The DIY and IRL energy of punk rock mutual aid

Ekko Astral is not a trans band. They may have a trans frontwoman in Jael Holzman. Much of their material may deal with being trans. Plus, they may have grown their fan base from word of mouth online in spaces such as trans Twitter. But at the end of the day, they are not a trans band.

This three-piece punk band is going to remind you of the bullshit that consumes everyday life, but give you “power anthems” to live by and help you overcome. The songs are short, brash, and aggressive — their debut full-length album, pink balloons, clocks in at less than 36 minutes, existing in what the band dubs the genre of “mascara mosh pit.”

As a band, Ekko Astral wants to fight to make the world a better place. And that means speaking out on a variety of topics, including trans rights, Holzman says. Because harnessing the energy that people bring online into the physical world and bringing together people who are fighting for that through mutual aid — no matter how large the crowd size — is where magic happens. They’re a political project as much as a band, and it goes far beyond the identity of their lead singer.

Ekko Astral is also on the front lines of making sure that while the internet becomes less safe for queer people every day, there is a group of artists and musicians fighting to re-create those safe spaces in person. “People are increasingly isolated. People are increasingly just siloed onto their screens and their phones, so you need to actually try to develop campaigns to disrupt,” Holzman says.

Having worked as a congressional and climate journalist in Washington, DC, since 2017, Holzman knows the power of media narratives and how they shape the world around us. Seeing how major artists have spoken out about important political issues, she decided that it was time to leverage her connections in the music industry to kick-start this kind of energy for trans rights.

This past May, that energy became Liberation Weekend, the largest trans-led music festival in DC. Over two days, 30-plus acts performed — such as Speedy Ortiz, Ted Leo, Bartees Strange, The Ophelias, and Ekko Astral themselves — in the nation’s capital to help raise over $30,000 for the Gender Liberation Movement, a nonprofit which works to “build a people’s movement for bodily autonomy, self-determination, collectivism, and fulfillment.” But the impact wasn’t just monetary.

When Republican lawmakers sought to use a congressional budget bill to bar Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care, Holzman and other artists leveraged the connections made from the festival to organize social media pressure campaigns aimed at bringing awareness to the cuts. She says that these moves helped push lawmakers to use the procedural measures available to them to fight, instead of conceding to Republican efforts.

With the money raised from LIberation Weekend, the Gender Liberation Movement worked to organize protests outside the Supreme Court following the ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for minors. Those rallies garnered international media attention, keeping the issue in the public spotlight.

This fall, Ekko Astral will be back doing the work that the band has continuously done when going around the country: mutual aid to directly benefit trans people. The reality of the trans community ”spending a disproportionate time” online compared to other groups is it leads to many of us being “hyper conversational,” according to Holzman.

That allowed groups of trans musicians to create new musical communities in the last five to seven years, and then use their existing knowledge of going on tour to create something “really beautiful.” Now, she says, they’re finding a way to leverage these burgeoning communities to work together and build something even bigger.

“Imagine if bands just decided to take it upon themselves to use their platform as they’re on the road to say, ‘If you’re at the merch table, would you give, like, $5 to help this person pay their medical bills?’ Imagine how far that would go,” she says.

For trans artists, Holzman adds, many of them are “acutely” aware of just how tenuous access to robust, lifesaving healthcare is for our community. Add in the layer of being an artist, a group that rarely enjoys the benefit of healthcare access through employment, and you have a group primed to use tools such as mutual aid to make up for where governments and corporations lack.

This kind of ethos of mutual aid and finding support systems in the cracks of society is rooted in a musical tradition with a long history: DIY spaces. Trans musicians have historically thrived in these arenas, with less gatekeeping from traditional labels and media, and flourishing with the help of an online community is vital.

The DIY scene is known to have grown out of the punk rock scene from the late 1970s in the US, where bands shunned by major record labels would create their own venues to host shows in unsanctioned locations. A wide variety of groups, including anarchists, working-class people, people of color, and queer people, found refuge in punk rock and other DIY aesthetics.

It was in these spaces that Nicolle Maroulis, a queer guitar player and songwriter, fell in love with music. They first started playing music around the age of 14, inspired by the DIY ethos. Eventually, Maroulis started their own project, Hit Like a Girl, and put out their first record in 2017. Today, they embody that DIY spirit by working as a hired musician, photographer, tour manager, and merch seller all over the music industry. They also run a nonprofit called No More Dysphoria that raises money on different tours to help trans people access necessary gender-affirming care.

Maroulis started small: 20 poorly made T-shirts to be exact, they said, sold at shows where they knew the acts. That led to more opportunities to get No More Dysphoria at different concerts with larger and larger venues. As word of mouth spread, more bands got involved with some event-showcasing flags in music videos or onstage on tour.

Now, the project is an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit continuing to help more and more people get access to lifesaving care — even if internet algorithms are doing their best to try and bury any transgender content. Platforms like Instagram were blocking LGBTQ content from being searchable by young people for months at a time. X, formerly Twitter, has faced allegations of algorithms “deboosting” certain words associated with the queer community.

“It’s harder now to connect with people online and make sure that the right people are seeing it because of just how things get buried so much,” Maroulis says. “But I think that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying.”

Even if our internet platforms continue to atomize and degrade — like the ever-changing policies on Elon Musk’s X that seem to allow for abuse to be hurled at trans people — that doesn’t mean that the knowledge passed around on tour will stop disseminating. In fact, it’s the opposite, Maroulis says. Selling T-shirts and raising money is only one part of the equation when people on tour are dedicated to sharing resources aimed at helping their community. Sure, those same resources can be shared through videos aimed at trans people seeking information about accessing transition care, say, on Instagram, but it lacks the human connection that meeting at a show generates, they say.

As more and more bands work to harness the energy from Liberation Weekend, they’re remembering how important music can be as a unifying force, especially in more conservative areas of the country where bands don’t always tour. Tilley Komorny, the guitarist for band Home Is Where, grew up on the northeast coast of Florida, an area with an unfriendly reputation toward transgender people. After getting involved in her local DIY scene at the age of 15, she realized playing music could create tangible help for people in her community. Komorny worked to organize local trans-led music festivals to help pay for friends’ surgeries or name changes. During the covid-19 pandemic, they had to take these festivals online.

Seeing just how many more people they were reaching, Komorny cites the online community she had access to as helping Home Is Where break out and connect them with more resources to organize more support for trans people on tour. Those connections made in that period were important for the band as they are preparing to head out on their largest tour to date with the opportunity to reach more people than ever.

The band works with the Campaign for Southern Equality, donating proceeds from every ticket sale to the group’s trans relocation fund, what she calls an “easily accessible form of social responsibility” that any band can draw from.

Coming from Liberation Weekend, Komorny says the biggest lesson she learned for Home Is Where is to prioritize local vendors to table at shows on their next tour. That may require a little more legwork before actually setting out to play these shows, but the potential of exposing crowds to smaller organizations with resources that may be available in their own backyard is worth it.

After building all that energy that the band has managed to harness online, now is the time to convert that potential into actual organization, Komorny adds.

“If you can get people who are stoked to go to a show, and then they see that there’s all this other stuff there that’s a part of the culture, that’s ideal,” she says.