Go North, Young Transfemme!

Book learnin’ in the Pacific Northwest changed how LA educator Badly Licked Bear sees art

Early in my conversation with Los Angeles arts educator Badly Licked Bear they forced me to realize that I’d miscast them in my mind as a student. They’re definitively a teacher, by impulse and experience, as the conversation below reveals.

Part of why I had to wake up to my bias is my association with Badly before they were called Badly and had a name that is now deceased. They were in school back then, rejiggering their place in the realm of West Coast art.

If Badly Licked Bear’s PNW awakening had only resulted in their turn with Kristina Wong’s Aunties Sewing Squad—a Covid-era wonder discussed in great depth below—the trip would have been worthwhile. So much more has come out of it though, as this lightly edited interview shows.

Donnell Alexander: What is it that you do?

Badly Licked Bear: That’s a really fucking good question today.

I work as a writer. I’ve worked for most of the past decade as an educator. I’ve done a lot of mutual aid work around Covid, particularly with the Navajo nation. I have a history working as a performance artist and doing all sorts of art and creative things. I was a curator for 10 years before I retired and basically became an educator. I was burned out and also feel like the contemporary art world is totally bogus.

DA: We’ll come back to that one.

BLB: So, I mostly work as an educator, training animators and artists going into the media industry in Los Angeles, who basically are making the movies you watch. I teach people how to tell stories—I’m a professional storyteller. And that’s kind of the lens I see myself through right now.

But I’m also somebody who’s at a place in their career where a lot is changing. I’m doing different kinds of work now, and I’m not quite sure what my future in at least higher education is. I have no doubt that I’ll continue thinking of myself as an educator when I wake up in the morning, but working in a broken system… it’s inefficient. Let’s just say that.

You put a lot of energy out and it’s hard to give people what they want to give. I’m really thinking about what I want to do next.

DA: Let’s take everyone behind the curtain. This is the third time we’re doing this, for technical reasons. I feel like your affect is a little different this time.

BLB: I was in Denver last time we talked. I’m in my office here in LA, where I have my computer and a second screen and my sewing machines—I do a lot of work with sewing. There’s a squat rack over there. It’s like the little room where I work my shit out. [Laughs] It’s that 10 foot-by-10 foot space that’s yours, right?

But I’m definitely thinking about my work right now. Without getting into the weeds here, until I worked in a pseudo-full-time role as a part-time employee, and making quite a bit of money. Like, more than full-timers at my situation make. For a variety of reasons, I’ve seen my income with that institution drop from that role to almost nothing.

In the past 24 hours I’ve been very unsatisfied with my current employer, which is an institution where I’ve had a role as a leader—from the bottom, as it were—for a very long time. It’s also an institution where I’m very involved with my union and other stuff. It’s a terrain in which I’m working.

DA: I won’t push you too much deeper into that.

Here’s the thing: You think of yourself as an educator, and I associate you with being a student in the Pacific Northwest. That’s where my beginning with you goes. But you have a whole past in Los Angeles that’s neither of those things.

BLB: For real, yeah. From 2000 to around 2010 I essentially worked as a gallery director, program director, and curator in Los Angeles, in the contemporary art sphere. My work in that area was primarily in the realm of what’s called social practice. That’s practice that might involve communities or they might happen over time. I tended to specialize in funding new work by emerging artists and sometimes mid-career artists. Really incubating people, supporting people.

The contemporary art world is problematic and I still work in it. The other night, went to an awards dinner with a couple of friends who were getting awards. When a slate of awards comes out—whether it’s anything for the Whitney Biennial to California Arts Council awards, the COLA Awards—if there are 10 or 20 awardees, often times two of those are people I’ve had a role in their early career.

