The Troll Toll
They've been busy! But the personal toll we pay for tolerating trolls is too high.
Howdy Kumquats—
Whew. Thought I’d pop by with an update to the “Banana Gate” situation.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about (look back at the last 2 essays for details)— I’m referring to a public post I made on Instagram about how it’s not ok with me to have my performing work plagiarized by a drag queen who was competing on RuPaul’s Drag Race. I believed this was an opinion that only other professional performers would care about, and was expecting about 30 people to even see it, let alone read it.
Intellectual property concerns have been a common issue for creatives / innnovators / artists throughout the ages. It’s very topical right now. However, the values and professional etiquette that USED TO BE in place among performers, is gone. Almost every aspect of decency we once knew has been eroded— and in addition to the lack of respect between human beings, now we can all be mocked by AI imitations too.
So, I thought this was a niche concern, but apparently, I was wrong.
Because “Banana Gate” was a topic of conversation on Reddit over the weekend.
Whereas last week was full of just the usual burlesque trolls, having a good time spreading mean memes they made about me— this week, I’ve descended to viral infamy. In the pathetically-reductive and relentlessly-sensationalistic way of the internet— the issue is that I am a “racist transphobe claiming to own bananas.”
For fuck’s sake. How many times can I place a rose on the grave of nuance before it wakes from the dead? COME BACK TO LIFE!!!! PLEASE!!!!
I was speaking to those who are similarly exhausted by the lazy imitation of EVERYTHING in the culture. I was raging against “the dying of the light” by lamenting that the real artists with original ideas are dying on the vine. In my way, I was saying— I’m still here— you can’t take everything from me! After 7 years of this crap playing out in my life, I’ve lost damn near everything, except my self-respect and my creativity. I will fight to the end for what’s left.
I’m a living, struggling artist still endeavoring to make a living from my art. I know several drag queens that have been able to buy houses off their Drag Race related earnings, and good for them. I’ve been waiting for opportunities for myself too, however I have been rendered homeless several times since being cancelled. The stakes are real.
I have not seen the Reddit thing personally. I don’t have the stomach for it.
I was told about it yesterday. One of my friends sat me down to tell me how concerned she was for my physical safety at the shows. I knew the venues were being pulled into the scandal too. My nervous system has been fried for several days, meaning that I am basically on full-time self care. It’s very tiring. And it sucked my joy right out, which renders me unable to rehearse. Honestly I’m so raw, it’s hard to remember even if I even like performing anymore. But there’s only one way way to find out.
After being beat up online all weekend, I spent yesterday considering whether to cancel the show in NY. But I was not myself. I had to remember—
Rule #1— Do not make decisions out of fear.
Rule #2— Do not let the trolls win. Ever.
Rule #3— Never give up because you don’t know what’s going to happen.
So, the show will go on. I’m choosing to be un-cancel-able. Unless I’m physically unable to get there, the show always must go on. Having watched the movie One Love (about Bob Marley) recently, my experience is nothing compared to what the artists I admire have had to endure. Ever onward…
Taking the risk of being yourself and sharing it proudly is what this fight is always for. So, unless I’m physically unable— I’m always going to do my part and show up. Every show counts. Even if only 2 people come.
Finding out about the Reddit thing was unnerving, but it was a relief to know why there was such an uptick in trolling on Saturday, when even unrelated posts about my show were filled with comments about Banana Gate.
Dealing with trolls is such a tricky business.
Most advice is to ignore them. And I do a lot of that. However, I would rather state my case to them in a clear, clever way than have them live rent-free in my mind. You’d be surprised how much mental time can be wasted, cycling through all the things you WISHED you had said to defend yourself. Their poison darts get stuck in the heart and mind.
By mid-afternoon Saturday, I finally made my account private, so only approved people could reach me. Then I only had to deal with deleting hundreds (not joking) of requests and private messages— I didn’t have to respond to them, so it was a relief. And even these have finally started to trickle off.
Remember this— the primary tactic trolls use is shame.
Shame is so insidious. It’s a very effective strategy because it forces people to silence themselves. Then they abandon hope and give up on their dreams, on living life and give up on the world.
When you believe you are horrible and unworthy of love, all kinds of dark things can happen. For me, it made me want to kill myself. I thought about it in detail. I’m lucky I was able to pull myself out of that thinking. I knew it wasn’t like me to think that way, but it was a powerful darkness that came over me.
