Los Angeles: A Troubled Entry

LA was incredibly fun and and we spent our nights wisely and productively having Shonde-fied adventures (see LA tourism entry for details).

However, we didn't play our LA show. We had been really excited about it - it was a bill of queer local bands, and we'd never played LA (well, technically, Long Beach) before. It had also been a day or two since our last show, so we were ready to perform. We piled into the van and 45 minutes later pulled up to the venue - a local family restaurant and bar.

As we pulled up, we registered the restaurant’s 'Old West' theme, conveyed by a mural across the front/outside wall; we all took note of the racist, stylized image of an 'Old West Indian' (naked, kneeling, with war paint, etc.), and were really troubled. We weren't entirely surprised, of course, because racist images of indigenous people and appropriated aspects of indigenous culture are incredibly common, and the normalization of these images are part of what makes that particular kind of racism function.

We stood by the van talking for a while, mostly to think through the implications of playing and of not playing. It became really clear that there was no 'good' thing to do - not playing, at a very basic level, felt like sticking to an anti-racist bottom-line in some important ways: 1) we obviously don’t want to support businesses that cavalierly invoke genocide to create a retro ‘old west’ aesthetic. 2) But also in many white-dominated, subcultural spaces (including queer spaces), there's often a tacit consent to racism/racist imagery/cultural appropriation, often in the interest of kitsch value, camp or humor. As white people entering that space, there was no question that we needed to undermine the normalization of the imagery in some way. There’s also often an implicit/not so implicit classism in that kind of kitsch- like isn’t it funny to come to this white working class or lower middle-class bar or restaurant where there’s this funny racist stuff that “we” don’t normally see.

On the other hand, playing the show would provide an opportunity to have a conversation (in a different way than if we weren't playing) about the image (and what it represents) in that space, a space where we were passing through, and a space we had no relationship with. Playing would mean starting a relationship with a seemingly really vibrant LA queer community; nonetheless playing would be, at some level, an implied consent to having a “radical” show in that space, and that felt totally unacceptable to us.

We spent some time talking with people in the other bands, getting into questions about what it would mean for a non-local band to vocally take on racist imagery at a local space, versus what it would mean for them, as local acts, to take it on. We talked about how if we were at home in Brooklyn and found ourselves in a similar situation with a venue, we'd take it on with the space and with our community. They talked to us about how the restaurant was one of the few good show spaces in town, and that the evening's show was one of the first (and few) queer and feminist events to happen there. As we continued to talk with the bands both inside the space and in the parking lot, something started to happen. The conversation intensified and people talked about what challenging and calling out that racism would mean for them, as locals. People also talked about the work they are doing to make space for women and queers making music, particularly at this venue, and the representative weight of us not playing the show. We want to support that work, and they began talking about what it would mean for them to challenge racism as part of the space they were creating. It was a hard scene to walk away from - charged with anger and ideas in a way that felt really productive.

Throughout tour we have been talking about the privilege of mobility and of traveling across the country - a country none of the four of us have ever seen this much of, and yet in many ways are accountable for and to. There is no way to slide through the U.S. as a privileged band on tour with *any* kind of consciousness (let alone explicitly radical politics) and not deal with questions like this one.

So we're very committed to continuing this conversation with the bands we were supposed to play with in LA. We're also committed - as we have been, but in a way that's reinforced by this concrete experience - to being really conscious about what spaces we play, how we interact with those spaces, and how we maintain an anti-racist bottom line in our creative work that is both unwavering and has the ability to open up space for conversation about what that really means. Cause after all, as one of the other band members there reminded us, racist and classist and misogynist and homophobic shit happens in all kinds of art and food and community spaces - and though that may seem a little obvious to anyone who's either thought about or experienced it, it's crucial to remember that fact, and to keep it visible.