Less Lonely – 26 December 2023
Less Lonely spoke to me at a time in which I needed these words and these concepts desperately. Jes Tom gave me and many other queer people in the room tonight exactly what we needed to pick ourselves up and keep going.
Less Lonely explores a side of the transgender experience that is frequently misunderstood, even by trans people ourselves—the idea that who we are can change. The idea that, when you live your life and have experiences, and when you get gender affirming health care, you don’t always go straight down the path you thought you would. You are not always the same person, just in a more comfortable body, the way many of us expect to be when we first come out as transgender to our family and friends.
Many of us have trapped ourselves in this prison of fully committing to a gender identity and not recognizing that cisgender people also have a journey of discovering what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman, and those journeys can be dynamic and involve cycling through multiple definitions and perspectives. Tom told a story about going from a girl who liked girls to a boy who liked boys, and it being okay to lean into the way your body and your feelings change with new experiences and new ideas and new medications and new cities and new partners and new lifestyles.
Who we are on the inside is a concept that we see as flexible in many phases of our lives. For example, I know precious few people who answer the question of “what do you want to be when you grow up?” the same way as they did when they were 5, 12, 18, 30, 45, etc. Our interests and occupations evolve. Our situations change. We adjust to parenthood and pandemics and get exposed to new art and ideas and political movements. And we let those things change our inner definition of who we are.
Why should gender and sexuality be separate, unchangeable boxes that don’t grow and change with the rest of us?
Jes Tom’s one person show, Less Lonely, posits that you can be any mix of identities on this planet without being a contradiction. Jes Tom is Chinese and Japanese. They are able to talk about sexual experiences with “men and women of all configurations.” They’ve engaged in monogamous and nonmonogamous relationships. They’ve cherished moments of being a little girl and moments of being an adult man. They’ve legitimately been all of those things, but what’s most remarkable is that they’ve accepted that to the point of being able to stand on stage in front of a theatre full of strangers and tell their story in a way that makes us laugh, even if at moments we identify with them so strongly that we also want to cry.
Less Lonely was on point about how different factions of the queer community have very different struggles and experiences being themselves in the world, and Jes Tom was uniquely able to speak from all of them as an insider. It is my hope that we drift closer towards community and can share these journeys from a place of respect as journeys, not from gender A to gender B, not from birth until the end of the world, but from here to whatever’s next with the understanding that you don’t have to be 100% anything to have your identity be 100% valid.
My connection to the thematic material was so strong that I didn’t notice too many changes in lighting until the very end when Jes Tom talked about the death of their grandmother and the segue into the conclusion of the production. Which is to say that all of the design elements did their job—they supported Jes Tom through telling the story without distracting the audience from their words. They created the right vibe for the environment and maintained it effortlessly.
Even as I write this review, I am struggling to refer to Jes Tom as anything other than “Jes”, because their story was so intensely personal that I walked away feeling like I know them. All in all, a wonderful connection and experience that deconstructed the barriers in queer culture while also validating, respecting, and loving our differences.
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