At the height of a global pandemic, the legendary non-profit group Red Hot celebrated its 30th anniversary. Where other organizations of Red Hot’s size and influence would be able to throw a lavish party to celebrate their accomplishment, executive director and senior creative producer Dust Reid remembers the event much differently.
“The pandemic basically caused us to look inward,” Reid recounts to Billboard. “We were analyzing what the core driving values and beliefs were behind the start of the org. I worked on distilling a larger mission statement for Red Hot, and I found that our driving belief was that we want to promote diversity by advocating for the equal access to care for all.”
It’s a fitting mission for the organization — starting in 1990, Red Hot became a fierce advocate for those diagnosed with HIV and AIDS, releasing their first, star-studded compilation LP Red Hot + Blue the same year to help raise funds for those affected by the crisis. Reid points out that while lingering stigma and access to care around the virus is still “a very big issue today,” life has become simpler for those living with HIV “if you have enough access and money.”
With a new mission statement in hand, Reid looked to the community around him to find a way to bring the non-profit’s organizing power to another important cause. Following the death of the iconic producer SOPHIE in early 2021, Reid found his answer: Red Hot needed to advocate for the transgender community.
Three and a half years later, that seed of an idea has blossomed into Transa (due out Nov. 22), a nearly four hour album featuring over 100 artists all dedicated to representing the vastness of the trans experience today. With stars like Sam Smith, Sade, Andre 3000, Jeff Tweedy and many more joining the album, Transa aims high in an effort to uplift and celebrate the community, while keeping the door open for everyone to find understanding.
Massima Bell, a model and musician, served alongside Reid as the album’s co-creator. The pair met at a video shoot towards the end of 2020, where they immediately hit it off, speaking about their shared love for ecology, music and activism. “He was setting all the right moods for the shoot that day, and we connected really deeply about music,” she recalls with a smile.
After SOPHIE’s passing, Reid called Bell and pitched her on the idea for Transa — he wanted to make a Red Hot album that honored the trans experience. Bell knew that “this needs to exist,” especially in the wake of the pioneering electronic artist’s death. “She was such a singular kind of creative force in the world, and a lot of times it can be hard for trans people to speak to their transness in music,” Bell says. “Part of what SOPHIE was able to do comes from the fact that being trans is kind of a creative act in and of itself. We should acknowledge her transness as a gift with her music. It’s all part of the beauty that she created.”
In their collaboration to celebrate the complexity of life as a trans person today, Bell and Reid started with two major themes — grief and transcendence — before realizing that they needed more. The pair put together a set of eight “chapters,” charting the course of a trans person’s life from the “Womb of the Soul” to the “Dark Night” all the way to “Liberation” and “Reinvention.”
Reid acknowledges that the album is a lot to ask listeners to sit down and listen through 46 songs over the course of three-plus hours. But, that was largely the point of this. “It’s a journey and a transformation throughout an album, and if we had only done one track per chapter and done a traditional hour long album, then you wouldn’t get that meditative, reflective time to work through what we’re asking of the listener to do on this record,” he explains. “If you’re asking someone to sit down and listen all the way through a three-hour Taylor Swift record, that can get old. But there are so many unique voices in this, and it’s so dynamic, which helps.”
With funding from Red Hot and organizations like Pop Culture Collaborative, Bell and Reid got to work reaching out to artists. Moses Sumney, who is featured twice on the album, remembers getting his first call for the project in 2022. “I had been such a fan of Red Hot for a long time, so I immediately was just like, ‘How can I help? How can I reach out to people? How can I get other people involved?’”
Help he did — working within his network of fellow artists, Sumney brought a list of names to Bell and Reid, including Anohni and Lyra Pramuk to work on the project. With Anohni, Sumney reinterpreted SOPHIE’s “Is It Cold in the Water?” as a stunning, soulful anthem; with Pramuk and Sam Smith, the alternative artist transformed Sylvester’s “Mighty Real” into an a cappella ballad.
It was important for Sumney to celebrate two icons in the queer music scene who so often go unsung. Beyond the sound SOPHIE helped cement in underground electronica and pop spaces, Sumney says that most people “don’t really know just how involved she was producing music for pop and hip-hop artists.” As for Sylvester, the singer points to the late legend as a trailblazer for combatting gender conformity.
“When I first learned about Sylvester, I didn’t really have a social framework to get what it meant to be trans. A lot of people were playing with gender fluidity in the ’70s, but it was only fine as long as they were straight,” he says. “I think that that was such a big part of why Sylvester was just so revolutionary. When you’re on the dance floor and you hear the words ‘You make me feel mighty real,’ all of that other stuff falls away, and it’s this completely euphoric moment.”
