The National Queer Arts Festival Presents:
TransForming Community
was curated by Michelle Tea with a generous grant from The Haas Creative Work Fund.

Qcc on-line shares with you some of the excerpts from this groundbreaking event.
TransForming Community explores the friction at the intersection of contemporary trans and queer communities. With a burgeoning transsexual community growing in tandem with a genderqueer movement, what are the issues that arise when non-trans queers share cultural space with transpeople and genderqueers? With distinctly different needs and identities, what needs to be worked out between the transsexual and genderqueer communities?
Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, spoken word performer, trans activist, and biologist. Julia is the author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (to be published by Seal Press in June, 2007), a collection of personal essays that examines the ways in which misogyny frames many popular stereotypes and assumptions about transsexual women. Her other writings have appeared in queer, feminist, and pop culture magazines such as Bitch, Clamor, Kitchen Sink, LiP, make/shift, and Transgender Tapestry, and excerpts of her work have appeared in The Believer, The San Francisco Chronicle, and on NPR. In recent years, Julia has gained noteriety in transgender, queer, and feminist circles for her unique insights into gender. Lynn Breedlove (also known as Lynnee Breedlove) (born in Oakland, California) is an American musician, writer, and performer. Breedlove was a founding member and lead singer of the San Francisco queercore punk band Tribe 8. The band appeared on film in A Gun For Jennifer and also performed in She's Real, Worse Than Queer, and Rise Above: A Tribe 8 Documentary by Tracy Flannigan. Breedlove has performed spoken word on Sister Spit tours, at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival doing outreach on subjects considered controversial by most feminists, such as BDSM, femme butch culture, and trans inclusion. Tribe 8 also played at the San Francisco Transgender March, multiple Ladyfests and LGBT Pride Festivals, including Europride 2000 in Rome, Italy.
Michelle Tea is the author of four memoirs, including the Lambda Award-winning Valencia, and the illustrated Rent Girl with art by Laurenn McCubbin, which is currently being developed for television. Her novel, Rose of No Man’s Land, was selected as a best book of 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle, ArtForum, and BookMark. She is the author of the collected poetry volume The Beautiful, co-editor with Clint Catalyst of the anthology Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person, and editor of the anthologies Baby Remember My Name: An Anthology of New Queer Girl Writing and Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class.
 Just your average female-to-male trans-man spoken-word-artist-turned-"emo-hop"-MC, Katastrophe (aka Rocco) got his start as a stanza-spitting wunderkind in the Bay Area's slam poetry circuit. After a stint as a teenage teacher, mentor and performer with the nonprofit literary organization Youth Speaks, Kayiatos appeared in the PBS documentary Poetic License, toured with acclaimed spoken-word troupe Sister Spit, and co-composed the soundtrack for lesbian porn film Sugar High Glitter City. And, really, after that, what was left but hip-hop? So Kayiatos started crafting rhymes that spoke to his experiences as a queer kid, a female-to-male trans-man, and a disillusioned young person living in the dystopian belly of America, releasing the work on his debut album Let's F*ck, Then Talk about My Problems, released on homo-hop legend Juba Kalamka's (of Deep Dickollective) Sugar Truck Records. - Rachel Devitt
San Francisco Pride Parade 2002 Grand Marshal, Shawna Virago is a trans-fox rock star, actress, leftist political activist and filmmaker. She and her band, The Deadly Nightshade Family, were called ”lo-fi headbangers” by the Bay Area Reporters and have performed at clubs and events including the San Francisco Dyke March, East Bay Pride, and the San Francisco Pride Main Performing Stage. Ms. Virago is the first transsexual woman elected to the Board of Directors of San Francisco Women Against Rape (SFWAR). She is a founding member of TransAction, a group of transgender people who organize to expose state violence against the transgender and genderqueer communities. She has served on the Transgender Human Rights Task Force, sponsored by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Ms. Virago has starred in several underground movies including Shut Up, and Josephine! and has also appeared in two LunaSea Theatre Productions, TransSisters: Live and Uncut and Everyday People. Thea Hillman has performed her work in bookstores, cafes, colleges, poetry festivas, theaters, and music venues across the country. She is a San Francisco Poetry Slam Champion, was awarded first place in the 1999 Books Inc. poetry contest, second place in the Berkeley Fiction Review's sudden fiction contest, and won the 1998 Albuquerque Poetry Festival tag-team haiku championship. She received an MFA in English, Creative Writing from Mills College. She has produced and co-produced national tours and performance events, including ForWord Girls, Shameless, Rated XXXY, Intercourse, and Hell on Heels. Her work has appeared in newspapers, journals, magazines, CDs, tapes, and websites.
Max is an American Indian (Blackfoot) Latino Sephardic performer and writer. He has appeared in a number of documentaries including the MAX short in Monika Treut's Female Misbehavior and Gendernauts.

He is also a poet and has acted in several films. His work has been published in This Bridge Called my Back and This Bridge We Call Home; Male Lust; Transgender Care; The Blythe House Quarterly; (0nline) Transgender Warriors and The Phallus Palace. He was also photographed for Body Alchemy and The Pallus Palace.

 Marcus Rene Van is a transgender hip-hop legend who uses hip-the-word (hip-hop, theater and spoken word) to communicate sharp observations on race, class, and other elephants in the room.

Marcus Rene Van has performed with Deep Dickollective, MC's and performed at Fresh Meat and the National Queer Arts Festival and other venues throughout the Bay Area.