All Posts By

Addie Tsai

Free to Be: Navigating My Queer, Non-Binary Identity as a Child of the Southern Suburbs

Posted on January 14, 2020
A photo of Spectrum South writer Addie Tsai.

For the last month, I’ve been on tour for my first book, Dear Twin, a queer Asian young adult novel about twins and childhood trauma. The book centers a queer Asian romance between Poppy, a half-Chinese, half-Japanese queer teen and her girlfriend, Juniper, a self-identified butch Korean girl. When audiences ask me about the characters’ relationship, I say that, when writing this book, instead of envisioning a queer future, I instead envisioned a queer past—one in which I could have…

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The Potentiality of Romantic Comedy: The Queer Asian Fantasy of ‘Saving Face’

Posted on October 24, 2019
A photo of the film Saving Face.

I wish I could remember how I met her, the one and only queer Asian woman I’ve ever seriously dated. The one who, although our relationship wouldn’t last longer than a year, floats through my mind perhaps more often than proportionate to what we shared.  I do remember the first time we interacted. It was outside at a mixed performance venue and bar at a time when I was just coming to terms with my queerness. I had just finished watching…

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Coffee (and Cherries) with Jonathan Caouette, in Three Acts

Posted on July 22, 2019
A photo of Jonathan Caouette in Tarnation.

You send your partner a text: Tell me if this piece isn’t good enough. I need this to be as perfect as it can be. Your partner knows the significance of this piece because shortly after the two of you met, you fangirled out over its subject and maker, Jonathan Caouette’s indefinable, hybrid, crossgenre, tour-de-force film Tarnation—a capsule of a young queer artist’s relationship to himself, his childhood (and adulthood) in Houston (and New York), his sexuality, but most of all,…

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Liberation for All of Us: ‘Up Rising: A Night of Dance Commemorating Stonewall’s 50th Anniversary’

Posted on June 11, 2019
A photo of Stonewall dance at CAMH.

On May 30, 2019, a small group of performers and a few members of the Houston community who identify under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella took the stage at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising to a packed audience. Queer dancer and choreographer Rebecca French curated the performance, which was co-sponsored by CAMH and presented in conjunction with Stonewall 50, CAMH’s current exhibition featuring local, national, international, and multi-generational visual and mixed media…

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