Look At Me Part 3: Reveling with "The Other"

Besides exploring personal spectacle, the Look At Me documentary project on New York City nightlife revels with The Other, who keeps reminding us how queerness is not exclusively about sexual orientation.

The Other is everywhere. In protests nationwide, we see people rebelling against a male-chauvinist, Eurocentric system that relegates many people of color to the status of The Other, begetting discrimination, mistreatment, and marginalization.

The Other is ingrained in our society and it has its own Wikipedia entry. Women can be The Other in male-dominated societies. The Other includes LGBTQ people for not conforming to the dominant heterosexual norm.

Excluded from dominant norms, nightlife spaces for The Other can be flashy, fun, or transgressive since many queer people don’t follow rules of traditional behavior, appearance, and sexuality. In fact, the verb “to revel” means to enjoy oneself in a lively and noisy way and it comes from the Latin verb for “to rebel.”

In nightlife spaces where personal spectacle is served or enjoyed, queerness means a radical celebration of Otherness. Personal characteristics that were once a source of ridicule or alienation become wellsprings of joy, creativity and self-invention. The following women dwell in New York City spaces of The Other, where they are free to create or perform.

Leona Beretta, fire artist and bartender

It was a burlesque performance, not a discharge of weapons, that got Leona Beretta her association with an iconic semi-automatic pistol.

“My character was a 1920s gangster brothel owner who was also the singer in her own nightclub…..So we all picked gun names. I was Leona Beretta….Even when we stopped the show I was doing other shows and it stuck so well that people were announcing that name….My brand name is Boom Boom Beretta.”

Leona, 31, has performed fire dancing and burlesque at venues like the Red Room in Manhattan’s East Village and at the House of Yes in Brooklyn. Some of her performances have a circus sideshow quality designed to shock spectators, such as her staple gun act when staples meet flesh.

She calls her personal style a mash-up of subcultures.

“I am a tribal, hippie, goth, punk, witchy, warrior child. There’s layers of me and it all kind of comes together in that.”

Unlike most participants in Brooklyn’s nightlife, Leona is a genuine local. She had a front-row seat as Bushwick changed from a low-income community to one of the trendiest neighborhoods on the planet.

“It was definitely a lot rougher. I actually did like when things started to clean up over here. Maybe not over-gentrified and a little exaggerated, but definitely better from when I was younger. My grandmother lived in Bed-Stuy and she would literally open the door with a butcher knife and stuff just to make sure it was us. Things were that scary.”

Growing up in a rough neighborhood made Leona good at fighting.

“India Arie said…she’s positivity and light, but if you mess with her, tea and incense will turn into Newports and a 40 real quick.”

Watch interview with Leona:

Lola Strange, performer

Inspired by Shirley Temple movies of the 1930s, Lola Strange began serving childhood looks in pearls and dresses. Child-star chic eventually gave way to fetish gear, fire, and clown face.

Growing up in Lares, Puerto Rico, neighbors and family didn’t share Lola’s interests in Shirley Temple, drag or scary-sexy clowns.

“I felt like I did not belong….I felt very alienated for sure. You know, the classic story: bullied. I felt like nobody understood me. Pretty much like now I would just hide in my room and do my looks and do my thing for no one.”

In Bushwick, Brooklyn, Lola, 37, has a growing audience. Lola is a member of Disasterpiece Theater, a psychedelic clown variety show about the adventures of child clown doll.

“We have a child called Kevin. He is the innocence that lives inside of us….The point is to keep the child clown that lives inside of you alive.”

Lola also performs at parties that feature dark wave, techno or post-industrial music, including the LGBTQI kink poly party called The Sacred Conspiracy. Typically, parties that hire Lola celebrate perverse beauty. Sometimes that means sex and blood.

“The gore is always something fascinating to me, a horror movie fan,” said Lola. “I think we all have a curiosity towards this thing, a fear.”

Like many performers worldwide, the Covid-19 pandemic has upended Lola’s life. As a full-time performer, surviving from gig to gig isn’t easy in hyper-expensive New York City.

“It’s taken away everything, but we do have the Internet….If it wasn't for the (online) work that I have been doing, I would've been out of money a long time ago.”

Jooj Sutt, fashion/jewelry designer, bartender

Jooj doesn’t do subtle and her fashion line Bitchfist isn’t demure.

“I design genderless versatile bitch wear….Strong, powerful, statement pieces.”

Jooj’s creations range from chokers studded with vaguely sinister, foot-long metal spikes to industrial chain belts. It’s fetish-gear chic for nightclubbers and fashionistas with a touch of eroticism, but not intended for dirty deeds.

“I was perceiving it mostly as fashion and I didn't think that most people would wear it for sex….Sometimes people want to wear a choker cause it's like a hug for their soul.”

Jooj, 33, began designing as a child, starting with new outfits for her Barbie dolls. Jooj’s fashion career launched after a scarf she made for herself became a big hit at school in Pittsburgh.

“I had 50 orders of something when I got home from school… My dad went out and  bought me a sewing machine and a mannequin that day.”

Jooj runs Bitchfist from her apartment in Bushwick. The brand has earned attention from fashion stylists, who have used her accessories to tart-up stars like Poppy and Billie Eilish for shoots in Rolling Stone and Vogue. Most recently Lady Gaga wears Bitchfist in her “Stupid Love” video.

When she’s out partying, she enjoys Bound, a roaming techno and dark wave fetish party, where she has performed for the mixed crowd.

“If I'm doing that, I usually have like a flogger in hand…I’m in full latex and whipping people….It's leather and latex and it’s a queer utopia…anything goes, you can just be free to be whoever you want to be without any judgment.”