There’s a saying in Zen Buddhism: “Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.” A peak moment is great, the idea goes, but the real satori shows up in the everydayness of life and work and relationships. I thought about this line when I was thinking about Pride—the event, the month, the movement, the way of life—and what that looks like here once the rainbow flags are rolled and stored and the Target aisles return to shades of khaki. And I thought about it while talking with Karl Jones, a Tulsa Artist Fellow whose current Arts Integration grant has him operating not in the lofty heights of conceptual art but in the everydayness of queer culture in Oklahoma, working on a project about the gay architect Bruce Goff (learn about him here) and building opportunities to connect around art, nightlife and events.
Jones is one of many helping make sure Tulsa is increasingly a fun, safe, welcoming home for LGBTQ+ people—a big tent that maximizes access points while keeping quality high (“I want it to be fantastic: the music needs to be good, the drinks need to be good!”) and community-building at the forefront. You might have seen his flyers circulating on social media: one for Studio 66 (a regular late-night Route 66/Studio 54 hybrid dance party held at Four Seven Three in Kendall Whittier), one for a recent Tulsa Tough watch party, one for a Gaythering at Maple Park, co-sponsored by Black Queer Tulsa. These are different sorts of events than bar crawls or once-a-year parades; these are about making space in the everyday life of the city for queer people to just be.
Jones grew up here in the 1980s and ‘90s, a math whiz whose personal teenage Alison Bechdel/“ring of keys” moment happened at Queenie’s (pun intended, he noted) while having lunch with his mom, when a server with a right lobe earring came to the table bearing a plate of quiche. “I just knew this was a dude, a very beautiful human who was playing with gender and offering me … this,” he said. “I fell in love with quiche in that moment. Do you remember the ‘80s? This was a time when the toxic masculine response [to the LGBTQ+ movement] was to put the phrase ‘Real Men Don't Eat Quiche’ on bumper stickers and t-shirts. And I'm like, it has protein! It goes great with a salad or a soup! It's incredibly versatile. Why are you in my head about an object of food? So yeah, I had these little snippets of realization.”
Those were pre-Internet days, though, and Jones didn’t have the words to make sense of these experiences. At 17 he left for college—"I would say that I was fleeing, for sure”—but came back regularly through the years to spend time with family, dipping into Tulsa’s gay nightlife, sustaining relationships and creating performance art events and house parties that were precursors to the gatherings he’s helping to organize now. Exploring queer culture in bigger cities like Brooklyn and Washington, D.C. meant that when he recently came back here for good, he brought along a far broader set of norms, experiences, influences and inspirations than he'd had access to before.
“Those of us who saw the brokenness here and left for New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles, whatever—the sort of bigger city where you could be who you are and express yourself in the freest form—we've had gay mentors and lovers and friends and dealt with all of these things in a free and open society," Jones explained. "So I think there's a little bit of learning and healing I can help people do, honoring the work of all the people who’ve been here doing good all along and offering what extra expertise I have. I'm not a therapist. I don't intend to say that I know exactly what people need to heal, but I am good with people and I am good at bringing people together.”
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Black Queer Tulsa (@blackqueertulsa)
A post shared by Black Queer Tulsa (@blackqueertulsa)
Thanks in part to Tulsa Remote and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, the city is seeing an influx of people who’ve experienced diverse urban landscapes and creative environments. (Speaking of which, don’t miss the Tulsa Glitterary Conference, a TAF outreach project from Steve Bellin-Oka.) Jones sees this as an opportunity to foster some growth at the intersection of three groups: artists, new Tulsans, and locals for whom queer culture may not yet be a comfort zone, who might not know much about drag shows or what happens at a Gaythering, for example. (What happens, FYI: some people come early in the day, others come after work meetings. You sit in the grass, eat snacks, jump rope, listen to tunes. At a recent one, Black Moon artist Alexander Tamahn was doing some pole dance work. Jones described with a smile how the gay boys sat together in rows, while a bunch of women piled up on blankets 200 feet away. "When I walked up to say hi, the women said, 'Yeah, we know who you are. We’re here for your thing, but we’re doing our own thing.' “I was like: Yes. We want to make a big enough place for lots of different people to feel comfortable and safe.”)
“I think about it as integration,” he said. “I've known people in Tulsa my whole life, and I'm still very connected here. So helping those people find some way to interact—because, you know, we all know that the bars only provide a certain thing here. When I meet new Tulsans, or have friends from New York and L.A. considering moving here, the first thing they ask is, What is gay life like there? And I give them an overview of what I think the bars are looking like, but there's also a curiousness about what else we can do. Tulsa has brought in this huge contingent of very diverse people, and they know how to go out.”
For Jones, it makes more sense to attend to what’s organically happening in the city and create experiences around that, connecting new Tulsans to the existing landscape and native Tulsans to a cool factor they might not have had a bridge to before. “There are things to love and hate about every city I’ve ever lived in. It's all about finding the best things and highlighting those, improvising within what's already going on,” he explained. “So I threw a party one Saturday because I live downtown and there was a cool bike race going on all day with like 30,000 cyclists with some really attractive bodies, working really hard just for you—so you know, bring your binoculars. I could have thrown another Gaythering, but that's de-valuing what's already happening, what the energy is going to be. And then Art House Show was happening, featuring like 40 artists, and like a third of them are queer, so that was the queer thing on Saturday night. You don’t have to go to a bar. If people in Tulsa are already highlighting and focusing on a group thing, incorporate that into your thing! It's really hands-off. It's not about ‘my event’; it's just ‘what we're doing on Saturday.’” (Here’s a great interview Jones did with the New York Foundation for the Arts about the advantages of living and making art in a place the size of Tulsa.)
That “we” is everything. Not a corporate thing, or even an official thing—a “we” thing, by and for queer Tulsa. Making spaces of LGBTQ+ inclusion and celebration and safety an everyday part of the city’s life is one more way Tulsa starts to heal from a broken history. “That thing that your community beat out of you when you were seven years old? That's the best version of you,” Jones said, thinking of young artists in the community who are discovering new ways outside existing power structures to create, to share their work, to shine—the way he mostly had to leave home to do. “When I came back, it wasn't like I was coming in and creating new community in Tulsa from nothing,” he said. “I already had these lifelong friends, the people who are activists, artists, thinkers in the city, who've been making it a better place. To be wanted back for all those things I had been unwanted for: that’s the big full circle for me.”
Sometimes, Jones says, he checks out what’s going on around town, then makes a flyer on Thursday for an event on Saturday. Keep up by following these queer culture hubs:
Karl Jones
Oklahomans for Equality’s Tulsa Pride website
Black Queer Tulsa
Studio 66
Four Seven Three