Queer Bodies Open Portals to New Worlds

As I enter Area 405 in Baltimore for the opening of Paradise Portals, the glow of projections greets me. Floating discs made of fabric and plexiglass fill the space. Each is three to five feet in diameter. On their translucent surfaces, films play, viewable from all angles, creating an otherworldly throng of digital humans. In one, landscapes and textures move across DJ Aave’s face. In another, Rahne Alexander’s body is obscured by green screen and caution tape. With collaborators DJ Aave, Rahne Alexander, Alexander D’Agostino, Arit Emmanuela, Eli Erlick, Max Gregg, Bryce Hample, Bao Nguyen, Pangelica, Amy Reid, and Soleil, Red Rae has created a show that asks, “If your body is a portal, where does it lead?”

Each video answers this question. Through its ensemble of trans and queer performers, the exhibition centers transness and queerness in its answers. The show’s run coincides with Pride, adding to a conversation about desire, bodily autonomy, resistance, and resilience that spans many years and many geographies. It also comes at a time of escalating attacks on transgender and queer lives. Hate-fueled violence has increased. The Trump-backed budget reconciliation bill prohibits federal Medicaid funds from covering gender-affirming medical care for adults and minors. In United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court ruled that Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors does not illegally discriminate against individuals on the basis of sex or transgender status. The court will soon hear cases related to trans athletes and may choose to hear a case that jeopardizes the right to same-sex marriage set by Obergefell v. Hodges.

In the face of these threats, some of us might feel the increasing desire to find an escape, however temporary. But in Paradise Portals, the portals offer us a different choice. The only way out is through the multiplicity of realities that we contain. The portals shown here do not linger simply in fear, anger, or grief. They explore joy, playfulness, curiosity, and more, defying binaries and borders. They ask us to consider all the selves we contain, what pieces of history and future dance inside us, and what elements of the more-than-human world we could invite in. Through embracing the mess of self and the possibilities found there, we might be able to imagine and then bring about peace, healthy conflict, deep pleasure, and more equitable systems.

If bodies are portals, there is always another left to find, a delicious mystery waiting to be discovered, and more realms to bask in than we can know.

Audience members are encouraged to partake in this curiosity. We receive a map of the space, which includes a riddle pointing to the locations of six hidden portals. (All of these have been designed by Red.) Around me, visitors kneel and peer into the crevices of the building, searching. These portals are smaller than the disks suspended from the ceiling. You might find one in the belly of a machine beside the gallery of trans ancestors, which featured photos curated by Eli Erlick. Or you might find one hovering in a corner of the high ceiling, like a stray cloud. There’s a delight in finding something secret and a type of hope evoked by knowing a secret exists somewhere, waiting to be found. If bodies are portals, there is always another left to find, a delicious mystery waiting to be discovered, and more realms to bask in than we can know.

Echoing this possibility for permutation, the show changes every night. It runs on Fridays for a month and a half, with the acts lasting around an hour all together. Each of the collaborators has at least one live performance with their portal, but only three or four perform on any given night. The audience, too, shifts the dynamic of the performance, as many of the cast invite viewers to interact with them. On one Friday, I stood on the balcony during Bao Nguyen’s piece while they demanded that someone come help with the wash, saying, “We wait here all night until one of you helps.” A twisting silence filled the space until someone next to me dashed down to wring out the soapy clothes. In another piece, Alexander D’Agostino, wearing a chainmail headdress, a thong, and sparkling silver high tops, instructed us to hiss like snakes as they called forth the queer spirits from the four corners of the Earth.

Only Red Rae performs every night, and with each performance, they change the space. They dance behind a double-layered screen of fabric. The cloth gleams with a projected film of Red swaying, a shimmering portal in their stomach, jeans just slightly unbuttoned. In another part of the film, they dangle from a rafter, cloaked in scarlet tulle. The live Red, pressed against the screen, plays with the multiplicity of their bodies. The dance culminates as they tear through the fabric, reaching out toward the audience through their own projected flesh. After the first night’s performance, they pulled me behind the screen and laughed.

