Christina sits down with Jae W. B. Jae is an absolute queen. She is a signed recording artist, beautiful creative soul, and a friend who will tell you like it is. We talk about everything from ego to the basic hope for love to what it's like to balance the line.
Jae's Instagram: @jaemusicoffical
Jae's Fun Plugs:
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Musical Bop by Madge and Graphic by Jeannine
Christina Peña: Hello. Hello. Hello and Welcome back to Conversations with a Mixed Chick. You know the basics. And if you’re new here. I’m your host and resident mixed chick, Christina Peña. It’s pretty simple every week I get to sit down and have a conversation with humans that I am obsessed with.
This week is a real treat. My friend Jae is here. Let me break it down for you. She’s a signed recording artist who was just featured in paper magazine, Center fold. She’s an incredible human. She has an amazing cabaret that just reopened in NYC call Group Therapy. And she is a light in my life.
If you are ever lucky enough to find a friend like Jae hold on tight because I am never letting this bitch go.
Madge Dietrich: She's changing minds and conversations. Sharing her appreciation. Taking charge of her creation. This is Conversations with a Mixed Chick.
Christina Peña: Hi.
Jae W. B.: Hi.
Christina Peña: Oh, my god thank you for coming.
Jae W. B.: Thank you for having me. My fellow mixed chick.
Christina Peña: Oh, my god. I love this. We're going to start with the question.
Jae W. B.: Give it to me.
Christina Peña: What does it mean to be unapologetically, Jae
Jae W. B.: I think what it means to be unapologetically, Jae is to walk with an even balance between bitchy and kind I think. There is a realness to me that wouldn't be possible without me wholeheartedly accepting that I give it to people straight, but, but I do it with love. So, I guess to say an unapologetically Jae thing is to somehow find a balance between being real and honest and a grounded, but also kind and caring and giving to the people around you.
Christina Peña: Hold on. I just need to like, stop and talk about how honest and amazing that is.
Jae W. B.: Thank you. I mean, I get in trouble for being bitchy or being perceived as bitchy because I'm just very no bullshit type of person. I mean, you are too. And I think that it's something that we probably could bond a lot about, about the times that people in our lives may sometimes take our love or support that we give them as.
Meanness. When in reality, if I'm not being mean, I'm just really tired of hearing about your woes for the 45th time, and you're doing nothing about it when you probably would not let me have the same kind of grace, you know, and I feel like it's a responsibility that we have to, the people that we care about, which is be real with them.
Be honest and make sure that. We're uplifting each other and giving each other, you know, the feedback and support that is necessary for them to grow. And sometimes some people aren't ready to hear that. And then we're bitchy and they don't see the kindness, but the kindness is something I've had to work on.
No lie, all tea, no shade. I've fully been, I've been a bitch. I've been a person that didn't know how to communicate. What was helpful information to somebody because. I wasn't speaking from a place of love first, which I think is important to recognize too.
Christina Peña: That's okay. You've been a bitch to me and that's fine.
Jae W. B.: I have, I'll never, and I apologize now on national television, about the time that we were in an Uber and I was just drunk and I was like, well, you all be 13 or whatever the math was. Do you remember that time? No. We were, it was me you and Libby in an Uber, we were at the, were going to the West end RIP and we'd spent like all night together.
So, we were like tally and we were going over like, Oh, who owns this? Who knows that I was such a bitch about like what I might've owed or not. And Libby was like, it's really fine. Like everyone is going to be okay.
Christina Peña: Oh, my God, I don't re well, obviously, I. Wow. Okay.
Jae W. B.: She starts crying and she's like, wow, triggered.
Christina Peña: That's not what I meant. I just meant that I’ve never interpreted your bitchy as a bitch because it's always very honest to the point and sometimes it's needed. Not, a lot of people will do that with you. It's actually very rare that you find someone that will open and honestly tell you the truth.
