The courage to perform

When Temple K. Kirk hits the stage at The Press Club, she’s armed with a mic stand, which she holds like Steven Tyler of rock band Aerosmith. The club’s PA system starts to blare hyper synthy, off-kilter new wave beats from her iPod.

“This is the feel-good hit of the summer—or the trigger warning of the summer,” she says. “It’s about destroying the patriarchy.”

Her voice, when she sings, sounds somewhere between Half Japanese’s eccentric Jad Fair, a stream-of-conscious hip-hop performer and an ’80s radio pop starlet. In other words, entirely unique.

If destroying the patriarchy is a trigger warning for anyone, it’s not the people in this room who are here for a Sac LadyFest fundraiser. The crowd of roughly 50 folks—a mishmash of people from the trans and radical queer community, punk rock feminists, and cis allies—cheer for her wildly.

While Kirk, herself trans and radically queer, has been playing music since the early ’90s, it’s only this past year that she’s been actively and consistently playing shows, enjoying herself on stage and building a fan base.

“Everything has been a love fest this time around. I guess I finally caught up to the times, or the times have finally caught up to me, where I can do what I want to do, and it’s authentic to me, and the world appreciates it,” she says.

This past year’s string of live shows has been unusual for her. The decade prior she’d barely stepped on stage. Before that, she had battled serious stage fright and anxiety. She tells me of an aborted set in 2004 that she’s still a little embarrassed about: The backing tracks from her CD started skipping, and she started to cry, kicked over amps and left the venue.

She’s been able to handle little failures and disappointments now, she tells me, because she has a lot of support in her life: her wife, her poly family, her friends in the trans community and her day job at the Gender Health Center (“working at a radical queer inclusive organization that values me even though I am eccentric and I bring certain things to the table and have holes in the table, too”). Prior to joining the Gender Health Center, she had no connection to a Sacramento trans community—she didn’t even know one existed. People in her life perceived her as a guy in a dress, she says, like Klinger from M*A*S*H. The moment she entered the Gender Health Center, everyone there affirmed her identity as a woman. Through their support, her identity has evolved. She now identifies as a nonbinary femme. And they have her back.

When I visit Kirk at the Gender Health Center, I see that in a lot of ways it’s she who acts as the support system for so many other folks. Kirk runs Danelle’s Place, a drop-in crisis center for trans people or any person in need.

Immediately upon entering, a woman named Jasmine says, “Temple is my favorite person.”

Later, a trans man named Adrian Smith, a volunteer at Danelle’s, says he’s dealt with lots of frustrations with hospitals regarding his polycystic ovarian syndrome. Kirk has been an advocate for him.

“Temple’s been amazing,” he says. “Without the Gender Health Center and just the support that I’ve gotten from everybody, I would not be here today. When I first came to the Gender Health Center, I was suicidal.”

Kirk works to help people get back on their feet and back to their lives. Her drop-in center has inadvertently evolved to give people in the local trans community a space to simply eat, nap or chat where they won’t be judged, treated weirdly or presented as some kind of novelty. It’s a necessary resource for a people who face a lot of discrimination from a society that often denies their very identities.

Kirk has a stressful job, and it’s obvious that the musician rocks at it. Her capacity for empathy is high. She does her absolute best to make sure everyone—drop-ins, volunteers, fellow staff—is taken care of.

“For quite a while I was thinking I wasn’t good at this job,” she tells me. “The more I talked to my therapist, they’re like, ’Temple, you have a very intense position here. And you’re helping community members deal with discrimination, sad stories, a lot of misfortune, and you have to come back and do it the next day.’ It’s intense,” Kirk says. “It’s very rewarding.”

Kirk recalls the first time she set foot in the Gender Health Center. She had heard about the place and wanted in immediately. She showed up and offered to volunteer, and by the end of the day, she was behind the desk helping out.

“I got dressed up in my femmey best; I looked straight out of an ’80s J.C. Penney’s catalog,” Kirk says. “If I’m going to dress business, I’m going to dress business like I wanted to dress business as a little kid and stealing my mom’s clothes and wishing I was a woman.”

A month later, her boyfriend John Wiggins (DJ Polly Parallax) insisted he and Kirk start a band together, which became Katmonkeys. She hadn’t played much music but was willing to give it a go. Her mental health had been low for the previous couple of years, but working at the Gender Health Center and receiving therapy there had helped her. By the spring of 2014, she had developed the confidence to write and record her own music again.

In the ’90s, she’d played in several bands, though often with cis men, whom she had to pretend not to be offended by when they made sexist and homophobic comments. Then, in 2007, she started the band The Pilots Dared Me To Die! with “a group of queers and eccentrics,” she says, who were also terrified of performing on stage. In their nearly five-year run, they played live only twice. Normally, they’d get together at Kirk’s place to write and record music. Some of the recordings were quite intense.

“There was a lot of trauma in that group to process. When people got shitfaced and into their medical cannabis or their bourbon, it would pour out,” she says. “We had a lot of joy.”

Katmonkeys’ first show kicked off Kirk’s active year. In April 2016, the Gender Health Center threw a Big Queer Bazaar, a swap meet where the Katmonkeys played. It went really well, or rather Kirk had fun despite making several mistakes. When they messed up, she’d own it: “Everyone, that was train wreck No. 7. Were you betting that there would be seven train wrecks today? If you were betting, you might be the winner of the train wreck bet.”

Dolores Warren, a fellow Sacramento trans artist, heard about the successful gig and asked if they would open for her musical project, Dolores 5000, at the Fox & Goose. Warren appreciated Kirk’s mixture of weird music, personal expression and knack for politics.

“Temple Kirk is an intense person and thinker, well-spoken, witty and a lightning-fast wordsmith, which lends itself well for her musical expressions,” Warren says. “Although a true social-justice warrior, she also expresses trippy sideways musical grooves with that same intense spark. Really quite a remarkable person.”

After her gig at Fox & Goose, the Katmonkeys were invited to play the Sac LadyFest campout in Placerville. Wiggins couldn’t make it, so Kirk did a solo set—her first since the aborted set 12 years earlier. Pretty soon, she was part of a music scene.

Playing live music has been fun and liberating for Kirk this time around. Since her first foray into performing, audiences have shifted their attitudes toward performers who play with backing tracks instead of full bands.

“No one’s going to bitch at me for not being a real musician anymore. That’s so last century,” Kirk says. “In gay clubs, you can get up there and lip sync your diva ass to backing tracks and everyone’s down. I get so much courage from drag queens. If they can tour gay clubs with a lip sync act, I can bring my little iPod act and do my thing.”

Kirk isn’t exactly sure what’s in store for her and her music. The Katmonkeys recently broke up this past April, but the future looks bright for Kirk and her solo music.

“I probably wouldn’t feel empowered enough to put myself out on the stage like that if it wasn’t for Gender Health Center,” Kirk says. “It’s sort of a second life on my teenage dreams of being a punk rock star. I’m just going to go with it.”