Sideboy Chit Chat, with Matthew Lawrence and Jason Tranchida

Photo: Nelson Villarreal

Matthew Lawrence and Jason Tranchida are an artist / curator duo who publish the journal Headmaster, your go-to print magazine for sophisticated takes on art, culture, and man-loving. Born a decade apart and hailing from different parts of the country, they’ve come together to build an incredible creative partnership; their most recent work is the hybrid documentary, musical, and video installation Scandalous Conduct: A Fairy Extravaganza.

The Well (TW): Hey guys. Thanks for taking the time here. We want to start off with you Matt, being that you’re from the area. What do you know about East Providence? 

Matthew Lawrence (ML): Coming from afar (Cranston), East Providence was always where people’s Vovó and Vovô lived, but I really never went there until I started shopping at Savers as a teen. Honestly, I still get turned around all the time. The part on the map that looks like a bowtie will never not confuse me. What’s also confusing to me is that people—gay men, specifically—don’t make a bigger to-do about the fact that there's a landmark called Spooky Bottom.

Jason Tranchida (JT): I, on the other hand, as a non-native RI-er, pride myself on being able to navigate EP. Pawtucket, not so much.

TW: Spooky Bottom is a dock, too! What’s your relationship with the wider area today? 

ML: Living where you grew up is super crazy. I see people from high school everywhere. One of them wordlessly high-fived me on the street the other day and just kept walking without saying hello. While recording our musical, one of our musicians mentioned a brother and it triggered a memory of someone I went to elementary school with who had the same last name. I quickly Googled him and it turns out he became a professional poker player?! I won’t say too much more than that because once Scandalous Conduct is finished, my next project is going to be a novel about my childhood, which—because Cranston was wild in the 80s/90s—involves both satanic panic, child murders, and a drive-thru condom store.

Above: Scandalous Conduct. Photo: John Hesselbarth.

TW: Wild. Times may have changed but, we did once see a 15 year old at Garden City who was wearing a Burzum shirt while outside the Gap with his mom so—maybe still a weird energy there? Jason how about you—what’s your story?

JT: I was born in Detroit, but I grew up in the suburbs and then Ann Arbor for college years. I used any opportunity to get out of the suburbs and into the city when I lived there, mostly for the music, culture, and architecture, not to mention some awesome people. The Detroit Institute of Arts was a bit of a safe haven for me growing up—it was a place where I felt I fit in. It’s still one of my favorite places in the world. It was the same for the music scene. I’m totally dating myself, but I grew up in the height of the Detroit Techno scene. While I wouldn’t call myself a club kid (now or then, lol), I did sneak into plenty of them! It was a great scene and the dancing was incredible. While I knew it was something super special, it wasn’t until I left Michigan that I realized how influential Detroit Techno was on a global scale. After college I headed east and ended up in Brooklyn for grad school. I took a little break from New York in 1999, landed in Providence, and forgot to go back.

TW: Matt, one of your projects Rhode Islanders may be familiar with was Law and Order Party. Can you speak on that a bit?

ML: Sure, I started Law and Order Party in 2015 because there was nowhere to find out what was happening culturally in town without doing a ton of leg work. Since I was doing that legwork for myself anyway, I thought I’d start a newsletter. There was one out of New York called Gayletter that sent out five recommendations each week, one per night, and it was on my radar because they wrote about Headmaster parties a few times. There’s obviously less happening in Rhode Island than in New York, but I thought that idea was scalable. I reviewed art exhibits, plays and movies, previewed concerts and readings, and left space to cover performance work and other miscellaneous things. After five years of weekly newsletters and getting slightly burnt out, I relaunched it to write more in-depth pieces. Unfortunately that was early March 2020. I wrote about an exhibition of Warhol polaroids at RIC and then interviewed author Joanne McNeil, and then everything shut down and I floundered for a few months before retiring the project.

TW: And Jason, we know a bit less about your solo work. What are you up to outside the collaborations with Matt?

JT: As far as my creative practice goes, folks seem to know me, or my work, in very compartmentalized ways, which makes sense in that I’m seemingly all over the place. I studied architecture, then got an MFA in sculpture, became a graphic designer/creative director, worked in events and theater design, planned two weddings, and now I’m making a movie / documentary / installation / musical thing. So people are always surprised when they find out I do something other than the single thing they know me for. I also love gardening.

Above: From Headmaster No. 10, The Huxleys

TW: From working across so many fields...any core lessons learned?