Jae W. B.: I just hate that truth is sometimes interpreted as negative for people. Yeah. So many of us, we want to live in these like fucking fantasy lands and I don't think that it's bad to you know, Fantasize and exist in, in a positive Headspace or whatever it is, but I just don't want any of the people. I love to fool themselves with it.
I know I've folded myself and, you know, to be unapologetically myself is to do that, is to check the people around me. So that way they don't end up in the places that I've been when I wasn't healthy, happy, and good to myself.
Christina Peña: Yeah. Well, and if you're not honest with yourself, there's nowhere to grow. I've known you for a very long time and you're a beautiful person and you've changed so much in the time that I've known you into the most beautiful version of yourself. And I think if you, weren't honest with people around you and honest with yourself, then you would never become this person.
Jae W. B.: Thank you. I agree. I think for me, honesty even came in the pandemic. And, you know, I was starting my hormonal transition in the middle of the pandemic for us. COVID-19. Was a moment of me having to be really honest with myself.
I felt on my journey of tranness and I still have my moments of difficulty in my identity. And how do I want to represent it and what's enough, you know, as a trans person, because my experience is so specific and unique as a trans person. And for me, it came with being honest that I was really depressed and I was really unhappy and really triggered.
Every time I looked in the mirror, really sad about what I saw really frustrated. And I realized that underneath the glitz and the glamour and the performance and the things that I was doing in my daily life to exist in my transness. That I still had to be happy with who I woke up as and who I went to bed as. The wigs, come off the nails, come off the dresses, come off. The shape wear comes off.
Christina Peña: List it all out, list out all of them.
Jae W. B.: Okay. The shape where it comes out, the thongs come off, the titty titty, tassels come off. Truly and honestly, though, and I had to kind of, you know, you're not happy with how you're waking up in the morning. You're not happy with who you are going to bed.
We don't like your hair. You don't like your skin. You don't like your face and like your body. And it was beginning to really wear on me. And I knew that the next step for me was to accept wholeheartedly that I needed, assistance with my transition. That the things that I was doing weren't enough because now that I existed in the pandemic without the glitz and glamor, without the events and excuses to leave my house. I needed a reason to be happy that wasn't outside of myself, that didn't feel like a costume that didn't feel like I had to put these things on me, this makeup on me to be happy.
And, you know, amiss a pandemic. I I've been seeing people. Not in an unhealthy way, but I've been dating. Because frankly I've been a very adverse and negative person when it came to dating because of my trauma. But you know, when luck strikes and the time comes, I don't want to deny it.
So, I, I dated and I have to say that the men that I've dated in 2020 really helped me and really guided me to a place where I don't, I don't hate my body. I don't hate my face. I don't hate my hair, that combined with the wonderful help from my doctor at Callen-Lorde plug Callen-Lorde, I wouldn't have the headspace that I have now, but that does in fact, come from that honesty with yourself and the growth that comes from honesty. So, thank you so much for saying that.
Christina Peña: That's so interesting because hearing you talk about balance and transitioning and all of this stuff and being a mixed woman and seeing how to balance a line is probably something you've dealt with your entire life.
Jae W. B.: A hundred percent. I think balance is kind of been my magic word of 2021. It's all I've been talking about. And I find that kind of is the experience that I guess I have been juggling in my whole life. Balancing, you know, gender performance. Balancing, ethnic identity. Balancing, my bilingualism. You know, there are moments in my life where I felt like I almost lost Spanish, even though I grew up in Puerto Rico.
I moved in with my dad in Connecticut and he, you know, didn't encourage me to be around my Latinx family. He didn't encourage me to speak Spanish in the home and, you know, bring what I knew of my culture in Puerto Rico to his home. To his black ass house. But in doing that, I didn't lose my Latin culture, but I did get to gain a lot of the blackness in me that I had no idea about because my mother was not a black woman.
