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FROM THE LOVE TO RUPAUL: THE MAINSTREAMING OF IN THE 1990S

by

JEREMIAH DAVENPORT

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Music

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

August, 2017 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the dissertation of Jeremiah Davenport candidate for the degree of PhD, Musicology.

Committee Chair Daniel Goldmark

Committee Member Georgia Cowart

Committee Member Francesca Brittan

Committee Member Robert Spadoni

Date of Defense April 26, 2017

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you from the bottom of my to everyone who helped this dissertation come to fruition. want to thank my advisor Dr. Daniel Goldmark, the Gandalf to my

Frodo, who has guided me through the deepest quandaries and quagmires of my research as well as some of the darkest times of my life. I believe no one understands the way my mind works as well as Daniel and I owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude for helping me find the language and tools to write about my community and the art form I love. I also want to thank Dr. Georgia Cowart for helping me find my voice and for her constant encouragement. I am grateful to Dr. Francesca Brittan for her insights that allowed me to see the musicologist in myself more clearly and her unwavering support of this project. I also would like to thank Dr. Robert Spadoni for expanding my analytical skills and for constantly allowing me to pick his brain about drag, movies, and life.

Secondly, I want to thank my drag mothers who helped usher my drag persona,

Lady Martinez ’Neal, into world. You taught me more than any academic degree or institution ever could about the world of drag. To Christopher Hamblin, also known as Miss Hamblin, thank you for the late nights spent teaching me about

Christ, , The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the , , , and Herb, and a slew of others. I thank Christopher for being my Motherfathersisterbrother and helping me navigate my life as a person. I also want to thank Ashley O’Neal, my original drag mother, who taught me how to paint a drag face, how to sew, how to create pads, how to build elaborate costume structures and silhouettes, and every other skill needed to

3 become a professional drag . Ashley has fostered my entire drag career and I owe her more as my best friend and my drag mom than I could ever express for encouraging this project at every single step. I also want to thank Erica Martinez, my second drag mother, for allowing me to join her shows and asking me to become part of her drag . The hours Erica has spent telling me stories of Cleveland’ drag past, competing in pageants all over the country, and show directing have been crucial to my drag research and my development as a . To my drag sister Veranda ’Ni for encouraging me at every turn since the day we met and for presenting me with the Drag

Pride Flag for my work in promoting our art form and community. A special thank you goes out to the of The Carousel II who are the reason I fell head over heels in love with drag and never recovered—India Dupree, Champale Denise, Demitrya, and Ashley

O’Neal.

A tremendous thank you goes out to my who have had my back at every turn and who have reminded me that I am lucky enough to have my chosen family as well as my biological one: Devin Burke, Leah Branstetter, Carla Roth, Anthony Flores,

Joshua Poling, Aaron Burnell, Hannah Snelling, and Angelique Collins. Mark and Jenny

Ruscin, thank you for your support at the most difficult time in my life because it saved me from giving up on everything I worked for. I want to thank my dad Philip Clark for supporting me and encouraging me to follow my dreams. To my mom Vivian Clark, I owe a thank you larger than I can convey. She has inspired me my entire life and she has always taught me to stand up for myself and for all oppressed people. I count myself lucky to have a mother whose love has always proved unconditional, who always

4 encourages me to follow my passions, and who has always had my back. Without her none of this would have been possible.

I reserve my final thank you for my boyfriend Trae Ruscin who is the most supportive partner and drag husband a queen could ask for and who is the reason I finally came out of the closet to my family. I never imagined when I started this project that I would find the Armand to my Albert, because I did not believe such a person could exist in my life. I am so thankful that you love drag as much as I do and for everything you have done to help me make this dream come true. You have altered the landscape of my entire life and I cannot imagine taking this journey without you.

This dissertation is dedicated to those who helped me get here who are sadly no longer with us: Reanie Vachon, Kiarra Cartier Fontaine, John Napier, my cat Irving who always had his paws in this project, and my best friend Elizabeth Shell who passed many years before I became a drag queen, but who was the first to obsess over drag movies with me as we watched The Birdcage, Priscilla, and To Wong Foo on what seemed to be a never-ending loop.

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Table of Contents Acknowledgements: 3 Table of Contents: 6 List of Figures: 7 Abstract: 9

FROM THE LOVE BALL TO RUPAUL: THE MAINSTREAMING OF DRAG IN THE 1990s

Introduction: Expanding the Conversation on Drag 11

Chapter 1: Downtown New Wave Drag: Klaus Nomi, 26 and the Kooky Comminglings of

Chapter 2: Queens and Come Together: 74 , Harlem, and the Explosion

Chapter 3: No RuPaulogies: How the Queen of Downtown 134 Became the

Chapter 4: Sequins on the Silver Screen: 185 What Happens When Drag Goes Mainstream?

Bibliography: 238

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List of Figures Figure 1: Klaus Nomi’s Debut at New Wave Vaudeville, 1978 44 Figure 2: Klaus Nomi’s Logo, co-designed with Page Wood, 1980 54 Figure 3: Klaus Nomi, Joey Arias, and , 62 “The Who Sold the World,” , December 15, 1979

Figure 4: Klaus Nomi, Joey Arias, and David Bowie, “TVC-15,” 65 Saturday Night Live, December 15,1979

Figure 5: Poodle Doll featuring live feed of Klaus Nomi, 66 Joey Arias, and David Bowie, “TVC-15,” December 15, 1979

Figure 6: Klaus Nomi, Joey Arias, and David Bowie, 69 “,” Saturday Night Live, December 15, 1979

Figure 7: Leigh Bowery and Trojan, “Pakis in Space” 83 Figure 8: Leigh Bowery, Session VII/ Look 38, 85 Photographed by Fergus Greer, 1994

Figure 9: Leigh Bowery, Session II/ Look 7, 86 Photographed by Fergus Greer, 1989

Figure 10: Leigh Bowery, “Birth,” Wigstock, 1994 96 Figure 11: and three unnamed voguers forming a vogue pose position, “” , 1989 108

Figure 12: Willi Ninja and an unnamed voguer forming a 109 vogue pose position, “Deep in Vogue” music video, 1989

Figure 13: Dancer looking up ’s skirt during “Vogue” 124 performance, MTV Video Music Awards, 1990

Figure 14: Dancer squeezing Madonna’s during “Vogue” 125 performance, MTV Video Music Awards, 1990

Figure 15: RuPaul’s most iconic early genderfuck look, 141 Worn to the New Music Seminar, 1986

Figure 16: RuPaul’s post-genderfuck “black hooker drag,” 1989 161

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Figure 17: RuPaul’s short-lived, androgynous image 167 taken on while working with the Pop Tarts, 1989

Figure 18: RuPaul’s “Supermodel” music video costume designed 169 by , , make-up and photography by Mathu Andersen

Figure 19: Daniel Hillard’s initial drag transformation, 196 Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

Figure 20: Daniel Hillard’s second transformation, Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) 197

Figure 21: Daniel Hillard’s first appearance as Mrs. Doubtfire 199 after the Transformations montage, Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

Figure 22: The queens’ tribute to the Opera House, Hugo Weaving 207 as Mitzi del Bra, Guy Pearce as Felicia Jollygoodfellow, and Terrence Stamp as Bernadette Bassinger, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)

Figure 23: The queens perform in the desert, Weaving as Mitzi, Stamp 208 as Bernadette, and Pearce as Felicia, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)

Figure 24: as Chi Chi Rodriguez, Wesley Snipes 220 as Noxeema Jackson, and Patrick Swayze as Vida Boheme, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995)

Figure 25: Nathan Lane as Albert Goldman in Republican drag, 226 pictured with Gene Hackman as Senator Keeley, The Birdcage (1996)

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From the Love Ball to RuPaul: The Mainstreaming of Drag in the 1990s

Abstract

by

JEREMIAH DAVENPORT

In the first half of the 1990s, Western popular culture experienced an infusion of drag. The success of Jenny Livingston’s seminal but highly problematic documentary of the Harlem Ballroom drag scene, Paris is Burning (1991), signaled an intrigue from popular and critical circles alike. The form “voguing,” born of the same Harlem

Ballroom scene, appeared before and after the film’s release in music videos for Liz

Torres, , Malcolm McLaren, and Queen Latifah. Madonna’s song “Vogue” and its accompanying video and live performances capitalized on the dance’s underground chic that had begun to bubble over into the mainstream. RuPaul’s

“Supermodel (You Work)” and the clean and relatable image she created for herself around it soon after catapulted her from the Queen of to legitimate stardom. In doing so, she and her team of collaborators turned her into a household name, musical performer, model, actress, and host of her own . RuPaul’s rounding off of the edges of the drag queen image led drag characters to take center stage in the films

Mrs. Doubtfire (Columbus 1993), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

(Elliot, 1994), To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (Kidron, 1995), and

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The Birdcage (Nichols, 1996). ’s Wigstock festival also became a documentary focus in Wigstock (Shills, 1995) during the height of drag queen visibility in film. This dissertation traces the emergence of drag into the mainstream culture of the

1990s. I argue that three separate subcultures dramatically altered the aesthetics and aims of drag: Downtown new wave, Harlem House Ballroom, and London New

Romantic. I explore how each of these artistic nightlife cultures incorporated drag and queer performance as well as the ways that each garnered increasing attention for drag from new audiences and media outlets. Susanne Bartsch’s role as a purveyor of drag to the worlds of fashion and art are also explored. Lastly, I examine the Hollywood films mentioned above and how drag and sexuality are treated in each, reflecting the approaches major studios, directors, and actors took in seeking a heterosexual audience for drag.

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Introduction: Expanding the Conversation on Drag

During the early 1990s, Western popular culture experienced an infusion of drag.

Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990) explored the primarily Latinx and Black

Harlem Ballroom community’s take on drag and brought drag culture to new heights of public consciousness (if not necessarily recognition) when her film won the Grand Jury

Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.1 Shortly afterward Madonna wrote and released the song “Vogue” in an attempt to capitalize on the drag-based dance phenomenon showcased in Livingston’s film and already on the rise with in-crowds in New York.

Capitalizing on the success of Madonna and Livingston in appropriating drag for their own purposes, drag queen RuPaul tamed drag into a relatively family-friendly and marketable phenomenon through the creation and mass distribution of her “Supermodel” persona. This tempering of the idea of the drag queen led drag queen characters to take center stage in the films Mrs. Doubtfire (Columbus 1993), The Adventures of Priscilla,

Queen of the Desert (Elliot, 1994), To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar

(Kidron, 1995), and The Birdcage (Nichols, 1996). Mrs. Doubtfire’s heterosexual granny drag, in conjunction with the introduction of family members who assist in the construction of the Doubtfire look, resulted in a box office success that proved that gay themes and drag could go hand in hand while also attracting heterosexual audiences. The

1 Latinx is the -neutral form of Latino or Latina, which I use throughout this dissertation in order to avoid confusion since many of the people I discuss who are switch in their performances or are on the spectrum of identities between male and . I also use the capitalized version of Black to denote that Black is not simply a marker of skin color but also of a coherent culture produced by Black people.

11 other films directly situated drag queens within their queer “natural” setting, featuring professional drag queens as main characters who are (in most cases) .2

This study explores three subcultural approaches to drag that altered the landscape of the art form: Downtown New York new wave, Harlem Ballroom, and London’s New

Romantic nightlife. These drag subcultures eventually collided in , with artists from each group serving as performers at the parties of New York nightlife maven

Susanne Bartsch. Most importantly, members from each subculture performed, judged, and/or hosted at Susanne Bartsch’s Love Ball in 1989, which brought these subcultures

Uptown and garnered widespread attention for each of the scenes. The elite from the worlds of fashion and popular culture were present as judges and attendees garnered widespread attention for the event. Prior to the Love Ball, these scenes largely functioned independently and had dissimilar histories. I explore how each came into being and produced new kinds of drag performance, expanding the art form’s potential for transformation, character creation, and performance. I also explore how Bartsch herself uniquely combined performers from each of these subcultures in crafting her weekly events, giving these performers access to larger pathways to fame and success.

I explore RuPaul’s involvement with these scenes and with Bartsch, and how RuPaul, the first professional drag queen to create a highly marketable image, came to construct her

“Supermodel” image with the help of two of Bartsch’s regular performers, Mathu

2 The queens in some of these films also showcase the diversity of genders and sexualities occupied by the drag queens when out of drag. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert features Bernadette Bassinger, a post-op as well as Tick who has an estranged wife and son and who refuses to clarify to his fellow queens whether he’s straight or a “donut hole puncher after all” when he reveals these details. I also argue that Chi Chi Rodriguez in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar may also be a transwoman though this is never stated outright in the film.

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Andersen and Zaldy Goco, and the men formerly known as The Fabulous Pop Tarts,

Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey. This team of five not only carefully constructed

RuPaul the “Supermodel” but continued to work together to define RuPaul’s career as creative and executive producers for RuPaul’s . I also showcase the unexpected nature of her performance history in the new wave clubs of and New

York, and how she used her “Supermodel” era image to market herself, capitalizing both on the echoed image of the queens featured in Paris is Burning and Madonna’s elevation of a drag-originated trend.

In Chapter One, I examine Downtown New York’s post-punk underground culture and relevant performances in significant venues like the and

Danceteria, with particular focus on the collaborative ethos of Club 57. I zero in on two representative queer performers from the scene who achieved relative success and notoriety: Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias. David Bowie’s identity creation, in the form of his

Ziggy Stardust character, takes on a new level of inspirational importance in the world of drag and queer performance in this subculture. Nomi and Arias in turn crafted works that developed queer performance identities akin to Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona. The duo utilized the collaborative ethos of the Downtown new wave Scene and created performances with visual artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, , and , among others. Arias and Nomi also created their own unofficial artistic collective, known as The Nomis, who took on alien personas and made them a reality on and offstage as they perceived Bowie to have done with Stardust. The music crafted by Nomi and Arias, and later Nomi on his own, reflects a and parodic approach to songs of the past, fusing camp sensibility with the retro-futurism of new wave exhibited also in Bowie’s

13 own projects. Bowie eventually got wind of these two and incorporated Nomi and Arias into his own live performance in 1979 on Saturday Night Live, bringing attention to the queer Downtown scene Bowie had influenced through his earlier creations and interpolating that influence into his own new work.

Chapter Two begins with a brief introduction to the nightlife of

London and its subcultural queerness in order to explore its influence on queer performance/drag artist, musician, dancer, nightclub owner, personality, and model Leigh

Bowery, who opened up new possibilities for queer performance that featured physical transformation as central to its aesthetic. From London we move to New York, where the

British influence on the New York drag scene came in the form of Bowery and Bartsch’s fashion shows and later parties. Meanwhile, Harlem’s Ballroom culture of competitive pageantry made inroads into the upper echelons of nightlife, moving further uptown as its notoriety and influence grew. Malcolm McLaren comes into play at this point in New

York’s drag world when he writes and records “Deep in Vogue” about the Ballroom world and its rapidly ascending dance form. With Willi Ninja’s voguing front and center in the music video for the song, people began to take notice of the dance and the song became a moderate success.

The second section of the chapter explores the explosion of Ballroom culture and, more specifically, voguing. I argue that though Madonna appropriated the concept of voguing, in doing so she emptied it of its cultural significance: a grassroots system to fight within the drag community. This chapter deliberately fractures the story of drag to showcase some of the threads that came together to make up drag’s world of performance possibilities. These varying forms of drag began gathering strength due to

14 tighter knit communities and an increased need for artistic ways to deal with the oppression of the Reagan regime and the larger oppressions of AIDS, threats of violence, and anti-gay forces in society. The chapter ultimately leads up to Susanne Bartsch’s Love

Ball, where the forces of London, Downtown and Harlem came together under a single roof to raise money for the fight against AIDS. Each of these communities had produced ever increasing interest from the hip in-crowds of New York and London, but gathered together they showcased a new world of possibilities for drag performance, choreography, fashion, and constructions of identity and character personas.

Chapter three brings the various strands of the earlier chapters together to explore how RuPaul constructed his “Supermodel” era sound and image in an intentional bid for mainstream success. I explore the ways his history as a collaborative and multidisciplinary new wave performer allowed him to experiment with his looks, personas, gender, performances, and music. RuPaul’s pre-drag and pre-fame efforts have received little attention in the past, but studying these periods grants new insight into her success with the mainstream, showing that this success was partially the end result of years of studying what had and had not worked for drag queens and queers in achieving fame. RuPaul pitched himself as a creator of his own content rather than a lip- syncing queen; such acts could never achieve real fame due to the dependency on songs, sung by other artists, that were subject to expensive licensing fees. The final section of the chapter explores how RuPaul takes the successful elements from Livingston’s Paris is

Burning and Madonna’s “Vogue” in order to craft a song that introduced and established

RuPaul as the “Supermodel of the world” within the song.

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In the final chapter I analyze the successful mainstream drag films produced in the 1990s: Mrs. Doubtfire, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, The

Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and The Birdcage. I argue that Mrs.

Doubtfire occupies a transitional space between two historical arcs of films that deal with drag. On one hand the Doubtfire character represents a continuation of a long standing tradition that Chris Straayer calls the “temporary transvestite” in which characters must get into drag for the purposes of the plot.3 Examples of the genre include Tootsie

(Pollack, 1982) and Some Like It Hot (Wilder, 1959); each film of this type conveys a standard set of tropes that serve to remind the audience why the -dressing takes place and attempt, through a myriad of comedic gestures, to contain the created by drag. However, I argue that Doubtfire simultaneously provides the beginning of a new arc that showcases drag as a queer art form practiced largely by gay men and reflected through the inclusion of central drag queen characters rather than heterosexual male characters who adopt drag when in a bind. In this way I analyze the scene involving

Doubtfire’s co-creation with “uncle Frank and aunt Jack,” Daniel Hillard’s gay brother and his brother’s partner.

Doubtfire also normalizes gay themes and drag through associating both with the nuclear family. Family plays a significant role in the films in which drag queens are professional performers who are homosexual men. Priscilla, To Wong Foo, and Birdcage all put queer relationships into heteronormative terms: in Priscilla and To Wong Foo this occurs most prominently through the casting of recognizable male action stars Terence

3 Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-orientations in Film and Video (New York: Press, 1996), 42.

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Stamp and Patrick Swayze as elder drag matriarchs Bernadette Bassinger and Vida

Boheme. These queens play head honcho, organizer, teacher and physical protector to the queens and serve as makeshift drag mothers to the queens in Priscilla and To

Wong Foo. In both films the queens also actively work to preserve heterosexual through seeking to reunite drag queen Tick with his estranged son in Priscilla and the queens’ interventions to save heterosexual families from their inner strife in To Wong

Foo. The Birdcage takes the focus on the family to new heights as the central gay couple attempt to remake themselves, their home, and even their Jewish last name in order to appease their future in-laws, who are conservative Republicans. The film ends with the traditional heterosexual “happy ending,” the wedding of the children of the gay and conservative parents who now must handle the farce that has become their lives where drag queens attend their daughter’s wedding.

Retheorizing Drag

Drag history remains a peripheral and difficult to categorize area of study due to its very nature: drag is a malleable art form and has been long discussed by academics as a monolithic entity whose central purpose can be defined by the transition from gender to another. Where some performers attempt sincere forms of outdated/conservative femininity that ultimately uphold patriarchal standards of beauty and femininity, many drag performers problematize that same image through ironic representations or evade representing gender altogether in favor of fashion-based “editorial” looks that function as standalone visual art.

Academics regularly utilize drag as a tool for understanding and unpacking identity by focusing on gender, class, race, and social status (among other signifiers)

17 projected through the art of drag. Drag queens and their history on the stage have, however, evaded inclusion in this scholarly dialogue. Despite the usefulness of these discussions to cultural and gender theory, they say little about embodied drag performance intended for the stage within its context and historical settings. Furthermore, previous work on drag tends to reduce the artistic tradition to a singular entity that bears only a resemblance to the realities of drag’s functions as an art form.

In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler expounds upon the constructed nature of the and how drag performance can be used as a parodic tool to deconstruct the performative nature of male and female images, exposing the inherent fabricated nature of the duality of gender. Butler’s reliance on Esther Newton’s ethnographic study of drag queens conducted in 1968, Mother

Camp: Female Impersonators in America, presents many problems.4 Newton undertook her exploratory venture during a transitional phase in drag history when lip syncing had only just begun to enter into the economics of drag entertainment. Prior to this time, drag- queen acts had always been live performances and the established live performer queens did not take kindly to the younger lip syncers, whose acts were cheaper to produce and appeared to require a smaller skill set. In the years after Mother Camp was written, lip- syncing became the predominant form of drag entertainment in gay nightclubs.

In the years around and following Newton’s study, drag’s syntax, imagery, and very purposes morphed substantially due to a barrage of cultural influences, including the

1960s , politics, racism within the drag community, television

4 Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America ( and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1972).

18 programming, as well as more localized phenomena like ’s factory, the punk movement, and so on. Furthermore, the queer counterculture of the 1960s produced the communally-living, all genders welcome, acid ingesting, glitter-bearded, spectacle- producing drag queen collective from , The Cockettes, whose drag had little to do with the transition from male to female that remains the focus of much scholarship on drag. This group in turn spawned , whose starring roles in John

Waters’ films took filth to unheard of heights in (Waters,

1972), as well as the gender-blending diva Sylvester, who had major success with

“Dance (Disco Heat),” “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), and “Do You Wanna .”

Between the publication of Newton’s study and Butler’s academic writings on drag, the art form changed dramatically in terms of audience, goals, genders of participants, influences, and even the way queens functioned as families.

Butler’s work thus relies on a dated conception of drag, taken from the precise moment in which the art form began to experience intense upheaval and shifts in its practice. Though her explorations of gender continue to provide fertile ground for further study and analysis, her work considers but a fraction of drag performance and its performative possibilities. My work expands our understandings of how drag functions through explorations of its detailed historical and cultural context during the years prior to its biggest presence in the mainstream and what happened when it was removed from that context in order to be taken up for mass consumption.

Marjorie Garber also explores drag, though on a far wider scale, in Vested

Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. As her title suggests, Garber focusses on cross-dressing in general rather than solely as of drag queens. Like Butler,

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Garber zeroes in on what drag tells us about the gender binary. Garber, however, adds a

Freudian layer to the argument by focusing on the importance of the acknowledged yet veiled penis of the transvestite. Vested Interests acknowledges and theorizes vast swathes of cross-dressing traditions, laying important groundwork for further studies of the relationship between drag and gender theory. Her work also brings to light how commonly the theme of transvestitism recurs in Western society explaining some of the salient differences between those traditions. Yet as with Butler her arguments are less useful when exploring drag performance history because of their ahistorical nature and scope. Both scholars tend to collapse drag’s multivalent, multidisciplinary aspects in favor of focusing solely on what drag has to say about gender. As my work shows, however, situating drag within historical, localized settings grants a different view of the art form. When contextualized in this manner, drag speaks as nimbly of race, class, style, politics, and subcultural aesthetics as it does about the gendered body. My work thus picks up where these scholars leave off in exploring how drag functions as an art form, a business, a purveyor of cultural goods, a political rallying tool, and a marker of identity.

By studying drag within its context in Downtown New York, for example, I show how drag functions as one of the many intertwining art forms occurring in the experimental grounds of Downtown New York’s nightlife scene where drag queens colluded with visual, musical, theatrical, and outsider artists of many kinds to produce works of performance that often evade easy categorization.

Garber and Butler also take up a misconception, both explicitly and implicitly: that drag solely centers on the covering of one sexed body to create the appearance of another. Both scholars explain various ways this feat can be undertaken

20 and how those acts and their reception critique, uphold, or question gender and patriarchal norms of feminine expression and comportment. My research situates drag instead as part of an ecosphere of queer nightlife entertainment where drag queens and other queer performers and visual artists share influences, resources, and relationships, as well as mutual pathways to larger stages of the entertainment world. Through these interactions, queer performers, artists, and drag queens directly influenced one another as well as , music videos, film, art, and television.

Laurence Senelick’s The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre provides an excellent counterpoint to Butler and Garber in its practical explanations of drag within a multitude of geographic settings, time periods, subcultures, and styles. Senelick argues for the need to get beyond Butler’s explorations of gender performativity:

In trying to clarify gender identities in society, theorists showed no particular interest in the special case of the theatre. Performativity occluded performance. [my italics] … The performing arts provide the most direct, most graphic, often most compelling representations of gender; however, their form and function are often at odds with the concerns of everyday life or even with the common sanctions of society. The methods and motives of the performer involve different mechanisms and are less rooted in personal psychological concerns.5 By exploring drag within the context of the theatrical tradition, Senelick challenges both

Garber and Butler’s positioning of drag as inherently subversive or transgressive to the gender binary through thorough examinations that show how drag often serves to reify and uphold patriarchal gender norms. Garber’s assertion that “transvestite theater is the

Symbolic on the stage” also comes under Senelick’s scrutiny. Senelick argues that staged

5 Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre, Gender in Performance (London: Routledge, 2000), 6.

21 actions are inherently symbolic and that the transvestite brings no special claim to this symbolism on the stage by mere virtue of cross-dressing.6

Senelick’s study stretches from images of men in women’s dress carrying parasols on ancient pottery, up through the explosion of drag into the mainstream during the 1990s that I address in this dissertation. Senelick carefully situates cross-dressing traditions within their own separate and individual cultures and provides strong evidence to make the case of how each functions individually. The Changing Room stands alone as the best source to begin research on drag history, providing open doors to new research with each exploration of contextualized drag. Senelick’s brief but extraordinarily thorough and scholarly excursions into drag’s many histories will continue to provide scholars with an abundance of material from which to begin deeper studies into each realm.

My work on drag history is heavily indebted to Senelick, whose work takes into account the shifts in how, where and for whom drag has been performed as well as why and how certain aesthetics arose in particular areas of the country and the world. Where other scholars’ work seemed to erase the queens themselves from discussion in favor of gender theorization, Senelick prioritizes the artists who create and perform the work of drag. Most importantly, he discusses their work, its influences, and its reception, treating drag as a legitimate art form with origins in theater, religion (two-spirit shamans, for instance), and identity expression. Senelick analyzes drag performances and explores the grainy texture of the lives of drag queens and how those lived experiences translate into

6 Ibid., 7.

22 their work. Senelick never collapses one form of drag (transvestitism vs. nightclub drag queen vs. man playing a female character in a play) into another in order to theorize about how gender works; he likewise understands that gender is often not the focal point of a drag act, but rather the roux of the gumbo (and the same ingredient after which

RuPaul’s mother named him) of drag performance—an arguably important building block, but not the end product.7

My own research depends on Senelick for historical background and guidance in approaching drag texts and performers. His move away from gender theorization and toward historical narrative provided a framework for how to deal with the highly intersectional world of drag. He also provides the larger contours upon which to paint the more delicate histories of local drag subcultures. Significantly, he lays out a lengthy history (among others) of drag queens in nightclubs, as well as several narratives about countercultural drag that arose in contrast to the glamour, female illusion, and Las Vegas- style spectacle that solidified into the crux of the art form for at least half a century between the rise of drag in nightclubs in the early twentieth century and the rumblings of queer counterculture that arrived over halfway through the same century. For instance, he follows the narrative of trashy, highly sexualized queens whose lineage begins with his explorations of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sharman, 1975) and The Cockettes and leads through Hedwig and the Angry Inch. This history in turn provides the foundation for future studies of outgrowths of horror drag, like the modern day critically acclaimed

7 Many would argue, in fact, that drag is more about the art of transformation than anything else. This idea is also reflected in the Puerto Rican title for drag queen “Transformista,” which translates loosely to “transformer” or may be translated to “shape-shifter” or “drag queen.”

23 web competition series The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula: The Search for the World’s First

Drag Supermonster, where contestants compete to see who most embodies the crowning ideals of Drag, Horror, Filth, and Glamour.

The timeline of drag covered in The Changing Room continues through the mid-

1990s and covers all of the major players discussed in this dissertation. However,

Senelick’s study inherently cannot provide too great a depth on any of the individual topics due to the vast span of time and globe covered in his tome of drag history. The book’s temporal closeness at time of writing to the 1990s also limits both his ability to acquire resources on the era as well as the critical distance needed to allow scholars from other disciplines to begin to contribute further understanding of the zeitgeist. Importantly to my work, Senelick took note of the explosion of drag that took place in the 1990s and how some queens reacted negatively. Furthermore, Senelick documented changes to the linguistics of drag as well as its practice:

Mass culture became pervaded by what was once alternative drag: Joey Arias, backed up by two other transvestites, serves as ringmaster of the Cirque du Soleil. The fashion photography of Mathu Andersen and Zaldy Goo was deployed on behalf of Donna Karan and Shisheida, while mannequins at Bloomingdale’s were fashioned to look like RuPaul. Lypsinka was coupled in People magazine with his backer Madonna. The trend spotters’s Bible Nova pronounced drag to be “the drug of the 1990s” and Parisian fashion week turned into drag week, with Joey Arias strutting at ’s show.8 Senelick attempts a few possible explanations as to why drag achieved acceptance at the level that it reached, citing the AIDS crisis as an allowance for more extreme performative possibilities that were confrontational while lacking the danger of going to a bathhouse, as a necessary “quantum of femininity and variety” in the gay nightclub, and

8 Ibid., 503.

24 as “regaining their shamanic prestige” in the cases of deificatory hero roles like that depicted in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.9

In this dissertation, I build on the groundwork laid by Senelick in order to explore how a Black gay man in glamourous drag, a , and a pin-curled and piled high blonde wig became a household name just as politics had begun to turn away from the intense conservatism of the 1980s. My work here further explores how Hollywood, and pop culture more generally, constructed money-making images of drag queens for the big screen in the years immediately following RuPaul’s initial success with “Supermodel”

(You Better Work). I ultimately bring to light three drag subcultures that contributed intensely in altering the face of drag and moving it toward increasing acceptance in film, television, magazines, and pop music. My work shows that the queer and drag artists themselves worked hard to achieve wider audiences for their own works, but this became difficult in the face of the AIDS crisis and its destruction of many lives in each of these communities. It is my hope that this dissertation will begin to show how interdisciplinary scholarly work can account for drag performance’s multifaceted aspects and that more scholars and will begin to unearth more of this long, complex story and further our understandings of drag’s history while writing queer artists back into the larger histories of pop culture on whose pages they remain at best marginal.

9 Ibid., 504-506.

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Chapter One Downtown New Wave Drag: Klaus Nomi, Joey Arias and the Kooky Comminglings of Club 57

In the latter half of the 1970s as punk seemed to be losing underground favor, new wave and no wave aesthetics began to take shape in the developing underground nightlife. New wave acts tended toward pop-and-rock based sounds and occasionally performed 1950s and 1960s rock covers. Often these songs were performed through ironically detached personas. A light hearted frivolity permeates new wave sensibilities.

However, a sense of intellectual dread and anxiety about the future also arises in lyrics from the genre’s artists. Despite some crossover between punk’s final years and new wave’s onset, new wave acts generally favor and keyboards over guitars.

These synthesizers provide an electronically informed sound that pairs well with the often nerdy personas put on by the performers. New wave acts include the chic coolness represented by Blondie, the Southern camp and pro-partying attitudes of the -52’s, and also encompasses later British teen idols .

Influencing and echoing these developments in new wave, drag queens also began to play with pop culture images of the past. Drag queens had traditionally focused on polished spectacle and glamour alongside celebrity impersonation. The queens of

Downtown New York, especially those who made The Pyramid their home, turned to pop culture of the 1950s and 1960s. They took an ironic twist on drag by incorporating advertisements (RuPaul used to regularly read Champale commercials aloud, for instance, receiving huge laughs due to the irony of the upscale description of the cheap alcoholic drink marketed to low income Black demographics) and splicing and recutting

26 clips from classic Hollywood films. In this way, the drag acts aligned themselves with the same aesthetic approaches as the new wave bands.

No wave acts explored an intellectualized, nihilistic, and noisy response to the emerging doom of the onset of the 1980s. The no wave movement had a great deal less influence on drag, but its proximity and connection to new wave mean that its aesthetics and concepts bubble over in the darker new wave performances. Unlike new wave, no wave shied away from danceable beats served with an ironic twist as well as the genre’s regular referencing of 1950s and 1960s pop culture. Instead, no wave artists favored a freewheeling experimental approach to art, fashion, and music. No wave artists took inspiration from intellectualism, art, and anti-art rather than mainstream pop culture of the past, and their artistic works often focus on self-destructive points of view, suicide, and generally dark overtones. Musical sounds of no wave include experimental uses of noise and distortion, musical chaos, and a bleak perspective in terms of lyrics. The essential difference between the two camps, in many ways, can be defined by each performance culture’s response to the increasing desolation of their times: new wavers wanted to throw one last party at the end of the world, while no wavers wanted to deal intimately with the oncoming darkness and explore the depth of despair caused by it.

Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, fronted by , strongly typify the music’s off kilter rhythms and sense of despair and frustration with life in songs like “The Closet” whose lyrics include “Suburban wealth and middle class well-being/ All it did was strip

27 my feelings/ Personality down the drain/ After all who needs a brain/ Take a bullet to my eyes/ Blow them out and see if I die.”1

New wave and no wave came to being in the same Downtown breeding grounds.

During the 1980s New York's Downtown and East Village took on a distinctly queer infused flavor as gay and trans kids from coast to coast flocked to the low , seedier parts of town in hopes of fulfilling Warholian dreams of stardom.2 The success of Andy

Warhol’s factory superstars, especially the trans women and drag queens among them like and , fostered the idea that up and coming queers might become famous without the cost of homogenization or de-sexualization of queer content usually required for mainstream success. However, these kids took their first delicious, and for some poisonous, bites of the Big Apple in vastly different scenarios and subcultures. For some this meant creating art under the guise of post-punk performance and experimental theater at rock clubs in the East Village while others found their niche in the enormous and highly competitive balls of Harlem that had recently expanded to encompass new ways of being and performing for so many Black and Latinx queer youth. Meanwhile in London, the notoriety of the and New Romantic fashion gave rise to a culture of outrageous queer nightlife where individualized identity-based expression reigned supreme, as evidenced by the critical success of performance/drag artist Leigh Bowery in multiple artistic realms from nightclubs to legitimate art galleries.

1 Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, “The Closet,” my transcription. 2 The term trans encompasses anyone whose does not match their assigned at birth. An extremely limited list of the myriad identities denoted by the term includes: transwomen, transmen, non-binary people, genderqueer identities, etc. Importantly, transgender identity does not dictate a queer political perspective or any particular sexual preference.

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These two chapters explore the queer artists that came before RuPaul and how they gained acceptance outside the gay , opening a widening path to national stardom and notoriety for drag queens and queer nightlife performers. While the queer performers

I discuss in these chapters had their polished nails in many projects (performance art, fashion, modelling, theater, visual arts, etc.), many focused their efforts toward musical performance, where many who toyed with gender and transformative fashion had come before, from Little Richard’s makeup, wigs, and flamboyant stage persona to David

Bowie’s androgynous bisexual from outer space -Ziggy Stardust. Many of these performers not only created science fiction stage personas that reflected Bowie’s

Stardust, but also mirrored Bowie’s development of a fully realized character on and offstage. Another queer alien appeared on stage and screen in the latter half of the 70s in the form of The Rocky Horror Show’s Dr. Frank . Furter. Though the influence of The

Rocky Horror Show on queer nightlife remains unexplored, it is worth noting that science fiction and alien identities offered up a space in which to create personas that explored otherwise social mores as liberated in the futuristic world of outer space. We will return to this idea later in the chapter when I discuss Klaus Nomi’s inner circle of friends and fellow artists, known then as the Nomis, who lived communally and feigned life in outer space after Earth’s post-apocalyptic abandonment by humanity.

This chapter and the next further show how separate, previously self-segregating groups of queer performers and artists in New York and London began to intermingle, subsequently highlighting the commonalities and significant distinctions of their separate drag-o-spheres. Across these chapters I explore the ways drag and its aesthetics are utilized in the artistic realms of three cultures: Downtown new wave, London New

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Romantic, and Harlem Ballroom. My purpose here is not to give any sort of exhaustive analysis of these scenes. Much work is left to do in reclaiming these realms for the queer and drag-influenced artists who have been underrepresented in respective histories, including this one. Rather, these chapters focus on how the separate groups utilized music and drag to display a specifically queer aesthetic in the atmosphere of political conservatism that existed in both America and England at the time. Through the complex interweaving of individual artists’ stories, I also show that queer performers who had some level of success as solo artists emerged from communities of largely queer artists who worked with and influenced one another’s various and individual artistic approaches.

As will be seen in the case of the Nomis, these queer artists also took advantage of their diverse artistic backgrounds and talents to create fully realized productions for the stage that incorporated lighting, stage design, costuming, make-up, music making, choreography, and later the fusing of on and offstage personas. Lastly, I demonstrate how these groups collaborated with the emergent queen of New York nightlife Susanne

Bartsch to bring money to the larger LGBTQ community's efforts to fight AIDS at the

“Love Ball.” Bartsch’s “Love Ball,” along with the Design Industry Foundation Fighting

AIDS (DIFFA), served as the springboard to and conduit for national and mainstream success for drag, if for a brief number of years in the 1990s. It is little coincidence that

RuPaul became the marketable queen from the Downtown scene with Bartsch's prior promotion, a point I will return to later in this dissertation.

In this chapter I examine Downtown culture’s post-punk underground as represented by venues like the Mudd Club, Club 57, and . Though there are many key players who assisted in altering the future image of drag through participation

30 in new wave culture and its historical precedents, I focus on Klaus Nomi and to a lesser extent Joey Arias. However, this focus establishes a clear and previously undocumented

(at least in the scholarly world) connection between the look and sound of the no wave and new wave movements as well as underground queer drag performance. I focus on

Nomi and Arias also because of their connections to David Bowie, both as an influence on them and later as their co-performer on Saturday Night Live.

The removal of queerness from Downtown’s no wave and new wave histories can be attributed partly to the larger male focused framework that punk historians and commentators have created in dealing with its core history as well as its aftermath.

However, part of the issue lies in the sheer number of performers involved in Downtown nightlife whose deaths from AIDS or its complications both then and later, left much of the story lost to the general public in the shuffle of papers, estates and lives that occurred in the following years. In telling this small portion of the story of Downtown queer performance in I hope to contribute to the steady flow of reclamatory narratives from the period that have recently shown up everywhere from documentaries and tributes in honor of Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias to serious academic treatments of the work of drag performers and playwrights and Ethyl Eichelberger.3

3 Representative examples of these works include: The Legend of Leigh Bowery, directed by Charles Atlas (2002; New York: , 2006), DVD; Nomi Song, directed by Andrew (2004; New York, : Palm Pictures, 2005), DVD; Sean Frederic Edgecomb, “Still ridiculous: The Legacy of Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theater Movement, 1987-2007” (PhD diss., Tufts University, 2009); Kelly Aliano, “Ridiculous Geographies: Mapping the Theater of the Ridiculous as Radical Aesthetic” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2014).

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Across the Atlantic, London nightlife held many shared features with New York’s

Downtown scene, particularly the rise in interest in combining drag with other artistic mediums and blurring the lines between nightlife and high art. Blitz, a club in London’s

Covent Garden, proved a breeding ground for significant players in music, fashion, high art, and drag with its androgynous post-punk developments in style and self-fashioned identities. The attendees’ focus on re-fashioning the individual and crafting personas through and music would eventually give rise to the laced and frilled New

Romantics that included important players , to nightclub, and

Leigh Bowery. As I will show, London and Downtown drag developed independently, eventually cross pollinating through the efforts of Susanne Bartsch. They developed in and around the new wave, and in the case of London, New Romantic cultures over the course of the 70s and 80s. The drag cultures of these two cities contributed to the rising interest in nightclub culture as well as drag performers in general that would eventually flood off the streets and into mass pop culture in the early 90s.

Drag and Theater in New York

Throughout the 1970s, major shifts occurred in New York’s drag scenes that would forever alter the options available to future drag artists. Prior to this period, drag aimed primarily for glamour, elegance, pageantry, illusion, and imitation. Drag queens, often known by safer designations like mimics or female impersonators, of the time clung to these concepts especially during the latter part of the 60s as miming or lip- syncing to records began to replace live singers backed by bands because they were far less costly to the clubs. The vocal impressionist queens often considered themselves and their acts more “professional” and those of the lip-sync acts to be “street fairy” beginner’s

32 work performed by insurgent hustlers as part of their bag of coin-earning tricks.4 Despite complaints from the veteran queens, lip-syncing took over quickly and soon became the predominant form of drag entertainment at gay bars. As such, the live nature of many of the acts I discuss, especially Nomi’s, disrupted audience expectations by returning the voice to the queen’s body. Unlike the impersonation of celebrities and singing of torch songs performed by prior generations of singing queens, Nomi brought his own unique version of new wave musical aesthetics to the stage even when interpreting arias and covers of pop songs.

As vocal styles shifted away from impersonation and street performers became part of the drag world in ever increasing numbers using lip syncing as an inroad to the stage, drag bled over into other artistic worlds as they reinforced its emergence into theirs. Downtown New York and London both saw new queer artists that used drag to explore territories of transformation beyond gender crossing like Leigh Bowery’s expansion of the human form through over padding the belly or legs or Nomi’s reduction of his own body to the symmetry of geometric form. Part of this came from a tendency toward despecialization in the art worlds of the 1970s, especially that of performance art and theater. A flavor of bizarre camp and otherworldliness in combination with an incredible collage of traditionally “high” and “low” cultures can be seen in the works of drag artists as varied as Nomi, Charles Busch, and Lypsinka, whose careers align them with changes in theater that began in the latter half of the 1960s—an influence primarily handed down to them by one man: Charles Ludlam.

