Nyx NocturnE

Branded Saloon, Brooklyn

Burlesque was really the start for me, I had, for a birthday one year went to see a burlesque show for the very first time, and was just completely blown away. I did not know that this was a thing that people did or could be done, and was so in love with it immediately. And I think at that point in my life, I'm having all these self image issues like all of these confidence issues, so I'm just gonna, like, get naked in front of a roomful of people, and that'll be better.

Eight years later, I'm still doing it. Switch n’ Play, my involvement with them started years later, that was like, a whole new world, all queer people in that audience, all sorts of different types of people and identities and types of performance happening in that show. And that was really, really exciting. So I was definitely lucky in the fact that my day job transitions really easily to working from home. So when the pandemic happened, when everything kind of hit, I was able to keep doing that. But I definitely realized how much I depended on my other forms of income too. So between, you know, performing, I was also tattooing, privately, and that was something that had to stop at that point, too. One of the most beautiful things about having a stage persona is it allows you to play with who you are being able to incorporate different elements into the the stage persona allows you to incorporate different elements into yourself. It's a low pressure space to be able to like see how things fit you. And so I had switched my pronouns and identity for my stage persona. Long before I did that for my off stage persona, or my offstage person. Where, you know, sometimes they both feel like personas, you know, it's like you put one on in one context and one on the other. I had started doing that and realized how good it felt to be referred to that way to be seen, like as a more androgynous person and to have that identity and so that identity just kind of creeped into who I was offstage too. It's really hard. I feel like there are a lot of things that I learned about myself, but there are a lot of things that I also feel like I lost about myself as well. I realized how my personal identity is really wrapped up in that and to have that suddenly disappear is really challenging.