This week, LAist Studios debuts "Imperfect Paradise: The Castle" — Part 2.
In Part 1, hobbyist magician Carly Usdin fell in love with the Magic Castle, a members-only magician’s club in Los Angeles. After a year of taking classes, they auditioned and became a member. This is part 2 of 3 in their story.
When Carly Usdin started inviting friends to the Magic Castle, they always sent them a link ahead of time — the Castle’s dress code guidelines.
The club’s website lists a full breakdown of acceptable attire — “tie and suit,” “ravishing dresses” — and lists restricted choices: “all denim,” “skorts.” Back in 2015, the site presented a gendered breakdown of the dress code, asking men to “think business attire” and women “elegant attire.”
Carly included the link as a joke, but it was also a warning.
“We could have a laugh,” says Carly. “And also, I think probably subconsciously to prepare them for stepping back in time in this space a little bit.”
Carly is trans and non-binary. Back in 2015, Carly identified as a woman, and they say that throughout their gender journey, their appearance at the Castle was always the same: gender neutral, short hair and a suit. Carly says they were usually read male in the Castle.
“It is like you are back in time in the ‘50s and anyone in a suit is a guy, anyone in a dress is a gal, and the guys should hold the door open for the gals,” says Carly.
For Carly, complicating this binary worldview meant dealing with discomfort.
“When I would be in that space, I would actively try to make myself smaller,” says Carly. “And when I brought people, there was that mix of pridefully showing them around, but also knowing that most of the people that work here are gonna call me sir.”
Initially, Carly accepted their discomfort as a trade-off of being a Castle member. But as they spent more time at the Castle, the gender dynamics of the club began to feel less tolerable.
One year, for their wife’s birthday, Carly booked a small-group experience at the Castle called the Houdini séance. Their friends would spend two hours with a magician who would summon the ghost of Harry Houdini.
“It's a little cheesy in a Disney's Haunted Mansion sort of way,” Carly says, “but so fun.”
They specifically requested a woman magician to lead the performance.
“And we get there and it's just some dude and no one told us about the switch,” says Carly. “And we had a group of like queer people, trans people, Black people. And this guy trying to talk to us was like misgendering everybody in our group. Saying ma'am to people who are trans men. [Making] assumptions of heterosexuality, like, ‘Who's your husband? Who's a handsome man in your life?’”
Carly was starting to realize that the old-timey atmosphere they’d initially been so charmed by had drawbacks.
“You're like, first of all, this person's queer. Second of all, what does that have to do with Houdini?”
Carly noticed the way sexism was baked into performances and casual conversation at the club. They’d invite friends to shows, and then watch as male magicians filled their patter with jokes at the expense of women.
“I just started worrying that I was bringing people into a space where they might not be safe and I couldn't do that anymore,” says Carly. “I felt complicit and accountable.”
First, Carly stopped bringing their friends. Then they stopped learning magic. And they completely let go of their aspirations to start a club for queer magicians.
“I guess I never really felt welcome enough to try to make it better,” says Carly. “I was definitely not advocating, trying to make my voice heard in a way that like I would normally do in my career. And I don't know if that's the difference between a career and a hobby. I didn't want everything in my life to be that struggle.”
After five years as a member of the Castle, Carly stopped going altogether.
They say it wasn’t a conscious decision. They still paid dues, but they let life get in the way.
Casual misogyny has always been part of Kayla Drescher’s experience in magic.
“I've been doing magic since I was 7 and the very first day I walked into a magic club, the other kids told me magic isn't for girls,” says Kayla. “And one kid offered that if I wanted, I could stay and be his assistant.”
Kayla became a professional magician nonetheless, specializing in mentalism, bar magic and comedy-based magic. She joined the Castle around the same time as Carly, but as a performer and teacher rather than a hobbyist magician.
As a booked performer, Kayla was experiencing the same unsavory aspects of the Castle as Carly — but from a much closer vantage point.
One evening when she was getting ready to do her bar magic act, she says a member came up to her and asked her for a drink. When Kayla pointed him in the direction of the bartender, she remembers him responding, “How are you not the bartender?” When she told him she was the magician, he said, “A little lady doesn’t do any magic.” When Kayla started her show, he left.
Kayla wanted Castle leadership to understand they’d created an environment where sexism was tolerated. She decided to start with their booking practices. She wanted to quantify the Castle’s exclusion of woman magicians. So she and another member created a spreadsheet.
She found that between 2016 and 2019, the percentage of women performers grew from about 6% to about 9% — which tracks with national numbers on women in magic. But Kayla’s spreadsheet also looked at where performers were booked, which theaters and times, and she found that women tended to get less prestigious slots: brunches and early shows.
In 2019, Kayla presented these findings to the Castle’s Board of Directors.
When asked about whether this presentation had any effects, the Castle told us that as a result, they've made an effort to book at least one woman per week, as well as magicians from underrepresented backgrounds. They didn’t address time slots or locations.
Kayla says that early in her time at the Castle she was physically assaulted by two different magicians, and a third magician harassed her and followed her out to her car.
