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Meet Sharmane Fury of ManeHustle Media in West Los Angeles

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Sharmane “MixedGirlMane” Fury.

Sharmane, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
For as long as I could remember, I have always made creative projects that were somehow based in my Mixed Race identity. When I was interested in writing as a little girl through my teens, I would write stories that were about a Mixed girl. In college, for video and film projects for film school, my main characters were always Mixed or Brown and Black people. I craved seeing and hearing stories about people that looked like me and the people in my family because I rarely got to see people that looked like us on TV or in movies, portrayed in a positive light. Of course, that took into adulthood to realize what I was doing but hindsight, I was trying to make myself and the people I grew up around a part of the “mainstream.”

I went to film school for my bachelors but dived straight into the workforce after school to pay the bills. I both ignored my desire to create content for people like me and believe it wasn’t possible for me because as one of the few POCs in my program, I had very little access to production classes while a majority of the White kids I knew had multiple production classes. I was heavily discouraged but I excelled in the business world, or at least that was my young perception. I had been promoted after three months in a job to senior project manager. I managed operations for many years and when I moved on to other jobs, I always tended to be promoted after my first three months. It became a habit for me in a new work environment. I would try here and there to find a way to work in film but couldn’t afford to live and I’d go right back into the workforce. But then I decided I wasn’t thriving anymore, I was making my rich, White bosses richer and I was barely scraping by so I decided to go back to school to get my Masters in the entertainment business. By that point, I felt that I knew the business pretty well but needed to understand the entertainment side better. I also knew my family fought for education but I was the first to finish college so I felt like I owed it to my family to aim high. I got my masters and began working on trying to figure out how to create a production company that would focus on POC created content. But the bills started calling to me and I went back into the workforce again with a masters degree that most employers asked me why I even bothered getting. It was just many years of feeling thwarted by society and what I was starting to believe were my poor instincts of what would benefit me most professionally.

Flash forward to 2016, I move back to L.A. from the Boston area, and I get a job I excel at quickly, I get promoted in 3 months (she still gots it) and I’m a department head but I still want to produce Black and POC content so I am using vacation days and weekends to produce a couple of short films out here and it is what gives me the most joy but no money. The job I had was the most money I had made in my life and I finally felt like I found my niche outside of entertainment. I could always make little projects here and there I thought and then something bad happened. I’m not able to talk about it but something in that job went south for me and I lost the job. At 38 years old, I was in the worst position of my professional life and the last few years of my personal life were fairly awful too. I laid on the couch in the dark watching 30 Rock for a few months, wishing I was the Mixed Race Tina Fey, even though she is also Mixed (but like I live my life publicly as Mixed Race.) Depression got the better of me for a long time until the bills hit again and I had to take on some contract work for 1/2 my most recent salary. With the exception of a 2-month contract gig, I was unemployed for 18 months, I was too old and too expensive to get a job anymore. So I began dreaming about putting together a podcast on Mixed Race identity but more than that I always wanted to produce POC created content and the two ideas became one. Start a podcast network, focusingon POC created content. I was going to start with my first show Militantly Mixed, a podcast about race and identity from the Mixed Race perspective and then I wanted to do a show about Mental Health in the Black community since we as a community tend to not want to talk about these issues and I reached out to some friends and that is how Jhavia Nicole of Black Radical Queer and I started working on shows that made ManeHustle Media a reality.

Dang, I feel like I skipped a lot so I should also mention that my childhood homie Shawnbay aka BlerdVision, also of Mixed-Black heritage, and Ihad been talking about working on something related to being Mixed for years. We were going to do a screenplay, then a documentary, but once I got the podcast bee in my bonnet, he was on board for that as well. He just has a family with a busy activities schedule so we couldn’t get together on a regular basis to record. I ended up starting Militantly Mixed with him as a guest and then told him to come back whenever he had time. Eventually, his schedule opened up where we were able to meet weekly BUT Militantly Mixed had become a different monster than we had originally planned so he and I created a new show, BLERDcoMIXed, a podcast about Blackness and Blerd shit from a couple of Mixed-Black blerds. And so all ManeHustle Media shows up until this point have had a race-based focus but in different areas of experience and identity.

