PYRAMID HAIR REPORT:

P.Legere drawing of our friend Dean Johnson modeling the Fur Bikini at the Lingerie Legere Fashion show
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In those days, makeup was a comment on sexual politics; the glitterati signaled each other through cosmetic displays. Our surreal grooming transformed us; we distanced ourselves from white middle class women’s ideas of taste and decorum so that our souls could pop open. Ours was a night world, of youth and fire and beauty. We sang songs and danced along a vibrant art/fashion/sex continuum. Were we out to make art history? Were we out to make money? Get famous? Or were we just out to get laid? Answer: Yes.


I looked at myself in the mirror. I underscored my eyes with incandescent eye shadow, extending the line outward into a scroll, a wing, a wave, a supereye. I was extremely thin and wearing an outfit of my own design -- The Fur Bikini: a soft puff of ermine at my genitals and breasts. Nothing to mar the spectral lines of my bones.

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The 80’s were all about hair: club kids sprouted aerodynamically improbable styles—spikes, color, sparkles, shaving, layers…. For gay males, the mustachioed clone look of the late seventies period had given way to a collective skin of wonderful smoothness: bald heads, shaved faces and waxed chests reflected coins of light from disco balls. In 1984 outlandish hair was de rigueur, but paradoxically, the less hair you had the more seriously you were taken. Hence, bald was shorthand for integrity. Go figure. If you wanted to have hair, and still be taken seriously, you had to go vertical.
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I was wearing a leopard top hat cocked atop varying shades of blond hair. I had big hair, the biggest. I tilted my head and looked at the whole package; red lips, laughing eyes, rosy nipples, wasp waist and long legs: It all added up to something nutty and fun. I smiled.

Our song "Blond Fox in A Fur Bikini Goes to Rio"

THE PYRAMID DRESSING ROOM/ESCALATOR TO PIXIELAND: Going down!

Artists are pit bulls by nature, we have to be – the art market is no place for sissies, but like all dogs, deep down, we crave love and sex. Artistic creativity is the libido transmuted into the transmundane.

Enter the Drag Queens. Lady Muskrat, Ru Paul, Tabboo!, and Hapi Phace minced around the dance floor in thrift store frocks, merrily festooned with feathers and beads, rank with man-sweat and sperm stains. Bad dresses in which no self-respecting suburban woman would be caught dead were suddenly transformed into Rags of Power. The Royal Pyramid Family-entwined girlness with maleness; drag was both a sexual come on, and an arch commentary on female vanity.
Territorial, hyper confident, and muscular, one by one the killer queens passed through the backstage door. There was an esprit de corps among the Pyramid performers. A depraved dragocracy, we found a way to combine business, narcissism, aestheticism and pleasure.

Loveboy scampered down the spiral staircase to the dressing rooms below, calling out in his astringently fluty voice,
“Hi Lady Musty! You sure look good tonight honey. I've always liked the clothing styles of other times and places in history!” He waited for a reaction to his sting. Lady Muskrat flounced down the stairs bitterly. You had to be very quick and very mean to get a laugh at the Pyramid in 1984.

Ah the XXieme fin de siecle! Ours was a world of illusion and decay. We were a sisterhood of night, an aristocracy of luscious fruits and phantom Loveboys, swishing into the void with gorgeous aplomb. The Pyramid was a psychic glory hole. A dangerous place. Many did not come back alive.
It was just a few minutes past midnight –and already music executives and movie types were taking turns ass fucking boys in the bathroom. The Pyramid was home to round the clock gay action. Horny hunks with huge cocks cruised for boys while waiting for the Live Art to begin. Tightly packed ass cracks offered themselves to men sporting anal blue pocket hankies.
Devil Cola was zipping up his fly in the bathroom. He called to a young hustler in the next stall. The young boy’s knees could be seen shifting on the fetid tile floor.
“High School was never this much fun!” Devil laughed. He had already been seen on National TV, singing backup vocals for The Ultimate Rockstar.

One had a sense that as assholes filled with hot cum, art and music careers were being made. John Sex was one of our most brilliant downtown performers, and one hell of a nice guy. Liberace, also a nice guy, came down to the Pyramid one night after his show at Radio City Music Hall. He heard Johnny sing, “Hustle with the Muscle.” Après show, John Sex and Liberace hit it off and now, wonder of wonders, John was on the red eye to the big-time. Liberace was planning to produce the Las Vegas John Sex Revue!

excerpt...from American Weimar ©Phoebe Legere 2005 Reprint by Permission Only

Photo: Phoebe, Susie and Anne Craig in the Pyramid Dressing Room