Free to Be

• Posted by The Artist D May 2, 2012 #theartistd  #popcox  #radio  #brodcast  #freedom  2,657 views
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  This last Sunday on my show I had London-based DJ Poppy Cox on for an epic episode. We discussed Pops’ 15 year DJ career  and his walking the line of gender, drag and trans. I don’t think he even knows it yet but right about mid-show he had myself and listeners on the verge of tears with the subject matter.

   

  It was nothing bad at all in fact it was quite good. We were on about influencing others and stepping up to the call to change lives for the better. To inspire. To give people a place to be themselves. Being an American myself I am quite set on the fact that there are few open venues to be your true self on this side of the pond. There are plenty of dressing services and underground boutiques but there are few shops that everybody actually knows is there. You know, the kind that hangs a sign out front and isn’t a dirty little secret. Pops is the founder of StyleMeQuirky.com which is a service for anybody who needs an escape to be fabulated. (That’s my word for taking someone and making them fabulous.) Not only is it a website but it’s a place, a studio, that you can just pop into if you happen to be in the neighborhood.

   

  Every time I hear that I’ve changed someone’s mind (for the better) or that someone else is giving other people a chance it’s this amazing feeling. Pops is giving people a place to be themselves. The hidden women in their homes could come out and get pretty, get their photo taken.

   

  More of us should take chances and just be, because so many others would follow. Everybody wants to be themselves. I’m not even asking you to change the world …  it isn’t about to be changed. It’s that so many people are shoving their life in the dust bin just because the popular culture is diluting us all. I give people a place to be themselves on the Internet. When I was a teenager it’s all I needed to spark all that you see before you. If it did it for me, it’ll do it for someone else.

   

  What came up most during the interview was that people flock to us because they wish to live vicariously through us. Indeed some people would be ruined if they started being themselves in public. We know this best in the transgendered community as we may want out but the lives we setup will simply not allow. It’s deciding when it’s killing you. That’s the hard part. To be or not to b?

   

  You can hear the full interview at my website: http://theartistd.com/radio.html