Queer Communion: Ron Athey

Queer Communion

Ron Athey

First published in the UK in 2020 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2020 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

© Signed texts, their authors

© Rest of the book, the editors

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Book design and typesetting: Aleksandra Szumlas

Copy editing: MPS Technology

Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas

Cover photo: Rachel Papo, Acephalous Monster

Indexing: Lyn Greenwood

Production editor: Jelena Stanovnik

Print ISBN 978-1-78938-094-1

ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-096-5

ePUB ISBN 978-1-78938-095-8

Printed and bound by Gomer, UK

To find all our publications, please visit

www.intellectbooks.com.

There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, AMELIA JONES AND ANDY CAMPBELL

PRELUDE, AMELIA JONES AND ANDY CAMPBELL

INTRODUCTION: QUEER COMMUNION AND THE WORLDS OF RON ATHEY, AMELIA JONES

WRITING ATHEY

Writing Athey, Athey’s Writings, AMELIA JONES

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED

Unless otherwise noted, text entirely by Ron Athey

Premature Ejaculation written by Rozz [Williams] and Ron [Athey], c. 1981/ c. 2000; to be published in Ewa Wojciak book on No Mag, 2020

Brochure for Walker Art Center (at Patrick’s Cabaret)

Polemic of Blood: Ron Athey on the ‘Post-AIDS’ Body, Walker Art Gallery website, posted March 19, 2015,https://walkerart.org/magazine/ron-athey-blood-polemic-post-aids-body

Gifts of the Spirit, Ben Is Dead issue #25 (Los Angeles, 1995), 41-45

Raised in the Lord: Revelations at the Knee of Miss Velma, LA Weekly (June 30, 1995), 20-25 (cover story)

Deliverance: Introduction, Foreword, Description, and Selected Text, Acting on AIDS: Sex, Drugs and Politics, ed. Joshua Oppenheimer and Helena Reckitt (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), 430-44

The Catholic Envy of Vena Mae, Unnatural Disasters: Recent Writings from the Golden State, ed. Nicole Panter (San Diego: Incommunicado Press, 1996)

Trixie Assigns Ron Athey Essay Questions, ROD’N’BOB, Infected Faggot Perspectives, Los Angeles, issue #15 (c. 1996?), 4-5, 15, 17

Ron Athey’s Dissections: A Tribute to Griffith Park, Honcho (December 1997), 68-71

Ron Athey’s Dissections: Split Personality, or So Many Men, Honcho (January 1998), 65-66

Ron Athey’s Dissections: Flirting with the Far Right, Honcho (June 1997), 77-78

Rozz Williams, 1963-1998 [Obituary], LA Weekly (April 8, 1998); text available online:https://www.laweekly.com/content/printView/2129452

David Wood T. G., Ron Athey Interview, Body Probe: Torture Garden 2, ed. David Wood (London: Creation Books, December 1, 1999), 129-30, 132

Lydia Lunch and Gene Gregorits, The Violent Disbelief of Ron Athey, Sex and Guts, ed. Gene Gregorits and Lydia Lunch (Los Angeles: Phony Lid Books, 2003), 242-50

totally Rad experience with in a totally Rad Party, Radical People 1 n. 2 (2015), 38-39

Untitled [Day Two of the 10 year cycle of. Remission. Dual-diagnosis ], The Golden Fool, ed. Tristene Roman and Luka Fisher (Betep International, June 6, 2016), n.p.

I’m with the Band: Sound Design at the Intersection of Sex Clubs, Drance, and Electro, to be published with the Chris Cruse re-release of Drance’s Latex Love, from the 1991 album Hermetically Sealed, 2020

UNPUBLISHED

From the Ron Athey archive

Miscellaneous notes, handwritten performance script, and sketches relating to performances with Rozz Williams, Premature Ejaculation, 1981

I hate everybody when I feel like I’m on the outside, c. 1980s; typescript with handwritten emendations

Angry Pain, handwritten diary page torn out of pad, c. late 1980s

Letter #1 / to a pubescent Holy rolling Ronnie Athey, handwritten page torn out of notebook; AA exercise, c. 1986-87

There used to come that point… a lump of numb meat, handwritten notes; recovery writing, late 1980s

The Perfect Gentleman, c. 1991; handwritten notes from session with Cross (aka Clayton Cross, the former Crystal Meth from the Speed Queens), for a Fetish Ball event

Radical Artists and Hardedge Hardcore Queers… Dyke women, they ground me, c. 1992; handwritten diaristic musings on rose-embellished stationery

After years of deep depression, handwritten note, c. 1992, single sheet torn out of pad, relating to tattoo dream: text working through suicide bed/tattoo salvation scene, 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life

In the midst of my inevitable self destruction, handwritten note on yellow lined paper, torn out of pad, c. 1992; first page of sheaf of notes relating to tattoo dream: text working through suicide bed/tattoo salvation scene, 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life

I started off on a destructive binge…, c. 1992 (actual text for suicide bed/ tattoo salvation scene, 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life)

Stations of the Martyr, handwritten notes for 1992 version of Martyrs and Saints at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE)

Here’s the laying out of the symbology, a dissection, of a Ron Athey performance, typescript with sketch at the end of wrapped body and the handwritten text, I prophesize a year of total sensory deprivation, c. 1994; automatic writing experiment leading towards Martyrs and Saints

My life is going by so quick, typescript with handwritten amendations, c. 1993-94 (text working through ideas for 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life, including Butch Dehner, aka George Rausch, script)

There’s so many ways to say hallelujah, c. 1994, handwritten notes for 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life

There’s so many ways to say Hallelujah/ The dominant male evangelist, c. 1994, handwritten notes in spiral sketchpad for 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life

Walker, typescript of performance script for Patrick’s Cabaret show of 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life, co-sponsored by the Walker Art Gallery, 1994

Once in a while I realize that most of the world hates faggots, typescript of musing on AIDS experience, c. 1995

Miscellaneous typed pages of Judas Cradle script, c. 2003-4, showing appropriated text from Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love

Queen Mary Artist Lecture, typescript showing visuals and spoken text, c. 2010

Gifts of the Spirit scene sketches (1-3) and sheets of automatic writing collages (4-13), miscellaneous handwritten (14), London, c. 2010

1. Psychic Death / 2. Where is the soul?.... Why did you come here?, handwritten notes from strategy meeting with Empress Stah in Rindelsham Forest, UK, c. 2012; Athey had been hired to direct her November 2012 Spill Festival cabaret show

REFLECTIONS

The Alchemist: Ron Athey, LISA TEASLEY

Anatomy of a Revival, KAREN GONZALEZ RICE

The Right to Bleed in Public: On Premature Ejaculation, LEON J. HILTON

A Poetry of Meaningful Experience: Miss Velma Jaggers’s Stagecraft, Fisting, and Ron Athey’s Miraculous Acts, ANDY CAMPBELL

Ron Athey Rolls Deep, LISA NEWMAN

The Beauty of the Dork, VAGINAL DAVIS AND RON ATHEY, reprint from LA Weekly (June 13, 2001); http://www.laweekly.com/news/the-beauty-of-the-dork-2133456

big brother/big sister, CESAR PADILLA

AIDS, Athey, and Culture War, JONATHAN D. KATZ

An Unruly Archive By Each of Us Towards Each of Us…, JULIE TOLENTINO

Father Daughter Love, ZACKARY DRUCKER

Athey-ism, BRUCE LABRUCE, revised version of Athey-ism, Collaboration, and Hustler White, in Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey, ed. Dominic Johnson (Bristol: Intellect Press, and London: Live Art Development Agency, 2013), 118-123.