So, she couldn't give me some of the things, no matter, you know, where she grew up, where she was born. She couldn't provide to me the experience of raising me as a black child. So, the balancing act of my ethnicity really, I don't think came into play until I was in college. And I started really having to contend with the fact that. Okay, well, you're racially ambiguous, which is really difficult to typecast and growing up people.
I remember the first time I was at a barbershop, one of the early days of my childhood, and they were talking about what I look like, because when you're not white, everybody wants to talk about the things that make you not white. So, I'm at this barbershop with nothing but Puerto Rican's and they start saying like, well, you know, it's funny cause I feel like you look kind of. Like Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, not South Asian, but you know, whatever. And so, I remember that clicked in my head. I was like, that's funny. And it's something that I get all the time and being a mixed person, who's really balancing so many different things and feeling like, okay, I have to justify my blackness today.
I have to justify my Latin heritage today. I have to justify my womanhood today. Then finding that balance between outward performance that keeps you safe and justified and, you know, inward introspection that makes you appreciative of what you have and who you are. That balance is hard and people constantly think. Oh, you know, she's Dominican, I'm not, I'm Puerto Rican and black.
There is no way for people to just accept an exist among and besides mixed chicks. We have to be the specific thing that people can easily digest, easily pinpoint, otherwise it's going to be a conversation for days in every room we go in.
Christina Peña: Oh 100%. And I fully hate the term ethnically ambiguous, and it has become a big problem in our society with that word and white passing, because it has become almost our fault that we look the way we look and it's a way to blame us for our trauma of being captured and colonized and raped and killed. And so, it's not our fault. We look like this. It is the white people's faults. And how do you understand how I look so that you can make yourself feel better?
Jae W. B.: Yeah. And I also think there's this, there's this thing that we do with people who are mixed or, you know, who are hard to figure out what their ethnicity might be. Where if you're too far on one end of the spectrum, then you don't get to explore certain things without pushback. So, you know, the things that would let you find me being a black girl to you are things that are completely off limits to me because I'm too pale or the things that would make me a Latinx woman are, I'm too black to experience them. You know, all my dark skin, Latinas that speak Spanish. Oh, Whoa. You're always so blown away. When you see, a black person speaking Spanish.
Well guess what? That's this, we're all here. We're all here. And the same way that you know, my little brother. My little brother is blonde with like blue, green eyes. And he's Puerto Rican as a hell. But, you know, even for him, there was this kind of identity crisis moment where it was like, well, how do I present my Puerto Rican-ness in a way that doesn't clash with how white people find me. And how do I exist as, as knowing what I am knowing that I'm not a white person, but for some reason, unless I'm like, you know, yodeling from the top of the mountain, people are going to think I'm a white person.
And once someone thinks you're white, it absolves you of any conversation about what you may go through. And it's a difficult thing for people to kind of process because there is a level of privilege that exists with your proximity to whiteness, but that privilege in proximity doesn't erase the trauma and the things that have happened to you because of your experience as a person who is not ethnically white, there is a difference. And a lot of that nuance gets lost.
Christina Peña: Period. Done. And, end. End of all of it.
Jae W. B.: End of discussion. The end. Goodbye.
Christina Peña: Bye. Oh, my God. That's Ugh. That's so true. And it's always, it always feels like it's my fault and it's totally not. And it it's taken me finding people like you, who are amazing, who can teach me how to be more of the things. I don't know. I don't speak Spanish, but it's not my fault. My dad doesn't speak Spanish either.
Jae W. B.: It's not his fault.
Christina Peña: It's not his fault either. And it's not even my grandfather's fault who didn't want to teach him Spanish. Like it's not our fault.
Jae W. B.: There's so much that our, that our families and our ancestors did to keep us safe. That years later, we're kind of having to contend with and we'll realize, oh fuck, you guys forced my family to erase everything that we come from, just so we could be okay.
And now it's on me that I'm not Latin enough. Or I'm not black enough or I'm not this, or I'm not that enough. It's really exhausting.
Christina Peña: Also. Like how do you this is my other thing that I feel about race. How do you prove a race?
