The Many Poses of Patricia Black, Creative Director and Actor
Black’s first stage experiences came when she was a 15-year-old sheltered child turned runaway: “A couple of drag queens kidnapped me and shaved my eyebrows and shaved my legs and put me in a dress. And I was in a show,” says Black. She made her living working in clubs and landed for a while in New York around the time of Studio 54 (1977). “I was a part of that whole world for a second,” she says. But Black sensed danger. “I thought, I’m going to die If I stay here.” She got a ticket out, and headed back to Florida just as AIDS, the danger she had sensed, hit New York.
Black had long ago learned to be alert to peril. “Living in that time, and living as this being that I was, of course you find yourself in precarious situations because people don’t believe that you are a girl, or people don’t believe that you are a boy. I was young and very naive and I found myself in many situations that almost cost me my life.” When she was in her early 20s, and well-traveled, Black arrived at a tipping point. “I realized that I had to pick one,” she says. “Either I had to live my life as a boy, or live my life as a girl. I didn’t want to live being in between, and I knew if I lived my life as a boy, [it] was going to cost me my life, so I became a girl. I felt like I saved my life, by exiting out of it and going on to living another life.”
The actor and creative director no longer remains “under cover,” but for a long time Black addressed her history only if asked. “I lived my life very privately. I come from a time where they were killing us,” she says. “Since the whole trans thing has become a very public discussion now, it’s really allowed me to have space in it.”
Representation, Black believes, is something that matters, and she’d like more people to be given room at “the table,” to have their experiences and voices heard. “What we have to accept right now is that whatever we thought was normal didn’t work. And that was abnormal,” she says. “I’m looking for authenticity more than anything.”
