WTFemme Arts Foundation Response to Anti Blackness and Community Commitment
Our Mission: The WTFemme Arts Foundation is creating spaces and places for queer artists and entertainers to learn, grow, and thrive.
The following statement has been crafted as an organization, with community input from trusted parties to ensure folks are heard and being named respectfully and with clear intent.
In this statement, we plan to name the circumstances, how it relates to us, our values, our commitments, and our asks as we move forward as an organization.
What Happened
To briefly summarize, Fun.K, Santiago El Amor, and Faux Q are bearing the brunt of the labor when it comes to holding our community of producers and groups accountable for their anti Blackness behavior within the drag community specifically. Among the events in question, there was a situation involving Mustache Envy(ME), our drag king community partners. In this instance, ME production leadership was called in regarding casting and its lack of Black entertainers, as well as an absence of focus on Juneteenth, on a regularly programmed show that happened to fall on Juneteenth of this year. ME producers were notified by Fun.K, and no significant changes were made. This happened again months later with the same involved parties, and ME producers failed to meet community expectations.
Repair is still in progress, but harm has been done and has not been fully addressed. Fun.K has let Danielle know that they are working with fellow Black performers to create the Black Burlesque and Drag Alliance and will have a statement regarding this new alliance soon. Tulla Moore has since been made a guest producer of the Mustache Envy show in question, which now features an all Black cast and an explicit Juneteenth theme. Tulla Moore has made helpful, informative contributions by sharing their knowledge and expertise around communication via Instagram, in an effort to help support the conversations happening around these traumatic experiences.
While we cannot speak specifically to what repair looks like for parties involved, we do, however, hope that repair can happen, so that healing can begin.
We recognize how painful and laborious it is for all parties involved. Conflict and hard conversations require courage, vulnerability, and getting comfortable with the uncomfortable. It forces us to take a hard look and ask, “how did we get here, and what does the road forward look like now?”
Why It’s Important: Honoring Juneteenth
Juneteenth is an important landmark day that commemorates freedom and liberation for Black people in the U.S., highlighting the resilience of the Black communities as they waited, and still wait, for true freedom to arrive.
Juneteenth asks us to connect history to the work before us, to center Black voices, and continue conversations that support equity and equality for Black folks which in turn means the same for all.
How It Relates To Us
Mustache Envy is our long-time community partner, who we intentionally highlight, so that their impactful work as the longest running drag king troupe in Texas is elevated to our audience.
Fun.K is the current reigning King of FemmeFest, and a valued member of our community.
Santiago is the FemmeFest ‘26 Crowd Favorite king, and also a valued member of our community.
Faux Q is performing for the first time at FemmeFest this year, and is a valued member of our community.
Tulla Moore is a past board member, has hosted and performed at FemmeFest, and is an integral contributor to the growth of our organization.
Our Values
Our organization's tenets are rooted in:
Harm Reduction Through Mutual Aid We believe in meeting people where they’re at, treating them with dignity and respect, and promoting incremental change in tandem with individual autonomy.
Trauma-Informed, Transformative Conflict Approach We enter spaces of conflict to find solutions, while maintaining safety and trustworthiness, allowing for system regulation, and healing to prevent re-traumatization and foster resilience so folks can move forward with confidence.
Reproductive Justice As a Foundation and a Framework We believe folks have the right to not have children, to have children, and to parent the children you have. For us, we apply this framework in a nurturing way when working with our community and community partners, their art, and their careers.
Our Action In Solidarity
The WTFemme Arts Foundation has decided to pause their community partnership with Mustache Envy and all other existing community partnerships, to allow space for the unlearning of anti-Blackness to happen for others, and to open our organization’s capacity to look within and examine where we can make changes as well.
We stand in solidarity with the performers who have been impacted, both named and unnamed, by this occurrence and the harmful history of anti Blackness, both proximal to our community and historically at large.
Our Current State of The Organization
As we began discussing our organization’s statement, we took time to look at the inner workings of our organization to see where we are and where improvements can be made. We found that:
100% of our Board Members self-identify with an oppressed or marginalized community, including, but not limited to, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, physical or mental disability, or others.
Because our leadership comes from marginalized communities, we bring lived experience, trust, and cultural awareness to our work.
Our board has one (1) Black person, Rynn Myles, in leadership. Among our committee chair seats, we have one (1) Black person, Lyric Jehlani, in leadership as Programs Chair. We recognize the severe gap in Black representation within our leadership, and are working to make changes in actionable ways.
Below are the demographics of the FemmeFest 2026 application pool.
This year, we received 83 applications.
These applications came from 40 different cities across 22 states, with 1 Canadian applicant.
Of those 83 applications, 45 submissions or 54% came from Black and Brown queer artists and entertainers.
33% self-identified as TGNC or Trans/gender non-confirming.
Since 2024, we’ve created annual reports to share the work we’ve done as a festival and as an organization within the community. These reports are available on our website for review at no cost.
Our Commitment
Below are our commitments that we are making as an organization.
At the time of this statement release, reparations and wellness fund distributions of $400 total at $100 per person have been paid to impacted community members, Fun.K/Fawn.X, Tulla Moore, Faux Q, and Santiago El Amor Wylde.
FemmeFest is pursuing anti-Blackness training with a third party organization who have experience in this type of facilitation. Our goal is to open this training up to other productions as well, to help shoulder the cost and allow for more to learn/unlearn and grow.
We are seeking out Black leadership professionals to join our board of directors and committee chair leadership. Applications to join the board are free and open to the public, and can be found here,
We will continue to support the Black Drag and Burlesque Alliance of Dallas through financial, promotional, and resource support when and where possible and feasible by our organization.
We will share our gear, resources, and staff with Black-led productions to help them produce a more successful show.
To ONLY host shows in collaboration with or in support of 100% Black-led events on the weekend of Juneteenth.
Explore what we can do beyond these initial commitments, including holding these conversations more often so that they don’t arise only during times of crisis. These conversations as a community should be happening all of the time.
To provide an update about this in some way during FemmeFest, beyond social media posts so that folks can learn and hopefully support us with these efforts as volunteers. Most likely during the break between court of Kings and court of Sizzle.
Our Ask
We’d like to part with these final asks of our community as we move forward.
Please help hold us accountable by volunteering or joining our board of directors.
Support these artists as best possible (list their payment options)
Faux Q
Fun.K
Santiago El Amor Wylde
Tulla Moore
Join us by making your own commitments to supporting the Black community, Black entertainers, etc. This work cannot be accomplished by one group, one entity, or one person, this has to come from all of us, all of the time.
In support and solidarity,
The WTFemme Arts Foundation team
