Tamil Culture
D’Lo is a queer, transgender, masculine-of-center, Tamil Sri Lankan artist, poet, comedian, and actor. D’Lo has claimed success through performance art and entertainment work that have strong political messages tied to his identity. Recently, D’Lo has been featured on popular television shows such as Looking, Transparent, and Sense8. I had the opportunity to talk with D’Lo about the intersections of race, culture, queerness, art, and social justice through his life and work.
Zain: So how are you, how is LA? Anything you are working on in particular?
D’Lo: Well, tonight, I have two shows: one of which we’re gonna do a report back from Ferguson. I was part of an API Artist delegation to Ferguson – that one’s called the “Black and Yellow,” show produced by a collective of comics of which I am a co-producer for “Disoriented Comedy”.
Zain: That’s amazing! So recently, I’ve heard you’re on the show Sense8, and you’ve also been on shows like Looking and Transparent as well – and all of these shows have LGBT narratives at the forefront. How is working on those shows like for you, and being a queer South Asian person, how is it working in the industry?
D’Lo: So, I don’t know if talking from a perspective of a queer South Asian is… I’ll talk from the perspective of a queer person of color, and then probably hit some things along the way. I’ve been doing theater and acting for a long fucking time, almost fifteen years, and performance for like, about twenty. So, it’s not like if I knew that it would be lucrative for me to pursue acting, I think I would have probably taken that as my first choice. But, I’m very gender nonconforming; I’m trans. I felt like every time I was trying to jump into the industry, it was like, the doors were shut more than they were open.
And so, even shit like trying to get, trying to do acting classes, and shit like that, you know, they’re not… it’s like, I’ve been to acting class, I’ve been to improv classes where they literally do not know what the hell to do with my ass, you know what I’m saying? So, it’s not like Hollywood is a welcoming place for gender nonconforming or trans people. Unless you’re a passing queer person, you’re not… nobody’s going to really touch you, because it’s a hard sell, and Hollywood is about making money. And up until recently, those stories weren’t even being told. And if they were, they were generally in a very white, passing, “straight-gay way”. I say “straight-gay,” you know I’m talking about, right?
Zain: Yeah, like very heteronormative fitting.
D’Lo: Yeah. [But] it’s been incredible working on queer themed shows and every set that I have been on has been like… I never would have thought that there would be, like, trans consultants on a show, but that’s what happens in Transparent. I would never think that there would be specifically created gender neutral bathrooms on set. I never thought that there would be people who would just know that my pronouns weren’t female. So, in a lot of ways, it’s been kinda like I feel like I’m in the beginning of the wave of more queer programming and I feel blessed – and yet, I also know that there’s a lot of problems still. So, as a critical thinker, I know that the media is still lacking, in a mainstream way, queer people of color narrative storylines. But as an actor, I can’t say I couldn’t be more blessed – like, I really have to thank everybody who’s believed in my ass for me to even get these opportunities. How ever small they may be, as far as my career is concerned, it’s a big fucking leap.
Zain: Do you see things slowly changing, and slowly becoming more accessible to gender nonconforming and trans people of color in the media?
D’Lo: You know, I don’t know yet. I think that my marker, like in my mind, is if I see a storyline that centers around a queer person of color – meaning like a gender nonconforming person of color. I don’t know if you’ve been watching Empire, but Empire’s got a gay black storyline, and there’s a whole bunch of other versions of queer storylines all over the fucking place in that show. But, the thing is, that we have a lot of, there’s a lot of white, trans storylines. In the past, whenever trans women or gender nonconforming people were asked [to play a role], they were in the roles of “hookers,” so to speak. That’s a quote. The role of like, “junkie.” The roles of quotes. Whatever demeaning role they could give somebody who was trans-identified. So, I don’t know if we have gotten yet to the point where we can, where people even want to hear people of color storylines as much. So, I think it’s just going to be a long time until we get a trans person of color’s voice in there, or a gender nonconforming storyline in there. But I don’t know! Shit is changing so quick. The fact that Empire slayed in ratings is like a testament to the fact that good writing, drama, all of that shit. People love that shit, you know. But like, aside from Orange is the New Black, I haven’t really seen strong people of color roles, and we’re not even talking about queer people of color.
Zain: Right. I definitely do see a small shift towards showcasing more “diversity,” in media, but it is in these singular spaces and not holistically.
D’Lo: Yeah. Even though they have people of color in other shows, it’s not like they’re concentrating on a storyline that is based around somebody’s identity politics, or identity. It’s not going to be about race, it’s just, ‘oh, we cast you, you’re playing a doctor,’ which is cool, too, but what I’m saying is as far as the stuff that interests me, is not happening to a large degree on network, and in Netflix, and Amazon, and all these studios – there are very few central characters of color with complex storylines around that address race, class, gender, etc. So, I think it’s going to be a long time before real-er stories become mainstream, or at least available.
