You may have seen my “vote for debbie” post yesterday, & now I have another artist I want to pimp. The other queen I’m voting for to appear on the fifth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race is Chicago’s Sissy Spastik (one of the best names ever)! …Influenced by great transgressive and counter-cultural artists like Grace Jones, Leigh Bowery and Divine, she’s one of the coolest stylists I’ve met (check out the set design for her audition video! …it’s all in the details), with a range of looks that are edgy but glamorous. Sissy’s aesthetics are way up my alley, and I would really like to see her make a strong showing. Check out her video and vote for her here.

Hello Big Other readers!

I’ve got an artist to share with y’all, and I am hoping you will help me support her work.

Debbie Fox is a Chicago drag queen who is competing in an online “fan favorite” contest that will secure her a slot on the fifth season of the reality television series RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE. I am a big fan of queens in general — not just because they are glamorous and often subversive — but because they are true DIY multimedia performance artists who must develop skills in a broad range of visual and performance-based media, often in bar and nightclub environments that are not especially conducive to art-making. This impresses the shit out of me.

I like Debbie in particular because while on the surface, she appears to be a very beautiful, polished, pretty queen — not my usual cup of tea — she is versatile and full of surprises, able to dirty it up, take risks and get unconventional, as well as funny and theatrical (when I first saw her perform a couple of weeks ago, she did a live performance of a musical theater song usually associated w/ male performers). I like people who can code switch and are canny. The camera loves her and I think her personality will be well-suited to television.

Anyway — she’s actually doing really well in this online voting thingie and stands a decent chance of winning, so I wanted to see if I could ask y’all to take a quick minute to watch her hilarious video and vote for her. There are some other folks in the running whose personal style is maybe more aligned with my own, but I think she is very “full package” in terms of how well-suited she is for this show, and I am excited to see her kicking as much ass as she is. And so I want to do what I can to help push her up over the edge. Thanks!

What does this mean for small presses/micro presses/indie presses?

If we are determined to get “innovative” or “experimental” or challenging lit in the hands of readers who are not also writers and not already part of our community/communities, then what is the particular audience we are targeting? Discuss.

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