It's 7:30 p.m. at the Center on Halsted, and the Youth Space was quietsave for the lull of a faraway air-conditioning unit. A handful of people sat scattered over three couches. To the right, someone finished off a bag of potato chips. To the left, a young person consulted the handwritten page of a notebook. The number of organizers nearly matched the number of attendees.
If this was the site of a groundbreaking event, no one told the audience.
But every third Thursday of the month, transgender Chicagoans do something unprecedented in their communitythey step up to the microphone.
T-OUT Mic might be the first transgender-led open mic in the country. For a community that often laments that "in LGBT, the 'T' is always silent," the feat is not small.
A version of T-OUT Micbegan more than a year ago when June LaTrobe, the transgender liason at the Center on Halsted, saw queer open mic at Urban Café and fell in love with the idea of hosting a trans-led version. She convinced friend and musician Jami Bantry to organize it. Bantry scheduled the open mic at the Center month after month, but almost no one showed.
"I thought, 'Geez, this maybe isn't going anywhere,'" she said. "But we stuck with it."
In July 2008, Urban Café closed, freeing Lars von Keitz and Scott Free, who had been organizing the event. Scott Free had an idea.
"I thought it would be cool to keep it a trans-run activity, but open to everybody," said Free.
Free put von Keitz and Bantry in touch and offered up his own sound system. Bantry and von Keitz renamed the event "T-OUT Mic" and advertised it widely.
T-OUT Mic has grown considerably since. Some nights, the event pulls in 30 participants. On others, a smaller group of regulars performs round-robin.
Trans film director and musician Madsen Minax said that safe spaces for trans musicians are scant. Minax's recent film, Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Musical Performance, explores challenges that transgender musicians vocalists face in debating taking hormones.
"Having feedback is essential to knowing how your voice is being perceived," he said. According to Minax, the trans music scene has exploded in the past four years, and trans performers have a community for the first time.