In June and  July we celebrated the anniversaries of Militantly Mixed and Black Radical Queer. It is a bit overwhelming but so exciting to know that this thing we created, or more precisely, this thing I wanted to do that Jhavia kept telling me “well do it then” was now a year old and there was no going back. I love this work, it is everything and I just want to do more of it. Over the past year I was invited to a couple speaking engagements on Intersectional Identity for Pride events at Sierra College in Rocklin, CA by my friend Professor Johnnie Terry because of Militantly Mixed. I really came alive in those spaces engaging with students on the subject of intersectional identity in an environment where the people there were all “finding themselves,” I knew it was important to keep this in mind as we expanded ManeHustle Media in the future. I am Bisexuality-Polyamorous, which would come up during the talks and I would be asked more questions about that sometimes than being Mixed Race. Students would say, “I’m not Mixed Race but when you mentioned being out at work about being Poly…” It seems my next podcast needed to tackle sexual orientation and lifestyle, so I recently started Bifurious with MixedGirlMane, to speak about POC LGBTQ+ issues coupled with what the mainstream call alternative lifestyles. Different from Black Radical Queer, Bifurious is a bit of an exploration for me about how sexuality informs lifestyle and vice versa, and as I am Mixed Race, the idea of how race and sexuality change depending on environment and partner, etc. will be laced in. I am just glad to have multiple shows on LGBTQ+ issues to show the differences in the Black and non-Black POC experience is from the “mainstream” LGBTQ+ world.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Creatively yes, financially no.

Creatively, both Jhavia and I created shows that come from our own experiences. Though we speak to other people about their experiences, we are able to put together shows that cross over the individual experience and make it understandable for people that come from different backgrounds. And every time we had ideas of what we want to talk about for a show, we find people that want to talk about it with us. It is pretty easy. With BLERDcoMIXed, the magic there is that BlerdVision and I are friends from childhood, that grew apart as teens and young adults but found each other again and really just fell into this old routine of chopping it up about shit we both geek for, comics and movies, pop culture and Blackness. It is effortless to chat with each other, we make each other laugh, so it is always fun. We’re like brothers if one brother also happened to be a woman. For Bifurious with MixedGirlMane, it is new and I’m still finding the rhythm of the show but with the folks I have been speaking with for episodes already, I see that there has been so much pigeon-holing in what it is to be an LGBTQ+ person but that there are so many differences in how we feel about and express our sexuality and gender generationally. For instance, I am not very comfortable with the word “queer” for myself cause I’m over 40 and remember it used as a slur, whereas Jhavia learned to embrace the word during the reclamation once LGBT identity and gender became group under the umbrella term. And even younger folks have grown up post reclamation of the word and it has given them the comfort and courage to be out at younger ages, which is empowering and beautiful but even as I have lived out loud in my bisexual-polyamorous identity, I wasn’t exploring this stuff.

Financially, you know we are independent podcasters trying to build our brands and an audience big enough to eventually justify major ad revenue or investments into the larger plan for ManeHustle Media.  Which is a full-service production house that offers affordable studio space for rent for POCs that want to stay independent, or opportunities to join the network and be produced by Manehustle Media. I want to be based in a predominately Brown and Black area so that the community benefits from a Black and POC owned business in the community. We get a few independent, monthly sponsors that support what it is we are trying to do on Patreon and through Paypal and stuff and that has been amazing to help keep us sustained but unfortunately we have had to have day jobs to sustain the growth of the business.

Please tell us about ManeHustle Media.
ManeHustle Media is a production company with a primary focus on People of Color (POC) created content. Currently, we are producing podcasts with the intention of crossing over into film/video/web content.

I am proud that we have been able to focus on Black and POC created content. That we are, as Jhavia says on Black Radical Queer, producing “Our stories on our OWN terms.” People of Color, Mixed Race people, Queer People of Color, Mental Health in the Black community, Nerds and Geeks that are Brown and Black, these are the people we are speaking with, this is who we are. And being able to stay focused on that value within the company is what I am most proud of.

Well, I am sure there are a lot of people like me out there, that have the drive and the hustle to create something from scratch and keep grinding on it no matter the obstacles. But I think that what sets me apart from the mainstream podcaster or production company is that I am a Mixed Race, Bisexual, Polyamorous, Atheist, Woman that reads comics, knits, is a Mother of Cats, and wants to create safe space media for Brown and Black people. I am a very intersectional person and therefore, I am already ready to hear stories and produce stories about people that are not like “the mainstream.” I will take care of the stories that are shared with me, I will not be exploitive, I have empathy beyond my own experiences, and so people that come to ManeHustle Media will be taken care of from someone that sort of looks like them. (I present very racially ambiguous so I could be from any group if they need me to be.)