Divine Fire: Ron Athey in Europe, DOMINIC JOHNSON

The Light of Night, LIA GANGITANO

OBJECT LESSONS

Codpiece, AMELIA JONES

HIV Lifecycle Model, ANDY CAMPBELL

Honcho, DAVID GETSY

Rod ‘n’ Bob (Arrested Intimacies of the Flesh), AMBER JAMILLA MUSSER

Leigh Bowery Cape, ALPESH KANTILAL PATEL

Resonate/Obliterate (or, Untitled [Dear Ron]), MING -YUEN S. MA

Raised in the Lord, JENNIFER DOYLE

GENERAL CHECKLIST, AMELIA JONES

Religion, Speaking in Tongues, Family/ 1961-1980

Music and Queer Club Scenes, Los Angeles and Beyond/1976-1983, 1990s

Body (as) Art, Performance Art/1980-present

Art and Martyrdom: Performance, AIDS, the Culture Wars/1990s

Literature, Opera, Theater/1990-2018

Communion: Friendships, Caretaking, Love, and Loss/c. 1961-ongoing

RON ATHEY TIMELINE, ANA BRIZ AND ANDY CAMPBELL

INDEX

Acknowledgments

AMELIA JONES

Of course, above all, Ron Athey—in his epic charisma and profoundly generous relationship to his communities, friends, colleagues, and admirers—is the source of intensity behind everything (here and beyond). After Ron, I am so grateful to Lia Gangitano for believing in this show when others turned a blind eye (Lia has always been open, supportive, and fully embracing of Ron’s practice and what I and my collaborators have attempted to do with and of it); to Sophia Hao (Dundee), Ginger Porcella (formerly of Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson), Jamillah James (Los Angeles), and others who embraced it once fully formed. There is no question that I relied heavily at points on Hannah Grossman, whose enthusiasm has never waned and whose curatorial skills are prodigious, and on my dear USC colleague Andy Campbell, who stepped in at just the right moment to help me make this catalogue happen, with his brilliant and expansive knowledge of queer worlds and archives. I could not have completed this book without them. Andy’s brilliance is such an honor to engage here and in our collegial day to day at USC/Roski.

Thanks to: the contributors to the catalogue—your brilliant words speak volumes; all of those who loaned objects, documents, or memories to the show (often friends of Ron’s, some of whom generously relinquished their décor, former performance props, to the exhibition!); and every spark in the queer worlds documented here who regaled me with fascinating tales of past moments of queer love and survival amongst trauma and social violence—you all have kept Athey’s practice vivid from start to finish. I cannot name you all here, but this show and catalogue would not have existed without your contributions. Dominic Johnson deserves special thanks for his continual advice and help; a more generous colleague in the research and living of queer communion could not be asked for. Jonathan Katz and David Getsy have also engaged me for several years in inspiring conversations about Athey’s work and curatorial issues, and emerging scholars/artists such as Luka Fisher and Marvel Rex (both following after greats such as Sheree Rose and Ron) have been inspirational. Research assistants Maddie Phinney and Ana Briz (supported by much appreciated USC research funding) made the details work. Finally, to Paul Donald—friend, lover, Athey-prop-builder, ad hoc photographer, and lifeblood to me through the thick and thin of organizing this mega effort (including loaning space in his already limited workshop for the Judas cradle and other props)—your prodigious patience, skills, and suggestions made Queer Communion: Ron Athey happen.

Ron has made worlds and my only hope is that this catalogue and exhibition go some small way toward making some of these worlds visible and readable for the future.

ANDY CAMPBELL

Like Amelia, I wish first to acknowledge Ron Athey’s generosity, grace, and verve—I have gained so much being in and amongst his archive and its many pleasures. While many who worked on this catalog have been in dialogue with Athey’s work for a number of years, for me, editing this catalog has functioned as a deep introduction to his practice; I hope it is only the beginning of my queer relation to Athey and his work. Those who are his familiars call him papa Ron, reminding me of the profound significance of queer chosen family.

I cannot express adequately enough my admiration and love for Amelia Jones. I remember as a young professor teaching from her books and anthologies, and it is a dream to now work alongside her and to be a beneficiary of her intellect, wit, and great affection. I have gratitude for her trust and counsel; I know this book will remain a point of pride and affection for decades to come.

