I had the joy of interviewing ALOK on Zoom when I was in Mumbai at the end of last year. They were just getting their day started in Texas, and lying in bed, provided me with the relaxed, eloquent poetry that they do. This interview is such a treat to share with you all. I hope that it stretches and moves you just like it did for me.
MADAME GANDHI: Do you think that we are rewarded for being ourselves?
ALOK: The truth is that—and I think that my career is really, really an indication of this—the more that I stepped into my truth in my power, the more backlash I’ve received. The more death threats I’ve received, and also the more love I’ve received. That contradiction is what it means to be alive. It’s to have to really accept, I’m not for everyone right now.
And so I think that what we do— because our brains are predisposed to this—is we’ll then populate the narrative with all the negative vitriol. And that’s been, I think, the hardest work I’ve had to do in my compassion practice—to not just fixate on the people who are mad or not ready but instead to notice the people who are ready. Not just fixate on the catastrophe and the collapse but also notice the becoming and the beauty, and to witness that they’re both there at the same time.
MG: Beautifully put. There’s not a difference [between] when you show up in your poetry or on a stage or to a talk— the day-to-day is the same. Is there a difference when you suit up, or every day you’re showing up as ALOK, even if you’re going to get a tea that day?
A: I think a lot is changing in me and it’s exciting and petrifying. For a long time fashion was my armor. And that served me for a very long time, but now I’m really reaching a place where it’s not actually about what I look like anymore, because I have internal witness.
DRESS Chictopia, EARRINGS Simone Rocha
TOP & SKIRT Melitta Baumeister, TIGHTS Wolford, SHOES Jeffrey Campbell
A: Every time, I want to. Like if I’m doing a morning TV show on tour or something, Okay, ALOK, you’ve got to change the way you speak. Then I go up there and I don’t. It’s almost as if my tongue is the most disobedient instrument that I have, but that’s because I’m just a vessel. It’s less about the audience [than] it is about the moment. Like what do I have to say in a moment?
MG: One hundred percent correct. What are some of the private practices that nourish your mental health, nourish your vibrancy–your goodness rituals?
A: Reading, and I listen to a ton of audiobooks, often on 2.5 [speed], which I really should stop doing—but I love it so much. I want to zoom through as many books as possible. There’s very few parts of the day that I’m not involved in literature. Literature has always been like the secret whisper to me. I feel like writers are my favorite teachers.
MG: That’s inspiring me because I know exactly what you mean. Is there an opportunity to use pronouns but then to be expressing the full vastness of your gender expression? Is there an opportunity to then rebrand our conception of what it even means to be feminine or masculine?
A: That’s been a really big shift—I’m not actually outsourcing validation as much to other people. I’ve developed an interior life in a way that I hadn’t before. I think that a lot of that was thanks to the quarantine situation, because it was the first time in my life in a very long time that I had to stop moving and stay put, and that was profoundly destabilizing for me.
Before, I was very committed to a political project of diagnosing the world through a language and terminology of politics. And that’s still obviously important to me, but it’s insufficient. To really understand the world, I’ve had to understand the idea of spiritual crisis, of saying things that don’t actually make empirical sense, like, It is possible to be physically existing and not be alive. Like, The true transition is not between genders necessarily; it’s actually between a false self and a true self. The reason that trans people are persecuted is because we become honest mirrors.
So that kind of murky architecture has now become so much more clarified to me. In the past, I felt very farfetched and naive, but now it’s become my compass to actually say...the things that are most important to say are often the things we don’t have the language for yet.
COAT & GLOVES Willy Chavarria
COAT & GLOVES Willy Chavarria
MG: Your resilience in playing the long game is the thing that will allow so many more people to have access to the way that you are thinking, so that it may have the potential to unlock a seed in their own mind. Do you code switch when you speak? Do you change the way that you address different audiences based on the context?
A: Yeah, totally. Pronouns are not prophecies and genders are not prophecies. There’s a zillion ways to be a woman, a zillion ways to be a man—all that matters is your particular way. I don’t have a hierarchy that says that people who use “they” are somehow more transgressive than people who use “she.” I don’t think that’s true.
I think we all in our own zones can challenge gender—not can, must. The stakes of challenging gender are not just once again political, they’re transcendental. What gender is, is a system of coercion, and what a system of coercion does is it prescribes conformity, groupthink, and it disincentivizes imagination and possibility.
So the stakes of challenging gender are not just about resistance. They’re about creation...resplendence. Like, it’s actually about creating a more wonderful and beautiful world where people are able to craft their own gender.
DRESS House of Campbell, TIGHTS Wolford, SHOES Syro
MG: We should be free to change our bodies however we want, but is there an opportunity where we actually can feel the fullness of our masculinity while being visibly assigned female at birth? There’s such a lack of care when people age in a transition body. I wonder if there’s more awareness being brought to that conversation.
