Maybe there’s power in reclaiming this aesthetic, but I’m curious what a Faggotica that grappled with the underside of this culture it so lionizes would look like. What of the racism? Fatphobia? Ableism? What would it mean to not just uncritically embrace this archetype but meaningfully subvert and challenge it? 

My only other qualm was the ending. After carrying us on such a beautiful journey throughout the night it felt like it ended without warning, like a lover leaving the next morning before we’d woken up. The final number, Maxx Love decked out in a spectacularly huge and hugely spectacular jacket was indeed beautiful. Rarely do you see so much tenderness paired with such sex appeal but he pulls it off. There’s a reason he’s such a beloved mainstay in the Brooklyn drag scene. Even so, I was waiting for another moment with the whole group, something to tie together all that we’d witnessed. Perhaps in future versions, and there should be future versions, these culminating moments can be explored further. 

All that said, if you take Faggotica for what it is, a glorious display of skill and pathos, it really is stunning. Everything from the gorgeously disheveled costumes to the impeccable lighting by Milner Somers is meticulously crafted for a night of perfectly polished, elevated mess. As the show ended the audience and performers merged, transgressing our taped down boundaries. The room began to resemble the moments of community explored in the piece– little circles of intimacy and gossip, laughter and overlapping sentences. At the end of the day Faggotica’s gift is not only its artistic excellence, but the community it invites us into, a community that deserves more spaces as joyful and heartfelt as this one.