Join Queer Kentucky for their latest print edition featuring original stories, gorgeous photography, and exclusive interviews with Zack Wickham of Bravo’s The Valley, award-winning singer S.G. Goodman, and Chappell Roan’s makeup artist Andrew Dahling.

Identity is not static. It is a dynamic process, shaped by the spaces we occupy and the relationships we form. In many ways, life itself is a performance. We adapt, survive, and navigate our existence through acts of expression—often without fully realizing the weight of our roles. For me, as a Black Queer Southerner, performance has always been both a survival mechanism and a pathway to self-discovery. It is a practice that allows me to better understand who I am and, perhaps more importantly, who I am becoming. Love, in its truest form, emerges from this ongoing process of understanding—recognizing not only the selves we project to the world but also those we keep hidden or are still learning to embrace.

It is messy, imperfect, and ever-evolving, but it is also what drives me forward. In those moments when doubt and uncertainty threaten to take hold, I remember: the show must go on! As a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker, my work grapples with the intricacies of personal history, memory, and the legacies of folklore. Performance, in this context, is both an act of defiance and an assertion of presence. It is a method of reclaiming space in a world that was never designed for us. And yet, the creative process often invites doubt. Imposter syndrome lurks at the edges, questioning my right to claim these stories and inhabit these roles. But in these moments, I feel the presence of my ancestors—those who, through their own performances of survival, carved paths for me to walk. Storytelling, I am reminded, is not a privilege, but a birthright. Each story I tell, each frame I create, is an act of resistance to erasure, a refusal to remain invisible. To create is to insist on the value of our narratives, to recognize the complexity of our existence, and to pass down the histories that demand to be carried forward.

photo by Jeremy Grier

Recovery, too, is a performance—a quiet, often invisible act of reassembling what has been broken. To survive in a world that has consistently rejected your humanity is an act of performance in itself. It is an act of endurance. It is the performance of not allowing them to see you falter—of putting on the mask of hope, of code-switching to navigate spaces that were thoughtfully built in your opposition. There are times when the body speaks louder than the will. There are moments when there is no energy left for pretending, no capacity for performance. In those moments, we must lean into the complexity of grief, of exhaustion—because to heal, we must stop the show. We must stop to listen to our bodies, to honor the fullness of our emotions, and to embrace the radical necessity of rest. This pause is not surrender; it is a radical act of self-care and restoration that enables us to return with renewed strength.

In the pauses between performances, I have learned to rely on my Queer kin. It is they who have taught me how to find joy in the cracks, how to dance in the rain, even when despair threatens to swallow us whole. It is through them that I understand that even in the most difficult of times, there is always space to breathe, to move, to begin again. To perform is to survive, to transform, to adapt. It is how we make sense of the fragments of our lives, how we turn brokenness into story, and stories into futures. Each performance, each gesture, each moment of self-expression is a declaration: we are here. And when the show must stop—when we are compelled to rest, to breathe, to heal—let that be an act of radical care. The show must go on, but it is in the pauses, in the moments of stillness, that we gather the strength to keep moving forward!