#jack collier

[speed0tuxed0-blog]

JACK x LOMO pt2 

Photographer: Me

Model: Jack Collier 

[speed0tuxed0-blog]

JACK x LOMO  pt 1 

Taken w/ Lomography Instant Camera

Photographer: Me 

Model: Jack Collier 

[contrapasso666]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRWBDEsqY3A)

[warriormonkus]

Jack Collier

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.  Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries.

It had been my intention to completely kill off the identity, the internet identity of jackcollier7.  It transpires that this was not as easy as I thought it should be.  To begin, although I thought I had utterly destroyed the email…

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[beodddierich]

SOFT LEATHER x BeOddDieRich x Jack Collier

[beodddierich]

SOFT LEATHER #3 X BEODDDIERICH

JACK COLLIER, SYDNEY PAN GELIC A, PARKER BRIGHT, BEN MORINO, JOHNNY LOVE, JPEG PAPI

SEE THE WHOLE COLLECTION AT https://www.facebook.com/BeOddDieRich

[jaxxshit]

HATE U 2

Model/Make-up Artist: Jazzeppi Zanaughtti

Photographer: Jack Collier

[jaxxshit]

AMBIVALENCE: The Drag of Sissy Spastik

By Jack Collier

October 18, 2013

“Hi-ee.”

Nasally and dispassionate, the greeting reaches me at the bottom of a building’s landing. The silhouette of a tall, thin male in a bathrobe stands at the top of the stairs before disappearing into an apartment, leaving the door open. I’m reminded of the stomachy apprehension you feel just before a Grindr hookup.

Inside, the place is buzzing. People are scattered around a sparsely furnished space in a building that faces Broadway and Roscoe in Boystown and everybody is moving: a boy is straightening another boy’s hair, which is feminine and past his shoulders even though he sports a beard. Another boy with huge diamond gauges in his ears loads a bong. People are twirling and trying on clothes. I lose track of who is who, intoxicated by the aromas of hairspray, weed, and designer perfume that mingle with the sound of a stereo pumping something electronic.

Sissy Spastik purses her lips at her reflection and perfects the line accenting the hollow of her cheekbone. She was the looming male figure at the top of the stairs, though in the light I see that she’s actually in a state somewhere between man and woman. She’s ambivalent to pronouns at this point, and actually she’s ambivalent about a lot of things. Sissy’s delivery of absolutely everything she says is deadpan and flat, which comes off as cool/bored. She shrugs her shoulders when I ask who she’s channeling tonight and it’s clear that Sissy is a drag queen that’s not really about the tell. She’s about the show.

  ***

  Beneath the makeup, Sissy Spastik is Robert Brady, a 28-year-old makeup stylist who moved to Chicago from Michigan ten years ago. “I’ve been playing with makeup since I was a kid,” he says. “I was an only child from small hick town in Michigan. Big city dreams, you know?”

Small towns are always smaller to those who don’t fit in. But mounted on the back of this small child in this small town was the heavy weight of loss--when Robert was nine years old, his father died. “It really made me grow up fast. That’s for sure. It took all the fun outta bein’ a kid.” A half-hearted laugh. “I had to be an adult. My mom went bipolar and I almost had to be put in a foster home. But her sister took custody of me for a while and let me live with her.” His relationship with his mom is better today - she’s supportive of his drag career and even tries on his wigs. Her role has taken an interesting reversal, where once Robert was once donning her makeup and dresses. Unlikely transitions, I begin to notice, are a theme in the story of Sissy Spastik.

I ask Robert what his father would think of his drag career. “I don’t think he’d be okay with it. No. I mean, I don’t think fathers want their sons to grow up and be drag queens. But they want them to grow up to be themselves, so ultimately, I think he’d have to be proud of me at some point.” She pauses, and beats the brush she’s using hard against the side of the container. It’s loud, and she does it for a good twenty seconds. The white powder she’s using to highlight her jaw and cheekbones sprinkles onto the floor but she doesn’t notice. It’s the only time she breaks character, and it’s subtle. “I was like, down in the dumps the other day - it was nineteen years ago Friday. I’m wondering, you know, if he’s okay with it…”

After his initial move to Chicago, Robert lived in New York briefly and began experimenting with “dressing up.” He came back to Chicago in the Spring of 2008 and joined the House of Santana as a fledgling drag queen.

