transgender hip-hopper Katastrophe is a rebel with a cause

Heavy handed but tender-hearted, transgender hip-hopper
Katastrophe is a rebel with a cause

Rona Marech
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, February 25, 2005

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/02/25/DDG0
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Rocco Kayiatos, the hip-hop artist known as Katastrophe,
compulsively discloses his past. He talks about it with
strangers on the street, with waitresses, and always, always
with his audiences.

"I'm the token joke in this world," he sings in "Something
Different." "If you didn't understand, try to, woman or a man,
not true. There's something different."

For fans who don't see what the lyrics are getting at, he comes
out and says it: The swaggering, rhyme-throwing, emoting,
girl-crazy, 25-year-old hip- hopper with the scramble of brown
hair and the dark eyes that have sent more than a few Catholic
schoolgirls into happy paroxysms is transgender. He used to be a
girl.

Sometimes, after the revelation, slack-jawed audiences will yell
"no!" or "prove it." Once, a roomful of blond-haired sorority
girls at a college in Missouri screamed until the teacher
pounded on her desk and shouted for order.

"Because what the f -- does that mean?" said Kayiatos, who
collected sorority gear from enthusiastic undergraduates during
the remainder of his trip to the Missouri college. "If you don't
have gender to trust, then you have nothing to trust."

Kayiatos, who recently returned from a European tour and has a
new CD out, "Let's F* Then Talk About My Problems," spends a lot
of time pondering the relative untrustworthiness of gender. Part
of a growing queer hip-hop movement, he sees himself as a kind
of missionary -- using music and the power of his personality to
help educate society about people who are different.

"Everyone is uncomfortable with gender. It's an uncomfortable
thing, especially if you are born in a body where you have to
think about it all the time," he said. "Sometimes I feel the
reason I was born is to make it something comfortable for me,
but also to make it comfortable for the rest of the world."

Kayiatos was voted "rebel without a cause" his senior year in
high school, but they got it wrong -- even then he had a cause,
he said. A classic underachiever, he blew off school and did
drugs, but found an outlet for his passion and restlessness in
slam poetry. He became a champion slammer and, after graduating,
went to work for Youth Speaks, the spoken word performance and
education organization.

"Here was a queer, white girl" -- before his gender
transition -- "going into high schools and absolutely turning
everyone out," said James Kass, the Youth Speaks director. "It
was amazing -- very smart, passionate, literate,
hip-hop-influenced work. It just blew everyone away."

Later, Kayiatos took his brand of mouthy, fearless poetry on the
road with Sister Spit, an all-female traveling show. Before
long, he was adding beats, and his poetry became music; his
hip-hop style became straight-up hip- hop.

Katastrophe's music, which he describes as wordy, underground
emo-hop -- for emotional hip-hop -- is funny, sad, angry and
lyrically complex. Sometimes it sounds jagged, sometimes it
sounds sweet.

The music is a lot like Kayiatos -- dark and charming at once.
He looks serious and brooding on the cover of the new CD, but he
smiles a lot in person. His tattoos have it right, said his
mother, Diana Kayiatos, a banker. "Heavy handed" is the message
that runs down his arms. And across his chest: "Tender hearted."

"So much about emceeing is about ego and about the big ego,"
said Juba Kalamka, who is in the queer hip-hop group Deep
Dickollective and put out Katastrophe's CD on his independent
label, Sugartruck Recordings. "This is cliche and stereotype,
but poetry is about fallibility. ... He's got a little bit of
both. He's got swagger, and he's got 'I'm a sensitive guy' at
the same time."

Kalamka, who is black, shrugs when asked whether as a white man,
Kayiatos should be making hip-hop music. "I'm not saying
cultural appropriation isn't a valid concern," he said, "I'm
just saying that people who are saying this for the most part
are really kind of naive and really kind of ignorant about the
history of hip-hop and even more so, the dynamics of queer
hip-hop."

Expressing himself through hip-hop, the music he grew up with,
comes naturally, Kayiatos said, but as a white person, "I try to
step lightly, to make sure it's coming from an honest
perspective."

Both straight and gay audiences respond to that honesty, he
said, adding that it's only a matter of time before people
realize that queer hip-hop is about being disenfranchised or
having parties or "the human struggle," and the music becomes
more mainstream.

For an intense artist, Kayiatos has an almost oddly stable life.
He's been in a relationship with writer Michelle Tea for the
past six years. He talks to his mother every day, and his
parents, who live in Burlingame, go to as many of his shows as
they can. They also paid for his chest surgery by taking out a
second mortgage on their house and helped him select his male
name -- though his mother claims she only mentioned that Rocco
was a family name and would have preferred Perry.

On a recent morning, Kayiatos bustled around the North Beach
apartment he shares with Tea, preparing for a trip to Scripps
College to perform in a queer arts festival. He left a note for
the cat sitter explaining Petunia's occasional crankiness, made
calls and downloaded music for his show.

The apartment is crammed with thrift store art, books and cat
paraphernalia. Stuck to the fridge next to a Valentine's Day
card from his parents is a picture of Kayiatos at 5, dressed
like a boy in a red vest and a black tie. He pulls out other
childhood pictures, and in all of them, he has the same short
hair and open-mouthed smile. He was a mostly happy kid until
puberty approached and he realized for the first time that he
wasn't going to magically turn into a boy, Kayiatos said.
Recently, he found an audiotape journal he made when he was
about 10. On it, he talked wistfully about how he wished he
could switch schools and start over as a boy.

As a child, before society imposes its rules, "you don't feel
there's anything wrong with you and nothing is wrong with you,"
he said. "I'm trying to get back to where I was at 5 years old."

Other transgender people see him as one who has had a blessedly
easy time.

"But I'm still trapped in a transgender brain," he said.

He wrote about the "alienating trip" of changing genders in the
song "Bad, Bad Feelings." He doesn't perform the song much
anymore because he wrote it at an especially dark time he feels
he has since moved past. But the song stands, hauntingly, on his
CD.

"I got these bad bad feelings/This life I'm livin' ain't mine/I
got these bad bad feelings/I'm my own worst enemy, I'm my own
hate crime/With no one defending me, but I'll be just fine
sitting/with my bad feelings."

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Katastrophe performs (along with Kirya Traber) 7-10 tonight at
Mama Buzz Cafe, 2318 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. (510) 465-4073.
E-mail Rona Marech at rmarech [at] sfchronicle.com
(that was this past Friday)
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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