Before founding her band Public Universal Friend (PUF) in 2019, Friend began writing, recording, and performing original work in her mid teens and continued as a (mostly) solo artist for what would become a decade. PUF is known for their multifaceted embrace of punk informed americana adorned in southern gothic grit, attracting audiences rooted primarily in the midwest and Friend’s native south. Their debut album Perennials saw its independent release in March 2021, garnering attention from NPR, Mahogany, New Noise, and Emmy Award winning production Music in Transit. To date, Friend has written and recorded 11 albums of original music, with PUF’s next record Chrysalis expected to release in early 2023.
Friend came out publicly as a gay trans woman in 2021 following many years of genderqueer presentation. Her gender identity has played a major role in her ownership of the spectral nature of outward expression, with work focused mainly on trans representation and queer bodies within the commercial fashion and fine art world.
Friend is also the author of Transangelicism, a memoir recounting a closeted trans daughter’s adolescence in the evangelical South, anchored in the turning point found in young adulthood. The work serves as a touchstone for queer southerners, boldly encountering the vulnerability, visibility, and authenticity required in the narrative of her personal experience of trans reality. In the middle of all of it, Friend also graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Drawing from ETSU in 2015. The portfolio for her visual work can be found here.
cosima bee concordia is a femme leatherdyke based in Portland, Oregon who loves devotion and God. In past lives she’s been a bookseller, an English teacher, a philosophy student, and a limp-wristed sissy, but these days she’s a writer of horror, essays, theory, and weird experimental fragments as well as a co-host for a podcast about religious eroticism, anti-fascism, and queer perversion called Drunk Church.
Her whole thing is pushing the boundaries of body and self in both her intimacy and art, and since contracting covid she’s been settling into her chronically ill mystic era. She generally can be found around the internet as bimbo theory, and you can keep up with and support her work by subscribing to her Patreon and Substack.