4 Esther Newton, Mother Camp, 38 and 44.

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The “Theater of the Ridiculous” came out of New York’s underground theater scene, where director John Vaccaro formed a troupe whose initial purpose was to perform some plays by Ronald Tavel (who had screen-written Chelsea Girls (Warhol, 1966) and several of Andy Warhol’s other underground films), who also ran the troupe with him, and a few scenes that had been rejected for use by Warhol’s Factory. The Theater of the

Ridiculous countered realism in staging, acting, and set construction/conceptualization, through asking actors for over the top, broad performances that took place on sets crafted on the cheap that projected an atmosphere of surrealism.5 A member of the Theater and one of its central players, queer actor, playwright, and director Charles Ludlam took on a place of prominence in the troupe, often appearing in drag as the star of his own works.

Though director John Vaccaro, playwright Ronald Tavel, and others helped to build a foundation with the troupe and its works, Ludlam eventually separated to form his own, queerer take on things as represented in The Ridiculous Theatrical Group. Ludlam expanded the troupe’s ethos into an entirely new genre of theater. Ludlam’s influence has been largely underestimated in the past, but emerging scholarship has begun to accomplish a great deal in establishing the Ridiculous tradition’s lineage within queer theater and in New York as well as the deeper mechanics of its aesthetics.6

Ludlam deeply affected the work and aesthetics of Downtown drag for generations, with major players like Charles Busch, Ethyl Eichelberger, and Klaus Nomi

5 Steven Samuels, “Charles Ludlam: A Brief Life,” in The Complete Plays of Charles Ludlam, ed. Everett Quinton and Steven Samuels (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1989), xiii. 6 Sean Frederic Edgecomb, “Still ridiculous: The Legacy of Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theater Movement, 1987-2007,” (PhD diss., Tufts University, 2009).; Kelly Aliano, “Ridiculous Geographies: Mapping the Theater of the Ridiculous as Radical Aesthetic” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2014).

34 performing with his troupe in the early stages of their careers. Ludlam remains, however, largely absent from lists of canonically significant drag performers. Ludlam’s primary influence on the queer artists discussed here came from his way of inhabiting the most extraordinary characters from theater and literature’s classical works like Cleopatra and

Camille without feigning any attempt at realism in passing for these female characters.

Yet Ludlam’s approach to acting allowed for heart rending moments of emotionality that came off as anything but saccharine, all within the context of some of the most absurd mixtures of high and low references where all culture became source material for a camp collage.7

Though Ludlam’s distinctly queer approach to theater became central to

Downtown drag aesthetics, especially those based in theater or cabaret, the execution of the Ridiculous in their works troubled his sense of lofty ideals laid down in stage performances, as well as his treatise in miniature Ridiculous Theater, Scourge of Human

Folly, whose cited aim was “To get beyond nihilism by revaluing combat.”8 Ludlam attended Charles Busch’s career-starting Off-Broadway play Vampire of Sodom

(1984), often cited as an obvious descendant of Ludlam’s own works, and became infuriated. His biographer David Kaufman writes that the playwright left the performance

…griping that superficial elements of his work had indeed been stolen, but without any of their substance. Work like Busch’s—and the wide array of cabaret bad-boy drag that would come to characterize much of Downtown

7 Edgecomb, “Still Ridiculous,” 5-9. 8 Charles Ludlam, “Manifesto: Ridiculous Theatre, Scourge of Human Folly,” in Ridiculous Theatre, Scourge of Human Folly: The Essays and Opinions of Charles Ludlam, ed. Charles Sullivan (New York: Theater Communications Group), 157.

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theater—possessed an easy camp and glitter that lacked the more serious intentions underlying those ingredients when employed by [himself].9 Ludlam’s hostility, expressed here and in accounts from many who worked with him

(including Busch himself), may aid in explaining why his work has been less adequately accounted for historically than it deserves.

Downtown New Wave

As one-time new wave club magnate and later actress/ performance artist Ann

Magnuson suggests, New York had always been a lure for those who wished to achieve fame and leave their pasts behind. The dizzying ascendance of Andy Warhol’s transsexual “factory girls” Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, and , illuminated a short, glamorous road to a version of real stardom and fame for those who saw themselves as society’s outcasts and its untold stars, ultimately attracting many outsiders who became part of new wave culture to the East Village like Nomi, Arias, and

Magnuson.10 Prior to future Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s “Broken Windows” campaign and large scale efforts to clean up the city, this run-down section of town retained many tenement buildings that could be rented cheaply by queer refugees of heteronormative and suburban respectability as well as their heterosexual counterparts fleeing their own suburban landscapes. The neighborhood’s low rent prices allowed for a mixture of art/ college students and drop-outs, punks, street folks, performers, and various other artists who intermingled with the sex workers and drug dealers of the neighborhood. This blend

9 David Kaufman, Ridiculous!: The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam (New York, NY: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2005), 361. 10 Nomi Song, directed by Andrew Horn (2004; New York, NY: Palm Pictures, 2005), DVD.

36 of cultures led to fetishization of the underground, gritty, and drug-fueled nature of the scene by the mainstream that later stood at odds with artists’ aims to avoid assimilation.

Simultaneously to this influx of queer artists to Downtown New York, major artists from the worlds of punk and glam had begun to question gender through the crafting of stage persona and costuming in ways that would prove highly influential on the future of drag. Bowie’s kabuki-esque makeup as Ziggy Stardust created an alien evasion of gender altogether, while the reflected Bowie’s earlier with their own brand of chaotic cross-dressing. As Philip Auslander points out in Performing Glam Rock, glam rock artists’ attempts to feign or highlight queer identities during this same period through musical and visual signifiers as well as occasional moments in interviews, created safe spaces in concert halls, bedrooms, living rooms and other private venues for queer kids to explore their identities, granting newly found confidence in shared identity with celebrities. This form of identificatory fandom contributed to communal aesthetic bonds that linked queer performance with gender play and the post-gender possibilities of alien identities taken on by the Nomis themselves, a point I return to later in this chapter.

Bowie’s interstellar glam queer posturing never took on the longstanding place of prominence on the American pop charts it had in England, however. The only groups able to utilize glam rock’s theatrics for major financial gain and rock star status in

America seemed to be Alice Cooper and KISS. Most likely, this success relied on their hypermasculine posturing through gory violence in the case of Cooper and Kiss’s addition of sexuality and pyrotechnics to the mix. Both also placed themselves within larger American heteronormative marketing constructs marketing their memorabilia

37 directly to young boys through advertisements in comic books. KISS crafted their personae as marketable products from comic books to lunch boxes aligned them with the traditionally male world of comic book heroes and villains, while Cooper’s offstage persona of rock respectability and acknowledgement of his act as an outgrowth of vaudeville made it clear his character was no more than an actor’s mask.

Steven Hager’s history of the 1970s-80s East Village art scene cites Reagan’s presidential campaign as a catalyst for change among the artists of the Village who wanted to counteract the prevailing conservatism of the era. Inspired by the beatnik generation, culture and the punk ethos and aesthetic, multiple new movements began to coalesce in New York’s grittier, cheaper neighborhoods:

… was elected president on a hardline, anti-Communist campaign. The election provoked an outbreak of doomsday fever across the country. For those who felt the world’s situation was getting increasingly hopeless, throwing a party seemed like an appropriate response. It was so appropriate, in fact, that it turned into a four-year binge that a lot of people attended: punk rockers, hip hoppers, new wavers, performance artists, fashion designers and drag queens.11 Furthermore, the scene’s aesthetic diversity and on-the-cheap, collaborative ethos responded to the highly produced, highly glossed and exclusive air around disco’s biggest presence and most iconic nightclub: .

Though close by, Club 57 distanced itself from the perceived schlock of Studio

54 in its ambience, atmosphere and entertainment leaving its oddly similar (though quasi- happenstance) name to provide a coolly ironic twist on the original club’s decadent

11 Steven Hager, Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 3.

38 corporate affiliation with celebrity.12 Though many figures in the scene looked to Warhol for a template for previously untrod paths to fame, the world they produced to play and exist in was a far coarser, less costly existence, in which stage props that nodded to the future were crafted not only out of images from the past as Warhol’s had been, but also the literal garbage scraps and cast off polyester and plastics of the post WWII production period.

Club 57 served as an avant garde and postpunk performance space that also functioned as a collaborative laboratory for its regulars. Many attendees came from the nearby School of Visual Arts, though artists of all types ended up using the space to try out new artistic experiments.13 Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, , ,

Klaus Nomi and others contributed to a uniquely gay flavor that later differentiated Club

57 from the atmosphere of the Mudd Club. addresses the long lineage of pop culture that descends from Club 57’s unique ironic take on American pop culture’s past:

Fueled by acid, mushrooms, and poppers, Club 57’s vibe was kitschedelic. It helped pave the way for the mainstreaming of camp and Mondo aesthetics that took place in the nineties and included Deeelite, Nick at Night, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and the crossover success of ’s films and Tim Burton movies like Ed Wood and the lamentable Mars Attacks! The Club 57 ethos was playful in both the childlike and theatrical sense of the word “play.” Artifice was celebrated and gender was treated as performative rather than innate.14

12 Ibid., 12. 13 Peter Frank and Michael Mckenzie, New, Used and Improved: Art for the 80's (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987), 66. 14 Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 265.

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Noticeably absent from Reynolds’s lineage is the boom in mainstream interest in drag in the 1990s- and the household name status of RuPaul herself. As we will see in Chapter 3,

RuPaul and the Downtown drag that contributed to drag’s mainstreaming in the 1990s also exhibited this kitschedelia, directly inherited through the lineage of drag this dissertation explores. The B-52’s and Deeelite, cited by Reynolds as inheritors of Club

57’s kitschedelia, both hold significant ties with the world of drag. Deeelite arose from the same Pyramid Nation circles as RuPaul, who cites their success as a point of initial envy due to their contemporaneous proximity within the nightclub world. Deeelite lead singer Lady Miss Kier’s stage name signifies her metaphorical rearing by drag queens.

The B-52’s may have been outside Atlanta where RuPaul worked before his New York days, but their styles shared similarities even then with punk, television, and old movies serving as major influences for both. Later, RuPaul featured as an unmissable extra in the

B-52’s video for “Loveshack,” cementing their shared Southern trash meets camp aesthetic in a moment of queer music video glory.

Club 57 provided a collaborative space that artists could float freely in and out of as they worked with others developing art there. The space allowed them to freely experiment with one another without institutional pressures to produce work acceptable to either the masses or the art market. Many performances at the venue were attended by little more than a handful and even at capacity it held only a small set of attendees.15

Despite the experimental art lab nature of the club and its often small crowds, ideas conceived there managed to move beyond the club walls due to its status as a place to see

15 Tim Lawrence, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 (London: Duke University Press, 2016), 39.

40 and be seen. Keith Haring states, “It was the experimental ground for everything that happened in the clubs, because it was small and it was commercially unfeasible to ever make money there… Other club owners would come there to get ideas, and to hire us to do it at the other clubs like the Mudd Club or Danceteria.”16 Club 57 then served as a space for artists to try out new concepts and collaborate without the usual demands from venues that acts must bring in a large enough audience to turn a profit. This also allowed for a sort of test-run before moving performances to money-making venues.

In 1978, performance artists and club figures Ann Magnuson, David McDermott and a number of other prominent nightlife figures in the East Village created a four-night event to showcase the ironic, silly, aggressive, and otherwise seemingly untamed artists from the new wave scene as well as some straight off the streets. They christened the event “New Wave Vaudeville.”17 Though the term new wave had already fallen out of favor with many in the underground scene, this lent an air of anti-professionalism that assisted in the intentional uneasiness of the night’s entertainment. Ads were placed all over the area asking for auditions from “…Egyptian slaves, B-girl hostesses, robot monsters, geeks, Nazis, emotional cripples” and a number of other provocative and unusual items.18 Though McDermott made a number of attempts to publicize the event, it did not receive the attention or acclaim he had hoped for.19 However, according to all accounts one performance stood prominently over the others in its emotional and multi-

16 Elizabeth Sussman, Keith Haring (New York: Skarstedt Fine Art, 2008), 23. 17 Stanley Strychacki, Life as Art: The Club 57 Story (Bloomington: iUniverse, 2012), 42. 18 Armand Limnander, “Alien Status,” New York Times, August 27, 2006, https://mobile.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/style/t_w_1507_remix_nomi_.html 19 Steven Hager, Art After Midnight, Kindle -book.

41 sensory breadth and impact: the German-born alien spaceman falsettist, Klaus Nomi.

Nomi’s performance encapsulated the new wave obsession with the world of the future and science fiction while mixing high and low art with a countertenor falsetto smoothed upon the grindstone of the Maria Callas records he had been imitating for years. Nomi’s cool, detached vocal timbre and unusually high range seemed unbelievable to audiences

(especially among the other offerings at the NWV), leading McDermott to announce after each performance that Nomi’s vocals had been live rather than a recorded .

While Klaus Sperber (Nomi’s German birth name) had performed a few times in various new wave events at Max’s Kansas City and with Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous

Theatrical Group, his debut as the stage persona Klaus Nomi at New Wave Vaudeville made him a name on the scene almost instantaneously.20 While most of the acts featured in the event took a winking, ironic stance toward the audience and reveled in their amateurish nature, Nomi’s performance had a seriousness that showed an artist with a strong perspective hard at work, crafting something larger than a single night’s act aimed at mocking the established artistic order. Nomi’s grand entrance had the nature of an alien landing or as Susanne . Frantz aptly describes: “…what seemed like an apparition from Fritz Lang’s 1927 cinematic masterpiece, Metropolis. Like the film’s

Maschinenmensch robot, the newborn Nomi stepped stiffly forward with arms opened in oratorical posture.” Nomi’s grand entrance had also clearly been influenced by his time

20 The name Nomi had come from another performer who created an anagram from the title of OMNI magazine but quickly abandoned it, leaving Klaus to utilize it for his space age meets Baroque persona. Dominic Johnson, The Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 185.

42 observing the Opera in his younger days.21 As he entered the stage, a din of unrecognizable symphonic noise played leading to an orchestra hit as he stopped in place at the microphone. The recording continued, providing the orchestral background as he began to sing in a clear (if somewhat pinched), unaffected, unironic, and trained to some extent, countertenor falsetto. Nomi’s studied approach, combining agendered science fiction camp with an affective aria and make-up and costume inspired by 1920s and 30s

Berlin, showed his clear connections to both drag and performance art. Nomi had crafted a drag alien or robot, a gender neutral space-age diva. Nomi’s genderless diva of the future also echoes and re-envisions the celebrity castrati singers of the Baroque past, themselves generally cloaked in the most ornate costuming. When he entered the stage, rendered in black and white against the backdrop of orchestral noise, he wore a black leotard with a nearly imperceptible cummerbund-like black satin belt while encased in a clear plastic cape with a highly structured and rigid collar upcycled from a vintage women’s rain slicker. (See Fig. 1) The rain coat cape also had a large running around the perimeter of the base, so that it opened similarly to the base of a hoop skirt at knee level.

21Susanne K. Frantz, “Klaus Nomi: Astral Countervoice of the New Wave,” in Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-1990, ed. Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt (London: & A Publishing, 2011), 198.

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Figure 1: Klaus Nomi’s Debut at New Wave Vaudeville, 1978

Video footage of the event and numerous eye witness accounts attest to the crowd’s silence during the entire duration of Nomi’s siren-like performance of Saint-

Saens’ aria “Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix” (My heart opens to your voice). Unlike

McDermott, who wore an Egyptian-style costume with a kingly necklace made from

Chiclets, Nomi’s unusual visual image tilted heavily in favor of science-fiction future, rather than historical past. While singing, Nomi stands in place, just barely adjusting his hands, arms and head in the fashion of a mime or robot. These gestures bring to mind those used in Baroque opera to suggest affect, the area in which the countertenor would excel the most in later years as early music performance practice and revival of Baroque operas with male countertenors filling in for the castrati roles became a more common practice. After the aria draws to a close, a cacophony of recorded sounds creates a rumble that takes over and continue until his disappearance as smoke is released on stage, lights

44 flash and Nomi begins to take purposeful, but angular, awkward, and halting steps backward for a full minute until the audience no longer sees him and the curtain finally closes. As many have noted, the entire performance gave the effect of a strange extraterrestrial vocalist landing, communicating his message to the people of the world and then, without further comment, disappearing into the mists to return to his homeland.

It was this opera-singing spaceman persona that became the mainstay of his career and garnered him attention as one of the most significant new wave performers in the East

Village, the same persona that would later catch the eye of David Bowie after his return from Berlin.

Nomi’s impact derived not only from the power and emotion of his voice, but also from the visual elements used to craft his image for performance. At the core of Nomi’s extraterrestrial-meets-Baroque-affect visual presentation lay his ability to become black and white for the stage, making him seem as if he had walked out of a film screen. Nomi styled himself this way by first using thick, pancake stage makeup to paint his skin completely white and then outlined and stylized the other features of his makeup to exaggerate and define them. Nomi’s hairline had receded by this time; he emphasized and highlighted this fact through exaggeration rather than avoidance, creating a three-point crown design out of his remaining hair and dying it jet black to create high contrast with his white foundation. He also used black lipstick to draw attention to his vocal performance. He took that concept to the extreme by bringing his natural cupid’s bow mouth to two geometric points above his upper lip and enlarging his lips by overdrawing them. Nomi’s use of these opposing points on the color palette became his everyday look and he maintained this image throughout his career. This black and white imagery aided

45 in the construction of his futuristic persona, making him seem fully fabricated much like

Frankenstein’s monster. This fabricated imagery helped to highlight the real and authentic voice that went with it. Much like Dolly Parton speaks of having something to work against because while her persona and talents at songwriting and musicianship are

“totally real” her image is “completely unreal.” Nomi’s appearance provided a stage entrance that promised the spectacle of the future alien world, while bringing the voice from the European past. As photographer Antony Scibelli points out about Sperber,

“Seeing Klaus in black and white was easy. He had rendered himself into black and white. I think that Klaus was the first person I’ ever met who had been chemically treated to become black and white.”22

Nomi’s futuristic, geometric, and highly stylized look when combined with the unnatural sound of his then-unfamiliar countertenor and his mechanical movements conjured up to some the aesthetics of the German Bauhaus school of art. Though Klaus often claimed that he had no awareness of Bauhaus, his acknowledgment of the similarities between his work and that of the Bauhaus School reveal that he had some awareness of their aesthetics. It is not unlikely that Klaus may have heard about Bauhaus or seen photos of performances given that he was surrounded by art students. As RoseLee

Goldberg explains in her history of performance art, the Bauhaus School’s aims began with Walter Gropius’s “Bauhaus Manifesto” that aimed for a unification of the arts under a single “cathedral of socialism” that would wed all of the arts to technology.23

Exemplary of the “Man and Machine” concept central to the Bauhaus School, Glass

22 Nomi Song. 23 RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, Revised and expanded edition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 97.

46

Dance (1929) saw performer Carla Grosch dancing enclosed in a waist high metal hoop with dangling glass rods that went nearly to the floor while carrying glass orbs around his neck and in each hand while a glass globe enclosed his head. Nomi’s restrictive, affective posing while cloaked in highly shaped plastics of the 1950s future certainly echo a knowledge of the images of Bauhaus whether acknowledged or not.

Nomi’s strategies for stage production tended to reflect a similar approach to that of Gropius’s “cathedral of socialism” as well. Where the Bauhaus had its school of artists to draw from, Nomi formed a queer family of artists of his own, the Nomis. These

Downtown artists used stage design, music, choreography, costuming, lighting, and extrasensory elements like smoke to craft performances centered around Nomi and to a lesser degree, Joey Arias. According to new wave artist and former Nomi Kenny Scharf’s comments in Nomi Song, The Nomis shared a love of the science fiction pop culture of the 1950s and 60s that encompassed everything from the Jetsons to sci-fi B movies.24 The

Nomis took inspiration from the concept of space travel and the achievement of the moon landing, which ultimately led to their more central tenets, living their lives as a continuation of their stage concepts, enacting alien personae in their everyday interactions by eating “space food” and living as if they were trapped in a spaceship.

They also shared a common faith in the future of space travel as well as the earth’s impending doom. Their future, conceived from science fiction past and NASA’s present, consisted in the belief that space travel would allow us to leave the Earth and its destruction behind. What better way to deal with the end of the world, then, than to throw one last giant party. The Nomis’ style of body movement in daily life even bore out their

24 Nomi Song.

47 ideology, contorting their bodies with “new wave angles” similar to Nomi’s own. They lived, ate, and created stage performances together. While doing so, they submitted to a version of life-as-performance-art based in aesthetics and a way of life based on Nomi’s stage persona.25 At various times, Scharf, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Sex and others were part of the Nomi family and participated in stage performances with him.26 Joey Arias alone remained with Klaus throughout and is seen in almost all his stage performances before signing with new management.

The Nomi family lived their own camp version of science fiction extraterrestrial life. Richard Dyer’s formula for camp provides insight into Nomi’s musical life.

“…Camp is far more a question of how you respond to things than qualities inherent in those things. … it is a way of prising the form of something away from its content, of reveling in the style while dismissing the content as trivial.”27 Nomi’s musical director ’s selection of “Lightnin’ Strikes”—a 1966 Billboard pop number one single for falsetto singer Lou Christie28—as an opener and regular performance piece for Nomi’s shows, for instance, serves as a prime example of Nomi’s approach to camp. Nomi’s celebration of the forms and style of the past personify part of the camp of his persona and music. The choice of a long-forgotten song celebrated something of the past while also completely recontextualizing it by celebrating its form

25 Ibid. 26 Hager, Art After Midnight, Kindle e-book. 27 Richard Dyer, “It’s Being So Camp as Keeps Us Going,” The Culture of Queers (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), 52. 28 “Lou Christie: Hot 100,” Billboard, February 19, 1966, accessed April 6, 2017, http://www.billboard.com/artist/308246/lou-christie/chart.

48 and camping its lyrical content, that is, by vastly altering its meaning through a newly devised delivery and singing persona.

Lou Christie’s sexualized pop lyrics, begging “Listen to me baby/ you gotta understand/ You’re old enough to know/ the makings of a man,” became ironically detached and quasi-villainous when whispered forcefully by Nomi. The subject, altered from greaser loverboy to Germanic extraterrestrial with lines delivered pointedly “Listen to me baby/ it’s time to settle down/ Am I asking too much/ for you to stick around” followed later by Nomi’s operatic falsetto piercingly belting out “Lightning striking again!” The last line’s giddy delivery suggests a Frankensteinian response to reanimation as much as an announcement of extraterrestrial arrival, possibly the subject’s, via streaks of light in the night sky. Here Nomi creates a camp collage of references similar to what we will later see in RuPaul as well as a priori in Ludlam’s work.

Hoffman’s adaptation of “Lightning Strikes” also served practical ends of demonstrating Nomi’s range of singing styles while simultaneously amping audience interest as a regular live show opener. “Lightning Strikes” highlights three alternate vocal styles that also increasingly climb in range while shifting musical styles, part of the collage aspect I referred to above. This terracing of musical and vocal styles also creates a layered build to the chorus quite different in nature from the original. In verse one

Nomi delivers his lines in a quasi-spoken form, backed by a rhythmically and melodically repetitive bass and , sounding something akin to the buzzing of electricity.

Already he leaves Christie’s original a hull with little left but its lyrical and harmonic content. Christie’s rapist’s song reveals its subject’s dark intentions more readily in

Nomi’s version. Here the horror of science fiction image and sound begin to shine light

49 on truths that had always been present in the original, exposing the lyrics’ threatening nature. Without Christie’s cooing vocals submerged in a Spectorian wall of sound, and with the lyrics instead foregrounded through the sparse backing, Nomi’s camping of the original lays bare the demands and “uncontrollable” actions taken to “make time” with the woman of the song.

Nomi tackles the second verse with a musical style that celebrates the cloying, smarmy nature of the lyrics. He belts out clearly, but with an overly detached and over- articulate delivery, unnecessarily rolling his ’s: “Every boy wants a girl/ he can trust/ to the very end/

Baby that's you, won't you stay?” Nomi’s vocal timbre alters here as he shifts from speaking into a cabaret singing style. The song’s music video highlights this shift into singing and saccharinely overstated emotional statement, moving focus from Nomi’s face alone to the upper portion of his body, gesturing in symmetrical angles on each side in poses that draw attention to their artifice in much the same ways as those featured in the positioning of Baroque opera’s affect. Simultaneously, synthetic sounding high pitched supporting vocals make their first entrance sounding choral vocables in consonance with

Nomi’s. The artificial sound of the feminine voices adds to the increasingly threatening nature of the “lover” protagonist bearing out a girl who is threatened yet never materializes aurally. Nomi bites off the end of the second line tersely, punctuating each word: “But. Til. Then.” The supportive, if artificial, presence of the feminine background is suddenly removed, dropping back to the driving rhythmic repetition of the bass. The bass’s rhythmic repetition, coupled with the its new mobility, however stuntedly stuck on a repeating pattern, along with Nomi’s increasingly irritated sounding “I can’t stop/ I

50 can’t stop myself,” provides the final drive to the moment of electricity represented in the lightning strike of the chorus.

The chorus provides a moment of high camp focus on the spectacle of Nomi’s vocal display. Near the top of his falsetto and louder by far than the rest of the song’s vocals, Nomi all but yells “Lightning Striking Again!” Here, in concert appearances especially, Nomi’s vocal prowess as a falsetto singer distracts from the narrative with one hand, while simultaneously his sudden shocking and piercingly high vocals suggest a myriad of sexual metaphors concerning the song’s protagonist, as well as the sudden trauma likely experienced by the object of his pleading. The high pitched backing singers also re-enter at the chorus. The backing singers reiterate Nomi’s lines before repeating

“and again and again and again” after Nomi. These voices sound faint, thin, and certainly not altogether human. Thus they provide no stable footing for the increasingly bizarre and demanding behavior of the singer.

Through this kind of commentary on pop culture songs of the past, Nomi used the drag teachings of Ludlam to herald old works seen as passé and schlocky, adding a dose of the Ridiculous and absurd to make these works relevant by liberally altering the extant cultural object to reflect modern queer underground values based in Downtown ethos.

Nomi’s works can come off as mere kitsch at first glance, but deeper analysis and contextualization within Downtown’s commingled art, rock, theater, and drag scenes situates him as an example of intersectionality par excellence. Rooted in contemporary and historical performance art, Ludlam’s Theater of the Ridiculous, developments in visual art, and most significantly Club 57’s kitschedelic contributions to no wave and

51 new wave, Nomi’s persona, music and stage productions celebrated outmoded pop culture in futuristic creations that satirized the politics of the cultural present.

Nomi’s closest personal and professional bond came in the form of Joey Arias, one of the few friends who remained by Nomi’s side even to his death (as one of the earliest casualties of the then-unnamed disease AIDS). Arias and Nomi met in 1976 and became friends and companions as two odd birds of a feather who stood out among the punks, new wavers, and queer artists of the downtown scene. Though never romantically intertwined (as far as we know), the two moved in together, later forming the Nomis.29

Around this time, Nomi and Arias both worked at ’s department store, where

Arias masterfully played host and artistic visionary. The store attracted a diverse crowd by creating an atmosphere of playful artistry inside what Paper magazine writers Mickey

Boardman and Elizabeth Thompson call “a sort of fashion clubhouse for up-and-coming artists and musicians.”30 Staffed by infamous East Village nightlife figures working as salespeople, elaborately staged performances took place in window displays and inside the store, with the performers assisting customers in finding items most days, earning themselves commission to pay their rent and bankroll their artistic pursuits. The Nomis collaborated in the space, with Kenny Scharf premiering his first solo show there coupled with a performance by Nomi.31

29 Hager, Art After Midnight, Kindle e-book. 30 Mickey Boardman and Elizabeth Thompson, “Remembering Elio Fiorucci with Former Shop Boy Joey Arias,” Paper, last modified July 20, 2015, http://www.papermag.com/remembering-elio-fiorucci-with-former-shop-boy-joey-arias- 1427606252.html. 31 Even Madonna did a stint working for Fiorucci on her way up the showbiz ladder while her brother sang there. See Ibid.

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Arias embodied Fiorucci’s and served as the go-to dresser for the celebrities and icons that came through its trendy doors, the ringleader to a bizarre circus tent show where one could buy clothes or possibly catch an artist premiering a work or up and coming rockers and musicians doing a set.32 The image of Fiorucci’s as a party destination rather than a business is somewhat distorted however. In an interview for

Dominic Johnson’s The Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art, Arias’s usual clouds of mysticism and bravado part for a moment as he describes the real work that went on at Fiorucci’s:

I was a salesperson. I was there to sell clothes, I was paid on commission… People think I was doing performance art at Fiorucci, but that was because Klaus and I were filmed doing a one-off stunt in the window for television, and it was aired in a news report. It wasn’t a day-to-day occurrence, but rather a little show for the tourists. ”33 Arias gained prominence as a gatekeeper to the New York art world as an artist’s show at

Fiorucci’s could provide massive exposure to those with an eye for the increasingly attention-garnering Downtown artists’ works. Though Arias admits the television bit as an over the top moment of artifice, evidence exists that at least some of the events were meant to make a lasting impression. Nomi’s Fiorucci debut, for instance, featured him stepping into the spotlight from a door that opened out of an enormous black and white striped vinyl “N,” the shadow of his tri-point crown forming a Bat signal like image against the striped vinyl, one that went on to become his logo.34 (See Fig. 2)

32 Kim Hastreiter, “Joey Arias’s Eight Most Insane Moments from Working at Fiorucci’s,” Paper, July 21, 2015, http://www.papermag.com/joey-arias-eight-most- insane-moments-from-working-at-fiorucci-1427607106.html. 33 Joey Arias, “The Accidental Goddess: An Interview with Joey Arias,” The Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art, ed. Dominic Johnson (New York, NY: Palgrave and Macmillan, 2015), 183. 34 Nomi Song.

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Figure 2: Klaus Nomi’s Logo, co-designed with Page Wood, 1980

Like Nomi, Arias had taken an interest in pop and at a young age. He released a self-penned bubblegum pop single, “Burgerette” under Capitol Records.35

Based in his hometown of , Arias’s band Purlie played at the Whiskey A Go-

Go but ultimately nothing materialized beyond live gigs and the lone single, leading him to audition for now-legendary training ground the Groundlings.36 Performing in the Groundlings troupe and taking their classes prepared Arias for his future endeavors in writing and improvising for the stage and most importantly character creation. Arias moved to New York in 1975, just three years after Nomi’s arrival. He quickly merged with the underground Downtown performance, nightlife and art scenes. Arias befriended

Nomi, Keith Haring, Ann Magnuson, and a wide array of other significant nightlife figures. These early cooperative efforts in music, acting, and art of various types led

Arias to myriad fruitful collaborative projects, both during his time in the Downtown

35 Pam Degroff, “TVocalizers—Joey Arias,” TG Forum (site), October 10, 2011, http://www.tgforum.com/wordpress/index.php/tvocalizers-joey-arias/. 36 The Groundlings regularly served as a catalyst to mainstream fame for its strongest members, including actor Phil Hartman whose tenure coincided with Arias’s.

54 scene, and later when performing in and constructing major stage works with Cirque du

Soleil and the highly regarded puppeteer Basil Twist.37

Arias performed as a dancer in a large number of Nomi’s stage acts. The Nomis offstage and onstage melding of alien character personas into a constant performance where their daily lives became art garnered additional attention. Arias explain in Nomi

Song: “Around this time Klaus and I decided we were the future…We formed the Nomi family. We lived as if we were on the space shuttle. We ate little bits of food—space food.”38 The constant method-acting-turned-reality existence of the Nomis fed into their onstage act. Around this time David Bowie, having caught their show on the recommendation of mutual friends in Berlin, introduced himself to them at the Mudd

Club. Not long after, he invited the duo to be part of his upcoming performance on

Saturday Night Live.39

The collaboration between Bowie and the alien-like duo of Nomi and Arias proved a natural one. Their mutual interest in German performance, especially mime,

Bauhaus (whether through direct or indirect observation) and the of the 1930s brought them together along with the realization they shared friends from Berlin. Arias and Nomi’s infatuation with outer space also aligned them with Bowie’s oeuvre. Ziggy

Stardust and alien personas complete with costuming and make- up had much in common with the Nomis themselves, but the fascination with space travel

37 For more on Arias’s elaborate stage show with puppeteer Basil Twist and their separate biographies, see Arias with a Twist, directed by Bobby Sheehan (2010, New York, NY: Working Pictures, 2012), DVD. 38 Nomi Song. 39 Hager, Art After Midnight, Kindle e-book.

55 went further, to Bowie’s initial break into the mainstream with a self-penned song about an astronaut calling home base, “,” a track whose release coincided with the first moon landing.40 The song became emblematic of a return to success for Bowie when he rereleased it in 1975, and it became his first UK number one charting single, having originally risen on the chart to only the 5th position upon its initial release. Significantly, the Nomis’ merging of onstage and offstage realities, personae, and behaviors mirrored

Bowie’s own melding with the Ziggy Stardust persona and later .

After the implosion of the Thin White Duke, Bowie decided to pack his bags and head for Berlin to seek recovery, rest, and education in/exposure to other art forms. While there Bowie recorded three known now as “The ”: Low, Heroes, and Lodger. On these albums, Bowie explores new sonic territory through the use of experimental techniques borrowed from, among other sources, minimalism, the emerging

German electronics-based music exemplified by and their contemporaries, and twentieth century Western art music.41 While crafting these works, Bowie found out about Nomi through mutual friends who insisted the two meet or that Bowie at the very least go and see him perform.

Bowie came to New York in 1979 to work on some upcoming shows and prepare for a performance on Saturday Night Live. Late one night around 4 AM as the Mudd

40 Ian Chapman, Experiencing David Bowie: A Listener’s Companion (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 55. 41 Shelton Waldrep, Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 9.

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Club was emptying out for the evening, Bowie was introduced to Nomi and Arias.42

Initially, Bowie’s interest laid with Nomi alone but after meeting Arias he decided to use the two as a backing duo on his upcoming SNL performance. Given creative control over their costuming and about a thousand dollars in cash, Arias and Nomi found matching

Thierry Mugler geometric, monochromatic outfits.43 Arias would go on to become

Mugler’s fashion muse and regular collaborator after this initial encounter with his garments led to a later meeting between the two. Bowie also requested that Nomi and

Arias choreograph the show. According to Arias, Bowie lamented the fact that he met the two only after he had retired his Ziggy character from the stage.44 Ziggy’s alien presence, however, would still manifest, if indirectly, in the SNL set, as will be seen in my analysis.

Shelton Waldrep proposes a theory of Bowie’s “future nostalgia” that helps to situate the performer’s attraction to Downtown and to Nomi himself. Waldrep expounds on the futurity of Bowie’s imagined science fiction worlds that reveal a nostalgia for a past, always located in the present reality:

By taking us into the future he burrows more deeply into the present. The future he presents can be excitingly strange and fascinating, but it is never simply celebratory. Indeed, his glimpses into the imagined future are poignant and effective precisely because they are rooted in the present and have, therefore, sympathy for the now-ness of the time, the very inability to ever imagine the future as anything other than desire. The present is future’s nostalgia, but the future is the desire on the part of those living now to know what will become of them, to strive for something else.”45

42 Kim Hastreiter, “‘His mind was so open:’ Joey Arias on Performing with David Bowie and Klaus Nomi,” Paper, January 11, 2016, http://www.papermag.com/david- bowie-klaus-nomi-joey-arias-snl-1549090218.html. 43 Ibid. 44 Hastreiter, “‘His mind was so…,” http://www.papermag.com/david-bowie- klaus-nomi-joey-arias-snl-1549090218.html. 45 Waldrep, Future Nostalgia, 5.

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Waldrep notes that this sense of nostalgia and futurism is most central on Bowie’s 1977-

1980 work as he transforms into something larger than simply “glam rocker.” This path also led Bowie back to New York to resorb his own past through the imagined future worlds of the Nomis. The resulting performance personifies Bowie’s new directions in music and approaches to the stage, rooted in the Downtown present, a present that took influence from his most significant past incarnation—Ziggy.

Bowie’s selections for the performance reached past Ziggy to his earlier flirtations with androgynous gender identity. While Bowie’s on the cover of The Man

Who Sold the World (1970) reflected hippie androgyny, his drag for SNL would present a harder edge and a sharper, more stylized look. Bowie’s gender performance played out on SNL differently than in his earlier attempts at cross-dressing because they took inspiration in performance art’s focus on the body and altering it as a productive source for material. Bowie’s performances here exemplify his interests in the Bauhaus concepts of unifying and utilizing multiple arts in single works and its fusions of man and machine, Lindsay Kemp’s particularly gay-infused approach to mime, as well as contemporary performance art and its echoes through Downtown.46 These interests bring to Bowie’s performances on Saturday Night Live with Arias and Nomi an intense focus on the body as a surface for, and work of, art. Nomi and Arias’s robotic, angular performances help to highlight the artificial nature of daily life throughout the piece and provide commentary on Bowie’s performances. Most importantly, they provide Bowie a direct link to what is most current in underground and avant garde pop performance art.

46 Ibid., 18.

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As obvious descendants of Bowie’s Stardust character, they also echo the portion of the

1970s where Bowie’s fame and notoriety were at their most intense: the Ziggy era.

Performing on December 15, 1979, Bowie also chose songs that neatly encompassed his output for the entire decade, laying out three distinct tableaux. “The

Man Who Sold the World” had been Bowie’s first hit of the 70s in the initial year of the decade and marked his first time donning a dress as well as a clearer turn in his career toward rock and roll rather than folk oriented sounds. “TVC-15” keeps the theme of science fiction horror, but shifts from alien apocalypse to the fear of humanity’s detachment caused by technology. Originally appearing on 1976’s ,

“TVC-15” highlights Bowie’s next major career shift as he became the Thin White Duke and began to embrace noisier sonic landscapes. Closing the show with “Boys Keep

Swinging” brings the audience to the most current point on the journey through representative songs of his career as it had been released only a few months before in

April of 1979. Here Bowie performs a bent version of 1950s nostalgia somewhat akin to that of Club 57. Though the driving guitars and backbeat, reminiscent of early rock and roll, represent 1950s heterosexual , that masculinity is now repositioned as the overt, performative machismo of late 70s gay culture represented in Tom of Finland imagery. As Perry N. Halkitsi points out, during the 1970s, gay male culture took on a performative hypermasculine nature as men began suiting up in outfits that reflected traditionally working-class, physically intense (and thus producing enormous muscles) heterosexual jobs in attempts to both camp and reclaim masculinity for gay men: construction worker, police man, etc. Tom of Finland’s pornographic cartoons of the same period reflected this through similar depictions wherein traditionally masculine men

59 engaged in gay sex.47 Bowie’s use of drag in the music video for the song earlier that year drives home the queerness of the masculinity represented in the song’s lyrics. Arias and

Nomi serve not only as commenters upon each of the tableaux presented, but their presence serves as a reference to the glam rock Ziggy Stardust era not presented in the chronological tableaux of Bowie’s career with their white faces contoured in the extreme with blush matching their dyed hair colors.48

Beginning the set with “The Man Who Sold the World,” with Bowie between them, Arias and Nomi stand dressed symmetrically and geometrically in dresses that resemble knee length lab coats with angular shoulder padding and matching pants and shoes. Their hair is dyed and faces contoured to match their outfits: red for Joey and for

Nomi his signature black. Facing opposing ends of the stage, the two emerge from their circle with Bowie and lift him underneath his flattened palms, carrying him to foreground. (See Fig. 3) The alien subjects present their leader, one whose attempts to pass as human are always garbled and overly stylized as if learned from the artificial poses of catalog models as much as mime. (Ironically, Bowie’s body is only allowed totally unencumbered movement when absented and replaced by the form of a puppet in

“Boys Keep Swinging.”) Mirroring the minimal look of Nomi and Arias, Bowie stands still, encased in a recreation of a Tristan Tzara outfit in which he too was originally

47 Perry N. Halkitis, “Masculinity in the age of AIDS: HIV Seropositive Gay Men and the ‘Buff Agenda,’” in Gay , ed. Peter Nardi (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2000), 131. 48 Contouring is the make-up artist and drag terminology for the shadows and lines created on the face with darker make-up products in order to re-shape the appearances of bone structures.

60 carried onstage.49 The Tzara outfit, a plastic geometric tuxedo that only reveals Bowie’s arms, draped loosely in what appears to be grey burlap-like material, aligned him with a tradition of avant-garde and performance art going back to the beginning of the century.

This style also heavily influenced Nomi and his contemporaries by echoing one of its major artists’ own body-restricting costuming.50 Though the paint, powder, and hair dye of Ziggy have long since disappeared from Bowie, Nomi and Arias serve as references to the influence of Bowie’s alien past, and their makeup and costuming have much in common with the bisexual rocker persona. Their presence situates Bowie within the alien landscape of Stardust while allowing him to take a more ironically distanced approach to his own alien subject position in the set. Bowie’s entrance and exit for this first number also echo Nomi’s own shows, where he often entered and exited the stage in wordless clouds of smoke that established his extraterrestrial landing.

49 Kathryn Johnson, “David Bowie is,” David Bowie: Critical Perspectives, Routledge Studies in Popular Music, ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, Martin Power (New York: Routledge, 2015), 13. 50 Ibid.

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Figure 3: Klaus Nomi, Joey Arias, and David Bowie, “The Man Who Sold the

World,” Saturday Night Live, December 15, 1979

Sonically, “The Man Who Sold the World” becomes staccato and halting in vocal delivery, threatening in a way the original never presented. The 1970 recording marked an acid trip wherein the subject meets his doppelganger who slowly morphed into something darker as the song moves forward. This staging presents an altogether different situation. The non-moving automaton body with only the arms and head in motion suggest an uncomfortable fusing of human and non-human that leave us to wonder if both the subject and doppelganger have merged into one altogether alien being.

The stiff, ceremonial arm movements and resting placement of hands joined at the fingertips in front of Bowie’s chest when not in motion mirror the halting and staccato vocal delivery that had once been legato and spaced out.

