This story was produced in partnership with the Provincetown Business Guild and originally published in July 2025 for WUSSY Vol. 14 — order a copy!

We queers love a beach–Jacob Riis, Pensacola, the entire Isle of Lesbos, to name a few–so it’s no surprise that we congregate on the shores of Cape Cod, the flexed arm promontory that forms the eastern end of Massachusetts, a state early to embrace its LGBTQ+ community. 

What is more surprising, perhaps, is how long queer folks have been gathering there–especially in Provincetown, the very tip of Cape Cod, which has been synonymous with American LGBTQ+ culture for well over a century. First drawn in with a cohort of artists and bohemians who flocked to the town beginning in the late 19th century, gays, lesbians, and trans people quickly formed year-round communities, helping to grow a flourishing art scene and establishing their own local businesses and organizations. 

Provincetown–or Ptown, as it’s known familiarly–has changed over the years, evolving into a summer tourist hotspot popular with families, with soaring housing costs that threaten its longstanding creative ecosystem. But to visit Ptown today is to be immersed in the same vibrant queer culture that made it such a singular place: even amidst the families eating ice cream cones and the straight 20-something Europeans flirting with each other while on break from their foreign worker visa summer jobs, the beating heart of Ptown is still stone cold gay. 

You’d know it from the rainbow flags overhead, the tourist shops hawking “I <3 My Two Dads” t-shirts, the scantily-clad lads promoting late night drag shows on bicycles. But even without all that, you’d know it merely by walking down the street, immersed in the kind of buoyant, welcoming warmth that queers knit instinctively into their communities, a form of survival that blossoms into abundance. Ptown’s LGBTQ+ culture makes ample room for the many other kinds of people who faithfully return year after year–and it lives happily alongside the town’s Portuguese heritage, the legacy of its many decades as a fishing community. But bumping up comfortably against all these other kinds of visitors and locals is a queer scene that still feels vividly alive and welcoming, from afternoon tea dances at the Boatslip to sold-out performances by the legendary Dina Martina. 

You don’t have to be queer to enjoy Provincetown. But to be queer in Provincetown is to be invited inside its sunny inner-sanctum, to belong to its numinous legacy as a haven for creative misfits and gender outlaws. As these delicious archival images make clear, Ptown has long been a queer town. And as any visitor today will find, the little fishing village on the tip of Cape Cod is just as wet and wild as ever.   

Before the Queers

Cape Cod’s indigenous history stretches back at least 9,000 years. For millennia, the Eastern Cape was home to the Nauset, Monomoyick and Wampanoag tribes, who established semi-sedentary communities supported by the Atlantic’s bountiful fish and shellfish. 

European colonists began arriving in the early 17th century–including the Mayflower, which landed Provincetown in 1620 before making its way inland–and quickly began decimating the local indigenous communities, both through intentional warfare and disease. The Wampanoag absorbed the few remaining members of the Nauset and Monomoyick tribes, and today are the federally-recognized Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, which numbers around 3,200 members. Many tribal members still live on the Cape and are actively reasserting the region’s long indigenous history.

Moby Dick(-Dock) Era

Provincetown was formally incorporated into the British Colonies in 1727; its unoriginal name simply clarified that it was part of the Province of Massachusetts. After a shoddy attempt to farm the sandy Cape Cod soil, the Cape became a fishing region, and by 1840, Provincetown was the biggest fishing port on the Cape. 

During the early 19th century, when the frenzied demand for whale baleen for corsets and whale oil to light lamps sent the whaling industry into hyperdrive, Portuguese fishermen, mostly from the Azores, began enlisting en masse on American ships. Many brought their families over from Europe–Portugal was reeling from poverty and political instability–and when cheap petroleum oil cratered the whaling industry beginning in the 1860s, they pivoted to fishing cod and other local seafood. 

By 1890, Provincetown’s population had grown to 4,600 citizens, 45% of whom were of Portuguese descent. That rich cultural tradition survives today in numerous Portuguese bakeries and heritage events like the Portuguese Festival and Blessing of the Fleet every June.

The Art Party Arrives

In 1873, the railroad finally made it to Provincetown, drawing visitors from Boston and New York–especially visual artists, attracted to the beautiful landscapes, good light, and cheap boarding houses operated by local families. 

In 1898, American painter Charles Webster Hawthorne, scouring New England for a bucolic spot to open the country’s first outdoor painting school, landed in Provincetown. He’d arrived on the heels of the Portland Gale, a storm that devastated the town’s fishing infrastructure, and locals leapt at the opportunity to welcome a new revenue stream. The Cape Cod School of Art opened in 1899, leading to the creation of one of America’s largest artist colonies, built by droves of artists and bohemians–many of them queer.

Okay Here’s Where Things Get Gay

As the creative scene bloomed in Provincetown–with new art schools, salons, and artist shows cropping up all over town–a pipeline emerged between the seaside town and New York’s epicenter of bohemia, Greenwich Village. Out of it spilled artists of all stripes, from painters to writers to actors. Many had just fled Europe, chased out by World War I, but full of its cosmopolitan ideals–among them a newfound embrace of sexual and gender fluidity. Painters Marsden Hartley and Charles Demuth, both gay, arrived in time for what Hartley called “The Great Summer of 1916.” Eugene O’Neill, still mostly a brooding mariner with aspirations of becoming a playwright, showed up around then, too, staging Bound East for Cardiff with the fledgling Provincetown Players (he’s not officially known to be queer but, you know, playwrights…). O’Neill met Demuth that summer–perhaps at Atlantic House, then as now a popular gay haunt–and they became lifelong friends; Demuth was O’Neill’s inspiration for the character Charles Marsden in Strange Interlude (1928). 

More queer artists followed: poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and e.e. cummings both lived and worked in Provincetown. Tennessee Williams arrived in 1940 and promptly fell in love (with the town and multiple men), spending four summers there. He’s rumored to have written part of the Glass Menagerie at Atlantic House.

In addition to such creative titans, queer people of all kinds made their way to Provincetown, its sand-swept remoteness forming a buffer that nourished a growing community of gay and trans people. Gay bars, drag shows, and nightclubs bloomed; many visitors bought homes and businesses and became year-round residents. Portuguese women opened their boarding-house doors to gay men and women, largely unbothered by their counter-culture tendencies so long as they paid rent on time. By the early 1950s, Provincetown had become well-known for its art, its light, and its queer scene.

Cishet Nonsense

Provincetown’s queer evolution was not without its detractors. In 1951, Phil Baiona purchased the bar Weathering Heights and turned it into a gay club, featuring cabaret-style shows and drag performers, including the occasional appearance of “Bella Baiona.” 

Larger than life and unapologetically gay, Baiona became the target of some Provincetown residents who resented the queerification of the once-sleepy fishing town. The next year, local government selectmen passed an ordinance barring establishments from “cater[ing] to…homosexuals of either sex.” They then attempted to strip Baiona of his liquor license, but had no luck until 1960, when a church moved in next door and the selectmen could claim the nightclub was too close to a place of worship. Weathering Heights was forced to close, but local business owners were not pleased with the selectmen’s moral grandstanding. They printed a “Shopkeeper’s Plea” in the local paper, warning officials not to chase off the “summer people,” aka gay and lesbian visitors. Shutting down queer-friendly establishments, they wrote, would risk losing “a great deal of color and quality that brings the summer source of income into this town.” That pushback helped protect Provincetown’s status as an LGBTQ+ enclave.

Baiona sold his property in 1968 and passed away a few years later, but his legacy lives on in Provincetown–as does the Weathering Heights sign, still visible behind overgrown shrubbery on Shank Painter Road.

Pride Goes Coastal

After the Stonewall Inn riot in 1969, the gay liberation movement that cascaded across the country made its way to Provincetown. The town held its first Lesbian and Gay Liberation March in 1970–denied a permit, they marched anyways–and continues to celebrate pride every year, usually at the beginning of June. 

This photo was taken during celebrations for the United States’ Bicentennial in 1976. Paul Asher-Best, a longtime Cape Cod resident who spent years living in Provincetown, recalled: “My brother, David, entered this contingent [for the] Fourth of July parade. When he went to the high school to register, the secretary who handled the event was hesitant. She finally relented, but admonished, ‘No raised fists or armbands.’ By the time we got to the center of town, our numbers had swelled considerably as ‘Proud and Gay Americans,’ with our allies joining in to march with us.”

The Tea on Tea Dance

Perhaps no gathering exemplifies Ptown’s long-flourishing queer scene better than tea dances at the waterside club the Boatslip. Held in the afternoon, sophisticated-sounding “tea dances” sprung up in LGBTQ+ havens beginning in the 1960s as a way to throw off police, who often raided gay gatherings at night. The Boatslip hosted Provincetown’s first tea dance in 1976; Henry Butch Mcelroy, who DJ’d that auspicious inaugural party, recalls a disco-heavy playlist that included Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer, and Frankie Valle. Sandra Cisneros immortalized the party in her poem “Tea Dance, Provincetown, 1982.” She wrote: “But the tea dances shimmied/ miraculous as mercury./ Acrid stink of sweat and/chlorine tang of semen.” 

This series from 1978 was shared by Bridget Seley Galway (right), whose mother worked at the Boatslip in the ‘70s. Galway said of the photo: “This is me and my friend and then-roommate Kevin Mahoney. I was dressed in his clothes in this photo. Going to tea dance that afternoon was spontaneous. He was my favorite dance partner. That is how we first bonded, on the dance floor. Kevin passed away in ‘88. He was like a brother. I will always miss him.”

The Boatslip still hosts afternoon tea dances daily: stop by on your next visit!

Dreamlanders in the Dunes

John Waters may have hailed from Baltimore, but he and his Dreamlanders have a deep connection with Provincetown. Waters himself washed up there in 1964, having hitchhiked his way north after high school with his girlfriend. Dreamlanders, including Divine, Cookie Mueller, and Channing Wilroy followed in subsequent summers, and Waters actually met Mink Stole in Provincetown, who quickly joined the ragtag ensemble. Waters still often spends his summers in Provincetown.

In this photo, Divine is being escorted by a crew of “sailors” to the Boatslip, where he was performing in the Hollywood Tonight’s Classic Disco fundraiser for the Provincetown Fire Department. According to Henry Butch Mcelroy–then the DJ at the Boatslip–the man in white on the right was a local fisherman who lent Divine his boat for the occasion. The grand entrance went slightly off the rails: Allegedly, Divine’s sailor escorts were blinded by flashing cameras, lost their footing, and dropped him in the surf. Sopping wet, annoyed but elegantly composed, Divine didn’t skip a beat, emerging “like a dripping wet mermaid in sequins!” as one attendee recalled on Facebook.

But Also, Lesbians

As is often the case, Ptown’s LGBTQ+ history often focuses on gay men–but women have been building community there for just as long. In the 1970s, several women opened guesthouses catering to lesbians, among them Elizabeth Gabriel Brooke, owner of Gabriel’s. Brooke founded The Women Innkeepers of Provincetown to help grow and support this growing community. 

In 1984, the association was looking for ways to encourage visitors during Provincetown’s slow off-season. They sent hand-written letters to past guests inviting them to an October clam-bake, complete with local entertainment. The inaugural event–pictured here, with Brooke in the front row wearing white lace-up sneakers–ultimately became Women’s Week, a lesbian gathering held in Provincetown every summer, now one of the longest-running lesbian events in the world (you can learn more in Andrea Meyerson’s 2015 documentary Clambake).

The Grand Trans Party Arrives

In the 1970s, as the liberation movements for women and gay people were flourishing across the world, the trans community was finding its voice, too. In 1975, members of the Cherrystones, a Boston-based trans support group, held the first Fantasia Fair in Provincetown. Organized largely by Betty Ann Lind and Ari J. Kane, a pioneering gender-queer activist and educator, Fantasia Fair was founded as a safe space for “crossdressers and transsexuals”–the nomenclature of the era–to gather and explore their identities. 

The event, held in October, quickly grew in popularity, drawing attendees from across the globe as well as high-profile transgender guests like activist Virginia Prince and scholar Susan Stryker. In 1980, Fantasia Fair was even covered by Playboy Magazine. This photo from the mid-1980s was taken at the Follies! show, a staple of the week’s festivities, by Mariette Pathy Allen, a photographer renowned for her work depicting transgender communities.

Over the years, Fantasia Fair shifted to become more inclusive of trans men and non-binary people, officially changing its name in 2022 to Trans Week. The event, still held every October, is now one of Provincetown’s most beloved celebrations.

Ho, Spiritus!

Spiritus Pizza, opened in 1971 by John “Jingles” Yingling, is about as iconic as a pizzeria and ice-cream joint could possibly be. The family-owned shop built its name on cheap slices available until 2 a.m.–an hour after the bars closed–ensuring a crush of patrons every night in the high season, as well as faithful regulars and tourists who still stream in day and night for pizza and cones.

