My Womanly Story
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My Womanly Story Vaginal Davis in conversation with Lewis Church s. Vaginal “Crème” Davis has come to occupy a unique position in the parallel and intertwining histories of performance and live art, punk, Mand queer subcultures. As lead singer of the Afro Sisters, black fag, Pedro, Muriel & Esther (PME), and ¡Cholita! The Female Menudo, she developed a fearsome reputation and cult following on the alternative music scene of the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, emerging as a prime antagonist of the post-punk subgenre Queercore. Alongside this musical practice, she directs and stars in her own independent films and theatrical productions, and was a central figure in the burgeoning fanzine culture of the 1980s, producing both home-printed magazines and the influential video-zine Fertile La Toyah Jackson. Davis also ran and hosted several highly influential performance/club nights in Los Angeles throughout the 1990s and 2000s including Club Sucker, G.I.M.P., and Bricktops. Now living in Berlin, Davis continues to produce work as a performer, visual artist, sculptor, and writer, and as a musician with her most recent bands Ten- derloin and Ruth Fisher. Davis produces work that blends a peculiarly Angeleno understanding of celebrity, glamor, and showbiz with the cultural politics of race, sexuality, privilege, and class, all made within a DIY ethos that stretches back to the earliest days of Californian punk. This interview was recorded in a cold Berlin on December 3, 2014, at Davis’s home in Schöneberg. I want to ask first about the process through which we arranged this interview—through our letters to each other. We’ve kept up a written correspondence since 2010, and you have many other people you regularly write to . Hundreds and thousands of people, it seems like! The post has largely been supplanted by email as a primary method of keeping in touch for most, but it seems like letter writing is quite an important part of how you commu- nicate. Do you think of it as part of your artistic practice? Of course. I think it’s one of the main components of what you would call my “art practice.” I always shy away from those academic terms other people use, 80 PAJ 113 (2016), pp. 80–88. © 2016 Performing Arts Journal, Inc. doi:10.1162/PAJJ_a_00320 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00320 by guest on 26 September 2021 like “art practice” and “my work.” But letter writing for me is so paramount. I first started writing letters when I was around seven or eight years old. I always thought of myself as being a child of the world confined to the inner city, South Central Los Angeles. I knew that there was a wider world out there and I wanted to be a part of it, so I actively became involved in letter writing campaigns, and found pen pals in other countries. I was writing to kids my age behind the Iron Curtain in Russia and East Berlin, and in Japan, in South America, Argentina, and Brazil, all the places that I had imagined. And of course in England, because I was an Anglophile at a young age. I was obsessed with castles and all that imagery. It’s weird because almost all of those early correspondences from childhood I’ve still kept going all these years. Those relationships have been really helpful. A lot of them have become prominent people, and these are relationships I’ve had since we were nine or ten. People of our modern age, who are only obsessed with smartphones and gad- getries, devices, and apps, they should realize that this analog way of being is something that you shouldn’t underestimate or ignore. That’s one of the things that I really stress when I teach, and I keep in contact with all my former students and continue collaborating with them. A lot of that is through letter writing with people your age, “millennials.” For people born between 1982 and 2000 (I guess that’s considered a “millennial”) writing a letter via the post is something that’s so novel and so unusual that it has a weight to it. A letter is like a little gift coming to you. As a young person in Los Angeles these letters were coming in to you from all over the world, and you could say that they were a clear example of the influence this concep- tion of the “wider world,” as you put it, had on you growing up. But how much of an influence was L.A. on your development and earliest artistic work? L.A. is a very unique city. Only a place like L.A. could produce a Ron Athey, a Vaginal Davis, a Kembra Pfahler, a Beck. Only L.A. can produce that kind of weirdness, that uniqueness, because L.A. itself is this very, very strange, strange city. If you haven’t been there yet then it’s hard to try to articulate just how strange and how different it is. It’s an industry town. I call it the “Entertainment Industrial Complex” city. Because of that it isn’t a city where art is always cher- ished, especially the kind of art that I do, because it’s not commercial enough and it doesn’t make money. Only the commercial arts, like film, television, and popular music are given real attention. I went against the grain of those com- mercial practices from an early age. I started doing little writing projects and art when I was still a child, and getting attention from it. Of course at that time my elders wanted to guide me in a certain way that was more commercial, like being an actor. I rejected that from the get-go. I had one theatre teacher in elementary CHURCH / My Womanly Story 81 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00320 by guest on 26 September 2021 school that I had huge aesthetic fights with, because I already had my sense of the aesthetic at a very young age. At that time for someone that young to know themselves so well was just unheard of. With this particular teacher, who was a control-queen gay (and I’m something of a control-queen myself!), it was a clash. How much of those early clashes with authority came out of a “punk” attitude? I read that your cousin, Karla DuPlantier, got you into punk and brought you into the punk scene quite early on. She didn’t really get me into it, but she was already the lesbian drummer of a band called The Controllers, and a fixture of the early L.A. punk scene. I’ve never really considered myself a punk rocker in the purest sense, but she was already part of it and it was the raw intensity of the early punk scene that caught my attention. I was much younger than that first wave of L.A. punk, people like Karla and Alice Bag (I later collaborated with them in the Afro Sisters and ¡Cholita! The Female Menudo). I was still in school and they were already out, I was still really a child. Those early days of punk were very queer-dominated, and very female-dominated and female-driven. It was also very art-motivated, because a lot of people had gone to art school. This was before the advent of the hardcore scene in the late 1970s, when it became more macho, testosterone-fuelled, and suburban. Before that it was very urban rather than suburban, which is a big difference. Women and queers ruled the scene. In the late seventies, the scene became more violent. It was a whole change of energy. Women and queers got pushed into a secondary role. You say that the scene as a whole got more macho and suburban, but was the work that you started to make still appealing to that first audience? The queer, urban, female-led crowd? Was that your audience at first? I guess you could say that. There was a change in the scene definitely, but I still had a lot of people from that new aggressive scene who came to see things that I did. I opened up for a lot of groups. One of the influences on both Ron [Athey] and me was Johanna Went, who was doing performance art opening up for hardcore punk bands. It’s funny because that period between punk and the advent of hardcore was a really precarious time, and there were a lot of things that overlapped. When it became more male-centered these hunky suburban beach boys from Orange County started coming to Hollywood, and there was a homoeroticism attached to that too. A lot of the early punks who were queer latched on to that, so there was mixing. Even the word “punk” itself has a queer connotation. 82 PAJ 113 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00320 by guest on 26 September 2021 How did your various art bands form? Did you think of them as specific artistic state- ments? Or where they just an alignment of people you were working with that grew out of friendships? Well, back in those days nothing was really planned, everything just happened organically. You would get a zany idea, with people that you knew or hung out with, and just run with it. Now people are so careerist and strategize everything, but in those days stuff just happened. Even the formation of the Afro Sisters hap- pened through being at a party with Greg Hernandez (who later became known as Fertile La Toyah Jackson).