“Anytime new diversity becomes visible as a voice of culture, that changes how everyone looks at themselves, and forces a question of just what elements our society is comprised of, who is qualified to speak as an artist and who can represent what.” 

Trans identified writer, poet, composer and songwriter Eli Wise is a storyteller who uses lyrics to weave his tales.  He’s an artist who uses his songs to provide windows onto his inner world.  The subject matter of his rock songs is often dark, but Wise isn’t a pessimist.  He believes transgender musicians and artists are bring something new to cultural expression by simply telling their unique stories. 

The essence of a culture, Wise says, can be found in its mythic tales. “Every culture, even our modern one, relies on archetypes, expressed in myths, in order to understand itself.  For instance, Star Wars is the common example given of a modern day myth that kids and adults use…to better understand our lives. The successful entrepreneur is [another] American myth. As soon as you take ideas that are an undercurrent in every day life, and extrapolate them into a larger setting, you are using a mythic structure.”

Wise first became involved in the San Francisco performance community after attending Gender Pirates, a regular trans and gender queer performance, that Wise later co-produced.  Gender Pirates is a project of United Genders of the Universe (unitedgenders.org), a San Francisco organization that sponsors support groups for “everyone who views gender as having more than two options.”

Wise recalls the scene during his first Gender Pirates event:  “It was very much a community gathering, which made it feel accessible to me as a new guy in town.   It was also very clearly a gender queer space, which meant it was open to me wherever I fit on the spectrum, which was great because at the time I didn’t know.”

Later Wise joined the Collaborative Arts Insurgency (CAI), a group of poets, musicians, artists, and other creative folks in San Francisco that Wise says, “formed a few years ago with the idea that collaboration—rather than individual egos—were key to making our art succeed.” 

Wise joined CAI after he followed friends to the corner of 16th and Mission on a Thursday night.  He says he was surprised by what he discovered at the San Francisco Mission location. “I found the coolest open mic I’d ever been to.  There’s no host, [and] no explicit rules—except you only do one poem or song at a time.  Most people perform with each other. The open mic transforms one of the more dangerous corners of the city into a creative venue for a few hours a week and it is done because we all deserve a voice and art deserves to be public.”

Best of all, Wise says, “There’s no horrible battling of other artists in a line or lottery to get a cherished spot on the stage, [or having] to shout to be heard over the noise.”

Some CAI members went on to create Poems under the Dome, a poetry open mic that happens once a year at San Francisco City Hall, while the rest, Wise says, “Continue to build collaborative relationships with each other, across genres.”

The performer (myspace.com/eliwise) identifies as trans male, in the process of transitioning, and he says that he’s increasingly, moving through the world as male.

Wise recently recorded his first album, which he’s currently mixing at Asphodel studios in San Francisco.  He’s cutting the album down to nine songs so he can wrap it up and send it to labels and dedicate his energy to setting up gigs.  But, he says, he’s enjoyed the process.

“It’s been a great introspective process, to spend all this time really getting to know my songs, working on the various layers.  I can’t wait to make the next one.”

Trans writer, Jacob Anderson-Minshall, co-authored Blind Curves, the first in the Blind Eye Mystery series, available now. Contact jake@trans-nation.org or visit Anderson-minshall.com for more information.