On Machismo, Healing, and LQQK: A Queer Visual EP
The time it has taken me to navigate my insides and share these words as delineators of my being takes mountains of continued internal work. I arrive now in this place where I can create a piece of art to laugh, cry, and share collective healing.
My name is José Rivera. I am a queer, latinx, nonbinary recording and performing artist. I am currently creating my debut visual EP, LQQK. It features four singles each accompanied by a music video. I’m a creator-in-residence at Kickstarter this Fall and just launched a campaign to make this work a reality.
The music itself is a love story about unlearning the pain of the past to embrace the beauty and wonder of the now and beyond. The visuals are a deconstruction of masculinity, starting with me in solo performance as a queer “Marlon Brando” metamorphosing into the homo-simpleton I am today.
For a long time, I hid who I was to make others feel more comfortable. I would lie about what I deeply felt as a defense mechanism — getting too close to anyone felt too intimidating. I just did not have the tool kit to process what I was feeling.
Growing up Puerto Rican, I felt a compulsion to fit into the standards of masculinity upheld by my father and his fathers. You know, the (stereo)typical suburban-male dream — living to love sports, cars, drinking, having a wife and 2.5 kids, playing video games, ignoring your feelings, and never letting anyone know exactly how you feel. If I didn’t abide by the unspoken codes of what it meant to be a “man” in my family, I was shamed verbally, physically, and otherwise.
Accepting pain as “normal” and leaving it unaddressed is part of what it meant to be masculine in my upbringing. I still find hidden ways in which I subscribe to these beliefs everyday life, and navigate unlearning them through conversations with my best friends….and duh, my therapist — because it’s 2019 and we should all have access to wonderful, culturally competent mental healthcare (we don’t and here’s one place you can change that).
Education was my way out.
I worked hard in high school in upstate New York, involved myself in every after school activity that would allow me to participate, took every advanced class that accepted me, and performed in lead roles in my high school’s drama club (shout out to Masque and Mime). I ended up snagging one of 40 full-ride scholarships to New York University Tisch School of the Arts where I majored in Drama. This was a blessing because it was and still is literally the gayest school on the planet and gifted me some of the best friends. The training was pretty good, too. ;-)
My music and dance is a way of healing this space while celebrating what emerges on the other side. This often constitutes glitter, colors, and aliveness on camera and stage. What comes is often unexpected, beautiful, and massive.
I started dancing at 2011 at age 19 as a means to get to know my body. My best friend, Catie Davis, gave me the opportunity to create some really amazing choreographic work for musicals both major and unknown. Through a practice I developed (which I then called inTension…. lol), I would use movement as a tool to paint pictures. I choreographed pieces for stages of all sizes, bodies of all kinds, and found a love in finding space where all bodies moved freely however they were built, however they felt and whatever they ate that day, etc.
My movement practice became about actively addressing the pain while indulging the many pleasures of fully-realized self-expression. I continue to find the importance of creating a space all experiences and stories are welcome, shared, and exalted— I like to think I make work that does this, too. I often turn my work into clown pieces, where laughter around what’s happening in performance gives the audience a moment to let their guard down and really see what’s happening for what it is. This all transformed in 2015 when I decided to say “fuck it, I’m making music videos! Why? I have no idea — they’re fun, I like them, and I’m going to do it.”
LQQK is my first completely original digital work.
The seedling idea of LQQK began in 2016. I had released three music videos by this time — two viral covers tracks, and a screen dance to a Missy Elliot track when she made her never-been-gone sweeping reveal. The live performance (then called yes this is about you from LQQK, the way I Look) featured 13 dancers, a live band, and music by the artist SOPHIE.
LQQK is a response to the cage masculinity has felt like to me. My body felt like a shell for an internal life that was misguided, and the rolodex of language we have now around identity did not exist. The idea was altered by the Orlando Pulse shooting, which felt incredibly personal as a gay person of color. It felt more important than ever to share my experience for the means of representation and presence — being alive as who I am was suddenly political.
These four video-singles have been a way of grappling with my identity to find a more wise, gentle, vulnerable me day in and out.
The healing process is heard directly through the music, and I can’t wait to share the visual aspect of it, too. Here are lyrics to the second single on the LQQK EP called Like That. It’s wrote it in collaboration with Cesar G and Alexander Ronneburg. It’s about healing and understanding, and is currently the song I sing on repeat in my head.
Like That from LQQK EP
V1
I never really felt like that
Didn’t know someone could care like that
Didn’t know that you could hurt like that
Never meant to hurt you like that
I thought I was the best of me
I thought you could trust in me
And now I see the flaws in me
And I’m trying
C1
OHHH OHHHH
I’m trying
OHHH OHHHH
Come see me
V2
I know that I was preaching “us”
But really only doing me
Seems like it’s time to move on
Put the past behind me
I just started learning myself
And I hope you forgive me
And Im trying to forgive me
Ohhhh I’m trying
C2
OHHH OHHHH
I’m working
OHHH OHHHH
Come see me
BRIDGE
I laugh, I clown
I love being an ass
to give a smile in the wrong
to give beyond the past
And I fuck up sometimes and that’s alright
because I’m human
And I take shit (this) so seriously
but that’s human.
I’m learning & unlearning.
C3
OHHH OHHHH
I’m healing
OHHH OHHHH
Watch and see
V3+V4 Out
and I’ve just gotta be right now
gotta listen to everything now
Not think about anyone else
I just wanna be with myself
To share all the best of me
The part of me that makes you feel free
The part of you that makes it feel new
Cuz I love everything that you do
The part of me I hid so well
Is growing wilder and loud
It’s time to let it all out
It time to let it out
The part of me I hid so well
Is growing wilder and loud
It’s time to let it out
And I’m trying
Everyday is navigation. Everyday is worth living. Learning, growing, and giving are experiences that breed wisdom and compassion for experiences outside of our own. This is such a time of abundance. It is time to really live out loud.
To sharing more. To being more. To never giving up.
With admiration.
