Members of the Freshman Leadership Council, Fluidity’s former parent organization, join Luena to celebrate after the show. Several members also walks as models.
Oct 29, 2023 | Story by Luena Rodriguez-Feo Vileira | Images courtesy of Luena Rodriguez-Feo Vileira
On a Monday evening, before the downtown’s 20-somethings file in line, I head to a space of queer-inclusive, universal human desire: the University Club bathroom.
My cause is less biologically urgent than the typical restroom patrons’, but the space is no less occupied. I’ve cracked the door just enough to glimpse the singular stall inside when I hear the polite “Oh!” of someone struck from behind it.
I guess I’m not the only model looking for a place to change.
Two hours from now, I’ll join 50 others donning a genderless array of clothing, applying bobby pins and body glitter where necessary, to walk Fluidity, an LGBTQ+ fashion show. Until then, UC, the heart of queer nightlife and drag shows in Gainesville since 1990, remains a tangle of finishing touches.
Fluidity launched a year ago on the University of Florida’s campus as the spring project of 10 students in the Freshman Leadership Council, a university organization. As a freshman myself then, I remember savoring the show from an indoor balcony above the 150-person audience in Pugh Hall.
Young male, female and non-binary models — all just college students like me — formed a mosaic of queer expression in patterned overcoats and fluorescent trousers. They flaunted layers of jewelry, matching the color of the gems to their eyeshadow. My gaze swallowed the liquid movement of each sashaying figure, trailing them up and down the runway to soak in the spectacle of apparel.
The show rendered the gender scripts of their clothing illegible.
And, thanks to attendee donations, it raised over $300 for the pro-LGBTQ+ political advocacy group Equality Florida.
The success inspired Fluidity’s reinstatement as an independent venture. Now in its second annual installment, Fluidity is still young to Gainesville’s queer scene, toddling toward a citywide recognition beyond the perimeters of the university.
Modeling for Fluidity expands my horizons too, beginning with my mere presence; the show date marks my first time at UC.
The club’s interior teems with visual noise, loud colors and offbeat patterns shamelessly claiming space. Emblematically, it reckons with Florida’s increasingly anti-LGBTQ legislature.
For kindergarteners to high school seniors, “Don’t Say Gay” laws ban school discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation and restrict personal pronoun usage (HB 1069). Students, too, must exclusively use the bathrooms and changing facilities that match their sex assigned at birth or face a second-degree trespassing misdemeanor (HB 1521).
Meanwhile, medical practitioners who provide minors gender-affirming care now risk their licenses and a possible felony charge, and transgender people of all ages can no longer depend on state funds, like that of Medicaid or public hospitals, for gender-affirming treatment (SB 254).
LGBTQ+ community members live with their identity policed in spaces as ubiquitous as the classroom, as vital as healthcare facilities and as intimate as the bathroom. Still, UC and Fluidity refuse silence.
Their song is not merely an affirmation of queer existence; it’s a celebration of it.
Inside UC, I meet worn hardwood floors and exposed brick walls, rugged surfaces softened by the glow of hanging lights and neon signs.
Members of Fluidity’s executive board scatter around, still setting up the venue. They break their concentration for a moment to flash me a smile.
Some are models from last year, now managing Fluidity’s logistics, communications and finances, drawn again to the magnetism of this community’s creativity. Others are Fluidity’s founding members and close friends of mine, like Phuc Phan, vice president of outreach.
“Hi, Luena!” Phuc says. “If you could just go upstairs, that’s where all the models are getting ready.”
I admire their outfit, burnt orange bell-bottoms and an oversized cardigan that lets their bare chest peek through. The colors and textures outshine the Bermuda shorts and T-shirts typical of their closet pre-Fluidity.
Two years ago, self-labeled “frat guy” outfits shrouded Phuc in the comfort of a heteronormative camouflage — when “I didn’t know you were gay!” felt like a compliment, a success. After working as a Fluidity team member and model last year, they found a different sense of safety, in the embrace of its unapologetically queer community.