Jae W. B.: You don't because race has made up.
Christina Peña: A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Yes. Done. End of conversation. Again.
Jae W. B.: Part 2. Call me back in 20 minutes.
Christina Peña: Wow. Okay. Well, let’s talk about some amazing things that you've done. And just so I can brag about my good friend. So, you have a couple, a lot of successful, amazing singles, including Independent Femme and Sisters, not to limit you, but those are might be my favorites.
You're signed, you're signed to Trans Trenders.
Jae W. B.: I am!
Christina Peña: An actual label. You were in paper magazine.
Jae W. B.: Center screen split with lady London, who I love so much. And my other girls.
Christina Peña: All of this during a pandemic, what?
Jae W. B.: It really does not. I was just on the phone with my friend Naso. And I was talking to them and saying, there are days that I just don't feel like I'm doing anything.
And they were like, what do you mean? And I was like, well, you know, there are girls on her monetizing, Instagram. And they've got 50,000 followers. It's all about. But then I talk to people and they're like, okay, but you did this or you did that and you did this, you did that. And I'm like, I guess you guys are right, but it doesn't always, so it just doesn't always feel like I'm doing anything because I don't know. I don't know. But thank you. Thank you so much. Yes. When you put it that way? Yes. And all this in a pandemic, All this in a panini.
Christina Peña: All this in the Panorama.
Jae W. B.: Okay. All of this in a parallelogram.
Christina Peña: Facts. It's just, I find it so interesting because I know you really well and I love your story. And I find that, the thing I'm most interested in people is their stories.
And you're so open with your story to the point where it now leads your life. And you have no problem talking about it and no problem sharing it and telling others about it and amplifying voices around you. It's just, it's beautiful.
Jae W. B.: Thank you so much. I mean, I just know that for me growing up, I didn't have people like me in my life. And even now to this day, I know that there is something about me that helps people get through the day. There's something about the way that I am able to find my words that is harder for a lot of other people. And it makes their lives easier when they hear my story. So even when there are grimy parts of my story, or messy parts of my stories, sad parts of my story. I don't care. I'm going to tell you what it is. Because it could potentially save a life. It could potentially spark interest for somebody. And, you know, I said this on a gray scale podcast, I said something along the lines of it's all about planting a seed. And if you can take a moment to be honest and transparent and giving with your time, your energy, your love, you can plant the seed in somebody. And that's all it takes. If that seed doesn't grow, it doesn't grow. It is what it is, but you still planted it there. And you did what you could in hopes that they will blossom and do what they need to do with that piece of information.
Christina Peña: Oh, this is why I love you because I feel the exact same way. I talk about it all the time. Stories are not about the story and not about how you're telling it, it's about what it does to the other person. How they react and what they do and how they can blossom, like you said.
Jae W. B.: Yeah. Because like, I don't tell my story for me, you know, like it's and I think that's the thing that, that gets lost for some people when they're trying to figure out how to be expressive about what's going on in their lives or, you know, maybe that's why it is easy for me, because for me to express my story.
I've already done it for myself. I already know the story, you know, and as a cabaret artist, it's integral for me to be able to be honest so that when I get behind a mic and I sing a song. People feel like it's been given to them. For so much. Like, I love my, my accompanist Yaz, as you know.
My baby. I love Yaz. And you know, it's funny because I, I always want to do like 8 million songs. And be like, Oh, let's do this song and this song and this, and I remember one time, I don't know what show it was. Well, for one of my shows, I came with way too many songs and Yaz was like, okay, I understand that all these songs are great choices.
But I need you to keep in mind that the thing that people really love about coming to your show is the stories you tell. And is the way that you set songs up because that's the magic for them. And I was like, okay. And so, it's important for me to be able to be honest about my story and know that it's, it's just as much for the listener as it is for me. But for me to be able to tell it, I'm telling it, because I know that it's going to affect somebody out there and that's what we need to do. And when we're thinking about being storytellers.
