He starts the day at 6:30 a.m. in boy drag -- khakis, a black T-shirt -- standing at a bus stop on Hollywood Boulevard like a veteran commuter, a newspaper tucked neatly under his arm.
He finishes the day at 3 a.m. in flapper drag -- white drop-waist dress, an auburn bob -- standing on a tiny stage in West Hollywood, spinning jazz records, singing and spewing subversive social critique.
This latest persona, the flapper, is Bricktop. Over the years he has also been Clarence, the white supremacist militiaman; Graciela Grejalba, a 13 1/2-year-old cholita; Cicciolina, the Italian porn star turned parliamentarian; and the Rt. Rev. St. Salicia Tate, itinerant preacher woman. He is way beyond "drag queen." He is a one-man psycho-socio-sexual revolution. As one academic who studies him has put it, this is "terrorist drag."
Who is he? For the purposes of everyday life, for this story, he is Vaginal Creme Davis. Ms. Davis. Dr. Davis. (His friends call him Vag, but refer to him as "her.") Performance artist, painter, writer, singer, filmmaker, poet, conversationalist.
Who is Vaginal Davis?
"Who is Vaginal Davis?" he says. "I don't know."
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IN THE PAST 25 YEARS VAGINAL DAVIS HAS produced an astounding body of work that few outside the demi-monde, or academia, will ever see. He is what an artist used to be, before the '80s made them market stars and the '90s made them eternal grad students: He lives for his art. He is incapable of selling out. And he is all but unknown.
Davis came of artistic age in the L.A. punk scene of the '70s. He appeared in Bruce LaBruce and Rick Castro's "Hustler White" and has made his own socially blasphemous films, such as "The White To Be Angry," which is studied by art students across the country. He has started rock bands such as the Afro Sisters, ¡Cholita! the Female Menudo, and Pedro, Muriel & Esther (P.M.E.). He has produced a series of 'zines, including his most well-known, Fertile La Toyah Jackson, which chronicled scandalous celebrity gossip in a manner reminiscent of Kenneth Anger's "Hollywood Babylon." One of his short stories, whose title cannot be printed here, was included in "Best American Erotica 2003." And for the past year he has performed every Friday at the Parlour in West Hollywood, where he plays Ada "Bricktop" Smith, the real-life redheaded African American vaudevillian and jazz impresario who owned eponymous nightclubs from Paris to Harlem to Mexico City.
