DOROTHY R. SANTOS

View OUT/LOOK Issue #5 at the Lesbian Poetry Archive.

With a love and passion for interactive media and experimental storytelling, I wanted to respond to the article titled The House the Kids Built: The Gay Black Imprint on American Dance Music by Anthony Thomas. As a part of the exhibition, my piece, “Swallowing my Boredom,” takes the reader through a circuitous array of emotions and desires associated to being a closeted queer Pinay growing up in San Francisco Bay Area and my experiences of going to house parties and dancing with friends.

Swallowing My Boredom

A breeze lightly touches your face as you open the window. Anxiously waiting for friends to summons you outside of the same walls enclosing and somehow trapping you away from your true self. The self you have been searching for. You want to get away. You are itching to get your best pair of dancing shoes on for the night on the town.

You can’t stay in your bedroom, let alone the closet forever, right?

You decide to…

Access the full interactive story online by visiting
Go straight to the playlist.

To: You, From: Me

Interactive fiction presented on iPad, handwritten letters in Plexiglas box as handout.

DOROTHY R. SANTOS

Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipina-American writer, editor, curator, and educator whose research interests include new media and digital art. Born and raised in San Francisco, California, she holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco, and received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. In the fall of 2017, she will be a doctoral candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. Her work appears in art21, Real Life Magazine, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture.