Shelly Mars has always been interested in what we should not talk about, and as a result, she has for the past forty years faced constant criticism and pushback. Nonetheless, the multifaceted performance artist, who credits herself as the “first drag king,” has been a celebrated figure in New York’s arts community since the 1980s, when her career began. Since then, she has created a whole gamut of fictional personae in fringe theaters and galleries on both coasts of the US, personifying granola feminists, lipstick lesbians, a misogynist pig, and a Belgian primatologist obsessed with proving that the homosexual is the descendant of the bonobo ape.
Shelly’s personae are disturbingly elaborate and just as self-contradictory, confusing, and multilayered as the reality we live in, largely because they often come from real-life experiences. They have crawled out of the artist’s fantasies, and it is precisely this that gives them the power to speak fearlessly, without shame—no matter how awkward and inappropriate they sound. These characters encourage us to think differently and look at what is happening around us from perspectives beyond our own. Such awareness is especially relevant now, when LGBTQ+ books are getting banned; queer, nonbinary, and trans folks face an epidemic of violence; and women’s reproductive rights are increasingly curtailed in many parts of the world.
This charged reality—in which voicing questions about gender, religion, and race is increasingly challenging—has perhaps helped fuel renewed interest in the so-called downtown scene to which Shelly belonged. A new oral history of the Pyramid, an East Village nightclub founded in 1981 and a place where Shelly frequently performed, was released earlier this year. The book pays tribute to a group of artists who, although operating underground and with a radically DIY spirit, defined what we today call queer performance art and experimental theater. Given that it was this community most affected by the AIDS crisis, there remain plenty of gaps to fill. Sharing these artists’ stories demonstrates the transformative potential of expressive, politically charged work and gives future generations models that we desperately need.
Shelly-as-Mistress S at Bay Brick Inn, 1981. Courtesy the artist.
In the few months that I have known Shelly, she has been busy working on her archive and her memoir, preparing to add another chapter to the herstory of the scene. Like many artists of her generation, she was generous and excited to share her memories with me, determined, as she told me, not to “fuck it up” in her third act. But before she began showing me the videos and archival materials from the ’80s and ’90s, we talked about which gay tribes I fit into. She is an expert on characters and enjoys making snap judgments about people. Her assumptions about me—transitioning from a twink to a daddy—weren’t far off. After a meeting at a café and two long visits at her West Village apartment, an area she said “was full of fags back then,” we continued our conversation via Instagram and WhatsApp voice memos.
Shelly’s journey began in San Francisco, arriving from Celina, a small town in Ohio, where hers was the only Jewish family. She studied acting at the American Conservatory Theater, a nonprofit in the Tenderloin. She tried to break into mainstream television and the film industry after she finished the program in 1981, and had only sporadic success. For instance, she recalls one traumatic memory about an agent in Los Angeles who reacted angrily after she sent him a tape of herself in drag, telling her, “Don’t you ever come in here and show me this.”
Underground theater, in contrast, embraced her from the start. The first place she ever lived in San Francisco was the creative complex Project Artaud, where she befriended and started performing with the members of Angels of Light, a troupe that evolved in the early 1970s out of the hippie theater ensemble the Cockettes. To make ends meet, she also worked as a masseuse at the Sutro Baths, San Francisco’s only bisexual spa at the time, and then as a stripper at a lesbian bar called Bay Brick Inn. She also spent a single week working at the adult theater Sutter Cinema, but she had no chemistry with the businessmen who went there, because, as she puts it, “They would just stare and wait for you to flash your cunt for a dollar.” One day, she instead flashed a leather dildo at them, and the manager asked her to “behave.” This patronizing gesture, along with the straight male audience she disliked, made her angry, so she decided to strip only at lesbian bars from then on.
Courtesy the artist.
The first time she stripped in drag as a man was in 1986, at the lesbian striptease show BurLEZk. This is where her character Martin was born, as, in Shelly’s words, “a negative statement about male lust.” Martin is a baggy shirt-wearing, sex-obsessed Australian with a mustache, a “grotesque parody of worst-case hetero boorishness”—according to film critic Dennis Harvey, writing about Shelly in 1995—who tells creepy, dirty jokes, jacks off a banana in a woman’s face and then grabs a beer from someone’s table, repeats the crude gesture, and, at the end of the show, slowly undresses to reveal his true identity as a woman. While San Francisco at the time was a hotbed for experimental queer performance, no one else was doing anything quite like this.
