photography by Matt Lambert
interview by Bruce LaBruce
Vginal Davis is a radical cultural producer whose work unsettles the boundaries of race, gender, and class with a singular amalgam of satire, camp, and political subversion. Emerging from the Queer punk subculture of Los Angeles, Davis has cultivated a multidisciplinary practice–spanning performance, film, writing, and visual art–that resists institutional co-optation while exposing the violence embedded in normative structures. Drawing on the aesthetics of DIY, trash, and illegibility, her interventions disrupt dominant narratives, foregrounding the insurgent power of the abject and the marginal. More than an artist, Davis is an agent of cultural détournement, turning the overlooked and discarded into sites of radical possibility. On the 20th anniversary of her migration from Los Angeles to Berlin, Gropius Bau unveils Vaginal Davis: Fabelhaftes Produkt–the artist’s first solo museum retrospective in Germany. In an expansive and provocative conversation, Davis guides avant-Queer filmmaker Bruce LaBruce through an unfiltered oral herstory of the Queer underground, charting the subversive currents that have shaped both their work and the wider cultural landscape.
LABRUCE: I remember my first trip to LA in 1991, staying with you at your charming La Villa Rosa apartment on Sunset and Fairfax—right next to the Chalet Gourmet, where I once spotted Barbara Barrie either shopping or shoplifting. Your neighbor was Drew Barrymore’s father, living in squalor. One afternoon, while you were at work at UCLA’s Placement and Career Planning Center, which is referenced in Hustler White (1996), where you have a cameo, your answering machine picked up a call from Liz Rosenberg—Madonna’s all-powerful press agent. She wanted you for something. I was thrilled to tell you when you got home, but you were totally blasé and didn’t even bother calling her back. Now Madonna isn’t just an institution—she’s practically an element, like wind or dirt, impossible to get rid of. Looking back, what do you think? I know she later showed up at your legendary Club Sucker. Any good stories about the celebrities who passed through the hottest ticket in town?
DAVIS: Oh, Judy LaBruce, you have a much better memory than I do. I do remember getting a call from some of her people, who I believe wanted me to perform for her birthday party. I didn’t respond because my performance style isn’t really geared for birthday parties or bar mitzvahs. Boy, I sure could have used the moula in those days, as I lived very hand-to-mouth.
I believe in the Diane Vreeland adage, “There is elegance in refusal.” I heard Miss Madonna wound up hiring some other Los Angeles showgirls: the late Alexis Arquette, Sherri Vine, and, I believe, Jackie Beat. Madonna and her then companion Carlos Leon, the father of her daughter Lola, came to Club Sucker to see the Madonna Tribute Band, The Madonnabees, led by punk great Mike Watt. The head bartender, Kim Ghee, said she ordered a cranberry juice, listened to the band for about ten minutes, and had to pry Mr. Leon away from his gay gym buddies, as I believe he was a personal trainer at Crunch. This coincided with a lot of normative gay types discovering Club Sucker and how sexy the “alterna” fags could be. In the 1990s, there was still quite a distinction between status-quo gays and anti-assimilationist queers.
My Sunday-afternoon-punk-rock-beer-bust-and-Old-English-tea-dance performance space Club Sucker at the Garage on Santa Monica Blvd at Virgil in Silverlake lasted for five years, from 1994-1999. The building that housed the club had formerly been The Bunkhouse, one of the oldest gay bars in Los Angeles. Paul Rossi of the punk band Wasted Youth bought the bar from the elderly gay owner. Paul was the father of actress Patricia Arquette’s son Enzo. When Patty was married to Nicolas Cage, she would bring her child to visit his father as there was an apartment above the bar. I go way back with Patty and the entire Arquette clan. Patty has quite the punk past that most people don’t know about. I’d known Alexis Arquette since before she was a weenager. Sometimes, Patty and Nicholas Cage would park their Jaguar and come into the club for a cocktail. We opened at 3 PM, which was an unusual time for a rock club, but I liked seeing how people looked and acted in broad daylight. In the first year of the club, I still had my day job at UCLA, so I had to be at work at 8 AM on Mondays. Since I didn’t know how to drive a car, my main mode of transport back then was my vintage cruiser bike or the bus.
I’ll always remember when you brought Gus Van Sant to Club Sucker, and you two held regal court in the Mitzi Gaynor ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair’ Tiki Lounge, which was the closest thing we had to a VIP area. Mr. Van Sant had just risen to the ranks of A-list Hollywood director, and all the Eve Harringtons in Hollywoodland got word pretty quickly that he was at the club and swooped down on him like chicken hawks. At the time, Mr. Van Sant’s boyfriend, a stunning skater thrasher kid named Ben Alexander, was so protective of Gus’ honor. You and Gus were the Margo Channings being bombarded by Eves and Phoebes. A raucous fight even broke out when one aggressive Eve with the unusual name of Echo was trying to hog Gus’ attention and get him to read his screenplay. Ben was having none of it and dashed poor Echo’s hopes of becoming a Dustin Lance Black. The knockout sluggo was covered in all the international gossip columns, including Page Six and La Dolce Musto. Whatever became of Ben Alexander?
