Behind the Screen, HISPANIC PANIC! and Spittles the Clown at Dixon Place, NYC

It’s the Ides of May kittens and I have lots to share with you! First off, if you haven’t already heard (and if you even care) I’m dragging the clown out of the closet for a fifteen-minute spoken word performance at Dixon Place on Saturday May 30^th, 8PM. It’s part of an evening organized by Edwin Ramoran, titled “Lips Like My Sugar Walls”, and promises to be a wacko, multimedia evening of frisky New York City queerness. I will include the link to the Dixon Place site for you to peruse at your leisure should you want to. www.dixonplace.org

 

PRESS RELEASE FOR “LIPS LIKE MY SUGAR WALLS”

GUEST CURATOR: Edwin Ramoran

 

LIPS LIKE MY SUGAR WALLS promises an evening of world premieres by emerging artists working in New York City. As a curatorial concept “Lips Like My Sugar Walls” acknowledges the primacy of our outer layers, lips, foreskin, culo, mandala, epidermis, and labia. They propel us. We use them in so many ways. We spit, suck, sing, slurp, squirt, lick, fuck, eat, blow, flirt, and kiss. What can a post-punk, Prince-influenced mash up look, feel, sound, taste, smell like? Does it hurt, love, fear, accept? This performance showcase brings together a raw, innovative mix of New York artists. All are contemporary artists who use interdisciplinary practices to produce performative works in video, poetry, photography, and song.

 

The world premiere of Ivan Monforte’s short video “Tres Veces” reveals the artist and three other men in a racy interpretation of Paquita La Del Barrio’s ranchero song of revenge “Tres veces te engañé.” For the first time, Jayson Keeling collaborates on a slide show and text performance with the punk antics of Alison Ward and her rock group The Ruffian Arms. Bringing the immediacy of the edgy East Village scene, performance artists Karen Jaime and Charlie Vázquez, both dynamic writers and spoken word poets who recently performed for Hispanic PANIC! at the queer bar Nowhere, will deliver new works, including a rare performance by Vázquez as “Spittles the Clown”, a fetish, sex worker. Designer Imposter (aka Ramdasha Bikceem), known on the queer club circuit for her fierce mix of dance music at parties like Pantyho’s, will perform new original songs. Rachel Mason and Mark Golamco, who have worked together since 2003, will play a set of their experimental, collaborative music with viola accompaniment.

Here to buy tix: (Hot Shots) https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pe/7094445;jsessionid=E35DA118CF3E75DC20363342F059785E

 

 

Secondly, a few nights before “Lips Like My Sugar Walls” is PANIC! at Nowhere, New York City’s only running monthly queer reading series hosted by yours truly. HISPANIC PANIC! will take a Latino/a focus for the Taurean month of May. Join me, Karen Jaime, Larry La Fountain, and fellow tauros Cristina Izaguirre, Charles Rice-González and Maegan ‘La Mamita Mala’ Ortiz for an evening of LGBT/feminist thrills and gropes. ¡Olé! This all-star lineup should not be missed! Wednesday May 27^th, 8PM, free, 21+, at Nowhere (322 E 14^th St, btwn 1^st/2^nd).

 

Fellow queer writer, performer and whistleblower Brandon Lacy Campos was so sweet to interview Spittles/me for his blog, My Feet Only Walk Forward, which he posted last night. I will let the interview speak for itself and Brandon will be one of the featured readers at DOUBLE PRIDE PANIC!, the June installation of Panic!, on Wednesday, June 24^th, 8PM, free, 21+. I had the pleasure of reading the manuscript for his upcoming poetry book, which I will also read over and review for Ambiente, the largest Latino LGBT culture e-zine.

See Brandon’s interview with Spittles here:

http://myfeetonlywalkforward.blogspot.com/2009/05/interview-with-clown-charlie.html

 

 AMBIENTE: www.ambiente.us

 

This issue’s review:

 Behind the Screen | How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 (Viking, 2001) By William J. Mann

REVIEW by Charlie Vázquez

Q: Now who put the “tinsel” in Tinseltown?
A: Ask Glinda the Good Witch…

 

I don’t know how this book got past my sharp “book” nose, but somehow it did. There are times when I pick up a book, as I did with this one, and just cannot put it down. Behind the Screen will surely do the same for you—and I’m not a movie person, by any means. But, I love queer history. This book, with all of its layers of shady studio politics, art and craft history and thirsty egos, makes me want to revisit some of the movies discussed that queers wrote, directed, costumed, made up, designed, acted in, edited and scored, from the silent era through the turbulent 1960s.

Starting with boomtown Hollywood’s infancy, Behind the Screen unravels the development of the film industry and its transition from rough diamond to sophisticated pearl. And we “fairies” had much to do with this—as New Yorker sophisticate and theater set decorator George James Hopkins learned, when he was called to work in Tinseltown in 1916. He was apparently aghast at what was considered a set in those days. Queers were attracted to this new and exciting industry from day one, but as soon as “talkies” came about, muted queer caricatures became all to real “faggots”, and a long war, in varying degrees of oppression, was waged against the very people who helped elevate the business from crude to fabulous.