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The sense of unease increases when Nomi and Arias’s backing vocals dramatically alter the song’s original meaning. Where previously there had been no major backing vocals, Nomi and Arias now perform call and response with their alien overlord.

Entering with haunting staccato pierces of falsetto, Nomi and Arias stand in for the threat of larger alien forces who may be the subjects of Bowie’s extraterrestrial ruler. These backing vocals provide no comfort to the listener with their emotionally, as well as musically, detached delivery. Nomi and Arias’s heightened tessitura in these call and response sections simultaneously intensifies hysteria with their initial foreboding entrance of “Oh no/ Not me” followed by an “Ooh” vocable. As the song fades out, the backing band freezes in place as Nomi and Arias formally proceed to lift Bowie by his palms once more, carrying him into final position. The unseen forces that freeze the band may well be represented in the electronic synthesizer sounds that provide backing for the alien processional after the song’s fadeout. After placing Bowie, the Nomis assume their positions on his left and right side just behind him and leaning out. This configuration creates an architectural form representing their reascension, akin to Nomi’s own exit orchestrations begun at the New Wave Vaudeville.

Bowie’s second number sees him performing a garbled transmission of gender from the future. In this performance he appears in a replication of what Joey Arias referred to as the “Chinese stewardess’s uniform,” again with no character makeup. In this song, Nomi and Arias have far fewer vocal lines, leaving them free to use the stage with the added props of a newspaper and a large pink poodle doll whose mouth is a television whose screen is edged with triangular “teeth.” Live footage from Bowie, Nomi, and Arias’s performance fed back onto the screen in a looping of image that occasionally

63 compounded into screen within a screen visions of the poodle and its mouth consuming the live performers. Waldrep argues that “Bowie gives us a way to understand the vicissitudes of performance, aestheticizing the link between rock music and everyday life by calling attention to the artificiality of both.”51 Nowhere is this more apparent in the set than in the latter two performances where the duo transform from new wave sendups of

1950s suburban conformity into aliens whose movements have achieved a sort of rock and roll reality. Nomi and Arias here perform a stilted, gestural, angular form of movement that came out of the style of body and hand gestures cultivated in the Nomis.

Throughout the song, Nomi and Arias feign human behavior expressed through their alien Nomi lens. They pull the poodle around by its transmission cable as they pass one another on the sidewalk and wave hello. They open and pretend to read the paper. (See

Fig. 4) Nomi and Arias present a vision of the technology fetishizing, electronic world of the sci-fi future of the 1950s past. The narrator of the song and his girlfriend both fetishize the amazing innovation of the TVC-15, a futuristic “hologramic” television whose screen allows for viewers to enter the worlds it presents, even after she climbs inside never to return. Nomi and Arias’s performance then exemplifies the logical outcome of this kind of consumption based fetishization of the electronic world where even the fluffy poodle’s television mouth has teeth that engulf the viewer and the viewed in the endless loop of image. (See Fig. 5) This further takes the song’s original concept of the screen literally consuming the viewer and through the poodle’s mouth, comments on the loop of consumption that has occurred. The loop consists in this case of Bowie’s original spaceman image, the consumers who folded it into their own identities and

51Waldrep, Future Nostalgia, 3.

64 artworks, and his own performance of alien persona with Nomi and Arias. That image in turn feeds into the poodle’s mouth, the home viewing television audience, and refers back to Bowie’s regular use of self referentiality. This circle of references also mimics the referentiality of drag in general as well as Nomi and Arias’s drag’s referencing Bowie’s queer alien Ziggy Stardust.

Figure 4: Klaus Nomi, Joey Arias and David Bowie, “TVC-15,” Saturday Night

Live, December 15,1979

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Figure 5: Poodle Doll featuring live feed of Klaus Nomi, Joey Arias (pictured),

and David Bowie, “TVC-15,” December 15, 1979

Nomi and Arias’s camp performance of a silly cyborg future, complete with faux, angularly positioned non-sounding whistling to the dog, is interrupted by their slavish devotion to operations of the “TVC-15.” Suddenly Nomi and Arias shift upon the arrival of the chorus from robotic humanoids of a future landscape into the operators of the terrifying “TVC-15,” the television that consumes its female viewer. Assuming rigidly unmoving foot positions in front of the mics with no movement below the waist, they stand at oddly angled attention, tweak knobs and move their heads from side to side, operating and reacting to the machine. At the entrance of the choruses they mime pulling levers, shifting the music into its climactic moments. Their voices enter in a range much closer to Bowie’s own, sublimating their more individualized identity from “The Man

Who Sold the World” to their slavish positioning in devotion to the TVC-15. Where the

66 first number saw them as alien subjects to overlord Bowie, their persona now reflected an

Orwellian vision of Earth’s future inhabitants enslaved to a constant loop of electronic media.

For “TVC-15” Bowie smoothed out the noisy sounds he had begun to pick up as the latter half of the 70s began. The band plays the song in the style of a straight forward rock and roll number as Bowie swivels at the knee and swings the mic with rock braggadocio. Bowie’s movements, restricted by his tight pencil skirt, approach 1950s rock posturing in much the same way as Nomi and Arias portray the future imagined in the 1950s. Repositioning these worlds of the future and the past allows for commentary on current issues for the Nomis and Bowie. Bowie’s macho bravado and posing are shown for the artifice they are when presented in the “Chinese stewardess” dress and red stockings. Here Bowie’s posturing and head seem to signal rock masculinity while, though Bowie’s sexual appeal often lay in his androgynous beauty, the Chinese stewardess costume gave his figure a squared off and covered up look reflecting the confining and banal nature of even female attire when presented as a uniform. This disconnected form of drag also represents a garbled image presented by the “TVC-15,” one meant to entice Earth’s viewers with the same head literally placed on another body to be more endearing and feign authenticity, but ultimately falling short through the mismatching of gender signifiers.

For “Boys Keep Swinging,” Bowie returns to the stage as a puppet with a human head. (See Fig. 6.) In this performance he shifts audience attention to the subject of queer sexuality and alternative masculinity rather than the androgynous possibilities of gender.

Bowie showcases, through the combination of human and automaton taken from the

67 world of Bauhaus, how masculinity is as much artifice as the femme queerness presented through his Ziggy persona. By utilizing the male, shirtless puppet body with extendable phallus, rather than his own physical body, in juxtaposition with the androgynous

“Chinese stewardess” costuming, Bowie highlights the performative nature of both femininity and masculinity. This is achieved through an old puppeteer’s trick where the puppet body is attached to the performer’s front with the head the only visible part of

Bowie’s actual body, his body then further deleted through blue-screen technology. With the addition of modern technological advancements Bowie’s clothing and personage behind the puppet remained out of sight. His puppet automaton heralded the same kind of

“man and machine” themes seen in Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus performance pieces as well as Nomi’s echoes of those themes through the prism of post-World War II science fiction.52 “Boys Keep Swinging” appears at first to be a celebration of male privilege with Bowie’s exuberant delivery of “ loves ya/ The clouds part for ya/ Nothing stands in your way/When you're a boy.” However, the song quickly reveals itself as a critique of the homogenizing effects of masculinity and shows that male privilege also applies to those men who sleep with men, something many in the queer world still have a difficult time grappling with today—“When you're a boy/ You can wear a uniform/ When you're a boy/ Other boys check you out/ You get a girl/ These are your favourite things/

When you're a boy.”53

52 Philipp Blom, Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938 (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 191.

53 Bowie’s music video for “Boys Keep Swinging” demonstrated that when you are a boy you can also be a girl. Bowie stars as both a masculine singer in suit and tie as well as three female backing singers. The younger looking drag versions of Bowie remove their wigs and smear their lipstick while walking a catwalk near the end of

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Figure 6: Klaus Nomi, Joey Arias, and David Bowie, “Boys Keep Swinging,”

Saturday Night Live, December 15, 1979

As mentioned above, Bowie ironically frees his body to move, bounce and dance about the stage only when replaced by the automaton puppet body. Here, the alien presented to us by Nomi and Arias finally imitates the Earthling persona of the white male. This identity grants it its closest link with humanity while highlighting the artifice of that presentation as Bowie’s performance. While Bowie trounces the stage, throwing his puppet hands around rhythmically and taking up significantly more space than he has the rest of the performance, Nomi and Arias take on an altogether different nature in this

the video, each time revealing the boy underneath the beautiful drag. The matronly third drag version of Bowie walks the runway with the aid of a cane, lips pursed and clad in a somber black and white cardigan, blouse, and skirt, and blows a kiss to the audience; the gesture might reference the sort of camp image represented in Bette Davis’s portrayal of Baby Jane Hudson in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Aldrich, 1962). Bowie’s drag, in this instance, provides another reading of “Boys Keep Swinging” that shows one way he reflected his gay audience’s sensibilities and desires.

69 last performance. The Nomis stand with hands on tapping one ankle in time, looking like the backup singers in a girl group. They make mock-macho flexing gestures in time to the music, largely serving to back up and reinforce Bowie’s takedown of runaway masculinity. The aliens are thus normalized by the end. They have adapted to become humans in their girl group, although this notion is highly troubled by Bowie’s slick, plastic puppeted torso glimmering against the stage light with Bowie’s head appearing overly large for it on camera. It all adds up to a dim view on society’s celebration of homogenizing masculinity even among queers. The aliens, having learned to fake it ‘til they made it, take over and sublimate our rock stars with their own, controlled plastic copies. Adding insult to injury and piling on the masculine signifiers to take it to the realm of Ludlam’s Ridiculous in order to make a point about what you can get away with

“when you’re a boy,” Bowie ends the number flashing an enormous flesh-colored phallus that unlike the line “Other boys check you out” evaded television censors’ notice.

Bowie’s SNL performance encapsulates the loop of influence between himself and the underground Downtown art and music scene. Bowie’s calls to his followers, aliens in their hometowns, in the form of extraterrestrial figures and lost explorer of outer space led queer performers to work together on science fiction infused camp constructions of their own future possibilities. They celebrated pop culture’s past through ironic re- envisionings of alien pop stars of the future. Their cold detached retellings of the harsh realities of rock and roll destabilize previous obsessions with menacing masculinity that disregard any attempts to stall its roaming libidinal drive. This drive is then aligned with

Bowie’s supreme ruler position throughout the performance as the center of attention even amongst the ghostly white alien faces of Nomi and Arias.

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Though Bowie and the Downtown duo expressed mutual desire in creating future projects together, nothing materialized. Nomi, believing the chance to work with Bowie was his ticket to fame, began work on an with accompanying French and

American tours, as French audiences had responded to Nomi with wide praise. Nomi’s albums, interesting in their own right, explore a somewhat different sound than that from his stage works presented to Downtown audiences. This shift is personified by the musical backing for Nomi in a live performance recorded for Urgh! A Musical War, where Nomi is presented as something more closely resembling arena rock featuring modern ballet dance movement from his backing dancers.

Though Nomi’s albums after this period reflect an important part of his career, they show a different take on the Nomi persona that is less relevant to our narrative.

Nomi and Arias’s prime significance for this project’s purposes lay in their work together in the Downtown world that established a new approach to drag. This approach combined performance art, experimental theater, the visual arts, and new innovations in using drag to transform more than just gender. Nomi and Arias used drag to reconfigure themselves into alien life forms by utilizing costuming to alter the body and makeup to recontour and alter the face in unexpected ways. The taking on of unique, self-crafted character personas performed by Nomi and Arias also served as a primer for the shift in drag from impersonation to cultivating one’s own persona seen in Lady Bunny, RuPaul and others.

The influence of punk drag like Wayne/ Jayne County and the Warhol girls also allowed for an approach that expanded its aesthetics beyond the traditional glamour exemplified by drag performers in middle-class supper clubs.

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The Nomis are also one of drag’s first forays into legitimacy, this time in the rock world, through their appearance with Bowie. Bowie’s use of the duo as a central element of the performance, given the freedoms of costume creation and choreographing their own movements, granted the underground, drag infused, and distinctly queer performers a heretofore unforeseen access to a major media moment on live television. Though this moment did not lead the two to their own fame, it gave Arias a leg up in Downtown cultural capital that would help position him as a major force there. It also allowed him to make the jump to drag when it became a central focus of New York nightlife. It is difficult to know what lay in store for Nomi as his career was cut short a few years later upon his death from complications from AIDS. However, this performance, viewed by countless fans over the years, served as a standout moment in Bowie’s career. Repeated resurfacings of the Saturday Night Live performances online, as well as a 2004 documentary, have brought new Nomi fans to the fold, giving him his own cult following. Nomi’s image even managed to rear its black-and-white head on RuPaul’s

Drag Race when took to the runway in a Nomi-based tuxedo while she carried a rainbow trout affixed to a silver platter. The look won her praise from RuPaul who came of age in New York only a few years after Nomi’s death.

Nomi and Arias, then, provide some of the first rumblings of new development in drag as an art form: drag and the other arts joined collaboratively to celebrate pop culture of the primarily post WWII era. This ironic sendup of the past in turn became part of drag culture’s central appeal when it entered mainstream culture in the 1990s. It is in their acts, as well as Charles Busch’s, that Ludlam’s queer and distinctly Ridiculous approach to pop culture manages to border constantly on territories of emotional depth and

72 lighthearted silliness and play. The glamour and female illusion based drag of the past had become, to some, seemingly turgid and dated, stuck in outmoded forms of glamour that no longer critiqued straight society and the demands of imposed masculinity. This high glamour drag as represented in character illusion and showgirl headdresses, celebrated the reiteration of hollow femininity that the new wave queers deemed ripe for revision. Nomi and Arias demonstrated that the entire concept of drag could be shifted to reimagine not only gender, but entire worlds and bodies when combined with the talents of artists skilled in multiple areas. Nomi’s rarely changing look also established that one could remain a single character and maintain one image alone rather than shifting costume to constantly maintain spectacle or illusion.

Importantly, the Nomis ultimately used their artistic talents to craft a musical stage show, not a theater piece. Nomi’s falsetto established vocal drag, again not to shift gender as queens had done for years, but to shift his identity to non-terrestrial being.

Nomi furthered the cause of the mixture of high and low references advanced by Ludlam as well through his alteration between popular song forms, whether covers or originals composed for him, and period opera works. While Nomi and Arias’s attempts to become

Warholian stars may not have been successful at the time, both deserve a place in queer and drag history for their initial fusions of pop culture, high and low references, and a no- wave approach to drag performed for mixed audiences of straight and gay attendees. This kind of approach opened the way for the future parties of Susanne Bartsch, explored in the next chapter, which granted drag queens new found access to audiences largely unfamiliar with drag. This new approach also set the stage for drag’s later ascendance into pop culture prominence.

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Chapter Two

Queens and Queers Come Together:

London, Harlem, and the Vogue Explosion

This chapter navigates the muddied waters that connect 1980s London and New

York nightlife in order to explain how these two multidisciplinary artistic subcultures were fused through the parties of Susanne Bartsch and how this fusion produced a new, multifaceted image of drag for the larger public’s consumption. In

London, the New Romantics came to represent a form of modern dandyism based in reconfigured and recycled fashions of the past. The New Romantics’ focus on the individual and the cult of personality allowed queer sensibilities to take prominence.

Initially, deejays were the focus of New Romantic’s aural soundscape and David Bowie and punk bands were the prime artists played before members of the scene formed their own successful musical groups. As New Romantic magazines began to make money, nightclub personalities capitalized on the movement by translating their outrageous fashion into cash through the creation of successful music videos from New Romantic performers like , Marilyn, and Culture Club. The musical artists that emerged from the New Romantic nightlife scene favored a smoother, pop sound that like the American new wave acts, heavily featured synthesizers. The queer visuals and confrontational style of the New Romantics influenced Leigh Bowery intensely enough to convince him to move from to London. His persona and those of the New Romantics constitute the queers referenced in the chapter title. Those queers would eventually mix with the

74 various New York queen cultures in the weekly parties of New York’s underground nightlife.

Drag as an art form became strengthened and, expanded in its possibilities by an increasing set of artistic influences, reinvigorated for a new generation. Drag became a cultural force to be reckoned with as the energy and stylized imagery of the Ballroom met the campy send-up of past culture represented by Downtown performers. This multicultural melting pot of queens and their own subcultures merged within the context of the Love Ball, leading drag to becoming a mainstream sensation and exposing these drag queens and their aesthetics to some of the most influential names in New York.

Helmed by Bartsch, The Love Ball attracted media attention, connected drag to the elite of New York Society and demonstrated that drag queens could attract significant attention from both nightlife insiders and elite tastemakers. The success of the Love Ball also importantly translated into serious cash to fulfill the queer community’s need for more resources and better treatment for HIV/AIDS patients.

I focus on several individual narratives within this chapter to highlight the ways that the events leading up to and away from Susanne Bartsch’s “Love Ball,” which functioned as a “spark in the powder keg,” thrust the diverse styles of New York drag onto the national stage. It may appear to be structured around significant mainstream musical figures, but in fact what I wish to show is how these performers and their performance aesthetics propelled themselves, via limited opportunities, ever closer to penetration of the . I the movement of performers over and across the previously discussed boundaries of drag (as well as its individuated aesthetic camps/cultures) to showcase the diversity of drag and queer performance and in order to

75 show how these shifts broadened queens’ access to legitimate worlds of commerce for their art. Underlying the propulsion of drag ever upward from the world of nightlife was its connection to . Queen Latifah, Malcolm McLaren, Madonna, and other artists capitalized on the increasing chic of drag and Harlem moves with songs that sounded like the featured prominently in the Ballrooms.

Meanwhile in London, the New Romantic performers pursued a smoother and more intimate pop sound that moved away from the stylization of American new wave acts.

Leigh Bowery’s musical efforts reflect something closer to the experimental nature of no wave acts with abrasively aggressive lyrics, screams, and noisy distortion to accompany his outrageous stage show.

London: Blitz Kids and Leigh Bowery

We begin by backing up a few years and briefly shifting our focus to London. The movers and shakers in and music began looking for something new in nightlife culture when punk’s popularity reached a level of mass appeal. That popularity ran counter to its anti-establishment ethos. Punk had become somewhat bereft of its seemingly authentic connections to poverty, griminess, and originality and had thus become passé. Hebdige describes how this process occurs for style subcultures, noting how punk’s achievement of high fashion status signaled its death knell:

Youth cultural styles may begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must inevitably end by establishing new sets of conventions; by creating new commodities, new industries or rejuvenating old ones (think of the boost punk must have given haberdashery!) This occurs irrespective of the subculture’s political orientation … It also happens irrespective of the startling content of style: punk clothing and insignia could be bought mail- order by the summer of 1977, and in September of that year Cosmopolitan ran a review of Zandra Rhodes’ latest collection of couture follies which consisted entirely of variations of the punk theme. Models smouldered

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beneath mountains of safety pins and plastic (the pins were jeweled, the ‘plastic’ wet-look satin) and the accompanying article ended with an aphorism—“To shock is chic”—which presaged the subculture’s imminent demise.1 The music scene began to move away from punk as well as bands created more aggressive, faster, noisier, and more experimental approaches. The three chord songs of prior punk groups sounded much less aggressive when set against the emergent noise- laden soundscapes of no wave artists. London nightlife began to shift as punk and disco were assimilated into popular culture through events like the punk fashion show mentioned by Hebdige, and in disco’s case the Hollywood imagery of Saturday Night

Fever. The advent of single-night parties with individually crafted ambience and atmosphere provided fresh options for those seeking a new clubbing experience. In years past, clubs’ ambience, décor, and soundscape had generally been controlled and set by the owners and management. London’s nightlife shifted as individuals who had a decent rolodex and could fill the club with their friends and acquaintances began to take over for once-a-week functions that became known as clubs unto themselves. Power changed hands as small subcultures began to hold sway with once-a-month or once-a-week nights where the club owners gave control to whoever planned the night.2 The temporary and shifting nature of these nights also fed into an insider culture since one needed to be "in the know" in order to find out what was happening on what night at what venue in order to make an appearance.

1 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, (London: Routledge, 1979), 96. 2 Chris Sullivan and Graham Smith, We Can Be Heroes: Punks, Poseurs, Peacocks and People of a Particular Persuasion; London Clubland 1976-1984 (London: Unbound, 2012), 47.

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In 1978, Strange and , who had both been members of the

Bromley Contingent, arranged for a one-off night at Billy’s, a dive bar in .3 Billy’s was a perfect initial location for the crowd they wanted to bring in, being an atrocious bed of grime and seediness hailing from both its physical uncleanliness and its relationship to the legal and illegal sex that went on up and down the streets nearby.4 The event began as regular “Bowie nights,” playing Bowie’s music along with sets from Egan that included heavy doses of -produced disco and Grace

Jones alongside Kraftwerk, Bowie, , and other electronic sounds.5 At these events, fashion, rather than dancing, took center stage as the attendees dressed in grand tributes to glamour past and future; the crowd at Billy’s gave a new face to both glam and punk by fusing elements of both. Clubgoers purchased an inordinate amount of the clothes from suppliers including Lawrence Corner’s army supply store, Helen Robinson’s

Acme Attractions descendant PX, and local costume shop Charlie Fox, which they ripped apart to create new looks.6 The royal, military and theatrical costumes purchased were then deconstructed and reconstructed into new looks fashioned from disparate signifiers of elegance like ornate brooches, diadems, flowing cape-like garments, etc. The looks produced provided early grounding for the excess and androgyny of the New Romantics.

3 The Contingent were a group of teenage early adopters of punk who grew up in Bromley, England. Their fashion involved an outrageous approach to creating affront and included the adoption of swastika arm bands and “Nazi chic” combined with the punk fashions of and Malcolm McLaren’s shops “Sex” and “Seditionaries.” They were also known to hang around in gay bars: they found that drag queens and gay men minded their presence less than most and left them to their own devices. For more on the see Paul Marko, London WC2: A Punk History (London: Punk 77 Books, 2008), 13-19. 4 Sullivan and Smith, We Can Be Heroes, 50. 5 Ibid., 48-50. 6 Alistair O’Neil, London: After a Fashion, (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 179.

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Fashion scholar, contemporary of the scene and one-time editor of BLITZ Ian R Webb provides an apt description as follows:

The look was post-punk meets glam but heavily influenced by Kenzo and his Toy Soldier look (like in the Nutcracker). I remember buying purple satin from Joh [sic] Lewis to wear as a regal looking diagonal sash across my chest, accessorized military style with diamante brooches and toy medals from a shop called Tridias, I wore a hat that I got from Laurence Corner army supply store – part Nehru, part Thunderbirds.7 Where glam’s fashion consisted primarily of a glittering, ostrich feather trimmed androgyny, the emergent New Romantic look took a much wider angle on glamour with a heavy focus on historical trappings and blousing alongside elements that suggested a bent version of nobility.

“Bowie Night” soon outgrew Billy’s and moved on to the Blitz where it garnered even more attention. The nights gained prominence through the fashions created by, among others, the students of the fashion schools sandwiching the club, St. Martin’s and

Central School. ran the door, basing admission to the club on appearance and style. Those he chose not to let in were treated with notoriously villainous camp as

Strange would turn a mirror to their faces, sarcastically asking “Would you let yourself in?”8 The club became successful, even attracting the attention of David Bowie, who came to the club in 1980 and arranged for Steve Strange and three other Blitz kids to star in his music video for “Ashes to Ashes” to be shot the following day.9 In a relatively short amount of time, New Romantic clubgoers from the scene became musical stars in their own right. Though Steve Strange had some success with his band Mirage, and

7 Iain R Webb as quoted in Sullivan and Smith, We Can Be Heroes, 52. 8 Dave Rimmer, New Romantics: The Look (London: Omnibus Press, 2003), 12. 9 Ibid., 14-17.

79 fellow New Romantic Marilyn’s uber-androgyny also gained some attention through her

UK top ten hit “Calling Your Name,” Boy George’s androgynous image had the largest impact in terms of influence on drag culture and mainstream acceptance of drag, with

George announcing in Culture Club’s 1984 Grammy acceptance speech that America knew a good drag queen when they saw one.10

Culture Club’s sound echoed new wave with heavy use of synthesizers and the recycling of traditional rock and pop forms. However, their focus on American pop music of the past was based in ballads and blue-eyed soul rather than bubblegum and rock and roll. George’s soulful and smooth vocals provided a New Romantic counter to the jittery nervousness of American new wave acts. Culture Club also expanded into later new wave sounds through their incorporation of reggae and world music influences that show up in

RuPaul’s early new wave musical efforts as well. Culture Club’s smooth and lustrous ballads reflected the sleekness of their fashions and both had been crafted from the leftovers of the past.

Iain Ellis argues that Boy George’s relevance resides less in his status as a member of the band Culture Club, but as an emblem of the Warholian culture of the

“individual as art product.”11 Ellis claims Boy George as another icon who gave outsiders and gay kids an aspirational figure beamed into their living room via MTV (among other media outlets, including talk show appearances) that presented new identity possibilities.

10 “26th Annual Grammy Awards,” The Grammys, accessed April 7, 2017, https://www.grammy.com/awards/26th-annual-grammy-awards; “Marilyn,” Official Charts (site) access date April 6, 2017, chart date May 11, 1983, http://www.officialcharts.com/artist/21093/marilyn/. 11 Iain Ellis, Brit Wits: A History of British Rock Humor (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 103

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Lastly, Ellis makes a strong point about how Boy George became a celebrity by forging his own image as a star through makeup, costuming and the wearing of dresses before he became famous, thus selling himself as the art product.

Part of George’s success in promoting his image was the media coverage of Blitz kid culture, with magazines tracking the faces, looks, and sounds of London’s new nightlife figures. Blitz, i-D, and The Face all covered the scene. Fashion photographs often received the most coverage.12 As these magazines circulated outside of London, new fans emerged who wanted to see every decadent look these clubbers had to offer. In the pages of these magazines we can find the early career rumblings of many of the New

Romantics, Leigh Bowery among them.

A fashion design student at Royal Institute of Technology in 1978-79,

Leigh Bowery became obsessed with the extravagantly artistic and outrageous looks displayed by the London fashion students and ex-punk Bowie fans at the Blitz. But

Bowery ultimately left school for London’s nightlife fashion scene after tiring of the increasingly technical and less artistic aspects of fashion and design classes.13 While in

London, Bowery found out how to work the English welfare system for cheap housing and government money like a large number of the clubgoers who could not or did not want to manage a day job on top of their rigorous party schedule.14

12 Iain R. Webb, Blitz: As Seen in Blitz—Fashioning 80s Style (England: ACC Editions, 2013,) 8-9. 13 , Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 1997), 11-13. 14 Ibid., 22.

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According to close friend and biographer Sue Tilley, Bowery failed to be noticed at first, shyly bumbling about in the wrong clubs meeting no one he really wanted to for some time, but finally found a guide at Andrew Long’s Miss Alternative World competition, where he bumped into notable cabaret circuit queen Yvette the Conqueror.15

Yvette introduced him around, leading Bowery to Steve Strange’s Club For Heroes, as well as the notorious gay dance bar Heaven that held the more risqué backroom club

ChaChas.16 During this time, Bowery also met his first major collaborator and muse,

Trojan, while beginning to work up the nerve to go out in his own creations. After

ChaChas closed, Bowery and his group of newly-made nightlife friends moved on to

Steve Strange and Rusty Egan’s new megaclub, The Camden Palace.17 In many ways,

The Palace was where New Romanticism went to die. Where Billy’s, the Blitz, and other early New Romantic venues had been small, intimate clubs for like-minded clubgoers, the Palace was, according to member and chronicler of the movement Chris Sullivan, “a massive venue made mighty by an upgrade from lighting Tony Gottelier, including a sound system inspired by Richard Long’s sonic engineering at New York’s Studio

54.”18 A far cry from the ex-punk takeover of hole-in-the-wall venues mounted by

Strange and Egan a few years earlier, the club became a huge money maker while also removing the fashion-based barriers to entry of Strange and Egan’s earlier clubs.

15 For more on Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World competition see “Andrew Logan’s The Alternative Miss World,” Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World (site), accessed April 5, 2017, http://alternativemissworld.co.uk/history/. 16 Tilley, Leigh Bowery, 18-21. 17 Ibid., 24-25. 18 Chris Sullivan, We Can Be Heroes, 182.

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The grand size and wild atmosphere of the Palace finally gave Bowery a reason to muster the courage to sport his own clothes, which up to this point had been modeled in public by Trojan, his friend, muse, and darling of the London club scene. Bowery quickly made an enormous splash with his and Trojan’s “Pakis in Space” look that earned them their first feature in Face magazine, one of the magazines Bowery had read back in

Australia.19 (See Fig. 7)

Figure 7: Leigh Bowery (front) and Trojan, “Pakis in Space”

19 Robyn Healy, “High Risk Dressing by the Collective Known as The Fashion Design Council of Australia,” in The Design Collective: An Approach to Practice, ed. Harriet Edquist, Laurene Vaughan (, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 144.

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At the Palace, Bowery made one of his strongest connections to the New

Romantic inner circle via Boy George. George was initially underwhelmed with Bowery, thinking him little more than a knockoff of himself, but his respect grew as he saw that

Bowery’s looks grew more varied and presented imagery as yet unseen in nightlife.20

George situates Bowery as an inheritor of the punk and New Romantic past, but also as someone who had to carve an enormous niche for himself in order to escape the fact that those movements having been pushed to their seeming extremes had largely ended.

… [I met Leigh] when he was hanging around with his friend Trojan, sporting a look they called Pakis from Outer Space. I thought they were a bit naff. I'd been painting my face blue years ago, darling! But I soon realised Leigh was taking things a lot further. He'd missed out on punk, he'd just missed the Blitz scene, so he knew that he was going to have to be extreme in order to make his mark. Well, he certainly did that!21 Bowery took the ideas of androgynous makeup and fashion promoted by glam rock and taken to further extremes in London by the Blitz kids and shattered them by expanding beyond the New Romantics in avant garde approaches to costuming and silhouettes that dramatically grotesqued the human body. Bowery’s work emphasized, among other elements, the ability to morph the human body into non-traditional forms through fabric stretched over oddly-shaped and oddly-placed padding, focusing on grotesquing the human body. (See Figs. 8 and 9) His costumes refashioned the body with monstrously distended bellies, distorted extremities, and fabric face coverings with

20Bowery’s impact on George and the culture of New Romanticism was tremendous, leading George to memorialize his friend in his West-End musical Taboo years after his death. Taboo confuses timelines in order to wedge Bowery (and Taboo, the club he created) into the early New Romantic scene, positioning him alongside Philip Salon, Boy George and others in the musical. Rupert Smith, “‘We were so naughty,’” , January 9, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2002/jan/09/artsfeatures. 21 Ibid.

84 undergirding that his collaborators Sheila Tequila and Stella Stein referred to as “face furniture.” These consisted of padding glued to the skin with fabric stretched across the face to create bizarre, mask-like morphologies of bone structure.22 Bowery’s costumes were rarely worn by others aside from Trojan’s early endeavors and later the Michael

Clark Dance company due to Bowery’s focus on himself as a work of art and the immense pain brought onto the model.23

Figure 8: Leigh Bowery, Session VII/ Look 38, Photographed by Fergus Greer,

1994

22 Sheila Tequila, as quoted in The Legend of Leigh Bowery, directed by Charles Atlas (2002; New York: Palm Pictures, 2006), DVD. 23 Hilton Als, “Introduction,” in Leigh Bowery, ed. Robert Violette (London: Violette Editions, 1998), 15-16.

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Figure 9: Leigh Bowery, Session II/ Look 7, Photographed by Fergus Greer, 1989

One of Bowery’s greatest contributions to nightclub fashion and performance came when he and Tony Gordon created the notorious nightclub Taboo. Held in Leicester

Square every Thursday night for most of its short tenure from 1985 to 1986, Taboo’s atmosphere consisted of a tripped out fashion and costuming fantasy complete with a wildly aggressive and equally chaotic dance floor. Bowery’s slogan for the club became

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“Dress as if your life depends on it or don’t bother!”24 Taboo took advantage of a dip in interest in clubs, reviving the outrageous fashion and dangerous dance moves of New

Romanticism and punk respectively as increasingly mainstream and accessible New

Romantic clubs became bloated and lost their edge.25 Taboo quickly became a place to see and be seen in outrageous fashion, with each night dominated largely by Bowery’s entrance into the club, which served as his prime performance of the evening, in addition to his actions on the dance floor and the club each night.

Each Thursday at Taboo Bowery spent the entire evening inside costumes that qualify more as contraptions than fashion. Expanding on the drag queen’s transformational arsenal, Bowery utilized any tools he could to morph into a monstrously grotesque version of the human body using makeup, fabric, masks, gaffer’s tape, self- inflicted piercings, repurposed fashion, found objects, and a myriad of tools that could make the human bone and bodily structure expand and constrict in terms of and bodily dimensionality. Bowery’s costumes challenged conceptions of the body, gender, morality, and fashion. At around six feet tall, Bowery’s frame became menacing in his transformative costumes as one leg would often be longer than the other, with both feet stilted on platforms with fabric sewn around them to make the legs appear to have neither feet nor shoes, extending Gumby-like, all the way to the floor, to elongate the body of

Bowery’s creation. Looks often featured either full-body makeup or full-body fabric

24 , “Culture: Taboo,” Interview, January 20, 2009, http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/taboo/. 25 Ibid., http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/taboo/#_.

87 coverings, with the fabric-based costumes often texturized with sequins, bobby pins or other small objects.

By the time Taboo closed, Bowery’s career had taken off. He performed and modeled on tours of London, and New York organized by Susanne Bartsch.26

Michael Clark brought him on board with his troupe to design costumes which led to

Bowery performing in Clark’s dance performances like “Hail the New Puritan.”27 Boy

George and Bowery also became close friends around this time, leading to Bowery making several costumes for him.28 Bowery’s performances in nightclubs garnered him the status of a performance artist of sorts, but before his performance at the Anthony

D’offay gallery he remained identified more as a nightclub act.29

The D'offay Gallery contacted Bowery to request a performance installation.30

The press release showcased Bowery’s unusual resume: “Leigh Bowery, cultural icon about town, clothing designer, co-host of MTV’s ‘Take the Blame,’ dancer and nightclub host, is having his first individual exhibition at the Anthony D’Offay Gallery. Bowery will be installing himself.”31 The gallery viewers, positioned on the outside of a two way mirrored chamber wall, viewed Bowery in a so-called natural habitat as a living,

26 Melissa Mara, “Subcultural Capitals: London and New York City,” in Valerie Steele, Fashion Underground: The World of Susanne Bartsch (New York: Fashion Institute of Technology, 2015), 140-141. 27 A.D. Jameson, “Hail The New Puritan,” Big Other (), October 5, 2010, https://bigother.com/2010/10/05/hail-the-new-puritan/. 28 Robyn Healy, “Taboo or Not Taboo: The Fashions of Leigh Bowery,” Art Bulletin of , vol. 42 (2002): http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/taboo-or-not-taboo- the-fashions-of-leigh-bowery/. 29 Ian Parker, “A Bizarre Body of Work,” Independent, February 26, 1995, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/a-bizarre-body-of-work-1574885.html. 30 Als, Leigh Bowery, 22. 31 Ibid.

88 breathing work of art: an installation of himself. Inside the chamber, positioned behind glass so that he could only see his reflection, Bowery preened and posed around a divan positioned in the center of the room. While Bowery could not see through the glass, the responses from the viewers remained audible to him inside the chamber. The exhibition was a tremendous success for both the gallery and Bowery. Gallery manager Lorcan

O’Neill recalled the mixture of clubgoers, young people, and the art world in attendance:

“You felt that you were in the right place in the world, at the right time and there was no better place to be. Art world people came, and club people came, and kids came. Lots of things get an enormous amount of attention when they’re done. But ten years later people aren’t necessarily talking about them.”32

In most of his staged performances, especially the D’Offay gallery installation,

Bowery’s fashion and movement are cogs in the larger machine that represents the living, breathing artwork that is Bowery. Bowery approached not only fashion, cosmetics, dance, and theater as constructed events meant to make artistic statements, but rather exhibited and proclaimed this intent about the entirety of his life.33 His love for embarrassing and humiliating those around him, as well as enacting deception throughout his interactions as an act of amusement, contribute to this sense of performed daily identity as art. In doing so, Bowery unintentionally echoes the blending of on and off stage persona of the Nomis, but even more their progenitor, David Bowie, who had shifted identities on and offstage numerous times by this point.

32 Ibid. 33 Rene Zechlin, “Introduction: The Human Body as Art,” in Leigh Bowery: Beautified Provocation, ed. Rene Zechlin (Heidelberg, GA: Kehrer Verlag, 2008), 31.

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The resulting success of Bowery’s installation of himself at the D’Offay gallery took queer nightclub performance to a land of legitimacy previously inaccessible to its members. The D’Offay gallery exhibit showed that queer costuming and the performance of persona could withstand the art critic’s lens as something with both true intent and a core of artistry and reflective thought. The context of the legitimate and influential gallery brought Bowery’s queer nightclub aesthetics and attitudes to the world of high art and ultimately led to collaborative projects that preserved his persona, looks, and performances for posterity: the intimate nude portraiture of the artist produced by Lucian

Freud, and Fergus Greer’s stunningly sculptural and statuesque photography of Bowery spanning his career.34 In doing so, Bowery had taken the cast-offs of New Romantic nightlife and imagery and infused them with the wild aggression of punk while expanding the syntax of queer nightlife performance and gender transformation beyond that of the traditional drag queen.

Bowery’s deconstruction and reconstruction of anatomy, human and otherwise, on top of his own large frame (as well as inside that frame in the case of his bodily, fluid- oriented performances, wherein he spewed fecal enemas on audiences as well as urinated in the mouths of his fellow performers) remained a constant focus throughout his career.

Bowery’s inability to control his weight or maintain the kind of muscle man Tom of

Finland images particular to the gay scene never stopped him from pursuing a ravenous sexual appetite in the form of anonymous hookups. However, Bowery reveals a queer sense of desperation to be visible publicly while his performances and costumes call attention to the artist, like queer sexuality, that must be hidden in order to achieve these

34 Martin Engler, “The Multiple Bodies of Leigh Bowery” in Ibid., 59.

90 artistic and nightclub successes and excesses. He did this through a career-long focus on the billowing embarrassment of stomachs that burst forth from the confines of their waists, hidden male genitals braced and girdled with gaffing and tape that do more damage than the average drag queen’s penis devices, facial and head coverings and costuming and makeup that completely engulf the individual behind them. These transformations take the tools of the drag world and those of Punk and New Romanticism in terms of fashion and deconstruction/reconstruction and alter the gendered body beneath the costumes until unrecognizable as any clearly definable sex. In fact, to pose the question of gender to most of Bowery’s looks is to miss the point altogether.

Elisabeth Bronfen highlights the nuance Bowery applies to gender in her essay “Being

One’s Body: The Last Diva Leigh Bowery”:

The work with the body represented his veritable handicraft. The artistic object into which he transforms himself does not serve any fantasy of a natural body claiming its due with respect to limiting codes of cultural concepts of beauty. Instead in his performances Leigh Bowery elevates the pure artifact into a cult. The disappearance in costume represents an estrangement which is not to be deplored as collateral damage of the modern life of urban anonymity, but instead should be seized upon as an opportunity. If Byron, the great dandy of British Romanticism, insisted that authenticity could be most impressively brought to expression in a staging of the self, Bowery represents what it means to transfer the self as performance onto the question of sexuality in a radical manner. His prosthetic Looks do not depict a third sex, an androgynous, intermediate being but instead, with the enfolding of perfect beauty with grotesque ugliness, they at the same time display an annulment of the border between the .35 Bronfen’s conception of Bowery’s approach to gender as one of “annulment” indicates an important difference between Bowery and Klaus Nomi’s ilk. Through sound, movement,

35 Elisabeth Bronfen, “Being One’s Body: The Last Diva Leigh Bowery,” in Ibid., 76.

91 narrative and staging, Nomi became android and sexless, an alien exploration of the space between genders or an evasion of the topic altogether through the robotic morphologies of imagined futures. On the other hand, Bowery nullifies the gender of the body through violent and physically painful methodologies that extend the boundaries of his already large frame, stacking high heels and platforms inside of shoes, encased in fabric that stretched from underneath the sole to the top of his head and covering his extremities, both of which were often encased in various forms of padding. While in these costumes, Bowery’s performances also reflect an agendered approach that veers heavily toward wild aggression and a lack of control.

Bowery’s nudes are revealing of an artist willing to expose his flaws, and the audience for these works was likely quite different from the clubgoers who had swarmed to Taboo. The viewers would likely be a self-selecting, artistically informed crowd quite different from those familiar to him from the nightclub scene. These images say more about Freud and Bowery’s relationship than they do about our aims here. For now, we turn to the furthering of drag and queer performance toward mainstream success. In this regard, Bowery knew his status as performance artist/ nightlife icon would never suffice.

Much like Nomi before him and RuPaul after, Bowery recognized that success was far more likely to come through music than by costuming alone. In an effort to make this vision become a reality, Bowery made several attempts at fame based in music and even crossbred his performance art work with a musical performance in “Birth,” the only performance work he performed repeatedly.36

36 Martin Engler, “The Multiple Bodies of Leigh Bowery,” in Ibid., 59.

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Bowery began crafting musical projects, having seen the recent success of friend

Boy George and his fellow Blitz kids in the music world, especially in the emerging visually oriented music video market. He had already gotten a small taste of MTV fame through his stint as a cohost to the MTV-Europe chat show “Take the Blame,” with Steve

Blame as host.37 Made the cheapest way possible, the first record of Bowery’s attempts at a musical career are preserved in the form of a pay booth video from a Piccadilly Circus kiosk. This initial attempt unfortunately incorporated Bowery’s highly problematic use of blackface. Unlike some of the other times he donned blackface (his other works often use black makeup on the face without the visual signifiers of minstrelsy like white around the mouth and eyes), there is no context that attempts to explain or explain away the blackface minstrelsy connections. Here Bowery and his bandmates, originally christened the Quality Street Wrappers and then Raw Sewage, wear blackface as well as painted black extremities and white paint around their eyes and noses with tartan gowns over top.

