Actually, this was is a special edition made June 2021 by in the occasion of Bergen Art Book Fair 8 Midimart 3. Love. Photo by Pamflett.
I was on the phone recently to my childhood friend, we phone maybe once every second month or so. We used to phone and play video games with each other but recently he has said he does not want to play league of legends with me because the community is so toxic. He tends to play video games that are immersive and where you get full customisation of your character. He says he likes to challenge the gender stereotype by picking a support position such as a healer then he will set his gender to male. This is his way of challenging gender stereotype online. When we phone, he updates me about the look of his character and the promotion of his role. He works with a lady who lives in America who has her fashion brand online. My friend wears the fashion, swims around in her latest look. His payment is that he is gifted the outfit. He is a mermaid and welcomes new mermaids. He has fallen out with a few people on the game because they ask to discord, to hear his voice and when he refuses, he is excluded from further conversation. He wants to keep a distance between himself and others. Some of the people who he gets closer to will prompt him about his personal life, like who he is dating. Online and offline. They expect a man. If he gets a sense of this, he will eloquently-aggressively tell them to fuck off and mind their own business. My friend asked me, at our most recent call, what I was working on. I began to explain a video of a boy dancing alone in a club that I had filmed in the only gay club in Bergen. He asked me if it had to be a gay club. I said ‘yes’. And that Bergen only has one gay club. He said that labels were outdated. I agreed but then reminded him of the time we first moved out from our in-the-middle-of-nowhere high school. We moved together to a larger town. He lived on an island in the city where there was a gay club. I remember when we had just turned eighteen, we would prep ourselves up to go out. The first time we went way too early — we weren’t aware of the cool time to arrive, the time you have pre drinks with your friends, and then smoke four cigarettes out the front and chat with the not-so-scary-anymore doorman. But at this point he is scary still and we wonder in half an hour after the doors open. 3 dykes are sitting at the bar and stare as we walk in. Eyes follow us as we awkwardly look around. 3 blue-red-green alternating patterns of a panning of 3 sad lights. We hear the mechanics of the rapid twists in between what seems to be a lifetime transition of the most recent Beyoncé song; ‘who run the world? — girls girls girls’. A song that would become our little anthem every Saturday. Perfectly timed lip-sync, shoulder grab, locked into each other, and holding each other. Let go. Hip pop. My hands on his chest. Jokey sexy dance. Highlighting his slim body and popping-white new H&M white T-shirt. Then, a pull away. So we do not own each other and let that be known to any potential seductors. The first time I saw my friend share a kiss was in this club on a later Saturday night. We had been drinking, and both him and I had kissed strangers that night. Not our type, but these were rare gay kisses, so they were special. Close enough to the type. Benjamin wrapped his legs around Jean-Luc, an older man with a small beer belly and a butterfly neck tattoo. Jean-Luc picked my friend up. I looked away but looked to check he was enjoying himself. Today Benjamin resents clubs for being too pornographic. That the way we enter a club and look at each other is overly sexualised, he thinks we are animals. This was a place where my friend could have a kiss, have no one see the kiss than anything else than a kiss. In this place that was named gay bar. This was for others a secondary trait of gay kiss. First kiss before anything once. That he could feel safe from other here. We felt normal. And Beyoncé’s Run the World (Girls) became our soundtrack to our Saturdays and the sound of our normal. At the same time we spent money on buying more white tees because we couldn’t get the armpit stain out of our old Saturday’s and were too young and fresh to know that bleach was ‘a thing’. We consume white T-shirts, Beyoncé and RuPaul quotes become part of our vocabulary. And we place ourselves within the community. I noticed that if I wore a baseball cap I would kiss more girls, if I didn’t have the cap I would kiss more guys and I became aware of what I am and who people see me as. I didn’t not want to be seen but I didn’t like having such a stupid binary cap on my head. The music grew redundant and our choreography grew tired after we had mastered Nicki Minaj’s Super Bass going ‘this one is for the boys’. Eventually our pre-drinks grew longer. We would empty the bottle and stay at home