Lead artist:  Michelle Tea
Project Title:  TransForming Community
Recipient Organization:  Queer Cultural Center
Lead Artist:   Michelle Tea
Genre and Date Awarded:  Literary Arts, June 2004
To be Completed:  June 2005

Queer Cultural Center (Qcc) and novelist and poet Michelle Tea will create, develop, and present “TransForming Community,” based on new writings by six queer, transgender, and intersex literary and spoken word artists.  The project will culminate with four free readings at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center in June 2005 during the Eighth Annual National Queer Arts Festival and will be featured on the Qcc web site.

“TransForming Community” explores the implications of the recent surge of San Francisco residents who are choosing their own gender identities and seeks to demonstrate literature’s potential to launch public dialogue about the complex implications of these choices.  Tea writes:

“The advent of what has been called the TransRevolution challenges many commonly held beliefs and assumptions about almost everything—feminism, biology, sexual identity, community-based separatism. As an artist and facilitator, I feel a great desire to use literature as a tool to further explore these important shifts.”

Qcc’s history-making 2003 National Queer Arts Festival presented work that reflected the experiences of 28 different transgender artists.  These artists, who were born into the world as one gender and now live as the other, or who are “gender queer” and live entirely outside of the gender binary, provided numerous new perspectives on issues such as love, relationships, sexuality, race, raising children, political activism, resistance, coalition-building, religion, police brutality, social justice, and war.  In the process of describing their experiences, these artists made important distinctions between sexual and gender identity. They also employed a new descriptive vocabulary that reflects the expanding number of gender and sexual identities emerging inside the queer community.

Building upon these writers’ voices and Qcc’s experience with emergence of transgender issues at the 2003 Festival, Michelle Tea will artistically create “TransForming Community” with six other accomplished local writers and spoken word artists: Katastrophe, Thea Hillman, Lynn Breedlove, Shawna Virago, Julia Serano, and Marcus Rene Van, each of whom addresses the transgender topic from a different perspective:  lesbian, gay, queer, intersex, male-to-female transgender, and female-to-male transgender.   

The project began at the June 2004 Queer Arts Festival at which Tea emceed two free community forums about gender and identity issues and where the six participating writers began to gather material.  Over the next year, Tea worked one-on-one with each writer and the six writers and their curator have met together in workshops to provide one another with constructive criticism.  This creative and critical process led up to a “work in progress” event in April and the four culminating performances in June 2005. 

Michelle Tea is the author of three novels, a book of poetry, and hundreds of newspaper articles.  In 1999, she received an award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation given to a handful of exceptional female writers at the start of their careers.  In 2000, she won The San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Goldie Award in Literature.  That same year, Tea won the Lambda Literary Award in the “Best Lesbian Fiction” category for her novel Valencia, which the Village Voice Literary Supplement named as one of the “Top Twenty-Five Books of 2000.”  The same publication also named Tea’s third novel, The Chelsea Whistle, one of the “Top 100 Books of 2002.” 

Collaborating with Tea, Qcc is a multicultural community-building organization that promotes the artistic, economic, and organizational development of San Francisco’s queer arts community.  Its programs explore queer identity issues; promote the development of emerging lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender artists and arts organizations; and serve queer and non-queer audiences alike.  Among other programs, Qcc produces and presents the world’s largest annual National Queer Arts Festival.

Michelle Tea

Michelle Tea is the author of three novels, a book of poetry, numerous short stories, and hundreds of Bay Area newspaper articles.  Over the past decade, Tea has curated and emceed more than 200 Bay Area spoken word events.  In 2000 she won the San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award in Literature as well as a Lambda Literary Award for her novel Valencia.  The Village Voice Literary Supplement named her third novel, The Chelsea Whistle, one of the “Top 100 Books of 2002.”

In 1994 Tea and performance poet Sini Anderson created Sister Spit, a weekly girls-only open-mic event that ran for two years and was always free of charge.  From 1997 to 1999, Sister Spit conducted three major nationwide tours.  Over the past ten years, Tea has read her work approximately 300 times before audiences in small coffee houses, lesbian bars, community centers, classrooms, and cafes in approximately 50 different American cities.  She also has read her work before audiences numbering in the thousands at events such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, the San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade stage, the Dyke March, and the San Francisco Street Theater Festival.

Tea has won several journalism awards for her numerous articles published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Bay Times, Girlfriends, Nerve (and Nerve.com), The Stranger, The Believer, and Lesbian Nation.  Her writings have appeared in many anthologies, including Beyond Definition:  New Writing from Gay and Lesbian San Francisco (Jennifer Joseph, editor), and Hatred of Capitalism (Chris Krause, editor).

Lynn Breedlove (Writer)

Lynn Breedlove is a no-ho (that’s no hormones), no-op (that’s no surgery) trannydyke (that’s a female-bodied lesbian who feels more than a bit like a man on the inside).  Lynn transformed pop culture for lesbians with the creation of her seminal punk rock band Tribe8, which has recorded multiple albums (recently on the esteemed punk rock record label Alternative Tentacles), toured the United States and Europe extensively, headlined at EuroPride in Rome, and has been featured in the music magazines Spin and Rolling Stone and on MTV.

With the publication of her first novel, Godspeed—a tale of a genderqueer trannydyke named Jim dealing with issues of marginality, addiction, and relationships—Lynn has made an impact on the literary world.  Godspeed was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in the category “Best Lesbian Fiction.”  She hosts and curates the long-running queer monthly open mic event K’Vetch, which recently received a “Best of the Bay Award” from the San Francisco Bay Guardian; and she writes for Girlfriend magazine, Other magazine, and other periodicals.  She is one-half of the hip-hop duo Stop Staring at My Boyfriend, and curates events at the Montclair Women’s Club in the East Bay.