When the footage of Shelly’s first performance as Martin reached German filmmaker Monika Treut, she was working on her feminist underground film Virgin Machine (1988) and was keen to include a scene with Martin. The movie is about a German journalist, Dorothee, who explores alternative forms of love and sex in San Francisco while spying on her sadomasochistic neighbors and hanging out at a strip club on a ladies’ night. There she sees Ramona (Shelly) in male drag (Martin) and falls for the young woman. In another scene, when the two go on a date, Ramona wears high heels and a black lacquer jacket that perfectly matches her shoulder-length, blond hair—clearly demonstrating how vers Shelly is.
Martin in Monika Treut’s Virgin Machine. Courtesy the artist.
Like most of Shelly’s personae, Martin is based on real people—men she met while stripping, to whom, pretending that she had a cock, she sometimes just said, “Suck me.” By impersonating the kind of men who watched her strip and revealing how dumb their entitlement and bigotry made them, she took their power away. Martin’s sleazy character continued to evolve after his debut at BurLEZk, and he next appeared in the experimental film Shelly’s Psycho Deli (1987), which Shelly made in collaboration with videographer Michael Brand. The film is set at a private party where people with virtually no substance are having lots of fun. They are showing off, telling stupid jokes, hitting on each other, and getting wasted. Like in many of Shelly’s later theatrical works, all the speaking characters are played by the artist, including the host, Laura Martinelli Cantelloni Maria Pizza—a young, rich, Eurotrash woman with an Italian accent—whom Martin tries to pick up the entire time by offering her three hundred dollars.
In 1986, the year she invented Martin, Shelly also left San Francisco. She had started to feel like a big fish in a small pond and had been busted for marijuana possession. After finishing community service—teaching aerobics at an all-Black senior house in Hunter’s Point—she moved to New York and joined the company of the downtown artists. Unable to pay her bills with her art, she taught yoga, performance, and acting, and for about five years, like so many others at the time, she also maintained a side job, giving therapeutic, and occasionally erotic, massages to straight men. But unlike today’s generation of artists who often need three side jobs to pay those bills, Shelly and her peers could afford to spend most of their time in clubs, where life and art intertwined.
Many of the people in this underground community experimented with drag, everyone had bands—whether they played an instrument or not—and hardly anyone went by their real name. Performers like John Sex, Mr. Fashion, Carmelita Tropicana, Penny Arcade, and Hattie Hathaway were all using invented names, just as Shelly had changed her given surname Schreibman to Mars, in reference to both the candy bar and the planet. These artists were still influenced by the Warholesque idea that you could create an alter ego, dress up, put on a wig, or a mustache, and become a movie star. However, unlike the “last superstars”—as Cynthia Carr, in her new book, calls Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, and Jackie Curtis—their approach to stardom was rather ironic.
Portrait of Shelly Mars. Courtesy of The Kitchen, NYC. Photo: M. Burgess.
Alongside Jackie 60, Meat, and Clit Club, was the Pyramid, a place where Shelly partied and nurtured her art and a hub for a new generation of drag artists and trans-punk theatricality. It was the late video artist Tom Rubnitz who first brought her to the dive bar on Avenue A, and there she met queens like Tabboo! and Lady Bunny, who helped Shelly define her own relationship to drag. Her first performance in New York City took place there too. She went onstage as a dominatrix called Mistress S—a character “encouraging all wimmin to link hands and shed the lining of their uterus,” as Lisa LaBia wrote, interviewing Shelly for the cover story of a 1990 issue of the lesbian magazine On Our Backs. One night in 1991, hanging out in Pyramid’s basement after one of her shows, Shelly coined the term “drag king”: “I was always performing around drag queens,” she says, “so I said, ‘I’m a drag king.’”
Downtown clubs fostered spontaneous, raw, unpolished burlesque shows and plays that actively challenged the racial, religious, and sexual bigotry of American society. Performance artists broke down taboos by screaming, cracking inappropriate jokes, and threatening or throwing raw meat at the audience, as vividly illustrated in the happenings of Dancenoise, or Blacklips Performance Cult’s gory psychodramas, where all these things occurred simultaneously. This was a way for these artists to unleash their frustration and anger over simmering cultural tensions and, more directly, the ongoing AIDS crisis that by the mid-1990s had decimated the scene. In a sense, much of the socialization in those days—besides fun and community—was about protest, in which Shelly took an active part through her art. As a performer, she was “pushing the boundaries of sexual and psychological forbidden territory,” as she says, through vaudeville, storytelling, and drag.
