SECRETS OF THE GREAT PYRAMID The Pyramid Cocktail Lounge as Cultural Laboratory Howl! Happening An Arturo Vega Project
captions for the images across from the editorial this will be reading the oppo
Published on the occasion of the exhibition October 17–November 7, 2015 at Howl! Happening An Arturo Vega Project
Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 5
Howl! Happening takes its name from the unpredictable, free-form happenings of the ’60s and ’70s, where active participation of the audience blurred the boundary between art and viewer. More to be experienced than described, Happening will curate exhibitions and stage live events that combine elements of art, poetry, music, dance, vaudeville, and theater –– a cultural stew that defies easy definition. The history and culture of the East Village/LES are still unfolding. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, fashion, and nightlife is even more relevant now. While gentrification continues apace and money is king, Howl! Happening declares itself a spontaneous, autonomous zone: a place where people simultaneously experience and connect with the creative community. As the father of the Happening, Alan Kaprow, declared: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.”
Curated by Brian Butterick aka Hattie Hathaway
SECRETS OF THE GREAT PYRAMID The Pyramid Cocktail Lounge as Cultural Laboratory Howl! Happening An Arturo Vega Project
Pyramid Poop SUSAN MARTIN
Moving to 6th Street between A and B was a real disappointment. It was 1982 and me and Mike Gira couldn’t afford the sublet on 10th, a much nicer apartment on a much nicer block. Of course, that’s not saying a lot since Tompkins Square Park across the street was a kind of no man’s land and “must to avoid.” Skirt yes; traverse, no. So we traipsed over to our wrecked tenement apartment on a block with a social club, an athletic club, and a locals bar perfectly placed across from my digs. I was a broke, crazy L.A. post-punk performance art/new music kind of girl. Mike and I met at a Hermann Nitsch performance that I produced in L.A. We fell in love in the midst of the cacophony and blood and guts of Nitsch’s Orgies Mysteries Theater. We decamped for New York motivated by Suicide and No Wave and Mike’s nose for decay. We scrounged around for money, took acid, went to TR3 and other clubs with Kim and Thurston—following the noisiest, messiest, most transgressive people around town. I thought everyone was an asshole except my friends and they were the finest and most passionate bunch of creators in the world to me. Lydia Lunch had recently asked me to manage her, though at the time, we were both completely unmanageable. I was looking for a place to put on Rhys Chatham and one of his ear-splitting guitar fugues. One afternoon, as I was strolling along Avenue A, I noticed a group of flamboyant people coming and going from a bar. I stumbled into the dark, stanky interior and met Brian (aka Hattie Hathaway) and that superbly beautiful soul, Bobby Bradley. Of course they’d be happy to have Rhys perform. Of course, we could split the door. Of course we did blow in the downstairs office to seal the deal. The turnout for the show
Cover: Pyramid Ad by Tabboo! Stephen Tashjian, 1985 Picture of Hattie Hathaway, Ru Paul Charles, 1991 Weekly flyer 1985
surprised us all and I staggered home from the Pyramid with $600 stashed in my panty hose and a glass of the club’s “cognac” in my hand. I say cognac in quotes because Pyramid cognac was mostly cheap scotch, but I didn’t care: I’d found a home, and shortly thereafter, a job. Bobby hired me to do PR for the club, my first client. Prior to moving to New York, I didn’t even know PR was a job. And working with Bobby and Brian, it wasn’t. It was an exercise in absurdity—a ridiculous expression of the creative juices flowing in the club. It was heady times: Reagan was President, crack was epidemic, Pat Buchanan was preaching hatred from his pulpit, Michael Stewart was martyred, Ed Koch was mayor, and AIDS—and the devastation and heartbreak it wrought upon all of us— was looming on the horizon. The Pyramid was my muse and Brian Butterick was my partner in crime. I’ve been a publicist ever since and I have never been able to duplicate the magic—attitude, satire, and “voice”—of those press releases we wrote in the basement every week. We dedicated each release to a theme and riffed all around it. We addressed our audience directly: we harangued and harassed them. In other words, the releases epitomized the satire and social commentary of the club. The entire month of September 1983 our theme was FISH “for no particular reason except a deep and abiding respect for their perseverance and friendship in the face of man’s polluting and corrupting influence.” We saluted “The Idiots of the Sea: scrod, fluke, sea cucumbers and urchins.” That week alone featured more than 100 individual artists, musicians, and performers including Ann Magnuson as Alice Tully Hall, Tom Murrin’s Full Moon Show, John Epperson, Christian Marclay, Ming Vauze, John Kelly, John Sex, and Johanna Went. We poked fun at all the sacred cows. We equated the birth of the Pyramid to the birth of Christ.