A month ago, Phuc’s hand-squeezing encouragement melted my nerves about applying as a model. I’d only walked a runway once before, and while Fluidity’s landscape of creative freedom enchanted me, I don’t identify as queer.
But I didn’t need to. The electricity of this space only calls for my body as a channel of expression and my soul to communicate connection.
Phuc’s eyes beam with their usual kindness, but the strained syllables in their words betray the stress of preparing the show.
With a soft nod, I walk toward the staircase, counting the 20-step path before it transforms into my runway.
Luena reunites with friends Iona, Abel, and Nishant after walking the runway.
Next to me, a crouching brunette maps the unfinished runway aisles with fabric and tape. She lets her pink tulle gown splay out around her, unbothered by the family of club-floor bacteria likely making it their new home.
Internally, Primrose Tanachaiwiwat reels from a more infectious worry, thanks to a phone call an hour and a half before I arrived.
I cannot cry, she thought as she hung up. I just put lashes on.
As I approach her on my way to the stairs, her gaze merely floats over my feet. She’s busy condensing a six-hour decoration process in half.
Luckily, Primrose wields a warm compass, guided by her seven-month-long vision for the show’s theme. “Ethereal strange” — she’d arrived at the words even before applying to be Fluidity’s design chair.
As a queer artist, Primrose found her interests easily kindled by the show’s founding concept. Still, beneath the colorful, creative, politically charged mode of expression, Fluidity beckoned her with a softer freedom.
She explains to me in conversation days after the show: While the fight for queer rights and civil liberties persists, there lies a significance in the fight for queer joy.
“We need to find places where we can simply be happy — not angry, or enraged or even empowered. Just happy,” she said.
She douses her own art with this yearning; through sketched portraits and acrylics on canvas, she depicts faces, sometimes her own, with eyes wide, pleading. Fresh paint stains on her fingertips already hint at a new project, unforetold by her integrative biology major and entomology minor. (She assuages my confusion with “a sort-of shameful secret”: She’s really just waiting to talk about bugs all the time.)
Still, within five minutes, Primrose outpaces my limited fashion repertoire with references to the 2018 Met Gala and 2010 Alexander McQueen. The words fit comfortably in her mouth, like the names of old friends.
“I wanted something heavenly and holy and just deeply unsettling,” she said.
When I confess biblically accurate angels come to mind, she nods emphatically.
“I’m a big believer in things for gay people not being tacky,” she clarifies.
Weeks before the show, Primrose sharpens her thematic vision with a Pinterest board of all things avant-garde, capturing models in sheer pastel frills and mushroom-shaped silhouettes. Her ensemble of decor features fabrics and streamers, conveniently eclectic, gleaned from a local repurposing shop.
Twenty-four hours before the show, she and the Fluidity team prep the floor, the walls and the runway stage.
Three hours before the show, they learn their decorations are sitting in the trash, dumped mistakenly.
Primrose rushes to UC, where panic clicks her authority into place. But between rounds of gluing and taping and curtain placing, she quickly realizes she can’t do everything.
“Okay, so tell us what to do,” Fluidity’s executive director Lauryn Tyler says to her.
Oh, right. I’m going to delegate, Primrose thinks to herself.
By the time the other models and I trickle in, Primrose is an hour into improvising with materials salvaged from garbage bags. She’s already paced the room one, two, 20 times to reconfigure its design. A severed supply of fake ivy vines meets a new fate then, scattering the walls instead of marking the runway.
Models will walk along a train of fabric, Primrose decides. Her Fluidity team members join her in kneeling down and taping it to the floor.
On the second story, I follow the buzz of chatter up another set of stairs, past walls lined in framed photos of UC drag queens, and into a lounge room.
A garment sea awaits me, with models adorned in soft white cotton (a frilly top worn as a skirt) and shiny black leather (gloves salaciously fitted as a bra). Between the embellished bodies is an obstacle course of belongings; backpacks and purses swallow every corner of the floor.
