Vivian McCall established her career as a multi-instrumentalist and recording engineer with Chicago’s off-kilter retro-pop band Jungle Green. After years of engineering sessions for her bandmates, and recording a Jungle Green album with Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, she recorded Pansy (Earth Libraries, 2021) on her Tascam 488 tape machine. In taking a lo-fi emotional inventory of her transition, Vivian drew from the music that helped her endure it: The Magnetic Fields, Liz Phair, and the eclectic punk of New Zealand’s Dunedin sound.
Shortly after releasing Pansy, Vivian moved to Seattle, where the band became a bona fide four-piece with guitarist Liz Perlman, drummer MJ Harbarger, and bassist Syd Brownstone. Pansy is about coming out. The Skin Graft EP is about trying to live a normal life as a trans woman in America, where the political temperature is rising.
(Photo Credit: Victoria Scott)
After three years of a roiling, semi-suicidal hell, my life had finally begun to fall into place in February 2020 (perfect timing, I know). I credit a surgery.
A surgeon had taken a scalpel to my hairline, peeled my face from my skull, bossed my brow, chiseled my chin, and broken my nose. With care, I was brutally, bloodily re-made.
Life was good once the swelling subsided. I liked who and what I saw in the mirror. The friction of life suddenly eased. The street harassment dropped off. Strangers left me alone, either because they didn’t clock me as trans, or they did and I was womanly enough by their standard. I ceased to be a “thing.” This new face opened doors and sometimes, men held the handle.
I’d never felt a deep attraction until I noticed those stares weren’t stares anymore. They were looks. Examinations. Evaluations. Meaningful smiles from across a train car. Swipes right. Superlikes. Not only from men, but from women and straight married couples. I leapt at the attention and frequently landed on a bed.
I was 24 and amazed. What good fortune, I thought. Life was just beginning for me, it seemed. I was up for whatever, whoever, whenever it came my way. Then I noticed a few patterns. Where their eyes lingered. The almost clinical fascination with my body. What they wanted to do to me, and what they wanted in return. People who came on strong and vanished. People I had nothing in common with, whose eyes glazed over when we weren’t talking about sex, or having it. To my rising horror, I realized I was still a “thing” that happened to make them horny instead of uncomfortable.
In popular culture, the “tranny chaser” is a rich white man with an embarrassing desire for dick. I can tell you, they come in all sorts and desire has nothing to do with it. Chasers are fetishists attracted to certain kinds of people, usually for the shit that marginalizes them. Chasers chase trans people, they chase fat people, they chase Black people, they chase Asian people. When they’re done chasing you, they chase someone new. Who they’re fucking is an incidental part of the experience. It’s about your attributes. Your assets. The special features the other models don’t have.
And after they cum, they want to process what it’s like to live a sexual fantasy through your sexual reality. If they have a cis partner, this is the point you usually find out. One guy brought his dog to my apartment. Before he left, he told me his girlfriend thought he was taking a long walk. The admission gave me a stomachache. Mostly, they are men. But women chase, too.
In uncomplicated terms, they’re assholes with a clear dating pattern the people in their life may or may not know about.
These people sucked. They bruised me. Though, it’s funny, because I kind of feel for them. I’m not chair of the chaser fan club, or anything, but I get what it’s like to feel like your desires could explode your life. But if you’re not careful, or just don’t care, shame can cut other people like a knife.
After a few months of this bullshit, “Walk Dangerous (Chasers)” came as a bolt of inspiration. I wrote it kneeling over the same 8-track I’d used to record my debut record, which I’d only just started shopping around. I did take after take until my roommate yelled for me to stop. I felt so high getting this rage off my chest, I hadn’t noticed it’d gotten dark.
I’d written about a trans woman who is at the end of her rope with a man who doesn’t love or respect her. Her personal liberation intimidates him, and his social mobility paralyzes her. She’s bitter, but the sex is freeing enough that she stays. He may not want to be in love, but he definitely is, and she’s trying to process what that means for her.
I’d just finished an album dealing with these titanic feelings of metamorphosis and I was writing about lying on my back like a pretty roach. That record starts in a chaotic moment I wrote about for Talkhouse in 2021, and ends with “Me In Mine,” this defiant message of “fuck everyone, live your life.” It felt like I’d walked into the sunset, took one step over the horizon line and bumped into an invisible wall.
Five years later, that invisible wall looks pretty OK. I came out in 2017. It wasn’t that long ago, but it seems like eons politically. The hope that growing social acceptance would make things better for us, that’s all dashed. The federal government wants to wipe us from public life. Every day, I wake up with a thought: Could today be the day that changes everything? Will he give a speech, an order, will something unpredictable happen? Does anything even have to happen? I have no idea.We’re living through a nightmare.
I’ve been thinking about what this song means to me now. “Walk Dangerous” was an invitation back then — would a man walk with me, love me openly and without shame? Now it’s a description. When I walk, I walk dangerous. I’m in danger. My face isn’t going to save me. My job isn’t going to save me. My government isn’t going to save me. I can only keep walking.
— Vivian McCall
