Kevin Aviance: Cunty - 4:3

Kevin Aviance: Cunty - 4:3

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Kevin Aviance: Cunty

Music Videos

1996

5 min

Directed by Ralph Modica

Kevin Aviance, of the House of Aviance, is a New York nightlife superstar. His first single, of what would be two albums, is based around the idea of “feeling cunty!” — which means, for those who don’t know, feeling incredibly snatched, beat, glamorous. Released in 1996, in the wake of Paris is Burning and Madonna’s 1990 appropriative smash Vogue, queer femme identities were hugely related to ideas of fashion, glamour and the aspirations that came with it.

Aviance is the ultimate purveyor of this type of black femme eleganza — donning fashions beyond your wildest imagination and proclaiming the feeling of cuntyness that comes with being so impossibly, unimaginably fashionable. It’s a political statement, and one which arose from the culture of Harlem’s balls: We are worthy of the best, we are worthy of what fine white women have had a stronghold on for decades, we exude style, class and glamour. And Kevin Aviance absolutely does.

Tom Rasmussen

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AAA: agitating all areas

Flyer for event Kevin Aviance: Cunty.

Kevin Aviance: Cunty

Released in 1996, in the wake of Paris is Burning and Madonna’s Vogue, "Cunty" was the ultimate show in black femme eleganza.

Flyer for event Christeene: Butt Muscle.

Christeene: Butt Muscle

A “genderqueer drag terrorist” is how Christeene would describe herself. She represents the dark underbelly of the queer experience: combining rage with her politics, sexual pleasure into her confusion, Christeene’s music, performance and visuals are about radical resistance which challenges any who behold her. And Butt Muscle does just that. The lead single from her second wave of CHRISTEENE, the video — featuring Rick Owens and Michelle Lamy, directed by the brilliant Matt Lambert — pushes into the grotesque, while being firmly planted in reality. The reality of dirty, stanky sex which underpins so much of queer life. Tom Rasmussen

Flyer for event Karnage: Hoe Diaries.

Karnage: Hoe Diaries

Karnage, or Karnage Kills in full, is the beautiful London based queer grime artist doing exactly that — queering grime. His original track Hoe Diaries is an unencumbered celebration of black homosexuality, with lyrics that race about guys like “Dylan” — “dick bigger than my ambition.” Karnage leads a way in the grime scene, but won’t just ride on amazing bone structure and long hair. Karnage is about proving queers can do it just as well as our heterosexual peers — with lyrics and skill just as quick as any of the top grime artists out there. Tom Rasmussen

Flyer for event Amanda LePore: Heatherette x MAC.

Amanda LePore: Heatherette x MAC

The most expensive body in the world, starring in perhaps the most glorious video on the planet. The legendary camp cultivator David Lachapelle directs Amanda LePore as the poster girl for MAC makeup’s collaboration with New York club-grown brand Heatherette, in a five minute darkly humorous commercial. The video itself, made in the year of the new millennium, plays on tropes of the Hitchcock, the Stepford Wives, putting Amanda front and centre as the perfect vision of iconic womanhood, with a gloriously maniacal twist. From painting herself pink to escaping across country on a blue Transam, LePore’s beautiful nude body in motion imagery of a trans woman’s body around the world. As camp should, the commercial both celebrates and undermines the obsession with capitalism, with beauty, with perfection a brand like MAC might be known for. It’s a feast for the eyes, guaranteed to make some viewers uncomfortable. While it’s an ad for a pink lipstick, it’s actually so much more. Tom Rasmussen

Flyer for event Ron Athey: Solar Anus.

Ron Athey: Solar Anus

Based off a homophobic Bataille essay — L’Anus Solaire (1931) — which draws the erect penis as the sun, and the anus as the nighttime, attracted to each other but unable to exist together, Ron Athey’s performance work aims to queer Bataille’s theory. After pinning his face and head into a crown, Athey proceeds to fuck himself with a dildo attached to a pair of high heels, eventually releasing a string of pearls from his anus. The work, like much of the Connecticut born artist’s work, aims to place a queer reading on a homophobic canon. In Solar Anus, Athey uses self-harm, blood, and his ass-hole to honour the anus as a weapon of power among homosexuals, while also profiling and representing the suffering associated with anal penetration and blood in the wake of the HIV pandemic of the 80s. Athey’s work aims to both plunder and excoriate the shames and harmful associations inbuilt around anal penetration and gay sex. It’s unflinching, unnerving, but enthralling and effective. Tom Rasmussen

Flyer for event Divine David: The Avant Garde.