Weekly flyer 1984
We parodied the big, slick clubs: The Pyramid may just be the size of the a post-mortem Rubell bathroom, but we all know that bathrooms are the hottest spot at any club. We stretched metaphors, attributing the club’s appeal to Oscar Wildean humor and Richard Wagner’s concept of the Gestsamtkunstwerk: In no other club in NYC is this concept of the total work of art as passionate vision of artistic genius, individual ecstasy, erotic sublimations and protest against alienation so evident. We wrote of Ethyl Eichelberger’s Real Pearls and Teeth of Marie Antoinette that the stunning period piece included intelligent historical commentary, a be-wigged cast of thousands, and a rare personal audience with the Queen... The crowd went wild at the beheading and left convinced that in many ways 18th century France and NYC 1983 resemble each other more than a little. We especially made fun of ourselves and our audience: Rather than dwell on another year of pestilence, volcano eruptions, fashion wars at the Summit in Geneva, Hurricane Gloria’s being such a bust, David Lee Roth’s bald spot and Stephen Stills’ inability to sing on key when you loved CSN so much... A release entitled The Pyramid Wants to Be Your Eyeglasses —Even if You Don’t Need Them starts this way: Our lives are but the briefest flicker in Time and in order not to squander one precious moment, the Pyramid advises everyone to think deeply about the CONTENT submerged below the stylish façade of everyday life. We don’t like to READ you. The laundry list of terrors of modern day life are what bars are for: To comfort. To offer solice. To provide amusement. We know our place, but can’t help being uppity. We like to make strong statements because it stimulates debate. We like debate because it stirs up ideas. Sound pretentious, you say? Too intellectual? Too boring for words? Well, when you’ve seen it all and done it all, remember,
Bobby Bradley, Marty, and Twinkle from Beaut
nothing is TOO SACRED to be spared the razor-sharp scrutiny of the Pyramid—not even YOU! Bobby eventually fired and then rehired me. Thank you Michael Musto for reminding me in Downtown. What I do remember is that we changed the name of the releases to Pyramid Poop deliberating using the Volume and Number system of scholarly periodicals.
Music calendar designed by Julie Hair, 1988
This Volume sums up the spirit of my collaboration with Brian and Bobby and all the drag queens and poets and playwrights and musicians and bar dancers and artistes that changed my life. I offer it now as a taste of what this exhibition and those times meant to all of us:
Whitewashing the Picket Fence Today there is a frightening, new unity in the vast morass of public opinion. The powers-that-be have tarted up the crumbling picket fence enclosing America by telling and selling you your own selfimage. Your ideology is weight-trained by the laconic muscularity of Sly Stallone. Your sexuality is transplanted onto the gyrating hips of Jane Fonda and Jamie Lee Curtis. On the street, a dingy gay bathhouse gives way in three days to a neon-embossed girlie review. On TV, newspeak informs us that Mrs. Reagan won the day in her evening-wear from Paris. In print, The New York Times Magazine says renew your Visa card and you, too, can live the “bohemian life.” Well, listen and learn! Thought isn’t stifled. Style isn’t dictated. Fun isn’t dead. In memory of this encroachingly holy season, go back to your own Amerikan dream house and speak your mind! Tell us who, what, and where you are. Give us hell, complain, write that letter to the editor. Then, refreshed from this soul-searching endeavor, come down to the Pyramid where the partisans of the American cultural war are fighting for your rights. And on the way, pick up a can of white paint—so in one evening you can find out how to make your outside as pretty as what lives within. The Editors, Brian Butterick and Susan Martin
Three Nights / Three Artists: The Pyramid, 1985 C.CARR
