In the largely unknown cast of John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, Justin Bond (aka the jaded lounge singer Kiki from the drag cabaret act Kiki and Herb) is as close as the film gets to big-name casting. Because of the explicit nature of the film (it’s a frenzy of wall-to-wall unsimulated sexual activity) and the two-year improvisational workshopping period, Mitchell, its director, probably couldn’t have lured a celebrity cast even if he’d wanted one. But he was determined to have Bond in the film, to the extent that he wrote him into the script as a pivotal character.
Nonetheless Bond, who was studying for a master’s degree in scenography in London at the time, took some persuading. “I was doing a course at St Martins and had to miss a group installation project in Palermo. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do it, but I thought who else is going to play Justin Bond?” Even so, Bond says that he was by no means certain that the film would be well received. And as a first-time visitor to the Cannes Film Festival, where Shortbus had its premiere, he had nothing to compare it with and no way of knowing that the audience response was exceptional.
“It was my first Cannes, so after the ten-minute ovation I said: ‘Does this usually happen?’ It’s like when I was in the San Francisco earthquake in 1989. I thought, it’s probably not a bad earthquake, whatever. Then I found out it had been bad — part of the Bay Bridge collapsed.”
Bond appears as the hostess of a salon called Shortbus: he’s the catalyst for a meeting of minds, spirits and genitals in a haven for “the gifted and the challenged”. He’s a one-man Greek chorus, or a sardonic White Rabbit guiding a pre-orgasmic Alice to her first glimpse of Wonderland. He gets all the film’s most outrageously quotable lines and raises the biggest laughs.
It’s a role that Bond says he has always been comfortable with. “The earth mother — I’ve always liked that role. I’m not very comfortable in those crazy sexual scenes. When I was in San Francisco, the first big sexual party I went to was an S&M one.
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I didn’t feel comfortable engaging but I felt very comfortable walking around. I felt like the madam.”
A long-time doyen of the Big Apple’s club and party scene, Bond (and his alter ego Kiki) represents the spirit of the creative, alternative underground New York that inspired the film and thrives still, despite the disasters that have befallen the city. “My character is pivotal but I didn’t have to develop all that sexual chemistry. And I didn’t have to create a character; Justin Bond is me — was me, it’s not really the me now but it was definitely the me that was the tranny hooker hostess of various sleazy s***holes in New York.”
Bond has a smoky snarl of a voice and perfect comic timing that wrings every last drop of innuendo from his anecdotes (most of which are probably best left unprinted in a family newspaper). He can’t swear to it (“I have a bad memory”) but Bond thinks that he first met Mitchell at a restaurant in the West Village called The Cowgirl Hall of Fame. Bond and his accompanist Kenny Mellman performed there in the early days as Kiki and Herb, “for $100 and a piece of fish every Thursday”.
Bond does know for certain that both he and Mitchell were part of the same scene in 1990s Lower Manhattan that gravitated around a rock’n’roll club called Squeezebox. “They had bands, and they had drag queens and downtown club personalities, and sometimes famous people like Debbie Harry and Courtney Love would come and sing with the house band.
“It was really a cool scene. It was very confrontational — crazy drag queens running around who would beat the s*** out of anyone. A lot of straight people came, but they didn’t get away with the heterosexual privilege thing. So that was great. You felt tough and appreciated.”
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It was this scene that spawned Mitchell’s alter-ego, the East German transsexual rock goddess Hedwig (first seen in an off-Broadway play and later in Mitchell’s directorial debut, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, in 2001). Meanwhile Bond created the raging, ageing, alcoholic Kiki, inspired by the mother of a friend “who had this tremendous political sensibility, had a tremendous drinking problem and had an amazingly strong character”.
According to her “biography”, Kiki is more than 70 years old (in fact Bond is in his early forties), but she pillages contemporary pop culture for her performance, bringing her tortured, gin-sodden vocal style to the works of everyone from Britney Spears and Bonnie Tyler to Nirvana and Radiohead.
“I was just in a bad mood and I created this character Kiki so I didn’t have to go and be nice to people,” says Bond of the act’s genesis. “I was just a terror, I was awful. It was this birthday party, and I walked across the bar, kicking all the drinks off. It scared Kenny. He ran out of a couple of places when Kiki first started making an appearance.”
From their humble beginnings playing in bars (“I think most Europeans don’t realise how hard it is because there is no funding for the arts in the States. You have to just get by. I have always performed in bars. The liquor is my friend.”), Kiki and Herb ended up with a stint at Carnegie Hall, followed by a Broadway run. And although Bond maintains that he never aspired to be famous or to be a movie star, he admits “now that I’ve been on Broadway, and now that Shortbus has happened, it’s very different. You get invited to better parties.”
Kiki and Herb are at the Reindeer, the Old Truman Brewery, London E1 (020-8880 6433) from tomorrow to Dec 16