LABRUCE: Poor Ben Alexander died many years ago of a drug overdose. I used to hang with him a bit in LA; I fondly remember he and I and some hot big-dicked Southern gay gentlemen friend of his went to see the Betty White crocodile potboiler Lake Placid in 1999, and we heckled the movie throughout! There’s a photo of Ben that I love in my latest photo book from Baron Books, The Revolution Is My Boyfriend, that I snapped at a party that Gus Van Sant had in his trailer on the set of his remake of Hitchcock’s “Psycho” on the Universal Backlot for which someone had rented a tank of nitrous oxide, and in the photo, Ben is taking a big hit from a balloon while Gus smiles approvingly in the background. Ben also gave a helping hand to John Cameron Mitchell when he was casting Shortbus if you know what I mean. But yeah, dead.
DAVIS: Thank you so much for updating me on poor Ben Alexander. How tragic. What a beauty prize he was. He was a GoGo boy at the Westside club I attended once, and I was mesmerized by his dancing style, which had absolutely no relation to the music whatsoever. He wore these wonderful white knee-high tube socks, which appeared to be Dolphin booty shorts, with a Johnny string tank top.
What really made my Club Sucker pop was the love sexy lesbian regulars like filmmakers and artists Cheryl Dunye, Catherine Opie, Kaucyla Brooke, Alexandra Juhasz, Kari Krome, actress Clea Duvall, and gifted performers and musicians who did surprise shows at the club like The Jesus & Mary Chain, L7, Woodpussy, Stone Fox, Weazer, The Foo Fighters, Auntie Christ that featured Exene Cervenka of X and Matt Freeman of Rancid, GoGo’s, Phranc, the Jewish Lesbian Folksinger and Cardboard Cobbler, early Rufus Wainwright, The Dandy Warhols, and Tribe 8. We even had a very young Miranda July perform and the Drag King performance troupe Club Casanova headed by Mo B. Dick and featuring World Famous BoB. Ellen DeGeneres and the late Anne Heche first cemented their romance at my club during a Sleater-Kinney performance.
Oh, and all the fervid fornications that happened at Club Sucker at the Garage. My Sucker partner and co-host Frank Rodriguez was Silverlake’s hottest ‘it’ boy. Frank worked at Sony Pictures as his day job then, along with gorgeous queer club kingpin Jeffrey Hilbert. Frank and his 25 centimeters of cruel club cock decimated all the rank and file of the Silverlake 40 and then some. Both Frank and my other Sucker partner Dale Johnson who worked for Virgin Records, knew the secret of how to be very, very popular, just like Sherrie North in that 20th Century Fox flick starring her and Betty Grable from the mid-1950s.
LABRUCE: I was seething with jealousy of Frank and Dale’s conquests as I’ve always been perpetually unboyfriendable.
DAVIS: Dearest sweet Judy, with the most sugar in your tank, you hold the record as the only person in the world who has successfully hooked me up with a smoldering sex partner. This was in Toronto at Will Munro’s Vaseline Club, where you literally force-fed me one of Will’s tallest and most fit GoGo studs who wore a size 15 trainer. Yowza, was he ever gorgeous and soft-spoken. That art collector Bruce Bailey tried to use his wealth and offer of mounds of cocaine to lure my young man away from me, but you, being the true blue gal pal that you are, blocked his efforts at every turn, and I will always be grateful to you for that.
ACT I: GLADYS BENTLEY BUFFET FLAT
LABRUCE One of the most insulting questions that a queer person or person of color can be asked in an interview is, “What do you think of Madonna?” [laughs] I’ve been asked about it so many times.
DAVIS: When Madonna first came on the scene as a mainstream force around 1983, she stopped by the Melrose Avenue boutique owned by Helen Bed O’Neill called Retail Slut, where my bandmate Fertile La Toyah Jackson was one of the in-house designers. Madonna bought some of Fertile’s original clothing, and she was very matter-of-fact and no-nonsense but also quite polite. I adore Ms. Ciccone in all her many facets and manifestations. She and Michael Jackson are premiere performance artists and body art practitioners. I’m especially fascinated by the modern-day Madonna, her transnational adoptions, and the body and facial reconstructions on par with the famed French body artist Orlan. I could see Madonna being brave enough to graft a second arm or leg onto her person.
When I lived in Koreatown, my next-door neighbor was the vivacious and lovely Hollywood production stalwart Billy Hoye, who I went to UCLA with and was best friends with Madonna’s ex-beau, the gorgeous and talented Tony Ward. I loved hearing Mr. Ward tell us about how sexually adventurous his paramour was and how fearless he was. A true alpha power top with righteous big dick arrogance to match. She also loved performing hours and hours of analingus on Tony’s bountiferous buttocks before she mounted him, and she certainly isn’t afraid of fluids or unconventional sex toys and positionings. I’ll never be able to look at a garlic press in quite the same way after Tony demonstrated one at one of Billy’s famous barbecues on Edgemont Drive—the same homo moderne streamline apartment building where we filmed the Black bordello sequence from Hustler White. I think one of the cute young production assistants wound up getting bombusculated on my terrace by one of the dinosaur-peniled courtesans recruited straight off Santa Monica Blvd moments before filming began. Ah, those were the days, my fine friend.
