Sm{art}: Diggin' Deep With Cristy C. Road

Cristy C. Road, a Miami-raised, Brooklyn-based, Cuban-American illustrator, writer, and of course, total dreamboat, is no stranger to DIY, punk, queer, zine, and activist communities all over the place, and certainly no stranger to the pages of Bitch magazine. You might recognize her work from covers of books such as We Don’t Need Another Wave and The Revolution Starts at Home, or maybe you’ve caught her on tour with Sister Spit The Next Generation when they rolled through your town, or perhaps you’ve flipped through an issue or two of Green Zine, or you stole your ex’s copy of Bad Habits, or you saw her band play in someone’s basement, or maybe you’ve never heard of her at all, but basically, she’s a big deal, not to mention a badass. This is what happened when I sat down for a chat with her on a sunny Friday morning, pajamas on, and breakfast in hand. Cristy shared her feelings about everything from her art, to astrology, to racial dynamics in radical communities, to cats and brunch. It’s all here for you to read, so let’s get started!

DM: So this is not gonna be like a professional interview where I try to cut you off when you’ve said too much. Just go for it and spill your heart.

CR: I don’t know, I think professional interviews are really uncomfortable.

DM: Yeah! They are!

CR: They want like, juice. They’re like, “I don’t care about anything besides drama.” It’s really weird, like “tell me about drama with your mom… or drama with people you date.”

DM: Whoa, people really ask you that?

CR: I’ve had that experience with two “professional” interviews, like the Daily News was one, and another one, I can’t even remember what it was… They were just asking weird things about the characters in the book and about me, and I was just like, “I don’t want to talk about that! I want to talk about my feelings!”

DM: No, I totally get that and I want to talk about your feelings too. Okay, we’ll start with some low-pressure questions. How about describe yourself in ten words or less! Off the top of your head, it can be a sentence or just ten words that resonate with you.

CR: Wow, I don’t even know. Let’s see… troubled, cunt-y, stoked, feelings-y, emotionally exhausted, and… oh my god, I don’t know. That’s the last one.

DM: That totally works for me. What are your biggest pet peeves? I feel like this sounds like an interview for Seventeen magazine. I assure you, it’s not.

CR: My pet peeves are really weird. I get really stressed out over the obvious thing of people being casually offensive around me, like if I’m at a restaurant, or if I’m on the train and there are people having conversations that stress me out, I want to participate, or I end up writing an essay about it. But then really weird things like, [various ways that] people take up space, like when people walk really slowly and look at stores on a busy sidewalk, or like, taking a photo in the middle of the street where it’s really crowded, I hate that. I’m really aware of how I get really loud and take up space, but the older I get, the more I’m like, “Wait, is that like witty and funny? Am I inclusive, am I letting other people participate?” So when people dominate rooms in ways that it’s like, hey, don’t you notice that everyone’s really quiet? You just said something really weird or inappropriate. Or when people use the word “rape” as an adjective, I’m just like “STOP.”

DM: Yes, I agree!

CR: Also, passive aggressiveness, when people don’t share their feelings, or don’t act upon them. But certain feelings, like things that are really difficult, that’s understandable, but if it’s like, “Oh, I stole your toothpaste, so I’m gonna treat you really weirdly for five days.” I don’t know what else.

DM: That’s a good list. I think lots of people with any social awareness would agree with you. Okay, what are your five favorite things in the whole world?

CR: Shit! Oh my god, I don’t know if I can say all of those things… I think my favorite things are pop-punk, punk… punk is really important. I feel a lot for cats, but I feel that way for any little animal who can be your companion. I also really like Mercury in retrograde.

DM: You do???

CR: Yeah! As a Gemini who is ruled by Mercury, one of my favorite things is communication.

DM: Wait, I’m glad we’re getting into this. I love talking about astrology. I feel like that’s a really queer thing.

CR: I like being really open… communication and connection, not necessarily in the sense of relationships, because I’m never really in relationships, but I become obsessed with people. I’m really into having a co-dependent best friend, or always having access to people. And then, my other favorite thing is being alone, but only when I’m excited about it. But Mercury in retrograde, it gives us this time to reflect, like, when things aren’t getting fucked up, Mercury in retrograde is like, “Hey, are you sure these are things you really want to do?” If it is, great, but if it’s not, [these problems that are happening enable] you to think about something that you wouldn’t regularly be thinking about if you’re life was going so well. I think planets and nature are more powerful than humans and we have to acknowledge how we are all connected.

