Selected Clips

All articles are for Them unless otherwise noted.

Profiles/Scene Reports

Longform cultural reporting, you know the vibes.

Silver Iocovozzi Is Leading a New Wave of Queer Food Culture*

“It blows people's minds that simple food could taste this good, and I think that's a lot of what Filipino food is,” he says. There is also, I might add, something distinctly trans about this alchemy that transforms simple ingredients into a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and about reclaiming the repressive conditions you are dealt — whether colonialism, the gender binary, or both — to dream something new into existence. 

*I won the 2024 NLGJA Award for Excellence in Food Coverage for this profile.

Jes Tom’s Wayward Tales of Transsexual Horniness

That careful blend of emotional vulnerability and sardonic self-deprecation is a constant throughout the hour-long performance, which touches on Tom’s lifelong obsession with death, the lesbian-to-trans-faggot pipeline, and stepmom roleplay — sometimes all at once.

Mauree Turner Is Looking Beyond the Ballot Box

“I love that I go walk around my neighborhood and that we talk to each other,” they say. “It’s nice to just exist here.” When they travel elsewhere, Turner says, they feel “shockingly queer” all of a sudden. An avid movie enthusiast since their library days, they liken the feeling to the scene in Barbie in which the titular doll and Ken enter the human world for the first time. But they love Oklahoma City and hope to make it “a place that feels comfortable for everybody all the time.”

How SYRO Melded Beauty and Violence to Create Their Iconic STILETTO Bag

As much as SYRO exists as a personal mission of reclamation and revenge, Han also emphasized that at the end of the day, “femme is sexy. It’s fun.” Like that dialectic of beauty and pain, femme, for SYRO, holds many truths at once.

Welcome to Club Shortbus, Where Queer Sex Party Meets Cabaret Theatre

Meanwhile, the person in front of me was probably my age (25) or younger, a huge fan of the original film, and had traveled from the midwest to New York just for Club Shortbus. He had just started doing drag in his small town the month prior; when I asked him why now, he said that he’d always wanted to, but didn’t feel comfortable doing so until he started transitioning. Then, a friend of his finally pushed him to start performing, and so he did.

Criticism

Trans Stylists and Makeup Artists Are Reshaping Red Carpet Looks. Will They Get the Credit They’re Due?

All famous people are subject to intense scrutiny, especially when it comes to their appearance; adding transness on top of the usual pressures of fame heightens the stakes immeasurably. Much like the general trans population, it makes sense that rising trans stars might adopt more normative forms of expression in exchange for a greater sense of safety or stability.

Fantasmas’ Bizarre, Late-Capitalist New York Is Utterly Absurd Yet Painfully Realistic

In general, Torres’ comedy excels in building out seemingly simple concepts to absurd effect. By taking the bureaucratic logics that govern our world and stretching them to their extremes, Fantasmas lays bare with devastating clarity the absurdity — and the profound emptiness — at the heart of American society.

From “Girl Dinner” to the “Sassy Man Apocalypse,” 2023 Was Full of Cringey Gendered Memes

Trans humor, broadly speaking, is deeply ironic and often absurd, occasionally veering on the outright offensive — and it works because it operates on that shared understanding of gender that you articulated. I think many cis, straight people have witnessed the ways that queer and trans people playfully engage with gendered signifiers, whether through Drag Race or through Twitter jokes, and have tried to put their own spin on things. But they’ve ended up re-inscribing the very gender roles that queer/trans humor subverts.

A conversation between myself and Them’s senior culture editor, Samantha Allen.

Album of the Day - Pantayo, “Pantayo” (Bandcamp)

Alongside joy and desire, there’s a concurrent underlying rage, made explicit in “V V V (They Lie),” which sounds like Carly Rae Jepsen if CRJ had generational trauma from centuries of colonialism, and the furious rap-punk of “Taranta.”

Q&As

Jerrod Carmichael Knows His HBO Show “Doesn’t Make Him Look Good”

The impulse to confess is the beating heart of both Christianity and the modern-day internet; Carmichael crystallizes that instinct into its purest form to nauseating but compelling effect. The show’s eight episodes made me feel viscerally uncomfortable, more so than anything else I’ve ever watched on television. Yet I would also be lying if I said that I didn’t recognize the worst parts of myself in it, which was exactly Carmichael’s intent, he tells me.