Thea Hillman (Writer)

Thea Hillman is a writer and curator who founded Intercourse in 2001 to promote the development of spoken word performance and discourse about sex and gender by intersexed, transgender, and genderqueer artists.  In 2001, Hillman curated an evening-length event attended by more than 200 audience members that employed spoken word, community and personal histories, food and music, to raise awareness about the issues of these subgroups.

Hillman has many years of experience as a writer, political activist, and event producer.  She has published her original poetry and fiction in over 15 literary journals, poetry and short story collections, and recordings.  Her book, Depending on the Light, was published in 2001.  She is currently at work on a second book that addresses queer identity and intersex issues.  Hillman is the president of the Intersex Society of North America.

Katastrophe (Writer)

Katastrophe (Rocco Kayiatos) is a female-to-male transexual hip hop and spoken word artist. When 24-years old, Katastrophe traveled with the Sister Spit all-girl performance tour as a butch lesbian prior to transitioning to male.  He is a former Teen Poetry Slam Champion of San Francisco and was featured in the documentary Poetic License about teen slam poets, which premiered on PBS and was written about in Seventeen magazine, Vibe, and the Atlantic Monthly.  Rocco’s groundbreaking, innovative poetry has been the subject of profiles in Instinct magazine, Bitch magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle.  He is an artistic collaborator with performer, activist, and author Kate Bornstein (Gender Outlaw, My Gender Workbook), who says, “Katastrophe’s work is at once brutally kind, passionately reasonable, and way sexy without being at all intimidating.  Watching Katastrophe’s performance, my heart beat faster, my tears flowed freely, and I laughed and laughed and laughed.  I felt welcomed to a world and identity more radical than my own, and that’s something that rarely happens to me any more.”

Rudy Lemcke (Internet Programs Director)

Rudy Lemcke is an artist and new media designer.  His works have been exhibited locally, nationally and most recently, internationally in such venues as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the M.H. deYoung Memorial Museum, the University Art Museum at Berkeley, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Grey Gallery in New York, and Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.  His recent CD-ROMs have been exhibited at the Dallas Video Festival, the Lesbian Gay Film Festival, and the Mix Festival in New York.

Lemcke was the Co-curator of Qcc’s 1998 FACE exhibition.  He designed and continues to program Qcc’s web site, Queerculturalcenter.org, which has emerged as one of the most innovative non-profit arts websites in the United States. 

Pamela Peniston (Project Director)

Pamela Peniston has served as Qcc’s Executive Director and as the National Queer Arts Festival’s Executive Producer since 1997.  She provides the artistic vision and leadership that lies at the core of Qcc’s programs.  As Qcc’s representative to the funding world, she is responsible for securing the financial resources to support Qcc’s annual programs, personnel and operating expenses; and she plays a major role in audience development.  As the Festival’s Executive Producer, she is responsible for its technical production quality.  She supervises all staff, hires all contractors, and evaluates their performance.  Finally, she serves as Qcc’s representative in the media.  Peniston as an artist, has designed sets for over 25 Bay Area theaters and dance companies.

Julia Serano (Writer)

Julia Serano is a male-to-female transsexual lesbian poet, writer, and musician.  She has performed on the main stage at both San Francisco Pride and the San Francisco Dyke March, and her work has been published in the award-winning indie magazines Kitchen Sink, Cherry Bomb, and other feminist, queer, and popular culture periodicals.  She is a Bay Area Poetry Slam Champion, and organizes the multi-gendered literary open mic event Gender Enders, which was recently featured in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. She also is a co-editor of the Annual San Francisco Trans/Intersexed/ Genderqueer Community Picnic, and is a member of the genderqueer rock band Bitesize.

Marcus Rene Van (Writer)

Marcus Rene Van is a transgendered performance poet who uses poetry to fuse realistic tales about being a transgendered poet of color with his love of hip-hop.  Marcus has traveled to venues all over (and beyond) the Bay Area, spitting bold lyrics to incense racist and homophobic minds.  He has performed in San Francisco venues including Theater Rhinoceros, ODC Theater, the San Francisco Pride Stage, Second Sundays at the Justice League, Poetry Above Paradise, and many others.  Outside of the Bay Area, he was featured in Vancouver’s “Rock for Choice” Festival and the Providence and Seattle National Poetry Slams.  Marcus also organizes benefits and shows to raise money to maintain artist spaces in the Bay Area.  He is a member of the acclaimed queer hip hop ensemble Deep DicKollective, and was selected by the San Francisco Bay Guardian as one of the sexiest people in San Francisco.

Shawna Virago (Musician, Actress, Filmmaker)

Shawna Virago is a musician, actress, filmmaker, and longtime transgender political activist.  She is the Co-Director of TrannyFest transgender film festival and the Domestic Violence Survivor Program Director for Community Unity Against Violence (CUAV).  Ms. Virago has starred in several independent films/videos and her directorial debut, Almost Human, has screened throughout the world, including TrannyFest and the San Francisco Frameline Festival.  Her second film, Shut Up, Josephine!  screened at the Frameline Festival in June 2002.  Ms. Virago wrote for and performed in two LunaSea Theatre productions, TransSisters: Live and Uncut and Everyday People. In 2003, with the support of a Creating Queer Community grant from the Queer Cultural Center, Virago created a transgender multimedia performance piece that met with critical acclaim at ODC Theater.  Ms. Virago was a 2002 San Francisco Pride Parade Grand Marshal.  She is currently on the Board of Directors for the Transgender Law Center