I’m not the only person who’s had a role in their career, but I’m very proud to be able to support people who I do think are doing important work. So, it would be a lie to say I’ve completely divorced myself from contemporary art, because I obviously make special guest appearances as a performance artist and artist—at my leisure. I’ve never derived an income from being a contemporary artist, so I’ve never had any notion that I have to hustle up gallery representation. Or, I need to be in the Whitney Biennial—the Whitney Biennial got announced yesterday, so it’s stuck in my head. And I’m happy. I know the Whitney Biennial is super problematic, we all talk shit on it, but I’m happy for my friends to be on that stage because it’s useful to them.

DA: I’m thinking of you as a student, so I have to ask: Was Evergreen State a kind of turning point in your life?

BLB: Oh absolutely. Like, totally, one hundred percent absolutely.

I quit my job and I needed to get out of Los Angeles. I knew that I’d been gate-kept from better gigs. I didn’t understand at the time that I was being gate-kept because I was essentially acting as a diverse person in a non-diverse field. Even when I wasn’t articulating my diversity, when I wasn’t articulating my anti-capitalism or my decolonialism—

DA: Let’s stop, because I want people to understand your diversity. You’re an adopted Native American person. Transnational adoption, is that the word?

BLB: No. Transracial adoption is the term. I always want to clarify this, because Rachel Dolezal fucked things up for a lot of people. Transracial adoptees are adopted out of our race. We don’t change race. Race is a very fungible concept. It’s a very malleable concept, but I was functioning as an outsider. I am also a high school dropout. I have a history of coming up pretty rough; I left home at 17, I’m queer.

I wasn’t really in command of my own outsiderness at the time.

DA: What does that mean?

BLB: I was comfortable being a weird person, and I was used to being the boss—because I was the director of programming. I was used to owning a gallery—I had made things for myself and cut out a space where I had power. But I didn’t understand how to use that power to help other people and I was really tied into very formalistic ideas about structure and art. So I wasn’t thinking socially in my work the way that I would now. Evergreen was the place where I began to put two and two together.

I left my career because I knew that I had been gatekept. I new that I was getting finalist gigs for stuff —people wanted me to be curator for international biennials and stuff. I would always be in the finalists, and I was never actually getting it. I learned that the weak link is me. I didn’t have any degree. If you looked at my resume, it was like, Where did this person go to school, and the answer was, “Nowhere.”

I just didn’t see things like that; I’m also from San Pedro, which has a labor history. I was working from the ground up, and the art world really values proximity to the top. I value proximity to the bottom.

DA: That’s a great line. I have to tell you. You said you’re being affected by the art world being bullshit. But you’ve always felt that way. What makes you say this more than ever, right now?

BLB: For most artists who make objects or create conversations about ideas via contemporary art, those objects and ideas are either functionally consumed as home decor by the richest people you have ever fucking heard of, or those ideas are in a loop of people who are basically at the upper-middle class or higher. It’s not that the people consuming contemporary art don’t get the ideas in it? It’s just that they’re not changing anything based on that work, right?

I don’t see the ideas I see expressed in contemporary art making change in the broader society. It’s not to say that they’re not useful. It’s not to say that I’m against contemporary art or something. I’m going to be on the planet for a short amount of time and I want to have the greatest impact that I can, as someone who tells stories and is interested in narrative. And is interested in seeing a very, very, very fucking unjust world change.

My students work on shit for, like, Marvel, Netflix, and stuff. My students are making work in a sphere where they have huge audiences that respond to their work, even if they aren’t “the director,” the auteur or something, they are a part of that stream of mass culture. I might be repulsed by mass culture and accepted in the world of contemporary art, but mass culture is where change takes place.

Mass culture is where radical change comes of the slow work of miracles that are at the product of decades and years of effort, whether they’re in the political realm or whether they are in the artistic or creative realms. So, I’ve chosen as someone who’s interested in art—because I’m interested in storytelling, and that is very much an art—I’ve chosen to move my sphere of influence and action to those kinds of narratives. There’s nothing that I’ve done in an art gallery that I think has fundamentally changed anything for anyone.

