Formerly Known As…
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| For centuries, erotic pioneers and outlaws have made art. Without sex worker artists, San Francisco would be boring! This is a variety show featuring a dozen men who are current or former sex workers and featuring their stories, performances, music, videos and photography. Curated by Kirk Read. Funded by Zellerbach Family Foundation.
Biographies
Kirk Read (curator and performer) is the director of Army of Lovers, which produces arts events. He is the author of “How I Learned to Snap” and an upcoming book of essays “This is the Thing.” As a performer he’s toured with the Sex Workers Art Show twice and will be touring next year with Sister Spit. He created the full-length show “This is the Thing” and is working on a show about computer addiction called “Computer Face.” He is the cohost of the open mics Smack Dab and K’vetsh, which are incubators for all types of performance and visual art. He’s increasingly disenchanted with urban and online life and wants to spend more time picking mugwort and watching salmon spawn.
Suppositori Spelling is a former Miss Trannyshack whose avant-drag persona is a shot of adrenaline into the world of drag performance. She is known for fearless, highly physical performances which merge the aesthetics of punk, camp, runway and theater. She is working on a full-length solo show, which she will be performing at Formerly Known As.
George Birimisa is an 85 year old playwright who helped invent gay theatre back in the Sixties in Greenwich Village. He wrote the lengendary S&M GYM, a fifteen chapter blistering novel that was published in DRUMMER magaine 30 years ago. He teaches creative writing at the LGBT Center and a collection of his plays will be published by Moving Finger Press in the summer of 2009. It is called PLAYS, PORTRAITS AND PORNO.
Cyd Nova – has ho’d his way through 7 states, 2 countries and a fair handful of gender presentations. He’s now a San Francisco hustler and health care worker. He’s been published in some hooker magazines and some transsexual magazines and once, when he was 12, CAT FANCY. Right now he’s working on a zine for infected Faggots and poz lovers called Off the GRID.
Jaime Cortez is a Bay Area artist, writer, and occasional performer. His art has been exhibited in many Bay Area galleries and museums. He has had over a dozen short stories published, and his graphic novel “Sexile” was nominated for an American Library Association Award for gay literature. His art can be seen at www.cortezjaime.blogspot.com.
Avant-crooner and balladeer, Christraper Sings, writes and performs doleful songs with an ear to the great depressed composers of past to modern. Taking performative and musical cues from ritual Satanism, German opera, Black Metal and the songs of 15th century lutenist John Dowland; he utilises a full baritone to countertenor vocal range to build layered, lush harmonies accompanied by simple electronic and acoustic sound arrangements. The effect is at once beautiful, hypnotic and haunting.
Jesse Hewit – Jesse is a dance and performance maker, and he occasionally has sex on film. He is a current Artist in Residence at CounterPULSE, a fellow curator of NQAF, and in the past year has lovingly collaborated as performer/choreographer with Catherine Galasso, Erika Chong Shuch, Sara Kraft, Jorge De Hoyos, and Keith Hennessy. Jesse is deeply and irreconcilably moved by his sexuality.
Ben McCoy is a writer, performer, and actress living in San Francisco. Ben has toured the states twice, the most recent being with the legendary Sister Spit. Alongside baby-wipes, lubricants, and poppers, one may find monologues, essays, one-person shows, and various short films deep in McCoy’s handbag. An original descendant of the infamous Hatfield vs. McCoy feud in Kentucky, Ben’s stories are as sharp as same-day express delivery 4-inch stilettos from Fredericks of Hollywood.
Inbred Hybrid Collective was established in 2005. Our mandate is to stimulate a consciousness of the external factors affecting our human existence. The type of interventions associated with Inbred Hybrid Collective, achieved as artistic concept, constitute a provocation for the public to reflect upon the influence that this immersion has had upon them. Our work has appeared in venues as diverse as the Liverpool Independents Biennial (visual installation),Queens Museum of Art (sound art), Deitch Projects (film), Bereznitsky Gallery, Berlin (conceptual), World of Wonder Gallery, Hollywood (video installation) and the Ontario Crafts Council (visual installation). Uncredited appearances include the cover (and throughout) Slava Mogutin’s NYC Gogo due to visual installations we did through Slurp, set design for the IFC Halloween spot on the Voluptuous Horror Of Karen Black, who we also assisted at the Whitney Biennial, and an acting role in Michelle Handleman’s “Dorian,” recently exhibited at M.I.T. In 2009 we made history as the first sanctioned performance artist invited to perform at the Armory Art Fair, but we are not committed to any one medium in the exploration of a concept.
Adela Vazquez is a Cuban native and spent the first part of her life living in “the island”. The Mariel’s exodus in 1980 was the opportunity to fulfill the 20 years old queen dream. Adela arrived in the US with an education yet without training on how to live in a capitalist society. One thing was very clear in her mind she was going to make it. The punk rock movement and the drugs of the 80’s were part of the young immigrant life that absorbed every ounce of whatever the new culture had available. In 1992 invited by a community worker enter in the Ms Gay Latina contest. Adela got crowned. Since then Adela has been an activist and a soldier on the war against HIV. She started as a showgirl with the AtreDivas a drag group that would donate their earnings to PCPV. Proyecto ContraSIDA Por Vida, Tenderloin AIDS Resources, Glide Church, Ark Of Refuge, Iris Center, TRANS:THRIVE and now Instituto Familiar de la Raza had been some of her battle fields. |
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