Christina Peña: And you're talking about your beautiful cabaret series called Group Therapy at Rock Bar.
Jae W. B.: I am, yes, I am Rock Bar NYC. Clap. Clap. Clap
Christina Peña: Plug, all the, all the things!
Jae W. B.: Plug, all the things!
Christina Peña: I've seen, almost every single Group Therapy.
Jae W. B.: What's your favorite one?
Christina Peña: The one when you come out as Jessica Rabbit, just like period. End of sentence. I was on the floor dying just at the beautifulness of yourself. Okay.
Jae W. B.: That's my favorite too. No lie.
Christina Peña: It's so good. I will link. I will link all my pictures and videos below. Cause you take up much of my camera roll.
Jae W. B.: Space. That's funny as fuck.
Christina Peña: Don't care.
Jae W. B.: She said I'm a part of the fan group.
Christina Peña: Oh. President of the fan club. I find your title really interesting because of the same thing, stories that we have to share every time I think of a group therapy session, I think of one child sitting there telling a story and everyone being like mmmmmm.
The difference is at your show, you sit there and tell a story. Everyone's like, "yes, queen!" It's the difference in being an adult with your friends, listening to your amazing stories and like being a child scared in a group therapy session is, oh, it makes me feel so happy. I miss live theater.
Jae W. B.: I don't even remember what I was going to call the show.
Cause it wasn't always there. It was going to be called like Supreme something. Cause the Supreme is a title like a queen or a King, but out of the binary. And like Supreme story hour or something like that. And. My friend was like, yeah, but I don't think people are going to get that what you mean by Supreme.
And I was like, okay. And then eventually I came up with group therapy because I realized that when I do these shows, people are really connected. People cry at my shows. People laugh at my shows and it really is this kind of group catharsis. At my show is people stay along. I encourage them to sing along at my shows.
It's a really different cabaret experience in my opinion, I think about, you know, doing my show at places like the duplex. So, they're doing my show at like, I don't know, the cutting room or something, and it's not. It's not how people would expect the cabaret show to be. And it's why it's been really hard for me to think about doing it in the internet age.
It's not a show that I can do by myself. I'm not a cabaret artist like that. At least not Group Therapy. I could put together a classic cabaret show, but to me, that's not the fun of Group Therapy. The fun of Group Therapy is everybody in the room, raising their hand. I remember my opening line of Group Therapy is every time I say something that's relatable to you, I want you to take a shot.
And it's a great time, even though we cry and we laugh and we shake our asses and we pass around the mic sometimes. I remember that one time I had people doing key changes to Love on Top. Eight times. So, fun. Or the time I did All I Want for Christmas Is You and I got other people to sing the verses because I don't know them.
It was a great, I missed, I missed Group Therapy! Actually, uh, exclusive. They actually asked me to come back and do it. Yes. At like 25% capacity
Christina Peña: I'm in California. So, if you stream it, I will watch it alone in my bedroom and cheer!
Jae W. B.: I thought about doing it like that. I thought about doing it like that. We'll see it. We'll see it. We'll figure it out.
Christina Peña: Also. The other thing I find really interesting about you, I find anything interesting about you is how good of an artist you are just in general, because you're so willing to do whatever you want and to not listen to rules and to not subscribe to the systems we have been placed in.
You created a whole show that you can do however you want. And it's beautiful. And even when I watch you do the theater stuff, the theater roles and the theater songs, and we've talked about auditions and you, you don't listen to any rules in the best way possible.
Jae W. B.: Thank you. I feel like the best example of that is how I say Poor Unfortunate Souls. Nobody's singing that song the way I sing that song. I don't care. It's a song that's going to, it's going to take me to places. I just know it is. And that comes from not feeling like I have to do what people told me to do. There's no reason for me to be singing that song the way, that I sing that song, but I do because I can and I want to.
