But back to another usurer, the Flawless Sabrina. She said it was a sold out house and we couldn’t even get any comps. When I looked through the curtains, about a fifth of the orchestra was filled, so I quick asked the secretary how we were going to get paid. “In checks,” she said. Well, I went to my sisters from the Jewel Box Revue and said, “Girls, this looks serious. They’re going to pay us in checks.” Fortunately, we demanded on the spot cash from the Flawless Sabrina. Mario has still never been paid a cent for that show.
By 1965, after my celluloid career, I had had a nervous stomach for a dozen years, mostly because I was in show business. Where was I going to work next? Where was the money going to come from? I was going to emigrate to Morocco with my friend the Professor. We thought we could both live off his GI bill. And then I took acid.
I was sitting here in the parlor with a couple boys like you and in came a man I knew who was a real sad sack, a non compes mentis, “the worst thing on Christopher Street,” he is now called. But on this day, his lowness came in and his eyes were all lit up and he’s so vivacious. “I took LSD 25,” he said. “Lead me to it” I said. “If it can do that for you, it can make me a genius.”
So I took a trip and my nervous stomach cleared up. On that trip I said to myself, “Kid, all your life jobs have been dying out from under you. Burlesque. Vaudeville. Nightclubs. Everything died out.” And I said, “Why go to Morocco? Morocco has come to me.” See, you’d go over to the Casbah — that’s what I call the section of Tompkins Square — and you’d think you were in Morocco. All these hippies and these freaky fabulous people.
That was 1965 and to me, honey, the hippies were a Renaissance. There was never anything in my experience like them — it was the only period that I lived through that I identify with good art. I felt like all my life I had been waiting for the hippies to come along. It was the only time I was ever in style — I had always been 10 years ahead and 20 years behind.
Gay Liberation
It was Billy Bike that first told me about the Gay Liberation Front. He said, “You must come.” Another friend of mine said, “Oh, don’t go there — there’s nothing but dirty old men: they want it for nothing.” Well, there were a few dirty young men, but very few old ones. There were more lezzies mixed in with the fairies in the GLF than any other group. It was lovely, I never went to the meetings much — I could never figure out when to talk and I was always out of turn.
That wasn’t so true in the GLF as it was in GAA. When GAA took over, Mary, gay liberation started getting very straight, talking about Robert’s Rules of Order. I remember Sylvia Rivera who founded STAR — Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. She was always trying to say things — the same kinds of things Marcia P. Johnson says in a sweeter way — and they treated her like garbage. If that’s what “order” is, haven’t we had enough?
Gay liberation was natural for me because I was a hippy. It was much tougher for the ribbon clerks, the straight life ones, because they had to live a double life. But, after acid and after the hippies, it was easy for me.
I joined a gay consciousness-raising group and I was very lucky because my CR group was all radical young hippies. I was the oldest one of all of them, but I always had a generation gap with my own generation so that didn’t make any difference. We’d take a subject apart and we would relate our own experiences so I could see my own life as more than just a personal thing. I saw it in a better context. That was the crux of a good consciousness-raising group.
I got involved with Communitas, a gay liberation group in Brooklyn, and they wanted me to put together a show for them. The place was out in God’s country, beyond Flatbush, at the end of the subway line, so it was cursed before it started, but I decided to give it a try. And I got all these singers and dancers and all but I had to get a stripper. You gotta have a stripper to make it look professional, you know. And it couldn’t be an amateur. “It’s got to be graceful, it’s got to be done right,” I told them. And about that time Taffy Titz rang me up. “Titz with a Z,” she always said. And I had my stripper.
I met Taffy when he was a teenager named Clyde, and it was at one of Frannie’s soirees. Franny — she’s the queen that still runs The Opulent Era on Christopher Street — used to have these soirees and then she’d stop them in the middle and show people how lovely her shop things were. That was the only soiree I’d been to that had a commercial break. I met Taffy there before she was in drag, and she’d always call me up asking advice on this and that. And Taffy started getting in the business. Her specialty was a tassel dance. A tassel dancer has tassels attached to the end of the tit cups and usually on the ass, and gets them all going at once, sometimes in opposite directions. It takes enormous skill to do well.
When Taffy rang me up, she said, “Oh, I just gave away my wardrobe a few months ago and I’m out of drag now.” So I pulled together things from my Free Store. The Free Store was leftovers from rummage sales and things I get from my sisters, and from the street. I said to Taffy, “Look at this beaded top, Taffy, you could make a bra out of that, and this chiffon skirt could make gorgeous panels, and if you need any help with the stitches, I’m an experienced stitch bitch.” So Taffy returned to the business.
I arrived late for the show. I was in semi-drag in the pouring rain, climbing over a fence, my curls coming down, my shoes soggy, with a full face on, running down. The first half was over, but Taffy was yet to come. And I will say, she was lovely, like a Theda Kara with her dark hair. And she kept her mouth shut, so her routine was fabulous. She was so graceful she tore the house down.
Alter the first show, they asked me to put together other shows. They had the Hot Peaches, and Mario Montez and Alexis Del Lago (the male Marlene Dietrich, star of “Shanghai Local”), and James Mofogin, and of course Taffy Titz. But Taffy couldn’t stay graceful forever. She was supposed to be glamorous, but she had to be campy. So we put this show in a church. Can you imagine, they built a special runway for Taffy, and she came out with industrial house numbers on her ass. There she is, on the church runway, flashing 69 on her ass. Taffy was a punk before her time.
This is the Gay Day Be-In of 1972 — looks like I’ve got some campy thought buzzing around up there. That gay button I’m wearing was designed by Spin Star. I met Spin in a picket line in front of a homophobic bookstore on Fifth Avenue — I only picket in the best areas. I guess Spin and I were sort of lovers, until we started living together. This was the only Gay Day I ever marched in — I usually just showed up at the end rallies — and that was because of Spin and because he worked day and night for Gay Day.
Here I am at the benefit the Hot Peaches did for WBAI in 1977. It was my last public performance, until now anyway. It was a gorgeous show and the Peaches were at their peachiest. I sang the “St. Louis Blues” parody, which starts out “I hate to see my little son go down.”