DIY and IRL energy for mutual aid in punk rock

Ekko Astral is not a mutant band. They might have a trans lady in Gayle Holzman. Much of their material may deal with being transgender. Additionally, they may have grown their fan base through word of mouth online in spaces such as Via Twitter. But at the end of the day, they’re not a transgender band.

The three-piece punk band will remind you of the bullshit that consumes everyday life, but give you “powerful anthems” to live by and help you get through it. The songs are short, loud and aggressive – their first full-length album, Pink balloonsclocking in at under 36 minutes, exists in what the band calls “the mascara pit.”

As a band, Ekko Astral wants to strive to make the world a better place. This means speaking out on a variety of topics, including transgender rights, Holzman says. Because harnessing the energy that people online bring into the physical world and bringing together people fighting for it through mutual aid – no matter the size of the crowd – is where the magic happens. They are as much a political project as they are a band, and it goes way beyond the identity of their lead singer.

Ekko Astral is also on the front lines of making sure that while the internet becomes less safe for queer people every day, there are a group of artists and musicians fighting to recreate those safe spaces in person. “People are becoming increasingly isolated. People are becoming increasingly isolated on their screens and their phones, so you have to actually try to develop campaigns to disrupt it,” Holzman says.

Having worked as a congressional and climate journalist in Washington, D.C. since 2017, Holzman knows the power of media narratives and how they shape the world around us. When she saw how major artists were speaking out about important political issues, she decided it was time to leverage her connections in the music industry to start that kind of energy for trans rights.

This past May, that energy became Liberation Weekend, D.C.’s largest transgender-led music festival. Over two days, more than 30 acts — including Speedy Ortiz, Ted Leo, Bartees Strange, The Ophelias and Ekko Astral themselves — performed in the nation’s capital to help raise more than $30,000 for Gender Liberation Movementa non-profit organization working to “build a grassroots movement for bodily independence, self-determination, collectivity, and fulfillment.” But the impact was not only financial.

When Republican lawmakers sought to use a congressional budget bill to block Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care, Holzman and other artists leveraged the connections generated from the festival to organize social media lobbying campaigns aimed at raising awareness of the cuts. She says these moves helped push lawmakers to use the procedural measures available to them to fight back, rather than concede to Republican efforts.

With funds raised from Liberation Weekend, the Gender Liberation Movement organized protests outside the Supreme Court in the wake of the ruling in United States v. Skremitiwhich upheld a Tennessee law prohibiting gender-affirming care for minors. These marches received international media attention, bringing the issue into the public spotlight.

This fall, Ekko Astral will return to doing the work the band has consistently done when touring across the country: mutual aid to directly benefit trans people. The reality of the transgender community “spending a disproportionate amount of time” online compared to other groups is that it leads to many of us being “overly vocal,” according to Holzman.

This has allowed groups of transgender musicians to create new musical communities in the past five to seven years, and then use their existing knowledge of going on tour to create something “really beautiful.” She says they are now finding a way to leverage these thriving communities to work together and build something bigger.

“Imagine if bands decided to take it upon themselves to use their platform because they were going to say, ‘If you were at the merch table, would you give, like, $5 to help this person pay their medical bills?’” “Imagine how far that would go,” she says.

Holzman adds that for transgender artists, many of them realize “acutely” how poor access to powerful, life-saving health care is for our community. Add to that the class of being artists, a group that rarely has the benefits of access to health care through employment, and you have a group primed to use tools like mutual aid to make up for what governments and corporations lack.

This kind of ethos of mutual aid and finding support systems in the cracks of society is rooted in a musical tradition with a long history: DIY spaces. Trans musicians have historically thrived in these areas, with less monitoring from labels and traditional media, and thriving with the help of an online community is vital.

The DIY scene is known to have originated from a world of… Punk rock scene from the late 70s In the United States, bands shunned by major record labels create their own venues to host shows in unauthorized locations. A wide range of groups, including anarchists, working-class people, people of color, and queer people, found refuge in punk rock and other DIY aesthetics.

It was in these places that Nicole Maroulis, guitarist and songwriter, fell in love with music. They first started playing music around the age of 14, inspired by the DIY spirit. Eventually, Maroulis started her own project, Hit Like a Girl, and released her first record in 2017. Today, they embody the DIY spirit by working as a hired musician, photographer, tour manager, and merchandise vendor throughout the music industry. They also run a non-profit organization called No More Dysphoria which raises money in various rounds to help transgender people access the care needed to confirm their gender.

The Maroulis started small: They said 20 poorly made T-shirts, to be exact, were sold at shows where they knew the acts. This led to more opportunities to have No More Dysphoria at different concerts in larger and larger venues. As word of mouth spread, more bands became involved in some of the showbiz events in music videos or on stage on tour.

Now, the project is an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit that continues to help more and more people access life-saving care — even if internet algorithms do their best to try to bury any trans content. Platforms like Instagram They were preventing young people from searching for LGBTQ content for months at a time. X, formerly Twitter, He faced allegations The algorithms “de-promoted” certain words associated with the LGBT community.

“It’s harder now to connect with people online and make sure the right people see it because of the way things get buried a lot,” Maroulis says. “But I think that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying.”

Even if our internet platforms continue to fragment and deteriorate — like the ever-changing policies on Elon Musk’s X device that seem to… Allowing abuse to be directed at trans people – This does not mean that the knowledge transmitted during the tour will stop spreading. In fact, it’s the opposite, says Maroulis. Selling T-shirts and raising money is only one part of the equation when people on the tour dedicate their efforts to sharing resources aimed at helping their community. Sure, those same resources could be shared through videos targeting trans people searching for information about accessing transitional care, for example, on Instagram, but they say they lack the human connection that meeting on the show generates.

As more and more bands harness the energy of Liberation Weekend, they’re reminded how important music is as a unifying force, especially in more conservative areas of the country where bands aren’t always touring. Telly Komorny, guitarist for the band Home Is Where, grew up on the northeast coast of Florida, an area with a reputation for being trans-unfriendly. After getting involved in her local DIY scene at the age of 15, she realized that playing music could provide tangible help to people in her community. Komorny has worked to organize local transgender-led music festivals to help pay for friends’ surgeries or name changes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they had to move these festivals online.

Given the number of people they were reaching out to, Komorny cites the online community she was able to access as helping Home Is Where get off the ground and connecting them to more resources to organize more support for trans people on the tour. Those connections made in that period have been important to the band as they prepare to head out on their biggest tour to date with the opportunity to reach more people than ever before.

The band works with the Southern Equality Campaign, donating proceeds from every ticket sale to the group’s repatriation fund, what it calls “an accessible form of social responsibility” that any band can benefit from.

Coming from Liberation Weekend, Komorny says the biggest lesson she learned at Home Is Where was to prioritize local vendors to pitch on their next tour. It may take a little more work before actually putting on these shows, but the potential to expose crowds to smaller organizations with resources that may be available in their own backyard is worth it.

Komorny adds that after building all the energy that the band was able to harness online, it is now time to turn this potential into an actual organization.

“If you can get people who are excited to go to a show, and then they see that there are all these other things that are part of the culture, that’s perfect.” He says.