Vaginal Davis.

art
7/22/2009

Beware the Holy Retarded Whore - a light introduction to Vaginal Davis.


by Hynam Kendall


The muse of fashion designer Rick Owens, photographer Catherine Opie, dance theatre legend Pina Bausch; infamous transvestite, hostess, film star, dominatrix, performer, ‘zine princess, feminist, artist, fabulousity, friend of the A-list, and, of course, icon - how did you survive without Vaginal Davis?


The barriers of Dalston Superstore are ripped open with clenched fists of fingers, as Beth Ditto, flagged by a six-foot-nigh-on-seven-foot African queen goddess in stomping heels and horsehair weave, pushes her way past a smoking bay of art students, Mandi Lennard on mobile, and Sibling tenure Cozette McCreery in a printed silk Richard Nicoll shift dress. “You mean we can’t get into my own party????” Beth, pixie-sized in a knock-out black number barely containing a counter of porcelain chest meat, wails in a comedy Texas drawl in the vein of Blanche Devereaux, more verbal margarine than Southern American belle. “No ma’am,” the bouncer, a wry smile, wink, nod, satirical aside to the aforementioned bronze goliath, who stands in tow, umbrella armed, the London rain thwarting the glitz, the glam of tonight’s launch. The to-and-fro hustle ensues for five minutes, all on camera. “Life’s not worth living if it’s not on camera,” someone muses, lips back-and-forth behind a cigarette. A line from In Bed with Madonna. Beth - animated with arms, mouth and kicking heels a go-go. “Let me in!!!!” she screams! And of course they do - its a Gossip party after all.

Beth, teamed with the iconic LAist and splendid raconteur Vag Davis, are filming Music for Men TV. When Gossip manager Tara aka Annie Oakley of the Sex Workers Art Tour, invited Vaginal to host the Gossip record release party and be the presenter (she was assured she was the first choice), she was asked personally, employed for the role with these kinds of funny sketches in mind. With the skit over, a fag is sucked to the butt, and the cackling pair shuffle through a crowd incensed from Tiger beer and chicken skewers. Vaginal bowing in mid catwalk strut for her Oscar-worthy performance. “Thanks doll,” Doll being her trademarked slurpy wet term of endearment for all and sundry, an Americanism of affection. “Thanks Doll, kisses,” she greets me inside, passes me a business card as I lavish her with praise for her comedy stylings, her cutting figure, her flawless appearance and apparent fabulousness. It is the first time I have met Vaginal, though, of course, I am aware of her legend. “Black is beautiful...” she writes with a black marker she found somewhere... her cleavage? Scrawling in maths book cursive on the back of her 3” x 4” business card. “Black is beautiful. But it sure get’s dusty...” 




Hynam Kendall: It was at the Gossip album launch that we met. You and Beth go way back, right?

Vaginal Davis: I was first introduced to the Gossips music, I believe, in 2002, through my punk class of ´77 colleague Alice Bag of the legendary LA punk group The Bags. Alice and I co-founded the art rock band Cholita, The Female Menudo back in 1985. Gossip had toured with Alice Bag, and Alice raved about Beth Ditto and Gossip, suggesting I write about them in my column Because I Said So for the fashion and action magazine Glue. Also at that time I was a culture critic for the LA Weekly, an alternative arts publication. Alice Bag does not promote other singers so for her to genuinely love Beth really says something. Alice has extremely high standards when it comes to vocalists, and I believe that she saw a younger version of herself in Beth. And of course Alice lauded that Ditto strength of character and glorious self confidence commanding the stage. Seeing Beth perform for the first time in 2006 was very inspirational for me. Besides singing with her band she also was the star model at Homo A-Go-Go in a Jared Gold avant-garde fashion show, which was the precursor to her becoming a fashion icon.

HK: I found an old interview you did with her in which Beth described you as the most attractive person in Hollywood...

VD: Beth Ditto and I are certainly twin sisters of the cloth....And the world's most powerful hermaphrodisiac! I feel fortunate that I emerged from my mother’s womb an inter-sexed baby, so Beth is very correct in calling me a “hermaphrodisiac”.

HK: The other day I was talking to fellow queercore zine founder Bruce LaBruce and you came up. He told me how your role in the gay community is "to reject it, as it is tired and bourgeois” and that you are "the last great drag queen, who questions all the orthodoxies that need to be questioned"... very high praise indeed!

