This video utilises my recent swarm of filters of progressions/regressions to explore considerations around the popularisation of drag within mainstream (cisgender-heterosexual) popular culture. I thought about reading Kate Bornstein's My Gender Workbook in 2000 when i finished art school and the early internet days of creating Other, different identities - genders to inhabit as a point of process. Reflecting on my recurring feeling of fierce protectiveness around the esoteric parts of my own queer sexual and gender identities, as they became popularised online, even if I was a more passive participant in some forms, or attempting to be an active cultural producer in others. 

“Who owns you?” is a Newfoundlander phrase I grew up hearing, but less so after I came out and chose to LOOK queerly. 

How/Do we hold onto a queer semiotics where so much of our richness comes from plurality? Where our histories of mentorship and knowledge are bound up in sexual trauma, internalised homophobia and state and familial erasure, how do we discern what belongs to queerness and what (seriously what) sits outside of it? 

I know that I’m not an owner of queerness, nor even of my own experience, nor memory.