Jennifer Doyle, Dominic Johnson, Hannah Grossman, Jonesy, CASSILS, Jennifer Locke, and Marval A. Rex are to be thanked for their insights into Ron’s practice—even when our conversations were nearly, or only virtual.

While everyone who has been a part of this book is deserving of praise, I’d like to especially acknowledge the efforts of those for whom writing is only an occasional activity. Thank you for your good faith and pluck.

Jay Alcazar: a queer familiar and steadying presence. Our shared desire for a better, more expansive world inspires and thrills me every day, reminding me of the many ways that love can be a verb.

Props for Acephalous Monster in Ron Athey's apartment, Los Angeles, January 2019

Prelude

Queer communion: the primary title of this exhibition and catalogue establishes queer community and intimacy as the organizing logic of Athey’s career. This is but one of many strategies that could have been applied to the vast range of Athey’s life work and archive. To this end, this volume is devoted to articulating the various communities of which Ron Athey has historically been part—from the evangelical religious sects of his youth, to the pugilistic music scenes of his early adulthood, and the performance art circles that he initiates and participates in to this day. Unlike Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey, the previous anthology collected and edited by the performance scholar and sometimes artistic collaborator Dominic Johnson (to whom we are greatly indebted), our book focuses on what one can know (or imagine one knows) after the face of Athey’s performances and lived experiences one may have seen or participated in, some of which are documented in his extensive archive.¹ This book, then, relies on Johnson’s book and, instead of covering the art career through lavish color illustrations, takes a scrappier approach with several hundred illustrations, many drawn from the ephemera and photographs in Athey’s collection.

Also, Queer Communion: Ron Athey is not a stand-alone reference book but accompanies the survey exhibition of Athey’s work, serving as its open-ended catalog.

Throughout this book you will read the reflections of scholars and familiars, evincing the multiple and overlapping intimacies and investments of many of those who have come into Athey’s orbit by chance or by choice. In other words, this book aims performatively to enact aspects of Athey’s expansive and heterogeneous communities, to revivify them for future readers who may or may not have seen the exhibition. The cultural theorist Raymond Williams wrote in his signal, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, that community is the warmly persuasive word used to describe both existing and alternative sets of relationships.² Although probably far from Williams’s intended meaning, the life, work, and communal implications of Athey’s art limns out a space to consider already extant and (we would add: queer) alternative relationships that make a life worth living.³ Like a hook through the skin or a message captured through surrealist psychic automatism, Athey’s work engages with obdurate physicality and chthonic mysticism in equal measure, building a makeshift church, of sorts, for the bulldaggers, faggots, and marginalized folks that form the luscious core of his community.⁴

To be clear, we are part of this community, too (albeit in very different ways)—and this book you hold is a reflection of that incontrovertible fact.⁵ We wager that you might be part of Athey’s community as well—related by affinity, curiosity, desire, or something else altogether. In this way, we hope that this book doesn’t just commence a readership, but confirms an extended perverse community.

As a key component of this effort, we are thrilled to be printing a collection of Athey’s unpublished writings and texts that are otherwise difficult to find. Thus, in addition to functioning as a catalogue of Athey’s art and various communities, this volume will ideally serve as a sourcebook for scholars and artists and others of queer communities seeking information about and ratification for historic and present subcultural lifestyles for years to come.

That Athey has endured abuse, illness, and addiction reminds us of the concept of survivance developed by the Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor—survival as an ongoing act of resistance in the face of existential obliteration.⁶ (This is an apt concept to a degree, albeit the vicissitudes of Athey’s oppression, marginalization, and resulting strategies of survivance—all keyed to the specific familial and societal modes of violence developing from and directed at the poor and the queer—are vastly different from those indigenous people have suffered and developed.) If this precarity is Athey’s story, it is also, in some respects, the story of his archive, which is now split across domestic and institutional spaces, and forms the core of this catalog’s accompanying exhibition. The performance scholar Diana Taylor has productively countered the problem of official archives (places like the Getty Research Institute, where part of Athey’s archive resides) with that of the repertoire, or embodied practice/knowledge that requires presence, and sometimes participation and transmission.⁷ Of course, the term repertoire also describes the theatrical learning, enactment, and reimagining of a suite of performances—an apt term to describe Athey’s sometimes recombinant and mutative work. His performances—again and again—relate and unmoor queer, seropositive, and socially abject bodies from dominant cultural narratives that have historically insisted on their disposability, and in doing so clarify not only an alternative set of relationships but also an alternative way of living.

