Style Memories and Aesthetics as Resistance

Francisco Galarte:Can you offer our readers a “style memory,” a short autobiographical anecdote that tells us about the importance of clothing or style to you and its relationship to your artistic practice?L. J. Roberts: In 1996, when I was sixteen years old I was kidnapped and taken to a “therapeutic boarding school,” located on a mountaintop, forty-five minutes outside the city of Redding in northern California. It was a depository for wealthy families to turn their misfit and/or outsider teenagers into “good kids,” normal kids. An integral part of entering the school was being stripped of “your image.” Nose rings were taken off the faces of punks, goth kids were forced to forfeit their black apparel and eyeliner, slutty girls' thongs were confiscated, and so on. The staff of the school rifled through my suitcases: cargo pants, boys t-shirts, and cologne were separated from items deemed “in agreement.” I wasn't left with much to wear that was my own clothing. Soon after, I was ordered to adhere to a specialized “feminine program,” created just for me. I was to shave, wear my hair up, put on dresses for dinner, to not walk like “a trucker,” and to have “appointments” or scheduled hang-outs with male students.It's easy, when I think of my time at the school, to dive into trauma. During dark times, it's a convenient black hole. One of the tools I've used to dig myself out is to think about small acts of resistance that I and other students activated to reclaim a piece of ourselves and ultimately to stay alive. For me it was wearing hiking boots when I could—they were butch to me then, as was a pair of cargo shorts I had managed to hang onto. After being strip-searched that first day, and given a garbage bag of my belongings that were deemed “acceptable,” I dug out a bar of “CK ONE” soap from the sack. Produced by Calvin Klein, CK ONE was advertised as the first “androgynous” scent and miraculously, it was skipped over during the comb through of my belongings. I made this single bar of soap last almost the whole time I was at there. I would dab just a smidge of it on my body as an act of knowing. I was enacting my gender—even if it was only in the shower, which lasted a rigid maximum of ten minutes. Other people practiced covert hacks to reclaim part of their identities too. Our aesthetics are resistance.FG:Why do you use embroidery as part of your artistic practice? What does this form allow you to capture?LJR: My creative practice, thus far, hasn't included making garments. However, I can remember clearly, using a needle and thread to patch up what seemed like a never ending stream of holes that would appear in my favorite pants, baggy corduroys that felt butch to me. I wore them every day and slept in them for a summer. Those pants, obtained probably when I was around fourteen years old, held the first glimpse of my gender expression. And so, I kept them alive, stitched hole by stitched hole, to keep me going forward in a world where my preference for “men's clothing” was ridiculed and forbidden to the point where I was institutionalized.I keep a needle and thread on me at all times. I literally never leave my home without these tools. They've come in handy to mend holes for myself and others, or to repair someone's boots before a hot night out, and one time to do a guerilla hem job on the pants of my sweetie on the corner of Forty-Ninth Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan during rush hour. Of course I carry them with me so I can always work on my art as well. I started stitching small-embroidered portraits when I couldn't afford a studio in Brooklyn. Making small work enabled me to explore the city, sewing everywhere from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to Veselka during sleepless nights, to the queer corner of Riis Beach while avoiding the sun in a beach tent and admiring the many fashion conscious swimsuit changes of queens parading down the sand and into the surf. These portraits also serve another purpose—they allow me to take friends with me wherever I go, or at least images of them. In all of the portraits, agency and power is expressed in either subtle or upfront ways by people who deeply inspire me in their creativity, activism, and existence. This is reassuring to me, especially when walking the streets of the city where someone seems to offer an opinion on my gender daily.FG:Finally, tell us a bit more about the portrait on the cover of this issue.LJR: The image of the cover of this issue of TSQ was taken on my cell phone during the New York City Drag March of 2012. People gather in Tompkins Square Park and help each other put on costumes and drag and makeup and fake lashes and all of the accoutrements that they desire to perform their campy gender fuckery. Everyone then marches west to Stonewall, one of the sites that sparked gay liberation. One mantra that you hear over and over is that the “Drag March is not a parade, it's a protest.” The image on the cover of this issue of TSQ is of Jackie Mautner carrying a sign expressing her solidarity with Cece McDonald. Jackie was wearing a painted-on mustache and a bra over her shirt holding the sign high and grinning. Jackie, with her sign, calling Cece's presence into the march invoked what I like to think is a key component of the drag march—always resisting while being our most fierce and hard-to-read selves. It's really important to me that if the work is in a gallery that it also reach the people it depicts; postcard prints were made of the embroidery and given to Cece's campaign for freedom and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project to sell with all proceeds going directly to them

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