New York City’s LadyLand music festival arrived on Pride Weekend, one of dozens of weekend outings available to the city’s queer and trans population and those traveling in from out of town for the festivities.
I wasn’t sure what to expect, given how complicated the idea of celebrating during Pride right now feels.
People love to call NYC a liberal bubble, but just like everywhere else in this country, we’ve seen hospitals pull out of providing youth gender-affirming care and increased physical attacks on queer and trans people since the January inauguration of a president that campaigned in part on anti-queer and trans rhetoric. Headliner FKA twigs has faced visa problems this year in order to perform stateside, as the heated policing and contestation of the U.S. border continues to make headlines.
So while I came to LadyLand to party and dance and see the cutting edge of dance and pop music — not to mention headliners like Cardi B — the politics writer in me also wondered how people were, y’know, really feeling.
Like last year’s festival, the fashion was superb. (I’ll largely let it speak for itself via photos from Teen Vogue's very own Skyli Alvarez.) Just like at WorldPride in our nation’s capital earlier in June, I witnessed countless “Protect the Dolls” shirt ripoffs and handmade homages to the original made by fashion designer Conner Ives; a particularly inspired trio of friends had bedazzled black baby tees with the slogan.
I started my Saturday night chatting with up-and-comer Cortisa Star, a rapper out of Delaware who I first saw perform at a local Brooklyn trans dance night that also serves as a mutual aid hub. That was just a few months ago — since then, Cortisa has walked for Miu Miu in Paris, gotten written up in Pitchfork, and was on the cover of THE FACE magazine. I ask if she’s shell-shocked at how quickly it’s all happening.
“Especially compared to, like, my small town in Delaware, I'm doing crazy things every day,” Cortisa says, perched on a couch in a blessedly air-conditioned backstage trailer. She tells me she’s preparing for a three-week tour in Europe; the first time she had left the country was earlier this year for Miu Miu.
“My grandmother thought I was lying,” she laughs, regarding the show. In the future, Cortisa hopes to continue pursuing modeling, as well as someday even launching her own magazine. Watching the crowd during her set — a crowded and raucous party, with easily ten other girls up on stage with her, including her three sisters — it all feels possible for her.
Back in the trailer, behind a cool, friendly exterior, Cortisa was feeling the pressure of doing what she does while living in a country that legislates against her existence. “People really do hate us,” she tells me matter-of-factly. “They want us gone, but we gotta keep popping. That's the only resistance we have, is popping in their face.”
Looking at 19-year-old Cortisa, with her doe eyes and braces, her rocketing-upwards star and her brash, powerful presence, it’s hard not to think about how young trans people consistently permit the world to see their creativity and vibrancy, undeserving as it may be, amid the anti-LGBTQ+ legislative onslaught. Several states across this country would’ve banned the festival’s sets: During vogue icon Kevin Aviance’s DJ set, the word “c*nty” ricocheted over the crowd, the ratatatat sounding the starting bell of a ballroom strut.
The handwringing induced by being chased around by fascists couldn’t penetrate the energy of the festival. Before a transcendent performance by FKA twigs, attendees were treated to a reading of Zoe Leonard’s famous poem “I Want a Dyke for President” by event organizer Ladyfag.
During the title track of twigs's latest album Eusexua, as she eerily cooed, “You feel alone/you’re not alone,” the crowd rush, which jumped and swayed in time, helped tell the lyrics’ story. As she closed out the weekend, twigs shared that her music only existed because of the queer community, as so many pop stars have expressed before. LadyLand felt like a space that didn't even need that validation — they just knew.
I went to LadyLand last year with a loved one awaiting gender-affirming surgery, and we saw a girl looking all the world like '90s Kate Moss in a post-facial feminization surgery head sling. I’ve thought of that girl most days. In the year since, trans communities have lost so much, but so many of my trans friends have also been able to access surgery and start HRT. Things change. Resistance sprouts, despite the forces constantly trying to squash it. I think of a phrase I saw scrawled on a wall elsewhere in Brooklyn last winter captioned with “Free Palestine,” a line attributed to the poet Pablo Neruda: “You can cut all the flowers, but you can’t stop spring.”
The purple and pink in the sky faded to periwinkle, the sun’s sleep letting the heat release somewhat. I saw hand fans snapping with the beat at a further-off stage, could nearly hear their thwacking. I glanced up and spied, then briefly caught hold of, a lightning bug, which crawled along my palm then took off, looking at first like it was falling.
I asked Cortisa Star if she had any final messages for readers at home. After a beat, she says, “I want all the tr*nnies to know that we are powerful. We're gonna take over.”