The activism, anger, and infighting of this scene became the material for the evening-length performances that Shelly began presenting in the 1990s. One of her most powerful plays was the multi-role one-person show Invasion from Mars, directed by off-Broadway veteran Vera Beren and which premiered at The Kitchen in 1994. Just like Shelly’s club performances, it evoked ambivalent feelings in the audience. The play starts with Martin and his jokes, including: “What’s the difference between the refrigerator and the faggot? The refrigerator doesn’t fart when I pull my meat out of it.” Then, other characters appear on the stage, all played by Shelly, with minor changes to her outfit. Critic Harvey called the piece “a neurotic horror show of ethnic and political stereotyping”—a description that captures some of the performance’s almost-chaotic energy.
The multiple characters seem quite distant from one another at the beginning of the piece when they appear in succession, but by the end, they all become part of the same story. Peter Powell, a talented, young fashion photographer and ACT UP activist, starts yelling at the woman modeling for him for seemingly no reason, though this is later explained as an instance of something called AIDS dementia; lipstick-lesbian bar-star Tammy laughs at a lesbian rape story while drinking a cocktail called Sea Breeze; and Zana Anna Rosen, a Jewish lesbian-separatist poetess from North Hampton, Massachusetts, almost throws up when she has to say the word man out loud. The final scene is Peter’s ascension to heaven—quite similar to a scene in Mike Nichols’s Angels in America—in which the character is not sick and doesn’t have dementia anymore but feels very lonely and advises the audience: “Be as crazy as you can while on Earth.”
Shelly’s snapshots are funny on the one hand and disturbing, even cruel, on the other. While many people find these characters, with their inner contradictions, provocative in a good sense, “politically correct types” were often “running to the exits,” as the artist told drag queen and photographer Linda Simpson in a 1997 article for HX for Her magazine. Nonetheless, Shelly never knew what to expect. She told me that “sometimes straight guys would freak out, or lesbians would start signing petitions” to not invite her to lesbian festivals. She added, “There were so many noes among the feminists and the lesbians.” But she responded to these noes and her critics with fierce humor.
Headshot of Shelly Mars. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of The Kitchen, NYC
For instance, in 2010, Shelly performed again as Zana Anna Rosen at Bulldyke Chronicles, an event series the artist cohosted at the nonprofit performance space Dixon Place with Kirby, the venue’s bulldog mascot. The lesbian-separatist poetess, who like most of Shelly’s characters has aged alongside the artist, admits that she is still haunted by the question “Where do the lesbians go at night?” and begs the “princess of menstrual tides” to lead her “to the secret place where smells of unshaved armpits and bushy pussies unite with the gentle sound of laughing labias and crunchy Cape Cod clits that echoes softly over moonlit mammaries.” There are a lot of poets in the world Shelly has built up over the years, and I find this métier a smart way to comment on sensitive topics. Characters like Zana allowed Shelly to playfully address the anti-sex and anti-pornography mindset that certain early second-wave feminists embraced.
“I find that lesbians are heavy censors,” Shelly said in the 1990 interview for On Our Backs. “I’ve been a lesbian for years and I’ve always felt alienated from that group.” Despite this feeling of alienation, the issue featured Mariette Pathy Allen’s portrait of Martin on the cover. However, more than once, Shelly faced criticism for her misogynistic character from members of her community, who told her that she had gone too far and shouldn’t play with such behavior on the stage. She simply replied, “I can, because I’m a lesbian woman.”
Of course, there were spaces that remained free from the type of policing Shelly talks about. For example, WOW Café, an East Village bar that grew out of the Women’s One World Festival in 1980, allowed artists to perform their differences, go onstage in male drag, put on a dildo, sing songs about their dicks, and thus explore questions related to gender, the idea of androgyny, and what quintessential male behavior or femme desire might be. Such were the acts of Disband, an all-woman group that consisted at the time of Martha Wilson, IIona Granet, Donna Henes, Ingrid Sischy, and Diane Torr. With Torr—also known as Tornado or Danny King—Shelly (as Peter Powell) costarred in a 1995 Montel Williams TV show that was about, as Williams repeated on air, “women who dress as men to get ahead,” skewering those charged and reductive ideas about gender that fueled debates around feminism at the time and parallel the arguments of transphobic politicians today.
Shelly has always been fascinated by the extremities and intricacies that complicate movements and communities, and in addition to lesbian circles, she has turned her attention to the tribes and inner conflicts of the gay scene. As she likes to stress, her sensibility is more like that of a gay man anyway. She also often says: “I’m not a fag hag, I’m a fag.” But the world of fags wasn’t free of inner conflicts either. For example, there was a clash between East and West.