From Trainhopping to Trans Anthems, Hurray for the Riff Raff’s New Record is an Instant Folk Classic

It took Segarra a fair amount of healing to feel comfortable actually opening up about their life in their music, which they do on The Past Is Still Alive in tender, intimately rendered detail. From their first encounter with a trans woman to a rallying cry for people to carry Narcan, the songs on the record are woven with all of the grief, rage and love that has carried Segarra and their beloved “riff raff” through a world that pushes them to the margins.

Kate Bornstein and Kelindah Bee Schuster on Art, Parenthood, and Gender as a Four-Dimensional Concept

Witnessing the rapid-fire rapport between Bornstein and Schuster is both electrifying and unexpectedly moving. Mentorship and found family are longstanding organizing principles of any queer community, but it feels like a rare gift to be able to witness such an intergenerational pairing — the 76-year-old Bornstein is more than twice Schuster’s age — especially one as aligned as these two.

From a Tiny Studio in Brooklyn, Late Stage Live! Is Queering Late Night

It’s by no means a slick production, but the writing is well-researched and genuinely hilarious, especially when delivered by [Ella] Yurman, a trained actor who has a tendency to start listlessly reciting Shakespeare monologues between takes. Late Stage Live! is not the first to meld Gen Z’s Dadaist sense of humor with sharp leftist political analysis, but it may be the most daring in its radical sense of optimism amid our generation’s doomer tendencies.

Personal Essays

There’s Nothing More Romantic Than Falling in Love With Your Friends

But for once, I refuse to let romantic love be the sole force that keeps me alive while the revolution brews. I have accepted that the world will end a million times over, and that as long as I want to live in it, I must find modes of existence that aren’t just living like there’s no tomorrow.

Searching for Trans Belonging in Puerto Vallarta

What kind of new social and sexual possibilities could we imagine beyond the scripts that have so far defined gay travel culture? What would it take for me to let my anxieties about being trans in America melt away and revel in the warmth of sunlight on my bare body?

How Captain Kirk Helped Me Define Masculinity (StarTrek.com)

My identity may not make sense to a large portion of the world, but Star Trek also taught me the old standby of Vulcan philosophy: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. To me, that crucial tenet means making space for all the potentialities of who I am and will become.

Service Journalism

6 Top Surgery Recovery Tips to Stay Calm and Comfortable as You Heal

From tips for your first bath post-surgery to how to organize meal trains, this collectively-sourced advice will hopefully help you avoid some of the discomforts that your medical providers may not warn you about.

A Beginner's Guide to Hormone Replacement Therapy (VICE)

When even basic access to care is difficult, the more granular questions about medical transition can feel hard to parse. But we’d like to help! VICE spoke to several experts on trans health care to clear up some of the most common nitty-gritty questions people might have about hormone therapy

A Guide to Primary Care for Transgender Patients (The Paper Gown, Zocdoc)

With help from experts, we put together a guide to primary care for trans patients — what to look for in a PCP, which healthcare services different groups of trans patients need, what challenges to be ready for and more.

News Reporting

6 LGBTQ+ Students on Finding Queer Kinship at Pro-Palestine University Encampments

Them spoke to six LGBTQ+ students at college campuses from Michigan to New York to hear why they occupied their campuses and how queer kinship has been an important part of their encampment experience.

Other Media Appearances

How To Start Hormone Replacement Therapy - NPR Short Wave

Reporter James Factora explains where to start, common misconceptions about HRT, and the importance of finding community through the process.

Netflix Draws Criticism For 'Anti-Trans' Comedy Specials - The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC

A new comedy special on Netflix has drawn anger over comedy specials that critics and LGBTQ allies have called transphobic. James Factora, freelance writer and reporter, and contributing writer at Them, shares a view of the controversy.

Filipemo - Sounds Gay Podcast on Stitcher

How do our identities get fused into the sounds we make? In this episode, we witness the birth of a song co-created by two friends. What they come up with turns out to be an intricate portrait of gender dysphoria and Filipinx identity.

All articles can be found here.