“I could only rip through the first layer of fabric,” they said, pointing to a tiny hole creating a run in the fabric. “Maybe that’s the whole show,” they added. “Maybe I’m just making a tiny hole in one layer.”

But the next time I come to a performance, their whole arm makes it through, and the fabric is sutured from all the previous tears. This, too, is part of the performance: a meditative moment at the beginning of each show where Red sews the screen back together with surgical stitches, a scar that grows and grows, mirroring the top surgery stitches visible across their chest.

At this second show, there’s something new to notice in what I’ve already seen: patterns like microscope slides flickering in a corner, hidden in an old sink; the collage of land and sky tucked into a wooden pillar above my head.

Throughout the show, I see the repetition of plants and water. Perhaps most strikingly, Soleil’s piece contains long, close-up shots of grasses gently strummed by breeze, projected larger than life onto one of the enormous plexiglass disks. The size, combined with the slow motion of the wind, offers a reverent portrait of this piece of earth. Queer ecology seeks to erode the walls built between human and non-human, to see how deeply interconnected our worlds are. It also explores the many types of reproduction, sexuality, and kinship roles within the more-than-human world. Possibilities flourish, lush as the stems that layer over other images on Soleil’s portal.

I’m interested in the portals as possibilities. Doors open throughout the show’s performances, whether a garage door that seemed to be a wall until it creaked upward or Red tearing through the cloth that divides them from the audience. The fabric hangs at the end like a wound, though not an unwelcome one. It will be sewn then broken again. As images flicker throughout the space, we also see moon landscapes, city streets, early gay porn, blurry shapes, cascading colors, ladders, nearly empty rooms, and other humans within the humans. There are many possible answers to the question, “If your body is a portal, where does it lead?”

What if you are the means of transformation? What if your desire is the key that unlocks this door? This idea is specific to trans bodies, to the shaping and reshaping of one’s flesh, hair, clothes, and more.

These portals are not stagnant. They are not windows or places where one goes only to return, having gained some knowledge, completed some quest. In the canon of portal stories, one almost always gets a chance to return. And, almost always, the door closes behind you, an irreversible choice. Alice comes back from Wonderland. Dorothy does not remain in Oz. Snow White will eventually leave the forest. But Paradise Portals seems to ask, “What if we choose not to return?” or “What if we can be in many places at once?” What if Wonderland is not a stopover on the way to adulthood that must be navigated or traversed to become oneself, but instead a part of us that is always catalyzing? A portal is the means of transformation. What if you are the means of transformation? What if your desire is the key that unlocks this door?

This idea is specific to trans bodies, to the shaping and reshaping of one’s flesh, hair, clothes, and more. I am grateful for the playful, grieving, fiercely full way that it offers liberation to anyone with bones who feels that the edges of their skin crackle with passages to unknown planets.

It’s fitting that this momentum, this kinetic potential, reaches its conclusion with a dance party. It’s a nod to the history of queer clubs as sacred meeting space and to the needs of our bodies to move. Visitors have the opportunity to feel themselves stretch and sway. The music, served by GRL PWR (DJs Pangelica, Amy Reid, and ILUSM), is another portal, allowing the crowd to step from the quiet contemplation of art into a mystical land of bump and grind. Just as bodies are transformed throughout the show, the dance party transmutes the gallery into another room entirely. Moving together, the audience and artists become part of a collective body, spilling like droplets of water into and away from each other, becoming something bigger, wilder, and more magnificent than any one human could alone.

As the dance floor clears, I am left with the buzz of it still in my veins. This is the power of Paradise Portals: both deeply personal and political. When bodies are the means for entering another world, the control of our bodies means control of these doorways. And the fact of our bodies means the fact of these doorways. The embodied performances and profusion of projected worlds leave me with a greater sense of where the portals in my own body lead—and of my full embodiment of them.

Outside of the gallery, the wider world of grasses, skies, Supreme Courts, queer clubs, health insurance, and endless stars awaits us. We carry it with us into the performance. It is there all along. But please, let the portals anoint us (or at least me!). Let their beams and boughs, their hinges, their puckers and holes, their squiggles, circles, and cracks bless us as we pass through Area 405’s doorway back into the vast night.