Visibili-T is dedicated to transgender members of our community in Central Florida and Tampa Bay, some you know and many you don’t. It is designed to amplify their voices and detail their experiences in life.
This issue, we check in with Central Florida comedian and former Watermark account manager Brianna Rockmore, also known by the stage name The Bri.
Rockmore has so many more identifiers she talks about ahead of being a trans woman. She is a stand-up comic whose favorite movie and TV show — “Office Space” and “Friends,” respectively — help to show the type of sense of humor she has. She is a self-confessed foodie who loves trying out new eateries and hot spots in Central Florida. And she is a proud “nostalgia nerd” with a collection of pop culture memorabilia.
“I’ve definitely become a nerd the older I’ve got,” she says. “Love Marvel stuff, I love Deadpool. I am into the Funko Pops! I Iove ‘Stranger Things,’ that might actually be my favorite show. No, I really love ‘Friends.’”
Rockmore came out as a trans woman nine years ago, when she was 36.
“I just love the community as a whole,” she says. “The majority of people are just nice and loving and want what’s best for everybody. I mean, I see the prejudice in certain things but as a whole it’s just a fun, loving community. They open their arms to you. No matter what, they open their arms to you.”
Rockmore has always had an interest in doing stand-up comedy, but it wasn’t until she came out as trans that she started to put some serious thought into doing it.
“I always knew I was funny, but writing and doing comedy was hard for me,” Rockmore says, “because before I came out as trans I didn’t know what would be funny if I wasn’t up there as my actual self. I’m like, ‘I can talk about myself but it’s kind of a lie, so I don’t want to do that.’ I wanted to be genuine.”
Since coming out, though, she’s gotten more comfortable in writing jokes and performing her stand-up routines. The catalyst to getting her on that stage was something that came about during her time working at Watermark. She attended comedy classes at Orlando Improv that she saw promoted in an issue and that helped her find a starting point for her comedy.
“I learned how to write comedy, to an extent,” she says. “A lot of it’s just going out and doing the jokes, seeing what fails and what doesn’t fail. See what works and doesn’t work, you know?”
Right as Rockmore’s comedy career started to take off, however, COVID struck.
“The class, it got me to the direction that I wanted and then I started doing it and then COVID happened, so then I was like, ‘Alright, I haven’t been on stage now for almost two years, let me try it again,’” she says.
And try again, she did. Now, she’s working comedy stages regularly, even doing a biweekly show with friend and fellow comic Gregory Metts at Savoy.
“I just recently got married,” Rockmore says. “So I want to be home doing the married thing and I don’t want to be out every night, but that’s not a good comedian’s mentality. I make it work though and I still keep active with it.”
Outside of attending more of her comedy shows, Rockmore’s hope for the queer community is that everybody can make an effort to be a little bit more supportive, even if they can’t be understanding.
“You don’t need to understand it, you don’t need to have a full understanding of what being trans is,” she says. “We’re different, I get that. We’re all different, we live in a different cloth, but you just need to understand that it’s not about you understanding, it’s just about supporting us.”
Rockmore says she has never been happier in life more than she is right now, and that happiness is something she would like to send to her younger self if she could.
“If I could talk to my younger self, I would say ‘Just keep going,” she says. “Don’t focus on where you are in that moment. Look forward and know that everything happens for a reason. I believe that. If I didn’t I don’t think I would be with my wife right now.”
As for her future, Rockmore says there isn’t anything more that she wants. “Well, I want to still be doing what I am doing except maybe on a bigger stage,” she says.
Additional reporting by Jeremy Williams.
Interested in being featured in Visibili-T? Email Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Williams in Central Florida at Jeremy@WatermarkOnline.com or Managing Editor Ryan Williams-Jent in Tampa Bay at Ryan@WatermarkOnline.com.
