In Jeffrey Augustine Songco’s America, You Can Be Both A Bro And A Queen

If you lived in a college dorm, you’re likely familiar with the room. It’s in the basement of the fraternity, down a flight of stairs that reeks of vomit and cheap beer. The room is the place where the fraternity brothers hang out late night, when the party upstairs is officially over, but they still want to play beer pong. Because it’s 2021, you wonder how many sexual assaults have taken place on the dirty old sofa in the corner, and how many of the “trophies” in the so called “trophy room” are sexual conquests.

For an exhibition at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, the artist Jeffrey Augustine Songco has perfectly recreated the room, only he’s made it cleaner, gay-er, more beautiful and decidedly less rape-y. Entitled “Society of 23’s Trophy Game Room,” the installation contains a Bocce ball court, a Foosball table, a stand-up piano, a card table and a wide array of ephemera, photographs and trophies. On the walls, superimposed on top of foil curtains in black and gold — the colors of the Pittsburgh Steelers — hang photographs of the brothers of the fraternity engaged in various forms of celebration. In one photograph, the brothers, all of them wearing red hats and baseball uniforms, hold up a silver trophy. In another, a single brother kisses his trophy tenderly in the midst of what appears to be a crowded stadium. And on one wall, seven of the brothers, all of them representing a different year starting in 2015, are celebrated for winning the pageant, “Mr. Society 23.” Around the room, televisions play the first episode of “The Fabulous Society of 23,” a Kardashian-esque reality television show starring the fraternity brothers that is superimposed with the text of the United States Constitution. The exhibition is open through mid-November, 2021.

Society of 23 is a project that Songco first conceived while an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University in the early 2000s. Back then, he was in the closet — today, he is openly LGBTQ+ — and part of a fraternity. “I hated myself,” Songco said. “I was depressed.” A former child actor, Songco created a senior-thesis project in which he multiplied himself into five different fraternity brothers recruited by the CIA to be spies. The project grew after graduation, and the brotherhood proliferated until it contained 23 brothers, all of them played with Songco himself. Songco gave each brother a distinct name — culled from popular boys names in the United States in 1983 and 2008 — and personality. Over the years, he created installations for the brotherhood to inhabit, including a Locker Dressing Room in which they donned rainbow-colored costumes redolent of Klu Klux Klan robes, thereby elevating a symbol of bigotry into a celebration of gay identity.

In both the Trophy Game Room, and the project itself, Songco cleverly and deftly distills the essence of what it means to be American into a collection of performative objects. At its heart, the American ethos is defined by a competitive, cut-throat spirit disguised to look harmless and fun through the celebration of sporting events, beauty pageants and academic competitions. To be the ultimate American, you have to be good-looking, good at sports and good at presenting yourself in soundbytes on television. It used to be that you also had to be white, but that is changing. Songco, who was raised by a devoutly Catholic Filipino family, is in some way, questioning the American dream by inserting his own visage into imagery typically reserved for blonde-haired, blue-eyed football quarterbacks and homecoming queens. But actually, he really is the American dream — a minority who overcame prejudice, and his own self-loathing, and still celebrates the trappings of the good American life we all watch on television. In the Trophy Room, he says you can be a Bro while at the same time being a Queen, and that’s not weird.

On the morning I spoke to Songco, eight people, six of them women of Asian descent, had just been murdered in Atlanta, Georgia, by a white man. “There is this stereotype of an Asian person being quiet,” Songco told me. “This is the time when I, as an Asian American, can speak.”

What he wants to say, it seems, is that while he acknowledges that the United States has many, many problems, he still celebrates the fact that he lives here, amongst all of the silly rituals, like trophy ceremonies and beauty pageants and Kardashian television events. “2020 has really amplified my anxiety,” Songco says. The trophy room he created at the Mattress Factory is a place where he feels good about himself. “I get to pat myself on the back all the time, literally,” he laughs. “And I do it through this very American way of collecting objects of recognition.”  

Songco still talks to his fraternity brothers from Carnegie Mellon University. In fact, the morning after the shootings in Atlanta, he was able to speak on his fraternity Slack about his own experiences as an American of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) heritage — and be received with understanding and love. “They’ve evolved,” he says. Songco sees the grace in that, and he hopes you do too. In the meantime, if you’re in Pittsburgh, he invites you to go see his Trophy Room.