The QLP Questionnaire: Roger Q. Mason
"As a big black femme, I’ve found that men are afraid to associate themselves with me... [I'm still] looking for someone who's free to explore, expand, and explode into the unknown while we embrace."
Did you struggle to find love? Or maybe you had a difficult time making it work in a same-sex relationship or outside the typical heteronormative parameters that dominate our culture and have lessons to share? Since most LGBTQ+ people don't have many role models to help us learn what it means to put ourselves together, we invite you to take “The Queer Love Project Questionnaire” and share your distinctive experiences so that others might learn from them. Email us at QueerLoveProjectSub@gmail.com to find out how you can participate.
Hello, there! I’m Roger Q. Mason and I am a Black, Filipinx, plus-sized writer, performer and educator. My film Lavender Men has traveled around the country on the festival circuit, and I’m hustling these streets with my creative partner Lovell Holder to get it to theaters near you in 2025.
When I’m not making mischief on the silver screen, I am a creature of the theater, and my works have been seen on Broadway through Circle in the Square’s Reading Series and The 24 Hour Plays; Off and Off-Off Broadway, as well as regionally. My recent productions have garnered five Barrymore Award nominations in Philadelphia, a Jeff Award Recommendation in Chicago and the San Francisco Chronicle's prestigious Datebook Pick. Lavender Men is based upon a play of the same title which, according to the Los Angeles Times, "[evokes] the mingled visions of Suzan-Lori Parks, Jeremy O. Harris and Michael R. Jackson."
Though the road is never easy, it is always wonderful to earn some encouragement for the work. I’ve been blessed to receive 2024's Playwrights' Center McKnight National Playwright Commission, the inaugural Dramatists Guild Foundation Catalyst Grant Award, a Hermitage Residency, a Lucille Lortel commission, a Kilroys List nod, and the Chuck Rowland Pioneer Award.
But my most fulfilling accomplishment is motherhood: the nurturing of the next generation of LGBTQIA+ writers through mentorship and education. I’m currently a faculty member at CalArts, and I’ve served as an instructor for Lambda Literary, Workshop Theatre, the Marsha P. Johnson Institute’s Starship Fellowship, the New Visions Fellowship and the Shay Foundation Fellowship.
I’m a proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America, and an alum of the Ma-Yi’s Writing Lab, Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Group, the Fire This Time Festival, and Primary Stages Writing Cohort.
And if you want to have a good laugh, watch my memoir/cooking segment on Instagram called “Cooking with Q: A Playwright's Guide to Telling My Truth.” That damn thing is delicious!
Finally, my zany ideas were developed with the help of the following institutions: Princeton University, Middlebury College, and Northwestern University. They helped me find who I was both within the classroom and outside of it, for experiential education is the best teacher. Instagram: @rogerq.mason
What is your age, where in the world do you primarily live, where did you grow up?
I will be 39 in January, and I live in Santa Monica, California. I grew up in Koreatown in Los Angeles.
How do you define yourself on the LGBTQ+ spectrum?
Genderqueer and pansexual.
What is your relationship status?
Single for now but ready for my husband.
Do you have an “ideal” relationship status?
Variety is the spice of life, and I love exploring intimacy very intensely with various people, but think having someone—a main squeeze—to come home to is the sustained dream for my near future.
What is the biggest misconception about being single or in a relationship?
I think you have to really spent time with yourself, true and earnest time, knowing who you are and what you have to offer before you can share a life with someone else. Being single is a time to excavate and celebrate and prepare for that great sharing.
When was your first intimate moment? Was it with someone you liked? Did you feel pressured into it?
My very first kiss was with a young man whose drunkenness loosened him from the inhibitions of the binaries of gender and sexuality. In that moment, he was free to explore who he really was, and he heaped that moment onto us both. I was by turns flattered and frustrated.
