I am often nervous to speak. Audibly, my voice has a life of its own, making an impossible project of my body. As a trans-feminine person located in a Black-Male-read body, my voice is a tell-tale sign of my transcendence of gender. I carry the power & anxieties in my voice, most often manifested during phone calls. Yet since transitioning, I have begun a new consistent practice of talking to my trans sisters & siblings on the phone. Taking our conversations & check-ins beyond the digital & fortifying them in other natural worlds. I have begun to abandon my own hang-ups regarding my voice & can share that navigation with my kin. I exposit this to contextualize how this conversation with Michell'e comes at the perfect apex of my capacity & the cultural need for this documentation. The urgency spurned by the Editorial team at The Tenth, saw us, two Black Trans creatives, navigating the terrains so desperate for Black Queer mapping.

The Lady speaks: “This new year has been f-ing amazing.” Just under a week into 2018, Michell'e & I are able to connect for a genuine kiki. Because of technological constraints, but to my secret delight, we were only able to manage an audio call. I saw this because Michell'e Michaels is inarguably one of the most beautiful people on the planet. This beauty is intentional as it renders any surveyor speechless. Trust me, you can hear it in her voice. The light in her voice is neon & unwavering, it flickers only to remind you of the currents that flow beneath. Or her voice is a collective blossoming of every spring flower demanding nourishment from our fatalistic sun.

I am curious about the relentless softness of Michell'e’s aesthetic; its cultivation of humanity around rituals of remaking oneself. As a performance artist, model, critically-acclaimed Beyoncé illusionist, & Overall Mother of Saint Laurent, Michell'e Michaels is the coagulation of romantic migration & an unapologetic commitment to self.

Michell'e Michaels’ persistence began “way back to the back-back” as a young Black queer in a very normative East Oakland hood family. Called “creative” as a code for different, Michell'e leaned into artistic expression & resisted obstacles even in childhood. At the age of eight, refusing to be denied the chance to tap, Michell'e forged her parents signature & began her formal training. Find support from her mother, in covert operation of her father, young Michell'e would show & perform & compete with her dance. Between training & the prevalence of music videos, dance remained a constant medium for her artistic practice. As home life shifted, her performance experience grew as she became a professional dancer at a local studio, giving way to more creative arts in high school. Despite unquestionable physical skill, she failed high school PE & was permitted to take a dance class at the local community college, which opened up her artistic practices to other genres e.g., fashion, interior decorating, costumes, sewing, & one of her best known skills: hair design. While the labor of art had already become a distinct passion, young Michell'e found it increasingly unrealistic to live at home with her stepfather & his wife. Having already acquired a job at 14, Michell'e persuaded her family to emancipate her at 15, giving her the chance to take the world for which she felt long ready. “I was pretty rebellious but very disciplined,” she reflects.

Once leaving her adolescent home, though still in high school, Michell'e connected with the local House/Ballroom scene through workers at local youth centers. After attending a party, Michell'e recalls the experience fondly: “I seen these girls that were performing & they were beat outta their mind & I was like what the fuck?” The rundown of the scene was only confirmation of a secret dream Michell'e had been living for years. “I was secretly dressing in drag & doing my makeup & stealing my sister & cousins’ clothes… but now I actually had a title for what this could be, or what I could possibly do. It just all made sense at this point, where has the world been all my life, this is what I’d been looking for…” The acceptance that came from this community was critical to how Michell'e fortified her creative ethic. She took on the challenge of innovation the Balls create with stride. “You give someone like me a category, asking ‘we wanna see what your vision of this is’ —that’s what really motivated me.” Michell'e created a home there for several years until her graduation from high school, where she promptly moved to Los Angeles. Like 3 days after receiving the diploma. “From everything that I learned … I just took it and just ran with it”.

Eager but still focused, Michell'e quickly obtains her cosmetology license & begins to nail down salon jobs & hair design gigs. This was the first instance, Michell’e stepped into her resilience. Facing the responsibilities of school, work & living as an active 18,19-year-old in sunny Los Angeles, Michell’e learned how to balance her ambition & her joy. As her beauty career flourished she fell in love & decided to pick up her entire life & try domesticity with her first partner halfway across the country in Texas. As her then partner began establishing himself, she faced new considerations of family & home, putting her craft on indefinite hiatus.