VD: Bruce La Bruce and I have known each other since the mid 80s, through letter writing, though we didn´t meet in person till 1990 when he was on tour with his first feature film No Skin Off My Ass. I hosted Bruce when he first came to Hollywood. I was living on the Sunset Strip in an apartment that also doubled up as The Hag Gallery-Small, Contemporary, Haggard. I lived at this space from 1983-1991. Bruce was enamoured with Hollywood and the palm trees. My apartment building was right next door to an upscale supermarket called The Chalet Gourmet. Bruce couldn’t believe that every time he went into this market for a Cappuccino he would see a famous film, TV or recording star. Bruce was also disturbed at how blasé I was around celebrities. He couldn´t believe I knew so many famous people and was so casual about it. What he didn´t realize is that I was born In Los Angeles so celebrities were a dime a dozen to me. I went to college with the children of movie stars at The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), and lots of stars slummed in the punk rock scene of the late 70s and early 80s. The cult of celebrity didn’t reach its zenith until the late 90s. Before that celebrities were considered tacky. Being an underground personality had more of a cache. I came out of the Hollywood club scene of the late 70s and 1980s when it was interesting. Los Angeles and other international club scenes now only glorify the banal.

Gay used to be part of outlaw society. You seem to hold onto these ideals, whereas other drag artists like RuPaul expose themselves as a mainstream, commercial product. You still have the underground sensibility of a cult figure... Back then RuPaul had a character called Starbooty that was grittier than his mainstream persona which led him to become the first drag queen to break into the commercial world. Whatever criticism one may have about what RuPaul has become now, at one time he initially started out in the post punk underground.

HK: You seem to be the more traditional type of drag queen - someone who is consistently political, avant-garde, iconoclastic...

VD: I really have a lot of respect for old school drag. It was an art form. I never performed at gay clubs, because when I was a teenage queen the gay world didn´t understand me. The only place that welcomed my aesthetic was the punk scene. But I really didn´t fit in that world either. There really has never been a place for me. I usually have to create my own movements and scenes.

HK: Do you agree that new-drag seems to have lost its democratic socialist edge and now appears to be little more than men in women's clothing?

VD: The new school of drag emerged in the 1980s and owes a lot to the Warhol queens Candy Darling, Holly Woodland and Jackie Curtis, and also to Jack Smith and Mario Montez, as well as crazy queens like Mother Flawless Sabrina of the 1968 documentary The Queen and Dorian Corey of Paris Is Burning. Ms. Corey murdered her abusive lover and kept his dead body in a costume trunk in her apartment in Harlem for over 25 years. The body wasn´t discovered until Dorian died of AIDS, so it’s stemmed from a real place. I have been an internationally recognized artist since I was a teenager, but few people know much about what I do, because my main medium is my own whimsy. My approach to art is playful, so I get dismissed as not serious.

HK: For someone who gets dismissed, you have a big fanclub. You're Rick Owens' muse...

VD: I am actually more known through associates who have become very famous like Rick Owens. I first met Rick when he was a post punk damaged fashion fag working as an Oscar gown knockoff designer in LA´s garment district. He was friends with these LA musicians in the bands Red Wedding and The Shadow Minstrels. He even designed some costumes for my performances back in the 1980s, and I was the one who introduced him to his current wife and muse Michele Lamy. Rick and I were kindred spirits who had an ambivalence toward the mainstream gay world. All of Rick’s gay relationships were strained, and after he was taken advantage of and literally raped by a hideous S&M creature who held him captive in his dungeon for days until I was able to get some of my gangbanger friends to rescue him, he became completely disillusioned by the gay world. He started an affair with Michele, who promptly divorced her husband, the performance artist and filmmaker Richard Newton, and she and Rick Owens became a couple in 1990 and they are still together. I also introduced Rick to the Goddess Bunny who became the inspiration for his first line of clothing. I´m proud to own a lot of Rick Owens early designs, and he even designed the costumes to the stage production Cheap Blacky that I starred in 2007-08 that was directed by our friend Bruce La Bruce that we talked about earlier.

HK: Then there's art photographer Catherine Opie...

VD: Catherine Opie I first met when I was a visiting artist at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California when she was a student being groomed for a high art career. Catherine Opie and Matthew Barney were the first group of art stars cultivated by Blue Chip gallerists while they were still in art school. I was part of Cathy´s first series of photos that put her name on the map. Cathy now teaches at UCLA and I was part of the hiring committee to bring her to UCLA.

HK: And Dan Clowes of Ghost World fame...

VD: I met Dan through Tim Hensley of the bands Carousel of Death and The Victor Banana. I had known Tim since he was a teenager and was a fan of my group the Afro Sisters. Our bands performed together on the same bills in the 1980s. Tim and Dan both were regulars at my performances, and Hag Gallery. Dan showed his drawings at my Hag Gallery way before he was famous. Tim stopped making music and is now a successful cartoonist and graphic novelist. Tim´s father Tom Hensley is the long-time keyboard player and music director for pop legend and songwriter Neil Diamond.