LABRUCE: I recently had dinner with our mutual friend Glennda Orgasm in NYC. We discussed your meteoric rise to fame in the art world, which has taken forever but is nonetheless earth-shattering. She admiringly said you’re a blue chip artist now, and I was wondering how you feel about that? I mean, it seems like you’re doing the same work you’ve always been doing, but on a bigger scale, and it just took the art world forever to catch up to you because you have always been so far ahead of the curve. Have they caught up with you, or are you just toying with them?
DAVIS: Oh, Judy Maria Pilar La Bruce, you are so right. I have been doing the same schtick for over 40 years. I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel. Ron Athey, who is a paragon of wisdom, says that he and I both go in and out of vogue every seven years and that a new generation seems to discover us. My poetry and prose first got my attention in the 1980s, but I had always made visual art in the same manner that I do now. Of course, no one was interested in my art or art objects back then, so I gave them to friends as presents. Some of those pieces are in my traveling exhibition.
Until I was represented by a commercial gallery in New York around 2014, if I was in two group shows a year, that was a lot. Having my first solo exhibit in New York in 2012 at the not-for-profit gallery Participant Inc. founded by the great and glorious Lia Gangitano created a certain buzz that led me to work first with Rod Bianco Gallery (New York/Oslo), then Invisible Exports NYC which is now called New Discretions, then Adams and Ollman Gallery on the West Coast, Dan Gunn Gallery, London and now Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin who also represents one of my darling, talented children the filmmaker and artiste Wu Tsang. Most people only knew me as a performance artist and writer because of my writing for years with the LA Weekly, Dutch, and Zoo Magazine, where you and Glennda Orgasm were regular contributors under that amazing Paris-based editor Rebecca Voight, who I’ve known since her days in Los Angeles working for Women’s Wear Daily. Rebecca Voight, who now works for the New York Times International, formerly The Hearst International Herald Tribune, and Janet Duckworth of the LA Weekly, who just retired from the Los Angeles Times, are my all-time favorite editors who know how to work with my insane way of using language. It’s a shame that writers’ voices are taken away these days, so a magazine gives the impression that one person wrote everything. That’s one reason I hardly ever take on any journalism assignments anymore. Most people don’t know that I was actually the editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper. What about you? What’s your take on journalism these days as we both came tumbling out of the Queercore-era of zine-making?
LABRUCE: I’m not very motivated like I was in the old days. Standards of journalism are so low now that people who are barely literate are published in major magazines. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to proofread interviews that have been done with me and correct grammar and spelling, for which I am not even paid. But gay journalism, in particular, has always had low standards. Photographers are still showing up in K-holes from the night before, expecting you to come up with ideas for their photo shoots of you. Appalling! Ironically, our journalistic standards for our meager and modest fanzines were much, much higher!
DAVIS: Thank Goddess Hecate other people kept copies of my various zines and ephemera that I created over the years because I don’t have a set of anything I did as I would work on something and then move on to the next project and never looked back lest I turn into a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife. I am really a bad archivist of my own work. But who would have ever thought there would be a demand for such underground and way below-ground materials so many decades later? In those days, we were far from being careerists. Kids today know their worth, but it was just survival mode back then. I was fortunate that Los Angeles, the city of my birth, used to be the least expensive international metropolis, but that all changed in the early aughts, and it decided to take its place with the boutique cities in the world; I hear it’s more costly now in Los Angeles than New York, London, or Paris.
I was fortunate I had someplace else to run to and a lovely infrastructure of friends and supporters like Susanne Sachsse, the fearless leader of CHEAP Kollektiv, to help me in my hour of need when I lost my Koreatown complex to gentrification. I’ve always been a very needy bitch. Now, there is no place to run and escape the mess of this world. Poor young people. For you, Ron Athey, and me, it’s our Last Chance Texaco. My health isn’t so great, so how long do I have on the planet? Sorry if I’m being too morbid. All good things must come to an end. I’m just glad to be able to smile through the morass. Nothing is guaranteed in this world or the next, so I may be having museum shows today, but I could still wind up a toothless hag back in the gutter tomorrow. Blessed be sewers, and never take oneself too seriously or take anything for granted.
LABRUCE: You mentioned the CHEAP Kollektiv, of which you are a member, and which I hold dear to my heart as I collaborated with you and the Kollektiv on our 2008 production “Cheap Blacky" at the Hau Theater in Berlin in 2010. Talk to us a bit about the inspiration there and how central dear Susanne Sachsse and the Cheapies have been to your development as an artist and a human being.
DAVIS: The CHEAP Kollektiv collaboration with you, “Cheap Blacky,” which premiered in 2007 was your first time directing for the stage. I love how you brought elements of film production to the theater. Everything with “Cheap Blacky” came out perfect. Rick Owens provided the costumes. It was very important with CHEAP to work with an outside director—someone outside our group. Somebody who shared our aesthetics and sensibility to a certain degree. It all came together so seamlessly, but it was a lot of hard work. You really pushed Susanne and me to the brink of total exhaustion. Susanne is a classically trained actress, so she can handle that very well. I’m actually so far from being an actress; I can’t memorize text for shit, even if it’s the text I wrote or song lyrics, and let’s not even go there with my horrible singing voice.
