I was dripping with sweat, all of my clothing soiled. I would have been more self-conscious except everyone on the street was also drenched: the little old Italian nonnas dressed in various shades of black, fanning themselves with soaked ankles, the shirtless garbage men heaving molten cans of trash into the truck looking as if their bodies were fighting against the winds of a hurricane. I felt like I was in New Orleans but I wasn’t; I was in Palermo, Sicily, where I had come to act as a judge for a queer film festival.
After being cooped up all morning inside a chilly movie theater, nose running from the blasts of air conditioning, I had escaped a planned luncheon to wander the streets in pursuit of the perfect apricot. As I searched, I heard the voices of both of my grandmothers: people get sick that way, going from the cold to the heat. I had been walking in the shade, hiding under every awning I could find until at last I spotted what looked to be a bountiful, dare I say gourmet-looking fruit seller. It was in this exact moment, as I entered the piercing sunlight, that I heard a laugh that stopped me in my tracks. It was raucous, yet feminine and sanguine. It was too familiar, it hit too many notes in me. I forgot the fruit, veered right, and took a peek inside the tiny alleyway next door. It felt like a mirage because sitting at a table outside a cafe draped in a white linen kaftan was the doyenne of Black femme supremacy herself, Ms. Vaginal Davis. I walked over quickly. After all these years — the idolizing, the researching, the name-dropping in interviews — I, Mykki Blanco, had never actually met my idol.
Vag recognized me immediately. Her look of surprise matched my own but was quickly replaced with a warm nonchalance. It seemed as if serendipity and synchronicity were natural rhythms for her. “Well, here you are, look at you, sweetheart, come pull up a chair and sit with us, you’re so tall and handsome in person,” she said.
My fairytale with Vaginal “Creme” Davis begins years before that fated meeting in a Sicilian back alley. Growing up in the rural south in the early 2000s, one of the only places where I could discover the faraway worlds of cosmopolitan arts and culture was my local Barnes & Noble. It was there that my teenage brain turned on, tuned in, and devoured all that seemed “other” to compensate somehow for the otherness I felt within. And it was in the pages of artist Peter Halley’s Index magazine that I first set eyes on Vag. I saw the close-up portrait on the open magazine page, a handsome Black femme with a strong jaw and a beehive updo akin to Brigitte Bardot, mascara on the lashes and just a touch of lipstick, nothing else. This was the first time I had ever encountered this kind of liberating androgyny, especially from another Black person. I sunk into the deliciousness of this moment. A torch had been lit, and it was guiding me to expanses in my soul not yet traversed.
I remember feeling and innately knowing I was like Vaginal Davis, but not actually understanding how deep or how far our similarities would become. Mykki Blanco began as a video art project in 2010, and I see traces of Davis everywhere. In one of the first videos ever created as Mykki Blanco, I speak directly into the camera, feigning a Valley girl accent and explaining away the frivolities of my day. When I see old performance footage of myself screaming at the top of my lungs in a disheveled wig and kinder-whore lingerie, I pause and think, how truly unaware I was at the time of the osmosis that had occurred between the legendary Vaginal Davis and myself. She has worked across disciplines and across mediums, each time breaking the mold of who and what is possible for Black artists, queer folks, and gender-nonconforming punks. I can’t imagine my life as Mykki Blanco existing without Davis, without all that Davis lived through and created so that I, and so many like me, could just feel comfortable in our own skin.
My education in the school of Vaginal Davis began quickly. I learned that she is the godmother of the radical queer movement, a visual artist, musician, and pioneering Black femme in punk. Vaginal is also an easy breezy California girl at heart, like Jane Fonda, or Lisa Turtle á la Saved By The Bell. Coming of age in the womb of South Central Los Angeles, Vaginal was a natural-born radical, her name taken from activist, public intellectual, and freedom fighter Angela Davis. As she told the writer Brontez Purnell back in 2020, “I feel fortunate that I grew up in a very unique historical moment in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The Black Panthers just took over my elementary school and the white administration couldn’t do a thing to stop them as they were armed and ready to throw down.”
She continued, “My inner-city elementary school had Black, Brown, Asian, and some White kids whose parents were too poor for white flight into the suburbs, and here, we were all being indoctrinated into spirited Black Nationalism singing protest songs together and learning war chants and solidarity dance routines.”
