GAYLETTER

Where’s Auntie Glam’s accent from? Well, I wanted to do an accent that sounded fantasmatic — A fantasmatic accent, darling. I wanted something that was heightened and glorious. I wanted to emulate great, grand actresses of a certain age in a certain era. Just anything so I could have an opportunity to roll my tongue, darling.

It’s a little bit British but also a little transatlantic accent. Yes, well you know somebody who’s not really classy is going to try very hard to pretend they are.

How was Auntie Glam born? Well you know, darling, in the 89 to 90s I had a column in San Francisco called Glam on the Rampage where my character was Glamoretta Rampage. And Glamoretta Rampage covered the underground queer scene in San Francisco for the gay papers because in that time the gay papers there were relatively mainstream and I started writing about the queer kids and all the sort of shenanigans that was happening in the nightclubs. Then, when Kiki came along she got busy and moved to New York and just sort of forgot about me and left me back in San Francisco. At the time I was married to Elvis Herselvis, a lesbian Elvis impersonator. We went on Montel William’s show where the theme was Crossdressers Who Marry. It was very extravagant. A while ago, earlier this year Justin Vivian Bond was very tired, darling. She got very tired of talking about herself. She didn’t feel like leaving the house with the kittens. …

Art has the capacity to balance seemingly incompatible qualities — self-expression and communal tribute, tangible materiality and metaphysical essence, fading ephemerality and boundless eternity. American artist Steven Arnold (1943­-1994) embodied these dualities, proving that the dark shadow of death cannot exist without the shining light of life. His enduring legacy is memorialized in an upcoming exhibit at New York’s International Center of Photography and a new documentary Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies.

When Arnold died in 1994 amid the AIDS crisis, he left behind a vast body of work. During his life, he fluttered between different modes of art-making —  painting, drawing, sculpture, film, photography, fashion, and set design. A pioneer of cultural revolution, Arnold was at the forefront of counter-culture in the ’60s, but meandering through different eras with an indulgent grace, he defied limiting himself to one genre or style. In the ’70s, he was a dashing surrealist; in the ’80s, a mystical revisionist historian. Today, he’s often remembered for his role in launching the gender-bending performance troupe the Cockettes and for studying under Salvador Dalí as his protégé.

This weekend is your chance to watch Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies for free. Steven’s steadfast commitment to creativity and personal expression in the face of great physical decline, and ostracization from many of his ‘friends,’ due to his AIDS diagnosis, is truly inspiring. Click here to watch the documentary for FREE, this weekend only

To see the feature printed in GAYLETTER Issue 11, click here.

To get a copy of GAYLETTER Issue 11 – limited edition cover by Steven Arnold, click here. …