JT: One (of many) professional fails was on one of the first photo shoots I ever directed. I was going for ethereal, but the products were pretty much rendered invisible. Lesson learned: trust your photographer and your clients.

TW: Are you “Never leave Rhode Island” types? Any memorable trips?

ML: In November of 2021, we went to Bilbao together for an art fair—two artists from Headmaster No. 9 lived there and their gallery got us set up with a booth. The artists, los picoletos (ig), were incredibly hospitable and even made us a whole Thanksgiving dinner because they knew it was Thanksgiving in the US that day. Bilbao is not the easiest city to love, maybe because I’m a vegetarian, but it does have some amazing punk bars.

I also very, very randomly went to Laos in 2013 on a family vacation with a family that was not mine. Aside from a high school trip to Paris it was my first venture outside of North America and I actually loved it. Because of its messy history, Vientiane, the capital, is a fascinating mix of Southeast Asian, French colonial, and Soviet architecture. I signed up for a trip to Phnom Penh, a city I’ve always wanted to visit (Cranston is very Cambodian!) and I got bait and switched not too long before we left. But I’m happy things worked out the way they did.

TW: Since we’ve mentioned it a few times now, can you give us a rundown on Headmaster?

JT: Headmaster is a vehicle to showcase the artwork and careers of queer artists, and we always include at least one RI artist in each issue. When deciding which artists to work with, we are very conscious to include a range of voices and ages for example. We often also include assignments that are based on hidden/forgotten fragments of queer history. This is actually where the germ of an idea for Scandalous Conduct came from.

Above: Matthew, age 5.

TW: You mentioned los picoletos from Bilbao; Headmaster’s also featured Slava Mogutin (NYC), House of Rice (Vancouver), and Barry Marré  who is, or at least was, out of Rotterdam. How do you get tapped into a global community and what's the process like for curating people and stories?

ML: The world is pretty small, it turns out. Smaller than we even realized when we started the magazine. We've worked with artists from…fourteen countries? I think? I never know whether to go by where people are from or where they live now. I’m counting quickly here—we've gotten to meet sixty of our contributors in person which is always exciting. I’m glad you mentioned Barry because we really like his work and haven’t really stayed in touch with him. 

By the second or third issue of Headmaster we were featuring a mix of people that we already knew, people that contacted us themselves, and people that were referred to us by friends and colleagues. In the early years of the magazine we were helped immensely by platforms like Tumblr, which were popular with visual artists and especially with the sexy queer ones. Honestly I have no idea where people go for that kind of visual community now. 

TW: And on to Scandalous Conduct, a project that feels very wide in scope. What’s the elevator pitch?

ML: Scandalous Conduct is a project about the year 1919, but its themes are super relevant today: surveillance of queer sexual spaces, the role of drag in the United States military, and so on. After close to five years, we are actually very proud to be finishing. Our public presentations began in May 2020 with a virtual talk about John Rathom, the enigmatic Australian rapscallion who was editor of the Providence Journal in 1919. This was early enough in Zoom Times that everyone kept their camera on and also stayed while we talked for over 90 minutes. The 2024 version of the project is much tighter. 

JT: Our collaborative practice has traditionally been centered around curating and publishing, so Scandalous Conduct is the biggest thing we’ve ever worked on together in terms of art “making.” It’s been a long process and I think we still like each other!

TW: The role of drag in the military...can you elaborate on that?

JT/ML: We started the research for Scandalous Conduct a few years before the recent brouhahas about drag and pride events on military bases. Last year the Pentagon declared that drag shows are “inconsistent with Defense Department spending regulations”, with the Biden administration caving to Republicans who were in a tizzy about drag story hours. Times change, of course, and the older I get the more I realize that things usually get worse even as they’re getting better. Shows with drag elements were big during World War II, and even in World War I drag wasn’t such a big deal. 

In 1919, the Newport Naval Station produced a musical version of Jack and the Beanstalk, touring it around New England to show young men how much fun military service could be. In this version of the story Jack has a love interest, Princess Mary, and the Navy capitalized on this in its marketing. A three-star admiral was quoted in newspapers as declaring Princess Mary “the daintiest little thing I ever laid eyes on”. An ad we found in the Providence Journal led with the boast that “Princess Mary will be prettier than ever before.” 

Above: Jason, age 25.

TW: A three-star review...not bad! Publishing a magazine and projects as wide in scope as Scandalous Conduct are resource intensive—how are you getting by and pulling these things off?