I began covering the East Village clubs (The Pyramid, 8BC, WOW, Limbo Lounge, Club Chandalier, Darinka) for The Village Voice in summer, 1985. These are excerpts from my column, “On Edge,” written in August and September of that year. JOHN SEX: The pompadour deserves a place in the history of great ideas. No one realized this till John Sex sharpened his hair, exaggerating the outlandish essence of the sex god. It crests a foot above his forehead like a wave about to crash. Last week at the Pyramid Club, in this hair plumage like a courting bird’s, in a broad-shouldered tuxedo jacket encrusted with little lights, John Sex hit the stage singing no one does the shing-a-ling like he does. Small leap of faith to ask in the face of so extravagant an image, even if the music was—well, less than memorable. This was Las Vegas from another planet, Sex working through eight songs of either awesome schmaltz or vulgarity —from the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme to the X-rated “Hustle with the Muscle.” He dropped the electric Liberace coat, asked us to applaud it, and danced loose as a go-go boy in front of his three-woman back-up group, The Bodacious Ta-Tas. “I want what I’ve got!” he sang. That’s the secret of his sex appeal. He called it the story of his life. His act celebrates a pansexuality even though a few songs reaffirm everything Frankie Avalon ever believed. This teen dream is a freak, delighting in his sexiness and everyone else’s: “I’ve got it and it’s alright. She’s got it and it’s alright. Sex appeal.” ANN MAGNUSON: It was just after 2 a.m. at the Pyramid Club when a guy dressed like Prince (ruffle, black patterned stockings) appeared onstage to claim that just
Black Lips invite, 1992
like God created Eve, he had created...Fallopia. Enter Ann Magnuson. Fallopia looked down on us slobs, not a megasuperstar in the bunch. Dancing to “Love Slave” in Dolly Parton wig, garter belt, and push-up bra, she was pure Object. So it was her job—and a job well done—to stay coolly distant while singing of how much she wanted to fuck. She told us how great it was to know that she wasn’t as poor as us—and had we seen all the magazine covers she was on? From Redbook to Field and Stream? Fallopia is pretzel logic, proudly informing us that her act— according to Newsweek—is “a witty send-up of sexuality.” And if we couldn’t see the socio-political implications, then “fuck you up the ass!’’ Sure—she might be “made for modern man, part of God’s sexy plan,’’ as she sings in her opening disco number. But the marriage she was planning, to an actor who beats up paparazzi because he’s living “on the edge,” is basically a good career move. Unfortunately, neither Madonna nor a single corseted celeb was on the premises to get offended at this parody. Or revel in the publicity. With Fallopia, Magnuson mocks both male fantasy and the women who excel in the ancient art of manipulating it. ETHYL EICHELBERGER: Ethyl Eichelberger thinks that at this point in his life he should play both women and men. So when he hit 40 two weeks ago, he did his own variation on King Lear at 8BC. Leer he called it. With a cast of one. That way, he got to do Cordelia too, which “made playing a man easier.” So he told me later... A couple of nights earlier I’d stopped in at the Pyramid Club to see a drag version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written in Cliff Notes chunks attributed to a certain “Joey.” I stayed only for the 13-minute first act, in which Ethyl played Queen Hippolyta, and I couldn’t always catch what was on the somewhat muddy prerecorded tape. (“That’s to prevent
John Sex invite
improvising. We have to keep it short,” the doorman told me.) But the style was pure pose, a distance mocking comment on all the characters. Ethyl’s “Minnie the Maid” performance at 8BC the weekend before (and also performed at the Pyramid) was a completely different sort of theater. That both were “drag” describes nothing. Minnie had finally appeared to a thinned out crowd at three in the morning, wearing a short black dress, fishnet stockings, and huge silver wig entwined with black feathers. Accompanying herself on accordion, she sang about love, about how she’s “never said no” but never found the right man either. Would she never find The One? Suddenly Ethyl himself came into focus. Said probably we thought we were gonna see some classy drag act. And he reeled off a line each from Bette Davis, Diana Ross, Mae West et al. But no. Ethyl’s never been a female impersonator, just an actor who wants to play great women. And men. He shifted back into Minnie, who did another verse on love lost. She told of finding happiness at hairdressing school, because the teacher was a queen “nellier than me. Who said, ‘The hair has no brain,’ and I thought, ‘I’m home.’ ” Actually that was Ethyl, licensed hairdresser, speaking. Minnie/Ethyl then sat down at the old upright piano to do a song on what her/his mother had told him/her about love— that friends were the most important thing—and then s/he pointed out the people in the audience who were friends, saying why they were friends. Ethyl said later, “Minnie is me.” C.Carr (Cynthia Carr) is the author, most recently, of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz.
