Today we’d like to introduce you to Josh Alex Baker.
Hi Josh Alex, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Before I am anything, I am worldbuilder, and I believe that every moment of my life has been divinely calculated to bring me to the present where I harness the power of story to transform the lives of the communities I deeply love and am indebted to. Birmingham born and Huntsville raised, I was drawn to the art of oratory at young age. My beautiful mother Kathy, who has transitioned, was a minister and radio personality. It was this earliest exposure to conviction and command of language that I believe was critical for my own ability to language myself, my world, my being, my desire. These skills would ultimately eventuate into my creative process today. As a multi-medium genesis, I converge art, archive, advocacy, and academic scholarship to tell the stories of Black Trans and queer communities. From poetry and photography to community participatory research and music, my life is a praxis of curiosity and discovery put into action. My work exists as an invitation, a beckoning for others to answer the call to come back to themselves. An invitation for recognize oneself as their own genesis and confront the responsibility of that gift.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Some would say that the challenges have tried to outrun me for who can get most creative throughout the years. Life indeed has been “no crystal stair” (Langston Hughes) but what I can appraise on the other side of much distance is that those challenges have been invitations to transmutation. Access points for an alchemy that has shifted the atmosphere of my life. Growing up as a closeted Black queer youth in the Deep South was an experience rife with heaviness. I remember the immensity of dread that flooded my body as night after night, despite my efforts, the gay was not being “prayed away.” I remember the fear and shame that haunted me as I preemptively imagined ever being found out as a gay preacher’s son. I mourn every silent crush and desire I hid in my back pockets, all of the deliciousness of human experience that queer communities are coerced to delay or forego completely. And never without cost. But now, on the other side of that experience having paid and continuing to pay that cost, I am everyday becoming more and more the best version of myself. And more than that, I have become a possibility model for others to do the same. To take the risk of demanding the life they desire. This, too, was a revelation birthed from crisis. At the end of my sophomore year of undergrad, I confronted perhaps the greatest challenge of my lifetime–the death of my mother. After years of illness where I served as her primary caregiver, her death activated a critical desperation that laid the groundwork for my continued becoming. Among my most prized transmutations is my healing practice as a griefworker. After the loss of my mother, I became dedicated to alchemizing my own grief into a sustenance that could nourish beyond me. Directly after her death, this looked like me starting a grief support initiative when I returned to school my junior year. In graduate school, it looked like my thesis work on Black queer grief, expanding death-only conversations around all that Black queer people lose and grieve at the intersection of structural anti-Black, heterosexist systems of power. As a Community Engagement Director at a Black TLGBQ non-profit serving Black TLGBQ communities, it looks like workshops, trainings, and wellness convenings dedicated to giving our communities language for their lives and longing. As an artist and archivist, it is building out a body of work that affirms that we are here and we deserve to name how we are here. An affirmation that we have been and will always be the living archive, that we are the cited sources.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
As a multi-hyphenate artist, I engage mediums–to include but not limited to photography, poetry, film, music, and music–to create sonic and visual Afrosurrealities toward the advancement of Black Trans and queer narrative visibility and overall liberatory futurity. As a writer and performance artist, I have written and performed spoken word for over a decade. As a photographer and filmmaker, my work–often surrealist self-portraiture–seeks to distort, queer, and reassemble our own understanding of ourselves. In my self-portraiture particularly, this looks like an interrogation, confrontation, and reorientation of Black masculinities. As a singer and songwriter, my work explores grief, love and self-discovery. I recently released an EP (available on Spotify, Apple Music, & YouTube) titled “HOW YOU DO HOW YOU BE” that ruminates of Black queer becoming, from the origins of secrecy and fear to the actualization of self-agency and reclamation. As a criticalist and scholar, I have created several conversation series throughout the years, most notably the most current iteration–On Coming Home. On Coming Home is a conversation series dedicated to the ways Black Trans and queer communities find home, languaging the old and new tools and technologies that have carried and will continue to carry us toward collective liberation. What I am most proud of is my art’s living, breathing desire to best whatever has preceded it. I am not afraid to be seen trying. To be seen experimenting–world collapsing and world building in real time. What I believe sets me apart, though perhaps seemingly contradictive, is the desire not to be. The desire to be one heartbeat, in rhythm with every other heartbeat, keeping alive the body of our collective human experience–made most special in what we sustain together.
We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
My favorite author, the genius Toni Morrison, once said, “It’s not possible to constantly hold onto crisis. You have to have the love, you have to have the magic. That’s also life.” For me, success is ensuring that not only am I radically present in that love and magic but that I am also radically responsible in creating (and inviting others to create) that love and magic for themselves.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sites.google.com/view/alexanderbakerandco/welcome-to-the-galleria
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshalexbaker/
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCZfbpH1TnElvDFrqXXXkr1A?si=SGdsqw04SzBBuwyJ
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/intrldbby
- Other: https://joshalexbaker.substack.com/
