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Pride Member Spotlight: Margaux Morales

Meet proud Local 33 member, Margaux Morales. Margaux currently resides in Los Angeles, California, where she works with her union siblings as the new House Head Audio for the Mark Taper Forum, as well as a monitor engineer for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Margaux says before coming out, she was one of the busiest freelance audio engineers in the LatinX music market. “I have credit on nearly a dozen Grammy recordings, a pair of Emmys, even an Oscar,” they said. “The day after I told the world that I am an ‘Intersex Person of Transgender experience,’ nobody knew my name. No amount of credit, experience or ability mattered, I couldn’t even buy a gig for myself, even if I could have afforded to.”
 
Morales says they thought they’d find a safe place working as a theater manager, so she went over to the ‘dark side.’ And dark it was, she explained. “I was discriminated against constantly by other managers, HR representatives, my co-workers and Arts Administrators who claimed to represent ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’ would routinely and daily mis-gender me and I was constantly held back for being ‘queer’.”
 
Margaux says for years she bounced between different venues, encountering massive amounts of discrimination from management. “I returned to mixing sound when I was hired as an audio engineer by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and joined Local 33 in 2020.

“Despite what many folks would have assumed, everybody I encountered in the Local accepted and respected me as an equal!” They added. “After years of struggling with sexual and gender discrimination by management, I had the legal protection and human support that I needed all along.

She says her siblings from Local 33 have been there for her, not only when it’s time to rock the big shows together, but even when she has had rough days of medical treatments and struggled to get through the call. “In them, I found the acceptance, validation and sense of belonging to a family that every Transgender person desperately needs. Thanks to IATSE, I can be my real Self and Do what I really Do.”

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