Honeymoon Killers flyer
The Pyramid’s Scheme DAN CAMERON
One of the leftover myths of 1970s and 1980s New York nightlife that still retains a grip on the collective imagination is that of the supposedly restrictive door policies at the hottest clubs. From Studio 54 and the Mudd Club to Nell’s and Limelight at their late-80s peak, what all the legendary clubs shared was a policy of only admitting those who could pass muster with whomever was minding the front door. From that perspective, the Pyramid Lounge’s door philosophy was emphatically the opposite of exclusive, and more a matter of ascertaining whether the would-be entrants were sure they really knew what was taking place on the other side of the door. Queen or butch, twink or bear; stoner, popper, boozer or straight edge—all were welcome, along with a smattering of geeks and the occasional skaters and post-punks. The only folks who seemed out of place were the ones who had come to be seen in a cool spot, since the Pyramid in its glory days was the diametrical opposite of cool. Oddly, even the Pyramid’s identity as a gay bar was relatively opaque, in the sense that not a lot of cruising went on there, at least in comparison to The Bar or Boy Bar. It seems in retrospect like the Pyramid served primarily as hangout and laboratory for the lunatic fringe of the downtown music, theater, art and performance communities of the 1980s and 1990s, becoming in the process a New York cultural institution whose impact, in retrospect, towers over more than a few of the more upscale artistic venues— the ones whose revenue stream was not entirely based on pouring drinks. I didn’t really consider myself a Pyramid regular, yet when I think back on some of the indelible performances I witnessed, it sometimes seems like I was there every other night. A slashing 3 Teens Kill 4 performance, with
Julie Hair, Paula Now, RuPaul Charles Photo by Lynn Grabowski, 1984
David Wojnarowicz holding a transistor radio up to the microphone between verses, is still a recurring motif in my dreams today. The foul-mouthed, sharp-witted Hedda Lettuce, brilliantly lampooning gay-straight/drag-butch dichotomies, seemed to have been transported to Avenue A direct from an off-color Catskills club act of the postLenny Bruce era. If a time machine was invented tomorrow, I would use it to go back and witness every installment of John Jesurun’s obliquely surreal serial Chang in a Void, a new chapter of which was showcased monthly (as it is I’m fortunate I was able to have seen two episodes). I’m also fairly certain that the one occasion I was able to experience a slide projection of Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency—before the images became pricey framed photos—as at the Pyramid, and I have a very distinct memory of chatting with Pat Hearn while waiting for Leigh Bowery to come onstage. . .or was it John Kelly performing as Joni Mitchell? Depending on the night, one of a regular procession of musical acts that preferred the Pyramid’s intimacy might tear through a set, but at its heart the club served as incubator for a new generation of drag artists. The quintessential event at Pyramid was the evening-long revue, often a benefit for which a $5 cover was forked over at the door, and in which some combination of Lady Bunny, RuPaul, Mistress Formika, Lypsinka, Tabbooo!, Sherry Vine, Anita Greencard, Ethel Jean Merman, or International Chrysis would emerge onto the stage and deliver a polished gender-bending spectacle, often in under 10 minutes. I often envisioned the backstage dressing room as a military-level operation, considering the sheer volume and quantity of wigs, gowns, props and effects that followed one another onstage in a series of impressive feats of synchronicity. When I finally did make it behind the curtain one night, the darkness, clutter and claustrophobia permanently shattered that fantasy, while dramatizing the artistry of the illusion.