A turbulent, utopian age laid the foundation for a young Vaginal Davis to creatively roam free, an imagination unboxed. She was a child prodigy and the cultivation of her artistic practice began early, often writing, directing, and producing her own guerilla-style stage and film work. One of her first performance art and musical projects was a group called “The Afro Sisters,” formed in 1978. One of her first archived works is a video art piece that has now been canonized as a cult classic, That Fertile Feeling.
The 1982 collaboration between “The Afro Sisters” and The Amoeba Records Film collective is a low budget, no budget, gritty camp romp following a baby-faced Davis in a mangled long blonde wig and her best friend, “Fertile Latoya Jackson,” as they careen around central Los Angeles looking for a place for Fertile to give birth to the eleven babies that have grown in her womb. Turned away from the local hospital for not having health insurance, Fertile and Vaginal proceed to barge into Fertile’s baby’s daddy’s apartment. Fertile’s boyfriend, completely naked and unmoved by the pop-up delivery room created in his kitchenette, proceeds to clean house while Vaginal coaches Fertile through each heaving contraction. Absurdly, after Fertile’s “eleven-tuplets” are born, she immediately leaves all eleven with Vaginal, hops on a skateboard, does a few tricks, and rides off into the sun-drenched afternoon. Whether a comedic comment on living through generations in a welfare state or a tongue-in-cheek take at queer bodies playing at heterosexual normalcy, That Fertile Feeling reminds me of the joy I felt discovering experimental theater for the first time, the freedom in occupying a liminal space where anything is creatively possible.
Beyond That Fertile Feeling, Davis interlaced her many interdisciplinary projects with her own hyperreal version of queerness, offering viewers meditations on race, class, ridiculousness, and absurdity as a means of societal critique. During the mid-1980s, she would pioneer “Queercore,” what a 1992 issue of i-D defined as a “growing American movement of low-budget punky gay fanzines...who reject the gay mainstream and function as self-help network for alienated homos." Vaginal’s zines in particular reflect the DIY “give no fucks” ethos of the social punk and hardcore scenes while also acting as a bridge for a certain flamboyant, militantly queer ideology.
“‘Queercore’ was a broad community and zines were significant at the time because they were calling cards to meet and get to know people who had similar ideas, art, and musical tastes as well as perspectives on life in general,” she told i-D in 1992. “Mainstream gay American culture was white, privileged, and homogenous while the punk and hardcore scenes were often homophobic, transphobic, and racist. I get interviewed a lot because I’m a controversial Black woman. My teachers didn’t understand. I was this black kid that came to school in a dress and they couldn’t work out how to teach me. So I did my own thing; taught myself to type and Xerox. I’m a notorious punk rock, retarded whore, six-six with childbearing hips.”
Vaginal Davis, how you make my heart glow. You might think I’m being dramatic when I say she sits within my being with somewhat of a spiritual force. I was only 15 years old the first time I encountered her work, and now writing this love letter, I am 37. Vaginal for me is now a hazy forever feeling; more of an emotional geography, more place than actual human being. I think of Vaginal similar to how I think of Jesus Christ, extremely familiar and yet elusive. To me, Vaginal Davis is an iconoclast, a legend, and an art mama; someone who, by her sheer existence and artistic will, has created universes for generations at the drop of a dime. Vaginal is the oracle of our Black punk mythologies. Vaginal is a shapeshifter birthing timelines, inventing biographies and “her stories —” a griot of gutter camp. Springing Venus-like out of the radical West Coast of the 1960s, there is no exact birth date for Ms. Davis, and rightly so. I would not be surprised if Vaginal is immortal.
That afternoon in Sicily was a dream come true. Years of yearning condensed into minutes of joy, I was hypnotized by our conversation and the intimacy provided a homecoming for my inner self. Vaginal Davis is a living legend and a global treasure whose early works have had a lasting influence on who I am as an artist and the perspectives that I’ve carried with me from youth into adulthood. I urge anyone and everyone to take a deep dive into the living archive of this matriarch of “terrorist drag” because like all pioneers, it is society's job to do the catching up to the foundations laid by visionaries like her.
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