Oh! My Saturn return just ended. According to the sources I’ve been using, when it started is when I decided I wanted to keep my hair short. I had it really long for three years. But I think the funniest part is when I did this drag show as Billie Joe from Green Day, and my Saturn return started that day and I was like, “THIS IS WHO I’M GONNA BE FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!” It’s like a mixture of me in high school, and college, and early 20’s, and all of my different faces of queer anarchist communities, when I was a mod, when I was more femme or more butch—my whole life has been these really extreme presentations of gender and subcultural personas. And a lot of it has been based on anger around me, like “FUCK YOU, CRUSTY WHITE PERSON WITH THE DREAD LOCKS, APPROPRIATING THESE CULTURES AND BEING A MANARCHIST! I’m gonna wear a polyester turtleneck gown with white go-go boots to that protest.” That was a really special, important era, but now I feel like I’m just a mix of all of those things. I have the hair of that era, but not the outfits, that’s not gonna come back. But anyway, my whole Saturn return was this haircut that I got and this connection to how I dress and how I look, and not feeling like how I look everyday is my frumpy errands look, but more like me. I dyed my hair weird colors every month for fucking ever—it was pink, and green, and blue, and then when my Saturn return ended, supposedly, I dyed it mom-ish brown.

DM: Wow. So I guess we should probably talk about your art too, though I’m sure your Saturn return will make another appearance in this chat. When did you start drawing and when did you decide it was going to be what you would do forever and ever?

CR: I actually have been drawing my entire life. My sister and I used to have a fake TV channel where we made fake shows—it was like Disney, it was a television empire. But the leader was Jerry Orbach from Law and Order! We were just these 10-year-old girls who hated popular culture. Oh, and then Raul Julia who was in the Addams Family, he was one of the main stars. We would make things that were so zine-like, the scripts for the shows were like short stories. There were a lot of Disney characters in it, like Disney Afternoon—TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck, that era—so I used to draw these things all the time, and I loved Disney drawings. Sometimes I’ll be doing the pencil for something and I’ll be like “This looks like the Little Mermaid!” But then I discovered Ren and Stimpy and I was like “This is what I wanna do!” I wanna draw creatures that are slimy and everything looks kind of shrink-wrapped and bubbly.

But then I got into album covers, like the Lords of Acid, Devil Girls, stuff like that. And then I got into punk, and there was this album called Can of Pork, it was a compilation with a drawing of a little pig in Berkeley, and it was drawn by Patrick Hynes, who did a lot of early work for Lookout! Records. He did amazing cartoon-y punk drawings, and I got really into putting little dots on everything because of his art. When I got into punk, I knew I wanted it to be my life. I wanted to play music, and learn to play guitar, but it took me like 13 years to get that together. Now, that’s all I really want to do especially because my band, The Homewreckers have been on hiatus and it was the worst and I hated it. That was my dream creative endeavor my whole life. Art was just this thing I did all the time. I started my zine when I was 15, and I needed to share with the world that I love Green Day, so I did this zine, and all the feelings I had, I needed to share with the world, and that all changed the older I’ve gotten and the closer to Earth I’ve gotten, which is good, because I couldn’t just write about everyone I was dating at the time, or like radical concepts in relationship dynamics that I was discovering. I can’t just like put that on a blog every month because it was [stressing me out]. And sometimes I do that, and I look back and I’m just like “Oh girl, you don’t want this archived,” but then there are things that I do want archived, like this abusive date that I went on when I was about 20 and he really affected my life. I used to never [write about] serious things, and this was one of the few serious things that I was willing to write about because of the impact it made on my life—for so many years, and I turned out a lot of anger towards that. And also writing about feeling disconnected from culture because of my sexuality, that’s something I still write about. My graphic novel that’s coming out soon is about that.

In 2005, I started focusing on my mental health, and being a healthier person, and I started writing about my past and it was really good. That happened because of my last book, which is about now, and it was such an intense personal revelation about emotional and physical abuse and I needed to publish it for myself. I changed everybody’s names, I wanted it to be super vague–like, your “everyday relationship with the abusive manarchist.” You get involved in activism together, then he ruins your relationship with activism. That, I feel has changed a lot. But I feel like I’m starting to answer a new question now.

DM: I mean, this is all interconnected, and you sort of answered this, but what are your favorite things to draw?