Poster for Drag Queen Marathon, 1986
Like much of underground NYC in the mid-late 1980s and early 1990s, the mood at the Pyramid was one of unflinching, purposeful defiance. AIDS was very much a part of everybody’s world by the time the Pyramid reached its peak, ca. 1984-1986, and although it would hardly be accurate to suggest that anybody left their suffering at the door, what prevailed inside was driven by a kind of gallows hilarity, a feeling that with so many of us already gone or marked for death, the only thing that truly made sense was the assertion of the vitality of the sexual outlaw, the experimental queer, and the gender rebel. ‘Celebratory’ isn’t precisely the right description of the ambiance, despite the fact that everybody did whatever was necessary to maintain high spirits and a light touch. In truth, fury was barely concealed beneath some of those sequined headdresses, but ingenuity remained the byword for transforming the helplessness generated by the barely concealed homophobia of Reagan’s second administration into a force to be reckoned with: wicked, all-enveloping glee at the seemingly illicit knowledge that the truly indispensable minorities will always have the last laugh. With the culture war raging around us, both clientele and talent at Pyramid Lounge were in the front lines of envisioning a future in which sexual identities can be mutable and fluid, so long as the core identity remains crystal clear. In the interest of full disclosure, it should be added that, like so many other downtown denizens of the period, I too had a band in the late 1980s, and sometimes it seemed that all would be well if only I could secure a booking for Infra-Dig at the Pyramid. I dropped off demo tapes, wheat pasted flyers, made phone calls, and tried to be as gently wheedling as I could whenever I saw Brian Butterick—all to no avail. In retrospect, there were any number of reasons why my band would never fit on a bill at the Pyramid, but the fact that Infra-Dig did play bigger clubs around town, not to mention every other dive in the neighborhood—8BC, Limbo Lounge, CBGB, Cat Club, Kamikazee—made the Pyramid’s
Faux Art Show invite, 1982
resistance that much more bewildering. What I came to understand, however, was that not unlike its door policy, Brian’s philosophy about booking talent seemed to grow naturally from the idea of exclusion: if no other place knew what to do with you, then maybe you had a decent shot at getting your foot in the door. The stranger and more outré your gift, the more likely it was that you would fit into the bill at 101 Avenue A. In fact, before that fevered decade had come to an halt, I’d already set the wheat paste aside, bid farewell to rented equipment vans and rehearsal rooms, and happily joined the ranks of those Ethyl Eichelberger and Wendy Wild fans who appeared on the Pyramid’s doorstep at regular intervals, ready to experience the next chapter of our initiation into a brave new world where queens are universally beloved and drag is high art. It all happened in such miniscule increments that today it’s nearly impossible to recall just how thoroughly disenfranchised we really did feel. It was so much easier to keep those feelings at bay when year in and year out, the only thing that seemed reliable was the unspoken understanding that by stepping into the Pyramid’s inner sanctum, even for an hour or two, that future belonged to us.
Black Lips, booklet invite, 1990’s
Pyramid MICHAEL MUSTO
If ever a club had a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland “Let’s put on a show” feeling to it, it was the Pyramid, the ramshackle but comfortable East Village dive filled with oddballs, outcasts, and fabulosities angling to throw on some tinsel and get their attention-hungry asses on that stage. In the 1980s, the ongoing parade of money led to a bunch of large, glitzy NYC dance clubs aimed at mixing bohemia with paying customers, but the East Village scene simmered in reaction to that, providing an exclusive home for the disenfranchised and unpretentious, all filled with a beautiful rage to live. The Pyramid was the jewel in the E.V. crown, a hotspot with a unique set of anything-goes ethics and its own stable of stars. It turned what was once a blue-collar bar into a spirited free-for-all managed by Bobby Bradley and filled with drag queens, performance artists, and just plain artists like Brian Butterick, Stephen Tashjian, and Mark Phredd, all outdoing themselves in creative bouts of outrage. In my non-fiction guide to the scene, Downtown (1986), I described the Pyramid as “smoky, dirty, narrow, crowded, and totally fabulous.” It was so divey, in fact, that the facilities didn’t tend to work, so Benjamin Liu (a/k/a drag diva Ming Vauze) told me he once had to pee behind a pole in the back just to keep going. But that was part of the place’s unapologetic brashness. “The Pyramid is totally unafraid,” said the club’s publicist Susan Martin at the time, which was true, since audiences came there to be shocked, amused, and titillated in ways they might not get from the glossier clubs and their more mainstreamy grabs at boho culture. The crowd that gathered at the Pyramid was freewheeling, zany, anti-establishment, and a lit bit angry; they were tuned in to all sorts of pop culture trivia, but also were cognizant of world happenings, which were sometimes
Weekly Flyer 1987
referenced in the less disposable stuff that went on at Pyramid, the ultimate variety show. The most prestigious offering at Pyramid was John Jesurun’s 44-part “living film serial” Chang in a Void Moon, the kind of thing that could appeal to avant-garde theater lovers of the LaMama school, as well as to the occasional wacky drag queen with an enterprising bent that extended beyond camp. And performer John Kelly did some heady shows there, including playing Dagmar Onassis, the illegitimate daughter of Ari Onassis and Maria Callas. (Kelly told me, “If you perform in a place like Pyramid, you can perform anywhere else”—meaning that the immediacy of the audience and the performer’s unavoidable involvement with them made it impossible not to be engaged in the moment and learn from it.) But there were also enjoyably silly trifles like Psycho III—The Musical, done on a mere $100 budget, though the postering cost a few bucks extra. Like Club 52 before it, the Pyramid was a place for people who didn’t fit into traditional theater or uppity clubs to work out their stuff for a willing crowd who didn’t expect too much and yet expected a lot. And they definitely got it!