Spiritus was twice the site of large-scale protests that highlighted tensions between Provincetown’s gay scene and the local police force. In 1986, aggressive crowd-control measures to try to clear the street outside the pizzeria led to three days of protests and nine arrests. In 1990, another protest broke out in front of Spiritus after the beloved local drag-queen Vanilla was arrested for disturbing the peace: She had just won the “Golden Plunger Award”–an annual honor bestowed on the queen who fell off the stage the most–and was celebrating by plunger-ing her trophy on cars as they passed. After she was arrested, a crowd quickly surrounded the squad car, demanding “Free Vanilla!” as she attempted to escape. The altercations–collectively known as the Spiritus Riots–revealed a seam of distrust between Provincetown’s queer community and some other long-term residents, exacerbated by the desperation and fear the AIDS crisis was stoking around the country. After Vanilla’s arrest, the town’s police department agreed to implement reforms, including hiring LGBTQ+ officers.

Through it all, Spiritus thrived. New York-based photographer Lola Flash worked there for a decade: “Jingles and all are like my family,” they say. Once, on a whim, Flash affixed a milkshake cup to their head “like a barette,” and it became something of a signature look. 

Flash’s art is intimately connected to Provincetown, where they produced work like the Gay to Z series (1992) and Band AIDS, 1987, reproduced with their permission below.

Big Drag

A century of queer revelry has turned Provincetown into a world-famous destination for drag performance. The town’s drag bona fides stretch back to at least the ‘60s, when the famed female impersonator Lynne Carter purchased the Pilgrim House hotel, where for years she’d been performing–often as Bette Davis–at the hotel’s Madeira Club. Carter turned the venue into a popular venue for drag performance, helping to solidify Provincetown as a creative LGBTQ+ haven. 

These days, you’d be remiss to visit Provincetown without catching one of the many drag shows that pack venues year-round. If you only have time for one, do yourself a favor and make it Dina Martina’s. 2025 marks her 21st summer performing in town, and she gets weirder and more wonderful with every show. “Just a charming little ashtray of a town,” she says of her beloved “Provence-town”--the two go together like sandy ass at the Dick Dock (another Provincetown bucket-list item…)

Still Here, Still Queer

Many things have changed over the years, but the tip of Cape Cod has remained, for over a hundred years, a vibrant center of queer culture. Gays, lesbians, trans and non-binary people, and all the communities in between have found freedom and connection amongst the dunes and cedar-shake shingles of this sun-kissed little haven.  

Located in sapphire-blue Massachusetts, Provincetown may be sheltered from the worst aggressions of the Trump Administration’s Christian Nationalist agenda, but it is plagued by other, more local problems: sky-high real estate prices have jacked the costs not just to buy property here, but to rent or even visit, making it more difficult for lower-income queer people to come to Provincetown, especially young queers and queers of color. The town is actively trying to make Provincetown more accessible: check out our “how to get there” sidebar for more information on budget-friendly travel. 

As the world has become more queer-friendly, LGBTQ+ have carved out summer vacation destinations in pockets all over the place. But Provincetown still offers something special, a flavor of sun-soaked, artistic, quirky community that tastes utterly unique. “The Wild West of the East,” Norman Mailer once called it. It’s worth a trip to come see why.

To read more and see our recommendations for go-to spots in Provincetown, order a copy of WUSSY Vol. 14 !

This interview was originally published in July 2025 for WUSSY Vol. 14 — order a copy!

Over the course of seven albums, Mike Hadreas has used his mordant humor, painterly lyricism, and radical vulnerability to make baroque art rock that wrestles (in the classic, homoerotic sense) with the opposing gravitational pulls of the public and private spheres. Since emerging as Perfume Genius in 2008, Hadreas, alongside his band and life partner, the classically-trained multiinstrumentalist Alan Wyffels, has crafted a body of work defined by prismatic psychodramas and devastating confessionals, frequently delivered with a wry smile, in an attempt to map the vertiginous heights and fathomless depths of his own queer interiority. In spite of this gaze within, Hadreas is often thrillingly preoccupied with his simultaneous fear of (and perverse fascination with) the dysfunctional mechanics of the outside world. His songs lament the inherent risks of exposure, the fragility of the male ego, and the all-too-familiar tragicomedy of never quite feeling ready to greet the day–an impulse only bolstered by the acute cabin fever and amplified agoraphobia he experienced during the COVID-19 lockdown, when much of his latest album, Glory, was written.

Produced by Blake Mills, and sporting earthy, full-bodied arrangements of what I refer to as “uncanny prairie” roots music, Glory contends with aging, settling down, the difficulty of maintaining relationships, and the sundry quiet terrors of domesticity. The prolific visuals created around the album by Cody Critcheloe–AKA multidisciplinary artist SSION–envision a liminal homefront in a nameless small town, where Hadreas inhabits elaborate tableaux of suburban rot that pay homage to photographers such as Gregory Crewdson, but are further complicated by renegade kitchen appliances, cursed tchotchkes, and the unspeakable ravages of cottagecore. 

In SSION and Hadreas’s reimagining of Disturbia, the looming threat of home invasion is just one of many perils our protagonist must navigate, including but not limited to: carbon monoxide leaks, splintered floorboards, or an elevated sensitivity to household chemicals, hearkening back to the antiseptic paranoia of Todd Hayne’s Safe (1995). Throughout Glory, Hadreas coaxes sonic poetry from deeply relatable quotidian anxieties, reminding us to always check behind the proverbial shower curtain, especially when the calls are coming from inside the house. 

A couple weeks before Glory was released in late March 2025, I sat down with Hadreas to talk bad omens, faded glory, and the trouble with getting out of bed. 

Perfume Genius: Oh, I think I'm late. Sorry. 

Kerosene Jones: No, it's okay. We were just telling your publicist that we operate on a system of "Gay Delay" at WUSSY. So all is well. How are you? 

PG: I'm good. I woke up. I overslept. I’ve been jet lagged for a week and a half, and so I was waking very, very early, but now I'm slowly reverting back to my normal bad schedule. 

KJ: I'm a nocturnal entity, and I just started a new job that requires me to sometimes commute at six in the morning, so I relate deeply to this. 

PG: Intellectually you could want to do that. But then your body is like “Let's have a couple nightmares tonight,” and then you start sweating really hard and sleep through your alarm. So that's something I did last night. 

KJ: Now I'm thinking of “No Front Teeth” and the motif of teeth falling out in nightmares, and I'm wondering if that's something that ever happens for you?

PG: I'm sure I've had one of those. But my nightmare last night was not very existential. I had a dream that I was in the bed that I was in, on the side that I was in, and a huge dog came into the room and was right in my face, growling at me all sinister. And I woke up, and made a noise, like a sleep noise in real life (imitates jolting awake). The second nightmare was the same. It was a man watching me, a sinister man. I don't remember the setup of that one either. I just remember that it was a man, which makes sense. 

“I feel like this album is a lot more of just sharing how these fears are, instead of imagining the solution to them, or fucking them up and making them so faggy and crazy that it becomes a new version of the fear.”

KJ: That also speaks to the lyrics of this new album, and the imagery surrounding it, in a pretty tangible way. One of my first questions for you is: I feel like your work is often exploring or straddling this line between public and private spheres and inner and outer spaces, and that feels very present in the new album and the visuals accompanying it. I was wondering if you could talk about that?

PG: I think I've always used the music as a framework to think about things that I've been avoiding. Trying to make a space where I could have feelings that were confusing or I hadn't figured out. Even old feelings, like going through old memories and trying to reframe them or soothe some version of myself, in an attempt to have that be helpful or interesting to other people. The more personal it is, weirdly, the more it reaches people. 

But I kind of only do that for the music, and I think it’s become really clear to me the older I get, is that I'm reserving all of the willingness to do that for writing and performing. I shake off all of my self-consciousness…well, not all of it, but more than usual, and I'm charging people money to watch me sing, and I feel okay with that, for some reason. 

But I don't have that same brazen feeling in my everyday life, and I'm unwilling to do a lot of the counterintuitive things that would make you feel better, like exercising when you're sad, or putting yourself out there socially when you're feeling anxious, because that's the only way things will change, is if you do something different. I'm like “Well, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to stay at home, I'm not going to exercise.” And my phone is dead, and it stays dead for like, three days and...that's not really working anymore, honestly. It worked for a long time and it felt like my job, that after a tour, I went home and I isolated and I would just go into a spiral in my head to try to find out what's the new thing that I'm going to make a record about, but then there was the lockdown, and there was a lot of time in between the records, between the writing portion of it and touring. So I didn't have that outlet. And I realized I can't live with that sort of dynamic anymore.

KJ: It feels like there's a lot of focus on ideas of the domestic, or reframing the domestic, from what I've seen in your collaborations with Cody for this record, and in the lyrical content. There’s a reflection on the different stages of your life and how it relates to notions of privacy, but with the domestic as an overarching framework. 

PG: Well, I think a lot of the personal things that I was obsessing over were not personal. They're kind of universal, like dying–like, I'm not the only one that it's gonna happen to, and Alan and my Mom, they're going to die, but so is everybody else. And I think I feel that now more than I used to, the older I get, and everything feels-

(A dog hops into view)

Here's my dog. Isn't she cute?

KJ: What's her name? 

PG: Petunia.

KJ: Hey, Petunia.

PG: But these things are really scary to me, in a way that I've been attempting to beat for a long time. I'm trying to fix it. You know what I mean? I feel like this album is a lot more of just sharing how these fears are, instead of imagining the solution to them, or fucking them up and making them so faggy and crazy that it becomes a new version of the fear.

KJ: I think I feel the same with getting older, contending honestly with my relationship to my family, or attempting to tend to my gardens socially and romantically. Especially in “No Front Teeth,” in the lyrics and the accompanying imagery, it feels almost like a renegotiation of the traditional family, and I'm not sure if the idea of polyamory is being thrown into the mix, or other nontraditional relationalities that constitute a queer family. I was wondering if you could speak on that gesture?

PG: Yeah, and the process felt like that. We all stayed in an Airbnb, everyone that worked on that video. There's like 16 people in there, and a lot of us are older and not doing tons of Adderall anymore, so we're all just hanging out.

And the reason I worked with Cody, beyond him just being brilliant and me fully trusting his taste and his ability, is that he has a curiosity and a lack of bitterness. Both of us get really excited by things, and we laugh really hard at things, and I want to be around people like Cody more in my life, and I want the work I do to feel like that, and my life to feel like that. I want it to be more full of joy. I think what's lucky about not having a map for the second half of my life is that you get to make your own map up. But to do that you have to really pay attention, and you have to notice where the goodness is and move towards it, because you don't really have a rubric. You have to make your own rubric, and in order to make your own you have to actually write it down and organize it and be very intentional about it. And I think that's been hard for me. I kind of just power through and don't think about anything, and don't really move with intention, as far as organizing my life. Which is fine. I don't know if that answered the question at all.

KJ: Yeah, I think it speaks to this kind of friction between how much we are able to curate our own experiences, or create these inner and outer worlds, and the difficulty in figuring out how much they can intersect. It also brings me to the title of the album. “Glory” is such a multifaceted concept, and for me, it has a particular kind of American connotation, as well as finding glory in the mundane or the quotidian or the banal. I’m wondering if that was on your mind? Also your work, this album in particular...I have a certain imagination of what the Pacific Northwest is like. I've never been. But my imagination of the Pacific Northwest lines up with how this album sounds. 

PG: That's interesting. I mean, I lived there for most of my life, and it still feels like a serial killer country, like Twin Peaks-y, spooky. It just feels like permanent dusk there. 

But I was born in the Midwest, and if there is a place, especially in all the visuals for Glory, that feels resonant to me, it's weirdly the Midwest. And we did shoot all the art and the videos in Kansas City. But I also wanted it not to signify anything. We wanted a house that had an energy and a charisma to it, but didn't want to signify a time period or a class level or a clear specific place in the world.

KJ: So folks can attach their own meaning to it?

PG: Yes, but also because that feels really satisfying to me when it's sort of off and on at the same time. Same with the styling. I wanted it to be over the top and absurd, but also deeply felt and earnest. And my hair, it's fake now, but I was born with red hair, and my mom has red hair, and I like how it's artificial, but then I also have a real connection to it, too. Holding both truths feels very satisfying to me right now, but it also, at the same time, feels like pure chaos. I can reckon with death or whatever, but it still fucking sucks, and it could happen at any moment. I can try to go and be more engaged. 

The other day, I was on the couch, and I was playing video games, and I was feeling very cozy, and everything seemed really good. And then we had an earthquake, and I thought "I'm gonna die. We're dying." I grabbed my dog. I was like, "Well, here we go." So it's just like, how do you do your life? When it's hard to hold all those things at the same time, but it's also a relief to just say that you can't.

KJ: Or conversely, you're sharing that load or that weight with other people who know how to carry it for you in different ways.

PG: I want to do that, but that's very hard. It requires you to be very vulnerable and share with them what you need help with to be carried, and that's very embarrassing to me for some reason. But I feel like that with Cody and with Alan and with my producer Blake and my band. They all really know me and I really know them, and sometimes you have to explicitly say what those things are, but when you know someone, you just kind of know what they need too. It's weird that you can be with somebody for 16 years and still have things that you're scared to share with them, or that feel extra tender. You'd think you would run out, but you don't.

KJ: It's also a matter of getting so close to someone that you start to develop blind spots, or you're so used to how you are perceived in their eyes that things fly under the radar or get buried.

