Joy and Laughter Are a Technology of Expansion

Insights from my conversation with ALOK on the evolving vision of Divine Fluidity

I first reached out when I saw ALOK would be performing in Tacoma, WA. I wrote to their team asking if they’d be open to meeting to advise me on the next steps of my Divine Fluidity body of work. I wasn’t expecting a response, honestly. But a few days later, their team replied: “Can you come to the green room before the show?”

I was nervous because ALOK’s work has meant a lot to me. Their poetry, performance, and unapologetic way of being have helped me unfold my own queerness, redefine my masculinity, and find beauty in ambiguity. Their presence has been a fierce companion in my journey, and the ideas behind Divine Fluidity - the belief that queerness is sacred, that fluidity is divine - have been deeply shaped by artists like them.

So I prepared, not with a list of questions, but with what I thought was a clear intention about what I wanted to learn with them. I wanted to know: Why move from poetry to comedy? How do you prepare yourself to do your best art? What if the art is not a product, but an experience, a gathering, a moment of connection?

When I arrived, they had just landed. ALOK sat in the green room, calmly unpacking their luggage. I was shaking a little. I sat with them and closed my eyes while explaining my work so I could focus and set the table for our conversation. It was very overwhelming, in the best way.

What if the art is how we live?

ALOK shared so much of what I know them for - stories, questions, contradictions - all very real and poetic at the same time. A lot of what they said is still generating new ideas and feelings in me. But what resonated most wasn’t about how to succeed as an artist; it was about how to live honestly through art.

They told me that “comedy allows for contradiction. It allows for tension. It allows for joy… It allows for the multifacetedness of our humanity to emerge.”

I want divine fluidity to help evolve narratives so we see queer people beyond our suffering and challenges and into the true complexity of our humanity and "everydayness". Joy not as an escape from oppression, but as a way to celebrate life in spite of it.

Our conversation was so expansive and helpful for me. I’ve been building Divine Fluidity around poetry, ritual, and gathering, and often worry that the work doesn’t have a big, tangible product. But ALOK reminded me that the most influential art, the one that goes to people's hearts, sometimes doesn't need a physical product; it can be an activation, a moment, a place where people feel seen and heard.

They also said something I’ve been feeling but hadn’t yet named: the exhaustion of constantly performing liberation in progressive spaces. How we’ve created new forms of respectability that demand perfection instead of humanity, and how that’s not freedom. A centering desire for my work emerged during our conversation: “I want my art to make people feel more human, not more correct.”

Where I’m going next

This conversation reminded me that gathering in honest and expansive ways is the art, and that creating spaces where people can feel the fullness of their humanity is not part of the work. It is the work.

ALOK helped me see that the sacred often doesn’t live in answers or polished frameworks. It lives in the questions. In the tension. In the moments where people feel seen, heard, and held in all their contradictions.

That’s what Divine Fluidity has always been about, even before I had the language for it.

I left that green room with a clearer invitation: to let Divine Fluidity hold more of the mundane, the comedic, and the messy. Not everything spiritual has to be solemn. Not everything queer has to be about pain. But as ALOK reminded me, we do have to feel seen in our pain before we can move toward joy.

What I’m building isn’t just an art project. It’s culture work. It’s narrative change. It’s a reminder that we can’t support others' healing if we’re not being honest with ourselves. This is the work of being real, not perfect. It’s about finding the divine in the in-between, and creating spaces where all of us can breathe, laugh, grieve, wonder, and become.

I’m so grateful for the support of a planning grant from a national arts funder that is allowing me the space and resources to be in conversation with brilliant queer leaders such as ALOK and many other artists, philanthropists, organizers, and community leaders. I can feel my artistic vision sharpening already, and the work of Divine Fluidity becoming more grounded and connected to the communities I'm seeking to grow with.

If you’re interested in supporting this work or joining the conversation, I’d love to connect.