The Quarantined Queens rehearse their production of The Butcher of Las Sirenas in a Time of Plague.

In the climatic moment of Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers, Tchaikovsky lights the wicks of some cannons and beheads the rest of the cast to the gallop of the 1812 Overture. His wife, his lover, his benefactor and his wild mistress; with a puff of smoke, the close-ups of their garish giggling faces cut away to freshly guillotined necks. It’s a scene that prompted Roger Ebert to roll his eyes and call the Englishman a “deviously baroque director,” and one who “sucks us down with him into his ornate fantasies of decadent interior decoration, until every fringe on every curtain has a fringe of its own, and the characters have fringes too, and the characters elbow their way through a grotesque jungle of candlesticks, potted plant stands, incense sticks, old champagne bottles, and gilt edges, and it is almost certain that something is happening in the movie; but what?” 

Something is almost certainly happening in the photographs presented here. But what? One narrative: a cast of wild queerdos desperate for some activity in the midst of a world-wide quarantine respond to a call to pose with little context. I ask: are you comfortable exposing yourself for this photo? “Sure, should my dick fall to the left, or the right?” A meta-narrative: some fags and their friends between revolutions are pretending to stage a theatrical play in the 1980s based on my unread novella set in the 18th century Caribbean. 

Before sipping on iced mezcal in an un-air-conditioned warehouse, Morgan and I stare at our day’s labor: a mess of draped canvas drop-cloth bound by red shibari ropes, some wood palettes from a piss-strewn alleyway now glistening with amber shellac, and a plastered aquatic tail that most likely belonged to a roadside attraction of caged alligators. “Should we drape more of those antique tassels, and paint them? I mean, would that be a travesty?” Morgan responds: “Darling, this whole project is a travesty!”

Quite a lot has brought me to this particular gaudy horror-show. A couple years ago, I was sitting in the corner of my humid bedroom (then newly painted powder-blue and purple), feverishly writing a novella about a pathetic Spanish casta painter traveling to a mythical island of mermaids in the Gulf of Mexico. The work felt like a powerful form of therapy after a string of break-ups, my old flames commanding me to investigate my colonial fantasies and identifications. When it felt complete, I made a crude cover image with a photograph of a raw tilapia filet, beaming with pomegranate kernels like a saintly Virgen. I titled it: “The Butcher of Las Sirenas.”

A year later, I was washing the gold and hot-pink pigments from old brushes in Franco Mondini-Ruiz’s Southtown atelier in San Antonio. When I walk through his cavernous studio (54) of huge canvases and rococo furnishings, I find him lounging on his twin canopied bed, jewels and gilded trinkets splayed over the rough wool comforter. “I look like a troll, today!” he exclaims before allowing me to pick one old-world gold earring to keep. I pin one to my black denim overalls, and slip another in my pocket. When I was a teenager, Franco had fed my first boyfriend and I weed chocolates, and I bought an acrylic painting of his on layaway. As I walk through the wrought-iron front door, he shakes his head at me: “Greedy, I knew you’d take two!”

I asked him if he’d be interested in painting sets for a film version of Las Sirenas. It would be about San Antonio in the ‘80s, a kitschy kaleidoscope of gay iconography; the Pet Shop Boys, but if they were a conjunto band in some shabby cantina on the West Side. He nodded with little effort and shooed me when I admitted the budget was based on “some grants I’m applying for.” When I sat down to write the screenplay, the title took precedence: The Sissies of Southtown Rehearse their Production of the The Butcher of Las Sirenas in the Time of Plague. Nevermind the length, I’d find the slash to place between two words later for my overbearing Peter Weiss homage. All I could really churn out was a collage of random quotes I’d collected from various queens: “Honey, it’s a god-damed mess, we’re gonna have to fung shei the shit outta it!” / “I went to New Orleans and all I got was crabs, and girl I am not talkin’ about gumbo!” / “You’ve got a headache? Sweetie, just roll up a dollar bill and go sniffing in corners; relief is everywhere here!”

When I saw Gered Mankowitz’s album art for ABC’s The Lexicon of Love months later, everything suddenly made sense; this blown out panorama of Martin Fry saving the feigning heroine, a small pistol drawn on his bandmates who seem nonplussed by the scene, the set and lighting rigs exposed. I didn’t have the sweeping narrative arcs or nuanced character development for a full feature film. No, no, these one-liners lived inside the fleeting and mysterious whimsy of a new wave music video; or, the over-saturated punk-chic of The Associates’ album (which I bought solely for the sleeve and found an operatic synth masterpiece my friends confessed was “nauseating”). I listened to those two coked-out twenty-somethings as if some secret was glossily covered in “18 Carat Love Affair.” 

I revisited the Pierre et Giles sailor boys paper-back I stole as a pre-teen, back then fearful of being found-out. I built the bare-bones of a plywood set that could be transformed each week into a different chapter of the novella. I found 30 pounds of antique gold tassels at an estate sale where I quickly befriended the manager. I asked her: “The man who lived here, he was definitely super gay, right? I mean, the vibe is also that there was probably a dungeon here.” ‘Well,” she hesitates, “there were quite a few…dark items, if you will.”

Morgan Landry, who I had only known as a charismatic and stylish bartender at my fine dining gig, joined me one day to help paint. She came to the studio everyday after; and, really what title does not apply to her? Jello sculptress, frozen fish-skin separator, Christo and Jean-Claude impersonator, she-who-collects-grime-to-make-the-rococo-rotten. Alex Hennen Payne, a gifted cinematographer, sorted through half a century’s worth of (semi)functional theatrical lights and painted the sets in ways I couldn’t have imagined.