PG: It can make you not have a new experience of yourself or a new experience of them anymore, because you're just sort of living the story you have in your head about yourself and about them, you know?

KJ: I read that a lot of this album was originally conceptualized during the COVID lockdown. Is that true?

PG: I mean, COVID for me lasted a lot longer than it did for other people. I was very bowled over by it. I did not deal with it very well. It was a dark time for me and I still don't know if I'm on the other side of it, or if other people are feeling the same way, and are just better at hiding it. I have met some people that loved it, and it seems like that they're really telling the truth.

KJ: What were you listening to during that time, and what sonically informed this new record?

PG: I was listening to a lot of Arthur Russell, especially the kind of folkier, country leaning...I mean, it's not fully country, but I love that there's an outsider quality to him. There's an unhinged, exploratory, completely unbitter way about his writing, but it also feels very connected. It's not out in the clouds. There's some real sweetness and grace. There's a humility to all of it. And Townes Van Zandt too. Townes has a way of writing that is very resigned and plain spoken about huge things.

KJ: I would venture to say they're both very lonesome writers too. Their sense of solitude is palpable in a lot of their work, respectively.

PG: Yeah. I don't know why that made me sad. I didn't really think about it like that, and honestly that's how I had been feeling for a while, and a lot of that is, I'm sure, my own doing. Somebody else would be able to tell me better why I feel so lonely when there's a lot of opportunity not to be.

KJ: I think sometimes for me that makes it worse, when you're surrounded by people, especially living in a city, it's one of the most isolating places, because things can be so transactional or ephemeral. It's harder to hone in on tangible connections.

PG: Also what happens is I'm very bad at responding to emails because, well, I need to have lunch. I need to feel very confident and feel like a good version of myself before I respond. But I never feel like that. So I just never respond. My life has felt more like that lately. I'm like "I'll go out and re-engage with the world after I figure all this stuff out, after I come full circle and process these feelings so that I can really show up for the world." And then I just never really feel like that. Then you get into this real guilt and shame spiral, but who cares?  Me talking to myself is, "I understand this is hard for you, but like, girl, get it together."

KJ: I'm someone who has spent hours late at night ruminating on how I shook someone's hand wrong. So I get you on the fear of showing up for the world. One of the most fun parts of the “It’s a Mirror” music video is you getting momentarily terrorized by a bunch of motorcycle dykes. I see a lot of Gregg Araki's influence in Cody's work in general, but I'm wondering if that's a particular like entry point for you?

PG: Big time. All of the original references that I sent to Cody were film. I sent Cody the scene in The Piano Teacher (2001), when Isabelle Huppert smells the cumrag in the porn theater, where one time you'll watch that, and you'll be disturbed, and then one time you'll watch it and you'll laugh. It is so over the top. And I love when things exist in both of those modes. Especially the “No Front Teeth” video, I love how it's absurd. I guess it's campy, but me and Cody talk about campiness a lot, we know that’s part of it, but I don't think we think of it that way. We think it's really beautiful.

KJ: There's this duality that makes things more illegible, or harder to emotionally comprehend, that really enriches the experience. When Isabelle is smelling the cumrags, you could respond to that from a very erotic positionality, or see its inherent camp appeal, or be completely disturbed. Or all three. 

PG: That's very satisfying to me. It feels like an exorcism, because it feels like the inside being reflected outside, with all of its ingredients. There's this scene in a movie called Humanité (1999), where this guy, I think he's the chief of police, but his friend has just confessed to killing a young girl, and he's weeping and hysterical. The police chief is interrogating him, and the guy confesses, sobbing, and the police chief starts to kind of comfort him, and then they start to make out. And when I first saw that, it was just so full of competing information and feeling that I laughed, but I cried. There's something very satisfying about it. 

 “I'm very bad at responding to emails because, well, I need to have lunch.”

KJ: I think what makes it so effective is that their inner life isn't legible, or the reasons behind that choice are completely obscured. And that's what makes it so rich, in regards to inner and outer worlds. The deliberate lack of translation.

My favorite sequence of tracks on the album is the one-two punch of “Full On” followed by “Capezio.” It's really beautiful. And I love those ornate fluttering flutes combined with what I read as a football narrative that is happening in “Full On.” Thinking again about the idea of glory in the mundane, in that song in particular.

PG: You know when a very traditionally masculine man gets a cold? And he is just like, on the ground, and he can't do it, he can't function.

KJ: He's all tuckered out.

PG: And he literally just has a cold, but he's hysterical. And there's part of me intellectually that finds that repulsive, that he's unable to do any kind of internal work or reflection to go through the world despite his cold. But then there's part of me that feels very empowered by it, like, "Let me help you. I can take care of you. I know how to do it." Also, there's a kind of masculinity that I'm attracted to that I don't really understand, because I don't get anything from it. It's not a meeting in the middle. It's not a collaboration. It's more just me witnessing it and comforting it or getting off on validation from it. It's more archetypal. I'm not really looking at them as their own full person. I'm dealing with the archetype, which is a partial reflection of their truth, but I'm also dramatizing it. I'm making a film, a movie scene out of this interaction. 

Like my song "Jason." Jason and Capezio, they're different people, and they're both real people, but they represent that dynamic to me. And they're both people that were in and out of my life, very withheld, and literally didn't talk and were steely, but then would sometimes portion out vulnerability. This sort of back and forth of power, or sweetness, but it was never really collaborative. It wasn't like meeting in the middle and talking and processing things, which is fun. I mean, that can be really fun and it can be therapeutic in a way, but also I'm old now, and I'm sick of wondering why I like things, or why I do things–like, “Just do it. Who cares?”

I think that's why I was so obsessed when I was younger with fetish videos, because I loved how pure they are. People know exactly what they want and that feels so beautiful and liberating to me. And I don't really feel like that. I have a lot of shame, I guess. the things I want have shifted and changed, and the way that I think about my sexuality, my gender, all this stuff, it weirdly has become more expansive. It just feels fun to dramatize it and to turn it into the movie scene that I always dreamt that it was. 

—-

Interview by: Kerosene Jones (@kerosenejones_)
Photography by: Cody Critcheloe (@ssion_official)

The OFFICIAL Robyn party is coming to Atlanta this weekend!

On May 16th, Brooklyn party powerhouse ADVENTURE[s] bring their iconic dance party to Lore! This Party is Killing You celebrates everyone’s favorite Swedish pop diva, Robyn, with a night of classics, deep cuts, and remixes you’ve never heard before. The party kicks off at 11pm at the cutest new hotspot in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward. Trust us, you won’t be dancing on your own.

Grab your tickets early at http://bit.ly/robynpartyATL and check out our interview below!

Q: What’s This Party Is Killing You!: The Robyn Party All About?

ADVENTURE[s]: This Party Is Killing You!: The Robyn Party is the original, longest-lasting, and biggest night celebrating the music of the Swedish goddess of pop, Robyn. It started out as just us wanting to hear her music LOUD in a club setting and dance to it, and it grew into something that really has seemed to connect emotionally with people all over the globe. When we started this party there were no “theme” parties for things like this, even though they’re everywhere now, so we had this weird/unprecedented concept dj night/dance party/club thing that spread by word of mouth and has grown into what it is now. It’s really about the transcendent and euphoric power of pop music on the dance floor, and no one does cry-dancing better than Robyn.

It’s also about community and self-expression. Everyone who comes comes as themselves, heart on sleeve, and if you want to dress a certain way that’s fantastic, if you want to come right off of work and just lose yourself that’s also spectacular.

Q: Tell us about the time Robyn was there!

ADVENTURE[s]: That was a really incredible time. You can watch it all unfold in the video she put out for “Missing U”, which launched the Honey era.

Basically she came and gave everyone, us included, the night of our lives, and debuted the song “Honey” (in full!). It was really special, she’s truly incredible and brilliant and giving and so, so kind and SO COOL.

Q: What do you love about bringing The Robyn Party to Atlanta?

ADVENTURE[s]: Atlanta crowds are so GOOD. They want to DANCE and they want to SING ALONG. It’s gorgeous! Two of us grew up/lived here for a long time, and it’s always immediately welcoming. Also, we’re huge fans of Nonsense ATL and have been collaborating for the longest time - literally cannot remember when or how, it’s been that long. And that’s always a really fun time.

Q: What’s different about this year’s version of the party?

ADVENTURE[s]: This year we have a special focus on Robyn Is Here, the very first Robyn album, because it’s celebrating 30 years this year. 30 years! She has a line on Charli XCX’s 360 remix that has been doing music for so long, and since she was so young, that she didn’t have email, and that’s a wild thing to think about. Robyn Is Here is nothing but back to back bangers, some slow burners and some more immediate, and we’re enjoying taking this opportunity to play more of that album out.

Also: dancing is a protest right now. Expressions of sexuality or love or joy are protest actions right now. In times like this we find it really important to get out of the bubble we exist in in New York and show the queer and non-conforming communities that they’re NOT alone and give a little bit of respite and togetherness, as best we can.

Q: What’s One Robyn track you hope ATL requests?

ADVENTURE[s]: Please request “Monument” multiple times, because it’s Russ’s favorite song and there’s a couple of different remixes we’re in LOVE with right now and we’d like to play all of them .

Four lesser-known Robyn remixes you need in your life right now, curated by ADVENTURE[s]:

The way people bristle at the Oscars and so-called ‘Academy politics’ are not without merit. The history of the Oscars does not, and should not, tell the whole story of American film history, let alone world film history. The Oscars are less a national referendum on the state of the film industry and closer to the electoral structure of the Iowa Caucuses, in terms of quirks and selections made by a small, privileged group of voters. Rarely an objectively great film wins. The Best Picture winner is more tied to recency bias of ‘the last good movie’ the members of the voting committee have seen due to media blitzes and publicity campaigns by the competing film studios. When considering what gets platformed as “Oscar-worthy,” one must keep in mind that much of the struggle is for films to simply get their foot in the door and be noticed. This is especially the case with trans narratives. 

Trans rights in the United States are in the midst of being targeted by the second Trump administration’s rapid succession of executive orders, a barrage of reversals and denials that are celebrated by the American right-wing. Such dark times make the significance of recent trans narratives like The People’s Joker and I Saw the TV Glow feel all the more of a respite. Then there is the “cause célèbre” of Jacques Audiard’s musical crime melodrama Emilia Perez. In addition to the film netting the most Oscar nominations this year (13), its lead Karla Sofía Gascón became the first trans actress nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role. But compared to more digestible liberal pablum like the Oscar-winning Chilean film A Fantastic Woman (2017), which was nonetheless an effective showcase for the talents of trans actress Daniela Vega, who plays a trans woman rocked by the death of her male lover, Emilia Perez has gotten polarized responses from the trans community. This is largely due to the perception around the film as a playground of trans stereotypes, with the eponymous Emilia living a double-life and trying to outrun her violent, murderous past as a Mexican drug lord after medically transitioning. Then came the numerous revelations of racism, ableism, and islamophobia from Gascón’s past social media posts, that have quite possibly jeopardized the film’s Best Picture prospects. The fallout surrounding Gascón’s social media could also function like a meta-critique on Emilia Perez; a film that awkwardly and unconvincingly tries to humanize its trans protagonist—treated with utmost valor in her efforts to make amends for her crimes—that ultimately gets unmasked as vacuous pandering by Gascón’s real life ‘trans villain reveal.’ It underscored just how cynical and insincere the whole endeavor has come across to the trans community…but Emilia Perez may still win Oscars. The relationship between the trans community and the Oscars has long been a cumbersome one. However, there are significant figures and films tied to the trans film image and trans cinematic cultural production that have their own place in Oscars history. 

Often at the margins of popular culture and society at-large, trans film images were most visibly utilized by Hollywood to present a ‘challenging’ acting role. Transness on-screen has consistently been over-represented by cis male actors in dresses and wigs and cis female actresses wearing chest binders and butch haircuts. Such performances get Oscar nominated, and even win, but Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn was the first trans actress to campaign to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as a cis woman in Paul Morrissey’s Trash (1970). Her grassroots Oscar campaign, which included collectible pins and promotional photoshoots, got the attention of Oscar winners like My Fair Lady director George Cukor. But alas, she did not secure the nomination. Still, the 1970s were a time where films with trans subject matter were getting attention from the Academy. While Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and its “ripped from the headlines” tale of a bank robber seeking to fund his lover’s sex change operation was seen as a hallmark of 1970s cinema, it was predated by the Spanish film Mi Querida Senorita (1972), which was nominated for Best Foreign Language film. Mi Querida Senorita is about a provincial spinster who transitions into a man and seeks romance with his former maid (played by Pedro Almodóvar regular Julieta Serrano). The film, despite being a precursor to the work of Almodóvar, has been strangely lost to time. 

In the last decade, non-binary and trans performers like Mica Levi and Anohni have been nominated for Original Score and Original Song, but Angela Morley, also known for her collaborations with avant-garde pop musician and composer Scott Walker, was the first known trans individual nominated for her contributions on the scores for The Little Prince (1974) and The Slipper and The Rose: The Story of Cinderella (1976). Morley continued to work in film and television as a conductor and composer, netting three Emmy Awards. Morley and the great electronic musician Wendy Carlos have been hailed for their ‘below the line’ contributions to music in film, illustrating that trans labor in film production extends beyond what is in front of the camera. As for the question of direct representation, trans people have often turned to documentary films over scripted narratives to present their lives more authentically. But historically, and somewhat surprisingly, the Documentary Feature category severely lacks trans representation. 