ML: This is a great question. Grants and crowdfunding donations are currently paying for Scandalous Conduct and subscriptions are sort of paying for Headmaster but certainly neither of those is paying the bills. Jason has a successful design practice and I am always doing my best to cobble together a semblance of a day job. Right now I am working as a contract archivist though August, and also doing PR/marketing work for a few local nonprofits. There are pluses and minuses to this setup—it allows me to take weeks off to work on filming a musical, for instance—but overall it’s less than ideal.

TW: With it being less than ideal for now, where do you find balance or comfort?

ML: We try to keep a balance of healthy habits and wild stories when we’re not working around the clock. In the first year of the pandemic, I discovered that the best path mentally was to not pick up my phone for the first hour that I’m awake and to not look at my phone for the last hour before bed. I’ve backslid considerably but still aspire to that two-hour daily information cleanse. I have an elderly aunt that won’t watch depressing world news on TV before bed because it will give her bad dreams. I aspire to that level of self-control.

TW: In one of the earlier presentations for Scandalous Conduct—your zoom talk for the PPL in May of 2020—you give the audience a heads up that the project's current status is in-progress; to expect lower image quality, etc. You presented again in June of 2021 at the Newport Art Museum...it's been ongoing. We're wondering how you think about project evolution—how to make early-phase presentations; present incomplete ideas, and how scope / scale changes over time.

JT: Both Matthew and I have creative practices that are project-driven. Unlike the development of a lot of our work, this project in particular evolved in a very public way. We spent a long time in the research phase of Scandalous Conduct, and we really dug into it. It actually  took a long time to decide what form would be best for the way we wanted to tell this story. A puppet show and opera were both seriously considered for a minute...Several of our in-process presentations were requirements of grants we received, but we always used them as an opportunity to push the project into a next phase. Creatively, it was great for me to have these iterations. There were so many twists and turns and rabbit holes that we went down, presenting these stories publicly really forced me to keep everything organized in my head.

Above: Matthew and Jason at a workshop. Photo: Nick Dentamaro. 

TW: Any particular books, archives, etc that have helped inform this, and other projects? Places we can learn more?

ML/JT: Well, everyone ought to read Lawrence R. Murphy’s Perverts by Official Order: The Campaign Against Homosexuals by the United States Navy. It’s a dense history but it’s also the only full-length book to date about the 1919 Newport Sex Scandal. 

Aside from that, this seems like a good moment to plug the weirdly large number of non-fiction titles released by our friends this spring. There’s Kate Schapira’s Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth, Phil Eil’s Prescription for Pain: How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the 'Pill Mill Killer’, Michael Andor Brodeur's Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle, R. Tripp Evans’s The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home, and Linda Kushner’s The Fight That Saved the Libraries: A True Rhode Island Story. 

TW: Love us some Broduer. Two decades ago his indie pop band, Certainly, Sir was a Boston favorite, and the House stuff he’s done as New Dad is outstanding, too. [Side Note, the New Dad tape was release by Dan Boucher, who The Well interviewed over here]

What role has/does music play in your lives? At home, in clubs, etc?

ML: Great question, and also a funny question because we are currently editing a musical and so we’re listening to the same handful of songs over and over and over again. To be honest, though, one thing we learned is that we don't particularly love music from 1919. There are some good songs, including the ones in our video, but the rest of that era is just a minefield of racism, cringe patriotism, and sounds that haven’t aged well. When we’re not working on this project, generally we always have something playing over the speakers at the studio. Our go-tos are Italian internet radio, Montreal disco playlists, the Wheeler radio station that plays 90s alternative music all day for seemingly no reason, and at home we play a fair amount of vinyl.

TW: Guys, thanks so much. Going to end this with a promo moment—what’s coming up? 

ML/JT: Our magazine Headmaster will have a table at this year’s Queer/Trans Zine Fest (QTZFest) at The Steel Yard, which we’re excited about because it’s the first year we’ve been able to even apply to the fest and it’s also the last year that it’s happening. So the stars aligned for once!

Aside from the Scandalous Conduct exhibit, which runs September 12 – October 6, we’re doing a Haus of Codec market with our magazine Headmaster at the end of October. We’re also probably planning a holiday event although we tend to plan those at the last minute. Last year we threw our party at Myrtle and it happened to be like two days after the bridge shutdown and we had a fantastic time even though we were afraid no one would show up, so maybe we’ll see about doing that again?