dancing to the same songs in the club and recording ourselves in Benjamin’s web-camera. Benjamin was a better dancer, and his mission was to teach me so I could follow as a perfect backing dancer. We would dramatise a meeting. We would pretend we were in a club. I am sitting down and he comes over to me, makes an advance, and offers a dance, and then, boom, we would break into the choreography. We would record these moments and re-watch them. The next time we would put on makeup. Benjamin would do my hair and we would play getting ready and drink and stay in pyjamas with battered up faces. Glitter would grow in the creases of our faces. We had consumed the club and lived a fantasy of our own club. Press record and save the dream in laptop. We came out to Friend. She had a gay gang, they watched The L Word, went to different gay bars, and we went with them. He was funny and loud and they loved that. I was intimidated going from our sacred duo to group. I lost my baseball cap and I got more and more shy. And got less and less invited to the parties. So, I stayed at home and watched YouTube clips of other people who were alone facing a camera. They started taking testosterone. 1 month their voices are this deep. This is what my voice sounds like 3 years on testosterone. I would mouth out the words in my head. A yearly compilation and fantasy of what the voice would sound like. Years later after the videos and a few years on testosterone. ‘Has the voice in your head changed, too?’ I smiled at this ambiguity of double meanings or existential questions that perhaps we are creatures of a divine understanding that surpasses gender. You are put into a pedestal of insight. Which to some extent you are like ‘yeah I actually do have an insight on gender that may be of value, having experienced life being perceived as a woman, a man, a trans person.’ I emailed the Bergen local medical center, they were conducting a payed experiment on sound and how the brain responds. I needed money and thought this could be a fun idea. I wrote them an email. ‘Hello there, I would like to take part in your experiment, but I would like to mention before that I am a transgender person and have being taking hormones for over 3 years now. Will this be a problem?’ They responded that ‘they would have to check with their supervisor’. A few days later they responded. ‘Unfortunately, we are uncertain how the hormone will influence your body and could affect the results of our test. Unfortunately we have to say that you may not take part in this experiment. Thank you for showing an interest.’ I told them how it is a shame that people like me are left out of the scientific field yet our bodies are easily medicalised and politicised. Yet never seem to be included in research because we are making things a little more complicated than a binary category. As a trans person I miss out on a paid job, but most importantly, we get erased from a study about music. So, I will continue to take my chubby trans body down to clubs, and experience the un-recorded effect that sound has on my brain. I feel that my body is political because it is in constant activation. In a place where we can feel free to kiss whomever we like, a space where you can dance drunk to Beyoncé’s single from 10 years ago now and have a political meaning that they have failed to understand because it is not classifiable. When I first arrived in Bergen, even before arriving, I looked up on Google ‘queer night Bergen’. Nothing. New try: ‘Gay bar Bergen’ and ‘Fincken’ came up. I checked out their Facebook page and it brought me back to when I was eighteen and we would see bodies and gay flag colour schemes painted over every possible item of clothing and body part. Copy-pasted ‘Pride’. And Beyoncé popped into my head again. I knew they had and were listening to it like us. When I got to Bergen, I was identified as a man. Deeper voice. And dancing to Kylie in Fincken made me feel so gay. I repeated what I had done 7 years ago, I danced, because I had just moved and needed to find a home that was welcoming and accepting and overtly queer. I saw dads pushing prams, women working in construction, and feminism seemed to slip easily from the tongue. Even words like feministic — which I had never heard before. Is this it? Is this the Eldorado of a perfect society? One that was equal or strived for equality; I never knew it would be one that recycled and philosophised about ‘queer’ and ‘black’ and ‘visible disability issues’ at art conventions with very few queer and black and people with visible disability actually present in the room. There seemed to be ‘no dirt’. And then I realised that the anger that had built in me when supporting and dancing in Paris was merely a reminiscing feeling. Everything I had been dancing for disappeared and I felt alone. We sit in groups and talk as the sweat dries.