She was a young magician in her early 20s, and felt too uncomfortable to speak up — afraid she wouldn’t be believed or that it would have consequences for her career. She also remembers that the staff who observed these incidents didn’t intervene.
“It was in that moment,” she says, “I realized, 'I’m not safe here.' To this day, I will not enter the building alone.”
When we contacted the Castle about Kayla’s experiences, they said if she wanted to talk with management now, she would be listened to and taken seriously.
Kayla said for her, it wasn't about calling out any specific members or staff — but about conveying how the environment of the Castle made her not want to speak out in the first place.
“Magic is still this microcosm of the world, but of the world in like the ‘50s and ‘60s. It's a world of secrets,” she says. “It's a world of ‘don't tell anyone.’ It's really easy for stuff to just breed within the community and there's no outside checks and balances.”
In the spring of 2020 the Castle closed its doors due to the COVID pandemic. Then, that summer, the murder of George Floyd roiled Los Angeles. Carly Usdin joined many in the city to protest. Their friends clashed, at times violently, with police. Carly had journalist friends shot at with rubber bullets.
At home, Carly diligently followed the news online. One day, they saw a tweet shared into their feed — a screenshot of a Facebook post made by the Magic Castle.
Amid the protests, the Magic Castle Hotel — the property adjacent to the Magic Castle — had let the LAPD and the National Guard set up in their empty parking lot. In the photo, a Castle Hotel staff member was giving candy bars to the National Guard.
Carly honed in on the caption: “Tonight our hearts are with the business owners and employees whose livelihoods have been destroyed.”
For Carly, it felt like the Castle had chosen a side. The parking lot move was a vote in favor of the police, and against the protesters who were being attacked.
So they wrote a tweet, calling out the Castle on Twitter. And then they went to the Magic Castle members-only Facebook group — and everything that they’d been holding in about the Castle, spilled onto the page. “I felt like I’d been really quiet and essentially complicit in some of this garbage for a while,” Carly says, “and I hit a breaking point.”
Carly’s post was long and wide-ranging. They wrote about how they weren’t comfortable bringing their friends to the Castle because of the sexism they encountered there. They wrote about the treatment of their friends at the protests, about what it meant for the Castle to give its parking lot to law enforcement and shared links to different resources — for example, a primer on white privilege.
The post ended like this: “I'd love to see the [Magic Castle] turn over a new leaf and become a progressive institution dedicated to raising up newer voices of magic voices that are not all male, not all white.” Carly offered their commitment to helping with such efforts.
“There's definitely a part of me that was like, ‘This is a teachable moment and maybe they'll listen,’” Carly says, now. “Although the tone I took was very dismissive.
“I had good intentions — at least 50% good intentions. And then I think 50% chaotic screaming and just having hit a wall and feeling powerless.”
Carly’s post got 105 comments. Some members commented that they’d never personally experienced anything unsavory at the Castle, or if Carly was unhappy, they should leave.
People argued about the Castle’s environment and the nature of that summer’s protests.
Others responded with stories about racism and sexism, discomfort with the orientalist artwork and other problematic aspects of the Castle’s old-boy’s atmosphere.
The Magic Castle is supposed to be a non-political organization, so Carly had never explicitly heard the views of its members. And suddenly, they were all out in the open.
By late summer 2020, leadership at the Castle shut down conversations on the official Facebook group, so an unofficial Facebook group popped up — and for Carly, this was a window into a different world.
“It's like the moment they go to Toon Town in Who Framed Roger Rabbit,“ says Carly. “That's how it felt. There's like this Facebook group with all these progressive, interesting people that are at the Magic Castle.”
In Zoom meetings, members shared their stories and frustrations about the Castle — and also, came up with suggestions and solutions, talking about how they might put pressure on the club.
While the Castle did not apologize for the parking lot situation, after a small protest outside the Castle, they did put out a statement saying that Black lives matter. The Castle’s Board announced that they would create a Diversity and Inclusion Committee.
The Castle wasn’t alone in announcing its intentions to do better — institutions nationwide created DEI committees. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, DEI-related job openings spiked by 55% in the immediate month after George Floyd’s murder.
“It definitely felt like a turning point,” says Carly. “Is the Castle going to move forward into the future? Are we going to be on the right side of history as so many industries, as so many groups have faced those moments of reckoning?”
In 2020, Kayla Drescher joined the nascent Diversity and Inclusion Committee — and Carly wanted in, too. They saw it as a chance to fulfill the dreams they had for the Castle when they first joined — to build a community and make it a more inclusive, more progressive institution.
“My anger and frustration with the situation had started to give way to optimism, excitement, hope. Like, I don't know where this is going, but maybe someone will listen,” says Carly.
And then that hope was punctured, by a single email from the Ethics and Grievance Committee.
When Carly joined the Magic Castle, they’d signed a Member code of conduct, agreeing not to disparage the Castle. Two members felt that Carly had done so, when posting on Twitter and Facebook.
They’d filed a grievance, asking that Carly be kicked out.
Find out what happens next, on Part III. Coming Dec. 13.
