Every chapter in my life has a connecting queer, transgender connection,

 Working on this nutty retrospective at RedLine Contemporary Art Center, i discovered every chapter in my life has a connecting queer, transgender connection. i am going to attempt to type some briefly out now....typing live. .. It starts with my great grandfather James L Breese who hosted queer artists and performers .. female painters and rights activists, and black musicians and gay intellectual authors and mad scientists.. all VERY unheard of ..in fact was very dangerous in the 1890s. He documented it all in his infamous Carbon Studio also astonished front-page newspaper accounts. One queer friend and sitter for Breese that made the papers for making ladies faint is Ortho Cushing.

I found i have a remarkable parallel path to Great Grand Pa... Unknowingly, Starting when i was sixteen i I turned 21, scratching my license birthday 1958 into 53. I soon peddled my ten-speed downtown exploring drag and punk bars, The infamous Sid Kings Club another was Malfunction Junction and the Mercury Cafe...Later the Broadway was solely drag shows. ...this was the start of my serious portrait picture-taking life. I shot the clubgoers and musicians with a hard bright flash against a white walls in back rooms , bathrooms, kitchens and alleys. One memorable standout i printed and exhibited was transgender punk rock musician Lilly Rose and her community.

A few years later going to school at Metro state college i first saw some of Warhol's early films. Some shot in my future NY home the Hotel Chelsea. One in particular TRASH with superstar "Walk on the Wild Side" Holly Woodlawn, a heroine of the transgender movement. This really shook up my world. I was raised on Disney white-washed Hollywood narratives then seeing this .. it was so real, brutal, so honest and punk.

 

I have always preferred gay bars more than straight bro bars. The queer bars like Tracks and the Foxhole were crazy fun for all and boy we had fun. More poppers and coke, please. Yes i tried a couple times to go drag..i just looked pretty Rocky Horror picture show...needed a better makeup artist i think. I did love wearing Jean Paul Gaultier skirts and doc Martin boots.. outfits from Linda Dershangs Fashion Disaster store on 13th. We did a memorable fashion show called Fashion Disaster ..Dressing for Failure at the Pirate Gallery. We sewed together wild things inspired by Gaultier it was a smash hit, ran a second show. Staring Kurt and Bart queer stylists to the superstars now.. Mud people even performed. We tied on super high price tags joking at couture crazy pricing ...a joke ..women were purchasing the outfits !! That was sooo fun.

Moving to NYC I crossed with some of Warhol's superstars and became friends with Taylor Mead, Rene Ricard, and Margo Howard Howard who did a interesting early transgender book, "I was a White Slave in Harlem"

I became friends with a fabulous supermodel Teri Toye, she walked Paris couture for Carl Lagerfeld ..fell off the runway once dope-stoned, Carl LOVED it and was celebrated! She also was a friend and muse model of Stephen Sprouse whom i photographed his art for. She was the girlfriend of brilliant gallerist Patrick Fox ..all above would hold court in the back skylit Tinroom at his galley mixing with some of the most celebrated artists of the 1980s. I am hoping to do a book on this room. I have thousands of images.

A memorable encounter there on the street was meeting wild child fashion performance artist extraordinaire Lee Bowery.

My wild and fun friend Chris Makos shot his famous Lady Warhol during this period that i am very lucky to have in my collection from a couple of trades.

Returning back to Denver in the 1990s I met transgender artist Marina Graves in our Northside community garden in 1994. RIP.

She was a full-time walking art performance piece. She said don't you think we need a contemporary art museum? She was on a mission to start a contemporary art museum in..and it worked, we started up the MCA Denver. Our first big fundraiser had twelve ft tall drag queen walk-off....bubble wrap gowns! I was even the director there for a couple of years.

Years later i was at Sundance for a Jean-Michel film when i saw a great great film "Tangerine"

..a story of LA street hustler wild girls. That film hit me like seeing TRASH. So real LA street with real transexual actors being fabulous and emotionally real. What also set me was the about zero-budget production was shot solely with a Phone 7 !...and it looked GREAT on the big screen... mind blowing you could make a big-screen award-winning film with a iPhone ! Very Warholian very inspiring.

That brings me to another chance encounter with the current LGBQT community. DATELINE gallery, RIP, had a show of fabulous Polaroid club kid portraits by a photographer performer Shadow

Gathers.

Shadow introduced me to a culture i lost track of. Most exciting for me was meeting drag performer Hexsorsist .. I viewed his music video " My Mother's Savage Daughter " shot on iPhone ! in a snowstorm on St Mary's Glacier.

That moment and since had blown my mind. Leigh Bowery meets Klaus Nomi. This also unearthed an artistic community of art and drag performers i am very happy to see. Its very different than popular slick RuPaul like Drag Race ..its raw and real , Lee Bowery-like NYC in the 1980s. It's very exciting to see this young millennial artistic performance community in Denver alive and VERY well thank you. Lastly, a couple of young art stars are in our orbit Chella Man and MaryV

a couple from NYC who showed amazing work of introspection of Chella's teen years of transitioning. MaryV was a high school intern of ours that flew to great notoriety including a recent show at Union Hall Denver. I just keeps going spilling out of my orbit ... my dear friend activist amazing artist Andre Ramos-Woodard and our hometown superhero Miss Koko Bayer.

Still with me ? Photographer Shadow Gathers will be exhibiting her amazing club community Polaroids at the wonderful Leon Gallery during the Month of Photography Denver We are going to share a Walk and Talk day cross-pollinating our two shows. Battle of the club kids Polaroids 1980s vs 2023... Stay tuned. Check out the MoP calendar for details. https://denvermop.org/event-calendar