For Laura Jane Grace, who features on a reinvention of trans punk group Wayne County and the Electric Chairs’ “Surrender Your Gender,” Transa was an opportunity to work with an artist she’d idolized for much of her life. “This is the coolest f–king list of people to be a part of,” she explains. “The whole time I was in our recording session I was kicking myself, like, ‘What in the f–k is happening here?’ It’s such a wide range, and it’s insane.”
The Electric Chairs’ lead singer Jayne County — widely considered to be the first out trans rock stars in America — features with her on the track. It was a full circle moment in Grace’s career, considering she looked up to County as a fellow Georgian and pioneer for trans artists. “I have admired them for such a long time that there’s a portrait of them hanging in my dining room,” she explains. “I only wish that the two of us could have been in the studio at the same time, but even just working around them was so rad.”
That ecstasy that Grace describes was part of Bell’s mission in assembling the project — she wanted to “make dreams come true” for trans artists who have gone unsung in the modern music industry. “For me, as a trans person, I felt that if we were going to be speaking about transness in all of these different kinds of ways, we needed to have trans people be the central voice of the record,” she says. “We needed the project to be able to uplift those voices and do beautiful things for those artists.”
Another dream that came true happened with Smith teamed up with jazz folk artist Beverly Glenn-Copeland for a reimagining of his song “Ever New.” Over mesmirizing guitars and violins, Glenn’s voice soars right next to Smith’s, as the pair completely revive the former’s 1986 track as a spiritual hymn to the power of transformation. “It’s so rich in humanity,” Reid says with a laugh. “I don’t know how you can look at Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s life and his message and art and not think that he is so spiritually incredible as a person.”
Yet the album also features a number of cisgender allies — which Reid says was vital to getting the album in front of audiences who desperately needed to hear it. “We didn’t want the general public to hear about a trans project and just think, ‘Oh, that’s not for me, I’m going to tune this out,’” he says. “Somebody in the South, somebody conservative, even somebody like me who is the child of a person like this, can at least say, ‘You like Jeff Tweedy and Bill Callahan, so this project can’t be all that bad.’ Maybe it becomes a gateway, or an entry point for them.”
One such moment on the album comes towards the end of the project with Sade’s “Young Lion.” The first song the star has released in six years, the track serves primarily as an apology to her transgender son, Izaak. “With such a heavy burden/ You had to carry all on your own/ Forgive me, son/ I should have known,” Sade sings in the song’s first verse.
When Bell hears that song to this day, she finds herself welling up with tears. “I do really feel like that song has the capacity to change people. I can confidently say that I have never heard a song like that in my life,” she says. “To have a parent apologizing to her child and uplifting her child alone is amazing. But then it’s not just any parent, it’s literally Sade!”
Even by Red Hot’s standards, Transa is an ambitious project. And Reid acknowledges that, in the modern music business, the album’s success is far from guaranteed — in the 30 years since Red Hot + Blue sold well over a million copies and raised as much for ACT UP, Reid says he and his organization know that Transa will not achieve that same kind of commercial success, though he does name the New York City Trans Oral History Project, GLITS and the Dallas Hope Project as just a few of the organizations that will benefit from the album’s sales.
“Our goal is to raise awareness — the fact that Transa exists as a historical document is success, in our eyes,” he explains. “This is meant to be accessible for generations to come.”
The album arrives a few weeks after Tuesday’s election (Nov. 5), where topics of transgender care and existence have become an ideological boogeyman for the right-wing and their candidate, Donald Trump. It’s a scary thing to watch, Bell explains, especially when there is so much willful ignorance about the purpose of that animus. “Something that gets lost about the nature of those attacks is that they don’t just affect trans people — what these attacks are, as a whole, is an attack on our bodily autonomy,” she says. “That’s a much larger conversation that impacts all of us — if you aren’t trans or you aren’t close with a trans person, you might think that there are no stakes for you when it comes to bills making gender-affirming care more difficult to access. But when you think about it being your body, or your child’s body, it becomes a different thing.”
Transa, though, never directly comments on the societal strife the transgender community is currently suffering through. Bell says that she and Reid wanted to make clear that Transa exists as a tribute to trans people that “looks beyond the surface” of the current moment. “While I do feel that it is a very terrifying time right now, the hope is it will serve as a beacon of hope for people in years to come, so it can show them a path towards something better.”
Sumney vigorously agrees, and adds that the album deserves to stand as more than just a political statement. “What has always been great about the Red Hot projects is that, outside of the rhetoric and and the will to bring change is just really good music, right?” he says. “We’re in such a different time now with music, and we don’t really sit with stuff in the way that stuff deserves to be sat with. There are people coming together on this project who you would never put together. So, I hope audiences sit with the whole thing. And I hope that people are reminded of how powerful we can be when we come come together and collaborate.”
