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| Courtesy of Squeaky Blonde |
Nobody messes with Squeaky Blonde. Her face, powdered paper
white, is a spooky muse: A meticulously painted clash of shimmer, matte and
neon embellish her grayish green eyes. Her penciled eyebrows are fiercely thin
and crimson. Her hair is big, black and ratted out, in tune with the rest of
her outfit: scuffed fishnets, a leather corset and a black g-string. With her seven-inch stiletto heels, she stands
at nearly seven feet tall. “I like to look a little bit dead, a little bit
sexy, a little bit whore-y, like I’ll kick your ass and eat you.”
Squeaky Blonde is the gut-wrenching drag persona and alter
ego of 43-year-old Tony James, a San Francisco-raised performance artist and
drag queen veteran. “I was once called a cross between Elizabeth Taylor and a
Tasmanian devil,” James says at our first meeting in a small Hollywood café,
just a few blocks from his home. “I mean, that’s sort of what I am.”
Squeaky’s drag performances are usually on par with her
appearance: fierce and unapologetic. “Mostly everything I do is dark, violent,
bloody, aggressive, sexual or just kind of fucked up,” James explains. “I
really want people to see that drag doesn’t have to be feathers and rhinestones.”
Therein lies Squeaky’s appeal: She challenges the average
drag queen as portrayed in the mainstream media and perceived by the mainstream
audience: beautiful, sassy and funny. “I want you to be scared, and I want you
to have nightmares and push your buttons because that’s what art is to me,”
James says. “I have no interest in making you laugh.” Almost immediately, he
laughs heartily.
In one act, James explains, Squeaky and a friend reenact the
tragic murder of actress Sharon Tate, which chilled the American public in the
summer of 1969. Tate, almost nine months pregnant, was stabbed to death by
infamous criminal Charles Manson’s cult family. As Squeaky’s friend—a drag
caricature of the pregnant Sharon Tate— obliviously sings a heartfelt number to
the audience, Squeaky breaks into her house through the glass, cuts open her
stomach and viciously pulls out her premature baby. Her intestines—lasagna
noodles, actually—and fake blood would cover the stage floor. “Then we’d make
out afterwards and I’d hang myself or something,” James adds facetiously.
This genre, often called monster drag or horror drag, is a
niche within the niche that already is drag culture. “There’s only a handful of
people in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles who even do it because it
comes from inside and we have a desire to do it,” James explains. “We’re acting
out some sort of sick thing in our heads to fuck with other people’s heads and
provoke them.
Given all that, it comes as a surprise to find that James is
kind, friendly and cheerful at our meeting. A tall, bearded man sporting a
black hoodie jacket and a trucker’s hat, there’s not an unconventional
characteristic about him upon first glance. His tattoos at least give away his post-punk,
gothic roots: Each finger wears a rectangular blacked-out cuff, and a
conspicuous “LA” sign is inked on the side of his neck. Small, silver hoops
modestly hang from his earlobes.
James explains that despite her hardcore guise, Squeaky was
initially conceived as a form of catharsis. When James was a teenager, he lost his
closest friend in a tragic accident. To deal with the pain of this sudden loss,
James decided to fill that void with something creative: He developed a
character that embodied his late friend—“a real beautiful goth chick,” he says.
The name Squeaky Blonde—adopted some years later—is a tongue-in-cheek reference
to Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the notorious Manson family member known for her
failed attempt to assassinate then-President Gerald Ford in the 1970s. From
there, his drag career slowly took off, performing at parties and 18-and-over
gothic clubs in San Francisco. “I started using that energy to heal myself and
say to my friend, ‘C’mon girl, you’re coming on stage with me for a minute.’”
Several years into the development of Squeaky, James
hesitantly took on another persona in the mid-90s—at his day job as an
executive at eBay. “My coworkers didn’t know [about Squeaky] at all; I was
still in the closet back then,” James explains. “I told them I was a single
parent and had to be with my kid on Wednesday so I would have the day off.” Squeaky
had begun performing every Tuesday night at Trannyshack, then a small, alternative
drag club in San Francisco. “I would be out late on Tuesday doing my show and I
didn’t have to be back at work until Thursday, so I could have all the glitter
and the remnants off by then,” James says with a cheeky smile.
