The trans queer poet and educator runs awQward Talent, which teaches the freedom to just ‘be’
On the lower level of Seattle’s Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, J Mase III stands in front of a small group of people eager to learn about artist sustainability. He is wearing a gray T-shirt with the words “Don’t Get Too Close” on the front and “I’ll Turn You Into Poetry” on the back. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there’s also a real possibility you’ll appear in verse. This is because Mase’s life is written in many stanzas.
After a brief introduction, statement of preferred pronouns and a slight nudge for more energy from participants, Mase begins. The session, which is titled “But Can I Pay My Rent Tho?!: A Workshop on Artist Survival,” is a part of the We Out Here Festival: a six-day event in late June honoring and celebrating black excellence and sharing resources. Mase asks the people to think critically about their work: to identify themes, their ideal audience and to identify how much time they have devoted to their craft. Mase speaks to the group with ease and a confidence rooted firmly in a strong sense of self.
Mase describes himself as a trans queer poet and educator. In the fall of 2018, he held a TEDx talk in Los Gatos, Calif., titled “What Coming Out as Trans Taught Me About Islamophobia.” In it, he called out white “progressives” for choosing politeness over justice, among other issues. He also runs an organization that supports trans and queer artists of color called awQward Talent.
“Author” is another title that the artist goes by. “If I Should Die Under the Knife, Tell My Kidney I Was the Fiercest Poet Around” is a collection of poems, and “And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer’s Reflections on Grief, Unemployment, and Inappropriate Jokes About Death” is a self-published book that is part poetry, has a Grieving Bill of Rights (No. 1: You have the right to cry in public places) and offers several blessings to trans people. One states: “Thank you for calling yourself into existence.”
The book can be read straight through, or the reader can jump around and absorb what speaks to them. He writes it from the perspective that black transness is the default, which is an important distinction for him.
“Usually as a black trans person, oftentimes when we’re writing, we’re writing with the understanding that the people reading it don’t understand our experience,” Mase explains. “Which is a waste of time on my end and the reader’s end, because I want to believe that people are smart and that they can get to a place in which they will meet you there.”
As a full-time artist, Mase travels a lot. Three years ago, he left the Northeast and relocated to Seattle. He’s performed at various local and national events, including the Capturing Fire International Queer Poetry Summit and Slam in Washington, D.C. In Seattle, he was a headliner at the Trans Pride Parade on June 28 with Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi, with whom he co-edited the “Black Trans Prayer Book.”
Before he became a full-time poet, Mase worked for nonprofit organizations and in higher education. It was while he was working in the latter that his life took a dramatic shift. Mase had relocated from his hometown of Philadelphia to New York City in the fall of 2012. His grandmother died in December that year, and then, a few months later, his father died. He’d experienced people close to him dying before, and he thought he would bounce back quickly. That’s not what happened. Mase was close to his father, who he called Sir, and the grief manifested itself physically.
“People are like: ‘Oh, you know, and the world keeps moving.’ It doesn’t,” Mase said. “If you’re actually grieving in a certain type of way, it doesn’t keep moving and you have to really figure out what is even your reason for being on this planet right now, because these are people that are cornerstones of why you exist. You have to find a new reason to be.”
Mase said death is often never just one trauma. He returned to work only to be fired six weeks after his father died. He shares how it happened in the book and includes a candid haiku for his former boss. Mase reads the termination letter twice at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, because, he tells the crowd, “I left my glasses home again and it was hard to read in the 10-point font of capitalism.” It leaves the room jubilant. A warm New York spring day awaited him after he left work that day. “I’ll tell you: that day was birthed just for me,” Mase recalls. “I think Sir wanted something more from me than me sitting behind a desk.”
Mase veered off the traditional path of work toward freedom. His favorite poem in the book is “Zone of Rarity.” It begins with him recounting a dream where he was cuddling a human-sized platypus. He became obsessed with the mammal and connected with it because it didn’t fit into a conventional assortment of traits. Platypuses don’t have teeth, so they use gravel to help break down food, they nurse their young without nipples, and their bill is considered a sixth sense. The poem reads in part: “Underwater it senses electrical pulses to find its food and the things that it will prey on. It reminds me of myself and the ways that I sense bullshit and decide what kinds of energy I will or not feed on even when you think I am a joke that my body is weird and strange even when you call me a thing a thing I am not.”
Mase said that even at the doctor’s office, he’s made to feel that something happening with his body is abnormal, even though he knows it isn’t because other trans people have experienced it as well. He came out as queer at 15 and trans at 19, and a couple of years ago, he started medically transitioning.
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Mase also uses the poem to talk about the legacy of trans people being regarded as spiritual healers, which isn’t common knowledge.
“When people, such as conquistadors like (Vasco Núñez) Balboa or other folks, would see transgender, non-conforming people, they specifically sought to not just kill us, but anyone that was connected to admiring us or uplifting our value,” Mase explained. He brought this up to make the point that transness isn’t new and erasure was intentional.
“Despite all that, we still exist,” Mase said. “We’re still kind of manifesting ourselves out of our own capacity and our own will.”
Before Janet Mock signed an historic multimillion-dollar deal with Netflix and Pose on FX became a hit show, Lucy Hicks Anderson, a black trans femme living in California from 1920 to 1945 made headlines. Then, there was jazz musician Billy Tipton and We’wha, a Native American Zuni Two Spirit, who lived from 1849 to 1896. She was an advocate for the Zunis and was known for her weaving and pottery. She met President Grover Cleveland in the 1880s. There are many others who didn’t rise to the ranks of recorded history.
Mase is radical in the sense that he’s living life out loud. He does not apologize to anyone for who he is in a society that shuns what they don’t understand. Further, he gives the readers of his books, the people he encounters in seminars and anyone consuming his writings permission to just be.
He’s motivated by people, like a teenager he met at an event who wanted to take a picture with him so that he could show his parents there are queer trans Muslims. Mase is also showing targeted communities that art is an accessible method for work and a tool for survival.
Courtesy of Real Change / INSP.ngo
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