Pyramid flyer during the second Tompkins Square Police riot Following: Pyramid, snapshots early 1980’s John Kelly, Tanya Ransom, Ethyl Eichelberger, Sister Dimension, Bobby Bradley, and Richard Baran
captions for the images across from the editorial this will be reading the oppo
Learning, in Retrospect CARLO MCCORMICK
There is no worse stylistic offense in art writing—where critics and historians couch subjective opinions as objective facts with presumptive authority—than to lapse into the first person. Perhaps “we” to include the reader in what we all know to be true, or even “one” as might signify anyone as kind of everyone, but never “I,” like this is what I think or feel. That’s a kind of disclaimer, a way of saying we know better but in the case of the Pyramid Lounge I can only talk about it as something I experienced. As the curator of this exhibition said to me the other day, “you were like the baby who grew up there.” Perhaps not the most flattering quote, but true enough to merit repeating. I began working in downtown nightclubs when I was just a teenager, and if not still a teen when I worked at Pyramid I wasn’t far into my twenties. In hindsight I can only presume the charms of youth—a manic degree of energy and enthusiasm as well as the inescapable fact, so often wasted on the young, you’re still kind of cute at that age—which must have made up for the fact that I was no doubt as annoyingly stupid as a kid can be. If it were not such a generational trauma that we lost mostly everyone who made up our social life in those years way too early in their most promising and beautiful lives, I could take some comfort there are not so many around today to remind me how totally uncool I was then. The point is that a lot of what I experienced, wideeyed and eager as I must have been, I didn’t fathom in the least. It’s taken the better part of my life since then, and the community-gutting extinguishing of so many other lives, for me to understand what little I do. My first real club job was just a couple blocks away from the Pyramid, in the basement of a Polish church named for its address on Saint Marks Place “Club 57.” It was a legendary
Weekly Flyer 1984
venue of the downtown demimonde. I’d be considered very fortunate to land the job I had there, working everyday, be it as doorman, promoter, booker or curator, if not for the sad fact that its glory days were long over. It’s biggest stars like Ann Magnuson, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf had not only moved on but would never go back there for any reason. We still had some magnificent people about however; troopers happy for any gig and not likely to hold a grudge against the clueless kids who had no knowledge of whatever bad blood lay in its past. It was through some Club 57 veterans like John Sex and Jayne County, and via that loose fabric of commonality that exists in any vibrant neighborhood, that I learned how most of the talent was busy having fun at this new place around the corner. I ended up asking Hattie Hathaway from Pyramid to be in one of the art shows I was putting on, and through her managed to first trip my way down that most magical rabbit hole. So here’s what I didn’t really comprehend at the time: 1. The raptures and pleasures found in the abandonment to a moment, that impossible bond we can only call the zeitgeist, the brilliant stupidity we embrace as both a negation of everything we’ve been taught and a paradigm for a new kind of discovery, the exceptional thrill when everyone is so creative and doing what they do for their friends that there is no such thing as an “audience,” the compression of so much energy in so brief an instant that even a week past might seem a lifetime away—these things are neither easy nor common. Because everyone was working so insanely hard on their craft, often in those early years without technical ability or finances, because things were done for art rather than money, and because everything we did, from the drugs we took to the way we dressed was an expression of our difference, the party belied the intense dedication of its participants. I remember meeting people who just seemed old to me (probably younger than most of us now) and who had commuted a great distance just for a night at the Pyramid or had moved halfway across the globe just to be in the
Weekly Flyer 1984
East Village then, and I couldn’t understand what they were doing there. Little did I know how rare this occasion was, and taking it all for granted, how lucky I was to be there. 2. That culture thrives in chaos. I remember going to see friends from the Pyramid at more established venues in these years and thinking how the shows just weren’t that great. Sure it was nice to see people up on a big stage in a proper theater with an attentive audience that didn’t talk to each other during the performance and applauded at the appropriate moments, but it was all so polite, antiseptic and sober it bored the fuck out of me. When I think of the remarkable explosion of performance art during that era, with the aggressive and anarchic vernaculars unleashed by the likes of Karen Finley, Tom Murrin, Ethyl Eichelberger, Tabbooo!, Les Ballet Trockadero, John Kelly and Kembra Pfahler, a great part of its visceral appeal was because it had to compete with the unruly energies and diminished attention spans of a crowd that was really drunk and pissed off that the DJ wasn’t playing music at that moment. Eventually most of the serious artists would of course migrate to the more conventional and helpful venues like Dance Theater Workshop or PS 122, but the edge they brought with them to these more serious spaces came straight from the clubs. 