Questions & Answers
1997 — Burn The Quilt
A Missing Question
One question you didn’t ask, Chris, is this:
“How do you feel about Burn The Quilt?”
I’ll presume to answer it, because there’s a kind of shadowed quality to it as I appraise
it not only as part of my oeuvre but also as the final Animal show, the last piece of
bona fide performance art as such that I have mounted from then to now: 26 years
and four months ago.
The show was a rush job, slapped together in an unnaturally compacted timeframe,
no time for thoughtfulness or revisions, only taped electronic piano accompaniment
that was recorded in one pass with no chance for edits or multiple takes, and the
impetus wasn’t anything compelling from within or need to address an urgent
political or cultural situation: it was that Hank Hyena had asked me to do a show in
his new space and I was so dry and thirsty sitting on my ass doing nothing that I said
“yes”.
I’d been in a foul mood for months because of a schism in the Folsom Street leather
community caused by a new gay biker-ish bar that had been making its name by
provoking and encouraging bar fights among the gay patrons, resulting in some
seriousinjuries and spreading a shit ton of ill will in the community. The effect was
exactly like MAGA: the more gay-on-gay violence they created, the more the gays
and the straights poured into the place, and the more money poured into the
pockets of the owners. I had bailed and turned on the place when one of the owners
(who had been one of my and the Ensemble’s biggest supporters for years) allowed some raw bastard to break a bottle in the back of the bar and come at me with it, and
when I asked the owner to throw the son of a bitch out, he threatened to throw me
out. I went to his partner who was a friend in the following days, and he told me
“you’ll always be safe in this bar, Animal.”
A week or so later, while I was there one afternoon, the first owner came up to me,
unprovoked, emptied a box of plastic and metal with both hands right into my face,
then while staring at me like a madman two feet in front of me, stomped up and
down on the plastic sending shards flying everywhere, turned on his heel and stalked
into his office, slamming the door behind him.
I was dumbstruck. The friend I was with just stared at me with his mouth open. I
looked down at the drink in my hand and said to myself, why am I in this place? I left
my drink on the bar, walked out, and 30 years later I have neitherset foot in that
establishment nor given one penny to that operation.
There were friends of mine I’d known for years who were loyal to that bar that I neve saw again before they died of AIDS. I took heat: “hey, don’t go in there, there’s fights
in there, haw haw haw!” Yeah, ha ha, big joke – but it turned out that the joke was on
us, the people who made up what had been a tight-knit community of men. Over
time, it split the community of that time in two, and although those owners have
retired and those shenanigans are things of the long-ago past, Folsom Street was
never the same.
So that was the major theme underlying Burn The Quilt: the failure of the leather communit to rise above eating its own, to rebuke gay-on-gay violence for the entertainment o the straights, to see how people were falling all over themselves to literally get beat up by the owners and staff. To this day, a rationale for this phenomenon eludes me.
And here’s why I’m pissed that Burn The Quilt, assuming the DVD can ever be unearthed fro the Leather Archives (no response yet from their curator), is the only extant exampl of my Animal work: the show is not up to my standards in staging, execution, qualit of music and lyrics, sharpness of performance, or subject matter. My previous work from 1990-1995 is far superior in my view, and I would like to try to reconstruct some of that for you during our work together; you deserve my better stuff. I will say that the one saving grace of Burn The Quilt was that theatrically it was the most cohesive show I’d done: there was a clear through-line of action and intent, and the flow from beat to beat was smooth and fine. So I’ll continue to bug the Archives for the DVD, for the record, and for you and Aslan to see me as I was at that moment in time, the momen where the hinge had just begun to swing between my San Francisco life and my Ne York life, the precise time that you focused on when you dreamed as me.
Due to the smoky quilt-burning the first time, subsequent performances ended with
an invitation to come to the parking lot and join me in burning a small strip of the
performance quilt panel, with an invitation to come to Ocean Beach with me the day
after the final show and burn all four panels in a bonfire pit at the Pacific Ocean front.
As it happens, the light-rail from downtown to the beach had more than a 90 minute
delay, so by the time I got there folks had dispersed (they were kind enough to send
regards on the phone and understood the vagaries of the San Francisco Municipal
Railway on Sundays), but one tall, shaven-headed guy with AIDS in his 40’s came
late, and I shall never forget the sight of him chanting as he stomped out the embers,
his words lost in the wind from the sea but his countenance aflame with anger and
justice as he paid his own respects and homage to the ones he had lost, burning
blindingly bright, as the sun set on the West Coast of North America limning his
expiation and sanctification in stark silhouette while the waves crashed, crashed,
crashed inexorably and eternally over the continental margin, mingling their salt
tears with our own, saturating our dry, desert, desolate hearts, trying to fill the holes
left behind by our dead friends and lovers with aqua vitae, demanding new life,
insisting that we live.