CR: I like drawing people, but I’m really tired of it because it’s all I’ve done!

DM: Oh no! But I love your drawings of people!

CR: I’m not tired in a bad way. Right now, I’m working on a tarot card deck, and it’s like, “I’m gonna draw this person” and this is my job right now. I also just went on the Radar Lab Queer Writers Retreat in Akumal, Mexico, which really reconnected me with queer drawing. I’ve [also] been really excited to draw made up, weird things. I use references to draw people, but there are certain things that I’ll just event that I enjoy drawing more, like plants and food. I love drawing food because you can just make it up. I really enjoy drawing animals that are scaly, or mollusk-y, or fish, reptiles, [and] amphibians… I think some day I’ll get it together and do this science-fiction comic that I was going to work on, but it turned into my coming out memoir because the main character is me when I was 12, and I was like, “What’s my problem? I have to write about Green Day!” So, right now, I’m excited about drawing made-up creatures with weird eyeballs like Ren and Stimpy. When I draw people, they have to be doing things, or if they’re gonna be sitting, they have to look really heroic in a campy way.

DM: This might be kind of off-topic, but what are you doing when you’re not drawing? I know you have your band, so there’s that, but is there anything else?

CR: Well, that is my favorite thing to do when I’m not drawing: making pop-punk music. I really like walking around and looking at buildings because I’m sitting all the time. I cocktail waitress two times a week, and it’s a good job because [otherwise] I’m always sitting. I’m really into home décor. I feel like I enjoy anything spontaneous—”Hey, you wanna go to a baseball game?” YEAH! “Wanna come to this live taping of Martha Stewart” YES!—all kinds of stuff, as long as it’s free and it doesn’t involve climbing shit. I like to go hiking, and going to the beach and looking for weird shells and trespassing into places where I’m not supposed to be. I really like going to the Staten Island Boat Graveyard, but if it involves climbing a tree or a fence, I’m just like, “No. We’re gonna go underneath the fence, no climbing. I hate it.”

DM: Yeah climbing is really freakin’ hard! So, it’s probably kind of clear if anyone has seen your work, but what people or places or things do you draw inspiration from, in life and for the work you do?

CR: I mean, obviously, I’m sure it shows in the fact that I draw all of my friends. Like, I’ll be at a party, not participating, and someone is making pies, and maybe someone just put a bowl on their head, kind of like queer, punk Normal Rockwell—like, everyone looks so happy and weird, and this makes me want to draw it, which is what’s so exciting about doing a tarot card deck, because they’re all just these heroic pictures of people, queers doing weird things! But also like, the same thing happens with people who aren’t my friends. Whenever I see children running around in a weird, cliché, poetic way—like, the other day, I saw all of these people on bikes and this little boy was running after them like he was being left behind, and he was holding a bunch of streamers and I was like, “That’s so beautiful, I want to draw it!” But also, walking around the city and all the buildings. But yeah, home décor, home repairs, and cleaning.

DM: I like cleaning too, it’s because I’m a Cancer.

CR: Yeah, I think it’s my Cancer moon and being able to have little compartments. I’m also obsessed with Chippy, my cat. I talk about her all the time. But oh my god, lately, New York has been really fun with being able to see all of these queer punk bands—like, setting up shows. I used to just not be super involved in a lot of community organizing, whether it was art stuff or organizations. I used to do a lot of abuse survivor support work with Support New York and Philly’s Pissed, and I’ll get back to that, but right now it’s just too emotionally draining, so I decided to put together punk shows. Otherwise, I’m really into being involved in creating spaces that are inclusive. I really like being on tour—that’s one of my all-time favorite things—living on tour is really therapeutic. I’m going on the people of color zinester tour, People of Color Zine Project, in September, and it’s gonna rule. I think those are my favorite things.

DM: Oh, awesome. I’m stoked for that. So, you read at C.L.I.T. Fest a couple of weeks ago, and I’m so bummed I missed that because it was in New Jersey, where I’m from. How was that experience?

CR: I’m sad I missed the second day, but I went Friday and Sunday, and it was really special and exciting. It’s rad to see people pull together and make these sorts of spaces happen. It was really diverse, and it makes me wanna do some really gay punk thing.

DM: You should. Gay punk things are the best. For folks who have never ever seen anything you’ve done, how have punk and feminism and queerness and social justice and activism and anything within that realm influenced your life and how are they translated into your work?