They sing a karaoke version of Run DMC and Aeromsith’s crossover pop and rap hit

“Walk This Way,” ending by stripping naked to reveal white stomachs, bare and necks with pubic merkins fashioned over tucked penises and finally poorly attempt a human pyramid before the video ends. It is little wonder then that, as Leslie Bryan recalled “the Black children were not having Leigh’s Mammy look,” leaving Bowery to eventually abandon Raw Sewage in favor of another musical group.38

Around a year before his death Bowery, like Nomi, attempted a major push with his musical career. He made the switch from the amateurish musical skills and stunting

37 Als, Leigh Bowery, 22. 38 Leslie Bryant, quoted in Ibid., 21.

93 antics of Sheila Tequila and Stella Stein to the more trained approach of composer and musician Richard Torry. Bowery formed a new group called Minty along with his artistic partner and soon to be wife Nicola Bateman, Torry, and fellow club figure Matthew

Glamorre. Though short-lived due to Bowery’s death from AIDS in 1994, Minty served as a prime example of how Bowery combined drag with the other art forms to create commentary on the human body that went beyond questioning gender. Though we have little in terms of recorded performances from the group, their music held some similarities with new wave and no wave acts in America. In one performance Bowery sings a cheery 1960s Beatles song before inducing a confrontational and grotesquely humorous live birth from his own monstrously over-padded and round body. On the other end of the spectrum, their song “Useless Man” takes the listener on a wild ride through noisily distorted melody with perverse lyrics rapped at breakneck speed: music meant to be danced to, but with thrashing movements likely to harm yourself and those around you.

Among the glamour and camp performances of Wigstock: The Movie lies

Bowery’s performance of Birth created with Nicola Bateman and musically enhanced with his new group. Nestled inside the context of live and lip synced camp, punk, and glamour oriented performances, Bowery proves his then-outsider art status within the world of queer performance as he luridly belts out the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love” in what Martin Engler calls his “supermother” look: Bowery’s face is presented as a

Halloween-mask-like construction with white fabric stretched over his entire head, puffed out cheekbones protruding. The face transforms into a garish caricature and Bowery

94 completed the look with his oft-used tiny sewn circle for a mouth.39 (See Fig. 10) Though

Bowery sings live, the audience never sees his mouth move. Rather, his face appears to stretch as the fabric covering moves tightly around the “face furniture” beneath. Likely because of Bateman’s weight, hung upside down in Bowery’s hugely rounded belly,

Bowery’s movements are more restricted than usual as he begins the song. The chorus of

“Love is All You Need” (altered to “love stands tall and free”) builds in repetition as

Bowery moves toward a long table and lies down on his back, continuing to sing as he spreads his legs. In a matter of seconds, Bateman’s head begins to push from behind

Bowery’s white stockings until bursting forth naked and covered with fake blood.

Immediately, Bowery sits up and proclaims in high camp fashion “Oh my God!

Wigstock’s first baby!” before grabbing an umbilical cord (in reality a chain of sausage links) and ripping it in two with his teeth, spitting it onto the stage and front row. Bowery kisses Bateman and shouts “My little baby!” before they take a bow and exit hand in hand.40

39 Engle, “The Multiple Bodies of Leigh Bowery,” 55. The film version of Wigstock: The Movie features an altered, but still largely recognizable sound-alike variation of “All You Need is Love,” I refer here to the video footage taken by Steve Lafreniere and seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VWV1vsHnJc which is taken from a different vantage point and with a home video camera, seemingly at the same performance. It should be noted that no records I have found state that Bowery performed Birth twice at Wigstock 1993 where both the documentary footage and the YouTube footage were filmed. 40 Wigstock: The Movie, directed by Barry Shills (1995; New York: MGM, 2015), DVD.

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Figure 10: Leigh Bowery, “Birth,” Wigstock, 1994

Within the next year, Bowery and Glamorre wrote a song about the women of a real, hard-edged bar called Fist.41 Noisy, chaotic, aggressive and fast, “Useless

Man” proved Bowery could work as a front man, as he fused postpunk with performance art, writing from a queer perspective about a queer audience. The lyrics, repeated over and over again, are ruptured by musical drop-offs of guitar noise and sonic texture over which Bowery gradually distorts the phrase “Useless Man” from a clear enunciation to mocking distortion over the course of several interruptions. The lyrics emphasize the disgusting nature of men’s sexual proclivities:

Boot licking/ Piss drinking/ Finger frigging/ Tit tweaking/ Love biting/Arse licking/ Shit stabbing/ Mother fucking/ Spunk loving/ Ball busting/ Cock

41 Atlas, The Legend of Leigh Bowery.

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sucking/ Fist fucking/ Lip smacking/ Thirst quenching/ Cool living/ Ever giving… Useless man. 42 Lyrical irony fully on display, Bowery would perform the song and then give birth to

Nicola onstage, dressed in his “Birth” costume. Bowery’s song embraces a hard-edged lesbian viewpoint where men are reduced to their sexual proclivities. 43 Bowery’s well known history (which he had been extremely vocal about) of anonymous, unprotected sex with hundreds of men likely played into the song’s lyrical content as well as its camp wailing at its closing. Perhaps Nicola’s messy birth at the end of the song represents what

Bowery could likely have endured after being handled by so many men had he been born female. In this reading, “Birth” serves as an attempt to punish himself publically for his past actions while using that as a catalyst for pop stardom. Bowery had told only Sue

Tilley, but he had contracted AIDS earlier and knew he would not likely last much longer. On the other hand, it can be read as pure histrionic camp that mocks women’s bodies in performance while mocking men’s sexual proclivities in the lyrics, thus offending everyone as Bowery was often desirous of doing. Minty and “Useless Man” found some success, but too late, as Bowery died from AIDS in 1994, only months after the band had begun to attract attention.

Bowery’s contributions to drag and its move toward the mainstream are numerous. The club kids of New York City, especially who shared a connection in Susanne Bartsch, largely based their concept of queer nightlife on

Bowery’s career. The club kids emphasized horror-show fashions that seemed to increase

42 Minty, “Useless Man,” 7 inch, my own transcription. 43 Gregor Muir, “Uptown: The Evening Before the Morning After,” in Lucky Kunst: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art (London: Aurum Press, 2009), Google e- book.

97 the ugliness of the wearer rather than highlight, define and create traditional beauty in ways akin to Bowery. 44 Bowery also managed to round many of the bases of the artistic media, working at various points with legitimate dancers, high fashion, drag, sculpture in the form of his own body, the performance of his daily life, and performance art in both nightclubs and as installations, not to mention his work as a model for .

Lastly, Bowery took the ideas and concepts of New Romantic fashion and persona construction and pushed them until they burst at the seams in terms of both how a nightclub operated and how street fashion could be constructed. Bowery called into question traditional drag’s focus on recreating perfect bodies, but took that idea far beyond the literal weightiness of Divine. Bowery remains a strong point of historical interest today and a touchstone for the current generation of Susanne Bartsch’s performers as well as later club kids and drag artists. 45

House Balls and Dance Songs:

Willi Ninja, Malcolm McLaren, and Queen Latifah

We return now to New York City, shifting our attention from the kitschedelic and largely white Downtown performance art drag to the largely Black and Latinx world of

Harlem drag balls. Harlem drag queens had been competing in balls since the turn of the twentieth century, both before and after the “” took New York City by storm

44 Frank Owen, Clubland: The Fabulous Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 131. 45 Oggy Yordanov, New Club Kids: London Party Fashion in the Noughties (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2011), 1-3.

98 in the early 1930s.46 Initially and for many years, these balls were sumptuous events where competitors of many races could compete equally based on outrageous costuming.

They were often held in front of massive, often celebrity laden, and largely heterosexual audiences. As time passed, anti- laws as well as anti-cross dressing laws intermittently interfered, though the ballroom world often found ways to negotiate or circumvent these barriers. As the 1960s set in, race began dividing the balls when even in the context of integrated competition and an integrated dance floor, black queens were expected and encouraged to “whiten up” if they were to stand a chance at winning.47

Black queens began to put together their own competitions beginning in the early 60s, although they did not stop competing against white queens altogether, as can be seen in the integrated pageant presented in the 1969 documentary The Queen.

Never receiving the same level of attention as Paris is Burning, The Queen presents a snapshot of late 1960s New York drag pageants including competitor

LaBeija, who brings her wrath upon the pageant owner after being crowned fourth runner up. An argument ensues in which Labeija speaks out against the pageant’s profiting from her name, eventually threatening legal action over photos for which she had not signed a release. The issue around race comes closest to the surface in a back and forth in which hostess Flawless Sabrina accuses LaBeija of “showing her color,” to which she retorts “I

46 For more on the Pansy Craze see George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 314-321. 47 Tim Lawrence, “‘Listen, and you will hear all the houses that walked there before’: A History of Drag Balls, Houses, and the Culture of Voguing,” in Voguing and the House Ballroom Scene of New York City 1989-92, ed. Stuart Baker (London: Soul Jazz Books, 2011), 3. also speaks about the issues faced by herself and other Black queens in the integrated pageant world of the 60s and 70s in Paris is Burning.

99 have a right to show my color, darling! Because I am beautiful and I know I’ beautiful!”48 Here, LaBeija takes ownership of her worth as a performer in the face of a racist pageant system and uses her screen time to her advantage, becoming one of the focal points of the documentary through a fierce display of “reading” the owner and the system itself as rigged.49

As a result of the racial tensions that came to a head in the documentary, LaBeija, coerced by fellow Harlem queen Lottie (who later took on the LaBeija House name) through the lure of a central focus on Crystal in the first ball, became the mother of the first House in what became the new Black Ballroom system.50 Soon after, other

Legendary Ballroom figures of color, equally fed up with the racism of the white owned systems, founded their own Houses. By the end of the 1970s eleven Houses had formed, attracting followers behind the legendary winners of the ballroom world who gave them their names: Corey, Dior, Wong, Dupree, Christian, Plenty, Ebony, Pendavis, Princess, and Omni. More Houses arose throughout the 80s as the addition of new categories expanded the competitions slowly at first and eventually expansively, dramatically altering the competitions.51

The older style of competitions consisted of multi-part pageants structurally akin to women’s beauty pageants and held for a relatively small pool of competitors.

48 The Queen, directed by Frank Simon (1968; New York, NY: New York Film Forum, 2013), DVD. 49 “Reading” is the common drag queen practice of insulting your foes by magnifying their flaws through wordplay. 50 Lawrence, “‘Listen, and you will…,” 4. 51 Kevin Omni Burrus, post to LGBT News Facebook wall, March 28, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/NEWSLGBT/posts/10152855528538727.

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The Harlem balls expanded drag through the inclusion of categories for ever increasing numbers of body, personality and talent types. Significantly, many of the categories maintained primary focus on the performance of gender, class, and mimicry of society’s archetypes. The popularity of new categories with the younger ballroom competitors caused a shift in the nature of drag itself: “Gone were the days when drag balls revolved around the act of men dressing as women,” notes Tim Lawrence.52 The increased categories included a vast array of queer performance of identities, most of which emphasized roles and occupations largely barred to black, trans, and queer people by a white patriarchal business world and the popular media, including business executives and models. Contestants competed to see who could best morph into these archetypes through their demeanor, gait, posture, presence, and of course, attire. Though many of these types are based in white archetypes of the upper and middle classes, categories like

Banjee Girl and Boy emphasize the skills of morphing into Black, poor, but ultimately heterosexual counterparts as well. The expansion of competition categories focused on contestants’ abilities to pass as heterosexual (whether or not gender transformation was involved) because these skills allow one to get by with fewer scars both mental and physical, an important skill for real-world survival for many young queer youths. The categories also allowed Black and Latinx Ballroom members to envision themselves in roles that society would not likely allow them to take on: heads of business, supermodels, tv stars, etc.

Categories also developed around emergent dance forms native to the ballroom world, including varied styles of voguing. The origins of voguing are difficult to pin

52 Lawrence, “Listen, and you will…,”5.

101 down with two mythologies primarily arising around it. One claim is that the dance began as a form of competition between gay Black men at Ryker’s Island prison, while another claims that it began when a queen opened a Vogue magazine on the dance floor and copied its poses in time to the music during a dance-off.53 Regardless of which is true, voguing arose as a combative dance form akin to breakdancing where two dancers face off against each other in competition, posing in time to the beat of primarily House, Funk, and Dance records. The syntax of voguing rapidly expanded to include influences from high and low culture as well as gymnastics and historical imagery. Hieroglyphic poses and mime added to an increasing arsenal of visual insults to be used against the voguer’s opposition.54 Hector Extravaganza and Willi Ninja added their own now-canonical vogue movements to the mix; Ninja points to some of these in an interview with Tricia Rose after talking about prior developments: “Then people started doing splits, and Hector and

I started doing what they now call ‘arm clicking,’ where you’re dislocating the arms and doing cartwheels and aerials.”55 Ninja and others innovated new techniques within the form while holding true to its on-the-dance-floor and into-the-ballroom competitive nature. The rapid, improvisational form simultaneously showcases the voguer’s bodily feats of excess alongside an acute virtuosity of embodied wit. Ninja exemplifies this in

Paris is Burning as he mimes opening a compact mirror, applying blush to his cheeks. In a final moment where Ninja’s virtuosity turns to venomous camp wit, he turns the mime

53 Ibid. 54 Carolyn Trench, “Performativity's Moment: Vogue, Queer Video Production, and Theoretical Discourse,” (PhD diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 2014), -xi. 55 Tricia Rose, “Nobody Wants to Be a Part Time Mother: An Interview with Willi Ninja,” in Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (New York: Routledge, 1994), 167.

102 compact to his opponent’s face so they may see for themselves just how wretched they look. This part of voguing utilizes the drag queen’s tool of “shade,” the art of implying, rather than straightforwardly stating your opponent’s flaws through eye gestures, words, actions, etc. As laid out originally by Dorian Corey in Paris is Burning: “Shade is I don't tell you you're ugly but I don't have to tell you because you know you're ugly.”56

Much like breakdancing, voguing morphed into a national phenomenon that had origins in primarily Black street culture. As the balls expanded, they also moved uptown, attracting attention from nightlife observers. The first major introduction of voguing to the ballroom scene came in October of 1988 as “dominatrix doorwoman, barwoman, performing artist and promoter” Chi Chi Valenti penned a piece for Details that described

New York’s rising “clubbing nations,” including: the ; the new

House of Field, the first predominantly white, downtown house; the Pyramid Nation (the club kids who worked at the Pyramid); and the Haringtons, comprised of artist and social activist Keith Haring’s inner circle, who assisted him in putting together his Party of Life events.57 Valenti not only highlighted these varied groups from New York’s nightlife, but explained how these nations and their approach to nightlife shifted away from that of

1970s disco culture with its focus on stars, celebrity and the individual:

Have you noticed, latter-day wanderers, the recent resurrection of the night: new clubs, new religions of style, ideas so old they’re new again? Look for the new stars, though, and you won’t find any. What you will find is a richness of nations, mighty and small. And nations cast a different glow—more diffused, more long-lasting than the meteoric brilliance of individual celebrity.

56 Paris is Burning, directed by Jenny Livingston (1990; Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate, 2012), DVD. 57 Lawrence, “‘Listen, and you will…,” 6.

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These nations have nothing to do with political beliefs (unless you count to be one) or geographic boundaries. At first glance some appear to be only fashion cults, but the fashion, though dead-serious, is merely an identifying stripe. A nation is a family of like-minded souls on a mission, inching towards a collective glory undreamed-of alone. Nations educate: The elders teach the young, learning new lessons in the process. Nations protect: They offer identity, safe haven, and a clear sense of purpose. …By mid-decade, the rope and chain of Seventies stardom had become just another joke in an Area theme, a V.I.P. room that no one wanted to sit in. Outside, fledgling nations were fast being born in the most unlikely places, from the gloom and glam-rocked elevator children of Danceteria to the fearlessly gay Latin ball children en pointe at the piers.58 The voguers and the drag queens from the Downtown scene functioned as but two facets of a growing jewel of New York nightlife that shifted focus away from the success of the individual and onto the needs and desires of marginalized peoples. The nightclubs that became popular during this time period—places like Danceteria, Tracks, and the

Tunnel— emphasized territories that were reigned over by separate groups but where all others were welcome. Valenti’s article ultimately spotlight on the voguers that remained for the rest of the decade and into the 1990s. Soon after her article appeared, several of the voguers walked in Paris as runway models for fashion designer Thierry

Mugler just before the first major explosion of news coverage of the ballroom participants.59

One ballroom performer did more than any other in terms of taking voguing into the mainstream: Willi Ninja. Ninja came to prominence quickly in the Ballroom scene due to his quick mastery of voguing. Ninja’s legendary skills as a voguer, status as a

58 Chi Chi Valenti, “Nations,” Details, October 1988, 159-160. 59 Michael Gross, “The Cutting Edge: The ‘New’ New Look,” New York Magazine, April 10, 1989, 36-37.

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House Mother, and mind for business allowed him to be taken seriously inside and outside the ballroom scene. Importantly, he also had privileges that many of the tossed- aside queer Ballroom children did not. Willi Ninja came to the ballroom scene from a more supportive background than most. Ninja’s mother accepted him as gay without his ever needing to officially come out so he never required the kind of assistance that most

House mothers would supply aside from guidance within the scene itself. All of this is to say that he entered the world of ballroom from the perspective of a relative outsider, ultimately founding the House of Ninja through non-traditional methods. A competitor typically must already be a member of a House to walk a ball or alternately win three grand prize trophies in a Ball before creating a House. Ninja evaded the rules for creating the House of Ninja due to his House having “racked up the trophies” their first time at a ball.60 The house became legendary along with its Mother who went on to become the biggest exporter of voguing in the world of music video choreography.

Though Madonna’s “Vogue” (1990) often receives credit as the first video to feature voguing, several artists hired Ninja to infuse their music videos with the dance and its sensibilities years earlier. In a revelatory interview in the documentary How Do I

Look (Busch, 2006), Willi Ninja says that Jody Watley first hired him for vogue choreography for her 1987 “Still a Thrill” music video, the follow-up to her hit single

“Looking for a New Love.” Ninja makes no appearance in the video and the vogue movements are only showcased in a small portion of the moves. The following year,

Ninja’s choreography featured heavily in Taylor Dayne’s single “.”

Bobby Brown dances backup along with a white male dancer and neither seems able to

60 Rose, “Nobody Wants to …,” 167-168.

105 capture the sensibility and fluidity required to properly vogue. The dancers appear to entirely miss the liveliness and improvisatory sensibility that even highly restrained voguing must retain. Though Ninja himself seems to have a hard time reconciling the compromise made in crafting vogue movements that could be capably done by the dancers, this video is the first in which commentators recognize on-screen voguing during the height of Madonna’s “Vogue” period.61 Ninja’s next choreography hire came from Liz Torres, where voguing came full circle as a track popular to the ballroom world turned into a music video featuring vogue choreography from Ninja.

Ninja made his on-screen debut as a dancer with Malcolm McLaren just after

McLaren went to witness hip-hop culture in action as a guest of Afrika Bambaata.

McLaren gobbled up what he could of hip-hop culture with the end result that he finally succeeded as a solo artist, in the process becoming the first British white emcee to hit the pop charts.62 McLaren had first made his career alongside his wife, Vivienne Westwood; as fashion designers both set up at King’s Road, catering most famously to punks, but at various times to everyone from teddyboys to the New Romantic crowd, many of whom had purchased from them in their punk days when the shop was Seditionaries and morphed into SEX. While running the store McLaren put together and managed the Sex

Pistols, eventually losing control over the group and afterwards attempting a solo career.

McLaren came across the House ballroom performers as they were making their way outside Harlem, creating inroads and establishing a presence both uptown and

61 Jess Cagle, “What, Me Vogue?: The Secrets of Voguing -- Everything you ever wanted to know about the dance Madonna made trendy,” , May 4, 1990. 62 Reynolds, Rip it Up and Start Again, 260.

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Downtown. Johnny Dynell, a member of the House of Xtravaganza and husband to Chi

Chi Valenti, DJ’d at the Tunnel where the voguers hung out and had access to rough cuts from Paris is Burning prior to its completion. Believing McLaren could help raise the funds Livingston needed to finish the film, Dynell passed McLaren some of the uncut daily footage from Livingston.63 McLaren already had a new album in the works to follow up his most recent album, Swamp Thing, intending to merge the 3/4 time rhythms of the waltz with the 4/4 beats of rock and roll by pairing The Blue Danube and other waltzes with the bass funk of and rock guitar from Jeff Beck.64 Rather than assist Livingston however, McLaren began putting together a new track with sampled quotes from the footage. McLaren’s attitude of take it now and deal with the legalities later had already led him to lengthy legal battles with the members of the Sex

Pistols.65 Despite that experience he drew the opening lines of the song from Chi Chi

Valenti’s “Clubbing Nations” article without crediting his source. Valenti went on to sue and won credit for her words, while McLaren’s track “Deep in Vogue” went on to become a dance floor hit.66

Though McLaren’s approach is liberally peppered with his usual appropriative actions, ironically “Deep in Vogue” showcases members of the ballroom scene and Willi

Ninja performing his choreography front and center, with multiple music videos shot for the song, all prominently featuring Ninja and a handful of other skilled vogue dancers.67

63 Lawrence, “‘Listen, and you will…,” 7. 64 Craig Bromberg, The Wicked Ways of Malcolm McLaren, (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 311. 65 Ibid. 66 Lawrence, “‘Listen, and you will…,” 7. 67 “Malcolm McLaren - Deep in Vogue,” YouTube video, 04:15, posted by “,” December 6, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG44JJ6Ihyo.;

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“Deep in Vogue” also positions itself from its opening text as an intentional homage to the ballroom scene, rather than a celebration of the dance alone. The song opens with the line “This has got to be a special tribute to the Houses of New York…” after which

McLaren speaks the names of some of the most renowned houses.68 Ninja’s choreography for “Deep in Vogue” highlights posing most prominently. The poses created often require all four voguers to complete the forms; much of the remaining choreography features Ninja and an unnamed female voguer clicking and morphing from pose to pose together (See Figs. 11 and 12). This video significantly marked Ninja’s first major music video in which he became the on-screen talent, lip-syncing to singer

Lourdes’s vocals in the music video as well.

Figure 11: Willi Ninja (second from left) and three unnamed voguers forming a vogue

pose position, “Deep in Vogue” music video, 1989

“Malcolm McLaren - Deep in Vogue,” YouTube video, 04:19, posted by “ChickHabits,” August 27, 2006, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9KDmJQjS_0. 68 Oddly enough the album’s liner notes feature the indication “Introducing Willi Ninja” but his House name appears nowhere in the track.

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Figure 12: Willi Ninja (right) and an unnamed voguer forming a vogue pose position,

“Deep in Vogue” music video, 1989

Ninja managed to glean quite a bit of attention from the dance hit. He used it to showcase his multitude of talents in queer performance to McLaren, who in turn promoted Ninja’s work to further his own cause. In addition to McLaren’s interest in

Ninja’s choreography and voguing skills, as a designer with a historically keen eye for underground fashion and styling, Ninja’s supremely confident runway walk also drew

McLaren’s eye toward the House father. McLaren took Ninja on tour as a dancer, but also in order to introduce him to members of the major fashion houses of Europe that had inspired those of the Ballroom scene. McLaren’s work with Ninja, though problematic at times, led to significant inroads for the queer performers and performance styles of the

Ballroom world as well as a lifelong relationship with the fashion community for Ninja.

Ninja’s arrival and successes in the fashion world led him to work as a model and modeling instructor for Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Thierry Mugler

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(for whom Downtown performance and drag star Joey Arias served as a muse).

Importantly, he also coached two of the most successful Supermodels, and Naomi

Campbell.69

Rapper Queen Latifah’s involvement with the world of voguing and Willi Ninja coincided with a rising interest in combining hip-hop and house music, but Latifah’s approach intentionally distanced itself from the colonizing implications of McLaren’s tribute. Though House music became a staple of the Ballroom scene, their names and origins are unrelated. House music features synthesized basslines and four-on-the-floor drum patterns in which the bass drum is hit on every beat. Like disco, house music came about initially as music for dancing and similarly had strong ties to gay and Black nightlife. House music often features samples of disco and funk songs and later often featured belting gospel-style singers, being the most prominent among them. Rather than pop out a paean in honor of balls and voguing while taking the credit and the cash, Latifah smoothly incorporated it into her larger anti-patriarchal and unifying message. Carol Cooper notes this in her article on House and Hip-Hop “The

House That Rap Built,” where she contrasts Latifah’s approach with the following example of one of the heterosexual male artists who contained their fusion of house music ( representing an association with the gay community due to the music’s roots in gay dance culture) with hip-hop: “[Big ] Kane undercuts his LP’s house track

69 Terry Monaghan, “Obituary: Willi Ninja,” The Guardian, September 13, 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/sep/13/guardianobituaries.usa.

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[“The House That Cee Built”] with a “” lyric on another song, ‘Pimpin’ Ain’t

Easy.’”70

Latifah’s music video for “Come Into My House” features dancers from across the globe performing seemingly traditional dances in traditional costuming. Voguers and hip-hop dancers pop up across the video, though notably the voguers seem to take the most screen time. Latifah may not showcase Ninja and his dancers to the extent that

McLaren had, but vitally different in approach there is no real attempt to “cash in” on voguing or the Ballroom scene either, as it receives no name drop, nor do the Balls themselves. The “House” into which the listener is invited to come can be imagined as a vogue house, but only with preceding familiarity with the terminology of the Ballroom.

The other repetition of the text “Give me Body!” mimics judges’ commentaries on

Ballroom competitors in categories based on the body itself and can be read as an homage to the body positivity and lack of bodily shame inherent in the expansion of

Ballroom categories for bodies of many sizes, shapes, and genders.71 Willi Ninja often pointed out the striking difference in Latifah’s work with the voguers on set:

There was no problem about [authenticity] with the Queen Latifah video (“Come Into My House”). This amazing woman fights for everybody, and fought for us to do this video right. Of course, there was a little shade on the set, between us voguers and the homeboy rappers, but she set it straight, ‘Just watch the boy dance.’ They watched, they shut up.72

70 Carol Cooper, “The House that Rap Built,” Village Voice, May 15, 1990. 71 Ballroom judges and audiences regularly yell encouragement of what they want the contestant to present: “Give me body!” for instance is regularly yelled during the “Cheesecake” category which focuses on the overt sexuality of the nearly nude physical bodies of transwomen. 72 Rose, “Nobody Wants a…,” 162.

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Susanne Bartsch and the Love Ball

By the time McLaren and Latifah’s tracks began to heat up the Dance charts, and in Latifah’s case Rap and R& B as well, voguing had begun to pop up all over. Ninja claims several major artists attempted to steal his moves from his audition tapes, but never succeeded. Having seen b-boys acts be stolen through audition tapes, Ninja altered those of his troupe to make it very difficult to get a handle on his unique approach and the overall arcs of movement.73 He emphasized only the negative when commenting on

Madonna. He claimed unto his dying days in 2006 that it was Latifah and McLaren who championed his career and introduced voguing to the world.74

In the latter half of the 1980s, Susanne Bartsch became one of the most significant forces for employing drag queens’ and other queer performers’ talents in the nightclub world and beyond. Swiss-born but aligned primarily with London before her move to the

Chelsea Hotel in 1981, Bartsch had begun her fashion career with her own London boutique.75 Bartsch’s London efforts focused on knitting and some of her sweaters could be seen on major rock artists like Jimmy Page.76 She tired of the tedium and rigor of running a shop and creating individual pieces and soon found a new direction.77 Bartsch’s goals shifted away from fashion design and production when she became a regular at the

Blitz night hosted by Steve Strange and Rusty Egan with George O’Dowd (later Boy

73 Ibid. 74 , “NY Mirror,” The Village Voice, September 5, 2006, http://www.villagevoice.com/news/ny-mirror-6418735. 75 Steele, Fashion Underground, 18. 76 Ibid., 24. 77 “Susanne Bartsch & Dr. Valerie Steele in Conversation,” YouTube video, 49:48, posted by “The Museum at FIT,” April 15, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0FODhC6hnM.

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George) as the coat check girl. There, she fell in love with the swirling mixture of fashion and music that comprised the weekly looks and sounds of the New Romantic clubs.78

Notably, Bartsch regularly attended Bowery’s Taboo club nights later in the decade. His parties lead her to promote the club runner’s fashion across three continents in her “New

London Goes to Tokyo” and “New London in New York” shows.79

After moving to New York in 1981 she became bored with its legitimate fashion scene and began importing her favorite styles and designers into a series of boutiques. In

1987, Bartsch left the world of retail to begin producing her own weekly club nights akin to those she longed for from her New Romantic days in London.80 She built her name as a producer of nightlife events in New York by crafting weekly events that altered the decor of a locale and its audience, while infusing it with performers from the underground and sex work worlds.81

These parties began Bartsch’s most important contributions to the history of drag.

The designer and boutique owner employed considerable drag and trans workers in roles that made use of their respective strengths and skills. At the club nights one could dance to the twisted sets of drag queen DJ Sister Dimension, witness the visual insanities of

Leigh Bowery, or listen to Joey Arias or RuPaul sing live. Just as the Blitz Kids and

Leigh Bowery’s generation of clubgoers had done, Bartsch began by producing at run- down clubs attended by a relative few, beginning with “Savage” at the Copacabana. She produced elaborately decorated, highly stylized, and high on street fashion events geared

78 Steele, Fashion Underground, 24. 79 Steele, Fashion Underground, 24. 80 Ibid., 37-38. 81 Simon Doonan, Wacky Chicks: Life Lessons from Fearlessly Inappropriate and Fabulous Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 62-65.

113 to create a precise ambience of diversity of crowd and entertainment, aimed to attract a highly heterogeneous crowd in terms of sexual orientation, class, social status, and race.

Echoing once again the Blitz Kids’ takeover of the hole-in-the-wall spot Billy’s,

Copacabana was seen as trashy and outdated but Bartsch’s brought it to life once a week with energy and attendees for “Savage.”

Bartsch’s “Savage” nights began her tradition of using acts normally associated with lower class clubs—drag acts, club personalities, strippers, and East Village and

Downtown musicians among them—to attract the kind of audience she sought. The events quickly took off and Bartsch parleyed the gig into larger and larger events. Part of their success lay in the stark difference between these events and the usual gatherings of glitterati that preceded them, descendants of Studio 54 which no longer attracted the voluminous crowds it had in disco’s heyday. Journalist Jill Selsman provides an account of the types who attended these gatherings well after Bartsch had become an established brand in the nightlife world:

She makes Bentley’s, at 25 East 40th Street, come alive after midnight. On platforms above the crowd, go-go dancers bop to the very loud music—club mixes and disco hits from the seventies. With three dance floors and two sound systems, the club can please almost everyone—British expatriates, the fashion crowd, and Polly Mellon and Barry Diller.

On the upper level of Bentley’s there is another dance floor and the cabaret room, where Bartsch books quirky acts like Perfidio [sic], a drag queen who impersonates the Peruvian folk singer Yma Sumac.82

82 Jill Selsman, “Brief Lives: Club Scout,” New York Magazine, August 15, 1988, 14.

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The interest in these largely queer nightlife entertainers arrived just as an increase began in the value of queer artists’ work from the Downtown scene that birthed Nomi and

Arias.

The musical diversity of disco and dance tracks presented on the same night as

Perfidia’s lipsync performance of Yma Sumac echoes that of the New Romantics, but with the flavor of Downtown drag that continued to grow out of the seeds sown by Nomi,

Arias, and Charles Busch’s lineage of theatrical and camp queens. Perfidia’s lipsync of

Yma Sumac defied the drag stereotypes of glamour and faithful celebrity impersonation that likely would have yielded a performance restricted to an exoticized presentation of beauty. Perfidia on the other hand took the look to extremes, aging herself and wearing her signature hyper-styled wigs; her performance of Yma Sumac won favor with Sumac herself, leading the two to become friends.83

Yet even as Bartsch’s parties expanded the audience for queer performance and drag, AIDS continued to claim an ever increasing number of the community of partygoers and performers. An increasing number of artists felt compelled to work together to do something about a disease the federal government had not shown enough interest in early on when it remained primarily associated with homosexuals and intravenous drug users. The rising anger and sorrow within the queer community led to a proliferation of movements and organizations for better health care, better care for those living with the disease, more knowledge, expanded education, overall increases in money designated toward treatment, better care for those living and dying with AIDS and

83 Michael Musto, “‘Valley of the Dolls’ Was Our Bible’: Talking to Drag Legend Perfidia,” Paper Magazine, June 15, 2016, http://www.papermag.com/perfidia-pyramid- bar-boy-bar-1860456360.html.

115 finding a cure. Queer New Yorkers began to mobilize through acts of direct protest, community organizing, acts of artistic resistance, and fundraisers large and small.

Newly established as the grand dame of New York nightlife, event production, and club promotion, Bartsch decided to use her connections in the fashion industry to throw an enormous event—the Love Ball—in an attempt to bring together performers, especially queens, from the incongruent queer performance cultures of New York to raise funds for Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA). Raising as much money as possible for DIFFA served as the event’s primary goal and unifying theme, with

Bartsch using every connection she had so that all items were donated (from Sara Lee cakes to the queens’ performances and celebrity judges’ appearances), with every dollar raised going directly to help the cause.84 Bartsch wanted to bring under a single roof a wide representation of New York’s queer drag performers showcasing an art form that shattered the highly stereotyped image of the drag queens of the past: stale celebrity illusions and glamorous, sexy, or camp female impersonation.85 In terms of drag, Bartsch understood what many did not: drag’s transformative nature, not simply in terms of crossing the gender binary, but in its ocean’s depth of approaches, styles, artistic content, and unique combination of the art forms of fashion, visual arts, performance, vaudeville variety skills, and music. With the Love Ball, Bartsch brought the Ballroom performers into her world and presented them to some of the biggest names in fashion, music, art, and popular media.

84 “Susanne Bartsch & Valerie Steele in Conversation,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0FODhC6hnM. 85 Ibid.

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Because of the unusual mixture of New York’s LGBTQ underground with the upper echelons of New York society, the Love Ball became a remarkable jumping off point for the ballroom scene. The Love Ball, held at the Roseland Ballroom on May 10,

1989, raised approximately $400,000 for the Design Industry Foundation for AIDS and provided enormous media coverage for the diverse set of drag performers represented among Bartsch’s clique.86 , mother of the house of Dupree, outshone the star-studded judges panel with her theatrical style and presentation. She judged competitors while wearing an oversized tiger print hat with enormous matching print glasses that extended beyond her face, coupled with a tiger print suit tailored sharp as a razor.87 In addition to the media exposure, the Love Ball bestowed a kind of legitimacy on the ballroom scene from New York’s societal and art world elites through the use of judges like supermodel Iman, Vogue editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley, and legendary

Broadway actress and dancer Gwen Verdon.88

Bartsch helped New York’s drag performers break through the metaphorical glass ceiling that restricted access to national media outside of Willi Ninja’s choreography efforts. Suddenly, eyes and ears shifted toward the various cultures highlighted at the

Love Ball: the club kids of downtown and the East Village, the fashion and persona of

Leigh Bowery, and of course the House Ballroom performers who competed for trophies

86 David Amsden, “Happy Days,” New York Magazine, accessed April 7, 2017, http://nymag.com/nightlife/features/15957/index1.html. 87 “Susanne Bartsch’s Love Ball, May 10, 1989 - the complete tape,” YouTube video, 54:51, posted by “5ninthavenueproject,” September 14, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odnaKLU8Kag. 88 Mary . K. Choi, “House of Style: Episode 01,” MTV News, July 24, 2012, http://www.mtv.com/news/2517065/house-of-style-episode-01/.

117 designed by Downtown artists like Keith Haring.89 A young Madonna sat in the audience, transfixed by the ballroom performers and the intricacies of voguing. Though Madonna had worked the same venues as many of the Downtown queer crowd of performers—

Danceteria among them—she had yet to encounter the stylized dance that led to her 1990 single “Vogue” until that night.90

Can White Women Have Black Balls?:

Madonna, Jenny Livingston, and the Legacy of Vogue Appropriation

Madonna arrived late to the party in terms of the voguing phenomenon in New

York. Between the time she saw the voguers perform at the Love Ball and the release of

“Vogue” as a single in 1990, the dance had already begun to erupt everywhere. Voguing had already appeared in music videos if not in its greatest form in Taylor Dayne’s “Tell it to My Heart.” Between the Love Ball and Madonna’s “Vogue” however, the dance had begun to take center stage where before it had been but a spice in the stew of contemporary pop choreography. I argue that Jenny Livingston’s Paris is Burning and

Madonna’s “Vogue” both end up taking advantage of the Ballroom community by appropriating its most popular dance. In the case of “Vogue,” the dance is emptied of its cultural, gender, sexual, and racial connections while the diva responsible for this grew wealthy in the process. The Ballroom community, however, saw little effect from the success of either.

89 “Susanne Bartsch’s Love Ball…,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odnaKLU8Kag. 90 Doonan, Wacky Chicks, 68.

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The year following the Love Ball, voguing took hold of mainstream attention when Madonna’s take on it topped the Billboard Pop charts at #1, just months before the theatrical release of ’s documentary that followed seven years of the

New York City House Ballroom community, Paris is Burning. Voguing became a household word and the ballroom figures received a fleeting spotlight focus, but critics, academics, and prominent members of the ballroom community decried the appropriative acts taken by both pop star and documentarian in their interactions with the community they profited from. In separate essays about Livingston’s film and the behind-the-scene tour documentary Truth or Dare: In Bed with Madonna, bell hooks criticizes both women as colonizing forces whose actions decontextualized the ritual of the balls and reproduced the culture and dance as spectacle for consumption by white audiences.91

Shep Pettibone’s musical choices in crafting “Vogue” reinforce these claims of decontextualization and appropriation on a musical level. Pettibone had worked with

Madonna on “Express Yourself” and “Like a Prayer,” among other singles and , and his post-production and work on Salsoul Orchestra’s 1982 single “Oooh I

Love It (Love Break)” contributed to its favored status among ballroom dancers and

DJs.92 Furthermore, David DePino and Johnny Dynell sampled horns and drums from the same song to create “Elements of Vogue,” the first track about voguing that featured

91 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation, 2nd ed (New York: Routledge, 2014), 145-157. 92 Lawrence, “Listen, and you will…,” 7; Keith Caulfield, “‘Vogue’ Producer 's First Interview in 20 Years: On Making a Madonna Classic & Why He Left Music Behind,” Billboard, May 22, 2015, http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop-shop/6575923/vogue-producer-shep- pettibone-interview.

119 vocals written and performed by a House member, David Ian Xtravaganza.93 DJs Dynell and DePino themselves had strong connections to the Ballroom world, spinning at clubs like Tracks where Ballroom members regularly took over the dance floor.94 “Elements of

Vogue” seems not to have found an audience outside these Ballroom clubs, but it’s sampling of “Ooh I love It” reinforces the perception that the song was played in heavy rotation on dance floors frequented by Ballroom dancers.

Pettibone’s appropriations of the sounds associated with voguing went beyond this sampling. The remixer/ composer (recording the track for $5,000 at Sony’s behest) wrote the piece in the “Philly Salsoul” style (a sound established on the Salsoul that consisted of Latin percussion infused funk coupled with lush disco strings), but remained somewhat puzzled by the idea to do a voguing track in the first place.95 In a

1990 interview with Billboard magazine Pettibone stated that “Vogueing was in the underground clubs. It had been around for a while and it was also semi-passé. People were saying ‘What’s the next thing? That’s over.’”96 Pettibone’s use of Philly Salsoul style in conjunction with the sampling of the group’s track within months of “Elements of

Vogue,” along with his knowledge of how voguing had already risen among in-crowd dancers, adds up to a sound that closely approximates that of the Ballroom style in small ways, but ultimately co-opts these styles and smoothes them out. The use of lush disco

93 Lawrence, 7. 94 Ibid. 95 Caulfield, “‘Vogue’ Producer…,” http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop-shop/6575923/vogue-producer-shep- pettibone-interview. 96 Fred Bronson, The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits, 5th ed. (New York: Billboard Books, 2003), 757.

120 strings on “Vogue” hints at associations with disco and opts for less funk-based sounds, heavy on synthesizers normally danced to in the Ballrooms.

Several musical elements, including the use of sustained string lines in the opening section of “Vogue,” also echo Malcolm McLaren’s “Deep in Vogue.” An established dance re-mixer by the time he co-wrote “Vogue,” Pettibone would likely have been aware of the dance chart success of McLaren’s piece. Madonna’s musical “rap” listing off white stars from Old Hollywood (which mimics the listing of houses in

McLaren’s piece) had been an addition suggested to Madonna by Pettibone.97 Where

McLaren’s list featured at the front end of his song, Madonna’s moved to the bridge.

McLaren’s list pays homage and gives credit to the Houses for the creation of the dance, while Madonna’s lyrical choices erase the Houses and avoid the highly racialized history of the Ballroom. Significantly, casting and depictions in the music video for “Vogue” reinforce this sublimation of identities and names of people of color. Not only are the Old

Hollywood stars mentioned all white ( and other black actors are noticeably absent), the music video also positions two of the dancers of color as “the help,” dusting a banister and picking up clothes in a grand mansion presented, ironically, in black and white.

Madonna’s lyrics for the song are problematic due to their erasure of the creators of voguing and its relevant racial history. As I noted earlier, the House Balls arose as a direct result of overt and implicit racism in New York City’s major drag pageants.

Madonna’s lyrics omit what McLaren’s highlight: voguing’s creation by queens and its

97 Caulfield, “‘Vogue’ Producer…,” http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop-shop/6575923/vogue-producer-shep- pettibone-interview.