Our very first CHEAP stage vehicle in Berlin, CHEAP Jewelry, directed by Marcuse Siegelstein in 2001 was a salute to the genius of Carmen Miranda and Jack Smith. Later, Susanne Sachsse took over the helm of directing CHEAP pieces when we were subverting German youth at the children’s theater in East Berlin, Theater an der Parkaue, with adaptations of Erika Mann’s Stoffel fliegt über Meer, The ABC’s of Dr. Seuss, and Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz where I played a Dovimaesque Witwe Bolte. I enjoyed the steady work at a state-sponsored theater, and since it was for children, all the performances took place in the morning. I’m such a morning person I was delighted to have the rest of the day completely free.
Max und Moritz ran for about three years; we also did a command performance for the Bundes President at Schloss Bellevue, where all these politicians and dignitaries like Angela Merkel were in attendance. The roundtrip airplane ticket that brought me to Germany in 2005 came from Stefanie Schulte Strathaus of Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Kunst to participate in that year’s Berlinale Film Festival. Hard to believe I came here with nothing as I sold or gave away everything and only had one hundred euros in my pocket. Even with steady work at the children’s theater with CHEAP, I felt rich if I had fifty euros in the bank at the end of the month. Of course, twenty years ago, the cost of living in Berlin was quite low. Two years after moving here, I was offered a regular curating gig at the Arsenal, and that’s how my monthly silent cinema event, “Rising Stars, Falling Stars,” began.
My early salad days in Berlin were rough and tumble. Still, I was fortunate that Susanne, via your fabulous Berlin film producer Jürgen Bruning, found me a great, cheap flat in the centrally located city west district with an old contract. Jürgen also always hired me to DJane his events, and once over tea and dainties, I mentioned that I was working on an interactive workshop called Porno Adorno-F*ck Like the F*cking Blacks, and Jürgen encouraged me to debut it at his fledgling porn film festival. Jürgen was smitten by the cheeky title. When he loves something, he really lights up. Daniel Hendrickson and Susanne supported me on the concept, along with technical help from Jürgen’s right-hand man, the effervescent Kiki Petersen. Porno Adorno became a huge success after the porn film festival, and I was invited to do it at a dozen other Berlin venues and an art congress in Paris at Palais de Tokyo in 2008.
Our first CHEAP presentation in the US was The Magic Flute, An Opera in Six Steps (2015), a performative installation featuring Jamie Stewart of XiuXiu, who composed the score, with Susanne’s masterful direction and my libretto. It was a massive collaboration, produced by Jonathan Berger at NYU’s 80 Washington Square East Gallery, with support from the Goethe Institute and Deutsche’s Haus NYC. When I grandly demanded a full orchestra, Jonathan—raised in high art as the son of NYC’s former arts commissioner and Act Up’s youngest member at 13—quietly made it happen. Since then, XiuXiu has become part of the CHEAP cosmos; Jamie and Angela even moved to Berlin, and our collaborations have made them an essential, sexy appendage to our creative existence.
After CHEAP first came on the scene in the early aughts, many copycat collectives formed, like one of our biggest rivals, Hangover. However, they wound up imploding after a very short time together. It hasn’t been easy, but CHEAP will celebrate 25 years together in 2026. The installation Choose Mutation really underscores this dynamic.
LABRUCE: After my theater project, The Bad Breast, which was based on the psychoanalytic theory of the Freudian apostate and revisionist Melanie Klein, you actually went into Kleinian analysis, which boggles the mind. Are they all mutes and sadists, as I contend in the play? Will you, like Woody Allen, be in analysis for the next 35 years?
DAVIS: I don’t think I’ll pull a Woody and be in analysis or alive 35 years from now, but I’ve been going strong in therapy for quite a while. Thanks again to Jonathan Berger and Susanne Sachsse for facilitating it for me. Oh, and yes, I’m in love with my therapist; what a cliche, eh? It’s the first time I’ve never had a male analyst. When I first met him, he seemed too young for me to work with, he is also very slight and small-boned with tiny hands perfect for fisting, so I thought he was an F2M, but he is actually a cis-gendered male, married with two very young children. His hands are quite small, but strangely, he has exceptionally large feet. I always find short kings with big feet fascinating. My Club Sucker partner Frank Rodriguez is like that. My therapist has these very sympathetic eyes with total recall of everything I’ve told him over the years, which is really scary. Let’s face facts, I’m a damaged messticle and my pussy is a stinky cactus. I’ve sometimes wondered what it would be like to be addicted to psychotropic medications. Usually, after my therapy sessions, I spend hours by myself at Park am Gleisdrieick at the Skateranlage, lesbian-processing in my handwritten journal.
LABRUCE: As stellar as Club Sucker was, you actually outdid yourself with your next LA club, Bricktops, in the aughties, a demur comeback that was pure genius. What was the inspiration for that stylish soiree, and how was the clientele different from Club Sucker, celebrity or otherwise?
DAVIS: Bricktops at the Parlour Club located in the Russian Quartier of Hollywood only lasted from 2002 till right before I quietly slunk out of town for Berlin in 2005 without saying goodbye or any fanfare. Bricktops was known as a haven for the literary clubgoer who was not caught up in the youth culture myopia of the then-current club scene. It had a tacky bottle service and boys wearing complicated jeans and backward baseball caps with wallet chains. I saw the club as a performance space/speakeasy saluting the spirit of the Jazz Age and the Parisian hostess Ada “Bricktop” Smith, a Black American woman who conquered Paris in the 1920s and 1930s and after the war, Rome, Mexico City, and finally, New York City when she was an octogenarian in the 1980s.
