I need to start compiling a list of magicians doing good things for the art, culture, and diversity of magic. Through the years I’ve mentioned magicians doing amazing stuff in the field and a list of legendary magic heroes would be a great resource.
Today I’m going to plant my flag a little. As you might know, I live in the UK and I’m as queer as a bottle of crisps¹, which is why the recent news coming out of the equalities and human rights commission is so troubling.
Sure, America has a despot in the oval office using a stacked supreme court to dodge legal accountability while he makes unconstitutional attacks on minorities, but at least over there it’s recognised as an authoritarian coup using strongarm tactics to impose a christofacist regime. Here the official voice of equal rights is imposing transphobic laws, the independent press report constant fearmongering about trans interlopers, and the most left wing government we have available are that the press and right wing pressure groups have valid points and thanks the EHRC for providing “clarity” in their rulings.
On top of all this, the richest woman in Britain has vowed to fund push back for any legal case where a trans person has attempted to assert their rights, specifically for the purpose of setting case law to deny those rights more robustly. And she’s our most beloved cultural export, who people hold up as a champion for progressive politics.
📌 But put a pin in that, I’ll get back to her later.
This post is about legendary magician hero, Justin Wilman.
Justin Wilman is the star of a magic show on Netflix called Magic for humans. It combines the usual TV street magic content with somewhat grander illusions, as well as some effects being pitched more as hidden camera pranks or experiments. I hesitate to use the word pranks because it covers a wide range of content, from simple confusing moments to pushing old people into a lake. Many of you may know of Jeremy Beadle, who was a member of The Magic Circle and made a TV show in which a combination of illusions, hidden cameras and convincing extras were used to trick people into thinking they had seen the walking dead, encountered a crashed alien space ship or had their parked car totalled in a freak construction accident. Justin’s pranks are not like this. With one notable exception they play out pretty much exactly like regular magic tricks. His most famous was making a person think he had been turned invisible, through a combination of a vanishing assistant illusion, a levitation and about 60 actors pretending they couldn’t see him.
He also did some educational segments featuring a sort of cup and ball reinterpretation of the marshmallow test. And speaking of educational segments, he also did a PSA ridiculing anti-trans bathroom laws.
It may not surprise you to learn that a lot of the performing arts community is pro LGBTQIA+. Justin Wilman however gets it in a way many don’t.
You see, within the performing arts there’s also a secondary loyalty, a sort of cultural false consciousness, where the rich and famous have more in common with eachother than anyone else, and as such support their showbiz friends through scandals and controversies because they spent a long time forming a professional network and don’t want to burn any bridges with the folks who matter.
It is for this reason why actors attached to upcoming Harry Potter projects have all spoken in support of J.K. Rowling, even as her meltdown into full blown exterminationist rhetoric becomes unavoidably clear.
📌 Oh, there’s that pin from earlier.
The cultural relevance of a short series of derivative and poorly written childrens books is now threatening the whole queer community. It’s been well documented, not only by the kinds of activists who draw conspiratorial charts, but also by Rowling herself. She has openly said that the money she makes from her writing³ is fuelling her legal fund for fighting against trans rights.
Despite this people still flock to the movies and the theme parks. The merch still flies off of shelves and there is no shortage of actors lining up for the stage plays, prequel movies, and upcoming big budget streaming adaptation of the original books.
Oh, and bringing us back on topic, magicians are happy to lean into the iconography of that world to appeal to the same audience, aligning themselves to the false consciousness of a recognisable brand over solidarity with their true peers in the arts.
I did a lot of research⁴ before writing this post, so just to catch you up quickly, the current anti-trans panic should fill you with dread even if you’re cis, or straight. There is a direct connection between these fringe transphobic organisations, proponents of conversion therapy for all queer identities, child abuse, antisemitic conspiracy theorists, and the rise of a new fascist patriarchy.
We live in scary times, and the fucked up thing is that every time you use the word “leviosa” you’re reinforcing the cultural cachet defending one of the main figures funding it in the UK. Isn’t that fucked up?
Rowling doesn’t own the concept of wizards, witches, pointy hats, broomsticks, potions, magic schools and even the idea of student houses scoring points for an end of year trophy. I grew up in the UK, so my school had 4 houses, named after types of trees. I was in Beech, and our biggest rival was Sycamore.
