Lot Louis Veelenturf, 2/5, home blogger ArtEZ Business Centre

“This is real”
November 30, 2019, 2:58 PM
It’s two minutes before we start and the projector won’t work. People are slowly starting to trickle in and I’m in the middle of the room, standing on a chair, messing with the machine. Overheated.
I sigh, step down from the chair, gesture to silence the music and take the microphone.

Welcome to the presentation of the second issue of First Person Magazine.

As I did in my opening talk, I want to introduce you to the people with whom I make this platform: the editorial board. It’s necessary to have one for a platform like ours, not just because I can’t and don’t want to do everything alone, but also to avoid a situation where I become the gatekeeper of what is ‘good enough.’ After all, taste is incredibly subjective and the queer community is marginalized, misunderstood and overlooked enough without my own limited understanding imposing some kind of (unintentional) censorship.

This time, I made First Person with Merit Vessies, Lisa Huissoon and Clodagh Read. Merit and Lisa took on the editing of several texts; Merit took responsibility for the technical side of our launch event (the projector debacle was not her fault) and Clodagh Read is tasked with creating the visual identity of the platform. Everything you see – our new website, our Instagram, our Facebook page and our printed magazine – is designed by Clodagh. We had meetings every week from September onwards, cooked for each other and they all spent a great deal of time reassuring me that everything would be done in time and that I needn’t worry.

It turns out publishing a magazine is a lot of work. Because De Nieuwe Oost Wintertuin wanted to support us by offering us a place in their Wintertuin Festival on November 30, we also suddenly had a hard deadline: three months to prepare a new issue (the same amount of time I had for my graduation project – can you feel the stress?). That meant: finding new people who might want to publish, cooperating with those people on their texts or visual material, interviewing new people and editing the audio, building a new website, developing a new Instagram identity, designing, printing and binding a new zine, programming the event (inviting people, making the scenario, generating publicity, preparing interviews) and in the meantime making enough money to pay our rent. It’s nice to work with a team of unbelievably talented people, but it’s also strange to be the person to direct everything. I’m suddenly the editor-in-chief of a magazine and it’s my duty to motivate all those people, put them to work, chase their tails and let them know they’re doing a good job. It’s a lot of responsibility. It’s fun, but I’m still a little ill at ease.

At the start of these last three months, for example, I was at the Wintertuin office talking about the program and I blurted out that it was all so exciting, being the editor-in-chief. I got a few awkward looks and a hesitant “uh, yeah…” back. I started to sweat bullets right away, because of course it was a completely unprofessional thing to say. I realized I had put myself in the role of a subordinate, like a student at a show, while I should be presenting myself as the founder and editor-in-chief of First Person. I salvaged the situation with a joke, but the moment stuck with me because I suddenly understood this is real.

That recognition, that this is real, is one I’ve had a couple of times now. During the first interview I conducted (with Marisa Miller, about having a baby in their belly while identifying as agender), in the moment I had the printed zine in my hands, and when our launch event started and Pelumi Adejumo began to read her beautiful poem Dode kamer. I wasn’t nervous for my interview with Marisa. I had met them before during a picnic of Queer Eindhoven and talked to them about gender-neutral pronouns in Dutch (they speak English). I had prepared my questions, I had asked Merit to adjust my voice recorder and I had looked up some terms in English. Still, I was completely blown away when Marisa opened their mouth. They answered my questions in such a deeply honest way and with such love that I could only listen breathlessly. This was real. This beautiful person was sharing their story with me, with all of us, and in that moment I felt more connected with my community than I had in a long time.

On the other hand, I was incredibly nervous when we were printing the zine for First Person #2. Clodagh (who’s temporarily living in Austria and couldn’t be here) had given me instructions, and Lisa (who fortunately has experience printing brochures) was there to help me, but I was still trembling at the copy machine. It went wrong. It went wrong again. We changed the colors and the text and added the name we had forgotten on the cover and then it went wrong again, but finally, after a bunch of anxious international phone calls and Lisa physically dragging me away from the screen, I held it in my hands: a stack of self-published zines, with a real editor’s note and acknowledgments and all the material we had worked on with the authors and artists. When you’ve worked on something for months and it finally becomes a physical reality, it’s a special feeling. Maybe pride is not the right word, but it’s close.

My nerves had calmed down as I held my opening talk. I had thanked everyone, I’d shown the audience our website and told people they could buy the zine for five euros if they wanted to support us, and then I announced Pelumi Adejumo. Pelumi was the night’s first speaker (after that I’d have a conversation with Marisa, Christiaan Lomans would do a performance and I would talk about the Pose series with Merit) and when she was behind the microphone, I realized it had truly started. She recited her text, which we had worked on together, and I was so incredibly grateful to be able to work together with such talented people, to listen to them and learn from them. This is why it’s so important that First Person Magazine exists: to celebrate talent like this, to share our stories and to say together, to each other, “This is real, we exist, we’re not going anywhere.”

Read, watch and/or listen to the contributions of Pelumi Adejumo, Marisa Miller, Christiaan Lomans, Merit Vessies, but also Simon(e) van Saarloos, Sandro van de Leeuw, Caz Egelie, Lae Schäfer, Lieke Tijink, Marjolein Takman and the registration of Let’s call it a safe space online at www.firstpersonmag.nl

Follow us on Instagram: @firstpersonmag or send us an e-mail at hello@firstpersonmag.nl
Photography Jesse Gunsing

Translation by: Witold van Ratingen

Lot Louis Veelenturf - Creative Wrinting ArtEZ

2019 - Last summer I graduated from the Creative Writing program without doing the things I had planned to do. I didn’t write a book or publish a poetry collection. Instead, I founded an online platform for queer art and literature, named First Person. It’s a personal project, because I noticed that as a genderqueer author, there weren’t so many places I could publish my work without having to answer for myself, my identity and my pronouns. photography Leroy Verbeet.

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