The story of Team Rayceen Productions, a local advocacy and events organization that was honored earlier this year when the city declared March 18 Team Rayceen Day, begins with a couch.

The year was 2014, and the couch was in the since-shuttered Liv Nightclub, where queer activist and noted socialite Rayceen Pendarvis was setting up for the Ask Rayceen Show, a cabaret-style monthly variety show and community gathering Pendarvis hosted around town from 2012 to 2021.

After connecting with Pendarvis over Twitter (the platform now known as X), a queer activist from Prince George’s County named Zar showed up to help out with the show’s logistics. When Zar got there, he found Pendarvis struggling to drag a couch across the room, with nobody around to help. The sight shocked him, he says—from what he knew about Pendarvis’ popular event, he thought there was an entire team behind it.

“I’m like, ‘Wait, Rayceen. You don’t have staff? You don’t have volunteers? You don’t have an entourage? What is this?” Zar recalls. “It was in that moment, when I saw Rayceen dragging that couch across the floor, that I was like, ‘Okay, I gotta fix this’ … Life has taught me that you can’t wait for it to happen. You have to make it happen.”

So he did. First, he helped Pendarvis move the couch. Then, he started recruiting volunteers—many whom he found through Craigslist—and built a team. Next, he made it official: Team Rayceen Productions was properly born later that year, with the intention of carrying out the mission of its namesake through advocacy, collaboration, events, and entertainment.

This year marks a decade of Team Rayceen, and it’s safe to say the organization has made good on its promise. Together, Zar, Pendarvis, and the rest of Team Rayceen saw the Ask Rayceen Show through its 10th and final season in 2021, which took place virtually due to the pandemic. Taking the final season online “was one of the most difficult things I ever took on,” says Zar. The silver lining is that a bit of the show’s eccentric spirit was captured for perpetuity.

Since then, the organization has shifted its focus: The Team Rayceen YouTube channel features interviews with notable locals, including blues singer Gaye Adegbalola, politicians including Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George and At-Large Councilmember Robert White (“It’s really important for us to put candidates in front of the public,” says Zar), and journalists, including City Paper’s own Loose Lips reporter Alex Koma. 

“We don’t have a studio. We don’t have a camera person … So what can we do? We can interview people, we can talk to them about their lives and give them a platform to promote themselves,” says Zar about the interviews, which are primarily recorded Zoom calls. “It’s very much about giving people the opportunity to talk about what they’re doing.” (Fittingly, “Queen of the Shameless Plug” is one of many self-designated nicknames for Pendarvis, who prefers monikers to pronouns.)

Team Rayceen has also spent the past 10 years putting on local events, which have run the gamut from voter registration drives and book clubs to film screenings and talent showcases. They all, however, tend to have in common a reverence for Blackness, creativity, community, changemaking, and queerness. The group has partnered on and hosted events at the DC Public Library and the Smithsonian and has also supported several of the city’s annual happenings including the 17th Street High Heel Race, Art All Night, and Story District’s Out/Spoken. Just last week, on June 27, Pendarvis hosted the city’s District of Pride Showcase.

It’s easy to see what makes Pendarvis a good host. Even over a Zoom call, the social butterfly is captivating, overflowing with energy, and casually dropping fabulous pearls of wisdom like, “When people tell us no, the universe tells us yes.”

It’s also easy to see what makes Pendarvis and Zar such a great team. While Pendarvis expresses lofty, poetic ideas—like a desire to be “a vessel to allow folks to experience what it is to be free”—Zar is behind the scenes, taking notes and reaching out to people. “My life is emails,” he says, but he’s often able to turn Pendarvis’ grand ideas into tangible realities. 

“It makes me really proud to hear people say ‘Rayceen, I wish I had someone like Zar,’” Pendarvis says. “Everybody needs someone to push them.”

Part of what makes their partnership work, according to the pair, is that it’s intergenerational. Though they’re both coy about their age—Pendarvis is “over 50 and under 100,” Zar says he’s “over 30,” then jokes, “neither of us are good at math”—they both stress the importance of working with people of all ages. “We come from two different generations, and Zar has allowed me to see things through a different lens,” Pendarvis says. “Older people need younger people, and younger people need older people.”

Running Team Rayceen isn’t always easy. It’s largely volunteer work, and it hasn’t always gone recognized, the co-founders say, which is why moments like being a finalist at the Wammies in the music media category earlier this year and having the city designate a Team Rayceen Day mean so much to them. “When people say, ‘I see what you’re doing and I want to celebrate the work you’re doing,’ it makes you feel so much better than somebody writing you a check,” Pendarvis says. 

That said, a check never hurts. “I wish we got paid what we’re worth,” Pendarvis says. “We would be billionaires.”

Team Rayceen can be found uploading interviews and other content to YouTube, and promoting events on Instagram.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with the 2024 date for District Pride.