Earlier this week, the Missoula comedy community came together to roast Charlotte Macorn at the Roxy Theater. It might sound rough, but it’s a long-standing tradition reserved for the most respected Montana comics who are, for one reason or another, leaving town.
I roasted Charley as thoroughly as I could (“In college, I learned that trans people are just like us, but after meeting Charley, I thought to myself, I sure hope not.”) because I love and respect her so much. Since I started performing stand-up eight years ago, she has been a guiding light, a deep creative well, and a safe space for every weird idea I’ve ever had. We’ve also eaten a lot of pad thai together. For the community, she has been much more: an extremely out trans person during a decade where trans people have been under blatant attack, a performer who has shown many how to dovetail art and activism, and an absolute pillar of the Roxy and the indie film community. She also may be the first trans person in Missoula to really rule the strange margins of underground art (through homemade zines and her film series Trash Talk) while simultaneously being embraced by the mainstream (through emceeing Out To Lunch, teaching at the university, and countless stand-up comedy shows).
How does she do it? Though her fast-talking, strange comedy that feels modern and vintage at the same time. As well as an iron constitution when it comes to hecklers and anti-trans nonsense (when heckled with the very worst language, Charley responds with, “Dad?”).
Charley grew up in Deer Lodge, Montana, the kid of a prison guard. And while she’d be the first to admit that it hasn’t been easy being queer in this state, it hasn’t stopped her from becoming more herself—and increasingly more vocal—with each passing year. In fact, she says the loneliness and isolation she felt growing up is the biggest reason that she, and her art, won’t shut up now.
The past year has been one full of change for Charley. She’s fallen in love, gotten engaged, and is ready to start a new chapter of life with her future wife. And they want that chapter to begin in a place that’s a little bigger and a little kinder to families like them. It’s a gain for Charley and a big blow to Missoula.
In her final month in the Missoula spotlight, Charley has a lot planned. At the center of those plans has been the Queerwest Film Fest—three days of celebrating queer filmmaking and art at the Roxy. It also includes the Missoula Drag Wrestling show, a collaboration between a group of comics and artists that, well, you just have to see it. It’s a perfect curtain call for someone who has given so much of herself to our community.
I sat down with Charley to learn more about the history of the fest, this year’s not-to-miss standouts, and what Charley thinks looking back at her tenure as—as she would say—“the mercurial icon of Missoula, your friend and mine.”
How did the Queerwest Film Fest start?
This festival grew out of some of the specialty programming that I’ve been doing at the Roxy for the last five or six years. And the Roxy saw that there had never been a queer film festival as far as we could find anywhere in Montana.
And we knew—especially last year, in light of the moral panic and the concentrated attacks that we saw at a policy level and at a personal level against LGBTQ people, especially trans people—we knew that building community was one of the best ways that we could stand up for queer people right now.
Give us a few highlights from the festival this year.
The big highlight is the film Hidden Flora. This is its world premier. It’s playing at a lot of other festivals throughout this year, but we are the first to show this incredibly charming coming of age film by a trans filmmaker. It’s about a queer kid growing up in the late aughts in New Mexico, and they, through a series of relationships, discover who they are in this beautiful heartwarming way.
We’re also doing a Maker’s Market in the Roxy Garden on Saturday afternoon from 12 to 3 p.m. with a dozen local vendors. M-80 Chicken is going to be there, too, and it’s just a great place to support local artists doing local things.
What’s this we hear about bad movie night at the fest?
We’re kicking the festival off with a screening of Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda, which is a famously very bad movie. The basic story of it is that Christine Jorgensen had her series of gender affirming surgeries in the 1950s, which turned her into an international celebrity. She wasn’t the first trans person to get gender affirming surgeries, but because of when it happened and because of her history as a GI in the US Army, it made international news. And so exploitation filmmakers lined up to exploit her story, one of whom is Ed Wood. He was commissioned to do a biopic of Jorgensen’s life and instead made a movie about their own cross-dressing.
And it’s just this strange artifact from 81 years ago, where we can see the way we perceive trans people has changed quite a bit in 80 years. But you’re also seeing a film from that long ago that is just so accepting and weirdly progressive for the time. It’s really incredible.
It’s also a terrible movie. Ed Wood is known as one of the worst filmmakers of all time. I don’t know if I believe that. I mean, there’s that thing Roman Polanski did. But this film itself—it’s terrible.
It’s just a really great way to kick the festival off and celebrate, because the theme this year is Queer Joy. And I think sometimes just getting together with a group of friends and watching just a terrible movie, and in this case, a terrible movie that deals with a lot of things that trans people still deal with today, is the best way to do that.
Drag wrestling. Where did this idea come from? What can we expect at this weekend’s show?
Expect the unexpected, and if you’re expecting the unexpected, you’re already expecting the wrong unexpected.
Montana Drag Wrestling came originally and continues to be a piece of political protest art done by myself and a group of artists here in the community. And that’s all based around this thing we discovered, which is that professional wrestling is just drag for straight people. And so taking that principle and then applying drag made the most sense in the world.
Audiences can expect a wig-snatching death-dropping Friday night. And on the card we have the Von Dooms defending their MDW tag team titles against BB Mystery and Ace of Hearts. Who are the good bad boys? And then we are going to have, in our main event, probably the biggest match, Chastity Wilkes, who has been the villain throughout the show, wrestling Iris Van Moxley, who’s the current MDW champion in an I Quit match—the only way to win is to beat your opponent so bad they tell the referee that they quit.
I was obviously at your roast earlier this week. How did you feel about the roast and how do you feel about leaving Missoula?
It felt a little bittersweet, I would say, to recognize that part of my life is moving on and I’m going in a different direction. I am sad to be leaving Missoula; it’s been my home longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. But I believe that the time is right for me to go out and see what else I can do in the world. I feel that my time in Missoula has been one that’s been blessed by creativity and working with so many incredible artists and performers and just getting an incredible education in how to mix art with activism. I’m eternally grateful for the lessons that I learned here and I’m looking forward to using them somewhere else.
What kind of legacy do you want to leave behind?
I grew up a lonely queer kid in rural Montana. I felt incredibly isolated from the world around me. I felt that I was broken. I thought that there was something wrong with me. And coming to Missoula and being able to work on myself and figure myself out, the thing that really struck me is how many other kids there are like me, who need support.
I would say that when I’ve toured and done shows across the country, everyone is just so surprised that I’m from Montana and I really hope that my legacy is reminding people that there are queer people everywhere. There are trans people everywhere. We are part of your community. And I hope that the work that I have done has been able to give other people like me a platform to do all of the things that they want to do to live their wildest dreams.
Also put up a statue of me. Give me a fucking statue.