Despite the fact that Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990) is canonized as one of the great documentaries, it was not nominated. Also not nominated was Kate Davis’s award-winning Southern Comfort (2001), about cancer-ridden trans man Robert Eads. This makes Yance Ford’s Oscar nominated Strong Island (2017), which was the first time a trans person was nominated in the Documentary Feature category, all the more powerful to consider. Strong Island is Ford’s meditation on the injustice of his brother’s murder, and his approach to confronting the systemic racism of where he grew up, featuring striking close-ups of his face and direct addresses to the viewer. In times where state and reactionary violence are fueled by not only the contemporary American administration, but oppressive far-right initiatives across the globe, speaking out on injustice in this confrontational manner might be how trans non-fiction will unfold in these upcoming years. 

Even before the Gascón controversy, I believed that Emilia Perez could not have been released at a worse time, airing on Netflix after a Presidential election that saw unprecedented and highly coordinated attacks against trans people in national ad campaigns. Now, amid the immediate impacts of Project 2025 and anti-trans executive orders, the film feels even more radioactive. Yet, I find myself less invested in whether or not it wins anything. It would make sense for the same organization that honored Green Book (2018) and Crash (2004) to also reward Emilia Perez. Still, it says something that—even by accident—trans film images, subject matter, and labor were recognized by this complicated institution dating back to the 1970s. Trans people have always been part of the story of film, in both narrative and production. Whether or not the Academy recognizes those contributions, trans cinematic cultural production will continue, much like trans life continues despite and against this rising current of fascist transphobia. 

Caden Mark Gardner is a film critic from Upstate New York whose work has appeared on Film Comment, the Criterion Collection, MUBI and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the co-author of Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema.

Montré and Eden have combined forces once again with special guest Electra to host a hauntingly good Halloween-edition of everyone’s favorite club kid party, Mannequin. The Basement in East Atlanta Village was decked out in ghoulish decor, from big flying ghosts to massive red spider webs, while iconic DJs Fairy Dust and Jagu4r played the wickedest sets you could possibly imagine.

Nothing goes better together than Halloween and club kids. The looks of the night were absolutely insane! We had Rush fairies, a mime who faithfully stayed commuted to the bit, a screeching red harpy complete with a 6-foot wing span and Sexy Patricks (yes, plural). Winner of season 8 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Bob the Drag Queen, was also spotted in the crowd as well!

Check out the cute pics of the event below, captured by Lyte Imaginari!

This interview was originally published for WUSSY Vol. 13 — order a copy!

Interview with Fever Ray (@feverray) by Kerosene Jones (@kerosenejones_)
Creative Direction by Martin Falck (@neuemartin)
Photography by Nina Andersson (@ninaanderssonvoigt)

The phrase “Fever Ray” seems to suggest an epiphany that occurs at the height of sickness: a shaft of light shot across a soiled hospital bed that inspires a febrile revelation, a moment of lucidity in the midst of a sweat-drenched delirium. For Karin Dreijer—who rose to international acclaim as one half of the Swedish anarcho-electro pop band The Knife alongside their brother Olof, before releasing three celebrated solo albums as Fever Ray—the malleability of both bodies and identities, especially when subjected to extreme states of pleasure, duress, and modification, has long been a primary point of interest in their work. In 2010, Dreijer accepted an award on Swedish television in a red ceremonial veil, which they raised to reveal an alien visage slathered in special FX makeup that resembled multiple layers of melted, gooey skin tags. Dreijer proceeded to gutturally croak into the microphone for a few seconds before exiting the stage. More recently, in the music video for “Shiver,” off Fever Ray’s latest album Radical Romantics (2023), Dreijer, in a tattered and ghostly businessman persona known as “Main,” is subjected to a series of grotesque surgical experiments in a defunct medical facility by a muscle-bound nurse-cum-dominatrix played by Swedish professional bodybuilder Irene Andersen. “Shiver,” like much of Dreijer’s music, celebrates the liberatory potential of kink, of erotic subcultures and alternative frameworks of intimacy that exist outside of mainstream heteronormative society: music equally suited for group piss play, relationship anarchy, and renegade body hacking.

Dreijer is known to treat voice as prosthesis, deploying a variety of singing techniques and electronic processing effects to create what could be referred to as  multiple sonic drag personas, encompassing spectral ingenues, doomed pirate kings, malfunctioning sex cyborgs, murderous matriarchs, and militant gender outlaws. The “Mona Lisa” character in their video for “Even It Out,” a song from Radical Romantics about a parent’s violent retribution against the bully of their child, is a hyperbolic psychotic femme directly inspired by John Waters. Much of Fever Ray’s output toys with the otherworldly terrain that may exist between these archetypes, conjuring imagery of obscure tentacle porn, ectoplasm as lube, or of wandering down the wrong tunnel at Berghain only to be inseminated with bioluminescent eggs by some extraterrestrial dungeon master. This impulse towards the fabular is often grounded in tangible political ideology and action, as The Knife has been outspoken about anti-trans legislation across their oeuvre, and has publically supported the cultural boycott of Israel since 2017. 

I first saw Fever Ray live at the Sonar music festival in Barcelona in the summer of 2023, where I promptly found another fan to make out with. Dreijer’s choreography, gray businessman attire, and white painted face reminded me of what it might look like if a Butoh dance ensemble staged a production of the cult comedy Weekend At Bernies (1989) about two hapless employees attempting to manipulate the corpse of their boss into appearing alive for a holiday weekend. The minimal set design evoked a fog-laden harbor in the afterlife, where lost souls wander around looking for rough trade and illicit encounters. Speaking from their studio space in Stockholm, which is custom built in a warehouse space and shared with their brother Olof, I spoke with Dreijer about cruising culture, body horror, Swedish political theater, and whether or not they believe in ghosts.

KEROSENE JONES: I was curious to talk to you about how the world of your latest album Radical Romantics has extended into the tour, and if you've discovered anything new about the album through performing it live?

KARIN DREIJER: It is strange when you make the album. Some of the songs I've only sung a few times. Then when you start the rehearsals, and you start touring with the new tracks, it's then you really get to know them and you definitely notice which songs connect well with the audience or are easier than others to perform. I remember Sonar. There was quite a bit of chaotic atmosphere in the audience. I would say it is typically like that at festivals. It's a very big difference to being in a venue where it's more focused. With festivals you really have to work with big gestures and maybe more uptempo.

JONES: The stage design and the choreography reminded me of cruising grounds, but in some sort of haunted shipyard: Sniffies for undead sailors. Is cruising something that comes up for you when you're thinking about stage direction?

DREIJER: Yeah, I mean, I work very close to my friend Martin Falck, and we started to talk about the visuals for the album a year before it was released. I think the lamppost appeared in the many different settings that we talked about. I can't remember the name of the director of these films, but I can send it afterwards. It's rooms where there is definitely a cruising scene and the colors are very pink. Oh, it's Pink Narcissus (1971). That was a very clear reference for us. But we also talked about having people on stage coming out of a back alley, or like an after-work situation, and just stumbling into each other. We only have one prop on stage, which is the lamppost. I think for me, it was important to have a guiding light on stage. Like a lighthouse like out at sea that was lit all the time, something safe to navigate towards. But I also read the The Chronicles of Narnia series thoroughly as a kid, where the lamppost is also very prominent. It's a light where the two different worlds meet, and you can enter new worlds towards that light. 

JONES: That makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of your work deals with thresholds between the metaphysical and the body. Do you believe in ghosts? Have you ever had a paranormal experience?

DREIJER: I'm very boring in that sense…I don't. I was brought up atheist, but I'm very interested in different spiritual movements. [Touring band member] Helena Gutarra is very into astrology, so we talk about that a lot while we're on tour. I like to hear about the different suggestions of how to understand something, and I'm very curious about different ideas on seeing things and how they can help one to understand things but, no, I don't believe in anything else than what's here and now.

JONES: What is your sign astrologically?

DREIJER: Aries, that's my sun, and Helena will get mad at me now, but then I'm also Taurus and...(laughs).

JONES: We can let the readers figure it out for themselves.

DREIJER: I'm really bad at this. But I'm very intrigued when I'm being told about the different aspects of it.

JONES: There's multiple personas throughout all of your work but there are very distinct entities manifested in the visual world of Radical Romantics. I wanted to ask how they're all doing currently in this world historical moment, and how they would each be responding to current events?

DREIJER: I think the Mona Lisa, that's what we call her in the “Even It Out” video, she was actually at the Swedish National Radio award ceremony a little while ago, and I think she's probably the most fierce of all of the characters, so we were talking about continuing some stories with her. I think it could be important and interesting in these times because she's very mean, and she has no shame. 

JONES: From what I gathered she is a vengeful spirit.

DREIJER: Yeah, some of the others would probably just walk away and hide somewhere, but she would never do that.

JONES: You've spoken in past interviews about the resurgence of the neofascist movement happening in Sweden currently, which makes me wonder about the queer scene in Stockholm and what that's been like for you both historically and from a contemporary perspective?

DREIJER: Stockholm is a very strange city. First, Sweden is so small. It's only about 11 million people, and then Stockholm is like a 1 million people city. It's very capitalist, and there are no suburbs with cheaper venues. I've talked to a lot of people and we try to do things, but it's difficult because you have to have a lot of money to arrange anything. For the last year and a half I have been away or working, and I know there are great people who arrange queer clubs and bars and I try to go to a lot of them when I'm in town, but  it's quite difficult. I think culture in general has become much more difficult, because we used to have a government that gave a lot of money and support to culture and festivals, but it's quite a big difference now.

JONES: Am I correct in understanding that a lot of play parties or queer sex spaces would be organized privately in Stockholm because of the lack of public resources for them?

DREIJER: The play parties are still very private and within the small communities. It's going on and it's happening, but it's not like going to Berlin. 

JONES: I wanted to ask how your collaboration with Irene Andersen came about for your recent video for "Shiver"?

DREIJER: I have been very fascinated by muscles for a long time. What is this book? I have it here. One second (reaches towards a bookshelf).

This was one of the first art books that I got when I was young. It's Robert Mapplethorpe's photos of [first ever World Women's Bodybuilding Champion] Lisa Lyon. Then I started reading [experimental novelist] Kathy Acker, who was also into weightlifting. I have always been too lazy to create any muscles myself, but maybe one day I will. We'd been talking about how to portray women, me and Martin, and then the Mona Lisa character came out of that. Then when we were going to do the "Shiver" video, Martin said, “We need to do this now because it's our last video for this album.” We searched everywhere, and then there we found this one professional female bodybuilder in Sweden, and that was Irene. She had actually been doing smaller roles in some kids movies and stuff in Sweden before and I think she's amazing. She's a really good actor as well.

JONES: She has a very captivating wink. Are there any legacies of Swedish avant-garde music or cultural production that you identify with?

DREIJER: There's one man called Kjell Hoglund. He was an early synthesizer musician. This was in the ‘80s. There was also Bo Hannson, but I think I was drawn to music that felt queer, that used instrumentations and lyrics and vocals that were something else than the mainstream. But I don't think they would call themselves queer.

I listened to a lot of music that was made for theater, because political theater was a big movement in Sweden in the ‘70s and ‘80s, very left wing theater that also had a lot of music. 

JONES: I recall that you composed music for a stage adaptation of Hour of the Wolf (1968) the horror film by Ingmar Bergman. Would you consider that an extension of your upbringing around political theater?

DREIJER: I don't think so. Bergman was quite established early on working for the Royal Dramatic Theater. Hour of the Wolf is a very strange play. I've been thinking of mixing it in stereo one day to release it, but I haven't had time yet.

JONES: I imagine that the films of David Cronenberg were a big influence on Radical Romantics, especially in terms of surgery as a metaphor for radical vulnerability. If you could grow any new organs this year, what would they be? 

DREIJER: Oh I think I would like to fix things that are a bit broken. I'm getting old. I think repairing would be great so that I could last for another 50 years. That would be fun.

JONES: I also want to ask you about the intersection between chosen family and biological family, because they seem to intertwine for you in a really interesting way, be it through collaborating with your brother or raising a family, and how that relates to your queer family.

DREIJER: First, it's such different cultures. Swedish culture is quite different from American culture in that sense, because most of my friends who have kids, even in heterosexual relationships, they are not married. People don't marry first in Sweden. I have two children. One has moved out and one is still living with me, but every second week, because the other time she's living with her other parents.

I think I have always had friends who also have kids, so we're always trying to take care of all the kids together. The more parents the better, I think, for children. I consider my close friends as family, definitely. I do have blood family, but I have much closer relationships with my chosen family. We travel together, we take care of each other, when we need to be taken care of. I'm very grateful to have landed in this place that I am in now. But it has taken quite some time.

JONES: I'm really fascinated with your singular trajectory through using voice, and I'm wondering how you would characterize your personal relationship to voice, and which vocalists have inspired you the most?