Hollywood personality Selene Luna and Michele “Meesh” Mills (now the many-time Emmy award-winning producer of Drag Race) were my door girls, and Kimberly Kim of North Korea was our beloved main barkeep. I DJaned—taking on the persona of “BerniceBobsHerHair” along with academic Dr. Jennifer Doyle of UC Riverside as “Pirate Jenny of Montpelier.” We had many heritage burlesque stars and cabaret performers take the stage, like Velvet Hammer, Kristian Hoffman, Jane Cantillon, Phranc doing Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Abbie Travis, Kitten on the Keys, La Poubelle Twins, Pleasant Gehman, Weba Garretson, Penny Arcade, Brian Grillo and his Grillo Follies featuring Mink Stole, Kentucky Karbunkle, Reny Monk, the niece of Thelonius Monk, as Josephine Baker, The Ditty Bops and Rebecca Del Rio from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive along with resident oddball Mr. Uncertain.
I also had nude boys taking baths in gin tubs, Mary, Mary Pagone, and Jason El Norte as taxi dancers, while 1920s porn and silent film classics were projected on a large screen. The club started off once a month because of my clubland burnout, but because of high demand, we switched to once a week, which was a lot of work and a headache but wound up being so rewarding that we became the nightclub experience Los Angeles longed for. Oh, and the outfits people wore.
The bar was owned by a film producer named Lenny Young, who produced movies like The Legend of Bagger Vance and James and the Giant Peach. After five years of Club Sucker at the Garage every Sunday afternoon, I was overdoing a regular club night. The Parlour Club’s angelic manager, Andrew Gould, seduced me out of club retirement. Andrew was Lenny’s decades younger boyfriend. Andrew was a spirited and smart 20-year-old, very well-read blondine Brit with an enormous uncut penis. We were never lovers, but I did refer to him as my colonial husband, and he called me his wifette. I fell in love with Andrew, and we worked well together. He was as meticulous and detail-oriented as I was in coming up with themes and art, directing the bar where even the restrooms reflected each week’s theme. My club night and the bar got so popular that it was inevitable that the owner would be offered a price he couldn’t refuse, so it all ended abruptly. It was a difficult time as an incredible community had formed around the space, but if Bricktops at the Parlour Club hadn’t ended, I might not have wound up moving to Germany, which turned out to be the best decision I have ever made in my life.
There was some crossover between the Club Sucker crowd and Bricktops, but most of the people who were Bricktops loyalists were a bit averse to loud discordant music, even though a lot of them came from punk and post-punk backgrounds. Because of the large amount of international mainstream press, we received a lot of celebrities who ventured to Bricktops. Looking back, I can’t believe we charged so little to get in. Just a measly five-dollar cover charge.
Obviously, I don’t have very good business acumen. Both Club Sucker and Bricktops crowds were heavy drinkers. There was a huge fight that broke out once between the ex-girlfriends of the late famed Italian lesbian poet Diviana Ingravallo that made it into the national gossip columns. Growing up in a lesbian separatist household, I adore Lesbian drama. I see it as necessary and vital. I’ve always had a large lesbian following and feel more akin to lesbians than gay men. Ron Athey and I have justly been accused of being dag hags. My inner circle has always been made up of mostly queer and straight women. I see myself as a woman trapped in the body of a woman. I’ve also always found women much more interesting than men.
I am the baby in my family with four older sisters and a single mother who died in 2000 from cancer. Only one of my sisters is alive; the others all died of cancer. My only living sister is ten years older than me at 74, living in the same dingbat Hollywood apartment since 1975. She has also worked a government job for the County of Los Angeles since the 1970s. My mother was never married to my Mexican-born father, who was about 19 when they met, and she was in her forties. I am a bastard. An illegitimate child. I love old-fashioned phrases like that. I’ve always lived in apartments and never in a single-family home with a front or back yard. Like most Black people, I can’t swim, and I’m terrified of large bodies of water, swimming pools, worms, and snakes.
I’ve been slowly working on a project with Jonathan Berger and Susanne Sachsse where we will engage a private detective to trace my family background on both my mother’s side of the family and my father’s, as there are some parallels with Jonathan and Susanne’s family. There is a Jewish and German background on my father’s side of the family; my mother is a Black French Creole and Choctaw Native American. With this private detective working with us, we can settle all the facts from mythology in my family background. My mother was notoriously close-lipped on everything and never divulged family secrets. It’s been a painstakingly slow process to pull information from my sister, who is very protective of our mother. Whenever I try to probe my sister, she shrugs and says, “Oh, that’s so long ago I can’t remember.” Not knowing all the proverbial “T” in my own family is quite disturbing, to say the least. I’m just one nosy motherfucker.
LABRUCE: You recently conducted a very demure hostile takeover of Stockholm, virtually taking over the entire city with events, installations, and performances hither and yon. They practically gave you the key to the city! What is your relationship to that northern, whiter-than-white city and to the Swedes?