A: I think there definitely needs to be more care for transitioning folks. The onus has always been put on trans people—as broken, as the pathology, as buying into gender—when in fact these are structural considerations, structural responsibilities.
Once again, we produce this other binary of like, okay, if you’re pursuing body modification like this, then you’re less real or less self-accepting. I think that that’s wrong too. We’re all pursuing body modification, but it’s only when it comes to trans people that there’s this profoundly disproportionate scrutiny and that just reads as transphobic. Why are certain forms of body modification politicized and not others?
So I actually believe that it is so possible for people’s most authentic self to be revealed in an interplay with medicine. We have to accept that other people are living fundamentally different existences to us. We’re able to make our own decisions about ourselves.
MG: That’s very interesting because also there’s a conversation around passing when someone transitions. Then there’s a conversation around gender conformity, but it’s radical to transition and seek fearlessly and bravely the gender that you are and the way that you want to show up in the world.
A: Yeah, totally. Ultimately, what I’m fighting for is not an aesthetic. It’s not about the visual. It’s about dignity and what dignity looks like in self-authorship. If people decide to self-author themselves in ways that the world will dismiss as normative, that’s not normative to me because normativity is not about what we look like. It’s about how we treat other people.
MG: When I first read the acronym LGBTQIA+ when I was a kid and used to go to NYC Pride, I always genuinely felt confused because there wasn’t parallelism. I felt like you can still be trans and gay or trans and lesbian, or trans and bi, or intersex and straight. I always felt confused by the grouping of these labels and identities. Do you think there’s a reason why that happened? Do you think it’s actually a great joy for us to come together as folks who think alternatively about gender and that’s why that is a lump?
A: Yeah, I think it’s actually a framework that we inherited, not from our own but because of a culture that pathologized us in the aftermath and ongoing lives of a eugenic project. Especially the United States, which was invested in quote–unquote correcting queer and trans people to become straight.
But I think what we’re seeing right now is the disintegration of that. What we’re seeing is a serious reconsideration of this framework, and I think it’s for the best, actually. I don’t think that the best points of political activation are who we are. I think the best point of political activation is, what do we want the world to be?
I hate to break it to all of us, but, gay and trans people are not perfect and we shouldn’t have to be. My community that I’m most aligned with are artists, and some of them might be straight or cis, but all of them have imagination.
TOP & SKIRT Melitta Baumeister, TIGHTS Wolford, SHOES Jeffrey Campbell
DRESS & SLEEVES Stella McCartney
MG: Ignorance can be damaging and it can also present an opportunity to educate. When do you see it as violent and as damaging as erasure?
A: It’s exploitative when the presumption is that oppressed people’s obligation, and in fact, tax for existing on Earth, is educating other people. I was brought to this Earth to teach and to preach—but that’s my job. It doesn’t have to be the job of all people like me; I chose this job. I’ve always felt a deep need to share every single thing that I learned and that’s just my task.
But true ignorance is not lacking information, it’s lacking imagination.
MG: Tell me about a time that you felt deeply loved, seen, valued.
A: I’ve been taking my birthday more seriously and so I had a birthday party this year. I’m notorious in my friend group for roasting. Like I just love roasts. It’s where my best comedic material comes out. This time, I got roasted by my friends. Getting roasted for me is the ultimate form of trust and intimacy.
MG: Yes, and when we are more healed with-in, we are less triggered by somebody poking fun. We see it more lightly. You talk about play all the time. Was there a conscious shift?
A: Yeah, so much. I’m touring comedy now. I didn’t think I’d be able to do that. I was always very funny interpersonally, but I felt like when it came to my work I had to be like a serious advocate. Then I was like, Actually, no, play is advocacy, being ridiculous is advocacy, being flippant is advocacy, because it’s, once again, not just what we’re saying but how we’re saying it.
The absurdity is not what I look like, it’s this entire architecture of how we’ve arranged the world. That’s absurd.
MG: Tell me about romance!
A: I’m in a romantic relationship with being alive. I’m in awe of everything. Every time I write I listen to music and I just sit here and it’s sensory overload. I weep. I’m like, Someone in the world made something this beautiful. I love this person so much. They created this incredible work of art that will live forever and forever make me feel.
MG: You’re in the practice of being in love. You are recharging your heart every day. It’s radical. ❤
DRESS & SLEEVES Stella McCartney
STORY CREDITS
PHOTOGRAPHY Josefina Santos, STYLIST Jèss Monterde, SET DESIGNER Conor Fay, MAKEUP Laurel Charleston at Opus Beauty, HAIR Dee TrannyBear-Marino for DDPro, PRODUCTION Get It Productions, PHOTO ASSISTANT Natasha Garoosi STYLIST ASSISTANT Claudia Civit, PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Romina Berberi
HERO IMAGE CREDITS
TOP & SKIRT Quine Li, TIGHTS Wolford, SHOES Charlotte Stone
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