121 context within the Ballroom world. Madonna sings “It makes no difference if you’re black or white/ If you’re a boy or a girl.” The reality of voguing stands in near opposition to this statement: queer people of color created, sustained, and had already begun to popularize the dance. Gender mattered to the ballroom figures, many of whose transgender members had left or been thrown out of their family homes for transitioning, leading them to the ballroom scene’s queer familial bonds. Transgender members of the ballroom community also put their lives at stake for the balls because of their gender identities. Dorian Corey describes in Paris is Burning the “femme queens” of the ballroom as those who passed as cisgender and as such could move about the city unrecognized as trans and unbloodied by attackers.98 Madonna’s lyrics conveniently paper over this history with a seemingly progressive narrative of gender blindness that removes the racial and gendered implications of the dance. Erasure and removal of color in “Vogue” did for voguing what Saturday Night Fever had done for disco: it removed the black, Latin queer, femme historical aspects of the culture in order to achieve palatability for the masses of white consumers, many of whom though gay themselves had little in common with the black femme queens or other performers of the ballroom world.

In the music video for “Vogue,” director pitted Madonna in a vogue-off with the back-up dancers that she refuses to participate in, altering a traditional challenge dance to a commodifiable fad-ready version largely hollowed out of its original meaning. Her star status is highlighted through framing devices that echo images of

Marlene Dietrich as well as Marilyn Monroe. Her refusal to participate is emphasized

98 Livingston, Paris is Burning.

122 through her visual distance from the other dancers in much of the video. Fincher keeps

Madonna isolated from the voguers except during the chorus. Madonna’s grasp on the dance moves seems limited. The only times she engages her entire body in dance rather than framing her face with her hands in close-ups, she distracts attention from the other dancers rather than engaging in a vogue-off. She upstages by standing closer to the camera than the voguers, occluding one dancer by dancing in front of him to create the illusion of multiplicity of extremities, and surrounds herself with the disembodied hands of the dancers. These attempts to upstage draw attention away from Madonna’s limited version of voguing which reduces the dance to hand movements and posing. Madonna poses and struts in the video like a tamed down Mae West meets showcasing her modeling skills. These are of course a component of voguing, but hand movement and modeling could only minimally be recognized as voguing due to the lack of articulation of its necessary component moves.

Madonna’s performance of “Vogue” at the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards further removes voguing from its New York Ballroom context, recontextualizing it in an entirely unrelated form of ballroom dance. Madonna enters the stage dressed as Marie

Antoinette complete with panniers and a fan, and reigns over her backup singers and dancers (including Jose and Luis Xtravaganza) as their queen, set against a backdrop of heavy drapes, divans, and ancient columns. Symbolically echoing the racist pageant issues of the pre-Ballroom era brought up by Dorian Corey in Paris is Burning, Madonna has literally “whitened up” her own skin. Madonna heterosexualizes the dance as well: one dancer looks up her skirt and another squeezes her breasts later in the performance

(See Figs. 13 and 14). Madonna’s selection of the Marie Antoinette image furthers the

123 idea that she is queen and the Ballroom dancers slaves to her demands as even their greatest poses are commissioned through Madonna’s fan pointed in their direction with the command “pose!” The spectacle of the elaborate costumes serves to distract from the racial implications of a wealthy, blonde, white woman donning the costume of the queen known (however incorrectly) for the phrase “Let them eat cake.” Here she ties her own pop star narrative to the nobility of the French Revolution, making clear that her alliances lie with , whiteness, and wealth.

Figure 13: Dancer looking up Madonna’s skirt during “Vogue” performance,

MTV Video Music Awards, 1990

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Figure 14: Dancer squeezing Madonna’s breasts during “Vogue” performance,

MTV Video Music Awards, 1990

Madonna diluted the dance to make it more palatable to a mainstream audience, but she had hardly been the first to bring it to national attention. That feat had already been performed by Malcolm McLaren, Queen Latifah, and Willi Ninja by the time she began to look for ballroom performers to incorporate into her own work. More importantly, little, if anything, Madonna does herself in these performances reflects the complex realities of voguing. Her own performances merely frame her face and pose.

Hand moves and framing thus became the dance trend known as “voguing,” while the actual dance was comprised of moves done lying on the floor, pops, dips, spins, miming, duckwalking and contorting the limbs. Without the other elements of voguing present then, it cannot be accurately claimed that Madonna popularized a dance she never truly performed. Whatever “voguing” Madonna popularized retains too few of the original elements to legitimately be called “voguing.”

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The music and video for “Vogue” raise concerns about Madonna’s interactions with and understanding of the ballroom world that have significant racial implications to consumers of her work. Ballroom figures’ claims around financial gains and notoriety that should have come about as a result of “Vogue” can be pushed aside as puzzles that involve more pieces than the appropriations of a single pop star. However, the seemingly neutral artistic, lyrical, musical, and aesthetic positions taken up by Madonna in these works provide evidence of a purposeful removal of race and queerness at a time that

Madonna heavily profited from black and gay audience members and performers.

The chart topping success of the single introduced some of the basic elements of voguing for consumption by the general population. Madonna maximized her gains by tapping into the concept just after the dance charts for McLaren and Latifah’s songs had cooled down. Madonna’s “Vogue” took on added relevance when Jennie Livingston’s

Paris is Burning saw theatrical release later that year featuring voguing as a central focus.

Madonna also cleaned up financially once again a year later upon the release of her tour documentary that featured Jose and Luis Xtravaganza alongside seven other gay dancers.

Madonna’s efforts left little interaction with the Voguers, however, until the time came to create the music video.

Madonna arrived and departed from the New York City ballroom scene in sweeping fashion. Debi Mazar, who had danced in several of Madonna’s previous videos and contemporarily served as her hair and makeup artist, set up an initial meeting between the pop singer/ dancer and David DePino, the deejay at legendary voguing club

Tracks and co-producer of “Elements of Vogue.” Mazar had recently become a regular at

Tracks and wanted to introduce Madonna to the ballroom scene. Rather than mingle with

126 the dancers in their element, DePino set up after-hours sessions where Madonna could watch the dancers and decide who she wanted in her new music video.99 She also attended a few nights at another club important to the voguers, The Sound Factory, where she called ahead and sat in the DJ booth to observe and choose her dancers.100 Thus, from their first interactions, Madonna never met the voguers as equals or even as partners in business. Rather, she elaborately auditioned them in order to select only two as supporting choreographers meant to augment the work of others and as supporting role dancers.

Madonna’s route for selection of dancers showcases an intentional “safe” distance from the actual lived experience of the ballroom scene, where younger figures dying of

AIDS, murder, or any other number of horrible situations that could confront quasi- homeless youth in Harlem. Rather than immerse herself in the culture, Madonna carefully selected only the things that mainstream America could handle and left behind most signifiers of a vibrant gay Black and Latinx experience. Though Madonna helped to popularize her version of voguing her interactions with the disenfranchised community appear to have left a relatively minimal, if not outright negative, impact. Notably Jose and Luis Xtravaganza dropped as quickly from Madonna’s radar as they entered it once the relevant touring ended. Even their treatment in the behind-the-tour documentary for the Blonde Ambition tour reveals Madonna’s lack of depth and understanding of the gay individuals who worked as her dancers. Reviews of the 2016 documentary reunion of the

Truth or Dare tour dancers, (Gould & Zawan, 2016), also reveal that two of

99 Lawrence, “‘Listen, and you will…,” 8. 100 Ibid.

127 the dancers filed suit against Madonna, but left the results out of the discussion while

Madonna chose not to appear in the documentary at all. 101

The music, lyrics, and video for “Vogue” strangely lack much of what had originally appealed to the New York crowds that previously flocked to see the ballroom competitions. Released as a single on March 27th, the music video premiered two days later and by May 19, the single hit number 1 on the Billboard pop charts. 102 Voguing became a household word, if not likely a real dance floor phenomenon due to the difficulty of its moves. Rather, Madonna’s facial framing with her hands became the referent to voguing and Madonna.

Regularly touted by fans, commentators and critics as an homage to the dance that took it to the mainstream, Ballroom figures and queer artists lob contrary criticism in

Madonna’s direction often and forcefully to this day. In 1993, reported on ’s funeral, painting a grim scene of the fallout from

Madonna and Livingston’s involvement just a couple of years after the whirlwind of interest in the scene. Jesse Green wrote in the article that “ …other than Willi Ninja, the movie's star dancer, who has stitched together a career including choreography, fashion and music, the characters Ms. Livingston presented remain, at best, where they were when filmed,” while pointing out the extraordinarily short range of time that any traction existed with larger sources of notoriety and money.103

101 Dennis Harvey, “Film Review: “Strike a Pose,’” Variety, April 16, 2016, http://variety.com/2016/film/reviews/strike-a-pose-film-review-1201754749/. 102 “Madonna: Hot 100,” Billboard, chart date May 19, 1990, http://www.billboard.com/artist/308786/Madonna/chart?f=379. 103 Jesse Green, “Paris Has Burned,” New York Times, April 18, 1993, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/18/style/paris-has-burned.html.

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bell hooks cites Madonna’s portrayals of and interactions with gay black culture during the Blonde Ambition tour featured in the documentary Truth or Dare: In Bed with

Madonna as symbolic of larger issues of racism and appropriation in her general body of work. In the essay she states that

…when the chips are down, the image Madonna most exploits is that of the quintessential "white girl." To maintain that image she must always position herself as an outsider in relation to black culture. It is that position of outsider that enables her to colonize and appropriate black experience for her own opportunistic ends even as she attempts to mask her acts of racist aggression as affirmation.104

As examined earlier, this distancing plays out in the music video and lyrics of “Vogue” as well. There we find Madonna only interacting momentarily with her black dancers while celebrating color-blindness rather than gay, Black, or Latinx cultures themselves. White, queer, trans, gender non-binary DJ Tierry Thamielle, better known as musician DJ Sprinkles, crafted a track called “Madonna Free Zone (Ball’r)”, that ends with the following testament against Madonna’s presence in Sprinkles’ sets.

When Madonna came out with her hit “Vogue” I knew it was over. She had taken a very specifically queer, transgender, Latino and African-American phenomenon and totally erased that context with lyrics about how it makes no difference if you're black or white, if you're a boy or a girl.' Madonna was taking in tons of money, while the Queen who actually taught her how to vogue was sitting at a table in front of me broke. So if anybody requested Vogue or any other Madonna track, I told them, no, this is a Madonna-free zone! And as long as I'm DJ-ing, you will not be allowed to vogue to the decontextualized, reified, corporatized, liberalized, neutralized, asexualized, re-genderized pop reflection of this dance floor's reality!105

104 hooks, Black Looks, 159. 105 DJ Sprinkles, Madonna-Free Zone (Ball’r), my transcription.

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In an interview for thump where they106 discuss their song and its genesis, Sprinkles points to some of the same issues that hooks had nearly two decades prior, citing that the issue is not the authenticity of Madonna’s “Vogue,” but rather the larger aims of commercial success and its inherent strategies that must aim at massive sales from a white, heterosexual audience. 107

Referenced throughout this chapter, Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is

Burning (Livingston, 1990) achieved critical and relative financial success through the depiction of the House Ballroom scene’s culture, competitions, and performance/ dance forms as well as the private lives of its members. The film took numerous critics’ awards including the prestigious Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 1991 Sundance

Film Festival and achieved a great deal of attention from the popular press. Livingston, however, receives heavy criticism to this day, including boycotts of showings of Paris is

Burning, that focus on similar issues of racism and appropriation. Criticisms of

Livingston extend further to the issues of the white colonizing gaze of the documentarian’s lens itself; many ballroom members attempted to sue Livingston for monetary compensation soon after the film’s release and success.108 Much of this can be attributed to the fact that Livingston directly used the images of a large number of the

Ballroom figures themselves, depicted within their own balls, homes, and social hangouts. In so doing, Livingston appeared to profit from the balls themselves rather than

106 I use the gender neutral pronoun “they” here because of DJ Sprinkles’ non- binary gender identity. 107 William Warren, “DJ Sprinkles On How to Lose Fans and Alienate the Music Industry,” Thump, September 24, 2014, https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/terre- thaemlitz-aka-dj-sprinkles-gives-it-to-madonna-straight. 108 Jesse Green, “Paris Has Burned,” http://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/18/style/paris-has-burned.html.

130 a product of her own creation. This depiction made legal action appear much easier, though the ballroom figures soon discovered their efforts would be fruitless due to the releases they had signed to be in the film.109 This can be effectively contrasted with

Madonna’s inclusion of only two members from the culture itself seemingly nestled within her own creation of the song “Vogue.” Here, Madonna’s agency in creation differentiates her from the relatively simple seeming efforts of the documentarian to observe, record and edit, while retaining dance, text, and culture directly taken from the balls themselves.

Despite these criticisms, Paris is Burning became a significant artifact of LGBTQ culture, both as a historical object that showcased the balls just as they began to gain traction in larger circles and as an influence on future drag, and later gay culture in general. RuPaul, as will be seen in the next chapter, took much of her Supermodel era persona from the film and used its language as a set of slogan-like go to phrases. Words and phrases like shade, reading, , and tens across the board pepper modern gay slang to this day.

Livingston’s film and Madonna’s single took the images and culture of the

Ballroom scene, though in diluted form, into living rooms and theaters across America and abroad. Their efforts brought attention to the scene and its members, if only a fleeting one. Sadly, the end result essentially became that average white gay kids all over

America co-opted the language and dances of a black and Latinx drag culture that rose into being in opposition to white racist pageants profiting from those very artists. The irony did not sit well with the ballroom community, though the handful that did achieve

109 Ibid.

131 fame certainly spoke out less on these issues. The Ballroom Community has made efforts in recent years through YouTube and other online resources to re-educate the world about the real history of voguing and the ballroom scene. One result and response to how to deal with the issue of recording and distributing this information without appropriating the culture once again came about in the 2000s from an ongoing discussion between filmmaker Wolfgang Busch and representatives of the ballroom world.

These discussions yielded the documentary ? (Busch, 2006) whose monetary earnings went directly back to film’s participants and the ballroom culture in general. Taking issue with Livingston’s issues of balance within the community, legal battles with film participants, and appropriation of Black and Latinx gay culture, the film picks up where Paris is Burning left off. The mission statement laid bare precisely what

Livingston left untreated:

How Do I Look? Is a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender “look” at the Ballroom community through a multi-cultural, inter-generational, and artistic lens. It serves as an artistic community empowerment project sending strong HIV/AIDS awareness messages through screenings, lectures, politicians, AIDS & community based organizations and the media. The Mission is: to empower 200 “Ballroom” community members artistically, financially, and professionally. Proceeds from the royalties are to be shared by the ballroom community, LGBT-community based organizations and the director.110

This project thus highlights and attempts to deal with the repercussions of Livingston and

Madonna’s interactions with the ballroom community by granting a large degree of control over the distribution of the information yielded from the project, as well as its monetary earnings, back among the community members. More importantly, it attempts

110 “Mission Statement,” How Do I Look, accessed April 2, 2017, http://www.howdoilooknyc.org/about.html.

132 to confront directly the issues of race, historicity, sexuality, transness, and generationality that the two white women who gained financially from the community had not.

In the next chapter I explore the ways that RuPaul navigates many of these issues herself as a faux blonde Black supermodel pop star. RuPaul familiarized herself with

Paris is Burning well enough to mine not only its catchphrases, but also its hard lessons about negotiating Black and gay identities in achieving success of any sort. Her repeated pre-Supermodel era viewings of the film, discussed in her autobiography, perhaps taught her all too well how easily one’s image could be manipulated as she had also known some of the ballroom members through time with Susanne Bartsch and time spent homeless and living on the piers of New York City. In the following chapter I explore the contours of how RuPaul maintained control over her image and constructed herself into a more palatable and mass marketable drag queen than both her pre-“Supermodel” genderfuck and club kid image or the ballroom figures themselves.

133

Chapter Three No RuPaulogies: How the Queen of Downtown Became the Supermodel of the World RuPaul pranced onto the pop music scene in 1993 with the release of her hit song

“Supermodel (You Better Work).” Though “Supermodel” never hit the top of the

Billboard charts it remains well known, most likely due to the unusual nature of the pop star behind it. One might think it’s a considerable stretch to call RuPaul a pop star since she hasn’t had many top 100 singles and no top ten hits, but it is important to remember that practically everyone is well aware of her existence. In other words, RuPaul is one of the standout pop figures who can unquestionably be called a household name.

This chapter explores RuPaul’s beginnings as an underground new wave and punk performer, her rise to the top of New York’s Downtown drag scene and her mainstream multimedia success achieved in the wake of “Supermodel.” Most significantly, I focus here on the strategies, especially musical ones, that RuPaul used in garnering fame on the national stage, focusing on how such notoriety occurred in the wake of the Bush and Reagan years. Notably, RuPaul began her career out of drag and transitioned through several styles of drag before arriving at her “Supermodel” era image.

She crafted new wave stage personas that shifted from androgyny to genderfuck presentations before arriving at a version of female illusion that was informed by new wave sensibilities. Through examining RuPaul’s artistic and career choices, political stances, and persona construction I show how RuPaul’s career hinged on her place in

Atlanta’s new wave and drag scene and the ways her career intersects with the subcultures and drag cultures represented in the previous chapters. RuPaul’s

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“Supermodel” image stands on established models that had already penetrated the mainstream with drag, specifically through Paris is Burning and Madonna’s “Vogue.” In the “Supermodel” incarnation RuPaul signifies the dream of becoming a Vogue fashion model referenced by many of the younger queens in Paris is Burning. The solution to the queer riddle of RuPaul’s success involves a number of moving parts, some of which were discussed in the previous chapters: an increasing interest in gay culture, especially and specifically black gay drag culture; the rise of queerness in pop music; and enormous political shifts in the American public and their elected officials. Lastly, I explore

RuPaul’s appropriations and manipulations of culture, showing her savvy in turning the ideas of others into a marketable image and sound.

As we have seen, drag queens and queer performers had already begun to show up in a number of mainstream spaces in the 70s and early 80s in rock and disco.

However, the return to so-called “family values” during the Reagan era attempted in part to keep homosexuality squarely and firmly in the furthest reaches of the closet.1 Reagan’s mishandling of the raging HIV/AIDS epidemic also meant that many queer lives were lost and the status of gay people as pariahs increased to that of disease carriers. As seen in the previous chapter, these issues left a legacy of queer group unity that deeply affected much of the art produced during a time when many felt, as did the Nomis, that the world was nearing its end. And by the end of the 1980s, events like the Love Ball began popping up more often, bringing together disparate sections of the LGBTQ community to raise money, awareness, and general spirits. The oppressive atmosphere of the time also

1Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in The Reagan Era (New Brunswick, : Rutgers University Press, 1994), 55.

135 produced vast amounts of underground queer art in the vein of punk and new wave that acted as a backlash against the dominant culture. The overwhelming focus during the

Reagan and Bush administrations on the heteronormative family, religious fundamentalism, and of course good ol’ American capitalism resulted in a decade worth of businessmen father figures on television with heteronormative nuclear families. The

Reagan administration’s conservative social agenda in terms of gender and sexuality heralded a return to the social mores of the 1950s. While the 1960s and 1970s counterculture influenced change on these issues, many voters believed a return to conservative values would mean a return to the prosperity of the post WWII era. RuPaul and the queens who surrounded her rose up against this rigid societal imagery. Though many of the 1980s New York scene queens found local success within the decade, a level of far-reaching, national notoriety unseen by drag queens since the days of vaudeville awaited one among them.

RuPaul in Atlanta

RuPaul Andre Charles was born in California in 1960. RuPaul claims in his autobiography that his mother named him this not only because of the relation to the Creole word relating to gumbo, but more importantly because she believed he would one day be famous: she claimed “There ain’t another out there with that name and there never will be!”2 Though RuPaul weaved in and out of a number of areas during her childhood, his beginnings as an entertainer lie in Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta in the 1980s was a time of great success for drag queens despite the raging HIV/AIDS

2 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All Hang Out (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 3.

136 epidemic. Gay people had gotten a taste of acceptance and fame via disco and were seemingly still riding high on that tidal wave. Nothing showcased this fact more than a typical night at Backstreet, Atlanta’s 24-hour . Backstreet was unique for any city in that it never closed and had been a 24-hour dance bar since it opened its doors in

1975—the early days of disco.3 The Legendary “Bitch of The South” Charlie Brown was the show hostess; drag shows ran alongside other entertainment all night long at the club.

Brown gives a detailed description of what the incredibly busy club was like on a typical night:

Oh my God, it was unreal. We had to start our show at 11:00 on the , and we would run it until 6:00 in the morning. And people still packed into that room begging for more. It was three floors, with a game area, a sitting area, the showbar, a disco, all open 24-hours. People would dance downstairs, then come up and watch a show, and the room just constantly turned over. Two people would leave and three people would come in. And it wasn’t just gays, it was straights too. It was the hardest audience I’ve ever had to work. You had to be ON it. You had to be polished: the costuming, the hair, the makeup, the total look. You had to sell it. You couldn’t go out there and half-ass do something. And at 3:00 in the morning all the other bars closed and the drunks piled up in our club! We would start out with a crowd that had been to dinner and would come in and catch the early part of the show, then we’d get the crowd that wanted to run over to Backstreet and have a good time before the drunks took over when the bars closed. 4 Though Brown tells us little in regards to what happened musically, he does give us some insight into the constituent audience: a heterogeneous mixture of gays and straights. This fact runs counter to popular portrayals in media, histories of HIV/AIDS, etc. of how gay

3 Dylan S. Goldman, “The Backstreet Legacy: Looking Back at the Atlanta Institution, Ten Years After the Last Call,” David Atlanta (site), December 23, 2013, http://davidatlanta.com/2013/12/the-backstreet-legacy-looking-back-at-the-atlanta- institution-ten-years-after-the-last-call/ 4 Charlie Brown, interview with Hollis Hollywood, “The Bitch Never Left: There is No Slowing Down the Legendary Charlie Brown,” Hollis Hollywood (blog), February 2013, http://www.hollishollywood.com/2013/02/charlie-brown/.

137 and straight people interacted during the 1980s. That straight people in the South would deign to enter a club during a time when HIV/AIDS was rampant and knowledge of how transmission occurred was non-existent seems rather progressive. Additionally, it shows how much bars, and particularly drag bars, could bring together the oft-oppositional communities in Atlanta. Significantly, unlike Charlie Brown and his compatriots, in

RuPaul’s Atlanta-based beginnings he neither pursued nor found major success in this

Southern mecca as a lip-syncing queen or a hilarious show hostess assaulting her audience. Instead, he situated himself as part of the local new wave scene.5 In doing so,

RuPaul was able to collaborate with multidisciplinary artists in film and music who were not likely to participate in drag culture’s lip-sync and comedy dominated entertainment styles.

As RuPaul recounts in 2016, the initial birth pangs of her career took a considerably different turn from most queens, whose careers tend to begin within and remain within gay drag clubs, with a written to a local cable access production: The

American Music Show. When the cast responded and allowed him to come on the show,

RuPaul quickly formed a three person “girl group” (though drag per se did not enter yet) of lipsyncers with two cisgender - Robin Prows and Josette Glasper-el, both friends of his. In early 1982, RuPaul and the U-Hauls (the name they gave themselves)

5 Mr. Charlie Brown, as of this writing, has been in the business non-stop for over forty years, a longevity practically unheard of in the drag world. Career lengths vary, but many queens leave the business after a few years and even the best often quit after fifteen or twenty years because of low pay coupled with physical demands on aging bodies. Many queens end up needing major reparative surgeries (knee and hip replacements, leg alignments, etc.) due to extreme dancing involving drops onto the back (“deathdrops”) and other difficult and physically taxing maneuvers performed often in extremely high heels.

138 appeared on local cable access performing a dance routine to Junior Walker and the All-

Stars’ “Shotgun.”6 RuPaul was asked back numerous times afterwards and eventually became a staple on the show. His performances varied widely- rapping live vocals over instrumental versions of songs, appearing in interviews on the show as a guest or showing videos he made on his own. Furthermore, launched a spinoff called Dance-O-Rama USA, what RuPaul refers to as a “new wave American

Bandstand”7 where he hosted a section called “Learn a Dance with RuPaul.” It is essential to understand that at this point RuPaul’s performances remained outside the realm of drag and instead generally favored a post-punk genderfuck image that included costumes constructed from tattered clothing and refashioned into androgynous fashions meant to confuse the viewer in an often confrontational manner. RuPaul combined jockstraps, feminine makeup, and unusual thrift store finds to create his looks, a set of football shoulder pads completed several of his most notorious fashions at the time.8 (See

Fig. 15) He performed intermittently on The American Music Show as he moved forward

6 Kelly McEvers, “Shante, He Stays: RuPaul Reflects On Decades of Drag — And 2 Emmy Nominations,” NPR Pop Culture (blog), August 25, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2016/08/25/491338249/shante-he-stays--reflects-on-decades- of-drag-and-2-emmy-nominations. 7 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 61. 8 “RuPaul's Cha Cha Lesson on Dance-O-Rama USA,” YouTube video, 4:20, posted by “misterrichardson,” January 22, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5GHfWRhjfk. Here RuPaul can be seen guest appearing teaching the Cha-Cha on Dance-O-Rama presenting her initial forays into post- punk and genderfuck new wave images, sporting striped black and white pants with an open sided orange top with flouncy and feminine ruffles wearing basketball sneakers with the white rubber tips shoddily died urine yellow with highlighters; Transgender actress, , and theorist Kate Bornstein defines genderfuck as “the intentional, crossing, mixing, and blending of gender specific signals all at once.” She also notes that genderfuck is the opposition of passing (which was emphasized in the Ballroom world). Kate Bornstein, My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, The Real You, or Something Else Entirely (New York: Routledge, 1998), 32.

139 into other fields, but his experiences there served as an initial foray into show business and introduction to many of the new wave performers he would work with for years to come. His time on the show contributed to his artistic development by granting him free reign to experiment with sketch concepts, characters, persona, and on-screen presence.9

During his tenure he forged a multi-directional approach to show business learning to interview, host, and perform. The relationship he forged with producer Dick Richards during this period likely assisted in the acquisition of his first recording contract at

Funtone USA Records, also owned by Richards.10

1983 saw RuPaul pursuing his music outside the world of cable access television when he joined a band called Wee Wee Pole as the front man for Robert Warren and

Todd Butler.11 The music was written collectively with RuPaul generally in control of the lyrics. Several of their tracks ended up on his first album Sex Freak, which we will return to later in the chapter. After only one month together they got their first gig opening for

Now Explosion, a new wave Band featuring .12

9 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 56-62. 10 John Walker, “The (Drag) Queen of ’90s Public-Access TV is Ready to Reign Once More,” Fusion, July 11, 2016, http://fusion.net/story/322087/deaundra-peek- atlanta-drag-queen-interview/. 11 Amber Frost, “Back to Her Roots: See RuPaul’s New Wave Band Wee Wee Pole, 1983,” Dangerous Minds, March 5, 2014, http://dangerousminds.net/comments/back_to_her_roots_see_rupauls_new_wave_band_ wee_wee_pole_1983. 12 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 69-70.

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Figure 15: RuPaul’s most iconic early genderfuck look, worn to the New Music Seminar,

1986

The band became somewhat of an underground favorite while opening for Now

Explosion. Consisting initially of Warren on , Butler on lead, and David

Klemchek on percussion, RuPaul took center stage as vocalist and front man.13 A clip

13 Robert Burke Warren, “Me & RuPaul,” Solitude & Good Company (blog), May 13, 2009, https://solitudeandgoodcompany.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/me-rupaul/. Footage of the band recently regained attention after a mention on RuPaul’s Drag Race during a challenge that emphasized RuPaul’s roots in new wave and punk bands. Fusion, Dangerous Minds, and other all shared the same footage I analyze here just after the show’s airing.

141 from 1983 grants a glimpse of the young, androgynous yet recognizably male RuPaul careening around the room with the eponymous wee wee pole, a body-sized cylindrical support pillow from a 1970s-era floral velour couch, yelling loudly, ending by running on stage to join the band’s musical performance, already in progress. Their bears resemblance to funk, punk, and disco: heavy bass, simple repetitive rhythms on the guitar, sparse sound, vocalized orgasmic choruses, rapped verses, all done to a danceable tempo and beat. RuPaul raps, “Don’t go worryin’ ‘bout your right or left/ We just wanna make ya have sex/leave it to that funky beat/ Turn into body heat,” with the rhythm of the raps showing RuPaul taking inspiration from Blondie’s “Rapture” with a more intense, funk sexuality.

RuPaul began his tenure with the group draped in nothing more than a loin cloth, sporting a Tarzan style look, updated for the 80s new wave scene with heavy make-up, though not yet sporting full drag make-up that redefines bone structure and shadows on the face. Wee Wee Pole’s act focused on the singer-as-spectacle: RuPaul incorporated costume changes and choreographed dance moves within a wild stage presentation. The band was known for their eponymous prop- the “wee wee pole,” a large, floral printed cylindrical pillow distinctly reminiscent of the 1970s. RuPaul and the pole dominated performances, with RuPaul often running offstage into the audience flailing the cylinder at them. The U-Hauls, RuPaul’s cohorts from The American Music Show, eventually joined Wee Wee Pole as well, adding to the on-stage energy.

The band played at punk and new wave clubs on their own, often opening for

Now Explosion, and became successful enough to get themselves booked for back-to-

142 back gigs in New York at the Pyramid Club and Danceteria.14 Wee Wee Pole’s success in these venues, as well as the thriving club scene of Atlanta, established RuPaul’s credibility as an underground performer and yielded industry connections not normally attainable through drag and gay venues. Though the band split up soon after breaking into the New York clubs, RuPaul went on to become a regular solo performer at both venues.

Ruth Polsky, who had recently been hired as Danceteria’s promoter, became one of

RuPaul’s biggest advocates in New York City, booking him repeatedly before her untimely death in September of 1986.15 Polsky, a tastemaker and ambience creator, became a significant figure in RuPaul’s ascendance of New York nightlife, exposing him to the city’s hippest audiences. During her tenure at Danceteria, Polsky completely altered the club’s soundscape, managing simultaneously to put its prime competitor, the

Mudd Club, out of business. Feeding into the wildly divergent Downtown New York nightlife scene’s thirst for new sounds and new experiences, she booked up-and-coming artists like Madonna, Duran Duran, , Run-D.M.., R.E.M., Johnny Dynell, and the , among a lengthy list of new artists with widely divergent musical styles and performance approaches. 16

As with the Harlem Ballroom performers discussed in the last chapter, RuPaul’s notoriety through performance did not necessarily come with a living wage. He went through various stints of homelessness beginning in 1983, initially sending him back to

Atlanta to regroup. Later that year, RuPaul met and fostered the career of a fledgling

14 Ibid. 15 Steven Blush, New York Rock: From the Rise of the Velvet Underground to the Fall of CBGB (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2016), 208. 16 Tim Lawrence, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor 1980-1983 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 345-346.

143 queen from Atlanta who would go on to become a magnate of drag in her own right:

Bunny Hickory Dickory Dock, now known as [The] Lady Bunny. Lady Bunny later created and organized the enormous “Wigstock” drag festival that lasted for 21 years in

New York.17 The event went on to become the world’s largest gathering of drag queens and the focus of a major documentary released in 1995, during drag’s reign over

American society. Hailing from Chattanooga, Tennessee, Lady Bunny’s southern wit and use of social in her performances provided for a natural alliance and friendship with

RuPaul. Neither queen took much interest in the serious approach to glamour, elegance, and female illusion offered by the standard Atlanta drag scene; instead, RuPaul and

Bunny Hickory Dickory Dock used drag as an outlet for mocking the established orders of identity and popular culture. Significantly, after meeting Lady Bunny, RuPaul acted in a series of low budget punk horror films in which she made her screen debut as a drag queen.18

Later in 1984 RuPaul reappeared at New York’s Danceteria, this time producing and creating a show called the “RuPaul is Red Hot Revue.” The revue featured performances by Lady Pecan, Felicia (later known as Flloyd), Opal Fox, and Bunny

Hickory Dickory Dock.19 Danceteria became a launching point for the aforementioned queens, but the unique style of drag they brought ultimately blossomed, along with their own personas, at The Pyramid Club. Like Club 57 and the Mudd Club, The Pyramid fostered experimental new work from emerging underground performers and did not

17 Dylan Michael, “Lady Bunny Touches Up Southern Roots in Atlanta,” Project Atlanta, July 25, 2013, http://www.projectq.us/atlanta/lady_bunny_touches_up_southern_roots_in_ atlanta. 18 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 72-73. 19 Ibid, 77.

144 trade in celebrity or high glamour. Rather, as then-contemporary Village Voice columnist

Michael Musto states, “The Pyramid was the CBGB of drag and Downtown performance culture,” a place where, like Club 57, artists could feel free to experiment and try ideas out without judgment.20 John Epperson, known professionally as Lypsinka, elaborates,

“When I went there, I realized it was the ’80s equivalent of what the gay baths had been

14 or so years earlier, launching the career of … I just knew in my bones this was the place to be. And there was a built-in audience on Sunday nights that loved everything, no matter how awful. It was O.K. to try anything.”21 The Pyramid featured a new, politically motivated and parodic drag that ground up and reconstituted popular culture into stage performances that reimagined rather than reiterated pop iconography and resplendent glamour. In her , RuPaul refers to this new style as

“superdrag,” an approach closely related to the goings-on of the punk and new wave world(s).22 During their tenure at The Pyramid, RuPaul and her compatriots lived on the streets and maintained the club’s backstage lockers as a makeshift repository for their personal belongings. Even when RuPaul was no longer a cast member at the bar, she was still allowed to keep her things in a locker there as she pursued other paths and spent time living on the streets or in friends’ homes.

After this major stint in New York, RuPaul returned to Atlanta where Dick

Richards, the head of Funtone Records and producer of The American Music Show,

20 Patrick Hedlund, “Push to Make Pyramid Club City’s First ‘Drag Landmark,’” The Villager, December 5-11, 2007, 11. 21Ibid. 22 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 78-79.

145 offered him a recording contract.23 He cut his first album Sex Freak for the label. The album mainly consists of RuPaul’s spoken vocals over new wave dance tracks with heavy emphasis on the bass guitar. Three of the album’s songs were recorded during his tenure with Wee Wee Pole, while the remaining three were new material.

Though Sex Freak never garnered any serious attention, RuPaul’s androgynous image, enhanced with make-up and costuming, became an increasing part of his appeal.

His looks at the time garnered attention in spaces like The New Music Seminar in New

York, where he arrived to the Marriott Marquis in his “not-yet-ready-for-MTV look”: fisherman’s waders, a jockstrap, football shoulder pads, “voodoo style makeup” and the words “FUCK OFF” and “” written on his arms in the fashion of tattoos. He took to the center of the ballroom floor and made a spectacle of himself holding his record, until security took him away.24 That night, RuPaul took to the stage at as the opening act for Now Explosion. His confrontational costuming and imposing physical stature were now magnified by a white cape fastened to and draped from the football padding.25

That same year, after a four month stint with Atlanta’s Theatrical Outfit as Riff

23 John Walker, “The (Drag) Queen of ’90s Public-Access TV is Ready to Reign Once More,” Fusion, July 11, 2016, http://fusion.net/story/322087/deaundra-peek- atlanta-drag-queen-interview/. 24 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 83. 25 “Now Explosion & RuPaul "Skin Tight" CBGB's New York,” YouTube video, 3:34, posted by "misterrichardson," May 6, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD1KXP4szWo.; “RuPaul at CBGB's in 1985,” YouTube video, 4:42, posted by "misterrichardson," April 28, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buLb8XUfRLU.

146

Raff in the Rocky Horror Show, RuPaul became a go-go dancer at the disco next door.26

Weekends was a club that he had frequented before going to New York. RuPaul was the club’s only go-go dancer for two and a half years; he received fifty dollars a night plus tips. Even as a go-go dancer, RuPaul differentiated himself from most others in the profession by focusing on his performances rather than giving personal attention to the patrons. Within the gay community, go-go dancers are generally men who dance and entertain the bar’s patrons, but often other activity lurks below the surface. Professor of psychology Michael David Smith explores this subject further in his book In the

Company of Men: Inside the Lives of Male Prostitutes.

…the patrons situate themselves around a bar, while dancers, who are hired by the bar’s management walk or sometimes dance around spending a little bit of time with each man in hopes of earning tips or after-hours business. Sex between the dancer and client may or may not be permitted on site; when it is, behavior often takes the form of brief massages, masturbation, and oral sex.27 28 RuPaul’s time as a go-go dancer became a stage for development of an emerging stage persona rather than a backdoor into sex work as it was for many men. He used his time at

Weekends to make business connections in the industry, rather than to make time with the patrons of the bar for extra pay.

RuPaul does not deny her own abilities to hustle, however. She regularly utilizes the language of in her drag persona and music as well as in describing her

26 Richard L. Eldredge, “RuPaul,” Atlanta, May 1, 2011, http://www.atlantamagazine.com/great-reads/rupaul-2011/. 27 Michael David Smith and Christian Grov, In The Company of Men: Inside the Lives of Male Prostitutes (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011), 161. 28 It is an open secret that sex work was and to a lesser degree still is relatively common among drag queens.

147 attempts to become a superstar. Just before she hit the big time, RuPaul did a short section on the oddball magazine show Manhattan Cable in which she spoke to transgender prostitutes (described by RuPaul in the video as transvestite hookers) who worked the Meat District. After talking with several of the trans sex workers,

RuPaul claimed her kinship to them, though with one important caveat:

I’ve had to talk with people or be with people who… who I didn’t necessarily know and I had to be friendly with them. Ya know? … and that’s the hooking sense. So, what’s the difference? …I guess the difference is that I didn’t have to go down on those people, but if you ask me it’s almost the exact same.29 Over the years, RuPaul often refers to her work in the entertainment business as a form of high class whoring, in which you sell your image rather than your sexual abilities.

Whatever her private actions, she appears to have picked up a trick or two while working as a go-go dancer as well as later when living around the meat packing district and talking to the prostitutes working the streets near her home.30 At the very least she cast her lot closely to their social class by participating in the economy of go-go dancing and walking the streets in drag to and from performances.31

While most go-go dancers functioned primarily as eye candy with whom patrons

29 “RuPaul Talks to Transvestite Hookers,” YouTube video, 4:17, posted by “drewnice1,” September 25, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv5NrI1ZNUw. 30 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 130-33. RuPaul reveals her locale near the Anvil and Vault sex clubs and also that the final shot of the Manhattan Cable piece on prostitutes ended on a shot of her getting into a car whose driver she masturbated before returning to the camera crew, citing this as her turn in the sex trade. 31 It is common knowledge in the drag community that a majority of performers are approached by men (especially heterosexual men) looking for sex with drag queens, trans women, and other folks who work in the flexible world of gender and performance. RuPaul’s referencing of the phenomenon occurs in many of her songs, especially “Lady Boy” and “ Chaser” (the latter is the colloquial language used by many drag queens to describe men who fetishize drag queens and transgender women and ).

148 may or may not be able to engage with sexually, RuPaul created costumes, played with gender and acted more as a star attraction for the club than one of several interchangeable go-go dancers. Film of RuPaul at Weekends shows a far more charismatic persona and energy than is generally associated with go-go dancing. Footage taken at the time shows

RuPaul dancing on the go-go box wearing a woman’s dress hacked off at the sleeves and tied behind his head, with no corset or body padding to provide the bodily contours generally associated with female illusion. His hair is in dreadlocks and piled atop his head in a crudely put together updo, no wig in sight. RuPaul’s genderfuck presentation differentiated him from most male go-go dancers, and helped him become a person of interest who was regularly booked at the club.

Larry Tee also worked at Weekends, deepening the working friendship that had begun with RuPaul’s regular feature as touring opener for Tee’s new wave Atlanta-based band Now Explosion. Tee had made a name for himself in the music scene through Now

Explosion and producing the original 7-inch single of the B-52’s “.”32 His retro-white-trash-meets-DIY-punk approach to performance and costuming made him a natural ally for RuPaul; both performers had also recorded for Funtone USA. Explosion had recently split up and Weekends quickly scooped up Tee as their in-house DJ. This re- connection proved invaluable to RuPaul since Larry Tee would be the one to bring drag queens RuPaul, Lady Bunny, and LaHoma Van Zandt to New York, where they would become central figures in the shaping of New York’s East Village and Downtown drag

32 D.B. Burkeman, “The Many Lives of Larry Tee, the ‘90s Club Kid Who Coined ‘,’” Thump, No School Like the old School (blog), August 8, 2015, https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/the-many-lives-of-larry-tee-the-90s-club-kid-who- coined-electroclash.

149 scene, and arguably the entire American drag landscape. As a jack of all music trades

(DJ, producer, writer, performer), Tee ultimately proved extremely invaluable to

RuPaul’s career, later co-authoring the lyrics to “Supermodel (You Better Work),”

RuPaul’s biggest pop hit, the song that framed and explained her “Supermodel” character for mass media consumption.

Underground Film and Music

Like the Downtown figures discussed in Chapter 1, RuPaul made much of her work re-envisioning the past through the deconstructing and reconstructing lens of the new wave scenes she participated in as a musician, actor and personality. RuPaul’s next major effort took a double barreled approach to media, as she created a film and album soundtrack of original songs: Starbooty. Directed by Jon Witherspoon (also known as the drag queen Lahoma Van Zandt), the film starred RuPaul as Starbooty in a send-up of

Blaxploitation films. The work also drew from the cinematic collaborations of John

Waters and Divine, especially Pink Flamingos (Waters, 1972). Filmed on no budget with a home video camera, Funtone Records released the film in 1987. The film links RuPaul to the punk scene through its DIY aesthetic and strong similarities to John Waters’ films

(despicably heinous villains, improvisatory and unskilled acting style, cast made up of friends who work together, camp humor, lack of budget, etc.), providing further evidence of RuPaul’s disconnect from the wider drag scene’s focus on glamour and variety performance, as seen at clubs like Backstreet. RuPaul sought a bigger kind of fame, and her foray into film set her apart from other Atlanta nightclub personalities, including drag queens.