Drag houses are like families: they usually have a mother, who is the leader and most seasoned of the queens. She is the sage, a wise witch who wields her magic to help create the complicated illusion of femininity and the power of fantasy. Houses work to establish many things: performance troupes, drag culture itself, and most importantly, a sense of belonging among an otherwise disenfranchised community. The queens in the House of Santana took Sissy under their glittery wing, extended by their drag mother and Sissy’s best friend, Eric (formerly known as Mistress Vana).

“We were the punks and the weirdos,” Vana, who also lives in the apartment, tells me. “We didn’t want to be like the other Halsted queens. Not saying that there’s anything wrong with that, but I got up there and performed Hole, or L7, or Donna Summer. And what we did worked, because anything went. Our only rules were ‘lashes and nails. If you had those, you could do anything you want.”

Clearly, to Sissy and those she most closely associates with, there’s an attitude of underground solidarity and a little animosity toward the mainstream. However, they are reluctant to throw shade (a drag term for being catty/talking shit). They understand that drag culture boasts a variety of different queens, each with her own niche.

There are the “pageant girls,” who are viewed as the classic but more sterile sect of queens. There are “comedy queens” and “edgy queens” and trashy (“booger”) queens. There are the bigger girls who own their body image and the “fishy” girls whose appearance is almost indistinguishable from a biological female. (I ask Sissy if she looks fishy: “I’m prettier than real girls.” Straight-faced. Modesty is not a virtue drag queens admire or possess). The genres of queens are ill-defined and ever-changing.

“I never thought I’d be this involved in drag, to be honest. I don’t do drugs,” Sissy lies before I pass her the weed, “but it’s like that. It’s addicting.”

***

On Sunday nights, Sissy co-hosts Boom Boom Room with legendary club kid Jojo Baby at Evil Olive in Wicker Park (a pretty westward stretch for drag in Chicago). Each week, the two dress outrageously in loose adherence to a given theme. Thousands of pictures--and a lot of Sissy’s ‘selfies’--are taken. Sissy is also a part of Neverland, a group that hosts a monthly costume-oriented party that attracts famous faces like Amanda Lepore and various contestants from RuPaul’s Drag Race. There’s also Twirl, a dance party Sissy hosts that happens one Thursday a month at Berlin Nightclub. At this one, she mostly stalks around, greeting people toweringly with a whiff of Thierry Mugler and a kiss that daren’t mess up her makeup. She spins around on the dancefloor and flirts with the veritable feast of young gay men who are transfixed by her.

“I was probably flirting with you when I met you,” Sissy says to me with a laugh and it’s true. “But nobody wants to sleep with you in drag. I’ve never had sex in drag. I’m always like, wait! This comes off.”

                      Tonight, we’re going to Roscoe’s, a bar, for a drag show. Sissy’s been invited as a special guest and is slated to perform two numbers. She needs to be there by 10, but it’s a quarter ‘til 11 and we’re still waiting for her to get ready. She’s throwing an outfit together and fretting aloud that her lips may be uneven. She asks the photographer, Tony, and me to leave so she can “tuck,” meaning her penis (“her penis”), and when she steps out, she’s in a long white wig and a jacket made of shaggy pieces of loose fabric that I recognize as Jojo’s work. However eye-catching, her look is only to get her from the apartment to the bar, which is two blocks away.

A few fluttery minutes later, Sissy’s ready and back at the top of the stairs, this time as a different gender. She looks from me to her impossible heels and wordlessly thrusts her enormous suitcase at me.

We get to the landing - there’s a beat - and we’re off. Shoulders back, steps long, confident. The sound of her heels are a kick drum, everyone is in the music video. There’s not an eye that doesn’t follow. The white family of four she passes stops talking as they forget simultaneously their manners and what gender is supposed to be. Tony and I follow dutifully behind.

Boystown is the most fantastic neighborhood in Chicago. And by fantastic, I mean both meanings of the word, especially the fantasy part. It imagines both unlikely segregation--the hefty bears, the skinny twinks, the bull dykes, the lipstick lesbians, the straight-acting and the T-girls, to name a few--but also powerful solidarity. It’s a place that realizes boys can some nights dress up like girls and lip-synch pop songs. It’s a place where, for better or worse, success seems to be measured by how well you’ve mastered your character in everyone else’s eyes.