CR: I think it’s weird, because when I first started when I was 15 or 16, I didn’t want any [of my work] to be political, then everything ended up being about gay rights, and guys at school calling me a slut, or guys at school being fucked up, then eventually, I realized that a lot of the stories I was writing about self-empowerment [were] like a fabricated self-empowerment based on these values that were introduced to me through punk and activism, but weren’t necessarily my values—through weird scenes that were a little bit second-wave feminist, and not super sex-positive. There were moments where I’d write these really idealistic things that were like, “And then the punks got together and made vegan biscuits and everyone lived happily ever after!” And it would feel that way at the end of the day in some of these cities I would visit, or places I was staying. But overall, there was so much bullshit, and I feel like a lot of the ways I didn’t want to feel bad about people talking shit about my promiscuity was by talking about promiscuity as a problem. Something I said came off that way, and I looked at it and I was like, “I’m just attacking myself!” I used to attack a lot of drama in my life, like, you know that Against Me! song that’s like “I will not ever call anyone out on their shit,” and I love Against Me! I’ve loved them since 2001 when I was in Florida, and I love all of their lyrics, even that song, and I think it’s important to have a night that’s like, “This is about fun and music and we’re not gonna call anyone out on their shit, and if you do, let’s go outside in the hallway in a safer space,” but I feel like a lot of kids took that line and that concept and used it to justify this idealist anarchist community that I really [romanticized]. But a lot of it functioned because people weren’t dealing with shit and not calling each other out, and I just felt like it was really important to write an entire zine about calling people out on their shit, and that was the last issue of my zine. It was all of my problems with punk, and classism and transphobia in queer and activist communities, and these are my problems with myself that I wanna fix and change. And I got obsessed with the question of what is a comfortable radical community? And it made it difficult to listen to some of my favorite anarchist punk bands. I have this part of my life where I only listened to Le Tigre and The Butchies and being like “I HATE PUNK. IT’S ALL CLASSIST SHIT AND PEOPLE NOT DEALING WITH THEIR INTERNALIZED RACISM!” Then eventually, I got back into it, and that’s when I wrote Indestructible.

I’ve gone through these weird phases of my political values inspiring my art in different ways, and now I just want to write about my experience growing up. I already talked about why punk is fucked up, now I need to talk about why I’m obsessed with it and why my life revolves around it. It’s also like being Latina and seeing your community go through [hardship]. Right now, my art is really interpersonal, so I want to talk about these concepts and struggles that I’ve experienced. For my last book, drawing pictures of my grandma was really powerful, as far as me [wanting to] draw the most awesome, radical, Cuban poster with this scene of anarchist flags, and there are parrots and the working class doing one thing and there’s Fidel Castro, so I have in my head, this big mural about Cuban anarchists that never happened because I’m a Gemini and I’m [busy]. But then when I finished this book, it was basically my Cuban anarchist mural—a book about being queer and obsessed with Green Day. Until that point, I had never really drawn my family and I feel like, if your connection with your culture involves a family that you grew up around, or even if it’s a community, or your friends who are your ethnicity who you grew up with, just making art that was about my cultural background, and not really this intense–I mean, there are intense drawings of crosses and Mary and intense religious [depictions] and the Virgin Mary crying with Billie Joe [Armstrong], but just drawing a straight-up statue of the Virgin Mary that was in my family’s house when I was a kid, felt really good, like a real post-Saturn return. I’m not drawing the Virgin Mary with a machine gun—I will, I would like to do that—but like, drawing pictures of my family and culture in a way that [felt] important to me as the drawings I make of punks hanging out on the porch.

DM: You kind of touched on this, but how does being a queer person of color influence your work?

CR: Yeah, it’s really interesting. I always wrote about punk, then when I moved out of Miami and started thinking about my identity outside of being in an all Cuban, or mostly Latino, like my school was 86% Latino, and it was really intense because I had that cultural background, but I had this other battle as a queer person. I didn’t have a queer Latino community, I just had my punk friends, who were all Latino, but none of them were queer, and the only queer people in my life were my penpals, who were in Texas or Los Angeles. Like, I had my girl in LA, and we would talk on the phone and get dirty, and those were my teen dyke experiences. So, it was weird to focus on that struggle, and not feeling like the queer people I met at school just thought I was really crusty. There were like two punk girls who were gay, but there was just so much girl competition and you couldn’t even be friends. And now, we’re friends and like, I’ve really connected with queers from my high school. There was a lot of drama with the students who were out, they didn’t want to deal with me. It was really hard not having queer friends who were Cuban. And now when we meet each other it’s like “OH MY GOD, WE’RE RELATED, LET’S DO SOMETHING TOGETHER, AN EVENT! LET’S HAVE BRUNCH!” So yeah, then when I moved and I started thinking about my queer experience versus other queer experiences, that’s when I was like, “Where are the brown people?”