It is with this in mind that we dedicate this book to Ron.

NOTES

1.Dominic Johnson, Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2013).

2.Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 76.

3.As to what queer means in the domain of performance, see Amelia Jones, In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (forthcoming). In Between Subjects was, in turn, deeply informed by Queer Communion and Athey’s work and friendship.

4.On these intimacies and their fierceness in relation to the visual culture of queer BDSM communities, see Andy Campbell, Bound Together: Leather, Sex, Archives and Contemporary Art (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2020).

5.Amelia is honored to be identified with queer communities when the offer is extended. She certainly spends much time circulating within them; for Andy, queer is a primary personal identifier as well as a critical category of investigation.

6.Gerald Vizenor, Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 1.

7.Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 19-20.

Introduction: Queer Communion and the Worlds of Ron Athey

AMELIA JONES

Lisa Teasley, Transcendental, Portrait of Ron Athey, 1999; oil on board, 30 x 23 in.; collection Amelia Jones and Paul Donald

LIVE EXPERIENCE #1 AND FOLLOWING

It’s 1994 and my friends Sheree Rose and Bob Flanagan have encouraged me to go to a BDSM performance at 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica by their good friend Ron Athey. At the time, I’m in a fairly conventional marriage, living on the eastern edge of West Side Los Angeles. Frankly, my boundaries are already being pushed by Bob and Sheree’s collaborative work, which (thanks to Sheree’s feminist energies) is edging into fairly mainstream, if nominally alternative, art spaces such as LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), where they performed Issues of Choice (about abortion rights) in 1992. Issues of Choice, assertively feminist, involved Sheree safety pinning plastic babydolls onto Bob’s body, through his flesh, as he shrieked out the tortuously hateful words of Randall Terry, an influential antichoice advocate at the time.¹

Ron Athey and troupe, Deliverance, December 7, 1994, flyer for performance in honor of Day without Art/World AIDS Day, held at 18th Street Arts Complex, Santa Monica

I would not have chosen to go see Athey’s piece on my own, nor would I have met Ron at that time without already having engaged the Southern Californian queer community of which he has been a part since his teens. The piece was Deliverance, one of the Torture Trilogy series in an early manifestation, performed on December 7 as part of that year’s Day Without Art series of events.² I remember the performance taking place outside of the complex’s buildings, under a tent, in the dark chill of a Los Angeles winter night. I remember dimly an operating table with Athey lying supine, nurses hovering, and body lacerations taking place. The piercing of Athey’s body got to me and I struggled to stay with it.

Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, Issues of Choice, 1992, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; photograph by Sheree Rose

I easily suppressed my anxieties around the intense generosity of Athey’s giving of his body, filing the experience away. I would see him around and about the art world in Los Angeles after that, and would say hello. I felt his majesty and charisma from those early moments, and a sense of awe. I have noticed in subsequent years that even those who know him well show a deference around him, and a desire to be loved.

In the early 2000s, my life shattered just after I moved to the United Kingdom with my two children and then-husband (who abandoned us). My body, my heart, my beliefs, my trust—all were full of holes, penetrated, severed, ripped apart.

I ran into Athey again as he was starting to perform frequently in the United Kingdom, and I witnessed his work many times. I flew to Ljubljana in December 2004 to attend a performance festival, Visions of Excess, which he organized with Vaginal Davis at Kodeljevo Castle. My body, already opened, received the work. Suddenly his entire aesthetic clicked in. The self-wounding made perfect sense, as I mirrored it back to his wounded flesh and heart. I found the visceral, extreme nature of his relationship to his body perfectly understandable and I even identified with his externalization of internal hurts (or so his wounding of self felt to me). After that point, I became passionately attached to his work and thus (as tends to happen, given his approachability and the coextensivity of his performing and everyday bodies) to him.