If the trolls’ target believe all that stuff about themselves, the work is done. It’s brilliant out-sourcing. Then the trolls don’t even have to troll because their targets do it for them. Public shaming leads people to a self-fulfilling doom. A lot of people can’t bounce back from it.
The use of shame was the reason I even got myself cancelled at all— it’s what I stood up against. The 2017 trolls were coming after the white men in my creative community, blaming them for everything from a lack of stage time to slavery, via public shaming.
I already knew from direct life experience that you can’t actually change people unless they feel valued, loved and appreciated. I also saw how damaged men around me were by not being allowed to express emotion— women liked to act like they were only victims, but they certainly did plenty of damage. It was like abuse ping pong.
We all deserve to feel valued, loved and appreciated, even when we are making mistakes. We can’t play God and judge what a “mistake” is either. We have no way of knowing what the bigger spiritual lesson is.
This is unconditional love. This is compassion in action. These are deeply spiritual values, that I was fortunate to experience through my grandmother. My grandmother was a devout Christian, a Baptist to be exact, originally from Texas. She was such a loving, twinkly-eyed person that I describe her physically as looking like the fat, laughing version of Buddha. She felt that way when you were around her too. Unconditional love sounds soft, but it is actually only achieved by the warriors-of-the-heart.
It takes a lot of courage to choose love when faced with the hysterical temper tantrums of the spiritually immature.
It demands a fierce, tough love. It’s not about tolerating disrespect or suffering fools. It’s about being the adult in the room.
Asleep people are choosing to stay asleep, and that’s what they want to do. They have a right to have their experience, however long it takes. And I deserve to have my experience respected as well. I don’t need every person to like my work or to like me, but they do not get to destroy what they don’t like. We don’t have to give them an audience.
More mature souls have a responsibility to steer the ship.
My biggest complaint is that most of my peers stood by and let this all happen. As if the trolling would just stop with me. As if by playing along, all the drama would just disappear. This is immaturity too. What is a wrong to one, is wrong to all.
My peers allowed the story of me being a “racist, rape-supporting, homophobic, bigot” to grow. I was a salacious piece of gossip that they dragged around for years. It didn’t matter that they had never seen me exhibit this behavior even once. All that mattered was that I had to be destroyed because I “revealed” my true colors. And most of them were just happy it was me and not them.
This logic is just so crazy. If you have an actual human being standing in front of you and you want them to change their opinion about something….would you do that by obliterating their self-esteem, taking away their career, making their friends afraid to talk to them, and leaving a permanent stain on their reputation?
Would you really choose that approach if you cared about changing someone’s mind?
That’s why I stopped believing that any of these woke-avengers even care about the culture at all. They just wanted fame and attention. Their values might work for an influencer on social media, but not if you’re an actual artist using your work to improve the world. In my scene in particular, our differences were celebrated— anything unique about you became your gimmick, what made your act special. It was alchemy, folks.
The worst of the burlesque trolls were low-level performers who ascended the ranks of social media popularity and successfully took performing jobs away from people. They were not the best performers or the performers who had actually helped create the scene in the first place. Yet their bullying was/is rewarded over and over again with fear-based invitations to headline festivals and produce shows. They co-opted the entire scene and are still only mediocre performers. They do not spend their time working on their craft, but on policing everyone’s behavior around them.
I make jokes, calling them the “burlesque mafia”— but it’s not even a stretch. They don’t just make accusations and leave hateful comments and leave it at that. Oh no. That’s not nearly enough. They maintain a record of people who like or support my posts— and they cancel by association. I’ve had a friend trolled for putting a clapping hand emoji in a comment.
They put fear into anyone who expresses even the slightest support, thus making themselves appear to be the majority opinion. I’m pretty sure this is illegal harassment, but at the very least, it’s immoral.
The burlesque trolls would torment producers who booked me, back when I still got booked. They complained to venues who worked with me. I had a 12 year theater residency for my Christmas show taken away. They even called the Brooklyn police multiple times about vandalism when I posted a photo of this street art I made in 2017….
They scared the burlesque legends (women who did burlesque originally in the 40s-70s) I was close with into not speaking to me— which really pisses me off because they are old now and some of them have passed away now. This was how I lost practically every friend I had in that scene. And how the cancellation continued even after I moved to the sticks, out in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains.