DREIJER: I think I use so many different voices. When I was a kid, I listened to Cyndi Lauper and Kate Bush. That very high-pitched, girly screaming voice is an interesting place to tell stories from, but I also have stories that need to be told from another perspective or from another place in my body. Sometimes I think I have a very dark voice, and then it does not sound like that at all when I open my mouth, and then I have to use all the plugins. 

JONES: So does the voice find itself, or do you typically have a narrative in mind that you need to convey? Do voices pop out and surprise you? Do characters emerge without a narrative in mind?

DREIJER: I can be surprised, yes. I can do things that I haven't thought of. I think it's mostly an emotion or a feeling that I want to tell in the best way, and then I try to find the right vocal to do it.

JONES: Do you feel like there's a distinct connection between queer community and remix culture?

DREIJER: I haven't thought about that. Regarding remixes of this album, its people that I like and admire, and those are often queer artists. That also goes for picking support acts for the tour. I think that's an important responsibility to have but no, I haven't thought about it in that way.

JONES: That segues into my final question which is about the artists' responsibility, especially in the midst of multiple ongoing genocides and transphobic legislation across the globe. How do artists continue to use queer community as a tool for resistance?

DREIJER: That's a huge question. I think you should definitely use your platform and be intentional with the decisions you make, who you choose to work with how you do things. At the same time, you can't be everywhere. It's important to choose your battles, and it's important to focus on what is most important to you. I just got a question from Uroish, who was supporting me on the last tour leg, an Iranian-Swedish artist, who keeps on getting invited to different protest gigs, and she does a lot of them, but she's also super tired. We need to remember to take care of ourselves so that we can continue.

See more in WUSSY vol.13 with Fever Ray on the cover — order a copy!

The peak of Atlanta Pride this year was Mother! Nestled in the gallery of Underground Atlanta, we threw a massive drag show consisting of a cast of Atlanta’s heavy hitters like Drew Friday, Cici Nicole, and Taylor ALXNDR. You could catch multiple iconic group numbers, sickening visuals, and the winner of Little Mx. Wussy 2024, Chucky Deville, had two iconic numbers.

Hosted by Brigitte Bidet and EllaSaurus Rex, the night was a celebration of ATL drag excellence. We even had the gorgeous Ganymede all the way from Asheville, North Carolina. Our very own SHI gave the most powerful moving speech during the halftime break that got the entire crowd riled up to vote this year. To top it all off, we were in the presence of two iconic RuPaul’s Drag Race, Mirage and Katya.

Did you miss out this year? Wanna check out the recap? Below are some our favorite pics captured of the night, courtesy of Kynk.

Every single year, ya gotta make sure you have the perfect Atlanta Pride plans.

We’re doing you a big favor and compiling all the places you can catch WUSSY this weekend. After all, there’s nothing worse than a homo with FOMO. Snap a pic, serve a look, and start to dance with icons from RuPaul’s Drag Race, HBO’s Legendary, and of course, our local ATL favorite drag performers, club kids, Queers and DJs!

THURSDAY, October 10th

MARTA Plaza Party
We’re getting things started at a stop. A MARTA stop! A new Pride bus wrap for MARTA gets unveiled with a family-friendly drag show, ice-cold drinks, and naturally, Wussy will be there with a photobooth designed by Eden from Alt3r. Start your Pride weekend off smarter with MARTA!

FRIDAY, October 11th

Pride Underground with Dashaun Wesley and Aja Miyake-Mugler
This dance party is going to be an absolute ki. I’m sorry like… we have three absolute legends from Legendary coming to ATL to commentate and dance the night away. AND presented by Chaka Khan Hacienda with Deviant Events? That’s iconic. Dashaun Wesley, Aja Miyake-Mugler, and Jeter Gorgeous Gucci are all going to be in attendance. Will you be?

SATURDAY, October 12th

Drag Brunch with Mirage from RuPaul's Drag Race @ City Winery
It’s no surprise that Mirage had so much fun the last time we had her that we had to bring her back! This one is for all my brunch girlies. Refuel your tank with an incredible all-you-can eat brunch at City Winery and wrap it up with a drag show that’s never not anything but spectacular. Meet and greets are available for this one if you want a picture with Mirage herself!

MOTHER! Wussy Pride with Katya & Mirage @ Underground Atlanta
This cast???? This cast!!!!! We’re calling this a massive drag show because that’s exactly what it is. We’ve got group numbers from Alt3r and BBL. We’ve got the winner of Little Mx. Wussy 2024, Chucky DeVille. We’ve got one of Atlanta Pride’s Grand Marshall’s Taylor ALXNDR. If you missed Mirage earlier, you get another chance (you're welcome) to see her tonight! Top that off with Katya Petrovna Zamolodchikova. But let’s just call her…. Katya. There’s a meet and greet for this one too so make sure to get there early!

This interview was originally published for WUSSY Vol. 13 — order a copy!

Robert Plunket is having a renaissance. Last year, his first book, My Search for Warren Harding, was reissued by New Directions for its fortieth anniversary, receiving a wave of new critical acclaim. The New Yorker called him “one of America’s funniest, gayest writers.” This year, New Directions is reissuing his second novel, Love Junkie, which follows an innocent suburban housewife, Mimi, as she becomes enamored with the gay underworld of early ‘80s New York. Published in 1992, Love Junkie looks back on a scene that, by that point, had been devastated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic; Plunket lovingly preserves that lost world in all its outrageous glory. There’s an orgy on Fire Island, a gay-for-pay porn star, a mail-order underwear business, an S&M club, and more (lots more). Still hilarious and shocking, Love Junkie tracks common human foibles persisting even in extreme circumstances.

These days, Plunket lives in a trailer park with his pug Meatball near Sarasota, Florida, where he was a gossip columnist at the local magazine for decades. I spoke with him on the phone ahead of the reissue.

CR: I have to start with a burning question. You mentioned in an interview that you were in Madonna’s bedroom once. What was that like?
RP: At this point, she was living on Central Park West. I can’t remember the exact address. It was an older building. She had a beautiful apartment. The master bedroom, as I recall, was in the back. It didn’t face the park. There was a big bed. Right over the bed was a Picasso. So I was quite impressed with that. It was her brand new Picasso that she had just bought. We had a ball. We talked about men.

CR: Really? I assume you were there because of the book. But what she really wanted to talk about was men.
RP: Well, that’s kind of what we have in common, our experiences with men. I was very curious to see what her taste in men was. We kind of had the same.

CR: Which was…
RP: Bad boys. We both liked bad boys. And we talked a lot about porn stars we liked and ones we didn’t like. 

CR: Do you know how she came across the book? What was the story with her finding it?
RP: We have a mutual friend, a guy named Griffin Dunne. He recommended the book to her and she read it and kind of fell in love with it. She really, really liked it. She identified with the leading character, which is strange, because I didn’t see any similarities. But she said a lot of it reminded her of her own life.

CR: I could talk all day about Madonna, but I don’t want to only talk about Madonna. Love Junkie feels so different from a lot of gay and queer novels today because there’s this really rich and vivid gay world—a very complete underworld—which Mimi falls into. It’s not just a few queer characters figuring things out on their own. How much first-hand experience did you have with that world? Were you going to Fire Island? Were you going to places like the Mineshaft?
RP: I will say that everything in that book happened. I made absolutely nothing up. And most of it happened to me. Now, you never knew that world, because you’re too young, right?

CR: No, but I love reading about it. I read Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance recently. It’s set a little bit before, but it gave me a similar sense of what a world this was, because it had to be a world of its own.
RP: It was an incredible world. It really was. And then it had such an incredibly dramatic ending. Andrew Holleran, how did you discover him?

CR: I’d heard people talking about that book for ages. What do you think of him? Did you ever cross paths with Andrew Holleran?
RP: He’s one of my favorites. In fact, I wrote Love Junkie sort of because of Dancer from the Dance. That’s an incredibly important novel. It was really the first that made [gay novels] respectable, you know. It was so good that actually straight people would read it. I became friends with him. We were pen pals for a while. He’s a wonderful person. I’ve never met him, I’ve just written him a letter, which is weird because we live about a hundred miles from each other in Florida.

CR: Were you reading a lot of other gay or queer writers at the time? Were you connected with them?
RP: Oh, I wanted to be part of that world so badly and they would have nothing to do with me.

CR: Really? Why?
RP: I cannot figure it out. But I knew Ed[mund] White. I don’t think he thought I was a very good writer, to be perfectly honest. Larry Kramer, I knew quite well. He was a nice guy, but Larry Kramer was so totally obsessed with himself that he had no room for other people. He did a lot of good—he was a force for good—but a little egomaniacal.

CR: You’ve said it took seven years to write Love Junkie. From the early eighties to the early nineties, there couldn’t have been a more tumultuous, frightening, tragic time for queer people. This book is so funny and light. Was it hard to keep writing material that was so irreverent? Did you have to wait for something to shift in the culture?
RP: I understand what you’re asking. I think I only saw that there was an absurdity to it. That’s what I do naturally. It’s not like I was trying to do it one way or another way. It’s just the way that I operate.

CR: What were your feelings about how sharp you wanted the satire to be or where it was targeted?
RP: I certainly don’t set out to write satire. It just happens. To a certain degree, I’m surprised people think my books are funny and satiric, because to me they’re just the plain truth. I realize there’s some funny stuff in it. I had to reread it recently to proofread it for the new edition. Even lines that get laughs when you’re reading are things I heard or said. Those were lines I heard and I thought, “Oh, what a funny line,” and jotted them down. All the situations and the lines and the attitudes were true to the period and the people.

CR: When the book first came out, you said in an interview, “My interest in sex is purely intellectual,” which is funny, but also interesting, because you depict sex so frankly. I found it refreshing. Could you say more about what sex means for you, artistically and intellectually?
RP: I’m just astonished at how poorly very good writers write about sex. It’s like they don’t get it. What am I missing that I don’t understand their attitude towards sex? To me, describing sexual behavior is a way of describing character. It’s basically the same thing. The little peculiarities that people have sexually, the things they like and the things they hate about sex, the things they’re compelled to do sexually—that’s so interesting. Most writers, they clam up when they come to sex. I don’t think I do. That comes from a lifetime of having had a very strong sex drive and having to deal with it.

Everybody thinks sex is this wonderful feeling of intimacy between two people. I never saw it that way at all. It’s totally hormone-driven, and it’s incredibly dangerous. This is what people don’t realize. I’ve seen it kill everybody I know. It’s not just getting sick. It gets you in trouble. I mean, how many times have you been arrested for your sexual behavior?

CR: Knock on wood. Never yet. We’ll see.
RP: Wait until you’re my age and then you’ll know. It gets you in trouble. It’s not this gift to humanity. It’s this thing you gotta be revally, really careful about or it will kill you. That’s the way I approach it.

CR: You don’t hear that often.
RP: They have to be very positive about sex and talk about how wonderful it is and how it’s the human connection. My life has not indicated that at all.

CR: When this was published, what was the reception like? Did it freak people out?
RP: The weird thing was that nobody wanted to talk about how I knew all that stuff. I kept thinking, Why doesn’t somebody ask why I know so much about being a hustler? Why do I know so much about the porno business? Nobody ever asked, which led me to believe people were terrified to bring that question up. They were afraid to talk about the book to me. Maybe behind my back they talked about it. People are afraid of sex. It’ll be very interesting to see, now that it’s coming out again, whether there will be that same kind of reaction. The world has become infinitely more sexual, I assume because of the internet.

CR: What’s the status of the Civil War novel?
RP: It’s coming along. It’s actually a lot of fun. I’m reimagining the Civil War from the point of view of parties and entertaining and gay men getting in fights with each other over who didn’t get invited where. Believe it or not, there was a lot of that.

CR: It seems like you’re finding your readers now, or at least a new generation of readers.
RP: I’m absolutely delighted with the way things are turning out, believe me.

Chris Robinson is a writer from North Carolina living in Brooklyn.

Hi Wussy — Let’s have a ball this Fall!

There’s a sickening drag king show you won’t want to miss, two chances to see Trinity the Tuck, and more! Show the Atlanta nightlife scene some love and check out all these incredible events featuring some of the best queer talent you’ve ever seen.

WEd, september 25

• 8PM at Atlanta Eagle - Ruby Redd’s Birdcage Bingo
  What’s more classic than drag bingo? Ruby Redd proudly presents this iconic weekly show featuring incredible performers, great food, and a charity aspect benefiting AID Atlanta.

• 9PM at Mary’s - Maryoke
  Sing the night away with non-stop karaoke performances by… well anyone who signs up! Who knows, maybe the whole bar will sing along with you too!

• 10PM at Felix’s - Wild Out Wednesday
  Nicole Paige Brooks, Mo’Dest Volgare, and Alissah Brooks join together for Atlanta’s wildest, raunchiest drag show!

THUr, september 26

• 7PM at Landmark’s Midtown Art Cinema - Out On Film LGBTQ Film Festival Opening Night
  Kickoff the start of Atlanta’s LGBTQ Film Festival that’s been running for or over 35 years. Two films are being shown this night: “Young Hearts” and “Riley”.

