“IT'S ALL ABOUT DESIRE”: ERICA DAWN LYLE AND HANNAH BAER TALK ABOUT TRANS FREEDOM AND JOY
from MOMUS, March 3, 2022
In her book, Trans Girl Suicide Museum, hannah baer teases out the implications of the larger thought experiments and challenges that gender transition poses to consensus reality and identity politics. In early 2020, after reading TGSM, I sought out Baer – who is also the operator of the widely-read Instagram meme account, @malefragility – to do an interview. The pandemic intervened and instead we began a correspondence that became a real life friendship. In October 2021 we planned, promoted, and performed together at a successful guerilla improv show and dance party at the amphitheater in East River Park on New York City’s Lower East Side. The next day we finally sat down to have this conversation and to compare notes on our mutual obsessions with illegal street parties, improv noise music, and the radical political possibility of gender transition.
THE VOICE MAIL INTERVIEW: ERICA DAWN LYLE AND MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE ON THE PHONE
from MOMUS, June 3, 2021
“Seeing the faces of queer friends from all over the country lined up onscreen in the audience, it occurred to me that the pandemic had in many ways brought all of us back to this very familiar, almost teenaged queer site – the place of hiding out from an unsafe world, all alone in one’s room, dreaming about another world… But how do you, like, cruise each other on Zoom? The tiny Zoom boxes we were now caged in seemed an apt visual metaphor for the atomization of our era. Many of us, of course, had once lived in close proximity in the same queer neighborhoods but were now dispersed all over the country… The isolation of the pandemic in so many ways was merely a logical extension of the breakup of community we had all already experienced during the hyper-gentrification of American cities over the past decades… Playing on the recurring themes of disconnection and loneliness in Sycamore’s book, The Freezer Door, we decided around the first anniversary of the pandemic to do an interview that would take place over a series of voicemail messages we left for each other.
THE NEW WORLD
Erica Dawn Lyle on Florida’s Space Coast
from ARTFORUM, September 29, 2020
“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great—and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past.” —Elon Musk
I TRY TO GO SEE the SpaceX rocket launches whenever I am back home in Florida. I attended one in the very first week of this year, pulling off to the side of the road on a little sandbar between Titusville and the Cape and parking with a direct view across the water to the launchpad. It was a tradition that I knew from childhood on the Space Coast of Florida: the prelaunch tailgate party. These days, SpaceX simulcasts all of its launches on its website, along with a kind of warmup show made by an in-house production team. Since I was the first one there, I opened up the back of my van, which faced the launchpad five miles away, and I loaded SpaceX TV on my phone, the voice of the announcer mingling with the sound of gulls and traffic on the causeway… Read more