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Looking back on the film in 2007, RuPaul recalled that in the original Starbooty,

“We were taking our cues from John Waters and Russ Meyer.”33 The two villains of the film are strongly reminiscent of the sick, twisted, evil and over-sexualized duo of Connie and Raymond Marble in Pink Flamingos: the duo in Starbooty are the Evil Twins, terrorists who kidnapped the president’s son and now want to infect the world with jars of

AIDS they carry at all times, threatening to dump them into the water supply.

Though the film bears strong resemblances to John Waters’s works, RuPaul and

Witherspoon intentionally made the movie as a sendup of Blaxploitation films, particularly in terms of the soundtrack.34 The influence of the genre yields a hefty dose of funk music throughout the film. Parliament’s funk classic “Tear the Roof Off the Sucka,” regularly punctuates the film. Funk had long been aligned with Blaxploitation films;

“Theme from Shaft,” “Across 110th Street,” or “Superfly” all provide strong examples of this phenomenon.35 I would argue that RuPaul used musical signifiers of Blaxploitation to create camp humor based upon competing generic expectations: RuPaul uses a distinctly Black musical style within a Waters’-esque, white, punk landscape where

1950s and 1960s music, both obscure and popular, dominated the soundtracks. In doing so, she recreated and refashioned the worlds of Waters and Meyers to sound like the world of Blaxploitation. RuPaul further creates a Shaft-like theme for Starbooty through a recurring musical motive in which high, shaky voices chant/sing “Star Booty, Star Booty,

33 James Kelly, “RuPaul: 's Revenge, Queen of Drag Returns to Roots and Meets Atlanta at the Crossroads,” Creative Loafing (site), October 17, 2007, http://www.clatl.com/music/article/13025804/rupaul-starrbootys-revenge. 34 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 88. 35 “Across 110th Street” was the title song for the 1972 film and ’s 1997 return to the genre Jackie Brown starring Pam Grier, a former Blaxploitation star.

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Star Booty Yeeeeeeeah/ Star Booty, Star Booty, Star Booty Noooooo.” “Starbooty’s” musical camp re-envisioning of funk mirrors much of what was occurring in Downtown

New York, the grinding up and refashioning of the past to suit the needs of those who have been written out of pop culture.

Camping the ghetto superhero political sensibilities of Blaxploitation films,

Starbooty serves as a heroic anti-drug symbol for the US Government, as well as its unwitting accomplice in the cocaine fueled antics of the American president character,

Max. As she states in the film, Starbooty was saved from the ghetto by the government.

Sought out for her “outstanding athletic…a-qualities [sic],” she was trained by

Washington’s finest to become “the hottest secret agent girl spy the US government could produce.” Starbooty constantly mentions the ghetto (which she always over- articulates as “ghe-toe”) and her desire to get drugs off the street: desires that come to a head when she kills one of the Evil Twins carrying a large amount of . She even ends the film with a statement trite enough to be worthy of Miss America, “I’m proud to put drugs out of business and to make this country drug free and make all the ghetto safe for every black child, every Puerto Rican child, and every white child across the

American borders. I, sugar baby, am proud to be an American. Thank you so much.”

Mere moments before this monologue, however, we see Max committing adultery and snorting massive amounts of cocaine as Starbooty discusses her success in the mission over the phone. Through these countering images, Starbooty suggests a comedic critique of Reagan’s ramping up of the War on Drugs during the AIDS crisis.

The key to this critique is the irony that while Starbooty sees a future where children of all colors are free of drugs, the actual pursuits of the Reagan administration

152 sent countless people to jail for soft drugs, most significantly Black men. As Kenneth B.

Nunn has noted:

… strategy of concentrating aggressive street-based law enforcement measures on the low income communities where the vast majority of live has only made drug dealing a more lucrative, if not dangerous, choice for young Black men seeking economic gain. Consequently, there is increased conflict, violence, and death as new street dealers seek to replace those arrested by the police. In waging the War on Drugs, police have detained African American pedestrians and drivers without probable cause or reasonable suspicion, gained consent for searches through coercion, and conducted indiscriminate seizures of property and cash as proceeds of drug trafficking. These types of tactics have led to harassment and the curtailment of African American privacy rights. Moreover, aggressive law enforcement practices such as these can only contribute to the feelings of distrust that African Americans have toward police, courts, and the government generally.36 The results of the War on Drugs are obvious: rather than the cleaned up streets and upward mobility of children of color from the ghetto envisioned by Starbooty, the government’s efforts removed many people of color altogether, especially Black men who were fathers. This policy left a landscape of impoverished children, especially children of color, who were not plucked from poverty, but remained in the ghetto with a parent in jail.37 Starbooty’s blind support of the President and the viewer’s knowledge of the president’s actions combine to showcase RuPaul’s abilities to distract with laughter while simultaneously offering critiques of topical issues through re-mixing the threads of

36 Kenneth B. Nunn, “Race, Crime and the Pool of Surplus Criminality: Or Why the “War on Drugs” was a “War on Blacks”, Journal of Gender Race and Justice (2002), 384. 37 It should be noted that this phenomenon has become so pervasive in the new millennium that multiple books dealing with a parent in jail have been published for adults and children to assist with coping, such as Melissa Higgins and Wednesday Kirwan, The Night my Dad Went to Jail: What to Expect When Someone You Love Goes to Jail (Mankato, MN: Picture Window Books), 2011.

153 its past. This mirrors much of what we saw from the Nomis, though now turned on its head for a southern audience steeped in similar culture to the B-52s.

In addition to the commentary on the War on Drugs, Reagan's silence on the

AIDS crisis, if not openly mocked, is certainly critiqued in the film. In his relays from the president, Max only cares about the president’s son. Anything else done by Starbooty is of her own volition, and it is significant that the Evil Twins’ plans to give everyone AIDS and distribute hard drugs are of no concern to the president. The Reagan Administration here is presented precisely as its policy had proceeded since AIDS was initially reported.

While Starbooty knows the danger of AIDS and the Twins' plot to infect the world, Max remains completely oblivious, echoing the US government’s inaction throughout much of the AIDS crisis. On April 1, 1987, after six years and tens of thousands of deaths, Reagan gave his first speech concerning the fight against AIDS; when asked about the role of educating the public he stated: “How that information is used must be up to schools and parents, not government. But let's be honest with ourselves, AIDS information cannot be what some call ‘value neutral.’ After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don't medicine and morality teach the same lessons.”38 This statement showed that Reagan still viewed the disease as a largely gay disease that served as punishment for the supposedly sinful homosexuality of many of its victims. To appreciate the horror of this statement and his relative silence one need only glance at the statistics on AIDS: By 1987 41,027 people were dead from HIV and 71,176 were

38 Gerald M. Boyd, “Reagan Urges Abstinence for Young to Avoid AIDS,” New York Times, April 2, 1987, http://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/02/us/reagan-urges- abstinence-for-young-to-avoid-aids.html.

154 diagnosed with AIDS in the US.39

The critiques in Starbooty showed that RuPaul had the political savvy coupled with queer punk sensibilities that would help her further succeed in the world of

Downtown culture. Certainly no queen at Backstreet or Atlanta's other drag bars would have created a performance that used fighting AIDS to comic effect while simultaneously critiquing the Reagan administration's policies' effecting gay communities and communities of color. Success would not have come, however, had the movie not also featured camp as a central aesthetic to hysterical ends. Part of her success with selling these films in Atlanta came from her unique guerilla marketing strategy of self- promotion. While she had already made a name for herself by pasting touched up photos of her face with the caption “RuPaul is Red Hot!” all over downtown Atlanta, she also wrote short pamphlets featuring photos of herself alongside short, witty anecdotes and sayings.40

Starbooty marked a major move forward in RuPaul’s career by spawning sequels and a soundtrack that would lead to a bevy of other film projects and one of the most significant relationships of her career. The film’s soundtrack, co-written by Larry Tee

(credited as Lawrence Thom), was produced by The Fabulous Pop Tarts, comprised of

Randy Pop and Fenton Tart (now known as Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey). This trio also collaborated on RuPaul’s “Supermodel” song and music video. The Pop Tarts had a short-lived musical career, describing their sound as a “cross between the

39 Ibid. 40 Ellen Dennis French, “RuPaul,” in Contemporary Black Biography: Profiles from the International Community, ed. Shirelle Phelps, vol. 17 (: Gale, 1998), 163.

155 and ELO.”41 Fenton and Bailey later became well known for their production company

World of Wonder, which focused primarily on figures at the margins of celebrity.42 The multi-talented duo understood the importance of working in multiple media and establishing a brand long before “branding” became part of common parlance.43 The Pop

Tarts would later sign on as RuPaul’s management and acquire her first major label recording contract, which I will return to later in the chapter.

The Pop Tarts arranged, recorded, and produced the soundtrack album, RuPaul is

Starbooty, assisting RuPaul in moving into a slightly more polished, studio quality sound.

The album is less a direct soundtrack to the film, however, and more of an expansion of the sonic landscape of the Starbooty character. Sex Freak featured RuPaul speak-singing to the stripped down sounds of bass and guitar riffs, with a heavy emphasis on the bass groove. RuPaul’s sophomore effort moves away from punked out funk toward a sleeker, synthesized new wave sound featuring drum machines, loops, background singers, and even a rap that caps off the album. RuPaul is Starbooty provides a glimpse into a more coherent musical style and the emergence of her first multi-media character. The album, like the film, featured RuPaul as Starbooty, with songs based around the character like:

“The Mack,” about a pimp and a prostitute; “Ghetto Love,” a serious love

41 James Michael Nichols, “: Randy Barbato & Fenton Bailey, AKA The Fabulous Pop Tarts,” Huffington Post: Queer Voices (blog), July 27, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/27/randy-barbato-fenton-bail_n_5621822.html. 42 Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, “Wow Manifesto,” The World According to Wonder (Hollywood, CA: World of Wonder Books, 2013), inside covers of book. 43 World of Wonder has since grown into an independent production company that has produced The RuPaul Show, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and RuPaul’s Drag U, as well as the documentaries The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Barbato and Bailey, 2000) (a documentary about Tammy Faye Baker narrated by RuPaul) and Party Monster: The Shockumentary (a documentary about a gruesome murder that began the dissolution of the 1990s club scene).

156 song featuring synthesized strings; and the titular “Starbooty,” drawing from funk classics. RuPaul’s humor comes through on this album, foreshadowing much of her later work as a major label artist. “Ernestine’s Rap,” which closes the album introduces the character of Ernestine Charles, RuPaul’s mother, who returns as a character time and again.

The humor and funkiness of the album brought RuPaul national attention, landing

RuPaul is Starbooty in the “Underground” column of Spin magazine. Judge I-Rankin wrote glowingly of the album, specifically picking up on RuPaul’s use of “the dozens”- style rhyming insults which she returns to time and again in her songs.44

RuPaul is Starbooty and vice versa… Star Booty is unctuous gay discoid funk with sarcastic lyrics… “Ernestine’s Rap” admonishes “I can tell by your knees you eat commodity cheese” while a ferocious slap-funk bass crushes the beat into a greasy spot on the dance floor. RuPaul’s material is influenced by the trashy Blaxploitation films of the early ‘70s, which he attacks with biting accuracy on the title cut and “You Want Love.”45 RuPaul received national attention as a musical artist with no caveats about her status as a drag queen. Remarkably, the only mention of drag in the article clarifies who the artist is in relation to the character of Starbooty: “… RuPaul (in real life a black drag artist from

Atlanta).”46

Both the album and film became cult hits and gained the attention of an independent filmmaker in Atlanta: Wayne Hollowell. Hollowell’s interest in RuPaul led to numerous films like Mahogany II (1986), American Porn Star (1986), and Voyeur

44 She recently used The Dozens in her 2012 co-written track with Bounce Artist , “Peanut Butter”. 45 Judge I-Rankin, “Underground,” Spin, May, 1987, 39. 46 Ibid.

157

(1986) which once again lifted RuPaul a little higher over the heads of her competitors for fame in Atlanta. As RuPaul explains, they had “…one common theme, sex, nudity, trashy dialogue and fake blood.”47 The films were still low budget, but considerably more expensive than those produced by Witherspoon. Audiences and venues for the films became larger and more serious as well. Where her earlier films had been sold out of shopping carts and viewed in local art house cinemas, Hollowell’s films premiered at

Club Rio, an important nightspot for Atlanta.48 The club had once been Atlanta’s best for the local punks, new wavers, and gay crowd; Michael Musto of the Village Voice described it as “New York City’s best new nightclub, airfare not included.”49 When the films premiered here in 1986, RuPaul got her first star treatment: she was dropped at the club in a limousine and whisked away to the private screening room while cameras photographed the whole thing.50

Showcasing a true working girl’s spirit, RuPaul continued to work at Weekends as a go-go dancer as her star continued to rise in Atlanta’s music and nightlife scene.

Meanwhile, Weekends had opened a club in a nearby movie theater where RuPaul became their host for drag shows and pageants. One can only imagine the initial incongruity of RuPaul’s genderfuck drag with the polished glamour and expensive costuming of the traditional drag pageants of Atlanta whose queens’ exhibited the same

47 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 92. 48The club is now notorious for Rob Lowe’s filmed escapades with an underage girl he met there in 1988. 49 Richard L. Eldredge, “Club Rio’s 25th Lures City’s Reformed Punks, Yuppies,” Atlanta Magazine, August 23, 2013, http://www.atlantamagazine.com/agenda/2013/08/23/club-rios-25th-lures-citys-reformed- punks-yuppies. 50 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 95.

158 polish described by Mr. Charlie Brown as necessary for success in the drag clubs. There

RuPaul honed her skills as an emcee, skills that would make her a more marketable nightclub persona.

From Genderfuck Drag to Queen of Manhattan: RuPaul Moves to New York

By the fall of 1987, RuPaul had grown tired of the Atlanta scene and its seeming comfort and began to hunger for New York City again. In August of that year, she, Larry

Tee, and Lahoma Van Zandt packed up the now defunct Now Explosion’s van and headed to New York. While en route their van flipped over on the highway, almost killing them.51 This accident only served as the beginning to what would become

RuPaul’s bleakest year. Once they arrived in New York, RuPaul had been somewhat forgotten and ended up working routine jobs or doing drag for as little as eighteen dollars a night.52 RuPaul lived with friends and eventually she, Larry, and Lahoma started a night at the Pyramid called “Disco 88.” (As discussed in the previous chapters, theme nights formed the foundation of a new model of clubbing that arose in London and spread to

New York City through the importation of the culture by major nightlife players in both scenes, especially Susanne Bartsch.)

After “Disco 88” RuPaul relatively disappeared from both the New York and

Atlanta scenes.53 Larry Tee ultimately lured her back to New York City and in January

51 “Outback with Larry Tee,” The Back Building (blog), accessed March 5, 2017, http://thebackbuilding.com/post/38890377740/outback-withlarry-tee. Larry Tee claims that this incident inspired To Wong Foo in the same interview, but from my research this claim appears unfounded. 52 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 98-99. 53 Over the next year, RuPaul’s life took a turn for the worse. She performed in an ill-fated play, Shaggy Dog Animation, in Atlanta; was offered a performance opportunity

159

1988, RuPaul returned to the Big Apple on Tee’s dime. On arrival, she recognized the drag scene had shifted during her absence.54 The order of the day was “,” or what

I categorize as “female impersonation” in its purest form: the desire with this type of drag is to look as passable as possible as a cisgender woman.55 RuPaul suddenly shifted her image from “punk drag” to “black hooker drag” (presenting a beautiful female illusion costumed in revealing and cheap outfits) and learned how better to blend in with the other queens through a closer approximation of femininity and an abandonment of her genderfuck approach to drag (See Fig. 16) : “I learned how to lipsync- not just approximately, but with laser precision. I began buying wigs- I had never done that before- started sewing clothes, wearing tits, and shaving my legs. Instead of fright drag, I was going to look hot and sexy as a drag queen.”56 This list may seem odd to the uninitiated as these would seem to be essential elements for making a man look like a woman, but for some drag queens giving the illusion that they are women was/is not their main goal. For many drag queens and queer performers, as seen in chapter two, drag is

in London, but was immediately sent back by customs agents after a strip search; after a series of flights, she was caught in an attempt to stow away and ended up in Mansfield, after her sister Renae took her to where their father lived, a man with whom she had a bad/non-existent relationship. She eventually ended up moving to Los Angeles where she managed to get on . Though she made it on the show, she lost to an Elvis impersonator while Salt-n-Peppa judged. Despite her loss, the moment still stands as RuPaul’s national television debut. Soon after this, things got even worse for RuPaul as she ended up moving in with her sister Rozy, until she was basically forced onto the street after which she moved back in with her mother. RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 100-106. 54 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 107-108. 55 Cisgender is a relatively recently adopted term to identify individuals whose gender identity matches their birth sex, i.e. a female born, female identified person. See Evin Taylor, “Cisgender Privilege: On the Privilege of Performing Normative Gender,” in Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2010), 268-272. 56 RuPaul, Lettin’ It, 108-109.

160 about transformation: the ability to make yourself into anything you desire whether it be an identity or an abstract visual effect. This quotation from RuPaul sums up how different she was from the average drag queen: up until now she had used drag as a way to confound people’s perceptions of gender. RuPaul also began to understand the need, in order to go mainstream, to feed into people’s desires rather than their fears. The move to

New York and alteration of her appearance served as the starting point to RuPaul’s launch into stardom and it was not long before the downtown scene and the city at large took notice.

Figure 16: RuPaul’s post-genderfuck “black hooker drag,” 1989

161

RuPaul’s new look began to grab the attention of club promoters, audiences, and musicians alike. Soon after her arrival and restructuring of her drag character in New

York, to honor their shared Georgia roots she was asked to do a cameo in the music video for The B-52’s “” where she can be seen sporting a pink afro and hot pants.57

Though the band did not know RuPaul in Atlanta, its members hail from Athens,

Georgia. Athens is not far outside of Atlanta and the new wave scene that the B-52’s emerged from had influenced Atlanta’s new wave scene, echoes of which can be clearly felt in the white trash thrift store punk aesthetics of The American Music Show.

The seven-foot-tall drag queen, now polished into a more palatable and less confrontational package, began to work nonstop once in New York. Initially she was hired by Susanne Bartsch to go-go dance at her weekly club night Savage for fifty dollars a night. Suzanne Bartsch was, and still is, one of the most famous promoters in New

York. The same year she hired RuPaul, she created the “Love Ball,” discussed in the previous chapter. Similar to Ruth Polsky, Bartsch helped to establish RuPaul as a booking commodity in New York, featuring her regularly in the unofficial troupe of performers that helped her establish a nightlife brand. Bartsch’s support elevated RuPaul to new heights by connecting her to the world of street fashion, which Bartsch’s performers took influence from and contributed to, and by including her in her national and international touring shows that featured Leigh Bowery and Joey Arias as well.

Bartsch’s brand allowed RuPaul access to gatekeepers of nightlife previously beyond her

57 RuPaul, , and The B-52’s, “Episode 90: The B-52’s,” What’s the Tee? (), March 29, 2017, http://www.rupaulpodcast.com/episodes/2014/7/2/episode-7-the-rupaul-secret-with- mathu-anderson.

162 reach. Years later, RuPaul credited Bartsch for her image and financing, saying: “You were really the one who championed me in New York and really got me propelled to a place where I could pay my bills and have a platform.”58

Outside Susanne’s troupe, RuPaul’s first success came in performing for Larry

Tee’s club night Love Machine at the old Underground Club. Love Machine brought the old gang from Atlanta back together under one Downtown roof: Larry Tee, RuPaul, Lady

Bunny (who had by now changed her name from Bunny Hickory Dickory Dock),

Lahoma, and Flloydd. As RuPaul states, the group “merged the southern realness thing with the ratty old wigs and social satire of the Pyramid.”59 The Pyramid played a central role in New York’s drag history, housing performances from Charles Busch, Ethyl

Eichelberger and Charles Ludlam before RuPaul and the Atlanta gang came to town.

Laurence Senelick ties the changes in drag in the East Village to the switch from goth and punk to new wave that occurred in the larger nightlife scene:

Performances retrospected wistfully to the performers’ childhoods: in lieu of Barbra, Judy, and Eartha, references to Warner Brothers cartoons, sitcoms of the early 1960s, Blaxploitation films, the inept movies of Ed Wood, glitter-rock bands, leopard-skin toreador pants and especially earlier drag artistes served as fraternal handshakes and Masonic symbolism. Eventually, via cultural seepage, these revivals were taken up by the fashion pages and entered mainstream culture.60 Though much of this can be said for RuPaul and the Atlanta gang, Senelick notes that the queens from the South (RuPaul, Lady Bunny, Lahoma, Happi Phace, Lypsinka, and Flloyd)

58 “RuPaul Drives… Susanne Bartsch,” YouTube video, 6:56, posted by “WOWPresents,” April 17, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhVntKY8-78. 59 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 110. 60 Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre, (London: Routledge, 2000), 433.

163 set out with more serious goals in mind.

…(these) Southerners… had no intention of degrading themselves to gain acceptance. They parodied exaggerated glamour, and crafted personae which were caricatures rather than replications of pre-existing female types. They disdained false breasts of any manufacture, and never asked to be taken as women.61 Senelick’s claim that the queens of New York never wore false breasts is an overgeneralization. The queens of New York never asked to be taken for women not because of their lack of physical resemblance to cisgender women (which varied widely), but because of their stage personas that often represented camp send-ups of variations on womanhood rather than sincere female illusion.

By October of 1989, RuPaul had been embraced by many of the major players in the Downtown nightlife scene and was voted “Queen of Manhattan” 1990 by club owners, promoters, and DJs, unlike the pageants of the Ballroom world that are voted on by prominent members of the community.62 Toward the end of her year-long reign, she realized there would need to be some major changes made to grasp real fame outside of

New York’s bustling, but ultimately local, nightlife. Jealousy became another motivator for RuPaul as she saw her friends Deee-lite blast both the Club (#1 US) and Pop charts, peaking at number four. Their lead singer, Lady Miss Kier, had been reared in performance by Downtown queens. The basis of her group’s sound in disco and their retro and campy outfits tied them to new wave, with both genres being essential to the gay community. Whereas disco had brought elements of gay culture to the masses and

61 Senelick, The Changing Room, 434. 62 Michael Shulman, “In Drag, It Turns Out, There Are Second Acts For RuPaul, A Second Act with ‘Drag Race,’” New York Times, February 21, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/fashion/RuPaul-Drag-Race-television.html?_r=0.

164 played a part in moving gay rights forward, new wave allowed for a pilfering of the detritus of pop culture’s past for satirical or ironic effect similar to the way many drag queens assemble their performances. These similarities allowed drag queens to be taken seriously by new wave clubs like Danceteria and expanded opportunities for drag performances.

During this time RuPaul had some limited appearances on national television, including the “Club Kids” episode of Geraldo.63 RuPaul was a last minute addition to the panel because only white kids had been included.64 The casting of only white kids for the episode was perhaps inevitable because the club scene was predominantly white.65 The club kids were often the children of white middle or families who wanted to escape the grips of their conservative parents. RuPaul managed to take center stage even among the brilliant colors of her cohorts’ costuming: her experience on Atlanta’s The

American Music Show gave her experience working a television camera to her favor. She ultimately received more screen time than many of the other participants. She promoted what would become a lifelong catchphrase, “You’re and the rest is drag,” and acted the part of drag televangelist by asking viewers to place their hands on their televisions and repeat “Everybody say love!” Though the audiences responded positively to RuPaul and the Club Kids, an appearance on Geraldo, where many versions of cross- dressing regularly received sensationalized attention, was hardly the sort of national

63 “RuPaul and Club Kids on Geraldo,” YouTube video, 0:46, posted by “VCRalert,” February 3, 2008, original air date February 25, 1994, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAPvdqaDupM. 64 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 115. 65 Ibid., 113.

165 exposure needed to garner interest from the public at large.

RuPaul soon recognized the only route to success was to become a functional adult, awake and sober during the day hours that most people did business. After rehabilitating herself by giving up drugs and alcohol, she began to pursue a manager and a recording contract. In 1991 World of Wonder, a management company created by the former Pop Tarts, signed RuPaul.66 Despite the Pop Tarts’ lack of any major success as a music group, she wanted to sign with them because they kept regular business hours, were professional, got Dan Hartman of disco’s “Instant Replay” to produce their album, and had at least managed to acquire contracts for themselves as the Pop Tarts before splitting up. The relationship would lead to extensive club touring, submissions of demo tapes to every label that Fenton and Bailey could reasonably get in contact with, and ultimately a recording contract with .

Before signing her recording contract, RuPaul took a somewhat unexpected avenue in her career. As she worked with the Pop Tarts, she performed as an androgynous, but ultimately male persona appearing in a form fitting pink body suit with a tight hood and ostrich trim (See Fig. 17). Unlike most queens, RuPaul never visualized her true fame coming from drag. Rather, she had begun as a new wave figure and planned to move forward with an androgynous image, hoping to follow in Boy George’s footsteps. Little evidence of this period remains aside from a few photos.67 RuPaul explains in her biography that she underestimated the abilities of the public to connect

66 Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, The World According to Wonder (Hollywood, CA: World of Wonder Books, 2013), 43. 67 Some of these images of RuPaul can be seen in RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 125-128.

166 with drag. Though she had risen through the underground new wave scene in various drag looks, she perceived that drag could go no further than a subcultural audience, and would ultimately keep her from more ambitious goals.

At that point, I felt that if I was ever going to become a star, I’d have to be androgynous or whatever. Anything but a drag queen. I wasn’t fighting it, simply would not translate. I had no idea that what worked at The Pyramid would work just as well in a massive stadium, or in a Hollywood movie. With the exception of Divine and Sylvester, no one had carried it off, and even then, for all their groundbreaking success, they seemed to make it only so far. Sure, I’d done my movies in drag, but I never thought of presenting myself as the premier drag queen for mass consumption, for the with-it MTV kids who go to the mall.68 The androgynous look sans wig and heels appears to have made little impression based on the lack of visual evidence within an otherwise fairly well-documented career.

Figure 17: RuPaul’s short-lived, androgynous image while working with the Pop Tarts, 1989

68 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 128-129.

167

The emergence of RuPaul’s “Supermodel” image came about through a calculated effort on the part of RuPaul and her collaborators whom she met through Susanne

Bartsch. During a tour to Japan sponsored by Bartsch, RuPaul encountered Mathu

Andersen and Zaldy Goco (known as Zaldy), who would go on to become her lifelong stylists, makeup artists, wig makers, and general image consultants to her drag persona.

Along with RuPaul, they crafted the ultimate drag image that would be marketable to mainstream America, pushing aside any attempts at genderfuck or rough-around-the- edges punk drag of her past. RuPaul and her team created a new image, the “Glamazon” that would become RuPaul’s go-to look for the rest of her career.69 (See Fig. 18) Mathu

Andersen’s make-up work on RuPaul became an essential key in softening her image;

RuPaul stopped doing her own makeup from that point forward.70 In an interview with

Andersen on RuPaul’s podcast the duo discussed the intimate details of constructing the drag diva’s image, with RuPaul admitting that she could not do her own face at anything approaching the level of Mathu’s specificity and artistry. The ability to do one’s own makeup is normally considered one of the qualifying skills that make a drag artist.71

Never one to stand on ceremony, RuPaul detached herself from the drag dictum that one must do their own face to be a drag queen. With much of drag culture, the illusion of man-as-woman is the skill of drag, but for RuPaul the drag image was but one of many that he had transformed in and out of, reiterating the truth of her catchphrase, “You’re

69 RuPaul, Michelle Visage, and Mathu Andersen, “Episode 7: Timeline Failure with Mathu Andersen,” What’s the Tee? (podcast), July 2, 2014, http://www.rupaulpodcast.com/episodes/2014/7/2/episode-7-the-rupaul-secret-with- mathu-anderson. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid.

168 born naked and the rest is drag.”

Figure 18: RuPaul’s “Glamazon” image solidified with this “Supermodel” music video costume designed by Zaldy, hair, make-up and photography by Mathu Andersen

169

The Glamazon image became the package RuPaul would sell as well as the product. The Glamazon made use of the talents of artists from different backgrounds who had all come into their own in the world of Downtown nightlife, RuPaul included, much like the collaborative efforts from artists who each brought something different to the table examined in Chapter 1 around Club 57 and the Nomis. The Glamazon consisted of a seven-foot-tall black Barbie visual, complete with platinum blonde hair relaxed, rolled, curled and piled mile high, and a waist steel bone corseted so tightly it could rival

Scarlett O’Hara. RuPaul’s transformation resulted in a clean and polished presentation of glamour inspired by supermodel culture, wherein models were no longer interchangeable pretty faces, but the new stars and celebrities of the tabloids. Some scholars have claimed that RuPaul’s blonde hair came about as a request from of Tommy Boy

Records, but in reality that image had already been solidified before she entered the picture. Unlike most images of black men in drag from popular culture (like Flip

Wilson’s Geraldine character), RuPaul may have made people laugh, but the joke was never on her or women. Monica Lynch of Tommy Boy Records would end up taking notice soon after RuPaul’s “Glamazon” image emerged.

The Pop Tarts had been sending out RuPaul’s demo tapes to every label they could think of in pursuit of a recording contract, and Tommy Boy Records remained one of the longest shots on the list.72 Tommy Boy catered to a hard core hip-hop and rap crowd, but there was at least a minimal connective tissue between the company and the world of drag. As discussed in the chapter 2, Queen Latifah had been signed to the label just a few years earlier and had since done the music video for “Come Into My House,”

72 Barbato and Bailey, The World According, 43.

170 featuring Willi Ninja. It came as a shock to all involved with RuPaul when Monica Lynch of Tommy Boy Records rang up the Pop Tarts’ office expressing interest in the drag queen pop musician.

A few months later, RuPaul was signed to the label on the strength of her and songwriting partner ’s song “Prisoner of Love” after RuPaul’s performance at Wigstock in 1992.73 Wigstock, which began as a small, Lady Bunny-led gathering of queens in the park, had morphed into a gathering of tens of thousands bewigged queens, women, children, and all other manifestations of teased up, aerosol glory, while the best queens from around the country performed routines of all sorts.74 After RuPaul was signed based on her new Glamazon image, Larry Tee suggested she write a prequel to

Starbooty (a fashion model turned secret agent) called “Supermodel.” Though wary due to a recent lapse in their friendship and Tee’s busy schedule as a successful solo act, she pursued the idea and collaborated with Tee and Harry. Tee co-wrote “Supermodel,” while the rest of the album was largely conceived by RuPaul and Harry.

RuPaul had spent much of her time off from the nightlife hanging out at a movie theater, where a friend worked and could get her in for free. During this time, she gorged herself on repeat viewings of Paris is Burning, along with a few other films. The documentary’s subjects’ focus on supermodels seem to have been appropriated by

RuPaul and channeled into her “Supermodel” Glamazon image. As noted in the last chapter, the Ballroom figures have been critiqued for aspiring specifically to white

73 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 128-136. 74 “History,” Wigstock, accessed February 25, 2016, https://wigstock.squarespace.com/history/.

171 standards of both beauty and class. As bell hooks claimed, the subjects were aspiring to the very class and social standings structured to maintain oppression of people of color.75

The effect of these repeat viewings on RuPaul appears evident in her adoption of the sobriquet of “Supermodel of the World.” While RuPaul attempted to rise from the underground in the first couple of years of the 1990s, she took note of the success of

Paris is Burning and Madonna’s successful appropriation of the same Black queer culture and the culture’s focus around imitation of (largely white) supermodels. As I will show,

RuPaul also tweaked the obsession with supermodels by adding a heavy dose of the satire from the Pyramid club and Downtown scene to her Glamazon image by fracturing it through the lens of the linguistics of black transgender sex workers.

The Signifyin() Drag Queen:

How RuPaul Marketed Herself to the Mainstream

RuPaul’s transformation into America’s most marketable drag queen ever involved a winking, campy, knowing approach to drag, with the grace and poise of a debutante and down-home relatability of a Dolly Parton; both performers capitalize, at least partly, on the idea of an inner core of emotional realness juxtaposed with an outer over-the-top artifice Transforming RuPaul’s most recent drag incarnation—a black transsexual hooker— into a sanitized beauty queen/model with a heart of gold and a disarmingly girlish laugh allowed RuPaul buy-in with the American public that other gay black men and drag queens had not attained. Where Sylvester’s name had been known

75 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 148.

172 during the heady days of disco, his drag never had the opportunities allowed by the MTV era for attaining household name status and celebrity.

Only two drag queens had managed to achieve fame in mainstream culture since the 1970s: and Divine. Dame Edna’s popularity is an extreme case because of her ties to the British dame tradition, carried out in Monty Python and other British mainstream television, as well as her status as an independent character from her heterosexual male creator, comedian .76 Divine’s drag had nearly exclusively remained underground with Hairspray’s Edna Turnblad, her only mainstream role known to Americans at the time. Divine also did not desire fame via drag, wanting instead to be taken seriously as a character actor. (The wish remained unfulfilled at her death the day before shooting began for her new gay uncle character on

Married with Children.)77 RuPaul brewed a drag potion as yet unseen, taking note of the successes and misfires of her cultural elders-in-drag. This concoction came about not as the effort of one or two prime creators, but instead took the collaborative Downtown mindset and created a team that took a somewhat terrifying punk drag that questioned society’s gender norms at their most basic levels and repackaged it for family-friendly consumption. While doing so they managed to maintain the queer undertones and double meanings that zipped past the heads of many heterosexual listeners by using the linguistics of black New York transgender prostitutes, such as “You better work!”,

76 The is a specific form of drag queen who performs either extremely campily or extremely butch. In either case, the viewer is not meant to be deceived into believing in of the character; Senelick, The Changing Room, 236-252. 77 !, directed by , Automat Pictures, theatrical release March, 2013

173 turning them into catchphrases for the supermodel Glamazon drag queen of the 1990s.

RuPaul’s ability to disarm her audience with gentility and warmth, coupled with a talent for mirroring and conveying her audience’s own desires back to them, aligned her with the long-standing literary tradition of the trickster in African-American culture that has pervaded pop culture. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explains the trickster figure as a master manipulator of language who despite a disempowered position manages to triumph due to the use of doubled meanings, entendres, and word play in the black vernacular. Gates describes the Signifyin(g) Monkey as an African-American descendant of the trickster and explains this vernacular trickery’s place within African-American culture:

The Monkey is a hero of black myth, a sign of the triumph and wit and reason, his language of Signifyin(g) standing as the sign of the ultimate triumph of self-consciously formal language use. The black person’s capacity to create this rich poetry and to derive from these rituals a complex attitude toward attempts at domination which can be transcended in and through language, is a sign of their originality, of their extreme consciousness of the metaphysical.78 RuPaul’s song “Supermodel” performs the same sorts of deception as the trickster by aligning her with the supermodel, the emblem of haute couture and opulence, while using a colloquial phrase borrowed from both underground African-American , as seen in Paris is Burning, and more directly from the black transgender sex workers who frequented the Meatpacking district. Larry Tee claims that in creating RuPaul’s signature song, he wanted to combine the “You better work!” catchphrase of these transwomen with the energy of ballroom voguing.79

78 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 77. 79 Larry Tee, interview by Danielle Top, TOP, September, 2011, http://topthemagazine.com/2011/09/larry-tee/.

174

Gates also writes on the connections between the trickster figure and the idea of

Signifyin(g) in African-American culture. RuPaul’s use of the trickster’s trademark tools of cunning, wit, and double (or more) meanings leads us to her own acts of Signifyin(g).

Signifyin(g), as described by Gates, is a complex game of wordplay expressed in almost endless variety. At its core are doubled meanings, so that one audience may read the statement at face value while another (African-American) audience may understand the expression on an entirely different level. Gates notes that to play with the meaning for signification itself is an incredibly disruptive force. 80

At this level one must wonder if all drag queens are Signifyin(g) in their performances and I would argue that many do. While many queens still charm audiences through the skill of transformation and the virtuosity of illusion, these days directly imitating a celebrity’s look and choreography has become somewhat passé, seen more often in tourist locations like Las Vegas. Many LGBTQ audiences prefer a drag queen to infuse a performance with their own ideas.81

RuPaul’s version of Signifyin(g) takes this concept to a level beyond mere troping on a single celebrity. When RuPaul signifies she calls white society into question by forcibly infiltrating the heights of visual perfection: the supermodel.

Whereas real supermodels had to earn their place through beauty and modeling skills, RuPaul crafted a narrative that proclaimed her status as “supermodel”

80 Ibid., 44-45. 81Chad Michaels, for instance, a winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, is now seen as a leading impersonator, not because he performs exactly the way that Cher does, but rather because he knows her so well that he can show off exact replicas of moves and costumes while simultaneously troping on the concept of Cher. He pushes the idea of Cher rather than a clone onto his LGBTQ audiences and they love it.

175 regardless of her lack of notoriety, female gender, or beauty outside of drag. She did so by constructing the visual image of supermodel and embodying the character in all her appearances as the “Glamazon”. She hammered home her already-a-star story with a false -esque rags-to-riches narrative placed strategically at the opening of her debut to the world of MTV, the 1993 music video for “Supermodel (You Better Work).” “Once upon a time, there was a little black girl in the Brewster Projects of Detroit, Michigan. At fifteen, she was spotted by an Ebony Fashion Fair talent scout, and her modeling career took off.”

Nothing is as it appears to be and RuPaul’s mock bio line in the video does not define her as a drag queen, a fact that had to be deduced by first-time viewers for themselves. RuPaul speaks to two different audiences: a queer audience who would understand the stitched-together references in the video that gestured at classic camp films like Sunset Boulevard and Mahogany; and a straight audience that would focus largely on the beauty and confusion of gender created by the concept drag queen-as-supermodel.

RuPaul signifies on drag within the community as well. To champion the phrase "you're born naked and the rest is drag" disrupted drag as a concept on the level of signifier and signified. Drag, by this definition, could no longer define itself around the altering of one gender to appear as another. Instead it would be a way to approach every day as nothing more or less than an elaborate and meaningful game of dress up and theater. Who is, was, and will be the real

RuPaul? Glamazon? Black transsexual hooker? Punk, new wave front man? Talk show hostess? Political activist? RuPaul deliberately left it all as possible levels of

176 artifice, leaving audiences to wonder what meaning any of these images ultimately retained in terms of defining RuPaul herself. On one level, RuPaul’s

“Supermodel” image tied her to the grand structures of the fashion industry that still leans heavily in favor of white, thin, female beauty. Yet, on the other hand, her use of the language of the transsexual hookers of downtown New York and her fellow drag queens situated her identity as firmly queer and working class. It is significant that most heterosexual, white listeners would not have understood this linguistic connection due to a lack of knowledge of black queer culture, especially that of sex workers. Because of this unfamiliarity RuPaul could sneak a filthier, queerer persona under the radar of most listeners. As psychologist and head of her own marketing consulting company Carol Moog pointed out RuPaul’s success hinged on his “Safe, clean” image that provided American a chance to

“experience the outlandish, and do it safely, in a nonthreatening way.”82

Unlike many who have referenced or revered prostitutes like Madonna and Dolly

Parton, RuPaul had a certain closeness with the community. Her previous homelessness in New York, coupled with her apartment location near the Anvil and the Vault, two sex clubs where prostitutes worked nearby, allowed for this connection to flourish. RuPaul admired the transgender prostitutes of the Meatpacking District not only for their ability to make money outside the system while (possibly) maintaining control over their own finances, but also more surprisingly for their power. The comparison became a returning theme for RuPaul throughout her career. In her autobiography, she discusses the similarity between selling one’s body and selling oneself on the commercial market and

82 Ellen Dennis French, “RuPaul,” 163.

177 its relevance to her big break into popular media: “I was going to have to sell my ass in every way possible —in print, on videos, on television, on radio— whore myself for the sake of the record. I would have to bow and scrape and kiss ass to a bunch of , so really, what was the difference?”83 RuPaul knew the game she was getting into and believed she knew how to work the system to commercial success.

RuPaul began her ascension to pop fame by touring a modern day version of the

“gay chitlin circuit” that Alice Echols mentions Labelle toured during the 1970s.84 After the release of “Supermodel” in 1992, RuPaul’s tour saw her performing in the same clubs as Martha Wash and CeCe Peniston.85 Her tour lasted until 1994 after which she opened for Duran Duran. During this time, the music video for “Supermodel (You Better Work)” helped push the single to number 45 on the Billboard “Hot 100” and number two on their

“Club Dance” charts.86

One essential element RuPaul and her co-creators on “Supermodel” hit upon was the rising interest in voguing, and by extension gay black culture generally. Though

RuPaul does not vogue in her video, nor is she an exceptional dancer, her song is danceable, focuses on modeling, and even has a rapped list of significant names (similar to both McLaren’s and Madonna’s singles). The musical characteristics of the song lend themselves easily to voguing, including a four on the floor beat, easily danceable hi-NRG

83 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 130. 84 Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (New York: .W. Norton & Co., 2010), 111. 85 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 151. 86“RuPaul: The Hot 100,” Billboard, April 10, 1993, accessed April 5, 2017, http://www.billboard.com/artist/369236/rupaul/chart?f=379; “RuPaul: ,” Billboard, October 9, 1993, accessed April 5, 2017, http://www.billboard.com/artist/369236/rupaul/chart?f=359.

