the art of doing good

Fan communities mobilizing to get shit done is nothing new under the sun. Bring a bunch of people together around a common interest and give them a call to action, and magic can (and does!) absolutely happen.

Until the internet years, though, fan campaigns usually centered on the media itself — going all the way back to 1969, when the Star Trek fandom rallied a massive letter-writing campaign to save the show from cancellation. That approach has changed significantly since the rise of online fan communities, from forums to LiveJournal to Tumblr, Twitter, and beyond, coinciding with a more generally widespread awareness of What’s Going On In The World.

In the last 20 years or so, fans have come together to create more organized, streamlined, and ultimately impactful platforms, groups, and movements to promote social change. These have included official nonprofits like Fandom Forward (formerly the Harry Potter Alliance, though they’ve thankfully rebranded) which “mobilizes fans for social good” through training, campaigns, and community-building, and smaller, time-bound campaigns like Fandom Trumps Hate, an annual online fanwork auction with proceeds going to small, independent nonprofits across a range of social issues.

A lot of today’s fundraising centers on rapid response and urgent needs, and fan campaigns are no exception. For this month’s Creativity Q&A, I talked with fan artist and my beloved friend Jay Geris, who recently helped rally the Our Flag Means Death fandom to raise $10,000 through the #OurFlagForPalestine campaign. We chatted about loving bodies in all their messy, beautiful forms, fandom values, and turning art into action.

creativity q&a with jay geris: on loving (and valuing) all bodies

Tell me a bit about your relationship to creativity and creating. How did you get started? What has that journey been like?

All kids start out creative and making art and doing silly drawings with stories in their head and all that kind of stuff, but I just didn't stop doing that. When other kids were playing dodgeball and stuff at recess, I was spending at least half of the time sitting on a bench and drawing with my friends — to the point where we would get prodded by lunchtime supervisors to be like, “go play!” Like, how dare you. And I just continued on that journey where my particular expression was drawing.

So I went from that childhood to then wanting to pursue an art career. I started on a graphic design route, but I realized that wasn’t right for me. I then ultimately figured out that I needed to pivot to just doing it for me, and doing it for fun. Doing illustration for the sake of illustration was kind of how I've gotten to where I am now as a 32-year-old person, doing fan art on the internet for my friends.

How do the things you're passionate about (your likes, your values, your personality) show up in your art?

When I was about eight or nine, I saw Titanic for the first time, and became obsessed with Jack's drawings of women. And I started being really obsessed with drawing bodies, and that informed a lot of how I then approached everything afterwards, where I really cared about specifically drawing interesting-looking figures. One, it informed my queerness in a lot of ways and was informed by my queerness in a lot of ways. And two, it definitely affected my style. As you know, I draw in a semi-realistic style, and I became very into the curvaceous Renaissance woman, that sort of thing. And I didn't know that I was queer then obviously, but it definitely had to be something in my subconscious of like, I have to like learn how to draw beautiful people, in order to be a good artist.

But to me, I hate sanitized bodies. Like, a body that has rolls and then you take them out to make it prettier or whatever. No! That's a huge value that I place in my art, especially when it comes to drawing based on real people. Even depicting entirely fictional people, I pay attention to the way that the person they're based on or their race and racial features actually look. Like if you've got a light-skinned black man as a character, why would you not draw him in a way that shows the beauty of what that looks like? I'm going to do the kinky hair. I'm going to do the large nose, the stubble, the whatever else, like, that does exist. And that is part of what this person would look like if they were real. I want to create a space in my art that celebrates those features. And I think that people really respond to it.

How has being a fanartist changed the way you interact with your creative work?

When it comes to drawing fan art — because again, you're drawing things that already exist in the mind of someone else or in reality, like a real person — I absolutely have a lot of passion for depicting the person how they really look. And sometimes I even embellish a little bit on some of the things that are part of that character or part of that real person's look. So like if there are eye bags and they've been put through makeup, and so they're a little bit smoother, I'm like, no, that guy has eye bags.

And yet, a lot of people don't agree, which is crazy. So yes, that is something that I absolutely have a huge moral stance on when it comes to my art, too. Just depicting real people the way that they look.

And it's great when you get into a show like Our Flag Means Death where the actors are imperfect, they are not super sanitized Hollywood beauties. It's like older people, like disabled people, queer people, fat people. Everyone just looks like people. And they're beautiful. And I'm like wildly in love with every actor on that show. But they're beautiful because of the fact that they look like real people.

With fandom generally and with the Our Flag Means Death fandom specifically, I think one of the things that people like about my art is that I'm drawing every body hair, you know, like making a point to have all of these “imperfections” on the characters. The people who like Our Flag Means Death have a lot of similar values that I do when it comes to conventional beauty in the queer space. Like loving fat bodies, loving disabled bodies, loving hairy, scarred, blemished bodies. That's part of the appeal of the story of the show and of what you can bring to the art.