I’m saying that as someone who—and I’m not going to get into it—from the year 2004 to 2008 made work exclusively about pandemics. When the pandemic happened, I was sitting on a back catalogue like, I’m the one artist who did shit about this. I need to have a conversation about this. My options when the pandemic happened was like, Oh, should I force my back catalogue on everybody so that they can realize how brilliant I was or something? And I could go back to 2006 and live the glory I didn’t get then and get attention.

I had changed by that point. It wasn’t the work that I wanted to make. I was very much living in the pandemic that I had made work about [laughs] for a significant period of time. And again, making work about stuff doesn’t change stuff. I was in a show last night, an art show at Cerritos College. I’m in their permanent collection and the piece is from an exhibition called Cassandra, and it specifically talks about this. Literally, two weeks before lockdown I had a solo show at Cerritos College in LA that was called Cassandra and it’s got this apocalyptic imagery in it.

A lot of people had given me a lot of credibility as, like, a professional doomsayer or prophet of the apocalypse or someone whose interested in apocalypticism. But it doesn’t change anything. What did change something was that I got involved in mutual aid.

I delivered a pair of intubation isolation boxes for children. This is for if you have to intubate a child. It’s basically a plexiglass prison that you put a kid in so that they can intubate him and they can’t get anyone else sick. Once you’ve been transporting fucking triage gear in a pandemic that’s designed for the bodies of children who are probably… again, there’s no Paxlovid. There’s no fucking vaccine yet. The stakes get raised when you get out of the contemporary art world and the gallery the white box.

DA: I want to talk about that now. Can you explain what you did?

BLB: My dear friend and performance art colleague Kristina Wong kicked off an organization called the Auntie Sewing Squad, or ASS—that’s our acronym. The Auntie Sewing Squad is an 800-member national network. I joined as soon as I could. I didn’t know what I was going to be doing initially, but I knew I wanted to be part of this. It grew during that time. And then there are 10 Super Aunties in the organization, of which I’m one, who led certain areas or played special roles.

Kristina was going to do some partnerships out in the Navajo nation. We needed to send a lot of fabric and a whole lot of supplies, for them to make masks—to this group in the Navajo nation. This was a Facebook thing. This was the turning point: She said, “Does anyone have a car who can drive stuff out to Navajo nation?” This is the height of the pandemic. There’s no vaccines. You gotta be protecting yourself and others, all this shit.

And I know this dude—who I don’t think highly of at all—he volunteered and was like, “I could drive out there.” Now I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the Navajo nation, driving it and stuff. There’s, like, no services out there, no fuckin’ light at night. I’ve driven across it in ice and snow —there’s no snow plows out there, btw—

DA: Have you done that, by the way?

BLB: I just travel. I travel a lot in the Southwest, and the Navajo Nation is part of the Southwest and it’s a place that I’ve been. I didn’t have any substantial relationships in the nation before that project. I have many of them now. I’m Native American, but because of my adoption I don’t have tribal ID—totally fine. That’s my life, I’m a city Indian. A lot of people presume that I’m Navajo. I’m not. But I became the Navajo nation van driver. I have a cargo van and I’m like, that guy shouldn’t drive out there. I didn’t say that, but I was like, I’m volunteering the cargo van.

I said, It might be a little big and Kristina was like, Yeah. And then days later, she called me back and said, “We need the van.” Because we needed that much stuff. So, I started doing these relief trips out to Navajo nation.

In mutual aid, people like to highlight the 48-72 hours of the relief van trip. You know you’re driving out there, it’s “dangerous” because of Covid, all of this shit. Arizona’s right wing, and that’s when the photos get taken and stuff like that. When you’re handing stuff off, that’s the media side of doing mutual aid work. But really, each of those van trips took six-to-eight weeks of prep time to get the donations lined up, because I’m donating physical goods.

I was donating materials for people in the Navajo nation, which at the time had the highest Covid infection rates on the planet and then became the place with the highest vaccination rate in America, because it’s a community that cares about its elders. More than anything, it cares about its elders. I can tell you one thing about Native American communities in general. You can generalize: We all care about our elders. We care about elders in other communities. We care about elders anywhere.