178 disco rhythms, and rhythmic stopping points for modeling poses. Each recitation of the word “Work!” rhythmically punctuates a point for popped and locked poses clearly enough for even the beginning voguer. The simplicity of this call to motion lies in its half note length. The call, unlike others in the song, lasts for two beats, allowing the better voguers more time to form a more flamboyant pose and new ones enough time to decide on a movement. The ending of each verse is also heavily punctuated with synthesizer triplet hits to provide a background for quick dramatic movement.

The song’s lyrical focus on modeling is somewhat more obvious, instructing the listener to “Work! Now turn to the left! Work! Now turn to the right!” The fashion-based lyrics of the rap also show a deeper connection to the vogue songs that brought attention to drag queen culture in the first place. RuPaul, however, shifts the focus of his rap away from McLaren’s and Madonna’s focus on drag houses and old Hollywood and toward models. RuPaul explained that she chose to focus on supermodels because they, rather than modern day actors and actresses, became the heirs to old Hollywood’s glamour.87

The lyrics imply secondary coded meanings when it comes to the song’s subject.

While the song appeared to be about modeling, it also slyly hinted at another profession where the body remains central. The term “work” can conjure up quite dissimilar images to different communities: where most listeners hear “Work!” as an incitement toward models to move more dramatically on the runway, Tee and RuPaul’s inspiration came from the prostitutes of the Meatpacking District that RuPaul had felt a close affinity to for years. The vocabulary that helped to build RuPaul’s career draws heavily from the

87 RuPaul, Michelle Visage, and Mathu Andersen, “Episode 7: Timeline Failure with Mathu Andersen.”

179 language of both drag queens and prostitutes. Larry Tee explains the influences for the lyrics to “Supermodel” in a 2011 TOP interview.

…I said let’s do a dance song about supermodels! I thought about the girls on the corner, the hookers at the meatpacking district they used to go: “You better work! You better work! You better work! Work it girl! You better work!” So I basically took that and the energy out of vogue-ing.88 Tee not only connected the two worlds, but did so with ease. In this moment we see one of RuPaul’s greatest feats of Signifyin(g) in action. She easily drew the public in with the image of the towering blonde goddess Supermodel (even if she was an African-American man in disguise) while alerting those in the know that beneath her polished exterior, she was not perhaps as sterile as she appeared. Signifyin(g) the sex worker through the image of the supermodel contributed greatly to RuPaul’s ability to capitalize on the interest in voguing in a way that was never achieved by the subjects of Paris is Burning. Venus

Xtravaganza’s life, as played out in the documentary, showed all too realistically for viewers how grim the travails of a sex worker/entertainer could be (with her murder forming the film’s conclusion). An enormous number of AIDS-related deaths also occurred during and after the film’s shooting.

Where the voguers themselves often came across as pitiable to the heterosexual public, RuPaul came across as a sassy diva with a very particular message and set of premade sound bites, many of them built into her songs. Several of her still oft-used phrases in her current pursuits derive from her first single: “You Better Work!,” “Sashay

Chante,” and simply “Work!” Through the use of catchphrases, Signifyin(g) both

88 Larry Tee, interview by Danielle Top, http://topthemagazine.com/2011/09/larry-tee/.

180 verbally and visually, and a message that emphasized love over all else (“Everybody say love!”), RuPaul was able to avoid becoming associated with the poverty and underground status left to the voguers as depicted in Paris is Burning. RuPaul peeled away the grittier, more difficult layers of the Ballroom drag queen’s image, leaving a character that declared wealth and opulence beforehand and then waited for fame to catch up with the rewards. In actuality this was also an old drag trick: spend an inordinate amount of money on the costume and performance and then the audience will reward you for your grand presentation many times over.

RuPaul’s savvy appropriation of the marketable pieces of pop culture aligns her heavily with Madonna’s path to success. RuPaul managed to escape much of the mud thrown at Madonna for her appropriations because of her identity as a gay black man underneath the blonde wig. I would argue that RuPaul’s origins in the New York queer and new wave worlds and her connections to the Ballroom scene through Susanne

Bartsch played an important role in assuaging claims of appropriation. RuPaul may not have been a voguer herself, but she subsisted as one of the many gay, black, homeless youths of New York for some time, similarly to Livingston’s depictions of many of the

Ballroom performers. In addition, she has made it clear throughout her career that she wants viewers to be able to see her references when she performs. She explains this further in her autobiography.

The point about pop culture is that so much of it is borrowed. There’s very little that is brand new. Instead, creativity today is a kind of shopping process- picking up on and sampling things from the world around you, things you grew up with. That’s very much my modus operandi. If you knew all the references, you could deconstruct one of my performances and place every look, every word, and every move I do. I know all the references, and watching myself on tape I love to sit with friends and unstitch (to their

181

amazement) the patchwork of my performance, identifying this bit from here and this bit from there. I really see myself as a sampling machine. Even the supermodel drag queen I would later become is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster- a collage made up of bits and pieces from old television shows, copies of Vogue magazine, and advertisements.89 Many elements of RuPaul’s performance come from the sources she lists, but many more also come from sex workers and her fellow drag queens. More significantly, RuPaul is much more forthcoming about the Frankensteinian nature of her performances, regularly crediting the pop culture he references, when compared to someone like Madonna whose appropriation must be deciphered and analyzed by fans, critics, and scholars.

While voguers’ songs did not achieve fame, “Supermodel” became a success due to RuPaul’s ability to bring together numerous threads of pop culture in the guise of one gigantic drag queen. She became a major New York nightlife figure during the success of

McLaren’s “Deep in Vogue,” performed with the Ballroom community at Susanne

Bartsch’s Love Ball, watched Paris is Burning on a loop during her reboot to daytime life, was on the rise to fame during the vogue craze brought on by Madonna, and toured the same clubs as members of the up and coming House music movement like CeCe

Peniston. Observing these drag-related phenomena, RuPaul spotted the perfect trend for a black drag queen to capitalize on. She might not have been able to vogue but she made a dance record that anyone could perform the move to easily. She topped off this musical focus on fashion, glamour, and modeling with a light, lovable persona that could disarm most audiences with one of her Parton-esque laughs.

89 RuPaul, Lettin’ It All, 64.

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In the following years, RuPaul leveraged her success as a musical performer into other show business ventures. She became the first face of MAC cosmetics, launching their Viva Glam campaign to raise money for work on AIDS.90 She hosted her own talk show on VH1 featuring prominent guests like Cher and Dennis Rodman from its earliest episodes.91 She managed to get into acting again, playing to entirely different crowds with small parts in Movie (Betty Thomas, 1995) and ’s

Crooklyn (Spike Lee, 1993).92 got in on the RuPaul craze too, recording with her a remake of his duet “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” Through all of these endeavors, the drag queen image multiplied across media in front of the American public’s eyes.

RuPaul did not merely appear for interviews in magazines, television, and film. Instead, she showcased the wide set of talents held by many drag queens: modeling in magazines and print ads, acting in film, and hosting on television. In the years following her dramatic success, Hollywood began to take notice of mainstream interest in this seemingly family-friendly approach to drag. In my final chapter I will examine the films that sprung up in the wake of RuPaul’s triumph. During the middle of the 1990s the film industry put out several drag films: Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), The Adventures of Priscilla

Queen of the Desert (1994), To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), and The Birdcage (1996). A floodgate remained open throughout the 1990s and only began to shut toward the turning of the millennium.

90 “Campaign History,” MAC AIDS Fund, accessed March 1, 2016, http://www.macaidsfund.org/theglam/campaignhistory. 91 Alan Frutkin, “Fall Television Preview,” The Advocate, September 17, 1996, 52. 92 Andres Zervigon, “RuPaul,” The Queer Encyclopedia of Music, Dance, & Musical Theater, ed. Claude J. Summers, 223-224.

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In this chapter, I have examined what brought RuPaul to mainstream American attention. RuPaul’s choices on her path to fame set her apart from other drag queens. She did not seek to become America’s foremost drag pageant queen, nor did she go after becoming the most well-known emcee in drag like Charlie Brown. Rather, RuPaul traversed cable access television, the new wave scene, low budget films, and more to rise to the top of the Manhattan nightclub world. Once there, rather than resting on the easy drugs and fun attached to being “Queen of Manhattan,” RuPaul sobered up, sought management and began a calculated attempt to become America’s drag queen. She used her skills at Signifyin(g) to both capitalize on the rise of voguing and craft the perfect image. On her way to fame she critiqued the government’s anti-gay and anti-Black policies, awaiting the change in political winds to capitalize on America’s shift away from conservatism. She utilized music every step of the way, from muddling through the new wave scene in Atlanta to riding the crest of the voguing movement in house music.

By the time she achieved her goal of stardom, she had also opened the doors for a new interest in drag that would last the greater part of the decade. It is to this outpouring of interest that we turn our attention in the next chapter.

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Chapter Four

Sequins on the Silver Screen:

What Happens When Drag Goes Mainstream?

This chapter begins with the election of Bill Clinton. As the Reagan and Bush era came to an end, a shift toward more liberal social views began to take hold in American popular media. The March on for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and

Liberation in 1993, the third march on Washington for LGB rights, saw massive numbers of attendees, with celebrity performers standing alongside the political types present at the marches in 1987 and 1979.1 RuPaul sang “Supermodel of the World” and then declared that within ten years she should be president and paint the White House pink.2

Melissa Etheridge, Kathy Najimy, Ian McKellen, , Martina Navritolova,

Martha Wash, and Judith Light all made appearances to perform and/ or speak on behalf of the LGB community.3 As RuPaul noted in her post-performance message to the crowd,

Bill Clinton’s capture of the presidency was seen (by some at least) as a direct result of queer involvement in the political sphere and a win for the community itself. 4

1Vicki Lynn Ealkor, Queer America: A GLBT History of the 20th Century (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2008), 203-204. 2 March on Washington Lesbian/ Gay Rights, “RuPaul Performs at 1993 Gay and Lesbian March on Washington,” C-SPAN, last modified December 5, 2014, https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4517776/rupaul-performs-1993-gay-lesbian-march- washington. 3 “In the Life: Ep. 207, ‘March on Washington,’” YouTube video, 28:35, posted by “UCLAFilmTVArchive,” June 30, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5osK7kvRGk. 4 March on Washington, “RuPaul Performs.”

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This election marked a turning point in the acceptance of gays and lesbians

(though not for the bisexual and transgender communities); that acceptance led to a new marketability for gay images in popular media. According to many inside the movement, increased acceptance and visibility came at the cost of homogenization of the community’s diverse viewpoints and a decrease in radicals at the forefront. For many activists within the queer community, the addition of celebrity speakers to the March on

Washington was not a sign that the movement was flourishing, but instead of its demise or at a minimum its cooptation by the media.5 The Clinton administration ultimately failed to deliver on its promises to the gay community: though Clinton had actively courted gay voters, he ultimately colluded in and signed into law legal compromises that took nearly two decades of activist work to undo: the Defense of Act

(colloquially referred to as DOMA) and the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” Policy.

During the Clinton era, film, television, magazines, and advertisements traded on a new hipness to gay sexuality, going after an untapped market of primarily gay men.

Brenda Love explains why gay men had stronger market appeal than other members of the queer population: “A gay couple has potential to be financially more secure than a heterosexual couple because they have a double male income and no dependents.”6 A double male income refers to the fact that unlike heterosexual couples or lesbians, without a woman no one receives the statistically lower pay for the same work done that women do. Love further explains that lesbians received less attention because they were

5 After Stonewall, directed by John Scaggliotti (1999; New York, NY: First Run Features, 2005), DVD. 6 Brenda Love, Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices (Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 1992), 122.

186 more likely to have children and to suffer the inequities of a dual female income while women still statistically receive less pay for the same jobs as men.7 The increased visibility of gay men (and not the full spectrum of queer identities) did not compel the acceptance of queerness into mainstream society. Homonormative, assimilationist, classist and racist ideals abounded within the emergent gay imagery in popular media and advertising. Fred Fejes explains that this emergent advertising demographic led to a proliferation of gay images that tended to flatten out and erase the complexities of the community as well as the real issues faced by its members. Gay men witnessed increasing representation in the media, but as Fejes points out, those portrayals typically embraced and reinforced racist, sexist, classist, anti-queer imagery that dictated that to be gay and successful one must be “young, white, Caucasian. Preferably with a well- muscled, smooth body, handsome face, good education, professional job, and a high income.”8 The advertisements from major corporations that showed up in major gay press outlets like The Advocate and Out generally appealed to an upper class, white, male clientele and included such status symbol brands as Calvin Klein, Armani, American

Express, Neiman Marcus, and Seiko.9

Michael Bronski argues that the drag films of the 1990s can be read as

“reaffirmation” films “in which LGBT characters, while asserting their own identities and desires, ultimately serve to support and confirm the heterosexual status quo.”10 Not

7 Ibid. 8 Fred Fejes, “Making a Gay Masculinity,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17, no. 1 (2000): 113-116. 9 Ibid. 10 Michael Bronski, “The Queer 1990s: The Challenge and Failure of Radical Change,” in American Film History: Selected Readings, 1960 to the Present, Volume 2,

187 coincidentally, every mainstream Hollywood film involving drag released in the 1990s, as well as the critically acclaimed independent film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Elliot, 1994) and drag documentary Paris is Burning, attempts to normalize drag queens through a focus on the family: Paris is Burning and its House mothers, Mrs.

Doubtfire’s transformation of Daniel into a “better” father, Priscilla’s narrative goal of father/son/ex-wife reunion, To Wong Foo’s Vida as mother/trainer to Noxeema and Chi

Chi, and The Birdcage’s gay couple mirroring heterosexuality through their femme/butch characterizations. By reflecting the image of the nuclear family, the outrageousness of drag’s irony and wit is subdued and rendered fit for consumption on the terms of a heterosexual audience. The reiteration of heterosexual family structure forces gay narratives to behave like heterosexual ones, taking away or softening drag’s queerly subversive take on the family unit. Drag families are forged through artistic similarities, friendships, mutual bonds of respect, and younger queers’ need to acquire seasoned queens’ knowledge of how the gay community works. In my explorations of the drag cultures that grew in Downtown New York, Harlem, and London, the art of drag has been used to toy with identity, the body, gender, and sexuality. When drag made the jump to the big screen, it unfortunately did so primarily though the female impersonation aspect of drag and reflected only a small fraction of drag’s transformative capabilities to question the solidity of the gender binary and destabilize identity.

The first highly successful gay film of the 1990s, (Demme, 1993) dealt with the intersecting problems that occurred for successful, white gay men catered

ed. Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundman, and Art Simon (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 330.

188 to by the luxury brands mentioned above.11 The film became a box office and critical success earning Tom Hanks an Academy Award for Best Actor and the film a number one in box office sales. Philadelphia eventually earned over 200 million dollars when it returned to the top ten in sales after the Oscars revitalized interest in the film. As Michael

Bronski points out the film also focuses centrally on the homophobic lawyer who must overcome his bigotry rather than the defendant fighting for his life and legal rights.12 The tagline for the film made this clear to potential viewers: “No one would take on his case… until one man was willing to take on the system.”13 The tagline deflects attention from Beckett, making it clear that this disease-ridden homosexual must remain reliant on heterosexual legal muscle in order to win his case.

Liberal social politics took stronger foothold in America’s heartland after the election of a relatable, blue collar Democrat from the South, Bill Clinton. While much seemed to be turning over anew in the media for gays and lesbians, some social issues retained a conservatism based in the home itself. Both Reagan and Bush put a focus on the “traditional family” and argued against media images that normalized alternative family situations of all kinds. Vice President Dan Quayle publicly decried the choices of even fictional characters, attacking sitcom news anchor Murphy Brown’s single motherhood in a 1992 statement to the press.14 Mothers leaving the home represented a

11Tom Hanks’s character Andrew Beckett simultaneously battles his rapidly worsening symptoms from AIDS while fighting for his job at a law firm after being outed and subsequently fired due to coworkers’ recognition of a visible Kaposi sarcoma lesion. 12 Bronski, “The Queer 1990s,” 341. 13 Ibid., 341. 14 The writers of Murphy Brown returned this favor by having Brown view the actual statement inside the narrative of an episode, repeatedly touching on the point as a historical marker of the fictional news anchor’s prominence throughout the series.

189 symbolic attack on the nuclear family and cleared the way for the effeminization or outright removal of fathers and boys, threatening the patriarchal white male’s position of power in the home. Susan Jeffords argues that beginning in 1991, the “hard bodied” hypermasculine action stars of the 1980s began to be featured as a new archetype of manhood that returned them to their central position in the home and family.15 In films like Kindergarten Cop (1990), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and even Terminator 2:

Judgment Day (1991), Jeffords claims that the masculine men of the past decade are

“Retroactively … given feelings, feelings that were, presumably, hidden behind their confrontational violence. And whereas 1980s action-adventure films glorified in spectacular scenes of destruction, 1991 films began telling audiences that these men were actually being self-destructive.”16 She clarifies this further in discussing the Beast from

Beauty and the Beast, stating “He is the New Man, the one who can transform himself from the hardened, muscle bound, domineering man of the eighties into the considerate loving, and self-sacrificing man of the nineties.”17 Jeffords also makes the case that these feelings, emotions, and self-sacrifice are generally improvements made to aid man in his return from the battlefield and/or workplace of the 1980s to home, hearth, and family.

While this shift is most obvious in films like Kindergarten Cop, she notes that “Even the

Terminator ‘dies’ in Terminator 2 to ensure the survival of its new “family,” Sarah and

John Connor. In these films families provide both the motivation for and resolution of changing masculine heroisms.”18 In Terminator 2 this concept shifts away from the

15 Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 140-145. 16 Ibid., 144-145. 17 Ibid., 153. 18 Ibid., 143.

190 nuclear family, opening up alternative domestic relationships. The family becomes a tool to help the audience get inside men’s emotional headspace, viewing their struggles with love, bonding, and a myriad of what are traditionally seen as feminine modes and expressions of thought and feeling.

Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

These same familial concepts return in the first mainstream film that begins

Hollywood’s half-decade intrigue with drag queens, Mrs. Doubtfire (Columbus, 1993).

As in Jeffords’s “hard-bodied” recovery films, the father learns to express his emotions more fully, which in turn results in a more dependable patriarch. Yet the film also allows a short glimpse into a queer family who play and work together in the one scene involving the father’s gay brother, played by Harvey Fierstein. This scene shows a different sort of gay family: not one with two gay fathers, but instead a family where a gay brother assists his heterosexual sibling without having to expressly come out to him within the film, his brother’s acceptance implied as pre-existent. This is also a family whose members can indulge in adult camping of dress-up play through creating characters together.

Based on the British children’s novel Madame Doubtfire by Anne Fine, Mrs.

Doubtfire stars as Daniel Hillard, a voice actor with antics that get in the way of his being a financially stable and dependable husband and father to his three children. Out of work, sued for divorce, and with limited visitation rights to his children,

Daniel suits up as elderly nanny Euphegenia Doubtfire, with the help of his gay brother,

Frank, and Frank’s partner, who work in makeup and prosthetics. Wearing hefty

191 prosthetics, he goes unrecognized by his wife and children and applies and receives the position of nanny to his own progeny.

While working (as Doubtfire) for Miranda, Daniel is discovered by a studio executive who offers to meet with him about creating his own show. When Daniel’s drag is revealed to both Miranda and the executive Miranda takes him back to court. The proceedings end with the judge declaring that Daniel should seek psychiatric treatment to deal with his crossdressing. By the film’s end, Miranda and Daniel decide not to reunite when they recognize that they are better and stronger for their children when apart. This ending was unusual for a family film of the early 1990s.19 Daniel learns to utilize

Doubtfire and his virtuosic voice acting skills to a positive end when at the film’s closing the audience witnesses his children and ex-wife viewing his now-successful after-school show for the kiddie set, akin to Mr. Rogers if the show’s lead were an Irish granny.

Mrs. Doubtfire marks an important turning point in films that use drag and can be placed both as the end point of a pre-existing arc of films and the beginning of a new one.

On one hand, Mrs. Doubtfire belongs within a history of films where drag is used as a plot device to create a temporary camouflage, a genre Chris Straayer coined as the

“temporary transvestite film.”20 Straayer positions Mrs. Doubtfire within this genre due to its many formulaic similarities: bathroom scenes that reveal the “true” sex of the disguised body, a deepened knowledge of the self gleaned from entering the social world of women, and failures of both wig and prosthetics that produce slapstick comedy

19 Jay David, The Life and Humor of Robin Williams (New York: Quill, 1999), 169-171. 20 Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-orientations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 42.

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(Doubtfire’s breasts catching fire from bending too close to a stove are a prime example).

I would however argue that Mrs. Doubtfire simultaneously exists within another, newly emergent arc of drag narratives in film that stray away from the “temporary transvestite” model and focus instead on professional, career-oriented drag queen characters clearly associated with the gay community. This concept emerges in Mrs. Doubtfire, alluded to through Harvey Fierstein’s presence as well as Williams’s antics, and shows up soon after in full strength in To Wong Foo, Priscilla, and The Birdcage, all released within three years of the family-oriented Doubtfire. Significantly, Williams shows up as a star or cameo in two of those three films; only Priscilla lacks his presence. Mrs. Doubtfire walks a fine line at the transition between the conservative 1980s and the relatively liberal

1990s. The film does this by playing to gay and straight audiences simultaneously through moments of queer excess that pop up in the film, but whose threats are contained by masculinizing gestures elsewhere in the film (often contained by Miranda’s wealthy and traditionally handsome boyfriend-apparent Stu, played by 1990s sex symbol Pierce

Brosnan).

Two montages encapsulate these oppositional forces of queering and heteromasculinization. First, the co-creation of the Doubtfire character with Daniel’s brother and life partner in what I am calling the “Transformations” montage in which we get to see Daniel playing multiple drag characters in a queer moment that acknowledges the film’s gay audience. Second, the “Dude Looks Like a Lady” montage wherein we see

Daniel becoming a better father as/through Doubtfire while retaining his masculinity inside the Doubtfire character and prosthetics moments of physical and emotional expressions of masculinity. The music of both scenes underscores and

193 reinforces these countering visions of masculinity, one queenily gay and the other heteromasculinizing, even in drag.

The “Transformations” montage arrives early in the film and establishes Daniel’s connections to the gay community while addressing his own femininity in creating Mrs.

Doubtfire. This montage is the moment in which the film turns away from its

(presumptive) heterosexual narrative and audience to speak to and acknowledge its gay viewers. The presence of Harvey Fierstein, the on-screen appearance of a gay couple

(even if not physically romantic), Daniel’s familial and uncritical love of his brother, as well as the multiple character types performed by Williams, encourage the viewer to take in a moment of queerness within the family setting. The musical shifts in the scene underscore Williams’s performances as individual drag characters. The fact that Daniel and his brother experiment with characters so far flung from Doubtfire when Doubtfire’s voice and personality type have already been witnessed by the audience also begs the question: does Daniel enjoy doing drag just for the campy fun of it all?21 It certainly seems so, especially since the scene hints at the possibility of another queer familial past: perhaps this was the sort of childhood gender/character theatrical dress-up play that led

Daniel to become a voice actor and his brother to make-up artistry (and somewhat implicitly drag) in the first place.

The beginning of the montage introduces Daniel’s gay brother Frank, who appears to run an entire Hollywood style makeup and prosthetics operation out of his

21 Before this scene, Daniel uses multiple character voices to respond to Miranda’s ad for a nanny in the paper; the Doubtfire persona and voice is the one that gets him an interview for the job.

194 apartment with the assistance of his partner, Jack. Mirroring a transgender coming out moment, Daniel asks his brother “Could you make me a woman?” to which Frank responds “Oh honey, I’m so happy!” before bringing him into the apartment. Daniel comes to them seeking assistance in dragging himself up to become Mrs. Doubtfire.

Daniel strangely does not arrive ready to become the Irish granny he has already posed as on the phone. Instead, the dynamic duo put Daniel through a series of individual transformations, each closer to the vicinity of the look he needs but none proving sufficient until Frank pulls out the big guns and switches to plaster molds and full prosthetic applications.

The musical background alternates with each transformation. Initially Frank turns

Daniel into a Latina spitfire stereotype with a chopped off Cleopatra wig, flaming red acrylic nails, and a sultry smoky eye, face pulled back with toupee tapes to give him an added lift under his wig (See Fig. 19). With this transformation, Hillard becomes not a woman but rather the first of several drag characters. Williams emphasizes this with a campy speech in faux Latin accent about meeting a Cuban man with whom “every night was like the Bay of Pigs,” positioning his fingernails into a claw asking “too much?” The musical score switches here from ’s gentle lilting string accompaniment into a salsa-style Latin theme featuring timbales, congas, and horns. After Hillard realizes that the camp excess of this character might literally “scare the children,” Frank suggests that they go to the “next level: latex.” The queer undertone of this offhand comment may also be an inference for a gay audience about sex after AIDS, especially when delivered by the writer and lead actor of the Broadway and film productions of Torch Song Trilogy.

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Figure 19: Daniel Hillard’s initial drag transformation, Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

Metamorphosing this time with the help of a prosthetic hooked nose, very little makeup aside from foundation, and a wig topped off with a head scarf knotted under the chin, Williams as Hillard now takes on the persona of a Jewish bubbe (See Fig. 20).

Williams toys with the character for a moment, spouting the second gay reference, this one only for those viewers familiar with Yiddish. Hillard utters the line “Oy! What a shonda! I should never buy gribenes from a mohel!” The subversive nature of this line is brilliant, providing a queer John Waters- level gross out joke (during what was advertised as a family film) about accidentally eating circumcised foreskins rather than fried animal skin. Hillard claims this transformation makes him look too much like their own grandmother and requests another look, but not before a spontaneous rendition of a few lines of “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” from . Hillard’s brother and lover join in, placing their heads on his shoulder and singing in unison: “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a math/ Find me a find/ Catch me a catch.” Their brief performance recalls the trio of Tzietel, Hodel, and Chava from Fiddler. Simultaneously,

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Daniel’s elder appearance gestures toward Yente’s image as well as Tzeitel’s outburst where she imitates Yente, also in Fiddler.

Figure 20: Daniel Hillard’s second transformation, Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

The make-up chair swivels around again to reveal the penultimate transformation as Williams becomes a drag caricature of , set off with a naturally-hued red bob wig and another nose prosthesis. As soon as the chair stops moving the musical backing to one of Streisand’s most iconic songs from Funny Girl (Wyler, 1968) “Don’t

Rain on my Parade” enters and Hillard sings the vocals before stopping short. The moment of high camp comes as Williams appears to be singing more to his own nose prosthetic than to any audience or camera. Once again, Hillard remains unhappy with the look, asking to have it aged up once more. “You mean like… Shelley Winters older or

Shirley MacLaine older?” replies Frank. Many audience members might not even catch the reference, but to older gay men, especially drag queens in the audience who knew their Hollywood divas, the implications of Fierstein’s differentiation of the two as “some scotch tape and red hair dye” made a crystal clear joke about both the or

197 lack thereof of major stars and cheap ways of mimicking those results on aging queens’ faces for drag performance. Frank clarifies that there are limits to even his power in mimicking the facelifts of the stars stating “I don’t think I have the strength” when Daniel requests something akin to Joan Collins’s lifted likeness.

As Fierstein moves from one medium to the next, shifting from make-up to plaster, the music suddenly enters more masculine territory as the montage shifts from a focus on quick changes and Williams’s flights of character fancy, to the tough and unglamorous work of crafting molds and building major prosthetic pieces. As Frank

Sinatra’s version of “Luck Be a Lady” enters, the camera moves away from the makeup chair and captures a facial construction site akin to a makeup department for science fiction and horror prosthetics. No words are spoken as we witness the physical work of building Dr. Fierstein’s monster, Mrs. Doubtfire, in his prosthetics laboratory. The music masculinizes the process through ’s imposing swinging crooner’s vocals as he implores luck to be a lady, or in this case for Hillard to become a lady, this time successfully. The camera focuses on shots of Doubtfire’s eyes, chosen false teeth, and bits of body, but never enough to clearly show her while Sinatra’s song continues. As the final look appears, if only from behind and half out of frame, Hillard inquires as to how he looks and Fierstein states “Any closer and you’d be mom” before exchanging a two handed high five with his lover followed by bumping their hips together in a congratulatory and high femme celebration of their co-creation. The final unveiling happens as we are transported to Miranda’s front door where Doubtfire’s musical theme enters, marked with repeated ascending glissandi on a mark tree signaling the magical nature of Mrs. Doubtfire’s post-transformation entrance (See Fig. 21).

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Figure 21: Daniel Hillard’s first appearance as Mrs. Doubtfire after the Transformations

montage, Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

The first half of the montage functions as a tableaux of childlike fantasy play while also turning to face, if only for a brief moment, the gay audience of the film. For the film’s queer audience in the know, Harvey Fierstein signified queerness, theater and drag rather than simply homosexuality (especially given that he was well known as an out actor even in the early 1990s, at a time when such a public stance was uncommon).

Though Columbus sections off and separates the gay uncles from their nieces and nephew due to the secrecy of creating and maintaining the illusion of Mrs. Doubtfire, the children react familiarly, positively, and without judgment when their father explains that his costume was made by “Uncle Frank and Aunt Jack.”

The second musical montage arrives after the “temporary transvestite” aspects of the film have begun to solidify. Daniel has repeatedly struggled with both his domestic

199 skills in Doubtfire’s daily duties and the problems of having to maintain two identities and appearances. Daniel’s skills in the home eventually begin to gel, setting the stage for his fatherly redemption through Doubtfire to begin. In the “Dude Looks Like a Lady” montage, Daniel’s masculinity is reclaimed and emphasized by the fatherly skills he learns through Doubtfire as well as masculinity enacted while in drag. Doubtfire spends quality time with the children: playing soccer and riding bicycles in the park, reading to his daughter, and learning to cook for them when home alone out of drag. Our attention is also focused on Daniel’s virile masculinity while inside the prosthetics, driving home that we are not to view Daniel as tainted with the femininity of motherhood despite his mincing around with his brother in the earlier montage. The use of ’s “Dude

(Looks Like a Lady)” backed by the buzz of this masculine activity serves to reinforce

Daniel’s masculinity by proclaiming through the lyrics that despite his “looks like a lady” status, Daniel’s real life identity is all “dude.” The guitar riffs, horn hits, and heavy drums of the song reflect traditional rock and roll masculinity that intensifies at orgasmic moments of excess like the singer’s shrieks of “Do me! Do me! Do me Do me!” that prompt the entrance of the phallic guitar solo.

“Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” seemingly has the potential to subvert gender norms.

Its narrative begins as the story of a man coming onto a woman that the narrator later discovers is a man. The (assumedly heterosexual) male protagonist goes for it anyway with the dude (“Do me Do me Do me Do me!”) proclaiming “never judge a book by its cover or who you’re gonna love by your lover.”22 Desmond Child, the openly gay

22 Steve Tyler, Joe Perry, and Desmond Child, “liner notes to Permanent Vacation,” Aerosmith, Geffen, CD, 1987.

200 who co-wrote “Dude” with Joe Perry and , notes the oddity of the song’s association with Mrs. Doubtfire in a 2012 interview with Dan Macintosh: “[after

Mrs. Doubtfire came out] it was like every four or five year old child in America was able to sing that song. It was like; do you realize this is about a tranny?”23 Child, notwithstanding the use of a slur for transgender people, emphasizes the incongruity of the song’s subject with a family-friendly audience.

Victoria Flanagan draws our attention to the song’s insistence on the physical male body and identity of the “lady” in question. She counters with the example of the

Kinks’ “Lola” where although Lola’s gender is eventually revealed as “a man” at the end of the song, she is still referred to as “Lola,” which she describes as “a gesture that implicitly legitimizes the success of her feminine performance.”24 In the “Dude Looks

Like a Lady” montage, the subversive possibilities of the song are obliterated as the sexualized “lady” drag of the song’s lyrics is replaced by desexualized grandma drag donned by a heterosexual father. These lyrics reinforce the masculinity of the “dude” behind the “lady” as the audience is treated to a romp through Daniel’s masculinity: playing sports, imitating rock and rollers, beating back a mugger, and learning the domestic skills he failed to learn as a father, i.e. cooking meals and cleaning. The introduction of cooking as a part of this masculinity also touches back on the idea of the reclamation of masculine men for the home and hearth discussed by Susan Jeffords. All

23 Dan MacIntosh, “Interview with Desmond Child,” Songfacts (site), June 25, 2012, http://www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/desmond_child/. 24 Victoria Flanagan, Into the Closet: Cross-dressing and the Gendered Body in Children's Literature and Film (New York: Routledge, 2008), 194.

201 of this is done to contain Daniel’s femininity and reassure us that despite the earlier montage’s implications, he just wants to be a good father, not a lady-like drag queen.

During the montage, we see how Daniel behaves as Doubtfire when Miranda and the children are otherwise indisposed. He privately indulges in masculinity, allowing himself to be freed from the temporary prison of Doubtfire’s femininity. Doubtfire dances with cleaning tools, but this is no would-be drag queen lipsyncing into the mirror.

She struts with the vacuum cleaner, dropping it to the floor and raising it up by its cord, echoing Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler’s phallic mic stand play in the music video for the song (and in his concert performances in general).25 She plays air guitar with a broom, dropping to her knees with legs spread, pretending to play the strings with her teeth and turning the handle into a guitar-like phallus played between the legs. This moment of escape when the children are gone also echoes another famous scene of privately expressed hypermasculinity—Tom Cruise’s dance to Bob Seger’s “Old Time

Rock and Roll” in button down shirt, underwear and socks when finally outside his parent’s watchful eye in Risky Business (Brickman, 1983).26 In both cases men who have been emasculated within the domain of their home/family lives regain dominion over the home.

During the montage, director Columbus encourages the viewer to see Daniel through the Doubtfire prosthetics, focusing on his inner masculinity and its outward

25 “Aerosmith - Dude (Looks Like a Lady),” YouTube video, 04:23, posted by AerosmithVEVO, December 24, 2009, originally released 1987, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf0oXY4nDxE. 26 Michael Bronski, “The Queer 1990s: The Challenge and Failure of Radical Change,” 335. Not insignificantly, Risky Business also features Tom Cruise’s character interacting with a trans* call girl he mistakenly requests.

202 expression. Doubtfire thwarts a purse snatcher, immediately breaking into butch vocality to gruffly shout “Back off asshole! …Beat it!” The Doubtfire voice and accent return upon walking away from the situation, character resumed: “He broke my bag, the bastard.” Breaking out of drag voice into masculine vocality is a known performance choice for some: English entertainer and drag queen diva Danny LaRue greeted his audiences growling “Wotcher, mates!” in a deep bass before returning to his drag character voice as far back as the 1960s.27 Laurence Senelick argues that this, among other masculinizing and de-sexualizing performance bits, allowed LaRue to craft a career where even the Queen (for whom he performed on a televised special) found his drag safe and permissible.28 The exhibition of Hillard’s vocality from inside the Doubtfire prosthetics, like LaRue’s “Wotcher, Mates!” reassures viewers that this (both Hillard and

Williams) is a heterosexual professional actor in a dress, make-up, and prosthetics who is performing the hard (masculine) work of maintaining a character. The montage further reassures the audience of Daniel’s heterosexuality, highlighting a downward cast glance from Doubtfire toward Miranda and Stuart. Doubtfire watches the two emerge from their car with the hatred of an ex-husband spurned. The momentary nature of this lapse in character reminds us once more that Doubtfire is a character that Hillard must play (and thus keep up through effort), rather than an identity, fetish, or full time job (despite

Doubtfire’s presence as a worker, her gig is meant from the outset to be temporary). As

Stuart looks up, Daniel’s masculinizing hate stare shifts into the soft and sweet glance that Doubtfire puts on display through much of the film.

27 Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room, 247. 28 Ibid., 246-250.

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The drag in Mrs. Doubtfire renders itself palatable for mass consumption largely by removing from the film the context of homosexuality. When the film does speak to its gay viewers in the “transformations” montage, it does so only temporarily. The cross dressing in Doubtfire functions as part of a hero’s journey to the land of drag and back again where Daniel learns lessons from time spent in the world of womanhood. Though

Daniel must resign himself to a divorce by the film’s end, his accidental exposure of

Daniel-as-Doubtfire to both his ex-wife and the executive from the television network leads to a new career. Daniel can now make positive use of the Doubtfire character, honed through daily immersion for his job as an actor, and thus the drag need not be homosexual in nature; after all, it’s just a job. Daniel learns to be a better father through Doubtfire and in this way, the film echoes Susan Jeffords “New Man” films in which a masculine hero of the ’80s must be given feelings and emotions again and returned to use for the home.29 In the case of Robin Williams, Doubtfire serves to bolster his masculinity as an actor by making him one of the “new men” of the 90s, a father who could understand that his children need stability, healthy and regular meals, and structure in addition to his goofy and erratic personality. Williams’s imitation of queers expanded across the Hollywood films; his penchant for creating characters, imitating stars, and his compelling turn as

Doubtfire made him a strong box office choice when dealing with drag. He was offered the role of Vida Boheme in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, but reportedly turned it down citing that he was “too hairy” for the part.30

29 Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 140-146. 30 Mitch Kohn, “Op-ed: The Amazing Story Behind To Wong Foo,” Advocate, August 13, 2015, http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/08/13/op-ed-amazing- story-behind-wong-foo.

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With Philadelphia and Mrs. Doubtfire both taking home in

1994 and earning major profits at the box office, Paris is Burning only a short distance in the rearview mirror, and RuPaul marching up the Billboard charts and into living rooms with her message of “Everybody say love!”, major players in popular media must have realized the earning potential and marketability of drag. Drag could serve up spectacle and flash that would grab viewers’ attention and provide avenues, for advertisers in particular, to deal with gay themes in a light-hearted fashion without having to address the real life intimacy of the romantic and sexual lives of queer people. The films produced during this period should not however be written off as merely problematic.

While critics and some gay audiences rightly complain about the ways in which gay people are depicted in the films explored in this chapter, the presence of the friendly drag queens on movie screens and living room televisions gave a younger generation a gateway into the gay community and, for some, a feeling of representation.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)

The first major film of the 1990s featuring professional drag queens as the main characters, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert sets three bitchy drag queens in a road movie travelling across the Australian Outback for a residency at a King’s Cross hotel where they would perform as weekly entertainment. Priscilla captured nuances of sexual and gender identity, the aesthetics of queer drag, and the lives of queens within the drag community that The Birdcage and To Wong Foo would miss in their aims at a wider audience. Priscilla’s statuses as an independent and foreign film place it somewhat outside the scope of my arguments here since my research focuses mainly on the drag worlds in New York and to a lesser extent London. Sydney drag has its own rich history

205 that has a great deal to do with the style of drag represented in Priscilla. While the film does a fairly solid job of exploring the personal lives of the queens, it also contains hefty doses of misogynistic and Orientalist humor that problematize the film in ways that are perhaps less expected than the somewhat mishandled details of the transsexual character

Bernadette.31

For one thing, the queens’ sexual and gender identities are divergent. Mitzi del

Bra / Tick (played by Hugo Weaving) presents a queer sexuality that refuses to be defined within the film’s narrative alongside a campy and clownish performance persona.

Felicia Jollygoodfellow/ Adam Whiteley is a younger, gay male and a drag queen who represents a more “natural” look (as much as that can be said of someone who wears a teal plastic wig and thong), provocateur’s approach to identity and sexuality politics, and occasionally abuses drugs. The de facto sage of the group, Bernadette Bassinger is a transsexual woman when not in drag and her career in heels stretches across decades to her time as a legendary figure in the real and iconic King’s Cross “all-male” revue Les

Girls. Les Girls existed as part of the culture of all-male revues of female impersonators focusing on stage performance, glamour, illusion and impersonation that ran from Paris’s

Carousel to numerous American groups akin to the Jewel Box Revue. Les Girls became renowned as a tourist destination not to be missed by celebrities and average Joes alike when visiting Australia.32

31 Why does Bernadette have such rough facial features if she’s been on hormones for years and was one of the celebrated Les Girls? Why is she played by a man if she’s undergone gender reassignment surgery? 32 Senelick, The Changing Room, 439.

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Stephan Elliot pitched the idea for Priscilla at the 1991 Cannes film festival (the year Paris is Burning took home the Grand Jury Prize), but found the financial backing he thought would result not forthcoming. Made on the relatively small budget of 2.7 million dollars through collaborative financing developed with cooperation from

Polygram and the Australian Film Finance Company, the costumes come across as resplendently tacky alien camp one moment and psychedelic trips through Australia’s most iconic visions another (See Figs. 22 and 23). The budget’s visible tightness manages to draw attention to how drag queens must struggle to create opulent images on the budget of a local nightclub performer largely restricted to performing in gay bars that focus on drag.33

Figure 22: The queens’ tribute to the , (left to right), Hugo Weaving

as Mitzi del Bra, Guy Pearce as Felicia Jollygoodfellow, and Terrence Stamp as

Bernadette Bassinger, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)

33 Al Clark, Making Priscilla (New York: Plume, 1995), 68.

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Figure 23: The queens perform in the desert, (left to right) Weaving as Mitzi, Stamp as

Bernadette, and Pearce as Felicia, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

(1994)

Priscilla marked the first time that drag queens could watch other drag queens, in and out of drag, as central characters on the big screen with real and complex lives. The divergence of identities among the characters shows some of this attention to the inner complexities of the drag community. Drag queens can be transgender/ transsexual, drag queens can be bisexual, and drag queens can be privileged, wealthy, young, muscular and

208 white.34 Critics lauded the film for the diversity of identities. Northwest Gay Times critic

Connie Becchio’s response is fairly typical of the gay press:

For once, the drag queens are smack in the midst of it all, not peripheral characters… Here are their self-doubts, fears, rivalries, tragedies (Bernadette has recently lost the love of her life) and foibles… One haunted hero is ashamed of what his son might think. Yes, Virginia, some gay men- even drag queens- do marry women, in this case an affluent, joyful and joy-giving bisexual woman.35 The queens in this film not only have separate and authentic identities based in the community’s history, they also explore the reality of how drag queens make a living.

