Years ago, when San Francisco illustrator Alex L. Combs, his boyfriend and his younger brother dressed up as Harry Potter characters for Halloween, it wasn’t just an expression of fandom. Their costumes also expressed gender identity.
“It was a way to get people to see us as boys, because we were all trans, and we didn’t normally get to be seen as boys. It was a way to be affirmed,” he recalled.
自从哈利Potte J.K.罗琳出版了第一r novel in 1997, many trans, queer and nonbinary fans have found refuge in the series or used it to imagine or express new possibilities in themselves, either via the magic and creativity of Rowling’s world itself or from the fandom around the franchise.
So when Rowling began supporting and posting content widely viewed as transphobic, starting in 2019 on social media and then in 2020 on her own website, many trans fans and their allies began to re-evaluate their relationship to Harry Potter.
And some made Harry Potter art of their own.
Now, as “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” based on a story by Rowling, is in previews at the Curran, condensed from two parts to a single evening of theater, these trans-positive projects transcend the time-honored question of whether it’s possible to separate art from a problematic artist. In reclaiming the Potterverse for themselves, these artists model a third way that at once testifies to the power of Rowling’s work while also taking a small but meaningful amount of power away from her.
San Francisco drag company Fraudway Productions did its first Harry Potter parody, “Harry Poofter and the Sorcerer’s Rhinestone,” in 2019 and is now working on “Harry Poofter and the Chamber of Secretions” (which was supposed to premiere in January at Oasis but got postponed because of the omicron variant). Both feature trans performer Vanilla Meringue as Harry Poofter.
Theatre Battery in Kent, Wash., made a stop-motion animation web series with Legos called“Lego Harry Potter and the Transgender Witch,”on which many Bay Area artists collaborated. The first seven episodes premiered in 2021, with three more in 2022 and a series finale slated for this month (streaming is available indefinitely).
And Combs made a comic about his Halloween story, solicited contributions from other trans and ally artists, and combined them all into“Trans-Affirming Magical Care: A Harry Potter Fanzine.”
For all three teams, Harry Potter is ripe for adaptation.
“It has such a rich mythology to it,” said Meringue. “Harry Potter is a queer analog, almost. He is not accepted by the family that he lives with. He lives under the stairs, and they want to get rid of him. Then he goes to school, and the kids bully him, and the adults underestimate him.”
But the same author who created such a character then went on, via her website, to raise the hateful specter of trans women preying on cisgender women in bathrooms. “It’s a little confusing as to why she would take that stance. It’s disappointing to a lot of queer people,” Meringue said, taking particular issue with pitting trans and cis women against each other. “I’m a trans woman, and we’re not trying to take anything away from the experiences of cis women.”
In “Harry Poofter and the Chamber of Secretions,” billed as a “queer clapback,” there are plenty of absurdities and vulgarities, but the creative team made it a point to treat Meringue’s character’s trans narrative, evolving from Harry to Harriet, respectfully.
”,在我们的头脑中总是:我们如何celebrate trans women and trans people who feel so let down?” said Elsa Touche, one of the show’s producers, writers, directors and actors.
Logan Ellis of Theatre Battery got the idea to make stop-motion animation after his mom brought home a Harry Potter Lego set in the early days of the pandemic. One Lego set soon wasn’t enough. Eventually, Theatre Battery set up a miniature film studio in his family’s attic. “In total, we probably have $1,500 worth of Legos,” he said. Some “rare” ones had to be acquired from a specialty trader.
The series’ transgender character, Quincy Blueburger (voiced with rich texture by Donato Fatuesi), tries to get Hogwarts peers to accept her, only to discover that the Harry Potter she had idolized makes fun of her, just as everyone else does.
“It makes people squirm,” said Ellis. “It makes people have to reckon with who they’re identifying with.”
The company has faced backlash for its work — not just in comments from strangers but loss of relationships.
“When we first sent out the announcement we were doing this project, we lost more subscribers on our Mailchimp than on any other message we’ve sent out in our 10-year history,” Ellis said.
Theatre Battery also lost a stakeholder so important that “the way we’re going to produce theater in the future is changed.”
For Combs, making a zine was never about Rowling. It’s about the fans. He had long been more interested in fan-made creations than in Rowling’s work.
“There was more queer content,” he said. “I was interested in finding something I connected with within that world but that wasn’t represented by the canon franchise.”
When Rowling revealed her thoughts about trans people, Combs said, “I could see how a lot of (her fans) were really heartbroken, so I wanted to put out some material for them to make them feel supported and seen.”
Rowling’s rhetoric isn’t just rhetoric, and it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, Combs pointed out. In 2020, Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) cited Rowling’s posts on the Senate floor to block consideration of an LGBTQ civil rights bill; the next year, the New York Timestallied“dozens” of anti-trans bills in legislatures across the country.
“There’s a grand tradition of trans people making art in response to the constant threat of violence,” said Maxe Crandall, a lecturer in and associate director of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Stanford University.
As recent examples, Crandall cites the documentaries “Disclosure” and “No Ordinary Man,” as well as the performance art piece “You Make Me Sick” by Morgan M Page, performed at the Squirts festival at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in 2015.
“But that tradition and that canon are still in formation,” Crandall continued, “and it’s not widely known because trans people’s art is so marginalized still. That’s another discrepancy that’s so infuriating. (Rowling) gets all the airtime in the world to say these really stupid things. … There’s no platform that’s adequate for trans people to respond.”
Yet if the platforms are smaller, trans artists’ responses are still mighty, said Melina Cohen-Bramwell, a Bay Area writer on “Harry Potter and the Transgender Witch.”
“J.K.罗琳给世界,和once you do that, it becomes bigger than you,” he said. “Harry Potter is the world’s now, and we as trans people are part of the world, whether she wants that or not.”
Alex Vermillion, a Los Angeles associate producer and writer on the web series, doesn’t intend to stop being a fan.
“I shouldn’t have to change my experience with it because the creator decided I shouldn’t exist in it,” Vermillion said. “That is not my responsibility. What I wanted to do is bring joy. Do you know how rare it is to get into a room of queer artists and just have the freedom to work together and create something with our own story and ourselves in mind?”
“Lego Harry Potter and the Transgender Witch”:Directed by Logan Ellis. Free. Streaming atwww.theatrebattery.org.
“Trans-Affirming Magical Care: A Harry Potter Fanzine”:Created by Alex L. Combs. $10 online.https://alexlcombs.gumroad.com
“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”:Written by Jack Thorne. Based on a story by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany. Directed by John Tiffany. Open-ended run. $69-$229.Curran Theater, 445 Geary St., S.F.https://sf.harrypottertheplay.com