Zain: In your identity politics, and in a lot of interviews and in your bio, you put your identities in the forefront of how you portray yourself. Why do you think doing this is important? Do you think these identities are universal, or are they specific to you?
D’Lo: The reason why I started putting all those labels initially was because, I felt like, let me just call the elephant in the room, let me just tell you who the fuck I am, especially because there were so many people saying ‘why do you want to put that you’re queer?’
In the beginning, in the ‘90s, and early 2000s, people would ask me, ‘why do you want to do that to yourself,’ and I’d be like the minute I step on stage you’re gonna fucking know. It’s not like I don’t smell of it. Like, oh, because I didn’t say it, I can talk about other things and people aren’t gonna have a problem with it. Like, that was kind of where people were in hiding, I’m not tripping. Like, uh, I’m fucking queer all day, every day. When I walk into a room, that’s the first thing people see.
When I say that I’m Tamil Sri Lankan American, it’s about placing where I am in the grand scheme of things. Like, I’m Tamil before I’m seen as Sri Lankan. I’m Tamil Sri Lankan, but I would never go around saying only I’m Sri Lankan. Our history is that Tamil people have been consistently oppressed. As far as the South Asian, and the API, I felt like it was important to say Sri Lankan. And then I come from an immigrant family, my parents were the immigrants, so I have to acknowledge that American side. And the country we live in, it was supposed to be where everything is just better than it is back home, and the opportunities are greater, and all of that stuff. And, yet, here I am, wondering why this place that is supposed to be the land of fucking milk and honey is so rotten to people of color and black folks, and queer folks. These are the things that, as an American, it is my duty to make “America,” better.
A lot of people will say, especially in Hollywood, they’ll be like, ‘so-and-so, John Smith is a writer/ actor/comedian,’…there’s so many people trying erase identity that I’m still like, ‘Nah, man,’ I’m still putting the labels. Don’t get me wrong, I also believe that if an artist of color just wants to be seen as an artist, they have that right and it doesn’t bother me. But, for me, these are just five bits of this multi-layered lens that I see this world through. I put all my identities out there as a source of pride for my audiences. They know that they’re gonna come in hearing an unapologetic perspective coming through these lenses.
Zain: Yeah that makes a lot of sense. How do you think putting your identity politics out there affects your success and how you going about your work?
D’Lo: For my own artistry, whether it’s writing, plays, poetry, standup, whatever it is that I’m doing. If they see that bio on the program, or for [them] to book me, they gotta know like ‘okay, this person is about this stuff and this is what I’m going to hear about,’ but when I perform, the material is always going to be different than what you imagine. Like, my role as an artist, the one that I put on myself, is to go beyond what even the labels are describing. In regards to the stuff I create and my own personal artwork, that’s the situation. As far as acting, in Hollywood, they could give a fuck about how you identify. I’ve auditioned for roles that weren’t ethnically South Asian or sometimes ethnically ambiguous. Hollywood doesn’t give a fuck about how you label yourself, they’re more about what you are perceived as – which is problematic, but that’s what about Hollywood isn’t problematic?
Zain: That’s very true. I was reading some of the articles on your website, and in one interview for Timeout Mumbai, you talked about how you don’t identify with the term ‘Desi’ because it generally means Indian. How do you see yourself as a minority within the South Asian community, and how are your experiences unique and distinct from the general, over-encompassing narrative people have of South Asians?
D’Lo: Well, I think that everybody’s South Asian experience is vastly different from one another’s; but, as much as we queer political people might talk about South Asia, so many aspects of it are completely different. Like, there’s the religious background, or the environment in which your parents grew up, and mentality, class background, caste background, a whole bunch of factors. For me, as a Sri Lankan, I didn’t really grow up with South Asians. Then when I started hanging out with South Asians, I had to learn all these new terms, like ‘desi,’ and ‘South Asian,’ and suddenly I’m learning about like I didn’t know shit about Bollywood, I didn’t know shit about Hindi this or that. I didn’t know about the great poets, the great artists of South Asia, like, it was foreign to me.
I think that happens with a lot of Sri Lankan people. I think that the fact that I’m Tamil, it’s more of a connect to South Asia, but Sri Lankans who are not Tamil don’t necessarily have any desire to be a part of South Asian because they have their own big cultural communities that they are a part of. It’s only because I was an artist that I ended up becoming part of a thick, diverse South Asian community. ‘Desi;’ I know that people use it, but I‘ve never used it. I don’t think I’ve barely even said that word. It’s not like I hate on people that do use it, it’s just that it’s not my personal term that I relate to.
