Definition of ambiguous label is explored at art event

Each person has a definition for every word based on experiences with and understandings of the term. But for the crowd gathered at Harvey Milk Park and Equality Plaza on July 27, just one word was in mind— queer.
At the pop-up art event featuring visual, musical and performing art as a well as an open discussion about the art economy, regional performing artist Marissa Lynn challenged everyone gathered there to ask, “What does the word ‘queer’ mean to you?” through her performing and interactive piece called “Queery.”
Lynn came to the park with baskets of colorful ribbons and pens and encouraged the people there to explore their personal definitions of queer and then tie them to her, to themselves or to the nearby trees. Then, about an hour into the event, Lynn danced around the plaza to music, trailing ribbons after her and tying even more to trees.
For her, queer represents a journey.
“For me, I had a long time coming to where I am today,” Lynn told the Signal Tribune before her performance. “I am more newly into my queer self.”
Part of that journey included finding a place where she could allow herself to explore who she is and was.
“Kind of a strange thing that brought me to help realize that I could be queer, and at the time not have had any female partners, was [social-media platform] Tumblr,” Lynn said. “Tumblr has a really open community across a lot of different platforms.”
Through the site, she began to see that not everything had to be black and white, she said. There are options outside of straight and gay or man and woman.
Instead, she sees queer as a gray area and a place where doubt and ambiguity can be embraced.
“You don’t fit in a certain place or in a certain box, and you can be queer, and it’s cool,” Lynn said.
And, for the longest time, gender roles kept Lynn in one of those boxes.
“I definitely had a lot of time where I was doubting, where I wasn’t sure what was going on with me, and I was really trying to fit myself into a mold of a certain thing, a certain way of being, a certain societal expectation,” she said. “It’s sort of weird when you’re expected to be very feminine and have certain ways of speaking or approaching people or interacting […] For me, queer is that embodying [of] non-gender-binary.”
Being able to break out of the expectation of committing to one or the other in that binary paradigm of gender roles for Lynn involved finding communities that accepted her queerness, and while Tumblr was one such place, the arts was another.
“I think obviously the arts community is usually a little more open-minded,” Lynn said. “I have been more active in that to get to a more welcoming place.”
And as artists and onlookers knelt to write their definitions of “queer” on colored ribbons, the welcoming atmosphere flowed through the music of Mooney Starr and the laughter of art fans congregated around the exhibit.
One such person who shared their ideas was Cal State University, Long Beach professor Benny LeMaster, Ph.D., who works and teaches in Communication and Gender & Sexuality Studies. (LeMaster identifies with the pronouns they/them/their.)
“I see queer as intersectional and complicated, always changing and inherently political,” LeMaster said.
For LeMaster, finding their queerness involved journeying through prejudice only to be in a relationship that, from the outside, doesn’t look queer at all.

“I feel like I found my queerness through a constant-changing identity beginning as a gay person back in the ’90s when I first came out here in Long Beach when I was at Poly High School. It was a great experience, but also scary at the time. Also, I come from a religious background and went through a lot of conversion therapy and always grappled with who I am in the world,” they said. “Ultimately, I end up with a person who is a transwoman, and I am and am not in a straight marriage and have been for seven years. […] We’re both very queer, but we also, sort of through bureaucracy, become heterosexual in a weird way, but we don’t identify that way.”
Several artists who displayed art at the gallery also spoke about their queerness and their definition of the word “queer,” including artist Abbey Barnett, who showcased three photographs at the pop-up event, all created using disposable cameras.
“Each of them are two different photos that I’ve blended together to make one cohesive image,” she said, describing her art on display.
Barnett mixed together photos of nature with a photograph of herself and her partner and with photos of queer allies and musicians in Long Beach, she said.
She defines “queer” as a word anybody can use if he/she chooses, Barnett said.
“Queer is being yourself and understanding yourself through more than one label,” she said.
She explained that “queer” is simple for her because she doesn’t like using labels like “gay,” “lesbian” or “bisexual.”
“I just like saying ‘queer,'” Barnett said, adding that she views sexuality as a spectrum and that everybody falls somewhere along it.
“I don’t know exactly where I fall, and I feel like a lot of people don’t know either,” she said. “To be comfortable with that, I think ‘queer’ is a good word.”
The journey to finding “queer” as a word that she could define herself with started when she moved from Georgia to Long Beach, Barnett said.
“There wasn’t really a community at all for me there,” she said. “I kind of ran away from all that.”
In Long Beach, Barnett found people who directed her towards a word she felt more comfortable using.
“[I was] around all these people who kind of told me what queer was through their actions and through who they were as people,” she said, and that helped her move away from “lesbian” and begin to use the word she prefers.
Another artist, Dez’Mon Omega Fair, displayed two works of his that he painted using watercolor on rice paper.

