Jet Noir

Jet Noir, Noir Photography

Jet Noir is a founding member of Black Manarchy Male Revue, which will be on display Friday night, August 17 at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco.

Facebook: facebook.com/JetNoirMuse Instagram: @JetNoir Twitter: @JetNoirMuse

Questions for this interview contributed in part by Angsty Andy:

What influenced you to get into burlesque originally? Is this the same reason you are doing burlesque nowadays? Why or why not?

JN: “A friend was asking me to help her out with an act and she wanted me to sort of be a living prop [an Oscar, shaved body covered in gold] in her act so I helped out…what kept me in burlesque was that from day 1 no one ever made me feel like an outsider. There is no sense of exclusivity, no sense of ‘you don’t belong here.’ In fact, I was embraced by the community when I first moved to the Bay Area… I have always been part of burlesque since I moved here in 2010. Recently someone asked me the question ‘what is it like about performing burlesque’ my immediate response was the autonomy. I can create something from concept through completion and no one is standing over my shoulder telling me what it should or should not be and the people that produce shows and hire me to be in those shows support me and let me be.”

What observations have you made in the demographics of burlesque performers, and what would you like to see change?

JN: “In the Bay Area it’s a little bit easier for me to comment on the shows I’ve been in, not quite the shows I’ve seen, because the shows I’ve seen I may not always stay around for the curtain call where I can see everyone standing next to each other but shows I’ve been involved in I can see everybody backstage and when it comes to those cases I feel like the Bay Area is pretty good about shows that will have people that fit into various categories, whether the performer may identify themselves as fat or Black or queer or all of the above I feel like there is a handful of those sprinkled in every cast I’ve been involved in. I don’t recall a time (and I’m sure it has happened but I guess it never stood out too much) where I’ve been the only Black person in an all white cast. Now, there have been times where… I am the only male in the cast [,] but that is not really a surprise because there’s only recently been… a surge of men on the stage, not to say that men haven’t been doing it for a long time, they have, there’s just… more of them being brave enough to do it … When I first started [performing] in 2010, ’11, ’12 a lot of men would approach me and say ‘I can’t do what you do’ and I would ask them ‘why not?’ Ok, and now what’s happening is men are saying ‘I want to do what you do but I don’t know if I can’… The thing that people don’t talk about very much is the vanity of men. Men will approach me and say ‘I wanna do what you do but I don’t look the way you look’… why do you give a shit, there is someone in the audience who wants to see you, and even if they don’t want to see you, get there and fuckin’ dance and let them enjoy the fact that you are enjoying yourself.”

In what ways do your performances/ productions forward or embody intersectional feminist thought and advocacy. Why is this important to you?

JN: “It’s important that I respect the challenges that women have to go through with blue laws… with blue laws women are not allowed to show their nipples so with each of my performances I make sure to wear pasties because if they cannot show their nipples I shouldn’t be able to show mine…. [A man in a bar confronted me once,] he was saying… ‘you gotta wear pasties’ and because of the way he presented it my initial response was ‘fuck you, who are you, I don’t know.’ You don’t just go up to someone and tell them what they gotta do… My initial response was fuck that guy but as time went on and I got more involved with burlesque, created more friendship, and… it just made sense to do it because I felt like there was this stupid double-standard.”

Are there any specific cultural and/or systemic issues that you address in your performances/productions?

JN: “For the show Body Political the idea behind the show is to talk about body politics and a lot of people when they think about body politics they automatically think about bodies that do not fit into current society beauty standards but I approach it from the standard of ‘what about the bodies that do fit society beauty standard and the shit we deal with?’ and when I say ‘we’ I mean a lot of times people will look at me and say ‘oh Jet you are a fitness coach, you work at a gym, your body is fill-in-the-blank-with-whatever-words-they-choose… so because of that you couldn’t possibly have any problems’ but as a matter of fact what happens [when] people make all these assumptions [is] ‘hey Jet will you walk me to my car?’ Because they just assume that ‘oh well because of the way you look no one’s gonna fuck with you’… understand I haven’t been in a fight since 6th grade so what makes you think that all of a sudden I’m now one of the fuckin’ avengers? … The other thing that happens is a lot of people say ‘oh well Jet you can be intimidating.’ How can I be intimidating if I’m just standing here?I wrote this poem called ‘I Am Not A Threat’ and in the performance piece I do a reverse striptease walk out with nothing but thongs and pasties and from there as the piece goes on I start putting on clothes and I talk about how people make all these assumptions about my body and my appearance and how my body is politicized ‘oh I don’t wanna fuck with him’ ‘oh you can be intimidating’ or they just assume that I’m angry… because I’m muscular and it’s really frustrating because…. as a kid I was scrawny and then I got picked on for that, so then I started working out on a regular basis, and now people fear me because of that and it’s like I can’t really win.”

What do you hope your audiences take away from these performances?

JN: “My general rule when I’m creating something even before I step on stage is I just say ‘I want to create something memorable’ and I say ‘memorable’ because I have no control over the perception of an audience… That was a mistake I used to make in my early days performing, I used to always practically hyper-fucking-ventilate worrying about ‘oh well I hope they understand this nuance’ or this inside joke or this so on so on that I’m putting into the piece, I would hope that they get every little detail but that shit never gonna happen and even if they do get every detail they are gonna perceive it how they perceive it and I have no control over that. If somebody tells me that they remember some shit I did three years ago, I don’t care how they remember it because again I have no control so… I feel like that is sorta mission accomplished.”

What are some unexpected reactions you received from audience members, and how did you deal with those interactions?

