Queer LA LIVE: Watch The Performances From Stories Of Joy

How we experience joy was the big question on my mind recently. Why? Because Queer LA, our project exploring LGBTQ+ stories through joy, went LIVE with our first event.

On a recent Thursday evening, we explored the idea of queer joy through three performers' personal journeys to self-expression. There was drag, dance, poetry and a lot of fun — all at the Crawford, our events space in Pasadena.

Below, watch the recording from that night and learn more about the people behind these performances. Want more? Check out our next Queer LA LIVE event, Wellness for Joy, on November 30.

Watch the performances

Maya Salameh

For Maya Salameh, who will be performing a slate of poems, her love for writing really started around the fourth grade.

She’d write short stories that kept getting shorter and shorter until Salameh felt like it was the right time to call them poems. They embarked on this journey without any formal training or inherited connections to the art world — that’s one of the reasons she fell in love with it.

Today, Salameh is a nationally recognized poet and the author of the book How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave. Their poems cover a breadth of topics with a mastery of illustrative techniques, but her main focus is on writing to “imagine queer Arab futurism in an age of mass extinction.”

Maya Salameh's poetry explores the queer and Arab experience of technology.

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Courtesy of Maya Salameh

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Among her many accolades, Samaleh is the winner of the Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers, is a National Student Poet, and has even performed at the White House. But at the beginning, Salameh says she’d spent hours searching the internet just to find someone like her.

“I was a huge internet warrior. Whether that literally just meant opening up Google and typing, like, ‘Arab lady poet,’ and discovering writers like Hala Alyan [a Palestinian American poet]… who really took poetry and made it reflect them,” Salameh said.

She followed in their footsteps, playing with English in ways that de-center English’s hegemony over everyday life and the white gaze. Poetry has allowed Salameh to find new language for her experiences. She says as a queer Arab American woman, being able to follow in a lineage of other Arab women has helped her understand both pains and joys.

“It was really a self taught love for me,” Salameh said. “You don't need to be driven to theater practice. You don't need singing lessons. All I needed was a pen, myself and a notebook.”

Joey Navarrete-Medina

For Joey Navarrete-Medina, who will be performing a contemporary dance, their story of queer joy comes from healing the relationship with their father.

It started with their thesis project, where Navarrete-Medina choreographed a dance that explored their gender expressions and identity as a first-generation Mexican American. The 50-minute solo performance was an avenue to collaborate with their father, who plays the accordion and favors norteño music. But their father had a request.

Joey Navarrete-Medina poses for a portait.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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“It was very vague, like ‘mijo, write me something so I can pull information and start writing [the song] for you,” they recalled to me earlier this year.

This was during a time when family health issues and talks of loved ones passing away were happening, so the dancer got to thinking.

“It became a self-reflection. If my dad would pass, or if I were to pass tomorrow, what would I want him to know?” Navarrete-Medina said. “The thing that kept coming into light was the fact that I never came out to him. I never verbalized ‘Hey dad, I'm gay.’”

Navarrete-Medina gave their father a belated coming out letter, which was later translated into Spanish for ease of communication. It included an apology for not being the son their father expected and acknowledged that he may feel shame or confusion about them being queer. (Growing up, Navarrete-Medina says their experience was marked by conservative values and machismo culture.) But ultimately, the hope was that their father would feel joy seeing them live a full life.

How did Navarrete-Medina’s father respond? By composing and singing a song called “Niño de mi Alma” — meaning child of my soul. Navarette-Medina choreographed their dance around it, and the song played as they gradually moved across the stage in a hoop skirt dress.

“When I heard it for the first time, I was bawling,” Navarrete-Medina said. “I think for me it was that idea of queer joy — like wow, this person who I have loved for the 32 years that I've been on this world, they're able to see this new version of me.”

Johnny Gentleman

For Johnny Gentleman, who will be putting on a drag show, being a drag king and creating space for Black and brown kings to perform is what brings him joy.

Gentleman recalled a moment before his more than five-year performing career when he saw a drag king named Havoc Von Doom in Long Beach, performing as the green Power Ranger — his fantasy idol as a kid.

Johnny Gentleman with his finished drag king look.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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“The way they interpreted the character was just so captivating,” Gentleman said. “It just kind of hooked me in.”

He fell in love with drag — and challenging the assumptions of it — after that. Gentlemen runs Dapper Puss Entertainment, a producing company where he focuses on the inclusion of Black, Indigenous and trans performers of color in events.

Gentleman grew up in Chino without seeing any trans people around him, likening it to a “Latino misogyny” where the community stayed away from LGBTQ+ people. This backdrop, coupled with a white and cisgender-dominated drag field, informs his view.

“I made it my goal to just fight for visibility for BIPOC folks and for trans folks,” he said. “We have just as much talent.”

He pushes back on the notion that drag performers need to be ultra-pretty and put together, or do more dangerous moves like death drops (when someone throws their leg in the air and falls to the floor). Drag kings, he says, can be just as entertaining without all the wigs and dresses.

Gentleman says that drag came at a crucial time in his life, and it gave him an avenue to becoming a person that he liked being on stage. He says it helped him see his truth with his heritage and trans-masculine and nonbinary identities. It’s a way for him to release emotions and anxiety, and to learn more about himself.

“Drag saved my life,” he said. “The moment I saw myself in masculine makeup, I felt the most validated I've ever felt in my life. I was able to be this character that was the braver version of what I wanted to be or could be.”