Ron Athey and Julianna Snapper in Judas Cradle, December 2004, performance at Kodeljevo Castle in Ljubljuana, Slovenia as part of Visions of Excess festival organized by Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis; photograph by Miha Fras

At the Visions of Excess event in Ljubljana, Athey and Julianna Snapper, a trained opera singer, performed Judas Cradle in the deconsecrated neo-Baroque nineteenth-century church attached to the castle. My heart broke yet again, but in solidarity; I felt less harrowingly alone. As I wrote in an extended hallucinogenic interpretive exposition on my experience of witnessing the piece:

While the woman [Snapper] flutters through a weird hysterical version of some bad, miscast 1970s BBC drama (with wispy ahs and huffs), the man impales himself slowly on the [Judas cradle] pyramid. The searing agony of wood penetrating anus prostrates me (figuratively). He grimaces. I grimace. I hold my orifices tight. I am, inadvertently, determined to close myself after all. I am his pain, his fracture. He lifts himself off, moves ceremoniously through the crowd like a post-crucifixion Christ having risen from the dead (of pain).³

And, again, on May 17, 2005, Athey and Snapper performed Judas Cradle in a more formal alternative theater space (the Contact Theatre, in Manchester, where I was teaching at the time).

At one point Athey attaches a chicken-wire breastplate to his chest and smears lard on/in it, then smashes his body down onto [a]… low platform, sliding back and forth along the grease. A body skating on the thin ice of fat.

My nostrils are assaulted with the smell of fat and sweat. My throat constricts. Groans, trills, howls barge their way into my formerly obedient ears. I can't, I can't refuse the incursion. I am permeable again.

Deep...

Throat...

Close it on up. Make me clean again. I write in order to purge the chaos….

J[udas] C[radle] is an extremely complex and intelligent meditation on the limits (or not) of the holy body. Watching it, I became a body of holes.⁴

Witnessing Athey perform in these instances marked a shift in my relationship to the world and to my own body. It is this capacity for worldmaking and for shifting concepts of self that defines the profundity of Athey’s project. His body becomes your body if you are in a psychic place to receive it. The generosity of this project of public injury (where he hurts, hurts himself or has himself hurt, and shares with you) is like none I have experienced with any other artist whose work or person I have encountered.

LIVE EXPERIENCE #2 AND FOLLOWING

Ron* and I became good friends, Americans living together in the United Kingdom (he in London, I in Manchester) and then moving back to Los Angeles around the same time (2014-15). In 2016, he hears rumors that his Los Angeles rent-controlled

*Generally speaking, I will designate him as Ron when writing about him as a friend, and Athey when pointing to his professional role as an artist, even though the two are most of the time overlapping and inseparable for me.

The judas cradle from Judas Cradle, c. 2004; photograph by Paul Donald

Boxes of props from Ron Athey’s archive in Amelia Jones and Paul Donald’s garage, 2019; photograph by Paul Donald.

apartment of 25 years, his affordable haven in an increasingly priced out city, is in danger of being sold—the owner having passed away. He begins posting alarming messages on Facebook about throwing his long-accumulated archive of props, scripts, and miscellany out on the street and torching it all… . His rage at the carelessness, even violent refusal to care, of contemporary late capitalist societies is fully justifiable and understandable, but his posts put me on alert. As a scholar of past art and performance histories, I cannot let the archive go up in a billowing plume of smoke—no doubt rank and poisonous, due to range of blood encrusted polyester, leather, and vinyl costumes, tapes (analogue and digital), and other noxious products involved in the costumes, props, and visual documentation. Along with others, my (as of 2007) husband Paul and I rush over and pick up the archive in several days’ worth of loads. We help Ron scoop items from half-organized drawers into plastic bins; we assist in carrying metal filing cabinets, paper files, and box after box of costumes and props to Paul’s truck and my car, and then to our house a few miles away.