That work kinda relied on the organizational skills that came out of my work as a curator: Lots of balls in the air, lots of juggling, lots of social skills, community building work. That work just changed me. It had a real effect on the world.

DA: You’re going back to the beginning. Changed you how?

BLB: It was sobering. I’ve been in Navajo nation. Nothing about the living conditions were new to me or shocked me or surprised me in any way, but in the second trip out there I delivered a pair of intubation isolation boxes for children. This is for if you have to intubate a child. It’s basically a plexiglass, like, prison that you put a kid in so that they can intubate him and they can’t get anyone else sick. Once you’ve been transporting fucking triage gear in a pandemic that’s designed for the bodies of children who are probably… again, there’s no Paxlovid. There’s no fucking vaccine yet. The stakes get raised when you get out of the contemporary art world and the gallery and the white box.

It wasn’t that the stuff was new to me, but I felt part of something that had a real effect on public health and my indigenous community—the broader indigenous community, which I was very disconnected from as a child. It was like someone shot me up with a speedball of Wake-the-Fuck Up.

DA: I’d love to see your book about that.

BLB: I have a book. The Auntie Sewing Squad has a book. There’s a documentary. There’s one of those things—you do a good thing, you get a lots of media.

DA: I was with a friend in Oregon. They’re a trans person who’s getting biohacking done. Do you have a thought on that, because I’d never heard of it. Does it have any bearing on the trans experience of the future?

BLB: Absolutely. The term biohacking kind of came out of Mondo 2000—underground people who were real freaks, who liked drugs and had a connection to the counterculture—Mondo 2000 was run out of a house in Berkeley. If you were in the early nineties and you were a certain kind of nerd, you were taking Nootropics, which are like brain drugs, and now you hear about tech bros micro dosing Ritalin to, like, be more efficient. All these dudes are on testosterone replacement therapy, to maximize. They talk about it: Maximizing, optimizing. In high school—maybe junior high school—I was literally one of these body-hacking kids, mega-dosing on, like choline to kick up the Acetylcholine in my head. I did this for a long time. And I was deeply involved in the body modification community.

I do consider Shannon Larratt, who was the founder of Body Modification E-zine—he’s no longer with us; he had a terminal disease you wouldn’t wish on anyone—a friend and a colleague. I considered him a mentor in some ways, the kind of mentor you don’t always agree with, which is like best kind of mentor; you’re kind of going back and forth. I miss him dearly.

As someone who’s trans in the trans community, a lot of us are engaged in various kinds of biohacking. We don’t trust the medical establishment, even as we have access to it. We spend oftentimes years or decades basically learning what our options are, medically, those of us for whom medical transition is relevant. And a lot of us are weird nerds for weird science and we do weird things to our bodies.

I came out of the body modification community, as a teenager. I had a big septum ring. I was the person at my high school with piercings; I was that person. I got that when I was like 15, I still have the hole and can put stuff through it. Now I’m scared that if I put something in my septum people will be like, Oh, you’re just trying to have dyke credibility [Laughter] It’s like, I’ve had this fucking septum ring for like, 30 years.

It was big, and I had a lot of earrings. I still have big-ass holes. I really did identify with the modern primitives movement, as problematic as that movement was; it deserves both a reckoning and a history.

DA: I always learn new things that are problematic when I talk to you. You’re like the problematic updater!

BLB: Like, we all had dreadlocks at some point!

[Laughter]

The modern primitives is lot of people who aren’t Black, with dreadlocks, who appropriated their dreadlocks from Pacific Islander and Sadhu Indian culture. It’s one of these things where it’s complicated, right? It’s not not appropriation, but it was going in a different direction.

Often times biohacking is where we find ourselves.

DA: Oh.

