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