DAVIS: Well, my first solo museum retrospectacle was seven installations spread out throughout four of the city institutions, including the Moderna Museet and The National Museum. In the National Museum’s portrait gallery, my makeup paintings were in conversation with the 19th Century Collection. At Index—the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, they concentrated on my writings in zines, mainstream newspapers, magazines and books, including the anthology Discontents that you are, also edited by Dennis Cooper back in the early 1990s. I didn’t save any of my old zines, but luckily, a young fan from back in the 1980s named Jeff Briggs, now an archivist at Warner Brothers Studios, had obsessively saved almost everything I had ever put out to the public. You never know what effect you have on people.
Later, in the Swedish run, MDT (Modern Dance Theater) hosted one of my quirky film presentations. I got the audience to come dressed up in 1979 drag to watch a double feature of Milos Foreman’s Hair and Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz. I was shocked that a modern audience had the patience to sit through two very long feature films. What was I thinking?
At Tensta Kunsthalle, located in a sexy not so whitey white migrant suburb, I created a specially designed Learning Annex featuring workshops, performances, and lectures under the guise of the Vaginal Davis Universitet of the Gifted & the Damaged. Thats where Big Daddy Ron Athey did his Scandinavian debut of Willendorf, there was Goddess worship of Mae West and butch lesbianic modalities, torture comedy by one of my other Nordic former students, Stix Omar, who is now a huge star and top model, novelist Lisa Teasley, Radical Love, and the brilliant Iris Smeds and her Death Yoga practice. Everyone who attended my 12-hour endurance university received a certificate equivalent to a PhD in Life Affirming Experiences. Like most of Europe, Sweden has gone very right-wing, so it’s a wonder how Moderna Museet’s very gay Dutch curator, Hendrik Folkerts, was able to get my exhibits past the censors.
LABRUCE: What is their discreet appeal? And what do you think of their Syndrome? They once courted me—I’ve shown my films at the Stockholm International Film Festival and was on the jury many years ago—but I think they’ve forsaken me, like the French.
DAVIS: I don’t think I could live in Sweden. It’s way too cold in the wintertime. Stockholm has too many hills for all the swelling I get in my feet, knees, and other arthritic joints. Hey, I’m pensioner age now. The Spring and Summer months can be breathtakingly beautiful. People seem really healthy and fit. I saw a lot of men with thick thighs and calves who could pull a bus with their John Wayne big leggy torsos. The only thing I didn’t like is that so many cute people love to dip this weird kind of snuff that they place in their mouths. What’s that all about? I guess it’s better than binge drinking, cigarettes, or vape smoking.
LABRUCE: Owing to your Swedish success, you now have huge shows at the Gropius Bau in Berlin and MoMA PS1 in NYC. Is there no stopping you?
DAVIS: My Swedish exhibition is just traveling now to Berlin’s Gropius Bau, where the seven installations that were in four institutions in Sweden have to be revamped to fit one large museum in Berlin. It’s turning out to be quite complicated, but we have a great team working with us. Nothing I have ever done has been about being in a bubble. I’ve always had a lot of dazzling collaborators. The turnover time between Berlin and NYC is very tight. I haven’t been to New York since I was in that group show Trigger at the New Museum in 2017. I hope my health holds up so I can travel. Since the pandemic I’ve just about given up on traveling. When you’re immune compromised, airplanes, which I’ve never enjoyed being on, are the enemy. Several other museums in the States and in other parts of Europe would like to host my exhibition, but I never believe anything will happen until it actually does. That way, one is never disappointed.
LABRUCE: I know that you were friends with the late great art star Mike Kelley, who adored you. Considering his tragic end, do you ever fear the corrupting power of art celebrity? I recall in 2007 when I had a joint show with fellow Canadian artist Terrence Koh at Peres Projects in Berlin, and we installed a meticulous recreation of The Bang Bang Bar from Twin Peaks and had you performing in the Julee Cruise role (she was unavailable!), singing and reading from Schopenhauer, Mike Kelley came from his own Berlin opening that night to our show, mostly to see you! As I gave him a tour of the installation, I was concerned to see that although he was still charming, he was very drunk and surrounded by a stern group of Berlin art types all dressed in black who were acting as enablers and yes-men and yes-women to him, propping him up and indulging his whims. How do you plan on avoiding the pitfalls of art stardom? Also that same night, the hunky porn star Tim Kruger performed in our glory hole installation, a huge iron box with glory holes in the top and bottom that he and other porn stars could stick their dicks up or down in, like stalactites and stalagmites. Mr. Kruger had a massive stalagmite, which you fondly fondled as part of the performance. Sadly, he just died recently at the age of 44, an apparent household accident, probably like William Holden slipping in the bathtub while drunk and hitting his head, although, to my knowledge, Mr. Kruger wasn’t much of a drinker. Any thoughts on that night at Peres Projects and on his sad passing?