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
Man, that’s a tough one, favorite childhood memory? I know what popped in my head first, whether or not it’s my favorite, it does make me laugh though, but it doesn’t make me look great. Okay, here we go.

So when I was three years old, we live in Kingsville, TX, my dad was stationed in TX while he was in the Navy. My mom stayed home with me. They were both teenagers when I was born. I was playing outside with a Blonde girl in the courtyard/pool area of the apartment complex and we were like bouncing a ball back and forth which I’m sure was a lot of fun at the time because when the little, Blonde girl’s mom called her in the house, we both fought about wanting to play. So, the mom let me come in with her.

We get in their apartment and on the kitchen counter, there were a bunch of blue cupcakes. To my 3-year-old eyes, these were gigantic cupcakes, like the size of basketballs but I am sure they weren’t that crazy. I go to reach for one and the girl’s mom was stopped me. They were for some party later, not for me. Well, I was not happy about that. I wanted that blue cupcake, and this lady told me no, so I had to figure out a way to get that cupcake. I don’t remember why, probably I kept trying to get the cupcake, the mom kicked us out and told us to go back to playing outside. This was the late 70’s/early 80’s when you could send you toddlers outside and somehow not be monitoring them which is absolutely crazy. Anyways, we went back to bouncing the ball back and forth but my brain was working out how to solve this damn blue cupcake problem. I became crazy focused on what I could do to get one and then it occurred to me, if I got hurt, I might get a cupcake. I was a pretty forward thinking 3-year-old. So I start bouncing the ball a little harder, which I think made the little Blonde girl bounce it harder too, and finally, I catch the ball and throw it hard into my own face and instantly start crying and screaming.

So something you need to know about my mom is that she was and probably still is, a 5′ 1/2″ crazy woman. She would fight anyone that talks mess to her and as a 19-year-old mother of a toddler that was screaming outside because she got hit in the face with a ball, my mom was BATMAN come to life! She ran outside to check on me and I dig in to my forced, glupping tears, and point at the girl “She…hit…me…with…the..balllllllll!” And my mom snatched me up and grabbed that little girl by her arm and marched over to her apartment to cuss out that girl’s mama. After a few minutes of yelling and threatening, we went back home and my mom says to me that I “can’t play with that little girl no more.” I WAS DEVASTATED! I didn’t get a cupcake. I was stuck in the house the rest of the day, red-faced, and without a blue cupcake. What could have gone wrong?!

Who knows how long after, we get a delicate knock on the door and my mom opens it to that little girl, who is also red-faced from crying but what does she have in her hands? A BIG, BLUE, BASKETBALL SIZED cupcake! The little girl apologized for being bad, gave me the cupcake and went home. I did it! I got my motherfucking blue cupcake. I was victorious.

I remember eating the blue cupcake, mostly just the frosting because it turned out it was a chocolate cake and I didn’t like chocolate cake that much but I loved that blue frosting.

So I always remembered this incident and one day I don’t know if my mom brought it up or I did but I ended up confessing to her that it was all a lie to get me a blue cupcake and my mom was horrified. She told me she cussed out that lady for being a bad mother that didn’t know how to raise her kid right and that woman broke down in tears because she was the girl’s step-mom and they had just got custody over the little girl but that she was acting out because she wanted her real mom (but she was on drugs) and she just didn’t know what to do about her. So not only was I the bad kid in that scenario, I probably got that little girl fully spanked, and I made a step-mom that was probably trying her best cry. Worst of all, I set my mom on her who I had seen punch folks for lesser offenses. But I tell you what, every time I see a blue cupcake, I buy it and remember how I managed to get that amazing blue cupcake when I was a kid.

Pricing:

  • Basic Podcast Editing Services – $35/hour (add intro/outros, ads, to main file, noise reduction, normalization)
  • Premium Podcast Editing Services – $60/hour (add intro/outros, ads, to main file, noise reduction, normalization, make cuts based on notes provided, cut umms/coughs/etc.)
  • Full Service Producing/ManeHustle Media Network – Negotiated based on custom package)

Contact Info:


Image Credit:
For Headshots: Cara Zozula
Picture ar podium – Johnnie Terry
The candids from events were on my phone by random people

Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.

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