3. Sexuality could be a lot more complex than the simple binary gay/straight perspective of mainstream culture, and that a lot of the complications that people either didn’t perceive or understand had as much to do with fundamental issues of identity and politics as with the specifics of any particular sexual proclivity. What I could never have understood at the time because really none of us had all the information to realize what was happening in our midst, was that the East Village in the Early Eighties gave birth to something far more meaningful in terms of cultural currency than the simple dichotomy of hetero and homo sexualities. Here was ground zero for Queer identity politics. I first registered this difference when a bunch of us met up at
Ethyl Eichelberger residency 1983
Pyramid one late afternoon and traipsed over to a famous gay club on the West Side to see one of our all-time favorite house performers Tanya Ransom do a show. It was a nothing event really, but it constituted an act of assault and borderline rage that was unmistakable in its context. On a bill that included the predictable assortment of frilly drag queens lip-synching to the likes of Judy Garland songs came out Tanya like a hardcore riot, dressed not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you, sexy and scary singing a perfect Nina Hagen cover of “White Punks on Dope”. To say that everyone in the room absolutely hated her performance except for us would be something of an understatement. Yes, it was in some ways a matter of taste—that we listened to different music, lived in shabbier apartments and dressed/lived/ loved in more unconventional ways than they did just across town—but this crucial distinction of lifestyle mattered more than you could imagine. We were all freaks in one way or another, regardless of whomever we slept with, and in the West Village they were, by and large, the most conformist and conservative people regardless of their happening to be gay. About this time a bit of wheat-paste Xerox poster street art started appearing in the neighborhood. Made to look like the angry missives of some radical extremist group, in part parody but also in part earnest, we saw the agitprop of an organization that went by the acronym FAFH, which stood for Fags Against Facial Hair, and proclaimed an alternate zone of in/difference with slogans like “Clones Go Home.” I never really knew who was part of this madhouse membership. I did eventually learn that Keith Haring was responsible for some of the graphics, but I’d bet the Pyramid was their unofficial clubhouse. In the end I didn’t work all that long at Pyramid. I left in an angry snit one night when a photo show I had organized in the basement was unceremoniously taken down because they decided they had something better to do with the decorations that night. I probably stayed away all of a couple of months before it became obvious that I cared too
Picture of Hattie Hathaway, Ru Paul Charles, 1991
much about everything going on there to spite myself with absence. Though I never worked there again it was always family, no matter how dysfunctional that family must be and how sad we became to see all our brothers and sisters die. In fact I met my wife Tessa Hughes-Freeland there all those years ago when, looking for people to be in a Chic video that was shooting at the Roxy that morning (but a few hours away), she asked my buddy David Crocker who was Pyramid’s stalwart soundman. He told her he couldn’t because he’d been up for days on speed but she should ask the guy in coat check because he’d just taken acid. Happily she had a far longer tenure as a bartender there than I did, as a curator for a place where the art never belonged on the walls so much as breathed through the club. I moved on as kids do, progressively to other clubs that opened and continued to define the neighborhood, dumb enough to only retire from this dubious line of work last year after some 35-year tenure. And of course the East Village art scene started happening, so finding myself slightly better at describing the visual art our friends were making than being an utterly abysmal promoter, I followed the energy unleashed by clubs like the Pyramid Lounge into galleries like Gracie Mansion and Civilian Warfare. Sometime a couple decades after the fact, Artforum, a magazine I was writing for in the 80s, did a survey of that decade by asking different people to remember something really important that happened in that time. I chose the first Wigstock, a relatively spontaneous gathering that happened in Tompkins Square Park one Labor Day conjured by Lady Bunny, a recent arrival to the Pyramid family and total game changer in terms of our culture. Because that was such a seminal event, legendary in the other history by which subcultures are written and something that would soon grow so huge in size it couldn’t maintain its critical mass, I suppose people read it as the start of something significant which it was. As AIDS made its horrific march through our world I cannot help but feel this was closer to the end than the beginning.