DAVIS: Mike Kelley was such a dear. I am so glad I got to spend quality time with him and his ex-girlfriend, that bombshell Emi Fontana of West of Rome Public Art. He was in such a good mood when I had dinner with him and Marnie Weber of the Party Boys back in Los Angeles in 2012. Mike and Skip “Girls in Bikinis Getting Fucked All Day” Arnold were the first persons to have me teach at a college or university, taking their place at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena when they were off in Europe. Something told me at the time that they did it to freak out the administration. It didn’t matter one way or another. I realized I was really good with students. I’m very nurturing and motherly. I joke that my breasts can feed dying nations. When I teach, I steal a lot from the great performance artist Rachel Rosenthal and her DBD (Doing-By-Doing) technique. I really have enjoyed tag team teaching with Ron Athey at CalArts, where I first met a 19-year-old coed, Jonathan Berger. Immediately, Ron and I were captivated by his talent and wisdom beyond his years. Jonathan and a lot of those students from that class at CalArts were part of the first Platinum Oasis endurance art festival at the fist fuck motel, The Coral Sands, in Hollywood on Hollywood Blvd and Western Avenue.
Oh, your “Blame Canada” installation at Peres Projects was so dreamy. I had an amazing time in Julie Cruise drag. Javier was rolling in dough then and was quite generous; this very young but gifted French fashion designer made me the dress I wore. I still have that gown. It weighs a ton. I remember the first time you worked with Javier in San Francisco. I always liked him. He had taken me to lunch at Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Blvd to pick my brain on where in Los Angeles to open his gallery, and I told him about Chung King Road, and he wasted no time.
After “Blame Canada,” a rumor got spread in Berlin that a drag queen sucked 100 dicks. I didn’t even suck one, let alone 100. I think it stems from the fact I helped one of your porn models who worked for Jürgen’s Wurst Films by bringing him a chair so he could comfortably fellate the globulin member of Tim Krueger. This skinhead boy started chowing down on the blue movie sex champion with much vigor and determination and, pulled out his own massive dostado, and started pleasuring himself. It looked like he was in the thralls of orgasm rather soon, and I didn’t want his seed to get on my new dress, so I got far away from him, but his ejaculation was so explosive that some of it did reach my wig and audience members. The large crowd broke out into a spontaneous round of applause and cheers.
LABRUCE: I know you’ve slept with countless celebrities, including, but not limited to, Horst Bucholtz, Christopher Jones, Damian Albarn, Justine Frischmann, Vegard Vinge, Bjarne Melgaard, Matthew Barney, and perhaps even the late aforementioned porn star Tim Kruger? Who had the biggest cock (my money is on Vegard!), and did you even bother to douche beforehand as a kind of preemptive professional courtesy, or did you just give yourself over to the inevitable mudslides that those cruel club cocks would unavoidably induce? Any other celebs you’ve bedded worth mentioning?
DAVIS: I did meet Matthew Barney through Catherine Opie before he married Björk. He was really cute and a sweetie pie. He’s a little too kinky for my taste. You know how pervy those WASP men can be. Vegard Vinge does have a much bigger peterfication than the late Mr. Krueger. There is a strong sexual energy floating between Vegard Vinge and me. I felt the same thing with Swiss artist Urs Fischer, who is great friends with Cyril Kuhn, who you also know from when he was married to that super talented and stunning Canuckian Los Angeles-based artiste Karen Lofgren. Urs Fischer even participated in Platinum Oasis at Coral Sands. I’m not sexually aggressive enough to get a man to go to bed with me. I’m way too passive. I like being seduced and don’t think Urs or Vegard would make the first move. Though Vegard has pulled out his penis and shown it to me on many occasions at dinner parties and at my Berlin events, I would have had to take on the initiative to get him in the sack.
I did share a passionate kiss with John Kennedy Jr. at Jackie 60 in Manhattan in the early 1990s, but he wisely chose Naomi Campbell over me. In 1998, when I hosted the Fluxus Happening, Al and Beck Hansen: Playing With Matches, at the Roxy in New York, I had a steamy makeout session with Kennedy brat Brian David Kennedy, which was well documented in the New York Times, Out Magazine, Paper, and some other mags at the time. At the same event, I shared a giggly tongue smooch with Gwyneth Paltrow right after I had slurped clean Maraschino cherries, Aunt Jemima Light Syrup, and whipped cream off the comely feet of three bookish NYU grad students of the late Professor Jose Munoz. Gwyneth’s prep school girlfriends were horrified.
LABRUCE: You mentioned that you go way back with Rick Owens and Michéle Lamy, way back before speech replaced sign language. What are your memories of Los Angeles in those days? Did you frequent their famous Les Deux Cafes in West Hollywood, a hustler’s stone’s throw from the great hustler bar The Spotlight? We used to go back and forth.
DAVIS: Michéle Lamy—I actually met her before Rick Owens. She owned the West Hollywood boutique on Santa Monica Blvd, Too Soon to Know. She had flaming red hair and smoked a cigarette from a long holder. She had these Lamy rhinestone cat-eyed sunglasses, as her family has owned an eyewear company for many generations, and was being walked by a pink poodle wearing cha-cha heels. I was too intimidated by her to ever approach, so I’d spend a lot of time walking by her store and staring. One day, she marched right up to me in that direct manner of hers and said, “Come inside and say hello.” To this day, her French accent is so strong that I can barely understand a word she says. Rick Owens is married to her and admitted the same to me. Rick can’t speak French, but he is Mexican, so he understands French. I love it when Rick speaks Spanish because he says the words correctly, but there is no Spanish cadence or inflection. His mother, Connie, recently died, and she would bake the most amazing persimmon cookies. She was a great and very gracious lady. I will miss her.
