Good morning, peeps, and welcome to look f Daily with me your Girl, Daniel Moody pre recording from the Home Bunker. Folks, you know, during this Pride month, I think that it's really important one to have conversations about the origination right of pride, being a riot, being a pushing back against police brutality against LGBTQ plus community, but particularly black trans women.
And I oftentimes give you the headlines, right we delve into the headlines which are heartbreaking, which are traumatic, and so it is my hope that during this month of Pride, that we're also having conversations about joy, which is why we named and themed along with our friends at GLAD the theme of Pride for WOK at this you can't ban queer joy, and so I'm really excited to bring to you this conversation today with kit Yan and Melissa Lee,
who are award winning queer Asian American musical theater writing team based in New York, and they have been using art and theater and musicals with their stories to talk about the LGBTQ plus community, but through joy, through dance, right through characters that have depth, and not through our trauma and pain and So Kit and Melissa and I get into a really great conversation on this episode about the power of art, the necessity of joy as an
act and form of resistance, and talk about their musicals and their work which is award winning and really just joyful and exciting. So I hope that you all enjoy this episode, folks. I am very excited to welcome to wokef during our Pride coverage this month, Kit Yan and Melissa Lee, who are award winning Queer Asian American musical theater writing team based in New York City. They are the winners of the twenty twenty two ASCAP Harold Adamson
Lyric Award twenty twenty two. In two thousand and seven, Jonathan Larson grants the twenty twenty one Club CLEBN Prize and the twenty nineteen This Award, and have their first musical, Interstate, won Best Lyrics at the twenty eighteen in New York Music Festival, and their second musical, Misstep, was commissioned by the Fifth Avenue Theater's Draft Program, received the twenty nineteen Divese Award from the Brett Adams and Paul Rice Foundation.
So you all are just clearly badass, clearly, clearly everything you both touch turns to gold. So let us open up with talking about your work and why it's important in each of the musicals that you have put out to center the stories of queer folks and diverse people.
First of all, it's an honor to be here. Thank you so much for having us and Happy Pride, Happy Pride, thank you, and we are super excited to chat with you today about our musicals. I'll just maybe tell you a little bit about them and then Melissa, please we can talk a little bit about what they mean to us. Yeah, let's see, we have two main musical projects. So the kind of writing we do is we work in theater, TV and film, and in musical theater specifically. We have
two musicals. One is called Interstate and it is a semi autobiographical musical about two best friends that go on the road, a transgender slam poet and a lesbian singer songwriter who just want to share their art with the country and along the way they inspire Henry, a sixteen year old South Asian dacy transgender teenager in Kentucky whose family, community and church do not support him to go to see a show of theirs, and that it's loosely based
on our own lives and journeys, because in two thousand and eight we quit our jobs. We both were living in Boston performing monthly at a queer Asian drag cabaret bar variety show type thing. We quit our jobs. We got on the road and we went and did what the two characters in Interstate did.
Wow, oh way, I love this.
Okay. We were equipped with a Toyota Corolla Corolla, a rice cooker, a hot water boiler, and a hot plate, and we just we went to about thirty four or so states and performed at at venues like coffee shops, cafes, open mics, and then San Francisco Pride was the West coast cap of our tour.
Amazing. So wait, let me so let me ask you this during your the actual you know tour that you guys were on and going into these different states, like what were your like did you go into you know, the Red States and like were you like how were you feeling coming in as you know, as the quote unquote other Like what did you have concerns where their fears?
