From 2018-2021, I was a co-founder of The Anchoress Syndicate, a New York City-based DIY collective known for happenings that prioritized play, risk, excess, and subversive experimentation in queer and trans poetry, performance, sound, and video art. The Syndicate’s annual My Smutty Valentine marathon, an alternative/anti-Valentine’s Day event that raised over $5000 for mutual aid organizations including GLITS, SWOP, and For the Gworls, celebrated sex workers, relationship anarchists, leatherdykes, cumdumps, and sundry manifestations of love beyond the strictures of the couple form. Our ethos was inextricably rooted in the liberatory potential of kink and smut, envisioning a forced-femme Aphrodite protesting FOSTA-SESTA with her vore-curious metamours, or a bratty transmasc Eros with a red hanky in his back right pocket, trawling the urinals at The Spectrum for direct action and a revolutionary fist.

Created by myself (Polycule Outreach Coordinator), The Mistress Sabine (Submissions Directrix), the “tops rights” activist known only as WEBMASTER (Spreadsheet Daddy), The Syndicate operated as a platonic amorous throuple with occasional consulting from intimacy coach and renowned “love doctor” Bassel Al-Rahim. My Smutty Valentine featured a post-transgressive melange of human furniture installations, ravenous bloodslut sonnets, and myriad meditations on the virtues of bestiality, to name but a few of our customary attractions and abjections. Spiritually indebted to the pornotopic writings of Samuel Delany and the erotic undercommons cultivated by Julie Tolentino’s Clit Club, our mission statement, digitally archived by Wendy’s Subway, reads as follows:

My Smutty Valentine says FUCK YOU to romance—to the myopic, respectable, sanitized, state-sanctioned “romance” of cisheterocapitalism.
It’s about love, yes, but it’s about the type of love unrecognized by Hallmark cards and promise rings; unrecognized by the biological family and W9 forms; unrecognized by trajectories of futurity, financial investment, and resource hoarding; unrecognized, often, even by ourselves. It’s about love, and the possibility of love attaching itself wildly and variously to neighbors, comrades, strangers, friends. It’s “I love you” as in “Fuck the police,” and “roses” as in, “Give us our roses while we’re still here.”

Operating from within and against the global resurgence of fascism, that which encompasses blatant pinkwashing, virulent homonationalism, incessant genocidal violence, and a reactionary turn towards “good old-fashioned family values,” it felt vital to reaffirm this ideology, and to spend Valentine’s Day weekend in the presence of artists and thinkers that vehemently flout respectability politics, producing bodies of work that challenge the predominant concept of love as a privatized commodity, gesturing towards the radical romance of queer collectivity.

To that end, my non-penetrative life partner WEBMASTER and I spent Friday, February 14 attending two performances, the first of which was Machines and Other Intergalactic Technologies of the Spirit, a multimedia Negrogothic space opera created by pianist and countertenor M. Lamar & The Living Earth Show, commissioned as part of the exhibition Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now, for The Performance Pyramid at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lamar’s spectral, melismatic vocalizations and anguished death rattles are frequently in the service of what the artist has identified as “doom spirituals,” apocalyptic laments drawing on the overlapping legacies of the Black voice as a means of resistance. These spirituals often accompany hypnotic video installations to address the omnipresent phantoms of the transatlantic slave trade, those which populate both the literal and psychic space of our contemporary necrocene. Lamar traces, rearticulates, and attempts to transfigure the indelible impact of this mass death and forced displacement, through dark celestial dirges and abject erotics that disrupt the historically-ingrained aesthetics of white supremacy. This mission is made explicitly evident in the imagery of Surveillance Punishment and the Black Psyche, Part Two, Overseer (2014), in which Lamar sodomizes a series of masked white men with the handle of an overseer’s whip.

Image courtsey of EMPAC. Machines and Other Intergalactic Technologies of the Spirit was supported through a residency provided by EMPAC/Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Machines and Other Intergalactic Technologies of the Spirit further delineates the generative void, or what Lamar refers to in his libretto as “Divine Infinite Blackness,” between Afrofuturism and Afropessimism. Riffing on the singular philosophies, fascination with Egyptology, and narrative predilections of free jazz pioneer and visionary bandleader Sun Ra, Lamar reimagines the great interstellar migration of Black civilization depicted in Ra’s experimental sci-fi musical Space is the Place (1974) by way of Georges Bataille’s elliptical metaphysical text The Solar Anus (1931), in which symbols and semiotics become mutable and transvaluated. In Technologies of the Spirit, a sarcophagus is a rocket, is a chrysalis, is a slave ship sailing across the galaxy, and then is a sarcophagus yet again, death being a cyclical mode of becoming/unbecoming. Black & white images of hieroglyphs glitch and shimmer on-screen before destabilizing into binary code. Inner space becomes outer, and in both Ra’s and Lamar’s musical cosmogonies, teleportation may be achieved via vibrational attunement.

Throughout the work, as Lamar sings with the aura of prophecy that “We are the new technology. Posthuman. Postgender,” a floating statuette of Osiris, god of fertility, the afterlife, and resurrection, is dematerialized and reassembled in shafts of light. According to mythology, Osiris was assassinated and dismembered by his jealous brother Set, only to be reconstructed through a process of divine mummification by his wife Isis. Locating every chunk of Osiris’s mutilated body except for his penis, Isis used magic to perform an “astral phalloplasty” to recreate the missing appendage, which impregnated her with Horus, god of the sun and sky. Neither Ra or Lamar are without humor when it comes to their own brands of mythmaking: each artist pokes fun at a Hotep sensibility and the hubris of false enlightenment. When Lamar sings of a “Nigga Corpse Dickslinger” he situates Osiris in a Black imaginary that pays homage to the racialized provocations of composer Julius Eastman, while invoking the systemic fetishization of Black masculinities, and the hegemonic reification of a Black male hypersexuality. By the end of Technologies of the Spirit, Lamar has reframed the Osiris mythos through the lens of queer and trans self-actualization, or annihilation. By positioning Egypt as a fictive “promised land,” one that is as far away as the cosmos or collective liberation, Lamar channels the pain and grief of yearning for the unattainable, while reasserting the urgency of communal world-building—and destroying.

