“If you're going to try to liberate others, you've got to liberate yourself first,” says Giselle Byrd, the newly minted executive director of the Theater Offensive (TTO), one of the nation’s oldest and most decorated queer hubs of performing arts. The 31-year-old leader speaks from a place of unique authority; with her recent appointment, Byrd becomes the first Black trans woman to lead a major American theater company.
“I think about all of our ancestors and our transcestors who didn’t get to have their voices amplified, or even heard — how they fought for me to get to this moment,” she shares when asked of the history she now embodies. “I hope that people see that trans women of color are so capable; we’re so capable of leading your companies, of leading the arts in general.”
Long before taking the reins at TTO, Byrd began the process of liberating herself one afternoon at the Mac makeup counter of the Augusta Mall. At the time, Byrd was the president of Third Act, a student theater organization at the Savannah College of Art and Design. That year, the group planned to throw a charity drag show to support Broadway Cares and Equity Fights AIDS. “When [my collaborator, the drag queen] Biqtch Puddin’ came to me with the idea, my initial reaction was, Cool. Go forth. Conquer. Let’s raise the money,” she recalls. “Internally, I was thinking, Oh, that sounds fun, but I don’t think I should [participate]. I was self-editing; I thought the safe option was for me to [continue presenting] as a Black queer man.”
That was when a faculty advisor stepped in, Byrd tells me. “As the president of the organization, I feel like you should lead by example,” the professor said, and she agreed.
Byrd headed to the mall, where she sought professional assistance from a makeup artist who asked the fledgling queen what she wanted to look like. “And I said, ‘A Black glam Barbie,’” Byrd remembers, pausing the story to note — “an aesthetic that has not escaped me in my transition.”
We laugh, and she continues, “So I’m just sitting in the Augusta Mall getting my face beat like it’s nobody’s business. Two hours later, I looked in the mirror, and that was the first time I really saw myself.”
This is finally it, she thought. How I feel on the inside actually exists.
As liberating as it was clarifying, the performance also helped Byrd to see how far she still had to go. “She needed to fully breathe,” she recalls of herself, mid-bloom. “She couldn’t be put in a box and be brought out every couple of months. Giselle was who I am.”
That summer, Byrd got a job in New York doing talent management at the Katz Company. “Shortly after I started, I realized I was hiding my truth as a trans woman,” she tells me. “It was really hard to navigate helping other artists with their vision when I wasn’t complete in the vision of who I was.”
Byrd came out to her employer and her family in an email one frigid day in January. “My momma responded, ‘I wish you would've told me before Christmas. We could have got you together so you could be ready,’” Byrd remembers. Soon, she received an urgent package from her mother. Inside was a receipt, Byrd tells me. “She had basically taken the Express men’s catalog and got it, like a Southern momma does.”
“Go get the things you need,” she told her daughter. “I want you to be the best version of yourself.”
Byrd listened. “Once I did that, once I stepped into that truth, my mind opened so much to the windows of possibility of how I could help artists,” she tells me. “I could make the connections. I could see where there was someone in my community who had been struggling to find representation and build those bridges.”
After nine years managing the careers of authors and actors at the Katz Company, the executive is poised to continue amplifying queer and trans voices as she assumes leadership of Boston’s TTO. Founded in 1989 by playwright Abe Rybeck, the company has long sought to present the manifold realities of queer life while seeding the next generation of queer and trans theater-makers. In 1994, the organization launched True Colors: Out Youth Theater, now the nation’s longest-running LGBTQ+ youth theater program. Its festivals have included works by renowned theater artists, including Pose star Billy Porter, Fun Home writer Lisa Kron, and beloved drag queen Katya. Most recently, TTO’s Queer (Re)public program has offered workshops, residencies, and individual commissions for new works by queer and trans artists of color.
When asked about the moment at which she arrives at TTO, Byrd points to the cultural reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd. “That was really when there was this reassessment by the organization to ask, ‘Who are we really serving? Whose stories need to be told? Who needs to be elevated,’ she explains.
The answer, the organization has decided, will be placing a greater emphasis on “presenting art created for and by queer and trans folks of color,” as the new executive director maintains. New mission statements aside, Byrd’s appointment is far from symbolic. In truth, she joins TTO at a critical juncture in its 35-year-history, as the organization continues its $20 million campaign to build its own performance space, the Boylston Black Box. “This will be the world’s largest theater owned and operated by queer and trans folks of color,” Byrd says of the project. “We’re creating a blueprint.”
In addition to raising funds for the theater, TTO’s upcoming season will include a production of the play “Interrobangers,” in collaboration with the Boston-based troupe, Company 1, a spring/summer lineup of performances from Queer (Re)public artists, and a month of programming in June produced in partnership with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The organization is also currently recruiting young performers for its spring True Colors Troupe, which will offer participants an opportunity to learn from “some of the arts community’s greatest leaders” while simultaneously gaining “education on building safe and healthy relationships in an arts environment, with the support of a drama arts therapist,” Byrd tells me.
The executive’s voice quickens as she dreams into what the theater will mean to TTO’s already substantial community of young artists. “A lot of people have spoken about how we’ve got to take care of the youth. The youth are going to take care of us,” she tells me. “We’ve got to make sure that we leave the light on for them, and that’s what we’re doing in this new wave at TTO.”
This past November, Byrd made her final trek from her place in New York to her new home in Boston. That was when the magnitude of the moment finally started to sink in: “My momma was here helping me unpack while I was on a Zoom call. When I hung up, she looked at me dead in the face and said, ‘Oh, girl, this is it — Giselle, you’re really the boss.’ And we just laughed, because…” she trails off. “Because in both of our wildest dreams, we didn’t ever imagine a moment like this to happen. But as she has always reminded me, what is meant for you will be for you. And this is meant for me.”
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