Jovi Radtke

Wooohooo!!!

Jovi Radtke was such a nerdy, silly, queer person. I could dig it.

She identified as a boi, which means she identifies as female, but often expresses her gender more masculine-ly. After a quick research session (wikipedia) I discovered that this term is also used for young boys who like older men, butch lesbians, and by Avril Lavigne.



Jovi Radtke is a spoken word artist, a slam poet, which is just a fancy way of saying rapper without music (is that ignorant? that's just how it felt). I really enjoyed her performance and her poetry.

There are more videos of her stuff on YouTube but I won't just post her videos. She didn't have background guitar/drums at this performance, it was just her.

Most of her poems were about hard-hitting issues like suicide, transgender violence, and any other gay hot topic that all us gays go through. It was true and real and she was good, but I had heard most of it before.

But on that note,  I still want to emphasize that I liked the night and her performance. Just because I'm a sassy bitch and I've heard it all before doesn't mean that it wasn't inspiring or meaningful. And although Jovi's poems were well-worded, funny, and often inspired a rise of action, what hit me the most during the night was hearing her introduce her poem about Brandon Teena.

I was first shocked that people hadn't seen Boys Don't Cry or at least heard about Brandon Teena. But I guess I'm just old. I remember seeing the film at 3am at a slumber party when I was ten. The guys wanted to watch it because they heard you see tits. There are indeed tits, but I focused more on the violence and hate that was focused on. Jovi talked about how she was ten, living in Nebraska when Brandon Teena was murdered (in Nebraska). She remembered seeing stories on the news and thinking that if she ever came out Brandon's story would be her story.

I grew up in a small town that was overwhelmingly strict puritan. Any break in sexuality 'codes' meant discrimination and excommunication. I grew up believing that Jesus was going to come and set me on fire because I thought about naked men from time to time. I then became aware that other people might want to set me on fire because I thought about naked men from time to time. I saw films like Boys Don't Cry and Brokeback Mountain. I heard news stories of violence. People talked about Matthew Sheppard and at that time said, "If you just stay in the closet and do what you want on your own time, no one will want to hurt you."

But that is destructive to the mind. And Jovi talked about that, and I understood it perfectly. That has always guided my work because I want to open about my experiences because I grew up feeling like I needed everything to be a secret.

So the performance was fun. If you want more info about Jovi, you can see some of her performances on her website or just search her name:

www.joviradtke.com