Before getting Bernadette to agree to travel cross-country, Tick first explains how they will be paid. Mitzi makes a living from performing and selling Wo-Man cosmetics to make ends meet. Adam, the most privileged of the three, appears to live off of his wealthy parents. They have to deal with real drag queen audience issues: maintaining control of drunk and disorderly crowds, handling lackluster or dismal responses to exuberant blow-the-walls-down performances after hours of exhausting costuming and makeup, and discrimination faced even when acceptance appears earned and in hand.

Priscilla’s queens are performers and the art of lipsyncing in costume is on full display throughout the film. Director Stephan Elliot perceived drag queens as walking remnants of the Hollywood musical. “After all…”, says Elliott, “they are just lip-syncing.

34 Notably, the only black drag queen appears literally overshadowed, lipsyncing during the credits, removed from the context of the film’s narrative or landscape. the particularities of race in Australia are brought to however, through a chance meeting between the queens and an aboriginal man who ends up donning a frock and dancing with the girls as other aboriginal figures play digeridoo along to his and the queens’ impromptu performance of “I Will Survive.” 35 Connie Becchio, Northwest Gay Times quoted in Boze Hadleigh, The Lavender Screen: The Gay and Lesbian Films, Their Stars, Makers, Characters & Critics, 2nd ed. (New York: Citadel Press, 2001), 273-274.

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And in musicals that’s all they do really… they just lip-sync.”36 The queens perform in their home bar, at an aboriginal camp in the desert, at a rough and tumble straight bar in the middle of nowhere, and at the hotel where the trip ends. Furthermore, the queens sing throughout the film so that even when not performing, they are still infused with musicality as they pass the time on the bus singing traveling songs.

Regardless of its independent status and gay director, Priscilla still bends the narrative toward a heterosexual audience. The trip across the desert turns out to be for the express purpose of uniting father and son as well as ex-husband and wife. The one couple that consummates their relationship (at least through implication)—Bob and

Bernadette—are a heterosexual couple; Bob simply turns out to be accepting of a transwoman as his bride. Ultimately, the film centers around a construction of family, making the concept of three drag queens more palatable in much the same way that the

Houses of Paris is Burning normalize the familial units of the Ballroom world. A great deal remains to be said about this film, but its Australian production and independent film status mean that further exploration must be left for another project that allows deeper delving into of the relevant subcultures that produced the film’s particular imaginings of drag queens.

To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995)

To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar arrived at the box office in

1995, about one year after Priscilla. Though To Wong Foo and Priscilla had been in

36 Stephan Elliot, “Director Commentary,” The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Extra Frills ed., DVD, Directed by Stephan Elliot, Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 2007.

210 production at the same time, the former was often regarded as a homogenized Hollywood version of the Australian independent. In both films, drag queens hit the road in problem vehicles that eventually fall apart, leaving them stranded in small, rural towns where they experience bigotry and eventually triumph over both small-minded mentalities and vehicular issues to head off into the sunset.

To Wong Foo begins at a (fictional) pageant where Noxeema (Wesley Snipes) and

Vida (Patrick Swayze) tie for first place. Significantly, the opening pageant scene features cameos from many New York drag queens, a partial list of which includes but is not limited to: Sweetie (featured as pageant hostess), Lady Catiria, , Lady

Bunny (who stands at the right hand of the enthroned Quentin Crisp), Coco

Peru, Joey Arias, Miss Understood (who became an entrepreneur hiring drag queens as performers, models, etc. out for parties of all kinds), and Flotilla DeBarge. The winning queens take pity on Chi Chi, a young Latina drag queen, and invite her along on their winners’ trip to Hollywood to compete in the (fictional) Drag Queen of America pageant.

While on the road, their car breaks down and the queens are saved by a local who, believing them to be women, escorts them to the rural ghost town of Snydersville. Over the course of their stay the queens use their feminine wiles and supernatural powers to instantaneously decorate a room, relieve the townswomen of addiction to alcohol, speech impairments (muteness and stuttering are both cured by the girls), an abusive husband, and a mousy personality, rendering the queens less human by virtue of magic feminine powers. By the film’s closing, the queens have won over the townspeople who now understand that they are drag queens and show their support by defending them when

211 trouble arrives. At the film’s closing, the eponymous Julie Newmar crowns the Drag

Queen of America, a newly glamorized and resplendent Chi Chi.

Gay audiences and critics responded ambivalently to the film, with many in the gay community pronouncing it a watered down version of Priscilla, meant to be more palatable to the American mainstream audience. To some the film came off as a lighthearted effort to deal with gay issues that did not focus on AIDS, death, or the weighty real-life problems of gay people, a film that depicts even the drag queens in the community as acceptable. For many in the gay community however, the film symbolized

Hollywood’s desire to play to an increasingly wealthy gay market while distorting and misrepresenting the lives of actual queer people to reinforce heteronormative ideas based in maintaining the nuclear family.

In fact, To Wong Foo has done all of the above. For many young queers who grew up watching the film in the context of bigoted, rural towns without access to the politicized world of the gay community, the film was a nod to the experiences of everyday bigotry and the power of the drag queen to solve those inescapable problems through determination and a flair for the fabulous. More importantly, it was one of the most accessible drag films available for home video rental and one of only three films about career drag queens available for youthful perusal. However, for many the film’s supposed success in acceptance for the gay community seemed like trickery since the queens are only briefly seen as men and despite clarifications made by

Noxeema that a drag queen, unlike other cross-dressing subgroups, is a “gay man with way too much fashion sense for one gender.” Given this statement, it would not be unreasonable for an audience to pose the question: “what gay men?” given that the

212 queens never get out of drag save for a brief glimpse at the film’s opening. In the wake of the queens’ personal lives and out-of-drag personas in Priscilla, To Wong Foo fell short partly because its queens’ non-existent, out-of-drag personas failed to showcase any gay men in the flesh.

The drag queens in this film are further distanced from reality by their status as

Snydersville outsiders who roll into the ghost town like tumbleweeds, become heroic, accepted figures through supernatural powers, and leave again to head back to their own world. Brookey and Westerfelhaus argue that this filmic structure feminizes the

American monomyth with the villain this time as “masculine aggression.”37 However, the queens often beat the men by enacting their own most masculine, aggressive traits: squeezing sheriff Dollard’s genitals when he attempts to rape Vida; squeezing a town ruffian’s genitals when he threatens Noxeema; and punching out Carol Ann’s abusive husband. Though Carol Ann’s life seems better at the film’s closing, the drag queens are leaving town and the question of what happens when her abusive husband returns is left unanswered. She cannot rely on the queens’ brute strength in the future.

When physicality fails the queens, another option exists: femininity and feminine superpowers. The queens make a mute woman talk for the first time in 30 years, solve another woman’s alcoholism, reinvigorate the town’s local restaurant, unite heterosexual couples in the town, separate a victimized woman from her abusive husband, and manage

37 Robert Alan Brookey and Robert Westerfelhaus, “Pistols and Petticoats, Piety and Purity: To Wong Foo, the Queering of the American Monomyth, and the Marginalizing Discourse of Deification,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18, no. 2 (2001): 146.

213 to help a young man stop stuttering. Brookey and Westerfelhaus explain that though deification may seem flattering, it ultimately dehumanizes the queens:

The deification of gay drag queens … is part of a … pattern of positive representations through which the mainstream culture contains and tames marginalized groups. Some deified representations … promote the continued marginalization of groups that are culturally … removed from the mainstream. When such groups gain visibility and a measure of power, they can no longer be ignored by the mainstream. Nor is it as easy for the mainstream to openly represent such groups in a negative fashion. As we have argued, such is the case with gay drag queens. In much of American society, the open expression of anti-gay sentiments is no longer deemed acceptable, and the display of the transgendered [sic] experience is more overt. Through deified representation of queer experience in the popular media, however, the mainstream can appear to embrace them while at the same time defining queers in terms that dehumanize, marginalize, and attempt to tame.38 Carol Ann addresses Vida at the film’s closing, for instance, stating that though she recognized her Adam’s apple from the outset: “I don't think of you as a man and I don't think of you as a woman. I think of you as an angel.” With this statement, Carol Ann erases Vida’s male gender and homosexuality and also neatly contains the queens’ sexuality, enshrining them as magical helpers (“sometimes it just takes a fairy”) that need not have any life outside the story. Queer sexuality took a backseat in the film in an effort to appeal to straight audiences who could congratulate themselves for their tolerance while understanding queer people no better than before.

To Wong Foo made its most straightforward attempt to appeal to mainstream audiences through the casting of hyper-masculine, heterosexual lead actors: Patrick

Swayze and Wesley Snipes. Strangely, the film grants nearly a total lack of space to the male bodies of these stars, relishing instead in their characterization of these queens.

38 Ibid., 153.

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Playing queenily gay might be offensive to a gay audience, but playing that persona through the drag queen allowed these straight actors to do so with little questioning, due to the nature of camp performance practices that grant an allowance for extreme femininity in manners and personae. The focus on these actor’s masculine pasts reiterated their heterosexual identities, cemented by prior action film success. Mainstream America thus could applaud themselves for being accepting through witnessing all the delights of a specifically queer art form, drag, while remaining at a safe distance from gay men.

Significantly, aside from the appearance of the New York queens and Quentin Crisp in the initial pageant scene, there are no gay male roles and no gay actors in the film at all.

The film can be read then as what Matthew Toland calls “pink-face minstrelsy,” wherein heterosexual people imitate queer identities while signaling that they are after all straight.39

The original theatrical trailers for Priscilla and To Wong Foo illuminate the extreme divergences between the films. One trailer for Priscilla compares the queens to extraterrestrials, asking, “If alien beings arrived in your town… how would they act?

What would they say? …and most importantly, what would they wear?” Initially, the actors enter view as their drag personas dressed in outrageously camp costuming and make-up far flung from glamorous female illusion or anything from a fashion Runway

(Tick’s dress, for instance, is made entirely of flip-flops, complete with tiny flip flop ear- rings and a flip-flop handbag). Only after introducing their personas are they revealed by

39 Matthew Toland, unpublished discussion with Rachel Devitt, quoted in Rachel Devitt, “Girl on Girl: Fat Femmes, Bio-Queens, and Redefining Drag Queering,” in Queering the Popular Pitch, edited by Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga (New York: Routledge, 2006), 36.

215 the voiceover as the “three hard-working guys” who “dress up in women’s clothes and parade around mouthing the words to other people’s songs.” The irony with which Adam dismisses his profession and simultaneously sums up his and his cohorts’ life’s work shows an informed knowledge of how drag queens praise and at their craft and that of their competitors and sisters.

On the other side of the spectrum, To Wong Foo’s ham-fisted trailer begins with an action-packed montage of gun blasting and martial arts from Wesley Snipes’ and

Patrick Swayze’s earlier films, assuring the audience of the masculinity of the actors behind the drag masks: “Wesley Snipes: He’s been a killer and a commando… Patrick

Swayze, he’s been a heartthrob and a hero. But these tough guys are about to face the most physically challenging roles of their careers…” The queens appear onscreen after a bright white flash of light, with Leguizamo going uncredited as protégé Chi Chi

Rodriguez until the final seconds of the trailer. This juxtaposition of a drastically opposed image of masculinity feeds into an unfortunate mindset that with drag the real joke is that men are wearing women’s clothes. As the preceding chapters have shown, entire movements of drag and queer performance had long since shifted away from this misogynistic concept. As we have seen, drag began to be used for entirely different purposes regarding gender at least as early as the 1960s. In case the footage of Swayze and Snipes in their earlier action film roles did not hammer home their masculinity hard enough, Vida throws in a traditionally masculine film reference as a metaphor: “...think of it like Easy Rider in dresses.” Oddly enough, because of the action hero footage, the audience sees more of the drag queens’ male bodies in the trailer than in the film itself.

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Another significant difference in the trailers is that Priscilla depicts its queens as real people who must work and earn money to participate in an economy where not only shoes, rhinestones, and wigs are purchased but food and household goods. While the queens in Priscilla openly talk about their monetary woes and their hopes of “making a fine living in a pair of heels,” Snipes’s and Swayze’s queens are only motivated by their desire to win a pageant.

Though Noxeema clarifies in the film that drag queens are “gay men with way too much fashion sense,” the trailer also never raises the idea that Snipes and Swayze are gay men, a notion that also never fully materializes in the film. Noxeema and Vida never mention how they make money and we are left to our own assumptions of how they maintain their glamour. Though they do not have enough money to travel without wheeling and dealing with John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt (a cameo from Robin

Williams), ultimately trading their plane tickets for a cheap used car, the girls do not discuss their jobs or sources of cash, including drag bookings. Unlike Priscilla’s queens, these girls never perform in the film. They model on the pageant runway and dance briefly with the townspeople at the Strawberry Social, but never mention any of this as a way to make money. Chi Chi appears to be the only girl working and the only “working girl,” listing part of her woeful story to her elders as “old men with their greasy bellies and their [grunt grunt grunt] and leaving when their time is up.” The only skills Noxeema and Vida possess appear to be modeling, glamour, and queer interpersonal magic performed for the townspeople of Snydersville.

The queens’ identities as gay men are also masked in what is decidedly the most bizarre element of the film: they never get out of drag, even when heading to bed. This is

217 total fantasy. No campy one liners arise about wearing makeup to sleep to fool the townspeople and there is no acknowledgement or irony surrounding this performance of

24-hour-drag-queen. No drag queen lives their entire life morning, noon, and night in drag any more than Dolly Parton or Cher would go home and sleep in their wigs and makeup. Lady Bunny, for instance, differentiates herself from queens who identify as men playing drag roles they create: “I'm a man who has been called Bunny for 25 years.

I've got gender issues. Unlike other queens like Charles Busch, or John Epperson as

Lypsinka, or even RuPaul, using my birth name is just not an option. I'm not trying to say that I'm an actor portraying Lady Bunny. I am Lady Bunny.”40 Yet even Bunny has never claimed to live in drag 24 hours a day (it is unlikely that she could given the grandiose size of her signature wig style).

By keeping the queens in drag and in female persona 24 hours a day the film visual conflates transgender women’s and drag queens’ performances of gender. The problem here is that few transwomen would walk the streets in the extravagant drag and

“say something hats” the queens wear (See Fig. 24). The queer community is thus misrepresented from multiple sides: transwomen are confused with drag queens and both are conflated with gay men who never appear in the film. The confusion of these images and terms is particularly strange given that the film goes out of its way to elucidate the differences between gender non-conforming identities. After a confrontation between Chi

Chi and her drag elders, Noxeema proclaims:

40 Angelo Patillo, Lady Bunny on Her New Theater Role, Pat Robertson Supporters and John Travolta,” Paper (site), February 18, 2010, http://www.papermag.com/lady-bunny-on-her-new-theater-role-pat-robertson-supporters- and-john-t-1425648892.html.

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When a straight man puts on a dress and gets his sexual kicks, he is a transvestite. When a man is a woman trapped in a man's body and has the little operation, he is a transsexual. When a gay man has way too much fashion sense for one gender he is a drag queen. And when a tired little Latin boy puts on a dress, he is simply a boy in a dress! The audience never sees Chi Chi out of drag or without makeup and the elder queens’ reference to Chi Chi as a mere “boy in a dress” rather than a true drag queen is the only reference to her male gender in the film. The film also seems to subtly hint that Chi Chi is actually a transwoman. She appears to make a living having sex dressed as Chi Chi and that same gender and have to be explicitly quelled by the older queens when she persues Bobby Ray in hopes of both sexual satisfaction and a romantic future with a heterosexual man. Suspiciously, Chi Chi’s identity, job, and personality appear to mirror many of the Latin Ballroom femme queens who are introduced in Paris is Burning as queens who possess a flawless ability to pass as cisgender women.41 Jennie Livingston focuses on the story of femme queen in Paris is Burning, exploring her desires to marry a rich white man who will take her away from the squalor of her current existence as a sex worker. Venus explains her sex work as no different than a wealthy woman who has sex with her husband to get a new appliance. In To Wong Foo,

Chi Chi seemingly mimics Venus’s persona and attitude to an extent that begs the question of whether the character was explicitly based on her. To Wong Foo would fail even in that effort because in true Hollywood fashion, Chi Chi escapes gang rape or worse from the town’s younger men when saved by Bobby Ray.42 Through the saving of

41 Livingston, Paris is Burning. 42 Venus was tragically murdered before Paris Is Burning’s finalization, her body left in a hotel room.

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Chi Chi, the film papers over the real life difficulties of transwomen while the rest of the film confuses identity with a performance persona.

Figure 24: (Left to right) John Leguizamo as Chi Chi Rodriguez, Wesley Snipes as

Noxeema Jackson, and Patrick Swayze as Vida Boheme, To Wong Foo, Thanks for

Everything! Julie Newmar (1995)

Patrick Swayze confused the drag queens’ gender and sexual identities further when promoting the film. He provided a somewhat unexpected response when asked if he thought of Vida as a gay man while playing her:

I thought of her as a gay man in the beginning of the film, when we see her getting made up in drag, but never really again after that. For one thing, Vida is not a gay man who does drag as a profession. This is a gay man who flourishes only when he feels like a woman. I thought I was going to walk through this. After all, I teach women how to walk in high heels all the time, because most of them walk like Minotaurs in these things. Sure enough, I’d

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be working on it at home, and my wife, Lisa would say, “More hips! You’ve lost the shoulders.”43 Here Swayze implies that Eugene, the gay man behind Vida, barely exists outside the context of his drag character. As with Chi Chi, the part seems motivated from a place of trans-ness that is infused with over the top glamour. Swayze’s need to deflect this conversation onto his wife’s correction of his walking in heels also reframes the question into heterosexual terms, again erasing queerness despite the interview being done by a prominent drag queen, Charles Busch, for The Advocate.

Along with these mixed messages, the film nods to its gay audience and acknowledges the world of drag in some surprising ways. RuPaul appears, for instance, descending onto a drag pageant stage on a swing, in a sequin-encrusted dress made to look like the Confederate flag.44 In camp excess, RuPaul’s character in the film bears the name “Rachel Tensions,” an 8 foot tall black drag queen who lords over a short and beefed out white go-go boy wrapped in chains, quipping “I don’t know who he is, but if it snows tonight, he’s going on my tires.” The black drag queen here reclaims the normally offensive confederate flag while dominating a willing go-go boy fetishistically costumed as white slave; the images of feminine and gay power assuming the patriarchal power and privilege the muscled dancer would normally have outside the confines of queer nightlife.

43 Alan Frutkin, “Too Wong Foo’s Gay Crew,“ The Advocate, September 5, 1995, 51. 44 RuPaul had discussed confronting the Ku Klux Klan that same year on and her dress highlights her outrageous approach to racial tensions. “RuPaul - On Arsenio Hall (1993),” Wistia video clip, 8:18, posted by The Critical Media Project, accessed April 7, 2017, http://www.criticalmediaproject.org/cml/media/rupaul-on-arsenio-hall-1993/.

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This moment grants the audience at least a brief view of drag’s more subversive edges and potential for artistic use.

Though To Wong Foo achieved number one at the box office its first two weeks and went on to financial success, it got a mixed response from critics. 45 While some found it to be harmless fun, others regarded it as schlock at best and a threat to the gay community at worst. New York Times critic Janet Maslin called it a “squeaky-clean sex comedy, with a plot that's a lot sillier than its title” before ripping it asunder as hopelessly off the mark in its depictions of gay men and complaining of the two-dimensionality of its major plot points.46 Writing for the daily Harvard Crimson, Theodore K. Gideonse implored viewers not to contribute to the film’s financial gains, stating “Hollywood does not think that straight America wants to see deep, sexual, human gay people. Protest that perspective. Don't go,” adding, “It’s drag that plays in Peoria, pays at the box office, and preys on filmgoers everywhere.”47

These critics made strong, valid points concerning the film’s formulaic plot and the way Hollywood treated gay men (and their sex lives). However, much of the contemporary gay audience showed ambivalence, due partly to the lack of any gay actors in the film and despite its openly lesbian director and out gay writer. Guinevere Turner’s

45 Mitch Kohn, “Op-Ed: The Amazing Story Behind To Wong Foo,” The Advocate, August 13, 2015, http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/08/13/op-ed- amazing-story-behind-wong-foo. 46 Janet Maslin, “Film Review: All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go,” New York, September 8, 1995, http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=990CE7DE1F3EF93BA3575AC0A9639582 60. 47 Theodore K. Gideonse, “‘To Wong Foo’ Not Worthy of ‘Priscilla’s’ Old Pantyhose,” The Harvard Crimson, September 28, 1995, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1995/9/28/to-wong-foo-not-worthy-of/.

222 review of the film for The Advocate gets to the heart of the concerns surrounding To

Wong Foo.

I was very wary of seeing To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar because the idea of any of those three men in a dress made me nervous. I came away feeling entertained, but tricked. On the one hand, the script was catty, ludicrous, and fun, and the costumes were too, too fabulous. On the other hand, I have to speculate: What would this movie have done if three actual drag queens had played the leads? Would anyone have seen it? The film is essentially about the spectacle of three heterosexual male stars in drag, and that feels like good old-fashioned slumming, and I’m back to being nervous and asking, What’s a queer film?48 Turner’s review brings Hollywood’s lack of faith and support for out gay actors to the fore. Additionally, she points that though Hollywood has taken on drag, it still lacks drag queens themselves amongst its many stars.

To Wong Foo also returns to Jeffords’ theme of emotionally recovering hard bodied heroes of the past: the film recovers its action hero stars through the emotional maturity and wisdom earned through drag’s version of womanhood. In promotional interviews for To Wong Foo Swayze invokes the emotional vulnerability that drag’s femininity granted him access to. In an interview with famed drag queen Charles Busch for the Advocate he proves his value like Jeffords’ New Man of the 1990s, in touch with his feelings and feminine side: “When I’m in touch with my feminine energy, my compassion is at its height, my understanding, my caring, my lack of defenses.”49

The Birdcage

48 Guinevere Turner, “Film: Gay is… Gay Ain’t,” The Advocate, January 23, 1996, 89. 49 Charles Busch, “Risky Business,” The Advocate, September 5, 1995, 53.

223

By 1996, Robin Williams had done one drag role and turned down two starring roles in drag: To Wong Foo’s Vida Boheme and Nathan Lane’s role in The Birdcage,

Albert Goldman/ Starina.50 When casting The Birdcage, a remake of the 1978 French farce La cage Aux Folles, the director wanted Williams to play Starina because of his well-known physical comedy, but the part was given to Broadway actor Nathan Lane after Williams turned it down. Though Lane’s homosexuality is widely known today, he surprisingly did not publically come out until three years after Birdcage hit the big screen, in an interview with . Though he claims he “did not know he was supposed to make a public declaration,” in the same interview he admits to dodging questions about dating during the press junket for the film: on Oprah, for instance, he allowed Williams to intervene and distract from the question with comedic interruptions.51

In The Birdcage, two gay men (Williams as Armand Goldman and Lane as his longtime live-in partner in love and business, Albert Goldman/ Starina)—one a screaming queen who doubles as the club’s drag diva Starina, the other a butch director with a flair for production—must deal with the fact that their son wants to marry the daughter of an ultraconservative Republican senator, Kevin Keeley. In the wake of fellow fictional Republican (and co-founder of the fictional Coalition for Moral

Order with Senator Keeley) Senator Eli Jackson’s death in the bed of an underage Black prostitute, Senator Keeley and his wife decide to arrange for a sumptuous wedding for

50 Eila Mell, Casting Might-Have-Beens: A Film-by-Film Directory of Actors Considered for Roles Given to Others (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2005), 34. 51 Bruce Vilanch, “Cover story: For the First Time, Nathan Lane Talks About Being Gay, Matthew Shephard, and Why The Birdcage Kept Him from Coming out of the Closet,” The Advocate, February 2, 1999, 32.

224 their daughter in order to use her nuptials to bolster the Senator’s moral standing. When the Keeleys visit the Goldmans they are led to believe that Armand is a “cultural attaché” to Greece and that Val has a mother instead of a second father. Armand attempts to hide this information from Albert, but his plan to bring Val’s biological mother (a one-night attempt to go straight on Armand’s part) to the meetup with the Keeleys backfires.

Armand decides Albert can stay if he can play it straight, but the more Albert attempts masculinity the more spectacular his failure. Confusion ensues when Val’s mother is delayed but does not receive a call that Albert will be at the dinner rather than his mother.

Albert arrives unannounced in matronly Republican drag: a white dress with light pink polka dots, baby pink silk blazer, tightly coiffed Republican bob wig, topped with a dress-matching neckerchief and immense pearls likely chosen to hide Albert’s Adam’s apple (See Fig. 25). Senator Keeley is so thoroughly deceived by her drag that he remains confused even after Albert’s wig is removed and his wife explains that Albert is a man.

Following this revelation, the Keeleys discover that the press has been tipped off to their whereabouts. Despite their differences, the Goldmans assist the Keeleys in a veiled exit by putting them in drag and having them perform down the runway and off the stage in drag. In the ultimate farcical reversal from his politics, Senator Keeley in drag begs his future son-in-law “Don’t leave me! I don’t want to be the only girl not dancing!” after which he is left to awkwardly pair off with Albert who is now dressed in a full tuxedo.

The film ends with Senator Keeley being left at the curb by his driver who believes him to be a drag queen looking for a sexual encounter.

225

Figure 25: Nathan Lane as Albert Goldman in Republican drag, pictured with Gene

Hackman as Senator Keeley, The Birdcage (1996)

Despite the film’s title, the camera never lingers long within the Birdcage’s walls or stage. We get a few glimpses of Starina’s onstage act, but never a full performance.

The club’s primary reason for existence within the film narrative is to show us what

Armand and Albert have built together and to provide fuel for Albert’s diva personality

(not to mention a neat supply of wigs and costuming for all occasions since she’s the star), and to furnish an escape route for the Keeleys. Significantly, the club appears to have a majority heterosexual crowd, as can be seen in the audience shots and mentions of the list of who’s who that Starina entertains (the Kennedys among them). This is no nightclub with a hip, youthful crowd. Rather, its greatest clientele are some of the oldest, most politically well-connected names in the country. The ambience of the Birdcage provides a stark contrast to the drunk, rambunctious Sydney gay bar crowd in Priscilla and To Wong Foo’s auditorium full of authentic queens topped off with London’s

226

“stately homo” himself, Quentin Crisp, enthroned and surrounded by the likes of

Wigstock creator Lady Bunny.52 The casting of the queens featured in the opening performance of “We are Family” (that transitions into a cowboys-and-Indians themed production) renders cracks in their female illusions. Two of the central queens in this number feature in close-ups that reveal muscular biceps and another queen appears to have no false eyelashes on. These giveaways do not serve to deconstruct gender, but rather to assure viewers unfamiliar with drag that these are men in dresses. Bizarrely, one drag queen who stars in the show returns to the stage with her penis clearly untucked after another queen helps her adjust her costume bottom. The same queen’s flat, muscular

(male) chest is also on display as she quickly switches costume tops. These reminders of the physically sexed male body reassure viewers that these are men in drag, not cisgender dancing .

The film also removes drag from the context of the stage for the majority of its narrative, only allowing brief glimpses of performance, and never enough to tell us anything significant about the performers. Where Priscilla takes us inside both rehearsals and productions themselves, The Birdcage largely uses the stage as a reminder that the bar itself is a character in the film; it is no mistake that Boze Hadleigh refers to this retelling of La Cage Aux Folles as a “musicless American remake” reiterating the lack of staged drag performances53 The musical moments in the film are generally fragments.

Unlike the case of Priscilla, where the queens’ staged performances factor into the plot,

52 Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant, American edition (New York: Penguin, 1997), 169. 53 Boze Hadleigh, The Lavender Screen: The Gay and Lesbian Films, Their Stars, Makers, Characters & Critics, 2nd ed. (New York: Citadel Press, 2001), 283.

227 in The Birdcage the performances largely serve to move the plot forward, never granting us a chance to see more than a snippet of what actually occurs on the club’s stage. Thus the film uses drag more as a plot device that allows for camouflage for a character who needs to disappear similarly to the heterosexual “temporary transvestite” films rather than featuring the work of a career drag queen then, we are treated to a situation that utilizes her drag for disguise more often than pleasure.

Starina’s performance of ’s “Can That Boy Foxtrot” provides an example of this approach. This snippet of Starina’s performance largely receives airtime to clarify to viewers that Albert has been removed from the apartment. Once

Albert is on stage, Armand runs upstairs, dismisses Agador and waits for Val’s arrival.

The nature of Starina’s performance has no bearing on the plot. She makes her stage entrance, vamps with the audience for a moment and just when her musical performance begins, Armand leaves and so does the camera’s focus on Starina. Yet, Starina’s musical entrance signifies a queer past, if only for a moment, in its own way. She takes the stage to a drum roll followed by “The Man That Got Away” overture that would surely return many queer listeners to the opening notes of gay icon ’s legendary live album Judy at Carnegie Hall. This scene also dates Starina’s drag act, connecting it to a supper club tradition of female impersonation acts attended by heterosexual celebrities, taking place in a pop culture atmosphere already penetrated by RuPaul’s modernized, hip

“Supermodel” drag.

The one scene in the film where musical drag performance becomes central to the plot is the concluding scene in which the Keeleys, now in costumes and/or drag, escape the club. Dancing to the music, the Keeleys maneuver off stage, through the audience and

228 onto the street. Though this musical drag performance plays a key role in moving the plot forward, it is problematic from a queer standpoint because The Keeleys, known for their right-wing politics, escape unharmed by scandal. The musical choice of “We Are

Family” nevertheless underscores the eventuality that the film has been leading up to.

After being assisted by the Goldmans, the Keeleys apparently consent to the marriage of their children as the film ends with both families present at the ceremony.

The Birdcage utilizes drag as a backdrop for the film’s narrative and a reasonable explanation for the histrionic heights of femininity in the character of Albert.

Albert/Starina’s duality as both a gay man (though the film denies him that gender outright) and a drag queen allows the film to slip Albert’s feminized gender safely past many of its gay viewers because it codifies him as one archetypical personality that many effeminate gay men would find resonant (if cartoonishly in most cases) with their own experiences of attempting to pass as heterosexuals. Conspicuously, Starina’s defining moments occur in the dressing room: barricading herself with furniture, demanding mood altering drugs, and quoting melodramatic speeches (“Victoria Page will not dance the dance of the red shoes tonight or any other night!”). The dressing room also provides the setting for one of Albert’s denials of the difference between his female drag persona and out-of-drag gender: As Armand tries to convince Albert to go onstage, Albert yells “You know everything because you’re a man and I’m a woman.” Armand replies “You’re not a woman,” to which Albert defiantly yells “Oh, you bastard!” This interaction encourages the viewer to conceive the two as a heterosexual coupe through the blur in identities created in the in-between state while Albert prepares in the dressing room.

229

In box office terms, the Birdcage became an enormous hit, reaching well over 100 million dollars at the Box Office, nearly four times what To Wong Foo earned. The film’s wide appeal and hefty financial returns for its producers divided responses from the gay community. Immediately after Birdcage opened, debates about the film’s depiction of gay people sprung up like wildfire. In an article titled “Battling over The Birdcage,”

Bruce Vilanch laid out the culture of criticism that developed around the film, placing the blame for it squarely on Bruce Bawer’s New York Times review.

You might as well see The Birdcage now, because you’ be arguing about it at dinner parties all summer. Any picture about the complicated family life of drag queens that generates upwards of $35 million in its first two weeks is going to be around awhile. … The movie was two days old when Bruce Bawer, who writes eloquently elsewhere in [the Advocate], took the media escalator to The New York Times and tore the flick to shreds. In less than 48 hours, the spin was in. People who called to about it on Saturday called back to dump on it on Monday. By the time you read this, if you haven’t seen the movie yourself, you’ve witnessed five or six catfights over it that rival anything big-boned Linda Evans and the noted novelist Joan Collins ever cooked up. Friendships have been shattered, phone lines frayed, and more than one bar trashed.54 The stakes for Vilanch and his audience are different. Later in the same article, he defines the concerns of those opposed to the film as misremembering the past and expecting too much from a farce. For Vilanch however, the stakes are heightened by his long-term status as part of Hollywood’s comedy writing stratosphere. Though the film has resonance with pro-gay themes like long term coupling and the rearing of children, Mike

Nichols’ restraining of Williams comedic bits and persona serve to masculinize Armand

54 Bruce Vilanch, “Notes from a Blond: Battling Over The Birdcage,” The Advocate, April 30, 1996, 51.

230 while Lane’s histrionic diva moments reach fever pitch. The couple are cast as a heterosexual couple, if an absurdly farcical one.

The Birdcage serves up heterosexual couplings in a multiplicity of forms. Bronski notes that “Armand and Albert are willing to humiliate themselves to ensure the success of their son’s heterosexual relationship, and the film, predictably, ends with his marriage.”55 He further points out that Nichols presents the two as “an old married couple who are asexual.”56 Additionally, the narrative goes out of its way to force further heterosexuality onto the gay couple during the introduction of Val’s biological mother, fitness guru/ CEO Katherine Archer. When Armand visits her, Albert tags along and quickly begins to seethe with jealousy while waiting in the lobby for Armand. Though both men are gay, this one night stand from decades ago, and with a woman, intensely threatens him as though he would fear a sudden upheaval of Armand’s sexuality.

Meanwhile, Armand and Katherine flirt and dance. Katherine edges closer, unbuttons

Armand’s shirt and compliments his thick mane of chest hair as they reminisce before being broken in on by Albert, now on a tear. All of this makes little sense unless there remains a tinge of hetero- or . Why else would two gay men find a woman from one of their pasts to be such a threat? This scene implies that Albert should continue to be seen as a woman, threatened by another woman trying to steal his man

(thus framing the two as a heterosexual couple). Secondarily, it implies that Armand is perhaps less gay because he’s more butch, especially given the focus on chest hair and the making of so much of a night of heterosexual experimentation. Katherine’s

55 Bronski, “the Queer 1990s,” 339. 56 Ibid.

231 procreative act with Armand seals Armand’s status as the “real” father by unnecessarily tying parentage to biology. After all, Val could have been written in the script as a non- biologically-related adopted child and Katherine could have assisted without all the heterosexualizing ties between biological mother and father. The fact that a woman must be trotted out as the threat to their relationship underscores the film’s avoidance of gay sexuality by avoiding the same scene played out with a younger man. If we are not to see

Albert as a man, his sexual competition must be a woman.

Claire Jenkins notes that though the gay family is presented in a more positive light than the Keeleys, that family must “echo the structures of the norm” in their masculine/ feminine coupling and other heterosexualizing gestures.57 At the film’s closing, for instance, Armand finally gives in to Albert’s demands for a palimony agreement, which Jenkins claims “further [heteronormalize] the queer couple.”58

However, as Bruce Bawer points out: “Only in Hollywood would a palimony agreement be a romantic gesture.”59 While the couple mirrors heterosexuality in their performance of gender roles within their relationship, their legal rights are only played out in the event of the other’s death.

Though audiences may perceive Albert and Armand as a married couple, their context denies that reality outright, forcing Albert to beg for a simple palimony agreement. During the film’s production gay marriage stood in a place of prominence in

57 Claire Jenkins, Home Movies: The American Family in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 160. 58 Ibid., 162. 59 Bruce Bawer, “Film View; Why Can't Hollywood Get Gay Life Right?,” New York Times, March 10, 1996, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/10/movies/film-view- why-can-t-hollywood-get-gay-life-right.html.

232 the national gay rights movement. In 1993, Bruce Bawer claimed to speak for the “silent majority” of gay people who desired to move beyond leftist radical gay politics that sought to keep queer people separate from the rest of society that rejected them. He argued an assimilationist perspective that most gays wanted a “place at the big table” and claimed that sexuality granted this group no special similarities to women, the Black community, or other oppressed minorities.60 In doing so he attempted to normalize gays and show that they deserved the same rights as heterosexuals at the cost of marginalization of radical queers and their politics. Only a few months after the film’s release the first Constitutional amendment since Prohibition that removed, rather than conferred, rights was signed into law, making it expressly illegal for two people of the same sex to get married: The Defense of Marriage Act.61 The reiteration of heterosexual coupling by the homosexual Albert and Armand and their simultaneous protection of their son’s homophobic, anti-gay marriage crusading politician, soon-to-be father-in-law set against the backdrop of the unsuccessful fight to keep the Defense of Marriage Act from being signed into law paints a rather unpleasant picture of how much positive political use these “reaffirmation” films did for the gay community.

Conclusion

On the other hand, the films discussed in this chapter provided accessible representation of gay men and drag to people who previously had no access to such images and ideas, among them gay youngsters and teens who could perhaps view them in

60 Bruce Bawer, A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993), 69-70 61 Kyle Stevens, Mike Nichols: Sex, Language, and the Reinvention of Psychological Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 73.

233 the movie theater or through home rental. Problematic as they are, these films also satisfied a need for many to see themselves depicted, in some way, on the big screen. In

The Celluloid Closet, the image of “the ” in early film is described as a negative, swishing, effeminate stereotype that Arthur Laurents compares to the black caricature of laziness performed by Stepin Fetchit.62 Harvey Fierstein responds to the same “sissy” imagery on the big screen: “I like the sissy. Is it used in negative ways? Yeah. But my view has always been… Visibility at any cost. I’d rather have negative than nothing.

That’s just my particular view. And also ‘cause I am a sissy.”63 In much the same way, young drag-queens to be or effeminate gay boys saw at least some part of themselves reflected onscreen. It seems little coincidence that the generation of queers reared on these films have gone on to fuel nine seasons (and counting) of RuPaul’s Drag Race, now a subculture unto itself. My work in this dissertation only begins to scratch the surface of the history of drag. Each of the subcultures explored in this dissertation could easily be expanded out into projects of their own and it is my sincere hope that more scholars will begin to look at drag within its context and historical setting rather than continue to use drag as a theoretical basis for the study of gender without relating those theories to the embodied performances of actual queer artists.

In the years following the uptick of drag into the mainstream that we’ve seen in this dissertation, drag appeared to go back underground (with the exception of cult stage and film hit Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998/2001) and Rent’s featured role of drag

62 , The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, revised edition (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1987), 35. 63 The Celluloid Closet: Special Edition, directed by and Jeffry Friedman (1995; Culver City, CA: Home Entertainment, 2001), DVD.

234 queen character Angel). In 2009, Logo TV began airing RuPaul’s Drag Race; after almost a decade on air, the show has resulted in a vast entertainment empire of drag queens creating content for live performance, lip-syncing acts, stand-up comedy, vaudeville variety, YouTube series, merchandising, and social media. The show is currently going into its ninth and has been upgraded to airing on VH-1 (complete with added pre- and post-show analysis on the same network). RuPaul’s show has given rise to its own culture resulting in college courses based around the series, two collections of critical essays, and a viable pathway to enormous fan followings for many of its former contestants, allowing them to increase their booking fees from a pittance to thousands per performance, and to create their own productions and tours to boot.64 In effect the show has quickly built a network of drag entertainment that has, over the years, begun to expand popular conceptions of the art form while also achieving access to higher pay and levels of work within the entertainment world for those queens lucky enough to get on the show.

As drag culture becomes ever more pervasive, it also too easily can become divorced from its hard-fought origins in the queer community, and significant artists and their contributions are often lost in the shuffle. The culture of drag has changed dramatically due to these shifts: drag mothers and their orally passed on traditions have largely been replaced by YouTube tutorials for make-up, body padding, character creation, and more. Most significantly, increasingly younger audiences (anecdotally

64 Jim Daems, ed., The Makeup of RuPaul's Drag Race: Essays on the Queen of Reality Shows (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014).; Niall Brennan and David Gudelunas, eds., RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Shifting Visibility of Drag Culture: The Boundaries of Reality TV (New York: Springer International Publishing, 2017).

235 described by many of the shows’ most popular performers as composed of more teenage girls and queer kids than adult gay men) are exposed to drag through the show, bringing drag to children of diverse sexualities and genders at earlier ages. At the same time both drag and transgender images and issues are assimilated into mainstream society through the larger fight for and its visibility through outspoken intellectual activists who participate in popular media interviews like , , and

Chaz among others. Libraries in various parts of the country now feature drag queen story hours in which professional drag queens read books to children to help teach them about the fluidity of gender, and drag slowly becomes more deeply embedded in the popular society.65 The extent of this phenomenon can be seen in ham-fisted marketing ploys that appropriate drag’s language for other uses.66 As drag slang penetrates even into the most mundane email advertising, as historians we must remember the distinctly queer history and origins of the art form and that, despite its inclusion and assimilation into mainstream society, drag (largely) remains a queer art form whose history is essential to understanding its aesthetics, goals, and criticisms present and future. Drag’s tendency toward pop culture referencing doubles back on references to earlier drag queens, outmoded forms of drag, and ironic send-ups of particular aesthetics. Though scholars have already begun to explore RuPaul’s Drag Race, I believe that to do so without an

65 Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, “ Brings ‘Glamorous, Positive’ Voices to Libraries, Bookstores,” NBC News, February 24, 2017, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/drag-queen-story-hour-brings-glamorous- positive-voices-libraries-bookstores-n724966. The popular and critically acclaimed children’s cartoon series Steven Universe now also features gender transformation and LGBTQ themes aimed at the younger set. 66 Most recently, I noticed this in an email trend alert from online streaming service Hulu that lead with the subject line: “YASSS KWEEN: Beyoncé is pregnant with twins.”

236 understanding of drag’s complex history may serve to obscure some of the real issues going forward. In order to understand the changes drag is currently going through and what those changes say about the art form itself, we must first begin to get a better grasp on the details of how this art form moved beyond simple mimicry of femininity and into the complex art form that it had become before it penetrated the mainstream in the 1990s.

I hope that my exploration of the foundational changes that occurred in the 1970s and

1908s will lead to a better understanding of the modern drag world and the vast diversity of drag now represented on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

237

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