DM: I feel that way in so many spaces!

CR: I have this experience of being 19 and not out to my family, or 20 and not out, and I mean, they knew, based on my friends, my entourage of really out people, mostly gay guys and all the girls in my life, we were all really tortured and dirty, and I always had a butch best friend. I was also really political and into activism—and I liked guys. That was the other thing. And sometimes I did actually like these guys. I never identified as a lesbian, I just like some people more than others, so when you’re sixteen and you don’t know where to find butch punks, like, “Where am I gonna find them? They’re not real!” Even now, I don’t only like butch punks. I like femme punks too, and then I’d come across these femme punks who were like, “Well, I’m not gay.” I liked every girl in my community. I was really forward about my sexuality, but I never said, “I’m queer.” I would just flirt with all of my friends. The Internet was where I found all of my queers. I feel like I answered that, right?

DM: Yes! You totally answered my question perfectly. This is something I’ve been pondering for a while, and you kind of talked about it, but what are your thoughts on radical queer communities and the whiteness that takes over?

CR: Haha, I feel like I have had experiences with identifying more with communities that happen to be predominantly white. And I think, if you grow up in a Latino community, leaving that seems really daunting—like leaving any community, but it’s different if you were brought up in that sort of community. [I went to this] radical queer organizing meeting, and I went wanting more talks about affinity groups, and going to protests and doing stuff like that, but there was a PoC caucus breakout and there were like ten of us and we were just like, “Oh my god! Let’s have brunch!” And that always happens in any queer organizing situation. There was a femme conference, and we had a meeting at my house and there were ten people, then three people stayed and we all happened to be femmes of color and we were like “LET’S HAVE FEMMES OF COLOR BRUNCH!” But then we noticed, why are we in this anarchist community? I have certain political values that are really specific, and the community that pushes these values sometimes have pretty primitive values of being in the world. There are so many radical anarchists of color who are out there. It’s like being in a punk community that’s also mostly straight. Like, I’m the token queer, or the Cuban, or the anarchist, or this or that, because we’re in the community for one thing and [not anything else]. And it’s like that for any community that comes together under a certain belief, but I feel like there’s a huge white presence that’s kind of hard to speak to sometimes. The Latino gaystream for example, if I had been a part of that when I was fifteen, I feel like I would have gotten something from it that’s different from being this lonely gay person. But then eventually, I would have been like, “Where are the anarchists? I don’t want to be with just my two Cuban anarchist friends.” And still, we’re the only three of our kind, even though we’re in this whole Latino community, which is rad, but we have this different political value system, and we want a community for that. I also think [the issue is] really regional.

DM: Most definitely, I see what you’re saying about regional differences. How do you personally deal with being a person of color within predominantly white radical communities, and the space that’s taken up by white folks?

CR: I feel like being in New York City has helped me to not feel isolated as a brown person. I’m not the only one! But there’s a lot of stuff people don’t talk about, there’s a lot of stuff I used to feel affected by because I was more active and younger, and now I’m more independent. I have my best friends, I have my art, and I mean, my band was all white except for me, and they’re awesome, and I want to play music with them, and they love pop-punk, and that’s what I’m looking for as far as starting a band. So, I’m in this place where I’m not really on a constant quest for community. But there are other situations in my life where queer people of color exist, whether it’s my best friends or housemates, I’m so happy and grateful, and it’s so important to have this queer PoC presence here, and if it wasn’t here, I’d be really sad! I feel that way anywhere. [But again], New York makes it really easy. It’s really intense in a smaller city though; there are race politics where people are discussing internalized racism and the weight that puts on the two people of color is always really overwhelming, which is why I’ve left certain communities. People want me around for judging that, when I really just want to listen to Queen and hang out.

DM: I’ve definitely had that experience being the “brown voice of reason,” like hey, I don’t have the answer to all your petty problems just because I’m a PoC.