Like, yeah, that's such a great question. I think when we left, we were pretty young, and we were like kids said, we're both geminis, and we were like, let's just go on tour and like share and like share our music and and you know, try to I think for us, you know, we you grew up in Hawaii and we met in Boston and I grew up in Boston, and we just wanted to break out of our bubble. We were like, we want to we know there's queer people that look like us across the country, and we
want to find them. We want to go perform and put together our own tour. So when we did it, we weren't thinking about those things, to be totally honest, I think we were just like, okay, like Ohio, like you know, Cincinnati, like where is like the you know, the queer youth. Whatever. We'll just play, We'll crash at someone's house, you know, We'll we'll go to like a college, you know, in Chicago. We went to Appleton, Wisconsin. We stayed at someone's house and we played at like Harmony Cafe,
which is just like a quick cafe there. And we talked about this recently because we're doing a bunch of rewrites on Interstate and we were actually saying, you know, like we had a great time on the road, and part part partly it was naive day, you know, part
right right right, we were having a good time. We weren't paying attention to any of that, and partially you know, sad to say, like the political climate has gotten much worse now, like correct words now where if if we were going on the road today, Again, we're older now, so we're more mindful, but also I think we would have been way more afraid.
Yeah, I'd be a little more concerned just about our safety, just because like I'm an openly transgender artist and and we're both very openly queer. We write stories about queer and transgender people of color, and our main characters are often queer and more often transgender, and so we when we used to go on the road, it was like a really fun time. But that was like kind of pre social media boom, and so it was two thousand and eight when we weren't as connected on the internet
as we are today. Yeah, people, we were doing a lot of education in those days. I don't think we largely have to explain transgender or queer to most people we meet nowadays. In twenty twenty three. But back then we identified in those ways and sort of went on the road and figured it out collectively. I think I'm not even gonna we didn't know what we were doing back then.
But you know, I think that that is like I think, well, one, that's the beauty of youth, right like this, you know, the idea that like we can just do whatever we want and do it right. And I think that that's the beauty of being artists too. Is kind of is the risk taking. Like you may not have seen it as a risk, but like you're saying now, in reflection and as you're doing these rewrites, you know, how would
you move differently? The question that I have for the both of you is, you know, from from two thousand and eight right to twenty twenty three, as you just alluded to, the country has seen a real regression in acceptance. Right like two thousand and eight, we're welcoming and cheering the first black president, you know, entering into the White House.
We're thinking that America is quote unquote post racial. We're thinking we are part of this you know, Obama coalition, and look how diverse and open and welcoming, and we're watching during this time, you know that the White House would turn rainbow, same sex marriage would be past. The conversations that were happening around the LGBTQ plus community were largely positive. Right about the winds that were happening fast forward, we are so fucking far from that place, you know where.
And you said, KIT like that you don't feel like in twenty twenty three you have to necessarily explain transgender and explain queer two people. But I'm like, we have an entire right wing Republican party that is weaponizing people's ignorance, is what I will say around the transgender community. So how do you feel about while thirty percent of people in America? And this I remember this because back in the beginning of the two thousands, it was at eighteen percent.
Eighteen percent of Americans knew somebody that was transgender.
That number has.
Now a little more than doubled. Right in twenty twenty three, it's about at thirty percent, But there are still seventy percent of the population that has never had any interaction with or knows somebody that is trans So how does that land for you in terms of how you both try to create normal narrative normal you know, stories, comedies
and what have you. How does is what you're sharing in your work educate and inform in a way to kind of bring people along in this process of trying to better understand and in your work you're actually able to aid in using art and comedy and music to be able to aid people in that learning.
Wow, you know what's so interesting? You have totally just opened something in my mind about Interstate specifically and the time period that it sits in, because that music call is a parallel journey. There is an older transgender person who is based on me, the slam poet, going on tour to share his identity and figure out his identity
with the country. And then there's a teenager isolated in a bedroom by themselves in the South who sees this person and is figuring themselves out and is inspired by seeing that art to go on a journey of their own. And so that's making me think about the fact that like two very separate things are happening in our art.
We have never really set out to educate the general public about any issues or identities, but we know that we have a responsibility as artists to people who hear our work, even if we don't set out to do that necessarily. And so I think what's funny is in Interstate that the Dash and Adrian, the main characters of the show, they are going out to partially educate the world slash share their art and open themselves up to
that kind of vulnerability. But our art, I think largely sits in where Henry is, where it's like we're making a lot of work that is sort of like for us, by us, for us. Yeah, using our own language, using our own culture, and exploring I guess like that through our art. So I guess it's just makes me think about in that show that whole thing's happening at the same time.
