Spotlight on HJ Farr

HJ Farr

HJ Farr moved to New York City one year ago this month with hopes that the spring of 2020 would bring the opportunity to really get to know the city. Of course, COVID-19 had other plans.

But quarantine hasn’t kept HJ from creative work. This summer, they were cast as “Iz” in Two Anxious Bisexuals, an ensemble musical comedy by Dianne Gebauer, Marie Incontrera, and Megan A. Zebrowski. “I’ve spent quarantine kind of yo-yoing between feeling very productive and doing a lot, and feeling just the pressure of everything,” they share. “So luckily, I saw the casting notice for Two Anxious Bisexuals when I was in my, like, ‘Let’s go for things!’ mode.” Through that production, HJ developed a relationship with the creative team that would lead to their casting in the role of “Pax” for A Very Queer Holiday.

Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, HJ lived in Toronto and Madison, Wisconsin before ending up in New York. A role in a production at Madison’s experimental Broom Street Theater forced them to reckon with gender identity in a serious way, leading them to ultimately identify as gender-nonbinary.

HJ Farr in Falsettos

HJ’s training in musical theater has led to roles in The Fantasticks, Falsettos, and Fiddler on the Roof, but they’ve begun to notice an internal hesitancy when considering musical theater as a career. “This doesn’t feel like me now, and I wish that it did,” they say when discussing the aggressive heteronormativity of traditional musical theater. “I gave a lot of heart and soul to musical theater, and I felt like it just kept kicking me away.” Two Anxious Bisexuals was different: “I auditioned and I just, like, was immediately put at ease with Marie and Dianne and Megan” by having permission to show up just as they are.

Acting isn’t all HJ does -- they’re also an accomplished aerialist who enjoys lyra, silks, trapeze, and cloud swing work. At just above five feet and with rainbow hair, HJ describes themself as “a quirky, weird nerd who’s kind of awkward.”

In preparation for A Very Queer Holiday’s upcoming premiere, I sat down for a video call with HJ to talk to them about their experience creating the groundbreaking nonbinary lead character of “Pax” for the series.

KSL: What’s your favorite romcom?

HJF: Honestly, I don’t watch romcoms, because they’re so heteronormative. And I think that’s part of why I got so excited about this, is because I was like, “Based on the description, I would actually watch this.” And I don’t like holiday movies and I don’t watch romcoms, but like, representation matters.

I feel like quarantine has given a lot of creatives the opportunity to be like, “Let’s stop waiting for those in power to do our stories poorly, and let’s just freaking go for it.” And I love that.

HJ Farr in Bite the Apple (Broom Street Theater)

What’s most exciting for you about A Very Queer Holiday?

Every story that big-budget, Hollywood, everyone tries to put out there is like, “It’s time to come out.” And that’s what our stories are: coming out. Or, you know, dying. And sometimes both!

One of the things that struck me and made me super hyped to do this project was reading the full script and having there be, like, two lines about me being nonbinary: one, saying, “Who can resist a cute little enby in a reindeer onesie?” and another explaining the term of “enby” meaning “nonbinary” to my character’s dad. Not, like, explaining what “nonbinary” meant, but like, the lingo within enby culture.

And then, similarly with Damaris’s character (played by Deity Blair), they describe her on the dating app as, like, “Transwoman. She/her pronouns. Likes nerds.” Like, it’s just a part of the list of who she is, it’s part of her identity. And it’s not a huge deal.

It shouldn’t be revolutionary to just tell our stories without our stories only being about our trans-ness, but it kind of is. And the fact that we get, as a trans couple, a cute little holiday romcom, and it doesn’t have to end in tragedy…. The big, antagonistic hurdle (in A Very Queer Holiday) isn’t anything about trans-ness. It’s anxiety, it’s fucking up an opportunity, it’s something that literally everyone has done.

There is an energy about this project that I don’t think I would have found anywhere else. And I think that it’s necessary for these times, and it’s necessary for the people whose stories we’re trying to tell. It’s very safe. A safe space. A safe message, a safe medium, a safe story.

What was it like shooting from home?

