Today, from our friends at Guernica, we bring you an interview with queer South Asian performance-art duo DarkMatter. Author Kevin St. John says of their performance at Mercury Lounge, “The evening’s performance at times resembled a political rally, a downtown drag act, an agit-prop polemic, a stand-up routine, and a traditional poetry reading. The duo performed much of the text together, talking over one another, jumping in to complete the other’s punch line: ‘I hear white men have huge—’ ‘—empires.’” This article was originally published May 2, 2016.

Kevin St. John: So much of your work satirizes the white male cis patriarchy. But here I am, a white cis man, interviewing you. I don’t know what that means, but I want to start by acknowledging that.

Alok Vaid-Menon: Hopefully, by the end of this interview, we will help you recognize that you’re not cis.

KSJ: Please do.

AVM: I don’t believe in men. I’ve never met a man in my life.

KSJ: Okay. Please help me understand that.

AVM: I think one of the biggest betrayals that a lot of people don’t understand is that the term “gay” was never about signifying sexuality. When the gay liberation movement started, it was actually about political confrontation of gender as a system, and some of the foundational divides in the gay movement were between gay men who wanted to assimilate into masculinity and gay men who were challenging the very idea of masculinity.

What happened in the gay movement was that trans became the space for gender nonconformity, whereas gay became nice, palatable, assimilate-able. For me, that feels like something imposed on us by heterosexual society—that you have to be men in order to validate your sexual desires, that your queerness is so ominous and threatening that it has to be in a man’s body in order to be understood.

Read the full article here.