“Well, I’m headed to the bathroom anyway,” I sigh in relief, unaware that several other models have beat me to it.
Once I apologize to the model I thumped with the door, I manage to squeeze into the bathroom’s corner. I try not to notice how the walls next to me are close enough to press my palms against.
Half-dressed, the other model inside flashes me a sympathetic smile. The long emerald skirt of her lehenga spreads across the floor. Before I can grab my own clothes from my tote bag, she launches into conversation.
“Can you believe my shoe broke on the way here?” she asks, holding up the half-detached sole of her black heel as proof.
I smile in surprise, grateful for the invitation to skip small talk, before gaping with the appropriate disbelief. “Of course it would happen on your way to the show.”
We exhale together and let soft laughter spill out.
As soon as she finishes walking, Luena’s roommates find her downstairs to congratulate her.
Once dressed, I examine myself in the bathroom mirror one last time before slipping back into the lounge room. A spectacle of light announces my return, as the room’s layered overhead lights bounce off one particular source: my boobs.
Oh, right. I’m strutting in a disco-ball bra.
Both bra cups are covered entirely in mirror tiles, painstakingly arranged with fabric glue long after midnight. Now, the slightest motion of my chest projects a radiant cascade onto the ceiling, the walls and any other unsuspecting surface.
The rest of my outfit, a collection of black fabrics and silver accents, commands less ostentatious attention. A faux leather skirt with decorative eyelets covers me from mid waist to upper thigh; my feet sport lightweight ankle boots.
The clothes compete with my makeup for attention. I spent the day prior scrolling through Instagram beauty tutorials, searching for an eye look so eccentric that only Fluidity could serve as my excuse to wear it out.
The result is mostly eyeliner, drawn in asymmetrical lines and curves. The design, bizarre enough to earn the eyebrow raise of a passing UPS driver, receives compliments from multiple models.
Altogether, the look no doubt falls on some spectrum between dominatrix and 2008 Lady Gaga, the bra dutifully modeled directly after the pop star’s in her “Just Dance” music video.
Still, there’s one piece missing from my outfit. I wander further into the lounge, searching for the stylist who will complete me: Kayla Ehrlich.
Kayla stands by the bar counter, prepped with a fashion first-aid kit: safety pins from CVS, emergency jewelry and a sack of extra clothes.
Their own outfit, configured 48 hours ago, recycles pieces from the depths of their brimming closet. They’ve pinned a wedding-guest dress into a skirt and styled it with a jacket made from a nightshirt.
Truthfully, I barely register Kayla’s apparel when I first see them. After the show, I return with a burning question: “How did you decide on your makeup?”
“Just something I found on Instagram,” Kayla replies, explaining what led them to paint their entire face, cheek to cheek and forehead to chin, in a gradient of blue. “It was really fun!” they add.
Back in the lounge, Kayla checks off items from a list on their phone, ensuring they’ve handed off the last-minute pieces models need.
“I still ended up forgetting some things,” Kayla later admits. They’d arrived at Fluidity after an 8 to 11 a.m. shift in City Hall and classes subsequently until 2 in the afternoon.
When we spot each other before the show, I don’t get more than three words in (“Do you have–”) before Kayla hands me the jacket I’m seeking. The long black blazer, a rare purchase from H&M, is a staple in Kayla’s collection, having passed their “Will I wear this like 30 times?” test multiple times over.
The piece joins others circulating in a decade-old orbit; Kayla’s been drawn to flamboyant jackets and flashy earrings since elementary school. They still remember draping their mom’s puffy-sleeved knit sweater over their private school uniform when they were eight.
“It made me feel… undeniable, in a way. It was a way of putting myself forward,” they tell me. “I just loved dressing up and looking ridiculous.”
They’ve been thrifting, too, since childhood, out of financial necessity (and “like, way before it was cool,” they clarified). After years of repurposing, recycling and reimagining, Kayla’s current closet is an anthology of day trips to vintage markets and hours scouring the boxes in their mom’s garage. Happily, it serves a higher purpose now.
