It’s the
third Saturday in January and I’m at Reynaldo Rivera’s house looking at
pictures of the long-disappeared worlds of Los Angeles drag bars … dank clubs
with names like La Plaza, the Silverlake Lounge, Little Joy and Mugy’s that
offered live shows between the late Seventies and early Nineties.
These
clubs, Reynaldo tells me, were mostly frequented by LA’s gay male Latino
community at the time. Reynaldo and I have been friends for a long time and
I’ve seen these pictures before. Many of them are burned into my brain because
I’ve written about them for a forthcoming book on his work, Reynaldo Rivera –
Provisional Notes For A Disappeared City. Reynaldo took these photos three
decades ago for himself and his friends, but soon other people will look at them,
too. He’s planning shows at Gaga & Reena Spaulings Fine Art gallery and
Centro Estatal de las Artes in Mexicali, Mexico, and his work will be shown
early this summer at the Hammer Museum’s biennial show, Made in LA (7 June to
30 August).
All of
Rivera’s silvery black-and-white prints evoke an impossible glamour made even
more potent by its aspiration. Glamour and danger… the makeshift stage of a
dive bar becomes a conduit for an illusion of perfect beauty. In Yoshi Mugy’s
(1995), a middle-aged Japanese man wearing a blonde wig and tiered floor-length
taffeta dress poses in front of an unseen audience on the dirty black-and-white
checkerboard floor of the Mugy’s stage. The club is clearly a tiny hole in the
wall, with small cluster wood tables and chairs around the makeshift stage.
Oblivious
to the cheap cascade of white Christmas lights and the tattered New Year’s
banner hung over the stage long after New Year’s, Yoshi channels some kind of
Southern Gothic American beauty, the Civil War South as depicted in David O.
Selznick’s Gone With The Wind (1939). All of these different eras collide, and
Yoshi tilts her head back to bathe the left side of her face in the light. (The
other side of her face, hidden in darkness, has a terrible scar that she got
when a trick sliced her cheek with a knife.)
Glamour,
Reynaldo tells me, has to do with the perception of danger. There couldn’t be
glamour without restrictions. And what is allure without danger? It’s something
you want to have but you can’t… In his new book, Dismembered: Selected Poems,
Stories and Essays (2020), the co-founder of the New
Narrative
movement (a fiction trend which began in the Seventies, striving to represent
subjective experience), writer Bruce Boone, talks about glamour and sleaze as
“masochist doors that open onto another world.”
He asks:
could they be the world of the spirit? “Think about it,” he writes. “For
whatever reasons – environmental catastrophe, political decay, infrastructure
collapse – don’t you really want to identify with some kind of FAILURE more and
more often these days, and in the process turn your back on stupid images of
SUCCESS? … The ghetto serves as a place of refuge from exterior violence
directed against gay people, a place of relaxation.”
Lounge,
most of the Mugy’s performers were Asian. The club, Rivera recalls, “was very
low budget. You can see that in the photos. There was just a little stage. But
unlike the Latino drag bars where everyone was trying
to look real and pass, the girls at Mugy’s were more about pushing boundaries.
They had a very different way of viewing themselves and what they did. The La
Plaza girls, a lot of them came from these small Mexican towns where on
Sundays, the girls from the rancho would come down with their white patent
leather shoes. The polka dots and loud mismatched colours … the flashier the
better.
These
are the ways they were deluxe or glamorous. I know this because I come from one
of these small towns. I saw this with a new filter when I came to LA, but you
can’t run away from your own culture.
“The
Asian girls saw themselves more as performers. It was a whole different ball
game, much more about art and illusion. Once, I asked one of the Mugy’s
performers what he thought the difference was between them and the La Plaza
performers, and he said: We don’t want to be housewives. The Asian performers
took a lot more liberty in how they did drag, and they had so many influences.
Yoshi would come onstage with Kabuki makeup and hair, wearing a flamenco dress
and singing a Japanese song from the Fifties. It was a mishmash of culture.”
“When
you look at the images now, the Mugy’s photos read as a much more recognisable
form of glamour. And then I add my own layer, of course. I’m from LA, which is,
for better or worse, the movie capital of the world. I think we grow up with a
movie language inside our brain that can translate everything into something
cinematic. It’s like, when you look at Cindy Sherman’s early work – those
images are completely invented, but they look like stills from movies you’ve
already seen.”
Glamour
and melancholy. We talk about what’s become of some of these performers since
he took these great photos of them. Drugs and street life took their toll. Many
of them are no longer alive and some of them disappeared with shocking speed.
Reynaldo remembers the words of a song, Arráncame la Vida (Spanish: ‘tear this
heart out’), by the Afro-Mexican singer Toña la Negra:
Arráncame la
vida
Con el último
beso de amor,
Arráncala,
toma mi corazón,
Arráncame la
vida
Y si acaso te
hiere el dolor
Ha de ser de
no verme
Porque
al fin tus ojos
Me los
llevo yo.
Chris
Kraus on the dangerous glamour of Reynaldo Rivera. Sleek , March 11 , 2020
If you
went to a drag bar in Los Angeles in the 1980s or ’90s, you might have seen a
buoyant Reynaldo Rivera working the room. If your look was interesting, chances
are his irresistible charm and humor would have you posing as he snapped away.