The love you have for every kind of body really shows through in your artwork. Do you feel like that’s connected to the way you care about broader issues and communities?

I've grown into an adult while in fandom and fanart spaces, and that community has absolutely informed my interactions with broader issues, for better and for worse. I realized I was bisexual and trans as a result of being in fandom spaces. I (as a sheltered Middle-America white person) encountered my first social justice education through stories, before taking that curiosity into looking at the real world beyond my limited view.

My passion for intersectionality and social reform absolutely informs my art. I ultimately just end up drawing characters I care about, and I tend to care about characters who are presented as outside the societal norm. This translates to a passion for art that combats racism, colorism, ageism, fatphobia, queerphobia, etc., and I do my best to take those convictions and translate it back to real life as well as my art and the art I share.

Tell me about #OurFlagForPalestine! Where did the idea come from? How did it come together? What are you most proud of?

So as things were beginning to develop in Palestine, I had been feeling very impotent, I guess, feeling very much like, I literally don't know what to do. I ended up putting out some feelers on Twitter, just like, “Hey, are there any fan activities or fan initiatives going on right now in the Our Flag Meets Death fandom about Palestine?” Because sometimes people do zines or sometimes people do just various fundraising things. And I have gotten involved in some of them before, though I’ve certainly never planned one. The response I basically got was, “no, there’s nothing going on, but actually, if there was something, I would love to get involved.” So I ended up teaming up with these two other people from the fandom, Casper and Rin, and putting together what became the #OurFlagForPalestine fundraiser.

So between the three of us, we just started building a basic plan of what we wanted to do, a Discord to get people talking, just getting informative forms out, to be like, what do people think we should do? and taking suggestions, and where we landed was to do a commission/merch auction and a stream. We gave ourselves two weeks to plan, and things really started to happen in the last few days before the stream on November 19th.

My expectation was that we would maybe get like 15 or 20 artists, maybe a couple of fan writers who wanted to donate a commission. Our goal for the whole thing was $2,500. And then as people started posting about it and getting a little bit more traction on our hashtag, people started to get excited and start posting about what they wanted to bid on and all that kind of stuff. And then the floodgates opened and I got inundated. I got so many requests to join that in three days I went from about 40 entries to 98 entries, plus four raffle items, just things that people wanted to give for free to donors. Within the first two days, we had already reached that $2,500 goal on 50 entries alone. And then as that basically doubled, we started out the stream already having essentially a promised $6,600, something like that, in bids, with more and more people asking to get involved.

I think it was perfect because people love creating fan art anyways. And a lot of people do commissions, mostly just out of the fact that they enjoy creating for this fandom regardless and having a direction and a little bit of extra money on it is super cool, but so many fan artists that I know don't rely on commissions for their main income. So donating a commission is no big deal. It's like, oh, I never even thought about this as an option to donate a commission. Like to donate a commission is nothing to me. That's the easiest thing I could possibly do. It was like a no-brainer for everybody, which was super, super cool. And everyone was just so excited to get involved in a way they felt that they could.

Because again, I think a lot of people were feeling impotent, were feeling like I literally don't know where to start, and this gave them a way to do that. And we ended up raising $11,000, donating $9,000 to Palestine Legal and then $1,000 each to PCRF and Anera. And it was amazing, to see other people caring so much and wanting to do something, and then actually doing it.

What's next for you when it comes to doing creative work for good?

So we still have our Discord community, and we’ve started threads now for mutual aid, we have like mental health threads where people are still posting — like, we're not done. Our plan now is to take that same Discord and that same initiative and pivot into other work.

We want to focus on places where raising a larger sum of money is needed these first few times, do that every two to three months. Our next big focus is Congo. And I doubt that there will ever be a time when we're not trying to focus on one thing or another as far as a large-scale issue goes, but we do hope to maybe have some side funds for mutual aid and for other general queer organizations in the States and maybe in the UK.

But to know that we have the ability to do something big is like a feather in our cap, as far as our confidence goes. Because none of us had ever done anything quite like this before so it was a surprise to everyone. But it was massive. We did a lot of organizing and a lot of work for it, and it was huge and it was awesome. And we're proud.

Jay Geris (they/them) is a fan creator and one of the organizers of #OurFlagForPalestine. Follow them on Twitter/X at @gayjeris.

resources, links, and further reading

spotlight on: fandom activism

• read: Collective Identity, Organizational Structure, and Framing in Fan Activism (2020 dissertation by Jamie Puglin)

• listen: “At the end of the day, when you're talking about activism, it's just a bigger word for care.” (Director Eliyannah Amirah Yisrael and Fandom Forward’s Sabrina Carten on the “What Can I Do?” podcast)

• donate:

  • Shelly’s pick: Fandom Forward

  • Jay’s pick: Trans Pride Brighton