October 5, 1987

By Rick Stewart

Crass Dressing

By the time we got to Wigstock the Gods were angry and the queens were wet. But as in the case of its twisted namesake a little fowl weather wasn’t going to dampen the annual labor day lower east side transvestite music fest.
Centered at the Tompkins Square Bandshell the event’s six plus hours of gender bending song, dance and dress-up seemed a reversion to an earlier era. If there were any real estate speculators in the crowd they were probably in tears. Yuppiefiers who stumbled onto the hijinx fled with strollers in tow. Gender rearrangement and gentrification make only the uneasiest of bedfellows.
The talent ranged from deranged- as at Woodstock there were some problems keeping people off the stage – to transcendentally trivial. The kids involved clearly had a lot of grit, most of it unfortunately under their make-up. If the program wasn’t Brooklyn’s Jewel Box revue it wasn’t Andy Warhol’s Interview either.
Hosted by genial “toast- Mistress” Lady Bunny,” listed in the Wigstock program as “High Priestess,” the program offered a dizzying and often dizzy program of mixed, not to say minxed, messages. As show business extravaganzas sometimes will, Wigstock tended to go on and on and on and on. An occasional star turn suddenly would bring the onward rush to a halt.
The delightful Lypsinka, introduced as a “defectress” from the Soviet Block seemed the very model of a modern major genital. A fetching “Sheena of the Jungle” get up highlighted both breasts and her prominent genitals. Her balls to the wind miming of various Broadway show-stoppers radiated a savage irony from which old time cross dressers would have fled in bouffant hysteria.
People Tree (we think) played to the many platform shoed among the spectators, the same sort of show business psychedelia that made Laugh-In a druggie favorite.
A Melanie impersonator (or better, replacement) claimed to have been born “in a tee-pee amongst the free spirited youth,” during a festival performance by his distaff muse. Frieda gave new dimension to the term “Pinhead,” wowing the crowd while disguised as a doll (literally) from the neck up.
In contrast from the malaise stretching from Washington, D.C. to the real state section of The Times, Wigstock was a spirited, strangely naïve exercise in dressing up, one which gave us a new appreciation of the transvestite tribes. The final word goes to Jelly Joplin: “They say downtown is dead, but I’m dead and I’m still happening.”