Rivera
came to Scripps College’s Balch Auditorium March 13 to present his work.
Invited to Claremont by longtime friend Chris Kraus, the Mary Routt Humanities
Chair at Scripps, the photographer is currently collaborating with Kraus to
produce a book of Rivera’s photographs that highlight the ’80s and ’90s trans
and gay Latinx subculture in Los Angeles.
Rivera
discussed and showed a slideshow of the photos that will appear in his book,
and followed the talk with a Q&A.
“I know
many [people] in both our colleges and local communities are concerned with
matters of gentrification, identity and art,” Corrina Lesser, the organizer for
Scripps Presents, said via email. “Given our proximity to Los Angeles, it’s a
great opportunity to hear from someone who has documented that ever-evolving
metropolis to our west.”
The
event was intimate and interactive from the beginning. Kraus first reminisced
on her 20-year friendship with Rivera before reading an essay that introduced
the book. Many of the audience members were Rivera’s friends, and some even
appeared in the essay and photographs.
Rivera
first started taking photographs as a young migrant worker from Mexico. He came
to downtown LA for seasonal work and stayed at the St. Leo Hotel. As a result,
the first photos he took were of the hotel’s maid Minny, and he said his early
photographs all came out black.
He
learned to take pictures through trial and error, and modeled his images after
old movies and magazine spreads. He was drawn to photography for its ability to
preserve moments in time.
“I didn’t choose [photography] — it chose me.
I wanted to do other stuff, but it came out of my need to document,” Rivera
said. “I am a control freak, and interestingly enough photography allows you to
control even time. You can freeze any second in time and relive it over and
over.”
Rivera
photographed in black and white because the film was cheaper, but also because
“when you’re looking at something in color, the color is going to take your eye
away from whatever the fuck is going on,” he said.
With
black and white, he felt he could focus on the subject. As he went through the
photographs, he engaged with the audience and told stories. Occasionally he
paused on a photo in contemplation and the audience would goad him to reveal
the contex
One of
the photos showed a drag queen staring to the right of the viewer. “I love this
photo and photos like these,” Rivera said. “I mean, what was she thinking?”
He then
showed a photo of another drag queen and joked, “but not this girl, she was
always thinking the same thing. See?” he laughed, flipping to a photo of the
same subject posing in the mirror.
The
compiled images offered an exhaustive view of an under-documented subculture in
Los Angeles, but mostly an intimate view into Rivera’s life in the ’80s and
’90s. There were pictures of his friends and family at birthdays, Halloween
parties and weddings.
At one
point he said, “It feels like I’m flipping through a picture book, I’m getting
emotional.”
Occasionally
the slideshow jumped to Mexico City, where Rivera was born and returned
throughout his 20s. Rivera became a National Geographic photographer for his
work in Mexico City, but he mostly glossed over those images to return to his
LA photographs.
He
commented that his work was often compared to a contemporary artist, Diane
Arbus, but explained that there was a key distinction between their work. “She
made normal people look freaky, but I make freaky people look normal,” he said.
He
wanted to portray subjects in their natural habitat: “When you look at my stuff
you almost feel as though you’re invited in and you are a part of it because in
most cases I was a part of what was going on,” he said. “That was always my
forte, to make people feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable in front of this
exposing thing.”
During
the Q&A, most audience members wanted to know whether there was a subject
matter that captivated Rivera in the same way as his earlier photographs, and
Rivera said there was not.
“Things
have changed from when I was doing this stuff back then to now,” he said. “I
[photographed] a lot of trans clubs back then and they were really aware of
your presence there because they didn’t allow cameras, especially in the back
rooms where they were creating their magic.” In those days, he said that even
the trans community was an outcast in the greater gay community.
“I
document people now, and the young folk — they could give half a shit — they
were taking their clothes off, they didn’t care that I was there taking photos,
and that was a very different experience from back in the day when I shot all
that stuff.”
Reynaldo
Rivera’s photographs explore a lost LA subculture. By Catherine Ward. The Student Life , March 14 , 2020.
Provisional
Notes for a Disappeared City
Photographs
by Reynaldo Rivera that document a vanished LA of cheap rent, house parties,
subversive fashion, and underground bands, and long-closed gay and transvestite
bars.
Throughout
the 1980s and 1990s, Reynaldo Rivera took personal photos of the Los Angeles
that he lived in and knew: a world of cheap rent, house parties, subversive
fashion, underground bands, and a handful of Latino gay and transvestite bars:
Mugi's, The Silverlake Lounge, and La Plaza. Most of these bars are long closed
and many of the performers have died. But in Rivera's photographs, these men
and women live on in a silvery landscape of makeshift old-style cinematic
glamour, a fabulous flight from unacceptable reality.
As a
teenager, Rivera took refuge in used bookstores and thrift stores, where he
discovered old photo books of Mexican film stars and the work of Lisette Model,
Brassai, and Bresson. Inspired, he bought a camera and began photographing people
at his hotel. In 1981 he moved to Echo Park and began taking photos for the LA
Weekly.
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