Trannyshack became a home for James, who was inducted as a
regular and a member of the family. The club, though born in the underground
scene, grew bigger in San Francisco each year, even hosting the likes of
mainstream musicians Lady Gaga and Gwen Stefani on its stage.
“[Initially],
no one really thought anything of it, other than it was just a bunch of freaks
performing for other freaks,” says Joshua Grannell, better known as drag queen
Peaches Christ and a longtime friend of James. “But we were a part of the
underground drag movement without knowing it was a movement. We just had no
idea. We were just having fun being crazy.”
In 1998, Grannell founded his own show—Midnight Mass—a
horror film screening event in San Francisco that he hosts as Peaches Christ.
Though two separate businesses, Trannyshack and Midnight Mass have frequently
overlapped over the years. “The truth is, we grew old together,” Grannell explains.
Their successes, however, are largely confined to San Francisco—“a city that
celebrates freakishness,” he adds.
When James left his hometown and relocated to Los Angeles in
2000, he didn’t find that kind of underground drag scene here. The drag queens
here were “more like club kids,” James says, “dripping with Louis Vuitton
jumpsuits, really glamorous, great makeup”—completely contrary to Squeaky’s
“gutter girl” persona. “There was no trashy, messy, ugly kind of things going
on.”
But that’s not to say factions didn’t existed within LA’s
larger drag community: While West Hollywood primarily reflected the
glamour-driven, mainstream genre of drag, the scene in Silver Lake “was darker
and grittier, which is what I gravitated toward,” James says. During his 12
years in Los Angeles, he has set foot in West Hollywood exactly three times:
“It’s not really my scene. People don’t seem to react to the type of drag I do.
They want you to look like Madonna or Britney or something and I don’t even
listen to that, so…” James trails off, chuckling. “But downtown, they love me,
and Silver Lake too, so I’m happy with that.”
Nevertheless, James got busy. With the last of his savings,
he opened a boutique on Sunset Boulevard, selling his personal creations for
Squeaky that she no longer used: clothing, makeup, wigs, as well as music and
art. The shop didn’t last long—“it may have been ahead of its time,” James
quips—but that didn’t deter him from pursuing other opportunities for Squeaky
to shine in Los Angeles. Squeaky joined a collective famously coined the Tranimals—LA
drag queens who take an animalistic approach to the drag genre. He became one
of the four primary performers in the collaborative group, which also includes
his “drag daughter,” Fade-Dra, a younger drag queen whom he took under his
wing.
The Tranimals undertook a number of projects, including
their Tranimal workshops last year at the Machine Project Gallery in Echo Park
and at the Hammer Museum, UCLA’s art exhibition in Westwood. Photographer
Austin Young partnered with the collective, taking before-and-after shots of the
participants whom Squeaky and Fade-Dra transformed from run-of-the-mill to
Tranimal status using makeup, clothing and other props.
Later this month, Squeaky and the crew will
work with students at a boy’s military school in Kansas, putting on a similar photo
shoot as well as a musical. He doesn’t expect to be received well, but he remains
inspired and is brimming with ideas. “Right now, I’m drawing a lot of my
inspiration from world tribal looks,” he says of his conceptual sketches. “I
wanna show how these tribal leaders adorned themselves so incredibly and how
revered they were in their society for looking so beautiful, whether it’s
stretching ears or using mud or something.” All these ideas simply go back to
provocation—pushing the boundaries of the norm and the conventional standards
of beauty.
“I think people like Squeaky are really amazing,” Grannell
says. “They continue to do all this great, great, great stuff, but they’re not
necessarily supported by the larger institution.”
For James, staying true to his art form outweighs the need
for positive feedback or mainstream reception. “I’m a performance artist who
happens to be in drag,” James says. “Art is meant to provoke. If I’m not
getting a reaction from you, then I’m not doing a good job.”
