Ria Brodell’s More Butch Heroes Brings Queer + Trans Ancestors Back to Life
By Rivka Yeker
There are a few moments in my life that have seismically altered my trajectory: the first time I fully admitted to myself who I was, the first time I fell in love as a queer person, the first time I got my heart stomped on, the first time I read Stone Butch Blues, the first time I saw a production of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home with my best friend, the first time I read Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp”, the first time I picked up Butch Heroes and read it all the way through. Repeatedly, in every one of these instances, I was begging to be seen by someone, including myself - or an ancestor, a God, a stranger, a fictional character, a real person. It was lonely to be told that what I wanted didn’t exist - then and now, all the things that I desire in this lifetime are too frivolous, difficult, unreachable, untenable. I yearn to break the parameters of what we think is possible. Ria Brodell shows us that many before me, before them, before all of us, have felt - and done - the same.
I sat down with Ria over Zoom a few months ago. More Butch Heroes had just arrived at my house a few days prior, and I was gluttonous for new stories of my beloved trans + butch brothers from the past. My initial ask of Ria was, “What are you currently working on?” as if an artist needs to be in a constant state of work! Their reply was much better than my question, “Right now I'm taking a break honestly. Butch Heroes took a lot of work mentally and physically at the end of that series. I feel like I spent so much time on one thing and I need a good couple years to kind of reset, you know?”
It makes sense - the toll of laboring over accurate and specific research to actualize a book like this is a lot. I checked myself, validated their break, and reminded both of us, “That’s why they have fellowships and residencies - let me go create without the pressure to produce something.” I noted that it was integral to an artist’s process. Sometimes nothing is something. Ria replied, “We need to absorb new information, experience new things, and just have some downtime to chill. That’s what I'm loving, just spending a lot of time outdoors and focusing on different things. Over the summer, I was doing macro photography for the first time and just looking at all kinds of bugs and crazy stuff.”
When I asked what their favorite bug was, they said, “I'm in love with jumping spiders. They're the cutest freaking spiders. Crickets are pretty cute; I didn't realize how cute crickets were.” I tried to imagine it, looked up a photo of a cricket, cocked my head slightly to see their perspective - and it kind of worked. Bugs up close actually are sort of cute. Of course, Ria followed up with something deeply profound.
“I think there's a connection there to transness and queerness. It's comforting for me to know that all of these beings exist in so many different forms and so many different places, and they have all these ways of surviving and thriving. We're part of this world, you know? In general, we forget that we're also animals. We're necessary to the system as much as they're necessary to the system. As trans folks, there’s comfort and beauty in that.”
As the general globe - and the US government - tries to deny this concept, Butch Heroes actively reminds us of our longevity and perseverance. So many of these stories have been hidden or forgotten about or erased. I asked Ria how much they had to sift through in order to find real information about these people. They explained, “It was dependent on the person itself and their story. Sometimes not much. Sometimes all I could find were two little snippets in a newspaper. One of the last paintings I made for Butch Heroes was a person whose name wasn't written down, but they were called “Papa” by their child. And with them, I only found two little snippets, maybe one or two lines in newspapers in North Carolina. I basically wrote down what was there because I had no other information. Then with people where there's a lot of information, Esther Eng for instance, who's in this second book or Anastasius Rosenstengel aka Catharina Linck. There were a lot of them because it was such a famous trial. I'm gathering everything that I could find from multiple sources. And then I'm just writing down the bullet points, like okay, what are the facts here? When were they born, what are the names they use? Where did they live? What were their professions? 'Cause often, they had multiple facts of their lives. What could I find that they said about themselves? What did other people say about them? And then after I gather all those things, then I write my own summary, but with each one, I try not to input myself at all.”
Though Brodell’s artistic background is heavily in visual art and painting, they have had to become a master archivist and researcher by taking on this project. They are very adamant about it not being an editorial and that these stories are factual and from primary sources. Occasionally, after cross-checking academics and newspapers, they have to explain that some stories are perceived as fake. Again, when the majority of the people find someone’s reality to be a spectacle or a disgrace, the truth can easily get lost in the fluff. They explained, “Sammy Williams and Joe Monahan had fictitious narratives written about them. That happened a lot. Two scholars, Emily Skidmore and Peter Boag, wrote that newspapers wanted to sell copies of their papers and wanted to make sense of these stories to their readers, and so they would legit just make stuff up.”
So much of queerness was just masking in society when in public. Everyone knew Tchaikovsky was gay, but he wasn’t publicly queer. Similarly, Russian and former Soviet Union poet Marina Tsvetaeva wrote an entire collection of poems titled Podruga, which means “girl friend” in Russian. Tsvetaeva happened to be my mom’s favorite poet, who I heard about my whole life, but didn’t realize was actually queer until I was searching for a gift one Mother’s Day many years ago. My mother never explicitly told me this until I confronted her. She said, “Yeah, it just wasn’t a huge part of her life.” To the hetero eye, maybe they just didn’t understand. Podruga was written for Sophia Parnok, who was an out lesbian poet in the USSR. Through Parnok, Brodell discovered Olga Tsuberbiller, who blew my mind. Brodell expanded, “Olga was amazing to find. Olga just lived her life. It's one of them that didn't have a bad ending. They were surveilled, but other than that, who wasn't surveilled, really?”
Olga was a famous mathematician and garnered respect through that, which was sort of the way out as a queer person. My babushka always says that all the artists and talented people typically ended up being gay. I laugh at the irony, but it is what cultural capital allotted to people. It was some sort of conceptual token of “safety.” Everyone knows, but no one is saying it. In Olga’s scenario, it is the best case solution. In other stories, the butch’s wife or neighbor or mother-in-law tells everyone - or the court - that the butch is not really a man or is a lesbian. Some examples of this were of Hans Kaiser and Mary de Chaumont en Bassigni.
Brodell reflected on the current administration’s fearmongering of queer and trans people, and their own concern about how people will react to More Butch Heroes. They said, “How are people going to respond? What questions are they going to ask of me? Because yes, I wrote these books, but I don't have any insights or advice or solutions for this madness.” To which I told them, the books and what they're helpful for is reminding people, especially young people, that we've always existed and we've always had nuanced, interesting, complex lives. We have always faced some sort of tension with our governments and our society. We have to make a choice: do we want to live as our truest selves or do we not? That's the question. This type of oppression has also always existed. I told them that I’ve shared these stories with queer teens and I see it like trans chicken soup for the soul.
Of course, my favorite stories are the ones where people are respected and can live their lives as themselves. There’s Sitting in the Water Grizzly or Qánqon Kámek Klaúla and Biawacheeitche or Woman Chief, who were Indigenous queer people that are remembered positively within their tribes or were spoken of with deep respect when they were alive. In More Butch Heroes, Brodell found additional positive stories. They reflected, “Sam Pollard lived with a schoolteacher in Minnesota. They’re buried in the same cemetery. Just the other day, I heard from some trans folks at the Fort Missoula Historical Museum. They’re putting together an exhibit for Sammy Williams and asked to use his image. They visited his grave recently and found little queer offerings left there. The gravestone had been restored.”
Little by little, these stories bring ancestors back to life in a way they were meant to be seen. Amidst unending doom and fear, Brodell’s Butch Heroes shows that queer + trans people have always existed and lived with dignity no matter the circumstance.