The body has a right to be bodily in public. It is our duty to try to remember this and to treat history as the body of Lazarus.
The nightclub's named was legendarily unsubtle. It sidestepped nuance, proclaimed hedonism, and dared one to do more than just say it aloud. It commanded exclamation. Legends survive that way, by being belted out from one generation to the next. More than just a nightspot, Fuck was a bloody, sweaty, and hungry social organism, a kinky kiki that celebrated the queerest of the queer and the coolest of the queer. From 1989 to 1993, Fuck brought together weirdos, perverts, artists, and tastemakers for dancing, drinking, and of course, interesting flavors of fornicating. Vogue magazine cautioned and counseled, Go at your own risk. Wear leather-or less! and Fuck continues to be touted as one of the most transgressive jewels LA's queer demimonde has ever produced.
Fuck represents a Bonnie and Clyde, or rather, Bonnie and Bonnie, way of being queer in Los Angeles that has largely, but not entirely, been lost. Instead of industrial strength resistance to mainstream American values, much of today's queer culture places marriage equality, not public sex, at the top of its agenda.
The legend that was Club Fuck is resurrected by co-curators Lucia Fabio and Toro Casta o in a multimodal exhibit entitled Fuck! Loss, desire and pleasure that blends artifact with art at USC's ONE Archives.
A card-carrying club member, Casta o describes a quintessentially Fuck moment, a holiday unfolding in Hades: [It was] Easter Sunday. Double crucifixion procession with Michelle Hell Carr in Jesus drag with black spiked heels Apex was fake blood spray and Ministry blasting our ears off, revelry in blood bath. [I was] wearing thigh high Wesco engineer boots, a codpiece, and black eyeliner. Blissful! Profane. Shocking. Fun! Casta o's reminiscence pulses with ecstatic and exclamatory blasphemy.
Casta o holds a tender stake in the exhibit.
I saw the exhibit as an opportunity to theorize, clarify, and make sense of my own experience [at Fuck!] he explains. It was so key in my self-actualization, formation, and understanding of the world in which we, as LGBT people, reside.
Fabio, his collaborator, adds, It was important for us no to let this be solely an historical exhibition. We felt that Fuck influenced younger generations of artists though not in a direct manner. Fuck's zeitgeist, for instance, still echoes in the work of marginalized artists like Los Angeles based performer Daphne Von Rey. Von Rey's work embodies her reality as an HIV+ transgender woman. Los Angeles based curator Selene Preciado, who saw Von Rey perform at the library on the exhibit's opening night, says, [She] reminded me of Ron Athey and other artists from [Fuck's] circle. [They] created ritual performances about pain, endurance, and bodily fluids as a form of resistance.
While Von Rey's work has tried and true roots in Fuck's ethos, Fuck's aesthetic has leaked into popular culture in superficial ways. If one scrolls through the Instagram Account of many an aspiring model, one will find a young woman trussed in rope or showing off curves in bondage gear that probably won't get put to its intended use. Pop stars like Rihanna don leather, latex, dog collars, and studs for music videos, making Fuck's once rebel style fit for the boring masses to consume.
Rush Riddle, Dancers at FUCK!, March 1991.Courtesy of the artist.
The Transcendent Glue
Club Fuck's genealogy as well as that of artists selected in the exhibit -- Jordan Eagles, Siobhan Hebron, Young Joon Kwak, and Dominic Quagliozzi-- can be traced to a time before the Stonewall Riots, to a watering hole called the Black Cat Tavern. At this Silver Lake queer bar, plainclothes cops trounced and beat New Year's revelers welcoming 1967. Cops swung pool cues, brandished side arms, and arrested men for making out. That February, queers protested the raid. Approximately two hundred history makers gathered on Sunset and Hyperion and staged the largest rally for queer rights ever to occur in the United States.
This birthplace of queer resistance became the Bushwhacker which, in turn, became Basgo's Disco, a brown queer bar and Fuck's first official home outside Hollywood's Fontenoy Apartments. Sexy house parties thrown at this complex outgrew their locale and turned into a Sunday club happening where bodies thrashed and swayed to post-punk, queercore, tribal and industrial dance music. Fuck became a theatre of sorts where modern primitives spilled beer on leather daddy's cowboy boots, fakirs gossiped with wannabe vampires, and dudes with gleaming nipple piercings sought partners for BJs and barebacking. Disco wizards psilocybin tripped to nearby dimensions where fog and strobe lights replaced moon and stars. Grinning Bettie Page clones with lipstick on their cigarette stained teeth shimmied to the screech of live bands like Pedro, Muriel & Esther, vocalist, and cultural terrorist, Vaginal Davis shouting, She's a real fine chick! She's got tits and a dick!
Casta o cites Melrose Avenue circa 1980s, a then seedy place unblemished by Starbucks, as a critical influence on Fuck. There was a whole confluence of art, design, and music that coalesced [in that area], he says. [Neighborhood] borders weren't so strictly observed and the economics of the time supported low cost living which in turn supported a more leisurely artistic [lifestyle]. Many of Fuck's habitu s and stars chilled in or lived in and around this area. A clutch of these iconoclasts went on to form the canon of Los Angeles queer arts and letters, making work unified by themes carnality, stigma, illness, and death that can be traced to values nourished by Fuck. Some of these luminaries include the writ
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The body has a right to be bodily in public. It is our duty to try to remember this and to treat history as the body of Lazarus.
