I grew up putting on shows in my bedroom.
At breakfast, I’d announce, “There’s a show tonight,” sell tickets to my parents, position a lamp as a spotlight, hang curtains from my bunk bed, and perform for upwards of an hour in a cape, singing and playing bongos for my captive family audience. My parents were very patient people.
The obsession started even earlier when my family would attend musicals. At three, Les Misérables in San Francisco: voices resonated in my chest, stage lights radiated actual heat, the overwhelming sense that I wasn’t watching something so much as living inside it. At four, Cats affected me so profoundly that when nature called with some urgency, I refused to leave my seat and soiled my pants.
Then came Cirque du Soleil, where performers moved through the audience and the world of the show surrounded me, and I finally had a name for what I’d been chasing: immersion. Entertainment you don’t watch – you enter.
I’ve spent most of my adult life working to recreate and design that immersive feeling professionally through stage productions, live events, music videos, and the many other overcomplicated ideas on the pages of my notebook that are yet to come to life. So when Santa Cruz Pride asked me to help produce Queerlantis, I said yes before I finished reading the email.
My vision is that, for one night on June 6, the Santa Cruz Veterans Memorial Building stops being a building. Over seven hours, it turns into something between a Pride celebration, an art party, a concert, a drag show, and a unique little temporary village – a place where everyone belongs.
The theme of this fourth Queerlantis is “The Walls Crumble, But We Grow Stronger,” reminding all of us of the importance of resilience together. We will create this micro-festival bringing together drag, music, visual art, a vendor fair, drinks, networking and fun.
This is Santa Cruz’s drag event of the year, headlined by Irene the Alien from RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, featuring local drag performers, and hosted by the legendary Fou Fou Ha. There will also be live music from my own band, “Robbie Fitzsimmons”, including many of my original compositions, and the band Plasty, as well as DJ sets from Ayumi Please.
An outdoor acoustic patio will be a place where people can disappear for a minute when they need air or conversation or a break from the beautiful chaos inside. The Neighbor’s Pub will be running the bar, which feels correct considering many in Santa Cruz have probably cried, flirted, danced, or had a minor identity revelation there at some point.
The night begins with a panel discussion called “Breaking Down the Binary Barriers,” featuring Irene the Alien out of drag, alongside local members of the trans and nonbinary community. This exists alongside the spectacle because glitter and vulnerability deserve equal billing. And, of course, a meet and greet with Irene the Alien.
What excites me most isn’t any individual performance. It’s the possibility of collision. The kind that only happens in physical spaces. A multi-generational conversation between a college student and someone 20 years older than them on the patio. Someone attending their first queer event, standing next to someone who’s spent decades fighting for queer visibility. A person arriving nervous and leaving with three new friends and a slightly expanded idea of humanity.
There’s something hopeful about that image right now. Not hopeful in the shallow motivational-poster sense. Hopeful because nature doesn’t ask permission to grow. People don’t either.
Santa Cruz has always had this strange, unique and beautiful undercurrent to it. For all its contradictions, it’s still a place where artists, outsiders, students, aging punks, theater kids, theater goers, drag performers, musicians, politicians, the status quo of all ages, and wonderfully undefinable people keep finding each other. Sometimes awkwardly. Sometimes accidentally.
But they do.
I think this is what Queerlantis really is underneath the lights and music and costumes. A reminder that we’re less alone than we think we are.
As a kid sitting in those theaters, what moved me most wasn’t just the spectacle. It was the feeling that, for a few hours, everyone in the room agreed to believe in something together.
Queerlantis happens June 6 at the Santa Cruz Veterans Memorial Building. The event is 18+, and proceeds benefit a scholarship fund for queer youth through Santa Cruz Pride.
More info and tickets can be found at SantaCruzPride.org and via Instagram at @queerlantis.
