AJ Strout

Being a queer / trans / alt individual who is also an educator, video producer, artist, Drag King, wedding officiant, and writer, my identity is as entangled as my practice is. My work is founded on radical acts of pleasure, queer space making, and community building that interrogates and resists the dominant culture’s tendency to exclude queer folk from spaces that are both real and imagined.

My work interrogates whether queer-coded characters in speculative worlds are enough to represent the vibrance of queer culture and joy that is traditionally oppressed and silenced by the dominant culture. Through worldbuilding and immersive design, I create vital sites for queer and trans space-taking, thrusting queer, trans, nonbinary, and asexual beings into magical realms, futuristic cities, and dystopian Earth. More than just representation, this work is world-making as resistance.

Since founding the art collective Ex Corpse in 2018, I have transformed these materials into experimental entertainment at themed Live Action Role Playing festivals and community drag shows. Our Nonbinary drag show is held at a prominent Cyberpunk festival each spring in California City. In the fall we host the Wasted drag show at the largest Post Apocalyptic festival in the world. I also produce queer music videos that navigate queer surrealism for underground queer music artists, extending these worlds beyond the stage into digital and sonic spaces.

Magical Officiant Speech + Vows

In 2025, I officiated the wedding ceremony for my closest friends, Alie and Jared. This is my telling of their story.

Mages, shapeshifters, alchemists, monsters, and fae. It is an honor to gather here with you for this adventure. Today is a day marked by whimsy, magic, transformation, and triumph as Alie and Jared step onto a new path together (for the 2nd time) where the union of their spirits will strengthen them to face and overcome challenges as kin.

Like any good tale woven in the threads of magic and myth, this story too subverts expectation and offers transcendence from that which tethers us to the hostile world we live in. This union does not follow the script carved by tradition—it casts its own spell, shaped by two creative and loving souls who have never fit neatly into the world's molds. They are oddities whose adventurous exploration of life is both intentional and playfully haphazard; a magical response to a world steeped in oppressive lore. What better magic, besides love and connection, allows us to thrive when we must all contend with the orange human that has taken the realm by force, threatening the rights of all magic folk. Alie and Jared have woven from stardust, a relationship and a chosen family that face that foe together. This is why we have gathered today; to uplift and celebrate these two queer, gender non-conforming creatures whose arcane powers can only be strengthened by the love that surrounds them, making it possible to transcend these challenges.

It is especially significant that I be the one to bind this couple. As a queer and transgender person, I am loath to participate in the social scripts that are forced on us, while still acknowledging the ways in which we can stick it to the man. Let me explain. Queer folk do not experience social scripts in the linear fashion that those in power have designed. We do things backwards, out of order, and without the same intentions. We also have more obstacles to overcome in achieving milestones. Many of us are underprivileged. Many of us do not wish to have children, or maybe we cannot because we are in same sex unions. We often do college late if at all, we marry in unusual ways, we adopt or foster, or better yet, we take on fur babies and wayward nonconformist companions. We are more prone to kin intervening and on our civil rights when disaster strikes, upending the authority we have given to our chosen love. Our opinions are not valued in society. WE are not valued in society unless we are a product, a commodity for pride month in particular, that consumers can acquire. But through the magic that we’ve studied and learned together, many of us find our paths regardless. We go beyond the realms expectations or rather we reclaim and repurpose it. We reject tradition and oppression. And we ask our trans masc best friends to officiate for us. A form of blasphemy. We also! And here is the punch line! Find any way we can to take full advantage of this shit show of a democracy. We combine resources. We take on intimate yet platonic queer relationships with likeminded folk who love us so deeply that they cannot be called anything but family. We live 5, 6, or 7 in a household to fulfill both financial and emotional needs. We are poly. We have a clown car Amazon account. We polyamorous Netflix with 10 different profiles. And we Costco shop and make group meals. And so! We are here today to join these two seemingly but totally not hetero people in a loving but legal agreement to receive tax deductions, discounted insurance policies, adopted friends, and commitments that move beyond the rhetoric of patriarchal society and mirror the endlessness of the cosmos that made us.

Jared, when you marry Alie, you marry their needs, their wants, and their shortcomings, family, and challenges. Alie, when you marry Jared, you marry all the same, and you also marry their queer, atypical, chosen family. What an honor for you both. And it is an honor that comes with the beautiful understanding that this choice to combine lives is one that acknowledges temporality. I do not believe you are together out of obligation. I do not agree with the promise for foreverness. I do believe that you marry with a total understanding that people love, grow, transform, and potentially part ways together or apart as a unit. Of course this is not an omen, nor a prediction. It’s an agreement that we are in love for the benefit of each other because we WANT TO BE and not because we make a promise that honors tradition. And we acknowledge that this union shall only last for as long as we choose each other. On the topic of choice— it is paramount to any love. Because love is a choice. It’s a decision we make to continue when it’s hard, and communicate when it is too hard for us to avoid a pause for reflection. Jared, you’ve chosen the manic pixie dream girl known as Alie. You plucked her from the stars and she holds you. Alie, you’ve chosen the determined, dark and intense spellcaster that is Jared. You pulled them from the fire and you took them into your den. And whenever you feel like you cannot choose each other at any point, I’d like to think that you feel held enough and safe enough to ask your family to step in and remind you of the beauty and joy of choosing one another moving forward. Because our choices may not be easy, but in a world of hostility, hierarchy, pain, war, and subjugation, the choices of queer folk matter. They are meaningful. They are, hopefully, the change we wish to see in the world. And so I ask you to take each others hands. And look into each others eyes. The eyes are a space of transference. In the eyes we see pain, love, glory, and admonishment. They are a physical expression of what the mouth cannot say. And, so, with both your words, and your eyes locked, repeat after me with intention and gravity Before these people.

I, Jared, ask for your hand in this magical service…

Where we acknowledge that we know very little

About the universe that holds us

and the dark forces that attempt to keep us apart…

I declare that I deeply desire to connect…

Spiritually, financially, physically, and communally…

And so I promise you this…

I will love you, I will show up for you…

I will fight foes for you… I will support your endeavors…

Until when and if we choose not to do so, TOGETHER

I understand that nothing is forever…

but I endeavor to put all my heart and soul into finding eternity with you…

Against the pressures of the spiritless world…

Alie will you be my spouse, to have, to hold…

and to wield weapons against the patriarchy that we live in..

Until we are unable to.

Alie. My other best friend. Whose introduction to me was at a small dance carnival where she witnessed me ward off an evil warlock attempting to abduct a fair maiden in plain sight. Repeat after me:

I, Alie, ask for your hand in this magical service…