Tuck Woodstock

Zackary Drucker! Kink! Snow Day! FAQ!

Added 2021-02-15 06:45:03 +0000 UTC

Hey everyone,

I hope you're all hanging in there. I am only sort of achieving that today, tbqh, so we'll see how this goes.

First of all, hi, I love you. Thank you for supporting the work we do here. It means everything.

This/last week on the show (why do I write this at such a weird liminal time every week??), I had a delightful if very last-minute chat with artist and filmmaker Zackary Drucker. You might know Zackary from her work on Transparent, Disclosure, I Am Cait, or any of her other projects. I tried to cover as much ground as I could in the interview, but Zackary is incredibly media-trained, so she managed to bring most questions back to her latest project, The Lady and the Dale. Honestly, props 2 her.

This is not paid Lady and the Dale spon so I won't spend too much time on it, but basically: Zackary directed a four-part docuseries for HBO about Liz Carmichael, a con artist and auto entrepreneur who was publicly outed by none other than Tucker Carlson's shitty dad (who is literally named Dick!!). In our interview, Zackary talks about why she is drawn to complicated and unlikeable trans characters, and why she feels like it's an appropriate time to share those stories with an audience that's still wrapping its head around transness.

I was particularly excited to talk to Zackary about Relationship, her collaboration with then-partner Rhys Ernst documenting their relationship (and gender transitions) from 2008-2014 or so. At the time, mainstream T4T representation was incredibly rare (I'd argue that it still is), and T4T wasn't even a term popularized outside of Craigslist yet, so Zackary and Rhys had to put up with a lot of scrutiny and wild, inappropriate questions while doing press for this project. (I'm glad to hear her say that she's receiving less offensive questions in this press circuit!)

OK, enough about the interview. You know where to find it if you haven't listened yet.

In other news, we've been having a series of snow days here in Portland, so I spent Friday almost entirely inside and on Zoom. My favorite part of the day was attending a reading by four queer writers I really admire — R.O. Kwon, Alexander Chee, Carmen Maria Machado and Garth Greenwell — all of whom were reading excerpts from the new short story collection Kink.

Kink, the book, is very very queer and quite trans and I haven't read it all yet but I'm deeply excited about it. If you want to grab a copy (and 'tis the season or whatever), do it soon, because I heard on the zoom that they're already running out of copies. We love to see it!!!!

Apropos of nothing, here's my obligatory snow day selfie.

OK, I'm going to go upload tomorrow's episode, which features the utterly fabulous Tre'vell Anderson. But before I go, just a heads up that I recently published the FAQ I mentioned last week. So, in the future, if you have any questions about the podcast / merch / grants / etc, try checking the FAQ page! Maybe it will help. Who knows.

That's it for me tonight. Here's your weekly Rhubarb. She's watching the snow. :)))