Gay Place

QUEERING UP FOR THE HOLIDAYS The season is the reason so many of us pause and contemplate our planetary path. For many, the season's reason is dieties – specific for some, general and cartoonified for others. For even more folks, the season is about the seasons proper, the change, the tidying up before putting away the year. Queer Austin has enjoyed a rebirth this year – not that she was unborn, nor that he had disappeared, mind you. But Queer Austin as a focal point, a community to enjoy and perhaps even join, saw the tsk-tsking, chiding, judgmental, product-driven, materialistic normative shit – that stuff that crawled up the ass of Austin and died – and decided to take agency and push itself out past the detritis. ("If you wanna be free/Below the ground's the only place to be/Cause in this life/You spend time running from depravity" from "Cold War" by Janelle Monáe.) Instead of carping about what this town used to be, how back-in-the-day playful and sinful and silly and raw we remember it to be, a tore-up colony of kids (basically) and some elder types (yours truly a low stripe in those very storied ranks) moved the conversation forward and, voilà, a butt-ton of queer events has since blossomed in the wake. One such tribe is Tranarchy! Born of the loins of Gadjo Disko, the booty of Bounce, and the heart of Queerbomb, Tranarchy! (www.tranarchy.com) encourages the dressing of transgressing. It's a ball. And it's a blast. Worth the price of admission alone for the visuals: especially Recspec's projections, Coco Coquette's Transformation Station (for those who arrive feeling under-togged and in need of a glam-spruce), and of course, the eye-candy crowd itself. The best part of that crowd, darlings, is that you will be it. We'd love to see you out. Let's do a jig. Look for the horn. (See Saturday.)