• 10PM at Mary’s - Larry’s: A Drag King Show
  Mystery Meat returns to drag once more to bring you a special curated showcase of some of his favorite drag kings, including Jarvis Hammer from Dragula.

FRI, september 26

• 5PM - 9:15PM at Landmark’s Midtown Art Cinema - Out On Film LGBTQ Film Festival
  Celebrate LGBTQ in Cinema with a wide variety of queer movies to choose from all day long. Enjoy titles such as “Around the World” and “Chuck Chuck Baby”

• 10PM at Mary’s - Larry’s: A Drag King Show
  Mystery Meat returns to drag once more to bring you a special curated showcase of some of his favorite drag kings, including Jarvis Hammer from Dragula.

SAT, September 28

• 11AM at Pontoon Brewing - Deja Brew Drag Brunch
  The first ever Deja Brew drag brunch kicks off this Saturday with host, Demi Valentine! Whether you’re a brunch lover, a drag fan, or just looking for a good time, Deja Brew has got you covered.

• 12PM - 9:15PM at Landmark’s Midtown Art Cinema - Out On Film LGBTQ Film Festival
  Celebrate LGBTQ in Cinema with a wide variety of queer movies to choose from all day long. Enjoy titles such as “Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps” and “Ganymede”

• 9PM at My Sister’s Room - Trinity The Tuck Drag Show
  Werk, Slay, Serve, Repeat! RuPaul's Drag Race All Star winner Trinity the Tuck joins us at My Sister’s Room Atlanta on September 28!
  Don't tuck this up - tickets will be limited!

SUN, SEPtember 29

• 11AM at City Winery Atlanta - Bottoms Up! Drag Brunch with Trinity the Tuck
  WUSSY Mag presents this boozy drag brunch featuring special guest Trinity the Tuck, winner of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars! This monthly Atlanta drag brunch is PERFECT for birthday parties and special occasions.

• 12PM - 8PM at Landmark’s Midtown Art Cinema - Out On Film LGBTQ Film Festival
  Celebrate LGBTQ in Cinema with a wide variety of queer movies to choose from all day long. Enjoy titles such as “Duino” and “Transfabulous”

This interview was originally published for WUSSY Vol. 13 — order a copy!

It’s well past midnight at the Clermont Lounge in Atlanta, and Alan Cumming has managed to be the first among us to land a crumpled dollar bill in a stripper’s underwear. The dancer winks at him as she plucks out the bill and snaps her panties back into place; the rest of the bar cheers—most with no idea who he is--and Cumming sits back on his stool, smiling serenely behind a pair of trim red glasses. 

It feels, as a general rule, that the best shot in the group at the strip club shouldn’t also be one of the most wildly talented performers alive today. But when it comes to Alan Cumming’s singular, almost defiantly original career, the general rules have never really applied. 

Born and raised in Scotland, Cumming shot onto the American scene in 1997 with the instant classic Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, where he played Sandy Frink, the archetypal nerd-who-gets-a-glow-up. After that, Cumming was everywhere, madcapping his way through so many hit films that he more or less shaped the cultural landscape for two generations of American youth. From Spy Kids—where he played a villainous techno-wizard in purple tails named Fegan Floop—to Josie & The Pussycats—unctuous sidekick to Parker Posey’s would-be world dominatrix—and the movie-musical Reefer Madness—President FDR, among other roles, in a chummy mid-Atlantic accent that sounds like he’s about to burst into a fit of giggles at any moment—Cumming was the rare come-from-away performer who could perfectly parrot our bizarre American proclivities back to us. “We didn’t really do things like prom in Scotland,” he told me during the talkback at a sold-out screening of Romy and Michele. “All of that American teenage culture was new to me.” 

But the impish, larger-than-life Cumming who won over American Millennials and Gen Z’ers in the early aughts is only a slice of the kaleidoscopic performer, whose career has flourished consistently over the last forty years. After studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, he launched into television in the UK, later moving into film—notably, as Mr. Elton in Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow in 1996—and live theater, including a touring production of Hamlet, opposite his then-wife Hilary Lyon, who played Ophelia. In 1993, Sam Mendes cast him as the Master of Ceremonies in a new production of the musical Cabaret, which opened in the West End but eventually brought Cumming to the U.S. Over-the-top, queer coded, and triple-threat-level demanding, it was the kind of role Cumming seemed born to play, but rather than pigeon-hole him as a perennially fey character actor, he just kept finding his way to work that challenged and delighted him. 

Since then, he’s played a buttoned-up campaign manager in The Good Wife, written and produced a movie about divorce with his friend Jennifer Jason Leigh, and gallivanted through the musical parody Schmigadoon as a Sweeney Todd-esque butcher. He’s written three memoirs, a children’s book series, and several solo cabaret shows, and owns a live performance venue, Club Cumming, in the East Village. In 2010, he appeared on the ancestry-tracing show Who Do You Think You Are, where he learned that his abusive father, who had doubted his paternity, was in fact Cumming’s biological parent; one überfan told me it was her favorite of all the work he’s done. And if for some wild reason you made it the 2020s without ever hearing about Alan Cumming, you likely know him now thanks to the viral reality game show The Traitors, where he hosts a clutch of conspiratorial contestants plotting each other’s downfall in a Scottish castle, draped in a dazzling array of tartans and kilts. (Cumming won the Emmy for Outstanding Reality Show Host for the series, ending RuPaul's eight-year winning streak; the series also won Emmys for Outstanding Reality Program and Outstanding Reality Program Cast.)

“I’ve always been a sort of maverick in both the parts I’ve played and the eclecticism of the things I’ve done,” Cumming told me over Zoom a few weeks after we met. “Of course, when I was younger, I felt more pressure to be a certain type. But it wasn’t even so much that people were saying be a type--it’s just that they didn’t quite know what to make of me.” He laughed and shrugged. “So I’ve always just done what I wanted.” 

Like others for whom the general rules do not apply, there’s a feeling of undeniability to Alan Cumming, a sense that he was always going to be who he’s proven to be. “He’s just one of those once-in-a-generation x-factor performers,” said Catherine Cohen, a comedian who performs regularly at Club Cumming and has become close with him. “He’s so magnetic, and when people want to be around you like that, it creates a sort of magic.”

You can see that magic in the earliest recordings of him, fresh out of drama school in the 1980s, riffing onstage at Edinburgh Fringe Festival with his friend Forbes Masson in their show Victor and Barry. Barely in his twenties, Cumming is nevertheless instantly recognizable, with that telltale, irreverent bravado, his grin showing off impish dimples and his luxurious hair oiled into a curl over his forehead. As a young actor, he has Hugh Grant’s casual charm and the congenital comedic timing of Eric Idle. That duality unlocked an unusual range of opportunities, which, despite Cumming’s lack of obvious type, unspooled almost immediately. “Looking back on it now, I was a bit of a golden boy,” he said, with a hint of sheepish smile. “It all just sort of happened.” 

It didn’t all start out that way. Cumming has been forthright about his traumatic childhood at the hands of a violently abusive father. The family lived on the grounds of Panmure Estate, a 17th century country home on the east coast of Scotland built for the Second Earl of Panmure, though the grand house itself had been demolished by the time the Cummings lived there; Alex Cumming, Alan’s father, was the head forester for the sprawling woods that surrounded the estate. Cruel to both Alan and his older brother Tom, Alex Cumming held a particular antipathy towards his younger son, who he was convinced was the product of an illicit affair Cumming’s mother Mary had conducted while on holiday.  Whether it was this belief itself or just young Alan’s inherently binary-resistant characteristics, Alex Cumming tormented his son, who lived in terror of the unpredictable attacks. 

“People didn’t quite know what to make of me, so I’ve always just done what I wanted.”

“I could tell by the clack of his boots, I could tell by the way he opened the door,” Cumming told the BBC radio host Lauren Laverne. “Often it would be to do with my appearance or my hair.”

From his earliest years, Cumming’s imagination became his refuge. “I used to just wander around in the woods, creating little stories and characters,” he told me. “My connection to acting was much more about making up stories.” Once he started performing in school plays, he found he had a knack for it: “It was honestly the first thing I was any good at—and I just sort of stuck to it.” 

His double act with Masson, Victor & Barry, which they developed while still in drama school, became a runaway sensation across Scotland, and within a few years they were hosting TV shows and starring in the BBC comedy The High Life. By the time his Cabaret performance on the West End earned him an Olivier Award nomination for best actor in a musical in 1993, Cumming was a well-known performer across the UK. 

Even so, he was stunned when David Mirkin cast him in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. “I still have no idea why they chose me!” he said. “It was my first time playing an American, and I truly knew nothing about America.” During a table read, Cumming recalled chuckling when another cast member mispronounced the Arizona city of Tucson–or so he thought. “I thought it was pronounced ‘tuck-son!’” he laughed. “I was mortified when I realized I had gotten it wrong!” 

Nevertheless, Cumming handily won over American audiences, playing not one but three iterations of Sandy Frink. The reunion dance sequence performed by Cumming, Lisa Kudrow, and Mira Sorvino, set to Cindy Lauper’s “Time After Time,” was nominated for an MTV music video award; the film routinely appears on lists of must-watch cult classics.  

When the WUSSY team invited Cumming to Atlanta for a screening, he requested we select Romy & Michele for the event, which he told us later he hadn’t seen on the big screen since it premiered. He was excited to revisit the film, especially because a sequel is officially in the works: in February, Mira Sorvino confirmed that Robin Schiff, who wrote the original based on her play Ladies Room, will pen a second installment bringing together much of the original cast. “It was such a big hit, and the fact that there hasn’t been a sequel is total Hollywood misogyny,” said Cumming. “A real fear of showing women getting older on screen.” Had it been a buddy comedy about two guys, he added, we’d have already been treated to six sequels. 

Romy and Michele received the pleasant condescension typical of films destined for cult followings—Entertainment Weekly called it an “amiable mess”—and heralded Cumming’s arrival in Hollywood as a versatile, genre-bending actor who could make magic out of nearly anything. Meanwhile, as his film career was unfolding on one coast, he was simultaneously exploding onstage on the other. In 1998, Cabaret moved to Broadway, and Cumming won a string of awards for that performance, including a Tony. American actors rarely manage to slalom between film and theater, but Cumming—who’s a Brit, after all—has always successfully maneuvered back and forth; for every fan who knows him for his film and television work, another is a devoted follower of his early stage plays and one-man cabaret concert tours. “I really do thrive on both mediums, but once you’ve had that visceral contact that you get with an audience [onstage], it’s difficult to stop doing it,” he said. “That connection, to me, is sort of the lifeblood of being an artist.” 

A stage performer at heart, Cumming has always preferred New York to Los Angeles. He met his husband, the artist and illustrator Grant Shaffer, through friends in the city; they now live in the East Village with their dog Lala, who enjoys celebrity status thanks to her stylish appearances on The Traitors. “When Cabaret transferred to Broadway, that’s what really made me fall in love with New York,” Cumming told me. He’s spent plenty of time in LA over the years, but says it feels like a “work town,” where industry talk consumes most of the socializing. “I think LA is what Hershey, Pennsylvania must be like!” he said. “Everybody in Hershey probably talks about chocolate all the time, and in LA it's really the same thing.” 

Cumming became a U.S. citizen in 2008 in order to vote for Obama, though he retains his Scottish passport and spends a good deal of time there, especially lately while filming The Traitors. To him, New York feels like a bubble outside the malignant forces besieging the rest of the country—a literal island off the coast of America, oriented, geographically and culturally, towards Europe.  “I really worry, with more and more people’s rights being taken away—women, people of color, gay and trans people’s rights,” he said. “But it’s been sort of galvanizing me to make sure that I fight hard, to use my voice as loudly as I can to stop this.” 

In the last few years, Cumming has toured the country with a series of cabaret shows, which often use music, dance and comedy to dive headfirst into the country’s most fraught issues. Audiences in red states generally embrace his provocative content, but you can never be too sure, especially in Florida: during a tour stop near Mar-a-Lago for his show Legal Immigrant, he told The New Yorker’s Rachel Syme, spectators became irate over Cumming’s message of America as a country of immigrants. “’Get on with the show!’” One man yelled at him. “And I went, ‘This is the show! You’re in it!’” Just before his visit to Atlanta this spring, he’d been back in Florida testing out a new show, Uncut, which features, among other themes, meditations on being uncircumcised. (Cumming is a vehement critic of the traditional practice, which is much more common in the U.S. than in Europe: “it’s genital mutilation,” he told me. “It should be banned.”). The show, he reported cautiously, had gone over well, though you can never be too sure in Florida. 

Cumming was thirty when he moved to America, so he has an outsider’s view of his adopted country’s savage politics. “I lived half my life in another, completely different environment, so I think I have a healthy perspective on things here,” he said. “It allows you to see that you can have more than two political parties, you can have political discourse that doesn’t end in violence.” Spending time back home in Scotland—progressive, woman-led, Brexit-denouncing, LGBTQ-affirming, climate change-believing Scotland—sometimes has Cumming longing to move back permanently. But every return trip to New York reminds him—and Grant, a longtime New Yorker—why they love it, and perhaps, by extension, the rest of its crazy neighbors on the mainland. 

