Blocky Horror blocking for United Front. Photo by Andrew Hart, April 6, 2019.
Blocky Horror #13 (they/them/theirs) is, to our knowledge, the first trans or non-binary captain of (arguably) the first all-/no-gender roller derby team. They started skating in January 2017, and now play for the WMDs, QMCs, and UF.
Read the transcript of their interview here!
How’d you decide on your derby name?
Partly because I was really eager to have a derby name, truthfully. Like, I really like puns and I agonized a bit over it, just like “I gotta find the perfect one!” And then it took me a while and I was like, “Everyone else has a derby name and I really want a derby name” so I like sort of settled, but like the inspiration is the more important part. It came from me performing in—not a shadow cast—but like a live stage performance of the Rocky Horror Show when I was in my first year at Smith, as Columbia, and then subsequently going to a lot of shadow casts at the Tower Theatre in Hadley, and just having a really great time in a queer community and doing theater and, you know, being strange and playing with gender and performance and everything. So that was like very formative for me, and it’s also like, you know, kind of queer production and it’s also really problematic, so I don’t know. But yeah, that’s how I came up with it and it feels right in a lot of ways, and also I’m like excited at the thought of having another opportunity to create another name for myself, because that feels kind of genderqueer, doesn’t it? I’m just like “Hmm, who am I going to be now?”
Do you remember when you first heard about or saw roller derby?
I don’t remember exactly what came first, but I didn’t actually start derby until after I graduated, although it was like the second that I graduated. And I knew, I think, exactly two people when I was in school who did derby, and one of them was Punches. We actually didn’t go to the same school, she went to Hampshire, but we were in ASL classes together for a few years, so I didn’t actually know her as Punches, initially. And I hadn’t heard her speak for like the, you know, first handful of years that I knew her, which was interesting and strange, but she had like talked about it in ASL and I was like that seems so cool!
Someone else, actually, that I did Rocky Horror with […] used to do derby, although I think for like a shorter time and was definitely gone by the time that I got there, but I was like vaguely aware of it. I thought it was really neat, and I was super busy as a student, kind of like you were describing before. I feel like I didn’t have time for a lot, outside of like my one chosen extracurricular which was, at the time, this like rinky dink musical theater organization that I was having a lot of fun with and… Yeah, then I was graduating and didn’t have a whole lot of direction and was just like super anxious all the time, like “What am I gonna do with myself?” And I got really excited at the thought of joining derby and I had seen—I don’t know, maybe on Facebook or something—like the recruit nights being published, and there was one in January, which I now know is like the last of the season that we would do. And I had… I was a J-grad, so I technically finished up at the end of December, and then like two weeks later came to recruit night.
And I have a lot of social anxiety, so I made my partner EJ go with me to recruit night, even though she had no intention of actually joining uh the league except in a volunteer capacity, but it was really fun and I was very sold on doing it before I had even started, so I just needed some like support to to get there. I had messaged Punches, too, we weren’t, like, close per se, but I was like “I’m gonna come to this recruit night!” and she was like “I don’t usually go but I’ll definitely go because you’re gonna be there,” which was fun. And then another thing that was fun was that […]—Salty—happened to be the person that got paired up with me at my recruit night, to like skate back and forth across the floor for the like super basic stuff that Mai leads everyone through, and then like two or three years later we ended up co-captaining together. So that was… I don’t know, the whole thing is is fun and funny to think about, but it was a really like good thing, positive thing that I had going for me at a not great time in my life.
What was your worst derby injury?
Yeah, I was about to say I haven’t really had any, but that’s not true. There was a… the last season that I bouted before the pandemic, which I guess was 2019, there was an away game in Connecticut where I took a jammer to the side. And I feel like I had heard in practice before that, like “Don’t show the jammer your side, like don’t show the jammer your side!” Because it’s all legal target zone, so, you know, they can hit you as hard as they want there, and I was like “What if I can take it, though?” You know, like I’m strong there and I learned the hard way that, you know, maybe it’s not the best idea.
And I never actually went to a doctor about that, because I figured—well, first of all, imaging is super expensive and not always covered by insurance, and that’s a whole other can worms—but I was like “something is is not good with my rib, and there’s absolutely nothing really to do about it other than rest.” Like that’s just the way it works with that kind of an injury, because it… you know, I wasn’t having trouble breathing or anything that was super concerning, so I either bruised or like cracked a rib, and I don’t definitively know, but there were like, I don’t know, a subsequent six to eight week period where I didn’t do any contact at all, at least. And now it’s fine, I assume, but I like to be able to say that I bruised a rib, even though I’m, you know, not 100% sure.
Did you ever skate before joining derby?
I mean, I had skated a lot as a child, like I had gone to roller rinks a bunch and I think I even like owned rollerblades—I was always a blader, though, I don’t think I had like ever put on quad skates in my life. I might have gone with a Smith friend one time to Interskate and been like, “I think I’ll try quads today,” and that was like literally it.
Did you do any other sports?
Not exactly. When I was like a kid, I think my parents put me in softball or something that I was never particularly good at, but I did dance a lot through childhood and adolescence. And it’s, you know, not a sport per se, but it’s a very physically active thing… That’s the other physical activity I’d probably spend the most time on outside of derby.