As a big black femme, I’ve found that men are afraid to associate themselves with me because it outed them (this was the early 2000s when such foolishness still abounded). I was (and still am) looking for someone who’s free: free to explore, expand, and explode into the unknown while we embrace.
How would you define love? Is it the thing you work at for a long period of time? Or is it the strong feeling you feel for someone right from the beginning for no reason?
Love is the silent celebration of your humanity without expectation of return on the investment. It is selfless and light and free.
Does the relationship fill your deepest needs for closeness with a person? Or do you prefer not to share every part of yourself?
I let it all hang out—whether I like it or not—and I am sure to some I can be an acquired taste. So, when I fall for a man, he’s getting everything—like it or not. Isn’t that the reason why I came to him anyway: to find a place where I could be that person fully and unconditionally?
When did you come out to family, friends and others for the first time?
At two years old, I posed in a white Christian Dior suit holding a pink cat in one hand and the whispering wind between my fingers in the other. I think the family should have known then that I was one of the Legendary Children. It took them another 25 years, but when they came around, I was able to live a more honest and robust life. The friends—they knew the minute I opened my mouth, honey.
Did you have any LGBTQ+ role models as a child or teenager? What do you remember about images of same-sex or queer relationships or messages you gleaned?
I used to sneak into my father’s front office in our home in the mid-1990s and watch Will & Grace, The Real World and later Queer as Folk (US version). Those were my windows into queerness. And they were necessary educations because, otherwise, I would not have seen anything like myself, for queerness at that time, in that house, was the thing that would not be named.
Are there any pivotal pop culture moments that you credit for teaching about love and/or relationships?
Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice helped me identify my own queer desire.
Do you have a Chosen Family?
I do. And they mean everything to me.
What is your relationship with your biological family (if any)?
I speak to them every day.
What do you (did you) like about dating as a LGBTQ person? What do/did you dislike?
It’s tough because gender binary expectations cause so many people to shy away from relationships that could otherwise be magical if they allowed themselves to dream beyond their inhibitions. We need to see dating as an intense invitation to be wildly curious about each other in the most vulnerable and potent of ways.
Has race, ethnicity or cultural differences been a factor in who you seek out?
As long as they treat me right, we gonna be just fine.
Have you had any difficulties dating or finding/keeping a relationship?
You see I’m single, honey, so yes. Show business and frequent travel don’t help. I suspect sometime soon I’ll settle somewhere and, in that place, I’ll find someone who excites me to cook short ribs for them on Fridays. And that is the one I’ll surely keep. The one who warms the hearth.
What’s the most surprising thing you have learned about relationships from your perspective?
You can have a whole love affair and relationship in one night, and it can be absolutely everything—and then all of a sudden done. And that is just fine.
Have you experienced heartbreak?
I once mourned my parting from a man till dawn, and it was the most purgative and necessary weeping I’d ever experienced. Sometimes heart break is heart opening.
Do you have any moments of joy, happiness or pleasure that you can share about being in a same-sex or queer relationship?
There’s something about burrowing in a partner’s chest, just next to their armpit and under their nose (probably a prime spot for pheromone exchange, to be honest) that is all I ever need.
Are there any things that standard heterosexual relationships have that you feel are out of reach or that you wish you had or could achieve?
They ain’t got nothing I want or need.
What is your philosophy about relationships?
The ideal person is the one whom you don’t have to introduce yourself to—they see you from the start.
Any advice you’d give to someone younger than you who thinks it’s impossible to find love?
This is such a dangerous world for young queer people, so the only advice I’d give them is to stand proud and tall in their desires because this world wants so desperately to make LGBTQIA+ people feel small and disappear. Our love is revolutionary.
BONUS:
We all need more inspiration. Please recommend something that influenced or helped shape you significantly that you’d recommend to someone else.
Book: The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
TV Show: Abbott Elementary
Movie: Wind River
Song: Meshell Ndegeocello’s “What Did I Do?”
Play, Musical, Other Cultural artifact: Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.