So, my background here is, like, way too busy. So I’m at this desk, but there’s a little side area that has a plainer space, but it’s right by the door. During filming, one of our actors kept apologizing for his janky setup and I was like, “No, my laptop is on top of a game board case with my Yeti mic on one side and my circle light” -- which dropped once, so the bottom lights don’t work, so I put it behind my laptop at an angle, so it’s an arc of light, and I’ve got my phone over here, just in case I need the lines, and I’ve got a water bottle down here, everything’s spread out on the floor…. This is technically my spouse’s work desk, so they were like, “You’re going to fix that by the time the weekend’s over, right?”

I think what surprised me was, because it’s a Zoom recording, rather than a traditional film recording, you can’t do a lot with, like, editing the angles. So a lot of the takes had to be correct all the way through or we needed to restart. I did a “found footage” film in Chicago, and it reminded me a lot of that. But it also felt like a little less pressure because, you know, it’s a Zoom recording where we’re doing what we can. We’re trying to get it out into the world.

HJ Farr at Mish Mash-Madison Circus Space, 2017

What do you usually do to celebrate the holidays, and what are you doing differently this year?

My family does a lot of pie-baking for Thanksgiving. So the past few years, the day before Thanksgiving, I’ve gone over to my grandma’s house and we’ve made our pie crust from scratch and done, like, just a cute little get-together with some tea and some soup and little sandwiches. Just like, very nice and chill. My spouse and I have gone to my family’s for Thanksgiving, and stopped off at their family on the way from Madison to Cleveland, because they’re from Pittsburgh.

And, so that we didn’t have to choose which family we went to Christmas things for, and because my mom died when I was pretty young, and all of my good memories are with my mom, and Christmas is, just, like a huge conglomeration of what once was and is no longer… so that we weren’t around all of that sadness, we were like, “Let’s just travel internationally every Christmas and New Year’s, and then we can see what different cultures do for New Year’s celebrations and for Christmas celebrations.” And we had two years of that: we went to London and Costa Rica.

This year, no one’s going anywhere. We might be Zoom Thanksgiving-ing our friends. One friend of mine had a baby right before we moved to New York. And Kip and I are godparents, or the atheist equivalent of godparents. Science parents. And our other friend, who actually bought our house in Madison, had a baby just after we moved. So those two friends are in each other’s quarantine bubbles because they live very close.

I asked my dad, “Do you think Grandma is going to do a Zoom Thanksgiving?” and my dad said, “Probably not.” So everything is very up-in-the-air, and it might end up being, instead of running around to catch a bunch of different Thanksgivings, we might be like, “Logging on! Saying hi to the Farr family!” “Logging on! Saying hello to the Price family!” “Logging on at Friendsgiving!”

HJ Farr as “Pax” in A Very Queer Holiday

Do you have a favorite holiday song?

Probably “Little Drummer Boy.”

What would you say to queer folks who are facing a hard season for mental health?

I would say that chosen family is important. And I would say that you can get through to family that have raised you, if they’re ready. So like, my dad, super chill. He doesn’t really understand pronouns. I know he loves me. My grandma is like 95. I came out to her as nonbinary before I came out to my dad and she was like, cool, chill, whatever.

Still, I realize that I have a very safe space with which to speak from. So, like, family tends to be a bigger problem around the holidays because there’s so much pressure from media and everything, to like, “Oh, it’s all about family during the holidays.” But like, it’s really about who makes you feel safe and who makes you feel loved.

So even though I’m very much loved by my family, I learned early on that I can’t really be with my family during Christmas because memories are hard and the anxiety is there. So I found my spouse, and we found a way to -- instead of ignoring or running away from the memories -- put them in a different context.

And I think that, like, everyone knows what they need eventually, so you might need to have that difficult conversation with your parents and come out, and you know, they might not understand right away, but they’ll probably come forward. Or you might know your family and you might know that if you come out, it’ll be dangerous for you, so then don’t.

You know yourself, you know your family, you know what you need. And if you don’t know, ask someone you trust. Say, “I don’t know what I need. Can you be here for me?”

This interview was conducted on November 24, 2020 between Karl Saint Lucy and HJ Farr. It has been edited for length.