On April 17, 2024 Alok Vaid-Menon (they/them), an internationally renowned gender non-conforming writer and performance artist, was invited to appear at UC Santa Cruz by Dean of the UCSC Arts Division, Celine Parreñas Shimizu. The event was organized by the UCSC Arts Division in collaboration with the university’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (ODEI) and was a special performance just for UCSC students, staff and faculty, filling the Music Center Recital Hall on campus to capacity. Alok’s book Beyond the Gender Binary was given to the first 100 students who walked through the door.
During the first part of the two-hour presentation, Alok did a poignantly humorous stand-up comedy performance that brought laughter, tears and much applause throughout. They started by telling the audience that their preferred pronouns were hee hee, ha ha, and saying they wanted to make the argument that trans people are human, “by which I mean insufferable, just like you.”
Other amusing highlights included calling the 50-pound weight limit on luggage anti-trans, talking about their grandfather’s dementia and dying being the longest verb, and about the color beige being hardwired into white people’s DNA. “You mean to tell me that you girlies colonized the entire world, stole everyone's cutest stuff, and you call this interior design?” quipped Alok. “The home renovation budget was infinity, and you delivered monochrome.”
Dean Celine (as she’s fondly known as at UCSC) invited Alok to speak since she had known them from having them in her Sexuality and Cinema class at Stanford University in 2013. She said in her introduction of Alok that when she would arrive to class early, Alok would already be there, writing in a notebook, and dressed in a way that “warranted coverage in the New York Times Style section.” Alok’s fellow students, Dean Celine recalled, including an Oscar winner and someone designing their own fashion line, would listen with rapt attention to Alok, who has since played at major venues including the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and London’s Soho Theatre, and written books including Beyond the Gender Binary, and Femme in Public, and currently is in a comedy special, Gender Agenda on Netflix.
The second hour of the event was a thought-provoking panel discussion with Alok and UCSC affiliates: Pamela Rodríguez-Montero, assistant professor of costume design who designed the stunning outfit Alok wore; mattie brice, assistant professor in the Performance, Play & Design department; delfín bautista, the director of the Lionel Cantu Queer Resource Center, and PhD student in cross-cultural musicology, Balakrishnan Raghavan.
During the discussion, Alok expressed how people want to legislate against trans people because they don’t want to confront their own image. Maybe not everyone will read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble— but seeing a trans person walking down the street can delivers the same lesson, they said. “Existing in public as a gender non-conforming person is a permission structure that allows other gender non-conforming people to come into themselves,” Alok told the audience.
Finding a community helped them figure out who they were, Alok said, referring to meeting elder trans women of color when they moved to New York City. “They would say, ‘drag didn't used to be something we did on the stage, it's what we used to do everywhere. Drag was about fucking with straight people's perceptions of gender,’” Alok told the crowd to much laughter. “I said, ‘Oh, my god, sign me up!’”
Alok also offered that emotions don’t have to exist in opposition, and happiness and sadness don’t cancel each other out. They described being nonbinary as occupying a third space and being more than one thing at once. They said that in the contemporary social justice movement, there is a fetishization of being unhappy and focusing solely on the pain in the world. “I actually don't believe that we can sustain ourselves with misery. We have to entertain the prospect that joy is a valuable renewable resource. People want to be able to decipher you and think you have to be a certain way. Even people who love you.”
As the discussion came to a close, Alok said, “I suppose that the proudest accomplishment I've had creatively is to live because I don't think that the art is just the imprint in the poem or in the joke. Most of the art I make is not about this — it’s about the way I wake up. That’s the artistry of living.”
After their performance, Alok sat at table in the Recital Hall lobby, greeting a very long line of enthralled students who waited patiently to speak with them and have books and posters signed, and selfies taken. All of the students were thrilled with meeting Alok and hoped that Alok will return again to the campus.