John Kelly residency, mid 1980’s
Hattie Hathaway BRIAN BUTTERICK
Certainly we had no idea how this would all begin on that cold day in early December 1981. We were a young confused group, like many, searching for something— anything that would shed some light on the murky future that stretched before us. We were mostly white, privileged, male, gay, and a great many of us were from some distant place. Even those of us that were from somewhere in the City… well, it might as well have been Montana. It might be interesting to note that among us were a great many former Roman Catholics. We were quickly joined by others: women, lesbians, people of all gender identities; many religions, races, ages, countries, sexual proclivities. Really, the thing we all seemed to be saying most frequently was, “America, we aren’t buying it.” And we weren’t. Not one bit. We were part of a Great Migration. Those movements of people throughout history caused by war, disaster, turmoil and upheaval. We were migrating, however, into devastation. An East Village gutted by greed, despair and neglect. And for one reason or another The Pyramid Cocktail Lounge on Avenue A became our Ellis Island. There was once a store in the East Village of the 1960’s called Everything For Everybody. It was run by the Yippies, of course. It offered clothing and furniture at very little cost. And if you had no money, you could get things for free. Maybe it’s a romantic, anarchistic notion, but I like to think that the Pyramid was our Everything For Everybody. We knew we were dissatisfied. We left what we felt was an oppressive atmosphere. What New York’s West Village had become. And the Castro, and Hollywood. And countless
Pyramid snapshots from early 80’s (clockwise from left to right) Joey Horatio, Chuck Schreiber, Mr. Fashion (Gerard Little) The Vickies: Chris Clements, Ann Craig, John Kelly, Hattie Hathaway, Richard Lieberman (Bunny Manhattan), and Tanya Ranson, George Rock
other places. We headed East. Unlike the men who flocked to those places, we loved women. And we rejected labels.
Pyramid Ad by Tabboo! Stephen Tashjian, 1985
Certainly, we embraced drag and what was then called cross-dressing, which many at the time insisted was a crude parody of all things female. And although we embraced parody wildly because we always loved a good “send-up,” the drag we did was deconstructive. More like gender-fuck at first. Ripped fishnets with hairy legs, panty hose beneath Wall Street suits. Women in top hats and tuxedos. Blurring the lines of gender… beginning to erase the binary world…in doing so, we came to realize (more through instinct than intent) you had to own your own gender, sexual preference or role. And this was the last great revolution of the Twentieth Century. The beginning of what we now call Queer, though it didn’t have a name then. All of this was played out against the horrifying backdrop of the AIDS crisis, and yet it was a time of great joy and revelry. Around this time, I wrote this line in my journal: “Flow’r furious before the frost!” That is exactly what we were doing then. And you had better believe they are doing it now. The Pyramid was our clubhouse. Our tribal circle. Our gang-lair. Our home. Walk in the door, you’ll get a round of applause.
HOWL! COMMUNITY
Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker BOARD OF ADVISORS Curt Hoppe Marc H. Miller Dan Cameron Carlo McCormick James Rubio Anthony Cardillo Debora Tripodi Lisa Brownlee Howl! Board of Directors Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Program Director: Carter Edwards Creative Consultant: Susan Martin Archive Manager: Mikhail Torich Videographer: Darian Brenner
Secrets of the Great Pyramid: The Pyramid Cocktail Lounge as Cultural Laboratory Curated by Brian Butterick aka Hattie Hathaway October 17–November 7, 2015 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project ISBN: 978-0-9961917-4-6 © 2015 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 5 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. New York, New York 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 Essays © 2015 © 2015 © 2015 © 2015 © 2015 © 2015
Susan Martin C. Carr Dan Cameron Michael Musto Carlo McCormick Brian Butterick
Editor: Ted Riederer Design: Jeff Streeper, Modern IDENTITY
The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman
Jack Water The Blue Dress by Brian Taylor performed by POOL Previous: Guest Pass, 1984, The First Pyramid invite, 1981 Following: Sister Dimension and Hapi Phace during the filming of Tom Rubitz’s The Drag Queen Marathon. Photo by Laura Levine
captions for the images across from the editorial this will be reading the oppo
captions for the images across from the editorial this will be reading the oppo