Magicians have been using the iconography of wizards in robes and pointy hats for centuries. That’s basically ours. The first people to write about the scourge of magicians ruining the art by wearing modern clothing wasn’t about Dynamo in his tracksuits or Criss Angel’s leather cuff. It was about the adoption of tuxedos, top hats, and black and white wands over wizard robes, pointy hats and gnarled wooden sticks. Yet now, wear any of that and you can charge twice as much, so long as you say “Hogwarts” at some point during the show. Even if you don’t, people assume it’s related somehow. I mentioned in a previous post about Magical Katrina’s stance on this, that even though she opposes Rowling, she is still actively pursuing the brand by doing her wizard themed act for Harry Potter parties, and monitoring her SEO accordingly.
To not do so is, as they say, leaving money on the table.
Well… Maybe it’s time we left that money on the table. A huge part of my blog relates to finding alternative worldbuilding for magic shows, and indeed building your own narrative with its own aesthetic and brand. The people I champion on this blog are all influential figures who do exactly that… Except… Even Lucy Darling has a trick with an appearing book, which when last I checked used a Harry Potter book, just because it had to be a book the majority of the audience would recognise. This is a kind of cultural hegemony which we can never escape if we continually attempt to appeal to the masses.
Anyway, speaking of magical heroes, and returning finally to Justin Wilman, I saw this today on his Instagram, in which amongst other things, he throws out a magic trick specifically because it is culturally connected to J.K. Rowling.
Would that we could all show such backbone in these troubling times.
However, I’d like to offer this as a glimmer of hope for those of us who would like to be true artists with solidarity on the right side of history. There is more than one way to attach onesself to a brand. You can, for example, position yourself in opposition to it⁵.
Cultural touchstones can be clung to in order to make a joke or a bit land in the audience, giving them a widely understood reference point… But they can also be pushed off from. This is what Wilman is doing here. He’s using a cultural reference but instead of leaning into it, he’s pushing off of it.
That’s a topic for another time, but for now I want to speak to one specific magician who definitely doesn’t read this blog, but maybe it’ll eventually reach him.
You can be a boy wizard without going all out on the iconography of those movies, complete with the full John Williams score. When it’s your show you get to choose what a wizard is, what a wizard does, what a wizard says, and what a wizard looks like.
¹ Someone actually called me this once and I was more annoyed that he meant it as an insult, because I think it’s cool as hell. I’m reclaiming “bottle of crisps” from the homophobes. It’s too clever to be a slur.
² Marxist theory explains that class consciousness is recognition of the struggle between capitalists, who have all the power, and the proletariat, who do not. In an attempt to break up solidarity between the much larger group of workers, the capitalist classes push divisive narratives of a middle class who are still reasonably powerless but have expensive personal property and own their own homes, and an underclass of those who are unable to work. The attempt is to stratify workers to make the lower waged resent the well paid, and fear the impoverished scroungers. This is before you get into dividing people along lines of race or sexuality, trying to push a narrative of everyone for themselves. Strivers and skivers, the bourgeois luxury queer lifestyle, and the foreign interlopers both stealing our jobs and getting big handouts on a silver platter. It’s all made up to turn us against each other.
³ This isn’t just some kind of oppositional position, I read the first Harry Potter book back in 2004, the year the third movie came out. Even back then before the author started advocating genocide, I thought the writing was absolute dogshit. Never read another. But years later I heard about some of the less savoury stuff which the movies left out, including a narrative of contented slaves resisting their own liberation. My big hope for the new adaptation is that she insists on keeping all that stuff and it finally reveals how fucked up the whole thing is. No, she may be an author but the real source of her fortune is not her writing so much as her willingness to license her work. People wrap themselves in apparel and. surround themselves with mugs and notebooks emblazoned with emblems of their hogwarts houses. But Rowling didn’t design any of that. Professional artists design all the merch on a salried basis, and none of them have become billionaires from the fruits of their labour. Wow this whole post is getting really anti-capitalist in the foot notes isn’t it?
⁴ Okay, full disclosure, a lot of that research involved watching queer YouTubers like Caelan Conrad, Abigail Thorn, and Natalie Wynn (cancel her all you want I know her heart is in the right place).
⁵ There is a whole industry of right wing media commentators who attach themselves to the current cultural zeitgeist by opposing every piece of it, from complaining about the Barbie movie making a mockery of toxic masculinity to treatises on whether Superman has gone all woke now.