Yeah, I mean there's a couple of things I think, Like one Kit, when you said like, yeah, we didn't go out to set out to educate, I actually find personally the best art is not the kind that people go and set out to educate, right. The best kind of art that actually ends up educating people is stuff that doesn't explicitly do that, right, stuff that's just a
reflection of the stories or of our lives. Right. And I think just to I think just say it, maybe a different way that you had said it too, Kit, is that like it's it's actually for us, our activism is around, is around telling and uplifting the stories of our communities. That is so needed. Like especially in the theater. You know, I think we do have some representation. When I say we, I mean I'm really talking about trans
non binary folks. Uh who I'm sis so, but but yeah, like I think like there's a lot more in in film and TV, and I think, like you know, theater, particular musical theater too is even more specific, is a little bit behind. So so for us, like you know, coming from a place of queer joy, coming from a place of not trauma, not retelling stories that people have
already heard is really important. I think the more honest we are about us and the stories we want to tell, the more our communities will feel uplifted.
Totally. That's not to say I don't we don't respect education, lectures, book, that sort of thing, but they all sort of work together in a way. Like we as artists, we a lot of times when we set out to create something, we have more questions and answers. So when we're writing, we're processing, like what's happening with the characters the story,
what's happening in the world around us. We're certainly not immune to the state of the world when we're writing as well, And that's all sort of like working together as a vehicle for us to ask important questions about ourselves, our community, and about where and the times we're living in.
Yeah, you know, I think that that's important. I just want to touch upon what you said about about queer joy because I do. I feel like it is so necessary to have stories that are uplifting, that are funny, that are you know, that are centered in the good as opposed to the continued. And again this is not to this is not to discredit those who create work that is seeped in trauma right in order to show
society's impact right on individuals or on particular communities. But there is something about I just you know, I sit in misery all day. I followed the news on a regular basis and have created a career around politics, and so the opportunity to really see joy as part of the resistance, right like the whole our whole mantra is along with Glad's mantra, is that you can't ban queer joy. You can ban all of these things, but that it's important to show trans people, non binary people, queer people.
It's just people live in lives, dance, singing, you know, carrying on. And I just, yeah, I I respect that that that you said that, because I I do. I think that if we just see trans people, particularly as just the statistics of what's bad, right of of the murder rate of suicide, if I'm only talking about that, I still don't believe that I'm really talking about the entirety of the experience. So how do you Yeah, so,
so how do you all see now? And you only talked about your your your one place, so your your one musical. So I want to give you the opportunity to talk about this step. Let's talk about that, and then I want to ask you a question about just how we're moving, how we're how we can use art, musicals, plays, theater as kind of escapism from the misery right now and your and your thoughts around that.
Yeah, that's a perfect segue because talking about queer Joy. Because the next musical that we've been working on is called Misstep, and it's an eighties dance aerobics musical featuring an all trans lead cast that is like in their thirties, forties, fifties like, and it's like a twenty person dance cast. And it's just it's truly is that. And the show is essentially it's about Pam, who's like a middle aged trans woman who works on the New Jersey Turnpike and
living a boring, happy life. She calls herself unremarkable and essentially her her father, who's a strange of her, passes away. She has to go home to deal with the funeral, and when she gets back, she opens a box of his stuff and realizes that he was an aspiring aerobics competitor, aspiring champion and never got to compete. And so, in in order to an effort to get to know the man that she never knew, she assembles a ragtag group of trans friends to try to compete in the regional competition.
And so, you know, I think, yeah, and I think that's just been such a joyous project to work on, not just for us, you know, behind the you know and behind the stage, and also also the folks on stage as well. Getting to embody characters that don't die, you know, getting to body get that don't you know, have you know all these other issues that they have.
In real life, Being trans is not part of the story.
Yeah, and being trans is not the mate. It's not something we shy away from. It's very explicit, but it's also not really the driving story.