And I feel like it helps push the narrative of that song and that character to me. And unless you're willing to break a couple of rules, you're not going to make bold, crazy choices. And those have always been the things I've wanted to do when I was, when acting as my focus. I want to play these weird quirky, wild roles, or, you know, sing these crazy things because sometimes I feel like I have access to that stuff.
But thank you so much for saying that there are just days. I don't really feel like an artist sometimes in the same way that I used to. Apparently, Miss Cissy Walken, a friend of ours Cissy Walken. Well, she said to me that she brought me up to somebody or she brought me up in passing in conversation.
You were like, Oh, the singer, Jae. Me? People are calling me the singer? People know me as a singer? Never thought in a million years, when I decided to go to college for musical theater, that people would know me as a singer. Or my roommate, Alex, who is like, no, I think of you as a performer. I don't really think about you as just an actor.
I think about you in, in these like of this total performing artist, who does anything she wants to in any capacity that she feels like that. Thank you. I don't know. It's hard to kind of see outside yourself. I have very, I have a, I talk like I have a big ego, but I actually have very little ego. Very little ego. And I feel like, it's why I haven't done certain things for my career yet because I don't, I don't have the ego.
Christina Peña: Okay. I have many things to say, number one, Disney. FBI agent Disney. If you're listening, you can recast Melissa McCarthy with Jae and it'll be a phenomenal.
Jae W. B.: Worst decision Disney made was not casting me as Ursula. Truly, and honestly, but they didn't know. They didn't know It's not their fault.
Christina Peña: Not to hate on Melissa McCarthy because she's wonderful, but we could, we could change it up. You're going to put Daveed Diggs. I know you could change it just, just a little bit.
Jae W. B.: You could put Jae Brown in it.
Christina Peña: You could put Jae Brown and it would be perfect.
Jae W. B.: If you could put Daveed Diggs in it, you could put Jae Brown in it.
Christina Peña: Also, can you talk about artists and the word performing artists and being a singer and being labeled as things. It's so funny. Cause I don't think of you as labeled you're so you, so don't want to label yourself in the best way possible. Non-binary trans queen. Like that is the best thing I've ever heard.
Number one. You don't care. But I love the idea that you're like, I have a small ego and I know that because I know you really well and you, and you are never egotistical, but you're still phenomenal. So...
Jae W. B.: Thank you. I live with confidence, but I definitely don't live with ego. I was thinking about it recently because well that's part of like, what's hard about making music. Now being in the music industry, as well as the theater world, is, you have to have an ego to make R and B hip hop and pop music you really do. And I've developed somewhat of an ability to talk about myself with, you know, a bigger ego. But even still, my ego is not consumed into my art in terms of making myself out to feel like I'm God's gift to the earth. You know what I mean?
That's never how I feel. And sometimes I think that there are people out here whose egos weren't shaken up enough when they were younger. And so, they roll the fucking world because. They just, I know I'm destined for greatness, but I don't say that because of my ego. You know, there are some people who literally are, have entire careers built off of their ego alone, and that is crazy.
Like Instagram culture. I find that, I think that that's why it's hard for me to even make Tik Toks. Because like take Tik Toking is like me sitting here, coming up with my own ideas and believing in them so wholeheartedly that someone has to see them. Even if you have three followers on Tik Tok, you're posting every day to your thoughts, because your sense and connection to your ego is strong.
And I don't think, that we use ego. Like it's a bad and dirty word. I don't think that it's a bad enter the word, but a conflated ego and unchecked ego is. And for me, I have a really hard time tapping into my ego.
Christina Peña: This all leads back. To what it means to be unapologetically Jae is you're just truthful. Truly what it is is you just want to tell the truth. And living with confidence is just being like, this is my truth and you can believe it or not. And that's where we go from there. Okay. We've come to the last two questions. Are you ready?
Jae W. B.: Give it to me.
Christina Peña: What is one piece of advice that you would give sixteen-year-old Jae?
