Hale Linnet – Brazen Bandits

The Brazen Bandits are a newly formed artist collective of trans-non-binary artists in Southern Maine. Boots Shertzer (they/he), Sampson Spadafore (they/them), and Hale Linnet (they/them) met at a creative retreat organized by Maine TransNet in 2023, and have been collaborating ever since to gather community around art making and social change.

Over the past two years the Bandits have collaboratively built puppets and marched in Portland Pride, made art supporting a Free Palestine, organized a vigil for Nex Benedict, hosted collective grief events and a “Trans Joy is Resistance” dance party. This past January, we had the opportunity to take over Space Gallery in Portland, and transform it into a community art gathering place.

Brazen included artwork from the three cofounders, including work showcasing identity, transition, and relationship to self and community. Through the lens of the trans experience each of the three cofounders create art in their own mediums that explores relationship to the body as both universally human, and uniquely personal. The trans body exemplifies revolution and liberation, and we believe art acts as a tool for both individual and collective excavation. Brazen Bandits’ creative practices seek the truest versions of ourselves in hopes of using that knowledge as a foundation for a different world. The art shown in Brazen represented a journey of self-excavation for each of us that is still unfolding, shapeshifting, and trans.

The timing of our pop-up at Space was intentional. As the administration changed and the attack on trans people increased, we were together—making art, dancing, sharing food, connecting people with resources, and people with each other. Sixteen community organizations serving our queer community tabled at our opening night. Trans organizers shared strategies on conspiring for our survival. Trans musicians played at a potluck where trans allies cooked us food. Folks of all stripes came and created with us. In the face of tactics of fascism designed to keep us in a state of shock and despair, it felt like an immunization against hopelessness to be immersed in trans-centered creative spaces all month long, and know that our community is rad, showing up, resourced, and caring.

When we gather, we might end up crying, dancing, laughing, then head home well-fed, nourished in more ways than one. It’s important we remember our communities have been in positions of persecution before, and have lived and loved and survived. It’s our job to study the lessons from our revolutionary TRANScestors and Black feminist solidarity movements, and to make sure our youth know this moment is the latest chapter in a long story of trans resistance and queer thriving.

At our artist talk, I mentioned my work with queer and trans youth, and the crisis of suicidality. An audience member asked how to support trans and queer youth. I wasn’t prepared for this question as I was expecting to talk about my creative practice and my self-portraits, but there is no separation. My response was that there’s nothing wrong with the youth or the way they feel. The answer isn’t to try to “fix” the youth or their suicidality. The way they are feeling is proportional to the hate and ostracism they’re experiencing. The best way to support trans youth and all people is to construct a world that celebrates them, with the conditions that allow them to thrive.

Rose Dubois, a political organizer and one of our panelists at the Conspiring for Our Survival event stated it best when she said the most important way to support trans people is to bolster affordable housing, universal healthcare, worker protections, and all things that resource working class people. This is an idea long taught by Black feminist liberation movement leaders, that when we center the liberation of the most marginalized of us, we all get more free.

Well-meaning people have reached out to me asking how to support trans people during this time. There are resources with some good ideas for direct support (read through the whole thing, as many of the more tangible items are listed towards the end), but more importantly, what is your spark in life at this moment? Your spark can change, but what is it right now? Gardening? Great! How can you garden in a way that is devastating to capitalism? Who can you invite in? Who can you feed? How can you connect your community across difference through whatever sparks your soul? The world is best served when each of us follows our spark, and pursues it in such a way that divests from systems that rely on our hyperindividualism, isolation, overwhelm, comfort, and convenience. Learn about mutual aid!

We are going to lose people. There’s no silver lining or bright side to that fact. Nothing won from this moment on will be worth the cost of the ones we lost along the way. We have to hold that truth and stay dedicated to building a future worthy of the lives that should have been. Do whatever is necessary to let yourself feel the grief, grieve collectively, so that we can stay alive to the miracles all around us. Every trans person I have ever met has felt like a miracle. The magic of trans people is not that we are trans, or brave, or different. The magic of trans and queer people is that we’ve each looked inside ourselves with curiosity, and faced what we saw even when it meant giving up all we know, the ground we were standing on, the lives, stories, identities, and sometimes relationships, that we had built on that ground.

The Brazen Bandits are committed to continue gathering, connecting, making art, making a ruckus, making friends, and being unapologetically trans.