“I like watercolor because you can’t control it. You really have to figure out a way to come to a compromise,” Fair said. “I’m always trying to figure out a way to take those ideals out of my art-making and bring them into my life.”
Art is a depiction of what is hard to explain, show and articulate through language, he said, and his artwork specifically looks to understand serendipity— those moments when something beautiful happens.
“There are certain things that I’m not controlling; I’m only suggesting,” Fair explained. “When I think about how I am making a piece of art and I’m living my life, there’s only so much that I can actually control, and I am trying to find those moments where things just seem to happen perfectly in the right direction in the way that I couldn’t have done by myself.”
Fair identifies as gay, but he sees his gender as a separate entity, he said.
“I think there is a female dialogue happening within me,” Fair explained. However, he said, he doesn’t have the words to describe what he is exactly, which is where “queer” becomes helpful.
“Being queer is seeing through illusions,” he said.
Queerness can also open doors, Fair explained, and, for him, it opened a door to self-acceptance and self-love.
“I grew up in the South, so I really had to understand myself and understand that everyone else’s opinion does not always have to reflect what I feel like what my opinion of myself is,” he said. “Understanding that I am correct in the way I am made and having to articulate that through painting [and] through activism is something that queerness does.”
For Fair’s partner, artist Nickels Sunshine, queerness also opens doors. (Sunshine identifies with they/them/their pronouns.)
“Queerness opens up new possibilities, like new ways of thinking about things,” they said. “I’m a dancer and a performance artist, so I think about how, as a queer person, my embodied experience might be different or special, or what new possibilities or ways of thinking and being in my body can manifest through just being queer in the world.”
Sunshine displayed three works, including a photo collage called “Oh There You Are,” which depicts a shirtless young man in blue jeans and a belt photographed in various poses. The work has a yellowed hue to it, and the photos are pasted in a circle.
“This is my queer body— prismatic, multifaceted,” Sunshine said, describing the piece. “It also has a reference to Narcissus seeing the reflection in the lake.”
John Thatcher Montgomery, a programmer for Harvey Milk Park, brought together the artists who displayed works at the pop-up art gallery. He identifies as queer because it is the space in which he feels most comfortable, Montgomery explained.
“[Queer is] self-expression to the fullest with no abandon where there is no weird— there’s only love and acceptance of everything,” he said.
And in this specific pop-up art event, of which Montgomery has hosted several at Harvey Milk Park since February, he wanted to focus specifically on queer and on that space of love, he said.
“[I wanted] to activate the space and particularly to have a conversation about the art economy and how we can actually create a rising tide for our LGBT community in terms of art-making,” Montgomery explained.

In order to help local artists, and specfically LGBTQ artists, Montogomery invited a group of panelists to speak about the art economy and how to market oneself in the world of the Internet.
Griselda Suarez, the executive director for the Arts Council for Long Beach, led the panel, which included Getting Your Sh*t Together, or GYST-Ink, founder Karen Atkinson, local queer artist Myriam Gurba and Curensea co-founder Sofia Chirico.
“The reason I call my company Getting Your Sh*t Together is that you never quite get it together,” Atkinson explained to the circle of people seated on the floor facing the panelists. “The art world is changing so drastically all the time, so you constantly have to know what’s going on and know the tools and resources.”
Atkinson herself is a longtime artist and teacher, and she uses her experience to make life better for artists, she said.
Gerba is a local writer and visual artist and high-school teacher. She works as an arts-and-culture reporter for KCET and has displayed her visual art in Long Beach.
Chirico co-founded an online artist platform called Curensea, pronounced like “currency.”
“What we do is provide a space for artists to post their work online and directly monetize it when there is any kind of ‘like’ or comment or share,” Chirico said, giving viewers the option to contribute a tip to the artist.
It is important for artists to have a web presence, but there is often little to no monetary gain from it, she explained. She and her colleagues saw a need for an effective way for artists to make money while promoting themselves online and came up with Curensea as a solution.
“We tried to create a space where it’s actually worth it to invest time to build the web presence,” Chirico said.
According to Montgomery, LGBTQ artists might feel vulnerable promoting their artwork, so the pop-up art event served to open doors— just as queerness opens doors— to making a career as a queer artist.