Interview by Edie Musker
Portrait by John Vlautin

EM What were the origins of the Queercore movement?

VD Queercore, or homocore, sprung from those of us discontented with the sexism, homophobia and sexual conventionality that emerged in the hardcore punk scene with the second wave of punk. The early punk scenes in major cities were driven by women, minorities, artists and queer communities, as a lot of early punkers came out of art school and were urban nomads. By the late 1970s into the 1980s, the scene shifted to the suburbs and became more of a pasty sausage party, very ingrained with dull-as-Melba-toast middle-classism. The founding mother of Queercore was really the genius musician, filmmaker and consummate artiste G.B. Jones, aided and abetted by her comrades in arms, Candy Parker and Bruce “Judy” LaBruce of The New Lavender Panthers in Toronto. This was before the internet, so I struck up a long-running correspondence by post with G.B. Jones and her band Fifth Column, and was awed to find we were working in a similar vein in different parts of the world. What I was doing with The Afro Sisters in Hollywood, mixing punk and Blaxploitation, I considered very subterranean; I was just amusing myself and my associates. Others crucial to these early rumblings included Diane Paillette-von Heyneman of Nardcore and Homo House fame, Phranc, the Jewish lesbian folk singer and cardboard cobbler, Steven Arnold, and Museum of Fun’s Skot Armstrong, all using whimsy and humour mixed with collage tactics. Believe me, it wasn't appreciated by many at the time. We were out freaking the so-called freakazoids and weirdos, which didn’t sit well with a lot of orthodox circles. Of course, I wasn’t aware I was part of a movement back then. I joked with my friends that in the future, rather than the Andy Warhol adage that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, instead, there would be a new movement du jour every 15 minutes.

EM What role did individuals play in the construction of the scene?

VD One of the tools of our trade was hyperbole. You weren’t a queer in good standing unless you made films via Super 8 or video, played in an art band, created a zine or did zany off-kilter art projects. Through our grassroots connections, we made it seem we were at the forefront of a sprawling new era of creativity. We inflated our numbers as if we oversaw a cast of thousands, when in actuality the scene was quite small. In Los Angeles, the predecessors of the Queercore scene were the art and music happenings called Theoretical, on Sunday afternoons at a leather bar in Silver Lake, love-sexy-performance-art baby dykes Carol Cetrone and Debbie Patino, and the artist Jack Marquette, all close associates of Tomata du Plenty and Tommy Gear of The Screamers. Theoretical was the show runner to Queercore in Los Angeles, attracting a large audience of thrill-seeking gays, stylish bulldaggers, the ubiquitous art fags, bikers and assorted misfits. It ran on the motto “The Maladjusted Rule!”

EM The avant-garde is ever-vulnerable to subsumption by the dominant culture. How has your art practice resisted reification?

VD I’ve always worked with ephemera, re-using props, costumes and sets in different configurations, borrowing from Kembra Pfahler’s concept of “Availabism”: making the best use of what is readily available so as not to require moula, the root of all evil. Everything then was not just low budget but no budget. I rarely looked back, preferring to move on to the next project. Miss Kembra Pfahler of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black collective is, like me, a Los Angeles-born-and-bred native. Kembra, Ron Athey, the fashion designer Rick Owens and I were all born in that powerful year of 1961, and we’re still close and supportive of each other over 40 years later.

EM What is the power of a name?

VD The name one gives oneself, or gives to one’s projects, is the ultimate. Nothing is more important. I’m known for giving people names that stick; I use language in a very specific way. This comes from my background, having a Black Creole mother from Louisiana who gave birth to me late in life. I’m the youngest of four older sisters, so I grew up in a very feminine household, with no men allowed.

EM As a young queer person of colour in the punk scene, what was your perspective on the hierarchies and financial structures of the art world?

VD  I actually worked as a teenage docent at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park under the magnificent Josine Ianco-Starrels, a fierce, dynamic and ultra-glamorous woman and early mentor. I tend to get along really well with women whose brilliance is read as difficult; we understand each other and can communicate without words. My former landlady, Mrs Ritchie, was one of these women. I lived in an amazing streamlined modern building on Edgemont Street in Koreatown that I renamed Homo Moderne. She only rented to artists; you had to have the right energy. The split-level flat was a palace: three bedrooms, five gardens, original 1922 fixtures and a $500-a-month rent she once offered to lower. After years in bedsits, that space was sheer luxury. When she sold up, the new owner, a dirty carpet-bagger, did every trick in the book to get me out. In hindsight, I’m glad it happened, because I probably would never have left Los Angeles for Berlin.

EM Could you talk about your movement from what you’ve termed the “extreme” underground to a place of more mainstream recognition? 

VD Well, I never expected to be an artist represented by commercial galleries in New York, the West Coast or here in Europa, or to see my work shown in my lifetime at museums around the world. If you never expect anything, you can’t be disappointed. My mother would always say, “There are no guarantees in this life or the next.” And as Diana Vreeland once said, “There is elegance in refusal.” That’s a mantra I chant on a daily basis. .