CR: Yeah! I don’t want to police someone right now! I mean, I will if they piss me off, but if there’s something about them and they’re not acting upon it at that moment, and we’re at a potluck and all of a sudden, the conversation turns into talking about this person’s internalized racism. Like, don’t drag me into the conversation as the person of color input. I don’t even know this person, I don’t even care. I just want to get some potluck items into my Tupperware and go home. I just felt tired and sad and Bad Habits is about that time in my life. Just feeling tired and feeling like I had to justify why things hurt. My experience is different because I’m brown, let me explain that. It’s weird in New York, and you do think about things in a different way—like, the importance of the trans experience, or the experience of being poor, or abused. There are so many experiences that contribute to being angry and deserving a voice in radical communities. And I feel like if you’re in a big city, there are people who want to be that voice, and I have in my life, I make art about it, duh, but I’ve tried to organize certain things, where I’ve felt, in New York even, where it’s really easy to do something that’s non-exclusive and all-encompassing. But, I just want to organize with people of color! I don’t want to be in a group that’s mostly white people, because that’s the world! And so, I was tired of being the angry brown person who is upset with outreach, and I’m the only person who cares about outreach. If you want to be the angry brown person who is obsessed with outreach, you should do it, I’ll do it again if I have to, but sometimes, I don’t want to.

DM: It’s draining!

CR: Yeah! But then there are fierce white people who I trust—I trust this person to not do something weirdly racist and exclusive. But then there are other situations where it’s like, “This is a really big conference, I don’t think that the only music that should happen is punk and folk-punk. We need other genres.” And sometimes, I don’t want to be the person who has to bring that up. I feel like everyone should just know that.

DM: Yeah! Okay, so I’m sure people want to know, what’s next for you? What are you up to now?

CR: Well, right now, my book Spit and Passion, which is about coming out, and family, and takes place in the seventh grade, and that’ll be published by Feminist Press in November. We just finished editing, and I’m really stoked because they really care about their projects. There are so many presses out there who treat their books like products, like, “How are we gonna make this sell?” instead of like “How are we gonna honor this artist’s voice because we’re so proud of [them]? We’re so impressed by their work that we want to release it, so we want everyone to see that voice for what that is.” A lot of presses don’t give a shit about that. There were people interested in my book if it was not about coming out, and just about Green Day.
The main character would be like ambiguously butch, and like yeah, that’s why every comic has ambiguously gay characters, because the artist wanted, which I don’t blame them, some presses with give like fifty thousand dollar advances to finish a graphic novel, and like, that is so much money, what the fuck is that? I can’t. It’s so much that it doesn’t even seem like anything. I’d rather not get an advance, or get a really small one and get someone who cares about the project. I don’t want to just go to a small publisher’s coop and print my book, I don’t want to go to Kinko’s and print ten issues of my comic, because I did that already and that’s an important experience, but I’m not there anymore. But I’m not gonna compromise what I want to share with the world. Feminist Press really cares. They’re so rad. They just put out Laurie Weeks and Justin Vivian Bond’s books, they’re both really awesome queer writers. Anyway, other than that The Homewreckers are having a practice soon. After nine months of trouble. I’ve been writing so many new songs, it’s stupid, I need to play with a band again. I am reconnecting with all of that. I’m playing acoustic shows around town. I set one up with Lauren Measure who was in The Measure, they were a really rad pop-punk band, Princess Tiny and the Meats, who are cool, local, queer, dark, like the Smashing Pumpkins… we’re all doing acoustic sets, oh, and me and Witchdog. This is Chippy’s birthday show! She’s turning one! That’ll be at my house on August 10th and everyone should come! Then the other thing I’m doing, which I’ve been working really hard on is my tarot deck and I’m so stoked about that! It’s a really slow project. This is the first time in my life where I don’t have a project that I’m already working on that is stories and art of my life, I’ve done that since I was fifteen, and I’m done… for now. I’m so excited so just draw these tarot cards. It’s a really weird therapeutic project. You’re making the tarot cards, so you’re contributing to astrology, and Michelle Tea is writing the descriptions.

DM: Awesome! Yeah, I’m excited for that. You and Michelle make such a rad team. Well, thanks for doing this. I was awesome talking to you and I’ll see you around soon!

Keep an eye out for Cristy’s new book Spit and Passion, as well as her tarot card deck! And hey, if you’re in New York, catch her play an acoustic set.

All illustrations/clippings/drawings by Cristy C. Road, duh.

Stay tuned for more queer art surprises and the last installment of this series on August 22nd!

Previously: Queer Zine Machine, Edie Fake