“I’ll always be coming back and forth,” he said. “So as long as I’m doing that, I have to stand up.” 

“I've always been a combination of mischievous, provocative, and challenging…and also sort of cute.”

As an openly queer actor, Cumming’s standing up has always involved standing out. But while his genre-defying, gender-bending career is queer in the most bedrock conception of that term, perhaps the most striking aspect of Cumming’s long life in the spotlight is how handily he’s avoided being pinned to any specific version of queerness. 

“It used to be that if there was a queer character, they would have a problem–they had AIDS, or had issues with their family, but whatever it was, there was always a problem connected to a gay storyline,” Cumming said. “But I think eventually, the aim is just to have queer characters where that’s only one of the many interesting things about them. And I think we’ve still not quite got there.” 

Cumming has certainly done his part to nudge the world in that direction. When it comes to understanding an artist’s point of view, the work they write themselves generally offers the best insight; I find it thrilling that, when given the opportunity to make his own film, Cumming crafted one in which he plays a man in a complicated separation from his wife. 

The Anniversary Party, which came out in 2001, was Cumming’s brainchild with Jennifer Jason Leigh, with whom he wrote, directed, and produced the film. The pair also star as Joe and Sally, successful actors whose sunny Hollywood life is cracking beneath them. Sally’s reaching the has-been end of her glittering career, while Joe longs for London, and–more subtly–for a handsome young man who attends the anniversary celebration the couple throw in their glamorous mid-century home. Cumming and Leigh made the film on a shoestring, shooting it in a month with a cast of mostly their friends (though those friends included Parker Posey, Gwyneth Paltrow, and John C. Reilly). 

“It was this very personal thing because it was about real people that we knew, these things that we knew,” Cumming explained. “And we said very harsh things about ourselves in it and I think that’s what people resonated with.” It isn’t an easy film, full of the petty cruelties of a marriage on the rocks and the cold in-or-out arithmetic of Hollywood, but it has a deep and complicated heart. Cumming is wonderful in it, utterly at ease in the gray area between the intimacy of his marriage and the desire for what (or who) might exist beyond it. “We wanted [Joe’s] bisexuality to be an element without it being a sensational thing,” he said, “Without anyone really commenting on it.” In that way, it’s a gesture towards the world Cumming would like us to live in, the one he’s always found a way to live in himself.

“people just want to know if you like cock. And when you say yes, it kind of shuts them up a bit, suddenly they stop being so inquisitive.”

Several years before The Anniversary Party, Cumming was forced to navigate his queerness under the harsh light of the world we actually live in. In 1993, he and wife, the actress Hilary Lyon, divorced. Students together at drama school, they’d married in 1985, when Cumming was only 21; he’s said that he married young to escape his father and prove that, unlike his parents’ unhappy union, he could find genuine love. When their marriage collapsed in 1993, Cumming was devastated, but the ruthless British press was only too happy to exploit the news–especially when they caught wind that Cumming was dating a man. “The British tabloids were terrible,” he recalled. “They went to my mother’s house, my ex-wife’s house, trying to find out who I was seeing.” 

Cumming knew he liked men and women before he got married, and hadn’t felt any need to claim some specific identity–or even what that identity would be. “But I realized that to be coy invites speculation, so it’s better just to get it out there.” And so he got it out there, in true Alan Cumming fashion, by posing nude on the cover of OUT Magazine in 1999. “Exposed!” boasted the cover line, trailing over his bare leg.

“When it comes down to it, people just want to know if you like cock,” he laughed. “And when you say yes, it kind of shuts them up a bit, suddenly they stop being so inquisitive!” There was one unexpectedly inquisitive viewer: Conan O’Brien, who was sure the cover was not as modest as it appeared. “He thought my heel was one of my testicles!” Cumming recalled, amused. “He was very convinced.”

Outing himself allowed Cumming to shape the narrative around his queer identity, something few people got the chance to do in the ‘90s. And it’s something he’s done since with a similarly defiant insouciance: picking the roles he wants, the life he lives, playing with gender and sexuality, without adhering to anyone else’s idea of what a queer icon should be. 

“I feel we’re still fighting against this argument that if you’re an action star, you can’t be queer, or that a queer person can’t be an action star–we still get sort of boxed in,” he told me. “I feel the more people who are out there playing all these different roles, then people just think about it less and they get used to it.” 

When we chatted, Cumming was in Italy, shooting a cameo for the film Death Do Us Part, which he told me will feature a resplendently curly wig and a live iguana. Shortly after that, he was back in Scotland, preparing to shoot the third season of The Traitors, a show that has made him a household name for anyone in America he hadn’t already won over. Reality television host is a new title for Cumming, but one he’s adopted with gusto. “I’m the stern daddy of it all,” he told the outlet Puck. Even more than in most such competitions, the host is himself a central character: Cumming addresses the cast in satiny melodrama, his Scottish accent keyed up to match his lavish costumes. Many are Cumming’s own clothes, jeujed up with capes, kilts and other accessories by stylist Sam Spector, to turn him into, as he puts it, “a dandy Scottish laird.”

A remake of the British original, the concept of The Traitors is relatively simple–I call it “fancy mafia,” as the rules essentially follow the classic summer camp game of murder and intrigue–but it’s become a runaway hit, in part thanks to its casting concept: beginning with season two, all the contestants are former participants in other reality TV shows, from veterans of the Real Housewives franchise to competitions like Survivor and Big Brother. The format adds a layer of individual narrative control to the psychological dynamics of the game, which–combined with the gothic Scottish backdrops–makes for intensely watchable content. “Pure, evil, shout-at-the-TV brilliance,” crowed The Guardian. Cumming demurred from giving any details on season three, except to assure us that it would be as devilishly fun as the first two. “Oh, you’ll enjoy it,” he said, smiling coquettishly. 

But holding court over one of television’s most popular new shows is only one of Cumming’s projects at the moment, and there are plenty to come. He’s currently touring Uncut and has a production deal with NBC-Universal to give them first look on project ideas. He and Forbes Masson are working on a musical for National Theatre of Scotland, and there’s talk of returning to The Anniversary Party with Jennifer Jason Leigh. And of course there’s a Romy & Michele sequel to film soon. 

“I don’t really have a list of things I want to do,” he said. “I like to stay open to possibility.” For a performer as singular as Cumming, there was never any prescriptive list to follow anyway; the key to his success, perhaps, is the joy with which he’s charted his course without one. 

“It’s a liberating thing being my age and looking back, seeing the patterns of things,” he told me. “And I see that, through it all, the bolder I was, the more true to myself, the more people accepted me and respected my work.” If that is the general rule of Alan Cumming, then it does most certainly apply. 
—

Photographer: Jamie Hopper
Photo Assistant: Landri Peirce
Stylist:  Joey Ellington
Hair and Makeup: Lauren Killip
Location: The Hotel Clermont // Atlanta, GA

Drunk Drag Broadway and WUSSY Mag have joined forces to craft a witty, drag version of everyone’s favorite musical. Starring some local beloved drag talent such as Tyra Rex, Stella Pearl Fontaine, Nicole Paige Brooks, Boudreaux, and Jesus ‘n’ Drag, this romping good time took to the stage for four sold out nights at City Winery Atlanta.

You might have thought you were tired of Hamilton, but this retelling of a retelling breathes new life that creates a refreshing yet familiar new story to enjoy. From live singing to group choreography, the cast and crew certainly put on a show that will go down in herstory.

Check out some photos below from Mark Morin @markmorinii

The craziest collection of club kids all came together for the first ever Mannequin party this past weekend at The Basement. Weirdos from New York, Arizona, and all over Atlanta danced the night away in a room literally covered in assorted mannequin parts and deconstructed plastic.

From Coca-Cola “c0keheads” to classic Party Monster creations, the creative spirit was well and alive as everyone danced to the tunes of JayBella Banks and DJ AbbyDear. We even got to see lewks from some of our favorite local icons Canzara SZN and Ocean Kelly. Just a little bit after 2 a.m. we were blessed with a stunning pop-up performance to “Video Phone” from our hosts, Eden and Montré, who absolutely slayed their choreography — with a special appearance by WussyVision hosts, Katrina Prowess and Hera Kane!

Keep an eye out for the next Mannequin and check out what you missed from this last one below!

Photos by Sam Teague

After several weeks of anticipation and preparation, the second ever Little Mx. Wussy pageant has successfully come and gone! Everyone’s been dying to know who would succeed Mr. Elle Aye after his win last year. Held at City Winery at Ponce City Market, seven (originally eight) contestants brought their A-game to show exactly why they’re deserving to win this crown of this dynamic drag pageant.

The judges of the evening were powerhouses in their fields: Jarvis Hammer from Boulet Brother’s Dragula, EllaSaurus Rex – the mother of EAV drag, and founder of WUSSY itself, Jon Dean. Contestants were challenged with a Creative Presentation with the theme of “Sportsball: Red, White, and Who?”, evening wear + Q&A, and a talent performance that showcased their skills, concepts, and creativity.

Shaun L’Oreal Kennedy won Mx. Professional, Hannibal Montannibal won 2nd Alternate, and Ruby Iman Starr won 1st Alternate. Chucky DeVille not only won Mx. Fan Favorite, but also won the title of 2024’s Little Mx. Wussy! She’s now simultaneously holding the title of being the current reigning winner of 2023’s Who’s Got It and 2024’s Dragnificent. Relive these legendary lewks with us below!

Photos by Toby Rhinehart (@tobyrhine)

May the blessing of today, the gift of life, grant you the possibilities and potential of what you need. Agosto Machado recites this mantra for anyone lucky enough to reach the voicemail of her landline. She doesn’t carry the Gadget– her term for any device (phone, computer, whatever) which connects one to the cyber world. Too gentle to call a luddite, she’s better understood as a humble mystic, enmeshed instead in the world of spirit. Rather than scrolling, she spends her mornings in meditation and prayer; her afternoons visiting old friends, many in hospice. A creature of place, she embodies the memory of generations of queer rebels and iconoclasts of Manhattan’s downtown scene. Liminal, she moved with and through a dizzying mélange of milieus: the gay liberation movement, the doll wing of the Factory, the downtown experimental theater scene, the anarchists of the Motherfuckers, and S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries).

I was a street queen in the West Village [in the 1960s]. The definition of a street queen is a queen who didn't have money or an apartment or what have you, and you lived on your wits... I have no wits... people were so kind to me. I used to sleep at the Port Authority or Grand Central Station with my shopping bags. I learned from the other queens: if you mind your own business you can survive. Street queens tell you where free food is, what places are being raided, and if you're hustling or doing anything, what places to avoid.

I'm not brave or anything, but below 14th Street was sort of a safe neighborhood. Because there was safety in numbers. And there's so many – mixed drag outfits, and you couldn't tell. Gem Spa was still there, and they never batted an eye. We'd come in in drag or non-drag. Gem Spa was safe because it was 24 hours, so if you needed a meeting place, it's well lit. There's traffic on St. Mark's & 2nd, so it was ok if there were any bullies or so forth, if you were alone. Those were very curious times.

As we know in Alphabet land:
Avenue A: be Afraid.
Avenue B: Beware.
Avenue C: you're Crazy,
and Avenue D: you're Dead.

I think between C & D there was a theater, the Old Reliable. To do a show or go there we'd walk in the middle of the street. You had to zig-zag because the bullies would see you're vulnerable. They'd take your money or your shoes. Fleet of foot; we were much younger. Hell's Angel's ruled 3rd street between 2nd & 1st, and in the evenings they would light the barrels, garbage cans. That was their turf. So when you were over in Alphabet land and you saw the fires in the barrels, you knew you're getting closer to safety because no one fucked with the Hell's Angels then, and they left us alone. It was a whole different time.

She especially credits her survival– and the development of glam rock –to Jackie Curtis.
Jackie grew up on 11th Street, between 3rd & 4th. Jackie was part of the neighborhood. She went 24/7, all over the East & West Village, everywhere, in semi-drag, way before the Cockettes and so forth. She went all over in the most outrageous outfits, so carefree and so naturally. If you saw her uptown: just another girl who's sort of bearded or didn't shave. That look has come and gone a couple of times, the torn stockings and makeup over a little beard, five o'clock shadow. Agosto met Jackie out and about. Downtown, we all knew each other by first names. We always said ‘Hi!’ At St. Mark's Poetry Project you saw Alan Ginsburg, Warhol, all these people, and you'd just use first names as if you were all girlfriends. Jackie initiated their friendship by dropping by. She knocked on the door of Agosto’s 3rd Avenue tenement to inquire about a neighbor who’d drawn her curiosity. Agosto remembers feeling deeply honored by the visit. I'd seen her downtown at some of the places and we just waved and chatted, because maybe she liked my drag or something. A kinship. And then I thought “oh jeez, no one is going to believe it!”

Jackie quickly got Agosto involved in the Warhol scene and eventually onto the stage.

She said, “can you sing?”
I said “no.”
“Can you act?”
I said “no.”
“Can you dance?”
And I said “no.”
“Do you want to be in a play?”
And I said “yes!”