Right. Actually, I want to take that all the way to the personal because I think that's really important and relevant to this discussion. Is the reason why we wrote the show is because Interstate is about eleven years in the making. We have been working on that thing since twenty twelve. Yeah, and doing deep introspective, self reflective work, thinking about our lives, thinking about the state of the country, thinking about queer and trans young people, and really really
diving into those kind of themes and questions. At some point, like you said earlier, Danielle, you need a You do need an escape, and you need a break from all of that stuff. So my escape when we started writing Misstep was I was going to step aerobics classes in Long Island in the Export Fitness in the basement of
the Roosevelt Field Mall. And so I was like in this basement just doing step aerobics with like mostly women who were significantly older than I. And that was the first time in my entire life that I really felt free in my body as a trans person. I was like, oh, dancing is fun, Like I can dance too. I didn't really think I could dance before. I didn't really think that movement was something for me. I don't do it well,
but I had a lot of fun doing it. And then and so I kept I kept sharing with Melissa this joy that I had found within my own body, which was like, I love Stubb aerobics and it's so fun and everyone should do this, which it's kind of a hard sell. It didn't really come back, but I loved it. I loved it. I still love it, and so that sort of led us to go down this path of writing this joyous musical centered around the body.
So in Misstep there are some very deep themes around bodies and being trands and women's bodies and impossible beauty standards that and trans people in sports, all of these things that existed in the eighties and and now. There are very very big questions that we had, But the show itself answers those questions by asking, like, what if these this group of people went and found themselves by dancing.
I think that that's so interesting because I think, well, I mean, I know, I'm assuming that you chose the eighties because that's when step aerobics and like all of the video that the you know, the the VHS's and all of those you know things, because I know that my mother had a step, had a step in the
house and like had those videos. I remember doing like wanting to be like earths and doing it as as a little kid, and I you know, when I watch it now on TikTok videos of people like they're wild with it, like it's you know, it's actually really cool to see the evolution. How do you see though, like those the different discussions and themes that that you brought up kit around you know, uh, body dysmorphia around you know, your feelings of being in your body as you're as
you were writing this. Have we shifted in any way in terms of how from the eighties, which you you know you case this in, have we shifted? Have we grown? Do you think in our way of how we think about the body, body images and feeling both for CIS folks, particularly women who have to meet these you know or forced into these unrealistic beauty standards, but then also for for trans folks.
Yeah, I'm not. I don't really know if I'm I'm having a hard time thinking about if and how things have changed. I guess things are always changing throughout time. When I think about like the impossible beauty standards of eighties aerobics, it doesn't feel too far from seeing, yeah, seeing people on TikTok and wanting to be like wondering how you can be like that, or seeing something on TV and thinking like, oh, yeah, maybe I could be
that that movie star or something like that. But what I will say that I have seen is like more I think because of social media that still exists and now there are lots of other people sharing their stories and creating content, and that feels really important in terms of just thinking about like who I am and what I who I could be. It's it's like really heartening for me to see lots of trans people on the Internet, and people of different bodies and different ethnicities and abilities
just sort of like sharing themselves and being seen. And so I do think that they are certainly more examples of people different kinds of people out there are. Is that translating into greater opportunities for stuff that we make to be produced. That part is why I said I don't know, yeah things have changed or not, Because, particularly in the theater, we write these kind of stories. We're
very true to that. It's a very difficult path. Creating an original musical is probably the most difficult path in the theater you could take because it costs the most amount of money. It takes a lot of people. You have to sing, dance and act at the same time.
We're a very specific, trans specific casting yep too.
And so has the world shifted so much so that we can see those stories on stage right now? No, But last night at the Tony Awards, two Binery folks Wantoni Awards, Alex Dwell and Jay Harrison. So I do think that things are changing on stage behind the scenes, I haven't felt a giant leap from twenty twelve when we started writing musicals together to now. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I mean it's you know, on one hand, hopeful right in terms of in terms of the Tonies and that kind of representation. We see more representation I think in front of the screens right on TV and in film, but it's you know, there's still a lot of work to be done for those that get, for those that have green lighting power, right, those that are the money people and seeing value in in quote unquote non traditional stories.
