Vaginal Davis: Drag as Intersectional Politics (+ The Origins of Queercore)
- keschmader
- May 13, 2021
- 6 min read
Confronting queerness, race, and “the other” in alternative spaces.
(cw: racism, homophobia... confederate flag further down the page)
Punk is remembered as the voice of young rebellion. Blue collar kids. Anarchy patches. An introduction to counterculture and bare bones, raging rejection of American values wrapped in crass wit, played fast and loud.
… And incredibly male. And incredibly white. However, oft omitted are the contributions of queer people, women, and people of color to the genre and culture. One queer woman of note (of many) is Dr. Vaginal Creme Davis.
Dr. Vaginal Davis is a queer Black Chicane punk icon, homocore originator, and instigator extraordinaire. A thousand words will truly only be enough to get you desperately enthralled with her, so I highly recommend some extra research on your way out. No worries, I’ll provide some links to set you off on your way.
Self-titled after her inspiration, Dr. Angela Davis, Vaginal Davis’s career is long and illustrious (as outlined on her neon chartreuse website, “Vaginal Davis Dot Com”): zines, video-zines, bands, club promotions, no budget/low budget DIY film… Vaginal projected the sights, sounds, and gossip of LA punk with a camp sense of grandeur that, in time, helped create a homocore (progenitor to queercore) scene as vibrant as she said it was on paper.
Though her zines are damn near impossible to come across online today, their influence can’t be overstated. The longest running of these was Fertile La Toyah Jackson (‘82 to ‘91), named after Davis’s band member (of the Afro Sisters) and fellow drag performer of the same name.
Reality and “realness,” more specifically their subversion, are constant themes in Dr. Davis’s drag and other work. From the beginning, she brought to question the idea of realness in Fertile La Toyah Jackson, purposefully eschewing and obscuring the truth in place of making the future.
Ok, Arya, what are you on about now? Creating the future, subverting the truth, queering the workplace? Literally sounds like I’m about to get scammed.
Word, word, word. Totally fair. Here, lemme try some specifics:
Fertile was a small, hand-Xeroxed zine that billed itself as the most important piece of literature in the scene to date. It “was a privilege... to be interviewed for it or even mentioned in it” (This Is Not a Dream). In its video form, Vaginal took to the streets and brought trans sex worker’s fashion to the forefront, bringing the respect and excitement of fashion week reporters in NYC.
Independently to, but in a similar fashion to future collaborator and fellow homocore originator Bruce LaBruce’s zine in Toronto, after feeling shut out by the new, aggressively heterosexual face of punk and hardcore, she exaggerated the queer scene in LA—which up until then actually consisted of small shows in dive bars—so much that people believed it. All of these things eventually became true largely due to her vision. Queercore exploded. Her love and respect for sex-worker’s fashion sense spread to the scene. Fertile La Toyah Jackson was processing orders from as far away as London and Argentina (This Is Not a Dream). I’m sitting here writing a paper about her zines like… 20 years later. See?
Vaginal fronted multiple bands including the Afro Sisters, ¡Cholita! The Female Menudo, PME (Pedro, Muriel, and Esther), and Black Fag, ranging from camp bubble gum pop to punk and hard core. This post will focus on PME and their sole LP “The White to Be Angry.”
THE WHITE TO BE ANGRY
The White to Be Angry (WBA) is a ten track record featuring titles such as “Mushroom Head,” “Homosexual is Criminal,” and “Closet Case.” While a few songs off the album, like “Anna-Ee” about respecting people’s pronouns, are sung by Vaginal’s self-titled drag-zageration “The Hot, Sexy Afro-American Dominatrix, Vaginal Davis,” these are sung by another persona: Clarence, a homophobic white supremacist with a horrifically fake, ZZ Top-esque beard (Muñoz 103).
WBA was conceived after SPEW – The Homographic Convergence, homocore zine conference in Chicago. After a beautiful, dare she say hopeful, night of queer community, Vaginal Davis witnessed fellow creator Steve LaFreniere get attacked by a group of homophobes (Davis, LaFreniere qtd. Rathe). In an interview with Keenan Smith for Hyperallergenic, she notes that though it wasn’t a conscious response, per say, WBA was definitely influenced by her attempts to process that night. “... One can never let down their guard and become complacent.” (Davis qtd. Smith).