“How do you feel about Burn The Quilt?”
I’ll presume to answer it, because there’s a kind of shadowed quality to it as I appraise
it not only as part of my oeuvre but also as the final Animal show, the last piece of
bona fide performance art as such that I have mounted from then to now: 26 years
and four months ago.
The show was a rush job, slapped together in an unnaturally compacted timeframe,
no time for thoughtfulness or revisions, only taped electronic piano accompaniment
that was recorded in one pass with no chance for edits or multiple takes, and the
impetus wasn’t anything compelling from within or need to address an urgent
political or cultural situation: it was that Hank Hyena had asked me to do a show in
his new space and I was so dry and thirsty sitting on my ass doing nothing that I said
“yes”.
I’d been in a foul mood for months because of a schism in the Folsom Street leather
community caused by a new gay biker-ish bar that had been making its name by
provoking and encouraging bar fights among the gay patrons, resulting in some
seriousinjuries and spreading a shit ton of ill will in the community. The effect was
exactly like MAGA: the more gay-on-gay violence they created, the more the gays
and the straights poured into the place, and the more money poured into the
pockets of the owners. I had bailed and turned on the place when one of the owners
(who had been one of my and the Ensemble’s biggest supporters for years) allowed some raw bastard to break a bottle in the back of the bar and come at me with it, and
when I asked the owner to throw the son of a bitch out, he threatened to throw me
out. I went to his partner who was a friend in the following days, and he told me
“you’ll always be safe in this bar, Animal.”
A week or so later, while I was there one afternoon, the first owner came up to me,
unprovoked, emptied a box of plastic and metal with both hands right into my face,
then while staring at me like a madman two feet in front of me, stomped up and
down on the plastic sending shards flying everywhere, turned on his heel and stalked
into his office, slamming the door behind him.
I was dumbstruck. The friend I was with just stared at me with his mouth open. I
looked down at the drink in my hand and said to myself, why am I in this place? I left
my drink on the bar, walked out, and 30 years later I have neitherset foot in that
establishment nor given one penny to that operation.
There were friends of mine I’d known for years who were loyal to that bar that I neve saw again before they died of AIDS. I took heat: “hey, don’t go in there, there’s fights
in there, haw haw haw!” Yeah, ha ha, big joke – but it turned out that the joke was on
us, the people who made up what had been a tight-knit community of men. Over
time, it split the community of that time in two, and although those owners have
retired and those shenanigans are things of the long-ago past, Folsom Street was
never the same.
So that was the major theme underlying Burn The Quilt: the failure of the leather communit to rise above eating its own, to rebuke gay-on-gay violence for the entertainment o the straights, to see how people were falling all over themselves to literally get beat up by the owners and staff. To this day, a rationale for this phenomenon eludes me.
And here’s why I’m pissed that Burn The Quilt, assuming the DVD can ever be unearthed fro the Leather Archives (no response yet from their curator), is the only extant exampl of my Animal work: the show is not up to my standards in staging, execution, qualit of music and lyrics, sharpness of performance, or subject matter. My previous work from 1990-1995 is far superior in my view, and I would like to try to reconstruct some of that for you during our work together; you deserve my better stuff. I will say that the one saving grace of Burn The Quilt was that theatrically it was the most cohesive show I’d done: there was a clear through-line of action and intent, and the flow from beat to beat was smooth and fine. So I’ll continue to bug the Archives for the DVD, for the record, and for you and Aslan to see me as I was at that moment in time, the momen where the hinge had just begun to swing between my San Francisco life and my Ne York life, the precise time that you focused on when you dreamed as me.
Due to the smoky quilt-burning the first time, subsequent performances ended with
an invitation to come to the parking lot and join me in burning a small strip of the
performance quilt panel, with an invitation to come to Ocean Beach with me the day
after the final show and burn all four panels in a bonfire pit at the Pacific Ocean front.
As it happens, the light-rail from downtown to the beach had more than a 90 minute
delay, so by the time I got there folks had dispersed (they were kind enough to send
regards on the phone and understood the vagaries of the San Francisco Municipal
Railway on Sundays), but one tall, shaven-headed guy with AIDS in his 40’s came
late, and I shall never forget the sight of him chanting as he stomped out the embers,
his words lost in the wind from the sea but his countenance aflame with anger and
justice as he paid his own respects and homage to the ones he had lost, burning
blindingly bright, as the sun set on the West Coast of North America limning his
expiation and sanctification in stark silhouette while the waves crashed, crashed,
crashed inexorably and eternally over the continental margin, mingling their salt
tears with our own, saturating our dry, desert, desolate hearts, trying to fill the holes
left behind by our dead friends and lovers with aqua vitae, demanding new life,
insisting that we live.