“Hey, if you ever want to add another stylist, I know that I have no experience, but I have a lot of clothes,” Kayla told Phuc last year when Fluidity was getting started. “And you guys probably need clothes.”
With just an hour until showtime, I’m coating my lips in a final layer of gloss when I hear a gravelly “Models!” cut through the room. The call needs only one repetition before our 50-something heads swivel obediently.
I recognize the caller before I turn.
Mel, or Melanie Rodriguez-Martinez per her resume, stands with her back straight, arms cautiously loose and mouth unsmiling — at least, while she’s on duty. She reprises the blunt disposition she uses to control crowds at UC Wednesday through Saturday and at Vecinos, another downtown bar, on Tuesdays.
But today, Mel isn’t head of club security. She’s Fluidity’s sponsor chair.
In the past seven months, she’s coordinated fundraisers through musical performances and comedy nights. She secured outfits for models from The How Bazar, a worker-owned clothing co-op. She’s the main link between Fluidity and its UC venue.
Her movement through the club lounge wears an easy familiarity, having spent the last two years darting along its narrow stairs and clearing the walkway of buzzed patrons. Her nightly objective: Protect the drag queens strutting in 6-inch stilettos.
On especially rowdy nights, she uses her body to clear space, then returns to the patrons she pushed amid the madness of moving limbs. “I’m sorry I’ve shoved you out of the way — that man was yakking all over me.”
“At the end of the day, that’s going to make the difference between you and some Midtown motherfucker that’s beating the shit out of people for fun,” she told me when we met.
My interest in Mel’s revolving door of community projects, from free home-cooked food drives to sapphic-only rave parties, kept us babbling at a park bench until sunset. Her Instagram profile remains saturated in event promos.
When I asked how she came into security work, she was suddenly 21 again, reliving the angst of moving to Gainesville two years ago for an abusive girlfriend. The relationship left her a stranger to herself as much as she was to the city.
Mel’s first friends in Gainesville were a gay male couple, who temporarily housed her after her breakup. Successive introductions linked her to a chain of queer connections, leading to UC co-owner Mark Spangler.
When Mel was driving Uber through the night to survive, Mark told her, “I don’t know if I’m going to have a security guard tonight, so you just show up.”
“And so, I showed up,” she told me.
After a year of shifts from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., Mel began showing up 5 minutes down the street, too, at the clothing co-op How Bazar. She spread herself to open mic nights and soup kitchens, putting up flyers and donating hot meals, finding friendships in recording artists and restaurant owners and DJs and drag queens.
I study Mel shyly now from behind the throng of models as she painlessly commands our attention. We’re going to do a practice walk-through, she explains, directing us in a line.
We nod in understanding, and her eyebrows soften.
Then she leads us back to the runway, for the next-to-last time.
Twenty minutes before showtime, the lounge room teems with contagious excitement, like a bathroom of drunk girls. Choruses of “You look so good!” and “I love your outfit!” saturate the air.
Ten minutes before showtime, before I head downstairs, I sneak one last glance in the mirror.
I trace my body, from the boots my roommate lent me to the magnificent, glinting bra my other roommate spent hours decorating by hand. I run my hands over the skirt I thrifted during a summer reunion with my closest friends and then over Kayla’s borrowed jacket. I admire the silver earrings, also borrowed, that Kayla readily offered me.
Two minutes before showtime, I peek at the full crowd from UC’s second story. My eyes travel over their faces, some foreign (like Primrose’s roommates’, there to surprise her after the show), some familiar (like my own roommates’, who lock eyes with me and grin expectantly). I look at the line of models behind me and notice Mel’s outfit change; she’ll proudly walk the runway, too.
Steps away from UC’s entrance, with a beaming Kayla nearby, Phuc readies the crowd.
“The freshman Phuc would’ve never imagined themselves wearing this outfit right now,” they say.
“I’m grateful to Fluidity – for allowing me to not only explore but understand my gender identity.”