Yeah. What that says to me is that trans people can be seen as someone else, but not themselves.
Oh damn, Oh you said a mouthful there. Yeah, yeah, okay, last question for the for the both of you during this during this Pride season, you know, what does Pride mean for you at this at this time? How are you showing up to Pride this year?
Does Pride mean for me this season?
I think, well, I don't know. Maybe you start first, let me think about it a little bit.
Okay. I am thirty nine years old. I just turned thirty nine two years ago.
We are old gay.
Well, haven't gone to Pride in quite some time. Because you need to prepare for Pride. You need to get a group together, or you could go by yourself. You gotta get hydrated because you're in the sun all day. Yeah yeah, get on the train and fight through the crowds.
There is actually a period of time where we stopped going to Pride because it was too capitalistic, and we just went camping with our gay group of friends, and that's that's just as good of a pride for us, honestly.
Yeah. So, actually, friends i'm thinking about, your question is so right on, because where you're catching us right now, I'm going to just describe what we're doing right now. I'm in Montreal with Melissa and where she.
I'm turning forty on Saturday.
Yes, it's celebrity, thank you. And so these two weeks we're both working on interstate and many friends are flying and driving in to celebrate. Yes, many queer friends are flying and driving in to celebrate Melissa's birthday. And it pride for me. I'll I will never disassociate that with being a riot, a protest fighting for our rights and a movement led by trans women of color and black trans women, And I think about what they were fighting
for or asking for. It's unfortunately not too different than the things we're asking for now, which is the ability to be yourself, the ability to live, body autonomy, basic human rights, a place to live, eat, sleep, be with your families. Like that stuff is what pride is about. To me, is for like it started as like a fight for those rights and freedoms. And so this week, as we're in Montreal, and we're just not necessarily going
out to the nightclubs and stuff. It's celebrating at home, barbecuing on the rooftop, making chocolate moose from scratch, teaching each other how to do those things like that feels that kind of family, community, chosen, family building is that's the stuff that they were fighting for. And that's something that I certainly never want to stop celebrating. Is like, yeah, the families were creating during the season.
I love that. I love that.
Yeah.
And and and for me, I think, you know, I came out when I was eleven, so when I went to Pride, I was like thirteen fourteen. This was in the nineties. And yeah, and and what's interesting is that now we've we've moved on to a phase where maybe we don't go out and we and we you know, hold the flags and do all that stuff. But what's Pride for me is actually little bit about a little
bit about hope. I think like what's inspiring is that actually seeing younger people, you know, and people that were like us when we were kids and we were in college and having all of that energy to like go and like you know, support and shout and protest, you know, go to the Dike March, do all of that, and so for me it actually is really hardening sometimes to see the young folks come out and really yeah and celebrate and bye for our rights.
When our friend group is having kids now, so we're talking about bringing the in the newborns to Dike March and it is so full circle.
Yeah, I love that the both of you are fantastic. I could honestly talk to you forever. Thank you so much for making the time to join wok F kit Yan and Melissa Lee, thank you so much, and thank you for your work. And how can people just lastly, how can people follow you? How can they how can they get connected with the with the work that you're doing.
Let's see, we're on uh Instagram and we have websites. So my Instagram is at kit Yan Poet and then it's kit yanpoet dot com and we're we're about to launch a joint site. Yeah.
Mine is Melissa Lee l I dot com uh, and you can find me on Instagram anywhere at melsa boo. And also you could find Interstate at Interstate musical dot com as well as Misstep Misstep Musical dot com Oh that's.
Right, awesome, Thank you both.
Happy pride to you. Oh, thank you, and thank you for having us such a joy to chat with you. You're so wonderful and smart and generous.
Thank you guys. That is it for me today. Dear friends on woke app as always, power to the people and to all the people power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.