Interview of Stella Dance

NYC Trans Oral History Project

Stella Dance is an educator, tarot-card reader, and professional dungeon monitor who currently works at the recently unionized Babeland sex toy boutique in New York City. In this interview they describe their experience dealing with bullying, physical disability, and mental illness while growing up in a working-class family around Park Slope in Brooklyn, and later attending college in the south. Their experience spans such topics as physical disability, schizophrenia, hospitalization, the play party scene in New York, relationships, economic and class struggles, and finding a community of support while grappling with a continually fluctuating gender identity. (Summary by Boyda Johnstone.)