BLB: This is the easiest way I can talk about it: Transgender people in the United States are acutely aware, and have been for decades, that we do not have autonomy over our own bodies—even if we have the independent wealth to be whoever we want to be. Like, Caitlin Jenner money. Or Dylan Mulvaney money, and our transition is something you can buy on the market. Even if you are one of those people, you still have to have—as far as I know—letters from a therapist or multiple ones in order to get this done. Same surgeries that cis women get because they have insecurities or because the want bigger tits, because they’re a sex worker and it’s part of their income, any number of reasons. We have demonstrated that we are pathological: that we have body dysphoria. They don’t make 16 year old girls who want a nose job go to a therapist and say, “Suzy has gender dysphoria because her nose is damaging her self-esteem.” She can just buy a nose job.

So, we have all of this gender-affirming care for straight people, for cisgender people. On Facebook I’m getting constant advertisements for testosterone replacement, which is fucking hilarious to me. And a friend of mine knows 10 dudes who are on it. Dudes are really into it, and not just tech workers. He’s from Massachusetts and knows 10 dudes.

We’re all biohacking, but I can tell you this about control: As someone who was involved in the body modification community as a child, four days after my 18th birthday I was in San Francisco having some very serious work done to my genitals. We’ll just leave it at that, right? I said this at the time, and I will say this now: I wanted to have control over my body and my sexuality. People want to have control over their bodies, or they will lose their shit. Transgender people do not have and have not had control over their bodies. They’re always being pushed into the medical underground. We order drugs from Canada when we can’t get them. We do all of that underground, gray-market shit. So of course we’re going to be doing some weird shit.

I recently wrote an article for RISD and I outlined my Estradiol, which is estrogen injection routine. My estrogen injection routine is literally timed and dosed to the cycles of the moon. This is weird, queer, spiritual shit, right? And that’s not what my doctor told me to do. It’s not that far away from it? But we are fucking in control of our bodies.

DA: In one of our early talks, I don’t remember the specific language of it, but it had to do with your sexuality as expressed in art. Do you remember the language of the question?

BLB: No, not at all. I’m getting old, and my memory is a rusty steel trap. [Laughs]

DA: You’ve been a part of some fairly extreme sex scenes. I think I was asking how you’ve been able to express that in what you do. Not just as an artist, but in all of these things you do.

BLB: I’m a very sexual person, much more than most people. That’s colored my life in a lot of ways. Particularly in the last four years—but even before that—as a queer person, as a trans person, as someone who’s been involved in BDSM and leather communities in particular, sex work has been a large part of my life at various points. Not personally, like I have a long history as a sex worker—I do not. I’ve done work in the industry. I’ve done a lot of writing for sex workers. You know, I’m the person writing the Twitter posts—you know make the girl with big boobs look clever. They are clever, they’re smart people. They just aren’t professional writers.

I certainly had what I view as quite a bit of survival sex in my 20s, where I wasn’t paying rent places and didn’t have a choice in who I had to sex with. I think that’s a much bigger conversation than we’re having in our culture, because normally it’s associated with homelessness or drug users or street level extremes. So that colors part of my life. I’m part of a leather community. That’s part of my daily life in many ways. And I don’t have any sense of shame about it, that it needs to be segregated from the rest of my life.

This comes up in my classroom from time to time. Or, within my educational practice within higher ed. Like, I wrote an essay for a zine put out by the California College of the Arts last year that was something called Three Things I Learned on Planet Sex Work. Which was was designed as advice for students, because sex workers have a lot to teach people. Sex workers are a certain kind of laborer and they have a certain kind of knowledge that has benefitted me, even outside of sex work.

That’s always been a part of my life. It’s what I’m interested in. It’s where I spend some of my time. I do educational work within the BDSM community, and I find that very rewarding. It’s a very different teaching than what I do in the classroom, but also not so different, you know? At this point in my life I do try to keep a balance between those things but I also, I really don’t want to live in a world where any kind of cultural or professional sexuality is somehow segregated from the rest of the world.