…I’m not saying it’s like that consistently, or that things haven’t changed, but what I am saying is that it’s almost a microaggression because no one is telling you you have to learn it, but everybody’s talking about India and in a very North Indian way. The Sri Lankans were like, ‘ok we’re learning more,’ but meanwhile, I don’t even know when the last time I’ve heard anything that has been Tamils. There’s more on the table for certain parts of South Asia than there are for others.
Zain: I totally agree with you and notice that. As a Tamil Sri Lankan and a trans [person], how is navigating gender, masculinity and femininity in your community? Is it more specific and nuanced in your own individual life?
D’Lo: Yeah, the closer in you get, the more nuanced it is.
So, I kind of have to separate my transness from my masculinity, even though I see myself a trans masculine person of color, trans masculine Tamil Sri Lankan whatever-whatever. I feel like in my community, I was the first. I grew up in a really tight-knit community of Sri Lankan Tamil people in Lancaster, California, which is about an hour away from LA, give or take ten minutes. I was the first openly and out queer person. It was always a thing, but I think that people in my community, even if they didn’t know I was queer, they understood that something about me was different whether because of my creative or comedic-ness, and so I got away with a lot more than what I would imagine the reality being for someone whose queerness could’ve come with a heavy dose of bullying. Don’t get me wrong, I felt judged. Of course I felt judged by my community. But I never felt it in a way that was killing my soul.
As far as my family is concerned, of course they have a lot of shame. I would say now my mother has a lot less shame around me. My father still has a nice, thick layer of shame around who I am – but, at the same time, it’s not like I don’t know they care for me, they love me. But, that journey has been a rocky and bumpy one.
As far as my masculinity is concerned, I’ve always been masculine from day one. I’ve always felt like I was a dude, and I would do everything that wasn’t typically girl/feminine and not in resistance to anything, but just because that’s who I was. I was a boy. I think that my masculinity has been informed through the feminist movement and through incredible, beautiful, queer mothers, and queer elders. And my masculinity is in a lot of ways, the root is still the same, but the fruit and the leaves are more informed. Masculinity is such a beautiful thing. I am on a quest to really understand, ‘what does beautiful masculinity look like?’ I am holding myself to standards, and experimenting how I want to walk in this world, and be an upstanding person and using my masculinity in ways that aren’t what is typical – misogynistic, sexist, whatever whatever – like really challenging those set of norms.
You grow up in an immigrant household, and masculinity is powerful – it can silence femininity. It can squash it, it can kill it. It can scare it, and I don’t know what was going on in my mind as a baby in regards to picking up energy. I don’t know I became a masculine person. That wasn’t typically supposed to be such. I would expect it to go another route completely. I don’t know what in my mind, in my soul, in my body, in my cells, in my nerves, in the memory that travels through our DNA, I don’t know what and at what time shit shifted. But, I adapted an understanding of masculinity that was very Sri Lankan, very machismo, for lack of a better word. It’s not like I was a rough and tough type of person, but my ideas of what it meant to be a masculine person were definitely defined earlier on. Who I was as a person was not hard, I was definitely a loving person, but all those things as a critical thinking queer person, at some point I realized that, ‘Look, shit is not cool even within our queer communities,’ towards women, towards trans feminine people, towards femininity in general.
Zain: How do you rethink masculinity, and how does that look like to you?
D’Lo: In an “ally” way – I’m having such a hard time with that word these days, especially after Ferguson – if I were to talk to my cousins who aren’t necessarily, like, they’re liberal but they’re not radical or progressive in their ways of understanding women. If I were to talk to them, I would be like, ‘Well, it’s okay to be nice to women and respect women, but how do you wanna jump up your game where you’re really supporting the women in your life?’ If I were to talk to somebody in our queer circles who is trans masculine or masculine-of-center, I would be like, ‘So maybe part of our reality is to deny the fact that we have come into this world with organs – our sex, our junk – is like, what cisgender men had been feeling like is theirs, so maybe we have to distance ourselves from that in order to step into our transness or our masculine-of-center-ness. But then why does it have to be that we have to then hate the perceived weakness or the perceived softness that is found within feminine communities, or femme identified, or woman identified or and trans feminine identified communities?’ I feel that there’s a lot of misogyny coming from masculine-of-center folks towards feminine-of-center people, and I’m like, ‘Look, in all of our beautiful queerness, really? You’re gonna start copy-catting this bullshit?’ This is how I want to call out my brothers, my siblings who are masculine-of-center.