The album addresses people in America like Clarence and their insatiable obsession with the subjects of their hate (why are you so obsessed with me?). Furthermore, Vaginal interrogates the social themes and structures inherent to oppression in this country, including the hyper-sexualization, exoticization, and “danger status” thrust on minorities by the cis-het, white majority throughout history. Think Birth of a Nation, or white enslavers abusing enslaved black women; the conservative obsession with “urban promiscuity” and their mystically ubiquitous yet equally absent villain, The Welfare Queen; the appropriation of black culture and features while disregarding and criminalizing us… think Hillary Clinton and the Super-Predators, and every parent that has ever freaked because their kid was taught by a queer teacher or—the horror—had to share space with “dangerous, corrupting” queer youth. (“When all the nerds died, all the trans people appeared. Coincidence?” No, it’s true, Anonymous Author on MercatorNet.Com. I did indeed kill my nerd-sona and emerge as the queer before you today. Can’t believe she caught me in 4K. :/ But I digress.)
Where most would expect queer and/or POC people to avoid negative stereotypes, Vaginal Davis jumps into their bodies Matrix style, or as Jose Muñoz so eloquently put it, “explodes them by inhabiting them with a difference,” and in the process begins the work of upending their reign as the social norm unfathomable to change (109). Clarence sings songs about terrible gay serial killers. Clarence thinks he’s the picture of white cishet masculinity. Clarence cannot stop talking about his bandmate Glen’s ass on stage. In the accompanying film (also titled The White to Be Angry), Clarence is also having an affair with a black drag queen (Muñoz 109).
This intense parody is something Muñoz calls “terrorist drag,” or “performing the nation’s internal terrors around race, gender, and sexuality” in order to deconstruct and strip them of their authority (Muñoz 100). There was occasionally actual stripping on stage, but I’ll get to that later? We’ll see. (Clarence really went for it. In the most not gay way possible, of course.) Her work on this album/film also offers important critique of minority associations and relationships with forces/symbols of oppression that I unfortunately do not have the time to get into right now.
Punk relishes in subverting, parodying, or otherwise rejecting/deconstructing or humiliating normative power structures. There is a pride in punk about maintaining this contrarian, insular identity—of being the Other that frightens the veneer of polite society. In the most punk move to date, queercore began as punk commentary on the punk scene that wished to homogenize itself as a solely straight, white genre. Within the performances of WBA, Dr. Davis combats this by once again challenging the concept of “realness” and the cultural norms that feed into it through “guerilla representational strategies” (Muñoz 108). In other words, the performance, the content, and the presentation are intentionally unconventional, strategic, and aggressive. Within the clash is the commentary. There is no attempt to look realistic, and in fact the obvious shoddiness of the drag presentation is the point. God-awful fake beard, camo jackets, reflective sports shades, fishing hat and all. Anti-realness, if you will, exposes what all scuttles underneath the foundations society presents as right, true, and everlasting.
Instead of the glam often associated with (and incorrectly equated to) drag, Davis uses the “backdoor” disrespected (read: punk) modality not only to confront normative culture, but to also circumvent it and create the community she wished to see (the creation of homocore/queercore).
I suppose I’ll sign off with this really great quote from Dr. Davis during an interview with Hyperallergenic:
"By being a back door, around-the-way-girl, I can influence culture surreptitious[ly] without the hyper scrutiny that comes with entering the front door arenas of so-called respectability and adulation."
Later y’all,
Arya <3
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Sources:
Butt, Gavin. Walters, Ben. YouTube, YouTube, 3 June 2017,
Carillo, Sean. “Clarence Norbert.” Contemporary And, 15 Mar. 2018, contemporaryand.com/fr/exhibition/gallery-reflection-4-protesting-identities/.
Castro, Rick. “Vaginal Davis.” LA Weekly, 6 Sept. 2019, www.laweekly.com/event-pick-vaginal-davis-on-video-in-fertile-la-toyah-jackson-volume-1/.
Davis, Vaginal. Vaginal Davis Dot Com, www.vaginaldavis.com/.
“Fertile La Toyah Jackson Video Magazine #2: The Kinky Issue!” VHS Collector, vhscollector.com/movie/fertile-la-toyah-jackson-video-magazine-2-kinky-issue.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Vol. 2,
University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Rathe, Adam. “Queer to the Core.” OUT, 6 Feb. 2015,
Smith, Keenan Teddy. “‘The Maladjusted RULE!": A Conversation With Vaginal Davis.”
Hyperallergic, 5 Nov. 2020, hyperallergic.com/554360/vaginal-davis-the-white-to-be-angry/.
“The White to Be Angry, Pedro, Muriel and Esther.” Artspace, www.artspace.com/pedro-muriel-and-esther/the-white-to-be-angry.
“Vaginal Davis.” Dis Charge, 27 Nov. 2013, delighteddischarge.wordpress.com/category/vaginal-davis/.
Extra Links:
That Fertile Feeling (Part I)
Her Blog
LA Chicane Punk History (Vaginal Davis, Nervous Gender, The Bags)
Zines
PME Live
Dragazine Article
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