And that's how I got to be part of Vain Victory: the Vicissitudes of the Damned (1971). Jackie held a six month rehearsal period, involving many of the Warhol people, before the show debuted at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Warhol himself delayed opening night. Running late from dinner with John and Yoko, he phoned the bar and asked them to hold the curtain. Unheard of downtown. After the nearly three-hour production, Warhol brought the couple onstage to meet the girls. Andy always had his eye out for interesting characters. It was a clearing house of characters downtown, and multiple drag queens.

Once Jackie opened the door, Agosto worked with a number of Factory superstars including Ondine, Candy Darling, and Holly Woodlawn. One of the games downtown was "guess my sex," because the long hair was coming in, and tie dye, this is like pre-hippie and things. You really couldn't tell. And of course Candy Darling was always a lady. Holly was always so fun and so vulnerable. Everyone wore glitter and lipstick, and auditioned for parts irrespective of gender. The saying was, “every day is Halloween in the Village.” You had the freedom of dressing how you want.

Still, the inclusion of the girls in the Factory scene caused tension with the street queens. Agosto attributes it to a class differential. Agosto remained friends with everyone– I'm a Libra, I'm like Switzerland! I don't take sides, I accept you for what you are. People understand that I will talk to everybody and be civil and polite. People go through changes. There was that schism, and there was a great deal of dishing: when Andy wanted to photograph the drag queens, they got a sandwich and coffee. They didn't get a print. It was awful. You could get one of the girls they photographed for $20, $15 on the street. They weren't invited to the openings or anything. But the idea of the glamour, “oh Warhol is going to photograph me!” And then it was being silk screened with different colors and slashes and things, and those sold for hundreds of thousands, limited edition. There is the awareness that they did take advantage of Candy, Holly, and Jackie, too.

Once they fell out of favor, the queens were back on the street. Warhol and his crowd were being absorbed by debutantes and high society and eurotrash. At a certain point all the drag queens were out and we weren't welcomed anymore. Agosto marks Jackie’s passing in 1985 as the definitive break. People phoned the Factory and they said, "We know about Jackie. She's not associated with us.” When asked if they’d like to send flowers to the wake, the Factory responded: “She's dead and she's not with Warhol." We were all shocked– no card or even flowers –how severe the divide was.

It just so happens that we delight in giving the girls their flowers and had the pleasure to do so in May of 2023. We shot a portrait of Agosto on the fire escape of her dear friend, the artist Ken Angel Davis. Agosto looks to the distance, robed in gold and wearing her signature floral headpiece, against an overcast sky, surrounded by toffee roses and etched salmon peonies. Agosto expressed that having her portrait done then was the most significant thing in her career since her solo exhibition at Gordon Robichaux gallery. While the honor is all ours, the day holds a tremendous significance for us as well. To meet Agosto is to encounter, amidst the labyrinth of the city, a key or cypher slipping between timelines to unlock the archive of a disappeared world. Throughout that afternoon she charmed and tantalized us with stories from before.

In the old days we used to liberate all our makeup from the drug stores. Not stolen, liberated! She smiled mischievously. I’m just such an anarchist. When we asked what she meant, she joked: Oh, I'm not butch enough to be an anarchist! That word just came out of my mouth. For lack of a better word, it’s asserting my difference. Agosto is certainly no stranger to a queer anarchy. In her time with the Gay Activists Alliance she befriended Arthur Evans, whose seminal book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, argues for gay witches to form anarchist cells to conduct magical attacks against Western civilization. She remembers Arthur fondly: He was really bright, and very vocal. There were so many people who were emotionally there with the cause of GAA, but they weren't intellectually as advanced as Arthur.

For her part, Agosto served on the News Committee of GAA. Listen, I have a 6th grade education, I don't spell, but I was News Secretary, because nobody else wanted to do it. I wrote letters to J Edgar Hoover and all these people signed "News Secretary of the Gay Activists Alliance," what have you. It's so brazen in paranoia state, because we learned that anybody or any school or institution who subscribed to the Village Voice was an enemy of the people and were on this list. For Agosto, the risks were worth it. Her eyes glistened, holding back tears: We thought we were gonna change the world for the better. And we saw changes, but it didn't happen the way we wanted– to liberate everyone.

“We thought we were gonna change the world for the better.”

AIDS brought an end to the dreams of the gay liberation movement, but Agosto carried the torch, spending twelve years as a caregiver for those who got sick. Friends had this mysterious illness. It wasn't called AIDS, it was called gay cancer. When people found out, discreetly, they’d whisper: "Agosto is helping so and so." They assumed that I could give it to them. I had to stop going to gay bars because people would move away. Despite the stigma, Agosto became a lifeline. Other people said, "Oh, Agosto might be available to help your friend." There was a certain set, I could do four or five, take them to doctor's appointments. And I did pick-up jobs, dog-walking, apartment cleaning, so I could work around my own schedules. I was available 24/7 to take them to the hospital in emergencies and so forth. But the fear and ignorance was so deadly. They moved out of the Village, because they thought by geographically moving uptown or to another borough that they would be immune to this gay cancer, what have you.

In the aftermath of the gay movement, Agosto was drawn deeper into the theater. Agosto embraced a bicoastal life, splitting time between San Francisco and New York– The only two cities in America with public transport! Within that circuit, she befriended Rumi Missabu who involved Agosto in Cockette productions, such as Pearls Over Shanghai. Rumi delighted in curating what she termed a “cocktail of glamour and anarchy.” Oh, Rumi, God bless Rumi! Every time I talk to Rumi it's like having an espresso coffee. Her energy is so amazing. If she was in New York she'd have dozens of projects and nudge people to do things because she has so many wonderful ideas. What's wonderful about her shows was they didn't charge and they gave a free meal. So people started lining up!

Rumi has since joined the ancestors with an honored place on Agosto’s personal altar, which spans every wall of her tiny studio apartment. She greeted us at the door: Welcome to the Forbidden City. Once inside her sanctum, a mountain of ephemera– portraits, newspaper clippings, books, artwork, and ashes of several friends (including Marsha P. Johnson’s) –surrounds you on all sides. The faces and names of her departed loved ones look down from every available space. Several deities are enshrined there as well from Buddhist, Catholic, and indigenous lineages. Truly monastic, Agosto sleeps on a mat rolled out amidst the powers. She wakes every morning and spends hours tending the spirits.

“I’m not an artist, just a hoarder.”

I pray and meditate. I was brainwashed as a Roman Catholic– original sin and all this business. But to cover my ass, it is mixed. I'm poly-faith now. I believe there's one creator, of no gender; or a great spirit. People have reinterpreted everything from worshiping the sun, the weather, and what have you, in their own way, which is very valid. Whatever you believe, I respect. And if you are a believer– of even mother nature –it's a gift.

Santisima Muerte, the Holy Death, holds a place on Agosto’s altar. It's an acknowledgement, because life and death are one, really. I do not fear it. It's all part of the cycle. Indeed, Agosto believes in the transmigration of the soul; that we die and are born again into new life. I believe in reincarnation. I believe you grow to heaven, and it's not a one-time experience. I went to a trance medium. The lessons I learned from the tutelage is that not only do we individually reincarnate, but we collectively incarnate. Agosto asked the medium about certain friends, Peter Hujar, Shayla, Charles Ludlam, and so forth, and collectively we go back to Epidaurus where all male theater happened. Appropriately, Epidaurus was the ancient site of both a sacred theater and the healing sanctuary of the god of medicine, Asklepius. We had an incarnation there but also in the 1890s, in Paris. All of us shared an experience there. Then, somehow, the Village experience, part of the collective art circle.

Though no longer embodied with us, that circle still sustains Agosto. I really do feel all the people who gave me so much love and friendship continue to give me strength. Keeping the ashes of nine of her friends, Agosto intends to continue her work across generations. She wishes someday for her ashes to be comingled with those on her altar, and ritually scattered in the Hudson River. If I live longer, there will be some other ashes. All I need is a medicine capsule, and I feel that this joins, symbolically, our time together. We’ve shared a lot.

For whatever remains of this lifetime, Agosto intends to keep sharing what she can. One of her altars was recently acquired by MoMA. Though finally getting the artistic recognition she deserves, Agosto always humbly insists, I’m not an artist, just a hoarder. She’s something more than both, though. Agosto is a mystic, a lineage keeper, holding the memory of an era of artists and troublemakers at risk of erasure.

This year, on HIV Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day, we had the honor of collaborating with Agosto to build an altar at the NYC AIDS Memorial in remembrance of many of the city’s lost queer icons. We transformed the Memorial’s central fountain into a portal, overflowing with flowers– calla lilies, hanging amaranthus, carnations, olive branches and smokebush –and portraits selected from Agosto’s shrine, including the likes of Peter Hujar, Cookie Mueller, Ethyl Eichelberger, Hibiscus, and a dozen others from the city’s gay avant-garde. The installation proved an interactive site for the local community, who dropped by to visit their loved ones temporarily enshrined there. Visitors could take these prayer cards, and many left tears and stories in turn. Agosto and we believe wholeheartedly in the healing power of prayer and flowers and flowing water to elevate our queer ancestors and friends among the dead. Our floral palette was black, white, green, and red, because the memory of one genocide demands resistance to every genocide. I’ve always been with the counterculture! I was against the Vietnam War! Just as their martyrs guide the Palestinian resistance, so too do our dead lend strength to queer survival; a force direly needed now more than ever. In Agosto’s words, printed behind each portrait:

AIDS DOES NOT DIMINISH THEIR CONTRIBUTION FOR GENERATIONS TO COME

—

Portrait of Agosto by Harry James Hanson, flowers by Devin Antheus
Agosto’s makeup by Miwa Sakulrat
Text by Devin Antheus & Harry James Hanson
Install photos all by Deb Leal

There’s blood (and eyeliner) in the water, and erotic despair in the black lagoon. Dark Entries Records brings you 13 sweat-inducing tracks full of transcontinental midsummer melancholy, perfect for swimming in shark-infested seas, engaging in cursed orgies on abandoned islands, and drifting towards sultry sirens singing you to shipwreck…

1. Nico  - All Tomorrow's Parties (1982)

Starting off with the saddest piece of music Martin Hannett (Joy Division) ever produced and played bass and guitar on. Nico was thick in the throes of despair (basically creating the Goth movement) when she relocated to Manchester in the early eighties.

2. Russya - Білий сніг (1989)

Ukrainian pop goddess with winter tale of sadness "White Snow" about waiting for a lost love to return in the spring. The opening lines translate to, "Between us the wall of separation has grown again, the heart is sad."

3. Loveshadow - Another Dream (2023)

San Francisco DIY pop duo smear the lines between past and present, pop and avant, immanent and transcendent on their their sophomore album 'II'

"closer – not within reach, touching, never feeling, walking all alone again"

4. Corinne Tell  - Histoire de Coeur (1987)

French chanteuse sings "Story of the heart" in her darkest Birkin delivery. You want to dance but end up crying. "The thirst to love you is fatal to me, my blood freezes"

5. Valerie Dore - Get Closer (1984)

If there is one song that captures the melancholic mood of the mid-80s this is it!

I picture Valerie sitting on her balcony in Milan singing to the sky, "When the world is running down, get closer."

6. Chris & Cosey - Silent Cry (1987)

"Is it true what they've said about love?" Chris & Cosey's 1987 Animal Liberation Anthem for PETA could also be a funerary love song.

7. Martin L. Gore - In A Manner Of Speaking (1989)

This song has been with me since my teenage years in New Jersey. One of the best covers ever done. Written by Winston Tong of Tuxedomoon, simply the best love song ever.

8. Brazil - Tvoj Svijet (1990)

Croatian synthpop cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World”. Originally self-released on cassette in 1990. The eerily faithful production belies Brazil’s re-working of the song’s lyrics about getting lost in an imaginary dream world.

9. The Cure - A Strange Day (1982)

According to Robert Smith this song is about, “how I would feel if it would only be the end of the world.” Easily one of my favorite Cure songs, the drama after the waves crash in and a sudden hush across the water…

10. Pink Industry - Don't Let Go (1987)

Goosebumps from the first drum kick. Downtempo shoegaze from Liverpool 1983 re-recorded in 1987. Pleading never sounded so dreamy.

11. Escape From New York - Save Our Love (1983)

Mournful melodic synthpop/Italo from London, sign me up! If you were to distill the 1980s emotions into one song, this would be it.

12. Anything Box - Do You Hear Me Anymore? (1989)

New Jersey's finest output this song was a b-side from 1989 and captures yearning at its finest. How it just tears at my heartstrings all these years later.

"Every part of me is losing ground."

13. Xymox - Imagination (1989)

Clan of Xymox is arguably the best Darkwave band of all time, and this song has followed me since I was 16 and bought Twist Of Shadows on St Marks Place.

"Every day I've been without you, every shadow follows me."

Josh Cheon grew up in New Jersey, just outside New York City where he spent his weekends dancing at goth clubs and digging for records. He moved to San Francisco in 2006 and joined gay DJ collective Honey Soundsystem. His love of underground ‘80s music pushed him to start Dark Entries in 2009, a record label specializing in reissuing lost music from that era as well as contemporary bands referencing those analog sounds.