HK: The list goes on... Margaret Cho...

VD: Margaret Cho I first met in the mid 1990s when she would come to my Sunday afternoon punk rock beer bust called Club Sucker at the Garage in Silverlake. I hosted and DJ’d this rock ‘n’ roll queer space for 5 years. We had local, national and international touring band play every week at this dive bar called the Garage which formerly had been one of the oldest gay bars in Los Angeles until Paul Rossi bought it from the drugged out old faggot who owned it. Paul used to be in the hardcore punk band Wasted Youth and is the father of actress Patricia Arquette´s son, who is now in his late teens if not older. I don´t know if you are familiar with the Arquette’s in Britain, but they are part of a famous acting dynasty like the Barrymore’s. Anyway, Margaret Cho used to be a semi-regular to my club, and in 2001 she asked me to open up for her tour of the US and Canada. That tour was called Notorious CHO. I had never played to such a large mainstream audience of between 2-10,000 people at each tour stop. With Margaret I played places I had never been to like Las Vegas, Hawaii, Miami and Austin, Texas. I also wouldn’t want to go back to any of these places. Both Margaret and I share a fetish for large male feet. My performance that I did on tour with Margaret involved picking innocent boys out of the audience and worshiping their youthful feet by invoking the goddesses Clymidia and Anal Wartis.

HK: And you were in a band called Black Fag with Beck's mother Bibbe Hansen...

VD: My relationship with Bibbe Hansen goes way back to the 1970s in Los Angeles when she was taking photos for a punk magazine that her father, the famous Fluxus artist Al Hansen, was the publisher of. Back then I also use to babysit Beck and his younger brother Channing. Bibbe also was the manager for my band Cholita. The band Black Fag that I did with Bibbe in the early 1990´s started off as a joke we were playing on Beck, and it took off. There was even a bidding war to sign us to these major labels, which we felt was just nonsense.

HK: You've done everything - performance art, independent curating, painting, composing, writing, club organising - but what do you do now? What does Vaginal Davis do? Maybe it would be easier to ask what you don’t do...

VD: Since I work in so many areas and don´t stick to one medium no one knows how to process that. I am a bit of an enigma, I can´t be packaged and sold as a commodity. That’s also why I will never have crossover appeal to a mainstream audience. Which is fine with me. I like that I am only known by a select few. I have never been a careerist. My life will always be about struggle which is great. I never take anything for granted that way.

HK: You are an LA icon. Why did you relocate to Germany? Is it that LA has become so gentrified that it's almost impossible to afford to live there as a creative, or something more romantic, like that it's because you're an anglophile and it's your spiritual homeland, or that, as a black American, you're an exotic out there... ?

VD: I have been living in Germany for 3 years now. I left the US because it became impossible to afford to live in my own country and do the work I do, the way I want to do it without becoming a wage slave. My rent in Berlin is only 200 Euros a month and I have a nice garden view. I would never want to live in expensive cities like Paris, New York, San Francisco or London. I am so glad this global financial collapse happened. Advanced capitalism is getting it s ultimate comeuppance. 

HK: Finally, let's look to the future - you've got a compilation of your celebrity interviews coming out called Beware the Holy Retarded Whore, in which you interview the likes of Keanu Reeves, Eminem and Missy Elliott...

VD: Beware the Holy Retarded Whore is a compilation of a series of unedited interviews I did that originally appeared in the alternative newspaper The LA Weekly, and the international fashion and culture magazines Dutch and Zoo.

HK: Which has been the most difficult interview? Who was an asshole?

VD: I never have problems with interviewees. They are so used to getting asked such dumb questions by regular mainstream journalists that talking to me is a breath of fresh air. The only person I interviewed who was annoying was this acolyte of P.Diddy/Sean Combs. I don´t even remember his name now, but he was a dapper dresser whose claim to fame was opening up an umbrella for P. Diddy in Monaco. His interview isn´t in the compilation though. He was too much of a press whore. I never hear anything about him anymore. I guess he faded into obscurity. My best ever interview was with Nirvana where at the end of the interview I licked and sucked all the band members feet. Chris Noveselic had huge Croatian feet, and was really turned on by me. He was definitely a tranny chaser, and every time I was in Seattle I´d give him a little tongue foot bath. Unfortunately he was a pre-mature ejaculator.

 
www.vaginaldavis.com

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