All right, hi I'm Eva Monxy and today
the Queer Zine Library babes have asked me
to read a bit to you from my 2017 zine. It's
called I Found a Way to Make You Cry
which is a spoiler. Um yeah I wrote it quite
a long time ago now but I still really
like it. It's a zine about like crying
and masculinity and sort of growing up
and getting all your emotions all turned
inside out and upside down, so you know
not inappropriate for the time we're
currently in. And yeah and I wanted to
make it kind of very illustrative. I
wanted to do like, my whole thing was to
do a really like illustration based zine,
but I had a huge technology fail for
like a whole year. So I ended up kind of
I guess I'm gonna describe this as
painted it all, and I based a lot of it
on sort of mascara and tears and
sort of that idea of like 90s femme
masculinity. Plus like I don't know,
there's something really dramatic and
cinematic about like someone with
mascara all down their face, so kind of
relates to what I was saying what, I was
writing about. Yeah so I want to read you a
little bit from the introduction and
then I'm gonna read you another couple of pages. Um it's
quite wordy.
It seems trite to say that queerdos get
good at hiding our true selves. Schooled
in that shit from the first time we
are shamed for accidentally revealing our
queer trans oddballness, but we do. When
there is a distinct lack of examples of
our weird wonky secret selves we learn
to replace, narrativise, externalise,
and outsource our emotional realities. I
imprinted my sense of self onto Ducky,
Christian Slater, River Phoenix, and the
entire cast of My So-Called Life. I let
them carry the weight of what I wanted
because there was literally no one else
there to show me how to be a person that
felt authentic. I learned to cry like
them and be strong like them, be distant
and beautiful and funny and sensitive. I
learned to perform my feelings to
manipulate an imagined audience, to feel
satisfied with
the transition cut at the end of the
scene. Or I look out the window sad and a
little teary, and the music swells. Late
eighties/early nineties films couldn't
be described as emotionally subtle, they
were hyper real and the music was so
important to that. UK surf version of the
Pixies' Wave of Mutilation or the
ultimate end credits weeper of Jeff
Buckley's version of Hallelujah, the
music tells us when and how to cry.
Reality has always been a bit of a
struggle for me. I outsource myself
emotionally to the extent that I only
really understand myself as a reflection.
I learned to stop performing as a
fictional character and force myself to
be real but it took a long long time. I
like who I am now but there are some
parts of fictional me I can't shake. I
still look to camera all the time
because of John Hughes, and I can't
really feel my emotions unless they are
played back to me as if I'm
participating in them as a theoretical
filmic exercise. Um so I talk a little bit
here about, sort of how crying and
sadness sort of turns into rage. And in
order to try and access crying, because I
know how good it is for me and I also
don't want to be like my dad,
I built a playlist. And on that
playlist there's certain songs that will
just [click] turn on the tears like a Pixar film.
And uh I, I use that to kind of access
the type of crying that I want to do. So
here for your listening displeasure
allow me to introduce my playlist. I
wrote the descriptions by listening to
each one and then describing the kind of
crying they do, they make me do. It's
gross and messy and scary writing this,
and it's no different now three years
later doing this video.
So yeah it's got some pieces of art in
it, there's a particularly cute molotov
cocktail made out of tough guy tears
which I really like. But I'm gonna read you
Off You by the Breeders, which is off their Title
TK album. Best enjoyed sobbing silently
on your bedroom floor until you become
so hyperventilated you feel like you're
floating off the ground. This is the
music of true unjust suffering. You're a
good person right? You try your hardest
and yet you're taken
apart time and again. You constantly try
to keep your head up smile and carry on,
and this is the cry of the moment that
smile breaks and you finally fall apart.
You cry until you can't move and you
realise that you've been lying there,
eyes dry and open, staring catatonically
at the wall for a while as you pick
yourself up. The disgust you feel at your
fear of being a broken disgusting mess
that you clearly are, puts you back on
the floor. And you give in and you put
this one on repeat.
And I'm gonna read
you the last one which is La Vie En Rose by Louis Armstrong, which I've been obsessed
with, not realizing obviously at the time
that it is a tried and true lesbian anthem.
Yeah I was obsessed with it since I was
a kid so I wrote about that one. This
makes me cry for what I have and what I
have lost. When I was a child, this track
was the clean trumpet of my hopes, hidden
underneath and aching loneliness and my
absolute certainty that I would be a
horrific disgusting thing, reviled and
outcast forever. These tears are the
tears of the tiny queer gender defiant
child in working-class Ilford who had
absolutely no idea that they would ever
get the hell out. I couldn't have
possibly known how amazingly their, how
amazing their life was going to get.
These are so bittersweet and agonisingly
embarrassing, and then they're so far
from me now that in a way they seem sort
of obtusely tragic and I miss knowing
the shape of them so intimately. Yeah so
that's just a couple, there's a whole
playlist here all with different types
of crying. My friend who is much smarter
than me called it A Taxonomy of Tears
which, god I wish I'd thought of that
before I put it out, so 10 points to them.
But yeah I'll put the whole thing up, I'll
put the whole thing up on here so enjoy
and much love to you all
