The Time is Now! for nostalgic activisms

“Do you think it should say: The Time is Now: Reagan and Bush Must Fuck on National Television; or, The Time is Now: Fuck Reagan and Bush?” I was asking Morgan, stylish bartender turned studio assistant who worked with me for the first couple months of the pandemic. We were adorning a set for my photography series; I held a paintbrush dipped in bright red, ready to deface a Reagan-Bush campaign poster from the 1980s. I had found it in a second-hand shop in the French Quarter a year earlier, unsure of what to do with it, this flimsy relic from the evil empire.

I opted then for the shorter tag, but the full phrase lingered: Reagan and Bush fucking live on national television. There are times when I choose not to question my impulses;

walking in the blistering Albuquerque sun one windy Spring day, I sent a message to my one-time-hook-up-turned-freaky-friend C, asking if he’d don a Reagan mask and push push in the Bush on camera. He’d be a militant ACT UP faggot, commanding the prez and his bottom boy get it on lest they fund AIDS research. The shoot was thrilling and deeply uncomfortable: imagine sucking dick through the sweaty cut-out of a plastic mask, smelling like the glory days of a dressing room in Cesars’s Palace. It was one of those production days where an actor couldn’t quite be themselves the rest of the afternoon: something had shifted, perhaps casting his long-term low-budget crush wasn’t the ideal first sexual scenario.

Should I have questioned this impulse? I anxiously showed the piece at a gathering of (very serious) international artists and curators. “I was initially very offended, but then I had to ask myself why,” one conceptual artist dyke of my age responded. Richard, wild queer-punk addict artist in his mid-50s, found the whole thing riveting; he had been a part of ACT UP in Montreal — so was he the ultimate judge of what’s appropriate here? 

C was reprising his role as Jordi Cervical, a character I had centered an exhibition around in the Fall of 2022. Cervical was one charismatic leader of The Sissies of Southtown, a group of rag-tag performance artists in 1980s San Antonio, Texas erased from the historical record. They squatted the mansions of the now-“historic” King William neighborhood, where they threw rent parties with bad cabarets and government welfare checks. The Sissies exist somewhere between the acid trips of the Cockettes, the Theater of the Ridiculous, my time working with Jump-Start Performance Company, and my experiences of the informal punk performance art that is inevitable in squats and run-down buildings housing dozens of lost children. But, creating the Sissies was also a tactic: so despondently lonely in a new city for graduate school, I had to call up lineages of radicals to be my community. And then, in the process of asking others to embody my fictions, a new community was cultivated; more simply, I was pretending my way into new friendships. 

For the show, I fashioned light-boxes that adorned panoramic photographs from the Sissie’s final dress rehearsal. It was for a lavish period-piece performance never realized: The Butcher of Las Sirenas. Next to these hanging tchotchke drawers, I mounted some ephemera from vintage publications and gossip columns onto cracked plywood: the Sissies and their antics mingled with gay memorabilia I had discovered from a disheveled archive in the basement of the Bonham Exchange, an ol’ gay night-club in downtown San Antonio. Filing cabinets overflowed with manila envelopes labeled as disparately as “military trials” and “Denis Rodman.” This was all sitting beneath a disco dance-floor where popped-polo collar gays pinned dollars on go-go boys.

Catherine Harris, professor in Art & Ecology and Landscape Architecture, commented that the work functioned as a kind of self-portrait; this felt apt, but it was still one within a form of invented cultural history. And it was one that many people fell for. I can’t believe I’d never heard of them! countless people said to me. When I presented it again in an artist talk, again with a trickster style with-holding that it was contrived, one queer artist responded that they felt “heartbroken,” because they felt like they had been introduced to queer elders, and then they were “ripped away from me!”

Perhaps that is exactly what I am curious about: the ways that archives give us—queer people, or more broadly marginalized identities—a self of self, both individual and collectively. And really, in that sense, we aren’t that special: collective memory shapes everyone, but it can definitely feel more poignant when the archive has been withheld or historically erased, burned, or banned. Undoubtedly, I believe I am who I am because of the work of Diamanda Galas, the activists of Queer Nation and Act Up! My actions are shaped by reading Sarah Schulman; by spending hours with the freaks of The Cockettes, of my ghostly mentor Sterling Houston who initiated Jump-Start Performance Co.