Jae W. B.: Oh. To except that you're hurting. I spent years being really, really depressed from about the age of 15 to 25, thinking that there was no way that I was going to live past 25. Thinking that there was no way that anything was great for me. Feeling really ugly and unworthy and some days untalented. Talking to myself really negatively. Never wanting to be in front of a camera. Taking way too long to figure out some very basic truths about myself and my gender and my identity and who I am.
And maybe baby girl, if you took just a little time to accept that you are hurt. You're hurt by the fact that your dad is abusive. You're hurt by the fact that your mom passed away, when you were 14. You're hurt about the fact that you and your little brother were separated when she died. You're going through a lot of trauma.
So, go through your trauma and be patient and don't rush yourself. I did a lot of things out of the need to survive that, you know, thankfully I did them because I'm still here, but if I could go back, I would tell myself to just be a little kinder to myself and acknowledging the things that are hurting and then it's okay.
Christina Peña: Okay. That's beautiful. Just, I think we, we forget a lot about. When you talk about traumas and we do it a lot right now because of all the Black Lives Matter movements and BIMPOC calls and all that and such. And we forget that the reason it's called trauma is because we were hurt and that we don't get to actually deal with the hurt 16-year-old. Wow.
Jae W. B.: And we're too busy, you know, trying to sew up the wound sometimes. To stop the bleeding that we don't necessarily go. We don't think about rehab. We're too busy trying to fix the bone.
Christina Peña: Okay now I'm going to cry. Okay. That's beautiful. And so, as we move forward, what is one hope you have for the future?
Jae W. B.: A hope I have for the future is... EW. Am I supposed to say like whatever, the first thing that comes to mind is?
Christina Peña: You can. You censor yourself if you want, but you're not someone I know to censor themselves.
Jae W. B.: I was going to say like love. It's weird.
Christina Peña: That's so good though.
Jae W. B.: It is good, but I mean, I just, I say that in the sense that the dream that I have for the future is a world, where I see less news about trans women dying and more news about trans women loving and existing.
And, you know, you said that in the first thing I thought about was like, Oh, getting married one day. Because to me that that was never something I thought about or wanted in my life, because I never really thought about seeing myself very far in the future. But this question about future has come up a lot in the past couple of days.
Cause I went on a wonderful brunch date recently. And we were kind of going through some questions. And one of the questions is when you dream about your future, what do you see? Or you know, in five years from now, what, what do you, what do you want in five years? And I feel like as a black, Latinx, trans person, I'm usually not given the privilege of fantasizing about the future.
I'm usually too busy about figuring out what I got to do next. To survive that I don't think about kids. I don't think about marriage. I don't think about home ownership. Or paying my fucking student loans because I sometimes feel like my student loans are going to outlive me. So yeah, that's what I want for the future.
I want more trans representation, more trans happiness and joy and love. And happiness for all of my friends who, you know, aren't skinny, white, straight, and rich, you know, like I want all of us to live with the same audacity as half hazard, mediocre white man. You know, that's what I want for all my friends to not be limited by the world because you just, you don't have to be.
Christina Peña: Yeah, everyone deserves love. And I want to be your flower girl. So, this is my official request to be a flower girl and walked down the aisle to some amazing song written by you and sang by you sound like that's it. Simple requests. Well...
Jae W. B.: Got you girl.
Christina Peña: This was amazing.
Jae W. B.: Thank you. This was amazing. I really appreciate you for having me.
Christina Peña: Oh, my God. Thanks for coming. And, um, you're a great person and deserve all your happiness in the world.
Jae W. B.: Thank you, darling. You're welcome.
Christina Peña: You're welcome.
Madge Dietrich: It's an obsession. Talking to people. Hearing their stories. Learning new lessons. Telling the truth. Defying categories. Intellectual jam session. Passing the mic. Making voices heard and more. She's changing minds and conversations. Sharing her appreciation. Taking charge of her creation. This is Conversations with a Mixed Chick.