Divine David: The Avant Garde

David Hoyle is another drag terrorist and, coincidentally, the husband of CHRISTEENE. An utter institution, their 1998 series “Divine David” takes us through the thoughts of one of the most compelling creatures born of the British drag scene. In Life and the Avant-garde, my favourite of the eight episodes, David takes to the street to work out where exactly one can find the avant garde, and what the meaning of life might actually be. Both challenging and beautifully effete, David — in their gloriously heavy Blackpool accent and heavier smudged makeup — asks unwitting members of the public questions nobody can really answer. What proffers is a selection of both moving and comic moments which see Hoyle pierce the monotony of everyday life, desperate to find some meaning to it all. Another classic, it combines both high and low culture in the most acerbic of ways, pitting David as the most human, sane character as they trawl streets through utter normality.

Flyer for event Leigh Bowery: Wigstock 1994.

Leigh Bowery: Wigstock 1994

A queer series wouldn’t be so if it didn’t feature Leigh Bowery. A club kid of the most exalted proportions, Bowery is perhaps the most referenced queer person in history — from fashion to performance, his life’s work brought a specific brand of challenging beauty to the world. Wigstock was a legendary New York queer festival founded by Lady Bunny, and in his 1994 Wigstock performance Bowery arrives on stage in one of his characteristically huge silhouettes, to sing All You Need is Love. "A pretty performance, until it reaches climax: in which Bowery gives birth to a blood covered body — the body of his wife. It’s far from perfect: which was the whole intention of the time — queer mess, queer failure, and queer appropriation of normative oppressive codes to undermine their sanctity. This was a space of unencumbered queerness, but in a world of vigilant homo and queerphobia, so much of the art produced by our community took aim at undermining normativity. Some years before, a video of Lady Bunny wearing a giant dildo in front of a child in the audience at Wigstock had made its way onto 20/20 as religious propaganda, making queers out as pedophiles. Instead of stepping away from those labels, performers like Bowery and Bunny stepped into them — making art which shows the absolute ridiculousness of any such association Tom Rasmussen

Flyer for event Big Freedia: Gin in my System.

Big Freedia: Gin in my System

Freedia is widely credited with popularising bounce music, which found its roots in the New Orleans underground in the early nineties. While her detractors would file her music under the “sissy bounce” side of the genre, Freedia maintains that it’s all bounce, that there’s no need for the division. For those in the know, Freedia was a cult icon before she featured as a voice over along side Messy Mya on Beyonce’s Formation single. From performing raucous, sexually aggressive sets at Berghain to collaborating with RuPaul, Freedia is known for her high energy voice and sexually explicit lyrics which position her as a proudly sexual body. As a gay man who’s gender performance is far from binary, however, her spirited words and characteristic voice have often been used by mainstream artists who don’t necessarily want to platform Freedia’s image, it straying too far from the acceptable realms of the mainstream as a black queer body. Freedia continues to push for her representation, “that’s something we’re steady working towards to make it happen,” she told The Fader. Gin in My System is one of Freedia’s original hits, and the video which features people ass-bouncing across a bunch of Freedia’s gigs, a trademark of a devoted Freedia audience. Tom Rasmussen

Flyer for event Brendan Maclean: House of Air.

Brendan Maclean: House of Air

A history lesson in the semiotics and signifiers of gay sex. Both educational and entertaining. The music video for Maclean’s House of Air directed by Brian Fairbairn and Karl Eccleston takes sexual acts that might be deemed grotesque or extreme and splashes them with comedy, and thus humanity. From poo on a face to deep anal fisting, the video removes these acts from the pornographic sphere — instead serving as an enlightening tool for those who ask one too many questions. It’s radical in its content but accessible in its tone, treading the line perfectly it asks not for approval because it doesn’t give the viewer the opportunity to give it. Approval lies with the artists in the video. It’s much more than just the sum of its parts, however, and it depicts casually perhaps what the ever elusive idea of acceptance might mean: allowing the transgressive to exist happily, not shamefully. Tom Rasmussen

Flyer for event Divine: You think you’re a man.

Divine: You think you’re a man

The Baltimore babe, who rose to fame as the grotesque star of John Waters’ Pink Flamingos — in which she ate a dog shit — Divine was the most glorious of cultural agitators of the 60s, 70s and 80s. While her’s was an attitude of abandoning cares, Divine was an early example of a subculture which started to venerate the most outcasted of people. In her song, and video, for "You Think You’re a Man (but you’re only a boy)" she proclaims of being the best lover in the world, that these men with huge egos have no ability to give her what she needs. Queer delusion is a tactic oft employed in drag — the most unlikely of bodies and faces can become the biggest superstars, the most celebrated lovers, all while undermining the ego of masculinity. This was Divine through and through. Tom Rasmussen

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