Vaid-Menon ushers me into the lobby of the old Victorian home that serves as their crash pad in Toronto. “I never was able to consent to the various sets of stereotypes around gender and race that were ascribed to me, but with my outfits, I found I could interrupt those logics.”

It’s hard to reconcile the garrulous figure onstage with the soft-spoken, thoughtful person I met one day earlier. I feel as if I’ve been shaken out of complacency so hard that I might wake up tomorrow with whiplash. After a moment of silence for the Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre, they proceed to launch into a rapid-fire act evoking the violence that trans people face on a daily basis and, in the same breath, throw shade on Ariana Grande.īy the end of the show, Vaid-Menon is visibly in tears and at least one person in the audience has passed out. The air in the club is nearly unbreathable, spiced with the ubiquitous scent of Santal 33 and generous base notes of body odour.Īfter Lassi finishes stripping down to her pot-leaf nipple pasties, Alok Vaid-Menon, a gender-nonconforming performance artist (who goes by they/them pronouns), arrives onstage dressed like a futuristic prophet attending Coachella, wearing a blue spandex crop top and matching pencil skirt that reveal a thatch of body hair, a Frida Kahlo flower crown adorning their magenta locks. We’ve all assembled here to watch a South Asian drag queen named Manghoe Lassi gyrate with a comically oversized fake blunt to Bollywood music. It’s Friday night in Toronto, and The Garrison is packed with a motley crew of people with angular haircuts and septum piercings-the kind of crowd one might expect in attendance at Venus Fest, a feminist music festival that aims to remove toxic male aggression from live music environments.

Femme in Public by Alok Vaid-Menon