Les Deux Cafe was located across the street in a parking lot from Rick and Michéle’s Hollywood atelier on Las Palmas Avenue between Selma and Hollywood Blvd. Yes, mighty Selma, where John Rechy would turn tricks near the Baptiste Church a stone’s throw from the old Hollywood Reporter office that became the LA Weekly headquarters. The restaurant was a former crack house that Michéle had moved into the parking lot, so it was conveniently hidden from the street. It was an oasis in the middle of urban decay, so very glamorous. I was a guest at their table many Santa Ana windy nights. Of course, Spotlight Pub and Hospitality Center was located at the beginning of the Cahuenga Corridor. Rick had his birthday party at the Spotlight, where everyone was gifted old-fashioned roller skates that you put over your shoes and use a skate key to size them. Glen Meadmore and I brought Lisa Suckdog and her then-husband, Jean-Louis Costes, with us. We had just performed at Al’s Bar downtown and were covered in Lisa’s urine—we smelled to the high heavens. Spotlight was the only hustler bar where dogs were allowed and would be sitting on a stool like a customer. Maybe they were sex worker dogs; anything and everything was possible in Los Angeles in those days. An ambulance always stayed parked outside the bar to attend to the regulars. I like to eat when I drink alcohol, so you could always zip around the corner to the Blvd and get some fried chicken and biscuits from Popeyes and bring them back to the bar.
LABRUCE: RuPaul was once your backup dancer or singer or something at the Pyramid Club in the early 90s, and now she rules the drag world as surely as Genghis Kahn ruled the Mongol empire. What is your current take on drag? Does it still hold any real appeal, or is it all McDrag now?
DAVIS: Actually, Rupaul and I were Glen Meadmore’s backup singers and dancers for his performance at the Pyramid Club in New York in the mid-1980s, captured on video by Nelson Sullivan. You can see it on YouTube. I was wearing a macromet mini dress designed by Abel Villareal when he was working for Marina Spadafora. Before Rupaul became mainstream, she lived in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. She was living with her sister, but because she wouldn’t get a regular job, her sister showed her some tough love, and Glen Meadmore let her move in and live rent-free. They had a lovely time together, and that is when RuPaul sang backup on Glen’s second LP, Squawbread, on Amoeba Records. I also sang back up on the song “No Money, No Honey” along with Iris Parker of the ’80s alternative R&B Group Madame X and Melanie Gold, the sister of Andrew Gold, collaborator of Linda Ronstadt, and singer of the 70s hit song “Lonely Boy.” When it was time to film a video for Glen’s song, Rupaul moved back to New York City, so Dora took her place in the video, mouthing to her playback vocals. Quasi O’Shea, the lover of Amoeba Records Keith “Gomorrah Wednesday” Holland, filmed, edited, and directed the video. Glen told me that RuPaul contacted him a few years ago and invited him to lunch and to watch his TV show being taped, so I gather he never forgot the kindness Glen afforded him when he was down on his luck.
LABRUCE: Similar to the assassination of JFK or 9/11, do you remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news that Liam Payne fell off that balcony in Buenos Aires? Which reminds me of a joke I made up. What would it take to reunite One Direction? Four balconies! [laughs] It’s a reworking of the old Beatles joke that circulated after Mark David Chapman assassinated John Lennon: What would it take to reunite The Beatles? Three bullets!
DAVIS: Oh my darling, I’m afraid you lost me with Liam Payne. I stopped following pop music ages ago. I know that One Direction is a boy band, but it’s from the modern era, and I’m afraid I haven’t kept current with today’s music landscape, except for some K-pop stars who are so love sexy. Hey, I’m borrowing your term from the JD days. No one coins a phrase better than Judy LaBruce.The only member of One Direction I found attractive was the vaguely Pakistani Zayn Malik, though the last time I saw a photo of him, he had too many bad tats like so many of today’s young people. Since everyone has tattoos and piercings, they have lost their outsider status.
LABRUCE: Ron Athey once told me the story that when Lady Bunny sucks a dick or gets fucked I guess, probably in the DJ booth, she always uses two condoms. I replied with the rhetorical question, “Jesus, what is she clinging so desperately to life for?” So, I extend the same question to you (non-rhetorically.) What are you clinging so desperately to life for? (laughs) In other words, what gets you out of bed in the morning?
DAVIS: Darling Judy, yes, it’s true, The Lady Bunny daintily performs hot, buttery fellatio using two or more condominiums. She is very skilled and adamant about her safe sex practice and is always consistent. In my youth, I was very risk-averse. I’m sexually attracted to men, but I don’t really like them that much. Of course, they don’t care so much for me either, as I just turned 64 and have never had a serious relationship with anyone. After so many years practicing so-called “safer sex,” I wound up getting diagnosed with the chronic illness of late-onset type one diabetes. Who would have thunk, eh? I guess I’m a scrub for punishment; I continually wake up every morning like clockwork at 5 AM and zip to my atelier by 7 AM. Just call me Pollyanna with a hatchet, in that I can still be optimistic in a new world order dominated by financial and social necromancers who are slowly but surely siphoning all life for profit. Honey child, in your film, Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008), you thought ad-“JD”-vanced capitalism was the culprit. Well, what’s come along since to replace it doesn’t have a proper name yet, but it’s fifty times worse. Ain’t life grand?