The queen (king?) of the archive is the Judas cradle. I laugh as Paul carries the item into the garage (formerly devoted to his woodworking workshop) for safekeeping, its menacing point jamming into his face. This is our life.

I now inhabit my home with a full array of archival materials, spilling out of the small closet in my home office, with the Judas cradle and boxes and boxes of props filling part of the garage, and large-scale artworks adorning the walls (Franko B’s extraordinary needlepoint portrait and Lisa Teasley’s gorgeous jewel-like painting of Ron). One year into it I am alerted that the J. Paul Getty Center has confirmed acquiring his paper archive (after months of correspondence with me and Ron and others involved), without the props. In a panic, I now have two months to sift through everything and pull out all the items needed for the exhibition—otherwise, once the Getty takes things, they are forever swallowed into the cushy storage areas of one of the wealthiest museums and art history study centers in the world. I compile a checklist (frantically, with little sleep, and building anxiety), re-box the already haphazardly organized materials, and finally hand off about half of the paper archive to the Getty. Tellingly, they want none of the props or costumes. They deal in paper, which can be filed away. Bodily stains have no place here.

Franko B’s Portrait of Ron Athey (2012) and Lisa Teasley’s Transcendental, 1999 (with Judy Chicago’s Domes, 1968) in Amelia Jones and Paul Donald’s living room, 2019

I live with the remaining archive still, now, as I write… to my right is Franko’s portrait, over in the office closet and in the garage are boxes of reorganized writings, notebooks, sketches, tapes, costumes, hundreds of photographs and snapshots (which peter out with the advent of digital imaging, around 2000), bric-a-brac, letters, and props…. To some degree, it feels as if I’m living with Ron, albeit sometimes a few weeks go by before I actually see him (now ensconced in another reasonable rental, shared by a friend who is often out of town). Sometimes I cycle over and we hang out, or he performs one of his world-famous body-work sessions on my aching soul and flesh. Other times we go together to performances or openings.

Researching an artist can be—often is—an intensely intimate act. All the more so if you live with the detritus of 50 years of their life; all the more so when they become a beloved friend. In this context research is an honor, a burden, a fearful yet joyous responsibility. In Queer Communion: Ron Athey (the show, programming, and catalogue), I attempt to pull all this (including my emotions) together into my own version of the interrelated histories of community and works relating to Ron Athey and his oeuvre. I sincerely hope my sensemaking project makes sense to you, reading this now, in the future. Most importantly, I hope it does some justice (albeit inevitably never enough) to the epically florid, passionate, complex, fraught, beautiful, even sublime, quality of this career, this life work: Ron Athey’s queer communion.

PART I: THE IDEA

This exhibition began many years ago out of an impulse to honor the multifarious practice of an artist who has developed and perfected modes of embodied creative expression across theater, art, opera, music; poetic, diaristic, and prose writing; social media, performance programming, and more. I suppose it has to be admitted that, like dozens or even hundreds of others, I have a bit of a crush on the artist—the kind of crush that art historians and performance scholars develop when they can’t get enough of an artist, witnessing his performances again and again, hanging around for drinks afterwards…. I transitioned (I hope) from fascinated observer (groupie?) to friend and then scholar of his work, attempting to place a little bit of strategic distance between us as I contemplated mobilizing this project.

That said, I’ve made it clear in introducing this catalogue with personal experiences of Ron’s work that it renders an authoritative art historical approach impossible as well as undesirable (a performance studies approach might be more appropriate, albeit crossed with the insights of feminist and queer theory). An art historical approach (such as that beautifully extended and queried in Dominic Johnson’s Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey, which we consider complementary to this volume) would in this case have excluded the very voices we hoped would amplify the subcultural energies of Athey’s performance and life practices.⁵ The exhibition and this catalogue do not seek to frame his work in a traditional academic way. To this end, this personal is political framework is extended through my decision with my coeditor, Andy Campbell, to solicit other catalogue contributions that focus on the intimacies and intensities of queer communion generated through Athey’s performances and central role in Los Angeles’s alternative art communities. And, finally, the dirty, messy, personal approach culminates in our decision to center