Yet, something, many things, with her remained unfulfilled & Michell'e knew she had to begin her physical transition—having always truly known. She recalls unsolicited dissent from those close to her, “People were always: ‘you’re going to ruin your life,’ ‘trannies don’t get love.' It’s just negative, negative, negative, & these are my best friends… telling me [I’m] not gonna be shit if I decide to make this decision.” However in this new place, her first love was an early affirmer of her need to transition & she began with his full support. Surrendering to love was another turning point. Michell’e recalls “Wanting the ideal. The ideal perception of what you think it is when you are younger… in losing myself (in him) & I was also pushed to find myself.” Her partner’s faith motivated her to dig deeper into her own trappings of purpose & possibility. So she began to seek out self-help books & reading & “coming into the new age of things... Everything I had before, I was able to let go, so I was like a sponge & I took that on like a fucking religion.” She was looking for what could define her as a Trans woman, as a Black woman.

After returning to Northern California with her first love, she was navigating her process discreetly & studying to be a registered nurse. She kept everybody out & avoided her art in an attempt to commit to this personal work. A real TS Susie Homemaker, she remembers: “Whenever we moved to an apartment, I would paint it, make furniture, decorate it, just the whole interior design aspect would be done by me even down to changing the light bulbs. I was painting all the artwork in the house so I did have my little creative outlets around the house & it made me feel good to make a home more than just a house.” Still, like things do, that love came to an end. As the relationship began to fracture, a former love from Michell'e’s past was there to reconcile. The lure of a familiar intimacy took Michell'e back across the country to Atlanta, abandoning her schooling & California life behind for a second time. She was promised a support system for her art, even if not in the city she originally dreamed. Yet, the cycle returned & new old love did not have her creative future at heart & she found his disloyalty extended beyond the emotional. Not received by the Atlanta performance scene & now without the love that brought her there, she immediately realized she needed to calibrate herself back to her goals & aspirations. She headed back to Los Angeles with all she had left without any interest in failure. “Then I really started to thrive,” she affirms.

Restarting her performance practice, she began performing “on boxes in small ass clubs,” but still continued to perfect her craft. As she beautifully describes, it “allowed [her] to get into [herself].” Then one particular night, she had honed her Beyoncé impersonation & her reputation spread like wildfire. She got two other club gigs from that one performance (though she lost one for not knowing she was only allowed to do ONE pop-star & pulling a Rihanna number) & the Beyoncé calls kept rolling in. This brings us to one of most pivotal moments in Michell’e’s career.

Just after Lemonade (2016), Beyoncé’s visual & sonic magnum opus gathered its bevy of Emmy nominations. Michell’e along with Glass Wing Group, a trans art collective in Southern California, created a pitch-perfect alternate version featuring trans & gender-non-conforming Black women. “Lemonade Served Bittersweet,” as it was titled is an excellent example of what makes Michell’e Michaels work so captivating: she humanizes the often misread “superhuman” Beyoncé. The Queen Bey is a staple of queer performance & gender illusionists but there is something so complete about Michell’e’s Beyoncé. She states,“My motto is if you are going to do anything, or be somebody then you be the best fucking at it.” You can almost see it more when she is in her everyday glamour. You can see it on her instagram. She has studied the breath, softness, & density of Beyoncé’s performance but brings her own personal understanding of self. “There are certain things that make Beyoncé Beyoncé,” Michell’e reflects, “But I also put my own spin on it as an artist that also makes it myself, making better by making it something the masses haven’t seen. It makes it more than a copycat.”

With “close to perfection” as a personal aesthetic, Michell’e has learned to keep perfection from hindering her production & just committing to quality. “My art was what I wanted & couldn’t nobody get it the way — if you get in the way, b*tch you are going to wayside — i’ve cut off, what i thought was the love of my life, i done cut off my family & friends before, so nobody can come into my life & be safe if they are not supporting my art” The accumulation of skills both professional & emotional guided Michell’e toward her purpose, but that path was laid by decisions to stop apologizing and abandon compromise for the sake of her love, for the sake of her art. She is looking forward & upward, and ultimately creating a non-profit to better support TWOC who are creating & performing their own stories. What Michell’e seems to curate through such explicit intention is an organic humanity. She materializes the incessancy of her expression by focusing on the dynamics of beauty. She find the whole in the body that is too often demanded to be broken.