 
The names go on and on: Cary Grant, Dorothy Arzner, Montgomery Clift, Anthony Perkins, Raymond Burr; Billie Burke who played Glinda in The Wizard of Oz—did you know she was a dyke? I didn’t. One fascinating surprise after the next kept me glued. When anything queer is at hand, irony is never far away: Mann even looks at how “deviant” men such as James Dean and Rock Hudson helped define “masculinity” for men the world over. The inquisitions of the McCarthy years was a maddening section (in terms of the cruelty doled out to gays) and Hollywood’s connection to the Mattachine Society and the development of the Los Angeles gay bar subculture come off the pages clear as day.

Latinos are alive and well in queer Golden Era Hollywood, too—beginning with the “effeminate” Mexican heartthrob Ramón Novarro and working forward to Cesar Romero—who although I knew was of Cuban heritage, was also the grandson of Cuban icon Jose Martí. Who knew? Although Romero was seen escorting stars such as Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck to gala events and restaurants, he often complained of being “alone” to the press and is alleged to have had an affair with Tyrone Power. Yet both Novarro and Romero came to define the (straight) Latin lover type—hmm, ok. It would be interesting for a Latino scholar to write a similar book on the closeted world of Spanish-language entertainment media, as many in the Spanish-speaking world prefer to watch Univision and Telemundo and go to see Spanish-language movies. Until then, William J. Mann’s Behind the Screen serves as a memorial to our unjust treatment and innate creative power—our uniqueness, that which makes our work stand out as the best. We need to remember that our enemies hate to be outshined.

 

 

Now go enjoy this spring!

 

Charlie Vázquez

Brooklyn, NY

 

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Breakfast in Bed and Spittles the Clown

I hope that all of you have been enjoying spring, wherever you are. The weather here in New York has been a little ‘schizo’ and I feel right at home. So some updates and reminders before I tell you about Lawrence Schimel’s latest Spanish poetry collection…

  

DANGER PANIC! was a wild, wild success—you boys really laid it on them! Such thunderous applause…I’ve come to the realization that PANIC! is the only ongoing monthly queer reading series in Gotham. Bluestockings hosts all kinds off wonderful one-offs and other venues host queer readings as well (the layers are endless), but I believe PANIC! is the only series right now (please correct me if I’m wrong). Dean Johnson’s Reading for Filth does occasional gatherings, but since his unfortunate passing and The Rapture’s folding a while back, their monthly output has been interrupted—so thanks for making PANIC! everything it’s becoming.

 

On May 27^th we’ll be presenting HISPANIC PANIC!, which I’m going to do three times a year—in January, May and September. This installation will feature Larry La Fountain, who’ll be joining us from the University of Michigan where he teaches, Maegan ‘La Mamita Mala’ Ortiz, Charles Rice-González, Karen Jaime, me, and Cristina Izaguirre, who’ll be joining us for the first time. Six Latino LGBT warriors armed with tales and poems of politics and pleasure—save the date (I will send out official announcements and releases as we get closer).

 

I’ll also be participating in an event being staged at Dixon Place on the Lower East Side. It’s part of the Hot Shots series that Earl Dax produces and which Eddie Ramoran is curating. On the night of May 30^th, I will be dragging Spittles the Clown, my alter ego, out of the closet, for a one-time spoken word performance. The piece is titled “Spittles the Clown on Making Money during HARD Times” and contains all kinds of subject matters you would rather not discuss with your mother—most of you anyway. Fellow Latina Karen Jaime is also on the bill, as are a bunch of other people I will tell you about on May 15th’s post.  

Okay…

 

Lawrence Schimel’s Desayuno en la cama

(Egales editorial, Madrid, Barcelona, 2008)

 

Madrid-based writer, poet and publisher Lawrence Schimel’s latest poetry collection Desayuno en la cama (en español) dazzles the eyes, heart and spirit with themes of love, desire, sex and infatuation. He is a true romantic—these poems are sensual, honest and at times even adorable. They capture the contemporary queer man’s longing for, what are often, opposing forces; companionship and freedom, simplicity and adventure. At times his voice worries that others might hear him in the midst of passionate sex; other times he dives into the carnal world of male sexuality with all the enthusiasm of a lusting virgin.

This brand of magical poetry serves as a testament to the complexities we experience as desiring queers and also serves as a crucial document of the rewards and heartbreaks we reap, as men who live our lives as we so deem to. “I have sex with other men,” he tells a man, “but breakfast in bed is ours alone”. Episodes of cyber-infatuations and long-distance yearning ring all too dear and true. Schimel’s fearless confessions of yearning for male beauty—the desire that marginalizes us—is the poetry’s driving force, the wind in its sails, the man he explores with ever-thirsting lips. Desayuno en la cama is a bold foray into queer Madrid noir and glows with the scent of love just made.

To order:
http://www.libreriaberkana.com/buscador.php?searchp=Desayuno%20en%20l
a%20cama

 

If any of you have book suggestions that I might want to review, please drop me a message at: firekingpress@yahoo.com

 

 

Xoxo

Charlie

www.firekingpress.com

 

This review also appears in Ambiente, a Miami-based LGBT Latino culture e-zine: www.ambiente.us

 

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