As poet, drag artist, and theater maker Brian Butterick remembers in the oral history of the Pyramid, East Village clubs in the ’80s and the ’90s were more artistic, experimental, and queer, and this was in stark contrast with the West, where the bars had become the epicenters of gay male existence with “established” guys in flannel shirts who all looked the same, with beards and mustaches. “We only went West if we wanted to get laid,” says Butterick, who managed the Pyramid for decades. In the oral history, he also recalls when, sometime in 1980, Keith Haring sprayed a Day-Glo orange border between East and West on Third Avenue and stenciled “CLONES GO HOME FAFH” on the sidewalk—FAFH being short for “Fags Against Facial Hair.” So lesbian separatists were not the only ones who wanted to keep certain kinds of masculinity out of the East Village.
Shelly Mars as Daring Dramatist on one of the cards of Post-Modern Pin-Ups by Annie Sprinkle. Makeup by Kabuki Starshine. Courtesy the artist.
In her performances, Shelly doesn’t just showcase the diversity and controversies of the gay community. She draws us in to explore what she calls the underbelly, demonstrating her willingness to lead the audience into unsettling and dark places. For instance, her show Bug Chasers (2004) was inspired by one of the first gay dating sites, Manhunt, and, as its title indicates, the rare but sensationalized practice of men seeking unprotected sex with men in the hope of contracting HIV. The performance is about trust, submissive behavior, and the loss of control through the online conversation of two “meth heads” who chat about fetishes and kinks. It was performed by Shelly and one of her private acting students, Matt Cartwright. The piece is based on his story of struggling with both sex and drug addictions. Their chat culminated in a sex scene in which Shelly plays the top. “I was a badass top,” she tells me. “I fucked the shit out of him, and he started crying. It was his first day sober, and it was too real for him. But he’s been sober ever since.” Such performances led their audiences into worlds where the judgments and the schemes we typically rely on in everyday life don’t always work. “Isn’t this why people go to the theater?” asks Shelly.
Her subsequent undertaking, the Homo Bonobo Project, ventured even further into uncharted territory. The idea for the project came in 2006 when Shelly worked the door at the Black Party—a gay leather circuit party—on the day of the vernal equinox. She was amazed by how thousands of gay men could be in one place for hours with no incident or violence. “If the room had been full of lesbians or straight guys, drunken violence would have surely ensued,” Shelly recalls saying to a friend. Her friend replied, “They sound like bonobos.” Bonobos are the only primates other than humans who engage in face-to-face genital sex, all the time, in virtually every partner combination.
Shelly-as-Dr. Pussait with video camera in the Congo. Courtesy the artist.
In 2008, Shelly applied for and received a grant from the Arcus Foundation, which supports LGBTQ+ rights and the conservation of apes—an anomalous yet important philanthropic project founded by the billionaire Jon Stryker. She spent a few months in the Democratic Republic of Congo. During this time, she took on the character of a Belgian primatologist, Dr. Ghislaine Pussait, a parody of a researcher who becomes overly attached to her subject. The fictional Dr. Pussait traveled into the jungles of the DCR to investigate male-male, male-female, and female-female sexual behavior, then returned to Manhattan to continue her research in the city’s darkest parties—exploring sex “in the deepest parts of the ape pussy, the uterus, and the black leather–strapped asshole,” as told by the primatologist in a teaser video. In the TED Talk–like presentations that Shelly-as-Dr. Pussait later made in theaters, universities, and even gay bathhouses—sometimes with men fucking around her as she talks—Dr. Pussait speaks with a strong French accent about how human sexual desire and feelings are controlled by civilization while suggesting that queers have always been ahead of the curve when it comes to breaking out of this control. The presentations are thought-provoking yet hysterically funny due to Shelly’s mix of complete seriousness and radical self-parody.
When she returned from the Congo, inspired by the dense jungles—and her ayahuasca trips that started around the same time—she turned fifty and became interested in printmaking. Her fashion brand, SMOD SHOP (SMOD being short for Shelly Mars On Drugs), which she is about to launch this year, is influenced by her psychedelic experiences. It is just one of her new ventures. As we keep chatting, Shelly tells me that she is in the process of revisiting her past personae in preparation for an evolving multimedia performance based on an autobiographical script she wrote during the pandemic. It features Dr. Pussait, the Black Party, and some other characters from the 1990s, and for now, she calls it Witch in a K-Hole, referencing a recurring vision she’s had on ketamine. In the vision, she gets buried in the ground while thirteen druids walk around her body, and then suddenly resurrects as a character from her past and starts entertaining the audience. She will debut Witch in a K-Hole next year at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York.
I was glad to hear that Shelly’s past characters are coming back because most of them express ideas, emotions, desires, and anxieties that we tend to repress. They dare to ask, and trigger their audiences to ask, questions that feel as needed as ever: How can we talk about politically loaded, heavy subjects without getting into a war of words? How can we function as a community instead of policing each other? And how can we use irony and humor to understand the absurdity of these times?
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