Later that night, after processing both the show and our recent sociosexual entanglements over dim sum, WEBMASTER and I made our way downtown to NYU Skurball to see the New York City debut of TANZ by Austrian feminist dance-theater provocateur, body horror aficionado, and certified stunt queen Florentina Holzinger, whose recent lesbian nun opera Sancta courted international notoriety when 18 theatergoers were treated for “severe nausea” at its opening in Stuttgart, most likely due to a sequence of unsimulated consensual onstage cannibalism, during which a morsel of a performer’s flesh is cut out and deep fried in a pan before being consumed like the body of Christ. By contrast, TANZ’s most visceral moment is when the body modification artist Lucifire is hoisted naked into the air by hooks that have been painstakingly pierced through the skin of her back, only to perform a farcical witch dance with a utility broom between her legs, set to the ubiquitous Eurodance hit “Axel F” by Crazy Frog. Suspended high above the stage while a bloody chaos of feral ballerinas breaks loose below her, Lucifire shimmies and shakes like a neo-burlesque sorceress. Holzinger’s devised spectacles of levitation are a cheeky reclamation of the fantastical elements associated with classical romantic ballets such as La Sylphide, in which Act 1 is rooted in the real world and Act 2 departs into the realm of the supernatural. As far as we know, no one fainted at our show during this climactic display, but 5 attendees were reported to have passed out the night after, likely from the shared delusion of altitude sickness.

TANZ, consisting of a multigenerational cast of women dancers, takes the literal piss out of the matriarchal toxicity and homosocial claustrophobia of the traditional ballet academy. Over flashing intertitles that evoke the bombastic credit sequences of New French Extremity auteur Gaspar Noe, eighty-three year old actress and dancer Beatrice Cordua is a marvel as she, naked and wheelchair-bound for most of the production, commands the troupe of increasingly nude dancers in what at first resembles a standard ballet class. What follows is a kinetic and shockingly funny bacchanalian meta-farce punctuated by moments of sublime beauty. Cordua interrupts her own lesson to directly address the audience, sharing a touching anecdote about her relationship with filmmaker Jack Smith and her gratitude for the legacy of NYC avant-garde dance, before whipping the girls into an occult psychosexual frenzy that runs the gamut from mutual masturbation to vulval inspections, to lyrical aerialism featuring real motorcycles, liturgical rantings and ravings, and raucous feats of Viennese Actionism. The most electrifying of these moments, for me, was when a live camera affixed to a performer’s head documented the bloody birthing of a large toy rat from Cordua’s pussy, as she lip synced to the song “Inside” by R&B singer Jacquees. I later learned that many who attended TANZ believed Cordua to be Holzinger, who appeared towards the end of Act 1 in a full arm cast to briefly turn the show into a spiritualist grift, collecting $120 from a spectator to go towards an adjacent agricultural project: the creation of an enchanted forest in the Alpine foothills.

Holzinger’s interests lie in dismantling conventional Western dance pedagogies, while using a treasure trove of cinematic allusions to complicate the ever-shifting threshold between high and low culture that is present in her oeuvre. Luca Guadagino’s remake of Suspiria (2018) is clearly referenced during one scene where a performer is disfigured through telekinetic interpretive dance. Later, a character played by Annina Machaz known as “Business Witch,” who over the course of the show vomits cornflakes and is anally penetrated by a flying broom, is made up to resemble Hatchet-Face from John Waters’ Cry-Baby (1990). This burbling cauldron of post-structuralist film theory and Grand Guignol acrobatics flooded my sensorium, while calling into question the culturally-sanctioned avenues of discipline and masochism, the elusiveness of bodily autonomy, and the earthly limitations of the flesh.

On this particular corporatized holiday, awash with neoliberal pabulum and tenderqueer mawkishness (not to mention a viral mayoral election campaign ad utilizing heart-shaped chocolates and a sensual saxophone solo to encourage voters to register as democrats, a sobering reminder that the state can never truly love you back…) we’ve borne witness to a revalorization of the saccharine spousal tribute, used as social currency to approximate normativity and security amidst global infrastructural collapse. It was galvanizing and dare I say— heartening—to experience two works that reveled in the wonders of volatility and transformation, honored the vital interplay between transgression and transcendence, and activated the many erogenous zones existing between interdimensional longing and corporeal secretion.

That Sunday evening, WEBMASTER and I attended a rainswept orgy at the Hotel Chelsea, which was organized by artists, activists, archivists, and professional dommes around the Yoko Ono Birthday Symposium at the Park Avenue Armory. I was the only honorary faggot in attendance, and mostly operated as a prop manager (having brought my sacred golden watersports chalice) and chanteuse-in-residence (having sung an impromptu rendition of Love Letters by Ketty Lester upon my exit, applauded by a flurry of fleshy spanking). Watching friends and comrades new and old getting beat up, passed around, catheterized, and their pussies medically stapled shut for the first time, it was the holesome ending to Valentine’s Day weekend that the entire post-nuclear family had been cruising for.