Tony and I wait in Roscoe’s for Sissy to go on while one of Sissy’s roommates tells me about the porn work he’s done. By my fourth or sixth drink I’m about to ask how I can get involved in the industry (the $12 pitchers are like 95% shitty punch and 5% alcohol so really you just get a sugar-high and a hangover) but the announcer puts an abrupt end to my career in porn and hour-long wait.

Sissy is the first queen on. Performing Peggy Lee’s version of “Fever,” she’s wearing a long, red gown with a black corset over it and slits up the side. In a black wig, she saunters across the stage and accents each important moment with a hip thrust and a point. It looks a little rehearsed and too Cher-y for someone who I know can be more out-of-the-box. And though the rest of the performances will admittedly be almost impossible to top, Sissy’s number gets forgotten.

It’s just that the next performers sweat out Sissy’s “Fever.” There’s an Asian performer that hypnotizes the crowd with an exotic belly dance and elaborate oriental costume. As (he? she?) moves, Lee Na Moo’s body is languid, as though made of water. The chanting music takes us out of the rowdy gay bar and across oceans and centuries to somewhere mysterious and exotic. Ruby Dee, another drag queen, is always breathtaking. Her character is so intelligent and natural; she’s like a gorgeous Spanish actress from the 40’s, a gothy femme fatale and antihero that smirks back at you while your man whisks her away. Two other performers, Spyder Dupree and Queerella Fistalot use bat-shit insane tactics on stage. They play with fire and sparks - one twirls, caresses, and licks flames while the latter shoots sparks from her crotch. At one point, Fistalot is laying on her back center stage, wearing black tape over her nipples and grinding a fucking power-saw between her legs. Noisy sparks shoot from the metal plate there and land on those of us in the crowd. We panic slightly about our clothing and then about our safety as we try to keep it cool in front of the other boys.

Sissy’s next and her final number is her best. She does a Marilyn Manson song, which is great. It’s not an artist you’d expect a drag queen to perform nor a gay audience to particularly like, but this audience is different. We were in middle or high school when Manson was at the height of his popularity. If anyone doesn’t know or like it, they at least recognize the song and what it stands for to the experience of someone who didn't always fit in. I think about a young Robert in his small Michigan town.

We have the magic of Sissy Spastik in full effect: she is all female in the face and sports a black bob, but she’s topless with her flat, boyish chest exposed. She wears silver chains loosely around her shoulders. The red dress is gone but the black leather corset remains, now paired with knee-high leather stilettos. She wears a single black leather glove and all of these pieces together give us the (accurate) idea that she is in charge.

This piece doesn’t seem nearly as rehearsed as her “Fever” performance and that’s a good thing. Her pattern of posing and spinning, which she’s fallen back on before, here is forceful and purposeful. She’s not afraid to make grotesque faces when she mouths the lyrics.

Sissy is militant in her message of androgyny. As she spits in Manson’s voice, “beautiful people, the beautiful people,” she is grabbing our faces and jerking them her way. “LOOK AT ME” she seems to scream, and she’s taken every drag queen’s most important command and delivered it with incredible angst. She is the beautiful person, and in this androgynous state, she is also the future. We live in a post-RuPaul world that has made leaps and bounds for the LGBTQ community, but there’s still places to go; those that will push the art form of drag forward are not necessarily the ones that are imitating women and reinforcing a gender binary. Rather, it is the beautiful people like Sissy that will be the new face of drag. Sissy Spastik is androgyny performed with the fervor of a rebel and the technical virtuosity of a talented makeup artist. Through step after graceful step, she somehow stays cool and dry beneath an impenetrable umbrella of ambivalence.

“Beautiful People” slams into the ending and Sissy--gasp--rips off her wig and throws it into the crowd. Her natural hair, which is like a fallen mohawk, comes out, and free of her wig, it whips around angrily. What was an militant conviction is now an angry renunciation. She thrashes her body, which is all limbs, around the stage. She relinquishes her composure. Just like that, she’s shown us the future and, ever-ambivalently, she throws it away.

The song ends and the audience goes ape-shit. Sissy bows, and as she moves to exit the stage, she catches my eye.

Breathless and wigless. Genderless. Ambivalent.

A smile.

Jack Collier is a fashion theorist and musician. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter at your peril. The first two photos in this story are being used temporarily and are the work of Adam Ouahmane.