Look at Me: Alternate Beauty after Dark

I first played with makeup in the mid-1970s around the age of 15 or 16. It was my mom’s lipstick, so the shades weren’t flashy or fashionable. I smeared it on my lower lip and I suddenly felt beautiful, exotic, cartoonish, otherworldly. It was a fabulous rush, almost like a drug high. I wanted to feel fabulous again, and then again.

The furtive lipstick play eventually led down a glittery rabbit hole, though I didn’t imagine how flashy my life would become. Over the almost 40 years I’ve been serving looks in nightclubs, I discovered that many New Yorkers shared my addiction to flamboyance. So I asked the drag queen Drewcilla to collaborate on a documentary about striking personalities, the origins of their style journeys, how they got extreme, and what their families thought of their pursuit of exotic beauty.

We are learning a lot on this journey. For instance, not everybody’s upbringing is painful or traumatic. That means serving looks doesn’t necessarily come from a place of rejection like it did for me. Parenting doesn’t seem to determine who will serve looks. Some subjects’ parents were very supportive of their self-expression, while others were hostile to, or embarrassed by, their children’s pursuit of alternate beauty and gender fluidity.

Our documentary continues through 2020 and maybe 2021. These are a few of the dazzlers we’ve interviewed so far.

See the trailer for our documentary:

Vile Sanchez

Vile Sanchez could be mistaken for a hallucination. Intricate geometric shapes within shapes distort her facial features, which are also frequently subverted by alien contact lenses and prosthetic elf ears.

The look was initially inspired by a robot geisha in the 2017 film Ghost in the Shell. Vile’s transformation spawned a nightlife character from a fantasy realm as the face painting became increasingly intricate. She’s a menacing character that can be hard to approach.

“She doesn't smile….that’s part of the character and the look….It’s really aggressive,” said Vile,  a musician and cafe manager. 

Vile, 28, grew up in Medellin, Colombia, where she started going to her first nightclubs at 11. Despite the preponderance of clubs in Medellin, there weren’t many accepting social spaces for flamboyant queer people.

“If you're doing a full look it wasn't really OK to leave the house (and) be on the street by yourself unless you're with a bunch of people. So we used to rent a house… an hour away from the city and bring our costumes and take pictures, do drugs, dance.”

In contrast, New York allows Vile to step out however she wants, sometimes in metal stilts that make her almost seven feet tall.

“It’s like a monster coming straight out of a horror movie….I've been always obsessed with aliens,” Vile said. “If I just landed from Mars, that will be my look straight out of the spaceship. I will be leaving in my stilts. Hi humans!”

Check out Vile’s new music video on Youtube.

Shanita Bump

Shanita Bump describes herself as a character from Mattel’s Monster High, a line of dolls and toys that celebrates teenage ghosts, vampires and other creatures.

“(I’m) a Barbie that’s grotesque and dead and spooky. Like your favorite Halloween doll, but really fucked up,” said Shanita, a native of Sandusky, Ohio, who is a retail stylist at New York City’s largest goth clothing stores.

Shanita, 24, calls her performances drag, which confuses some people.

“I have to explain that I as a cisgender lady can do drag, that it's not just for men.”

Shanita has a prominent sense of humor. On Instagram she describes herself as a funeral service and cemetery. Her shows can be absurd, such as the time she strapped a cereal-filled bowl on her ass, poured milk into it and then twerked.

On other occasions, it’s no exaggeration to describe Shanita Bump’s performances as public exorcisms, though it’s unclear what demons she’s casting out of her body.

Her performances involve writhing, violent flailing and falling on the floor.

“I feel like they're not as complex as people think. I will be listening to Spotify on the train and the song will play in. I'm like, Wait a minute, this will be so good if I did this to this song….I just feel like I'm having like a lot of fun, honestly,” Shanita said. “I’m definitely not serious. I don't think so at all. Not in the slightest bit. It's all nonsense.

Luka Ghost

With nightlife looks featuring animal horns, ghostly white faces and flowing gowns, Luka Ghost might induce fear, but he actually wants to soothe clubbers’ anxieties.

“I’m a kind of therapy animal for people in the clubs who don’t really feel comfortable there,” Luka said. “It’s very easy to talk to a gentle looking deer thing, isn’t it?”

It was a quarter-life crisis that compelled Luka to move from Chicago to Bushwick, Brooklyn in 2018. By the time of his move, Luka, 30, had been dressing up for about three years.

“Luka was actually a male character. He was a drag king and I would kind of describe him as a cross between Goldust the wrestler and a Final Fantasy villain….Like that masculinity that’s kind of comedic, but swaggering but also kind of a fool like a clown character….Nobody really got that so I don’t know how it evolved into a little fairy deer, but I’m doing it now.”

His performances reference dreams and fantasy worlds where one might encounter satyrs or centaurs. Luka wanted a character that breaks out of the assumptions about trans men. 

“I exist for transgender men who don’t want to be your average transgender man….Trans boys who don’t fit into the ‘Oh, you transitioned and now you look like Grizzly Adams’ mold because that just isn’t reality for a lot of us,” said Luka. “It’s more just like rebellion against that idea…why don’t I just dress up as the complete opposite?”