The word “burlesque” is an embarrassment to me now. I don’t want to be associated with what it has become at all. I use the word “cabaret” to describe my work now.
But my current trolls are actually Drag Race trolls. A gay friend warned me that they were vicious. However, an indigenous pinup model woman I became friends with on Instagram through all this, actually works in cyber security. In between congratulating white people for trolling me on behalf of colored people who don’t want it, she looked into some of the accounts— many of them were fake.
Meaning that people who have probably already been blocked and reported for bad behavior made dummy accounts to do their dirty work from—they don’t have photos or post anything on these fake accounts— just troll.
It’s not lost on me that there are stories of bot farms, algorithms and AI that are also designed to create division in America specifically.
And I do believe that the owners-controllers of the world are trying to create the illusion of division every way imaginable.
These are just more reasons why we have to stand up for what’s good and insist on integrity right now. Insist on unity. Or die trying. I will not live in a fake ass world anymore. I want what’s real and true— and that is always coming from love.
Stepping on others and believing that you only get power by taking it from someone else— those are defining features of the materialist world I thought we were fighting in the first place.
The anger I’m now struggling to transmute is not towards the trolls, but towards my peers.
Shaming people is the most self-serving, destructive, inhumane way of operating I could imagine and yet it has been completely normalized— primarily because the rational people turned a blind eye and let it go on.
The only way out is through. I do believe everyone has to fight this battle in their own way, in their own lives. And support others who are wrestling back nuance and reason from the edge of oblivion.
We are fully capable of APPRECIATING our differences.
We have the power to transform the cold, stark world we’ve been forced to endure into the golden age of enlightenment that we’ve been longing for.
If you believe the world is shit, you make the world shit. Then your narrow belief is justified and you maintain it.
Maybe because I actually grew up around rednecks, I’ve never had all this fear or hatred of Republicans or Trumpers. I was always a Bohemian freak and the rednecks tormented me quite a bit when I first moved out to the eastern shore of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, into corn country. Eventually I charmed them because I was just my weird ass self and I let them be themselves. We found things that we had in common and respectfully avoided the things we didn’t. We could just all BE and it was fine. Good, even. Remember Breakfast Club?
So, healing the political polarization is not something I’ve had to work through. I appreciate that we all get to see the world differently and I don’t think there’s only one “correct” way to see things. This world is a jewel and we each can see it through one facet.
This is also not about doling out punishment either. To me, justice is just having the freedom to make my weird ass art and explore my ideas in peace— to be able to find an audience to share with.
I want every human being on the planet to be healthy, whole, healed and LOVED so they have the courage to express themselves however they want to. Then I get to witness them being fully themselves, and it empowers and inspires me to keep doing me. This is what the greats gave us— permission to be our true selves.
The immature people are where they are at. If they want to change, great. I don’t care. I haven’t been talking to the haters. I’ve only been talking to the mature souls who actually have healed themselves and know better than this. Going along with thisshit gives it a power that it does not deserve. When everyone participates in it, it makes the story true.
I am very grateful to the trolls for teaching me how to love myself through anything, how to have firm boundaries and a tender heart, and how to navigate with fierce integrity. I thank the villains in my life all the time. I have mediated for hours upon hours while visualizing my enemies as happy, healthy and free from suffering.
Yes, I still have anger and get pissed off, but I always return to the spiritual work. I return to alchemy— which is the work of transforming the shit into gold. And that returns me to love every time.
First we do this in ourselves. It’s an inside job. Then it radiates out by example. There’s nothing to fix or change about anyone else. You change yourself and the world changes.
I am considering leaving social media. Again. For good this time.
If we are ascending to a more evolved version of Earth, I would not be figting to bring social media with us. I have been longing for us to return to the real world en masse. I’m going to get through these shows though. I don’t want to make a bunch of decisions from fear.
I want to leave social media for love.
Also, if we want to stop the wars or get the owners to listen to us— why doesn’t every one cancel Amazon and delete Meta? These are addictions that are hurting us. That kind of action is the only thing that I think could work. The owners don’t give a shit about anything else but our money, attention and misery anyway. Why do we keep giving it to them?
More soon.
Please send your friends to see my shows.
XO, Trixie