I remember watching my father playing drums in the park in the summers of my childhood. On Saturdays, he'd come prepared with his two canvas-covered congas waiting in the back seat of the car and a red milk crate of percussion instruments to share.
We'd drive by the park or the lake and he'd listen out for the sound of others playing. I remember his face lifted up the sky when he played, eyes closed. He seemed to be aware and not aware of the other drummers, the dancers, the audience, of his children by his side who were beating out a 2/3 rhythm on the clave. I remember the iron smell of his sweat, wanting to be strong like his hands were strong, and the promise of being transformed through music.
What is creativity? Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way writes that "our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity." Designer Tim Brown describes it as recapturing the playful, uninhibited improvisational state of childhood. Creativity is inherently queer, in that it can take us out of the normative stories of our lives that we've been given, and reorganize our relationship to our bodies, to family and sense of place.
In Summer of 2013, The New York Times asked artists as well as readers from all over the country to share moments when they were inspired to pursue a creative life. People listed Buffy, sculpture, The Simpsons, a trip to the opera at age 5. As I read these creative crush stories, it made me want to collect some from our own queer community here in Chicago, to think about what sparks link us.
Who knows? These stories might spark a crush in you, too.
"hop scotch on federal street with the fire hydrant opened up. me and my sister mopping the floor for mama with old ratty t-shirts, we didn't have much money then and nothing made mama happier than a clean house when she came home from school. and soooo many beads in my plaited hair, ( i did it all by myself! ) swoosh swoosh, clickety-clack time i turned my head. hula hooping on front porches. and sneaking off to the bathroom to find me turning grown. my crush, reverberating from everybody's everything, touched my spirit-self, where s/he shimmied, shook." — Misty DeBerry, Performance Artist.
"His talent to cut the rug in a suit and pumps softens the butchest of bikers. The ability to contort his face in concert with the rest of his body celebrates grotesquery in its finest. Pee Wee Herman. At age seven, the word 'camp' was not part of my vocabulary, yet it got me, and it still gets me…through. I had no idea that homosexuals, let alone genderqueers, existed, even when staring one down in the mirror. Yet, there I was, every Saturday morning in front of the TV, crouched forward in my awkwardly female body, studying, imitating, flaming, becoming." — Rae Langes, Performance Artist ( sites.google.com/site/ralanges/ ) .
"Was my first creative crush a metaphor-crazed singer-songwriter? A Broadway diva? A feminist poet? A discordant jazz track? A political manifesto or two? Which brash and unconventional female, which critique of normal, led me to become a queer-form-loving essayist? My first serious literary crush was Doris Lessing's five-book and somewhat autobiographical Children of Violence series, which I binge-read as a young woman living alone in a studio apartment, marveling at this epic portrait of a character named Martha Quest who refused convention and witnessed the 20th century imploding. The sleepless weeks I spent reading these books are rewriting me still." — Barrie Jean Borich, writer.
"I can still list the first three albums that I ever brought. I had to put away my Samantha Fox cassette tape—a hand me down from my mother's collection—and was still recovering from the revelation of Milli Vanilli's betrayal of public trust ( Can we continue to blame it on the rain? ) But there in my hands I held the first three items that would spark my own creative journey: Boyz II Men's II, The Mighty Ducks 3 Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, and Alanis Morisette's Jagged Little Pill.
"It was the latter that most resonated with me as a childhood friend and I reenacted an imagined lived concert in front of a VHS recorder, working our way through Morisette's collection of iconic '90's hits. While I don't think I quite understood the nuances and complexities of her anger, hurt, and confusion, I still attest that I gave my best performance to date in front of that camcorder, a spatula as my microphone. Unfortunately, that VHS tape suffered at the hands of my mother, who went on to record over it the latest episode of All My Children, but the memory—and the moment of imagination—live on." — Asher Diaz, multimedia artist
Francesca Royster is a Professor of English at DePaul University, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, Popular Culture, gender, race, sexuality and performance. Her books include Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era ( University of Michigan Press, 2013 ) and Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon ( Palgrave, 2003 ).