JN: “On a positive note the unexpected reactions I’ve received have been tears. When someone said they cried because of a performance I did … I recognized [it] as a positive thing because to draw that emotion from someone, no matter where those tears came from that’s still a positive response… I always try to talk to people in [the] audience, doesn’t always happen because of whatever goes on backstage but if I talk to someone on a few occasions I hear that sort of response I talk to them a little longer to sort of hear their story. Negative side has been a lot of people (and these are usually people who have never left their fucking house and don’t know how to be a person in the real world,) they sort of take our performance as invitation or assumed consent and someone grabs my ass… in which I case I try to break their fucking wrist.”

Any upcoming performances or events you are doing that relate to feminism and intersectionality?

JN: “Soonest show on June 30th body political… Black Manarchy don’t have shit to do with intersectional feminism I’m not gonna try to bullshit you and say oh well… No it’s an all-male, all-Black revue and the reason I think this show is important is because there is something that, while the world may see it, I feel from a different perspective. I see Black men being killed in the street, I see Black men being arrested and incarcerated at alarming rates, I see extinction when I see what’s happening to Black men in this country so our visibility is important and I want to be clear when I talk about Black men I am talking about cis-gender men, I am talking trans-gender men, I am talking about nonbinary…This is not an exclusive thing because my mentality when putting on this show is for people that have always navigated a black male body through the streets of America or for people that make the constant decision to navigate a black male body through the streets of America. Visibility is important and it’s important to show the world that we also have art that we want to show the world that is less… traditional, maybe not a painting, maybe not music, … not just dance but this particular art form where…. the way cis gender heterosexual black men are raised is to think that anything the least bit effeminate is less than masculine it makes you weak and I wanna break outta that stereotype. I want to break out of that and show the world that yes I can get on stage and let this be my chosen art form and it has nothing to do with sexuality [,] it is more about art. More about expressing myself in any way that choose, more about showing the world that yes I have hopes, I have dreams, I have passion, I have love just like any other person okay?, and it’s also showing what full spectrum masculinity look like… One upcoming show (8/17) is going to [involve] dancing in ballet shoes on point… If someone in this upcoming show is a transgender man than I need you to see that as well. If someone in an upcoming show identifies as nonbinary I need the world to see that, so does it relate directly to intersectional feminism? Maybe not. But if someone can watch this show and look at the stage and say ‘oh well maybe masculinity is not as pigeon-holed as I thought it was, maybe it is a much broader spectrum when I think about masculinity and Black masculinity’ than maybe I can open some minds in that regard and that would be lovely…When I think about the word ‘feminism’ my immediate thought is ‘equality’ and that’s across all genders, the entire gender spectrum equality. That’s what I think of when I think of feminism, and when I think of intersectionality I think let’s bring it all together and let’s all fight as one for that same equality. Now when I think about full-spectrum masculinity, when I think about carrying down the concept of toxic masculinity I think that that is an important step towards the equality of all genders. However, I think to relate it directly to intersectional feminism… I think it’s a little bit of a reach. That’s not to say that it’s not a part of the long term process, it certainly is, but I think it’s a little bit to suggest there’s a direct link between the two… In order for there to be equality between all genders than what we need to do is …whether we are talking about masculinity, femininity, everything in between, everything within the margins where there are plans we address all those problems, all those wounds, if you will, and then all of that will come towards the long term healing… What I’m doing is about tearing down the problems that I see on the side of masculinity, tearing down those problems first and then moving towards that equality of all genders….When it comes to the law, much like counting or math everything has to sort of fit into a specific box and if it doesn’t… than people in the legal field are reluctant to say this is a thing because they can’t prove it. Everyone who has ever experienced it will tell you that Misogynoir (prejudice against black women) is a thing. What happens is, since it can’t be proven with hard evidence, legal minds will say ‘oh this is not a thing, we can’t prove it, we can’t put it in a box,’ and because it is hard for them to prove it they will easily sweep it under a rug and shrug their shoulders… without them stopping to say ‘you know what? All we have to do is prove this has never happened to a white woman or a white male’ and then look intersectionally from that viewpoint. Going back to what you said about the desire of feminists to break down toxic masculinity so that they’ll have less of a fight I will agree that I have never met a woman that did not want to tear down toxic masculinity because they know that their fighting for equality will be not quite as challenging… if you didn’t have men who were constantly so afraid of anything that was not ‘masculine.’ When I hear stories about men… that will not wash… the crack of their ass because they think it is too invasive and ‘gay’ that’s a fucking problem, and… I’m not talking about hygiene I’m talking about [how] that mentality means anything they consider to be less than masculine they want nothing to do with. So if it means putting a woman in a leadership role, especially if that role is over them they are gonna somehow think of that as less than masculine and it’s gonna cause a problem in the workplace.”

What do you think the future of burlesque, in regards to intersectional feminism, will look like five years from now?

JN: “It’ll look the same it does today. Nothing’s gonna change in 5 years, and I know that sounds shitty, it sounds pessimistic, but I’m just being real because what happens is the people that need to make change are not the people on the outside, not the people on the margins, not the Black, the queer, the trans, the marginalized people that need to make change, we are trying to make change, it is the people in positions of comfort, it’s the white people who are in positions where they can easily say ‘hey we are gonna band together until these marginalized people are getting same comforts that we are getting’ but that’s never gonna happen because white people have more to gain from being under the protective umbrella of White Supremacy than they have to gain from the umbrella of Allyship. There are a lot of people right now on the internet saying ‘this is not who we are’… ‘I am so shocked at this country’… I’m calling bullshit for two reasons: 1.) If they are shocked they have not been paying attention… 2.) There’s a good chance that they are not actually shocked, they are just using social media to sound like they are shocked so that way they can partake in … ‘Performative Allyship’ where you pretend to be an ally but in reality, behind close-doors, we know what side of the fight you are actually on and it ain’t ours.”